Few in the civil sector fully understand that geoengineering is primarily a military science and has nothing to do with either cooling the planet or lowering carbon emissions. While seemingly fantastical, weather has been weaponised. At least four countries – the US, Russia, China and Israel – possess the technology and organisation to regularly alter weather and geologic events for various military and black operations, which are tied to secondary objectives, including demographic, energy and agricultural resource management.

Indeed, warfare now includes the technological ability to induce, enhance or direct cyclonic events, earthquakes, drought and flooding, including the use of polymerised aerosol viral agents and radioactive particulates carried through global weather systems. Various themes in public debate, including global warming, have unfortunately been subsumed into much larger military and commercial objectives that have nothing to do with broad public environmental concerns. These include the gradual warming of polar regions to facilitate naval navigation and resource extraction.
– Matt Andersson, former executive adviser, aerospace & defence, Booz Allen Hamilton, Chicago; letter in The Guardian, 9 Feb 2012

As Matt Andersson indicates, the public has been profoundly misled about “climate change,” “global warming,” and carbon, three primary cover stories that deliberately obscure the truth that chemtrails and geoengineering are neither a “conspiracy theory” nor “solar radiation management” that necessitates “carbon dioxide removal.” In reality, geoengineering functions as a planetary weapon system whose effectiveness relies on a wireless, ionised atmosphere. 

My earlier books examined Project Cloverleaf, a joint US-Canada covert operation that commenced in the 1990s.Commercial and military jets dispersed nanoparticles into the atmosphere to enable an ionospheric heater technology that controlled both the ionosphere and the jet stream. Project Cloverleaf chemically and electromagnetically modified our atmosphere, soil, vegetation, oceans, long-range climate, and Human 1.0 bodies and brains. 

Before Cloverleaf, two world wars and the Korean War exposed us to chemical air assaults, nuclear fission over White Sands, New Mexico, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan; atmospheric “nuclear tests” like Operation Argus in the Van Allen radiation belts; and covert chemical warfare “research” involving aerosols over domestic civilian populations, such as the zinc cadmium sulphide over St. Louis. In the 1960s, Vietnam endured bombardments of Agent Orange, sarin, and VX nerve gas, resulting in devastation for both the environment and generationsof humans. Unfortunately, the 1978 Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD) turned out to be little more than a worthless piece of paper to evade, particularly given that the Big Pharma cartel had been placed in charge of warfare.

The Earth’s atmosphere has become a biowarfare lab and theatre. 

The United Nations Committee on Disarmament approved “research projects” that involved aerosols deployed over civilian populations, “vaccinations” administered to military personnel and lesser-known ethnic groups, and extensive post-Cold War “national security” weapons programs such as HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project. This is obscured by the “climate change” narrative designed to conceal what has been occurring in our atmosphere due to ongoing “persistent contrails” filled with chemicals, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology like Morgellons, all worsened by wireless electromagnetics. To this day, we continue to inhale this toxic mix in the name of “climate change” rather than war. 

In 2013, the US Air Force gained control of the ionosphere, thereby weaponising it.¹ Since then, the entire planetary atmosphere has been maintained in a battle-ready state as an active electrified antenna and semiconductor, all thanks to HAARP and other strategically positioned ionospheric heaters (many of which are mobile and smaller), along with the Space Fence infrastructure we call the “smart grid,” composed of thousands of miles of artificially sustained plasma cloud cover created from jet-delivered nanochemicals stimulated by pulsed high-frequency beams. This HAARP weapon system has remained secret under various cover stories since the 1990s, supported by the controlled Mockingbird media and virtually invisible wireless technology.

I wonder how Matt Andersson viewed the plasma fires induced in Los Angeles in January 2025, the microwave fires in Lahaina, Maui from August 2023, and the fires in northern California from April 2017 to January 2018?² People watched as safety glass melted at 2,500ºF on cars, alongside the melting of aluminium at 1,220ºF and carbon steel at 2,500ºF. Is this “wi-fire” what Judy Wood, PhD, described as cold fusion (the Hutchison Effect) in Where Did the Towers Go? (2005), considering that trees either do not burn at all or burn only from the inside out, and timber in guardrails does not burn while the bolts melt?

Here’s essentially how a wi-fire is set up: Three days beforehand, jets and drones strafe the sky above the target zone with nanometals, nano-sensors, and chemicals that determine the indices of refraction.³ Thanks to the network of powerlines, underground fibre optic cables, microwave towers, iPhones, and cars acting as conductors and antennas, a microwave energy field is generated, causing plasma fire to ignite as if combusting.⁴ Finally, ignition from the sky via laser/maser is signalled by the telltale shaft of blue light that activates nanoswarm brigades of nano-robots programmed to target specific buildings for burning. 

Our era will undoubtedly be remembered for significant leaps in macro and micro technologies, while the public mindlessly submitted to the US National Security Act of 1947, which protects the secrets of the powerful. We only need to recall that 81 percent of Americans lined up for injections of unproven substances to gauge how the “land of the free” is faring under public fear and mind control, whether or not we are among those still sharp enough to distinguish what is natural from what is technology-driven. 

Our self-perception as human beings is at an all-time low, considering how ignorant we are of the true spiritual nature of both our planet and our human status. The planet is seen as a “thing,” and we are little more than consumers and “meat bags” for medical and Big Pharma experiments, alongside being “wetware” to complement computer hardware and software. From childhood to adulthood, we hear no mention of an evolving human divinity. No wonder the ruling plutocracy does as it pleases with us and our children, given our naïve assumption that they wouldn’t go too far, considering they have children, too.

Across the planet, embedded in forests and GMO agribusiness land, from one 15-minute “smart city” to another, we are now connected to the smart grid that Lockheed Martin⁵ calls the Space Fence and the military refers to as the global network-centric warfare system operated by artificial intelligence, all aimed at mastering the Earth and its human domain, designed and calibrated to function together seamlessly. 

Part 1 of my book, The Geoengineered Transhuman, explains how this multilevel weapon system functions as a fundamental geoengineering infrastructure. Part 2 delves deeper into how this geoengineering weapon surprisingly seems trained to target Human 1.0, the natural human being – from magnetism to the release of ionised and non-ionised energies alongside artificial intelligence. It highlights what it means that life (bios) is under assault by being increasingly exposed to synthetic biology (synbio) and Transhumanism, all controlled by 5G/6G millimetre and terahertz waves. 

If we know how to read the signs, it’s not all that surprising that “scientists” and technocrats have fallen for the disinformation about overpopulation⁶ and view the “useless eaters” as little more than carrion. In fact, it’s remarkable how the truth continues to seep out, despite layers of lies. However, it’s unfortunate that the public often lacks the context to understand it. 

For instance, during the California fires of 2017-2018, economist Mark Skidmore from Michigan State University and investment analyst Catherine Austin Fitts, who was the former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development under former president George H. W. Bush and now heads Solari, Inc., found that at least $21 trillion was unaccounted for in the US budget, which included a significant transfer of $800 billion from the US Treasury to the US Army to “reconcile past years.”⁷ At the 2014 Secret Space Program Conference in San Mateo, California,⁸ the Dark Journalist Secret Space Program Conference in Austin, Texas, in November 2015, and the GlobalBEM conference held in the Netherlands in 2019, Fitts highlighted this glaring discrepancy, suggesting that it may have been funnelled into the secret space program (SSP) for a space-based economy separate from the American budget.⁹

Another example of the truth emerging is how we, the public today, might perceive the Dynamic Duo of Donald Trump – nephew of MIT professor John G. Trump, called in after Nikola Tesla’s FBI death in 1943 “to analyse the Tesla artifacts, which were being held in government custody” (Wikipedia) – and Elon Musk, whose Starlink satellites are operational (and multiplying) to assist in tracking CV-19 transhuman vitals. The second-term President Trump recently announced Stargate AI,¹⁰ surely a nostalgic name for a more diabolical version of the 1977 secret US Army Stargate Project.¹¹ 

As the secret space program becomes increasingly evident as an actual government line item, Israel has begun setting up synthetic SpacePharma labs under suborbital conditions.¹² This may be to avoid bioethics regulations but certainly to continue working on synbio “inorganic life” species under microgravity conditions, thus preparing for when the transhuman easily passes through the Van Allen Radiation Belts.

The final titbit of truth that reminds me of the early days of the nano-synbio forerunner Morgellons is the remarkable research into “spiderwebs” in Switzerland. Hollow manmade ‘spiderwebs’ can be filled with lethal payloads, all of which will dissolve in liquid, whether rainwater, saliva, or blood.¹³

The current three-pronged epigenetic assault on the human immune system and blood began decades ago with genetically modified “foods,” whose vibrant appearance belies their lack of nutrition, given that GMO seeds are generally synthetic. Following that, early childhood vaccination schedules have increased logarithmically and now include adults. The third and most recent delivery system contributing to the ongoing epigenetic assault is geoengineered “chemtrails” filled with Big Pharma chemicals, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology in service to Transhumanism, all of which we continue to breathe, eat, and drink. 

Up until 2020, the only synthetic biology the public had been informed about was encased in polymer filaments and was erroneously called Morgellons, a term derived from a 17^th-century description of a skin ailment. Scientist Clifford Carnicom discovered Morgellons in 1999, following the appearance of high-flying jets leaving long “chemtrails,” not contrails. Through saliva and blood tests, he found that this synthetic biology specimen was engineered and programmed to invade blood and consume its iron. Post-2020, Carnicom, along with doctors and medical researchers, are conducting live blood analyses and discovering that “gene therapies” like mRNA are filled with nanotechnologies designed to respond to 5G/6G transmissions, self-assemble, and self-replicate in the bloodstream. 

Is it possible that AI systems are already driving globalist decisions? Is there a possibility that, as David Icke puts it, an “AI sentient invading alien force” is behind not only the Internet that Transhumans are set to occupy but also brain-computer interface technology? 

The truth is that we haven’t a clue about the actual nature of nanotechnology or synthetic biology, yet both have been secretly released into the atmosphere and everything alive, including Human 1.0. Now that we’re realising our “experts” have often lied to us, is there any way out of this? Rather than debating whether gene drive inoculations are beneficial or not, we should be discussing whether we will do what we can to defend our authentic human species. Do we not owe such an effort to future generations?

Is the divine model of Homo sapiens worth saving? My upcoming book on synthetic biology is focused on this question.

Elana Freeland details these developments in her book The Geoengineered Transhuman: The Hidden Technologies of HAARP, Chemtrails, 5G/6G, Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology, and the Scientific Effort to Transform Humanity, available from here.

FOOTNOTES

1. The ionosphere, loaded with ions and free electrons, is viewed as a layer of the Earth’s upper atmosphere 80-1,000 km above the surface of the Earth. In the 2014 YouTube video “Murkowski Committee Q&A on HAARP Future,” David Walker, deputy assistant secretary of the US Air Force for Science, Technology and Engineering, admits that HAARP was created to control the ionosphere. The effective radiated power of HAARP alone can be measured in terms of billions of watts of electrical power.

2. Environmental Health News, “New evidence links heavy metal pollution with wildfire retardants,” 30 Jan 2025: “Wildfire retardant is composed of about 85% water, 10% fertilizers and a mix of other undisclosed ingredients that sticks to plants and depletes the fire of oxygen. This study cracks open the ‘chemical black box’ of the proprietary, undisclosed ingredients in wildfire retardants, according to Andy Stahl, executive director of the nonprofit watchdog group Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE), who was not involved with the study.” 

3. Necessary to wireless energy transfers in which the angle of light is reflected and refracted.

4. Read about geoengineered fires in Chapter 4, “Geoengineered ‘Wildfires,’ DEWs, and the Climate Crisis Deception,” of The Geoengineered Transhuman (Inner Traditions, February 2025).

5. Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are the two top corporations of the “military-industrial complex” that US President Eisenhower warned Americans about so long ago.

6. The human population of the Earth was more like 3.5 billion than 8 billion before the CV-19 purge.

7. See the Solari Report, “DOD and HUD $21 Trillion Missing Money,” missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-supporting-documentation. Oxford University scholar Joseph P. Farrell’s Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations: The Secret Space Program, Celestial Psyops and Hidden Conflicts posits that a hidden system of finance for a “breakaway civilisation” has been in place since World War II so as to solve the Deep State’s “triple strategic problem”: (1) Nazi survival, (2) Communist bloc, (3) UFOs – all of which lead to the secret space program that geoengineering serves.

8. “The Black Budget: What Does It Mean to U.S. Federal Budget, the Economy and You,” live.solari.com/w/50ca234a-26e0-443e-a7ce-d52029e620b1 

9. The Pentagon with its doctrine of full spectrum dominance works in tandem with the secret space program (and therefore geoengineering).

10. See x.com/soniaramos4607/status/1881873383878791317

11. The 2004 book by Jon Ronson and 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats made fun of the psychic aspect of the Stargate Project, which was a shame given how many people were made to suffer MK-Ultra-style mind control under that project.

12. “Israel’s SpacePharma is pioneering the ‘Made in Space’ revolution,“ calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3893233,00.html

13. “URGENT: Scientists CONFIRM Fake Spiderwebs Used to Deliver Biologic Payloads Were Dropped from Airplanes,” librti.com/view-video/urgent-scientists-confirm-fake-spiderwebs

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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You wanna be the next Danny Casolaro? This is not your thing. You don’t know this world.
– From American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders

Danny Casolaro developed a body of research that inspired and affirmed the work of many researchers and writers in the last decade of the twentieth century.
– Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith, The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro

Sometimes, the pursuit of truth can be dangerous. Sometimes, it can be deadly. Such is the case with Danny Casolaro, an American investigative journalist who either committed suicide or was ‘suicided’ for getting too close to the truth in 1991. 

Those who are already familiar with his story and the stories of other independent journalists and whistleblowers who, like moths to a flame, got too close to the truth and got burned (some even killed), such as Mae Brussell, Dorothy Kilgallen, Gary Webb, Gary McKinnon, and Julian Assange, to name a few, know that Casolaro was pursuing a story about a major global conspiracy he named “The Octopus” for its many tentacles reaching into the darkest corners of covert operations and government cover-ups.

Shortly after his body was found in a hotel room bathtub (more on his death in Part Two), his wrists slit in what officials claimed was an act of suicide, other investigative journalists, family, and friends proposed that Casolaro was not a victim of suicide at all but was ‘suicided’ a la Jeffrey Epstein in an effort to silence him and bury with him what he was about to expose. 

Now, a new Netflix documentary series – American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders – offers additional insights into who he was, what he was pursuing, and why he may have met with an untimely death because of it.

