‘The first public association of men,’ said Coningsby, ‘who have worked for an avowed end without enunciating a single principle.’ ‘And who have established political infidelity throughout the land,’ said Lord Henry. ‘By Jove!’ said Buckhurst, ‘what infernal fools we have made ourselves this last week!’ ‘Nay,’ said Coningsby, smiling, ‘it was our last schoolboy weakness. Floreat Etona, under all circumstances.’ ‘I certainly, Coningsby,’ said Lord Vere, ‘shall not assume the Conservative Cause, instead of the cause for which Hampden died in the field, and Sydney on the scaffold.’
‘The cause for which Hampden died in the field and Sydney on the scaffold,’ said Coningsby, ‘was the cause of the Venetian Republic.’
‘How, how?’ cried Buckhurst. ‘I repeat it,’ said Coningsby. ‘The great object of the Whig leaders in England from the first movement under Hampden to the last most successful one in 1688, was to establish in England a high aristocratic republic on the model of the Venetian, then the study and admiration of all speculative politicians. Read Harrington; turn over Algernon Sydney; then you will see how the minds of the English leaders in the seventeenth century were saturated with the Venetian type. And they at length succeeded. William III. found them out. He told the Whig leaders, “I will not be a Doge.” He balanced parties; he baffled them as the Puritans baffled them fifty years before.
The reign of Anne was a struggle between the Venetian and the English systems. Two great Whig nobles, Argyle and Somerset, worthy of seats in the Council of Ten, forced their Sovereign on her deathbed to change the ministry. They accomplished their object. They brought in a new family on their own terms. George I. was a Doge; George II. was a Doge; they were what William III., a great man, would not be. George III. tried not to be a Doge, but it was impossible materially to resist the deeply-laid combination. He might get rid of the Whig magnificoes, but he could not rid himself of the Venetian constitution. And a Venetian constitution did govern England from the accession of the House of Hanover until 1832. Now I do not ask you, Vere, to relinquish the political tenets which in ordinary times would have been your inheritance. All I say is, the constitution introduced by your ancestors having been subverted by their descendants your contemporaries, beware of still holding Venetian principles of government when you have not a Venetian constitution to govern with. Do what I am doing, what Henry Sydney and Buckhurst are doing, what other men that I could mention are doing, hold yourself aloof from political parties which, from the necessity of things, have ceased to have distinctive principles, and are therefore practically only factions; and wait and see, whether with patience, energy, honour, and Christian faith, and a desire to look to the national welfare and not to sectional and limited interests; whether, I say, we may not discover some great principles to guide us, to which we may adhere, and which then, if true, will ultimately guide and control others.’
‘The Whigs are worn out,’ said Vere, ‘Conservatism is a sham, and Radicalism is pollution.’
‘I certainly,’ said Buckhurst, ‘when I get into the House of Commons, shall speak my mind without reference to any party whatever; and all I hope is, we may all come in at the same time, and then we may make a party of our own.’
‘I have always heard my father say,’ said Vere, ‘that there was nothing so difficult as to organise an independent party in the House of Commons.’
‘Ay! but that was in the Venetian period, Vere,’ said Henry Sydney, smiling.
‘I dare say,’ said Buckhurst, ‘the only way to make a party in the House of Commons is just the one that succeeds anywhere else. Men must associate together. When you are living in the same set, dining together every day, and quizzing the Dons, it is astonishing how well men agree. As for me, I never would enter into a conspiracy, unless the conspirators were fellows who had been at Eton with me; and then there would be no treachery.’ ‘Let us think of principles, and not of parties,’ said Coningsby. ‘For my part,’ said Buckhurst, ‘whenever a political system is breaking up, as in this country at present, I think the very bestthing is to brush all the old Dons off the stage. They never take to the new road kindly. They are always hampered by their exploded prejudices and obsolete traditions. I don’t think a single man, Vere, that sat in the Venetian Senate ought to be allowed to sit in the present English House of Commons.’
‘Well, no one does in our family except my uncle Philip,’ said Lord Henry; ‘and the moment I want it, he will resign; for he detests Parliament. It interferes so with his hunting.’
Albert G. Mackey, in his Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry writes two pages on the number seven, claiming : "Seven is a sacred number in Masonic symbolism."1
But the point must be stressed that The Number 7 is not a "sacred" number in masonic ritual, it is a "significant" number.
The sacredness or importance of the number seven in many belief systems, mythologies and cultures is recognised by knowledgeable freemasons but the number itself is not specifically masonic.
Geometry was considered one of The Seven Noble or Liberal Arts and Sciences, the others being Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Music and Astronomy.
In ancient Kemet, or Egypt, the number seven represented completion. Creation took place in seven time periods. There are seven colours in the rainbow, seven notes in a musical scale, seven days in a week, &c.
In Ancient Kemet, there were also Seven Cardinal Principles/Virtues of The Goddess Ma'at to achieve human perfectibility. These principles are Truth, Justice, Balance, Order, Compassion, Harmony, and Reciprocity.
In Freemasonry Seven Brethren are required to Open or Work a Lodge: 3 Master Masons, 2 Fellowcraft and 2 Entered apprentice.
While those fascinated by numerology will make much of the two rows of seven tassels found on most Master Mason aprons, this was an aesthetic choice made by regalia makers and has no masonic significance.
The Number 7 was said to be 'Perfect' because it contained the numbers 3 and 4 — 3 and 4, The Triangle and The Square, the Perfect Figures — and was itself indivisible and could not be created by multiplication.
Some freemasons will claim that together the seven officers represent how human consciousness works. They represent the co-ordinated parts connecting Man's outer nature with his inmost Divine Principle. They provide the necessary channels for the various spiritual and material levels to maintain contact. This, like much hermetic and sacred teachings, is not fundamental to masonic teachings but should be of interest to all students of Freemasonry.
fem. proper name, often a diminutive of Clara and its relatives. Also, "a nun of the order of St. Clare" (1790s); the Franciscan order also known as the Poor Clares (c. 1600).
The Word “Remember” is extremely important....
Almost Famous - "Starway to Heaven" Deleted Scene
“Lenina Crowne has a really hard time in the book , as she is always being slapped around by a sociopathic, Shakespeare-quoting, sex-negative John the Savage.
So, the notion was — let’s do something more modern and radical.
In terms of my magical practice, this ties Brave New World to my thoughts about the Aeon of Ma’at, the Goddess of Truth, Balance and Harmony.
In the book, Lenina is treated quiet badly and comes to a grim end, so I thought let’s make her the central character of this new version.
The Savage Lands depicts a childlike level of society; John is tied to his mother and has very little agency.
The World State has progressed to teenage; with its non-stop music and parties and strict social demarcation into easily-identifiable ‘Tribes’.
The idea was to have Lenina begin to work with the Indra to build a truly ‘adult’ Utopia… which would lead us into season 2…
I’ve seen critics complain about the Brave New World sex scenes not being sexy but that was the point we were making!
There’s even a major scene of intimacy between John and Lenina that deliberately exists in contrast to the shallow hedonism of the orgies.
In This World, sex is more like a social duty, or it’s like Sport.
It doesn’t involve the Guilt and the excitement, the Transgression and the Passion that we associate with sex at all.
Speaking of this new myth and ethos, for a few years now you have been speaking about the Aeon of Ma’at. Is this the strongest current you see in humanity these days?
GM: It’s still a subcurrent at the moment, as the patriarchal Aeon of Osiris bows out kicking and screaming but I think it’s the only one that gives us any chance of Survival right now. It’s not like this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
For me these ideas are interesting metaphors; they’re filters, and I find that if I apply this particular filter suggested by Kenneth Grant and Crowley it allows me to see things in a different relationship, which is very creatively rewarding if nothing else.
Viewing The World through the filter of these Thelemic notions, what’s happening right now all around us suddenly becomes not only obviousbut almost predictable.
It’s important to emphasize that this is not something to ‘believe’ in. This is a metaphor and not a belief system.
But new metaphors can change whole cultures as we know from Our History.
