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The Death Spell Had Broken Between the Living and the Dead
Speculation is bound to pursue a wealthy, extremely beautiful, celibate recluse, who has lost those who mean the most to her and is haunted by spirits of the damned. Many wild rumors circulated about Sarah Winchester during her residence in Santa Clara Valley—her opulent estate was even known locally as “The Spirit House”—and some say the rumors may have added to Mrs. Winchester’s isolation. However, the glory, the splendor, the beauty of her mansion, surpassed the vicious rumors and speculation; and the fragrances of the Victorian garden were intoxicating. The tracks were gone; they vanished where the velvet emerald green sod began. There were plenty of creatures, and they welcomed her with caresses. Yet, Mrs. Winchester was bent, broken, withered, widowed—her head was white with unnumbered sorrows. She had been familiar with grief for a thousand years. The deaths of her young husband and her six-week-old daughter Annie stood out clear in her memory, for it was a land-mark; it brought Mrs. Winchester her first real misery, her first real heartbreak. Her memories were blurred with tears, and after ten centuries she cried over and over and over again. Crying over it for pity of that poor child—the child she had lost. Other mothers have felt something akin to this in recalling, not their former selves, (as in her case), but the little figures which represents sons and daughters of their which have since grown to the gravity and stature of full age. Sometimes, for a moment, these poor mothers have a vision of those little creatures romping by, and they recognize the voices of laughter—gone silent long ago!—and they have a pain at the heart, as knowing that those children are lost to them for always, in the flesh, although their grown-up selves are still present in life and still precious. The loved and lost! Lives having gone out from their mothers’, lives to return no more but in visions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Yes, across the mouldering centuries Mrs. Winchester could still see that silken little baby, with her waxen round arms, and delicate smile, just as she was, the fairest thing in this fair World; and in her heart, leathery as it was, she felt again the pang of that day’s disappointment, holding on to the memory of what could have been. It was weeks that she had been wandering the halls of her enormous mansion, and had found no trace of William, her husband. The Valley was so cruelly vast! Early she had a happy thought, and took the bloodhound throughout the estate and showed him the tracks, and was fully of hope, not doubting he would hunt him down in an hour. But she knew that she tried everything she could try, and just needed to say goodbye forever. The track gave no scent. William Winchester was dead. The hurt stayed with her, and Mrs. Winchester was resolved to absorb herself in the construction of her mansion. She did the work, but the old pleasure in it was somehow gone; she did not care anymore. She had between 500 to 600 rooms constructed, but thought they were not good ones and tore them down because her heart was not in it. Some of them were tolerable, but mainly they were crude and inartistic; they lacked finish. The miles of twisting hallways were made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. When Mrs. Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of the angry spirits or even of a bloodhound, to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment into another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Then she opened a window in that apartment and climbed out, not into the open air, but on the top of a flight of steps that took her down one story only to meet another flight that brought her right back up to the same level again, all inside the house. This was supposed to be very discomforting to evil spirits who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps. Mrs. Winchester was the most unfortunate of women. Rich, respected, very well educated and of sound health and mind—with many other advantages usually valued by those having them and coveted by those who have them not—she sometimes thought that she would be less unhappy if they had been denied her, for then the contrast between her outer and inner life would not be continually demanding a painful attention. In the stress of privation and the need of effort, she might sometimes forget the sombre secret ever baffling the conjecture that it compels. After communing with the spirits, as she turned the hallway, Mrs. Winchester could hear a sound of a door gently closing, and saw in the darkness, indistinctly, the figure of a man, which instantly disappeared among the statues and furniture. A hasty pursuit and brief search of the mansion in the belief that the trespasser was someone secretly visiting a servant proving fruitless, she entered an unlocked door and mounted the stairs to her chamber. Its door was open, and stepping into black darkness she fell headlong over some heavy object on the floor. She spared herself the details; it was her poor William, dead of strangulation by human hands! Nothing had been taken from the house, the servants had heard no sound, and excepting those terrible fingermarks upon the dead man’s throat—dear God she hoped to forget them!—no trace of the assassin was even found. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Although William had Tuberculosis, something had come to end his life before the illness did. Mrs. Winchester kept barbarous murder a secret. Mrs. Winchester donated a substantial sum of money to the Winchester Clinic of the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. One night, a few months after the dreadful event, Mrs. Winchester and her butler were walking back from the carriage house after a trip to the city. The full moon was about three hours above the eastern horizon; the entire countryside had the solemn stillness of a summer night; their footfalls and ceaseless song of the katydids were the only sound, aloof. Black shadows of bordering trees lay athwart the mansion, which, in the short reaches between, gleamed a ghostly white. As they approached the door to the mansion, whose front was in shadow, and in which no light shone, her butler suddenly stopped and clutched her arm, saying, hardly above his breath: “God! God! what is that?” “I heard nothing,” Mrs. Winchester replied. “But see—see!” he said, pointing along the road, directly ahead. Mrs. Winchester said: “Nothing is there. Come, Henry, let us go in—you are ill.” He had released her arm and was standing rigid and motionless in the center of the illuminated roadway, staring like one bereft of sense. His face in the moonlight showed a pallor and fixity inexpressibly distressing. She pulled gently at his sleeve, but he had forgotten her existence. Presently he began to retire backward, step by step, by step, never for an instant removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought he saw. Mrs. Winchester turned half round to follow, but stood irresolute. She did not recall any feeling of fear, unless a sudden chill was its physical manifestation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
It seemed as if an icy wind had touched her face and enfolded her body from head to foot; she could feel the stir of it in her hair. At that moment her attention was drawn to a light that suddenly streamed from an upper window of the mansion: one of the servants, awakened by what mysterious premonition of evil who can say, and in obedience to an impulse that she was never able to name, had turned on the Carbide gas lights, which were operated by pushing an electric button. When she turned to look for the butler he was gone, and in all the years that had passed no whisper of his fate has come across the borderland of conjecture from the realm of the unknown. Mrs. Winchester retired and had fallen almost immediately into a peaceful sleep, from which she awoke with an indefinable sense of peril which was, a common experience in her estate. The servants slept in another part of the house. But these were familiar conditions and never distressed Mrs. Winchester. Nevertheless, the strange terror grew so insupportable that concurring her reluctance to move she sat up and pushed the button to turn on the lights at her bedside. Contrary to her expectation this gave her no relief; the light seemed rather as added danger, for she reflected that it would shine out under the door, disclosing her presence to whatever evil think might lurk in the halls of her mansion. You that are still in the flesh, subject to horrors of the imagination, think what a monstrous fear that must be which seeks in darkness security from malevolent existences of the night. That is to spring to close quarters with an unseen enemy—the strategy of despair! Extinguishing the gas lights, Mrs. Winchester pulled the bedclothing about her heard and lay trembling and silent, unable to shrike, forgetful to pray. In this pitiable state she must have lain for what you call hours—with her there are no hours, there is no time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
At last it came—a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way; to her disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal. She even thought that she must have left the hall gasolier burning and the groping of this creature proved it a monster of the night. This was foolish and inconsistent with her previous dread of the light, but what would you have? Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. In Mrs. Winchester’s mansion lived those who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to themselves, and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning for speech with out loved ones, yet unenlightened, and as fearful of them as they of humans. Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate they break the spell—they are seen by those whom they would warn, console, or punish. What form they seem to them to bear one knows not; they know only that they terrify even those whom they most wish to comfort, and from whom they most crave tenderness and sympathy. What a thing it is to have legions of spirits, cowering and shivering, fearful and vengeful in an altered World, roaming the hallways of one’s house. However, Mrs. Winchester did not die of fright: the Thing turned and went away. She heard it go down the stairs, hurriedly, she thought, as if itself in sudden fear. Then she rose to call for help. Hardly had her shaking hand found the annunciator when—merciful Heaven!—she heard it returning. Its footfalls as it remounted the stairs were rapid, heavy and loud; they shook the mansion. She fled to an angle of the wall and crouched upon the floor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Winchester tried to pray. She tried to call the name of her maid. Then she heard the door thrown open. There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when she revived, she felt a strangling clutch upon her throat—felt her arms feebly beating against something that bore her backward—felt her tongue thrusting itself from between her teeth! And the she felt the life pass from her. As the spirits still dwelled in the mansion of the shadows, lurking in its desolate places, peering from brambles, thickets, towers, corners, stairways and doors. Ghosts at the Winchester mansion know when it is night, for then most people retire and they can venture from their places of concealment to move unafraid about in their old mansion, to look in at the windows, even to enter and gazes upon people’s faces who might still be wandering in the evening hours. Vainly, spirits often seek some method of manifestation, some way to make their continued existence and their great love and poignant pity understood by their loved one’s or those they wish to haunt and terrorize. Ghosts dare to approach people when they are awake, but the terrible eyes of the living frighten them by the glances that they seek from the purpose the hold. Demons, ghosts, and other spiritual beings search for the living in the Winchester mansion during the moonlight dawn. At the time of her death, the unrelenting construction had rambled over six acres. The sprawling mansion contained 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens. Carpenters even left nails half driven when they learned of Mrs. Winchester’s death. According to the provisions of her will, Mrs. Winchester’s personal property, including the furnishings, household goods, pictures, jewelry, and papers were left to her niece, Mrs. Marian Merriman Marriott, who promptly has the furnishings auctioned off. It is said to have required sic trucks working six weeks to car the furnishings away! The mansion and farm were not mentioned specially in the will. They became part of the Mrs. Winchester’s estate. #RandolphHaris 7 of 16
Demon possession is a well-defined phenomenon and should be clearly distinguished from spiritism. Since the same demonic forces are at work in both phenomena, they bear some similar characteristics and result in the same occult oppression and bondage. The demonized state of the demon possessed is similar to the trance of the spiritistic medium. Both are under the direct influence of demons who speak through them. In the case of the medium who processes to communicate with the spirits of deceased persons, the demon apes the personality and voice of the deceased. In the case of the demon possessed, the evil spirits appear to be more crassly cruel, unclean, violent, and less sophisticated and subtle than spirits working through a clairvoyant medium. In demon possession, they are also more domineering and brutally enslaving. Nervous muscular reactions and contortions peculiar to the demoniac often appear also in the spiritistic medium when one goes into a trance, but in a much milder form. Then, too, the demoniac is normally an involuntary victim of possession, while the medium is a willing subject, who cultivates psychic propensities and willingly yield to demonic control. Extraordinary movements of inanimate objects surrounding the demon-possessed remind us of similar happenings in spiritism. Extraordinary movements of inanimate objects surrounding the demon-possessed remind s of similar happenings in spiritism and magic. Tables, chairs, dishes, and the like are mysteriously moved about without anybody touching them, recalling tumbler moving and table lifting so common in spiritistic séances, and magic conjurations. In demon possession as well as in spiritism, unexplained rappings and noises in so-called “haunted houses” are heard. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
After the Winchester mansion was opened for tours, a spirit from the house had taken possession of one of the tour guides. The spirit insisted on taking up its abode with them, since it has been driven away from its for dwelling by the presence of Christians. Such cases of haunted houses about everywhere in occult literature in connection with mediums, magicians, and demon possessed persons. The tour guide saw apparitions and had frequent attacks in which she fell unconscious and demons spoke through her in their own voice and personality. A thorough investigation was conducted. Persons were stationed all around the house, in various rooms, and even in the Daisy Bedroom. Noises were heard which gradually increased in violence and seemed to concentrate in the bedroom Mrs. Winchester died in. Chairs bounced, windows rattled, plaster fell from the ceiling, and objects moved about without any visible explanation. Prayer caused the noises and telekinetic phenomena continued for a while in the mansion. On one occasion, after continued prayer, one of the demons inhabiting Jane cried out, “All is now.ost. Our plans are destroyed. You have shattered our bond, and put everything into confusion. You, with your everlasting prayers—you scatter us entirely. We are 13,130,130,130 in number. But there are still multitudes of living men, and you should warn them lest they be like us forever, lost and cursed of God.” The demon confessed that he was an emissary of Satan. The next day, the contents of the mansion were found in compete disarray and utter confusion. The amazing and terrifying thing was that the doors were still securely locked. No man or beast had entered. Evil spirits had obviously been at work in a satanic assault. On that day there were some tremendous crashing and knocking noises heard in the Winchester mansion, as if the whole house was filled with evil spirits. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Everyone giving tours in the mansion in the early 1900s, used to hear knocking and rumbling and crashing noises to such an extent that some of the visitors were frightened by them. Ghosts were also seen there quite regularly, even during the day time. A headless ghost was repeatedly seen in the mansion. Many people reporting becoming burned after contact with the “possessed” tour guide Jane. The autumn of 1925, all the pigs on the Winchester mansion’s farm died. The cause of death could not be found even though one of the carcasses was sent to a biological institute for examination. They tried everything but all to no avail. The following year the same thing happened again. This time the farmer redoubled his efforts to discover the cause of the pigs’ death. He had the stables inspected and the food analyzed but again without success. He thus decided to have the conservators of the estate decided to have the pigsty torn down and rebuilt on another site using completely different materials. Next year the pigs died again. They would all of the sudden squeal and then collapse. The whole process was repeated and every possible examination made in order to find out why the pigs had died. At this time certain of the member of the community began to say that someone must be killing the pigs magically out of spite. At first the conservators of the Winchester Estate would have nothing of this and continued to seek the advice of the vet and other such people. However, they could not help them, and so in the end they went to see the local minister to ask him about the question of magic. The minister simply laughed and said that the idea was stupid. Nevertheless the villagers pointed out to the representatives that there did exist some people in some areas of California who could kill livestock by means of magic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The conservators could do nothing though, and the event recurred year after year in spite of the fact that by now they had doubly secured the stables with locks and had sometimes stayed up all night with thread stretched out around the estate in order to discover if anyone was causing the animals’ deaths. One day, however, the circumstances changed. The minister visited the estate and asked one of the tour guides to accompany him to the vicarage. There they found one of the neighbour’s of the Winchester Estate, a man who had been less affluent, and this man confessed that it was he who had been the cause of everything. He had killed the pigs using black magic. The tour guides and conservators were naturally upset because by now 39 pigs had been killed. When asked why he had done this, the neighbour replied that it was because the tourists made such a noise outside his house. He had become so angry that he had tried to get his revenge in this way. He had subscribed himself to the devil with his own blood. To do this he had gone out on a Friday night to some crossroads and there drawn up a contract between himself and the devil. He mentioned that the devil had not appeared to him as he is often pictured, but that he met a black curly headed figure with blood-red eyes and a small snout and that the figure had been dressed in rather old-fashioned clothes. Ever since that day the man confessed that among other things, he had had the power to kill his friend’s pigs. The minister asked him what had made him come out into the open about the whole matter. His answer was that the people at the Winchester estate had been so kind to him over the year, donating food, clothes and furniture, that he had felt ashamed and he now asked for them to forgive him, and promised he would no longer plague them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Not wanting to take any legal action, the conservators of the Winchester Estate forgave him and all went well until the neighbour ceased going to church and slid back into his old ways. Since his confession none of the estate’s pigs had died but now the man again took up his drinking habits two more of the pigs died in exact same ways as the others. The conservators decided to shutdown the farming land of the Winchester Estate and sell off hundred of acres, only keeping four. In the process, several other Victorian houses on the grounds, along with fountains, and gazebos were demolished. From the psychological point of view it is suggested that a person delving into magic and who believes in occult practices is really only succumbing to a fulfilment compulsion. One unconsciously fulfils the things that one seeks to perform by magic. One is the victim of auto-suggestion. However, even if this were the whole explanation as some people affirm, it would still be true to say that occult practices have a corrupting effect on all those who get involved in them. Demons tend to be somewhat more independent than angels…When possession takes place, you will not get to see them at all. The Florida-based Luciferian Light Group (LLG) adopted the ‘Watcher myth’ of devils that were originally angels, sent to Earth to guard humankind and cursed by God for screwing their charges. In the original myth the couplings produced monsters, but, according to the LLG, the actual result was the Aryan race. They say that African Americans and other racial groups take pride in their cultural roots, so the argument goes, why should the same concept not apply to Europeans? The argument cannot be countered by liberal sophistry, and so the ghosts of German volkisch occultists continue to be conjured. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The role of cultural villain again proves to be a delicate balancing act—nothing can ever be condemned on purely moralistic grounds. Many people are still trying to protect “The Black House.” The Black Pope himself once reassured his flock, “the first 99 years are always the toughest. Rege Satanas!” Satanism is opposed to victimology and scapegoating. Many people are really drawn to the dark side because they grow up reading a lot of books and watching a lot of movies about it. If witches are out there, practicing some of the old ways of the pre-Christian gods and goddesses, then they are still Satanic in the sense that they are heretical. One side of the heretical and diabolical is the scientific aspect of Satanism. Copernicus and Galileo were regarded as practicing sorcerers in as far as they dared to challenge the supremacy of God with their heresies-their scientific research. Anton LaVey codified modern Satanism. There is a rich heritage of hearsay and blasphemy behind it, but as far as an aboveground religion that reveres Satan, there was not anything before the Church of Satan’s foundation in 1966. There were Black Masses that parodied the Catholic Church. A lot of modern Satanism draws from that codification or personification of Satan used as an archetype in mythology. Satanist are more interested in power, and what was going on in the castles and courts of the times. The interactions of power and Machiavellian machinations interest a Satanists rather than going out and find herbs to cure indigestion. Satanists are reaching for a religion of the aristocracy. They have all the aspects of that pride, that energy, that stye, and hopefully those elevated standards. Many people fear them because they believe they will lure you in their house and kill you, but is that not what many Christians are doing today? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Your relationship with your personal Satanic archetype is yours alone. The only way some can see how effective one is as a practicing black magician is how well one gets on in the outside of the World. Satanism has always represented and will always represent the adversary. He is a counterbalance to the unspoken injustice that prevails in the current society, whether that be overweening elitism or, going to the opposite extreme, mob rule. They always have to be in the minority that push hard in the other direction to get the pendulum swinging. Satanism will never be a religion of the people. It will never be populist beyond its current position. You see hundreds of thousands of kids making the sign of the horns, wearing black, getting devil tattoos, and listening to rock music they think is Satanic. They will take all the trappings and even grasp a few of the basic ideas, like Satan representing indulgence and independence of spirit. But, beyond that, they will always be a minority and that is how some think it should be. The Winchester mansion is a common site of demonic assault. In the early 1900s, a group of tourists and tour guides were attacked by demons; some became possessed; 30 people in the group were seized. In 1926, Satan and his allies once again possessed people at the Winchester mansion. For the first time in their lives, many of these people found themselves to be powerful, significant beings, establishing their own realm of authority. When they spoke, everyone in the mansion stopped to listen, for their shrill cries became testimony. Many historians have argued that the Satanism at the Winchester mansion was only the product of demented minds. However, there was something quite real in all the series of accusations and counteraccusations of the witnesses and the possessed—some definitely evil driving force that led humans to turn against one another like mad dogs lusting for the smell of blood. If Satan was to have presided over the Satanism at the Winchester Mansion, much was left out of the picture. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
The Devil manifested himself in many forms to people at the Winchester Mansion—as a horse, a fox, a dog, a cat, a pig, and as a shadowy figure. At the Sabbats, the Devil was always present in the form of a tall, handsome man with blue eyes and black hair making no attempt to disguise his identity in any way Neither was the all-important bloodletting present in the ceremonies, either in the form of a sacrifice or in the singing of the pact. There was no defiling of sacred object, nor mention of the administering of the witches’ mark, a painful ceremony that was quite vivid in the minds of many of the witches at the estate. The Sabbats, all in all, seemed to have been rather staid affairs, involving no wild ritual or debauchery. The Devil offered not immediate wealth or riches, but a new system of government, where all humans would be equal, each human being free to “live bravely.” He promised an end to beliefs. Whoever the Devil was at those meetings, he obviously did not seek adulation, but rather he sought to establish a more equal and suitable social order among humans. Taken in this context, the entire episode begins to sound like a huge projection, a gigantic wish fulfillment on the part of the disgruntled citizens, who were expressing disdain for the system that, in their eyes had become oppressive. The figure chosen by the confessors as the Devil presiding over the midnight Sabbats had himself become disillusioned by the system. Perhaps he had been holding nocturnal meetings in the mansion in an effort of “cleansing the soul.” At any rate, the meetings were necessary psychological safety valves in the minds of the people. People would stand around begging for the master to teach them his secret. How to become invisible, how to acquire love, and oh! beyond all, how to make gold. How much gold would you give for the Secret of Infinite Riches? Humans became strengthened with wonderful power through the order of angels, so that one declares the divine will. From the Seraphim, that we cling with fervent love. From the Cherubim, enlightenment of the mind, power and wisdom over the exalted figures and images, through which we can gaze upon divine things, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
From the Thronis, a knowledge of how we are made and constituted, that we may direct our thoughts upon eternal things. From Dominationbius, assistance to bring into subjection our daily enemies, who we carry with us constantly, and enabling us to attain salvation. From Potestatibus, protection against human enemies of life. From Virtuibus, God infuses strength into us, enabling us to contend against the enemies of truth and reward, that we may finish the courage of our natural life. From the Principtibus, that all things become subject to humans, that one may grasp all power, and draw unto oneself all secret and supernatural knowledge. From Archangelis, that one may rile over all things that God has made subject to one, over the animals of the field, over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air. From the Angelis one receives the power to be the messenger of the divine. When the veil between the conscious and the subconscious mind begins thinning it is likely that one will begin to experience certain phenomenon that will grab your attention throughout the day. This will occur more and more as the veil between Worlds thins merging your spiritual awareness with your physical life. Usually it will manifest in the form of synchronicity, Déjà vu, or circumstance which seems to jump out and grab your attention. Thee I invoke, the Bornless one. Thee, that didst create the Earth and the Heavens: Thee, that didst create the Night and the Day. Thee, that didst create the Darkness and the Light. Thou art Osorronophris: Whom no human has seen at any time. Thou art Ahriman. Hear Thou Me, for I am the Angel of Paphro. Osorronophris: this is Thy True Name, handed down to the Prophets of Ishrael. Ahriman rise up through the infernal planes through the seal of Arezura and find rest within this manifestation of the blessings. Fill this sorcerous fluid with your power and might that it will serve my cause of counter creation through the intent of my own evil mind. Bless this blood as the very powers of death, destruction, and decay that I may cast out all that does not serve the cause of my own great work upon this path of enlightenment. Come tour the dark, brooding and mysterious, promising all kinds of forbidden treats. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
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Why Does the Work Force Seem Riddled with Ulcer-Producing Levels of Angry and Envy?
