#Justified Ancients of Mu Mu

[sowhatifiliveinfukuoka]

[laboitediabolique]

One of the lesser discussed events, or publicity stunts, the KLF created was the Rites of Mu, a three day event taking place on the Isle of Jura off the Scottish coast during summer solstice in 1991.

By mid 1991, the KLF had gone from obscure dance music group to a chart toping pop group with three worldwide top 10 hit singles and an album that reached the top five in the UK and Australia. As a result KLF members Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were inundated with requests for interviews, however both of them did not want to answer the questions being asked.

The duo referred those questions as the four handmaidens of evil; who, what, where and why. So much so that at one point they flat out refused to do any more press interviews. In order to take control of the situation (and more likely to hold a good party, get a lot of press coverage, and increase the enigma of the group), the KLF invited around a dozen music journalists to a weekend away on the Isle of Jura.

On Friday 21 June 1991, the journalists arrived on the island. There they met Drummond dressed as a border guard who stamped their passports with a KLF pyramid blaster logo stamp and then proceeded to confiscate any alcohol they had on them. In the evening after dinner, the journalists were asked to wear yellow robed hoods and then were marched down a muddy path to a beach, following Drummond in his white hooded robe and a fake rhino’s horn protruding from his forehead. Drummond lead the group in chants of "mu mu" and "om" until they reached a 12 metre wicker man that had been erected at the water’s edge.

Meanwhile all of this was being filmed for a promotional film being directed by Bill Butt who had collaborated with the duo on various music videos and short films since 1987. While Drummond shouted in tongues in front of the stunned journalists, the four Angels of Mu (four Asian women in long blonde wigs, white dresses, with flower head bands), took money from the journalists which was placed in a bag, then inserted inside the wicker man. Right at the summer solstice at 10:21pm, the wicker man was torched, with cameras recording its burning.

On the second day, Drummond forced the journalists to partake in more filming, having them march behind him in the same yellow robes as the previous day. In the evening, a rave was held on the beach, complete with an arena sized sound system, strobe lights and a bonfire blazing until dawn.

On the Sunday, the journalists were ferried and flown back to Liverpool. Drummond cheerfully announced to the unexpecting journalists that they would be performing "Justified and Ancient" before a sold-out crowd of 2,000 at the Liverpool Festival Of Comedy. They were taught the first two verses of the song, told to wear their robes again and filed onstage during the interval at Emo Phillips’s Liverpool Royal Court show, being introduced as "The Lost Children of Mu" before warbling the song in an off key acappella. During the intermission, Drummond and Cauty handed out ice creams to the audience from an ice cream van which had been parked on stage.

On the event Drummond said this; "Instead of granting interviews we turned the tables and had journalists onstage giving a concert, to give them an opportunity to see what it feels like from the other side". However neither Drummond or Cauty would not elaborate any further as to why they decided to spend over £70,000 on this strange event.

The footage of the event was complied into a film called "The Rites of Mu". Several shorter versions and edits of it appeared from the end of 1991 onwards, most notably on the promotional video "The Work". A full 15 minute version the film was prepared for a 1992 UK arthouse cinema release, but was thwarted by Drummond and Cauty themselves when they put a moratorium on their work after they left the music business in May 1992, infuriating Bill Butt who had just completed the final cut of the film, including newly recorded narration from actor Martin Sheen.

Various versions of the film appeared on Youtube over the years, with the final cut being uploaded in 2021. This was pulled from Youtube in late 2023 with the DVD and blu-ray compilation release of "23 Seconds To Eternity", which complies most of Bill Butt's music videos and short films with Drummond and Cauty.

[martynrandles]

THE KLF - The Rites of Mu

KLF are back, yet they never went away. Fall down the rabbit hole & find the KLFRS... ssshhhhhh... or ssshhhhhhout it out... or ssshhhhhhare it, there are no rules, it's art if you say it's art. These guys opened my mind as a teenager, they planted the seed which lead me to walk the path searching for Mu Mu land. They're back just when we needed them the most.

