for a film that so meticulously recreates the time of the summer of love (may 1967 appears as the date on the calendar of the first rabbi's office wall) it may strike a viewer as odd that a serious man time-jumps ahead 3 years when larry gopnik is summoned by the columbia record club. during this conversation larry is informed that he owes them for his monthly main selections. this month's record being santana's abraxas and next month's selection vowed to be ccr's cosmo's factory; both albums were recorded and released in 1970.
etymologically the two records share reference to god and the heavens. the origins of "abraxas" come from a greek word generally describing gnostic cosmology. while it remains vague, carl jung offers the following from his gnostic text seven sermons to the dead: "that which is spoken by god-the-sun is life; that which is spoken by the devil is death; abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word, which is life and death at the same time. abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness in the same word and in the same act. wherefore is abraxas terrible."
according to jung abraxas is a force that combines all opposites into a single being; a god higher than that of god and the devil and at the same time encompassing each. theoretically this is not unlike the paradox of schrödinger's cat referenced by gopnik earlier in the film. gopnik uses a boxed cat that is at once dead and alive to illustrate the uncertainty principle. the conclusion being that we can't really know anything until the cat is out-of-the-bag or the answer reveals itself. abraxas, then, may come to stand for gopnik's inability to comprehend the unattainable, the unknown, and the unlistened to record.
on the otherhand, cosmo's factory is a little more straightforward. although the album itself refers to the rehearsal space in which the band recorded, the root "cosmos" refers to the sky, the heavens and the universe. in this sense abraxas and cosmos are used with artistic liscence to represent a call from the supernatural.
this thought is especially salient considering how gopnik's frustration with the "columbian" record club parallels his problems at large: larry didn't ask for or want santana abraxas and to recieve it he didn't do anything. much like all the present trials that have befallen larry, he automatically recieves abraxas without knowledge or reason for the cosmological order behind it. it just happens. there is no understandable explanation of god's will (or in this case the coens). and like the goy's teeth it is best to stop trying to decipher what these (anachronistic) puzzles mean and simply accept the mystery.
