2012 diaries

Fredrik Söderberg.

2012-01-28T16:13:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of the occulture-themed artwork of Fredrik Söderberg:

The Trip (1967.)

2012-01-28T15:48:00.000-08:00

Written by Jack Nicholson and directed by the indefatigable Roger Corman, The Trip is a severely entertaining and groovy counter-culture exploitation flick, and can be seen in its entirety here:

The Illuminatus! Trilogy 37 Years On, or How We Learned to Start Worrying, and Love the Illuminati. ( Part 1)

2012-01-26T18:21:00.000-08:00

I read Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show in my teens, and didn’t much care for it even then. It has, however, one great chapter early on. In 1969, an egocentric loser called Randolph Jaffe finds himself sorting mail in the Dead Letter Room of the Omaha Central Post Office. Initially, Jaffe hates the job, but gradually he begins to become fascinated, even obsessed, by the strange world that is tangentially revealed through the lost missives of America’s vast underbelly. In time, a strange pattern starts to emerge, and Jaffe sees fleeting glimpses here and there of a mysterious spiritual underworld called the Art. Like Oedipa Mass in The Crying of Lot 49, Jaffe is initiated into a great conspiracy whose symbology is hidden everywhere in plain sight.

In the more or less real world of 1969, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson were executive editors at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, where they had a Dead Letter Office experience of their own. In reading correspondence from Playboy readers relating to the emotive issue of civil liberties, the pair were exposed to a myriad of paranoid rants and convoluted conspiracy theories. As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his now legendary 1964 study The Paranoid Style in American Politics, a kind of apocalyptic rhetoric of paranoia and conspiracism had been a pervasive part of American political discourse since the country’s inception:

In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

Historically, Hofstadter argues that a variety of groups have been subject to this kind of populist paranoid fervour, with Jews and the various secret societies and fraternal orders taking by far the lion’s share. Hofstadter acknowledges that these anxieties are not in every instance completely unjustified; however, the language and mentality of the paranoid style is one that is always exaggerated to a peculiarly apocalyptic pitch:

Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was “not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that was ever imposed on man…..It may truly be said to be HELL’S MASTER PIECE.”

In expounding the history of conspiratorial panics in America, Hofstadter makes reference to a group that could scarcely have been particularly familiar to the average citizen in 1964: the Bavarian Illuminati of Adam Weishaupt. The Illuminati were, as far as any perusal of verifiable history can ascertain, a short-lived, not very effective, and perhaps not even particularly interesting group of Enlightenment free-thinkers formed in 1776 and modelled on the organisational structure of the Freemasons. It is one of the peculiar quirks of cultural history that the popular imagination would ultimately come to adopt this minor group of rationalist utopians as the universal mascot of nebulous, all-pervasive and all-controlling evil. Contributing somewhat to the irony of all this is the fact that the crucial catalysts to the emergence of the Illuminati into pop culture infamy were a pair of hippies goofing off on Hugh Hefner’s payroll in the late sixties. Conspiratorial panic-mongering, as Hofstadter suggests, was a pervasive element of American political discourse; but in 1969, when Shea and Wilson began to discover the paranoid marginalia of American society, conspiracy theory as we understand it today was completely absent from mainstream discourse and popular culture. The legitimate and significant role played by esoteric and fraternal societies such as the Freemasons in American history and politics was a fact little noted or discussed by the culture at large. Nobody, with the exception of right-wing cranks, was particularly aware or concerned by the existence of groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations or the Bilderburg Group. The only significant would-be world-dominating secret society in the popular culture of the day was James Bond’s camp, feline-fondling antagonists SPECTRE, who, interestingly, in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had graduated to using Manchurian Candidate-style mind control (on an international bevy of beautiful women, naturally.)

Pope RAW.

Was Ernest Stavo Blofeld one of the Tramps Arrested in a Boxcar near the Grassy Knoll?

Through their discovery of America’s underground folk-lore of conspiracy theory, Shea and Wilson discovered a nexus of hidden facts and feverish imagination, a gonzo re-writing of history that revelled in the pot-head’s love of lateral connections, coincidences, and synchronicities. They came to the prescient realization that somewhere in all these illusionary emergent patterns was a hell of a yarn. Or two. Or 23. Hence, they began work on the Illumintus! Trilogy, a fictional thriller whose simple initial premise was that all the craziest and most paranoid conspiracy theories were, in fact, true. They sought to compose a master-narrative that would weave together all existing crazy conspiracy theories, and raise the stakes by introducing some even more unlikely and out there additions of their own invention. They introduced elements of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos into the conspiratorial stew, little realizing that Kenneth Grant, and after him various Chaos Magicians, would one day avow that the trans-dimensional cosmic depravities of the Providence bard were no mere fictions.

