Objectivity Means You Have Not Done What You Have Just Done
A review of Eugenia Macer-Story’s The Pulse of the Dragon
Published in UFO magazine Vol 23, No 11
The Cartesian Control System
This is a book about the lost power of subjectivity. As such, it travels the royal road of
traditional magic. Magic is what it has
always been: it is an expression based on the assumption that it might be
possible to locate and use forces within mind—group or individual—in order to
transform the world in defiance of the established facts of formal scientific
observation.
All so-called occultism is deeply political in that it disrupts the
flat Cartesian control signal of so-called mechanical objectivity. Once the cultural control signals are
sabotaged, disrupted, or denied, we have access to limitless chattering
subtexts of experience whose structure and organisation are image-based rather
than linear, rational, or concrete; this latter being the most common metaphor
used to beat existential consumers into cowed submission.
In Pulse of the Dragon: The
Secret Knowledge of The Pirates [1]
we see Charles Fort’s banned texts and events pouring out of cracks in
the mangled Cartesian clockwork. Without
exception, all cultures are advertising systems. The ideas of the concrete and the real are
maintained by powerful systems of ideological fabrication using every trick of
the commercial break to ensure that hypnotic rays of auto-generated propaganda
hold all human attention.
As both George Orwell and Arthur Koestler told us long ago, semi-automated
management of mass suggestion can switch us from channel to channel at will
until the entire scale of our experience is chosen for us by quasi-robotic
viewing engines, the size and complexity of which we are only just beginning to
encounter. Passive viewers become mere image-processors in the supermarkets of
ideologies. Big Science, as General Leslie Groves of Los Alamos called it, is
just one more prime-time special offer, with its latter-day mechanical
rationalisations merely updates within the cultural sales chatter.
In the Western world the great propaganda system of the past two
hundred years was, and still is, some form of social-scientific Communism. In whatever form: left-liberal,
social-democratic, Marxist, these systems—still plentifully described as enlightened—are still quite willing to
beat an unbeliever to death until he or she becomes real, to use the Left’s
favourite world.
Orwell’s Winston Smith in 1984
is a living corpse, judged finally to be fit for the reality of proper, scientifically
based consumer-socialization. But like noises from old mine workings long
thought abandoned, beneath the concrete we hear rumours that life exists deep
in the woods beyond the supermarket, the laboratory, and the viewing settee.
Pulse of the Dragon
Eugenia Macer-Story, the author of Pulse of the Dragon, is an occultist. As such, she is a great
hunter and collector of synchronicities; she judges form, shape, idea, and what
the commercial breaks of science have reduced to mere coincidences or
chance. She ransacks, time, space, and
all history, no less, to reveal personality and idea—animal, vegetable,
mineral—as live and evolving structures weaving through one another in a
metaphysical dimension way beyond the mundane terms of finite, vegetable life
and death. She does not discover the chattering subtexts below the overt
material world so much as she allows them to speak. When she gives them life, what do we see,
what do we hear?
In this author’s hands states, empires, and whole and entire
geographies become live animals, grazing on rich symbolic pastures. We hear stories of red-hatted, fairy tale
elves seen in a basement; other images are seen in trees which appear to
connect to patterns of cabalistic sorcery.
Photographs and tape recorders, of course, show their usual
misbehaviour. Imps and orbs appear, and
the author herself is sometimes almost transformed, as if the camera is seeing
a person superimposed upon that of the image of the immediate subject.
Sequences of stick-figures are found on postcards, in photographs,
and indeed on the ground itself; such things acting as if they were parts of a
long-forgotten language. Once we
unshackle the strict separations of fact versus fiction, then we see a very
different world structure. In this intermediate, liminal world, the hard spines
of differentiating mechanisms are transformed into systems of individual and
cultural allowances, with inputs and outputs being replaced by permissions and
relationships. Thus is established a dialogue between self-image and symbol; a
relationship largely lost to a mankind controlled by the prime-time frames of
rampant, physical consumerism.
She makes us realise that occult solutions do not so much not
work as they are prevented from working properly by the prevailing
paradigm. The main reason why occult forms often appear as
strangulated forms of complete nonsense is because they are shredded by the barbs
of the allowance systems which try desperately to hold the prime-time, cultural
viewing schedules in place.
