The creative relationship

Ernest Hemingway famously said, "There isn’t any symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea.  The sea is the sea.  The old man is an old man.  The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.  The shark are all sharks, no better and no worse.  All the symbolism that people say is shit.  What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

Thus frustrating the absolute hell out of literature teachers everywhere.

To me, though, the interesting point here isn't the bit about puncturing your tenth grade English teacher's balloon, it's the last part: "What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."  Because that's true of all creative endeavors, isn't it?  When creativity succeeds, it's a dialogue, not a monologue.  We each bring to that dialogue our unique personalities and backgrounds and biases and individuality, and what we each take from it will be just as varied.

I ran into an interesting example of that last week when I was listening to the radio, and heard a song that was new to me -- Joywave's "Tongues."  I was immediately grabbed by the mesmerizing, electro-pop riff that introduces the song (and reappears several times during its run), but the lyrics were what fascinated me most.

They seem to exist at that strange intersection between "evocative" and "fever dream."  They're downright peculiar in places:

Pick me up, dust me off
Give me breath and let me cough
Drag me back, collect my thoughts
I've come back to the land I'd lost

The palms are down, I'm welcomed back to town
Sometimes I feel like they don't understand me
I hear their mouths making foreign sounds
Sometimes I think they're all just speaking in tongues

Despite their oddness, the lyrics immediately resonated with me.  Pretty much all my life, I've been baffled by the behavior of my fellow humans.  When I'm in conversations, even with people I know well and feel friendly toward, most of the time I not only never know what they're going to say next, I don't really get why they have the emotional reactions they do.  I often feel like I'm witnessing something I don't really understand on any deep level, and even afterward I can't really parse what happened and why.

I've described myself as feeling like a changeling -- someone who was replaced as a child by a being from another species, and has grown up irredeemably separate from the people around him.  And "Tongues" seemed to capture that sense of being a stranger in a strange land pitch-perfectly.

My emotional reaction was so powerful that I thought it'd be interesting to see what others came up with from listening to it.  The first place I went was the music video, which took an entirely different tack -- this one about how society makes us hide who we actually are.  [Nota bene: the video is cool but mildly NSFW, as it shows more human skin than might be appropriate in certain circumstances.  Be forewarned.]

Then I did a search to see if I could find out how the songwriters themselves described it, and I found a piece lead singer Daniel Armbruster did with Medium about the origins of the song.  Here's what Armbruster had to say:

There are a few things happening in the lyrics of “Tongues”, but a large chunk of it explores a disconnect with one’s peers.  Back when I was DJing in Rochester, I would see the same well-meaning individuals night after night talking about how they were moving to a bigger city, writing a novel, starting a band, etc, etc.  All of these things were great in theory, but no one ever did them.  They never left the bar so far as I could tell.  It really weighed on me after awhile and I’d just have to let it go in one ear and out the other.  In a way I felt like I needed to push myself harder to compensate for my peers’ lack of effort.  After the song came out, I had a person approach me one night in Rochester and tell me that the song had really resonated with them.  I was thrilled until they elaborated and said that they had been traveling on another continent recently and couldn’t understand the local dialect.  Hopefully that’s not what you take away from the song.

So there's yet a third and a fourth interpretation of what "Tongues" means.

As a writer, I share Armbruster's frustration that sometimes readers (or listeners) don't take away from a creative work what we intended.  But that's part of the game, isn't it?  Because creativity implies a relationship between producer and consumer, the producer can't (and shouldn't try to) control where it goes.  Readers, listeners, and observers are one-half of the creative relationship, and their uniqueness is inevitably going to shape what they pull out of the experience.  And, of course, this is why sometimes that relationship simply fails to form.  I love the music of Stravinsky, while it leaves my wife completely cold -- she thinks it's pointless cacophony.  A lot of people are moved to tears by Mozart, but I find much of his music inspires me to say nothing more than "it's nice, I guess."  My friend Andrew Butters, who is so much like me we've been described as sharing a brain, found my favorite book (Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum) a colossal bore, and forced himself to finish it only out a sense of loyalty.  Conversely, his favorite book, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, got no more than a tepid, "It wasn't a bad read" from me.

But that's what we should expect, you know?  How monotonous would the world be if we all had the same opinions about creative works? 

It's part of why I have zero patience for genre snobs and self-appointed tastemakers.  If some piece of creative work inspires you, or evokes emotions in you, it's done its job, and no one has the slightest right to tell you that you're wrong for feeling that way.  Honestly, I'm delighted if Mozart grabs you by the heart and swings you around; that's what music is supposed to do.  Just because I'm more likely to have that experience listening to Firebird than Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong; all it means is that human creativity is complex, intricate, and endlessly intriguing.

So don't take it all that seriously if someone tells you what a poem, lyric, or piece of art or music means, even if that person is a college professor.  Enjoy what you enjoy, and bring your own creativity to the relationship.  It may be that Ernest Hemingway didn't mean The Old Man and the Sea to be anything more than a depiction of an incident involving a fisherman, a boy, a fish, and some sharks; but that doesn't mean you can't bring more to the reading, and pull more out of it, yourself.

And isn't that what makes the creative experience magical?

****************************************

Cloudy, with a chance of disaster

I remember my younger son, ever the practical, literal type, struggling over his homework in eleventh grade English Lit.

"You know what the problem is?" he finally burst out.  "I have a hard time identifying narrative techniques because they never occur in real life!"

I asked him to elaborate.

"Like foreshadowing."  He made an annoyed gesture.  "Nothing foreshadows anything.  If I look outside and there are black clouds on the horizon, it doesn't mean some disaster is going to happen, it just means it's going to rain."

I told him I couldn't argue with that.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gerlos (original picture), modification: Mielon, Thunderstorm 003, CC BY-SA 2.0]

"So why do writers do that?" he asked.

I told him to revisit the definition of the word fiction.