Crowley said that the general tenor of the last six thousand years of human civilization could be summed up by the personalities of a family of Egyptian gods.
And the first two thousand years up to the birth of Christ, this was the Age of Isis, The Mother Goddess, where people were hunter/gatherers or early agrarians living off The Land, relying on ‘Mother Earth’, the seasons and the tides.
So, the next Aeon from Christ onward is The Aeon of Osiris, The Dying and Resurrected God. Osiris is also The Law Giver and He brings with Him The Written Word, so now Ideas can be enshrined in books and books can outlast generations and they take on the aura of Gods Themselves.
God Himself is present in the works of The Bible.
God Himself is present in The Quran.
So certainly, there’s this programming code language, the instructional Dad Language, which can take people over just from reading a book and turn them into Agents of The Dad God’s Expansionist, Controlling Agenda.
This is when Nature goes from Provider to something that exists to be tamed and exploited. That’s The Aeon of Osiris.
Following Osiris, comes this fiery breakdown, the child Horus is the son of Osiris and he’s every jihadi, every warrior, every rock star reformer, every young man who sees as his sacred mission the tearing down of structures, the questioning of rules. It’s punk rock, “I gotta tear it all down.” But running in tandem with that, according to Kenneth Grant, is the shadow Aeon of Ma’at, Horus’ sister and she’s the goddess of truth and balance and harmony and all that Wonder Woman stuff.
For me, having gone through the Abyss of Da’ath in the Thelema structure of initiation — having undergone that in a really experiential and exhausting way, I found myself in the Qabbalistic sphere of Binah, and The Entire World suddenly looked very different and made sense in different configurations which re-energized the work I’d been doing.
So, I decided to accept that The Aeon of Ma’at was coming down fast and I tried to align all my thinking with that, which provided me with a new bunch of metaphors and ways of framing the world.
Imagine all this division and deconstruction was just a corridor we’re passing through. All the fractioning and separation —that’s typical of Horus. We can see the hand of Horus in the modern-day tearing down of monuments and statues. He’s kicking The Fuck out of formerly stable systems all around the world. That’s exactly what you would expect of this spirit that Crowley said manifested first in 1913. But for me, I think he made his presence felt quite clearly on 9/11.
You can easily organize The Evidence to suggest that there is an Aeon of Horus occurring now. Where Systems are being taken-down, where everything’s being Questioned and Audited, and The Past is subject to Major Revision.
So, there’s also some fun to be had in thinking “Ok, if this is actually playing out in some symbolic fashion, then what might the Aeon of Ma’at look like, artistically?’
And to me it looks like the rise of marginalized voices, it looks like more women coming into the discourse. It looks like trans people coming into the discourse. It looks like all the opportunities for groups who were disempowered by the Patriarchy, who couldn’t speak before to have their say.
Ma’at – What would her signature disease be? Well it might be a distributed network, a viral malady that could attack All of Humanity. What would happen if She emptied The Houses of The Old Gods as a Show of Possibility?
You remember at the height of the first lockdown, all the churches were empty, all the sports stadiums were empty, all the mosques were empty, all the temples were empty. So, the Dad god had nowhere to go.
In Britain, I know, and I’m sure in America, there was a strange uprising of praise for care workers. People would go out every Thursday here and bang on pots and pans and basically thank the nurturing spirt, this caring spirit, for its very existence. It was a very religious, ritualistic thing that we were all doing. That’s Ma’at right there.
Then there’s Mother Nature with hurricanes tearing down borders, storms ravaging everyone’s homes. It all suddenly makes sense in a new context if you use the filter of Ma’at to look at The World.
For me, I’ve found some creative applications for it, like in Brave New World and the Wonder Woman comic that I’ve done.
Let’s talk about Magick. How does one get better at it?
GM: By doing it on a regular basis! It’s like a martial art or a musical talent.
If you dedicate yourself to Learning and Practice, if you read other magician’s accounts, if you Pay Attention, then you start to notice details that the less engaged will miss and this allows you to do things that other people may regard as magical or even supernatural.
Just like a stage conjurer, or a great guitarist, or a gifted actor or artist can do. It’s just about really paying attention and Doing The Work to see What Happens.
It’s just a way of looking at things in a fresh light and then working with this augmented version of reality in ways that can appear supernatural.
One of Magic’s main attractions involves bringing things Into Being, from the conception or thought all the way to solid materiality.
Making The Insubstantial tangible.
But there’s also a whole other thing. Magic is about deliberately inducing unusual states of consciousness. Some of these states of consciousness have been called Gods because they feel Super Organized and Positive, and some of them can be called Demons because they feel Chaotic, Violent, Hateful and Perverted or whatever.
That’s part of Magic.
It’s as simple as how can you create different states of consciousness?
Magic uses spells or rituals, some developed over many centuries, to stimulate specific focused states of consciousness, whether demonic or angelic or god like.
Psychedelics and hallucinogens have been used by shamans for the same purpose.
And the written word along with the expression of it are all magic. In the sense that words themselves hold such tremendous power.
GM: If you can limit the language you can reduce the scope of a conjuror. George Orwell warns us about that in the appendices to 1984.
If you restrict the language, if you make it impossible to express abstract ideas, then you put boundaries on people’s ability to think creatively or communicate certain concepts.
It Does Work. Words shouldn’t have the kind of power and meaning that we attribute to them but most of us grew up in The Aeon of Osiris, where words have been really important and fundamental to human progress.
Words mean The Law, words mean The Bible, or The Constitution, words define The Divine Rules by which we abide. The 10 Commandments.
As any writer can tell you; words are just things that dance around when you play with them. They can mean all kinds of different things.
They bring with them the distortions of interpretation where the words of Christ – ‘love your enemies’ – can be twisted to motivate bloody genocidal Crusades. I think Wilson was trying to undermine people’s fear of the perceived authority and power of words as things in themselves.
For sure. There are some big words that have been added to the dictionary over the last 20 years, specifically Beyonce’s ‘bootylicious.’
GM: Well exactly, there you go man. But still I don’t exactly know what it’s describing, but I can almost taste it!
Adding on the to the notion of words and symbols being charged with magic, they have also been charged through the increasing amounts of propaganda over the course of the 20th Century and into today. Isn’t that something that RAW is constantly reminding readers, that propaganda is real, and lots of it feeds off your base emotions, like anger and fear. Most people don’t recognize that cuz they haven’t seen the FNORDS!
GM: It’s more like people’s sense of the immense energy compressed into certain words. It’s not the word itself – as Wilson reminds us ‘fuck’ is a ‘bad’ word but it doesn’t sound much different from ‘folk’, a ‘good’ word, and it means the same as ‘coitus’, another ‘good’ word. So where exactly does the wickedness and dirtiness of ‘fuck’ reside?
Words become fetishized for reasons good or bad and the more fetishized they are, the more taboo they become, which confers an aura of outlaw sexiness that attracts some people to them.
Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bob Wilson himself, all made a point of saying that words should not be given this kind of power because once they have this power, they can become fetishized and weaponized. If you de-power a word then it can’t be used to trigger other people in the same reliable way, but we’re just not in that phase, with the dislocated politics of culture right now. I think people got it right to take down some of these structures right now and perhaps it’s okay to retire certain radioactive, abusive terms as long as we make sure we’re creating new words in other areas.
As a for instance, when I was a kid there were no words to describe certain aspects of my own experience. I’ve been non-binary, cross-dressing, ‘gender queer’ since I was 10 years old, but the available terms for what I was doing and how I felt were few and far between. We had ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’ both of which sounded like DSM classifications rather than lifestyle choices! I didn’t want to be labelled as medical aberration because that’s not how it felt, nor was it something cut-and-dried and done. I didn’t want to ‘transition’ or embody my ‘female’ side exclusively, so I had no idea where I fit in.
Terms like ‘genderqueer’ and ‘non-binary’ only came into vogue in the mid-90s. So kids like me had very limited ways of describing our attraction to drag and sexual ambiguity. Nowadays there’s this whole new vocabulary, allowing kids to figure out exactly where they sit on the ‘color wheel’ of gender and sexuality, so I think it’s OK to lose a few contentious words when you are creating new ones that offer a more finely-grained approach to experience.
