Blueface

We received a shipment of textbooks yesterday. Together with the books, the company had thrown in a special "History of Witchcraft" issue of National Geographic, on the back cover of which was this advertisement for a book called Super Simple Psychology (cf. my pet phrase "for complex psychological reasons," which comes from a newspaper explanation of why a man was eating 25 eggs a day):

The main image is a human face divided vertically in half. The left half is blue-green and shows the visible surface of the face, but the eye is featureless, with no iris or pupil. The right half is a deeper blue and shows what appears to be a stylized MRI of the brain.

My last post, "Richard Arrowsmith on 3i/ATLAS," included not one but two images of blue faces with featureless eyes:

Both the ancient Egyptians and Alan Moore are notorious practitioners of magic, so that's a tie to the "history of witchcraft theme." Here's the front cover of the magazine:

The witch on the cover is wearing a blue dress. The above image of a blue pharaoh with featureless eyes is a detail from this dress, which belongs to regular commenter Debbie:

I wrote all of the above this morning, before my morning classes. After the morning classes, during my lunch break, I read a few pages of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by David McGowan. On p. 270, I read about the original name used by the band that later became the Mamas and the Papas:

The new lineup, of course, needed a name, and John [Phillips] pushed hard for the occult-based Magic Cyrcle, a name by which the band was briefly known before ultimately settling on the Mamas and the Papas.

On the very next page was this:

[John Phillips' wife and bandmate] Michelle Phillips had a brief affair with Roman Polanski in London while Polanski was married to the soon-to-be-murdered Sharon Tate (during that same sojourn to London, Tate was reportedly initiated into the practice of witchcraft).

Although there are plenty of references to the occult in this book, which concerns itself with "the dark heart of the hippie dream," this is the one and only occurrence of the word witchcraft. Witchcraft is also the subject of the National Geographic magazine; the word dominates the cover of the original English version:

The version I received is all Chinese and does not feature the English word witchcraft. The only English on the cover, aside from the name National Geographic, is the title of the John William Waterhouse painting that serves as the cover illustration:

That's almost exactly the original name of the band that made Michelle Phillips famous. The difference is that John wanted to use the Greek-influenced spelling cyrcle. The Greek kyklos "circle" is also supposed to be the source of the name Ku Klux Klan (see "Klan movies").

Cyrcling back to Super Simple Psychology, that image -- the right half of a face, with a featureless blue eye -- is something I've seen before, and even on a book cover:

The half-face on Super Simple Psychology has a wire-frame pattern on it, somewhat suggestive of a web.

In a second added note on my last post, I noted a 4chan thread that featured George Costanza as Dr. Manhattan on Mars:

The /x/ post this was illustrating is a link to a collection of bootleg copies of The Gateway Tapes from Robert Monroe. If you do an image search for gateway tapes, two images consistently turn up. One is a thrice-bisected head with featureless eyes, and the other is a blue-green person in space:

Note added: I forgot to mention in the original post that the two-colored face on the cover of Super Simple Psychology corresponds quite closely to an image I posted back in December in "The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies."

It's appropriate that this butterfly with a Greek name should match the cover of a psychology book. The word psychology comes from the Greek word psyche, which means two things: (1) "soul" and (2) "butterfly." The link, noted above, to a book called Transformation is also relevant here. Transformation is a Latin word, of which the Greek equivalent is metamorphosis.

Oh, and speaking of book covers with a single blue eye:

Both Kafka and the George Costanza actor are Jewish, which ties in with the 4chan custom of highlighting Jews in photos by making them blue, as in this adapted/hijacked infographic from The New York Times: