Richard Stanley MySpace Blogs - eBook

MySpace URL: myspace.com/richardstanley13

"As above, so below..."

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MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

Contents MySpace Profile - Richard's Blurbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04 The golden age of piracy! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Kingdom Come! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 LACHRYMAE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 LACHRYYMAE II The Widow's Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 LACHRYMAE III The Devil's Chessboard . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 LACHRYMAE - The Final Chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 CEREMONIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 CEREMONIES II - 1. The homecoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

- 2. Wood Green Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

- 3. Hollow... Loosen… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

- 4. Their ways... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

154 159 162 164

Year Zero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Terra Umbra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

Cover Image: Pattern wall of pile colorful retro television (TV) Image: jakkapan / Shutterstock.com

MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

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Richard Stanley

Richard's Blurbs About me: Richard Stanley is an award-winning South African born writer and filmmaker, a trained anthropologist and veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He has British nationality, native American ancestry, a degree in medieval metaphysics, was initiated as a houn'gan in Haiti and ordained as a reverend by the life church of Modesto, California.

Blog Archive

Stanley learned his trade documenting tribal customs for the South African College of Music before graduating to music videos and throwing off the occasional album cover for bands as diverse as 'The Fields of the Nephilim', 'Public Image Limited' and 'Marilion'. His first feature as a writer and director was the cult sc-ifi movie Hardware, a low budget psychedelic saga of a maddog android on the loose in a futuristic 21st apartment block. Critics slammed it as a Terminator rip-off, yet the film became a financial success. The 1,5 million dollar budget was paid back quite handsomely and continuation was imminent.

Stanley followed Hardware with Dust Devil, returning to Southern Africa to create a nightmarish love letter to his homeland. Using the real life crimes a Namibian serial killer as his starting point the writer-director turned in what may be his most challenging yet most enduring work, a hallucinatory hybrid of seemingly disparate genres. A daemonic African western road movie police procedural romance narrated by a one eyed Drive In movie projectionist.

A fallout with the distributors led to the recutting of the US version, while the bankruptcy of the British-based production company Palace Pictures temporarily shut the postproduction down in Europe and the film remained mauled or unfinished, depending how you look at it. Finally Stanley himself managed to finance a new, restored print from the original negative, which has later gained a cult following similar to Hardware.

Stanley's third feature was to be The Island of Dr. Moreau, an adaptation of the famed H.G. Wells novel. Unfortunately it ended up a victim of creative disputes and the fall-out from the scandalous events surrounding the untimely death of Marlon Brando's daughter, Cheyenne. The finished film, released in 1996, carries little to no resemblance to the version Stanley was originally set to make, using only about two words of his original script. This, however, hasn't beaten the visionary filmmaker down and horror movie fans are now waiting for him to come back... with a vengeance. A new feature concerning a luckless pair of American holiday makers stranded in the middle east by the outbreak of World war III is set to go before the cameras this winter. 'VACATION' described by Stanley as a 'fun-filled romantic holocaust for two' looks set to propel the young writer-director back into notoriety.

In the meantime Stanley has been far from idle, turning in a haphazard series documentaries on subjects matter that tends to stick in the throat of mainstream western television. 'The Voice of the Moon' (1990) is a poetic, visually ravishing record of the events that lead to the onset of the civil war in Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban. 'The White Darkness' (1999) casts an impartial eye over the clash of faiths in present day Haiti as the Baptist missionary movement supported by the occupying American army goes eyeball to eyeball with indigenous Voodoo sorcery. 'The Secret Glory' (2001) is a feature length exploration of the life and bizarre death of Nazi idealogist Otto Wilhelm Rahn culled from over a decade of research and thousands of hours of first hand interviews. 'The Secret Glory' remains unfinished and Stanley has spent much of his time this year embroiled in unpicking the enigma. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and Stanley is only too aware that it may be many years before the full story can be placed before the public.

To know is to die...

Who I'd like to meet: The Great Architect/God.com/Yahweh/Jehovah/Rex Mundi/My agent Whatever force is ultimately responsible for this show...

Not that I'm complaining mind you but a little, responsible, adult leadership would do. Besides I have a few questions...

Failing that would settle 4 dinner with:

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I'd like to get stoned with Hasan ibn Sabah and play chess with Lord Dunsany.

I'd like to ride with Genghis Khan and Geronimo, sleep with Pocahontas and fart about with guns with Sam Peckinpah and Timothy McVeigh.

I'd like to be spat on by Klaus Kinski and kissed by Esclarmonde d'Alion, she of the forests of the Capsir mountain who wandered with the hunted Albigensians, fought like a man and loved like a woman.

My father Ahmed Shah Massood H.G.Wells Orson Welles Count Cagliostero and Count Saint Germaine Ray Harryhausen and Henri Rousseau

I'd like to get high with Thomas de Quincy, drink rum with Jules Verne and Berenger Saunier in the Tour Magdala and drop acid with Clark Ashton Smith.

I'd like to go on a bender with Paul Gauguin and Edgar Allen Poe and go hunting with Robert E Howard.

Failing all else I'd settle for a good, strong cup of coffee and a chance to pat Claudia Cardinale's ass.

MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

I'd like to take H.P.Lovecraft on holiday and show him the world he never had a chance to see, go climbing with Otto Rahn and walkabout with Lewis and Clarke.

Richard's Interests Music Music The Sex Pistols / Creedence Clearwater Revival

Steve Earle / The Judds / Ennio Morricone

Dusty Springfield / Johny Cash / Hank williams

The Doors / Basil Poledouris / Jimi Hendrix

The Grateful Dead / Fields of the Nephilim

Neil Young / Woody Guthrie...

Movies Movies

'Mirror' Andrei Tarkovsky / 'The Wild Bunch' Sam Peckinpah / 'Once upon a time in the West' Sergio Leone / 'Four flies on Grey Velvet' Dario Argento / 'Big Wednesday' John Milius / 'The Ninth Configeration' William Peter Blatty / 'The Man who laughs' Paul Leni / 'Apocalypse Now!' Francis Ford Coppola / 'Fata Morgana' Werner Herzog / 'The Stuntman' Richard Rush / 'The Devil and Daniel Webster' William Dieterle / 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2' Tobe Hooper / 'Ride the High Country' Sam Peckinpah / 'The Golden Voyage of Sinbad' Ray Harryhausen / 'Performance' Donald Cammel/ Nik Roeg / 'The Shout' Jerzy Skolimowski / 'Wise Blood' John Huston / 'Night of the Hunter' Charles Laughton / 'Phantasm' Don Coscarelli / 'The man who would be King' John Huston / 'Pat Garret and Billy the Kid' Sam Peckinpah / 'King Kong' Merian C.Cooper...

Television Television

'The Prisoner' Patrick McGoohan 'Edge of Darkness'Troy Kennedy Martin 'Echoes from a Somber Empire' Werner Herzog 'Geraldo live from Death Row!' Geraldo Rivera 'Q' Spike Milligan 'Twin Peaks' David Lynch

Books Books

'The Necronomicon' - Abdul AlHazred (Latin edition) 'The epic of Gilgamesh' 'The Bible' 'Parsifal' - Wolfram Von Eschenbach 'Le Morte d' Arthur' - Thomas Mallory 'Idylls of the King' - Alfred, Lord Tennyson 'The Arabian Nights' 'Moby Dick' - Herman Melville 'Tales of Mystery and Imagination' - Edgar Allen Poe 'The Manuscript found in Saragossa' - Jan Potocki 'The Return of the Magi' - Maurice Magre 'The Island of Doctor Moreau' - H.G. Wells 'The Man Who Would Be King ' - Rudyard Kipling 'The Mystery of the Cathedrals' - Fulcanelli 'The Great God Pan' - Arthur Machen 'The House on the Borderland' - William Hope Hodgeson 'Time and the Gods' - Lord Dunsany 'At the Mountains of Madness' - H.P.Lovecraft 'Out of Space and Time' - Clark Ashton Smith 'Solomon Kane' - Robert E. Howard 'The Master and Margherita' - Mikael Boelgakov 'The Great Gatsby' - F.Scott Fitzgerald 'Under the Volcano' - Malcolm Lowry 'Crusade Against the Grail' - Otto Rahn 'Gormenghast' - Mervyn Peake 'The Myth of the Eternal Return' - Mercea Eliade 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' - Carson McCullers 'Wise Blood' - Flannery o'Conner 'Deliverance' - James Dicky 'Dispatches' - Michael Herr 'Dog Soldiers' - Robert Stone 'Make Room, Make Room!' - Harry Harrison 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' - Walter M.Millier jr 'I am Legend' - Richard Matheson 'The Final Programme' - Michael Moorcock 'Radio Free Albemuth' - Philip K.Dick 'Aquarium' - Viktor Suvarov 'Shadowland' - Peter Straub 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker' - Jan Harold Brunvand 'Sculpting in Time' - Andrei Tarkovsky '59 degrees and Raining' - Barry Gifford 'The Sea of Perdition' - Grebthor Smoo

MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

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Heroes

the Arab slavers who came before them. It literally means 'heathen' or 'unbeliever' - one who does not subscribe to the ways of the one God - be it Allah or Jehovah - and can hence be officially killed, sold or otherwise treated like a piece of furniture. In 1989 I made my first visit to Kafiristan,the pagan heartland of the Hindu Kush and became perhaps a li'l too involved with the tribal people I found there. I am the tall, skinny dude second from the right. The li'l guy on the far left was called Baram khan but everyone called him mini-muj. Like the 'feral kid' in the Max movies he spoke an obscure mountain dialect that no-one else could understand, not even the other partisans...

In places deep...

Where dark things sleep...

The mass media is the holding pattern of 'consensus' reality. The Shadow Theatre is a non-profit making organization devoted to attacking and destroying that superficially reassuring yet essentially deadly illusion through performance, direct action and the dissemination of images, information and hard evidence that challenges or contradicts the so called 'consensus' opinion in a continuing struggle to liberate our consciousness by whatever means available. Ends justify means...

The documentary's initial images (seen above) were recorded in the heart of the Hindu Kush in the villages of Dudruk and Weigal in the 'Valley of Light' - unvisited by any outsider since the last Chinese trader passed that way in the 1950's. The totem poles, horsehead markers and the decorated faces of the women are relics of a pre-Islamic pagan tradition largely stamped out when Abdur Rahman forcibly converted Kafiristan by the sword in 1910, putting their shamans to death and burning their idols. In the high mountains however the old ways die hard...

As the territory is still effectively living in the dark ages and is wholly unelectrified myself and my cameraman Mr.Horn used old fashioned hand cranked cameras. The surviving footage was recorded on two separate journeys, traveling initially with a UN convoy and then later with a band of Hezb-i-Islami guerillas under the command of General Younis Khalis...

The movement is named after a natural amphitheatre hidden deep in the limestone heart of the Brecon Beacons where the first live shows took place in the mid-eighties...

The Soviet army threw in the towel, officially withdrawing the last of its troops on Valentine's Day 1989. The UN however refused to recognize the guerilla government while it was still in exile, denying vital food aid to the free territories and precipitating a violent struggle for the provincial capital. The battle and subsequent siege of Jalallabad was the single greatest guerilla defeat of the war with the partizans losing some 7000 men in the first week alone. After the first 24 hours we were forced to stop filming and concentrate on staying alive which wasn't as easy as it sounds.

A fuller account of these events can be found on the weblog under the heading 'KINGDOM COME'...

My late compadre, Abou Zarquawi - the former head of Al Quaeda in Iraq - later told a journalist that he often wished he had died in that battle as his 'soul would have made it to heaven faster'if he had. The funny thing is I think I know what he means...

It follows that I found common ground with the medieval Albigensians, the persecuted inhabitants of Occitania who were denounced by the Holy Roman Church as heretics and devil worshippers and whom history remembers as the 'Cathars'. (same word, same derrogatory meaning, different spelling)

The initial private displays drew heavily on African witchcraft, local mythology and the works of a now all but forgotten magician and acrobat named Coleman Collins who toured between the wars with a troupe of Irish tumblers and vaudevillians known as 'Mr.Peet and his Wandering Boys'.

Their grande farewell performance at the Wood Green Empire on August 27 1924 was so gaudy no-one came out alive although some believe Collins faked his death by substituting another body for his own before escaping to a new life in America. Some say the test of a true magician is that he does not use his powers in ordinary life. Collins however was adamant"the test of a true magician is that he has no ordinary life."

The word 'kafir' is a racial insult commonly used by white South Africans who adopted it from 06

They say the sun shone more brightly in those days and the woman were more beautiful. The colors were deeper and more vibrant as I remember them being in the mountains of Afghanistan without the veil of smog that has hung over us since the industrial revolution...

By the dawn of the 13th century the world was lit only by fire yet there was a school of Jewish medicine in Toulouse and a school of magic in Salamanca. The south embraced equal rights and democracy of a sorts. Above all they embraced the code of chivalry...

If I had to single out one hero and role model from the scrap heap of history I would have to choose Esclarmonde d'Alion also known as Esclarmonde the Bastard, the illegitimate niece of

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the last high priestess of the Albigensians. She was conceived after her father, the Comte de Foix, became lost while hunting a wolf in the forests of the Ariege and spent the night at a convent where he duly deflowered the apparently willing abbess. In the fullness of time the abbess begat twins - the girl she named Esclarmonde (literally the light of the world)and the boy was called 'Loup' after his father's exploit on the night of their conception. Esclarmonde the bastard grew up at a distance from her father's court, sequestered in a strange octagonal tower on the Comte's estate in Belpech where according to the superstitious gossip of the day the young sorceress wandered the woods consorting with the wild wolves and 'certain dethroned pagan divinities' whose language she was said to speak and whom she was supposed to have 'called down from their homes in the mountains' to come to the aid of the south against the murderous French crusaders who sought to annihilate their language, culture and ultimately expunge their very existence from the history books.

Esclarmonde was betrothed to the Lord of Usson as part of a typically feudal land deal but fled the loveless marriage to live as an outlaw in the trackless woodland of the Capsir Mountains.

She wore her hair in shoulder length braids and painted her skin with phosphorescent paint so that the credulous Christian marauders would think her and the others who rode beside her, the sons and daughters of Belisenna, were spirits rather than flesh and blood. Some even came to believe she was the Antichrist incarnate, the avatar or 'living tabernacle' of the Elder Gods - the 'saint of saints' of an unknown religion. She fought in countless skirmishes in defense of her vanishing homeland, lit the night beacons that were the only means of communication between the scattered partisans and organized the shepherds to push over the rocks that crushed the crusaders as they marched through the gorges below. Many a knight dreamed of this ardent girl and according to historian Maurice Magre 'she gave herself to more than one of them, beside her horse and her sword, in the shade of the Pyrenean pines...'

With the help of her twin brother, Loup, she helped refugees flee the besieged fortress of Montsegur and smuggled vital supplies into the stronghold. The supreme effort of resistance was made round Montsegur, at So, Tarascon and Lavelanet and for two years the last bastion of the south held out against the Teutonic knights, the Roman Pope, the kings of France, the spanish inquisition and the merciless Simon de Montfort, founder of the British bicameral parliamentary system.

Some say Esclarmonde perished beside the other defenders when the castle fell on March 16 1244 or fled with her brother and the other survivors who were remorselessly hunted through the mountain passes by packs of trained hounds before being cornered in the grotto of Ornolac where they were buried alive by troops under the command of the Seneschal of Toulouse who thought it expedient to seal the cave's entrance and substitute a slow death in the darkness for public martyrdom at the stake or gallows. Some believe Esclarmode d'Alion did not die her brother that day but somehow lives on standing watch over her kingdom, that she is there even now and will always be there, one hand raised above the clouds in the ancient sign of greeting. It is to her I swear my sword and dedicate my heart ...

I first visited Montsegur in the early nineties while working as a researcher for Channel Four Television's religion department. The producers had made a hit show entitled 'The Real Jurassic Park' about the extraction of dinosaur DNA from amber and now wanted to do the same for the 'Raiders' franchise, dispatching me to Europe to hunt down the remaining members of Heinrich Himmler's pre-war archeological department, a division of the 'Ahnenerbe SS' under the command of the deranged rune mage and SS Gruppenfuher Karl Maria Willigut alias 'WEISTHOR' who had scoured the world for proof of the Nazi leadership's ever more outlandish racial and scientific theories. I became increasingly intrigued by the career of one of Willigut's subordinates - the German Jewish folklorist and Grail historian Otto Wilhelm Rahn who was supposed to have perished under mysterious circumstances during a storm in the Alps shortly before the outbreak of the war. There are those who believe that Rahn had found or had come close to finding the most precious relic in Christendom - the most high Holy Grail - and paid for this knowledge with his life. His story was to become the basis of an ongoing multi-part documentary entitled 'THE SECRET GLORY'...

Rahn was aided and abetted by a descendant of the de Foix clan, the Countess de Pujol Murat, who was apparently acting under the direct instruction of her own ancestor, the immortal Esclarmonde, whom she claimed to have physically encountered in the north facing tower of the castle. While I initially dismissed the wild rumors about Otto's mission and the castle's ageless guardian as pure delirium my skepticism was to be challenged by some of the most bizarre, improbable and at times deeply terrifying phenomena I have ever borne witness to including what can only be described as a freak electrical storm in the keep itself, a display of primal, superhuman force that came within a breath of reducing myself and my companion to husked out cinders... A fuller account of these strange and somewhat challenging events can be found in the weblog 'LACHRYMAE 3: THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD' Although Rahn himself is dead the events set in motion by his quest continue to ramify into the present day, prompting my return to Montsegur in the summer of 2007 and an ongoing investigation whose outcome I have yet to place before the public. 'The trail of the 'White Lady' continues... .. The crusaders destroyed Montsegur along with Occitania's language and culture yet some vestige of its science lives on , encoded in the symbolic language of gothic art and architecture, in the stonework of the great cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dames and in the songs, words and images of the modern mass media that has become the holding pattern of our collective consciousness..

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Fulcanelli, the master alchemist alluded to in Dario Argento's 'INFERNO'(1980) Miichele Soavi's 'LA CHIESA' (1989) and Guillermo del Toro's 'KRONOS' (1993) seeks to define the meaning and origins of 'Gothic art'in his discourse 'THE MYSTERY OF THE CATHEDRALS' (1925) in which he argues that the term 'art gothique' is a corruption of 'argotique' linking it to the 'Goetic' or magical art through the phonetic cabala. The dictionary definition of 'argot' is that of 'a language peculiar to all individuals who wish to communicate their thoughts without being understood by outsiders'. A self-censoring secret communicable only to the elect. What Fulcanelli defines as the"language of a minority of individuals living outside accepted laws, conventions, customs and etiquette…"The language of the humble, the poor, the despised, the rebels and wanderer, the vagrants of the Court of Miracles and the Freemasons of the Middle Ages who built the gothic masterpieces we admire today...

