3. The Shamanic World
She makes us realise that occult solutions do not such much "not work" as they are prevented from working by the prevailing paradigm. The main reason why occult forms appear often as strangulated forms of complete nonsense is because they are shredded by the barbs of the allowance-systems which try desperately to hold the prime-time cultural viewing schedules in place. But once we penetrate the silver screens and lay aside the deeply political rules dividing what we should see from what we should not see, we get rid of the facts versus fiction dualities of the mechanical world. The universal lights are switched on again, relating image and symbol, spirit and matter in one evolving synthesis in which the Myself-It relationship is replaced with the classical I-Thou axis.
In The Pulse of the Dragon we enter such a metaphysical world with a vengeance. What does this author see as distinct from what she should not see? Well, infamous pirates, such as Kidd, Morgan, Jean Lafitte (the Jewish Pirate), become bearers of Masonic doctrines, secretly involved in the fate of nations. Some of the author's personal notes on John Keel's book The Eighth Tower disappear; this Macer-Story attributes to a live chatter of shamanic entities who appear to be in charge of certain metaphors within certain emotive statements.
In this shamanic world of course every single thing is judged to be alive: word, symbol, idea, wish, and personality. Texts, “concrete” matter and ideas become virtual animals, and indeed she assumes that a kind piratical freemasonry may have impressed itself upon the very stones of world-significant structures, such as that of New York harbour.
She discusses many more such mythological signatures, and often measures things in terms of her quite clear re-incarnation recall.
Against such a background, Mechanism becomes a very low-order manifestation. It emerges as a set of concepts built largely of hard-core trading metaphors, most of which involve the making of a fast buck. Generally speaking, Mechanism requires that human beings be measured by the depth of their shoe-leather multiplied by their working capacity. Neither Faith Hope nor Charity abide in that application of mechanical objectives which led both to Eugenics and ultimately Auschwitz as mere by-products.
All occult operations relate to a third-world interface between Matter and Spirit. This is the "working, but not working very well" option as distinct from a two-state solution defined by ON or OFF states. The author uses this three-state framework to form a theory of entity creation and control very similar to that outlined both in the séance-created "Philip the Ghost" http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa102201a.htmThere is much historical evidence to show that when entities are summoned up, they appear in whatever form is desired, and behave as required. This is Jung's idea of participation mystique, in which all the traditional "nonsense" language of the ancient alchemical texts may well be encountered, as experienced in abduction scenes and dialogues with “extraterrestrial” entities. Scoff as we may, these manifestations are amongst some of the oldest ideas known to Mankind, and there is no dismissing them, even in a time dominated by science.
4. The Nuts and Bolts of Old Ufology
The Pulse of the Dragon helps us rediscover the lost borderland between Matter and Spirit. This is an unstable region whose high strangeness replaces fact versus fiction arguments by web memes stitched into a postmodern fabric, At its best, this ever-changing media structure represents a techno art form which is intellectually far superior to the crude nut-and-bolt schemes of the “fact versus fiction” arguments of the MUFON Commissars of Old Ufology.
Like it or not, the non nut-and-bolt people are Darwinian winners over Mechanism. The purple passages from say, Dan Burische, Project Camelot, Billy Meier, Alfred Webre, and the lurid claims of and Michael Salla of Exopolitics (to name but a few), represent a visionary form made positively ectoplasmic by the Web.
Whether we like it or not, the living fabric of the virtual borderland so well described by Macer-Story represents story technology in action (no pun intended!). It is a view of nothing less than a new kind of Matter in which virtual animal forms such as Bigfoot and George Adamski’s Orthon make equally virtual appearances within the information processing fields of Mind, a truly cyber entity if ever there was.
The forms described by both Macer-Story and John Keel live quite comfortably between Fact and Fiction. Just as Bigfoot leaves no nesting, hunting, or fighting traces, Orthon and his famous “bottle cooler” UFO are rare sights indeed, although like Bigfoot again, there are quite a few claims that they have been seen. The Ufologist Laura Mundo, for example, claimed she had met Orthon.
http://www.alibris.co.uk/search/books/author/Mundo,%20Laura
These what could be called Fast Transient beings are experiences and events just as fleeting as any legendary quark or muon. Both relevance and meaning are matters very much dependent on how the silver screens are adjusted. Science needs its commercial breaks and prime times just as much as does Howdy Doody or Anne Coulter. In many cases it is difficult to separate the “scientific” messages from the broadcast messages as regards content and style.
