Hesher as the Holy Guardian Angel

             “I will view every circumstance of my life as a working of God upon my soul.” ~ Paul Foster Case

            “And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.” ~ Genesis 32:24

            The movie Hesher outlines the induction of what Aleister Crowley refers to as the “knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel”. Of prime importance to the occultist is this engagement of which Crowley writes in Magic Without Tears:

“It should never be forgotten for a single moment that the central and essential work of the Magician is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Once he has achieved this he must of course be left entirely in the hands of that Angel, who can be invariably and inevitably relied upon to lead him to the further great step—crossing of the Abyss and the attainment of the grade of Master of the Temple.”

            This “Knowledge and Conversation” is an ongoing relationship with a high guiding spirit through the medium of life and life’s contents. In it one experiences one’s own voice ministering to him through all mouths. It is seeing a single agent of God behind the many masks of the phenomenal world, and relating to that agent as a holy guide through the unknown into perfect understanding. Hesher shows us how to not only integrate this heightened state, but also the way in which this relationship contributes to the congealing soul.

            As the movie begins, the socially stunted T.J. furiously peddles his bicycle after a red wrecked car being towed to a garage. We begin well along the path of the aspirant represented by T.J., who, at the death of his mother, has entered into “the Abyss”. This Abyss is a stage of spiritual unfolding as a sort of circumstantial free fall. Reference points are wrested one by one until one is bereft of castle or crutch, and must learn to swim in consciousness as consciousness. In this most vulnerable state, we become the unfettered ward of the Holy Guardian Angel. To the extent that contact, knowledge, and interface with this inner Genius is attained, one navigates the Abyss with grace and poise.

            The wrecked car is a symbol of outmoded power, or, more accurately, a power that has been released and is now at work in T.J.’s inner life. This power is the Mars force in residence at the interior star below the navel. His mother’s death represents a severing of the umbilicus, and T.J.’s ripeness for the abysmal plunge. He is, of course, unwilling to let go, and his hot pursuit of that old vehicle, is demonstrative of the clinginess to dead forms that often accompanies transition. This is common amongst mystics, who remain entrenched in a religious system, or even occultists, who adhere too rigidly to the doctrines of their school. T.J. is depressed, and it is this inertia, which must be eradicated before the transcendental may be actualized.

            The rift between T.J. and his father, Paul, is a symptom of the dissolution of the son’s old power. In the dark night of the soul, tools fall away, and one’s relationship with God must be reestablished within a new context. Indeed the very meaning is stripped from God as one beholds one’s projections upon Divinity for what they are – glittering costumes wrapped around nothing at all.

            The divide between father and son is only a portion of T.J.’s predicament, for the real rift that must be sown is his relationship with his grandmother, Madeleine. In qabalistic terms, T.J. is Tiphareth (beauty), the son; Paul is Chokmah (wisdom), the father, and Madeleine is Binah (understanding), the mother, and the sephirah associated with the grade of Magister Templi (Master of the Temple). It is the role of the Holy Guardian Angel to lead the mature ego into a firm fluency of the forces of nature housed in Binah. To be cogent, the “Temple” is the individuated soul. This is the work of alchemy, and the true alchemist is the Holy Guardian Angel.

            These gaps between T.J. and mother, father, grandmother, and peers are all part of the invoked effects, which Crowley states is partly for the purpose of “separating them so completely that his soul is stripped of its sheaths.” One must become empty and sensitized before engaging with the Holy Guardian Angel.

            Our processes will not allow us to hold too long to outworn tools. We are allowed only so much sentimentality before our inner evolutionary urges drag us onward. T.J.’s encounter with Dustin at the car lot is everyone’s encounter with decay. His refusal to allow things to run their course, and his injuring of Dustin by rolling up the car window on his arm, puts him at odds with decay, and, as such, decomposition becomes his fierce adversary. The conflict between integration (beauty) and disintegration becomes the field into which Hesher, symbolic of the Holy Guardian Angel, is called.

            T.J. rides his bicycle and flips over the handlebars at the construction site of a house. He angrily hurls a stone through the window of the house, shattering the glass and arousing the hesher squatting within it.