He gave me an annoyed snort, and rolled his eyes in the way only a teenager can.  "Well, it's ridiculous.  I think the only reason they put that stuff in there is so that high school English teachers can make their students try to find it."

When I was remembering this exchange, the thought occurred to me that this might make an amusing topic for this week's Fiction Friday.  Why work tropes into writing that obviously never happen in the real world?

I have to admit to having used some of this "ridiculous stuff" myself, although being that what I write is speculative fiction/magical realism, we're already assuming that in some way or other we've left behind the real life Nathan finds so narrative-technique-free.  I explicitly used "Chekhov's gun" in Descent into Ulthoa -- the principle coined by playwright Anton Chekhov, that if something unusual appears in a scene, it'll eventually be crucial to the plot.  The way he put it was, "If a gun appears, at some point it will go off."  In this case Chekhov's gun is a trail cam -- but in my own defense, I had one of the characters point out that maybe just putting out the trail cam was assuring that it'd turn something up, and outright identifies it as the famous writer's eponymous firearm.

Despite my son's objections, I have to admit that a lot of narrative techniques do have the effect of making me keep turning the page.  Here are a few, and some examples I think were particularly effective:

• In media res -- the name comes from the Latin phrase for "in the midst of things."  It's the technique of starting a story in the middle of the action, and (if necessary) revealing the lead-up to it in flashbacks.  For example, I think it's pure brilliance that Andy Weir began The Martian with the sentence, "Well, I'm pretty much fucked."
• Plot twist -- the stock-in-trade of murder mystery writers, but certainly used widely in other genres.  The one that immediately comes to mind is in Stephen King's The Stand, in which four men -- Glen, Stu, Ralph, and Larry -- are walking from Boulder, Colorado to Las Vegas to confront the evil Randall Flagg.  There's an accident in which Stu shatters his leg, and the other three recognize they have to leave him behind, that their task is more important than one man's life.  (Stu agrees with them, for what it's worth.)  When they leave him, the chapter ends with the sentence, "None of them ever saw Stu Redman again."  The reader, of course, thinks it's because the badly-injured Stu is going to die -- but in the end, it's the other three who die, and Stu survives.  (This is also a good example of "author intrusion" -- the author giving the reader information that none of the characters have -- which is usually frowned upon in modern novels.  Here, though, I think it was a stroke of genius, showing that there's no such thing as "the law of the land" in writing fiction.)
• An unreliable narrator -- the best example of this I can think of is the wonderful (if heart-wrenching) character Snitter from Richard Adams's The Plague Dogs.  Snitter is a dog who was used as a test subject in an animal research lab, and had his brain surgically altered.  The result is that he can't tell reality from his imaginings.  There are a number of sections in the book told from Snitter's point-of-view, and every time you have to adjust your understanding of what you're reading, because what Snitter is experiencing -- and telling the reader -- may or may not be real.  It's profoundly disorienting, but chillingly effective.
• Allegory -- the most commonly-cited example is the Christian allegory in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but that one is so ham-handed that I wouldn't cite it as a skillful use of the technique.  Much better, I think, is George Orwell's Animal Farm, which can be read as a rather disquieting fable about sentient animals on a farm, or -- more devastatingly -- as an allegory to the Russian Revolution and historical figures like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.
• Hyperbole -- exaggerating for humorous effect.  I may have been guilty of that once or twice here at Skeptophilia, but no one does it better than writer Dave Barry.  As an example, one of his statements in a column on politics: "The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery."
• Parody -- poking fun at something by amplifying the style to the point of being ridiculous.  Take, for instance, National Lampoon's Bored of the Rings, which features characters named Frito, Dildo, Poppie, Murky Brandyflask, Legolamb, and the wizard Goodgulf Greyteeth.
• Irony -- where there's a discrepancy between what the characters know or expect to happen, and what the reader does.  Despite other aspects of the book being problematic at best, this always makes me think of C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, where it's used like a sucker punch.  The bad guys, led by the evil Fairy Hardcastle, are hot on the heels of the good guys, and are desperate to trace them back to their headquarters.  There are three people they're trailing whom they suspect might lead them to the good guys' home base, but at the last minute Hardcastle realizes she doesn't have enough people to follow all three.  She instructs them to forget about tracking Professor Cecil Dimble.  Dimble, she says, is a mild-mannered academic who surely doesn't have the guts to put his life on the line for the cause.  "In any case," she tells her subordinates, "Dimble can be got any time.  He comes into college pretty regularly every day; and he's really a nonentity."  Dimble, of course, is the guy they were after -- and the good guys miss being found out by a hair's breadth.

Like anything, these sorts of literary devices can be used unskillfully, or overused.  But with a subtle touch they can really ramp up the emotional punch of a story.

Even if sometimes, dark clouds on the horizon just mean it's going to rain.

**********************************

I've always loved a good parody, and one of the best I've ever seen was given to me decades ago as a Christmas present from a friend.  The book, Science Made Stupid, is a send-up of middle-school science texts, and is one of the most fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious things I've ever read.  I'll never forget opening the present on Christmas morning and sitting there on the floor in front of the tree, laughing until my stomach hurt.

If you want a good laugh -- and let's face it, lately most of us could use one -- get this book.  In it, you'll learn the proper spelling of Archaeopteryx, the physics of the disinclined plane, little-known constellations like O'Brien and Camelopackus, and the difference between she trues, shoe trees, and tree shrews. (And as I mentioned, it would make the perfect holiday gift for any science-nerd types in your family and friends.)

Science education may never be the same again.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

My little... Satan

About a year ago, I got into a fairly surreal conversation with a friend of mine over the phenomenon of "Bronies."

A "Brony," for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is an adult, usually male, fan of the television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  At first my friend didn't believe that there was such a thing, and she accused me of trying to convince her of something ridiculous so that I would have ammunition for teasing her later when she found out that it wasn't true.

