AstroGnosis: The Terrible Burden of Truth

I'm finishing up some work here at Secret Sun Central, but in the meantime it's summer and that means it's time for The Outer Limits. Unfortunately You Tube pulled their TNOL collection so you'll have to hit Hulu if you're in the US or check your local streaming service if you're outside the US.

This is a pure dose of AstroGnosis, and the paranoid brand thereof. Joey Pants (of Matrix fame) plays a Howard Stern clone who witnesses an alien walk-in exit a host and finds himself involved in a deeper conspiracy. It's the kind of thing The X-Files would have handled much better, but you take what you can get.

But at the same time it goes for a deeper shade of weird when dealing with these walk-ins and how they communicate and travel (harking back to the very first Outer Limits episode, which also dealt with radio), whereas Chris Carter's aliens were always just stand-ins for the dark forces of the Military Industrial Complex. There's also a deeper metaphor at work here...

What the text doesn't say outright is that even if he doesn't consciously acknowledge it, Joey Pants' character is really asking for a dose of Instant Gnosis. And he gets it. He spends his time poking at the hornets' nest and then tries to put the swarm back in the hive when it comes gunning for him.

I often wonder if so-called 'debunkers' are doing the same thing right now-- whacking at Pleiadian pinatas in hopes that one day they'll find a real alien nest in disguise.

Chris Carter certainly thought so- the Dr. Barnes character of 'Sixth Extinction' fame was probably inspired by the shoddy reception he received at a CSICOP meeting back in the 90s. Carter's an insightful guy-- he would quickly realize what the debunkers were really after.

Think about it: why would they bother spending all their time looking at UFO videos if they weren't secretly hoping that one day they'll find one that will finally break through the phony cynicism and disenchantment?

Off the top of my head I can think of dozens of topics I don't believe in or think are valid. Do I spend all my time writing about them? No. Why?

Because I don't believe in them and I don't think they're valid. Doing so would be a total waste of my time. So what's their story?



'Alien Radio' also deals with a similar theme explored in X-Files episodes like 'Conduit' and its sequels 'Tempus Fugit' and 'Max'- and that's the terrible burden of truth. We always tell ourselves we want to know the "truth," to know all the secrets and mysteries that lie beneath the facade of everyday life.

Do we really?

Forget about aliens and science fiction and the rest for a minute-- how much do you want to know? How deep do you want to dig? I'm not trying to discourage anyone in their personal quests, I'm simply trying to tell you that my own experience has taught me that the truth hasn't always been something I wanted to hear. And it can never be unlearned, either.

The truth doesn't always set you free. Sometimes it saddles you with a burden you can never escape. So choose very carefully where you decide to start digging and what dragons you choose to slay. Prepare to be taken places you never wanted to go. Gnosis isn't always a flower-- sometimes it's a sword. Maybe more often than not.

And sometimes the truth is a lie. Most often when it's spelled with a capital T.



UPDATE: Well, I had forgotten The Outer Limits did an episode directly addressing the issues raised in this post. This should be available for region-free viewing .

Funnybook Prophecy: Spectacle and Control

Madonna should really lay off the steroids.

I wrote recently in "Fool Me Twice" that I'm increasingly uncomfortable in covering some of the spectacle being broadcast out there, just as it was during Bread and Circuses era of the Roman Empire. Why? Because it gets to the point where you start to feel like an accomplice. That's not a feeling I enjoy.

That era was recreated during the Super Bowl halftime show, as Madonna and a cast of hundreds revisited the Egyptomania of Classical Rome, as well as the ancient ritual of having subservient peoples dance suggestively for their masters. Last night, the British Empire looked back on its glory days during the Olympics ceremony, which was also sprinkled with the increasingly ubiquitous quasi-Masonic symbolism that even the dumbest YouTard can spot a mile away these days.

I haven't been quite been able to put it into words yet, but I almost wonder if we're not seeing a new quasi-Masonic civic religion being rolled out, with stunning parallels to the roll out of Constantine's church in the early Fourth Century. It sounds absolutely crazy, but history is full of crazy.

And here's some crazy- Constantine made his move roughly 300 years after the birth of Christ, even though Christianity was based on religious ideas that had been circulating for much longer. Freemasonry was officially born about 300 years ago, even though it was based on esoteric ideas that had been around for much longer.

