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Me again – I had other things to do for a while. this is interesting – it ties in with what I was getting at earlier. Here we’ve got somebody taking powerful mind-altering drugs and, as a result, becoming convinced that he is under attack from demons which he blames for everything wrong with his life, including a kind of “spiritual radioactivity” which causes major health problems for those around him. By what stretch of the imagination, exactly, does this constitute a “danger of psychic questing”? Sounds more like a “danger of taking psychoactive drugs” to me! The point is the same whether or not these alleged demons actually existed – it seems the fellow didn’t take the drug with the intention of a friendly wrestling-match with astral entities which got a bit out of hand, he just took it, and bang! – demons!
Similarly, the whole “crossing the road is dangerous but does that mean we have to stay indoors for the rest of our lives?” argument is totally useless. Crossing the road is a necessary risk which is very small indeed unless you’re very careless, and unavoidable unless you’re going to live a hopelessly constricted existence – I’m reminded of the Ancient Egyptian proverb about a rich man who, informed by astrologers that a terrible danger awaited him on a particular day, had a completely empty room with thick stone walls built, into which, on the appointed day, his servants sealed him so that nothing could possibly get to him. The next day they unsealed the room, to discover that he’d suffocated…
I think a more useful question would be to first bear in mind that walking around Baghdad with a rifle and a British Army uniform right now is an incredibly dangerous activity, but not one which anybody is obliged to do, unless they voluntarily joined the army, knowing full well that if there was a war, they might have to go somewhere and risk being shot at and killed. Is psychic questing dangerous like being a soldier in Iraq, or is it dangerous like crossing the road?
Returning to my unfortunate old buddy – apparently I have an overly narrow definition of just about everything! COME ON, Simon! If somebody told you that he was being persecuted by Winnie the Pooh, who followed him everywhere waving a machine-gun and muttering threats and obsenities, but always hid behind lamp-posts whenever anybody else was looking, would you, for even one second, assume that this was literally true? Especially if you knew already that this guy had taken extremely large amounts of acid in the sixties, and since then he’d been in the habit of running out of the room during horror films in case ghosties came out of the telly and got him? There comes a point where you have to admit that the poor bloke is a few hags short of a coven! Unless you’re suggesting that there’s no such thing as mental illness, and anybody allegedly suffering from it will be right as rain after a good exorcism…
That’s the trouble with definitions – in this lark, there don’t seem to be any! I’ve occasionally wondered why there was never a “How To Go Psychic Questing” handbook, but I used to think that the reason was that the method was made very clear in Andy C’s books. Obviously this is not so. Although Andy needs the assistance of people with massively-above-average psychic talents, this isn’t necessary after all; I can become “psychic” myself just by deciding that I want to be, and absolutely everything I do apparently counts as a “quest” just because I say so. Andy didn’t always get the results he’d hoped for, but there was generally some sort of pretty dramatic and frequently tangible outcome to his quests, which I’d kind of assumed was necessary at least some of the time to show he was on the right track – apparently not.
I’d also assumed that there was some element of Destiny, or being chosen, since rather a lot of important-sounding discarnate entities involved in the process. Apparently not – I can just make one up, assume it’s telling me how to do a psychic quest, and then do whatever I fancy for a bit, so long as I can kid myself it has some symbolic meaning; and it seems that there’s absolutely no way of telling whether or not I’ve actually achieved anything, other than my own personal feelings on the matter…
Do I take it that absolutely everything said by anyone under any circumstances whatsoever is quite likely to be true, so long as they genuinely think that it might be? Do I therefore take it that, because the number of people on this planet who sincerely believe that an entity called God who created the Universe told them that dabbling in the occult is evil vastly outnumber the people who honestly think that that well-known selfless altruist Aleister Crowley came back from the dead to tell Andrew Collins where to find the Holy Grail, they’re right, you’re wrong, and everybody on this website is destined to burn in Hell for all eternity? Or is the yardstick of whether a belief-system is in any sense valid purely whether you, personally, right now, want it to be so?
Discuss!
Actually I did notice that Andy’s “21st. Century Grail” Quest does seem a tad inconclusive – the part where they seemingly trip over the Holy Grail but can’t actually find it because they’re bumbling about in the dark was a bit of an own goal (to say the least!), and the “never mind, here’s one I found earlier…” solution just a wee bit too pat, but since the book’s ending more or less promises that the Quest will continue in the sequel, I assumed that that was only half the story.
