Black Hole Sun
The symbolism of Saturn worship and the tragedy of Chris Cornell
Black hole sun, won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun, won't you come?
Won't you come? Won't you come?
In my last essay The Axe is Laid at the Foot of the Tree I discussed how the meta-pattern of the end-times and its symbolism is beginning to manifest in our culture as we move ever closer to the end of the age. I think it is worth further exploring the idea that “symbolism” is something that tangibly happens in world.
When modern people hear the word symbolism, they usually hear it as synonymous with analogy or metaphor. But this is not what the word means. Something that is “symbolic” is a literal manifestation of an idea, pattern, principle, or identity. If you are a husband and father, then you are the symbol of divine kingship in the context of your household. You are not a metaphor or analogy of that ideal, you are literally embodying that symbolic role in the world.
In the same way, when I speak of a an end-times symbol “manifesting” itself in the world, I am describing something that is actually happening, even if it is not physically tangible. There is not a conflict between “symbolic” and “literal”.
Metaphors and analogies do not actually exist in the world, as humans create them in order to make a point. But symbols and symbolism are literally manifesting in the world at all times, and if you pay attention, you will start to notice them.
To illustrate this, I will tell you a story of a minor but interesting manifestation of symbolism that I just experienced and the rabbit hole it led me down. A rabbit hole that connected Saturn worship, a 90’s rock song, Jeffery Epstein, and ends with the sad fate of Chris Cornell.
I was driving home from work yesterday when Soundgarden’s number one single “Black Hole Sun” came on the radio.
It was my first time hearing the song. It came out before I was born and I’ve never been into 90’s music. But within the first minute, this song stopped me in my tracks.
For weeks while putting my last essay together I had been focused on the topic of the end times. And so the demonic forces of the world were laying heavy on my mind, especially the dark force usually described as Saturn or the black-cube, that form of demon worship that corrupted the ancient world and still appears today in occult societies. I have been reading about it, journaling about it, trying to understand the nature of the devil’s hold on our world.
And that’s why “Black Hole Sun” stunned me. Because never before have I heard a song that is so blatantly, disturbingly Saturnalian.
Before I go on, you first need to watch the song’s music video, which was a huge hit when it came out in 1994. Pay close attention to the words and imagery you are presented with.
On its surface, the song has an eerie aura. Many of the commenters on Youtube mention how the song used to creep them out as kids, and many comment that they have no idea what the song is supposed to be about.
Well, immediately upon hearing it I could tell you that the song is not creepy for no reason. It is certainly not a song about nothing.
It is a song about Saturn, the Black Cube, the Matrix, the devil, the demon king of the world itself. And once you understand this symbolism, you’ll never unsee it, and you’ll especially never hear this song the same way again.
For this to make sense, I’ll have to briefly (and hopefully coherently) explain what Saturn actually is and its historic and mythic importance. Bear with me, this may seem strange if you are unused to classical mythology or alchemy, but we are getting somewhere with this.
Saturn is one of the seven ancient heavenly bodies, in medieval times it was named “Infortuna Major” because is the most “negative” or “evil” planet. Words like good and evil are too simplistic and not usually well suited to discussions of mythic ideas, but I’ll use them for the sake of simplicity. Saturn serves as an opposite to both the Sun and Jupiter, the two highest or “good” heavenly bodies. It is often represented as a black cube, the “black sun”, or a hexagon. It may surprise you that the planet Saturn actually does have a huge hexagon-shaped storm on its north pole, but the ancients could not possibly have known that… or could they?
Some historical and mythological references suggest that Saturn was once perceived as the primary celestial body, referred to as the "night sun" or "black sun" in certain ancient cultures. I would suggest that any cultures that considered Saturn the highest heavenly body would have been shockingly demonic- because Saturn represents evil itself.
Saturn represents time, death, stagnation, materialism, and structure or tyranny. It could be understood as the power that devours, decays, and drags things downwards. Saturn is the god of this material plane, in rebellion to the true God of the heavens. For this reason, ancient cultures associated the planet Saturn with lead (the alchemical opposite of gold) as its symbolic metal- all other metals turn back into lead when left to radioactive decay. Lead is poisonous to all life, and in humans this form of poisoning is called saturnism. Its symptoms include lack of energy, depression, blindness, and rapid aging. Lead accumulates over time in the bones of the human body. This is what Saturn represents in a nutshell. He is time, but not in the sense of the passing of moments, but in the sense of the cyclic nature of decay and death. Time in its most terrifying aspect. What rises must fall, what is born must die.
