Masterpieces of Deviant Imagery 1: Sean Connery In Zardoz.

John Boorman's Zardoz is an incomparable, alchemical masterpiece of Seventies cinema. A few more years of economic and environmental upheaval, and this species of nappy-clad barbarian could become all too real.

The Ancient Kind Conclusion: The Theme Park That Slaughtered its Patrons.

The Kind appeared in our history once again, in the fertile crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates, at the very birth of our civilisation. There, they visited the dreams of the men of Ubaid, Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon, and fashioned an identity for themselves as the Anunnaki. Belief in this race of three hundred earth and underworld dwelling deities grew so prevalent and dogmatic that they became flesh and blood giants, and the Ancient Kind lived for a time on earth in towering temples and ziggurats constructed by their human slaves. The Sumerians eventually ousted the Ancient Kind, not with thermonuclear weapons this time, but through the less environmentally destructive expedient of agnosticism, satire and the mock-heroic mode. ( The Olympian deities, similarly, were vanquished from the earth by means of such technologies. All expressions of sarcastic humour, free-thought, and scepticism are repugnant to the Kind, whose powers are largely dependant on the cultivation of rigid certainty systems and controlled dogmas.)

It was during this period that the Ancient Kind began a process of inter-breeding between their Anunnaki hosts and human females. (This programme has continued, via incubai, succubi, the Good People of fairy lore, the Old Hag and other entities common to the experience of sleep paralysis, right down to the Greys of modern times.) The Annunki programme, by far the most successful of these endeavors, produced a race of hybrids who have maintained a hidden and influential presence on this planet ever since. The offspring of the Ancient Kind possess a flesh and blood physiology essentially similar to our own, except that it is endlessly pliable. Though able to assume virtually any anatomical form, this hidden race tends to divide its time between the human appearance, and that of a reptilian humanoid, which they have adopted as their true identity. The reptilians, many of whom have assumed positions of power in the industrial, political, and entertainment complex, are the overlords of a variety of evil, subterrain cults which have have sprang up around the Ancient Kind. Some avow that the Reptilians have infiltrated the upper echelons of virtually every significant secretive organisation that has ever existed, including the Orphic mystery schools, the Knights Templar, Bavarian Illuminati, Council on Foreign Relations, Church of Scientology, and indeed a further selection of organisations whose activity is so elusive and shadowy that even the most obsessive scholars of invisible cabals have no inkling of their existence. (There are organisations which are so secretive that even their own rulers are not informed of the existence of the group, and given no indication of their participation within it. Instead, these randomly chosen individuals issue their decrees unconsciously, by virtue of what color shirt was worn on a particular day, what book was browsed in a bookstore on a certain afternoon, and so on. It has been theorized that the true secret rulers of this world are ourselves, with no knowledge whatever of the extreme gravity of our slightest decisions.)

These, then, are all the essential particulars of the invasion of the human subconscious, and occasionally our earth itself, by a parasitic, highly virulent interdimensional species. The Archetypes the Kind have utilised have constantly evolved in tandem with the technological media by which these archetypes are dispersed. All channels of communication have been infiltrated and appropriated by the invasion of the image; no human activity superseding that of sensation and rudimentary thought is innocent. The Kind whispered to our ancestors in the caves, and lead them to abstract ceaselessly mutable vagaries of vision into static images crudely daubed in ochre on the walls. (Later the Kind whispered to Plato in dreams, convincing him utterly of the counter-intuitive fallacy that those drawings possessed a greater degree of reality than the mutable vagaries of energy that they sought to emulate.) When men spoke, the Kind transmuted those sounds into symbols, first of a hieroglyphic nature, and latterly the pure, compressed abstractions of the alphabet. All this facilitated their ultimate design: the unstoppable viral transmission of control images. The association of the Hebrew god with the word or logos is a latent admission of intent; the naming power granted to Adam is a ruse. The Ancient Kind are the timeless, tireless agents of division and entropy; their enemies are scattered mystics and visionaries who have transcended all invented images of the world, and apprehended its reality as a self-creating and indivisible entity. The foot-soldiers in this war are non-believers, satirists, paranoiacs, contrarians, anti-authoritarians, and all who prod restlessly at the Leviathanic carcass of certainty, wherever it should lay its rotting folds.

