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I Have Enough Trouble Conjuring Myself Out of Bed in the Morning
Returning from her global trip, Mrs. Winchester arrived in San Francisco, California USA and finding this area seldom subject to thunderstorms, she purchased an unfinished farmhouse four miles west of San Jose. She hired an architect, a foreman and an army of carpenters and work began; architect and foremen quit the first day. The story of their fate was told by one generation to another, but in course of ages the natural cause, well known to the unfortunates at times of the calamity, was lost to view, and the story of the disaster began to assume supernatural features. There was a legend that Mrs. Winchester’s estate contains not only her mansion, but village of Victorian cottages. In the center of the hundred of acres of land was a fountain guarded by spirits, fairies, elves, and leprechawns, who guarded the Winchester Estate. Things went well, the fairies and the people on the estate sharing the benefits of Mrs. Winchester’s farmland, which included orchards of apricots, plums, and walnut trees to supplement Mrs. Winchester’s income. Mrs. Winchester’s financial resources were virtually unlimited; upon her husband’s death, she received $20,000,000 (2022 inflation adjusted $692,780,722.89) in cash and 777 shares of stock in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Upon her mother-in-law’s death in 1897, Mrs. Winchester received 2,000 more shared, which meant she owned under fifty percent of the company’s capital stock. This provided her with an income of $1,000 (2022 inflation adjusted $34,639.04) a day—back in the days before income taxes. The combination of her wealth and her eccentric building project gave rise to many rumors in the local community. It was the biggest house that most people had ever seen in their lives with, at the time, over 500 rooms, and 125,000 square feet, four stories high, and a nine-story observation tower.
On the Winchester Estate, there lived two woodcutters; Albert Jennings Fountain and Louis Le Prince. At the time of which I am speaking, Albert was an old man; and Louis, his apprentice, was a lad of twenty years. Every day they went together to a forest situated about a mile from the estate, which was still on Mrs. Winchester’s vast landholdings. On the way to that forest there used to be a wide lake to cross; and there was a boat. Albert and Louis were on their way home, one very cold evening, when a great rain storm overtook them. They reached the boat; and they found that the boatman had gone away, leaving the boat on the other side of the lake. It was no day for swimming; and the woodcutters took shelter in a cottage in the forest. There was a fire place in the cottage and a couple of bedrooms. At first they did not feel cold, but they made a fire anyway. They fastened the door, and lay down to rest with the blankets over them. They thought the storm would be over soon. Albert almost immediately fell asleep; but the boy, Louis, lay awake a long time, listening to the awful wind, and the continual slashing of the rain against the door. The lake was roaring; and the cottage made creaking noises. It was a terrible storm; and the air was every moment becoming colder, even though the fire was blazing in the fireplace; and Louis shivered under his blankets. However, at last, in spite of the cold, he too fell asleep. The door to the cottage was forced open; and, by the moonlit rain, he saw a woman in the room—a woman in all white. She was bending above Albert, and blowing her breath upon him—and her breath was like a bright white mist. Almost in the same moment she turned to Louis, and stopped over hum. He tried to cry out, but found that he could not utter any sound.
The white woman bent down over him, lower and lower, until her face almost touched him; and he saw that she was very beautiful—though her eyes made him afraid. For a little time she continued to look at him—then she smiled, and she whispered: “I intended to treat you like the other man. However, I cannot help feeling some pity for you—because you are so young. You are a pretty boy, Louis; and I will not hurt you now. However, if you ever tell anybody—even Mrs. Winchester—about what you have seen this night, I shall know it; and then you will regret it. Remember what I say!” With these words, she turned from him, and passed through the doorway. Then he found himself able to move; and he sprang up, and looked out. However, the woman was nowhere to be seen; and the rain was pouring hard. Louis closed the door, and secured it by fixing several billets of wood against it. He wondered if the wind had blown it open—he though that he might have been only dreaming, and might have mistaken the gleam of the moonlit rain in the doorway for the figure of a white woman: but he could not be sure. He called Albert, and was frightened because the old man did not answer. He put out his hand in the dark, and touched Albert’s face, and found that it was ice! Albert was stark and dead…by dawn the storm was over; and the boatman returned to his station, a little after sunrise, he found Louis lying senseless beside the frozen body of Albert. Louis was promptly care for, and soon came to himself; but he remained a long time ill from the effects of the cold of that terrible night. He had been greatly frightened also by the old man’s death; but he said nothing about the vision of the woman in white.
As soon as he got well again, he returned to his calling—going alone every morning to the forest, and coming back at nightfall with bundles of wood for Mrs. Winchester’s Hall of Fires. Because of the mansion’s immense size, it contained forty-seven fireplaces and seventeen chimney. One rambling section in particular, the Hall of Fire, was designed to produce as much heat as possible—perhaps to ease Mrs. Winchester’s extreme arthritis. In addition to many widows that let the sunlight stream through, the three adjoining rooms have four fireplaces and three hot air registers from the coal furnace in the basement. One evening, in December of the following year, as Louis was on his way to the Winchester mansion, he overtook a girl who happened to be travelling by the same road. She was a tall, slim young lady, very good-looking; and she answered Louis’s greeting in a voice as pleasant to the ear as the voice of a song-bird. Then he walked beside her; and they began to talk. The girl said her name was Theodosia Alston; that she had lately lost both her parents; and that she was going to visit Mrs. Winchester for tea, who might help her to find a situation as a servant. Albert soon felt charmed by this unusual girl; and the more that he looked at her, the more beautiful she appeared to be. He asked her whether she was yet betrothed; and she answered, laughingly, that she was free. Then, in turn, she asked Louis whether he was married, or pledged to marry; and he told her that, although he had only a windowed mother to support, the question of an “honourable daughter-in-law” had not yet been considered, as he was very young. After these confidences, they walked on for a long while without speaking; but you know the saying, “When the wish is there, the eyes can say as much as the mouth.”
By the time they reached the village, they had become very much pleased with each other; and then Louis asked Theodosia to rest awhile in his cottage on the estate. After some shy hesitation, she went there with him; and his mother made her welcome, and prepared a warm meal for her. Theodosia behaved so nicely that Louis’s mother took a sudden fancy to her, and persuaded her to speak to Mrs. Winchester about a job in the mansion. And the natural end of the matter was that Mrs. Winchester was very pleased with Theodosia and hired her right away. Later on Louis and Theodosia were married. She proved a very good maid and daughter-in-law. When Louis’s mother came to die—some two years later—her last words of affection and praise for the wife of her son. And Theodosia bore Louis thirteen children, boys and girls—handsome children all of them, and very fair of the skin. Mrs. Winchester’s staff thought Theodosia a wonderful person, by nature different from themselves. Most of the women on the estate aged early; but Theodosia, even after having become the mother of thirteen children, looked as young and fresh as on the day when she had first come to the estate. One night, after the children had gone to sleep, Theodosia was sewing by the light of Tiffany lamp; and Louis, watching her said: “To see you sewing there, with the light on your face, makes me thin of a strange thing that happened when I was a lad of twenty. I then saw somebody as beautiful and white as you are now—indeed, she was very like you.” Without lifting her eyes from her work, Theodosia responded: “Tell me about her…Where did you see her?” Then Louis told her about terrible night in the Victorian cottage in the forest—and about the White Woman that had stopped above him, smiling and whispering—and about the silent death of Albert.
And Louis said: “Asleep or awake, that was the only time that I saw a being as beautiful as you. Of course, she was not a human being; and I was afraid of her—very much afraid—but she was so white! Indeed, I have never been sure whether it was a dream that I saw, or the Ghost Woman of the Winchester. Theodosia flung down her sewing, and arose, and bowed above Louis where he sat, and shrieked into his face: “It was I-I-I! Theodosia it was! And I told you then that you would regret this if you ever said one word about it! But for those children asleep there, I would curse you right this moment! And now you had better take very, very good care of them; for if every they have reason to complain of you, I will treat you as you deserve!” Even as she screamed, her voice became thin, like a crying of winds—then she melted into a bright white mist that spired to the roof-beams, and shuddered away through a chimney. Never again was she seen. Soon after there were reports of graves being opened, and bodies stolen. Reports of rash cattle mutilations, and killing of two hundred dogs, cats, and pigs in that area. When Louis went back to the cottage, he found a fire containing animal bones, along with a crude Satanic altar, as a group of youth were interrupted conducting a conjuring spell. There were Satanic pentagrams on the walls. Some years later, a woman at the Winchester mansion believed that another desired to steal the butter she had just churned, flew in a passion, assaulted her and threw her down, breaking her arm in the fall. The woman was burnt, not because she was a witch, but in the belief that the real servant had been taken away and a fairy changeling substituted in her place; when the latter was subjected to the fire it would disappear, and the servant would be restored. Thus the underlying motive was kindness, but on, how terribly mistaken!
By chance there came onto the Estate an angel who had been sent from Heaven to observe the servants of the Winchester mansion and note their piety. In the garb and likeness of a man, weary and footsore with travel, the angel spied the castle (mansion) from the hills above the lake, came down, and boldly took a night’s lodging in Mrs. Winchester’s mansion. Mrs. Winchester asked him, “Where would you like to sleep, beautiful creature?” The angel pointed to a spot nearby the parlor, told Mrs. Winchester he would be happy there and to build and prosper; then, as the awe-stricken widow kneeled before him, his clothing became white and shining, wings appeared on his shoulders, he rose into the air and vanished. And one night, on a day of the thunder and lighting and big rain there did a ghost come into Mrs. Winchester’s mansion. Objects were thrown through the air and furniture moved around by its. A heavy oak wardrobe moved six feet across the room. Some knocking and scratching noises were heard in the house, and again objects were seen to fly through the rooms for no apparent reason. It was observed that the object sometimes travelled in a rectangular course which is physically impossible. These events grew even more complicated, and things began to appear and disappear in both closed rooms and containers. Mrs. Winchester was very annoyed as her bed started levitating. A lady came to her that night while she was elevated, she was dressed in white, with a wreath on her head, and said Mrs. Winchester was in danger. She then told the maid, “If you receive this woman’s pension-book without taking off her clothes and cleaning them, and putting out her bed and cleaning up the house, you will receive a curse. The ravings of this creature were accepted as gospel truth.
A torrent of rain fell from the sky, and drowned several of the farmers, and a lake was formed over the spot where they stood when the curse was pronounced. And sometimes, they say, when the mansion is quite still, one may hear the groans of the lost souls that where once chained at the bottom. A lot of supernatural activity happened on the estate than many cannot explain. Mrs. Winchester may have been trying to confuse evil spirits. There were no budget ceilings or deadlines to meet. This resulted in many of the 600 rooms, and features being dismantled, built around, or sealed over. Some rooms were remodeled many times. However, because so many rooms were redone, and astounding 160 rooms still remain today. This naturally resulted in some peculiar effects, such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, doors that ho nowhere and that open onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof! Mrs. Winchester once had some silverware stolen and she suspected a young mad who worked for her and who already had quite a bad reputation. Mrs. Winchester turned to a spiritist for help. This man was both a clairvoyant and a medium, and he also possessed the remarkable powers of materialization and dematerialization. This spiritist went with the woman into the back yard of her house and there put himself into a trance. Suddenly they were disturbed by a strange noise from the roof of the house, and then the stolen silverware fell from the roof on to a pile of hay beside the house. Mrs. Winchester had no idea how this was accomplished. One might be able to find a natural explanation for this occurrence, as for example someone throwing the stolen articles out of the skylight at that moment. It could not have been the maid though, for she had already been given notice. However, it could have been one of the other employees with whom she had been friendly, and who may have received the stolen articles from her.
The word “divine” is derived from the Latin divinus, meaning “divinely” inspired and pertaining to a deity (divus).” Thus a diviner is one who practices divination. One processes to predict future events or to reveal occult things by supernatural means. Divination is a specialized for of magic. In magic, demonic agencies are resorted for performing superhuman feats. In divination, magic is used to foresee the future. Divination relates to magic as prophecy relates to miracle. Both divination and prophecy imply special knowledge. In divination it is unclear if it is godly or demonic. However, magic is supposed to be Satan’s imitation of God’s miracles. Genuine fortune-telling or divination assumes the existence of superhuman spiritual beings. It also assumes that these beings possess knowledge which humans do not have and that they are willing, upon certain conditions that are familiar to diviners, to transmit this information to humans. In ancient times, the convictions prevailed widely that not only oracles but omens of all types were given to humans by the gods. In the cases of supernatural invention, the various forms of fortune-telling were real divinatory phenomena. Divination supposedly invites the activity of demon spirits because it seeks secret knowledge. Rock music has an incessant throbbing beat, the same beat that people in primitive cultures use in their demonic rites and dances. If the beat is monotonous enough it can induce a state of hypnosis. The fundamentalists and their allies attributed powers to rock music that were inherently supernatural, sorcery wrapped in a thin veil of pseudoscientific gibberish. Since its inception by British bands Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, heavy metal has always had a heady whiff of brimstone about it. As the genre took off, and mental bands have been filling stadiums with fans, the Devil increasingly symbolized their bombastic form of rebellion.
Satan translated from Hebrew means “accuser” or “adversary,” and that was precisely the role Satan played in Judaic angelology before the Persian influences. Satan was at the time, at the very most, slightly rebellious and resentful, perhaps wishing to work evil but forces to promote good due to the overriding influence of God. His function was to accuse humans before God, expose their infidelity, and then bring about their punishment—but only under the auspices of God Himself. To some, Satan symbolizes man’s evil inclinations. The sign of the devil’s horns—index and little fingers extended from a fist—replaced the peace sign as youth culture’s salute. Many may not know this, but AC/DC stands for “Away from Christ/the Devil Comes,” while KISS is “Kids in the Service of Satan.” Many artists are accused of producing backward, or “back-masking,” music on records. The back-masking myth contends that messages recorded backwards and camouflaged with music can enter a person’s mind without them knowing it, as a subliminal form of brainwashing. Like the hypnotic effects of the “druid beat,” many considered it as sorcery. In 1986, evangelist Jim Brown of Ohio led 75 young people in the mass burning of records containing the theme tune to Mr Ed, the popular TV comedy show about a talking horse. If the song “A Horse is a Horse” was played backwards, Mr. Brown explained, the message “Someone sung this song for Satan” could be heard. Some evangelist believe that all rock music was “a carefully masterminded plan instigated by Satan himself.” However, in dealing in the extraordinary phenomena that undulate between the natural and the supernatural, the physical and superphysical, some discount any theory that postulates evil supernaturalism. Yet, to be fully meaningful, the scientific studies in parapsychology must take into consideration the reality of the spirit World of evil (Satan and demons).
To limit the scientific to the natural plane of existence is to omit some of the data responsible for certain natural effects. The result of such study is a tendency to explain away rather than objectively explain supernatural events and to end up with learned theories that ignore part of the evidence. This is where current parapsychological studies stand. They are, however, exceedingly valuable in focusing scientific interest on the supernatural realities behind occultism. If they would recognize the influence of evil supernaturalism in psychic activities, they could advance to great achievements. As an ingredient of idol worship, magic goes back to antiquity. By virtue of their multiplicity and limited knowledge and power, the gods (demons) of paganism are incapable of establishing stability and security in society. This deficiency forced both gods and men to make use of magic—an inactive power independent of god and men, but which could be activized by the assistance of incantations and rituals in order to accomplish supernatural deeds. Magic—like divination—is the divinely forbidden art of bringing about results beyond human power by recourse to superhuman spirit agencies (Satan and demons). In the widest sense of this definition, divination is but a species of magic employed as a means of securing secret and illegitimate knowledge, especially of the future. If magic is genuine and not ere deception or hocus-pocus, it must be personal. Living, intelligent spirit beings become the real agents. Humans, by incantations and ceremonies, actually influence and even control these spirit agents. The activity of such superphysical agents of evil produces the extrasensory phenomena of magic, that is, occurrences the transcend the normal operation of physical law and the perception of human’s five senses. This is how the Winchester Mystery House became known as “the house built by the spirits.”
The Winchester Mystery House is open all weekend until 5PM! Ghostly tales are bountiful at Sarah Winchester’s Mystery House. Come explore the beautiful & bizarre Winchester Estate.
The Cathedral of the Fallen Angel
During a Connecticut thunderstorm, Mrs. Winchester’s husband and baby lost their lives in a tragic fire. The distracted widow turned to spiritualism and was advised to take a trip around the World. This she did, visiting mediums, spiritualists and wizards in Europe and India. Foretelling her future, one seer warned her of all the countless thousands of departed souls slain by her husband’s rifles; she was told to plan a castle and continue its building indefinitely because as long as it was under construction she would live; cessation would prove immediately fatal. In the afternoon of Tuesday, July 10, 1888, the inhabitants of Santa Clara Valley, were greatly excited by the sudden appearance, far out in the fields, of a mansion where none was known to exist. The people of the town were farmers and knew the area well. The day before, they had been out on their horses and rode over the spot where the unusual mansion appeared, and where certain that the locality was the best farmland in the valley. And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, for the day was clear and the mansion could be seen as plainly as they saw the hills to the south. It was massive. The estate was surrounded by a six-foot hedge, densely wooded; here and there were deep shadows in its sides indicating glens heavily covered with undergrowth and grasses. At one end the mansion rose almost precipitously from the from the land; at the other, the declivity was gradual; the thick forest of the estate gave way to smaller trees, these to shrubs; these to green meadows that finally melted into the valley. It was patrolled by a pack of ferocious hellhounds, plus, of course, Mrs. Winchester’s staff of armed bodyguards. Hundreds of people from all over California came to investigate; when, as they neared the spot, the beautiful but bizarre mansion became dim in outline, less vivid in color, and at last vanished entirely, leaving the wonder-stricken farmers to return, fully convinced that for the first time in their lives they had really seen this enchanted mansion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
For once there was a topic of conversation that would outlast the day, and the enchanted Winchester mansion passed from lip to lip, both story and the mansion grew in size till the latter was little less than a continent, contain a labyrinth mansion with towers and steeples, stupendous mountain range views, fertile valleys, and wide spreading plains; while the former was limited only be the patience of the listener, and embraced the personal experience, conclusions, reflections, and observations of every woman, man, and child in the valley who had been fortunate enough to see the mansion, hear of it, or tell where it had been seen elsewhere. This is the invariable history of its appearance. No one had ever been able to come close to its grounds, but it had been so often seen on the west coast, that a doubt of its existence, if expressed in the company of farmers, will at once establish for the sceptic a reputation for balderdash of the common affairs of every-day life. In Santa Clara, for instance, the Winchester mansion had been seen by hundreds of people, while many more could testify to its appearance near San Francisco. In San Jose, all the population saw it a few years ago, and shortly before, the villagers of Oakland, saw it, if not by themselves, at least by some of their friends. The Enchanted Winchester mansion, it should be stated that its resemblance to a Victorian/Gothic castle is sometimes very close, and shows that the “enchanter” who has it under a spell knows her business, and is determined to keep her mansion for herself changes its appearance as well as its location in order that her property may not be recognized nor appropriated. At night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. Mrs. Winchester’s arrival was a sensational event. They talked about Mrs. Winchester! Gossiped would be a more fitting word, gossip no one claimed to like-but everyone enjoyed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Talk begat rumor and as the years passed and new towers and gables rose behind the six-foot hedge of Llanada Villa, the rumors grew to established legend. Populations said it just appeared out of nowhere two years ago. Sure two twins could not be like her, and when it appeared in Santa Clara, the mansion would move around to different locations. It had also appeared in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, but it went no further than the Bay Area. Concerning Mrs. Winchester’s mansion, legendary authorities differ on many material points. Some believed that its architecture was due to geometry or some other enchantment, while opponents of this materialistic view were inclined to the opinion that the mansion was not what it seemed to be, that was to say, not Earth, wood, and stones, like as those most people see, but only an illusion that evil spirits or the devil created to deceive the town. Public opinion on the west coast was therefore was strongly divided on the subject, unity of sentiment existing on two points only; that the island had been seen, and that there was something quite out of the ordinary in its appearance. People believe that it would come and go in the night like a light in a bog, and when you do see it, you can see through it. An old fisherman of San Francisco called Ebenezer Thornton knew all about the enchanted Winchester mansion, having not only seen it himself, but, when a boy, learned its history from a “fairy man,” who obtained his information from “the good people” themselves, the facts stated being therefore, of course, of indisputable authority, what the fairies did not know concerning the doings of supernatural and enchanted circles, being not worth knowing. He said that the Winchester mansion was full of temples and round towers all covered with gold and silver till they shone so one could not see it for the brightness. There was a great enchantress in the mansion, and she had all kinds of secrets, and knew where to dig for a pot of gold. She built the castle in one night, and could make herself disappeared when she wanted and could take any shape she pleased. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Ebenezer when on to say that Mrs. Winchester’s husband gave her a charm before he died to use when she was in mortal danger, he also left her a ton of diamonds and millions of dollars. She was a pretty smart woman. One night, Mrs. Winchester was awakened by a noise in one of the kitchens. She tole down, and found her old housekeeper, Madge, with half a dozen of her kidney, sitting by the fire drinking whisky. When the bottle was finished, one of them cried, “It’s time to be off,” and at the same moment she put on a peculiar red cap, and added:–“By yarrow and rue, and my red cap, too, hie over to England!” and seizing a twig she soared up the chimney. As the latter was making her preparations Mrs. Winchester rushed into the kitchen, snatched the cap from her, and placing herself astride of her twig uttered the magic formula. She speedily found herself high in the air over the Irish Sea, and swooping though the empyrean at a rate unequalled by the fastest airplane. They rapidly neared the Welsh coast, and espied a castle afar off, towards the door of which they rushed with a frightful velocity; Mrs. Winchester closed her eyes and awaited the shock, but found to her delight that she had slipped through the keyhole without hurt. The party made their way to the cellar, where they caroused heartily, but the spirits proved too heady, and somehow Mrs. Winchester was captured and dragged before the lord of the castle, who sentenced her to be hanged. On her way to the gallows an old woman in the crowd called out in Irish, “Ah, the enchantress herself, Sarah Winchester alanna! Is it going to die you are in a strange place without your magical charm?” She reached into her pocket and held it in her hand. On reaching the place of execution she was allowed to address the spectators, and did so in the usual ready-made speech, beginning, “Good people all, a warning take by me.” But when she reached the last line, “My parents reared me tenderly” instead of stopped she unexpected added, “By yarrow and rue, good-bye I love you,” with the result that she shot up through the air, to the great dismay of all beholders. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Magic persecution. Genuine magic is the art of bringing about results beyond human powers through the enlistment of supernatural agencies. Black magic deliberately involves the devil and demons, and the resulting enchantment is used for persecution and revenge. A spiritistic circle of twenty members furnishes a good example. Working with black magic, these spiritis experimented to see if they could cause psychic harm or even illness in people they disliked. A strong medium of this occult group chose a minister as a target and vowed to afflict and eliminate her. The minister suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to work for several months. Some phenomena must be eliminated from the spiritistic magic field. In the psychiatric realm, for example, many schizophrenics claim to be magically persecuted. In reality this is only a symptom in the course of psychotic disease. Eliminating all such cases, there are still large-scale, genuine phenomena, especially in areas where occultism has flourished for many years. One common form of magic persecution is beatings by an invisible attacker. Parapsychology also sees magical persecution as a mediumistic problem in the sphere of materializations. Strong mediums (when under demon control) send out energy with which to build up human phantasms and are also able to transform this energy into animal forms, including dogs, cats, frogs, snakes, or human bodies with animal heads, etcetera. This explains the bizarre spiritistic persecution through phantoms in the form of various animals of human bodies with nonhuman heads. These animals bite, scratch, or otherwise torment their victims. Examples, of these occult phenomena abound in areas where the black arts are practiced. However, such occurrences are denied by many intellectuals. Often peasants and country people, especially in Europe, know more about magic than university graduates, who claim to swindle or hocus-pocus trickery are used instead of occult powers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Magic defense. Magic defense enlists supernatural agencies to counteract or unto the mischief wrought by magic persecution. Various kinds of spells, charms, or incantations are employed. In spiritistic séances it is an established fact that injuries inflicted upon a phantasm are sustained by the medium, even in the case of animal phantasm. Many defensive customs develop to combat this threat since magical persecution involves materialization. If a victim can injure an aggressive phantasm one has won the struggle. Many in the West wanted to remove Satan from the equation of black magic and demonic aspects of life. However, more serious discontent came from Satanists whose concerns were completely the opposite. Anton LaVey did not believe in Satan as a literal entity—He was a name for the dark, brutal aspects of humans and nature, as well as a symbol for the potency of humans’ untrammeled will. The Church of Satan was not a religion, and did not worship deities. For many, however, this was not enough. They wanted a real Devil to worship—belonging to a dark, mysterious coven, in the traditional gothic style, seemed much more appealing than being part of some cultural and social elite. Some believed that Satan, although thrown out of Heaven, was reinstated as the son of God and is directly in contact with him. If any coven members offends, they are a bit evil now and again, given corporal punishment, or is expelled from one’s coven and cursed. However, this is said to be for the members own good. They really believe in love, the sanctity of woman as the child bearer and procreator of life, and in worshipping Satan their master. Aleister Crowley was grooming Kenneth as his successor. Mr. Grant’s work examined lost gods, strange spiritual traditions and forbidden symbols, often leading him to some disreputable spiritual neighborhood where devils and demons might be expected to reside, like the Winchester Mystery House. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
If you have a lot of magic in you, you can be a Satanist and have no idea. As if they are the mafia or something, sometimes those who are suspected of being Satanists have their offices broken into like they are the Mafia or something. The Church of Satan, however, has saved lives because it has given them power, power to come out and be themselves when traditional churches would not accept these people. The Dark Lord, was said to be an anthropoid but faceless. Looking at the concept as a diamond, much like the ones left to Mrs. Winchester by her husband William Wirt Winchester, Satan or Lucifer was just other facets of that diamond, purely ways of achieving workings which encompassed the whole. So, if you are particularly drawn to the gothic Satanist current, fine, use rituals based around that. In the Temple of Darkness one could equally have Satanists, Setians, or followers of other paths, the principle being that the whole thing is a psychodrama anyway. Magic is basically the Western version of yoga. Everything that happens in magic happens first in your head. Set, the Egyptian god of evil, was an older deity than Satan. Satan derives from Set. Set, who is defined as the Prince of Darkness, is a force about which you could say, “As we are now, he once was.” When you die your force can survive. Magic is mind enhancing. When one perishes or passes, instead of going into the cosmic whole—becoming one with the goddess or whatever—by sheer force of the will the existence of that magician’s mind can be sustained. This is the whole idea of the Temple of Set, and they use the word “xeper,” meaning “to become,” to define this. Spiritistic cults. If you did not know, Mrs. Winchester was a spiritists. Spiritism is considered a form of Christianity, practically in all civilized countries. A typical meeting consists of hymns, prayer, and a sermon as in a Christian service. The sermon, however, is allegedly given by a spirit from the other World, through a medium. These cults are said to be affected by the “doctrines of demons” and press into the supernatural World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
However, even born-again Christians often cannot differentiate between the spiritual and the psychic-demonic when under the spell of doctrinal errors, particularly those concerning the work of the Holy Spirit. The result can sometimes be confusion, division, and promotion of certain spiritual gifts accredited to demons. We have sometimes seen people end up suffering from mediumistic psychosis. Quite a number of patients who have suffered serious psychic disturbances through the misuse of such practices have become split personalities. The spirits which they called, confused them. One who tries to discover the promises of the other side through superstition endangers oneself to fall a prey to the dark side of one’s psyche. However, many Christians say that spirits of loved ones cannot be brought back from the dead, and the it is just a demon impersonating them. Yet, consider the case of Saul’s visit to the spiritistic medium at Endor (1 Samuel 28.3-25). Samuel’s spirit was actually brought back from the spirit World when the medium Endor tried to contact him. Yet, God brought the spirit back. The Lord stepped. Still one must be careful because many become enslaved and oppressed by occult powers and become victims of various manifestations of spiritistic phenomena. While overwhelming evidence from Christian counseling confirms the fact that spiritistic complicity serious damages the believer’s spiritual life, adherents of Buddhism, Island, or even false cults of Christianity sense no ill effects. Spiritists claim that spiritism has strengthened their belief in life after death and deepened their religious devotion. Psychiatry, psychology, and medical treatment are not sufficient for the healing of the whole human. The gospel of Christ and the liberating power of the Word of God can fully heal body, soul, and spirit. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Mrs. Winchester had a pain in her right forearm. At first the pain was treated as rheumatism but one day the Mrs. Winchester made the interesting discovery that the pain would suddenly subside if she wrote a letter. Having discovered this, whenever the pain became unbearable, she would always take a pencil and begin to write in order to alleviate the pain. However, after a period of time the Mrs. Winchester when go into her Blue Séance Room, where she developed a writing compulsion. She would write things down that she could normally speaking never have written. Often times, this is where the blueprints from her mansion came from. Added to this the written material on each occasion turned out to be some form of religious treatise. Mrs. Winchester took the articles to her minister to let him examine them. He was surprised at their intellectual content. Mrs. Winchester had become a spiritistic writing medium. The parapsychologist would merely see in this example a psychic automation involving the expression of subconscious thoughts. It is true that we need not consider the Mrs. Winchester to be in direct contact with the dead, or putting it another way we need not assume that this is a case of direct demonization, but God could be speaking to her. This is why some believe Mrs. Winchester to be a prophetess. During one of her spiritistic seances, as it happened, a phantasm did in fact appear during a séance. However, it is still not necessary to believe that a spirit really did appear in this instance. Depth psychology suggest that a phantasm can be produced in the following way. The medium through emitting energy causes matter to form as a result of this. In nuclear physics we have the idea that matter is nothing more than concentrated energy. Einstein’s formula E=M.c^2 illustrates this relationship. A comparison can also be drawn from another branch of physics. It is found that both particles and anti-particles are formed at the cathode of an X-ray tube when a current is passed through it at a very high voltage. Energy in the form of electro-magnetic waves is in this way transformed into matter. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
The next step in the mediumistic process involves the unconscious tapping of the information from some source or other, and then the newly formed matter is physically shaped according to this information. The final step is made when the phantasm is brought under the control of the medium. Looking at it from this point of view there is no necessity to believe that the dead person has in any way been disturbed. An animistic explanation based on the powers of the subconscious is thus sufficient to explain the phenomenon of materialization. Yet this is not to say that the rationalistic explanation does justice to the facts of the case. The problem is not as simple as that. However, we do not have the time to delve further into the scientific side of the issues. We have, on many occasions witnessed a disintegration of the personalities of both mediums and participants where materializations have taken place. In addition to this in every case where a person has frequently taken part in spiritistic séances, there is some kind of reaction, even if it is not immediately notice or if there is no manifestation—something happens. There are also people who are able to practise the excursion of the soul. Spiritists affirm that people can send out an astral body from their material body, and commission it to do whatever they ask. Perhaps that was the case when Mrs. Winchester appeared in another country? Spiritism haunts the dark jungle of human aberration. During a séance as the Winchester mansion, Mrs. Winchester noticed that time was passing somewhat wearily. She could hear an occasional thud, thud. Some time must have elapsed before she became, dimly at first, and then distinctly, aware of a bluish phosphorescent emanation from a skeleton. This seemed to rise above it like a faint smoke, which gradually gained consistency, took form, and became distinct; and she saw before her the misty, luminous form on an unclothed man, with wolfish countenance, prognathous jaws, glaring at her out of eyes deeply sunk under projecting brows. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Although she thus descried what she saw, it gave her no idea of substance; it was vaporous, and yet it was articulate. Indeed, she could not say for sure if she saw this apparition with her eyes, or whether it was a dream-like vision of the brain. Though luminous, it cast no light on the wall of the Blue Séance Room; if she raised her hand, it did not obscure any portion of the form presented to her. Then she heard: “I will tear you with the nails of my fingers and toes, and rip you with my teeth.” “What have I done to injure and incense you?” she asked. No word was uttered by either of them; no word could have been uttered by this vaporous form. It had no material lungs, nor throat, nor mouth to form vocal sounds. It had but the semblance of a man. It was a spook, not a human being. However, it proceeded through the walls, odylic force which smote on the tympanum of her mind or soul, and thereon registered the ideas formed by it. So in a like manner Mrs. Winchester thought her replies, and they were communicated back in the same manner. If vocal words had passed between them neither would have been intelligible to the other. No dictionary was ever compiled, or would be compiled, of the tongue or prehistoric man; moreover, the grammar of the speech of that race would be absolutely incomprehensible to humans now. However, thoughts can be interchanged without words. When we think we do not think in any language. It is only when we desire to communicate our thoughts to other humans that we shape them into words and express them vocally in structural grammatical sentences. The beasts have never attained to this, yet they can communicate with one another, not by language, but by thought vibrations. Mrs. Winchester knew as she conversed with him that she was not speaking to him in English, nor in French, nor in Latin, nor in any tongue whatever. Moreover, when she used the words “said” or “spoke,” she meant no more than that the impression was formed by her brain-pan or the receptive drum of her soul, was produced by the rhythmic, orderly sequence of thought-waves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
When, however, she expressed the words “screamed” or “shrieked,” she signified that those vibrations came sharp and swift; and when she said “laughed,” tht they came in a choppy, irregular fashion, conveying the idea, not the sound of laughter. “I will tear you! I will rend you to bits and throw you in pieces about this mansion!” shrieked this demon man. Mrs. Winchester remonstrated, and inquired how she had incensed him. However, yelling with rage, he threw himself upon her. In a moment she was enveloped in a luminous haze, strips of phosphorescent vapour laid themselves about her, but she received no injury whatever, only her spiritual nature was subjected to something like a magnetic storm. After a few moments the spook disengaged itself from Mrs. Winchester, and drew back to where it was before, screaming broken exclamations of meaningless rage, and jabbering savagely. It rapidly cooled down. “Why do you wish to ill me?” She asked again. “I cannot hurt you. I am spirit, you are matter, and spirit cannot injure matter; my nails are psychic phenomena. Your soul you can lacerate yourself, but I can effect nothing, nothing.” “Then why have you attacked me? What is the cause of your impotent recement?” “Because you are the heiress to the Winchester Rifle, and I lived eight thousand years ago. Why are you nursed in the lap of luxury? Why you enjoy your comforts, a civilization that we new nothing of? It is not just. It is cruel on us. We have nothing, nothing, literally nothing, not even lucifer matches!” Again he feel to screaming, as might a caged monkey rendered furious by failure to obtain an apple which he could not reach. “I am very sorry, but it is no fault of mine.” “Whether it be your fault or not does not matter to me. You have these things—we had not. Why, I saw you just now strike a light on the sole of your boot. It was done in a moment. We had only flint and ironstone, and it took half a day with us to kindle a fire, and then it flayed our knuckles with continuous knocking. No! we have nothing, nothing—no lucifer matches, no commercial travellers, no Benedictine, no pottery, no metal, no education, no elections, no chocolat menier.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
“How do you know about these products of the present age, here, buried one hundred feet of soil for eight thousand years?” “It is my spirit which speaks with your spirit. My spook does not always remain with my bones. I can go up; rocks and stones and earth and your labyrinth mansion heaped over me do not hold me down. I am often above. I am in the gasolier overhead. I have seen your servants plough the fields. I have seen a bottle of Benedictine. I have applied my physical lips to it, but I could taste, absorb nothing. I have seen commercial travellers there, cajoling the patron into buying things he did not want. They are mysterious, marvellous beings, their powers of persuasion are little short of miraculous. Why do you think of doing with me?” “Well, I propose first of all photographing you, then soaking you in gum Arabic, and finally transferring you to a museum.” He screamed as though with pain, and grasped: “Do not! do not do it. It will be torture insufferable.” “But why so? You will be under glass, in a polished oak or mahogany box.” “Do not! You cannot understand what it will be to me—a spirit more or less attached to my body, to spend ages upon ages in a museum with fibulae, triskelli, palstaves, celts, torques, scarabs. We cannot travel very far from our bones—our range is limited. And conceive of my feelings for centuries condemned to wander among glass cases containing prehistoric antiquities, and to hear the talk of scientific men alone. Now here, it is otherwise. Here I can pass up when I like into your mansion, and can see the maid and butlers cleaning, the roses and trees growing, the farmers working the field and the magnificent glow of your fine estate. Give me life. There is a sort of filmy attachment that connects our psychic nature with our mortal remains. It is like a spider and its web. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
“Suppose the soul to be the spider and the skeleton to be the web. If you break the thread the spider will never find its way back to its home. So it is with us; there is an attachment, a faint thread of luminous spiritual matter that unites us to our Earthly husk. It is liable to accidents. It sometimes gets broken, sometimes dissolved by water. If a black beetle crawls across it it suffers a sort of paralysis. I have never been to the other side of the of your mansion, I feared to do so, though very anxious to see your architecture and furniture.” “This is news to me,” replied Mrs. Winchester. “Do you know of any case of rupture of connection?” Yes,” he replied. “My old father, after he was dead some years, got his link of attachment broke, and he wandered about disconsolate. He could not find his own body, but he lighted on that of a young female of seventeen, and he got into that. It happened most singularly that her spook, being frolicsome and inconsiderate, had got its bond also broken, and she, that is her spirit, straying about in quest of her body, lighted on that of my venerable parent, and for want of a better took possession of it. It so chanced that after a while they met and became chummy. In the World of spirits there is no marriage, but there grow up spiritual attachments, and these two got rather fond of each other, but never could puzzle it out which was which and what each was; for a female soul had entered into an old male body, and a male soul had taken up its residence in a female body. Neither could riddle out of which each gender was. You see they had no education. However, I know that my father’s soul became quite sportive in that young woman’s skeleton. Each generation makes some discovery that advances civilization a stage, the next enters on the discoveries of the preceding generations, and so culture advances stage by stage. Man is infinitely progressive; even the brute beast is.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
At that moment, Mrs. Winchester heard a shout—saw a flash of light. The construction workers had pierced the barrier. A rush of fresh air entered. She staggered to her feet. She felt dizzy. Kind hands grasped her. She was dragged forth. Brandy was poured down her throat. When she came to herself, she said, “Thank you. Talking with spirits can be terrible dreadful. When you are trying to summon one, souls get crossed and the one you are seeking may not cross through. They are so desperate to find a medium to communicate with.” As an ingredient of idol worship, magic goes back to antiquity. By virtue of their multiplicity and limited knowledge and power, the gods (demons) of paganism are incapable of establishing stability and security in society. This deficiency forced both gods and men to make use of magic—an inactive power independent of gods and men, but which could be activized by the assistance of incantations and rituals in order to accomplish supernatural deeds. Because of widespread denial of the reality of supernatural power—both divine and demonic, confusion abounds concerning the nature of magic. The history of magic is replete with extraordinary extrasensory phenomena that involve the spirit realm and every phase of the natural World as well, including human beings, animals, plants, and inorganic matter. Spirit-rapping, apparitions, ghosts, moving of furniture, and playing of musical instruments by invisible hands, stones falling from a ceiling, magical killing of cattle and blighting of crops, etcetera, are just a few of the weird occurrences that have happened at the Winchester Mystery House in its 134 years. However, there have also been beautiful supernatural events such as apparitions getting married, giant spirits of light in the shape of a man peering out guests, and on occasion, even rainbows and angels have appeared. Not all spirits or evil or angry, some or loving and welcoming. Few of thousands of annual transient guests are disappointed for here one finds visible truth even stranger than all the weird Mystery House features. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Winchester Mystery House
Beautiful weather calls for a walk around Sarah’s iconic gardens ⛲️🪴Open 10AM – 5PM this weekend!
