Yet big adjustments were on the way. One driver of change, often overlooked, was the vital role that the paranormal — specifically spiritualism — played in the Feminist Awakening and Women’s Suffrage.

Spiritualist practitioners traveled from place to place and, for a small fee, would use their “spirit guide” — an otherwordly advisor of all affairs — to deliver messages from Beyond. The spiritual medium could contact dead relatives, conjure spirits, cause rooms to fill with mysterious tapping sounds, or make the writings of a ghostly hand appear on chalkboards. Spiritualists of the Victorian Era were highly sought out for comfort, advice and to rekindle memories of long-lost friends and family members.

Primarily, most spiritualists were women. Their role as medium offered an escape from the persistent indignities of domestic life. Spiritualism gave women a platform, one that came with certain degrees of power, freedom and equality absent in contemporary society. The practice also cultivated an air of mystery around the medium, which in turn drew the attention of both men and other women in ways seemingly impossible in other professions. It conferred wealth and fame. In looking at the early years of the feminist movement, you could justifiably point to the séance table as a symbol of equality.

The names of female Victorian-era spiritualists remain synonymous with the profession: Emma Hardinge Britten, Victoria Woodhull (the first woman to run for President, with Fredrick Douglass on the ticket, no less!), Leah Fox Fish and Cora L. V. Richmond — a woman whose exquisite features personified the Victorian male definition of virginal beauty.

All of these women would test the boundaries of feminism before women’s suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Lucy Stone came along. In fact, many female spiritualists would ultimately abandon the profession to directly empower the feminist movement without the obfuscation of the paranormal.

The women of spiritualism used the field as a means to empower themselves and counter the hegemonic rule of men. At a time when divorce and adultery were considered in league with prostitution, women could explore aspects of their sexuality at the séance table through the aforementioned “spirit guide” — a connection to another party that transcended typical matrimonial relations. These spirit guides often “took over the body” of the female medium and the actions — often physical — were not deemed harlotry on the part of the female.

Still, the uptight and conservative society of the day was reluctant to change. Despite its popularity, spiritualism was regularly condemned as a danger to the family and the sanctity of marriage. Writer Henry James despised the burgeoning sexuality and power among women of his era. Inspired by the beautiful Cora Richmond, he created (and condemned) the character Verena Terrant in his novel The Bostonians. Regardless of its editorializing, the novel forever pegs spiritualism to the rising feminist movement of the 19th century.

Over time, the original spiritualists were mostly deemed frauds and con-artists, and today, séance tables are few and far between. Gone are the papier mache “ghosts” materializing out of curtained corners, ecto-plasm and mysterious tappings on tabletops. Yet the role of the spiritual psychic advisor, tarot reader, etc., is to this day often filled by a woman.

The world finally caught up with the those women who, nearly two hundred years ago, sought a better life of equality and justice through the world of the paranormal. Yet even now, many see the empowerment of the marginalized as a threat to a certain way of life and attempt to thwart progress and social change.

Maybe it’s time to fire up those séance tables.

My head would hang over these books for hours, taking in fantastic tales of the macabre. I studied intently grainy black and white photos of odd buildings, castles and churches in far off lands, each marked by supernatural phenomenon that chilled my youthful bones.

For the most part, these tales were well scrubbed of actual terror, designed to spark interest in reading rather than drive 6-year old Chris to scream for his mother with every headlight that bounced into his nighttime bedroom.

But there is one story I remember that was truly scary. So much so that I wonder how it was ever deemed suitable for a kid’s book. Maybe it was the fault of some bitter editor who saw himself writing the Great American Novel instead of proofreading “The Ghostly Hand of Fartmiser Castle!” for a second-rate publishing company. Because “The Terror of 50 Berkeley Square, London” could soil the britches of children well past their diaper years. Just thinking about it still sends shivers down my spine to this day.

The house on Berkeley Square is a residence built in the Georgian style popular in the 1700s — a time when London was divided by class lines too broad to bridge. The building stood as a testament to the privileged, while only a few blocks away, London’s poor dwelt in filth, crime and starvation. Occupying one of the city’s chic districts, it has been home to Prime Ministers, socialites and high-ranking military officials. Yet for many decades, the house remained abandoned.

The Berkeley Square story transcends your typical ghost yarn — no white phantoms stalk the hallways, nothing goes bump in the night. Instead, the building houses a terrifying, Lovecraftian presence bent on corrupting all those who live there, dubbed “the Beast.” In the 1800s, a young man dared to spend the night in a bedroom the entity was said to occupy, a challenge he laughed off with blustery confidence. Late in the evening, his associates heard him screaming. Rushing into the bedroom, they found him standing upright, eyes bulging from his head and sweating in panic. The man went into a delirious shock and died shortly thereafter.