As for definitions – yes, Yuri’s is simple, but it’s also so broad that it covers just about anything! You might as well define a car as something that moves along the ground under its own power – do I now have to pay road tax on the cat? By this definition, finding Excalibur after 3 years’ hard slog while fighting off the Sons of Mordred (don’t panic! – I just made them up!) would count as a jolly impressive Psychic Quest, but so would going down to the park because I had a “psychic” feeling that I should, thinking nice thoughts in the sun for half an hour, and going home satisfied with a job well done.
If the whole concept is so shapeless that absolutely anything goes, if I decide that today is a good day for going on a Psychic Quest, can I assume that anything whatsoever that pops into my head before midnight might be a psychic message? And if I suddenly decide that walking round the block clockwise thinking about white light would be rather jolly, have I accomplished something worthwhile? If there are no rewards for success, no penalties for failure, and indeed the concept of “failure” is apparently completely meaningless because it isn’t possible to fail really, and even if you do, it isn’t possible to tell because nothing will either happen or not happen as a result, isn’t it all in danger of becoming totally pointless?
I’ll give you a real-life example. I used to know an unfortunate fellow who, as a result of taking way too many recreational drugs, had a total mental breakdown and became permanently unbalanced. Amongst his numerous other very weird beliefs was the unshakeable conviction that for some totally unfathomable reason he was under constant attack on the Astral Plane from a coven of evil time-travelling wizards who in the 1960s secretly ran Paisley Dental College. This fellow, who, by the way, was very, very obviously as crazy as a tree full of fish, and was only allowed out because he was completely harmless, honestly believed himself to be psychic, and that this vast cabal of time-travelling diabolist dental students really did exist, apparently for the sole purpose of putting voices into the head of a complete nobody like him.
Should I assume that, because at least one person truly believes in this wildly unfeasible occult conspiracy, it in some sense really exists, therefore I can adopt him as my resident “super-psychic”, and assume that everything he says on the subject of the occult is fairly reliable? Should I start researching in all seriousness into this cabal of Satanists who did awful things in Paisley 40 years ago under the guise of dentistry? Furthermore, it occurs to me that there was actually one person who took him seriously, a fellow who also took rather a lot of recreational drugs, and who, though more or less sane, believed pretty much anything said with reasonable conviction by anybody because he was very stupid indeed. So if I went to the trouble of reuniting with these fellows (I haven’t seen them for years, mainly because they’re both incredibly dull people), I’d have the beginnings of a Questing Coven, wouldn’t I…?
(By the way, this, like that cat business, is a “thought experiment” – I have no more intention of trying to square the ramblings of unfortunates undergoing treatment for severe, incurable paranoid schizophrenia with reality than I do of poisoning the poor old pussycat!)
I mean, just because the other two people involved are mad, thick, stoned, or all of the above doesn’t necessarily make it untrue, apparently; and even if it IS untrue, that doesn’t make it TOTALLY untrue… So who’s for a Black Quest to Paisley, then? That’s 1960s Paisley, of course, so you’ll have to wait until I’ve got my Tardis working again…
Yes, that’s a ludicrous example, but it’s perfectly true, and with just a teeny bit more effort, that fellow might have had a little group of terminally credulous stoned New Agers hanging on his every word (actually I suspect that he would have, had he not suffered in his teens from that really awful acne that leaves you looking like a pineapple for the rest of your life).
I’m not suggesting that anybody here would swallow a yarn spun by some self-proclaimed “psychic” who claimed that all the problems in his life were consequences of his being pointlessly persecuted by unseen hordes of satanic hippy dentists (well I hope not!), especially as you didn’t have to be in his company for very long to realise that he was several wheels short of a unicycle (his habit of leaving the room in genuine terror to hide if a supernatural being appeared on the TV screen was a dead giveaway).
But surely you have to draw the line SOMEWHERE – not trusting clinically insane “psychics” would be a pretty good rule of thumb for starters! Otherwise anything I do counts as a Psychic Quest, so long as I decide that I’m doing it in a psychic sort of way – going to the shops, for example. If I decide right now that there might be secret occult clues to be gained from the names of the household cleaning products in Tesco’s, should I go and have a look? After all, that DID just pop into my head, so it MIGHT be a secret message from the Hidden Masters in Tibet – no?
