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Er… I wasn’t sure whether to mention this at all, since it may strike some people as a little bit silly, but I’ve just had a read of Andy C’s recent interview, which includes advice to neophyte Psychic Questers, and he seems to be saying that anything which keeps coming up in visions, synchronicities etc. and won’t let you alone is probably a good starting point for something a bit Questish.
Thing is, myself and a few others seem to be picking up definite hints of this kind which, while by no means a proper Psychic Quest yet, are very strikingly synchronistic. There seem to be several threads involved, mostly connected with genuine historical figures; the problem we’ve got is that one of them – who flatly refuses to go away and seems to be at the very heart of things – is, er… Sherlock Holmes…
That’s what I meant by “a little bit silly”! What are peoples’ thoughts? Does Holmes count as an archetype yet? Is there a possibility that occultists associated with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in some way might have created a Holmes thought-form of some kind? He does seem to be rather in the character of a guardian. I would appreciate feedback from anybody with a fair bit of experience of these matters, since I feel there’s a reasonable possibility of some quite interesting material coming out of this – it’s just that constant guest appearances by somebody who is definitely 100% fictitious are a little off-putting!
Any suggestions?
Always follow synchronicities…
I think that Holmes is a great archetype for questers, being a sleuth an all… whatever ‘name’ spirit chooses to wear, roll with it… test it, follow the path it leads you to, if it turns out to a be red herring then dont talk to ‘Holmes’ again.
Reminds me of the film ‘Ninth Gate’, and the main character asks the mysterious woman what her name is, she says ‘Guess?’ he says ‘green eyes’ and she says ‘that’ll do!’….. it could also be a veiled character clue to something connected with Holmes, maybe you’ll be lead off to Dartmoor and Baskerville territiories, or something similar.
I’d play with it, but seek some kind of intelliegent confirmation (signs in the physical realm) that its not just a prankster spirit.
Ta, Yuri; thought as much, but there was a lingering doubt – I mean, I’d definitely draw the line at Bagpuss, but Holmes…? He’s at least as “real” as King Arthur, surely!
Regarding “signs in the physical realm” – interesting you should mention Dartmoor… The main reason we carried on taking this Holmes business seriously was that a couple of days after I’d decided that it was obviously random crap, owing to the presence of Holmes, I was walking along the road at night – this was in the middle of Edinburgh, by the way – and a bit of a mist had fallen – unusual in itself. Suddenly I heard the unmistakeable sound of a very big dog running very fast coming towards me, and an absolutely HUGE halve-starved looking stray bounded out of the mist straight at me! Luckily it was a benign critter that had presumably mistaken me for its owner in the fog, and it promptly went away again, but you almost never see stray dogs of ANY kind in this area – about one every several years, and I’d certainly never seen this one before – I would have noticed! I’m not suggesting that it glowed in the dark or was otherwise demonic in aspect – this was abviously a real lost dog, and not quite “gigantic”, just bloody big – but it was one hell of a coincidence, no?
This led me to do a bit more research. One other thread we’d been getting was something to do with “Jack”, which we’d initially taken to be the Ripper, who has no credible Edinburgh connections whatsoever, and was therefore presumably more random Victorian schtick like Holmes. However, since no actual murders seemed to be implied by our material, I tried assuming that it was Spring-Heeled Jack (I had several other possible Jacks in mind too, but he was next on the list).
I couldn’t at first find any obvious SHJ link – Mike Dash has produced what looks like an exhaustive list of sightings. However, shortly after this, by sheer chance (?) I discovered from an obscure source that there was apparently a rash of SHJ sightings in Edinburgh. Unfortunately the only references I could find were in an undated miscellany, so although local papers were presumably quoted, I have yet to find the full articles (they do exist on microfiche, but without a date, there’s a hell of a lot of text to look through!). However, we do know that one SHJ-related incident, involving an unseen bat-like entity with the apparent power of flight spooking a coachman – occurred several hundred yards from my home.
Another – as far as I can tell, the first in the series – happened in the Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh, where SHJ, wearing a flowing white robe, was seen leaping over the wall (about 8 feet high at its lowest, by the way). Looking up a guide to Edinburgh cemeteries revealed that one of the notables buried there is Dr. Joseph Bell – Conan Doyle’s old tutor at medical school, and the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes…
Incidentally, the cemetery has Theosophical connections – one senior member is buried under a very impressive pyramid, allegedly sitting up in an armchair with a glass of wine to await the Resurrection (he’s taking it a bit too literally if you ask me)! It’s also the only place in Edinburgh I know of where you can find wild mistletoe – at Xmas they post one of those elderly coppers with the green hatbands and the cushy park jobs to stop people nicking it (wonder how he’d cope if SHJ paid a return visit?).
Anyway, there’s obviously some sort of attempt here to communicate something – unfortunately it isn’t as yet all that useful. I have no knowledge of any modern-day occult activities, good, bad, or greyish, associated with any of this (especially Holmes, of course), and if anybody did try such a thing, since it’s a well-maintained burial ground in a posh part of town with high walls on 3 sides and a cliff on the other, it would be difficult for anybody to do such things without ending up in the papers. (And they might just be a bunch of neo-Druids attracted by the mistletoe.)
