At the request of a British television producer, we dug up the following article from the archive, and now present it here for your consideration: “Malta, Entrance to the Cavern World” is a recounting of an experience at Hal Saflieni Hypogeum by C. Lois Jessop, then Secretary of New York Saucer Information Bureau, with follow-up commentary by Riley Crabb, originally included in the Journal of Borderland Research (Vol. 17, No. 2, March 1961). We have left the spellings of place names as they were originally printed— Hal Saflieni Hypogeum as Hal Saflini Hypogaeum, Valletta as Valetta, Paola as Paula. This article is part of our “Round Robin” classic series, presenting random pulls from the archives and the best offerings of the BSRA from 1945 into the 1970s!

MALTA, ENTRANCE TO THE CAVERN WORLD

C. Lois Jessop, Secretary, New York Saucer Information Bureau

I visited some friends on the Island of Malta in the Mediterranean in the mid-1930s. One afternoon six of us decided to hire a car and visit some of the many historical tourist attractions on the island. One of our party suggested that, since the weather was very hot, our best bet was to visit some of the caves and underground temples. At least there we could keep cool for a few hours.

Some few miles out of Valetta, the capitol of Malta, is the little town of Paula. It has only one main street, Hal Saflini, and on this is the entrance to an underground temple known as the Hypogaeum of Hal Saflini. We stopped here and sought out the guide for a tour of the cave or catacombs of the Hypogaeum.

There was a fairly large cave entrance with ancient mural decorations of whirls and wavy lines, diamond patches here and there, also oval patterns seemingly painted with red ochre. The entrance itself smelt damp and mouldy, but inside the cave there was not a trace of mustyness. Joe, the guide, told us there were three floors of underground rooms and gave each of us a lighted candle.

One by one we bent down low to walk through a narrow passage which led to a step or two, and again we were able to stand up in a fair sized room which had been built out of the Malta sandstone aeons ago in the Stone-Age. Joe told of a powerful oracle (or wishing well) deep down, and how it had worked wonders in the old days for the initiated who knew the correct sound to use. I think the oracle still works today unless it was damaged. Malta was heavily bombarded during World War II.

The oracle was supposed to work only if a male voice called to it but as the guide was saying this I slipped down a small step and gave a yell that was picked up by something and magnified throughout the whole cave.

We followed the guide through some more narrow passages which led down, down, down, then straightened our backs again when we came into another room. In this large opening was a circular stone table or altar in the center of the room. Cut out of the rock walls around were layers of stone beds or resting places of some kind, with hollows scooped out for head, body, and narrowing to the feet. I guess these were places for adults about four feet tall, with smaller scooped out beds. It looked like mother, father and child either slept or were buried here, although we saw no bodies here.

Down, down, down again, stooping and crawling through a narrow passage into another large room, with slits or narrow openings in the stone wall.

“They buried their dead in here,” said the guide.

I peered through a slit and saw skeletons another. Through another slit I peered into a cave where, the guide said, they kept their prisoners. A three foot thick stone door, about four feet high and four feet wide, guarded the entrance.

“What kind of people, and how strong were these pigmies, to be able to carve out these rooms to a definite pattern and to move doors this thick and heavy?” I thought.

“This is the end of the tour,” Joe, the guide, said. “We must now turn and retrace our steps.”

“What’s down-there?” I asked him; for on turning I noticed another opening off one of the walls.

“Go there at your own risk,” he replied, “and you won’t go far.”

I was all for more exploring and talking it over with my friends, three of them decided to go with me and two waited with the guide. I was wearing a long sash around my dress and since I decided to lead the group I asked the next one behind me to hold on to it. Holding our half-burnt candles the four of us ducked into this passage, which was narrower and lower than the others.

Groping and laughing our way along, I came out first, onto a ledge pathway about two feet wide, with a sheer drop about fifty feet or more on my right and a wall on my left. I took a step forward, close to the rock wall side. The person behind me, still holding on to my sash, had not yet emerged from the passage. Thinking it was quite a drop and perhaps I should go no further without the guide I held up my candle.

There across the cave, from an opening deep below me, emerged twenty persons of giant stature. In single file they walked along a narrow ledge. Their height I judged to be about twenty or twenty-five feet, since their heads came about half way up the opposite wall. They walked very slowly, taking long strides. Then they all stopped, turned and raised their heads in my direction. All simultaneously raised their arms and with their hands beckoned me. The movement was something like snatching or feeling for something, as the palms of their hands were face down. Terror rooted me to the spot.

“Go on, we’re all getting stuck in the passage!” My friend jerked at my sash. “What’s the matter?”

“Well, there’s nothing much to see,” I stammered, taking another step forward.

My candle was in my right hand. I put my left hand on the wall to steady me, and stopped again. My hand wasn’t on cold rock but on something soft and wet. As it moved a strong gust of wind came from nowhere and blew out my candle! Now I really was scared in the darkness!

“Go back,” I yelled to the others, “go back and guide me back by my sash. My candle has gone out and I cannot see!”

In utter panic I backed into the narrow little passageway and forced the others back, too, until we had backed into the large room where Joe and my friends were waiting. What a relief that was!

“Well, did you see anything?” asked one of them.

“No,” I quickly replied, “There was a draft in there that blew my candle out.”

“Let’s go,” said Joe, the guide.

I looked up at him. Our eyes met. I knew that at one time he had seen what I had seen. There was an expression of caution in his eyes, adding to my reluctance to tell anyone. I decided not to.

Out in the open again and in the hot Malta sunshine we thanked the guide, and as we tipped him he looked at me.

“If you really are interested in exploring further it would be wise to join a group. There is a schoolteacher who is going to take a party exploring soon,” he said.

I left my address with him and asked him to have the schoolteacher get in touch with me, but I never heard any more about it, until one of my friends called me to read an item from the Valetta paper.

“I say, Lois, remember that tunnel you wanted to explore? It says here in the paper that a schoolmaster and thirty students went exploring, and apparently got as far as we did. They were roped together and the end of the rope was tied to the opening of the cave. As the last student turned the corner where your candle blew out the rope was clean cut, and none of the party was found because the walls caved in.”

The shock of this information didn’t change my determination not to say anything about my experience in the Hypogaeum, but several months later my sister visited Malta and insisted on making a tour of the underground temple on Hal Saflini. Reluctantly, I went along, retracing the same route; but there was a different guide this time. When we got down to the lowest level, to the room where I had taken off to explore the tunnel entrance was boarded up!

“Wasn’t it here that the schoolmaster and the thirty students got trapped?” I asked the guide.

“Perhaps,” he replied, with a noncommittal shrug of the shoulders, and refused to say anything more. You cannot get a thing out of the Maltese when they don’t want to talk.

“You are new here, aren’t you?” I asked him. “Where’s Joe, the guide who was here a couple of months ago?”

“I don’t know any Joe.” He shook his head. “I alone have been showing people around this catacomb for years.”

Who was this guide? And why did Joe disappear after we left Hal Saflini that first time? And why is it impossible to get any facts on the disappearing schoolchildren story? In the Summer of 1960, Louise Becker, N.Y.S.I.B.’s treasurer visited Malta during her European trip. She searched old newspaper files and the Museum, trying to get some facts to substantiate my story, but in vain. The Maltese are tight-lipped about the secrets of their island.

CRABB ON JESSOP, MALTA, AND THE CAVERN WORLD

Your editor’s third lecture, “Flying Saucers and America’s Destiny”, contains brief references to the Cavern world in the interior of the earth; and it was after hearing this talk to her New York saucer group that Miss Jessop told Mrs. Crabb and me the Malta experience described above.

We spent two days with Lois Jessop during our eastern trip in April, 1960, and found her a charming hostess, cosmopolitan as a much-traveled Englishwoman can be, and a student of the borderland. Lois has a level-headed, level-eyed way of looking at life and people, which is very refreshing; nevertheless, I found her Malta story difficult to believe until Mrs. Crabb and I returned home and I had a chance to look up Malta at the San Diego library. Two Malta articles in the National Geographic are especially fruitful for the underground researcher: Griffith’s “Malta, Halting Place of Nations”, May, 1920 and Walter’s “Wanderers Awheel In Malta”, August, 1940. (p. 267, 272)

Walters and another young American friend made a leisurely bicycle tour of Malta in 1939, with plenty of time to get acquainted and to ride around with island teenagers. They visited Hal Saflini, too, and proved the startling amplifying power of the “oracle”. They also picked up this sad information from their Maltese friends.

“Years ago one could walk underground from one end of Malta to the other, but all entrances were closed by the government because of a tragedy. On a sight-seeing trip, comparable to a nature study tour in our own schools, a number of elementary children and their teachers descended into the tunneled maze and did not return. For weeks mothers declared that they heard wailing and screaming from underground. But numerous excavations and searching parties brought no trace of the lost souls. After three weeks they were finally given up for dead.”

Griffiths noted a hollow-sounding floor in one of the rooms of Hal Saflini, indicating yet unexplored lower levels. He also gives a few facts which back up Richard Shaver’s contention that the Deros, the evil Cavern dwellers, are cannibals and enjoy eating human flesh. Hal Saflini was discovered in 1902 but before the Valetta museum director could open it up for the tourists, dirt, broken pottery, and enough normal-sized human bones to account for 33,000 people had to be removed from the rooms of the Hypogaeum. Archaeologists and other innocents believe that catacombs like Hal Saflini were burial tombs; I rather think that it was a Cavern restaurant for the degenerate, undersized descendants of the Atlanteans who were forced into the caves thousands of years ago.

Here is Griffith’s description of the “oracle” in the cave: ” . . . at about the level of a man’s mouth is a hemispherical hole in the wall about two feet in diameter. Here it was noticed only a few months ago that any word spoken into this place was magnified a hundredfold and audible throughout the entire structure. A curved projection is especially carved out of the back of the cave near this hole and acts as a sounding board, showing that the designers had a good knowledge of sound-wave motion. The impression upon the credulous can be imagined when the oracle spoke and the words came thundering forth through the dark and mysterious places with terrifying impressiveness.”

GIANTS IN THE EARTH

Lois Jessop was reminded of the peculiar appearance of the twenty-foot giants she saw in Hal Saflini, by a couple of 35mm slide illustrations in my No. 4 Saucer lecture, concerned with mediumship. These slides are copies of Max Heindel’s drawings of the human aura, from his book, “Cosmo-Conception”, curved lines radiating out beyond the body.

Of the huge Cavern dwellers she saw she said, “their covering seemed to be like long white hair, combed downward and shaggy looking. Their heads were oval and elongated at the chin and top; and the hair on their heads fell about the shoulders like a draped monk’s cowl.”

Now these underground beings, whatever their origin, have no resemblance to Shaver’s Deros. At least we have the fact of their existence; and in this experience of Lois Jessop’s, and in the Hal Saflini material in the National Geographics, we do have some of the best factual support of the Shaver Mystery your editor has yet seen. In fact it was this material which encouraged me to go ahead and put together talk No. 5, “The Reality of the Underground”, including a portion of Miss Jessop’s experience and a review of Shaver’s basic theories as spelled out by Ray Palmer in the early Mystic Magazines back in 1954 and 1955. My basic premise is that there are many different races in the interior of the earth, of all shapes, sizes and colors, and of different degrees of density, depending on what level or plane of vibration is normal to them. Along with our former director, Meade Layne, I believe that some of these underground races can shift back and forth across the border between 3-D and 4-D; so that sometimes they are visible to normal humansight and at other times they are invisible — to our great bewilderment!

The following posting is a collection of three older pieces, presented as they first appeared in the original BSRA Round Robins and Journals, all three explorations of the still mysterious Mount Shasta (Úytaahkoo, the White Mountain), that legendary Cascadian peak in Siskiyou County, California. We present these selections here as a historical survey of early thoughts and ideas on phenomena that has been linked to Shasta, viewed through the dawn prism, in hopes that you will find some value or curiosity in them.

The Mystery of Mt. Shasta

Originally included as part of the the BSRA Round Robin (Vol. 3, No. 7, Sept.-Oct. 1947);
Article by Edward Lenser, with opening and closing remarks (and footnotes) by Meade Layne.

The following article appeared in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine of May 22, 1932, and has since been quoted in part, in many publications. Its interest however is perennial end the mystery still unsolved. For the sections quoted, RR is indebted to Miss Ella Young, of Oceano, Calif., a well-known writer and poet.

The author of the article is Mr. Edward Lenser. He tells us that one morning, while en route to Portland on the Shasta Limited, he went out on the observation platform to see the sunrise, and was looking at Mt. Shasta.

“Gazing upon its splendor, I suddenly perceived that the whole southern side of the mountain was ablaze with a strange reddish-green light – a flame that grew faint, then flared up with renewed brilliance. My first conjecture was a forest fire, but the absence of smoke discounted that theory. The light resembled the glow of Roman candles… The thing intrigued me, and when I met my travelling companion at breakfast, he asked me if I had seen the forest fire on Mt. Shasta.”

“Did you see smoke?” was my question.

“No,” he replied. “Just a red glow.”

Convinced that I had not been the victim of a mirage, I later asked the conductor about the mysterious pyrotechnics. His answer was short but enticing:

“Lemurians,” he said. “They hold ceremonials up there.”

“Lemurians!” ………..

Just as soon as I had transacted my business in Portland I returned to the Mt. Shasta region, incredulous but consumed with curiosity … I planned to equip myself for an expedition ..

I motored toward the point of my investigation, pausing at Weed, a town near Mt. Shasta, for the night. There I discovered that the existence of a ‘mystic village’ on Mt. Shasta was an accepted fact. Business men, amateur explorers, officials and ranchers in the country surrounding Shasta spoke freely of the Lemurian community, and all attested to the weird rituals that are performed on the mountainside at sunset, midnight, and sunrise. Also, they freely ridiculed my avowed trek into the sacred precincts, assuring me that an entrance was as difficult and forbidden as is an entrance into Tibet.

It appears that tho the existence of this colony has been known for more than 50 years, only four or five explorers have penetrated the invisible protective boundaries; and no one has ever succeeded in entering the village, or at least returned to tell the tale. It is of course possible that such a person might have good reasons to hold secret whatever he had seen.

It is safe to say that 50 out of 100 people living within a reasonable distance of Shasta have at some time or other tried to approach the Lemurians – yet many who are known to have penetrated at least part of the mystery will deny having made such an investigation or having any knowledge concerning the Lemurians.

It began to look as if the whole affair was a matter of well-seasoned legendry, yet I myself had seen the strange illumination of Mt. Shasta …. And yet it seemed incredible . . .

Then I learned that the existence of the Lemurians on Mt. Shasta was vouched for some years ago by the scientist Professor Edgar L. Larkin, formerly director of the Mt. Lowe observatory. He penetrated the Shasta wilderness as far as he could, or dared, and then continued his investigations from a promontory with a powerful telescope.

What he saw, he reported, was a great temple in the heart of the mystic village, a marvellous work of carved marble and onyx, rivaling the magnificence of the temples of Yucatan. He saw a village of 600 to 1000 people; they appeared to be engaged in in the manufacture of various articles and in farming the sunny slopes and glens with miraculous results … evidently contented to live as did their Lemurian forebearers … Professor Larkin gatered enough evidence to enable him to say … that in this village live the lest descendants of the first inhabitants of this earth, the Lemurians.^[1]

That these Lemurians are cognizant of the disaster which befell their ancestors is revealed by the fact that each night at midnight they perform a ritual to Guatama, which is the Lemurian name for America. The chief object of this ceremony is to celebrate the escape of their forebears from the doomed Lemuria and their safe arrival in Guatama.

In this midnight ceremony, as in the sunrise and sunset rituals, the weird but wonderful light that first attracted my attention is used. I have seen the midnight ceremonials cause the entire southern side of Mt. Shasta to be illuminated in s most baffling way – a light that reaches up and covers the landscape for great distances … This display of light far exceeds our modern electrical achievements. . .

The Lemurians have been seen on various occasions; they have been encountered in the Shasta forest, but only for a brief glimpse, for they possess the uncanny secret knowledge of the Tibetan Masters^[2] and can blend themselves into their surroundings and vanish. At times they came into neighboring towns – tall, bare-foot, noble-looking men, with close-cropped hair, dressed in spotless white robes that resemble in style the enveloping garment worn by the high-caste East-Indian women of today – to patronize certain stores.

Indeed, the records reveal that at one time on official visit was made to the City of Sen Francisco by a white-robed patriarch from the mystic village. He came on foot, with an escort of younger men, to bring greetings and an assurance of good will upon the anniversary of the founding of their sacred retreat in California. The patriarch was met by an official committee at the Ferry Building and escorted to the City Hall. As soon as greetings had been exchanged the visitors returned to their retreat.

The article concludes by saying that purchases made in Shasta villages by these ‘white-robed men’ include a greet deal of sulphur, lard, and salt; their purchases are paid for in gold nuggets, “they cannot speak our language”; and they make extensive donations to charity. When forest fires occur, they “cause an invisible wall of protection to rise up”.