Come on, there must be SOME people who are prepared to say: “When I was just starting out I used to get it all totally wrong, but now I know better”? Unless it really IS the case that all results, including no result at all, are equally valid – in which case, why bother doing it at all?
Yes, well… I wasn’t really trying to get into the question of spiritual healing there, just the rather strange suggestion that the placebo effect also applied to Psychic Questing. Yes, obviously belief matters quite a lot in all things magickal, but if you’ve got constant “miraculous” phenomena taking place, some of which are of very dubious quality indeed, and everybody privately has doubts about them, but nobody says anything because there’s a sort of unspoken agreement that it would spoil everybody’s fun, don’t you end up with a level of collective belief somewhere in the region of zero? Clearly a well-executed bit of fakery that comes off might convince everybody (except whoever did it) that further miracles are possible, thus making them more probable; but it would have to be done VERY convincingly indeed, since ANY suspicion in the minds of the group is going to sabotage things completely, no?
And in any case, if things found on Quests whose origin is strongly suspected by those involved to be a bit dodgy are treated as if they’re sort of symbolically genuine for some reason linked to quantum physics, and lumped in with the less doubtful finds for purposes of ritual activity, is there any point in Psychic Questing at all?
I mean, let’s suppose I’m on a mission to find those 7 holy daggers featured in the Omen movies because I need them to slay the Antichrist – in a spiritual, ritualistic sense, of course – not as in sticking them in anybody. Somebody whose sincerity I don’t doubt at all comes up with a couple of decent-looking daggers, but a few other characters I’m much more dubious about start jumping on the bandwagon with increasingly doubtful cutlery they allegedly found by psychic means. Do I just not say anything because if we all quietly agree not to admit that we have doubts, we can ignore them? Do I then go ahead with my ritual and assume that it probably worked, even if I’m privately convinced that 5 of my daggers are fakes, and so is everybody else? Do I need even ONE proper dagger, or can I just go on a “symbolic quest” to my kitchen knife-drawer? Where do you draw the line?
That’s the trouble with physical evidence – it has to be convincing, and as soon as you start suggesting that a bit of blatant fakery doesn’t matter so long as it keeps the pot boiling, the whole edifice falls apart! I recall reading somewhere that when he was President, Ronald Reagan used to tell anecdotes about his heroic battles with the Japs in WWII, failing to realise that he had gotten so confused about the borderline between fantasy and reality that he had forgotten about never having been in action against the enemy at all, and he was quoting heroic scenes from his movies in the belief that he’d actually done these things. By this strange new principle of Quantum Truth Uncertainty, should he have been given a medal anyway? And is the Black Alchemist really dead, or just hiding from Harry Potter?
Hmmm… I’m still not entirely sold on this “ambiguity” business… Thing is, let’s suppose for the sake of argument that I’ve been going around saying that I’m powerfully psychic, I have a personal link with a spirit calling itself Merlin, and this spirit has told me to find the 8 holy amethysts from the breastplate of King Arthur (this example is entirely fictitious, by the way). Perhaps I’m being totally honest about this; or perhaps I’m telling deliberate lies about all of it to make myself sound interesting. Or perhaps it’s somewhere in between – maybe the original vision, though genuine, was a little garbled, and I tidied it up just a teensy bit for the sake of clarity – people do that all the time and may not even realise they’re doing it. Or maybe I filled in a few gaps and left out an embarrassing bit about Bagpuss – but hey, it’s still half-true at least… And so on.
And assuming that I’m totally, or at least very nearly, honest – am I right? Maybe I’m 100% correct in every detail; maybe my lines got crossed and I’m only half-right; maybe I got the message OK but “Merlin” isn’t as reliable as I thought; maybe it’s a symbolic message which I interpreted too literally, so it’s sort of true but not in the way I think; maybe I honestly think it’s a psychic vision but it’s just an ordinary daydream and means nothing; maybe I’m not psychic at all, but I honestly think I am because I’m a bit over-imaginative; maybe I’m mentally ill; or, just maybe, I’m a cynical skeptic telling lies to wind up some gullible New Agers, but actually deep down I’m genuinely psychic but I can’t bring myself to admit it, so that stupid message I made up for a joke is in fact true – unlikely, but possible!
