A store in Barcelona. A good store.

Like mojitos, everything comes back into fashion again.

And like those who have been drinking mojtios anytime between 2008 and next month, people remain blissfully ignorant of their unfashionability and… better than that… probably wouldn’t care if they knew, anyway. (But seriously, they are the chemical perms of the cocktail bar.)

So it goes with my ‘taste’ in music.

Like pretty much everyone else, my taste in music coalesced around the era that it was most prominent, most transformative, in my life. Which would be those warm Sydney summers of the mid-to-late nineties… Paris house, progressive trance. And I know that will annoy loads of people but when has that ever stopped me?

The macro cultural trends at the time were very much MDMA for the evenings, marijuana for the morning after -watching VHS tapes of X-Files, lighting bongs with alien grey lighters and talking about chaos magic. This was a good time for space movies. For me, ‘the sixties’ ended one night in 2002 when I was doing the DVD buying for a couple of hundred music/DVD stores (back when people bought such things). Having taken a load of speed and Absolut vodka, I was up watching Waking Life at 3am so that I could plan how many to buy and where they’d go. There was some missing time, there was a vague sense that the numinous had shifted from something experiential to something you just talk about. That was it. The air had been let out of the balloon.

Daft Punk is the mojito of my heart. Sorry I didn’t come of age in a cooler decade but there you have it. It was warm, I was pretty and high, all Australians are great big sluts, my mobile phone had four backlight colour options and nothing else… Good times.

Then we had the neckbeardy, money-focused noughties that destroyed the entire world. Fantasy was just about hobbits. Back to work. There’s no god. Have a fucking cosmopolitan. But, as previously indicated, the macro culture is trending back toward the psychedelic and numinous. Heck, Scully herself is back on TV! And you can also stream the entire upcoming album from the mojito of my heart on iTunes right now for free! (Come in, Sekhmet. Sekhmet, do you copy?)

We also have a crumbling of the previous ontological fascism. (More specifically, we have the rise of multiple ontologies.) Witness the TED fiasco. Witness the sea change in the ‘war on drugs’. Witness the return of decent space movies! And the absolute-best gnostic head trip I have seen in years:

From an interview with the creator:

“Well, so much of the story is about being effective at a distance. The main thrust of it is the breaking down and building up of a personal identity and where that comes from, but when we get into the next… the “closer to text” layer, which would be… you know, we’ve got central characters that are being affected by things they are not aware of, things they can’t speak to or name.”

That’s about as close to why this amazing movie is relevant here without going into further detail. Watch it.

But, of course, it’s not just music and it’s not just movies… it never is. It’s things like Hood By Air, a deliberate blurring of social and gender categories shot through with a genuinely cosmic understanding of what is of value in our world.

For a start, there’s the word ‘hood’. Here’s Shayne Oliver explains:

We’d be running around wearing heels with parts down the middle of our hair, but wearing these t-shirts that said ‘Hood,’ just to mix it up. I’d sometimes get into altercations with people over [the shirts], but at least I knew there was power in something I made.”

Power, energy… check out another interview with the HBA team:

Leila: I think the fucked up thing about copying or when a huge label copies, is that they’re going to use that idea once. So they don’t know where that come from. You can’t reproduce that season over season. You can’t focus on it, and develop it and then turn those ideas out over and over and over again. They’re going to play that style out and that’ll be it….

Soto was more blunt: “It’s very interesting to watch your brands become more mainstream, but to be excluded from that…there is so much vampire energy. I want to be careful. I’m still a struggling artist staying broke while other people use my ideas.”

I am waaaay too old, fat and profoundly uncool to be personally interested in HBA but I mention them for two reasons:

• They are other hands on the elephant. (Actually, it’s a space squid, but the metaphor holds.)
• Whenever you despair of kids these days, remember that, in many ways, the kids are always all right. That’s just how humanity rolls.

Whilst you could make the case that this is a rehash of the late seventies gender/norm atomisation (Bowie, etc), such a contention -whilst true- only gets us so far. It’s not like it was new then, either. It’s entirely shamanic, it just needed to be re-membered, then and now. It reminds me of what Genesis P-Orridge said about how personal synchronicities increased after the creation of hir third gender.

And the soundtrack for the space squid’s latest wrigglings is also the soundtrack to HBA… and come straight out of NYC’s GHE20G0TH1K parties. It’s synchrosomethingly appealing that one of the luminaries is Venus X. Here she is, doing her thing:

The dharma of cat videos

Think on this:

When the improbable dominates the archive to the point that it seems as if the library contains ONLY the impossible, then these improbabilities don’t feel as improbable.

I think there is already evidence that this ocean of extraordinariness is inspiring, galvanizing, prompting, daring ordinary folks to try something extraordinary. At the same time, superlative epic failures are foremost as well.

Here is how one uses the extraordinary. Recall The Verne Effect and consider the potential impact on your consciousness of daily viewings of dozens of very low probability events. That cat riding around on that roomba may just be making it more likely that your enchantments will succeed. If we shift our expectations that then the highly improbable becomes more probable… we move the needle for everyone.

And so we come back to the most anticipated album of the year. Not only does it include the musical signature from Close Encounters -providing a pleasing Truffaut/Vallée French connection- it also ends with a track making use of a recording of Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan. How many hundreds of millions of times will these words be heard this year?

“Hey Bob I’m looking at what Jack was talking about and it’s definitely not a particle that’s nearby. It is a bright object and it’s obviously rotating because it’s flashing. It’s way out there in the distance. Certainly rotating in a very rhythmic fashion because the flashes come around almost on time. As we look back at the earth it’s up at about eleven o’clock, about maybe ten or twelve diameters. I don’t know whether that does you any good, but there’s something out there.”

The name of the track?

Contact.

I am pleased, earthlings. Very pleased.

Rune Soup. Where wizards drink free.

Paris in February. Called The City of Light for some reason.

In my baby wizard days, I was particularly enamored of Crowley’s presentation of The Trance Of Sorrow.

To experience ‘sorrow’ is an error because it implies there is something wrong with the universe.. and how could that possibly be?

Boom.

To my tiny, idiot mind, here was the ‘get out’ clause for activism or helping anyone but yourself.

Children living in Mumbai slums? Trance of sorrow. Lack of housing assistance for Australian Aborigines? Trance of sorrow.

But see… I grew up in a financially and emotionally stable, loving, white family in a house overlooking three beautiful Australian beaches, in a safe (albeit boring), prosperous town. Of course, sorow looked like an illusion in such circumstances.

The only thing that was sorrowful about my fifteen years of existence was how little I knew about sorrow. That’s changed.

Hôtel de Ville, Paris.

The ongoing archonology series has attracted four or five emails and comments around these internets with two broad messages: “this is awesome” but “it makes me want to sit in the corner of a dark room, silently drinking great quantities of cheap bourbon, waiting for my inevitable and utterly meaningless expiration.”

To the first point, may I publicly say athangewe! To the second point… well… I did kinda warn everyone. Literally. The series opened with a one thousand word warning that you’d get slimed so here’s an almost-extinct Cathar prayer to wash yourself down with at the end. (It’s also why I have resisted doing the series for so long, to be honest.)

Hampton Court.

The other message seems to be “what can I do about it?” My immediate response is disabuse yourself of the notion that you are in any way an actor in what’s unfolding. Now is a suboptimal time for macro probability manipulation… that will indeed come. But for now, it would be like holding your breath as the plane crashes.

So that’s some little comfort in its own way. Then there’s:

Chaognosticism

I get that gnostic cosmologies are pretty unpopular toward the pagan end of the spectrum because it supposedly considers the physical world evil and the stapler on my desk has a spirit or some shit. And as such, it has to be discounted or wrong or ill-fitting.

The end of my street in January. Weird, right?

But there is a lot of value here if you think of gnostic perspectives as tech rather than worldviews… in the same way chakras aren’t a worldview but have a higher concentration in worldviews that have been influenced by Hinduism. (The analogy is apt as there is no such thing as ‘gnosticism’ as a cohesive set of beliefs anyway.)

If you think a gnostic perspective somehow literally life denying then you need to get yourself down to the Languedoc and see how the descendants of the Cathars still live. Warmth, family, amazing wine, seasonal hyperlocal food, an enlightened pace of life. Europe can (and will) come crashing down around them again and they’ll still be feeding olives from their own trees to their stupidly beautiful, happy children. How are you living? How did that soda you drank in the car taste? Who is the one denying ‘real’ life here?

In Glasgow.

A big part of my day job is to communicate complex ideas as simply as possible. The people I speak to are by no means unintelligent, it’s just that the broader context is entirely irrelevant for the purposes of grasping an idea so that one might take action. Most digital media nerds struggle with that kind of discernment.

Having briefly touched on this last week, I have a suspicion that many of the world’s great spiritual teachers did the same thing. It’s only human to want to know that, yes, there are gods and angels and Sandalphon is partial to hummus. The Buddha flat out said to meditate through divine visions, Jesus’s message can be cooked down to “do as I do, which is not be a dick”.

Behind ‘not being a dick’ is a clearly enlightened understanding of what we might call karma or the myriad ways that one little act of darkness echoes across creation. (“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others. And by each crime and every kindess we birth our future.”) Jesus didn’t go into detail about how the continuous manifestation of universal consciousness generates atemporal, non-local ripples and every little hurt or act of generosity reorganises it. (Or however this place actually works.)

He said don’t be a dick. It’s a shortcut, a hack. Because, as Cat says, this is a rescue mission.

London in January.

Enlightenment on the London Underground

A gnostic perspective is another hack. It is a means of orienting yourself to better discern what is important and what is not. The esoteric interpretation of which god built which realm is a deliberately skewed version of largely hermetically cosmology. (Their shared origin is the giveaway.) It is an hermetic accelerant, it is an inaccurate map that is more helpful in completing your journey than an accurate one.

Like London’s tube map. It is not an accurate depiction of the topography of the capital but it has been getting visitors and citizens around much more effectively than a ‘proper’ map for almost a century.

Don’t dismiss -in this case- chaognosticism just because it doesn’t map the fact you think you can talk to rocks.

Paris again.

‘Divided for the chance of union’

To some extent I was saving this next part for the conclusion of the archonology series, but it has been made clear to me that a few people might need a breather on the way there… some way of orienting the very bad news in a constructive map of reality. (We haven’t even gotten to the assassinations yet!) So here it is.

It’s not unreasonable to suggest that the dominant magical worldview is one in which the universe exists in its entirely to experience and understand itself… it’s an intentional shamanic universe, it’s the Sea Org of animism.

Gardens of Hampton Court.

Of course, the notion that the universe exists so that you may experience it -and vice versa- is much easier to grasp when you’re lying on a tropical beach with a handsome native bringing you cocktails that you are charging to your room. However, if it’s true there, it’s also true when you’re stuck, rammed into a stranger’s armpit at 7:15am in a tunnel blasted through a plague pit because there has been a signal failure on the Victoria Line.

And this is the secret to chaognosticism. The universe is experiencing archons just as it is experiencing you but it is also experiencing you resisting them. And all of it is continuously emanating from that First Thing. Archons may be shit but holy shit if they aren’t holy shit. The entire artifice is That One Thing which is sacred.

What I didn’t get as an idiot, fascist child was that seeing through The Trance of Sorrow is not an excuse for inaction, it is an instruction to act without despair.

The photos on this post were pulled from my phone, just from this year. Which is some wonderful ‘experiencing’. So that’s my answer.

There are certainly snakes on this game board… but there are also ladders.

Rune Soup. Where wizards drink free.

The entrance to One Hyde Park looking suitably portalish.

It’s 1942.

A train leaves Nazi-occupied Paris for the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Basel. On board is a member of the French cabinet, Pierre Pucheu.

He also happens to be a director of the private Worms Bank in Paris. And Pierre has heard from his US State Department contact in Vichy that Eisenhower is about to invade North Africa.

At the BIS, Pierre sits down with a fellow Frenchman who quickly passes the news along to BIS director and senior Gestapo member Kurt von Schröder. Never mind letting information that could free France falling into German hands, never mind passing along this information to Nazi High Command… there was money to be made.

And what money! This Franco-German banking alliance immediately transferred 9 billion gold francs via the BIS to Algiers. Correctly anticipating the German defeat, they boosted their personal holdings from $350 million to $525 million (in 1942 money) almost overnight.

Thing of it is, that’s exactly what the BIS -which exists to this very day- was set up to do:

The inspiration for the BIS came from none other than Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, later president of Hitler’s Reichsbank. And here the plot thickens, considerably: Sensing Adolf Hitler’s lust for war and conquest, Schacht, even before Hitler rose to power in the Reichstag, pushed for an institution that would retain channels of communication and collusion between the world’s financial leaders even in the event of an international conflict. It was written into the bank’s charter, concurred in by the respective governments, that the BIS should be immune from seizure, closure, or censure, whether or not its owners were at war.

But that was by no means all. For while the bank was originally and ostensibly created to handle the payments and transfers of war reparations between Germany and the former western Allies, “the Bank soon turned out to be the instrument of an opposite function. It was to be a money funnel for American and British funds to flow into Hitler’s coffers and to help Hitler build up his war machine.” Thus, by the time World War Two broke out in September 1939, the BIS was almost completely under the control of Hitler via his various proxies, and included among its directors the head of I.G. Farben (of course), Hermann Schmitz, Baron Kurt von Schröder, “head of the J.H. Stein Bank of Cologne and a leading officer and financier of the Gestapo; Dr. Walther Funk of the Reichsbank” and Emil Puhl. And at the head of this, as president, “was the smooth old Rockefeller banker, Gates W. McGarrah, formerly of the Chase National Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank, who retired in 1933.”

As Charles Higham reports, after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, and later its annexation of Bohemian Czechoslovakia in 1939, the gold reserves of those nations fell into Nazi hands. By this time, “the BIS had invested millions in Germany, while Kurt von Schröder and Emil Puhl deposited large sums in looted gold in the Bank.” In other words, the nexus for the postwar relationship between the Nazis and the Western banksters of London and New York was being created even before the war, and its principal mechanism was the BIS. [More.]

Ahh, London. Of course your filthy, ‘pie n mash’ finger stains are all over this. Here’s an image of One Hyde Park.

Personal note: my commute is frequently interrupted by the Household Cavalry. Yes, it’s surreal.

I drive past One Hyde Park all the time. Energetically, it feels like a boss level in a yet-to-be-released Wolfenstein game. It is home to the most expensive apartments on the planet. And not much else. Literally. A large proportion of them are owned by mysterious shell companies -like a ghostly reboot of Melrose Place, Archon Place.

Trevor Abrahmsohn, a U.K. real-estate agent, remembers London before the modern property boom began. “London was as Paris is today: an interesting, quirky souvenir town. We had the Tower of London, the Queen, the palace, and the Changing of the Guard,” he says, adding Scotch whisky as an afterthought. “That is what we stood for. London was not a tax haven.”

“It seems to be that every big trading disaster happens in London,” U.S. congresswoman Carolyn Maloney observed last June. “And I would like to know why.” The disasters she was referring to were the ones that bankrupted Lehman Brothers and nearly bankrupted some other American firms, such as A.I.G. and MF Global, as well as causing JPMorgan Chase’s $6 billion loss at the hands of the trader popularly known as “the London Whale”—all of these happened to a high degree in the London branches of those firms and have cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars.

To answer her question and to understand why so much of the world’s money goes to London in the first place, you need to go back hundreds of years, to the emergence of what must be the most peculiar, the oldest, the least understood, and perhaps one of the most important institutions in the menagerie of global finance: the City of London Corporation. It is the local authority for “the Square Mile,” the pocket of prime financial real estate centered on the Bank of England and located about three miles to the east of Knightsbridge, along the Thames River.

Apartment interior, One Hyde Park.

But the corporation is also much more, its identity embedded in—and slightly apart from—the British nation-state. The corporation has its own constitution, “rooted in the ancient rights and privileges enjoyed by citizens before the Norman Conquest, in 1066,” and its own lord mayor of London—not to be confused with the mayor of London, who runs the Greater London metropolis, with its eight million inhabitants. One sign of the City of London’s distinct identity is the fact that the Queen, on official visits there, will stop at the boundary of the Square Mile, where she is met by the lord mayor, who engages her in a short, colorful ritual, before she may proceed. Most Brits see this merely as a relic from a bygone age, a show for the tourists. They are wrong.

“The lord mayor’s principal official role, his Web site says, is to be “ambassador for all UK-based financial and professional services.” He lobbies far afield, with offices in Brussels, China, and India, among other places, the better to “expound the values of liberalization” far and wide. The City Corporation and closely linked think tanks issue streams of publications explaining why finance should be less tethered by taxes and regulation. The corporation also has its own official lobbyist, with the delightfully medieval-sounding name of The Remembrancer (currently one Paul Double), lodged permanently in Britain’s Parliament. Local elections in the City are unlike any other in Britain: multi-national corporations vote alongside and vastly outnumber the tiny borough’s 7,400 human residents.

Over the centuries the City has thrived, thanks to a simple advantage: it has had money to lend when governments or monarchs needed it. So the City has been granted special privileges, allowing it to remain a political fortress withstanding the tides of history that have transformed the rest of the British nation-state. It has nurtured a British tradition of welcoming foreign money, with few questions asked, and so has for centuries attracted the world’s wealthiest citizens. “There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together,” Voltaire wrote in 1733, “as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts.”

This is how international finance is conducted. I’m not even kidding.

When the British Empire crumbled in the mid-1950s, London replaced the cozy embrace of gunboats and imperial trading preferences with a new model: tempting the world’s hot money through lax regulation and lax enforcement. There was always a subtle balance, involving dependable British legal bedrock fiercely upholding U.K. domestic rules and laws while turning a blind eye to foreign law-breaking. It was a classic offshore-tax-haven offering that tells foreign financiers, “We won’t steal your money, but we won’t make a fuss if you steal other people’s.”

Britain could close down this tax-haven secrecy overnight if it wanted, but the City of London won’t let it. “We have, to put it provocatively, a second British empire, which is at the very core of global financial markets today,” explains Ronen Palan, professor of international political economy at City University in London. “And Britain is very good at not advertising its position.”

‘Not very good at advertising its position’ is a suitably British understatement. Its ‘position’, perhaps inevitably, looks like nothing quite so much as a highly complex financial instrument. Have it explained to you in a couple of minutes. (Note for Americans: this will also be handy if you’re coming a visitin’!)

The British Overseas Territories sound like a roll call of every criminal den of tax avoidance all around the world. They are shadow places with a gaping hole where representative government should be… and on the other side of the gaping hole is a supremely wealthy individual who is so unbound by law that she has her own navy but doesn’t even have her own passport. (Sidebar: I so wish she did. “In the name of me, grant me passage.”)