When we make the jump to a non-Roman-alphabet-based emoji language for purposes of radio telepathic communication, things will change once more.
This conversation of neutralizing the charge from taboo words is also a premise of RAW’s Ishtar Rising, which you wrote the introduction of the newest reprinting of the book by Hilaritas Press. Also, in that book, Wilson explores the mythical trope of the underground journey, something explored and unpacked in nearly all his books.
Joseph Campbell has some cool stuff to say about the Underground Journey, mainly that in all his studies of world myths he had observed two types of underground journey stories. One type was when the underground swallows up a poor soul like the whale did to Jonah. When this happens, the sole purpose of the seeker is to just survive the ordeal and return to the surface in one piece. The second type of journey through the underground occurs when the hero or heroine must descend into the depths and kill a monster. Campbell mentions one myth where the hero must slay a dragon then drink its blood to gain its power and move on and continue their quest. Campbell associates this killing of the dragon and drinking its blood as an integration of our shadows into our psyches. By integrating these elements of ourselves we then gain the sort of personal power needed to live a joyful and energetically engaged life.
GM: Yeah, and the story of the underground journey in Britain often involves someone finding a cave where he sees all of King Arthur’s knights asleep just waiting for the time of England’s greatest need when they will have to rise up and fight the final battle against evil. So that’s a more passive version of the story. Someone goes in and finds these sleeping warriors. That’s the personal power, that’s the higher self that will arise when you need it most.
Wilson has a dark side version of this exact legend at the end of Illuminatus with the undead Nazi battalions awaiting their orders to rise from Lake Totenkopf and reclaim the world!
What advice do you have for the magicians out there who have a story to tell and want to storm the reality studio?
GM: Tell a different story. Tell a fresh story that speaks to its times and the people around you. A story that offers possibilities, exit strategies, rather than apocalypse and ruin. I can’t see that there’s anything else…
In the Wonder Woman book I’m doing, for instance, I’ve actively avoided writing the boy hero story that’s so ubiquitous as to seem inescapable — the familiar story of the One, the champion, the Joseph Campbell monomyth thing that drives so many Hollywood movies and YA stories. We’ve seen it. The Lion King. The callow youth loses mom or dad, or his comfortable place in the tribe, and he has to fight his way back to save the kingdom from its corrupt old leader, before claiming the captive princess and becoming the new king and… ad infinitum. The Circle of Life if it only applied to boys. I thought, where is the mythic heroine’s story? In Ishtar Rising, Wilson talks about the myth of Inanna, and how she goes down into Hell and has to give up everything of herself to gain the wisdom and experience she can bring back to her tribe. Privileging the network rather than the sovereign individual.
And so, as I thought about the differences between the hero’s and the heroine’s journey, it gave me a bunch of different modes to work in. Finding ways to avoid telling the boy hero story again was quite liberating. It just gave me a bunch of new ideas, an interesting new way of telling stories that didn’t rely on the framework of the hero’s journey that Campbell talks about.
Playing the devil’s advocate here. Today there is a lot of fervor around identity, and there is one strong of thought that people can never truly understand what it is like walking in the shoes of others. Some may ask why a white man would seek to tell the story of a woman, from her perspective, instead of just sticking to what he knows, being a man.
How authentically real is that character or story, etc.?
GM: It’s important to air these feelings for debate. I must admit, with all respect, that I completely disagree with the idea that we cannot understand one another.
Firstly, there’s a major obvious problem about coming at things from this perspective — if fundamentally, we cannot truly know or have any meaningful opinion on what it feels like to be X, then we may as well stop listening to anything anyone else has to say about their personal experience, on the basis that it can only be irrelevant to our specific lives!
If I can never truly understand you without walking in your shoes and vice versa, what’s the point of listening or talking to anyone about our experience? What’s the point of writing stories, or protesting, or making art if experience cannot by its nature be communicated and understood by anyone who has not shared the experience of the artist, or the writer?
I think we all know it doesn’t really work that way in the real world. We don’t need to be a thing to have some understanding of how it operates. People can be great veterinarians without personally experiencing the day-to-day inner lives of dogs and cats. I can read Solzhenitsyn and shed empathic tears for the inmates of the Gulag without having to reprise their exact experience.
To think otherwise might be, I suspect, a symptom of narcissism painted into its inevitable corner, its private echo chamber – destructive, divided, atomized, individualistic to the point of self-abnegation – and indicative of late stage Osiris pathology.
And you know, we actually do understand one another in so many ways. We can imagine what it’s like to live someone else’s life –— or we can have our imaginations enflamed by well-told tales of other people’s lives and thrill to the ways they resonate exactly with our own lived experience. As a writer, I know this to be true.
We’ve been observing one another’s behavior and drawing conclusions since the dawn of humanity. People aren’t so complicated or new that the basic functions remain a mystery. All our plays, poems, songs and stories are a record of our attempts to understand ourselves and one another. The fact that Greek drama or Shakespeare still speaks to us is evidence that basic human nature has remained fairly consistent for thousands of years.
We figured one another out a long, long time ago.
And ultimately, I’ll say again, we are all the same organism. What we’re seeing is ring fingers fighting with thumbs, eyelashes screaming that eyebrows can never understand them! To point that out is probably an anathema in this current time of narcissistic inflation but it will be understood as a fact of nature in the end.
Maybe I’m wrong and we’re all fucked because humans are a kind of cancer-creature and our only purpose is to destroy each other and all other lifeforms on our planet… there’s still time for Agent Smith to be proved right!
I think everyone should have to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. We can all learn from one other but that means communicating; that means starting with the assumption we do have a common basis for genuine understanding even if our specific circumstances can never be repeated or totally understood by anyone other than ourselves. We all hurt, we all feel joy, we all get turned on, or scared. We all experience loss, and lack of self-worth and feel badly treated by the world at times.
And I understand why everyone should talk and tell stories from their own position you know but it’s also very useful – and a major human talent – to imagine how other people feel and consider how the world might look through their eyes.
And you do that by staying informed, listening to voices even when you disagree with them –—and by employing empathy and imagination to put yourself in their place as best as you’re able.
These are difficult times. I’m not a guru. I don’t know what to say to make it all better. There’s seven in a half billion people and it often seems they all fucking hate each other! Yet they all want everyone else to agree with their tiny, restricted, localized points of view. And they’ve all got a piece of ground to defend against perceived foes. I get it, but ultimately, we’re all one thing, one massive organism that’s going through difficult growing pains at the moment, so maybe we need to start thinking about what makes us alike, rather than different.
I hope so
GM: Well, this is part of the boiling process. Capitalist consumer culture has clearly reached its limits and we either advance to a more efficient, stable, less suicidal and aggressive engagement with other people and our environment or we go extinct as a species, taking all the whales and tigers and gorillas with us, before we even figured out how to talk to them and hear their stories! There are few options remaining.
The current questioning, the judgmental audit of where we are and how we got here, is a Horus thing. We can only hope we sublimate from here via Ma’at into something more nurturing and sustainable.
It is a hot moment. Temperatures are rising, Artic ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and people may be unconsciously registering all that, and doing a horrible job at it. Instead of dealing with one’s own sense of panic, constriction, and fear it looks like many people are just running hot.
GM: I feel like every word we say is now a potential indictment, you know. The last malignant thrashing of the passing Aeon of Osiris. The echoes of the Inquisition, accusations of ‘wrongthink’, the return of Original Sin, the demonic glee taken in any stumble or falter from the approved path seems almost mediaeval. It’s terrifying. The potential for misunderstanding is almost infinite and its almost fated that we will struggle to abide by rules that grow ever more authoritarian and specific every day. Again, all that feels to me like the last ferocious attempts at asserting its fading power by the Osiris energy of the last 2000 years, now gone rotten and unsustainable but trying harder to keep everything and everybody under increasingly deranged levels of control in every area of our lives.
