What on earth is this? It appeared on 25 April 2013, having been posted on his own website (digitaldmx.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/the-shroud-of-turin) by digital surrealist Daniel Milberg, without any explanation. The walls and ceiling appear to be made of distorted two-dollar bills, and the tail marking seems vaguely but militarily German. One or two of the scholars of shroudstory hazarded a guess as to the symbolism, and then gave way to the master of his self-styled genre, the arch cryptosteganographer himself, Max Patrick Hamon. Of the 176 comments, 158 are Max’s own, the tap being finally turned off by Dan Porter (whose blog it was) himself. The only counter to Max’s flood of linguistic prestidigitation were a few tongue-in-cheek attempts to emulate him by Colin Berry, but really they didn’t come close.
Any attempt to make sense of Max’s convoluted expatiations seems doomed from the start, but by some fairly savage editing I will try to clarify some of the more abstruse allusions if I can…
176 thoughts on “The Shroud of Turin Blimp”
Max Patrick Hamon says:
Methinks Daniel Milberg’s surrealistic digital work of art deserves, and requires, a surrealistic cryptological approach if you really want to know the whole truth behindenburg it.
Milberg’s Shroud of Turin blimp image plays both with the word “hidden”, the names ‘Milberg / Hindenburg‘ (almost Hiddenburg,) and a story, ‘The Balloon-Hoax’, by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1844, about European balloonist Monck Mason’s trip across the Atlantic Ocean, taking three days. It was originally printed as fact in the New York Sun, but quickly retracted. The Atlantic Ocean (A.O.) stands for Alpha Omega or Christ, and the three day journey refers to his Resurrection. To Milberg, the Shroud of Turin is nothing but a hoax or a fake medieval relic to make money (the dollars).
Another ‘Christocryptic’ Hiddenberg reference, I would say, considers the Hebrew word ‘Notsry’ which means not only ‘of Nazareth’ but also ‘of the grottos, or crypts’, and a crypt is an underground chamber to store human remains or religious relics.
In Hebrew DaM (as in Da.niel M.ilberg) means ‘blood’, and DaMi (Da.niel Mi.lberg) means ‘my blood’. Needless to say Daniel Milberg is of Jewish origin, or has an artistic Messiah complex. The name Daniel (in Hebrew ‘Daniyyel’) means “God is my judge” and is the name of a Jewish prophet.
In Hebrew Yeshua Notsry (Jesus of Nazareth) can mean Yeshua the Hidden, meaning the hidden prince, and thus can read as a word play on Hindenburg / Hiddenburg.
Re: the red carpet. To DM, the Turin Shroud is not unlike Ali Baba’s flying carpet, and thus Yeshua arising from the dead nothing but an Eastern fairy-tale, here become a Western ‘airy-tale (or even eerie tale), or hoax, that nevertheless makes money. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls.” Falls = false = fake.
[Louis says: On the tail is a Panzer cross, displayed on an airship like the Hindenburg, which ended in disaster. With a Shroud-like face also displayed above the words ‘The Shroud of Turin’ is he trying to say that the Shroud enterprise is also doomed?]
An airship with a cross on the tail can be interpreted as a (f)airy tale about a cross. ‘The Turin Shroud’ has just taken off, from the red carpet, in order to ‘cross’ the Atlantic Ocean (Alpha Omega). These are references to the crucifixion.
Adolf Hitler claimed that the Hindenburg disaster was an Act of God, when actually it was an Act of Men.
[ColinSBerry says: And now for something completely different (relax – it’s from a mere ‘chemist’, so can be instantly dismissed). It was executed in 2005. That was the year that Pope Benedict XVI, a Bavarian German, assumed office. The artist may have been aware of that Pope’s interest and prior involvement in the Shroud, and had attempted to link it with international politics. The blimp is prevented from taking off, being confined, nay trapped, within a hangar. The latter is cathedral like in its general proportions, but is lined with dollar bills. Is it American money that is preventing an incoming German Pope’s pride and joy from truly taking off, preventing a renaissance of the RC Church? I leave it to others to make tendentious connections between mighty US dollar and the Shroud, though no doubt the conspiracy theorists will not be slow to suggest that the result of the radiocarbon dating had been “paid for” by Stateside WASPs. And it is of course a Balkenkreuz on the blimp’s tail fin, a symbol of the WW2 Wehrmacht. The artist sensibly avoided a more potent symbol of that era in German history.]
Re: the word ‘fin’. A fitting description of the ‘end’ of the balloon. And the implicit Nazi attribution leads us from ‘Nazi Zeppelin’ to ‘Nostry’s Z-linen’, a reference to the twist of the thread of the Shroud.
Re: the word Hangar. The cryptographic fact is that it plays with the Aramaic word Naggar, meaning ‘Builder’ (i.e. ‘wood and stone cutter’) in connection with Yeshua’s trade. The hangar wall is lined with two-dollar bills. Now it is well known, for some people, that holding or possessing a $2 bill is considered to be bad luck. Hence, as a Hindenburg substitute, the Shroud Of Turin is doomed to collapse.
