This is part two (part one available here) of a series defining the allegorical meaning of light as roughly: “Visibility, guided attention and awareness.”
All at once, of course, since there isn’t an equivalent word in English that summarizes the concept.
Guided Attention
Filling in the Gaps
Symbolism can be summarized as the art of saying things without saying them.
It can be conceptualized as gestalt-style transparencies that are laid over real-life situations to give them a defined shape and context. Specific details are what fill in the gaps and create the whole picture.
Counterintuitive though it may be, the main form symbolic communication takes is actions, almost like a game of charades. Allegorical actions. Hints can be given through cultural references and puns. Religious allusions, especially to occultist concepts like astrology and numerology, can be made.
Above all, timing is everything. The same basic symbols get recycled ad nauseum forever, so the only reliable way to interpret meaning is to know when they were used in relation to current events. Symbolism is inherently vague, and without knowing the specific context over which the vague allusions are being laid it’s impossible to extrapolate any meaning.
That’s the entire point. Only certain people involved in steering society are supposed to get the message. The world is a stage, and Symbolism is the language of the production crew and the stage hands.
I think that referring to any of this communication as secret is a misconception since it’s done out in the open and as clearly as possible with the intention of being easily understood. It is, however, intended to go over the heads of the majority of people.
Symbolism is fundamentally utilitarian. What gets discussed is transactional and specific. A “comm” (a message sent through symbolic means) is always about something specific- usually money. Often about specific people.
Following right behind in frequency is societal steering. Shaping and guiding culture. Life is more planned out than we take for granted, especially social trends and political changes.
Shaping Raw Experience
To stick to our theme, let’s use a light switch as an example. Fundamentally, there are only two options- you can turn the light on or turn it off.
You mark a threshold where you differentiate. You start tracking an array of multiple switches, whether they are on or off. Then, you can begin counting. This is what binary numbers are for.
From your array of switches you can turn off and turn on, you can begin encoding data into the numbers you’re tracking. You can group switches together to create memory registers. With your memory registers, you can start embedding commands. Then you can time sequences of these commands to a clock and run programs. You’re a programmer!
Social programming isn’t so different.
Social programming is neutral, neither good nor bad. It just is.
I really hate when comparisons are made between gaining a more sophisticated understanding of your reality and the movie The Matrix, because there’s no escaping the Matrix in real life. Raw experience has to be shaped (programmed) in order to be understood and acted upon. That, and everybody always thinks they’re Neo. None of us are Neo.
Intention is what makes something evil, and there are intrinsically evil actions that can’t be done with good intentions. Social programming isn’t one of them, in my opinion. It’s not inherently bad- it’s what societies are built on. There is no group cohesion without shared mythology and rituals.
Raw human experience has some similarity to arrays of light switches perpetually turning on and off. The synapses in our brains are firing constantly like millions of little switches.
The earth turns in a perpetual on-off cycle of day and night. A programming clock.
All timed by our yearly trip around the sun. The tides follow the cycle of the moon, the stars cycle in perpetual paths.
Cycles upon cycles tracing all the way down from cosmic forces over centuries to each individual person in every moment. Off topic, but I think this concept is probably what the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card is referring to.
With planning and organization, these cycles can be harnessed and given a meaning and direction. Programming. Your day can be given a schedule, weeks punctuated by days of rest. Years divided and labeled, with different seasons having different purposes.
Every culture does this, because that’s what culture is. At some point in every society, no matter how primitive, there are people making decisions on behalf of the group that guide and shape their world. Cultures don’t just randomly happen, they’re amalgamations of generations of decision-making.
What can change is granting agency to people who have had it robbed from them. Teach people the code, make it open source, and allow for collaboration.
Guided Attention
…which brings us back to light.
How do you encode your cultural programming? By dictating what attention is focused on.
How do you control what attention is focused on?
By drawing it in, like moths to a flame.
If individuals’ worlds are shaped by what is visible to them, what is in the light, create their world for them by guiding their attention to desired objects.
