Stranger Things: Symbolism of the Mind Flayer and Eleven - Truthiverse Episode 26

By Brendan D. Murphy

*This transcript is excerpted from “The Grand Illusion - Book 2”

In Gnostic cosmology there is no imagined “big bang,” and the same can be said for its Hindu, Tantric, and Buddhist counterparts, as Gnostic researcher John Lash points out in his inspired work Not In His Image. 
The dynamic cosmological principles of the Gnostic outlook are emanation (instead of creation) and mirroring, instead of cause and effect. In mirroring, all elements of reality simultaneously reflect all other elements of reality, as per the holographic model of reality. 
Our universe emerges from an obscure “power source” or foundation awareness—in Tibetan Dzogchen it is rigpa, in Tantra it is parasamvit, for the originals of Australia it is Dreamtime, and in the Gnostic materials, it is pronoia. Our cosmos does not come into being as the Big Bang theology would have us believe.
As Lash points out, “The sacred narrative of the Mysteries is emergence myth, not creation myth.” The aboriginal Dreaming concept can also be applied to the creative emanations of the Gnostic Aeons including Sophia, whose dreaming we humans (as one manifestation of the Anthropos, our cosmic template) are intimately involved in. Aeon means “god,” “generating power,” or “emanation.” 
Each Aeon, like Sophia, is a vast current of energy and information. It is crucial to note that such energies can be - and were - perceived clairaudiently by Adepts centuries ago, as a chord or vein of sound. The Gnostic seers were able to tune in directly—this is where their creation myth originates from.
There was a time, according to the Gnostics, where the intelligent informational current dubbed Sophia plunged into the planet and unwittingly - and indirectly - created the Demiurge, the would-be ruler of our solar system. 
How does that relate to Stranger Things, you ask? More on that in a moment.
The Gnostic telestai (plural, those who were aimed/goal-oriented) were so-called pagan seers initiated into the Mysteries, and, as Lash tells us in his opus - they were also known as the Sons of Seth. 
In Gnostic creation myth, Sophia is the mythological name given to the intelligent energy emanating from the galactic core which plunged into the earth in an act of “dreaming” - “she” is one of several aeons or so-called “god’s” of the galactic pleroma. 
Don’t let the anthropomorphisms fool you: this is creation physics in disguise. In the Gnostic telling, Sophia was fascinated with the potential of the Anthropos, or luminous cosmic child - the template for humanity - and this drew her out of the galactic core in an unprecedented act of emanation - that is, emanation without a “male” consort.
If Gaia is the planet, Sophia (a creative torrent of sound, light, and information) is the Aeon who dreamed herself into the spiral arms of the Milky Way, and in particular, planet earth, becoming “trapped,” as it were. “She” is not the physical planet, to be clear, but the intelligent energy residing within.
For brevity, we must only gloss over the whole creation myth and focus on our theme here, so I’m giving a severely abridged version by necessity, based on my writing in Book 2 of The Grand Illusion.
According to the Gnostics - who were misunderstood and reviled by the Catholic Church which sought to exterminate all pre-Christian nature-based cosmologies - Sophia’s plunge into our local solar system created an unexpected glitch in the “matrix,” which was the arising of inorganic AI type beings called Archons. As Lash observes, Archon comes from the Greek archaia, meaning “prior,” “first,” and “in the beginning.” (The root “a” indicates “first” or beginnings, being the first/prior/primal letter of the alphabet.) 
Chief among the Archons was/is the Demiurge, Ialdaboath (pronounced as “yahl-duh-buy-ot”), who mistakenly believes he is the creator of all he surveys—he thinks he created the solar system he finds himself in. This deluded “god” (equated with the Christian Yahweh by some) constructs his celestial home from what the Gnostics referred to as residual/inert atomic matter, this being the planetary system we inhabit, though not including the sun, moon, and earth (which constitute the trinary “organic” system in Gnostic thought, an odd dualism to the modern scientific mind). 
The Archons can be considered the primal cosmic elementals, as kabbalistic lore calls them—a type of thought-form entity pre-dating humanity in the Gnostic model. Their attitude towards us is less than congenial. Ialdaboath views humanity as something to conquer and dominate, along with Sophia and the planetary biosphere. To the archontic mind virus, humans are barely more than food.
A talented seer friend informs me that the closest visual representation he has yet seen of what Ialdaboath would look like to us is in fact the malevolent shadow being in the Netflix show Stranger Things. Interestingly, in this show, the being—known both as the Mind Flayer and the shadow monster—exists in its own parallel dimension (which the children dub the Upside Down—a Dungeons and Dragons reference) and it is constantly trying to break through to our realm, first, by invading people’s minds, taking them over (possessing them), and then controlling their thoughts, perceptions, words, and actions, exactly as we would expect an Archon to do. 