It is hardly surprising that even smart executives seem confused. Some take Dale Carnegie courses on how to influence people, while others attend seminars on the tactics of negotiation, as though power were purely a matter of psychology or tactical maneuver. Still others privately bewail the presence of power in their firms, complaining on that power-play is bad for the bottom line—a wasteful diversion from the push for profit. They point to energy dissipated in personal power squabbles and unnecessary people added to the payroll of power-hungry empire-builders. When many of the most effect power wielders smoothly deny have any, confusion is redoubled. The bewilderment is understandable. Free-marketeer economists like Milton Friedman tend to picture the economy as an impersonal supply-and-demand machines and ignore the role of power in the creation of wealth and profit. Or they blandly assume that all the power struggles cancel one another out and thus leave the economy unaffected. This tendency to overlook the profit-making importance of power is not limited to conservative ideologues. One of the most influential texts in U.S.A. universitites is Economics by Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus. Its latest edition carries an index that runs to twenty-eight pages of eye-straining fine print. Nowhere in that index is the word power listed. (An important exception to this power-blindness or purblindness among celebrated American economists has been J.K. Galbraith, who, regardless of whether one agrees with his other views, has consistently tried to factor power into the economic equation.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Radical economists do a lot of talking about such things as business’s undue power to mold consumer wants, or about the power of monopolies and oligopolies to fix prices. They attack corporate lobbying, campaign contributions, and the less savory methods sometimes used by corporate interests to oppose regulation of worker healthy and safety, environment, progressive taxation, and the like. However, at a deeper level, even activists obsessed with limiting business power mistake (and underestimate) the role of power in the economy, including its beneficial and generative role, and seem unaware that power itself is going through a startling transformation. Behind many of their criticisms lurks the unstated idea that power is somehow extrinsic to production and profits. Or that the abuse of power by economic enterprises is a capitalist phenomenon. A close look at today’s powershift phenomenon will tell us, instead, that power is intrinsic to all economies. Not only excessive or ill-gotten profit, but all profits are partly (sometimes largely) determined by power rather than by efficiency. (If it has the power to impose its own terms on workers, suppliers, distributors, or customers, even the most inefficient firm can make a profit.) At virtually every step, power is an inescapable part of the very process of production—and this is true for all economic systems, capitalist, socialist, or whatever. Even in normal times, production requires the frequent making and breaking of power relationships, or their constant readjustment. However, today’s times are not “normal.” Heightened competition and accelerated change require constant innovation. Each attempt to innovate sparks resistance and new power conflict. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
However, in today’s revolutionary environment, when different systems of wealth creation collide, minor adjustments often no longer suffice. Power conflicts take on new intensity, and because companies are more and more interdependent, a power upheaval in one firm frequently produces reverberating shifts of power elsewhere. As we push further into a competitive global economy heavily based on knowledge, these conflicts and confrontations escalate. The result is that the power factor in business is growing more and more important, not just for individuals but for each business as a whole, bringing power shifts that often have a great impact on the level of profit than cheap labor, new technology, or rational economic calculation. From budget-allocation battles to bureaucratic empire-building, business organizations are already increasingly driven by power imperatives. Fast-multiplying conflicts over promotions and hiring, the relocation of plants, the introduction of new machines, or products, transfer pricing, reporting requirements, cost accounting, and the definition of accounting terms—all will trigger new power battles and shifts. The Italian psychologist Mara Selvini Palazzoli, whose group studies large organizations, report a case in which two men together owned a group of factories. The present hired a consulting psychologist, ostensibly to boost efficiency. Telling him that morale was low, he encouraged the consultant to interview widely to find out why the work force seemed riddled with ulcer-producing levels of angry and envy. The vice-president and co-owner (30 percent, versus 70 percent owned by the president) expressed skepticism about the project. Hiring a consultant, the president shrugged, was merely “the thing to do” nowadays. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Analysis by Palazzoil’s group revealed a snake pit of power relationships gone awry. The consultant’s overt agenda was to increase efficiency. However, his real task was different. In actuality, the president and vice-president were at dagger-points and the president wanted an ally. Palazzoli and her group write: “The president’s secret agenda was an attempt to gain control, through the psychologist, of the whole company, including manufacturing and sales [which were largely under the control of his vice-president and partner]….The vice-president’s secret agenda was to prove himself superior to his partner and to show that his authority derived from his greater technical competence [id est, better knowledge] and more commanding personality.” The case is typical of many. The fact is that all businesses, large and small, operate in a “power field” in which the three basic tools of power—force, wealth, and knowledge—are constantly used in conjunction with one another to adjust or revolutionize relationships. However, what the above case chronicles is merely “normal” power conflict. In the decades just ahead, as two great systems of wealth creation come into violent collision, as globalization spreads and the stakes rise, these normal contests will take place in the midst of far greater, more destabilizing power battles than any we have yet seen. This does not mean that power is the only goal, or that power is a fixed pie that companies and individuals fight to divine, or that mutually fair relationships are impossible, or that so-called “win-win” deal (in which both sides gain) are out of the question, or that all human relationships are necessarily reduced to a “power nexus,” rather than to Marx’s famous “cash nexus.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
However, it strongly suggests that the immense shifts of power that face us will make today’s takeovers and upheavals seem small by comparison, and will affect every aspect of business, from employee relations and the power of different function units—such as marketing, engineering, and finance—to the web of power relations between manufacturers and retailers, investors and managers. Men and women will make those changes However, the instruments of change will be force, wealth, and knowledge and the things they covert into. For inside the World of business, as in the larger World outside, force, wealth, and knowledge—like the ancient sword, jewel, and mirror of the sun goddess Amaterasu-ominkami—remain the primary tools of power. Failure to understand how they are changing is a ticker to economic oblivion. If that were all, business-men and -women would face a time of excruciating personal organizational pressure. However, it is not all. For a powershift, in the full sense, is more than a transfer of power. It is a sudden, sharp change in the nature of power—a change in the mix of knowledge, wealth, and force. To anticipate the deep changes soon to strike, therefore, we must look at the role of all three. Thus, before we can appreciate what is happening to power based on wealth and knowledge, we must be prepared to take an unsettling look at the role of violence in the business World. One reason the “surplus complexity” imposed on consumers when companies bundle too many functions into a single product is hopes of widening its market, a holdover from the era of mass merchandising. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
The result is cell phones that play music, take pictures, screen videos, offer games, track appointments, identify location, store memos and—if you are lucky—place and receive phones calls. Or a Volkswagen Passat that boasts of 120 different features, including a refrigerated glove compartment that can keep sushi cool. However, the more multi-functional a product, the more suboptimized its functions are, the more costly it is, and the more difficult it is to use. Since few customers want or need all the functions, the rest of us are victims of this surplus complexity. Complexity at the personal level is immensely amplified at the level of business, finance, the economy and society. In America, Elon Musk, who ought to know, speaks of “overcoming astronomically rising complexity.” In Germany, the Federal Financial Supervisory Board speaks of the “growing complexity of banking.” In Basel, Switzerland, the powerful Bank for International Settlements, which sets rules for banks all over the World and tells them how much capital they need to keep on hand, drafted a new set of proposed regulations called Basel II. These rules can shake up the World’s biggest banks, and governments everywhere are battling over them. Yet they were so obfuscating and complex that, according to banking consultant Emmanuel Pitsilis of McKinsey & Co., “Nobody understands 100 percent of Basel II or its implications.” Similarly, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is pulling together a collection of the financial and business instruments used in foreign direct investment and in deals among multinational corporations. Designed to be “conveniently available” to its user, the compendium runs to a mere fourteen volumes. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Welcome to “Complexorama”—the new everyday reality. Computers are supposed to help us cope with complexity, but software, according to MIT’s Technology Review, has “outrun our ability to comprehend it. It’s next to impossible to understand what is going on…whenever a program runs lager than a few hundred lines of code—and today’s desktop software contains millions of lines.” Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows software contains fifty million lines of code and its Vista product even more. Says Ran S. Ross of the National Information Assurance Partnership, the complexity of I.T. systems themselves has “outstripped our ability to protect them,” making “complexity…the No. 1 enemy of security.” We see mounting complexity in every aspect of business, from scheduling and marketing to calculating taxes. Especially taxes. The Cato Institute in Washington reports that the American tax code has been changed no fewer than seven thousand times in the past two decades, requiring a 74 percent increase in the number of pages needed to print it. The complexity of the system costs Americans an estimated six billion hours each year spent filling out forms, trying to understand the rules and collecting and storing records of transactions. Then there is the compliant, by USA Today, that the perennially low American savings rate is being further depressed by complexity. With seven different types of individual retirement accounts and many others offered by employers, each with its own rules and constraints, “a once simple savings concept has grown into an incomprehensible thicket that can be stored out only by high-priced accountants.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Exactly as one might therefore expect, the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that positions for accountants are multiplying rapidly. As one job search firm puts it, the growing demand reflects the “increasing complexity of the corporate transactions and growth in government.” Yet another measure of skyrocketing complexity is the increase in sub-and sub-sub-specialties in many fields. Half a century ago, before the shift to a knowledge economy began, the health-care profession was divided into about ten specializations. Today there are more than 220 categories of medical professionals, says Dr. David M. Lawrence of the Kaiser Permanente health network. In the 1970s they had to stay abreast of approximately one hundred randomized, controlled clinical research trials a year. Today the annual number is ten thousand. Outside the United States of America, we see a slower but similar process of complexification at work. The European Union agency devoted to R&D speaks of the “growing complexity of all our societies,” adding that “companies’ ability to manage this complexity will be a determining factor for Europe’s future innovation capacity.” An official of the British prime minister’s Office of Public Reform reports that “more complex personal and social problems are presented for state solution” and that “national objectives for better education, health and other outcomes can only be successful by engaging with this complexity.” Meanwhile, Karola Kampf of the University of Mainz in Germany describes the escalating complexity of higher education. Kampf speaks of the “increasing number of system levels,” the multiplying types of “corporative actors” involved with the university, the rising importance of NGOs and “intermediary actors,” the “growing number of policy fields concerned with higher education” and a rise in “different modes of coordination.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The mounting complexity of universities, however, whether in Europe or elsewhere, is nothing compared with the dizzying complexity of health-care systems dependent on fast-diversifying medical specializations, tests and forms of medical treatment, equipment, schedules, government regulations, financial and accounting arrangements—all constantly interacting at high speed. These are just a few examples. However, lay over these the additional intricate complexities of local, national and now global environmental regulations; financial and trade rules; disease controls; anti-terror constraints; negotiations over water and other resources; and an endless list of other interrelated functions, processes and laws. Then lay on top of that the complexities introduced by tends of thousands of NGOs each proposing or demanding it own new complexities. A decade ago, the Union of International Associations in Brussels published the two-volume Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential. Its ambitions compendium listed no fewer than12203, “world problems,” each one cross-referenced to others that are “more general,” more specific, related, aggravating, aggravated, alleviating [or] alleviated.” The index to the section had no fewer than 53,825 entries, backed by a bibliography of 4,650 sources. And that was then. We are moving beyond the relative simplicity of an industrial era that everywhere emphasized uniformity, standardization and one-size-fits-all massification. And the United States of America is not alone in generating the new complexity. Add the byzantine complexities imposed by the European Union in an attempt to “harmonize” everything from education to cheese. Only computers can keep track. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
What we see, then, are changes in the deep fundamentals that are creating the revolutionary wealth system and a corresponding way of life, both based on unprecedented levels of economic and social complexity. Together, the convergence of acceleration, de-synchronization and reglobalization, along with a tsunami of new knowledge, is overwhelming our rust-belt institutions and driving us ever closer to implosion. Fortunately, there is a way out. Before looking further at the stability of the cooperation, it is interesting to see how cooperation got started in the first place. The first stage of the war, which began in August 1914, was highly mobile and very bloody. However, as the lines stabilized, nonaggression between the troops emerged spontaneously in many places along the front. The earliest instances may have been associated with meals which were served at the same time on both sides of no-man’s land. As early as November 1914, a noncommissioned officer whose unit had been in the trenches for some days, observed that “the quartermaster used to bring the rations up…each night after dark; they were laid out and parties used to come from the front line to fetch them. I supposed the enemy were occupied in the same way; so things were quiet at that hour for a couple of nights, and the ration parties became careless because of it, and laughed and talked their way back to their companies.” By Christmas there was extensive fraternization, a practice which the headquarters frowned upon. In the following months, direct truces were occasionally arranged by shouts or by signals. An eyewitness noted that: “In one section the hour of 8 to 9am was regarded as consecrated to “private business,” and certain places indicated by flag were regarded as out of bounds by the snipers on both sides.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, direct truces were easily suppressed. Orders were issued making clear that the soldiers “where in France to fight and not to fraternize with the enemy.” More to the point, several soldiers were court martialed and whole battalions were punished. Soon it became clear that verbal arrangements were suppressed by the high command and such arrangements became rare. Another way in which mutual restraint got started was during a spell of miserable weather. When the rains were bad enough, it was almost impossible to undertake major aggressive action. Often ad hoc weather truces emerged in which the troops simply did not shoot at each other. When the weather improved, the pattern of mutual restraint sometimes simply continued. So verbal agreements were effective in getting cooperation stared on many occasions early in the war, but direct fraternization was easily suppressed. More effective in the long run were various methods which allowed the two sides to coordinate their actions without having to resort to words. A key factor was the realization that is one side would exercise a particular kind of restraint, then the other might reciprocator. Similarities in basic needs and activities let the solider appreciate that the other side would probably not be following a strategy of unconditional defection. For example, in the summer of 1915, a soldier saw that the enemy would be likely to reciprocate cooperation based on the desire for fresh rations. “It would be child’s play to shell the road behind the enemy’s trenches, crowded as it must be with ration wagons and water carts, into a bloodstained wilderness…but on the whole there is silence. After all, if you prevent your enemy from drawing his rations, his remedy is simple: he will prevent you from drawing yours.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Once started, strategies based on reciprocity could spread in a variety of ways. A restraint undertaken in certain hours could be extended to longer hours. A particular kind of restraint could lead to attempting other kinds of restraint. And most importantly of all, the progress achieved in one small sector of the front could be imitated by the units in neighboring sectors. Just as important as getting cooperation started were the conditions that allowed it to be sustainable. The strategies that could sustain mutual cooperation were the ones which were provocable. If necessary, during the periods of mutual restraint, the enemy soldiers took pains to show each other that they could indeed retaliate. For example, German snipers showed their prowess to the British by aiming at spots on the walls of cottages and firing until they had cut a hole. Likewise, if they wished to, the artillery would often demonstrate with a few accurately aimed shots that they could do more damage. These demonstrations of retaliatory capabilities helped police the system by showing that restraint was not due to weakness, and the defection would be self-defeating. When a defection actually occurred, the retaliation was often more than would be called for by TIT FOR TAT. Two-for-one or three-for-one was a common response to an act that went beyond what was considered acceptable. “We go out at night in front of the trenches…The German working parties are also out, so it is not considered etiquette to fire. The really nasty things are rifle grenades…They can kill as many as eight or not if they do fall into a trench…But we never use ours unless the Germans get particularly noisy, as on their system of retaliation three for every one of ours come back.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
There was probably an inherent damping process that usually prevented these retaliations from leading to an uncontrolled echo of mutual recriminations. The side that instigated the action might not the escalated response and not try to redouble or retriple it. One the escalation was not driven further, it would probably tend to die out. Since not every bullet, grenade, or shell fired in earnest would hit its target, there would be an inherent tendency toward escalation. Therefore, it is clear that business negations are a lot like war strategy. When it comes to transportation outward, there are other things we need to consider. For example, Jim Salin’s afternoon from Dulles International is on the ground, late for departure. Impatiently, Jim checks the time: any later, and he will miss his connecting flight. At last, the glassy-surfaced craft rolls down the runway. With gliderlike winds, it lifts its portly body and climbs steeply toward the east. A few pages into his novel, Jim is interrupted by a second recitation of safety instructions and the captain’s announcement that they will try to make up for lost time. Jim settles back in his seat as the main engines kick in, the wings retract, the acceleration builds, and the sky darkens to black. Like the highest-performance rockets of the 1980s, Jim’ liner produces an exhaust of pure water vapor. Spaceflight has become clean, safe, and routine. And more people go up than come down. The cost of spaceflight is mostly the cost of high-performance, reliable hardware. Molecular manufacturing will make aerospace structures from nearly flawless, superstrong materials at low cost. Add inexpensive fuel, and space will become more accessible than the other side of the ocean is today. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Galileo did not invent the telescope, although he did not always object to the attribution. A Dutch spectacle-maker named Johann Lippershey was probably the instrument’s true inventor; at any rate, he was the first to claim a license for its manufacture, in 1608. (It might also be worth remarking here that the famous experiment of dropping cannon balls from the Tower of Pisa was not only not done by Galileo but actually carried out by one of his adversaries, Giorgio Coressio, who was trying to confirm, not dispute, Aristotle’s opinion that larger bodies fall more quickly than smaller ones.) Nonetheless, to Galileo must go the entire credit for transforming the telescope from a toy into an instrument of science. And to Galileo must also go to the credit for transforming the telescope from a toy into an instrument of science. And to Galileo must also go the credit of making astronomy a source of pain and confusion to prevailing theology. His discover of the four moons of Jupiter and the simplicity and accessibility of his writing style were key weapons in his arsenal. However, more important was the directness with which he disputed the scriptures. In his famous Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, he used arguments first advanced by Kepler as to why the Bible could not be interpreted literally. However, he went further in saying that nothing physical that could be directly observed or which demonstrations could prove ought to be questioned merely because Biblical passages say otherwise. More clearly than Kepler had been able to do, Galileo disqualified the doctors of the church from offering opinions about nature. To allow them to do so, he charged, is pure folly. He wrote, “This would be as if an absolute despot, being neither a physician nor an architect, but knowing himself free to command, should undertake to administer medicines and erect buildings according to his whim—at grave peril of his poor patients’ lives, and the speedy collapse of his edifices.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
From this and other audiation arguments, the doctors of the church were sent reeling. It is therefore astonishing that all the church made persistent efforts to accommodate its beliefs to Galileo’s observations and claims. It was willing, for example, to accept as hypotheses that the Earth moves and that the sun stands still. This, on the grounds that it is the business of mathematicians to formulate interesting hypotheses. However, there could be no accommodation with Galileo’s claim that the movement of the Earth is a fact of nature. Such a belief was definitively held to be injurious to holy faith by contradicting Scripture. Thus, the trail of Galileo for heresy was inevitable even though long delayed. The trail took place in 1633, resulting in Galileo’s conviction. Among the punishments were that Galileo was to abjure Copernican opinion, serve time in a formal prison, and for three years repeat once a week seven penitential psalms. There is probably no truth to the belief that Galileo mumbled at the conclusion of his sentencing, “But the Earth moves” or some similar expression of defiance. He had, in fact, been asked for times at his trial if he believed in the Copernician view, and each time he said he did not. Everyone knew he believed otherwise, and that it was his advanced age, infirmities, and fear of torture that dictated his compliance. In any case, Galileo did not spend a single day in prison. He was confined at fist to the grand duke’s villa at Trinita del Monte, then to the palace of Archbishop Piccolomini in Siena, and final to his home in Florence, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1642, the year Isaac Newton was born. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
In a society like ours, in which people have become increasingly isolated from each other in their offices, private cars, single-family living units and television-watching, sharing personal information has become a rarity. The extended family is gone and neighborhood community gatherings are increasingly the exception to the rule. There is less and less interpersonal sharing of intimate problems, few windows into other people’s lives. Now our only windows are professional counselors, psychiatrists, and, least expensive and most available, television. It becomes the window for most people. That it looks into fictional lives is irrelevant. Although critics complain about the stereotyped characters and plots of TV dramas, many viewers look on them as representatives of the real World. Anyone questions that assertion should read the 250,000 letters, mostly containing requests for medical advice sent by views during the first five years of one doctor’s practice on television. Imagine a hermit they suggest, who lives in a cave linked to the outside World by a television set that functions only during prime time. One’s knowledge of the World would be built exclusively out of the images and facts one could glean from the fictional events, persons, objects and places that appear on television. His expectations and judgments about the ways of the World would follow the conventions of TV programs with their predictable plots and outcomes. His views of human nature would be shaped by the shallow psychology of TV characters. There are definite distortions of reality in three areas that we measured: Heavy users of television were more likely to overestimate the percentage of the World population that lives in America; they seriously overestimated the percentage of the population who have professional jobs; and they drastically overestimated the number of police in the United States of America and the amount of violence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In all these cases, the overestimate matched a distortion that exists in television programming. The more television people watched, the more their view of the World matched television reality. Knowledge that the television programs were fictional—surely no one who watched them can consciously doubt that police dramas are fiction—does not prevent one from “believing” them anyway, or at least gaining important impressions which lead to beliefs. If you need further proof of this, there is always advertising. A recent study showed that a greater percentage of voters based their decisions concerning candidates and ballot propositions on information received from advertising than on information received in any other way. This may be partially due to the fact that, except for big electoral races which are widely reported in all news media, we are likely to receive a greater quantity of data from advertising than from the news. This is certainly true of most congressional races and ballot issues. Yet we all know that advertising cannot be considered always truthful. In fact, it is by nature one-sided. Advertising always reflects only the facts and opinions of the people who pay for it. Why lese would they pay for it? And yet, knowing that people use advertising information as though it can be relied upon. When it comes to product advertising, the situation is clearer still. When one is watching an advertisement, one knows for sure that the advertiser is trying to get you to do something: but the product. One also knows that the people in the ad are not “real,” that is, they are actors who are speaking lines, in situations that do not represent their actual lives. Everyone knows this. We all know that the motive of the sponsor and the actors and the writers of the ads is that they are all trying to implant a feeling in us that will eventually get us to but something. We know they are doing this, but we often act on the ad. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
In Meat Joy (Paris, 1964) nearly naked men and women interacted, in a rather frenzied, Dionysian way, with one another and with hunks of raw meat and carcasses of fish and chickens. They smeared themselves with blood, imprinted their bodies on aper, tore chickens apart, threw chunks of raw meat and torn fowl about, slapped one another with them, kisses and rolled about “to exhaustion,” and so on. The sparagmatic dismemberment and the suggestion of the suspension of mating taboos both evoke Maenadism and the Dionysian cult. The wild freedom advocated by this ancient cult, as well as its suggestions of rebirth, seemed appropriate expression of the unchecked newness that faced the art World as its boundaries dissolved and opened on all sides into unexpected vistas, where traditional media, torn apart and digested, were reborn in unaccountable new forms. The Dionysian subversion of ego in the cause of general fertility has become another persistent theme of appropriation performance. Barbara Smith has performed what she calls a Tantric ritual, that included pleasures of the flesh, in a gallery setting as an artwork. In general, performance works involving appropriate of religious forms follow two groups: those that select from the neolithic sensibility of fertility and blood sacrifice, and those that select from the paleolithic sensibility of shamanic magic and ordeal; often the two strains mix. Both may be seen as expression of the desire, so widespread in the 60s and early 70s, to reconstitute within Modern civilization something like an ancient or primitive sensibility of oneness with nature. Though the erotic content of the works based on the themes of fertility has been received with some shock, it is the work based on the shamanic ordeal that the art audience has found most difficult and repellent. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Clearly that is part of the intention of the work, and in fact a part of its proper content. However, it is important to make clear that these artists have an earnest desire to communicate, rather than simply shock. Seen in an adequate context, their work is not aggression but expression. Nietzsche restored to something like the soul to our understanding of man by providing a supplement to the flat, dry screen of consciousness, which with pure intellect looks at the rest of humanity as something alien, a bundle of affects of matter, like any other object of physics, chemistry and biology. The unconscious replaces all the irrational things—above all divine madness and eros—which were part of the old soul and had lost significance in modernity. It provides a link between consciousness and nature as a whole, restoring therewith the unity of humanity. Nietzsche made psychology, as the most important study, possible again; and everything of interest in psychology during the last century—not only psychoanalysis but also Gestalt, phenomenology, and existentialism—took place within the confines of the spiritual continent he discovered. However, the difference between the self and the soul remains great because of the change in the status of reason. The reconstitution of man in Nietzsche required that sacrifice of reason, which Enlightenment, whatever its failings, kept the center. For all the charms of Nietzsche and all that he says to hearten a lover of the soul, he is further away from Plato in this crucial respect than was Descartes or Locke. Since the wicked man has negated his existence, he ends in nothing, his way is his judgement. However, with sinners it is different: their “not standing” does not refer to the decision of the supreme judgement, it is only a human community which is unable to offer them any stability if it is not to make its own stability questionable. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
However, entry into this community is not closed to them. They need only to carry out that turning into God’s way, of which permits us to the divine, is not merely open to them but that they themselves may desire it in the depths of their hearts, whereas they do not feel themselves strong enough, or rather fancy they are not strong enough, to enter upon it. Is the way, then, closed to the wicked? It is not closed from God’s side—so we may continue the reflection of the divine way—but it is closed from the side of the wicked themselves. For in distinction from the sinners they do not wish to be able to turn. That is why their way peters out. Here, it is true, there arises for us modern interpreters of the Divine way to which neither this nor any other work of knowledge nor any human word knows the answer: how can an evil will exist, when God exists? The abyss which is opened by this question stretches, even more uncannily than the abyss of Job’s question, into the darkness of the divine mystery. Before this abyss the interpreter of the Psalms stands silent. Underlying principles of respect that were once commonplace in society have increasingly given way to unkind behavior. To help our children and youth set aside the many negative examples that bombard them, we must first understand respect, reasons we sometimes act disrespectfully, gospel principle that apply, and ways we can be better teachers and exemplars of respect. Respect is being polite or civil to those we meet or with whom we interact. This would include being respectful of a teacher. We hope grandchildren will treat grandparents respectfully during visits. We usually treat strangers with polite respect. We want children and others to treat us with respect—using good manners—but also to honor our standards, which we seek to exemplify through Christlike living. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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By the Way of King Diamond and Diamond Baby
Black metal, as a 1990s phenomenon, is a creature with an identity largely distinct from its parent heavy metal music. Growing like a poisonous fungus away from the light of mainstream media and interest, it developed its own bizarre sounds, imagery and philosophies. Fostered upon a diet of xeroxed fanzines with names like Thanatograpy (after Thanatos, Greek god of death), Hammer of Damnation and Baphomet, its teenage male exponents were keen to make their mark with a genre too willfully obnoxious for outsiders. Visually, bands tried to outdo each other with outrageously macabre or offensive imagery: fire-breathing; tattered black clothing or robes; blood-soaked or naked flesh; medieval weaponry; bullet belts and spiked leather; insane calligraphy—spattered with profane images—which rendered band names illegible or scarcely identifiable. The most striking black-metal “fashion statement,” however, was the sepulchral black-and-white make-up worn by many bands which became known as “corpse paint”—a mutated offspring of the theatrical greasepaint worn by KISS in the 1970s, by way of King Diamond. At the movements genesis, few band members had racked up enough years of experience to excel at their instruments in the traditional fashion—instead, they concentrated on producing unearthly, crazed, bizarre sounds with guitars, drums, the human voice and keyboards. Specialist independent record labels, founded by fans or the bands themselves, sprang up as a truly international underground: Osmose Productions in France; Blackground Records 2.0 and Wild Rags in America; Candlelight Records in Spain. The list continues to proliferate to the present day, but the most influential of all was a small Scandinavian label called Deathlike Silence—of which, much more later. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