Constantine too faced a empire in crisis and sought to consolidate it with a one-world religion his predecessors saw as a breeding ground for conspiracy, witchcraft and sedition. But it became alluring to an oppressed people with its promises of eternal life, just as "Illuminism" is so utterly fascinating to so many people with its promises of a life of privilege, pleasure and hidden knowledge.

Even the people who profess to oppose it. Hell, especially the people who profess to oppose it. The so-called exposés are just part of the sales pitch; viral marketing at its finest. And what's a soul, really, in these days of poverty and economic collapse?

But there's a simple explanation for why I don't blog much on that stuff anymore: I'm sick of it. I'm sick of looking at those symbols, I'm sick of the stories and I'm sick of the game. I've been studying this stuff since before a lot of you were even born. It gets old.

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers 10

But I also know my history too well. Sure, we're talking about an extreme possibility. But I've seen a lot of extreme possibilities become dreary, everyday realities. And cartoonists trade in extreme realities-- oh dear, I meant to write "extreme possibilities." Check out this story from 1984 and look at the spectacle and how that spectacle is the mask behind which the iron face of control hides.

Sure, a lot of this kind of thinking was in the air back then too. But something about this story seems especially prescient to me. How about you?

UPDATE: I should explain what I mean by "civic religion," since it's not exactly the kind of religion that Constantine's church evolved into, concerned with personal salvation and the rest. A civic religion is largely ceremonial and largely involved with rituals of state, like oh, the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

It's about unifying disparate peoples under a commonly understood yet not particularly tightly-held system of symbols, rituals, codewords, oaths (the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance) and public works and monuments. I don't know if the Romans invented it, but they perfected it.

This is why I pointed out that Madonna's ritual was straight out of the Temples of Jupiter and Juno- not the "mystery schools" (sic) as some gross historical illiterates would have you believe. America once had a civic religion based on the various national anthems and the mythology of the Founding Fathers, but that is being phased out to make ready for a new model.

So why do so many huge transnational corporations- McDonalds, Visa, TimeWarner, Microsoft, GM, etc etc etc- stuff so much money into the pockets of Vigilant Citizen? I don't know. But maybe it's because that site is doing more to initiate the uneducated into the rites and rituals of the new civic religion than any lodge could ever dream of doing.

UPDATE: How do old religions die? Like this:

Ronald William Brown of Largo, Florida, the 57-year-old proprietor of “Puppets Plus,” has been charged with the possession of child pornography and of conspiring with another man to kidnap and then eat a child.

The Christian Television Network kids program Joy Junction regularly featured Brown and his ventriloquist dummy “Marty,” who would warn about things like… pornography.

Brown, an active member of the Gulf Coast Church in Largo, and an accomplice, Michael Arnett, were planning to abduct a specific child who was a member of the church and who took part in Brown’s “Puppet Ministry Kidz Zone” youth ministry program.

Homeland Security agents who searched Brown’s home and tool shed yesterday discovered images of bound and gagged kids, photographs of dead children and a flier for a missing child.

According to a Tampa Bay Examiner blogger:

Brown and Arnett chatted about murdering children as young as two. In one chat Arnett described to Brown what it is like to drown a little girl and what different body parts taste like if roasted or fried in a pan.

Brown revealed to Arnett in another chat regarding the little boy at Gulf Coast Church that he would enjoy strangling the child to death.

Not even the most powerful organization can withstand too many stories like this. You'll never see this on Christian propaganda sites like Alex Jones or Vigilant Citizen or any of the other mouthpieces for the so-called "right wing" of the status quo like WND or Drudge, but stories like this can't be quashed in the age of email and Facebook.

Please Stand By

The Secret Sun's been on summer hours while I try to keep a roof over my head. I've been working morning, noon and night but soaking in all kinds of information while I do so, thanks to the modern miracles of podcasts and YouTube.

Summer also seems to be the time of year when I cast my neural net as far as it can go, and this year's no exception.

I've been mulling over a big pile of contradictions, looking for the common denominators. I've been taking UFOs more seriously at a time when growing numbers of people are not, precisely because I've dispensed with the extraterrestrial hypothesis entirely (so to speak, you always want to keep that trapdoor open). As someone a lot smarter than me once said: "We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us."

