The Black Books
 

Going through my library, I dug these out and decided to write about them. A Black Book is manual, novel, treatise or written account that explores the dark, seedy underbelly of a topic or deals with a topic that is of itself dark and seedy or generally shunned by the mainstream. The attitude of the author or authors is not critical but either sympathetic or ambivalent towards the subject matter. This is a compendium of Black Books of all types. Some of them you have at least heard of and may even have read or browsed, most you probably never knew existed.

The Book of Black Magic and Ceremonial Magic by Arthur Edward Waite

http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/978158509...1_s260x420.jpg

Waite, a Christian mystic, was a member of the Victorian English secret society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The membership included other noted occultists as Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Samuel Liddell MacGregor-Mathers, Moina Mathers, Constance Wilde (wife of Oscar), William Butler Yeats, Israel Regardie and others. Waite also made perhaps the most popular tarot card deck—the Waite-Rider pack. This book by Waite is an invaluable source of the type of magic that flourished in Europe from the 18th century that were originally disseminated in pamphlets that would almost certainly be permanently lost to us today. Waite also criticizes various translations and providing what he feels are more accurate readings and this gives us a bit more latitude in understanding the material.

Books of true Black Magic, Hollywood notwithstanding, are often brutish. Waite mentions a magical treatise called The Method of Honorius which contains a sacrifice that goes thus:

“After sunrise, a black cock must be killed, the first feather of its left wing being plucked and preserved for use at the required time. The eyes must be torn out, and also the tongue and heart; these must be dried in the sun and afterwards reduced to powder.”

And if you think that’s bad, to become invisible, Honorius instructs the magicians thus:

“Begin this operation on a Wednesday before the sun rises, being furnished with seven black beans. Take next the head of a dead man; place one of the beans in his mouth, two in his eyes and two in his ears. Then make upon his head the character of the figure which here follows [Waite does not reproduce it as it has been deleted from all available source material]. This done, inter the head with the face towards heaven, and every day before sunrise, for the space of nine days, water it with excellent brandy. On the eighth day you will find the cited spirit, who will say unto you: What doest thou? You shall reply: I am watering my plant. He will then say: Give me that bottle; I will water it myself. You will answer by refusing, and he will again ask you, but you will persist in declining, until he stretch forth his hand and shew you the same figure which you have traced upon the head suspended from the tips of his fingers. In this case you may be assured that it is really the spirit of the head, because another might take you unawares, which would bring you evil, and further, your operation would be unfruitful. When you have given him your phial, he will water the head and depart. On the morrow, which is the ninth day, you shall return and find your beans ripe. Take them, place one in your mouth, and then look at yourself in a glass [mirror]. If you cannot see yourself, it is good.”

Honorius does not say where or how to procure the head of a corpse. Why so brutal? Magicians of the Middle Ages, as Waite points out, were brutish people shunned by the rest of society. They lived on the fringes of society. They practiced as they wished, had no regard for the law or morals. Waite does not point out, however, that most of these magicians were born as Jews. Indeed, qabala was a fixture in medieval magic and is still practiced to this day (Madonna is a confirmed qabalist). I have been informed by Jewish qabalists that the type practiced in Christendom is not true qabala which requires many years of intense study of the Hebrew language and alphabet under a master qabalist of the type that can only be found in Jewish schools. Christian qabalists, however, have also informed me that this is not true and the medieval brand of qabala practiced in Europe is the true qabala. Be that as it may.

We should point out, however, that kings and aristocrats were often fascinated by occultism and were avid practitioners themselves. Some were placed under the instruction of these magicians and believed wholeheartedly in black and white magic. Many privately rejected the Christian god and embraced the Infernal One. The French king, Henry III (who reigned from 1574-1589), at least made a show of practicing devil-worship and kept an altar which had an alleged piece of the true cross which Henry had had mounted in gold. This was, in turn, laid in a crucifix upon which two devils wrought in silver are rubbing their posteriors. Small wonder then that most of the Black Magic information in Waite’s book came from French pamphlets.

One of the most famous secret occult societies was England’s so-called Hellfire Club. They were really known as the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe and contained some of the most powerful men in England. St. Francis was Sir Francis Dashwood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who founded the club. John Montagu, the fourth the Earl of Sandwich and Secretary of the Navy, was also a member and a rather depraved one at that. Benjamin Franklin also joined the club when he visited England at Dashwood’s behest. The club had its own abbey where they gathered to practice ritual sex on various prostitutes. They also had an altar where they would gather to intone Satan to appear before them (it’s not known if Franklin participated in these although the other members would certainly have wanted to see him prove his prowess and he did have illegitimate children and so was not above a bit of rakishness). They had a black scripture although no one is sure what is was but the available information indicates it to be the Key of Solomon (also known, according to Waite, under the title True Black Magic).

Dashwood obtained his Black Magic books from a bookseller of low repute named Edmund Curll who ran a bookshop in Covent Gardens in London. Curll specialized in pornography for certain clients (aristocrats and nobility) and Black Magic books were viewed as pornography back then which would obviously hold a fascination for the Friars.

Much of the material in Waite’s book would have been the type of thing that the Friars would have encountered since they lived at the same period. How much of it they incorporated is anyone’s guess. Waite’s book, although more a commentary, contains enough entire manuscripts of various Black Grimoires, many of them too rare to be found anywhere else, that it itself qualifies as a Black Book.

Principia Discordia: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger

For those who have read the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Principia Discordia should at least ring some bells. Malaclypse the Younger is Greg Hill who, along with Kerry W. Thornley (Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst), founded the Discordian order and wrote much its material. The First Edition of Principia Discordia appeared in New Orleans in 1964. Hill wrote it and gave it to Lane Caplinger who worked in the office of the District Attorney who just happened to be none other than Jim Garrison (the person played by Kevin Costner in the JFK movie). Caplinger typed up the manuscript and ran off copies on the mimeograph machine in Garrison’s office (all without his knowledge). Working from this, Hill added and expanded to the Holy Writ of Discordianism over the next five years. Thornley was himself questioned due to some tenuous ties to Oswald.

In short, Discordianism worships Eris the goddess of chaos and discord. While clearly a gag religion expressed with much humor, as with most gag religions, the founders often find themselves wondering just how much of gag it really is (i.e. a joke disguised as religion or religion disguised as a joke). Oftimes, the pithy and witty comments do seem to have a kind of unintended wisdom to them:

“But before I was a Discordian, when I entered my room only to be reminded by its disarray that it was a mess, I felt a sense of defeat. These days when that happens I just say ‘Hail Eris!’ – our customary salute to any embodiment of chaos – and then I cheerfully carry on, secure in the knowledge that the constellations look no better.”

“You must discipline yourself under a certified Slackmaster until you are capable of drinking beer and watching television with total concentration.”

“Elayne Wechsler was just some broad with a funny bone until she read the Principia and asked the question that led to my great definition of theology. ‘Why,’ she wanted to know, ‘is the Discordian Society, which worships a female divinity, so male dominated?’ Recalling that more women than men are devout about Christianity with its male God and His male Son, I decided that people like religions that blame reality on the opposite sex. So let that be a lesson to us males. Behind every great idea there is a broad with a funny bone.”

The Discordian symbol resembles a tai-chi containing a pentagon and an apple with Callisti written on it in Greek. It is called the Sacred Chao a.k.a. the Hodge-Podge:

http://byt.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/w...discordia1.jpg

Malaclypse the Younger explains it thus:

The Sacred Chao is not the Yin-Yang of the Taoists. It is the Hodge-Podge of the Erisians. And, instead of a Podge spot on the Hodge side, it has a pentagon which symbolizes the Aneristic Principle, and instead of a Hodge spot on the Podge side, it depicts the Golden Apple of Discordia to symbolize the Eristic Principle. The Sacred Chao symbolizes absolutely everything anyone need ever know about absolutely anything, and more! It even symbolizes everything not worth knowing, depicted by the empty space surrounding the Hodge-Podge.

The Greek legend holds that a banquet was thrown by the gods but Eris was not invited. In retaliation, she tossed a golden apple to the banqueters. On it was written “Callisti” or “For the fairest.” Hera, Athena and Aphrodite all began to bicker that the apple was obviously meant for herself. It was decided that the prince of Troy, a fellow named Paris, would award to the fairest one. He gave it to Aphrodite and thus began a chain of tragic events that led up to the breakout of the Trojan War. The golden apple is known as “The Apple of Dischord.” The pentagon within the Hodge-Podge has to do with the Law of Fives which Robert Anton Wilson writes about at great length. Basically, the more one looks for the way five fits into things, the more one finds. For this reason, the number 23 is holy to Discordians (2+3=5). The death of Harlem gangster, Dutch Schultz, was so firmly hitched to the 23 that Illuminatus! refers to him as “a cluster of synchronicity.”

Discordianism has made a lot of inroads into American culture and was even featured on The Colbert Report (and THAT is making it in America, folks!).

Am I correct to label Principia Discordia a Black Book? I think so. The Discordians would probably be upset with me if I didn’t.

The Picatrix: Liber Atratus Edition translated by John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock (2010-11, Adocentyn Press)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WJzapZiinh...-picatrix2.jpg

http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/...rrorDesign.jpg

Originally four books of astrological magic from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance assembled into one volume. Its origins are murky but legend has it that it was originally written in North Africa in the 9th century and titled Ghayat al-Hakim (The Goal of the Sage) and attributed to the Sufi scholar al-Majriti although the attribution is likely spurious.

Ever since the Moorish invasion in the 8th century, there has been an avenue open between Spain and North Africa and so the book made its way to Spain where it was translated into both Spanish and Latin by someone in the court of the Castilian king, Alfonso the Wise in 1256 where it received the title of Picatrix. According to the Latin text, Picatrix was the name of the author of the book.

As with all Black Magic treatises of that day, you have to wonder if anybody actually performed these rituals to see if they worked or how they came up with the ingredients that they did. “The Operation of Saturn,” for example, calls for sacrificing a cow or calf and “suffumigating” it with a mixture of hemlock, myrrh, St. John’s Wort and the brain of a black cat.

To affect the obedience of men (as per a military leader, for example) “…take equal parts lion brains, leopard fat, and wolf blood. Liquefy the fat, and mix it with the brains; then pour the blood into it, and it will take on a spotted color.” Don’t touch it, get it on your clothing or breath it because it is a deadly poison, says the instruction.

For acquiring the love of a woman, there a couple of nifty formulas given. One requires a half-ounce each gazelle marrow and beef fat. Melt them together then add a half-ounce each of camphor and rabbit brain. Another formula requires two ounces each of rabbit rennet (that’s the stomach lining) and wolf brains and three grains of melted beef fat. Then add in the blood of the person for whom you are doing the working. Yet another formula requires two ounces each of wolf vulva and rabbit penis, one ounce the eyes of white mice and two ounces of the fat of a white dog. Now if that doesn’t win a woman’s love, what will?

But what if you would rather make war and not love? Well, then, a half-ounce each of black cat bile and the brains of a pig, two ounces of the fat of a black dog and two grains of sweet myrrh should do the trick. “When this confection is eaten it attracts spirits of enmity and ill will.” I don’t doubt that but I do doubt that this concoction qualifies as a “confection.”

If that formula didn’t work as planned, try three grains of black dog bile, two ounces each of pig’s brains, black cat bile, pig grease, sulfur, sweet myrrh, black cat’s eyes and oil of caubac. Then add two grains of copper, four ounces of the brains of a black dog, and one ounce of hair from its tail.

And if you really want to cause some enmities, powder up four ounces of black cat brains and mix with the same amount of powdered human feces. “Give this food to whomever you wish, and he will hate.” No kiddin’.

Some of the folk cures surpass belief:

“Whoever has a deadly illness in his thighs, let him wash his thighs in water of feces that has been distilled three times, and put powdered, calcinated feces on it, and he will be quickly healed.” You would only need to threaten to put that on me and I will be instantly healed.

“Take your sweat in a very clean and beautiful basin, and then put it in a glass vessel. Put into it scrapings from the soles of your feet, and a little of your feces dried in the Sun, and one root of the herb that is called fu in Arabic, and in Latin valerian. Give this in a drink to whomever you wish, and he will delight in you. I, Geber, have tested this, and it is entirely true. Women, however, add water with which they have washed their thighs, while keeping their buttocks turned toward the east.” Yeah, if they were turned toward the west then I’d really be grossed out.

And don’t make me print all the formulas that require toad’s testicles! And since the author identifies himself as Geber then I suppose we know who actually wrote The Picatrix.

The Psychopath’s Bible: For the Extreme Individual by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D. with Dr. Jack Willis (1994, New Falcon Publications)

http://www.bobbycampbell.net/10/PSYC...IBLE_COVER.jpg

A true Black Book if there ever was one. The basic contention of the authors is that most religions don’t encourage the individual but rather use up the individual to further the goals of the collective. Unable to work on developing the self, religions hold back enlightenment. This book—both a social philosophy and a technique—will help the individual develop not only the self but what it claims to be the best part of the self—the Psychopath. It warns the reader that the book is evil but, as Ben Franklin once said, if God created everything then God created evil too. All cultures celebrate evil as we do with our Halloween. The evil is in us and it is not going anywhere so we invent these holidays to acknowledge it and let it out as a kind of safety valve.

I have personally always believed that all of us are psychopathic to an extent and this book agrees and instead of trying to stifle or sublimate that side of us, it seeks to instead liberate it. It teaches the individual to become a “Toxick Magician.” Nicholas Tharcher, who authored the book’s foreword, describes the Toxick Magician as someone who “is not afraid to be deliberately malicious and malevolent. From society’s standpoint, he is the worst of the psychopaths because he does his Work intentionally.” Above all, he is FREE—mainly from delusions that cloud the thinking of homo normalis. He maintains anonymity while plotting the downfall of everyone around him.

Tharcher also makes the interesting observation about the bible of psychiatry known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) or DSM-IV. Tharcher writes:

If you’ve never picked up DSM-IV, we strongly recommend that you do so. You’ll find yourself in it. You’ll find your friends and associates in it. You’ll find your family members in it. Indeed, you’ll find everybody in it. In other words, from the point of view of psychiatry, everyone has a “mental disorder.” For psychiatry, there is no such thing as mental health, only types and degrees of pathology.

Some of what I read in this book is close to the dadaist philosophy expressed a little differently. Dada taught that wars are useless for anything other than spreading around the very thing it has declared war on and it doesn’t matter if it is war on poverty, on racism, on sexism, on abortion, on capitalism, on saving the ecology, on war itself. PB teaches that such wars bring about Toxick Chaos that opposes the actions of the party that has declared war. For example, a war on abortion will only result in over population that inevitably leads to a rejection of the anti-abortion sentiment and will destroy the ones who declared the war. The animal rights activists who declared war on the fur trade anonymously slash up hundreds if not thousands of fur coats as a protest which accomplishes nothing but forcing the fur coat manufacturers to have to slaughter yet more animals to make up for the coats that were uselessly destroyed. More animals have died rather than less.

The book takes a brutal position that the human race’s loftiest goals are but ruses and farces of destruction, stupidity and mediocrity. The book asserts that “all goals reduce to control” and “[l]earn how to help everyone achieve what they want. It will, in the end, destroy them.” Hence the goal of the Toxick Magician is simply to sow the seeds of destruction by helping others achieve their goals. A true psychopath learns to disguise his contempt of his fellow humans by appearing to be one of them—he goes to church, helps a stranded motorist, gets married and raises children but he is NOT a human being. This is done “for the good of the gross force field which is forever struggling to give birth to new life forms as quickly as possible, regardless of the cost to the older forms.”

The Toxick Magician is a Manipulator and a Manipulator always gets what he or she wants by disguising it as a lofty goal. This is the reason a white collar criminal who robs his clients of millions of dollars spends less time in prison than a guy who held up a gas station and took off with $50. European kings declared the triumph of Christendom which earned the adulation of the Christian masses who didn’t give a f-uck that it was achieved by slaughtering thousands of pagans, “witches” and druids and taking their land. The same was done in the United States by declaring “Manifest Destiny” as the goal—the god-given right to expand—by killing off Indians and herding the survivors onto wastelands (until the white man decided he wanted those as well). There is no difference, for example, between the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the goal of global literacy. The result is the spread of illiteracy. Since knowledge is power, illiteracy is the guarantee of powerlessness. Why would the few Manipulators at the top want everybody to be as powerful as them? Where is the fun in that? And to prevent the intelligentsia from conspiring against them and overthrowing them, the Manipulators developed the goal of “tenure” which has effectively neutered the intelligentsia and turned them into compliant work beasts. That’s why they will do anything to help the intelligentsia attain and maintain this goal—because it actually destroys them and preserves the Manipulators’ power. Never miss a chance to destroy others who are not useful to you as allies by helping them to destroy themselves. Be an enabler and help others destroy themselves—that’s control.

A true Toxick Magician also understands his place on the food chain. A pretender always thinks he’s at the top of it all but a true Manipulator knows he is just food to someone else. He accepts this and controls how much of himself he allows to be eaten. He does not want to stand out. As Dylan once so sagely put it: “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Know how to do that and don’t fight it or you will only damage yourself and badly. As an example, I was once telling my father (a Navy veteran) how much I hated certain people in the Navy who outranked me and that I was not inclined to recognize their authority or follow their orders and didn’t care what they thought or did as a result. My father said, “Don’t try to rebel and have things your way because you know it won’t work and all you’re gonna do is make some sonofabitch’s day.” I realized he was right. I was helping them to destroy me. The smart thing to do was to never give them that satisfaction and I did a complete 180. They knew I hated them and that I wanted them to hate me with a burning, smoldering passion but I was strictly by the book from that point on about everything and so there was nothing they could do about it except wait for me to slip up, which I never did. In this way, I triumphed over them. “You are your own end. You are not the means to anyone else’s end. However, it is wise to let others believe you are a means to their ends.”

The problem is we come into the world as infants and are treated as such our entire lives. The authors call this “infantilizing.” As children, we fear the dark, we fear the bogey man, we fear the monster in the closet and under the bed, we fear mommy and daddy catching us doing something bad. The fear never leaves us but just gets applied to other things because, we tell ourselves, we’re adults now and we know better than to believe in that kid stuff. The kid stuff is the fear itself. Otherwise it is translated over to fear of sickness, fear of taxes, fear of unemployment/bankruptcy, fear of old age, fear of crime, fear of government, fear of lack of government, fear of life, fear of death, etc. Fear is irrational but we won’t admit this because we want to be infantilized. We want government to take care of us but we fear that it may know too much about us. We fear crime so we bury ourselves under firearms which has done nothing but increase the crime rate a thousand-fold (remember, whatever we try to stop we only perpetuate in reality). Doctors and dentists push people to get surgeries they don’t need because people allow doctors to be the adults in the doctor-patient relationship.

At some point somewhere, however, we get to assume the adult role. Maybe we are a supervisor at work and people have to answer to us (even though someone over us made us that supervisor). Maybe we are a parent. Dr. Hyatt states, “The entire structure of the world is a food chain of infantilizing.” We get to play parent and child depending on the circumstances. We use fear on others and have others use it on us. The Toxick Magician understands this and plays up on the fear in order to force things to fall apart because that’s when the Toxick Magician is then at his most toxic. He will go about forging connections and making allies through a combination of fear and deceit.

He does this because:

The psychopath acknowledges that he is born a fool and is living in an insane asylum. He does not seek to make sense of the senseless, he does not look to find reason in chaos. Being convinced that those around him are nuts, he commits to the law of the self rather than the blatherings of the herd.

The book is full of strange, little exercises as:
“[D]isplease someone you really like, and please someone you really can’t stand. Write down your actions and their reactions in your journal.”

“Watch three sitcoms a month…… Now! you know what people value and what they compare themselves to…… Count their lies, their assumptions, their social tricks, how they inculcate values and ideals in the viewer. Record a few different sitcoms and begin to break them down. Notice how they use laughter to get the audience to accept their implicit values.”

The book does not recommend the use of violence. It differentiates between the psychopath and the sociopath. The sociopath will resort to violence to get what he or she wants. The psychopath simply but knowingly gives those around them who are of no other use to them enough rope by which they will inevitably hang themselves.

An Age for Lucifer: Predatory Spirituality and the Quest for Godhood by Robert C. Tucker (1999, Holmes Publishing Group)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...4,203,200_.jpg

This is one of the most eye-opening of the various Black Books I have read. Tucker does a lot of work with young people who practice or claim to practice Satanism or Black Magic/Left-Handed Path-type spirituality. In his years of doing so, he began to notice a certain similarity in the subjects of his study. One of the things he realized quickly was that he had to educate himself, immerse himself, in the Left-Handed or Black Arts because without an intimate knowledge of the subject, the people he wanted to interview would not talk to him. They saw themselves as a new type of organism and other humans as lesser organisms towards whom they felt a deep contempt and arrogance. If you know nothing of their type of spirituality, you are less than a piece of s-hit and even less worthy of being addressed. To gain their respect, Tucker had to learn how they think and why. I’ll let him describe what he found:

This book explores a strange new spirituality about to enter into competition with other established religions. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable.