But once we penetrate the silver screens and lay aside the deeply
political rules dividing what we should see from what we should not see, then we
get rid of the fact-versus fiction dualities of the mechanical world. The universal lights are switched on again,
relating image and symbol, spirit and matter in one evolving synthesis in which
the myself-it relationship is replaced with the classical I-thou axis.
The Shamanic World
In The Pulse of the Dragon
we enter such a metaphysical world with a vengeance. What does this author see as distinct from
what she should not see? Well, infamous
pirates such as William Kidd, Henry Morgan, and Jean Lafitte, the Jewish
pirate, become bearers of Masonic doctrines, secretly involved in the fate of
nations. Some of the author’s personal
notes on John Keel’s book The Eighth
Tower disappear; this loss Macer-Story attributes to a live chatter of
shamanic entities who appear to be in charge of certain metaphors within
certain emotive statements.
In this shamanic world, of course, every single thing is judged to
be alive: word, symbol, idea, wish, and personality. Texts, concrete matter, and ideas become
virtual animals, and indeed she assumes that a kind of piratical freemasonry
may have impressed itself on the very stones of world, significant structures
such as that of New York Harbour.
She discusses many more such mythological signatures and often
measures things in terms of her own quite clear reincarnation recall. Against such a background, mechanism becomes
a very low-order manifestation. It
emerges as a set of concepts built largely of hard-core trading metaphors, most
of which involve the making of a fast buck.
Generally speaking, mechanism requires that human beings be
measured by the depth of their shoe-leather multiplied by their working
capacity. Neither faith, hope, nor
charity abide in that application of mechanical objectives which led both to
eugenics and ultimately Auschwitz as mere by-products.
All occult operations relate to a third-world interface between
matter and spirit. This is the
working—but not working very well—option as distinct from the two state
solution defined by on or off states. The author uses this three-state framework to
form a theory of entity creation and control very similar to that outlined in
the séance-created Philip the Ghost. [2]
There is much historical evidence to show that when entities are
summoned up, they appear in whatever form is desired and behave as
required. This is Jung’s idea of
participation mystique, in which all the traditional nonsense language of the
ancient alchemical texts may well be encountered, as experienced in abduction
scenes and dialogues with extraterrestrial entities. Scoff as we may, these manifestations are
amongst some of the oldest ideas known to mankind and there is no dismissing
them, even in a time dominated by science.
The Nuts and Bolts of Old Ufology
The Pulse of the Dragon helps us to recover the lost borderland
between matter and spirit. This is an
unstable region whose high strangeness replaces fact-versus-fiction arguments
by web memes stitched into a postmodern fabric.
At its best, this ever-changing media structure represents a techno art
form which is intellectually far superior to the crude nut-and-bolt schemes of
the fact-versus-fiction arguments of the Victorian Station Masters of Old
Ufology.
Like it or not, the non-nut-and-bolt people of the ufological
twilight zone are the Darwinian winners over mechanism. The purple passages from say, Dan Burisch,
Project Camelot, Billy Meier, Richard Hoagland, and the lurid claims of Michael
Salla and Afred Webre of exopolitics, to name but a few, represent a visionary
form made positively ectoplasmic by the web.
Whether we like it or not, the living fabric of the virtual
borderland so well-described by Macer-Story represents story-technology in
action, no pun intended! It is a view of
nothing less than a new kind of matter in which virtual animal forms such as
Bigfoot and George Adamski’s Orthon make equally virtual appearances within the
information-processing fields of mind, a truly cyber entity if ever there was. The
forms described by both Macer-Story and John Keel live quite comfortably
between fact and fiction. Just like
Bigfoot, who leaves no nesting, hunting or fighting swathes, Orthon and his
bell-shaped UFO make equally rare appearances.
These are what could be called fast transient beings and events,
and such things are just as fleeting as any quark or muon. Both relevance and
meaning are matters very much dependent on how the silver screens are adjusted.
Science needs its commercial breaks and prime times just as much as does Howdy
Doody. In many cases it is difficult to
separate the two such broadcast messages as regards content and style.
Such are the new soap-type cultural horizons, and they are going to
change the way we think and how we structure our rationalisations. The wheel, weight, and watch-spring universe
described by dear old Lancelot Hogben in his classic Science for the Citizen is passing away, just as are the weights
and measures, and rules and regulations cosmos of the beloved Victorian Station
Masters of Old Ufology who would seek to
rule our mercifully badly behaved minds.