            On invoking the Holy Guardian Angel, Crowley writes,

“It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; a secret not to be told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade. It is the Holy of Holies, whereof each man is his own High Priest, and none knoweth the Name of his brother's God, or the Rite that invokes Him.”

            In T.J.’s case, he is divorced and vexed. He is laid low. He hurls a stone through the window of a house under construction. Hesher appears.

            Now the bicycle may be regarded as an insufficient vehicle of mediocrity. He is less than his peers by nature of this sad way. Moreover, his insufficiency turns on him, and he is cast down into the dust, a poignant testimony to his own decrepitude. His ire is kindled, and he casts a stone (his thusfar coagulated soul) through the window (his logic) of the unfinished house (his mercurial mind). This rebellion of the subconscious mind against the lower aspects of the self conscious mind summons the Holy Guardian Angel, for the risk of madness is great here, and indeed a guardian is required to ferry the aspirant across that stretch of epigenetic mire that lies between Tiphareth and Keter; the king and his crown, respectively.

            Hesher drags a terrified T.J. into the house. Hesher begins to threaten T.J., but they are interrupted by a police officer. “You just fucked me,” Hesher states, revealing that the Holy Guardian Angel, though powerful beyond human measure, is still subject to the laws of equilibrium and justice. Though subject, he is infinitely resourceful and has complete understanding of how to alter his response to those laws to mitigate their effects. He tosses an explosive out the window disrupting the officer. Hesher then flees the construction site.

            T.J.’s life now goes into high gear, and a series of events ensue that irritate the depression that has settled on his world like a blanket of numb. A specific effect of Crowley’s invocation given in Liber Samekh is “to keep them so busy with their own work that they cease to distract him”. It is through this excitement that the radical changes that will open T.J.’s inner ear begin to tumble into place.

            At school the next day Dustin confronts T.J. in the hall pouncing upon him, spitting on him, and taunting him with the words, “Suck my dick!” T.J. sees Hesher watching the entire affair. He does not intervene. Later, T.J. sees Hesher outside his classroom window. Hesher places a finger to his lips indicating that he is that “Silent Self”, representative of T.J.’s truest divine nature. He then throws a marker at T.J. 

After school, Dustin finds his yellow car vandalized by an obscene drawing with a marker pen. The words, “Suck my dick” are scrawled on the side of the car. This mantra is part of Liber Samekh, the invocation prescribed by Crowley for “knowledge and conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel”: “Thou, the Savior! Silence! Give me Thy Secret! Give me suck, Thou Phallus, Thou Sun!” 

Dustin assumes T.J. vandalized his yellow car and goes after him. Nicole, a local supermarket clerk, defends T.J., chases away Dustin, and gives T.J. a ride home.  Nicole represents the Abyss itself. She is the 13^th path running between Tiphareth and Keter on the Tree of Life. She is the great mystery, the unknown, along which T.J. must travel to become whole. Nicole and Hesher enter T.J.’s life almost simultaneously. Problems and solutions always emerge at once.

At T.J.’s house Hesher walks in and proceeds to make himself at home. “Have you ever been skull-fucked?” Hesher asks a resistant T.J. Here Hesher offers to return the favor T.J. granted him at his squat earlier. T.J. “fucks” Hesher at Hesher’s house. Hesher “fucks” T.J. at T.J.’s house. This is an allusion to the “knowledge”, in the classical sense, of the Holy Guardian Angel.

            “Behold I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” ~ Revelation 3:15

            “Who am I?” ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

            T.J. is disconcerted but unsure what to do about Hesher’s intrusion. Hesher sits on the couch and smokes a cigarette, and when T.J. asks him to put it out, the angel agrees to put it out in T.J.’s mouth, bringing to recollection Isaiah 6:6-7, “Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.” Hesher then notes that their television has only four channels, and remedies this by climbing the telephone pole outside, making some mysterious adjustments to the box, and then falling to the ground calling out his expletive of choice. The television now has a variety of channels including porn, vulgar, though acute, demonstration of alchemy. “Now you have more channels,” says Hesher. He is expanding their receptivity.

