Still from Zeitgeist (2007)

This film was circulating the internet when I was a teenager. It’s a conspiracy theory-style documentary that connects recurring themes throughout many of the world’s most prominent religions, some still practiced, some not. We passed it between us like contraband, thinking we’d been given a clear-headed, logical way to understand much of the totality of human history.  I mean, we had been given a logic, but it was off.

Aside from being fundamentally irrelevant to the actual point of religion, many of its claims are totally factually incorrect. For one thing they equate ‘the sun’ with ‘the son’ (referring to Horus, Jesus, and other figures) because said out loud, they’re the same word. In English. Which didn’t exist five thousand years ago. A quick check of the Aramaic and they don’t seem so related…

The sun | שמש | “shmash”

The son | בר | “bar”

But now I worry I’m falling into an ancient rabbit hole. Can a deep debunking of a conspiracy theory become apophenic? I have to stop.

I find myself thinking about the warped, low-res audio and image of this film, and of the layered diagrams and crafted depictions of deities. It’s an aesthetic that I think is still with us, if a little updated. I’m very much holding it in mind as I work on this piece.