Writers and artists can find more reasons to stop their expression than ever before it seems. The voice of criticism and judgement is easier to find these days, just doom scroll through various social media sites and it’s all over the place.
GM: I regard it all as new input. As tough as it is, there’s an excitement. It’s making me think, it’s making me question myself and my assumptions, it’s making me write different things. I love ideas that challenge my thinking — even if I don’t agree with them in the end.
What are your thoughts on Simulation Theory these days?
GM: I was reading New Scientist recently and one of the correspondents on the letters page threw out this random idea that really resonated with me. The writer was saying that if we live in a simulation then perhaps the world in the past was not as detailed or as high fidelity as it we experience it now! There have been upgrades, developments. In computer game terms, think of the difference between Space Invaders and Red Dead Redemption 2!
And I thought, wow, wouldn’t that be funny if, you know, those medieval painters with the flat landscapes and no perspective, what if they were accurately representing an earlier, more simplistic iteration of our simulated reality? What if they were simply portraying what the world actually looked like in the early stages of the simulation! What if these artists were recording what they saw and that’s how it looked?
Suddenly I saw the history of art in a whole new light! I thought how cool it would be if the cave paintings at Lascaux represented caveman reality perfectly – that’s how the simulated world really looked in an early development of the simulation when we were all just stick figures with antlers and the animals were sketchy semi-abstracts…
I love that idea; that the simulation is becoming more complex and well-rendered as it goes along – and we can see where it’s been.
It almost seems like it will become harder to break the Matrix as it becomes more refined, nuanced and easier to mistake for reality. It is interesting looking at the Simulation theory with the idea of calling it a metaphor for the same thing that the Gnostics came up with.
GM: Yeah, the idea that the universe is a counterfeit created not by god but by some sort of underling of god… that was the gnostic idea. It’s not so much about breaking the Matrix, I feel it’s more about learning to work with it. In the movie, once Neo figures out how it works, he becomes a magician, a superhero. The counterfeit world in the movie seems much more fun than the real one. Can magic be a useful tool for navigating VR and AR in IRL?
GM: Yeah, because magic is just about adding meaning or enchantment to the environment and to your life. Magic spices up everything; it’s like hot sauce! Once you add magic, the universe comes to life and starts to dance with you. If you choose to be an exploiter, a black magician, it’s more like a lap dance but otherwise it’s a tango! As I’ve said before, it’s easy to add magic to things. If you decide a certain stone could use some magic power, then carry it with you long enough and it will become first a good luck talisman and will finally accrue the significance and meaning of a Holy Grail if it’s given enough time and attention. So, the more meaning you can add to experience, the more magical it will seem. It’s not difficult or ‘occult’ at all. Magic makes everything more exciting, rich and alive and that’s its job. The more magic you can create around something the more special your interaction with it will feel.
Roddenberry got very deeply involved around 1974 with an EXTREMELY sinister high-level channelling cult known as "The Nine" - in fact, it's reliably claimed that the last creative decision he made relative to Star Trek that the celestial temple Space Station where the elders of all cultures and races would come to dialogue and resolve their conflicts and cultural differences in enlightened Masonic peace would be called "Deep Space Nine".
"Nine He gave to Mortal Men,
proud and great,
and so ensnared them.
Long ago they fell under the domination of the One...
Shadows under His great Shadow,
His most terrible servants."
"Apparently Parsons...or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts."
- Alistair Crowley, 1947.
"The [Babalon] Working began in 1945-46, a few months before Crowley's death in 1947, and just prior to the wave of unexplained aerial phenomena now recalled as the 'Great Flying Saucer Flap'... Parsons opened a door and something flew in.
"A Gateway for the Great Old Ones has already been established -- and opened -- by members of the O.T.O. who are en rapport with this entity [Lam, an extra- terrestrial being whom Crowley supposedly contacted while in America in 1919]."
Arthur Young, who invented the Bell helicopter. However at the end of WWII he abandoned military aviation to concentrate full-time on the paranormal.
Arthur’s wife, Ruth… previously of the Forbes dynasty. Her son, Michael, would get a job at Bell Aerospace through her and Arthur’s influence. (Michael’s wife got Lee Harvey Oswald his job at the book depository. She was learning Russian from Oswald’s wife who was living with her in Irving, Texas. Oh, and her father worked for a CIA front called the Agency for International Development. Lee Harvey Oswald left the coffee company in New Orleans, saying to his co-workers he was “going to work for NASA.” After the assassination, two other coffee company employees get jobs at NASA. Just saying.)
Mary Bancroft; of the Bancroft dynasty who would much later sell the Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal to Murdoch. She also happened to be the mistress of the then-CIA chief. (The one JFK fired after the Bay Of Pigs after saying he was also going to break up the CIA… who conveniently went on to investigate JFK’s death. Just saying.)
Marcella Du Pont of the Du Pont family.
Alice Bouverie who was born into the Astor dynasty. (Her father died on the Titanic and her first husband was a Czarist prince who would work for the OSS during WWII.)
"...Ruth Paine admitted that at one point Lee Harvey Oswald was considering going to Philadelphia. As soon as she mentions Philadelphia, Allen Dulles chimes in and opined that it was presumably to find work, to which Ruth replied in the affirmative.
This is what is known as 'leading the witness.'
Philadelphia, of course, is where Arthur and Ruth Young lived, and Ruth had a habit of going up there every year in the summer... as she did in the summer of 1963. Did Arthur Young invite the young Marine defector to his wooded estate in Paoli?"
Peter Levenda,
Sinister Forces, pg. 268
"Ira Einhorn, Puharich's close associate in the 1970s, told us recently that, although Puharich had worked for the CIA during the 1950s, he was no longer doing so twenty years later.
However, the evidence points very much in the other direction. Puharich's relationship with intelligence agencies almost certainly did not end in the 1950s.
Uri Geller told us at a meeting in his home near Reading in England in 1998 that: 'The CIA brought Puharich in to come and get me out of Israel.'
Jack Sarfatti goes further, claiming: 'Puharich was Geller's case officer in America with money provided by Sir John Whitmore.'
And according to James Hurtak, via his Academy For Further Sciences, Puharich 'worked with the US intelligence community.'
By implication this was during the early 1970s when he, Hurtak, was also working with him."
The Stargate Conspiracy, pg. 206
From Deep Space to the Nine
How Gene Roddenberry was hired to prepare Earth for an alien invasion
What would you do if you were asked to write a movie preparing mankind for the arrival of a race of godlike alien beings? David Sutton examines on of the strangest episodes in the life of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.
By 1975, no one could deny that Gene Roddenberry – B17 pilot during WWII, commercial aviator, Los Angeles cop, television writer and creator of Star Trek – had enjoyed a varied career, but in May of that year it took a turn for the strange when he was approached with an unusual proposition by a wealthy Englishman called Sir John Whitmore.
Whitmore explained that he had sought out Roddenberry on behalf of an organisation calling itself Lab Nine. His proposal was that the TV producer and writer should pen a film screenplay based on the group’s research into the paranormal and its belief that Earth was soon to be visited by extraterrestrial beings traveling in spacecraft; Roddenberry, in other words, was to prepare the ground for the aliens’ arrival by writing a movie script that would prime the human race for first contact.
Lab Nine was, in fact, the direct descendent of the Round Table Foundation, an organisation set up in Glen Cove, Maine, in 1948 by MD, inventor, and paranormal researcher Dr Andrija Puharich (with, some claim, backing from the US military and/or intelligence agencies) to study telepathy, ESP and related phenomena;
the celebrated psychics Peter Hurkos and Eileen Garrett, for instance, passed through the Foundation’s doors, as did an Indian medium by the name of Dr Vinod, who promptly went into a trance and began to channel messages from mysterious entities calling themselves ‘The Nine Principles and Forces’.
Vinod had no memory of the messages, and soon returned to India, but Puharich continued to receive communications from ‘The Nine’, initially via flying saucer cultists Charles and Lillian Laughead, [1] and later from none other than Uri Geller, who Puharich had met in 1971 and helped catapult to international fame.