The point being that there are a huge number of possibilities, most of them neither 100% true or 100% false – almost all possible results lie in some sort of a grey area, and the best I can realistically hope for is to mostly be very pale grey (unless I’m simply lying to impress a girl or something). This, I suppose, is sort of like that mythical half-dead pussycat in the radioactive box – the “truth” is smeared all over the place and very fuzzy at the edges, and if there are mistakes and contradictions and ambiguities from time to time, nobody will be too bothered.
But now let’s suppose that I’m also claiming that I’ve found the first holy amethyst – Merlin showed me in a vision where to dig, and I dug there, and sure enough, there it was! What I’ve just done is opened the box and collapsed the wave function – the cat is now either completely alive or completely dead. Or in my case, barring a few very remote possibilities (it’s all a fantastically huge coincidence, I have Multiple Personality Disorder and don’t know it, etc.), either I’m telling the absolute truth, and I found the gem in some paranormal way, or I’m telling the absolute untruth – I bought it in a rock shop for a few quid and I made up all that nonsense about Merlin.
If you’ve got a real-life Psychic Questing situation where something like this happens, obviously the unbelievers will say that it’s all a hoax; but if even those involved are left in a state of uncertainty where they admit that some of their number MIGHT be fooling them at least some of the time… Isn’t that a bit like Doc Shiels saying: “Yes, I have repeatedly hoaxed photos of various monsters, but the magical currents I engendered by doing that have now borne fruit, and THIS photo is genuine; though of course, if it wasn’t, I’d say it was…”?
If it’s sort of acceptable to consider that the whole thing might be a bit of a wind-up, and anybody, including the group’s leader and all the people claiming to be psychic, might or might not be cheating at any time, isn’t that going to lead to a situation where absolutely everybody is going to cheat just to join in with the fun? And if the basic honesty of everybody involved doesn’t really matter if they’re only cheating for valid magical reasons, isn’t the whole exercise liable to end up as a sort of live-action Dungeons and Dragons thing which nobody takes seriously on any level?
I mean, comparing it to the placebo effect is all very well, but that’s something that doctors do either if they really can’t do anything except pretend they can help in order to keep the patient’s spirits up, or they reckon the disease is all in the patient’s mind and they don’t want to waste expensive drugs on a non-existent illness. If I were to pretend to find a “placebo” holy amethyst of King Arthur, what purpose would it serve? To persuade other people that the Quest isn’t all in my head, even though it sounds increasingly as though it might be? To give my acolytes the pleasing illusion of being able to find powerful occult items and influence events for the good, even though I know they’re just an ordinary handful of rocks?
Suppose my deception works splendidly well, and people take me seriously. Then other people start finding more holy amethysts just like mine, and in very much the same way. Great! My placebo worked, and my followers, believing that it CAN be done, have found the faith to actually do it! But hang on – I know I was lying all along; how do I know they aren’t just giving me the wink and playing along with what they see as a fun game of make-believe? I know that if I personally was involved in one of your classic Psychic Quests where physical objects actually turn up, and I had serious doubts as to the honesty of the people involved, I’d either pack it in immediately, or if it was a nice day and I wasn’t doing anything else, perhaps stick around for a while just to see the comedy. (“Honestly, it was an apport! But the Cosmic Joker apported it right into my pocket and then made it appear to fall out!”)
Obviously it’s possible (unless you assume from the outset that all things magical are by definition impossible) for Andy C to get a valid clue by paranormal means from a source that turns out to be irrelevant – it’s perfectly clear to me that if he’d been trying to deliberately cheat, he wouldn’t have laid out in his own book all the evidence needed to spot the error, including a large uncropped photo of the “swan”. But in a situation where it would be impossible to get the results described in any way other than by either cheating or by being genuinely psychic, isn’t it extremely ill-advised to suggest that nobody really knows whether certain “psychics” are cheating or not, but it doesn’t really matter because nobody really cares? I’m overstating the case, but that’s what some people appear to be saying, at least to some extent.
Oh, by the way, if I’m going to be stuck with a smiley thingummy that’s all “spots” and “freckles”, can we at least agree that it’s got more to do with leopards than herpes?
Awww… Somebody missed me! (“Spotty”? Perhaps I need a new cryptosmileyglyph…) Yes, there are things in this world that sometimes take me away from the vicinity of a computer for days at a time, and this has been one of them.
Anyway – some extraordinarily interesting posts here – thanks, guys. Obviously not every single Quest results in somebody finding seven swords or five rings or whatever, and doubtless there are dozens that aren’t quite dramatic enough for book-length treatment that are of this kind, but as some of the replies make clear, actually finding something is a splendid way of proving to everyone, yourself included, that you’re definitely on the right track.