Following this incident the house went unoccupied for decades. Empty, maybe, but hardly quiet: some wandering passersby reported screams of lunacy emanating through the thick walls of the vacant estate.

There is a subsequent tale of two sailors taking advantage of England’s “squatter’s law, through which an unoccupied building can be temporarily used as housing by anyone who gained entrance. Shrugging off the paranormal “nonsense” of 50 Berkeley Square, the seamen broke in to spend a night on shore-leave.  That same night, one of them was found cowering in a nearby alleyway. He spoke, almost incoherently, of an “oozing” creature that entered the room through a closet door. His last recollection was of the entity “filling the room” as his colleague stood frozen in terror. When the sailor and a  local constable returned to the home, they found the other man forcibly impaled on the iron gates below a broken window.

Theories have emerged to debunk this supernatural history: tales of “afflicted” relatives, banished from status-conscious London, returning in confusion to the place of their original confinement. Shunned family members haunt Berkeley Square as much as ghosts: symbols of genetic imperfections in a high society that refused to tolerate any flaws, whether organic or social.

There are other stories of those whose sanity imploded when met with the Berkeley Square Beast — the formless monster that enters unseen and pulls you out of your world and into something much darker and more sinister. Perhaps these tales were invented to keep the vagabonds and Cockneys, and squatters out of Berkeley Square’s general vicinity. Perhaps the Beast of Berkeley Square is the manifestation of the fears of the upper echelon: that the undesirables living mere blocks away could invade their pampered lives and force them to contemplate a truly terrifying world of pain, disease and death.

Those who currently occupy the building (now as an office complex) still speak of strange occurrences: smells, screams and strange mists that fill rooms. Whatever haunts the halls, rooms and minds of 50 Berkeley Square remains a tale of madness and mystery for all ages.

Gary Lachman

We at The Contrarian are huge fans of Gary, as are many of our readers. Which is why we’re so delighted that he took time from his ridiculously busy schedule to answer a few questions about his new book and its perennially enigmatic subject.

——————————————

The Contrarian: There’s not a shortage of books about Carl Jung, with each subsequent entry purporting to be the definitive biography. What about your book stands out in this crowded field?

Gary Lachman: Rather than avoid talking about Jung’s “mystical” or “occult” inclinations, as some books on him do, or use them as a stick to beat him with, or applaud them uncritically, or explain them away, I take them seriously, and try to place Jung in the context of other “mystical” teachers, like Rudolf Steiner and Gurdjieff. I also ask why Jung seemed to have had a profound ambivalence about them, why publicly he insisted repeatedly that he was a scientist and not a mystic, yet among his close circle presented a different attitude.

TC: Individuation is Jung’s term for an alchemical-style process in which the components of one’s “spirit” and psyche are melded in a more holistic comprehension of self. How much of a believer are you in this transformation?

GL: If you’re asking if I believe in self-transformation, the answer is yes. I think you can understand individuation as broadly alchemical, in the sense that it involves bringing together opposites and creating something new out of the encounter. I don’t think you need to use alchemical language or concepts in order to do this, though. Individuation is about “becoming who you are” — it’s the same as Abraham Maslow‘s notion of self-actualization. It means becoming “you” and not merely a copy of the people around you.

TC: Jung is also known for his theory of the collective unconsciousness, or “world psyche,” in which the contents of our individual minds correlate at a deeper level through communal archetypes. Is there a dissonance between the idea of a shared spirit-map and the subjective experience of individuation, in which transformation is different for different people? Did you find any evidence in your studies of Jung attempting to reconcile these potentially contrasting ideas?

GL: I don’t see them as conflicting. It is precisely the collective unconscious that one individuates from, as it were. You individuate by becoming aware of the influence of the collective unconscious, the deeper forces at work in the psyche. By becoming aware of them and incorporating them consciously, one becomes an individual.You are not then pushed around by them without a clue, as most of us are most of the time.

TC: Jung seems to have spent a great deal of energy trying to dodge the mystic tag he was so often flagged with. How do you think he’d have dealt with the Aquarian-age co-opting of his concepts? If he were around today, would he be Grand Poo-Bah of Burning Man or an embittered shut-in?

GL: I think Jung would have been pleased that his ideas have become so fundamental to modern spirituality, but he would have shaken his head at raves and such. Individuation is hard work and it means confronting yourself, society, and the cosmos on your own. He enjoyed a good party but like anything of value, individuating is something one does on one’s own. I’m sure Burning Man and so on are great fun, but I don’t know how useful mass events are in “becoming who you are.” Jung, remember, spent a great deal of time in solitude in his famous tower at Bollingen.