In 'real' life Jules Violle could be commonly found in his favorite drinking hole - the Parisian 'Cabaret du Chat- Noir' or 'Black Cat Club' which he warmly describes in the second volume of his trilogy 'The Houses of the Philosophers' (1929) -"Many of us remember the celebrated ChatNoir but how many knew of the esoteric and political centre that was concealed there, of the international masonry that was hidden behind the signboard of the artistic cabaret. On the one hand, the talent of fervent, idealistic youth made up of carefree, blind aesthetes in search of glory and incapable of suspicion; on the other hand, the confidence of a mysterious science mixed with obscure diplomacy, a dual faced picture deliberately exhibited in a medieval frame..."

The 'Caberet du chat Noir' was the home of the notorious anarcho-esoteric theatre company - 'Le Theatre d' Ombres' better known to us now as ' The Shadow Theatre' and whose first production at the Black Cat Club was a little confection entitled 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony' a cracking show by all accounts and yet another 'coincidence' in the endless spiral of maddening synchronicity.

Perhaps as Kazanian the aleurophobic book seller in 'INFERNO' so baldly and simply states:-"The only true mystery is that our very lives are governed by dead people...

My own work dovetails with the research of Patrick Riviere among others leaving little doubt that in so-called 'real life' the master alchemist was none other than the eminent French physicist Jules Violle, a member of the Academy of Sciences and inventor of the calorimeter. Violle's discoveries, seemingly back-engineered from the hermetic science of the middle ages proved instrumental to our understanding of nuclear physics and the construction of the Hadron supercollider due to go online this year in Cern, Switzerland.

While undoubtedly a genius the vanished adept known only to his disciples as 'Fulcanelli' (a contraction of 'Vulcan' and 'Helios' - Vulcan being, you may recall, the weaponsmith of the Gods) would appear nonetheless to be a dead adept having apparently passed in his home town, the tiny village of Fixin on September 12, 1923, at the age of 83. Of course there are a few irregularities surounding his demise. His son , Henri, signed the death certificate rather than the local coroner and I am fully aware of Eugene Canseliet's long standing claim of having met the master years later in Seville where he is meant to live and work to this day, an ageless alchemical hermaphrodite operating out of a ghostly manor that cannot be found on any earthly map, existing seemingly in a fold in space-time...

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In his masterly inaugural lecture ('On the Eloquence of the Vulgar') delivered to the first M.A course in film studies to be offered in the United Kingdom professor Colin McCabe justified the study of film and television by comparing it to the study of Italian at the time of Dante when Latin was considered the language of civilization and Italian was seen as the language of the masses. Dante wanted the readership of his 'DIVINE COMEDY' to be his fellow citizens, the people from whom he felt himself exiled, rather than simply the scholars. If he had written in Latin he would, he tells us in the 'CONVIVIO' have been advancing his own career but would himself have been prostituting literature. Instead he wanted to write for those who were 'volgari e non litterati', those who were increasingly able to read Italian although formally unlettered. Just as Italian replaced Latin as the language of the masses so film, television and the internet have displaced conventional literature as the vernacular of our times.

In this light it should come as no surprise that just as the powers that be seek in vain to control the medium so too can one find in the most stigmatized of popular forms, in what is commonly tagged 'gothic' music and the creaky horrors of Lovecraft and Argento the attributes of Fulcanelli's secret language. A symbolic truth hidden in a ghetto genre, neglected by mainstream criticism and the current definition of 'art'.

This is indeed the art of the hidden. The projector or monitor has become the new conveyor of the art of light and at fusion frequency, at 33 frames a second an ancient mystery lives on, casting the heretical illusion of life across the shining screen, an illusion born out of the ceaseless friction of light and dark. What Apollonius of Tyanna and the soothsayer Tiresius called 'the Language of the Birds'. The language Solomon knew before he lost his seal and was forced to go eyeball to eyeball with Asmodeus…

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The origins of the motion picture apparatus if not the roots of the modern mass media itself are intertwined with medieval 'heresy' and the so-called 'dark art' of sorcery. The gimmick that ate the medium. A cheap conjurer's trick that eventually took over the auditorium and ousted the human performers....

Stage magician George Melies was the first to grasp the camera's capacity to lie after licensing the first projector from the Lumiere brothers who drew inspiration from Roget's famous pamphlet on fusion frequency which was in turn derived from the zoetrope or moving picture wheel, a toy of the devil shunned for centuries by the Catholic church who like the modern day Taliban deemed its capacity to mimic the 'illusion of life' inherently heretical. In point of fact the 'magic lantern' enters the history books with Giovanbattista Della Porta's experiments in light and shadow using a device described as a 'thaumaturgic' in the' Magiae Naturalis' probably the same early form of motion picture projector as the Lucernae Magicae seu Thaumaturgae described by the Jesuit monk Kircher in the second edition of his 'Arsmagna Lucis et Umbrae.'

Kircher wrote his treatise in 1646 but it is generally conceded that the device was in use long before its closely guarded secret appeared in print. The famous Italian goldsmith, Benvenuto Cellini, recorded in detail his meeting with a notorious Sicilian magus during his visit to Rome in 1540. While discussing the 'magical arts' with the sorceror Cellini remarked that he would like to see someone invoke demons and the older man calmly offered to produce a horde of them for his benefit. The ruins of the Colosseum were chosen by the magus as a suitable spot for such a demonstration and Cellini arranged to meet him there the following evening, bringing along one of his friends to act as as a credible witness. Within the silence of the vast amphitheatre the necromancer drew circles in the dust and kindled a fire upon which he tossed various substances that produced a dense column of perfumed smoke. He then began a lengthy incantation while there appeared about the circle a vast array of devils which according to Cellini completely filled the Collosseum.

The sorcerer called the demons by name while Cellini's friend shook with fear, pointing out four gigantic devils in full armour who seemed to be riding across the walls of the ancient auditorium.

In an effort to reassure the trembling onlookers the magus told them the demons were in fact only smoke and shadows. Indeed they gradually diminished in number, their outlines fading from view as the smoke cleared...

While some sceptics dismiss Cellini's account as pure fiction it seems more probable the author is simply exagerating an actual experience as was his custom throughout the autobiography. From the given account it seems the Sicillian warlock was using a mechanical device, possibly operated by hidden accomplices to achieve the ghostly illusion. This sort of skullduggery dates back to ancient times when concave metal mirrors were used in pagan temples to project brilliant lights and even images upon various surfaces including smoke, a theory supported by British historian and archeologist Sir David Brewster. The smoke from the fire may have caught occasional images but the mighty background of the Colosseum itself is the only sure solution to the mystifying effect otherwise the sorceror would surely have chosen some other, more convenient venue.

The name of the thaumaturge mentioned in Cellini's account has sadly not come down to us but his Sicillian origins bring to mind the order of the 'Faithful in Love' described by Dante that allegedly traced its roots all the way back to 12th century 'Cathar' prophet Nicetas himself. Hence it may come comes as little surprise that the design of Montsegur, the oldest of the 'Cathar' castles, themselves the earliest examples of 'gothic' stonework to be found in Europe resembles the design of a pinhole camera acutely aligned to the rising sun at the summer solstice...

It goes without saying that Kircher's 'Arsmagna' is a seriously weird book that draws heavily on an all but forgotten alchemical / hermetic tradition. While some of the plates remain obscure to modern analysts Kircher nonetheless arrives at real science, his work proving vital to the development of the henakitoscope (1832), the zoetrope (1860), the kinemetoscope (1861), the kineograph (1861), and the praxinoscope (1877) and finally Thomas Alva Edison's kinetoscope (1899). Edison had a pet name for the tar papered studio in West Orange, NJ where all his prototypical films were made. He called it the 'Black Maria' - a term richly if inadvertently redolent of the image to whom Inago de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits and Kircher in turn dedicated their lives - Our Lady of Darkness - 'La Morenita' - the Black Madonna of Montserrat...

Graphic representation of a pinhole camera

Rays of light travel from the object, through the picture plane, and to the viewer's eye. This is the basis for graphical perspective.

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My mother was a graphic illustrator. She picked up the early Warren comics for their covers and they turned out to be the best reading primers a boy could ask for. Uncle Creepy was my surrogate dad and he taught me everything I know from the vivid use of color to my warped, antiauthoritarian values. I think I only became a film-maker because I knew I didn't have the talent to make it as a comic artist! These guys shaped the way I saw things long before I set foot in a cinema...

You can forget Clint Eastwood or Stephen King! The first time I saw the walking dude was the front cover of this magazine when I was four years old! The apartheid regime had a 'thing' about the devil and this was the first comic book to be officially banned by the regime and removed from the shelves. I guess something about that smile must have resonated. For them, and for me...

Miramax commissioned Frank Frazetta to design the original 'HARDWARE' campaign but my real influence was an underrated visionary named Vaughn Bode.

Forget 'TERMINATOR' and '2000 AD! This is where the story really started...

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MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

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Richard Stanley

The golden age of piracy!

Current mood: moody

Blog Archive Sunday, July 01, 2007

Still raining here in River City, streets clogged with police cars and marauding spooks. Worse still the aborted nail bombing last night has lead to all sorts of ordinary decent criminals being apprehended under draconian new anti-terror laws. Accordingly the normally reliable 24/7 soft drug / ice cream / pirate DVD / software delivery service in my 'hood has gone on the fritz. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind but they do such good Belgian waffles. Blowing up stockbrokers and city folk may be one thing but this is barbaric! I have half a mind to write to uncle Osama and complain. How are we supposed to smoke the US out of Afghanistan if the Man can't even get past the roadblocks?

And on top of everything else I have to deal with this?!? (just in from Shadow Theatre Continental Op. SEBASTIAN Pk.) At first I thought it was something I made in some other, parallel universe even more creatively impoverished than this one, the work of the same auteur as 'FLYBOY' and 'DEMONIACA ' Basically the disc is a fuzzy blow up of everyone's favourite exploding 'droid movie inexplicably dubbed into French, retailing at the bargain basement price of 2 Euros! (I guess someone's making money out of it at least.) My one question being: "Who the **** is Frank Zagarino?"

Ah well... Blame it on the age we live in! Never a dull moment for the Shadow Theatre legal department and this particular rag assed veteran of the psychic wars.

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To paraphrase the Book of Mark, Chapter thirteen:"..nation shall rise against nation and false prophets shall appear to distribute diverse dubs and fuzzy dupes to tempt even the elect! But they shall see 'em comin' a mile off and hold on to their bucks accordingly..."

As for the real thing? There's some pretty seismic activity going down over here although sadly I can't be more specific. Need 2 know basis only. Ends justify means. But the big boys seem 2 dig my pitch for HARDWARE 2 GROUND 0. ("Think of it as a 'remake', like 'TRANSFORMERS' only so much... cheaper!!!")

Not to mention R-rated. If we shoot for an X we can always include the delated scenes on DVD , another gift for the buccaneers of the high frequencies who will doubtless be flogging copies out of their car boots before principal photography has even commenced, unless al Quaida and the roadblocks gobble'em up en route!

And still it rains, hammering down on the grimy rooftops of River City, finding its way down into the dreams of the righteous and unrighteous alike. Looks set to be one helluva storm, brothers and sisters, and a long, dark night! Just remember wherever you are, on land or sea stay vigilant, stay tuned to this channel and above all keep the faith! I promised you a few surprises at the off and you ain't seen nothin' yet.

This is just the lemon next to the pie. It's gonna get bigger. A whole lot bigger...

THIS IS RICHARD STANLEY13 THE LAST FREE MAN IN WEST LONDON SIGNING OFF**********FULL MOON JUNE 2007****************TRANSMISSION ENDS************************

MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

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Richard Stanley

Kingdom Come!

Current mood: awake

Dark out there. So dark.

Been raining so long I can't imagine it any other way.

And I'm alone at this keyboard and although I'd rather be asleep or getting laid or catching the sun some place I got no choice because there are things I have to tell you that can't wait. Things that concern our survival as a species in the long term and my survival in the here and now as a living, breathing blog-writing film director with a thriving MySpace site and a bunch of irons in the production fire.

Blog Archive Thursday, August 16, 2007

I knew this period would be a transient one and all the signs seem to indicate my tenure in this drowning city is drawing to an end, at which point these postings will grow less frequent. I warned at the top there was an agenda at work here. A madness to my method. When I made my first posting a couple of months ago there were only a handful of you. I salute those who have been here long enough to recall the manifesto I ran at the beginning and welcome all who have found this site since. The virtual tribe now numbers more than six hundred souls, six hundred jpegs in the Shadow Theatre inbox. Chickenfeed compared to the ten thousand plus views recorded for my last blogs. Enough to get myself corporate sponsorship were I that way inclined, which I ain't. Ten thousand, silent hits. All but invisible. Could be anyone. Random Google searches. Journalists looking for copy. Fans looking for gossip. Entertainment lawyers lookin' for action. Your mother. My mother. Ex-girlfriends. What have you.

Except I have Spyware and various resources at my disposal such as Lauri Löytökoski in Finland, who has been recording similar unidentified cybertraffic on the unofficial site Between Death and the Devil @ www.everythingisundercontrol.org/nagtloper/, and we know darn well what audience we're playing to. While much of the banter over the last weeks has been perfectly lighthearted, I dropped odd details into the blogs for reasons that may have seemed unclear at the time. This was because I have been aware there were bigger fish than you might imagine cruising these cybershallows. I now intend to introduce you to our nameless guests and make this blog's agenda clear.

Friends, fellow surfers, assembled skins of the virtual tribe I would like you to meet the hidden rulers of your world or at least their emissaries: wakko.whs.mil And what does that stand for, you ask? mil is for military, oh my brothers and whs is Washington Headquarters Services.

"WHS provides consolidated administrative and operational support to several Defense Agencies, DoD Field Activities, the headquarters and various elements of the military departments, the White House, and to some degree Congress."- From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_ Headquarters_Services) In case you doubt me (which is only natural), the IP address for wakko.whs.mil is 140.185.96.57.

OrgName: The Pentagon OrgID: THEPEN Address: OPN-BM, Pentagon Address: Rm BE884 City: Washington StateProv: DC PostalCode: 20310 Country: US Please step into the light, gentlemen! Don't be shy.

Forgive the Spyware but some things are best dealt with in the open. I know we're all supposed to be on the same side, but in this war, you can never be too sure, and if I have to stand alone against you then do not expect me to do so in silence. Not unless you do the honorable thing, unblock my credit cards and pay me off, at which point I'll happily cooperate in any and all investigations, sign the official secrets act and never say another blessed word about it. Until then I have a reputation and a livelihood to defend.

Brothers and sisters, fellow Americans, tax payers one and all, meet your 'elected' government. The Pentagon, the White House and 'to some degree' Congress! ..tr> ..table>

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MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

Since I've obviously got your attention I thought I'd tell you a story. It's an old story and you've probably heard it before, but to set the record straight I will try to tell you about my role in 'World War Three' - not my choice of words, but that's how the spook phrased it when he debriefed myself and Ms. Moor at Grosvenor Square a few days after 9/11. He went by the name of 'James'.

Not to mention their friends: ns.nic.ddn.mil / Defense Information Systems Agency aos.arl.army.mil / U.S. Army Research Lab afis.osd.mil My, my! What a bunch! Step forward and take a bow!

The walking dude sends the ancient sign of greeting and welcomes you to his campfire.

Now you might be telling yourself I'm a natural paranoid making mountains out of molehills, that a janitor or bored public servant was probably just foolin' around on an in-house terminal but my techno-savvy cohort, Lauri, records 143 Page views and 1483 Hits on a single file alone which seems like an awful lot of foolin' to me.

Like it or not there's no way of avoiding the fact that Lauri and myself along with most of the other Shadow Theatre Irregulars and God knows how many others on this site are under surveillance from the powers that be. Why? Because although I may be a filmmaker and a fantasist, it seems I may have gotten one or two things right along the way. Of course the problem with messengers is they tend to get shot, which is why I'm posting this screed and having examined all the angles I believe I'm within my rights.

We were referred to him directly by CIA, Langley and did our best to cooperate under the circumstances. Most of what I reproduce has been printed elsewhere as sleeve notes for Subversive Cinema's Dust Devil disc (although the garbled text managed to get pretty much every Afghan name back to front and sideways). This statement is essentially a fuller, amended version merged with material culled from recent private mails. I chose to make the content of those mails available to save the intelligence community the effort of rummaging through the inbox's and to hopefully preserve my friends privacy, something that matters a lot to dodgy, liberal, long-haired types like myself at the end of the day.

For those who know this already, you can tune out now as I doubt you will gather anything new from this hoary yarn, give or take a few trivial corrections. For the rest here is the full existing account of how I got myself into this mess.

I hope you're sitting comfortably!

MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

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Gonna Try for the Kingdom if I Can - An Open Letter to the Pentagon I have the dark hair and eyes of my native American great-grandmother, whose partner was a plantation overseer in Trinidad, dark enough to feel a natural antipathy for the blue-eyed Afrikaners. The rest of me is Anglo-Welsh colonial stock, transplanted to the southernmost tip of Africa, where I was born and raised. There was a military tradition in the family and after cadet school, where I excelled in the school shooting team, I might have expected to become an officer.

Only I hated everything the South African army stood for.

The Afrikaners justified Apartheid by telling themselves they were fighting Godless communism.

It was the time of the Angolan bushwar and everyone knew there were Russian T-62 tanks and Cuban troops waiting just across the border, ready to roll on Pretoria at any time. One more proxy war between capitalism and communism fought at a sufficient distance to preserve a couple of generations from the fire Stateside. Certainly none of my family wanted to admit they were basically killing black people for a living. For me there were only two alternatives. Stay and serve time as a deserter or get the hell out of Dodge.

I knew I didn't belong in Africa but in some other place which matched my hair and eyes, some homeland I'd never seen.

Staying just one jump in front of the military police and a none too promising career in the stockade, I high-tailed it across the border to Namibia (formerly the German colony of South West Africa) and hence to Frankfurt, the Netherlands, and finally, London, where I joined the Committee on South African War Reservists (COSAWR) and held a torch outside the embassy in Trafalgar Square, but my relatives shrugged it off, preferring to believe I was too chickenshit to face up to the communist threat than to accept my opinions as a genuine challenge to their warped morality. So I went to Afghanistan instead.