Also, it’s pretty clear from Andy C’s own books that when he happens to have the services of an extraordinarily powerful medium like Graham or Bernard, he goes out on Quests and generally finds things. But when he doesn’t have such a colleague, he pretty much confines himself to theoretical and historical writing with minimal psychic content. This does seem to imply that a) a proper Psychic Quest is all about finding stuff, b) this isn’t possible without certain exceptional talents being available, and c) therefore if you don’t know such a person, it isn’t worth bothering. (Obviously you have no hope of achieving anything if you don’t even start – “every journey begins with the first step” and all that – but clearly there’s no point in even filling in the entry form for a car rally if you haven’t got a car!)
About that “clue” – I didn’t bother with the details because I thought everybody would have noticed by now, since I spotted it almost immediately and it’s bugged me ever since. For those who don’t know: basically, Andy’s attention was drawn by psychic means involving other people to Mary Queen of Scots. Checking out certain things she had produced on the offchance that one of them might be a clue, he spotted a tapestry of a swan Mary had personally embroidered, in which the swan’s neck was in a bloody strange position. As it happened, a local bend in the river of approximately that shape was indeed called the Swan’s Neck. Having told Graham to look in that general area, sure enough, the fabled (and surprisingly valuable) Green Stone turned up.
The problem is, it’s NOT a swan! It looks a bit like one, but actually it’s a pelican. The interesting thing about pelicans is that they feed their young on their own blood (actually they don’t do anything of the kind, but Pliny the Elder thought they did). This makes the pelican symbolic of noble self-sacrifice, patient endurance of suffering, etc., and thus very popular in heraldry – it’s obvious why Mary would have been drawn to knit such a thing in her prison cell, and since any educated person of the kind would have been very well up on heraldry, this meaning wasn’t hidden at all. The pelican in the tapestry is clearly shown biting its own breast to feed the hungry chicks visible in the illustration – heraldic pelicans were nearly always shown in exactly this position, including the neck.
If Mary had intended this as a clue, she would obviously have embroidered a heraldic swan, which would not have had that little crest the pelican has, would not normally have been shown with a nest full of chicks, and would certainly not normally have had its neck in that position. But she didn’t, so the “clue” doesn’t work on any normal level.
But anyway, I’m slightly puzzled by several curious comments to the effect that it’s sort of OK to hoax things a bit to start with, because it gets the ball rolling, persuades people that they really CAN experience wildly improbable events like solid objects falling out of thin air, and therefore the items which turn up later on will be genuine! Do I understand this correctly?
I’m reminded of the interesting theories of Doc Shiels, who has stated on various occasions that if you fake evidence of mythical monsters, including ones you’ve just thought of, people will take them seriously and they’ll become real by and by! Apart from seriously undermining the credibility of all those Nessie photos he keeps taking, I’ve never seen much point to this kind of activity. Are people here suggesting that a partially faked Quest is OK because it will become real halfway through?
As for the “Charlaton”, I’m afraid that quantum physics was never my strong point; though I always understood that the whole point of that thing with the cat was that you didn’t actually end up with a cat that remained in some magical blurry condition until you opened the box, and it certainly didn’t work with things bigger than electrons and whatnot. Am I missing something here?
Incidentally, well done Yuri & Simon for becoming Magi! I always thought it was a lot harder than that – something to do with years of dedication, mysterious rituals in bizarrely-furnished rooms, and being MacGregor Mathers’ best friend (rather tricky now that he’s dead). How many posts do you need to be an Ipsissimus?
Would this have any connection with the extremely strong taboo Jews have against consuming blood in any form because, as the Bible explicitly states, that would entail absorbing the life-force of another creature? It’s interesting that Jesus was responsible for a post-Judaic religion which totally ignored all previous dietary prohibitions.
Of course, the Jews may well have pinched the whole idea of monotheism from Akhenaten, the only recorded monotheist who predated Judaism. And the Egyptians took the idea of spiritual life being intimately connected with the physical body even after death to extraordinary levels of obsessive complexity.
And then you’ve got that old pre-Christian Celtic Grail-type object originally owned by Bran, whose severed headcontinued to live and protect Britain from invasion in some way, though he seems to have slipped up on the Normans, who cunningly built their greatest fortress on the burial-site of Bran’s head – the Tower of London.