It's exactly that symbiotic relationship that seems to me to be the common denominator. And then there is also the question of light- starlight, particularly- and why that was such a all-consuming fixation to so many ancient peoples. How this might tie into the endlessly deceptive goings-on at CERN and Fermi has been bouncing around my brain as well.

When I can, I've been reading thought criminals like Vallee, Keel, Hansen, and now Andrew Collins' new book. It's gotten me to go back and look at UFO videos I once dismissed out of hand with new eyes. Paradigm shifts tend to give you those.

This all really started-- even before I wrote Our Gods Wear Spandex-- as a conundrum; what did all of these ancient secret societies really believe? It certainly got lost somewhere down the line (though recent advances in physics may well have put their descendants back on the scent) but somehow it was connected to the OOPARTS and the megaliths (geology itself seems to be of central importance in all of this) and the rest of it.

hint, hint, hint

I won't give too much away but the work done with the shafts and the stellar alignments in the Great Pyramid was the first and final key to this mystery, I just didn't realize it until I had the other pieces of the puzzle in hand.

I could write some insubstantial posts to keep the counts up but I hope most of you are least looking at the Facebook group. I've been using it as a microblog, dropping in links and minirants during my breaks. As to the next post here- please stand by. I hope to have it up this week, but it's still a work in progress. I want to make sure it crushes skulls before it goes up.

Wizards, Workings and Walk-Ins: On the Lam

Click here for Part One and Part Two

Most UFO researchers point to the Barney and Betty Hill event in September of 1961 as the start of the modern "alien abduction" era, the same way that occult researchers point to Aleister Crowley's 1918 Amalantrah Working as the first appearance of a classic (or near-classic) Grey-type in the modern era.

But what if I told you that the two events are connected in a direct and tangible way, as well as through some stunning semiotics? And what if I told you that Jack Kirby was picking up on all of this on whatever alien frequency he spent his life tuned into?

First, let's cover the basic facts....

From Lee Spiegel's Huffpost column we read "Betty And Barney Hill UFO Abduction Story Commemorated On Official N.H. Highway Plaque":

Late at night on Sept. 19, 1961, they were driving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, returning from a Canadian vacation to their home in Portsmouth when they spotted an object in the sky with lights, which at first seemed like an airplane. But when the "airplane" began to rapidly descend in their direction, they quickly continued driving south along Route 3.

Just south of the Indian Head resort, the Hills stopped in the middle of the road and said the silent, cigar-shaped craft hovered above their car. Through binoculars, Barney claimed to see several "strangely not human" figures at the object's windows. Fearing they were about to be captured, Barney quickly drove away.

The next thing the Hills remembered was that they were 35 miles farther along on their journey and approximately two hours had passed which they couldn't account for.

This amnesia continued to bother them, leading to physical and mental disorders until finally, three years after the experience, time-regression hypnosis was used to extract the lost information. Under separate hypnotic sessions, the Hills produced details of a reported kidnapping by aliens on board a spacecraft.

Eventually, a well-known psychiatrist and neurologist, Dr. Benjamin Simon, used a technique called regression hypnosis to help unlock the Hills' forgotten memories. Through many separate hypnotic sessions, the Hills recounted a tale of being abducted by alien beings into the UFO and given physical examinations before being returned to their car with their memories erased.

A plague concerning the event at the Indian Head Resort reads as follows:

On September 19, 1961, while driving on US Rt 3 to their home in Portsmouth, NH, the Hills observed a large, silent, hovering disk-shaped object. The Indian Head resort is the last property they remembered prior to becoming aware that they were 35 miles south of Lincoln and of a two-hour period of "missing time." ... Their claim generated much interest in the scientific community as it was supported by collaborating evidence. The Hills' experience has become a vital part in the public's consciousness regarding the UFO phenomenon.

In another Spiegel article, the appearance of the Hills' captors was described:

"As far as appearance, we described them as four-and-a-half to five feet tall, humanoid-like, very large eyes that slanted upward, very flat nose, just a thin slit for a mouth, a grayish complexion, and that they were all dressed alike. I don't think I was really prepared for their appearance -- I was terrified," Betty recalled.