Noir Desir - Always Lost in the Sea (Full clip available at YouTube) We're in the background of a video for Noir Desir, Desir that, for some reason, played for years on the Paris Metro. I'm sitting in a boat just off the Norfolk coast somewhere in the late 80's beside the huddled outline of Paul Trijbits, who would later become the head of the Film Council and, for a while, the 'most powerful man in the British film industry', watching lead singer, Bernard Cantat (later jailed for the murder of his girlfriend Marie Trintignant) doing his thing in the vessel ahead. Carlos is standing beside us, oar in hand like some sort of Volga boatsman, immediately identifiable by his Afghan pachul and threadbare Italian army jacket, all three of us staring into the mist, headed some place else.

The second Nephilim video, Blue Water, hadn't turned out the way we wished, largely because of bad luck in running into one of the worst storms in British history, making the resulting cut into something of a salvage job. It was a tough old winter, I had just been ditched by my first girlfriend and those earliest wounds are always the deepest. Either way, I was in a Devil-may-care mood, and offered to pay Carlos's expenses if he could get me across the border into Afghanistan.

We first entered the country as part of a UN food convoy, distributing flour to the border area east of Jallalabad. Frustrated by the rigid protocols which forced us to stick to a carefully defined route, I resolved to return the only way I could, by embedding myself with one of the burgeoning fundamentalist parties along with two fellow westerners, cameraman Mr. Horn and former Wall Street banker Carlos Mavroleon.

With Carlos's aid, we threw in our lot with the Hezb-i-Islam under General Younis Khalis, but the war and the ideologies that motivated it held little interest or attraction for me, other than having effectively left the country culturally isolated, cut off from the mainstream of the 20th century.

Precisely the conditions I was looking for!

Carlos was the son of a Greek shipping tycoon with demons of his own to grapple with. Islam offered him a way out of his various addictions, but I guess changing his name to Kari Mullah and taking up arms against the Soviets was hardly what his parents had in mind when they put him through Harvard. By the time we met in '89, they had more or less disinherited him and he was down and out in London, doing any odd job he could find to save up enough money to return to the Jihad. In fact he was driving a truck on a video shoot when we first got talking, bitching about the gears being as tricky as the stickshift on a BTR-60, a lightweight Soviet troop transporter used in the invasion of Afghanistan.

In fact you can still see us debating our options now but you'll have to look carefully.

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I had studied anthropology at College and knew that the Native Americans and the Inuit were related to the tribal people and horse cultures of northern and central Asia, people like the Yakut, the Evenki, the Tungus and the Goldi, who still cling to their shamanic beliefs, the old religion that dates back to Cro-Magnon man, to the Ice Age and the cave paintings of Lascaux and Troisfrere (see image).

The Hopis speak of their ancestors entering America via a back door now blocked by ice, and if those tribal people were moving north across the roof of the world, then it figures they were probably spreading south as well, into the mountain locked vastness of the Karakorums, Himalayas and Hindu Kush, where time moves at a very different rate and the distant past is still a recent memory. While still a bone of academic contention, it does not seem unlikely to me that the lost tribes of Kafiristan may represent the remnants of that first migration (3rd - 2nd millennium B.C.) of pagan IndoEuropean people from South Russia and Central Asia.

In Europe, the old ways have been banished for centuries, but in Kaffiristan the tradition survived until 1910, when Abdur Rahman brought Islam to the Hindu Kush and forcibly converted its people by the sword. Barely a lifetime ago in a country where news travels slowly and there are still white spots on the maps which simply read 'relief data incomplete'. Close one eye and the men become braves, the patouks become ponchos, the mud-walled villages are revealed as pueblos and those dark-haired children that ran, jibing at the hooves of our horses seem awfully familiar.

In point of fact, the Afghans made for poor Muslims. I never saw a woman wearing a veil in the high villages, and their faces were decorated with henna and golden jewelry that bore the same strange patterns such as surviving roof beams scavenged from the earlier temples and some of the horsehead marker stones in the graveyards, literally the spirit horses that carry the dead on their journey to the underworld.

In South Africa the word 'kaffir' was a racist insult, a fighting word, the word the slavers had used for their heathen cargo. But Kaffiristan was the land of the pagan, of the unbeliever, the very last to be converted to anything. Sir George Scott Robertson accurately states that"civilization fell asleep centuries ago in Kafiristan".

Quintus Rufus makes mention of them in 50 A.D., and Arrian in approximately 100 A.D., while Herodotus describes similar people apparently living in Ethiopia! There is definite evidence of bloody confrontations with Tamerlane (May, 1398 A.D.) and the Moghul Emperoer, Babur (1507 A.D.).

Before 1910, the people of the Hindu Kush worshiped a supreme being, Imra (whose prophet was Moni), a fertility Goddess Dizani (or Dizni, which has a certain ironic ring to it), a rain God Suteran, and a devil/trickster (also the God of money!) Ba-Gisht, identifiable by his missing thumbs or forefingers. Even now, there are villages where the Wahabis fear to tread and where some perform an ancient ecstatic dance (akin to Haitian 'Voodoo'), known as the Attani Meli kaishana, or 'The Dance of the Animals', in which the hunters become possessed by the 'spirits of the animals they hunt', an ecstatic rite also practiced in remote corners of Chitral.

Of course dogs are unclean in Islam (if one licks your hand you have to wash before being allowed to pray), so the accusation that the neighboring tribe are 'dogs', or 'wolves wearing human skin', has to be taken with a certain pinch of salt, yet stories persist (A northern alliance commander recently on trial in London for war crimes was accused amongst other things of feeding his prisoners to a 'human dog' he apparently kept in a pit for this very purpose!). There are no jails or mental hospitals in the mountains and it is possible some villages have become human garbage bins, populated by social outcasts and murderous brigands, but underneath it all beats another, deeper rhythm, one I recognized.

I thought the people of the high mountains were the last survivors of a culture literally freezedried from an earlier epoch, and would have given my life to defend them, but my companion, Mr. Horn (who came closer to death than I on that journey), quietly disagreed. For him, they were people of the future, a race that would endure to repopulate the earth, once our civilization has gone the way of all histories and our technologies are one with the dust.

And their women were beautiful and their men were strong and wore strange flowers plaited into their long floppy hair as they danced, jumping one by one over the sacred fire...

MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

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Unloading ammunition at Islam Dara (stills courtesy of Immo Horn, 1989).

If I could get it down to one image, my war in thumbnail, it was that Hind helicopter gunship carved on a cave wall as a warning to future generations in Am-La, the valley of light. Beside it was the outline of the aeroplane that had crashed some years before in the mountains above Dudruk. Finding no survivors, the locals had cut up the wreck and turned it into something useful, raw material for plough blades and irrigation pipes. A few days later, the 'choppers had come and strange men had disembarked speaking a language no-one could understand, the first outsiders to enter the valley since the 1940's, when their previous visitor had been a Chinese trader, who had walked in through the Wakhan corridor, dragging his bad-tempered pack animals behind him (I was shown a coin minted in the time of Pu-Yi, the wartime puppet emperor).

When the Spetsnaz found the remains of their downed Mig, they rounded up the locals, brandishing guns and shouting angry, incomprehensible words. Before leaving, they blew up most of Dudruk and shot all the men they could find between 15 and 50 as an example to the others.

Those who were left, had rebuilt their lives and repaired the shattered walls of their homes accordingly, and when they were done they carved a picture of the craft into the rock so that it might last 10,000 years, so that all could see it and know to fear it if it came again. It might as well have been a flying saucer, like something Erich von Daniken would've creamed himself over...

Two years ago, an American Special Ops unit got mislaid in the same area. Before sending in the choppers to pick 'em up, the yanks decided to bomb the surrounding villages first, a routine 'softening up' exercise to make certain the rescue party met with no resistance. Those valleys were one of the few earthly paradises I have been privileged to enter, and had I still been there now, I don't doubt I would have fired on those boys as readily as I would have fired on the Russians in the 80's. As with most modern warfare, you never really get to see the faces of the people you're fighting. We were bombed and strafed often enough, but the only Russians I got to see up close were dead ones. Two kids who probably never even knew what country they were in. Held hostage and then shot after being captured near Abdul Kheil, their bodies were heaved into a fox-hole and fed to the dogs. What was left of them was nothing like human. I felt neither 18

disgust nor pity. Instead, I went and found a shadow to sit in and cracked open a few more walnuts with my AK's banana clip. It was hot in the sun and I dozed off and had an absurd dream about flat-hunting in London.

We were all on the same side back then. America had armed the Afghans willy-nilly, fighting the cold war by proxy and inevitably backed the most right wing, fundamentalist elements, the same forces supported by the Saudis and the young Sheik, Osama bin Laden, who was still cutting roads. Let's get this clear at least. I am not now nor have I ever been a Muslim any more than I am a Christian or a Communist, and have no sympathy for the Wahibis, who, in my eyes, are symptomatic of the same murderous intolerance as the fanatics who put the kafir priests to the sword in 1910, or threw the last of the Cathars onto the bonfire after the fall of Montsegur in 1244. I make Sci-Fi horror movies. Hanging videotapes from trees just never appealed. The Wahabis were religious fanatics and foreigners, Arabs, who were paid for their services, unlike the Afghans, who had no choice but to fight. For their sins, the Wahabis felt much the same way about me and would have killed me on sight had they known I was a Westerner, but in times of chaos, your enemies' enemy is oft-times your friend and for the while, an uneasy truce existed.

I think the first contact I had with Sheik Osama, and the group that were to become the rump of the nebulous movement known to you as 'Al Qaeda', was at a hastily convened sitting of the ad-hoc guerilla government (or 'shura') in Chiga Serai, a tiny trading town on the Kunar river, that was briefly declared the capital of free Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, in the vain hope of gaining some form of recognition from the outside world. The kind of town where you could buy boiled sweets, chick peas, bullets, flour, heroin, gasoline, hashish or plastique all under one roof. What I'd call 'one stop shopping'.

We were the only Westerners present and I made the mistake of approaching the Wahabis to see if they had fresh batteries for my Sony Walkman.

MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

My sympathies were always with the tribal people, who mistrusted the Arabs just as they mistrusted all outside forces that sought to meddle in their ways. While I made firm friends with the Afghans, Carlos, seemingly an old hand, belonged to neither one side or another. Possessed of the missionary zeal of a recent convert, he seemed fearful of the pagan ways that drew me from the council of white-bearded mullahs and back to the high pastures at every turn. He was confused by how I could choose to film the sunset or sit, watching the moon rise and listen to the sound of the river, rather than retreat into the mosque at dawn and dusk to face the bare mud wall that represented the shortest cut to Meccah. Like the Americans and the Russians before them, the Wahabis instinctively feared the night, retreating into their floodlit compounds with the coming of the dark.

On one of my last attempts to penetrate the mountainous heartland of the country, working from an aerial navigation chart provided by the U.S Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center (St Louis AFS, Missouri 63118. ATTN PP.), which I had corrected by hand, making close to a thousand tiny amendments, we found ourselves caught outside as the shadows lengthened in the headwaters of the Pech Valley, and talk turned again to the unseen creatures of the high mountains and the nameless tribes that lived beyond. The nightwalkers and shapeshifters that one of my recent correspondents rightly linked to the pishacas, rakshasas, and vetalas of Hindu mythology, the children of a non-Aryan sage and a daughter of Daksha, who had allegedly possessed the head or horns of a goat.

My Afghan friend now long lost to me, the jocular, ginger-bearded Nawab, told me the high mountains were full of them, although he had never seen their faces clearly as they always turned away. Such things, he said, would never be seen clearly by mortals 'til the day of judgement. Carlos usually fell silent at times like this, refusing to translate any details that rested uneasily with his faith, but for once, he chimed in to explain that while these beings might well be creations of Allah, they were evil and capricious like the Djinn and not to be associated with.

Then his eyes fell to the image of the horned man on the copper medallion at my throat, and while I insisted it was in no way intended as a 'representation of God', Carlos sullenly maintained it was, nonetheless, a part of the 'malthusian forces of darkness from which Islam sought to rescue Afghanistan' and as such an anathema to him.

Like I said, war makes for strange bedfellows.

At the time, myself and Mr. Horn began to think Carlos was a little crazy, potentially dangerous, even in the way he seemed hellbent in drawing us again and again into the very thick of the mayhem, but like Conrad's Lord Jim, Jim he had something to prove that no-one but himself could ever fully understand. He averted his eyes from the heathen music and totems that confronted him, and frowned on my efforts to introduce the tribal people to Spaghetti Westerns and the joys of early Ennio Morricone, whose crooning, screaming vocals and galloping rhythms mirrored their own strange, keening songs. Sensing his disapproval, I often declined the smouldering joints passed my way, although it was the finest Hashish known to man and, to my lasting regret, I never tasted the ever-present opium or knew the dreams that came with it. But I enjoyed the sight of the poppy fields and the vividness of their colors nonetheless. The incursion of the poppy into the Hindu Kush is a relatively recent deal of course, taking the place of the vineyards that were stamped out when Islam came in 1910 and put an end to the making of wine and the songs and ways that went with it.

It was only years later that I learned from a man named Aiden Hartley, who had known Carlos in Mogadishu, that our friend had once had a heavy habit of his own, and radical Islam was what he got instead of rehab. He was looking for something that would make sense of his jumbled life and the last thing he needed was a pagan like myself challenging the very faith that gave him refuge.

And although at times he was a pain in the neck, so much so that I felt like shooting him myself on at least one occasion, at least he had faith, and aspired towards what he felt could be a better world even if he couldn't help falling time and again below those aspirations. And as Goethe says:"He who strives constantly upwards, him can we save..."

For a while, we were united in our cause and I did what little I could to help. Having some prior knowledge of automatic weapons, I was able to help the locals recalibrate their gun sites and taught them enough rudimentary English to be able to write their names on their rifle straps to avoid potential squabbling. My map played a central part in the local commander's planning.

MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

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We were attached to a BM-12 missile crew that were supposed to take out the runway before the Migs could make it into the air. My fault perhaps for making such a big deal out of the contours that enabled us to situate the rocket crews in natural gulleys and washouts in the surrounding hills. Unfortunately, we were well within range of a Communist garrison on an overlooking hill that was supposed to have been taken out by another group the night before, but Hazrat Ali was away in Pakistan at the time looking for a wife for his younger brother Sunak and the correct order didn't get passed down.

Hazrat Ali was the main man in Am-La, a beaming bear of a man, who invited us into his house with open arms, but for a native he seemed singularly poorly informed when it came to the topography his crew commanded. Years later he was the put in charge of the Allied assault on Tora Bora and it came as no surprise uncle Osama slipped through the net.

The last I saw of Hazrat Ali was in Time magazine, older now and wearing the same kinda look as the one worn by Murray Boyd, the location manager on The Island of Dr. Moreau, Moreau when he said"No worries, mate! Sea's gonna be flat as a millpond", the day before the hurricane blew in. But I digress!

Leaving us to be massacred...

The UN refused to recognize the guerrilla government, the shura, unless it was established in one of the existing provincial capitals. Until then, food aid continued to go to the Communist regime, now crumbling as the Soviet Union withdrew support.

Thus it was that with the backing of the free world and the tacit support of America and the UN, we eventually swept down on Jallalabad, starting the battle that led to the installation of the Taliban. For the record, the attack was launched to the soundtrack of 'NAVAJO JOE'. Having experimented with Carl Orff and Jimi Hendrix, it turned out that Ennio Morricone was the only one that really cut across the cultural barriers.

Of course it was a disaster.

The initial assault on Jallallabad was the single biggest guerilla defeat of the 10-year war and the mujaheddin lost over a thousand men a day in the carnage, but time is of the essence and there is no point lingering over the details now.

My final journal entry on the morning of the battle reads:"Let's do this all again from the top some day. Let's do it again when when we're 103 and the birds bring us honey and flowers for tea..."

After that the pages are blank.

The last I saw of Carlos was when he went to pray just before dawn. The moment we opened fire, we gave away our position and were pounded into submission by incoming. It was pretty much over by the end of day one.

I had my John Woo moment at sunset. We were working our way down a gulley. Our target was the nearest river, but when we came around the corner, we saw all the grass was on fire and there was no way to go forward but going back was inconcievable. No one said a word. We just looked at each other and then, hard as it is to believe, my brothers, I raised my rifle and ran screaming through the flames towards the enemy lines and the incoming fire. It was so hot I couldn't even see where I was going. We never did make it to the river but we didn't die either, so I suppose it's no big deal or anything. But we should have died. The missile that hit us just after dark should have done the trick in any sane world. I was picked up and blown through the air and for a while, everything was silent and blinding white. Like the movie had slowed right down to a stop.

Then the light broke up into sparks, moving so slowly I could see every one of them, every tiny white hot splinter of shrapnel in perfect focus. Some of those sparks went right through Mr. Horn's body without severing any major arteries and miraculously cut the nerves to his legs so that he was spared the worst of the pain. They fanned out past me into the gathering night and as the dark returned I hit the ground and normal sound and motion returned.

I got up and let go of my backpack, because I simply couldn't hold on to it and Mr. Horn and the Kalashnikov all at the same time. He's a big lad, Mr. Horn. All of seven feet, the descendant of a lost race of German giants which is why he presented such an easy target. I managed to half-drag, half-carry him back across the field of fire to the advance position. Everything was coming apart, the writing clearly on the wall and requisitioning a donkey I decided to head for home, striking out across the minefields towards the distant mountains where we belonged.

I used to catch snakes for pocket money when I was a kid. The local venom man milked them for serum before turning them free. Mostly boomslang and puff adders but you could get five bucks for a decent cobra, which was a fortune in those days. Before leaving Peshawar, I'd done a half-assed course on mine recognition but on the ground, I relied on the same instincts I had used to avoid getting bitten as a kid. Doubtless a form of delusion, but God knows how many times I paused in mid-stride or changed course just in time, somehow always knowing the boobytaps were there just the same as the way you stop, catch your breath and look for the snake, knowing it's there a beat before you consciously see it.

Total horseshit perhaps, but it was enough to keep me moving and my relaxed, loping gait meant I never fell or twisted my ankle although at times the going was rough and when the way was dark, it was my dark-adjusted therian eyes that gave me enough of an edge to stay in the land of the living or at least within striking distance of it's borders.

In danger all that counts is moving forward. I can't remember who said that. Nietschze or Conan the Barbarian.

All I know is we walked a while.

And then we walked again.

Siege of Jallallabad, 1989 - stills by Immo Horn 20

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argue that she was ultimately responsible for persuading Reagan to arm the resistance with heat-seeking rockets, but by the final stages of the war, the Communists had learned to drop parachute flares to throw the American ground-to-air missiles off their scent. They were so bright they burned out your visual purple so you couldn't see the stars, only those incandescent points of light that descended so slowly it was as if the whole world were rising to meet them. It was perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I could feel the changing air pressure in my diaphragm and the bass of the heavy artillery rose through the soles of my feet like the thunder of some tremendous party, the night cut with the flicker and strobe of incoming fire, tracers weaving cat's cradles in my retinas, incendiaries rising in great golden balls of living plasma, falling and fading in slow cooling sparks, into nothing. And all the while the city burned behind us, a ruddy glow beyond the hills, a thickening plume that seemed to rise forever to fill a third part of the heavens.