Thank you KLF. You are justified. You are ancient. You drive an ice cream van.

Love Martyn xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xx

[exxcitement1995]

“It doesn’t bother us

Their records are still there

It’s not as if we’re taking anything away,

Just borrowing them and making things bigger.

If you’re creative you aren’t going to stop working

Just because there is a law against what you are doing”

Jimmy Cauty, Sounds (May 1987)

[postpunkindustrial]

Why did the KLF burn £1,000,000?

[derbybeardo]

new arrival… “1987 What The Fuck’s Going On” by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (1987 UK release) and merch insert

[autism-disco]

magical john drag king is exactly what alan moore meant about the ideaspace this absolutely existed in our collective consciousness as a human species

[nscafe-firehose]

First, there I was going into grade 8 and had a medical issue that was very much bothering me and as such, I was going to a doctor regularly and they had happy face buttons at their reception. I usually grabbed one or two (or five) and kept one for myself but gave the others I acquired over time to friends who had asked for them... we had a happy face gang, so to speak. I was already wearing quilted flannel at that point and a happy face button decorated that until I got my duster.

Then during the same time frame (1991... but honestly could have 1992, I don't quite remember), I had heard "The White Room" album (on cassette, bought because the cover grabbed me so hard... could not resist) and listened to it a lot walking back and forth to and from school in grade 8. Then I read "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" in grade 10 (after previously "The Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy" a year earlier) and started getting into Discordianism around then (and also picked up The KLFs "Chill Out", it took me a while to figure out it came out before "The White Room")… AND then I got online regularly… this would explain why you saw my duster with a happy face button it throughout the rest of the 90s. In 1998 the anthology book "Disco 2000" came out with stories by both Bill Drummond and Robert Anton Wilson (for further details on why that's an interesting intersection involves how Drummond and Cauty met).

Then in 2012 I had tried to buy one of the not glitter versions of the shield but the price on the shipping put it just out of reach (currency conversion killed it)… then Cauty and Drummond put out the novel 2023 in 2017…. in 2022 I picked up the 12" of "It's Grim Up North" (killer!) and finally at the start of 2023 things worked out where we could try getting a shield again…. and after ups and downs we're finally here. Got the Glitter Smiley [Appropriated!] Riot Shield by the end of the year.

I do not currently have one of the old happy face buttons... but I just ordered a bag of 25...

(you are now a Discordian Pope, enjoy your hot dog)

[bat-in-the-machine]

Every once in a while I think about

the KLF, otherwise known as the JAMS, otherwise known

as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu but mostly I think about that one single they released

as the Timelords, ostensibly with a new member of the group known as Ford Timleord - a custom 1968 Ford Galaxie that was listed as one of the artists on the album

Anyway I think about Ford Timelord every once in a while

[deadlypen1]

Time to start 2023 off right

[creature-wizard]

Is the spiritual person a conspiracy theorist? A list of red flags

They talk about a shadowy group of people supposedly manipulating everything behind the scenes. They might refer to them by terms such as globalists, bankers, international bankers, secret rulers of the world, the elite, the cabal, Kabbalists, Talmudists, satanists, satanic pedophiles, pedophiles, generational satanists, satanic bloodlines, the Illuminati, the Babylonian Brotherhood, lizard people, Reptilians, Orions, regressives, regressive entities, Khazarians, Marxists, cultural Marxists, or leftists. Sometimes, very rarely, they'll just come right out and say "Jews."

They claim that the conspiracy has been working to conceal historical and spiritual truths from humanity.

They claim that the conspiracy uses stuff like food, entertainment, and medicine to control the masses. For example, "additives in food suppress our psychic abilities" or "Hollywood films contain subliminal messages" or "COVID vaccines were actually created to alter your DNA to make you more docile."