Based on the descriptions from the hypnotic sessions and a sketch provided by Barney an artist named David Baker created a sketch and explained his understanding of the creatures and noted large, slanted eyes, oversized heads, weak, pointed chins, immobility of facial expressions, lack of hair and ears and an inability to distinguish male from female.


In other words, the classic Grey prototype, which has been reported for several thousand years. Echoes of the Greys have appeared in art and pop culture over the past hundred years or so, but they've been largely absent since ancient times. It was with the Betty and Barney Hill episode that the archetype burst back into the collective consciousness in a major way.

Of course, they did so with Aleister Crowley's Lam contact in a minor way 43 years earlier. And as we'll see in future installments Jack Kirby seemed rather obsessed with the archetype in the 50s as did Outer Limits mask maker Wah Chang in the early 60s.

Skeptics seized on the Grey archetypes on that landmark show to discredit Barney Hill's testimony, only because they were too lazy and smug to research how far back in history that Greys have been reported and depicted in art. They're not quite so smug now.

Here were see Baker's depiction of the Hills' captors and Crowley's sketch of Lam. Neither are as evolved as the Greys we see on the cover of Communion, for instance, but the basic architecture is the same. It's also roughly the same as the captive-taking Talosians from "The Cage" and any number of aliens in the more credible sci-fi of the 50s and 60s.

So we know the Hills' basic story- what about Crowley's? From Ian Blake's story on the Amalantrah Working from the late, lamented Excluded Middle:

At the outbreak of WWI, Crowley set sail from his native England aboard the Lusitania, bound for the USA....he returned to New York and moved into furnished rooms on Central Park West. Roddie Minor, a married woman living apart from her husband, joined him there circa September/ October 1917 and together they set about exploring the wilder shores of magica sexualis.
Under the influence of hashish and opium, (Minor) described to Crowley a series of archetypal visions involving (among others) a king, a small boy and a wizard who introduced himself as "Amalantrah"--who delivered exhortations to "find the egg."...the details are unclear, but it seems that some stage during the proceedings he underwent a form of contactee experience involving a large-headed entity now known to occultists as Lam.

The egg has since been interpreted by some observers as a UFO, which makes sense given the fact that Lam looks like a Grey. Though this working has become legendary in recent years, I can't find any evidence that any record of it was widely published until Kenneth Grant's The Magical Revival in 1972, and I don't believe the portrait of Lam was republished until several years after that.
In other words, there's not much chance that Crowley's drawing had much of an effect on the culture at large, and certainly no evidence the Hills ever saw it.
Grant then devised his own Lam liturgy called The Lam Statement, which seemed for all intents and purposes to be a contactee ritual in the tradition of the Mithraic Liturgy. Note also the banishing ritual, an occult tradition in which the entities summoned are believed to be sent back to their native realms:

The Mode of Entering the Egg may proceed as follows. Each votary is encouraged to experiment and evolve his own method from the basic procedure:
1) Sit in silence before the portrait.
2) Invoke mentally my silent repetition the Name.
3) If response is felt to be positive...enter the Egg and merge with That which is within, and look out through the entity's eyes on what appears now to the votary an alien world.
4) Seal the Egg, i.e., close the eyes of Lam and await developments.

Grant also warned his followers to be patient, which might makes sense given the 43 years between the first Lam sighting the Hill case:

It may take years to accumulate significant evidence of contact with Lam, and - if Lam is the Gateway - with Those who lie Beyond. It may be that communion with the dikpala lies through congress with a Priestess chosen by Lam, or with one who possesses certain characteristics peculiar to this office, in which case new procedures will have to be devised.

OK, you might be saying-- your typical Thelemite occultism. Nothing new there. What does it have to do with Betty and Barney Hill?

Left: Kirby's Dr. Droom Right: The Great Beast 666

Well, two summers before he undertook the Amalantrah Working, Aleister Crowley was living-- and performing rituals and encountering weird phenomena-- in New Hampshire:

In 1916, while living near Bristol, New Hampshire, Crowley promoted himself to the rank of Magus through a ceremony of his own devising. According to Richard Cavendish, in History of Magic and The Powers of Evil in Western Religion, Magic, and Folk Belief (both currently out of print), this involved baptizing a toad as Jesus of Nazareth, then crucifying it.

