Sold On the Title.

I haven't watched this (yet), but I'm posting it based on the title alone:

Crystal Voyager (1973.)

Hauntology Rising Part 1: Ghost Box Music.

Established in 2004 by Julian House and Jim Jupp, Ghost Box Music is an independent record label with a uniquely cohesive vision and mission: to celebrate a glorious legacy of weird British culture from the 60's and 70's, and to create new musical forms, and a distinct cultural aesthetic, from the lingering ghosts of childhood memory. With a small roster of closely related artists, including the Advisory Circle, the Belbury Poly, and the Focus Group, the label specialises in atmospheric electronic music that is steeped in a half-remembered fog of surreal children's TV shows, cosmic horror and sci-fi paper-backs, library music, novelty synthesiser records, and stunningly off-kilter Public Information films. Particularly important to the label's aesthetic is the notion - arguably also the main conceit of The Twilight Zone - that the most mundane, ordinary, seemingly safe environment can suddenly intersect with strange other dimensions. Founder Jim Jupp cites British science fiction and catastrophe author John Wyndham:

“Part of a theme that’s ongoing in all the Belbury Poly records, and I think all of the Ghost Box records, is a tradition of British science fiction, where you’ve got on the one hand the setting of a very traditional background, with very ancient things, but you’ve got this weird, cosmic stuff happening [at the same time]. A lot of old British sci-fi books – John Wyndham, for instance – have these really mundane, quaint little village settings, but all of a sudden something really freaky and cosmic appears in the middle of it.”

The cosy and quotidian tinged with a strange and potentially threatening undertow - this incongruous but perennially satisfying mixture lies at the heart of the Ghost Box sensibility. In the logic of the world they have crafted from memory, quaint British villages are subject to abrupt Lovecraftian infestation; paternal safety warning are delivered with an edge of menace worthy of the Daleks; and children's afternoon adventure serials have weird psychedelic overtones. All of these elements were present and correct to some degree in seventies British culture; Ghost Box's music and design sensibility attempts to imbue these eerie cultural artefacts with all the numinous power they possessed for the children of that generation.

The ghost box itself was one of many DIY interfaces that have emerged between the worlds of technology and spiritualism. Invented by amateur radio enthusiast Frank Sumption, it was essentially a radio receiver/recording device which was designed to scan the static ether for voices from beyond the grave. (Popular legend has it that Thomas Eddison was secretly absorbed in experimental efforts to establish such a communication network with the afterlife.) With Ghost Box Music, the metaphor becomes explicitly cultural, recasting the television as the haunted medium, beaming otherworldly, often subversive transmissions into the cosy sanctuary of the family home. The idea maintains much of its paranormal overtones, however, and we are invited to envision nostalgia and cultural sampling as a form of occult channelling.

The culture we are exposed to as children exerts an extraordinary power over our imaginations; it leaves a heightened impression of something, which is not quite what it was, or is perhaps the essence of what it was in a way that becomes only partially retrievable through memory. Every childhood will then create a store of memories to haunt the adult world; a series of entities out of time which, like paranormal hauntings, operate under a potent but mysterious logic.

The seventies in Britain was a harvest time for such hauntings. Seventies culture in general exhibited a healthy appetite for weirdness, largely as a result of the many mental doors left ajar in the aftermath of the sixties. There was a massive popular resurgence of interest in the occult, so widespread that it prompted the greatest Time magazine cover of all time on June 19, 1972:

For perhaps the first time in its history, Fortean/unexplained phenomenon became a huge mass market preoccupation. One of the most characteristic cultural avatars of the seventies was the Ancient Astronaut, itself a retro-futuristic spectre emerging from the dimness of memory:

All of these things coincided with, and feed directly into, an extraordinary golden age of British science fiction and fantasy television and cinema. In this period - late 60's, 70's - Britain exhibited a preternatural genius for surreal, visionary genre pop culture that remains unequalled to this day. The real roots of this Renaissance go back to the fifties, and the BBC's Quatermass serials written by the legendary Nigel Kneale. Kneale really hit his prime in 1958 with the landmark third outing Quatermass and the Pit. While some of these cultural artefacts are retro-futuristic, others are examples of true futurism, of extraordinary leaps of prescience appearing in ghostly form before their time. Quatermass and the Pit falls in the latter category. All of the weird DNA of seventies culture, and beyond - Ancient Astronaut theory, Martian mysteries, neo-paganism, insectile aliens, military cover-ups - were present in Kneale's gripping drama, and his innate gifts for story telling and suspense made this invasion of the unconscious a unlikely success with the viewing public.

This Educational Series for Unusual Boys and Girls continues Here.

