Epcot Design

This blog deals with the prophetic design details of Disney's Epcot park in Florida. It answers many long standing questions people have asked about the prophetic design of Disney property in Florida.

Epcot (Google Maps)

The link here is to Google Maps zoomed in on Disney's Epcot theme park near Orlando Florida. If you have never been there, or even if you have, it provides a bird's eye view of the park. Disney's property is much bigger than Epcot alone. For reference, the famous Magic Kingdom park is North Northwest from Epcot. I will be dealing with details from this map through the rest of this blog post.

Disneyland As Mirror

We had been visiting the Disneyland Parks in Anaheim, California, after being directed there in a series of prophetic dreams.

That park was the first place where we realized that places on the ground might have some sort of map to stories and ideas in the Bible. At first we were looking at how various major rides there might map to the tribes. Did we know enough about the tribes to pick matched rides?

The most interesting tribe in those days was Manasseh, the lost tribe that became the USA. It is identified this way because it signed Manasseh's Revelation 7 Seal Date document in 1776.

Manasseh seems to reflect the whole set of tribes which is why 13 original colonies map to the tribes themselves. Manasseh is a subset reflecting the whole. The tribe of Manasseh had 2 parts, one on either side of the Jordan, as the USA has Alaska and the lower 48.

Within the USA, some zonal region within the entire country should reflect both Manasseh itself, and the 2 aspects of Manasseh. Our hunch was that California would be that region in the built out USA. Northern and Southern California are a similar matched pair, so it might be Manasseh inside the USA.

Think of this as a hall of mirrors. The world is at the top. Manasseh is in the world reflecting the tribes of the world. If it keeps reflecting down, somewhere in, say, southern California should be a reflection too, say the Los Angeles Metro. Within that region, another, say Disneyland paired with California Adventure, should be yet another reflection in this strange hall of mirrors.

The 2 parks would be yet another 2 part twin reflection of Manasseh's 2 parts inside the LA Metro. Within the parks some ride should also reflect Manasseh. Take a guess. (Pause for dramatic effect.) How about Small World? Small World was designed by Walt himself for the 1964 Worlds Fair in New York. It was moved to Disneyland after the fair closed.

That ride is a series of rooms. For those who know the ride, which room would reflect Manasseh best? (Another pause for dramatic effect.) The final room. Below this the ride maintainers regularly tweak the details.

Alphabet Design

These sorts of thought experiments occupied much of our time as we were learning more about the tribes in the text. In those days we were not particularly preoccupied with additions. On one of those early Disneyland visits, as we were leaving, it looked to me as though the alphabet might also be found in that park's design along main street. That would need to be explored later, after we learned more about the letters themselves.

We eventually started traveling there as a modern surrogate for the ancient temple in Jerusalem. It gave us the reason to think about the holidays as described in the text. I would not recommend that now. Solomon's temple is the platform for the text's villains. But, we did learn about the holidays. We learned what it felt like to practice them.

Once we were going there regularly, we realized there were far more major rides than 12 and something else must be going on. This is where the Qu-Map was discovered. We found 25 letter-tied locations in a specific geographic arrangement. Disneyland was doing the hall of mirrors, but mirroring down 25, not 12 particularly. This caused us to look at the national USA map. Indeed, we could find the 25 rides, 25 letters, mapping out to 25 places in the USA.

Epcot and especially the iconic Epcot ball which houses a ride called Spaceship Earth, mapped to letter Ba on the overall map of the USA.

Many of our friends at the time wanted to know if Disney in Florida mapped the same way as Disneyland in California. Eventually we would need to go figure this out.

2012 Trip

By 2012 we had the finances to make a cross country trip and go see. We did not want to do this very often, so we planned enough time to understand all the parks on the Disney property in Florida on a single trip.

Our plan was to spend 20 days in total in Florida. We planned 4 days each for each of the main parks, and then 4 more days that we would schedule once we understood the layout of each park. We brought a friend and found a very cheep motel some distance from the parks and drove off to see what we might learn.

We had a planned schedule, but about a week before leaving I had a prophetic dream that there was some sort of emergency. We needed to leave immediately. That dream shifted our trip earlier than planned. This would turn out to be really important.

