Was Alan Moore on Oceanic flight 815? It was either him, or someone deliberately meant to look like him (note the rings!). I noticed this guy and commented on him while watching the season premiere, but didn’t think much of it. That is, until I was the above screencap from Bleeding Cool.

What are the chances it was actually him? Well, Moore appeared on The Simpsons and recently name dropped the Sopranos in an interview, so we know he’s not totally adverse to American television.

See also: Alan Moore’s influence on LOST.

In the church, Ben talks about the Biblical disciple Thomas. What he doesn’t mention is that a principal gospel of Gnostic Christianity is the Gospel of Thomas.

The “Locke as Jesus” theme is obvious, and the reference to Jack as Thomas shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Most extensive article on LOST and Gnosticism that I know of.

Theory: the Others are Cathars (Wikipedia entry on Catharism)

Previous coverage of LOST and Gnosticism on Hatch 23

The thing that stuck out from last night’s episode for me was the opening sequence: it reminds me of the time machine project from the Invisibles. For the unfamiliar: in the Invisibles, there was an occult corporate conspiracy (headed up by an Asian scientist, natch) building a time machine with, IIRC, help from information being received from the future.

I’ve mentioned the consciousness time travel bit from The Invisibles before

To be honest, I never quite figured out the narrative of the Invisibles there at the end, but I get the impression it’s supposed to be a game of some sort. Ben and Widmore are apparently playing some sort of game. Hmm.

This was a brief, badly written, post I made at Lost Theories dot com some time back. The site seems to be defunct now, so I’m posting this here:

The Prisoner was a British TV series that aired in 1967. It took place in a mysterious location called “The Village.” The location of the Village was never pinned down conclusively, it seems to have either been somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, or perhaps in England - a single gas tank’s drive from London.

The Village is apparently destroyed in the last episode. During this destruction, the Rover(s) - strange egg shaped robots that act as guards of the Village - are seen melting into smoke. Is this the Smoke Monster?

The Village was administered by a group of strange, paranoid individuals doing some sort of research - usually assumed to be espionage related, but the last episode casts doubt on this. It seems they may be more interested in psychological or sociological research than espionage. They do a lot of work with brainwashing and mind control. Could this be the Dharma Initiative?

The Village administered by someone called “Number 2.” Every episode has a new Number 2. The nature and identity of “Number 1″ is never made clear. Could Ben be the current Number 2, with Hanso (or someone else) being Number 1?

Since I wrote this, it’s become clear that Jacob is Number 1, and John Locke is the new Number 2.

Also: “In the ABC TV series, a group of survivors is trapped on a mysterious island. In the second season, they open a hatch that leads to a large bunker. A cache of food inside is labelled in an identical Albertus font to that used in The Prisoner.” Source: The Prisoner references in popular culture entry on Wikipedia

More Info

Watch every episode of the Prisoner online for free (US only?)

The Prisoner Wikipedia entry

Above is a screencap of Ben’s secret door from last night’s episode. Here’s some information about what the symbols mean.

More to come…

There’s a lot going on beneath the surface of the ABC television series Lost. Lost is sprinkled with references and allusions to the occult and esoteric secrets. Perhaps the most explicit reference is the use of the number 23. Since the release of the Jim Carrey movie,the significance of that number has become widely known.

But Lindelof and company started sprinkling the number throughout the first season, over 2 years before the movie. The number comes from Robert Anton Wilson, as Lindelof has confirmed at various times, including in this Entertainment Weekly interview:

My father was into the Illuminati and the number 23, so he was a big reader of Robert Anton Wilson. So there was some intentionality behind it, but we had no idea, no grand design behind the Numbers. But suddenly, the No. 1 question stopped being ”What is the Monster?” and went to being ”What do the Numbers mean?” This isn’t to say that the Numbers don’t mean anything. We just had no idea it had this potential to get totally out of control.

And also on this Maybe Logic Academy page, quoting from the Chicago Tribune:

But for Damon Lindelof, co-creator and executive producer of the ABC drama Lost, “It is a good lucky number. The first thing I do when I get to Las Vegas, every time I go, is I drop $50 on the number 23. It hasn’t hit yet, but one of these days…”

Lindelof has been fascinated by the 23 enigma since his childhood and has made the number part of the mysteries on Lost.Jack Shepard’s seat on doomed Oceanic Flight 815 was in Row 23. Twenty-three passengers from the tail section of the plane survived the crash. And the number is among Hurley’s winning lottery numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 that end up bringing him and the other survivors bad luck.

Though Lindelof said the number 23 is often purposely used on Lost, he sometimes is just as surprised as some fans when it pops up. Conspiracy or coincidence? It’s a perfect illustration of the 23 enigma.

Who was Robert Anton Wilson? And why is the number 23 significant?

Robert Anton Wilson was an author who researched and wrote about, amongst many other things, the occult and secret societies. He is perhaps most famous for his Illuminatus novels and his non-fiction Cosmic Trigger series. I think any fan of Lost would especially enjoy reading the first Cosmic Trigger book, Wilson’s autobiographical detailing his “stranger than fiction” life.

One of Wilson’s fascinations was the number 23. He discovered it by way of two other writers: James Joyce and William S. Burroughs. Wilson claimed Joyce was fascinated by the date April 23: the day Shakespeare was born, and the day he died. Burroughs became obsessed with the number after the following bizarre incident:

In the early ’60’s in Tangiers, William Burroughs knew a certain “Captain Clark” who ran a ferry from Tangiers to Spain. One day, Clark said to Burroughs that he’d been running the ferry 23 years without an accident. That very day the ferry sank, killing Clark and everyone aboard. In the evening, Burroughs was thinking about this when he turned on the radio. The first newscast headlined the crash of an airline plane on the New York-Miami route. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was listed as Flight 23.

Wilson, and later his readers, began compiling more and more 23 synchronicities. Here are a few from Fusion Anomoly:

W is the 23 letter of this alphabet. The symbol for that letter is two points down and three points up.

The human biorhythm cycle is generally 23 days. One measures a circle beginning anywhere.

It takes 23 seconds for blood to circulate through the human body.

The human body has 46 chromosomes, which are paired, in somatic cells. Generative cells have half this number, 23, which is the number of chromosomes each parents gives to human

23 Axioms in Euclid’s Geometry.

The Knights Templars had only 23 Grandmasters. Jacques de Molay was the 23rd and last of the Templar Grandmasters.

23 is the first prime number in which both digits are prime numbers and add up to another prime number.

There are many, many others. Here’s another lengthy list. And here’s a list to uses of 23 in the show.

And 23 is just scratching the surface. We’ll be looking at Lost’s references to the occult, secret societies, conspiracies, utopian engineering, mad science, underground culture, numerology, geomancy, alchemy and more. Keep watching this site, or subscribe by RSS, for more occult secrets!