I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on Darwinian evolutionary principles: a new predator will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to prey on humans. Another assumption then follows: this predator will evolve gradually and incrementally from humanity, just as we apparently evolved from lower forms to prey on them. A further assumption suggests that these predators have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as new humans with advanced methods of survival and new forms of spiritual expression and religious organization designed to support and advance their predation.

What follows is a kind of manifesto of this new human. Tucker refers to this new human predator as a “Luciferian.” Lucifer means “light-bringer” and the subjects that Tucker has interviewed over the years do regard themselves as bringing the True Light to humanity—the light of predation. Tucker claims that the book is part imagination, part conjecture, part fact. He writes in a combination of Luciferian and therapist. While he wouldn’t go so far as to say the book is channeled, he says he would just let his thoughts flow while he took it all down. But this is not a stream-of-consciousness book, it is, in fact, well organized and extensive (376 pp.) Here are some examples:

In chapter 3 entitled “Devouring,” Tucker-as-Luciferian states, “Luciferianism can be understood in part as a philosophical and spiritual extension of eating and consuming. When compassion, empathy and conscience are killed, then devouring and consuming can swell proportionately. When the impediments to personal power acquisition are removed, the devouring the life energies of other beings becomes easy: I become stronger as you become weaker, I absorb strength as yours flows into me. I am capable of this because I do not experience your pain, I do not care about your loss, and I feel no remorse or regret about using, abusing and devouring you.”

“This system of devouring is not limited to the animal world. Large corporations devour and consume smaller ones; large nation states devour the resources of less powerful ones. On a personal level, human beings constantly consume the emotional and intellectual energies of others. The hierarchy of devouring rips into our personal and collective lives like a dripping claw.”

“To a Luciferian, life is as it is. Cruelty and devouring are the way of things, so why not adapt? Why not admit the obvious and become good at it? All else is simply illusion. There is only one reality, and that is acquiring the power to devour ‘up the hierarchy’ biologically, personally, socially, and politically.”

The Luciferian drains her victim by isolating him from everything else he loves. If not, then he might find the strength to pull away. She will make him love her and only her by cutting him off from friends, family, hobbies, interests and even habits. She will rule his universe completely. He will kill and die for her. He will be incapable of thinking a bad thought about her. His every thought and deed is done with only her in mind. Tucker terms this as the Luciferian “becoming the object of focus.” She will drain him until he “collapses,” i.e. when his entire core energies have been sucked clean. This is called “assaulting the core.” Even if he begins to understand the hold she has on him and starts to struggle, she will hold on and continue to drain. Even if he starts to hate, loath and despise her, these emotions provide just as intense an energy as the love and adulation and she will continue to feed off them until the victim’s core collapses.

He will not be allowed to recover his energies for a second draining, the reason being that he might then find the strength to pull away which is defeat for the Luciferian which results in a loss of energy in the form of self-esteem and pride issues which is difficult for the Luciferian to recover from because she is an arrogant and supremely self-confident being. The only way to damage a Luciferian other than outright killing him, is for the intended victim to damage his ego by cutting off his predation before he is finished. Secondly, the collapse is like an orgasm in that it brings a rush of new, intense energies with it that can be had no other way—like breaking open the bone to get to the marrow. To the Luciferian, this rush of energy is deeply satisfying.

After that, with the victim entirely drained, collapsed and ruined, the Luciferian moves onto the next victim. Of course, the relationships don’t have to be romantic in nature. A Luciferian can procure victims while posing as a clergyman, a guru, a financial advisor, a psychologist, a salesman, a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a lawyer, a banker, a boss, a psychic, a cop—just about anything that puts him or her in a position to isolate and devour victims.

Luciferianism can be generational in that a parent can feed off a child until its core collapses and the child will, in turn, turn to emotional cannibalism in all its future relationships. Why don’t victims break away sooner? The fact is, they rarely do. Scientology is a good example of a Luciferian organization. First, it isolates the new recruit (victim) from friends and family and destroys any outside interests or hobbies that cannot be put to use for “the Org.” They punish members for various infractions within the Org. Why don’t they leave? In the words of one man who did leave after many years of the Org’s abuse: “I don’t know anything else.” He had spent three decades in the Org and simply did not know how to handle life without it. We see the same with people who have been caught up in predatory romances. When asked why he doesn’t leave, he answers, “I can’t! I love her!” Or she says, “I can’t! He’s all I know about love!”

How does one go about assaulting the core? Tucker points out:

A known set of techniques can be used to commit psychological assault. These techniques have evolved in the last twenty years [a little over 30 years at the time of this writing] and can now be described as a sophisticated technology. (These techniques will not be discussed here: please refer to Singer, Schein, Lifton, and others for details). To be effective, the technology must be systematic: it must be used over time and in a specific sequence.

An abusive spouse is a Luciferian to a slight degree. He beats his wife, controls her, insults her, intimidates her and makes her hate herself. Above all, he makes her feel powerless. That without him, she is nothing. This is a core assault but it is not Luciferianism precisely, it’s more of an analogy. Perhaps one of the best true Luciferians I can think of is Charles Manson (although Tucker’s Luciferian denies it). He never beat or even insulted the women under his command. Quite the opposite—he told them they were beautiful. He simply “moved in.” His core assault was complete and systematic. Instead of being traumatized into giving in psychologically as with an abusive spouse, Manson assaulted their core identities without them even realizing it. They gave themselves over to him with complete willingness.

A follower named Paul Watkins stated, “Everything I was, was Charlie. There was nothing left of me anymore.” Of the other Family members, Watkins said, “There’s nothing left of them anymore either. They’re all Charlie too.” Now that is textbook perfect Luciferian core assault. When the father of Susan Atkins, a military man, went to confront Manson and kill him, he instead fell on his knees before the scruffy, little guru and began to worship him. So complete was his domination that when Family members heard him speaking inside their heads, they truly thought it was telepathic communication. Susan Atkins stated some years after the murders for which she was sentenced to life in prison that it took five years for her to get Charlie out of her head.

Manson stunned other cult leaders because they had to promise their followers a reward such as enlightenment or passage to heaven or godhood and they practiced rituals and wore ceremonial costumes and wrote books or pamphlets and had occult bookstores and coffeehouses and rock or folk bands to spread their word but Manson had none of that. For the Family, the only reward was simply to be with Charlie. And it worked.

Manson is as close to a true Luciferian as I can think of and he is a scary guy because of this amazing power he has to psychologically dominate people completely without expending much effort to do it and without their even suspecting what he was doing to them.

We have to hope he is unique and that there was never anyone like him before and never will be again but, if Tucker is correct, Manson is just the vanguard of a new race.

But Manson has been called a psychopath. So isn’t the Luciferian just a self-glorified psychopath? According to Tucker, while there are a great many similarities between a psychopath and a Luciferian, there are profound differences. To a Luciferian, a psychopath is merely a lower order predator. A psychopath is a hyena that scavenges the bones left behind by the lion. The Luciferian and the psychopath share a love for the glory of the hunt and moment of the kill but this is only a means to an end for the Luciferian but is the end-all for the psychopath. The Luciferian has learned to crush out all feelings of empathy and conscience, seeing them as an impediment to power while the psychopath was simply born without them and has no experience of them to draw from. The psychopath wastes his predatory instincts only to enrich his sexual, materialistic and/or narcissistic urges while the Luciferian hones his skills to achieve personal godhood. To a Luciferian, a psychopath is beneath contempt but they still recognize that the psychopath may be an ancestor of the Luciferian or that they spring from the same source with the Luciferian being more evolved.

Tucker writes:

Psychopaths do not even rate as good food for devouring, because they lack nourishment. Luciferians cannot live off them. Hence the great disrespect that Luciferians have for psychopaths. They are not even worth the effort of predation. At least other victims stand for something—for decency, love, compassion, morality. Their stand gives them a certain kind of nobility (and hence edible energy), albeit the nobility the predator assigns to his prey. But psychopaths have never possessed this nobility and never will. As a result, they are to be despised and destroyed, not cultivated. They are an experimental prototype only, and not worth supporting or devouring.

This debate will probably remain unresolved. Some Luciferians will try to cultivate and use psychopaths, others will simply erase them whenever possible.

However, in The Psychopath’s Bible, psychopathy is very definitely touted as a form of spirituality and a path to immortality. There doesn’t appear to be a great deal of difference between a Toxick Magician and a Luciferian. Hence the Luciferian appears to be a psychopath with a certain spiritual view different from what many psychopaths exhibit. As a result, he sees himself as different from and superior to the psychopath that just wants to take people’s life savings or live high on the hog without doing anything to earn it or torture and kill prostitutes or little kids to get off sexually. Even having a spiritual view is not enough to elevate a psychopath to a Luciferian.

Zodiac, for example, believed his psychopathic worldview was a path to “Masterhood” and that those he killed would be his slaves in the afterlife. But his predation simply consisted of killing rather than the eating of another’s emotional and intellectual energies for power and ultimately the attainment of Godhood. No Luciferian would waste his time writing taunting letters to the cops and the newspapers for kicks. He doesn’t get his kicks that way and doesn’t respect anyone who does. To a Luciferian, Zodiac is an amateur and a hack in need of being liquidated. To the Toxick Magician, he is simply a sociopath and incapable of internalizing the spirituality that psychopathy offers and therefore just another foil to be assisted in his own destruction. The only difference I see between the Toxick Magician and the Luciferian is that the latter cannot feed off a sociopath like Zodiac and so would just kill him to be rid of him and keep him from killing the types of people that the Luciferian seeks to devour (i.e. they are competing for the same food sources) while the former would still gain power and control by helping this individual bring about his own demise.

The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey
(Avon Books, 1969)

http://img102.imageshack.us/img102/7573/satbibjz3.jpg

The most accessible Black Book to date and owned by just about every goth and metalhead in junior highs across America. To give some background, San Francisco was a wild and crazy place in the 60s and undoubtedly the mecca of the counter-culture and the underground. It started off as a kind of social experiment by certain freethinkers in the late 50s. These were largely people with college degrees in chemistry and physics and other sciences looking for an escape from their dreary 9-to-5 jobs and academic existences. Many practiced Eastern religions, American Indian religions, various philosophies, some started their own religions and many did mind-altering drugs in an effort to expand the human consciousness and they believed in free love.

The problem was that all sorts of others heard about it and set up shop in San Francisco. These included the dreary Christians who relabeled themselves “Jesus Freaks” and who dressed in counter-culture clothing but were really just the same old boring, repressive Christians that the founders of the social experiment wanted to escape from. High school dropouts and runaways flocked to Haight-Ashbury only to be recruited into cults, turned into prostitutes, or ended carted to a hospital after overdosing on some drug or other. Free love turned into free venereal disease.

By ’62, most of the founders were disappointed with the experiment and began to leave. Most were gone by ’64 and by ’65, none were left. Haight-Ashbury was now nothing but runaways, junkies and the worst kinds of hucksters imaginable. The 1967 so-called Summer of Love was a joke. The “hippy” had already been declared dead and the founders of the movement were long gone.

Cultic groups at work recruiting members in the area were the Process Church of the Final Judgment, the OTO, Scientology, Hare Krishna, Soka Gakkai, and the aforementioned “Jesus Freaks.” Many of these groups had no affinity for the values that kicked off the hippy movement. In fact, most were steadfastly opposed to it and highly contemptuous of it. Many Christian cultists looked and talked like hippies but had no trouble explaining to the media that they regarded the Haight as the devil’s world and were willingly wearing the devil’s uniform (i.e. long hair, love beads, tie-dyed shirts, peace signs, sandals, etc.) in order to save the souls of those so obviously in his clutches. But other cults were far more rightwing than this. Some were downright and even openly fascistic—some to the point of being neo-Nazi. Many were dangerous.

Satanism, according to some a product of this hucksterism, started in San Francisco with the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966. The prime mover behind this was Howard Stanton Levey. Levey claimed to have been everything from a lion-tamer to a police photographer to an organist before landing his gig as the premier Satanist and changing his name to Anton Szandor LaVey.

LaVey didn’t come from the Norman Rockwell apple pie scene of the 50s era. He wasn’t someone you would see on Leave It To Beaver but he might be sophomorically lampooned on a show like Dragnet (and likely get a big kick out of it). LaVey emerged into the 60s from the carnival/girlshow seedy underbelly of the 40s and 50s complete with his “Step right on up, folks, and peek behind the curtain at a real, honest-to-god Satanist” type sideshow campiness fully intact. He entered the 60s in the same way Burroughs’s Naked Lunch or Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn did but he drew no attention doing it. He snuck in stealthily like the black leopard he kept as a pet.

What shined through that era mostly for LaVey was the hypocrisy of the whole thing. All appearances had to be kept up despite what was seething down below. This was something America had inherited from its earliest days as a nation. The blackface minstrel era, for example, allowed white people to dress, walk, talk and sing in the carefree lifestyle that they perceived blacks to be living. All the societal pretensions of propriety and respectability could be dropped for a while and the Lord of Misrule could have full reign. The old Roman festival of Saturnalia where slaves became masters and masters became slaves was an even earlier version of this. When minstrelsy gave way to vaudeville and vaudeville gave way to carnivals and circuses and girly strip shows, it was carried on in new ways. LaVey stated, “On Saturday night I would see men lusting after half-naked girls dancing at the carnival, and on Sunday morning, when I was playing the organ for tent-show evangelists at the other end of the carnival lot, I would see these same men sitting in the pews with their wives and children, asking God to forgive them and purge them of carnal desires. And the next Saturday night they’d be back at the carnival or some other place of indulgence. I knew then that the Christian Church thrives on hypocrisy, and that man’s carnal nature will out!” Well “carnal” and “carnival” sound alike for a reason.

LaVey’s experiences as a carny and now as a prototype phone-in psychic on the SFPD hotline made him realize that people are driven by three basic needs: entertainment, hypocrisy, and self-deceit. He began wondering how he could combine all three into a single occupation. Oh, what fun he could have then! The realization that there was no difference between the carny barker, the guru, and the evangelist got him to thinking.

He started a “magic circle” of like-minded individuals in the Bay area. They held get-togethers at his home. Among this strange group of businesspeople, lawyers, cops, and real estate dealers, was the occultist filmmaker Kenneth Anger (whose films have included everyone from Mick Jagger to Jimmy Page and have large cult followings). At first, the meetings were simply to satisfy curiosity regarding taboo subjects as cannibalism but soon the circle began to take on quasi-religious overtones. The magic circle became known as The Order of the Trapezoid. The idea was to admit that indulgence is at the heart of human nature but that people need to be responsible for their own actions and stop groveling before God for forgiveness for their carnal weaknesses.

One thing this Order did that changed the occult culture of America and ultimately the world was promoting the writings of H. P. Lovecraft culled from the trashy and lurid pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales. Today you can go to any bookstore and buy entire Lovecraft anthologies but back then, he was almost unknown to the vast majority of Americans and completely unknown to the rest of the world. LaVey began crafting his own religion based on the modern American myth rather than the old esotericism gleaned from musty tomes and Lovecraft fit in perfectly. Many of Lovecraft’s friends were happy to see someone taking an interest in their mentor and were frequent guests at LaVey’s meetings. LaVey stated that Clark-Ashton Smith was a good friend and that August Derleth helped the Order to assemble a history of Weird Tales for their lectures. “The writings of H. P. Lovecraft are far more Satanic than those of most occultists.” LaVey said. “Lovecraft was the first writer I discovered who really scared me. Lovecraft was pretty heady stuff back then, and has proved a hard act to follow since.” In LaVey’s mind, Lovecraft’s fiction gives the reader something immediate, something undeniable—that sense of creeping horror—which Crowley’s writings were too oblique to convey. And, well, how do you know anything’s any good if it can’t evoke the proper emotions within you? LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals even contain “The Ceremony of the Nine Angles” and “The Call to Cthuhlu” during which various Lovecraftian deities are invoked including Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath and, of course, Cthulhu.

LaVey then announced the founding of the Church of Satan on April 30, 1966 (April 30th is sacred to Satanists and various pagan groups and is known as Walpurgisnacht or May-Eve and is also the day on which Hitler committed suicide) where mass was held at his own home, painted entirely black and called the Black House not only for its color scheme (or lack of) but also to perhaps provide a West Coast offset to its opposite across the country in D.C. His church and style of ritual combined the best of Halloween with a great cult classic B movie. Not only was his house entirely black on the outside but he made it dark and mysterious on the inside—like a carnival house of horrors—and used beautiful naked nubile women for his altar. When hippies and occultists began to populate the Haight, the Church of Satan was a prime hangout for many of them.

In 1969, LaVey penned perhaps the single most important document in Satanism, The Satanic Bible. In it, lay the entire creed of the Satanist movement. Such as not turning the other cheek or wasting love on ingrates. There was nothing difficult in understanding it. LaVey was no Hobbes or Kant by any means. Kenneth Anger summed up LaVey’s Satanic philosophy by stating, “LeVeyan Satanism is an amusing, if somewhat superficial, take on the concept of self-indulgence.” In short, the Church of Satanism is dedicated to hedonism more than anything else. But the hedonism was conscious with the participant fully aware of why he or she was doing it. It wasn’t just to be a church of mindless enjoyment.

To symbolize his church LaVey chose the image of the goat’s head within the two-points-up pentagram enclosed in a circle with the five Hebrew letters for “Leviathan” spread around it, one letter at each point of the pentagram. These were surrounded by yet another circle. It is referred to as a Baphomet although I am not clear how it acquired the title from the Templar Knights whose own Baphomet was said to be a black cat or a head with three faces.

http://www.forbiddensymbols.com/wp-c...3061163330.gif

LaVey referred to his Sigil of Baphomet as “ex calibur.” The lower point is the sword thrust in the stone (which, according to Arthurian lore, was not ex calibur which was actually the sword given to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake) and “represents the opening of the gates of Hell.” This is by far the most salient symbol of Satanism known to the public today.

The Trapezoid Order did not dissolve upon the founding of the Church of Satan, however. According to LaVey, it is “the exclusive governing body of the Church of Satan.” The Trapezoidal Order’s symbol became the very epitomy of evil and Satanism in the modern age.

Smack dab in the middle of that hippiedom, LaVey detested them. Whatever the hippies did, LaVey did the opposite. They liked psychedelic music, he liked classical and even circus organ pieces which he had once played for a living. They wore their hair long, LaVey shaved his head. They wore long, shaggy beards and mustaches, LaVey sported a black, well-trimmed mustache and goatee for that Satanic touch. They wore faded denim and buckskin with peace signs and tie-dyed t-shirts and love beads, LaVey wore black robes and black biker jackets and caps with a silver Baphomet medallion. The hippies reveled in drugs, LaVey eschewed them. He was on another wavelength entirely. But that was cool with the hippies. To them, LaVey was a guy doing his own thing and more power to him, man, even if he does hate hippies! Parents knew not what to make of him. He was a frigging Satanist, for Christ’s sake! But then again he hates hippies and claimed to have put a curse on the entire movement so he couldn’t be all bad. LaVey made both sides scratch their heads in bewilderment and that was exactly how he wanted it.

Another of LaVey’s cohorts in the founding of the Church of Satan was Arthur Lyons who functioned as a sort of “High Priest.” Among those who joined the Church of Satan in those early days of its formation was actress Jayne Mansfield and entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. Some modern fairly well known entertainers include avant-garde artist Boyd Rice (a.k.a. Non, who was the inspiration of Marilyn Manson and Depeche Mode) and Marc Almond of the band Soft Cell. Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” would become a big hit for the band Coil, one member being Peter Christopherson who was formerly with industrial music pioneers, Throbbing Gristle, along with another LaVey cohort, Genesis P-Orridge.

A lesser known member who would become quite famous or infamous was a runaway named Susan Atkins. She became involved with “High Priest” Arthur Lyons’s Witches’ Sabbath—a topless show basically cooked up by LaVey and his carny-style Satanism—where she played a vampire. Lyons wrote a book called Satan Wants You in which Atkins also appears. Another follower of Lyons was a young woman named Leslie Van Houten.

LaVey claims to have written The Satanic Bible because all other systems of magic nothing but fraud going all the way back to the Middle Ages and not just in the West but over the entire globe (yet the book contains the 19 Enochian Keys of the magic system invented or revealed—depending on how you look at it—by the Elizabethan English astrologer and alchemist Dr. John Dee and his assistant, Edward Kelley). This bible contains a “Book of Lucifer” but is not meant for the Tuckerian Luciferian. The sixth statement of the Nine Satanic Statements reads: “Satan represents responsibility to the responsible, instead of concern for psychic vampires!” But a Luciferian is a psychic vampire—that is exactly what a Luciferian is—although LaVey refers to a certain type of unsavory but otherwise ordinary person (i.e. a jerk-off).