This is the same idea that the Church Fathers refer to when they refer to the evil spirit of “The World”, the demons that tie us to our passions and material things and keep us from looking to God.
This is why the Saturn/Kronos of mythology devours his own children. This is why the Gnostics associated their idea of the “demiurge” with Saturn. This is why occult magic groups and western pop culture are so filled with black cube and hexagram symbolism. Saturn is the anti-god, the head demon of the fallen world and all who hate Christ.
Now that you understand what to look for, back to Soundgarden and Black Hole Sun.
With your new symbolic knowledge, you should be able to analyze what is really going on in this song. It is an ode to the old tyrant god of this world, and an invocation for his return. Let’s look at the lyrics and the symbolism of the music video.
The song begins with a sickeningly plastic and fake 50’s style suburb, eerie and surrealist. An odd troop of assorted religious figures walk the neighborhood carrying a sign that reads “the end is nigh”. Frontman Chris Cornell sings:
”In my eyes, indisposed
In disguises no one knows
Hides the face, lies the snake
In the sun in my disgrace
Boiling heat, summer stench
'Neath the black, the sky looks dead
Call my name through the cream
And I'll hear you scream again”
This first verse invokes a feeling that unseen horror lies underneath the surface of the fake world that has been presented. The “snake” is likely a reference to the snake in the garden of Eden, which may or may not be the same entity as Saturn (from what I can tell, the Church has never been as clear on the identity of demons as modern assumptions may lead you to think).
Musically, the song would feel Saturnalian even without the lyrics or the video to accompany it. The droning dissonance and flat notes make the whole song feel like lead, but it’s still catchy in an odd way. It’s not happy or bright, but it gets stuck in your head. Many of the music video’s comments on YouTube mention an odd, indescribable feeling the song gives them. It certainly feels otherworldly, but not a world I want to be in.
Next is the chorus, which is the majority of the song, repeated over and over again.
Black hole sun, won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun, won't you come?
Won't you come? Won't you come?
Saturn over the ages has been represented as a black sun, a black cube, a wormhole, and an eclipse among other things. “Black Hole Sun” is a new one, but one can see how it is just a mashup of all of these ideas. A black hole is the perfect analogy for the essence of Saturn, the force that seeks to consume and posses all of God’s creation.
“Wash away the rain” is an interesting line in the context of the song. God uses rain to cleanse the world of evil in the story of the flood. So, washing away the rain, the implement of cleansing, seems to me like a sort of inversion of this idea. Whereas God made the world new, this “black hole sun” is about to “cleanse” the world by devouring it.
In verse two, the Saturn symbolism gets even more explicit.
In my shoes, a walking sleep
And my youth I pray to keep
Heaven send Hell away
No one sings like you anymore
A “waking sleep” is a perfect way to describe a world ruled by Saturn. In Greek and Roman mythology, Saturn/Kronos is said to have ruled over man’s “golden age”, but in reality I think this is a bit of demonic progaganda. The spirit of Saturn may rule over an age of peace, but it is a false one, his is the paradise of the Lotus-Eaters. A dream world, a fake world, fake eternal youth. Not the life that God offers, which is eternal growth, but a life of eternal stagnation as the next line tells us.
“And my youth I pray to keep” is an interesting prayer to make to the god of time and death, but a fitting one. Occult groups have always been obsessed with youth, there seems to be some idea of sacrifice in exchange for the extension of the material life. It is reminiscent of Cypher’s betrayal in The Matrix, where he decides to live in blissful ignorance inside the machine rather than face the hard truth. This is what Saturn offers. “No one sings like you anymore” could be a reference to the false golden age of Kronos and the pleasures it offered mankind. Honestly, I’m not sure I can make much sense of “Heaven send Hell away”, other than that it feels like yet another inversion.
The most disturbing part of the music video is what happens as the Black Hole Sun begins to devour the world. These people want to be devoured. Their faces show a sort of masochistic glee underneath the terror. I think this is an accurate picture of the reality of the occult and all that is dark in the world- at the bottom of it is a desire for suicide and death, a desire to be devoured by the gaping maw of the beast. Watching this, I really cannot imagine that it could be about anything other than Saturn and death worship. Whether I think Soundgarden did any of this intentionally or not is another matter that I’ll get to later.