Here is what the shadows do in shadow places:

The invisible financial world is something the majority of people have no idea of. The major part of it is the shadow sector of world financial system – financial institutes and financial operations conducted under the cover of off-shores and falling out of the sight of financial regulators (central banks, ministries of finances, security and exchange commissions etc.) . One can only guess how large it is, there is no way to have a clear picture of what it is like because all the activities are conducted beyond any supervision. No books kept, no accounting before state structures exists. The world dwellers are criminal gangs related to drug trafficking, arms trade, slave trade and so on. It’s not even grey sector activities, but rather “black” economy breaching all norms of penal law. According to experts, the turnover is a few trillion dollars a year… Besides, the shadow sector encompasses various structures that do not hide underground. Many of them openly offer various services to individuals and corporations.

For instance, hedge funds involved in different ventures. Or respectable banks that offer private banking services (investing account holders money in off-shore jurisdictions). They are involved in importune advertising offering services of dubious character. The activities simply fall out of legal and financial oversight, as well as common laws and international norms, they have their own rules to abide by. The last financial crisis was of much greater depth, scale (actually the whole world) and duration due to unrestrained growth of shadow sector (many experts think the crisis is not over, it was just the first “wave”.)

Wheee! Businessss!!1!1! Still need convincing I mean ‘archon’ in the literal sense? (Some very ‘Aryan’ looking guards there, I note.)

The invisible world is not limited by “shadow” sector only. A part of it may be called clandestine. The clandestine financial world is diversified, no one knows all about it. It’s a mixture of various financial relationships and agreements hidden away from peoples, parliaments, official financial institutions, and international organizations. The secret international agreements are the best example. Some of them have surfaced to public view (for instance, financial accords between the United States, Great Britain and Hitler’s Germany). There are more numerous examples of secret accords between private structures. For instance, traditionally banks have been concluding cartel agreements in flagrant violation of anti-trust laws. It’s enough to remember the 2012 row when it was discovered that the largest banks were in collusion and manipulated LIBOR interest rates.

Let’s have this in cartoon form, because it’s extremely, extremely important. The world’s 100 richest people made enough money in 2012 to end global poverty four times over.

Advocacy groups like the Tax Justice Network estimate that about $250 billion is lost in taxes each year by governments worldwide, solely as a result of wealthy individuals holding their assets offshore. The revenue losses from corporate tax avoidance are greater.

The group estimates that half of all global trade now passes through tax havens and an estimated one third of world wealth now resides there.

The issue of secrecy jurisdictions is not just about evading taxes. Shell companies – that is, corporations with no apparent operations, no apparent employees and no apparent physical assets – are used by those who register them for a range of other nefarious activities around the world. Thanks to loose laws of incorporation in many jurisdictions, it’s easy for offenders to remain anonymous. And the entities can often be formed in less than 24 hours using online facilities.

It is not just criminals that take advantage. The secret service arms of governments use tax havens to create covers for their networks of spies, according to experts we have talked to. And advocacy groups claim many small-time dictators use tax havens to strip the assets of their people.” [More.]

What we are seeing here is a continuation of ‘the game’ that led to the creation of the BIS. And it’s a game in a very real sense… it is at the level of make believe you only otherwise find in treehouses. You say “I have a gazillion bajillion dollars!” and it becomes true. This is an important point because it speaks to not only how we got into this mess, but how easy it should be to get out of it.

So let’s have a brief diversion for a potted history of money.

A potted history of money

Here are a few excerpts from Extreme Money, which is currently free on Kindle, and definitely recommended.

The word bank has its origins in the word for the table or bench on which bankers did their transactions. Originally, the table or bench may have been an altar. The Templars, a military order of religious knights dedicated to the task of liberating the Holy Lands from the Infidels, can lay claim to being the first truly global financial supermarket.

Modern banking practice began in Italy in the Renaissance. Great banking families in Venice, Florence, Genoa, and Pisa profited from financing growing trade. To avoid religious prohibitions on usury, the banks dealt in bills of exchange—documents, traditionally arising from trade, that order the payment of a known sum of money to a designated person at a specified time and place. Banks bought and sold these documents, effectively lending (buying a bill of exchange with money) and borrowing (selling a bill and receiving money).

Bills of exchange overcame the need to transport gold. They were faster and more secure. The bills circulated as an early form of pure money. Banks allowed idle gold or money to circulate freely. It would be deposited with a bank or used to buy a bill (a debt collectable at a future date with interest). The original holders of $100 still had their money, but the bank and whoever it lent to also had the $100. The money that was lent would come back to the bank or another bank as a deposit. The money could then be re-lent and recirculated in a continuing, endless process.

This process—reserve or fractional banking—is the quintessential element of modern finance. Banks keep only a fraction of their deposits in reserve to meet the needs of withdrawals by depositors and lend out the rest. The practice expands the supply of money, allowing merchants, businesses, and investors to increase the scale and scope of their activities. The only limit is the requirement for banks to keep a minimum fraction of their deposits as reserves. The banking system that evolved in the Renaissance survives remarkably unchanged to this day.

Here you can see the beginning of money as a complete fiction, as make believe. The book goes on:

Less than 8 percent of all dollars are in the form of paper money or coins. The vast majority of dollars exists in the form of entries in the accounts of borrowers or lenders. Paper money is an abstraction or, as most of it does not exist physically, the abstraction of an abstraction. Its sole reason for existence is as a medium of exchange. There are no limits to the amount of money that can be created.

The view from what you can buy with money you invent, stashed in an avoidance system you invent, to hide it from rules you invented.

At each step of the transition from commodity to paper to credit, money became more unreal, and detached from the real goods and services that money can be exchanged for. Money transformed itself from a mechanism for trade into an object in its own right. Modern technology— digital money—further stripped money of corporeality. Money exists as pure information, with no intrinsic value. It is nothing and everything. Making money, lending it, borrowing money, and making money from money is central to human existence and activity. As the Roman poet Horace noted eons ago: “Make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, by any means money.”

…

Money is the ultimate Faustian bargain—a pact with the devil in return for earthly power, wealth, or knowledge. In the second part of Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has Faust and Mephistopheles visit the Emperor who lacks the money to pay his retinue of soldiers and servants as well as his lenders. Mephistopheles comes to the aid of the Emperor, obtaining his permission to print paper money. Faust has the Emperor sign a note that anticipates modern money: “To whom it may concern, be by these presents known, this note is legal tender for one thousand crowns and is secured by the immense wealth safely stored underground in our Imperial States.” The Emperor is incredulous: “And people value this the same as honest gold?” Mephistopheles arranges for thousands of notes to be printed and uses this to pay off the Emperor’s creditors.

In 2013, the relationship to the underlying asset is now, for all intents and purposes, entirely fictional. Bear that in mind the next time you hear the prime minister say there’s no money for northern libraries so they’ll have to close. No money?! How bout… The next time you invent some, instead of giving it to the banks, give it to the fucking libraries!

We live and work in the world of extreme money—spectacular, dangerous games with money that create new artificial highs in growth, prosperity, sophistication, and wealth. Once used to value and exchange ordinary goods, money has become the main way to make money. To make a billion dollars, it is no longer necessary to actually make anything. The rule of extreme money is that everybody borrows, everybody saves, everybody is supposed to get wealthier. But only skilled insiders get richer, running and rigging the game. Money and the games played are intangible, unreal, and increasingly virtual. Electronic displays flashing red or green price signals are the distilled essence of the financial world. Traders do not experience the underlying reality directly but only in terms of gains or losses—money made or lost that can be lost or made back in the next few seconds.

The most expensive apartment on earth looks out over a park that is bigger than Monaco. I hope those shell corporation egregores like the sunrises.

Money and you

Meanwhile, back in what I hesitate to call the real world, 1 in 3 Americans are now ‘poor’ or ‘near-poor’, considering themselves “lucky” to be working jobs like these. (Warning: heartbreaking.)

Or, as the cute and smart Matt Bors puts it:

Our economy has been slowly gaining ground since we bottomed out in the 2008 job-pocalypse. That oughta be good for people, right? But, turns out 121 percent of income gains made in the recovery went to the top one percent of the country’s earners. I’m not sure how you can capture more than 100% of something. It sounds kind of greedy to me. An economist at Berkeley got to that number when figuring in the fact that incomes for most everyone else have dropped. Wages are down, household incomes are down, but don’t worry, these are the job creators we’re talking about. If you don’t have an employment scenario figured out just yet, wait a few minutes. I’m sure some rich guy needs someone to give his shoe-shine 121 percent of their effort.

Jobs, jobs, jobs! They’re everywhere. The problem with all this job-creation is the new jobs are all worse than our previous jobs, which, to be honest weren’t all that rad in the first place. Some jobs, they don’t even pay money, which is still a thing you need some of to live.

My mother spent the recession in multiple jobs, the most recent of which paid federal minimum wage. $7.25, baby! This is the reason why, when I hear well-paid pundits say that no one except high school kids work for minimum wage, I want to fly to their home, poop on their doorstep, and set it on fire.

Stories like my mom’s are the new normal. Barely scraping by and taking what you can get is the new normal. Having 500 people show up to apply for jobs at Walmart, who pursues a strategy of paying people such low wages that they qualify for government assistance, that’s the new normal. Let Uncle Sam pick up the check!

I want to return to an extended story from Extreme Money, because it is the perfect illustration of how the money world you live in is wholly separate from the one the residents of One Hyde Park live in:

Four thousand participants cram into the 2007 Global Finance Conference, staged that year in London. The opening address is from the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Chancellor’s intellectual signature is a naïve belief in the primacy of finance, banking, and money in general. He has made London money friendly and is lionized by the City for it. Modern economies have long ceased to make anything. The major activity is money: investing it, borrowing it, trading it, making it, and spending it. Money generates derivative industries like property speculation, luxury car dealerships, personal trainers, and company-paid-for lifestyle coaches, butlers, and valets—all essentials of a modern life of conspicuous consumption in the modern service economy.

The City.

The Chancellor’s allusion to London’s superiority over New York as a center of money elicits a negative reaction from the large contingent of American financiers. Mailer bristles with indignation: “If you’re good enough to make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.” Government mandarins and academics vouchsafe the contribution of finance to society at large. Bankers talk of innovation and the golden age of finance, the money to be made, and the money they are making. Regulators speak of market responsive regulations. One bank chief executive notes: “The regulators are finally under control!” There is the dull repetitious quality of minimalist music. The lunchtime guest speaker—a rock star noted for his charity work—enters to a blast of his hit song from 30 years ago. The audience, which was in nappies when he enjoyed his popularity, looks confused, not recognizing the tune. Unconstrained by anything as restrictive as a lectern or notes, the speaker celebrates his own “humanitarian achievements,” and concludes: “I tell you this—the paradigm for the future century must be a new order or else there will be new global disorder.”

Over to us. At the same time, away from Guildhall, across the Atlantic, in a convention centre in the middle of anywhere:

The speaker at the real estate seminar is a 30-something man in a shiny silk suit and a headset. He is big on rhetorical questions: Do you know what is the hottest real estate market in the world today? It’s the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria. Do you know why? It’s the cheapest waterfront in the world today. Just $40,000 gets you prime beachfront property. What would you get for that amount in Florida, Mexico, Spain? Think about it. Prices have doubled in the last six months. Do you know what gains I expect over the next two years? 500 percent. That’s right! You will get back five times what you invest. Can you imagine that? Only smart people can imagine that. Are you smart? Do you dare to be rich? The speaker pauses and looks carefully at his audience. “Or are you a loser? Do you want to stay a loser?”

I grapple with magnificent Black Sea beachfront bungalows overlooking rocky, pebble-strewn beaches, a heavily polluted sea and a smoke-belching Chernobyl vintage nuclear power plant. The speaker’s other favored investment destination is the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, where prices have appreciated 150 percent over the last 2 years. Soaring oil prices and demand from other property players diversifying their investment portfolios guarantee massive gains. World RE Investment Portfolios, Inc., the speaker’s company, is selling seminars not real estate.

At the conclusion of the speech, assistants fan out, buttonholing attendees to sign them up for further seminars to gain in-depth knowledge about the path to riches by the Black Sea, in Dubai, and further afield. The cost is $25,000 for a series. If you want a personal one-on-one with the “Divine One,” then the cost is $50,000 for a 2-hour audience. “Best investment I ever made,” a fellow attendee tells me. “I’m signing up for a personal coaching session. Just to ‘fine tune’ what I’ve been doing.” What he has “been doing” turns out to be a portfolio of 200 homes in various countries assembled over the last 7 years. He purchased a property next to his house for his aged parents, but they became seriously ill and died before they could move in. The property appreciated in value. He sold it and was left with a profit on his first trade. He reinvested the gain in another property. He now buys property, and as soon as the property rises in value, he increases the mortgage amount to take out his initial investment and starts the whole thing all over again. “Banks are pretty relaxed now about lending these days. They lend you the full amount, no questions asked. You really don’t need to have any money to start. Not like in the old days.” He is worth $20 million on paper. “Not bad for a garage mechanic.” It is all tied up in the properties. “I don’t want to sell. There’s so much upside.” If he needs spending money, then he borrows it. He has around $180 million in debt. The consistent message is “Debt is in; debt is good.”

Debt is good? Yeah, for these guys:

Minions of the archon

Here’s the testimony of a junior at Lehmann Brothers in New York. Read on and let your stomach churn!

In the early days, I learned important lessons on markets, liquidity, and how to value impossibly complex financial products. I would spend days attempting to understand the intrinsic value on structured bonds collateralized with physical jet engines or commercial real-estate scattered across various regions of the country. The reach of these products was real and the analysis could mean millions won or lost for the firm. The purely cerebral slice of the industry, and I’ll stand by this today, was fascinating (to me).

Unfortunately, what I eventually came to learn, and this took time, was that what was really happening was a simple transfer of wealth, more often than not from the less intelligent and informed to the more so. I worked in a highly opaque market. There was no price ticker scrolling across our screens telling us what these bonds and derivatives we traded were worth. In fact, no one really knew what any of this stuff was worth. Which, it turns out, is a trader’s field day. What this meant, in its simplest form, is that these traders (or salespeople) could buy bonds at the “market” price from intelligent hedge fund managers in NYC and sell this same crap at much higher levels to unsophisticated (but legally considered “sophisticated”) pension funds and insurance companies in middle America.

What I discovered, quite starkly, is that the part of Wall Street that I worked in was simply transferring wealth from the less sophisticated investors, often teachers’ pension funds and factory workers’ retirement accounts, to the more sophisticated investors that call themselves proprietary trading desks and hedge funds. Of course, the traders had all sorts of excuses and jargon to deal with this truth. “Oh no,” they would say, “We are important providers of liquidity that create stable financial markets. We’re a crucial part of a system. And besides, if we don’t do it, someone else will.” These are the lies that people tell themselves so that they can buy larger homes.

Here be dragons. You ain’t kidding.

It wasn’t just Lehmann Brothers, of course. Far from it. It’s just that they -for reasons that remain unclear to me- were the only bank to be refused a taxpayer bailout. But it is all of them. This, from an amazing, amazing piece in Rolling Stone by personal hero, Matt Taibbi.

These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation’s GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it’s no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

One of the biggest Libor suits was proceeding on schedule when, early in March, an army of superstar lawyers working on behalf of the banks descended upon federal judge Naomi Buchwald in the Southern District of New York to argue an extraordinary motion to dismiss. The banks’ legal dream team drew from heavyweight Beltway-connected firms like Boies Schiller (you remember David Boies represented Al Gore), Davis Polk (home of top ex-regulators like former SEC enforcement chief Linda Thomsen) and Covington & Burling, the onetime private-practice home of both Holder and Breuer.

The presence of Covington & Burling in the suit – representing, of all companies, Citigroup, the former employer of current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew – was particularly galling. Right as the Libor case was being dismissed, the firm had hired none other than Lanny Breuer, the same Lanny Breuer who, just a few months before, was the assistant attorney general who had balked at criminally prosecuting UBS over Libor because, he said, “Our goal here is not to destroy a major financial institution.”

In any case, this all-star squad of white-shoe lawyers came before Buchwald and made the mother of all audacious arguments. Robert Wise of Davis Polk, representing Bank of America, told Buchwald that the banks could not possibly be guilty of anti- competitive collusion because nobody ever said that the creation of Libor was competitive.

But these numbers are supposed to reflect interbank-loan prices derived in a real, competitive market. Saying the Libor submission process is not competitive is sort of like pointing out that bank robbers obeyed the speed limit on the way to the heist. It’s the silliest kind of legal sophistry.

…

At ICAP, the interest-rate swap desk, and the 19901 screen, were reportedly controlled by a small group of 20 or so brokers, some of whom were making millions of dollars. These brokers made so much money for themselves the unit was nicknamed “Treasure Island.”

The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure. The whole thing, in fact, has a darkly comic element to it. “It’s almost hilarious in the irony,” says David Frenk, director of research for Better Markets, a financial-reform advocacy group, “that they called it ISDAfix.”

“In all the over-the-counter markets, you don’t really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together,” Masters notes glumly. That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.

It’s fine. Just go back to watching your televised amateur singing competitions. I’m sure our ‘elected’ officials will get to the bottom of this. Won’t they?

PBS’ Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. What this program particularly demonstrated was that the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable.

What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.

Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way, overwhelmingly supported Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions. As Harvard law professor Larry Lessig put it two weeks ago when expressing anger over the DOJ’s persecution of Aaron Swartz: “we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House.”

Ahh yes, the White House. Which brings us back to where this highly illegal, completely imaginary world of impossible wealth and ancient titles has to actually interface with allegedly-functional governments. Let’s return to HSBC and how they got away with being the most insidious organisation operating on earth today:

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that “they make the guys on Wall Street look good.” The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

HOW did they get away with it?

Well… my suspicion is that it will eventually emerge that HSBC is one of the primary sewers -along with the aforementioned Vatican Bank- that launders and vomits intelligence agency money to and from the dark corners of the world in which they are operating. Basically… if they looked too closely at the ledgers, various western governments would see their own names. And they know it.

One can only imagine how much of the shadow economy is intelligence-related. Based on when it iceberg peaks into the real world, we can be confidently that it is truly enormous.

The Portland Font in the British Museum.

Spook money

To some extent, this is arbitrary, but we might date the origins of spook money to the end of World War II. You ever heard of a guy called Ed Lansdale?

Didn’t think so.