Allow me that Biblical reference, my brethren, for Biblical it was. The sight of thousands fleeing their homes, dragging their families and all they owned on the backs of mules and camels, fleeing aimlessly into the dark like Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus lighting out for Egypt land. We made it as far as a Red Crescent field hospital, a huddle of tents strewn amidst the boulders at the mouth of a river known as Islam Dara.

mouth and bit down, hoping someone might identify me by then and it was my own foolish, simple pagan faith that came to my rescue and gave me the strength to keep going, the one thing in my life I can be justly proud of.

And the Djinn were merciful, my brothers, and sent a storm to hide us from the Migs, whose Doppler lookdown systems were no match for the dust cloud that swirled about us like great black wings. And we came as far as Am-La and I stopped to retrieve the surviving film stock cached before the battle, before striking out for Chiga Serai and the free territories. The spring rains had begun, the pass Sheik Osama and his Arabs had cut through the Kashkund mountains turned to mud and for a long, terrible while, I found myself trapped in a dank, Afghan remake of The Wages of Fear, and if you've seen that movie, you'll know how bad it sucked to be there with those trucks filled with spent ammunition and dying people, stripping gears, running out of gas and sliding backwards into the deepening sludge, engines churning helplessly all day and night, every day while the rest of us tried to wedge anything we had beneath the straining wheels for traction.

We lost one of the trucks over a cliff and buried the folk on board at sunrise.

The light seems sharper and clearer at that altitude and the colors of the grave diggers scarves stood out vividly against the snow. I remember I was listening to Wagner, Overture to Tristan and Isolde when my Walkman finally gave up the ghost.

Mr. Horn's legs had started to rot and there were literally vultures following us, hopping from rock to rock which is never a good thing. Then the sun faded behind the clouds and the rain set in...

We thought if we could just make it to the top of the mountains we'd be alright, even if we had to do it on our own, on foot, but when we finally made it to the summit, the tribal militia who controlled the border were less than happy to see us. We had lost our friends and supporters in the guerilla party just as I had lost my passport and I.D. with our discarded backpacks. There had been a party of bullets going on around us at the time, and if I had paused even for a split second to retrieve my documents, we would have been beef jerky.

Instead we were placed under de facto arrest at the border and held in a mud-walled garrison.

While the rain hammered down, Mr. Horn slipped steadily into a coma and the company medic argued with the stern-faced men who held us, arguing for our lives, I realized later. At one point, I was marched out into the courtyard. At first I thought I was being taken for a piss call, but then I saw my escort were picking up their guns. And again the nameless medic intervened on our behalf, arguing with the local commander in a dialect I couldn't hope to comprehend.

Forward position at Islam-Dara - stills by Immo Horn There were no doctors or surgeons, only wounded people, a few boxes of analgesics and enough morphine to stop the pain which is sometimes enough, even if you can't always save people. I have College level physiology and could help the overworked Pakistani medical student, who was trying to stay on top of the situation with the externals, burns, amputations, etc., but there was no realistic hope for the internals, not in a place like that.

The only chance I had of keeping Mr. Horn alive lay in somehow making it back through enemy lines and across the mountains to the border, the outside world and what remained of the 20th century. Despite the prominent symbols painted on the tents, we endured an air strike on the field hospital before loading all those with a reasonable chance of survival into the remaining trucks and making a break for it. The enemy found our range almost immediately and our pathetic, slow moving convoy came under sustained fire.

I tried saying Hail Mary's and chanting every mantra I could recall, but in the end, when there was fire all around us, I put my dog tags and that copper medallion I am still wearing now in my

Forward position at Islam-Dara - stills by Immo Horn

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We were bundled into the back of another truck and by the next afternoon, the sun had come out and we had made it all the way back across the tribal territories to the Red Cross Hospital in Peshawar. Unfortunately, the Swiss doctors in charge were already overloaded with casualties from the Jallallabad action and refused to admit Mr. Horn, accusing us of being mercenaries. In the end, the Afghan surgeons at the Red Crescent hospital cleaned his wounds and removed the pieces of shrapnel still lodged within him. While they did the cutting, I wandered down the dusty trunk road and caught sight of a KFC outlet where I ordered a Coke and rejoined the West.

Mr. Horn still has those pieces of shrapnel on display, the closest thing to a medal you can expect in our line of work. That shambollic hospital was like something from Gone With the Wind, the ranks of the maimed and the burned flowing out across the surrounding fields, on stretchers, cots or blankets, makeshift tents improvised from sodden patouks. It was here that Trix Worrell, the writer of For Queen and Country and the television sitcom Desmond's, finally caught up with me.

He had been tasked by Paul Trijbits to bring me back to London so that they could close the deal on Hardware Hardware.

At first I was loathe to abandon the country that become an adopted homeland. The sight of burned or limbless children tends to stir strange emotions in the hearts of even the worst of us, even heathens like myself. And there was unfinished business.

Carlos was still missing, presumed dead and it now transpired that he had been less than straightforward in his initial dealings, having helped himself to a large sum of money from a West London property magnate before leaving town, apparently with the intention of closing one of those illicit transactions that Frontier Province is famous for. Now Carlos was gone, the deal that none of the rest of us even knew existed had fallen through and the big cheese in Fulham wanted his money back.

There was another small catch. Although miraculously our backpacks were later retrieved from the battlefield and returned by the Hezb, who must have carried them clear over the Kashkund mountains along with my maps, notebooks and several remaining cans of film, the one thing that conspicuously failed to turn up with them was my passport, which at the time I assumed to have been filched by my otherwise impeccably honest cadres. And getting back to River City without ID proved to be a bit of a head-scratcher.

In the end, it was my ex-girlfriend, Kate, who managed to get through to a line in the Hezbi-Islami party political office in University Town and persuaded me to give up my plans to return to the mountains with a shipment of Polio and Smallpox vaccine from one of the medical charities. It was at the time of The Satanic Verses.

Verses There was a fatwah on Salman Rushdie's head and the British consulate in Peshawar had been just been firebombed. I managed to get Mr. Horn flown out from Peshawar along with the surviving exposed stock before making my way overland to Islamabad to find diplomatic representation. I was arrested by Pakistani police the moment I arrived in the capital, and only survived by repeating the phrase"Call my consul"until someone finally did.

A kind man, named vice-consul Pete Roffey, got me out of the slammer and helped me trade what I knew about the massacre in Ningrahar Province for a fresh passport. That was the first time I was ever debriefed by Western intelligence and I told them all I knew, which was quite a lot even though I didn't realize it at the time.

I made it to Karachi, then Abu Dabi, then Istanbul and hence to London, where Kate met me at Heathrow. It was raining and she looked pale and unhappy. She told me she didn't want to hear about it, not one word. We drove back to the flat in Kennington in silence and when I finally walked into my lounge I found there were people waiting for me there, adults, folk from a firm called 'Brigade Security'. Apparently, their boss wanted his money, either that or they were going to feed me to the dogs. I recall one of my favourite LP's playing on the stereo somewhere in the background.

In the end, Paul Trijbits got Brigade Security off my back, paid the outstanding and saved my 22

worthless ass and saved Mr. Horn too, who lay all the while quietly going to pieces in a backroom because the NHS wouldn't admit him and his girlfriend didn't want to saddle herself with a gimp.

Even a stoic one. In return, I traded Paul the underlying rights to Hardware and he let me live under a table in the production office while we got the beast up and running. For a while, I was half-convinced I was dead and living in some other world that barely resembled the one we had left behind. I can remember the sound of the one that got us, totally different from all the other incoming. The soundless white flash that followed like a freeze frame. Then slowly I realized I was out of luck and we were alive after all...

A hack from the Sunday Times later wrote that I had"adopted late eighties grunge style clothing and hygiene"during the shoot, but believe me, I looked that way because I was sleeping on the floor and didn't have two beans at the time.

Somewhere in the middle of it Carlos turned up, still alive too and looking a little sheepish about it. He said he'd been pinned down by enemy fire but the long and the short of it was he'd left us to die, getting back to the advance position only few days later when he arranged for the return of our personal effects. We shook hands on it but there was bad blood between us and he never looked me squarely in the eye again.

The journey had shaken Carlos and changed him somehow. While he might not have fitted in on Wall Street, he knew in his heart he could never be an Afghan. He tempered his faith and traded on his talents as a fixer and veteran of the Jihad to become a stringer for the networks, covering the fall of the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia. Either which way, it was the 90's, and no-one cared about Afghanistan any more than they cared about low-budget British Sci-Fi horror movies. We drifted apart, found new girlfriends, new obsessions, new wars, but none of them seemed to satisfy. Carlos got Mogadishu and I lit out for Haiti and got with the Voodoo. I think we both caught a dose of Rwanda, but received it on separate channels.

There were still times when I was convinced I had been killed by that rocket but those thoughts came less frequently now and by the summer of 1998, things were starting to look up for Carlos too. His family had decided not to disinherit him and he had finally gotten engaged to the love of his life. He had just gotten back from a trip to Kenya when al-Qaeda detonated a truck bomb outside the US embassy in downtown Nairobi. The blast killed 213 people. Many victims were vaporized or buried alive by rubble from the embassy or a nearby multistory office block that collapsed like a house of cards.

President Clinton ordered a punitive missile strike on Afghanistan and Sudan, although the news took second billing to the first day of Monica Lewinsky's notorious testimony. Hillary Clinton looked the camera straight down the lens and told the world:"We're victims of a massive right wing conspiracy!"People laughed, but she was right.

Travelling under an assumed name, Carlos retraced his steps to Peshawar and a few days later was arrested and detained by the ISI, the Pakistani military police, while trying to cross the Afghan border. He was interrogated and on release succeeded in reaching a hospital in Miram Shah, where he made contact with survivors of the missile strike on Sheik Osama's camp. Some believe the information he became party to at that time placed his life in danger. Following the attack, the Sheik had posted a $20,000 bounty on the head of any American found in the area and Carlos was carrying a sat phone, which men like bin Laden knew would allow the CIA to get an accurate fix on the bearer whenever it was switched on.

Somehow Carlos made it back alive.

He booked into a room at Dean's Hotel in Peshawar, Room 304, a far swankier set of digs that he could have afforded back in the day. The first thing he did was call his fiancee. Then he had a shower and a hot meal before phoning a producer named Leslie Cockburn at CBS television. He had a story to tell. A big story. Miss Cockburn thought the situation through but by the time the network tried to call back approximately an hour later, there was no-one left to answer. When hotel staff forced the door, they found Carlos seated upright next to the telephone table, stone-

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cold dead, the butt of a Marlboro Red clenched between his lips, burned right down to its filter, the ash resting in his lap.

An empty syringe was apparently found near his body. No actual drugs. No makings. Just a needle. My passport was retrieved from his personal effects, having been removed from my bag back in 1989 after we abandoned our packs at the advance position. My stolen identity, one last puzzling detail amidst the clutter of camera equipment, cigarette cartons, gaffer tape, five grand in cash, the sat 'phone and a bunch of happy snaps of the one-time Wall Street trader posing with his Afghan buddies, intended presumably as a way of befriending any militias he encountered along the road.

Back in River City an official wake was held at the stock exchange. Monitors above the urinals showed a continuous tickertape crawl of shifting figures while a famous American anchorman stood in front of another screen in an adjoining reception area, this one showing images culled from our documentary Voice of the Moon, Moon and we listened as he eulogized Carlos Mavroleon for his role in"alerting the world to the situation in Afghanistan". I sat near the back with Mr. Horn and his wife Deborah, taking advantage of the cocktail snacks and joking about how that would be the only time we'd get to hear someone from the networks say something nice about our untransmitted footage. Mr. Horn said nothing. He had not only recovered the full use of his legs but in the interim had become an accomplished ballroom dancer. He remains a strong walker to this day. And of course the world was so f***ng unalerted it isn't funny.

The police claimed Carlos died from a self-administered heroin overdose. An autopsy was never conducted and those who tried to ask questions about the affair were gently but firmly warned away. We tried to keep the story alive for a while and sent out treatments and one pagers to every television station we could think of, but it was the 90's, the economy was booming and no-one wanted to know about that sort of thing. I still have copies of those treatments on file and even now, they seem a little paranoid in their far-fetched assumption that regardless of whether or not Carlos was assassinated, he seemed to have been on the brink of blowing the whistle on the misappropriation of American and Saudi money to create a terrorist movement apparently hellbent ..ing World War 3, if not by training up militants to destabilize Kashmir, then by some other means.

Nuclear War was just so passé in the 90's, not something that real adults felt the need to waste their time on. Some nutty right-wing theorist in the States had apparently decided that history was dead and no longer an active process worth losing sleep over. For a while, I thought about trying to write a book but my agent succeeded in talking me out of it.

By 2001, the millennium bug had proved a wash and it had all become just one more 'conspiracy theory' parked on the same shelf as David Icke and his reptilloids. Producers would roll their eyes or sneak snide glances at their P.A.'s, shutters coming down before you even had time to spit out the A-word."Ohhh, Richard! You and your little Afghan friends! I mean, it's just not the real world, is it?"sighed an industry maven who shall remain nameless."Look around you!"She shook her head, gesturing at the brightly lit Soho bistro before us."This is the real world!"

But it wasn't...

By the time the first aeroplane hit the World Trade Center, my mother was being treated for cancer and I was already feeling pretty brought down by the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massood some 24 hours previously. Massood, who I never met on account of my alliance with the Hezb, was a hero of the guerilla war and had stood as the lone opponent of the Taliban, a giant amongst men, the country's natural leader and only real hope.

The suicide camera crew had made their appointment through his press agent and although they were reportedly carrying British passports, their identities were never publically established.

Clearly someone knew that after years of being willfully ignored by the West, Massood's role was about to become a crucial one, so he was surgically removed by outside parties working to a detailed game plan. Apparently, Massood recognized one of his killers as they entered the room, either that or he suffered a belated premonition, yelling for the guards to"Get them out of here!

Get these men out of here..."

Accordingly, the bomb (which was hidden in the camera) was detonated in the doorway before the phony journalists could enter the office, atomizing the press agent and mortally wounding the guerilla leader, who is rumored to have lingered on for a day or so before giving up the struggle. Shortly afterwards, Abdul Haq was betrayed and murdered, and his brother, Abdul Qadir, gunned down on the streets of Kabul in what was dismissed in the press as a minor skirmish between rival opium barons. Either way, the countries natural leaders were being rapidly expunged.

As those images of the burning towers flickered across the monitors in the silent transit lounge, I endured a sense of helpless deja-vu, of being forced to watch something unfolding that could and should have been averted. That was the day I met Maggie Moor, who, like myself, was on her way home from a film festival in Germany and had made it as far as Frankfurt before the sky fell in. Maggie occupies a special place in my heart because she was the first person to listen to me. It's an old story, but by dint of her proximity at the time, she was the first to hear it in a post-9/11 environment and it no longer sounded like gobbledy-gook. As they say in that 'America' song,"SANDMAN", all the planes had been grounded and unable to make it back to the States.

Miss Moor did the only thing she could. As soon as she got to a working telephone, she told the operator to connect her to CIA headquarters at Langley, who set up the meeting with 'James' at Grosvenor Square.

I told my story over again and 'James' took notes. He consistently misspelled the Afghan names, couldn't tell the difference between Engineer Machmud and Ahmed Shah Massood, and seemed baffled by the plethora of rival clans and parties, having merged them in his mind into a single indistinct foreign other. If the CIA said it was impossible to infiltrate Al-Qaeda, then who was I to say that some Greek guy whose name he couldn't pronounce had succeeded where the company had failed, relying instead on information retrieved at a distance by either the Pakistani ISI or satellites and drones, whose lookdown systems are scarcely more sophisticated than those Russian Migs that failed to kill us back in '89.

Maggie was no beginner at this game. She supplements her occasional earnings as an actress by moonlighting as a process server for the oldest private investigation agency in Manhattan, a company run by an elderly Jewish gentleman and former Mossad agent, who claims to have been amongst those responsible for tracking down the terrorists in the Black September affair. She could tell 'James' wasn't taking us seriously, and refused to part with any maps, notebooks, charts or coordinates without the promise of protection or reward.

That was the last straw. Narrowing his piggy Ivy Leaguer eyes, 'James' fixed her with a look as if she were so far beneath him she belonged not to a different gender but some other taxomic group entirely."How does that make you people feel, huh? Trying to profit out of World War Three?"Shaking his head, he pushed back his chair, drawing the line under my second debriefing.

World War Three.

He said it. Not me. But it had an nice old-fashioned 80's ring about it.

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We tried to tell ourselves that anything we knew was probably old news anyway, and that there were responsible adults in charge now but by the time the Allies got 'round to bombing all those places, 'James' couldn't pronounce the folk they were looking for, and they had melted like ghosts into the mountains, into the sea of the people. The company insisted they were on the case and had the situation by the tail, but when I saw they had put 'feared warlord' and 'northern alliance' commander Hazrat Ali in charge of the Tora Bora operation my heart sank further. For a couple of weeks, Afghanistan was all the rage and there was a brief run on our footage, mostly for stock shots to illustrate the prehistory of the war. We were the only human beings to have ever taken movie cameras into the Hindu Kush, which held some small curiosity for the video generation, who seemed surprised by the light and color. I was tapped by Sonja,"The Stinger Girl", to come up with a piece for a fundraising dinner thrown by the"Afghan World Foundation", a dodgy charity headed by Hamid Karzai. She slyly hinted that she had friends in the Academy and if I cooperated, they could get a belated nomination for our still untransmitted documentary.

I played along in the hope of getting myself embedded with US forces in Kabul. There was a rumor Bush would be attending the bash in Beverly Hills and I became frightened they might try to force me to shake his hand. But the Iraq war was in the wind and just like that, Afghanistan dropped out of the media as if it had never existed.

I think it was a deliberate policy decision by the administration to not mention the A-word in public and they didn't after that, not for many years. The last thing anyone wanted were camera crews actually covering the situation as it developed on the ground and the fundraiser was duly cancelled. For some reason, I got to shake Kissinger's hand instead, quite by accident, the two of us just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Later I was driven by Don Stroud's brother, Charlie, to a meeting with my anonymous sponsors in a penthouse in Century City, where we waited for a while in a [OMMITED]

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From the Wikipedia article Clandestine cell system, system under the heading Non-traditional models, models exemplified by al-Qaeda:"If al-Qaeda Osama, the most respected, died, the core would reconstitute itself.