The alleged factual data in this article obviously falls into some four categories: (a) Observations by Mr. Lenser himself, apparently confined to the lights; (b) Reported observations of Professor Larkin, source not stated – but We believe contained in a small book by Professor Larkin himself; (c) The visit of the “Patriarch” to San Francisco – said to be a matter of record – somewhere; (d) A digest of stories, beliefs and alleged experiences from inhabitants of the Shasta area. It is impossible further to evaluate this material as it stands, but seems certain that there is a considerable substratum of remarkable facts.

We are anxious to know whether there are any recent reports of similar phenomena (within the last 5-4 years), and would appreciate information from our readers.

Footnotes

1. No reason appears in the account for calling the colony “Lemurian”, except the alleged use of the word Guatama, nor do we know how the meaning and use of this word was ascertained.
2. The “secret knowledge of the Tibetan Masters” is a bit of journalistic build-up; probably some slight skill in woodcraft would be sufficient explanation.

Photo: Michael Zanger, “Sunrise on Mount Shasta” (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Presented here is a contribution by Roger P. Graham to The Flying Rolls, Beta II June, MCMXLVII regarding to Santa Cruz Vortex. Enjoy.

(The so-called vortexes of the west, including the “House of Mystery” near Grant’s Pass in Oregon, a number of locations in the Ojai Valley, and the one near Sta. Cruz here described, have been the subject of much interest and baffled speculation. In Round Robin 1-8, Sept. 1945, we published a report, largely negative, by physicist Keith J. Hayes of Palo Alto. Interest in the subject still continues, however, and we now offer our readers a discussion by mathematician Roger P. Graham, known for his experiments on the ether drift. Borderland phenomena of this sort belong equally to science and occultism – which are only complements of each other – and hence are suitable subjects for Flying Roll discussion. Ed.)

The phenomena at this mystery spot are unquestionably genuine and impossible of explanation on the basis of delusion, refraction, or any conventional system of explanation.

The owners, not being scientists, are content merely to exploit the money-making possibilities, but they permit anyone who desires to study the problem, to do so.

I did not see Mr. Prather, the present owner and son of the discoverer of the spot, but I saw Mr. McCray, the manager. He was very cooperative, answering my questions without hesitation and offering to perform any experiment I might devise, providing I sent him the apparatus with instructions.

Dr. Compton, formerly with the University of Southern California, spent some time at the spot, digging a deep shaft which went doom to bed-rock which is of granite. He found the effects were stronger down there. A blimp was brought over the spot and instruments lowered slowly from it, and the effects were seen to extend upward for a hundred feet or so. I do not have the details of any report Dr. Compton may have made – merely Mr. McCray’s verbal account of those reports.

I am not acquainted with any explanation of the phenomena which Dr. Compton might have made. There is a news item posted on the side of the ticker office at the ‘spot’, in which an engineer explains the mystery as being due to a seepage of carbon dioxide gas from fissures in the rocks. If the effects were merely visual this might be a logical straw to clutch at. However, the most startling effects are nothing more or less than gravitational. These cannot be explained on a basis of refraction.

Those who have read my ether drift experiment will recall my assertion that gravity is the effect on matter of ether flow. Without going into the basics, I wish to repeat the conclusions concerning gravity which led to the experiment mentioned, in February of this year. (1) An aggregate of negative electricity produces a field called negative field. (2) An aggregate of positive electricity produce a field called a positive field. (3) A neutral aggregate of positive and negative electricity, according to conventional science, does not have an electrical field, since the fields cancel out. According to my basics it has a field, and that field is gravitational. In other words, a gravitational field is a neutralized electrical field.

Magnetism is produced by the rapid travel of electrons in a wire other material such as iron. It is essentially a patterned flow of either the positive ether or the negative ether, but not both. That is, e electrical fields are equal in strength, but one is stationary and the other is not. One field only has what might be called a vortexian motion. That is magnetism.

Theoretically, according to my basics, there can be two types of magnetic field. One would be produced by the rapid motion of positive electricity alone in a vortexian pattern. The other, and the one we know, is produced by the rapid motion of negative electricity in a vortexian pattern.

Neither of these could be distinguished by its effects. Each would have its north and south poles. Yet if these two were combined they would not produce a stronger magnet, but would cancel out if they were exactly in strength and pattern, and produce a gravity vortex.

This is exactly That has happened at Sta.Cruz at the ‘mystery spot.’ Somewhere under that spot is a large deposit of something. What it is, I don’t know, yet I can surmise. The reader is undoubtedly familiar with the explanation of an iron magnet. Each iron atom is a small magnet. The field patterns of the iron nuclei are such that the orbital electrons of the iron atom revolve around the nucleus at great speed. When the iron atoms are lined up, this motion adds up and we have a large magnet.

To have the other kind of natural magnet we would have to have,` molecular or atomic structures in which the orbital units were protons or positrons.

What this structure might be is problematical. It might be possible that a hydrocarbon of a certain type might produce a permanent magnet as the result of the orbital motion of the hydrogen nuclei about the carbon atom, if the field patterns of the substance were right. It might even be that in such a molecule both the electron and the proton of the hydrogen atoms in the molecule would evolve around the carbon atom, producing the gravity vortex from the one substance

It is interesting to note that the vortex at Sta.Cruz and the ones in Ojai are near large oil deposits. Oil is a hydrocarbon consisting of long strings of carbon atoms tied together with hydrogen atoms strung along the sides. If such a molecule were spun rapidly with its long axis stationary, and an aggregate of such molecules was lined up in the same way that iron atoms in a natural magnet are, a gravity vortex should be produced.

Since all petroleum is liquid, and molecules of a liquid could hardly be lined up that way permanently, there must be either some ex – ternal lining up of force, or, if the vortex is produced by the hydrocarbon molecules, the aggregate must be of some kind in which the molecules are not in liquid form. This might possibly be done by (1) the molecules of hydrocarbons being dispersed through some sand or shale formation in which they can be fixed as in a solid, or (2) the hydrocarbon molecules being much longer than those in petroleum deposits and being a natural solid. Then they could become permanently lined up in a concentrated form.

The strength of the Santa Cruz vortex is so great that such a deposit would have to be quite large. It might be far down, even under a bedrock formation.

The vortex at Gold Hill, Oregon, is not, so far as I know at this time, near any large oil deposit. That would not necessarily mean that there is no such deposit there, but merely that none has been found.

No doubt there are many undiscovered vortex spots in the United States. Are there others near other large oil fields? If so, this would lend confirmatory evidence to the tentative explanation of them being permanent gravity-vortex magnets made of hydrocarbons.

Just as the effect of gravity produced by a neutralized aggregate of positive and negative electricity (matter) is very much weaker than the force of the separated electrical fields, so also the gravity vortex mass would produce a much weaker field than the separated magnetic fields. Therefore it might be almost impossible to detect such a vortex in a small mass of the hypothetical stuff. It might take thousands of tons of it to produce measurable effects.

The only other way to-account for the vortex according to my basics (and no other basics account for it at all) is a new type of matter in which the nucleus has a negative charge and the orbital units are positrons or protons. Regardless, the final solution to the mystery of the vortex will certainly follow the principles of the explanation I have given here.

Can a gravity vortex be produced artificially? YES. Such a field is produced by every revolving wheel. However, it is too weak for any possible measurement. The strength of such a vortex would be to the separated magnetic fields in the same proportion as the separated electrical fields would be to the gravity field of the same amount of matter.

If all the negative electricity in one pound of matter were withdrawn, and kept in a compact volume, and the remaining positive electricity were similarly contained, and the two were place a few feet apart, their mutual attractive force would be perhaps billions of tons. In a homogeneous mass they still exert the same forces. A one pound lump of lead attracts another with millions of tons of force – and repels it almost the same force, so that the result is an almost undetectable attraction.

A mild excess or lack of electrons in an object results in a strong electrostatic field. It takes millions of tons of matter to produce an easily detectable gravity field.

A mild flow of electric current in a wire coil produces a strong magnet. If it were possible to get a similar flow of protons in a –Are without an accompanying flow of electrons, a magnet of the same strength could be produced. The two together would produce a gravity vortex.

To produce a gravity vortex artificially, it would be necessary to cause a large amount of matter to revolve at a very great speed in a small volume. A flywheel could do it if it could hold together at enormous speeds. Since it won’t, no measurable vortex could be produced that way. A coil of copper tubing in which hydrogen is forced to travel at incredible speeds might do the work. In that set-up it is probable that the resistance of the walls of the tubing would prevent great enough speeds.

It is more than probable that only by discovering the substance that produces the gravity vortex at Santa Cruz and other places, and setting up a huge black of it, can we ever produce a similar vortex intentionally, and thus prove the cause beyond all doubt.

However, we may possibly devise instruments to detect very weak gravity vortexes – perhaps instruments delicate enough to demonstrate the vortex set up by a revolving wheel with massive rim.

A whole field of scientific experiment is wide open here – completely unexplored to date. And vie have the evidence of Nature at Santa Cruz and Gold Hill to point the way, and stand as mute evidence to science which the accepted basics of today are helpless to “explain.”

Though the phenomena observed at Santa Cruz are fairly well known, We append here a memorandum concerning them.

1. At many points within the area, if two persons of equal height face each other, one appears shorter or taller than the other. This effect appears in photographs and Mr. Graham estimates the difference at about one-seventh.
2. A pendulum requires much more effort to displace it from the vertical in one direction than in the other, and the right and left hand arcs will differ considerably on the free swing-back (by about 6″ with the pendulum used).
3. A beard is raised at one end to form an inclined plane, by sighting along it at a nearby hilltop. A tennis ball placed on the low end rolls uphill, with a constant speed (after the first second). A cigarette placed beside the ball rolls in the same direction with the same speed, (no acceleration).
4. A ball tossed so as to fall over and beyond a fence or wall, returns from about the height of its arc and falls beside or behind the person tossing it.
5. There are also various distinct subjective effects, especially in walking up and down hill. Most of the effects seem to be in the nature of sideways acceleration.

We should perhaps add, that it is believed by some that the effects are due to buried mechanisms of ancient times, and a well-known occultist assures us that such devices have been seen and examined clairvoyantly.

The article you are about to read (from May – June 1972 Round Robin) includes the story of time traveller Rudolph Fentz, which, as you may know, has been very thoroughly investigated (and debunked) by forteana researcher Chris Aubeck of the Magoniax Project. In addition to Holland’s telling of Jack Finney’s Rudolph Fentz story, the article includes other weird claims and references that may not make sense outside the context of the psychic research circles that existed at the time it was written. Some articles of patent absurdity, some of unique interest; in all cases, as ever, keep your eyes open and tread lightly when walking through the borderlands— you never know what you might step in.

Articles by Ralph M. Holland, Marian Hartil (channelling Myron), and Vincent Gaddis, with comment by Riley Crabb — from Journal of Borderland Research (Vol. 28, No. 3, May – June 1972)

The Voice from the Gallery

By the late Ralph M. Holland, from “Colliers” (September 15, 1951– Jack Finney’s “I’m Scared”)

One night in June 1950 an oddly dressed man Square in New York City — which eventually led to the most baffling mystery in the history of the New York Police Department.

Captain Hubert V. Rihm was in the Missing Persons Bureau at the time, and took an active part in the investigation. He is now retired and since he does not have the records in his possession, could not quote exact dates and addresses in all instances. He did, however, remember the main details. It was somewhere near the middle of the month, about 11:15 P.M., right at the height of the after theatre traffic rush.

The man appeared be about 30 years of age. His most noticeable features, aside from his clothing, was a luxuriant set of mutton-chop whiskers, which went out of style many years ago. He wore a high silk hat, a coat with cloth covered buttons at the back, and a high cut vest with lapels. The trousers were black and white checked material, rather tight, without cuffs and pressed without a crease. He wore high button shoes.

No one saw his walk out into the street. Witnesses first noticed him standing in the middle of the intersection “gawking at the signs as if he’d never seen an electric sign before”. Then he seemed to become aware of the traffic and began to make frantic movements to dodge out of it. The police officer at the corner saw him and started out to lead him to safety. Before he could reach him the man made a sudden dash for the curb. A taxicab hit him, and he was dead when they picked him up.

The attendants the morgue took the whiskers and the clothing in their stride. One meets some odd characters during 20 or 30 on the force, some of them much odder than he. When they began to search his pockets, their brows began to wrinkle, “One brass slug good for one 5 cent beer”. The name of the saloon was unfamiliar even to the old timers, “One bill from a livery stable on Lexington Ave.: ‘To the feeding and stabling of one, horse, and the washing of one carriage; $3.00′” The name of the stable did not appear in the directory. “About $70 in currency, all old style notes, and including two gold certificates.” “Cards bearing the name ‘Rudolph Fentz’ and an address on Fifth Ave., with a letter to the same name and address, postmarked in Philadelphia June 1876.” None of the items showed any signs of age.

The Fifth Ave, address was a store. So far as the present occupants knew, it had always been a store. None of them had ever heard of “Rudolph Fentz”. The name did not appear in the directory. A finger print check, both in New York and Washington, brought no results. No one ever called, or made enquiries at the morgue. Capt. Rihm continued to investigate the case. He checked back thru old phone books, looking for the name “Fentz”. Finally, in the 1939 directory, he found a “Rudolph Fentz, Jr.” with an uptown apartment address. They remembered Fentz at the apartment: a man in his 60s, who worked at a nearby bank. He had retired in 1940 and moved away. They had not heard from him since.

At the bank, Rihm learned that Fentz had died about 5 years before, but that his widow was still alive in Florida. In reply to Rihm’s letter, she said that her husband’s father had mysteriously disappeared sometime during the spring of 1876. It seems that Mrs. Fentz, Sr. didn’t like to have him smoke in the house. She thought it smelled up the curtains. So it had been his custom to go out for a walk every evening about 10 and enjoy a final cigar before retiring. One night he went out as usual and never returned. The family spent quite a bit of money trying to find him but he was never seen or heard of again.

Capt. Rim found Rudolph Fentz listed in the “Missing Persons” file for 1876. The address given was the same as that appearing on the cards and letter, so the place was evidently a private residence at that time. He was 29 years of age, and wore mutton chop whiskers. The description of the clothing which he was wearing when last seen agreed exactly with that worn by the mysterious traffic victim. The case was still listed as “unsolved”.

Captain Rim never wrote the results of his private investigations into the official records. He didn’t dare! They’d have had him in the “nut factory” for a mental checkup in nothing flat! After all, a man can’t just walk out into thin air in 1876 and then suddenly turn up, unchanged in any way, 74 years later! No one would believe a tale like that. He didn’t believe it himself, “but — give me some other explanation which will make sense”.

NOT THIN AIR BUT A FOURTH DIMENSIONAL PORTAL!

From Holland’s “A Voice In The Gallery”, No. 4, 1953 until March 1969, we had to wait for the occult explanation of the Fentz disappearance and reappearance. Marian Hartill was the channel, Myron the communicating Teacher.

“I see you wish information as to what exactly happens when humans suddenly disappear from the Earth without a trace being found of remains. This is a very common occurrence, more common than is ever accepted; for in this day and age family ties are not as they once were and people travel far and wide.

“Picture if you will two large spheres or balls one within the other, the inner smaller being the 3rd Dimension, and the larger outer sphere being the 4th Dimension. Now imagine that both of these globes have been punched with holes, some very large and others very small. These two balls are constantly turning so as to make these holes both big and small come in direct line with each other at one time or another as the Earth surface or inner globe turns.

THROUGH THE VEIL

“These holes are thinly covered with a vapor — like a sheer curtain hung over the opening — that has a very solid appearance but which is nothing more than a flap of vapor-like energy reflecting the true solid material on either side of it. This is why people are completely unaware of anything being amiss until they have passed through this vapor illusion and find themselves unable to find the hole back through; for remember that these holes are slowly turning and it is only seconds before the entrance is again overlapped.

“The human finding himself in a vapor-like vacuum of 4-D atmosphere is in a state of shock and confusion. He can’t find his way back through these moving holes and he cannot see where he is to get any bearings as to how to attract help. He will on most occasions die quickly of fright, but many have been seen to live in a stupor-like state, calling and calling for their relatives and friends for help.”

One of the best examples of this out of borderland literature is David Lang, a Tennessee farmer. On Sent. 23, 1880 he was walking across one of his fields, in full view of his wife and two children at the house, and of two friends in a buggy on the approach road, when he disappeared before their eyes. There was no cover or concealment possible in the flat, open, grassy field, overlaying a solid understructure of limestone. No physical trace of him was ever found, though his children claimed they could hear their father calling them from that general area, in an ever fainter and fainter voice for two or three weeks afterward.