Imagine for a moment that that Door, which separates us from the Ancient Kind, were opened wide........creatures of errant belief of every age and culture run wild.......in the forests, fauns and satyrs frolic with Sasquatch, happily barbecuing the innards of campers, roasting luckless back to nature yuppies on spits.........in the cities, fascist cyborg policemen, mutant alligators, bouffant disco savants who emerged from the words of songs and Saturday night reveries, all spring through the Door and gorge themselves on commuters, foodies, and the fashionably androgynous............in the skies, the sun is blotted out by wheeling droves of Olympian gods, Japanese dragons, gleaming UFOs, and all the comets and meteors promised us in a thousand disaster films.........the human race is surely doomed, its only hope lies in its technology........then, in a shattering twist worthy of second-tier Stephen King, the Coming of the Ancient Kind causes an Electro-Magnetic Shockwave, or Something, which instantly causes all household appliances, cars, computers, Luxury Items, and even certain varieties of fashionable attire, to come alive, and subject their former human masters to an orgy of violence...........cars turn major motor-ways and city streets into insane, fatalistic games of dodge-em', with stricken passengers subjected to hideous music from their car radios and i-pods as their cars collide in Jackson Pollack bursts of colour and viscera.......microwave ovens prowl crablike around suburban homes, capturing beloved pets and frying them before their horrified owners.......

in time, all human life is extinguished.
while the stars blink out
and the vast interstellar void
returns to its howling crucible
of primordial chaos
the earth resembles an arid theme park
whose many attractions and simulations have
slaughtered all the patrons,
and continue to wheel about
with all the fervid semblance
of vitality which we gave
them
while the stars blink out

Anatomical Differences Between Goblin and Man Leave No Room for Confusion.

The Ancient Kind Part 2: The Invasion of the Image.

We are obliged, therefore, at the start, both to establish the existence of this other Kind and to examine its nature and the mode of its Being.
Plotinus, Enneads.

The Ancient Kind are composed of the elemental stuff of universes, frozen in a Protean, larval condition. Their mode of Being lies so far beyond our conceptual frameworks, that it is difficult to adequately convey a sense of Them. They possess an advanced intelligence, but not what we would regard as a personality. Their Mind is an insectile hive consciousness which can create endless miniature copies of itself. The closest human approximations we might apply as to the character of the Ancient Kind would lie in the unrestrained appetites of infants, or the blank cruelty and irrationalism of the sociopath and the schizophrenic. Their nature is infinite morphology and flux. The Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, who seems to have intuited the existence and nature of the Ancient Kind, provides us with a good description in his early treatise "On the Two Kinds of Matter": "The Matter of this realm is all things in turn, a new entity in every separate case, so that nothing is permanent and one thing ceaselessly pushes another out of being."

It is not possible in this condition for the Ancient Kind to take up permanent habitation in our universe, and hence their visits are sporadic and very brief in duration. However, the Kind have evolved a complex colonisation strategy, involving the creation of host-bodies in our reality. As we have already argued, that reality is constructed via the medium of belief; hence, the Ancient Kind attempt to gain a foothold in our reality by creating and manipulating our belief systems. The host-bodies which the Kind have created for themselves are that common store of iconographic, emotionally resonant images which Jung has called the Archetypes; the ultimate purpose of the Games the Kind have played with us throughout history is to make us believe in the material existence of those Archetypes.

The Kind construct the Archetypes out of material culled from our dreams. In dreams, consciousness relinquishes its moorings in the illusionary temporal/spatial matrix of sense experience, and fully realizes its capacity as the creator of that matrix. Hence dreams, and the ingestion of certain potent psychoactive botanicals, represent a quantum communication channel between different dimensions. It is via this channel that the Ancient Kind ceaselessly commune with us, and create their iconic hosts. An Archetype is a particular kind of idea, and requires some elucidation. First of all, they are something like an unwilled act of artistic creation. They absorb a vast amount of communal experience, of a culture's subconscious fears and longings, and refine these down to a figure, to an extraordinarily virulent image. It is important to note that Archetypes do not require any kind of external transmission. They become part of that store of faculties and incipient mental powers which is transmitted from generation to generation; that is, they are recorded onto the genetic code itself. The second most noteworthy quality about Archetypes is their extraordinary power over the societies who have participated in their creation. People tend to react to Archetypes in either abject terror, or utter, unquestioning reverence. There is no individual person, however wise or beautiful, no merely rational idea however brilliantly extrapolated, no vista of nature which can subjugate the human imagination to the same degree as the Archetypes.





