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Perfidious Albion: An Introduction to the Secret History of the British Empire

From New Dawn Special Issue 11 (Mar 2010)

Perfidious Albion – “Treacherous England,” “Faithless England,” or, if you prefer, “Dirty, Low-down, Sneaky England” – is commonly assumed to derive from the French La Perfide Albion. The epithet’s best known appearance is in the 1793 poem “L’ere de Francais” by the Marquis de Ximenez. The year is not without significance. In February 1793, the increasingly radical and beleaguered French Republic declared war on Britain, and Ximenez exhorted his revolutionary countrymen to carry the fight to the enemy’s shores. One wonders what he would have made of the theory, advance many years later, that the very Revolution he praised was the clandestine handiwork of Perfide Albion.

In any event, the good Marquis was hardly the first or the last to invoke the term. References to something of the kind date back to the late Middle Ages. In 1919, Canon Charles O’Neil enshrined it in the lyrics of “Foggy Dew,” which lauded Ireland’s Easter Rebellion. The Spanish, recalling the ill-fated Armada and the depredations of Sir Francis Drake, speak of Perfida Albion, the Italians of Perfida Albione, and the Germans of Perfides Albion. In any language, it boils down to the same thing: the English displayed a special knack for underhanded behaviour and more that they were damned good at it.

Is such sniping just the reflexive bitterness of losers, or was the rise and success of the British Empire really abetted by dirty tricks and not just hardy seamen, stiff upper lips and the will of the Almighty? If so, much of the dirty work falls into that category loosely termed espionage or “secret service.” But the English did not invent spying, which if not the world’s second oldest profession, must be the third. Nor can it be that Britain’s alleged sin was simply putting its interests above that of any other nation, be it friend or foe. What other country can really claim to have done otherwise, and why should anyone expect them to?

Of course, we are talking about more than mere intelligence gathering; suborning treason, inciting rebellion, even war, not to mention blackmail and assassination are neither the least nor the greatest crimes of which Perfidious Albion stands accused. Indeed, some might argue that the British Empire was born and maintained through a pact with the Devil himself. In any case, the likes of Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay argue that the long history of skulduggery manifests the hand of a British “Secret State” which continues to guide the policies and destiny of the United Kingdom.¹

The notion than England possessed a special talent for deceit and underhandedness may be a myth, but it has proved an effective and enduring one. After all, though the Empire is gone, the most famous secret agent in the world, James Bond, remains a Briton. The long list of historical figures who stand accused of being Albion’s tools (whether they knew it or not) includes Christopher Marlowe, Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky and Adolf Hitler. Those who, to one degree or another, definitely were, include Aleister Crowley, Harry Houdini, Benito Mussolini and Noel Coward. What follows will take a necessarily very selective look at some of the persons and events involved in Britain’s clandestine affairs from the era of Elizabeth I to the Second World War. Some may be familiar, others definitely obscure, but each played a part in the Secret History of the British Empire.

Sir Francis Walsingham

Credit for creating the first “regular” English secret service usually goes to Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.² He faced a predicament shared by many of his successors; the need to combat both external and internal threats and the collaboration of the two. In the case of the Protestant Walsingham and his Protestant Queen, the unifying factor among their enemies was devotion to Catholicism. Walsingham battled this menace by recruiting agents at home and abroad and waging an aggressive campaign of counter-subversion. His most successful weapon was the provocateur or “mole” who penetrated and compromised hostile conspiracies. He also followed the maxim that England’s enemy’s enemy was her friend, or at least an exploitable tool. In addition to Protestant sympathisers and dissident Catholics, he is also supposed to have enlisted the help of witches, sorcerers and atheists in Albion’s cause.³

Little surprise that one of Walsingham’s better known operatives was an Elizabethan occultist whose interests included hermeticism, alchemy, astrology and conversing with “angels.” This was Dr. John Dee (1527–1608), a man whose encoded signature – a stylised representation of handled spectacles – was later appropriated by Ian Fleming for his “007.”⁴ Among other things, Dee was a prophet of England’s Manifest Destiny. He allegedly coined the term “Britannia” and conjured up the image of the small island kingdom as the centre of a world-girdling maritime empire.

While Dee served Walsingham well, he was first and foremost a scholar and seems to have lacked the ruthless quality often required of a secret agent. Thus, it surely was Walsingham’s hand that in 1582 steered Edward Kelley into his path. Dee wished to commune with the spirits but lacked mediumistic powers. Kelley had them – or claimed to – and the pair formed a team which endured for some seven years. Kelley was a dubious character, a convicted forger and counterfeiter whose occult interests included necromancy and maybe outright diabolism.⁵ Since the angels “spoke” through Kelley, and Dee was inclined to do whatever they decreed, Kelley was ideally positioned to “manage” Dee. Kelley would have had no qualms about doing whatever Walsingham required. Little wonder that some three centuries later another English occultist-spy, Aleister Crowley, would proclaim himself the reincarnation of Edward Kelley.

Dee and Kelley’s most important mission was their extended visit to Central Europe in the 1580s. This brought them to the court of Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, nephew of England’s nemesis, Philip II of Spain, and host to a dangerous cabal of Catholic exiles. Kelley ultimately infiltrated and betrayed this group and their co-conspirators in England. Dee ingratiated himself (and by extension, Kelley) to Rudolf by providing the Emperor with rare tomes of esoterica. Dee is generally assumed to have sold Rudolf a very strange volume later dubbed the Voynich Manuscript after the book dealer who rediscovered it in the early 20th century.⁶ It is an illustrated manuscript depicting mysterious plants and rituals and written in an unknown and indecipherable alphabet. Among the multitude of theories about the book is one that holds Dee concocted it as cryptographic experiment based on the angelic or “Enochian” revelations received through Kelley.

Britain’s Alliance with the Jews

Half a century after Dee’s death, England was under a very different political regime but facing a remarkably similar security predicament. In the mid-1650s, power rested in the hands of a Puritan dictator, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell’s principle enemies were the royalist partisans of the dethroned Stuarts who brewed sedition at home and plotted abroad with the Catholic kings of Spain and France.

At this time there lived in London a wealthy Portuguese-Spanish merchant named Antonio Fernandez de Carvajal. In fact, Carvajal was a Marrano or crypto-Jew, a descendent of Iberian Jews compelled to accept Catholicism in the previous century. Like many of his secret co-religionists, Carvajal hated Spain and all it stood for. He also sought to legitimise his and other crypto-Jews’ status in England and permit other Sons of Judah to live there openly. The obstacle was Edward I’s 1290 Edict of Expulsion which forbade Jews to dwell in England. In 1655, Carvajal arranged for Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel to come from Amsterdam and make a personal appeal to Cromwell. The Lord Protector formally repealed the Edict two years later. Part of the quid pro quo was that Carvajal put Cromwell’s agents in contact with a far-flung network of “Jewish Intelligencers” who operated in the Netherlands, the Levant, Spanish America and inside Spain itself.⁷ As early as 1656 this secret alliance proved its value when Carvajal’s agents exposed royalist intrigues in Holland.

Jump ahead 260 years and British agents in the Middle East, among them a certain T. E. Lawrence, were being aided by another network of Jewish spies, this one the Zionist NILI ring which worked against the Ottoman Turks.⁸ At the same time, Albion’s operatives spun visions of independence before the Arabs while quietly plotting to divide up the whole region with France. The leading light of the NILI ring, Aaron Aaronsohn perished in a mysterious plane crash over the English Channel in 1919. As in the later cases of the Duke of Kent (1942) and General Wladyslaw Sikorski (1943), suspicious minds saw the hidden hand of Perfidious Albion ridding itself of an “inconvenience.”⁹

At the very least, had Edward I’s Edict remained in force, British history would have been very different. No Rothschilds would have lent their weight to London’s financial might, no Benjamin Disraeli would have become prime minister, nor would a Polish Jew named Shlomo Rozenblium have become Sidney Reilly, the Ace-of-Spies.

The French Revolution has spawned its share of conspiracy theories. Perhaps the most resilient of these is the “Illuminati-Masonic Conspiracy” promoted by Abbe Augustin de Barruel in his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797–98) and John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against All Religions and Governments of Europe… (1797). Both writers point accusing fingers at the recently disbanded Bavarian Illuminati who, they allege, infiltrated French Freemasonry and spawned the head-chopping excesses of the Jacobins. It is worth noting that both Barruel and Robison wrote their books in Britain and that the government of Sir William Pitt the Younger embraced and promoted their ideas. At the very least, Pitt exploited the conspiracy theory to effectively discredit and demonise the French Revolution.

In the 20th century, the doggedly anti-British researchers associated with Lyndon Larouche’s Executive Intelligence Review argue that the hidden hand of England both helped to get the Revolution rolling and steered it into the hands of the fanatical Jacobins. In modern parlance, it was all a “destabilisation” effort designed to cripple France economically and politically. Even the storming of the Bastille was part of the plot.¹⁰ In the “Bestial British Intelligence of Shelburne and Bentham,” Jeffrey Steinberg singles out Lord Shelburne (William Petty) the evil genius of the venture who used the monetary power of the East India Company to carry out a silent coup against weak King George III.¹¹ According to this view, British intelligence ever since has been the tool of the same secret power. If so, were the works of Barruel and Robison sponsored disinformation designed to divert attention away from the real conspiracy to a manufactured one?

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the British secret services had to negotiate a shifting landscape of alliances and real or potential enemies. In the 1850s, Britain joined traditional foe France in the Crimean War against Russia, but in the 1890’s France allied itself with Russia, a combination that was almost as troubling to Britain as it was to the rising power on the block, Germany. Up to the first years of the 20th century, Tsarist Russia remained the Empire’s #1 adversary, but when, after 1900, the Germans embarked on the creation of a big navy, British interests demanded an alliance with France (1904) and subsequently Russia (1907).

Of course, just because you were allied to someone, didn’t mean you would or should stop spying on them. To better manage intelligence operations, a War Office Intelligence Division appeared in 1873. The Admiralty followed suit with a Foreign Intelligence Committee in 1882 which became the Naval Intelligence Department (NID) a few years later.

William Melville

Nevertheless, the man who was the closest thing to a British spymaster in the late 19th century, and who arguably laid the basis for British intelligence in the 20th, came from the London Metropolitan Police – Scotland Yard. His name was William Melville and he was, of all things, a Catholic Irishman from County Kerry. Originally a baker, Melville entered the Metropolitan Police in 1872 and ten years later joined its new Irish Branch. The latter was designed to combat Fenian conspiracies, particularly bomb attacks in London. Despite his background, Melville became an implacable enemy of the Irish rebels and a bitter foe of anarchists and radicals generally.

In 1887, Melville was involved in ferreting out the so-called Jubilee Plot in which a Fenian cabal aimed to blow up Queen Victoria and most of her cabinet in Westminster Abbey.¹² The key instigator turned out to be a British agent. Much the same emerged five years later when Melville masterminded the destruction of the Walsall Plot in which a group of anarchist workmen went to prison for scheming to build a bomb. Once again, the man at the centre of plot turned out to be one of Melville’s provocateurs.¹³

Befitting a servant of Perfidious Albion, such deviousness did not go unrewarded. In 1893 Melville became Superintendent of Special Branch and earned an almost mythical reputation as the ever-watchful guardian of public order. Always on the lookout for new angles in trickery and deception, in 1900 Melville enlisted the talents of American magician Harry Houdini. He even inveigled Houdini to spy for him during his tours of Germany and Russia.¹⁴

Still, this did not inhibit Melville from establishing cooperative arrangements with the secret services of those very same countries. In 1901, he worked with German agents to forestall an assassination attempt against Kaiser Wilhelm II at Queen Victoria’s funeral.¹⁵ He evolved a more elaborate relationship with Pyotr Rachkovsky, the equally cunning chief of the Russian Government’s Okhrana section in Paris. Melville’s men spied on Russian exiles in London, while Rachkovsky supplied Melville with intelligence gleaned from radical circles on the Continent. They even shared agents.

A case in point is the Pilenas brothers, Casimir and Peter. They were Lithuanian subjects of the Russian Empire who fled to London in the 1890s and moved in revolutionary circles. Casimir became a spotter and informant for Scotland Yard around 1896 and he and his brother worked as London operatives for the Okhrana.¹⁶ Their recruiter was one of Melville’s officers, Michael Thorpe who also, with Melville’s approval, worked for Rachkovsky.

The Okhrana came to doubt the Pilenas’ reliability and cut them loose in 1913. This may have had something to do with their peripheral involvement in a sensational robbery-murder in London in December 1910. The so-called Houndsditch Murders resulted from a botched burglary attempt by a group of Latvian-Russian anarchists.¹⁷ Three policemen were shot dead and not long after two of the suspects died in a fiery shoot-out in the East End’s Sidney Street. Despite what first appeared to be overwhelming evidence, the surviving robbers were all acquitted. One reason for the acquittals may have been that there was one or more police agents among the accused.

The group’s shadowy ringleader, “Peter the Painter,” was never found, but among those suspected was Peter Pilenas who conveniently left England for America just days before the robbery went down. Peter soon was followed to the States by brother Casimir. When the First World War broke out, British intelligence in New York re-mobilised him as an agent, and he similarly returned to Albion’s service (if he ever left) in 1939.

There is something fishy about the Houndsditch/Sidney Street business, and the suspicion that it involved State-inspired provocation is not unjustified. In that respect, a not insignificant detail is that the Home Secretary who personally oversaw the Sidney Street shoot-out was Winston Churchill, a man who some believe “had already sealed an indissoluble bond” with the Realm’s secret services.¹⁸

Melville resigned his Scotland Yard post in October 1903 but immediately opened a private detective agency under the name William Morgan. In fact, Melville’s outfit was a cut-out for the War Office and served the Empire’s secret needs at home and abroad. Basically, Melville’s agents did the Empire’s dirty work under a cover of complete deniability. In 1909, most of his organisation was subsumed into two new agencies created to handle domestic and foreign intelligence (what would become MI5 and MI6) and Melville served as MI5’s Chief Detective until his real retirement in 1917.

