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  • Trending to a Multipolar World: Opportunities & Challenges

    Trending to a Multipolar World: Opportunities & Challenges

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 3 (June 2019)

    At the conclusion of the Second World War, the United States was the overwhelmingly dominant military and economic power. The other major colonial powers, in particular France and the United Kingdom, had been financially exhausted by the war. Germany was shattered, its industry in ruins. The United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and there were serious plans to use those weapons on the Soviet Union (Operation Unthinkable).1

    The Soviet Union had borne the vast brunt of the fighting against the Germans, losing at least 28 million soldiers and civilians, a sacrifice of people and treasure that has never received the acknowledgement in the West that it is due. Generations of Australians and New Zealanders, among others, were raised on the mythology of “plucky Britain” standing alone against the Nazi hoards.

    In fact, as many Russians died during the siege of Leningrad (September 1941– January 1944) as total US and UK casualties combined for the whole war. Nearly half a million Russians were killed in the battle of Stalingrad (July 1942–February 1943), which is more than total US losses for the whole war.

    Had Churchill’s plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union after the defeat of the Germans in May 1945 eventuated, additional casualties would have been incalculable. It is the memory of those horrendous losses during the war, and the treachery of the British and the Americans after the defeat of Germany, that is essential to an understanding of the reaction of Soviet, then Russian, leaders ever since to the actions of the Western powers. 

    Any thoughts of a military confrontation between the West and the USSR was resolved in 1949 when the Soviet Union successfully exploded its own nuclear bombs. Instead of a ‘hot’ war, the two sides engaged in what is generally referred to as a Cold War. That term is somewhat of a misnomer as war was indeed waged on a number of fronts: ideological, propaganda, economic and via a series of proxy actions in third countries.

    The other great shock to American sensibilities in 1949 was the defeat of the Chiang Kai Shek nationalist forces in the Chinese civil war. In what was to be a precedent for the following decades, the United States refused to accept Mao’s Government as the legitimate rulers of China and fought to retain the nationalists as China’s representative on the United Nations Security Council. US Navy ships patrolled the narrow straight between Formosa (known later as Taiwan) and the Chinese mainland. The fiction of Taiwan as representative of China in the United Nations persisted until 1971.

    In an echo of Operation Unthinkable, the United States military command in the Korean War (1950–53) urged US President Truman to allow the use of nuclear weapons against China,2 after China entered the war on the side of the North Koreans. US and Allied forces defied the clear intention of United Nations Security Council Resolution 82 and invaded North Korea, continuing to the Yalu River which marked the border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.

    The Allied forces were quickly driven back to the North/South border, itself a unilateral creation by the Americans in 1945 without reference to the citizens of either the North or the South.3 From then until the armistice of 27 July 1953, the United States and Allied troops waged a relentless war against the North. The entire country was devastated with civilian infrastructure almost completely destroyed. That, together with the use of chemical and biological weapons, amount to a sustained war crime against North Korea.4 As is the case with all atrocities committed by the United States and its allies in the almost continuous warfare waged since 1945 against mostly poor and relatively defenceless nations, the issue of accountability for war crimes is a non-issue as far as the Western powers are concerned.

    In the American case, not only do they not subscribe to the International Criminal Court, they have threatened sanctions and worse5 should that body ever have the temerity to investigate the actions of its military personnel or those of its allies, much less prosecute them.

    As a result of that war, North Korea lost an estimated 8 to 9 million people or about one-third of its total population at that time. By comparison, the United Kingdom lost 0.94% of its population during World War II, which lasted twice as long as the Korean War.

    An understanding of that war, as well as the history of United States intervention in Korean affairs, which dates back to the 1880s,6 is essential to understanding the contemporary geopolitical situation on the Korean peninsula.

    Exceptional Interventionism

    The post-World War II military and economic dominance of the United States and its imperviousness to international law had a number of other consequences. In particular, it bred an attitude best expressed in their own self-description of being the “exceptional nation.” The ordinary definition of the word exceptional implies being atypical, extraordinary, or out of the common or usual mode.

    In the American case, however, it came to be equated with much more, in particular a profound belief in all levels of society that their way was the only way. Deviations from their defined path were not to be tolerated, and recalcitrant nations or individuals were subject to “regime change” operations, economic and financial sanctions, and in extreme cases invasion and occupation.7

    These actions always justified in terms of “bringing democracy” or “upholding the rules-based international order” or some other patently self-serving justification.

    It is difficult to reconcile these high-minded concepts with the actual behaviour of the United States and its allies. Operation Boot (UK name) Ajax (US title) on behalf of the Anglo Persian Oil Company overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953. That coup was reversed with the Islamic Revolution in 1979, an outcome that still dominates United States attitudes and behaviour towards Iran.

    That was followed in 1954 by Operation PBSuccess, the overthrow of the Guatemala government, to the great benefit of the United Fruit Company. Operation Condor from 1968 to 1989 involved the assassination or disappearance of tens of thousands of Latin American civilians, and the installation of a series of brutal dictatorships, all supported by and paying obeisance to the United States.

    The “Whitlam problem”

    From an Australian perspective, there is a common thread running through many of the CIA coups of the post-war era. There was a coup in South Korea in 1961; in Indonesia in 1965 (where more than 500,000 were killed at the instigation of the CIA); Chile in 1973 and Australia in 1975. The common denominator to all four was US State Department diplomat Marshall Green, named in CIA and State Department circles as the “coupmaster.”

    Declassified CIA and State Department documents show that Green was sent to Canberra as US ambassador in 1973 with a specific brief to deal with the “Whitlam problem.”8

    Whitlam was threatening to close Pine Gap spy station; the United States lease was due to expire in December 1975. The Governor General sacked him in November 1975, the day before he was to make an announcement in the Australian Parliament about Pine Gap.

    Again, to return to the earlier point, it is impossible to understand the stance taken by Australia viz a viz the Americans and their illegal wars without understanding the effect that the coup had on successive Australian governments.

    Historian Jenny Hocking makes worthy efforts to uncover the role of the British, and in particular the correspondence between Governor-General Kerr and Buckingham Palace, but in this writer’s view she misses the main point.9 By 1975 the British had become of peripheral relevance to Australia’s geopolitical perspective. Then, as now, Australia was an appendage to US foreign policy, “joined at the hip” in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s infamous phrase.

    Australia joined illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to support the Americans when any vital Australian interest is vanishingly small. 

    Hubris & Containment

    American hubris reached its pinnacle following the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Boris Yeltsin became president and the following decade was catastrophic for the Russians. Life expectancy plummeted. State assets were sold off at fire-sale prices to Western corporations and Russian oligarchs. Yeltsin, an incompetent drunk, would in all probability have lost the 1996 presidential election were it not for blatant and large-scale US interference to his benefit.10

    That they had “their” man in office only added to the sense of US triumphalism. This history is bitterly ironic given the hysterical and wholly fake allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

    From an American perspective, the demise of the Soviet Union and the election of a pliable puppet in the form of Yeltsin meant they had won the Cold War. In what was a common and disturbing pattern, the undertaking given by George HW Bush to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO “would not advance one inch to the east” was almost immediately broken. Successive US presidents have overseen the expansion of NATO and US military bases right up to Russia’s borders.

    This was a pattern repeated in the east with a steady increase in US military bases on China’s borders. They made no secret of the fact that the policy was to “contain” China.11

    Despite the frequent invocation of phrases such as “Chinese assertiveness” or “a threat to America’s allies” in the Asian region, there was never any evidence to support such claims.

    What the US sought to “contain” in fact was the rise of an economic and military powerhouse that threatened US hegemony of the world. On the basis of parity purchasing power, China is now the world’s largest economy, and the gap is destined to widen for the foreseeable future. The US reaction to this has been an increase in economic warfare through sanctions, tariffs, and an unrelenting propaganda barrage to paint each and every positive development emanating from China in negative terms.

    Managing the News

    This is not a new phenomenon. Victor Marchetti told the United States Congress decades ago that the CIA provided $250 million annually (in modern value) to the Asia Foundation for anti-communist academics to disseminate a negative view of China, and paid journalists and publishers elsewhere in the world to do the same.

    Operation Mockingbird was a large-scale CIA program that began in the 1950s to infiltrate student organisations, newspapers and magazines, and other forms of media outlets to “manage” the news in such a way as to favour US interests.12 Any resemblance to the truth was coincidental. The only thing that changed since the 1950s is the scale and the sophistication of the penetration of news outlets.

    The German journalist Udo Ulfkotte’s book Gehanfte Journalisten (Bought Journalists, 2014) which exposed how German mainstream journalists had been compromised, had its English rights bought by a Canadian company but was never published. Amazon does not stock it, although it can be purchased (in German) on Book Depository.

    What is a unipolar world?

    When Vladimir Putin replaced Yeltsin as President of Russia, he initially sought to cooperate with the United States. He has been criticised within Russia for persisting in seeking détente in the face of constant rebuffs and unilateral moves such as the United States withdrawal from the antiballistic missile treaty in 2002, and the aforementioned constant expansion of NATO.

    Putin’s change of heart became most clearly evident when he addressed the Munich Security Conference on 10 February 2007. His speech included the following remarks that are worth quoting:

    “What is a unipolar world?…. It refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. At the end of the day, this is pernicious not only for all those within the system but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.

    “I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but impossible in today’s world. Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts…. we are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. One State, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way.”

    If the unipolar world is not only unacceptable but “impossible in today’s world,” what then is the alternative?

    The pattern of voting in the United Nation’s General Assembly over the past few decades, in particular, reveals that the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations want a better alternative than the unipolar model dominated by the United States.

    Rise of China

    Those nations see, for example, the transformation of China in the 40 years since the “reform and opening up” of the Chinese economy and society that officially began under Deng Xiaoping. Those reforms have seen more than 600 million Chinese (more than the whole of Europe’s population) lifted into the middle class since the turn of the century.

    China outspends the United States on basic science and technology research by a ratio of 4:1. It leads the world in patent applications with more than twice the number of the United States (1.38 million versus 606.9 thousand in 2017) which in turn represented more than a third of all the world’s patent applications in that year.

    Significantly, Chinese patent applications to the World Intellectual Property Organisation in Geneva grew by 14.2% over the previous year, while United States applications grew by 0.2% (so much for allegations of intellectual property theft).

    The fundamental difference between the rise of China to a dominant position compared to that of the United States is that China does not seek either to dominate the world or to impose its system on others.

    The philosophy underlying China’s international posture was clearly set out by President Xi Jinping in his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2017. Again, it is worth quoting some key passages from Xi’s speech:

    “The global economic landscape has changed profoundly in the past few decades. However, the global governance system has not embraced these new changes and is therefore adequate in terms of representation and inclusiveness.

    “(Red Cross founder) Henry Dunant once said ‘our real enemy is not the neighbouring country: it is hunger, poverty, ignorance, superstition and prejudice’.

    “We should pursue a well-coordinated and connected approach to develop a model of open and win-win cooperation. There is a growing call from the international community for reforming the global economic governance system, which is a pressing task for us.

    “We should adhere to multilateralism to uphold the authority and efficacy of multilateral institutions. We should honour promises and abide by rules. One should not select or bend rules as he sees fit. No country should view its own development path as the only viable one, still less should it impose its own development path on others.”

    It is not difficult to identify which country Xi had in mind. The Chinese model of development is seen for example in the following organisations.