          Madeleine and Hesher get along well. “Hello, Young Man,” says Madeleine to Hesher. “Hello, Old Woman,” says Hesher to Madeleine. This immediate rapport between the Holy Guardian Angel and the Elohim of Binah is instantly explicable. The Elohim are the creative powers or angels that spoke the universe into existence, according to the Hebrew tradition. Elohim is God the many and the mother.

Later that night during dinner, Madeleine remarks that she would like T.J. to walk with her. This is significant in light of Genesis 5:24, which says, “And Enoch walked with Elohim: and he was not; for Elohim took him.” Here is T.J.’s golden opportunity; however, he responds that he has to attend school. Hesher is irritated by T.J.’s refusal, and attempts to goad T.J. into that excellent pedestrianism that makes stars of men, and galaxies of stars. He growls that T.J.’s priorities are mixed up and uses a lie about “granny rapists” to convince T.J. of this worthy undertaking. T.J. is unconvinced, and here begins the work of the Holy Guardian Angel to break the boy into that stellar stroll.

The next day at school, Dustin attacks T.J., forcing him to eat the soap cake at the bottom of a urinal. Hesher appears, but he does not defend him. If T.J. will not walk in the sky, he must grovel in the dirt. Feeling betrayed, T.J. confronts Hesher about this, and the Holy Guardian Angel accommodates his ward’s desire for revenge. However, after torching Dustin’s car, Hesher abandons T.J. When the two meet up again later, Hesher hits T.J. with his van, and T.J. kicks Hesher in the genitals. Hesher responds with aplomb in a sort of congratulatory appreciation for the anger stirring within T.J. He is successfully arousing a requisite intensity within the youth.

The next morning, the police arrive to bring T.J. in for questioning, but no charges are filed due to lack of evidence. As Paul drives T.J. home from the police station he asks him, “Did you do it?” To which T.J. replies, “Not really.” “Not really?” Paul questions, “Did you or didn’t you do it?” “No,” T.J. answers. This echoes the words of Christ Jesus, who says in John 5:30, “I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just…”

            Man is his own star; and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man

Commands all light, all influence, all fate.

Nothing to him falls early, or too late.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

 ~ John Fletcher

The following day, T.J. goes to the supermarket where Nicole works to observe her. Unbeknownst to T.J., Hesher has followed him there, and begins to loudly extol the virtues of “poking”. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of!” Hesher cries out, turning heads and shaming T.J., who runs from the supermarket humiliated. We are ashamed at our desire for union, for it makes us feel our incompleteness.

After Nicole has finished her shift, Hesher and T.J. follow her in Hesher's van. Now they are on the 13^th path. Hesher celebrates their journey by slapping out heavy metal beats on the steering wheel. Up ahead they see Nicole rear-end another driver, who angrily steps out of his car and begins to brow-beat and denigrate her. Hesher menacingly approaches the furious driver stripping off his shirt and revealing his tatoos; a stick figure committing suicide on his front torso and a giant middle finger hand gesture on his back torso. The tattoos are demonstrative of the right and left hands of the Holy Guardian Angel. These are the tools that that great spirit uses to accomplish our temperance. They are, namely and respectively, Death and Hell, as illustrated by Tarot Keys 13 (Death) and 15 (The Devil), marking paths 24^th and 26^th on the Tree of Life. Their respective intelligences are those of the Imaginative and the Renewing. Hesher himself represents the 25^th path of wisdom, the Intelligence of Probation or Trial, occultly associated with Tarot Key 14.  Of the 25^th path, the Sepher Yetzirah (Book of Formation) says, “It is the first test whereby the Creator tries the devout.” This trial is for the readying of the soul to serve as a vehicle for self-consciousness into immortality.

After scaring off the other driver, Hesher drives Nicole and T.J. to his “uncle’s house”. They all swim together in the backyard pool for a while, before Hesher initiates them both in a sort of Erisinian chaos ritual, wherein he begins dumping all manner of lawn ornaments into the water. He then lights the diving board on fire, runs the length of it, and tosses his body into the pool. He crawls out on the other side before stating that he must leave for a doctor’s appointment of gonorrheaic import.