But if the Illuminatus! Trilogy began life as a Byzantine shaggy dog story, it became something else in the telling. The trilogy was written (barring some late revisions) between ’69 and ’71, and although it didn’t see publication until 1975, it would be an understatement to say that Illuminatus was a novel of the 60s. It is arguably the novel of the 60s, a book that is as encyclopaedic in its embrace of the counter-culture as it is of way-ward conspiracy theories:

And Joe Malik – ex-Trotskyist, ex-engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic –heard himself saying, ‘Yes.’ And heard a louder voice, unspeaking, uttering a more profound ‘yes’ deep inside himself. He was game – for astrology, for I Ching, for LSD, for demons, for whatever Simon had to offer as an alternative to the world of sane and rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting their course towards what could only be the annihilation of the planet.

Everything that was happening in that period – the sexual and neurochemical revolutions, the popular revival of occultism and the emergence of Anton Le Vey’s Nietzschean/Randian brand of Satanism, the conflicts between the pragmatic old guard of left-wing political activism and the Situationist surrealism, or ‘Groucho Marxism’, of the Yippies – the Illuminatus! Trilogy absorbed it all like water to a sponge, or perhaps more aptly, like bong-smoke into the lungs and synapses of a monumental pot-head. It is truly the Summa Theologica of the psychedelic era.

Continued shortly.

Mexican Pulp Art.

2012-01-16T21:12:00.001-08:00

An amazing selection from Monster Brains.

fnessnej - mann aus frau

2012-01-10T18:06:00.000-08:00

The Green Children of Woolpit.

2011-12-29T18:36:00.000-08:00

In the Chronicum Anglicanum of Ralph of Coggeshall and the Historia rerum Anglicarum of William of Newburgh, we find a record of a fascinating marvel which was said to have occurred in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, at some point in the twelfth century. Woolpit was named from the Old English wulf-pytt, which were deep trenches which had been excavated to trap wolves. It is said that one year during the harvest, two mysterious children emerged from one of these ditches. Their skin was light green in hue, and their clothes were also an unusual colour, fashioned from a material the local reapers didn’t recognise.

As the language the children spoke was also unfamiliar, they were brought to the home of a local landowner named Sir Richard de Calne. Here, the children remained distraught, and refused to eat any of the food that was presented to them for a few days. Finally, the villagers brought them fresh beans with the green stalks still attached, and the children were happy to eat these.

It seems that of the two, the girl, who was the eldest, was far better equipped to survive away from whatever home the children had wandered from. The boy, on the other hand, became depressed, wasted away, and died. The girl prospered. She was baptised, adopted the name ‘Agnes’, gradually lost her anomalous green skin tone, and eventually married. She had adapted to the ways of the human world, though perhaps not fully, as Ralph of Coggeshall noted that she was “rather loose and wanton in her conduct.”

When later queried regarding how she and the boy had arrived in Woolpit, she told the following story. She and the boy (who was her brother) came from a place of perpetual twilight which she called the “Land of Saint Martin.” There everybody was green like the children had been. Like the Underworld of antique Greek myth, the Land of Saint Martin was bordered by an expansive river, across whose banks could be seen a mysterious luminous country. One day, ‘Agnes’ and her brother were tending their father’s flock in the fields. The children followed the animals into a cavern, where they heard the sound of bells chiming. Following the sound, the children went deeper and deeper into the cave, until they finally arrived at a bright exit, whereupon they stepped out into the blinding sunlight of Woolpit in the height of the harvest.

There has been little agreement as to whether the story is a pure folk tale, or a garbled account of some real historical event. There are indeed elements of the story that would suggest both. The idea of caves or caverns as points of entry into the Otherworld is an extremely common motif in folk-tales and the antique mythologies of various nations; similarly, the Children refusing to eat until they are presented with the green-stalked beans is strongly suggestive of the internal logic of correspondence common to many folk-tales. However, it is extremely rare for visitors from the Otherworld to actually stay in ours; the Green Children of Woolpit is perhaps the only ever instance of this. To those who would take the perilous but very pleasing expedient of taking the tale largely at face value, several exotic explanations present themselves. The Children may have been refugees from some subterranean country akin the imaginary cavern worlds which were popular in the scientific romances of the 18^th century, and are avowed a reality by some occultists to this day. To a modern reader, the Children might suggest stranded extra-terrestrials of some kind, and this interpretation of the tale goes back much further than you would imagine. In the Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, Robert Burton opined that the Children might have “fallen from Heaven”, an idea which found its way into Francis Goodwin’s fancy The Man in the Moone (1638), a work sometimes regarded as the very earliest example of science fiction.