TC: To me, Jung is the preeminent cartographer of the human mind. In fact, I’m always puzzled that he has so many critics who are quick to dismiss his work while swooning for far nuttier stuff. Why do you think he’s had such difficulty being accepted by either the scientific or spiritual mainstream?

GL: I don’t know that he hasn’t been accepted by the “spiritual mainstream,” whoever that means. He opposed the reductionist, materialist “scientistic” view, so it’s no surprise many scientists consider him a flake. I think Jung is a rare character, someone who applied scientific rigour to spiritual concerns. Sadly many “spiritual” people are disinclined to think, so they may adopt Jungian ideas like synchronicity without really thinking about them, or about anything else for that matter.

TC: Leading neuroscientists have embraced the idea of brain plasticity as a means of dealing with the “reformatting” of troublesome mental “programs,” i.e., neuroses. Plasticity is not a new concept; Buddhists have for centuries advocated for practices that allow thought to be neutrally observed and new mental habits established. In light of meditation, mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy, are Jung’s self-initiated breakdowns perhaps unnecessarily messy?

GL: Jung didn’t offer his “method” as one appropriate for everyone, and he often said that most neuroses were probably better treated by other means, even Freudian ones. But if you want to discover your unconscious and have some idea what’s going on in it and how you can develop a vital, creative, and surprising relation to it, he believed you needed to meet it face to face, as it were. He certainly wouldn’t have wanted active imagination to be seen as a “technique.” Becoming who you are isn’t something you can do when necessary. You either become who you are or you don’t.

TC: Speaking of self-initiation, Jung was also big on highly personal information, whether it be drawings, sculptures, mandalas or secret linguistics. Does sharing the semantic code with others somehow lessen its alchemical potency?

GL: I think some symbols discovered in dreams etc can have a collective meaning, but many are metaphors about your own life and are surprisingly specific, as if the intelligence responsible for them is speaking directly to ‘you’. At least in my own case I have always been stunned by the aptness of imagery in dreams and how they use jokes, plays on words, visual gags, to make a point. I am repeatedly reminded that what I call “my unconscious” is an independent, living intelligence that more times than not knows more than I do. Jung also believed it was important to have a ‘secret’, something of deep significance that you kept to yourself. This creates a kind of inner pressure that fuels individuation. It’s something he shares with most esoteric teaching. We all know the devaluing effect of telling a particularly important dream to someone else, how it often loses its “charge.” Pearls before swine, and all that.

TC: What do you think of the Red Book? I have it, but feel like I need to take a vacation in order to properly experience its contents.

GL: I think it is a remarkable record of one remarkable person’s encounter with a formidably remarkable living intelligence that just happened to have resided in his head.

TC: When it comes to transformations, you’re certainly no slouch. Going from punk rock star to distinguished esoteric historian is hardly a typical career arc. Could you offer a word of advice or encouragement to others on a less-than conventional path?

GL: Well, in the first case I never was a “star.” I made a not inconsiderable contribution to pop music, but was never a celebrity. But my basic advice is to listen to your “self” and do your best to become who you are. Don’t be afraid of taking risks or of disappointing other people, especially your friends. My interest in music and performing is part of the same impulse that later led me to write. It’s a need for self-expression combined with an appetite for ideas. I was always interested in the kind of thing I write about now, but I needed to mature in order to do it. I have nothing against pop music, but there’s only so much you can say in a song. Now I have 80,000 – 100,000 words. You may not be able to dance to it, but it is very satisfying to collect all your thoughts on, say, Jung and organize them into a book that, with any luck, others will get something out of.

Well, I finally saw Inception. I hadn’t planned on writing about it, however, as everyone from fanboy to critic to armchair PhD has already weighed in. Still, Christopher Nolan‘s latest certainly squeezed my mind grapes, so I figured I’d throw some ideas together.

++Dream a Little Dream++
Artists of all kinds have long been fascinated with dreams — from painter to playwright to composer to filmmaker. The connection should be obvious: dreams are nearly synonymous with imagination itself. Artifacts from the sleep state can be inspiring or disturbing, but the true nature of dream remains an enigma. Inception makes a noble attempt at cracking the cipher, but Nolan’s airtight aesthetic fails to convey the mind’s deepest and most anarchic interiors.

The film is hardly a failure, however. Nolan seems to understand that Hollywood is America’s dream factory — that to step into a theater is to enter the headspace of the filmmaker. This an environment where your own reality is no longer of primary concern (plus it’s air-conditioned!). We moviegoers are willing participants in a ritual of sensory subjugation, and cineplexes exist to enhance this ceremony via giant screens, stadium seating and potent sound systems.

This dream extends in multiple directions. Like the subconscious projections in Nolan’s film, movie actors, sets, wardrobes and so forth are but ancillary expressions of the director’s imagination. Which means that, metaphysically speaking, Inception can be seen as a facet of cinema itself.

