Kenosis to Gnosis
Hear the silence
Begotton is a very strange artistic movie that was made by Elias Merhige in 1991. This movie has no dialogue in it, which makes it all the more harder to understand what is going on. There is no music in this movie either, just sound effects that add to the disturing nature of it.
Clues as to what this movie is about is from the end credits which state that the man killing himself in the first scene is God, the man who is convulsing for most of the movie, while cannibals are feeding on him is the Son of Earth and the woman is the Mother of Earth. The images have symbols in them that give clues about what this movie is trying to tell the audience. The pregnant woman standing next to the coffin is a give away that this movie has some deep occult themes to it which very few people can notice.
The first scene of this movie shows God, who seems to be wrapped up in bandages. This could represent the mask that covers over the soul. In this scene the camera focuses on an eyeball, which represents the third eye.
In this scene God disembowles himself and after he is dead, the Mother of Earth emerges. There is a big clock on the left, which represents time, the room that God is in represents the body and the bandages represent his soul being covered up. God is cutting up himself to fertilize the Mother of Earth.
God cutting his flesh out, which is later used by the Mother of Earth to get pregnant. Soil starts coming out of God's mouth, which represents the Word creating the Earth. After that God dies, the Mother of Earth emerges out of where he is sitting. The passage in the Bible in John 1:14 is relevant, "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."
In the scene where the Mother of Earth is getting fertalized, there is another clock in the picture, which reinforces the symbolism of time.
This is the scene which makes it clear that this movie has an occult theme to it. The pregnant Mother of Earth is standing next to a coffin, which can mean either death and rebirth, or that birth in the body is death.
The rest of the movie focuses mainly on the Son of Earth who is convulsing most of the time and getting fed on by cannibals. The cannibals appear to be workers and they could be farmers. They appear to be wearing straw hats. At the end of the movie, one of the cannibals puts the flesh of the Son of Earth into the ground and in the last scene, new plants emerge. This emphasizes the death and rebirth theme.
The Gnostics belived that Archons fed on Man and that is what these cannibals appear to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archontics
"The Archontics held that there were Seven Heavens, ruled by the Demiurge surrounded by Archons begotten by him, who are the jailers of the souls. In the eighth heaven dwells the supreme Mother of light. The king or tyrant of the seventh heaven is Sabaoth, the god of the Jews, who is the father of the Devil. The Devil, dwelling upon earth, rebelled against his father, and opposed him in all things, and by Eve begot Cain and Abel. Cain slew Abel in a quarrel about their sister, whom both loved.
"They say," records Epiphanius, "that the soul is the food of the Archons and Powers without which they cannot live, because she is of the dew from above and gives them strength. When she has become imbued with knowledge ... she ascends to heaven and gives a defence before each Power and thus mounts beyond them to the upper Mother and Father of the All whence she came down into this world."