When Statues Conspire With Snakes
JAGO, Covid, and the Abrahamic Family House
April 25, 2020. During the height of the Covid pandemic, the Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano lets slip a strange comment on Italian television. Referring to him and his fellow astronauts, who were but months prior on board the International Space Station, he said, “Già a novembre sapevamo dei primi contagi.” “Already in November we knew of the first (covid) infections.”
The public reacts with confusion and anger. How could an astronaut in space have already known of the virus in November, when global media outlets did not report on the virus until December? At this point in time, it was universally agreed that the Covid outbreaks began in December, not November. In response to the public uproar, Luca Parmitano released several lengthy statements delivering convoluted explanations for why he got the date wrong. Even astronauts make mistakes, right? And yet, in 2021 researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine released a report stating that Covid infections in China almost certainly began by at least November 2019.
Which begs the timeless question, Who knew what when?
Almost a year before the aforementioned slip of the tongue, on July 20, 2019, Luca Parmitano had left earth and arrived on the International Space Station for his second mission into space. A symbolic day for sure, as it was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. He would return on February 6, 2020. In his possession during the trip was a peculiar item. A historic item. The first marble sculpture to be sent to the International Space Station.
A piece titled The First Baby, created by the artist JAGO.
And it was Luca Parmitano who would take this very picture.
Both Jago and Parmitano are men seemingly endowed with a certain prescience. Men whose comments and actions imply foreknowledge of certain sensitive events before they occur. Jago with his bust of Benedict XVI and Parmitano with his comments on Covid. Both men know each other, as Jago entrusted Parmitano with his statue. Both men have friends in high places. A conclusion could be drawn here, that these men are in contact with certain circles, certain networks with secrets.
On August 25, 2020, Jago posted a video on his youtube channel titled “The First Baby,” which was a recording of a minute-long conversation between Luca Parmitano and an interviewer, discussing Luca’s experience with Jago’s statue in space. During the conversation, Luca asks the interviewer if he knows the Lucio Dalla song “L’Ultima Luna.” He compares Jago’s statue to the last couple of lines of the song.
“L'ultima luna
la vide solo un bimbo appena nato,
aveva occhi tondi e neri e fondi
e non piangeva
con grandi ali prese la luna tra le mani, tra le mani
e volò via e volò via
era l'uomo di domani l'uomo di domani
e volò via e volò via
era l'uomo di domani l'uomo di domani”
Luca explains that Jago’s statue is like the child in the song, a child who had just been born, that he represents a new future— a man of tomorrow. His words vibrate with a subdued undercurrent, subtle hints of a kind of messianic fervor.
An enigmatic song choice to reference. But a reference that Jago found important enough to highlight in a video. I doubt many outside of Italy would recognize the musician or the song in question.
But Lucio Dalla and his aforementioned song ring with significance for Italian Freemasons, at least according to Giovanni Francesco Carpeoro. Carpeoro is a prolific Italian Freemason who was grandmaster of La Legittima e Storica Piazza del Gesù (the masonic lodge of Piazza del Gesu) from 1999 to 2005. He is considered an expert on masonic symbolism and he was personal friends with Lucio Dalla himself. In the past, Carpeoro said that Dalla was “an initiate,” “one of the last Rosicrucians,” and “a brother mason.” And even stranger, Carpeoro gave a closed lecture to fellow freemasons on the masonic significance of Lucio Balla and his song “L’Ultima Luna” two months after Jago posted the video of Parmitano’s comments.
Carpeoro has claimed that Lucio Dalla’s enigmatic song was an esoteric nod to the cycles of human development and various cosmic dimensions, and that the closing lines of the song describe a new man being born under the last moon, a semi-divine being going boldly into the future. And this is exactly how the astronaut Luca Parmitano described Jago’s statue “The First Baby,” in a video Jago posted for the world to see. It would seem that Jago is endorsing this interpretation.