Grad-school grandstanding aside, Inception is basically a big summer movie. So the lofty stuff ultimately takes a backseat to elaborate effects and action sequences. To his credit, Nolan maintains a cogent sci-fi narrative while simultaneously exploring the nature of loss. Dialogue and exposition are nonetheless sacrificed on the altar of audience comprehension, yet these faults can be forgiven due to Nolan’s heroic balancing act. I mean, you try making a movie like this.

One complaint I wholly agree with is that Nolan’s dreamworld isn’t terribly… well, dreamlike. There’s no doubt that Nolan is a gifted cinematic architect who has shown himself capable of wrenching powerful performances from his actors. Still, he’s more watchmaker than imagineer, which is why his slumberland feels clinical. It’s not the fault of technology — as was the case in The Dark Knight, Inception goes light on obvious computer trickery. And directors like Stanley Kubrick and Stephen Spielberg have crafted far more evocative worlds with less.

Consider the nature of the sleeping unconscious. Even those dreams with high a degree of detail contain plenty of shifty elements when we recall them in the light of day. And that shiftiness extends to pretty much every aspect of the dreaming experience. The interrelation between objects, places and events are nothing less than fluid. Meaning is multilayered, enigmatic and “extra-logical.” None of this lends itself to moviemaking, but Nolan seems to duck the challenge entirely. Inception‘s only hints of elasticity are in its architectural elements, and these are ultimately more mechanistic than mutable.

Such criticisms aren’t solely limited to set design and FX — they apply to Inception‘s characters and concepts, as well.

++Interpolation and Identity++
Though an original work, it’s impossible to consider Inception without recognizing the kaleidoscopic imagination of sci-fi scribe Philip K. Dick, whose intertextual tales have eluded translation by several gifted filmmakers. To some degree, Inception mirrors the concepts in PKD’s The Minority Report, as well as the Spielberg-helmed adaptation. It’s a powerfully freaky thing to think that someone can get inside your head for the purpose of extracting information. In Dick’s story, it’s a preemptive law enforcement technique — the mere thought of committing a crime being justification for arrest. Nolan’s yarn is more about mindjacking as corporate espionage, but it’s certainly in keeping.

What scared PKD most wasn’t ubiquitous authority but rather the porousness of identity. Even his protagonists that are agents of “the system” (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) experience the paralyzing and pervasive fear of losing themselves across multiple layers of consciousness. Another occupational hazard is the danger of being subsumed by one or more cover identities (A Scanner Darkly) — a literary fascination shared by William S. Burroughs.

My point is this: to effectively evoke dream reality, there must be at least passing attention paid to the mutable nature of identity. Nolan’s film deals with three layers of dream consciousness, each a further step removed from the rules of waking reality. Yet his protagonists remain rooted even as they descend further into raw strata of mind. This is especially odd considering that they’re occupying another person’s dream and therefore susceptible to said individual’s subconscious idiosyncrasies. PKD would’ve thrown everybody’s physical, mental and emotional characteristics into one big psychic Cuisinart until the mission was either a paranoid shambles, or an entirely new plotline emerged. Why do I feel like me, but look like you? Is this my memory or yours? How do I know I haven’t already been compromised? Which reality is the “true” reality, if that can even be ascertained? And does it even matter?

Nolan expresses some of this by having his characters struggle with the idea that their current reality is a mirage. To me, this is the most powerful aspect of the film, touching as it does upon mental illness and the effects of consensus reality. Those unwilling or incapable of entertaining this shared consensus suffer tremendously, as did PKD in his own life. I wish more of these themes were addressed in Nolan’s film, but I understand the difficulty of building a summer blockbuster using madness as the cornerstone (we’ll see what Del Toro does with Lovecraft).

++Neurosecurity and Mindfulness++
I’m surprised that the geek overlords on Boing Boing, etc. haven’t brought up mindhacking in their discussions about Inception (or maybe they have, and I missed it). To me, the idea of establishing a defense against brain invaders is interesting, especially in light of new discoveries in neuroplasticity and the battle to maintain computer network security.

Fascinating stuff, but I’m pretty sure our psyches are less in danger of being harmed by outside forces than our own mental habits.

One of Nolan’s most original ideas is that the subconscious can be trained to act as a built-in police force during synaptic security breaches. The director seems to gravitate towards characters who exhibit tremendous martial/intellectual/transcendental discipline on the road to exceptionalism (Batman, The Prestige). This includes certain mental technologies.

Buddhism has for centuries been aware of the the mind’s plasticity. It teaches (among other things) that we can shape the function of our neural networks by observing our thoughts and establishing new patterns. In therapeutic psychology, this is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — a remarkably effective treatment for a host of mental afflictions. Borrowing from Buddhism, it prescribes mindfulness as a method for rooting out “bad code” and establishing a healthier psyche.