You learned Plato's allegory of the Cave in high school English, and now we’re doing it again.
You are gazing into a cell phone screen or at a computer monitor right now. Imagine that you are instead looking at the wall of a cave which you can’t leave.
I might kind of clumsy at it, but I am busily organizing images and projecting them in front of you. This Substack consists of a set of outlines I have crafted and am holding in front of a light so that their shadows are projected onto the wall.
I have made brief little forays outside of the cave and I want to show you what’s out there that you can’t see yet (being trapped in here.) Me in particular, my goal is to train you to see what I have seen with the idea of exiting the cave together.
But what if my goal was to make sure you never see the real world?
It’s faster if you just read the whole allegory:
There’s a lot of wisdom to this story, because so much of culture is essentially shadows on the wall.
Some shadows have good intentions- eliciting good behavior, instilling good morals.
The same light can be shone in order to disguise reality, though. Create discord, maneuver the unsuspecting audience to obsess about trivial fixations and differences.
Symbolic communication is mostly expressed through allegorical actions. If you want to see light being used symbolically in context, look to the actions in our daily lives where light features most prominently.
I already pointed this out in the last post, but anyone who spends a decent amount of time on social media recognizes the plethora of disingenuous and outright fake personas that elbow their way onto your feed.
Regardless of which group is being misrepresented- Evangelical prayer warriors, middle-aged white American men, young black American women, feminist Onlyfans models, etc.- exposing users to these personas is a purposeful attempt at shaping users’ identities and image of the world. Shadows on the wall.
Dressing up as a stereotype of a group of people and giving a performance intended to influence how they are perceived is what minstrels were doing, by the way. An old tradition.
There is another, more pervasive, performance given every day in every corner of the globe in order to influence perception. The news.
The same news cycle on which the directors of society float daily instructions for their actors and stage hands also serves as a constant trivial distraction for the uninitiated to fritter their time away on.
Here’s a summary of the U.S. news cycle from the week of April 10, 2025 that I stole from an account called “Satanwatch” on X.
How much of this carries any actual meaning to the average person? It’s of vital importance to the stage hands behind the curtain of life. Everyone else is being sent on endless wild goose chases debating non-events and artificial cultural conflicts.
This past Christmas into New Year’s Day, clearly one of the more important messaging weeks of the calendar:
What does a flaming Cybertruck mean to any individual member of the public?
Urban Legends: Shadows on the Walls of Your Mind
Social media minstrelsy and news cycle puppet shows are a modern extension of the ancient storytelling tradition. What is pictured on a screen in front of you is, at best, an imitation of what you naturally picture in your mind’s eye yourself as you visualize ideas.
From the physical light of phone screens, tablet screens, computer monitors, e-readers, lit billboards, glowing advertisements, storefront window displays, public artworks and any infinite variety of artificial media we can distill a root source interior light of thought.
All culture is ultimately oral culture. Whatever means you may use to project your narrative to the masses, you are ultimately still engaging in word-of-mouth storytelling. Mythology is the original mass media.
Modern myths, due to their urban context, are known as urban legends. Urban Legends are more persuasive than fictional media because they purport to be real events, just as ancient myths did. They are often presented in a “friend-of-a-friend” story format.
A coworker will claim that their friend’s friend’s mom in another city really did prick her finger on an AIDS-infected needle in a coke machine coin return.
Southerners will swear up and down that some small hamlet in the rural county they grew up in is well known to be an honest-to-God sundown town.
Everybody knows Tommy Hilfiger doesn’t want black people wearing his clothing, he said it on Oprah.
These myths, this mythology, these folk beliefs guide our behavior and self-perception. They are our world, even if we don’t personally believe them. Our social circles and communities do.
The Mystery of the Rainbow Parties
I’ll give you an example.
Teenagers looking to figure out the adult world habitually lie to each other about sex, which presents an opportunity for enterprising adults looking to dictate behavior. This story never happened, and it was overwhelmingly likely written by a man:
Once upon a time in 6th grade, a guy had just moved to our podunk town from the suburbs. He spent more time than you’d think is necessary impressing us with tales of what kids got up to at his old junior high in the suburbs- what with all the many gangs, rampant drug dealing and torrid affairs with teachers that they were apparently inundated with. We were all ears.