We arrived, got annual passes which for 20 days was cheaper than 20 days of regular tickets. We then started in, 4 days at Magic Kingdom, then 4 at Epcot, then 4 at Animal Kingdom then 4 at Hollywood Studios.

Magic Kingdom is the Disney park in Florida that was built to mimic Disneyland in California. Unlike at Disneyland in California, there was no discernable Qu Map as the overall design. Florida's version is also much more spread out than California. It has many of the same rides, but it does not follow the same macro level design.

Hollywood Studios was the most disappointing of the parks. Every ride was built around some variation on the theme of death. I suppose it should not have been any surprise, Hollywood itself is mostly themed on death.

On what should have been our 4th day in Hollywood Studios we decided to go back to Epcot instead. Epcot is very large, and takes time to explore. We felt we did not fully understand it.

The Epcot ball is the icon that maps the letter Ba. At Disneyland the Ba is Space Mountain. The 3d version of the letter has a top that sits above the ground, as does that ball. So we headed over to Epcot to see what else we might learn.

Epcot 30th Anniversary

When we walked in that day the people at the gate were handing out all sorts of stuff. They were not doing this when we had been there a few days before. This was Epcot's 30th anniversary, to the day. There were various special programs and we were handed the schedule which explained what was going on and where.

This was the emergency that was warned of in the dream. We needed, very much, to be there on that specific day. In particular, Disney had hauled back in from retirement the executive who had been charged by the Disney board of directors to design and build what today is Epcot park.

We sat through an earlier presentation by the executive who was running the Florida parks at the time. Her material was interesting too. But not as fundamentally important as the executive who knew the history.

We would need to hurry between the venues, and for awhile it looked impossible given the massive crowds. But, we were lucky. As it does so often in Florida, it started to rain. The crowds dived for cover. Being from Seattle, no problem, we walked through the rain and got a nearly front row seat at the second venue.

This was an important presentation. Let me share here the salient points of what that former Disney executive had to say.

History Of Epcot

With the success of Mary Poppins in 1964, Disney had enough excess free cash to purchase land for a new park in Florida. They were not going to make the same mistakes as they had done in Anaheim.

In particular, they wanted control of the neighborhood around the park. Even by the early 1960s there was trouble with drug dealing and especially prostitution outside of Disney's main gates in Anaheim itself. This was a problem for their brand.

They also wanted enough land that they could grow on that property for decades without having to purchase neighboring land that had become valuable through Disney's own park development.

Through a series of shell companies they purchased around 30,000 acres of mostly swamp land in central Florida. On that land they could build for a long time to come. Those acres were mostly cheap because they were mostly swamp. This detail will matter later.

By opening date on October 1, 1971, the Florida copy of Disneyland was done. It was open for business and became the east coast destination for people wanting to visit a Disney park. It was mostly surrounded by a massive tract of undeveloped land.

By the late 1970s the board wanted to start using more of those 30,000 acres. They had Walt's given name for the place, Epcot, Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. They knew they wanted something different than Disneyland. They framed their commission to the executive as go build something like a permanent, standing, world's fair. With that Disney staff set off to design and build.

No Vision

Up until this point the Disney Parks were built upon the (prophetic) vision of Walt Disney himself. Let me state that we believe him to be something of a modern industrial prophet. Though he did not live to see Disneyland fill out the Qu-Map, he saw enough to get it started. There was enough prophetic heritage to get it complete, including the most recent additions in the northwest corner of Disneyland.

Visionaries do not inhabit corporate America. If you want a current example, consider Elon Musk. His competitors do not have his vision, and at best can only imitate.

Disney executives knew they needed a visionary for the Epcot design. In that quest they eventually turned to Ray Bradbury. He was a well known writer of science fiction at the time. He was hired as a consultant to give some vision to the corporate lemmings that would go off to actually build Epcot.

When I think of Ray Bradbury, I liken him to French novelist Jules Verne. Prophetic people like these tend to express themselves as writers of fiction. Jules' writings in the mid 1800s involved going around the world in 80 days, a journey to the center of the earth, and going to the moon by rocket. These were all radical ideas in his day. They were all Verne's ultimately prophetic visions related to the Eden moon at Saturn.