One of the more arresting rock artists of the early 1990s bridged the gap between the musical extremes of black metal and rock “n” roll’s demonic roots in the blues. Far subtler than most black metal bands, Glenn Danzig still operated at the infernal end of the spectrum. An anomaly who stubbornly refused to bow to the expectations of either purists or populists, Danzig began his career at the height of the punk revolution in 1977 as vocalist for New Jersey band the Misfits. No ordinary punk band, Danzig’s classic rock “n” roll delivery gave a quasi-1950s feel to their abrasive sound, while they spurned the usual punk look in devour of an all-year-round Halloween image. Sporting monstrous black quiffs they dubbed “devil locks,” the Misfits often took the stage in skeletal garb—indeed, Danzig’s skull make-up was prescient of the “corpse paint” popular among the 1990s black metal bands. The Misfits were one of the first punk bands whose songs possessed a strong gothic undercurrent. Many reflected their love of fascinating schlock movies, such as “Teenagers from Mars” and “Return of the Fly,” but others were genuinely disturbing explorations of hat and violence. Their second recording, Bullet, featured a song entitled “Hollywood Babylon,” inspired by magus and film-maker Kenneth Anger, while another track included an authentic Latin chant for effecting a werewolf transformation. In what was to become a familiar pattern, Danzig tired of the more tongue-in-cheek aspects of the Misfits, forming Samhain (pronounced “Sow-En”—the precursor to Halloween, a Celtic festival dedicated to fire and death) who released their first album, Initium, in 1984. This was a stark journey into primal evil, threatening rhythms and bleak guitars combining with Danzig’s lupine vocals to create a musical beast that howled at the World. It was all too bleak for most audiences and, in 1987, the vocalist dissolved the band in order to enter his third incarnation—called simply Danzig. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Danzig was in many ways the singer’s most innovative project, as well as the most overtly Satanic. Voodoo blues as deep and black as Mississippi mud met predatory heavy metal, with vocal style redolent of early rock “n” roll’s late-fifties/early-sixties crooners. Typically, Glenn Danzig’s insistence on treating his Satanic subject matter without a trace of irony did not endear him to the press. Short, powerfully built, with raven black hair and prominent side-burns, the music media dubbed him as “Evil Elvis” or, more irreverently, “Fonzig.” Some audiences were also perplexed: younger black metal fans wanted a less subtle Satanism, while rock fans who appreciated Danzig’s musical approach found his lyrical preoccupation off-putting. Nevertheless, the ban attracted a dedicated fan base, appreciative of a familiarity with demonic subject matter that most shock-horror rockers could only envy. Nietzschean howls of defiance against the Creator, such as “Godless,” complemented more traditional takes on hellish suffering like “Tired of Being Alive.” At his quietest, Danzig was at his most sinister—like the poet William Blake, Danzig identified love as “a Devil’s thing.” In 1994, when MTV picked up on the video for the anthemic “Mother, the band received mainstream attention; in the same year, an uncompromising Glenn Danzig released a solo project entitled Black Aria: an album of quasi-classical music retelling the story of Satan’s fall from grace. In 1996, after four albums of powerfully-infernal rock music, Danzig took his eponymus band in a new direction. BlackAcidDevil was predominantly an industrial record, many fans mourning the passing of the classic Danzig sound and dismissing at as “poor man’s Nine Inch Nails.” In truth, when the industrial grind is layered with the dark velvet of Danzig’s seductive tones—as on “Come to Silver,” an exploration of temptation—then the material becomes really interesting. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The indifferent sales and reviews that greeted BlackAcidDevil tested Danzig’s already-strained relationship with the music business. He let the band slip back into the cult status he was perhaps happiest with, and began spending the money he had made from his musical career on other projects—most notably a comic-book company named Verotik. As the company’s name suggests, these comics are crammed with violence and erotica, combined with the fascination for all things infernal that has become Glenn Danzig’s trademark. Scripting many of the comic-strips himself, Danzig introduced overly devilish characters, like the vamp Satanika, to stake his claim as one of the main modern contributors to Satanic popular culture. On the continent of Europe, particularly in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, things were being taken to a less subtle extreme. Deathlike Silence was an independent record label owned by a young man who re-named himself Euronymous—according to some folklore traditions, a cannibalistic demon with skin the bluish-black colour of a meatfly’s carapace—who also ran a dank, dingy specialist record store named Helvete (meaning “Hell”) and founded a band called Mayhem. Mayhem formed in 1984, just as the original black metal scene was peaking, debuting with a demo called Pure Fucking Armageddon and an album called Deathcrush. Interest in Satanic imagery, with its attendant gothic spikes-and-leather garb, was faltering among audiences at this time, but Mayhem clung onto its uncompromising style. They sounded like a rawer, more grinding version of Venom, screaming and thundering between militaristic marches and growling rage. As the tastes of young underground fans in the 1990s swung further towards the diabolical excess, Euronymous’ obsessive dedication made him a potent force on the newly-burgeoning black metal scene. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
During the early 1990s, Euronymous’ store became the focus for a small circle of likeminded Scandinavian metal fans who all started their own bands. This loose group named itself variously the Black Metal Circle, Satanic Terrorists or Black Metal Mafia, and was influenced by the supposedly Satanic doctrines of Euronymous—based around a vague reading of the biblical concept of war between Heaven and Hell. For Euronymous, siding with Satan meant endorsing everything that was considered evil, spiteful, hateful. Hate motivated his philosophy, coloured by the cold, depressive morbidity that characterizes the negative edge of the Scandinavian psyche. All of the releases on Deathlike Silence were stamped with the “Anti-Mosh” symbol (moshing is a raucously combative form of dancing common to thrash and death metal fans). Around the symbol were stamped the messages “No Mosh,” “No Core” (a reference to the hardcore punk revival), “No Trends” and “No Fun”—these sentiments taking against those metal audiences who were introducing splashes of gaudy mainstream colour, in the form of Bermuda shorts, baseball caps and skateboards. In the center of the “No Moshing” symbol was a red line struck through those figures Euronymous professed to hate most: Scott Burns, the Florida-based record producer whose work had come to dominate the death metal scene, and curiously, Anton LaVey. Euronymous divorced himself from all Satanic tradition, loathing LaVey because of the Church of Satan’s philosophy of self-empowerment and individualism. Euronymous’ simple faith expressed all that was negative: a cold core for violent code of self-destructive nihilism. Joining Mayhem in their isolated World of hate were several other extreme bands. Burzum—chiefly a vehicle for Count Grishnackh (given name Kristian Vikernes, though he legally changed his first name to Varg, Norwegian for “wolf”), who had lived in the damp, lightless cellar of the Helvete record shop for some time—were a prominent presence. Burzum were an odd blend of frustrated insanity and strange, sad, ambient mood music, pained pathos and gibbering fury—oddly effective, but distinctly disturbed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Founder member Grishnackh took his name from one of the evil “orc” characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings, while Burzum meant “darkness” in the orcish language conceived by Tolkien. Perverse as this seems, it should be remembered that The Bible is just a book of stories—in this light, perhaps using The Lord of the Rings as the basis for an (im)moral philosophical code is not wholly ludicrous. However, it does an infernal philosopher’s credibility no favours to identify too closely with “hobbits” (glorified goblin). Grishnackh’s personal mythology combined the darkness-versus-light motifs of “mystic quest”/sword-and-sorcery sagas with the violent Viking tradition he believed true Northern Europeans belonged to. While this seems symptomatic of Scandinavia’s peripheral removal from—and distorted imitation of—Western pop culture, it also has an authentic dark side. As is common among Norse pagan revivalists, the Black Metal Circle began to espouse race-based Nazi political views. (Though totalitarian-loving Euronymous also expressed admiration for communist despots and Cambodian genocidalist Pol Pot.) Also pivotal in this new movement were the bands Emperor, Immortal, Enslaved and Arcturus. The last to join Euronymous’s Norwegian cadre were Dark Throne, who had already recorded one death metal album, Soulside Journey, in 1990. In the following year, they disowned their debut, donned corpse-paint and joined the “Satanic Mafia” with their album A Blaze in the Northern Sky. If Euronymous exemplified the nihilistic hate at the heart of the Black Metal Circle, and Burzum represented its violent Norse/Nazi fantasies, then Dark Throne symbolized the Circle’s isolation and sociopathic need for solitude. Taking their country’s sombre, anti-social reputation to extremes, the band never met to record, spoke little, and spent increasing periods alone in the frost-bitten Norwegian wilderness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the spring of 1991, Mayhem’s vocalist died: a Swede who, by way of black comedy, had re-named himself “Dead.” Dead blew his head off with a shotgun, leaving a note to day that he felt he was not of this World, but belonged instead to the cold solitude of the forest. He also apologized for the mess. As in common with obsessively inward-looking groups like the Black Metal Circle, a crisis of this type either causes the grouping to dissolve, or re-enforces their convictions. The latter instance applied, and the Circle hailed Dead as a hero. Euronymous, who found the corpse, rushed out for a camera to take his final photograph of Dead before altering the authorities—claiming a morsel of brain to make into soup and a fragment of skull to fashion into a necklace. At this point, the Black Metal Circle were no longer merely a group of disaffected teens and early-twentysomethings, but a subculture who believed themselves to be at the center of significant, apocalyptic events. Euronymous’ demented, anti-social rants were making him a regular feature in the underground metal fanzines; despite the continued indifference of the global music media, black metal was rising from the grassroots across the World. The “legend of Dead” contributed to a growing international interest in extreme, Scandinavian Satanic metal, with Deathlike Silence treating the grim event as a grotesque promotional gimmick. For the first time, European countries bordering the Mediterranean also began throwing up a slew of black metal acts—most notably the Greek band Rotting Christ. In contrast to the could hatred of the Northerners, the Southern European scene was inclined to a less self-destructive, more LaVeyan approach—though Anton LaVey would have regarded many of them as blasphemy-fixated novices, struggling to topple the repressive Christianity that dominates their culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Much of black metal is supposed to be inspired by demons. They cannot be any worse than human being, right? Many of them just have never possessed a body of their own. They are souls who have been lurking around before humanity. Before the dinosaurs. They are the darkness. The reason God created life so that life could flourish and grow and rest when it is dark. Demon possession is a condition in which one or more evil spirits or demons inhabit the body of a human being and can take complete control of their victim at will. By temporarily blotting out one’s consciousness, they can speak and act through one as their complete slave and tool. The inhabiting demon (or demons) comes and goes much like the proprietor of a house who may or may not be “at home.” When the demon is “at home,” one may precipitate an attack. In these attacks the victim passes from one’s normal state of possession. The condition of the afflicted person in the “possessed” state varies greatly. Sometimes it is marked by depression and deep melancholy, sometimes by vacancy and stupidity that resemble idiocy. Sometimes the victim may be ecstatic or extremely malevolent and wildly ferocious. During the transition from the normal to the abnormal state, the victim is frequently thrown into a violent paroxysm, often falling to the ground unconscious, foaming at the mouth with symptoms similar to epilepsy or hysteria. The intervals between attacks vary greatly from an hour or less to months. Between attacks, the subject may be healthy and appear normal in every way. The abnormal or demonized stages can last a few minutes or several days. Sometimes the attacks are mild; sometimes they are violent. If they are frequent and violent, the health of the subject suffers. The chief characteristic of demon possession or demonomania is the automatic projection of a new personality in the victim. During attack the victim’s personality is completely obliterated, and the inhabiting demon’s personality takes over completely. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The inhabiting demon uses the victim’s body as a vehicle for one’s own thoughts, words, and acts. The demon even speaks out of the victim’s mouth and declares emphatically that one is a demon. Frequently one gives one’s name and dwelling place. The new personality reveals itself in a different voice and sometimes uses a different language or dialect on a completely different educational or cultural level. Pronouns are used to emphasize the new personality. The first personal pronoun consistently designates the inhabiting demon. Bystanders are addressed in the second person. The victim is referred to in the third person and looked upon during the attack as unconscious and for all practical purposes as nonexistent during this interval. Demonomania should be clearly differentiated from the insanity in which a person imagines oneself to be someone else, often a famous personality such as Liz Taylor, Julius Caesar, of William Randolph Hearst. The demoniac, when in the demonized state characterized by the new personality, speaks and acts in all respects like a completely different person. By contrast, the insane person is one’s own diseased self, one’s assumed personality being a transparent unreality. In cases of demon possession the new personality clearly and constantly recognizes the distinct existence and individuality of its “possessed” victim, speaking of that victim in the third person, an element entirely lacking in cases of insanity. Because various inadequate theories have left demon possession largely unexplained, it is quite probable that some patients in mental hospitals are demon possessed rather than insane. This was the conviction of the famous nineteenth-century specialist in mental diseases, Dr. Forces Benignus Winslow (1810-1874). He correctly recognized the demoniac by a strange duality; and by the fact that, when temporarily relived from the oppression of the demon, he is frequently able to describe the force which takes control of one and compels one to act and speak shamefully. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
While in the demonized state many persons give evidence of knowledge which cannot be accounted for naturally. The demon who takes control of the body of one’s victim is obviously the source of the superhuman knowledge. While demon possessed, many persons recognize the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and display an aversion to and a fear of Him (Mark 1.23-24; 5.7). The case of Mrs. Winchester, who lived in Santa Clara County, illustrates how a woman came under demon domination through practicing séances. Being centered within our own God like power is of utmost importance. Even when evoked to create change directly, keep in mind that you are the God that wields these powers for the cause of Counter Creation. Just be careful! As a God you will be tested and so how these powers are wielded is a powerful initiatic test in its own right. Mrs. Winchester was in her Blue Séance Room, she lite a candle on her left first, and then a candle on her right. A sacred serpent was sacrificed over the wood sigil and the blood was left to drain upon the idol. Then the body of the serpent was encircled around it, she chanted “I do invocate and conjure thee, O Spirit, Sabnock; and being with power armed from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by BERALANENSIS, BALADACHIENSIS, PAUMACHIA, and APOLOGIAE SEDES; by the most Powerful Princes, Genii, Liachidae, and Ministers of the Tartarean Abode; and by the Chief Prince of the Seat or Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee, and by invocating conjure thee. And being armed with power from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by Him Who spake and it was done, and unto whom all creatures be obedient. Also I, being made after the image of GOD, endued with power from GOD and created according unto His will, do exorcise thee by that most mighty and powerful name of GOD, EL, strong and wonderful; O thou Spirit Sabnock. And I command thee and Him who spake the Word and HIS FIAT was accomplished and by all the names of God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
“Also by the names ADONAI, EL, ELOHIM, ELOHI, EHYEH, ASHER EHYEH, ZABAOTH, ELION, IAH, TETRAGRAMMATON, SHADDAI, LORD GOD MOST HIGH, I do exorcise thee and do powerfully command thee, O thou Spirit Sabnock, that thou dost forthwith appear unto me here before this Circle in a fair human shape, without any deformity or tortuosity. And by this ineffable name, TETRAGRAMMATON IEHOVAH, do I command thee, at which being heard the elements are overthrown, the air is shaken, the sea runneth back, the fire is quenched, the Earth trembleth, and all the hosts of the celestials, terrestrials, and infernals do tremble together, and are troubled and confounded. Wherefore come thou, O Spirit Sabnock, forthwith, and without delay, from any or all parts of the World wherever thou mayest be, and make rational answers unto all things that I shall demand of thee. Come thou peaceably, visibly, and affably, now, and without delay, manifesting that which I shall desire. For thou art conjured by the name of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, HELIOREN, wherefore fulfill thou my commands, and persist thou therein unto the end, and according unto mine interest, visibly and affably speaking unto me with a voice clear and intelligible without any ambiguity. I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O thou Spirit Sabnock, to appear and to show thyself visible unto me before this Circle in fair and comely shape, without any deformity or tortuosity; by the name and in the name IAH and VAU which Adam heard and spake; and by the name of God, AGLA, which Lot heard and was saved with his family; and by the name IOTH, which Jacob heard from the angels wrestling with him, and was delivered from the hand of Esau his brother; and by the name ANAPHAEXTON which Aaron heard and spake and was made wise; and by the name ZBAOTH, which Moses named and all the rivers were turned into blood; and by the name ASHER EHYEH ORISTON, which Moses named, and all the rivers brought forth frogs, and they ascended into the house, destroying all things. #RandolpHarris 11 of 21
“And by the name ELION, WHICH Moses named, and there was a great hail such as had not been since the beginning of the World; and by the name ADONAI, which Moses named, and there came up locusts, which appeared upon the whole land, and devoured all which the hail had left; and by the name SCHEMA AMATHIA which Ioshua called upon, and the sun stayed his course; and by the name ALPHA and OMEGA, which Daniel named, and destroyed Bel, and slew the Dragon; and in the name EMMANUEL, which the three children, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, sang in the midst of the fiery furnace, and were delivered; and by the name HAGIOS; and by the SEAL OF ADONI; and by ISCHYROS, ATHANATOS; and by these three secret names, AGLA, ON, TETRAGRAMMATION, do I adjure and constrain thee. And by these names, and by all other names of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, the LORD ALMIGHTY, I do exorcise and command thee, O Spirit Sabnock, even by Him Who spake the Word and it was done, and to Whom all creatures are obedient; and by the dreadful judgments of GOD; and by the uncertain Sea of Glass, which is before the DIVINE MAJESTY, mighty and powerful; by the four beasts before the throne, having eyes before and behind; by the fire round about the throne; by the holy angels of Heaven; and by the mighty wisdom of GOD; I do potently exorcise thee, that thou appearest here before this Circle, to fulfill my will in all things which shall seem good unto me; by the Seal of BASDATHEA BALDACHIA; and by this name PRIMEUMATON, which Moses named, and the Earth Opened, and did swallow up Kora, Dathan, and Abiram. Wherefore thou shalt make faithful answers unto all my demands, O Spirit Sabnock, and shalt perform all my desires so far as in thine office thou art capable hereof. Wherefore, come thou, visibly, peaceably, and affably, now without delay, to manifest that which I desire, speaking with a clear and perfect voice, intelligibly, and to mine understanding. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
“Tbatlu! Bualu! Tulatu! Labusi! Ubisi!—Let thee also appear and being before me the Spirit of Sabnock. Sovar, merciless leader of Divs come forth! Inner eye behold the demon before me. Sovar awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Shahrewar! I stand alone as the embodiment of the Adversary known as Ahriman, the Black Dragon of Chaos and becoming! I devour the natural order of stasis brought forth by Ahura Mazda and forge my destiny through the power of the Black Sun! Taromat, beautiful Div or rebellion come forthy! Inner eye behold the demoness before me. Toramat awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Spandarmad! Ahirman, Lord of Darkness divine, I thank you for your presence within this unholy temple of counter creation. I have offered you the life of this noxious creature as a gateway to your manifestation within this realm to stand before me! You are Angra Mainyu who is the Lord of counter creation, whom has brought forth the mountains to the plains! You have brought forth the beasts to the field and the creatures of the night! Ahriman with your infernal blessing I ask that you would bring forth the baneful powers of the wolf kin to fill this oil with their essence that it may be compelled according to my will! I offer my nails as fangs which will devour that which stands in my way! I offer my hair to embody their predatory essence! I give my blood as a gateway to empower them to act within this world according to my will and purpose!” Then Mrs. Winchester heard the distant howling of wolves and she perceived their phantom shadows as they began to surround her and encroach. She was focused on Sabnock and dared not fear that which she had just conjured. SABNOCK—of course is the Forty-third Spirit of the Winchester Mansion. He is a Marquis, Mighty, Great, and Strong, appearing in the Form of an Armed Soldier with a Lion’s Head, riding on a pale-coloured horse. His office is to build high Towers, Castles and Cities, ad to furnish them with Armour, etcetera. Also he can conflict Men for many days with Wounds and with Sores rotten and full of Worms. He giventh Good Familiars at the request of the Exorcist. Commandth 50 Legions of Spirits; and his Seal is this, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Mrs. Winchester fell down unconscious, frothing at the mouth, and was carried to her room, outside where the crescent hedge is planted. A doctor was called in gave her large doses of medicine to no avail. He left and refused to have anything more to do with the case as he saw with in hours gables and towers rise, wings of the mansion extended right before his eyes, and gardens grow from sprouts and spring up to mature plants and trees before night fall. For five of six days Mrs. Winchester raved wildly, and her staff and friends were in great distress. In desperation they proposed giving Mrs. Winchester more medicine. However, the demon, speaking through her, replied: “Any amount of medicine will be of no use.” Daisy then implored, “If medicine will be of no use, what shall we do?” The demon replied, “Burn incense to me, and submit yourself to me, and all will be well.” The staff knelt down and worshiped the demon, imploring him to torment Mrs. Winchester no longer. During that time Mrs. Winchester was in a state of complete unconsciousness. A little later when the demon drove Mrs. Winchester to renewed frenzy, her distraught staff repeated their promise to worship and serve him. They also promised that they would urge their Mrs. Winchester to do likewise. When Mrs. Winchester regained consciousness, she reluctantly consented to do so. The demon gave explicit directions regarding the proposed worship. On the first and fifteenth of each month, incense was to be burned, food offered, and the require prostration made before the shrine of himself, SABNOCK. Periodically the demon came, sometimes every few days, sometimes after a month’s lapse. Each time, Mrs. Winchester felt fluttering of her heart, a sense of overwhelming fear, and inability to control herself. She would quietly as Daisy to fetch a neighboring woman whenever the demon came. The two would burn incense to the demon in Mrs. Winchester’s stead and receive his directives, which they then communicated to the possessed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Although these communications were spoken by the Mrs. Winchester’s (the victim) lips, she was completely unaware of them, since she was in the demonized state. The demon often bade the audience not to be afraid, protesting he would not harm them, but rather help them in various ways. He declared he would instruct the victim in the healing art, so that people would flock to her and be cured of their sickness. This soon proved true, although may diseases were not under the demon’s control. Apparently only those afflicted by evil spirits were completely cured. Mrs. Winchester’s long-ill child was not helped. The demon declared he controlled many inferior spirits. He also frequently outlined his plan for Mrs. Winchester’s life and work. He promised he would help her grow more proficient as a healer, and the people would compensate her for her services. Gifts thus earned were donated to the nearby ancient pagan temple. As certain parts of the Winchester mansion would appear but once every seventeen years, SABNOCK was never seen save on the eve of some awful calamity, visitors to the mansion had a very slight chance of seeing his physical body. There could be no doubt though of the existence of the mansion and SABNOCK, for everybody knows he was one of the greatest of the giants during his natural lifetime, nor could any better evidence be asked then the facts that he guided Mrs. Winchester into turning stone, wood, and class into the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansions. The door-to-nowhere was also known as Lovers’ Leap;” from which Mrs. Winchester once flung herself when she was a state of deep morning, and survived unharmed. The path SABOCK made from the door-to-nowhere to the mountains was used by him when he would leave his island and come to shore. Upon being informed of the variety and amount of legendary material collected about the Winchester mansion and Mrs. Winchester’s doings, many people unhesitatingly pronounced the entire assortment condemned all the gathered treasures as creations of the supernatural. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It was very well beknown that in them old days there were giants in plenty hereabouts, but they did not make the make an appearance at the estate very often. But everyone knows that there were giants, because if there were not, no one would know of them at all. They were just like human beings, except in the matter of size, and one of them could make a dozen like men that live now. When they walked, they carried oak trees for sticks and lived in the forest of the giants, and carved the mountain and caves. (It should be noted that spiritistic visions of this nature are quite likely to occur in the course of reading occult literature. Sometimes people mistake these visions for genuine religious experiences. However, it is again a case of Satan disguising himself as an angel of the light.) Yet, there are more than 20,000 accounts of spirits, ghost, angels and demons being seen in the Winchester mansion. The uncanny phenomena places one under a charm. The pattern of the courts during this early period in the 1800s was erratic, sometimes convicting, sometimes throwing cases out of court for lack of evidence, something awarding damages for slander to those who had been maligned as witches by accusers. This vacillation sprang from the fact that the judicial bodies that heard the causes were not religious but secular, and therefore had little competence in dealing with matters that were primarily religious. As far as control was concerned, in adhering to the principles of congregationalism, the responsibility for suppressing heresy and enforcing religious behavior within the communities went to the state. The trial judges were not the sure, steadfast, confident Dominican Inquisitors or Protestant prosecutors of the Old World, but merely secular officials of the valley who had been forced into the position of trying heresy for lack of anyone else to do it. Mary Johnson, who was hired at the Winchester mansion in 1887, as a cook, admitted have had “familiarity with the Devil” and was executed by the state. She confession to have pleasures of the flesh with demons and other sorted things. She made no mention of mass meetings; rather, her Devil seems to have been a personal one, coming to her assistance when needed. #RandolphHarri 16 of 21
Dolls were sometimes used as a means of projecting curses, and Mary said she had attended meetings with Satan and his consorts. Witches’ pact with Satan was attributed as part of God’s inscrutable plan of the Universe. The Puritan settlers in Santa Clara Valley believed in the doctrine of Original Sin wholeheartedly; their pessimistic outlook proclaimed that all men were unworthy until God saw fit to bestow His grace upon them. They believed that the God allowed the Devil to afflict not only the guilty but also anybody else that might happen to get in the way. If He had to teach misguided humans a lesson, He might punish an entire community for the sins of the most wicked in that community. And it appeared to the God-fearing Puritans that He was doing just that. The Puritans were highly intolerant and has a paranoiac distrust of other religious groups, some were farmers at the Winchester mansion, and did not always like the rituals that were performed, but they were very loyal and protective of Mrs. Winchester. Many of the people who worked at the Winchester mansion were often under suspicion of witchcraft. The Puritans came to the Winchester mansion because they felt it was a true kingdom of God on Earth, and they could help Mrs. Winchester live peacefully. However, what they found was something different. They found that the vast acres of the estate had bitterly cold winters, and the terrain could be inhospitable. They found themselves in a wilderness, surrounded by demonic tribes whom they considered to be the legions of Hell incarnate. Having come to settle in this last stronghold of the Devil, they were plagued by him constantly for the very reason that they were God’s chosen people, thus the most likely target for unholy temptation. The fact that the new settlers in the Santa Clara Valley were being attacked by Satan seemed incontestable. The estate was ravaged by smallpox, and had suffered constant harassment by envious local town’s people and demonic tribes. Mrs. Winchester wondered what she had done to offend God that He should allow the Devil such free range. She experimented with the spirits to bring peace to her life and home. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Mrs. Winchester had an answer: Judgment Day was at hand and Satan was therefore stepping up his activities in one last desperate move. It was simply the nova-like burst of the energy from a dying star. She glibly stated that “there will again be an unusual Range of the Devil among us, a little before the Second Coming of the Lord, which will be to give the last stroke in destroying the works of the Devil.” This theory found wide acceptance among the servants and laity of Santa Clara Valley, for not only did it offer a simple explanation for all their maladies and misfortunes, but it also gave them hope, promising cooly a quick end to their hardships. Satan is most able to seduce human in periods o great discontent, for human, in times of poverty and affliction, will turn knowingly to whatever hands will feed them. The valley had had a difficult time of it up to that time, and famines had reduced the population drastically. However, as if labouring under the most severe environmental handicaps was not enough, Puritan perfectionism went even further in making life unbearable. In seeking to establish a holy kingdom, according to Heaven’s law, self-indulgence in any form was strictly repressed. Severe punishments were meted out for drinking, swearing, and licentiousness; in Santa Clara, it was a punishable offense to walk on the streets on Sunday, except when going to and from church. And witches, people possessed by demons, and others also attended church to blend in and keep the peace. On top of it all, there stood the Calvinistic doctrine of election, holding that as soon as man was born, eh was judged to be headed for either Heaven or Hell, this choice being made according to God’s immutable law. However, even if a human thought oneself to be damned, the civil punishment for one’s indulgence were still exacted upon one. It was into this environment that the waters of the witchcraft flood would soon pour. The good people of Santa Clara clearly saw signs of Satanic activity in their midst, and an investigation was launched. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Mrs. Winchester confessed to having attended witches’ Sabbaths and of having met with the Devil, who was a tall, black man from New Haven, Connecticut. Soon the witch fever spread, and more people from the valley became posses by demons. The common belief was that at that time witches, when entering into a Covenant with Satan, because the owners of specters, with the help of which they could do harm to any person of their choosing. People believe that God—the Alpha and Omega was both God and Satan. That He has a soul and character. He is not just this futile entity but someone you can see many aspects to. Some people fled to Satanism because they had to deal with so much evil from Christians that they wanted another source of power to exalt them. Satanism is supposed to be something to be something secret, something people do not know anything of. One goes to America and in the telephone directory one can see “Church of God,” “Church of Jesus,” and “Church of Satan.” One calls, and a person answers: “Church of Satan, how may I help you?” One thinks, “This is not Satanism!” The Church of Satan deny Satan, they say He does not exist, yet they act as if He dd, they rebel against God. They call themselves Satanists because He also rebelled against God, but they are basically light and life worshipping individualists. Well, the phone is tapped, so I think you better write what you know. Some people have disappeared. And of course the normal grave yard desecration. Anne Winchester’s headstone was recently stolen, but replaced. Normal people just disappear and never show up again. It could have a Satanic connection. Every human is life, and some hate life, especially human life. That is why people disappeared. These people may have disappeared for some form of sacrifice. Something like that would be called a Satanic murder. The murder is the ritual sacrifice. These murders gain power from whoever was responsible. Everybody has their own aura, and auras can be stolen by sacrificing an individual, this allows one to gain more power. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Places of worship, such as churches, have their own spirit—the Winchester Mystery House, for example, has been worshipped in for maybe hundreds of years and has thus gained a lot of spirit in that time, it could qualify as a church and gain charitable tax exemption. But that is not the point. A person who sacrifices that will gains a lot of power and grows stronger. Some people fear the Winchester mansion, because there are a lot of different energies. There is fear, terror and suspense, but others feel a lot of light, happiness, and goodness. Sometimes the energy is mixed. Anton LaVey really surprises me. If your every rea his work, he seems very intelligent and not scary at all, but I guess it depends on what one reads. I have read parts of his Bible, and it is very straightforward, it is stuff people tell their kids every day. Stand up for yourself and do not let people run you over. I think that the Winchester mansion should also open on nights of a full Moon, not just Friday the 13th. During the full Moon, there is a lot of energy and symbolic value. A lot of people believe in the full Moon and a lot of people believe in virgins. That makes both the full Moon and the virgin more powerful because of belief in them. God was first and He created the World. Of course, a lot of scientists would deny that. However, I would challenge their view because I believe God used evolution, which is why it took so long, which is why we have evidence like dinosaur bones. Yet, some Gnostic Christians have suggested Satan created the World. Everybody will be taken as slaves except the warlords. Euronymus, who we talked about earlier, was murdered in August 1993, Aaliyah 2001. Some say that is a month when sacrifices are made. Grishnackh killed Euronymous, and a few hours later, he was laughing and joking, saying, “Ha ha, Euronymous is dead, I’m going to dance and piss on his grave.” It reminded of the jokes Howard Stern made about Aaliyah. It was not funny. These are not the rantings of someone who is all there. Grishnackh talked about the dynamite he had and how he was going to blow things up. Basically, they took things to illogical extremes, but it all made sense in their own heads. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
It is possible when dabbling with occultism for one to make an unconscious contract with the powers of darkness. The gift of discernment is absolutely necessary in life. It is generally not wise to lay one’s hands on a person who is occultly subjected. The retuning spirits will often attempt to creep back under the guise of some pious camouflage. It is in this way that evil can often enter unnoticed into one’s Christian life. A maid at the Winchester mansion once accepted the invitation of one of her coworkers to attend some spiritistic meetings. At first she felt as though she had gain something from going along to the meetings but later on she began to notice some psychic changes taking place in herself. She began to notice some psychic changes taking place in herself. She began to suffer from depression which resulted in her consulting a neurologist. During the course of the treatment she was committed to a lunatic asylum. However, as her condition improved, she could no longer attend the spiritistic séances. At the hospital the chaplain came to see her through his help and counsel she was able to make a complete recovery. One of the farmers at the estate wanted to see if charms actually worked, and some of them He. He practiced in the basement of the Winchester mansion. He drew a magic circle on the ground and drew some other magic symbols in the circle. He then used a charm three times in order to invoke the spirit. However, no spirit came. Yet, as he repeated, the charm he fell down in the magic circle and lay there unconscious for some time. The result was that for several weeks following this event he was semi-paralysed and drained of all his physical strength and will-power. After a few weeks, he died. Frequently identified as a common spot where the “wheelbarrow Ghost” is sighted, Steam Alley is one of the most well-known paranormal hot-spots in the mansion. Have you ever seen anything in the basement? #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Some stroll Sarah’s lovely gardens this Memorial Day Weekend. There is a beautiful parrot which Mrs. Winchester used to pet, it talks! He is supposed to be happy and impudent, and talks and laughs and screeches all the time. Maybe you may catch a glimpse at this wooded, flowery estate. It is such a beautiful spectacle, all of that life and grace and animation, and sun-smitten flash and sprinkle of rich colour.