Though OTO purists protest Cavendish's claims as to Crowley's ritual activities, one thing is for certain; Crowley wrote a letter to The New York Times (of all places) complaining of a strange visitation in the form of ball lightning:

To the Editor of The New York Times:

I do not know whether globular lightning is a sufficiently
rare phenomenon in this country to merit remark. Yesterday a
globe of fire with an apparent diameter of about a foot burst on
the floor of the middle room of a cottage here and within a few
inches of my right foot. Curiously enough, no damage of any
kind was done.

ALEISTER CROWLEY.
New Bristol, N.H.,
July 13, 1916

Crowley wasn't there alone; he was the guest of a famous astrologer. One who traced her lineage back to two presidents born in my old neck of the woods:

Between 1913 and 1918, Evangeline Adams owned the Jonathan K. Pike House, which was built around 1803 as a parsonage for the village church next door. This is the cottage where Crowley stayed during the summer of 1916. Although Crowley refers to the dwelling as “a cottage on the shores of Lake Pasquaney in New Hampshire” (Confessions, p. 806), it really isn’t on the shore. Indeed, Crowley clarifies this fact a few pages later in his Confessions when he writes that the distance between the cottage and “the water's edge…was barely a hundred and fifty yards in all” (p. 812).

Adams was an occultist whose fame overshadowed that of Crowley's, in America, at least:

Related to two United States presidents, Evangeline Adams capitalised on an upscale image to serve such clients as J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab, Tallulah Bankhead and Joseph Campbell.

In 1914, Adams was tried for fortune telling in New York, but was acquitted of all wrong-doing. (Adams) utilised the cycle of Uranus in the US chart and said "the signs point to a war .... for religious, racial and political reasons, in 1942, 1943 and 1944". (She) also warned of impending financial difficulties: "In 1928 and 1929... it behooves everyone to be extremely cautious in investment and money matters, and be prepared for this threatening configuration of planets".

Adams worked on a book with Aleister Crowley in the teens; gossip has it that they were also personally involved. After they separated, however, Crowley published an attack of Evangeline's astrological skills and business methods, calling her "a grey-haired old woman of exceedingly shrewd expression".

While summering with Adams, Crowley wrote an occult detective story called "The Pasquaney Puzzle" with a subtle abduction subplot.

And as you can see from the map, Crowley was less than an hour's drive from where the Hills reported to have been abducted by beings almost identical to the creatures Crowley would claim contact with in New York in just over a year and a half.

Even more remarkable is the fact that the highway that links Crowley's stomping grounds with the Hills' abduction spot is Interstate 93: 93 being the holiest of holies in Thelemite gematria:

The number 93 is of great significance in Thelema, a religious philosophy founded by English author and occultist Aleister Crowley in 1904 with the writing of The Book of the Law (also known as Liber AL vel Legis)

The central philosophy of Thelema is in two phrases from Liber AL: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" and "Love is the law, love under will." The two primary terms in these statements are "Will" and "Love", respectively. In the Greek language, they are Thelema (Will) and Agape (Love). Using the Greek technique of isopsephy, which applies a numerical value to each letter, the letters of both of these words when added together equal 93.

Boy, the Collins Elite would love all of this, eh?

It gets better- the accounts have it that the Hills claimed

The next thing the Hills recalled was being frightened by the unusual flying object, and the occupants inside of it. Barney scurried back to the car where Betty was waiting. They jumped into the car, and raced down the highway. Looking for the object, they found that it was now gone. As they drove on, they began to hear a beeping sound... once, then again. Although they had been driving only a couple of minutes, they were 35 miles down the road!

35 miles down the road would have ensured that the Hills would have woken up in the very same town in which Crowley was actually living- it was Hebron, not Bristol.

Adams’s cottage was located in the village of Hebron, NH, ten miles north of Bristol. According to Musgrove, “Hebron village is situated very pleasantly on a plain near the northwest shore of the lake. It contains a church, town hall, schoolhouse, a store, and several dwellings”




Of course, Interstate 93 was Route 3 back when the Hills were driving it, and who knows what when Crowley was there. But it gets better-- the next town over from Bristol? Hill.

Note also that the exit which the the Hills would have taken off of Route Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law is Exit 33, just to add the cherry on top.