Individually, such claims as those of SERPO or CHAD—see my essay “Meme Wars: We Have an Agenda” [3]—may
individually be as nonsensical as we judge them to be, but collectively here we
may have our first maps of how an alien mind might work. Such a mind might well use image, symbol, and
metaphor in a form of media reasoning and not any kind of mechanical
rationale.
Purely mechanical study of the UFO phenomenon is almost meaningless
unless it is placed in the Matrix-type
context that both Macer-Story and John Keel put it in. By comparison, recently two very good
ufological brains—and there aren’t many of those around in ufology—wrote a
much-praised book on the supposed Roswell crash. The trouble with this
otherwise admirable book is that it deals with the Roswell incident very much
as a kind of air traffic accident. If
the supposed Roswell craft was alien then this methodology might well be as
useless as going into the boxing ring with an opponent who has four arms and
four legs in round one and three arms and five legs in round two.
In this respect, the construction of an analytical, practical game
plan as regards purely physical interpretations of the UFO experience is very
difficult. For example, concerning
supposed UFO crashes we might well be the hapless victims of a complex alien
media joke. See my essay “Deconstructing
the B-29” [4]
Certainly, Macer-Story’s solution to the mechanical impasse is
interesting. She connects joker entities
as depicted in John Keel’s The Mothman
Prophecies with Ingrid Cold, the claimed extraterrestrial contact of Woody
Derenberger, who wrote Visitors From
Lanulos. [5]
Her analysis here plunges us deep into early ufological folklore:
But what if
this séance “spirit control” is a different order of spirit playing shell games
with identity the way a rogue adventurer such as Armen Victorian… might play
games with forged passports and smuggled orchids? Are we confronted with
“intelligence assets” in a multidimensional contest wherein rewards and
motivations are also many-dimensioned, not limited to money, archaeological
treasure or designated prestige, but include all of these things and a lot more
else located somewhere offshore in the dreamtime?
Why would an intelligent entity stop a
car on Earth and impersonate a tour guide from another planet, even if he/she
was actually from another solar system? What’s the deal? Robbery? Of what? It does look like an
attempted shanghai situation of the car’s driver. What is being impacted? Is it history which
is being targeted, the collective awareness which is being altered by these
inexplicable events? Are individuals with a more developed mental / material
capacity attempting to enter the operative logos of planet Earth and throw a
few switches?
The following quote October 2006 from
the blog of West Virginia Mothman expert Andy Colvin seems a bit surrealist if
one’s daily experience has not been involved with the numerous appearances and
disappearances, impersonations and counter-accusations of the sort that Colvin,
now living in Seattle, describes:
“Since I posted my last article on the
meaning of Indrid Cold’s name, there has been a startling development. The mother of one of my childhood friends
identified Woody Derenger’s psychiatrist, Dr Alan Roberts, as being the same
psychiatrist who treated my friend, Mothman contactee Timothy Thomas Burnham. Burnham claimed he was a warlock and came to
believe he was a vampire. He was
expelled from school for biting another student in the neck. According to the mother, Dr Roberts travelled
between Parkersburg, Huntington, and Charleston specializing in the treatment
of UFO abductees. The book Visitors from
Lanulos by Derenberger states that Dr Roberts—who had a wife and three
children— believed he was taken to the planet Lanulos by Indrid Cold. Cold’s assistant, Demo Hassan (which means
“terror assassin”) was known to have staked out the Roberts home with an
accomplice, while Roberts and his wife were visiting Derenberger and Cold. Hassan creepily left messages on the Roberts’
frosty windows, while the children were alone. Team Cold was known to drive a Volkswagen
bug, the same type of car that John Keel states the MIBs switched to in late
1967. A Volkswagen bug was also driven by the ‘FBI agent’ who came to
investigate the car bombing of Harriet Plumbrook’s father in early 1968. Harriet’s father was an engineer working for
Western Union on the Echelon Project at the Navy’s Sugar Grove, West Virginia,
command-listening post. [6]
Old and New Ufology
Of course to most so-called serious ufological researchers, much of this will appear as utter nonsense. But then, most of such earnest seekers are from a practical engineering, technological, or scientific background which ill-equips them to face the quadruple-takes, comic absurdity, and manifold high strangeness of either the UFO event or the UFO experience.