This impressive mansion dates back to the 1880s, when it was developed by Sarah Winchester and the spirits, whose project enobed and enriched the community. It once had a nine-story military watchtower. Mrs. Winchester further developed the grounds of the 160 room mansion, introducing a Victorian garden at the hands of World renowed architect Gino Coppede around the turn of the century.
These adaptions made this idyllic mansion a unique asset, tinged with the signs and influences of eclecticism and Liberty, juxtaposed to the ancient Architectural characteristics of its medieval heritage. This mansion presents itself as impressive and spectacular. The building now spreads on four floors plus the basment, for a total of approximently 25,000 feet square.
There is lovely gift shop and cafe, and it is also an ideal venue for hosting private events, conventions and/or ballrooms are located on the back overlooking the internal garden with its panoramic position which glows thanks to its night-time lighting.
Inside the property there are splendid rooms filled with historial furniture, decorated ceilings and flamboyant fireplaces, vaulted ceilings and richly frescoes walls. In addition, there are several bedrooms, nine kitchens. and thirteen bathrooms, which made the structure a perfect luxurious accommodation for guests, and is now a tourist destination.
This mansion is located within a private park of 4 acres and elegant Nineteenth-century Victorian-gardens, that offer areas of wide lawns, and further green spaces. There is also a parking area, with free parking. Currently used to host guided tours and private events and functions. The enitre porperty sits at a close distance from the mall, hotels, and resturants. The high-fashion outlet complex and gourmet food has brought further development and tourism to Santa Clara County. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
The Grounds Have their Share of Unexplained Mysteries
A mansion is not a mansion with its stately grounds, and Mrs. Winchester was just as attentive to the exterior of her estate as she was to the sprawling house. An avid gardener, she imported plans, flowers, trees, shrubs, and herbs from over 110 countries around the World. Mrs. Winchester employed eight to ten gardeners. Her head gardener was Mr. Nishiwara, who was responsible for seeing that the beautiful gardens, plus the tall hedge around the hose, were well maintained. The hedges were once so tall that only the top floor of the house was visible from the road! Mrs. Winchester loved to spend time in her gardens, and she had gazebos built where she could sit and enjoy her trees and flowers. It was a Saturday night, in January 1888, and Mrs. Winchester has, as usual, come home from the City early in the afternoon. It has been a black and foggy day, and the gas had been lighted in the streets and in the office where she worked from early morning. The fog was very bad at the time Mrs. Winchester returned home, and she congratulated herself on the fact that she had not to go out again that night. She sat with her puppy Zip in her sitting-room all the evening, with that comfortable feeling that she was able to relax until Monday morning, and that she need trouble about nothing outside the mansion. In due course, Zip went to bed, and then the maid Agnus reminded her of a letter that must be written and posted that night. Sufficient is it for Mrs. Winchester to say that the letter was to an elderly relative of some means who lived in Oakland, and who had taken great interest in her puppy Zip. The butler Martin remembered that the following day was the birthday of this relative, and that she should receive proper greeting by the Sunday morning post in the country town.
Frankly, Mrs. Winchester did not want the bother of it; but Agnus always knows best in these matters, and so Mrs. Winchester wrote the note and sealed it up. Mrs. Winchester had read nothing exciting during the evening—nothing to stir her imagination in any way. She stamped the letter and proceeded to the front door. Judge of her astonishment when, on throwing it open, she saw nothing but the gray wall of fog coming up to the very house; even the railings, not ten yards in the front of her grand estate, were blotted out completely. She called back into the house for the maid to come and look. “Don’t lose yourself, Mrs. Winchester,” she said, half laughing. “What a terrible night!” “I shall not lose myself,” Mrs. Winchester replied, laughing in turn. “The pillar-box is only at the end of the crescent; if I stick to the railing, I cannot possibly miss it. Do not wait here,” she added solicitously. “I will leave the door ajar, so that I can slip in easily when I come back. I have left my keys on my writing desk.” Angus went in, and Mrs. Winchester pulled the door close, and then stepped out boldly for the front gate. Imagine her standing there, just outside her own gate, and with her back to the crescent, knowing that she had to go to the left to find the pillar-box which was at the end of the crescent. There were thirteen Victorian cottages on her estate, so she knew she had to pass seven more before reaching the pillar-box. She also new that each cottage had an ornamental center-piece before she stepped away from the crescent at the end to reach the pillar box. That Mrs. Winchester knew would be something of an adventure, for the fog was the densest she had ever seen; she could only see the faint glow of her observation tower as she looked behind; the rest of her mansion was invisible.
Mrs. Winchester counted seven Victorian cottages, and then stood at the end of the last line of railings. She knew that the pillar-box was exactly opposite her. She took three quick steps, and literally cannoned into it. She was a little proud of her own judgment in getting it so nicely. Then she fumbled for the mouth of it, and dropped in her letter. All this may should very commonplace and ordinary. Mrs. Winchester is an observant woman, and she had noticed always that the mouth of the pillar-box faced directly along the crescent, thus standing at right angles to the road. At the moment that she had her right hand in that mouth, therefore, she argued that if she stood out at the stretch of her arm, she must be facing the crescent; Mrs. Winchester had but to move straight forward again to touch the friendly railings. She was putting that plan into operation, and had let go of the mouth of the pillar-box, when a man, coming hurriedly round the corner, ran straight into her, muttered a gruff apology, and was lost in the fog again in a moment. And in that accidental collision he had spun her round and tossed her aside—and she was lost! This is literally true. She took a step and found herself slipping of the kerbstone int the road; stumbled back again, and strove to find her way along by sticking to the edge of the pavement. After a minute or two, Mrs. Winchester was so sure of herself that she ventured to cross the pavement, and by great good luck touched in a moment one of those ornamental center-pieces of one of the gates—or so, at least, it seemed. She went on with renewed confidence until she saw certain bushes which topped the railings of one particular cottage, and then Mrs. Winchester knew that she was near her mansion’s front door. She pushed walked confidently, stepped quickly up the little path, and reached the door. She was right; the door yielded to her touch, and she went hurriedly in.
Mrs. Winchester had taken off her hat, and had held it towards the familiar hat-stand before she realized that it was not a familiar hat-stand at all; it was one she did not know. She looked round in some confusion, meaning to make good her escape without being observed, and yet wondering into what part of her mansion could she have come into, when she stopped stock still, with the hat held in her hand, listening. From a room near at hand, Mrs. Winchester heard the sound of a low, long-drawn moan, as from someone in pain. More than that, it was almost the wail of someone in acute terror. Now, Mrs. Winchester was a mild and caring soul, and her first instinct was to run. There was the door within a foot of her; she could open it again noiselessly and slip out, and leave whatever was moaning to its own trouble. Her next instinct, however, was a braver one; she might be able to help. Putting her hat on, and so leaving her hands free, she moved cautiously towards the sound, which was coming intermittently. She found that this wing of the house was unfamiliar to her; there was a 7-11 staircase built in the shape of a letter “Y,” which enabled the servants to quickly get to three different levels of the house. Then there were these stairs that lead to the ceiling, and there was also a cabinet that went straight through to the back thirty rooms of the mansion. When she went down the steps of the 7-11 staircase, slowly and cautiously, with her flesh creeping a little, the morning went on, and Mrs. Winchester was almost inclined to turn back with every step she took. However, at last, she got into the basement, and came to the door of the room from which the sound proceeded. She was in the very act of recklessly thrusting open the door when another sound broke upon her ears that held her still. The sound of someone singing in a raucous voice.
It was a sea song she remembered to have heard when she was a little girl in New Haven, Connecticut, and the words of which she had forgotten; it was something about “Boney was a warrior.” The door of the room was open a little way, and through the crack of it, Mrs. Winchester was able to peer in; and there she saw a sight that for a moment made her doubt her own eyes. She rubbed her eyes in a curious fashion and looked again, and this is what she saw: The room was in a neglected state, with strips of wallpaper hanging down from the walls and with a blackened ceiling. There was a table in the center of it, and at that table a man was seated, with a square black bottle and a glass before him, and a candle burning near his left hand. Mrs. Winchester could see the whole room now as plainly and as clearly as she saw it then. He was a man so villainously ugly that she had a thought that he was not a man at all, but some hideous thing out of a nightmare. He had very long arms—so long that they were stretched across the table, and his hands gripped the opposite edge of it; a great heavy head, crowed with a mass of red hair, was set low between enormously broad shoulders; his eyes, half closed, were high up and close together on either side of a nose that was scarcely a nose at all; the lips were thick and heavy. However, it was not the man that Mrs. Winchester looked at first, it was at two other figures in the room. These figures were seated on chairs facing the table at which the man was, and the strangeness of them lay in the fact that each was securely bound to the chair on which he and she sat, for it was a man and a woman. The man, who was quite young was not only bound, but gagged securely also; the woman was more lightly tied to her chair by the arms only, and her mouth was free. She was leaning back, with her eyes closed, and mingling with the raucous singing of the man at the table. Mrs. Winchester’s first impression was that the man at the table was some sort of unclean, bestial judge, and the others his prisoners.
He stopped his singing to pour some liquor from the square bottle into his glass and to drink it off; then he resumed his former attitude, with his fingers locked over the edge of the table. And now Mrs. Winchester noticed that while the woman, who was, by the way, quite young and very pretty, with a fair, dainty prettiness, still kept her eyes closed, the eyes of the bound man never left that dreadful figure seated at the other side of the table. Mrs. Winchester felt like she was on the eve of some awful calamity. She then unhesitatingly pronounced the entire assortment of people in the room as ghost, and condemned all the gathered treasures as the creations of petty intellect, which could not get out of the beaten track, but sought in the supernatural a reason for the explanation of every fact that seemed at variance with routine of daily experience. In her opinion the collection of people in this room had never seen at all in her day and generation, and must have been souls killed by the Winchester rifle ages ago; she did not yet believe her mansion was enchanted, however. To use her own language, “all those stories have been made by those people that set up overnight stirring out legends to entertain each other.” However, she must have known that she was in denial. For she was not insane and there were some kind of beings in this room. “Wouldn’t you like to speak, you dog?” said the red-haired man. “What would you give now to have the use of your limbs—the free wagging of your tongue? What would you say to me; what would you do to me?” The man who was bound could, of course, answer nothing. Mrs. Winchester saw his face flush and darken, and she guessed what his thoughts were. For herself, she was too fascinated by the scene before her to do anything else than peer through the crack and watch what was going one.
“Lovers—eh?” exclaimed the man at the table. “You thought I was unsuspicious; you thought I knew nothing and suspected nothing—didn’t you? While I was safely out of the way you could meet, the pair of you—day after day, and week after week; and this puppy could steal from me what was mine by right.” The woman opened her eyes for the first time and spoke. “It isn’t true,” she said, a sob breaking her voice. “It was all innocent. Martin and I have done no wrong.” “You lie!” thundered the man, brining his fist down upon the table with a blow that might have split it. “You’ve always lied—lied from the moment your father gave you to me—from the very hour I married you. You always hated me; I’ve seen you shudder many and many a time at the mere sight of me. Don’t I know it; haven’t I felt you stab me a thousand times more deeply than you could have stabbed me with any weapon? You devil! I’ve come at last to hate you as much as you hate me.” The woman turned her head slowly and looed at the younger man; a faint smile crossed her lips. In an instant the red-haired man had leapt to his feet, showing Mrs. Winchester astonishingly enough that he was a dwarf, with the shortest legs surely ever a man had. However, the bult of him was enormous, and Mrs. Winchester could guess, with a shudder, at his length. He caught up the glass, crossed the room, and flung the contents in the face of the man. “It’s a waste of good liquor—but that’s for the look she gave you. I wish there was some death more horrible than any invented yet that I could deal out to you,” he added, standing with the glass in his hand and glaring at his victim. “The death I mean for you is too easy.” He walked across to the fireplace in a curious purposeless way, and stirred a great fire that was blazing there. Then from a corner of the room he dragged with ease a great sack that appeared to contain wood and shavings; so much that Mrs. Winchester saw a rent in the side of it. As if in readiness for something, this he dropped down near the fire, and then went back to his seat, applying himself again to the drink that was on the table. And still Mrs. Winchester watched, as a woman may watch a play, wondering how it will end.
“I got the best of you tonight,” he said presently. “If I hadn’t some upon you from behind, you might have been too much for me; but I was ready and waiting. I’ve been watching longer than you think; I had everything mapped out clearly days ago. Tonight sees the end of all things for the pair of you; tomorrow sees me smiles away from here. You came in secret, you dog; you’ll go in secret.” “We have done no wrong,” said the woman again. “We loved each other years ago, when we were boy and girl; there was no sin in that.” “Bah!—I don’t believe a word of it. Don’t I know that your black heart you’ve compared the two of us every day of your life since first I saw you. His straightness for my crookedness; his sleek, black hair for my red; his prettiness for this face of mine”—he struck his own face relentlessly with one hand as he spoke—“that women shudder at. Don’t I know all that?” It was the strangest and most pitiful thing that the creature sitting there before his victims suddenly covered his face with his hands and groaned. If ever Mrs. Winchester had seen a soul in torment, she saw it then, and though she loathed him she could have wept for him. After a moment or two he dropped his hands and seized the bottle, and poured out the last drops into the glass and drank them off; then flung the bottle and glass crashing into the fireplace, as though there was an end to that business. And now, as he got down again from the chair, Mrs. Winchester saw the eyes of the woman open wide and follow his every movement with a dreadful look of terror in them. “I’ll kill you both—here in the place where you’ve met—and then I’ll seal up the house,” went on the dwarf. “I’ve planned it all. Look you last on each other, for tonight you die—and this house shall be your crypt!”
“I swear to you,” panted the woman eagerly, “by all I hold most holy and most dear, that if you let us go, we’ll never see each other again. For pity’s sake! —for the sake of Martin!” “For the sake of Martin!” sneered the dwarf. “That shows you in your true colors; that show who you are and what you are. There’s one poor satisfaction left to you; you’ll die together.” What held Mrs. Winchester then it would be impossible to say. She could only plead that in the dreadful thing that followed was a woman who sits at a play wondering what will happen next, and with never a thought in her of interfering. Mrs. Winchester’s in her anxiety has pressed the door a little to get a clearer view, so that she saw every movement of the dwarf. For herself, Mrs. Winchester had forgotten everything—in her own home, and my puppy zip, and the servants who slept in the mansion. It was as though she has stepped straight into a new World. Mrs. Winchester saw the dwarf advance towards the man in the chair, carrying his right hand stiff and straight beside him, gripping something s, she could not tell what it was that he held. Mrs. Winchester saw him come straight at her, and she saw the eyes of the woman in the opposite chair watching her as one fascinated. Then Mrs. Winchester saw two movements’ one with the left hand of the dwarf, when he struck the other man on the face; then with the right hand, when he raised something that gleamed n the light of the candle and brought it down with a sound that was new and horrible to her on the breast of the other man. And Mrs. Winchester saw the face of the man change, and start as it were into new life, and then fall as it were into death. And Mrs. Winchester saw his head drop forward, and his eyes were closed. Then, above it all, and yet seeming as a sort of dreadful chorus to it all, rang out the scream from the woman in the other chair. Mrs. Winchester did not think that the dwarf heard it; he had drawn back from what had been the living man, and was staring like one mad upon what he had done. And still piercing the air of the place rang the scream of the woman—not for her lover alone, but for herself.
That sound seemed at last to break in upon the senses of the dwarf and to call him partially to himself. Mrs. Winchester had watched him to the point where he draw himself together and crouched like a wild beast ready to spring, with that in his hand that dripped red, when, in some fashion, she flung herself round the partially open door and stumbled into the room. Mrs. Winchester thought she must have been a little made herself; otherwise, frail and commonplace creature that she was, she could not have battled with this madman. Mrs. Winchester came upon him from behind and gripped him, seizing him by the throat and by the head, and all the while shouting something to him quite unintelligible. The attack had been so sudden and so unexpected that she had him, in a sense, at her mercy. He could not know who had attacked him; he struggled madly, not alone to get away from her, but also to discover who she was. Mrs. Winchester struggled to keep his face away from her, gripped him by the neck and by the hair, and fought with him for what she knew then was her own life. And so struggling they stumbled at last horribly against that still figure bound in the chair and brought it over crashing with them to the floor. And then in a sudden Mrs. Winchester felt the dwarf inert in her hands, and knew that she had conquered him. What she must have looked like in that room, kneeling there, panting and struggling to get her breath, she could not tell; the whole business was so like a nightmare. She remembered seeing the dwarf lying there—huddled up and very still. She remembered that other figure, bound grotesquely in the chair and lying, still bound, upon its side; and she remembered, too, the woman, with her arms close fastened behind her, sitting there and sobbing wildly.
The dwarf must have been stunned; he lay there quite still, with the knife that was dreadfully red fallen from his hand, and lying beside him. When at last Mrs. Winchester staggered to her knees she saw that the girl was staring at her with a face that seemed to suggest that here, perhaps, was another ruffian come to kill her. “Who—who are you?” she asked in a frightened whisper. “A friend—one who stumbled in by accident,” Mrs. Winchester panted. “Look at the man that’s tied to the chair,” she whispered hoarsely. “He can’t be dead.” Mrs. Winchester knew that he was, but still she looked, as she bade her. Mrs. Winchester had no need to look twice; the poor fellow was quite dead. The blow had been strong and sure. On her knees beside him, Mrs. Winchester looked up and nodded slowly to her; there was no need for words. The young lady leaned back in her chair again and closed her eyes. “Set me free,” she said in a faint voice. Mrs. Winchester could not touch that knife that lay there; in a mechanical, methodical way she took from her waistcoat pocket the decent, respectable little bone handled penknife she carried always with her. With that Mrs. Winchester but the young lady’s bonds, nothing as she did so how cruelly they had cut into the white flesh; and after a moment or two she swung her arms listlessly against her sides and opened her eyes, and then, with an effort raised her hands and pressed them against her temples. “What will you do?” Mrs. Winchester asked, looking at her curiously. “I—I don’t know,” she said; and then, breaking into weeping, sobbed out: “Oh—dear God—that it should have come to this! What shall I do—what shall I do?” “You must get away,” Mrs. Winchester said, watching the dwarf, who was beginning to stie a little. “If he wakes, you know what will happen.”
“I know—I know,” she said; and got to her feet and began to move towards that bound figure still lying tied to the chair. However, at that Mrs. Winchester got before her, and with her hands against he shoulders held her back, and pleaded passionately to her that she should go, and leave the dead alone. She listened, with that strange look in her eyes of a child wakened from sleep and not clearly understanding; but she yielded to Mrs. Winchester, and stumbled under her guidance to the door. They had reached it, and Mrs. Winchester had opened it for her to pass out, when suddenly the dwarf twisted over on to his hands and knees, and then raised himself upright. He did not seem to realize for a moment what had happened; then he caught sight of the woman, and, with a snarl, crawled forward and gripped the hilt of the knife. At that she pushed suddenly past Mrs. Winchester and fled like a hare up the stairs. Mrs. Winchester heard the swift passage of her footsteps in the little hall of the house—then the slamming of the door-to-nowhere. And now Mrs. Winchester had to look to herself, for she saw in the eyes of the man that he would not let this witness escape if he could catch him. Mrs. Winchester had managed to get through the door by the time that he had got to his feet, and in a dazed fashion was stumbling toward her, knife in hand. With a sudden swoop he reached the table and blew out the candle, and at the same moment Mrs. Winchester ran up the stairs, and in the darkness stumbled along the hall and fumbled with the catch of the door. By great good fortune, Mrs. Winchester got the door open, and literally fell out into the fog. She could not see him as he tore after her; in a faintness Mrs. Winchester had fallen to her knees, and she heard him, as he raced past her, panting heavily. Then the fog swallowed him up, and she knelt there on the farm alone, shaking from head to foot.
Mrs. Winchester had, of course, no means of exactly in what part of her mansion she had had her adventure; she could only judge roughly that it must be about the middle of the crescent. She started along again, in the right direction, as she hoped, and thought to find the front door to her mansion; missed the railings, after going what seemed to be an interminable distance, and came up hard against a pillar-box. Scarcely knowing what she did, she set her right hand in the mouth of it, and performed the same maneuver she had done before; advanced three paces, and touched railings again. Stumbling along these, she came blindly what she thought was her front door, walked up the path, and pushed open the door that yielded; and there, with the face of her maid looking at her in alarm and wonderment, Mrs. Winchester feel in a dead faint at her feet. It has to be recorded that Mrs. Winchester never found that room again. She knew every square inch of her mansion. Over and over again, in clear weather, Mrs. Winchester has always around in her mansion, and had closed her eyes, and tried to remember what steps she took to get to that particular room that night, after a stranger had cannoned into her and twisted her round; but all in vain. Whether in some part of the house lies the body of a man who was foully murdered on that particular night; maybe in a hidden room the crime was committed; or perhaps, in some strange supernatural fashion, she saw that night a deed committed that had been committed long before, she shall never know. That it is no mere figment of the imagination, and that something really happened that night, is proved by one fact. Her maid, in raising Mrs. Winchester from the floor that night when she fell at her feet, found her fingers locked closed upon something, and, forcing them open, disclosed what it was. A tuft of red hair!
Such episodes may appear utterly absurd and pure superstition to people in countries comparatively free of black magic, but instead they should be warnings of the power of Satan and demons where occult literature lures readers into illicit magic. Magic as the release of special power by satanic and demon forces of evil in its character and effects. While divine help and miracles produce new strength and positive results, magic shifts the burden to another area. Small relief in one area must be paid for by terrible burdens in another. The principle of compensation prevails. The price exacted is always found to be much greater than the amount of help received. Satan drives a hard bargain and grossly cheats his victims. Usually violence, suicide, and insanity will run through a whole family line, where the magical arts have been cultivated and practiced. Such tragic events often involve as many as four generations. Many occultists and magic workers, especially those who have cultivated the black arts and signed themselves over to the devil in their own blood, die horrible deaths. When a ready successor is not provided to carry on the nefarious practice, this is especially true. The psychic bondage and oppression that traffickers in occultism themselves suffer, as well as their dupes, is horrifying to contemplate. Demon possession is represented as a vivid symbol of the prevalence of evil in the World. Other critics attempt to dismiss demon possession with theories of accommodation or hallucination. However, this view fails to meet the issue. Nor can present-day parapsychologist and psychiatrists, who refuse to recognize evil supernaturalism in the phenomenon of demon possession, either explain it or deal adequately with it. Laws defining witchcraft as having league with the Devil and prescribing the death penalty for such offenders cropped up in the colonies as early as 1636 in Plymouth. Other colonies soon followed suit—Connecticut in 1642 and Rhode Island in 1647.
The first executions took place in Boston in 1648 and in Hartford, Connecticut, in that same year. The executions were carried out by hanging, in contrast to the European practice of burning witches, which probably stemmed from the widespread fear among the European peasantry of vampire, the dead who returned from their graves to suck the blood from the living. The vampire myths never really took root in America, so the necessity of destroying the bodies of the witches was not deemed urgent. Throughout the 1650s, there appeared prosecution and attempted prosecutions in America, but these cases were infrequent, and all of them were based on the fear of maleficum, the witch’s working of evil, the accusations coming from frustrated and jealous neighbors. Few confessions were recorded in the early cases, and they did not seem to have much real validity. The few that did confess mentioned having dealings with Satan, but for the most part these admissions were confused and incoherent, and the details of the accounts differed greatly from the confessions of the witches in Europe. For example, in 1699, in Connecticut, a woman named Greensmith confessed to trafficking with the Devil, but made no mention of all-important Covenant, or pact. She further stated that the Devil had appeared to her in the form of a deer (not a goat) and that she had attended meetings at a place not far from her house. The mention of “meetings” occurred in some early confession, but the word “Sabbat” or “Sabbath,” commonly used by European witches, did not come up until later, apparently at the suggestion of the Salem judges. Some believe that Satan has a soul and a character. He is not just this futile entity but someone you can see many aspects to. Some people do not see Satan as this guy with horns who is evil, they see Him as the first rebel. Then one can see why He is so attractive to many in the Victorian ages and the young people. He is someone who is standing up to the greatest power in the Universe. “If that ‘evil’ is of a rebellious nature,” says Glenn Danzig, “then I guess, in Christian terms, that evil is the Satan in you. I don’t buy that. I believe in honesty, standing up for yourself. That’s my ‘good.’”