When Geller, presumably sensing that things were about to get a little too strange, backed off, Puharich wasted no time in finding others who could get in touch with the space entities, eventually lighting on the unlikely team of former racing driver and business coach Sir John Whitmore, Florida healer and psychic Phyllis Schlemmer and the pseudonymous ‘Bobby Horne’, a cook from Daytona who became the new channeller of the extra terrestrial communications. ‘Horne’ burnt out quickly; he became suicidal and fled after suspecting that he had become the victim of cosmic jokers. From this point on, Schlemmer became the group’s official channeller and the ‘voice’ of The Nine.
By now the circle had a home – Lab Nine, a 15-acre estate in Ossining, New York, where prominent visitors from the worlds of science, politics and business were greeted in some style; those spending time there included, allegedly, various Stanford Research Institute scientists, Supernature author Lyall Watson, [3] quantum physicist Jack Sarfatti and counterculture icon (and soon to be wanted murderer) Ira Einhorn (see FT166:24–25).
Gene Roddenberry’s name was added to this heady mix when the residents of Lab Nine decided that they needed some PR in advance of the landings, now scheduled for 1976 (like most such deadlines, it would become something of a moveable feast). Roddenberry, though, was perhaps a misguided choice – an avowed humanist with a deep mistrust of all organised religions as well as a hard-line sceptic when it came to tales of UFOs and alien visitors. He did, though, have an interest in altered states of consciousness. [4] Psi phenomena in particular fascinated him, although in a 1968 letter to SF legend John W Campbell, who’d alerted Roddenberry to some particularly outrageous claims of something that sounds remarkably like an experiment in deadly remote viewing, Roddenberry wrote:
“I do believe we have something loosely and incorrectly tagged a ‘sixth sense’ and I do believe there exist such things as clairvoyance and psychokinesis. But as for a guy killing Japanese beetles from 500 miles away just by looking at a picture of the field, in fact doing it so selectively he can kill them off one leaf and leave them alive on another, my life experience adds up to a belief that this is impossible. In other words, I’ve read and seen enough examples and read enough documented reports concerning instances of telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis to indicate that we do indeed have latent abilities in these areas which we do not yet understand or really know how to use. Those instances which do happen are largely haphazard or the ‘power’ ebbs and flows to a point where it is rarely controllable enough to produce any long-term or meaningful results on a scientifically controlled test.” [5]
IN ADVANCE OF THE LANDINGS What Lab Nine presumably saw in Roddenberry was a man who had already, through the growing popularity of the then defunct Star Trek, opened a vast number of minds to the possible existence of extra terrestrial life, superior non-human beings and a future for mankind among the stars. Star Trek’s Federation, after all, represented a dream of space brotherhood beyond even the wildest dreams of the contactee movement and the emergent channellers of the New Age. What the Lab Nine crowd seem rather to have missed is that one of Star Trek’s major themes is that humankind would rather stand alone and on its own two feet than be guided by anyone (or anything) describing itself as a God – the theme of more Star Trek stories than one cares to count.
UFO religions have often floated the idea – from the Aetherians’ belief in an alien Jesus to the Raelians’ reinterpretation of the Biblical Elohim – that the entities mankind once believed to be Gods or prophets were in fact alien races who visited us long ago and steered humanity’s destiny – a concept subsequently popularised by the books of Erich von Däniken (and an army of imitators) with their ancient astronauts mistaken for deities.
Of course, anyone who’d bothered watching a Star Trek episode such as Who Mourns for Adonais? (in which an ancient Greek ‘god’ expecting human worship is sent packing by an indignant Captain Kirk) would quickly have realised that Roddenberry’s response to any returning alien ‘God’ would most likely be a “Thanks, but no thanks – we’re managing quite well without you”. [6]
Another, often connected, strand in many UFO cults – and one dating back to the first era of contactees – is that the space brothers have been keeping a watchful eye on us, waiting for the right moment to announce their presence and usher in a wider interstellar community in which all Earth’s problems – war, poverty, bigotry and environmental degradation – will be solved by superior alien technologies and an evolved spirituality. While Star Trek had presented a 23rd-century future in which this was indeed the case on Earth, it was presented as the achievement of a species that had finally ‘grown up’ and solved those problems for itself, with no help from beyond the stars (although later incarnations of Trek would explore the impact of ‘first contact’ with the Vulcans).
Roddenberry, then, was a strange choice for an alien ambassador; but necessity makes strange bedfellows. Despite Paramount finally giving serious thought to reviving Star Trek – Roddenberry was developing ideas for what would eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture – he was in need of funds.
He accepted Whitmore’s proposal – and a ,000 contract for a first draft screenplay to be based on his experiences with the Lab Nine circle and their otherworldly masters.
WELCOME TO LAB NINE Despite his philosophical and temperamental unsuitability for the job, Roddenberry revealed a surprisingly open-minded approach to the question of non-human entities like The Nine in his early correspondence with Whitmore: “I do not reject the possibility that other forms of intelligence can be in contact with humanity or with certain humans. Nor do I reject the possibility that another life form or forms might even live among us. It would seem to me rather extra ordinary if this were the only place in the Universe in which intelligent life happened to occur. Neither do we know the real nature of time and whether it and space are always linear and constant. “On the other hand, I’ve never seen any proof, or at least anything I recognise as proof, that other intelligent life forms exist, or are or have been in contact with us. Nor have I ever seen anything I recognise as proof that other laws of physics exist.” [7]
‘Proof’ was clearly what was required to penetrate Roddenberry’s sceptical defences, and get him on-message, so Whitmore arranged an expenses-paid tour of a number of parapsychology departments and research facilities across the country to observe scientific investigation of the paranormal at first hand. And Roddenberry was invited to spend time both at Whitmore’s home in England and at Lab Nine itself while he spent the autumn of 1975 working on the draft screenplay.
On his visits to the Ossining compound,the still sceptical writer witnessed spoonbending (still a popular pastime, despite Geller’s defection), saw Puharich receiving cryptic Hebrew messages through his wrist watch and finally, on numerous occasions, made contact with The Nine through channel Phyllis Schlemmer. As with most such pronouncements, those that came through Schlemmer – speaking as The Nine’s usual spokesperson ‘Tom’ – were marked by what Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince have described as “all the usual New Age ingredients… grandiose statements, shaky grammar and unprovable predictions”. [8]
In response to Roddenberry’s surprisingly tactful questioning [9] ‘Tom’ revealed that a mass landing of the “Twenty-Four civilizations” would happen in due course but that great pains would be taken to avoid creating panic (“This is of great importance, for if there were panic, humans may then attempt to end their own life, and also the lives of their families and neighbors, which would not serve any purpose”.) [10]
There were hints that Earth governments know of the alien presence but have hidden this knowledge from the people who now needed to be informed (“We do not come to control, we do not come to hold in bondage, we will come with love and patience and understanding – but since there is the denial of our existence, how can those of Planet Earth accept that the civilizations of Altea, Hoova, Ashan, and the rest of the Twenty-Four mean well?”).
Roddenberry was worried that, no matter how peaceful their intentions, the aliens’ arrival would be greeted in many quarters as a threat. Fortunately, the aliens had clearly seen The Day the Earth Stood Stilland had developed non-lethal methods to deal with such a scenario. (“If an Altean were to appear at an entrance of his vehicle, and were stepping onto Planet Earth, and if there were a group that attempted to destroy that Altean, he has only to hold out his hand in an upright manner, and not in great extension, to bring calmness, and also to render them into a state in which they would not have the desire to harm, and would put down their weapons. Hoovids would operate in a different manner: if they were in the same situation, and they came out and raised their arms, those humans with weapons would become totally stationary for a period of time.”)
Perhaps with half an eye on Star Trek’s future revival, Roddenberry showed a good deal of curiosity about the alien space craft, their methods of propulsion and their physical (or not) nature. Tom wouldn’t be pinned down on this one, though, merely talking about the space equivalents of aircraft carriers, V-shaped space ships and craft that not only look like spinning tops but are propelled by a method that “resembles the reversal of a spinning top”, a splendidly naïve notion that Roddenberry accepted with seemingly good grace.