Here another method proposed by Crowley is utilized, and that is “to concentrate the necessary spiritual forces from every element, and fling them simultaneously into the aspiration towards the Holy Guardian Angel.”

The ritual is functionally pivotal to T.J.’s orientation. It serves to seal T.J. and Nicole’s friendship, and while honoring her true nature as the teeming sea of pure being completely adaptable to self-conscious suggestions. Hesher clutters the pool with lawn furniture to illustrate the receptive nature of subconsciousness. He lights the diving board to show the fiery deck from which superconsciousness propels itself into that space. His parting comment, “It burns when I pee”, provides another poetic metaphor for this profound principle.

After T.J. and Nicole realize Hesher lied about it being his uncle's house, they walk back to Nicole's car. Nicole finds a parking ticket on her car, which upsets her very much: she has a part-time job and is not allowed to work full-time, and therefore does not earn enough to pay her bills, let alone a parking ticket. She reflects in this moment the mundane concerns of T.J. When she is with Hesher such trivialities don’t surface, instead it is lush creative anarchy. When she is with T.J. the conversation becomes inane and fixated on decay. She is ever a reflection of the consciousness she is subjected to. This is why Hesher is needed to help T.J. cross these waters. 

“It becomes, therefore, the most important of all considerations with what character we invest the Universal Mind; for since our relation to it is purely subjective it will infallibly bear to us exactly that character which we impress upon it; in other words it will be to us exactly what we believe it to be…” ~ Judge Thomas Troward

T.J. uses Madeleine's credit card (symbolic of sown karma) to withdraw money from her account at ATMs, and tries to use it to buy the wrecked car back, but the owner of the garage tells him (as he did before) that it is not for sale. The motion of the universe is only forward. We cannot go back. We cannot recreate. Our modus operandi must be to let it go and move on. 

Later that night, T.J. and Paul argue over dinner. With Hesher between them, T.J. smashes his plate to the ground. Paul does the same. Of this Crowley delights, “to arouse in him an enthusiasm so intense as to intoxicate and anaesthetize him, that he may not feel and resent the agony of this spiritual vivisection, just as bashful lovers get drunk on the wedding night, in order to brazen out the intensity of shame which so mysteriously coexists with their desire.” Thanks to Hesher’s influence, they are both becoming activated. Until this activation, however chaotic it may appear, there can be no progress toward understanding and mastery.

Madeleine is saddened that there is 'nothing she can do', and goes to her room. It is important to note that as powerful as Binah and her composite Elohim are, they are also responsive and receptive. The same principles apply to the grandmother as do to Nicole and even T.J.’s dead mother, for they are all simply different expressions of the same aspect of cosmic life – the divine feminine, the High Priestess of the Tarot.

Finally, that stage comes wherein, by Crowley’s estimation, there is motion “to attract the Angel by the vibration of the magical voice which invokes Him”. Hesher teaches Madeleine how to smoke her medical marijuana from a bong, and promises to go on a walk with her in the morning. Of special note is that T.J. is not present for this movement, meaning that it happens beyond his conscious awareness. The pieces have been set by past actions and the subtle work of the Holy Guardian Angel in secret places. Hesher’s promise is fulfilled when Madeleine dies. He disappears for a time, presumably to walk with her where angels fear to tread. Her death is an internalization of those principles, which she represents. In the words of Christ on the cross, “It is accomplished.” However, this shift has yet to express in T.J.’s personal life.

T.J.’s growing affection for Nicole sends him to her apartment to give her the stolen money from the ATM. He walks in on Hesher and Nicole having sex. Only when one is in mastery of subconsciousness may this holy congress happen. T.J.’s jealousy is predictable, but he has only projected sadness onto Nicole, whose desire is unto Hesher and his appreciation for her anarchic substance.