The book contains some rituals which can be easily performed. It is clear that LaVey wanted to write something easily accessible to just about anybody and that is why the book has so much appeal to kids looking for new kicks. There is nothing particularly evil being expressed in the bible. Much of the tenets expressed in its pages most people who call themselves Christian already agree with whether they think so or not. How often do you meet a Christian who truly believes in forgiveness or turning the other cheek? They only do it if you remind them to do it, their natural inclination is as reactionary as it gets—eye-for-an-eye. So LaVey asks why don’t we just cut out all the sanctimonious phoney baloney and say that eye-for-an-eye is just and I’ll forgive you only if I feel like forgiving you? At least then we’re not being hypocrites.

LaVey’s system also requires no initiation or a period of being an adept. One need not know what a tarot card looks like or how to calculate the position of a star. Hence, the teachings are immediate and therefore a big draw for young people looking to rebel against the norms and the mainstream and don’t want to have to wait much less study.

In 1972, the Church of Satan was large enough that LaVey stopped holding meetings at the Black House. Instead, chapters were set up in various cities and were called “grottoes.” Detroit’s chapter was the Babylon Grotto while New York had the Lilith Grotto and so forth. A degree system was also put in place and a certain amount of study was necessary to advance and each advancement required a fee. Not that advancement fees were anything new to degree systems. They are standard in Freemasonry, for example. LaVey said it was time to stop performing Satanism and start practicing it.

In no way can we underestimate the importance of LaVey in the formation and direction of modern occultism. Satanism in its various forms descended almost without exception from him. Former-members of the Church of Satan formed many different offshoots with varying degrees of success such as the Temple of Set, the First Church of Satan, the Werewolf Order, the Church of the Satanic Brotherhood, the Church of Lucifer, Ordo Templi Satanas and others. Many of LaVey’s writings are considered required reading on the subject of Satan even by LaVey’s rivals. These books include The Satanic Bible (first and foremost), The Satanic Rituals, The Devil’s Notebook, The Satanic Witch, and Satan Speaks. He was also largely responsible for thrusting Lovecraft into the modern occult. Thanks to LaVey, there are now approximately 20,000 Satanic orders, cults and lodges worldwide. Not bad for being in business little more than thirty years before his death on October 29, 1997.

Coincidentally, LaVey portrayed Satan in Roman Polanski’s now legendary 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby and, of course, Polanski was the husband of Sharon Tate, who would be murdered a year later by Susan Atkins on the orders of her new master, Charles Manson. True to her vampiric fantasy, Atkins freely admitted to tasting Tate’s blood, which she described as “warm and sticky and nice.”

In fact, LaVey stated that the curse he put on the hippie movement resulted in the Manson murders which was the beginning of the end of the hippies. If we combine LaVey’s philosophy with that found in The Psychopath’s Bible, we can conclude that indulgence is good because it feels good and because with “normal” people it is the rope by which they hang themselves. So give them as much as they want.

Finally, on the last page, the two final words of the bible are "YANKEE ROSE." No one is sure why.

More to follow.

The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
(Barricade Books, 1971)

http://www.atomicbooks.com/media/cat...stcookbook.jpg

A modern day alchemist’s manual to work evil only it’s not with horse dicks mixed with ewe ovaries sprinkled over with crushed wolf nads soaked with hemlock. The potions to be mixed and applied in this Black Manual will kill, maim and disfigure—guaranteed. Within its unholy pages are instructions on how to build bombs, how to make a garrote, how to booby-trap anything from a ballpoint pen to a smoker’s pipe to a policeman’s whistle (the last two will blow the person’s head off), how to make a blackjack, how to make poison darts, how to convert a shotgun into a grenade launcher, how to sabotage a moving vehicle without firearms or explosives (but with results every bit as messy), how to mix chemicals for explosives or hallucinogens, how to make weapons out of hat pins, beer cans or a pair of gloves, how to conduct electronic surveillance, how to jam electronic signals, how to broadcast free radio, how to place explosives to take down buildings, how to make and dispense poison gas, how to make silencers and what types of firearms to procure to conduct guerilla warfare.

A dangerous book? Certainly. An evil book? It could certainly be employed for evil purposes. The Cookbook definitely has been read by evil people although I do not know if they concocted any of the explosives, bombs or booby-traps shown therein. These people include Tim McVeigh, Jared Loughner, the Boston Marathon bombers, the London railway bombers, the Columbine killers, the anti-abortion radicals and a host of other imbeciles.

Powell wrote the book when he was 19 and filled with revolutionary fervor. It was published in 1971. My copy was published by Barricade Books but, in 2002, Billy Blann bought the copyrights of the book and sells it online through his publishing house, Delta Press, along with a host of other books that detail things like how to build a dirty bomb to how to build homemade hand grenades with butane lighters. But, Blann admits that The Anarchist Cookbook is his biggest seller. Delta Press’s catalog has earned Blann a $3 million-a-year business and netted him a nice income on which he lives comfortably in semi-retirement. Since Blann owns the book now, Powell gets no say in whether the book will continue to see publication. Blann states that he has no intention of stopping. Nor have Amazon nor Barnes & Noble stopped selling the book (I bought my copy some 20 or more years ago at Border’s—with cash).

Of his book today, Powell states, “The Anarchist Cookbook should go quietly and immediately out of print.” Blann, in turn, states, “You know, we don’t ban books in America.” To be precise, Powell is not calling for an outright ban. The book would still be available but there would be no new copies being printed up. Eventually, there won’t be any more copies around. This is more a banning by attrition or what I call “soft-banning.”

I must say that I find Powell to be a disappointment. His position today looks disingenuous—washing his hands of a book he knows is not ever going to go out of print. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. His attitude is, “Yeah, I wrote it and it changed the world but since I don’t own the copyrights, I can distance myself from it so I don’t have to answer for anything. But it will still and almost certainly always will be available to anyone who wants it.” The young revolutionary has turned into the world’s biggest old hypocrite.

His opening paragraph in the book’s original published form laid a perfectly valid rationale for making such a book available to the public:

“This book is written for the people of the United States of America. It is not written for the fringe political groups, such as the Weathermen, or The Minutemen. Those radical groups don’t need this book. They already know everything that’s in here. If the real people of America, the silent majority, are going to survive, they must educate themselves. That is the purpose of this book.”

I have talked with a few different types of people to get a range of views on this. One man I spoke with felt that the book should be banned because it made killers of people with kooky views. “But didn’t they always have the ability to commit mass murder in them to begin with?” I asked. After all, I read the book as have some two million others and the vast majority of us didn’t become crazed guerilla assassins. He agreed with that but said the book nevertheless helped them formulate this loose assemblage of ideas they had into something coherent that could be and eventually was acted upon.

Others said that if we ban this book, we are opening a door to banning other material because some group or other finds the content objectionable. There are parents who want Huckleberry Finn banned from schools because of its liberal use of the word “n-igger.” As it is, many school districts now issue a censored version where the word “n-igger” is now replaced with “slave.” Some groups think The Communist Manifesto should be banned while others want Mein Kampf banned. This is upsetting to me because in a free society, YOU have the right to read this stuff if you so desire. If you decide to act on anything you read, YOU take the responsibility for your own actions. That’s the deal and that’s always been the deal from the day this nation was founded. Some people are acting like they only just figured this out and don’t agree with it on top of that.

The bottom line is, who gets to decide what gets banned and what doesn’t? Not the government as the First Amendment makes clear:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The people, then? Which people? If you ask me which books should be banned, my answer is “None of them.” Others would disagree. So NOBODY gets to make that decision. No books should be banned by default. It is no one’s decision. Anyone who detonates a bomb they learned to make from reading Powell’s book is responsible for that bomb and whatever damages it caused not Powell and not his book. With freedom comes responsibility. But then we always have to be watching what people are doing. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” NSA snooping notwithstanding.

Apocalypse Culture I and II edited by Adam Parfrey
(Feral House, 1987 and 2000)

http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net...88l/276477.jpg

http://wordpress.outthereradio.net/w...1.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Trying to cover everything found in these two books is impossible and no review I give could do them justice. These have to be read to be truly appreciated but I will do my best to convince you of it. A lot of the people, organizations and places I learned about for the first time, I read in the pages of these books. Parfrey has thrown together disparate writings on virtually every controversial subject under the sun. Some are scholarly works such as John Zerzan’s superb article Agriculture: Demon Engine of Civilization to his The Case Against Art to Eugenics as a lost science written by Parfrey to David Paul’s Man is a Machine.

One of my favorite articles is from Book I entitled The Cereal Box Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind by Michelle Handelman and avant-garde musician Monte Cazazza. The article states that young children “are to have a tv show, a top movie, a record album, a video game, and a toy doll to accompany their eating experience.” Since this article was written in the 80s, the language seems a bit archaic but the thrust of it as pertinent as ever. In the 80s, the most harmful foodstuffs were processed, today the most harmful are processed like a motherf-ucker. Yesterday, the corn in your cornflakes may have been worthless being so processed but at least it was real corn. Today, it’s all GMO corn so it’s worthless from the git-go.

The worst of the foodstuffs are breakfast cereals for young children. They are utterly worthless as nutritional commodities but are designed to be cartoon friends to the kids in a deliberately non-tangible way in order to create an emptiness in children that they will seek to fill up with cereal. The cereals are designed to appeal to children in their oral and anal stages and so the boxes are designed to have open, happy mouths ready to receive large, oh-so-yummy, heaping spoonfuls are stuff that resemble…well…feces.

http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/u...ereal-mark.jpg

To the anal-expulsive tot, images of s-hit are subconsciously welcome sights. They represent a good bowel movement that, if nothing else, makes mommy happy. The cereal is often shown shooting or hopping or zinging about or splashing into the bowl and this, of course, symbolizes the acting of s-hitting, of expelling.

http://imgs.sfgate.com/blogs/images/...dycornpops.jpg

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/i...0OKFYiBaIacl3w

http://www.mrbreakfast.com/ucp/94_2707_ucp.jpg
In this image, notice how the corn pops (formerly sugar pops) are popping out of an “O”. This represents the loosening of the sphincter muscle and the expulsion of yellowish-brownish blobs from the anus which then dutifully plop into the toilet bowl.

This ties in with an article in Book II entitled “Brown Magic.” As we have seen from the Black Magic tomes already reviewed, fecal matter is considered a powerful magical agent. The greatest alchemists as Paracelsus intensely studied feces to learn the secrets of “putrefactive fermentation.” This led to a branch of study called scatology. In 1696, Paullini gathered together all the treatments he could find that used feces and assembled a comprehensive book on the subject, New and Improved Healing Filth-Apothecary. In this book, s-hit was found to be a healing agent for virtually every ailment.

In the Middle Ages, people routinely ingested, rubbed on their bodies or carried about with them the feces of an animal with a property they wished to possess or increase. Ingesting bulls-hit was said to make a man more potent. Rubbing falcon s-hit on the eyes was said to increase the sharpness of ones sight. Someone wishing to remain youthful would ingest the s-hit of a young boy or girl. Carrying rabbit feces in a little pouch was believed to increase a woman’s fecundity. In the 19th century, the Dalai Lama’s dump was considered so sacred that it was formed into amulets to be worn around the neck or pills to be ingested.

Aleister Crowley believed a woman’s feces was sacred in his sex magick ritual where the man and woman would have sex. During the course of orgasm, she would evacuate and the man would swallow it in an ecstatic fit.

Carl Jung’s interest in alchemy stemmed in part from a dream he had as a 12-year-old lad in which he saw God take a huge s-hit and it fell from the heavens to the earth and crushed the church.

S-hitting was central to the Christian understanding of Jesus. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, various Christian schools would argue over the nature of Jesus—was he human or god? The question was termed this way: Did Jesus ever take a s-hit? If so, was it just for the sake of appearances or did he really have to go? Corruption cannot coexist in one body with divinity, they said, so if Jesus dumped, he was human. Others said that, yes, Jesus dumped but it was just to be of human-like appearance. Still others said, no, Jesus did not ever pinch a loaf. But, said their critics, the gospels tell us of Jesus eating and drinking, the stuff had to go somewhere, he didn’t just fill up with food. The response was that Jesus was divine so the food upon being swallowed just slipped into a kind of never-never land and so was never to be digested and hence Jesus did not lay brick. But others said that corruption and divinity could exist in one body because divinity can do anything and so Jesus could be divine and still have a bowel movement or perhaps it was even divine doody. I don’t think Christians have ever resolved the Big, Brown Question and probably never will. For those who doubt any of this, bear in mind that the planet Uranus comes from the Roman god of the sky, Ouranus, which is derived from the Greek ourow which in English is “urine.” In Ancient Rome, the word for heaven and chamber-pot were the same. So you see, cleanliness is NOT next to godliness.

There are two particularly disturbing articles in Book II—Pedophilia and the Morally Righteous by Chris Campion and Prime Time by Peter Sotos. Campion’s piece is a defense of Thomas Watt Hamilton, a pedophile who murdered 16 schoolchildren between 6 and 7 years of age in Dunblaine, Scotland in 1996. The article states that Hamilton carried on an ancient tradition (the article stops just short of saying an ancient and honorable tradition) of pedophilia. The article doesn’t defend the killings but only that Hamilton was driven to it by a society that made him an outcast for being a pedophile.

http://murderpedia.org/male.H/images...lass_photo.jpg

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...n_1648933c.jpg

Campion writes:

“That this ‘slaughter of innocents’ occurred in a school gymnasium is no mere coincidence. Two and a half thousand years ago, at the height of Greek culture, the gymnasium (from the Greek gymnos meaning naked) was the epicenter of intellectual and erotic energy. There, men and boys would engage in the pederastic pursuits of loving, learning and Olympic sports, during which the youth performed unclothed for the unadulterated pleasure of their teachers.”

Campion compares this to today where he claims the pedophile is misunderstood and mischaracterized as a psychopathic baby-raper and child molester. But, he points, out pedophilia has its roots in prehistoric culture as demonstrated by the Sambia tribe of New Guinea where, he claims, male children by age seven are taken away from their mothers to live exclusively among older males. The boys are taught to perform fallatio on the “elders” to prepare them for manhood. He also cites Aristotle’s account of King Minos of Crete who instituted pederasty as a form of population control. From Crete, it went to Greece where it found enthusiastic support among such notables as Plato (and hence the term “platonic relationship”). There is also the story of Zeus and the youth Ganymede with whom Zeus had a “platonic” relationship naming the boy as his consort and cup-bearer.

Campion’s contention appears to be that as long as pedophiles (the people with the long history of “platonic” contact) continue to be lumped in with true molesters and rapists, “society will get the devil it deserves.”

Soto’s article doesn’t try to couch pedophilia into something less horrible than child rape. It talks about child rape with complete frankness:

“Have you ever masturbated with child pornography?

“ The way one is meant to? For the reason it was created? The difficulty in obtaining it, the dangers of even owning it, the sickness one has to trundle through to come to one small, barely realized desire.

“With a f-ucking magazine. The manufactured and professionally reproduced and planned issues like the European INCEST 4. The only one the police took from me.

“Or with videos. Or with five-minute 8 mm films. The way I did when I was younger. The kind I used to buy from a f-aggot pedophile out of his gold coast basement in Chicago. Who I met while pursuing a entirely different form of entertainment.”

“It’s just one small part of one small girl. In a high-contrast black and white snap done in extreme close-up. And if it didn’t look so small next to the fat fingertips and stretched so tightly painfully barely open, one could argue that it could be anything. Anything like some adult fresh out of illegality, shaved and trimmed and short for her porn star by-the-piece peroxide age. But this shot. In its violence. Is unequivocal.”

“A tiny baby held upside down. Between two large hairy arms and meaty hands clasping its delicate toddler shoulders and head aimings its tiny naked cold c-unt spread towards the beast’s ugly thick semi-flaccid cock very close to where penetration would be a screaming killing rape. Less than a girl, this one. Too young to know anything. Too young to take in anything but the spin. Far too young to f-uck even beyond this particular pose unless one’s customers, like me, are primarily interested in buying filth that proves death and pain. I’d like to see her head nailed to a f-ucking board afterwards. When the frustration gives way from cock to coke bottle.”

Yes, it’s pretty brutal stuff. There are articles on white supremacy, interviews with psychopaths as well as cool article as Who Rules Over the Earth? The Archetype of the World Ruler and the Work of Universal Regeneration by Tim O’Neill and The Call to Chaos: From Adam to Atom by Way of the Jornada del Muerto by James Shelby Downard. I’m not sure how many of the Apocalypse Culture installments there might be. I have these two. If there isn’t a third, there needs to be. Definitely Black Books—get you some.

The Necromantic Ritual Book by Leilah Wendell
(Westgate Press, 1995)

http://cs419924.vk.me/v419924552/339f/jvUae87RPS0.jpg

This thin, little monograph is a thing of beauty. Black covers inlaid with silverleaf written throughout in old English font with beautiful artwork and page borders. It is clear from the title that the author has a love affair with death itself—not romantic but necromantic. She makes clear that the rituals she describes constitute neither black nor white magic but “rites of twilight.” She writes:

“In High Necromantic practice, the cadaver is simply a consecrated catalyst—an empty chalice, if you will, that we will attempt to fill with a potent spirit. It is the host body. The death house is not violated, nor is the host. All elements are treated with the love and sacrosanctity a true magician must have if he or she ever hopes to succeed in contacting and sharing consciousness with a divine entity.” The divine entity is Death himself (Wendell refers to Death in the masculine although a male magician might just as easily regard this entity as female).

Despite the romance of death, Wendell makes clear that necrophilia or using a corpse for sex is never to be done. She stands opposed to Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt” philosophy. What is obvious is that Wendell does herself feel sexual desire when practicing necromancy on a corpse. In her book, Encounters with Death, the cover features a comatose or even dead woman in the arms of a black veiled corpse or this is Azrael, the angel of death.

http://cache4.bdcdn.net/assets/image...0944087091.jpg

http://www.grandmidwayhotel.com/wp-c...orgehisham.jpg
This life-size piece called “The Gift” was created by Leilah Wendell and George Hisham and depicts Wendell herself in the arms of Death. It stands at the Grand Midway Hotel in New Orleans which is also the location of Westgate Press.

I have always been intrigued by the statuary found in charnel houses and mortuaries. There is undoubtedly a kind of romance we have with death:

http://th04.deviantart.net/fs71/300W...01-d4lozwj.jpg

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3077/3...ca7ca67c_z.jpg

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/i...ce-f138BDTDo6W

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/73...3315b7be0c.jpg

http://cdnpix.com/show/imgs/a70fa894...d5e2cb829c.jpg

Wendell’s system is a kind of astrological magic but rather different from the kinds you most encounter while perusing the Black Books. She believes in star gates and earth gates that serve as portals to other dimensions including that land beyond the veil. Where these points coincide is where temples should be built so that the right energy is channeled through the place for which the rituals work the best.

For the record, I’ve never performed these rituals. I’m not much of a necromantic. These are not rituals that Wendell recommends to a total novice. She feels that one must introduce oneself to Death first to overcome the normal fear we have of it. She says all fear must be overcome and the best way to overcome it is attend funerals, work in funeral homes or mortuaries, stroll through graveyards and the like. Get used to death until it becomes as a friend. When doing the rituals, first learn them from someone skilled in their use.

One must then procure the proper materials and charge them. The charging is done via the emotions. You must assemble a “golem” from an armature and a base. The armature can be a skeleton of simulated skeleton or it can be made from tree branches which must be fashioned and glued together to form the golem’s skeleton. Afterwards, let it dry and settle and then put “flesh” on the bones using clay in layers. After you build the frame and prop it up, you must pose it and “clothe” it so that it exudes the appropriate feeling you want to it convey. The cloth must be stiffened and the whole thing should be varnished over.

What should your golem look like? It can look like whatever you want it to for the rituals. You can make an image of Azrael or perhaps a transi or maybe someone you love who has passed on. Whatever puts you in the mood to contact Death during your rituals.

http://static1.wikia.nocookie.net/__...ed-d5ivirq.jpg

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/20...ascination.jpg

The golem, however, is not an idol. It is a talisman to help you focus your energies. It must treated respectfully but not worshiped. The most important ritual is “High Necromancy” where you become one with Azrael and see through his eyes. This requires a private temple and a corpse and should be performed at the times of the year when the “West Gate” is aligned with the earth. I won’t describe it too much. You’ll have to get the book if you’re interested (I think if is available in pdf format online). Again, I’ve never performed this ritual as this kind of thing is not my bag but Wendell’s writings are good for seeing death in a different light.

The Book of the SubGenius: The Sacred Teachings of J. R. “Bob” Dobbs
(Fireside Books, 1983)

http://www.thepixiecollective.com/fi.../bookofsub.jpg

Although the book claims no writing credits the main author is one Ivan Stang. He apparently founded the Church of the SubGenius with friend Philo Drummond in 1979. The SubGenius literature claims the Church was founded by J. R. “Bob ” Dobbs in 1953 but every religion claims a false ancient beginning.