Thousands of people base their hopes on the statements of spiritistic practitioners and subsequently become dependent upon the advice they receive from the “other side.” There are quite a number of people who has suffered serious psychic disturbances through the misuse of such practices. Their personalities have been split and they have been utterly confused by the spirits on which they have called. People therefore who try to discover what life after death is like through spiritism and superstition may be in danger of falling prey to the dark and hidden side of their own minds and soul. If you look at the early tracts of The Christian Bible, there is really not much about Satan in there anyway. Christian religions have tried to overblow and create a whole legend around Satan which is not true to the actual scriptures we have. If you desire, you must first make yourself strong so you can help others. You should only help people who want help, a lot of times people do not really want your help. You tell people what has to be done to change their lives, they will not listen. If Satan were corporeal, He would not be something repulsive, He would be something seductive. He would want to win you over and gain your trust, and of course being repulsive or disgusting would not be the way to go. One would imagine this would be a seductive, beautiful creature. In the Gnostic account of the fall of the angels, the angels were suppsed to be watching over this flock of humans and all of a sudden, they are perpetrating acts of pleasures of the flesh with them. Eventually this created the Cyclops, the Minotaur, things of this nature. There are so many accounts of the fall of the angels, it is like a fantasy tale that you would like to believe actually happened. We, in this circle, conjure and cite this spirit Fatenovenin, with all his adherents, to appear here in this spot, to fulfill our desires, in the name of three holy Angels, Schomajen Sheziem, Roknion Averam, Kandile, Brachat Chaijdalic, Ladabas, Labul, Rargil, Bencul, in the name of God. Amen!
Winchester Mystery House
Mrs. Winchester’s estate was a little town within itself. The grounds have their share of unexplained mysteries. Mrs. Winchester outfitted her home with the finest stained glass doors, windows, and wallpaper that money could buy during her time. She had everything she needed: plumber’s shops, carpenter’s workshops, her own water and electrical supplies, and complete sewer and drainage systems. Mrs. Winchester even had her own gas manufacturing plant. It produced carbide gas by adding a small amount of water to a drum containing calcium carbide. The resulting gas was pressed through the gas lines to the house by a large piston and cylinder. The gas lights in the house were then lit by electromechanial strikers that created a spark to light each lamp.
Come see her estate, in person, for yourself this weekend! Please Click the link below for tickets and more information.
The Time of the World Disappears Before Eternity
Revolutionary wealth is not just about money. Civilization is one of those big, stuffy words that may intrigue philosophers and historians but puts most people to sleep. Unless it is used in a sentence like “Our Civilization is threatened”—at which point large numbers of people prepare to defend themselves. Today many people do, in fact, believe that their civilization is threatened—and that the United States of America may be doing the threatening. And it is. However, not in the way most of us think. Around the World, critics of the United States of America point to its military and its economy as the main sources of its predominance. It is, however, knowledge in the broadcast sense and new technologies based on it that integrate America’s military and financial power and propel both forward. It is true that America’s technological lead is threatened. According to the National Science Board, foreign students earn nearly 50 percent of all U.S. doctorates in mathematics, computer sciences and engineering. And American youth are showing less and less interests in these fields. NASA officials complain that there are three times as many scientists over sixty as there are under thirty in the space agency. Shirley Ann Jackson, then president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has cautioned that “centers of technology-based activity, training, and entrepreneurialism are rapidly spreading throughout the globe. Thus even the status quo for the U.S. represents a declining share of the global marketplace for innovation and ideas.” Nevertheless, America still leads in most fields of digital technology, in microbiology and in science generally. It spends 44 percent of the World budget for research and development. By most criteria, the United States of America is still the undisputed leader in the performance of basic and applied research. In addition, many international comparisons put the United States of America as a leader in applying research and innovation to improve economic performance.
In the latest IMD International World Competitiveness Yearbook, the United States of America ranks first in economic competitiveness, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore. The survey compares economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency, and infrastructure. Larger economies are further behind, with Zhejiang (China’s wealthiest province), Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany ranked 20 though 23, respectively. An extensive review by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concludes that since World War II, US leadership in science and engineering has driven its dominant strategic position, economic advantage, and quality of life. And at least for now, the United States of America remains the Word’s scientific powerhouse. Perhaps even more important is the speed with which scientific and technical findings from everywhere are converted into marketable applications or products and widely dispersed into manufacturing, finance, agriculture, defense, biotech and other sectors. All of which boosts economic productivity, further accelerates change, and increasing the U.S. ability to compete at the global level. However, knowledge is not only a matter of bits and bytes or science and technology. Part of the knowledge economy is the production of art and entertainment, and America is the World’s biggest exporter of popular culture. That culture include fashion, music, TV programming, books, movies and computer games. Americans have always been told that their most important message to the World is one of democracy, individual freedom, tolerance, concern for “the rights of man” and—more recently—the rights of women. In the last three decades, however, a U.S. media spread into formerly closed or nonexistent foreign markets, a very different set of messages has been communicated. Much of it targeted at young people.
Certainly not all, but a considerable amount of this material has disgustingly glorified pimps, gangster, drug lords, drug pushers, and hollow-eyed drug users. It has celebrated extremes of violence marked by unending car chases, over-the-top special effects and songs dripping with sexist venom. The impact of all this has been further intensified in the hard-sell, over-the-edge advertising used to promote these products. Hollywood, for example, has painted a fantasy America in which adolescent hedonism reigns supreme and authority figures—police, teachers, politicians, business leaders—are routinely satirized. Film after film, and TV shows one after another, tell young viewers what many of them hunger to hear: that adults are bumbling fools; that being “dumb and dumber” is okay; that “we do not need education”; that to be “bad” is really good; and that pleasures of the flesh, in infinite variety, is or should be nonstop. In this fantasy World, women are readily available, but they can also leap over giant buildings in a single bound (like Superman), shoot and kill (like James Bond) and practice martial arts (Like Jet Li). Extremes, we are repeatedly told, are good and restraint is bad; and, by the way, America is so rich that event its secretaries, police, clerks, and other ordinary working people live in high-rise penthouse apartments or Malibu mansions—images that set adolescent glands tingling from Taipei to Timbuktu. What few foreign critics of American’s pop culture seem to know is that ironically enough, many of the ostensibly American firms producing and disseminating the interesting and unusual of these programs either are, or were financed not by America, but by European and Japanese capital. Nor is it widely understood that shows are often made by, say, a European director with an Australian stary, a Chinese martial-arts consultant, an anime cartoonist from Japan or other foreign contributors.
In the meantime, however, the influence of these intriguing programs is so powerful that other societies fear for the survival of their own culture. Only if art threatens action, then terrorism can be advanced through art. For such a phenomenon as Aesthetic Terrorism to occur, aesthetic pursuit must become symbolic not of its own decadently solipsistic pleasures (exemplified in madness of des Esseintes in Huysmans’ Against Nature), but of action taken beyond the pale of art World confines. Terrorism is art is called the avant-garde. However, if this was once the case, it is no longer. Most avant-garde art is viewed and created today as simply an enfolding reaction to its own history. This disingenuous game-playing guarantees that the avant-garde art is viewed and created today as simply an enfolding reaction to its own history. This disingenuous game-playing guarantees that the avant-garde can no longer stimulate or even provoke. Dada and Futurist actions, which attempted to lead art out of the classroom and museum and into the streets, are simply appropriated by postmodernist facsimiles which capture the letter but little of the original essence. It hardly matters anyway. Avant-garde art has evolved into nothing more than a cultural benchwarmer, corporate tax write-off and public relations smokescreen. Art which openly espouses anti-corporate ideology is embraced as long as it hews to arbitrary standards invented by those taste-making and fortune-telling hirelings, the art critics. What could be wrong, after all, with a business World that allows people to say what they want (because it does not matter)? Aesthetic Terrorism is a term more realistically applied to the faceless regime of consumer culture than the avant-garde. The onslaught of Muzak, ad jingles, billboards, top 40 tunes, commercials, corporate logos, etcetera, all fit the terrorist dynamic of intrusion and coercion.
One almost forgets that aesthetics once implied a consensual relationship between the creators and appreciators of art. How often is it that one hears someone admitting a fondness for a media product “in spite” of oneself? How many times have you heard a slogan or rancid tune ring in your ears like a brain-eating mantra? When consumer terror’s avant-garde correlative, Pop Art, became indistinguishable from the object of its supposed social satire, it erased from big business its pejorative taint. Many of today’s avant-garde stars have emerged from or entered the business World, some enormously successful in the arcane number-juggling or speculation and commodities scams. Even freeloading on the state and private foundations is fair game only for those whose bureaucratic aptitude is matched by their shameless butt-kissing. It is not surprising that most grant recipients excel in little more than lawyerristic logorrhea and ingrained artistic timidity. Critic-centered postmodernism spawned the phrase-art hybrid of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer in which an advertising-style slogan is combined with an implied message or visual cue (usually swiped from some old magazine). Their posture is a hip cynicism which is supposed to subvert the “thrall” of the advertising command. Kruger and Holzer play the market like skillful double-agents, boosting themselves into the public eye through clever steals from Madison Avenue behaviorist techniques yet simultaneously troweling on crypto-Marxist jive to secure the perks of critical and academic currency. Their self-promotions worked when they were at the sidelines of the establishment. However, not the social commentary grows increasingly hollow. Currently being groomed for jet-setting prominence by Soho millionairess Mary Boone, Kruger’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial in 1987, for which she is paid a handsome sum, featured nothing more than a socialite princess joke, “I Shop Therefore I Am.” Winking at and wagging the tail of establishment hierarchy is part of that I-rib-you-gently-you-pay-me-off confidence game artists have been playing the Renaissance courts.
These contemporary court artists, like many of the past centuries, smugly pretend t spit in the eye of the exploiters while allowing themselves to be pampered de-loused—and when they are not looking—de-clawed. There are, of course, those artists, usually fresh out of university, who are unaccomplished at filling out grant forms, and therefore consider themselves “subversives.” The majority of these art and rock magazines-styled rebels are playing out rebellion psychodramas to package and merchandize to consumerist sycophants. This strategy is (forgive them term) the simulacra of terrorism: the content seizes in the frozen attitudinizing of pose and goes no further. We must look to the true outsiders and not the would-be insiders for an artist truly capable of effective counter-terror against the insidious mantras of consumerist brainwash. Terror means a threat, and the outsider’s version of Aesthetic Terrorism belongs to those performances or arrangements of words and pictures that unleash the reactionary impulses of police and bourgeois artist/critic alike. The kind of art that evokes this wrath, fear and condemnation rejoices in its pagan spirit of schadenfreude which controverts the humanist piety of “enlightened victim.” Anti-social sadism rarely receives patronage, however. Outside the corrupting realm of societal handouts, the Aesthetic Terrorist—much as this definition may grate on him—is the last bastion of aesthetic purity. Operation Sun Devil is the name for a government action against computer wizards and assorted sharpies and super-smarts who were resourceful enough to figure out how to hack into the electronic files of Ma Bell. Those who know, claim the Sun Devil gambit as a terrified overreaction against intelligence by the plodding and stupid bureaucracy.
John Perry Barlow (Whole Earth Review, Fall 1990) describes a typical Sun Devil action against a teenage hacker: [A] father in New York […] opened the door at 6.00 a.m. and found a shotgun at his nose. A dozen agents entered. While one of the kept the man’s wife in a choke-hold, the rest made ready to shoot and entered the bedroom for their sleeping 14-year-old. Before leaving, they confiscated every piece of electronic equipment, including all the telephones. Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure are unheeded by the government agents who claim nerd computer hackers are terrorists and have “the ability to access and review the files of hospital patients. Furthermore, they could have added, deleted, or altered vital patient information, possibly causing life-threatening situations.” Meacorporate interests have staked claim to the entirety of cyberspace, and they are not about to tolerate the presence of digital interlopers. This may scare off some, but other pirates like the mysterious Legion of Doom and NuPrometheus league (who illegally circulated highly protected Macintosh computer source code) will rise to the challenge now that they have been provided a clearly delineated enemy to innovation, the individual, and personal freedom. It may come as a surprise to learn that a few artists are now producing work which finds itself classified as a thought crime, punishable by expulsion into a Siberia of non-distribution, and in some cases by litigation and imprisonment. Pure magazine, from Chicago, a xeroxed vehicle which extols child torture, murder, and extreme misogyny, tweaked too many civic-minded noses, and its editor, Peter Sotos, was tailed for nine months and underwent a lengthy trial process in which he was finally convicted for possession of some very illegal magazine. Soto’s case was the first successfully prosecuted new Illinois state law, enacted under the influence of the Meese Commission Report on pornography, an example of First Amendment revisionism par excellence.
Soto’s case is particularly disquieting because it proves that prison is in the offing for simple possession of controversial material. No doubt this legal precedent was established to open the doors for future roundups of other thought criminals. The expertly managed Gulf War (massacre), in which networks censored war casualty footage that might provoke a “Vietnam War syndrome,” provides a small window into the dynamics of mass control to come. Any thoughtful individual is undeniably malnourished by the current information diet. Whether this is due to a direct conspiracy of State or by design of the oligarchic marketplace matters little. However, it has upped the ante for a new American Samizdat in which “disreputable,” “crazy,” “hateful,” or “dangerous” topics are broached by individuals or small, autonomous groups that are not compromised or swayed by institutional priorities. Can “offensive interests become the political crime of future? Apparently so. When looking at the previous sentences one can compare and see that musicians have been arrested for obscene lyrics, anarchist individuals have been collared for burning the flag; parents have been arrested for photographing their toddlers in their birthday suits; painter and performer Joe Coleman was arrested in Boston for operating an “infernal machine” and in New York for killing a rat: museum curators were threatened with arrest for hanging homoerotic photos; G.G. Allian was jailed for some consensual sadomasochism with a girlfriend; the FBI have been “monitoring” certain groups who practice unorthodox pleasures of the flesh; and on and on. Even many of the books you read have come under widely publicized attack by authors such as Carl A. Raschke who advocated the revocation of First Amendment rights from those who spread “cultural terrorism.” Even globalization could be considered cultural terrorism.
It has become increasingly obvious that the aesthetic terrorist hobgoblins are nothing more than symbolic scapegoats to divert attention away from the real issues. For Americans, fear is not another form of awareness, it is just another form of gossip. As Charles Manson has stated, true subversive terror can only be actualized by turning off the TV sets. Until then, aesthetic terrorism will be orchestrated by those already in command against insubstantial or non-existent villains. And in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorism will be orchestrated by those already in command against insubstantial or non-existent villains. And in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity. The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in a chameleon-like stye master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime. We will not know them by name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet. Until then, there is a lot of work to be done. Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a World of egoists without central authority? This question has intrigued people for a long time. And for good reason. We all know that people are not angels, and that they tend to look after themselves and their own first. Yet we also know that cooperation does occur and that our civilization is based upon it. However, in situations where each individual has an incentive to be selfish, how can cooperation ever develop? The answer each of us gives to this question has a fundamental effect on how we think and act in our social, political, and economic relations with others. And the answers that others give have a great effect on how ready they will be to cooperate with us.
The most famous answer was given over three hundred years ago by Thomas Hobbes. It was pessimistic. He argued that before governments existed, the state of nature was dominated by the problem of selfish individuals who competed on such ruthless terms that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 1651/1962, p. 100). In his view, cooperation could not develop without a central authority, and consequently a strong government was necessary. Ever since, arguments about the proper scope of government have often focused on whether one could, or could not, expect cooperation to emerge in a particular domain if there were not an authority to police situation. Today nations interact without central authority. Therefore the requirements for the emergence of cooperation have relevance to many of the central issues of international politics. The most important problem is the security dilemma: nations often seek their own security through means which challenge the security of others. This problem arises in such areas as escalation of local conflicts and arms races. Related problems occur in international relations in the form of competition with alliances, tariff negotiations, and communal conflict places like Cyprus. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has presented the United States of American with a typical dilemma of choice. If the United States of American continued business as usual, Russian might be encouraged to try other forms of noncooperative behavior later one. On the other hand, any substantial lessening of United States of America’s cooperation risks some form of retaliation, which could then set off counter-retaliation, setting up a pattern of mutual hostility that could be difficult to end. Much of the domestic debate about international policy is concerned with problems of just this type. And properly so, since these are hard choices.
In everyday life, if they never invite us over in return, we may ask ourselves how many times we will invite acquaintances for dinner. An executive in an organization does favors for another executive in order to get favors in exchange. A journalist who has received a leaked news story gives favorable coverage to the source in the hope that further leaks will be forthcoming. A business firm in an industry with only one other major company charges high prices with expectation that the other firm will also maintain high prices—to their mutual advantage and at the expense of the consumer. For me, a typical case of the emergence of cooperation is the development of patterns of behavior in a legislative body of the United States Senate. Each senator has an incentive to appear effective to his or her constituents, even at the expense of conflicting with other senators who are trying to appear effective to their constituents. However, this is hardly a situation of completely opposing interests, a zero-sum game. On the contrary, there are many opportunities for mutually rewarding activities by two senators. These mutually rewarding actions have led to the creation of an elaborate set of norms, or folkways, in the Senate. Among the most important of these is the norm of reciprocity—a folkway which involves helping out a colleague and getting repaid in kind. It includes vote trading but extends to so many types of mutually rewarding behavior that “it is not an exaggeration to say that reciprocity is a way of life in the Senate” (Matthews 1960, p. 100; see also Mayhew 1975). Washington was not always like this. Early observers saw the members of the Washington community as quite unscrupulous, unreliable, and characterized by “falsehood, deceit, treachery” (Smith 1906, p. 190). In the 1980s the practice of reciprocity is well established. Even the significant changes in the Senate over the last two decades, tending toward more decentralization, more openness, and more equal distribution of power, have come without abating the folkway of reciprocity.
As will be seen, it is not necessary to assume that senators are more honest, more generous, or more public-spirited than in earlier years to explain how cooperation based on reciprocity has emerged or proved stable. The emergence of cooperation can be explained as a consequence of individual senators pursuing their own interest. We are investigating how individual pursuing their own interests will act, followed by an analysis of what effects this will have for the system as a whole. Put another way, the approach is to make some assumptions about individual motives and then deduce consequences for the behavior of the entire system. The case of the U.S. Senate is a good example, but the same style of reasoning can be applied to other settings. The object of this enterprise is to develop a theory of cooperation that can be used to discover what is necessary for cooperation to emerge. By understanding the conditions that allow it to emerge, appropriate actions can be taken to foster the development of cooperation in a specific setting. The Cooperation Theory that is presented here is based upon an investigation of individuals who pursue their own self-interest without the assistance of a central authority to force them to cooperate with each other. The reason for assuming self-interest is that it allows an examination of the difficult case in which cooperation is not completely based upon a concern for other or upon the welfare of the group as a whole. It must, however, be stressed that this assumption is actually much less restrictive than it appears. If a sister is concerned for the welfare of her brother, the sister’s self-interest can be thought of as including (among many other things) this concern for the welfare of her brother. However, this does not necessarily eliminate all potential for conflict between sister and brother.
Likewise a nation may act in part out of regard for the interests of its friends, but this regard does not mean that even friendly countries are always able to cooperate for their mutual benefit. So the assumption of self-interest is really just an assumption that concern for others does not completely solve the problem of when to cooperate with them and when not to. A good example of the fundamental problem of cooperation is the case where two industrial nations have erected trade barriers to each other’s exports. If barriers were eliminated, because of the mutual advantages of free trade, both countries would be better off. However, if either country were to unilaterally eliminate its barriers, it would find itself facing terms of trade that hurt its own economy. In fact, whatever one country does, the other country is better off retaining its own trade barriers. Therefore, the problem is that each country has an incentive to retain trade barriers, leading to a worse outcome than would have been possible had both countries cooperated with each other. This basic problem occurs when the pursuit of self-interest by each leads to a poor outcome for all. To make headway in understanding the vast array of specific situations which have this property, a way is needed to represent what is common to these situations without becoming bogged down in the details unique to each. Fortunately, there is such a representation available: the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, there are two players. Each has two choices, namely cooperate of defect. Each must make the choice without knowing what the other will do. No matter what the other does, defection yield a higher payoff than cooperation. If both defect, the dilemma is that both do worse than if both had cooperated. Cases typically result in one of four possible outcomes in the matrix. If both players cooperate, both do fairly well. Both get a reward for mutual cooperation.
However, if one player cooperates but the other defects, the defecting play get the temptation to defect, while the cooperating players gets the sucker’s payoff. If both defect, both get the punishment for mutual defection. What would you do in such a situation? That is basically the gamble of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is simply an abstract formulation of some very common and very interesting situations in which what is best for each person individually leads to mutual defection, whereas everyone would have been better off with mutual cooperation. The definition of Prisoner’s Dilemma requires that several relationships hold among the four different potential outcomes. The second part of the definition of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that the players cannot get out of their dilemma by taking turns exploiting each other. This assumption means that an even chance of exploitation and being exploited is not as good an outcome for a player as mutual cooperation. It is therefore assumed that the reward for mutual cooperation is greater than the average temptation and the sucker’s payoff. This assumption, together with the rank ordering of the four payoffs, defines the Prisoner’s Dilemma. We have come back to the point where we began, where values take the place of good and evil. However, now we have made at least a hasty tour of the intellectual experiences connected with modern politics that made such a response compelling. How it looked to thoughtful Germans is most revealingly expressed in a famous passage by Max Weber, about God science and the irrational: Finally, although a naïve optimism may have celebrated science—that is, the technique of the mastery of life founded on science—as the path which would lead to happiness, I believe I can leave this entire question aside in light of the annihilating critique which Nietzsche has made of “the last men” who “have discovered happiness.” Who, then, still believes in this with the exception of a few big babies in university chairs or in editorial offices?
So penetrating and well informed an observer as Weber could say in 1919 that the scientific spirit at the heart of Western democracy was dead for all serious men and that Nietzsche had killed it, or had at least given it the coup de grace. The presentation of “the last man” in Thus Spake Zarathusta was so decisive that the old-style Enlightenment rationalism need not even be discussed anymore; and, Weber implies, all future discussion or study must proceed with the certainty that the perspective was a “naïve” failure. Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion. This means, simply, that almost all Americans at that time, thinking American in particular, were “big babies” and remained so, long after the Continent had grown up. One need only think of John Dewey to recognize that he fits Weber’s description to a T, and then remember what his influence here once was. And not only Dewey, but everyone from the beginning of our regime, especially those who said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” shared the rationalist dream. Weber’s statement is so important because he made as much as more than anyone brought us into contact with the most advanced Continental criticisms of liberal democracy, and was the intermediary between Nietzsche and us Americans who were the most recalcitrant to one’s insight, perhaps because according to it we represent the worst or most hopeless and are therefore loath to see ourselves in that mirror. A very dark view of the future has been superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys. They have proved too much for us to handle. However, in our defense, we are probably not the only ones for whom they are too much. Perhaps you have caught yourself kissing another person as you first saw kissing in the movies or on television. My children have a phrase to describe this: “television kiss.”
It is fortunate for them that they have noted that there are television kisses and other kinds, because it will help protect them from absorbing it, taking it into themselves where it will come back out ten years, like a replay. Most of us did not make that distinction as we sat in darkened rooms or theaters as children. Since we did not see all that much real kissing, the media kiss became our image of kissing. We found ourselves producing that model of kiss later in life. I was fourteen-year-old when I tried to kiss for the first time. I imitated Brad Pitt’s kiss, but I did not feel it. Only later did I realize that perhaps Brad Pitt did not feel it either; he was merely kissing the way the director said he should. So there I was imitating a kiss that was never real in the first place, worried that there might be something wrong with me for lacking the appropriate feeling and failing to obtain the appropriate response. The journalist Jane Margold was driving home one night in Berkeley with her brother, Harlan. Suddenly a man crawled into the street right in front of them. They screeched to a stop and then, stunned, just sat there for a moment. They finally got out and cautiously went up to the man to find out that he had been stabbed several times in his upper body, was bleeding profusely and was in danger of dying right there. The man’s assailant was nowhere to be seen. In describing the event to me, Jane said that she instantly flipped into a media version of herself. She had never faced anything like it before and had no direct feelings. Instead, playing through her mind were images of similar events she had seen on television or in films. The media superseded her own responses, even to the point of removing her from the event. She was there, but sue did not experience herself as being there. She was seeing the event, but between her and it, floating in her mind, was an image of an implanted reality which would not get out of the way. Jane thought such thoughts as: “This is real; there is a wounded man lying here in from of me, bleeding to death, yet I have no feeling. It seems like a movie.”
In fact, it was they very movielike quality that eventually got her into action. Without feeling, she performed mechanical acts. She and her brother comforted the man, directed traffic, dispatched people to summon the police and an ambulance. She became extremely efficient, but throughout, she had the sense of performing a script. Apart from their economic implications, technologies create the ways in which people perceive reality, and such ways are the key to understanding diverse forms of social and mental life. As individual express their life, so they are. There are three stages in the development of technology: the age of technology of chance, the age of technology of the artisan, the age of technology of the technician. Cultures may be classified into three types: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. At the present time, each type may be found somewhere on the planet, although the first is rapidly disappearing: we must travel to exotic places to find a tool-using culture. If we do, it is well to go armed with the knowledge that, until the seventeenth century, all cultures were tool-users. There was, of course, considerable variation from one culture to another in the tools that were available. Some had only spears and cooking utensils. Some had water mills and coal- and horsepower. However, the main characteristic of all tool-using cultures is that their tools were largely invented to do two things: to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life, such as in the use of waterpower, windmills, and the heavy-wheeled plow; or to serve the symbolic World of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion, as in the construction of castles and cathedrals and the development of the mechanical clock. In either case, tools did not attack (or, more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced.
With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization. These beliefs, in fact, directed the invention of tools and limited the uses to which they were put. Even in the case of military technology, spiritual ideas and social customs acted as controlling forces. It is well known, for example, that the uses of the sword by samurai warriors were meticulously governed by a set of ideals known as Bushido, or the Way of the warrior. The rules and rituals specificizing when, where, and how the warrior must use either his two swords (the katana, or long sword, and the wakizashi, or short sword) were precise, tied closely to the concept of honor, and included the requirement that the warrior commit seppuku or hara-kiri should his honor be compromised. This sort of governance of military technology was not unknow in the Western World. The use of the lethal crossbow was prohibited, under threat of anathema, by Pope Innocent II in the early twelfth century. The weapon was judged to be “hateful to God” and therefore could not be used against Christians. That it could be used against Muslims and other infidels does not invalidate the point that in a tool-using culture technology is not seen as autonomous, and is subject to the jurisdiction of some binding social or religious system. This is why power, which to a large extent defines us as individuals and as nations, is itself being redefined. A clue to this redefinition emerges when we look more closely at some of the unrelated changes. For we discover that they are not as random as they seem. Whether it is Japan’s meteoric rise, GM’s impressive rebound, or the American doctor’s fall from grace, a single common thread unites them.