T.J. lashes out at Hesher. He vandalizes Hesher's car, threatens him, calls Nicole a 'fat prostitute', and rides away on his bike. He returns home and after destroying all Hesher’s possessions goes to Dustin’s house with a pair of cutting shears bent on another assault against decay. T.J. seems perpetually torn and is still unable to reconcile his past with his present. While this angst seems to drag on, it is, in truth, all part of T.J.’s essential transition. It is succinct despite its messiness.

T.J. threatens to cut off Dustin's toes if he does not disclose the location of the wrecked car. Dustin informs him that it is in the junkyard, and then pins T.J. to the ground. However, Hesher won’t allow decay to take T.J. and finally acts specifically to defend T.J. from his own malign creation. Swooping in with guardian deliberation, he rescues T.J. and cuts Dustin’s nose with the shears. T.J., still bitter at Hesher, runs off, saying he never wants to see him again.

T.J. spends one last night with his mother in the wrecked car. He dreams of his happiness with her, and he dreams of her accidental demise. He is rudely awakened in the morning by the car’s magnetic ascent and its sure journey to compaction. T.J. falls through the windshield and watches angrily as it is crushed. He stalks away defeated and faithless.

 A few hours later, T.J. and Paul attend Madeleine's funeral. It is a sad and moping affair, and T.J. is unable to say anything of value about his grandmother’s demise.  The scene his ripe for Hesher’s beer-swilling entrance, whereupon he relays to the audience a crude parable:

 “I pulled this gas tank from an old Chevy. I wanted to blow it up, so I did. What I didn't think about was all the little bits of metal that were going to fly out in every direction. I almost killed myself. I woke up in this hospital and this doctor was like, ‘Son...’ and I said, ‘Don't call me son, you fucking cunt.’ And he was like, ‘You blew off your nut.’… I just lost my nut, like that. I went fucking crazy. I assaulted a nurse or a doctor, I don't really remember. I got arrested. I went to juvee. All I could think about was my fucking nut, man. I'm missing a nut. What am I going to do? I had to go looking for it, right? So I busted out of juvee and I went searching. I couldn't find my nut…

“Well, there was this one night I was sitting there and I was taking a shit and I was looking at my balls and I was staring at this little piece of flabby sack where my left nut used to be. And then I saw my right nut for the first time. I was like, ‘FUCK MAN, MY NUT!’ Look I have one, I still have a nut. Right? It's a good nut, it works. God or the fucking devil or whoever the fuck it is you know he left me with one good nut. I still have a fucking nut and it works. And my fucking dick works too…

”Okay, you lost your wife. And you lost your mom. I lost my nut.”

Hesher then wheels Madeleine’s casket outside and down the road. Father and Son join him, and together they walk with the Elohim amidst starlight and shadow, irreverent, irrelevant, and in a sacred slow motion, etching unadulterated love and appreciation into the walls of time and space. It is this shift into appreciation that stabilizes both T.J. and his reality. Gratitude is the only signature of success we need concern ourselves with. It is the end, the beginning, and the tempo of every lofty song.  

The next day, Paul shaves and apparently is done with his depression inspired by Hesher's story. He shows T.J. the block that was his mother's car left by Hesher in their driveway. Father and Son are now at peace and in new union. That metal block is the Cube of Space, and T.J.’s new vehicle for flight into the heavens.

Hesher has vanished for he has fulfilled his obligation and safely forded the Abyss with T.J. intact. However, T.J. will be forever marked by their journey as evidenced by the endearing graffiti left on the roof of his house:

"HESHER WAS HERE."

Drive Retells the Eleusinian Cycle

The movie Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn appears as a lucid demonstration of the ancient Eleusinian mysteries. The film’s characters symbolize varying aspects of death as it applies to mortality and immortality. Its illustrative formula correlates with the specific phases of the Persephone myth and the masks of Hades, lord of the Underworld. The film maps a journey into the chaos of the soul, and the necessary trauma that forges a vehicle for consciousness to endure cosmic assault.