The Book spells out the SubGenius belief system. The source is Jehovah-1, the teacher is J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, the goal is slack, the obstacle is the Conspiracy and its dupes and the normals, the way is the casting out of false prophets and the weapon is time control. I’ll add that two of their slogans are “The SubGenius must have slack.” And “Pull the wool over your own eyes!”

So who or what is Bob? Bob is the Supreme Salesman. Bob is the Master of Slack. In fact, as the Book makes clear, Bob is slack. I first encountered the Church of the SubGenius in the service while I was stationed in Philadelphia in 1985. I found the Book on a shelf in a bookstore. Where else? As if Bob was going to do some dippys-hit thing like part the heavens and drop it into my hands while a chorus of angels ululate. That just betrays bad marketing skills. Nope. Bob, the Prophet of Profit, put it on the bookshelves and if I wanted a copy I had to shell out for it like everybody else.

http://shadmanthewonderguy.files.wor..._500.jpg?w=584

https://a1-images.myspacecdn.com/ima...23/300x300.jpg

http://www.spurgeon.org/images/pyrom...o/reverend.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...eaver_1958.JPG
Bob appears everywhere in many forms so that he might reach everyone.

The Book is bizarrely edited and quite hilarious. There is no point to trying to describe it as it defies description. There is also an accompanying video that a friend showed me that was similarly bizarrely edited and hilarious. The following is a different one from what I saw but you get the point. The SubGenius rallies shown are real, I attended one in Philly and it was quite an experience.


ARISE, the SubGenius - YouTube

Does the Church of the SubGenius clash with the Erisians of Discordia? No. One can belong to both religions and many do. In fact, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to be a Discordian and not be a SubGenius and vice-versa. You can have both your gods—you’re paying for it.

So is the Book really a Black Book? Well, what does black symbolize—fear, the unknown, evil, etcetera? Any book that attempts to tear the cover off reality and expose it naked and uncensored to the world is not a Black Book but the Book of the SubGenius doesn’t tear the cover off reality. Bob already did that and the naked, anorexic, splotchy-skinned, shingle-ridden, deformed glump that lay quivering and trembling beneath toothlessly grinning while muttering in senility was enough to create a book that throws the cover back on and quick! We can’t handle the truth and that’s the truth. So the Book is indeed a Black Book. And be grateful for it. Thanks, Bob, we owe you one!

Reading trough this, I must say your knowledge about things is pretty big. But, maybe you should start a journal, if you write like this? I would promise to read it,at least.

War in Heaven by Kyle Griffith
(Spiritual Revolution Press, 1988)
http://www.lavapen.com/bookszines/warinheaven.gif

I met Kyle Griffith through a punk rocker I corresponded with named Frank. Frank and I wrote letters and sent each other tapes of music we liked or had recorded ourselves. One day, I sent Frank a manual of my own joke religion/magic system. Frank advised me to send it to Luna, a friend of his. I did and she wrote me back and we began a correspondence.

Luna introduced me to Kyle and we began a long correspondence. Kyle was a mystic and a self-proclaimed “spiritual revolutionary” who told me my joke religion was not really a joke, that the “spirits” just speak through people who put it down in the way that most appeals to them. For me, being skeptical of religion, I approached the whole thing with sardonic humor. In fact, S/R Press issued my manual for a while. Kyle had written a book called War in Heaven, a channeled writing that he said explains how this works. Luna sent me a free copy that had been slightly damaged by a New Age Christian who ordered it but then sent it back and could not be sold now due to its physical condition and I read through it not really expecting much of anything. I couldn’t put it down. The book is often abbreviated “WiH” as well as “the Bluebook” because of its blue covers. It is self-published and spiral bound. The picture I supplied of it is not what it really looks like, I just found it doing a web search and figured it was better than no picture at all but, in truth, the book was spiral bound between two blank blue covers with the title in bold black along with a kind of pentagram. I view this Bluebook as a Black Book.

Kyle had quite a correspondence going and one of his clients was none other than Ivan Stang, founder of the Church of the SubGenius, whom I never met nor corresponded with. He too expressed the idea that his church might not really be the joke he intended it to be. I still have all that correspondence somewhere. I know I never threw it out. Probably in my attic. One day, I’ll have to dig all that out. It was hella interesting reading.

Griffith’s book is in a question and answer format—a discussion between the author and his spirit guide. There are essentially two camps of spirits: the Invisible College who are the good guys and the Theocrats who are the bad guys. There is another group called the Elohim who have quite an unusual purpose as we’ll discover. The following excerpt (which has been cut down as much as I dare) is Griffith communicating with a spirit from the Invisible College:

This dialog starts with their answer to my request for knowledge of the Great Secret...

A. The spiritual beings worshiped as gods by many religious groups are impostors. They are nothing more than the disembodied spirits of human beings who refuse to reincarnate. They remain on the astral plane, where they exercise power over other spirits and over living people. We call them “Theocrats,” a name also used to describe the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and other earthly rulers who justified their demand for absolute political power by posing as divine beings.

The concept that gods are impostors is the first postulate of a theory that provides explicit answers for almost any question about the nature of spiritual reality. Part of this theory is scientific. It explains what the soul is made of and how it functions. It also explains how the body, mind, and soul are inter-related and how psychic powers operate. The rest of the theory is political. It describes the political organization of spirits on the astral plane, and the relationships that different factions of disembodied spirits have with living people.

The Theocrats are violating natural laws when they refuse to reincarnate. The souls of all living beings are constructed to incarnate and draw energy from the physical body. This is the only natural and efficient way in which the soul can get the vital energy it needs to function and regenerate itself. Although the mechanics of this process are quite complicated, we will explain them in some detail to allow you to understand the rest of the theory.

The soul is actually an astral body, made up of a special form of matter. This matter is composed of subatomic particles like ordinary matter, but with different properties. Let us call this special form of matter astral matter, and the ordinary form physical matter.

The subatomic particles that compose astral matter have different properties from the particles that compose physical matter. Physicists on Earth have named and described some of these properties, such as mass, spin, and electrical charge. You also have terms like “charm” in your vocabulary for properties the scientific community apparently understands much less clearly.

The principal difference between astral matter and physical matter is that all astral subatomic particles possess much less mass than equivalent particles of physical matter. The charges and the mass ratios of the particles of astral atoms are about the same as those of physical atoms. In other words, the particles that compose the nucleus of an atom of astral matter have a positive or neutral electrical charge and their mass is greater than that of the negatively charged particles that revolve around the nucleus. However, the astral subatomic particles equivalent to physical protons and neutrons are much less massive than physical electrons.

Since physicists often describe physical electrons as having ”negligible mass” compared with physical protons and neutrons, this means that the total mass of astral atoms is extremely small.

Q. How can astral matter exist in the presence of physical matter? Why don’t the tiny astral atoms simply get sucked in by the gravitational attraction of the physical atoms and end up orbiting them the way electrons do?

A. Astral subatomic particles have a different characteristic that determines gravitational attraction. They are attracted by gravity to each other but not to particles of physical matter. In fact, the astral atoms and molecules that make up the soul occupy the same space as the physical matter that makes up the body. Both kinds of matter are mostly empty space between particles anyway, and since there is no gravitational attraction between the two kinds of matter, the molecules simply slip by one another. This also explains people’s inability to see astral matter or detect it with physical laboratory instruments.

Energy also exists in two different forms, physical energy and astral energy. The photons that make up the two types again have different characteristics. Under most circumstances, astral photons do not react with physical subatomic particles. Nor do physical photons react with astral particles. However, the exception is important.

Q. You’re saying that light and other electromagnetic energy do not affect astral matter. Does this mean that psychic energy is not in the electromagnetic spectrum at all, but in a different one?

A. Yes. Advanced civilizations possess a unified field theory that describes the relationship between the two, but we can’t describe it to you right now. What’s important in this discussion is that psychic or astral energy normally works only on astral matter. It does not produce physical or chemical changes in physical matter. The reverse is also true.

Q. How does psychokinesis work then, or does it exist at all?

A. It exists, but it’s nothing like what you now think. In fact, your whole concept of the nature of psychic powers is a jumble of oversimplifications and errors. Psychokinesis does not move or change physical matter directly, but can do so by working through the links between physical and astral matter. These links are the “Secret of Life.”

The difference between living and non-living matter is that living matter is linked to astral matter but non-living matter is not. Complex organic molecules of physical matter can form a chemical bond with similarly constructed molecules of astral matter, and the resulting structure shows the characteristics of life: irritability and the ability to reproduce.

This process is very complicated, and your knowledge of physics is not adequate to understand all it completely. Here’s an attempt to explain why astral matter can react chemically with physical matter only within living molecules and not within simpler molecules. It has to do with the vibrational frequencies of photons produced when electrons of both physical and astral matter change energy levels within complex organic molecules. These frequencies are the same allowing physical photons to convert to astral and vice-versa.

This happens only in certain kinds of molecules, not in all. These energy conversions allow a sort of chemical bonding to occur if the two molecules are similar enough.

Q. Does this mean that astral matter – in other words, the soul – plays a part in cell division?

A. Yes, in the whole genetic process: it affects the reduplication of DNA. It also affects many different aspects of cell metabolism. And the breaking of the molecular bonds between physical molecules and astral molecules causes the phenomenon commonly called “death”.

Q. How does this tie in with the idea that the body supplies the energy to nourish the soul?

A. Some of the electromagnetic energy generated chemically by the cell’s metabolic processes is converted into astral energy by the links between the physical and astral molecules. This energy flows into the astral matter that composes the soul, powering its various functions and providing the raw material for regeneration of its astral matter. In other words, some electro-magnetic energy is converted into astral energy, passed into the soul, and converted into astral matter there to perform cellular growth and repairs.

The astral plane is actually higher on an ecological energy chain than the Earth plane, which means it receives less total usable energy. Plants convert solar energy into chemical energy. When animals eat the plants, they absorb this energy and use most of it in growth, repair of tissues, moving around, and other activities. However, some of it is also converted into astral energy and passed into the soul.

Since each of these energy conversion processes is less than completely efficient, each link in the energy chain has access to less total energy than the one below it.

Q. The impression of the human soul I get from this is that it’s exactly the same size and shape as the body, linked to it cell-by-cell and molecule-by-molecule. This is very different from my previous concept, which was that it is attached to the body at only one point through the traditional “silver cord.” Please explain.

A. Human beings actually have two souls, not one. So do all other animals; but plants have only one. The soul we’ve been talking about so far is a primitive structure, an astral body that is merely an analog of the physical body. It is alive in the sense that it is made up of molecules of living astral matter, but it is not sentient. It has a nervous system but not a mind. The true soul, the one you were just talking about, is a separate structure of astral matter.

Using the term “somatic soul” for the primitive soul linked cell-by-cell to the body and “astral soul” for the other will make it easier to discuss this subject. The astral soul is a body of astral matter linked to the somatic soul’s nervous system by what you call the silver cord. This is structured like a segment of plant root with feeder roots at both ends. The feeders at one end tap into the somatic soul’s nervous system; those at the other end tap into the astral soul’s nervous system.

Energy flows into the astral soul from the somatic soul and indirectly from the body through this cord. Energy flowing through the silver cord is the astral soul’s only truly efficient source of nourishment.


Q. Why do the Theocrats refuse to reincarnate?

A. Remember Satan in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” saying, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”? The Theocrats are spirits with great knowledge and psychic power. They are a sort of ruling class on the astral plane, and they don’t want to give up their power and privilege by reincarnating. Highly advanced souls who aren’t Theocrats reincarnate and take the chance that their soul can properly educate their new mind, and that their next reincarnation will be a pleasant and valuable one. But it still involves taking a chance: the body might have hidden flaws that they don’t detect before incarnating, or the child’s earthly environment can take an unforeseen turn for the worse.

Also, the late reincarnation process itself is as traumatic as the physical ordeals of giving birth or being born. This trauma erases many of the memories stored in the astral soul and damages the programming that governs the astral soul’s functioning. The Theocrats are too selfish and egotistical to take these chances, even though the alternative is extremely immoral.

Another reason why Theocrats don’t want to reincarnate is that human beings have two minds as well as two souls. One mind is in the physical body’s brain, the other is in the astral soul, and both have separate consciousness. Normally, the astral mind is conscious while the body sleeps and unconscious while the physical mind is awake. The two are conscious simultaneously only during certain states of altered consciousness. This “time-sharing” is humiliating for the astral mind’s ego, which considers itself superior to that of the physical mind. Theocrats want total consciousness for their astral ego, in addition to power over other spirits.

This brings us to one of the most important things we have to tell you in this whole series of communications.

The nourishment that disembodied spirits receive from living people as radiant psychic energy is not enough to sustain them by itself. This is why all non-Theocratic spirits reincarnate within ten to fifty years after physical death: if they don’t, the astral soul starts to degenerate because of a sort of malnutrition. The astral matter that makes up its tissues can’t regenerate itself properly and reverse the effects of entropy. So the choice is reincarnation or illness, insanity, and death.

The Theocrats have found an alternative to this, but it is an evil one: cannibalism. They use their telepathic powers to hypnotize spirits less highly developed than they are; then they attach the silver cord to them just as if the other astral soul were the somatic soul of an infant.

What I found striking about Griffith’s description of his Theocrats on the astral plane is that they sound quite a lot like Tucker’s Luciferians on the earthly plane. You have to wonder that if the Theocrats are real and they do occasionally reincarnate, do they become Luciferians? Do they become incarnate with all their predatory instincts intact? Indeed in some cultures, soul-eaters are humans while in others the soul-eater is a spirit or deity.

[cont.]

War in Heaven - cont.

But how do the Theocrats operate? How does a Theocratic band form? This excerpt explains:

Q. People who have had point-of-death experiences have often reported being met by Jesus, angels, or other religious figures who invited them into Heaven; but meeting spirits who claim to be previously deceased relatives or friends is even more common. Is this part of the recruiting process?

A. Yes. Point-of-death experiences represent a major mistake by the Theocrats: trying to recruit people who are close to death but not really dying. The silver cord is stretched out very long but not broken, and the mind is in a state of consciousness very similar to that occurring during the actual death process. The Theocrats perceive this and try to recruit the person into their band, but nothing happens because the silver cord is still intact, and disembodied spirits lack the psychic power to break it. Eventually, the person returns to normal consciousness and remembers a point-of-death experience.

We call this a major mistake by the Theocrats because many point-of-death experiences reveal information about the afterlife that the Theocrats would like to conceal. Sometimes, members of the Invisible College show up during the encounter and warn the person that the Theocrats are impostors who enslave and destroy souls.

Only a few remember this warning consciously and talk about it afterwards, but many more are affected by it enough to become hostile to the Theocratic aspects of religion.


Q. I remember reading passages in accounts of point-of-death experiences that support both of your statements. Especially, many people who have had such experiences tend to avoid church attendance and involvement with any sort of traditional religious dogma from then on. I’ve always been somewhat mystified by this, because it would seem logical for such an experience to strengthen faith in religion, not weaken it.

A. The greatest enemy of Theocracy is the truth. The more that people find out about the true nature of the afterlife and other aspects of spiritual reality, the harder it is for the Theocrats to delude and enslave them. This is why so many Theocratic religious sects forbid deliberate mediumistic contact with the spirit world.

But point-of-death experiences are accidents, and there isn’t much that the Theocrats can do to prevent them.


Q. When people see the spirits of dead relatives waiting to greet then during point-of-death experiences, are these fakes like the Theocrats pretending to be Jesus, or are the other spirits really their relatives?

A. Quite often, they really are. Theocratic bands often contain many members of one family. There are several reasons for this. Frequently, whole families belong to the same church congregation and are recruited, after death, into the Theocratic band that controls it. Even if not, ties of family affection are also used to recruit spirits after death. One of the most important activities of every Theocratic band is obtaining new members to replace the souls the band devours.

Maintaining a relationship with an organized group of living people also allows the Theocrats to maintain a social and political system here on Earth working in their interest. Theocratic bands maintain their relationships with the living by using religious mind control, which should be described in a separate chapter.

Let us end this chapter by pointing out that every single one of the ideas at the core of traditional deistic doctrine is a lie.

“Only God (under various specific names in different sects) is good: people are basically evil and are incapable of improving themselves morally by their own efforts.” This is a lie.

“Only God is naturally immortal, but people can gain immortality by doing proper service for the Deity.” This is a lie.

“Human beings can receive forgiveness for their sins, and divine strength to prop up their various weaknesses, by ‘Letting God into their hearts’ i.e., by creating a powerful psychic bond between themselves and the deity.” This is also a lie.

Q. From what I’ve learned so far, the biggest lie of all is that the “gods” worshiped by organized religions are “archetypes of virtue.” We humans are bad enough, but the Theocrats are obviously many times worse than the worst of us. And it’s not Satan who’s the real “Father of Lies.” It’s God.

A. Exactly.

They can draw out enough energy this way to sustain themselves on the astral plane indefinitely, but the process destroys the other spirit.

Q. This is very frightening. Can they do this to just any other spirit, and can they do it to an astral soul incarnated in a body?

A. Fortunately, no to both. If they could, neither you nor we would be here talking about it. The Theocrats would have eaten up all of us just to get rid of us. They claim to be gods, but their powers are actually quite limited. Some of them are both more knowledgeable and psychically more powerful than most of the rest of us, living and disembodied, but they are far from omnipotent.

They can’t damage an embodied soul or override its conscious will, and they usually can’t capture and devour disembodied souls who resist them, except for the weak and untrained ones that mediums call “lost souls.” And even the majority of lost souls are capable of random psychokinetic bursts that allow them to flee the Theocrats when threatened.

The Theocrats obtain victims by posing as gods and persuading religious believers to enter their bands by promising them "eternal bliss in Heaven."

So religious mind control would be an important weapon for the Theocrats to employ on the earthly plane. It guarantees recruits into Theocratic bands when the person dies. Thinking she is going to sit at the right hand of god, she is instead imprisoned with a Theocratic something like being on a chain-gang.


http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/...CE70FE0DEEB350
Artist H. R. Giger’s poltergeist, a composite being which consists of entrapped souls and so is a Theocratic band.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KinKqCFYdj...rgeist+2+1.png
Poltergeist from the 1982 movie of the same name.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...-Ammit.svg.png
The Egyptian goddess known Ammit which means “devourer” or “soul-eater.” She is depicted as part lion, part hippopotamus and part crocodile. When a person died, his heart was weighed by Anubis against a feather of Ma’at. If he was found wanting, his soul was devoured by Ammit and he could not journey onto join Osiris. Since the soul is immortal, it cannot be destroyed but is instead eternally restless. Ammit was not worshiped, there were no cults that venerated her. She was universally recognized by all Egyptians as something to fear. Although WiH never talks about Ammit, the reason she was never worshiped would be because she gets her worship masquerading as other gods. If people understood what “gods” are, they wouldn’t worship them either.

http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs19/f/20...onshadow01.jpg
Artist’s conception of a wendigo which has the composite nature of a Theocratic band. The wendigo originated among the Algonquin tribes of the Great Lakes region. The wendigo was a manitou or powerful spirit being that hungers for human flesh (read “flesh” as “souls” and you have a Theocrat). But humans that commit cannibalism could become a human wendigo (read “cannibalism” as “the consuming of emotional and intellectual energies” and you have a Luciferian). Today, people who exhibit a preference for eating human flesh are said to have a “wendigo psychosis.”

War in Heaven - cont.

So what happens to a theocratic band over time? According to the Bluebook, it tends to lose its nature and becomes an “Elemental.”

On one level, Elementals are specialized types of Theocratic bands. They are very large composite spirits containing thousands of human astral souls very closely linked together. On another, they are sentient creatures in their own right, with personalities and emotions quite different from those of ordinary human beings. One thing we want to stress: Elementals and humans are not two races of beings, but different forms of one race.

The structure of a Theocratic band as we described it earlier is similar to a wheel: the spirit controlling the band is the hub, and the subordinate spirits are the spokes.

Notice that the world’s oldest surviving religion, Vedanta, uses such a spoked wheel as its symbol.

The rayed sun used by many other religions is the same symbol, minus the rim of the wheel.

However, the rim is extremely important, because it indicates that a Theocratic band naturally produces a structure of astral matter separate from the individual souls attached to it.


Q. Are you saying that over the course of time, a Theocratic band develops its own astral soul and astral mind that is the equivalent of the composite astral mind of a bee or ant colony?