Who Was Danny Casolaro?

Born Joseph Daniel Casolaro, Jr., in 1947, Danny was one of seven children of a large and close-knit Catholic family in McLean, Virginia. Two of his siblings passed away when they were young, one of an ailment shortly after birth and the other from a drug overdose. According to his brother, Tony, who was the baby of the family, Danny was the apple of everyone’s eye. 

In a recent article for The Cinemaholic, Tony described his older brother as extroverted and gung-ho, yet also kind and caring. One of Danny’s biggest faults was always being late, something Tony remembers because the last time he saw his brother before his fateful death, Danny was late to celebrate his son’s third birthday. But Danny made up for it by staying late and spending quality time with his family.

Danny graduated from Providence College in 1968, married a former beauty queen named Terrill Pace, had a son named John Daniel Casolaro III, and began a writing career as a journalist, with his work appearing in trade journals and tabloids like The Globe and The National Enquirer. 

McLean, Virginia, was home to the CIA headquarters, and Danny was said to have been fascinated by espionage and had quite an adventurous streak, according to the Netflix four-part documentary series American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders. Directed by Zachary Treitz, the true crime series follows Treitz and friend Christian Hansen as they investigate the Casolaro case. It was released on 28 February 2024 to great applause and introduces Casolaro and his work to a new generation of interested viewers and those dedicated to uncovering the shadow world of the Deep State.

The series features many never-before-seen interviews with key players in the Casolaro mystery. Hansen, who has an uncanny resemblance, even plays Danny in the docuseries re-enactments.

When Casolaro began his investigative career, few knew of him. After his death in 1991, he was all over the media, but over the years that interest waned except for those who know the case and the many questions about his alleged suicide. 

The Netflixseries may make him a belated hero, a whistleblower of sorts who was writing a book to expose a global conspiracy he called The Octopus. That was also to be the title of his book, with tentacles reaching, as he claimed, into everything from the Iran-Contra affair, the October Surprise, the banking industry, money laundering, Malware, the Bay of Pigs, and even Area 51.

Danny Casolaro, an independent journalist who committed suicide or was murdered over 30 years ago, has suddenly been thrown back into the spotlight again, along with new revelations about his pursuit of truth and the cabal he believed pulled the puppet strings of so many major world events during his time on Earth.

More importantly, are they still pulling them?

The Man Behind the Mystery

This daring and adventurous writer was athletic and had a shock of wavy blond hair, giving him the look of a California surfer. He ran away from home at age 16 to hunt for lost Incan treasure in South America, then came back with plans to start a business importing corvina fish. Casolaro’s other interests included amateur boxing, writing poems and short stories, and raising purebred Arabian horses. His interest in writing and journalism would eventually consume his life and lead him to research many ‘hard’ subjects, such as the Soviet naval presence in Cuba, the Castro intelligence network, and Chinese communist smuggling of opium into the US. He also eventually wrote and published a novel titled The Ice King.

During the 1970s, he stretched his reporting wings on the Watergate scandal, then began writing about computers and computer-related technology as a trade journalist before he and his wife divorced in 1980, and Danny got full custody of their son. He wrote for Computer Age and eventually acquired Computer Age Publications, which published computer and data processing trade journals. It wasn’t necessarily the kind of journalism he longed to do, but it was a good job, and he knew his subject matter well. 

While working at Computer Age Publications, one of his IT connections, Terry Miller, told him about the ongoing controversy involving a small, Washington, D.C.-based information technology company called INSLAW, Inc., which specialised in creating and marketing case management software for government and corporate use. 

In the Netflix series, Miller states: “I was a consultant in computer contracts for 27 years in the Washington, D.C. area. I became well-known by writing a trade publication called Computer Age. And that’s how I met Danny. I felt like it was my fault ‘cause I had sicced him on the INSLAW case. And I still feel… anguish that I did that, but it can’t be helped now.” Miller had no idea then what the tip would lead to. “I told him, here’s a very suspicious case involving the Department of Justice. And he just found an astounding amount of stuff that nobody knew beforehand. It all started with the software and evolved to a much bigger story.”

Casolaro soon met the founders, William “Bill” and Nancy Hamilton, who were by then in the process of suing the US Justice Department over alleged intellectual theft of what was described as a revolutionary criminal case-tracking software called PROMIS. Casolaro would soon become embroiled in the INSLAW/PROMIS case, which went on for years and included some big players that reached far beyond the tech world.

Treitz, who described Casolaro as “an adventurer, journalist, poet, novelist, and charmer,” told The Guardian, “It’s an interesting jumping-off point for a guy who could have gone a lot of different directions. Maybe he hadn’t fully realised his ambitions in life and he had a chip on his shoulder about that and wanted to prove himself with a big story. He also had a deep background in understanding the computer industry at that time in the early 90s.” 

Treitz believes Casolaro’s computer background was a key reason why INSLAW was a “perfect storm of circumstances” because it would be a hard story for a political journalist to follow with no tech knowledge. It almost seemed as if the INSLAW story was made for Casolaro.

In the Netflixseries, Treitz follows his childhood friend, journalist Christian Hansen, in a quest to retrace Casolaro’s “metaphorical footsteps” by going over his handwritten notes, some never-before-heard audio recordings, and interviews with involved figures. Hansen had been a photojournalist for the New York Times and became intrigued by the Octopus theory ten years before the Netflix series. While filming the series, he formed friendships with some of Casolaro’s friends, many of whom were taken aback by the resemblance of the two men. 

Hansen told The Guardian that his own introduction into the deep, dark world of The Octopus came at a time when there were allegations of intelligence community involvement in drug trafficking. This was at a time when the “war on drugs” was all over the American media. “That was something that surprised and shocked me and actually kind of blew my head off. At that point, what is real and what isn’t and what is conspiracy theory is actually a conspiracy that happened or is happening. That was what made me go a bit insane for a little while.”

No doubt Danny Casolaro experienced that same disorientation when he began looking into INSLAW, unaware of the size of the proverbial bear he was poking and where it would lead him. What he first might have imagined as a scandalous story of tech theft morphed into a monster involving the US Department of Justice and some very shady figures at the helm of a massive conspiracy. 

The stuff of a journalist’s dreams.

INSLAW & the Broken PROMIS

Casolaro interviewed the Hamiltons, the founders/owners of INSLAW. They gave him details of the software their small tech company created to speed up case management for law enforcement agencies and improve tracking and record keeping. Called PROMIS – Prosecutors Management Information System – the case management software system was developed with funding from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). 

When the early version of PROMIS was released, its main users were the US Attorney’s Office of the District of Columbia and state and local law enforcement agencies. PROMIS was developed under LEAA contract, and when Congress voted to abolish the LEAA in 1980, the Hamilton’s continued to operate as a for-profit corporation and began marketing their PROMIS software to new users. In January 1981, INSLAW, which had been the non-profit Institute for Law and Social Research, became a for-profit corporation, and the Institute’s assets became INSLAW’s.

In the Netflix series, Charles Work, an INSLAW attorney, states: “PROMIS was a remarkably big, effective, powerful piece of software in an era where there were not many big, powerful pieces of software. This software could find relationships of all different kinds between cases. It really was revolutionary.”

In 1979, the Dept. of Justice contracted the then non-profit Institute on a pilot project using a version of PROMIS in four US Attorney’s offices. In 1981, having been happy with the pilot project results, the Dept. of Justice went ahead with a full implementation of the locally based PROMIS and issued an RFP – request for proposals – to install the program in the 20 largest US Attorney offices, as well as later installing word processor style versions of PROMIS into a number of smaller offices. INSLAW was awarded with a three-year, $10 million contract.

Things didn’t go as well as hoped, and there were issues with the computer software and disputes over the contract’s execution and service fees. Eventually, the Executive Office of United States Attorneys (EOUSA) accused INSLAW of overcharging and began withholding payments to the tech company. The word-processor version of PROMIS continued to pose installation problems, and in February 1984, the Department of Justice cancelled a portion of its contract with INSLAW. INSLAW would eventually be forced into filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1985.

Because proprietary rights of the mini-computer version of PROMIS and any later modifications funded by LEAA fell into the public domain, the government was given unlimited rights to the technical data and computer software that had been delivered under the contract. This posed a huge problem for INSLAW, which had planned to launch a commercial version called PROMIS 82 and resulted in a flurry of letters between INSLAW and the Dept. of Justice. Eventually, the Dept. of Justice signed off when INSLAW assured that PROMIS 82’s enhancements were paid for at the private expense of the company after its LEAA funding ceased.

Over the next year, there would be ample back-and-forth between the two entities as the Dept. of Justice battled over contractual differences, resulting in INSLAW being informed in 1983 that the original implementation contract required INSLAW to produce software that the government had unlimited rights to and that delivery of that software with any restrictions would violate the contract. Further attempts by INSLAW to delete enhancements to satisfy the Dept. of Justice and prove it was all privately funded pushed the company into financial ruin, even as there were still existing disputes over contract payments. 

INSLAW filed a claim for services appeal, but the Dept. of Justice denied the claim. INSLAW could not avoid bankruptcy filing, although the Chapter 11 re-organisation was eventually converted to a Chapter 7 liquidation. Allegations continued right up to the level of the Supreme Court, which then declined hearing INSLAW’s appeal of the earlier dismissal of their complaint.

The Dept. of Justice knew that INSLAW couldn’t withstand having payments withheld. Hamilton was upset and became consumed with the case. Then, in April 1983, Hamilton received a phone call from the chairman of Hadron, a company with connections to the Justice Department. The chairman said to him, “We wanna buy your company.” When Bill said he wasn’t interested in selling, the chairman responded, “We have ways of making you sell.” 

INSLAW repeatedly accused the Dept. of Justice of a conspiracy to steal PROMIS, which led to the Dept. of Justice’s own Office of Professional Responsibility opening an investigation into discrepancies and alleged false statements made to the Hamilton’s. INSLAW’s attorneys claimed that Judge Blackshear and US Trustee Edward White both committed perjuries. The Dept. of Justice’s Public Integrity Section investigated and of course found no proof of perjury and recommended declining prosecution.

This was followed by two US Congressional investigations, first by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which found no proof to back INSLAW’s growing list of claims. The second was undertaken by the House Judiciary Committee, resulting in a report by Jack Brooks, Committee’s chairman, after a three-year investigation that faulted the Dept. of Justice and stated, “There appears to be strong evidence, as indicated by the findings in two federal court proceedings as well as by the committee investigation, that the Dept. of Justice acted ‘willfully and fraudulently’ and ‘took, converted, and stole’ INSLAW’s Enhanced PROMIS by ‘trickery, fraud and deceit’,” according to Richard L. Fricker’s 1 January 1983 report “The INSLAW Octopus” for Wired. 

But this vindication of INSLAW would not last long.

Persons of Interest

Some of the newer evidence, in the form of statements and affidavits, used by INSLAW to make their claims and included in the report came from two particular witnesses, both of whom would play into Danny Casolaro’s ongoing journalistic pursuits. 

According to Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith, authors of the 2004 book The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro, it began with Jeff Steinberg, editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, the journal of the Lyndon LaRouche movement in the United States. 

“Steinberg had put Bill Hamilton in touch with Michael James Riconosciuto, a 44-year-old denizen of the shadowy world of covert operatives. Riconosciuto first called Hamilton on May 18, 1990, and talked with him for two and a half hours, spinning a gossamer of connections that added startling new dimensions to the Inslaw case. Riconosciuto, in hundreds of collect telephone calls to Hamilton, revealed inside knowledge of the government conspiracy to steal PROMIS from the Hamiltons. He stunned Hamilton further when he told him that he had personally modified the PROMIS software as research director of a joint venture of the Cabazon Indian tribe of Indio, California, and the nation’s third-largest private security firm, Wackenhut.”

According to Thomas and Keith, Riconosciuto revealed that part of his job in modifying the software was to create a “back door access,” also known as a “trap door,” for spying on the files of its users. 

“These users included Great Britain, South Korea, Japan, Jordan, Canada, Israel, Egypt, Canada, and Iraq – Bill Hamilton tallied the figure at ‘as many as eighty-eight countries’ – for use in such activities as tracking terrorists. According to Riconosciuto, Attorney General Edwin Meese had provided PROMIS to Dr. Earl Brian and Peter Videnieks from the Department of Justice, who had then supervised the Wackenhut/Cabazon project to copy the program.”

Riconosciuto swore in his affidavit that Earl Brian had given him a copy of the Enhanced PROMIS. This supported INSLAW’s earlier claim that Brian was interested in acquiring the software. 

Brian was himself an interesting character and no stranger to controversy. He was an American physician and businessman who graduated from Duke University and served in the Army Medical Corp during the Vietnam War. He became a confidant of President Ronald Reagan. He served as Director of California’s Dept. of Health Care Services and then Secretary of California’s Agency for Health and Welfare under then-Governor Reagan. In 1980, he founded Biotech Capital, a venture capital firm that invested in companies developing medical technology and later in news and information services. In 1988, Biotech, then known as Infotechnology, acquired United Press International (UPI), a major American news wire service.

Infotechnology filed for bankruptcy in 1991, along with UPI and another of Brian’s companies and in 1995, he was charged with fraud and conspiracy, accused of inflating his companies’ values to secure loans, drafting hundreds of false invoices and other documents to conceal company losses and help the struggling UPI, and sentenced to four years in prison.

Riconosciuto claimed Earl Brian was in charge of the plan to steal PROMIS for more nefarious purposes. Brian was an officer of the Hadron company when they tried to bully Hamilton into selling INSLAW.

Thomas and Keith wrote: “According to Riconosciuto, Attorney General Edwin Meese had provided PROMIS to Dr. Earl Brian and Peter Videnieks from the Department of Justice, who had then supervised the Wackenhut/Cabazon project to copy the program. The theft of PROMIS, according to Riconosciuto, wasn’t all that was going on at the Cabazon Indian Reservation. The Cabazon/Wackenhut venture included the production of advanced weaponry, including biological weapons and fuel-air explosives (FAX), a new technology supposedly the equal of some nuclear weapons in explosive power. Riconosciuto claimed to have been involved in the production of the fuel-air explosives in collaboration with Gerald Bull of Space Research Corporation, an arms dealer who designed the ‘supergun’, and was murdered in Brussels, Belgium in 1990.” (More on the Cabazon connection in Part Two.)