It feeds, like the Archons, on rage, pain and suffering (in other words, human emotion). In one episode of Season 3 it builds a grotesque spider-like body for itself out of thousands of dissolved and re-formed rats—which, my friend sagely observes, are a species that has suffered greatly at the hands of humans through scientific experimentation, for example. Thus, it is literally built out of collective animalistic pain and suffering, an allusion to the mammalian limbic system in the human brain where human pain and trauma registers. The grotesque spider being represents, in a way, humanity’s raw, animalistic pain - embodied and materialised.	
Ultimately, in Season 3’s exciting climax, the Mind Flayer succeeds in building an even bigger body out of its infected human hosts (not rats this time) by drawing them to its lair in the dark basement of an impersonal abandoned warehouse (representing the fear, alienation, and general darkness of our post-industrial age). 
It dissolves them from the inside out, congealing from their cellular goop a humongous repulsive body somewhat reminiscent of a giant spider—a creature that has long inspired a primal fear in humans. Thus, the pseudo-Ialdaboath draws its legions of psionically infected (possessed), unconscious zombies into the dark and empty modern world’s post-industrial bowels of fear and isolation where—full of hatred for mankind (the Anthropos)—it proceeds to build a body out of the aggregate unconsciousness and self-loathing of its mindless drones. 
Its singular obsessive purpose is to seek out and physically destroy the one being who stands in the way of its agenda to consume and control: El (a contraction and adaptation of Eleven, which was the only name she had prior to escaping captivity; the homophone elle is also the French pronoun meaning “she”). 
El embodies the Gnostic Anthropos, the Luminous Child. She is the antithesis to Ialdaboath and his dreams of dark subjugation and soul harvesting.
Historically, mobs in the hypnotic grip of the unconscious have a “curious” need to destroy the “Other” when the Other is seen as threatening their control or way of life, merely just by being different—and nothing much has changed. 
El is a young girl with enormous psi capabilities, including remote viewing and psychokinesis - she is a living example of humanity’s inbuilt potential, though perhaps slightly exaggerated in some regards. 
She has suffered ongoing trauma at the hands of scientists experimenting on her at Hawkins National Laboratory where she was held captive and raised, a metaphorical lab rat deprived of a normal childhood.
In a way, you could say the unconscious is locked in a perpetual tussle with the conscious, seeking any opportunity to overwhelm, beguile, hypnotise, and dominate. Thus, Ialdaboath and the Archons seek to replicate endlessly in conquest of the goddess Sophia and the humans she shares the globe with. The psyche tends to seek to reproduce the qualities it has at any given moment, just as thought-form entities must feed on the dissonant human emotions that offer resonance and energetic reinforcement. 
In El, the Archontic Demiurge (Mind Flayer) meets its match in the form of the Innocent and Divine Child, one named after the master number eleven. The number 11 signifies highly developed intuition/psi, insight, access to the subconscious mind, sensitivity, and shyness, among other things. El(even) is a seer with immunity to the Archontic mind virus—she sees the dark illusionist for what it is. The Mind Flayer/Ialdaboath knows it can’t overtake or possess her mind, it can only hope to destroy her—and if it fails it risks extermination at her reluctant (but powerfully magical) hands. She is also the Mage (specifically shaman), in Jungian terms.
Un-blinded and unique, El is the fly in the shadow monster’s ointment of domination; an incandescent spark of consciousness standing against the vast and dark tyranny of the shadow, the trauma in the collective unconscious. She sees past superficial appearances and through the dark manipulations of the Mind Flayer—“she” is consciousness, insight., and LIGHT itself, and thus immune. The embodiment of vision, El’s seership and in-sight (internal sight) is crucial to healing the inner wounded child and ancestral trauma. 
There’s a beautiful moment in the show’s adrenaline-pumping pivotal scene in Season 3 where she psychically ventures into the tormented mind of the flayed proxy Billy, the neighbourhood rebel and bully—he is the older adoptive brother of El’s friend Max.
Billy, not coincidentally, has been the victim of domestic abuse under a tyrannical father figure, and is naturally traumatised and full of rage, and hence, an ideal target for the Mind Flayer from the start. Operating as a possessed drone of the Mind Flayer’s—infected by the Archontic psychotronic virus—Billy has a weakened El pinned to the floor as the grotesque behemoth looms, looking to finish her off before it moves on to destroy the other kids, and ultimately, human civilisation. 
Scanning Billy’s mind in desperation, El retrieves a precious long-forgotten childhood memory—a moment of pure youthful innocence shared with his now-deceased mother at the beach: 
“…You ran to her on the beach…There were seagulls. She wore a hat with a blue ribbon; a long dress with a blue-and-red flower; yellow sandals—covered in sand. She was pretty…And you were happy.” 
The recounting of this snaps Billy out of his hypnotic trance and breaks the pseudo-Ialdaboath’s psionic grip on him. The remembrance and integration of this submerged and fragmented part of himself re-minds Billy of his humanity, and he breaks out of his zombie-like rage trance. Reconnected to the innocence of his inner child and his humanity—and thus, “risen again” and resurrected, he rises to his feet and faces the Shadow Monster head-on—the demonic Flayer no longer has him in thrall; he is no more a mere vector for the malevolent mind virus. 