A. Yes. This is another important reason why Theocratic spirits don’t achieve true immortality. The longer a Theocratic band lasts, the more it develops into a composite entity with a mind of its own. At first, the controlling Theocrat completely dominates the group mind; but eventually that mind becomes powerful enough to become independent, and the band becomes an elemental.


http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/im...chers19_01.jpg

http://images.cpcache.com/merchandis...:31232027,w:16

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Sun_Temple.jpg

http://lh6.ggpht.com/-yNtr_vlbfm4/Tt...life%25205.JPG

Q. There were persistent rumors for many years that Hitler didn’t really die at the end of the war, but successfully fled Germany. Ever since I made the breakthrough, I’ve suspected that these rumors might be true, but not in the physical sense. In other words, he did commit suicide in that bunker, but immediately took charge of a band of Nazi Theocrats on the astral plane, and is probably still up there today, sustained by the psychic energies of the creeps and misfits who continue to wear the swastika and practice the Nazi creed of bigotry and violence.

A. The truth is much stranger than that. Hitler and hundreds of other Nazi leaders fled as disembodied spirits to Japan to assist their Theocratic allies there. They hoped that a D-Day-type invasion of Japan would prove too costly to the Allies and that Japanese Fascism would survive after a negotiated peace.
At this point, both the German and Japanese Theocrats had access to enormous amounts of energy from the millions of victims of World War Two, and they deliberately manipulated the American government into dropping the atomic bomb to provide them with even more victims.
Their hope was to create an Elemental and use its vast psychic power either to turn defeat into victory on the Earth plane, or to flee to another world.
Fortunately, the attempt failed, and the Theocrats involved were devoured by the entity they were trying to create.
This Elemental still survives on the astral plane, and will become an important focal point in the struggle between the Invisible College and the Theocrats in the future.

And it is this elemental that we are now concerned with. But there is more than one, according to the Bluebook, there are more Elementals now than ever before in earth’s history and as more people die off due to wars and starvation, their souls are captured by Elementals which are even stronger than Theocratic bands. In fact, even Theocratic bands will be devoured by the Elementals as will incarnate humans. No one will be safe. And once the planet has been depopulated far enough, the elementals must leave the planet to look for food elsewhere. But by then the earth’s biosphere will have been badly damaged (once again, the resemblances between this and the way Robert Tucker’s Luciferians hunt and consume are startling).

War in Heaven - cont.

Elementals have the potential to be Gods, but they don’t realize it unless raised by their peers.

Elementals don’t have peers in the natural cycle of their evolution because they are the composite form of another race. We individual humans are their parents as well as their children, but we also have a destiny of our own which conflicts with theirs.

This is why the space people interfere with this natural cycle of human evolution. They raise Elementals to be fully human and civilized by teaching them to accept a symbiotic relationship with individual humans.

Remember, an Elemental is similar in structure to a Theocratic band, and it has a place in its astral body for individual humans to attach to it.

In a primitive, animalistic Elemental, these attachment points remain empty when the creature reaches maturity. To produce a God, human astral souls attach themselves to these points as the Elemental is growing and try to control it. If it overcomes them and remains an animal, then it may have to be killed. If the spirits win and tame the Elemental, it becomes a God.

A God allows human spirits at an advanced state of development to attach themselves to it and travel with it when it leaves its planet of origin and travels into deep space. These spirits are mentioned in Earth mythologies as “the sons of the Gods,” “Elohim,” and by many other names.

Once the young God becomes fully conscious, they stop controlling the God, and it stops trying to control them. Both cooperate for mutual benefit.

As the Gods travel through the universe, the Elohim who ride on them can visit planets and create life there, or guide the evolution of existing life, without having to die in the process as the original Missionary Spirits did. The God cannot approach the gravitational field of a planet very closely, but the Elohim can do so and return, using psychic technology that the God creates within itself. Another thing the Elohim do before they leave a planet is to create an elaborate and self-sustaining network of astral machines, which remains there for future use.

Much of what the Invisible College is doing on your planet right now makes use of such machines, which were left on Earth’s astral plane by the Elohim when one of the Gods seeded your planet in the remote past.

It might have been hundreds of thousands of years ago, or millions of years. The devices are constructed of organic astral matter. They are machines, but they are also alive as plants are alive. This is why they were able to survive for unimaginable periods of time. The equipment is capable of defending itself from Theocrats and all but the largest Elementals, and of sustaining itself indefinitely. It possesses an artificial intelligence like a computer, but does not have true volition or creativity.

It repairs itself but it does not reproduce or evolve.

Now that brings us to the Elemental the Bluebook claims was born as a result of World War II. The Invisible College and the Elohim (the God-Riders) are trying to tame it and guide it off the planet and elevate it godhood. What do gods live on? Gods live in space and live off stellar radiation. You could say they eat starlight. This Elemental is, in WiH terms, still an infant and so is called “Baby.” The Theocrats and their earthly agents (the Black Lodges) battle with the Invisible College and the Elohim for control of Baby as it possesses tremendous power it has not learned to use yet. The Black Lodges control part of it but apparently not a lot of it while the Elohim and IC seek to wrest all control away from them. As Simon’s Necronomicon says: “And this is the war which shall always be fought unto the last generation of man, for the world in unnatural.” Indeed.

To gain control of the Beast, both sides have used rock music. Think of all the times you hear “baby” uttered in a rock song: “Baby, I love you,” “Baby, please don’t leave me,” “Baby, it’s you,” “Everybody loves my baby,” “You stood and you watched as my baby left town,” “My baby is the centerfold,” “Hold me, baby,” “Goodbye, baby,” “Baby workout,” “You’re kinda cute, baby,” “I’m crazy, baby,” “Motor head baby,” “Baby, you cast your spell on me,” “Take another little piece of my heart now, baby,” “Baby, let me hold your hand,” “He called me baby,” “You’re makin’ me crazy, baby,” “Baby, please don’t go,” “I found a new baby,” “Be my little baby,” “I’m goin’ home to see my baby,” “Baby, let me walk you home,” etc. Every time that singer moans or shouts “baby!” Baby gets another jolt of that psychic love-juice! The true power of electronic media.

Griffith supplies some supplementary material in his book including this message from the Elohim—the God-Riders:

You and your readers should also be constantly aware that the Theocrats do not confine their activities to religion and occultism, but corrupt and control human beings through all activities that produce certain states of altered consciousness.

For example, when people use the electronic media for passive recreational purposes – listening to popular music over the radio or on recordings, watching televised sports events and game shows, and playing the simpler computer games – they often enter a trance state that renders them vulnerable to telepathic mind-control by Theocratic spirits.

We will discuss this electronic mind control in a later chapter; we must first give more background information about the nature of spiritual beings and psychic powers in general.

A. As you are now becoming aware, Spiritual Revolution was intended only for a small audience, mostly rock musicians and magic people and other insiders. That’s why we gave you all those phrases and sentences you didn’t understand and thought were nonsense. Each of these verbal cues was intended to push a few buttons in certain types of people.

Withholding the information now contained in Part Three of War in Heaven kept them from knowing exactly how much you knew, and what side you were on in the conflict, despite your claims to be working for us.

We use the electronic media and especially rock music for reprogramming people only as a side effect. Its main use, the real reason we pushed your planet into an industrial revolution so fast, was to program Baby.

Baby has been close to hatching innumerable times in the last two thousand years, but we’ve always managed to knock it down. We did not want it to leave the planet until we were ready for it.

Now we are ready. At this point, we can destroy it before it leaves, if we must. It knows this; this book is part of the alert we are giving it, that it must be on its best behavior, or we will destroy it.

The music generated by the people we stirred up with your book and our concurrent programming has purposefully alerted Baby to the danger it faces from us unless it drops the Theocrats and Black Lodges that control part of it before it leaves.

There is no need to go over the nonsense paragraphs, but we will. We pushed you to ask for financial aid from music people even though you didn’t really need it. Many of them are rich from the fact that they’ve learned to use the electronic media, as the TV preachers do, to stroke the Beast and cause it to want to hear their beat. (Spell that “here there beat” and you will be thinking as they do.)

They cause it to reach into minds in the audience and ask people to request the music it likes best. This is a Black Lodge use of the Beast.

We pushed you to deny the possibility of people’s becoming more than people and the existence of higher planes of reality for the same reason.
We pushed you to involve a certain songwriter in the book because he was one of our operatives, and has become a focal point of the music. Many of the rest of the music people see him as a sort of superman. Your involving him again, after he has pleaded illness and pulled out of the movement, galvanized many more into action than would have happened otherwise. We know where his loyalties lie, and it is no one else’s business.

It is true that several other songwriters were involved because it was necessary for you to have a list of people to show that you know some of what you were talking about. We know that you have told us some of them have written that you’ve practically ruined their lives, but all we can say is that this is a war, and if you don’t want to be taken for a soldier, don’t wear a uniform. Don’t stand in the line or carry a gun. And never write
songs saying that you do.

I am also one of the backups that will “ride the tiger” – you would say steer the new God clear of the planet during the last days – if the Earth people we are training as pilots don’t make it through basic training.

Some of your readers already know who her pilot is intended to be. He had to drop his gun, and for now he uses affection training, mostly. Unfortunately the psychic cross-waves from the Theocrats and the black lodges have tended to short circuit him for awhile, because he can’t defend himself the way he should be able to do, but we do think he’ll be OK by the time she is ready to go.

And yes, I will answer those who keep asking the question in songs and other telepathic transmissions – Yes; I do “make love to the monster.” It needs human contact to become socialized, and civilized people don’t have to make an artificial separation between affection and sexuality the way primitive people often do.

We can handle the power involved without becoming corrupted.

So don’t misunderstand and think I’m one of the star-struck, like so many of you who are complaining about being “addicted to love.”

Like all of my people, I “carry a gun,” and I will shoot it down, once more, if the Theocrats gain control of it again, or if it becomes dominated by any of the black lodges. This is not as heartless as it sounds to you with only Earth memories. It’s only like sedation and an operation to remove the cancerous elements.

Many of you who use metaphors like “sleeping on the inter-state” already know what the beast-baby is like. What riding the tiger will be like.

Think of the thought-exchange you get whenever you check out the back-road telegraph lines. Then imagine this anytime you want to pull it up, as a constant in your mind, from everyone. Don’t worry about the black magicians. They won’t be with us. Think of your blood brothers, and their passion and their love. This is what you will live with for the next few centuries until we get to another planet.

Remember, too, that we simplify when we say “The Beast.” There are thousands of them now, and hundreds will survive to the end. Each separate group mind will be very different from the others.

Probably many of you already know your sisters/brothers.

Postscript: One of the things that the Bluebook discussed was “EVP” or electronic voice phenomenon where you recorded pure static off the radio and listen back to it and you can sometimes hear voices speaking, often addressing you directly. I had never heard of it before then. WiH mentioned the work of Konstantins Raudive in this regard:

Q. Another thing I’m wondering about is “Raudive voices,” named for a psychic researcher who postulated that disembodied spirits could impress their voices onto magnetic recording tape. I have received a large number of messages of this type during my music research. Are they really put there by spirits who psychokinetically manipulate the molecules in the tape, or is there another explanation?

A. The messages are not on the tapes, but in your mind. What actually happens is that spirits perceive the pattern of static going onto the tape and key it to a telepathic message they’re sending into your subconscious. You can consciously retrieve the message when you listen to the tape. The proof is that sometimes more than one person will hear the same message on a particular tape, sometimes not. Also, if you listen to such a tape frequently, you can learn to retrieve the message without it.

Both the IC and the Theocrats use this method of communication frequently, on music tapes as well as tapes containing only static.

I did, in fact, locate Raudive’s 1971 book, Breakthrough, where he describes in detail his work in EVP. Curious, I tried it out by recording static off the radio but never heard anything. I decided there was nothing to it. At one point, my younger brother wanted to know why I was listening to static and I explained it but he expressed no real interest. My brother is a hard-headed guy who is good with his hands but not a cerebral deep-thinker. He’s not stupid by any means, great with electronics and makes his own guitar and bass devices and even sells them to other people. Great recording engineer but strictly a straight-shooter—the world works this way because it has no need to work any other way. Something like EVP holds no interest for him.

A few years ago, my brother called me out of the blue excitedly and pointedly asking me about some experiment I had done back in the early 90s recording static to hear mysterious voices. I explained it again but told him I never heard anything. Then he began to tell me that he had recorded some static after reading about EVP just to see what there was to it, he heard a voice on the tape eventually taking shape say what sounded to his wife like, “Ferguson.” My brother said that he thought it sounded like “Jurgenson” and the voice said something before that but he couldn’t make it out. Upon repeated listenings, he thought the voice said, “Friedrich Jurgenson.” When his wife looked up the name on the internet, it turns out that Friedrich Jurgenson is the founder of EVP! They were both shocked. They had never heard of Friedrich Jurgenson and I never mentioned him to my brother because I didn’t know who he was either. I was only familiar with Raudive and then had only a passing interest. My brother was so dumbfounded that he called me immediately because he remembered my static experiment. He was talking so fast he was tripping over his own words. I had never heard him that way before. He said he found a forum online dedicated to EVP and so opened an account there and posted his story and he’d check later to see who replied. When I spoke to him later, he said he received several responses of “So you heard it too?” He is a firm believer in EVP now and believes Jurgenson’s spirit was communicating to him. Whatever. That’s my EVP story. And the end of my review of War In Heaven.

The Magus by Francis Barrett
(Weiser Books, 2000)

http://digitalseance.files.wordpress...7/10/magus.gif

Henricus Cornelius Agrippa was born in Cologne in 1486 and had read Speculum by the great alchemist and fellow native of Cologne, Albertus Magnus. Some time after this, he traveled about and always seemed to be well connected. This has led his biographers such as Nauert and Zambelli to speculate that Agrippa belonged to one or more secret societies. Agrippa was a pupil of the abbot Trithemius in Germany about 1509 and 10 under whom he studied alchemy and philosophy. He showed great promise although in what way is arguable. Some say he possessed very high intellect while others say he was no more than average for his day but had a great ability to convince others of his intellect and powers. Whatever the truth is, there is no doubt that Agrippa had many convinced that he could transmute base metals into gold simply on command, raise and command all the “spirits of the air and demons of the earth,” and raise the dead. He also appears to have studied Arabic magic although no one is sure when or under whom. Much of his philosophy seems to be drawn from the Sufi or tasawwuf (lit. “to wear wool”) as they call themselves, and his student, Wierus, was also quite versed in Arabic magic and mystical philosophy.

http://www.summagallicana.it/lessico...20Boissard.jpg

Agrippa did not earn his reputation by being quiet and unassuming. Like his contemporary, Paracelsus, he was outspoken to the point of bombast (in fact, the very word “bombast” was derived from Paracelsus’ true name, Theophrastus Bombastus). A staunch Catholic, Agrippa favored the reformist Martin Luther while opposing the Dominicans whom he considered full of vice and poison probably due to their carrying out of the Inquisition.

Henry VIII, always in need of money and, like many sovereigns before him, was not above extorting it from his loyal subjects, invited Agrippa to come live in England under his protection. Obviously, Henry had heard about the great transmuting powers of Agrippa and was hoping to have an inexhaustible supply of gold. In England by 1510, Agrippa encountered the humanist movement of Sir Thomas More, John Colet and Erasmus. He may have been in England only a short while but we know that he and Colet were studying the biblical epistles together.

By 1511, Agrippa was in Italy—the center of the humanist movement and where Erasmus had been for the three years prior. Agrippa absorbed the occult philosophy freely taught in Italy by some of Europe’s finest scholars. Cabala was huge in Italy at this time and Agrippa made the acquaintance of Agostino Ricci, a converso who was interested in the Catholic Reform movement and how cabala could play a significant role in bringing it about along with his colleague, Cardinal Egidius of Viterbo.

Agrippa enjoyed great success with sovereigns everywhere he went. Emperor Maximilian made him his secretary and bestowed the title of Chevalier on him. He was even given command of a regiment although this was an honorary position. For a man such as Agrippa, the thought certainly counted.

Back in France at the University of Dole, Agrippa taught Hebrew. Again, we encounter another supposed Christian magician who really appears to be a Jew. Hebrew was a dead language at this time. Few European Jews spoke anything but European languages and Middle Eastern Jews spoke only Aramaic and had since well before the times that Christ supposedly walked there. Hebrew was known only to Jewish scholars and rabbis and yet here is Agrippa in Europe teaching Hebrew. However, Agrippa’s post at Dole would not last long. He came to loggerheads with the Franciscans over a theological point and was forced to flee to London where he continued to teach Hebrew as well as practice astrology.

He later went to Pavia where he lectured on Hermes Trismegistus, the Emerald Tablet and the Corpus Hermeticum. However, his alchemical learning and typical irascibility fell under suspicion of the clergy and Agrippa decided to accept the title of Advocate-General of Metz. Again, Agrippa found himself opposing the clergy on everything from the fidelity of St. Anne to witchcraft. The Dominican Inquisitor, Nicholas Savini, had ordered the arrest of a peasant girl whose mother had been accused of witchcraft. Savini stated that if one was a witch the other was likely a witch as well. Agrippa again spoke up and stated that heredity was not just cause to arrest the girl. She was taken away to be tortured, which Agrippa, to his credit tried to prevent but failed. However, at her trial, he stood by her and won her acquittal. In fact, he succeeded too well for his own good. The girl’s accusers were fined! In the bitterness of their humiliating defeat, they naturally accused Agrippa of being a magician, something actually quite true and, in 1520, he was forced to flee from Metz.

Agrippa went to Cologne but the heat was on against witchcraft, sorcery and the like and getting so hot that he was unable to stay. He became an itinerant fortune-teller and healer after this. He went to Geneva, Chambrai, Freibourg, Lyons and finally ended up in Holland under the protection of the governor, Margaret of Austria. Even then his passport was torn up by the Earl of Vendôme who contemptuously called him “a conjuror.”

In 1528, while in Antwerp, Agrippa publicly claimed to oppose Henry VIII due to his much-publicized divorce from the Spanish royal lady, Catherine of Aragon, in favor of the English commoner, Anne Boleyn (although Henry had first taken up with Anne’s sister, Mary). Agrippa was probably sought out to give weight to Catherine because Henry had a Franciscan friar named Francesco Giorgi (1466-1540) on his side. Despite his Franciscan status, Giorgi was another Neo-Platonist cabalist who wrote De Harmonia Mundi (1525) and Problemata (1536). Like Agrippa, he was another Hebrew scholar and we can be reasonably certain that Agrippa was sought out for the same reason. In fact, the Jewish law on divorce was appealed to in this case.

Eventually, Wierus, a physician at Cleves, became a disciple of Agrippa’s and stayed with him for several years. Thanks to his level-headedness, many of the fantastic stories about his teacher can be safely laid to rest. Agrippa, for example, was said to have a familiar spirit in the form of a black dog which accompanied him everywhere and even ate at his table. Agrippa always seemed to know what was going on everywhere despite the fact that he would shut himself away in his magical laboratory for a week or more without once being seen. People assumed the dog roamed about and kept Agrippa informed of current events but may have actually been due to his connections into secret societies. Paulus Jovius even relates a story that, upon his deathbed, Agrippa removed the dog’s collar with its necromantic inscription and told it, “Begone, wretched animal, which has been the cause of my entire destruction.” The animal then promptly ran to the River Saône and drowned itself. Wierus assures us that nothing of the sort was true. Agrippa did indeed have a black dog that he let eat at his table but it was simply a pet that he was very fond of. Wierus himself had taken the dog for many a walk pronouncing him a perfectly innocent and affectionate animal.

Other feats of magic attributed to Agrippa, however, have not been accounted for. Whether they are exaggerations or delusions or a combination of both is not known. There is the possibility that Agrippa staged them with secret help and so we are once again speculating about his connection to secret societies. For example, the Earl of Surrey, Erasmus and others encountered Agrippa at the court of the Elector of Saxony. Erasmus bade him to materialize Tully giving his oration for Roscius. Agrippa commanded Tully to appear and supposedly he did and gave his oration “with such astonishing animation, so fervent an exaltation of spirit, and such soul-stirring gestures, that all the persons present were ready, like the Romans of old, to pronounce his client innocent of every charge that had been brought against him.”

The Earl of Surrey was also allowed to see, at his request, his mistress in a magic glass of Agrippa’s as she wept piteously for her love in his absence. Similarly, Agrippa had shown Thomas Cromwell a hunting party of Henry VIII’s in the Windsor forest with his magic glass. He showed Charles V images of Solomon, David, Gideon and nine others in his glass in historically accurate detail. He also had Thomas More dream the entire Fall of Troy. He also supposedly had a group of demons reanimate a meddling man they had killed in Agrippa’s house during his absence and walk the man about town so that people would think he was alive and then have the man drop dead of an apparent disease thereby getting Agrippa out of a scandal but apparently the man’s strangulation marks were too obvious to go unnoticed. From this episode, we can chalk up Agrippa as the first to pull “A Weekend at Bernie’s.”