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Sidney George Reilly

One of Melville’s most notable recruits was the Russo-Polish Jew mentioned earlier, Shlomo, or Salomon, Rozenblium. He would be much better known as Sidney George Reilly. His career is too convoluted to summarise here, but among other things, he is frequently cited as the role model for James Bond.¹⁹ Like so many things about Reilly, it turns out to have no basis in fact. In reality, Reilly was more a confidence man than a spy, and his loyalty to Britain, or anything else, was doubtful. A report on his character in early 1918 concluded that he was “a shrewd businessman of undoubted ability, but without patriotism or principles and therefore not to be recommended for any position which requires loyalty….”²⁰ Other terms applied to him included “untrustworthy” and “unscrupulous.” Among the few things said in his favour was that he had excellent sources of information and “connections in almost every country.”²¹ Reilly liked to hint of his connections to the “Occult Octopus,” his name for the more secretive aspects of international business and finance.²²

Nevertheless, despite his mercenary reputation, or maybe because of it, in the spring of 1918 the chief of London’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), chose Reilly to undertake an ultra-secret mission inside newly Bolshevised Russia. The main fruit of this venture was the so-called Lockhart or Ambassadors’ Plot which reached its crescendo in late August of that year. The plot centred on a plan, spearheaded by Reilly, to subvert the Latvian troops guarding the Kremlin and use them in a palace coup against Lenin’s government. The goal was less the total overthrow of the Red regime than a change in its leadership, and there is little doubt that an almost simultaneous, but botched, effort to kill Lenin was connected.²³ The Latvian gambit abruptly fell apart with the result that all the Allied secret services in Russia were compromised. Reilly and his British colleagues escaped unscathed, but his American counterpart, the unlikely named Xenophon Kalamatiano, was not so lucky. He alone was tried, convicted and imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for three gruelling years. To his dying day Kalamatiano maintained that Reilly had deliberately betrayed him and other Allied agents.²⁴ What he never seemed quite sure of was why.

Sidney Reilly disappeared on another mission to Russia in the fall of 1925. According to contradictory Soviet accounts, either he was executed soon after his capture or almost two years later. In London there were routine denials and whispers of defection. In what purports to be an account of his interrogation, Reilly emphatically states that there had been no British agents in Russia since 1919.²⁵ It may be that one purpose of Reilly’s mission was to convince his Soviet captors that this was true. Persons in London may have willingly sacrificed Reilly to make that point.

It was vital that the Soviets believe him, because nothing could be further from the truth. As researcher Phil Tomaselli has unearthed, from the fall of 1919 through at least mid-1923, MI6 received scores of reports, many very detailed, from a source with access to the highest levels of the Soviet Government. The source was also particularly well-versed in the secret collaboration between the Russians and the German military. Codenamed D-57, the agent’s identity was carefully disguised; indeed, it is not clear whether D-57 was an individual or a network of informants. As far as can be determined, the information provided was reliable.

D-57 was only a part of a much more extensive British intelligence operation in Red Russia. As a 1927 American military intelligence summary put it, “Just what agencies are maintained [by the British] in Russia, of course, cannot be found out, but according to recent Soviet claims, which are undoubtedly exaggerated, the British have an extensive system of espionage in that country.”²⁶ Actually, the Soviets were not hallucinating. London had intelligence officers imbedded in its trade and diplomatic missions, and in the ranks of private firms operating in Russia. Through the 1920s, a super-secret MI6 station existed in Moscow, though, like D-57, it remains completely unacknowledged in that agency’s official history.²⁷ Why? Why would such a seemingly outstanding success be covered-up? Could it be that to reveal the story of D-57 and related affairs would also reveal some darker secrets of the Empire, those that must forever remain in the file of Things That Never Happened?

Dr. Cornelius Herz

The Soviets were not the only ones who had to fret about the nefarious activities of English spies. The French had ample reason to maintain a healthy paranoia about L’Intelligence Service. Around 1877, a certain Dr. Cornelius Herz appeared in Paris. Although supposedly born in France, Herz claimed American citizenship, but his origins are, to say the least, obscure. He used his not inconsiderable wealth, the source of which was also a mystery, to dabble in finance and politics, initially to great success. He cultivated political figures in the Third Republic, most notably the sabre-rattling General Georges Ernest Boulanger, who almost staged a coup against the Republican regime at the end of the 1880s. Herz also befriended a rising politico named Georges Clemenceau, the future “Tiger of France.”

However, Herz’s little empire came crashing down when, along with another wheeler-dealer, the Baron de Reinach, he became mixed-up in the Panama Canal Scandal that hit France at the beginning of the 1890s. The Scandal, which included charges of bribery and official malfeasance, rocked the Republic to its foundations. To avoid prosecution, Herz, like others implicated, fled aboard, but it was the place of refuge he chose that raised eyebrows. Herz decamped to England in 1892 where, despite vigorous French efforts to force his extradition, he remained safe and silent until his rather untimely (some might argue convenient) death six years later.²⁸ In France it became an article of faith that Herz had been an “agent-of-influence” of Perfide Albion and that his aim all along was to destabilise the Third Republic any way he could. Some of his critics charged that Herz was nothing less than the “chief of the Intelligence Service in France.”²⁹ Herz, naturally, denied any such thing.

It was not lost on certain persons, among the outspoken anti-semite Eduoard Drumont, that Herz and Reinach were Jews, and this played into another scandal that hit the Republic in 1894 and raged for several years – the infamous Dreyfus Affair. By 1898–99, it had polarised France into pro- and anti-Dreyfusard camps and again brought the Third Republic to the brink of collapse. Britain’s secret services were not above fishing in these troubled waters. One man who thought the Republic’s crisis might be his opportunity was Victor Bonaparte, Prince Napoleon, or as die-hard Bonapartists referred to him, Napoleon V. From his exile in Belgium, he boasted of organising a march on Paris to seize control and restore order. Among the surviving records of War Office Intelligence, there is reference to the fact that in May 1901, British agents met with Prince Napoleon in Holland where they “sounded out” his views about affairs in France and elsewhere.³⁰ So, the Empire’s agents now connived with the heir of the man they had worked so hard to bring down almost ninety years before.

Basil Zaharoff

Some thought it more than coincidence that just as Herz’s star began to fade, another foreigner of mysterious wealth and provenance popped up in Paris.³¹ This was Basil Zaharoff, who had already gone through half a dozen aliases and careers in places as far ranging as Constantinople, London, Cyprus and America.³² No one was certain, or ever would be, whether Zaharoff was of Greek, Jewish, or Russian origin. He established a special relationship with British interests in the 1870s and that endured, to one degree or another, until his death in Monte Carlo in 1936. In the interim, Sir Basil, as he was later known, earned infamy and vast wealth as the world’s paramount arms dealer or, as the less charitable termed him, the “Merchant of Death.” Zaharoff later spread his tentacles into ship-building, banking, radio communications and, perhaps most prescient of all, oil. The basis of his business success was what he called the “System.” In essence, this involved selling arms to both sides in a conflict and even instigating conflicts when need or opportunity arose.

Zaharoff maintained an official residence in Paris and was rewarded by the French with enrolment in the Legion of Honor. But it was London which gave him an Order of the British Empire and a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath for his special services. Sir Basil was intimately connected with the British-owned Vickers firm and British politicians like future Prime Minister David Lloyd George.³³ His influence reached its peak during the First World War. According to T. P. O’Connor, “Allied statesmen and leaders were obliged to consult with him before planning any great attack.”³⁴ He was also rumoured to operate a private intelligence service which put the French Surete to shame.³⁵ His legion of sub-agents allegedly included the above-mentioned Sidney Reilly and arch-schemer Ignatius Trebitsch-Lincoln.³⁶ French investigative journalist Roger Menevee, the first to attempt a biography of Zaharoff, was convinced that not only was he a key British asset, but also was a kingpin in a shadowy “International Oligarchy” which dominated the world’s economy. One can only wonder how that connected to Reilly’s “Occult Octopus” or to the “High Cabal” alluded to by Winston Churchill.³⁷ Was Zaharoff a manifestation of the link between British imperial interests and some sort of “Illuminati”? If so, who was running who?

Yet another example of British spying on France, this one in the wake of the First World War, provides a little comic relief. In December 1925, the Surete arrested three male British subjects and two French female accomplices on charges of espionage. All were convicted in subsequent proceedings. The leading figure in the case, Capt. John Henry Leather, and his two colleagues, Ernest Phillips and William Fischer, were employees of the Paris office of the Burndept Wireless Co. They also all had recent backgrounds in British military intelligence. As of 1925, in fact, Leather was still attached to MI2(b), the War Office outfit handling intelligence in Western Europe.³⁸

The Foreign Office, Air Ministry and Admiralty ritually denied any connection to the men. Naturally, no one asked the “Agency That Didn’t Exist,” MI6. But there was no doubt about the guilt of Leather and his pals. Their undoing came about because he and Fischer had developed rival romantic interests in one of the French femmes, Marthe Moreuil, better known as “Mlle. Foxtrot,” whom they had used to coax information out of smitten French officers. For reasons never made clear, Moreuil tossed a packet of love letters out the window of a train, but managed to include a stash of compromising documents. These were retrieved by a curious farmer who dutifully turned them over to authorities. The main target of the Leather gang’s espionage was the French air force, then reckoned by London as the only air force that could pose a threat to Britain.³⁹

Sir William Wiseman

British intrigues in France pale in comparison with those conducted in America during and between the two World Wars. In the fall of 1918 Sir William Wiseman, who for the past three years had headed the MI1c (MI6) station in New York, assured his Chief that “the details and extent of our organisation [the Americans] have never known, and don’t know to this day.”⁴⁰ Sir William and his colleagues had conducted an aggressive, devious and very successful campaign against German operations in the US as well as the Irish and Indian nationalists with whom the Germans plotted. For instance, in 1917 San Francisco, British agents instigated a high-profile mass prosecution of Indians and Germans in the so-called “Hindu Conspiracy Trial.”⁴¹

No small part of this success was due to the fact that Wiseman and friends were able to finesse or coerce the collaboration of ostensibly neutral Americans. A vital part of this network of influence was the financial alliance between the British Crown and the 500-lb. gorilla of American finance, J.P. Morgan & Co.⁴² With utter disregard for policies in Washington, the Morganites aligned themselves with London in 1914 and used their clout to compel other American firms to do likewise. In this regard, Wiseman’s pre- and postwar career as an investment banker is not insignificant. It again smacks of Reilly’s “Occult Octopus,” and that is fitting because Reilly, along with Aleister Crowley and Casimir Pilenas, was among Wiseman’s small army of agents and informants.

By far Wiseman’s greatest achievement was his cultivation of the man who arguably was the second most powerful man in Washington, President Wilson’s confidential adviser and all-around eminence grise, Col. Edward Mandell House. The English-educated House was probably London’s man from start, and he had close ties to the Morgan interests. Wiseman credited House with making the President believe that Britain and America were joined in a “special relationship” to combat German militarism and that Wilson needed to consider British views and needs ahead of any others.⁴³ Wiseman could credit himself and his organisation with achieving the Great Work of British imperial alchemy in the First World War – bringing America into the war.

Some American officials, among them J. Edgar Hoover, were bothered by the fact that British intelligence operations on American shores did not cease on 11 Nov. 1918.⁴⁴ Not only did British surveillance of Irish and others continue, but so did their meddling in US immigration matters and the blatant collection of commercial information. Wiseman’s replacements took a keen interest in the American radical scene and infiltrated agents into the nascent US Communist movement. Some British agents were even accused of funding radical activity.⁴⁵ In 1920, then British Director of Intelligence Sir Basil Thomson admitted that his organisation had enticed one of the leaders of the Communist Party of America, Louis Fraina, into London’s employ.⁴⁶

William Wiseman returned to New York soon after the war and joined one of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In the 1930s, he became the firm’s point man in Hollywood and used his influence to encourage a favourable portrayal of the British Empire in American films. He never ceased to be Albion’s agent-of-influence. When war again broke out in 1939, Sir William was back in the saddle where he conducted back door negotiations with German and Japanese diplomats and helped set up the British Security Coordination (BSC) later headed by Sir William Stephenson.⁴⁷ Following the pattern established by Wiseman in the last war, the BSC ran roughshod over American neutrality laws while it mounted a vast propaganda campaign aimed once again at bringing the US into the fray. Among those recruited for this effort was the influential press and radio columnist, Walter Winchell.⁴⁸

As noted, the above examples barely scratch the surface in exploring the exploits of British intelligence and the “secret history” of the Empire it served. However, they hopefully offer a little glimpse of the history, reasoning and methods of Perfidious Albion.

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Lead image courtesy of www.micahwright.com.

Footnotes:

1. See, for example, Dorril and Ramsay’s Smear: Wilson and the Secret State, London: HarperCollins, 1992 and, more broadly, Lobster: The Journal of Parapolitics.

2. See Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham and the Birth of Modern Espionage, New York: Viking, 2005.

3. Ellen Wilson, “Raleigh’s Secret Society: Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘School of Night’ in Elizabethan England” (7 May 2008), www.tudorhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_school_of_night.

4. Richard Deacon, John Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I, London: Frederick Muller, 1968, 5.

5. Ibid., 123-125.

6. For a good overview, see Rene Zandbergen, “The Voynich Manuscript,” www.voynich.nu. The dealer, a Pole named Wilfrid Voynich, also happened to be an early associate of Sidney Reilly.

7. Lucien Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” in C. Roth (ed.), Essays in Jewish History, London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1934, 93-112.

8. Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T. E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, New York: Viking (2008).

9. Ben Cohen, “The Amazing Life of Aaron Aaronshon,” The Daily Banter (14 Aug. 2007), www.thedailybanter.com/tdb/palestine/.

10. Pierre Boudry, “Jean-Sylvain Bailly: The Benjamin Franklin of the French Revolution,” www.schillerinstitute.org/educ/hist/bailly.html.

11. Jeffrey Steinberg, “The Bestial British Intelligence of Shelburne and Bentham,“ www.hiddenmysteries.org/conspiracy/history/bestialbrits.shtml.

