I received an e mail from “Ernie” this morning (whose database of rightwing conspiracist sources can be found in the blogroll on the right):

Conspiracy theorists will love this! If you reverse the letters in the word “I-L-L-U-M-I-N-A-T-I” it comes out “I-T-A-N-I-M-U-L-L-I”…. Type http://www.itanimulli.com/ into your browser and hit “enter” and you’re taken to the home page of the National Security Agency!

I tried it and it works, which sent me on a Google chase. First up was a spookily crepuscular You Tube video, in which a heavily shadowed figure murmurs about some of the mystical semantical properties of the mirror form of the word “Illuminati”: break it up into syllables and it says “It and I am You”; the two “L”s with their final “I” can be construed to mean “to hell with I.” As the commentator says, “this is an interesting way to look at words….I think more people should look into the purpose and nature of words and you could find a lot more than looking for sentences. A sentence is like a prison sentence–when you start on that path, you’re looking into too much information and too much of it is wrong and and too much of it is opinion and so forth. But it’s right in front of your eyes, if you actually really look for it and look for it in the simplest way.” A graphic on the screen points out that the mirror form of “evolution” phonetically spells out “know it you love.”

But what about the NSA link? Is this or is this not proof that the United States government is a bought-and-paid-for subsidiary of the New World Order? “Anonymous Coward,” a poster at Godlike Productions.com, figured out that someone had purchased the domain name “itanimulli.com” and is redirecting clickers to the NSA site. The owner of “itanimulli.com” (he traced him through http://www.who.is.com) turns out to be John Fenley of Provo, Utah, a robot enthusiast and inventor. But lest you think that settles the matter, Anonymous Coward notes that spelling words backwards is a:

A basic Illuminati technique – a left/right mirror image. Remember George Dubya holding the book upside down on the morning of 9-11? Yup – another up/down mirror image. Oh, and btw, the name of that book was “My Pet Goat”. Goat – get it? Bapho’s nic..

Don’t understand “nic” but Bapho is Baphomet, of course, the goat-headed demon that the Templars supposedly worshipped. A variation of the 19th century French occultist and magician Eliphas Levi’s famous image of Baphomet appeared on the cover of Leo Taxil’s sensational book Les Mystères de la franc-maçonnerie dévoilés (1886)–a book that supposedly revealed the existence of Masonic Palladism or devil worship, but which its author revealed was a colossal hoax in 1897. (See my Boing Boing post on Hoaxes, Celebrities and the Net for more.) Perhaps John Fenley is following in Taxil’s footsteps.

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