This forced me to dig up an article in Wired from all the way back in 2011 that proved to her that, unlikely as it may seem, the Brony phenomenon is real.

The Bronies are pretty serious about their obsession, too.  They have conventions, and dress up as characters like Fluttershy and Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash, complete with wigs and costumes that are colors not found in nature.

BronyCon. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Keith Survell from USA, Bronycon summer 2012 cosplay session, CC BY-SA 2.0]

They collect action figures.  They have online discussion groups wherein they discuss the events in recent episodes with the same gravitas you would expect if the scripts had been penned by Shakespeare, or at the very least, George R. R. Martin.  They make fan art (as of the writing of the Wired article, the site DeviantArt had over 90,000 pieces of My Little Pony-inspired art; heaven alone knows how many there are now).  They went so apeshit when My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ended its run in 2019 that EntertainmentOne and Boulder Media teamed up with Paramount Pictures to produce a full-length movie called, I kid you not, My Little Pony: A New Generation, which is scheduled to be released this September.

There is also a subgroup which apparently like to dress up as My Little Ponies and then have sex with each other.  Which I guess is harmless enough if everyone involved is a consenting adult, but open-minded as I am, I really didn't want to investigate further.

Being an author, my internet search history is already fucked up enough as it is.

Anyhow, after discussing the whole phenomenon with my friend, I got to thinking about it, and I decided that I had to see if I could figure out why this show had gained so much popularity amongst adults.  And fortunately, the article linked above has a short clip from one of the shows.  "Who knows?" I thought.  "I'm an open-minded guy, and confident in my own masculinity.  Maybe I'll be charmed.  Maybe I'll understand how some dude could get taken in by the innocent delight of entering a pastel-colored world where stories always end well."

So I watched the clip.  And "delight" is not what I experienced.  All I can say is, the voices of the My Little Pony characters reach a level of Annoying Whine previously achieved only by the actors who voiced the little dinosaurs in The Land Before Time.  After watching ten seconds of the clip, I wanted to remove my ears, with a cheese grater if need be.  I not only cannot understand how anyone could become a Brony, I felt like I needed to chug a six-pack of Bud Light after watching the clip just to restore order to the universe.

But all of this is backstory.  Because just yesterday I found out, through a different YouTube clip that you all must watch, that there is a reason that otherwise normal guys become Bronies.  And after watching the clip, I realized what a narrow escape I had.

Because My Little Pony is rife with symbolism of Satan and the Illuminati.

From Princess Celestia, who watches the world with the Eye of Horus and is actually a pagan sun goddess; to Applejack, whose apple symbol represents the Apple of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; to Twilight Sparkle's six-pointed star.  All symbols of evil magic and the occult.

And don't even get me started about "Pinkie Pie."

All through the video, which is eight minutes long, there is eerie, atmospheric music playing, sort of like the soundtrack to The Exorcist only less cheerful.  I watched the whole thing through twice, because it's just that wonderful.  There are all sorts of references to the Masons and the Satanists and the Illuminati and the Pagans.  An especially great part is where the subtitles tell us that there are six Pony characters, and each one has her own "magic element" and her own color, and 6+6+6 = 666.

I always thought that 6+6+6 = 18.  Maybe it's special Illuminati math or something.

Be that as it may, I guess that this explains the whole "Brony" phenomenon.  Adult guys are getting sucked in by the evil magic of My Little Pony, and through the wicked influence of characters like "Rainbow Dash" they are being induced to dedicate their lives to worshiping Satan.

So it's a truly awesome video, and very educational, although I would caution you against drinking anything while watching it unless you really want to buy a new computer monitor.

Anyway, there you have it.  Why guys become Bronies.  Me, I'm still not likely to watch, even now that I know that the show has a darker side.  Those voices are just beyond anything I could tolerate.  Not that this will convince my friend, who still thinks I'm covering up a secret obsession, to the point that she got me a "Pinkie Pie" mug for my last birthday.

But it could be worse.  She could have gotten me a plush toy with a voice box.  And then I might have made a deal with Satan just to get even with her.

*************************************

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

The creative relationship

When I was in freshman lit -- a lot of years ago -- we were assigned to read and analyze Robert Frost's classic poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Mostly what I remember about the discussion that ensued was the professor telling us that when an interviewer asked Frost himself what the poem meant, Frost replied that it wasn't intended to be allegorical, or symbolic of anything; it was simply a recounting of a scene, a weary traveler pausing for a moment to appreciate the beauty of a snowy woodland.

"Of course," the professor went on, cheerfully confident, "we know that a poet of Frost's stature wouldn't produce anything that simplistic -- so let's see what symbolism we can find in his poem!"

I recall being kind of appalled, mostly at the professor's hubris in thinking that his own opinions about meaning overrode what the poet himself intended.  Since then, though, I've begun to wonder.  I still think the professor was a bit of a cocky bastard, don't get me wrong; but I've come to realize that creativity implies a relationship -- it's not as simple as writer (or artist or composer) creating, and reader (or observer or listener) consuming.

This topic comes up because a couple of days ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a video by Aldous Harding, a brilliant singer/songwriter from New Zealand, performing her song "The Barrel."

The song is weird, mesmerizing, strangely beautiful, and the video is somewhere in that gray area at the intersection of "evocative" and "fever dream."  The lyrics are downright bizarre in places:

The wave of love is a transient hut
The water's the shell and we are the nut
But I saw a hand arch out of the barrel

Look at all the peaches
How do you celebrate
I can't appearance out of nowhere

What does it mean?  Harding herself wants to leave that, at least in part, up to the listener.  In an interview with NPR, she said, “I realized that the video was a well-intended opinion of mine to just keep it loose.  I feel we’re expected to be able to explain ourselves...  But I don’t necessarily have that in me the way you might think."