Sitting in the bleachers at practice, he told me that a bunch of kids from his old junior high had had a party where all of the girls wore different colors of lipstick and took turns giving the boys blow jobs. The goal for the boys was to collect every color of lipstick by the end of the party.
But he was lying!
For no particular reason, I happened to have read “Making Faces” by Kevyn Aucoin cover to cover multiple times and I knew that that’s not how lipstick works. Any moisture that gets near it smudges it everywhere and wipes it clean off, which is the purpose of using lip pencil and blotting it in layers. It can’t stick to anything wet.
I called him out. He looked me dead in the eye and informed me I was wrong, that he knew these parties happen all the time, he knew it. His friend back home had been to one. Young and innocent as I was, I was floored. Why would someone choose to continue to believe something that was clearly a lie?
Why indeed.
Later it would fall on me to explain to an eager young transwoman that not only are lesbian rainbow parties not a thing, they aren’t possible. Again, I was assured that I was wrong. You hear about them all the time!
Widespread belief in rainbow parties dates all the way back to 2002 and a friend-of-a-friend anecdote from a Christian parenting book. Meeker only mentioned them in passing as something a therapist friend had reported to her, “people are saying this, isn’t that terrible?,” before moving on to other points.
The idea took off, though, and gained a life of its own. Eventually a very special episode of Oprah aired where Oprah and a panel of experts tutted and shook their heads about how terrible it was that the kids were definitely doing this.
Rainbow parties have lived on in the imaginations of junior high boys ever since.
This legend wasn’t just randomly daydreamed up, published and promoted in media. By conjuring a lurid sexual image in the minds’ eye of both clueless teenagers and worried parents, a goal was being pursued. People who should have easily known this wasn’t an organic trend, like a women who had appeared on camera daily for decades at that point, still pushed the idea. You could say cultural pushes like this were Oprah’s real job back in the day.
I am fully sure that once the legend spread, people tried their best to make it real. If I was an enterprising porn producer, I would have used movie magic to make it happen on screen. There is a hungry audience.
The story has to predate any futile attempts to act it out, though. It wasn’t happening as described. The idea of a rainbow party was cast as an image, projected and broadcast to create a shadow on the walls of the minds of the people who heard it. World shaping through the usage of light.
Needless to say, porn may be the most powerful “shadows on the wall of your mind” that there is. Not many people are willing to admit that it affects their worldview or influences their behavior. It’s not up to us to decide that, though. Agency requires awareness.
Awareness
The Enlightened
So who is guiding the light? The “comms-aware,” those who use symbolism- the stage hands pointing the cultural spotlight wherever their director tells them to.
Light as it is used in symbolic communication encompasses not just the idea of what the public sees and is guided to look at, but also marks those who are manipulating the light themselves. Those who are aware of the power are identified with references to it.
There are languages that operate the same way. In Irish Gaelic, rather than saying “My name is ____,” the phrasing goes “[Name] is on me.” This is a good way to translate the meaning of having a name that carries light symbolism. “Light is on me.”
Why light is on you could vary wildly depending on circumstances. Is your family intimately involved in the affairs of state? Are you a puppet being used by a more powerful person to pursue a goal? Are you a committed occultist? Does an entity need to communicate something through media, and you happen to be convenient? Light is the most common symbolism for both first names and surnames. Context is everything.
It could be the first name your parents or a grandparent chose for you. They may be hoping you’ll achieve a social position from which to guide light.
It can be your family name. You may possibly come from a line of people associated with an organized network.
It may be a chosen name or a nickname you adopted for yourself. You might potentially be positioning yourself to be used in culture-shaping or guiding public perception. Messages sent through you might conceivably be intended for the “enlightened.”