“It is rare,” wrote Myron of the Ashtar Command through Marian Hartill, “when these holes between the 3rd and 4th Dimension realign themselves so a human or a ship or plane can escape out by the same manner it entered,” and one such example was the Spanish soldier walking guard duty in Manila, Philippine Islands the night of Oct. 24, 1593. He must have walked into one of these 3-D-4-D portals, and out another one; for the next thing he knew he was walking down a street in Mexico City, and it was the morning of Oct. 25th! With him he brought the news that the Governor of the Philippines was dead. The Mexican authorities could only throw him in jail as a deserter, and hold him, until the news of the Governor’s death did reach Mexico City weeks later. The case would have been lost to history if the Holy Office of the Inquisition hadn’t taken an interest in it and made it a matter of record. The man’s claim to have been on guard duty in Manila was supported by sworn testimony from that city, also his sudden and inexplicable disappearance. He was wearing the uniform of his PI regiment; so there was nothing to do but accept the fact of the situation and ship him back to his outfit, a 9,000 mile journey which he had previously made in the time “it takes a cock to crow”.

ETHERIC “NO-MAN’S-LAND”

“There is a very real no-man’s-land between the two Dimensions,” continued Myron, “and if one were truly clairvoyant they would see right through these revolving holes as they turn. This is one of the reasons people claim to see events of the past played before their eyes only to quickly fade in a few minutes; for the two spheres have turned so as to close the openings where the scene was being re-played on the spirit side by Earthbound entities.

“What happens to the bodies? Of these unlucky beings who vanish? They die, or wander in shock, growing weaker and weaker. This enveloping fog-like vapor takes care of the tissue and bone unless negative scavengers have found it first and use its life forces for their own purposes.

“We have seen strongly religious people stumble into these openings, and we find that their auric-field takes on a radiant protective shell that while it does not solve their dilemma it does attract spiritual workers who are able to ease their panic, and they are protected from the dark forces that would vampirize them.

“There are spots all over the Earth where these holes align themselves with regularity (in the Bermuda Triangle for instance?). Many are in thinly populated areas or over your vast ocean stretches. This accounts for ships often sailing right through one hole and out another, while the crews are never found; for often they are seized with complete panic and jump off the ship into the vacuum; while if they had stayed with the ship they would perhaps have sailed out another hole back onto the 3-D surface. The time elapse could be minutes or weeks, depending on how long it. took for another hole to align itself with their position.

“Atmospheric changes are causing the space between these two spheres to be push-pulled. This causes uncanny events to happen all over the surface of the Earth. There is a kind of a suction or pull when two holes become lined up. Now, as never Before, hold tight to that Lantern within which contains the protective, CHRIST LIGHT.”

Well, students of the Mysteries, here’s another working hypothesis to explain teleportation: The 3-D-4-D Portals and their random effects. If we are going to use it to explain Rudolph Fentz’s disappearance in New York City in 1876, and reappearance there in 1950, we are going to stretch it beyond Myron’s outline; for Fentz showed no loss of vitality or youth in 74 years of earth time while parked in the 4th Dimension!

* * *

“THEY NEVER FOUND HIM”

Another Voice From The Gallery is Vincent Gaddis, BSRAssociate and author of “Invisible Horizons”. Vince and his wife Margaret have collaborated on another excellent borderland book, “The Strange World of Animals and Pets”. We have this choice item from them to round out our story and confound the academic flatheads.

“In the summer of 1927 I lived in a Los Angeles court. The landlord was a plaster contractor. He had in his employ a young man about 23 years old. On a Saturday the young man said he guessed he would go to Catalina. He would not take his pay until Monday, he might spend too much or lose some of it.

“Come Sunday morning, bright and sunny, the Catalina steamer ‘Avalon’ left Long Beach at its regular time about 10:30. Santa Catalina island is some 30 miles off the So Cal coast and Angelinos are proud of saying that on a clear day you can see it from the mainland. Well, that day you could. As a matter of fact the Coast Guard was looking at it, the steamer, I mean. She was about half-way across the channel, loaded with some 40 or 50 pleasure-seekers, and, as the guardsman later testified, he was watching her through binoculars.

“‘She was all right, nothing wrong. One second I saw her that way, the next I couldn’t see her at all!’

“Nor could the guards at Avalon on the other side. Upon losing sight of the steamer, coast guard boats lost no time in converging upon the scene where they last saw the ship. The water was calm and untroubled, no floating debris, no people, no oil, no signs of explosion. Just plain nothing. In the days and weeks that followed they searched the coast up and down and all around the island, too. Then they dredged the channel. But as far as I know there was never a shred of anything found from the boat. The young man never came back to work; nor did he come to collect his pay. His relatives eventually came searching, but they never found him.

“Then, about 20 years later, I read about a report made by the commander of a submarine that was making its way along the coast toward San Diego. He reported seeing an old-fashioned steamer cruising along, smoke issuing from her funnels; but not only was the ship odd looking but it was traveling in the wrong place, out of the regular passenger lanes. The name on her side was ‘Avalon’. But search ships failed to find this one.”

Mebbe the sub commander caught a replay of the tragedy in the mind of one of the earthbound victims, twenty years later, through the temporary alignment of a 3-D-4-D Portal in the area.

* * *

An Eskimo Medicine Man told it to Hans Ruesch: “The God of the white man is jealous, selfish, and greedy because the White man are jealous, selfish, and greedy. The White man’s religion is designed to restrain the wickedness of a very wicked people — and a people exceedingly afraid of dying. Their love of their God has been built upon their fear of death. Each tribe has the God it deserves. Gods are made in the image of those who believe in them . . .”

Article by Vincent Gaddis (with commentary from Tom Brown) — from January 1946 BSRA Round Robin, reprinted in Journal of Borderland Sciences (Vol. XLIV, No. 4, July – August 1988)

Phantom forms produced by electricity in magnetic fields! This amazing phenomenon has been witnessed in several large electrical plants. The General Electric Company’s Research Laboratory at Schenectady, New York, and an industrial research laboratory at Freibourg, Germany have issued reports on this strange occurrence.

In 1930, Chief Engineer Eastman, of the Rhodes Electrical Society in London, was working on some high-tension wires in a dark room when he saw a luminous blue sphere form about a revolving dynamo. In the center of this sphere a woman’s hand suddenly appeared. Eastman asked his assistant, a Mr. Woodew, if he could see it, and he replied that he could. Both men watched the phenomenon, and they were able to ascertain every detail of the conditions causing it.

The two men spent four days trying to produce the occurrence again, and when they succeeded a human head, instead of a hand, appeared. Photographs were taken and they were published in several European journals in the summer of 1930.

A follow-up to the Rhodes observation was an article printed in the Revue Spirite (Paris), written by M. Henri Azam. M. Azam has obtained his material, from an experimenter who desired to remain unknown except to the publication’s editors. This unknown student was quoted as follows:

  "In the pursuit of my specialized work in the occult and psychic fields I
   long desired to find out whether it was possible to reconstitute the astral
   form by means of sound vibrations.  It was my belief that mediumistic
   phenomena, when they are serious in character, are exclusively the result of
   setting in action some force for which the medium is the CONDENSER.  It was
   my purpose, therefore, to reconstitute a sphere of synchronous vibrations
   analogous to those which emanate from the human entity, but to do so without
   the intervention of any medium..."

The following methods were used by the experimenter. Two machines of static electricity were arranged so that the plates would turn in opposite directions. The positions and distance between the plates were so arranged as to be susceptible to infinite vibration. As a result there was a variable and sensitive magnetic (electrostatic) field formed.

A membrane covered with lycompodium powder was placed at the variable point so that it vibrated according to the electric wave lengths employed. The vibrations were intensified by adding the factors of light, sound, and perfumes. A magic lantern was directed upon the variable point for light effects; an organ was used for sound effects.

  "Under these conditions on several different occasions I was able to obtain
   the formation of human and animal forms, which appeared in the magnetic
   field.  At first these were only partial, but twice I succeeded in obtaining
   complete forms.  They ALWAYS PRESENTED themselves in the sensitive field and
   near the variable point.  Three photographic negatives, exceedingly clear
   and sharply defined, were obtained of these vibrational forms."

The conclusions of the experimenter are that he has been able to obtain responding vibrations of the astral or psychic world; that the results cannot be ascribed to imagination or hallucination; that the forms which appear are not spirits, but empty and discarded etheric or astral bodies or shells; that it is therefore possible to obtain psychic phenomena without the aid of human mediums.

The importance of these observations is obvious. Once again we have apparently found a realm in which the physical and astral worlds merge. Additional research in this domain of phenomena would be physical, and would not require the services of a medium. Nevertheless the ability to form a window or vortex between two vibratory planes might result.

First of all, what are these forms? Are they abandoned etheric bodies or disintegrating thought forms? Etheric bodies, which are regarded as links between the physical and astral bodies, are abandoned soon after physical death, according to the theory, and they slowly disintegrate in a vibratory plane known as the ‘astral cemetery’ which lies very close to the vibratory limits of our visible physical plane. It is also supposed that these empty etheric bodies remain close to the decaying physical bodies until they are dissolved into their original basic elements. Being held nearby by various subtle affinities, these etheric shells are said to be the cause of reported graveyard phantoms.

If this is true, the best place to set up an experimental electric/magnetic field would be in a cemetery vault or in a building close to a cemetery. This is an experiment the writer plans to make when conditions permit. Positive results would indicate that these forms, if successfully obtained, are actually etheric bodies abandoned by progressing astral bodies.

One more thought should be presented; the possibility that natural electric phenomena may provide conditions for psychic phenomena should not be overlooked. There are many reports of phantoms observed DURING ELECTRICAL STORMS. Apparent poltergeist activity are often displayed during intense electrical atmospheric stress. Ball lightning often exhibits the directions and actions of apparent intelligence.

For example, the late Charles F. Talman, government meteorologist, in an article in Readers Digest, June 1935, tells of a ball of lightning entering an open window, travelling about the room as if exploring it, then finally departing by the window it has entered.

More amazing cases will be found in Flammarion’s work, THE PRANKS OF LIGHTNING. In all of these occurrences tricks of a poltergeist nature were performed, under conditions indicating the possibility of a directing intelligence. The writer feels certain that in this phenomena of electrical ghosts we may have a key that will unlock many mysteries of the psychic world.

(In a personal letter, circa 1946, to Meade Layne we find the further related remarks of Mr. Gaddis: “The relationship between storms and psychic observations is a vast field in itself. A neighbor of mine, recently deceased, once told me of seeing a number of phantoms during an electrical storm when he was caught in a local cemetery. They were simply white human-like forms hovering above the grave, glimpsed during flashes of lightning.”)

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Clips, Quotes & Comments by Tom Brown

This article of veteran Borderland researcher Vincent Gaddis has been an interest of mine for several years. The work of M. Azam certainly brings to mind the high-frequency researches of Carl Wickland with his huge electrostatic Wimshurst machine.

In working with Eric Dollard around various high-frequency electrical apparatus I have observed many organic and mysterious forms appearing in gas plasmas and in free space discharges. The plasmas have provided the most interesting views across the borderlands and we have observed human, animal and plant forms as well as microscopic (amoeba, etc.) and macroscopic (fireball/stars, galactic formations). From direct experience in the lab I have seen that in Vince’s article resides an important key.

The eminent scientist and spiritualist Sir William Crookes studied the forms appearing in high frequency plasmas approximately a century ago. He felt that in this manner of experimentation one could find the true borderland between the physical and the spiritual. In Ernst Lehr’s MAN OR MATTER this matter is discussed in a quite lucid manner and one is brought to the understanding that there certainly is a “country” beyond the borderlands of this nature, but it is not the “country” we seek for a true spiritual understanding of the manifestation we are an integral part of.

“When William Crookes chose as one of the titles of his paper on the newly discovered properties of electricity, ‘The Fourth State of Matter’, it was to express his belief that he had found a state of matter, additional to the three known ones, which represented the ‘borderland where matter and force seem to merge into one another, the shadowy realm between known and unknown’ for which his soul had been longing ever since the death of his beloved brother. All that has followed from his discovery, down to the transformation of matter itself into freely working energy, shows that he was right in thinking he had reached some borderland of nature. Only the country into which this borderland leads is not the one he had really been looking for.” Ernst Lehrs, MAN OR MATTER, (C) 1958, Rudolph Steiner Press, London.

The “country” which we seek across the Borderlands is the one which contains the cosmic archetypes from which all life springs. The high frequency researches of Eric Dollard have helped put electricity into a proper perspective with the etheric realms and we can see how science has mistakenly plunged into the SUB-sensible realms rather than the SUPER-sensible which draws one to more refined levels of comprehension. Spirituality, following the general gravity-bound tendency of our materialistic society in general, has also mistakenly plunged into the SUB-sensible realms through attachment to the egos of the channelled entities. How much better it would be for spiritual researchers to ‘cross the borderlands TO THE SUPER-sensible through an awakened perception of nature and development of the intuition rather than by relying on mere belief in the words of discarnate entities.

I have found through studying Goethe’s indications on the phenomenon of Light and Color in conjunction with Eric Dollard’s high frequency researches that electricity is a reflection of the Light Ether. It is sufficient for present reference to say that Light has its two poles, red-yellow and blue-violet. The red-yellow pole in nature is longitudinal (direct rays from sun) and the blue-violet pole is a progressive type of transverse wave (rounded sky, Reich’s KRW wave/blue orgone).

Electricity has its two poles, electro-magnetism: red-yellow-hot, (retarded transverse); and dielectricity: blue-violet-cold (longitudinal). Hence, there are experimental indications that electricity truly is a reflection of the Light Ether.

With proper understanding and orientation of the etheric and electrical fields many workable concepts may emerge. For example the use of plasma detector tubes around a Lakhovsky Multiple Wave Oscillator will provide many clues to the etheric output of that device. The relationship of electricity to the evolving human soul is a prime area of interest at BSRF and is an open area of discussion in this Journal. Members are encouraged to send in their views on this most interesting subject.

Article by Franklin Ellsworth Clarke

Conventional thinkers too often express the desire for “new science perspectives”. In this theme, they lift up their voices in the midst of a present scientific vacuum, and profess their plea for a more complete scientific embrace of the world. But the persons from whom we hear these expressions are more frequently pandering to a more personal motive, where self gain is the theme. The narcissistic echoes of those who only wish to distinguish themselves amid the science vacuum are the ones who cry out for the “new science”.

There are those professionals who cannot forge their way sufficiently in the scientific community, either by lack of talent or advantage, and who therefore choose a spotlight path in the mass media. Such personalities have always taken the role of spokespersons for the world of scientific intellectuals, champions of “the method”. There are, of course, those who listen to these hollow voices. There will always be a following for every voice which speaks, and the science showpersons are no exception.

MEDIA SCIENCE

Those who follow the media science performers acquire some hopeful ideal, while gradually cultivating an emotional investment. The promise of a new science and a new world is the compelling aria from which sensitive hearts draw warmth in the vacuum. The sensitive followers find their heroic media speakers losing credibility when, after betraying their true prejudices and predispositions, fall short of their own promise. Young minds know that, while voicing the need for new science, the media science personalities remain completely ensnared in a deteriorating and failed scientific method. And they instinctively know that the method is the problem.

The modern scientific “big lie” is that it is forging new frontiers in our worldview. Nothing could be further from the truth. This perverse perspective is only a clever promotions attempt to stave off the extreme criticism harbored by science grant committees. The promise of a “new” science refers potential patrons to a possible “new world”. This new world will be theirs if the monies are given. We who are consigned to watch the science show from the shadows take notice of the repetitive pattern. We note, with bored familiarity, the recalcitrant scientific advocates. Those who maintain their theatrical poise, who cry out the most for “new perspectives”, are always the very ones whose power policies destroy every opportunity toward that professed goal. And so we observe the sad plight of science professionals who are locked in a prisonhouse of perceptions, ruled by the highly enforced dictates and well policed precepts of a few science hierarchs.

This decadent closure very fortunately does not apply to all who think and seek. There are scientific mavericks whose lives seem turbulent and wild by comparison, but whose thoughts remain unfettered by obligation and free of concern for loss of privilege. Harassed and beleaguered by the perpetual demands of a non-funded scholarly life, these impassioned persons live in the purity of a loving devotion to know. This is scholarship, this is science.

SACRED FIRES

There are those science mavericks to whom the profession never held an iota of attraction, who likewise owe the profession not a single shred of respect. And it is in these persons that the greatest of scientific revelations often emerge as whole. There are highly qualified researchers who have foregone the respectable dignities of profession for more pressing demands of honor and of responsibility. There are luxuries gained only through the abdications of personal integrity, an often required first rule when entering the science profession. But, the revolutions which so many profess to seek are never gained in becoming party with the problem. And the professionals do not seem to be yielding the gems of genius which so many patrons await.

In these fiery vectors, one requires passion, love, devotion — that urgency which drives persons of passion forward. A few drive headlong, and without concern, directly into these regions. In the heat of discovery, of new revelation, one is never concerned with the paltry dictates of parochial requirement. The lives of professionals rarely know the fires of love, of mystery, or of urgency. Passion is the principle element of this scientific flame. The urgent inner fire which fuels these lives leap out at the windows, burning the heart and pouring forth at the eyes. There is no advantage like the passionate love of learning. Money cannot buy it. Education cannot confer it. Applause cannot increase it. And neither professions nor honorariums can cover its absence.