Take the punctured power of the god-in-a-white coat. Throughout the heyday of doctor-dominance in America, physicians kept a tight choke-hold on medical knowledge. Prescriptions were written in Latin, providing the profession with a semi-secret code, as it were, which kept most patients in ignorance. Medical journals and texts were restricted to professional readers. Medical conferences were closed to the laity. Doctors controlled medical-school curricula and enrollments. Contrast this with the situation today, when patients have astonishing access to medical knowledge. With a personal computer and a WiFi, anyone from home can access data bases like Index Medicus, and obtain scientific papers on everything from Addison’s disease to zygomycosis, and, in fact, collect more information about a specific aliment or treatment than the ordinary doctor has time to read. Copies of the 2,354-page book knows as the PDR or Physicians’ Desk Reference are also readily available to anyone. Once a week on the Lifetime cable network, any televiewer can watch twelve uninterrupted hours of highly technical television programming designed specifically to educate doctors. Many of these programs carry a disclaimer to the effect that “some of this material may not be suited toa general audience.” However, that is for the viewer to decide. The rest of the week, hardly a single newscast is aired in America without a medical story or segment. A video version of the material from the Journal of the American Medical Association is now broadcast by three hundred stations on Thursday nights. The press reports on medical malpractice cases. Inexpensive paperbacks tell ordinary readers what drug side effect to watch for, what drugs not to mix, how to raise or lower cholesterol levels through diet. In addition, major medical breakthroughs, even if television news almost before the M.S. has even taken his subscription copy of journal out of the in-box. In short, the knowledge monopoly of the medical profession has been thoroughly smashed. And the doctor is no longer a god.
This case of the dethroned doctor is, however, only one small example of a more general process changing the entire relationship of knowledge to power in the high-tech nations. In many other fields, too, closely held specialists’ knowledge is slipping out of control and reaching ordinary citizens. Similarly, inside major corporations, employees are winning access to knowledge once monopolized by management. And as knowledge is redistributed, so, too, is the power based on it. A human is a “beast” and purifies one’s heart, and behold, God holds one by the hand. That is not a kind of humans. Purity of heart is a state of being. A man is not pure in kind, but one is able to be or become pure, rather one is only essentially pure when one has become pure, and even than one does not thereby belong to a kind of humans. The “wicked,” that is, the bad, are not contrasted with good humans. The good is to draw near Hod. One does not say that those near to God are good. However, one does call the bas those who are far from God. In the language of modern thought that means that there are humans who have no share in existence, but there are no humans who possess existence. Existence cannot be possessed, but only shared in. One does not rest in the lap of existence, but one draws near to it. Nearness is nothing but such a drawing and coming near continually and as long as the human person lives. The dynamic of fairness and nearness is broken by death when it breaks the life of the person. With death there vanished the heart, that inwardness of humanity, out of which arises the pictures of the imagination, and which rises up in defiance, but which can also be purified. Separate souls vanish, separation vanished. Time which has been lived by the soul vanished with the soul, we know of no duration in time. Only the rock in which the heart is concealed, only the rock of human hearts does not vanish. For it does not stand in time. The time of the World disappears before eternity, but existing humans die into eternity as into the perfect existence.
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes.
Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearby Sacramento and Yuba City.
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Restore to Him the Throne of the Universe
I would not necessarily say we have conjured demons that have entered members of the audience, but I would not deny it either. Every mythology has its good and evil spirits which are objects of adoration and subjects of terror, and often both classes are worshipped from opposite motives; the good, that the worshipper may receive benefit; the evil, that one may escape harm. Sometimes good deities are so benevolent that they are neglected, superstitious fear directing all devotion towards the evil spirits to propitiate them and avert the calamities they are ready to bring upon the human race; sometime the malevolent deities have so little power that they prayer of the pious is offered up to the good spirits that they may pour out still further favors, for man is a worshipping being, and will prostrate himself with equal fervor before the altar whether the deity be good or bad. Midway, however, between the good and evil beings of all mythologies there is often one whose qualities are mixed; not wholly good nor entirely evil, but balanced between the two, sometimes doing a generous action, then descending to a petty meanness, but never rising to nobility of character nor sinking to the depths of depravity; good from whim, and mischievous from caprice. As enshrined in legend, there are many mysteries to be solved involving the Winchester Mansion. Believe it or not, the key to the massive front door was made of solid gold and diamonds and the keys for the other 2,000 doors of this Eight Wonder of the World filled two water buckets. Mrs. Winchester never disclosed the spot where the “pot o’ goold” was concealed, but it was certainly not in her safe. Travellers who would go to her mansion, which was not often visited, at once became objects of intense suspicion. You are driving along a retired country road; at the turn of the hill a policeman heaves in sight. He speaks pleasantly, and if nothing arouses his suspicion, he will pass on and you see him no more; but if the slightest distrust of you or your business finds lodgment in his mind, he marks you as a possible victim.
He temporarily vanishes; look round you proceed on your journey, and you may, by chance, catch a glimpse of him a mile or two away, peeping over a wall after you, but when you appear at the Winchester mansion, he reappears, and the local policeman, after his coming, will be sure to observe you with some degree of attention. Step out on the street, and here comes the policeman, ascertains your name, takes a mental inventory of your effects, makes a not of the railway and hotel labels on your trunks, and goes away to report. A sharp detective is the policeman. He knows articles of American manufacture at a glance, and need only to see your satchel to tell whether it came from America or was made in England. Talk with him, and he will chat cordially about the weather, the crops, the state of the markets, but all the time he is trying to make out who you are and what is your business. His eyes ramble from your hat to your shoes, and by the time the conversation is ended, he has prepared for the “sergeant” who many say was the very Mrs. Winchester, a report of your personal appearance and apparel. There was also a legend that he was one of the spirits from the mansion, but no one can say for sure. From the day he puts on his neat blue uniform and saucerlike cap, the constable, on or near the mansion, carries his life in his hand. Every hedge he scrutinized with a careful eye; behind it may lurk an assassin. Every division wall is watched for suspicious indications, his alertness being quickened by the knowledge that he is guarding his own life. He watched the mansion with a love stronger than death, knowing that Mrs. Winchester was a widow, and the gentle soul, with an untiring devotion, spent her life reciting the prayers for the dead. Mrs. Winchester often times wondered who was she? What was she? And where was she? Those questioned remained unanswered. It was no matter for her to let them go.
“It was lonely,” said Mrs. Winchester. “Monotonous Tedious, in fact. The birds and horses and things are pleasant company, and they love me and I love them; but here lately they seem somehow insufficient. I lack something, I do not know what it is. If only they could see how pretty I am, and how rounded and smooth, and how daintily formed are my limbs. Possibly they do; sometimes I think they do; but at most they only look it, they do not say it—at least in any language that I can understand. I begin to feel sure that that is what I lack—to hear it said. So I am happier than I once was. I try to put away from me that thought—the thought of my husband and new born daughter—and in the day I succeed, and am content, and do not feel my pain. But at night I dream—and dream.” By the late 1880s, practices of sorcery in California had become so widespread. A long list of canons forbade the use of sacraments or holy objects in magical rituals or divination with holy water or blessed candles. The practice of sorcery with profane objects, it was decided, did not come under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition but was to be handled by secular authorities. There were some priests who were especially noted for their corruption and for their singular devotion to money. Members of the group were often found to be conducting rites too wild for the Catholic hierarchy to condone and were excommunicated. It was from this body of clergy that the modern Black Mass was to emerge. Monks who were renegades of the Franciscan order, were reported to have held nocturnal conventicles at which, after the service, indiscriminate events took place. When a baby was the inadvertent product of one of these gatherings, its body was supposedly burned, the ashes being mixed with blood that was served as a sacrament during the admission ceremonies of new members of the church. Such reports of disaffected renegade priests conducting illicit Masse were not infrequent at the time.
Sometimes the victims were obtained either by outright abduction or by buying them from their peasant parents, who were glad enough to sell the children, thinking that they were being taken as servants and would have a much easier life on the estate of a rich nobleman than plowing the fields. Now one may see why the Winchester mansion and Mrs. Winchester were so heavily guarded. In one church in particular, at the altar stood a statue of a hideous demon, presumably Satan. One room contained copper vessels filled with the blood of his sacrificial victims, the vessels all bearing neat labels revealing the dates of execution. In the center of the room was a black marble table, upon which was the body of a child who have been freshly slaughtered. These ritual Masses called from blood sacrifices to Astaroth and Asmodue, demons of love and lust. The blood was poured into a chalice. To that blood, flour was assed and a wafer made. The operators, seeking personal gain, sought to get what they wished from any source that would give it to them, and they were willing to prostrate themselves before any deity, good or evil, to accomplish their goals. It seems obvious that officials within the Church and without believed in the existence of such practices by renegade priests, which caused a sharp break in man’s attitude toward man and toward religion to occur. For the first time in centuries man began to look at himself and his society less seriously. With this new perspective, man’s religion also changed, and Satanism did, too. Therefore, it is no wonder that Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s arrival to the valley was a sensational event. People were thrilled by this dramatic entrance of a millionairess; by those freight cars sidetracked in Satan Clara, uploading rich imported furnishing; by building activity that mushroom a farm house into a mansion with over 500 rooms, and as many as 125,000 square feet.
Here was fair came for all! They talked about Mrs. Winchester! Talk begat rumor and as the years passed and new towers and wings arouse, so did the colossal, ominous figure of Satan, which had struck men dumb with terror and awe. The people of the valley could not tell if it was an optical illusions or material. When President Theodore Roosevelt’s entourage passed the Winchester House in 1903 to plant the City of Campbell’s famous redwood tree, he expressed desire to visit this now World-famous dwelling. At the great front door our nation’s leader was more than astonished when the ominous figure told him, “Mrs. Winchester is not at home!” As he left, a procession of white-and-red-robed, torch-bearing monks were seen floating down the misty nine-story tower of the Winchester Mansion. The ubiquitous inverted crucifix and black candles were present. There was a Mass taking place before an altar surmounted by a cross, on top of which was the sign of the tetragram, a traditional magical symbol representing the four elements and used in the conjuration of the elementary spirts. Mrs. Winchester was locked in her mansion in a life-and-death struggle with evil, spirits killed by the Winchester rifle. A cross was made in the fields. There was a goat trampling on the crucifix and a ghostly priest wearing a black robe and performing a ceremony. That night, passers by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. It was described as unholy sounds as the Devil’s Tritone. While God had invented music, Satan was the first musician, and many claimed to feel his presence. Classical music composers who were supposedly in attendance that night, he been denounced by the Church for making actual pacts with the Devil. And that night, these spirits in black and red robes insisted on all genuine creativity, including the music, which was the result of an implicit pact with the infernal. Shortly after the music started, witches assembled on the estate, there to jabber and disport themselves pending Satan’s arrival. When he appeared, they formed a circle around his throne and glorified him.
When he felt sufficiently stimulated by the praise, he gave the signal for the sabbath to begin. But this dark exuberance proved too much for the party. The night ended when the bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled at an ungodly hour to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchres. Mrs. Winchester felt such a demonic force that night…she dreamt of witches. She woke up screaming and screaming…and said, “I have seen the Devil.” And still a ghostly violin was playing as legions of restless souls still wandered in the mansion. The very act of hearing this music indicates that its intended purposes worked. This particular exercise was also intended to awaken dormant regions of the human mind. Ghosts playing certain frequencies would make unbelievable things happen the next day. It released adrenal energy, and the next day dead bodies were discovered mining in a cave in San Francisco. Mrs. Winchester fainted when she saw that the walls in her Daisy bedroom were done in scarlet black, and black candles surrounded the altar, on which a figure of Satan majestically sat. She found that her Bible was partially destroyed, there was a broken chalice, and inverted cross craved into the floor. Similar events took place all over the Bay Area that night. Weird animal sacrifices turned up with alarming frequency. Churches were vandalized, graves disturbed, and mysterious magical symbols were inscribed on church wall. It was as if the dead had been risen. I remember Mrs. Winchester telling me once of a visitation she had from her husband, William Wirt Winchester, deceased nearly ten years, and the shock of seeing him again, nearly killed her. This true story of these awful and inexplicable events—an experience that in one short day changed the colour of her hair from brown to white, and carved lines on her face that nothing would ever erase, haunted her with the recollection of the most fearful ordeal she ever went through and emerged alive to speak of it. Mrs. Winchester invited a Medium to her home to conduct a séance in the blue séance room. They heard such a melody as the World had never yet heard the equal to, note by note. A sort of ecstatic trance, and the most wonderful tunes ravished the air as if invisible hands swept over piano keys.
It seemed to tell her an unearthly story, faintly imagined and seen, shadow-like as in a dream, and awe-struck and bewildered, she crouched down on the cold stone floor, covering her ears, for she knew such a melody was never meant for human ears to hear. How long it lasted, she could not say, but it gradually died away as gently and imperceptibly as a summers breeze, and as it did so, the clock in the tower slowly struck 1.13 A.M. Then action came to her, and Mrs. Winchester sprang to her feet, she flew to the door and fumbled with the key. The rain was falling heavily without as she tore open the door, and she felt that strange soft wind she had felt thirteen times before pass her from behind! It passed her—passed her into the night was gone. But the sequel to that strange night’s experience came two hours later. A telegram came for Mrs. Winchester, that Reuben Gallon, a police officer known for guarding her estate was found dead outside her estate near the six-foot hedge with his horse laying by his side. The cause of death was apparently from fright. A priest who possessed a great deal of occult literature and practiced magic resented Mrs. Winchester because his mansion was much vaster and more beautiful than his church. He was envious of Mrs. Winchester’s zeal and determined to silence her and stop her building. He threated to cast a spell upon her which would upset her mentally, and perhaps this night of horrors was the result. Many charms are used to stir up love or hate, and some magicians specialize in this area of magic. Causing the death of human beings and animals. This type of black magic belongs to the darkest sphere of occultism. Such episodes may appear utterly absurd and pure superstition to people in countries comparatively free of black magic, but instead they should be warnings of the power of Satan and demons where occult literature lures readers into illicit knowledge. The satanists worshipped Lucifer, the fallen angel, who they believe has always had more power on Earth than God. Their goal is to restore him to “the throne of the Universe,” these strains echoing the tenets of the old Luciferins. In an honest moment, the priest confessed: “I didn’t want to curse Mrs. Winchester, but I was driven to do it. The devil drives me. I can never find rest.” By sympathy of your hearts for sin, more evil impulses inexhaustively than human power have stained the Earth. Such tragic events oftehn involve as many as four generations.
Unlock the secrets of these dark halls, where the magical arts have been cultivated and praticed.
A Guided tour through 110 of the 160 rooms. Guests will be able to see the infamous rooms of Sarah’s stately mansion, known around the world as the Winchester Mystery House®, and see the bizarre attributes that give the mysterious mansion its name.
Tour Duration: 1 Hour, 5 Minutes
Prices: $41.99 adults, $34.99 seniors 65+, $19.99 children 5-12.
Save by bundling both tours together! www.winchestermysteryhouse.com
Enchanted Words of the Black Forest
Legend has it that the Winchester Mansion was built in one night by angels without human assistance, the work being done at the solicitation of Mrs. Winchester, who watched and prayed while, while the angels toiled. However, the nine-story observation tower was built in one night by a demon, whom she summed by chanting, “I, Sarah Winchester, a servant of God, call upon thee, desire and conjure thee, O Spirit Anoch, by the wisdom of Solomon, by the obedience of Isaac, by the blessing of Abraham, by the piety of Jacob and Noe, who did not sin before God, by the serpents of Moses, and by the twelve tribes, and by the most terrible words: Dallia, Dollia, Dollion, Corfuselas, Jazy, Agry, Ahub, Tilli, Adoth, Suna, Eoluth, Also, Dilu, and by the words through which thou canst be compelled to appear before me in a beautiful, human form, and give what I desire. By sweating of blood in the Garden, by the lashes Jesus bore, by his bitter suffering and death, by his Resurrection, Ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit, Druj Nasu and all legions under the command of Az-Jahi feed upon the imposed limitations of the astral body which have been constructed by the programming of the World, and over the land raise a tower that will withstand the ravages of time. The tower being divided into stories about ten feet high, each story lighted by a single window, the highest compartment having invariably four lancet windows opening to the cardinal points of the compass. The roof conical, made of overlapping stone slabs, and a circle of grotesquely carved heads and zigzag ornamentation found beneath the projecting cornice, and every figure known to the geometrician to be found in the stones of this single tower.” The tower was indisputably of pagan origin, and of antiquity so great as to precede written history.
There is no doubt that the early Americans were sun and fire worshippers, and many excellent reasons may be given for the belief that the tower was built for the purposes of religion. However, when the Earthquake of 1906 struck, it toppled the nine-story tower directly on Mrs. Winchester’s bedroom. The servants rescued her and terrified, she fled to Redwood City, to build a palatial barge, (called the Ark) on which she lived for the next six years. While Mrs. Winchester was away from her estate, Druids moved in, and were worshipping Satan. A Black Mass took place inside. The alter was a coffin, there were religious artifacts, including the ritual chamber, which was black. The priests wore black robes, with cowls. The Black Mass not only existed, at least in not only in the Satanic ritual, but it also existed on a dual plane, with two different frames of social reference both in practice and in function. At this ritual, there was a sacrificing of a human at crossroads, and an incubus demon, a tall black-haired stranger, appeared in the form of a man. The Lord’s prayer was read backward, and Mrs. Winchester was summoned back home. The demon claimed her would give her a fortune so large that even her inheritance would pale in comparison. Mrs. Winchester entertained him. His name was Zairich, he was the demon of thirst. This spirit was useful for forging the will toward one cause, making one thirsty to achieve a specific objective. The cost was that Mrs. Winchester would become emotionally cold toward others during the period of working with this demon. This was because the majority of her mental and emotional energy would be harnessed by the demon and funneled into the desire of achieving the objective. Mrs. Winchester was quite willing to help him for as the evening advanced Zairich’s attentions great increasingly nauseating, and she was thankful to escape to her room, though the loud voices and coarse laughter below invariably kept her awake till long after midnight.
Mrs. Winchester, at the time, was thoroughly miserable. She had given her love to her Husband, William Wirt Winchester, and he and her new born baby had died, leaving her full of grief. The future without him seemed dark and hopeless, and she was also tormented with a fearful suspicion, which was justified when the 1906 earthquake struck at 5.13am. That sorrow came—it left her sitting up every night looking at the sparkling fields and the lovely myriads to the black sky, doubled by the blur of tears in her eyes. When she looked at her Victorian Garden, it was a dream to her. It was beautiful, surpassingly beautiful, enchantingly beautiful, but she was lost. She wished the secrets of this wonderful World could make her happy again and she could thank the Giver of it all for devising it. The garden gate clicked, and Zairich headed up the drive. There was a curious-looking packet for her sewn up with red cotton in dirty wax-cloth. She tore it open with shaky fingers and searched desperately for the contract she thought would be inside, but what she found was a diamond necklace that startled her with its brilliance—it seemed to be made of captive lightning. Mrs. Winchester looked enchanting: her cheeks were flushed with emotion; her eyes dreamy with memories of her lost husband and child; her white gown threw up the brilliance of her hair and added to the shapeliness of her slight figure; the gorgeous diamond necklace lay around her throat. Zairich told her, that if she kept continual construction on her mansion, and never stopped building it, she would never run out of money and would have eternal life. Zairich then departed in a haze of black smoke. There was a rush of unsteady footsteps down the hallway, a loud slam, a helpless giggling laugh from the butler Baetzhold, as he blundered into his own room, and then all was quiet.
Mrs. Winchester shuddered and turned wearily to the open window; she leaned out and inheld the fragrance of the flowers beneath, the cool sweetness of the night air; little white moths brushed past her face, and now and then a bird called from the trees at the end of the garden. A faint hint of the rising moon was stealing over the sky, and Mrs. Winchester sat motionless and inert while the weird light slowly increased and clove the darkness into blocks of shadow. Suddenly the sound of a muffled cry within the house made her start and draw back her head. Again she heard it, and her heart beat quickly with apprehension. She opened the door and listened; in this room at the end of the passage, Baetzhold seemed to be running violently to and fro and calling hoarsely for help, but before she could dart across to rouse the butler, a dishevelled figure with a white terrified face and wild eyes rushed past her and down the stairs. She heard the hall-door bang, and thud of running feet over the lawn. There were pentagrams on the floor, and black magical chants and prayers. She was powerless to rouse Baetzhold from his heavy stupor, and Mrs. Winchester ran in bewilderment back to her open window. The moonlight was streaming over the smooth grass; and, in and out among the bushes, as though pursued by a relentless enemy, ran Baetzhold, stooping, doubling, dodging. His heavy steps and painting breath throbbed on the night air, and once or twice he half fell, recovering himself with a low hunted cry. It was a sickening sight, but Mrs. Winchester’s courage rose unexpectedly, as sometimes happens with timid natures in a sudden crisis. She lent out of the window and called to him. At the sound of her voice he stopped, then hurried towards her and held up his hands. His face, in the moonlight, drawn with terror and delusion, was ghastly.
“Come down!” he called, “come down and help me drive him away—he is waiting there under the trees. If you are with me perhaps he will go, but alone I cannot escape from him, and he will hunt me to my death—Mrs. Winchester! Mrs. Winchester! The fear and supplication in his voice were pitiable; she braced her nerves and prepared to go down. Perhaps her presence would soothe and influence him—even if he should kill her in his delirium, it would be better than facing Zairich alone. “Wait,” she cried softly, “I am coming.” And presently her hand was on his trembling arm, and she was firmly reassuring him that he was safe from his imaginary pursuer. She led him to a garden bench under the dining-room window, and he sat down a shaking, huddled heap. “It was that cursed diamond necklace you are wearing!” Baetzhold ceased abruptly, his mouth open, his breath coming in quick gasps; he pointed towards the trees: “There! Don’t you see him? Over by the bushes—he has not gone, I have done no good—he is coming out into the moonlight on the lawn—Ah! I cannot bear to see his face.” He pushed past Mrs. Winchester, and ran with superhuman swiftness down the path. She heard him crash through the wrought iron gate, and his rapid footsteps rang clear on the hard road; faster, faster they sped into the distance, until the echo died away on the still night air. Extract from the Oakland Tribune: “An inquest was held yesterday on the body of Baetzhold Unger, who was found drowned in a pond on the Winchester estate, where he had been working as a butler for Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester, widow of William W. Winchester. The jury returned a verdict of suicide whilst temporarily insane; and much sympathy is felt in the neighborhood for Mrs. Winchester for we regret to learn that the young lady is at present lying dangerously ill from the effects of the shock, and grave doubts are entertained as to her recovery.”
However, Mrs. Winchester was called back from the borders of death by Zairich with news which gave her the promise of a happy future, but left her hurting. The secret was Zairich was a collector of souls. “The necklace is cursed,” he told Mrs. Winchester. “You can call pitching hatred at somebody the same thing as cursing them. So creating imagery in your mind to cause death or problems to somebody, that is the best way of accomplishing this curse.” As puerile and absurd as the practice might seem to scientific man, to a primitive who believes that the tying of a know means the casting of a spell, and the untying of the knot signifies the breaking of the spell, this reversal of right must have seemed altogether logical. In fact, modern humans have not lost all their contacts with the imitative World of the magician, for one practice this ritual when one curses someone for whom one feels an intense dislike; the curse is merely a reversal of a blessing, the words, “God damn him” being substituted for “God bless him.” Some times people find themselves stifled by an encroaching, alien force that spells out death for their old ways of life. At their nocturnal meetings, the Luciferans who had taken up residence in Mrs. Winchester’s mansion, were supposed to have for some obscure reason first kissed a toad, and then a tall, thin man who was described as having had cold lips. This man was reported by ecclesiasts to have been the Devil. A feast followed. Those members who were interrogated described a curious symbol that they worshiped at the ceremonies. This was a human figure, its body being half gold, half black, obviously representing the dual nature of the universe, Lucifer being the gold or “light” side. It is not certain whether the figure was a statue or a real human being, since the accounts of the proceedings are so vague, but at any rate all the initiates tore off a piece of their clothing and presented it to the figure as a token of fealty.
The efficacy of magic was widely believed among the clergy from the earliest times. and higher Christian officials, alarmed by the extent of such practices within the Church, often found it necessary to clamp down. In the thirteenth century, Pope Gregory IX passed a canon law forbidding priests to indulge in sorcery. However, these edicts did little to curb the belief on the part of the clergy that magic really did work. Even high officials were accused of practicing the black arts. In 1343, the bishop of Coventry was accused before the Pope of paying homage to the Devil. Pope Sylvester II, in the tenth century, was said to have been a sorcerer and was accused by many of having attained the papacy by magic. Pope Honorius III was rumored to have been a dabbler in magic, this assertion causing his name to be used later on a manual of black magic of doubtful authenticity, the Constitution of Honorius the Great. In 1401, Boniface IX absolved a priest named Otto Syboden for being concerned in an incantation to discover the location of some stolen money; the thief had supposedly died from the spell. It was only natural that the Mass should become the vehicle for later Satanists, for the Mass was believed by all good Christians to be the ultimate magical ritual. During the ceremony, the priest was supposed to be possessed by the spirit of Christ, thus establishing direct contact with the secret powers of the Heavens. However, these powers were not exclusive; they could be used and abused, just like other magical forces. By reversal and substitution, such powers could be twisted to fit the needs of the performer. Thus as early as 681, the Council of Toledo prohibited the so-called Mass of the Dead, which was performed by priests for the purposes of securing someone’s death.
A magic ceremony commonly involves the use of four elements—invocation, charm, symbolic action, and a fetish. If black magic is involved the invocation is addressed to Satan and demonic powers. The invocation of black magic is commonly fortified by a pact with Satan in which the person signs oneself over to the devil with one’s own blood. Magical symbolism is intended to give effectiveness to the magic charm and bring about occult transference. Magic symbolism, in turn, is supported by a fetish. This is a magically charmed object, which is supposed to carry magical power. Any object, of the most bizarre character, can become a fetish by being magically charmed. The magical effectiveness of the fetish (amulet or talisman) is increased by inscriptions, particularly by magic charm formulas. In Mrs. Winchester’s safe, was her diamond necklace, and a note that said, “I am he that holds the seven agues in hand and can send out the seven powers, and if you will hide this and live in my name, you will succeed in all things, and I will protect you.” Obviously, the superstitious use of such a magically charmed object elicited unusual demonic activity. Whoever now possesses this jewel can achieve dominion through magic over all powers in Earth, Heaven, and Hell, but they are in danger of becoming slaves of the devil. The diabolical knowledge and power they gain are paid for by tragedy, misery, and every type of occult oppression. A spell is produced by the release of demonic power through hypnosis, magnetism, mesmerism, or some other form of magic resulting in an extrasensory influence. Conjurers, charmers, and others who dabble in both white and black magic frequently know how to cast and break spells. They can paralyze a person on the spot, cause a thief to be frozen in his tracks.