Such are the new soap-type cultural horizons, and due to the Web and its fast-mutating offspring, they are going to change the way we think and how we structure our rationalisations. The wheel, weight, and watch spring universe described by dear old Lancelot Hogben in his classic Science for the Citizen (1938) is passing away, just as is the Weights and Measures and Rules and Regulations cosmos of the beloved Victorian Station Masters of Old Ufology who would seek to rule our mercifully badly-behaved minds regarding both “fact,” and Mechanism.
Individually, such claims as those of SERPO or CHAD (see my essay for UFO magazine "Meme Wars: we have an Agenda") may individually be as nonsensical as we judge them to be, but collectively, we may have our first maps of how an alien mind might work. Such a mind might well use image, symbol and metaphor in a form of media reasoning and not any kind of mechanical rationale.
Purely mechanical study of the UFO phenomenon is almost meaningless without it is placed in the Matrix-type context that both Macer-Story and John Keel put it in. By comparison, recently, two very good Ufological brains (and there aren't many of those around in Ufology), wrote a much-praised book on the supposed Roswell crash. The trouble with this otherwise admirable book is it deals with the Roswell incident very much as a kind of air-traffic accident. If the supposed Roswell craft was alien, then this methodology might well be as useless as going into the boxing ring with an opponent who has four arms and four legs in round 1, and has three arms and five legs in round 2.
In this respect, the construction of an analytical practical game plan as regards purely physical interpretation is very difficult. For example, concerning supposed UFO crashes, we might well be the hapless victims of a complex alien media-joke, see my essay “Deconstructing the B-29” in my own book An American Demonology (New Edition out in November 2009 by Cosimo Books, New York).
Certainly Macer-Story’s “solution” to the mechanical impasse is interesting. She connects joker-entities as depicted in John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies with Indrid Cold, the claimed extraterrestrial contact of Woody Derenberger, who wrote Visitors From Lanulos (1971).
http://www.freewebs.com/weirdtales/thetruthonindridcold.htm
Her analysis here plunges us deep into early Ufological folklore:
But what if this seance "spirit control" is a different order of spirit playing shell games with identity the way a rogue adventurer such as Armen Victorian http://www.wanttoknow.info/mindcontrollers10pg
might play games with forged passports and smuggled orchids? Are we confronted with "intelligence assets" in a multidimensional contest wherein rewards and motivations are also many-dimensioned, not limited to money, archaeological treasure or designated prestige, but including all of these things and a lot more else located somewhere offshore in the dreamtime?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime
Why would an intelligent entity stop a car on Earth and impersonate a tour guide from another planet, even if he/she was actually from another solar system`? What's the deal? Robbery? Of what? It does look like an attempted shanghai situation of the car's driver. What is being impacted? Is it history which is being targeted , the collective awareness which is being altered by these inexplicable events? Are individuals with a more developed mental/material capacity attempting to enter the operative logos of planet Earth and throw a few switches?
The following quote October 2006 from the blog of West Virginia Mothman expert Andy Colvin seems a bit surrealist if one's daily experience has not been involved with the numerous appearances & disappearances, impersonations and counter-accusations of the sort that Colvin (now living in Seattle) describes:
"Since l posted my last article on the meaning of lndrid Cold's name, there has been a startling development. the mother of one of my childhood friends identified Woody Derenberger's psychiatrist, Dr. Alan Roberts, as being the same psychiatrist who treated my best friend, Mothman contactee Timothy Thomas Burnham. Burnham claimed he was a warlock and came to believe he was a vampire. He was expelled from school .for biting another student in the neck. According to the mother, Dr. Roberts travelled between Parkersburg, Huntington, and Charleston specializing in the treatment of UFO abductees. The book "Visitors From Lanulos" by Derenberger states that Dr Roberts-who had a wife and three children-believed he was taken to the planet Lanulos by Indrid Cold. Cold's assistant, Demo Hassan (which means "terror assassin'), was known to have staked out the Roberts home with an accomplice, while Roberts and his wife were visiting Derenberger and Cold. Hassan creepily left messages on the Robert's frosty windows, while the children were there alone. Team Cold was known to drive a Volkswagen bug, the same type of car that John Keel states the MIBs switched to in late 1967. A Volkswagen bug was also driven by the "FBI agent" who came to investigate the car-bombing of Harriet Plumbrook's father in early 1968. Harriet's father was an engineer working for Western Union on the Echelon Project at the Navy's Sugar Grove, WV, command/listening post. The FBI man apparently paid more attention to."
