The far side of the moon is heavily pockmarked with craters, looking much different from the side we see.
It’s a fallacy to think there’s a dark side to the moon because the sun shines equally on all sides. It’s just that one side is angled away from us, so over time we can observe about 60% of the orb. But the part we don’t see is not any darker than the rest.
The actual color of the moon is grey, but the newest pockets on the surface have a darker color. In fact, most of the dark part faces us, leaving me to wonder if the earth’s gravity plays a role on moon evolution.
It’s not orthodox science or accepted into the current accepted paradigm, but I believe planets expand, the same as the entire universe is doing.
Expansion also makes a better explanation for the evolution of our planet versus the current hypothesis, which states that continents float around willynilly, crashing and bashing into each other. The oldest land on earth is on top of the continental crust, while the newest land is forming under the ocean floor, which is where the expansion is taking place.
But just as in the moon, Earth’s expansion does not seem to be happening in a symmetrical fashion, and it seems to push harder to the north than to the south, and I say this simply based on where the biggest mountains have formed and where the strongest subduction occurs.
I have to give credit to Neal Adams for cluing me into this theory. The other big revelation that came from this information was that oil is likely abiotic, meaning its a bye-product of subduction and may involve rock and minerals as much or more than organic matter. When they launched the Peak Oil scare seven years ago (which is how they drove the price of oil over $100 a barrel for years), I never fell for the scam and sensed the industry was just milking the last stages of toxic fuel before renewable energy took over. It can’t happen fast enough. And please don’t buy into gas cars because the price of oil is falling. It will continue to fall. But dismantling the oil and chemical industries (and replacing them with non-toxic alternatives) is the biggest challenge we face.
On a final note, while the moon does influence ocean tides, proximity is everything when it comes to gravity. Standing on your head will have far more influence on your bodily fluids than anything the moon could ever do.
Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, two Columbia University film students, learned about Steven Avery from the New York Times and decided he’d make an interesting documentary. Those who watched the Paradise Lost series will experience a sense of deja vu, for this is another murder trial in which the real murderer likely appears as a witness against a designated patsy. Meanwhile, the wheels of justice remain on a narrow track that allows the culprit to walk free.
One thing Stephen Gaskin taught me about enlightenment: it doesn’t require a high IQ. The learning disabled can attain serenity as easily as the geniuses among us. Steven Avery is a real life Forest Gump and his sense of dignity far exceeds that of the villains and stooges conspiring against him.
Mostly, however, the documentary series shows how police, the justice system and media circle wagons to guard against exposure of corruption in the system. The police have become laws unto themselves and woe betide any individual who dare question their ability to game our legal system to insure convictions. Evidence presented at this trial was more than sufficient to exonerate Steven. The key pieces of evidence in his favor are two recorded phone calls between him and his girlfriend while the actual murder was taking place, and the fact the DNA on the latch key was obviously planted, likely from a toothbrush. Until Zellner came around, Avery never had a truly competent attorney.
Since Steven was suing the local police department, they never should have had access to the alleged crime scene. All evidence is tainted because the local police took charge of the investigation and were the ones who discovered the suspicious evidence days after the property had already been searched multiple times by more appropriate authorities.
The real crime scene should have been uncovered when the cadaver dogs led the handlers into the quarry pit, where rib and vertebra remains were eventually located. Only the larger fragments had been moved to Avery’s burn pit. Avery’s blood in the vehicle must have been planted simply because his fingerprints were not found inside the vehicle.
I don’t think America can sleep soundly until justice is served and it’s time for a national commission addressing police violence and corruption as well. Communities should not be living in fear of their police, yet many are.
The biggest lesson learned from Paradise Lost is often the most obvious suspect turns out not to be the killer, so I’m wary of jumping to quick conclusions, but a new suspect emerged as the front runner after the second series was aired. We don’t know exactly where Teresa was shot 11 times, but she was never loaded into the back of her vehicle. Zellner shows how the blood marks on the inside of the rear hatch are much more likely the result of splatter flying off an ax head used to chop up the corpse. That SUV was reported to an officer, who seems to have had it driven back to the Avery junkyard, while most of the charred bones moved to Steven’s fire-pit.
There are two crimes here, the murder and the frame-up. In cases of murder, the primary suspects initially investigated are typically people close to the victim. But in this case, only Avery was investigated, while Teresa’s ex-boyfriend and any possible other stalkers ignored.