    The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the best known of these modern vehicles for multilateral development, but it is far from the only one. Others include the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which has as a primary aim the establishment of an equitable, democratic and multipolar world. Dating from 2001, BRICS developed its own bank and other forms of financial cooperation. It is not a coincidence that both Brazil and India are targets of United States’ foreign policy aimed at undermining their growing relationship with China.

    The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) also began in 2001 with six original members (China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). Pakistan and India both joined at the same time in 2017. In addition, there are four observer States (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia) and six dialogue partners (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey).

    Countries as diverse as Egypt, Israel and Ukraine among others have applied for observer or dialogue partner status and others in the Middle East such as Iraq, Bahrain and Qatar have expressed interest.

    The North South Transportation Corridor (NSTC) grew out of the Ashgabat Agreement in 2011 and a rail link from Mumbai to Moscow via Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan is now up and running. Again, a range of countries in proximity to the original route have expressed an interest in becoming part of this transformative transport project. As with the major rail projects that are an integral component of the BRI, these developments have the potential to slash both transport times and costs for goods traversing Eurasia.

    Eurasian Economic Union. This organisation was formalized in 2015 and incorporates Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, with Iran signing a free trade agreement in 2018.

    There is a notable overlap of membership of these organisations. They increasingly trade in their own currencies, part of a rapidly increasing move toward the elimination of the United States dollar as the principal medium of international trade. The demise of the dollar from its central role will remove one of the United States’ most powerful tools for imposing its policy preferences upon sovereign nations.

    The reserve status of the dollar has enabled the United States to defy economic logic, running huge internal and balance of payments deficits without the consequences that would ordinarily flow. That day of reckoning is rapidly approaching.

    The United States has for decades neglected its own vital infrastructure and educational standards as more than half of each federal dollar is spent on its military industrial intelligence complex. It has not been value for money, as both Russian and Chinese military technology is significantly superior, as even the Americans now acknowledge.13

    War or Peaceful Development?

    There is little evidence, however, that the United States recognises the cause and effect between its preference for military expenditure over civilian needs; the political, economic and reputational costs of endless wars for and on behalf of vested interests; and its steady decline in the world both in absolute and relative terms.

    The United States will undoubtedly continue waging its wars, whether they are hybrid wars using terrorist proxies which it has done since at least Operation Cyclone in the 1970s, or overt invasions and destruction of sovereign states as in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, to name but a few.

    There is a remarkable correlation between victim countries of the past two decades and the “seven countries in five years” identified by US General Wesley Clark.14 

    The world tires of this endless aggression and the chaos which ensues. For an increasing number, the win-win philosophy expanded by President Xi is the most attractive option. This is why more than 128 nations have now signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the BRI, in Africa, Latin America, Island States in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Middle East and throughout the Eurasian continent. They clearly view the multipolar world as the preferable alternative. The question is whether they will be able to continue to develop along their preferred path or will the frankly insane US political class make one final attempt at regaining world hegemony, and in the process destroy us all. 

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 3.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    Footnotes

    1. J. Walker, Operation Unthinkable: the Third World War, The History Press 2013

    2. C. Posey, ‘How the Korean War almost Went Nuclear’, www.airandspacemag.com, July 2015

    3. B. Cumings, The Korean War: A History, Modern Library 2011

    4. J. Kaye, ‘Revealed: The Long Suppressed Official Report of US Biowarfare on North Korea’, www.medium.com, 20 February 2018

    5. S. Vasaliev, ‘Not Just another Crisis’, www.ejiltalk.com, 19 April 2019 (Part 1); 20 April 2019 (Part 2)

    6. M. Pembroke, Korea: Where the American Century Began, One World Publications 2018

    7. W. Blum, America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, Zed Books 2013

    8. J. Jiggens, ‘11 November Coup? What Coup?’ www.greenleft.org, 20 November 2010

    9. J. Hocking, The Dismissal Dossier, Melbourne University Press 2015

    10. S. Shane, ‘Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections: we do it too’, www.nytimes.org, 17 February 2018; S. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post Communist Russia, Norton & Co (updated edition) 2001

    11. J. Reed, ‘Surrounded: How the US is Encircling China with Military Bases’, www.foreignpolicy.com, 20 August 2013

    12. C. Bernstein, ‘CIA & The Media’ www.rollingstone.com, 20 October 1977; J. Tracy, ‘The CIA and the Media’, www.globalresearch.ca, 30 January 2018

    13. A. Martyanov, Losing Military Supremacy, Clarity Press 2018; The Saker, ‘Newly Revealed Russian Weapons Systems’, www.southfront.org, 9 March 2018; R. Ridenour, ‘Has the US Lost its Military Supremacy over Russia’, www.counterpunch.org, 4 April 2019

    14. J. Conason, ‘Seven Countries in Five Years’, www.salon.com, 12 October 2007

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • The Faeries: From Folklore to Metaphysical Reality

    The Faeries: From Folklore to Metaphysical Reality

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 5 (Oct 2018)

    What are the faeries? Where do they come from and where do they go when they’re not interacting with their human observers? Faeries have been an important part of the folkloric repertoire for hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of years, and while they are portrayed in the popular imagination through faerie-tales and have become disneyfied through the 20th century, their main presence is in the myriad of folktales and anecdotes from every part of the globe.1 

    They usually (though not always) take a humanoid form, and interact with human societies as ambivalent supernatural entities, appearing in our world to both co-operate with people and as general arbiters of mischief, while also living in their own Otherworld, sometimes accessible to humans either through accident or abduction. While the phenomenon is ancient, the belief in these metaphysical beings continues, and there are thousands of encounter reports from all over the world every year, as demonstrated in a recent survey by The Fairy Investigation Society.2

    Folklorists are usually ambivalent about the faeries; they are likely to keep their distance from them, so to speak. While happy to record and discuss the beliefs of people who tell stories and anecdotes about them, most folklorists speak the language (at least in official publications) of the reductionist, materialist worldview that has held sway in Western civilisation for the last few hundred years, and they’ll be nervous about assessing the potential actual reality of metaphysical beings. In the materialist’s world, faeries simply cannot exist. They must be reduced into a categorised cultural belief system, and any discussion of them will usually be couched in the accepted language of scientific rationalism. This creates a problem for any folklorist (or anybody else) who wants to look behind the stories and investigate the possibility that the faeries can be incorporated into our consensus reality as a genuine phenomenon.

    The scientific orthodoxy has been challenged recently by a range of philosophical hypotheses such as Idealism, backed up by quantum mechanical theory and experiment, which reinstates consciousness (not matter) as the primary mover and creator of reality.3 When this is done, entities such as faeries are allowed back into the universe as an authentic phenomenon, and if we start to look in the right places, we begin to find that they are indeed everywhere… we just need to know where to look, or more accurately, how to look.

    The Electromagnetic Spectrum, Dark Matter and Dark Energy

    Our normal waking consciousness experiences less than 1% of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. If we take into account the current (mainstream) scientific hypothesis that this electromagnetic spectrum itself composes less than 6% of the universe, with the mysterious Dark Matter and Dark Energy taking up the rest, then we are at a good starting point to understand that our version of reality is extremely compromised.4 

    We may have the technology to utilise the unseen wavelengths in the spectrum, but they are not accessible to our ordinary consciousness. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are entirely inaccessible to our technology, and remain for the moment nothing more than theory based on the by-product of mathematical equations. 

    We also have to take into account the recent theoretical mind-bender that the universe may actually be a Matrix-like virtual reality hologram, put in place by (depending on who you listen to) a supreme being, aliens or future versions of humans, the latter option coming from ex-NASA scientist Dr Rich Terrile.5 

    With this level of uncertainty about the reality we inhabit, and in order to gain an understanding of the world in which we live (and the unseen entities that may exist alongside us), we might be advised to fall back on the only known certainty allowed us: consciousness.

    The Origins of the Faeries in Altered States of Consciousness

    Our earliest known artistic portrayals of the world, and how human consciousness interacted with it, come in the form of cave paintings from all parts of the globe, starting c.35,000 BCE. Many of these cave paintings include humanoids and therianthropes, otherworldly entities that have been recorded alongside geometric imagery, stylised animals and landscapes. They are in effect our earliest known folklore. What state of mind were our Palaeolithic ancestors in when they were painting these strange entities in often difficult to access caves and shelters?

    The anthropologist David Lewis-Williams has made the convincing argument that these cave and rock-shelter paintings were produced by shamanic cultures to represent reality as perceived in an altered state of consciousness.6 Twenty years ago this idea was anathema to anthropologists, but since the work of Lewis-Williams, and many others, the theory has tipped over to become an accepted orthodoxy. There are hundreds of motifs in the cave paintings that correlate with the visionary states of people in an altered state of consciousness, brought about most especially by the ingestion of a psychotropic substance. The basic premise is that the shamans of these Palaeolithic cultures transported themselves into altered states of consciousness and then painted the results of their experiences on the walls of caves and rock shelters – experiences that frequently included therianthropic beings and supernatural humanoids that correlate in many ways with later faerie types. 

    In his 2005 book Supernatural, Graham Hancock vividly utilises Lewis-Williams’ work to discuss the continuity through time of entities experienced in altered states of consciousness, coming to the conclusion that the faeries of our historic period are one and the same as those portrayed in prehistoric caves.7 And writers such as Carlo Ginzburg and Emma Wilby have argued that there is a direct link between prehistoric shamanic storytelling and the folklore embodied in classical, medieval and later periods, that often incorporate entities such as nymphs and faeries; supernatural beings that interact with humanity when the conditions are right.8 Those conditions may well be reliant on the human participants undergoing an altered state of consciousness as a result of the ingestion of psychotropic compounds. There is certainly a preponderance of mushroom imagery associated to historical depictions of faeries, most especially the highly psychedelic red and white Amanita Muscaria (fly agaric) mushroom, and the psilocybin mushroom, both prevalent in Europe and Asia. If these historic folkloric manifestations of interactions with supernatural entities can be linked to the cave art of prehistory and preliterate societies, then we have a continuation of relationship with an alternative reality, accessed through altered states of consciousness, over a very long period of time.

    The highly psychedelic red and white Amanita Muscaria (fly agaric) mushroom, often associated with faerie depictions.

    Many of the European faerie motifs repeated in stories and anecdotes through the centuries to the present day were already in place during the medieval period. When folklorists began to collect these stories in earnest from the 19th century onwards, they found a belief in faeries amongst rural populations that was probably very close to the medieval belief and understanding of what faeries were and how they interacted with humanity. Many of the stories include situations where the protagonist interacts with the faeries in what seems an altered state of consciousness: Faerieland doesn’t comply to Newtonian physics, it is consistently inhabited by strange humanoids and therianthropes (the faeries), and there are lots of recurring story motifs that are highly suggestive of an autonomous reality being described. 

    This is not consensus reality – this is the folklore recording stories from people operating outside consensus reality. The folktales about faeries have been overlain with much allegorical storytelling, but at their root the realities they describe are of people in altered states of consciousness, perhaps not too far from the realities experienced by the Palaeolithic cave painters and our shamanic ancestors.

    WY Evans-Wentz, Rudolph Steiner & Metaphysical Nature Spirits

    When the folklorist WY Evans-Wentz travelled around the Celtic world at the beginning of the 20th century, collecting stories and anecdotal experiences about the faeries, it was clear that most of his interviewees rated clairvoyance as the best way of altering the conscious state to a position where it could interact with the faeries.9 Seership or second-sight was the method of entering, or at least viewing, an alternative reality inhabited by a relatively consistent cast of characters, usually recognised as the faeries. 