You’ve been chosen because of your name to lead a company or pop culture IP. Someone would then possibly be signaling that attention should be paid to you, and you might be used to signal a deal or an affiliation with a particular faction.
You’ve made the news and your name carries light. A culture-shaper could use you to shine a spotlight on something.
It isn’t a guarantee that someone with name light-themed name is aware of anything.
You have to take it in context. Do they have a high public profile? Do they have social status and high powered connections? Are they seriously involved in any religious or occult activities? Separating the signal from the noise is difficult with this one. Context before everything.
There is also a very distinct pattern of CIA-affiliated entities being loaded with light symbolism, probably signaling association with a particular faction. The CIA is also signaled with keys. It’s less likely that the CIA has redundant symbols and more likely that these symbolize factions that the CIA operates as an extension of, or as a tool of.
I warned you this whole endeavor to translate light into English was going to lead into occultism. Buckle up, we’re heading there now.
Every Language Has a Culture
I didn’t get into learning Symbolism to study the occult. When NewClear’s blog was launched in January of 2021 it was advertised to me as decoding a kayfabe-like language used in the arts, popular culture, big business and geopolitics.
I was asked “Would you like to learn a language?” essentially.
Unfortunately, all language is ultimately culture. You can’t learn French without learning the French, and a huge part of the high school French curriculum in the U.S. consists of essentially training the students not to be put off by French culture. We spent a lot of time being coached about appreciating differences.
The culture of Symbolism is occultism. When you dig into symbols and break them down to their most diluted basic forms, when you trace their origins, it usually leads back to occult concepts- but not because the people using the symbols necessarily hold any esoteric beliefs themselves. The hiddenness and lack of accessibility is the attraction. Symbolism is used by a wide variety of people in almost exclusively secular contexts, usually to discuss mundane logistics about financial funding and media attention. However, occultists create the symbols everyone else borrows for their own uses.
The Divine Light
I’m going to be generous and call all of these religions and not specify cults, heresies, or philosophies. I’m demonstrating the ubiquity of light as a basic symbol in these belief systems. I am not an anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist or theologian. I went looking for light, this is what I found.
There is a theory that most occult groups in the Western world (also known as Christendom) share heritage with a single source belief system. A Q source, to make a comparison.
If this theoretical Ur-cult exists, light figures into it in some fundamental way.
There is an esoteric tradition in the western world of sects being formed around a basic set of repeated tenets where a sacred or divine light grants special awareness.
Many of these are Christian piety movements that are not secretive such as the alumbrados (the enlightened) in 15th century Spain and the Illuminists in 18th century France. Both movements promoted the idea of connection with a divine light of God through meditative prayer.
There is an idea in Christianity borrowed from Plato, as many Christian ideas are, that there is a divine illumination in human consciousness that emanates directly from God. This is the same Plato who gave us the Allegory of the Cave.
These include the Hesychasts in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, who essentially do transcendental meditation seeking communion with the “uncreated light” or Tabor Light:
They’ve been around since the 14th century and are still going.
Quakers meditate on an inner light as their main form of worship:
Many Christian groups over the years have sought union with that light, to the extent that many were accused of worshipping it rather than God.
By extension, some groups taught that physical reality is an illusion that needs to be overcome in order to see the light of an abstract true reality that has no physical form- also known as Gnosticism. These were the heretical groups. Remember Gnosticism for later!
St. Augustine, a doctor of the church, was originally a Manichean (Persian Illuminism) before declaring it heretical.
Jesus himself identified as being the light.
This concept of a fundamental abstract (divine, essentially) light that undergirds all consciousness comes into Western occultism through Kabbalah, and got built on from there.
Common New Age beliefs such as telepathy, precognition, astral projection, remote viewing, communing with the dead, ghostly hauntings and past life regressions are based on the idea of an astral light that exists on a timeless plane beyond physical reality:
This idea has also been projected by Western translators onto religious concepts from other cultures. Words meaning “freedom from fetters” and “awakening” were translated as enlightenment, which is about as much of a Rosetta Stone clue as we’re going to get about what the enlightened light means.
