Astana: The Illuminati Capital of Kazakhstan

from The Bohemian Blog:

As the first new capital of the 21st century, the city of Astana in Kazakhstan has been received by many as a revolution in social architecture. Rising out of the barren steppe in the north of the country, this surreal capital represents the investment of billions upon billions of petrodollars; and features some of the most radical, revolutionary design the world has ever seen.

Not everybody is queueing up to welcome this city of the future, however. Critics and conspiracy theorists the world over have pointed out the rich occult symbology which seems so deeply ingrained into the aesthetics of Astana… and many are heralding this as the ‘Illuminati Capital of the World’.

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ASTANA, KAZAKHSTAN

Earlier this year I spent the best part of a month in and around Astana. I had heard nothing about the Illuminati theory then, and the city didn’t exactly strike me as a capital for the New World Order.

However, there is certainly something strange about Astana. While the central and business districts have been laboriously designed by some of the most prestigious architects in the world, this 15-year-old capital is still seriously lacking in residential zones. Even now, many government officials commute by plane from the old capital of Almaty. The result is the most elaborately futuristic ghost town you could imagine – and feels like walking onto the abandoned set for a 1970s sci-fi film.

The rich symbolism and peculiar structural design of Astana do raise certain questions… questions which are best answered by superimposing lightning effects over footage of the city’s more notable landmarks, as this clip by xlivescom so amply demonstrates.

I’m going to continue referring back to points made in this video clip as the report goes on; not because xlivescom is anything approaching an authoritative source of information, but rather because this video offers a concise summary of the dozens of Astana-Illuminati theories scattered across the Internet [1].

Don’t worry if you didn’t make it to the end of the video, I’m sure you get the point. While the feature certainly manage to highlight some bizarre features of the city, there is little here that can’t be understood better when you consider the history and context of Astana.

THE WHITE TOMB

Kazakh culture has its roots in nomadic traditions, and the majority of permanent settlements didn’t begin appearing here until relatively recently.

In 1824 a band of Siberian Cossacks travelling across the Central Asian steppe stopped on the banks of the Ishim River, where they built what would later become an important fortress defending central south Russia. They named it ‘Akmolinsk’: the word for a Holy Shrine, translating literally as ‘White Tomb’.

The town grew into the 20th century, and Akmolinsk served as a pivotal rail depot around the time of the Russian Civil War. Under the Soviet Union Kazakhstan became a powerhouse of industry; factories, chemical plants, mining rigs and missile silos were built far and wide across the country, in addition to a number of notorious gulags.

Perhaps the cruelest of these camps was situated at Akmolinsk itself, and known as ALZHIR: the ‘Akmolinskii Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Motherland’.

Kazakhstan staked its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990; a year later, they struck oil in the southern Caspian region.

The decision to move the nation’s capital from the heavily Soviet-influenced Almaty to the small northern town now known as ‘Ak Mola’, was taken by many as a gesture of defiance on the part of the Kazakh government… although official motives included Almaty’s risk of seismic activity, its proximity to volatile foreign borders and limited space for expansion.

The move became official on 10th December 1997; and the town of Ak Mola adopted the Kazakh title of ‘Astana’, meaning ‘Capital’.

THE GREAT ARCHITECT

To return to the suspicions levelled by xlivescom in the video above, perhaps the strongest recurring theme is that of ‘sun worship’. While a naive observer may be justified in comparing the appearance of the Bayterek Tower to some kind of sun altar, it would nevertheless be a gross misunderstanding of the monument’s true meaning.

The Bayterek is Astana’s most enduring icon, with a design based on an ancient Turkic folk tale.

Like many of Astana’s landmarks, the tower was conceived by the renowned British architect Sir Norman Foster. The golden sphere represents an egg, the pillar the ‘tree of life’. This symbolism comes from the tale of Samruk, the ‘magical bird of happiness’: a mythical being common to Persian, Iranian, Armenian, Byzantine, and a range of Turkic traditions.

Personally, I don’t have an issue with sun worship anyway – of all the things you might care to deify, the sun strikes me as a fairly natural choice. Sun worship predates any other belief or teaching in the history of human culture, and the sun and eagle emblems serve as important, historical symbols of the Kazakh race. The conspiracy theorists would have us believe that the sun is a symbol of Lucifer, and the ultimate occult icon; but the sun was nourishing all life on this planet long before Christians had invented the notion of ‘Lucifer’.

However, the comparisons which can be drawn between Astana’s city centre and the traditional layout of a masonic temple are interesting to say the least.

The Ak Orda Presidential Palace sits in the East of the city centre, at the same position as the Grand Master’s chair. President Nazarbayev’s palace is flanked on either side by vast golden pillars, which correspond neatly with the twin pillars called ‘Joachim’ and ‘Boaz’ that stand on either side of a masonic temple.

Many masonic rituals require initiates to pass between these pillars, and those with a little imagination might suggest that placing golden pillars on either side of Astana’s central Nurzhol Bulevard allows for occult workings on a grand scale [2].

While the eastern station of a masonic temple is occupied by the Grand Master (whose wisdom is often associated with Divine Light), the western position is the realm of the Senior Warden. His duties are to preside over the Lodge at times of labour, and this position could be said to represent the soul; reflecting Divine Light in the same way that the moon reflects that of the sun [3].

It’s hard to draw a parallel between the apparent sun symbology of the Bayterek Tower and the moon associations which characterise the corresponding position of the masonic lodge. Unless of course we look even further west… considering the Bayterek as the mid-point of the temple then, at the far western end of Astana’s central plaza we find the Khan Shatyr leisure complex. I’m not sure that this is any easier to compare to the masonic position of Senior Warden though. Perhaps it’s fair to conclude that this masonic parallel is merely superficial and aethestic, rather than intended to serve as a functional reconstruction.

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