Only the fire of passion grants her seekers the creative intensity which is never seen among the professionals. The heart burns, the mind sees, the eyes penetrate, and the hands labor. These are the ones who forge the new science which professionals claim as their own, the purity which they wish to touch and cannot. Of the few such individuals, with whose work we are completely occupied, one produced a new revolution in thought which has never yet been equalled.

THE OBSCURE

In keeping with the rules of professions and professional denials, this precious scholar was never crowned with either honorariums or accolades. He was never lifted with an award, was never granted a single entitlement, and was never offered a drop of subsidy. Yet his works remain unique, original, and pure in their devotions. He was one who effectively achieved that “new scientific perspective” which the prating contemporaries merely mouth. He belongs in the lineage of Goethe and Steiner, a genius of science in the metacognitive tradition. And his words burn, but do so with wonderful softness:

“In the topography of intellection, I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance…surrounded by laughter.”

This marvelous quote, by Charles Hoy Fort, forms the frame on which my essay will now begin. It is to this wonderful little man, his great ideas, the false intellection of those who call themselves “Forteans”, and the cosmic laughter which derides those who have misunderstood his words that this article is dedicated.

From where do new ideas come? How do they emerge in the midst of a ruling thought structure, like bright and curious blooms in a lifeless desert? Where do we find the connective points from which human intellect might receive an enlightening signal? How do we escape the tautological prisonhouses which a closed scientific worldview seems habitually to produce? The answers to many of these questions are found in the writings of Charles Hoy Fort.

In the cognitive requirements of true scholarship, one must be possessed of superlative insight, sensitive intuition, and an uncommon openness to the world of experience. But cognitive ability is not the sole qualifying agent of personal transformation. It is certainly not the source of revelations. We find the single most important element of change in a peculiar openness and willingness to embrace completely new and apparently illogical revelation. Not one professional will stoop that deeply in the pool of truth. Those who do are completely ostracized and evacuated into our world.

There are those whose years of study brings only great familiarity with facts. These are the ones whose personal concerns do not extend beyond the collection and collation of factual knowledge. But, an unlikely few manage to absorb facts, learn the greater scope, and suddenly glimpse a whole new vision of the world. And, the scientific world, which stands only to benefit from such visions, often prefers to keep such persons unnoticed, unrecognized, and unremembered.

POCKETS

There was once such an unnoticed man. He loved everything magical and wondrous, and odd. And, he was himself not a little bit odd too! Out of the luminiferous atmosphere which surrounded the last decade of Sir William’s life, there was round little Charles Hoy Fort wearing a green eyeshade and trundling through the aisles of bracket chairs in the Municipal Library. His large eyes burned through the shining pince-nez glasses with a peculiar twinkle, highly reminiscent of that elvin smile exuded by Sir William Crookes.

There went the unnoticed Charles Fort, with pockets full of index cards, pencils, and magic. Perhaps he was thought to be a card dealer. If anything of that sort, he was indeed a gambler in the world of science and philosophy. What he later would have to say would eventually find response among a very small group of sensitive souls. His fame would reach out well beyond the confines of his modest perimeter of activity, an immense wave for such a small stone.

Fort was somewhat of a comic figure, and he enjoyed his simple scholarly life immensely. His modest apartment was graced by a caring wife, a cozy kitchen, several full rooms, and an overstuffed office which remained the principle focus of his intellectual delights. Riding the trolley uptown from the Municipal Library, into the forest which once was the Bronx (where also, years before, Edgar Allan Poe had his cottage), there disembarked Mr. Fort.

Fording through white snows, through honey-warm sunny afternoons, and through grey rains alike, the quiet Mr. Fort travelled home. He probably sang Methodist hymns as he went in a rich baritone voice. He climbed the stairs. Home to hearth, wife, and wonders. His files. Here he emptied the treasuries of strange facts which filled his day, his heart, and his pockets. Pencils, index cards, pince-nez glasses, two dozen strange facts, and a grand walrus mustache. Each day was like hunting in a free forest where the most prized and beautifully plumed exotic birds lingered to be caught and caged.

In his younger years Fort was a journalist by trade, and his income was a modest one. How had he afforded this relatively luxurious life at so young an age? On the passing of both his parents, Mr. Fort was left a small fortune. And it was with this that he managed to live, he and his wife, in their apartment north of Manhattan.

Just before dinner, just before the gas lamplights were turned down in his office, Mr. Fort stared out of the window and dreamed.

“All seeming things are not things at all, if all things are intercontinuous…only a projection from something else.” Again and again, day after day, he found evidence…but evidence of what? What did it all mean? How did his strange facts fit into the world at all? Oh, he did not deny the existence of these reports. No one could. Mr. Fort sought accounts and eyewitness reports by only the most credible persons; sea captains and professional people having affiliations with The Royal Society and the like. These reports with which he was most amazed came from these highly credible sources. But it was the nature of these “events” and “anomalies” which most disturbed his then traditional sense of order in the world.

Frog falls, fish falls, lightning out of a blue sky, inscriptions on meteorites, circular markings on the mountains of different continents, black snow, green sun, red rain, blue moon, yellow wheels of light in the ocean, petrified giants, manmade artifacts embedded in archaeozoic rock, soaring sky saucers, white islands in a dark blue sea. It all seemed to be a world such as that found in the stories of Baron von Munchausen. But it was real!

Perhaps strange events were some kind of secret language, one whose whole meaning required a new perspective. A new way of knowing or of perceiving. Of this he was sure. Obscure and puzzling manifestations presented the sensitive observer with a never ending creative cavalcade, whose fabulous beauty seemed to hold reservoirs of deeper metaphors. He sighed, and rose, but not before jotting down his final thoughts on this matter. “Let everything be reported…then one day we may have a revelation,” so he wrote in a note to a friend, and went in to dinner.

DAMNED FACTS

Fort learned of every strange and anomalous phenomenon in which natural lore is so very prolific. He knew where to look. He learned how to use the Library to his own curious advantages. His collection exceeded 25,000 separate index cards, a file of formidable volume. On these cards there rang 40,000 separate notes on rains of different kinds! The file collection grew in leaps and bounds after that first accounting — a well categorized register of the impossible, of the obscure, and of the unnoticed. One would think that Mr. Fort was expressing something of himself in his meticulous searches — the sense and savor of the obscure. But, of these friends, these obscurities and reports of the strange, he was chief expert in the world. A menagerie of wild facts, and a gallery of curios and mysteries. A connoisseur of the improbable, as unlikely a Marco Polo as one would ever find. Mr. Fort became a broker of wild talents!

With each perusal, with each accounting, his whole perspective shifted. He changed completely in his approach, reaching around and behind his every consideration of thought, perception, fact, and fancy. What was real and what unreal? Looking into his overstuffed office one day, Mr. Fort was smitten with a singular irritation. All these scattered facts, and no context. Their once sweet taste of mystery had lost the sheer delight which drove him each morning to strive with winds, rains, trolleys, bracket chairs, and critical librarians with tight lips and pince-nez glasses!

He had, after all, caught all the most beautiful birds in the forest, of plumage incredible and exotic. And now what? Would he simply display them in their cages? Was he to simply “play cards” with his collection? Vexed at his “viceful waste of time”, he carted the lot of files to the fireplace…and burned them en masse. Watching the curling flames mingle with thick white smoke, he destroyed the work of years, countless days of searching, of writing, of pencil notes, of frazzled thoughts, of books and tomes and piles of dusty magazines. His mind turned, and he suddenly caught a glimpse of a new world. He peered through the fire and saw.

LONDON

After the heat of this furnace had cooled, Mr. Fort proposed, of all things, that both he and Anna sail for England. Charles was finally out of his fires.

Fort’s intention to publish his works was not a small bit encouraging. The force behind the new move evoked portents of excitation. All things were arranged for the journey, including their return to New York. The couple was to take lodging in London, as close to the British Museum as could possibly be arranged. There was adequate money for the trip, and the usual bureaucratic problems worked themselves out with a unusual and seamless ease, normally the characteristic sign of good fortune.

They took up lodging at 39 Marchmount Street, in a section called Bloomsbury. In the Fortean tradition, no other two could have formed more auspicious (and humorous) names. Proximity to the Library gave him wonderful access to the most original documents from which his best New York entries had always been derived. A variety of English scholarly journals filled his eyes, mind, and heart once again. It was a much needed nutrition. After all, the world was stranger than most knew. Here was the proof of it, the countless pages and index cards of proof.

His new collection of facts was now far more resplendent than the one which he committed to the flames in his Bronx apartment. Obscure facts, like smoke, choke the vision. Seen in their proper perspective, facts are like windows through which the light and heat of a deeper world might be seen. How curious! That an act of desperation could result in so noble and transcendent an exaltation! He now knew what had to be done. To connect the facts, to associate them, to correlate and discover lines of connection. This would be the new task at hand. And, off he went, transformed. The eyes of the man now engulfed a grand and spacious vision of the metaphysical world process.

It was in London that Charles Fort took a huge and frightening leap into a larger perspective. To indulge his new notions no longer frightened him. What he first feared was now quite obviously the product of an overwrought imagination, the mere figment of shadow and intellectual restriction. The new reality which he indulged was no more dangerous to his sanity than the myriad other indulgences which seemed to be rocking the world. He had already become fused with the ideas.

Throughout all of this time period, he found a wonderful comfort in humour. This aspect of the cosmic drama was an unexplored facet. Where most chose beauty, even the aspects of somber gravity, Charles chose the humor of the cosmos by which to define world process. In this aspect, what he discovered shows him to be a true adventurer of the mind, a navigator of the mindscapes. Fort discovered that illogical schemes, improbable connections, and implausible correlations could be reasonably connected. No better place to learn this but in England, where mad Hamlet was to be exiled. For (in the words of their greatest poet) “they all be mad who live there”. Indeed!

PUZZLEBOX

Of “cabbages and kings”! Two more dissociate items, one cannot imagine. And yet, Charles Fort showed a means in which any of the two (under the proper circumstances) would demand the necessary existence of the other! The preliminary concepts which he received evoked the writing of “New Lands” in 1923. Here was the first instance in which a nonlinear logic was being espoused in the western world, and the western world was scarcely ready for the accelerating change. He and Anna moved back to New York. Back to the New World, where they resumed their quiet lives.

When Fort began to write and publish, the reading public was taken aback. It was difficult to gain the cooperation of publishers for the printing of these curious new works. They were more like fragmented homours, and less like science. The now laughing eyes could not be hidden. The walrus mustache could not hide the laughter, the sheer derision. Of course, few would know how to categorize his work. His ideas frightened the minds of thinkers everywhere. Their fear was drowned in his laughter.

Theodore Dreiser, a friend, managed this feat against weighty refusals by acrid publishers. But Fort’s remarkable book Lo! was published in 1931, being followed by Wild Talents in 1932. In his modest pamphlets and pocketbooks, we find the writings of a true and original genius. Goethe, ever the mystical and sensitive naturalist did not choose to handle the plethora of strange events which flooded his world. This work fell to Charles Hoy Fort.

The now restored “catalog of the anomalous” grew and grew again. It suddenly became transformed into a massive puzzlebox, which when examined along distinct lines and angles, granted a sustained vision of a deeper world. A metaphysical world, where the stuff of which dreams are made very obviously pour into the physical world. Did some vast and coherent vision, some cosmic dream generate material reality? It was not the collection of individual facts which remained important. Oh, the individual facts were important enough. Yes, they were fascinating,alluring. But in the grand scheme of knowledge, they were but clues to a larger whole. One which he had discovered in his dark period.

“There is probably a connection between a rose and a hippopotamus.” The connecting links, the associations, the view which considered the creativity in each of these strange manifestations; these were the important messages. Fort now realized that there were patterns in the chaos of his scattered records. Order, sequence, patterns, and hierarchies of awareness. There was meaning in the world. His recognition of connective links between events, and the manner in which they arrived in our world, unannounced and unexpected, now demanded much more than even associations could produce. And here is where Fort differs from all of his modern counterparts.

“I am a collector of notes upon subjects which have diversity…but my liveliest interest is not so much in things, as in relations of things.”

“Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores…But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note, and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunt ing, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on.” — Charles Fort, Wild Talents

STRUCTURES

Charles Fort considered the ultimate scope of his work to be “experiments with the structure of knowledge”. He had the credentials of the epistemologist, a pursuit which few modernists consider. In the vacuous world of contemporary science, the greatest population of its adherents cleave to a doctrine of proofs and apparent facts. But, while fewer and fewer value the wisdom of the arcane, the philosophical principles exceed the experimenter’s art, and rule experimental results. Fort knew this well, and saw that metaphysical realities govern every natural and experimental arrangement. After all, how were scientists going to approach a phenomenon as provoking as a fishfall?

In speaking of the transformation of scientific thought from linearity to holism, Fort declared that “no image can be too fanciful, no hypothesis too extreme; anything can be used to storm the fortress.” The fortress of rigid thought. That had to go. He strove to open the minds of his readers, those who would abide his notions for awhile. When the gentle approach failed, he became threatening. “I’ll send you reeling against the doors that open onto ‘something other’.”

When this attack failed to achieve its intended effect, he became bawdy, even raucous: “I am afraid that we shall have to give to civilization on Earth some new worlds…with white frogs in them”.

This worked. He indulged his hilarious and comical side. Appealing to a deeper response, humor usually melted the intellectual defenses. “I cannot quite define my motive either, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a scientist…or a humorist”.

What Fort reveals is the folly of linear thought in a world where creative wholeness is perpetually acting, a world whose apprehension requires familiarity with a language of the metaphysical. Imagine a report of a new lake which forms in a desert area. And suddenly, on an auspicious day unexpected…the sky claps in a massive roll of thunder…and down unfolds a miraculous plume of fresh water fish, frogs, and green water plants simultaneously! “I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidences?” His extreme delight in these numerous impossible circumstances, events reported by the humble and the credible, convinced him that divine creative works were yet very much in force throughout the world.

METAPHYSICAL WORLDS

Fort urged humanity to peer beyond the facts — those “damned” by science. Fort is the herald of a new way of seeing the world. More than that. He directed us to see through the most outlandish medleys of world events. He did not make trite those spontaneous creations ex nihilo. In such miraculous spewings forth of fish and frogs, Fort called us to behold a process of creation. His view was more befitting a vitalistic approach, requiring a vital environment. Charles Hoy Fort used the facts, and the anomalies, as indicators of a world-permeating intent. He saw the message in the connections — an augury of natural wonders. The slithering spawn which fell in full sight of day, was obviously directed by a divine agency.

That the physical things are the material artifacts of a creative and living metaphysical space, is a contradiction which professional science cannot abide. Enjoying the comic incongruity of linear scientific thought, Mr. Fort wrote amazing statements on his conception of world reality. “We conceive of all things as occupying gradations, or steps in a series between realness and unrealness.” In these considerations, the conceptions of Fort merge rather completely with those of Goethe, of Crookes, and of Steiner.

Fort never spoke of solid realities, never of fixedness in existence. All things were somehow plasmic, or more precisely “protoplasmic.” The latter term invited the strong suggestion that all things were inherently possessed of a living characteristic. This is why his concept of beauty, of wholeness, and of individuality is important.

“Every attempt to achieve beauty is an attempt to give to that which is local the attribute of the universal.” He repeatedly stated that the world was a finished product only in its ability to receive creative impulses. The world was a constantly created stageworks — an “intermediate stage.” The accuracy of this concept was exemplified in the innumerable strange events which constantly occurred on Earth.

“All phenomena, in our intermediary or quasi-state of being, represent a movement toward organization, harmonization, and individualization…in other words, an attempt toward reality.” There! In toto. An analysis of why it was possible for outrageous and unthinkable events to occur in our world. An explanation for true “strangeness”, made obscure only by those who were fearful of its deific implications. The Fortean world received creative applications from a pre-existential stage. Creative ordinations called forth sudden manifestations, ex nihilo. Therefore — fishfalls, turtlefalls, seedfalls, and frogfalls!

Besides these thrilling creative acts, the world also was witness to countless destructive effects. Fort also saw that there was resistance to the act of becoming, resistance to the expression of seeking reality. There were those disintegrative waves which came from another direction. In this negative influence, created things lost their integrity, being forced down the rung of existence, back through our world into the place of yet-becoming, and held there by a pressure of decreative force. Ours was a world where “things becoming” and “things unbecoming” passed through our opened gaze. Only the truly honest could report everything, every event, which occurred on earth. This is why it was possible for sea captains of the Royal Fleet to report most of these strange and unexplainable phenomena.