It's wryly funny, especially in light of the long-ago pronouncements of my freshman lit professor, that a lot of people are weighing in on the song and interpreting it in a variety of mutually-exclusive ways.  One writer said that it's about female empowerment and escaping from abusive relationships.  Another suggests that it describes how "the scariest thing is looking in the mirror and not recognising what you see staring back at you."  A review in The Guardian lists other interpretations that have been suggested:

Depending on whose interpretation you plumped for, the video was either a homage to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal 1973 film The Holy Mountain, a nod to the national dress of Wales (where [Harding's album] Designer was partly recorded and where Harding currently resides), analogous to the faintly disturbing vision of pregnancy found in Sylvia Plath’s 1960 poem "Metaphors," inspired by postmodernist poet Susan Howe’s book Singularities, which surveys the 17th-century First Nation wars in New England, [or] somehow related to menstruation.

Watch it... and see what you think.

Like my lit professor, what gets me about a lot of these interpretations is how certain they sound.  My own reaction was that the lyrics fall into the realm of "nearly making sense," and that part of why they're fascinating -- and why I've watched the video several times -- is that there's a real art to using language that way, neither being too overt about what you mean nor devolving into complete nonsense.

Creativity, I think, implies a relationship between producer and consumer, and because of that, the producer can't always control where it goes.  Readers, listeners, and observers bring to that activity their own backgrounds, opinions, and knowledge, and that is going to shape what they pull out of the creative experience.  And, of course, this is why sometimes that relationship simply fails to form.  I love the music of Stravinsky, while it leaves my wife completely cold -- she thinks it's pointless cacophony.  A lot of people are moved to tears by Mozart, but I find much of his music inspires me to say nothing more than "it's nice, I guess."

It's part of why I have zero patience for genre snobs and self-appointed tastemakers.  If some piece of creative work inspires you, or evokes emotions in you, it's done its job, and no one has the slightest right to tell you that you're wrong for feeling that way.  Honestly, I'm delighted if Mozart grabs you by the heart and swings you around; that's what music is supposed to do.  Just because I'm more likely to have that experience listening to Firebird than Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong; all it means is that human creativity is complex, intricate, and endlessly intriguing.

So don't take it all that seriously if someone tells you what a poem, lyric, or piece of art or music means, even if that person is a college professor.  Enjoy what you enjoy, and bring your own creativity to the relationship.  It may be that Robert Frost didn't mean "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to be anything more than a depiction of a scene; but that doesn't mean you can't bring more to the reading, and pull more out of the reading, yourself.

And isn't that what makes the creative experience magical?

****************************************

The advancement of technology has opened up ethical questions we've never had to face before, and one of the most difficult is how to handle our sudden ability to edit the genome.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a system for doing what amounts to cut-and-paste editing of DNA, and since its discovery by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the technique has been refined and given pinpoint precision.  (Charpentier and Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their role in developing CRISPR.)

Of course, it generates a host of questions that can be summed up by Ian Malcolm's quote in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."  If it became possible, should CRISPR be used to treat devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia?  Most people, I think, would say yes.  But what about disorders that are mere inconveniences -- like nearsightedness?  What about cosmetic traits like hair and eye color?

What about intelligence, behavior, personality?

None of that has been accomplished yet, but it bears keeping in mind that ten years ago, the whole CRISPR gene-editing protocol would have seemed like fringe-y science fiction.  We need to figure this stuff out now -- before it becomes reality.

This is the subject of bioethicist Henry Greely's new book, CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.  It considers the thorny questions surrounding not just what we can do, or what we might one day be able to do, but what we should do.

And given how fast science fiction has become reality, it's a book everyone should read... soon.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Templar cookie warning

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Nabisco creating a hermetically-sealed, bomb-proof vault on the island of Svalbard, with the sole purpose of storing a stockpile of Oreo cookies.  It's a little odd, but on first glance seems innocent enough; in the case of a global cataclysm, the company wants us still to be able to have tasty snacks to enjoy.

It will not surprise loyal readers of Skeptophilia to find out that there are people who ascribe more sinister motives to the company.  And one guy, in fact, thinks that the Oreo cookie vault is in place because when you eat an Oreo, you are unwittingly swearing allegiance to Our Illuminati Overlords, and the Bad Guys want us to continue being able to do that even if civilization collapses.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Robbgodshaw / Oreo, Vector Oreo, CC BY-SA 3.0]

At least, that is the contention of one Maurice "Moe" Bedard, over at the site Gnostic Warrior.  I looked in vain for any sign that he was joking, but alas, I fear that this guy is 100% serious.  Here's an excerpt from his "About" link on the site:

Let us help you on along your evolving path to enlightenment in order to assist you in connecting with your higher self and who you truly are on the inside.  Our global community is composed of reasonable men, and women of truth who seek to understand the world we live in by seeking the without being trapped by the darkness of lies, conspiracies and the masses who love them. 

Well, that's very nice and all.  But there are a lot of words I could use to describe the cookie claim, and "reasonable" is not one of them.  Here's a bit of it, so you can get the flavor (crunchy and chocolate-y and nice when dipped in milk, of course):

Almost 500 billion have been sold.  In fact, if you were to stretch out all the OREOs ever sold, you could circle the globe with OREO cookies 341 times.  But did any of these billions of people ever notice the hidden Knights Templar symbology etched into a Oreo cookie as they dipped their OREO's in milk; or licked off the white creamy filling from the Cross Pattée emblazoned cookies?

I know I didn't.  He goes on to tell us that the little marks on the cookie's surface are actually crosses and triangles that come right from the symbolism of the Templars.  This immediately brought to mind a quote from Umberto Eco's tour de force novel Foucault's Pendulum, from a conversation in which the two main characters, Casaubon and Belbo, are discussing how to define lunacy:

The lunatic... doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits.  For him, everything proves everything else.  The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy.  You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

Which is spot-on.  And as far as the crosses and so forth on the surface of an Oreo, the problem is that any geometrically-patterned surface is going to have triangles and crosses and squares and such.  That's what being "geometrically-patterned" means.  If all of this was Illuminati symbology, then kids in math class would be participating in a cult ritual every time they opened a geometry text.