While different members have an individual ideological guide, and these are not the same for all members, the core would reconstitute itself with Richard as most respected."Who else you think is modifying Wikipedia than our friends in the Vatican? -lauri

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Richard Stanley

LACHRYMAE Current mood: awake

Lachrymae

Blog Archive Tuesday, September 11, 2007

It started just as I was posting my last blog. I was grappling with the clunky MySpace technology (sorely tested by the last entry's epic length) when the building began to palpably tremble. It was already morning but it seemed to be getting dark again outside, the sky turning a curious shade of coppery green.

I stayed with the keyboard until the screed was safely posted by which time the rain was coming down in a white squall against the skylights. There were screams and a moment later the sound of breaking glass in the street below. And another sound. A weird deep, pulsing bass like a peal of thunder running in a loop, grumbling on and on, waxing and waning but refusing to let go. For a moment I thought I was simply suffering from nerves or sleep deprivation or somethin'.. But it wasn't. It was a cyclone.

In River City…

Which is like a tiger in Africa but that's the miracle of global warming for you.

I'd been expecting some sort of response to the blog but this was ridiculous. I fell back laughing on the couch as the house shuddered and something subsided in the chimney. The road outside turned into a river, the air alive with car alarms and for a while I thought maybe this is the end after all, maybe Earth's magnetic field's finally flipped and the atmosphere's being sucked right off planet! And I laughed so hard I could hardly get up and all the while the statue of the black Madonna that stands before my west window rocked silently on her plinth, watching placidly as the rain fell like tears on her altar and lightnings swirled around us.

By the time I stopped laughing and tried to fix myself a coffee the power was down along with most of the rail network so I fixed myself a lukewarm Coke instead, a little disappointed to find the storm easing off and myself still seemingly alive, the sirens of distant emergency vehicles joining the clamour outside.

At first the flooding had some novelty value for the locals, a chance to show their British pluck but after the first 48 hours or so people began to die and the mood turned ugly so I got out for a couple of months, leaving River City to stew in it's own juice. Figured I wouldn't be missed . Everyone is away on vacation this time of year. The producers and politicos are in Provence with their au pairs, their backers are in Monaco or the Cote d'Azur and the nation's armed forces are on extended camp out in Afghanistan and Iraq, same place most of the National Guard were at when that l'il thing happened in New Orleans if memory serves.

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So I hit the trail, oh my brothers and a long, strange trail it was and it wouldn't make the blindest bit of sense without the backstory. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and I realize what follows may seem far fetched. File under heading 'supernatural serial thriller', a metatextual detective story ala Dan Brown by way of that inimitable maestro of the macabre, the one and only Dario Argento so if you don't like 'freaky stuff' then tune out now! You have been warned. Otherwise its time to dust off those old Goblin albums and gather round. Some of this material has appeared before in the 2002 compendium 'BRITISH HORROR CINEMA' under the title 'Dying Light' and on the Metro-Tartan DVD release of 'TRAUMA' under the caption 'CIAO DARIO!' Most of the content however was inputed directly from handwritten notes hastily scribbled more than a decade ago for like all great shaggy dog stories the roots of this strange saga lie buried deep in the past…

The Trail of the Three Mothers

Her name was Dzugudini and at length her wandering tribe settled in the forest of Daja, where for a good two centuries they lived undisturbed amidst the giant ferns and cycads, their ceremonies unbroken from one generation to the next. Their last chieftain ascended the throne in the early 18th century. He was named Mugado and had three sons and a daughter, by all accounts a great beauty.

Although his tribe prospered this Mugado was a troubled man, assailed by spirits and invisible presences. The shades of his forefathers appeared before him by night and the secret rulers of the rainforest whispered in his ears even as he slept, sending clear instruction in his dreams so that he might govern in accordance to their will.

Whether Mugado was driven by vocation, demonic possession, paranoid schizophrenia with megalomaniacal tendencies or sheer force of inbreeding is hard to say but, in short, he was 'inspired'…

1:The Rain Queen Once upon a time, some 1600 years after the alleged death of Christ, a beautiful princess was seduced by her jealous brother and bore a child out of wedlock. Fearing her father's wrath she stole the source of his power while he slept, the rain making magic that kept the land fertile and gathering her bravest retainers about her fled the city state of Karanga to seek refuge in the trackless wastelands south of the Zambezi.

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Acting under direct orders from the forest Mugado ordered the immediate execution of his sons and decreed that as his line was descended from an incestuous union he would in turn marry his own daughter and secure the succession for another thousand years by founding the pure, matriarchal dynasty the spirits had shown to him in his dreams.

The princess was sequestered in a palace hidden deep in the rainforest where the powers of Mugado's masters was at their strongest and in the fullness of time she bore him two children.

The first was a boy who was strangled at birth by the midwives but the second was a daughter her father named Modjadji, the 'Ruler of the Day'and into her hands he entrusted the rain making medicine of his ancestors.

Modjadji remained all her life in seclusion, weaving her spells and practising her craft and when her unhappy parents were no more she ruled in her father's place and became renowned as the greatest of rain makers.

Supplicants came from all over Africa to make obeisance in front of her kraal in the hope of enlisting her aid and her kingdom became known as LoBedu, the 'land of offerings' and her people the baLoBedu.

From one lifetime to the next she ruled unchallenged, monarch of all she surveyed yet still essentially a prisoner, a martyr caught in the vast web of ritual fashioned by the cunning of her ancestors. When the 'Rain Queen' showed the first signs of old age it is believed she was obliged to sip a cup of poison derived from the brain and spinal cord of a crocodile and later her skin and body parts would become the essential ingredients of the rain making medicine. After being left to lie a few days until the skin loosened she would be washed slowly away, layer by layer by her retainers who stored the water in clay pots. Other ingredients are said to include the fat of a scaly anteater, parts of a kudu, seawater, feathers from a 'lightning bird', black and white seashells and various roots and barks. Nowadays a black sheep or goat is sacrificed but its fur is still carefully washed first and the water stored in the rain pots for future use. This ritual is rumoured to be a modern substitute for the ritual slaughter of a small child, a baby boy whose brain was once used as an offering...

(2) Out of Africa I was a child myself when I first came to Modjadji's kraal. My mother was an artist, a folklorist as much as an anthropologist and something of a protofeminist although I was too young to recognize any political dimension to her work at the time. Like many schoolboys of my generation I was familiar with H.Rider Haggard's fantasy 'SHE' which had been inspired by the flesh and blood myth.

She was never seen and this very secrecy, the impenetrable wall of spells and fearful incantations that encircled her court lead to the rise of all kinds of myths and fantastical beliefs. The Zulu believed she had four breasts and revered her as 'Mabelamane'.

Others believed she never aged nor lost her beauty but lived untouched by time.

Time however has no respect for folklore, even the most dearly cherished beliefs and Modjadji was duly scythed down somewhere in the 1860's when the name and mantle passed to her daughter. As for the boy children, well…

Modjadji II maintained her power over the subcontinent as skilfully as her mother, preserving the line down to this very day. When Mandela was released from Robben Island he sought the immortal monarch's council before assuming the trappings of state and so too his successor, Thabo Mbeki.

Ayesha, 'She Who Must Be Obeyed', retains her eternal youth and beauty by bathing in a singing, magical flame deep within the earth that consumes her in order to make her whole. According to Haggard's text at the base of the flame appear the glyphs of an ancient language, hewn in living rock:-"That which is alive has known death, and that which is dead can never die, for in the Circle of the Spirit life is naught and death is naught. Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten..."

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I never did get to meet the Black Mother herself, at least not on that occasion but the shadowy forest and its prehistoric cycads left an impression that lingered in my mind long after Africa itself was only a memory. The tides of time, war and the aftermath of European colonialism scattered my family across the face of the earth and after various misadventures typical to the period I found myself adrift in mid-eighties London with little more to my name than the clothes I wore and a pair of boots already past their sell-by date.

H.P.Lovecraft in 'THE NAMELESS CITY' (1921) attributed an oddly praphrased version of this text to the 'mad' Arab Abdul al Hazred (possibly a pun on the words:"all has read") and is in fact the sole direct quote the great man is ever foolhardy enough to offer from his notorious, 'fictional' grande grimoire, 'The Necronomicon':"That which is not dead can eternal lie and with strange aeons even death may die…" (* For the sake of our narrative it is easier to assume the adolescent H.P.L.simply filched the quote from Haggard, one of his undoubted literary heroes. There is of course another explanation, that both writers were working from variant translations of the same text but that is a different story for a darker and longer night.)

I had a cousin in Crouch End who who worked for Fleetway Comics on their 'Judge Dredd' strip (in fact he helped originate the first, Zelazney derived, 'cursed earth' series and came up with the 'landmaster' design ripped off, to his lasting chagrin by various toy companies ever since) so I duly found myself on his doorstep, which is as far as I got.

The sole familiar face I'd seen since leaving Africa appeared at one of the terrace house's upper windows and informed me that owing to various other 'issues' it would be best if I called back in a week or two and maybe we could meet for lunch. In fact I didn't see or hear of him again for a good five years.

Alone and footloose in north London I purchased a ticket to an all night movie show, hoping to catch a few winks before rethinking my options.

The Scala cinema in King's Cross was a former ape house, London's first and only 'Primatarium', its flaking walls lined with crawling jungle murals. The sort of thing Rousseau might have produced if you'd dosed him with Black Pentagram LSD. The murals were painted over in the early nineties when the cinema's fortunes went into decline but when last I looked there were still deserted cages in the basement and if you inhaled deeply enough you could catch the faint hint of musk and dried urine, a reassuring safari smell that connects to my earliest memories.

The cinema was managed by a feisty young redhead named JoAnne Sellar who had previously worked the house as an usherette, trolling the sepulchral cat haunted aisles in her 'China Blue' wig and scraping gum off the seats between shows. The former programmer Stephen Woolly and his partner Nik Powell had hit the big time after astutely acquiring the UK rights to Jean-Jacques Beneix's 'DIVA' and Sam Raimi's barnstorming debut 'EVIL DEAD', fighting and winning a landmark case against the British censor along the way. With the Scala's parent company booming I was stumbled onto the scene just as JoAnne's programming scaled new heights which was how I came to see all of writer/director Dario Argento's major works for the first time in chronological order in a single, mind wrenching sitting.

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(3) The Art of Light I managed to find a cash in hand day job working as a photocopy boy at the Soviet Press Agency but my night's belonged to the Scala and I gravitated back to it's miasmal, red lit auditorium again and again, a junkie chasing his fix, always trying to recapture that first, orgiastic experience and never quite getting there. I watched every other Italian horror movie I could track down but none of them felt quite like the real thing, more the cinematic equivalent of methadone.

If I didn't grow up in the ape house then I certainly came of age there.

I would camp out on the front tiers where the first few rows had already been totally destroyed by various nutters before me. Sometimes I would open my eyes at three in the morning and have no way of knowing if I was dreaming or not and as I slowly learned about the art of light so the Scala brought me into contact with some of the auteurs who had helped create this formidable body of work.

This was how I first met Dario, one night at the monkey house after a test screening of 'PHENOMENA' (1985) which had been acquired

by Palace, the cinema's parent company.

'THE BIRD WITH THE 'CRYSTAL PLUMAGE' (1970) 'CAT O'NINE TAILS' (1971) 'FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET' (1972) 'DEEP RED' (1975) 'SUSPIRIA' (1977) 'INFERNO' (1980) 'TENEBRAE' (1982) By the time I emerged, still sleepless into the mid-eighties dawn I knew I had been changed in various complicated ways I couldn't immediately comprehend.

It was all so much brighter, bigger, louder, more violent and infinitely more seductive than anything the moral guardians would have allowed to pass in the Dutch Reforned police state I had been born into. The Maestro had cast his spell over me and although I didn't know it I was already caught in the web that would lead to Rome.

A callow fan, too nervous to ask for an autograph I pressed his thin hand and offered him a smoke instead which went some ways towards breaking the ice. I don't remember what we spoke about but he was the first industry insider to meet my eyes and treat me like an equal. (I had twice met Alan Parker and shaken his hand without him ever looking at my face or otherwise registering my presence) Despite or perhaps because of the violence of his work il maestro there is a humanity to Dario rare in men.

His acute sensitivity lead to a kind of borderline anorexia that made him oddly ageless. There was an adolescent, almost bird like quality to the way he held himself as if his limbs were somehow still too long for his body and he inhabited a state in which he seemed to neither sleep nor eat. If he had been a bird he would have been a Raven.

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We spoke only briefly, a few sentences at best but Dario's English was not what it is now and the great man had far bigger things on his mind but the look of recognition in his eyes stayed with me. He was plainly nervous about the screening and probably needed that smoke.

Later I scrawled all over the preview card in big, scary looking printed lettering, telling the distributors to leave the film alone and not cut a frame. Instead they chopped it to pieces, dropping twenty minutes of plot and releasing it with damaging censor cuts under the title 'CREEPERS' to well nigh universal derision. The only positive word came from a British journalist, then unknown to me, Alan Jones who memorably summed it up with the line: "Just like 'CARRIE' with flies! It's a bitch!"

Michele (left) and Dario (right) pose with the Teutons during a quieter, happier moment between crusades.

I would happily have taken Dario home to meet my mother but instead I took my mother to meet him, along with my then fiancé at the British premiere of 'OPERA' two years later. I was too blown away by the movie to notice neither of the ladies seemed to be exactly enjoying the experience.

Something to do with the volume of the heavy metal music in my mum's case 'though it was a VHS copy of 'THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE' that my ex threw at my head shortly thereafter when she showed me the door, summing it up with the memorable tag: "This is exactly the kind of s**t I don't need in my life any more!"

To my surprise it was Dario who kept in touch and he became not only a friend but a mentor, introducing me to the others in his hallowed circle. His brother, Claudio, who produced Alejandro Jodorowski's last great film 'SANTA SANGRE', his loyal protégée Michele Soavi and Simon Boswell, the composer who had contributed to the 'PHENOMENA' soundtrack and scored Michele's first directorial outing: 'STAGEFRIGHT/ DELIRIA '

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Like so many people I didn't notice Asia until the evocative opening scene of Michele's second feature 'LA CHIESA' (1989) when a fleeing heretic wearing a bee keeper's mask escapes the massacre of her village and is hunted like an animal through the medieval wood by mounted Teutons. One of the crusaders tips off her mask with his lance and for a split second Asia's terrified face is revealed before he delivers the coup d'grace.

to compose his thoughts and avoiding our eyes the maestro spoke slowly and carefully, hands fluttering to give his words due emphasis:"Your film…the colors…the reds, the oranges… the way the camera moves. Up and down… in out… is emotional! Psychological… I like!"

At which point he gave me a hug and it felt as if I'd finally earned those spurs all the way, which was pretty good if I hadn't been feeling quite so broken hearted and otherwise distracted and down at heel about a certain young lady at the time…

(4) Our Lady of Darkness

At that very moment as I first viewed the scene in an Italian language print at the Scala someone nudged my hand and I turned to find an angry, balding man demanding I put out the joint I'd fired up, the first time such a thing had ever happened in my experience where smoking in the all-day all-nighters was a prerequisite, particulary Dario She Who Must Be Obeyed! movies. If you didn't want to go through the hassle of being a smoker yourself it was okay 'cause passive inhalation would do it for you. There was no way you were going home sane. Lighting up in a Dario movie was almost a duty like reflexively eating spare ribs during zombie/cannibal marathons or sprinkling feathers from the balcony during 'STAGEFRIGHT'. Some movies, like wars can only be fought, tolerated or understood when you're inebriated or under the influence of powerful mind altering substances.

I had another war in me by then (* see previous blog) and had been away too long to notice times had changed so understandably my first instincts were to snap the balding stranger's head off as he were an insect and send it spinning across the aisle.

But age and the sad coming of the nineties prevailed and I stubbed out my smoke instead. Which was how I met Alan Jones and 'though I later learned he'd helped procure the print the spirit of complete honesty compels me to admit my first instincts were to kill him on sight.

The lair of Mater Tenebrarum...

In my absence something had started to go horribly wrong with the British rep scene, like milk left too long in the back of a fridge. It was the advent of home video (ironically spearheaded by the success of 'EVIL DEAD' in the UK) that killed midnight movies as a social phenomena, depriving what people now call 'cult movies' of their context and the fertile soil that nurtured them but I was having too much fun preparing my first feature, 'HARDWARE' (1990) to notice at the time.

As much as anything 'HARDWARE' was a love letter to the Scala, lit and designed to extend the auditorium into the screen, with some beats in the lunatic dialogue left deliberately open, begging bellowed panto style comebacks from the aisles. (Sorry, kids but the experience just ain't the same at 'home' and never could be. You need bad plumbing, genuine rats, resident psychos and hundreds of other psychotic people you've never even seen before to get the hang of it. It was my version of 'home' viewing so long as the Scala lasted)

New York was a different story back then and Times Square still had some of it's pre-Giuliani savour. Miramax had decided to go wide on 'HARDWARE's U.S release and myself and JoAnne were doing a lot of live radio and cable, campaigning for the introduction of the 'R - rating' after my debut opus had been handed down a hard 'X' in it's initial cut along with several other titles including Wayne Wang's 'LIFE IS CHEAP, TOILET PAPER IS EXPENSIVE' and Almodovar's 'TIE ME UP, TIE ME DOWN'. The mainstream press hated us, Stephen King had walked the screening claiming 'the pointless strobe lighting' had given him a headache but Joe Bob Briggs had given it a big thumbs up and FANGORIA magazine had declared it the 'sci-fi horror movie of the year'. I was at the crest of my fifteen minutes of fame and although my suite at the Plaza came with all the trimmings, a computer that spoke to me gently when I woke up in the mornings, a cupboard full of designer suits and an in-box crammed with cheery messages from a bevy of brand new celebrity 'friends' the events of the preceding months (* see previous blog entry 'KINGDOM COME!') had cast a long shadow over my life. Some mornings I didn't even know if I was alive or dead and I spent my days inside a thunder storm that followed me wherever I went.

The moment we'd locked the picture Jo-Anne Sellar, the cinema's former programmer and now the film's producer who had pulled the beast out of the bag for well under a million (tough even in those days) flew to Rome with myself and the first married answer print and sat in a tiny preview theatre with Dario and Claudio, watching as our homage unspooled and neither of them moved nor made a sound, seemingly unphased by its frissons and not laughing at the gags.

Afterwards there was a pregnant pause as Dario encountered us in the foyer. Taking his time

To cheer myself up before the American premiere I took dinner with Dario and one of his friends, a journalist named Maitland McDonagh who had authored the first serious appraisal of his work to appear in hardback: 'Broken Mirrors, Broken Mind' (1990)

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Maitland had recently interviewed the notorious Henry Lee Lucas and had a good working knowledge of the Charlie Manson back catalogue and other witchy crime scenes but I couldn't help feel that while she had correctly dissected and identified the pathological underpinnings behind the maestro's earlier work there was something in her brand of cinepathology that couldn't hack it all the way when it came to 'SUSPIRIA' and 'INFERNO' taking a too Freudian approach (I suspected darkly) to an essentially Jungian work.

lurking beneath the floorboards at the climax of 'INFERNO' and whose 'real life' grande grimoire 'The Mystery of the Cathedrals' is brandished in 'La Chiesa'.