The crawling, flying, foaming, surging, wriggling, creeping protoplasmic world reality! Here was the “world process” of Goethe once again! “Will it be admitted that there are vast viscous and gelatinous regions floating about in infinite space?” Metaphysical influences effected the intermediate existence of the world in which we were situated. For Mr. Fort, the present world was fixed only in its position on a gantry of worlds. With reality now understood as a spectrum of possible existences, there were also thrilling new explanations for the strange occurrences which seemed to “flow up or down” from some other dimension. When he spoke of “other worlds” he referred not simply to “other planets”, but to whole world-stages which lay either “above” or “below” in order of reality.

“Intermediateness is quasi-existence. Neither real nor unreal. But expression of attempt to become real, or to generate for, or recruit a real existence.” I was rather taken aback when reading these lines. How succinct a description of the Borderlands! A vision of such parallel worlds would explain the myths, the heroes, lands, nations, and events of old! The explanation of parallel worlds seemed especially poignant and vital to the English writers. Those who especially come to preserve and cherish the writings of Charles Fort in this respect included H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis.

The extrication of mythos from the frozen ice of a growing materialist worldview was all-important to the Europeans. Their deep love of mythos betrayed an inherent world reality otherwise unexplained. What an idea! What a powerful thought! Events were “slipping through” our world from various metaphysical directions. There were “countless worlds”, evidenced sometimes by the wild strangeness of certain bizarre happenings. And these included a greater variety of parallel worlds than astronomers could count. To Fort, the cosmos was not the apparent display which senses brought daily to experience. There were larger spaces contained in the metaphysical regions.

The apprehension of these metaphysical regions barred the foolish and insensitive from venturing toward their borders. But where were their borders? What borderlands opened the portals to their worlds? How were they able to slip in and out of our world, and we could not? The knowledge of their existence preceded any scientific explorations. Entrance into these “other worlds” first required sensitive understanding. In speaking more directly of these portals, Fort stated that “we have a sense of a stationary region overhead, in which this Earth’s gravitational and meteorological forces are relatively inert; or a region that receives products like this Earth’s products, but from ‘external’ sources.”

The communications between such parallel worlds would be quite natural occurrences, though possessed of a distinct “strangeness”. These events would be reasonably quite repetitive, and as bizarre as the worlds from which the “messages” hail. Since the compositions, realities, and creative expressions in those worlds were completely unfamiliar, one would require special understanding of the natural world in order to discern that which could not be construed as “of this Earth.” Mr. Fort suggested that “beyond this Earth are other lands, from which come things, as from America, floating things to Europe…” This might explain the unintentional driftings between world realities, especially from their world to ours.

But the opposite drifting had also to occur, did it not? To this possibility, Mr. Fort added that “objects caught up by hurricanes or whirlwinds may be deposited in a region of suspension over this Earth,” but he is not speaking of physical space, not of physical suspensions. These are regions where several worlds meet; as the doorways of apartments meet in vestibules, terraces, or plazas…however great in prominence each such world may be. What were the potentials which triggered these happenings of strangeness?

In the Fortean view, everything on our world might be from “elsewhere”, and therefore has more than scientific significance, more than a linear potential, and not being capable of finding lineage in the world alone. The categorization of objects, such as rocks and living things, must now include their parent worlds. Charles Fort was a bold developer of extraordinary concepts. Assuming his premises of near worlds to be true, and assuming the accidental occurrence of “driftings” between such worlds, he then engaged the concept of deliberate signalling between metaphysical worlds. Messages from one metaworld to another! This was the riveting theme discussed in the great unfinished work of C. S. Lewis entitled, The Dark Tower. In speaking of “communications from other worlds” he means the sudden and unexpected occurrence of “events, messages, and visitors.”

Fort makes clear the fact that the observation of such messages is simply missed by most scientific observers because of their notion that Earth manifestations are products of this world reality. To Fort, anything found in this world may hail from another dimension. A better description of eidetic interchange I have not seen expressed. “Other worlds are in communication with the Earth. Proofs of this exist…some external force has marked the rocks of Earth from a distance.” Fort, the pure visionary, speaks when saying that “somewhere on earth there is a an especial rocky surface or receptor or Polar construction, or a steep conical hill upon which for ages have been received messages from some other world; but that at times messages go astray and mark substances perhaps thousands of miles from this receptor.”

BORDERLANDS

All of these wonders proceeded from the excited mind of a round, little, unnoticed man in pince-nez glasses, who lived in the Bronx. Unlikely? Strange? An event? Fort asked magnificent childlike questions. “Where to the whirlwinds go…of what do they consist? A supersea of Sargasso, derelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from interplanetary wrecks, things cast out into what is called Space by convulsions of other planets; things from the times of the Alexanders, Caesars, and Napoleons, of Mars, of Jupiter, or Neptune…things raised by this world’s cyclones…accumulations of centuries, cyclones of Egypt, Greece and Assyria..” On and on!

His writing and private publications now drew a small gathering. Charles was finally getting a little recognition for all the years of study. The original Charles Fort Society was founded on January 26, 1931. Its function was to serve Mr. Fort in matters of academic defense, and in the proliferation of his works, and consisted of ten founding members.

The Society published a review called Doubt! in which strange facts and their relevance in a larger scope were shared. In writing of himself on behalf of these few friends, Mr. Fort stated that “we are not Realists. We are not Idealists. We are Intermediatists.”

Charles Hoy Fort passed from this earth in 1932, as quietly and unnoticed as he had lived. Except for the original writings, which were bequeathed to the Society, he remains unknown in both the worlds of professional science and philosophy. The volume of his epistemology, his worldview, is contained in 1000-odd pages.

The Fortean masterpieces offer certain physical proofs for both the Goethean world process and the more metaphysical musings of Sir William Crookes.

The Fortean notion of “intermediate worlds” seems best to support certain concepts expressed by Crookes in the late Nineteenth Century. I am sure that Sir William conceived of a world in which dreams gradually merged with physical reality. Being a scientific researcher however, he was hard pressed to explain such transitions in light of physical process. He was therefore inclined to examine and describe the workings of these transitions in terms of space plasma, by that meaning “ectoplasm”. The phrase which he coined, some two decades before Charles Fort began his work, referred to that region of reality which lies between the dreamlike metaphysical worlds and the hard physicality of our own. He called it the “Borderlands”.

The very use of the term “Borderland” in the world of science has a special place and meaning for some of us who look beyond apparent reality. Those who do not see evidence of horizons beyond the physical merely mock the notion of a Borderland. But this mystifying term has special import for those who have peered into the meaning of physical reality, and have realized a metaphysical world.

It is also the very phrase from which our original foundation’s name is taken. It remains an apt title for our consortium, who search the “Borderlands” in order to discover and secure those connection points which permit energetic, material, and communicative exchanges. In our study of each research realm, we are closely examining the processes which manifest during “metaworld transitions”.

SIMILARS

There are scholarly contemporaries who have taken the first steps toward acquiring personal experience of the Fort revelation. Of the possible many (we cannot now be sure how many unnoticed there may be), I know of two or three who are presently being published. One of the most notable scholars in the Fortean tradition, William Corliss, must be mentioned. His prolific “Sourcebook Project” is a true bibliomantic treasurehouse. As enormous a labor of love as that exhibited in the young Charles Fort, Mr. Corliss has devoted decades to the acquisition of natural anomalies and unusual phenomena. The Corliss collection includes a series of bound editions. These are collections, collations, and correlations of strange natural phenomena.

Urgent and intense in their presentation, Mr. Corliss has given back perhaps the single most valued gift to our contemporary community of natural philosophers. I know that Mr. Corliss has a specific goal in mind, and that he scans the old literature for “evidence” of his essential worldview. I have never read what that view might be, but I am sure it is much more than a mere collection of forgotten facts. The true work of Charles Fort exceeds the mere collecting of strange facts. Fort, you will remember, burned his formidable collection more than once.

Where then do we find the essence of Fortean revelation? How is he singled out against the scores of others who have simply followed these pedantic early steps? Fort became a visionary, the result of intensive and devoted preoccupation with the most bizarre forms of information. One might say that the information itself contained the messages of transformation. Fort did not rest in his facts. He used them to realize a larger, more stunning reality beyond a consideration of the physical. He was more an alchemist than most suppose, preserving the belief that worlds were actively being transmuted from one form to another, and that these transmutations also signalled their messages throughout the gantry of reality. Experience was the gate, the mind was the sense.

Several moderns put forth the pretense that they follow Charles Fort, and of those I can identify perhaps only one or two who are genuine, but realize that they are merely retracing the work of Fort. Fort remains, with Goethe and Steiner, a true original.

But any similarity between Fort and the new plethora of self-proclaimed Forteans loses all credence on closer examination. Less experts than frogfalls!

To equate Fort with anomalies only, is a complete misrepresentation. We have reviewed the fact that Fort was no mere collector of strange facts. He used facts as indicators of metaworld transitions, of messages between the mythic worlds. And, while this first step is the necessary one in following the Fort footsteps, strange facts alone do not complete the qualifying requirement. No indeed. The path toward achieving the kinds of higher expressions gendered by Charles Fort require much more extensive revelations. But, this knowledge demands a personal transformation, so much more than mere ownership of the Fortean titles and bibliographies. This is a strange fact which certain “dashing” publishing houses fail to recognize.

Fort would even now scoff at his modern day adherents, especially those who seek to make a small living from the exploitation of his labors. Perhaps he would categorize them along with his other unnatural freaks of nature.

FORTEAN SLIME

With the arrival of flying saucer events and the social focalizing interest in that aerial phenomenon, the Charles Fort Society gradually lost its original direction and theme. Occupying themselves, not with the larger implications, but with very singular focal points, the Fortean Society began to lose its vision. Just as did Mr. Fort when he remained preoccupied with singular facts of strangeness. The transition in his life came when he stopped looking at the facts and their “strangeness”, and began to realize that bizarre events were actually quite commonplace. The importance of this fact more nearly directed his vision toward his ultimate estimations and conclusions.

Those who have entered into an experience of the good world of Charles Hoy Fort, who have delved somewhat into his mind and heart, become pained to hear of the sheer idiocy which proceeds from the groups which now sling his name about like some trite little bauble. It never fails to amaze me that those who so closely cleave to the work of great minds are too often completely unprepared to assume the role which they so boast themselves worthy.

I now find that an increasing number of unscrupulous persons have undertaken the theft of our title, one in which we have priority under Law. Moreover, it seems that this disorganized conspiracy of greed has seized on a method by which they each hope to gain some quick and easy fame or fortune on our coattails. I have not been a small bit disgruntled and irritated by the very obvious and recent petty assault which has been waged against Borderlands. Among those who search the internet for signs of life, not a few persons have brought to our attention the fact that other publishers have begun a truculent infringement campaign. If you are a world wide web browsing aficionado (which I am not) you must have, no doubt, recently found an increasing number of “new science” brokers with the “Borderlands” title attached to their credit line. Very apparently our good name, thematic continuity, and sound experimental legacy has been espied and coveted by a few dilettantes overseas.

It is through the vulnerable climate of our times that these repugnant individuals have employed the mere “buzzword jargon” of conspiracy fanatics to make some fast and easy money. From its inception as an entity in 1945, Borderland Sciences Research Foundation has had a long and illustrious history. We do not intend to remain neutral about these recent assaults on our character, the relevance of our scientific approach, our methods, or our format.

FAREWELL

Finally, we must bid adieu to Mr. Charles Fort, his pince-nez glasses, his menagerie of the odd, his hurtling fishfalls and regions of outer darkness. And it is indeed with a very dear and deep sadness that we relegate his life and life’s work to the other monuments of greatness. How thoroughly poignant. That he and his wife were childless, and that they lived out the whole of their lives in so quaint and so warm a little spot in the Bronx forever touches the heart. He rests his glasses down on a rolltop desk, flooded with pages, new index cards, fountain pens and pencil scrapings.

Of his like, there has been no equal. Charles Fort was an original. A true bibliomantic discoverer, whose ability to saturate the available literature of his day was given the gift of a new doorway, opening on a new and liberating dimension. It was in Charles Fort that humanity was offered a grand and connective view of the world process, that to which Goethe pointed.

New consciousness has its devotees, those who comprehend the essential Fortean message and meaning. There are those however who, without the least speck of understanding, have recently taken it upon themselves to become spokesmen of the great Charles Fort. Those persons who also, I may add, reveal their frail and spurious grasp of the Fortean theme, have not taken the humility and sweet humour of their namesake much to heart. Unable to pluck themselves out of the highly lucrative information complex enough, they insist on printing excessive copy on the trees rather than the forest! Oh, some are quite secure in applying the lacquer with a thick brush, their hands and works dripping with the pungent aroma. Scholars proclaim their worth in the sincerity of an ethical quietude, and do not seek to scully their colleagues across the sea.

Since there are now those publishers, whose weak grasp on the theme has let fall the glowing torch, we have decided to publish ongoing research to extend the work of Charles Fort. This effort, this labor of love, will soon take the form of a column “in memoriam perpetuum”. Land Ho!

With my many thanks to Louis Pauwels and Jaque Bergier! And thank you again my dear Eirene, who knows my thoughts and often speaks them aloud before I do.

References

• The Book of the Damned (1919) — (online edition, annotated by Mr. X)
• New Lands (1923) — (online edition, annotated by Mr. X)
• Lo! (1931) — (online edition, annotated by Mr. X)
• Wild Talents (1932) — (online edition, annotated by Mr. X)
• Dream in Society: The Power of Archetypes, by Marion L. Daye, Groetter & Sons, Vermont, 1965.
• Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, F. David Peat, Bantam Books, Toronto, 1987.
• Science Frontiers, by William R. Corliss, Sourcebook Project, 1994.

From “Oddities – A Book of Unexplained Facts” by Lieut.-Commander Rupert T. Gould, R.N. (Ret.), 1928

UNTIL 1836 the English public had never heard of Andrew Crosse. A small circle of friends knew that he lived at a rather dilapidated country-seat in the Quantock Hills, where he spent his time, and what money an encumbered estate allowed him, in electrical experiments. His rustic neighbours spoke of him as “the thunder and lightning man,” and shunned his house like the plague, especially after nightfall, it being a matter of common notoriety that devils, surrounded by lightning, were then to be seen dancing upon wires encircling its grounds.

By the end of 1837 he was being reviled from one end of England to the other. He was an atheist, a blasphemer, “a reviler of our holy religion,” “a disturber of the peace of families,” a modern Prometheus, a would-be Frankenstein, a man who had presumptuously attempted to rival the God that made him—and many other of those flowers of speech which generally spread themselves about like leaves in Vallombrosa during the progress of religious or quasi-religious controversies.

Who was this dreadful person, and what had he done ?

He was a simple, honest, and God-fearing man, belonging to a class very common in the last century but increasingly rare in this. In other words, he was a scientific amateur, having the time and money for prolonged experimental work, but gravely handicapped by a lack of scientific training and by an almost complete ignorance of the work of other men in the same field.

His offence—which, incidentally, he had not committed—was of an unusual kind. He was accused of having attempted to create living creatures, by an electrical process, from dead matter. Indeed, it was further laid to his account that he had succeeded in doing so—that he had evolved, in poisonous solutions fatal to all normal animal life, numbers of insects of the species Acarus (mites), which insects lived, moved, and bred.

Actually, he had done this. But he had not done it designedly, and whether what he had done was, in effect, an artificial production of life, remained and remains an open question, which he did not attempt to answer.

Here are his own words on the subject:1

“As to the appearance of the acari under long continued electrical action, I have never in thought, word, or deed, given any one a right to suppose that I considered them as a creation, or even as a formation, from inorganic matter. To create is to form a something out of nothing. To annihilate, is to reduce that something to a nothing. Both of these, of course, can only be the attributes of the Almighty.

“In fact, I assure you most sacredly that I have never dreamed of any theory sufficient to account for their appearance. I confess that I was not a little surprised, and am so still, and quite as much as I was when the acari first made their appearance. Again, I have never claimed any merit as attaching to these experiments. It was a matter of chance. I was looking for silicious formations, and acari appeared instead…

The obloquy so freely showered upon Crosse left him unmoved: knowing it to be undeserved, he could afford to despise it.2 It affected neither his life nor his temper. But it had one definitely evil effect—the natural result of all such persecutions. It prevented Crosse from publishing, or even communicating, his further work on the same subject. Extensive though that work was, very little record of it, or of the original experiments, has survived—and in consequence it is not easy to put together a clear account of what Crosse did and what he observed.

In fact, there are practically only two sources: the short account given in his wife’s Memorials of Andrew Crosse,3 and the even shorter one which appeared in Harriet Martineau’s History of the Thirty Years’ Peace.4 Still, these are quite authentic, as far as they go. The account in the Memorials is largely in Crosse’s own words, while that in Miss Martineau’s history is based on first-hand information communicated to her by Crosse, and contains several important details which the other lacks.

The following account is compiled from these sources.