Ryan Hillegas quickly became my primary suspect, an opinion formed while watching him in the role of search leader.
He now works as an out-patient therapist at a Lutheran hospital.
Since Hillegas admitted accessing Teresa’s cell phone after her disappearance by guessing her password, he’s the most likely person to have erased any final messages, and we know at least one was erased.
Zellner also implicates him in helping someone move the vehicle onto Avery’s lot, where it crashed into another vehicle, damaging one headlight.
Another suspect from the first series was Scott Tadych, who has had a long series of encounters with the court system.
Scott & Bobby.
Tadych also has a history of violence, and a previous lawyer representing him was Mark Rohrer, Manitowoc County DA (and now a judge). Rohrer’s firm, Roher and Fox, included Jerome Fox, who became the presiding judge in Brendan’s trials, the authority who signed off on two blatantly coerced confessions.
Thus we have a cluster of self-interest circling Tadych, who became a key witness in the rush to judgment against Avery. And thanks to series two, it seems possible Tadych may have had an accomplice in Bobby Dassey, who apparently changed his testimony of what happened that day and joined his step-father Tadych in becoming a key witness against Avery.
The police who tweaked the evidence to insure a conviction could also have been the murderers, however, simply because the insurance company refused to cover the county based on a loophole, which left the police department and individual officers liable for millions. So not only were some officers in jeopardy of losing their careers, but all their assets as well. They certainly had the ability to put Steven under constant surveillance while searching for any possible solutions to their legal dilemma.
Len Kachinsky comes off as a completely corrupt toady of the Republican Party who’d just lost an election when he was inserted into the case as a public defender. He was later rewarded with a judgeship, although he’s recently contracted cancer.
His sadly comical machinations resemble the nervous William H. Macy in Fargo as he led his client down a garden path to making a false confession. How many public defenders like him have been steered into politically sensitive cases? Suffice to say the strategy is probably not that unusual. You simply never know who that pro bono attorney is working for if you aren’t paying for him yourself. James Lenk, who appears to have retired since the trial, remains the most suspicious person in planting evidence. Lenk and fellow officer Andrew Colborn had just recently been deposed for Steven’s lawsuit, and during their deposition some valuable evidence emerged pointing toward a conspiracy involving their boss Sheriff Tom Kocourek to keep Steven Avery in jail after it should have become clear another party had confessed to the crime. After Steven was exonerated, Colborn wrote a “cover-your-ass” memo concerning a phone call he’d received six years earlier, which was six years too late to save Steven. On November 3, 2005, the day Teresa was reported missing to police, Colborn placed a request to his dispatcher to run license plate SWH582. Minutes before, he’d been informed about the location of the vehicle but filed no report. This is crucial info uncovered by Zellner.
One of jurors who was recused during the trial remains haunted by the outcome. The original vote taken was 7 to acquit and only 3 to convict. It appears the police may have had some strong allies on that jury who convinced the others to render a split verdict on the charges, convicting Steven of a murder he obviously never committed.
In the beginning all knowledge was occult, meaning “kept secret,” including mathematics, music, medicine, chemistry, astronomy, metallurgy and philosophy. Eventually, however, the sciences and the study of telepathy parted ways, the former being accepted into the national academies while the later confined to forbidden secret societies.
Priests and clergy have always made some of the best spooks, and certainly the Jesuits are famous for founding universities and recruiting secret agents within their ranks. But when the Age of Enlightenment began to threaten the European oligarchies, there suddenly was an explosive growth in occultism. To quickly advance to the front lines, one merely had to claim some secret wisdom or magic power and arrange a fake demonstration, a mission easily accomplished, which is why so many spooks transformed into fake magicians during this period in history.
While there were many serious students of alchemy, astrology and the use of symbols and ritual to communicate with the unconscious mind, there were more fakers looking for an easy buck, or playing roles as spooks, than authentic mediums. There simply was no more influential position for a spook to play than as official royal fortune teller.
The Most Holy Trinosophia was an illustrated Finnegan’s-Wake-like guide to Egyptian magic containing tarot-like paintings with cryptic captions written in a variety of languages and esoteric codes. The 97-page book had the ability to supply multiple meanings since the imagination was forced to fill in blanks, the same magic trick employed by songwriters seeking universality. Many of its codes have yet to be cracked, probably because the author intended it that way. Manley P. Hall found two triangular copies, now owned by the Getty Museum, while the original resides in a French museum.