Remapping the mind requires a great deal of discipline, but it can be done. Brains are far less rigid than stone, and even stone can be shaped by water. In this view, our thoughts are similar to ripples on a swift-moving river. Like thoughts, these ripples spontaneously and constantly appear and disappear. By not fixating on the origin of the ripples, but rather accepting the simple fact of their existence, we can begin to see the river as a whole and even influence its flow.

Inception takes a more martial approach to mindfulness, but it does offer hints as to how we can keep our shit together in the midst of chaos. In the film, one of the characters experiences acute panic when he realizes the reality he thought was solid is in fact quite the opposite. (We experience similar feelings of disassociation when someone close to us dies, we lose our job, get divorced, etc.) The character is told to focus on his breath and remember his training. The particulars of instruction aren’t revealed, but I’m guessing it involves meditation and mindfulness.

It’s easy to dismiss all of this as pop-culture exotica. And that might be true of the mystical kung-phooey on display in The Matrix, but this is different. Keep in mind that neuroplasticity and mindfulness training are hardly the core of Inception, but since it takes place almost entirely in people’s heads, there’s no way of avoiding some of these concepts.

If you haven’t seen movie yet, I definitely recommend it. Less as an artistic achievement and more as an incitement to cognitive investigation. Popcorn and Milk Duds optional.

The Council On Spiritual Practices offers information on psychoactive sacramentals in their Enthogen Project.

While the New York Times reports on emerging studies with psychoactives.

This is much along the lines of Aldous Huxley‘s beautiful deathbed experience.

Troublesome Creek could be the name of your next band/novel/screenplay. Maybe this is where the term “blue blood” originated, though I don’t think they had a clan of Kentucky hillbillies in mind.

In the lives of modern American families, this is pop culture gone adorably wild. As Rebecca Mack aptly describes, this video demonstrates the “dangers of rigid gender roles.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb9eL3ejXmE

And if you thought it just couldn’t get any cuter, please observe this orangutan and hound, who are clearly soul mates. WARNING. This may be too cute to handle. Please beware before following the link.

But sometimes, you just need a friend. Again, this is bromance.

This article includes a photo of some roadies, speaking of bros. I may plagiarize parts for my resume.

Though this blend of talent and ambition with the irony of their theme will likely dominate more of my time. To quote Animal: “DRUMS!”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl82N69B7qw

Meet Carter Lefebvre, data processor. I put this fictional character together like puzzle, adding upwards of 25 elementary pieces where I found they fit. One paranormal investigation group even ran a “background and criminal history” check to make sure that I wasn’t a pedo-bear or other criminal. I was shocked to learn that Mr. Lefebvre passed with flying colors. Guard your children, folks.

My experiences have led me to one basic conclusion: the term “paranormal investigator” is a misnomer. Actually, it’s the misnomer of all misnomers. Nothing paranormal was ever “investigated,” nothing was ever “debunked,” and certainly nothing was ever proven to be supernatural. There were no fact-finding techniques used, no group ever probed background information relative to a purported haunting, and nobody came to any logic-defying conclusion that would result in a sound or compelling case study.

This stuff should be called “paranormal waiting-for-something-to-happen” rather than “paranormal investigating.” I don’t say this to belittle those who investigate; I just feel that the reasons that we do what we do have become irrevocably compromised due mostly to the recent rise of pop-culture paranormal phenomenon and its attendant fandom.

Certainly I’ve had some strange events occur while on hunts: in Lithonia, the sounds of movement from an unseen source; in Decatur, a strange and distant voice heard; in Elberton, a mysterious, milky white ball of light resembling a woman’s shoulders. And yes, in each of these cases we unsuccessfully tried to replicate the phenomenon.

So these occurrences must be paranormal, right? If we can’t with our own faculties recreate the event, it’s got to be a ghost, right? Unfortunately, the more I investigated, the less I believed so.

Paranormal investigators need to admit to what they are: lovers of the paranormal who crave experiences more than answers. We must accept the fact that if there ever was any legitimate, scientific evidence of a haunting — whether it be an EVP, photograph, video recording, or other data proving life after death through even a minuscule but verifiable scrap of substantiation — it would be one of the most earth-shattering breakthroughs in scientific study since the splitting of the atom. Definitely the most significant religious event since the birth of Jesus. It would change everyone‘s view of everything.

But it hasn’t happened yet, and it’s highly unlikely to. Therefore, paranormal investigation needs to stop referring to itself as a science and begin to rectify its purpose. Paranormal investigators are not scientists, we are documentarians of humanity’s lore and legend. We chase humankind’s prehensile tail, scouring locations across the planet for remnants of how we’ve become what we are. We search for symbols, archetypes and connections to our own past — the unifying pieces that cross all cultural boundaries regardless of distance and time.