Of course, some time before that, we had Arthur, an allegedly Christian king with Grail connections, yet whose senior advisor was the half-human son of one of the Old Gods (unspecified, and later officially designated as Satan, so we end up with a Christian allegory in which a reformed Antichrist is one of the good guys – how weird is that, eh?). Arthur, naturally, carried on Bran’s habit of remaining semi-alive in some kind of post-mortem defensive mode in case of invasion (he too wasn’t all that effective against the Normans, but it seems to have worked against Hitler).
And we haven’t even discussed those Templars and their mysterious idol Baphomet – possibly another sacred head… It’s all rather confusing, really… By the way, if Dan Brown was determined to rip off some dodgy potboiler with a weird theory about Jesus for his even dodgier potboiler, wouldn’t it have been so much more fun if he’d chosen “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross”?
Re. the tryskele or fylfot – I’ve always taken this to be a variant of the swastika (in its pre-Nazi aspect of course), meaning that it’s a dynamic, revolving Solar symbol, and extremely masculine – having a threefold as opposed to a fourfold symmetry reinforces these aspects. I would imagine that African throwing-knives are made this way coincidentally, because there aren’t that many conveniently throwable simple shapes – otherwise you’d end up having to consider the mystical imagery concealed in quite a few of the wares at your local boomerang shop (if you have one – I do, which is nice, though very seldom useful). Quite a few of which are suspiciously swastika-shaped, by the way, but fortunately for boomerang enthusiasts, nobody has suggested a political correctness amendment to the laws of aerodynamics! (Yet…)
Re. labyrinths, I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Glastonbury Tor, which was probably carved into a classic Cretan labyrinth design, allowing you to go on a symbolic pilgrimage on the way to the top (if you’ve got a map, you still can). Some ancient Greek or other (Herodotus possibly? I’m quoting from memory) mentions a “spherical temple” to Apollo that rather surprisingly existed in a far Northern land which was probably Britain (don’t forget the Cornish tin trade connection). Obvious the god in question was some local chappie roughly similar to Apollo, but the word “spherical” threw scholars off for decades, until somebody pointed out that a globular structure of any size would have been physically impossible to build, but the ancient Greek word for “spiral” was near-as-dammit the same, and sounded identical if said with a non-Greek accent. Does that help at all?
Have you considered Hermitage Castle near Hawick? I don’t know about pointy turrets and whatnot – I don’t think it’s got a roof at all nowadays, though the rest of it’s in pretty good shape. But it’s got a splendid goblin!
His name is Redcap Sly, and apparently he was the familiar of one Lord Soulis, a late medieval necromancer who made the Black Alchemist look like Sooty! (Incidentally, Shakespeare seems to have pinched some of the supernatural stuff in Macbeth from this legend.) According to one version of the rather confused tale, Lord Soulis was eventually boiled alive in molten lead and buried under a nearby stone circle called Nine Stanes Rig. Redcap Sly, who lived in a metal box, and apparently wasn’t entirely under his so-called master’s control (his prophecies certainly seem to have been infuriatingly ambiguous), remained at large, and presumably still is; some accounts make him out to be a vampire.
Amongst other peculiar beasties to be seen thereabouts are the ghost of a 7-foot-tall half-faerie knight in indestructible magic armour who was eventually tricked and drowned in a nearby stream at a spot called the Knight’s Pool – some locals still believe that this vengeful spirit will drown unwary passers-by if it gets half a chance, and one such death in living memory is blamed on the spook (I’m not just quoting the lurid tales in tourist fodder – a friend of mine lives in Hawick, and some of the older residents still take this story perfectly seriously). You can also allegedly spot a headless horseman, Mary Queen of Scots, and several other assorted phantasms if you’re lucky – I believe this makes it the most haunted building in Scotland apart from Glamis Castle.
Anyway, it’s certainly got a goblin – not a very nice one, but that’s goblins for you…
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?
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?
Ta very much, Yuri – one does hear rumours, but they’re kinda vague, and I just wanted to know what the position really was. ‘The Demonic Connection’ in particular seemed to go a lot further than Andy ever did without really being able to build much of a case (and what did all that stuff about the Philadelphia Experiment have to do with anything, eh?).