Riconosciuto said that Meese had provided Brian with PROMIS as a pay-off on a favour and alleged that “William Casey, outside counsel to Wackenhut prior to his work in the Reagan administration, had hired him and Brian in 1980 to facilitate the now infamous ‘October Surprise’, in which the Reagan administration allegedly paid the Iranians not to release American hostages until after his election. Riconosciuto claimed that he and Brian had paid the Iranians forty million dollars in bribes. The PROMIS software, so Riconosciuto said, was Brian’s payment for his participation.”

Another intriguing witness was Ari Ben-Menashe, who also provided affidavits claiming Earl Brian had both the public domain and the Enhanced PROMIS versions he brought to Israel, eventually selling the Enhanced Version to the Israeli government and Singapore’s armed forces. Ari Ben-Menashe also claimed Brian sold public domain PROMIS to Jordan and Iraq.

If Ben-Menashe’s name rings a bell, that’s because he was a former Israeli intelligence officer with Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate and an arms dealer who, in 1989, was jailed for a year, then acquitted for attempting to illegally sell three military aircraft to Iran. He also claimed that Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s partner who is now serving time in prison for sex trafficking, was a Mossad agent and that Maxwell’s mysterious death falling off his yacht was not an accident but an assassination for trying to blackmail Mossad. Ben-Menashe made the same claim in the media about Jeffrey Epstein, stating Epstein was working for Mossad to blackmail high-powered individuals by capturing them in sexual encounters with minors.

The INSLAW vs US Dept. of Justice battle would continue with Danny Casolaro’s investigation mentioned in a later review of what was called the Bua Report. In October 1991, William “Bill” Barr became the new Attorney General and appointed a retired federal judge named Nicholas Bua as Special Counsel to investigate INSLAW’s continued allegations. Eventually, in 1993, Bua released the 267-page report concluding there was no credible evidence supporting INSLAW’s claims that the Dept. of Justice conspired to help Earl Brian acquire PROMIS and that any evidence presented overwhelmingly showed a “woefully insufficient” support of the claim that the Dept. of Justice used “fraud, trickery and deceit” to obtain the Enhanced PROMIS. The report nullified INSLAW’s claims and stated the Dept. of Justice did not seek to influence the investigation into Danny Casolaro’s death and that the autopsy finding of suicide stood.

Bua was highly critical of Riconosciuto’s testimony, stating in the report that his statements in the affidavit were inconsistent with those he made to the Hamilton’s. Bua also found inconsistencies in Ari Ben-Menashe’s affidavit, especially Ben-Menashe’s later claim that he had “no knowledge of the transfer of Inslaw’s proprietary software by Earl Brian or the DOJ.”

INSLAW rebutted the Dept. of Justice at every turn, including a 130-page Rebuttal to the Bua Report, with claims that the Office of Special Investigations was, as the Hamilton’s put it, “A front for the Justice Department’s own covert intelligence service.” INSLAW’s rebuttal also alleged that “another undeclared mission of the Justice Department’s covert agents was to insure (sic) that investigative journalist Danny Casolaro remained silent about the role of the Justice Department in the INSLAW scandal by murdering him in West Virginia in August 1991.”

This was followed by another 187-page review by the Dept. of Justice, under Clinton-appointed Janet Reno as Attorney General, stating that Casolaro’s death was a suicide and rejecting INSLAW’s claims that he was murdered by OSI agents. 

Bill Hamilton firmly believed that the Dept. of Justice prioritised paying off Earl Brian for helping President Ronald Reagan win the 1981 presidential election. PROMIS was the payoff and it was weaponised as a spying tool that it was never meant to be.

The Birth of An Octopus

As for Casolaro, he was onto something even bigger than software piracy. 

Says Treitz: “In the year before he died, Danny had stumbled upon a computer software scandal that led him to a series of high-profile crimes which he said would rewrite US history.” 

INSLAW became an entry point for Danny Casolaro into a much larger conspiracy involving a much bigger entity – a global cabal he believed had been around since the Second World War, an alliance of eight powerful people working completely in the shadows that he claimed made up The Octopus. Just how far their tentacles truly reached would cost Casolaro his life. 

To read this article’s companion articles, support independent media by purchasing a copy of this issue.

Part Two of this article appears in New Dawn 205, available here.

Sources

Kenn Thomas & Jim Keith, The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro, Feral House, 2004; covertactionmagazine.com/2024/03/11/netflix-series-on-the-octopus-murders-continues-cover-up-of-reporters-death-and-cia-crimes-he-threatened-to-expose; msn.com/en-us/news/crime/the-octopus-murders-everything-to-know-about-the-inslaw-case-conspiracy/ar-BB1j7hwt; muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/may/08/fbi-Danny-Casolaro; netflix.com/tudum/articles/american-conspiracy-octopus-murders-release-date-trailer-news; people.com/american-conspiracy-the-octopus-murders-true-story-8572439; stlmag.com/Stalking-the-Octopus; thecinemaholic.com/bill-hamilton; thecinemaholic.com/tony-casolaro; theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/mar/05/the-octopus-murders-netflix; unsolved.com/gallery/dan-casolaro; web.archive.org/web/20240306190453/https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/american-conspiracy-the-octopus-murders-review-1234976986

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Former radio executive and pioneer of out-of-body-travel Robert Monroe (1915–1995) had his first OBE (out-of-body-experience) in 1958 at the age of forty-three, discovering he had a natural talent for dissociating his mind from his physical body.

By 1984 and many “astral journeys” later, Monroe and his team at The Monroe Institute had reached a mix of premises and conclusions regarding out-of-body-experiences and sleep that were highly consonant with occult doctrines, including:

All humans move out of phase with physical matter reality and into the out-of-body state during sleep.

During deep or “delta” sleep, consciousness is completely detached from physical reality.

Some form of energy enters the body prior to birth and leaves at death, taking its experiences and learnings with it.

Human and other forms of consciousness are inherently non-physical. At death (or OB), people naturally move into an ambiance and environment that resonates with the vibrational matrix of their being.

No belief system, illusion, action or thought during life in the physical can alter this basic process.

Like it or not, we will survive the death of the physical body.¹

Occultists had long realised that when someone enters sleep, “his higher principles in their astral vehicle withdraw from the physical body,” leaving the dense body and the etheric body remaining on the bed, with the astral body floating in the air above them. “In sleep, then, a man is simply using his astral body instead of his physical,” continues A.E. Powell in his 1927 book The Astral Body.²

Interestingly, the idea is expressed in ancient Mesopotamian literature, that the soul, or some part of it, moves from the body of the sleeping person and actually visits the places and persons the dreamer sees in his sleep.³ 

The Poso Alfures of Celebes (in Indonesia) believe in three souls: the vital principle (inosa); intellectual (angga), and divine element (tananoa) – the latter of which leaves the body during sleep and wanders in dreams.⁴ There are variations on this trinary theme among other cultures as well. The point is the shared concept of some intelligent principle that separates from the physical aspect during sleep.

Manly P. Hall writes in The Secret Teachings of The Ages of the likelihood that the Eleusinian initiates of ancient Greece (c. 1600 BCE–392 CE) “realised that the soul left the body during sleep, or at least was made capable of leaving by the special training which undoubtedly they were in a position to give.”⁵

The American esotericist Sylvan Muldoon wrote in the 1920s that the astral body moves slightly out of sync with the physical body each night, allowing it to absorb the “cosmic force” or prana. The farther away the astral moved, the more easily it could obtain or “condense” (implode) the ambient energy. The distance between the astral and the physical determined the depth of sleep and amount of recuperation achieved. (“Man does not live by bread alone.”) The more tired you are, the farther the astral moves away from the physical to obtain energy, hence the notion that fasting or being physically ill or weakened can assist astral projection.⁶

As sleep deepens, the sleeping astral double moves higher and higher until, perhaps, it moves away to roam the astral, acting out dream scenarios until cycling back into the physical before awakening. Muldoon also pointed out that conscious projection prevents the re-energising process – unconscious projection is needed for proper recovery in sleep. At this point in time, it is a basic need for most people in order to function healthily.

OB traveller and author Preston Dennett explains that while dreaming and hovering outside our bodies, we basically live our stream-of-consciousness fantasies. Theosophical occultism in the early 1900s held that people operate at night in the astral body, but as soon as it is mastered, work in the ‘mental body’ begins. When the mental body too becomes completely organised, “it is a far more flexible vehicle than the astral body” and can do much that the astral cannot.⁷

From this perspective, the realisation of our astral wanderings takes on a humbling new form. Spiritually, we are but at the larval stage of development, for the most part.

Dennett (like any serious astral traveller) affirms Monroe’s conclusion that we all go out of phase with physical space-time each night to have OBEs. The event that initially confirmed this for him was waking one night to find himself out of bed, standing there inexplicably in the dark. Amusingly (though probably less so for him at the time), it dawned that he was out of his body. In a wave of terror, fearing he had died, the panic-stricken Dennett dove immediately back into his body.⁸

Theosophist Charles W. Leadbeater wrote of the nightly astral jaunt in 1915:

“There are many among us who are able to perform (and do perform every day of their lives) this elementary act of magic in full consciousness – who pass from one plane to the other at will; and if that is clearly realised, it will become apparent how grotesquely absurd to them must appear the ordinary unreasoning assertion that such a thing is utterly impossible. It is like telling a man that it is impossible for him to fall asleep, and that if he thinks he has ever done so he is under a hallucination.”⁹

In the obscurely named Breakthrough to Creativity (1967), Shafica Karagulla documents an extensive range of psi phenomena, including a number of mainstream medical practitioners who were also:

“…sensitives who attend classes when they are asleep at night. These are not usual dream experiences… None of the irrelevancies appear which are commonly associated with dreams. The lectures are as precise and clear as those given in a college classroom. The individual in question receives instruction and information which is accurate and often useful to him in his work.”

 More poignantly, friends and/or acquaintances were also showing up in the same classes “who remember the same lectures on the same subjects…”¹⁰ (Emphasis added)

Shared experiences are strong evidence in favour of reality (and consciousness) being nonlocal and holographic.

One mainstream “medical sensitive” mentioned by Karagulla was a Dr Philip, who was beloved by his patients and frequently consulted by the Mayo Clinic for his remarkable insight. He had kept secret that it was “higher sense perception” which allowed him to function so effectively as a doctor. He could see inside his patients’ bodies, observe the organs and immediately detect pathology without external assistance. Within a few minutes, he could see the complete health condition of a patient just by looking at them and, additionally, pre-cognitively see the course the condition would take. He hid these abilities and told Karagulla to share the information only after he had died.

During his nocturnal outings, Dr Philip found himself in a medical college where lucid and logical lectures were given; in the morning he could remember everything that had been said in detail. In these classes, he was trained to see into the body to discern its condition and functioning. The ability translated perfectly into his day-to-day medical operations and guided his diagnostic and treatment procedures.¹¹

Karagulla’s friend Vicki was another of these nocturnal students who had spent her whole life visiting the same buildings/learning centres in her sleep. The architecture was simple but unlike anything she had seen in the physical. In the classes, the teacher/lecturer would manifest three-dimensional thought-form models as learning aids, which they could rotate and alter at will.

Vicki remembered every word of the lectures and transcribed some for posterity at Karagulla’s urging. Lectures on the neutron in the iron atom contained compelling esoteric information, which, in fact, dovetails with that in Chapter 6 of The Grand Illusion [by Brendan Murphy], where the true nature of atomic and subatomic matter and its structure is discussed.

The class was shown “a schematic model of a neutron in an atom of iron. He represented it as a spiral of a certain number of turns with the two ends of the spiral forming a central line within the coil perpendicular to the plane of the turns of the spiral.”¹²

Vicki was also able to verify the “astral” presence of a friend at one night class via confirmation over the phone. He remembered the class too, though his recall of the information was lesser.¹³

By 1985 the Monroe Institute team had tested the Hemi-Sync process with over 3,000 subjects in the previous ten years. With a minimum of twenty individual tests/exercises per subject participant, that comes out to 60,000-plus trials/tests.¹⁴ That is a lot of testing and verification of the occult tenets – and those were the numbers from over 30 years ago. As Monroe said, through this process, people come to know – not believe – they survive physical death, regardless of what they do (or don’t do) in life. For Monroe, survival was not a belief system but merely a natural fact of life.

In summary, Monroe described “the after-death state, the nature and inhabitants of the nonphysical planes, the use of common siddhis and other phenomena of an occult nature.” Monroe uses different terminology to describe it all.

“Thus, the occultist’s ‘planes’ become ‘rings’, a ‘spirit’ becomes a ‘curl’, a ‘thought-form’ becomes a ‘rote-ball’, ‘telepathy’ becomes ‘rote transfer’, and so on…” according to Donald DeGracia in Beyond The Physical: A Synthesis of Science and Occultism.¹⁵

The “rings,” DeGracia (a biochemist and OBE traveller himself) observes, “correspond closely to the septenary arrangement of planes described by occultists and yet, from Monroe’s perspective… are the ‘backwoods’ of an even vaster interdimensional civilisation.”¹⁶

A perusal of the internet quickly reveals that the OBE is global, extremely common, and 99.9% of the time, encountered by well-adjusted, intelligent people. I know of many such people who have had OBEs and other related phenomena (such as sleep paralysis post-OBE).¹⁷ 

If we are essentially astrally projecting each night as we sleep, then something amusing emerges from all of this: in a sense, we all “die” every night when we go to sleep, only to awaken in the morning and resume our fearful delusions about the “horrors” of death!

The difference between clinical death and sleep is that the body and etheric vehicle in sleep remain living and functional so that we can make re-entry from the astral back into “physical matter reality.”

Death, then, is simply a permanent exit from the physical-etheric tuning system after the physical body has become non-functional.

The above is excerpted with permission from Brendan Murphy’s forthcoming release of The Grand Illusion – Book 2. Keep informed on its release by visiting brendandmurphy.com/signup.

Footnotes

1. Monroe, Far Journeys, 63-4.

2. Powell, The Astral Body, chapter .9

3. See Mishlove, The Roots of Consciousness.

4. Christie-Murray, Reincarnation, 23. See also: theodora.com/encyclopedia/l2/lycanthropy.html

5. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages.

6. Muldoon and Carrington, 148-9.

7. See A. Powell, The Mental Body, chapter 18.

8. Dennett, Out-of-Body Exploring, 9.

9. Leadbeater, Invisible Helpers, Ch. 5.

10. Karagulla, Breakthrough to Creativity, 246.

11. Ibid., 72-73.

12. Ibid., 111-112.

13. Ibid., 113.

14. Monroe, Far Journeys, 31.

15. DeGracia, Beyond the Physical,  104.

16. Ibid., 103.

17. Sylvan Muldoon actually referred to sleep paralysis as astral catalepsy. He asserted that sleep paralysis indicated the astral double was also cataleptic at that time. (Muldoon and Carrington.)