Cagliostro
Alessandro Cagliostro was the creator of the book, as well as the founder of a new branch of Masonry known as The Egyptian Rite, notable for its acceptance of Jews and women. Born in the Jewish quarter of Palermo, Sicily, as Giuseppe Balsamo, Cagliostro convinced a local goldsmith to loan him 70 pieces of silver and then departed Sicily to seek his fortune. He’d lured the goldsmith into a treasure hunting scheme, claiming he could locate a treasure while shielding against its evil curse.
In 1768, Cagliostro became secretary to Cardinal Orsini, and the following year Pope Clement XIII ordered a consistory to examine widespread demands requesting the suppression of the Society of Jesus. Many monarchs felt the Jesuits were a dangerous conspiracy of power as their influence had grown immensely since the order’s founding in 1534. The order had been recently expelled from France, Portugal, Naples and Sicily. This important consistory was scheduled for February 3, 1769, but whoops, Pope Clement turned up unexpectedly dead on the morning of February 2nd.
While I’m not connecting Cagliostro to this mischief, this background illustrates the intense conspiratorial reality during the Enlightenment, something Jesuits were trying to roll back through the power of the Inquisition.
Cagliostro was making his living forging Egyptian art and amulets (which he no doubt represented as ancient and magical) when he met the beautiful 17-year-old Serafina and swiftly proposed. Soon, Serafina was dangled in front of a forger named Agliata, who agreed to surrender the secrets of expert forgery in exchange for a night or two alone with Serafina, to which Cagliostro readily consented.
The couple soon traveled to London and made contact with the mysterious Compte de Saint-Germain, one of the greatest spooks of the time. In 1776, Cagilostro was inducted into the Esperance Lodge No. 289 on Gerrard Street in Soho, and four years later, founded Egyptian freemasonry. He began traveling throughout Europe in an attempt to unite the Masonic community under his umbrella, as he felt his Egyptian rites preceded all others. He was eventually arrested in Rome by Jesuit Inquisitors and died while in captivity. Aleister Crowley believed he was Cagliostro in a previous life.
The Count of Saint-Germain’s origins are shrouded in mystery. Although he claimed royal birth, that was most likely a lie, although he was well financed throughout most his life. He was constantly inventing autobiographical fables, usually claiming he was over a hundred years old and sometimes much older. He claimed to have discovered the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone.
The Count was also a talented composer who published an extensive array of sonatas and arias, as well as being fluent in many languages. Mostly, he was an expert in flattery and seduction.
These are the foundations upon which Blavatsky and Crowley constructed their philosophies. That and the tradition of using spooky symbols to scare people, an art that was all the rage in Paris prior to and during the Revolution. There was a side to the occult based in sadomasochism and the art of amplifying fear, for fear is one of the easiest emotions to evoke, especially during times of civil unrest. This trend can still be found all over the Internet today employed by spooks and kooks. Just try to keep in mind, any time they try to scare you with religion or magic, it’s always a hoodwink. Always.
Madame Blavatsky is a titan of Fundamentalist Occultism who died from the flu in London in 1891 at age 59. She was also one of the world’s greatest bullshit artists, and possibly an intelligence agent, like many other occult icons.
Blavatsky fabricated a head-spinning early biography that placed her in Cairo, Paris, London, New York, Chicago, Salt Lake City and San Francisco in the mid-1800s, where she supposedly held meetings with important mediums. She claimed to have become the only westerner to gain access to the holy city of Tibet, an obvious fabrication.
No doubt Blavatsky was fully exposed to Freemasonry, and her books shared Albert Pike’s affection for plagiarizing huge sections from other manuscripts sans attribution, although Pike never claimed special powers (that I know of), while Blavatsky claimed secret masters had given her special abilities, among which were telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, controlling the consciousness of others, and materializing and dematerializing physical objects.
It’s interesting she moved to India at a time of great social turmoil, summoned by her secret masters, and led an entourage around that country, from one sacred site to another, while encouraging Indians to embrace their native culture, which kept her under the close watch of British intelligence. She eventually created over 100 lodges devoted to her new religion, Theosophy, most of which were in India and probably still operating today. Have you read my theory Gandhi was a spook whose mission was to keep Indians non-violent to prevent the rise of an armed insurrection against British rule?