Regarding horse mutilation (Satanic and otherwise) – I’m not sure whether this is relevant, but I do have an interesting tale concerning this which is not widely known. About 17 years ago, I used to live on a farm in the Borders, near a tiny village called Blainslie a few miles from Lauder, where there were several Welsh mountain ponies. I was there for a couple of years because the place offered a free residential caravan to anybody who could be relied on to look after the chickens (times were hard!). Anyway, at the time all the locals were aware of these nasty horse incidents, though there hadn’t been any in the immediate area.
After a while I moved on, and some other penniless bum replaced me for exactly the same reasons. A month or two after I left, this chap was awoken by some sort of commotion in the field very late at night, and he went to investigate. A man was doing something mysterious with one of the horses, and when approached, he lashed out with a knife and cut my replacement’s face open – thus I narrowly missed out on becoming the only human victim of the horse ripper! (This incident was briefly reported in ‘Fortean Times’.) The really weird thing is, when they got a good look at the horse, it wasn’t cut at all – what he’d actually been doing was trying to turn the horse white (it was brown) with ordinary household paint!
There are two possible interpretations. The obvious one is that for some reason this guy got off on whitewashing farm animals under cover of darkness, which has got to be the most contrived sexual perversion on record! The other is a bit more interesting. Until a few months before the incident, the small herd had included an exceptionally beautiful cream-coloured pony (very unusual for the breed), which shortly before I left had been sold for a good price. Also, at around that time, a middle-aged man who was almost certainly far too old to have been the knifeman in the incident I’ve just described had been seen several times (including by me) peering intently at the horses over the wall of a back-road about a quarter of a mile away with very large binoculars.
Did somebody or other carefuly plan a ritual which specifically required a white horse they thought was going to be there, and when it wasn’t there, they were forced to improvise at short notice? Nobody was caught doing anything definitely suspicious – the owner of the farm did actually have a word with the older man, but he seemed quite respectable, and since the knife attack hadn’t happened yet, he didn’t think much of it, thought the man did seem to be obsessively interested in some not terribly remarkable ponies. It does rather sound as if there might have been a behind-the-scenes planner and a much younger perpetrator involved, which would be odd if it was just some kind of sexual thing.
There is one other possible sequel, though rather a silly one. A friend of mine who still lives in Galashiels, about 10 miles away, mentioned about 3 years ago that he had been reminded of my bizarre tale of horse-painting perverts by a weird item which was covered in the local press but presumably nowhere else. Apparently a Galashiels resident woke late at night because the dog was making a terrible noise, and called the police; they happen to have a car very nearby, and were in time to catch an intruder attempting to paint the dog – quite a largeone, I believe – white with ordinary household paint… Curiouser and curiouser!
(PS – For what it’s worth, we used to get regular flypasts by Honest-To-Gods Black Helicopters too – go figure…)
Anyway, I reckon I’ve now got the information I was looking for about the BA & Co. (though I’d still be interested to hear of any new sightings – I daresay we all would). I did have a reason for asking how seriously I’m supposed to take such people – I shall be posting more on this shortly.
(Written with a slight degree of irritation, because it’s the second time I’ve typed this in – presumably clicking “Submit” doesn’t usually crash this entire website? Sorry if anybody got locked out for a while yesterday afternoon – apparently I was somehow to blame. Or possibly a disgruntled Black Alchemist did it? Or maybe even rubbish web design…?)
Anyhow… Points taken. Vyxen’s link to the 1963 activities of a possible BA is most interesting; if it’s him, it would suggest that he’s capable of doing very little for long periods of time and then popping up again, so maybe we haven’t seen the last of him – that or it’s a family business…? Though if, as the article claims, BA was born c. 1940, he’s probably still alive, barring accidents. And if it isn’t him, it’s one hell of a coincidence – there must be something about the area that draws them out of the woodwork.
Some years ago, I read a very detailed account of all manner of curious events – I’m pretty sure UFOs and black magic were involved – in and around Bluebell Wood, though unfortunately I can’t remember all the details, or where I read it. Of course there are probably quite a few places in England called Bluebell Wood, so it may have been another one, which would itself be interesting – are places called Bluebell Wood, Hill, or whatever dodgy by nature, and if so, is “bluebell” a corruption of an older word meaning something quite different? – just a thought. By the way, obviously there are zillions of not-terribly good websites featuring a ragbag of weird bits and pieces of a Fortean Nature, but is there a really good one I haven’t found yet offering a guide to UK (or indeed World) weirdness hotspots, complete with maps and regular updates? If not, shouldn’t there be one?
