Tuesday 24 May 2016

In Search of the Miraculous #12: Space Barbie Revisited

I think the ever so slightly inept cut and paste of watermark url adds to the effect.
One of the sad things about my research into things occult, New Age and Atlantean is that so many of the people who wrote the things I'm reading are dead. And obviously some of this goes back a hundred and thirty years, right, so yes, obviously they're dead, but even the recent ones are dying off. Murry Hope's spirit transitioned to Sirius four years ago now, and I found out too late that Jo Logan, the editor of Prediction in its batty 80s heyday, and Michael Howard (Prediction's resident ritual magician, not the Tory grandee) both passed away last year. 

Where does the new material come from? I mean, sure I keep an eye on David Icke and Doreen Virtue (by the way, don't drink anything while watching the Doreen Virtue video I just linked, because it'll end up all over your screen), and I expect I'll have something to say there, but I've not looked at Doreen Virtue enough and I'm waiting to see what Philip Sandifer says about Icke first. But thank the Ascended Masters, nothing matches Space Barbie.

I'm talking about Valeria Lukyanova here, the most interesting of the Internet's Human Barbies, and the apparent reincarnation of a Lemurian teacher named Amatue. GQ called her a "racist space alien." Vice thought she was hilarious. She is the legitimate intersection of astral memory and internet famous; and being internet famous is really hard work.

So. How do racist Eastern European cyborgs from Lemuria keep it going on the Internet?

(Fair warning: some of the links that follow aren't exactly NSFW, but they're not really SFW either.)

They go on YouTubeFacebookInstagram and VK (the Russian answer to Facebook). Not so much Twitter, though. Amatue21's most recent Twitter feed hasn't seen action for months. But you know how I said it was really hard work? There's two YouTubes, at least two Facebook pages, a Soundcloud, two Instagrams, and evidence that she's tried Twitter more than once. She really works at being internet famous.

When you do stuff on social media, I find, what generally happens is that some social media outlets bear more fruit than others (for example, most of this blog's actually not terrible traffic comes from Facebook shares. If you came via Twitter, G+ or forum posts, you're in the minority).

It makes sense, really. Twitter isn't a medium that serves Valeria so well, in any of her incarnations. She needs the space to say what she wants and to present her visual identity consistently and that's not what Twitter is for.

So on Sunday I thought, hey, what's Amatue doing these days?

Twenty minutes on Google told me that Valeria's still keeping busy and doing just fine. She moved to Mexico, where's she's working as a house DJ (I have no idea if she is any good, but here's her Soundcloud, so judge for yourself), has taken a starring role in a doll-themed horror movie, and has – and this is the main point of interest for me because I am not like other people – been posing in front of Aztec ruins in full Space Barbie get-up, doing the whole Fingerprints/Chariots of the Gods thing for the Buzzfeed generation.

There are some glamour model shots too, actually quite a lot of them, which I'm uncomfortable talking about because when a guy talks about a pretty young woman just about young enough to be his daughter posing with her kit off it's basically icky, so I'll just acknowledge they're present like a gorilla in the room, a highly sexed plastic Atlantean gorilla, and reiterate I'm more interested in the pyramids, so let's talk about the pyramids.
From VK.com/Amatue
The shots of her at the sites of archaeological significance are really interesting. Because I find myself looking at them and thinking, "I see what you're doing there."

At the ziggurats, she's in character. She's Amatue. Not the DJ, not the model, not the Web celebrity. The New Age teacher. Granted, who doesn't like a nice ziggurat? But to make a point of being Amatue at these places says she's making a statement about where she thinks they're from. You don't pretend to be an Atlantean plastic doll in front of Chichen Itza without having a point to make. This is Atlantis. It's a tactic of appropriation. She's taking these old temples for herself. For the Aryans.

I don't know what the takeaway is here. Part of me, when I found that Valeria Lukyanova was still having new adventures, got quite excited actually, which is weird, if you think about it, but my delight and amusement at things that frighten, creep out and baffle pretty much everyone else I know has always been a thing, so. I know that I've been horrified at some Atlantis things, like the more openly fascist Atlantis page on Facebook (as in, posts about the True History of the Swastika kind of fascist) that I reported and Facebook wouldn't do anything about, presumably because they were too busy banning pictures of women breastfeeding. But Space Barbie is an endless fund of amused fascination for me. But she's just as sinister, because for all of the glamour shots, she stands in front of pyramids, dressed as a Lemurian space guru, and all but plants a flag in the ground.