    He met one such (un-named) Irish clairvoyant in Rosses Point, County Sligo. This seer talked about various types of faeries that inhabited the landscape of Sligo, “making them sound like a cross between nature spirits and mystical visions.” But Evans-Wentz was just as interested in the mechanics of interacting with the faeries as he was with the stories themselves. How did the seer interface with them?

    I have always made a distinction between pictures seen in the memory of nature and visions of actual beings now existing in the inner world. We can make the same distinction in our world: I may close my eyes and see you as a vivid picture in memory, or I may look at you with my physical eyes and see your actual image. In seeing these beings of which I speak, the physical eyes may be open or closed: mystical beings in their own world and nature are never seen with the physical eyes.10

    The rural people interviewed by Evans-Wentz consistently affirmed that clairvoyant alteration of consciousness was the best sure-fire way to see the faeries. By the time Evans-Wentz visited these communities, there was a sense that the number of people gifted with second-sight was dwindling; cutting down on communication with the faeries. 

    Evocative image demonstrating the slightly perverse nature of traditional faeries – Arthur Rackham’s ‘Illustration from Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market’ (1933).

    At the same time these rural communities were feeling the increasing pressures of modernism there was a reaction by organisations such as the Theosophical Society and the Anthroposophical Society to incorporate metaphysics into an understanding of reality. And their prime metaphysical technology was clairvoyance. The Austrian philosopher and esotericist Rudolf Steiner attempted to explain the mechanics of clairvoyance, when a person must transform their usually passive thought forms into something more dynamic. In normal consciousness, thoughts:

    …allow themselves to be connected and separated, to be formed and then dismissed. This life of thought must develop in the elemental world a step further. There a person is not in a position to deal with thoughts that are passive. If someone really succeeds in entering the world with his clairvoyant soul, it seems as though his thoughts were not things over which he has any command; they are living beings… You thrust your consciousness into a place, it seems, where you do not find thoughts that are like those in the physical world, but where they are living beings.11

    Steiner described the specific elemental animating forces at work in the natural world, when perceived clairvoyantly, in what he calls the Supersensible World. For Steiner the elementals in the Supersensible World existed as a range of beings, from devas, which are responsible for entire autonomous landscapes, through to the smaller nature spirits charged with the growth of vegetation. 

    Steiner (basing his epistemology on that originally developed by the 15th-century alchemist Paracelsus) divides these entities into four main types corresponding to earth (Gnomic), water (Undines), air (Sylphs) and heat/light (Salamanders). This is the faerie realm, existing as a non-material autonomous reality that crosses over with ours, and which can be accessed via a clairvoyant altered state of consciousness. Steiner thought everyone has this innate ability, but they had to be taught how to use it… it had somehow become almost forgotten amongst humanity.

    This idea finds common ground with the recent work of biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, who proposes that morphogenetic fields are the formative causation allowing life on earth.12 Sheldrake’s description of this organising principle behind the natural world is issued in the language of biochemistry, but what he postulates is basically the same as Steiner’s vision of nature spirits in action. There are invisible forces that are as essential in ordering life on earth as accepted non-material forces such as gravity. Sheldrake calls these morphogenetic fields “the memory of nature.” In effect, Steiner saw nature spirits as anthropogenic representations of these morphogenetic fields, imposed upon them through the thought forms of the observer, who perceives them clairvoyantly.

    The Faeries & DMT

    What allows this access to otherworldly realms and the entities that seem to exist there? The answer may lie with the substance called Dimethyltryptamine – DMT. This molecule is one of the main active ingredients in the Ayahuasca brew used by Amazonian shamans, but it is also produced endogenously in everyone’s brain, potentially (but not definitely) in the pineal gland. It’s usually safely dispersed around the brain and body for functional duties, but it seems that under certain circumstances it can be released in higher quantities, causing an altered state of consciousness. There is some evidence that this can happen during a frontal lobe epileptic seizure, as recorded in the well-documented 17th-century Cornish story of Anne Jefferies’ abduction by diminutive faeries when she suffered a ‘convulsion fit’ and was transported (at least in her mind) to a numinous world inhabited by the faeries.13 The author Eve LaPlante has used historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate that Temporal Lobe Epilepsy can provide access to an altered state of consciousness where the human mind participates in a reality several steps removed from the consensus material world. This often includes full immersion in alternative landscapes and contact with non-human intelligence.14

    The late and great Terence McKenna was an enthusiastic user of the synthesised form of DMT to access different realities and coined the term “self-transforming machine elves” for the creatures he regularly found there. As if to confirm Terence’s assertions, a research study conducted between 1990 and 1995 in the General Clinical Research Center of the University of New Mexico Hospital by Dr Rick Strassman found that volunteers in the study injected with varying amounts of DMT underwent profound alterations of consciousness.15 This involved immediate cessation of normal consciousness and transportation to a different realm of reality with divergent physical properties, and inhabited by a range of creatures described as elves, faeries, lizards, reptiles, insects, aliens, clowns (yes, clowns) and various therianthropic entities. One woman even describes a pulsating entity that she called ‘Tinkerbell-like’. The experiences, especially at higher doses, represented to the participants a parallel reality that was ‘super real’, not a hallucination, not a dream, but a substantial built reality with full sensory interaction plus telepathy.

    The experience reports from the study are irrational, absurd, frightening, illogical and surreal. There is no question of any of the volunteers physically leaving the hospital bed during their experiences, but for all of them (without exception) the DMT-world was every bit as real as the one their minds left behind. After the injections participants frequently talked about ‘blasting through’ or ‘breaking through a barrier’ after which they found themselves in a realm with its own laws of physical space and movement, and its own inhabitants.

    There are dozens of recorded experiences from the study, and the participants are all engaging in a non-physical reality directly with their consciousness, seemingly separated from their physical selfs. Some of the experiences agree in type to certain aspects of the faerie phenomenon. But what the research demonstrates is that under the right conditions, human consciousness can operate within a distinct and separate universe inhabited by a range of apparently autonomous entities [For more on this, see Peter Meyer’s article ‘An Ecology of Souls’ on page 23]. These entities may be one and the same as the metaphysical beings recorded in prehistoric cave art and historic folklore, by people who were describing the beings encountered during various types of altered states of consciousness, brought on either actively or passively. 

    The faeries may change superficially through time, adapting to the expectations of the culture they are part of, but if it is human consciousness they are interacting with, this is no surprise. Underneath the cultural masks, the faeries begin to reveal their true selfs.

    Art by Ylenia Viola, ‘A.I.R.’ www.fairytalesneverdie.com 

    Materialism vs Consciousness 

    There are many reasons why folklore about the faeries exists, and it certainly seems that interacting with them during an altered state of consciousness is one of them. Are they real experiences? They are subjectively real, but what is the objective reality? 

    A clairvoyant may suggest that we need to override our five senses with a dynamic type of consciousness that commands prominence over the material world. They would probably agree with Aldous Huxley’s description of a universal consciousness being “Mind at Large” and that the brain is a “reducing valve transceiver,” that can be retuned by a variety of methods. Huxley did this with Mescaline and LSD.16

    The brain certainly gives us a very limited view of what is actually going on around us. Altering the transmission to the brain seems to allow non-material consciousness more of a free rein. As in a dream, an altered consciousness is able to construct metaphysical realities. It can communicate with the entities it finds there, and bring back a report. The relative consistency of the inhabitants of this alternative reality may suggest that they live there all the time, non-physical, and only able to interact with our physical world when conditions are right for an individual’s consciousness. 

    This is the crux: does consciousness create physical reality, or is consciousness an epiphenomenon of the brain? If the former, then the realities experienced in altered states of consciousness can be accepted as true, with their own autonomous existence. If the latter, then while entities such as the faeries may be subjectively real, they do not exist objectively within the visible electromagnetic spectrum. This is the materialist/physicalist view. Although even physicalism has to adhere to its own rules and allow for the hypothesis that well over 90% of the universe consists of non-physical form: Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Maybe that’s where the faeries are, waiting to be found.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 5.[/alert]

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    Footnotes

    1. The best introduction to faerie ontology is Katherine Briggs, An Encyclopaedia of Fairies (1976). There are dynamic illustrations (based on Briggs’ book) in Brian Froud and Alan Lee, Faeries (1978)

    2. www.fairyist.com/survey/

    3. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coming-to-grips-with-the-implications-of-quantum-mechanics/

    4. https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy

    5. https://in5d.com/we-are-living-in-a-hologram-designed-by-aliens-says-nasa-scientist/

    6. David Lewis Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (2002)

    7. Graham Hancock, Supernatural (2005)

    8. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1991); Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2005)

    9. WY Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/ffcc/

    10. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith, p. 60

    11. Rudolf Steiner, Nature Spirits: Selected Lectures (1995). ‘Perception of the Elemental World’ (1913), p.177-78

    12. Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988)

    13. https://deadbutdreaming.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/the-faerie-abduction-of-anne-jefferies/

    14. Eve LaPlante, Seized: Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as a Medical, Historical, and Artistic Phenomenon (1993)

    15. Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001)

    16. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • The Ties That Bind – Spies & the Occult: The Connections Between Aleister Crowley, a Rocket Scientist, a Priest, & a British Spymaster

    The Ties That Bind – Spies & the Occult: The Connections Between Aleister Crowley, a Rocket Scientist, a Priest, & a British Spymaster

    This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 3 (June 2019)

    Dr Richard Spence, a history professor and author of Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (published by Feral House), is an expert on intelligence and the occult.

    In this interview with New Dawn magazine, Spence details his years of research into the little known connections between intelligence agencies, spies, and occult activity. Dr Spence explains the ties between occultist Aleister Crowley, rocket scientist and dissident Jack Parsons, British spymaster Maxwell Knight, along with author and priest Montague Summers.

    Crowley, described by the British press of the time as “the wickedest man in the world,” founded the spiritual philosophy Thelema and led the occult fraternal organisation Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). He remains at the centre of conspiracies.

    CHARLIE NASH (CN): You’ve written a book about Aleister Crowley and his connections to British intelligence, but for readers of New Dawn who haven’t read the book, could you tell us a bit about Crowley’s alleged intelligence connections and what you found from your research?

    RICHARD SPENCE (RS): Aleister Crowley would make allusions, or in some cases direct comments, about being involved with intelligence. He would mention specifically the admiralty’s intelligence and the name of a particular official who had been connected to that during the First World War, a fellow by the name of Captain Guy, or earlier, Commander Guy Gaunt. Gaunt, whenever asked about this, would waffle on the question or say that he knew nothing about what Crowley was talking about. And it’s fairly easy considering his dubious reputation and lack of any kind of documentary evidence, like a spy card, or something to back that up. Most people would dismiss that as an act of either desperation or a fantasy he had.

    Dr Richard Spence

    I was actually working on a subject about another person, another spy, who was active in and around New York City during the First World War, and one of the things that I was looking for was any possible cross-pollination. It’s always interesting to see who’s put in the same place at the same time, or even the same room. 