Then he drops the bombshell on us that even the name "Oreo" is full of secrets:

The etymology of the word OREO gives us two words. Or and Eo.  The Hebrew meaning of the word Or is light, and it can also mean dawn, daylight, early morning, lightning, star, sun, sunlight, and sunshine.  The word Eo has a similar meaning from the Greek word ēōs, meaning dawn. 

In the scriptures, we can then find a reference to fallen angels who are called the watchers, whom I believe are connected etymologically to the word OREO.  For example, the Greek word for watchers is ἐγρήγοροι egrḗgoroi, pl. of egrḗgoros, literally "wakeful".  This Greek word for "Watchers" originates in Daniel 4 where they are mentioned twice in the singular (v. 13, 23), once in the plural (v. 17), of "watchers, holy ones".  Hence, the Templars symbology of the OREO cookie and name are dedicated to the Morning Star, or Dawn Star of the morning.  Another Greek name for the Morning Star is Heosphoros (Greek Ἑωσφόρος Heōsphoros), which means "Dawn-Bringer."

All of this brings up a general rule of thumb, which is "don't fuck with a linguist."  My MA is in historical linguistics, and I can say with some authority that you can not simply subdivide a word any way you want, and then cast around until you find some languages with pieces that fit.  If that's the way etymology worked, then I could take Mr. Bedard's first name, "Maurice" and say that we can split it into "Mau" + "Rice."  From there, it's obvious that it derives from the Egyptian word mau meaning "cat"and the Old English word rice meaning, "strong, powerful, mighty."  So it's clear that Mr. Bedard is actually being controlled telepathically by his cat, who is inducing him to write reams of confusing nonsense so as to mislead us puny humans and keep us subjugated, i.e., bringing our Cat Overlords lots of canned tuna.

Actually, if you're curious, the origin of the name Oreo is unknown; the only idea I've seen that holds any water (besides the most likely explanation, which is that it was simply a short and catchy name), is that it comes from taking the "re" from "cream" and sticking it between two "O"s from chocolate, to make a symbolic sandwich.

In any case, I think you can safely enjoy your Oreos.  No worries that you're accidentally ingesting Templar symbology and an abridged version of the name "Lucifer."  So I'm just going to leave this here, because now I have to go off and investigate the claims of a guy who thinks that John F. Kennedy is still alive, and that he's the Great Beast from the Book of Revelation, and is soon to reveal himself and initiate the End Times.  The guy also thinks that Henry Kissinger is the "Second Beast."  This makes you wonder who the "Third Beast" is, doesn't it?  I'm thinking Mitch McConnell.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that has raised a controversy in the scientific world: Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, by Madeleine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier.

It tells the story of a stupendous discovery -- twelve-million-year-old hominin fossils, of a new species christened Danuvius guggenmosi.  The astonishing thing about these fossils is where they were found.  Not in Africa, where previous models had confined all early hominins, but in Germany.

The discovery of Danuvius complicated our own ancestry, and raised a deep and difficult-to-answer question; when and how did we become human?  It's clear that the answer isn't as simple as we thought when the first hominin fossils were uncovered in Olduvai Gorge, and it was believed that if you took all of our millennia of migrations all over the globe and ran them backwards, they all converged on the East African Rift Valley.  That neat solution has come into serious question, and the truth seems to be that like most evolutionary lineages, hominins included multiple branches that moved around, interbred for a while, then went their separate ways, either to thrive or to die out.  The real story is considerably more complicated and fascinating than we'd thought at first, and Danuvius has added another layer to that complexity, bringing up as many questions as it answers.

Ancient Bones is a fascinating read for anyone interested in anthropology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology.  It is sure to be the basis of scientific discussion for the foreseeable future, and to spur more searches for our relatives -- including in places where we didn't think they'd gone.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A monster of a problem

Apparently, it's easier than I thought to give your soul to Satan.

You don't have to attend a Black Mass, or hold a séance, or even wear an upside-down crucifix.  Nothing that flashy, or even deliberate, is necessary.

All you have to do is drink the wrong energy drink.

I am referring, of course, to "Monster," that whiz-bang combination of sugar, vitamins, various herbal extracts of dubious health effect, and truly staggering amounts of caffeine, which misleadingly does not include "demons" on the ingredients list.

At least that's the contention of the also-misleadingly named site Discerning the World, which would be more accurately called Everything Is Trying To Eat Your Soul.  This site claims that the "Monster" logo, with its familiar trio of green claw marks on a black background, is actually a symbol for "666" because the individual claw marks look a little like the Hebrew symbol for the number six:

Which, of course, is way more plausible than the idea that it's a stylized letter "M."  You know, "M" as in "Monster."

But no. Every time you consume a Monster energy drink, you are swallowing...

... pure evil.

Now lest you think that these people are just making some kind of metaphorical claim -- that the Monster brand has symbolism that isn't wholesome, and that it might inure the unwary with respect to secular, or even satanic, imagery -- the website itself puts that to rest pretty quickly.  It's a literal threat, they say, ingested with every swallow:

The Energy Drink contains ‘demonic’ energy and if you drink this drink you are drinking a satanic brew that will give you a boost...  People who are not saved, who are not covered by the Previous [sic] Blood of Jesus Christ are susceptible to their attacks.  Witchcraft is being used against the world on a scale so broad that it encompasses everything you see on a daily basis – right down to children’s clothing at your local clothing store.

So that's pretty unequivocal. Never mind that if you'll consult the Hebrew numeral chart above, the logo looks just as much like "777" as it does like "666."

Or, maybe, just like a capital "M."  Back to the obvious answer.