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle , or who were jealous of its wealth 👻
And a Hair of His Head Shall Not Fall to the Ground Unnoticed
We cannot go to others with what we have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what needs to be done. We can only go and put to the proof in actions. And even this is not what we “ought to” do: rather we can—we cannot do otherwise. This is the eternal revelation which is present in the here and now. I neither know of nor believe in any revelation that is not the same in its primal phenomenon. Joseph Smith returned to Independence in April, 1832, to help the Saints in their conflict with the pioneer Missourians, who did not like the people from the East. The day after his arrival, Joseph called a conference of the Saints in America. One of the first items of business was to vote to acknowledge Joseph Smith as “president of the high priesthood,” or president of the church. Provision was later made for two counselors to the president, making three in the Presidency. A revelation was received at this time in which the Lord said: “I give unto you directions how you may act before me, that it may turn to you for your salvation. I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say, but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise. American must increase in beauty, and in holiness…America must arise and put on her beautiful garments. Therefore, I give unto you this commandment, that ye bind yourselves by this covenant. And you are to be equal, or in other words, you are to have equal claims on the properties, for the benefit of managing the concerns of your stewardships, every man according to his wants and his needs, inasmuch as his wants are just. And all this for the benefit of the church of the living God, that every man may improve upon his talent, that every man may gain other talents; yea, even an hundredfold, to be cast into the Lord’s storehouse, to become the common property of the whole church, every man seeking the interest of his neighbor, and doing all things with an eye single to the glory of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
“Make unto yourselves friends with the mammon of unrighteousness, and they will not destroy you. Leave judgment alone with me, for it is mine and I will repay. Peace be with you; my blessings continue with you, for even yet the kingdom is yours, and shall be for ever if you fall not from your steadfastness.” After preaching several powerful sermons and visiting and encouraging the Saints, Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and Newell K. Whitney left Independence for Kirtland, where they arrived in June. During this same month the first issues of the paper, the Evening and Morning Star, was published at Independence. It was a joyous treat for the Saints in Kirtland to receive a copy of this paper. Joseph and Sidney Rigdon spent much of their time on the work of correcting the Scriptures during the summer and fall of 1832. Two revelations were given during this period giving instruction on the priesthood in the church and containing many glorious promises. The Lord praised the Saints for their hard work which had been done by much sacrifice and under unfavorable conditions. The Lord explained the purposes of the two priesthoods, the Aaronic and the Melchisedec. The people were instructed to accept the ministry of men who are called to the priesthood. Jesus Christ, the Lord said: “All they who receive this priesthood receiveth me, saith the Lord, for he that receiveth my servants receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth my Father, and he that reciveth my Father receiveth my Father’s kingdom.” Helpful instruction was given in this revelation: “You shall live by every word that proceedeth forth from the mouth of God. For the word of the Lord is truth, and whatsoever is truth is light, and whatsoever is light in Spirit, even the Spirit of Jesus Christ. And the Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the World; and the Spirit enlightenth every man through the World, that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
“And everyone that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit, cometh unto God, even the Father. Whoso cometh not unto me is under the bondage of sin; and whoso recieveth not my voice is not acquainted with my voice, and is not of me; and by this you may know the righteous from the wicked.” The elders were told they should travel without money or provisions—“pure or scrip” were the exact words used—and Jesus promised: “And any man that shall go and preach this gospel of the kingdom, and fail not to continue faithful in all things, shall not be weary in mind, neither darkened, neither in body, limb or joint; and an hair of his head shall not fall to the ground unnoticed. And they shall not go hungry, neither athirst. Therefore take no thought for the morrow, for what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. For consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin; and the kingdoms of this World, in all their glory, are not arrayed like one of these; for your Father who art in Heaven, knoweth that you have need of all these things. Therefore, let the morrow take thought for the things of itself. Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say, but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every man. Whoso receiveth you receiveth me, and the same will feed you, and clothe you, and give you money. And he who feeds you, or clothes you, and gives you money, shall in no wise lose his reward.” A little son, whom they named Joseph Smith III, was born to Emma and Joseph on November 6, 1832. This baby was to have an important part in the work of the Lord later. An important revelation was given on December 27, 1832. The Saints were commanded to keep the laws of God. The Lord said: “He who is not able to abide the law of a celestial kingdom, can not abide a celestial glory; and he who can not abide the law of terrestrial kingdom, can not abide a terrestrial glory; he who can not abide the law of a telestial kingdom, can not abide a telestial glory; therefore, he is not meet for a kingdom of glory. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
“And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you, and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things. Therefore, sanctify yourselves that your minds become single to God, and the days will come that you shall see him. Continue in prayer and fasting from this time forth. And I give unto you a commandment, that you shall teach one another the doctrines of the kingdom. Call your solemn assembly, as I have commanded you; and as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning even by study, and also by faith. See that ye love one another; cease to be covetous; learn to impart one to another as the gospel requires; cease to be idle; cease to be unclean; cease to find fault one with another. Cease to sleep longer than is needful; retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated. Pray always, that you may not faint until I come.” Provision was made in this revelation for establishing a “school of the prophets,” in the “house of the Lord.” This school was for all members of the priesthood, from the high priests to the deacons, and it was to be taught by the Presidency of the church. To be humble is to recognize gratefully our dependence on the Lord—to understand that we have constant need for His support. Humility is an acknowledgment that our talents and abilities are gifts from God. It is not a sign of weakness, timidity, or fear; it is an indication that we know where our true strength lies. We can be both humble and fearless. We can be both humble and courageous. The Lord will strengthen us as we humble ourselves before Him. “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble…Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall life you up,” reports James 4.6 and 10. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
When the storms in life come, one can be steady because one is standing on the rock of one’s faith in Jesus Christ. May everyone face the storms with a peaceful heart. The place to begin is to remember that we are each a beloved child of God and that He has inspired servants. Those servants of God have foreseen the times in which we live. Know also that in the last days, perilous times shall come. Anyone with eyes to see the signs of the times and ears to hear the words of prophets knows that is true. The perils of greatest danger come to us from the forces of wickedness. Those forces are increasing. And so it will become more difficult, not easier, to honor the covenants we must make and keep to live the gospel of Jesus Christ. For those of us who are concerned for ourselves and for those we love, there is hope in the promise God has made of a place of safety in the storms ahead. It has never been more important than it is now to understand how to build a strong foundation. “Then Solomon said, The Lord has said that He would dwell in the thick darkness,” reports II Chronicles 6.1. Therefore, do not fear because God is everywhere. The human wish, we are saying, is not merely a push from the past, not merely a call from primitive needs demanding satisfaction. It also has in it some selectivity. It is a forming of the future, a molding by a symbolic process which includes both memory and fantasy, of what we hope the future will be. The wish is the beginning of orienting ourselves to the future, an admission that we want the future to be such and such; it is a capacity to reach down deep into ourselves and preoccupy ourselves with a longing to change the future. However, there is no will without a prior wish. The wish, like all symbolic processes, has a progressive element, a reaching ahead, as well as a regressive pole, a propulsion from behind. The wish thus carries its meaning as well as its force. Its motive power lies in the conjunction of this meaning and force. We can now understand why William Lynch should hold that “to wish is the most human act.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The past is drifting away at a faster and faster rate. When we look back at, say, the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we realize that many of its defining episodes no longer grip us as strongly as they one did. For the generation now coming into power, events like the 911, the civil rights protests of the 2020s, the Ukrainian War, the Cultural Revolution, homelessness, demands for affordable housing and spread of graffiti in small towns seems increasingly more significant and relevant. Therefore much of what will happen in our lifetimes will consist of adaptation to and further development of a process that began three quarters of a century ago—the most revolutionary wave of change in wealth creation since at least the eighteenth century. Let us pause briefly, then, to summarize and draw together some key things. First, this revolution is a matter not just of technology, stock-market swings, inflation or deflation but of profound social, cultural, political and geopolitical changes as well. Failure to recognize the connections between these and economics leads us to seriously underestimate the oncoming challenges we face. Second, while headlines and business chatter continually refer to improving or declining “fundamentals,” we suggest that that these ups and downs are largely superficial responses to far more important shifts in what we have termed “deep fundamentals”—those factors and forces that have governed all economic activity sine our days as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Economists have long studied some of these essentials—things like work, the division of labor, exchange and the sharing of rewards. They have also filled libraries with studies on technology, energy and the environment. Business gurus drawing on these studies pour out advice about everything from human-resource management to network organization, insourcing and outsourcing, leadership and strategy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Yet, if they ignore three key forces driving today’s wealth revolution—dramatic changes in our relations to time, space and, above all, knowledge, how good can advice and proposed strategies be? It is, we have contended, only by recognizing the centrality of these wealth drivers that we can prepare for tomorrow. For this reason, we have looked closely at each of these deep fundamentals and their impacts on wealth. Take, for instance, the de-synchronization effect. As we saw earlier, companies are compelled to shift and re-shirt their products and relationships incessantly. Customer demands, financial imperatives and market forces all change at accelerating, but very different, rates. In doing so, they impose destabilizing cross-pressures on firms whose managers struggle to come to terms with time. In response, a big synchronization industry has grown up to help firms cope with clashing speeds. At the same time, a backward, tortoise-paced public sector—itself badly de-synchronized—imposes a huge “time-tax” on companies by slowing them down with delays in court decisions, procurements process, regulatory rulings, permit procedures and in a thousand other ways. In short, one part of the system is flooring the gas pedal while the other is slamming on the brakes. Nowhere, as we have noted, is this more frustratingly evident than in the contradiction between the fast-changing skill requirements of an advanced, accelerative economy and the glacial immobility of its schools. We have seen also that some degree of de-synchronization is essential to keep competition and innovation going on. However, it is equally clear that excessive de-synchronization can throw companies, industries and entire economies into chaos. Indeed, one can look at the great stock market shakeouts as desperate attempts by the wealthy system to re-synchronize itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
However, time is only part of the story. To understand tomorrow’s oncoming changes, the cumulative effects of time conflicts need to be seen against the equally powerful transformations in the spatial landscape. Thus the World today holds its breath while watching the massive relocation of wealth and wealth creation toward formerly “developing” countries led by China and India—surely one of the biggest and fastest such transfers in history and possibly the completion of a great circle of wealth movement that began some five hundred years ago. Moreover, we have suggested that, instead of asking whether globalization will continue, we recognize a coming split—possible de-globalization on the economic level and re-globalization of campaigns against such problems as pollution, terrorism, drugs, sexual slavery and genocide. Here, too, gas pedal and brake are applied at the same time. Out of this collision will come the accelerated relocation of the globe’s wealth creation to new high-value-added hot spots—leaving behind new pockets of poverty. However, the most dramatic spatial shifts of all has little to do with these terrestrial concerns. Though millions brush it aside, we actually stand at the historical edge of humanity’s serious thrust into outer space. For historians of tomorrow looking back at the twenty-first century, one of most important economic events of all may prove to be the colonization of space and wealth creation beyond our home planet. None of these changes would occur without even more potent transformations in the deep fundamental of knowledge and our relations with it. While shifts in the use of time and space will be easy to recognize, today’s revolution in knowledge—the defining deep fundamental of our time—is far harder to grasp. These changes are, by their very nature, intangible, invisible, abstract, epistemological and seemingly remote from daily life. Yet no attempt to forecast the future of wealth can succeed without a thorough appreciation of the new role of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
We have provided an admittedly simplified primer on the scope, nature and role of knowledge as the central resource of advanced economies. However, here again we do not just need to analyze, but to synthesize—to see these deeply fundamental changes in interaction with one another. When we alter our relationship to time, for example, by speeding things up, we inevitably make some knowledge obsolete. We thereby increase the backlog of obsoledge that we lug around with us. Let us proceed to economic and social changes. New Deal. The Keynesian economics of the New Deal has cushioned the business cycle and maintained nearly full employment. It has not achieved its ideal of social balance between public and private works. The result is an expanding production increasingly consisting of corporation boondoggling. Syndicalism. Industrial workers have won their unions, obtained better wages and working conditions, and affirmed the dignity of labor. However, they gave up their ideal of workers’ management, technical education, and concern for the utility of their labor. The result is that a vast majority could not care less about what they make, and the “labor movement” is losing force. Class struggle. The working class has achieved a striking repeal of the iron law of wages; it has won a minimum wage and social security (although future funding is uncertain). However, the goal of an equalitarian or freely mobile society has been given up, as has the solidarity of the underprivileged. The actual result is an increasing rigidity of statuses; some of the underprivileged tending to drop out of society altogether. On the other hand, the cultural equality that has been achieved has been the degradation of the one popular culture to the lowest common denominator. Production for Use. This socialist goal has been missed, resulting in many of the other failures here listed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Sociology. During the past century, the sociologist have achieved their aim of dealing with humankind in its natural groups or groups with common problems, rather than as isolated individuals or a faceless mass. Social science has replaced many prejudices and ideologies of vested interests. However, on the whole, social scientists have given up their aim of fundamental social change and an open-experimental method determining its goals as it went along: the pragmatist ideal of society as a laboratory for freedom and self-correcting humanity. The actual result is an emphasis on “socializing” and “belonging,” with the loss of nature, culture, group solidarity and group variety, and individual excellence. There are 773,000,000 illiterates in the World. There are approximately 43 million illiterates in the United States of America, and according to a report from our Librarian of Congress, there may be an equal number of alliterates. In any case, a general impatience with books will develop, especially with books in which language is used with subtlety to express complex ideas. Most likely there will be a decline in readers’ analytical and critical skills. According to the results of standardized tests given in schools, this has been happening in the United States of America for the past fifty-five years. I suspect concern for history will also decline, to be replaced by a consuming interest in the present. The effect on political life will be devastating. There will be less emphasis on issues, substance, and ideology, an increase in the importance of image and style. Politicians will have greater concern for moment-to-moment shifts in public opinion, less concern for long-range policies. Unless the use of television for political campaigns is strictly prohibited, elections may be decided by which party spends more on televisions and media consultants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Even if political commercials are prohibited, politicians will appear on entertainment programs and will almost certainly be asked to give testimonials for non-political products such as cars, beer, and breakfast foods. The line between political life and entertainment will blur, and movies stars may be taken seriously as political candidates. Once the population becomes accustomed to spending much of its time watching television—in the United States of America, the average household has television on about eight hours a day—there will be a decrease in activities outside the home: fewer and smaller gatherings in parks, beer halls, concert halls, and other public places. As street life decreases, there may well be an increase in street crime. Young and some older people will, of course, become disaffected from school and reading. Children’s games are likely to disappear. In fact, it will become important to keep children watching television because they will be a major consumer group. In the United States of America, children watch 5,000 hours of television before they enter kindergarten and 16,000 hours by high school’s end. Commercial television does not dislike children; it simply cannot afford the idea of childhood. Consumerhood takes precedence. Naturally, family life will be significantly changed. There will be less interaction among family members, certainly less talk between parents and children. Such talk as there is will be noticeably different from what you are now accustomed to. The young will speak of matters that once were confined to adults. Commercial television is a medium that does not segregate its audience, and therefore all segments of the population share the same symbolic World. You may find that in the end the line between adulthood and childhood has been erased entirely. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Television is itself a commodity, and an expensive one too. Therefore it is physically consistent with the prevalent reality. Its purchase gives the commodity system a boost. Television changes the nature of the artificial environment from passive to active. Unlike buildings and machines, television literally enters inside human beings; inside our homes, our minds, our bodies, making possible the reordering of human processes from the inside. Television is an experience that can be had by virtually everyone at the same time. By substituting for a greater diversity of experiences and unifying everyone with it, it assists commercial efficiency. With all people confined to the same mental and physical condition, a single advertising or political voice appropriate to the common mood can influence everyone. Once diversity of experience is reduced to television, a relative handful of people can control everyone’s awareness. Luckily for advertisers, in a capitalist system, whoever is in a position to pay for the technology has primary access to it. Television is unique in that it smooths out any furrows in the commodity system. Dormant anxieties can be dulled by the television experience. Beyond being a delivery system for commodity life, it is the solder to hold that life together, the drug to ease the pain of confined and channeled existence. Though television passes for experience, it is really more like “time out,” as we shall see later. It is anti-experience. Its interaction with the human body and mind fixes people to itself, dulls human sensibility and dims awareness of the World. This enhances the commodity life by reducing knowledge of any other. By focusing people on events well outside their lives, television encourages passivity and inaction, discourages self-awareness and the ability to cope personally, both of which are dangerous for advertising. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
By speaking in images, television adds a dimension to the mirror-image process. Unlike radio or print media, advertising can now implant internal movies, forever available for self-comparison. Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: itself. It becomes everyone’s intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power. You have seen how commercial stress the values of youth, how they stress consumption, the immediate gratification of desires, the love of the new, a contempt for old technology. Television screens are saturated with commercials promote the Utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naïve but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales. Which is to say, they are not. They are about values and myths and fantasies. One might even say they form a body of religious literature, a montage of voluminous, visualized sacred texts that provide people with images and stories around which to organize their lives. To give you some idea of exactly how voluminous, I should tell you that the average America will have seen approximately 1 million television commercials, at the rate of a thousand per week, by the age of twenty. By the age of sixty-five, the average American will have seen more than 2 million television commercials. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Commercial television adds to the Decalogue several impious commandments, among them that thou shalt have no others gods than consumption, thou shalt despise what is old, thou shalt seek to amuse thyself continuously, and thou shalt avoid complexity like the ten plagues of that the underworld. Perhaps you are thinking that I exaggerate the social and psychic results of the commercialization of television and that, in any case, what has happened in the United States of America could not happen anywhere else. If you are, you overestimate the power of tradition and underestimate the power of technology. To enliven your senses of the forces unleashed by technological change, you need only remind yourself of what the automobile has brought to Austria. Has it not changed the nature of your cities, created the suburbs, made roads through your forest and homes, restructured your economy? You must not mislead yourselves by what you know about World culture as of 2022. May regions around the World are still living in the age of Gutenberg. Commercial television attacks such backwardness with astonishing ferocity. For example, at the present time, less than 20 percent of population in Tuvalu watches television in the evening. A commercial television system will fund this situation intolerable. In the United States of America, approximately 90 percent of people watch television during evening hours, and broadcasters find even those number unsatisfactory. In nations like Korea, television commercials are bunched together so that they do not interfere with the continuity of the programs. Such a situation makes no sense to American commercial systems. The whole idea is precisely to interrupt the continuity of programs so that one’s thoughts cannot stray too far from consideration of consumership. Indeed, the aim is to obliterate the distinction between a program and a commercial. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
In some countries, you do not have many advertising agencies, and those you have are small and without great influence. In America, our advertising agencies are among the largest and most powerful corporations in the World. DDB Needham Worldwide has gross billings of $6.7 billion each year, 6,726 employees and SICs 7311 advertising agencies, and possibly receives $700 million per year for American network television alone. This is serious money and these are serious radicals. They cannot afford to permit a culture to retain old ideas about work or religion or politics or childhood. And it will not be long before they and their kind show up in the most primitive communities. If, like me, you claim allegiance to an authentic conservative philosophy, one that seeks to preserve that which nourishes the spirit, you would be wise to approach all proposals for a free-market television system with extreme caution. Indeed, I will go further than that: it is either hypocrisy or balderdash to argue that the transformation of the World from a print-based culture to a television-based culture can leave that country’s traditions intact. Conservatives know this is nonsense, and so they worry. Radicals also know this is nonsense. However, they do not care. In 1879, a French ophthalmologist named Luis Emile Javal discovered that when people read, their eyes do not sweep across the words in a perfectly fluid way. Their visual focus advances in little jumps, called saccades, pausing briefly at different points along each line. One of the Javal’s colleagues at the University of Paris soon made another discovery: that the pattern of pauses, or “eye fixations,” can vary greatly depending on what is being read and who is doing the reading. In the wake of these discoveries, brain researchers began to use eye-tracking experiments to learn more about how we read and how our minds work. Suck studies have also proven valuable in providing further insights into the Internet’s effects on attention and cognition. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In 2006, Jakob Nielsen, a longtime consultant on the design of Web pages who has been studying online reading since the 1990s, conducted an eye-tracking study of Web users. He has 232 people wear a small camera that tracked their eye movements as they read pages of text and browsed other content. Nielsen found that hardly any of the participants read online text in a methodical, line-by-line way, as they would typically read a page of text in a book. The vast majority skimmed the text quickly, their eyes skipping down the pages in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F. They would start by glancing all the way across the first two or three lines of text. Then their eyes would drop down a bit, and they would scan about halfway across a few more lines. Finally, they would let their eyes cursorily drift a little father down the left-hand side of the page. This pattern of online reading was confirmed by subsequent eye-tacking study carried out at the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University. “F,” wrote Mr. Nielsen, in summing up the findings for his clients, is “for fast. That is how users read your precious content. In a few second, their eyes move at amazing speed across your website’s words in a pattern that is very different from what you learned in school.” As a complement to his eye-tracking study, Mr. Nielsen analyzed an extensive database on the behavior of Web users that had been compiled by a term of German researchers. They had monitored the computers of twenty-five people for an average of about a hundred days each, tracking the time the subjects spent looking at some fifty thousand Web pages. Parsing the data, Mr. Nielsen found that as the number of words on a pace increases, the time a visitor spends looking at the page goes up, but only slightly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
For every hundred additional words, the average viewer will spend just 4.4 more seconds perusing the page. Since even the most accomplished reader can read only about eighteen words in 4.4 seconds, Mr. Nielsen told his clients, “when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18 percent of it.” And that, he cautioned, is almost certainly an overstatement. It is unlikely that the people in the study were spending all their time reading; they were also probably glancing at pictures, videos, advertisements, and other types of content. Mr. Nielsen’s analysis backed up the conclusions of the German researchers themselves. They had reported that most Web pages are viewed for ten seconds or less. Fewer than one in tend page views extend beyond two minutes, and a significant portion of those seem to involve “unattended browser windows…left open in the background of the desktop.” The researchers observed that “even new pages with plentiful information and many links are regularly viewed for a brief period.” However, with many people still have 4GLTE mobile phones, advertisers can get several seconds more of free advertisement from certain formats because the phones freeze up and leave their content on the phone for longer than they have paid for, so it is like with the older technology, firms get more for their dollar. Overall, however, results seem to “confirm that browsing is a rapidly interactive activity.” The results also reinforce something that Mr. Nielsen wrote in 1997 after his first study of online reading. “How do users read on the web?” he asked then. His succinct answer is: “They do not.” Many types of reading are important. The most visible sign of our increasing separateness and, in its turn, the cause of ever greater separateness is divorce. It has a deep influence on our universities because more and more of the students are products of it, and they do not only have problems themselves but also affect other students and the general atmosphere. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Divorce in America is the most palpable indication that people are not made to live together, and that, although they want and need to create a general will out of the particular wills, those particular wills constantly reassert themselves. There is a quest, but ever more hopeless, for arrangements and ways of putting the broken pieces back together. The task is equivalent to squaring the circle, because everyone loves oneself most but wants others to love one more than one loves themselves. Such is particularly the demand of children, against which parents are now rebelling. In the absence of a common good or common object, as Mr. Rousseau puts it, the disintegration of society into particular wills is inevitable. Selfishness in this case is not a moral vice or a sin but a natural necessity. The “Me generation” and “narcissism” are merely descriptions, not causes. The solitary savage in the state of nature cannot be blamed for thinking primarily of oneself, nor can a person who lives in a World where the primacy of oneself, nor can a person who lives in a World where the primacy of self-concern is only too evident in the most fundamental institutions, where the original selfishness of the state of nature remains, where concern for the common good is hypocritical, and where morality seems to be squarely on the side of selfishness. Or, to put it otherwise, the concern with self-development, self-expression, or growth, which flourished as a result of the optimistic faith in a preestablished harmony between such a concern and society or community, has gradually revealed itself to be inimical to community. A young person’s qualified or conditional attachment to divorced parents merely reciprocates what one necessarily sees as their conditional attachment to one, and is entirely different from the classic problem of loyalty to families, or other institutions, which were clearly dedicated to their members. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