Also, claims that the conspiracy controls people via spiritual or technological implants, 5G, or alter programming, with or without explicit mention of Project Monarch (a conspiracy theory promoted by far right cranks such as Mark Philips and Fritz Springmeier, who used hypnosis to respectively convince Cathy O'Brien and Cisco Wheeler that they'd been put under mind control by a global satanic conspiracy).

They claim that this conspiracy is controlling the media, has fingers in every institution they disagree with, and is generally behind everything they disagree with. (EG, the conspiracy created the Catholic Church; that other New Ager they disagree with is actually controlled opposition, etc.)

They claim that the conspiracy is trying to keep people in fear.

They claim that the conspiracy harvests something from people. Blood and adrenochrome are common ones. Loosh is somewhat less common. Expect to see something else pop up eventually.

They claim that the conspiracy practices genetic engineering; EG, creating animal/human hybrids, using vaccines to genetically sever people's connection to God, etc.

They claim that true spiritual wisdom can be traced back to places like Atlantis, Lemuria, or Mu.

They claim that world governments have secretly been in contact with extraterrestrials for years.

They appeal to known frauds and cranks, including but not limited to Erich Von Daniken, Zechariah Sitchin, David Icke, David Wilcock, Graham Hancock, Jaime Maussan, Bob Lazar, Steven Greer, Richard C. Hoagland, Fritz Springmeier, and Drunvalo Melchizedek.

Appeals to forged documents, including but not limited to the alleged diary of Admiral Richard Byrd, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, and The Urantia Book.

Appeals to channeled information, such as that provided by Edgar Cayce, Carla Rueckert, or George Van Tassel.

"But all of this has to come from somewhere, doesn't it?"

Oh, it all comes from somewhere, all right, but the where isn't what most people imagine.

A lot of the stuff above is just a modern spin on the content of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a Russian hoax created to justify violence against Russian Jews. The Protocols itself was plagiarized from a political satire and incorporated a lot of the post-French Revolution conspiracy theories about Freemasons and Jews being behind the French Revolution. I wrote a summary of the conspiracy tropes found in The Protocols over here.

The stuff about Satanic sacrifices and the consumption of blood, adrenochrome, loosh, or whatever are simply just variations on blood libel, an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims Jews practice ritual cannibalism. Blood libel can be traced back to ancient Greece. (With the Greek version, I really can't help but notice the similarity to modern urban legends of gangsters kidnapping random people for initiation rituals.)

Many of these tropes can also be linked back to the early modern witch hunts. It was believed that witches sacrificed babies to Satan, practiced cannibalism, and put people under mind control by way of diabolical magic. It was also believed that some witches didn't even know they were witches; they'd go off to attend the Devil's Sabbath at night and come back in the morning without remembering a thing. In the late 20th century, this witch hunter's canard would be reinvented as the alter programming conspiracy theory when media such as the 1973 book Sibyl and its 1976 television adaptation put DID (note: the woman who inspired Sibyl did not have DID) into the public consciousness. For a more complete list of witch panic and blood libel tropes, I wrote a list over here.

Lemuria was a hypothetical landmass proposed to explain the presence of lemur fossils in Madagascar and India while being absent in continental Africa and the rest of Asia, because if lemurs evolved naturally, they wouldn't be in two separate places with no connection to each other. The discovery that India and Madagascar were once connected not only made the hypothesis obsolete, it precludes the existence of Lemuria.

The whole notion of Mu began with a horrendous mistranslation of the Troano manuscript. A man named Augustus Le Plongeon would link the mistranslation with the story of Atlantis, and use it to claim that Atlantis actually existed in the Americas. (For Plongeon, Mu and Atlantis were one and the same.) And then other people (like James Churchward) got their hands on the whole Mu thing, and put their own spins on it, and the rest is history.

Le Plongeon's ideas influence modern Atlantis mythology today; EG, the idea that it was in the Americas. Another guy who helped shape the modern Atlantis myth was Ignatius L. Donnelly, an American politician. Dude claimed that Atlanteans spread their oh-so-superior culture far and wide. He also claimed that Atlantis was the home of the Aryan people, because of course he did.