12. Andrew Cook, M: MI5’s First Spymaster, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2004, 60-63.

13. Ibid., 87-93.

14. William Kalush and Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero, New York: Atria, 2006, 99-101, 135.

15. Cook, 134-135.

16. Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Okhrana Records, IIIf, Deep Cover Agents – Russian, (L-Z).

17. See Donald Rumbelow, The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street, London: MacMillan, 1973.

18. Guido Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich, London: Pluto Press, 2005, 109.

19. Donald McCormick, 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming. London: Peter Owen, 1993, 208.

20. UK, Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), File CX 2616, CX 023100, 13 March 1918.

21. Ibid., CX 023996, 20 March 1918.

22. Gill Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence, London: Routledge, 2007, 61.

23. Re the “Lockhart Plot,” see Richard B. Spence, Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly, Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002, 200-229.

24. Richard B. Spence, “The Tragic Fate of Kalamatiano: America’s Man in Moscow,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 12, #3 (Fall 1999), 354.

25. Richard B. Spence, (ed.), “Sidney Reilly’s Lubianka ‘Diary’, 30 October – 4 November 1925,” Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 8, #2 (December 1995), 183.

26. U.S. National Archives, Records of the Military Intelligence Division (MID), 9944-A-81, G-2 Report 6110, “England (military)”, 5 July 1927.

27. Phil Tomaselli, “C’s Moscow Station – The Anglo-Russian Trade Mission as Cover for SIS in the Early 20s,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 17, #3 (Sept. 2002), 173-180, and Tomaselli to author.

28. “Dr. Cornelius Herz Dead,” New York Times (7 July 1898), 7.

29. Charles Rochat-Cenisse, Roi des Armes: La Vie Mysterieuse de Basile Zaharoff. Bienne: Editions du Chandlier, 1943, 77.

30. U.K. National Archives, Intelligence Department Records, HD3/111, Pt. 1.

31. Rochat-Cenisse, 76-77.

32. Donald McCormick, Peddler of Death: The Life and Times of Sir Basil Zaharoff, New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1965, 22-47.

33. Ibid., 98-99.

34. Ibid., 150.

35. George Tallas and Anthony Stephen, Peddler of Wars: The Sir Basil Zaharoff Story, Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2007, vii.

36. Re Trebitsch, see: Richard B. Spence, “The Mysteries of Trebitsch-Lincoln: Con-Man, Spy, ‘Counter-Initiate’?”, New Dawn, #116 (Sept-Oct 2009).

37. Moss David Posner, “The High Cabal,” The American Chronicle (15 Sept. 2005), www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/2406.

38. Phil Tomaselli, Tracing Your Secret Service Ancestors, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire: Penn & Sword, 2009, 123

39. Ibid., 124.

40. Yale University, Sterling Library Special Collections, Sir William Wiseman Papers, Box 6, File 174, Wiseman to Chief, 6 Sept. 1918, 2.

41. Richard B. Spence, “Englishman in New York: the SIS American Station, 1915-21,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 19, #3 (Autumn 2004), 518-919.

42. Richard B. Spence, “Sidney Reilly in America, 1914-1917,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 10, #1 (Jan. 1995), 95.

43. Spence, “Englishman in New York,” 523.

44. MID, 9944-A-178, “British Espionage in the United States,” 15 Feb. 1921, 1-2.

45. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation Investigative Files, #8000-357986, “Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Mina Lowensohn,” 29 December 1919, 16-17.

46. MID, “British Espionage in the United States,” 6.

47. William Stephenson, British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in America, 1940-45, New York: Fromm International, 1999, 233-235.

48. Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44, Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1998, 202.

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May 18, 2011
Consciousness, Resonance & the Paranormal: Synchronised Swimming in the Quantum Sea

As a kid, watching the synchronised swimming competition of the summer Olympic games, I was always struck by how silly the sport seemed. Not to mention how it looked! Later, as a wise adult, I came to understand and appreciate both the degree of difficulty of getting human bodies to move in perfect unison, and the beauty that results when they do.

Humans often operate in synch with others. I am reminded of groups of women who work or live together menstruating at the same times, as if their hormonal systems sought a certain resonance of unity and harmony, and adjusted the individual bodies accordingly.

But bodies are not the only things that resonate. Quantum physics has taught us that there is no such thing as empty space, and that the so-called vacuum of space often called the Zero Point Field (ZPF), is teeming with quantum fluctuations that display a resonance, a vibration. Nothing does not vibrate. There is no such thing as zero, dead, still. Everything that exists gives off some vibration of a certain frequency.

Every planet, every person, every particle.

Musicians know that when a guitar string is plucked on one instrument in a music store, all the other guitars in the same room will vibrate to that tone. Healers refer to this as “entrainment,” when two objects (or people!) in close proximity, vibrating on different frequencies, begin altering their vibrations until they are vibrating at the same, or nearly the same, frequency. The Zero Point Field could act as a field of “entrainment” or resonance, where the vibrations of particles tune to specific frequencies, creating different forms of matter, energy and interactions. Other scientists believe this field has different names.

In 1998, physicist Paul Steinhardt and his colleagues coined a term that would describe a mysterious field of what they believed to be dark energy, or a “fifth essence.” They called it “quintessence.” Based upon an earlier idea proposed by Fermilab physicist Chris Hill and colleague Josh Freeman, quintessence suggested that, like the cosmological constant of Einstein’s vision, this essence fills all of “empty” space with a form of matter-energy that is changeable in strength. Some parts of space might have a thicker quintessence, others a thin “layer,” creating a field of invisible essence that has no direction, like a vector field, only magnitude, like a scalar field.

Described as kinetic energy by Tom Siegfried in Strange Matters, the strength of this field would be measured by how quickly it approaches the zero point. Because quintessence is believed to exert negative pressure, it is said to be a slow rolling scalar field, one that does not change too quickly over a period of time. Whether or not quintessence is the dark energy so eagerly sought by physicists will decide the fate of the universe itself, because of its relationship to expansion. The presence of a negative energy in space would possibly stop the expansion.

Aside from the role quintessence plays in the outcome of our universe’s destiny, it may also play a role in the way matter and energy interacts, or resonates. Nature is filled with signs of the importance of resonance and the beauty of synchronicity. From the physical foundation of all musical composition to the intricate mathematical ratios of the natural world, there seems to be an element of “arrangement” that results in a visible pattern.

Physicist David Bohm believed that underlying the physical, tangible world, there was a far more mysterious, deeper order of “undivided wholeness.” He called the visible world the explicate order, and that deeper world the implicate order, and used the analogy of a flowing stream to describe his realisation of unbroken unity.

“On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.”

Those rather philosophical words came from Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, which he wrote in 1980, and suggested the world of the implicate order was similar to a hologram, where the complex interference patterns appear to be chaotic and disordered to the naked eye, yet on a deeper level possess a pattern that is hidden or “enfolded” into the whole object. Bohm even suggested the universe itself was like a flowing hologram, or “holomovement,” that contained order on an implicate level. The explicate order would be the projection from higher dimensions of reality, and any apparent stability of objects and entities are really a sustained process of enfoldment and unfoldment. Nothing solid is really solid at the implicate level.

Bohm also believed there was a superquantum potential, or a higher “superimplicate” order operating in the universe, and that life and consciousness were enfolded within, with matter appearing in varying degrees of “unfoldment.” He even stated that the separation of matter and spirit is nothing but an abstraction, that the “ground is always one.”

All is Vibration

The study of music (and the patterns of sacred geometry) suggests an invisible, “implicate” vibratory nature. Sympathetic Vibratory Physics is a term assigned to a “musical universe,” an interesting alternative theory of reality proposed by Walter Russell in A New Concept of the Universe. Russell believes that there exists nothing in nature other than vibration. He attempts to create a paradigm of reality using wave and vibration theory based upon the work of John W. Keely’s concepts of a sympathetic vibration that connects all things and energies, and that the harmony of these vibrations creates what we see.

Russell and Keely suggest that music can be thought of as a model of the order found in the universe, with organised vibration or sound following principles of structure and behaviour that make sound into harmonies. These principles mimic those governing other vibratory patterns in the universe.

Take the idea that everything is the result of a vibration, and even Zero Point Energy in the quantum vacuum has been shown to “jiggle” or vibrate. Everything has its “jiggle.” We can go on to say that different things have different “chords” or “vibration signatures,” and that is what makes one thing discernible from the next. Sounds a lot like superstring theory, with tiny, vibrating cosmic strings at the very heart of existence.

Vibrations are dynamic, interacting with one another and their environment, creating different tones and chords and harmonics. In a sense, vibrations are more fundamental to reality than the tiniest subatomic particle, because in a sense, that is what the tiniest particle is… a vibration.

The most exciting thing about this invisible vibratory field, no matter what form it might take, is the potentiality it contains. Potential as a source of all other sources. Potential as a pure energy field upon which all matter is created and thrown out into the explicate order. Potential even is a doorway to other dimensions or levels of reality, where things like ghosts, UFOs and psychic abilities are the norm.

“Subquantum Kinetics” & “Morphogenetic Fields”

Physicist Paul LaViolette writes extensively about “transmuting ether” in his book, Genesis of the Cosmos: The Ancient Science of Continuous Creation. This ether, which is the basis of LaViolette’s theory of “subquantum kinetics,” is described as an active substrate that differs from the mechanical ethers once considered in previous centuries. LaViolette states, “The concentrations of the substrate composing this ether are the energy potential fields that form the basis of all matter and energy in our universe.” The ether reactions cause wave-like field gradients that emerge and form the “observable quantum level structures and physical phenomena,” including the various particles, forces, fields and electromagnetic waves.

Subquantum kinetics, which LaViolette proposes as a unified field theory that fills in the gaps conventional physics cannot, rests on the existence of this “primordial” transmuting ether present throughout space. “The transmuting ether is the wellspring of Creation,” he states, adding that were its activity to diminish, everything physical would cease to exist, coming to a state of “multi-dimensional consciousness” from which the physical universe is generated. A ground state, or Source of all Sources.

Rupert Sheldrake, biologist and co-author of The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination and Spirit refers to this vibratory field as the “morphogenetic field.” This “M-field” (and there can be many M-fields) is an underlying energy field that acts as an organising principle to give form to various levels of reality. He also suggests there is “morphic resonance,” or the resonance of memories sort of like Edgar Cayce’s “Akashic field” or the “collective unconscious” of Carl Jung. These memories shape our minds today, but subconsciously. Sheldrake, who has experimented with psychic pets and animals, theorises that the existence of an invisible field of influence, although unproven, could be the link between humans and their pets. “Morphic fields also contain attractors, which draw organisms towards future states.” This could explain how a dog might pick up a change in the morphic field that lets it know its owner is only a half block away.”

The morphogenetic field itself could be made up of “morphic wavelets” of resonating, vibratory energy that differ in scale and frequency. The wave could have a resonance that synchs up with the resonance of a pet, or a human, who then displays some “psychic” ability to predict a coming earthquake or disaster. And if they are tapping into a field that contains memories of past, present and future, a time landscape so to speak, they could access any event throughout the space/time continuum.

Obviously, it’s not that simple, or we would all be seeing ghosts, aliens, strange creatures, having precognitive dreams, major déjà vu episodes, and reading each other’s minds. But if even one small percentage of the claims of the paranormal is true, someone somehow is figuring out just how to do it.

Terence McKenna, psychedelic visionary and co-author of The Evolutionary Mind, points out: “Once non-locality is accepted, some of the things we’re interested in are permitted – telepathy, information from other worlds arriving by the morphogenetic field, and so on.” We know that experiments have proven non-locality to be a reality on the quantum level. Two particles continue to affect one another at extreme distances. The same actually happens on a macrocosmic level all the time.

The Synchronised Universe

Advanced physics tells us that an event at Point A in the universe does not cause an event in Point B to occur a little later. Actually, both events occur at the same time. Carl Jung used the term “synchronicity” to describe this same phenomenon on a human level. In his amazing book Power Vs. Force, Dr. David R. Hawkins states that a “question can’t be asked unless there’s already the potentiality of the answer… there can be no ‘up’ without an already existent ‘down’.” Synchronicities are evidence of an all-inclusive field that goes against the normal cause-and-effect rationale for events that occur that challenge our illusion of the line between subjective and objective reality.

Perhaps, the universe itself is based upon principles of synchronisation. Physicist Claude Swanson, educated at M.I.T. and Princeton, believes it is. He even believes his “synchronised universe” theory leaves the door wide open for a variety of paranormal phenomena to exist in a reality where our own matter operates in synchronised fashion with everything else.

In his book, The Synchronized Universe, Swanson points out that parallel universes superimposed upon our own can differ in phase or frequency of their synchronisation. Basically, people can only access their own universal “sheet” of existence, and thus believe that is the only one that exists. Same goes for anything moving around on all the other parallel “sheet” universes.

But alter the phase or frequency just so, and an object can disappear from one reality, and appear in another. Like a ghost.

The synchronised universe theory could explain how UFOs can appear and vanish instantly, as reported in hundreds of sightings, and how teleportation might be achieved. It could also explain the existence of “subtle energy,” which, Swanson theorises, arises from the motions coupled across the layers of parallel universes. Subtle energies, Swanson states, are the “coherent structure which crosses several of these parallel realities, and therefore is ‘higher dimensional’.”

The interesting thing about synchronisation is that it allows every particle a fundamental frequency proportional to its mass, and also explains how particles can become synchronised, like those Olympic swimmers, at small scales. This “synchronising” of matter and energy would indeed allow for paranormal events to occur, and would no doubt explain why they might occur in transient, unpredictable ways. Ghosts, out-of-body experiences, remote viewing, psychokinesis and poltergeist activity all may be the result of the synching of particles and matter between various levels of existence, creating a literal means for moving between dimensions of reality.

Swanson states, “Paranormal effects and ‘subtle energy’ cause a synchronisation across adjacent parallel universes. When this occurs, these adjacent universes become to a degree synchronised with ours. The interaction becomes more coherent, more in phase.”

When there is no synchronisation, we experience the other universe or dimension as “random noise.”