According to Sterling Seagrave, Lansdale was sent by General Charles Willoughby to the Philippines after the war. Lansdale “joined the torture sessions of Major Kojima Kashii “as an observer and participant”. As Seagrave explains: “Since Yamashita had arrived from Manchuria in October 1944 to take over the defense of the Philippines, Kojima had driven him everywhere.”

In charge of Kojima’s torture was an intelligence officer named Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana (Santy). He wanted Major Kojima to reveal each place to which he had taken General Tomoyuki Yamashita, where bullion and other treasure were hidden.” Ray Cline argues that between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion recovered by Santy and Lansdale was moved by ship to 176 accounts at banks in 42 countries. Robert Anderson and CIA agent Paul Helliwell set up these black gold accounts “providing money for political action funds throughout the noncommunist world.“

The story goes that MacArthur sent him directly to Truman to tell him about the gold the Japanese had amassed through their unrivalled theft operation in mainland Asia -gold that had never been included in the total estimate of world gold. (A dodgy number, anyway. The Vatican Bank estimates a much higher volume of world gold reserves than the Fed. That would be the same Vatican Bank that stashed the Japanese emperor’s gold at the end of the war.)

In this series, we keep coming back to how you fund a hijack of our reality… you import drugs into America and sell it to gangs, like the CIA did, you launder mafia money through the Vatican bank, you fly ‘planes’into the accounting section of the pentagon the day after announcing more than two trillion missing from the black budget.

It comes down to this… if you want to steal our world, you need a war chest. (And I would speculate, one that has an HSBC debit card with a picture of a coconut treelined beach on it.) Forget, for a moment, the vast amount of money that comes out of war and into Halliburton’s coffers… let’s firstly look at the money that goes into these war zones.

Pallet after pallet after pallet of crisp, never-used US bills flew into Iraq. In Afghanistan -the country the US was inexplicably ready to invade within days of 9/11- they appear to prefer the sack with a dollar sign on it so beloved of cartoon villans. From The New York Times:

While intelligence agencies often pay foreign officials to provide information, dropping off bags of cash at a foreign leader’s office to curry favor is a more unusual arrangement.

Afghan officials said the practice grew out of the unique circumstances in Afghanistan, where the United States built the government that Mr. Karzai runs. To accomplish that task, it had to bring to heel many of the warlords the C.I.A. had paid during and after the 2001 invasion.

By late 2002, Mr. Karzai and his aides were pressing for the payments to be routed through the president’s office, allowing him to buy the warlords’ loyalty, a former adviser to Mr. Karzai said.

Then, in December 2002, Iranians showed up at the palace in a sport utility vehicle packed with cash, the former adviser said.

The C.I.A. began dropping off cash at the palace the following month, and the sums grew from there, Afghan officials said. Payments ordinarily range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, the officials said, though none could provide exact figures. The money is used to cover a slew of off-the-books expenses, like paying off lawmakers or underwriting delicate diplomatic trips or informal negotiations.

Much of it also still goes to keeping old warlords in line. One is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose militia served as a C.I.A. proxy force in 2001. He receives nearly $100,000 a month from the palace, two Afghan officials said. Other officials said the amount was significantly lower.”

In what world is this anything but the textbook definition of a conspiracy? And lest you think it was just the Americans, some of those sacks had GBP signs on them, as well. (But again, the group we are discussing here is literally transnational.) From The Guardian:

“The thing about US money is a lot of it goes outside the budget, directly through individuals and companies, and that opens the way for corruption.”

Khalil Roman, who served as Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told the New York Times: “We called it ‘ghost money’. It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

One American official told the newspaper: “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States.” 

So that’s vast amount of intel money washing into a war zone historically known as one of the key nodes of the global drug trade. We’ve been here before. Are you at all surprised to learn that Afghan poppy farming is at an even higher level than it was under the Taliban? Highlighting the connections between intelligence agencies and drug trafficking can even get you imprisoned:

“There’s no question the mainstream media is reluctant to write about events well documented, and incidences of wrongdoing involving official agencies and drug trafficking,” Jonathan Marshall, author of Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, told Wired.co.uk. “And that reluctance helps breed speculation. It lends credence to the idea that there is some suppression of truth going on. It’s partly because there’s a well-deserved feeling that mainstream media and official investigations have not adequately pursued legitimate stories; it opens the door for conspiracy theorising.”

 …

“We live in an information wilderness,” political documentary maker Eugene Jarecki tells Wired.co.uk, “and so conspiracy theorists have been made a laughing stock by government and their friends in the media, because of course it’s a good idea to marginalise critics and turn them into people that shouldn’t be taken seriously. What better way to undermine them? Donald Rumsfeld referred to the information wilderness as information asymmetry — his goal was to maintain information asymmetry over his adversaries, but who were his adversaries? Was it Al Qaida, the Iraqi people? I think the real answer, in part, is the American people.”

Anecdotally, the exact same thing that happened in Central America is happening in Afghanistan. The armed forces of other governments know which trucks loaded with poppies to let through.

Have a look at this quote about the US Army ‘relaxing’ its rules when it comes to Afghan poppy farming. Witness the journalistic contortions required to make this sound ‘normal’. Never mind the fact that illegal methods of money making have been at the cornerstone of the intelligence community since its inception:

The rules are fairly new and reflect a subtle but profound shift in the way the U.S. Army thinks about Afghanistan, its people and culture and conflict. Having furtively experimented with every possible approach to Afghan poppies since 2001 — from blissfully ignoring them to actively destroying them and everything in between — today the ground-combat branch has made peace with poppies, viewing them as a potential good thing for Afghanistan and the Army. But Gackstatter’s brigade, in southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province since January, is also the last full-up U.S. combat brigade to be deployed to Afghanistan in America’s longest-running war. It’s the last chance for U.S. troops to make a major impact in this part of the country. After that, the American contingent shifts to a strictly advisory role. The poppy trade will be left to the Afghans to handle — or not.

We encountered Catherine Austin Fitts in the last part of this post series, talking about the black budget and what it is used to hide. As promised, here is the fleshed out description. If you watch one video on this page, let it be this one:

• The National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949 allow intelligence agencies to claw money from other federal agency budgets on a non-transparent basis.
• As a result of an Executive Order in 1980, Bush Snr, who was vice president at the time, assumed oversight of the National Security Council and all intelligence agencies. As part of the order, it was now legal for private corporations to handle classified projects.
• Add these together and you have the legal mechanism to use unlimited money to create extremely advanced technology and keep it in private hands. Which is exactly what I have been saying.

If you think our ‘betters’ are using this system for our collective benefit then you have never been anywhere near proper power. (Or possibly even looked out a window?) You don’t even exist to them.

More from an interview with Catherine Austin Fitts:

CA: Well think about it this way. Another way to look at it is, say the average taxes per resident is about $5,000. And 85% of that, or say $4,700, is going to agencies who refuse to produce audited financial statements or reliable financial systems. And if you study the black budget, increasingly what you’re seeing is that money is going to support private corporations and private banks who are using those resources to basically steal community assets out from under them. So you’re basically financing an operation which is stealing all your political powers and economic wealth. It’s a dream.

CA: What was happening [was that] annually, starting in 1995, the Federal government, the auditors underneath the auspices of each agency’s Inspector General, would come forward and say, “This year we could or could not produce audited financial statements, … and part of the reason is that we have undocumentable adjustments of $59 billion or whatever the number was.” And so in this annual sweep up whereby the individual Inspector Generals would report into the Secretary of the Treasury and to the General Accounting Office (which is the auditor for Congress), it would come in through this annual sweep, and they would come in and say, “OK, we can’t produce audited financial statements, and we have this much of undocumentable adjustments.” At some point after the numbers got really crazy, they just decided after 9-11 to stop reporting them.

Now, when people say to me “What is $3.3 trillion of undocumentable adjustments?”, let me give you an example. In fiscal 2000, the Department of Defense had $2.3 trillion in undocumentable adjustments. OK now, there’s no way for us to know Jim, how much of that translates into cash. ‘Cause $2.3 trillion is more than total taxes paid in a year by … say tax payers in that year would have paid taxes of about $1.6 trillion. So, there’s no way to know if $2.3 trillion translates into how much cash, or how much cash is missing.

What we do know is that under the laws of the Constitution, which say money cannot be spent unless it is appropriated. It is essentially a violation of the Constitution to do that, with one exception. And this is where the black budget comes up. There are provisions under the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949 for military and military intelligence to crawl money from outside of different agencies’ budgets, and spend it on non-transparent purposes. That’s sometimes why it’s called the “black budget”.

CA: (Laughter). It makes no sense, unless you, let me give you an example. Last year we appropriated $87 billion for Iraq, but the administration has repeatedly says it can’t explain where half of that money is going. It was interesting, one of the top reporters who followed the $3.3 trillion of missing money, I asked him the other day, I said, “Where do you think the $87 billion went to?” And they said, “Well, we think it went to finance the states’ deficits, because they were screaming about the states’ deficits, and then all of a sudden it stopped.”

We’ve had a complete implosion of internal financial controls in the governmental apparatus. $3.3 trillion missing from government is a financial coup-d’etat. You can keep a bubble going as long as you can finance it. And my guess is, again very much credited to Bill Murphy, what we’re watching is a securities operation both with the Federal agencies, the mortgage agencies, and the U.S. Treasury, which are financing a political economy. The money that comes in from those debt operations are being used for other than their lawful purposes.

One Hyde Park at night. I’ve never been in so I’m not sure if it’s permanently night there or not.

Counting up the pennies

Let us recap:

• The word ‘bank’ may have come from a word originally meaning ‘altar’. I leave it up to you to speculate, altar to what, exactly.
• Global banks operate from a shadowy, medieval fiefdom that is hosted by London the way one might host a demonic tapeworm.
• Half of all global trade passes through tax havens, most of which are personally owned by the Queen.
• Money is literally invented in a game whose rules are set to include profiting from both sides of war. Need more money? Invent it.
• Intelligence agencies wash international drug trafficking money through high street banks to pay off warlords in a country they invaded for spurious reasons.
• For thirty years, tax money that should have gone to the education of American children has been legally appropriated for the development of secret super-weapons within private companies thanks to the machinations of the son of a nazi collaborator and fascist.

This is the world the emerging economies are leaving behind. They are getting up from the table, uttering “fuck this” under their breath, and just walking away. Because, again, this is ‘treehouse economics’. It is saying “I have all the money and you have nothing!”

Just quite how this inter-archonic period goes remains to be seen. Skeletons will leave closets and dance. Check out this story from Greece:

Premier Antonis Samaras held a special meeting with the foreign minister Dimitris Avramopoulos and other key officials this morning to limit the diplomatic damage from the 80-page report. The document – stamped “Aporito”, or secret – was drafted by a panel of experts appointed by the Greek finance ministry and delivered to officials last month. The alleged claim against Germany reaches a grand total of €162bn, including €108bn for rebuilding the country’s infrastructure after the Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1944. This is 80pc of Greek GDP. The probe was chaired by Panagiotis Karakousis, director-general of the General Accounting Office at the Finance Ministry, and relied on 190,000 pages of documents scattered through the country’s ministries and archives.

This post in the series contains no ghosts, no invisible death rays, no crashed flying saucers, no military abductions or mass poisonings, no murdered popes. And yet, I promise you, it is the scariest fucking post in this series. Because it is the magic lamp at the heart of the entire régime. Never, never dismiss a claim based solely on its perceived cost in our age of so-called ‘austerity’. There is truly no financial barrier between anything they can darkly dream and its implementation.

However, there is some little comfort in this. A game of make believe ends the way The Labyrinth ends. With the words “you have no power over me”. Imaginary demons may be the most persistent but they are also the easiest to banish. And that’s what we have to do, just as the emerging economies are doing. You can’t just walk away from money because walking away from money makes us serfs.

Instead… watch, wait. And be ready to grab your pitchfork and torch and meet out the front of One Hyde Park.

Rune Soup. Where wizards drink free.

All of this would be totally fascinating if it wasn’t for the rats… Welcome to the new MI6.”

Tomorrow begins the Feast of the Larvae, the annual Roman ritual for banishing the cosmic vermin from our lives.

Rome was the nazis’ most effective ratline for fleeing postwar Europe. Given this is a Roman festival, let’s look there first for the expiration or banishment of rats.

Giulio Andreotti, one of the lynchpins of archonic corruption over the last fifty years died a few days ago. To put him in perspective, his lack of compassion and morals alarmed Thatcher herself.

Giulio Andreotti, who has died aged 94, was the ultimate insider of Italian political life. For half a century he was at the heart of power. His tenure at the highest echelons of government was unequalled in Europe. From the early 1960s to the early 90s, he was – almost uninterruptedly – either prime minister or a senior minister. Andreotti was in all but six of the 45 governments that ran from May 1947 to April 1992, led seven of them and, at various times, was the minister of defence, foreign affairs (five times), finance, treasury, and interior. He held the post of prime minister for longer than any other postwar Italian politician except Silvio Berlusconi, yet he never led the Christian Democratic party.

Andreotti was the most controversial figure in the political life of what came to be known as Italy’s First Republic (from 1946 to the political and constitutional turmoil of 1992-94). As a senior Christian Democrat, he played a leading part in all significant political watersheds while never taking a major political initiative. Few of Italy’s contentious issues left him untainted, from those surrounding the construction of Rome’s Fiumicino airport, which opened in 1961; to the murky banking scandals of Roberto Calvi, found hanging under Blackfriars bridge, London, in June 1982; and Michele Sindona, found poisoned in his cell in 1986 while serving a life sentence for murder.

Magistrates asked parliament 27 times for permission to investigate Andreotti, and 27 times parliament rejected the request.

You may remember Roberto Calvi from when I apparently annoyed some people the last time I mentioned the CEO of the First PaedoBank of Archon. Here he is after being fished out of the Thames from under the synchrappropriately named Blackfriar’s Bridge in London, home of MI6′s rat problem:

Roberto Calvi’s connections to Propaganda Due -the pseudo-masonic society that has prevented a stable Left government from forming in Italy since the war- are undoubtedly a factor in his murder. Andreotti’s connections to P2 -and where it blends into that strange spectrum of intelligence agency/mafia we also see behind JFK- are even more important here. He may well have been their boss:

Not only was [Andreotti] accused of being a freemason – by the wife of Roberto Calvi, the banker (and mason) found mysteriously hanged under Blackfriars bridge back in 1982 – but he was accused of being the hidden string-puller behind the lodge to which Calvi belonged. Headed by one Licio Gelli (alias “the Puppetmaster”), the so-called Propaganda Due, or P2, was a secret club whose members included senior figures in the police, the armed forces and the intelligence services as well as Italy’s current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

“Ah, yes,” Andreotti agreed. “That strange lodge – Gelli’s one.” He said it distractedly, with the air of a man recalling the bridge circle he had once heard was run by the wife of the friend of a very distant cousin. You would never have thought the revelation of the P2′s activities infused Italian politics with scandal for years – years in which Andreotti was a leading player, if not the leading player, on the political scene.

Andreotti was the public figure who initially revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, the NATO/nazi/OSS project to leave clandestine “stay behind” groups in Europe to destabilise the rise of socialism or communism. (Which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is very close to the stated aims of P2. Funny that.)

Anyone who thinks P2 is history needs to look at how P2 member, Berlusconi, serenely sailed through a multitude of court cases and announced his intention to return to politics with the breezy confidence of one who knows a foregone conclusion when he sees it. And check it out, the country’s new coalition leader has some interesting ties:

He knows that Mr Berlusconi, who is not in cabinet but exerts a big influence over it, will pull the plug on the government as soon as he knows he has the votes. Mr Letta should at least be well-informed of Mr Berlusconi’s intentions. His uncle, Gianni Letta, is one of Mr Berlusconi’s trusted advisers.

Mr Letta has started well – in Mr Berlusconi’s eyes – by suspending a planned increase in sales tax and a housing levy.

This tarot tower is so riddled with rat tunnels that it is teetering -something towers do just before they become The Tower.

This government is the last stand of a political class that is unable to generate a concerted, popular and legitimate vision of Italy’s path through and out of the crisis. Like the Monti government, it could be termed a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: a government with no popular mandate, to rule for a limited if ill-defined period, and whose principal task is kick-starting an economic recovery defined not in terms of social needs but “growth”: profit-making and exploitation. [More.]

And so, on the exact anniversary of the P2-backed plot to kidnap and murder Aldo Moro, a former Italian Prime Minister, whilst blaming it on the Red Brigade, we have a Tower collapsing in Genoa.

Genoa is no stranger to tarot symbolism. It is the family home of Italo Calvino, the Cuban writer perhaps known best for his novel based on the Tarot. The streets and shapes of Genoa inspired his young imagination.

Genoa is a cornerstone of multiple empires -having its tower collapse is heavy with symbolism. Known as La Superba, it was a trade and finance centre for the Phoenicians, it is the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, and it is one of the founding cities of modern international finance. Indeed, the Bank of St George is one of the oldest in the world. St George is the patron of another capital of European finance… what’s going on there while the dust settles on Genoa’s tower?

This:

On the very same day, the eve of the Feast of the Larvae, the richest woman alive by an impossible margin, an alleged descendant of St George’s extradimensional dragon, opens parliament talking about the EU and her government’s efforts to distance itself from it.

The girl in the multi-million pound hat; kept in London’s tower and topped by a cursed imperial diamond; has no money for Europeans. The tower might be falling but the drawbridge is going up.

The same day St George’s tower falls, St George’s queen speaks. When the queen cards appear in the tarot, they carry they same force as a king card, however this force is delivered in more subtle ways, the velvet glove on the iron fist. This force is division among the enemies, discord among the conspirators, cracks in the foundations.

The tower is the 16th tarot trump. 16 days back from the feast of the larvae is St George’s Day in England. Returning to Genoa’s Calvino, the destinies of these castles are well and truly crossed.

So how do you get rats off an island? Let’s ask Raoul Silva, a metaphor for the inevitable consequence of imperialism. (A bomb would have been too ‘on the nose’ it has since turned out.)

Hello James, welcome. Do you like the island?

My grandmother had an island when I was a boy. Nothing to boast of. You could walk along it in an hour. But still, it was – it was a paradise for us. One summer, we came for a visit and discovered the whole place had been infested with rats. They’d come on a fishing boat and had gorged themselves on coconut. So how do you get rats off an island, hmm? My grandmother showed me. We buried an oil drum, and hinged the lid. Then we wired coconut to the lid as bait. The rats come for the coconut, and… They fall into the drum, and after a month, you’ve trapped all the rats.

But what did you do then? Throw the drum into the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it. And they begin to get hungry, then one by one… They start eating each other, until there are only two left. The two survivors. And then what – do you kill them? No. You take them, and release them into the trees. Only now, they don’t eat coconut anymore. Now they will only eat rat. You have changed their nature. The two survivors; this is what she made us.