In the past, such breaking away was sometimes necessary but always morally problematic. Today it is normal, and this is another reason why the classical literature is alien to so many of our young, for it is largely concerned with liberation from real claims—like family, faith, or country—whereas now the movement is in the opposite direction, a search for claims on oneself that have some validity. Children who have gone to the school of conditional relationships should be expected to view the World in the light of what they learned there. Children may be told over and over again that their parents have a right to their own lives, that they will enjoy quality time instead of quantity time, that they are really loved by their parents even after divorce, but children do not believe any of this. They think they have a right to total attention and believe their parents must live for them. There is no explaining otherwise to them, and anything less inevitably produces indignation and an inextirpable sense of injustice. To children, the voluntary separation of parents seems worse than their death precisely because it is voluntary. The capriciousness of wills, their lack of directedness to the common good, the fact that they could be otherwise but are not—these are the real source of the war of all against all. Children learn a fear of enslavement to the wills of others, along with a need to dominate those wills, in the context of the family, the one place where they are supposed to learn the opposite. Of course, many families are unhappy. However, that is irrelevant. The important lesson that the family taught was the existence of the only unbreakable bond, for better or for worse, between human beings. The decomposition of this bond is surely America’s most urgent social problem. However, nobody even tries to do anything about it. The tide seems to be irresistible. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Among the many items on the agenda of those promoting America’s moral regeneration, I never find marriage and divorce. The last time anyone in public office took a crack at anything like this issue was when President Trump urged Federal civil servants living together out of wedlock to get married. He said, “Marriage is a very beautiful and wonderful experience, something that everyone should enjoy. When I married, it was courtly love, and was one of the happiest moments in my parents’ lives.” Courtly love, the literary invention of medieval troubadours, is one thing and, unlike the proverbial and unchanging wheel, has been constantly reinvented. Courtly love is a manifestation that acknowledges the tenderness of romance, but incorporates it into a great passion guided not by carnality but rather by the highest moral and aesthetic values. Courtly love is an exalted state between a man and a superior woman he both respects and adores with quasi-religious fervor. Her love tests his resolve, firmness, and loyalty, for it is difficult to obtain. It is also immensely ennobling, so that his very suffering strengths every aspect of his being: his military prowess, social standards, even his moral and religious perspectives. Sometimes, the mere thought of his beloved triggers these holistic improvements. The rules of courtly love are the inherently painful ceaseless meditation on the beauty of one’s beloved, whom one glimpses from time to time but cannot possess. The ideal, seldom fulfilled, is total union with the beloved, to whom one is almost never married. O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,–Nature’s observatory—whence the dell, its flowery slops, its river’s crystal swell, may seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ‘mongst boughs pavillion’s, where the deer’s swift leap startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
But though I will gladly trace these scenes with thee, yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be almost the highest bless of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. The moon is full the spring nights grow longer, in the north forests startled crows cry out. Past loves are a thousand miles farther each day, still the season’s changes can stir the heart. As one who with pain and suffering has cut a path through a trackless wilderness, and then looks back to observe joyfully other humans travelling easily the roadway one has chartered, so did out forefathers bless their lot as the bearers of salvation, saying: “How goodly is our portion, how blessed our lot, how beautiful our heritage!” Verily our ancestors regarded their role in history as a sign of God’s grace, a token of the love of the Almighty for America, and through America for all human. (Oh, by the way, America is seen as a brand and live styles in many countries, so there are people in China, Japan, and Korea, for example, who believe they are the real Americans. This shows you how manifest destiny and the America Dream is real.) For this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples. May we, the latter day children of America continue our people’s historic quest for God and His law of righteousness, and together with our fellowmen, may we establish His kingdom of truth, justice and peace. And the Lord shall be King over all the Earth, on that day, the Lord shall be One, and His name one. The history of America is the great living proof of the working of divine Providence in the affairs of the World. Alone among the nations America has shared all great movements since humankind became conscious of their destinies. If there is no divine purpose in the long travail of America, it is vain to seek for any such purpose in humans’ life. In the reflected light of that purpose each American should lead one’s life with an added dignity. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Where the Wind Blew and the Stars Sone Down
Haunting, eerie, mystical even at times a little frightening to those outside the shadowy half-World of the occult but compelling and demanding out attention. In 1884, Mrs. Winchester left New Haven, Connecticut, and the graves of her husband and only child, moved to San Jose, California, and began the obsession that was to last for the rest of her life. She purchased an unfinished farmhouse outside the small agricultural town, and for the next 38 years, the sound of construction on Mrs. Winchester’s house never stopped. She used to maintain, I remember, that there was no apparition or supernatural manifestation, or series of circumstances pointing to such a manifestation, however strongly substantiated they appeared to be, that could not be explained on purely natural grounds. However, there was a notable instance of what was by many supposed to be a supernatural manifestation that occurred in the water tower on the estate. It was a horrible sight. Barney Ackers and his wife Everly had evidently been waylaid and killed by a blow of an axe just as he was entering the yard gate, and then the door of the water tower had been broken open and his wife had been killed, after which Barney’s body had been dragged into the water tower, and it had been fired with the intention of making it appear that the water tower had burned by accident. However, by one of those inscrutable fatalities, the fire, after burning half of two walls, had gone out. Still, it was a horrible sight and the room looked like shambles. Barney had plainly been caught unawares while leaning over his gate. The back of his head had been crushed in with the eye of an axe, and he had died instantly. The pleasant thought which was in his mind at the instant—perhaps, of the greeting that always awaited him on the click of his latch; perhaps, of his success that day; perhaps, of Mrs. Winchester’s kindness to him for the work he did—was yet on his face, stamped there indelibly by the blow that killed him. There he lay, face upwards, as the murderer had thrown him after bringing him in, stretched out his full length on the floor, with his quiet face upturned, looking in that throng of excited, awestricken men, just what he had said he was: a man of peace. His wife, on the other hand, wore a terrified look on her face. There has been a terrible struggle. She had lived to taste the bitterness of death, before it took her. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Satan’s presence was haunting. It haunted Mrs. Winchester for years, and for many nights she could not sleep. No one ever found out who did it, and she found herself unable to forget it, or to have peace as she used to. On the night of the 3rd of January 1888, some thieves attempted to commit a robbery on the estate of Mrs. Winchester. They entered the mansion, armed with a dead man’s hand with a lighted candle in it, believing in the superstitious notion that is such a hand be procured, and a candle placed within its grasp, the latter cannot be seen by anyone except him by whom it is used; also that if the candle and hand be introduced into a house it will prevent those who may be asleep from awaking. The inhabitants, however, were alarmed, and the robbers fled, leaving the hand behind them. No doubt the absolute failure of this gruesome dark lantern on this occasion was due to the fact that neither candle nor candlestick had been properly prepared! The Winchester mansion is full of apparitions and specters and perhaps some of them foiled the bulger’s plan. The mansion was continually disturbed by a nocturnal house-spirits. At night heavy steps were heard as of one carrying a heavy load. On occasion a form appeared in a monk’s cowl. Certain ghosts are confined to the Winchester mansion and they plague particularly people. A certain butler, Elton Abram, was an active spiritist while employed for Mrs. Winchester. For years he practiced table-lifting and considered this to be a way of communicating with the dead. He continued with his occult practices so intensively that psychic disturbances set in. The effects of his spiritistic interests also appeared in his children and grandchildren. His oldest son committed suicide. His next son suffered from a persecution mania. His oldest daughter ended up in The Great Asylum for the Insane. Another daughter suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Among his grandchildren the same picture emerged. One of them was a schizophrenic. Another suffered from weak nerves and hypersensitivity, and another lived a dissolute life, and had given birth to an illegitimate child. The first of the man’s great-grandchildren became a psychopath and a delinquent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
From the scientific point of view, one might consider these effects to have a different cause from that of spiritism. The psychiatrist will be interested in the question whether the practicing of spiritism was rather the effect than the cause of the ensuing mental and emotional disorders. Or again, was there some latent disposition in the family that was merely triggered off by the spiritistic activities? The parapsychologist will explain the table-lifting phenomenon as psychic automatism, that is an activation of subconscious forces. The Christian however is concerned essentially with the frequency in which psychic disturbances appear in connection with the practice of occultism. It was well known that Mrs. Winchester donned herself with ceremonial robes and communed nightly with the spirits in the Winchester mansion, and it was the midnight rendezvous for legions of ghosts, with special attention accorded those created by a Winchester rifle slug. It is possible the Mr. Abram stole something from the Winchester mansion, which brought on a curse to him and generations of his family members. A person’s thoughts and actions are like people who populate a community: friendly, contentious, kind, malicious, virtuous, evil, virile, cowardly, optimistic, cynical. We prosper in a pure mental neighborhood and wither in a foul one. And we can choose our mental neighborhood. Tired minds and bodies are signals to be careful. Demonic oppression is not easily discerned. Some people mistakenly blame demons for unrepentant self-will and psychological abnormalities. The source is not always clear, but demon oppression is usually marked by an emotional inability of the individual to do what one wants to do. A young maid staying in the Winchester mansion called Bythesea Atterton, had been a founding member of a thriving witches coven in Essex and the group’s other three members all shared her dedicated to the occult. She began to complain about various mental disturbances which included being tired of life and having depressions. Added to this she often had violent fit of temper, and her marriage was being undermined by her own frigidity. It has also happened that the husband had seen strange figures in the house at night. He had not told his wife about this so as not to upset her, but after a while she too had seen similar strange and maimed figures about the house. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Mrs. Winchester questioned the woman about her past illnesses and about the general health of her parents and grandparents, but she was the only one to have suffered in this way. In answer to Mrs. Winchester’s questions about contact with occultism, after a lot of thought Bythesea told her the following story. She had stolen Mrs. Winchester’s sixteenth century book about magic, and saw a black shadow at the end of her bed. It was a horrible presence that frighted the life out of Bythesea. While Mrs. Winchester was asleep, she would invite her Protestant girl’s group over. The minister’s wife, who had become the leader, used to practice table-lifting with all the girls in the Blue Séance Room. The sessions had always begun with the question, “Spirit, are you there?” One knock had meant “yes,” two had meant “no.” When the spirit had been willing to answer they had all taken part in asking it questions. The minister’s wife had continued this practice for many years until she was paralyzed by a stroke. Bythesea told Mrs. Winchester that all the girls had subsequently been afraid to visit their leader since her face had been changed into a terrible grimace by the stroke. Medical science would classy this example together with the precious one. However, with regards to the stroke, we would like to point out that in the numerous cases connected to the Winchester mansion of suicides, fatal accidents, stroke, and insanity, they usually involve the occult and someone who has in someway broke a rule, stole from the mansion, or offended the spirits somehow. The miles of twisting hallways in the mansion are made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. Mrs. Winchester traveled through her house in a roundabout fashion, supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might he following her. Mrs. Winchester never slept in the same bedroom two nights in a row, in order to confuse any evil spirits that might be waiting for her. Music has always played an important role in cultural outlook and identity. Hymns, marching songs, lullabies—there are a thousand different aspects of life which are ordered or inspired by a musical beat. Music helps to define your cultural tribe. Even the ghost at the Winchester mansion reportedly had parties at ungodly hours. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The Satanic underground was celebrated—and eventually propelled into the mainstream—by musicians at the tail-end of the psychedelic era. While the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the public faces of the 1960s youth culture, other voices of that same social and spiritual revolution sang dark hymns of rebellion. Some think that Black Arts Festivals have gone too far, one in particular. Coven might have achieved the popular success that ultimately eluded them. The band’s first album went under the uncompromising title Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls, boasting a gatefold sleeve featuring the band engaged in a Black Mass—complete with attractive blonde singer Jinx Dawson serving as a naked altar. The album features a recording of this Black Mass at the tail end of side two: “Two the best of our knowledge, this if the first Black Mass to be recorded in written words or in audio,” explain the sleeve notes. (Anton Lavey recorded his own Black Mass shortly afterwards.) “It is as authentic as hundreds of hours of research in every know source can make it. We do no to recommend its use by anyone who has not thoroughly studied Black Magic and is aware of the risks and dangers involved.” The rite bears the hallmark of serious study, with notably authentic elements from medieval Gnostic and witchcraft lore. The overall effect, however is curiously naïve, with the high priest’s command to “kiss the goat” sounding more Monty Python than Aleister Crowley. The music that precedes the Black Mass is standard—if well-executed—1960s folk rock. It is something of a jolt to realize that, behind the gentle acoustic guitars, the lyrics are exclusively about Devil-worship and black magic, while the alluring Miss Dawson’s vocals give the effect of a demonically-possessed Join Mitchell. Ultimately, Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls is an interesting musical exploration of the witchcraft tradition which suffused rural America ever since the Pilgrim Fathers landed in New England over four centuries ago. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The infamous Salem witch-trials—which took place in Massachusetts during 1692—had been one of the last major incidents of state extermination by religious fanatics from the “Old World,” making the term “witch-hunt” synonymous with the persecution with marginalized groups. As such, it elicited the sympathy of twentieth-century hippies like Coven toward their satanic predecessors. (In sacrificing the lives of twenty suspected “witches” to the fantasies of hysterical children, it also predated the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s-90s.) Coven’s second album Blood on the Snow followed but, despite its demonic sleeve, the Satanic elements were fare more restrained. By the third album, imaginatively titled Coven, the sinister elements had all but disappeared, replaced by standard hippie material. Robbed of the distinctive image of their early days, Coven faded away. It is interesting that the British rock band Lucifer, formed in 1971, were a curious collection of characters whose sardonically-devilish promotional photos portrayed a Mansonesque image, enlisted the Devil to fight the capitalist-pig system. Lucifer issued two albums, Big Gun and Exit, and a single, entitled “F*ck You,” which was seized by the police. Most outre of the Satanic psychedelicists, Roky Erickson had been the leader of the mid-1960s Texan garage band the Thirteenth Floor Elevators until a bust for marijuana possession. Facing a long prison sentence under the Lone Star State’s sanctimonious laws, he committed himself to a psychiatric institution instead. This was a bad mistake. Three years later, in the early 1970s, the hallucinogen-loving Erickson came out of the lunatic asylum considerably more troubled than when he went in. An obscure cult figure who became known for lyrical tributes to his favorite 1950s horror movies, in the hospital he had formed a close relationship with his own personal Satan. “Ah’m not afraid of the Devil, the Devil is mah friend. He chose me to do his biddin’,” drawled the usual but loveable Erickson. “Those doctors and nurses…They could not mess with the Devil’s chosen one.” To cement this unholy pact, Erickson later vocalized his personal infernal visions in wildly sincere songs like “I Think of Demons” and “Don’t Shake Me Lucifer.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Ny far the most interesting of the Satanic-psychedelic bands were Black Widow. Their 1970s debt album, Sacrifice, was the result of guitarist Jim Gannon’s research into the Black Arts, with occultic lyrics accompanying a blend of traditional folk music and progressive rock. The almost-ubiquitous Alex Sanders warned the band they had done their homework too well, and would attract dark forces. He was right for one, though only inasmuch as Gannon’s lyrics boast a fair degree of authenticity, and some songs—like the catchy “Come to the Sabbat”—are highly evocative of the medieval-European Satanic tradition. Other moments—like the horrible saxophone solo Satan uses to tempt some poor innocent on “Seduction”—are diabolical in a different sense. The band enhanced their image with an elaborately Satanic stage show, professionally choreographed by a Leicester theatre company, complete with sacrificial daggers and an unclothed young woman to adorn the altar (at one point this was Alex Sanders’ wife, Maxine). They reaped the reward for their oddly entertaining work, with Sacrifice reaching the top 40 in the UK album charts. However, their second album, Black Widow, lacked both the Satanic themes and the power of its predecessor. The official explanation for this was that, true to Sanders’ warning, weird things stated to happen—most alarmingly, near-fatal car crashes. (Satan seems particularly keen on causing road accidents, however much more impressive lightning bolts or stampeding elephants might seem.) What is more likely is that, like many rock bands that use powerful Satanic imagery, Black Window may have begun to believe that same imagery was holding back their career. As many have learnt to their cost, however, it is more often the other way around—few dabbling rock stars regain the early excitement once they stop playing the Devil’s music. Suffice to day, Jim Gannon, the major creative force behind the band, cannot have been unduly worried by the curse, as he tried to mount a stage musical version of the Black Widow show on Broadway. Sadly, it never came off, and Black Widow—devoid of Devil worship—dwindled into obscurity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Prosaic accounts of Black Sabbath’s flirtation with occult imagery claim they were impressed by the interest Black Widow had enjoyed in their Satanic stage show. The truth is probably a combination of all these stories. Whatever, it is fair to say that intense interest in their demonic aspects surprised Black Sabbath as much as anyone else. Their eponymous 1969 debut album was recorded in to days for six hundred pounds, treated with contempt and indifference by the press, and rapidly became a commercial success. The Christian Science Monitor, or all publications, noted approvingly that the band did not “condone or promote the less seemly aspects of…an interest in occult matters.” They were right. The song “Black Sabbath” describes the narrator’s state of terror at witnessing a Black Mass. Their attitude to Satan was chiefly the traditional one of fear and loathing, their lyrics even sometime entreating listeners to turn to God as the only source of love. However, the audiences were not listening—they wanted a Satanic band, and that is what Black Sabbath ostensibly became. (Rumor has it that their management had the large cross that decorated the inside of their first album inverted without the band’s knowledge of approval.) Satan appeared in Black Sabbath’s songs as a constant source of fascination and fear, an entity who brings colour into drab existence but can also represent the overwhelming evil of the World. In the classic “War Pigs,” Satanic witched are equated with the evil of politicians and generals who callously kill millions in their power games. (According to guitarist Tony Iommi, the title was derived from “Walpurgis,” the night when evil traditionally rules the World.) However, the most fascinating manifestation of Satan in a Black Sabbath song is also the rarest: when they briefly allow the Prince of Darkness to speak for Himself. In this strange and haunting “N.I.B,” Lucifer, the creator, sings a plaintive love song to His greatest creation and fellow sufferer, humankind. (The song “Lord of this World,” also recognizes Satan as god of the Earth.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
N.I.B.’s title is the source of some confusion: according to drummer Bill Ward it was simply his nickname, derived from when the band were stoned and though he resembled a pen nib. Typically, the fans perceived a more Satanic significance—to them, “N.I.B” stood for “Nativity in Black.” Inevitably, the band were quizzed on such apparent occultic beliefs during interviews. “We are into God,” Iommi unhelpfully explained to which Ward added, “But sometimes I feel Satan is God.” Perhaps they were expressing the beliefs of the early Satanic Gnostic groups, fifteen hundred years before. Led Zeppelin emerged in 1968 from London’s lively rhythm and blues scene. The band took off completely and became a huge commercial success. They were also said to have a Satanic influence with their roots being in traditional black blues music—though guitarist Jimmy Page’s outfit, much closer in its sympathies to the blues than to heavy metal, was far more preoccupied with the tradition. The Devil also makes His presence felt, either as a symbol of the inevitable fate awaiting the debauched bluesman, or as the hard-living musician’s comrade and inspiration. The delta blues—the school that had the greatest influence on the rock-guitar style—became known as “the Devil’s music.” Delta bluesmen included Peetie Wheatsraw, who liked to be known as “the Devil’s Son-in-Law and High Sheriff of Hell,” and Robert Johnson. Johnson, the acoustic-playing grandfather of rock guitar, best illustrates the enduring legend of the bluesman who sold his soul to acquire musical talent. (As testified by Satanic Rock star Glenn Danzig during our interview with him: “A lot of the old blues songs are very heavily rooted in occultism. There is Robert Johnson, all the voodoo and juju stuff—‘Got my Mojo Working,’ ‘Black Cat Bone.’”) Johnson’s pact with Satan was said to be struck at the “Crossroads”—one of his best-know song, and a traditionally magical location in many cultures—and thereafter he always claimed to live, as another song put it, with a “Hellhound on My Trail.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Led Zeppelin, and Jimmy Page in particular, were heavily influenced by Johnson, lifting parts of his songs for their own compositions. As with Johnson, so the popular rumour went, Led Zeppelin has made a pact with the Devil, asking the Prince of Darkness to tune their instruments in return for their souls. Only Satanic aid, reasoned the myth, could explain the enormous success the band enjoyed so rapidly, or the power involving pleasures of the flesh these modern pied pipers had over young ladies. These same legends had been linked with musicians from Robert Johnson to Elvis Presley and beyond, but with Led Zeppelin the Satanic-pact myth has proved especially enduring. If you study the supernatural, you cannot ignore evil. The “ZOSO” symbol that became Led Zeppelin’s band’s trademark was also partly derived from the work of another influential British occultist, Austin Osman Spare—a contemporary of Crowley, and occultic artist, best known for his “automatic drawing,” which he claimed worked as a conduit for supernatural forces. One more than one occasion, Page hinted that much of Led Zeppelin’s material (particularly their meditative anthem “Stairway to Heaven”) had been conceived in a similar fashion. (If you recall, this is also how Mrs. Winchester received the plan on how to build her mansion.) Kenneth Anger asked Page to record a soundtrack for his magic ritual film Lucifer Rising, but was bitterly disappointed with the results, saying, “I had asked him for intimacy and strength, rhythms and counter-rhythms. But he gave me a short fragment of chanting voices and sounds that I thought were quite sombre and morbid.” In October of 1976, the two fell out in grand style. Page threw Anger out of the basement of his London house, where he had granted the American magus use of a fil-editing suite. Anger responded with a press conference. Asked if he felt vindictive toward Page, Anger reposed, “You bet I do. I’m not a Christian turn the other cheek kind. In fact, I’m ready to throw a Kenneth Anger curse.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Asked about the incident in an interview the following year, Page observed, “The whole thing about ‘Anger’s Curse,” they were just these silly little letters. God, it was all so pathetic…I had a lot of respect for him. As an occultist he was definitely in the vanguard.” Despite Page’s scepticim, many fans and commentators linked the personal tragedies that were to strike the band with some kind of hex. On 26 July 1977, vocalist Robert Plant’s young son Karac died of a respiratory infection. Three years later, on 26 September 1980, the band’s drummer, John Bonham, died after a drinking binge. Enough was enough. On 4 December 1980, it was announced that Led Zeppelin were no more. The band’s demise only served to fuel rumours. The more lurid stories held that all of Led Zeppelin, with the exception of Bonham, had signed pacts with the Devil for Earthly pleasure, supposedly explaining the drummer’s untimely death. One fanzine reported that black smoke had been seen billowing from Page’s house on the day following Bonham’s death, and that the guitarist was overheard uttering strange curses in unknown tongues. Even the mainstream press got in on the act, with the London Evening News quoting an anonymous source: “It sounds crazy, but Robert Plant and everyone around the band is convinced that Jimmy’s dabbling in black magic is responsible in some way for Bonzo’s death and for all these other tragedies.” What are we to make of the “Led Zeppelin curse”? Many young people still need to hear guitar music that conjured the Devil, and Satanic rock does show a tenacity that surprised all but its most fervent disciples. Kip Trevor from the band Black Widow tells the story about their album Sacrifice and the stage show of the same title. “There is a guy who has lost his wife as a result of an accident to do with some kind of occultic ceremony. Something goes wrong, and she is killed. He comes back through the centuries, is reborn, and remembers this in a dream. In this dream he realizes his wife can be returned to him, if he can perform another ceremony, like the one which had gone wrong. This time he would turn the tables on the Lady Astoroth, draw her, overpower her, and sacrifice her, then she would be banished and his wife would come back. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
“So in the first song, ‘In Ancient Days,’ tells the story of this guy travelling through the centuries. Then there is the conjuration in which we bring Lady Astoroth and the girl appears. We’d have a lot of fun with that, as she would appear from all sorts of odd places, depending on where we were playing. We toured with it all over Europe for around eighteen months. When Black Widow broke up, Jim and myself went off to try and revive the idea of the occultic stage show. We spent a lot of time, money and effort on this new black magic concept, but it did not work out. Black Widow’s first album was quite an achievement, but it would have been lovely to have developed it. The problem was that the band politics got in the way—some of them wanted to be a “normal” band and thought the whole black magic thing was not them. They thought it was overshadowing their playing. The show was written with Jim’s research, using proper conjuration ceremonies. The whole thing was done authentically as we could possibly do it. We drew the magic circles, used all the props—fire, earth, water, and air. We did it exactly as you were supposed to do it. Doing that has an effect, even if it is only psychological, because you know you’re doing it in the correct fashion. You’re stepping over the line. Combined with the power of the music and the power of the audience’s involvement, weird things would happen.” God did not create the devil as such. Lucifer, one of God’s mighty cherubs, rebelled against Him and became the devil. Satan is thus the product of his own evil choice. God created a superbly beautiful and wise being and invested him with power above all the other created beings. His name, Lucifer, means “son of the morning,” “bright and shining one,” or “light bearer.” He had many angels at his beck and call and was prince over all the Earth. A fee moral agent with the power of choice, he was filled with an ambition to which he had no right—to rise above God. Unwilling to rule over the World as a vice-general under God, he became “Satan,” meaning “adversary,” or opponent. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
There is only one devil; there are many demons. A familiar spirit in the service of Satan knows human beings so well that he can disguise himself as those people; there are different kinds of spirits—some are sensual and lewd, and others appear ethical; demons are wandering spirits belonging to the legions of Satan, a class of beings distinct from angels—some are on Earth seeking embodiment in human beings and animals, other already are imprisoned in the bottomless abyss; Satan wins followers by psychic and supernatural phenomena that approximate the power of God; Satan is a created being who presently exercises authority over his domain, the Earth realm, but he can do only what God allows him to do, and eventually he will be deprived of all power and glory. As one can see, it is not only Mrs. Winchester who had experiences with the occult, curses, and spirits. Many people have. Occasionally other theories turn up in the literature of modern parapsychology. Some speak of a magical astral World-soul. This entails the idea of an inner World in which all the occurrences of the visible World have their inner equivalent. The World-soul is supposed to be outside of our concept of space and time. The past and the future, the near and the far are said to be all on the same level. Everything is synchronized and simultaneous. A person who is capable of contacting this World-soul enables such a person to enter into a sphere of higher intelligence where the limitations of space and time no longer hold true. Prophecy is inspired either by the Holy Spirit of by the Devil. The wide scope of the occult power possessed by spiritists helps explain why they can cause so much mischief. Through the phenomena of levitation, apports, telekinesis, and materializations, it is not difficult to see how a person endowed with strong mediumistic powers can do a great deal of harm, especially in closely associated realm of magic. Genuine magic is the art of bring about results beyond humans’ power through the enlistment of supernatural agencies. Black magic deliberately involves the devil and demons, and the resulting enchantment is used for persecution and revenge. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Sarah Winchester was reportedly trapped in her Daisy Bedroom during the 1906 earthquake. Her workers had to pry her out of the room, and the crowbar mark is still on the door to this day… See it on the Mansion Tour!