Their usual practice is to scale down weirdness in terms of prevailing insights until a solution is found in terms of the kind of mechanical explanation much-loved by the MUFON reality commissars. Such explanations are subsequently tooled, mass-manufactured, and constellated as the primetime real, whose stage sets help us to get some sleep at night. Thus, in constructing our protective psychological screens do we deceive ourselves by means of fact as well as fantasy.
Of course, any authors attempting the kind of analysis put forward by Macer-Story must be very brave and strong. They will certainly receive much hostility from lesser earth-bound spirits, particularly in a Protestant materialistic culture. The Pulse of the Dragon may be at times confused or disoriented, but the author hits the beach and heads fast inland to a landscape in which everything that can be imagined can happen.
Once the stage machinery of our rationalisations has been demolished, we enter a strange world which has a language based on image, symbol, and metaphor, and is not based on any strictly mechanistic causation. If we do not update our ufological studies, Old Ufology will be left trotting along the dusty roads of yesteryear.
Once the author allows the chattering subtexts to play and speak, they have a ball. The occult experience splits up into different kinds of live, imagist theatres. The author suffers no failure of nerve as she asks us to follow her through dense thickets of names and associations, stitched together by a cross-referenced catalogue of all history, no less, from the Delphic oracle to characters active in British Intelligence during World War II.
Many of these people—Noel Coward, Roald Dahl, Maxwell Anderson, Sir William Stephenson—were also involved in the arts and showbusiness, and the author suspects that some of them had possible shamanic powers in terms of ritual and mimesis.
In this thoroughly disturbed cosmos events are connected imagistically rather than by any process of social-scientific rationale. Measuring and cataloguing weights and angles, or weight and speed, is much less important than seeing how the images around the abductee experience are created and organised. This is very much New Ufology as against science-based Old Ufology. Again, science proper is as good at measuring non-mechanical systems as it is good at measuring human relationships, namely zero marks out of ten.
If we see an alien carrying a spanner we can be sure that we are being grossly deceived. If we see control panels, as did Betty and Barney and George Adamski, we are being doubly deceived. Such equipment, involving hole cutters, taps, and dies, and stamping, shearing, and folding machines, is well over two hundred years old in our own culture.
As for indicators, the swinging needles of high-impedance voltmeters are long gone with nixie tube displays and hot-valve electronics. Thus, both time and endeavour are marked by technology and personality in the way that Macer-Story suggests. That the dramas behind such endeavours may still be extending themselves in time is another question she raises in her book.
Whenever such non-mechanical complexity is evident then we have to create some means of coming to terms with it. Thus does this author set a relentless pace through a tapestry of cross-stitched and cross-referenced fabric in which mind-boggling jumps are made between names, places, personalities, and motivation. A face becomes a map, a voyage, a ship, a harbour; all mundane things are seen in a very different light to that of common experience. The lives of legendary pirates— Kidd, Morgan—are transformed into mythological elements involving key-setting place names and magical quests.
At times this author’s somewhat explosive technique does not make for easy reading, and some patience is required. She loops, dives, swerves, turns in on herself; frequently she gets lost and presents not a few quite impenetrable paragraphs. But we forgive her; she has some genius, together with a great personal strength, and she does not bother wasting her visionary energies tidying up. Certainly there is no failure of nerve. She is a veritable latter-day Rommel; she crashes through and like many a good mind, leaves the dust of minor arguments and complaints for lesser folk to tidy up.
Yes, this extraordinary book is that good. It is a volatile, one-woman performance show done at a cracking pace. Formal history she replaces by imagist states and metaphysical depths as she paints an intriguing picture of illicit night traffic on the borderlands between matter and spirit.
Thus, we are left quite breathless as dizzying showers of images, symbols, and metaphors descend upon us and we are left suspended in Matrix country, where anything can happen. Finally, we are left looking out through the window of a Gormenghast castle at a bust of Captain Morgan mounted on a tower of Piranesi.
Footnotes
- Eugenia Macer-Story, Eugenia, Pulse of the Dragon: The Secret Knowledge of the Pirates. New York: Magick Mirror Communications, 2009.
- ly/2n45nkp
- UFO Magazine, Vol 22, No. 8, August 2007.
- Anthologised in this volume.
- ly/2mJx1k8
- ly/2nAnpMS; en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Dreamtime