The Coming Race: A Secondary Excursion into the Cavern World.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was many things - poet, politician, novelist, dabbler in the occult, and man of fashion. (It was this latter predilection which engendered a bitter, albeit petty lifelong feud with Alfred Lord Tennyson, each accusing the other of the then unspeakable crime of effeminacy.) Bulwer-Lytton was somewhat of a literary giant in his day, but has suffered a kind of posthumous infamy for the opening salvo of Paul Clifford : "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness." Fools tend to scoff at this line nowadays, but it is merely proof of Bulwer-Lytton's uncanny genius for the commonplace. He is also the originator of "The Pen is Mightier than the Sword", "the Pursuit of the Almighty Dollar", and the "Great Unwashed." Those are pretty impressive fingerprints to leave on the lexicon, by any standard.

Bulwer-Lytton's chief literary legacy, however, lies in a strange, remarkable book he published in 1871 - The Coming Race, later known as Vril: The Power of the Coming Race - which is a seminal tome both in the esoteric realm of the Crackpot Unconscious, and in the cannon of science fiction itself. The Coming Race has a fairly skeletal plot - a young narrator is exploring a mine shaft one day, and accidentally falls much deeper underground, finding himself in a Cavern World inhabited by an ancient race of giant, angelic beings called the Vril-ya. The bulk of the novel is devoted to a detailed description of the Vril-ya's matriarchal social structure, their culture, beliefs, and so on. Some minimal romantic complications are established in lieu of plot - and eventually our intrepid narrator escapes back to the surface world, armed, rather unsurprisingly, with a Dire Warming for Mankind.

By utilising plot merely as an expedient frame to facilitate the creation of an imaginary society, The Coming Race's primary literary model is clearly the Utopia. But what distinguishes Bulwer-Lytton's novel from its Utopian predecessors is the sheer weirdness and exoticism of the imagined community - Sir Thomas More's Utopia, after all, was merely an undiscovered island populated by regular humans; the Vril-ya are a race of massively tall, winged beings who wield a mystical power over matter, and live underground. It is worth noting that the movement of the Utopian format into increasingly exotic environs is a crucial element in the development of science fiction and fantasy - it is where we get the impulse to create intricately detailed alternative worlds.

But where did the exoticism come from? The quick, glib, and largely accurate answer to that question is evolution. The Race was published in the same year that Darwin completed The Descent of Man. The emergence of evolutionary theory, coupled with the findings of Charles Lyell and a variety of other geologists, was throwing up a variety of ideas about man's place in nature which were themselves extraordinarily exotic and shocking. We process these kinds of cosmological shocks and upheavals best not in realistic modes of discourse, but rather in mythic, archetypal patterns, which have a more direct relationship to the unconscious. This is why, to my mind at any rate, sci-fi has always been a Janus-faced phenomenon, a restoration of very ancient mythic forms designed to mediate the shock of extraordinary novelty and change in the modern world.

Bulwer-Lytton captured this mixture of archaic wonder and modernity when he claimed that what he was attempting was "perhaps a romance, but such a romance as a Scientific amateur....might compose." The Coming Race grappled with a very specific, deeply unpalatable notion: "the Darwinian proposition that a coming race is destined to supplant our races." Herein lay the sting in the tale, and the source of the narrator's Dire Warning for Mankind which forms the novel's coda: "I arrived at the conviction that this people - though originally not only of our human race, but, as it seems clear to me from the roots of their language, descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilisations of the world; and having, according to their myths and histories, passed through phases of society familiar to ourselves, had yet now developed into a distinct species with which it was impossible that any community in the upper world could amalgamate: And what if they ever emerged from those nether recesses into the light of day, they would, according to their own traditional persuasions of their ultimate destiny, destroy and replace our existent varieties of man." (This passage, with its evocations of Aryan jingoism, "ultimate destiny", and genocide, is eerily prophetic of the dark dreams of racial destiny that "emerged from those nether recesses" of mind into Nazi Germany in the 20th century.)

The element that really captured both the public and esoteric imagination, however, was the mysterious power wielded by Bulwer-Lytton's Cavern-dwellers: Vril. Vril is a power over matter which is acquired via an intense training and concentration of the will; it can heal, renew, or destroy; in classic necromancer-style, it is directed through the Vril staff, which contains a series of mechanical keys and springs whereby the force of Vril can be calibrated for maximum effect. Vril was an ingenious creation which amalgamated age-old speculations about a primordial, unitary cosmic energy with contemporaneous scientific speculation:

"I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, and so on. These people consider that in Vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation."