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
Summoning Devils on Film and in Real Life
Much like the Winchester mansion and Mrs. Winchester, the Hellfire Clubs and medieval Sabbat believed that devils and demons should not be stern masters or slaves, but welcome house-guest, which is why Mrs. Winchester built what is now known as the Winchester Mystery House. It is easy to imagine how the combined grief of losing both a child and a spouse could be very crippling. However, if you had $20,000,000.00 (2022 inflation adjusted $556,305,882.35) and all the time in the World to help you cope, can you imagine what you would do? Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester’s response to the deaths of her child and husband left a bizarre and impressive architectural reflection of her psyche. The fascinating story of the Winchester Mystery House has its roots in the personal tragedies suffered by Mrs. Winchester and in the legacy of the Winchester rifle, “The Gun that Won the West.” The Winchester Mansion raised its castellated walls and towers in every direction commanding magnificent prospects; like emeralds in a setting of deeper green, gemmed the surface of the surface of the rural landscape and contributed to increase the beauty of scenery not surpassed in the World. Ages ago the voice of prayer and the song of praise used to ascend from this sacred estate. Presented on the estate was a happy country, none better calculated to inspire love and harmony. However, there was a lack of happiness in the circumstances of life for Mrs. Winchester. At first glance, there seems to be no degree of truth in this statement because of all the riches she inherited and her beautiful mansion. Many people assumes that for the rich, enjoying their riches, are likely to be contented and to look no further than this World. There were also a group of seven Victorian houses on the estate, not connected to the main house, of goodly size, and a Holy Cross. The seven Victorian Houses which, according to tradition, were built there under Mrs. Winchester’s direction, along with a graveyard on her 760 acres of land. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
In the garden of the mansion was a curious stone cross, of considerable size, evidently monumental, though the inscription has been so defaced as to be illegible. On the front of the cross there is a deep indentation much resembling that made by the hoof of a cow in soft Earth, the bottom of the indentation being deepest at the sides and somewhat ridged in the middle. Concerning this cross and the depression in its face, the following legend was related by one of the farmers on the estate. “Mrs. Winchester built this mansion, houses, and the church, you see. When she lived, she owned all the land round about. But there was a devil here. If you had meet him on the grounds, you would know in a minute that it was himself and no other that was in it, and so make ready, either for to run away from him, or to fight him with praying as fast as you can, because, you see, it is no use for to strive with the devil any other way, seeing that no weapon can make the last dint on his carriage. In them days, and before the mansion was built, I am telling you, the devil was all as one as a man, a tall felly like a soldier, with a high hat coming to a pint and feathers on it, and fine boots and spurs and a short red jacket with a cloak over his shoulder and a sword by his side, as fine as any gentleman of the good old times. So he used to go about the country, desiring men and women, the latter being his choice as being easier to deceive, and taking them down with him to his own place, and it was a fine time he was having entirely, and everything his own way. As soon as Mrs. Winchester started construction on her mansion, the devil took up his quarters there, to make it as sure as he could. But when he heard what Mrs. Winchester was doing, a four-story mansion, of 500 or 600 rooms, and a nine-story observation tower, he came out to see the castle was rising before his eyes. He heard the construction singing and started cursing to himself, and at 5.13am on Wednesday April 18th, 1906, Satan stomped his cloven hoof into the ground causing a 7.9 Earthquake and brought down that tower. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
After the Earthquake, while the devil was laying about in the bushes a-watching the work, and the tower of the big mansion was lifting itself above the trees, this time just not as high as it used to be. Everyone knows that Satan is slicker than a weasel, and has a memory like a miser’s box that takes in everything and lets nothing go out. When you do anything, sore a bit that it scrapes the devil, and he hugs it close till a time comes when he can make a club have it to bate you with, and so he does. You may think it is queer, but it is no wonder to one that understands it, for the devil can take any shape he pleases and look like any one he wants to, and so he does for the purpose of tempting us poor sinners to destruction, but there is one thing by which he always knows; when you have given up to him or when you have beaten him on the face, no matter which, he has got to throw off the disguise that is on him and show you who he is, and when he does it, it is not the elegant, dressed-up devil that you see and that I was just telling you about, but the rale, old, black anger with a rancorous, without a haporth of rages to the back of him, and his horns and tail a sticking out, and his eyes as big as an oxen’s and shinning like fire, and great bat’s wings on him, and, saving your presence, the most nefarious smell of sulfur you have smelled. However, before, he looks all right, no matter what face he has, and it is only the goodness of God that the devil is bound for to show himself to you, because, Glory be to God, it is his will that humans shall know who they are dealing with, and if they give up to the devil, and after finding out who is in it, go on with the bargain they have made, sure the fault is their own, and they go to hell with their eyes open, and if they bate him, he has got to show himself for to let them see what they have escaped. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Satan was flying around the Winchester mansion, there were the farmers all along the day job, and the construction workers were building as fast as they could and a bottle of holy water were at their side to throw at the devil when he would come. So he went from the and would fly back and forth watching then working, and they restored the Winchester mansion. Old beliefs die hard, especially when their speedy demise is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Magic is only a physical or psychological effect that has yet to be explained, which means for many it is uncomfortable to entertain now. All good occultists must be skeptical—believe nothing in preference to believing everything. All proto-sciences could be defined as magic. You can see the ritual chamber as a kind of intellectual decompression of chamber to prepare your mind for other atmospheres. People who limit themselves to the occult curricula and profess to be wizards are laughable—magic is an interdisciplinary pursuit. You must consider all the options—investigating like a police officer. To perform a summoning, for example, would involve finding the right environment, appropriate retrieval cues, the right atmospheric conditions. The effects of magic are demonstrable. A lot of simple magic is just to do with self-confidence, how much your antennae are up, how open you are to the World around you. Rituals and magical words are not necessary, merely tools or exercises to help train your mind. Scientists are now coming to the conclusion that there is a lot more interconnectedness between man and his environment than they originally supposed, which is a basic occultic concept. The only really dangerous characters are the ones who think they are generational Satanists and their grandfather told them with his dying breath what to do, or whatever. There are a lot of armies of one out there, a lot of coffee-bar revolutionaries. New information technology has bred a lot of desktop Satanists and bulletin boards mean that cyberspace seems to be just full of Satanists. The Christian heretics rarely get much further than designing letterheads. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Many Satanists are fans of people like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and applaud their outrageous sexuality. They are also huge fans of Aaliyah for making that film Queen of the Damned. Many Satanists are quietly applying Church of Satan philosophy to their lives in their own fashion in a very real way. The best thing they could ask for is that people pass them a nod of respect. In the modern World, the spirit of the age often looms down upon us in strange, distorted forms from the cinema screen. Major production companies spend millions of dollars trying to trap the latest cultural trends on celluloid, while audiences make surprise blockbusters from movies which—accidentally or otherwise—tap into the anxieties and enthusiasms of the day. In the late 1960s and 1970s, 2000s the films which came to be regarded as four “Satanic blockbusters”—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), and Queen of the Damned (2002)—all took the box-office by storm, transforming themselves into cultural phenomena which attracted public interest far beyond that of most “mere” films. Cinema has been the most potent legend factory of the centuries. Despite constant predictions that TV would devour the silver screen, the spectable and ceremony of the cinema helped retain its status as the most sacred of modern temples. Film presents a super real version of the World—louder, larger, essentially more mythic. More people take cues on how to live, love, fight—even on how to die—from the silver screen than from the pulpit or the gospels. Pagan worship is alive and well and being practised at your local multiplex, with Hollywood stars as the gods of our age. And, just as cinema has given us new gods, so it has supplied us with a new hierarchy of devils. The relationship between Satan and the silver screen is a notable one. The father of fantastic cinema was a Frenchman named Georges Melies, who made delightful short films crawling with demons and devils. Melies was himself a Faustian figure, a stage conjurer and photographic illusionist who appeared out of the rump of the French Decadent era. Summoning devils on film, he defended this new sorcery in time-honoured fashion as “white magic.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
In The Laboratory of Mephistopheles (1897), Melies made Satan’s head detach itself and float around the room—to the enchantment and horror of audiences in darkened “picture palaces, resembling nothing so much as séance chambers. Hollywood’s dream factory was not even at the planning stage by the turning of the century, but the pioneer of US cinema, Edwin Porter (partner of the man who virtually invented the movies, Thomas Edison), produced his own version of Faust and Marguerite in 1900. The most striking cinematic fantasies came from Germany at this point—stark, angular exercises in shadow and nightmare. The Student of Prague was an updated version of the well-worn Faust tale, based on an Edgar Allan Poe story, which transformed the lead from an ambitious academic to a devil-may-care student and Mephistopheles into a rakish devil called Scapinelli. The story was retold onscreen in 1913, 1926, and 1936. The 1926 version was by the master of German Expressionist cinema, F.W. Murnua—the last film he made before leaving his artistic roots for Hollywood, where he met with a tragically early death. As a minor masterpiece, it was a suitably grandiose climax to a career which produced Nosferatu (1922), the first gothic vampire film. Now, it is always important to be safe on the road and sometimes to listen to the heartfelt advice of others. Jayne Mansfield, a buxom B-move actress died in a tragic car crash with her lawyer in and lover Sam Brody. Brody had disliked his beloved’s new guru from the start, and the friction led to LaVey placing a ritual curse on his rival. The Black Pope (Anton LaVey) warned the pugnacious lawyer—known to be a dangerous driver—that he would suffer a series of automobile accidents. It was no great surprise when a car crash ensued—but it made World headlines for taking the life of Jayne Mansfield, as well as the top of her cranium. LaVey grimly stated that on the night preceding the crash, as he cut out a newspaper clipping of Jayne, he accidently snipped off the top of the blonde beauty’s head. (By the way, I had no idea The Black Pope was dead, until today. I feel he is very much still alive. I have always felt like he is here, in San Francisco in his black church.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
The physical phenomena of spiritism are often closely connected with psychical manifestations, such as spiritistic visions, automatic writing, speaking in a trance, materializations, table lifting, tumbler moving and excursions of the psyche. There is no doubt that today, as in the time of Isaiah (Isaiah 6.1-5), Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1.4-28), Paul (Acts 9.1-8), Peter (Acts 10.9-16), and John (Revelation 1.10-18), God may give His people a genuine vision, particularly in great times of great stress. However, genuine experiences of this nature are always accompanied by true spiritual grace and modesty. Sensationalism betrays a lack of authenticity. Unfortunately, genuine experiences are rare, and counterfeit ones about. Christian counselors find that the “ratio is about nine to one over the genuine experiences.” Mrs. Winchester used to have visions. She reported that she saw visions of Christ at night, and it left her feeling a sense of uneasiness and fear. The so-called visions of Christ were mediumistic. They came as a warning. Weeks after the visions started, Mrs. Winchester saw her husband William Wirt Winchester’s spirit departing from his body as he expired in 1881. The visions of Mrs. Winchester bear evidence of the occult, as do the visions of Joseph Smith (1805-1844), who fathered Mormonism. Many of the founders and promulgators of modern cults have had alleged visions from God. However, some say these visions promote “doctrines of demons” (1 Timothy 4.1) among the credulous and those unable to discern spirits (1 Corinthians 12.10; 1 John 4.1-2). When humans depart from God’s Word, they supposedly expose themselves to demon imposture and deception. Automatic writing—some persons endowed with mediumistic powers are able—either in a waking state or trance to write letters, words, or sentences which spiritists consider to be message from the spirit World. This is how Mrs. Winchester came up with the architecture of her mansion, the blueprints were often dictated to her in her Blue Séance room as she took down the notes on napkin. Also, the persistent pain in her legs and back vanished whenever she sat down and dictated these blueprints. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
One day as Mrs. Winchester was taking dictation, a spirit named Apollonius Tyannaeus appeared and said, “In the name of the Lord Jesus, our blessed and exalted Savior.” The spirit then told the woman that she had been chosen by God for special revelations. She would become a prophetess and bless humankind with these revelations. The case is patently that of a simple farm woman turned indeed into a spiritistic writing medium. Rudolf Tischner, a parapsychologist, points out the danger of automatic writing when practiced in immoderation. Although he regards these writing phenomena only as “motoric break up the integrated psychic structure with ensuing peril to mental and physical health. This simply means that occult enslavement can result from mediumistic writing, or from dependence upon the Ouija board or other spiritistic devices to obtain alleged messages from the spirit World. Speaking in a trance—a trance is a condition in which a spiritistic medium loses consciousness and passes under the control of demonic power to effect alleged communication with the dead. The demon (or demons) takes over and actually speaks through the spiritistic medium, deceptively imitating the deceased. As a result this ruse innumerable spiritistic clairvoyants claim communication with the dead, often with famous deceased people allegedly appearing to speak to the living. One evening, Mrs. Winchester went into a trace and soon the “Apostle Paul” approached and preached to the audience. The apostle was not visible but only spoke through the medium who lay in trance. Some critic said it was only another constant instance of deception by demons who ape the deceased but cannot produce them. Other believe it was real. Perhaps the most remarkable phenomena of spiritism are materializations. These are supernatural appearances and disappearances of material images in connection with the activities of a spiritistic medium. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Materializations have been exhaustively studied and photographed and have been found to be manifestations of various degrees of teleplastic morphogenesis. The first stage is the evolution of a gauzelike substance of rubbery consistency from the body cavities of the medium. The second stage is the forming of the various parts of the body in outline—arms, head, etcetera. Frequently in the case of teleplastic forms of this kind, a threadlike connection is maintained with the medium. The third stage consists of the composition into completely outlined forms, which are visible as phantoms near the medium. These three stages of materialization manifest purely visual phenomena. The fourth stage displays telekinetic phenomena. There is an energy output from the teleplasm (telekinesis), such as the ringing of a bell, at night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. The bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled regularly at midnight to summon incoming flights of spirits. Later it tolled again to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchers. However, once a week, these departed ones relaxed and danced in the Great Ball Room. In other stages of materializations come automatic writing of a typewriter, and the automatic playing of a musical instrument. In addition to the active energy output of the materialization, there is frequently a passive pain experience of the teleplasm. The fifth stage of the materialization is the penetration of material substance. To his phase belong “apports,” that is, the appearing and disappearing of objects in closed rooms or chests and containers. From locked and cemented containers, for example, enclosed coins are brought out, or stones and other objects fall inexplicably from the ceiling. This often happens in the Winchester mansion, as documented by Mrs. Winchester. In this stage many mediums allegedly have the ability to penetrate solid material substance while they are in a trance. While Mrs. Winchester sat in a small cabinet, a phantom built itself up on the floor outside the cabinet and formed itself into a male person, who moved in and out among the participants of the séance. While the materialization extended his hand to one of those present and she held it, dematerialization began to occur before the eyes of all the participants. Soon there was only a lump on the floor and this rolled up into the cabinet. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Another example is during a séance, Mrs. Winchester was able to call and help the materializing of the spirit of the deceased German romantic poet, Johann Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862). At the memorable séance a white phantasm was seen, from which the audience demanded a poem. Instead of reciting a poem, the phantasm tore a page from a book in the library. With a pencil from a briefcase in the room, secured through the leather without opening the briefcase, the hand jotted down a few verses and vanished. The page was left and still exists. The examination of the mysterious writing by a graphologist proved to be sensational. He confirmed the ghost writing to be actually the handwriting of the deceased poet. Afterward there was a trial in Berlin over the ownership of the page. The court awarded it to the medium, who afterward kept it among her prized possessions. The phenomena of materialization and dematerialization in case of strong mediums illustrated the conversion of psychic energy into matter and matter changed back again into psychic energy. The problem is illustrated by nuclear physics. Einstein’s formula (E==MC^2), energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared, simply declares that it is theoretically possible to convert energy to mass and back again to energy. We have historical evidence of materializations. Missionaries claim that Mrs. Winchester’s mansion was never actually built, but that it materialized itself on the grounds, and (re)construction only began after the Earthquake caused by Satan. Some say this mansion is to be regarded as a miracle of Satan (2 Thessalonians 2.8-10; Revelation 13.15). Many people used to wonder how Mrs. Winchester used to travel so fast back and forth from San Jose to San Francisco to pick up items she ordered from overseas. Researchers believed that she would be spiritually transported miles away, and this may have been an example of this phenomenon or simply a miracle of transportation of unaltered physical body. It is debatable rather if these are miracles of God or that of Satan. God says He is the Alpha and the Omega. I wonder what that means? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Mrs. Winchester was said to possess tremendous occult gift and was reported to be able to make tables fly through the air for a space of one hundred feet. Above all, she was extremely adept in telekinesis, materialization, levitation, and black magic. Where Satan’s power remains virtually unchecked, miracles of evil supernaturalism abound. In Victorian days, the supernatural predated the mass hysteria about Satanism. As you may know, long before Mrs. Winchester arrived in California, there was a Devil worshipping conspiracy at large. However, her mansion seamlessly blends the ordinary and nightmarishly surreal. It is a rare treat for fans of demonic conspiracy and occult synchronicity. Some people have believed themselves to be demonically possessed after visiting the Winchester Mystery House, others claimed to have spoken to Mrs. Winchester directly. Directors of the Queen of the Damned claimed that the film was a makeshift occultic ritual, and Aaliyah unleashed the demon within herself. They also said the film poses some kind of supernatural power and they had to edit and voiceover a lot of the footage because not only did the characters act their own version of the script, but there were also some subliminal sounds and images on print. When many of these errors were re-examined, they also saw footage of the original Winchester mansion on the negatives, but rumors began that the original print had been withdrawn, replaced by an expurgated cut to protect the filmgoers from the movie’s insidious effects. The powers behind these manifestations were no doubt demonic. The director faced a terrible psychic assault on 25th August 2001, before they finished filming the movie. However, when the reel was played, the directors found they had all the footage they needed, even some they did not remembering filming. It was so intensified that the demonic oppression became that he was compelled to give up making other Anne Rice books into movies, especially after Aaliyah’s plane crashed later that evening. Although the film was unfished, with the blessing of her family, it was released to the public in February of 2002. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Certain psychic clairvoyants claim that their souls can travel great distances at their command. They always said she makes a room come alive. Much like Mrs. Winchester, Aaliyah had a lot of psychic phenomena around her death. When directors took photos of Aaliyah and Queen Akasha to a clairvoyant, while concentrating on the photographs, the medium declared that one of the women was apparently dead, while the other one, reportedly killed in 2001, was still alive. After more concentration, the clairvoyant said: “I can get in touch with this woman (pointing to Queen Akasha). I see her in a great stone building southeast of Ireland.” By psychic excursion and by psychometry (selecting an object belonging to the missing person and beginning to search from there) the clairvoyant was able to establish contact by occult assistance. The cinema is the Devil’s lantern. In March of 1922, Mrs. Winchester said, “Though it should be borne in the mind that in the persecution of witches many women were put to death on the latter charge, albeit they were really benefactors of the human race; the more so as their skill in simples and knowledge of the medicinal virtue of herbs must have added in no small degree to the resources of our present pharmacopoeia.” In August of 1807 an extraordinary affair took place in the house of Mrs. Winchester. She had a cow which continued to give milk as usual, but of late no butter could be produced from it. An opinion was unfortunately instilled into the mind of Mrs. Winchester, that whenever such a thing occurred, it was occasioned by the cow having been bewitched. Her belief in this was strengthened by the fact that every woman on this estate was able to relate some story illustrative of what she had seen or heard of in times gone by with respect to the same. At length the Mrs. Winchester was informed of a woman named Mary Butters, who resided in Oakland at the Cohen Bray House. Mrs. Winchester went to her, and brought her to mansion for the purpose of curing the cow. About ten o’ clock that night war was declared against the unknown magicians. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Mary Butters ordered old Klaus and a young man named Konrad to go out to the cow-house, turn their waistcoats inside out, and in that dress to stand by the head of the cow until she sent for them, while the butler, the made, and an old woman named Klara Lee remained in the house with her. Klaus and his ally kept their lonely vigil until daybreak, when, becoming alarmed at receiving no summons, they left their post and knocked at the door, but obtained no response. They then looked through the kitchen window, and to their horror saw the four inmates stretched on the floor as dead. They immediately burst in the door, and found that the butler and the maid were actually dead, and the sorceress and Mrs. Winchester nearly so. The latter soon afterwards expired; Mary Butters was thrown out on a dung-heap, and a restorative administered to her in the shape of a few hearty kicks, when had the desired effect. The house had a sulphureous smell, and on the fire was a large pot in which were milk, needles, pins, and crooked nails. At the inquest held at the Winchester mansion on the 19th of August, Jurors stated that the three victims had come by their deaths from suffocation, owning to Mary Butters having made use of some noxious ingredients, after the manner of a charm, to recover the sick cow. She was up to The Great Asylum for the Insane, but was discharged by proclamation. Her various of the story was that a black man (usually indicates a demon or the devil, not one of African descent) was summoned through the floor with a huge club, with which he killed the three person and stunned herself. This paranoid horror fantasies terrified the congregations, as well as the gross superstition displayed by the participants as for its tragical ending, yet it seems to have aroused no feelings in the greater community than those of risibility and derision. However, there is also another version of events. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
A farm-hand had brought an action against Mrs. Winchester for wages alleged to be due to him. It transpired in the course of the evidence that on one occasion he had been set to banish witches that were troubling the cows. His method of working illustrates the Winchester case. All left the house except Mrs. Winchester, and the farm-hand, who locked himself in, closed the windows, stopped al keyholes and apertures, and put sods on top of the chimneys. He then placed a large pot of sweet milk on the fire, into which he threw rows of pins that had never been used, and three packages of needles; all were allowed to boil together for half an hour, and, as there was no outlet for the smoke, the farm-hand narrowly escaped being suffocated. If the forces of darkness triumph, it is a warning not a celebration. Many religious people come close to depicting what evangelists are preaching from their pulpits, or TV shows. Does it not seem strange for fundamentalist Christians to attack them as sinful and dangerous? Sin sells, in a way that the bland platitudes of Christian morality never will. Many of these popular and historical figures will be remember long after the credits have rolled. You could say that it is an “inside job.” Satanism sells, it captures the metaphysics of fear. People like to be haunted and scared, but only when they consent to it. No one wants their house broken into, their children kidnapped, their cars constantly vandalized, or to be attack by a hate group who haunts them like demons of the night. People simply want to tune into a scarry movie or visited a haunted house and leave the fear behind when they walk out the door or turn the TV off. They do not want to fear for the lives like Sharon Tate did for years without anyone to protect them. Humans are often more harmful than any ghost, devil or demon you can ever imagine meeting. Satan, speaking through a beautiful serpent—perhaps as a parakeet “talks” to us—promises know that would make Eve “like God” if she would eat the fruit of the tree forbidden by God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Meanwhile, if the view of the power and knowledge of the people is that “Satan” is evil and not themselves, what can human beings do? Persist being evil, or resist the “devil,” and allow him to feel from them? Or is it they cling to evil because the darkness comes from their insidious mind and depleted soul? Note that it is useless to try to resist the devil unless you have first submitted yourself to God! Maybe YOU are the evil, not Satan. Sitting there, manufacturing all these evil days, so you can laugh at the pain and suffering you have inflicted on others to make yourself feel better. Is that of Satan, or is that YOUR nature on display. It is estimated that there are about 100 million adherents to spiritism in the World. The word “spiritism” comes from the Latin “spiritus,” spirit. The movement of spiritism represents the endeavour to communicate with the dead in the spirit World. Historically, spiritism can also be traced back over thousands of years. We have testimonies concerning it in the Old Testament in 1 Samuel 28, and Deuteronomy 18. It is also evidenced in the history of the Christian Church. Spiritism seems to be strongly connected with religion and religions. In so-called Christian countries such a variety of spiritistic forms, and such a range of associated psychic troubles exist, that the need for clarification is a pressing issue. What God do you really worship for “Satan disguises himself as an angel of the light. So it is not strange if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness,” reports 2 Corinthians 11.14-15. In other words, many of you Christians who claim to serve “God” do evil things and then blame the devil when you are disguising yourselves as children of the light. And you do not repent because you do not fear punishment nor hell, so you must be children of your “devil” and not of God. We live in a World which has turned its back on God. The reason some people fear Jesus is because they feel unworthy, it is not because they are evil. This conviction of inner unworthiness is not to be confused with a feeling of fear. However, people who suffer from schizophrenia and like to go around lying, the psychiatrist will be interested in the question whether the practicing of spiritism was rather the effect than the cause of the ensuing mental and emotional disorders. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Winchester Mystery House
The front gardens of the Winchester Mystery House looked different in the 1970’s! The gardens were restored to what they are today about ten years later.
The sign reads: “The world’s oddest, mysterious, weirdest, and freakish dwelling. Planned and built by Sarah L. Winchester of Winchester Rifle Fame”
Have you ever listened to Alessandro Moreschi sing “Ave Maria,” at night in the Winchester Mystery House? Try it and let me know what you experience. I heard ghosts appear, people have cried and screamed, and some love it. I think I would probably run outside. He sounds like a ghost.
Come Explore the Victorian Gardens this weekend! Open all weekend until 4PM.