    In the States, you can get through the Freedom of Information Act older FBI files, which at the time was called the Bureau of Investigation. You can also access a kind of semi-defunct agency that functioned at the time, as part of the US Army – the Military Intelligence Division. One of the interesting things is that the Military Intelligence Division in the United States during the First World War was the agency that handled domestic counter-intelligence. Handily, for us historians, all of the MID’s pre-1941 records were declassified many years ago, and they’re available in the national archives.

    Keep in mind here we’ve got this guy Crowley running around New York at the same time, and he’s claiming to have been connected to British intelligence, and the guy I’m looking at has some connections in the same period… Is there a possibility? Is there anything to it? I decided, partly out of curiosity, to send off to the national archives to see if the MID files had anything on Crowley, and lo and behold they did, and I got the file. This is from July 1918, and it deals with Aleister Crowley, English subject. The key elements say, “Subject has been camping on Esopus Island, Hudson River, and was brought to the attention of this office by subject’s connections with Madeleine George, an actress in New York City, who had been formally investigated by the Department of Justice on charges of being a German spy.” Now the key part is what follows: “It was determined that Aleister Crowley was an employee of the British government but at present in this country on official business of which the British Counsel, New York City has full cognisance.” Skip down a couple of lines, “It was found that the British Government was fully aware of the fact that Crowley was connected with German propaganda and received money for writing anti-British articles.”

    That was kind of interesting… The British Consulate was reluctant to say anything about it because they wanted to prevent the Americans from arresting him. They said, “Leave him alone,” and they did. 

    A war time photo of Aleister Crowley imitating Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, for whom he claimed to have invented the “V for Victory” hand sign.

    CN: That proves Crowley had a connection with intelligence?

    RS: One of the things you’ll find if you’re looking for people dealing with intelligence, almost never is that ever explicitly stated. No, people don’t carry spy cards, people don’t walk around with cards saying, “I am a spy,” that would be a bad thing to do. In the entire realm of intelligence, the single guiding principle, at least in terms of any kind of active operations, is secrecy. These are agencies which are essentially dedicated to concealing their own secrets and discovering other people’s secrets, so they do not operate openly. There’s no sort of general list of everybody who is an agent for this agency or another one. 

    The other thing which goes along with secrecy is the compartmentalisation of information, which means only people with an important and legitimate reason to know what this person is doing would be aware of that. In a sense, this is the closest thing you’re ever going to get to an admission from any kind of official that, ‘This person is an agent for us’. He’s an employee of the British government, and in this country on official business, which is known to us, and this official business is connected to him writing what appears to be treasonous propaganda, and we want you to leave him alone. When Crowley eventually returns to the UK, after the war, there’s not the slightest indication of any problems. He waltzed through the whole thing. He came back and went about his business. It was just before Christmas, and he went to his aunt’s house. He had a Christmas dinner and everything was fine until the British press caught on he was in the country, raised a stink about what he had been doing in New York, and then he very quickly left for France.

    Here’s the type of thing you have to imagine. You have an individual who arrived in America on the Lusitania on Halloween, in 1914, and he spent the entire war in the States, returning again in late 1919, and during that time he had indeed worked quite openly as a German propagandist. He had written articles, rather scathingly and insulting anti-British articles, for a publication in New York called the Fatherland. You might figure that when Crowley returned home there would’ve been some issue. But there’s none. The other thing is that to get back home in 1919 he had to go to the same British consulate that a year before said, “He’s okay leave him alone,” and he essentially had to get his passport renewed, because the passport that he carried with him when he came in 1914 was no longer valid. If a British official in New York simply wanted to keep him out of the country, they could’ve done so. They could’ve arrested him when he arrived. Instead, he goes to the consulate, they give him a new passport, and he goes home. There’s no problem until it becomes a public issue that he’s there, in which case he quietly moved across the channel until things died down. 

    Page of the US Army Military Intelligence Division file obtained by Prof. Richard Spence that discusses Crowley’s activities in America.

    Crowley was a controversial figure, he was a lousy businessman, he always seemed to be short of money, yet one of the things to notice is that he’s never without some money to live, and he’s never without food, and he’s never without associates. He’s not just lucky. There are people looking out for him, and some of those are his followers, and some of them I think were mysterious forces at work in that case. But he tends to get in trouble if he starts talking about these things because another rule in intelligence is that you keep your mouth shut. Basically works this way: You never say what you did for us, and we’ll never talk about what you did for us, and that’s the way the situation ought to be. The British consulate in New York is saying this guy is doing official business. What official business? If you look at Crowley’s visible activities, he’s going camping on Esopus Island, he’s up at Montauk Point, or he’s consorting with his ‘Scarlet Woman’, and seems to be doing a lot of nothing, other than travelling around, consorting with some other occultists. And yet he’s on official business from the British government. So, the mere fact that you cannot visibly see that business gives you an idea.

    CN: Interesting…

    RS: After a while you learn what to look for, and remember you’re dealing with a realm which is not intended to be obvious. None of this should be apparent to someone who is looking from the outside. That is the last thing a spy is supposed to do, to act like a spy. That defeats the entire purpose. I think people get these ideas very often from films in which spies tend to be quite obvious, but there’s always supposed to be some sort of cover to what it is that they’re doing. Anyone who is an intelligence operative in the field needs some reason to be where they are, other than the fact that they’re a spy. You have to have an excuse to be in this particular place at the time. That’s why journalist is a great cover, missionary is a great cover, explorer is a great cover, and in the same way, occultist can be a great cover. I think it even works well in this case because people say, “Aleister Crowley can’t be an intelligence asset because he’s just too weird, he’s too controversial in some way.” Well actually, in that way, it almost qualifies him for the job. “This person cannot possibly be a spy” is the very thing that qualifies them to be a spy.

    CN: Crowley wasn’t the only occultist who was alleged to have connections with intelligence. There are allegations that Jack Parsons was also connected to an intelligence agency. What do you think about Parsons?

    RS: For anyone who’s not acquainted with him,Jack Parsons is generally known for two things. Most commonly he is known as a rocket scientist. He was a kind of natural genius in the area of propulsion and explosives, and responsible for the creation, pretty much, of solid fuel rocket engines. He was one of the daddies of the American space program. That’s why he has a crater named after him on the dark side of the Moon. He was also connected to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, GALCIT [Caltech Aerospace] – the whole background to American rocketry in the space program. But simultaneously he was a devoted practitioner of the occult, in particular as defined and refined by Aleister Crowley. The two of them, of course, were associated for a period of time. Parsons came to believe that he was Crowley’s successor. The other thing about Parsons that people would know is he’s blown up in his lab in the early 1950s. 

    Jack Parsons standing above a canister at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), June 1943.   

    One of the things that began to intrigue me, and it started with Crowley, but then the more I began to look around the number of people you run across who were connected to intelligence in one form or another and had some sort of interest or connection to the occult… This isn’t just one of those things that’s an oddity. It’s almost commonplace. There is a serious overlap between the two realms, and I will admit that I’m not sure why that overlap exists. I can only tell you that it is there. You tend to find occult is all over the place.

    Consider the context of that period. You’ve got Parsons, who is connected with JPL and the aerospace industry. He has a security clearance because he’s working on classified projects, and he’s working side by side with other people who are involved in classified projects. And in his spare time he is trying to encourage these people to join him in his occult activities. Would it be insane to imagine that Jack Parsons was working for someone in an effort to compromise and recruit American scientists, or people working in classified areas of aerospace? It’s a reasonable suspicion. 

    Parson’s association with Crowley’s OTO is the thing that lost him his first security clearance. He was eventually able to get it back, which is fairly interesting, and then he lost it again. He lost it the second time – I think he was working for Hughes Aircraft – because for inexplicable reasons he decided to take home classified documents from a project he was working on, and that’s just one of those things you don’t do. Anybody in that circumstance would have been terminated from the project. I can’t see Parsons ever came up with a good explanation as to why he did that. Was it to take home for his own satisfaction? Was it with the intent to deliver them to somebody else? 

    In 1938, Jack Parsons’ testimony as an explosives expert helped convict the Los Angeles police intelligence chief, Earl Kynette, for the attempted murder of private investigator Harry Raymond. In court, Parsons reconstructed the bomb Kynette had planted, establishing his expertise in the public eye.

    Afterwards, he’s become unemployable in the aerospace field. There’s talk he’s going to Mexico to set up a fireworks factory, and the idea he had been invited by the Israeli government to come to Tel Aviv and help them develop their missile program. I’ve seen that stated, I’ve never seen anything from the Israeli end that might support it. Of course, you’re not going to get Mossad or someone to say, “Yeah we tried to recruit this guy.” Those are the type of things you don’t talk about. 

    There’s a third possibility. Are all those really blinds for the fact that what you’re going to do is go to Mexico, then pretend you’re going to Israel, but end up in Moscow? That is what I think some people on the American end were afraid of. You’ve got a guy who’s certainly a religious and social dissident… I mean Parsons had penned this thing called Manifesto of the Antichrist, in which he stated that he was opposed to all existing governments and wouldn’t submit to their authority. That makes him a problematic employee. And then you have someone who had briefly flirted with the Communist Party back in the late ‘30s, and at the JPL was associated with people who were past or present members of the Communist Party. This, by the way, was also a period, the late ‘40s and ‘50s, when a secret program known as the Venona Project was becoming increasingly aware that it was infested with Soviet agents. Lots of them. I mean the Manhattan Project was infiltrated. You have to place the whole thing with Parsons and his activity in that time frame to understand how people saw it. Their fears were not entirely irrational. They might have been wrong, but it wasn’t irrational to have those suspicions. 

    Parsons was a genius. He would have been the perfect guy to go after if I was a Soviet agent or recruiter operating in California at that time. There would be great advantage to that, and I would be very much surprised if no Soviet approached him… It’s a possibility that has to be considered.

    CN: What do you personally think happened?

    RS: His wife believed he was murdered. She believed it wasn’t an accidental explosion. I’m an agnostic on that point because while Parsons knew his way around explosives probably better than most people, maybe anybody, accidents happen. That to me would still seem to be the most likely explanation. But, it’s an interestingly timed accident, and if someone, let’s say, wanted to make sure their opponents can’t use him, well there’s only one way to be sure of that. I don’t think it’s the most likely explanation that Parsons was murdered, but again, I think it is a possibility that can’t be ruled out.

    CN: Where does British spymaster Maxwell Knight fit into things?

    RS: Maxwell Knight. Here’s another guy also involved with intelligence, and that’s what connects him to Crowley. Aside from whatever may have connected them in terms of intelligence work, they also shared a common personal interest in the occult sphere. I think that’s often important to draw people together. Knight’s a strange character. He’s a guy that starts out in the ‘20s, ostensibly as a kind of fascist. I think at one point he’s the chief of intelligence for one of the fascist organisations. By the ‘30s his organisation is infiltrating and spying on the Right in Britain. That’s one of the things he tends to be quite successful at, putting his eyes and ears inside things like the Right Club. These were essentially pro-fascist organisations in Britain that were suspected, and quite rightly in most cases, of being vehicles for German, and to some degree Italian, intelligence operations. A place where the Nazis could find fellow travellers who could be recruited for one purpose or another. 

    Maxwell Knight’s official file photograph. 

    You’ve got a guy who essentially starts out apparently working for these organisations, who then a decade or so later is now spying on very similar organisations. This always brings up the fascinating point about where their true loyalties actually lie. Do they have any? 