Unfortunately, though, there are people who think that the threat is real, which is a pretty terrifying worldview to espouse.  Not only did I confirm this by looking at the comments on the website (my favorite one: "It is truly SCARY that all the little kids who play their Pokemon and video games are being GROOMED to enter this gateway to hell.  Satan wants to devour our young and he will do it any way he can."), a guy posted on the r/atheism subreddit just last week saying that he'd been enjoying a Monster drink on a train, and some woman came up to him and snarled, "I hope you enjoy your drink IN HELL," and then stalked away.

What, exactly, are you supposed to say to something like that?  "Thank you, I will?"  "Here, would you like a sip?"  "Yes, it fills me with everlasting fire?"  Since quick thinking is not really my forté, I'm guessing that I'd probably just have given her a goggle-eyed stare as she walked off, and thought of many clever retorts afterward.

"It's damned good."  That's what I'd like to say to her.

Not, of course, that it would be the truth, since my opinion is that Monster tastes like someone took the effluent from a nuclear power plant, added about twenty pounds of sugar, and let it ferment in the sun all day long.  But that's just me.

And of course, there's my suspicion that the owner of the Monster trademark is probably thrilled by this notoriety -- they pride themselves on being edgy, and their target advertising demographic is young, athletic, iconoclastic rebel types, or those who fancy themselves as such.  So no doubt this whole demonic-entity thing fits right into Monster's marketing strategy.

Convenient for both sides.  The perennially-fearful hell-avoiders have something else to worry about, and the Monster people have an extra cachet for their product.  One hand washes the other, even if one of them belongs to Satan, who (if he were real) would probably approve wholeheartedly of capitalism and the profit motive.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Templar cookie warning

With all of the controversy right now over the upcoming presidential election, the conflicts over gun rights and federal land ownership, and the fears over climate change and ecological mismanagement, I'm sure what's in the forefront of your mind right now is:

Am I unwittingly swearing allegiance to the Illuminati every time I eat an Oreo cookie?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

At least, that would be your primary concern if you were one Maurice "Moe" Bedard, over at the site Gnostic Warrior.  I looked in vain for any sign that he was joking, but alas, I fear that this guy is 100% serious.  Here's an excerpt from his "About" link on the site:

Let us help you on along your evolving path to enlightenment in order to assist you in connecting with your higher self and who you truly are on the inside.  Our global community is composed of reasonable men, and women of truth who seek to understand the world we live in by seeking the without being trapped by the darkness of lies, conspiracies and the masses who love them.

 Well, that's very nice and all.  But there are a lot of words I could use to describe the cookie claim, and "reasonable" is not one of them.  Here's a bit of it, so you can get the flavor (crunchy and chocolate-y and nice when dipped in milk, of course!):

Almost 500 billion have been sold. In fact, if you were to stretch out all the OREOs ever sold, you could circle the globe with OREO cookies 341 times.  But did any of these billions of people ever notice the hidden Knights Templar symbology etched into a Oreo cookie as they dipped their OREO's in milk; or licked off the white creamy filling from the Cross Pattée emblazoned cookies?

I know I didn't.   He goes on to tell us that the little marks on the cookie's surface are actually crosses and triangles that come right from the symbolism of the Templars.  The problem is, of course, that any geometrically-patterned surface is going to have triangles and crosses and squares and such.  That's what being "geometrically-patterned" means.  If all of this was Illuminati symbology, then kids in math class would be participating in a cult ritual every time they opened a geometry text.

Then he drops the bombshell on us that even the name "Oreo" is full of secrets:

The etymology of the word OREO gives us two words. Or and Eo.  The Hebrew meaning of the word Or is light, and it can also mean dawn, daylight, early morning, lightning, star, sun, sunlight, and sunshine.  The word Eo has a similar meaning from the Greek word ēōs, meaning dawn. 

In the scriptures, we can then find a reference to fallen angels who are called the watchers, whom I believe are connected etymologically to the word OREO. For example, the Greek word for watchers is ἐγρήγοροι egrḗgoroi, pl. of egrḗgoros, literally "wakeful".  This Greek word for "Watchers" originates in Daniel 4 where they are mentioned twice in the singular (v. 13, 23), once in the plural (v. 17), of "watchers, holy ones".  Hence, the Templars symbology of the OREO cookie and name are dedicated to the Morning Star, or Dawn Star of the morning.  Another Greek name for the Morning Star is Heosphoros (Greek Ἑωσφόρος Heōsphoros), which means "Dawn-Bringer."

Well, at least now we're on solid ground for me; I'm a linguistics geek of long standing, and I can say with some authority that you can not simply subdivide a word any way you want, and then cast around until you find some languages with pieces that fit.  If that's the way etymology worked, then I could take Mr. Bedard's first name, "Maurice" and say that we can split it into "Mau" + "Rice."  From there, it's obvious that it derives from the Egyptian word mau meaning "cat"and the Old English word rice meaning, "strong, powerful, mighty."  So it's clear that Mr. Bedard is actually being controlled telepathically by his cat, who is inducing him to write reams of confusing nonsense so as to mislead us puny humans and keep us subjugated, i.e., bringing our Cat Overlords lots of canned tuna.

Actually, if you're curious, the origin of the name Oreo is unknown; the only idea I've seen that holds any water (besides the most likely explanation, which is that it was simply a short and catchy name), is that it comes from taking the "re" from "cream" and sticking it between two "O"s from chocolate, to make a symbolic sandwich.

In any case, I think you can safely enjoy your Oreos.  No worries that you're accidentally ingesting Templar symbology and an abridged version of the name "Lucifer."  So I'm just going to leave this here, because now I have to go off and investigate the claims of a guy who thinks that John F. Kennedy is still alive, and that he's the Great Beast from the Book of Revelation, and is soon to reveal himself and initiate the End Times.  The guy also thinks that Henry Kissinger is the "Second Beast."  This makes you wonder who the "Third Beast" is, doesn't it?  I'm thinking Ann Coulter.