For this year’s feast, banish with black beans, banish with laughter, banish with music, but whatever you do, pray for the sky to fall over their buried oil drum.

Rune Soup. Where wizards drink free.

Portuguese Catholics witnessing the ‘Miracle Of The Sun’ in Fátima.

There are space books and there are space books.

There are atypical phenomena which we have a fondness for describing as “being interpreted through the belief systems of the witnesses or experiencers.” Pagans see spirits, Christians see demons, and so on.

However, I’m not sure that such descriptions are entirely fair. Fair to us.

It seems like these phenomena should at least meet us halfway. Especially when they’re the ones making contact. ‘Interpretation via  belief system’ only gets us so far.

As a sidenote, it occurs to me there is probably a useful definition of magic versus ‘paranormal phenomena’ somewhere in the distinction between which side of the fence initiates contact.

Fátima, as previously discussed, cannot be neatly understood as ‘Catholics witnessing a UFO event’. This phenomenon wanted to be seen as the BVM. From an interview with Jacques Vallée:

He is quite serious about that word: technology. And he relates it to another: physics. A chapter dedicated largely to the Marian apparitions at Fátima, Lourdes, Knock, and Guadalupe follows in order to study what he calls, rather shockingly, “the physics of the B.V.M.,” that is, the physics of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He arrives again at the same conclusion: “We are faced with a technology that transcends the physical and is capable of manipulating our reality, generating a variety of altered states of consciousness and of emotional perceptions… The B.V.M. may dress in golden robes and smile radiantly to children, but the technology which ‘she’ uses is indistinguishable from that of gods and goddesses of other tongues and garb; it is also indistinguishable from the technology surrounding the UFO phenomenon.”

So then, the oracolo di Fatima, by an anonymous artist, dedicated to a UFO phenomenon pretending to be a Catholic miracle, was always going to be personally appealing. Here’s one I picked up in Glastonbury last month:

Because the artist is anonymous, we don’t know if he or she was actually in Fátima at the time of the incidents, but it’s almost more interesting if they weren’t there. Here is a person in Tuscany entangling their consciousness with a patently manipulative phenomenon and then dedicating a Lenormand-style oracle to it. (Tuscany is a Catholic version of a Keelian ‘window area’. Consider the visions of Maria Valtorta a few decades later. Or even… you know… the fucking Renaissance.) Was the artist instructed to create an oracle by this being? That seems remarkably out of character for the mother of a god who admonishes magic and divination.

Or does it?

Let’s look at another ‘neighbourly visit’ that also knocked mankind’s collective consciousness onto an entirely different track. From UFOs: The Psychic Solution.

The section of Evans-Wentz’ work of most interest here begins with some remarks about the Virgin of Guadalupe… To him, the entity that appeared before a 57 year old Indian named Juan Diego (his Nahuatl name was Singing Eagle) was not the Holy Virgin but the American goddess Tonantzin whom the Aztecs had adopted as the mother of all their other gods. The apparition took place on December 9, 1531, in Mexico. It began with the sweet sound of ‘singing birds’, followed by a voice which came from the top of the hill. The source of the voice was hidden by ‘a frosty mist, a brightening cloud’. The technology of the BVM was at work!

When Juan Diego came to the top of the mountain he saw a radiantly beautiful young Mexican girl of about 14, standing in the light. A series of well-documented miracles followed, in which hearings took place and mysterious flowers appeared. A basilica was built and immense crowds converted. (In the six years that followed the incident over eight million Indians were baptized.)

Here is a chronology of the miracle.

On Saturday, December 9, Juan Diego meets the entity and is told to run and instruct the Lord Bishop, in Mexico City, to build a chapel. (This is the same request made in Lourdes.) The Bishop thought Juan was insane.

On Sunday, December 10, Juan Diego went back to see the Bishop and impressed him with his sincerity. The prelate asked for a tangible sign, and Juan conveyed this answer to the Lady, who told him to come the next day.

On Monday, December 11, Juan Diego did not come, because his uncle was dying. He was unable to relieve his suffering and decided to get a priest the following day.

On Tuesday, December 12, the Indian ran across the mountain to get the priest, but was met and stopped by the apparition, who said:

“My little son, do not be distressed and afraid. Am I not here who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Your uncle will not die at this time. This very moment his health is restored. There is no reason now for the errand you set out on, and you can peacefully attend to mine. Go up to the top of the hill. Cut the flowers that are growing there and bring them to me.”

Singing Eagle knew well that there were no flowers on the top of the hill but to his surprise he found them there, cut them, and ran to the city to give them to the Bishop. When he arrived at the palace, unfortunately, the flowers dropped on the floor and he was much disappointed. To his great surprise the Bishop and all present suddenly knelt before him: upon his coarse garment, made of maguey fibers, had appeared the lovely image of an unearthly being, the figure of a woman, below her a crescent moon.

Evans-Wentz points out that December 12 was the ancient feast-day of the goddess Tonantzin, the dark-faced Earth-Mother, who thus remained the spiritual guardian of American in her modern guise as the Holy Virgin!

Notre-Dame de la Garde in Marseille.

A glowing Mexican kid? Not exactly how she is pictured today. And as for the so-called ‘miracles’? There’s no avoiding the conclusion that most miracles are downright shit. Interrupting a guy on the way to getting help for a dying family member to ask for some crappy flowers, the sun moving around the sky and changing shape. If they can do all these things then they can build their own fucking basilicas. I’m busy, yo.

But such a suggestion would only make sense if we assume that the entity’s goal was actually what it asked for; a basilica. If, instead, its goal were a manipulation of human consciousness, then the basilica isn’t the goal but rather the proof that the goal had been achieved. As Vallée points out, eight million Indians were baptised subsequent to the incident with the poor-quality flowers. Which is also why I reject the suggestion that the entity ‘is’ Tonantzin. Why not just appear as Tonantzin and then see how many Indians those imperial Spanish interlopers actually get after that? At the very point where a miracle could have swung the religiosity of the inhabitants either way, The Neighbours side with the invaders. Why?

In addition to shit miracles, these events also offer up shit prophecies. The three Fátima prophecies were:

1. A vision of hell.
2. A stern admonition that Russia should be destroyed and re-Catholicised (!?) or else there would be another war. Which isn’t exactly an earth-shattering prediction in inter-war Europe.
3. Nothing. Something about some churchmen walking up a hill, praying over dead bodies. It’s all very The Vision and The Voice. (There are rumours that the Vatican has witheld the final prophecy and that this one is a ruse.)

There is a clear push for an imperial agenda here. Return Soviet Russia to the Holy Mother or the church will be destroyed. Bow your Indian heads before this foreign god. And I wonder if that isn’t entirely the point. Here’s a quote from Anatomy Of A Phenomenon, which I amazingly managed to pick up second-hand in Hay-On-Wye:

The Fátima events are within spitting distance, historically speaking, from the end of the European belief in “beings from the skies who surveyed our Earth”. Could it have been time to ‘troop the colours’? If you are in the game of influencing or manipulating consciousness, you are going to have to change costumes as beliefs evolve. Here’s another quote from the same book. Pay particular attention to what Carl Sagan says at the end:

A transparent presentation of the purpose of contact would increase the credibility of the legend. Got that right. Sagan means it in the sense that a transparent purpose would have made him more likely to believe the legend actually happened, whereas I mean it in the sense that I would be more likely to believe the words coming out of the legend’s mouth.

A church in Lucca.

In a Mind War, this is an excellent strategy. It’s why the Fátima phenomenon appeared to thousands of unwashed, illiterate peasants rather than the crowned heads of Europe, it’s why it’s typically the rapey, inbred truck drivers who are abducted by aliens, it’s why Jesus is busy appearing in a tortilla right now. The goal is a groundswell change of consciousness.

Vallée sees meaning in the absurdity of the narratives, a meaning he will call the meta-logic of the encounter stories. Such a meta-logic, which appears as absurdity from the outside, more or less guarantees that the encounters will be rejected by the elite members of the target society (that is, by professional academics and scientists), even as the symbols conveyed through the encounters are absorbed at a very deep and much more lasting unconscious level. The absurdity of the extraterrestrial explanation, in other words, is a kind of intentional ruse or cloaking technique that allows the phenomenon to accomplish its real work, which is symbolic and mythological.

…

What he was arguing, after all, is that UFO appearances may be part of a huge “control system,” a kind of mythological thermostat on the planet designed to adjust and control the belief systems of entire cultures over immense expanses of times. As he described it in his journals, this control system “acts upon human consciousness, preventing it from going beyond certain limits”. Vallée seems to have in mind a kind of cosmic Puppet Master, a “manufacturer of unavoidable events,” as he puts it in one of his short stories, who pulls the strings of history from above and prevents us from developing our own psychic potentials. The religious doctrines and mythologies of the human imagination are the main object of control and adjustment here. Put crudely, we are being manipulated by our own belief systems, which are in turn being implanted, influenced, and guided by “alien” forces well outside our conscious selves. [More.]

Looking down on us in Rome. Literally.

Like the Fátima ‘secrets’, the star map shown to Betty and Barney Hill in their classic abduction case was flat-out wrong. Not only was it wrong, but it would have been useless from a navigational perspective -like trying to find your way around West London using a postage stamp map of Europe. So why show it at all? Because they want us to believe they come from ‘there’.

I think often about the evolution of our neighbourly encounters over the last thirty thousand years. Let me provide a fictional example of what their intended effect and modus might be. This is from Remote Viewer 001, Joseph McMoneagle’s book.

On the positive side, this is why we should all strive to have better ideas. On the negative side, it’s truly incredible just how much a bad idea can change the world. Let’s return to Monsieur Verne and his impact:

Everything, like superman or the bomb, starts with an idea. And ideas really do change the world. Much more than, say, a basilica magically appearing overnight on a hill. Influencing our ideas is the very definition of an abusive relationship: “I don’t want a basilica, I want you to build me a basilica.” Back to Verne:

The story of Verne and his impact is a particularly useful metaphor for the Mind War we are currently engaged in as part of our archonological transition. By deploying McMoneagle’s notion that there are those who are impacted by new ideas and those who seek to prevent their impact…who must therefore be circumvented… we return to Vallée’s contention that the unwashed masses are a better target than the elite for the manipulation of human consciousness. With Verne we have an example of not only how one little idea, a novel or a star map, can change the world… but also exactly who it is on earth that brings those changes through. And it is us. The unwashed masses. The scum.

“I have not found a topic that is more mind-opening than UFOs.” -Richard Dolan.

This may well be their entire purpose… and that purpose may not be entirely altruistic.

A piece of the Duomo in Florence.

Sync yoga

All of this could well be viewed as a suggestion to assiduously avoid entangling your consciousness with The Neighbours.

Pfff!

At best, it is certainly a suggestion to dispense with the wearisome, overt, extreme religiosity that infects much of modern paganism. But as Saruman says, in reference to the Palantíri, “why should we fear to use them?”

Use an ouija board wrong and you might just summon bigfoot into your bedroom like this girl did. Entangle your consciousness in a better-prepared way and you will yield more interesting (and less traumatic) results. And there is certainly value in exploring this path. Here’s Alan Moore talking about his first experience with Glycon while ball-tripping in his friend’s house:

“It was an unprecedented experience. It’s difficult to actually describe in material terms. The sensation that I had was that the roof had gone. There wasn’t “sky” up above… there was some sort of high space.

I got the impression of something bending over and leaning down, as if to get its head closer to us. And I remember I suddenly spoke in this really strange Darth Vader voice that I don’t think I can do now. And the words were “inchoate presence stooping low.”… I didn’t even know what the word inchoate meant. I’ve since found out that it means ‘on the brink of thought’. And there seemed to be something in this that… whatever it was that was leaning towards us… was gathering form as it got closer to us. It was dressing itself in imagery that we were supplying. I’m not saying it was the god Glycon, but by the time it was in proximity to me, it was the god Glycon.”

The first step is to recognise that the symbol is rarely what is symbolised. Forget this and you might end up leaving the world’s creepiest video suicide note. (Hat tip Chris Knowles! Both for the vid and for the inevitable nightmares that will come from watching it.)

The next is to understand the fluidity of the symbolism. We might call the twentieth century the hundred years of alien greys, beginning with Crowley’s LAM working, through the abduction phenomena of the 70s and 80s, and culminating in the late nineties with the X-Files/marijuana alien/pre-millennial gestalt. Today’s encounters seem to be a return to ‘lights in the sky’ and ‘numinous feelings’. (They’re also decidedly more psychedelic.)

Basilica di Santa Croce. Florence.

The third is to recognise that these beings have their own agendas. When you render out the core principles of the world’s great spiritual teachers, there is a surprising wariness when it comes to dealing with the gods. Not because they don’t exist, but because they are only occasionally relevant to your own journey.

The fourth is the need for verification when dealing with these realms. I used to think that the use of grade symbols or whatever when travelling on the astral was just so much High Victorian bullshittery. But there is no getting around the fact that -for whatever reason- deception is the name of the game. The Trickster is the One True God here.

If you don’t have an identifying symbol, you’re welcome to use mine; a jet black, spinning chaosphere. Although, it’s not so much a sphere as it is a rotating two dimensional object, like one of those spinning pentagram GIFs from a late nineties GeoCities site. (Heee! Remember those? An autoplaying midi of an Enya song would also likely terrify any being into submission.) The chaosphere seems to work either because

• It is entirely human… it doesn’t play into the entity hierarchy game. Granted, this is a bit like travelling around Europe on an American passport but it works for me. Speaking of America, you can also Captain America your chaosphere into a shield… or you can throw it against surfaces and jump through a la Portal.
• Two dimensional objects seem to freak out the denizens of inner space. I call this ‘reverse Lovecraftianism’.
• It may not have old timey provenance, but it still represents a potent magical current. So stamp my passport or fuck off! (There is something theatrically appealing in words to the effect of “open in the name of chaos”. Skeletor should have tried that.)

So then, summing up sync yoga:

1. Pick a sync saint: Saints are preferable to gods here. One, because I am less suspicious of them. Two, because saints are a lot more interoperable with whatever else you have going on. That’s basically their entire point. Gather the relevant accoutrements and commence engagement. (Full disclosure: I just printed off a card on some fancy paper in the office.) Pray for the saint and ask him or her to look favourably upon you.
   
2. Have a burner phone. I use either the UFO Tarot or the oracolo di Fatima, both from Los Scarabeo. They key is to keep the entire project wholly separate from whatever else is going on. You may need to jettison it.
3. Record the results. This can be as simple as posting syncs to G+. Usually I’m agin’ magical diaries because your memory is so unreliable. (And because I am sick of reading blog posts where people contort themselves into pretzels trying to justify why something didn’t work.) But synchronicity is when the universe notices you noticing it, and it does that more often the more often you notice it. For big syncs, check the astrological weather. The alignments are often so astounding that I am beginning to wonder whether observation of synchronicities is how astrology got started in the first place, way, way, way back in the day.
4. Visit the sync realm. I’m not going to bother covering methods of astral travel because if you’re reading this, you’re already on the internet, you lazy bastards. (My current preferred method incorporates a version of the chaosphere/portal mentioned above.) My biggest personal discovery here is that, like so many things in life, it is often the case of asking the right questions. Ask to visit ‘the realm of’ Our Lady of Fátima and you will end up floating in space. On the evening of fast days, before sleep, if I don’t have “anywhere else to go”, I ask for “an audience with” the relevant sync saint. They fucking love that hierarchy talk… again, a reason to tread carefully but not a reason to avoid treading. Some potent ideas originate from these places.

Insofar as I can tell, these are not beings to petition for mundane things. Our agendas just don’t align well enough for it to be worth the risk. But there is a net positive benefit to embiggening your sync experience. You achieve -and I only have evidence of this in the short term- an improved awareness of where reality overlaps (?) and which sequences of events are worth paying attention to. Plus, you know… it’s fun.

Let’s end with Alan Moore:

The one place in which gods and demons inarguably exist is in the human mind, where they are real in all their grandeur and monstrosity.

Have at them, kids.

Rune Soup. Where wizards drink free.

Not that impressive, you say? I wasn’t wearing glasses. But there, floating in front of the screen, was an animation of spaceships and asteroids and various other things.

This wasn’t a sexy telecoms conference either, with free waterslides and apps and cool new tablets. This was a boring telecoms conference about pipes and fiber to the home and such. And yet one of these boring pipe companies had built a 3D television for whatever reason.

Let me tell you another story about someone who isn’t me. SWIM works in digital media in London. He has regular dealings with a very, very large company that -as part of its remit to… let’s say… catalogue all the worlds information- is embarking on the greatest mapping project the world has ever known. And SWIM drinks regularly with people from this company. Late one night, SWIM heard a story. Prior to the release of the ocean component of their mapping project, this company summoned a bunch of diplomatic representatives from various governments to its London tower and put up some slides. Because this company had found some things. “Ladies and gentlemen… what’s this? And what are these? And… they’re in international waters. So which one of you owns them?”

I wonder about private companies that have extremely high capex, because there is nothing stopping them from building supervillain tech. What would you do with unlimited research money? Who knows what they have found? Sony found ESP, for instance.

As Richard Dolan points out, secrets develop their own momentum. You only need to look at how one little clandestine marital indiscretion snowballs out and collapses the whole partnership.

When that little lie is technology-based, it can snowball out into a completely separate world. Like when John D Rockefeller used Standard Oil (Nazi collaborators) to invest in (Nazi collaborator) Henry Ford’s motor company to build gasoline-powered cars rather than the more popular electric ones of the day, before buying up urban train systems, replacing them with buses and then eventually closing them down, building an unbreakable, hydrocarbon reich across much of the first world. (Among other crimes, in conjunction with their friends at the NaCIA.)

The magical properties of jet fuel. Not only can it melt steel to dust, but it can also rust, then bend it like a red vine.

This 3D television is currently not for sale through the company that was showing it in Milan. It may never be for sale. Because, and this is the other component of spook tech, nothing is mentioned until it is ready to ship. And it only ships when the benefit of launching a product exceeds the benefit of keeping it secret. So we need to work backwards from official announcements to get a picture of what’s going on where.

Like when Skunkworks -previously run by UFO discloser Ben Rich- promises fusion power within four years. That’s unnecessarily accurate. Unless it isn’t. You know how long it would take to get to Mars with a fusion rocket? 30 days, apparently. So a shadowy military contractor whose former CEO said, twenty years ago, “we have the technology to take ET back home” now has a precise date for the release of fusion energy and then we find out it only takes 30 days to get to Mars in a fusion rocket. Interesting.

