The Hidden Spirituality of the Fifth Element

“Time not important… only life important.” yep, we’re going there, things are about to get a little bit philosophical now that we’re dealing with the Fifth Element…no..not the Alchemical Quintessence, but close! That crazy 1990s Sci-Fi about a killer planet, the power of love… and… You know, Bruce Willis’s Wacky Taxi Adventures… and all that…

So, major spoiler alert… The fifth element is Love. Well, kind of…it’s this woman called Leeloominaï Lekatariba Lamina-Tchaï Ekbat De Sebat… For short, Leeloo is the fifth element, and in essence: a perfect, supreme being of sorts. In a way, she’s kind of like Avatar Aan, destined to unite with the other classical elements in an ancient Egyptian temple to act as a defense system against this super evil Dark Force called Mr. Shadow — which takes on the form of a cruel planet, whose only goal is to destroy life in a cosmic cycle every 5000 years.

It’s a movie that’s had its fair share of criticism, especially in the gender department… Leeloo is the only real female character, with others appearing randomly throughout as passive objects, sex objects, or with most of their femininity stripped away like Major Iceborg. Aside from the fifth element herself, there’s a real lack of divine feminine in this story, but then again, her nature itself does embody many characteristics of the divine feminine: powerful, unique, and beyond the understanding of nearly everyone that she meets.

Regarding the plot, we have kind of a Raava vs. Vaatu thing happening like from Legend of Korra… and it’s hard not to draw lines to Avatar here considering the whole elemental theme huh? In the intro, we see an archaeologist deciphering ancient words regarding the conjunction of celestial bodies, something we should all do more of you know? Which, by the way, if you haven’t picked up your edition of the 2021 Almanac of the New Age, I might highly recommend it, because it helps you do just that without being randomly surprised by a giant robot-alien! Before they show up though, the archaeologist has to keep yelling to Aziz to wake up, as the kid keeps nodding off… I wonder if this is subtly depicting how humanity keeps falling asleep and thus the light that illuminates sacred knowledge is not currently stable. Yet when the advanced beings come to show the way, the light is blinding… Powerful and concrete.

There’s also a sense here that humans are the custodians of Earth, so we have to protect it from darkness and destruction ourselves, and while these higher beings help when the time is right, they cannot do it for us. While Love is shown as this mythical force that these advanced beings can use to defeat the darkness, it could also be said that Love is neutral energy between Light and Dark, one that is capable of harmonizing both sides, ultimately resetting the cycle, something that is echoed in Zorg’s speech later on.

All this knowledge is of course passed down through a secret brotherhood of priests, acting as keepers through the generations, of which there are many stories of secret societies doing the same in our history, and amazingly in the future where the main story takes place, Priest Cornelius is also an “Expert of Astrophenomenon”. He’s not just an expert on the metaphysical, but also seemingly the scientific study of space, and there’s certainly a sense that he’s got that whole balance thing down to a tee, working to better his understanding of both science and spirit by combining the two fields.

So when the military fires a bunch of missiles at Mr. Shadow, it’s interesting to see how they treat Cornelius, who tries to explain to them what Mr. Shadow is, to which he is mostly ignored, and they continue trying to brute force the problem. Yet Evil begets more Evil — as Cornelius explains, subtly referencing that the military’s weapons, or at least their intentions. Mr. Shadow — symbolic of “our” shadow selves, demonstrates that it will grow in power if you try to destroy it with the same mindset that created it. The only way to truly harmonize the darkness is through love.

Even more impressive is this disconnect between the President of Earth and Earth itself. While, of course, they are trying to protect the earth and all of its life, when we see the world, we have to ask… are those living? Police and robots so heavily control everything, it’s smoggy, you see some crazy representations of people like the guy who tries to rob Korben in his apartment, and I’m not sure I saw a single tree…

Now, Major Dallas, to that end, of course, represents the divine masculine, also fulfilling the warrior archetype. While, of course, he checks all the classic hero tropes of the ex-lone warrior destined to save the world and fall in love with a perfect supreme sacred woman, the way it plays out DOES provides us with a bit of wisdom for ourselves concerning synchronicity. He describes that what he wants is to meet that perfect woman, and she falls from the sky into his cab. Perhaps this is a nod to manifestation in some way, as it’s their love story that’s the key to resolving the movie’s conflict. It’s also a reminder for us that when we stumble into synchronicity, we have to be willing to take that leap of faith and follow where it leads us. For Korben, he has an opportunity to give LeeLoo up to the coppers but ends up putting his whole life at risk for her instead, but it’s THIS path that leads to the world being saved. Korben has to ask himself what’s important, following his heart and helping someone in need or earning more points on his taxi license…

Now, Leeloo on the other hand, through her character explores the nature of spirituality, DNA, and the physical capabilities of our souls within a body. A big topic in spirituality today is the science of ascension — we made a whole workshop on that which you can watch for free if you like — and what enlightenment might look like or do to our physical bodies. Leeloo’s DNA is perfect.. But it isn’t inhuman. There’s nothing really out of the ordinary about her DNA, she has the same genetic composition as us, just more of it, more tightly packed, allowing for greater inherent genetic knowledge and potential. Perhaps there’s a message here that the human genome is already whole, we just need to utilize its latent capabilities to find inner harmony, leading to a leveling up of what we are truly capable of.