Attack of the fnords

Today I learned a new term that is apparently gaining popularity amongst the conspiracy-theory crowd, and that term is "fnord."

Originally coined for the Illuminatus! Trilogy by authors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, a fnord is a typographic or symbolic representation of disinformation, intended to misdirect or hypnotize.  Wikipedia says about its use in Shea and Wilson's writings,

In these novels, the interjection "fnord" is given hypnotic power over the unenlightened. Under the Illuminati program, children in grade school are taught to be unable to consciously see the word "fnord". For the rest of their lives, every appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of uneasiness and confusion, and prevents rational consideration of the subject. This results in a perpetual low-grade state of fear in the populace. The government acts on the premise that a fearful populace keeps them in power...  To see the fnords means to be unaffected by the supposed hypnotic power of the word.

So of course, it was only a matter of time before the conspiracy theorists latched onto this idea, despite Shea and Wilson's trilogy clearly being shelved in the "fiction" section of Barnes & Noble.  And once they decide that the government is planting fnords around, the next question is obviously... where?

Answer?  The logo for "Wendy's Old-Fashioned Hamburgers."

According to a guy who goes by the handle of "Solomon Sevens," this logo is just so fnordful that it's a wonder we don't lapse into some kind of catatonic state when we look at it.  If you listen to his YouTube presentation on the subject, which he delivers in a nasal monotone so dull that I expected him to end his sentences with, "Anyone?  Anyone?  Buehler?", you come away convinced either that (1) the entire superstructure of civilization is trying to destroy your mind, or else (2) the conspiracy theorists really need to institute some kind of quality control.

Because what is it that Mr. Sevens thinks are the super-evil symbolic fnords present in this logo?  He tells us that there are three of them:  (1) The circle around the little girl's head; (2) the curlicues underneath the word "Wendy's;" and (3) the fact that the logo is printed in all primary colors.

And I'm thinking, "that's it?"  That's the best you can do?  You're not even going to use numerology to show that the name "Wendy's" somehow generates the Number of the Beast?  You're not going to tell us that you can rearrange "Old-Fashioned Hamburgers" to spell "Balderdash! Humoring Foes?"  You're not going to comment on the oddly hypnotic black eyes which the little red-haired girl uses to bore into your soul and convince you that you really want to eat a truly terrible hamburger right now?

All you can come up with are a circle and a curlicue and some red and yellow printer's ink?  Those are your ultra-evil fnords?

Oh, Mr. Sevens tells us, it's because circles represent the Eye of Satan!  And the curlicues are just like the designs on the dollar bill that are next to the All-Seeing Eye in the Pyramid!  It's the Illuminati!  Trying to control us all!  Even coming at us when we stop for lunch!

It's kind of an anticlimax, isn't it?  Here I was expecting to find out that logos were going to be full of all kinds of subliminal messages, and I find out that I'm supposed to be afraid of clip-art.

So, anyway, that's what a fnord is.  I'm a little disappointed, frankly.  I thought they'd at least have some gravitas, given how weird the name is, but no luck.  So I'll just go get my breakfast, which I will eat off a circular plate using a fork with a curlicue design.  If I go missing, just look for me in the local insane asylum.  I'll be housed in the wing where they keep all the "sheeple."

Beyoncé of the Illuminati

Well, Superbowl XLVII is history, and the Baltimore Ravens have taken it despite a second-half rally by the 49ers that had Baltimore fans chewing their nails off.

The Superbowl attracts watchers for a variety of reasons.  Some root for particular teams, and if their favorite doesn't make it, they don't bother watching (I know one person who refuses to discuss the event if it doesn't involve the New Orleans Saints).  Others watch for the commercials, or the enjoyment of a wild, lavish spectacle, or the sheer love of football.

This year, of course, there was the added attraction of seeing how Beyoncé was going to use her magical powers and connections with the Illuminati to spread her evil message about the New World Order.

You think I'm making this up, but conspiracy theory websites have been hopping ever since the halftime show.  Take a look, for example, at this one, written by Sarah Wilson, who given the title must work for the Department of Redundancy Department: "What's the Verdict on Beyoncé's Illuminati Performance?  Illuminati-Fueled or Not?"

If you are understandably reluctant to read the original, let me sum it up as follows:

1)  Beyoncé has Illuminati connections.  Her husband Jay-Z's record company, Roc-a-Fella Records, has as its symbol a letter R with a circle and a triangle.  This obviously has nothing to do with the name of the company starting with "R," and circles and triangles being common geometrical shapes.
2)  During the performance, Beyoncé made a triangle with her hands. 
3)  The halftime show involved mirrors, which have secret symbolism.
4)  There was a red circular light used during part of the show.  Obviously the "Eye of Horus."
5)  At one point, her legs made a shape that has "black sun symbolism."

And if that's not enough to convince you doubters out there: during the second half, there was a 35-minute power outage that stopped the game dead in its tracks.  "Interestingly," writes Sarah Wilson, "following Beyoncé's performance, the Superdome suffered an outage that affected lights within the stadium, some cameras, and various pieces of audio equipment.  Power was lost for about 35 minutes before it was gradually restored to affected parts of the stadium.  The power company denied responsibility...  Social media outlets were alive with theories as to why part of the Superdome went dark, which ranged from 'doubting the power of Beyoncé' to her halftime show draining all of the power to her suspected Illuminati connections playing a role in creating darkness."

Oh, yeah, that's got to be it.  Because every time someone makes a special sign with their hands, it activates magical Illuminati Connections and causes a major power outage.  I have only one question to ask, to wit: did you learn logic from watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?  Or what?