Sadly for the uninitiated to follow this intercourse requires a certain familiarity with il maestro's oeuvre. To whit : - all of Dario's earlier pics are essentially whodunits, known as gialli in Italian because of the yellow covers of the original pulps and while re-inventing the genre they are essentially closed texts, paying lip service to the frozen archetypes (what the less charitable call 'cliches') of the genre, lurid, fetishistic murders, faceless, gloved assailants Dario back on form - on the set of 'TERZA (usually played by Dario himself) beleaguered MADRE' (2007) damsels, baffled coppers and inspired amateur detectives who sift through the red herrings before unmasking the killer, invariably as a result of a misperceived, seemingly insignificant clue trailed in the title or first act. Hidden in plain sight you might say. While the solutions are often wildly implausible an answer is made available and reason seen if not to triumph then at least hold the film's chaotic, pathological urges in check, a logic best defined by the Conan Doyle maxim repeated by the ill-fated Inspector Giemani in ’TENEBRAE':-"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains no matter how improbable, must be the truth!"

Despite the near incoherent plotting and jaw dropping non-sequeters the film's in Dario's mid-period output and the work of his various disciples and imitators contain countless literary allusions from sources as diverse as Lovecraft's 'THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE' , Clark Ashton Smith and Fritz Inferno (1980) Leiber whose terrifying 'scholar's mistress' in 'OUR LADY OF DARKNESS' systematically isolates the narrator before literally coallescing from the accumulated pages of his research, the very books that have mounted up on the side of the bed vacated by his lover, slowly but surely taking on human form. A close reading of Leiber's text will reveal that I have 'borrowed' more than a few ideas of my own from this source in 'HARDWARE' (1990) - notably the 'Peeping Tom'/'Rear Window' shtick and the freaky fat man's initial 'love at first sight' telephoto encounter with the adorable, newly reanimated Mark 13 drone soldier.

Trust me, it worked better in the book...

Thomas De Quincey's 'SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS' is of course the 'ur-text' from which Argento and his erstwhile writing partner Nicolodi 'borrowed' the central conceit of an infernal trinity, the negative aspect of the Goddess akin to the three norns or sorrows: Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears Mater Suspriorum, Our Lady of Sighs Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness…

Suspiria (1977) No such assurances are available in 'SUSPIRIA' or 'INFERNO' in which conventional logic is turned on its head.. While the primary coloured dreamscapes are strewn with the expected quota of impossibly glamorous slayings there is no single murderer at work here, often no motive and no certainly no attempt made to explain or 'solve' the crimes. Written with his former spouse, actor Daria Nicolodi both these notorious works concern witchcraft and share a weird, private cosmology only partly accessible to the casual viewer. Inspired by an incident related by Nicolodi's grandmother concerning a sojourn at an eldritch dance school in the black forest 'SUSPIRIA' and it's Manhattan bound sequel draw on real life figures such as Helena Blavatsky, Gurdijieff, Rudolf Steiner and the mythic 'master alchemist' Fulcanelli whose fictional counterpart is literally found 32

I quote now (for the sake of the uninitiated) from DeQuincey's"LEVANA AND OUR THREE LADIES OF SORROW':"But the third Sister who is also the youngest -! Hush! Whisper while we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large or else no flesh would be spared but within that kingdom all power is hers.

Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond reach of sight…and her eyes, rising so high, might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crepe the fierce light of a blazing misery that rests not for matins nor for vespers, for noon of day or moon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be

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Thomas De Quincey

read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She is also the mother of lunacies and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power but narrow is the nation that she rules.

For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions, in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace.

Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest Sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding and with tiger's leaps. She carries no key for though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is MATER TENEBRARUM - OUR LADY OF DARKNESS…"

Although the subject was politely left unmentioned in Dario's presence it remained something of an insible mastodon in the room when it came to to the subject of any potential sequel..

Dario was planning a cable show based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe instead and George Romero had agreed to direct the pilot hour - 'FACTS IN THE CASE OF M.VALDEMAR'. Michele was inked for 'MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH' which had been Romero's original choice and I was up for 'THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO' (a Masonic version set in Rome for which I had my sites locked on Michael Gambon - then hot off Greenaway's 'THE COOK, THE THIEF, etc' for 'Fortunato' and Jonathan Pryce for the Teflon coated 'Montressor') Sadly Romero struck out and only one further episode written and directed by Dario himself was produced with my script ending up on the shelf with the others. The maestro's television and commercial work (including direction of the Trussardi fashion show in Milan) is all too easily overlooked by fans and crtitcs but to my (admitedly partisan) eyes his entry in the Poe cycle, 'THE BLACK CAT', ranks amongst his strongest latter day work, faithful to the spirit and letter of Poe's classic and directly engaging with the issues raised in his existing ouvre by making the killer not only the protagonist but explicitly portraying him as a photographer struggling to rise above his genre roots and prove his worth as an artist.

Although it had not initially been conceived as a series the shared cosmology of 'SUSPIRIA' and 'INFERNO' seemed to demand a second sequel, a subject Dario was notoriously reticent on. His estranged partner, Asia's mom - Daria, had attempted to complete the trilogy without him, teaming up with director Luigi Cozzi to write ' DEI PROFUNDIS / OUT OF THE DEPTHS' (1990) which tried to get intertextual on the saga's sorry ass a couple of years prior to Wes Craven's 'NEW NIGHTMARE' with the Black Mother menacing a film crew under the direction of a thinly disguised caricature of the great man himself, her former husband, here portrayed as a sadistic control freak just begging for the inevitable, gory come uppance.

Daria's revenge - Writer Daria Nicolodi, 'director' Luigi Cozzi and Caroline Munro star of 'DEI PROFUNDIS' il Maestro's reposte - Harvey Keitel struggles with cat, conscience and beret to deliver one of the best performances in any Argento pic.

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The sequence in which Keitel (whose performance improves immeasurably once he loses the hat) stalks his wife's feline familiar while forming a viewfinder with his hands makes these linkages all too clear. Having violently butchered his dippy neo-Buddhist partner (a scene far too strong for television, despite Dario's protests at having to temper his violence for the US market) and walled her up (behind shelves containing his video and nascent DVD collection!) he feels compelled to draw attention to his crime.

When the two segments were released under the title 'TWO EVIL EYES' the rogue Third Mother sequel did it's best to ride on the very short tail of Argento's Poe homage by pointlessly adopting the title 'THE BLACK CAT' when it appeared on tape in certain sectors of the phantom zone and places south. Let's get this straight - I have nothing but respect for Signorita Nicolodi and her colloborator Signor Cozzi. Doubtless the good lady had just cause and needed to vent a li'l steam. As for Luigi, he sold me a mug once when he was working behind the counter at Dario's store in Rome and 'ALIEN CONTAMINATION' can be kind of fun for about five minutes if you're drunk, half asleep or in the mood to kick back and see a few people explode for no good reason. However Ray Harryhausen's 'GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD' happens to be one of my top ten favourite motion pictures of all time and it's former star Caroline Munro was among the performers who contributed to 'DEI PROFUNDIS' and never saw a dime of the fees contractually promised by the fly-by-night Roman producers. Now Signor Cozzi may claim that has nothing to do with him which may well be true but then he can scarcely call himself a director.

No director worth their salt would ever leave their people to be hung out to dry like that, especially not their cast, let alone their star and Miss Munro desserves better.

While we don't go near the contracts or financial negotiations the safety and well being of your people has to be uppermost among your concerns at all times.

When asked to define the role of the director on set by the judge at the 'TWILIGHT ZONE' trial John Landis replied: -"The director is the one who gets the blame..."A self pitying way of saying the director is the one who is responsible. Somebody has to be and if you're not willing to shoulder that burden then you don't belong on the floor.

Simple as that.

Crime and self induced Punishment - The imp of the Perverse at play...

Harvey's beautifully pitched delivery of the protagonist's fatal boast,"what secrets could possibly lurk between these soundly construced walls?"is not only true to source but cannot fail to recall 'INFERNO's third and final riddle and it's ludicrous solution:-"the third key is hidden beneath the soles of your shoes.."

This aberrant need to at once hide the secret whilst simultaniously flaunting and hence drawing attention to the skill and artistry of it's hiding is a pattern we will see repeated again and again throughout this discourse for if il maestro's story is really a confession then so is my own. Poe's pesky imp obtains to the giddy realm of the esoteric as much as to the somewhat less than fine art of murder.

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Dario himself seemed to quash all hope of an official sequel when he cast Ania Pieroni (the Mother of Tears in 'INFERNO') as a trashy shoplifter who is violently murdered in the opening scenes of his subsequent production 'TENEBRAE', her mouth stuffed with the pages of a lurid pulp novel bearing the film's title. It comes as little surprise when the killer is later revealed to be the author himself, the maestro's The destruction of the text - ' TENEBRAE's' opening frames 'fictional' alter ego, seeking to pin his crimes on a psychotic fan in order to rid himself of an estranged wife. Dario claimed at the time he had been questioned by the Polizei in real life as a possible suspect in the then current 'LUDWIG' killings (later solved, the true culprits proving to be not one but two Italian physicists who donned clown outfits before embarking on their eponymous kill spree, a scenario unlikely as any of the maestro's last reel twists) He hinted at it putting undue strain on his relationship with Daria although I suspect this is just smoke and mirrors. 'INFERNO' had tanked, failing to reproduce 'SUSPIRIA's break-out success and Dario was ready to clean the slate and move on.

Miss Munro's finest hour..just for the hell of it...

In 'TENEBRAE' (1982) the gaudy lighting and ornate art deco gothic is replaced by bare white walls, gleaming glass and chrome and stark, futurist architecture. Despite it's title it is the brightest of his films with the action unfolding in broad daylight or flatly lit interiors. 'INFERNO's' incoherent plotting had drawn too many poor notices and switching writing partners Dario triumphantly jettisoned his previous works penetrating the surface - 'TENEBRAE' (1982) magical trappings in a distinctly post-modern return to his giallo roots. Considerable care had gone into the dialogue and the plot is one of his best, unfolding with cruel yet undeniable logic.

Like the doomed Inspector Giemani, Dario had sought to eliminate the 'impossible' and arrived at a truth. Of sorts..

The bride of the one eyed God and the daughter of eight limbed Kali 'DEA PROFUNDIS' has since been forgotten, sinking into a desserved oblivion almost as profound as the missing final book in Fulcanelli's own trilogy. 'THE OVERTURE TO THE INVISIBLE' or the third installment of rogue philologist Otto Rahn's attempt to provide a key analogous to the 'verbum dismissum' of the alchemists : - ' ORPHEUS - A JOURNEY TO HELL AND BEYOND' (1937?)

In any initiatory process it seems the third key or indeed the 'third degree' is always the hardest...

Tenebrae - (1982)

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(5) Isis in New York.

That long, warm night in pre-war Manhattan Dario sat watching silently as we ate, barely touching a morsel, leaving me to defend 'INFERNO's fractured plotting without comment, content at least one person out there was cracked enough to consider it his strongest work despite the screaming papier mache skeleton at the climax and other lapses of reason. (admittedly I have an abiding passion for 'FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET' which gives me a huge kick every time I see it but let's not go there for now) In the 2000 hardback 'ART OF DARKNESS - THE CINEMA OF DARIO ARGENTO' Mitch Davis memorably describes the"dumbfounded sense of pure what-thefuck"that tore through him on his first viewing of the notorious 'INFERNO' 'taxi cab scene' with it's lunatic score by Keith Emerson. As Mitch succinctly says"It all seemed so ridiculous… for a multitude of reasons INFERNO just messed me up…"Granted your humble narrator had been half asleep and suspended between worlds at the time of his own initial encounter (in what a shrink might call a highly receptive 'hypnogogic state' similar to what you reach during those long haul drives when it's all too damn easy to pick up phantom hitchhikers) but that still didn't explain why this mad dog of a movie communicated so directly with my dreams. As always the maestro offered scant help or guidance beyond his customary shrug and rapid elision to current work. I was writing 'DUSTDEVIL' at the time and related the story of Modjadji, the Rain Queen in a backhanded attempt to draw him on the subject.

Dario listened politely only becoming engaged when I got to the part about the priestess's body serving as the crucial ingredient in the rain making medicine. Given the company our conversation turned readily to ritual murder and the use of human and animal body parts in tribal magic. I had filmed some bloody scenes covering violent Xhosa initiation rites for the South African College of Music but knew next to nothing of parallel Afro-Caribbean and native American traditions. Keen to further my education Maitland suggested we visit her local Santeria botannica and being game for a laugh I took her up on the offer, hoping to lure Dario into discussing 'TERZA MADRE' –the Third Mother…

I had no conception I was on the brink of events that would irrevocably overturn my view of the so-called 'real' world. But as they say, fools rush in and not twenty fours later I was ambling blithely as a black goat down a deceptively sun drenched sidewalk on the lower east side, squinting at an address written on the back of Maitland's card.

I was only aware of Santeria from half memories of John Schlessinger's 1987 klinker 'THE BELIEVERS' which conflated the tradition's dark side (Brujeria) with a listless sub-Polanski strain of whitebread Satanism. Like Voodoo the tradition's followers revered the images of Christian Saints in missionary approved spiritual palimpsest over the identities of the African spirits venerated by their ancestors and a host of plaster virgins and contorted Christ's stared mutely back at me from the shop window as I paced outside, awaiting the maestro's belated arrival. After an hour or two I began to tire of making trips to the nearest pay phone and began to come to terms with the fact that the great man's schedule and glamorous new assistant had gotten the better of him and any thought of a third sequel. At least for now..

I almost hightailed it back to the Plaza but resolving to make the most of the situation decided to give the store a brief once over first. I stepped a pace across the threshold and faltered. The atmosphere felt sticky, redolent with the pungent smell of drying roots and something sweet and subtle like the icing on a wedding cake, a hint of almond. What looked like an orange lump of olibanum smouldered in a clawfoot burner, yellow vapors wafting over rickety shelves lined with candles, bundles of plants and murky jars filled with pickled snakes, husks of seahorses, tarantula moult and what might have been fermented chilli peppers or rat embryos or quite possibly some combination of both. I had been in traditional herbalists before back in Africa but this was the first time I had come into contact with the bizarre packaging designed to appeal to the blue collar American consumer.

Delighted by the various absurd labels on display I decided to pick up a bright pink 'SPOOK SHOO!!! STAY AWAY EVIL' aerosol (containing 7 LUCKY INDIAN POWERS!!!!) and a small plaster black Madonna to prop up my Argento tapes back at the ranch. I had no idea about the icon's history or provenance but the statue seemed benign enough despite the frankly heretical color of her skin and that black child in her arms.

It seemed a fitting momento to bring back from the big apple - after all in the loony tunes opening narration to 'INFERNO' the off-screen alchemist/ author does explicitly maintain that the third mother who is also the youngest 'controls New York' just as Mater Suspiriorum and Mater Lachrymarum hold court respectively in Friborg and Rome.

I packed the tiny statue into my suitcase back at the Plaza as if it were any other souvenir and forgot about it. I had other things on my mind back then like my US premier, initial audience test cards (largely unfavourable or bafflingly incoherent) and 'HARDWARE's upcoming European release.

But Mater Tenebrarum hadn't forgotten about me.

In fact she was only just getting started...

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Rounding a bend I glimpsed what appeared to be a monastery built atop one of the highest crags serviced by a rickety funicular railway. Pulling into a roadside lot I decided on the spur of the moment to hitch a ride to the summit, hoping to catch sight of Barcelona or the misplaced Mediterranean.

(6) An Audience with the Black Mother Shortly thereafter I was obliged to make my first visit to Spain.

'HARDWARE' was playing in competition in Sitges, a vaguely seedy Catalonian resort town beloved to the local gay community that organizes an annual festival of fantastic cinema to presumably keep its hotels filled and fend off incipient off-season blues for another fortnight or so. Miramax flew me in at the drop of a hat to present the film and kick off the European campaign which was looming large. I made landfall in Barcelona, bringing the stormy weather with me and hiring a car at the airport, hit the trail but as it was my first time in Spain I had no clue where I was going or what I was doing and within minutes became hopelessly lost.

I not only missed the turn off to Sitges, I missed Barcelona and never did get to see the Gaudi cathedral, not until many years later. Instead I found myself on some sort of orbital freeway that skirted the city's outskirts, curving away from the coast and my intended destination.

Tumbling cloud surged past the carriage windows like the famous 'tablecloth' on faraway Table Mountain, condensing into nothing as it fell past beetling cliffs dotted everywhere with shrines and half glimpsed icons, spiralling steps cut deep into the living rock bearing what appeared to be hundreds of pilgrims upwards towards a great basilica set on a plateau approximately half way up the rampart like a way station to heaven, a celestial transit lounge, Warren Beatty's 'HEAVEN CAN WAIT' re-invented by William Peter Blatty…

I had reached my final destination but not having been in Spain before and not understanding the lingo had no idea where on Earth or elsewhere I really was.

Noticing a gift shop servicing the pilgrims I went in search of coffee, hoping to clear my head and reorientate myself. It was then the truth impacted on me, pulling the rug out from under the rational world….

Glancing about myself I noticed the shop's shelves were crammed with rows of identical souvenirs, thousands of replicas of the same tiny statue I had bought in New York only days before for I had come without knowing it to the mountain of Montserrat (literally the serrated or jagged mountain) and it was the image of La Morenita, the little dark one I had purchased unwittingly at the botannica…

Seeing a high range of weird looking jagged mountains up ahead I drove towards them, simply following the road and searching in vain for an exit ramp. Before long I found myself navigating the base of the surreally barren range, gargantuan spires of limestone, quartz and glinting porphyry towering over me, crests lost in cloud.

Schiller said: -"Montserrat sucks a man in from the outer to the inner world"and so it was for your humble narrator, ignorant as I was of the key initiatory role the mountain has played in the European esoteric tradition since time out of mind.

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I joined the procession and filed slowly through the vast basilica, past the sacred spear that Savanarolla deposited at the shrine when he laid down his weapons to found the black robed Jesuit order after experiencing his own Damascene conversion in the presence of the icon who stood resplendent in the heart of Her temple, at the spiritual core of Her strange fiefdom. The pilgrims had come to touch the globe in Her hand, a gesture reputed to confer fertility but when I pressed my trembling fingertips to the orb I could only think of how I had been summoned halfway around the world in a few swift days to complete a pilgrimage I never knew I had embarked on. I had come without knowing it into the domain of the Black Mother and as one journey ended so a newer and stranger one began. I had received a momentary flash of illumination but was as artless as a child playing on the outer doorstep of a mystery I couldn't begin to comprehend.