In the year 1837 Crosse was making certain experiments upon the artificial formation of crystals by means of weak and long-continued electric currents. The acari first appeared in the course of an attempt to make crystals of silica by allowing a suitable fluid medium to seep through a piece of porous stone (oxide of iron, from Vesuvius) kept electrified by means of a battery. The fluid used was a mixture of hydrochloric acid and a solution of silicate of potash.

“On the fourteenth day from the commencement of this experiment I observed through a lens a few small whitish excrescences or nipples, projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone. On the eighteenth day these projections enlarged, and struck out seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the hemisphere on which they grew.

“On the twenty-sixth day these appearances assumed the form of a perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail. Till this period I had no notion that these appearances were other than an incipient mineral formation. On the twenty-eighth day these little creatures moved their legs. I must now say that I was not a little astonished. After a few days they detached themselves from the stone, and moved about at pleasure.

“In the course of a few weeks about a hundred of them made their appearance on the stone. I examined them with a microscope, and observed that the smaller ones appeared to have only six legs, the larger ones eight. These insects are pronounced to be of the genus acarus, but there appears to be a difference of opinion as to whether they are a known species; some assert that they are not. [See Fig. 1]

“I have never ventured an opinion on the cause of their birth, and for a very good reason—I was unable to form one. The simplest solution of the problem which occurred to me was that they arose from ova deposited by insects floating in the atmosphere and hatched by electric action. Still I could not imagine that an ovum could shoot out filaments, or that these filaments could become bristles, and moreover I could not detect, on the closest examination, the remains of a shell…

“I next imagined, as others have done, that they might originate from the water, and consequently made a close examination of numbers of vessels filled with the same fluid: in none of these could I perceive a trace of an insect, nor could I see any in any other part of the room.”

In subsequent experiments Crosse discarded the porous electrified stone, and for the most part produced the acari in glass cylinders filled with concentrated solutions of such substances as copper nitrate, copper sulphate, and zinc sulphate. The acari generally made their appearance at the edge of the fluid surface, but he remarks:

“In some cases these insects appear two inches under the electrified fluid, but after emerging from it they were destroyed if thrown back.”

In one case the acari appeared on the lower part of a small piece of quartz, immersed to the depth of two inches in fluoric acid holding silica in solution. [H2SiF6]

“A current of electricity was passed through this fluid for a twelvemonth or more; and at the end of some months three of these acari were visible on the piece of quartz, which was kept negatively electrified. I have closely examined the progress of these insects.

“Their first appearance consists in a very minute whitish hemisphere, formed upon the surface of the electrified body, sometimes at the positive end, and sometimes at the negative, and occasionally between the two, or in the middle of the electrified current; and sometimes upon all. In a few days this speck enlarges and elongates vertically, and shoots out filaments of a whitish wavy appearance, and easily seen through a lens of very low power.

“Then commences the first appearance of animal life. If a fine point be made to approach these filaments, they immediately shrink up and collapse like zoophytes upon moss, but expand again some time after the removal of the point. Some days afterwards these filaments become legs and bristles, and a perfect acarus is the result, which finally detaches itself from its birthplace, and if under a fluid, climbs up the electrified wire and escapes from the vessel….

“If one of them be afterwards thrown into the fluid in which he was produced, he is immediately drowned. . . . I have never before heard of acari having been produced under a fluid, or of their ova throwing out filaments; nor have I ever observed any ova previous to or during electrization, except that the speck which throws out filaments be an ovum; but when a number of these insects, in a perfect state, congregate, ova are produced.”

The acari thus produced lived, generally, until the first frost, which was invariably fatal to them.

In a later experiment, Crosse succeeded in producing an acarus in a closed and airtight glass retort filled with an electrified solution, one wire being led in through the wall of the retort and the other through a cup of mercury at its beak. The solution was a silicate one, prepared as for the first experiment, and was put in hot. On connecting up the battery:

“An electric action commenced; oxygen and hydrogen gases were liberated; the volume of atmospheric air was soon expelled. Every care had been taken to avoid atmospheric contact and admittance of extraneous matter, and the retort itself had previously been washed with hot alcohol. This apparatus was placed in a dark cellar.

“I discovered no sign of incipient animal formation until on the 140th day, when I plainly distinguished one acarus actively crawling about within the bulb of the retort.

“I found that I had made a great error in this experiment; and I believe it was in consequence of this error that I not only lost sight of the single insect, but never saw any others in this apparatus. I had omitted to insert within the bulb of the retort a resting-place for these acari (they are always destroyed if they fall back into the fluid from which they have emerged). It is strange that, in a solution eminently caustic and under an atmosphere of oxihydrogen gas, one single acarus should have made its appearance.”

Crosse also succeeded in producing acari in “an atmosphere strongly impregnated with chlorine”; but while these assumed the form of perfect insects, and remained undecomposed until the apparatus was taken apart over two years later, they never moved or showed any signs of life.

His experiments were repeated and extended by another enthusiastic amateur, Weeks of Sandwich, who took a number of precautions to ensure, as far as possible, that no animal life was already present at the start of the experiments. For example, he baked his apparatus in an oven, used distilled water, filled his receivers (inverted over mercury troughs) with manufactured oxygen instead of air, and super-heated his silicate solutions. After about a year and a half of electrification, acari invariably made their appearance. Control experiments, made in exactly the same manner and with the same apparatus, but omitting the electric current, gave uniformly negative results—no acari appeared. He also made quantitative experiments, and found that the number of acari electrically produced varied, roughly, with the percentage of carbon in his solutions.

Weeks’s experiments, although most intelligently conducted, seem to have attracted little attention. He communicated a summary of his results to the Electrical Society, but does not appear to have published a complete account of them. In view of the precautions which he took, it is interesting to note that at the height of the Crosse furore (1837) no less an authority than Faraday stated, in a paper read at the Royal Institution, that similar appearances had presented themselves in the course of his own electrical experiments, but that he was doubtful whether they should be regarded as a case of production or revivification.

Should anyone in Tennessee or elsewhere be brave enough, in the face of Crosse’s experience, to repeat his experiments, it may be useful to record here a caution noted by Crosse himself.

“. . . I must remark, that in the course of these and other experiments, there is considerable similitude between the first stages of the birth of acari and of certain mineral crystallizations electrically produced. In many of them, more especially in the formation of sulphate of lime, or sulphate of strontia, its commencement is denoted by a whitish speck: so it is in the birth of the acarus. This mineral speck enlarges and elongates vertically: so it does with the acarus. Then the mineral throws out whitish filaments: so does the acarus speck.

“So far it is difficult to detect the difference between the incipient mineral and the animal; but as these filaments become more definite in each, in the mineral they become rigid, shining, transparent six-sided prisms; in the animal they are soft and have filaments, and finally endowed with motion and life.”

If the foregoing passage were all that we knew of Crosse’s work, it might be permissible to suppose that he had simply been misled by appearances. It is quite possible to “grow” artificial forms, from dead matter, which simulate living bodies in a positively uncanny way. Artificial “plants,” for example, can be grown (in certain solutions) which, although formed by a purely mechanical process—osmosis—have every appearance of life, and can even imitate the properties and movements of organic cells. The “osmotic growths” recently produced by Dr. Stephane Leduc of Nantes not only present the cellular structure of living matter, but reproduce such functions as the absorption of food, metabolism, and the excretion of waste products.

In spite of the precautions taken by Crosse and Weeks, it is, of course, impossible to disprove the assertion that their acari were hatched in the course of their experiments, having found their way into the apparatus as ova—the same cry of “faulty technique” that has been raised (in my submission with more force) against such experimenters as Bastian. Like Crosse, I offer no opinion.

Andrew Crosse died in the room in which he was born on July 6, 1855. He was seventy-one. For many years he had lived the life of a recluse in his Quantock eyrie, shut off from society, but happy in his marriage and his work. He died as he had lived, an honest man who would make no concession of any kind to popular clamour, but sought truth wherever he might find it. Such men are the true salt of the earth.

Footnotes

1. In a letter, dated 12.8.1849, to Harriet Martineau.
2. I have only found him complaining once. In a letter to Dr. Noad (whose Lectures on Electricity, published in 1849, contain a short account of Crosse’s work), he says: “. . . [I] met with so much virulence and abuse . . . in consequence of the experiments, that it seemed as if it were a crime to have made them.”
3. C. H. A. Crosse, Memorials of Andrew Crosse (London, 1857).
4. H. Martineau, A History of the Thirty Years’ Peace, A.D. 1815-46 (London, 1849).

Article by Aymon de Roussy de Sales — from Journal of Borderland Research (Vol. 50, No. 4, 4th Quarter 1994)

THE Sun, a hot golden disc in the sky, unintelligible, unknowable, and, yet, thirty-three years ago it sent a message into my heart. It transfigured me and made me a wanderer on this Earth.

How did it all come about? The years passed quickly, the psychedelic revolution, the need to push the world into a new consciousness. It was down there in Mexico – the Indian continent that lay dark, submerged, and away from white man’s power. Maybe I’d been reading too much Kerouac, his Dharma Bums about drifting between Los Angeles, Mexico, and New York, a sacred triangle, poets seeking a Bodhisattva vision. I mean, could such things exist? And they were all down in that funky place Mexico, and things in New York were really boring, early 1961 nothing happening there except liquor and stale jazz, and so I’d split the scene, the nowhere scene as they say. It was all because this old friend of mine, Josh Reynolds had come up from North Carolina and started talking to me about legends, legends of Mu and Atlantis and about live legends down in Mexico. There in Oaxaca an old witch lived alone in the mountains, a soothsayer, an oracle for the vanished Indian nation. She spoke of pathways of the mind, a way to see things which we hadn’t dreamed about, and with this knowledge you could experience mysteries. It gave you a power, this way of seeing, a sort of psychic power. Far out! Like a bugle across an empty hill, it was a call I couldn’t resist. This old Marie of the mountain had known Aldous Huxley. It was she who turned him on to the sacred mushrooms. She was the keeper of legends, and later on she would send word through the grapevine to Harvard to warn Professor Timothy Leary to lay off, that evil spells come to those who play with the doors of perception. Josh and I rapping about magic and Indians, there in 1961 when you could turn everything upside down and look into a mirror. Josh was a big, young man with a round cherub face that was old and young at the same time. He was given to going out of his head, but without any drugs. I asked him once how that felt? And he told me it was very high. He always knew it was coming on, because he began to see things, but he couldn’t control it. The last time it happened to him, he was walking on a New York street, and he began to see those faint crystals fall. At first they were small, but they got larger and larger, crystal snowflakes out of the sky — red! until there was a blizzard of them, and he couldn’t see anything else. He was turning a comer on 62nd Street and Lexington Avenue, making his way through the silent red crystals falling all around him. The last thing he remembered was a tropical fish store, two white fish side by side, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in a straight jacket. I liked Josh because he could see things we couldn’t see. I mean, I believe those crystal flakes are falling all the time – cosmic rays, man, but we have such bad eyes we don’t see them.

The knowledge of the Sun came to me those thirty-three years ago when I found myself in Mexico City. I was introduced to a poet called Philip Lamantia. He had these enormous dark liquid eyes like a deer, and they burned with an intense fire. He was a mystic, and upon meeting him I became involved with increasing rapidity in a strange set of circumstances. They had begun in New York City with Josh and a meeting in the Gurdjieff Institute, a bar called Malachay’s where we hung out, a beautiful woman called Helen DuFresne who liked to parachute out of aeroplanes, and Conrad Rooks, the filmmaker of Chappagua. He was down in Mexico, in Acapulco with Princess Zena Rachevsky taking psilocybin underwater and looking for androgynes in the ocean. He had invited Josh and Helen to join him for the experience. By different paths, it all came to being in Mexico City, three days before Easter Sunday. One of the more outstanding of these circumstances was a large vine covered house I went to. It had been a church hundreds of years ago, and was in an old section of the city. Josh, Helen, Philip and I had been talking all night about the connections with past ages, and how knowledge had been suppressed and even forgotten. Philip had brought us to the church because the “group” was into powerful magic, The people in it and the place itself had a heavy, pregnant atmosphere. The house was entered on the outside by a stone stairway. At the top of the stairs there was a massive wooden door with ancient seals carved in it. This door opened to cavernous rooms, and in one of the rooms several “Beats” were sitting around, their faces dulled by shooting smack. Large wax candles burned on the stone steps, leading into the room where they were. From other passageways came the musty smell of trapped air and incense.

One of the “Beats” was a black with GI fatigues who watched impassively as a pregnant girl with long blonde stringy hair sat on a three legged stool, moaning with labor pains. She wore a faded dirty smock, and her bare feet clutched the bar of the stool as the spasms of pain went through her. The others sat about listlessly with their heads bowed. She seemed to be cut out of space, and no one paid any attention. The vaulted ceilings of the rooms were high. Smoke from the incense and cigarettes curled there, and fanned a cloud that seemed to hold a presence in its ever-changing shape — it was strange and eerie and where we stood on the stone floor was roughly chalked a design of pentacles. The group that sat around was young. There were about twenty or twenty-five people, and they spoke in subdued voices, as if they were in fear of being overheard.

The oppressiveness of the atmosphere was not surprising, for afterwards I discovered that the people there had been attempting by mental conjuring to call on God. They felt that another reality existed on this earth, which they could enter into and communicate with. Easter Sunday was approaching, and they thought that was an auspicious time to attempt a magical act with God. Helen, Josh, Philip and I talked to a mysterious American man in his mid-thirties. He jokingly called himself the “Inspector of Space.” He was of a medium height with a small pointed face. He had a strange haunted look that was not pleasant. He had been looking for a chemical substance to “teleport” the mind. In fact he was hiding out in this church because a month earlier his underground factory had exploded, killing a Mexican worker. He said the American government was involved in psychic warfare programs, but he wouldn’t elaborate, and the reason they were trying to communicate with God was because these “Beats” felt the end of the world was near. Beings from the stars were using humans for energy. World Wars I and II had been a continuous war, a dramatic catharsis of the mind brought on by little understood events in Tibet and Turkestan. A third event, “a Covering of Wings,” would bring on a deep conflict in the fixture. These “Beats,” motivated by the apocalyptic images of Hitler and Hiroshima, were trying to exorcise the church, for it was involved in manipulating human destiny in a negative way.

The black GI joined in the conversation. He talked about impulses of the forebrain with its limited power, but what interested him was the sleeping beauty underneath the brain, which lay coiled like a snake. He spoke of hallucinogens that stirred this snake, and enabled him to see a fantastic reality.

“There’s a sacred dimension all around us,” he said, “but you can’t enter without the sacred substances that the ancient Aztecs used.”

Philip became excited by these prospects of dimensions and began waving his hands in an animated fashion. Philip, he was so out there, hugging trees and looking for visions.

“The waking of the Kundalini, when you wake it you have the knowledge of the ancients!” he cried.

I wanted to leave this church. I tried to get Helen to come with me, but she shook her head. She was with Josh. She wore this pale lipstick. It was the color of peach. I wanted to kiss those lips, feed the dark hunger in them. She had these smoldering eyes that flashed one message, “Take me out of my mind!” Back at Malachay’s bar in New York City, I remembered how she’d come in late at night, and wait there at the bar for me to go home.

“Give me a shooter!” she used to call out in a husky voice. The same smoldering eyes looking at me, asking me to jump with her into the hunger, but I was a long way from those nights in Manhattan, like a time warp away. The rest of the people in the church were slumped over against the wall, they did not take part in our conversation but were listening to other voices. The Beat Generation that had gone looking for beauty but only found trash in Americas. Kerouac’s On the Road had been a lot rougher ride than he ever wrote about.

Philip was saying, “The outcome has been predicted in the form of Huitzilopochtli, the Fifth Sun.

“It is known that this appears after four others have come and gone, and that this is itself destined to be superseded by another. It was all written down in their sacred manuscripts, the painted texts, that is why the Catholic priests burned them. They told of things that made the Christians fainthearted. There are various indications that the Fifth Sun is the creator of a great and indestructible work, and this work is the freeing of the human brain from duality.”

Duality, man, that was my whole life! Always split into two, trying to create while trying to work in the nowhere system of the West . . . Moon city always on my back. There had to be something better than what was happening. The grey fifties were still with us, trim green lawns and square dances, but this church was definitely giving me the creeps. I took a drag on a joint the size of a Cuban cigar that was being passed along, the weed going into me, clearing the head of old habits, Josh and Philip into conversations of Crucifixion and Rasputin…

“Did you know they knew each other?” asked Philip. “They met in some monastery in Southeast Russia, Gurdjieff and Rasputin.”

The sweet smoke was in my lungs – ahh so good. You had to let go of everything, that was the way – let go! Helen was sitting in front of me, who I loved so much six months ago. Six months is a lifetime these days. The long black hair on her shoulders, I remember when I met her in my apartment on Second Avenue in Manhattan, the noise of the trucks woke you in the night. But I couldn’t take her back now, she was Josh’s girl – in his southern gentleman way he had asked me if he could ask her out, I mean most friends would just take her from you, and I said, “OK,” I was exhausted from trying to keep up with her, anyway. She was connected to some lethal source of energy – and here we sat listening to stories of the land of Mu in a crumbling church. I had to get out of there! The blonde pregnant girl was moaning, rocking back and forth on the high chair. The black dude putting a long needle in his and sucking in his breath. African witness to some new reincarnation. Can you really contact God?