    The codename Maxwell Knight used, or one of them, was ‘M’, and there is a connection in the ‘30s. Someone using the codename M was supplying information to the Vatican about Crowley and other people’s activities. They’re supplying it to a fellow by the name of Father Joseph who was attached to the Vatican in the late ‘30s and essentially ran a kind of minor intelligence operation that was very interested in keeping track of certain individuals and occult activities. He was very interested in Crowley and other people, and he was getting these reports from England, from a British source. There’s some discussion about who this M actually was… the first conclusion you would jump to is that it must be Maxwell Knight. Why? Because Maxwell Knight was known to use the cover name or identifier M, and it would make sense that Knight had some acquaintance through Crowley, through interest in the occult… Crowley might have been someone he was keeping track of. Maxwell Knight seemed to be the kind of logical candidate for this particular M because the connections were there. The occult connections, his involvement with intelligence, the fact that Crowley was connected to unsavoury characters, or appeared to be, on both the left and the right… So he could have been M. I’d give you a 95 percent assurance, however, that it wasn’t Maxwell Knight.

    CN: Who do you think M was?

    RS: Montague Summers. Montague Summers was also British, and a man with a fascination with the occult, but apparently from the other side. Montague Summers wrote a series of popular books on occult subjects like werewolves, vampires, and witchcraft. Montague Summers was a peculiar character. He at one point had been ordained in the Anglican church and then had been defrocked for the reasons that priests often get defrocked. He apparently had an acute interest in young boys, and that got him kicked out of the Church of England. But then he was re-ordained, if my memory serves me correctly, in one of those kind of fringe… Not the regular Roman Catholic Church, but the Old Catholic Church, one of these semi-dissident bodies that still maintains connections to Catholicism.

    The English author and clergyman Montague Summers (1880–1948)

    From the standpoint of Montague Summers, witches, vampires, werewolves, and that kind of thing are bad. He doesn’t see anything positive in them. But notice there’s still this common interest. His interest in the occult may be from exposing its negativity, whereas Crowley is more of a proponent in some respects of its positive aspects, but outside their stage personas they hung out together. You have people who can indeed put Montague Summers and Crowley in the same room together. They don’t seem to have been fast friends, but they would talk. There was a common bond between them, and that’s why I think Montague Summers was M.

    Here you have another occultist or someone who was immersed in it, serving another purpose. The other thing that tends to reinforce this, and I got this from a fellow who was the descendant of Montague Summers’ personal secretary: When Summers died, which was around the same time or a little after Crowley did in ‘47, the story goes that after Summers’ death some men showed up and took a bunch of his papers, and when the secretary asked, “Who are you, and why are you taking these papers?” the answer was, “We’re from the government.” That’s a little interesting anecdote.

    I think that Maxwell Knight is the most obvious candidate for M, but sometimes the most obvious answer is not the correct one. 

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  • The Mysterious Connection Between Past-Life Recall, Near-Death Experiences, Alien Abductions & Multiple Personality Disorder

    The Mysterious Connection Between Past-Life Recall, Near-Death Experiences, Alien Abductions & Multiple Personality Disorder

    This article was originally published in New Dawn 131 (Mar-Apr 2012) and reprinted in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 2 (April 2019)

    On 2 January 1885, a mental patient named Louis Vivet, suffering from dédoublement (“double consciousness or “split personality”) escaped from the famous Bicêtre asylum in Paris. A month later he was rounded up and transferred to the military hospital in Rochefort, France.

    At Bicêtre, Vivet had suffered from having one alternate personality (or autre, “other”). In July 1885, his physicians at Rochefort reported that he now had eight personalities. In Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (University of Princeton Press, 1995), Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking writes, “Our phrase ‘multiple personality’ appeared in print in England in a year, explicitly to describe Louis Vivet.”1 Multiple personality disorder (MPD) – today usually referred to as dissociate identity disorder (DID) – had entered history.

    At Bicêtre, Vivet had displayed all the appalling symptoms of what was called, in full, grande hysterie chez l’homme avec dédoublement de la personnalité [“major hysteria in a person, with split personality”]. At Rochefort, he presented all the same symptoms, but more so. Dr Hacking describes him as suffering from, “Every kind of pain, paralysis, anesthesia, contracture, muscular spasm, hyperesthesia, mutism, rash, bleeding, coughing, vomiting, convulsing; every kind of epileptic seizure, catatonia, somnambulism, Saint Vitus’ dance (chorea), arc de cercle (in which the patient lies horizontal, face up, with a totally arched back), language impairment, animalisation (the patient becomes a dog), machinisation (the patient becomes a steam locomotive)… constipation, anorexia, bulimia, alcoholism, debility”2 and much more.

    Multiple personality disorder entered history with the case of Frenchman Louis Vivet in the late 1800s.

    Vivet’s physicians believed, as we would today, that his condition stemmed from childhood abuse. Vivet was the son of an alcoholic prostitute who beat and neglected him. He ran away from home at eight, committed theft, and was put in prison. This pattern of crime and punishment was repeated again and again, accompanied by increasing physical and mental hysteria. At Rochefort, Vivet shifted easily and unexpectedly between his eight personalities which ranged from pious and docile to violent and convulsive. He slowly began to recover. In about 1890 he was released in reasonably stable condition. From then on he is lost to history.3

    Over the next seventy years, only a dozen or so cases of MPD were reported and treated, mostly in France. Then, in 1956, the release of the movie The Three Faces of Eve, supposedly based on a true story, starring Joanne Woodward as Eve and Lee J. Cobb as the psychiatrist, caused a mild stir with its depiction of a woman with three personalities. There was a flurry of cases of MPD. In 1976, the film Sybil, also ostensibly based on an autobiography – Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities – starring Sally Fields as Sybil and Joanne Woodward as the psychiatrist,created a sensation. In the twenty years between the two films, there had been growing public concern over child abuse. This set the stage for an enthusiastic reception for Sybil. Subsequently, therapists began to uncover dozens, even hundreds, of “alters” in their clients. The number of people suffering from MPD/DID rose exponentially until, in the mid-1990s, researchers could claim as many as 100,000 cases.

    This story of the abrupt proliferation of incidences of MPD, beginning toward the end of the last century and following on the heels of a trickle of such cases over the preceding seventy to eighty years, is a well-known one. What isn’t well-known is that the same brief window of time (estimated by Dr Hacking at 1874-1886) that saw the birth of multiple personality disorder also saw the birth of three other altered-state-of-consciousness phenomena: past life recall; recall of near-death experiences (NDEs); and UFO sightings (which came to include alien abductions). 

    Moreover, if we draw lines on a graph tracing the proliferation of incidences of the four phenomena over the next 100-120 years – until about 2000 – we observe that the four follow almost the same path. The four lines virtually pile up on top of each other. In other words, all four of the phenomena make their appearance in roughly 1874-1886, trail along with little more than a smattering of occurrences for the next 60-80 years, and then – usually sparked off by a highly dramatic public event such as the film Sybil in the case of MPD/DID – abruptly proliferate at an exponential rate, approaching, in the 1990s, figures as high as 100,000. 

    Does this mean that all four phenomena are just different facets of the same phenomenon?

    All four have one thing in common (and this is true of the alien abduction side of UFO sightings if it is not true of the sightings themselves): They are recalled experiences. They must be remembered to be brought into being. Our awareness of them is dependent on the existence of the faculty of memory – that is, memory as a storehouse. This seems obvious in the case of MPD/DID, where only one personality manifests at one time, and the rest must remain in storage, “in our memory.” But it’s also the case with past-life recall; a past life can only be recalled if it, too, is stored somewhere “in memory.” And near-death experiences can only be remembered – assuming, that is, that the experiencer can be resuscitated – if they’ve been stored, somehow, somewhere in our memory.

    The phenomena of “missing time” is common to alien abductions; abductees find they can’t account for hours, even days, of their time, until, at a certain point – usually when they’re undergoing therapy – they recall that during that missing time they were whisked away to a UFO. (The experience of seeing a UFO in real time doesn’t require “memory.”)

    Ian Hacking asserts in Rewriting the Soul that the concept of memory as a storehouse only came into being just after 1874, and was invented by the scientists, and their colleagues, who were treating Louis Rivet. The concept was invented because the science of that time had proven – or so it was thought – that the soul does not exist. Religion now had sole ownership of the concept of the soul. Only the church had the right to inquire into its nature. Scientists, finding themselves without an object they could examine as they had examined the soul, came up with an alternate concept, and this was memory as a storehouse. That was the real soul; its study would yield an equal portion of truth.

    As Dr Hacking writes, “Memory, already regarded as a criterion of personal identity, became a scientific key to the soul, so that by investigating memory (to find out its facts) one would conquer the spiritual domain of the soul and replace it by a surrogate, knowledge about memory.”4

    Should we infer from this that the phenomena of MPD/DID, past-life recall, recall of NDEs, and alien abductions into UFOs are merely made-up realities, figments of our imagination? Ian Hacking certainly believes this is true as regards the soaring growth of incidences of multiple personality disorder/dissociative personality disorder over the past 20-30 years.

    But, first: to try to follow the Canadian philosopher’s line of reasoning, let’s see if it’s true that all four of these phenomena really do trace out roughly the same growth curve, coming out of nowhere in 1874-1886, lying fallow for the next 60-80 years, and then, as the twentieth century comes to a close, bursting forth in a wild proliferation of incidences. 

    UFOs & Alien Abductions

    France’s Jacques Vallée, writing in Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds (1993; “Magonia” is a cloud realm in a French Medieval folk tale), is the most eminent of a school of UFO researchers who believe UFOs go back a very long way in our history. He holds that aliens have visited us for millennia as angels, succubi, fairies, leprechauns, and so forth, and that their trysts with us in the past often resembled the alien abduction encounters of today. There are those who believe, for example, that medieval tales of persons’ being flown to witches’ sabbaths where the Devil rapes them with an ice-cold cast-iron-like penis, are really early accounts of abductees’ being whirled away to UFOs where their orifices are violated by ice-cold metal probes wielded by alien researchers.5 

    Temple University History Professor Dr David Jacobs is a prominent member of the other, “modernist,” school of UFO research. He insists that the earliest reported UFO sightings took place between November 1886 and May 1887, in western and mid-western states of the US, when thousands of people claimed they saw dirigible-type cylindrical airships sailing through the skies. The dates place this sighting at the upper end of Dr Hacking’s “memory creation” window of 1874-1886; in fact, the sightings took place about the same time Louis Vivet was being examined by his physicians at Rochefort. From May 1887 on, nothing resembling a UFO (with the exception of “foo-fighters,” phantom disks said to pursue Allied fighter jets near the end of World War Two) was sighted until 24 June 1947, when aircraft pilot Kenneth Arnold reported observing nine saucer-like vehicles hurtling through the skies above Mt. Rainier, Washington. This headline-grabbing event, as powerful in impact as the release of the film Sybil which preceded the explosion of incidences of MPD, was the starting point for an equally explosive proliferation of UFO sightings, which by the end of the century were said to number in the millions.

    Artist’s impression of Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting of nine saucer-like objects flying above Mt. Rainier, Washington. 

    In the 1970s, the phenomenon of “alien abductions” began to spin off from that of UFO sightings. Soon, almost as many alien abductions as UFO sightings were being reported. Whitley Strieber, author of Communion, and Anne Strieber, asserted in The Communion Letters (1997) that by the mid-1990s the number of alien abductions was probably as high as a quarter-of-a-million. In Abduction (1994), Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack reported that “polls of the prevalence of the UFO abduction phenomenon in the United States, including a survey of nearly six thousand Americans conducted by the Roper organisation between July and September 1991, indicate that from several hundred thousand to several million Americans may have had abduction or abduction-related experiences.”6 Dr Jacobs, analysing the same Roper report, put the figure, conservatively in his view, at five million. 