Who knows? Perhaps She does 'control New York'? Certainly Dario wasn't far wrong but what about the other two members of the infernal trinity? Worse still the official texts on the subject were disturbingly unclear claiming the icon's features had been 'blackened by candle moke' over countless years which is plainly not the case. The monastery atop the mountain's highest outcrop that first caught my attention from the freeway was strictly off limits to pilgrims and casual day trippers, apparently a retreat for the clergy's upper eschelon where many of them chose to spend their final days, papal palliative care in a relaxed healthy, albeit rugged mountainous environment. All well and good but even a casual glance at the map reveals that the ancient courtyard at the heart of this rarified enclave is not called 'St Peter's', 'St Paul's' or even St. Michael's Square.

It's called 'TARANTULA SQUARE'- check it out! A name that conjures black widows rather than virgins…

Elsewhere in the available texts (and I hasten to add the Benedictine Monastery adjacent to the basilica houses one of the finest esoteric libraries east of the Miskatonic) I found reference to an ancient legend that a temple dedicated to Venus had been built on the mountaintop in pagan times which was later destroyed by the miraculous intervention of the Archangel Michael.

The warrior angel is invariably associated with the aggressive Christianization of pagan sites, Glastonbury and Avebury among them, marching along the 'old, straight way', the so-called 'ley lines' that criss-cross Europe like spines or nails in the dragon's back.

Somehow this fragmentary folkloric episode, an echo of an older oral tradition seemed more on the money than the glossy text in the contemporary guide books...

According to the guide book the Virgin of Montserrat was found in 888 AD, not long after the liberation of Barcelona from the moors. It was apparently discovered by shepherds in a grotto where it had been hidden by what the text described as a 'fleeing Gothic bishop' which frankly raises more questions than it answers, if you'll forgive the pun. When repeated attempts to move the icon to the nearest village, Manresa, were repeatedly thwarted by violent electrical storms it was decided instead to leave Her on the mountain and build the basilica around Her so She might be venerated in situ.

Devotion to 'La Morenita' spread eastwards with the Mediterranean conquests of the Catalan-Aragonese monarchy. Throughout their Italian territories there were over 150 churches dedicated to the Madonna of Montserrat. At a later period the imperial dynasty in Spain consolidated the cult of the Black Mother in central Europe - in Bohemia and Ausria, carrying it westward with the discovery and conquest of the New World which had close links with the 'little dark one' from the very beginning thanks to the presence at Columbus's side of a former hermit from the mountain, Bernat Boil, thus making Her image the first 'Christian' icon to cross the Atlantic. The first place they made landfall was named in Her honour, the remote, volcanic island of Montserrat and the first churches in Chile, Mexico and Peru were dedicated to Her, leading to Her popular appellation 'the Virgin of the New World'.

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I bought a second replica of the statue for Dario , determined to tell him everything I'd learned when I saw him later in the year at Avoriaz. Boarding the dillipidated funicular railway I turned my back on the holy mountain and finally made it to Sitges to introduce my screening although I was feeling too bewitched and bewildered to enjoy the festival as I should have done. The one film I did catch was a rare screening of a beautiful new print of 'JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS' that ran in a huge, old fashioned Mediterranean picture palace where dusty murals of painted Gods and damned souls coiled across the walls and smoking was still tolerated in the balconies.

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Embarrassingly few people turned out for the performance which is how I came to meet the only other English speaker in the queue, the actor Jon Voight, then in his pre-'MISSION IMPOSSIBLE' wilderness years, in town to promote an ill advised personal project, the tepid reincarnation drama 'DESTINY' concerning a medieval knight born again into the present day to defend his chatelaine. There were rumours flying behind Mr.Voight's back that he was nuttier than a wagonload of pralines and had recently been putting it about that he not only believed in the whole reincarnation deal but actively thought the world was coming to an end. I admit he did expound at greater length than strictly necessary on the Hopi prophecies but he was the only sympathetic ear I could find and I was grateful he didn't dismiss me as the hopeless headcase I obviously was.

Somewhere in the midst of this marathon I ran into a young Catalunian named Nacho Cerda, then still a callow fan who pressed me eagerly for an autograph and I scrawled something about catching up with him in the 21st century on his programme. The look in my eyes stayed with him although I have little clear memory of the incident having bigger things on my mind at the time. Most of the time I was running so hard I barely paused to eat let alone get a full night's rest. Of course I would only realize later that Nacho was exactly the man I should have been talking to all along being a close family friend of the individual who owned and operated the funicular railway system instrumental to my attempts at penetrating the sealed enclave at the mountain's summit.

The Curse of the Black Widow - Nacho Cerda keeps a poker face while Anastasia and Karel struggle to come to terms with another dialogue polish on 'LOS ABANDONADOS' (2007) Nacho's debut.

As the images of those indifferent Greek Gods playing with Jason and his sailors like pawns on a vast chessboard unspooled before us back in 1990 it slowly dawned on your humble narrator just how stealthily the Black Mother had come upon me, Her negative aspect invading my life without invitation, the 'Scholar's Mistress' casting a long shadow out of the twilight, fictional universes of H. Rider Haggard, H.P.Lovecraft, Thomas de Quincey, Clark Ashton Smith and Fritz Leiber by way of Dario, Michele, Lucio Fulci and countless others.

How strange it seemed that elements of these apparently 'fictional' universes could have slowly impinged on my consciousness until they displaced my original definition of 'reality' and took hold of my waking existence so that my own life began to assume the unbelievable character of a fictional narrative.

Fulcanelli, the mysterious master alchemist alluded to in 'INFERNO' and 'LA CHIESA' perhaps holds the key to this conunmdrum, the perceived narrowing of the gap between the daylit world and the shadowy, imagined universe of the pulps. In the third chapter of 'THE MYSTERY OF THE CATHEDRALS' he seeks to define the origins of Gothic art arguing that the term 'art gothique' is a corruption of 'argotique' linking it to the 'Goetic' or magical art through the phonetic cabala. The dictionary definition of 'argot' is that of 'a language peculiar to all individuals who wish to communicate their thoughts without being understood by outsiders'.

Fulcanelli muses that 'the argotiers, those who use this language, are the hermetic descendents of the Argonauts who manned the ship ARGO. They spoke the langue argotique as they sailed for the felicitous shores of Colchis to retrieve the Golden Fleece.

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Three Mothers - ALEPH - MEM - SHIN Gothic art is in fact the art got or cot - the art of light or of the spirit.

A self-censoring secret communicable only to the elect.

What Fulcanelli described as the"language of a minority of individuals living outside accepted laws, conventions, customs and etiquette…"The language of the humble, the poor, the despised, the rebels and wanderer, the vagrants of the Court of Miracles and the Freemasons of the Middle Ages who built the gothic masterpieces we admire today.

Needless to say Queen Isabella of Spain who despached Columbus and Bernat Boil on their mission was herself a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece a secret society linked to the Order of Calatrava who were responsible for monitoring their progress in the New World. The records in the Order's archives, only recently made available to me, portray Columbus as a very different figure to the bold explorer familiar from our exoteric texts, cataloging a history of sadism, misogyny and megalomania that would put Mugado to shame, including removing the ears and fingers of his imagined rivals. It seems old Christophe finally went too far the day he ordered his unfaithful mistress to be paraded naked on a donkey through the streets of Santa Domingo, an affront to popular decency that lead to the rogue governor of the Indies being stripped of office and sent home in chains.

Scarcely pleasant reading but a lot more fun than the Gerard Depardieu movie made it look...

Sadly Columbus and Savanarolla are not the only martinets to have found sanctuary and inspiration for later crimes at Montserrat. Franco and Heinrich Himmler were both afficionados of the magic mountain not to mention the recently canonised Josemaria Escriva, founder of 'Opus Dei' a not so secret society whose supposed fascist leanings have been a continuing source of controversy.

While 'Opus Dei' claims not to be involved in 'political activities' its name has been linked with the death of 'God's banker' Roberto Calvi and the FBI agent Robert Hanssen, arrested and charged with espionage in 2001.

But let us move swiftly on for now as time may be shorter than you think…

commonly tagged 'gothic' music and the creaky horrors of Lovecraft and Argento the attributes of Fulcanelli's secret language. A symbolic truth hidden in a ghetto genre, neglected by mainstream criticism and the current definition of 'art'.

This is indeed the art of the hidden. The projector or monitor has become the new conveyor of the art of light and at fusion frequency, at 33 frames a second an ancient mystery lives on, casting the heretical illusion of life across the shining screen, an illusion born out of the ceaseless friction of light and dark. What Apollonius of Tyanna and the soothsayer Tiresius called 'the Language of the Birds'. The language Solomon knew before he lost his seal and was forced to go eyeball to eyeball with Asmodeus…

I didn't expect poor Jon to follow the gist of it but the midnight cowboy has the patience of a saint and did his best to sift through the informational shrapnel, concurring that there was only one way to get to the bottom of it and that was to get back up that blessed mountain as soon as possible and find out what was going on in Tarantula Square.

There were questions that needed answers.

Like why in hell was She black anyway?

And why did it have to be spiders?

TO BE CONTINUED…..

In his masterly inaugural lecture ('On the Eloquence of the Vulgar') delivered to the first M.A course in film studies to be offered in the United Kingdom professor Colin McCabe justified the study of film and television by comparing it to the study of Italian at the time of Dante when Latin was considered the language of civilization and Italian was seen as the language of the masses. Dante wanted the readership of his 'DIVINE COMEDY' to be his fellow citizens, the people from whom he felt himself exiled, rather than simply the scholars. If he had written in Latin he would, he tells us in the 'CONVIVIO' have been advancing his own career but would himself have been prostituting literature.

Instead he wanted to write for those who were 'volgari e non litterati' , those who were increasingly able to read Italian although formally unlettered. Just as Italian replaced Latin as the language of the masses so film, television and the internet have displaced conventional literature as the vernacular of our times. In this light it should come as no surprise that just as the powers that be seek in vain to control the medium so too can one find in the most stigmatized of popular forms, in what is 40

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If the first part of my unveiling finds favour then I will post a second installment of six chapters followed by a third and final key as time and tide allows. The nature of this metatextual account makes formal publication impossible.

Like the 'Man with No-Name' the trail of the Three Mothers weaves in and out of so many 'fictional' universes that she transcends traditional notions of 'ownership' or copyright. An agent or entertainment lawyer's nightmare. Of course She bears no resemblance to any mortal and all of us, all persons living or dead are entirely coincidental. You cannot unveil She Who Must Be Obeyed too clearly to uninitiated eyes. There are penalties you understand. Dreadful penalties.

They can be cruel…

I may have exceeded my tenuous charter in posting this much already but since my hard drive

has already been hacked six different ways from sunday I didn't feel there was any point in holding back what was already to some extent already in public domain. Not all the secrets in my possession, nor even the most important of them are by any means military, nor is there reason to presume that all the hackers that haunt my neck of the cyber-woods are necessarily working for the pentagon or the exoteric government. Time is short however and it only remains for me to wish the maestro all the luck that is mine to muster for the imminent release of his 'beloved 'TERZA MADRE' - the third and final part of the infernal trinity. The moment that his legion of fans, followers and daemonic cohorts have awaited so long with such unpresidented joy and trepidation.

It is to him I dedicate this unveiling of just what it was about the maestro's work that put the hook in me in the first place.

Blessed be and forever remain. R.S. - Opus Dei headquarters, Torreciudad, Spain, Summer 2007

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Richard Stanley

LACHRYYMAE II The Widow’s Web

Now summer is gone and the first chill of autumn is stealing into River City's hearts and homes, the clouds drawing in across the dank rooftops, bellies pregnant with ten million raindrops, ten million tiny sparks, ten million tears…

Blog Archive Saturday, September 29, 2007

In Africa the rain never stopped and a state of emergency has been declared in half a dozen equatorial nations were the flooding continues, crops rotting in the fields and those other two horsemen, famine and pestilence already abroad in Uganda, Rwanda and places south. I wish I could offer a ray of hope but I've seen the satellite pics and heard what NASA and the major environmental organizations have to say and it ain't sweet. Nothing we do now can save western civilization and the world we know. That chance is already lost to us, quietly frittered away by our leaders and no matter what measures are put in place nothing can halt the rapid dissolution of the polar icecaps or hold back the coming storm, not even the Rain Queen, Modjadji herself. The Magna Mater, Dr.Lovelock's so-called 'GAIA', the Goddess whatever you wish to call her is angry with her subjects and a pissed off Mother Earth is not to be trifled with. The Goddess has another face, a face that kills instead of nurtures and whose kiss blasts like the kiss of lightning.

The Widow's Web The dark side of the Goddess has been known by many names in countless cultures and our frail species has fashioned many masks by which our ancestor's hoped to personalize the abstractions that incarnated themselves in their wounded hearts. The writer Thomas de Quincey christened them 'The Three Mothers' or 'Our Ladies of Sorrow'.

To see the faces of these three sisters too clearly is to court madness and annihilation but I have known them thoroughly and have walked in all their kingdoms.

The eldest of the Three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears. Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy by turns, oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentrimes challenging the heavens. She goes abroad upon the winds when she hears the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs and beholds the mustering of the summer clouds. This sister, the eldest, carries a key which is more than papal at her girdle, which opens the doors of every cottage and every palace, stealing into the hearts of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children from Ganges to Nile, from Nile to Mississippi.

Because she is the first born of her house and has the widest empire let us honour her with the title of 'Madonna'!

In the previous instalment of I related as truthfully as possible how I had become aware of this infernal trinity through my fanboy devotion to all things 'gothic', in particular the work of Italian horror movie maestro Dario Argento and how I was lead seemingly by chance to the basilica of the Black Madonna, La Moreneta, the Virgin of Montserrat. I say 'as truthfully as possible' because there are some threads of the story I cannot share with you in order to respect the wishes and safeguard the privacy of those involved. As with the 'MOREAU' affair the full truth cannot be told 'til all concerned are beyond knowing. These events took place nearly two decades ago and while far fetched they pale in comparison to more recent developments. Were I to say more without proof of my claims you would doubtless dismiss me as a madman. Suffice to see I have been abroad, covering a lot of ground, some familiar territory, some of it less so. Part of my journey was conducted by horse and I had occasion to think of another madman and laughing stock who sought to restore honour to chivalry, which had crumbled in his country. Don Quixote read so many books on chevaliers that he became deranged and exhuming a dusty suit of armour from his attic he patched it up with bits of cardboard and set off on an adventure in the garb of another age, riding across Spain on his nag, Rossinante. You can't be a chevalier without a cheval and the more time I spent off road and in the saddle the more obvious it became that it was the automobile that killed the great age of chivalry as much as the Holy Roman Church. Not content with heretics and badgers the good ol' horseless carriage now seems set to kill us all thanks to the miracle of global warming. But I digress…

Since my last posting I revisited many of the sites concerned in this sinister saga and caught up with some of it's principal protagonists, including director Nacho Cerda who sends his regards. He was surprised and amused when I drew his attention to the previous instalment and having swiftly grasped the

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medium's potential he is now hell bent on setting up a MySpace page of his own. Nacho is riding high on the international success of 'LOS ABANDONADOS' and at present still debating whether or not to accept the poisoned Grail of the proverbial 'big Hollywood project.'

It is to him that I dedicate this second instalment of my unburdening and it is no coincidence it begins with the story of his namesake, another chevalier who rode the same slippery, downhill trail as myself in the summer of 1522…

He spent the night meditating in the presence of the mysterious icon and and later claimed to have been visited by"a blinding, celestial light"and a series of bizarre visions."Something white resembling three keys of a clavichord or an organ"appeared to him and he immediately thought it was a manifestation of the Holy Trinity. Then the three shapes merged into the glowing body of a single luminous being and the young chevalier began to weep uncontrollably as he realized the error of his ways and all the harm he had caused to others during his worldly life. Later this miracle came to be known as the 'gratia lacrymarum' or the 'Grace of Tears' that marked the quest knight's spiritual metamorphosis.

The Two Nachos - Saint Ignatius and Signor Cerda - separated at birth?.

THE TRAIL OF THE THREE MOTHERS (1) Gratia Lachrymarum Once upon a time a young nobleman named Ignatio set out across Spain on his horse.

On the way he met a 'Moor', a baptised Arab and lured him into a discussion on the Virgin Mary.

The Moor believed in the Immaculate Conception but contested that her virginity could have survived intact after the birth of Christ. Ignatio took this as an insult to his faith and in typically violent terms sought immediate justice.

At that time, being the early 16th century, the chevaliers of Spain lead an idle life around their sovereign and had lost the bravery and dignity of their ancestors. While demonstrating an excessive humility to their king and his favourites they were rude and arrogant towards those they considered their inferiors, especially foreigners and people of a darker complexion. Ignatio had the outward appearance of a knight, hardy and provoking, dressed in a leather doublet, armed with both sword and pistol, his dark, receding hair curling from beneath the broad felt brim of his travel stained hat but his inward character was displayed by the murderous look in his eyes and is perhaps best described by an official document of the time, a claim brought by the Corrigidor of Guipozcoa in 1515 at the Episcopal tribunal of Pamplona in which the magistrate described the young nobleman as"treacherous, violent and vindictive…"

Accordingly the Moor was on his guard and beat off Ignatio's unprovoked attack before high tailing it, his Persian stallion easily outrunning the psychotic chevalier's long suffering Spanish pony. As he watched the dark man's dust cloud dwindle across the flatlands Ignatio asked himself if it was his duty or not to pursue his slanderer and kill him or at least die trying. In his soul and conscience he could not resolve this dilemma so following an old superstitious tradition of chivalry he decided to rely on a 'sign', on this occasion the judgment of his horse. He freed the bridle and allowed his steed to choose it's own path.

Before long he caught sight of a strange, jagged mountain range on the horizon and felt himself borne helplessly towards it. As he drew nearer to the gleaming white cliffs the young chevalier noticed what looked like a monastery built on a plateau high above the clouds and tying up his faithful steed he started up the winding stone steps towards the basilica. And so it was that the nobleman, Ignatius of Loyola, came to the mountain of Montserrat and the temple of La Moreneta, the black Madonna.

Then his luminous visitor took another form, becoming a huge, coiling rainbow hued serpent which, in spite of its beauty, terrified him. Noticing that the nearer the supernatural creature came to the cross the less its beauty shone Ignatio concluded it was not God concealed within this hallucinatory image but the Devil.