Even teleportation fits into the synchronised universe theory. Swanson points out, “The behaviour and position of matter is dependent on its radiation field, which keeps it in place, gives it inertia and allows it to interact with other matter in the universe. If we shift the phases of radiation coming into the particle and coming out of it from the past and the future, we may be able to shift its position.” This may be the key to a form of “hyperdrive” that causes teleportation.

An Explanation for Ghosts?

Physicist F. David Peat suggests that synchronicities are “flaws” in the fabric of reality, momentary fissures that offer those sensitive to them a brief peek into the implicate, underlying order of nature.

We know from the Law of the Conservation of Energy that the total inflow of energy into a system must equal the total outflow of energy from the system, plus the change in the energy contained within the system. In other words, energy never dies. It is converted into another form. Ghosts, if they represent trapped energy, may move between parallel dimensions or universes by this process of synchronisation (possibly using the ZPF as a vehicle for moving between the dimensions) and become visible in our world because they are still energy. Many ghost sightings involve balls of plasma and changes in electromagnetic field measurements, as well as visible signs of energy manipulations. Lights flicker or pop, static appears on radios and televisions, and people report the feeling of their hair rising on their skin or the back of their head. These are also widely reported elements of UFO sightings (stalled car engines, black-outs, phone interference…). Obviously, energy is present, and affecting its environment.

Again, one is reminded of music. When two or more notes are played together, they either create a beautiful harmony, or a noisy discord. The notes that work well together create a resonance. Those that don’t “make sweet music” together create a dissonance.

If paranormal events can only occur when the “right two notes are struck,” then something in the brain, or the body, is responding to those notes and “tuning in” to the phenomena that is otherwise beyond perception. All of these frequencies exist in the field, and… even our brains seem to have access to this field of all possibility.

The Brain Works Like a Hologram

Neurosurgeon Karl Pribram spent decades pondering the secrets of the human brain and memory, and eventually discovered that the brain worked somewhat like a hologram, and that when you first see something, specific frequencies resonate in the brain’s neurons, which then send information about the frequencies to other sets of neurons, and the process continues until your neurons construct an image of what you are looking at. That the brain seems to process information in wave-frequency patterns suggested that human memory could hold amazing amounts of information “in storage,” and, using the same holographic model, be able to access and recall a memory as a three-dimensional image.

The holographic model of the brain could allow for ESP and telepathy, then, by the same process, according to Swanson. “If the sender can cause energy or information to refocus at some other point in space-time using the 4-D holographic principle, then it can be received if a person is there to sense the thought-form.”

Pribram’s brain research didn’t stop with the holographic model and its implications for a variety of interesting abilities. He also showed that the brain acted like a frequency analyser that literally filters out unlimited wave information from the Zero Point Field, where all the information possible existed. This allows the mind to take and use only what it needs, and not be overwhelmed with a bombardment of unnecessary frequencies trying to compete for some “brain time.”

Think about the simple experience of déjà vu, which may be our ability to access, albeit in very small doses, glimpses of ourselves in a parallel universe or dimension, or even the ZPF. When you have déjà vu, you are remembering what is happening to you in the present moment. That doesn’t make sense. If it is happening in the present moment, how can you yet have a memory of it? But if there exist parallel universes that have “branched off” each time we made a different choice, then it makes sense that we would, in many of those universes, be doing the same exact things at the same exact time. Déjà vu may then be our successful attempts to find and synch up with another reality, even just for a minute or two. Or perhaps we are accessing the Zero Point Field, which, like Edgar Cayce’s Akashic Record, supposedly contains the memories of every thought, action or event that ever happened or will ever happen in the universe.

If déjà vu, dreams and out of body experiences, including near death experiences, allow us to wander for a while in other realities, it begs the question – why can’t we easily access these other realities all the time, any time we please? I might suggest that it is because if we could, we would go insane. Information overload. Our brains operate as information sorting machines, only bringing into our perceptive fields what we need to see, hear and know to survive, and hopefully thrive.

That does not prevent us from being able to, when we meditate or go into a trance or zone out at our computer, have a peek into other dimensions of existence.

People do this all the time when they dream, when they know who is on the phone after only one ring, when they get a “bad vibe” about a person they’ve just met. Remote viewers may be tuning into a frequency upon which the information they are either sending or receiving is naturally “broadcasting,” as a psychic might pick up on similar frequencies when doing a reading or having their own clairvoyant episode.

If paranormal elements operate on a different frequency, again we must think of the dog that hears a high-pitched whistle that is soundless to us. Many species of snake have organs that allow them to perceive the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum and “see” the heat of another living thing. Sharks and eels are ultra-sensitive to changes in electrical fields, and some insects can see ultraviolet light. These creatures are obviously observing things we humans simply aren’t built to observe.

Yet somewhere there are humans who can hear these whistles, and sense EMF alterations, just as there are humans that can see auras and other forms of light energy the rest of us cannot. It could just be a matter, then, of the level of one’s consciousness or perception.

Whether energy is synching up, or emerging in a coherent pattern from the ZPF, or moving along a morphogenetic field, or even floating in a sea of quintessence, there is definitely fertile, dynamic ground for the movement of that energy between our world and the world of the paranormal (which could in fact be our own world, or one parallel to ours).

We are limited to our five senses: sight, smell, sound, touch and taste. But what about this sixth sense? Perhaps that is the sense, underdeveloped in most, yet present in all, which allows us to turn on and tune in to the frequencies that reveal the other layers of existence.

I think of years ago, long before cell phones, when I owned a CB radio and loved to listen to motorists and truckers chatter. Occasionally, there would be some bandwidth cross talk from a nearby Ham radio operator. Ghosts, UFOs, and other paranormal events may be cross-talk cutting into our normal bandwidth; chatter from another dimension, or universe, or somewhere in between. We don’t normally hear it because it is usually operating on another frequency altogether, but sometimes signals get crossed. Consciousness may be the key to knowing exactly which frequency to tune into to perceive paranormal phenomena. Think about that the next time you listen to the radio.

Tune into the right frequency and you may find yourself face to face with a ghost.

Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from Psience: How New Discoveries In Quantum Physics And New Science May Explain The Existence Of Paranormal Phenomena © 2007 Marie D. Jones. Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ, USA. 800-227-3371. All rights reserved.
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May 14, 2011
New Dawn & the Tradition of Alternative Publishing

This article was published in New Dawn 126 (May-June 2011)

The origins and influences for a publication as rich and manifold as New Dawn are difficult to trace in any simplistic way, particularly for someone who has come to write for it comparatively late in its development, but all the same a few things can be said.

There has always been a market for publications that cater to the human need to explore the unknown and reach beyond the categories of conventional knowledge and experience. The Theosophist, founded by the noted occultist H.P. Blavatsky in 1879 and dedicated to exploring a wide range of esoteric traditions, is an example from the nineteenth century. In London in 1887, Blavatsky, with fellow Theosophist Mabel Collins, founded another journal, Lucifer, which survived for ten years and whose provocative title has ensured Blavatsky’s notoriety among conservative Christians to this day. Another London-based publication – and one of the most distinguished and fascinating specimens from the early twentieth century – was the monthly Occult Review. Published intermittently between 1905 and 1951, it featured contributors like magus Aleister Crowley; Arthur Edward Waite, co-creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck; and Paul Brunton, author of works such as The Hidden Teaching behind Yoga.

A noted predecessor on the European continent was the French review Planète (“Planet”), published by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier as a follow-up to the sensational success of their 1959 book Morning of the Magicians (first published in English as The Dawn of the Magicians in 1962). The spirit of Pauwels’ and Bergier’s venture could be summed up by this quote from Morning of the Magicians:

Trends of thought that escape the notice of the trained observer; writings and works to which the sociologist pays scant attention, together with social phenomena that he considers too insignificant or too odd to worry about, are perhaps a sure indication of events to come than facts that are there for all to see and the openly expressed opinions and general trend of thinking which cause him serious concern.

And so it has turned out to be, not only for the general public but even for those who are supposed to be in the know. American readers are by now used to reading headlines that say “US Surprised by Developments in [insert nation],” and Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA tells an uninterrupted story of bungling and incompetence in practically every area that much-feared organisation has touched. The good news: if you’re worried about it, it’s probably not that important. The bad news: watch out for things you never even thought of worrying about. One could argue that the role of a genuine alternative press is precisely to register and discuss these things we have never heard of.

In any event, the reach of Planète, which was published between 1961 and 1972, extended into fields such as sociology, futurology, and even literary fiction: Planète was the magazine that first brought the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges to a wide public.

Gnosis & Alternative Media in the US

The alternative press in the United States today owes a great deal to the 1960s counterculture, whose ornate psychedelic newspapers, bizarre and hilarious underground comics, and publications like The Whole Earth Catalog set the tone for alternative publishing for the next generation. For a period extending from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s, publications such as Co-Evolution Quarterly (a spinoff of The Whole Earth Catalog), New Age Journal, Yoga Journal, were investigating the burgeoning spiritual scene in a way that was both sympathetic and critical: many a hypocritical guru got his comeuppance from these magazines. Jay Kinney, an editor for Co-Evolution Quarterly who was also an underground cartoonist, started an influential journal of the Western spiritual traditions in 1985, called Gnosis. Gnosis took its inspiration from a number of influences, some of them (the psychology of C.G. Jung) comparatively well known, others (Gnosticism, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick) then quite obscure.

Gnosis, of which I was editor from 1990 to 1999, with Jay Kinney as publisher and editor-in-chief, was a freewheeling and eclectic quarterly whose contributors included witches, Satanists, Gnostic bishops, and Eastern Orthodox priests. It had the great advantage of being under the auspices of the nonprofit Lumen Foundation, an organisation dedicated to little else than publishing Gnosis. The fact that there was no organisation with its own agenda looking over our shoulders meant that we could publish what we liked. Gnosis dedicated each issue to a specific theme – the ones dedicated to G.I. Gurdjieff and psychedelic spirituality were among our best-sellers. This approach enabled us to go into topics in depth and from a number of different angles, but it had certain commercial disadvantages. Many readers found it more expedient to buy individual issues that interested them (and avoid buying ones that didn’t) rather than subscribing.

Gnosis was able to keep going on an infinitesimal budget until the late 1990s, which saw many casualties among the ranks of small alternative magazines. The 1970s and 1980s had been comparatively good years for these publications in the US. The burgeoning capacity of the Macintosh computer for design and a comparatively low postage rate made it possible for little magazines to grow and even thrive, but toward the end of the century the situation changed dramatically. Independent bookstores – which were major vendors of these magazines – began to fail as two large chains, Barnes & Noble and Borders, began to monopolise the bookselling business. As a result, many small, independent magazine distributors – themselves children of the ’60s – began to collapse as well, often owing publishers tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, the proliferation of the Internet was robbing print media of a great deal of their glamour. It was in this atmosphere that Gnosis closed its doors in 1999. Some larger magazines in the field, notably New Age Journal (today called Body + Soul) and Yoga Journal, taking the hint from their heavily female demographics, survived by recasting themselves into ladies’ lifestyle magazines.

The situation remains to this day. The bookstore chains have retrenched somewhat – Borders filed for bankruptcy this year – but their place has been taken by the Internet giant Amazon, and while independent bookstores are said to be making a comeback, this is a trend that is hardly noticeable to the average reader. For someone of my generation (I was born in 1956), it seems particularly sad that old harbour of refuge for free spirits – the metaphysical bookstore – has more or less vanished. These bookstores were an odd lot, ranging from the superb to the ludicrous. I remember going into one in San Francisco’s North Beach in 1980 and overhearing a conversation that the clerk – a fat lady with eyes made up like a cat’s – was having on the phone. “Well,” she was telling her interlocutor, somewhat impatiently, “we really would have to know what the curse was for…”

Others – Weiser’s in New York, the Bodhi Tree in West Hollywood, even one called The Mystic Eye, on the edge of Harvard Square, which I frequented as an undergraduate – were meccas proffering incense fumes and esoteric knowledge in thick blue volumes to many whose spiritual aspirations did not fit under any known denominational rubric.

Most of these shops are gone now; even New York City, which prides itself on its rich cultural texture as well as on its eccentrics, has only one left. Other parts of the English-speaking world have not been exempt from the trend; London’s largest and most respected esoteric bookshop, Watkins, was closed temporarily in early 2010 until it was bailed out by investors.

In intellectual terms, one major influence on New Dawn has clearly been the British writer and philosopher Colin Wilson, whose persistent investigations into the mind’s unknown capacities – which Wilson calls Faculty X – have inspired countless readers to explore such figures as Crowley, Gurdjieff, and Gregory Rasputin, not to mention the more conventional themes of existentialism and phenomenology. Indeed Wilson started out focusing on mainstream thought in his first book, The Outsider, published in 1956, when he was only twenty-four, but he was fair-minded enough to remain open to alternative views of reality, and covered these sympathetically and brilliantly in later works including The Occult (1969).

James Webb

The occult is rejected knowledge. It may be knowledge which is actively rejected by an Establishment culture, or knowledge which voluntarily exiles itself from the courts of favour because of its recognised incompatibility with the prevailing wisdom. The word “occult” means “hidden,” and in this idea lies the key to the occult’s forbidding appearance. Something may be hidden because of its immense value, or reverently concealed from the prying eyes of the profane. But this hidden thing may also have achieved its sequestered position because the Powers That Be have found it wanting. Either it is a threat and must be buried, or simply useless, and so forgotten.

– James Webb, The Occult Underground

Another influential writer on the occult, James Webb (1946-1980), was neither so open-minded nor so lucky. His works, such as The Occult Underground and The Occult Establishment, are tainted by a curious smug disdain for their subject matter, perhaps influenced by his background: unlike the self-educated Wilson, Webb had a conventional upper-class British education at Harrow and Cambridge. Wilson, who wrote a never-published introduction to The Occult Establishment, observed that the object of Webb’s books was “to demonstrate that ‘the occult’ is merely a curious aberration of the human mind, a proof that man has failed to outgrow primitive superstition, and that one of his most incorrigible characteristics is his longing for the comfort offered by fake messiahs and gurus.”