Oh, and talking of websites and links to interesting things and all that, I did know about the Andy C interview in which he mentions the BA’s possible death because I’d seen it mentioned on the Eden website quite a while ago, but when I followed the links I couldn’t find it. I’ve just looked again, and I still can’t find it – am I just being unobservant (it’s a pretty crowded site), or has it been dumped ages ago to make way for newer stuff? If it’s still there, could somebody please tell me exactly where it is?
Anyway, the main point that puzzled me all along about this BA-People of Hexe-Black Questing thing is: how bad are these people really? I mean, it’s all very well to say “look what happened to Bernard”, but the fact is, not very much did happen to Bernard – a few panic attacks and stomach upsets, but as far as I know, none of it was exactly life-threatening, and since he packed it in, he’s been doing whatever it is he does of a non-psychic nature with no after-effects whatsoever. I would have thought that if you were the sole obstacle to some massive magical undertaking by a really serious group of extremely competent and totally ruthless black magicians, you’d suffer a lot worse than that! In fact, if I was the BA (I’m not, by the way), if I’d gone to all that trouble, there was just this one guy constantly spoiling everything, and my group’s combined magic simply wasn’t working for whatever reason, other than to make him a bit uncomfortable from time to time, well, if I knew where him and his family lived… I think Bernard got off pretty lightly, don’t you?
To be honest, I’ve always had the impression that the BA was – stand by for heretical statement – not really all that bad! If his Hexe organisation (or whatever they’re called) really were as effective as they were made out to be, they don’t seem to have had any real intention of harming him, just making him so uncomfortable that he’d quit bugging them. If so, they succeeded, and then presumably had another go at their Magnum Opus and quite possibly succeeded, but it wasn’t really that big a deal.
Alternatively, they were genuinely evil, and genuinely trying to kill Bernard or drive him permanently insane, but they simply weren’t as effective as Andy C thought they were, and the very worst they can do was so unimpressive that they probably just got sick of trying and quietly packed it in – certainly nobody was ever in any real danger.
So, final question – what is THE VERY WORST that can happen as a result of deliberately or inadvertantly getting involved in a Black Quest? Do people who started out healthy and sane actually ever die or go mad? Has this ever happened to anybody you actually know?
(Let’s see what happens when I press this button…)[/u]
Re. that naughty Alchemist fellow: I’m still slightly confused as to the exact mechanics of the whole business. I do have a rough idea what “Black Questing” is supposed to entail (incidentally, is there a specialist term for people who want to embrace the Dark Side – there must be a few, no? – and use psychic questing to do very bad things like old TBA? – presumably not “Even Blacker Questing”?), but it seems to me that if a particular individual is for whatever reason thrown into a Black Quest against the forces of evil, if he (or she) eventually decides that he’s frightened or sick of it or simply can’t be bothered, and packs the whole thing in, don’t the bad guys win by default?
If, on the other hand, fighting the Forces Of Evil is something you can do or not do as the fancy takes you because ultimately it doesn’t really matter, what’s the point of making a fuss about it? Why spoil TBA’s fun by taking all those mystic bits of rock away from the churches he placed them in if nothing very bad was ever going to happen anyway? Do I take it that it’s all just a great big jolly game, and if the Good Guys get bored and stop playing, the Bad Guys will pack it in too because there’s no fun in it if there’s nobody else to play hide-and-seek with?
It seems to imply that everyone concerned knows perfectly well that the whole thing is just fantasy role-playing that was fun for a summer or two, but walking away because you’ve grown out of it is perfectly OK because obviously a fantasy bogeyman you made up isn’t going to hurt anyone if you don’t get around to pretending to stop him!
And – seriously – if these characters really are as dangerous as they’re made out to be, isn’t it a bit irresponsible to imply that going head-to-head with them is something which pretty much anybody can do just for jolly, and if they get a bit freaked out, they can just walk away whenever they want and nothing will happen? It’s a bit like suggesting that it’s quite exciting joining the Mafia and becoming a supergrass, but if the constant threat of death gets to be a bit much, you can stop any time you like and take up your old life, and nobody will bear you any nasty old grudges!
If I’m completely missing the whole point, it’s purely because there’s doubtless a lot going on in the questing scene that I’m unaware of because not everybody has the ability or the inclination to write books about their exploits; so – any progress reports? I’d genuinely like to know what the score is.