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
Decision Sometimes Affect Life of Death of a Business or Person
When people first began writing things down, they would scratch their marks on anything that happened to be lying around—smooth-faced rocks, scraps of wood, strips of bark, bits of cloth, pieces of bone, chunks of broken pottery. Such ephemera were the original media for the written word. It is hard to imagine today, but as language advanced, scribes would write books with the words running together without any break across every line on every page, in what is now referred to as scriptura continua. The lack of word separation reflected language’s origins in speech. Today we place such a big deal on being literate and perhaps more school time should be devoted to get students in the practice of reading books. However, most literate Greeks and Romans were more than happy to have their books read to them by slaves. As the Middle Age progressed, people began to want, and to need, to read quickly and privately. Reading was becoming less an act of performance and more a means of personal instruction and improvement. That shift led to the most important transformation of writing since the invention of the phonetic alphabet. By the thirteenth century, scriptura continua was largely obsolete, for Latin texts as well as those written in the vernacular. Punctuation marks, which further eased the work of the reader, began to become common too. Writing, for the first time, was aimed as much at the eye as the ear. Readers did not just become more efficient, but they also became more attentive. To read a long book silently required an ability to concentrate intently over a long period of time, to “lose oneself” in the pages of a book, as we now say. Developing such mental discipline was not easy. The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness. Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and hence our attention, from one object to another, to be aware of what is going. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Neuroscientists have discovered primitive “bottom-up mechanisms” in our brains that operate on raw sensory input, rapidly and involuntarily shifting attention to salient visual features of potential importance. What draws our attention most of all is any hint of a change in our surroundings. Our senses are finely attuned to change. Stationary or unchanging objects become part of the scenery and are mostly unseen. However, as soon as something in the environment changes, we need to take notice because it might mean danger—or opportunity. Our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were once crucial to our survival. They reduced the odds that a predator would take up by surprise or that we would overlook a nearby source of food. For most of history, the normal path of human thought was anything but linear. To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroke attention to a single, static object. It required readers to place themselves at the still point of the turning World. They have to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to counter their instinctive distractedness, applying greater “top-down control” over their attention. The ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted, represents a strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development. Many people had, of course, cultivated a capacity for sustained attention long before the book or even the alphabet came along. The hunter, the craftsman, the ascetic—all had to train their brains to control and concentrate their attention. What was so remarkable about book reading was that the deep concentration was combined with the highly active and efficient deciphering of test and interpretation of meaning. The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not jut for knowledge readers acquired from the author’s words but for the ways those words set off intellectual vibrations within their minds. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply. Even the earliest silent readers recognized the striking change in their consciousness that took place as they immersed themselves in the pages of a book. The medieval bishop Isaac of Syria described how, whenever he read to himself, “as in a dream, I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.” Reading a book was a meditative act, but it did not involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was—and is—the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading. It was the technology of the book that made this “strange anomaly” in our psychological history possible. The brain of the book reader was more than a literate brain. It was a literary brain. As the nature of education and scholarship changed, universities began to stress private reading as an essential complement to classroom lectures. Libraries began to play much more central roles in university life and, more generally, in the life of the city. Library architecture evolved too. For instance, the Kadokawa Culture Museum by Kengo Kum and Associates is a futuristic a 5-story monolithic granite building that forms the cornerstone of development called “Tokorozawa Town.” The first floor the library, which actually appears to be composed of three stories, and it is truly labyrinth. It looks like something that belongs in the. There are scrolls hanging from the ceiling, and three floors of book, which cascade from the walls. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
This library is truly amazing. It is much different from the traditional large public rooms where students, professors, and other patrons sit together at long tables reading silently to themselves. It is more of a place where people are encouraged to browse and look around and quietly discuss the architecture. As one tours the library and enjoys, the rich heritage of books, they also appear to be in motion. For example, one can see an illustration of the evolution of such. This structure denotes how as book prices fell, following Gutenberg’s printing press the number, the number of books produced in the fifty years equaled the number produced by European scribes during the preceding thousand years. The sudden proliferation of once-rare books struck people of the time as sufficiently remarkable to suggest supernatural invention, and this library is very reminiscent of something paranormal. Because books are affordable these days, it is possible to not only read broadly but to draw comparisons between different works. All the World is fully of knowing humans, of most learned Schoolmasters, and vast Libraries and it appears to be a truth, that neither in Plato’s time, nor Cicero’s, not Papinian’s, there was ever such conveniency for studying, as we see at this day there is. A virtuous cycle has been set in motion. The growing availability of books fired the public’s desire for literacy, and the expansion of literacy further has stimulated the demand for books. However, along with the high-minded comes the low-minded. Tawdry novels, quack theories, gutter journalism, propaganda, and, of course, reams of social media and Internet research pouring into the market place to dumb down readers at every station in society. Priest and politicians have begun to wonder whether the Internet is more mischief than advantage. However, as books have historically become more common, humans could look more directly at each other’s observations, with a great increase in the accuracy and content of the information conveyed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Books allow readers to compare their thoughts and experiences not just with religious precept, whether embedded in symbols or voiced by the clergy, but with the thoughts and experience of others. The social and cultural consequences were as widespread as they were profound, ranging from religious and political upheaval to the ascendancy of the scientific method as the central means for defining truth and making sense of existence. Thank God for literacy. Literate people read all day long, mostly unconsciously. We glance at road signs, menus, headlines, shopping lists, labels of products in stores. These forms of reading tend to be shallow and brief duration. They are the types of reading we share with our distant ancestors who deciphered the marks scratched on pebbles and potsherds. However, there are also times when we read with greater intensity and duration, when we become absorbed in what we are reading for longer stretches of time. Some of us, indeed, do not just read in this way but think of ourselves as readers. After Gutenberg’s invention, the bounds of language expanded rapidly as writers, competing for the eyes of ever more sophisticated and demanding readers, strived to express ideas and emotions with superior clarity, elegance, and originality. The vocabulary of the English language, once limited to just a few thousand words, expanded to upwards of a million words as books proliferated. Many of the new words encapsulated abstract concepts that simply had not existed before. Writers experimented with syntax and diction, opening new pathways of thought and imagination. Reader eagerly traveled down those pathways, becoming adept at following fluid, elaborate, and idiosyncratic prose and verse. The ideas that writers could express and readers could interpret became more complex and subtle, as arguments wound their way linearly across many pages of text. As language expanded, consciousness deepened. The deepening extended beyond the page. It is no exaggeration to say that the writing and reading of books enhanced and refined people’s experience of life and nature. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The remarkable virtuosity displayed by new literary artists who managed to counterfeit taste, touch, smell, or sound in mere words required a heightened awareness and closer observation of sensory experience that was passed on in turn to the reader. Like painters and composers, writers were able to alter perception in a way that enriched rather than stunted sensuous response to external stimuli, expanded rather than contracted sympathetic responses to the varieties of human experience. The words in books did not just strengthen people’s ability to think abstractly; they enriched people’s experience of the physical World, the World outside the book. One of the most important lessons we have learned from the study of neuroplasticity is that the mental capacities, the very neural circuits, we develop for one purpose can be put to other uses as well. As our ancestors imbued their minds with the discipline to follow a line of argument or narrative through a succession of printed pages, they become more contemplative, reflective and imaginative. New thought came more readily to a brain that had already learned how to rearrange itself to read. The increasingly sophisticated intellectual skills promoted by reading and writing added to our intellectual repertoire. The quiet of deep reading is part of the mind. Books were not the only reason that human consciousness was transformed during the years following the invention of letterpress—many other technologies and social and demographic trends played important roles—but books were at the very center of the change. As the book came to be the primary means of exchanging knowledge and insight, its intellectual ethic became the foundation of our culture. Now the mainstream is being diverted, quickly and decisively, into a new channel. The electronic revolution is approaching its culmination as the computer—desktop, laptop, handheld—becomes our constant companion of the Internet becomes our medium of choice for storing, processing, and sharing information in all forms, including text. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
The New World will remain, of course, a literate World, packed with the familiar symbols of the alphabet. We cannot go back to the lost oral World, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized. However, the World of the screen, as we are already coming to understand, is a very different place from the World of the page. A new intellectual ethic is taking hold. The pathways in our brains are once again being rerouted. The great German physicist Werner Heisenberg remarked that nature does not reveal itself as it is but only through the questions we put to it. If this is true of our encounters with nature, surely it is even more true of our encounters with a nation. As hard as I tried, my education could not conceal that Germany had produced the World’s most beautiful music, its most rigorous science, some of its deepest philosophy, and its tenderest and most penetrating literature. We had the good fortune to participate in a conference of educators and businessmen who were concerned with the impact of technology on German culture. They also spoke about man’s inhumanity to man. They argued that a culture, like a person, must endure a period of grief when there is a tragic loss. Failure to do so may lead to disorientation, self-hate, or even violence. Everyone must do their grief work. Americans believe in Jesus Christ (who many of them tend to believe spoke English fluently and was American). Germans also have their own version of Krist, who has blonde hair and blue eyes and pale skin. Every culture has its own, unique truth. Nonetheless, Aldous Huxley thought that in the future people might be well controlled by inflicting pleasures on them rather than pain. And if you think about it, this idea may work. The Law of Diminishing returns is an economic law stating that if one input in the production of a commodity is increased while all other inputs are held fixed, a point will eventually be reached at which additions of the input yield progressively smaller, or waning, increase in output. If you overload on the things you love, and do not have to suffer at all, life becomes meaningless, but that is also what drives people to crime. They need instant gratification and excitement. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Some people did not believe that America was capable of producing an Auschwitz, but many feel like they are trapped in one. A lot of people never recovered financially from 911, then the great recession hit making things worst, then another recession came around the years 2011, and now COVID has further hit communities hard. That is a lot of tragedy that has cost some people their life savings and lives, and it was all in such a short time. If we have to expect a significant financial tragedy every ten years, perhaps one should be prepared for one to hit every five years, that way one will pay closer attention to the markets and know when to pull out and stop investing. Many Americans are starting to sense that they have imported culture with little intellectual coherences, uninterested in its own traditions, and preoccupied with the creation of spectacle. Even those who adore Joe Biden, and with few exceptions TMOS (the man on the street) told me they do know that he is incapable of conceiving and putting together five consecutive sentences of political substance and logical force. Also, it is amazing that so many people understand a script on the Statue of Liberty, which symbolizes freedom and is not a law but was also a gift from France, yet they cannot seem to have that same dedication to the United States of America’s Constitution. I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. The soul’s longing, its intolerable irritation under the constraint of the conditional and limited, may very well require encouragement at the outset. At all event, whatever the cause, our students have lost the practice of and the taste for reading. They have not learned how to read, nor do they have the expectation of delight or improvement for reading. They are “authentic,” as against the immediately preceding university generations, in having few cultural pretensions and in refusing hypocritical ritual bows to high culture. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
When I first noticed the decline in reading after the invention of the Internet and social media, I began asking my large introductory classes, and any other group of younger students to which I spoke, what books really count for them. Most are silent, puzzled by the question. The notions of books as companions is foreign to them. Just Black with his tattered copy of the Constitution in his pocket at all times is not an example that would mean much to them. There is no printed word to which they look for counsel, inspiration or joy. Sometimes one student will say “the Bible.” (He learned it at home, and his Biblical studies are not usually continued at the university.) There is always a girl who mentions Paris Hilton’s Confessions of an Heiress, a book, although hardly literature, which with its sub-Nietzschean assertiveness, excites somewhat eccentric youngster to a new way of life. A few students mention recent books that struck them and supported their own self-interpretation, like The Catcher in the Rye. (Theirs is usually the most genuine response and also shows a felt need for help in self-interpretation. However, it is an uneducated response. Teachers should take advantage of the need expressed in it to show such students that better writers can help more.) After such session, I am pursued by a student or two who wants to make it clear that one is really influenced by books, not just by one or two but by many. The one recites a list of classics one may have grazed in high school. Imagine such a young person walking through the Louvre or the Uffizi, and you can immediately grasp the condition of one’s soul. In his innocence of the stories of the Bible and Greek or Roman antiquity, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and all the others can say nothing to him. All he sees are colours and forms—modern art. In short, like almost everything else in his spiritual life, the paintings and statues are abstract. No matter what much of modern wisdom asserts, these artists counted on immediate recognition for their subjects and, what is more, on their having a powerful meaning for their views. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The works were the fulfillment of those meanings, giving them a sensuous reality and hence competing them. Without those meanings, and without their being something essential to the viewer as a moral, political and religious being, the works lose their essence. It is not merely the tradition that is lost when the voice of civilization elaborated over millennia has been stilled in this way. It is being itself that vanishes beyond dissolving horizon. One of the most flattering things that every happened to me as a teacher occurred when I received a postcard from a very good student on his first visit to Italy, who write, “You are not a professor of political philosophy but a travel agent.” Nothing could have better expressed my intentions as an educator. He thought I had prepared him to see. Then he could begin thinking for himself with something to think about. The real sensation of the Florence in which Machiavelli is believable is worth all the formulas of metaphysics ten times over. Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion. It a less grandiose vain, students today have nothing like Martin Buber, Rollo May, Paul Brunton, Allen Wheelis, Albert Schweitzer, Karen Horney, Francis Bacon, Thomas a Kempis, Paul Tillich, Dennis Coon, Ronald J. Comer, John H. Brennecke, or Robert G. Amick, who have sharpened our vision, allowing us some subtlety in our distinction of human types. It is a complex set of experiences that enables one to say so simply, “He’s an Anger.” Without literature, no such observations are possible and the fine art of comparison is lost. The psychological obtuseness of our students is appalling, because they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives. As the awareness that we owed almost exclusively to literary genius falters, people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Lack of education simply results in students’ seeking for enlightenment wherever it is readily an available, without being able to distinguish between the sublime and trash, insight and propaganda. For the most part students turn to the movies, ready pray to interested moralisms such as the depictions of Gandhi or Thomas More—largely designed to further passing political movements and to appeal to simplistic needs for greatness—or to insinuating flatter of their secret aspirations and vices, giving them a sense of significance. As films have emancipated themselves from the literary tyranny under which they stuffed and which gave them a bad conscience, the ones with serious pretensions have become intolerably ignorant and manipulative. The distance from the contemporary and its high seriousness that students most need in order not to indulge their petty desires and to discover what is most serious about themselves cannot be found in the cinema, which now only knows the present. Thus, the failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengths our most fatal tendency—the belief that the here and now is all there is. The only way to counteract this tendency is to intervene most vigorously in the education of those few who come to the university with a strong urge for un je ne sais quoi, who fear that they may fail to discover it, and that the cultivation of their minds is required for the success of their quest. We are long past the age when a whole tradition could be stored up in all students, to be faithfully used later by some. Only those who are willing to take risks and are ready to believe the implausible are now fit for a bookish adventure. The desire must come from within. People do what they want, and now the most needful things appear so implausible to them that it is hopeless to attempt universal reform. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Teachers of writing in state universities, among the noblest and most despised laborers in the academy, have told me that they cannot teach writing to students who do not read, and that it is practically impossible to get them to read, let alone like it. This is where high schools have failed most, filled with teachers who are products of popular culture and reflecting the pallor of university-level humanities. The old teachers who loved Shakespeare or Austen or Donne, and whose only reward for teaching was the perpetuation of their taste, have all but disappeared. We need more teach, like Mr. Crosby, who see that all students have potential and encourage them to try harder. Students need to know that studying and reading are very important. If you have to start the introduction of all your classes with a lecture of how the mind works, and why your course is important, that may be better than explaining the syllabus for junior high school and high school student. Maybe it is even necessary to have a period of class time that simply focuses on reading and discussion so students become more involved. Because if students cannot read the textbooks and orally explain why they are important, they may never make it. You may even need to hold more students back until they grasp the concepts of reading books, and more parents become involved. I have seen professionals who claim to be educated and able to diagnose mental problems, but have no idea who Dr. Karen Horney or Dr. Denis Coon is. They think these names have something to do with pleasures of the flesh and racial slurs. How can a professional even considered dealing with someone who is younger and may be more educated? People wonder why society is so messed up and it could be because of Affirmative Action, hiring people just because they fit into the “Ole Boys Club.” Frauds and psychopaths often talk their way into jobs, complain about hating their jobs, and no one seems to notice they are underperforming. Yet hardworking people are not considered for these jobs because of their heritage and race. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
I think if your want your corporation to succeed, you have to truly pick the best person for the job. Countries with homogenous populations, like China and Korea or Japan may very well supersede America because they do not have a problem with racism, people are more able to compete based on skill, personality, and education. Did you know that latest translation of Biblical text—sponsored by the National Council of the Churches of Christ—suppresses gender references to God, so that future generations will not have to grapple with the fact that God was once a sexist. However, this technique has only limited applicability. Another tactic is to expunge the most offensive authors—for example, Rousseau—from the education of the young or to include feminists responses in college courses, pointing out the distorting prejudices, and using the books only as evidence of the misunderstanding of woman’s nature and the history of injustice to it. However, people would rather get emotional and offended and appl censorship instead of having a rational debate. Every since the launch of the profoundly popular show Gossip Girl, starring the beautiful Blake Lively, people, families, TV news media and even politicians and law enforcement have become intent on taking good people down, even if they are related. Then the immensely popular show Pretty Little Liars gave these same groups of people the inspiration to form hate groups and terrorize people in the same sense that “A” did to these young women. A lot of people are suffering from acute television intoxication, and may not even realize it, but they fact that that you have supposedly heterosexual grown men watching adolescent TV shows aimed at young women for ideas may be indicative of another problem. How is you romance life at home…Moreover, the great female characters in novels can be used as examples of the various ways women have coped with their enslavement to their gender roles. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
However, never, never, must a student be attracted to those antiquated old ways and take them as models of him or herself. But you know, the problem is also that so many are focused on being popular and famous without caring about the United States Constitution or the content of their character. That is why they are forming hate groups. Having heard over a period of years the same kinds of responses to my question about favorite books, I began to ask students who their heroes are. Again, there is usually silence, and most frequently nothing follows. Why should anyone have heroes? One should be oneself and not form oneself in an alien mold. Here positive ideology supports them: their lack of hero-worship is a sign of maturity. Students otherwise have not the slightest notion of what an achievement it is to free oneself from public guidance and find recourses for guidance within oneself. From what source within themselves would they draw the goals they think they set for themselves? Liberation from the heroic only means that they have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current “role models.” They are constantly thinking of themselves in terms of fixed standards that they did not make. Instead of being overwhelmed by Cyrus, Theseus, Moses, or Romulus, they unconsciously act out the roles of the doctors, lawyers, businessmen or TV personalities around them. One can only pity young people without admirations they can respect of avow, who are artificially restrained from the enthusiasm for great virtue. In encouraging this deformity, democratic relativism joins a branch of conservatism that is impressed by the dangerous political consequences of idealism. These conservatives want young people to know that this tawdry old society cannot respond to their demands for perfectionism. We need to criticize false understandings of what America is. As it stands now, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. However, deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is a such thing. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Following on what I learned from this second question, I began asking a third: Who do you think is evil? To this one there is an immediate response: Gavin Newsom. After him, who else? Up until a couple of years ago, few students said Jerry Brown, but he has been forgotten and at the same time is being rehabilitated. And there it stops. They have no idea of evil; they doubt its existence. Gavin Newsom is just another abstraction, an item to fill up an empty category. Although they live in a World in which the most terrible deeds are being performed and they see brutal crime in the streets, they turn aside. Perhaps they believe if they got their therapy, that evil deeds are performed by persons, would not do them again—that there are evil deeds, not evil people. There is no Inferno in this comedy. Thus, the most common students views lack an awareness of the depths as well as the heights, and hence lacks gravity. As a child I wondered how human beings learned which plants were edible and which were not. How did our ancestors learn about poisons, or cured for poisons, without any doctors around? I assumed it was trial and error because that was the way it was explained to me. The Amazon and African people have been using medicinal plants as cures for aliments for many thousands of years. The medicines developed and produced through modern technology are usually extracted from medicinal herbs and plants. The major source of information about plants and their medicinal uses are the people who live in harmony and very close to the cycles of Mother Earth. If they were to research them all the plants by themselves in an attempt to discover their medicinal uses, the drug companies would take many years. The drug companies secure an adequate supply of the basic plant material, sometimes buying off Indian land for production, and sell the drugs derived from these plants to the World and to the people who first told them about them. They make great profits from their “discoveries” without any monetary reward to the Indians from whom they acquire their “drug secret.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Quite the opposite in fact. By taking over the land and turning the Indians into laborers, while introducing the money system and imposing Western-style medicine, the drug companies put the Indians in the position of having to buy the medicines they formerly had in abundance. The question remains: How did the Indians know about the curative powers of plants in the first place. One explanation for the knowledge of earlier cultures, expounded by such people as the popular German writer Erich Von Daniken, is that humans—white with red hair—had arrived from outer space and taught the ignorant savages everything they knew. This kind of explanation, aside from its implicit racism and its entertainment value, is an indication of how far we all are from understanding knowledge systems that are based on direct experiences. Pretechnological peoples do not have to go through a slowing-down process. Surrounded by nature, with everything alive everywhere around them, they develop an automatic intimacy with the natural World. Beyond intimacy, there is the sense that events of the forest, or desert, are not actually separate from oneself, that humans are just part of a larger living creature: the planet. Things that are put in our bodies so that we grow. The air goes into us and out. The water goes through us. Warm air outside warms us inside and vice versa. We can imagine that we are not connected to things in this way only when our connections are blocked, altered or stunted. For Indian and African people and many others in the Old World, the plants, weather, terrain, soil, water, and their interactions were part of the body of which they themselves were also a part. They experienced these natural forces as the did themselves. These primitive people observed individuals, experiencing each detail. Then they worked out larger patterns (the problem with modern people, is even though there are cameras and witnesses everywhere, they think no one is watching them) as a group, much like individual cells informing the larger body, which also informs the cells. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
In the evenings, the whole tribe would gather and repeat each detail of the day that just passed. They would describe every sound, the creature that made it and its apparent state of mind. The conditions of growth of all the planets for miles around were discussed. This band of howler monkeys, which was over here three days ago, is not over there. Certain fruit trees which were in the bud stage three weeks ago are now bearing ripe fruit. A jaguar was seen near the river, and not it is on the hillside. It is in a strangely anguished mood, The grasses in the valley are peculiarly dry. There is a group of bird that have not moved for several days. The wind has altered in direction and smells of something unknown. (Actually, such a fact as a wind change might not be reported at all. Everyone would already know it. A change of wind or scent would arrive in everyone’s awareness as a bucket of cold water thrown on the head might arrive in ours.) Many of the primitive people concerned themselves with the personalities of animals and plants, what kind of vibrations they gave off. Dreams acted as additional information systems from beyond the level of conscious notation, drawing up patterns and meanings from deeper levels. Predictions would be based on them. Drugs were used not so much for changing moods, as we use them today, but for the purpose of further spacing out perception. As if in slow motion (time lapse), plants and animals could then be seen more clearly, adding to the powers of observations, yielding up especially subtle information as to how plants worked, and which creatures would be more likely to relate to which plants. An animal interested in concealment, for example, might eat a plant which tended to conceal itself. Reading these accounts made it clear to me that all life in the jungle is constantly aware of all other life in exquisite detail. Though all this, the tribal people of the Old World, and Native Americans, gained information about the way natural systems interact. The observation was itself knowledge. Depending on the interpretation, the knowledge might or might not become reliable and useful. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Each detail of each event had special power and meaning, understood as part of a larger pattern of activities and forces. The understanding was so complete that it was only the rare event that could not be explained—a twig cracked in a way that did not fit the previous history of cracked twigs—that was cause for concern and immediate arming. It also seems possible these people did have supernatural powers and did talk to gods or spirits. That would make this explanation more plausible. The tribal people knew which animals to kill and when to stop. They did not go after the leaders because the animals need someone guide them and this would throw them into a state of confusion. No one in the tribe ever asked why their skills worked so well; they trusted their elders and the knowledge of it was merely passed down, generation to generation, and there was always plenty of pig to eat. Their ways could be amplified and integrated int the observer, directly, physically: emulation. By imitating a creature, “getting inside” it, one learns to better understand it. To achieve their exquisitely detailed knowledge of the World around them, human beings living in nonmediated environments had to use all their abilities to observe themselves, the planet, and the things that grow from it. They might not have even considered the planet to be something that was actually outside them since their senses told them it was also inside them. Their World was organized along flow lines, not in separate and distinct boxes. Knowledge results from the personal experience and direct observation—seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. These are assisted by several inward systems. There is instinct, for example, gathered by innumerable previous generations and carried forward in the cells. There is intuition, what Old World religions called “knowing without seeing.” In addition there are feelings, which may have been informed by prior experience. All of these—the five senses plus instinct, intuition, feeling and thought—combine to produce conscious awareness, the ability to perceive and describe they way the World is organized. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Western people like to think of these human qualities as separate from one another and some as more “real” than others. Yet all of these abilities interact both between person and planet and among each other. One sense interacts with another sense, the sense interacts with feelings. Intuition functions together with instinct, thought flows constantly in and out of all experience. The fully functional human being can be understood as a kind of microcosmic ecosystem inside a wider ecosystem inside a wider one and so on, all systems flowing in and out of each other. As with other systems, when one thing is altered, the overall balance is altered. Changes in one aspect of human perception or experience affects all others. When a person has all senses fully operative, we call the person “sensitive.” People who live in environments that stimulate the full sensory range from the most subtle to the most obvious are more sensitive than those who do not. The sense developed in interaction with the multiple patterns and influences of the natural environment; no sensual capacity was developed by accident. If it is not used, no sense maintains itself. If a sense remains unused, it atrophies. Eunuchs guarded the Ottoman imperial harems and were bulwarks against fitnah—chaos. Later, eunuchs were brought into households as servants and into the Ottoman sultan’s palace, despite Islamic law’s proscription of castration. At first, the Ottoman eunuchs were white, brought from European dealers. Vienne, in France, was the center of the actual surgery. Later, most eunuchs were either Ethiopians or black Africans, enslaved and mutilated outside the boundaries of the empire to avoid legal problems. By the reign of Suleiman (1520-66), black eunuchs were more powerful than white. The African eunuch’s behavior could be peculiar, petulant, and socially inept, and they were known as eccentrics. Young boy were the usual victims. They were also the most valued eunuchs because they had not already had, and could never have, any offspring to dilute their loyalty to their owners. In the early nineteenth century, these children were taken to Egyptian villages for castration, often performed by Coptic priests. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Frequently, the surgeries were fatal, thank to incompetent castrators and unhygienic conditions. Pus often clogged the urethra, killing the wounded boy. Scores of contemporary accounts testify that throughout their lives, surviving eunuchs suffered hormonal and psychological disorders, and many were intensely bitter about their deformity, about which, unlike their Chinese counterparts, the had had no consultation and over which they had no control. The eunuchs who emerged alive from the ordeal, however, were precious commodities, expensive, rare, and difficult to obtain. What better gift to impress and ingratiate oneself with the sultan, the man with everything else? So the palace seldom needed to purchase eunuchs as the vast majority were given as gifts. Once “manufactured,” the young eunuchs were sent to a highly regimented school where strict, elderly, castrated instructors taught them Turkish high-court culture, the etiquette of the palace, and how to perform their duties there. Playtime was allowed, and the youngest eunuchs mingled with harem slave girls, who were also learning their future trade. When the eunuchs graduated, they entered into service with the rank of en asagi—the lowest. Older eunuchs were sometimes brought to the palace after long service in high-ranking private households in Istanbul or the provinces. In 1876-1908, two head eunuchs were officially recognized for their high governmental standing. However, their real importance stemmed from their manipulation of courtiers and their intimate knowledge of palace intrigue and gossip. Who was better positioned to garner information about the personal habits and innermost secrets of the sultan’s family and inner circle? Black eunuch had enormous power because they became politicians and guarded the sultan and harem women—modern historians have variously described it as a sinister alliance and a cancer at the heart of the empire. Compared to China’s imperial palace, the sultanate required relatively few eunuchs—in 1903, for example, 194 African eunuchs guarded the harem. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
They enjoy unusual job security and over half were never transferred, a token of their owners’ attachment to them. They also amassed fortunes, strong motivation to continue their spirited service as almost coconspirators with their master or, more particularly, mistress. The eunuchs’ sexuality was, of course, supposedly nonexistent, hence their appointment to the harem. Mainstream society both dreaded and shunned them, so they had no outlet for relations outside the World of their sultan owner’s court. Furthermore, the authorities believed—wrongly—that black men were unattractive to women and so thrust them among women. Naturally, emotionally attachments developed, though unless an operation had been incomplete, no sexual activity was possible. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, the Ottoman eunuchs were reluctant celibates, their psyches as mutilated by involuntary castration as their bodies. The kizlar aghais, for instance, were reputedly cruel, their ruthlessness supposedly the consequence of their castration. Yet they greatly enjoyed the perquisites that constituted the flip side of being a eunuch, their prestigious, lucrative, and secure positions and the high esteem in which their owners held them. From the youth generation of today, we could learn something culturally useful. It we turn now to the big-city juvenile delinquency of the underprivileged, exempli gratia, new immigrants economically marginal, we are dealing with the uneducated children. Their legal arrests and convictions occur at average age fifteen to sixteen, but if not earlier, their delinquencies date from twelve and thirteen; and of course they attend school the least and get the least out of it. The so-called “delinquent subculture” has a few flashing and charming traits, but nothing in it is viable or imitable. On the other hand, the fight these kids put up, the record of their delinquencies, does test and explore our society. The accounts and statistics of delinquency come mostly from social agencies, the police, and reform schools. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
In a sense we know about juvenile delinquency only from its failures, the lads who are most disturbed and have the least general ability—except the one important ability of getting caught. I do not believe this gives us a valid picture. There is Delinquent Behavior as doing-the-forbidden-and-even-defiant from Delinquent Behavior in order-to-get-caught. If, as we saw, Leonardo da Vinci has outlandish ideas about beaver testicles, what should we make of some of the seemingly kooky beliefs floating through the culture today? One trip to the Internet is enough to deluge anyone with conspiracy theories, alien-abduction stories and evidence that Elvis lives. We are told the Kentucky Fried Chicken is genetically breeding six-legged hens; that is you do not turn your cell phone off at the gas station, it could spark an explosion; that the missing flier Amelia Earhart was a spy; the Lady Godiva is one of President Trump’s daughters who used a time machine; the eelskin wallets erase magnetic credit cards; that waterproof sunscreen can cause blindness in children; that some children born today have received mysterious messages from this generations vital force and ova warning them of environmental disasters to come. Want more? Just go online and search for “weird theories.” Knowledge may be one of those deep fundamentals of revolutionary wealth, but even if we set aside “obsoledge”—obsolete knowledge—how much of what we know about money, business and wealth—or anything else—is total nonsense? Or pure fiction? How much can we trust what we are being told? How do we decide? And even more important, who decides how we decide? Lies and errors abound in job applications, tax returns, contractors’ estimates, performance reviews, press releases, studies and statistics and surely in profit statements. Indeed, hyping profits led to the spectacular spate of business scandals that marked the turn of the millennium. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
At one level, CEOs, CFOs, accountants, stock analysts and other grew Pinocchio noses on the front pages of the World’s press. Hiding from television cameras, a few were marched off to prison in handcuffs for lying about profits, for dumping their own shares of stock while publicly urging others to buy them and for other high crimes and misdemeanors. Authorities accused them of causing investors to lose confidence in stock markets and of shaking global financial markets. Truth, it appeared, was in short supply. For lo, Thine enemies are in an uproar, and they that hate Thee have lifted up their head; they take counsel against Thy people. They have said: “Come let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of America be remembered no more. They have consulted together with one accord; against Thee do they make a covenant. O Lord, make them like the whirling dust, as chaff before the wind. Fill their faces with shame; O may they seek Thee, O Lord, that they may know it is Thou alone who are the Lord, the Most High over all the Earth. O God of hosts, restore us: cause Thy spirit to be with us and we shall be saved. Reveal Thyself in the majesty of Thy triumphant power over all the inhabitants of Thy World, that every living creature understand that Thou hast created it, and all with life’s breath in them may declare: “The Lord, God of America, is King, and His dominion ruleth over all. As my eyes search the prairie, I feel the summer in the spring. Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when the house of America will come to know Me. I will put My commandments within you and write them in your hearts, and I will be your God and you shall be My people. And I will betroth you unto Me forever; yea, I will betroth you unto Me in righteousness, in justice, and in love. And I will betroth you unto Me forever; yea, I will betroth you unto Me in righteousness, in justice, and in love. And I will betroth you unto Me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord. A new heart also will I gibes you, and a new spirit I put within you. I will take away the heart of stone, and I will give you a heart of flesh. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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When Did the Vortex of Fear First Catch Hold of Mrs. Winchester?
Long before Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s arrival, there were rumors of occult activity on the California cost. One told of a cult near Santa Cruz. They supposedly sacrificed animals and drank their blood in beach-side barbecues, where ritual fire-dancing tuned the attendees into “slaves of Satan.” More elaborate variation suggested that the slaves of Satan performed human sacrifices on an ornate altar decorated with dragons. The bizarre ritual dagger used for these purposes had six blades like a Satanic Swiss army knife: most were used to puncture the stomach before the last skewered the heart, which the cultist then ate. The victim was then disposed of in a portable crematorium—an improbable device that was a Standard prop in Satanic ritual-slaying myths. Yet, even with things like this going on, Mrs. Winchester’s arrival to California was a sensational event. Our valley was thrilled by this dramatic entrance of a millionairess; by those freight cars sidetracked in Santa Clara, unloading rich imported furnishings; by building activities that mushroomed a farm house into an expansive mansion in the first six months. As the years passed and new towers, gables rose, gardens bloomed, and trees sprouted. The terraces were generally about twenty feet high. Town’s people would see fairies dancing on the grass every night by the light of the moon, and stealing away children. Many of the ones they took never came back. At night passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. Diablo Mountain Range was full of dead, and after nightfall they would come from their graves and walk in a long line one after another to the old mansion in the valley where they would go in and stay until they bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled. Then bats, owls, and horses with wings would return to the top of the mountain range. #RandolphHarris 1 of 3
There was certainly an evil spirit that was always in mischief. Mrs. Winchester built a door-to-nowhere in her labyrinth, and with one step out that door, one would go down a thousand feet into the field. Sometimes Satan Himself would be there at the entertainment, coming and a monstrous dragon, with green scales and eyes like lightening in the Heavens, roaring his fiery mouth. It was a great thing, for they do say all the witches brough their reports with them to show him what they had done. Some would report how they stopped the weather in the spring, an inconvenienced the neighbors, more would show how they dried the cow’s milk, and made her kick the pail, and they laughed and split. Some had blighted the corn, more had brought rain on the harvest. Some witches told hoe their enchantments made the children fall ill, or how they stole the eggs, or spoiled the cream in the churn, or bewitch the butler. It was impossible to say exactly when the vortex of fear first caught hold of the Mrs Winchester. One night in the hellishly-hot hall of fires, a young man by the name of John Wise was a ranch hand for Mrs. Winchester. However, he had eyes for one of her servant Clara Haralson. She was socially higher than himself. Normally he would have had little success. But to arrive at his goal, summon the devil by reciting this very spell, “Come Thou Forth, and follow Me: and make all Spirits subject unto Me so that every Spirit of the Winchester and of the Ether: upon the Earth and under the Earth: on dry Land, or in the Water: of whirling Air or of rushing Fire: and every Spell and Scourge of God, may be obedient unto Me! John then cut his finger and wrote a contract in his own blood on a piece of paper. In this way he tried to obtain the help of some love magic. #RandolphHarris 2 of 3
John fell asleep on the sofa in the hall of fire, to find a demon with long finger nails tapping on his head. “What do you want?” he beathed at the intruder. “I am the Devil and I have come to do the Devil’s work,” responded the demon, as he kissed him on the forehead, and vanished. After a while he became scared. Nevertheless, John proposed to Clara and they were married. She was a very pretty young woman. The mother began to suffer from a state of anxiety and she started seeing ghost at night and feeling an unseen power which seemed to try to strangle her. A black figure often appeared in her room. She had a feeling that it wanted to kill her. One night in particular the door to her chambers opened and the demon entered her room, her whole body shook and she was terribly frightened, without a greeting he demanded to know what was going. Clara had been praying for a healthy delivered. The demon struck her with evil gaze and departed. When she gave birth to twins, they were both horribly disfigured. Clara was so distressed that she cut her wrists and died. John continued to suffer as he had done so ever since his subscription to the devil. One night while he was putting the horses in the stables, witches tore him limb from limb, and the fiends drunk his blood in red-hot iron noggins with shrieks of laughter to smother his screams, and the horses jumped on his body and trampled it into the ground. A committee Mrs. Winchester assembled consisting of a professor, an engineer, and a philologist who was conversant with parapsychological phenomena, was delegated to examine the strange events in the haunted mansion. Their research disclosed that the eighteen-year-old boy was a strong spiritistic medium. Although occult literature is full of examples of table lifting, dark shadows, and demons appearing, these forms of spiritistic practice have found many critics and who do not take into account the reality of demon spirits. #RandolphHarris 3 of 3
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻What do you think motivated Sarah Winchester to keep building?
▪️ 24,000 square feet
▪️ 10,000 windows
▪️ 2,000 doors
▪️ 160 rooms
▪️ 52 skylights
▪️ 47 stairways and fireplaces
▪️ 17 chimneys
▪️ 13 bathrooms
▪️ 6 kitchens
Will we be seeing you on the estate this week?
