The Death of the Queen and the Inception of the Noosphere

Crossing the rainbow bridge

“God Save the Queen”

Even though she was 96-years-old, the death of Queen Elizabeth was still a bit startling and unanticipated — almost as shocking as the burning down of Notre Dame Cathedral a few years back. She seemed immutable, vaguely immortal, hovering in the background of a long century’s worth of tumult and ferment. I always conceived of her as an old lady / matron / archetype. I realized I never really studied pictures of her as a young person, which instantly normalizes her.

I enjoyed reading the Wikipedia entry on her life. The sense one gets is of someone inveterately stable, careful, and responsible. Winston Churchill, when she was a mere two years old, described Elizabeth as “a character. She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.” She only got the throne because her uncle, a Nazi sympathizer, provoked a Constitutional crisis by marrying a twice-divorced socialite, which was good luck and good riddance. Elizabeth played her role to near-perfection, keeping her own private life scandal-free. She symbolized order, endurance, and continuity.

Of course I never agreed with her conservative politics, her Anglican piety, or her brutal Empire of military / financial domination. I enjoyed the recent fall of her gruesome progeny, Prince Andrew, due to the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal. He made the situation worse with his amazingly clueless entitlement about it, revealed in interviews. Generally, I agree with de-colonialist, anarchist views of monarchy and empire. I still love the Sex Pistols’ song-as-counter-sigil. God Save the Queen, a sneering provocation:

God save the queen

The fascist regime

They made you a moron

A potential H bomb

…

God save the queen

'Cause tourists are money

And our figurehead

Is not what she seems

…

Oh when there's no future

How can there be sin

We're the flowers

In the dustbin

We're the poison

In your human machine

We're the future

Your future

Taking world events allegorically, Elizabeth’s passing at this juncture also seems to reflect our ongoing societal shift into a more fluidic state of chaos and metamorphosis.

The Double Rainbow

I was fascinated by the “utterly coincidental” appearance of a double rainbow across Buckingham Palace the day of Elizabeth’s death, as mourners gathered there. Recently, I wrote about the capacity for psychic influence over the weather and other natural elements, something I have frequently experienced around ceremonies and festivals, substantiated anecdotally by accounts from many books and friends.

I also take to heart an idea from Terence McKenna, that the most interesting phenomena takes place at the edges and periphery of reality and can be extraordinarily subtle. The double rainbow across Buckingham Palace on that particular day is a kind of “talisman of remembrance,” revealing the psychic link between human consciousness and seemingly unrelated cosmic / atmospheric processes.

Equally interesting to me is the idea that we are undergoing a paradigm shift where what was once considered “the periphery” and “the center” switch places via a kind of cognitive polar reversal. Consider, for example, the growing global fascination with psychedelics. When I started writing about them in the late-1990s, they were subject to multiple levels of cultural repression, not only considered taboo, but also boring — beneath contempt — as a topic.

According to Genesis, God’s Covenant with Noah was revealed as the first rainbow

The apparition of the rainbow is, of course, something we also find in many religious legends and myths. The conclusion of the Great Flood was marked by the appearance of the first rainbow¹, as God tells Noah in Genesis:

I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.

Tibetan Buddhists understand the phenomenon of the “rainbow body” as something that can occur after the death of a diligent practitioner (check out this weird and interesting article). Not only can a rainbow-hued aura appear around the body, but the physical body can also shrink and even disappear. It is somehow reintegrated into the psychic or subtle realms.

I strongly suspect that this phenomenon actually occurs, but I don’t understand, exactly, what the utility is. Is it a sign simply meant for the human observers and spectators? Or does the absorption of the body’s atoms and particles into a realm of light somehow influence the subtler dimensions?

The Noosphere and the Rainbow Bridge