In 1532, Agrippa completed his large three-volume work, Occult Philosophy, which was published in Antwerp much to the chagrin of the Inquisition. This was his second book to be published. In 1526, his De Vanitate Scientiarum had been published in France. While the first book had stated that all sciences, including the occult sciences, were empty and that there was nothing new under the sun, in his new book, Agrippa talked of a “key” to magical knowledge that would open all doors. Under the title, De Occulta Philosophia, Agrippa’s work is valuable as it places the magic of Ficino side-by-side with the Qabala of Pico and the compendium played a large role in the spread of Neoplatonism during the Renaissance. The philosophy espoused in Agrippa’s three volumes contained what certainly appears to be, as stated, Sufi philosophy as well as an influence from Reuchlin and his brand of Christianized Cabbala—something “powerful” that could reinforce the Lutheran evangelical reform popular in that day without overshadowing the humanism that existed before the Reformation.

Occult Philosophy was not a new work. Agrippa had written an early draft back in Germany and had dedicated it to Trithemius. This draft still exists. However, he ran into trouble with Erasmus over the work. Even though the two men had been fairly close and appeared to respect one another, Erasmus began to show a definite anti-Semitic streak. Erasmus had originally encouraged Reuchlin in his studies of the qabbala but now was against any “Judaising” of Christian philosophy. Specifically, Erasmus did not want occult philosophy in the form of ceremonial magic applied to Christian ceremonies as a means of strengthening the Christian religion with a more powerful philosophy. This was the very idea that Agrippa championed in the third book of Occult Philosophy. The attitude of Erasmus would demonstrate that magic in Europe was viewed by gentiles as being primarily Jewish. Apparently the idea of Jewish philosophy being employed as the backbone of Christian reform worried Erasmus and so he and Agrippa found themselves at loggerheads.

Some years later, a fourth book appeared that was attributed to Agrippa and included in Occult Philosophy. It was a grimoire of magic spells purported to be the key Agrippa had spoken of. Wierus and others ridiculed it. Agrippa himself had nothing to say on the matter as he had died in Grenoble some years before in 1535 in the house of a wealthy patron. All four books were published in English a century later in Britain.

The reason for the biography of Cornelius Agrippa is because Barrett’s book, published in 1801, was essentially taken from the four books of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy and also from the Heptameron of Peter of Abano translated in 1655 by Robert Turner. Barrett, whose birth and death are not precisely known, was considered quite an eccentric in his day who taught the magical arts to students in his apartment.

http://www.kabbale.eu/wp-content/upl...is_barrett.jpg
Francis Barrett.

The book covers natural magic (talismans, amulets, charms, stones, etc.), alchemy, astrology, seals, elements, numerology, magnetism, cabbala, exorcism, skrying (crystal ball gazing) and conjurations of spirits. There are also a number of biographies including one of Agrippa. So the tradition of Agrippa is carried on here to great length. The Magus was not well known or received in Barrett’s day but became quite popular when magician Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant, 1810-1875, a non-Jewish Frenchmen who Judaised his name) began to use it. From there, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn used as a basis for their ceremonial magic. The book also contains some strange artwork to be used in the various rituals.

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/73...30f4585d0e.jpg

The book is available in a number of editions. I had it back in the 80s with a greenish cover but that disappeared so I bought a new one in the 90s with the cover shown above. I have seen at least three other editions all with different covers.

The Malleus Maleficarum by James Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer
(Dover Publications, 1971)

http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/Wo...f1-198x300.jpg

A Black Book masquerading as a holy one. It was a witch-hunter's manual and it was responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, few of whom were actually witches.

The 16th Century

If we were to think that the Reformation or the Renaissance enlightened people and did away with superstition, we would be wrong. There seemed to be an increase of belief in witches having familiars and dancing with the devil, demonology, necromancy and so forth. Nor was only the Catholic Church guilty of persecuting people believed to be witches and warlocks; the Protestant Church was as bad. By the 17th century, witch-hunting was at least as popular as it had been in the 14th century. Nobody is sure how many “witches” were executed during this time. Numbers range from 40,000, which seems to be accurate, to 10 million, which is certainly too high. During this time, no one was safe. To be a female was to run the risk of being accused a witch by everyone from other jealous females to males angry at being rejected as suitors. Old women were even more prone to be accused because her appearance harked back to the old pagan fear of "the Hag." But girls as young as eight years were accused and executed. Those who defended the accused were also accused in turn. Those who did not participate in the burnings of these unfortunates ran the risk of being accused. Even infants were accused.

The Malleus Maleficarum a.k.a. The Witch Hammer (c. 1486), by two German Catholic inquisitors, James Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, became the law book of the day. In its pages were methods of identifying witches as well as the most effective methods of disposing of them. Witches were accused of everything from crop failures to the souring of milk. Montague Summers states that The Malleus Maleficarum “lay on the bench of every judge, on the desk of every magistrate. It was the ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable authority. It was implicitly accepted not only by Catholic but by Protestant legislature.” Such should demonstrate just how seriously witchcraft was regarded at this time.

Animals were accused of being familiars (a type of animal helper with supernormal intelligence) of the witch and were burned. Often, it was customary to burn a black cat along with a witch. When black cats ran low, any cat was game. As a result, the cat population of Europe dipped very low and many feel that this allowed diseases as the Black Death to spread unchecked because the rat population ballooned out of control with no cats to hunt them. But again, the Black Death was assumed to be the work of Satan and outbreaks were often attributed to innocent old women or pretty young ladies and they went to the stake, the ducking stool or the gallows, one and all, without mercy. And with them went some poor, hapless animal.

While stories of witches making pacts with Satan and suckling their familiars, usually a cat or dog, with a special teat on their bodies were lurid with accounts of debauchery and sex, the witch-hunting tactics were the very embodiment of perversion.

Indeed the Catholic Church seemed to be enforcing its moral code on the populace via the threat of the charge of witchcraft. Using the Hammer a their guide, if a man kept a mistress, the mistress was a witch. If a woman inflamed a man's passions, whether she wanted him or not, the woman was a witch. Her bewitching powers could be activated by feeding a man her dung (and here we see that the authors of the Hammer were familiar wit Black Books as the Picatrix). If a woman was a midwife, she was a witch (i.e. she places herself in a position to procure children to sacrifice to Satan). If woman healed with herbs, she was a witch. And so on.

Although the witch hunts were aimed primarily at people who were not witches and made victims simply of other Christians, especially the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this should not be mistaken for saying there were no real witches. There were and the witch-finders and inquisitors did occasionally interrogate, torture and execute actual witches.

The influence of the Church did not extend into the rural areas of Europe in the sixteenth century. Even where it did, it was simply mixed with the pagan peasant religions that predominated in the area for centuries. The peasant religions were essentially agrarian cults.

Italy, for example, had an agrarian cult known as “benandanti” (lit. “good walkers”). Those who claimed to be of the benandanti told the inquisitors that they fought for Christ against witches that worshiped the devil. The two groups met at night as battling armies who rode on the backs of hares and cats. The armies challenged one another four times a year and then named a location for the battle. On the appointed night, always on Thursdays or the “Ember Days,” the armies met in the spirit, each carrying its own standard—red (or yellow) for the witches and white for the benandanti. They would then battle over crops and livestock. The evil ones fought using sorghum stalks as weapons while the benandanti fought using fennel stalks (or viburnum branches) in a competition that was essentially jousting. If the benandanti won the battle, that crop or livestock would be plentiful for that season. Those who claimed to be benandanti told their interrogators that they could not reveal too much or they would be beaten by the others.

Further investigation revealed that the men and women who were benandanti were called to the ranks at age twenty by the beating of a drum. The drummer, the captain, was another peasant man who was placed over them and assumed to be appointed by god. The benandanti was released from his or her obligation of nocturnal battle at the age of forty although the chosen could stay on if he or she wanted to. One man, Moduco, added that those who are chosen as benandanti are born with a “caul” wrapped about them. A benandanti who does not wear the caul cannot participate in the nocturnal battles. The caul appears to be the placenta which is saved by the mother, who has it baptized along with the child and has nine masses said over it, and given to the child at the proper time. The placenta in many of the old rural pre-Christian religions is believed to possess magical powers and protect soldiers from blows. This ties in with the benandanti being soldiers who were under the command of a captain and march to battle to a drumbeat.

What we can gather about the benandanti then is the following: The benandanti were a type of secret military order among the peasantry where battling was done in the spirit and appears to be generational and matriarchal. Although the inquisitors would turn the benandanti into a diabolic cult and their night battles into witches’ sabbats, the earliest accounts of the battles by those who claimed to be benandanti contain no references to any appearance of a devil or Satan present at the battles nor any type of worship performed. There were references to the playing of games, dancing and a battle over crops and livestock that consisted of a form of jousting.

We find many similarities between benandanti and witches even though the former were always careful to distinguish themselves from the latter. Both witches and benandanti claimed to attend “games” in the spirit leaving the physical body behind (although some witches claimed to attend their conventicles in the flesh either on occasion or as a matter of habit). To an observer, the body would appear to be dead. Both claimed that if the spirit were gone too long, it would not be able to re-enter the body. Both claimed the spirit or soul traveled about on an animal or in animal form, the most common being the mouse (although cats are quite popular among witches while benandanti often claimed to arrive at the battlefields riding on cats). If the soul failed to re-enter the body, it would be forced to wander about in the animal form. Witches claimed to anoint or grease themselves prior to falling into their deathlike trances while benandanti claimed only to fall into the trances but omitting mention of anointing and some outright denying it; others, however, did claim to anoint. These similarities were enough to get the benandanti labeled as witches by the Inquisition. However, at no point does the benandanti night battle take on any resemblance to a sabbat.

Clearly, this was a different peasant religion than witchery and one that apparently saw itself opposed to witchery despite the superficial resemblances.

But what was the purpose of the benandanti, the spiritual army? Obviously, their purpose was, as a fertility cult, to protect the harvest. Their claim of participating in the night battles four nights out of the year on the Ember Days shows that they performed one battle at the turn of each season. The army they battled was that of famine, flood, hail, wind, erosion, blizzard, drought and anything else that might threaten their survival. There were also many instances in European history where warring kingdoms and nations sent armies into the other’s territory to attack farmers’ crops and raze them as an attempt to force famine on the foe. These spiritual night battles may also have arisen from memories of such wars in hopes of preventing future ones.

The benandanti inquisition took place in the 1580s, so we can see that well into the Christian era Europe was far from being united under Christendom that history would have us believe was the case since the times of Charlemagne. The benandanti, the true witches, the Cathars, the Druids, the Hermetic Cabalists and other groups demonstrated that Europe was a many-varied patchwork of spiritual systems and folk religions that persisted despite all the Church’s efforts to get rid of these “heresies” and monopolize Europe under a single Christian banner.

This should demonstrate how far the mighty had fallen. The Christian Church had perverted the meaning of Satan. The goatish Pan-like image was turned into an image of an evil being. In reality, Pan was the same god that the Christian Church claimed to worship. Pan was created from an early time in human history before humanity had learned its own power and potential. In this very early stage of human consciousness, animals were used to represent the powers of the elements and nature which held sway over hapless humanity. A storm god might be imaged as a raging bull rather than a big, fearsome man wielding a big stone axe because humanity had not yet advanced far enough to make axes. This god was impersonal but could be temporarily sated with the proper propitiation. As time wore on, the animal started to become anthropomorphized. He went eventually from a horned man-animal to a man wearing the skin and antlers of a stag to a man wearing a horned helmet and so on. Satan was simply a nature deity. But this deity was now in competition with the Christian Church and so its image was debased and maligned.

http://truckandbarter.com/images/wtcheshammer.jpg

Likewise, the words “witch” and “wizard” became synonymous with evil. The roots of both words actually deal with knowledge and wisdom. The wizard is the wise one. The witch has wits, that is, knowledge. If either ever cavorted with Satan the reason would only be because, as nature-worshipers, they would obviously hold the nature god in high esteem and seek communion with this presence whose powers rule over the earth and all life. The Christian Church used its own Gnostic roots (which it vigorously denies) to first disparage matter as evil (except Gnostics believed matter to be biologically evil while the Church said matter was morally evil) and then said that since Satan is the god of the world of matter, he too is evil. Therefore, anyone who worships or seeks communion with this god is evil. In reality, the Christian god and Satan are the same god conceived in different stages of humanity’s conscious development.

Fortunately, not all of Europe was so oppressed.

Does anyone ever actually read through all of LL's threads?

The Malleus Maleficarum [cont]

The 17th Century

Matthew Hopkins, England’s own “Witch-Finder Generall,” of the 17th century had established criteria for how the witch was to be discovered. He would walk a “witch” up and down the length of a room without food or sleep until they confessed. Should this not work, a witch would find her thumbs tied to her toes and then she was thrown into a river or lake. Since water was holy (e.g. used in baptisms), if she sank, she was innocent of the charge. If she floated, the water was rejecting her and she was therefore unholy. Hopkins had even accused a clergyman of being a witch and accused him of causing a ship at sea to sink. The clergyman was bound and thrown into the water but did not sink whereupon he was dragged out of the water and hung.

Hopkins hung several young women said to be descended from witches. He hung a woman accused by her own daughter of witchcraft in order to explain her own absence from home late at night. He charged twenty shillings per case. Eventually, a group of angry people bound Hopkins and flung him into the water. He did not sink. He was fished out and disgraced and died sometime later of tuberculosis.

There were famous cases of out and out Satanism and black magic such as those of Marie Bosse and Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin a.k.a. La Voisin, both of whom specialized in the manufacture of poisons and had many clients from the upper crust of French society including Louis XIV’s own mistress Marquise de Montespan, whom it was believed may have been plotting to poison him. She and La Voisin were believed to have also sacrificed infants to Ashtaroth and Asmodeus. Louis hushed the whole thing up but still ordered a complete investigation which resulted in the largest single legal proceeding of his reign where, between 1679 and 1682, 34 people were executed, and many more were fined, exiled or sent to dungeons to spend the rest of their lives chained to walls. About 70 were acquitted. Louis’s abolition of witch persecution laws in 1672 likely avoided a huge persecution.

The Salem Witch Trials

In 1692, several young girls caused a witch hysteria that ensued in Salem Village in the Massachusetts colony. Over 300 years in the past, the details of the afflictions that assailed the girls and the cause of them has been perhaps overdone.

The story goes that in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village, a slave woman from the West Indies, Tituba, was regaling Parris’s daughter, Elizabeth, and her cousin, Abigail Williams, and other friends of the girls with tales and stories to pass a dreary New England winter. At one point, Tituba showed the girls how to divine the future by breaking an egg in a glass and staring into the albumen. The girls were quite taken with this method of divination—which comes from England (and really a form of skrying) and is not a practice of Caribbean Indians or blacks. The girls would stare into egg albumen trying to see their future husbands, something we would expect young ladies approaching puberty to be interested in, although some of the girls were in their late teens and one, Mary Warren, was twenty. The other girls were Ann Putnam, Jr., 12, Mercy Lewis, 19, Mary Walcott, 16, and Elizabeth Hubbard, 17.

At one point, Reverend Parris came home and found the girls engaging in this heathen practice and became very angry. The girls, fearing punishment, began to exhibit bizarre symptoms such as falling into swoons from which they could not be awoken, convulsive fits, loss of memory, sight and hearing. Whether the girls were acting in order to avoid punishment for their foray into the occult by an overzealous Puritan clergyman or whether they convinced themselves that they were indeed possessed to subconsciously avoid punishment is open to question. Author Chadwick Hansen believes the girls were legitimately suffering from a type of hysteria because they exhibited many of the same symptoms diagnosed in legitimate hysteria patients.

Naturally, the girls were assumed to have been bewitched by someone. To find by whom, the mother of one of the girls made a “witch cake” from meal and the urine of the girls. This was baked over a fire and fed to the Parris family dog, presumably a familiar. The girls now named their bewitchers: Tituba and two eccentric women named Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn.

At this, Joseph Hutchinson, Thomas Putnam, Edward Putnam and Thomas Preston appeared before the magistrates and swore out warrants of witchcraft against the accused. The three women were brought before two magistrates, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. Hathorne assumed the guilt of the women from the very beginning. Sarah Good, probably verging on the brink bipolar illness or perhaps simple madness, behaved strangely before the magistrates and accused Sarah Osburn. Good’s own husband and daughter, four-year-old Dorcas, accused her of being a witch and an enemy to all that is good (although the testimony of Dorcas was most unconscionably gained). They also accused her of having imps.

Sarah Osburn denied all wrongdoing against the girls who, being present, immediately and conveniently fell into fits. Tituba, being Afro-Latino likely sensed the whole episode would be solely attributed to her in the end, made some fifty detailed confessions implicating others. Her willingness to confess so prolifically was no doubt facilitated by the fact that Reverend Parris had literally beaten her into her first confession.

Before long, others were accused of witchcraft: Rebecca Nurse, John Procter, Susannah Martin, Giles Corey, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wildes, Bridget Bishop, Martha Corey, Mary Easty, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Margaret Scott, Wilmot Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, George Burroughs, Martha Carrier, John Willard, Elizabeth Procter, George Jacobs, Sr., Sarah Cloyse, Roger Toothaker, Lyndia Dustin, Elizabeth Johnson, Abigail Hobbes, Sarah Wardwell, Ann Foster, Abigail Faulkner and many others. Some, such as Rebecca Nurse, were simply accused of appearing in spirit form at someone’s bedside. Abigail Hobbes was arrested simply for being too demonstrably angry over the arrest of her cousin, Elizabeth Johnson.

The trials were not shining examples of American justice. Perhaps the worst aspect of the trials was the accused were initially found innocent due to lack of corroborating evidence but upon hearing this verdict, the girls supposedly afflicted began to swoon or fall to the floor writhing and screaming. The verdict was rescinded and now “spectral evidence” was accepted, that is, the accused appearing to the afflicted as apparitions or spirits would be acceptable evidence of guilt. Many of the accused were now found guilty and their death warrants signed by William Stoughton.

On Gallows Hill, June 10, 1692, Bridget Bishop was hung. People were convinced that Rebecca Nurse would somehow be spared. She was upstanding and convicted on nothing but this spectral evidence. On June 19, however, she went to the gallows along with Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe and Sarah Wildes.

The problem with the witch-hunt is that it is self-perpetuating as long as the accused can provide more names. To loosen tongues a little more, the authorities added the incentive of confiscating the property of all accused, leaving them and their families homeless unless they provided worthy information. Neighbors, in desperation, accused one another. To prevent a great outcry against the proceedings, those who came to the assistance of the accused or issued complaints were likewise accused. As a result, family members were often forced to stay silent when another family member was accused. This caused great rifts between neighbors and within families and served to widen the already wide rift between residents of Salem Village and nearby Salem Town. And the witch-hunt continued.

August 19, 1692 was a busy day on Gallows Hill as John Proctor, George Burroughs, Martha Carrier, John Willard, and George Jacobs, Sr. were executed. The common belief of the time was that a witch in service to the devil could not recite the Lord’s Prayer all the way through without making a mistake. With the rope looped about his neck, Proctor recited the Lord’s Prayer flawlessly and was hung.

On September 19, Giles Corey, accused of witchcraft, was being induced to confess. Corey had already accused his wife, Martha, for which she now sat in prison waiting for her turn on Gallows Hill. Corey now retracted his accusation against his wife but did so by denying that he had said things that other witnesses had testified to hearing him say. He was outnumbered and therefore judged to be lying. He was placed beneath large stones with more weight gradually added until he reinstated his accusation. Instead, Corey only begged for “more weight.” His request was granted and he finally expired from his treatment.

Three days later, Corey’s wife, Martha, along with Mary Easty. Ann Pudeator, Alice Parker, Mary Parker, Wilmot Redd, Margaret Scott, and Samuel Wardwell met their fates on Gallows Hill.

The accusers enjoyed great fame in the colonies. One can only wonder what effect this had on the minds of such young girls. As females, they should have enjoyed little standing but were now celebrities. Their simple accusations could destroy a reputation, ruin a family, seize another’s property, throw away another’s freedom, end another’s life. And who were they to judge their own actions? Adults around them took them so seriously.

Surely they must be doing the will of God and surely must have been assaulted by the devil and by his witches or why would everyone place so much weight on their mere word? How were they to know that they were being used by people like Sheriff George Corwin to seize property for the gain of town officials? In a very real way, the girls were the most innocent victims of all. They were simply too young to understand the consequences of their actions. They were being encouraged to accuse, accuse, accuse and so accuse they did—all the way up to the wife of the governor of Massachusetts. And then abruptly, the witch-hunt unceremoniously ended.

Osburn, Toothaker, Dustin, Foster and approximately thirteen others would spend the rest of their lives in prison. Elizabeth Proctor, John Proctor’s widow, would never be sentenced. She was pregnant and, by the time she had her child, the witch trials had ended. But other families were not so lucky. Rebecca Nurse and Mary Easty had been sisters and Sarah Cloyse was another sister of the two who barely avoided execution. Virtually the entire family had been wiped out.