Webb was nevertheless influential, if not in promoting esoteric themes, at least in presenting them and fitting them into a larger picture of Western cultural currents. In a preface to The Occult Underground, he contended that “to ignore the occult revival of the 19th century is to ignore a large slice of modern intellectual development, and that the proper understanding of the workings of the occult mind explains much which has puzzled commentators on the history of the last fifty years as well.” Webb’s books explore figures such as Blavatsky and the Theosophists, Jiddu Krishnamurti, the French occultists Éliphas Lévi and Joséphin Péladan, as well as the occult influences on more celebrated figures such as William Butler Yeats and Adam Mickiewicz, who is generally regarded as Poland’s greatest poet.

Webb’s last book, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers, was published in 1979, and as a whole reflects both Webb’s strengths and weaknesses as an observer of the esoteric scene. It is thorough and for the most part accurate, and in many ways remains the best treatment of the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky milieu, but like Webb’s other works it is flawed by a condescension toward its subject matter as well as by occasional wild lapses of judgment. In an early chapter, Webb bizarrely tries to prove that Gurdjieff was the same person as Ushe Narzunoff, a Central Asian adventurer, an argument that falls apart as soon as one looks at two photographs of the men (helpfully reproduced in Webb’s book), which display the obviously Asiatic Narzunoff and the equally obviously Caucasian Gurdjieff. (Webb claims, unconvincingly, that the photos were doctored.)

The Harmonious Circle was written in a phase of Webb’s life when he was confronting mental breakdown. Joyce Collin-Smith, sister-in-law of Ouspensky’s disciple Rodney Collin, recalls that at one point he phoned her “saying he was being ‘persecuted’ by his publishers and adding wildly that the French Freemasons had got it in for him.” Moreover, he was no longer quite so capable of treating his material with upper-class British disdain. In a letter to Collin-Smith from this period, he writes, “My life has just emerged from a nightmare…. I had a full scale nervous breakdown, with hallucinations, visions, and a fine repertoire of subjectively supernatural experiences. Hoist with my own petard, I would say. Despite the undoubtedly hallucinatory nature of many of my experiences, a residue remains which I simply have to take seriously. I can’t fit all the altered states of consciousness into one system. Gnosticism and some of the Indian systems seem to provide the best framework.” Not long thereafter he put a shotgun to his head and killed himself.

Webb’s work, though flawed in certain respects, had the great advantage of drawing together many disparate strands of history and thought and weaving them together into a readable and intelligent portrait, and as such he stands as an important precursor not only of New Dawn but of the burgeoning trend, led by Antoine Faivre, emeritus professor at the Sorbonne, to study esotericism as a legitimate part of the Western legacy.

Other influences on New Dawn clearly include another Australian publication, Nexus, which has been published since 1986 and, by its own description, covers “health breakthroughs, future science and technology, suppressed news, free energy, religious revisionism, conspiracy, the environment, history and ancient mysteries, the mind, UFOs, paranormal and the unexplained.” Another, less recognised influence was Critique, a magazine published by Bob Banner out of Santa Rosa, California, in the late 1980s, whose subtitle, “Exposing Consensus Reality,” has been echoed by New Dawn’s “Challenging Consensus Reality.”

What is Consensus Reality?

What, then, is the consensus reality that New Dawn is challenging? It is the idea, reinforced by mainstream media and mainstream thought, that the truth occupies a narrow bandwidth of reality that coincides with the obvious, the predictable, and the knowledge that is supposedly proven and unassailable. We have already seen one good reason for challenging this conventional notion of reality: it has huge blind spots, which are exposed every time some totally unforeseen development – sudden invasions, political upheavals over entire regions, shocking and inexplicable attacks by terrorist groups – shakes the world. The standards of normalcy do not help us very much when we are confronted with these events, which occur precisely when things are not normal – when ordinary systems of justice and economic distribution cease to operate; when large masses of people have no influence on political authority; when individuals feel that their only chance to make their voices heard is through violence. The fact that such incidents occur – and occur with such frequency – indicates that the mainstream perspective is, if not completely wrong, at least seriously incomplete.

Sixteen years ago, in a 1995 interview with GROK magazine, New Dawn editor David Jones observed, “Look at the profile of a ‘successful’ journalist. They know to write within the accepted parameters. They don’t dare say that the ‘emperor has no clothes…’ They certainly don’t want to upset the consensus reality. They’d be out of a job. If you are a mainline journalist you stay on safe ground between the well-defined goal posts…. If you want to be acceptably different you write about the environment…You express outrage over human rights violations a thousand miles away, and put an Amnesty International sticker on your car… That’s your limit.”

“On the immediate level,” Jones added, “New Dawn strives to present the ‘other side of the story.’ And this is just not a convenient cliché.” Regarding the AUM Supreme Truth group, a Japanese new religious movement that carried out a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, Jones said, “The underlying premise of the Establishment media reporting is ‘Oh, these people are a crazy religious cult, ipso facto they’re guilty…. Hey, everyone knows people with strong religious convictions are potential mass-murderers.’ In response, New Dawn asks, ‘What is going on here?… What do these AUM Supreme Truth people actually believe, where are they coming from, and what is their motive, if any?’ Invariably, when you start to dig beneath the sensationalised radio, TV, and newspaper stories, a bigger picture begins to form.” In order to enable readers to draw their own conclusions, New Dawn published the AUM Supreme Truth’s statement of its motives for its acts. (At more or less the same time, Gnosis did something similar, reprinting the official statements of the Solar Temple, a French cult nineteen of whose members had committed mass suicide in October 1994.)

New Dawn started in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, one of the strangest and most ambiguous wars of recent decades. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was on the surface a clear-cut act of aggression, but serious questions remain about the US government’s response to border tensions that had been between Kuwait and Iraq before the invasion took place. At that time, April Glaspie, then American ambassador to Iraq, told Hussein, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait…. [US Secretary of State] James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasise this instruction.” While the US maintained that this did not give Hussein, then an American protégé, carte blanche to invade, he clearly took it as such. Was this merely a colossal blunder on the part of the US State Department? Was it the result of some grand but nefarious strategy for bringing Saddam, and Iraq, to heel?

“New Dawn made its appearance at this time as a photocopied 32-page desktop published zine,” Jones recalls. “Our first issues dwelt on the US war crimes in the Gulf conflict, the dangers of a so-called New World Order run by the UN Security Council on behalf of the big Western powers, economic exploitation of the nations of the global South, and the role of intelligence agencies in international affairs.

“Over the following months we expanded into other ‘controversial’ areas such as the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade, international terrorism, banking, and the subversion of sovereign nations. Gradually our subscription list grew and we had enough money to actually print the magazine. By May 1992 we were printing 1,000 copies of a bimonthly 40-page New Dawn magazine.”

Over the years, New Dawn gave similar coverage to Libya’s alleged role in the Lockerbie airline bombing of 1988; the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993; and the bombings of the Oklahoma City US federal building in 1995.

“It can be a painful experience having your cherished beliefs and conditioned prejudices upset,” Jones observed in the GROK interview. “Depending on a person’s ‘conditioned thinking’ New Dawn, at various times, has been called ‘extreme left-wing,’ ‘extreme right-wing,’ ‘nazi,’ ‘anarchist’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘crazy’… You name it. Christian fundamentalists see Satan, rightists condemn us as left-wing radicals and doctrinaire leftists denounce us as fascist loonies. Our response is, ‘Look in the mirror… what do you see?’

“One prominent Melbourne professional ‘skeptic’ angrily denounced New Dawn on his radio program. Despite the fact that what he said was simply incorrect, it revealed more about his thought-processes or lack of them.” (This last remark serves as a reminder that self-proclaimed “skeptics” and “skeptical inquirers” are among the most bigoted and closed-minded individuals on the current cultural scene.)

New Dawn Readers

If none of these appellations quite fits, who, then, are New Dawn’s readers? In the first place, they are probably independent-minded. Because so much of the material in the magazine challenges political shibboleths on all bands of the political spectrum, readers of this magazine are likely to be neither left-wing nor right-wing in any pure sense of those terms. And this is an important point. There is often a demand for consistency in one’s political beliefs, but this kind of consistency usually amounts to buying one’s beliefs wholesale: if you agree with the left (or the right) on issue X, you are automatically expected to agree with it on issue Y. On the face of it, however, there is no reason that the right, the left, or the centre should have the monopoly on truth. In fact a reasonable person might agree with the American philosopher Ken Wilber, who once observed that no one is brilliant enough to be completely wrong.

Jones has pointed out that New Dawn readers “want something more… Something that transcends the ‘modern’ values, concepts, and relationships that are totally incompatible with nature, as well as with their own inner aspirations, capacities, and identity.

“We’ve got nonconformist, renegade Christians, Muslims, and New Agers. A good percentage of readers are seriously interested in metaphysics, and many would believe, like Camille Paglia, that God is humanity’s most important invention. As expected, New Dawn readers are hyperskeptical of the mainline media and prefer to buy their reading matter at obscure bookshops. There’s a high level of interest in all things alternative, particularly related to health, new science and religion. New Dawn readers don’t feel themselves ‘victims’, just people out to handle the problems of this life, with their sights set on something higher.”

And it may be in the hands of just such people that the destiny of humankind lies. We live in an age that is threatened not so much by the possible triumph of the wrong ideology as by the triumph of ideologues as a whole. Their opposites are free men and women who have abandoned the mental crutches of credos and slogans and taken the responsibility to think and act for themselves.

The Russian esotericist Boris Mouravieff, writing in the 1960s, said that the hope of the world lies in what he called the “new man,” the individual who is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually awake. Can these new men and women be found among the readership of New Dawn? Of course I have no way of knowing. But I remain convinced that those who will form the vanguard of humanity over the next century, and who represent the best prospects for the human race, will share many of the values that New Dawn readers hold most dear.
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May 1, 2011
Increasing Your Life Expectancy: Modern Medicine’s Impact on the Extension of Life

All too often, we hear that the reason life expectancy has been increased is thanks to the marvellous developments in modern medicine. This is a message that is repeated many times and promoted by the medical industry – with little or no evidence.

In fact, the opposite may be the truth. A combination of not understanding the concept of life expectancy, ignoring scientific facts, plus a willingness to take credit when it is not due has seen the medical industry promote itself as the reason we live longer. Behind the scenes, this is little more than a marketing strategy for the big pharmaceutical companies.

Don’t get me wrong; this does not undermine the fantastic role medical doctors play in acute life-saving events. These make a huge contribution to an individual’s life expectancy but make an insignificant contribution to life expectancy for all of us.

The overemphasis of modern medicine on the pharmaceutical model and “silver bullet” approach has led to a disempowerment of individuals over their own health during the past few decades, during which we have seen a huge rise in chronic illness. The more specialists and the bigger the medical budget, the poorer the health of the public.

Let’s take an example: the US uses 50% of the world’s pharmaceuticals and spends more per person on medicine than any other nation, yet has one of the poorest health outcomes in the developed world.

Modern medicine tends to focus on prescriptive treatment of disease, rather than health promotion, prevention and management.^1,2 It is likely that everyday medical care provides little contribution to increased life expectancy of a population.^3,4

Gains in life expectancy worldwide have been greater during lastcentury than at any other time in recorded history.^5,6 Statistical analyses show that since the early 1800s life expectancy at birth has seen a linear rate of increase.⁷

Within this time, it has been human advances in sanitation, increased food supply, improved access to water, and basic preventative medicine that have helped drive these steady increases in the developed world – not pharmaceuticals. The majority of life expectancy gains were made before pharmaceuticals to treat heart attack, stroke and other forms of chronic illness were even developed.

However, it is important to understand the concept of life expectancy. It is the average number of years of life remaining at a given age for a selected population. Life expectancy at birth is commonly used as the main indicator of human health and well-being. It is said to give an indication of the overall mortality of a population.⁵ However, it is a poor indicator of population health.⁸

Life expectancy is poorly understood. Most people think it is increasing the age to which they can live; for example, people at 50 think that they are going to live longer because of an increase in life expectancy. This is not the case. Life expectancy is a statistical anomaly, which takes the average of the age of a person’s death. It includes everyone: infants, children, teenagers right through to those in their old age. This means that if the rates of infant mortality are reduced, the average life expectancy is dramatically increased overall.

A simple example will highlight this. If 50% of the population died before one year of age and 50% of the population died at 80 years of age, the average age of life expectancy is around 40 years even though 50% lived to 80 years of age. If you eliminate the infant mortality the life expectancy goes up to 80 years of age. This does not mean people are living longer, they are still dying at 80 years of age but the statistical average, the “life expectancy,” has increased.

This reduction of child mortality skews the life expectancy.⁹ Statistical analysis has revealed that the trends in cohort geriatric mortality follow those of reducing childhood mortality.¹⁰ This means that benefits from improvements in mortality rates of younger generations provide a false impression of the benefits to older generations. Furthermore, life expectancy at birth can only predict life expectancy with 95% confidence to within a fourteen-year range.⁹

That is, we may live to 80 years of age plus or minus 14 years. Therefore it cannot be trusted as a reliable base to measure contribution of health interventions for whole population life expectancy. Reduced child mortality positively skews life expectancy statistics and gives the misconception of increased population lifespan.^11,9,6

To highlight the problems with this approach even further, the high rate of infant mortality in the 1900s was a result of the advent of pathological anatomy in the 1820s, and consequently the increase in number of conducted autopsies, is correlated to the incidence of fatal childbed fever. The decline in the 1840s and 1850s was a result of hygiene practices that the medical profession battled against for two decades. Why did it take so long?

Research now also shows the supply of doctors has an insignificant relationship within infant mortality,¹¹ that is, the number of doctors has no bearing on infant mortality rates. This becomes apparent when you look at non-medical home birthing rates in the Netherlands of up to 30% and 1% in Australia and the two countries have virtually identical infant mortality rates. But we have significantly higher wheeze, asthma, allergies and eczema, which are associated with interventionist births, in Australia.