Stories dealing with space are indeed getting extremely interesting these days, especially when viewed in the context of when the benefit of disclosing something exceeds the benefit of keeping it secret. There is too much money and too many competitors to stick to the same, tired, old snowball.

Like the strange wording of this Japanese treaty that forms part of the US’s Pacific pivot. Which, while clearly intended to spy on China, leaves the door open to the monitoring of space ships.

Which we could chalk up to a typo were it not for the fact that asteroids and space debris are big news in the private sector. One such asteroid may have what looks like artificial remains on it. Which is a place we’ve been before. And, insofar as ‘asteroids’ are concerned, there’s also Phobos, which Buzz Aldrin said on CSPAN had a monument on it but which also happens to be hollow and leaking gas, neither of which are remotely possibly for a captured asteroid. (Its orbit is also highly suspicious.) Treaties take ages to agree, so it makes sense to give yourself some wiggle room for the things you happen to know are coming up.

When it comes to this material, we don’t know what we don’t know. Why is China building some crazy-ass shit out in the desert? We don’t know. But we might just be able to pinpoint when we stopped knowing what we don’t know.

Reich tech

The notion that the nazis were somehow technologically behind the Allies is truly laughable. Most laughable of all is this idea they hadn’t achieved nuclear capability. Because there have been dozens of eyewitness accounts of their bomb tests. 126,000 barrels of nuclear waste were recently found in an old salt mine near Hanover.

Then there’s the so-called “rubber factory” IG Farben built at Auschwitz. Here are a few facts about it:

• It cost $2 billion (!) to build.
• It was built near water.
• It consumed more daily electricity than all of Berlin.
• It had more than two thousand scientists working there, which is rather a lot for making rubber. This is outside the tens of thousands of slave labourers from the nearby concentration camp.
• IG Farben itself took until the year 2000 to be fully unravelled as per the surrender treaty. (Keep that in your head for now.)
• The company told the Nuremberg trials that, after four years of operation, it did not produce a single ounce of rubber.

Of course, isotope enrichment requires all these things. As noted in this presentation, the Manhattan Project admitted that it would not be able to enrich enough uranium for Fat Man and Little Boy until at least November. A quick scan of Wikipedia will show that August comes before November. It is pure conjecture that the submarine that left Hamburg with “the surrender documents” for North America, which was picked up on radar by the Canadians -a signal the US jammed- and was then led into an American port contained enriched uranium… but the calendrical discrepancy stands.

The Richter Scale reading for WTC 1 was the same as for the Kingdome’s demolition. It has 30 times the potential kinetic energy but the readings show a collapse of only 20 floors. Where’s the rest? Can’t have been any normal explosive.

So it’s not unreasonable to put enriched uranium in the basket with the rest of the nazi military innovations -including over the horizon radar, jet fighters, the first cruise missiles and infrared targeting for their Panther tanks. Let’s throw this over to Eisenhower himself:

Albert Speer, in his book Spandau, The Secret Diaries brags that it was he who ordered Werner Heisenberg to stop building an atomic bomb and concentrate on a “uranium motor” for aircraft. Towards the end of the war, Hitler even made Göring and Speer subordinate to Kammler. Eisenhower admits in Crusade In Europe that the Nazis were within 6 months of developing advanced weapons that would have changed the outcome of the war.

Operation Paperclip starts to look a bit more exciting in that context, doesn’t it? Because the thing about Hans Kammler’s Kammler Group was that it was never penetrated by Soviet or Allied intelligence and he was in charge of all their tech projects.

There must have been some exciting toys in there that the fleeing nazis could use to secure their freedom. Indeed, Juan Peron used to joke that he had his own space programme and cold fusion project. And Peron’s Argentina was basically The-Eagle’s-Nest-On-Sea.

Remember that bit about Rockefeller’s Standard Oil from the beginning? And remember that other bit about IG Farben. Check this out:

The Rockefeller group maintained a network of interlocking directorships and relationships with I.G. Farben. The chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, Walter C. Teagle, for example, along with its president William S. Farish, maintained close ties with I.G. Farben’s Hermann Schmitz, and actually became the director of American I.G. Chemical Corp, Farben’s American subsidiary, and sat on its board along with Edsel Ford. This arrangement allowed I.G. Farben to protect its patents from seizure by the American government, by simply transferring them to Standard Oil joint ownership, with an actual agreement being signed in The Hague that after the war, regardless of its outcome, the patents would be returned to Farben. [More.]

By this stage, just as an aside, Standard Oil was also the home of the company that created Christian Fundamentalism as a way of combatting the rise of unionism. But as we saw last time with Allen Dulles and the Bush dynasty, those wartime corporate/nazi/Allied government connections get crazy murky. Again from the same book:

For example, John J. McCloy, the pre-war American attorney for I.G. Farben, and who had once shared Hitler’s box during the Berlin Olympics, and postwar American High Commissioner for Germany (and, let it be noted, subsequently a member of the Warren Commission on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy), was brother-in-law to American General Draper, and the first West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, for all three men had married daughters of John Zinsser, a partner in the JP Morgan interests! Similar connections were forged between Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s one-time Reichsbank president, and Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. And of course, the notorious Bilderberger meetings themselves were the brainchildren of David and Laurence Rockefeller and the London Rothschilds on the one hand, and Nazi SS officer former I.G. Farben manager Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, with early meetings in the 1950s featuring the regular presence of Dr. Herman Josef Abs, head of Deutschebank and at one time, the banker who actually paid Hitler’s salary. And of course, let it be remembered that Colonel Skorzeny had married Hjalmar Schacht’s daughter.

It’s breathtaking, really. All right in the open. As to what exciting things these archonic puppets may have kept safe from the eyes of the war tribunals and wider public, it has given rise to some very interesting speculations.

Before reading Dr Farrel’s conjecture below, it is worth noting that the SS effectively banned “Jewish physics” -ie relativity- which freed them up from some of the incorrect assertions that had historically stymied torsion physics. The following project, “The Bell”, if it existed, was classified higher than the A-bomb in 1944. Here’s the evidence to support some kind of field/torsion technology:

1. The Polish war crimes trial affidavit of SS general Jakob Sporrenberg, who was sentenced to death in Poland for the murder of some 60 scientists and technicians involved with the project. It should now be noted that Witkoski holds open the possibility that, during Sporrenberg’s execution, a last minute substitution of a double was made, and Sporrenberg himself was spirited out of Poland by the Soviet N.K.V.D., forerunner of the KGB, thus, there is a Soviet connection to the only known Nazi field propulsion project, exactly as was seen in the Nazi UFO mythos;
2. The Bell project was known to have been developed in lower Silesia, and there are installations in the region that would be commensurate with such a project. Similarly, the Nazi UFO mythos consistently locates the base of operations in lower Silesia, in the provincial capital of Breslau (modern day Wroclaw, Poland]; and, finally
3. It is possible to “reverse engineer” the physics conceptions of the Bell based on descriptions of the device, and other data. By following the clues of these conceptions, it is clear that the Nazis continued to research this project independently in Juan Peron’s Argentina in the early 1950s in Dr. Ronald Richter’s “controlled fusion” project.

These conceptions involved:

• High speed mechanical and electrical counter-rotation of a plasma inducing substance composed most likely of mercury and thorium 229 isomer oxide, to achieve magnetic fields separation and a quasi-super-conductive state; and
• High voltage direct current stressing of that plasma, to create momentary fusion reactions in the substance.

The basic goal of all of this, as I have argued elsewhere, is to create a “torsion shear” effect in the fabric of space time, a kind of “gravity bubble” around the device, which would account for its ionizing radiation and reported levitation.

What might this nascent technology be capable of doing with a further sixty years of clandestine development in the same dark world that was, to pluck two examples from a long list, testing tsunami bombs in the South Pacific or immediately snatching up all of Tesla’s papers when he died? What can the ’3D television’ of torsion physics do today? Evaporate steel and concrete buildings midair while leaving the paper undamaged? THIS?

Weird kind of heat, right? (Hint: it’s not heat.)

Before leaving this strange axis of nazi technology -> Standard Oil -> IG Farben -> fantastically wealthy wartime collaborators -> intelligence community -> the creation of Christian Fundamentalism, let’s hear from Catherine Austin Fitts, Assistant Secretary of Housing under Bush Snr (among other things):

Okay, so I moved to Tennessee in 1999, and from the time that I got here I joined a little church in a small town in Tennessee where I lived. About three weeks after I got here we had a sermon that was very political. Afterwards I called a friend of mine, a very successful investigative reporter in Washington DC, and I said to her: “You know, we just got this sermon and I think bla-di-bla-di-bla…“ And the reporter said to me: “How can you possibly got that in a little church in Tennessee – my best source at the CIA just called me to tell me that!“

Over the next two years what we found was that there was an extraordinary sort of coordination between what I was hearing at an occasional political sermon and then what the reporter got from sources at the FBI and the CIA. Anyway, on September 9, 2001, two days before the events of 9/11, I went to church, and it was a fantastically political sermon. Basically, what my pastor at that time said was: “The age old battle between Islam and Christianity is coming to a head, and the only way to solve this is going to war.“ He then laid out the basic battle plan: First we’re going to war in Afghanistan, then Iraq and other places, but number one was Afghanistan. So I called this reporter and said: “Have you heard we’re going to war in Afghanistan?“ And she said: “No, I haven’t heard a word.“

So lo and behold, two days later 9/11 happened, and I was just amazed. The following day was prayer service, I went to church, and the pastor on the pulpit said: “George W. Bush is anointed by God for times such as this!“ Lars, I put my head in my hands and I said: “Oh Lord, give me a sign, I don’t know what to do, please help me!“ Just at that moment my pastor said to me: “Catherine, you have worked in Washington, what do you think?“ Now, I have to tell you, Lars, from my pastor to ask me that question at that moment – that is divine intervention! (laughs.)

So I said: “Well, in my experience the Bush family is anointed by financial fraud, narcotic trafficking and pedophilia!“ My pastor gasped and said: “If that’s the case, it’s hopeless.“

It’s worth noting, once again, that the CIA was itself behind the Campus Crusade for Christ. When we talk about the poor and the Right being steeplejacked, it’s crucial to consider who jacked the steeplejackers.

Black Budget

We will come onto this in a later post in the series, so just keep in your head that 70% of retiring US generals get jobs with defense contractors. What needs to be emphasised here, once again, is that this is not a wide-ranging government conspiracy. As we have shown from the interconnection of fantastically wealthy collaborators, to a man entirely sympathetic with the nazi worldview (even the Jewish ones!), this is instead a hijack of mankind by a multinational, private/public cabal that moves in and out of government roles like we move through rooms in a house.

Operation Paperclip, for instance, may have been just the “public” face of a much larger private programme. Indeed, as Richard Hoagland points out, those nazi scientists out in the desert could wander on and off base, collect their own mail from the post office and drive around town in Mercedes Benz cars that they certainly couldn’t afford on a government scientist’s salary.

Also keep in mind the oft-repeated comment that a ‘plane’ hit the Pentagon the day after Rumsfeld announced $2.3 trillion missing from its budget, calling the “Pentagon bureaucracy” an “adversary”. You could hide all manner of things in “accounting systems that don’t talk to each other”. You could fly a plane through a hole that big, which is more than we could say about other Pentagon holes that week.

Instead, let’s go back to Catherine Austin Fitts, and the real reason this woman fascinates me so much. Here’s a story from her time in Washington, in her own words:

In 1998, I was approached by John Peterson, head of the Arlington Institute, a small high quality military think tank in Washington, DC. I had gotten to know John through Global Business Network and had been impressed by his intelligence, effectiveness and compassion. John asked me to help him with a high level strategic plan Arlington was planning to undertake for the Undersecretary of the Navy.

At the time I was the target of an intense smear campaign that would lead the normal person to assume that I would be in jail shortly or worse. John explained that the Navy understood that it was all politics —- they did not care.

I met with a group of high level people in the military in the process — including the Undersecretary. According to John, the purpose of the plan — discussed in front of several military or retired military officers and former government officials— was to help the Navy adjust their operations for a world in which it was commonly known that aliens exist and live among us.

When John explained this purpose to me, I explained that I did not know that aliens existed and lived among us. John asked me if I would like to meet some aliens. For the only time in my life, I declined an opportunity to learn about something important. I was concerned that my efforts with Arlington could boomerang and be connected with the smear campaign and the effects that I was managing. I regret that decision. At John’s suggestion I started to read books on the topic and read about 25 books over the next year on the alien question, the black budget, and alien technology.

I had to drop from the project due to the need to attend to litigation and the physical harassment and surveillance of me and some of the people helping me. This process —which turned out to be incredibly time consuming — I now believe was connected with the black budget/slush fund activities connected with FHA and Ginnie Mae at HUD. (See, “The Myth of the Rule of Law”) John then asked me if I would join the board of the Arlington Institute.

When I attended one of my first meetings, I joined in discussion with about 10 people which included James Woolsey, former head of the CIA in the Clinton Administration, Napier Collyns, founder of Global Business Network and former senior Shell executive, Joe Firmage, John, and other members of the Arlington board. The main topic of discussion was whether or not the major project for the coming year should be a white paper on how to help the American people adjust to aliens existing and living among us. I said nothing — just listened. Not that long after, I dropped from the board due to the continued demands related to litigation with the Department of Justice and their informant.

To cut a series of additional long stories short, when I talk with my few sources from the military and intelligence community, I hear the same themes:

1. Aliens exist and live among us;

2. In part for this reason as well the accumulated investment over the last 50 years, the technology we have access to through the black budget is far more advanced than is commonly understood;

3. The black budget/slush fund construct was created to deal with this issue, which is why reasonable people thought selling drugs to the children who were US citizens was the better of several options — including the option of telling the American public the truth and funding the expenses on budget.

As a result of these experiences, here is my framework for dealing with this very large pile of uncertainty. [More.]

Location of toasted cars. Interesting jet fuel spatter, there.

Personal testimony, sure. But let’s reverse it for the sake of argument. Fitts was a senior member of the Federal government, with a background in the world of international finance. She was a dyed-in-the-wool, book-balancing Republican (the last of her kind?) and yet spoke out regarding the black budget, 9/11, etc.

In recent years, she sings from the ‘they’re going to depopulate us out of existence’/'GM is poison’ fringe Right songbook. She may keep some dodgy company, but that’s not a reason to discount what she is claiming, just watch it a bit more closely.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think she’s lying about what happened in 1998. The names and titles of the people she rattled off who attended the Arlington Group meeting are pretty much exactly who I would expect to be in attendance. Spooks, hydrocarbon barons, and mandarins. However, she is unashamedly vocal about wanting a decentralisation of federal power -and financing- down to local levels. (Wanting local co-op banks rather than the criminal megabanks we currently have, etc.) So I think these events actually happened and she is using them to promote a political position. It’s not a binary analysis.

Nevertheless…

Grey Areas

Let’s look at how some of these archonic projects -extradimensional or not- might slip through the cracks. From a recent Washington Post exposé on the Top Secret world, which I highly recommend you read:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

…

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.

“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.

“I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”

This is not ‘the conspiracy’. This is the snowball. This is where ‘the conspiracy’ hides. Let’s return to Eric Walker. This is from Grant Cameron’s website:

Walker served as a member of the Institute for Defense Analysis from 1958 to 1981 when he became Chairman of the Board. In 1986 he became Chairman Emeritus and remained in that position until his death. The Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) is known as ” the think tank to the highest echelons of the Pentagon “ and “the principal advisory organization serving the office of the Secretary of Defense as a whole.”

90% of the work done by IDA is TOP SECRET, the other 10% is for OFFICIAL EYES ONLY.

This organization spawned off a group from within known as DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA was responsible for ” the scientific investigation into advanced technologies of the future.” DARPA is responsible for the initial research funding for over the horizon radar, the Stealth Technology, and the Internet.

Recall that it was Eric Walker who said to Grant Cameron’s researchers that ESP and consciousness are related to the UFO phenomena. MK Ultra started about six months after the Wilbert Smith UFO memo in 1950. Which also mentions “mental phenomena”.

The extradimensional/UFO component of these clandestine technologies is circumstantially tied into this snowball world from the start… especially when it comes to the manipulation of public consciousness. This is from Jacques Vallée’s Dimensions:

I have alluded to the fact that the major groups of UFO believers have been closely monitored by government agents. There is a good reason for this attention: their influence can be manipulated for political goals or simply as a test of various forms of deception. One of the recommendations of a recently declassified CIA/U.S. Air Force panel on UFOs, which met in Washington in 1953, was precisely to monitor the activities of civilian groups: The Panel took cognizance of the existence of such groups as the “Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators” or Los Angeles and the “Aerial Phenomena Research Organization” (Wisconsin). It was believed that such organizations should be watched because of their great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.
…
[T]hey would provide an escape valve for the steam of the enthusiasts and a useful channel for planted stories. Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the former CIA chief who stated, “It is imperative that we learn what UFOs are and where they come from,” and later joined the board of directors of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), could have lent credibility to the stratagem by deliberately promoting the extraterrestrial theory. Also among the leaders of NICAP, one of the most influential UFO groups in the fifties and sixties, were at least three well-known intelligence operatives: Bernard Corvalho, Nicholas de Rochefort, and Colonel Joseph Ryan, men who were trained practitioners of the modern techniques of psychological warfare.

I describe UFO research as sudoku for people who don’t like sudoku… and I fucking hate sudoku. (Stop saying sudoku!) It is simultaneously a bundle of Cold War propaganda, illegal manipulation of the public mind, a lie to cover dangerous military research, extradimensional trolling and what appears to be a persistent aspect of normally functioning human consciousness going back at least as far as the Neolithic renaissance. Some of it might even be actual aliens.

Unpicking its component parts is much more interesting than sudoku. Because it’s not just one thing… and there is a shadowy public/private contingent that goes out of its way to make sure it remains unpicked. This is from an interview with Jacques Vallée about forbidden science:

Plato: A massive project I’m sure. But you came across an important letter referred to as the “Pentacle Letter”. What did its contents divulge?

Dr. Jacques Vallee: I feel more free to talk about this now, I did not feel free to talk about it in the book because the document had a secret stamp on it. My attorney and I were unable to determine whether it was still secret today. The document was dated 1953. However, it has now been released officially and so I don’t feel now under any obligation to keep it secret anymore. The document that I had, that I found in the files, was a carbon of a letter sent by an organization working under Project Stalk, which was in fact, Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio which had been hired by the Air Force to do a very thorough, statistical investigation of the patterns in UFO sightings.