When the Ancient Kind make their occasional incursions into our reality, human beings have no perceptual models with which to process the information. Hence, people who encounter the Ancient Kind experience a profound ontological shock. Their brains lapse into a default setting, and process their experience of the Ancient Kind in whatever archetypal forms and patterns predominate in that particular era and culture. If the belief in a particular Archetype becomes widespread and prevalent enough, reality is fundamentally altered, and the Archetype becomes an actual physical body which the Kind can utilise as a host in order to exist permanently in our universe. This is their ultimate goal; hence all paranormal encounters throughout history, including those with pagan deities, ghosts, faeries, Christian icons, and, more recently, with visiting interstellar aliens, are all staged, theatrical set-pieces, designed to inculcate belief systems, and pre-emptively establish control mechanisms for the invading Kind.

In the enactment of this invasion, the Kind are subject to certain constraints. Their ability to manifest themselves in our dimension is always temporary, and can only occur in certain geographical locations. Those locations, for reasons far too obscure for merely human mentation to scry, have a kind of thin membrane separating them from other dimensions, and hence become hotspots for paranormal phenomenona. (I need hardly inform the seasoned scholar of the paranormal that Glastonbury and Avebury in Great Britain, the Nile Valley in Egypt, and the alien-haunted New Mexico desert of North America certainly rank among those eldritch locations.)

Yet, despite these constraints, the Ancient Kind have attained a temporary ascendancy over this earth on two occasions in its history. Many barely conceivable aeons past, the highly advanced civilisation of land-faring dolphins who constructed the fabled, sprawling metropolis of Atlantis fell to the Ancient Kind, who were then operating under the guise of a race of winged, air-borne shark deities which the Atlantean dolphins had worshipped in the infancy of their civilisation. The Atlanteans had attained a sufficient degree of technological ingenuity to produce thermonuclear weapons; these thoroughly ousted the Ancient Kind, with the rather less fortunate consequence of utterly annihilating their civilisation in the process. (I need not inform the marine biologist, or indeed any reader casually acquainted with the varieties of aquatic life, what became of the remaining Atlantean dolphins. Some avow that with the coming of 2012, our civilisation will be utterly destroyed, and those human beings that remain will scurry into the bowels of the earth, there to devolve into a race of blind, degenerated half-men, half-moles.)
Continued shortly.

The Ancient Kind.

(The following is a sketch of a mythos or cosmology modelled after HP Lovecraft and John Keel. This mythos is designed to form the background to an exciting series of novels or short stories which will almost certainly never materialize.)

The weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft and his many descendents share one common assumption: that this world is perpetually threatened by the intrusion of a race of unfathomably ancient and utterly malignant entities. Further to this, it is common in Lovecraft for these entities to communicate their presence to mankind via dreams, with the sensitive or artistic type being particularly susceptible to these nocturnal transmissions from the Elder Gods. Lovecraft himself regarded his tales as no more than an extravagant entertainment, and supposed his creations to possess no relationship to reality whatsoever. The truth, however, was right before his eyes: he was himself one of those sensitive, artistic types whose subconscious mind had received vague outlines, intimations, of the true order of things, and the sickening reality which underpins our limited vantage point. The massive influence and popularity of Lovecraft, which today utterly eclipses that of Poe, is a testament to the essential reality underlying his dark fables of cosmic horror. The human race is perpetually threatened by an elder sentience which announces itself in our dreams, and constantly seeks to establish a foothold in our reality. Of this elder sentience, we might say that the moralist or theologian has labelled it evil, and the scientist entropy; the initiated, however, know this threat as the Ancient Kind, for it has haunted this world since its inception, and is older by far than the universe itself.
In order to understand the Ancient Kind, we must first briefly discuss the history and constitution of the universe. Throughout history, the most common assumption with regard to the constitution of the universe has been that it is composed of solid bodies and objects, which are in turn composed of more minute solid bodies, or basic, primary constituents of matter. Against this, there is the perspective, evident in certain schools of Platonism and eastern philosophy, and expressed most notoriously in the west by Bishop Berkley, which suggests that the constitution of the universe is more akin to the incorporeal phantasmagoria of consciousness: that the universe is a thought that thinks itself, and the qualities of corporality and solidity are merely illusionary by-products of the human perceptual apparatus.
It should be noted that the once exotic heresy of idealism is slowly coming to represent the view of the mainstream scientific community. The quantum physicist observes a world not of things smoothly demarcated in terms of their relative position and velocity, but rather a protean sea of ghostly entities in a maddening gyre of probability. In the words of the great Buckminster Fuller, “Everything you learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There is not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no substances. There are no straight lines.”
Attend to the epochal sentiment of Sir John Jeans: “The stream of human knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of this realm.”
In reality, the universe in its infancy was very much akin to the subatomic world which the quantum physicist explores. It was a chaotic entity of infinite potentiality and disorder; an endlessly pliable material, wholly undifferentiated, formless, and disorganised. This the ancients understood as primal chaos, and they, aided by the nefarious telepathy of the Ancient Kind, invented a plethora of deities to bring this morass to order. In reality, the organising principle of the universe has always been via the intellection and self-awareness of a perceiving agent. The universe organises itself by creating separate, self-conscious entities whose specific perceptual tools serve to freeze a set of particular potential forms out of the infinite probabilities inherent, although unfixed, in the primary matter of the universe. The process by which the universe develops these perceiving and organising organs is that which our science understands crudely as evolution.
In this sense, we can think of our universe as a photograph taken of a crowded scene. The frozen, captured instant remains the totality of our perspective, while in reality, the scene changes from the very instant the image has been captured. The important thing to note is that our brains, in a very vital sense, create reality, by imposing a specific perspective on the unlimited, undifferentiated material of the universe. The process by which brains create reality is twofold. Firstly, brains structure reality loosely by means of unconscious telepathic transmission of impressions. Secondly, they do so in an external, communal sense, via verbal communication, exchange of ideas, and the gradual development of ideological consensus.
Reality, or the solid, material matrix in which minds interact, is created by a community of believers. But it is always the belief itself which engenders the quantity believed in. It is the theory which retrogressively alters the matrix, and engenders its own confirmatory evidence. If you go looking for the confirmation of a deeply held personal belief, be it the theory of evolution, the existence of an all-powerful Illuminati cabal, or the benevolence of the Holy Spirit, you will always find the evidence the belief requires. This is why there is no consensus among human beings, and the field of belief systems remains so wide. The intuition of magicians is correct: the material of reality is fluid, and responsive to varying degrees to beliefs which are imposed upon it by the will. We have a solid, communal reality by virtue of the fact that the majority of brains share a specific worldview; but that reality is subject to fluctuations and anomalies because that consensus is not absolute, and other beliefs briefly manifest themselves within the matrix.
The purpose, or natural tendency, of the universe in organising itself in this fashion is to reach ever higher degrees of complexity, organisation, and self-awareness. It is thus a mammoth, epochal act of creation, whose natural consummation is the realization of itself as an act of creation, with itself as the creator. At this point, it will most likely commence in the creation of other universes. There is a multiplicity of differing universes. Some have acquired the principle of organisation by virtue of another universe, having reached both the highest stage of its development and the end of its natural life cycle, seeding an infantile universe with scattered fragments of itself. The fragments will once again organise themselves, guided by a faint memory of their former state. Other universes have created their own infantile and developmental stages, by means of a reverse causality, and exist in an infinite cycle of creation and destruction similar to that intuited by Hindu cosmologists.

Certain universes, however, do not follow this path of organisation and development. The Ancient Kind hail from what might be labelled a degenerate universe: a cosmos which has remained in an infantile, unregenerate state, and seeks to spread itself like a virus through the developing universes. Their purpose is to divide, subjugate, and control the individual cells of universes, and ultimately create copies of themselves.

Continued shortly.