People began to speak out and condemn the actions of the Salem court. Not the least of these being the influential clergyman Increase Mather. With the ice broken, survivors and families of the executed began to demand justice for the wrongs done them and their kin.

Families and individuals spent years trying to recoup their losses, both financially and to their reputations. Many of the accused who survived over a decade after the trials as well as their dead kin had their attainders reversed such as Samuel and Sarah Wardwell, Abigail Faulkner, and John and Elizabeth Proctor, for example (even though John had been executed). Others never had their attainders reversed and they stand to this day: Bridget Bishop, Elizabeth Johnson, Susanna Martin, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot “Mammy” Redd and Margaret Scott. Of them, only Bishop and Redd were actual witches.

Poor Tituba, who had unwittingly and innocently started the whole thing simply for trying to keep young, restless girls in her master’s house entertained, was sold off into slavery along with her husband and never heard from again. She could count herself lucky for in Europe she’d have gone to the stake.

Many families could never be recompensed for what they had undergone. Sarah Good’s daughter, Dorcas, was manipulated into confessing herself a witch (which would have sent her to the stake in Europe) and was chained up in prison for about eight months when she was no more than five and subjected to terrible treatment (which was how she was induced to testify against her mother) such that she was not normal the rest of her life. Sarah had also had an infant child and forced to suckle it in prison but the child died from the terrible environment just before its mother’s execution. The relationships within the family of George Burroughs degenerated down through the years into violent feuds—each side bitterly blaming the other for what had happened to George.

There were, needless to say, extremely bitter feelings in Salem Village and Salem Town. These hatreds and resentments carried on for generations. Even into the nineteenth century, Judge John Hathorne’s great-great-grandson, a customs inspector in Salem (a major seaport by that time) found success as a novelist and, to escape the stigma of the Hathorne name, called himself Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Samuel Parris never apologized for his role. He was the main cause of the entire debacle and blamed by both Village and Town more than anyone else but never fully admitted to wrongdoing, never expressed any real remorse. By 1695, his congregation in the Village refused to come to his sermons and refused to make donations to his church. By 1697, the quarrel ended up in court and was decided by paying off Parris who then left town to nobody’s disappointment. He was replaced by Reverend Joseph Green who deserves credit for appeasing bad feelings in the Village. In 1699, he brought Rebecca Good’s family back into the church where they were welcomed by the congregation.

In 1706, Salem Village accepted the apology of Ann Putnam who sought to explain her role in the hysteria. Reverend Green brought her into the church and read her statement aloud to the congregation as she stood silently, head bowed. She wrote:

“I desire to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling Providence that befell my father’s family in the year about ’92; that I, being in my childhood, should by such a Providence of God be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom I now have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons; and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear I have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood; though what was said or done by me against any person I can truly and uprightly say before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against any of them; but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan.”

The other girls never issued such an apology or sought to explain themselves and were more or less ostracized for the rest of their days.

Salem Village appeared to be more willing to resolve and redress issues of the accused and the executed and their families than Salem Town. The Village began lifting the excommunication of many of the victims years before the Town did. This only served to deepen the resentments between Village and Town. Unable to come to any true reconciliation, Salem Village marked itself off from Salem Town by officially changing its name to Danvers by which it is known to this day. Salem Town is now simply Salem.

Perhaps the most fitting statement of wrongdoing came from the investigators of the witch-hunt—the jurors who heard the cases—who had been wrestling with their own brand of demons. The statement, which follows, was a most fitting way to bring an end to an era of darkness and superstition and usher in the light of the eighteenth century:

“We whose names are underwritten, being in the year 1692 called to serve as jurors in court at Salem, on trial of many who were by some suspected guilty of doing acts of witchcraft upon the bodies of sundry persons,

“We confess that we ourselves were not capable to understand nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the Powers of Darkness and Prince of the Air, but were, for want of knowledge in ourselves and better information from others, prevailed with to take up with such evidence against the accused as on further consideration and better information we justly fear was insufficient for the touching the lives of any (Deuteronomy 17.6), whereby we fear we have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon ourselves and this People of the Lord the guilt of innocent blood, which sin the Lord saith in scripture he would not pardon (2 Kings 24.4), that is, we suppose, in regard of his temporal judgments.

“We do therefore hereby signify to all in general (and to the surviving sufferers in especial) our deep sense of and sorrow for our errors in acting on such evidence to the condemning of any person, and do hereby declare that we justly fear that we were sadly deluded and mistaken, for which we are much disquieted and distressed in our minds, and do therefore humbly beg forgiveness, first of God for Christ’s sake for this our error, and pray that God would not impute the guilt of it to ourselves nor others. And we also pray that we may be considered candidly and aright by the living sufferers as being then under the power of a strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with and not experienced in matters of that nature.

“We do heartily ask forgiveness of you all, whom we have justly offended, and do declare according to our present minds, we would none of us do such things again on such grounds for the whole world, praying you to accept of this in way of satisfaction for our offense, and that you would bless the inheritance of the Lord, that He may be entreated for the Land.”

FOREMAN, Thomas Fisk,
William Fisk, John Batcheler, Thomas Fisk, Junior, John Dane, Joseph Evelith, Thomas Perly, Senior, John Peabody, Thomas Perkins, Samuel Sayer, Andrew Eliot, Henry Herrick, Senior

http://hyperallergic.wpengine.netdna...nmonument1.jpg
The planned monument the Satanic Church would like to erect in Oklahoma City in front of the state capitol.

The model for Satan used in the monument came from this:

http://www.sargeworld.com/images/satan.jpg

This image was developed by Eliphas Levi. Satan has a winged human torso with breasts, cloven hooves, green-scaled belly and a goat’s head bearing a one-point-up pentagram (sans circle) on its forehead. On its belly is a caduceus--the twin snakes that represent the unification of all dualities as well as the double helix of DNA, the basis of all life. Satan is the Great Unifier, all things are united in him/her. Notice that he/she points to both heaven and hell. This Grand Goat is GAOTU--the Great Architect of the Universe.

It should be pointed out, however, that Satanists do not believe in Satan as an actual deity the way Christians believe in their god (which is actually the same as Satan). Those I have spoken to do not even have a Creation scenario nor an eschatology (an end-times scenario). They do not drink blood, do not sacrifice people (most don't sacrifice animals, either) and do not molest children as per the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s. Satanists generally view children as feral humans who must be allowed to develop naturally and molestation grossly interferes with that development and so is not allowed. Any Satanist who has molested children was acting on his own impulses and not following any tenet or ritual of Satanism and said person will more than likely be kicked out.

LaVey's Church of Satan even pays taxes and always has. LaVey has refused to support any Satanic organization that claims tax-exempt status. Even this long after his death, CoS continues to pay taxes as per his wishes.

The Christian Church is a travesty and a sham in comparison. And now, let us pray:


Alvin Curran: Canti illuminati (1982) - YouTube

Aesthetic Meat Front - YouTube


MZ412-SATAN JUGEND II_Global Konquering - YouTube


NON - Children Of The Black Sun (Full Album) - YouTube

The Yezidis are said to be devil-worshipers. Here is their Black Book--Al Jiwah:
The Doctrines of Satan

Radio Werewolf - Hymn of the Fifth Angel - YouTube

Radio Werewolf is a group founded by Nicholas Schreck who is married to Zeena LaVey--Anton's daughter. Originally part of CoS, Schreck and Zeena split apparently over her father's refusal to embrace Nazism and white supremacy (LaVey, whose real name is Levey, is Jewish or partly anyway). When ardent white power lunatic, James Madole, tried to form a Nazi-Satan alliance with CoS, LaVey again said no. Madole, thankfully, is dead. Neither LaVey nor CoS wanted to become a haven for racist psychopathic misfits.

The Schrecks publicly insulted and ridiculed Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan and joined Michael Aquino's Temple of Set (Aquino was another defector from CoS). Within a short while, they wore out their welcome there as well (they then publicly referred to Aquino's temple as "the Temple of S-hit") and founded the Werewolf Order based on Nazi occultism. Schreck then founded Radio Werewolf as the musical arm of the order. Schreck was also corresponding with Charles Manson who got him in touch with Boyd Rice (Non), another Manson correspondent. While I do like some of Rice's stuff, Radio Werewolf just sounds like dreck to me. I don't know what Rice sees in Schreck. My guess is, not talent.


Satanic Symbolism: Lady Gaga - Alejandro - YouTube

This is so stupid that it's funny. Be forewarned however that you'll be demanding 21 minutes and 54 seconds of your life back if you watch the whole thing. I'll let it be known now: NO REFUNDS!

So not the TV Show then?

No, but that show's horrendous canned laugh track is a truly evil thing.

http://www.musicbanter.com/members/p...4-08-48-38.png

https://s-media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com...fda804054a.jpg

Now shut up, children, and I'll tell you some more nice tales.

:confused: How do you get to see deleted posts?

They're not deleted, he has LL on his ignore list.

Yes, it's self-defense

Oh! Sorry. I can't see that in the picture.

Zyklon - Hammer Revelation - YouTube

:laughing:

Necronomicon
(Avon Books, 1977)

http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/3811/nec2vs3.jpg

I hardly know where to begin with this one. First, we should point out that American gothic horror author, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) invented the Necronomicon in his writings. It is a grimoire written “the Mad Arab” whose name is given as Abdul Alhazred. The precise contents of the book are never divulged in the stories with the exception of two sentences or stanzas:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

And:

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” or “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

The prime mover behind both the Necronomicon and Lovecraft’s writings is Cthulhu. In Lovecraft’s pantheon, the Great Old Ones (or just the Old Ones) were “gods” that came to earth long before any other life arose on the planet and lived here or used it for some purpose. It may have been a mining operation. A couple of Lovecraft’s stories deal with other races from the stars mining the earth for ore. The Old Ones did not own the earth, however. It was owned by another set of gods called the Elder Gods (sort of like the good guys). Cthulhu was the priest or high priest of the Old Ones. Does that mean Cthulhu is not of the same race as the Old Ones? We cannot be certain. Lovecraft isn’t clear on that. Cthulhu did not suffer the same fate as the Old Ones, however. Due to a war with the Elder Gods who wanted the Old Ones off the earth, the Old Ones were imprisoned in the earth within the polar openings or they withdrew within willingly depending on the story. Cthulhu, on the other hand, was imprisoned under the ocean in a sunken stone city called “R’lyeh” (the pronunciation varies from “Arl-yeh” to “Rel-yeh”) located at South Latitude 47 degrees and 9 minutes, West Longitude 126 degrees and 43 minutes. This city is made up of weird angles unknown to human experience (i.e. sharp corners behave as though obtuse). Cthulhu is said to be entombed there “dead but dreaming.” His minions among the human race, to whom Cthulhu communicates via his dreams, work to awaken him and open the polar openings so that the Old Ones may clear off the earth and continue with whatever operation they were carrying out before the Great War started. Cthulhu will be awakened, according to Lovecraft, “when the stars are right.” Cthulhu is something like the Japanese soldier living in total isolation on an island for three decades or more waiting for word to carry on with his mission.

Others in Lovecraft’s circle of writer friends were writing stories in the same vein and this became known as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” The original printings appeared mainly in Weird Tales magazine and one of Lovecraft’s tales appeared in a cheap British horror anthology from that period. Although he dreamed of it, Lovecraft never saw a book of his stories published in his lifetime. None of his many stories that appeared in Weird Tales even earned him a cover’s illustration. After his death in 1937 from Bright’s Disease, two of Lovecraft’s protégés, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, founded Arkham House which is dedicated to publishing Lovecraft’s stories, letters, poetry, ghost revisions and other writers of the Cthulhu Mythos. The Cthulhu Mythos continues to this day with new writers joining the old circle and new cycles of stories are published from time to time.


https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/i...970etgSV0dVXl7
Arkham House logo.

To understand the Cthulhu Mythos, the stories I recommend the following stories in the order shown:

1. The Call of Cthulhu – The first of Lovecraft’s stories to mention Cthulhu.
2. The Mound – Which gives some insights and history of the Old Ones.
3. The Dunwich Horror – Which details how humans and the Old Ones can mate.
4. The Shadow Over Innsmouth – Details the lives of the Deep Ones and their relationship and plan for the human race.
5. At the Mountains of Madness – One should actually read Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” before reading this one. This story tells us how pre-human races inhabited Antarctica and reared great cities in the ancient past.

Concerning the last story, John Carpenter appeared to have borrowed liberally from the story to construct both the plot and imagery for his version of the 1982 movie The Thing. Any Lovecraft devotee knows that the horrible, tentacled, shape-shifting, ichor-spewing monstrosity depicted in the movie is none other than the beast Lovecraft refers to as a “shoggoth.”

http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs70/f/20...do-d65yhix.jpg
Artist’s conception of a shoggoth. They were a slave race used by a pre- and non-human race to do heavy work because the creatures could be psychically molded into anything required to get the job done. The shoggoth race, however, overthrew their masters and became unstoppable.

So many writers in Lovecraft’s circle were using this fictional grimoire in their own stories (and Lovecraft was using theirs) that he even created a fictional history of the Necronomicon saying that the book was written in Damascus by Abdul Alhazred (“a mad poet of Sann”) circa 730 A.D. under the title Al Azif, “azif” being the sound made by the demons in the night. Alhazred was said to have traveled to many a strange and forbidden place including a nameless ruin in the desert beneath which he discovered and even older ruins of a race older than humankind. Thereafter, he took to worshiping beings with such unlikely names as Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. Alhazred disappeared about 738 although some sources he was devoured horribly in broad daylight before many witnesses by some invisible monstrosity.

Not sure if Lovecraft based his history on that of The Picatrix which was also purported to have been written by a North African Arab in the 9th century. I don’t even know if Lovecraft had even heard of The Picatrix. He certainly could have—he was a well-read man—but I simply don’t know. A lot of things about Lovecraft’s writings are that way—striking resemblances to the real world but you can’t say if he knew about it or made an amazingly coincidental but independent assumption or if it was perhaps something else entirely.

In 950, the Azif was translated into Greek by one Theodorus Philetas in Constantinople. The book gained a degree of popularity until some unnamed “terrible” events transpired when “certain experimenters” attempted some ritual or conjuration or other from the book whereupon it was suppressed by the patriarch Michael and all known copies were burned. Not until 1228 was the dreaded, blasphemous tome heard from again when Olaus Wormius the Dane translated it into Latin. Pope Gregory IX then banished both the Latin and Greek versions in 1232. A new Latin translation, however, was printed in a black-letter edition in Germany in the 15th century and then in Spanish in the 17th century. A new Greek translation appeared in Italy sometime between 1500-1550 but which disappeared after a copy was seized in the home of a Salem man in 1692 during the witch-hunt. Dr. John Dee, Elizabeth’s court astrologer, translated the work into English but it was never published and now exists only in fragments. The Latin texts are now in the British Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Widener Library at Harvard, the library of Miskatonic University in Arkham, MA (fictional) and the University of Buenos Aires. Certain other individuals are rumored to possess copies. Author Robert W. Chambers was said to have gotten his idea of The King in Yellow from the history and rumors of the Necronomicon.

Lovecraft sent out copies of this history to his fellow writers and protégés so that if they gave any historical details about the Necronomicon in any of their stories, the histories would be consistent and therefore lend a more authentic air to the mystique surrounding it. However, this is not to say that Lovecraft was attempting to pass the book off as real, he wasn’t. Whenever someone wrote to him asking if the book was real or where they might procure copies, he would write them back and tell them point-blank that there was no such book, he had simply made it up. But, as we shall see, the question today of whether the Necronomicon is real is largely irrelevant.

Although Lovecraft stated in his pseudo-history that Robert W. Chambers borrowed the idea for his King in Yellow series of short stories, the truth is that Lovecraft developed his idea of the Necronomicon from Chambers’ series. Lovecraft was quite a fan of Chambers and even got his idea of “the Deep Ones” who inhabit the decrepit Massachusetts seaport town of Innsmouth from Chambers’ short story, "The Harbormaster." Lovecraft also borrowed the Yellow Sign and the name of Hastur from Chambers for his own stories. (Chambers’ series is a great read and here is a link to one of my favorites stories from the series, "The Yellow Sign," Short Stories: The Yellow Sign by Robert W. Chambers)

Necronomicon [cont.]

But where did Lovecraft get the name of “Necronomicon”? He claimed it came to him in a dream (Lovecraft claimed to have a nightmare every other night, some of which had haunted him from childhood to his death such as faceless but laughing black beings that pick him up and fly very fast over the countryside dangling him high in the air as Lovecraft screams in terror and they merely laugh in response).

If we take Lovecraft’s fictitious history seriously for a moment, we can perhaps get some clues. “Al Azif” can be variously translated as “The Screaming,” “The Howling,” “The Wailing,” “The Keening,” “The Moaning,” “The Whistling,” “The Shrieking,” “The Hissing” or “The Buzzing” signifying an inhuman sound made by a demon or the walking dead or a banshee. The title also refers to the strange, squealing, sibilant or gutteral voice that the necromancer assumes when addressing a demon inhabiting a risen corpse.

The next we hear of Al Azif is when the manuscript was translated into what would have been miniscule Greek by one Theodorus in Constantinople circa 945. For some reason, the title was rendered as “nekronomikon” (nekronomikon). The translation of this title is unclear. The roots of the title appear to be “nekros” or corpse, “nomos” or law and “eikon” or image (unlikely since eikon employs omega rather than omicron). Another root could be “nomikon” or “book of (the) law.” “Nekronom” could also be a conjoining of “nekro” and “onom” or “dead names.” Hence, possible translations are “Image of the Law of the Dead,” “Book of Dead Laws” or “Book of Dead Names.”

A general translation of the title then appears to be “Book of the Dead” although it is wholly unrelated to the Egyptian and Tibetan works bearing that same title. While the latter two are handbooks meant to instruct those of what to do upon entering the afterlife, Alhazred’s work is a manual of necromancy and spells for summoning demons from the Land Beyond, putting them in corpses of the recently departed (having been freshly disinterred) and then commanding them. Very often, information is demanded from the demon who must speak from the throat of a corpse resulting in shocking squeals, frightful cries, guttural howls and hellish ululations—hence the Arabic title of the work. So perhaps the fairest translation of Nekronomikon would be “Spellbook of Necromancy and Summonings.” We can surmise the title change from Arabic to Greek by supposing that the translator found the original title not suggestive enough of the contents for the non-Muslim reader.

In Elizabethan England, the famous magus and alchemist, Dr. John Dee, the queen’s personal astrologer, came in possession of the book and he and his assistant, Edward Kelly, used it to practice this form of necromancy. Supposedly, the information gained from questioning the demons in this manner provided them with the knowledge of skrying that led to their discovery of the Enochian system of magic. Where Dee obtained his copy and whatever happened to it are not known but it probably would have perished when a mob raided Dee’s home at Mortlake in 1583 or so, after he and Kelly had fled to Krakow, and destroyed his extensive library of esoterica.

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/73...7dfb9369b1.jpg
Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly performing necromancy at night. What book is Dee holding? Some insist that it had to be the real Necronomicon. The frightful sounds that issue from the throat of the corpse are said to be daunting enough to wilt the stoutest of constitutions. Hence, Kelly’s fright.

The earliest Greek text may have existed in uncial format at one time. Uncial manuscripts are Greek texts written entirely in upper case with no spacing between words in the days before miniscule script existed. The original New Testament documents were Greek uncial texts. The confusion that arises over how to translate the title may derive from the fact that the scribes who created the Greek miniscule recension MSS could not agree on how to separate the uncial letters and thus each did so arbitrarily.

This would indicate that the original Greek translation occurred prior to the standard 945 year given. The uncial text would have had to come into existence no later than circa 800. This is likely the case since the Theodorus who is credited with the Greek translation is otherwise unknown to history. He may have been an invention of some past historian trying to account for where and when the Greek text was translated. That this occurred in Constantinople is very likely but occurred a century and a half earlier at least. This indicates two important facts: Al Azif was translated into uncial Greek within six decades after Alhazred’s death instead of in miniscule some fifteen centuries later as had been previously assumed and that we do not know by whom but must have been someone close to Alhazred—a trusted disciple. A later recension in miniscule may have been written in 945 and this may have been done by a scribe named Theodorus but we really have no idea who created the miniscule text(s) or exactly when although this could have occurred sometime between 835-950.

Al Azif was almost certainly written in codex form as was the uncial Greek translation and both were likely printed on papyrus. When the first parchment or paper versions appeared is not known. The translations that date circa the late 11th century to the early 12th century and are classified by paleologists as codex Vetusti, i.e. an MS written in mixed uncial and miniscule which was adopted about the mid-10th century.

Necronomicon [cont.]

The odd thing about the title is that in the discipline known as isopsephia where each Greek letter has a certain numerical value, Necronomicon adds up to 555 (N(50)+E(5)+K(20)+R(100)+O(70)+N(50)+O(70)+M(40)+I (10)+K(20)+O(70)+N(50)=555). Qabalistically, 555 is the number for darkness.