Forgive me for concluding with a bit of nostalgia. The following is an account of one of the earliest events of my life, clouded as it is by subsequent revisions of memory and the hyperbole of passing years. Nonetheless, it remains an experience of my life like no other.

As a seven year-old, my friends and I would play in the woods behind Haircrafter’s Salon in South Burlington, VT — on the corner of Cottage Grove and Williston Road, to be specific. There, we would hold the most epic hide-and-go-seek games known to kid-dom. Jason, Garrett, Dylan and I, along with other kids from the neighborhood, would spend an entire day in the forest, only arriving home at sundown.

During one most distinguished game, I found myself secured in a fantastic hiding place: a turning point along the path, where I had a perfect sight lines of anyone who approached, with a thick thicket of branches and dead foliage hiding my face from all passersby. Completely obscured, I buried myself deep into the dried Vermont leaves and tested my ability to remain motionless, not crackling a single twig or leaf.

Down the path he emerged wearing a pear of jeans and a flannel shirt. The sun behind him blinded my first glimpse, but instantly I recognized him to be older than my friends and dressed differently — a stranger. This being Vermont in 1983-ish, I didn’t feel threatened; he was just a fellow cutting through the woods.

When he entered focus, head blocking the sun and revealing his face, I shivered in fright: it was featureless. Rather than eyes, nose and a mouth, what I saw was nothing more than the fabric of skin, like window drapes. Emptiness.

My eyes watered, my trembles rattling the leaves I knelt upon. The man continued walking down the path, ever closer my position. What I thought was the ill-focused flaw of distance that erased his features proved to be incorrect — his approach cleared any speculation — this man had not one facial feature, just a shroud of skin.

He stopped in front of me. By this point, I was nervously mumbling to myself and crying uncontrollably. From my lowly perch, the man towered over me. He scanned the area — as if that was possible without eyes — for a brief second. I held my breath. I employed every bit of self-control to still my shaking as the leaves below me rattled and crackled like a passing freight train.

His head bent down to mine, mimicking being face-to-face. Without his ability to do so, we became eye-to-eye.

With a strange “huff” sound, he turned and lumbered down the path with heavy footfalls that seemed to rumble the ground below me, disappearing into the thickness of the forest. I sprang from my hiding place and ran home, never telling a soul about it until later in my adulthood.

Do I believe that a faceless man was walking through South Burlington, VT sometime in the early ’80s? Of course not. With age I have come to the conclusion that it was either a dream or the subsequent enhancement of a semi-terrifying event from my childhood — perhaps a man with a facial deformity that I embellished with memory. Maybe it was the trauma of seeing the mouth-less girl in Twilight Zone: The Movie — a cinematic mainstay for my friends of the time. Who knows?

Still, it is an experience of my childhood. It is one of the million puzzle pieces of my life that when added together make up the person I have become — a curious-minded person, willing to accept the unacceptable, without the need for scientific evidence to consider those things which defy explanation.

The type of person who feels life should be experienced, not necessarily investigated.

This morning I awoke to a head full of thoughts — not an unfamiliar phenomenon, I must say. During coffee, something drew me to an online collection of interview snippets about/with Syd Barrett — the late psych-pop acid casualty and leader of the original Pink Floyd. Actually, I know exactly how I got there — I caught a random blog comment concerning Floyd’s onetime manager Peter Jenner, a fellow I happen to know (somewhat) personally and whom I like an awful lot. Summary: there was of fascinating stuff on this page, laid out in forensic detail. Check it out if you have the interest.

After that, I decided to vacuum the house, which for some reason always lubricates my synapses. The soundtrack to this chore was, of course, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. I started thinking about influences, aesthetics and all sorts of other things. I realized that most artists never fully transcend their influences, but the best of us steal flame from our forebears’ fire — Prometheus style — which in turn illuminates our own creative path. This is a natural tradition, as old as art itself, though it does have a tendency to muddy the business side of things from time to time.

Personally, I have begun to retreat from the au courant, the now, the hip, in order to focus more fully on my own craft. And that’s exactly what it is: a craft. Somewhere between a practical trade and extrasensory perception. Some equate it with spirituality, others magic, others don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. My point is this: there’s a time to soak up influences and check your vocabulary against the common tongue, and there’s a time to put aside distractions and simply go about your business. And that’s where I’m currently at.