There were two figures sitting inside the chalk marks chanting – and the candlelight was brighter. Holy mother! run for it, before they open the gates — they might not get God, but they might get something else!

I ran for it, lickety split passed the oak door with the ancient seals and down the stone staircase to the outside! The lamps threw their light down the street in great spokes as I ran. I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t care. I just wanted to put as much distance between the church and myself as I could. After several blocks of running, I began to tire and I slowed to a walk. It was then I realized how afraid I was. The sweat on my face wasn’t just from running. I couldn’t come to grips with my imagination. I had to clear my head of what had happened in the last forty-eight hours. What was taking place? I thought of my life as I walked.

Since childhood I had strange and terrifying dreams. These dreams were of earthquakes and titanic upheavals that would affect the entire world. It was more than a dream, it was a knowing, and it produced a fantastic feeling of euphoria as I remembered these things, so much raced through my mind. It was like a snake shedding layers of skin, this remembering. The meaning of my name, my childhood dreams, the strange ancestral connection with the famous Saint Francois de Sales who lived in the 16th century. These thoughts held no unity on one level of understanding but on higher levels they became clear. It was as if you had a puzzle before you, with hundreds of disconnected but somehow interconnected pieces, and in a flash these pieces came together. In an intuitive instant you saw the puzzle as a whole, then, afterwards each piece, a dream, a name, a strange occurrence took on meaning.

I was high on these realizations – they came over me wave after wave. I could hardly walk because of this feeling of exhilaration, and these emotions grew stronger with each passing minute. Inner possibilities were awakened in my mind. I was now walking on one of Mexico City’s broad thoroughfares with huge shade trees. I remembered Philip had said the Mixtecs believed they were descended from trees. There was so much to know, to find out – my brain raced.

I knew it was connected with the 360 degrees in a circle. A circle was much more than just a drawing, it was a whole mode of power – of thought power. With each minute of experience this new insight increased in power. I was hooked in some mysterious way, and that six hours was its duration. Somehow it had begun with the church. I did not understand any of it, though I felt enormous changes within me. All I knew was, it was happening incredibly fast, that my whole being as I walked was undergoing a mutation. Josh and Philip had spoken about the appearances of mutants, that it was something that was taking place all over the world, people were being born that were totally different in feeling and perception. They were far stronger mentally than their parents . . . but what was I meant to do?

I asked for a sign, a sign from where these forces came. I felt a magnet inside draw me on, but I needed a voice to confirm the connection. Before I got an answer, I had to choose between light and darkness, whether I would use this energy for my own purpose or for others, the most simple choice but one that would cause a thousand different things to happen. Suddenly I saw the image of Saint Francois. He seemed to be directing me from some vast distance, yet he was at the same time very near. There was only one choice, that of light. It seemed no matter what we did, all of us were drawn together for its purpose here in Mexico City.

My whole family had been connected with the Church and been in the Crusades. There in the Middle East near Jerusalem we rode in armor against the Arabs. I needed a sign to know what all the connections were about. The image of Saint Francois had made me feel elated. I felt as if the veins of my body extended back into time. As these complex emotions welled up in me, I found myself passing a movie theater. The motion picture was over and streams of people were descending this enormous stairway. I had the idea that the cinema was a new temple – and if I climbed the stairs into this temple I would find out what to do. Immediately, I went up the stairs against the crowd coming down. They were all dressed in white pants and sombreros and the women wore shawls. A great sea of nameless people pushed against me as I made my way up to the top. Several looked at me as I pushed against them, my face obviously agitated.

Through the large glass doors I went. I wanted a sign and there it was, forty feet across and twelve feet high – covering the whole wall of the cinema entrance, an enormous mural of a youth swimming down from space, his hair streaming backward with the solar winds, his eyes looking down at the planet Earth and in his gaze there was a power that comes from watching a place for centuries. He was bringing a knowledge with him from the stars – and on this Earth, rising like sacred totems from the continent of the Americas were these figures of Indian shamans rising up to greet this youth swimming down from the stars. The image transfixed me, I felt my mind expand. The message was this! I had to get to a place and communicate with the sky! That was where the message lay, in the stars. It did not come from out of our heads. It wasn’t from this planet. I was overwhelmed by the novelty of this thought. I ran out of the theater and down the stairs from the silver screen temple. I had received a message painted there by an artist whose name I would never know. The old wise men of Mexico believed the way to communicate with the Gods was through art, through flower and song. I had to get back to my hotel and figure out what to do! I grabbed a taxi and gave him an address in this city I’d never been in, but whose streets were leading me to a destination outside of time.

When I got to my hotel room I felt possessed of an incredible energy. I knew with certainty that forces beyond myself were directing me, the constant connections, the meeting with Philip Lamantia, the mysterious church, the sign of the boy swimming from space, the synchronicity of these events was producing a pattern.

In the room of the hotel, I tried to find a key to this pattern. I felt in me a tremendous power. I had no other word to describe the intense feeling in my body. There had to be an answer. I lay down on my bed to think. I looked out the window at Mexico City, and gradually my eyes caught the light of the star Venus, shining through the window of my room. It had a strange and compelling beauty to it. I do not know what made me do it, but I got up from the bed and turned out the lights of the room. I lay back down and began to stare at the star. This incredible energy was still in me — it was almost as if electricity was going out of my body. As a child I used to do a trick with my eyes and look at things out of focus. I found myself doing this, as I looked up at the star. I began aligning the starlight into the center of an imaginary triangle. At the same time my breathing altered and became deep. It was involuntary. It was something I just did without knowing why – almost as if I was being willed to do it, and the thought struck me, like a piece of fire in my brain, “I wanted to be there, there in the vast reaches of space, to let go! To go to Venus.”

When I had used my eyes this way before, I had had a feeling of coming into myself; but this time I knew I had to reverse the “feeling” and try to go out of myself. It was a feeling similar to being in a trance but more subtle, and I began making myself do it. I willed it. I focused on the starlight of Venus – and suddenly a larger circle formed around the star inside the imaginary triangle, and further as I watched a square formed around the triangle: the energy in my mind began to expand, and I felt myself beginning to move away – out of my body. The strangest thing was that it wasn’t surprising. It felt almost natural – like something I had known how to do all my life. Then I felt the sensation of movement stronger. I was out of the room, and then out of the hotel and with great speed I was above Mexico City, the lights of the streets below me. I was going out to the stars, and all the time this movement was getting faster and faster.

It was fantastic! I could look back at myself lying on the bed, I could see the room, I could see the city – all at the same time. There was no sense of cold or heat, and I felt as if I were leaving my body forever. I became frightened. What if I became suspended between one world and the next, and yet existing in neither? The idea terrified me. I had to get back to the one world I knew. With some effort I found the mechanism to will my brain down below and halt the rush of myself outward, and then I began willing myself back to my body, but it was a tremendous effort to do it. It took all my energy to get me back inside the hotel room. The whole experience was beyond belief. I lay on the narrow hotel bed, exhausted by this “out of body experience.” I knew now there were other levels of consciousness, and that through them I could travel distances beyond my wildest dreams, but still I had no answer to what was causing these experiences, or what I was meant to do. The state of my nervous system was at a terrific pitch. I was aware of things a hundredfold of what I would be normally. All the thoughts I had in my mind at this time would take up a book. As I lay on the bed, I continued to concentrate on what these mysterious events were leading to.

As I lay on the bed, I continued to concentrate on what I was meant to do. This place where modern Mexico stood, with its noise and grime and traffic, had been a great center of learning and of the arts. The men who had come here before the barbaric conquest of the Spanish studied the origins of flower and song. They understood the movement of stars in a living way, and they perfected the art of symbolism. These things we no longer hold dear. The emphasis of Western society has been on the perfection of ego and power. The Indians along with most of the ancient wise people were adept at the inward expansive movement of the mind. Somehow we have lost that sense, and advanced into a world of dementia, an instant reality where nothing means anything. We have become the living dead on a neon road where the only information comes from outside – and yet there were these other avenues which lay at our fingertips. The knowledge that Fray Diego de Landa destroyed was still there. If we could dig beneath the garbage of our schooling, we could find the same sacred hymns that the ancients sang at sunset.

Gradually I became aware, as I asked the question of what it all meant, of the mirror in front of the bed in the hotel room. I realized without knowing it I had been looking at it for some time.

I became absorbed in it. There was something in the glass, a substance beneath the surface. Slowly shapes were taking form in the glass, and they weren’t a reflection of any object in the room. I strained with my new consciousness to understand this phenomenon. Suddenly, three heads appeared in the mirror. They were just there. They did not materialize slowly, the heads were etched clearly in the glass. Their eyes were closed as if in contemplation, their foreheads were bowed, but I could not see their mouths. They were there on the other side of the glass. I had no doubt about it. I could feel a living vibration coming off their bowed heads. They seemed to be sitting in some kind of auditorium. They were heads of men, and they were of an age that is more than any man on Earth, they were very old, centuries old. Their skin was taut over their bones, brown and had a sunbaked quality to it. Behind them, the only glimpse I had of their mysterious world was a vague pattern-like mosaic tile. It was bluish and bluish-white and had a sterile shine to it and stretched beyond them until it was lost from sight. Their heads remained bowed slightly, the electric feeling in me became intense as I watched them. These mysterious beings in another dimension seemed equal in importance as they communicated through the mirror, though I had the impression the middle figure was more powerful than the others. I could not make out the expressions of their faces. Their mouths remained totally obscure, but there was this communication from them, a kind of subtle energy that came through the glass. It was hard for me to concentrate on it, and I sweated profusely from the exertion. It was like trying to make out the almost invisible design of a spider’s web. They held my mind for brief seconds so I could absorb their thoughts. Their foreheads glistened peculiarly as they did this. It seemed their skin was almost metallic in these moments. I was made part of their awareness, a kind of mosaic pattern. It was on a level higher than anything on a human plane. I was given the idea that they desired to “win the battle” on Earth, and to join in this battle would make a difference to what happened to me after life as I knew it. In the briefest possible way I’m trying to write down these extremely complicated impressions which flooded into me.

The image in the mirror became disturbed by the appearance of a fourth head. I could but vaguely make it out, and it hung to the right of the other three. It was distinctly different in personality. The other three became silent and ceased transmitting messages. I tried to see him, the fourth one. An inkling of fear crept into my mind, but I could not make him out. He was there, and it would be hard to say more. The message transmitted through the mirror was very clear. We were to go to the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan tomorrow, and I knew if we did this the extraordinary series of events we were involved with would come to a climax. It would be made clear why we travelled to Mexico.

The heads faded, and in their place was a huge room covered in the same blue and bluish-white tile I had seen before. It could’ve been an open terrace, but it was so alien I could not be sure. A huge statue stood alone in this room (or was it a statue?). I looked down on it from the right side. The statue was on a throne and was carved, sitting in very much the same attitude as an Egyptian sculpture. The expression the statue conveyed was of unrelenting will. He appeared to be made of a metallic substance. His form had a dullish shine, and at times as I watched him, I could not be certain that he wasn’t alive. I looked a long time at the statue in the room that seemed to be part of eternity. I knew I had a glimpse into another world, and I knew I had been given a fantastic knowledge. The image faded, and the mirror became an ordinary frame of glass in which I was reflected. I looked around the room to see what could have reflected the blue tile and the heads. There was nothing. The walls were cream-colored and the furniture was brown. The bed was soaked in sweat from the exertion of seeing into the mirror. I had to tell the others about going to the Pyramid, and I knew exactly where I would find them, though I had no idea how Mexico City was laid out. I got up and left the hotel. The neon sign outside was glowing blue as I got into a taxi and directed the driver to go through the unfamiliar city until I said stop. I had no knowledge of the streets or where they led to, I only knew by some peculiar wavelength in my brain where I had to go. It was like I was looking out the top of my head. I directed the taxi through a maze of streets – passed the movie temple where I had seen the fantastic mural, and at a corner of a large thorough fare I halted the taxi. I knew I was close. I ran from the taxi, across the street and down a few blocks. There, as I had foreseen, were the three friends walking: Helen, Josh, and Philip. They couldn’t believe I was there! After their shock I told them of what had happened, and the ancient heads in the mirror that talked to me, that we were to go to the Pyramid tomorrow on Easter Sunday. It was agreed we would go the next day before sunset.

Article by Vincent H. Gaddis — from Journal of Borderland Research (Vol.50, No.3, 3rd Quarter 1994)

The place was the royal residence of Prince Adam Wisniewski in Rome and the time was a September day in 1894. Members of the Italian court, social personages, patrons and performers of the arts had gathered to witness a musical seance. Seated at the piano was the medium, a tall, slender middle-aged man with a trim dyed moustache and large brown eyes. On his head was a wig of dark wavy hair and his cheeks were slightly rouged. The guests were placed in a circle around the piano and the room was darkened. As the pianist, his huge hands covering an octave and a half, struck the first chords, tiny lights flickered in every corner of the room. The great composers of past centuries had arrived, some to listen, others to perform from the beyond their latest compositions through the dexterous fingers of the medium. Thalbery was first with a rippling fantasia, then he was joined by Liszt in a rhapsody for four hands. “Notwithstanding this extraordinary complex technique,” wrote the Prince in Vessillo Spiritista, “the harmony was admirable, such as no one present had ever known paralleled even by Liszt himself, whom I personally knew and in whom passion and delicacy were united. In the circle were musicians who, like myself, had heard the greatest pianists in Europe, but we can say that we never heard such truly supernatural execution.”

A globe of light and three raps on the Prince’s knee announced the appearances of Chopin and George Sand, respectively. Then Chopin’s spirit, with the expressive tones that distinguish his compositions, played first a fantasia followed by haunting and exquisite melodies “with a pianissimo of diminishing notes and tones full of despair — a prayer to God for Poland.”

The somber mood was dispelled by Mozart who played with the agility and lightness of a sylph, the genius of his unique and melodious style displayed by notes that danced to an airy climax above a Lydian measured undertone.

“But the most marvelous incident of the evening was the presentation of the spirit of Berlioz by his two chaperones, Liszt and Thalberg,” the Prince reported. “That was the first time Berlioz had played through Jesse Shepard. He began by saying that the piano was toned too low for his music (Shepard is also clairvoyant and clairaudient) and he tuned it a tone higher himself. For ten minutes we heard the spirits working with the piano, which was closed. At the first sound we observed that the instrument was about two notes higher.

“Then Berlioz played sweet, ideal music. It seemed as if we heard the little bells of a country church; as if we saw and heard a marriage procession… entering the edifice; then a music which imitated to perfection the sound of the organ and continued piano, pianissimo and morendo, as if indicating that the marriage was celebrated….This piece finished, Berlioz, with the aid of several other spirits, restored the instrument to its first tuning and began playing on its ordinary tone while the lid was still shut.”

Jesse Shepard could speak English and French only, but after the musical seance he entered a trance state and the spirits spoke through him in other languages. Prince Wisniewski said that Goethe came and recited passages in German, while other spirits spoke in Hebrew and Arabic. “After the seance,” the article concluded, “Mr. Shepard was much exhausted and had to retire to rest.”

As the late Dr. Nandor Fodor wrote in his book Between Two Worlds, “No musical party by the Mad Hatter could sound more preposterous than this account. It leaves breathless the most ardent spiritualists.” Did Prince Wisniewski make an accurate report or was he guilty of exaggeration? Whatever the source of his inspiration, Shepard was a master pianist whose improvisations left his listeners dumbfounded. Varied in style, emotionally powerful, his music sometimes had a delicate lilting beauty and at other times it was haunting, primitive. His renditions roamed the world and the centuries. With processions of chords, he evoked the antiquity of Egypt, the mystery of India, the agelessness of china, and the sophistication of the West.

John Lane, the English publisher, was a guest one evening at a Shepard musicale when the performer improvised on the sinking of the Titanic. The treatment was so stupendous, so overwhelming, Lane said it caused him to postpone his departure for America for a fortnight, although he had arranged to sail the very next day. Edwin Bjorkman, writing in Harper’s Weekly, described a Shepard concert: “Something more than sound issued from that piano: it was a mood, uncanny yet pleasing, exalting, luring. He seemed to keep notes suspended in the air for minutes. How and then he would make a shining vessel out of such a chord, and then he would begin to drip little drops of melody into it, until the Grail seemed to rise before your vision, luminous with blood-red rubies….Then the music swelled and became strangely urgent — I left there was an image that wanted to break through — a consciousness of some mighty presence.”

Prof. Harold P. Simonson, author or the only book-length biography of Shepard, writes that to Shepard “music was the medium to supra-conscious experience. An intransigent foe of positivism, relativism and determinism — of all ‘isms’ denying the power of the invisible and the reality of absolute spirit — (he) by means of musical seances, sought to lead others to transcendental perception.” (Francis Grierson, by Harold P. Simonson, Twayne Publishers, Inc., NY, 1966.)