	Billy’s final act is that of noble self-immolation: he faces the Mind Flayer defiantly and surrenders to the shadow, using himself as a human shield, allowing the monster to destroy him, buying his saviour El and her friends precious seconds. It is seemingly only delaying the inevitable, but ultimately not in vain, since the group is saved when the Mind Flayer’s dimensional portal is closed and its connection to the Upside Down (the other-dimensional Archontic “flatland”) severed, killing it instantly just as it bares down on El and company who have no escape and no more tricks up their sleeves. 
Billy’s absolution and redemption is in sacrificing his own life to protect the Luminous Child - and human vision, insight, innocence, consciousness, and free will from all-consuming hatred, rage, fear, darkness, and tyranny—the otherwise inevitable destruction of the unrestrained and disowned shadow of the unconscious if left unchecked. 
The integration of Billy’s own innocence and lost humanity is his salvation from a fate worse than death: dying unconsciously under the hypnotic spell of the tyrannical and beguiling shadow. The scene is reminiscent of Neo’s final act of self-sacrifice in the Matrix, as he allows the machines to plug into him and re-upload his consciousness back into the Matrix, in exchange for a truce between humans and AI. Archons are regarded as a form of “artificial intelligence,” as it happens. 
Eleven (11) the number is a doubling of one (1), with 1 representing both new beginnings and purity. El/Eleven has no hidden agendas, no desire to harm anyone, and just wants to be done with the unfolding chaos. The shadow monster is rage, fear, pain, and malice itself and, like the mind virus playing out in humankind, seeks only to replicate and dominate. (Some might call it wetiko.) 
El is a singularity, pure and untarnished, while the Mind Flayer is the polar opposite, an aggregation of somnambulant humanity’s hate and rage. 
After infecting a host, the Mind Flayer/Ialdaboath has them in a sort of mindless waking trance—a good description of swaths of humanity at the moment unfortunately, who unwittingly infest themselves further with the Archontic virus every day (particularly via the mass media which endlessly spews out the mass-mind-control programme set by the Deep State and the Ultra-rich). 
Left in unconsciousness or repression, the shadow monster spreads its Archontic virus unchecked; “seership,” or vision—the process of self-reflection, introspection, and alchemical integration of our shadow—is the antidote to its reign of terror. We need to see with the mind of El-even (11), with insight, innocence and clair-vision, to create a new beginning both personally and collectively; by facing the darkness/dark night we gain the chance to become the “hero” and be born anew, empowered as never before. 
I find it interesting that the Mind Flayer creates forms for itself that mimic life and ape it, but it cannot—like the Archontic demiurge it represents—truly create/emanate the way that the galactic Aeons can, being that they are deeply connected to the Source of All and are direct emanations from the galactic centre. Like Ialdaboath, the shadow monster of Stranger Things creates pseudo-lifeforms out of “dead” matter (it literally dissolved and re-constituted bodies of the dead, be they human or rat); simulacra lacking nous and true creativity. 
The Gnostic Demiurge is “lord and master” of the Kenoma, the inorganic “dead” celestial matter of outer chaos—or so it thinks. Its first and most primary form of manipulation is not of matter but of minds which it seeks to invade and control (or, flay, as per Stranger Things). 
From there, a surrogate manipulation of matter can occur via infected hosts, exactly as depicted in Stranger Things. Lacking true creative agency, the Mind Flayer is a parasite of the highest order, and a psychic rapist of sorts. It can hijack, infect, and co-opt, but—unlike its human targets and proxies—is bereft of true creativity. It is not truly “alive” as we think of it, rather, it is much nearer an actual embodiment of death and entropy.
The first and habitual targets of the Mind Flayer are the children as they, in their innocence and purity—with vision, courage, and integrity in tact—pose its greatest threat to dominating humanity through the collective reservoir of unresolved trauma and pain. Hence young Will the “Wizard” (his D&D character)—who is an incipient medium-shaman with one foot in the human world and one foot in the Upside Down/Archontic reality—being an initial target of the Mind Flayer. Will, in his innocence “channels the monster,” so to speak, albeit reluctantly. 
He and his friends—who come to include Eleven as the group’s resident oracle, medium, and protectress—must synergistically collaborate and thwart the Mind Flayer’s attempts to destroy them, and take over the entire human biosphere with its tyrannical control and enforcement of a zombie-like unconsciousness characterised by hate, malice, and utter conformity.
Collectively, El and friends embody the archetypes and traits of innocence, magic, vision/seership, will, insight, courage, and the unmatched power of a group focused on their mission operating in harmony against the seemingly insurmountable power of the shadow and its seductive, hypnotic illusions. We will need all of these to move forward together and prevent the globalist’s Archontic agenda of total technocratic control. It is absolutely possible. We only need to choose: Face the shadow—or let it divide and rule us - and reduce us to living zombies without minds of our own - like the flayed people in Stranger Things; part of an archontic hive mind, ruled by parasitical overlords who MUST function as a surrogate parents for us because we chose not to grow up. 
But what if we choose to see with the eyes of Eleven?

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