It is a continual source of mystification for me how this kind of thinking can make sense to anyone.  That a performer might use edgy symbolism in his/her music, to deliberately up the hype, I can believe; if that's what Beyoncé was doing last night, it wouldn't be the first time.  Look at Madonna (not directly!  Use protective eyewear!).  She's worked so much arcane symbolism into her performances that she could be a walking illustration for the Malleus Maleficarum.  Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, and Kanye West have also capitalized on the game of tweaking the fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists to get attention.

The thing is, does it mean anything?  Anything real?  There are those, of course, who would say yes; symbols have power, and that power can be invoked even if the people using them are doing so without awareness of what's really going on.  Predictably, I think the people who believe this are wingnuts.  Myself, I think the whole thing is just a publicity stunt, and any deliberate use of occult symbolism by pop music stars is just a callous attempt to get more attention.  As Brendan Behan once famously said, "There is no such thing as bad publicity."

So I doubt very much whether there was any connection between Beyoncé's use of the "Eye of Horus" -- deliberate or not -- and the power outage that followed.  If circular red lights caused power outages, then stoplights would be kind of problematic, you know?

In any case, if you watched the game, I hope you enjoyed it, and my condolences to any 49ers fans who are still weeping into their empty trays of chicken wings.  There's always next year.  That is, if Beyoncé doesn't wiggle her fingers at her next performance and somehow cause the collapse of major world governments.  You know how that goes.

Symbol clash

"What does it all mean?"

It's a question you hear posed an awful lot.  The search for meaning is behind most of the world's religions.  It is a major driver for science as well; perhaps the only common ground science and religion share is that both stem from a quest to find connections, and explanations for what we see around us.  Humans are always looking for patterns and correlations.  It is one of the things we do the best.

Like any behavior, however, it can be applied too broadly, or in the wrong context.  The phenomenon of pareidolia that was the subject of this blog two days ago is one example.  I stumbled upon another one just this morning -- in an article that claims that thousands of companies deliberately include "occult witchcraft symbols" in their logos and advertisements.  (Source)

The article starts out reasonably enough, describing the use of symbols in various historical contexts, such as the use of the fish by early Christians to mark households who belonged.  Then, the author, Gabrielle Pickard, gets a little closer to the central point of her article by describing the use of the star-inscribed-within-a-circle symbol by Wiccans, and quotes one Wiccan source as stating that this symbol "cannot be mistaken as belonging to any other religion or deity."

Seriously?  No other culture could have, at some point, drawn a star within a circle, and used it to mean something entirely different?  At this point, we have crossed the line between symbols being used by certain people to mean something, and the symbol somehow having inherent meaning -- a contention that is ridiculous.  Just as language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication" -- with the exception of a few onomatopoeic words, there is no particular connection between a word's sound and its meaning -- symbols gain meaning only through context.  Outside of that context, the same symbol can mean something entirely different -- or nothing at all.

However, this doesn't stop Pickard from imbuing a whole bunch of corporate logos with sinister undertones.  The winged disc, she states, is an Egyptian symbol that connotes life after death, and has now been used in the logos for Bentley, Mini, Harley Davidson, Chrysler, Aston Martin and Chevrolet.  She also says that the symbol shows up in the "seemingly unrelated" contexts of Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians.

"Seemingly."  *cue sinister music*

But she still hasn't gone quite as far off the deep end as she's going to, because the next thing she introduces is the symbol of the "Vesica Piscis," consisting of two interlocking circles.  This symbol is part of "sacred geometry," she says, where it represents the vagina of the Goddess, and thus has "sexual associations."  And (horrors!) this symbol has worked its way into a number of logos, including Chanel, Gucci... and MasterCard!

Yes, people, next time you look at the two interlocking circles on your MasterCard, just remember that you are gazing at the Sacred Vagina of the Goddess.  I think I might switch to Visa.

At first, I thought she might just be commenting upon how ancient symbols have been co-opted by corporations, and have lost their meanings -- which would be an interesting observation.  As context changes, meaning changes.  But no -- she seems to be saying that the symbols all retain their original meanings, even for people who didn't know what those meanings were.  For example, until reading this article, I'd never heard of the "Vesica Piscis."  So, you'd think, any sexual connotations of the Gucci logo would have been lost on me.  But no, she says; she quotes one of her sources, The Vigilant Citizen, as stating that these symbols are "magically charged to focus the subconscious to perform particular tasks," and she goes on to say, "these logos are much more powerful than we may think...  It is only when we stop to look more closely that we can reveal more sinister and hidden ancient meanings behind those symbols."

It was a common claim amongst our ancestors that symbols and words had inherent meaning -- this is the basis of a lot of magical practice, where drawings, patterns, or even spoken words were thought to carry a sort of psychic charge.  (This is the origin of the magician's stock chant, "abracadabra" -- a word once thought to be imbued with tremendous power, and now usually laughed at.)  Of course, there's no inherent anything in symbols.  Symbols can mean one thing in one culture and something completely different in another -- witness the way the sentiment behind the one-finger salute is expressed.  In America, it's a raised middle finger; in France, it's done with the same finger, but palm upward; in some cultures, the equivalent is the thumbs-up gesture or the peace sign, which has led to some unfortunate misunderstandings!

So the idea that corporations are attempting to infiltrate our brains with magical symbols for some sort of malign purpose is ridiculous.  They choose their logos for a lot of reasons -- some historical, some cultural, and some just because they look cool.  Undoubtedly, a few do come originally from associations with the occult (such as the crowned snake in the Alfa Romeo logo), but as the context shifts, any sinister meaning that the symbol had gets lost.  The vast majority, however, are just there to be eye-catching and memorable, and as such are no more sinister than commercial jingles.  The bottom line is that unfortunately for the magical thinkers, everything doesn't have to "mean something."

So relax; you are not invoking sexual magic when you wear Gucci, and I am not summoning up Egyptian sun gods when I drive my wife's Mini Cooper.  To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a pair of interlocking circles is just a pair of interlocking circles.