The Empire’s Most Sacred Secrets
The eleven o’ clock television news and the front pages of our newspaper compete with our imagination’s attempts to create the bizarre. Reality is now not only stranger than fiction but a stranger to common sense. At the moment when the natural environment was altered beyond the point that it could be personally observed, the definitions of knowledge itself began to change. No longer based on direct experience, knowledge began to depend upon scientific, technological, industrial proof. Scientists, technological, industrial, economist and the medias which translate and disseminate their findings and opinions became our source. Now they tell us what nature is, what we are, how we are related to the cosmos, what we need for survival and happiness, and what are the appropriate ways to organize our existence. There is little wonder, therefore, what we should be being to doubt the evidence of our own experience and begin to be blind to the self-evident. Our experience is not valid until science says it is. It also of little wonder that we feel removed from participation in most of the lagers issues which shape our lives. We feel removed because we are removed. As we continue to separate ourselves from direct experience of the planet, the hierarchy of techno-scientism advances. This creates astounding problems for a society that is supposed to be democratic. In democracies, by definition, all human beings should have a say about technological developments that may profoundly change, even threaten, their lives: nuclear power, genetic engineering, the spread of microwave systems, the advance of satellite communications, and the ubiquitous use of computers, to name only a few. And yet, in order to participate fully in discussions of the implications of these technologies one must have training in at least physics, psychology, biology, philosophy, economics, and social and political theory. Any of these technologies has profound influence in all those areas. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Because most of us are not so trained, all discussion takes place among our unelected surrogates, professionals and experts. They do not have this full range of training either, but they do have access to one or another area of it and can speak to each other in techno-jargon—“tradeoffs,” “cost-benefits,” “resource management”—and they therefore get to argue with each other over one side of the question or the other while the rest of us watch. That their technological training and the language they use excludes from their frame of reference a broader, more subtle system of information and values rarely seems to occur to them. The alternative to leaving all discussion to the experts would be to take another route entirely. That would be to define a line beyond which democratic control—which is to day full participation of the populace in the details of decision that affect all of us—is not possible, and then to say that anything which crosses this line is taboo. Yet, the notion of taboo is itself taboo in our society, and the idea of outlawing whole technologies is virtually unthinkable. Taboo systems of earlier cultures were not quite the darkly irrational frameworks we now believe them to have been. Most often they reflected knowledge taken from nature and then modified by human experience over time. Their purpose was to articulate and preserve natural balances in a given area or within a given group of people at a particular time. They were statements about when too far is too far. This sensitivity to natural balances, which was the basis of virtually every culture before our own, has now been suppressed by our modern belief that science and technology can solve all problems and that, therefore, all technologies which can be created ought to be. The question of natural balance is now subordinated. Evolution is defined less in terms of planetary process than technological process. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The planet and its information are now considered less relevant than human ingenuity, an idiotic and dangerous error shielded from exposure only the walls of precious assumption and the concrete of the physical forms within which we live. Ivan Illich, a leading critic of the expropriation of knowledge into a nether World of experts and abstractions, argues in Medical Nemesis that professional medicine may be causing more harm than good. We go to the doctors as we go to mechanics. They speak a language that remains impenetrable to us. We take their cures on faith. Illich remarks that this may be producing more illness than cure: It has separated the people from knowledge about keeping themselves healthy, a knowledge that was once ingrained in the culture. Although some of our techno-scientific methods work, some do not, and the doctors who use them may not understand them or may be inexpert in their use. The doctors, Illich believes, are also taking the validity of techno-medicine on faith. Their source is usually the chemical and drug industry, which has a stake in disrupting natural healing methods. How else could they sell their chemical? Every technology is an expression of human will. Through our tools, we seek to expand our power and control over circumstances—over nature, over time and distance, over one another. Intellectual technologies are tools we used to extend or support our mental powers—to find and classify information, to formulate and articulate ideas, to share know-how and knowledge, to take measurements and performance calculations, to expand the capacity of our memory. The typewriter is an intellectual technology. So are the abacus and the slide rule, the sextant and the globe, the book and the newspaper, the school and the library, the computer and the Internet. Although the use of any kind of tool can influence our thoughts and perspectives—the plow changed the outlook of the farmer, the microscope opened New Worlds of mental exploration for the scientist—it is our intellectual technologies that have the greatest and most lasting power over what and how we think. They are our most intimate tools, the one we use for self-expression, for shaping personal and public identity, and for cultivating relations with others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
For centuries, historians and philosophers have traced, and debated technology’s role in shaping civilization. Some have made the case for what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen dubbed “technological determinism”; they have argued that technological progress, which they see as an autonomous force outside man’s control, has been the primary factor influencing the course of human history. The windmills give you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist. Our essential role is to produce every more sophisticated tools—to fecundate machines as bees fecundate planets—until technology has developed the capacity to reproduce itself on its own. At that point, we become dispensable. Our instruments are the means we use to achieve our ends; they have no ends of their own. Instrumentalism is the most widely held view of technology, not least because it is the view we would prefer to be true. Technology is technology, it is a means for communication and transportation over space, and nothing more. If the experience of modern society shows us anything, it is that technologies are not merely assistants to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning. Though we are rarely conscious of the fact, many technologies that came into use long before we were born. It is an overstatement to say that technology progresses autonomously—our adoption and use of tools are heavily influenced by economic, political, and demographic considerations—but it is not an overstatement to say that process has its own logic, which is not always consistent with the intentions or wishes of the toolmakers and tool users. Sometimes our tools do what we tell them to. Other times, we adapt ourselves to our tools’ requirement. Technological advances often mark turning points in history. New tools for hunting and farming brought changes in patterns of population growth, settlement, and labor. New modes of transport led to expansions and realignments of trade and commerce. New weaponry altered the balance of power between states. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Other breakthroughs, in fields as various as medicine, metallurgy, and magnetism, changes the way people life in innumerable ways—and continue to do so today. In large measure, civilization has assumed its current form as a result of the technologies people have come to use. What has been harder to discern is the influence of technologies, particularly intellectual technologies, on the functioning of people’s brains. We can see the products of thought—works of art, scientific discoveries, symbols preserved on documents—but not the thought itself. There are plenty of fossilized bodies, but there are no fossilized minds. If at all, since the late Stone Age, human heredity seems to have changed very little, while human social life, habits, have changed completely, have undergone revision and reversal. The process of our mental and social adaptation to new intellectual technologies is reflected in, and reinforced by, the changing metaphors we use to portray and explain the workings of nature. Once maps had become common, people began to picture all sorts of natural and social relationships as cartographic, as a set of fixed, bounded arrangements in real or figurative space. We began to “map” our lives, our social sphere, even our ideas. Under the sway of the mechanical clock, people began thinking of their brains and their bodies—of the entire Universe, in fact—as operating “like clockwork.” In the clock’s tightly interconnected gears, turning in accord with the laws of physics and forming a long and traceable chain of cause and effect, we found a mechanistic metaphor that seemed to explain the workings of all thing, as well as the relations between them. God became the Great Clockmaker. His creation was no longer a mystery to be accepted. It was a puzzle to be worked out. Doubtless when the swallows come in spring, they operate like clocks. The map and clock changed language indirectly, by suggesting new metaphors to describe natural phenomena. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Other intellectual technologies change language more directly, and more deeply, by actually altering the way we speak and listen and write. They might enlarge or compress our vocabulary, modify the norms of diction or word order, or encourage either simpler or more complex syntax. Because language is, for human beings, the primary vessel of conscious thought, particularly higher forms of thought, the technologies that restructure language tend to exert the strongest influence over our intellectual lives. Technologies are not mere exterior assistants, but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. The history of language is also a history of the mind. Language itself it not a technology. It is native to our species. Our brains and bodies have evolved to speak and to hear words. A child learns to talk without instruction, as a fledgling bird learns to fly. Because reading and writing have become so central to our identity and culture, it is easy to assume that they, too, are innate talents. However, they are not. Reading and writing are unnatural acts, made possible by the purposeful development of the alphabet and many other technologies. Our minds have to be taught how to translate the symbolic characters we see into language we understand. Reading and writing require schooling and practice, the deliberate shaping of our brain. Evidence of this shaping process can be seen in many neurological studies. Experiments have revealed that the brains of the literate differ from the brains of the illiterate in many ways—not only in how they understand language but in how they process visual signals, how they reason, and how they form memories. Learning how to read has been show to powerfully shape the adult neuropsychological systems. Brain scans have also revealed that people whose written language uses logographic symbols, like the Mandarin Chinese language does, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is considerably different from the circuitry found in people whose written language employs a phonetic alphabet. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Although all reading makes use of some portions of the frontal and temporal lobes for planning and for analyzing sounds and meanings in words, logographic systems appear to activate very distinctive parts of [those] areas, particularly regions involved in motoric memory skills. Differences in brain activity have even been documented among readers of different alphabetic languages. Readers of English, for instance, have been found to draw more heavily on areas of the brain associated with deciphering visual shapes than do readers of Italian. The difference stems, it is believed, from the fact that English words often look very different from the way they sound, whereas in Italian words tend to be spelled exactly as they are spoken. The Sumerians and the Egyptians had to develop neural circuits that literally crisscrossed the cortex, linking areas involved not only in seeing and sense-making but in hearing, spatial analysis, and decision making. As these logosyllabic systems expanded to include many hundreds of characters, memorizing and interpreting them because so mentally taxing tht their use was probably restricted to an intellectual elite blessed with a lot of time and brain power. For writing technology to process beyond the Sumerian and Egyptian models, for it to become a tool used by the many rather than the few, it had to get a whole that simpler. Writing makes the people wise and improves their memories. In a completely oral culture, thinking is governed by the capacity of human memory. Knowledge is what you recall, and what you recall is limited to what you can hold in your mind. In oral cultures, they believe that writing implants forgetfulness in their souls: they cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling thing to remembrance no longer from withing themselves, but by the means of external marks. Laws, records, transactions, decisions, traditions—everything that today would be “documented”—in oral cultures had to be composed in formulaic verse, and distributed by being sung or chanted aloud. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The oral World of our distant ancestors may well have had emotional and intuitive depths that we can no longer appreciate. Preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense sensuous involvement with the World. When we learned to read, we suffered a considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate human or society would experience. However, our ancestors’ oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own. The written word liberated knowledge from the bounds of individual memory and freed language from the rhythmical and formulaic structures required to support memorization and recitation. It opened up to the mind broad new frontiers of thought and expression. The achievements of the Western World, it is obvious, are testimony to the tremendous values of literacy. Oral cultures could produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. However, literacy is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself. The ability to write is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Writing heightens consciousness. I used to think that young Americans began whatever education they were to get at the age of eighteen, that their early lives were spiritually empty and that they arrived at the university clean slates unaware of their deeper selves and the World beyond superficial experience. The contrast between then and their European counterparts was set in high relief in the European novels and movies into which we were initiated at the university. The Europeans got most of the culture they were doing to get from their homes and their public schools, lycées, or gymnasiums, where their souls were incorporated into their specific literary traditions, which in turn expressed, and even founded, their traditions as peoples. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
It was not that their self-knowledge was mediated by their book learning and that their ambitions were formed as much by models first experienced in books as in everyday life. Their books had a substantial existence in everyday life and constituted much of what their society as a whole looked up to. It was commonplace for children of what they called good families to fill their imaginations with hopes of serious literary or philosophic careers, as do ours with hopes of careers in entertainment or business. All this was given to them early on, and by the time they were in their late teens it was part of the equipment of their souls, a lens through which they saw everything and which would affect all their later learning and experience. They went to the university to specialize. Americans were, in effect, told that they could be whatever they wanted to be or happened to be as long as they recognized that the same applied to all other humans and they were willing to support and defend the government that guaranteed that dispensation. It is possible to become an American in a day. And this is not to make light of what it means to be an American. The lack of American equivalents to Descartes, Pascal, or, for that matter, Montaigne, Rabelais, Racine, Montesquieu, and Rousseau is not a question of quality, but of whether there are any writers who are necessary to building our spiritual edifice, whom one must have read, or rather lived with, to be called educated, and who are the interpreters and even makers of our national life. Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States of America has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions of any nation in the World. What is more, that tradition is unambiguous; its meaning is articulated in simple, rational speech that is immediately comprehensible and powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
America tells one story: the unbroke, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its political founding on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us. No one serious or notable has stood outside this consensus. One would have to be a crank or a buffoon to get attentions as a nonbeliever in the democracy. All significant political disputes have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness. Nowhere else is there a tradition or a culture whose message is so distinct and unequivocal. Americanness generated a race of heroes—Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Alexander Augusta, Abraham Galloway, Frederick Douglas, Robert Smalls, Susie King Taylor, and so on—all of whom contributed to equality. Our heroes and the language of the Declaration contribute to a national reverence for our Constitution, also a unique phenomenon. All this is material for self-consciousness and provides a superior moral significance to humdrum lives as well as something to study. However, many students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it. The other element of fundamental primary learning that has disappeared is religion. As the respect for the Sacred—the latest fad—has soared, real religion and knowledge of the Bible have diminished to the vanishing point. God walked very tall in our political life and in our schools. Presidents still prayer for this nation and our money still says “In God We Trust.” The Lord’s prayers were silently said in grade school when I was a child and we used to have to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. If you look at it, although America is not perfect, you really won the lottery to have God bless you with being born in America this day and age and not in a developing nation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Nonetheless, it is also the home—and the houses of worship related to it—where religion lives. The holy days and the common language and set of references that permeate most households constitutes a large part of the family bond and gives it substantial content. Moses and the Tables of the Law, Jesus and His preaching of brotherly love, have an imaginative existence. Passages from the Psalms and the Gospels echo in children’s heads. Attending church or synagogue, praying at the table, are a way of life, inseparable from the moral education that is supposed to be the family’s special responsibility in this democracy. Actually, the moral teaching is the religious teaching. There is no abstract doctrine. The things one is supposed to do, the sense that the World supported one and punished disobedience, are all incarnate in the Biblical stories. The loss of the gripping inner life vouchsafed those who were furthered by the Bible must be primarily attributed not to our schools or political life, but to the family, which, with all its rights to privacy, has proved unable to maintain to any content of its own. The dreariness of the family’s spiritual landscape passes belief. It is as monochrome and unrelated to those who pass through it as are the barren steppes frequented by nomads who take their mere subsistence and move on. The delicate fabric of the civilization into which the successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated. We are not speaking here of the unhappy, broken homes that are such a prominent part of American life, but the relatively happy ones, where husband and wife like each other and care about their children, very often unselfishly devoting the best parts of their lives to them. However, they have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the World, of a high model of action or profound sense of connection with others. The family requires the most delicate mixture of nature and convention, of human and divine, to subsist and perform its function. Its base is merely bodily reproduction, but it is purpose is the formation of civilized human beings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The family requires a certain authority and wisdom about the ways of the Heavens and of humans. The parents must have knowledge of what has happened in the past, and prescriptions for what ought to be, in order to resist the philistinism or the wickedness of the present. Ritual and ceremony are now often said to be necessary for the family, and they are now lacking. However, if its ritual and ceremony are to express and transmit the wonder of the moral law, which it alone is capable of transmitting and which makes it special in a World devoted to the humanly, all too humanly, useful, the family has to be a sacred unity believing in the permanence of what it teaches. When that belief disappears, as it has, the family has, at best, a transitory togetherness. People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life. The cause of this decay of the family’s traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that old books do, or even could, contain the truth. In the United States of America, the Holy Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and—as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art, the greatest works of which were in one way our another responsive to the Bible—provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, they very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of World-explanation is disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise—as priests, prophets, or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole gets lost. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Parents do not have the legal or moral authority they have in the Old World. They lack self-confidence as educators of their children, generously believing that they will be better than their parents, no only in well-being, but in moral, bodily and intellectual virtue. There is always a more or less open belief in progress, which the past appears poor and contemptible. The future, which is open-ended, cannot be prescribed to by parents, and it eclipses the past which they know to be inferior. Along with the constant newness of everything and the ceaseless overturned moving from place to place, first radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the homes, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society. Parents can no longer control the atmosphere of the home an have even lost the will to do so. With great subtlety and energy, television enters not only the room, but also the tastes of old and young alike, appealing to the immediately pleasant and subverting whatever does not conform to it. The newspaper has replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois, meaning that they busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, has usurped all that remains of the eternal in one’s daily life. Now television has replaced the newspaper. It is not so much the low quality of the fare provided that it is troubling. It is much more the difficulty of imagining order of taste, any way of life with pleasures and learning that naturally fit the lives of the family’s members, keeping itself distinct from the popular culture and resisting the visions of what is admirable and interesting with which they are bombarded from within the household itself. The improved education of the vastly expanded middle class in the last half-century has also weakened the family’s authority. Almost everyone in the middle class has a college degree, and most have an advanced degree of some kind. However, their homes are not spiritually rich like one’s grandparents’ home were. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Grandparents did a lot of things to make their homes spiritual. They were modest, did not adhere to popular culture, were specifically ritual, and found their origin in the Bible’s commandments, and their explanation in the Bible’s stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the deeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling the past. Their simple faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material, but from outside or from an alien perspective, but believing as they did, while simply going deeper and providing guidance. There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief. I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are M.D.s or Ph.D.s, have any comparable learning. I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnishes. If it cannot present to the imagination of the young a vision of a moral cosmos and of the rewards and punishments for good and evil, sublime speeches that accompany and interpret deeds, protagonists and antagonist in the drama of moral choice, a sense of the stakes involved in such choice, and the despair that results when the World is “disenchanted,” the moral education that is today supposed to be the great responsibility of the family cannot exist. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Otherwise, education becomes the vain attempt to give children “values.” Beyond the fact that parents do not know what they believe, and surely do not have the self-confidence to tell their children much more than that they want them to be happy and fulfill whatever potential they may have, values are such pallid things. Actually, the family’s moral training now comes down to include the bare minima of social behaviour, not lying or stealing, and produces university students who can say nothing more about the ground of their moral action, “If I did that to him, he could do it to me,”—and explanation which does not even satisfy those who utter it. The loss of books has made the young narrower and flatter. Narrower because they lack what is most necessary, a real basis for discontent with the present and awareness that there are alternatives to it. Narrower because they lack what is most necessary ra real basis for discontent with the present and awareness that there are alternatives to it. They are both more contented with what is and despairing of ever escaping from it. The very models of admiration and contempt have vanished. Flatter, because without interpretations of things, without the poetry or the imagination’s activity, their souls are like mirrors, not of nature, but of what is around. The refinement of the mind’s eye that permits it to see the delicate distinctions among humans, among their deeds and their motives, and constitutes real taste, is impossible without the assistance of literate in the grand style. So there is less soil in which university teaching can take root, less of the enthusiasm and curiosity. It is much more difficult today to attach the classic books to any experience or felt need the students have. The youth’s literature and religion are becoming ignorant and thin, yet they have two invaluable properties. First, they are grounded in the existing situation, whatever the situation, without moralistic or invidious judgment of it. It is in this sense that Henry Miller is their literary father. Their experience is withdrawn. (Miller’s too does not add up.) Their religion is unfeasible, for one cannot richly meet the glancing present, like Zen, without patriotic loyalty, long discipleship, and secure subsistence. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Nevertheless, their writing has a pleasant bare surface, and it is experience. It is often bombastic, but on the average it is more primary than other writing we have been getting in America. A second valuable property of the youth’s style is that it tries to be action, not a reflection or comment. We say that, in both their conversation and heightened experience, this action does not amount to much, for they do not have the weight or beauty to make much difference. However, their persistent effort at the effective community reading, appearing as themselves in their own clothes, and willing to offend or evoke some other live response; and also their creative playing (especially if it would become more like the Bali dances), are efforts for art and letters as living action, rather than the likeness to literature that we have been getting in the Kenyon Review and the Partisan Review. Religiously, they are making a corrigible error. What they intend, it seems to me, is not the feudal Zen Buddhism, which is far too refined for them and for our times, but Taoism, the peasant ancestor of Zen. Tao is a faith for the voluntary less affluent, for it teaches us to get something from the act of wresting a living with independent integrity. It is, as youth intends to be, individual or small-group anarchy. If the youth would think this through, they would know better how to claim their subsistence under better conditions, and perhaps they would have more World. Tao teaches, too, divine experience from the body and its breathing. In this it is like the doctrine of Wilhelm Reich, much esteemed by the youth but now followed by them. The magic they are after is natural and group magic, and they need not be so dependent on ancient superstitions and modern barbiturates. Most important, Tao traches the blessedness of confusion. Tao is not enlightened, it does not know the score. Confusion is the state of promise, the fertile void where surprise is possible again. Confusion is in fact the state that we are in, and we should be wise to cultivate it. If young people are not floundering these days, they are not following the Way. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The actualized Christian is murky, confused. Block the passage. Shut the door. Droop and drift as though one belongs nowhere. So dull one is. All humans can be put to some use, one alone is intractable and boorish. It is square to be hip. The basic words of our jargon are “Search me,” “Kid,” “I couldn’t give you a clue,” “I’m murky.” “Creator spirit, come.” Although the Council of Nicea banned self-castration and barred eunuchs from priesthood in 325, and Roman legislation from the first to the fifth centuries forbade the castration of slaves, even the noblest families often opted to castrate their sons. The reason? Social and professional advancement, especially in the military. By the tenth century, eunuchs dominated the imperial court, army, and civil service rose to the highest offices. Their success was due to one simple factor—their sterility. No matter what, no eunuch would intrigue on behalf of a son. In consequence, eunuchs were considered so reliable they formed the core of the bureaucracy and provided an important balance to the hereditary nobility. The eunuch Narses was the Emperor Justinian’s immensely power and successful grand chamberlain and later, in ripest old age, the general known as the Hammer of the Goths after he demonstrated great military prowess, even genius, in routing them. Narses’ birth date is uncertain, but he died sometime between 566 and 574, at anywhere from eighty-six to ninety-six years of age, famous, fabulously wealthy, and widely esteemed, among the few [eunuchs] who have rescued that unhappy name from the contempt and hatred of humankind. At first, only foreigners or slaves were castrated, but as the institution of eunuchism developed, even emperors castrated their sons to eliminate rivals or to place them in such high positions as the Orthodox Church’s bishop, patriarchy of Constantinople, which required celibacy, preferably of the eunuch variety. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Military eunuchs had brilliant careers as admirals and generals. The grand chamberlain, a supremely powerful imperial official, was usually a eunuch. In the palace, eunuch were wardrobe-keepers, controllers of the imperial purse, estate managers, majordomos, and highest of all, superintendents of the scared bedchamber and, inevitably, repositories of the empire’s most intimate secrets. Eunuchs were often the booty of piracy, kidnapping, and tribal wars. Because so few castrates lived—Emperor Justinian believed that only slightly more than 3 percent survived the operation—they were extremely valuable, fetching three times the price of a genitally intact boy. Unlike the Chinese and Ottoman equivalents, many Byzantine eunuchs had the less radical testicles-only operation. A doctor sometimes forced to perform these mutilations described the two procedures. The compression method consisted of soaking young boys in hot water and then squeezing their testicles until they were crushed into nothingness. In the more drastic excision method, both testicles were surgically removed, which produced eunuchs who, unlike their testicularly compressed brothers, allegedly experience no erotic sensation at all. Excision was preferable to compression because it eliminated even more desire for pleasures of the flesh. However, when the operation was performed on a postadolescent youth, there was no guarantee it would remove his ability to achieve an excited status. It happened, therefore, that on rare occasions, a eunuch has pleasures of the flesh with a palace woman. Whenever such a liaison was discovered, the eunuch offender was executed. The mere possibility of such a scandal was so great that eunuchs who displayed homosexual tendencies were tolerated and sometimes even welcomed. Ironically, homosexuality was punished by castration, leading the public to equate eunuchs with homosexuality. Homosexuality was also the preferred charge against those suspected of plotting against the emperor. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
As was the case with their desexed compatriots elsewhere, the sexual incapacity of the Byzantine eunuchs earned them their masters’ trust, and they were often assigned to positions that involved considerable intimacy with women. Their presence bolstered the separation between the genders—eunuchs were, after all, the “third gender.” Sometimes, though, members of the third gender acted suspiciously as if they belonged to the first. The more gently castrated Byzantine eunuchs managed to escape enforced celibacy far more often than their more damaged, penis-lacking peers. This, despite the threat of death if their lovers were palace women. When the lure of lust was too strong, eunuch indulged as best they could, the spirit urging them on even when the flesh was seriously flawed. Others, less lascivious or more sexually incapacitated, focused instead on the career opportunities available to a talented and industrious eunuch. If intense ambition drove them more than sensuality, they were admirably positioned to reach the highest ranks of either civil administration or military command, and to influence imperial policy, amass personal fortunes, earn enduring reputations, and satisfy almost every human craving expect pleasures of the flesh. Now, when we look at the economy, the failure of many economists to grasp the profundity of today’s revolutionary change is ironic. It is not the first-time brilliance walked arm in arm with myopia. Francois Quenary was a genius. He was also the official physician of Louis XV’s famous mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Son of a commoner, he did not learn to read until he was eleven. However, once he did, he never stopped. He quickly taught himself Latin and Greek. For a time he worked for an engraver, then enrolled in medical school, became a surgeon and a renowned expert on blood. Over the years, he rose to the pinnacle of French medicine and won his place in the palace of Louis VX. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Quesnay, however, had more than medicine or Madame de Pompadour on his inquisitive mind. In the cramped entresol over Madame’s quarters, he made a deep study of agricultural economics. He was frequently visited there, we are told, by Turgot, who later became the controller general of finances under Louis XVI, and by other thinkers and doers of the time. He contributed articles to Diderot’s great Encylopedie on subjects such as farmers and grains. He wrote about taxes, interest rates and subjects as far afield as the Incas of Peru and despotism in China. By 1758 Quesnay’s ideas about economics had sufficiently crystalized for him to publish Tableau Economique, a remarkable precursor of the much more complex input-output tables for which Wassily Leontief won the Nobel Prize in 1973. In the Tableau, Quesnay compared the economy to the circulation of blood in the body. This analogy turned out to have powerful political implications—both in his time and ours. For if the economy is, in fact, naturelike and homeostatic, he believed, it would naturally seek equilibrium. And if that were the case, Quesnay argued, the French government’s mercantilist policies and its endless regulations of trade and manufacture interfered with the natural balance of the economy. Soon a group calling themselves the Physiocrats sprang up around Quesnay and began to extend and promote these ideas. Quesnay himself came to be regarded as one of the greatest penseurs in the West—a thinker some even compared to Socrates and Confucius. Yet Quesnay made one fateful mistake. He insisted that the sole source of all wealth was agriculture. For him and the Physiocrats, only the rural economy mattered. Indeed, he wrote, there were only three classes of people: peasants, landowners, and everybody else. The first two were productive, they very womb of wealth. Everyone else, for Quesnay, was a member of the “sterile class.” Brilliant as Quesnay might have been, he simply could not imagine an industrial society in which most wealth, in fact, would soon be coming from smoke-belching factories in cities, and from the hands and minds of precisely the “sterile class.” He missed the big picture. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Today, too, we find many economists suffering from Quesnay’s myopia, making brilliant contributions to components of a problem without examining the far larger picture into which they fit—including the social, cultural and political effects that come with revolutionary wealth. The time has come, in short, to inoculate ourselves against the Quesnay factor. And we will not be able to do that until we can separate true from false. The fulfillment of this meaning and this destiny is frustrated by the human who has become reconciled to the It-World as something that is experienced and used and who holds down what is tied into it instead of freeing it, who observes it instead of heeding it, and instead of receiving it utilized it. “Surely He has borne our griefs (sickness, weaknesses, and distresses) and carried our sorrows and pains [of punishment], yet we [ignorantly considered Him stricken, smitten, and afflicted by God [and is with leprosy]. However, He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our guilt and iniquities; the chastisement [needful to obtain] peace and well-being for us was upon Him, and with the stripes [that wounded] Him we are healed and made whole. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned on every one to one’s sown way; and the Lord has made light upon Him the guilt and iniquity of us all,” reports Isaiah 53.4-6. We raise our face to God’s infinite sky, and thank Him for His Son, Jesus Christ. As we feel Christ’s touch of grace, it is like gentle raindrops kissing our skin. Through all things, Jesus Christ has loved us, and His spirit has touched us. He has never left us alone. We live our ideals not because they are ours, but because they are God’s. O Lord, wherefore hidest Thou Thyself, and forgettest our affliction and our oppression? In Thee did our fathers trust; they trusted and Thou didst deliver them. Unto Thee they cried and were saved; in Thee did they trust and were not ashamed. O God, keep Thou not silence; Hold not Thy peace and be not still. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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He Opened the Book and a Demon Spoke to Him
All good religions need some kind of Apocalypse. Thelema—the new religion of Aleister Crowley—was no exception. The Great Beast fully expected his new holy age, the Aeon of Horus, to be ushered in with an orgy of violence and bloodshed. With the advent of the First World War, the prophecy seemed to have been satisfied. Over four long years, the optimism and complacency of nineteenth-century Europe drowned in the mud of the Western Front, along with hundreds of thousands of young soldiers. However, Crowley seemed curiously indifferent to the whole affair. With typical arrogance, when the British Government refused his offer to produce war propaganda, the Luciferian man of letters travelled to the US to write anti-British propaganda. If he could not find recognition on the side of the angels, the Great Beast was always ready to side with the opposition. However, Crowley later claimed he wrote deliberately absurd material to discredit the German cause. His article on the bombing of London by Zeppelin airships gives credence to this eccentric defense: “For some reason or other in their last Zeppelin raid on London the Germans appear to have decided to make the damage as widespread as possible, instead of concentrating it in one quarter. A great deal of damage was done at Croydon, especially at its suburb Addiscombe, where my aunt lives. Unfortunately her house was not hit. Count Zeppelin is respectfully requested to try again. The exact address is Eton Lodge, Outram Road.” If World War One had been too minor a cataclysm to introduce Crowley’s Age of Horus, 1939 heralded a new orgy of human suffering. The Beast always maintained that the first nation to adopt his Book of the Law as a state religion would dominate the World. During the 1930s, however, as the Third Reich came to power, his ambivalence towards Germany—the country where his magical doctrines were taken most seriously—is perhaps understandable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Some of his German followers saw in their new Fuhrer a political equivalent to their prophet, the Great Beast (perhaps even his “magical child”)—a new World order was to be created by the pure will-power of those extraordinary men. Some of his German followers saw in their new Fuhrer a political equivalent to their prophet, the Great Beast (perhaps even his “magical child”)—a New World Order was to be created by the pure will-power of these two extraordinary men. However, in 1935 the Nazis banned the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Order of the Silver Star, throwing numerous occultists (including Karl Germer, one of Crowley’s foremost disciples) into the concentration camps. There may have been similarities between Crowley’s Thelemic doctrines and emergent Nazi dogma (elitism, irrationalism, transcendence of morality), but the Great Beast could see on which side his future depended: Britain would “knock Hitler for six!” he announced. Whether or not the horrors of the Second World War signalled the advent of the Age of Horus, Adolf Hitler emerged from the blood and pain of that conflict as a secular Satan. Indeed, a minor literary industry has grown up around the idea of Hitler as a very literal Satanic figure suggests that the Fuhrer really did, in Dennis Wheatley’s words, “use dark forces.” The roots of this belief return us to the occult lodges of the late nineteenth century. In 1875, the writer and occultist Guido von List climbed a hill overlooking Vienna to conduct a strange ritual. Von List was dedicated to returning greater Germany to an older purer faith—the worship of Wotan, and the other pagan gods of the Teutonic race Upon the hill he commemorated the summer solstice by buying a number of empty wine bottles, carefully arranged into a sacred symbol: the swastika. In 1908 von List Founded the Armanen Initiates, the inner order of his modestly-titled Guido von List Society. His doctrines centered around ideas of racial purity—von List believed the German peoples, the Armenen, had originally been a race of supermen, but mongrelistation had weakened the race until bashful old Guido was its last pure-blood survivor. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