Although both black and white magic use numerous other enchantments, yet the very heart of both branches centers in casting and releasing the spell. A spell can cause temporary blindness, deafness, dumbness, torpor, sickness, pain, etcetera. The symptoms will disappear when the spell is broken. Often only superstitious claims are made which remain devoid of reality. However, through a genuine magic spell diabolic power is released and real results are obtained. Till the power is recalled or counteracted, the spell remains binding. When one seeks to point out the dangers of spiritism by means of the more exaggerated examples one can often be faced with the following response. “But we do not engage in such a primitive form of spiritism as that. We are interested in spiritualism, and that is a noble and a spiritual thing.” I was once told by a man who had been a spiritualist for a number of years that he himself considered spiritism as opposed to spiritualism to be a crime. Well, what is the answer to this question? Has spiritualism succeeded where spiritism has failed? It is true that today spiritualism seems to have taken over from spiritism, and whereas spiritism is concerned with more animistic experiments, spiritualism attempts to take within its scope the religious and the spiritual World. Once cannot argue with the fact that spiritualism exists on a much higher level both intellectual and ethically than spiritism. There is, for example, in Zurich a spiritualistic “Lodge” which holds services each Sunday in which there are the usual hymns and prayers and sermon. The sermon is allegedly given by a departed spirit from the other side through the help of a medium, and each week it is taken down in shorthand and then published later. I have read several of these sermons and they contain a mixture of idealistic, moral and Christian thought. They fail to present the very center of the Christian message, which is that before God man stands as a helpless sinner who needs the redemption that there is in Christ Jesus.
Another point to note is that spiritualists interpret the New Testament in a quite unique way. For example, they say that the appearance of Moses and Elijah on the mount of transfiguration, and also the resurrection appearances of Christ, were really materializations which one would normally associate with a séance. As well as this, by means of a forced exegesis of Scripture they avoid the direct command of Deut. 18 and other passages which forbid communication with the dead. Once I cited this very passage to a member of a spiritualistic church, he exclaimed that they did not call on the dead but rather upon the living spirits from the realm of the dead. The result of all this is that spiritualism merely confuses people through its apparent Christian façade. The disastrous thing is that some Christian circles fail to recognize the evils that lie behind both spiritism and spiritualism. For example, a Christian family used to visit Mrs. Winchester and they would hold séances together. In this way some of the well-known Christians of the past have apparently appeared and conducted the meeting, as well as preaching to them. It is noteworthy though, that these “spirit” sermons contain nothing exceptional and usually fell well below the standard set. After Mrs. Winchester lost her husband. Nothing would console her in her loss, but later a strange thing began to take place. Her deceased husband started appearing to her at night, and Mr. William Winchester told her that he had been allowed to do so in order to comfort her in her distress. In this way their marriage was able to continue through these nightly appearances. The Mrs. Winchester claimed that she received help and strength from her husband’s coming to her, and she used to ask him about any problems that she had to face. A well-known Christian minister advised her to end this communication with the dead, but Mrs. Winchester could not be convinced that she was in any way wrong in what she did. However, as time went on Mrs. Winchester began to suffer from various psychic disturbances. The enigma of the Mystery House that tragedy and a rifle built is perhaps unanswerable.
Winchester Mystery House
Unlock the secrets of these dark halls, and explore in your own space 👻🗝
Self guided tours are one party at a time. Winchester Mystery House staff will be available for questions and assistance along the tour route. Advance ticket purchase is required as capacity is very limited. Tickets may be purchased online at www.winchestermysteryhouse.com.
I Never Found a Man Who Knew How to Love Himself
It is important to look at the error in which one has lived in, and it will reveal so much to one. When the heart rises up in one, and one is pricked in one’s reins, often it is discovered how brutish one was and ignorant has been as a beast before the World. In todays highly professionalized World, the term amateur invites a brush-off from business executive and economists. Yet throughout history, unpaid amateurs, working for themselves, their families or their communities, have made remarkable achievements in a wide variety of fields, including science and technology. Because science had not become a paying profession, early scientists were almost all amateurs. Many gained a living as paid professionals in one field but made their greatest contributions to history as part-time prosumers. Joseph Priestley, who in 1774 discovered oxygen, was a minster. Pierre de Fermat, whose “last theorem” puzzled mathematicians for centuries, was a lawyer. And Benjamin Franklin, paid as a printer, media mogul and politician, studied ocean currents on the side, inventing bifocals along the way and demonstrating that lightning was a form of electricity. He, too, was a prosumer. Today prosuming amateurs are collecting huge amounts of valuable environmental information—for example, seismological data in the Philippines. However, it is astronomy and space that, often in collaboration with professionals, amateurs are making really important finds. They started early. When the World’s first artificial satellite, Sputink, blasted into orbit in 1957, amateurs all over the globe who had been organized by astronomer Fred Whipple, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, were waiting to track it across the Heavens. There effort was dubbed Moonwatch demonstrated what amateurs could do when properly inspired and led.” Today amateur astronomers are, among other things, charting asteroids and other potentially dangerous objects in space.
Brigadier General Simon “Pete” Worden, a former astronaut, not long ago told the U.S. House Committee on Science that small objects “at the nuclear weapons scale” smash into Earth’s upper atmosphere at a rate of once about every two weeks. In June 2002 one such event occurred over the Mediterranean and released twenty to thirty kilotons of energy—more than that of the Hiroshima blast. “Has this occurred over India or Pakistan,” Worden suggested, “it could have triggered a nuclear war.” Urging more attention to such low-probability, but potentially devastating, dangers, he paid tribute to amateur monitors, pointing out that “some of them are not so amateur.” According to Richard Nugent, himself an amateur asteroid hunter and a contributor to Starscan, a newsletter to the Johnson Space Center Astronomical Society, “Amateurs are catching up with the pros in certain fields, and surpassing them in others [such as] asteroid discoveries, novae, supernovae, variable stars, occultation events, fireballs, meteors, planetary observations, satellite passes, and other unique events.” As research tools become smaller, cheaper, smarter and more powerful, making possible further changes in our relationships to the deep fundamental of knowledge, amateurs will no doubt enter new fields. And this takes us to another overlooked contribution made by prosumers. Every single day around the World, countless volunteers get behind the wheel of their cars and drive to schools, churches, mosques, synagogues, hospitals, playgrounds or community centers to provide free services. Or they add to their odometers by picking up groceries for neighbors or taking a sick relative to a doctor. Nobody knows how many millions of miles they drive in aggregate over the course of year, or how much gas they use, or how much wear and tear they add to their autos in the course of creating unpaid value.
In addition, therefore, to delivering free lunch to the money economy by donating their unpaid time and labor, they are also contributing what amounts to a prosumer capital asset—the use of a vehicle—that makes possible or increases the value they created for others. That is more free lunch. (If they go to the trouble, tit is true that, in the United States of America, they may be able to reclaim some small part of their expenses as a tax deduction, but it is doubtful that in practice most volunteers do.) Car use, however, is not the only example of prosumer capital at work. As we have already seen, prosumers, as a group, spend large sums buying machines and tools—or, more accurately, investing in capital goods for use in prosuming. These tools range from telescopes, sewing machines and digital cholesterol testers all the way up to automobiles and other vehicles. And, in a new, fast-spreading practice, another pattern is emerging: Busy prosumers now sometimes volunteer their machines, instead of their labor. Only by taking account of practices likes these can we uncook the economic books. Now, Hobbes blazed the trail to the self, which has grown into the highway of a ubiquitous psychology without the psyche (soul). However, he, like Locke, did not develop the psychology of the self in its fullness, just as neither went very deeply into the state of nature, because the solution seemed to be on the surface. Once the old virtues were refuted—the piety of the religious or the honor of the nobles—Hobbes and Locke assumed that most men would immediately agree that their self-preservative desires are real, that they come from within and take primacy over any other desire. The true self is not only good for individuals but provides a basis for consensus not provided by religious or philosophies.
Locke’s substitute for the virtuous man, the rational and industrious one, is the perfect expression of this solution. It is not an ethic or a morality of a Protestant or any other kind of believer, but a frank admission of enlightened selfishness (selfishness that has learned from modern philosophy which goals are real and which imaginary), or self-interest rightly understood. Locke develops the opposite, the idle and the quarrelsome man—who, we see, may be the priest or the noble (id est, pretenders to a higher morality)—to debunk virtue in a less provocative way than Hobbes did. Lock’s rational and industrious man partakes, as a prototype, of the charm of the sincere man who acts as he thinks and, without fraudulent pieties, seeks his own good. Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism. The taste of the sincere expresses itself more in blame of Tartufferie than in praise of virtue. Terror in the face of death, an immediate and overwhelming subjective experience of the self and what counts most for it, and the imperative following from this experience that death must be avoided, were confirmed by the new natural philosophy which sees in nature only bodies in motion, bodies blindly conserving their motion by the necessity of inertia. All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared. Nature tells us nothing about man specifically and provides no imperatives for his conduct. However, man can be seen to behave as all other bodies behave, and the imaginary constraints on his following his powerful inclinations—constraints which would cause him to behave differently from natural bodies—vanish.
Irrational passion and rational science cooperate in a new way to establish natural law: Pursue peace. Man’s passionate subjectivity gives assents to the premises of natural philosophy—nay, takes them as its principles of action—and philosophy finds that that assent accords with nature. Man remains somehow a part of nature, but in a different and much more problematic way than in, say, Aristotle’s philosophy, where soul is at the center and what is highest in man is akin to what is highest in nature, or where soul is nature. Man is really only a part and not the microcosm. Nature has no rank order or hierarchy of being, nor does the self. Lockean natural man, who is really identical to his civil man, whose concern with comfortable self-preservation makes him law-abiding and productive, is not all that natural. Rousseau quickly pointed out that Locke, in his eagerness to find a simple or automatic solution to the political problem, made nature do much more than he had a right to expect a mechanical, nonteleological nature to do. Natural man would be brutish, hardly distinguishable from any of the other animals, unsociable and neither industrious nor rational, but, instead, idle and nonrational, motivated exclusively by feelings or sentiments. Having cut off the higher aspirations of man, those connected with the soul, Hobbes and Locke hoped to find a floor beneath him, which Rousseau removed. Man tumbled down into what we called the basement, which now appears bottomless. And there down below, Rousseau discovered all the complexity in man that, in the days before Machiavelli, was up on high. Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one.
The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to one’s real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in one, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise one perfection or salvation but merely buys one off. Rousseau explodes the simplistic harmoniousness between nature and society that seems to be the America premise. Rousseau still hoped for a soft landing on nature’s true grounds, but one not easily achieved, requiring both study and effort. The existence of such a natural ground has become doubtful, and it is here that they abyss opened up. However, it was Rousseau who founded the modern psychology of the self in its fullness, with its unending search for what is really underneath the surface of rationality and civility, its new ways of reaching the unconscious, and its unending task of constituting some kind of healthy harmony between above and below. Rousseau’s intransigence set the stage for a separation of man from nature. He was perfectly willing to go along with the modern scientific understanding that a brutish being is true man. However, nature cannot satisfactorily account for his difference from the other brutes, for his movement from nature to society, for his history. Descartes, playing his part in the dismantling of the soul, had reduced nature to extension, leaving out of it only the ego that observes extension. Man is, in everything but his consciousness, part of extension. Yet how he is a man, a unity, what came to be called a self, is utterly mysterious. This experienced whole, a combination of extension and ego, seems inexplicable or groundless. Body, or atoms in motion, passions, and reason are some kind of unity, but one that stands outside of the grasp of natural science.
If there were no place to hold them, Locke appears to have invented the self to provide unity in continuity for the ceaseless temporal succession of sense impressions that would disappear into nothingness. We can know everything in nature except that which knows nature. To the extent that man is a piece of nature, he disappears. The self gradually separates itself from nature, and its phenomena must be treated separately. Descartes’ ego, in appearance invulnerable and godlike in its calm and isolation, turns out to be the tip of an iceberg floating in a fathomless and turbulent sea called the id, consciousness an epiphenomenon of the unconscious. Man is self, that now seems clear. However, what is self? Our gaily embraced psychology leaves us with this question. If we are to abandon ourselves to it, it is important for us to know the unbearably complicated story behind it. If this psychology is to be believed, one thing is certain: it came to us belatedly, in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected in out liberal society, and it opens up a Pandora’s box, ourselves. Like Iago it tells us, “I never found a man who knew how to love himself.” Modern psychology has this in common with what was always popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it. The ambiguity of human life always requires that there be distinctions between good and bad, in one form or another. The great change is that a good man used to be the one who cares for others, as opposed to the man who cares exclusively for oneself. Now the good man is the one who knows how to care for himself, as opposed to the man who does not. This is most obvious in the political realm.
For Aristotle, good regimes have rulers dedicated to the common good, while bad ones have rulers who use their positions to further their private interest. For Locke and Montesquieu there is no such distinction. A good regime has the proper institutional structures for satisfying while containing the selfish men who make it up, while a bad one does not succeed in doing this. Selfishness is presupposed; men are not assumed to be as they ought to be, but as they are. Psychology has distinctions only between good and bad forms of selfishness, like Rousseau’s deliciously candid distinctions between amour de soi and amour–propre, untranslatable into English because we would have to use self-love for both terms. For us the most revealing and delightful distinctions—because it is so unconscious of its wickedness—is between inner-directed and other-directed, with the former taken to be unqualified good. Of course, we are told, the healthy inner-directed person will really care for others. To which I can only respond: if you can believe that, you can believe anything. Rousseau knew much better. The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of the most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things. Socrates too thought that living according to the opinions of others was an illness. However, he did not urge men to look for a source for producing their own unique opinions, or criticize them for being conformists. His measure of health was not sincerity, authenticity or any others necessarily vague criteria for distinguishing a healthy self. The truth is the one thing most needful; and conforming to nature is quite different from conforming to law, convention or opinion.
Socrates was always among the Athenians but was not quite one of them, apparently never made uncomfortable by the fact that they did not trust him. He was neither solitary nor citizen. Rousseau, a figure of similar stature in the new tradition, was distressed by the hatred of mankind, and was both, at least in speech, the perfect citizen and the complete solitary. He was torn between the extremes, and there was no middle ground. Although a very great reasoner, his preferred means of learning about himself were the reverie, the dream, the old memory, a stream of associations unhampered by rational control. In order to know such an amorphous being as man, Rousseau himself and his particular history are, in his view, more important than is Socrates’ quest for man in general, or man in himself. The difference is made apparent by comparing the image of Socrates talking to two young men about the best regime, with the image of Rousseau, lying on his back on a raft floating on a gently undulating lake, sensing his existence. Did you know that slow, synchronous brainwave activity is ordinarily associated with lack of eye movement, fixation, lack of definition, idleness, inactivity, overall body inertness? No organized thought is possible in these phasic states and selective associations are replaced by non-selective association, deprived of their purposeful character. Alpha is the mental state most commonly associated with meditation, but before anyone equates meditation with television, it is important to make a critical distinction. In the former, you produce your own material and in the latter it comes from outside; it is not internally generated. People who are good at meditation are among the most difficult to hypnotize. They start going into hypnotic trance, but at a certain point they begin producing their own material and cannot be influenced by outside instruction unless they choose to be.
These individuals have their own thing going. We doubt that any good meditators watch much television and that meditation might be an excellent ability to develop in people who are bothered by television addiction. In fact, television addiction might itself be symptomatic of an inability to produce one’s own mental imagery. When we compared brainwave activity while watching television with brainwave activity while reading magazines, it appears that the mode of response to television is very different from the responses to print the basic electrical responses of the brain is clearly to the medium and not to the content differences. The response to print may be fairly described as active, while the response to television may be fairly described s passive. Television is not communication as we have known it. Our subject was trying to learn something from a print ad, but was passive about the television. Television is a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure. This indicates that one gets a decease in beta [fast waves] and an increase in slow activity with a large percentage of alpha. Alpha wave patterns, recorded over the occipital areas of the scalp, disappear at the moment when a person gives visual commands (focuses, accommodates, and verges), when one takes charge of the process of seeking information Any orienting outward to the World increases one’s brainwave frequencies and blocks [halts] alpha wave activity. Alpha occurs when you do not orient to. You can sit back and have pictures in your head, but you are in a totally passive condition and unaware of the World outside of your pictures. The right phrase for alpha is really “spaced-out.” Not orienting. When a person focuses visually, orients to anything, notices something outside oneself, then one gets an immediate increase in faster wave activity and alpha will block [disappear].
Many meditators are in alpha but in meditation you are learning self-control and how to call upon your own internal processes. There is no such discipline with television. You are not training your mind to control itself, which biofeedback, and also meditation, accomplish; television trains people only for being zombies. Instead of training active attention, television seems to suppress it. Ten kids were asked to watch their favorite television programs. Our assumption was that since these programs were their preferred shows, the kids would be involved in them and we would find there would be an oscillation between alpha slow-wave activity and beta. The prediction was that they would go back and forth. However, they did not do that. They just sat back. They stayed almost all the time in alpha. This mean that while they were watching they were not reacting, not orienting, not focusing, just spaced-out. Also, children who are watching television are far slower to react to an emergency than children who are doing something else. And, that is predictable because when they are watching television, they are being trained not to react. To really learn anything, you have to interact with the source of the data. With television you do not really think. If I get engaged, I know that speaking for myself, I can only really learn, as in the Socratic method of teaching. The best teaching is an interactive form. Some people learn best, for example, by writing notes because the notes are a feedback system. (Like a journal or a diary.) Television watching is only receiving, no longer reacting. It cannot do anything but hold your attention; you are receiving, not looking. The key for why they are in alpha is that when they are watching they are not looking at, not orienting.
If you have a light which is not really being attended to, you can get an infinite amount of alpha. Perhaps it is that the TV target is so far away, the screen so small that your eyes need not move; you are looking at infinity, in a way, like looking at the hypnotist’s flashlight. If you look at moving targets, you have at least a little active interaction; that would tend to put into beta. However, with television though there seems to be movement, you stay all the in alpha. Reading produces a more active learning process and a higher amount of beta activity. You would expect abnormality in anyone who produces alpha while reading. The horror of television is that the information goes in, but we do not react to it. It goes right into our memory pool and perhaps we react to it later but do not know what we are reacting to. When you watch television you are training yourself not to react and so later on, you are doing things without knowing why you are doing them or where they came from. Because of the implications of this study, computer programmers might want to design their software to be less helpful in order to force users to think harder so that televisions and computers do not wipe out their brain functions. That may well be good advice, but it is hard to imagine the developers of commercial computer programs and Web applications taking it to heart. One of the long-standing trends in software programming has been the pursuit of ever more “user-friendly” interfaces. That is particularly true on the Net. Internet companies are in fierce competition to make people’s lives easier, to shift the burden of problem solving and other mental labor away from the user and onto the microprocessor. A small but telling example can be seen in the evolution of search engines. It its earliest incarnation, the Google engine was a very simple tool: you entered a keyword into the search box, and you hit the search button.
However, Google, facing competition from other search engines, like Microsoft’s Bing, has worked diligently to make its service enter more solicitous. Now, as soon as you enter the first letter of your keyword into the box, Google immediately suggests a list of popular search terms that being with that letter. Their algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. By suggesting more refined searches up front, Google can make your searches more convenient and efficient. Automating cognitive processes in this way has become the modern programmer’s stock-in-trade. And for good reason: people naturally seek out those software tools and Web sites that offer the most help and guidance—and shun those that are difficult to master. They want friendly, helpful software. Why would they not? Yet, as we cede to software more of the toil of thinking, they are likely diminishing our own brain power in subtle but meaningful ways. When a ditchdigger trades his shovel for a backhoe, his arm muscles weaken even as his efficiency increases. A similar trade-off may well take place as we automate the work of the mind. Another recent study, this one on academic research, provides real-World evidence of the way the tools we use to sift information online influence our mental habits and frame our thinking. After exanimating an enormous database on 34 million scholarly articles published in academic journals from 1945 through 2005, then analyzing citations included in the articles to see if patterns of citation, and hence of research, have changed as journals have shifted from being printed on paper to being published online; considering how much easier it is to search a digital text than printed text, the common assumption has been that making journals available on the Net would significantly broaden the scope of scholarly research, leading to a much more diverse set of citations.
However, that is not all that was discovered. As more journals moved online scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information leads to a narrowing of science and scholarship. With these counterintuitive finds, it as also been noted that automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what is not. The ease of following hyperlinks, moreover, leads online researchers to bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers would routinely skim as they flipped through the pages of a journal or a book. The quicker that scholars are able to find prevailing opinion, the more likely they are to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Though much less efficient than searching the Web, old-fashion library research probably served to widen scholars’ horizons: By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. The easy way may not always be the best way, but the easy way is the way our computers and search engines encourage of to take. Before Frederick Taylor introduced his system of scientific management, the individual laborer, drawing on his training, knowledge, and experience, would make his own decisions about how he did his work. He would write his own script. After Taylor, the laborer began following a script written by someone else. The machine operator was not expected to understand how the script was constructed or the reasoning behind it; he was simply expected to obey it.
The messiness that comes with individual autonomy was cleaned up, and the factory as a whole became more efficient, its output more predictable. Industry prospered. What was lost along with the messiness was personal initiative, creativity, and whim. Conscious craft turned into unconscious routine. Even if the hidden codes were revealed to us, when we go online, we, too, are following scripts written by others—algorithmic instruction that few of us would be able to understand. When we search for information through Google or other search engines, we are following a script. When we look at a product recommended to us by Amazon or Netflix, we are following a script. When we choose from a list of categories to describe ourselves or our relationships Facebook, we are following a script. These scripts can be ingenious and extraordinarily useful, as they were in Taylorist factories, but they also mechanize the messy processes of intellectual exploration and even social attachment. As the computer programmer Thomas Lord has argued, software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless “rituals” whose steps are “encoded in the logic of web pages.” Rather than acting according to our own knowledge and intuition, we go through the motions. Now, society is constantly always undergoing influx and change. Decades after it electrified, horrified, revitalized, and transformed Western society, North America’s revolution of the pleasures of the flesh is now firmly entrenched as a mainstream way of life. By now, its effects are showing—for one thing, it has probably cropped years off the age of the average virgin. Today, the median age of losing virginity is 17.4 for girls, and 16.6 for boys, about three years earlier than in the late, staid 1950s. Broken down, these figures are actually more startling: 19 percent of adolescents between the ages of thirteen and fifteen are nonvirgins. By age sixteen and seventeen, this rises to 55 percent, and fully 72 percent of all high-school seniors have had intercourse, at least half with more than one partner.
These figures do not paint a picture of uninhibited, liberating, and rewarding sexuality. To the contrary, they are adrip with poisonous consequences: a rash of pregnancies—by the time American women reach twenty, 43 percent will have become pregnant once (one every twenty-six seconds)—among mainly unmarried, ill-prepared mothers. Another way to understand this is to compare it with the situation in 1960: then, 33 percent of teenage mothers were unmarried at the birth of their first child; by 1989, this percentage had shot up to 81 percent. Rates of sexually transmitted disease (STD) have also skyrocketed, so much today, by the age of twenty-one years, about one in four is infected with such STDs as chlamydia, syphilis, or gonorrhea. More frighteningly, AIDS and COVID are making inroads of many young people. Despite impassioned warnings from such famous figures as basketball player Magic Johnson, who admitted his reckless promiscuity had caused his tragic diagnosis, many young people still engage in unprotected pleasures of the flesh. However, these same people were demanding that others get vaccinated and were a mask. I guess the difference is this new cancel culture gets to take their rage out of others just for thinking they are being exposed to others, while using a prophylactic requires self-responsibility, and people do not want to take preventative measures. Also, the government is not, nor are celebrities or politicians reminding people that it is dangerous and potentially deadly to have unprotected pleasures of the flesh. Perhaps people also may need abstinence from alcohol so they do not make irresponsible decisions and to play more sports and get more physical activity. If humans degrade it, it is perfectly normal for a natural function to become degraded. If elevated, noble. If sublimated, changed.
Where excessive erotic thinking accompanies physical continence, the result may be a mental disorder or bodily sickness. Equally sobering is that teenagers do not practice what they preach: despite their own early indulgence in pleasures of the flesh, few consider it reasonable to first have pleasures of the flesh before the age of sixteen or seventeen. Why, then, do they so blatantly jump the gun? Curiosity is the leading reason, and being in love is a distant second—63 percent of girls and 50 percent of boys surrendered their virginity to consummate their love. Alarmingly, even more girls (but only 35 percent of boys) succumbed to pressure from their sweethearts, while 58 percent of both were driven by the desire to impress their friends and become more popular. This, despite the ever-hardy double standard by which they judge themselves: two-thirds agree that pleasures of the flesh experiences enhance a boy’s reputation while it damages a girl’s. However, the children who would be born to parents whose matings are few, whose minds are pure, and whose hearts are aspiring, would be markedly superior in every way. An enforced chastity, which is the product of rigid circumstances or lack of temptation, is not the philosophic chastity. The power of pleasures of the flesh to make or mar happiness or equanimity is formidable. Left to run amok in savage lust it harms and degrades a human but, redeemed and transmuted, it serves one’s best interests. One knows, by theory and practice, logic and experience, that chastity may conserve energy—physical and mental, emotional and spiritual. However, one knows also that it creates undesired and undesirable effects in mind and character. Chasity is not the same as purity, although the two are often confused. The one is a way of outward life; the other a state of inner life.
If the energies needed for mastering the mind are to become powerful enough, such chastity cannot be avoided. In most men pleasures of the flesh is the largest diversion of these energies. The true union between man and woman is tantric. However, it cannot be brought about without developed qualities on both sides. Pleasures of the flesh, ought to be a natural controlled urge, between a married couple, but has all-too-often become a disease, a fever, an obsession. Once upon a time, before the revolution of pleasures of the flesh, chastity was easier for girls to maintain. For one thing, they menstruated later, at fourteen rather than twelve, as they do now, and married earlier, at twenty-one rather than today’s twenty-five. Then, a young woman could reasonably calculate that she had only seven years of chastity to conquer before she married, at which point she could surrender her virginity with the full approval of parents, religious authorities, and mainstream society. Today, both she and her brother are under sever pressure from hormones, a sex-driven society that scorns virgins as geeks, friends and classmates who taunt virgins and boast of their own sexual prowess, and the personal pain of dealing with boyfriends who coax or coerce them to have sex when they would prefer not to. Yet despite today’s rampant sexual experimentation even among the very young, about 20 percent of all teenagers remain chaste until adulthood. Why do these young men and women defy the norm? How do they handle the forces that defeat most of their peers? In what fundamental ways are they different from them? And, having achieved chaste maturity, do they regret deferring their sexual initiation? These issues must be examined against the backdrop of today’s complicated social and moral climate, in particular the media and music World dedicated to millions of young people and the power of the purses they control.