If Crowley had intended this as a working, he couldn't have possibly arranged it more brilliantly. Why? Well, shortly before decamping to Bristol/Hebron he took over the Ordo Templi Orientis, the occult order whose highest degree is the 11th. Hill, NH is bordered on the south by Route 11.

But Crowley didn't seem to have intended this as a working, otherwise we'd never hear the end of it. And the Amalantrah Working itself never seemed to rate on his personal best list. It's only since the Hill abduction drama and the rise of alien abductions that the Working became an internet meme.

Kirby's Black Magic comics and Crowley's Moonchild share a shot in 

Kenneth Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother

But the links here are tantalizing: even though I'd argue that Crowley's role in the UFO era has been greatly overblown (it was well underway before the Amalantrah Working and all sorts of people were claiming contact), the connections between Lam and the Hills' captors are undeniable.

The fact that Crowley was literally right down the road from the later Hill drama not long before his alleged contact certainly adds new pieces to the puzzle, if nothing else.

But I'll see your Great Beast and raise you a King...

Amazing Adventures #4 is cover-dated September 1961, the same month that the Hills claimed to have experienced their abduction.

This magazine wasn't actually released in September- comics are dated three months in advance for some crazy reason. Jack Kirby actually published not one but friggin' two stories dealing with alien abductions in September (cover-dated Dec. 1961), but for our purposes, let's deal with this issue.

Because-- believe it or not-- it's the hidden glue between Crowley and the Hills.

In "What Lurks Within?," our bald mystic friend Aleister Crowley Doctor Droom (who we met in the first installment of this series) is called to a rural community because a UFO has landed in the middle of a field. The colorist seems to have thought the spaceship looked like a jack o'lantern, but it's not totally unlike an egg-shape either, is it?

And then something rather remarkable happens: rather than cast spells or shoot rayguns at the aliens, Doctor Droom goes into a mystical trance and communicates with the aliens through telepathic means. Yes, just like Crowley and the Amalantrah Working.

Cover-dated the same month as the Hill abduction.

And here we see Droom's own kind of banishing ritual, complete with knocks provided from a derrick, or on loan from the Babalon Working, depending on your point of view. And damn, if that UFO still doesn't not look like an egg, an egg with teeth.

And now we're back where we started- with the Doctors. I'm starting to wonder if a certain British cousin wasn't in fact inspired by all of these American magi, which given the timeline might not be as far a stretch as it seems. As given recent episodes of Doctor Who, I get the very strong feeling the writers of that series most definitely read this blog. Well, I'll try to give them some new ideas to work from in the next installment...

TO BE CONTINUED

From Sidon to Cydonia: David Flynn on Mars

Once upon a time, "occult" didn't mean sorcery or black magic, it referred to a corpus of ancient hidden knowledge whose meaning had been lost to the sands of time. It embodied alchemy, astrology, gematria, numerology and other symbolic sciences.

Rome's one world religion suppressed this knowledge after a bloody series of purges, massacres and book burnings in late antiquity and passed edicts forbidding its study, which lent it the forbidden mystique it still enjoys today.

Today, "occult" is a misnomer. There's no such thing. There is no body of hidden knowledge mouldering away in some basement. What there is is a race of amnesiacs, of bloated narcissists mindlessly thumbing away at their touchscreens. What's hidden is the ability to understand anything but the basest impulses, which is why the work of a David Flynn is needed more than ever today.

I began following David Flynn's work so many years ago I can't remember exactly when anymore. I didn't always agree with his interpretations, but I was always dazzled by his intellect.

In fact, it was Flynn who first got me started doing this kind of work in public (I spent years doing it privately and through email) when I got so frustrated by waiting for him to update his Having Mulder's Baby website that I decided to do it for him. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Flynn was taken from us at the beginning of the year that informed so much of his work. That's life in this Archonic Hell, but in the meantime I hope you'll enjoy this vintage vid, Flynn's first public appearance. It's a tour de force, and I'm sure you'll be struck by his modesty, scholarship and honesty. This stuff troubled him- it challenged his Evangelical worldview and he wasn't afraid to admit that.

The man is gone too soon but the work remains. Dig into this one of a kind body of work-- it will give your own study and research a boost, believe me.