In the spiritual traditions, Vril is analogous to the Vedantic Pranashakti and the Chinese Qi or Ki, both of which relate breath to a primordial energy source or life-force. In fringe science and conspiracy theory, it resembles the notion, frequently ascribed to the ever mythologised Nikolai Tesla, that zero point energy could be harnessed as as a source of unlimited free energy. In popular culture, Vril is the clear precursor to the Force in George Lucas' lamentably ubiquitous Star Wars franchise.

Once again, we witness the Bulmer-Lytton genius for the commonplace: Vril is a kind of master meme that simply refused to stay within the fictional confines of its original context. Above ground, Vril seeped surreptitiously into the mass psyche literally in a liquid form. In 1870, Napoleon III, having sensibly resolved that his troops couldn't "march on empty stomachs", ordered one million cans of beef from Britain to feed his troops. The responsibility for providing the beef fell to a Scotsman, John Lawson Johnson. Sadly, there wasn't enough beef in Britain to fill the gaping belly of the French infantry. Johnson improvised, producing a product with the unappetizing name of "Johnson's fluid beef". By 1888, Mr. Johnson's fluid beef was a popular item in shops, chemists, and public houses, sold under the new name of "Bovril", a combination of the Latin bos (bovine, cow or ox) and the Coming Race's Vril. Bovril is still commercially available today. My childhood memories of this reputed elixir are unambiguously negative.

Faddish marketing is one thing. There are, however, even today certain people who believe that The Coming Race is either partially or wholly based on truth. The formidable Madame Helena Blavatsky, ever the incorrigible magpie, eagerly incorporated Vril into her portmanteau cosmology in Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. As mentioned in the last post, the Theosophists had established a fascination with a certain strain of Tibetan legendry that told of subterranean worlds: Agartha, the city at the earth's core, its central district of Shamballa, and the Ascended Masters who dwelt therein. Much of this legendry has been embellished in tall explorers tales, such as The Smoky God (1908) by Willis George Emerson.

Interestingly, the 1923 book Beasts, Men, and Gods by Polish author, journalist, and globe-trotting adventurer Ferdinand Ossendowsky records an unusual event reported to have taken place in the Tibetan monastery of Narabanchi in 1890, 19 years after the publication of The Coming Race. The monastery was said to have been visited by the King of the World, a denizen of Agartha, who passed on a prophesy to the High Lama. The next century would witness a succession of increasing horrors, it said, until the year of 2029, when "the people of Agartha will leave their caverns and appear on the surface of the earth."

The theosophical Agartha and Bulwer-Lytton's seminal fiction would in time be woven by the Crackpot Unconscious into a sprawling narrative of Nazi occultism, underground bases in the Antarctic, and Vril-powered wonder weapons and UFOs. We will leave off for the moment, however, safe in the knowledge that these Garbo-like denizens of the Cavern World will not be troubling us for the immediate future.

Postscript. Let us return briefly to to the magnificent icy wastes of the Antarctic, that land of perilous adventure in which the varied strands of our strange tale all converge. The New York Times of September 11, 1916 contained a thrilling dispatch entitled SHACKLETON'S MEN KEPT HOPE OF RESCUE HIGH; MAROONED SCIENTISTS LIVING ON PENGUIN AND SEAWEED, WATCHED DAILY FOR RELIEF. Note the following extract: "For the first three weeks after Shackleton's departure, Wild's party suffered from frostbite and exposure. Weather conditions having forced them to abandon their icehole, they rigged up a shelter by turning their two remaining boats upside down. A blubber lamp supplied their only light, while an old oil can served the purpose of a cooking stove. They had no tea or coco, their only hot beverage being the bovril, the consumption of which it was necessary to economise as much as possible".

"The conditions prevented seals from landing. When one was caught every scrap was utilized. The weather was continuous storms and fogs. The daily menu consisted, for breakfast, of penguin fried in blubber with a drink of water; for luncheon, biscuits with raw blubber, and a dinner of penguin breast and Bovril."

This extraordinary narrative of privation, found here, goes on to say that these unique men were driven by a lack of tobacco to smoke "grass taken from the padding of their boats, in pipes carved from bird bones and wood."

Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults.

A Preliminary Expedition into the Cavern World.

Within the whole corpus of rejected knowledge, there are a handful of ideas that seem to possess a particular virulence. These ideas have exerted an irresistible power over the imagination of generations of fantasists, contrarians, and crackpots. They form a constellation of ideas, often interrelated, which we will label for convenience the Crackpot Unconscious. (Please bear in mind that I don't use this terminology in an entirely derogatory manner. We are referring to the skid row at the wrong side of the tracks of Mr. Jung's collective unconscious, a territory where the trained explorations of the shaman or occultist give way to the visionary dementia of the schizophrenic and the paranoid. It is a common stream, mined by artists, prophets, and conmen alike.)