The movie’s title, Drive, is a direct reference to instinct. What is little known about urge is that it is only ever toward life and life eternal. Though it take the soul, no matter how vulgar or refined, through death and death again, it climbs, with glib disregard for the pains and pleasures of its process upon the instruments of its ascent, toward the perpetuity of consciousness of its host. This is the drive of self to Self. To identify with the drive is to harness the power of that one will that runs from one to many and many to one.

The complexities of this process are revealed in the book of nature. Its components of entropy and enthalpy, of gravity and levity, of death and rebirth, when perceived through the eyes of grace, belie a vision of unity, wholeness, and eternity. This vision exalts the spirit and grants the seer with confidence to move mountains. It is this confidence that strengthens limbs and steadies gaze. Our protagonist carries this sacred flame.

As the movie begins, the song Nightcall by Kavinsky informs us that this story is of a journey into the Underworld. It essentially romanticizes Hades pull of Persephone into the shadow of the valley of death. Death must necessarily swallow life so that life may strive to claw its way from that maw. This striving compounds until immortality is realized.

The song’s first line, “I'm giving you a night call to tell you how I feel”, indicates that this pull is, by nature, a watery and emotional experience. The desire of Hades to “drive you through the night, down the hills” is for the purpose of telling “you something you don't want to hear”. It is a dark experience that culminates in a courage-imbuing revelation, as promised, “I'm gonna show you where it's dark, but have no fear”.

The following stanza voices Persephone’s seduction. She sings back to Hades, “There something inside you, it's hard to explain”, celebrating her confused draw to death’s gate. Why indeed would life yield to death? She follows this by stating, “They're talking about you boy, but you're still the same”. Here she admits that the common misperceptions of death amount to nothing more than superficial gossip. She is unimpressed with rumor and warnings and must know this timeless “bad boy” first hand. She instinctively knows that she must go down to come up and is ready and willing.

The Driver dwells in a low-rent apartment building and works alternately as mechanic, stuntman, and getaway driver. These three professions predicate the three phases of the Elusinian mystery’s perennial cycle. The Driver’s job as mechanic is the “descent” or loss of Persephone. Irene’s first meaningful encounter with the Driver is in this context. His job as stuntman is a metaphor for the “search” phase, requiring trial and risk. His secretive role as getaway driver symbolizes the all-significant “ascent” from the Underworld into the world of the living.

In this regard the Driver demonstrates two specific aspects of ascent. Firstly, he works anonymously and never for the same people twice, indicative that urge or drive is impersonal and determinate. Its aim is furtive and final. Secondly, the Driver allows his riders only five minutes to do their business, indicative that this ascent is accomplished through humanity and the upright five-pointed star of controlled sensuality. The film’s theme song, “A Real Hero”, celebrates the virtues of the actualized human being. His countdown during each “job” is a pointed commentary on mortality, and the dire and ticking clock that accompanies our ascent.

The Driver rides with his neighbor Irene in their apartment building elevator, and later helps her and her young son Benicio when Irene has car trouble at a local supermarket. His role as mechanic here initiates her “under the hood” and into the gears and mills of Hades that wind and grind at the foundations of creation.

Irene is the Greek goddess of peace, and her son Ploutos’ name means “wealth”, as does her screen son’s name, Benicio (beneficent one). Ploutos is another name for Pluto, the Roman Hades. Peace yields wealth and abundance, but all things turn to dust. All individual things, in time, be they treasured or not, transform, and the Elusinian mysteries are the story and why of this transformation.

Irene is also known by her more popular name, Demeter, in Greek mythology. Demeter is the mother of Pesephone, who is seduced and abducted by Hades. So will Irene and Benicio be lured into a lushly violent criminal Underworld by the Driver.

Shannon owns the garage the Driver works at and arranges his other jobs on the side. Shannon represents the common cringing fear of death. He is crippled and, as Bernie states, has “never really had a lot luck” indicating that the gripping fear of change that haunts most of humanity is that which separates them from death’s abundance symbolized by Benicio (Ploutos). Fortune favors the bold, and the bold are distinguished by an unflappable courage in the face of big change. The current global economic crisis is a refining fire, which will, in time, separate the parasitic dross that infests the financial sector from those noble spirits that will give society new rise in magnanimous fields to follow. We are not all aboard a sinking ship, but rather a courtroom, in which the secret laws of justice are trying and judging the metal of our systems and institutions and their human fallout. As always, balance will prevail.