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I began this research inquiry out of necessity. I am by training and inclination a practitioner-scholar of subaltern, or oppressed, spiritualities. I have been studying and practising them since 1994 when, while attending seminary at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, I discovered the world-altering purview of women’s spirituality and Paganism.

Although in my undergraduate work I had already identified myself as a feminist, it had never occurred to me that the very religions I was devoting good time and money to studying might be built on the shoulders of other spiritual traditions that in many cases were supplanted – often persecuted into nonexistence – by dominator religions. This was a revelation and I vowed to question and deconstruct every assumption I held about my own spiritual experiences. In short, I became an agnostic mystic with a penchant for Paganism.

Then in 2002, I began to experience numinous encounters with what seemed to be a spirit lover, primarily in my dreams. Eventually, this spirit lover asked to marry me. What was remarkable about this phenomenon was the felt-sense knowing I had of a separate presence, something extraordinary that felt different from my experiences of other dream figures. I choose not to reduce the presence of a recurring dream being to gestalt or metaphor.

Initially, when these kinds of extraordinary beings first began to show up in my dreams, I did look at how they might represent aspects of myself. Yet over time, I began to determine that these dreams were different from the more psychological dreams I was having – those in which I was rehashing old stories, working out problems, dealing with relationships, and so forth. These extraordinary dreams included visitations, prophecies, lucid consciousness, and other parapsychological phenomena. In addition, they were almost always accompanied by a deep sense of wholeness, heart-opening, and oftentimes, orgasm, which I understand to be Kundalini Shakti rising and releasing.

These experiences led me to an in-depth study of sacred sexuality, also called erotic mysticism. Since then, I have received training in the yogic practices of Shakta Tantra, the Taoist practices of sexual alchemy, and the Western Hermetic practices of sex magick. In 2007 I was initiated as a Ceremonial Magician within a Western Hermetic lineage, and in 2010 I began my apprenticeship as a Faery Seership practitioner. I have also done an introductory study of the African Traditional religion of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso and the folk magic traditions of the American South – known as voodoo, conjure, hoodoo and rootwork. I began exploring these traditions because each one had something to teach me about spirit lovers and spirit marriage.

I take the presence of my dream figures – particularly ones that elicit a somatic response – seriously. I have come to the conclusion that when a spirit contact visits in a dream, it is a bona fide extraordinary being with its own energy signature, felt-sense, attitude, personality, and agenda – just like that of any human person. This is similar to the conclusion that ethnographer Irving Hallowell arrived at in his research with the Ojibwa people. He came to the understanding of “the Ojibwa concept of personhood as relational: persons were not classified according to whether they were human or physical, but rather according to their capacity to engage in relationships with other persons.” (cited in Hunter 2018).

Over the years, I have searched for spiritual and esoteric systems that would help me contextualise this phenomenon. I am particularly interested in those living traditions in which the relationship with a spirit lover is still practised.

The challenge I faced in the early 2000s was that very few books or articles explicitly discussed spirit marriage as a living practice and its importance as a spiritual undertaking. So I decided to undertake that research project both for myself and future practitioners who I imagined might encounter some of the same phenomena I was.

I spent years combing through libraries, bookstores, and online, as well as attending a variety of psycho-spiritual conferences and training, all on the hunt for information about spirit marriage. Then, in 2009, I decided to go back to school to do a PhD, with the intention of writing my dissertation on the subject of spirit marriage. It was time for me to unpack the mystery of being loved and wooed by a spirit and, being a religious studies scholar, I could think of no better way to do it than to surround myself with the discipline and circumspection of an academic institution. It would give me the container, a cauldron, within with I could deeply go into this highly transgressive and oftentimes dismantling material, both academically and experientially, while remaining grounded and sane.

Ultimately, I discovered that spirit marriage is a form of embodied spirituality and a transpersonal phenomenon. To put it as clearly as I can, it is the bonded or intimate relationship between a human and a subtle or discarnate entity such as a deity, spirit, or extraordinary intelligence. In this practice, the consciousness of the practitioner is linked or wedded to a specific entity, and the two beings share a co-creative consciousness forthwith. This practice has appeared in many cultures, among a strikingly large number of religious traditions ranging from African indigenous spirituality to Tantric yoga to Christian mysticism.

The general practice of union with a spirit can manifest in many different forms – channelling, possession, sexual encounters, visitations, and the like. However, spirit marriage tends to be an advanced phase within this range of potential contact, delineated by the fact that most spirit marriage practitioners have gone through a ritual or ceremony of union designed to bond them to a particular spirit, presumably forever.

Spirit marriage has allegedly been with us since the dawn of civilisation. Through folklore and mythology we hear of its ancient roots. We first start to see textual records of the practice in the ancient Mesopotamian sacred marriage, where it is reportedly undertaken to aid humans in the development and expansion of consciousness, both spiritual and everyday.It is said to result in the development of extrasensory perception (ESP), esoteric revelation, and personal and societal transformation.

Based on my twenty-plus years of research and experience, I believe that spirit marriage is a viable means of personal and planetary evolution, even though it has been marginalised and obfuscated throughout history.

Spirit marriage currently can be found as a living practice in many marginalised spiritual traditions. Most notably, the African Diaspora traditions of Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo; the folkloric Faery tradition of Faery Seership; the African Traditional religion of the Dagara people in Burkina Faso; the Indo-Tibetan Tantric sadhana; the Norse Heathen practice of the God Spouse, and various Amazonian plant spirit unions. And although I focused my research on marginalised spiritual and religious traditions, the Catholic Rite of Consecration to a Life of Virginity, wherein a woman mystically espouses herself to Christ, also falls within this purview.

Personally, I believe that spirit marriage has the potential to be a kind of liberation spirituality. At crucial moments in history, it seems that it has offered spiritual empowerment, co-creative engagement, and conscious evolution to its practitioners. And in cases wherein dominant religions and their God(s) are mediated by a human oppressor, many have chosen to offer themselves to what they contend are spirits that predate or dwell outside the oppressive regime; beings that are believed to have a higher authority and more power than their human persecutors. In fact, I once had a mentor tell me that if the Gods you’re worshipping don’t seem to be on your side, then you need to choose new Gods!

However, not all spirit marriages are undertaken to free someone from oppression. In fact, most seem to be undertaken at the request of the spirit who wishes to co-create with a human. My research indicates that spirit marriage offers a means to personal agency, individuation of the Self, and an avenue for personal awakening – often against widespread cultural oppression and religious intolerance.

One of my not-so-subtle goals in undertaking this inquiry, particularly from the perspective of a practitioner-scholar, was to offer a much-needed counterpoint to traditional academic scholarship. That type of scholarship tends to invalidate and deny the occurrence of extraordinary spiritual encounters by assuming Western scientistic reality as the norm. Research and reporting from within a colonialist framework tend to devalue the embodied and numinous experience of the practitioners in favour of a psycho-social analysis of the phenomenon.

Therefore, I used a postcolonial indigenous research framework to reclaim the embodied spiritual experience of the spirit marriage practitioners I interviewed for my research, particularly in the subaltern spiritual context. I argued that, in most instances, the practice of spirit marriage involves personal awakening, the establishment of self-worth, and the claiming of sovereignty in a world that in many cases relegates members of marginalised traditions to categories of slave, evil-doer, or subversive influence. Further, I demonstrated that in most cases,the practice of spirit marriage has been upheld predominantly through oral tradition or in the “twilight”or “coded” language of metaphor – only revealed to the trusted initiate – so as to preserve the practice of spirit marriage against the overarching tide of religious and cultural persecution.

I wasn’t interested in answering the question, Are spirits real? Nor was I interested in deconstructing views on reality versus nonreality. Instead, I embraced the worldview of an enchanted universe, which assumes that parapsychological phenomena and transpersonal encounters within an indigenous and ecofeminist framework are valid and worthy of serious study. Following the precedent set by transpersonal anthropologists, ethnographers, and animist psychologists, I assumed that these experiences are completely real for my co-researchers, who deserve the kind of respect that any religious studies scholar would afford a mainstream religion.

As paranthropologistJack Hunter observes, “The ultimate aim of this type of approach, then, is to interpret religious, spiritual and paranormal beliefs and experiences from a perspective that does not, from the very outset, reduce the complexity of the phenomenon or ignore the significance of personal, subjective experience.”(2018) Instead, following American ecofeminist philosopher Caroline Merchant’s clarion call in The Death of Nature (1980), which critiques modern scientific method as a specifically masculinist endeavour, I sought to reclaim the organic and feminist nature of extraordinary experience. I did this through a willingness to listen with an open mind and to enter the extraordinary worldview of the research and those I interviewed as much as possible.

Eventually, through my years of research and practice, I came to the understanding that the primary goal of spirit marriage is not only liberation and transformation of the individual, but ultimately the transformation of society and evolution of the planet. Spirit marriage practices have led and continue tolead to the development of a co-creative consciousness between humanity and divine intelligences – a partnership that helps the human species evolve, through the cultivation of extraordinary powers, acceleration of our evolutionary development, and progression of the human race.

In 2020, just as the world was entering into lockdown, I was invited to turn my dissertation (which I had completed in 2019) into a book. I spent my quarantine years delving back into the stories and transmissions that I had collected over the past ten-plus years to transform them into something new – a magical book written not only by me, but by all the extraordinary beings – human and Otherworldly – who co-created it with me.

Quite frankly, hidden within this research is magic – magic that is meant to please your intellect, delight your senses, and inspire a sense of wonder and awe at the extraordinary capacity of humans to love beyond the bounded notions of what’s deemed “normal” or “real.” And like all works of magic, if you allow it, encountering the topic of spirit marriage can transform you, like it did me, leaving you altered, quickened, and hopefully awakened to the extraordinary nature of your being and the vast intelligence of our beautiful Earth and its many extraordinary beings.

Learn more at SpiritMarriage.com. Megan’s book Spirit Marriage: Intimate Relationships with Otherworldy Beings is available here.

References

Hunter, Jack. 2018. Engaging the Anomalous: Collected Essays on Anthropology, the Paranormal, Mediumship and Extraordinary Experience. Hove, UK: August Night Books.

Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

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The romance with things occult and miraculous that gripped America in the seventies – a romance which was eventually to grow into the New Age phenomenon as it exists today – created a great gulf between the believers and the non-believers, between those who became heavily interested in these new ways of seeing the world, and those who thought them nothing more than an exercise in self-indulgence wilful credulity.

Emotions ran very high on both sides of this divide, and no one was more adept than my father at stirring up indignant opposition in the tents of scientific orthodoxy. When he told the news media that apples experienced the equivalent of an orgasm when eaten with a loving and respectful attitude, or that invisible, human-like nature spirits swarmed within the greenery of a well-tended garden – and worse, when these pronouncements were greeted with enthusiasm by journalists and readers alike – botany professors around the world felt their throats constrict and their scalps grow hot with rage. With his blustery demeanour and his love of sweeping prophetic generalisations, my father was an inviting target for attack, and for a time the debunkers were falling all over themselves to get in a shot at him. 

This war between the believers and the unbelievers in which my father loomed so large was an eminently televisable event. From Mike Douglas to Dick Cavett to Johnny Carson, my father made the rounds of virtually every talk show of the day, usually in the company of a representative of the scientific community with whom he was expected to fall into passionate and vitriolic debate. The standard menu of events on these shows would be for Mike or Dick or Johnny to introduce my father and then stand back while he flared his eyebrows menacingly and described whatever improbable phenomena he had been investigating that week.

In the appearances following the publication of The Secret Life of Plants in 1973, a table-full of plants would be wheeled onstage attached to a galvanometer, a lie-detecting device that my father’s friend Cleve Backster had found could register what appeared to be the emotional reactions of plants as well as humans. The plants would then be threatened with uprooting, burning, and other such abuse, and the TV cameras would zoom in on the galvanomenter’s wildly fluctuating arrows. Finally, a suitably dour scientist would emerge, and he and my father would square off like a pair of fighting cocks in a Mexican bar, trading accusations for however much airtime remained to be filled. 

My father brought a trademark intensity to the subjects he explored. When he argued that the ancients had lived in an expanded state of harmony and cosmic integration that the modern world had fallen tragically away from, and when he insisted that the door back to this expanded state was open to anyone who would simply listen to the whisperings of the plants they ate and walked upon, his fierce conviction was as persuasive as his ideas themselves. 

At the centre of all the intensity and charisma my father managed to generate in those years stood a single, burning conviction: escape into a more fulfilling world of experience was truly possible. For my father, it was not enough to spin seductive descriptions of the Eden that life on the planet could become if only we would throw off our repressive neuroses and awaken to the larger life that lay in hiding all around us. One needed to act on this knowledge. 

And act he did. 

Reprinted with permission of the author from Paradise Fever: Dispatches from the Dawn of the New Age (Bloomsbury, 1997) 

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On 27 February 2026, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi told the world that peace was “within reach.” Iran had agreed to full IAEA verification, permanent limits on uranium stockpiling, and irreversible downgrading of its enriched uranium to the lowest possible level. Talks were set to resume on 2 March.

The bombs started falling on 28 February.

The United States and Israel launched a joint assault that killed the Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, flattened military facilities, and also tore through schools, hospitals, and cultural sites across the country. Iran struck back with missiles and drones aimed at Israel and US bases in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The Strait of Hormuz was shut. Oil prices spiked to levels not seen since the 1970s. By early April, with thousands dead, the conflict was dangerously widening.

The stated reasons from Washington shifted by the day. Regime change. Self-defence. Nuclear prevention. Securing oil. No single story held for more than a news cycle.

That drift is the tell. When the reasons for a war change by the day, the real reason must stay hidden. And the real reason reaches far beyond any nuclear programme.

The Western ruling elite knows its era of unchallenged global dominance is closing. The economic centre of gravity is migrating eastward. The dollar’s monopoly over world trade is eroding. BRICS is expanding. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is weaving the Eurasian landmass into a single integrated economic zone.

In a desperate, last-ditch bid to preserve their grip on global power, Western elites are racing to build a Techno-World Order, a system of control founded on artificial intelligence, digital currencies, biometric tracking, and rule by algorithm.

That system requires the physical world to stay in their hands. And the physical world runs through Eurasia.Anglo-American strategists have understood this for over a century.