Although it’s obvious Blavatsky’s claims of magic powers were fraudulent, her basic message was actually a good one, as she sought to unite all religions, like Mani had done millennia before. She was obviously well-read in occult and Eastern religious traditions and freely incorporated elements from a wide variety of sources. The cleverly named National Socialist German Worker’s Party would lift her fascination with Tibet along with the swastika, although she’d appropriated that symbol from Jainism, the original religion of non-violence and “no gods.” Lifting symbols from other cultures while reversing their intended meaning is a magical trick.
Occultists make great spooks, and Aleister Crowley’s connections to SIS are well documented at this point. Crowley remained an asset for most of his life, and many suspect his induction into a German secret society (OTO) was actually part of his spook activities, just as Hitler’s introduction to Thule was part of his, but later in life, when James Bond creator Ian Fleming was his handler, “C” felt the Great Beast’s days as a useful asset were over. C is the real code name for the head of the circus, not the “M” deployed by Fleming in print. Blavatsky could have been an independent agent successfully inventing a completely new age religion, or then again she could have been someone’s spook. One thing I know for sure: her claim of magic powers was a lie.
Lombard King Albion successfully conquered much of Italy around 570. His nomadic warrior tribe was obviously of Scythian descent and had recently crossed the Alps from Germany after residing briefly in the Balkans. They ended up settling down permanently in Italy and the Roman Empire (weakened by invasions and disease) allowed these pagans to retain some of their own culture well into the Middle Ages. Eventually, however, the Lombards became major targets of the Inquisition.
The painting above concerns the death of King Albion, murdered by a plot involving his wife and her brother. He was killed while asleep, his weapons having been previously removed from the chamber, although the depiction of a lance is appropriate, since the lance had replaced the battle ax as primary magical totem for his warrior class, although it was soon usurped by the rise of the magic sword. The passing of the king’s lance was the Lombard ceremony marking the enthronement of a new king.
On the eve of a battle against the Assipi, the number of tents and fires inside the Lombard encampment suddenly tripled and Lombard spies inside Maurina began circulating a fable that magic reinforcements had arrived, men-wolf hybrids who lusted after human blood, and once fed, would become invincible, infused with a miraculous superhuman energy. To enhance this drama, men with wolf masks wearing wolf hides ran howling through the camp upon ascension of the full moon.
This tactic was so effective it was probably deployed many times prior to a battle. The part about drinking human blood was real, for just like their Saka ancestors, Lombards believed in decapitating enemies in battle and drinking blood from their skull caps.
According to Herodotus, the insides of these human chalices were once plated with gold, while the outside wrapped with human or animal skin. But after settling in Italy, the Lombard’s published a detailed description of their human chalices, which by this time included metal bases. This is the true origin of the Holy Grail.
According to Vita Barbati, an elaborate Scythian-like pagan ceremony was still being held outside the town of Benevento in 663. Young men on horseback with lances would ride full gallop past a hide hanging from a tree located on the banks of a river. After everyone pierced it, they tore the hide to bits with their teeth and devoured the pieces.
This was just the sort of activity the Vatican frowned upon so Benevento eventually became a major target of the Inquisition. Early on, punishments and accusations were mild. But after the Reformation kicked in, both sides deployed accusations of witchcraft as a primary tool of terror. A fraudulent book was published in Germany, the Malleus Maleficarum (Witch’s Hammer), which gave instructions on how to identify, torture and kill witches with great dispatch. For example, if a women did not cry during a witch trial, it was deemed sufficient evidence she was a witch and fully acceptable same as a confession in a court of law. It was fairly easy to deploy the Malleus to attack just about anyone for any reason, and although the Vatican condemned the book as false, it ended up on the desk of many Inquisitors as the go-to manual. As a forged political document, I’d equate it on the scale of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
For hundreds of years, Lombards covered themselves in oil on certain nights for ritual lucid dreaming, in which they turned into animal guides to battle demons on the astral plane to ensure a bountiful harvest. When told to stop practicing this witchcraft, they protested their innocence of evil to no avail. Much of our werewolf mythology as well as witch’s sabbats around a walnut tree spring from Benevento.
The oldest known mask of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the underworld who weighed which souls got into heaven. He also used a magic oil.
Meanwhile, many centuries later, in 1589, Peter Stumpp was put on a rack in Germany and claimed to have met the Devil at age 12 and received a magic girdle that allowed him to take wolf form. He confessed to killing and eating 14 children, including his own long dead son, as well as having forbidden sex with his daughter and a unwed mistress.