5. Old and New Ufology
Of course to most so-called "serious" Ufological researchers, most this will appear as utter nonsense. But then most such earnest seekers are from a practical engineering, technological, or "scientific" background which ill-equips them to face the quadruple-takes, comic absurdity, and manifold high strangeness of either the UFO event or the UFO experience. Their usual practice is to scale down weirdness in terms of prevailing insights until a "solution" is found in terms of the kind of mechanical explanation much loved by the MUFON “reality” Commissars. Such explanations are subsequently tooled, mass-manufactured, and constellated as the prime time "real,” whose stage-sets help us get some sleep at night. Thus, in constructing out protective psychosocial screens, do we deceive ourselves by means of Fact as well as Fantasy.
Of course any author attempting the kind of analysis put forward by Macer-Story must be very brave and strong. They will certainly receive much hostility from lesser earth-bound spirits, particularly in a Protestant materialistic culture. The Pulse of the Dragon may be at times confused, disoriented, but the author hits the beach and heads fast inland to a landscape in which anything that can be imagined can happen. Once the stage machinery of our rationalisations have been demolished, we enter a strange world which has a language based on image, symbol, and metaphor, and is not based on any kind of strictly mechanistic causation.
If we do not update our Ufological studies, Old Ufology will be left trotting along the dusty roads of Yesteryear.
Once the author allows the chattering sub texts to play and speak, they have a ball. The occult experience splits up into different kinds of live imagist theatres. The author suffers no failure of nerve as she asks us to follow her through dense thickets of names and associations, stitched together by a cross-referenced catalogue of all history, from the Delphic Oracle to characters active in British Intelligence during World War 2. Many of these people (Noel Coward, Roald Dahl, Maxwell Anderson, Sir William Stephenson), were also involved in the arts and show business, and the author suspects some had possible shamanic powers in terms of ritual and mimesis.
In this thoroughly disturbed cosmos, events are connected imagistically rather than by any process of social-scientific rationale. Measuring and cataloguing weights and angles, weight and speed, are much less important than seeing how the images around the abductee experience are created and organised.
This is very much New Ufology as against science-based Old Ufology. Again, “science” proper is as good at “measuring” non-mechanical systems as it is good at measuring human relationships, namely zero marks out of ten.
If we see an alien carrying a spanner we can be sure that we are being grossly deceived. If we see “control panels” (as did Betty and Barney and Gorge Adamski), we are being doubly deceived. Such equipment (involving hole-cutters, taps and dies, and stamping and folding machines) is well over some two hundred years old in our own culture. As for indicators, the swinging needles of high-impedance voltmeters are long gone with nixie tube displays and hot valve electronics. Thus both time and endeavour are marked both by technology and personality in the way Macer-Story suggests. That the dramas behind such endeavours may still be extending themselves in time is another question she raises in her book. Whenever such non-mechanical complexity is evident then we have to create some means of coming to terms with it.
Thus does this author set a relentless pace through a tapestry of cross-stitched and cross-referenced fabric in which mind-boggling jumps are made between names, places, personalities and motivation.
A face becomes a map, a voyage, a ship, a harbour; all mundane things are seen in a very different light to that of common experience, The lives of legendary pirates (Kidd, Morgan) are transformed into mythological elements involving key-setting place-names, and magical quests.
The great quality of the book is that it gives us some impression of the night-traffic in the borderlands between Matter and Spirit.
At times this author’s somewhat explosive technique does not make for easy reading, and some patience is required. She loops, dives, swerves, turns in on herself; frequently she gets lost, and presents not a few quite impenetrable paragraphs. But we forgive her, she has some genius, together with a great personal strength. and she does not bother wasting her visionary energies tidying up. Certainly there is no failure of nerve. She is a veritable latter-day Rommel; she crashes through and like many a good mind, leaves the dust of minor arguments and complaints for lesser folk to tidy up.
Yes, this extraordinary book is that good. It is a volatile one-woman performance show done at a cracking pace. Formal "history" she replaces by imagist states and metaphysical depths as she paints an intriguing picture of illicit night-traffic in the borderlands between Matter and Spirit.
Thus are left quite breathless as dizzying showers of images, symbols and metaphors descend upon us, and we are left suspended in Matrix country, where anything that can be imagined can happen. Finally, we are left looking out through the window of a Gormenghast castle at a bust of Captain Morgan mounted on a tower of Piranesi.
Colin Bennett
For UFO magazine
June, 2009