Re the Balkenkreuz. Etymologically speaking, the word means ‘beam cross’. In conjunction with The Shroud Of Turin, it can refer at one and the same time to:
– a building structure (that of the 2 dollar bill walled hangar featuring a Freemason/bricklayer/builder)
– Yeshua as a carpenter/builder/’naggar’ hanged to a cross beam
The Balkenkreuz as a heraldic expression refers to a straight/Greek cross. However the term ‘Balkan’ is generally believed to come from Turkish balkan, meaning ‘a chain of wooded mountains’. Alternately, the name may have derived from the Persian bālkāneh or bālākhāna, meaning ‘proud House’, which could subliminally refer to ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ into the dark waters of, say, a lake, as the Hindenburg disaster took place at Lakehurst, a toponym that contains the very letters e.h.u.r.s, which are anagram of Usher.
Daniel Milberg’s image is a kind of digital alchemy, a word derived from Arabic which can be seen as a possible pun on ‘al-qawmiyya’ (‘nationalism’) and ‘Al-Qyama’ (‘Resurrection’) both with subliminal reference to Al-Qaida and the ‘9/11 trauma’. ‘Trauma’ itself can be a word play from the Aramaic ‘Toma’ (‘Twin’), which reminds us of the Twin Towers’, a notion reflected in the image as distorted bank notes featuring two portraits of American leaders, as if they were twins.
The blimp actually is about to pierce (with its red nose) one side of the hangar, a pictorial reference to the side-wound of the Shroud image, and indirectly to Thomas’s incredulity.
Another of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories is ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, (the house being made of brick, or masonry, may itself be a reference to Freemasonry) which may provide another cryptostenographic key to this picture. The blimp is about to usher itself out of the ‘hangar’, having taken off from the red carpet, which takes us along a linguistic trail through tarpet to tarmac, short for tarmacadam. Mac-adam literally means ‘Son of Man’, another reference to Christ.
Thus the whole image can suggest that as The Shroud of Turin takes off from the Son of Man, the Hanger enclosing it, made of (Free)masonry half of playing cards and half of bills with twin freemasons on, is doomed to fall.
Or, the sound of Ushhhhhhh-er, puts us in mind of gas escaping from the balloon.
Also the twin faces on the banknotes suggest the twin faces on the Mandylion and Keramion in the Sakli Kilise, or Hidden Church.
We must not see the blimp as such (that would be-limp), but as the Shroud of Turin. I suspect that even the word b-limp, in connection with the erect phallus shaped airship is a verbal joke.
[ColinSBerry says: The origin of the word ‘pun-ishment’ has suddenly occurred to me.]
The use of puns as a cryptographic device dates back to ancient times. it was known as ‘the language of the birds’. The very name of ‘The Shroud Of Turin’ blimp is in se a pun, being Sh-o-T, possibly Shot Down, or possibly the Shot is shooting down Nazism, Freemasonry or the Catholic Church.
Remarkably, I have just read that “Poe desperately wanted to become a Freemason, but the Masons refused to consider him for membership.
[ColinSBerry says: Any interpretation that attempts to account for visual information in the picture – the date of execution (2005), the WW2 military insignia, the ceiling above the blimp etc etc – whether correctly reading the artist’s cues or not, is legitimate speculation. What you have been doing here is not legitimate speculation, since you are attempting to impose multiple layers of word associations that have no relevance in digital art. You would be well advised to put Japanese digital art into your search engine, and spend an hour or two interpreting the rich imagery you will see there, where any attempt to invoke word associations is impossible because you won’t know the Japanese characters that represent the components of the image, and even if you did, they do not lend themselves to your kind of misguided attempt to ‘cryptoanalyze’. Merhinks you have rather shot yourself in the foot today, through demonstrating that your cryptoanalyzing tendency is not rooted in an appreciation of early Western art – coded or otherwise – denied to us ordinary mortals, but to a particular turn of mind that sees all visual imagery as a proxy for spoken or written language. It is not. Visual imagery is free-standing, unless you have compelling evidence to the contrary. If you are so certain you are right, then go back to Daniel Milberg’s site where you were earlier – and ask him to state whether your approach is correct or not.]
You are ignoring/overlooking one very crucial fact: even the artist himself is not totally aware of all the elements that are embedded within his own work of art (there is often more than meets the eye), all the more so when it comes to a surrealistic (digital) collage as it tends to interplay with both personal and collective unconsciousness + subconsciousness. These are dimensions that totally escape your intellectual scope.
My cryptological approach is deliberately surrealistic (half for fun half serious) because the artist is a photo-surrealistic artist. I opted to decode the image using “the langage of the birds” as the image view point is not only surrealistic in se but seen from the “Bilder” (or Imagist)’s bird’s eye view. Last but not least, I was just trying to Maxrelax here and have some serious fun.
[Dan says: Max. Enough. Please.]