The Blueprint

To see this clearly, you need to look at two texts that most people have never heard of. One was a lecture delivered in 1904, later published as an article. The other was a book published in 1997. Taken together, they read like a blueprint for modern empire, so candid in their strategic vision that they feel like an architect’s own drawings for a structure you have been living inside your whole life.

Sir Halford John Mackinder was a man who acted on his ideas. A British geographer who directed the London School of Economics from 1903, he built his career on a single argument: the age of sea power was fading and the real prize was land.

In 1904, before the Royal Geographical Society, he proposed that the vast interior of Eurasia, stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze, held the resources and the position to command the globe. He called it the “Heartland” (see map on page 11) Around it lay coastal states he termed the “Inner Crescent,” and beyond them the maritime fringe of Britain, Japan, the Americas, and Australia.

His dictum, refined in 1919, still runs Western strategic thought. “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

Then he tested it. In late 1919, the British government sent Mackinder to southern Russia as High Commissioner during the civil war. His mission was to unite the White Russian forces of General Denikin against the Bolsheviks and prevent a hostile power from consolidating the Eurasian interior. He returned to London and proposed to the Cabinet a “cordon sanitaire” of buffer states running from Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan through Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic provinces. The Cabinet ignored him. Britain withdrew its troops. South Russia fell to the Bolsheviks.

Mackinder’s proposed buffer states were swallowed by the Soviet Union for the next seventy years. The same states he named in 1920 remain flashpoints in 2026. Georgia. Armenia. Azerbaijan. Ukraine.

Ninety-three years after Mackinder’s London lecture, Zbigniew Brzezinski picked up his thesis and fitted it for American use. The Grand Chessboard, published in 1997, is a startling book. Brzezinski, a former US National Security Advisor and co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, laid out American imperial strategy with a bluntness unthinkable in any official document. (He misspelled Mackinder’s first name as “Harold” throughout. The American heir to British imperial geostrategy got his own master’s name wrong.)

The core argument was simple. Eurasia holds seventy-five percent of the world’s people, sixty percent of its economic output, and three-quarters of its known energy. Control Eurasia and you control everything. America’s task was to prevent any rival from locking that landmass together.

Brzezinski identified five states whose fate would decide the balance. Ukraine. Azerbaijan. South Korea. Turkey. Iran. He warned that one scenario above all would threaten American power. A grand coalition of Russia, China, and Iran, joined not by ideology but by shared hostility to Western hegemony.

He was blunt about what lay beneath the surface. The Caspian Basin and Central Asia hold reserves of oil and gas that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea. Iran, with its own massive reserves and its position astride every proposed energy corridor, was the lock on the door.

Selling the project to voters would be hard. “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation,” Brzezinski wrote. The public would back foreign wars only if given a “sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.”

In Iran’s case, the nuclear bogeyman served that function for two decades. When diplomacy threatened to remove it, the bombs fell anyway.

Everything Brzezinski described in theory, Iran embodies in geography. The country is the gateway to Eurasia. No other nation bridges the Indian Ocean to the Caspian and Central Asia in a single overland corridor. The Iranian coastline commands the Strait of Hormuz, through which close to a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil flows. The country shares land and sea borders with fifteen nations. Iranian oil and gas reserves rank among the largest on Earth.

Western strategists see a strategic position on a map. Iran is something else.

Persia, as it was known for most of recorded history, is one of the oldest continuous civilisations on the planet. Five thousand years. When the first stones of the Persian Royal Road were laid, connecting the Mediterranean to Central Asia, Rome did not exist. When the Silk Road began threading through Iranian territory, Christianity had yet to be born. Zoroastrianism, one of the earliest monotheistic faiths, emerged from this soil. The mystical traditions of Sufism flowered across the Persian cultural world, producing a spiritual literature, including the Persian-language poetry of Rumi, Hafez, and Omar Khayyam, that still crosses every border of language and belief.

This is a land where the seen and the unseen have coexisted for millennia, where philosophy and statecraft and spiritual practice grew from the same root. The men in Washington see pipelines and chokepoints. What they fail to see is a civilisation with roots strong enough to outlast any empire that tries to uproot it.

The West has been trying for a long time. In 1953, when Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh moved to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the CIA and MI6 engineered a coup that toppled him and installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The stated reason was Cold War containment. The operating logic was older. Keep the resources and corridors of the Inner Crescent under Western-aligned control.

Iran’s 1979 revolution ejected the Shah and with him the Western strategic presence. The Islamic Republic has been targeted by Anglo-American policy ever since, through decades of sanctions, proxy conflicts, covert operations, and now direct military assault. The nuclear question has always been the public face of a strategic interest that predates Iran’s nuclear programme by half a century.

In the years before the 2026 war, Iran was doing what Mackinder and Brzezinski had both warned about. Tehran was fast becoming a key player in Eurasian integration. Iran joined the Belt and Road Initiative. In May 2025, the first direct freight train from Xi’an, China, pulled into the Aparin dry port, cutting transit from a month by sea to fifteen days by rail. The North-South Transport Corridor, linking Russia through Iran to India, was turning Iranian ports into the spine of a new Eurasian trade network. India had poured investment into the Chabahar port on Iran’s southeastern coast, giving Delhi a route into Afghanistan and Central Asia that bypassed Pakistan and sidestepped the Strait of Hormuz. Iran was connecting east to west and north to south at once. The keystone was locking into place.

Look at the map in 2026. The coalition Brzezinski described has arrived. The alliance runs through BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the Belt and Road Initiative. What Brzezinski feared on paper now moves in steel, rail, and pipeline. And the gateway holding it all together is Iran.

The Techno-World Order

This is where the century-old Mackinder doctrine meets the twenty-first-century endgame.

The Western elite policymakers can read the trends. American debt is spiralling. The move away from the dollar is picking up speed. China’s economy has overtaken the United States in purchasing power terms. The BRICS bloc now represents a larger share of global GDP than the G7. Military bases, dollar hegemony, arm-twisting through the IMF and World Bank, the old tools of Western control are losing their grip. The world that Mackinder and Brzezinski sought to manage is slipping away.

The ruling class has chosen a different path. Instead of accepting a multipolar future, it has set about building a new architecture of control, one founded on something beyond aircraft carriers and trade agreements.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 2026, the shape of that architecture was plain to see. AI-driven governance. Digital currencies. Biometric identity frameworks. Machine-run control of whole populations. These were working agendas backed by people who hold state power.

Technocracy researcher Patrick Wood (see New Dawn Special Issue Vol 20 No 1), who has tracked these developments for decades, calls key figures in the Trump administration “arch-technocrats” building a system of global digital dominion. He names Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Howard Lutnick among the architects. The stated US policy goal, laid out in an AI strategy co-authored by senior officials, is to export America’s “full AI technology stack” to every country willing to join its digital alliance.

By early 2026, the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial had launched a dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by US Treasury securities, and the GENIUS Act had created the federal regulatory framework to legitimise it. The merger of state power and private digital finance was no longer theoretical.

This Techno-World Order has material demands. AI runs on rare earth minerals and vast energy. Digital currencies need compliant banking systems. Surveillance needs cooperative states. All of this depends on controlling the trade corridors and energy routes of the physical world, the same corridors that Mackinder mapped in 1904 and that converge at Iran.

If Russia, China, and Iran build their own digital and financial systems outside Western reach, the technocratic project fractures beyond repair. And that is what has been unfolding.

BRICS states have moved toward de-dollarised trade. China’s rail links to Iran skip every Western-controlled sea lane. After the Strait of Hormuz was initially closed, Iran offered safe passage to BRICS members and blocked American-allied ships. A multipolar world with independent tech freedom is the one outcome the architects of the Techno-World Order are determined to prevent.

A stable, integrated Iran at the heart of Eurasian trade poses a greater danger to this project than any uranium centrifuge. The centrifuges made for a good story. The real target was the gateway.

The war itself had been building for years. In 2024, Iran and Israel exchanged direct attacks for the first time. In June 2025, Israel struck Iran and the United States later joined the 12-day war with attacks on Iranian nuclear sites. In January 2026, Iran was shaken by its worst domestic unrest since 1979. By late February, Washington had assembled one of its biggest regional military deployments since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Oman-mediated indirect nuclear talks, which had resumed in early February, showed progress. The 28 February assault ended that diplomatic opening. What followed stripped away whatever remained of diplomatic language.

A Whole Civilisation

On 21 March, Trump posted on his internet platform ‘Truth Social’ that if Iran did not “FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS,” the United States would “hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS.” Twelve hours before that deadline expired, he postponed it. On 26 March, he extended the deadline again, writing that negotiations were “going very well.” On 30 March, he expanded his threatened targets to include oil wells, Kharg Island, and “possibly all desalination plants.” Each deadline arrived and was pushed back. Each postponement came with louder threats.

On Easter Sunday, 5 April, Trump posted what may be the most unhinged statement ever issued by a sitting US president. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F****** Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell. JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” His Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had already threatened to send Iran “back to the Stone Age.”

On 7 April, Trump told reporters the US had a plan “where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again.” Hours later, on Truth Social, he wrote the words that Amnesty International’s Secretary General called “apocalyptic” and members of Congress called “genocidal.”

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

A whole civilisation. The president of the United States was threatening to extinguish one of the oldest continuous civilisations in human history. Five thousand years of philosophy and poetry and spiritual seeking, reduced to a target in a social media post sandwiched between threats about power plants and boasts about a rescued airman.

Iran’s response told a different story. Across the country, young Iranians formed human chains around power plants to shield them with their bodies. President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote that more than 14 million Iranians had registered to sacrifice their lives defending their homeland. “I too have been, am, and will remain devoted to giving my life for Iran,” he said. Iran’s foreign ministry called Trump’s threats “a sign of ignorance.”

Ninety minutes before his own 8 p.m. deadline on 7 April, Trump backed down. A two-week ceasefire was announced after mediation by Pakistan, where Washington’s traditional allies had failed to act. Iran agreed to allow passage through the Strait of Hormuz for the ceasefire period. Oil prices dropped eight percent within minutes. But Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, accepting the ceasefire on 8 April, issued a pointed clarification. “This does not signify the termination of the war. Our hands remain upon the trigger.”

The power that threatened to wipe out a civilisation failed to make its own deadline stick. Three ultimatums were set and withdrawn before the fourth produced a pause. The off-ramp was negotiated by a country that Brzezinski would have classified as a secondary player on the chessboard.

A confident hegemon behaves differently. The pattern of escalation, bluster, retreat, and re-escalation reveals an establishment that knows its position is eroding and is lurching between force and negotiation with no coherent strategy beyond buying time.

The war on Iran makes full sense when we consider Mackinder’s 1904 lecture and Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. Hold the Eurasian gateway or lose the world. In 2026, add the final layer. Lock the planet into a Western-built digital grid before any rival bloc can raise its own.

The desperation with which that project is being pursued, the expletives, the shifting deadlines, the threats of civilisational annihilation, tell you everything about how the architects of that project assess their own chances.

Iran, the ancient mystical land of Persia, has held this ground for five millennia. Every empire that tried to seize it, from the Macedonians to the Mongols to the British, paid a price too heavy to sustain. The land outlasted them all. Persia endures as a living civilisation, rooted in traditions older than any Western institution now claiming the right to reshape the world.

The question hanging over 2026 is whether an empire armed with cruise missiles, blockchain ledgers, artificial intelligence, and a social media account can break that record.

The accompanying article “The View From the Other Side of the Chessboard” can be read here.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

When we talk about the ancient wisdom, at least in Western cultures, what we’re discussing is a vast heap of wreckage left behind by three savage campaigns of destruction.

The first of these hit in the twilight years of the ancient world, carried out by religious fanatics after Christianity was hijacked by the Roman elite and turned into an instrument of social control. The second came in the late Middle Ages when the Church hierarchy panicked at the rising tide of independent thought and created the Inquisition to stop free inquiry in its tracks. The third and most recent arrived with the Scientific Revolution when the rising mercantile-capitalist class embraced scientific materialism as its ideology of choice and used its power and wealth to crush alternative viewpoints. It’s a long and bitter story.

There’s another side to the tale, however. During each of these orgies of violence and oppression, there were people who risked everything to preserve what they could for the future. Afterwards, in turn, small groups of independent thinkers rejected the orthodoxies of their time and set out to recover some of what was lost. In the teeth of outraged resistance from the established institutions of the day and blind hostility from the masses, these succeeded in preserving some of the core teachings and practices of the old mystery traditions and reassembling others from the surviving fragments.

Imagine for a moment that some immense machine of glass and bronze was battered to pieces by a furious mob and the fragments trampled underfoot so that all that remained were fragments scattered through the gutters of a great city. Imagine that every record of the machine’s structure and function had been destroyed to keep anyone from figuring out how to rebuild it. Now imagine that many years later, you learn of the machine. Inspired by the old stories, you prowl the streets of the city, and when you find something that might once have been a piece of it, you pick it up, take it back home with you, clean off the grime, and then try to figure out how it might fit together with the other pieces you’ve already gathered, and what the shape of the whole machine might have been. This metaphor, taken from John Crowley’s visionary novel Aegypt, may give you some sense of the labour involved.

That work is still ongoing. Some parts of the ancient wisdom – some pieces of the machine, in terms of the metaphor – have been restored to full working order. Astrology and ceremonial magic, for example, were brought back into use in the nineteenth century, the former pioneered by Alan Leo and the latter by Eliphas Lévi; both can now be learned from many books and teachers, and practised with good results. Other elements of the tradition, such as alchemy and sacred geometry, are still only half-understood. Then there are fragments of the ancient lore that were destroyed so completely and lost for so long that they survive only as hints and whispers or as gaps where something once existed.

The Lost Word

One of those gaps lies at the centre of modern Freemasonry. Down through the years, there has been a vast amount of chatter about the secrets of Freemasonry, but there’s a detail that generally gets left out, though it can be found in plenty of publicly available sources: the Freemasons don’t have their original secrets any more. When a member is raised to the sublime degree of a Master Mason, he is told that the words and signs he is given are substitute secrets because the real secrets have been lost. To this day, every Master Mason is, at least in theory, pledged to the quest for the Lost Word.

What is this Lost Word? Nobody knows – not even the Masons. Of course, there’s no shortage of speculation. Devil worship, political conspiracy, kinky sex, the relics of a prehistoric civilisation on Mars, you name it, no matter how lurid or absurd, somebody has identified it as the Lost Word. Some of the other Masonic degrees pass on words that are supposed to be the Lost Word, but none agree on what it is or why it is so important.