On October 31, 1589, he was chained to a wheel and ripped into ten pieces by red-hot pincers. His limbs were then broken with the blunt side of an ax to prevent his return from the afterlife. He was burned on a pyre along with his daughter and mistress, who’d already been flayed and strangled before his eyes. The torture wheel was then displayed on a pole with a figure of a wolf and Stumpp’s severed head placed on top.
Although the Inquisition began with a whimper, it went out with a roar, as every fantasy invented by Malleus Maleficarum came to life in the minds of the people. Witches never really existed, and black magic sorcery seldom practiced by peasants, but after centuries of terror and mind control, the numbers of evil doers rose immensely, as if in a self-fulfilling prophesy.
When surveying the history of magic and religion, one finds more fakers, frauds and con men than real avatars simply because it’s easy for clever people to hoodwink the masses with magic and religion. And nothing has changed much, which is why fraudulent books like the Da Vinci Code, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and everything written about an imaginary Yaqui medicine man named Don Juan is utter bullshit.
Magic is real, however, and runs through us all naturally. I like to use sports as an example. When a basketball team makes a huddle, clasps their hands and utters a mantra after a countdown, they are participating in a ritual of harmonization designed to unify the team telepathically. The teams that are the most connected telepathically tend to win against teams with internal psychic issues of discord.
During the Scientific Revolution, many wise people applied the scientific method to the study of magic with interesting results, and no one more so than Giambattista della Porta, a playwright living in Naples circa 1600. When he was merely 15-years-old, della Porta published the comprehensive Magiae Naturalis (Natural Magic). For thousands of years, the study of mathematics, music and magic (they are related) was confined within secret societies. For example, to learn the secrets of Pythagoras, one first had to spend months in monk-like silence, meditating daily at sunrise and sunset, before the masters unveiled any secrets. After passing this vow of silence (not everyone could do it), one was admitted as a full-fledged initiate, and began the study of music and mathematics in earnest. The nice part about Pythagoras was he admitted women as equals, which was quite rare at the time. Freemasonry would not be so kind.
Since he was of noble birth and financially well-off, della Porta was able to travel through Europe at a relatively young age visiting libraries and universities. He went on a mission to garner secret information and expose it to the public. Unlike the many fraudulent magic books of the time, most of which promised the secret of turning lead to gold, or how to make love charms, or how to fly, or some other such imaginary magical powers, della Porta’s book concentrated on experiments he could replicate.
“There are two sorts of Magick,” he wrote. “The one is infamous and unhappy because it has to do with foul spirits, and consists of incantations and wicked curiosity, and this is called Sorcery, an art which all good and learned people detest. Neither is it able to yield a truth of reason or nature, but stands merely on fancies and imaginations, such as vanish presently away leaving nothing behind them, as Jamblicus writes in his book concerning the mysteries of the Egyptians. The other Magick is natural, which all excellent wise men do admit and embrace and worship with great applause.”
Large portions of Natural Magic concerned agriculture and animal breeding. The book explained how to graft trees to produce hybrid fruit. It also describes the effects of various herbs and their use as medicines. Della Porta studied photography, military history and distillation. Although greatly overshadowed by Galileo, he claimed to have constructed the first telescope. He tried to create a wireless telegraph system using magnets created by the same lodestone. Although it didn’t work, his concept of wireless communication was far ahead of its time.
In 1578, della Porta came to the attention of the Inquisition, which closed down his academy and forced him to study in secret, and he quickly became the most advanced cryptographer of his day. He also wrote over 20 plays, most of which were comedies, although only 17 have survived. Apparently, they hold up quite well although you never see productions of them anywhere.
While surveying the history of magic, people like della Porta and Paracelsus stand out as honest students of the occult, but their influence was never as great as the fakers who invented magical myths promising secret powers that don’t exist except in the imagination. It’s a formula that still works well today.
Just as fired clay pots replaced braziers after cannabis intoxication switched from inhalation in tipis to drinking hot cannabis-infused milk in chalices, the arrival of the Menorah in Judea may have signaled a switch to incense fumigation supplemented by full body immersion (with oral and vaginal and anal ingestion always an option)
Since the original menorah didn’t survive, these two quotes are pretty much all we have to go on.
