Kcuf Uoy Iami -Origin of Cum Uh Sol Nu-

First things first: the title of this post is in CODE, folks! See if you can figure it out :)

Now to the heart of the matter, which is this: we had a day off today, so we decided to get cracking on translating the lyrics to Atom Miraiha...and ended up spending three hours researching the meaning of "cum uh sol nu," to no avail. Imai refused to explain it to either Fish Tank or PHY magazine, but he did tell PHY magazine that it was a sort of "puzzle," that it might or might not be Latin, and that the reading in katakana might or might not be "kamu aa soru nuu."

That didn't give us a lot to go on.

However, he also said that the answer to the riddle was hidden in the lyrics, so that's where we started looking. In particular, the phrase "Shambhala-Agarttha" is repeated again and again in the chorus.

Shambhala is a medieval Buddhist prophecy which has gone through many interpretations over the years. At first, it served as encouragement to Buddhist people in Central Asia as the Muslim empire encroached upon their lands. Shambhala was said to be a mythical land in the north, where the Buddhist people would find salvation, but it was also a reference to a prophesied holy war, in which the mythic king Rudra Chakrin would lead massive armies to save the Buddhist world from the unbelievers, called Mlecca, meaning "people of Mecca," or Muslims. Interestingly, the geographical area north of Tibet, which is now southern Kazakhstan, is a green and hospitable country, in great contrast to the frigid, arid surrounding regions. Was this the real-life Shambhala? Nobody knows for certain. Over the centuries, the holy war aspect of Shambhala was internalized, and the word came to refer more to a war with one's own inner demons than a war with an external foe - in other words, Shambhala is both a Buddhist paradise, and the quest for Buddhist paradise within oneself, depending on who you ask.

Fast forward to the 1920's, just after the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks had conquered the tsars, but they had yet to cement their power. How to impose this new idea of Communism upon a swath of territory stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean? In the early days of Red Russia, theosophy and occultism were widely studied and practiced, and some of the Bolsheviks sought to glean useful scientific knowledge from traditional occult practices. What if there were a way to hypnotize people or bend brain waves to influence people to adopt Communist ideals, love their comrades, and stop behaving in a selfish fashion? Gleb Bokii, one of the heads of the Bolshevik secret police, was an idealist who believed in the possibility that traditional cultures in Central Asia might hold the keys to new and powerful scientific techniques, and he set up a secret lab to conduct experiments in this vein. The man he selected to run the lab was his close friend Alexander Barchenko, who depending on your sources was either a hardcore bona fide occultist, or simply posing as an occultist in order to spy on the real occultists for the government.

In any case, Barchenko had studied with the French occult write Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, who was obsessed with the legend of Agarttha: an ancient kingdom deep under the earth, ruled by an enlightened elite, where the people had attained spiritual enlightenment and preserved ancient knowledge which had been lost in the world above. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre claimed that Agarttha was located in central Asia, and when Barchenko traveled to Central Asia to meet with Tibetan mystics, he heard about the Shambhala legend, and came to the conclusion that Agarttha and Shambala were in fact the same place. 

As part of a larger strategy, some of the Bolsheviks wanted to invoke the Shambhala legend to convince the peoples of Central Asia to embrace Communism. The claim was that the Communist principles were the principles that would lead to Shambhala enlightenment, and the prophecy indicated that salvation would come from the north, meaning Russia. Anti-Bolsheviks also invoked the Shambala prophecy to their own ends. In particular, "Mad Baron" Roman von Ungern-Sternberg set up a reign of terror in Outer Mongolia, studying the Shambhala prophecy extensively to try and convince the people he conquered that he was the incarnation of Rudra Chakrin...but that's a very long story, so go and look it up if you're interested.

Bokii and Barchenko, on the other hand, hoped that if they could discover mystical secrets to bend people's minds and wills toward noble behavior in service of the Communist cause, that they could achieve a Communist takeover of Central Asia without bloodshed. No one knows for sure what went on in their secret lab, but the rumor is that their goal was to create super-powered humans. Now doesn't that sound like something Imai would enjoy?

Unfortunately, by the 1930's, Stalin had achieved a firm grip on power, and deported the occultists in droves to Siberian labor camps. Stalin had also hated Bokii for years, and feared the information Bokii possessed as head of the Bolshevik secret police. In 1937, Bokii was arrested and executed (because shooting people was Stalin's favorite hobby.) Barchenko held out for a bit longer, claiming to the government he was a valuable scientist who could help develop massively powerful weapons, but soon he, too, bit the bullet, literally. Communist occultism was over, and nobody ever found Shambhala, until...

