Rise of the Black Phoenix: Redux

May 8, 2014,

Like the legend of the Phoenix....

May 9, 2014, Release of Michael Jackson album Xscape

  Resurrection of the King/Phoenix...via X marks the spot.

May 10, 2014, "Rise Like a Phoenix" by Austrian singer Conchita Wurst wins the Eurovision Song Contest. (BBC)

-Conchita means Concepcion

-Wurst means 'sausage,' the performer compares the choice of last name to the common German expression 'Das ist mir doch alles Wurst,' which translates as 'it's all the same to me,' and 'I don't care,' stating that the name emerged from the first meaning of the expression.

 May 11, 2014, Mini-Series Premiere of Rosemary's Baby

[Concepcion of Anti-Christ]

  May 13, 2014, Investigators claim to have found the wreck of Christopher Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, off the north coast of Haiti. (The Independent)

 La Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción (Spanish for The Holy Mary of the Immaculate Conception), or La Santa María. Alluding to Christ and the Phoenix.

May 13, 2014, Soma mine disaster: At least 238 miners are killed and 120 others trapped in a coal mine in the town of Soma in Turkey's Manisa Province. (BBC) 

May 14, 2014, Soma mine disaster: Turkey's Energy Minister Taner Yıldız raises the death toll from the disaster to at least 274, with 120 people still trapped in the mine and 80 miners injured, four seriously. (AP) 

May 15, 2014, Soma mine disaster: Several trade unions in Turkey hold a one-day strike in response to the disaster. (BBC)

-Several demonstrations, some of them violent, take place in Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, Bursa, Antalya and Diyarbakir in response to the disaster, with police responding to many of the protests with force. (BBC)
-The official death toll for the disaster rises to 282, with up to 150 miners still missing. (BBC) 

----

[Soma Mining Inc logo... a mushroom.]
 

Soma (Sanskrit सोम sóma), or Haoma (Avestan), from Proto-Indo-Iranian *sauma-, was a Vedic ritual drink of importance among the early Indo-Iranians, and the subsequent Vedic and greater Persian cultures.

There has been much speculation as to the original Proto-Indo-Iranian Sauma plant. It was generally assumed to be entheogenic, based on RV 8.48 cited above (we have attained the light). Many descriptions of Soma are associated with excitation. Soma is associated with the warrior-god Indra, and has been drunk by him before his battle with Vṛtra. For these reasons, there are stimulant (amphetamine like) plants as well as entheogenic plants among the candidates that have been suggested. Soma is also often associated with Light and Indra is the "Lord of Light" as shown in the following verses from the RgVeda:

RV 8.82.25 For thee, O Lord of Light, are shed these Soma-drops, and grass is strewn. Bring Indra to his worshippers. May Indra give thee skill, and lights of heaven, wealth to his votary. And priests who praise him: laud ye him.

There are several references in the Rig Veda, associating Soma with the visionary seeing of Light e.g. RV 9.4, RV 9.5, RV 9.8, RV 9.10, RV 9.42.

Candidates that have been suggested include honey, and fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), which was widely used among Siberian shamans for its entheogenic properties. Several texts like the Atharvaveda extol the medicinal properties of Soma and he is regarded as the king of medicinal herbs (and also of the Brahmana class).

From the late 1960s onwards, several studies attempted to establish soma as a psychoactive substance. A number of proposals were made, including one in 1968 by the American banker R. Gordon Wasson, an amateur ethnomycologist, who asserted that soma was an inebriant, and suggested fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, as the likely candidate. Since its introduction in 1968, this theory has gained both detractors and followers in the anthropological literature. (Wiki)

Amanita is also the Holy Grail and symbol of Jesus Christ.

The Priesthood.

and the Phoenix itself.

“The Phoenix: From the ashes (spores) the egg appears. Then comes the upturned cap resembling a gold and red colored bird (the gills as feathers). Then the heat (sun) burns the mushroom and it dissolves, once again leaving only ashes (spores), and finally repeating the whole cycle … The Phoenix-bird mythology is another piece of mushroom folklore.

As the fetus is generated in the furnace of the uterus, so the mushroom, that ‘evil ferment of the soil’, as Nicander (second century BC) calls it, is created, a womb within a womb, as it were. Like the fabulous Phoenix, the mushroom is self generated and regenerated, bursting forth from the vulvae, only to die as quickly and then apparently miraculously to reappear, a resurrection of its own self.”

Citation: James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (Pg. 13 & 56).

May 18, 2014,