I see a lampstand all of gold, with a bowl above it. The lamps on it are seven in number, and the lamps above it have seven pipes; and by it are two olive trees, one on the right of the bowl, and one on its left….Three bowls shall be made like almond blossoms on one branch, with an ornamental knob and a flower, and three bowls made like almond blossoms on the other branch, with an ornamental knob and a flower.”
Menorah of Zechariah’s vision, Cervera Bible, 1299
The most important element seems to be the presence of those bowls above the flames.
I could only find one ancient image that even tried to approximate the description from the Torah and Old Testament. Those bowls are possibly where cannabis oil would have been placed to fumigate a room, creating a cannabis sauna.
This certainly gives new light to why the phrase “oil lamp” appears with such frequency in the New Testament.
It’s interesting that the almond tree is signaled out for such special attention. It was first cultivated in Bactria and became a protein staple for nomadic Scythians. The Persian trail mix of almonds, honey and dates was the most popular snack all along the Silk Road for millennia and many lived on it exclusively when making long voyages.
And speaking on nut trees and magic.
Almond tree flowers
I recently read a report on an Italian alchemical website claiming the fleur de lis is actually the male and female flower of the walnut tree put together, and the male flower is the real object on display at the Vatican, a statue lifted from the Temple of Isis.
But when I looked at male walnut flowers on the Internet, they looked too long and stringy to convince me and I’ve already written my theory the statute is a giant pineal gland, something many ancient sages considered the seat of the soul.
That did get me thinking about the popularity of walnut trees and walnut wands in magical history. So I went on a search to discover the source of that legend, and found it in Italy. In 1639, Physician Pietro Piperno published On the Superstitious Walnut Tree of Benevento, which tracked the occult origins of the walnut tree back to the 7th century, when Benevento was a Lombard duchy. The Lombards seem to have had a somewhat Saka ancestry. They worshiped a winged golden viper, according to Piperno, and held annual ceremonies involving displays of horsemanship around a tree. These rituals became the origin of witches sabbats held under a giant walnut tree. In fact, the identity of the original tree was lost, and the walnut tree may be a later invention. Whatever that tree might have been, a priest named Barbatus chopped down a nearby walnut tree in 1498, claiming it was the evil one, tore out its roots and built a chapel on the spot named Santa Maria in Voto. As for the golden winged viper, he smelted that into a golden chalice for his Eucharist ceremonies.
flowering walnut tree
During his investigation into paganism, Barbatus got Matteuciccia da Todi (probably a midwife) to confess to being a witch (no doubt under severe torture). This confession may be how Barbatus became Saint Barbatus. Poor Matteuciccia seems to be the one who placed walnuts into the history of magic. So next time you wave a walnut wand, keep her story in mind because that magical tool you’re using may be a bit rusty on karma, in comparison, say, to a wand of hemp. But only if real magic is what you’re looking for.
The other part of this story is that these so-called witches of Benevento anointed themselves with a psychoactive oil during certain ceremonies, and I believe it could be the same oil employed by Scythian widows for ritual suicide, a practice that remained in India for centuries until the British were able to get control over Hinduism and eliminated it as barbaric.
Were walnut or hemp wands dipped to stir the oil during distillation and then employed for oral, vaginal and/or anal ingestion? I suspect that may be the true origin of the magical broomstick.
Nicolas Flamel was a scribe, notary and bookseller in the late 1300s in Paris who grew immensely wealthy, eventually founding fourteen hospitals while donating handsomely to many chapels and churches. In the 1700s, several hundred years after his death, The Book of Hieroglyphic Figures appeared and purported to have been written by him. Its introduction described how for two guilders, the author purchased the Book of Abramelin the Mage, an unusual manuscript on tree bark written in a strange language by Abraham the Jew, an Egyptian magician. According to the book, the author decoded Abramelin’s formulas of magic and alchemy, learning the secrets of the philosopher’s stone, which accounted for his great wealth and success in life.
The Book of Hieroglyphic Figures immediately became the go-to manual for magic all over Europe and exerted tremendous influence over the development of Freemasonry, the Golden Dawn and OTO. Only one problem, however: it was an obvious hoodwink. Flamel lived into his eighties and designed his own tombstone (see below), which contained only images of Jesus, Peter and Paul. He was a devout Catholic with an extensive biography that never mentions alchemy or occult ritual even once. If Flamel had a secret source of income beyond his bookstores and notary offices, it has yet to be discovered, but it’s safe to say any claims he was turning lead into gold is a total fabrication. His great wealth and connections with ancient manuscripts made him the perfect foil on which to hang a magical hoodwink. No doubt Flamel rolled in his grave after being posthumously transformed into the world’s greatest magician, instead of the great benefactor of Catholicism he actually was.