...did you notice, guys? An enlightened republic somewhere in Central Asia, serving as a repository of ancient wisdom? And nobody actually knows where it is or how to get there, but we know it's a paradise of untold wonder? Where else could it be but the Anarchic Republic of Buck-Tickistan! Why didn't we see it before? From this day forward, we're no longer calling it the Anarchic Republic of Buck-Tickistan. From this day forward, it's the Agartthic Republic of Buck-Tickistan. Or the Shambhalic Republic of Buck-Tickistan. Whichever you prefer.

If you want to read more about Shambhala and Red Russia, we suggest you check out the book Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia by Andrei Znamenski. This interview with him is where we obtained much of the information we used in this part of the article.

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Now let's get back to "cum uh sol nu." Imai hinted it might be Latin, but it doesn't appear to be. However, our research into occultism put us in a mind to research other ancient languages and occult concepts. We delved into The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky's bible of theosophy, which includes references to a lot of ancient Hindu and Buddhist ideas. The Secret Doctrine is one of the definitive works on theosophy, a form of European occultism practiced or dabbled in by many people interested in the Shambhala legend, including Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and Alexander Barchenko. Helena Blavatsky herself was either crazy or a genius or both, and she lived an extremely colorful life, so if you're in search of a good historical read, look up a biography of her.

Though we delved pretty deep into theosophical terminology, but we didn't come up with much. Kaama is the Sanskrit word for love or desire, and the concept plays a role in Hindu and Buddhist theology, as well as theosophy (remember the Kama Sutra?) Nous is the Ancient Greek philosophical concept of intelligent understanding (related to the words "noetic" and "noesis"), and it shows up in lists of theosophical terminology, and there's also some suspicion that nous may be derived from Nu/Nun, the Egyptian deity of water and the unconscious. Nu is invoked in some of the magic spells included in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but we couldn't find anything about cum uh sol nu, though it was interesting reading.

As for Sol, in addition to being the Latin word for "sun," and invoked both as a symbol of Christ and of gold in Alchemy, it's also the Slavic root for "salt." Kwas solny, the Polish word for hydrochloric acid, literally means "spirit of salt." Close, but no cigarillo.

But wait...could alchemy have anything to do with this? We did another hour or so of digging into alchemical terms in various languages, but came up with little convincing evidence. But what if we were taking the wrong tack here? What if we searched in Japanese? What if we searched for flasks?

All we came up with, kids, was the homunculi from Fullmetal Alchemist, an anime we confess we never had any interest in watching. But Imai wouldn't name a song after an anime, now would he? Yes, the word following the Shambhala-Agarttha sequence is "Nonmalt," the name of an fictional ancient underground race who appear in the popular Japanese TV series Ultraman, but every Japanese man Imai's age loved Ultraman as a boy. It was their Star Trek. It's iconic. Surely, surely Imai's not enough of an otaku to name the title of the song after something from an anime, is he? Surely not. Surely we were barking up the wrong tree.

Could it be a literal code or cipher? Could it be an anagram? At the behest of one of you readers, we tried a computer keyboard anagram of romaji  to katakana - no luck. A numerical alphabet-to-hiragana substitution cipher yielded nothing, either.

Feeling frustrated at this point, we were about to give up. A few days ago, when we checked the Japanese internet, we couldn't find any information except for puzzled fans shaking their heads over Imai's weirdness. This time, we dredged up something more: a Japanese fan claimed on her blog (Nikki), Dii Oba... to have solved the riddle, and she had posted a picture of her solution on her blog to prove it. "You can see the solution in the picture, so I blurred it out. But now I feel so good that I solved it!" she crowed. 

Nice claim there, sister. But if you were planning on withholding your supposed solution from the rest of the fanbase in order to get attention, let me give you a piece of advice: you would have gotten a lot more attention from the fanbase if you'd shared it. Everyone wants to know. They don't want to listen to you telling people you've found the answer, then refusing to share it just to make your small, petty soul feel good for a few moments, because you know your insignificant fangirl's life is actually nothing but a blip of consciousness of the futility of existence along the long lonely flatline of endless oblivion stretching out before and after your birth and death for all eternity. Solve that little puzzle next, and by all means, don't share it with us...after all, Mr. Sakurai told us in "Hosoi Sen" that it's better not to know the answers, and we trust him more than we trust you.