The Enlightenment
Which brings us to the Enlightenment of Europe. I’m going to assume you were already taught about this at school and can avail yourself of Google if you need to.
To truncate 200 years of world history: beginning in the early 17th century (often dated to 1606 when Galileo was first published,) there was a massive movement among the Western European elite away from the centralized power of the Church (either Roman Catholic or a state-run Protestant church depending on country) and toward a rational and universalist worldview, and especially toward science and secular philosophies.
It brought us the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Democratic Revolution, the invention of nations, Decolonization, secular humanism (more on that in a later!) and eventually globalization.
Occultism plays into this in a significant way. Remember, occult means hidden and the basic idea of occultism is that it relates to secret knowledge. It doesn’t have to be healing crystals and mood boards.
It is no secret that this was largely driven by aristocratic fraternal societies, such as The Secret Society and Freemasons in the UK, and by educated literary circles (such as Kołłątaj's Forge in Poland and the Haskalah among Central European Jews) that promoted secularism and humanistic values among the upper classes and skilled tradesmen.
There was another influential group you’ve probably heard of:
The cradle of the Enlightenment was the court of French king Louis XIV (reign 1643-1715,) known as the Sun King, with an inflection point in his reign being the year 1666.
He had declared war on England as part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in January of 1666, and founded of the French Académie des Sciences on December 22, 1666. This Academy, among many other things, would bring the world the metric system.
This is only months after London had been destroyed by the Great Fire on September 6, 1666.
London had also suffered a horrific plague that summer.
England itself was emerging from the shadows of an oppressive puritanical theocratic government. Literally Puritans, they had taken over the country in the War of the Three Kingdoms and executed the king in 1653. They had been recently deposed in 1660 and the monarchy and parliament had been reinstated.
By 1667 King Charles II had been at war with an alliance of the Dutch and French over colonial territories (including what would later become the states of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware) and control of Trans-Atlantic trade for two years. London had been more than decimated and he was ready to negotiate. He went to Louis XIV.
This treaty would become public on July 31, 1667 and be known as the Treaty of Breda. You may have noticed that this Substack is written in American English- that’s because the Dutch lost the war.
1666 into 1667 in a lot of ways was the inflection point from which the Enlightenment kicked off. France was establishing the secular institutions that would make it the predominate international cultural center in the coming centuries and coin the phrase lingua franca to mean “international language.”
England had gained full control over the thirteen American colonies that would later form the first nation on Earth to be founded on Enlightenment principles.
Philosopher John Locke- from whom the authors of the United States Constitution would draw the legal doctrine of tabula rasa, ideas about individual property rights, religious tolerance and the social contract- met his patron, the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, in 1666 and became a member of his entourage in 1667. The two would collaborate on the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669 that would govern the Carolinas until the American Revolution.
So is there a symbol of this inflection point of 1666, of this massive shift in political philosophy and world power? The old regime had been cast out, the old alliances replaced, the future set into motion.
How did stage directors behind the scenes who planned and organized the upheaval enshrine their efforts? It should appear in some way in the culture of the day, to be referenced and alluded to ad nauseum when discussing the trajectory and legacy of this dawn of an enlightened age and the enlightened ones who ushered it in.
Oh, there is absolutely a symbol for this and you’re very familiar with it.
Lucifer
“The Light-bearer” is the symbol of the Anglo-French Enlightenment
This is more specific and detailed than it sounds. Lucifer originally only symbolized the Anglo-French faction of the Enlightenment and was gradually adopted worldwide when that faction became globally dominant. The best modern translation is closer to “Secular Humanism” and it will take a my entire next post to explain (coming soon!) The basic gist, however, is fairly straightforward.
We need to clarify that Lucifer is an extension of light symbolism and not the other way around. The progression goes light→ The Enlightenment→ The Light-bearer. Lucifer is a reference to light, light is not a Lucifer reference. Lucifer dates to the 17th century and doesn’t appear prior, light is the most ancient symbol out of all of them.