One of Roddenberry’s most awkward questions – and an entirely understandable one after sitting through hours of this sort of stuff – went as follows: “I do have some difficulties in understanding why, if you are in the minds of humans at times, and your representatives have visited Earth, and you have a knowledge of human affairs… I find it difficult to understand how you have difficulty speaking with us, and understanding our basic colloquial English? Could you help me with that?” The answer, predictably enough, is that pure telepaths like The Nine tend to struggle a bit when reduced to the impoverished and bludgeon-like medium of the English language.
As well as these revelations of future plans, Tom on occasion ventured backwards through time – quite possibly to butter up The Nine’s chosen PR man – and produced tales of Roddenberry’s previous incarnations, which included the grandson of Moses, the father of St Peter and – if one is navigating correctly through the syntactical maze of these alien pronouncements – possibly even the god Jupiter. Roddenberry, as he’d often suspected himself, was a special person: “We are aware and we know that you know that you in truth are of a special one. And we say this to you with all of the love and all of the know ledge that you have of great love for this of the planet Earth, and of understanding. You know within that of your heart, that you have been of a benefit, and that you have been inspired. Yes.”
Even in the face of such cosmic flattery – no doubt intended to appeal to a man who was well on the way to creating his own legend – Roddenberry still had problems. As he told ‘Tom’, while he was attracted to the Lab Nine circle he was aware that: “I must not be pulled in too far until my story is written, because I must still retain some perspective.”
SECOND GENESIS Roddenberry’s completed draft screenplay was dated 29 December 1979. It has never been published, but based on the account given in Joel Engel’s biography, it appears to have been a fascinating, bizarrely autobiographical work, mixing Roddenberry’s experiences at Lab Nine with his compulsive womanising, escalating marital problems and his worries over the ever-growing success enjoyed by the defunct Star Trek, a success that had eluded him ever since.
The protagonist is one Jim MacNorth, the creator of a cancelled but still popular SF show called ‘Time Zone’ who now lives off convention appearance fees and the adulation of fans whose worship he knows he doesn’t deserve. With the studio showing interest in reviving the property as a movie, MacNorth is approached by a mysterious Englishman representing a group called Second Genesis and hired to write a screenplay about the group’s paranormal research.
After travelling the country to observe research into telepathy, auras, faith healing and theoretical physics, MacNorth – whose own awakening powers reveal to him that his wife is planning a divorce – ends up at the Second Genesis headquarters in Pennsylvania, where not only does he make contact with The Nine through a channeller, learning that human kind was one of their early, failed, experiments – but his erectile dysfunction is cured by an aura healer.
He learns that the screenplay he is to write will help prepare humanity for the ‘landings’ of The Nine’s representatives, which will take place one year from the release of the film.
In the end, MacNorth is reconciled with his wife and writes the screenplay; he remains sceptical about the reality of paranormal phenomena, but says that his life has never the less been transformed by these “lovely crazies at a Pennsylvania commune. What they made me believe is far larger and far lovelier. I believe I know that all life is One, that we’re all part of a wondrous, eternal miracle that we’ve yet to fully comprehend.”
THE GOD THING Whether Roddenberry, like MacNorth, was transformed by his experiences with Puharich, Schlemmer and company, we’ll never know – although some of his later pronouncements on religious matters do diverge from his earlier sceptical humanism towards more mystical “I am God” type statements that might have derived in part from his time in Ossining. [11]
The immediate upshot, though, was the Lab Nine group’s rejection of the screenplay. They asked for a rewrite, which Roddenberry was contractually obliged to deliver, and gave him another ,000. This time, clearly having had more than enough of The Nine, he farmed the work out to his assist ant Jon Povill, who produced a script in which the sceptical MacNorth/Roddenberry character becomes overwhelmed with fears that he is in fact setting up human kind for an impending alien invasion, has a nervous break down and enters his own ‘Time Zone’ (read Star Trek) universe – which, he discovers, was not so much his own creation as an inspiration emanating from the ‘real’ extra terrestrials. [12]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this wasn’t quite what Lab Nine were looking for either, and by some point in 1976 the project seems to have been dead in the water – although there are a couple of curious postscripts to the entire strange episode. The first script Roddenberry wrote in 1975 for the proposed Star Trek motion picture was entitled The God Thing and concerned an enormously powerful, but malfunctioning, machine entity travelling toward Earth to ‘save’ humanity. Actor William Shatner recalled the climax of the script as follows:
“As the drama builds and we finally approach the craft, the alien presence manifests itself on board the Enterprise in the form of a humanoid probe, which quickly begins shape-shifting while preaching about having traveled to Earth many times, always in a noble effort to lay down the law of the Cosmos. Its final image is that of Jesus Christ. ‘You must help me!’ the probe repeats, now bleeding from hands, feet and forehead. Kirk refuses, at which point the probe begins exhausting the last of its energy in a last-ditch violent rampage, commanding the Enterprise crew to provide the assistance it needs in order to survive.” [13]
It’s hard to say whether this vision of God as a malfunctioning spacecraft emerged from Roddenberry’s hostility to Christianity and delight in baiting the studios, from his anxieties about The Nine, or both (especially as some accounts suggest the script was written before Roddenberry even met Whitmore), but the vast organic/mechanical entity which is more Great Deceiver than Messiah seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to Puharich’s Spectra, and its promises of saving human kind from its own excesses are certainly close to those being channelled through Lab Nine. [14]
When, in 1979, the franchise finally did indeed return – in the form of the massively over-budget behemoth that was Star Trek: The Motion Picture – there was perhaps still a reflection of Roddenberry’s real thoughts on his Ossining odyssey in its epic tale (a kind of inversion ofThe God Thing derived from an Alan Dean Foster story originally entitled In Thy Image) of a vast and mysterious entity possessed of God-like powers and on a direct course for Earth. V’ger – as the being calls itself – turns out to be a long-lost (and alien-modified) Voyagerspace probe returning to Earth after centuries to seek its ‘Creator’… only to find that there is no God here, just us humans.
Roddenberry’s adventures with Lab Nine, then, were translated into a series of bizarre spiritual autobiographies, a hall of mirrors in which art imitated life imitating art, and in which the (Star Trek) Creator’s ambivalent relationship to his Creation – not to mention his followers – became increasingly problematic. There was, for Roddenberry, to be no saviour from beyond the stars.
He died in 1991, having seen the triumphant return of Star Trek to TV screens with the hugely popular The Next Generation series and, despite all that is now known of the man’s many and glaring imperfections, will no doubt continue to be revered as ‘The Great Bird of the Galaxy’. To add to his legend, a small sample of his ashes was launched into space to orbit the Earth for six years before burning up on re-entry.
Puharich followed in 1995, possibly attaining the next level but leaving a controversial legacy for conspiracy buffs, psychonauts and paranormal researchers to argue about for years to come. Sir John Westmore is still a sought-after business coach, working with high profile companies and writing books such as Coaching for Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose.
Phyllis Schlemmer continues to work with The Nine, having publishedThe Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space in 1993. Her website claims that Roddenberry’s contact with The Nine was part of his research for Star Trek!
And out there in the infinite loneliness of cyber space, like a long-lost probe waiting for a signal to return home, is a web page containing these words:
“This page is a seed.
It will, sometime soon, grow into the home
for all information pertaining to
THE NINE
A Major Motion Picture from a screenplay by
Gene Roddenberry and Jon Povill.”
NOTES 1 The Laugheads’ story is a fascinating one in its own right. This pair of outwardly respectable saucer cultists (Charles was a Michigan doctor, he and his wife both former missionaries) were involved with both George Adamski and Dorothy Martin, the Chicago prophet whose failed predictions of the world’s end in 1954 formed the basis for the 1956 book sociological study When Prophecy Fails. Jerome Clark tells some of the story in “When Prophecy Failed”, FT117:47.
