Heart Shaped Coffin

Nirvana's smiley face logo

I am about to start on another large post, and one thing I was going to mention was Nirvana's song Heart-Shaped Box. After seeing the video I thought it might make a good intro to the big post, and help get some of the symbolism out of the way early. I'm not interpreting the video or song, just using it to present my own material. Below is the second version of the video which has a few scenes not included in the original:

Any info on the video comes from the wikipedia page, such as: "The song's name came from a heart-shaped box [Courtney] Love had given Cobain. However, Cobain had originally titled the song 'Heart-Shaped Coffin'." Apparently Love collected heart shaped boxes, which isn't really surprising since she named herself "Love." Considering Love got Kurt hooked on heroin which probably lead to his suicide, the song, named for a gift Love gave Kurt, should really have been called Heart-Shaped Coffin afterall. Well I don't really have any idea on how to present this information, so I'll try by following the song's lyrics:

She eyes me like a pisces when I am weak

Pisces represents the current age and the current idea of god: a fisher of men, as well as other fish symbolism. Obviously this is on it's way out as Aquarius gets here, but until then I'll keep calling it the "current" idea. Hmm current, like ocean currents... Ok, so anyways the fish symbol, known as the vesica piscis, is made by the intersection of two circles. It creates an almond eye shape, "She eyes me like a pisces," which if you extend the edges on one side makes a fish with tail image, that old Christian symbol.

Turned vertical, the oval can represent a vagina. A woman who just lays there during sex is called a "dead fish." This vaginal symbol can be seen in the nimbus around the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Jesus obviously came out of Mary's "pisces" to officially kick off the Age of Pisces. The shape of a womans lips are often intended to represent the vagina, and this is why thousands of years ago they started painting them red, and these days inject them with various substances to enlarge them and make them more visible (though usually less visibly appealing). For a visual feast dedicated to this idea, please visit Quinta Essentia.

Here is a comparison of some of the other Christian symbols in the video. The dying old man is first seen in phrygian Santa cap, and below wearing the Pope's mitre:

I've been locked inside your Heart Shaped box, for weeks

Towards the end of the video, many of the scenes are from inside a large cubic box with a giant black heart above it. This room is first seen all in blue with hexagonal flowers/stars covering the walls, and then later all in red. Some of the flowers on the cover of the single CD are also hexagonal, and are probably mostly orchids. The band hangs out in the room, but never at the same time as the little girl in the Ku Klux Klan outfit. While in the room the girl can be seen opening an apparently empty heart-shaped box and then later lying down on the bed.

The heart-shaped box is quite the loaded symbol. A "box" is a slang term for a vagaina. Lesbians "pack a box lunch" so to speak, or rather "chew box." The heart, as at least one of my readers (The Celtic Rebel) already knows, is a very clear symbol for the vagina.

The above link to the Celtic Rebel goes to a post partly about cube/box symbolism, but it is also where I stole from that picture of The Spirit villan, The Maneater. Think about that name for a second. Your 'manhood' goes into the heart-shaped box, which as you can see, she hungrily eats like a PMS'ing woman with a chocolate craving. Chocolate has been called a replacement for sex, so here it's a replacement for a penis, which now we all now know is what really belongs in heart-shaped boxes. Check out that picture of the box room with the giant heart above it: don't those red curtains give the appearance of a birth canal, and hint that we're about to be born into the white light behind the heart?

I've been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap

The magnet tar pit trap, and the idea of turning black, has a real "Paint it Black" feel to it. Even the room with the heart above it should have a red heart, but it's painted black instead. The tar pit trap is seen in the video when the girls cone hat is blown off and follows a group of blue butterflys like it's a buterfly net, and then falls into a small pool of black ink which turns the hat black; as well as turning the girls whole outfit black which can be seen when she points to the dying old man in the hospital bed.

I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black

Pisces was already mentioned in the first line, so I'm not reaching too far to think that Cancer refers a house of the zodiac and not the disease. Love's birthdate makes her a Cancer in Western Astrology. A biography on Kurt Cobain claims that this line is a extremely convoluted way of saying "I love you" to Courtney Love. The sign for Cancer looks like "69" which we all know is a sexual position forced heavily into our consciousness where each persons face is near the other persons ass, infact, they have quite a good view of the brown-eye from this vantage point. You should check out The Celtic Rebel's 7-Part series which goes "in-depth" into these topics. "When you turn black" references death, decay and putrification. The Nigredo stage of Alchemy, it will eventually lead to spiritual perfection, as the life cycle of birth-death-rebirth is said to eventually accomplish, though you can shortcut physical death by becomming enlightened in life which gives one immortality, or a pass to get off of the wheel of Karma.