And yet...cum uh sol nu was really driving us crazy at this point. We've never failed to look up a reference before! How could we let the Blog-Tick readership down? We kept digging through pages of useless Japanese interweb search results, until at last, we found it. And where else did we find it but on Gunmar Blog, Blog-Tick's little Japanese brother, who were celebrating their third anniversary at Climax Together a few weeks ago. (Congrats on your third anniversary, little bro. Let us pat you on the head in a patronizing fashion, then sigh and talk about the good old days in the aughts, when were were still young.)

So here goes, Mr. Gunmar (god but is that a cringe-worthy affected way of romanizing "Gunma," but whatever. Little brothers do cringe-worthy, affected things all the time. It's their purpose in life.) Anyhow, this is us, Mr. Gunmar, stealing from your blog.

According to Mr. Gunmar, he didn't get it, either. In fact, he was just as confuzzled as we were. He doesn't even say how he found out what it was, or who told him, but according to him, it's this:

cum uh sol nu ... spell each word backwards and you get

muc hu los un ... which is an anagram for "homunculus"!

Except...I don't know what the backwards spelling was for. But we'll be damned...it was English after all. This whole time, we'd been assuming that Imai had been working with katakana versions of foreign words, and had romanized them (probably incorrectly) as "cum uh sol nu" in order to look cool, in much the same fashion as he did with qüan vie nnâ sigue eÿe. The spaces between the bits of the word add to confusion...but he did give us one clue. It is Latin.

"I could never have gotten there on my own," claims Mr. Gunmar, after revealing the solution (though let's notice he didn't see fit to credit whoever did find out...was it the smug author of Nikki Dii Oba? And if it was, damn lady, take credit for your own solutions instead of offering them anonymously to a guy. Sure, Japan is a sexist as fuck country, but you don't need to make the problem worse.)

Anyhow, at this point, we want to point out that we did, in fact, get there on our own, even if we didn't realize it at the time. We were searching for flasks, and the internet gave us Fullmetal Alchemist, and the homunculi. Damn you, Imai, are you really that big of an otaku after all?

Luckily, he probably isn't...unless Fullmetal Alchemist was the first place he heard about homunculi, in which case, shame on you Imai, get your ass to Akihabara because we don't want to look at you anymore (and now I see there's also a manga called Homunculus...if manga and anime are teaching people things, that's great. But the Ultraman reference was enough otakudom for one song already.) Still, Imai's done so much poking around into esoteric subjects that it wouldn't be surprising if somewhere other than anime, he came across the fact that homunculi were all the rage in Medieval European alchemy, though the idea apparently originated with Plato (we're too tired to confirm this right now but if someone wants to check the sourcing on that, go right ahead.) Anyhow, In De Natura Rerum ("The Nature of Things"), the famous Medieval scientist/occultist Paracelsus details the following method for creating homunculi:

"That the sperm of a man be putrefied by itself in a sealed cucurbit for forty days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse’s womb, or at least so long that it comes to life and moves itself, and stirs, which is easily observed. After this time, it will look somewhat like a man, but transparent, without a body. If, after this, it be fed wisely with the Arcanum of human blood, and be nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the even heat of the horse’s womb, a living human child grows therefrom, with all its members like another child, which is born of a woman, but much smaller." 

Oh yeah. Just harvest some sperm, stick it into a horse's hoochie, feed it with human blood for forty weeks, and presto! A homunculus. Easy, peasy.

However! Paracelsus and other alchemists were often picture in art from the period as creating homunculi not in animal wombs, but in alchemical flasks like this one:

There's your "flask of another type," kids! It's even in the album booklet! And here's Nicolas Hartsoecker's famous drawing of a tiny man or "animalcule" inside a sperm...and those of you who've seen the album booklet for Atom Miraiha may notice that the shape of this sperm is very similar to the shape of the flask Imai's holding in the photos. Even if we want to punch Imai for being so obscure, good on him for doing the thing properly.  

Because Medieval Europe was even more sexist than Japan is today, guys who believed in Hartsoecker's theory of "Preformatism" believed that sperm actually contained fully formed human beings that would simply get bigger until they became human babies (the "just add water" theory)...and women were nothing but passive incubation vessels.