2 Uri Geller & Guy Lyon Playfair, The Geller Effect, Jonathan Cape, 1986, pp269-270. Guy Lyon Playfair thinks the best explanation for Geller’s apparent channelling of The Nine is ‘doctrinal compliance’, “an important feature of the symbiotic relationship […] whereby patients produce what they believe the doctor, analyst or hypnotist expects”. In the Puharich/Geller relationship, the young Israeli’s interests and fantasies concerning space travel and other civilizations interacted with the researcher’s developing beliefs about The Nine to produce (through the fertile medium of the hypnotic trance) the bizarre account given in Puharich’s 1974 book Geller.
3 Watson was apparently offered the chance to become both joint channeller and the group’s official biographer; like Geller before him he probably saw this as a bad career move and turned it down. In 1975, Puharich and Whitmore instead commissioned British writer Stuart Holroyd to write Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth (1977); along with the commission of the Roddenberry screen play it clearly represents part of a PR blitz on behalf of Lab Nine’s ET chums. See Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Stargate Conspiracy, Little, Brown and Company, 1999, pp176- 178 and “Plan Nine from Outer Space”, FT126:34-39.
4 Roddenberry’s interest, according to his secretary Susan Sackett, dated to a childhood ‘out of body’ experience. See Joel Engel, Gene Roddenberry, The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek, Virgin Books, 1995, p167.
5 Letter to John W Campbell, 3 December 1968, quoted in David Alexander, Star Trek Creator, Boxtree Books, 1994, p 345.
6 Also the theme of Robert Silverberg’s 1957 story ‘Godling, Go Home!’.
7 Letter to John Whitmore, 2 April 1975, quoted in Alexander, p 416.
8 Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, ‘Plan Nine from Outer Space’, FT126:34.
9 “…his questions indicated that he was at least agnostic on the possibility on their existence; either that or he was respectful of his hosts’ and employers’ uncommon beliefs and practices. In the communications, which were taped for posterity, his tone of voice is unfailingly polite and engaged. If he was in fact feigning interest just to pick up some quick money, he demonstrated enviable skills as an actor.” Engel, p162.
10 Of course, those waiting for the saucers have sometimes chosen to end their own lives not from fear but a desire to leave behind their human bodies and actually enter the alien spacecraft en route for pastures new; strangely, one of the participants in the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide of 26 March 1997 (FT99:4, 32; 100:4, 35–41) was 58-year-old Thomas Nichols, brother of Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols (Lt Uhura). The group’s bricolage-like belief system drew on everything from Christianity to contactee lore and, according to many reports, a belief in the reality of the (surely incompatible) fictional worlds of Star Trek and The X-Files.
11 Yvonne Fern’s Inside the Mind of Gene Roddenberry (Harper-Collins, 1995), based on a series of conversations toward the end of Roddenberry’s life, reveals a curious, deeply flawed, guru-like figure whose constantly repeated mantra was “I am Star Trek” – a man as identified with, and possibly trapped by, his creation as MacNorth is by ‘Time Zone’; as hostile to organized religion as ever but increasingly certain that his own belief in the future in his head could lead humanity to the next level.
Susan Sackett stated that Roddenberry’s “spiritual beliefs were extant, although they were revised frequently. When I first discussed this with him, he believed in what he called the ‘All’, the life force of the Universe. Occasionally he referred to this concept as ‘God’, although it was clear that his was not the Judæo-Christian god concept in any shape or form.” Susan Sackett, Inside Trek: My Secret Life With Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry, Hawk Publishing, 2002, p38.
12 Povill put it this way: “Ultimately, the story became ‘what if Rod Serling wakes up one day and finds himself in The Twilight Zone for real?’ This is, ‘What if Gene Roddenberry wakes up one day and finds himself in touch with extraterrestrials, and he can’t deal with it?’” Quoted in Engel, p166. Povill went on to work on the projected but never made Star Trek Phase II series and to act as associate producer on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
13 William Shatner (With Chris Kreski), Star Trek Movie Memories, Harper-Collins, p37. The script impressed Shatner but he “couldn’t imagine Paramount or any other studio agreeing to make such a controversial, perhaps even blasphemous film… for the first time in history God was gonna be the bad guy.”
14 See www.well.com/~sjroby/godthing.html for more on the mysterious fate of The God Thing, which Roddenberry spent years desultorily turning into a still unpublished novel.
Plan Nine From Outer Space
One New Age channelling cult, above all the rest, has had a huge - very disturbing influence on hundreds of thousands of devotees worldwide. Known as 'The Nine', its disciples include cutting edge scientists, multi-millionaire industrialists and leading politicians.
This exclusive extract based on The Startgate Conspiracy by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince looks at the sinister origins of The Nine -
"I am the beginning. I am the end. I am the emissary. But the original time I was on the Planet Earth was 34,000 of your years ago. I am the balance. And when I say "I" - I mean because I am an emissary for The Nine. It is not I , but it is the group…We are nine principles of the Universe, yet together we are one."
The declaration above is typical of the channelled pronouncements of the Council of Nine – or just ‘The Nine’. They contain all the usual New Age ingredients of grandiose statements, shaky grammar and unprovable predictions. But unlike all the other channelling cults, that of The Nine has serious clout. Perhaps the reason for this is that they claim to be the Ennead, or the nine major gods of ancient Egypt (see panel). Or could there be another reason, one that owes more to The X-Files than the Pyramid Texts?
In December 1952, Puharich brought into his laboratory an Indian mystic named Dr D G Vinod, who began to channel The Nine or ‘the Nine Principles’. In the months before Vinod returned to India, a group met regularly to hear The Nine’s channelled wisdom. Never known for their modesty, The Nine proclaimed themselves to be God, stating "God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God."
Three years later, there appeared to be independent confirmation of their existence. In Mexico, Puharich and Young met Charles and Lillian Laughead, former Christian missionaries who were by then prominent in the burgeoning UFO contactee movement. (For a description of their involvement in the Dorothy Martin circle, see Jerome Clark’s ‘When Prophecy Failed’ in FT117.) Back in the States a few weeks later, Puharich received a letter from the Laugheads containing messages received by their group’s channeller. This message also claimed to come from the Nine Principles, even – amazingly – including references to the earlier communications transmitted through Dr Vinod. Could The Nine possibly be for real?
At their first meetings in Tel Aviv in 1971, Puharich hypnotised Geller in an attempt to find out where his abilities came from. As a result, the young Israeli started to channel ‘Spectra’ – an entity which claimed to be a conscious super-computer aboard a spaceship. However, Puharich suggested to him that there might be a connection with the Nine Principles, and Spectra readily agreed that there was. The Nine claimed that they had programmed Geller with his powers as a young child.
Through Geller, The Nine alerted Puharich to his life’s mission, which was to use Geller’s talents to alert the world to an imminent mass landing of spaceships that would bring representatives of The Nine. However, Geller – by now an international psychic superstar – bowed out in 1973 and has resolutely turned his back on The Nine ever since. Puharich had to find other channels.
He joined up with aristocratic former racing driver Sir John Whitmore and Florida-based psychic and healer Phyllis Schlemmer. They found a new channeller – a Daytona cook known to history only by the pseudonym ‘Bobby Horne’ – who lived to regret his dealings with The Nine. Driven to the brink of suicide by their constant demands, he too dropped out of the scene – his despair being dismissed by Whitmore as "signs of instability". After this, Phyllis Schlemmer was appointed the authorised spokesperson for the entity – known simply as ‘Tom’ – who represented The Nine
Puharich, Whitmore and Schlemmer then set up Lab Nine at Puharich’s estate in Ossining, New York. The Nine’s disciples included multi-millionaire businessmen (many hiding behind pseudonyms and including members of Canada’s richest family, the Bronfmans), European nobility, scientists from the Stamford Research Institute and at least one prominent political figure who was a personal friend of President Gerald Ford.
We also know that Lyall Watson (then the darling of the alternative scene because of his seminal 1973 book Supernature) was involved, as was the influential counter-culture guru Ira Einhorn – and Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek.