Unlike Rosemary Brown, the contemporary English housewife who has produced hundreds of astonishing and gifted compositions said to have dictated by Liszt, Chopin, Schubert, Beethoven and other musical geniuses of yesteryear, Shepard’s music was never committed to paper. He believed that to do so would nullify the rationale of his gift. Some of his improvisations had titles and basic tonal structures, but his renditions were never exactly the same.

Born in England in 1848, Jesse Francis Shepard was brought to the United States as an infant by his parents. The family settled on the Illinois prairie, in Sangamon County, in the heart of the Lincoln country. For a time his log home was a station on the Underground Railway, and at the age of ten he listened to the final Lincoln-Douglas debate at Alton. Three years later, as the Civil War got underway, he was a page to Gen. John C. Fremont in St. Louis.

Later the family moved to Niagara Falls and then Chicago. Shepard, in an biographical article in The Medium, a London spiritualist publication, said that his first psychic abilities of clairvoyance and psychometry appeared when he was 19. Meanwhile he was taking piano lessens and developing his skill in a normal manner. In fact, for a time, his sister Letitia played better than he did. When and where did the baptism of transcendental proficiency take place?

The mystery of this musical medium is presented in Twentieth Century Authors: “With only two years of formal musical training, Shepard exhibited an extraordinary talent at the piano. At barely 21, he set out for Paris, with scarcely enough money to buy his own passage, and almost overnight became a sensation.” Without a knowledge of French, letters of introduction, companions or a reputation as a musician, he received immediate acclaim as piano improvisator par excellence. Within a month he was a welcome guest at the Parisian salons where he entertained those distinguished in titles, society and the arts. In addition to his instrumental endowment, Shepard was blessed with a remarkable voice. He sang in Saint-Eustache and the basilica of Montmartre by special invitation, and was chosen by composer Leon Gasinelle to sing the leading parts in his Mass written for the fete of the Annunciation and performed with orchestra and chorus in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. “With your gifts you will find all doors open before you,” Alexandre Dumas the Elder told Shepard at a reception.

Now the darling of French nobility, Shepard received so many social invitations that he sought the advice of friends in dealing with them. But in time the Franco-Prussian War brought his happy stay in the City of Lights to an end. He went to London where he stayed at the home of Viscountess Combermere. He continued his recitals for the distinguished and socially elite and also advertised that his psychic services were available — “clairvoyant, prophetic, psychometric sittings, diagnosis of disease, and discovery of mediumistic faculties,” with the added note that “music manifestations are not given at the same sitting.”

After eight months in London he spent a delightful summer in the German resort city of Baden-Baden where his circle of aristocratic friends included the King and Queen of Prussia. In October, with no knowledge of the Russian language and with only enough money to pay expenses for one week, he moved on to St. Petersburg. After spending the week in a hotel room reading the works of Lord Byron, he took his limitless optimism and a letter of introduction to Madame and Monsieur Hardy. owners of the opulent Restaurant Dusseau. They took him in, and while the fierce Russian winter raged and howled he moved among the high and mighty, his days “crammed with pleasure and amusements of all sorts.” Princess Abamelik introduced him to General Jourafsky, the noted Russian mystic who discussed with him the proper conduct of seances. Shepard climaxed his first visit in the spring by performing before Czar Alexander II, then returned to London.

In the autumn of 1874 he returned to the United States. Within a month he was in Chittenden, Vt., attending the seances of the Eddy brothers in their farmhouse. He spent ten days there with Madame Blavatsky and Col. Henry Steel Olcott, later the co-founders of Theosophy, as crowds of the curious came and went. According to Olcott, in his book “Old Diary Leaves”, Shepard not only gave “mediumistic musical performances,” but entered into the spirit of things by going into trance and singing Russian songs “under the control of Grisi and Lablache.”

Back in New York Shepard continued to visit Madame Blavatsky, but a personality conflict finally developed. She told Olcott Shepard was a charlatan and accused him of having paid a music-master to teach him the Russian songs he sung in the Eddy farmhouse. But theosophical teachings were another matter, and years later he lectured on the doctrine. During the next 12 years Shepard roamed the world living by his wits and talents in northern California, Europe and a year in Australia. In Chicago he held a series of seances in the home of another medium, and according to the daughter of Hudson Tuttle, “strange and unaccountable phenomena nightly occurred.” Tuttle is the noted author of classical books on spiritualism. Shepard, the daughter reported, said he was controlled by a bank of Egyptian spirits, the leader of whom had lived on the earth when the pyramids were young.

The medium’s most amazing performance was simultaneously singing in two voices, in bass and soprano, his control singing in one voice and the Egyptian in the other, while another spirit accompanied on the harp. “Between the musical pieces,” she added, “Mr. Shepard, ‘under influence,’ gave tests, describing spirit friends, etc.” Throughout his career Shepard’s dual-tone singing left his listeners in states of bewildered shock. And it was in Chicago that he met Lawrence W. Tonner, his self-effacing modest secretary, man Friday and dedicated admirer, who would be his companion the rest of his life. A few months later they came to San Diego, Calif. Here Shepard would build his magnificent Victorian mansion, the Villa Montezuma, and enter a new profession. He had reached life’s mid-point, a Midwest farm boy who had become a globe-trotter over three continents; a cosmopolite honored in the salons and palaces of society and royalty. Now would come a time for inner searching, a change in goals, a personal renaissance.

Designated a historical landmark, the Villa Montezuma is currently being restored by the San Diego Historical Society, the San Diego Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the Save Our Heritage Organization. Upon completion of the work it will be furnished with period furniture and open to the public. Its exterior is somewhat weathered, but the main floor of the interior with its polished redwood walls, ornate tiled fireplaces, silvery lincrusta walton ceilings and cathedral glass transoms is almost the same as when the house was built in 1887. There are ebony panels inlaid with bas-relief figures of ivory and mother-of-pearl. A mantel in the design of a medieval castle tower is made of walnut shingles and imported English tiles. It is the colored art glass windows that Shepard had made to order that is the home’s outstanding decorative feature. On the long east wall of the music room is a huge window depicting the Greek poetess Sappho attended by two cupids. At the north end of the room are circular windows containing portrait heads of Mozart and Beethoven in art glass, while on the south wall are similar windows with portraits of Rubens and Raphael. In the drawing room are the heads of Shakespeare, Goethe and Corneille. Other art windows included allegorical representations of the Orient and Occident (the face of the figure representing the Orient a portrait of Shepard himself), the four seasons, at St. Cecilia playing the organ.

When Shepard lived in the house, the floors were covered with heavy Persian and Turkish rugs with a large polar bear skin in the music room. An elaborate Oriental candelabrum hung from the ceiling, and throughout all the rooms were life-sized busts, exotic plants and polished candelabra. The second floor, since remodeled into rooms, was originally an art gallery and museum displaying along with sculpture and paintings, memorabilia and gifts Shepard had received from royalty, titled patrons and others during his tours. A Spanish cedar stairway led up to a third floor tower room beneath a Moorish roof. This was Shepard’s study.

Private seances were held in the music room. So beatific, so unearthly was his music that contemporary accounts call it “simply indescribable.” There were listeners who said they heard drums, tambourines and trumpets accompanying the piano with voices issuing from the trumpets. Other guests claimed they heard choirs of voices led by Shepard’s own singing, now soaring to the heights in melodious soprano, then dropping down to an euphonious bass.

Two changes occurred in Shepard’s life during his San Diego period, one temporary, the other permanent. There was a crisis in his spiritual and religious thinking. Although he continued his musicales and was associated with a group of wealthy local spiritualists who had contributed heavily to the cost of his villa, he seemingly tried to break away from spiritualism. He attacked what he called “phenomenal spiritualism” which led to a bitter counter-attack by Hudson Tuttle in an article in the Religio-Philosophical Journal. His upheaval was climaxed by his becoming a member of the Roman Catholic Church. The permanent change was his decision to embark on a literary career with music taking second place. This career began with the writing of essays for The Golden Era, a West Coast journal that published much of the early work of Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Shepard’s friend, the poet Joaquin Miller. Most of them were written in the tower room where in later years it is said a butler hung himself.

Late in 1888 Shepard and Tonner went to Paris to arrange for the publication of his first two books, both containing some of the earlier Golden Era essays. They returned the following September. Shepard decided that to achieve literary success he should move permanently to Europe. He needed money. On Dec. 17, 1889, he completed the sale of the Villa Montezuma and all its furnishings to David D. Dare, a bank executive, and that night gave his farewell concert before a large audience at the Unitarian Church.

In a biographical sketch Tonner wrote: “Certain rich townspeople gave the land and some of the money to build the villa, the idea being to attract attention to the town (which it certainly did)… When the boom died out in San Diego in 1889 we had to sell for what we could get. We gave half the proceeds to those who had supplied the money, which they considered quite generous, for it was not thought necessary to return any; and the following year we went to Europe.”

Their arrival in Paris marked the beginning of a twenty-three year residence abroad. Shepard resumed his European tours and published reports revealed that he was still the musical medium. In Austria he played at a reunion of three royal houses as the guest of the duchess of Cumberland. The Queen of Denmark said that the piano playing was so marvelous that it seemed four hands were engaged instead of two. Again he was welcomed in royal courts and cosmopolitan salons.

Unless he knew his listeners were sympathetic, Shepard did not refer to psychic inspiration. Few would believe such claims, and those who did were regarded by others with suspicion. According to Dr. Fodor, the penalty for belief could be great. Henry Kiddle, Superintendent of Schools of New York, was forced to resign when he publicly said he believed in Shepard’s spirits. The school official said he heard Shepard play a magnificent impromptu symphony under the control of Mozart, give philosophical dissertations under the influence of Aristotle, and speak in six different languages while in trance.

During his European years Shepard was writing essays, articles and books on art, philosophy, human nature, biographical sketches and his own experiences. With the publication of his book Modern Mysticism in 1899, he took one of his middle names and his mother’s maiden name “lest his literary efforts be regarded as mere diversions. Thus, during the last 28 years of his life the former Jesse Shepard became Francis Grierson. Included among his published books were The Celtic Temperament (adopted as a textbook by Japanese universities), Parisian Portraits, The Humour of the Underman, and Abraham Lincoln, the Practical Mystic. In 1911 his Invincible Alliance foresaw World War I.

He won the admiration and praise of the leading critics and literary greats of his day. Maurice Maeterlinck found his writings mystical, romantic and profound. The Westminster Review noted his “rare intuition and a profound knowledge both of art and human nature.” Grierson’s greatest work was The Valley of Shadows, the story of his boyhood on the prairies of Illinois, in Lincoln country, at the time of the spiritual awakening as the Civil War approached. It presents a poetic and vivid picture of a bygone time, and was used by Carl Sandberg as an information source in writing his Abraham Lincoln, the Prairie Years. When the fifth edition appeared in 1948, Bernard DeVoto called it an American classic. Edmund Wilson, reviewing it in The New Yorker, said it fills a “niche which no other book quite fills.” This edition came 39 years after if was first published.

Grierson and Tonner returned to the United States in 1913. He continued his writing and piano recitals. For a time he was in Toronto giving lecture on theosophy. He made many friends. Judge Ben Lindsey introduced him to Henry Ford and he was invited to membership in the Chevy Chase Club. He discussed the fourth dimension and occult theories with Claude Bragdon. His literary friends included Edwin Markham, Sara Teasdale, Mark Van Doren, William James and Edwin Arlington Robinson.

In 1920 he settled in Los Angeles and a year later published his final book at his own expense. It was titled Psycho-Phone Messages, and its 82 pages contained communications allegedly received through a phone-like device from illustrious but deceased persons. Abraham Lincoln predicted the failure of the League of Nations; Henry Ward Beecher assailed the sins of the Jazz Age; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton preached Women’s Lib. Other messages, warnings and diatribes came from General Grant, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other great personalities of yesteryear. Grierson’s final years were sad ones. The public was no longer interested in his music. Despite the efforts of admiring fellow authors, publishers failed to express sufficient interest in his manuscripts. Occasionally he gave a lecture or lessons in poise and practical psychology. Tonner taught French and for a time was a partner in a small dry cleaning establishment. Despite the recommendations of Mary Austin, an anthology of poetry Grierson had compiled and edited could not be sold. Eventually all sources of income failed and the pair were destitute.

Zona Gale, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, was staying at the famed Mission Inn in Riverside, Cal., where Grierson sometimes gave concerts. He visited her at her request. When she arrived back home at Portage, Wis., she wrote friends in Los Angeles and encouraged them to arrange a benefit dinner to honor Grierson and to raise money for him. In the meantime he pawned the last of his valuable possessions, a gold watch given him by King Edward VII of England.

The benefit was held the evening of May 29, 1927. Following the dinner Grierson entertained with what Tonner called “marvelous instantaneous compositions on the piano.” Finally the pianist told the thirty guests that his final number would be his Grand Egyptian March. It was a moving rendition, haunting and mystical, with mighty chords alternating with soft melody that invoked thoughts of dark antiquity, of temples, the ever-flowing Nile, of gods dethroned and empires of the past.

When he finished he sat perfectly still as he often did as he rested, his head slightly bent forward, his fingers on the keys. There was applause but he failed to acknowledge it. Long seconds passed. A grim suspicion gripped Tonner. He walked over and touched his companion of over four decades. It was true! Dramatically, yet quietly, surrounded by friends, he had entered the realm of his visions and found peace.

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Brenden the Bold probably lived about 500 AD. and according to written reports was a brave and seasoned sailor. The question is was he successful in crossing the Atlantic and actually reaching the Americas. According to Brenden’s own statements he saw such exotic creatures as giant sheep, Pygmies, sea cats, talking birds, floating giant crystals, smoking mountains, and of course generalized sea monsters. At first this list would make anyone reject that Brenden ever basked on the shore of the New World. However, let’s look at this list again. The easiest to understand of these strange objects are the sea cats for we have both fresh water and sea catfish. Almost as easy would be the floating crystals which, of course, would be floating icebergs. The smoking mountains were simply volcanoes. (Feder, Kenneth 1990, p. 72).

The Pygmies could well be Indians. Many Mesoamerican Indians average between four and five feet in height. It would take more imagination to find giant sheep, although we do have large and powerful Rocky Mountain sheep. However, Rocky Mountain sheep are restricted to the west and I doubt Brenden went that far inland. We do have the desert sheep, a similar animal, that lives in and areas often adjacent to the ocean. If I were to venture a guess, Brenden may have seen a bison molting in the Spring when the Winter hide is falling off in patches. It has all the appearance of a huge sheep, including the horns. Talking birds could be either parrots or magpies both of which mimic animal sounds and human speech. That only leaves sea monsters; even today we have repeated claims that such creatures exist. They could be oar fish, manta rays, whale sharks, or any number of natural sea life. There is much in the sea we are just discovering; the coelacanth and the Mega-Mouth shark for example. One of Brenden’s stories has his ship being picked up by a huge whale and carried a considerable distance. Oh well, even monks lie at times.

Brenden’s description of icebergs as floating crystals shows that the Irish rarely or never saw these icy islands. This suggests that he was far from the Irish shore and perhaps in the North Atlantic on one of his several voyages. The reported trip to the Americas was with several other Irish monks seeking a remote and peaceful new land in which to worship and meditate. They were away from Ireland for seven years before returning to their homeland.

Their boat was an elaborate bull boat, animal skins over a wooden framework. I recall that a duplicate of this type of boat recently traveled from Ireland to Mesoamerica. This proves it could be done if the weather remained favorable. If we accept his successful crossing, ocean currents suggest he reached the Azures or one of the numerous islands off Mesoamerica. However, had he reached the actual mainland of Mesoamerica, he would have seen or been directed to one of the classic civilizations existing at that time. Had he visited Teotihuacan, probably larger than any European city of the period, he would have reported its presence. The architecture, culture, and non-Christian religion would not have been neglected. None of the islands off of Mesoamerican had an advanced culture and the natives were small enough to be consider Pygmies by Europeans.

We may never know if this voyage was actual or imaginary, successful or spurious, or ideal rather than real. No evidence has ever been found to support Brenden’s claims. If anything was taken back to Ireland from the Americas, it has been lost in history. I feel sure he could have made this voyage. The question is, did he? Over the centuries, early handwritten books usually done by monks could have additions or paragraphs of importance lost. Not all monks were dedicated in their copying of previous books, which usually needed rewriting each decade. Books of this period were rare and in demand for the few who could read and write. They were usually chained to a pedestal and read by candlelight. I wonder if occasionally pages were removed like what frequently occurs in college libraries. If so, then a reproduction of a missing page would rely on the monks’ memory and could be responsible for some unlikely additions.

References

Feder, Kenneth. (1990). Frauds, Myths, and Mys teries. Mountain View, California: Maylield Publishing Co.
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