On the aesthetic side, I’m comfortable in the knowledge that whatever art I produce will naturally be informed by my influences and previous experimentation. Perhaps I actually have learned some lessons — like, it might seem like a cool idea to put Beach Boys harmonies on a Swans-type cut, but it really doesn’t come out all that that well! Of course, I reserve the right to be contrarian. Meaning that, that even when popular taste matches my own inclinations I could — out of temperament or pique — reject an approach that might otherwise suit me. For example, I refuse to chase the current neo-shoegaze/indie-psych movement around hoping to catch a wink. Firstly, I’m too old for that, and the whippersnappers would have me terribly out of breath. Secondly, I think that a lot of today’s expression lacks clarity of vision. Where is your gestalt? What about your work screams out to be heard? So much of the new psych-gaze stuff sounds as shiftless and non-committal as the generation that produced it. Give me danger, give me drama, give me noise, give me melody, give me sensuality. Look, I’m as moon-addled as the next guy, with a profound love of being enveloped in puffy wafts of sound. But The Goddess requires a Consort, and he better be ready to fucking throw down.

Even approaching midlife, I’m game.

Back to influences (and Syd) for a second. It’s clear to me — and anyone with ears — that Robyn Hitchcock is hugely influenced by Barrett. But Robyn’s done the gentlemanly thing and taken part of Syd inside himself, consumed him, if you will. This is the noble tradition that I spoke of earlier. I swallowed Jimmy Page, for example. (And he tasted like velvet dragons!)

Who did you have for breakfast?

As I get older, it becomes more important for me to create. Not out of vanity or the sense that I’ve got to “leave something behind,” but rather because life is indeed short and I abhor waste. Talent should be refined, tested, refined, tested, refined, tested until you run out of breath. If you’re a creator, anyway. If you’re an accountant (and there’s nothing wrong with that), your path and purpose is different. As it should be.

The craft continues to inform, particularly as one gets bolder about embodying it in all parts of one’s life. I am no longer intimidated by the “marketplace.” What marketplace? I engage where appropriate. I consider my (admittedly limited) audience. I challenge myself to find new ways for my ideas to be formulated and disseminated. I trust my instincts, yet work hard at perfecting my ideas. And I hopefully get better.

Perhaps you take a similar approach. If so, I raise my glass of mid-morning Scotch.

The Process Church of the Final Judgment

It is my belief that there are points in history when societal structures — cultural mores, spiritual tenets, control apparatuses — go haywire, resulting in a funhouse reflection of human behavior. At times like these, distortions appear in the patterns of the mundane, creating a seasick feeling in all but those willing to indulge in the existential pandemonium. The ’60s and early ’70s were such times, and I dare say we’re on the cusp of a new freak-out. I mean, just look at the teabaggers, populist Christianites, elite fundamentalists and wrath-addled “patriots.” Something is fucking happening out there, and it ain’t flower-power.

As George W. Bush, disgraced saint of Manifest Destiny 2.0 once said, “bring ‘em on.” But I digress.

The Process Church was an offshoot of Scientology, formed by a pair of L. Ron Hubbard-worshiping lovers named Robert DeGrimston and Mary Anne MacLean. Like any sensible cult leader, Hubbard did not tolerate splinter groups that might siphon off his followers, so he declared DeGrimston and MacLean “suppressive persons.” By doing so, he inadvertently midwifed one of the most fascinating counter-culture cults of the era.

Occult historian Gary Lachman (who we’ve written about before) published a summary history of The Process, which is a good place to start learning about the movement and the cultural context that fueled its ascendancy.

The Process took the idea of hippie “love” to a creatively cosmological level. At heart, it’s not really all that different from the reconciliation of opposites described by Carl Jung and countless alchemists and magicians. But let’s skip the hocus-pocus for a minute and look at what Process theology actually represented. The Church believed in theurgical henosis, which is to say, they sought to syncretize the Three Great Gods of the Universe (four, if you count Christ, their emissary): Jehovah, Lucifer and Satan. By flower-power logic, loving everyone necessarily includes loving the Adversary. “Come Together,” dig?

Here’s the breakdown, cribbed from Wikipedia:

Jehovah, the wrathful God of vengeance and retribution, demands discipline, courage and ruthlessness, and a single-minded dedication to duty, purity and self-denial.

Lucifer, the Light Bearer, urges us to enjoy life to the full, to value success in human terms, to be gentle and kind and loving, and to live in peace and harmony with one another. Man’s apparent inability to value success without descending into greed, jealousy and an exaggerated sense of his own importance, has brought the God Lucifer into disrepute. He has become mistakenly identified with Satan.

Satan, the receiver of transcendent souls and corrupted bodies, instills in us two directly opposite qualities; at one end an urge to rise above all human and physical needs and appetites, to become all soul and no body, all spirit and no mind, and at the other end a desire to sink beneath all human codes of behavior, and to wallow in a morass of violence, lunacy and excessive physical indulgence. But it is the lower end of Satan’s nature that men fear, which is why Satan, by whatever name, is seen as the Adversary.