If this isn't trippy enough for you already, you might be interested to know that further theorists pointed out that if the homunculus contained in a sperm was already a miniature man, he must have sperm of his own. And so on, in an infinite regression, forever and ever. And this meant that Adam, the first man, had contained all of humanity in his ballsack, and this was how he transferred original sin to everyone on the planet today. And in fact, Imai even mentions Adam in the lyrics to "cum uh sol nu." Wow, Imai, we hardly even want to punch you anymore (j/k we still wanna punch you.) Anyhow, let's just pass over the part of Preformatism where they completely fail to explain the existence of women, and go listen to that ancient Buck-Tickistani ode to the Yoni of the Mother Goddess, "Kimi no Vanilla."

If, however, you remain unimpressed and want to learn more about ridiculous Medieval science, I suggest you look up "spontaneous generation" and "phlogiston".

In conclusion: in your face, Mr. Gunmar. You may have solved the puzzle first, but we actually took the time to write a full article about this shit, because we value our readers too much to feel satisfied by doing what you did, which was repost blocks of text verbatim from Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia may be a good starting place, but it is not an acceptable resource for real research. Check your sources before you submit your paper! Signed, Cayce: a graduate of real school as well as goth school, who has been blogging since you were in diapers, figuratively if not literally.

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And now, let's take a swig from our very own flasks to dispel the frustration of the past six hours (we have been working on this shit for six hours now. We wish we were kidding) and enjoy this (mostly) singable translation of "cum uh sol nu -flask of another type-," which will soon be available, complete with notes, over at This is NOT Greatest Site, but we wanted to share it here first, because we didn't want to drag you through reading this whole article and then fail to reward you with the translation at the end.

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cum uh sol nu -flask of another type-
Lyrics: Imai Hisashi
Music: Imai Hisashi

Ah I love you
On the borderline
Ah I love you
Come and dance
Man-made subtype Adam

I'm never die　I'm never die Oh
I'm never die　I'm never die Ha!
I'm never die　I'm never die Oh
I'm never die　I'm never die Ha!

Flask of another type - forbidden creature
Flask of another type - forbidden creature
Shambala-Agartha Shambala-Agartha
Shambala-Agartha Nonmalt

Ah I love you
On the borderline
Ah I love you
Come on home
Nihil, to null, we're gone

I'm never die　I'm never die Oh
I'm never die　I'm never die Ha!
I'm never die　I'm never die Oh
I'm never die　I'm never die Ha!

Flask of another type - forbidden creature
Flask of another type - forbidden creature
Shambala-Agartha Shambala-Agartha
Shambala-Agartha Nonmalt

I'm never die　I'm never die Oh
I'm never die　I'm never die Ha!
I'm never die　I'm never die Oh
I'm never die　I'm never die Ha!

Flask of another type - forbidden creature
Flask of another type - forbidden creature
Flask of another type - forbidden creature
Flask of another type - forbidden creature

I'm never die　I'm never die Oh
I'm never die　I'm never die Ha!
I'm never die　I'm never die Oh
I'm never die　I'm never die Ha!

Shambala-Agartha Shambala-Agartha
Shambala-Agartha Nonmalt
Shambala-Agartha Shambala-Agartha
Shambala-Agartha Nonmalt

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If one of you Tumblr-ers feels like sharing a scan of the pic of Imai with the flask, please, go ahead. We'd do it ourselves but we're not currently in possession of a scanner.

P.S. Who cracked the post title code?

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Coda [Update]: After taking a break, I realized I wanted to add something here. For those of you who wondered why I went off on wild goose chase searching for arcana when the answer was right there in the letters on the page (and for the sake of my own peccatum superbiae I'll have you know that anime is not where I first learned about homunculi.) I went off searching for arcana because I, unlike Gunmar, have been doing this job for a decade, and at this point, I've learned that with Imai it usually either ends in occultism, sci fi, art history, or all three. GJTHBKHTD, the Akashic records, Mona Lisa Overdrive...we could go on all night here. And yeah, I know in PHY magazine he said it was some sort of "letter puzzle." But this is the man who also claimed that the phrase "Atomic Futurists" has nothing to do with Italian Futurism, even though he wrote about Italian Futurism on the last album. This is the man who claimed Mona Lisa Overdrive had nothing to do with William Gibson. In short, I take everything he says in magazines cum magno grano salis.

[Update 2]: I have just been informed that the person who posted the solution on Reddit was one of our very own Blog-Tickers, and apparently she confused the hell out of Gunmar-san. Thanks, Blog-Tickers. Keep it up.