According to the race mystic, “The hydra-headed international Jewish conspiracy” was behind it all. To reverse matters, von List prescribed a study of ancient Teutonic religious runes and –more practically—laws to precent further racial interbreeding. His eventual gal was a racial state ruled by “a self-chosen Fuhrer to whom [Germany] willingly submits.” Alongside the swastika, the emblems of this new state would include the sig rune: the symbol later used to form the insignia of the SS. Guido von List was one of the leading Germanic mystics dedicated to “volkisch” occultism. “Volkisch” basically translates as “folkloric,” but this was also leavened with a hard-edged nationalism. Chief obsession among the volkisch orders were the sacred nature of race (or “blood”), an interest in the culture and beliefs of the Germanic peoples in the early Middle Ages, and a strong current of anti-Semitism. Among the most important of the volkisch occultists—some of whom fancied themselves the priests of a revived Norse religion—was Dr. Jorg Lanz von Libenfels. In many ways, a sorcerer in the classic mould, von Liebenfels adopted his aristocratic name to increase his mystique (his real name was Adolf Lanz), and began his career as a Catholic priest before being defrocked for “harbouring carnal and Worldly desires.” His response was to found an “order of New Templars”—quite what the original Templars had to do with racial purity is not clear, but it did not stop von Libenfels preaching a message of race war from his temple on the banks of the Danube. In 1909, a young Austrian named Adolf Hitler secured an audience with von Liebenfels to secure some back issues of Ostara, the journal of the New Templars. In 1932, von Liebenfels would write to a fellow occultist that “Hitler is one of our pupils…You will one day experience that he, and through him we, will one day be victorious, and develop a movement that will one day make the World tremble.” The most direct link between the occult underground and the Third Reich is the Thule Society. Thule, according to northern European myth, was a version of Atlantis, and island that sank beneath the sea. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Thule Society ideology decreed this legendary island to be the home of the German supermen, who they hoped to contact using magical techniques. In 1919, the Thule Society formed a tiny political group called the German Workers Party in Munich—the seed from which Hitler’s National Socialist Party grew. In the 1920s Germany of the Weimar Republic, volkisch occult groups sense that their time was coming. Losing the First World War left Germany politically chaotic, economically bankrupt and profoundly demoralized. Weimar Berlin earnt a reputation for decadence exceeding that of 1890s Paris—though there was a cynical desperation among the German hedonist that never surfaced amongst their French counterparts. For many ordinary citizens of “Greater Germany” (which included Austria), however, their feelings of disillusionment hardened into suspicions of betrayal. One such was the young war hero Hitler—who was convinced Germany’s forces were defeated by treachery at home, rendering the huge loss of life futile. Hitler, along with many others, was sure that the “November criminals” (government signatories of a peace treaty in November 1918) were responsible for the fatherland’s defeat and humiliation. And behind the November criminals were the treacherous Jewish people. In this environment, volkisch occultists found an eager audience for their fables of an ancient, noble Ayran race. They not only offered up a scapegoat for their defeat, but also created the mythology of a sacred Germanic blood heritage from which a humbled people could rebuild their pride. It is a long way from accepting that volkisch occultism helped create a spiritual environment friendly to Nazism to believing the Third Reich was a Satanic cult. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer was said to be symbolic of the rebirth of the Third Reich, maybe you can see the symbolism. This interesting thing is that Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy Summers is Jewish, but also reminiscent this Ayran super race.) #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The relationship between Nazism and volkism is similar to that between the radical African-American political groups and Black Islamic leaders who proclaim that the Man (the White Man) to be the Devil. Political leaders, as soon as they achieve any real power, are usually quick to distance themselves from such emotive spiritual propaganda. However, it is interesting how light and dark are used in Christian terms not to reflect colour, but the nature of one’s spirit. And when you see these people with soft features, pale skin, and these colourful eyes, it is hard to believe they do dark things, but when one sees someone with darker skin, people almost always consider them guilty. It is as if religious light has also been used to frame people based on skin colour, but when it comes down to it, people are capable of things that are bad no matter what colour their skin is, and as one grows up, once can see that skin colour matters very little in guilt or innocence. Nonetheless, total revolution also demanded a spiritual revolution. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had a similarly religious aspect. Communists were determined to uproot the Christian Church and replace it with religious loyalty to the State, and its socialist principles, which is why so many religious symbols in America are now banded on public builds, and next to be banned with be the America flag. Many people may thing that journalist Tomi Lahren of FOX News is a racist, but one should actually listen to what she is saying, and be objective about it. America is actually becoming a communist nation where the people have no power, laws are just recommendations, and the U.S. Constitution is being removed and stored in someone’s basement, much the Confederate Statues, and flags. Next, slavery will just be a conspiracy theory—it will be considered a myth. It is just like music, most real artists listen to all genera of music, but they have a typical style they love, and many scholars read all kinds of material so they can have a comprehensive view of what is going on in the World, instead of just be told only what the masses want them to know, but people love to label, which is why they are stuck in ignorance. #RandolpHarris 5 of 21
Bolsheviks held wild revels, called “African nights,” where Christian festivals were parodied in atheistic rites such as “Red Prayers,” and “Red Mass.” Obscene hymns were sung, and children were encouraged to spit upon and destroy puppets representing God, and other holy figures, in powerful echoes of the Black Mass medieval peasants. Hitler’s doctrines were no less revolutionary. Nazism was designed to revolutionize every aspect of life—even the way people thought—and the old ways were denounced as “Jewish,” “liberal.” Hitler despised “intellectuals,” advocating intuition, or even irrationalism, over logic and rational thoughts. In many ways the Nazis turned back the clock two hundred years, to when science and sorcery were still reluctant bedfellows. In the field of military technological innovation and instinct were promoted at the expense of methodology, liberating German scientist to creates some of the most efficient weapons of war the World had seen. Alfred Rosenberg, an intimate of Hitler and high-ranking Nazi official drew up plans for a National Reich Church, which was not going to destroy Christianity but “supercede” it, and called his new faith “positive Christianity.” He concluded: “On the day of its foundation, the Christian cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals, and chapels and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the Swastika.” However, what did the Swastika symbolize? Rosenberg wrote: “Today a new faith awakens: the myth of the blood, the faith that by defending the blood were defend also the divine nature of man. The faith, embodies in scientific clarity, that the Nordic blood represents the mystery which has replaced and conquered the ancient sacraments.” The historian Konrad Heiden beings his book on Der Fuhrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power with a curious story concerning Rosenberg: “One day in the summer of 1917 a student was reading in his room in Moscow. A stranger entered, laid a book on the table, and silently vanished. The cover of the book bore in Russian the words from the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew: “He is near, he is hard by the door.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The sent sensed the masterful irony of higher powers in this strange happening. They had sent him a silent message. He opened the book, and the voice of the demon spoke to him. It was a message concerning the antichrist, who would come at the end of days. The Antichrist is no mythical being, no monkish medieval fantasy. It is the portrait of a type of man who comes to the fore when an epoch is dying. The Antichrist was supposedly Hitler. The Nazi began suppressing occultists and secret societies in 1934, in a purge that reached its peak in 1937. Thousands of astrologers and mystic disappeared into the concentration camps, never to appear again, which also proves Whoppie Goldberg’s states, “The Holocaust was about race.” Anyone who was deemed a threat to national security was sent to concertation camps, but in the same sense, the holocaust was about race, it was about preserving the Ayran race. Just anyone who was not Aryan could be a target, as it was more about preservation of their bloodline. Volkisch occultists were not spared. Even the Thule Society—the magi at the nativity of Nazim—was devoured by its ravenous offspring. The Nazi State would not tolerate anything outside its control, or that it had not created itself. Its tenant of faith was the destiny of the Aryan race, as expressed by its prophet Hitler. If this policy of spiritual and intellectual monopoly sounds familiar, it is because it resembles the doctrines of one of the institutions of the Nazis sought to replace: the Church. The Nazi party created its own priesthood—the Black Oder, better known as the Schutzstaffel, or SS. The SS began as Hitler’s bodyguards, but under Heinrich Himmler, manoeuvered and massacred their way to become the most powerful organization in the Nazi establishment. Like “house of God” of the medieval Inquisition, the SS policed the souls of those under their ever-expanding jurisdiction. The faithful were monitored, the suspect—even the volkish occultist who shared the Nazi vision of race—purged, the unholy exterminated. Himmler became the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Any occultist who wished to survive in Nazi Germany was well-advised to find a place under Himmler’s wing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Several men did—most significantly Karl Weisthor. Weisthor was born Karl Maria Wiligut in Vienna, 1866, to a family with a long military tradition, and was decorated for his service during the First World War. Following the war he became involved in volkisch occultism, adopting doctrines which were extreme even by volkisch standards. With the modesty characteristic of his ilk, Weisthor claimed to be descended from Ayran gods, the last living representative of the Irminist Church. The Irminists—who worshipped the true Christ, an Aryan called Krist—had been opposed throughout history by the false religion of the Catholic Church, their racial enemies the Jewish people, and Aryan heretics who worshipped the pagan god Wotan. Weisthor knew all of this because he possessed clairvoyance that allowed him to recall the heroic lives of his ancestors, thousands of years ago. Not everyone was impressed by the evidence, however, an in 1924 he was committed to a lunatic asylum. Undeterred, when he was released, he changed his name and headed to Munich. In 1933 he attracted the attention of Himmler, who installed the cranky medium in the Ahnenerbe department of the SS. Under Weisthor’s advice, a castle at Wewlsburg in north-west Germany was chosen as the spiritual headquarters of the Black Order. It became the Nazi equivalent of the Vatican, with great echoing chambers dedicated to the heroes of the Aryan race, and a central hall where Himmler and his twelve closet disciples would meet. Weisthor designed the SS “Totenkpfring” –a scared ring decorated with skulls and runes, personally bestowed upon SS members by Himmler and retuned to Wewelsburg upon their deaths. He also conceived and presided over neo-pagan solstice ceremonies, and the Weddings of SS officers to good Aryan girls. The Black Order was not just a military organization but a sect, a fraternity of warrior priests. Though it never claimed the heritage of the Knights Templar, the parallels between these two orders are striking. Both snowballed into vast international forces. Both maintained independent economic systems that allowed them to accumulate vast wealth. Both were composed of highly-disciplined warriors, fanatically dedicated to their creeds. Both were exempt from the laws that governed their contemporaries, answerable only to the head of their orders (Himmler of the Grand Master) and the representative of the sacred creed on Earth (Hitler or the Pope). Both planned to establish their own independent states. And both were, at least ostensibly Christian. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Weisthor’s faith may have incorporated much bizarre German paganism, but at the core he believed he was preaching Christianity. One of the oaths taken by SS candidates before the full initiation ran, “We believe in God, we believe in Germany which He created in His World and in the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, whom he has sent us.” One of the titles Himmler had bestowed on him by is peers was “the Black Jesuit,” as he based the structure of the SS upon the fanatically-secretive Catholic Society of Jesuits. Himmler, brought up in a devoutly-Catholic Bavarian household, never lost his belief in the importance of ritual symbolism. When he used the term “Satanic,” or evoked the Devil, it was applied to the enemies of the Aryan race—never in connection with his own faither. Persecution of Jewish people was often inspired by accusation that they poisoned wells and drank the blood of children, or, more traditionally, that they had killed Jesus. They were commonly believed to be part of an international conspiracy—sometimes decreed to be Satanic—against all Christian values. The Catholic Church, concerned that the Third Reich was stealing souls that were rightfully theirs, had certainly preached against this new paganism. Nazis believed that they were breeding babies for God, or “for race and nation.” Occultic suggestions that the Third Reich was, as one author puts it, a “demonocracy” with the Fuhrer himself as a black magician, a “psychic vampire,” demonically possessed, even as the Antichrist himself—are based on Hitler’s skill at taking political military gambles (precognition), his inner voiced and violent rages (possession), and the way simultaneously drew upon and released great emotion with his speeches (physic vampirism). Some still say that there is no evidence for one to consider the Third Reich as a manifestation of supernatural evil. Yet people believed because Hitler consulted an astrologer that Hitler was evil; Satan is Evil personified, therefore Hitler is Satan. Even level-headed historians have described Hitler as possessing almost supernatural powers—whereas the terms “mesmeric” or “hypnotic” best described the psychological effect this frantic, grim little man has on the vast audience at Nazi rallies. Political figures such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King also based their careers on charismatic oratory, and few would suggest either man was possessed by demons. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
However, it is worth confessing that the Third Reich is of legitimate interest to occultists. Something about Hitler’s meteoric rise—from penniless tramp to omnipotent dictator—and Germany’s similarly rapid rise—from near-collapse to near-World domination—confounds rational explanation. Still, the philosophy of Hitler, and the psychological symbolism employed by the Nazis, are no more inherently Satanic than that of the Catholic Church. However, there were eyewitness accounts of wartime sorcery in England: Witches cast spells to stop Hitler landing after France fell. They met, raised the great cone of power and directed the thought at Hitler’s brain: “You cannot cross the sea. You cannot cross the sea. Not able to come. Not able to come.” We are not saying they stopped Hitler. All we say is that we saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea into his mind and this was repeated several times afterwards; and though all the invasion barges were ready, the fac that Hitler never even tried to come. The witches told us that their great-grandfathers had tried to project the same idea into Boney’s [Napoleon’s] mind. Exploration of the Great Beast’s (Aleister Crowley) darker doctrines—of a World divided into masters and slaves, with good and evil sacrificed on the bloody alter of a new morality—would be the province of a far less gaudy crew than the hippies. Marianne Faithfull—a former child of the upper-middle classes—was a long-time consort of English rock band the Rolling Stones, and an icon of “swinging London.” In her autobiography, written much later, she displays little doubt as to the source of the era’s dynamism. Speaking of her most famous lover, Mick Jagger, she says: “Her harnessed all of the negative forces into entities. Out of these destructive impulses, he created all the incredible personate of the late sixties: the Midnight Rambler, Lucifer, Jumpin’ Jack Flash. They are all manifestations of malignant and chaotic forces, the ungovernable mob. The dark, violent, group mind of the crowd—chaos, Pan. That frenzied power caused many of the causalities of the sixties.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Foremost among the musicians who pioneered the first colourful wave of psychedelia were the Beatles. Their high-profile transformation from chirpy, mop-headed scousers to long haired peaceniks reflected the cultural tide of their generation. However, in the United States of America, the FBI compiled a two-inch thick file on Lennon upon which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover scrawled, “All extremists should be considered dangerous.” Fundamentalist Christians—with their endearing disrespect for facts or common sense—discovered the occultic secrets behind the Beatles’ success. They maintained that the Lennon-McCartney sound was a magical beat stolen from the ancient Druids. According to them, in ancient times these pagan priests would beat out the demonic rhythm on drums made of human skin to summon evil spirits. In the hands of the Beatles, this Druid beat could be used to send the young people of American insane—or even worse, pinko. There were Christian protests of the Beatles, where the Ku Klux Klan burnt their records and Lennon was held up as a Satanists or something. The next years, Christian suspicions of the Beatles were confirmed by detailed perusal of the cover of their catchy, innovative Sgt. Pepper album. The cover design is a collage of people admired by the Beatles, all standing being the band: among them, in the top row, can be seen Aleister Crowley. In 1994, a prominent Vatican official, Father Corrado Balduci, would reinforce the Christian view that the Beatles were “the Devil’s musicians.” Sadly, in 1980, Lennon was shot dead outside his New York apartment by a dazed-looking young man named Mark Chapman. Chapman had become a big Beatles fan, but had become increasingly convinced that Lennon was evil. An interview with Chapman by a psychiatrist, published in Rolling Stone magazine, reported that the holy assassin could feel the presence of Satan’s demons around him. “I can feel their thoughts. I can hear their thoughts. I can hear them talking, but not from the outside, from the inside.” The unfortunate Chapman had become a “born-again” Christian, learning about the evils of Beatles music from his new faith. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Next to the affable efficiency of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones were a maelstrom of creative chaos. Black Magicians thought that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were acting as unknow agents of Lucifer and others thought hey were Lucifer. One of the “Black Magicians” Richards referred to was Kenneth Anger. Anger stood at the crossroads where many of the Satanic elements of the 1960s met. Anger happily announced Crowley’s dictum that the Key of joy is disobedience, and declared that not only was the Aeon of Horus upon, but the Aeon of Lucifer. Shortly before he became involved with the Rolling Stones, Anger helped found the Church of Satan. His blend of Crowleyism and Satanism entranced the band, though—in a familiar pattern—Anger was often keen to dissociate from Satanism, referring to his personal Prince of Darkness by the less inflammatory title of Lucifer. He later confessed, however, that his Lucifer had always been the “cosmic villain,” the Miltonic Satan. Whatever effect Anger had on the band’s professional lives, he touched them personally to varying degrees. Keith and his lover Anita later got into this black magic stuff. Mick Jagger dabbled in it. However, every one was just a little afraid of Kenneth Anger. Inexplicable things involving him would happen. Stores about the magus’ association with the band include Anger seeming to appears and disappear in various places. He offered to perform a pagan ritual wedding for Keith and Anita that involved a golden door. When they awoke the next day, a heavy oaken door had been painted gold, with the paint already dry. The house was heavily secured, and nobody could explain this occultic interior decoration. Faithfull talked about falling off a mountain during the making of Anger’s second version of Lucifer Rising, sustaining only a mild concussion. Anita Pallenberg was so spooked by all of this that she slept in a protective circle of candles with a string of garlic around her neck. Anger’s next overtly magical project Lucifer Rising was his first religious film, a weird, mesmeric narrative combined with a real magical ritual, it also embodied his love/hate relationship with the 1960s counter culture—both in the film itself, and the events surrounding its strange history. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
As Anger once observed, “Making movies is casting spells.” A screen director and editor, the theory ran that the magus could fully control both the characters to screen and the entities they invoked. Lucifer Rising depicted the downfall of the oppressive Aeon of Osiris (or Christian era), and the movement into the Aeon of Horus (or Lucifer). “My reason for filming has nothing to do with “cinema” at all, explained Anger. “It’s transparent excuse for capturing people…I consider myself working Evil on an evil medium.” On 21 September 1967, Anger organized a celebratory event titled the Equinox of the Gods at the Straight Theatre in Haight-Ashbury, the epicenter of hippie culture in San Francisco. However, Beausoleil proved a more capricious Lucifer than Anger anticipated—according to Anger, the pretty hippie he called “Cupid” ripped off 1600 feet of footage from Lucifer Rising and some camera equipment before the performance. Anger was livid, smashing a rare magical cane that once belonged to Crowley. He then pronounced a cruse upon Beausoleil, sealing it with an amulet he put around his neck. On one side was a picture of his erstwhile protégé, on the other a toad with the inscription “Bobby Beausoleil—who was turned into a toad by Kenneth Anger.” Cupid never turned into a toad, but a could of uncommonly dark fortune did follow him as he headed south for Los Angeles. In 1970 Anger remade his masterpiece, Lucifer rising—though even then he still tinkered with elements of the film to produce dozens of subtly different versions. Once again, Anger himself plays the Magus, invoking a new aeon through the door opened by the occult events of the 1960s: A film about the love generation—the birthday part of the Aquarian Age. Showing actual ceremonies to make Lucifer rise. Lucifer is the Light God, not the Devil—the Rebel Angel behind what is happening in the World today. His message is that they key of joy is disobedience. Isis (Nature) wakes. Osiris (Death) answers. Lilith (Destroyer) climbs to the place of Sacrifice. The Magus activates the circle and Lucifer—Bringer of Light—breaks through.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Bad luck had begun calling upon the Rolling Stone, in the shape of a series of tragedies. The first was the death of the band’s guitarist, Brian Jones. It was Jones who, in 1962, formed the band named it after a Muddy Waters song. On 2 July, in classical rock ‘n’ roll styles, he drowned in his swimming pool on a cocktail of vodka and pills. Two days after Jones’ death, the Stones turned their free concert in London’s Hyde Park into a memorial for their ex-guitarist. Jagger read a poem by Shelley, then tried to release hundreds of white butterflies from boxes by the stage. They have been in the boxes too long and most of the delicate creatures were dead. The summer Woodstock free festival, in New York State, represented for many the hazy apex of the Love Generation. At the suggestion of scheduled support band the Grateful Dead, the Stones hired the Hell’s Angels as security for their Altamont gig. The Angels were very affordable, but their brand of frightening freedom still had a devilish chic in the naïve 1960s. The Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club was formed after the Second World War, by bike-loving ex-servicemen who found civilian life too bland to bear. The Hell’s Angels moniker was taken from a notorious American Air Force squadron, but the Satanic implications of the name became increasingly appropriate. The Angeles were hellraisers, prototypes for the whole biker culture—particularly the outlaws, or “1%ers” (the “one percent of motorcyclists’ labelled as ‘hoodlums and troublemakers” by the American Motorcycle Association in 1967). Many 1%er gangs emulated the Angels’ Satanic-sound title, adopting infernal names like the Straight Satans, Satan’s Slavers and the Pagans. Some took their title at face value. One member of the powerful Canadian gang Satan’s Angels said in a 1970s interview, “There are definite spirits and we identify with that particular one that has been called Satan. It’s an upsidedown World. Our virtues are other’s vices. You could say we were Satanists.” Hell’s Angels, and other outlaw gangs, are symbols of the more destructive, volatile aspects of the Satanic canon. Their readiness to fight, their revelling in intimidation and fear, their rapacious passion for pleasures of the flesh in all their basest forms, all these characteristics made them into icons of willful alienation and violent self-indulgence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
When Jagger finally came onstage at Altamont on 6 December 1969, things were beginning to get ugly. Marty Balin of support act Jefferson Airplane had been in in the face with a pool cue by a Hell’s Angel. He tried to intervene when he saw the Angels beat up an African America kid in front of him. Paul Kantner, band founder, began to shout at the Angels until his microphone was snatched from him in the brawl that immersed the from of the stage. Jagger took the stage clad in his psychedelic sorcerer’s robes. Dancing under the red lights, surrounded by the dark wall of threatening, black-clad Angels, the vocalist could have been Anger’s Lucifer served by a surly army of warlike demons. Two songs into the set, things just kept getting uglier. Naked hippies cast themselves at the stage as offerings for their rock gods, and the Angels cast them back into the audience after beating them bloody. The third song began, “Sympathy for the Devil,” and all Hell broke loose. In the audience, an African American youth named Meredith Hunter pulled a gun. According to some he was aiming it at Jagger, other claimed he was defending himself against the Angels. Whichever is true, it was scant moments before a pack of black-leather Angels fell upon him and, in a flurry of kicks and knife blows, Hunter was killed. The Stones could see that the Angels were brutalizing the audience rather than controlling them—but Jagger was out of his depth, bleating weakly for everybody to “cool it.” As the killing of Meredith Hunter played itself out to the strains of “Sympathy for the Devil,” the song had to be stopped briefly as Jagger quipped, with unintended understatement, that “something very funny always happens when we start that number.” As the tide of panic and fury rose, the death count escalated to three with 100 injured. Following Altamont, the shaken Stones turned their back on the whole Satanic scene. Jagger wore a large wooden crucifix for some time after. The revolutionary stance and allusions to street violence were quietly dropped in favour of the stately image of rock ‘n’ roll aristocrats. The Rolling Stones abandoned any pretension to occultic chic or streetwise cool, letting themselves into the World of polite high society through the back door. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It is always just a few days before the Winter Solstice when the forces of darkness are at their most powerful. Because the immense size of the Winchester Mansion, Mrs. Winchester included forty-seven fireplaces in her mansion, and seventeen chimneys. One rambling section in particular, the Hall of Fires, was designed to produce as much heat as possible—perhaps to ease Mrs. Winchester’s extreme arthritis. In addition to many windows that let the sunlight stream through, the three adjoining rooms have four fireplaces and three hot air registers from the coal furnace in the basement. Mrs. Winchester is very significant, not only for a vast estate, but one of many reasons was because she was known to have encounters with the supernatural. While I was at Mrs. Winchester’s mansion, I was asked to meet with a group of high school students who had gotten into spiritualism just for kicks. We had a meeting that night and I listened as the young people told me their experiences. At a part a friend had fascinated them with stories of trances and séances. He told them how to use a Ouija board and how to enter a state of trance. They were seeking spirit manifestations. When they began to get reactions, they became frightened. The spirit had guided them back in time. A boy appeared and stated to tell a story, he said: “When I was about ten years old, I came to visit my aunt Sarah. I met a girl who lived on the estate Ethel—aged eight. I never had the courage to speak to her. My aunt Sarah asked me to stay three months, and I did.” The statement was so quietly serious, so destitute of any suspicion of humor, that the audience looked on with great apprehension. “I had to work hard in those days. I saw Ethel, later that evening, asleep in one of the carriages, and that was the last time I saw her. I ended stay with my aunt for three years. There was a glimmer of a summer gown under the trees; a figure passed from the shadow to sunshine, and again into the cool dusk of a leafy lane. While I was walking in the garden, I found her seated in the shade of a pine. She looked up serenely, as though she had expected me, and we faced each other. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
“When I stroke to speak, my voice had an unknow tone to me. Her upturned face was my only answers. The breeze in the pine-tops, which had been stirring monotonously, ceased. Her delicate face was like a blossom lifted in the still air; her upward glance chained me to silence. The first breeze broke the spell; I spoke a word, then speech died on my lips; I stood twisting my shooting-cap, confused, not daring to continue. The girl leaned back, supporting her weight on one arm, fingers almost buried in the deep green moss. ‘It has been three years today,’ I said, in a dull voice of one who dreams—’three years today. May I not speak?’ In her lowered head and ears I repeated acquiescence; in her silence, consent. ‘Three years ago, today,’ I repeated; ‘the anniversary has given men courage to speak to you. Surely you will not take offense—we have travelled so far together!’ –from the end of the World to the end of it, and back again, here—to this place of all places in the World! And now to find you here on this day of all days—here within a step of our first meeting-place—three years ago today! And all the World we have travelled over since, never speaking, yet ever passing on paths parallel—paths which for thousands of miles ran almost within arm’s distance—’ She raised her head slowly, looking out from the shadows of the pines into her sunshine. Her dreamy eyes rested on acres of gold-rod and green grass in the December coolness. ‘Will you speak to me?’ I asked. ‘I have never even heard the sound of your voice.’ She turned and look at me, touching with idle finger the soft hair curling on her temples. Then she bent her head once more, the faintest shadow of a smile in her eyes. ‘Because,’ I said, humbly, ‘these long years of silent recognition count for something! And then the strangeness of it!—the fate of it,–the quiet destiny that ruled over our lives,–that rules them now—now as I am speaking, weighting every second with its tiny burden of fate.’ She replied, ‘I have never forgotten you—never!’ She looked into my eyes. ‘Dear, do you not understand? Have you forgotten? I died three years ago today.’ The unearthly sweetness of her white face started me. A terrible light broke in on me; my heart stood still.’ #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“And that very day, I died of a broken heart. Legend has it that I came to visit my aunt Sarah to pick up a check and no one ever saw me after that day, but truth is I never left. When God takes the mind and leaves the body alive there grows in it, sometime, a beauty almost supernatural. ‘Be with me when the new moon comes,’ she whispered. ‘It will be so sweet. I will teach you how divine is death, if you come.’” About 4 o’ clock in the morning, one of the students started to levitate, and he saw all kinds of beautiful sights. I asked him if he were concerned whether or not this was from God. He said it must be because it was in the spiritual realm. The one of the other students went into a demonic tantrum. I asked God to rebuke the demons and set her free. The demons said, “We are going, but we will come back.” And come back they did, with reinforcements. I worked with this young woman for several months, but because she was unwilling to give up this traffic with spirits she was later placed in a mental institution. I am convinced that she could be perfectly healed of this oppression and indwelling by demons if only she would consent. Sometimes lewd demons trick well-meaning people into following their sensual behavior. Not all spirits are evil. However, it is a serious matter to become involved with spiritualism in any form, but also the atoning blood of Christ always gives us His purity and power. All who desire protection from Satan and His demons will receive it. In the case of levitations, apports, and telekinesis, God allows the physical and natural laws of the Universe to be superseded temporarily and in a restricted sense by higher laws of the spirit World. The Winchester mansion is known for having spiritual events take place, even today. These phenomena are diabolic miracles. In distinction to divine miracles, diabolical miracles are supernatural acts that imitate the power and benevolence of divine miracles. It is as if God said to the powers of darkness what he said to the sea in the day of creation: “Hitherto shalt thou come but no father, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed,” reports Jon 38.11. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
The demonic powers are allowed only a very small intrusion into the orderly realm of nature, and the miracles they produce are characterized by a rigid sameness. Everywhere in the domain of occultism there are reminders of God’s absolute sovereignty. He is in majestic control. Demonic power makes such a poor show by its severe restrictions and drab sameness, that it actually advertises the glory of God for those who can see evil supernaturalism in the proper focus of divine revelation. Levitations (from the Latin verb levito, “to raise or lift”) are objects or people that are raised up and appear floating in their air. Such phenomena are frequently reported in occult literature and experienced in haunted houses, where strongly psychic people have lived and died or where spiritistic séances have been heled. Objects on occasion sail through the air as if thrown by an invisible hand, or spooks (ghost) appear hovering in space. Furniture is lifted, often when a strong medium is present. Human, either in a conscious or unconscious state, are included in the phenomena of levitation. We would oppose the belief that a word has any power of its own, and that the charmer is only the representative of this power. Words are only neutral instruments. They can be used for either good or evil. It depends on the inspiration behind the words. A Christian employs the Word on God’s authority. The magician and charmer employs his words and phrases as demonized instruments of magic. One of Mrs. Winchester’s servants had died. The man in question had the reputation of being a magician—it makes sense that a house built by spirits would have some magical employees. Two weeks before his death, as he lay in bed seriously ill, he began to groan, “Take the charm away from me, take the charm away from me.” The relatives had gone to the minister for advice, but he had warned them against doing as the man requested. The magician finally died in terrible agony. The minister told Mrs. Winchester that the man looked black as coal when he had seen him in the coffin. Many magicians only find rest when someone takes the spell of charm away from them, together with the responsibility of carrying on the occult practice. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
A description of magic ritual can be found in various books on magic. These books have the same significance to the magicians as the Christian Bible has for the Christian. There is a great amount of literature on the subject of magic, the most widely distributed book on the spiritual subject being the 6th and 7th Book of Moses. Unhappily a publisher in Braunschweig has published new editions of this book. The use of the name Moses is only a camouflage. Magicians look on the miracle connected with the staff of Moses as a piece of magic. In this way they try to elevate Moses to the position of their patron saint. The first part of the book reveals how a human may enter into a relationship with the devil. The latter part gives instructions as to how a person can achieve dominion over all the forces of nature as well as the powers of Heaven and Hell through the use of magic. The book has already caused untold harm in the World and people who read it invariably suffer in the process. A house in which the book is kept is also a place where misfortunes often occur. There are many examples which illustrate this fate and we will deal with this problem soon in greater detail. In or about the 27 of December of 1899, a girl about eighteen years of age, Miss Mary Dunbar, was hired as a maid by Mrs. Winchester. Mrs. Winchester described her as “having an open and innocent countenance, and being a very intelligent young person.” She and her aunt, Mrs. Haltridge, were staying at Winchester mansion. A rumor was afloat that the latter had been bewitched into her grave, and this could not fail to have its effect on Miss Dunbar. Accordingly, on the night of her arrival, her troubles began. When she retired to her bedroom, accompanied by another girl, they were surprised to find that a new mantle and some other wearing apparel had been taken out of a trunk and scattered through the house. Going to look for the missing articles, they found laying on the parlour floor an apron which two days before had been locked up in another apartment. This apron, when they found it, was rolled up tight, and tied fast with string of its own material, which had upon it five strange knots. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
These she proceeded to unloose, and having done so, she found a flannel cap, which had belonged to old Mrs. Haltridge, wrapped up in the middle of the apron. When she saw this she was frightened, and threw both cap and arpon to young Mrs. Haltridge, who was also alarmed, thinking that the mysterious knots were boded evil to some inmate of the mansion. That evening Miss Dunbar was seized with the most violent fit, and, recovering, cried out that a knife was run through her thigh, and that she was most grievously afflicted by three women, who she described particularly, but did not then give any account of their names. About midnight she was seized with a second fit; when she saw in her vision seven or eight women who conversed together, and in their conversation called each other by their names. When she came out of her fit she gave their names as Janet Liston, Elizabeth Cellor, Kate M’Calmont, Janet Carson, Janet Mean, Latimer, and one who they termed Mrs. Ann. She gave so minute a description of them. Mrs. Dunbar said there was something in her stomach which she would be glad to get rid of. She fell into such violent fits of pains that three men were scarce able to hold her, and cried out, “For Christ sake take the Devil out of the room.” In her fits she often had her tongue thrust into her windpipe in such a manner that she was like to choak, and the root seemed pulled up into her mouth. Upon her recovery she complained extremely of the one Mean, who has twisted her tongue and spoke of someone who had tore her throat, and tortured her violently by reason of her crooked fingers and swelled knuckles. Her joints where all distorted and the tendons shriveled up, as she had described. However, through 38 years of residence, Mrs. Winchester’s employees remained fiercely and faithfully loyal, defending every eccentricity. Although usual things did occur in her home, they said she was very strong minded and firm, but always fair and kind. Laziness, theft, gossip or revealed confidences met with instant dismissal. Mrs. Winchester, they claimed, was deeply concerned with the welfare of their families. They were well paid and often additionally rewarded with gifts, even homes or real estate, and left lifetime pensions. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester Mystery House on a rainy day is a sight to see 😍 Come see for yourself this weekend!