Whatever its ultimate origin, the endlessly suggestive beauty, simplicity, and perfection of the tale cannot be denied. A village sign in Woolpit today depicts the children in silhouette; local folk singer and author Bob Roberts wrote in his 1978 A Slice of Suffolk: "I was told there are still people in Woolpit who are 'descended from the green children', but nobody would tell me who they were!" Perhaps the visitors from beyond the ditch are with us still.

Market Hermes: A Quotation Cut-Up.

2011-12-15T17:29:00.001-08:00

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

Salvador Dali.

The market-place of Pharai (in Achea) is an old-fashioned, big enclosure, with a stone statue of Hermes in the middle that has a beard: it stands on the mere earth, block-shaped, of no great size….They call it Market Hermes and it has a traditional oracle. In front of the statue is a stone headstone, with bronze lamps stuck onto it with lead. You come in the evening to consult the god, burn incense on the hearthstone, and fill up the lamps with oil; then you light them all and put a local coin on the alter to the right of the god; and then you whisper in the god’s ear whatever your question is. Then you stop up your ears and go out of the market-place, and when you get out, take your hands away from your ears and whatever phrase you hear next is the oracle.

Pausanias, Guide to Rome.

At close range, the UFO phenomenon acts as a reality transformer (or, in Bertrand Meheust’s words, a reality exchanger), triggering for the witness a series of blinking colored lights of extraordinary intensity, inducing a state of intense confusion for the subjects who are vulnerable to the insertion of new thoughts and new visual experiences.

Like the technology of the cinema, the UFO technology is a meta-system. It generates whatever phenomena are appropriate at our level, at a given epoch, in a given state of the “market”.

Jacques Vallee.

The only images capable of conveying a lofty idea are those which create in one’s consciousness a state of surprise and insecurity calculated to raise this consciousness to the level of the idea in question, where it can be grasped in all its freshness and strength. Magic rites and genuine poetry serve no other purpose.

Louis Pauwels, Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians.

The person who experiences the fantastic event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim an of illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination – and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality – but then his reality is controlled by laws unknown to us…..The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.

Todorov

Many are they who, looking at a painting or listening to a piece of music, have shared the sensations of “otherness” imparted to the work by artists who created it.

Unusual juxtapositions of colour, a mysterious massing of shades, strange perspectives such as those introduced by Chirico or Delvaux, have the power to plunge the mind into aeonic and nightmare abysses. The weird spectres of Max Ernst; Dalinian pavements haunted by the elongated shadows of dusk; Bertiaux’s fourth dimensional cubes and astral portraits of the “Deep Ones” from the gulfs of space, all are potent to release the mind from its mundane limitations, thus permitting the full flowering of the obsessive ideal. All the mantras of magick and the spells of sorcery are vibrated and cast with the intent of releasing consciousness from the thraldom of the physical body.

But there is another faculty of human consciousness, the intuitive or “inseeing” faculty; one might almost describe it as the fourth dimensional faculty. It is a faculty that appears sometimes in the artist, the poet, the occultist, and in a certain kind of scientist, and it functions also, though rarely, in almost everybody. It is epitomized on the Tree of Life by the third sphira, Binah, the Sphere of Understanding. Not the understanding of empirical things, but the insight into the hidden side of things made possible by a sudden total identity of the mind with its substratum, pure consciousness, wherein all ideas are stored and which under stands, or stands under, the mechanism of mentation.

Kenneth Grant.

We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: We cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions. We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us.

William Irwin Thompson.

The apparent incoherence of bees in flight, the dances executed by them, are, so it is thought, precise mathematical figures and constitute a language. I would like to write a novel wherein all the experiences of a life, the fleeting ones and the significant ones, chance ones and inevitable ones, would equally compose precise figures – would in fact disclose themselves for what they may well be: a subtle discourse addressed to the soul to help it accomplish itself: a discourse of which the soul comprehends, in its entire life, only a few disjointed phrases.

Louis Pauwels, Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians.

The literature of fantasy and the fantastic, especially in science fiction, is much in demand, but we still do not know its intimate relationship with the different occult traditions.

Mircea Eliade.

Whereas such marvels are vociferously denied (or simply ignored) in the halls of academic respectability, they are enthusiastically embraced in contemporary fiction, film, and fantasy. We are obviously fascinated by such things and will pay billions of dollars for their special display, and yet we will not talk about them, not at least in any serious and sustained way. Popular culture is our mysticism. The public realm is our esoteric realm.

Jeffrey J Kripal.

We are from Kansas. We are from ANYWHERE, but we’ll be in Cuba tomorrow.

Thinner and thinner hedges, in the garden of our destiny, separate us from a perfectly preserved Yesterday and a completely formed Tomorrow. Our life, as Alain remarked, “is on the brink of wide open spaces.”

Louis Pauwels, Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians.

Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands…..Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they merely want to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

Henri Bergson.