One of the most resonant notions within the Crackpot Unconscious is that of a Hollow or partially hollowed-out Earth, wherein complex subterranean societies exist coeval with surface-dwelling man. The idea of an underworld, particularly envisioned as a hub of the afterlife, is a deeply ingrained mythic constant. Virtually all the ancient traditions possess some kind of multi-levelled underground complex, usually devoted to the punishment of mortal inequity, and peopled by a subspecies of specialist in the provision of grisly torture.

In Chinese folk mythology the underworld is called Diyu, and was said to possess ten courts and eighteen levels of punishment. No sadistic stone is left unturned: there is a Mountain of Knifes, cauldrons where sinners are fried and even steamed, a grinding machine where they are ground into a bloody pulp, eye-gouging, skinning, and the works.

Variations of the underworld and its tormenting spirits are found in every major tradition. The non-canonical Apocalypse of Paul describes the keepers of Tartarus as the tartaruchi, fell spirits armed with an iron of three hooks. (In the 1980's, horror author Clive Barker refitted the tartaruchi in the fashionable garb of the bondage subculture, giving birth to the VHS-era nightmare of the Cenobites.) In the grand world picture of Norse mythology, to which the fantasy genre owes so much of its substance, three of the nine worlds were located underground: Niflheimr, Nidavellir, and Svartalfheim. Here the underworld is not merely a place of torment, but rather a whole confusing ecology of dwarves and elves. In folk beliefs, derivatives and relatives of these creatures, in the form of trolls and faeries, would populate the interior of mountains and the caverns of the underground for long into the modern period.

Mythical constants never fully go away; they merely evolve and mutate over time. The Hollow Earth theory started in the realm of scientific speculation, initially proposed by Edmund Halley in 1692. Perhaps because it dovetailed to some degree with the mythical constant of the underworld, it would go on to explode into the deranged stratosphere of alternative belief systems, drawing into its dark bosom most, if not all, of the major players in the Crackpot Unconscious: Atlanteans, Antediluvian Civilisations, Aliens, and even Antarctic Nazis.

The Hollow Earth is one of those rare, lively subjects where a pseudoscience and a subgenre of adventure literature eagerly feed off one another. Adding to the innate sense of adventure surrounding cavern worlds and lost civilisations, it was widely believed that the Hollow Earth had an entrance at both of the Poles. Hence the magnificent isolation of the North Pole has been a locus for both the theory and the fiction. The adventurer and Arctic explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds gave many lectures on the Hollow Earth theory which apparently influenced Edgar Allen Poe's "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym." (In the May 1839 issue of New York's Monthly Knickerbocker Magazine, Reynolds published an article entitled "Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal." This piece dealt with a notorious "bull whale of prodigious size and strength...white as wool", who had survived over a hundred skirmishes and wreaked countless ships, before it was finally laid low in 1838. The influence of this particular piece of maritime legendry on American letters need hardly be elaborated here.)


The place of the Antarctic in weird fiction generally is worthy of a study in itself. It is of course the setting for Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and plays a crucial, baffling role in what is perhaps the strangest novel of all: MP Shiel's The Purple Cloud. (Frank Belknap Long was scarcely overstating the case when he called the Cloud "the most unutterably terrible book ever written.") For our current purposes, it is the Pole that begins to draw some of the wilder strands of the Crackpot Unconscious together. One of the many offshoots of Theosophical lore suggested that the Ascended Masters of the esoteric tradition inhabit a subterranean realm known as Agartha, which also had an entrance in Antarctica, as well as Tibet, Peru, and Mount Shasta in Washington. One of the many occult societies whose interest was piqued by such notions was the notorious Thule Society of Nazi Germany. This has lead to persistent, unconfirmed suggestions that Hitler himself funded a Polar expedition to discover such an entrance, and herein we find the origins of the contemporary myth of a Nazi secret base in the Antarctic.

This beloved chestnut of conspiranoid historians seems to hinge largely on a couple of peculiar statements which have been attributed to Admiral Karl Donitz, the commander of the German submarine fleet who was later surprisingly named by Hitler as his successor. It is alleged that in 1943, Donitz said "Germany’s submarine fleet is proud that it created an unassailable fortress for the Führer on the other end of the world", later alluding during the Nuremberg Trials to "an invisible fortification in the midst of the eternal ice." While the preposterous can certainly sometimes be true, it seems far more likely to assume that the Nazis have merely joined the tartaruchi and their brethren in some chthonic realm of the imagination. They will not want for company, as we shall see.

Frank Frazetta 1928 - 2010