    On 26 December 1985, Whitley Strieber had an experience in which he believed he was abducted from his cabin in upstate New York by nonhuman beings. The above is a rendition of the ‘alien’ he encountered, this picture appearing on the front cover of his first nonfiction book, Communion (1987), which described the experience. The story was turned into the influential 1989 film of the same name. 

    Past Life Regression & NDEs

    The growth rate for the recall of near-death experiences (NDEs) kept pace with those traced out by incidences of MPD and alien abductions. Although in Otherworldly Journeys (1987), Harvard theologian Carol Zaleski compiled tales of ostensible NDEs from different cultures throughout history, many of these accounts probably describe quite different phenomena. The reporting of NDEs really only began when medical science had advanced to the point where people could be resuscitated after a significant length of time “among the dead.” It’s noteworthy that H.G. Wells published two short stories, “Under the Knife,” in 1896, and “The Door in the Wall,” in 1906 – the first only a decade, the second two decades, after Dr Hacking’s window for creation of the concept of memory – which eerily describe NDEs, the second with an exactness of detail usually found only in accounts of NDEs made possible by post-1970 resuscitation methods. Wells’s stories probably reflect unreported real events. From that point on, there are hardly any reports of NDEs until at least the early 1960s. By the late 1960s, the number of such reports was expanding exponentially, and the experience was becoming almost commonplace. According to Gallup polls, by 1991 the figure had risen to eight million. With continuing improvements in resuscitation technology, the figure would continue to rise. 

    The results of past-life regression therapy – hypnotising clients so they can recover their “past lives” – aren’t always reported, and sometimes the recollection of past lives is hidden in a thicket of broader psychological and psychiatric issues. Yet it’s possible to date the first recorded incidence of this fourth altered state of consciousness to just a few years after the close of Dr Hacking’s memory-as-storehouse-invention window. One of the earliest cases is that of the Swiss medium Hélène Smith, who, in 1895-1897, under the direction of philosopher-psychologist Théodore Flournoy, recalled past lives as Marie Antoinette and an East Indian princess. (These cases are usually regarded today as examples of MPD.) Smith was a medium; the “seances” were immortalised in Dr Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars (1899). In Les Vies Successives (1911), Colonel Albert de Rochas described turn-of-the-century experiments in Paris on nineteen persons whose consciousness was regressed back through birth to an existence as a discarnate spirit and then to one or two of their past lives.7 In The Belief in a Life after Death (1961), C.J. Ducasse chronicledsimilar experiments carried out at almost the same time by a group of physicians in New York City.8

    Then, for the next 60-70 years, travellers in search of reports of past-life recall will find themselves labouring across a vast, arid desert, with only one – though notable – oasis: Asa Ray Martin (1887-1949), a business school owner in Sharon, Ohio, who was the first American to regularly practice past-life regression therapy. In Researches in Reincarnation and Beyond (1942),Martin describes how over a period of twelve years he regressed 500 subjects, achieving remarkable results that included enabling a number of them to “talk, sing, and chant in languages of which they had no knowledge – Chinese, Arabic, German, for example – and their grammar and syntax would reflect their past personalities.”9 (It was at about this time that Edgar Cayce began his remarkable career in which past-life recall played a small, if vital, role.)

    The desert ends abruptly in 1956, with a towering, mountain-sized, past-life recall public event. This is the publication of The Search for Bridey Murphy by hypnotherapist Morey Bernstein. Bridey Murphy was a nineteenth-century Irishwoman who was a past lifetime of a Colorado housewife, Ruth Simmons, whom Bernstein had regressed hypnotically. Simmons convincingly recalled many details of Murphy’s life; historical research seemed to bear out these details. 

    The book and subsequent movie struck a nerve. People became intensely interested in reincarnation. Therapists became involved in past-life regression therapy. The curve for the number of past-life recalls shot upward at an exponential rate, until, in 1990, Hans TenDam could report in Exploring Reincarnation that “[therapist Joe] Fisher’s estimate that past-life therapy has since been responsible for healing hundreds of thousands of people… may be an overstatement, but the total number may be well towards 100,000.”10 By the late 1990s, the figure was probably approaching half-a-million: one Vancouver, B.C., therapist declared in 1994 that she had personally regressed 10,000 clients to past lives. Though past-life regression therapy has to some extent shifted away from the US, the figure, as we’ll see, remains high.

    These four phenomena, aping one another in distinctive growth patterns that first crawl slowly forward, then suddenly soar upward, constitute an extraordinary plenitude of altered-state-of-consciousness experiences. Would they never have come into existence had not a group of French physicians and their colleagues decided, late in the nineteenth century, to devise a way of understanding memory that would give them the means to gain knowledge of the soul?

    Dr Hacking makes it clear he doesn’t believe that men and women had, before 1874, no knowledge of the nature of memory. He writes: “I do not mean that we began to think about memory only in the late nineteenth century. The previous chapter [of Rewriting the Soul] dipped into the art of memory and listened to [eighteenth-century English philosopher John] Locke’s moving observation that episodes from the past ‘very often are roused and tumbled out of their dark cells into open daylight, by turbulent and tempestuous passions; our affections bringing ideas to our memories, which had otherwise lain quiet and unrewarded’. But there was little conception of a knowledge about memory before the nineteenth century…. [It was roughly in 1874-1886 that] the depth knowledge, the knowledge that there are facts about memory, came into being. Why did it come into being then? Because the sciences of memory could serve as a public forum for something of which science could not openly speak. There could be no science of the soul. So there came to be a science of memory.”11 This science of memory was based on the notion that memory is a storehouse, preserving in permanent form material as meaningful as that which the Church claimed to uncover in the soul. 

    Multiple Personality Disorder/DID

    Dr Hacking’s book focuses only on the birth, the painfully slow progress, and the sudden extraordinary flowering, of incidences of multiple personality disorder/dissociative identity disorder. He ignores the three other varieties of recall of altered states of consciousness that are the subject matter of this article. He makes it clear that he believes the rapid rise of cases of MPD/DID is a “copycat” phenomenon. The film Sybil didn’t give a name to the state of being possessed by “alters” that was already afflicting many; rather, the time was ripe for people to be so overpoweringly influenced by the film that they set about manufacturing a definition of themselves as afflicted by MPD. “Feedback” between therapist and client was a vital element in this process (as it had been a vital, “co-creative,” element in the relationship of Louis Vivet and his doctors); therapist and client together “co-created” the state of being called multiple personality disorder.

    Various cultural phenomena, particularly TV, were critical factors in the formation of MPD/DID. Dr Hacking writes: “Some really dysfunctional multiples going through a bad patch switch personalities very rapidly, each time assuming a new stock character. The effect is similar to that of switching TV channels by channel surfing. This impression is enhanced because patients with a great many alters often choose, for some of their personalities, the names of characters in sitcoms, soaps and crime series. It happens that TV remote controls became available in America just about the time that today’s florid multiples became abundant. I am not saying that multiples consciously act out television fantasies – or, at any rate, that they do so any more than the rest of us. We constantly mimic others.”12

    The Canadian philosopher goes so far as to imply it was no accident that, at the same time that as many as 100 channels became available on TV, sufferers from MPD appeared who claimed to harbour as many as 100 alters, that is, other personalities.

    Dr Hacking does not believe in the existence of an enduring soul. He seems to be, instead, a proponent of the modern-day theory of the social construction of reality. This theory holds that ‘reality’ does not exist. Physical ‘reality’, no less than social ‘reality’, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct. Scientific ‘knowledge’, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it. 

    The Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare

    There is one major cultural event of the past few decades that, in retrospect, seems clearly to have been a social construction of reality, and to bear out Dr Hacking’s contentions. This is the phenomenon of, in the words of Ontario’s Religious Tolerance website, “Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), [which] can be defined as the psychological, sexual, and/or physical assault forced on an unwilling human victim, and committed by one or more Satanists according to a prescribed ritual, the primary aim of which is to fulfil their need to worship the Christian devil, Satan.

    “A ‘Satanic Panic’ swept the US and Canada, starting about 1980 and continuing until the late 1990s. It included beliefs that underground and sometimes inter-generational Satanic cults were murdering as many as 60,000 people per year. The panic died after 15 years because of lack of hard evidence that it ever existed as a significant problem. A survey by Redbook magazine in 1994 found that 70% of American adults believed in the existence of abusive Satanic cults. Thirty-two percent explained away the absence of hard evidence or other proof by believing that ‘the FBI and police ignore evidence because they don’t want to admit the cults exist’. There is a near consensus among investigators today that SRA is either nonexistent or occurs at an extremely low and undetectable level.”13

    ‘Satanic’ ritual from a 1970s movie. Hysteria over secret Satanic cults led to the ‘Satanic Panic’ that swept the US and Canada in the 80s and 90s.

    Past-life recall, NDE recall, and alien abduction came into being, endured, and burst into prominence in the same way and in the same time frame as MPD. Are these first three, then, merely different facets of the same altered-state-of-consciousness stream of reality that gave birth to the fourth? Are these three merely fabrications, products of the infinite suggestibility of humankind?

    Dr Hacking would probably say yes. He would likely argue that Kenneth Arnold’s encounter with nine UFOs over Mt. Rainier in Washington in 1947 did not open people’s eyes to see clearly what they had been seeing all along (still less would he say that the UFOs seen by Arnold were the first in a steadily mounting wave of visitors from outer space). Instead, he would say that Arnold’s sighting, for reasons having to do with where society was at, at the time, struck at the heart of the vast impressionability of humankind; that we began, aided and abetted by each other, by the media, and by the rulers of society, to increasingly “make up” UFOs – and, not long afterward, to make up alien abductions. Dr Hacking would probably regard the publication of The Search for Bridey Murphy not as some explosive event opening us up to deeper parts of our psyche; rather, he would see the book as no more nor less than an irresistible invitation to dream, to create, to invent, to make believe that we are far vaster (in that we possess many lives) than we’d thought we were – to, in effect, “socially create” that reality. 

    Let’s pause here. Surely this isn’t the whole truth. There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructs and facts. Evidence does matter. Wise men and women, while not attributing to UFOs, to past lifetimes, to near-death experiences, an ultimate nuts-and-bolts reality, have nevertheless glimpsed archetypal forms – other, different, powerful realities – lying behind and within these phenomena, realities that ensure them a permanence beyond the flux of transient phenomena. 

    C.J. Jung is one. John White writes, in “What Are UFOs?”, in New Dawn Special Issue 17: “In his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, Jung proposed that UFOs are symbolic projections of deep human yearnings for wholeness and transformation in the collective psyche of humanity. Without denying their physical nature – because, of course, UFOs have been photographed and tracked on radar – Jung speculated that UFOs are either our own psychic projections perceived objectively in the sky or they are the appearance of real objects which afford humans an opportunity to project mythological symbols from deep in the collective psyche.”14 White lists other ways of understanding the phenomena of UFO sightings and alien abductions. It is likewise possible to list other ways of understanding past-life recall and NDEs – ways that give these phenomena a profound if ultimately unknowable objective reality while making allowance for the infinite number of forms they seem to take in the face of humankind’s infinite ways of seeing.