The idea that all of the world's wisdom can be traced back to Thoth/Hermes goes back to Hermeticism, a product of Greco-Egyptian syncretism. Hermeticism produced a fascinating body of mythology and an interesting way to consider the divine and its role in shaping human history, but that doesn't mean it was right. And the Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean is a modern text that has fuck-all to do with ancient Hermeticism and more to do with HP Lovecraft.

This idea that the conspiracy uses pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines for evil also has roots in Nazi Germany. The Nazi government, wanting to reserve real medicine for their soldiers, told the general populace that said medicine was the product of evil Jewish science and prescribed alternative healing modalities instead. (Said alternative healing modalities did not particularly work.) It also echoes the old conspiracy theories about Jews spreading the Black Death by poisoning wells.

The idea that the conspiracy uses genetic manipulation to create subhuman beings or sever humanity from the divine is a permutation of the Nazi conspiracy theory that Jews are trying to destroy the white race through race mixing. The idea of evil reptilian DNA goes back to the ancient serpent seed doctrine, which is indeed old, but no less pure hateful nonsense for it.

"But there's got to be somebody up to something rotten out there!"

Oh sure. But these people aren't skulking around in the shadows. They're acting pretty openly.

The Heritage Foundation has been working to push this country into Christofascism since the early 1970's. They're the ones responsible for the rise of the Moral Majority and the election of Ronald Reagan. They're also the ones behind Project 2025, which intends to bring us deeper into Christofascism. (Among many other horrible things, they intend to outlaw trans people as "pornographic.")

The Seven Mountains Mandate is another movement pushing for Christofascism. They intend to seize the "seven spheres" of society, which include education, religion, family, business, government/military, arts/entertainment, and media.

There's also the ghoulish American Evangelicals who support Israel because they think that current events are going to bring about the Second Coming of Jesus and cement the formation of a global Christofascist empire. Don't let their apparent support of Jews fool you - they believe that the good Jews will become Christians and the bad ones will go to hell.

All of these people are working toward monstrously horrific goals, but none of them are part of an ancient megaconspiracy. In fact, these are the kinds of people pushing the myth of the ancient megaconspiracy. From the witch hunts to Nazi Germany to the American Evangelical movement, if history has taught us anything, the people pushing the conspiracy theories are always the bad guys.

[laboitediabolique]

Publicity photo for The KLF, 1989

[taihua]

thoughts on peixin? 👀

Took me forever to get to this one because apparently I have a lot of thoughts on peixin and needed to type them out on my laptop rather than on mobile!

I'll start with my boring "what fits with canon" answer: obviously it's a non-canon ship, but I generally don't think Pei Ming and Feng Xin are very close or spend a lot of time around each other. Feng Xin is a known loner who doesn't spend time in heaven, and Pei Ming is busy seducing women (I think he's arguably bisexual in theory but in practice he just likes women too much to bother seducing men). There isn't even really any overlap in their territories to justify the idea of them helping each other, since Lang Qianqiu's in the middle. One of my favorite throwaway lines is Nan Feng calling the Peis "weirdos" in Book 1. Fanon overestimates how close they are by consistently having them be friends or hang out regularly.

Having said all of that... TGCF is the "side characters only exist to prop up Hualian" book, so there could have been a lot of interesting interactions between them if she took the time to actually work on Feng Xin's character and I am mad about the missed opportunities :(

I love the "God of Love who has a lot of casual sex" paired up with the "God of Sex who fears intimacy and has only had one serious relationship in his 800 years of life." Feng Xin should ask Pei Ming for help dealing with the horny prayers and Pei Ming should be delighted to share his knowledge with One Of The Guys and that should lead to the weirdest makeout session Feng Xin has ever had. It would be funny first but eventually they can have deeper conversations about what it means to be soldiers, their relationship with royalty/authority, love and loss and broken friendships...