Shannon persuades the mobster Bernie Rose to purchase a stock car for the Driver to race after seeing the Driver's skill. The mobster Bernie Rose may be viewed as lustful desire (a burning rose). The red rose means desire, and while all desire is sacred, not all desire is refined. As such it presents the second obstacle, behind the fear of death, to be overcome before Persephone may escape from the Underworld.

Bernie's business partner is Nino, a Jewish mobster. Nino, spelled backwards is Onin, and Onin is a symbol of waste in the Old Testament. According to Genesis 38:3-10, Onin was killed by God for spilling his seed upon the ground instead of impregnating his new wife. Onanism, over time, came to refer to masterbation, but in reality, it is a reference to any waste, though especially of sperm. Nino once had Shannon's pelvis broken when Shannon failed to pay a debt, leaving him with a limp. Here we learn that the third obstacle, namely waste, is responsible, in part, for the crippling fear of death. Waste diminishes the body and the spirit, and opens the door to fear.

Irene has her car towed to Shannon's garage and the Driver gives her and Benicio a ride home. They begin spending time together. Irene (Demeter/Persephone) here begins her seduction by the Driver (Hades), but she is not initiated until her husband, Standard Gabriel, is released from prison and returns home. This tells us that it is not her first journey into the Underworld, as Gabriel is qabalistically associated with the planet Pluto and sounds the trumpet transition from world to world. He is also the father of Benicio indicating that wealth is both the product and the substance of transformation. Implicit here is also the Egyptian Horus/Isis/Osiris triangle, wherein son and father are actually one.

Standard Gabriel owes protection money to a gangster, Cook, dating back to his time in prison. Cook symbolizes the sentimental personal love that leads to universal love – if it is carried to its conclusion. While the movie portrays Cook in a negative light, it is through the catalyst of Cook (personal love) that Irene is initiated into the shadows where the drive toward immortality is conceived. This occurs when Cook beats up Standard Gabriel, and threatens to go after Irene and Benicio, if Standard does not agree to rob a pawnshop. It is personal affection that may interrupt natural realization and transition, as demonstrated by Trinity’s and Neo’s kiss at the end of The Matrix. As such it serves as a powerful catalyst for inspiring the necessary twists and torques toward dynamic change.

The Driver agrees to help Standard pay off the debt by driving him to and from the pawnshop. Blanche, Cook's moll, also participates in the heist. Blanche means white, and she represents purified desire, as opposed to the crude red desire of Bernie Rose. The pawnshop heist is a critical juncture, at which the descent into the Underworld completes itself with the shooting and killing of Standard Gabriel outside. While waiting in the parking lot for Standard and Blanche to complete the heist, the Driver sees another car pull into the lot and park. This other car, with its tinted windows depicts the dweller on the threshold, a profound and terrifying sense of other, cuing the beginning of the second phase of the Hades experience, the search. Blanche returns to the car with a large bag filled with money, lending us to the idea that purified desire yields Ploutos’ wealth; however, when Standard exits the pawnshop, he is shot in the neck and dies. The Driver flees with Blanche and the money, but the car that pulled into the parking lot minutes earlier gives chase, trying to run them off the road. The search has begun.

The Driver eludes the other vehicle, and he and Blanche hide out in a motel room. The Driver discovers that the amount of money is much more than was expected. After the Driver threatens Blanche, she tells him that the chasing car belongs to Cook and that she and Cook planned to double-cross the Driver and Standard, taking the money for themselves. Keep in mind that while affectionate love and purified desire are in cahoots, they jeopardize our goal of revelatory knowledge gleaned through experience of the dark side. Two of Cook's men attack them in the motel room, killing Blanche and injuring the Driver before he kills them both. Ultimately personal love arrests righteous desire. It simultaneously gives rise to and inhibits high ambition.