    Where are Memories Really Stored?

    Could the “social construction” that was the invention of memory as a storehouse really have moulded our faculties of perception in such a way that we were able to invent the (otherwise non-existent) phenomena of MPD, past-lives, NDEs and alien abductions? This seems unlikely; and, besides, it has become increasingly clear in our time that the notion of memory as a storehouse is a limited, maybe an erroneous, one. This notion came into existence, as Dr Hacking suggests, at the end of the nineteenth century, as a political tool – “memoro-politics” – enabling scientists to pursue their deepest investigations despite the co-optation of the soul by the church. Increasingly in our time the notion is being put forward that memory is not only not stored in the brain, but it might not even be localised in the body. In Transplant Memories, Dr Michael Grosso writes of anomalous memories associated with transplant operations. He tells the story of Claire Sylvia, who “reports that after her heart and lung transplant she suddenly had cravings for foods she never liked before such as beer, green peppers, and chicken nuggets. Later, when she met her organ donor’s family, she learnt that the young man who gave her a new heart was indeed fond of these foods, and was actually carrying a container of chicken nuggets when he died. Tim, the donor, was possessed by a constant craving for action during his life; Claire, after her transplant, became unaccountably restless, and felt urges to travel in a manner quite unlike her pre-transplant self. She also found herself having dreams of beautiful women and flirting with other women; prior to her operation, she had no homosexual leanings.”15

    Claire even dreamt of Tim, at a time when she didn’t know who her donor was and certainly not what he looked like. Dr Grosso asks: “What are we to make of these cognitive memories, which we can assume for the sake of argument to have been accurately reported? Transplant memories suggest that memory may occur apart from any coding, storage, and retrieval from the central nervous system. We haven’t the foggiest notion of how to make sense of this.”16 He cites further research that seems to indicate that no matter how much, or what parts, of the brain are removed, memory survives. Dr Grosso concludes with a wild speculation: “For all we know, the brain’s complete destruction will liberate, not annihilate, consciousness.”17

    In “Intermediate States: Charles Fort’s Degrees of Reality,” Colin Bennett continues in the same vein, providing examples to show us that not only is memory not localised in the brain, but many other so-called “brain” functions may not be localised in the brain either. Among a number of other cases, he cites that of Pacho Penaloza, of La Paz, Bolivia, who “blasted off a quarter of his brain and a third of his skull when mishandling a pistol in 1984. He was in a coma for three months, his right side was expected to be permanently paralysed, and he was also expected to be deprived of speech. A new skull-cover was reconstructed by Minnesota plastic surgeons Joseph Skow and Frank Pilney, using a section of bone taken from a rib and another part of Pacho’s skull, and a scalp-flip stitched into place. Apart from a clenched fist and a limp, Pacho made a complete recovery.”18

    It seems that (as Ian Hacking suggests) the conceptualisation by Vivet’s doctors of memory (which they were certain was contained in the brain) as a faculty of storage, was a more or less arbitrary one, chosen solely to give the doctors a path to knowledge of the soul. Increasingly, it seems that memory doesn’t need a physical container at all. Perhaps it abides as a kind of mist surrounding the body – or perhaps as a mist extending throughout the universe. The ancient concept of the Akashic files – a higher reality in which all human knowledge is stored – may not be so far-fetched after all. 

    Altered States of Consciousness Today

    What does our altered states-of-consciousness graph look like today? In the first decade of the twenty-first century, do our four phenomena continued to soar upward intermingled?

    Reported cases of MPD/DID tapered off considerably in the first decade of the twenty-first century, suggesting that many of them may have been, like cases of satanic ritual abuse, the product of a kind of psychic panic. 

    The status of past-life recall, as reflected in the estimated number of past-life regression sessions taking place over the past ten years, is quite different. Therapist Bob Holmes, of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, told me: “Conservatively I would guess at in excess of one hundred thousand past life sessions world-wide and maybe it is several times that number. This loose guesstimate doesn’t include past life readings by psychics.”19 [The late] Dr Roger Woolger, a leading past-life regressionist, added: “My guess is that in the US there must be a decline in this field. On the contrary, in countries like Turkey, Brazil, Portugal, India, Japan and the Netherlands there is a growing number of practitioners who engage in regression therapy.”20

    Hans TenDam of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, president of the European Association for Regression Therapy (EARTH) and author of Exploring Reincarnation (1990), told me the field of past-life regression therapy grew rapidly in 1978-1990, then stabilised. “Probably over the last five years [before 2011] things are picking up again,” he said. “It is spreading in South Asia and slowly gaining ground in Europe.” Given the large number of variables, he added, it’s difficult to arrive at an exact figure. But, taking a wild guess, he estimates, worldwide, “the total number of sessions per year at 350,000.” In the last twenty-five years about one to one-and-a-half million people will have experienced one or more past-life sessions – [though] of very divergent quality, effect and credibility.”21

    Regarding UFO sightings, Clifford Clift, International Director, Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), Greeley, Colorado, reports that: “We had approximately 6,000 sighting reports to MUFON in 2010. Worldwide, I would estimate 12,000, but don’t know for sure… The sighting numbers are up over the year 2000, but that may be due to people being more aware of MUFON. One other figure you need to be aware of is only one out of ten people will report their sighting to MUFON or others.”22

    Xavier Passot, of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), in Toulouse, France, cautions: “It’s very difficult to announce a figure on worldwide UFO sightings… Moreover, any comparison of UFO sightings between 2000 and now would be skewed by many social parameters, e.g. the growing use of internet which makes UFO sightings reporting easy, and issues having to do with sci-fi films.”23

    Regarding alien abductions, Will Bueche, in Boulder, Colorado, representative of the John E Mack Institute, made the following, unexpected (in terms of the graphs we have been charting), statement:

    “Our impression, based on the experiencers who worked most closely with Dr Mack, who had recurrent experiences throughout their lives, is that alien encounters diminished markedly in the year 2000. Some people reported distinct communications conveying the message that the experiences would become rare, while others simply reported that they became infrequent without explanation. Though ‘one-off’ experiences continue to sometimes happen to these people on occasion, it is no longer the norm to have many experiences each year, with some ebb and flow, as was the case in the last decade of the preceding century.

    “A review of the literature suggests that the 1980s and the 1990s (all the way to 2000) was the period of most intense activity for these experiences.

    “The way in which the experiences seem to have stopped reinforces our impression that these are or were actual contact experiences of some kind, evidently on a schedule of its own – though as an organisation we maintain an uncertainty about what level of reality they occur in, given the lack of material evidence contrasted with the wealth of experiential evidence (the direct experiences by people of sound mind).

    “Another possibility could be that the experiences are continuing with another (younger) generation with whom the John E Mack Institute does not have contact, or, that the experiences may have changed from the seemingly physical and therefore difficult to dismiss (or dare we say, too terrifying to dismiss), to something more subtle (and pleasant) that may be more easily confused with dream states. But these alternative possibilities are only speculation.”24

    The incidences of NDEs continue to rise, the most recent Gallup Poll reporting that 20 million Americans claim to have had near-death experiences. 

    These altered-states-of-consciousness experiences continue to mystify us. The greatest mystery of all is why they resemble each other; why they seem to be facets of the same unknown reality. Perhaps only an in-depth comparative study of the four phenomena, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and today are as bewildering as ever, will begin to give us some answers. 

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was originally published in New Dawn 131 (Mar-Apr 2012) and reprinted in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 2.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    Sources

    Colin Bennett, “Intermediate States: Charles Fort’s Degrees of Reality,” The Anomalist 7 (Winter 1998/99), 79-157.

    John Chambers, “H.G. Wells (1866-1946): Did the Father of Science-Fiction Have a Near-Death Experience?” The Secret Life of Genius: How 24 Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds,” Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions/Destiny Books, 2009, 179-186.

    Theodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963. 

    Michael Grosso, “Transplant Memories,” The Anomalist 7 (Winter 1998/99), 71-78. 

    Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.

    David M. Jacobs, Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

    C.G. Jung, “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies,” Civilization in Transition. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970, 307-432. 

    John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, 2nd edition, New York: Ballantine Books, 1995.

    Personal Communication, Will Bueche, representative, John E Mack Institute, September 2011. 

    Personal Communication, Clifford Clift, MUFON, July 2011.

    Personal Communication, Bob Holmes, July 2011.

    Personal Communication, David Jones, Ph.D. July 1996.

    Personal Communication, Xavier Passot, CNES, July 2011.

    Personal Communication, Hans Ten Dam, July 2011.

    Personal Communication, Roger Woolger, July 2011.

    Religious Tolerance Website: www.religioustolerance.org/sraover.htm

    George Schwimmer, Ph.D., “A.R. Martin: Pioneer in Past-Life Regression,” The Journal of Regression Therapy, Vol. VII, No. 1 (December 1993), 16-28.

    Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, New York: Saint Martin’s Griffin, 2002.

    Whitley Strieber and Anne Strieber, The Communion Letters, New York: HarperPrism, 1997.

    Hans TenDam, Exploring Reincarnation, London: Arkana, 1990.

    John White, “What Are UFOs?” New Dawn Special Issue 17 (Spring 2011), 3-9.

    Roger, J. Woolger, Ph.D., Other Lives, Other Selves: A Jungian Psychotherapist Discovers Past Lives, New York: Bantam, 1987.

    Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

    Footnotes

    1. Hacking, 172

    2. Ibid, 174

    3. Ibid, 174-175

    4. Ibid, 198

    5. Personal Communication, David Jones, Ph.D.

    6. Mack, 85

    7. TenDam, 7-8

    8. Woolger, 87-88

    9. Schwimmer, 23-24

    10. TenDam, 8

    11. Hacking, 219

    12. Ibid, 32

    13. www.religioustolerance.org/sraover.htm

    14. White, 7

    15. Grosso, 71

    16. Ibid, 73

    17. Ibid, 77

    18. Bennett, 99-100

    19. Personal Communication, Bob Holmes

    20. Personal Communication, Roger Woolger

    21. Personal Communication, Hans Ten Dam

    22. Personal Communication, Clifford Clift

    23. Personal Communication, Xavier Passot

    24. Personal Communication, Will Bueche

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • A Convergence of Science & Real Magic

    A Convergence of Science & Real Magic

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 5 (Oct 2018)

    The word “real” in the title distinguishes the type of magic we’re discussing. This is not about the fictional magic of Harry Potter or the fake magic of Harry Houdini. This is about real magic, which falls into three main categories: divination, or perception of events distant in space or time; force of will, or mental influence of the physical world; and theurgy, or interactions with nonphysical entities.

    In my book Real Magic (Harmony, 2018), I describe how these traditional, esoteric forms of magic (occultists use the term “magick”) have been scientifically studied for over a century, and why the accumulated evidence in favour of real magic is now overwhelmingly positive. This assertion might be surprising given that college textbooks teach us that magic is merely an ancient superstitious belief. But textbooks are regularly revised and updated as science marches on, and at the leading edge of science today we’re finding that some of the ancient ideas about magic are actually correct. Science and magic appear to be converging.

    How do we know this?