Life expectancy at birth does not provide adequate information as to the health or morbidity of a population prior to death.^5,9 Better statistical analyses should be used that incorporate both morbidity and mortality measurements of population health. That is, continued increases in life expectancy in the future should only be considered worthwhile if accompanied by longer periods of good health.¹² More consistent measures like the “potential years of life lost” should be used.⁹

Modern medicine tends to focus on prescriptive treatment of disease rather than preventative avoidance and health management.¹³ We need to re-establish the balance between disease prevention for a population, as opposed to only treating consequences of disease to prolong individual life.¹⁴

Billions of dollars are spentinventing and testing new drugs that only marginally extendthe benefits of those they replace, instead of using existing resourcesto better deliver effective services.¹⁵ Despite the billions of dollars spent, there is no population-based data to allow the direct connection of prescriptive medical care to the extension of life.⁴ In fact, numerous studies have shown the opposite.

A major Australian study found an association between increasing mortality and an increase in the doctor supply,¹¹ which is attributed to increasing adversities or complications caused by or resulting from medical treatment within society.¹¹ This is known as autogenesis and has been the subject of much study. Depending upon how one uses statistics, autogenesis is now considered either first, second or third in comparison to cancer and cardiovascular rates. It is one of the biggest killers; most iatrogenic deaths are due to undesired effects of drugs when taken at a normal dose. In Australia alone, thousands of people die prematurely every year as a result of prescription drugs.

There is no evidence to link increased medical spending and health outcomes, with many lower-spending nations such as Cuba tending to have better outcomes than higher-spending nations such as America.¹⁶ It is fascinating to consider that despite having one of the lowest doctor-to-patient ratios in the developed world, Okinawans and the Seventh Day Adventists living in California can expect one of the highest life expectancies.¹⁷

Modern medicine cannot be given credit for increasing life expectancy at birth. Theory suggests that with increasing doctor supply, a population becomes increasingly dependent on their services to maintain health and ultimately neglects the more important lifestyle factors that contribute to longer, healthier life.¹⁸

To the peril of preventative health care, there is often more short-term political capital to be gained from the construction of hospitals and investments in curative technology than from alleviating the causes of ill health.^16,17

With obesity and heart disease emerging as leading causes of mortality in the developed world, we must ask where life expectancy is headed in the future and give more political weight to preventative care. Theories of a time lag effect suggest a possible regression of life expectancy in the future, even with better health outcomes during infancy, which may very well be a result of contemporary approaches to healthcare.^19,20

Nowadays few people are ignorant of the dangers of smoking, drug and alcohol misuse, driving while intoxicated, risky sexual behaviour, fatty diets and so on.¹⁶ Reduction in these contributors to premature mortality must be considered significant for life expectancy gains.¹¹ The cost of smoking cessation to save a life, not to mention the reduction in suffering and morbidity, is in the hundreds to a few thousand dollars per person²¹ and a recent Australian study reported favourable cost-effectiveness for smoking interventions, physicalactivity interventions and multiple behaviour interventionsin high-risk groups.²²

Okinawa, Japan boasts one of the longest life expectancies for its population in the world.^23,17 There are also a significantly large population of centenarians living within the region.¹ Despite being one of the poorest regions in Japan and being the bottom ranked in socioeconomic indicators for the country, Okinawa ranks at the top for its populations health and life expectancy.²⁴ Okinawan people tend to live long and, most importantly, healthy lives. This is attributed to diet, high levels of physical activity, and strong cultural values that include good stress-coping abilities.¹⁷

It just so happens that Okinawa culture embraces Hara Hachi Bu, which means to eat only until 80% full.²⁵ Caloric restriction is the only consistently reproducible experimental means of extending mean and maximum lifespan. Laboratory experiments show markedly decreased morbidity in laboratory mammals that are fed to only 80% full.^25,26 Much of the developed world stands to learn from this, as obesity linked to poor eating habits is an ever-increasing epidemic.

Studies on populations with Okinawan ancestry living in Hawaii have supported claims that epigenetics are more influential to longevity than genetics.²⁴ That is, Okinawans who leave the island do not live as long as those who live on the island. Furthermore, studies on the oldest living natural population in the world, the Seventh Day Adventists living in California, support these findings.¹²

Any gains in life expectancy have to be seen in the context of the healthy habits in which a population engages. Those living longer – 80 years or more – right now were born in the 1920s and 1930s. They developed healthy eating and lifestyle habits that many of them still practice. It is unlikely that the next generation will enjoy these longer and healthier years due to poor habits.

Our reliance on doctors and prescription medicine to ensure population longevity appears to be very narrow in light of its historical contribution to health. Starting down the right path with appropriatenutrition and lifestyle are important componentsof healthy aging and increasing your life expectancy.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Sean Allen for contributing to the research in this article.

Professor Peter Dingle’s book on the truth about cholesterol and cholesterol lowering medication, The Great Cholesterol Deception, is available from all good bookstores or order at www.drdingle.com.

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FOOTNOTES

1. Raskin and Ripoll 2004

2. Riley 2001

3. Kamerow 2007

4. Bunker 2001

5. Michaud 2001

6. Yin et al. 1985

7. Oeppen and Vaupel 2002

8. Robine 1999

9. Murray 1988

10. Cramming 2006

11. Richarson and Peacock 2003

12. Fraser 2001

13. Riley 2001

14. Dyer 2002

15. Kamerow 2007

16. Hunter 2003

17. WHO 2008

18. Illich 1975

19. Terry et al. 2008

20. Olshansky 2005

21. Cummings et al. 1987

22. Gordon et al 2007

23. Oeppen and Vaupel 2002

24. Cockerham 2008

25. Willcox et al. 2006

26. Bryant 2004

Steven R. Cummings, MD; Susan M. Rubin, MPH; Gerry Oster, The Cost-effectiveness of Counseling Smokers to Quit. JAMA. 1989;261(1):75-79.

Gordon L, N. Graves ,A. Hawkes, and E. Eakin A review of the cost-effectiveness of face-to-face behavioural interventions for smoking, physical activity, diet and alcohol. Chronic Illness, Vol. 3, No. 2, 101-129 (2007)

Aaron, S, Ferguson, D. 2008. Exaggeration of treatment benefits using the “event-based” number needed to treat. Canadian medical association journal (Online) Vol 179, iss. 7, accessed: 12/01/09 via Google Scholar.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2008. Australia’s national agency for health and welfare statistics and information, Australian Government http://www.aihw.gov.au/

Bryant, R, 2004. Live longer: cut calories, exercise more. Dermatology Times: Clarifying Cosmetic Dermatology, International journal of epidemiology (Online) Vol 25, accessed : 09/12/09 via ProQuest.

Bunker, J, 2001. The role of health care in contributing to health improvements within societies, International epidemiological association, (Online) Vol 30, accessed : 12/01/09 via Oxford Journals Online.

Cockerham, W, Yamori, Y, 2008. Okinawa: an exception to the social gradient of life expectancy in Japan, (Online), accessed: 09/12/09 via Google Scholar.

Crimmins, E, Finch, C, 2006. Commentary: Do older men and women gain equally from improving childhood conditions?, (Online) Vol. 35, accessed: 12/01/09 via Google Scholar.

Dyer, O, 2002. Simple measures could increase life expectancy by 5-10 years. British Medical Journal (Online) Vol. 985, iss. 325, accessed: 17/01/09 via ProQuest.

Fogel, W, 2004. The escape from hunger and premature death, 1700-2100. Europe America and the third world. University of Chicago, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Fraser, G, Shavlik, D, 2001. ten years of life, is it a matter of choice?, (Online) Vol. 161, accessed: 11/01/09 via Google scholar.

Halvorsen, P, Selmer, R, Kristiansen, I, 2007. Different Ways to Describe the Benefits of Risk-Reducing Treatments: A Randomized Trial. Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 12, 848-856, accessed: 19/01/09 via ProQuest.

Hunter, D, 2003. Public health policy, Blackwell publishing, Oxford, UK.

Illich, 1975. Medical Nemesis, Calder and Boyars, London. (Online Book) Vol. 161, accessed: 11/01/09 via Google scholar.

Kamerow, D, 2007. Today’s doctor’s dilemma. British Medical Journal, Vol. 12, 848-856, accessed: 19/01/09 via Oxford Journals Online.

Lubson, J, Hoes, A, Grobbee, D, 2000. Implications of trial results: The potentially misleading notions of number, (Online) Vol. 356, accessed: 04/01/09 via Google scholar.

Martien, P, 2007. Who wants to live forever? Three arguments against extending the human lifespan. Journal of Medical Ethics (Online) Vol. 585, Iss. 33 accessed: 09/12/09 via ProQuest.

Murray, C, 1988. The Infant Mortality Rate, Life Expectancy at Birth, and a Linear Index of Mortality as Measures of General Health Status, International Journal of Epidemiology (Online) Vol. 17, Iss. 1 accessed: 09/12/09 via ProQuest.

Michaud, C, Murray, C, Bloom, B, 2001.Burden of Disease – Implications for Future Research, Vol. 285, accessed: 07/01/09 via Oxford Journals Online.

Nakaji, S, Domhnall, M, O’Neill, S, McNally, O, Baxter, D, Sugawara, K, 2003.

Life expectancies in the United Kingdom and Japan, Journal of Public Health Medicine (Online) Vol. 25, Iss. 2 accessed: 15/12/09 via ProQuest.

Oeppen, J, Vaupel, J, 2002. Broken limits to life expectancy, Academic research library, Vol 296. accessed: 15/12/09 via Sciencemag.

Olshansky, J, Passaro, J, Hershow, R, Layden, J, Carnes, B, Brody, J; Hayflick, L Butler, R, Allison, Ludwig, D, 2005. A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century. Obstetrical & Gynecological Survey. Vol. 60 Iss. 7, accessed: 09/01/09 via Oxford Journals Online.

Raskin, I, Ripoll, C, 2004. Can an Apple a Day Keep the Doctor Away? Current Pharmaceutical Design (Online) Vol. 27, Iss. 10 accessed: 09/12/09 via ProQuest.

Richarson, J, Peacock, S, 2003. Will More Doctors Increase or Decrease Death Rates?, An econometric analysis of Australian mortality statistics, Centre for health programme evaluation, Working paper 137, Monash University, Australia.

Riley, J, 2001. Rising life expectancy: a global history, Cambridge University Press, New York, (Online book) accessed : 20/12/08 via Google Scholar.

Robine, J, Romieu, I, Cambois, E, 1999. Health expectancy indicators, World Health Organization, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, (Online) Vol 77, Iss 2 accessed : 11/01/09 via Google Scholar.

WHO, 1999. Making a difference, World Health Report, World Health Organisation, http://www.who.int/whr/1999/en/index.html

WHO 2002. Reducing risks, promoting healthy life. World Health Report, World Health Organisation,http://www.who.int/whr/2002/chapter1/en/index.html

WHO 2008. Statitstical information system. World Health Organisation, http://www.who.int/whosis/data/Search.jsp

Willcox, C, Willcox, B, Hidemi, T, Curb, D, Suzuki, M, 2006. Caloric restriction and human longevity: what can we learn from the Okinawans? (Online) accessed: 15/12/09 via ProQuest.

Yin, P, Shine M, 1985. Misinterpretations of Increases in Life Expectancy in Gerontology Textbooks, The Cerontological Society of America (Online) Vol. 25, Iss.1 accessed : 15/12/09 via ProQuest.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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March 9, 2011
Stan Gooch & the Neanderthal Legacy

From New Dawn 125 (Mar-Apr 2011)

On the 13th of September 2010, in a Swansea, South Wales hospital, an embittered and reclusive man, hailed as a genius by some, yet marginalised by many mainstream scientists and academics, passed away at the age of seventy-eight.¹

In his later years Stan Gooch lived “virtually destitute” in “a rented caravan in a nearly abandoned Welsh trailer park – with neither telephone nor computer, his correspondence inked on the backs of galley proofs, and scarce personal contact – wholly lacking family, right at life’s raw edge.”²

This was the sad end for a man who made incredibly original contributions to our understanding of the origins and nature of our own humanity. Colin Wilson once wrote of Gooch, “It has seemed to me for many years that Stan Gooch is one of the most underrated writers of our time.”³ We agree with this assessment.

Born in 1932 among the slums of southern London to working-class parents, Gooch raised himself from his dreary surroundings, ultimately earning a degree in Modern Languages at King’s College, London, and a degree in Psychology at Birkbeck College, London.⁴ After spending time, between earning his degrees, variously working in the scrap metal business, teaching in Coventry (English Midlands), and serving as “Head of Department” in a London grammar school, in 1964 Gooch was appointed a senior research psychologist at the National Children’s Bureau. He wrote scholarly articles and coauthored books on psychology.

On the surface it seemed that Gooch was off to a respectable and potentially prosperous career.⁵ However, Gooch’s life would take a different turn, driven by his overwhelming interest in two subjects that on the surface might seem quite distinct, but for Gooch were intimately related: 1) psychical research (the paranormal, or what is now often referred to as parapsychology) and 2) understanding and reconstructing the mental and cultural world of Neanderthals and their bearing on modern humanity.

Ultimately Gooch gave up his secure position, turning down both the directorship of the National Children’s Bureau, and a professorship of Psychology at Brunel University, London, to pursue his research and writing full-time.

Unfortunately for Gooch, his books never had the mass appeal, with the concomitant income, he hoped for. Furthermore, psychical research is a subject that is viewed as fairly marginal at best by most academics, and Gooch’s conclusions concerning Neanderthal mentality and culture diverged so radically from the common conceptions of the time that mainstream scholars systematically ignored his work.

At the time of his death Gooch was depressed, bitter, and even angry that his ideas had not garnered the recognition that he felt they rightfully deserved. Perhaps he was ahead of his time, as many of his ideas about Neanderthals in particular are now being independently confirmed (although still generally without citing or crediting Gooch).

From the Paranormal to Neanderthals

While teaching in Coventry in the late 1950s, Gooch began attending weekly séances, his introduction to the paranormal. This sparked a deep lifelong interest in psychic phenomena. Moreover, Gooch found that he personally had telepathic and mediumistic talents. At one séance Gooch and the other members of the circle became aware of “a crouching, ape-like shape” in the corner of the room that “approximated to most people’s idea of what an ancient cave-man would look like.”⁶ After a while the figure faded away and the séance continued.