The elder Freemason Carpeoro also claims that Lucio Dalla was a Rosicrucian, part of an ancient thread of artists and intellectuals, working in tandem with various secret societies to bring about a better world. Carpeoro claims that artists like Lucio Dalla serve a specific purpose, to influence and initiate the masses through their chosen artistic mediums. Ignoring the typical masonic grandstanding of Utopia and Prisca Theologia, Carpeoro’s comments beg an interesting question:
Is this how Jago views himself? In the same way that Carpeoro views Dalla? As a member of a specific occult order, whose mission is to initiate the masses through his statues? Is this how his patrons see him? Is this his role?
It goes without saying that we must retain a high level of skepticism when discussing hypothetical orders such as the Rosicrucians. But in the words of the historian Frances Yates:
I should like to try to persuade sensible people and sensible historians to use the word ‘Rosicrucian’. This word has bad associations owing to the uncritical assertions of occultists concerning the existence of a sect or secret society calling themselves Rosicrucians the history and membership of which they claim to establish . . . The word could, I suggest, be used of a certain style of thinking which is historically recognizable without raising the question of whether a Rosicrucian style of thinker belonged to a secret society.
The world is full of different orders— different societies— with different aims and motivations. The majority of these organizations are a mystery to us and will remain so. We can only try and wade through the various “coincidences” and connections, off comments and lines of patronage, to try and form hypothetical outlines—shapes of the phantoms that lurk in the margins of history.
What I propose is not so radical. If one has any knowledge of how art has historically been employed for visual propaganda purposes, then the campfire tale that I am constructing is not so impossible.
I am nothing more than a collector of coincidences. What you choose to make of these coincidences is up to you.
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In the first article I wrote on Jago, I briefly discussed a thematic undercurrent linking two of his statues— the aforementioned “First Baby” and “Look Down”— and the possible significance of their locations.
To quickly recap, I posited that JAGO was playing with antichristic and Messianic imagery, specifically the “baby/child” series of statues, possibly for some larger coordinated ritualistic effect. However, there were certain pieces I had not yet put together. Two years ago I knew far less than I do today.
In 2019, JAGO sent the first marble sculpture to the International Space Station, the “first baby.”
In 2020, during and after the first initial lockdown, he unveiled his chained baby in Napoli.
Finally, the baby is moved to a location in the al Haniya desert for artistic reasons not disclosed.
The narrative that crystallized from this arrangement is as follows:
A baby in space, who Parmitano describes as a child of the future, using a reference to Lucio Balla’s esoteric song L’Ultima Luna. The artist Jago who extensively employs social media to charge his sculptures with meaning, reposts the video of Parmitano’s explanation.
A larger child in the same fetal position, landing in the square of Piazza del Plebiscito, as if he has fallen from the sky, with a chain as an umbilical cord.
The chain is removed (he is unchained) and the sculpture appears in the Al Haniya desert, for reasons mysterious and unexplained.
In the first article, I hypothesized that the sequence was depicting an antichristic figure, an inversion of Christ’s ministry.
Christ describes Satan falling like lightning from heaven, and in the Christian cosmological drama, Michael is said to cast and bind the devil in a bottomless pit for a thousand years. And then after that millenia has passed, he will be unchained. This narrative of a fall being depicted in these two works of Jago, from the fetus in space to becoming literally chained on earth, is too blatant to ignore. And there is another intriguing irregularity in the timing of the statue’s placement in Napoli which adds to this possible theme of an inversion of Christ’s birth and ministry.
Look Down was placed in Napoli in November 2020. It remained there during the Christmas season. And during this period occurred an astrological event of damn near biblical resonance. On December 21, 2020, there was a great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, the closest conjunction of the planets in 800 years. The Saturn-Jupiter conjunction is the rarest and most spectacular conjunction among naked-eye planets. And the great scientist Johannes Kepler theorized that The Star of Bethlehem that heralded Christs birth was in fact a Great Conjunction of Saturn-Jupiter in the year 5 BC.
Jago posted the below photo on Instagram on Christmas Eve.
But what is truly eye-opening is what comes next. The statue is mysteriously moved from Napoli to the Al Haniya desert (UAE) and loses its chain.
When Christ begins his messianic ministry, he goes out into the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. This is when the devil takes him atop a mountain to tempt him. He shows him all the kingdoms of the world, and tells him that he will give them all to him as long as he submits.
And where did Jago place the statue in the desert?