    One strong indication appeared in May 2018. The American Psychological Association (APA) is the principal organisation for academic and clinical psychologists, with nearly 120,000 members worldwide. Its flagship journal is the august American Psychologist. In the May 2018 issue, a lead article was entitled, “The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review.” The author was Etzel Cardeña, a psychology professor at Lund University in Sweden. After analysing ten classes of experiments exploring psychic effects (“psi” for short), the article’s conclusion was unequivocal: “The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines.” That this article appeared in the conservative voice of academic psychology cannot be overstated.

    There are many other signs. For example, University of California statistics professor Jessica Utts was President of the American Statistical Association (ASA) in 2016. The ASA is the world’s largest organisation of academic and professional statisticians. In her Presidential Address in 2016, Utts mentioned that one area she had studied in detail for the US government was parapsychology. She said: “The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically and would be widely accepted if they pertained to something more mundane.” 

    These are just two examples, but there is an increasing number of scientists who are willing to say to their peers, in public, that based on evaluation of the experimental evidence, psi exists. This is hardly news to the majority of the general public who already believe this, but among many scientists the mere possibility that psi might be real has been such a contentious issue that few were willing to express such positive opinions in public. The reason for the ongoing debate has had very little to do with the evidence and very much to do with the scientific worldview – that collection of ideas that form how science understands reality and our place in it.

    The debate over psi has persisted for hundreds of years because generations of students have been taught that psi violates one or more unspecified laws of physics, and so any claims about it, either experiential or experimental, must be mistaken. This belief has forced psi out of the academic mainstream, and its marginal status has had important consequences. As the late Irvin Child, former chair of the psychology department at Yale University, wrote in 1985 in American Psychologist: 

    Books by psychologists purporting to offer critical reviews of research in parapsychology do not use the scientific standards of discourse prevalent in psychology. Experiments… on possible extrasensory perception (ESP) in dreams… have received little or no mention in some reviews to which they are clearly pertinent. In others, they have been so severely distorted as to give an entirely erroneous impression of how they were conducted.

    We see these distortions starkly reflected in the contemptuous way that Wikipedia articles describe topics in parapsychology. This is a pity, not only because psi phenomena are extremely common human experiences, but because the state of the scientific evidence is so strong. Still, many journalists within the “serious” media continue to portray such experiences at best as spooky or silly, and at worst as a sign of mental illness. Despite the evidence, it’s not surprising that this topic has become an entrenched taboo.

    I explored where this taboo came from, and why it persists, in Real Magic. I surveyed the history of the esoteric traditions, the classes of magical practices, magic’s relationship to psi, what scientific tests tell us about magic, and why leading-edge scientific ideas are suggesting a science/magic convergence. The bottom line was as follows: When you survey 10,000 years of esoteric history, ranging from shamanism through Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, the Kabbalah, Gnosticism, the Rosicrucians, the Free Masons, and so on, you find that they are all based on a single perennial wisdom that can be summarised in three words: Consciousness is fundamental.

    By consciousness, I mean a primordial, universal awareness, a perplexing type of “substance” that’s woven into the fabric of reality. From this esoteric worldview, scientific concepts like space, time, energy, and matter are said to emerge out of a universal consciousness. It also means that our personal sense of awareness, our self-consciousness, is composed of the same stuff. The esoteric traditions tell us that ultimately you are the universe. That is, universal awareness is the source of everything, including our bodies, brains, minds, and that spark of awareness within you that you call “me.” This is the source of the affirmation mantra “you create your own reality,” and it is meant in a literal sense. The esoteric worldview makes it far easier to understand psi experiences like telepathy and clairvoyance because the idea that awareness spans all space and time, and that it can manifest the physical world, is simply a consequence of the nature of consciousness itself. 

    Dean Radin proposes a more comprehensive knowledge hierarchy which places Consciousness (C) at the bottom to indicate where the physical world emerges from. At the top of the pyramid is Mind, meaning the brain’s machinery involved in information processing, cognition and perception. From this perspective, he says, “we enjoy conscious awareness not because the brain generates it, but because (C) permeates every layer of the physical world, just like electrons permeate every later ‘above’ the discipline of physics. Based on his hierarchy, which maintains everything currently known in science… magic is no longer an impossible anomaly.”

    What does this have to do with real magic? 

    Real magic is the pragmatic application of the esoteric worldview, just like today’s technologies are the application of the scientific worldview. That is, if consciousness is indeed as fundamental as the esoteric traditions claim, then magic must be genuine because awareness is primary over the physical world. Thus, we have the capacity to transcend the limits of space and time, and we can determine (to a small extent) how the physical world emerges. Further, human embodiment can now be seen as just one way, among a potentially infinite number of other ways, that consciousness can manifest into a physical being. 

    Why aren’t there university-based departments of magic? Why can’t we earn an accredited advanced degree in magical practice? The usual answer is that the esoteric worldview is so radically different from today’s scientific worldview that it cannot possibly be true. But that’s only because the scientific worldview as portrayed in the typical college textbook is five to ten years out of date. The leading edge today in science, represented by articles and books written by mainstream thought-leaders in physics, mathematics, and the neurosciences, is proposing that reality is literally made out of information. That is, the emerging scientific worldview tells us that reality is not composed of matter or energy, but rather of something far stranger, more abstract, and much closer to the esoteric worldview than the materialistic perspective that’s commonly associated with science.

    Theoretical concepts aside, how can science study magic? Here’s an example involving tests of the magical force of will. These studies were sparked by asking why ancient practices of blessing food, water, and wine are still vibrantly alive in the modern world. Indeed, proposing toasts with wine and spirits are as popular today as they have been throughout history.

    Anthropologists who study these practices have found that wine has been a popular beverage for at least 8,000 years. Its popularity was partially due to its pleasant psychoactive properties, but also because it was much safer to drink than water. Drinking from a pond, a river, or a well can be dangerous because the water might be contaminated. In ancient times (and still today), it was not easy to tell if water was safe or hazardous, and the alcohol in wine tended to neutralise most of those dangers. 

    Besides becoming a common beverage, wine was also associated with special or “holy” properties. It was celebrated by devotees of the Greek god Dionysus, and it was incorporated into the Catholic belief of transubstantiation. In these contexts, the belief was that divinely inspired intentions could alter the properties of wine, and this belief remains an act of faith for many today. But here’s the rub: Does anything actually happen to the wine that can be detected without having to rely on faith or anecdotal reports?

    Research anthropologist Stephan Schwartz conducted a series of experiments to find out. In each test, he took a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, separated it into two carafes of equal volume, and then asked a small group of meditators to intentionally bless one of the carafes for 20 to 30 minutes. Then he randomly labelled one A, the other B, and set the two carafes aside. Later, he asked a host of a dinner party to run a taste test. The host didn’t know that one carafe contained blessed wine and the other contained unblessed or “control” wine. The host told her guests that a friend was considering buying several cases of wine and he wanted to see which one was preferred. The guests tasted each wine and marked on a card which one they preferred. The host then evaluated the group’s preference, told them the result, and thanked them for participating.

    Over 12 such parties, involving a total of 93 meditators involved in blessing the wine, and 84 party guests, the results were clear. In 11 of the parties the tasters preferred the blessed wine, and in one party the preference was a tie. The odds against chance for this outcome was 2,000 to 1, indicating that under double-blind conditions the blessed wine tasted better than the non-blessed wine. This is an astounding outcome because wine-tasting is a highly complex process involving not just taste and smell, but sophisticated forms of cognitive processing, and neither the host or the party guests knew that they were tasting wine from exactly the same bottle. Something had happened to the wine as a result of the blessing.

    This was not the only experiment to find that focused intention altered properties of a beverage. The late Dr Masaru Emoto claimed that conscious intention could change the shape of frozen water crystals, such that pleasant thoughts would result in beautiful, symmetric crystals, while bad thoughts would result in displeasing, misshaped crystals. Emoto published many books showing results of his tests, but much of that work was more along the lines of artistic efforts rather than controlled experiments, so most scientists were not impressed by his claims. 

    Dr Masaru Emoto (1943–2014), the Japanese scientist and water researcher, revealed the true nature of water and how thoughts and vibrations affect the molecular structure of water.

    After attending a lecture Emoto presented in 2005, we asked if he would be willing to participate in a double-blind, scientific study. He agreed, and in our collaboration the technician who took the photos of the frozen water crystals did not know if the water used to create the crystals was blessed or not blessed. The blessing in our study was performed by a group of 2,000 people who focused their intentions on bottled water from a commercial source. The unblessed, control water, was another bottle from the same source and purchased at the same time. The results showed that the blessed water produced more beautiful crystals, as assessed by independent judges. This supported Dr Emoto’s claim. Later, we conducted a more rigorously controlled triple-blind study, which again supported his claim.

    In his years of water research, through high speed photography of thousands of water crystals, Dr Emoto showed the most beautiful crystals are those formed after the water is exposed to the words ‘love’ and ‘gratitude’. His claims were subsequently backed up by rigorous scientific experiments completed by Dean Radin and associates. (Source: www.masaru-emoto.net/english/water-crystal.html)

    We followed that up by testing if pieces of a gourmet brand of chocolate blessed by Buddhist monks and a Mongolian shaman would improve the mood of people who ate that chocolate, as compared to people who ate the same but not-blessed chocolate. Again, under double-blind, placebo-controlled conditions, we found a statistically significant elevation in mood among those who ate the blessed chocolate. Later, we tried a similar experiment with people in Taiwan using oolong tea blessed by Buddhist monks. Again, people drinking the blessed tea reported statistically significant elevations in mood as compared to people drinking unblessed tea from the same source.

    In these studies, we did not investigate which physical properties of wine, water, or food were altered by the blessing. But something clearly was affected. 

    Over the past century, many other scientific experiments have explored the effects of focused intention on physical systems ranging from elementary particles, to water, bacteria, seeds, plant growth, red blood cells, electronic circuits, and human physiology (I describe these in Real Magic). 

    These experiments demonstrate that modern scientific tools and techniques can be applied to ancient magical beliefs, and that when the lens of science is used to inspect magic, to our surprise we find that some of those beliefs are actually true. As science on these topics slowly advances, we may be rediscovering why these ancient practices have persisted for millennia: because they work. Explaining exactly how they work is becoming a topic of discussion at the leading edges of science today.

    Despite evidence for an imminent science/magic convergence, we may not see Harvard announcing its new Department of Magical Studies any time soon. Ancient taboos about magic are still very much alive, and those prohibitions tend to reinforce all sorts of fears: Fear of the unknown, of being thought weird, of being shunned by one’s peers, and of stories about demons and black magic. Such concerns have prevented the academic world from openly and seriously acknowledging the coming convergence, even though it’s unfolding right in front of our eyes.

    Fortunately, the taboo is beginning to crumble because of the popularity of books on affirmations and the law of attraction, the fast-rising mainstreaming of alternative healing therapies, development of new tools for enhancing intuition, the popularity of mindfulness meditation, the blockbuster success of superhero feature films, and in general the flourishing of “positive psychology.”

    Given the many challenges faced by the modern world, I believe we would all benefit by encouraging the unprejudiced study of real magic, especially because this topic is really about gaining a better understanding of the nature of consciousness. 

    Indeed, a case can be made that expanding what we know about consciousness may be a prerequisite for humanity to evolve from our present adolescence phase – which like all adolescents is chronically permeated by angst and emotion – to a more mature phase where concepts like wellness for all and “peace on Earth” become genuine, realistic possibilities.

    The convergence of science and magic is the theme of Dean Radin’s book Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe, available from all good bookstores.

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