In the 1930s, rabbit hole gained the figurative sense of a passage leading to a surreal or nonsensical place. While the OED’s “official” definition of white rabbit is a person or thing that hurries from place to place, it might also refer to something that leads one on (mis)adventures. In the film, the white rabbit appears in the form of a tattoo on the shoulder of a woman, who Neo follows to a club where he meets Trinity. Neo’s computer advises him to “follow the white rabbit,” a reference to the tardy rabbit which leads Lewis Carroll’s Alice down the rabbit hole and to her adventures in Wonderland. Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity might be considered embodiments of those three persons, with Morpheus as the Father (“Morpheus, you were more than a leader,” Tank says, “you were a father”), Neo as the Son or Christ-like figure (“You are my Savior, man!” Choi tells him, “my own personal Jesus Christ!”), and Trinity as the Holy Spirit who helps Neo come back from the dead. The word trinity is commonly thought of in the Christian theological sense of the existence of God in three persons. Metacortex could imply the idea of a higher intelligence, like that of robots and computer programs, or a higher consciousness, like that which Neo achieves in order to realize the true nature of the Matrix. Meta- is a combining element that means “changed” or “higher, beyond.” Cortex refers to the outer layer of an organ, in this case the brain. Metacortex is the software company that Neo works for. As for Anderson, it means “son of man,” perhaps to emphasize Neo's humanity. Thomas might also refer to doubting Thomas, the apostle who refused to believe in Jesus’s resurrection until he fingered the wounds himself. Thomas comes from an Aramaic word that means “twin.” Agent Smith tells Neo, “It seems that you have been living two lives,” one as program writer Thomas Anderson and the other as hacker Neo. The name Thomas Anderson also has significance. It's an anagram for "one," as in the One who will save humanity, and also means “new” as in the new, freshly-born person now aware of the Matrix. jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix." 2. The matrix as a VR-world might have first appeared in the 1984 novel by William Gibson, The Neuromancer: "He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high. The science fiction meaning, basically the equivalent of cyberspace, might have been coined in a 1976 episode of Doctor Who, “Deadly Assassin”: “How can you intercept thought patterns within the matrix itself?” The word matrix originated in the 15th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and referred to the womb (echoing the womb-like pods Neo and the others are kept in). ![]() What is the Matrix exactly? In the movie, it’s a virtual reality (VR) world into which people are plugged while their bodies are used for energy by a race of artificially intelligent beings. ![]() “The Matrix has you,” Neo’s computer tells him. ![]() Here we go down the rabbit hole to the stories behind 14 mind-twisting terms from The Matrix. But our favorite is still the original, when we’re first introduced to Neo, Morpheus, and the truth about spoons. The conclusion, The Matrix Revolutions, followed in November of the same year. Matrix Reloaded, the second film in The Matrix trilogy, kung-fu’d its way into theaters 13 years ago this month.
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