Nearly two decades later Gooch would write,

As regards the figure of the cave-man, which so very much impressed and haunted me both then and afterwards (in a wholly agreeable way, I must add) – I had [not] and could not have had any inkling that one day I would write books about Neanderthal man.⁷

Gooch summarised his own work during this period as

Looking always for further knowledge about the human condition, I was at the same time prospecting for a framework which could accommodate all the information that was accumulating.⁸

Ultimately Gooch developed a framework and theory of human personality in terms of dualities, such as unconscious versus consciousness, religion versus science, magic versus logic, dreaming versus waking. In his list are two key comparisons: psychic phenomena versus materialism, and Neanderthal man versus modern man.⁹

Gooch’s great insight was that while modern humans might manifest occasional psychic phenomena,¹⁰ Neanderthals “certainly possessed abilities in respect of the purely paranormal that far exceeded our own.”¹¹ According to Gooch, we modern humans are literally the result of the dualities coming together, the biological interbreeding of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (that is so-called “modern humans,” Homo sapiens) and the melding of Neanderthal religious beliefs and cultural practices with Cro-Magnon societal elements even as Cro-Magnons may have come to physically dominate, and even apparently exterminate, the earlier Neanderthals.

The Neanderthal Question

Who, or what, the Neanderthals were has been a much discussed issue ever since their remains were first recognised in the middle nineteenth century.¹² The popular conception of Neanderthals is that of big-browed, short, stocky, stooping, grunting, ape-like cave men (and women) eking out a meagre existence during the harsh conditions of ice age Europe, the Near East, and Southwest Asia.

Classic Neanderthals in Europe date from around 130,000 years ago to perhaps as recently as 24,000 years ago in Gibraltar, but Neanderthal characteristics and antecedents are seen in fossil forms going back to perhaps half a million years ago or earlier.

In many people’s minds Neanderthals are a primitive side branch of the human tree at best, a totally separate species from us, that was driven to extinction by the more intelligent and better armed “Cro-Magnon Man” group (archaic Homo sapiens, essentially the direct ancestors of living humans) who progressively migrated from East Africa into Eurasia during the period of about 60,000 to 30,000 years ago.¹³

Stan Gooch had a very different view of the place and importance of Neanderthals – in Gooch’s view modern humanity is a result of the intermixing, both biologically and culturally, of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal elements. In his words,

A biological supernova occurred when Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal man met. We can, if we will listen, still clearly hear the echoes of that explosion and observe its after-effects… [B]ehind these echoes and tendrils we can also then detect the still fainter traces of Neanderthal civilisation itself, and hear the still fainter echoes of falling cities of dreams.¹⁴

According to Gooch, Neanderthals possessed an intricate, psychically-charged, magical culture.¹⁵ Neanderthals built a long-lasting “high civilisation of dreams.”¹⁶ Neanderthal culture, more sophisticated than that of the Cro-Magnons when they first arrived in Europe, served as a primary source for much so-called ancient wisdom.

Gooch argued that Neanderthals were the original creators, the innovators, of high culture, of symbolic values and religious sensibilities, which early modern humans (Cro-Magnons) copied and adopted without genuine understanding. Neanderthal culture was not a civilisation of high technologies, but one of the mind and spirit that survives today in our beliefs, myths, folklore, and religious practices.

Neanderthal Culture

Neanderthals developed in time a culture of the mind of a very high order, but also of a strangeness that is extremely difficult for us to imagine.

Neanderthals, according to Gooch, worshipped the cave bear, the spider, and the serpent – animals with whom they shared their caves. Neanderthals were the first humans to fully develop religious cults, and cave bear worship was their most significant cult. Neanderthals worshipped the number 13, associated with the moon and the lunar calendar, a number that is still considered magical today. Neanderthals developed a profound knowledge of crystals and minerals. According to Gooch, Neanderthals developed their own unique symbols, signs, and sophisticated language systems.¹⁷

Neanderthals weaved and sewed embroidery, wore jewellery, painted their faces and bodies, danced, had an elaborate mythology and cosmology, built stone circles, utilised sacred fires, and made ceremonial sacrifices. They had their own grand celebrations and feasts, which were spectacularly colourful and creative performances.

They worshipped the moon and other celestial bodies including constellations still worshipped today worldwide such as The Big Bear, Little Bear, and Draco (the dragon or serpent in the sky). Gooch asserted that Neanderthals had a strong religious life, based on an earth-magic religion, and they believed in the afterlife, practicing complex burial rituals.¹⁸

Neanderthals, as Gooch emphasised, were capable of great cultural innovations that included wearing jewellery and decorating their bodies and faces with colourful paints for special ceremonies. There is evidence that the sophisticated Chatelperronian culture of France belonged to the Neanderthals and not, as was formerly believed, to modern humans.¹⁹ This culture included symbolic artefacts, such as jewellery. The Uluzzian culture in Italy, also now attributed to Neanderthals, is another example – an innovative culture that included a variety of very sophisticated tools that were similar to modern humans’ tools.²⁰ Neanderthals in Spain were painting perforated shells for decoration, using pigments, and engaged in other ritual behaviour.²¹ As archaeologist João Zilhão, has stated,

The one thing these finds make clear is that Neanderthals were behaviourally modern. They were not like early modern humans anatomically, but they were cognitively as advanced or more so.²²

In many ways Neanderthal culture and Cro-Magnon culture were diametrically opposed. Gooch wrote,

I believe the actuality of Neanderthal man – of whom archaeologists find only a handful of skeletons, a few altars, traces of ritualised burial, a range of flint tools, and an apparent knowledge of herbal remedies – was this: his was a moon-goddess-worshipping, matriarchal, food-gathering society, where women governed all matters. The only tasks delegated specifically to men were those where muscle power was directly and literally required, as in fighting, for example. The structure and nature of Cro-Magnon life was diametrically opposite. This was a patriarchal, hunter-warrior society, of which men governed all aspects, including religious life. Women were mere adjuncts in all things, whose main purpose was to bear sons and to comfort and care for the male. The supreme deity worshipped was the sun god.²³

Gooch believed that Neanderthals were a mostly nocturnal species, and came out at night. Observing the skies and the moon for thousands of generations, they had become experts in all phenomena of the stars, having a great understanding of cycles and time, equinoxes and solstices, the phases of the moon.

Cro-Magnons would have come to know Neanderthal religion and knowledge initially through secret observation during 10,000 years (or more) of co-existence. When Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe they were shocked by the knowledgeable Neanderthals, and wanted the Neanderthal magic for themselves; so, they slowly and carefully spied on Neanderthals, copied them, and in the process stole all of their knowledge and wisdom, including writing systems and rituals.

The meeting of Classic Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons in Europe some 35,000 years ago was an immense culture shock for both parties… The two species were culturally opposite to each other in every way.²⁴ At the purely psychological/cultural level,… Neanderthal dealt Cro-Magnon a culture-shock of such magnitude that its consequences are still with us today. Though it left little physical trace, there is in fact… not one aspect of our present lives, our attitudes and our institutions which does not today bear that ancient [Neanderthal] culture’s stamp.²⁵

According to Gooch, Cro-Magnon was dazzled by the religious rituals, symbolism, cosmology, and deep intimate knowledge of the natural world the Neanderthals possessed.

Cro-Magnon took over all the ‘magic’ and ritual of Neanderthal for his own. But he took it over without any real understanding of most of it, and also with certain appropriate changes to suit his own world view, his own existing social structure, his own biological imperatives. He took over essentially empty forms, while losing the priceless content.²⁶

The Cerebrum and Cerebellum

The vertebrate brain includes the cerebrum and the cerebellum. In modern humans the cerebrum consists of the cerebral hemispheres that fill most of the skull. In humans the cerebellum is smaller than the cerebrum and situated at the back of the head tucked behind and under the cerebrum. Gooch points out that essentially the cerebrum and the cerebellum are two different brains (“we are each of us ‘in two minds’”²⁷) that correspond to two different ways of approaching the world (“Two Brains – and Two Universes”²⁸). The cerebrum is associated with “logical” and “rational” thinking, versus the cerebellum is associated with “dreaming” and “magic.”

[T]he cerebellum… is responsible for trance states, for dreams, for telepathy, for psychic healing, for spontaneous wounds, for poltergeist phenomena, and all other such matters. It is also the source of and the impetus for religious belief.²⁹

Here we have the anatomical/physiological explanation for the duality of human personality. The Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal brains both consisted of larger cerebrums and smaller cerebellums, but the Neanderthal brain had a much larger and more powerful cerebellum than that found in Cro-Magnons. The more developed Neanderthal cerebellum gave rise to their “high civilisation of dreams.”³⁰

Neanderthals developed a deep understanding of the natural world, but they did not necessarily do so in the rational, logical, “scientific” manner that modern humans have come to expect and accept. “I think that they [the ancients, Neanderthals]” Gooch stated, “obtained their knowledge not logically and scientifically but intuitively.”³¹

Hybridisation Between Neanderthals & Cro-Magnons

The taxonomic status of Neanderthals has long been debated. Were they a species distinct from modern humans? Even if they were a distinct species, could they have interbred with our species, at least to a limited extent?³² Or were Neanderthals simply a subspecies or variety of our own species? Is the grouping of fossil forms currently labelled “Neanderthals” actually a collection of different types of humans, perhaps different species or varieties or races? Gooch believed there were several different varieties of Neanderthals, separated geographically and temporally, in Europe, Africa,³³ the Middle East, and Asia. Furthermore, a key point of his thesis is that Neanderthals, at least some Neanderthals, could and did interbreed with our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons.

In recent decades it has become apparent that human diversity tens of thousands of years ago was much more complex than previously believed. Some 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, for instance, there may have been half a dozen or more distinct species of humans inhabiting Earth. Besides Cro-Magnons (archaic Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) in Eurasia, in what is now modern Indonesia there was the diminutive “hobbit” form Homo floresiensis³⁴ as well as apparently the last remnant populations of Homo erectus.³⁵ In southern Africa were found the Boskop people, Homo capensis, reputedly with brains 25 to 35 percent larger than those of modern humans.³⁶ In Siberia about the same time there was another population of humans, who may have been a species distinct from those listed above (though perhaps most closely related to Neanderthals), at present simply referred to as the “Denisovans.”³⁷ To add to the list, the indigenous aboriginal Homo sapiens populations of Australia and New Guinea may have been relatively isolated for the last 50,000 years or more.³⁸

Leaving aside at this time the issue of the numerous other human species (how they interacted with one another, and what contributions they made to the modern human lineage, remain open questions), Gooch believed that aggressive and battle-skilled Cro-Magnons both massively exterminated some populations of Neanderthals and also interbred with them. He wrote,

The genetic crossing of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal produced not just (a) highly gifted individuals (‘the mighty men of old, the men of renown’) but (b) an entirely new species of human – ourselves…. [T]his new product was… either entirely or very largely due to Cro-Magnon men fertilising Neanderthal women – not the other way around. These offspring would have been accepted into Cro-Magnon groups…. And so Neanderthal genes were introduced into the Cro-Magnon gene pool…³⁹

This was a radical, unconventional view – to believe that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals interbred and therefore Neanderthal genes should still be found among us. However, recent studies of the Neanderthal genome reveal that today an estimated 1% to 4% of the modern Eurasian genome appears to come from Neanderthals.⁴⁰ That is, Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons must have interbred. Gooch’s ideas appear to be corroborated! (As an aside, we can also point out Gooch suggested that at least some Neanderthals may have been redheaded, another prediction since corroborated by modern science.⁴¹)

Gooch also asserted that Neanderthals never fully went extinct, writing,

[A]ctual Neanderthals at this very moment in time – that is, now, today – still survive and live at the edges of our civilisation…⁴²

Gooch cites, for instance, the research of anthropologist Myra Shackley, who tantalisingly suggests that the legendary Almas (“wildmen”) of the Caucasus and Outer Mongolia may in fact represent relict Neanderthals.⁴³ In one famous account a female Almas was captured in the nineteenth century. She was described as having skin of “a grayish-black colour, covered with reddish hair, longer on her head than elsewhere… She had a large face with big cheek bones, muzzle-like prognathous jaw and large eyebrows, big white teeth and a ‘fierce expression’.”⁴⁴ She sounds very much like a Neanderthal! First kept for some years in a stone enclosure, she later was kept in a cage, and finally in a house. She learned to obey simple orders and used branches and stones as tools. She became pregnant by her captors and while her first several infants died, she subsequently gave birth to two sons and two daughters who in turn produced children of their own via mating with other humans. This is all in line with Gooch’s hypotheses concerning Neanderthals. Note that the “primitive” state of the Almas may be because they are relict populations who have degenerated from the Neanderthal prime of 50,000 or so years ago.

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The Neanderthal Legacy

The Neanderthals left us a lasting legacy, one that remains an undercurrent of modern human psychology, society, and culture. It is important, even critical, to understand this Neanderthal legacy – and the work of Stan Gooch may provide the fundamental key to unlocking the secrets of the Neanderthals.

We are personally further exploring, testing, and developing Gooch’s ideas concerning Neanderthal culture, including through first-hand study of the evidence, such as sites visited and used by Neanderthals. Thus during the summer of 2010 we mounted a small expedition to Neanderthal territory, including caves where Neanderthal remains have been found, in the Bucegi Mountains region of Romania. Rather than hypothetically reconstruct Neanderthal lifestyles and modes of thinking purely intellectually, our aim is to actually experience (as much as possible) what it was like to have been a Neanderthal. Future potential research includes attempting to reconstruct Neanderthal rituals and cave usage, for instance. This may be a tall order, but we are sanguine about the prospects.

We will close with a final tantalising note on the life and death of Stan Gooch. At the end of his last book, Gooch writes

The number thirteen figures centrally in my work because it is the most important number of the moon religion [according to Gooch, the religion of the Neanderthals]. And it just so happens that I was born on June 13 [1932]. And the day, it just so happens, was a Monday. And Monday is, of course, Moon Day.⁴⁵

Gooch died on 13 September 2010, which also just happened to be a Moon Day. “Well, well, well…” (as Gooch himself might have written⁴⁶).