In the original 1960s literature of the church, Christ, Lucifer, Satan, and Jehovah were all arranged on a mandala, with Christ at the top opposite Satan on the bottom and Jehovah on the left opposite Lucifer on the right.

In between these Three Great Gods and man, is an entire hierarchy of Gods, beings and superbeings, angels and archangels, demons and archdemons, elementals and guides, and fallen angels and watchers.

The main doctrine of The Process is the unity of Christ and Satan, who exist as opposites. Jehovah and Lucifer exist as opposites and when Christ and Satan are united this will unite Jehovah and Lucifer.

The Process folks had a lovely eye for design and editorial, borne out by their groovy newsletter, which featured contributions from luminaries like Marianne Faithfull, George Clinton, Mick Jagger and everyone’s favorite boogeyman, Charles Manson. And, like any successful cult, they knew how to recruit. At its peak, The Process had chapters in a number of metropolitan areas, where members did all manner of “good works” while stealthily indoctrinating noobs.

After the Manson Family killings, the Church began to suffer from bad press. Later, an unfounded connection to “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz further damaged their reputation. DeGrimston, getting more and more into the Satanic side of the cult’s cosmology, was ousted. Mary Anne MacLean divorced him and started — along with her loyal followers — a more traditional Jesus sect called the Foundation Faith of the Millennium. At some point, MacLean realized that you can raise more money through social appeals, and her group eventually became the Best Friends Animal Society — a multi-million dollar nonprofit that even has a show on the National Geographic Channel. Perhaps this is a way to atone for the cult’s previous engagement in the gory sacrifice of dogs?

DeGrimston supposedly got a job with AT&T. I’m guessing he runs the company’s joint venture with the NSA.

Although the original Process Church archives were destroyed following the great schism, if you do a little digging on the interwebs, you’ll find some fascinating documents, like these crypto-Satanic missives by DeGrimston. And, if you’re ready for the cult motherlode, check out this PDF of more than 500 Process internal documents, uploaded by someone calling themselves “Process Friend.”

My renewed interest in The Process comes via a Contrarian supporter who tipped me off about a new book on the notorious Feral House imprint called Love Sex Fear Death: the Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment. I purchased it this morning, and am very much looking forward to reading it.

This Christmas, why not take a moment to consider the origins of the holiday you’re celebrating? You may be surprised at where you end up…

For those not privy to cornerstones of Western lit (or suffering from severe amnesia), the book tells the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge — a curmudgeon of a human who mocks the Christmas spirit, and is subsequently visited by four ghosts. The first, his long-time business partner and heartless mentor Jacob Marley, returns from the grave and tells Scrooge to change his ways — displaying his own earthly errors in the form of ghostly chains hanging from his arms and legs. Marley informs Scrooge that he will be visited by three ghosts: the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come, in an attempt to persuade the man to mend his manners. Each of these three spirits whisks Scrooge through time to witness his life from several perspectives and see the things to which he had been blind. In the end, Scrooge is reborn again as a lovable man, full of holiday spirit, and thanks the ghosts for showing him his folly.

It is a tale of Christian redemption (a recurring theme in Dickens’ works) — where a man can transcend his uncharitable and self-serving attitudes to become a more sympathetic member of society, harnessing his own largess to a greater purpose. But yet there is more to this tale. Each ghost represents a specific rhetorical persuasion device — Ethos, Pathos, Logos, and Fear — twisting and pulling Scrooge’s increasingly fragile psyche, driving him to a climax of redemption. And Scrooge’s journey depicts a higher level of truth-seeking that can only be attained through loosing one’s grip on the “rational” world.

Dickens’ uses the supernatural to bring his protagonist out of darkness and into light; his rite of passage is dependent on the concept that there are things in this world that are beyond his control — beyond his understandings. Scrooge initially passes off his encounter with his old partner as nothing more than undigested plum pudding, but in the end he begs the spirit to leave him be and alter the final reality presented to him: his own gravestone.

A Christmas Carol is an ode to the Romanticist movement of the 19th Century — the Age of Reason, when scientific discovery was ascendant. To be expected, artists and writers fought back with stories of the strange, macabre, unknown and the supernatural. Such creators believed that the Enlightenment use of logic remained integral to human advancement, but logic and reason was limited —  it was only through imagination, spontaneity and the acceptance of the unexplainable that certain “hidden truths” could be ascertained.

Scrooge’s story is immortal; it transcends the Romantic period and has become a part of the Christmas tradition. This story of yuletide redemption has been told and retold through multiple devices, but in each the Romantic truths remain strong: it is the world of the supernatural that seeds our love of the Christmas season, and allows us to suspend our beliefs for a brief moment. Scrooge finds his place in the natural world by listening to the supernatural one.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you. Be merry and joyful.  See you in 2010.