Forget about the phony DaVinci Code and numerous other rabbit holes. If you want to decode the real story of religion and magic, you first must expose the hoodwinks and then follow the trail to their source to expose the charlatan. (It’s interesting Flamel was turned into the world’s greatest alchemist when Francois Rabelais remains a better candidate for that throne, and actually did the necessary work.)
In 1761, Etienne Villain claimed the book’s real author was P. Arnauld de la Chevalerie, the publisher who was profiting immensely off its sales. Unfortunately, Villain’s expose gained little traction and even Issac Newton was eventually taken in by the hoodwink. You find this pattern of fake secret knowledge appearing throughout the history of magic, all leading into rabbit holes instead of real enlightenment. A modern equivalent would be the Don Juan series of books that continue to hoodwink even today.
Eventually, the Book of Abramelin the Mage also appeared written in German, although in somewhat fragmentary form. According to this manuscript, the road to enlightenment required months of daily prayer at sunrise and sunset, chastity, fasting and avoidance of intoxicants (echoes of Pythagoras and Mani). With the help of your guardian angel, who will appear after months of prayer, the budding magician need only capture and bind 12 devils in order to usurp their powers. Once this is done, the ability to cast love charms, find buried treasure, fly and become invisible will be conferred.
The magical tools employed by Abramelin included a wand made from an almond tree, and an oil and incense derived from the Old Testament. There was also a lamp for burning the oil. Although the oil was identified only as Abramelin Oil, it was supposed to replicate the original anointing oil of Moses. It would become an essential tool in the rituals of the Golden Dawn and OTO, although they didn’t agree on the recipe. They both got it wrong, replacing kaneh bosem with calamus or galangal (a relative of ginger).
Here is the actual recipe from Exodus 30:22-25:
Take thou…pure myrrh five hundred shekels, and of sweet cinnamon half so much, even two hundred and fifty shekels, and of kaneh bosem, two hundred and fifty shekels, and of cassia five hundred shekels, and of oil olive an hin: And thou shalt make it an oil of holy ointment, an ointment compounded after the art of the apothecary: it shall be an holy anointing oil.
The translation of kaneh bosem (fragrant cane) was not correctly identified until Sula Benet published Early Diffusion and Folk Uses of Hemp in 1967. Meanwhile, for hundreds of years, churches and magical societies have all been dutifully burning incense and anointing themselves with oil containing zero psychoactive effect. Although Crowley loved psychoactive substances, he too was taken in, for here is his personal recipe:
8 parts cinnamon oil, 4 parts myrrh, 2 parts galangal, 7 parts olive oil
All manner of nonsense was written about the purpose, effect and great power of Abramelin Oil. Fumigating temples with cannabis incenses and serving cannabis beverages were employed by numerous temples in ancient times to enhance the spiritual experience, much the same way a psychedelic garage band might hand out mushrooms before a concert today. But if you remove all psychoactive substances, there is no enhancement, and no magic, just a weak form of fake magic.
Suppression of the true story of the role of cannabis on the development of religion and myth has been so intense for so long that despite all the newly uncovered scientific evidence, most people still have no idea that cannabis was used as the primary medicine by Zoroaster, Moses and Jesus, among others and had a reputation for healing the blind and lame centuries before the arrival of the Jesus myth. Jesus was a Zoroastrian-Buddha hybrid, which is why the Magi attend his birth and why he preached against worshipping statue representations of Jehovah.
Perhaps the most important element of intel control over magic and religion has been diverting people away from cannabis and toward a poison mushroom, Amanita Muscaria. This op was launched by Robert Gordon Wasson, Vice-President and director of public relations for J.P. Morgan & Co., who had begun career by asserting his company had not been built on the back of selling defective weapons to the Union during the Civil War, an effort that largely failed to gain traction. Wasson next concocted an absurd story of wandering upon some magic mushrooms in the Catskills in 1927 and soon was peddling a phony secret history of mushrooms, which culminated with his falsely identifying Soma and Haoma as Amanita. Unfortunately, this hoodwink got massive traction. Since the scholarship was so sloppy and obviously directed by an agenda, one wonders why virtually nothing has been done to topple his absurd ideas and correct the historical record. Soma is a form of bhang, in other words, cannabis and milk with spices. And the history of cannabis in ancient Judea has been scientifically proven, so why isn’t it widely known the burning bush in the Bible is a reference to cannabis intoxication? At least from the 1950s on, Wasson’s work in this area was funded by the CIA’s MK/Ultra program, and he was greatly assisted by having his efforts put on the cover of Life magazine.