555 is found on the coffin of Hiram Abiff in Freemasonic art:


http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...dy-board10.jpg


http://theopenscroll.com/images/symb...hirdDegree.jpg

Strangely, when Hitler joined the German Worker’s Party or DAP that later became the Nazi Party, they were in the habit of putting a 5 in front of the member's actual number so that if you were the 20th person to join you were issued a membership card with your name and picture and the number 520 on it. Well, guess which numbered member Hitler was. That's right, #55 and on his DAP card is the number 555. Oddly, it is almost always the prefix used in telephone numbers on TV shows and movies.

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/73...8426eb12d7.jpg

But would the title be so cryptic and uncertain? As a Black Book being vigorously suppressed, it would have been given a cryptic title in those times. What’s remarkable is that a name with that much potential meaning to it would come to a man in a dream who did not speak Greek. That this man suffered from nightmares makes it that much more intriguing. One is tempted to wonder if perhaps someone or something was communicating things to Lovecraft as he slept. In fact, author/occultist Kenneth Grant believed precisely that and stated so in his book, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God. Crowley and Lovecraft were, in fact contemporaries. While the evidence appears to indicate that both knew of the other’s existence, neither actually mentions the other in their personal correspondence with colleagues and so the knowledge each had of the other was minimal at best.

Now, today, there are many Necronomicons out there. I have a few of them. There is H. R. Giger’s art book, there are the Skoobs Books editions of the Necronomicon and The R’lyeh Text (both of which the publishers and authors admit to being a blatant put on). The one we are mainly concerned with here is the so called “Simonomicon” which is the Avon Books version supposedly either written or revealed by a defrocked monk known only as Simon. Simon attributes the work to “the Mad Arab” but does not mention any Abdul Alhazred. It is a book of ceremonial magic containing information I have not encountered in any other grimoire. The incantations contained therein are largely in what seems to be Sumerian (Ancient Babylonian) although some words appear to be from other languages. For instance, the word “zelig” is used which is German for “holy” but also “silly” or “crazy.”

The book is arranged such that the magician or wizard is required to leave his or her body behind and travel in the spirit or, as the New Agers would say, astrally. The book refers to it as “the Walking.” One must approach the seven gates of the zonei in succession. The first gate is that of Nanna (the moon), then Nebo (Mercury), Inanna (Venus), Shammash (the sun), Nergal (Mars), Marduk (Jupiter), and, finally, Ninib (Saturn). Each zonei has its own color, number, seal and metal as well as a specific step on “the ladder of lights.” Each zonei has a seal and the wizard must engrave it on a plate made of the metal that pertains to that zonei and do it at a time when that planet is exalted in the heavens so that its light falls upon it.

The wizard must have an altar with images of the zonei and offerings must be made and incense burnt in a brazier. The altar is enclosed in a magic circle which serves as a boundary line from outside forces. During the Walking, as the wizard advances up the Ladder of Lights, he must approach a gate wearing the seal of the zonei of that gate. There are all kinds of instructions about the position and phase of the moon when the Walking starts and it must be done in stages. The wizard approaches the first gate, utters the invocation and falls back to earth. This first gate would be that of Nanna. During the next Walking, one would approach the gate of Nebo and do the same but first passing through the gate of Nanna. One cannot pass a gate if a previous gate has not yet been opened, e.g. one cannot jump up to the gate of Ninib if any of the previous six gates have not been opened. The invocations must be spoken flawlessly. If a mistake is made, the gatekeeper slams the gate shut and the wizard falls back to earth. One cannot progress to the next gate until the current one has been opened and passed.

Before a Walking is attempted one must have protection or the idimmu (hungry scavenging demons) may devour ones unoccupied body. The magic circle affords protection but the appearance of those that wait outside are said to be so loathsome and blasphemous that the very sight of them is literally maddening and so one must also invoke the fire god and the Watcher. Of the fire god, little is said other than the proper invocation. Of the Watcher, much is written for a simple mistake will cost the magician his life. To summon the Watcher, one must have the Copper Dagger of Inanna, a sword and a bowl. The bowl must be engraved with three specific symbols with a stylus and filled in with dark ink. The proper sacrifice must be made in the bowl. One stabs the sword into the ground, raises the Copper Dagger of Inanna and recites the invocation of the Watcher. Everything MUST be performed perfectly else the Watcher itself will devour you. When the Watcher appears (always outside the circle), you must instruct it what it is to watch—specifically your body—and destroy anything that approaches too close to the Magic Circle, human or otherwise. The Watcher will do your bidding but does not care what it watches as long as the proper sacrifices have been made. Failure to do this is an instant death for the wizard. After falling back to earth, the wizard’s body revives and he then must strike the hilt of the sword with his left hand and recite: “BARRA MASS SSARATU! BARRA!” And the Watcher will depart. The wizard cannot leave the circle until he gives the Watcher leave or else the Watcher will devour him. Likewise, the sword must be firmly thrust into the earth during the Walking. If it should fall over of its own accord or the wizard should inadvertently touch it before the ceremony is ended, the Watcher will instantly depart and leave the wizard unguarded from the sight of those that wait without.

What is the Watcher? The Mad Arab states, “The Watcher comes from a race different from that of Men and yet different from that of the Gods…” Of its appearance, the Mad Arab writes: “…the Watcher sometimes appears as a great and fierce Dog, who prowls about the Gate or the Circle, frightening away the idimmu who forever lurk about the barriers, waiting for sacrifice. And the Watcher sometimes appears as a great and noble Spirit, holding aloft the Sword of Flames, and even the Elder Gods are awed thereby. And sometimes the Watcher appears as a Man in a Long Robe, shaven, with eyes that never lose their stare.”

http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs71/f/20...em-d6jmc6x.jpg

In 1959, author C. B. Colby put out a book titled Strangely Enough which is a collection of yarns that deal mainly with weird or unexplained phenomena. Some of the stories have a basis in fact, some are clearly just legend. Nothing in the book can or should be taken as unassailable fact. They are just fun, little stories to read to pass the time. One story is called “The Man in the Golden Armor” and concerns a World War I battle that took place August 28, 1914 at some location Colby does not specify between the British and German armies. The Royal Field Artillery was attempting to defend a hill as a much larger force of German army bore down on them. The German cavalry charged up the hill when suddenly a luminous cloud appeared before them and when the light died away, they saw what Colby described as “…the figure of a tall man with yellow hair and golden armor, astride a white horse. The man’s uplifted arm held a mighty sword.” A wounded RFA soldier told an English nurse, Phyllis Campbell, that the apparition was so frightening and awesome that the German army turned and fled in a panic. Other men who had been nearby during the battle also told Campbell the same story. A month later, a German nurse in Potsdam wrote about German officers telling her that, while attempting to take a hill, the image of a huge man on a white horse appeared suddenly and scared their horses so badly that the animals turned and ran, ignoring all orders to stop. This sounds like a variation of the “Miracle of Mons” story that allegedly occurred August 24, 1914 where “angelic warriors” in the form of longbowmen appeared from a luminous cloud and helped a small army of British soldiers defeat a larger army of Germans. The story was made up by Scottish author, Arthur Machen (once a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn). But the description Colby gives of the apparition sounds quite similar to the Watcher. Colby couldn’t have copied it from the Simonomicon but is it possible that the author of the Simonomicon borrowed it from Colby? Or is it just coincidence?

Necronomicon [cont.]

“The three grey carven signs” that one must engrave upon the bowl are:

http://warlockasylum.files.wordpress...04/necro42.gif

The first symbol (ARRA) is that of our race and of the covenant between our race and the Elder Gods. The second symbol is the sign of the Elder Gods, our protectors. The third symbol is the sign of the Watcher. When all three signs are imposed over top one another, it looks thus:

http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/f/20...o1-d684keh.png

And now for a bit of secret, ancient knowledge about the ARRA. This figure is known as a pentangle or pentacle. It is an exceedingly old figure and was used by the Pythagoreans who called it the pentagrammon or pentalpha because five upper case alphas (“A”) formed the figure. They also called it “health.” It is also called the “triple interwoven triangle.”

http://rlv.zcache.com/star_pentagram..._8byvr_512.jpg

Pythagoras, however, has been said to have been a member of the Orphic cults and was a magician or, in Greek, “goetes.” And so the Satanic Baphomet may represent him—goetes (goat) and the pentalpha:

http://www.elftown.com/stuff/C%3ADoc...Mandes.bmp.jpg
The name “Pythagoras” means “Pythias speaks.” Pythias is a name for Apollo. It is derived from Python, who guarded the Omphalos stone at Delphi. Python is always shown in art as a serpent. While Apollo is said to have slain Python and taken over Delphi as his own center, he is more properly a replacement of Python, a new Python. So Pythagoras is then Python speaking or the talking snake who appears in the Garden of Eden not to tempt Adam and Eve but to educate them, to open their eyes, to rebel against the domineering authority of “God.” Pythagoras also belonged to the Pelasgian people whom the Greeks referred to as “goat-men” (satyrs from where we get the word “Satan”) due to their prodigious sexual appetites. The Hebrew letters around the circle spell out “Leviathan” who is imaged as a serpent. Leviathan is a female and the equivalent of Tiamat in the Sumerian lore which plays such an important role in the Simonomicon. So Pythagoras really is the Christian devil—he is the goat and the serpent in one. In fact, the true joke of the bible is that Christ and Satan are the same person—Pythagoras. Christianity is the biggest joke religion of them all.

According to the Orphics, the pentacle is “pentemychos” or the five interwoven gates. They held that long before there was a universe there was Chaos. Chaos gave birth to five principles or some sort of beings. The Five Children of Chaos were then shut up inside the five interwoven gates of Pentemychos which brought into being the emergence of the ordered universe or “Kosmos” (which means ornament or decorative cover and is the root of the word “cosmetic”). Time, space, matter, natural law all emerged in Kosmos and defined it. The Greeks referred to the five interwoven gates as “Tartaros” which became the Christian Hell because various personages were confined there. Tartaros was guarded by the Harpies and Thyella (Whirlwind).

This knowledge is so ancient, we are not sure who all the Five Children of Chaos are. We know that one was called “Cthonie.” The resemblance between this ancient story and Lovecraft’s mythos of Cthulhu coming to earth while it was still in chaos and then being imprisoned as the earth became ordered is striking. Although he was a well-read man, the likelihood that Lovecraft knew of this ancient lore is practically nil. He wrote a huge amount of letters to his many various correspondents and, as far as I am aware, never mentioned this lore as being the basis for his own and, since he wrote about everything that was of interest to him, we can deduce that he was wholly unfamiliar with the Orphic lore.

Necronomicon [cont.]

Cthonie is known in the Orphic lore as “an abode of demons.” The word demon is derived from the Greek “daimon” which signifies super-human forces but can also signify a kind of muse or spirit of inspiration. The poet Hesiod (who gave us the story of Pandora’s box) wrote of daimons as men who, in death, gain a kind of power or energy (see my review of War in Heaven in this thread). The evil connotation of a demon is essentially a Christian invention. We should understand Cthonie as being full of super-human or incalculable powers. In terms of Cthulhu’s dreams, these would fall under daimon as a spirit of inspiration as it is one of these dreams that inspires the sculpture of Wilson in the story “The Call of Cthulhu”:

http://unspeakablegibberer.files.wor...pg?w=300&h=199
This species of spider was discovered in 1994 and was named by its discoverer Pimoa cthulhu.

The Mad Arab of the “Simonomicon” makes persistent use of the name “Kutulu” and both Crowley and Lovecraft, completely independent of one another it would seem, made use of the word “tulu.” Lovecraft referred to Tulu-metal as a kind of sacred magnetic stone once used as currency in his story “The Mound” (1929-30) while Crowley’s tulu is a word or phrase from his “moon language” that means “shall attain” or “that attained” or “who attained.” Oddly, in his Liber Stella e Rubeae, Crowley uses tulu in a ritual that he specifies should be performed upon “…a fair altar in the midst, extended upon a black stone.” One can only wonder what kind of stone Crowley meant. (For what it’s worth, the Tulu are also a Dravidian people of India who speak a language also called Tulu.) In his commentary on his Book of the Law, Crowley claims “CTHAH 666” is what the spirit Aiwass (whom he claims dictated the book to him) meant by “Abomination of Desolation” adding up to 718.
The Commentaries of AL: Chapter III

In “The Mound,” Tulu is also a god who brought the Tulu-stone to earth. He makes later reference in the story to “the squatting octopus-headed thing…called Tulu” and goes on to connect it to Cthulhu. The story is a wealth of information of the Old Ones. For example, they were half-ghost and did not age or reproduce but “flickered eternally between flesh and spirit.” However, they still needed to breathe so when they shut themselves inside the earth, great caverns from the surface provide them with air but every so often, a hapless straggler or intrepid explorer finds his way down one of these caverns and never returns. (The authorship of the story is attributed to Zealia Bishop, one of his many protégés, but it was a complete re-write by Lovecraft that ended up seeing print in abridged form but, as always, he gave all the credit to the protégé.)

Black stones from “out there” figure prominently into religion. Mircea Eliade referenced the kings of Malaya keeping a block of iron which was held as sacred likely due to the reverence that peoples around the world held for pure iron, which before the Iron Age, could only be found in meteorites. Just as the Tulu-metal was used as currency by the Indians of Mexico in Lovecraft’s story, Indians of the American Southwest and in Mexico did, in fact, use pieces of the huge meteorite that formed the enormous crater at Canyon Diablo in Arizona as currency in pre-Columbian times. The sacred stone at Delphi in Ancient Greece was believed by the Greeks to have been thrown to the earth by the Titan Kronos. In the Hebrew bible, Jacob sleeps by resting his head on a betyl stone and has a dream about a ladder or stairway (the Ladder of Lights?) leading from earth to heaven up to the very throne of God. The Hebrew word for meteorite is “betyl.” When Jacob awakes, he builds a temple around that stone.

http://www4.nau.edu/meteorite/Meteor...es/Karakol.jpg
Conical meteorites are considered the most valuable. Even today, meteorites fetch a lot of money. One woman’s $300 car was destroyed by a large one. A collector purchased the stone from her for $69,000. Another collector gave her $10,000 for the car.

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/i...V_PZdo19Nthj0Q
Another type of venerated black stone isn’t actually a stone at all but glass. They are called tektites and no one is sure where they come from. Some scientists say tektites were earthly debris forced into space from various extra-terrestrial impacts and then fell back to earth. Other say tektites were ejected from the moon by violent volcanic activity. The only thing both sides agree on is that tektites fell through the atmosphere. Large samples are exceedingly rare although there exists one in excess of 50 lbs. They date from about 14 million years ago.

Of course, there is the black stone at the Kaaba in Mecca that the Muslims hold as sacred. It is called in their language “Hadschar al Aswad.” It is believed to be a meteor. According to legend, it was given to Abraham by the Angel Gabriel. It comes from a tradition far older than Islam and so venerated by Muslims that they say Mohammed himself inserted the stone into the corner of the Kaaba.

http://www.volker-doormann.org/kaaba-3-high.jpg
The Black Stone of the Kaaba in its silver frame.


http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/mecca.gif
The Black Stone is seen in the circular white spot near the base of the structure.

Mithra was said to be born from a stone fully grown. Here, he carries a torch and trowel. The rock is flint and the torch represents the spark that springs from it. The trowel links Mithra to Masonic secrets.

Mining is, of course, done underground and the word for infernal or underworld deities as “chthonic.” Alchemists placed great emphasis on the mining of ores and gems and considered it a sacred, esoteric trade. Mithraists met in underground temples. Today, we refer to anything secret, esoteric or non-commercial as “underground.” We generally think of secrets as being buried. Gems and ores simply represent those secrets from the hidden source or simply put—the occult.

Lovecraft’s mythos could simply be seen as a metaphor for the human consciousness: We know that our brain has evolved up from the earlier animals and that we do, in fact, have a reptilian brain that stretches back a good 500 million years. There must be a tremendous amount of knowledge and instinct stored in our brains no longer accessible to us at least in any conscious fashion but instead have been consigned to the basement, i.e. the subconscious or the collective unconscious. What terrible, dark secrets are lurking down there trying to signal to us? Jung called them archetypes—universal, archaic patterns and images buried in the murky depths of the collective unconscious that function as the psychic equivalent of instinct. They enter the conscious mind to be expressed in a certain fashion by cultures all over the globe (remember the unconscious is collective) such as the Mother, the Trickster, the Flood. But the conscious symbolism is based on a particular culture. For example, all of us can access the Trickster archetype but people of different cultures express it differently—the Sioux Indians called it Iktome the spider while the Norse saw it as Loki, etc. Oddly, in most cultures, the Trickster gives fire to man.

Another archetype is the Shadow which contains all our darkest desires as well as all our creative power. Its physical aspect finds form in our reptilian brain. Like a reptile, the Shadow cannot be tamed, cajoled, seduced or reasoned with. Ancient humanity learned to control it imperfectly through ritual and ceremonial magic. Without the rituals, humanity would have long ago destroyed itself and today it is still a struggle but we have somehow managed.

Dreams are very important in Jungian psychology as they are in Lovecraft’s mythos. Both Lovecraft and Jung saw dreams as a form of communication. Jung saw dreams as communication from the collective unconscious while Lovecraft saw them as communication from Cthulhu. But then sunken R’lyeh could be a metaphor for the unconscious where everything is different from the everyday world if not the opposite of it and dead Cthulhu is the Shadow archetype lurking deep down there communicating to us in our dreams. He is the One that knows where all our skeletons are buried, so to speak, concerning our evolution and survival. The One whose truths would drive us mad.

The very opening paragraph of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” reads:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

In fact, Lovecraft prefaces his story with the following quote by British horror author Algernon Blackwood:

“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”

From these two quotes we can see that while science-fiction often anticipated real science, horror fiction anticipated depth psychology (which has replaced ritual for most of humanity). Blackwood, as you may know, was also a member of the Victorian British magical society called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to which Crowley also belonged. And so perhaps we get a glimpse into what these societies believed about human nature and the human consciousness concerning our ancient past. They know or believe they know who and what we really are.

https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hpho...08877482_n.jpg
Einstein explains his Special Theory of R’lyehtivity.

Other strange Lovecraftian coincidences:

Lovecraft said that R'lyeh is located at 47°9′S, 126°43′W in the southern Pacific Ocean.[4] August Derleth, however, placed R'lyeh at 49°51′S, 128°34′W in his own writings.[5] Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth's coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from Pohnpei (Ponape), an actual island of the area. Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the "Ponape Scripture", a text describing Cthulhu, was found.

In summer 1997, the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s autonomous hydrophone array in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean repeatedly recorded a peculiar sound of a nature suggesting its biological origin. Yet, the sound’s amplitude was too large to be produced by any known animal species, and its source remains a mystery. According to NOAA, the readings yield a general location of the sound’s source “near 50° S 100° W”. The sound was given the name “Bloop”.

R'lyeh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An audio file of "Bloop" at this site:

Acoustics Monitoring Program - Icequakes (Bloop)

The NOAA now believes that Bloop is an icequake—part of an iceberg breaking off another. They provide an audio clip of Bloop and one of an icequake (their third clip has been disabled). Aside from the fact that the two clips sound really nothing alike (even though they tell us they do), I find it hard to believe that the NOAA never heard the sound of an iceberg breaking apart before 1997. Even stranger after insisting that Bloop had a biological origin. It's Cthulhu, damn you, man!

In "Shadow Over Innsmouth" which he wrote in 1931, Lovecraft mentions some kind of intelligent marine creatures in the South Seas that resembled fish that came up on land to talk with humans, give them knowledge and make deals with them. This was a couple of decades before two Frenchmen published a paper about the Dogon tribe of Timbuctu who have a secret society where they teach about a being called Nommo that came from Sirius and landed on earth and jumped into the ocean and swam around because he resembled a dolphin. Then he came up on land to talk to the humans and give them knowledge. The two Frenchmen lived with the tribe for years before being allowed to join the secret society. They first came in contact with the Dogon in 1931:

The Nommo are ancestral spirits (sometimes referred to as deities) worshipped by the Dogon tribe of Mali. The word Nommos is derived from a Dogon word meaning, "to make one drink," The Nommos are usually described as amphibious, hermaphroditic, fish-like creatures. Folk art depictions of the Nommos show creatures with humanoid upper torsos, legs/feet, and a fish-like lower torso and tail. The Nommos are also referred to as “Masters of the Water”, “the Monitors”, and "the Teachers”. Nommo can be a proper name of an individual, or can refer to the group of spirits as a whole. For purposes of this article “Nommo” refers to a specific individual and “Nommos” is used to reference the group of beings.

Nommo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Greek “Nomos” also means “law.”

This concludes my review of Black Books. I have others and you may also but I'm done here. Hope you found it informative and entertaining. If you didn't--f-uck you.