Yes, the resemblance between the statue’s new location, and the recognized location of the Mount of Temptation in Israel is uncanny indeed.
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Since writing the first article almost 2 years ago, a new episode in the statue’s life has materialized, one that only strengthens my thesis.
From February 17th to June 3rd 2024, the statue which was once in the al Haniya desert was moved to the famous Palazzo Reale in Palermo.
In the Gospel narrative, Christ is tempted by the devil, he is promised all the kingdoms of the world. Christ rejects the offer and begins his ministry. But an antichristic figure would take the Devil up on his offer.
And so our child is brought to an imperial palace, as Christ would have been brought if he took the Devil up on his offer, and how the antichrist will rule according to Christian tradition. And not just any imperial palace, but the palace that served as the imperial seat for the Holy Roman Emperor Frederik II. In fact, the foundation that requested and funded the exhibition was the Fondazione Federico II. Why is this a significant detail for our artistic psychodrama? Because Frederick II was explicitly linked with the antichrist by the Church herself, with Pope Gregory IX going so far as to label him preambulus Antichristi, predecessor to the Anti-Christ. If Jago is truly playing with antichristic imagery here, then he could not have picked a better location following the al haniya desert.
If you think I am going a bit overboard in my analysis of the locations in which Jago chooses to display his work, I will direct you to Jago’s own words.
“The place where the work of art is positioned is, even, much more important than the work itself.”
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But there is another thematic matrix that haunts these statues.
Luca Parmitano’s second space expedition ended on February 6, 2020, and with it, the end of Jago’s sculpture’s trip in space. By some great coincidence, this “child of the future” lands back on earth during the week in which the world would change. For it was one week after that the first cases of Covid were confirmed in Italy. As if on some symbolic level, this work descended to earth as the virus came to Europe. The virus that would herald the future. Later that year, Jago unveils the larger fetus statue in Napoli. It is called Look Down, an intentional play on the term Lockdown, which had chained Italian citizens for the better part of a year. The statue is then mysteriously moved to the desert, specifically placed in a location where the desert and mountains meet, mirroring the location of Christs own temptation.
The word Quarantine comes from a Venetian term, meaning 40 days. It originates from the Venetian policy of isolating ships during the time of the plague for 40 days. However, it was originally a 30 day policy:
“Officials in the Venetian-controlled port city of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia) passed a law establishing trentino, or a 30-day period of isolation for ships arriving from plague-affected areas. No one from Ragusa was allowed to visit those ships under trentino, and if someone broke the law, they too would be isolated for the mandatory 30 days. The law caught on. Over the next 80 years, Marseilles, Pisa, and various other cities adopted similar measures. Within a century, cities extended the isolation period from 30 to 40 days, and the term changed from trentinoto quarantino—the root of the English word quarantine that we use today. No one knows for certain why the isolation period was extended to 40 days, but scholars have a few hunches. There’s a lot of cultural meaning packed into the number 40—plenty of Biblical events draw upon the number, such as Jesus’ fast in the desert, Moses’ time on Mount Sinai, and the Christian observation of Lent.”
The location where Christ was supposedly tempted by Satan (during his 40 day fast) at the beginning of his ministry is called Mount Quarantania. The very word quarantine is directly linked to Christs time in the desert before his ministry, when he is tempted by Satan.
The statue First Baby “falls” to earth at the very beginning of the Italian Quarantine, before Look Down/Lockdown is then placed in a symbolic Mount Quarantania.
And by some great coincidence, all of this occurs in the year 2020. Literally 20 +20 = 40.
It is time for the third symbolic dimension.
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I initially found it odd that Jago and his benefactors picked a location in the UAE for the symbolic Mount Quarantania. Would not an area closer to the levant be more fitting—more biblical— for this specific visual statement?
And then it hit me.
During this time period the Vatican had a historic deal in the works. Several documents and agreements, along with a construction project, that were widely decried as contrary to the Catholic Faith and overtly Masonic. The project was done in conjunction with the United Arab Emirates, the country in which Jago’s Look Down was placed.
February 4, 2019. A joint statement is signed by Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, also known as the Abu Dhabi Declaration.