Some have interpreted the ancient Black Sun to be that of a huge meteor or an eclipse, connected to the planet Saturn in some way, that would have sent whatever civilization that existed at that time back into the stone age. Back into an age of ignorance and simplicity, in a way that feels like the inverse of the Biblical flood story.
“Won’t you come, won’t you come…”
Hearing this song after weeks of ruminating on the forces of Saturn was like a lighting bolt to my brain. Something about it felt significant, so upon arriving home I immediately began researching the song and the band, and that was before I even found the music video.
After then finding the video and analyzing its symbolism, I turned to origin of the song, and the band itself, where the rabbit hold went even deeper.
To start, Chris Cornell, the band’s lead singer, claimed in an interview that he had no idea where the idea of the song came from, and no idea what the lyrics were about.
In 2014, Cornell explained the song's origins to Uncut Magazine:
I wrote it in my head driving home from Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville, a 35–40 minute drive from Seattle. It sparked from something a news anchor said on TV and I heard wrong. I heard 'blah blah blah black hole sun blah blah blah'. I thought that would make an amazing song title, but what would it sound like? It all came together, pretty much the whole arrangement including the guitar solo that's played beneath the riff. I spent a lot of time spinning those melodies in my head so I wouldn't forget them. I got home and whistled it into a Dictaphone. The next day I brought it into the real world, assigning a couple of key changes in the verse to make the melodies more interesting. Then I wrote the lyrics and that was similar, a stream of consciousness based on the feeling I got from the chorus and title.[1]
In another interview he elaborated further on the subject:
“If you read the lyrics to the verses, it’s sort of surreal, esoteric word painting. It was written very quickly. It was stream of consciousness. I wasn’t trying to say anything specific; I was really writing to the feel of the music and accepting whatever came out.”
If you follow music at all, you’ll be familiar with stories exactly like this one. Many bands’ biggest hits come to them in dreams, on whims, or seemingly out of thin air. The ancients believed in the idea of the Muses or something similar that would impart ideas to creatives. Artists often speak as if they “discover” their creations, rather than creating them themselves, and so I think it is reasonable to believe Cornell here.
If Cornell’s description of the origin of the song is true, then it seems clear that somehow, for some reason, this song “channeled” the spirit of Saturn into the cultural consciousness in 1994 without any intention from Cornell. The song was an immediate hit and rose to the top of the charts. The song became a symbol of Saturn- not a metaphor, not an analogy, but a real symbol because it brought the “energy” if you will of this dark spirit into the spotlight.
Does this mean that the members of Soundgarden were devil-worshippers? No, I don’t think so. I think these powers manifest themselves into the world in all sorts of strange ways, and if you are not explicitly against them, they may catch you by surprise. This is how symbolism works, just like the symbolism of the end-times that I have previously written on, it will start appearing regardless of people’s intentions. However, dark energies and dark powers are probably more likely to appear to lost and confused people. I would imagine that at the time of writing this song, Cornell was not in a very good place mentally or spiritually.
And channeling powers and invoking symbolism has consequences.
For myself, this little event of symbolism popping up was not that big of a deal. I had been thinking about Saturnism, and Saturnalian symbolism appeared to me in the form "of “Black Hole Sun”. Those were my “consequences”.
But imagine what kind of effect Saturn’s energy could have on someone like Chris Cornell? Channeling its creation, performing it for decades for millions of people. What kind of consequences would that have?
And so I looked into it, and the rabbit hole went deeper. Unfortunately, Saturnalian symbolism continued to “happen” in Chris Cornell’s life.
Cornell died in 2017 of an apparent suicide immediately following a Soundgarden concert. While this is tragic enough in itself, the story does not stop there.
The official story is that Cornell hung himself, after taking extra Adivin pills according to his wife. She has claimed ever since that she does not believe her husband meant to take his own life. From the linked article:
Vicky Cornell said her husband slurred his words when she spoke with him after the Detroit show. She said “he was different,” and she contacted security to check on him.
“What happened is inexplicable, and I am hopeful that further medical reports will provide additional details,” she said. “I know that he loved our children and he would not hurt them by intentionally taking his own life.”
But there is further reason to believe that foul play was involved- and it may be directly linked to the Black Hole Sun.