The key to predicting eclipses is noticing that they occur in cycles, or at more or less regular intervals. The Sun goes round the sky once a year; the Moon once a month. This means that, every month, the Moon ‘overtakes’ the sun. This happens at the New Moon, and this is when solar eclipses occur. But, of course, we don’t get an eclipse every New Moon. This is because the Moon has an elliptical orbit: sometimes it passes above the Sun when it overtakes it, sometimes below. But the Moon’s elliptical orbit has its own cycle: it returns to the same place it started from every 18 years or so. Thus – if seen from the same place on Earth – an eclipse will be followed by another one just over 18 years later.
Roddenberry was part of that circle in 1974 and 1975, and even produced the screenplay for a movie about The Nine. How much he was influenced by them is unknown, although it is said that some of their concepts found their way into the early Star Trek movies, and The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine (what a giveaway!) series.
(There is a character named ‘Vinod’ in one Deep Space Nine episode.) Another key player in Lab Nine was Dr James J Hurtak, who was appointed Puharich’s second-in-command by The Nine. In fact, Hurtak had been independently channelling The Nine since 1973.
Puharich and Whitmore commissioned British writer Stuart Holroyd to write an account of their adventures, which appeared in 1977 as Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth (retitled Briefings for the Landing on Planet Earth in paperback)
In this extraordinary book the true identity of the Nine – and of Tom – was finally revealed. Far from being the chummy character that his rather avuncular name suggests, Tom is actually Atum, the creator-god of the ancient Egyptian religion of Heliopolis, and Uncle Tom with his eight mates are none other than the Great Ennead of Heliopolis,
But even with such impressive contacts, all was not well with Puharich. Lab Nine broke up in 1978 after a series of mysterious events that culminated in an arson attack on the Ossining estate, and he fled to Mexico, claiming that he was being persecuted by the CIA. He returned to the USA two years later, and appears to have played no further part in The Nine story. He died in 1995 after falling down the stairs in his South Carolina home.
However, The Nine continued. Not only did Schlemmer and Whitmore continue their mission, but Dr Hurtak has also moved on. He has become a major player in the unfolding millennial drama currently being played out at Giza, but perhaps more importantly he has established himself as a New Age guru par excellence, travelling the world giving workshops on his book of channelled revelations from The Nine, The Keys of Enoch. Written and laid out in classic Biblical style, its darkly apocalyptic vision has huge numbers of influential devotees.This we find very worrying.
Another Nine channel – an Englishwoman named Jenny O’Connor – was introduced to the avant garde Esalen Institute in San Francisco by Sir John Whitmore. She and The Nine became so influential there that they held seminars and – unbelievably – were actually listed on the Institute’s staff, even successfully ordering the sacking of its chief finance officer and the reorganisation of its entire management structure..
This should concern us, because many influential people attended The Nine’s Esalen seminars, including Russians who were part of the Institute’s Soviet Exchange programme. Some of these later rose to prominence in the Gorbachev regime and were instrumental in the downfall of Communism. (The Esalen Institute now runs the US branch of the Gorbachev Foundation.)
The Nine are very much still with us. One of their recent channels, who is also in contact with Tom, is the American writer David M Myers. He is co-author with Britain’s David S Percy of that extraordinary tome Two-Thirds, a history of the galaxy and the human race according to Myer’s otherwordly contacts (who clearly have no sense of the absurd). Percy – best known as a champion of the ‘Face on Mars’ and the ‘hoaxing’ of the Apollo moon landings – was at one time part of the Schlemmer circle.
Among the other major proponents of the ‘monuments’ of Mars and their alleged connection with ancient Egypt is none other than Dr James Hurtak – The Nine’s great prophet – who has promoted this idea since as long ago as 1973. Richard C Hoagland – familiar to FT readers as another unrepentant ‘Mars Face’ enthusiast – is also clearly under The Nine’s spell. David Myers and David Percy were, respectively, American and European Director of Operations for Hoagland’s Mars Mission. In fact, his interpretation of the ‘monuments’ of Mars comes directly from The Nine. Flake though he may appear (increasingly in these hallowed pages), but his influence over huge swathes of the hungrier mystery seekers is undeniable. This is the man who addresses rapt audiences at the United Nations.
But it is in the New Age channelling circuit that The Nine have truly come into their own. In any other circles their true agenda would no doubt have been rumbled long ago, but this is the New Age. Anything The Nine say must be sweetness and light, right? But an objective reading of their divine pronouncements reveal the first stirrings of something very nasty in Paradise.
Their words appeared in 1992 as the book The Only Planet of Choice, credited to ‘transceiver’ Schlemmer and edited by Mary Bennett (a one-time member of the Schlemmer circle who also edited Myers and Percy’s Two-Thirds). This has had an unprecedented influence over the New Age. According to Palden Jenkins (editor of an earlier edition of Only Planet) more and more New Age channelling groups are ‘realising’ that the real source of their wisdom is The Nine.
In fact, we have discerned what amounts to a campaign by The Nine – or their adherents – to ‘take over’ the New Age. It would be a mistake to underestimate the economic or even political potential of this vast subculture – rich pickings indeed.
But The Nine’s influence does not extend merely to New Age channelling circles. Andrija Puharich, James Hurtak and Richard Hoagland have all lectured at the United Nations in New York. And individuals connected with The Nine are also known to have influence with Vice-President Al Gore.
Of course, if The Nine really are the ancient gods of Egypt, then surely there could be fewer more significant events than their return. One may be justified in thinking that the more leading politicians who fall under their influence the better; but are they really the ancient Ennead of Egypt? Can it be that they have actually returned to sort us all out, scattering love and enlightenment from their high moral ground?
Tom, in The Only Planet of Choice, chooses his words carefully as he explains that all the races of the Earth were seeded from space-gods – except one, the "indigenous race", the blacks. He is very careful to urge us not to make an issue out of this. After all, it’s not the black race’s fault that they have no divine spark like the rest of us.
But The Nine’s influence does not extend merely to New Age channelling circles. Andrija Puharich, James Hurtak and Richard Hoagland have all lectured at the United Nations in New York. And individuals connected with The Nine are also known to have influence with Vice-President Al Gore.
Of course, if The Nine really are the ancient gods of Egypt, then surely there could be fewer more significant events than their return. One may be justified in thinking that the more leading politicians who fall under their influence the better; but are they really the ancient Ennead of Egypt? Can it be that they have actually returned to sort us all out, scattering love and enlightenment from their high moral ground?
Tom, in The Only Planet of Choice, chooses his words carefully as he explains that all the races of the Earth were seeded from space-gods – except one, the "indigenous race", the blacks. He is very careful to urge us not to make an issue out of this. After all, it’s not the black race’s fault that they have no divine spark like the rest of us.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the history of The Nine is its relationship to the career of Andrija Puharich. Recent research has revealed Puharich to have a distinctly sinister side. As an Army doctor in the 1950s, he was deeply involved with the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA mind control project (see panel). He – together with the infamous Dr Sidney Gottlieb – experimented with a variety of techniques to change or induce actual thought processes… even to creating the impression of voices in the head. These techniques included the use of drugs, hypnosis and beaming radio signals directly into the subject’s brain. And, significantly, he was engaged in this work at exactly the same time that The Nine made their first appearance at the Round Table Foundation. The Foundation itself is now known to have been largely funded by the Pentagon as a front for its medical and parapsychological research. Puharich was still working for the CIA in the early 1970s, when he brought Uri Geller out of Israel. Puharich’s use of hypnosis is particularly interesting in The Nine circle. In the case of Uri Geller and Bobby Horne, he first hypnotised them and then suggested that they were in touch with The Nine – and lo, they were! Ira Einhorn – a close associate of Puharich’s during the 1970s – confirmed to us that he believed that Puharich was "humanly directing" The Nine communications.
The evidence we have gathered strongly suggests that Tom and his fellow gods originated, not in the stars, but behind closed doors as part of a CIA mind control experiment. And what happened to that experiment? Now with hundreds of thousands of devotees, some in very high places, can The Nine be deemed a success? Of course, that depends very much on what the CIA had in mind. With their subtle racist propaganda, perhaps the flaky New Age Nine should worry the hell out of us.