Any good prophetic writer is picking up Joshua's own vision. These people are very rare. Most fiction is NOT prophetic, mapping instead to the editors. Bradbury pulled off the Epcot prophetic vision as skillfully as anything Verne had done, as I will explain.

Because of the 1977 release of the first Star Wars movie, there was public fascination with artificial moons. Bradbury had many short stories on similar themes, which may be why they choose him for help. The Epcot ball was to become an instantiation of the death star, but without any Star Wars branding.

No Cash

Disney's other problem was no cash. Major hit movies generate free cash that can be invested in new projects by the film production company. But audiences are fickle and few movies are smash hits.

The last major hit movie Disney had produced was the same Mary Poppins movie that had purchased the land in Florida around 15 years previous. With Walt gone and changes in American culture, the studio was not producing major hits. So Disney was not generating excess cash. They could not just go build.

So funding the construction of Epcot would need to be done as most world fairs are funded, through commercial sponsorships for each of the major pavilions.

To be fair, Disneyland itself was built with similar funding. But Disneyland was modest by comparison to Epcot.

In order to get those sponsors they set up a sales office high in an office building in downtown New York City. Here they could wine and dine and show park models to convince vain executives from other companies to put money into this new, permanent, worlds fair.

The executive we were listening to stressed the problems in this sales work. Most of the CEOs of major companies have personality problems of various types. He personally dealt with them all, suffering through torment as he sold pavilion sponsorships to heads of major corporations.

So with great struggle they were able to find sponsors to fund the main pavilions at Epcot. At least enough to get started. Now the problem turned to construction.

The Map

Those 30,000 acres, in their natural state, are mostly swamps. Technically this means the water table is at or very near ground level. This is not good land for building big buildings. But, this is why they were able to purchase 30,000 acres of it.

To make the land so it can be developed requires lowering the water table or raising the soil. Lowering the water is not easy. But by excavating soil and forming lagoons the excess dirt can be used to raise remaining acres above the water table. This was done initially with the Magic Kingdom theme park. A giant lagoon was dug out and the dirt piled up so they could build. The same had to be done for Epcot.

If you go look at the map, you will see what is now the World Showcase Lagoon which is where the soil was dug up to raise the area around the Epcot ball itself. We were told various stories related to that excavation, especially a sink hole that opened up in the lagoon area now south east of Test Track. They had to redesign that area after it had swallowed excavators. This redesign broke the central east-west symmetry that had been the original plan.

As the basic design was taking shape the corporate sponsored pavilions mostly ended up north of that lagoon, and then smaller, less expensive, nation sponsored pavilions ended up around the lagoon. Walking the 1.2 miles around the lagoon was like walking around the nations of the world. The bigger pavilions had corporate sponsors and were much more technical in content.

2 Parks

As the park operations people started looking at what was happening in terms of running this park, they wanted it split into 2 different parks. They even anticipated different operating hours, expecting the lagoon to open later and run later than the bigger pavilions to the north. Epcot remains the only Disney park with 2 entrances in part because of these operational concerns.

Because it had taken so much work to find sponsors of the pavilions in the park as designed, the executive in charge of those sponsorships refused any fundamental design changes. Design changes would cause every sponsor contract to be redone. That would take time and easily risked loss of already signed up sponsors.

Epcot would get built as conceptually designed by Bradbury and his close collaborators, as called out in the contracts.

Design

When we studied Epcot in 2012, we could not see any overall prophetic design. We did see that a clockwise tour around the World Showcase Lagoon seemed to be weakly following the Passion Week chronology.

It begins at the Mexico Pavilion. The ride and themes there are like the triumphal entry. It ends with Canada. The 3 crosses picked up in 3 maple leaves above a band stand. That entire area is like Golgotha and the garden tomb area in Jerusalem.

This was weak. It did not explain the large pavilions, but for 2012, it was a start.

Now, I look at the park's design and I can see how this looks similar to the map of Eden. Bradbury picked up the same prophetic vision as Verne. Let me give you some reasons.