Lucifer, specifically meaning “light-bearer” in Latin, was the generic common term for the morning star, i.e. the star which shines brightest in the sky at dawn, a.k.a. the planet Venus.
Identifying Satan as Lucifer is an innovation of the English-speaking world. Prior to the English translation of the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 it would not have been understood as a proper name by anyone reading a Latin Bible or a Bible translated into a different language.
There are Latin prayers that refer to Jesus as the morning star, for example, calling him “Lucifer.”
So how did Lucifer become commonly accepted as Satan’s name?
There is an actual source for this, the English epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton.
Written between 1658 and 1666, Milton became the first author in the English-speaking world to sign a publishing contract when he sold the book in 1667. That contract happened to be formalized in April of 1667, at the same time as the secret treaty between Great Britain and France that would go on to become the Treaty of Breda.
I have not read Paradise Lost because it is a dense, 350-page, ten-book-long, open verse poem written in Early Modern English.
The internet says that it describes the Fall of Man from the perspective of Lucifer, God’s formerly favorite angel, as he is cast out from heaven and plots for revenge against the creator. It is famously sympathetic toward the devil, although it ends with mankind being redeemed by Jesus and Lucifer tormented by his isolation from God. This is the first and most famous reference to the devil as having the proper name Lucifer, and clearly it stuck.
We have a theme of rebellion against authority shining through, and goodness without God. Percy Shelley was a famous early atheist.
This is where Gnosticism comes in again, since the book is essentially promoting a gnostic reading of the Book of Genesis. Gnostic philosophies teach that material reality is an illusion created by some power (Greeks called it the Demiurge) to trap the spirit. The goal of life, therefore, is to escape the illusion and achieve gnosis, “self-awareness.”
Overlaying this idea onto the Creation story in Genesis paints the serphent as a rebellious hero, convincing Eve to achieve gnosis by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
You can see where a cadre of upper class intellectuals who believed that the light of science and reason could rescue humanity from the darkness of ignorance would identify with Adam and Eve gaining knowledge of good and evil. These same intellectuals were organizing a mass rebellion against church authority, so embracing the symbol of rebellion against God as their representative makes sense.
That, and they may have felt a little dangerous and been a little pleased with themselves. The devil is the ultimate badass.
I do think that he was an already existing Renaissance-era symbol for European atheists, based on the German Faust legend which we’ll go over in my next post.
The Enlightenment, especially at the beginning, was driven by atheists and secularists who just straight up didn’t believe in the devil. Partially probably why atheists were so flippant in adopting him as their representation.
What I don’t think is true is that any of the 16th century Anglo-French rationalists who chose him as their symbolic representation literally considered themselves followers or worshippers of Lucifer.
I do think that there was something different about the atheists of England and France in 1666 that necessitated that they adapt of the symbol of the devil and create a separate symbol for themselves.
Presumably unlike other atheists, they wanted to retain Christian ethics. Christ is given a glowing depiction in Paradise Lost, presenting himself as the solution to the battle between Lucifer and God and offering himself to redeem mankind.
This is an ongoing pattern in Luciferian media (more examples next post.) Promotions of Lucifer usually also praise and promote Christ- especially his good intentions and fundamentally sound worldview. You wouldn’t think those two things would go together, unless there was a type of atheist that maintained some kind of attachment to the teachings of Jesus.
It’s called secular humanism in the modern U.S. (just humanism elsewhere in the Anglosphere.)
Humanists hate organized religion and reject the divinity of Christ. They treat him more as a very profound philosopher who happened to be right all the time. The humanist idea of “good” is almost identical to the Christian idea, without the God part.
The golden rule in this “love your neighbor as yourself” format was a signature teaching of a specific person:
The churlishness of modern humanists aside, Christian ethics without Christian cosmology is the worldview encapsulated in the idea of Lucifer as a symbol.
Upper class Western European atheists collaborating with Christians in the 17th century would lead to cultural innovations in later centuries that weren’t seen elsewhere- and which would lead them to dominating the globe, for better and for worse.
More in the next post.