Now, that investigation eventually was published as a very well known report called Report 14. What struck me was that the letter, it was a 2 page, single spaced letter, which was very, very well written by someone who obviously was very, very familiar with the scientific method. It explained what we already know by the way, that they were; Battelle at that time, was doing a massive statistical study on UFO sightings. However, it also discloses two things that have never been disclosed before. First, they have found patterns in those sightings. They wanted to go on studying before any kind of scientific panel was convened. So they were telling the CIA to stop this top secret meeting of the five scientists.

Now, when I read this, I almost fell from my chair. I mean, who were these people nobody had ever heard of before? They were actually telling the CIA to stop this top secret meeting of the five leading physicists in the land. Then they, went on saying that they wanted to discuss what could and could not be told to those scientists. Now, from a, if you will, from a historical point of view or from a ufological point of view, that may or may not be significant. From a scientific point of view, it’s amazing, I mean, science relies on the ability of researchers to get the data and if there is somebody who is in the background telling agencies of a government what can and cannot be told to the scientists who are hired to make an assessment of the potential threat to the security of the country; I mean, this is… this is extraordinary.

And they went on to say something even more extraordinary and more ominous, although it’s really not a smoking gun. But one of the paragraphs in the memo, in the Pentacle Letter, suggested before convening any panel, that they wanted to do a series of experiments, essentially to simulate UFO waves. This is not just putting cameras here and there and pointing them at the sky, and seeing what percentage of balloons are going to be recorded, and what percentage of meteors or whatever. This is actually simulating, what they were suggesting was simulating an actual UFO wave. And they said this would be on the scale of a secret military maneuver. So the question this raises is – this was 1953 – but was this actually done, and could this explain some of the more recent manipulations that we have been seeing in this field? I don’t have to tell you that this field is becoming more and more bizarre. And there are more and more rumors flying around and there are more and more planted stories. People are seeing very strange things that in many cases do not match what UFOs have been known to do in years past. And so the question of possible manipulation should be raised.

In the background of these phenomena are stories of supposed techniques and projects related to psychological warfare. The Montauk Project, for instance… even MILABS. They range from what appear to be the entirely ludicrous to the “it probably happened”. And then, every so often, you get things like this Pentacle Letter that revivify some old speculation you have either forgotten or dismissed. Here’s a very long list of conspiracy facts you may think are theories.

It’s the sheer ambition of faking an alien encounter that astounds me. But then, we know that when they weren’t smuggling drugs into the country to sell to criminal gangs, overthrowing foreign governments, creating and training Al Qaeda or frantically covering up their own nazi dealings, the CIA would also kill the scientists working on these secret programmes:

The whole thing paints a terrifying picture of what the ’3D television’ of mind weapons might be, and how that may have been deployed. Given the provenance of these groups, their historic behaviour and the documentary evidence, you can no longer dismiss out of hand the assertions of individuals or groups who claim to be targeted psychically. If they can create modern art and turn that into a mind weapon, it’s time to reconsider what you think has actually happened in the last 60 years.

I mean… this one turned out to be true:

Energy weapons

“9/11 is so in your face it makes the Kennedy assassination look like a true mystery.” – Jim Marrs

Magnetometer data from Alaska for Sep 11. Jet fuel doesn’t do that either.

Returning to the notion of tech only being released when it’s expedient, I do sometimes marvel at the archonic ingenuity of using technology that most of the planet didn’t even really know existed, or that wasn’t publicly acknowledged. (It begs the question of what other pieces of spook tech have been or are currently being deployed, of course. But that’s the whole point of this post.)

Close up of the Alaskan magnetometer data. Thermite doesn’t do this.

In fact, in the next video, watch how Rumsfeld squirms (1:18s) so soon after 9/11 when a reporter asks him about the use of directed energy weapons in Iraq. It’s fascinating. She may have accidentally asked him just the right question:

Unless he’s simply lying. Iraqi children were being microwaved, after all. (Caution: unbelievably graphic.) And here we are in 2013 with scientists talking about using death rays to evaporate asteroids (asteroids again) and the air force wanting directed energy weapons that trigger ‘non lethal’ bioeffects.

So if you haven’t seen it yet, watch Dr Judy Wood’s presentation on the use of directed energy weapons preposterously masquerading as aeroplane damage, because this really is the fulcrum with which the outgoing archonic regime tried to propel themselves to total dominion of our yuga.

“At some level of the government, at some point in time … there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened [on 9/11].” –John Farmer, Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission and Attorney General of New Jersey

I was actually discussing this on the weekend at a party in a Sussex village with a British military bomb expert who has done two tours of Iraq. They all watched it happen on a base in Essex and when the buildings dustified he said the entire room called controlled demolition. After taking him through some of the physics shown in these screengrabs, he agreed that on these seismic data alone, it could not have been any kind of explosion or kinetic device.

The results are in. Directed energy weapon.

Unfortunately, that also meant I had to recommend the following video for an explanation of the Hutchison effect. Apologies to you, as well, for the format.

It strikes me that I’m in a slightly more fortunate position when it comes to extracting the actual content from pieces like this because I have an employment history that has required an understanding of the absurd, sausage-making, bullshittery that goes into making ‘factual’ multichannel programming for a ‘low information audience’. Sigh. (Those tales about shadowy handlers meddling in the production and deliberate changes to make the story seem preposterous are entirely true, I’m afraid. Even when it’s about ghosts. Go figure.)

So that you don’t have to watch the whole thing, here’s the bit with John Hutchison himself, detailing the Hutchison Effect, his involvement with the Star Wars programme and his invitation from members of Bush Jnr’s Executive Branch to return to working for the neocons.

What’s worse than just sharing it, I’m inclined to agree with with Ventura that the only thing keeping Hutchison alive is camping up his insanity act. It’s material for a separate post, but his contention that a lot of the black programmes went private under Reagan rather than get shut down seems sound to me. Things were getting pretty hot in Contra-town at the time. (Plus there’s more money to be made by the exact same people in sending these things into the private sector.)

As for other uses of energy weapons, here’s another little gem appearing courtesy of the Secret Sun facestalk group. Their ultimate conclusions are their own, but the material regarding how modern technology interrupts the Schumann Resonance and the terrifying implications of that for all of us. Regarding their more extreme claims… the whole point of this post is that it’s almost impossible to simply dismiss them out of hand.

http://youtu.be/EfqxN5DHFvU

Now, a quote from Dolan’s UFOs and the National Security State, regarding some even weirder implications -one way or another- of the use of energy or frequency manipulation and the alphabet soup agencies:

Throughout the summer and fall of 1980, Paul Bennewitz kept a close eye on the Manzano Weapons Storage Area. Bennewitz was a trained scientist who had done contract work for the Defense Department. He had an array of equipment that was picking up low-frequency electromagnetic pulses and recording aerial displays. During the fall of 1980, he called Kirtland AFB about this. He believed that the displays were genuine UFOs and the pulses were alien signals of various sorts. Some were alien messages directed to the implants of abductees (although why he believed this is not clear). Other signals seemed to be about an alien base.

Many of Bennewitz’s notes are gone or unavailable, but some exist – and make for strange reading. The following are ‘messages’ he received with what he described as “analog recording equipment” in October 1980:

Den under Archuleta Peak. West of peak, snow gone. Go west 1 km. Enter ram bad judgement. Attach cable. Drag ramp away. Drown good until Ant Widow beg for life. Death eats hate. Fox kill dead. Go down a railed entry. Strike fast. Enemy very tough at death. When at each turn test air. Key to effective fight, fear – ejection. Arbitrated peace no heed and deny or death take you. Do cut jugular. Go no further to arrange deal. State day they leave Earth. Near Lyra orbit. A gentle act does cause material good. Take fact first. Take until a black auto hit has seen chase. No let catch or upset you. Have Den racked. Aim well. A brave death has man.

(Ed: this sounds like just the kind of trolling crap inexperienced channelers and ouija users get. Which should be of professional interest to the wizards out there. Keep that in mind for the last paragraph of this quote.)

He wrote a series of separate interpretations of these statements, and believed they were instructions on how to attack and destroy the alien base under Dulce’s Archuleta Peak.

Bennewitz was worried. All this seemed very wrong. His communications with Kirtland AFB resulted in a personal meeting with AFOSI Special Agent Richard Doty. Doty’s office had jurisdiction over all criminal and security investigations at Kirtland and Manzano. Accompanied by Air Force physicist Lew Miles, Doty went to Bennewitz’s home on October 26. They saw Bennewitz’s impressive array of equipment, various photographs, and heard recordings of many of his signals – including, we might assume, the cryptic message regarding Archuleta Peak. At the request of the NSA, which had a major presence at Kirtland, Doty secretly photographed everything he saw. Bennewitz was invited to Kirtland AFB on November 10 to present his findings to a small group of officers and scientists. In attendance was commander Brigadier General William Brooksher, four colonels, two AFOSI men, and several scientists from Phillips Laboratories. Doty does not appear to have attended.

Bennewitz described the Manzano UFOs, his work with Myrna Hansen, and his thoughts on ET. When he asked for financial support to continue his investigation, he was advised to apply for an Air Force grant. It is possible that Bennewitz received a grant from the NSA, which appeared to be most interested in his work, particularly the discovery of the signals emanating from Kirkland. A week later, on November 17, Doty told Bennewitz that AFOSI had decided against further consideration of the matter. This was not true. In reality, Bennewitz’s story had created great concern within sectors of the military-intelligence community. Somewhere within AFOSI, DIA, or the NSA, the decision was made that Bennewitz would be allowed to continue his work, so that it could be learned how he obtained his information. To do this, Doty befriended Bennewitz and expressed enthusiasm about his research.

Years later, when Doty discussed this on the radio show Coast to Coast with Art Bell, he argued that AFOSI’s interest in Bennewitz had nothing to do with UFOs or aliens. Rather, it was to protect the technologies and activities at Kirtland. What followed was a program on Bennewitz that involved monitoring and misinformation, most of it passive. When, for example, Bennewitz asked Doty to let him know if he “tapped into something” that was going on at Kirtland, Doty merely nodded and said Bennewitz had found “something unknown.” Doty did not so much tell stories of aliens as allow Bennewitz’s belief system to take over.

Adding to the intrigue are rumors that a “Project Sigma,” allegedly an NSA program to communicate with non-humans, was based at least in part out of Kirtland AFB since the 1960s, or even earlier. In a communication with the author, Linda Moulton Howe stated that she personally had been shown from a distance an NSA structure at Kirtland that was said to house Project Sigma. According to her source, Sigma operated by sending out various Hertz signals identified as operational with Grey, Nordic, or other craft. If Sigma was in fact real, this could easily explain Bennewitz’s sightings, which would be alien craft attracted by the signals being generated. And if Bennewitz did stumble onto Project Sigma, surely this would have been more than sufficient cause for MJ-12 to order an immediate end to the threat this posed.

On a related note, Dr Stephen Greer even has an iPhone app you can use to attract UFO phenomena, proving that even the New Age movement has a Left Hand Path. Because, professionally wizardly speaking… this isn’t recommended. This is going swimming at dusk while bleeding profusely.

Geoengineering

Let’s start with a news piece about military spraying of poisons and radioactive material onto the people of St Louis. They were told it was to test a ‘smoke screen’ in the event of a Soviet attack. It wasn’t. And much of the spraying was centred on low-income (ie black) areas, parts of which had a population that was 70% under the age of twelve. Britain was a bit less discriminatory in its own testing.

You need to keep that in the back of your head when it comes to the possibility that someone may be spraying something from airplanes. The fact is they’ve already done it. Unfortunately, like so many other aspects of alt research, the legitimate concern over chemtrails has been hijacked by a neoconfederate agenda, seeking to paint the whole thing as a NWO extermination plot.

Because the thing is… geoengineering is extremely easy. At its most simplistic level it’s basically strategic littering. You can dump a few tonnes of urea into the ocean to generate a phytoplankton bloom and sink some atmospheric carbon. Will this have knock on consequences? Probably. But when has that ever stopped an archon?

So, in one breath, you’ll have our occasionally-elected betters telling us that chemtrails and geoengineering are paranoid nonsense. In the next breath, they’ll jet off to the World Economic Forum where ‘rogue geoengineering’ is point four on the agenda. (That would be just after the €300 lunch, then.) Reading between the lines of what is meant by ‘rogue’ here, this is a further indication that you should not roll all the manifestations of geoengineering up into the one agenda.

It is so easy to do and has been researched for so long that it’s quite clear that different archons are worried about which of their kin can do what. Who knows? World War III may resemble nothing quite so much as the Olympian overthrow of the Titans… a tsunami here, an earthquake there, a two hour electrical storm over there. Here’s a pertinent quote:

US Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, said on 28 April 1997 at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, University of Georgia “Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.”

Electromagnetic waves, huh? Here’s the path of a hurricane off the East Coast on September 11, 2001. It got close enough to cause rain on Long Island. Then it fucks off out to sea.

View this in the light of the magnetometer data and the whole thing gets very interesting.

I remind you that the counter-rotating effects of the hypothetical Nazi Bell are present in hurricanes -which can also cause molecular effects like loss of mass and structural integrity.

Regarding HAARP, it is part of a wider project to -in the words of the USAF itself- “own the weather”:

This advanced stage of full capacity (FIRI) corresponds to what the US Air Force has called “Owning the Weather”:

US aerospace forces [will] ‘own the weather’ by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications… From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary… In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels. (US Air Force, emphasis added. Air University of the US Air Force, AF 2025 Final Report, http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/ )

Somewhere in the intelligence community snowball there is a panel with cartoon-style red buttons and words like ‘earthquake’, ‘drought’ and ‘volcano’ under them. FACT. But, in all seriousness, we’ll leave this section with a final note. It has already been acknowledged that geoengineering has been used in a theatre of war. This stuff isn’t speculative.

Where you hide things

Everyone caught this when it came out. Declassified schematics of a hypothetical 1950s flying saucer. It needs to be viewed in the light of the comments Dr Vallée found regarding the staging of a mass UFO sighting (both documents date to the same time) and also in the light of the opening paragraphs: Stuff doesn’t come out unless it’s entirely useless from a tech perspective or slightly useful from a disinfo one.

Staying with the disinfo angle for a moment… the first place you hide things is in plain sight. Here is a drone that looks exactly like a helicopter.

Skynet does Jurassic Park.

It is commercially available now. Which means I can tell you with almost total confidence that it has been in use for some time. So it rather begs the question… how long have drones been in use in their countries of origin and in the domestic airspace they’re currently not permitted to fly in under FAA regulations? Can we get this far into this enormous post and just dismiss the possibility out of hand?

The next place you hide things is where no one can see them. Which leads us inevitably to Roswell and Area 51, but we are only stopping briefly on our way to a wider point.

All we can say definitively about the incident known as ‘the Roswell crash’ is what it is not. And that is a weather balloon. It persistently refuses understanding because it fits into more than one of the UFO/sudoku (ufoku?) categories:

• Historically, this appears to be the first major incident where “they” decided media manipulation was called for. First it was published as a crashed saucer. This was retracted several days later and it became a weather balloon.
• The timing of when the Roswell incident appeared in popular consciousness points to it being used as Cold War propaganda. (Can you imagine the consternation in the Kremlin when it was discovered those capitalist pigs had got their fat hooves on a fucking space ship?) This may well explain why the official refutation of the facts has been so patchy.
• With nearby White Sands and the entire area crawling with nazi scientists, it is very likely “they” have a preference for investigators looking up into space rather than down on the ground, given that this was an era where “they” were gassing American civilians and drugging entire populations.
• The Aztec Incident was clearly faked and then heavily promoted. A manipulation of public consciousness is part of it.

Insofar as it has convinced people much smarter than me, including Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell, I will err on the side of non-human craft, but this is a conviction you could knock over with a feather. At the moment, it hinges on some of the latterly released testimony from the very old men who were there at the time and too close to the grave to care what happens to them. Like Calvin Cox, who was issued with a “shoot to kill” order as he guarded the hangar where the material came in:

Cox said that there was a guard placed both outside and inside the entrances to the hangar. He was not to go beyond a rope that was placed just a few feet inside the hangar entrance. Despite this, Calvin had the opportunity to view some of the incoming Roswell debris from a distance. He saw some of the crash material sticking out of a 60 foot flatbed, filling perhaps just half of the trailer’s capacity. He indicates that it appeared that the crash material may have been metal-like, but that he could tell it was protruding out in beams and appeared shiny and smooth. Some of it may have had a burnished or tarnished coloring. Far back in the poorly lit hangar he could see about 30 feet of strange, structured metal-like material that was similar to what he had seen in the flatbed.

Cox states that at no time during this event did he see anything resembling a balloon or balloon train. He remembers the newspapers later stating that the disc was found out to have been a balloon after all- and personally knowing that was not true but being unable to say anything.
Calvin believes that Intelligence Officer Major Jesse Marcel’s late-in-life disclosures about finding material in the desert not from Earth are true. Calvin says that Jesse was “straight forward” and that Jesse was set up as a “fall guy.”

After the crash Calvin noticed that there were personnel around the base in great numbers that he knew to have been affiliated with intelligence agencies, including both the FBI and the OSI.

At the moment, my conviction hinges on the terrible official attempts to explain away the dozens of people who saw bodies (one of which may still have been alive) among the debris at several stages on its journey into the darkest recesses of the military industrial complex. Apparently these were crash dummies from a high altitude test flight… that actually happened several years after the Roswell incident.

Anyway, it’s almost the least part of the story, because whatever this non-weather-balloon was, where it went is where we go now. And where it went is into that shadowy public/private nexus with nazi tendrils. Here’s Chris Knowles talking about the odd appearance of something that seems so innocuous now, but certainly wasn’t in the mid twentieth century.

And of course, anyone who listened to my last appearance on Red Ice knows what I think about the whole transistor issue. And I’m not alone in this suspicion:

Much more recently, stories began surfacing about what the Army or Air Force supposedly did with the downed Alien Spacecraft in August, September and October of 1947. Nuclear Powered Engines and Advanced Communications and Computing devices, all of which were a hundred years beyond post-World War II technology, were taken from the Alien wreck and purportedly made their way to The Bell System’s “Bell Laboratories”, then located in Murray Hill, New Jersey – it has been alleged. There, they were studied, dissected, microanalyzed and pieces tested. One piece was supposedly found to have unique potential, an Alien switching device composed of Silicon and Arsenic, arranged in a microscopic array much more complicated than even now have been assembled by Humankind, hundreds of years ahead.

The Alien device purportedly became the priority focus object of Bell Labs’ and The US Department of Defense’s analysis and scientific research. It was discovered by the researchers, that the unusual electronic Alien device could act as both a high speed electronic switch and as an Amplifier. They decided to call it the “Transfer Resistor”, because it could be made to resist or accept power flow at much higher or lower currents than were applied to it, depending upon unique application of electron flows.