Space Ship Earth (Youtube)

The link here is to a Youtube video of a ride through Spaceship Earth. This is the ride inside the Epcot ball. If you have never been there you may wish to watch this video to understand the ride.

I have selected this video out of the many on Youtube because the audio narration can be made out over the background music. Listen carefully, she is telling the history of the evolution of language and communications.

This is a very unusual ride as Disney rides go. Let me explain how it is strange.

Most rides across most of the Disney properties involve 12 major plot sections, what I will call scenes. (Movie people use the term scene in a smaller sense than I do here.) I suspect this was a hidden design principle from Walt's era. His successful movies followed a similar pattern. His personal failures, like Fantasia, do not follow the stock formula.

Spaceship Earth is unusual in that there are many more scenes. If you study it closely you will find 25 scenes following the 25 letters of the Paleo Alphabet.

I will leave most of this as a riddle, but let me give you 2 that stand out so you can sync up with our answer. Early in the ride there is a scene of a cave with cave art. The point is made that you cannot take it home with you.

The ride itself is the national USA Ba letter on the national Qu map. This is the Ba room in the ride. This is the vanishing point in a hall of mirrors when looking at Ba. The room is a parable for the ride itself. There is writing on the walls of this cave we are riding in. As interesting as it is, we cannot take it home.

At the top of the ride is a computer room modeled after big computers of the 1960s. It is the Qu letter, or brain. A computer is a mechanical brain. With these 2 hints, and an understanding of the alphabet, you should be able to piece together the rest of the scenes/letters. It is a very tight map to the letters and should not be hard to solve if you try.

Eden Map

So all artificial moons that show up in popular fiction, including this ride, map back to Eden. But the map of Eden is in part there to teach the alphabet. This is something the Spaceship Earth ride gets fundamentally correct.

It looks like getting everyone on earth to use phonetic alphabets for writing was done by Joshua so everyone could one day read the text needed to get there.

Only in the past couple hundred years have most human languages been given a phonetic alphabet so they can be written. All of them, of course, derive from Paleo. Listen to the audio track in the ride for more details on language development.

So this ride is capturing a prophetic aspect of Eden itself. This is why a language ride is inside a model of Eden. This was something that we saw in 2012, but we could not reasonably explain until now. Souls are not let into this place without knowing the writings that get you there.

So the Epcot overall park design now makes sense. After entering through the ticket booths, guests walk under the Epcot ball. There is no way around the ball. Guests must pass under it. This is figurative of having entered Eden.

Near the ball, out back, to the south, are a series of large pavilions. These represent the interior, built out, portions of that moon. In Eden these are large cavernous regions. They are conceptually caught in Jules Verne's journey to the center of the earth. These are the Eden equivalent of buildings today in large cities.

As you keep going deeper into Eden you eventually come upon a large cavernous central room that surrounds a sea. Epcot works this way too. This is what is portrayed in the World Showcase Lagoon.

Look at the map to see a walkway fully around the lagoon. It is between the edge of the water and the national pavilions. Visible on satellite, but not by guests, there is also a second service road that also rings that lagoon. It is behind the pavilions used by staff at Epcot.

This was an intentional design feature to eliminate some of the operational problems found in places like Disneyland. At Disneyland, supplies to some areas must be brought in across public spaces. This mostly means supplies must be brought in at night.

At Epcot, delivery trucks have day-time access to most parts of the park. This is not just day-time access to the national pavilions but to the back sides of major pavilions at the north. In Eden, similar access is possible from below ground to any point.

Eden itself looks to have 2 sets of 3 parallel surface roads that each encircle the seas. Those are being reflected at Epcot with the public/guest and private/staff ring roads.

Fireworks

At the end of most days at most Disney parks there is a fire works show. On the Disneyland Qu Map this show goes with the Quad in the middle of the park. The best view of the Disneyland fireworks is from the central square. The points of light in fireworks shows are like the dots of a Quad Letter. The timing, at the end of the operating day, is like the Quad at the end of the alphabet.

Joshua is the king for the Quad and fireworks in the sky are a good marker for him. In Disneyland, Walt's statue sits in the middle of the park as its designer. Joshua sits on the Quad throne, and is the designer of all.