In the 1970s, Wasson passed the Amanita baton to Andrija Puharich, an Army MD also working for MK/Ultra out of Fort Detrick. Puharich would launch the career of British-Israeli self-claimed psychic Uri Geller while also arranging seances for elite members of the oligarchy, a list that included various Duponts and Bronfmans, among others.
“We use footage from the CIA-funded film record of the Uri Geller experiments, and we then track stories about Uri’s involvement in events ranging from the Israeli commando raid on Entebbe through to his participation in the search for Osama bin Laden, with a mysterious sidebar as a federal agent for the Mexican government. Forty years of psychic operations,” writes Vikram Jayanti, a filmmaker who produced a puff piece for the BBC. Jayanti goes on to assert: “Someone well positioned to know suggests that rather than being shut down in 1995, the use of psychic operatives by the US government and military has merely gone deeper black. If that’s the case, then perhaps Geller is still at work in the shadows.”
Maybe, but no matter what Geller is up to, it’s really some staged hoodwink involving deception to create an illusion of magic power. Knowingly or unknowingly, religions work with the national security state to maintain a status quo magic show, and so do all the occult alternatives. Most of your so-called psychics who reach icon status are intelligence agents. Magic and religion are the same thing, and only work on believers, but then there are a lot of those people around.
George Orwell was a huge influence on my early journalism career as his book Animal Farm contributed to my early resolve never to fall under the spell of Marxism. But when it came to Orwell’s famous confrontation with Henry Miller in Paris (debating the merits of joining the fight against fascism in Spain), I came firmly down on Miller’s side of remaining a pacifist. Orwell was soon shot through the throat, and fortunately miraculously recovered with his voice intact, enabling him to assume a prosperous career as a commentator for the BBC.
I’ve already exposed Orwell’s mysterious connections, and the possibility he was working for MI6. (Journalists make some of the best spooks.) Orwell always cited Somerset Maugham as his biggest influence, and that was long before Maugham was unmasked as an agent of MI6. Upon his deathbed Orwell gave a full confession regarding every spook he knew and who they worked for as best as he could determine. He was a patriotic citizen to the end, although his last book ended with a bold flourish, for it exposed cynical insights into the emerging national security state post-WWII, a system closer to fascism on steroids than democracy. The great insight of 1984 was that the revolution was secretly orchestrated by the state in order to ID and neutralize budding revolutionaries. It was all part of a grand charade. There never was any real hope of reform. The world had been carved into oligarchies that shifted alliances to maintain perpetual war. In the book, random terror is created by missiles raining down on the city periodically, although we know suicide bombers are cheaper and harder to trace through the wilderness of mirrors, which is why they are the preferred instruments of modern state-sponsored terror. But Orwell’s analysis of the social strata was off considerably because as the security states grew stronger, the upper strata of the oligarchy got progressively smaller. Today’s chart has .01% at the top, and a mere 1% occupying the second rung. The middle class has effectively been melted into the proletariat, creating the new 99% working class stiffs.
Most people imagine Orwell as the protagonist of 1984, but I can more easily imagine him as identifying with the leader of the fake opposition delivering the protagonist to the Ministry of Truth for his re-indoctrination mind-control.
On the dawn of a new year, I wonder if a cycle of change might not be on the horizon and the power of the .01% to call the shots might not be fading somewhat. As an indication of this novel trend, I cite the difficulty of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton to corral the next election exclusively for the old guard. At the same time, one must carefully evaluate any messiahs before selecting one as real because the so-called whistleblowers covered by the mass media are spooks. Real whistleblowers are eliminated and discredited (just google Danny Casolaro) and never appear on the cover of Time magazine.
I feel a glimmer of hope our millennials might one day rise above petty earthly attachments long enough to shatter Monsanto’s toxic influence over our economy, rip the profit motive out of the medical establishment, and invest our wealth in free schools and hospitals, not wars of aggression over oil and opium. Technology has provided the solution, and the Internet can easily be deployed for a weekly or even daily referendum process, in which national opinion could shape shots before they get called.