Bell Labs should ring a few alien bells for those who recall the séance that changed America. Because the inventor of the Bell Helicopter was in attendance, as was the wealthy mother of a Bell employee and blue blood scion, along with Andrijah Puharich, one of the strangest people in intelligence history… which is really saying something.

These archonological connections appeal to me because, from the very beginning, they paint a picture of the inextricability of the ‘nuts and bolts’ and consciousness components of these phenomena. Circumstantially, the guys who got their mits on Roswell debris turned it into real world tech but also, more or less immediately after, started talking to Egyptian gods orbiting the earth on a space ship. One wonders what the ‘transistor’ of ‘consciousness technology’ might be.

This doesn’t mean we can say “the Roswell debris went to Bell Labs”, but given the location of some of the more mysterious private military contractors and their connections to American royals, we can say there would have been some very interesting after-dinner discussion on The Vineyard that summer.

Of course, one of the other places this stuff was supposed to go was deep underground in a very literal sense. Unfortunately, this is one of those fudges you can use to explain the paucity of physical evidence. It sounds almost childish.

Be that as it may, the following presentation makes it abundantly clear that the creation of vast underground and even undersea bases has been technically feasible for fifty years.

For what it’s worth, I do believe there are hundreds of miles of tunnels and bases underneath North America but it seems more likely that most of them are currently filled with defunct, Cold War computers and slowly rusting office chairs. However, it must be nice to know that if you needed total secrecy for a particular project, there is some readymade, impenetrable infrastructure just waiting for you to build a stargate in.

One final note regarding SWIM’s story of what that big mapping project found out in the ocean… I personally believe it is related to this.

Reaping the whirlwind

The newspaper report quoted above indicates that the number of people with Top Secret clearance is 1.5 times the entire population of Washington. How many of them do you suppose work for private companies?

Tracing the tumbling down of spook tech is rather like looking for an electron. When you look, you can find it in Bell Labs or in Rumsfeld’s clenched demon claw or in the compounds of Bigelow Aerospace. Look away and it reverts into its ‘natural form’… a shadowy archon probability wave of unimaginable wealth.

Let’s return to nazis and asteroids then. Here’s Dr Carol Rosin’s oft-repeated warning from SS Major Von Braun. And whilst it might be easy to dismiss, as Dr Greer points out, our entire legal system is built on witness testimony. Either we take it for what it is; not much but still something; or we don’t.

What fascinates me about this statement is not the surprisingly-timed increase in meteor activity over the last few months, or the space monitoring treaties, or the ‘hypothetical’ (ie probably deployed) death rays that can evaporate incoming space targets like Manhattan office buildings… what fascinates me is the implications of Dr Vallée’s Pentacle Letter.

I think what Dr Braun is disclosing here is ‘The Plan’… but ‘The Plan’ is in tatters. As I interpret it, we can see this reflected in the recent events in Boston. The FBI has a long history of arming -only to disarm- deranged enemy assets. These ones appear to have gone off script. So is it ‘terrorism’ or is it a ‘false flag’? OR.. have we been lying down with dogs for so long that we can no longer distinguish where the canines end and the fleas begin? (Let me answer that for you… it’s the last one.)

Plans require cohesion and that is in short supply among the remaining orcs. Look at how quickly the intel connections came to light in Boston. Pardon the pun, but the plan behind the curtain has been revealed. Hence you should interpret the miraculous discovery of 9/11 airplane wreckage as a desperate bid to maintain the illusion of the much bigger lie. You can easily follow their thinking. If the whole world found and believes the intel connection to Boston, how long before our eyes turn to lower Manhattan?

The corporate race for the vast riches/possible alien tech floating out there in space will inevitably mean much of this will come tumbling out of the snowball and into the public domain without any official disclosure. They care less and less what you think. There is too much money at stake. You don’t even warrant the slightest nod of acknowledgement, just lies that get more and more absurd with each passing day.

We do not know what we do not know. Preventing our knowing, our gnosis, is becoming simultaneously more difficult and more important. That’s the good news.

The bad news is these orcs still have some fairly alarming toys and may get desperate enough to use them.

Rune Soup. Where wizards drink free.

Bayham Old Abbey

There is something so personally satisfying about ruins.

Contemplation and prayer come easily to me in places such as Bayham Old Abbey because they closely mirror my own shifting relationship to a Christian current.

Firstly, they are an invading force. There is no avoiding this.

Whether you consider them Norman or Roman, they are outposts of an imperial power. They are foreign.

Secondly -and related to this- they are a reminder that the outcome for gods is the same as it is for anyone else who plays the game of thrones.

Henry won. They died.

The very same withdrawal of support we are currently living through is encoded in the word, dissolution. The abbeys weren’t closed, they were dissolved. Closing something seals it, conveys a solidity and the possibility that it may reopen.

Dissolving something implies that its physical existence was always entirely in your hands. It does not end, it fades.

Can you imagine what the buttresses and the vaulted ceilings looked like when the first weeds grew through them? What the scuttling of rats through smashed idols sounded like as it echoed down the south transept?

For the locals there was presumably some sadness, but there must also have been a feeling of misplaced ambition. Like that terror that grips you just before your birthday party when you worry that only a few people will actually turn up.

A tree growing pleasingly above where the High Altar once was.

Before there was the grand foreign architecture, however, there was a community. Once, long ago, some people decided to dedicate themselves to spiritual enrichment here. The extreme wealth followed as an inevitable byproduct of being the nodes of the national economic grid.

I get to these places just as they open because it means I get them all to myself. And indeed, it was just me and the hares at Bayham Old Abbey on Saturday. You can stand in the remains of the water room, look up, and realise that the denizens of the abbey lived on the vanished first floor above you for the warmth.

This was home and work to people for hundreds of years… with all the politics and illicit love affairs and sickness and joy and sadness that implies. They would complain about the weather, inquire after distant relatives, make food, sweep floors. It is never far from my mind that this place was a home for a very long time. One that… somewhere in there… had some admirable ideals at its core. I silently acknowledge that.

Now it is just bones and they have the most valuable lesson to teach.

Bayham Old Abbey is over-manicured in that very English Heritage way, but there is still a holiness here. It is the underlying holiness that is revealed by the ruination of what was built over it, in honour of it. You may remove the relics from the High Altar but a tree will replace them with its own benediction. In some sense, every ruined abbey is now a gnostic holy place because you are compelled to see through all the accreted crap to the jewel at its core. There is that which remains.

Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass and are done; but there is that which remains.

An appropriate message, given our next stop. Netherwood, the deathplace of Aleister Crowley. (Do you think the name appealed to him as much as it does to us?) All that remains of this former house, its bones, are the old coaching houses and a pub that is actually a lot better than its exterior might imply. Another lesson there!

Remains of Netherwood.

My immediate impression is that the whole place, on a sunny Saturday morning, is just lovely. There is so much inaccuracy about the last year of Crowley’s life. Namely that he died a penniless drug addict in a shithole on the outskirts of a faded, seaside holiday town. But in the twenty first century, you will be lucky to retire to place like Netherwood. (Getting your heroin through the mail is also more difficult now.)

We go inside for a drink.

It’s a Greene King pub with a decent menu. And CHEAP. I’ll be coming back.

My immediate sensation is that this is not a place a wizard retires to, but it is one that an artist certainly does. This is where the Bright Young Things would put their cool parents.

According to people who were there at the time, it was his very reputation that so appealed to Netherwood’s owners.

The intellectual and gustatory attractions of Netherwood were made clear by him in the handbook: ‘So long as I am here,’ he wrote, ‘this house will never be a guest house in the ordinary sense of the term. Those seeking a conventional establishment will be able to find better accommodation elsewhere, for my friends care more for fine food than for the ritual of dressing for dinner, and more for culture and the arts than for bridge and poker.’

My kind of place!

A remaining part of Netherwood.

Tuning in, there is a persistent sense of amiability that is often lacking from the conventional retirement homes I have experienced. It was a place of laughter, rather than god’s waiting room.

Despite his unenviable reputation and the fact that he insisted on greeting everyone with injunction ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’, the Great Beast proved a popular addition to the Netherwood household. He had considerable charm, a pleasing personality and was very erudite, which helped make him a good companion and a stimulating talker. He had many long conversations about all manner of subjects with Vernon Symonds.

I go to a lot of haunted pubs. Okay, I go to a lot of pubs, but I actively seek out the haunted ones. This place had absolutely none of the restless, often hostile, energy associated with hauntings. Whilst I’m sure the staff may have stories of things moving in the basement, I can tell you right now that the spirit of place here is satisfied and amiable. (‘Satisfied’ is the word I got. Go figure.)

That is, assuming they are even aware of the history of the building. Most of the downstairs and the entire upstairs were booked for separate functions due to start later that day. I’m quite sure that none of the people attending a wedding reception or birthday party here are aware that Uncle Al left our realm from this very spot… and that delights me.

It echoes the layers of meaning you find at Bayham Old Abbey. It provides a lesson in the unfolding of meaning and place. And it makes secret again the goal of the initiates, it re-veils the holy of holies. In the spiritual quest, you can’t hide your own Easter eggs. You have to go looking.

This is the teaching I find written on the bones of the master, buried somewhere in a nether wood.

Rune Soup. Where wizards drink free.

So I was very much looking forward to The Book Of Mormon on Monday night. And the show is genuinely spectacular.

Matt and Trey’s entire oeuvre is everything that is good about America. It is bold, confident, self-aware satire so sharp that it cuts through time and space.

Rather than a manifestation of the Trickster current, it is something entirely rarer… it is the Jester current.

Anywhere that there are ideals held too preciously, or offices taken too seriously, they will find and subvert these targets, leaving us to look again at something we thought we knew.

If you have ever been offended by their depictions of race relations, patriotism, celebrity culture, religious belief, AIDS, gender -and everyone has- then that is evidence of their art affecting you. The pain is the cure. And it is art. It serves to re-relativise an idea you have made universal. Even their own output hasn’t escaped the hot knife of their own output. (It was Terence and Philip’s Uncle Fucker that made me cry in the cinema. Find me a more outrageous, more superfluous use of a 35mm projector. In the literal sense, I truly could not believe what I was seeing or hearing. And I had paid to see it. It was a jester pretending to have sex with the queen in front of the king.)

After the show, we leave the theatre and cross Piccadilly Circus into a supermarket to pick up a few things (wine) for a late supper. There are TVs above the checkouts. Boston. While I had been laughing and silently congratulating America on its awesomeness, some asshole had gone and bombed it.

Weird coincidence, sure… but not yet a sync. (And syncing with the story of an east coast wizard who founded what became a wealthy, right wing cult with extensive intelligence connections, who was himself killed in a public street, is too, too easy.) There are, however, any number of actual syncs. Here’s a quick round-up:

• 42 makes an appearance on April 15th. Follow up piece on further sport syncs here.
• The symbolism of the street and its surrounds.
• The finish line being at number 666.
• The significance of the date in question. Not just tax day and Patriot’s Day.
• The whole Family Guy thing.
• And now, another fertilizer explosion, this time near Waco, exactly 20 years after the David Koresh.

Rough. Fucking. Week.

The ACTUAL Boston conspiracy

No one believes the official version of 9/11. Fine. But, as you know, -and we’ll come onto this later- my current suspicions are less common than the mainstream of the non-mainstream: Namely, that the buildings were destroyed by a directed energy weapon because that is currently the least worst explanation for the actual physics of the event. This may ultimately change. Hold your beliefs lightly or go home.

As for Boston? Are you kidding me?

I think the fact that Fox News didn’t immediately and isn’t currently splashing a picture of a beardy, brown man with a funny hat and an inexplicable twenty year relationship with the CIA all over your television is, alone, reason enough to cool your damn jets. The other reason is, you know… sanity.

While we’re on the topic of sanity:

And so we come on to the actual Boston Marathon conspiracy. A lunatic shill, in the pocket of the radical right, Dominionist/Corporatist regime, waiting a matter of minutes before -like he always does when tragedy strikes- blaming an imaginary socialist hijack of human civilisation that is clearly coming to take your guns. So you should go out and buy guns… and survival food. (Which, conveniently for you, he sells.)

Please enjoy this rant about the Texas Toad from the inimitable Ted Torbich:

Perhaps ironically, if there is an old-timey conspiracy at work here, we can currently infer from the modus that it will likely have been perpetrated by the very same neo-Nazi/radical right/secessionist/white power shadowy spectrum that spawned the Texas Toad in the first place.

But it’s early days so perhaps we should -like sane people- avoid such speculation until the actual investigating is done. Speculation is…

Fearporn

There are LCD TVs in the elevators of my office building that play BBC News. There is no sound so the subtitles for the hearing impaired show up. For the last several days, it has been repeated shots of the carnage and endless, “expert” talking heads, in the woeful style of today’s multichannel ‘news’™.

They all talk about the ‘sophistication’ of the ‘attack’ and continue to repeat the number of deaths or graphically describe the injuries of the victims. You could genuinely replace all the subtitles with BE AFRAID BE AFRAID BE AFRAID BE AFRAID. That’s all it is saying.

Here’s Simon Jenkins in The Guardian earlier this week, proving once again why he is my favourite columnist in the world:

Such deeds are senseless murders, but they are not terrorism as such. What makes them terrorist is the outside world rushing to hand their perpetrators a megaphone. Murder is magnified a thousandfold, replayed over and again, described and analysed, sent into every home. A blast becomes a mass psychosis, impelling a terror of repetition and demands for drastic countermeasures. An act of violence that deserves no meaning is given it.

Today in Britain Margaret Thatcher’s memorial service was being “reviewed in the light of the intelligence and security environment”, as if Boston had suddenly rendered London insecure. Sunday’s London Marathon was likewise “under discussion”, as officials had to deny that it might be cancelled. David Cameron had to speak. Boris Johnson had to speak. Could the Boston bomber have been awarded any greater accolade?

I heard a radio reporter intone that it was “incredibly difficult to make sporting events safe and secure”. It is not incredibly difficult, it is impossible. But who dares say so, when the great god terror stalks the land, hand-in-hand with the BBC’s World at One?

Who needs invented conspiracies about the imminent suspension of the right to free assembly when people are too scared to congregate in the first place? On the cab ride home from the theatre, an hour after the attack, our driver says “here we go again, I suppose.”

No. I reject that. I reject the deranged mutterings of the radical right stooges and I reject the endless fearporn of what I can no longer call ‘news’ with a straight face. Like the South Park boys, we should raise our collective middle finger and say fuck Canada to all that.

Where you come in

The way these two awful events have thrown up so many syncs tells us something important. And by ‘us’, I mean those initiates that have ears for twilight language.

And what it tells us is that the universe is malleable. The universe has noticed us noticing it and is waiting to see what we do next. It is us against the smog of fear. Every newscaster signs off with “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of Boston and Texas” But you have to mean it. Because it works. Read this. Most of humanity is actually awesome. (Ignore the Texas link. But you see! There’s another one!)

You are in a mind war. You can singlehandedly stop terrorism. With. Your. Mind.

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims in Boston and Texas. Look who showed up the day after the bombing, April 16:

Kia kaha, America.

Rune Soup. Where wizards drink free.

When I say that the Welsh, in contrast to the Scots, seem almost entirely lacking in ambition I actually mean it as a compliment. Wales is like Britain’s Tibet.

The last few centuries of Scottish history have been defined by glorious innovation and aggressive, hyper-pragmatic power games… putting Scottish bloodlines on the throne, largely inventing modern finance, television, the telephone, housing great centres of industrial and imperial wealth. (There is no “Welsh Rite” in Freemasonry.)

Even today, Scotland is home to an agenda-setting parliament and an armory that, despite the shrill outcries of the British press, could still reduce great chunks of the world to slag.

Smelling faintly of woad paint and long ships, there is a deliciousness to Scottish identity that seems to say “come at me, bro”.

But the Welsh?

You’ll not wake up to the sound of their war horns on the beach. It feels instead like they’d simply phase out of our plane of existence before your very eyes and go and blight your crops with a song about dragons. Eavesdropping on identity politics conversations in pubs across South Wales like I did last week paints a very different picture to the one you find north of the wall.

Little wonder, then, that Tolkien based some of his Elvish languages on Welsh.

Interior of St David’s Cathedral. Wales.

Here at St David’s, the westernmost point in Wales, that Elvish current meets that wonderful Gaelic early church current which reaches up to Anglesey and Iona and across to Ireland’s east coast… part of the early Christian superhighway, too old to be constrained by modern national boundaries, an archipelago of spiritual innovation, like a cold Aegean.

The ceiling of St David’s tower.

As with Iona, ‘The Message’ feels perpetually ‘new’ here. Just walking through the grounds, you resonate like a tuning fork with those days when the story of universal redemption for all was first told. It is entirely different to the feeling in any of the great cathedrals of Europe I’ve so far been to.

I am fascinated with the early political message of Christianity. We are so used to the idea (if not the implementation) of universal equality and human rights that the possibility of a divine being coming to earth for you has been reduced in its impact.

But watch this scene from Agora (8:54 – 12:42):

When Columba and David and the rest began speaking on these shores, they would have found a land so caught up in tribal allegiances and royal bloodlines… warlords and a priestly caste set apart by virtue of blood and being in some sense chosen. Women and slaves were traded, raped and stolen, just as they were right across Europe. (Saint David is the product of a rape.) The miracle in Agora is that a slave, someone else’s property, may be chosen by God, and that the bread that ‘belongs’ to his master is God’s bread to give to the poor.

Those few dark centuries subsequent to the arrival of such a radical message were a magical time of hybridity, birthing stories of Arthur and faery saints, when almost any Christian enclave outside of Rome was, practically by definition, gnostic paganism -a new message injected into an existing spiritual world.

According to legend, corpses carried across a vanished bridge on this river would speak again.

Interestingly, in their down time from finding crashed Soviet aircraft in Africa for the CIA, rings around Jupiter and bases on the far side of the moon, some of the remote viewers in the Stargate Project RV’d a whole bunch of periods in history. (Well you would, wouldn’t you?) Remote Viewer 001, Joseph McMoneagle, wrote about this experience in the late nineties in a book called Ultimate Time Machine. He would lie in a soundproof, lead-lined faraday cage and receive instructions from an operator via microphone. This is a transcript of what happened when they attempted this with Jesus:

Joe: There seems like there is a missing piece here too, and I’m trying to grasp it. Hold on a second. Let me…

(Long pause.)