The quad as dots in the sky will be modeled expressly in one of the cases.

Illuminations: Reflections of Earth

Epcot, though, had a problem. Fireworks would conflict with the show already closing the day at Magic Kingdom. They needed a low elevation light show instead. From the opening days of Epcot, closing shows have been based on barges in the lagoon. They have mostly used lasers, video screens, fog, limited fireworks, and fountains.

Advances in technology have changed what was possible and so the shows were updated across the years. They build on light reflecting off the lagoon as most of the audience surround the show without obstruction.

Epcot's first year shows were only visible from parts of the lagoon, but by 1984 shows were being produced in the middle that could be seen from all sides. Variations on Illuminations began in 1988, with significant updates for the 25th anniversary in 1997 and then again in 1999 in celebration of the new millennium. Illuminations ran until September 30, 2019. It received awards for being the best show of its type, anywhere, every year, from 2005 to 2015.

I've linked above to a video of that award winning show. In the video linked above, the camera points north and the Magic Kingdom fireworks are visible in the far distance.

What matters most in this close-of-day show is the opening of the flower. This happens around the 13:00 minute mark in the video above. Scroll forward if you have limited time.

Never mind the details of the story constructed around the show by the Disney people. The imagery of the flower, with a torch within, is capturing an essential detail of the inside of Eden. Eden is a giant flower. The star in the middle is like a torch within.

The map of Eden unfolds like a flower. So the key object in the middle of the Epcot lagoon was a torch in a flower. This is the key to understanding Epcot.

2 Seas

The interior of Eden is seen in various passages in the text. The 'crystal sea' is referenced in Revelation 4:6. When I was working on the map there appears to be 2 different seas, one under the north pole, the other at the south pole.

The 'north sea' is the basis for the structure that goes up and around the artificial star in the middle. It is the pistil of a flower. So take the flower in the middle of the World Showcase Lagoon as a marker for the inside of Eden under the 'north' pole.

There is another sea at the south pole of the interior of Eden. That south sea is where visitors often start tours. The south sea is open (via water) to the outside of the planet. All the interior surface lands surround these 2 seas.

Go back to the link above to the map of Epcot. Zoom in enough to find the monorail station north of the Epcot ball. Zoom in enough to see the rails. Follow those monorail tracks to the other end.

They connect to a transit center on a circular double track monorail line. That other monorail line encircles another lagoon. At the far/north side of that lagoon is another monorail station and the entrance to Magic Kingdom, the big brother of Disneyland but in Florida.

Visitors to Magic Kingdom usually park near the transit center where the monorail lines converge. They can either ride the monorail around or ride a ferry across what is called the Seven Seas Lagoon to get to the Magic Kingdom entrance gates.

That lagoon was also excavated to raise the ground above the water table to allow the building of that park. There is a bigger system of lakes up there too. Use the map to explore.

That Seven Seas Lagoon is like the southern sea of Eden. It is the 2nd sea that goes with the sea at Epcot. So ALL the other parks in Disney's Florida property are in some sense a prophetic, on the ground, kid's map of the interior surfaces of Eden.

This is the interpretive idea for this Ba node on the Qu Map of the USA. The takeaway lesson is simple: The biggest tent that can be constructed is an artificial moon.

Footnote

In this blog I explore the national Qu Map of the USA. I am explaining long standing riddles that people have asked me about Disneyland and Disney World. I could not answer those questions until now. I am not trying to endorse Disney as a company. I don't recommend their products nor their parks.

Disney has seriously lost its way, especially since the purchase of Fox. Debt service for that mistake may yet bankrupt the company. They also listen to woke activist employees rather than their customers who are defined by parents trying to safely raise their kids.

Most of their product has a shelf life, ie copyright, of around 90 years. So the damage is done, and their brand will be unsafe for kids for the rest of this century. This is a very far cry from the vision given to them by their prophetic founder. Even the leadership of Disney in the late 1970s knew better.

Current Disney leadership are like those who build and decorate tombs for their prophets. See Matt. 23:29-31. Woe to them.

More Later,

Phil