The Driver confronts Cook in his strip club and learns that Nino was behind the heist after posing to hammer the bullet Cook gave to Benicio into his forehead. Cook’s gift to Benicio is the threat that personal love poses to wealth. The naked women (symbolic of nature) in the strip club sit idly by and watch the Driver threaten and torture Cook, who reveals Nino’s role. It is ultimately waste that terminates rapture, destroys high desire, and compromises affection. Waste (Nino) is the agent of all this chaos and pain.

Nino sends a hitman to the Driver's apartment building, with whom the Driver and Irene unknowingly ride the elevator down, revealing that a deeper layer of darkness must fall before they begin their ascent. The Driver kisses Irene before stomping in the hitman’s head. This transition from dreamy romance to unbridled rage is illustrative, as is boot to brains, of the quick movement from Pisces winter to Aries spring, and the beginning of the ascent from shadow to sunlight. The Driver’s drive toward life is now intact. Persephone will be free, and Hades, at the bidding of Zeus, the eagle, elevated expression of Scorpio, will make it so.

Meanwhile, Nino explains to Bernie that the money from the pawnshop belonged to the East Coast mafia. Fearing retaliation, Bernie and Nino agree to kill those with knowledge, starting with Cook. Finally, lust and waste destroy affection. However, a subtle turn of the tides occurs when Bernie confronts Shannon in his garage and reluctantly kills him with a straight razor by cutting his radial artery and leaving him to bleed out. Here lust serves the purpose of annihilating fear, which clings to the back of the Driver like a parasite both enabling him and shackling him. Like a swarm of nesting dolls, death begins to fold in upon itself as we climb the ladder from the realm of Hades.

            Here now, enunciated by the song, “Oh My Love” by Riz Ortolani, is our glorious rise to new life. She sings, “Oh my love, look and see the Sun rising from the river. Nature's miracle once more will light the world. But this light is not for those men still lost in an old black shadow. Won't you help me to believe that they will see a day, a brighter day, when all the shadows will fade away. That day I'll cry that I believe. Oh my love, high above us the Sun now embraces Nature, and from Nature we should learn that all can start again, as the stars must fade away to give a bright new day.”

The Driver, wearing a silicone mask, follows Nino to the Pacific Coast Highway in his car and rams Nino's car onto a beach. With Nino wounded and weakened, the Driver drowns him in the Pacific Ocean. The ascent requires firm resolve, demonstrated by the head stomping in the elevator. It requires the arrest of waste, demonstrated by Nino’s murder on the beach. Lastly, it requires a conversation and an agreement with lust. The Driver speaks to Bernie on Nino's phone, and they arrange to meet at a Chinese restaurant. This implies that the Chinese mechanisms for dealing with lust, namely the Taoist sexual practices, may be a key in transcending unrefined desire.

Before meeting Bernie, the Driver makes a final phone call to Irene to tell her he is leaving, and says that meeting her and Benicio was the best thing that has ever happened to him. Irene, Demeter, Persephone, and Ploutos are nearly free. Spring has arrived and new life will bloom, new wealth will circulate, and peace, however temporal, will prevail… pending on what must happen between the Driver and Bernie at the restaurant.

At the restaurant, Bernie promises only Irene and Benicio's safety, in exchange for the money, and the Driver acquiesces. In the parking lot, Bernie stabs the Driver in the abdomen as he pulls the money from the trunk of his car. The Driver pulls the weapon from his own gut and fatally stabs Bernie, leaving his corpse and the satchel of money behind.

That evening, Irene knocks on the Driver's apartment door, with no response. She is done, however reluctantly, with Hades. Her Underworld experience is over. She is reborn in the longing lonesome beauty that aches when the witchcraft has subsided, when the madness of love abates, when the dead have gone and left the living to do the living.

The Driver drives into the night. He is immortal, and descends again to his realm to await his next seduction of life and life’s wealth. In the end there is only urge. Urge constructs and deconstructs all. Urge is eternal and infinite. Urge leads through sunset and sunrise. Urge leads through death and rebirth. Urge paves the road and goads us upon it. Follow urge, that dark shepherd, into the black unknown until forever is a byword.