In the scene pictured above of the little girl in the now black KKK or Wicked Witch outfit, she points like the Grim Reaper to the old man laying in the hospital bed getting an IV, the bottle of which may represent the top half of the large red hourglass used by the Wicked Witch to threaten Dorothy's life. In a quick one-second scene, the old man is replaced by an ampliphier and speakers while Kurt strums his guitar causing our attention to be distracted away from this sudden transformation of the old dying man.

The old decaying body is revealed to be an artificial box, a stone vessel shaped from clay by God into the rough ashlar of Freemasonry. The Celtic Rebel and I muse over the boxy nature of reality in this post. All 3-dimensional platonic solids can be made from the 2-dimensional Metatron's Cube, the central shape of which is the hexagram, which it's self can be seen as a 3-dimensional cube, tilted so we view through two corners.

A circle has 360 degrees, a cube has six sides, and the hexagram has 6 sides, corners and triangles, and can be continually reduced into smaller hexagrams like a fractal, so that you keep getting 6,6,6...6,6,6... (36="three sixes") Quoting myself from Celt's blog: "If you add all the numbers in 36: 1+2+3…+35+36 it = 666. In relation of Man and 666: Man (and all life on earth/cubic-prison) is Carbon based, and Carbon has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons. Mother Earth is seen as square, having “four corners,” and even recent seismic evidence reveals that the center of the earth is not a ball of Iron, but more likely a large Iron cube." For more on earth's insides being cubic, see this.

In the middle of this Metatron's Cube is another cube which represents the 4th dimension. This is called a tesseract:

The ability for a 2-D image to project 3 or 4-D shapes is something you probably see every day on your credit and debit cards. A hologram projects a 3-D image above it's 2-D surface. Recent discoveries indicate that our universe is really a holographic projection. All the information inside the universe may be encoded at it's most outer edge, similar to how a black hole encodes information at it's event horizen. Holographics can also explain any currently "unexplainable" phenomena due mostly to the non-locality of information (because the tinniest piece contains all the information of the whole sysetm), as explained in The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot:

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Life is death, the heart-shaped box is a coffin, a coffin for a new baby. The cubic dead body is being revived with an IV which consists of a jar with a fetus inside of it, a new soul in the recycled waste of constantly dying organic matter:

There's two ways to leave this life. One is death, and then you just start over again, and the other way is achieving immortality before physical death. Jesus was transfigured before a crowd of non-believers before his crucifixion. At that point, I believe, no matter how he died he was already free from the cycle of birth-death-birth. He climbed the cross and willingly sacrificed his physical presence in order to free his spiritual self trapped in the corporeal box. After death and entombment he resurrected in the same body, with the same wounds, only immortal now. Notice in the below picture of the band visiting the hospital room of the dying man that the three band members sit with their legs crossed. Also in the third group of pictures below, note that the cross on the floor of the hospital room is made out of square tiles. This black cross is inverted (St.Peter's Cross) from the vantage point of the old man. X-Files episode "All Souls" has Scully trying to save Nephilim from the Devil incarnate. That episode features a church which is trying to save the Nephilim by giving them up to a 4-faced Cherub who shines the glory of God upon them. This divine light kills them physically, but is also frees their souls. This church uses the symbol of a black inverted cross.

Meat-eating orchids forgive no one just yet
Cut myself on Angel Hair and baby's breath

Orchids get their name from there testicular shaped roots. The orchids on the singles cover art, and the full length CD's reverse-cover art provide a male counterpart for the "heart boxes." "Meat-eating" give nature's process of decay some teeth, so to speak. The rear cover art (above) has babies potentially being consumed by the flowers. Apparently aborted fetuses were on the bands mind when making this song because: "In a 1993 Chicago Sun-Times interview, [Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic] said the original effect used on the song's guitar solo sounded 'like a fucking abortion hitting the floor.'" "Angel's Hair and baby's breath" is a mixture of divine and earthly. Humans are part angelic, belonging 'up there,' and part human, having to breathe, like the Nephilim from the above mentioned X-Files episode.