Certainly neither myself or anyone else involved has received any specific instructions, however vague, to look for anything, or indeed do anything whatsoever; there just seems to be a general intention that we should be aware of the Holmes/SHJ connection (the Theosophists may be irrelevant – I just thought I’d mention them because it’s such a striking pyramid). And the dog incident did kind of spook me!
I’m assuming SHJ in this context to be something a bit more esoteric than a Victorian prankster in a Halloween suit, and “Holmes” to be a similar entity – possibly they both aquired those aspects during some sort of conflict between rival occult groups about a century ago, and at least one of them has been reactivated in some way, perhaps by a magical ceremony in the Edinburgh area that probably didn’t really have that in mind? (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t our lot, since we were merely trawling for information, not invoking anything at all – especially fictional characters and bullet-proof demonic pranksters!)
Does any of this have any meaning for anybody else?
I think the dog sketch was great… lol
I had actually no knowledge at all of who Spring Heeled Jack was/is, so have read up on him on Wikipedia; here’s the link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Heeled_Jack
Fascinating story. brilliantly odd; without him we probably wouldnt have Freddie Krueger and ‘a nightmare on Elm Street’. SHJ seems to be the first, media-fuelled bogeyman/urban myth.
I dont know what to suggest though. SHJ may not be the right ‘jack’ anyway… I’ll sit on the fence, and think that maybe you need a bit more time for the story to unfold; holmes and jack; dont be too quick to wrap things up into a comprehensive package… I’d suggest letting things unfold and just keep making observations.
I’ve been to Edinburgh; it has a great ‘Victorian London’ feel in places.
This is fair comment – I put SHJ in the frame mainly because he was a famous Jack who happened to come to my attention at the right time, and he did have a fairly persuasive though obscure Holmes connection. Trouble is, 18th and 19th century bogeymen, whether they were supernatural beings or perfectly ordinary criminals, particularly exceptionally audacious ones, were more often than not nicknamed Jack Something-Or-Other.
So if I’m right in assuming “Holmes” to be some sort of guardian entity – the dog episode could be interpreted as a warning to keep off, but actually it was what persuaded me to take the whole thing seriously, so it wasn’t much of a warning – maybe Holmes is running on automatic? – Jack would be a very plausible default name for any supernatural baddie from the same era. Actually I have no evidence at all that this dates back particularly far; as noted, Edinburgh has a splendidly Victorian look – did you know that “Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde” was based on the true story of Edinburgh criminal Deacon Brodie, and the scenery is based on Edinburgh, but relocated to London to broaden its appeal? Presumably that’s why the strange Julia Roberts version of the tale was shot in Edinburgh.
Therefore a much more recent magical operation could well have included this kind of imagery, possibly suggested by a life-size bronze statue of Holmes they put up in central Edinburgh a few years ago, next to the Conan Doyle pub (which is, I think, nearer than Holmes himself ever got to Edinburgh). (The only occultist of any note I can trace who actually had connections with my part of Edinburgh at roughly the right time was Lewis Spence, who lived about half a mile away in the 1920s.)
By the way, the Mike Dash SHJ chronology is the definitive version thus far published; the only full-length book on SHJ is by Peter Haining, but the scholarship is extremely shoddy – he always uses the most sensational account available, including several very silly ones from 1960s UFO books determined to prove that SHJ was a space alien. Apparently there’s currently a movie in the works (about time, I would have thought!) but it looks suspiciously like a straight-to-video piece of shit – basically Freddy Kreuger in a top hat.
I’ll see if anything else turns up that sheds more light on this matter. It would also be interesting to know if anyone else has had any experiences involving Holmes – it strikes me that if you’re creating an artificial elemental with the capabality to stand up to hostile and chaotic thoughforms of a primitive kind, he’d be just about perfect, especially now that Chaos Magic has made this kind of use of fictional characters a bit more acceptable than it used to be: if I ever have need of such an entity, I might well consider Holmes myself (right now, that sort of thing is well out of my league, but you never know).
Oh, and how about SHJ? Anyone seen him lately? Since his documented career ran for almost 70 years with no loss of leaping ability, he’s presumably immortal, and apart from some totally wild claims that he might have been Jack the Ripper, mainly on the grounds that two people called Jack whom the police never caught must be the same bloke, he doesn’t seem to have been a particularly bad fellow really! Maybe he updated the costume and started calling himself Mothman?
Interesting link
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=295602005
(quotes from…
“Sherlock Holmes is a product of Scottish mind, born in Scotland, trained in Scotland.
Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh and studied medicine at Edinburgh University before practising as a doctor in England, where he began writing.”
…)
Guys,
Have you heard of the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Musgrave Ritual” all to do with the lost “Ancient Crown of the Kings of England”? Follow link below for full text…
http://www.projects.ex.ac.uk/trol/grol/ … moir05.htm
Also link to an article covering the possible hidden references of this story to the Holy Grail, Templars etc…
http://www.book-of-thoth.com/article1537.html
Is Holmes still making an appearence for you Dan?
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