“If you can dream it, you can do it.” ~Walt Disney

Welcome to Hidden Mickey, a blog exploring all of the multiple connections between Disney, spirituality, and the esoteric. To a handful of you, these connections may already appear self-evident. I assume that for the rest of you, like myself, even the idea of such a connection will seem strange and surprising, perhaps even ridiculous. Rest assured, I will do my best on this blog to substantiate these connections and explore them together.

From a young age, the allure of the “Disney magic” captured my imagination as few things have since. My shelves overflowed with my collection of the puffy white Disney VHS tapes that were typical of my generation. Living only a few hours from Disney World, when I was growing up my family would visit the theme parks often. Like countless millions of children before and since, I was utterly enchanted by the parks from the start. Soon this typical childhood enchantment flowered into an obsession. I read every biography of Walt Disney I could lay my hands on. I consumed endless amounts of Disney history, behind-the-scenes trivia, and Imagineering secrets. The peppy and vibrant tunes of Disney songs echoed in the house, in the car, in my earbuds. Suffice it to say, Disney played a defining role for me through my childhood and adolescence.

In retrospect, I’ve seen that my first truly religious or mystical experiences happened in those Disney theme parks. Yes, Disney represents many things that people find deplorable – the compulsive and fraudulent “wholesomeness” of 1950s America, an excessively middlebrow sensibility, “dumbing-down” and profiteering off of public-domain stories and characters, decadent displays of wealth and landed-ness in a poverty-stricken world, a sticky tourist trap where people are milked of their money via overpriced goods and an abundance of gift shops… However, something in me when I was younger, and to this day, recognized intuitively a deeper truth about this place – it was a temple to the Imagination. In an era when most of America has been converted into a noxious coast-to-coast shopping mall, Walt Disney attempted and often succeeded to manipulate land and wealth in far more imaginative ways, to bring a touch of wonder and excitement to the masses who shuffle through his plastic wonderlands day in and day out. The Disney parks create not images, not even buildings or places – they are crafting whole subjective experiences within which you can roam, opportunities to become lost within absorbing imaginative realms.

Much later in my life, when the glitter and glamour of the Disney magic had begun to somewhat wane for me, I began to explore many deep spiritual systems and concepts, first through meditation and Eastern mysticism, and the through Western esotericism and the Occult. To be perfectly clear, what I mean by “occult” is not the common popular definition of Satanism or some flirtation with the “dark arts”. By the Occult, I simply mean spiritual traditions and ideas that remain obscure or hidden from the majority of people. As Jesus said in John 3:8, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” The flow of the air is constantly intimate to us within the breath, yet remains invisible to the eye. These things are hidden in plain sight, as they say. In much the same way, spiritual truths of an “occult” variety will evade the “common sense awareness” of most people, and reveal themselves only to those who are both curious enough and prepared enough to receive them.

A couple of years ago, through a very unique experience which I’ll describe in detail in a later post, I began to observe the surprising number of connections between Disney and what is referred to as the Occult. Somehow, though my love for Disney had never truly dissipated, and my interest in the esoteric was already at this point several years old, these two streams in my mind had never crossed before that point. As I’ve already pointed out, these things have a tendency to stay hidden in plain sight. The more I explored these connections, the deeper down the rabbit hole I seemed to fall… and that is the very short version of what inspired me to create this blog and to share some of what I had found.

As I began to learn and study more about the Occult and Hermeticism, and began to understand the alchemical principle of the refining of the Spirit within matter, it seemed to me Walt Disney was putting his own whimsical spin on this very principle. Isn’t it interesting that one of the most wealthy and influential corporations in the world has made their own personal brand centered around “magic”? Between their fairy-tale animations, theme parks, and now purchasing Marvel and Star Wars, they have made their fortune by creating a monopoly on storytelling, imagination, and our modern mythologies. I find Walt himself to be a particularly fascinating character. The synthesis of raw willpower and raw imagination in that man is nothing short of alchemical, if you ask me. I think there’s a lot of parallels between Walt’s lifepath and the story of Gepetto in Pinocchio – which is of course based on a book that is a spiritual allegory written by an Italian Freemason. Much like Gepetto wanting his wooden puppet to be a real boy, Walt spent his whole life creating life, vitality and emotion from inanimate materials, whether it be his animations or his audio-animatronics. To me Disneyland is an incredible example of pure Will in the Occult sense, and such a shining beacon of the breathing of spirit into matter – how can you get more Occult and alchemical than that?

I feel the need to leave a kind of a disclaimer here: I remember the day when, following the recommendation of several writers who I admired, I went to the library and checked out Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces”. Opening that book, reading Campbell’s genius analysis of the depths of storytelling, reading the simultaneous multiplicity and unity of narrative structure around the world, I had the distinct feeling I had opened not a mere book of comparative mythology, but some sort of mystical grimoire revealing to me powerful incantations and the mysteries of the universe. The timeless truths and ageless patterns revealed in even the simplest of stories certainly run deep into the subconscious, plunge the same depths and soar in the same heights that mystics and spiritual seekers have also explored in all times and places, often with the aid of their own sacred stories. Disney is nothing if not a culture of imagination and storytelling, and these are things that can seem as mystical and profound as they can also seem banal and commonplace. All of this to say, at some point you may feel I’m prettying up or complicating things that are rather simple and plain by using difficult concepts and strange language. I can only freely admit that there is probably some truth to that accusation. But I will also recommend that you should certainly keep exploring and digging deeper. Some things that are directly in front of you can hide very deep secrets indeed. You can either uncover the truth, or it can remain hidden in plain sight.

Here are some videos and links for your further investigation. Most of these I plan to write much more extended and detailed posts on in the future.

“Donald in MathMagic Land”. Pythagoreans, pentagrams, and sacred geometry, oh my!

Have you seen what they’re playing on the Disney Channel these days? Bill Cipher is the villain of the show Gravity Falls. His name and design are a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Eye of Horus seal on the back of the $1 bill. VIDEO CONTAINS SPOILERS.

https://runesoup.com/2016/10/black-pearl-of-great-price-the-magical-significance-of-captain-jack-sparrow/

The inimitable Rune Soup explores Captain Jack Sparrow as an embodiment of the

Divine Trickster.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyQmXIsnmnA

Exploring the mystical philosophy of Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers – who was herself a disciple of the mystic Gurdjieff