Let’s go deeper. The Master Mason degree ritual used in regular Masonic jurisdictions today derives from an original that appeared around 1720, three years after the founding of the first Grand Lodge in London. There is no record of who introduced it or where it came from; it simply shows up. It tells a story about the building of the Temple of Solomon, and that story includes – indeed, centres on – the disappearance of the Lost Word and the invention of the substitute secrets, which are to be kept until the real secrets are recovered.

Thus, it is clear that in 1720, three linked ideas were so important to the most influential Masons of the time that they put them into the Craft’s most important ritual. The first of these ideas was that Masons of some earlier period had known some important secret; the second was that the Masons of 1720 no longer knew what the secret was but thought they had some hope of recovering it; and the third is that it had something to do with the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, one of the most famous buildings of the ancient world.

Power of the Temple

There’s plenty of information about the Temple of Solomon in ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish sources, as well as a vast modern scholarly literature on the subject. Most of it is fairly straightforward, but one very odd detail runs through the old sources. This is the claim that while the Temple stood, it caused a remarkable increase in agricultural fertility in the land around it. The Jewish sources go into quite a bit of detail about this: from the time when Solomon built the Temple to its destruction by the Babylonians, the weather and the soil fertility of the region were different. After the destruction of the first Temple, that stopped, but when the second Temple was built by Jewish refugees returning from Babylonia, the effect returned and stayed in place until the Romans destroyed the second Temple in 70 CE.

The Temple of Solomon isn’t the only ancient temple about which that same claim was made. You can find it in legends surrounding temples over much of the ancient world. Where it occurs, you find certain other things reliably associated with it. The temples are built above underground water sources and their sites have to be chosen by special means. A flurry of odd taboos govern who can or cannot enter and under what conditions. Usually, though not always, they are surrounded by at least a narrow green belt of natural vegetation. Above all, certain rules of alignment and sacred geometry govern their placement and design.

Geographically, this is a weirdly selective tradition. It doesn’t appear in Africa outside of Egypt, except in a few northeastern African countries that absorbed a great deal of ancient Egyptian culture. It is found all over the ancient Mediterranean and extends east to India and some, but not all, of the island chains further east. Then, it appears in Japan, where it plays a central role in Shinto shrines but not Buddhist temples. Finally, it crops up in the Christian churches of medieval western Europe but is absent from Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and post-temple Judaism.

Knights Templar

Western Europe in the Middle Ages apparently knew nothing about it until the time of the Crusades, where the tradition shows up first in churches built by the Knights Templar and spread from there. That turned out to be a clue of immense importance. The Templars – the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, to give them their original name – were founded in 1118 by nine French knights who had gone to Jerusalem with the First Crusade. They were dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1311 amid a flurry of charges of heresy and sorcery.

The Templars got their name because the original nine knights were housed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, atop the ruins of Solomon’s Temple; by the time of their abolition, they had landholdings in most of the countries of Europe. When the Order was destroyed, some of the members were burned at the stake and others were transferred to monasteries of less militant orders where they lived out their lives as ordinary monks.

There were two exceptions to this. In Portugal, King Dinis created a new order, the Knights of Christ, and had all the Templars in Portugal transfer into it; the Knights of Christ proceeded to play a remarkably active role in the great age of Portuguese navigation, sailing straight to islands in the Atlantic that (in theory) nobody in Europe knew about. Then there was Scotland, where the Pope’s rulings had no force because the whole country just then was under an interdict, and where Robert the Bruce was leading a war of independence against the English and needed every competent soldier he could get.

The Knights Templar had a significant presence in Scotland at that time; the village now called Temple, located next to the mysterious Roslyn Chapel, was their headquarters in the kingdom, but they also had many other properties and plenty of knights and officials to supervise them. Masonic tradition insists that the Scottish Templars promptly made a deal with Robert the Bruce. They fought for him at Bannockburn and elsewhere, and in return, he protected them from the Church and let them go quietly to ground.

The tradition proceeds to claim that since the Templars had their own master builders and stonemasons – they had to since they themselves built the castles, churches, and other structures on their landholdings – some of these Scottish Templars ended up supporting themselves as master masons in the original sense of that term, and from that source, certain Templar legacies found their way into Freemasonry. It’s a matter of historical record, finally, that Freemasonry as we now know it, was in existence in Scotland most of a century before it appeared anywhere else.

All of this is familiar ground to most people aware of alternative history. What deserves attention here are the charges levelled against the Templars when the order was dissolved. Much of it was the same sort of canned libels that would be used later in the witch trials; some of it had intriguing parallels to the actual practice of heretical Christian sects in ancient and medieval times, which deserve more attention than they’ve gotten in the historical literature to date; but then there was the claim that they worshipped a mysterious idol named Baphomet, which made the crops grow. There was the issue of agricultural fertility again.

Holy Grail

That issue pops up again in another place at precisely the same time. The oldest known version of the story of the Holy Grail was written around 1190 by Chretien de Troyes, who claimed he’d gotten the story from Count Philip of Flanders, a Crusader who had close connections with the Knights Templar and the royal house of Jerusalem. Between 1190 and 1250 – that is, during the golden age of the Templars – the Grail got massive play in popular literature. They were strange stories, these legends of the Grail; they spoke of a secret passed down through the centuries by hidden guardians, which could only be revealed to those who asked the right question.

What is the Grail? That was one of the questions those who sought the Grail had to ask. A later generation of authors, heavily invested in mainstream Christianity, insisted that the Grail was the cup Jesus of Nazareth used at the Last Supper and redefined the secrets of the Grail as those of ordinary Christian theology. Go back to the earliest surviving Grail stories, those by Chretien de Troyes or Wolfram von Eschenbach, and you land in a far stranger world where the Grail could take many forms, and its ultimate secret was the power to make the fields flourish. That was why King Arthur’s knights went out in search of the Grail: it alone could restore the barren wasteland to fertility.

All this happened as sacred geometries and other traditions that were part of the temple tradition elsewhere in the world found their way into medieval European religious architecture. In its wake, monasteries were founded all over western Europe in desolate areas, which promptly became burgeoning agricultural regions capable of supporting not only monks but thriving villages. To this day, all across Europe, you can visit the ruins of long-abandoned settlements from the Middle Ages in barren upland regions that nowadays barely produce enough grass for sheep; old records and archaeological remains alike show that these villages once had thriving fields of grain and other crops – and in the centre of each is a church laid out according to the sacred geometries of the temple tradition.

Temple technology

Up out of the darkness of the centuries, like a shape in the mist, rises the dim shape of a forgotten technology – the temple technology, as I came to call it – that was once used by priests and priestesses across much of the Old World to make the fields flourish. Long before the beginning of recorded history, perhaps by sheer chance, perhaps through other means, people in certain parts of the world noticed that buildings of specific shapes built and aligned in particular ways affected the crops grown in nearby fields. Over millennia of trial and error, that original insight gave rise to two kinds of structures.

One of them uses structures shaped more or less like a stair-step pyramid: large ones, like the ziggurats of Babylon or the pyramids of the Mayas, or small ones, like the earth-deity altars that used to be found in every village in China before the 1949 revolution. The other uses square or rectangular buildings, usually oriented to the rising sun, which seems to have functioned as a resonance chamber. Both kinds of structures were built over certain specific geological features that create electrical discontinuities in the ground.

This matters because there are currents of electricity and lines of magnetic force, closely associated with one another, moving through the body of the Earth. Back in the 1920s, before the chemical industry got a stranglehold on corporate agriculture with their toxic fertilisers and pesticides, experimenters working with these earth currents developed a system called “electroculture” which sent a slight electrical charge through the soil; this resulted in sharply improved harvests. A building properly sited atop an electrical discontinuity in the earth, as it turns out, can build up a substantial charge of telluric electricity, which then streams outward through conductive areas in the soil.

This was one of the secrets of the Templars, one of the reasons that their landholdings in Europe produced bumper crops year after year to help pay for the Order’s castles in the Holy Land. In past ages, it had been a secret kept by many priesthoods and played a role in many ancient mystery initiations. (The Eleusinian mysteries, to cite only one example, centred on the fertility goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and at the climactic moment of the initiation ceremony, the new initiates were shown a newly reaped ear of grain.) It is one of the secrets of the Grail, and it – or more precisely, a word or phrase passed down from the Templars, probably in garbled form, that once communicated it – is the original Lost Word of the Freemasons. That, at least, is the most likely explanation for the tangled web of evidence that surrounds the old temple technology.

Like so many of the legacies of the ancient wisdom, the temple technology has been lost. The monasteries that once preserved it in Europe were destroyed in Protestant countries and subjected to the rigid ideological discipline of the Counter-Reformation in Catholic countries, breaking the links by which the knowledge was once transmitted from generation to generation. Elsewhere in the world, three centuries of colonialism, breakneck modernisation, and global warfare have left little intact, though it’s possible that even today, oral traditions at some isolated Indian temple or documents in a remote Shinto shrine might record some of the secrets of the lost temple technology.

One way or another, however, it is still possible for the Lost Word to be restored and the Holy Grail found. There are plenty of reasons why the global corporate monoculture might want to hide every surviving trace of a simple and scalable technology that uses natural energies and practices linked to traditional spirituality to make gardens thrive and fields bear bumper crops. Every one of those is also a reason why independent thinkers and researchers in today’s rising alternative culture might be interested in finding those traces and following them.

In terms of the metaphor introduced earlier, this is an important part of the lost machine and one that might be rebuilt and put to work. I can only hope that others will hear the call and join the quest for the Word that once made the fields flourish. 

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

The religion of Thelema, founded by British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) last century, proclaimed a new “Aeon of Horus” based on “force and fire.” According to its ‘bible’, Liber Al vel Legis (The Book of the Law), it is a stellar or star-oriented religion. 

In his introduction to Liber Al, Crowley states that Liber Al “explains the universe.” The Thelemic dictum, “every man and every woman is a star,” places humanity in a stellar context, with each ‘star’ having its own ‘orbit’ through which it expresses its own ‘will’ (Greek = Thelema). The opening lines of Liber Al proclaim Nuit, the Egyptian sky goddess representing space, “invoking the company of heaven.” Nuit is to be “invoked under the stars.” 

Crowley claimed to have received his ‘revelation’ astrally from a ‘praeterhuman’ intelligence – Aiwass – representing the gods of a certain equinox. There are three aeons in Thelema based on three Egyptian gods: Isis (goddess worship), Osiris (dying and resurrected god – including Christianity), and Horus, the hawk-headed god that presides over the new (incoming) aeon. 

While stellar references are used allegorically, Crowley wondered whether there is also “some real connection between a given persona and a given star.” 

Among the sundry bohemians and intellectuals attracted to Thelema, including artists, poets, and academics, was one John (Jack) Whiteside Parsons (1914–1952), a seminal figure in setting humanity on the exploration of outer space. 

As we will explore later, Parsons attempted to invoke Babalon, the ‘Scarlet Woman’ of Thelema, as the manifestation of Nuit. He also penned what he proclaimed to be the ‘fourth chapter’ of Liber Al (given to Crowley in three chapters), ushering the Aeon of Babalon. 

Thelemic ‘War Machine’

The Aeon of Horus was to be ushered by cataclysmic events. As a sign of the times, Crowley referred to “war, the atrocities which occur on a daily basis and leave us unmoved and hardly worried.” 

Book III of Liber Al, relating to the Aeon of Horus, is a martial doctrine that refers to Horus as “a god of war and of vengeance,” stating that he would deal harshly with his enemies. Next, a “war machine” is referred to as something to be given to Thelemites. Liber Al states, “With it ye shall smite the peoples; and none shall stand before you.” 

Such apocalyptic visions of creating a “war machine” for Thelema would motivate Parsons. 

Crowley refers to another aeon after that of Horus and the emergence of “another prophet” to assume Crowley’s “throne.” He refers to this new prophet who would “bring fresh fever from the skies.” 

There were several claimants to this mantle while the current aeon and Crowley were still around. Parsons declared himself and that his aeon was Babalon. Crowley did not like the idea of a prophet emerging while he still lived. Crowley considered Parsons dangerously foolish, and Parsons broke with Crowley. 

Both Crowley and Parsons based their magickal workings on Enochian. Beginning in 1581, Dr John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley devised a system of astral communication with so-called ‘angels’ using a system of ‘Calls’, inscribed tablets, and the Enochian alphabet and language. The eighteen ‘Enochian Calls’ are full of fiery imagery. The ‘Tenth Call’ refers to the Earth “burning day and night, and vomit out the heads of scorpions, and live sulphur mingled with poison.” 

In a magickal ritual performed in the Tunisian desert on 7 November 1923, Crowley “quizzed a discarnate intelligence about what The Book of the Law’s third chapter meant by a ‘war engine’, described as a gift of Ra Hoor Khuit, the Sun in its martial aspect.” In a note, Crowley wrote that the ritual brought a vision “not incongruous with my idea of the new Energy.” 

Crowley sent the material drawn from the ritual to Thelemite mathematician Prof. Norman Mudd for interpretation. Crowley biographer Tobias Churton comments: “The notes show drawings, images, and algebraic concepts suggestive of nuclear fission. Extraordinarily striking for a North African vision in 1923, the notes, with hindsight, suggest the ‘war engine’ was nothing less than an atomic bomb.”

Founding of Jet Propulsion Laboratory

In 1945, Crowley wrote to the novelist Louis Umfraville Wilkinson, a Thelemite, that “The Atomic Bomb is interesting, not only because of Liber Al, chapter III, verses 7 and 8, but because one of the men who were working on it was for some time at the Abbey in Cefalu.” For a period, Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema (in Cefalu, Sicily) was where his community of disciples practised the doctrines of Thelema and performed magickal rituals.

In 1936, Dr. Theodore von Kármán, director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), founded the Aerojet rocket motor company with Frank Malina, a Communist sympathiser, and Jack Parsons. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) emerged from GALCIT in 1943 after the project came under the auspices of the US military. 

Kármán was a descendant of the famous Hasidic (Cabalistic) Rabbi Yehuda Loew ben Bezalel, the 16th century ‘Exalted’ Rabbi of Prague, astronomer, and, according to Jewish legend, creator of the ‘Golem of Prague’. Kármán was the great-grandson of Moses ben Menachem Mendel Kuntitz, a scholar of the Zohar, the main body of Cabalistic mysticism. 

Parsons, Malina and several others became known as the ‘Suicide Squad’ for their dangerous use of explosives and were subsequently moved from the CALTECH campus. From 1941, the US military lavished funding on GALCIT, and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation was founded in 1942 to meet its expanding requirements. 