🎟 link in bio. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
One Side’s Abundant Eden is the Other’s Vast Wasteland
The real community of humans, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers of all humans to the extent they desire to know. The face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the World was mad in the past; humans always though they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all. Many students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated. The best they can do is point out all the opinions and cultures there are and have been. What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others? Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more of less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others, the warlike, in others industrious. As a nation, we began with the model of the rational and industrious human, who was honest, respected the laws, and dedicated to the family. Above all one was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodies it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal.” A powerful attachment to the letter and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each humans’ reason, was the goal of the education of democratic humans. This called for something very different from the kinds of attachment required for traditional communities where myth and passion as well as severe discipline, authority, and the extended family produced an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism, unlike the reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty—not so much to the country but to the form of government and its rational principles—required in the United State of America. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
There is no enemy other than the human who is not opened to everything. However, when there are no shared goals or visions of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible? Hobbes and Locke, and the American Founders following them, intended to palliate extreme beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, which lead to civil strife. The members of sects had to obey the laws and be loyal to the United States of America’s Constitution; if they did so, other had to leave them alone, however distasteful their beliefs might be. The insatiable appetite for freedom to live as one pleases thrives on this aspect of modern democratic thought. In the end it begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all. The effective way to defang the oppressors is to persuade them they are ignorant of the good. History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice. We should not be ethnocentric, a term drawn from anthropology, which tells us more about the meaning of openness. We should not think our way is better than others. Then intention is not so much to teach the students about other times and places as to make them away of the fact that their preferences are only that—accidents of their time and place. Their beliefs do not entitle them as individuals, or collectively as a nation, to think they are superior to anyone else. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one. The dominant majority gave the country a dominant culture with its traditions, its literature, its tastes, its special claim to know and supervise the language, and its Protestant religions. The reactionaries did not like the suppression of class privilege and religious establishment. For a variety of reasons, they simply did not accept equality. Critics knew full well that the Constitution’s heart was a moral commitment to equality and hence condemned segregation. The Constitution was not just a set of rules of government but implied a moral order that was to be enforced throughout the entire country. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The Americans who were demanding civil rights, were the true Americans because they understood that equality belongs to them as human beings by natural and political right. It was a demand for American identity. However, with history, nothing has taken place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas. None of this means much, partly because little attention has been paid to what is required in order truly to convey the spirit of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone, partly because the students see no relevance in any of it to the lives they are going to lead or to their prevailing passion. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise humans in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life—except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. Gone is the real historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hour from each busy day in which “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.” Some critics of the United States of America’s Constitution, which provided rights for all citizens, truly believed that some people were inferior to them, and they thought that Jim Crow was necessary, as it was part of their unique way of life. Different strokes for different folks. Like said before, the only way to defang them is not with hate, but to show them the beauty of equality. The point is to persuade students to recognize that there are other ways of thinking and that Western ways are not always better. It is again not the content that counts but the lesson to be drawn. Such requirements are part of the effort to establish a World community and train its members—the person devoid of prejudice. However, if the students were really to learn something of the minds of any of these non-Western cultures—which they do not—they would find that each and every one of these cultures is ethnocentric. All of them think their way is the best way, and all others are inferior. Western phenomenon, and in its origin is obviously connected with the search for new and better ways, or at least for validation of the hope that our own culture really is the better way, a validation for which there is no felt need in other cultures. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The reason for the non-Wester closedness, or ethnocentrism, is clear. Humans must love and be loyal to their families and their peoples in order to preserve them. Only if they think their own things are good can they rest content with them. A father must prefer his child to other children, a citizen his country to others. That is why there are myths—to justify these attachments. And a man needs a place and opinions by which to orient oneself. This is strongly asserted by those who talk about the importance of roots. The problems of getting along with outsiders is secondary to, and sometimes in conflict with, having an inside, a people, a culture, a way of life. A very great narrowness is not incompatible with the health of an individual or a people, whereas with great openness it is hard to avoid decomposition. When people take on the good from another culture, this may be considered a dangerous business because it tends to weaken wholehearted attachment to their own, hence to weaken their peoples as well as to expose themselves to the anger of the family, friends, and countrymen. Loyalty versus quest for the good introduced an unresolvable tension into life. However, the awareness of the good as such and the desire to possess it are priceless humanizing acquisitions. Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys both one’s own and the good. True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness. A proper historical attitude would lead one to doubt the truth of historicism (the view that all thought is essentially related to and cannot transcend its own time) and treat it as peculiarity of contemporary history. Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether humans are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation. Prejudices, strong prejudices, are visions about the way things are. They are divinations of the order of the whole of things, and hence the road to a knowledge of that whole is by way of erroneous opinions about it. Error is indeed our enemy, it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. The mind that has no prejudices at outset is empty. It can only have been constituted by a method that is unaware of how difficult it is to recognize that a prejudice is a prejudice. Without getting misty-eyed about it, I think we can fairly say that universities have a sacred responsibility to define for their society what is worthwhile knowledge. These definitions are most clearly visible in university catalogues, where you will find lists of courses, subjects, and “fields” of study. Taken together, they amount to a certified statement of what the university thinks a serious student ought to think about. In what is omitted from a catalogue, you may also learn what a serious student need not think about. However, these are bad times for scrupulous efforts at gatekeeping, and, happily, many universities are now busily engaged in rewriting their catalogues. Some tend to think that living in California; Florida, and other warm climates tends to shrivel the brain and makes people dumber than those living in colder climates, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Iowa. There was a study by two doctoral students at Texas Technical University who found that the ten states with the highest average SAT scores all had cold winters. Indeed, every state with an average of 540 or higher on both the verbal and quantitative parts of the SAT had an average higher temperature in January of less than 42 degrees Fahrenheit. At the other end, five of the ten states with the lowest SAT scores were warm-weather states. Moreover, temperature has a significant relationship to SAT scores even when the researchers took into account such factors as per-pupil expenditures on schooling. So there! Now, there is also an important reason to keep authority figures on the right side of the law. Not only will it accord them more respect, but also more compliance. In the face of what they construe to be legitimate authority, most people will do what they are told. Or, to put it in another way, the social context in which people find themselves will be a controlling factor in how they behave. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Many people who consider themselves scientists, are not. Dr. Freud’s work is exemplary—indeed, monumental—but scarcely anyone believes today that Dr. Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Webber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing was weaving narratives about human behavior. Their work is a form of storytelling, not unlike conventional imaginative literature although different from it in several important ways. The work of these people is called storytelling because this suggest that an author has given a unique interpretation to a set of human events, that one has supported one’s interpretation with examples in various forms, and that one’s interpretation cannot be proved or disproved but draws its appeal from the power of its language, the depth of its explanations, the relevance of its examples, and the credibility of its theme. And all of this has an identifiable moral purpose. The words “true” and “false” do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no postulates in which they are embedded. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researchers. Quite like a piece of fiction. There is more hypocrisy in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in some of our philosophies. What we know about ourselves—can be more terrifying than what we do not know. Most of us generate piles of junk—unconvincing stores without credible documentation, sound logic, or persuasive argument. Books are, in many cases, written by men and women who are concerned not to improve scholarship but to improve social life. Thus, the purpose of doing this kind of work is essentially didactic and moralistic. The purpose of social research is to rediscover the truths of social life; to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people; and finally, to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity. Specifically, the purpose of media ecology is to tell stores about the consequences of technology; to tell how media environments create contexts that may change the way we think or organize our social life, or make us better or worse, or smarter or dumber, or freer or more enslaved. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Sometimes the stories media ecologists have to tell are rather more important than those of other academic storytellers—because the power of communication technology to give shape to people’s lives is not a matter that comes easily to the forefront of people’s consciousness, though we life in an age when our lives—whether we like it or not—have been submitted to the demanding sovereignty of new media. And so we are obligated, in the interest of humane survival, to tell tales about what sort of paradise may be gained, and what sort lost. We will not have been the first to tell such tales. However, unless our stories ring true, we may be the last. Now the TV tends to be a beast, too, as so many people know. The TV news media is usually there to frame certain stories they way they feel will be more entertaining, and they will also suppress or ignore others when they are involved in the corruption or paid to cover it up. To fight corruption, people need to learn the legal system, its tactics, and their means of manipulating media. To learn these, individuals have to restructure their mind and conceptions. And so to stand against the enemy, many engage of the process of self-destroying what remained of their own culture. When news television crews learn of a struggle they want to profit from, reporters are flown out from Hollywood and other areas to shoot images following the networks news guidelines for “good television” and “balanced reporting.” When it comes to the people, they often juxtapose with the people, others in suits and ties, who are responsible government officials concerned about jobs, and a lot of savage-looking types in funny clothes, speaking jive about their land, which does not seem credible because they way the people are dress and the emotions of their language. People are most likely to believe a professional in a suit, than someone who is wearing regular clothes and has been a victim of crime. After 40 million viewers see a Caucasian, modishly dressed TV newsman explain the crosscurrents in the struggle, and plaintively ask whether something of an earlier culture could not be permitted to remain, he finishes his report by saying, “From Sacramento, California, this is John Doe reporting.” This is followed by a commercial for the need to build affordable housing, how it creates jobs, and how green energy will be used to power the buildings during this energy crisis. The next is a story talking about gas prices and the need to suspend the gas tax. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Surely this story and the advertisements did not help the people concerned about their land. It was certain that they did not come through as well as the businessmen, the government officials and the reporter’s objective, practical analysis. They were attempting to convey something subtle, complex, foreign and ancient through a medium which did not seem able to handle any of that and which is better suited to objective data, conflict and fast, packaged information. When a struggle is revealed, usually the people become fixed into the model of artifact. The medium cannot be stretched to encompass their message. On the other hand, what if one had four minutes, or even one minute, to convey the essence of a product? A BMW? A stereo set? A toy? Could one accomplish that efficiently? One certainly could. It is obvious that a product is a lot easier to get across on television than a several acres of land or a cultural mind-set. Understanding cultural ways enough to care about them requires understanding a variety of dimensions of nuance and philosophy. You do not need any of that to understand a product, you do not have problems of subtlety, detail, time and space, historical context or organic form. Products are inherently communicable on television because of their static quality, sharp, clear, highly visible lines, and because they carry no informational meaning beyond what they themselves are. They contain no life at all and are therefore no capable of dimension. Nothing works better as telecommunication that images of products. Might television itself have no higher purpose? Most Americas, whether on the political left, center, or right, will argue that technology is neutral, that any technology is merely a benign instrument, a tool, and depending upon the hands into which it falls, it may be used one way or another. There is nothing that prevents a technology from being used well or badly; nothing intrinsic in the technology itself or the circumstances of its emergence which can predetermine its use, its control or its effects upon individual human lives of the social and political forms around us. The argument goes that television is merely a window or a conduit through which any perception, any argument or reality may pass. It therefore has the potential to be enlightening to people who watch it and is potentially useful to democratic process. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You have to accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers’ behavior becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. Once technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbolic relationships among technologies themselves. If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people’s thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behavior in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction. In all of these instances, the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the World, the way it will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends. And so it is with television. Far from being “neutral,” television itself predetermines who shall use it, how they use it, what effects it will have on individual lives, and, if it continues to be widely used, what sorts of political forms will inevitably emerge. Television is not reformable. If our society is to return to something like sane and democratic functioning, it must be gotten rid of totally. This is not about the television itself. It is about a process, already long underway, which has successfully redirected and confined human experience and therefore knowledge and perceived reality. We have all been moved into such a narrow and deprived channel of experience that a dangerous instrument like television can come along and seem useful, interesting, sane and worthwhile at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control. Television has been used and expanded by the present powers-that-be, and that was inevitable, and it should have been predictable at the outset. The technology permits of no other controllers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
One also has to worry about the effects of television upon individual human bodies and minds, the effects which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium. Furthermore, television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all humans understanding within a rigid channel. And as mentioned before, these aspects of television are reformable. What is revealed, however, is that there is ideology in the technology itself. To speak of television as “neutral” and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as social media. The medium is the message. Many do not recognize the transformative power of new communication technologies. They need to come with a warning about the threat the power poses—and the risk of being oblivious to that threat. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with on and through which the American way of life was formed and is changing. When people start debating (as they always do) whether the medium’s effects are good or bad, it is the content they wrestle over. Skeptics, with equally good reason, condemn the crassness of the content, viewing it as signaling a “dumb down” of culture. One side’s abundant Eden is the other’s vast wasteland. The Internet is the latest medium to spur this debate. In the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the World, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we us it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts. Rather, they alter patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Our focus on a medium’s content can blind us to these deep effects. We are too busy being dazzled or distributed by the programming to notice what is going on inside our heads. In the end, we come to pretend that the technology itself does not matter. It is how we use it that matters, we tell ourselves. The technology is just a tool, inert until we pick it up and inert again once we set it aside. We are too prone to make technological instruments, like guns, scapegoats for the sin of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value. However, it is also our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that count, which is the numb stance of the technological idiot. People have been replacing God with false idols and that is the problem. So many people say they believe in God, but so few read the Bible or pray daily. They are too busying watching TV and using the Internet to. Many people are essentially being sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine because is it calmly, coldly, discounting their memory circuits that control their brains. Many people can feel it, too. They have an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with their brains, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. Their minds are not going—so far as they can tell—but it is changing. They do not think the way they used to think, and it can be felt most strongly when they are reading. Several people are no longer able to immerse themselves into a book or a lengthy article. Their minds used to get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and they spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. For many, that is rarely the case anymore. Now their concentration starts to drift after a page or two. They get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. They feel like they are always dragging their wayward brains back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. The Net has become the all-purpose medium, the conduit for most information that flows through one’s eyes and ears and into their mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich and easily searched store of data are many, and they have widely described and duly applauded. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
While the Inter is an astonishing boom to humanity, gathering up and concentrating information and idea that were once scattered so broadly around that World that anyone could profit from them, now all this information is at your fingertips. When one is writing a report for school and using mostly book sources, some of the information may be outdated, and now what they can do it go online, find a reputable site and supplement the new information. It is better than gathering all your information from the silicon memory system. The more people use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some worry they will become chronic scatterbrains. Because of the Internet, some people have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a long article on the web or in print. Even electronic Web pages that are more than three or four paragraphs is too much for some to absorb. They just skim it. There are people that think the Internet is the most creative thing that was invented. One could hardly meet anyone who says it has not been helpful. Many individuals like to go online because they love the ability to review and scan tons of information on the web. It is believed that reading lots of short, linked snippets online is a more efficient way to expand one’s mind than reading a 250-page book. These technopagans also believe in superiority of the Internet and think others have not been able to recognize it yet because they are measuring it against our old linear thought process. In many ways, the Internet is making people less patient readers, but could possible be making them smarter. They have more connections to documents, artifacts, and people, which means more external influences on their thinking and thus on their writing. Regardless, more people know they have sacrificed something important, but they will not go back to the way things used to be. For some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even a little silly—like driving your own car when you can just schedule a ride share service. This generation thinks thing sitting down and reading a book from cover to cover does not make sense. It is not a good use of their time, as they can get the information they need faster through the Internet. These skilled Internet hunters think books are superfluous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The digital immersion has even affected the way people absorb information. They do not necessarily read from left to right and from top to bottom. They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest. The Net has become essential to their work, school, or social lives, and often to all three. Some log on only a few times a day—to check their e-mail, follow a story in the news, research a topic of interest, or do some shopping. And there are, of course, many people who do not use the Internet at all, either because they cannot afford to or because they do not want to. What is clear, though, is that for society as a whole the Net has become, in just the thirty years since software programmer Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web, the communication and information medium of choice. The score of its use is unprecedented, even by the standards of the mass media of the twenty-first century. We seem to have arrived, at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different types of thinking. What we are trading away for the riches of the Internet is our old linear thought process. Calm, focused, undistracted, the liner mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole our information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better. When people go online, they feel their brains light up, and feel like they are getting smarter. The feelings are intoxicating—so much so that they can distract people from the Net’s deeper cognitive consequences. Many people miss the days of the old box TV with rabbit ears sitting on the floor, and the bulky avocado telephone fixed to the wall in the kitchen with its rotary dial and long, coiled cord. And the den filled with books on the bookshelves—lot of books—with their many-colored spines, each bearing a title and the name of a writer. There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait, years, decades, our centuries even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time, the books whisper. We are not going anywhere. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The computer, however, is more than just a simple tool that does what one tells it to do. It is a machine that, in subtle but unmistakable ways, exerts an influence over you. The more one uses it, the more it alters the way one works. Reading lone feels new and liberating because for many kids who did not like reading books because of the lack of pictures, not have hyperlinks and search engines which deliver an endless supply of words to their screen, alongside pictures, sounds, and videos. People have started letting their newspaper and magazine subscriptions lapse. Who needed them? By the time the print editions arrived, dew-dampened or otherwise, the felt like that have already seen all the stories. The Internet is exerting a much stronger and broader influence over any one than their old stand-alone personal computer ever could. Their way their very brains work is changing. And this when most start worrying about their inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes. It is not just a symptom of middle-age mind rot. One’s brain is not just drifting. It is hungry. It is demanding to be fed the way the Internet feeds it—and the more it is fed, the hungrier it becomes. Should I check another e-mail, clink another link, look at another web page. Cause I am falling on the floor. I am climbing up the walls and everytime I get a grip, I seem to lose myself just a little more. Cause I am here and it eats me up, but I love the way it feels. I really should not stay online, but I cannot give up. The more it hurts, the more I need it more. It is like an addiction. I want to be connected. Just as Microsoft Word had turned me into a flesh-and-blood word processor, the Internet, one may sense, is turning one into something like a high-speed data-processing machine. Maybe that is a good thing because today more than every we are governed, all over the World, by the students of economics professors. Presidents and politicians, treasury secretaries or ministers of finance and chancellors of the exchequer, central bankers, investment bankers and senior officials of the World’s biggest and more powerful corporations have all dutifully sat in their classrooms listening to them, pouring over their key ideas. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The same goes for brokers, financial advisers and newspaper and television pundits who take these ideas to the public. Unfortunately, many ideas remembered from college days belong in the “obsoledge attic,” or better yet, in the cemetery of ideas. The media is sometimes behind big bloopers. In February of 2004 U.S. president George W. Bush stiff-armed his own Council of Economic Advisers, refusing to publicly back its forecast that the economy would provide 2.6 million new jobs that year. But as The Washington Post reported, That forecast, derided as wildly optimistic, was one of the more modest predictions the administration has made about the economy over the past three years. Two years ago, the administration forecast that there would be 3.4 million more jobs in 2003 than there were in 2000. And it predicted a budget deficit for discal 2004 of $14 billion. The economy ended up losing 1.7 million jobs over that period, and the budget deficit [for 2004]…is on course to be $521 billion. No doubt, some of this is political exaggeration. Any statistic can be tortured into submission. Nor are the torturers jut Republicans. The discrepancies between the forecast and subsequent results began to widen under the previous Democratic administration. It was clear that, even allowing for political fact manipulation, something was seriously amiss. In the words of a Republican White House press spokesman, “The old theories…proved themselves wildly wrong…Nobody saw this happening—not on Wall Street, not Vegas, not Poor Richard, not Nostradamus.” Economists have failed to anticipate more than job numbers and deficits. They have contributed to some of the most publicized, embarrassing financial debacles in recent decades. In the last two months of 2022, inflation has averaged 0.85 percent. If these hikes continue over the next three months, the headline inflation rate would approach 9 percent by spring. If they persist for a year, it would surpass 10 percent—the first time the United States of America would have a double-digit inflation since the early 1980s. President Biden’s entire economic team has consistently played down inflation’s threat all year. They lied about helping the American people through the pandemic and ignored the warnings from former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers that the American Rescue Plans massive size would reduce inflation. Then said initial upticks in prices were simply statistical glitches caused by the dramatic price drops during the pandemic’s initial phase and would fade away once that glitch dropped out of the calculations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
When that did not happen, they started blaming supply chain woes for the problem, even though that cannot possible explain things such as the fast and steady rise in housing costs. When consumers are fast losing purchasing power during two-digit inflation, consumers’ goods industries suffer symptoms of contraction and recession, especially unemployment of capital labor. Two-digit inflation only comes to an end with the advent of three-digit inflation which signals the approaching demise of the paper currency. In the final convulsion of inflation fever, millions of men and women will be in a panic rush to exchange their rapidly depreciating money for real goods. When there are mistakes made during a financial crisis by macroeconomists of the International Monetary Fund—errors can trigger ethnic clashes. Experts also occasionally miss anticipating major changes like the industrial slowdown in 1995, as we have seen with the 2020 pandemic. Along with the hyperinflation of the late 1980s, which we are also starting to see happening now and more so in late 2022-2023. The Fed does not know if it wants to raise interest prices because that will hurt human capital and businesses, while this war is going on and gas prices are skyrocketing, as well as consumer goods and services, and home prices. So we turn to our crucial problem: What to do that is self-justifying when the great social World is pretty unavailable? The essential Hipster problem is: to heighten experience, and get out of one’s usual self. To heighten experience is a common principle of Hipster and Delinquent, but the difference are marked. Among the Hipsters, the craving for excitement and self-transcendence is darkly colored with violence and death wish, and they therefore dread flipping, which they interpret as weakness, castration, and death. Among the younger delinquents, we shall see, it is fatalism, the wish is to get caught and be brought back into society. However, for some others, it is a religious hope that something new will happen, a revival. Not everyone gets self-destructive. The risks of delinquency, criminality, and injury rouse some in a normal apprehension, and they express a human amazement at the brutality and cruelty of some with whom they keep company. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In taking drugs for the new experience, many largely steer clear of being hooked by an addiction. On the other hand, if the aim is to get out of the World, one can hardly play it safe. So if they push their stimulants, sleeplessness, and rhythmic and hallucinatory exercises to the point of having temporary psychotic fugues, or flipping, it is not surprising. For some people, going to the municipal psychiatric hospital is an expected and regular occurrence. The young actualized Christians seek enlightenment, and the city hospital succors them when they break down. Let us now go back to the jargon. The supreme words are “crazy,” “far out,” “gone,” ‘high,” “gas,” “sent.” These mean not in this World but somewhere, not rational but something. “Flip” is generally used with enthusiastic self-deprecation. When the crazy or far-out moment can be maintained for long enough to be considered a something and somewhere, it is “groovy,” that is, one is like somebody else’s phonograph record. One is “with it” or falls in.” The “it” or the understanding “where” is not, of course, definite, for the pure being has no genus and differentia. “Swinging with it” is the condition of passing from here and now to the heightened experience of “it.” Contrariwise, it is bad and painful to be “nowhere,” to “fall out” (take an overdose), or to be “drug” (dragging). The way of being-in-the-World, that is, is to be either cool and mask-faced, experiencing little; or to be sent far out, experiencing something. However, since the cool behavior of these usually gentle middle-class boy looks like adolescent embarrassment and awkwardness rather growth in experience would not be a more profitable enterprise and ultimately get them much further out. A possibility that has interestingly dropped from popular culture as the exploitation of shared athletic or wildly physical agitation, which belonged grandly to the old jazz-for-dancing and revival meetings. This is certainly an important truth that jive is energetic, in words like “go” and “dig.” (To the jazz-for-listening one is not supposed to respond overtly by more than a quietly tapped toe. It can be hypnotic and speak to the listener like a crustal ball or a foundation or a hearth fire. As it is remarkably thin gruel (no doubt I am tone deaf). For the performer, of course, it provides the deepening absorption of any simple improvised variations, plus the solidarity of the group.) #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
I can think of two reasons why the overtly shared crazy physical rhythms are spurned. First is that this motion is in fact too much in the extremities of the body rather than in the solar plexus, it is too superficial an excitement and more fit for teenagers. The difference is between the lostness in juvenile jitterbugging and the “central” experience of an Eastern Dance or Mary Wigman. Some young men have taken to the Eastern dance, but most who love popular culture do not practice physiological yoga either, just as their Zen is without breathing-exercises or correction of posture. So perhaps another reason for their dropping the old physical jazz and revival is just the opposite, that the display of energy would upset their coolness, it would be embarrassing and make them feel too young. I would wonder if this is not the simple explanation of their disdain social dancing as “dry” pleasures of the flesh; for certainly one of the reasonable uses of social dancing is body contact and sometimes foreplay involving pleasures of the flesh. However, these boys are embarrassed to get excited, to betray feeling, in public, though they are more than willing to get into their birthday suits and exhibit themselves, or to beat a drum wildly in public as an exhibition for others, but not as contact with them. Celibacy necessitated by castration—the excision of the private parts—sends shudders through our modern sensibilities. Yet for more than four thousand years, millions of males have endured this mutilation. The Persians were perhaps its first authors. As an eighteenth-century scholar noted, “The Latin word spade, which comprehended several sorts of eunuchs, was taken from a village of Persia called Spada, where…the first execution of this nature was made…The first eunuch mentioned in the holy scriptures was Patiphor…who brought Joseph from the Midianites…and it is observed…that Nebuchadnezzar caused all the Jewish people, and other prisoners of war, to be gelt or cut.” Throughout the centuries, a large percentage of eunuchs have been youngsters from families whose poverty precipitated the decision to castrate the child. In these cases, parents expected to advance their son’s career in areas closed to all but eunuchs: certain types of domestic service in aristocratic homes or royal courts, or as castrati opera singers. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Other boys were neutered after their enslavement by enemies victorious in wars: Nebuchadnezzar’s policy of castrating male prisoners of war that he might have none to attend him in his private service but eunuchs is a case in point. Sometimes older males voluntarily sought out the surgery, almost always as a means of earning a living as an entertainer or court functionary. Occasionally, men gelded themselves in full adulthood for religious reasons—the Church Father Origen; the obscure Valesii, a heretical Christian scet of the third century about whom little is known; and the nineteenth-century Russian Skopts are examples of these self-determined celibates. Much closer to home and closer in time is California’s Heaven’s Gate celibate computer cult, the members of which committed mass suicide in 1997 and whose leader, Marshall Applewhite, had turned to castration as a desperate measure to obliterate his uncertain sexuality. Hundreds of thousands of people have also been subjected to castration as punishment for imagined or real crimes ranging from “self-love” to nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh. The mentally or physically disabled have been neutered to prevent them from reproducing. African-American men have been brutally desexed by lynch mobs, which some say are starting to pop up again in a different form, terrified of their sexuality. We shudder at castration for a host of reasons. It assaults the private core of human existence. It has almost always been a butchery, performed inexpertly by unqualified quacks and costing the lives of a majority of its victims. Its consequences are lifelong, visible, and far-reaching, affecting appearance, stance, and above all, psychological development and adjustment. We know now how important, perhaps crucial, the male organ is to psychosexual development. However, some men are now choosing to castrate themselves and keep their manly appears, which creating another gender’s private part in its place. Lessons harshly learned from routine circumcisions gone wrong have hardly taught us that gender is not an amorphous variable physicians can successfully alter simply by radical surgery. When we read about eunuchs, whether in medieval China or the Ottoman empire, or as victims of Nazi eugenics, our growing knowledge of the effects of castration colors our perceptions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The issues surrounding castration are complex and as fascinating as they are disturbing. Eunuchs who have left written records reported that they reflected deeply and incessantly on their mutilation. Though a dearth of such documents prevents a thorough study of eunuchs’ reactions, all anecdotal evidence suggests that most of them brooded bitterly about the physical effects of castration and about the contempt and ostracism that mainstream society directed at them, including the mightiest military commanders of the Byzantine empire. However, eunuchs often simultaneously understood and valued another dimension of their condition, seeing it as a means—their only means—of gaining access to certain positions. They or their parents neutralized poverty by trading their sexuality for opportunity, often nit not always realized. Afterwards, eunuchs had lifetimes of confronting the other, less desirable consequences of the procedure. In particular, they had to deal with incessant humiliation and enforced celibacy, though much evidence exists that they experienced longings for intimate passions their ravaged bodies could not satisfy. And these were the luckier men who could at least rationalize about their situation. Others, victims of brute force alone, had not even that consolation. “Search me [thoroughly], O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there is any wicked or hurtful way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting,” Psalm 139.23-24. A light exists in Spring, not present in the Year at any other period when March is scarcely here. A color stands abroad on Solitary Fields that Science cannot overtake but human nature feels. When you pass through waters, God will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you; when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon you. I shall strengthen you, yea, I shall help you, yea, I shall uphold you with the power of righteousness. Behold, all they that contend with you shall be ashamed and confounded; they say that strive with you shall be as naught and shall perish. In righteousness shall you be established; you shall not fear. You who have been forsaken, shunned and hated, now will I make you an eternal pride, a joy to all ages. Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. Every weapon that is formed against you shall fail, and every tongue that shall rise against you, shall disprove. This is the inheritance of the Lord’s servants, and their salvation from Me, saith the Lord. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Custom light fixtures in the bedroom are one of our favorite parts of living at Meadows Residence One at #PlumasRanch.
Other highlights include the walk-in shower and large soaking tub in the owner’s suite. Who knew you could get luxury like this in a single story home?! We did. 😉
Cresleigh Homes make the most enchanting homes you’ll ever find.
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 