The above was co-authored by OANA R. GHIOCEL who received an M.A. in Documentary and Audio Production from Emerson College and she holds previous degrees in screenwriting and filmmaking. Born in Bucharest, Romania, she is an award-winning media producer, consultant, and screenwriter, and currently the Vice-President of Hyperion Media Inc. She has done extensive research on Neanderthals.

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Books by Stan Gooch:

Total Man, Allen Lane, 1972.

Personality and Evolution, Wildwood House, 1973.

The Neanderthal Question, Wildwood House, 1977.

The Paranormal, Harper and Row, 1978.

Cities of Dreams (subtitle on the cover of the 2001 paperback edition: When Women Ruled the Earth), Aulis Books, 1995, reprinted 2001.

The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals: Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom, Inner Traditions, 2006.

The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind, Inner Traditions, 2007.

The Neanderthal Legacy: Reawakening Our Genetic and Cultural Origins, Inner Traditions, 2008.

Footnotes

1. Anonymous, “Stan Gooch 1932-2010”, posted at www.aulis.com/index.html (Accessed 23 October 2010); Geoff Ward, “A Sad End for Reclusive Writer Stan Gooch”, posted 26 October 2010, www.suite101.com/content/a-sad-end-for-reclusive-writer-a301122 (Accessed 20 November 2010).

2. Brent Logan, “An Urgent Appeal to Help the Acclaimed Author, Stan Gooch”, posted at www.brentlogan.net/sg/stan_gooch.htm (Accessed 8 June 2009).

3. Colin Wilson, posted 11 September 2007 under the title “Colin Wilson writes about me”, posted on a Stan Gooch blog at www.myspace.com/stangooch/blog/308876837 (Accessed 9 June 2009); for other comments by Wilson on Gooch, see for instance: Colin Wilson, Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals: 100,000 Years of Lost History, Rochester, Vermont: Bear and Company, 2006 (pp. 272-277, 281), and various remarks in Colin Wilson, Mysteries, New York: A Wideview/Perigee Book, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978/1980.

4. For biographical details, see: Brent Logan, “Stan Gooch, Biography”, posted at www.brentlogan.net/sg/bio.htm (Accessed 8 June 2009); “Colin Wilson writes about me” (note 3, above); and autobiographical comments in Stan Gooch, The Paranormal, New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

5. Of the time around during which he was at the National Children’s Bureau, Gooch comments dryly, “I was also married and divorced. So there were events enough to take up my days.” (The Paranormal [note 4], 17)

6. Gooch, The Paranormal, 7.

7. Gooch, The Paranormal, 8.

8. Gooch, The Paranormal, 17.

9. Gooch, The Paranormal, 18; Gooch outlined his theory of human personality in the following trilogy: Stan Gooch, Total Man, London: Allen Lane, 1972; Stan Gooch, Personality and Evolution, London: Wildwood House, 1973; and Stan Gooch, The Neanderthal Question, London: Wildwood House, 1977.

10. For a review of Gooch’s ideas on the paranormal, see Louis Proud, “Forces of the Unconscious Mind: Exploring the Work of Stan Gooch”, New Dawn 105 (November-December 2007), posted at www.newdawnmagazine.com/Article/Forces_of_the_Unconscious_Mind.html (Accessed 15 December 2008); see also Stan Gooch, The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2007 (Originally published under the title Creatures from Inner Space, London: Rider, 1984).

11. Stan Gooch, The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals: Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2006, 105 (Originally published under the title Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom, London: Wildwood House, 1979).

12. Neanderthal is alternatively spelled Neandertal. The species Homo neanderthalensis was named in 1864 (see William King, “The Reputed Fossil Man of Neanderthal”, The Quarterly Journal of Science, 1, 88-97 with two lithographic plates [January 1864]) based on a skullcap found in the Neander Valley, Germany, in 1856 and first described in 1857, although remains subsequently recognized as Neanderthal had been found earlier in Belgium and Gibraltar. For general information on Neanderthals, see the following (and references cited therein): Clive Finlayson, The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; C. David Kreger, “Homo neanderthalensis”, posted at www.archaeologyinfo.com/homoneaderthalensis.htm (Accessed 5 January 2011); Dennis O’Neil, “Evolution of Modern Humans: Neandertals”, posted at anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_2.htm (Accessed 5 January 2011); James Shreeve, The Neanderthal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins, New York: Harper Perennial, 1996; Robert Munro, “The Rise and Progress of Anthropology” (Address delivered 7 May 1894), Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 20, 215-244 with a plate (1895).

13. For background information, see discussion in Erik Trinkaus, “European early modern humans and the fate of the Neandertals”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104 (18), 7367-7372 (1 May 2007).

14. Stan Gooch, Cities of Dreams (subtitle on the cover of the 2001 paperback edition: When Women Ruled the Earth), London: Aulis Books, 1995, reprinted 2001, 7 (first published as Cities of Dreams [subtitle on the dust jacket of the hardback edition: The rich legacy of Neanderthal Man which shaped our civilisation], London: Rider [An imprint of Century Hutchinson], 1989).

15. Our summary of Gooch’s ideas concerning Neanderthals is based primarily on his books The Neanderthal Question (note 9), The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals (note 11), Cities of Dreams (note 14), and Stan Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy: Reawakening Our Genetic and Cultural Origins, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2008.

16. Gooch, Cities of Dreams, 242 (Chapter 16 title).

17. Paleogeneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox discovered that modern humans and Neanderthals share a version of a gene called FOXP2, associated with language abilities. Most likely Neanderthals were able to speak their own languages, exactly as Gooch predicted. See Zach Zorich, “Should We Clone Neanderthals? The Scientific, Legal, and Ethical Obstacles”, Archaeology 63 (2) (March/ April 2010), available from www.archaeology.org/1003/etc/neanderthals.html (Accessed 6 January 2011).

18. For instance, Neanderthal burials with flowers were discovered at Shanidar Cave in Northern Iraq, indicating complex mortuary rituals. See Ralph Solecki, Shanidar: The First Flower People, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971; Owen Edwards, “Beyond Bones: A Rare Cache of Hominid Fossils Offers a Window on Neanderthal Culture”, Smithsonian (March 2010).

19. See discussion in Paul Mellars,Brad Gravina,and Christopher Bronk Ramsey, “Confirmation of Neanderthal/modern human interstratification at the Chatelperronian type-site”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104 (9): 3657–3662 (27 February 2007), available from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805566/ (Accessed 7 January 2011).

20. Ann Wuyts, “Rehabilitating the Neanderthals – Accusations Uluzzian Man Took H. Sapiens Tools Prove False”, 22 September 2010, posted at heritage-key.com/blogs/ann/rehabilitating-neanderthals-accusations-uluzzian-man-took-h-sapiens-tools-prove-false (Accessed 7 January 2011); Julien Riel-Salvatore, “A Niche Construction Perspective on the Middle–Upper Paleolithic Transition in Italy”, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 17 (4), 323-355 (2010), available from www.springerlink.com/content/t6g625nx3744766x/ (Accessed 7 January 2011); Anonymous, “Neanderthals More Advanced Than Previously Thought: They Innovated, Adapted Like Modern Humans, Research Shows”, ScienceDaily (22 September 2010), posted at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100921171412.htm (Accessed 6 January 2011).

21. João Zilhão, Diego E. Angelucci, Ernestina Badal-García, Francesco d’Errico,Floréal Daniel, Laure Dayet, Katerina Douka, Thomas F. G. Higham, María José Martínez-Sánchez, Ricardo Montes-Bernárdez, Sonia Murcia-Mascarós, Carmen Pérez-Sirvent, Clodoaldo Roldán-García, Marian Vanhaeren, Valentín Villaverde, Rachel Wood, and Josefina Zapata, “Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Published online before print January 11, 2010, www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/01/06/0914088107 (Accessed 7 January 2011); see also supporting material posted at www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2010/01/07/0914088107.DCSupplemental/pnas.200914088SI.pdf (Accessed 7 January 2011).

22. João Zilhão [interview with], “Did Neandertals Think Like Us?”, Scientific American, June 2010, pp. 72-75 (quotation from p. 75); for online version see www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-neandertals-think-like-us (Accessed 6 January 2011); PDF of the article available from www.bris.ac.uk/archanth/staff/zilhao/scientificamericanjune2010.pdf (Accessed 10 January 2011).

23. Gooch, The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals, 56.

24. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 59, italics in the original.

25. Gooch, Cities of Dreams, 5, italics in the original.

26. Gooch, Cities of Dreams, 37.

27. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 118.

28. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 118 (Chapter 11 title).

29. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 131, italics in the original.

30. Gooch, Cities of Dreams, 242 (Chapter 16 title).

31. Gooch, The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals, 92.

32. Note that in some cases well-established species can on occasion interbreed and produce fertile offspring, such as lions and tigers producing hybrids.

33. Gooch considered “Rhodesian Man”, for instance, to be a Neanderthal representative (The Neanderthal Legacy, 11).

34. P. Brown, T. Sutikna, M. J. Morwood, R. P. Soejono, Jatmiko, E. Wayhu Saptomo, and Rokus Awe Due, “A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia,” Nature 431, 1055-1061 (28 October 2004); available from www-personal.une.edu.au/~pbrown3/nature02999.pdf (Accessed 11 January 2011); see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7012/full/nature02999.html (Accessed 29 July 2010).

35. Mark Rose, “Homo erectus Survival”, Archaeology 50 (2) (March/April 1997), available from www.archaeology.org/9703/newsbriefs/h.erectus.html (Accessed 2 January 2011); Hillary Mayell, “Java Skull Raises Questions on Human Family Tree” (27 February 2003), posted at news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0227_030227_javaskull.html (Accessed 6 January 2011); note that, as often used, Homo erectus may be a taxon that includes a collection of closely related species and subspecies.

36. R. Broom, “The Evidence Afforded by the Boskop Skull of a New Species of Primitive Man (Homo capensis)”, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 23 (2): 63–79 (1918), available from digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/bitstream/2246/287/1/A023a02.pdf (Accessed 10 January 2011); Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; note that there is disagreement as to whether or not Homo capensis represents a distinct species or variety.

37. Anonymous, “Denisovans? Fossil Discovery Is Neither Modern Human Nor Neanderthal”, 22 December 2010, posted at www.science20.com/news_articles/denisovans_fossil_discovery_neither_modern_human_nor_neanderthal (Accessed 28 December 2010); Carl Zimmer, “Siberian Fossils Were Neanderthals’ Eastern Cousins, DNA Reveals”, New York Times, 22 December 2010, available from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/science/23ancestor.html (Accessed 28 December 2010).

38. Hamish Clarke, “DNA confirms Aboriginal Australian origins”, Cosmos Magazine (8 May 2007), available from www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/1286/dna-confirms-aboriginal-australian-origins (Accessed 6 January 2011).

39. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 72, italics in the original.

40. Richard E. Green, Johannes Krause, Adrian W. Briggs, Tomislav Maricic, Udo Stenzel, Martin Kircher, Nick Patterson, Heng Li, Weiwei Zhai, Markus Hsi-Yang Fritz, Nancy F. Hansen, Eric Y. Durand, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Jeffrey D. Jensen, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Can Alkan, Kay Prüfer, Matthias Meyer, Hernán A. Burbano, Jeffrey M. Good, Rigo Schultz, Ayinuer Aximu-Petri, Anne Butthof, Barbara Höber, Barbara Höffner, Madlen Siegemund, Antje Weihmann, Chad Nusbaum, Eric S. Lander, Carsten Russ, Nathaniel Novod, Jason Affourtit, Michael Egholm, Christine Verna, Pavao Rudan, Dejana Brajkovic, Zeljko Kucan, Ivan Gušic, Vladimir B. Doronichev, Liubov V. Golovanova, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Marco de la Rasilla, Javier Fortea, Antonio Rosas, Ralf W. Schmitz, Philip L. F. Johnson, Evan E. Eichler, Daniel Falush, Ewan Birney, James C. Mullikin, Montgomery Slatkin, Rasmus Nielsen, Janet Kelso, Michael Lachmann, David Reich, and Svante Pääbo, “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” Science 328 (5979), 710-722 (7 May 2010), available from www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/328/5979/710.pdf (Accessed 7 January 2011); Paul Rincon, “Neanderthal genes ‘survive in us’ ”, BBC News (6 May 2010), posted at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8660940.stm (Accessed 6 January 2011).

41. Paul Rincon, “Neanderthals ‘were flame-haired’ ”, BBC News (25 October 2007), posted at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7062415.stm (Accessed 7 January 2011); Anonymous, “Ancient DNA Reveals That Some Neanderthals Were Redheads”, ScienceDaily (26 October 2010), posted at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071025143311.htm (Accessed 7 January 2011).

42. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 33, italics in the original.

43. Myra Shackley, Still Living? Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1983 [Paperback edition, 1986], 161-164.

44. Shackley, Still Living?, 112; this particular Almas, also referred to as an abnauayu, was named Zana and she is further described in: Igor Bourtsev, “A Skeleton Still Buried and a Skull Unearthed: The Story of Zana” (From: In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman by Dmitri Bayanov, 1996, Moscow, Russia: Crypto-Logos, pp. 46-52), available from www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/zana.htm (Accessed 10 January 2011).

45. Gooch, The Neanderthal Legacy, 132.

46. Gooch’s last three closing words (before the appendices) of The Neanderthal Legacy (page 132). Besides his work on Neanderthals, Gooch made other contributions to the study of ancient history, such as his quite rational suggestion that the ancients could have figured out, based on its approximately 50-year “wobble” (and possibly using simple lenses), that Sirius has a small, dark, heavy companion star (The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals, 227-240). This information was passed down, for instance to the Dogon tribe of Africa, and despite various sensational claims (see Robert Temple, The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago, Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1998; see also Blair MacKenzie Blake, “Dark Seed: The ABCs of the Sirius Mystery”, Darklore 5, 117-133 [2010]) no alien contact was required.

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February 28, 2011