Parsons’ contributions to solid propellant rocketry led to the development of the solid motors on the Space Shuttle and the motors in the Minuteman missile. A crater on the Moon’s dark side is named in his honour. After World War II, the work that Parsons undertook on liquid and solid-state fuel led directly to the US space programme. 

Liber 49 

Parsons became a devotee of Crowley in 1939. He joined Agape Lodge, the Los Angeles branch of Crowley’s organisation, Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), and was initiated in 1941. After his first wife left him for the lodge’s head, Wilfred Smith, he assumed leadership in 1943. The OTO temple was moved to Parsons’ mansion in Pasadena. 

When Parsons undertook his ‘Babalon Working’ in 1946, Crowley responded by stating, “I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.” With artist, poet and actress Marjorie Cameron as his ‘Scarlet Woman’, they intended to evoke Babalon to worldly manifestation by creating a magickal child, although Parsons later considered Cameron to be that incarnation.

According to Kenneth Grant, Crowley “wrote Parsons off as yet another failure,” and Parsons resigned from the OTO in August 1946. 

As a result of the Babalon Working, Parsons proclaimed himself “Belarion Antichrist” and issued a new revelation, Liber 49 – a fourth chapter of Crowley’s Liber Al – ushering the Age of Babalon.

Like the ‘Enochian Calls’, Liber 49 is reminiscent of the Apocalypse of St. John. While John’s Revelation announces the return of Christ after an apocalypse, Parsons believed that an apocalypse would bring forth a New Aeon of the Antichrist and Babalon. 

In martial spirit, continuing the legacy of Horus, Babalon proclaims that she will come via her daughter as a “penelous (sic) flame,” “a trumpet in judgement halls,” “a banner before armies,” to “judge nations” with “force and fire.” Those who resist will be destroyed: “None shall resist thee, whom I lovest. Though they call thee harlot and whore, shameless, false, evil, these words shall be blood in their mouths, and dust thereafter.” 

Parsons, as Antichrist, had undertaken his “black pilgrimage” in the Mojave Desert on Babalon’s command. He swore that he would fulfil Babalon’s rule on Earth and published his manifesto: “And in my name BELARION shall they work miracles, and confound our enemies, and none shall stand before us.”

Enochian 

The occult scholar Donald Tyson writes of the Enochian workings that John Dee believed the ‘angels’ he was evoking were servants of God, whereas Edward Kelley thought they might be deceivers. Tyson says these ‘angels’, by fooling Dee, used him to introduce a ritual working that would usher the Apocalypse. The working was aimed at opening the gates of the Watchtowers that guard against the intrusion of satanic powers into this universe. Tyson states that Dee was blind as to the true function of the ‘Enochian Keys’. He also claims Crowley failed to complete the entire apocalyptic Enochian Working despite his exuberance for the subject and his claim to be the Antichrist.

Parsons took on that mantle, broke with Crowley, and aimed to bring forth the Apocalypse by more direct means. Parsons is said to have recited Crowley’s poem ‘Hymn to Pan’ and danced at the launching of rockets by the JPL. It seems that he regarded each rocket launch as a ritual working.

Babalon

An academic study has been written on Babalon. Manon Hedenborg White references the Enochian magickal working of Crowley and Victor Neuburg in the Algerian desert in 1909, in which Crowley had a vision of the apocalyptic Whore of Babylon. He rendered this as “Babalon,” and incorporated it into Thelema as the primary goddess, who had been prophesied in Liber Al five years previously. In origin, Babalon is a generic name for ‘wicked’ in Enochian and related to the word ‘babalond’ meaning ‘harlot’. Apparently, she also communicated through her ‘daughter’ in the form of “a spirit called Madimi” to Dee and Kelley.

Chapter 5 of White’s study is devoted to Parsons’ interpretation of Babalon. After rituals with Cameron during January and February, Parsons went alone into the Mojave Desert, where he evoked Babalon and transcribed Liber 49 as the fourth chapter of Liber Al. Of course, Crowley had already disowned Parsons. 

While the Aeon of Babalon was intended to balance the “force and fire” of the martial Aeon of Horus, Parsons’ conception of Babalon nonetheless gloried in the biblical image of the Great Whore of Babylon foretold in the Revelation of John, “drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs.” 

Where the biblical Whore of Babylon is generally considered to describe a corrupt system, to Crowley and Parsons, Babylon rendered as Babalon describes a terrible goddess bringing apocalyptic desolation to the world before ushering a new aeon. Hence, Parsons describes Babalon as “the dark mother of anarchy and abominations,” which he compares to Kali and Lilith. 

Parsons & Israel

Parsons drew the attention of the FBI. He was noted as a bohemian living with various other suspect characters, indulging in orgies and black magic rites at his mansion. 

In September 1950, Parsons was identified as having removed restricted, confidential and classified documents on jet propulsion motors and rocket propellants from Hughes Aircraft Company, California. Parsons had worked there since 1949 as “group leader” in charge of propellants, propulsion and launching systems. In a statement to the FBI dated 27 September 1950, Parsons declared that he had taken the classified material for the purpose of preparing proposals for work in Israel.

In his astral visions, Parsons “arrived at Chorazin in the dominion of the Antichrist.” Manon Hedenborg White writes that in Parsons’ astral vision, he emerges as the Antichrist at Chorazin. 

Located near the Seas of Galilee in present-day Israel and now in ruins, Chorazin is mentioned in the Bible as one of three villages cursed by Jesus for failing to accept his teachings. Some medieval theologians believed that the Antichrist might come to be born in Chorazin. This notion clearly influenced Parsons, who explicitly calls the location “the city of the Anti-Christ” and believed that his astral journey marked his transition into the figure. 

Here, we begin to see why the State of Israel might have assumed central importance in Parsons’ belief he was the Antichrist at the inauguration of the Aeon of Babalon. 

The FBI files state that Parsons had read in technical magazines about research in Israel. In September or October 1949, that is to say, the year of his assumption to the role of Antichrist, he made contact with an Israeli agent who requested him to prepare a proposal “regarding the building of an explosives plant in Israel and data concerning rockets and other armaments which Parsons would be able to conduct research work on in Israel.” In August 1950, he was asked to submit costs for “a jet propulsion development program on which Parsons could do research work in Israel.” The initial contact with what Parsons said to the FBI was a “business consultant,” whom the FBI identified as “a representative of the Israeli Government” living in North Hollywood, came through the American Technion Society. 

The FBI report states that the Technion Society was designated officially by both the Israeli Government and Israeli industry as the “American body” through which the latest in US technology was conveyed to Israel. The Technion Society was another name for the “American Society for the Advancement of the Hebrew Institute of Technology in Haifa, Palestine, Inc.” (Los Angeles File, a-27-49). The file states that “this organisation publishes the Technion Yearbook and the society is also known as the ‘American Technion Society’.” A statement dated 2 December 1950 in the FBI files mentions that Dr. Theodore von Kármán had recommended Parsons contact what seems to be (the words are blacked out) the American Technion Society. It seems that Kármán, Parsons’ mentor and one of the most distinguished names in rocket science, had facilitated his communication with Israel for the purposes of espionage. 

Parsons had his security clearance suspended in 1948 because of his involvement with a “cult” and associating with an “alleged Communist Party member.” This suspension was removed the following year. US Assistant Attorney General McEachen declined to prosecute due to a lack of evidence that taking classified documents for use by Israel was “injurious to the USA or to the advantage of another nation,” but Parsons’ security clearance was again revoked on 9 January 1952.

As the self-declared Antichrist who would usher the Apocalypse, Parsons was uniquely positioned to do so as one of the fathers of US rocketry. It is significant that he intended to settle in Israel and sought to persuade the Israelis that he could establish a missile programme. In his role as Antichrist, it seems credible that Parsons envisaged settling in Israel at the location where the Apocalypse is supposed to unfold from the battle of Armageddon. 

It also seems likely that Parsons saw a vision of nuclear devastation in the fiery Apocalypse described by St John in The Revelation. One of the world’s most eminent experts in rocket chemistry, someone with such a mission as Parsons, was uniquely placed to complete the Enochian Working with the benefits of modern apocalyptic science that he helped in large measure to create.

Parsons’ hopes of going to Israel did not eventuate. It is debated as to whether the enormous explosion that killed Parsons on 17 June 1952 when he was handling chemicals on his property was an accident, murder, or suicide. 

Or perhaps it was a self-immolation rite to Babalon, a final fiery embrace intended as a sacrifice to inaugurate the Aeon?

Footnotes

1. Crowley, Liber Al (York Beach, Maine, 1976), 1: 1-3.

2. Ibid., 1: 57. 

3. Aleister Crowley, The Law is for All (Arizona: Falcon Press, 1985), 72-73. 

4. Crowley, Introduction to Liber Al, IV: The New Aeon, 13. 

5. Ibid., 3: 6-8, 39. 

6. Ibid., 3: 34, 42-43. 

7. Donald C. Laycock, The Complete Enochian Dictionary (London: Askin Publishers, 1978), The Tenth Call, 257. 

8. Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Biography (London: Watkins Publishing, 2011), 274. 

9. Ibid.

10. Crowley to Wilkinson, 7 August 1945, cited by Kenneth Grant, Cults of the Shadow (London: Frederick Muller, 1975), 115. 

11. S. Goldstein, ‘Theodore von Kármán’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 12, November 1966, 334-365. 

13. Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (London: Frederick Muller, 1972), 166. 

12. Henrik Bogdan, The Babalon Working 1946: L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Whiteside Parsons, and the Practice of Enochian Magic, Numen, No. 63, 2016, 28. 

14. Jack Parsons, Liber 49, The Book of Babalon (1946) v. 10, sacred-texts.com/oto/lib49.htm

15. Ibid., v. 40.

16. Ibid., v. 41. 

17. Jack Parsons, Liber 49, Part II: The Manifesto of the Antichrist. 

18. Donald Tyson, The Enochian Apocalypse, Gnosis Magazine, Summer 1996, bibliotecapleyades.net/bb/bluebook418.htm

19. Geoffrey Landis, The Three Rocketeers, American Scientist, July-August 2005, americanscientist.org/article/the-three-rocketeers

20. Manon Hedenborg White, The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon & the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism (Oxford University Press, 2020)

21. Donald C. Laycock, 83. 

22. Revelation 17:6. 

23. Manon Hedenborg White, 136. 

24. Manon Hedenborg White, 138.

25. Ibid., 139. 

26. ‘John Whitside Parsons’, FBI File No. 65-59589, 2 November 1950, ia902704.us.archive.org/27/items/marvel-whiteside-parsons/John%20Parsons%2001_text.pdf

27. Ibid., 29 September 1950. 

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., McEachen to Parsons, 13 November 1951. 

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Time appears to march on at what seems a constant rate. In this way, time has two opposite directions, the somewhat known past and the largely unknown future. However, events in the sky repeat and so they can be predicted as seasons within a year or lunar phases within a month. Even before modern calendars, Stone Age humans counted the days in a month to understand the recurrence of the menstrual period and know when moonlight would be strong again at night. 

Stone Age Origins of Time

Two months happen to equal 59 whole days: a lunar month is 29.53 days long, just over twenty-nine and a half, which is half of 59. In the artefact shown at the top of Figure 2, each day was carved upon a flat bone, each mark appearing varied in shape and depth to show the Moon’s changed phase on a given day. The flat bone enabled a cyclic shape to be used, of 59 marks, which “ate its own tail,” showing there was always the same number of days in two “moons.” This sameness emerges from dividing the recurring time of the solar day into the time of the month’s phases over two months to give the recurring whole number of 59, then forever useful as a knowledge object.

The solar day clearly has the same duration every day, and two lunar months clearly repeat twice after 59 days. But our modern life is the extended straight line of day numbers belonging to unequal months of the Sun so that the loops that recur are lost in the framework of man-made time. The Stone Age “lesson from nature” was that events in the sky largely run according to a definite schedule along cyclic paths, most of these being along the path of the Sun, along which the Sun, Moon, and planets follow their own cyclicities, seen from the Earth. 

This reliable cyclicity shaped our notion of an unchanging realm of Eternity, different to Life upon the Earth as our ever-developing present moments within Existence. In this way, knowledge from the sky came to be considered sacred and interconnected through numbers when counted as days and months, especially through counting the often identically sized discs of the Sun and Moon and their respective years.

While astronomy started as a Stone Age hobby, it later became a tribal science quite unlike our own astrophysics. Only later would farmers support city specialists who assimilated this prehistoric science by forming religious sciences and cosmologies in the East, such as Egypt, Babylonia, India, China, and so on. 

Millennia later, the 16th century altogether discarded this geocentric view-from-the-Earth and adopted a new heliocentric view of the solar system, which enabled the planetary orbits of the Sun to be clearly seen as mathematical ellipses by Kepler. This system was soon seen to be held together by Newton’s newly intuited force, gravity, of the central Sun’s large mass.

If counting the Moon had synchronised both female fertility and male hunting, then this shaped the format we call the hunter-gatherer who foraged for food before there was farming. Their women formed a naturally less-mobile core for the tribe and its children, the men hunting over extensive ranges. All adults worked together for the greater good, and since they were in-common descended from the women, a matrilineal society was an effective format for problems requiring larger groups. 

Stone Age art of the goddess seems to have been varied and geometrical (see Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas). In Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures, myexperience in analysing megalithic sites caused me to question whether the megalithic monuments were the work of Neolithic or a New Stone Age farming revolution moving west from the Middle East where it started. Because the farming revolution only advanced slowly through central Europe and towards the Atlantic coast (see Figure 3), it pretty much avoided the Mediterranean. 

The megalithic revolution largely took place within the islands and hinterlands of the Mediterranean and Atlantic Coast of Europe between 5000 BCE and 2500 BCE. It was, therefore, much more likely to have been carried out by the late middle Stone Age (Mesolithic) people before the farming way of life arrived. The indigenous culture of old Europe was Mesolithic – well-established and centred around women, foraging, and matrilineage (using your mother’s name) rather than the neolithic norm, led by men – farming and patrilineage (using your father’s name). 

Clash of the Titans

Being indigenous, matrilineal tribes were far more likely and able to innovate megalithic astronomy, which was effectively inherited from the long tradition of day counting seen on Stone Age tallies like the Blanchard plaque. 

This continuity of interest in the sky conflicts with today’s model of history and our foundation myth for modern science – as the grandchild of ancient Near Eastern civilisations and exact sciences, fuelled by farming on fertile soils using irrigation. 

By comparing day counts, sky time could be given geometrical forms such as circles, squares, and rectangles/triangles, and these were rightfully considered sacred by the coherent megalithic culture on Europe’s shores. The civilisation was numerate and intelligent, but not Stone Age in the vernacular sense, of having no ability to reason. 