Joe: He, ah…. he was very ah… evidently he had a far greater deal of…. a far greater number of people followed him as opposed to what’s known or available in the historical record. He ah… he didn’t spend time detailing his ideals or anything to like… student type of people. But he did take the more brilliant people he became involved with and ah… and instructed them in the philosophic side of the ideal. He secretly made them understand the necessity for the interaction. They, in turn, with that single key, spread the information as well. It was if it was all hinged on a single precept. I think the historical record is a compilation of not only the information from this man called Jesus, but… an awful lot of what was credited to him that was provided by or taught by others based on a like premise, and included as well.

…

Bob: Of what sense can you make of his death then?

(Long pause.)

Joe: Ah… have to create a place… or a… you have to create a parameter in which the higher experience can be experienced, in order to develop information based solely on the higher experience. Ah… it’s kind of like… I’m trying to figure out a way of translating… of putting it… but I’m really having trouble doing this. Ah, it’s like a… man, until that point, or interaction between men created a form of learning or a form of information that was called learning, and this form of learning had become stagnated. It needed a kick in the pants, in order to progress to the next level. So… the reason for his… his actions, were to… initiate a question or a… a questioning that would grow as a blossom in the minds of men and women. It’s sort of like promulgating a new… a totally new experience, or a new experiential type of thing that men would come to know, that would cause them to participate or interact on a higher level of what man was really supposed to be.

(Long pause.)

Joe: I’m trying to… I’m trying… be very… it’s kind of like, ah… man at the time was like two kids on the street corner. And their interaction at first is a discussion on who has the prettiest models or the best looking bike, or I bet I can jump out of that limb in the tree and you can’t, etc… That… that form of interaction was producing a truth or information of a certain level. So then, these two boys are met by a man, and the man says, have you ever wondered where that tree came from, or how it might have grown? And the boys find that in the next day they are discussing the more esoteric nature of the tree, or the possible manufacturer of the bicycle, or how marbles are made – it kind of like shoved them up to the next level of understanding, of curiosity. The interaction between them produces a truth that’s a tenfold higher step than who has the largest bag of marbles – that kind of effect.

(Long pause.)

Joe: I feel a need… I just want to say one thing here. In the course or history of humanity this manifestation, this being called Christ… that was one way of doing this… doing it. There are many ways of doing this… doing it.

‘The Ghostly King’. Believed to be Henry IV, he appeared when the paint was removed from the pillars. He’d been covered up.

What emerged from the Jesus experiments was the picture of a man who was born with a particular intensity about him, a driven man who vanished into the wilderness at an early age (those missing years) to meditate and hang out with crazy desert wizards. This potentially triggered a walk-in experience and he returned with the revelation that a truth exists in the interaction between those seeking it that is much greater than that which is simply revealed. (Do as I do... or for where two or three gather in My name…)

The appeal of this permanently-unverifiable vision is that it tracks with the injection of a gnostic message of personal, universal, spiritual discovery back into mankind’s discourse. It was the combination of network effects along with a sympathetic ideological framework -messianism- that led to its appearance in Bronze Age Palestine rather than, say, Madagascar. From there it could get further, faster. Had it come through elsewhere or elsewhen -and the implication is that is has- then Jesus would have looked very different.

It is a distinctly neighbourly view of Christ’s mission: The ongoing manipulation of human consciousness -presumably in this case for the better- by extradimensional forces. (Vallée, who was just down the SRI hall at the time of the experiments, would probably approve.) That uncorrupted transmission is keenly felt in places such as St David’s.

There is, inevitably, also evidence of that corruption.

Two pilgrimages to St David’s, for instance, eventually came to count as one pilgrimage to Rome. This is common across the Catholic empire and on the surface of it seems “nice”… most people could not afford such extreme examples of travel so concessions were made to the distant faithful. However, tuning into it in a place so awash with domestic folk magic, it feels like a further example of the archonic hijack. I get the sense that people chose to make repeated pilgrimages to St David’s and the Catholic response was to claim these for Rome: You’ve been to St David’s twice? That counts as going to Rome! You’re Catholic now, no backsies!

The ruins of the Bishop’s Palace beside St David’s. A pleasing metaphor for the things that continue and the things that don’t.

As for the man, himself, Saint David?

He lacks some of the bombast of Saint Columba but then his community was potentially too far south to worry much about Viking raids. He didn’t need to be quite so Gandalf with his miracles.

In fact, his story is rather light on wizardry. There is the tale of Saint David preaching to a crowd and a small hill miraculously appearing underneath him so that all could hear the Word. If you’ve ever been to Mid-Wales or are familiar with its geography you’ll understand why one wag, John Davies, said that he can “scarcely conceive of any miracle so superfluous”. Even in this, David is the quintessential Welshman.

More of the Bishops’ Palace.

But his association with magic (hollow) hills in Wales is evidence of his hybridisation with the indigenous pagan beliefs, as his association with corpse candles and enabling anyone who lives in Wales to be forewarned of their own death. From the perspective of actual magical practice, this opens up his ability to act as a psychopomp, as do his cryptic last words, which we’ll come to.

Saint David was initially believed to be the founder of Glastonbury Abbey, although later chroniclers say he merely “re-dedicated” it, bringing with him a great sapphire to do so. Either way, this hill magician’s story is intimately tied to that particular current. Speaking of Welsh magicians famous for hills, there is a legend involving Merlin and St David’s Cathedral, further blurring the associations and tying, inevitably, back to prophecies surrounding an English king. Also like Merlin, David was a bastard princeling.

Back inside the cathedral.

As for those famous last words? They’re wonderful:

Be joyful, and keep your faith and your creed. Do the little things that you have seen me do and heard about. I will walk the path that our fathers have trod before us.

After a lifetime of magical hills and bringing mysterious sapphires to Avalon, Saint David says he will “walk the path that our fathers have trod”. The church would have you believe this is a reference to his ecclesiastical forefathers. Maybe. But emphasising tradition with your dying breath when you founded one of the country’s first monastic communities seems a little incongruous. Whatever the case, his subsequent hybridisation plugs him back into that indigenous current.

It is the least part of his dying words, anyway. He requests his followers to “be joyful” and “do the little things”. This is a profound spiritual message that remains untrammeled by Roman imperialism. The patron saint of Wales appears almost Buddhist. (That thing I said about Wales being Britain’s Tibet?)

There are fragments that we can only glimpse that just hint at the wonders of what really went on… a profound change in human consciousness in a time of miracles and magic. In this case, we glimpse a monastic community devoid of mercantile ambition and the desire for glorious expansion… it is a place where the hybrid holy man’s last words, instead, are to do the little things… to live a little, profound, life. It pleases me that this current remains universally available to any who seek it.

And I’m also glad it’s somewhere you can visit.

A view of St David’s from the ruins.

Rune Soup. Where wizards drink free.

From a possibly spurious western analysis, it has fallen into sync holes around the web.

It refers to a symbolic language, a method of numinous communication, a less-dickish version of Crowley’s exhortation to treat every experience as a dialogue between your soul and the universe.

(‘Every’ is ambitious. Sometimes you just want to say shaddup shaddup shaddup! And that’s what wine is for.)

Twilight language is when something is communicated with symbols, rather than through them… like a psychedelic spell to summon the Annunaki back to earth in a Nick Minaj video, released on the deathversary of an obscure terrorist folk magician, during the year of the apocalypse and just a few months before an interdimensional lizard ‘illuminated’ the entire world with a giant diamond. (Man, last year was weird.)

In twilight language, the medium is the message. The sheer act of communication, of transmission, is what is important. Taken individually, or even taken by somebody else, the symbols are incomprehensible. If synchronicity is when the universe notices you noticing it, twilight language is how it says “hello, there!” immediately after. It is the sound of the wheel when somebody spins somewhere.

I like this:

Intuition and synchronicity are interconnected in such a way that it is hard to distinguish where one stops and the other begins. The more synchronicities one notices the more intuitive one becomes; the more intuitive one is the more synchronicities they are likely to recognize. The more awareness one has of his intuition and the synchronistic occurrences happening around him, the stronger his connection to universal energy and knowledge becomes.

Sometimes I wonder if this isn’t the secret of kabbalistic apotheosis. Hearing the language behind the words, connecting the things that aren’t connected… a mystical framework for exploring and encouraging synchronicity. On that topic, let’s have a wavy excerpt from Karen Armstrong’s fantastic The Bible, on the context and origins of kabbalah:

After abandoning the conception of God that the philosophies of the time left them with, this bunch of amateurs looked back at the holy books, seeking ‘plain meaning’ and instead found a ‘numinous significance that entirely translated the literal text.’ That’s a dictionary definition of twilight language. Do you wonder what kind of synchronicities people might have had in thirteenth century Spain? I mean, Nicki Minaj probably wasn’t even around then!

What did they do with it?

“Even though God could not be known, he could be experienced in the symbols of scripture.” The symbols. This is a chaos magic blog so you can probably tell what’s coming next.

You’re expecting me to say you can do this with any text, not just holy texts. Bob Wilson in Cosmic Trigger famously popularised the first year psych experiment where the pupils are instructed to look for quarters on the ground and subsequently find loads of quarters.

And yes, that’s technically true, just as it is apparently technically true that you can achieve enlightenment by drawing water from a well, but some texts seem to work better than others.

Twilight language thrives where it can use complexity, contradiction, mystery, falsehood and scope. It needs moving parts that can spin off or break. It needs lots of little lights rather than a monolithic floodlight. The Necronomicon, for instance, as I interpret it, could be considered a twilight language phrasebook. Because it is, for lack of a more mature term, a “space book”. It also appears to exist in our realm in incomplete extensions of a non-physical whole.

We’ll come back to this idea, but here’s something I learned in facestalk’s bestest ever group, The Secret Sun. In one of Lovecraft’s minor short stories, From Beyond, a scientist creates a machine that sends out rays or vibrations to stimulate the pineal gland, thus awakening a latent sense that enables people to see monstrous extra-dimensional creatures that always exist in a kind of hyperspace around us. Unfortunately, the machine also allows those creatures to see us. Huh. Another piece of the crashed spaceship, eh?

Watch the full movie here, which was also shared through the Secret Sun group. (Have I mentioned enough how awesome this group is? It’s the one thing about facestalk that doesn’t make me want to throw up in my mouth.)

Let’s take a more ridiculous example with videos gleaned from this neat blog by a fellow Australian. (Although he’s a Queenslander so, you know… you’ve been warned.) Everyone knows the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything is 42:

In his own words, the sole reason Douglas Adams picked this number was because it “sounds funny”. That was it. He was as adamant as Lovecraft that it was all entirely fiction. Here are some exciting things about 42:

But look what we can do with the ultimate meaning from this space book.

• 42 is a pronic number, achieved by multiplying, in this case, 6×7. Six being the number of the Divine Hexagram and seven being the original astrological planets. Thus we can say that the ‘answer’ is that the Supreme Architect brings forth and sustains the universe by manifesting through the Seven Powers.
• 42 is a primary pseudoperfect number, meaning the sum of its inverse prime numbers and itself is 1. Thus, 42 tells use here that the ‘answer’ is that the reflection or inverse of the upper world (“as above, so below”) is 1. All is One.
• 42 in binary is 101010. I’m sure there’s something here to do with three and the ten sephiroth but it’s beyond my skills. To me this looks like a representation of the interplay of yin and yang just before it brings forth “the ten thousand things”.

Non-wizards wouldn’t pick up the significance in this “funny” number. So is the significance “in” there, or is it in the transmission?

One of the final points in the video, which like all good nerds I already knew, is that Fox Mulder’s apartment number is 42. Which brings us neatly to the Seeker After Knowledge.

The grail

My flatmates and I watched this on Good Friday. Seemed totes apprope.

Sometime in the 1930s, Heinrich Himmler installed a round table in Wewelsburg Castle. One of the study rooms was named Gral. Another König Artus. He envisioned it as the literal esoteric centre of the thousand year reich, with SS officers as knights of the round table. Underneath this table was to be the holy grail. According to wikipedia, there is “no proof” Himmler wanted a grail castle.

That’s not strictly true.

Enter Otto Rahn, an impoverished scholar obsessed with the Parzifal story. After receiving a classical education, he spent five years wandering Europe investigating myths and following heroic storylines to blasted, isolated places. Eventually, like many before him, he lighted on the Cathar territory of Languedoc in 1931 and became an innkeeper so he could stay and pursue his grail studies. He believed that the “great treasure” that escaped with the last Cathar from the total destruction of Montségur was the holy grail itself.

As an innkeeper, he made a great academic, and was quickly bankrupt. He reemerged in Germany and put his researches to good use, writing Kreuzzug gegen den Graal, “Crusade Against The Grail”. This made him about as much money as trying to sell German beer to French farmers. But it did attract the attention of Himmler. And the opportunity for the ultimate academic devil’s bargain. From Levenda’s Unholy Alliance:

According to one version of the story, the Reichsführer-SS personally invited the author in his Prinz Albrechstrasse headquarters in Berlin. There, he offered Rahn a commission in the SS and virtually unlimited resources for which Himmler expected Rahn to continue his research into the grail, Cathars, and related subjects of Aryan interest.

According to another version, Rahn was a personal friend of völkish “channeler” Karl Maria Wiligut -also known as SS-Oberführer Weisthor- a gentleman who had once been certified insane but who nonetheless claimed that he had perfect recall of the entire ancient history of the Teuton peoples going back over 200,000 years, a kind of ancient racial memory upon which he could call at any time. This was, of course, a very handy ability to possess and Himmler considered himself fortunate to have access to the services of a man who could fill in those great gaps of Teutonic history that result when a master race proves rather lax in developing a written language… Wiligut… held salon-type meetings at his home on arcane Aryan topics at which Himmler and the young Otto Rahn were said to be frequent guests.

Rahn joined the SS and set off journeying all over Germany, France, Iceland and greater western Europe on the hunt for Cathar and grail mysterious. Whatever he may have found will never be known as it didn’t appear in his later book. But he would write regular letters back to Wiligut and Himmler, marked secret; for Reichsführer-SS eyes only. We’ll come back to him.

From the Grail Tarot

These are images from the Grail Tarot by John Matthews, which I bought last week in a particularly geographically appropriate place. The manifestation of the grail that holds the most fascination for me is that of the green stone or emerald.

It’s story is told by a thirteenth century poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, who said he received it from a man named Kyot of Provence (Cathar-adjacent), who had in turn received it from a mysterious -in some accounts Jewish- man named Flegitanis, who had “great knowledge of the starry mysteries”. Flegitanis told the story of a war in heaven, a war between the angels, with Lucifer -the Light Bringer- as its hero. During his defeat and fall from heaven, the stone fell from either his crown or his forehead (third eye) and became the grail.

With Lucifer as the hero, this is clearly a gnostic tale against the Demiurge, Yahweh. But it is also obviously alchemical, as we’re about to see. Here’s some wavy quoting from the fantastic Paul Weston’s highly-recommended Avalonian Aeon. (Paul, if you’re reading this, this is the bit I mentioned on facebook I was looking for. Blew the top off my head the first time around.)

A Jew from Toledo? We’ve been here, haven’t we? It’s a town that, at the time, was at the very crossroads of the whole western esoteric tradition. Now let’s dig a little deeper into the name of that stone:

Lapis exillis is Latin for nothing. Like the Necronomicon, it’s not an actual word in that language. But it just might be a word in twilight language. A gnostic stone that is the third eye of the light bringer fallen to earth, the possession of which grants immortality and the true vision of this realm. An hermetic cup “descended to earth” for the same purpose.

And, after all, what stone is Hermes’s Tablet made from? Emerald.

The end of the quest

Also from Indiana Jones. But it had the best images in my brief googling. Whatevs. The film is still awesome.

To call the grail “a pagan survival of the cauldron” is glib. It’s lazy. It’s only seeing 42 as a “funny number”. It’s only seeing the Necronomicon as a weirdo racist’s made-up word that some guy smooshed into a faux-Sumerian grimoire in the 1970s.

Yes, the grail is Cerridwen’s cauldron. Yes, the grail is the Cup that caught the blood of Christ. Yes, the grail is the cup from the Last Supper. Yes, the grail is the wisdom of the Light Bringer who fell from the stars and sought to free us from the Papal archon. Yes, the grail is the Medicine of Metals. Yes, the grail is the Emerald Tablet of Hermes.

When I read paedo-apologist Zimmer-Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, one of the parts that struck me the most was toward the end where, during the appearance of the grail in Camelot, everyone saw something different. Christians saw the Cup of Christ, pagans saw the Goddess, and so on. This is a reasonable description of how fragments or extensions of a single, non-physical thing can appear in the physical realm across multiple cultures and time periods. The grail could appear to you as music.

It is equally glib to say that the grail is anything, that it is simply a metaphor for the spiritual journey’s ultimate destination. Because it is clearly something. It doesn’t just come bundled in with enlightenment like a sleeping mask on a long flight. This thing that it is… well, if you want to know, you should probably go look for it. Like Otto Rahm did.

Did he find it?

Well, by 1936, Himmler had grown increasingly frustrated with his minions’ inability to find physical proof -for obvious reasons- of his various bullshit occult theories like how “true” Christianity was actually German, as were the Tibetans, etc. The story is he gave Rahm until Oct 31 (!), 1936, to finish his next book or else. Rahm did this. It was called Luzifers Hofgesind or Lucifer’s Servants. According to Levenda, it’s a remarkable departure from his earlier book, in some places filled with blatant propaganda. The underlying thesis is that the Cathars and other Aryan-approved groups actually worshipped Lucifer as the true God of Love, rather than the Jewish God and his son, but only because he represents earlier pagan gods. Some of it reads alarmingly like the underpinning early texts of modern paganism. (We’ll come to this anon.) Again from Unholy Alliance:

There is much more [Light] than in the houses of God -cathedrals and churches- where Lucifer is neither able nor wishes to enter due to all the somber, stained glass windows whereon are painted Jewish prophets an apostles, the Roman gods and saints. The forest, that, that was free!

Perhaps tellingly, he resigned only a year after the end of his four months of SS military training at Dachau, where he was also assigned guard duty as punishment for his homosexuality. Less than a month later, he was found dead in the mountains. By this time, of course, the Nazis had developed something of a knack for using occultists and mystics and then killing them. But… I don’t know. What if he found the secret of the grail? Would you give it to Himmler after what you had seen? Could you? As one of his friends points out, it is very difficult for a skilled mountaineer and trained soldier to die at less than 2,000 metres only two weeks from Spring. It might take one or two weeks. Whatever the story, Rahm’s end certainly wasn’t accidental.

The exact date of his death was March 13th, the anniversary of the fall of the last Cathar stronghold of Montségur and last known location of their “great treasure”.

Happy questing, kids.

Rune Soup. Where wizards drink free.