Although Cornell spent much of his life as a typical degenerate rockstar, that is not how his story ended. During his second marriage, to a Greek woman named Vicky Karayiannis the couple began a foundation to aid homeless and poor children, and he also converted to Orthodox Christianity and apparently got sober. He and his wife baptized their children into the Church and apparently frequently travelled to Greece to work with Syrian refugees.
All in all, it seem like the story of an older rock star who found Jesus and turned his life around. So why did he kill himself?
The easy answer could be that he struggled with mental health issues or substance abuse and finally succumbed to it. Maybe. But there is another angle.
If you do a quick google search on the issue, you will quickly find claims that Cornell was working with DJ Avicii (Tim Bergling), Linkin Park lead singer Chester Bennington, and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain on a documentary film about child trafficking before all four were suicided by the elites they were going to expose. The rings they were going to expose apparently involved Jeffery Epstein.
I don’t know if this is true. If you look it up yourself you will find evidence pointing to it, and you will also find an almost suspicious amount of “fact-checking” articles “debunking” the conspiracy. It would overcomplicate this essay to get into the details of all that, and I don’t know enough about the situation to do it justice. If you look into the matter, you will find some very disturbing evidence that may suggest that the people very close to him had a hand in his death. I don’t want to say too much more, as the accusations are so serious.
But what I will say is that we know for a fact is that elites have silenced many of those that have tried to expose them, and those elites are heavily connected to Saturnalian worship. We know that many whistleblowers in the Epstein case were silenced. We know that Hollywood is full of Satanic worship and symbolism, as are all occult societies. And one of the central tenets of all such societies throughout history is that once you are in, you cannot leave and survive.
Due to his conversion to Christ and the Church I think Cornell deserves a fair look into his death, especially considering the views of the Church on suicide. Maybe at one point he was a degenerate rock star, and maybe he channeled some dark forces and rubbed shoulders with dark people. But if he truly tried to turn his life around, and encountered darkness that he had to confront, and was killed for his trouble, that deserves consideration.
Symbolism happens. It would ring true if the man who wrote “Black Hole Sun” went on to experience demonic things in his life, but later repented and went on to challenge the cult that worships the real Black Sun. It would be poetic, and God is a poet, but you have to decide for yourself what you think really happened.
Did Cornell really fall back into his old inner demons and kill himself, or was he killed by servants of demonic forces that he had denounced? Either way, the story would be Saturnalian in its symbolism.
Symbolically, Saturn drags down those who seek to escape it, pulling them back in with his crushing gravity, devouring them. If Cornell committed suicide, it would be Saturnalian because it would mean he was pulled back in to his inner darkness and succumbed to it. If Cornell was murdered, it would be Saturnalian because he was pulled back in by outward forces, punished for daring to try and break free from Saturn’s matrix.
But Christ has conquered death by death, and so Saturn can no longer hold men in his grip forever. The Black Cube of death is rendered totally powerless in the end. There is hope, for Cornell and for all of us.
I know this is not anything like what I usually post, but I felt I had to write it. I knew nothing about Chris Cornell two days ago, but now here I am writing about him in the hopes that if he deserves justice, he receives it.
And maybe its for that reason that the symbolism of Saturn appeared to me, to bring light to this strange story. I think it is fortuitous that the matter presented itself to me yesterday, just in time to post on the summer solstice. It seems a good use of this most powerful day of the year to call out the darkness. It is unwise to discuss demons in the dark- they deserve to be called out into the light to face judgement.
I pray Chris Cornell truly renounced the devil and that his memory will be eternal.
God bless.
I had always harbored suspicions he had Christian principles when he moved to his later band Audioslave. Take a look at the song Show Me How to Live. Knowing he converted is a joyous thing to my mind. As a Gen X it feels as if a part of my youth was redeemed.
This Saturnalian stuff is very disturbing though. Makes me thing of the Muslim “holy” stone in Mecca and is supposedly a meteor fragment. They placed it inside a large black cube of a building…. Creepy.
It’s wild how the demons (and God) can speak to people through artists without them even understanding the message.
Last year I had a long conversation with Jonathan Pageau about this topic - the rainbow prism album cover of Dark Side of the Moon was incredibly prophetic… but did Pink Floyd know what it represented? And the album “Californication” is a perfect symbolic description of the end of the world. But Anthony Kiedis is apparently dumb as a rock.
We have to be very careful when creating or consuming our words and music!