Having an extended family of adults and no urgent need to seasonally grow crops, conserve seeds or tend their animals, nature already provided food through foraging. There was a natural collaborative workforce, perhaps explaining the dearth of neolithic settlements alongside the earliest megalithic monuments. 

Having overcome this misnomer that megaliths were automatically neolithic, further work is required to see why modern science cannot understand sky phenomena like the Stone Age did. Today, we do not study the synodic periods of the planets because they are seen as merely an incidental composite of the planetary orbits and our solar year. 

Quite unexpectedly, the view from the Earth is supremely important since the structure of time on Earth is a phenomenon reflecting the form and structure of the numerical world. This suggests that the Earth was, in some way, influenced by the abstract world of numbers to form this type of time environment. It might also suggest that the evolution of Life was an intended outcome for the third planet. 

Having discarded the Earth-centred model of the universe and ridding ourselves of the religions and gods proposed to explain this phenomenon, modern humans are free to live in an accidental universe where one is simply alive on an existential line-of-time with no end except for death, and without any appreciation of the deeper structural recurrences implicate within the sky. Instead, there is a hotch-potch Roman calendar whose roots were largely man-made.

The Greek myths referred to women but in ways designed to put matrilineage norms in a bad light. The patriarchal farmers of Jupiter-Zeus had defeated the religion of the Goddess whose representatives had snakes (perhaps the dreadlocks of the Medusa or knowledge of the snake-shaped ecliptic) or had kept men sexually enslaved on an island (as in the Odyssey) or sacrificed a sacred king after “a year…” (of 364 days) “…and a day” (making 365 in all). Our 7-day week derives from this Saturnian year of 364 days (52 weeks), named because the synod of Saturn is exactly 378 days (54 weeks) while the synod of Jupiter is 57 weeks. 

In this, one is seeing through a series of invisible filters – the ancient Greeks were against the tribal age that preceded farming and cities, when women rather than men were most important to that way-of-life. 

The Enlightenment adopted the heliocentric planets as a binary, removing the foundations of a vast past cultural corpus of religious and pre-scientific thought that had quite reasonably shown something special about the world that modern science never chooses to see. 

If we fathom megalithic astronomy, its uniquely powerful discoveries reveal what the religious texts were about: Earth’s favourable environment is no accident; it is a planet for the evolution of Life. 

Megalithic discoveries were transmitted subconsciously into the cultural subconscious of later civilisations. This impulse still informs and infects our arts and the classical form of numeracy called mathematics. 

This diffusion benefited from the clash of the Titans, namely between the matriarchal and patriarchal ways of life in the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant. It was recorded in the intellectual life of the Greeks and Hebrews, thus informing the Islamic and Christian world views as a code of numbers and stories often agreeing with those of the East. 

Continuity in Sacred Building 

If you know how to look, one finds the units of measure and geometries of the megalithic repeated in later sacred buildings, built under disparate religions, as if the design of sacred buildings had some sort of megalithic origin. 

The Chinese, Indian, Buddhist, Minoan, Classical Greek, Romanesque, Islamic, South Asian, Amerindian, Gothic, Sufi, and Renaissance buildings draw upon common geometric and metrological blueprints relating, for example, to the relative size of the Earth and Moon, and the sophisticated celestial time cycles such as eclipse phenomena, as if to celebrate the cosmic environment even though many religions conceptualised the heavens as if not found in the sky. 

For this reason, my books explore buildings of the historical period in the same way as megalithic buildings to demonstrate this continuity of an invisible language, as if there are people with megalithic knowledge behind the construction of buildings without the outer religion officially acknowledging this fact. 

In some strange way, others and I are recapitulating ancient works in terms of their meaning by employing skills belonging to the past. For example,

In Cappadocia, Turkey, stone-cut churches inexplicably contain high levels of meaning in their dimensions and definition of circular apse and rectangular naos occupied by hermit monks. 

Angkor Wat is shown to be a massive statement of astronomical cyclicities alongside an outer meaning of Vedic mythological carving and Indian temple design. 

St Peter’s Basilica was a Renaissance rebuilding involving many great architects, including Michaelangelo, who displayed sacred geometrical skill in translating a Greek square-cross basilica design into a Latin cross cathedral design through the golden mean relationship of a square to such a rectangle (see Figure 5). St Peter’s tomb is in the centre of a model of the Earth and Moon.

Chapter 11 of my 2024 book Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures: The Divine Science of the Female Priesthood demonstrates that the equal perimeter model of the Earth and Moon had been related to the now-abandoned geocentric model. 

The Earth is at the centre, and a system of growing square areas for each planet’s synod grows to embrace the whole figure, revealing that it was the archetypal form taken as the norm for Buddhist Mandalas. Jungian therapists and others use Mandalas to enable interaction with the subconscious mind. This suggests that our very being, as microcosmos, is part of the Earth and its planetary Sky environment of time. 

Celestial time appears to be a carrier wave for reality, not just a straight line.

The author’s book Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures: The Divine Science of the Female Priesthood is available to purchase.

Images courtesy of Richard Heath and the publisher Inner Traditions International. 

References

Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC to AD 1000, Yale 2008. 

Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, Thames & Hudson 1989.

Richard Heath, Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures, Inner Traditions 2024. 

Richard Heath, Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels, Inner Traditions 2021. 

Richard Heath, Tragic Loss of the Geocentric Arts and Sciences: When Poetry was the Language of Cosmology, New Dawn #185 (Mar-Apr 2021), sacred.numbersciences.org/2023/06/03/tragic-loss-of-the-geocentric-arts-and-sciences.

Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s first Art, Symbol and Notation, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1972.

Bettina Schulz Paulsson, Time and Stone. The Emergence and Development of Megaliths and Megalithic Societies in Europe, Archaeopress 2017. 

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Best known to the wider world through the Hollywood interpretations of his works Blade Runner (from the book Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report and others, Philip K. Dick was certainly not a typical ‘science-fiction’ writer.

Although his early books might indeed have featured ‘zap guns’ and ‘androids’, they generally did so only as ironic props in stories of bewildered human protagonists displaced by emergent technological absurdities and hostile bureaucracies.

Often plagued by relationship breakdowns (he had four wives) and an adventurous attitude to drug use, Dick wrote an extraordinary series of novels across the 1970s (and early 1980s) that have come to be known as his metaphysical or theological canon.

Inspired by a chain of otherworldly and mystical events in February and March of 1974 – Dick had often previously written of the fragile nature of what we perceive to be ‘reality’ – he now manifested a cogent and strikingly timeless alternate cosmology.

In essence, beginning with his novel Valis (originally written in 1978 but not published until 1981), Dick argued that the Roman Empire had never truly ended but instead transformed and adapted, continuing to dominate human civilisation through different masks and institutions.

In his view, what we perceive as historical progression – the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity, the development of modern nations – was largely illusory. Beneath these surface changes, the same imperial power structure or spirit remained intact, continuously subjugating humanity.

That concept was deeply rooted in Gnostic philosophy, which Dick encountered (largely through the Nag Hammadi scriptures) during the intense metaphysical period following his transformative 1974 experiences. In Gnostic thought, the material world is ruled by a false god (or Demiurge) which keeps humans trapped in ignorance. Dick mapped this onto his understanding of the Roman Empire, seeing it as the earthly manifestation of this malign cosmic force.

Described as “The Empire That Never Ended,” it was one of Philip K. Dick’s most profound and complex philosophical concepts, central to these theological works and his sci-fi-tinged personal spiritual perspective.

The “Empire,” in Dick’s view, had constructed a “Black Iron Prison” – another key concept in his work – a metaphysical cage that traps human consciousness. This prison operates through multiple vectors, often hidden in plain sight:

• Deception and illusion: Making people believe they are free while actually being controlled.
• Information control: Manipulating what people know and believe.
• Psychological oppression: Creating systems that make resistance seem impossible or pointless.
• Spiritual blindness: Preventing people from recognising their true divine nature.

Dick argued that the Empire’s continuation could be traced through various historical periods:

• Early Christianity: Rather than defeating the Empire, Christianity was co-opted and became another tool of imperial control. The institutional church became a new form of Roman authority.
• Medieval Period: Feudalism and the Holy Roman Empire represented direct continuations of Roman imperial structure.
• Modern Era: Contemporary governments, corporations, and institutions all serve as manifestations of the same underlying malevolent imperial power.

The methods may have become more sophisticated – psychological manipulation rather than direct, brute force – but the essential structure remained unchanged.

In Dick’s universe, the Empire is opposed by a divine force he sometimes called “VALIS” (“Vast Active Living Intelligence System”), represented, in the book of the same name, by a self-aware satellite that orbits Earth, shooting Gnosis (divine knowledge) through a blinding pink laser beam. This plot device presented authentic divine consciousness attempting to break the illusion and liberate humanity.

Dick believed that around 70 CE, with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, time itself became corrupted or trapped. This wasn’t simply a historical event but a cosmic catastrophe that fundamentally altered the nature of reality. In his cosmology, we are all living in a kind of temporal loop or stasis, where the same imperial patterns repeat endlessly under different disguises.

This temporal imprisonment means that what we perceive as progress – technological advancement, social evolution, political change – is largely illusory. The essential power structures remain unchanged because time itself has been hijacked by the imperial force. We experience the sensation of moving forward while actually trapped in the same historical moment.

While couched across the novels Valis (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer (1982) and the astounding Radio Free Albemuth (originally written in 1976 but published posthumously in 1985) as a kind of quasi-hallucinogenic science-fiction mysticism, it should not be difficult to see Dick’s vision as hauntingly prescient and direly accurate of our historical and current circumstances.

According to Dick, the Empire now maintains its power through increasingly sophisticated methods:

• Information Warfare: Rather than crude physical oppression, the Empire now operates primarily through the manipulation of information and perception. People are controlled not by chains but by false beliefs about reality itself.
• Psychological Programming: The Empire creates mental patterns that make resistance seem impossible or pointless. People become complicit in their own oppression by accepting the Empire’s version of reality as natural and inevitable.
• Institutional Capture: Every institution that might oppose the Empire – religion, education, media, government – is eventually captured and turned into another tool of control. Revolutionary movements are co-opted before they can pose any real threat.
• Temporal Confusion: By keeping people trapped in the false timeline, the Empire prevents them from recognising the true nature of their situation. People cannot resist what they cannot perceive.

His “Black Iron Prison” also represents the metaphysical structure that enforces the Empire’s control. It was Dick’s most powerful metaphor for the nature of oppression itself. Indeed, the Black Iron Prison is not a physical location but a state of consciousness – or rather, unconsciousness. The Prison functions through:

• Perceptual Limitation: The prison limits what people perceive and understand. Reality appears solid and unchangeable because the prison prevents people from seeing its constructed nature.
• Ideological Constraint: The prison functions through belief systems that make alternatives seem impossible. People remain trapped not because they cannot leave, but because they cannot imagine freedom.
• Temporal Imprisonment: Like the Empire, the prison operates through time distortion. People experience the illusion of temporal progression while actually being held in stasis.
• Collective Delusion: The prison is maintained through shared false beliefs. It’s a consensus reality that people collectively create and maintain, even as it oppresses them.

Directly intersecting with contemporary descriptions such as Matthias Desmet’s concept of “Mass Formation Psychosis” and the heaving totalitarianism that surfaced during the COVID Operation, there seems little doubt that Philip K. Dick’s ‘paranoid’ cosmology presents a vital roadmap for attempting to understand what passes for the spiritual, political, philosophical and informational landscape of the 21st century.

In classical Gnostic thought, the Demiurge is a false creator god who has trapped divine sparks (human souls) in the material world. Dick identified this figure with the “Empire That Never Ended,” seeing the Demiurge as the cosmic principle behind all earthly oppression.

While traditional Gnosticism often portrays the Demiurge as a cosmic principle, Dick historicised it, seeing it as actively manifesting through specific human institutions and historical periods. The Roman Empire wasn’t just influenced by the Demiurge – it was the Demiurge’s most successful Earthly incarnation.

The Archons, in Gnostic cosmology, are the Demiurge’s agents who maintain control over the material world. Dick saw these as manifesting in various forms such as political leaders, religious authorities, and institutional powers, who serve the Empire’s interests, often without realising their true role.

Furthermore, Dick identified Psychological Archons, internal forces that keep people trapped – fear, despair, conformity, the desire for security over truth. These are the ‘guards’ of the Black Iron Prison. And in Dick’s more modern interpretation, Information Archons are the forces that control information flow – media, education, propaganda systems that shape perception and belief.

Dick’s Gnostic perspective led him to a radical critique of institutional Christianity. He believed that Christianity had been co-opted by the Empire almost from its beginning, turning the revolutionary message into a tool of control. Orthodox Christianity promises salvation in another world, which Dick saw as a way of preventing people from recognising their potential for liberation in this world. And, Dick suggested, much of institutional Christianity actually worships the Demiurge while believing it worships the true God. Indeed, orthodox Christianity emphasises faith over direct knowledge, which Dick saw as keeping people dependent on external authority rather than developing their own direct divine consciousness.

In earlier Dick novels (such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from 1968), he subtly presents questions about consciousness and the true nature of what it means to be human, blurring and shifting the lines between the ‘androids’ of the title and their ostensible human creators.

John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live shared many settings and themes with Dick’s sublime novel Radio Free Albemuth. In the book, a scattered resistance battles the treacherous Archonic infection represented by President ‘Ferris F. Freemont’ (obviously, FFF is numerologically 666), as underground culture furtively keeps hope alive – situations loosely mirrored in the film. Similarly, the iconic 1999 film The Matrix presents ‘Dickian’ and Gnostic concepts wrapped in an action/sci-fi garb.

From 1974 until his untimely death in 1982, Dick produced a multitude of research, journals and letters that dealt with the events of “2-3-74” and his place in the great cosmic mystery. Condensed from over 8,000 pages of material, The Exegesis Of Philip K. Dick runs to more than 900 published pages and explores, in depth, Gnostic and unmistakeably Lovecraftian perspectives – indeed, “the Demiurge is still under the waters, dead but dreaming.”

While Philip K. Dick clearly and knowingly presented timeless Gnostic themes in a modern form, it is hard to imagine a time and place more necessary (than here and now) to examine concepts such as the constructed and manipulated nature of ‘reality’, the cancerous, imprisoning scourge of materialism, and the industrially designed death of the soul.

Indeed, it really is Philip K. Dick’s world… and we live in it.

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