And then my final thoughts are that I like any kind of dynamic that doesn't have Feng Xin as the sexy big-titted lampshade to Mu Qing's OOC crying traumatized little meow meow. Peixin has the potential to highlight some different sides of Feng Xin's character--it's simultaneously a friendship where he doesn't have ancient baggage to worry about so he can relax a little, but he also can't relax because being around Pei Ming is an inherently flustering experience and by the time Feng Xin realizes it he's probably in too deep (or maybe Pei Ming is in too deep ifkwim)

[catmaid-san]

Reading Daomu Biji as a non mainland Chinese would make you feel like, "Why so racist?"

But actually, NPSS might not be as racist or eccentric but in fact, truly a good writer who understood the way his characters and their setting would think.

The somehow racist part of Daomu Biji, perhaps is the subtle prejudice about their own Ethnic Minorities and the subtle Han Chinese supremacy, and unsavory comments about their bordering countries.

But If you're looking at it from the characters' POV, meaning, from a (somewhat average) mainland Chinese dude, it's actually quite natural. That's what they get from their history and the information from their media.

The way Daomu Biji put any extreme culture, such as sacrifices etc, to Ethnic minorities is actually quite justified, since in other countries too, that's what happened. And it's also quite logical or accurate, historically. Even today, some ethnic minorities are still continuing their "strange" customs. So it's not entirely racist.

In fact, Daomu Biji also wasn't merciful to their own Han Chinese ancestor's past incident. For example, by telling that King Mu of Zhou was fabricating history. Instead of being warmly welcomed by XiWangMu, he's actually there to invade but failed. In embarrassment, he fabricated history about him being entertained in XiWangMu's territory.

Next, the beef with other countries.

But in reality, it's not just Chinese, but other countries' citizens too, in Asia, particularly, would have beef with their bordering countries. And some (rather uncultured) people would also call them using nicknames. For example, in JP media, we often see how the Yakuza are always either connected or having dispute with Chinese Mafia. In SK media, we often see their Mafia connected or in a hostile relationship with Yakuza. In China too, their Mafia/other underground forces would often either connected or have enmity with Vietnamese Gangster.

In Daomu Biji, we can see that Wu Xie 's perspectives would always go neutral. Either citing the history or telling the informaiton that was told in China to general public like Wu Xie.

Pangzi or Pan Zi, on the other hand, are characters who aren't as "cultured" as Wu Xie. So their POV would often be quite racist. And that's actually rather in character and accurate, considering their background and character setting.

This, also applied to XiaoGe or Men You Ping. We can see that someone like him who cares a shit about the world, will turn out to never give zealous Han Chinese supremacy or racist comment about anything or anyone.

Surprisingly, Daomu Biji actually also isn't subtle to the actions of their Han Chinese or the past action of their government. For example, whenever the book was discussing about various people who smuggled Tombs goods overseas, the book didn't try to gloss that even among Han Chinese there were people like that. There's also when the book was describing the cruel reality during the purge of Superstitious and Religious forces in China, to strengthen their government's influence. At that time, people didn't even dare to say they know a little about Chinese ancient divination technique (Qimen Dunjia) for fear of being arrested or worse, eliminated. But most of all, Daomu Biji too, isn't merciful when it came to the protagonist's perspectives. The book isn't trying to beutify or justify Wu Xie's actions as a grave robber throughout.

But what I want to say is that, Daomu Biji is a series written from the perspective of (quite) average Chinese citizens, who aren't Overseas returnee (to be able to see more perspectives from the global history or information other than their government propaganda). While some topics were probably quite sensitive, but if you stop for a second and consider where they're taken at, you will understand why the Author wrote it that way.

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Tracklist:

3 A.M. Eternal (Live At The S.S.L.) • Justified And Ancient (All Bound For Mu Mu Land) • Make It Rain (Extended Version) • Last Train To Trancentral (Live From The Lost Continent) • America: What Time Is Love?

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