Broken hymen of your highness I'm left black

Broken hymen refers to loss of virginity which traditionally is done after marriage. For most of the video the young (and therefore virgin) girl walks around in a white outfit. Some people like to bring up the fact that Mary would probably have been quite young herself when she was raped by Zeus, err.. I mean "knew" the holy spirit and immaculately concieved Jesus. Either way, being a virgin meant being unmarried. Mary and Jospeph, except for possibly in the Book of Matthew, were not married at the time of Jesus' birth. This makes her a "virgin," though not necessarily one in todays sense of the word. The above picture of the albums cover art shows an angel with human internals. The album name is IN UTERO, which if you read "UTERO" starting at the "R," reveals: IN ROUTE. A soul is 'in route' from heaven to earth. The fat version of this woman is shown in the video walking forward to the fetus tree, but never advancing as if she is on a treadmill. She has obviously 'consumed' too much of physical life and cannot claim the fruit of this strange "tree of life."

Seeing as how the heart is a barely veiled vagina, a broken heart could be a broken hymen. And now a pierced heart is a symbol of sex. Anyone surprised?

The blue butterflys, mentioned above when the girls outfit changes to black, point back to an old post of mine about Monarch mind control programming which states:

Older victims were frequently tattooed for easy identification with a "so-called" Blue or other colored monarch butterfly. This practice became more or less obsolete in the early 1970's and was replaced by the victim wearing butterfly hair barrettes, large butterfly ear rings, pins, necklaces, bracelets, or embroidered insignias to "advertise" their art of expertise to knowledgeable abusers. This rule applies to 100% of the victims interviewed. - outpost-of-freedom.com

I had originally thought that the color blue was a reference to Project Blue Bird mind control, but the blue butterflys have appeared in a few places, and seem to indicate a connection to death and the afterlife; though the connection to sex is still relevant. Butterflys are a sign of change. A caterpillar goes into a coccoon and emerges transfigured (like Jesus before crucifixion) with wings, and flies off into the heavens. It's the serpent-to-eagle transformation that happens when the constellation Scorpio is shot in the heart by Sagittarius.

The bleeding or flaming heart is a common theme in figures who are transfigured (Thanks A Few Shots to Shaman for your post which added greatly to this idea):

Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back

Babys (and souls) come into this world on a rope connecting back to their physical origin, the umbilical cord going into the heart-shaped coffin, and perhaps a spiritual equivalent: the Silver Cord seen by astral travelers which connects their soul to their body. Cutting this cord would lead to physical death if you could not return to your body. And it leads to temporary spiritual death when the baby's soul is severed from its origin with the cuting of the umbilical cord and the baby takes it's first human breaths, already forgetting where it came from.

Kurt Cobain (KC/KK) is dressed like the Tinman (his shiny shirt) and the Scarecrow (or perhaps Patchwork Girl) (his patched pants), two of the un-real characters of the book and movie. Both of these characters are inanimate objects which apparently have had life breathed into them by some creator. They are in search of a heart and mind from the Wizard of Oz. But the Wizard is a charlatan, as shown via the traveling magician in the beginning of the story, and all he gives them are symbols of what they seek, just as they are symbols of what they are. Everything about you does not describe the real You inhabiting your cubic prison. The Tinman's heart is a pocketwatch. His "ticker" will one day stop ticking. But he was alive before recieving it and will live after it, just as we, as living souls, live before and after being born with our own countdown clocks in our chests.

the robot (person) lies behind the octagonal looking glass

Kurt uncrosses his legs and also takes off his Tinman shirt at one point. He is ready for physical death on the cross, and spiritual freedom.

Krist (Christ) Novoselic opens the blinds and lets in the divine light which kills all who look upon it - freeing their souls. He casts a shadow, a black cross over Kurt, by holding his arms out; reminding us that the cross is the shape it is because it represents the human body, and we are all locked inside out own cubic prisons from which we must free our divine selves, achieving immortality of the soul.


I'll end it here with the song from Jim Henson's The Cube which was mentioned in my Room 101 article:

You'll Never Get Out of the Cube:

There are places that contain you,
There are corners in your soul,
Plastic laminations in your life.
But when you're on the inside
Of the outside of your thoughts,
Do they restrain or do you stay yourself?

Now the inside of the near place
Is the outside of the far
But you can only face your space one way.
You're really in the middle
Of the the inside of yourself,
And there is only one thing we can say...

You'll never get out, you'll never get out,
You'll never get out of the cube!
You'll never get out, you'll never get out,
You'll never get out 'til you're dead!
Dead, dead...
'Til you're dead, dead, dead...

Here's to a transformative Valentines Day!

heart nebula

This series (which got way out-of-hand!) is continued here: Opening the Stargate. The next parts (so far) after "Opening the Stargate" are The Journey Back Home, Purification, and Bee Seeing You Through the Veil