In those Worlds, hedonistic values, sex-driven advertising, and musical presentations blare out the message that pleasures of the flesh are good, natural, cool, and ubiquitous. Those physical and passional conditions which pass for love among the young—with their uncontrollable sensuality, their total unconcern with higher values, their puppet-like copulation—all show that they have still to outgrow the close ties which they still have to the animal stage of evolution. Pleasures of the flesh, as they portray it is a physical maneuver preceded by seductive, flirtatious behavior and cloaked in suggestive clothing, come-hither stances, and an aroma for animal musk. In this sex-sated World, feminists interpret the sexual act from the perspective of power politics, revealing how it, too, is integrally linked to the inequities between men and women. Unfortunately, their analyses have inspired some other women to conclude that righting the wrongs of the damnable double standard means adopting more dominant sexual standards. Translated into action, this has led to belt-notching, score-keeping, power-play pleasures of the flesh, initiated and controlled by women. They see nothing ironic about defining independence and equality as gaining mastery of infinite varieties. In their combative version of the pleasures of the flesh revolution, real women carry prophylactics in their jeans, grade (out of ten, for instance) the hard curves of men’s rear ends, and initiate pleasures of the flesh with partners who arouse their transient lust. However, in these vary same Worlds, vying with that overwhelming vision of life, in another powerful force, the aggressively proselytizing Moral Majority of the Christian right wing. It, too, has its youth wing and sponsors a counter-cultural movement that preaches sexual abstinence until marriage and heterosexuality as the only legitimate form of orientation, and it provides converts with accessories as trendy and upbeat as those of the rival ethic of sex-is-almighty. The best-known organization within this framework, once whose reach extends Worldwide, is the aptly named True Love Waits.
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Summoned to Join the Waiting Throng of His Ancestors
Underneath all the stories there does lie something differ from the tales. How different? In this—that the thing which is invoked is an object of a different nature, however it may put on the appearance of the most beautiful and bizarre mansion in all of the World or indulge in its servants their human appetites. It is cold, it is hungry, it is mysterious, it is illusory. The warm blood of its visitors does not satisfy it. It wants something more and other; it wants “obedience,” it wants “souls,” and yet it pines for matter. The Winchester Mansions cost five million valuable dollars (2022 inflation adjusted $146,685,714.29 USD), with a million ($29,337,142.86) alone spent on materials. It contained 600 rooms with 160 still remaining, and has 10,000 windows, nine kitchens, and 47 fireplaces built of rosewood, cherry, mahogany, Italian marble, oak, teak, and pipestone; all hand-carved, and no two alike. For 38 years, 1884-1922, the sound of saw and hammer never ceased. Commonly, 16 carpenters were employed at one time, some having worked for 20 years without change. They produced the largest, most complicated and exclusively private residence in the United States of America. There are five different heating systems and three elevators. Some of the 13 bathrooms lacked privacy; they have glass doors! One rambling room has four fireplaces and five hot-air registers. A spiral stairway has 42 steps, each two inches high. Other stairways melt into blank walls. A second story door opens into the great outdoors and a 20-foot step. A linen closet has the area of a three-room apartment; a nearby cupboard is less than one-inch deep. A skylight is placed in the middle of a room, in the floor! Another floor is apparently a series of trap-doors. The visitor must stoop through one door to enter, the next gives clearance for an eight-foot giant. Many stairway turnposts are set upside down. Entire walls are built entirely of half-inch, “half-round” strips.
Everywhere prevails that strange deference to the number 13; 13 stairsteps, 13 hangers in closet, 13 wall panels, 13 lights in the chandeliers, 13 windows to a rom and if necessary to make that number, some placed in an inside wall. Perplexity is leavened by extravagant Victorian beauty scattered along each crooked path of exploration, but what else would you expect from the house built by spirits? It was not peaceful, but filled with demons in the shape of succulent young maidens. No casual visitor can see it all. In 1923, occupants gone, it was opened. The Inquisitors were certain that they had uncovered Satan’s lair. The number 13 has undoubtedly possessed great fascination for man throughout his historic and prehistoric past, and has taken on the aspects of a mystical number, embedded in his collective unconscious, just as the number 7 has been for time immemorial a number possessed of magical properties. Since 13 is the number following the perfect cycle of 12, it is symbolic of death or the unknown. It is quite possible that some covens might have been fixed at thirteen members. However, the evidence from the witch trials tends to corroborate the view that the number of members in covens varied, depending on how many members showed up. At night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. Secrecy was imperative, for discovery meant certain death. The Devil himself invariably presided at the important Sabbats, in the personage of the Grand Master of the region. Seated on a black throne, Satan began the meeting by reading the roll call of members from a book he had in his possession. As their names were pronounced, witches reported their activities—their magical success or failure—since the last Sabbat. After the roll call, the Devil admitted new members. The initiate had to enter the cult of one’s own free will. The Devil demanded at the meetings that the witches bring children to the Sabbats for conversion.
The initiation requirement was that the initiate had to make a pact with the Devil, which usually involved signing a contract to do Satan’s work for a specified period of time. This vow of obedience usually employed as a writing fluid the blood of the signer, which was extracted from the arm or the finger. The symbolism behind this part of the ceremony is clear, blood being a traditional symbol for the life force, or the soul. The participants lined up in order to pay homage to Satan. The traditional bowing was followed by the osculum infame, of “Kiss of Shame,” a ritual kiss planted on the Devil where the sun don’t shine. After the black mass, the feast began. Some accounts state that the food was abundant and delicious, consisting of succulent meats, bread, and spirits. Most of the guests gorged themselves with food and drink before leaving the feast to dance. The dancing in the Grand Ball Room was an important part of the ceremony. Whoever stumbled on the occasion of this celebration must have seen something very unbelievable. They saw incoming flights of spirits glowing with sulfurous flames, and the Hand of Glory itself—the human hand with the fingers ignited as candles. They saw even a devil god, monstrously masked, with a candle spluttering between its horns. Then the bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled again to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchres. But once a week these departed ones relaxed and danced in the Great Ball Room. But even after the guests had departed, something it had spawned lived on, and the chanting could still be heard echoing through the caverns of the Winchester mansion. This left many in Santa Clara County bound together by a nihilistic belief that the World was in the throes of a bloody apocalypse, slowly purifying the overpopulated planet. From the mansion, doctrines from the dark undercurrents of the movement had rise to the surface: social Darwinism, the idea that the brutal laws of natural selection applied not just to the natural World but to human society.
There is so much of delicacy in this subject, that the mere resolve to handle it at all might seem to imply a lack of the sensitiveness necessary to its understanding; and it is certain that the more reverent the touch, the more irresistible will figure its opportunity to the common scepticism which is boneslave to its five senses. Mrs. Winchester was an heiress. She managed her considerable estate. She was an opened flower who had been left a green bud—a thing so rare and flawless that it seemed a sacrilege for Earthly passions to converse of her. She loved her husband dearly, wholly, it was plain. And for her part, fearless as nature, she made no secret of her love. She absorbed in, a captive to, William from the movement she met him and forever. What man could have resisted, on first appeal, the attraction of such a beauty, the flower of a radiant soul? The two were betrothed; William’s cup of happiness was brimmed. They were man and wife before God. She never doubted or questioned their mutual bondage, and would have died a maid for his sake. Something of sweet exultation only seemed to quicken the leap in her body, that her faith in her dear love was vindicated. But the joy came to an upset when Mrs. Sarah Winchester lost her daughter only four weeks after her birth. And about a decade later, Mr. William Winchester died in his early 40s. This destroyed Mrs. Winchester utterly. Psychics told her she was cursed by the Winchester fortune. Lonely in her huge mansion, unearthly cries of seabirds answered the questions of her widowed heart. She worked, sweet in charity, among her servants, a beautiful unearthly presence; and was especially to be found where infants and the troubles of child-bearing women called for her help and sympathy. Mrs. Winchester was so sweet a sanity; and indeed, many often noticed that her estate bred the souls of mysticism.
Guest once saw a mermaid bathing in the fountain at the Winchester mansion. At least, that was their instant impression. The creature sat coiled on the strand, combing her hair—that was certain, for they saw gold-green tresses of it whished by her action into rainbow threads. It appeared as certain that her upper half was flesh and her lower fish, and it was only on their nearer approach that this latter resolved itself into a pale green skirt, roped, owing to her posture, about her limbs, and the hem fanned out at her feet into a tail fin. It was plain enough now; yet the illusion for the moment had quite startled onlookers. As they came near, she paused in her strange business to canvass them. It was Mrs. Winchester herself. They guests had never seen so lovely a creature. Her eyes, as they regarded, were something to haunt a dream: so great in tragedy—not fathomless, but all in motion near their surfaces, it seemed, with green and rooted sorrows. They were the eyes of an Undine late-humanized, late awakened to the rapturous and troubled knowledge of the woman’s burden. Her forehead was most fair, and the glistening thatch divided on it like a golden cloud revealing the face of a wondering angel. They passed, and the rose garden stile their vision. The beautiful sight was gone when they returned. The Winchester mansion was full of ancient memories and apparitions. Mrs. Winchester’s manner was still quite youthfully thrilling. One morning succeeding the night after her guests had arrived, after breakfast she invited her guest to a séance in her Blue Séance Room, but even as guests spoke to her, her pretty features wavered and vanished. Where she had been, a gleam of iridescent dust seemed to show one moment before it sank and was extinguished in the falling cloud. Heaping an eternal chaos with nothingness, never to be seen again. But she left the sweetest memory behind her, for human charity, and an elf-like gift of loveliness.
When a family had moved into the Winchester mansion, both the husband and wife heard ghost like phenomena in the house. At night they heard footsteps about the house and at the weekend of Easter they heard such a lot of crashing and knocking that is sounded as if all the furniture was being smashed to pieces. On investigation they found nothing disturbed at all. The noises continued at other times and several guests heard them although they had never been told that the mansion was haunted. The residents prayed continuously about the disturbances and finally they decided to command the invisible powers in the name of Jesus to depart from the mansion. One morning this while it was still dark, they heard a noise as if all the bricks in the basement were being trapped, and this was followed by another noise comparable to hundreds of pigeons flying away. The man was now convinced that the ghosts had left. Later while investigating the possible causes of the ghost, it was discovered that this was the mansion of the spiritist Mrs. Sarah Winchester, who was cursed by the souls taken by the Winchester rifle. When it comes to a genuine haunting, the appearances always have their roots in the occult activity of those ho have previously lived in the house, and, although ghosts associated with particular places are more persistent than ghosts or apparitions associated with particular people. The occurrences are not to be explained away by some scientific explanation or other, but a metaphysical answer has to be sought for to understand the whole truth. The ghosts in the Winchester mansion are so vividly real and yet so fantastically original as to make an impression sometimes exceedingly startling. Some are kind, humorous, some grotesque, and some awe-inspiring even to sublimity, and chief among the last class is the weird-wailing Banshee, that sings by night her mournful cry, giving notice to the people who hear her that one of them will soon to be called to the spirit World.
The Banshee is really a disembodied soul, that of one, who, in life, was strongly attached to the family, or who had good reason to hate all its members. Thus, in different instances, the Banshee’s song may be inspired by opposite motives. When the Banshee loves those who she calls, the song is a low, soft chant, giving notice, indeed, of the close proximity of the angel of death, but with a tenderness of tone that reassures the one destined to die and comforts the survivors; rather a welcome than a warning, and having in its tones a thrill of exultation, as though the messenger spirit were bringing glad tidings to one summoned to join the waiting throng of his ancestors. If, during her lifetime, the Banshee was an enemy of the family, the cry is the scream of a fiend, howling with demoniac delight over the coming death-agony of another of her foes. There exists a belief that the spirits of the dead are not taken from Earth, nor do they lose all their former interest in Earthly affairs, but enjoy the happiness of the saved, or suffer the punishment imposed for their sins, in the neighborhood of the scenes among which they lived while clothed in flesh and blood. At particular crises in the affairs of mortals, these disenthralled spirits sometimes display joy and grief in such a manner as to attract the attention of living men and women. At weddings they are frequently unseen guests; at funerals they are always present; and sometimes, at both weddings and funerals, their presence is recognized by aerial voices or mysterious much know to be of unearthly origin. The spirits of the good wander with the living as guardian angels, but the spirits of the bad are restrained in their actions, and compelled to do penance at or near the places where their crimes where committed. Some are chained at the bottom of lakes, others are buried under ground, others confined in mountain gorges; some hang on the sides of precipices, others are transfixed on the tree-tops, while others haunt the homes of their ancestor, all waiting till the penance has been endured and the hour of release arrives.
The Winchester mansion, in San Jose, California USA is believed to be still inhabited by the spirit of a chief, who there atones for a horrid crime, while the mansion is similarly people by the wicked dead. The ghost of a sinful abbot walks and will continue to do so until his sin has been atoned for by the prayers he unceasingly mutters in his tireless march up and down the halls ways of the labyrinth. The Banshee is of the spirits who look with interested eyes on Earthly doings; and, deeply attached to the old families, or, on the contrary, regarding all their members with a hatred beyond that known to mortals, lingers about their dwellings to soften or to aggravate the sorrow of the approaching death. The Banshee attends only the old families, and though their descendants, through misfortune, may be brought down from high estate to the ranks of peasant-tenants, she never leaves nor forgets them till the last member has been gathered to his fathers in the churchyard. The song of the Banshee is commonly heard a day or two before the death of which it gives notice, though instances are cited that the song at the beginning of a course of conduct or line of undertaking that resulted fatally. Thus, in Winifred, a young servant at the Winchester mansion in the late 1880s, engaged herself to a youth, and at the moment her promise of marriage was given, both heard the low, sad wail above their heads. The young man deserted her, she died of a broken heart, and the night before her death, the Banshee’s song was heard blaring loud and clear, outside the window. The servants marched outside the mansion, and they filed through the gateway, the Banshee was heard high above the observation tower of the mansion. The next night he sang again, and was heard no more for a month, when one of the farmer’s wives heard the wail under her window, and on the following day his coworkers brought back his corpse. One of the farmers heard the Banshee as he started on a journey before daybreak, and was accidentally killed some time after, but while on the same journey.
The wail most frequently comes at night, although causes are cited of Banshees singing during the daytime, and the song is often inaudible to all save the one for whom the warning is intended. This, however, is not general, the death notice being for the family rather than for the doomed individual. The spirit is generally alone, though rarely several are heard singing in chorus. A maid, greatly loved for her social qualities, bebevolence, and piety, was some years ago, taken ill at the Winchester mansion, though no uneasiness was felt on her account, as her ailment seemed nothing more than a slight cold. After she had remained in-doors for a day or two several of her acquaintances came to her room to enliven her imprisonment, and while the little party were merrily chatting, strange sounds were heard, and all trembled and turned pale as they recognized the singing of a chorus of Banshees. The lady’s ailment developed into pleurisy, and she died a few days, the chorus being again heard in a sweet, plaintive requiem as the spirit was leaving her body. The honor of being warned by more than one Banshee is, however, very great, and comes only to the purest of the pure. The “hateful Banshee” is much dreaded by members of a family against which she has enmity. The Winchester mansion was attended by a Banshee of this description. This Banshee is the spirit of a young girl deceived and afterwards murdered by another servant. With her dying breath she cursed her murderer, and promised she would attend him forever. Many years passed, the chieftain reformed his ways, and his youthful crime was almost forgotten even by himself, when, one night, he and his family were seated by the fire of the mansion, and suddenly the most horrid shrieks were heard outside the mansion’s walls. All ran out, but saw nothing. During the night the screams continued as though the mansion was besieged by demons, and the unhappy mand recognized, in the cry of the Banshee, the voice of the young girl he had murdered. The next night he was assassinated by one of the construction workers, when again the wild, unearthly screams of the spirit were heard, exulting over his fate.
Since that night, the “hateful Banshee” has never failed to notify the family, with shrill cries of revengeful gladness, when the time of one of their number had arrived. Banshees are not often seen, but those that have made themselves visible differ as much in personal appearance as in the character of their cries. The “friendly Banshee” is a young and beautiful female spirit, with pale face, regular, well-formed features, hair sometimes coal-black, sometimes golden; eyes blue, brown, or black. Her long, white drapery falls below her feet as she floats in the air, chanting her weird warnings, lifting her hands as if in pitying tenderness bestowing a benediction on the soul she summons to the invisible World. The “hateful Banshee” is a horrible hag, with angry, distorted features: maledictions are written in every line of her wrinkled face, and her outstretched arms call down curses on the doomed member of the hated race. Though generally the only intimation of the presence of the Banshee is her cry, a notable instance of the contrary exists in the family of the Winchester’s, to the doomed member of which the Banshee always appears in the shape of an exceedingly beautiful woman, who sings a song so sweetly solemn as to reconcile him to his approaching fate. The prophetic spirit does not follow members of a family who go to a foreign land, but should death overtake them abroad, she gives notice of the misfortune to those at home. When Mr. Winchester died, the Banshee was heard wailing round the house of his ancestors. In fact, the night before the 1906 Earthquake, several Banshees were heard singing in the air over the Bay Area, the truth of their prophecy being verified by the death-toll and destruction of the next day. How the Banshee is able to obtain early and accurate information from foreign parts of the death in battles and natural disasters is yet undecided in mystical circles.
Some believe that there are, in addition to the two kinds of already mentioned, “silent Banshees,” who act as attendants to the members of old families, one to each member; that these silent spirits follow and observer, bringing back intelligence to the family Banshee at home, who then, at the proper seasons, sings her dolorous strain. A partial confirmation of this theory is seen in the fact that the Banshee has given notice at the family seat in Ireland of deaths in battles fought in every part of the World. From North America, the West Indies, Africa, Australia, India, China; from every point to which Irish regiments have followed the roll of the British drums, news of the prospective shedding of Irish blood has been brought home, and the slaughter preceded by a Banshee wail outside the ancestral windows. However, it is due to the reader to state, that this silent Banshee theory is by no means well or generally received, the burden of evidence going to show that there are only two kinds of Banshees, and that, in a supernatural way, they know the immediate future of those who they are interested, not being obliged to leave Ireland for the purpose of obtaining their information. Such is the wild Banshee, once to be heard in every part of the World. Now, however, she attends only the old families and does not change to the new. Only a few retired districts in the World are the dreaded spirit still found, while for the most part, she has become only a superstition, and from the majesty of the death-boding angel, is rapidly sinking to a level with other supernatural creatures, who are sought out, but so infrequently seen. The deceptiveness of white magic. White magic is black magic in pious masquerade. It uses, in a magic way, the name of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, along with Bible phrases and terminology, but is demonic in character. It is called “white” because it parades under the banner of light, in contrast to “black” magic that openly enlists the assistance of the power of darkness.
White magic furnishes a perfect illustration of the Apostle Paul’s warning: “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore, it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works,” 2 Corinthians 11.14-15. White magic comes into play and alien spirits “not of God,” begin to operate when the truth of God is perverted. Many do not understand that utterly sincere believers of the holy Bible can come under the spell of white magic and demonic influence. The spirit realm of good in which the Spirit of God operates is closely related, although distinctly separate, from the spirit realm of evil where Satan and demons operate. Werewolf Order literature states, “Nikolas Schreck teaches that the ancient mythological figures of the werewolf and vampire are actually archetypal role models for the next step in evolution: cruelties of the natural order and man’s animal origins, and yet the master of a new science of pagan technology.” This concept—that the mythical creatures of the night were the most highly-evolved form of humanity—would be combined by Schreck with a revived Germanic racial occultism, inside the broader church of Satanism. His self-styled propaganda unit was tiled Radio Werewolf, after the propaganda stations set after the Second World War: Radio Werewolf stands as the standard-bearer of a new kind of youth…Orderly, disciplined, drug-free, proud and reawakened to their pagan heritage; the cadres of the Werewolf Youth Party. Contemporary youth culture was labelled a sewer of mind-numbing drugs, primitive rhythms, the unbalanced encouragement of androgyny and so forth, and the muddying and blurring of racial cultural boundaries. Performing midnight rituals to send signals to the sleeping masses in furtherance of the demonic revolution, the Werewolf Order were a gothic extreme for modern fascism.
The black-clad warrior priests and priestesses of the order form a lycanthropic legion who are shaking the axis of the World. There are thirteen designated Power stations of the Werewolf movement situated in such cities as San Francisco, London, Berlin, Seattle, Vienna, Brussels, Colorado Springs, with headquarters in Los Angeles overseen by Nikolas Schreck. Not one for half measures, Schreck declared his aim as World domination. Occultist trying to bring about a pagan revival has been going on for a very long time. At least since World War I. Necrophiliacs rub shoulders with advocates of eugenics, racist conspiracy theorists struggle for space against champions of self-castration. The Worlds of science, art, and the occult collide in a bewildering pile-up that leaves few standing. Apocalypse Culture distilled the pre-millennial angst and nihilism of people who grew up under the shadow of a mushroom cloud. The possibility of mass destruction, as imprinted on the subconscious of a generation, had produced a state of amorphous unease. A Malthusian mud flood has already been underway. The end of the World came sages ago, but it is happening slowly over a period of time and nobody has been noticing. It is an ongoing process. The World today is different than it was 30 years ago. Some of it has decayed so much, and it is decaying more and more all the time. The entire World is rotten and corrupt and they are [the masses are] ordaining their own death. To some, they are just dead people who refuse to lie down. It is people who do not see anything out in the World right now, who feel lost, unattached, swirling in a World of despair and boredom, but some glimmer of hope that there are at least some people like-minded. Lilith, a popular Satanic-femme pseudonym, is the archetypal illustration of Satan’s longstanding penchant for powerful women. Created of filth by Jehovah in the Old Testament’s Book of Isaiah, she was the first wife of Adam. Cast out into the wilderness for not submitting to her husband, she hooked up with the Devil and they made lots of little demons together.
The doctrines of the Order of the Nine Angels (ONA) calls for entry into a new aeon of human development, via the overturning of current social dogma. More specifically, individual members are encouraged to evolve personally by overcoming various physical and psychological ideas. The ONA defines itself as more “sinister” than the established Satanic movements—such as the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set—who are dismissed as not “evil” enough. The group’s efforts to establish its philosophical wickedness include, inevitably, flirtation with the Far Right. The purpose of human sacrifice was to release energy and draw down dark forces. There are some people who voluntarily offer themselves up; another is the human carnage that ensues as the result of political or social upheaval, to be brought about by the actions of the Order of the Nine Angels (ONA). In other cases, which give people most pause for thought—the secret murder of individuals considered to be opponents or impediments to the ONA’s goals. The Hard Right is a very dangerous thing to get involved with. Particularly for Satanists—the ONA has received threats from certain national socialists groups who do not like the idea of Satanism being linked with them. ONA claims that the secret of Satanism is that a Satanist restores the balance within society, acting as a counterbalance. For example, if we were in a right-wing situation at this time, there would certainly be a communist Satanic organization. This may all seem rather frivolous and aimless, but what Satanism represents is basically an energy for change. Evolution. An energy which provokes insight and adversity. Satan represents movement. Something which moves and that is not tied down by moral abstracts or ideas. You could remove someone you think is detrimental to your cause, but you could be wrong in in that. It could turn out to be the opposite. ONA is designed to attract people who can think and judge for themselves.
The work ONA does is very extreme, it has to be that way. The manuscripts are designed to produce certain changes in society, to create certain preconceptions and destroy others. They are very elitist, because very few people ever stay the course. It involves real hardship, a certain way of living which few people are willing to follow. All civilizations start off as a creative minority, a small group of people in certain area who did certain things which drew the masses. People are putty, basically, and it is always going to be a small number of people who can effect changes; the artists or whatever, the people who dare to break out of the constraints of society. They also let people know that they have freedom of will, but they have to take consequences for their actions. The archetypal ONA member is a lone sorcerer, somebody who defies their own limits, defies themselves. They find out their true potential, usual through ordeals. There is one ordeal, for example, which requires living alone for three months, completely alone, bereft of any possessions whatsoever. The actual aim is, on an individual level, finding your god within yourself. What is aims to produce is a unique individual who does not need anything. ONA is a traditional which goes back 7,000 years—that is according to legend. It was born when there was a civilization around here called Albion which had various rites associated with a dark goddess who we know as Baphomet. Baphomet’s been handed down through the ages as a composite figure. The famous goat-headed symbol was actually a distortion, a lie which took away from the real power of the dark goddess, who are actually a dark, menstruating women. It was very much a code of honor centered around war and the brutal realities of life, and actually the original paganism for thousands of years before Christianity arrived. It is basically an oral tradition some received from Anton Long. He received it from a Mistress of the Order and she had it passed on from someone before her.
The term “demon possession” does not appear in the Bible. The New Testament, however, frequently mentions demoniacs. They are said to “have a spirit,” “a demon,” “demons,” or “an unclean spirit.” Usually such unhappy victims of evil personalities are said to be “demonized” (daimonizomenoi) id est, they are subject to period attacks by one or more inhabiting demons, who derange them physically and mentally during the seizure. Rationalistic criticism has persistently denied the reality of demon possession as presented so vividly in the Bible accounts of our Lord’s Earth ministry. The mythical theory, advanced notably by Germany’s David Strauss, views the whole narrative of Jesus’ demon expulsions as purely symbolic, without actual foundation in fact. Demon possession is represented as a vivid symbol of the prevalence of evil in the World, and the expulsion of demons as a corresponding figure of Christ’s triumph over it. Other critics attempt to dismiss demon possession with theories of accommodation or hallucination. The proponents of the first hypothesis declare the Lord simply adapted Himself to popular belief and terminology without committing himself to the existence or nonexistence of the phenomena described or the truth or falsity of currently belief. The proponents of the second theory consider demon possession a pure hallucination or psychological delusion. However, all such views fail to meet the issue. Nor can present-day parapsychologist and psychiatrists, who refuse to recognize evil supernaturalism in the phenomen of demon possession, either explain it or deal adequately with it. Demon possession is a condition in which one or more evil spirits or demons inhabit the body of a human being and can take compete control of their victim at will. By temporarily blotting out one’s consciousness, they can speak through the individual and their complete slave and tool. The inhabiting demon (or demons) comes and goes much like the proprietor of a house who may or may not be “at home.” When the demon is “at home,” one may precipitate an attack. In these attacks the victim passes from one’s normal state, in which one acts like other people to the abnormal state of the possessed. The present generation must weigh and draw its own conclusions about supernatural activity and this valley’s most interesting, most haunted mansion, and surely our most mysterious Frist Lady!
Winchester Mystery House
Happy Day! Who’s visiting the Winchester Mystery House This weekend?
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
Randolph Harris II International 