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“There are a few songs that absolutely confuse me, I have no idea what I was thinking of – “Roy’s Keen” for example.” -Morrissey
In order to understand what I BELIEVE Roy’s Keen to be about, one has to embrace a very strange concept, that of reincarnation. There is an astonishing amount of occultist lingo and imagery found in Morrissey’s work, but I’m not entirely convinced that Morrissey himself has placed it there. And this isn’t a case of a CG’s-reading-occult-books-so-finds-occult-imagery-in-everything phenomenon like buying a Volvo then suddenly spotting Volvo’s all over the highway, it’s more distinct and accurate, though difficult to describe. He alludes to letting his mind wander as he writes and the songs writing themselves in a way. I feel as though this experience of being a modern voice for a very old mystery is the source of much of his pain. The man in him writes these deeply intense symbolic songs, yet the boy in him doesn’t have the education to distinguish their origin, and I believe the boy in him reigns over the man leaving him in a state of being a tad hesitant of the world that haunts him through people long dead. I liken myself to the Stanislaus de Guaita to his Oswald Wirth, a seeker of truth much younger than him but exposed to certain teachings that he himself has not had the fortune to be taught. Oswald Wirth, in a nutshell, was a magician. S de G was his mentor in a way, but younger than him. The story can be read in the Preface to Wirth’s Tarot of the Magicians. Wirth transposed what he learned into designing a deck of cards. But this modern day dispensing of truth is I believe not a visual endeavor, so much as a musical one, so dispensed through song. Rightly so, Morrissey deals not with magicians as a medium for his message, but musicians. The music or muse part is interesting on many levels, particularly that of embracing the idea of a sacred feminine whose voice sings through song, but I digress. So does a person reincarnate as a single person? I don’t believe so. I’m sure there are many schools of thought on this, but I believe Morrissey represents many reincarnations which could explain his hesitancy of most things, he’s going in a lot of directions, but he’s doing it with a lot of style and command which most take for granted considering the delicate psychic (for lack of a less stigmatized word) state in which I believe he lives.
I’m not going to go into a ton of detail because by now most readers have declared TLDR status on this post (or Too Crazy, Don’t Care) but ladders and windows are very important symbols in both hermetic and Masonic teachings. It’s the ladder that an initiate climbs to reach the sun when the window of oppotunity presents itself. In the case of this song, the sun smiles back . ROYS KEEN is an anagram of ROSY KNEE. It’s the Goddess Isis who traditionally takes a knee when she is met by her equal, Osiris. Massively heavy in Hermes Thoth imagery. (Google it if you want but the Thoth part is bit freaky in some respects regarding this very message board.) So these Gods speak though us as people, through Morrissey as our messenger. But these dead people like to sign their work like any good artist should. So morrissey’s got the God thing AND the dead people thing going all at once. In this case, the author of this song is who I believe to be Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who was an 18th century French occultist who studied the four humors and Thoth exstensively. He wrote a book using the name Etteilla about tarot cards called Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes. In this song Morrissey writes very plainly “I am a Satellite.” Omitting the word “sat,” the line is a 99% anagram of “I am Etteilla.” The “sat” is important in Egyptian symbolism that I won’t bother with, but know it isn’t to be dismissed in the equation. Anyway. The eerie part is the proclaimation that something is hidden in the very song with the lyrics:
Even when it's under your nose
well, you just can't
see it, can you?
There’s more going on, but that’s the jist of this song. So Morrissey if you’re reading, I hope this answers your question. Every single song is a gem to be dissected and inspected. I was going to take an additional angle regarding the sacred feminine and your work with the SMITHS which is code for Miss HT, or Lady Hermes Trismegistus who is basically God as a chick, and liken this song to Eliot Smith’s song Satellite, but I gotta go eat dinner.
If Gavin Hopps is correct about the spectrality of Morrissey's lyrics, and how he leaves gaps for unstated entities and dramas, you might be onto something. The homework is impressive!