So if Korben was like Link and LeeLoo was Princess Zelda, Zorg would be Ganondorf, completing the trinity. Zorg actually drops some pretty interesting wisdom in his discussion with Cornelius. Despite his “evil” role, his whole name is Jean Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, being named after the prophet and saint in many religions, and Emanuel meaning ”God is with us” in Hebrew. Zorg explains that life itself results from chaos and disorder at times. He believes that by creating a little destruction, he is encouraging life to renew itself, so the Priest and he are really in the same business… while it might just sound like he’s been brainwashed by the Shadow, when we look deeper, we do find some hidden spirituality!

His ideology is in alignment with the wisdom of the importance and honorable role of darkness in our reality. Much like the tower or death card in the major arcana or the shells of the Qliphoth in the Kabbalah, agents of darkness often come to give structure, boundaries, and direction for light to move through, as well as clearing stagnant energy to make way for new and evolved paradigms. Much like the cycles and sine waves that move through nature, energy flows through peaks and valleys that balance each other out.

Zorg knows he is a monster and is proud of it. He’s a businessman at heart, powerful from the money of capitalism, and a reflection of society’s state of awareness and evolution. As we mentioned, this future society is portrayed as consumerist and still dwelling on issues of pollution and crime, even in spite of great new technologies. Perhaps that’s why the Darkness had to come, to help propel the evolution of consciousness forward and bring about divine love. However, while the love between Korben and Leeloo is highly symbolic, it doesn’t seem to affect basically anyone else, which might call us to ask ourselves… would it have been better for humanity and its pollution to be destroyed? This — at the very least — seems to be the underlying thinking behind Zorgs criminal activity. Ultimately, in the face of darkness, humans must come together to accomplish things and stop evil, something we wouldn’t do otherwise… This is what makes us evolve as a species.

Zorg perfectly encapsulates his philosophy in his quote about glass, saying “this glass is serene and boring, but when destroyed, a lovely ballet ensues full of form and color”. He then knocks it off the table and a bunch of little vacuum cleaner droids come and clean it up. Describing that the “People who created them, technicians, engineers, now have money to feed their children. They are part of the chain of life”.

Interestingly though, Zorg is only a monster because life experiences took him there, but he started like any of us. There is a nice lesson from Cornelius about how fickle life is: all of Zorg’s power counts for absolutely nothing when his entire empire comes crashing down because of one little cherry. Cornelius saves Zorg’s life regardless, showing us the virtue of the angels, even towards the demons.

When the team finally makes it to the alien space opera, we get to meet Ruby Rhod and Plavalaguna. Ruby is one of the most unique parts of this movie… Crazy sexual antics aside, he is unapologetically authentic to his true nature, bending gender standards and seemingly embodying masculine and feminine with grace and humor. Perhaps the epitome of the wacky human spirit. And then as for Plavalaguna, she has some very ascended master vibes. The Mondoshawans entrusted her with the safekeeping of the elemental stones, who actually carries them inside her body as a safeguard. From a Spiritual perspective, this seems to describe how we all embody the classical elements within us. She even senses Leeloo’s presence behind a wall down the hallway, implying she has some measure of clairvoyance. Interestingly, like the Mondoshawan from earlier, she doesn’t seem overly concerned with her own death, echoing the movie’s sentiment that time is not important, only life. Deeper though, it appears that she knew she was going to die all along, in order for the stones to get out of her…. We’re not even gonna ask how she got the stones inside her in the first place…that’d be one hard pill to swallow, let alone perform an entire opera with these giant rocks in your belly. Mad props to her.

Perhaps the reason superior beings don’t fear death as we do is that they know the bigger picture, they know these lives are transitory, so they don’t mind dying for a cause, as they understand the purpose of this life in the bigger scheme of things. Knowing that the flux and flow between life and death is transient, they’ll be back in the right place and the right time as life requires it. In the same way, in traditional tarot the horse Death is riding, is stepping over a prone king, which symbolizes that not even royalty can stop change. Plava understands her role and accepts her death, after imparting wisdom to Dallas that Leeloo is still fragile and somewhat human, despite her seeming physical evolution.

This idea of Leeloo still being human, however, forms a key part of the ending, as up until this point she has been learning all of human history via an alphabetical database… When she learns of war, she loses hope in humanity after seeing the darker sides of our past. Certainly, we can’t blame her, humans are the only species to cut down a forest to make room for a billboard that says “stop deforestation”, I’d be pretty shocked about our history too. However, Korben’s love shows her that love is an undefinable thing, it’s not a stone like the other elements, but a feeling between people that permeates everything and is worth fighting and caring for.

It’s pretty funny that when it comes down to it, none of the characters actually know how to activate the super-love bomb. Leeloo doesn’t know what will happen, but she continues to follow her divine calling to be on that platform without second-guessing herself, even if she didn’t know at the end how to activate the final “weapon”..she follows her own inner voice and calling and is guided into defeating the darkness, speaking to the importance of following our intuition and own inner guide.

Ultimately love is shown to be something with no boundaries, no clear explanations, but still exists through us, changing our lives in powerful ways. And through thousands of years, it will stay as the most important thing worthy to fight for. It’s no accident that in a time of such modernized technologies and possibilities humanity once again has to turn to nature for help in the form of the elements. It reminds people that technology cannot always provide protection, it is nature that always has been the source of power, as it exists forever. And only things that are eternal, like nature and love, are of true significance. Today, it seems people either love or hate this movie, but whatever way the coin falls, it is undoubtedly a fun experience, and packed to the brim with spiritual wisdom!

So until next time, be mindful of what you do with the gift of life, cause we never know when a sentient evil planet might try and eat us. Toodles!

This video was created by Team Spirit Connect with the team at https://spiritsciencecentral.com/about