Laying down his weapons at the feet of our Lady the chevalier swore himself to Her service as a 'knight of God' or a defender of the 'celestial kingdom.' In the fullness of time he would become renowned as the founder of the 'Society of Jesus', the black garbed warrior monks we call the 'Jesuites', most commonly remembered perhaps by the uninitiated as the protagonists of 'THE EXORCIST' and other works by author/screenwriter William Peter Blatty, himself a former member of the order.

Ignatius came down from the mountain to set off on his conquest of the 'kingdom of the sky', sojourning for a while in a humid grotto at the foot of a cliff near Manresa where he sought to cleanse himself by inflicting the most severe exercises of penitence on his suffering flesh.

He would spend seven or eight hours every morning kneeling in prayer and would sometimes fast and go without sleep for days on end. He would flagellate himself heavily and it was not uncommon that he would wound his chest with a stone.

One day he went so far he fell seriously ill and was carried unconscious into the house of one of his benefactors. The doctors gave him up for lost and some of the pious women began to beg the lady of the house to cede pieces of his clothing to them as relics. To satisfy their desires she opened the cupboard containing Ignatio's belongings only to recoil in shock. Suspended within were neatly arranged the worst instruments of torture and mortification;- penitence belts in plaited steel threads, heavy chains, nails disposed in the form of a cross and an undergarment bristling with iron tips…

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There are many paths to enlightenment, as varied as the chemical elements that make up our material world and not all of them as dismal as the one chosen by Ignatius but it is a path nonetheless, a hard way perhaps but the only one available to"those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved … by conspiracies from without and conspiracies from within… in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks", for those who have come without knowing it into the domain of Our Lady of Darkness…

This seemingly medieval penchant for self harm is reflected today in the barbed 'celice' worn by devout followers of Opus Dei, the order founded by another tortured soul who found solace of a sorts at Montserrat, JoseMaria Escriva who like Saint Ignatius was posthumously canonized with unseemly haste. Yet there is more to this morbid sexual fetish than uninitiated eyes might readily discern. A method to it's madness…

These are the"Spiritual exercises"of the Jesuit order as laid down by it's founder, Saint Ignatius of Loyola: -"He who practises them must, with the help of all his senses, undergo the experiences of Heaven and Hell, from sweet beatitude to devouring woe so that the difference between Good and Evil might imprint themselves forever on his soul.

So that Evil is made tangible the spiritual exercises serve as a terrifying enactment of Hell. It must be represented in all its horror, full of the legions of the groaning damned…"

Saint Ignatius codified this strange 'enactment' into a series of precise points : "The first key consists of looking with the imagination of the eyes at the length, width and depth of Hell and the immense fires of the abyss and the souls imprisoned in their burning bodies. the second key key consists of listening with the imagination of the ears to the lamentations, cries, vociferations and blasphemies which slander our lord and his saints.

The third key consists of breathing with the imagination of smell, the smoke, the sulphur, the mire and rot of Hell.

The fourth key consists of tasting with the imagination of taste, all things bitter, tears, sourness and the maggot of conscience.

The fifth key consists of touching with the imagination of touch the flames that burn the soul…"

(2) Mission Improbable I cannot for obvious reasons name my companions save to say there were three of us who scaled the holy mountain that night, bolstered by fool's courage. Our actions weren't strictly speaking 'legal' but then a good magician always knows when to bend the rules. There were too many things wrong with the story, nagging details that refused to add up and like one of the doomed protagonists of Dario's 'giallos' I felt compelled to return to the scene, to keep pulling on those loose ends until I found where they lead to.

Then, and only then, is the candidate ready for Level Two. 44

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The mountain turned out to be harder to find than I thought and we we already behind schedule by the time we pulled into the abandoned lot outside the cable station. Whispering like schoolboys we started up the winding path, following the funicular railway towards the mysterious enclave on the summit identified on the map as the 'Pla de les Tarantules' - The 'Plain of the Tarantulas' or 'Tarantula Square'. The origins of the name was as much of a mystery to me then as the icon herself and the riddle of her ebon skin. Whatever it was had nothing to do with Christianity. What she represented was older than Christ or the Torah, older than recorded history…

represented the finest flowering of African art and culture. The science of Egypt, 'alchemy', came by association to be regarded as the 'dark' or 'black art' and those who rationalized it understood it as 'chemistry' just as the work of the Arab philosopher Geber was thought to be 'gibberish' to uninitiated eyes whilst only a select few recognized it as the secret language of 'algebra'.

The Arabic language is constructed so that many different meanings can be derived from trilateral root words and their variations. The writer and Eastern esoteric scholar Idries Shah Sayed insists that for 'black' we should read 'wise'. This confusion apparently arises from a play on two roots, FHM and FHHM, pronounced 'fecham' and 'facham', meaning 'black' and 'wise' respectively. The FHM root can also mean 'knowledge' or 'understanding', depending on context and pronunciation. Thus the so called 'black art' is also the 'wise art' just as the 'art of darkness', gothic art, the art 'got' or 'cot' is really the 'art of light'.

All of which sounds reassuring in theory but the night was dark and the going hard and as we climbed higher up that winding trail we fell silent.

>In the beginning according to the Egyptians there was only the void and the eye in the void, the awareness some call 'SET'. The deity whose image I had purchased unwittingly in New York might have begun her journey as 'AU SET' - the seat of consciousness, the throne of her male counterpart 'AU SAR', the eye in the throne. As a woman conceives and begats life so she symbolized the living embodiment of that primal awareness. The Greeks venerated AU-SET, the 'consciousness embodied'as ISIS and her counterpart AU-SAR as OSIRIS - also called NEB T-CHETTA, lord of eternity. Her two daughters were BAST, the cat faced one and NEB TET, the Lady of the Temple. The ancient Europeans knew her as KUBABA, CYBELE, SYBIL, DIANA OF THE NINE FIRES or as ARDUINA It is tempting to see 'La Moreneta', the Black Madonna of Montserrat, as another one of those masks - Our Lady of Darkness unveiled as NOTRE-DAME DE LUMIERE. Sadly I would need to write Her name in hieroglyphs for this to make ready sense but finding a keyboard for the task defeats me. Suffice to say she was a radiant being and one of the nine original members of the grateful dead. They were not so much gods, these holy nine but radiant aspects of the one God for the Egyptian faith is in essence a heliocentric monotheism based around RA the sun god who is the father of the other bright ones.

Archeologists have tried to argue that the holy nine are descended Could this be another intertextual clue? Green men of from a quasi-mythological memory Lemuria please take note! of a hierarchical dynastic race who conquered the primitive ancestors of the ancient Egyptians, exerting a civilizing influence over them.

The Moors knew Her homeland by another name - al Khem - the 'Black Land'.

It is thought by some to be an allusion to the rich, black, fertile soil of the Nile valley and by others (Malcolm X and Louis Farakhan among 'em!), as direct proof that the Egyptian civilization

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The narrowing path looped back beneath the cableway before disappearing into the shadows of an old railway tunnel, left disused since the introduction of the cable service in 1957. And the way was dark and I couldn't see my hand in front of my face and we were tempted to turn back but then I dug out my zippo and followed the disused tracks into the gloom. We tried to joke about it but the way was dark and our jokes fell flat and all the while I think we were quietly hoping those spiders would turn out to be just a metaphor after all…

There have been only a few times in my waking experience I have felt as if I had been transposed into something written by H.P.Lovecraft. This was one of them.

As we came to the end of the line and climbed out of the railway cutting we all came to a halt at once, unable to quite get our heads around what we were seeing.

"My God,"breathed one of my companions.

The mountain looked different from this angle and the unexpected change in altitude and perspective accounted for some of the initial disorientation. The basilica on the plateau far below seemed as insignificant as a sandcastle and despite the hour I could see a light still blazing in the window of the library attached to the Benedictine abbey, some scholar working late on his translation I supposed. The clouds had parted, the night was chill and the wild white cliffs rose and rose, dwarfing the buildings and the icon they contained, the lights of Barcelona strewn out like an ineffectual handful of glitter dust along the far horizon. According to the guidebook the jagged rock formations are the result of a freak sedimentary deposit but seeing the face of those stone giants by starlight the same thought hit all of us at once.

"They sure look like Gods,"I muttered.

"Don't be too sure, dude. Maybe they are."

A statue of Dominic de Guzman, (later Saint Dominic) the scourge of the Albigensians and founder of the black order who administered the system of terror known as the 'Spanish Inquisition' stood to the left of the disused railway station, ushering us upwards towards the 'Place of the Tarantula' past a winding calvary known as the path of Saint Michael composed of fifteen evenly spaced groups of life sized statues vividly illustrating the sufferings of Christ.

And I thought of Ignatius's 'Rainbow Serpent' and that old saw from the Book of Revelations:"And there was a war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon and the dragon fought and his angels and prevailed not, nor was their place found any more in heaven. And the 46

great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which decieveth the world was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him…"20: 2 Thankfully it was too dark to see the expressions on those stone faces otherwise we might have turned back for although the way was dark the light we glimpsed up ahead was all the more intimidating. A faint guttering light, what might have been the flicker of votive candles fell from the windows of a 17th century hermitage attached to a tiny domed chapel that seemed to have been organically extruded from the living rock. Later I was to learn the chapel contained a replica of the icon enshrined in the basilica below but on that first night the apprehension we felt on seeing the glimmer from within prevented us from getting closer. Not that we were particularly superstitious mind you but we had careers to keep on track and none of us wanted to run foul of some elderly Catalonian prelate caught in the act of ritual sacrifice or whatever the hell it was they did up here at three in the morning. Instead my attention was caught by a shadow at the base of the rock wall, a deeper patch of darkness that failed to dissipate as I approached.

Realizing I was standing at the mouth of a cave I recalled how the icon had been discovered by shepherd children after seeing a great light fall from the sky just after dusk on a summery Saturday evening the year of our Lord 880 AD and I started to wonder if this wasn't the actual grotto in which She had been found. Not for the first time that night I wished we had been together enough to bring a flashlight.

Clambering over the low metal railing I reached for my zippo…

It was a few degrees warmer inside the cave and there was a faint, sweet, half familiar smell in the air. Like incense or stale icing sugar...

"How far does it go?"

"I dunno. Goes in a way…"I took another step into the gloom as my actor friend climbed over the fence to join me. I raised the flame a little higher glimpsing what looked like markings on the wall, water damage or some kind of graffiti. Amongst them at least one shape that seemed disturbingly familiar.

"Looks like writing… damn.."The zippo slipped from my fingers, too hot to hold and for a moment we scuffled in the dark to try and locate it.

"This place is weird, dude" "I thought I saw something. On the wall.."

The only light came from the display on my malfunctioning eighties wrist watch, casting a dim green glow across the cave floor. At just after 3.21 my fingers closed on the still warm metal of my fallen lighter and I began to turn, spinning the flint.

At 3.22 the flame caught and a single loud gunshot echoed flatly off the face of the cliff followed by the sound of a dog barking in the valley far below.

"The f***k!?!"

"Sounded like it came from the monastery…"

The third member of our posse, a young Spaniard, was circling nervously on the path, staring down at the lighted window .

"The hell happened?"

"Maybe someone was cleaning their gun and it went off by mistake ."

"Why would anyone be cleaning their gun in the Benedictine library reading room at three in the f*****g morning?!"

"3.22"I glanced back, taking a last look at the grotto.

"It makes a difference?"

"Tell it to the judge. Could be crucial. I dunno…"There were definitely words scrawled on the rock, thick black lettering and what looked like geometric markings."Maybe it was suicide. Maybe one of the monks just couldn't take it any more and shot himself…"

"Why would they do that?"

"Stress. Working too late. Bad vibes. Perhaps they started seeing things like Saint Ignatius…"I paused, focussing on what I had glimpsed for only a split second before.

This time I held the flame steady.

"C'mon!"

"There it is."

"What?"

"F*****g spider!!!

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(3) Kiss of the Tarantula Who knows where it began? A single walking man in a battered felt hat wending his way across Europe bearing a strange, long necked guitar? A troupe of strolling players from the Africa or the east with painted faces and bare breasts whose songs 'contained the names of devils never before heard of' and whose dark eyes glowed as they danced to curious serpentine rhythms in the glow of the bonfire…

Or did it start with the kiss of the Tarantula?

The origins of the Tarantula Cult are lost in the toxic fug of time. To penetrate those anterior mists and scry a little closer to the bone you've got to ask yourself which came first - not so much the arachnid or the egg as the spider or the dance? Was the tarantella named after the eight legged beastie because of its jerky, frantic motions or was the tarantula named because of the movement of the dancers? The two are intertwined, seemingly inseparable, held together by a kiss…

"People, asleep or awake, would suddenly jump up, feeling an acute pain like the sting of a bee.

Some saw the spider, others did not, but they knew that it must be the tarantula. They ran out of the house into the street, to the market place dancing in great excitement. Soon they were joined by others who like them had just been bitten, or by people who had been stung in previous years, for the disease was never quite cured. The poison remained in the body and was reactivated every year by the heat of summer. . . . . . . Music and dancing were the only effective remedies, and people were known to have died within an hour or in a few days because music was not available"(Sigerist 1943, 218-219).

Symptoms included headache, giddiness, breathlessness, fainting, trembling, twitching, appetite loss, general soreness, and delusions. Sometimes it was claimed that a sore or swelling was caused by a tarantula bite, but such assertions were difficult to verify because the bite resembled those of insects. The dance symptoms resemble typical modern episodes of epidemic hysteria, in addition to expected reactions from exhaustive physical activity and excessive alcohol consumption. The 'dancing frenzy' that has come to be known as 'tarantism' was reported almost exclusively during the hot summer months of July and August.

One of the oldest surviving treatises on 'tarantism', Fernando Ponzetti's Sertum Papale De Venensis (1362) suggests that the victims of shade-dwelling spiders were hostages to the music of the tarantula's bite, to its 'cantum tempore'. His contemporary, William de Marra, scoffs at Ponzetti's ignorance in believing that the tarantula actually sang as it bit down with those venefic fangs yet despite his skepticism even he was forced to admit the tarantella held all classes of Apulian society inexplicably in thrall, from peasant to noblewoman. None were exempt from its insidious power.

latrodectus tarantula

While early medical observers theorized that a venomous species of tarantula found in the Italian state of Apulia was capable of producing sporadic 'tarantism' symptoms tests on spiders in the region have failed to substantiate these suspicions (Gloyne 1950, 35). Latrodectus tarantula is a nonaggressive, slow-moving spider common in Apulia that can produce psychoactive effects in people it bites. In severe cases, it may temporarily mimic many tarantism symptoms, including twitching and shaking of limbs, weakness, nausea, and muscular pain (Lewis 1991, 514).

lycosa tarantula

Ironically, Lycosa tarantula was typically blamed for tarantism symptoms, as it is larger, more aggressive, ferocious in appearance and has a painful bite. Yet neither spider can account for the predominantly symbolic and psychogenic character of tarantism attacks. Latrodectus tarantula is also found in other countries where tarantism does not occur (Russell 1979, 416), including the United States (Lewis 1991, 517). There is no evidence that a venomous species of tarantula, native only to Apulia, may have existed during this period and later died out. As Sigerist (1943, 221) remarks:"The same tarantula shipped to other parts of the country seemed to lose most of its venom, and what remained acted differently."It is also doubtful that some insect or other agent was responsible for causing"attacks,"as most participants did not even claim to have been bitten, and would only participate in tarantism episodes at designated times.

Clearly most cases were unrelated to spider bites. Other psychological aspects include the only reliable cure: dancing to certain types of music."Victims"would typically perform one of numerous versions of the tarantella, a rapid tempo score characterized by brief, repetitive phrases which escalate in intensity. Such performances also allowed"victims"to exhibit social behavior that is prohibited at any other time. Dancing persisted intermittently for hours and days, sometimes lasting weeks. Participants would eventually proclaim themselves"cured"for the remainder of the summer, only to relapse in subsequent summers. Many"victims"believed they had been infected from those who had been bitten, or from simply brushing against a spider. All that was needed to"reactivate"the venom was to hear certain strains of music.

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A variation of tarantism spread throughout much of Europe between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, where it was known as the dancing mania or St. Vitus's dance, on account that participants often ended their processions in the vicinity of chapels and shrines dedicated to this saint. Like its Italian counterpart, outbreaks seized groups of people who engaged in frenzied dancing that lasted intermittently for days or weeks. These activities were typically accompanied by symptoms similar to tarantism, including screaming, hallucinations, convulsive movements, chest pains, hyperventilation, crude sexual gestures and outright intercourse. Instead of spider bites as the cause, participants usually claimed that they were possessed by demons who had induced an uncontrollable urge to dance. Like tarantism, however, music was typically played during episodes and was considered to be an effective remedy. Detailed accounts of many episodes appear in a classic book by German physician Justus Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages (1844). He considered the origin of these"epidemics"as due to"morbid sympathy"since they often coincided with periods of severe disease, such as widespread pessimism and despair after the Black Death (Hecker 1844, 87). This epic disease plague, which by some estimates killed half of the population of Europe, subsided about twenty years prior to 1374, the year that most scholars identify with the onset of the dance mania.

Benjamin Gordon, in Medieval and Renaissance Medicine (1959, 562) describes the onset of the dance mania: From Italy it spread to . . . Prussia, and one morning, without warning, the streets were filled. . . .

They danced together, ceaselessly, for hours or days, and in wild delirium, the dancers collapsed and fell to the ground exhausted, groaning and sighing as if in the agonies of death. When recuperated, they swathed themselves tightly with cloth around their waists and resumed their convulsive movements. They contorted their bodies, writhing, screaming and jumping in a mad frenzy. One by one they fell from exhaustion. . . . . . . Many later claimed that they had seen the walls of heaven split open and that Jesus and the Virgin Mary had appeared before them.

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(4) The Walls of Heaven Mora (1963, 436-438) writes that tarantism and dance manias used rituals as psychotherapeutic attempts to cope with either individual or societal maladjustments which fostered mental disturbances. Henry Swinburne who traveled to the 'country of the tarantula' in the 1770's was one of the first and only foreign observers to hint at the true character of the phenomenon. He concluded that the tarantella was probably a form of pagan bacchanalia, a flight from the toils of agrarian life that now operated 'under cover' of the Spider and devotion to St.Paul. (Melechi, A. University of York, 2005) Sigerist held a similar view An abnormal psychology text written by Robert Carson of Duke University and his colleagues (1998, 37) cites Sigerist to support the view that St. Vitus's dance and tarantism were similar to ancient Greek orgiastic rites which had been outlawed by Christian authorities, but were secretly practiced anyway. While still only a wild hypothesis that anonymous text in the Benedictine library hinted at the existence of a pagan shrine on the mountain of Montserrat in southern Catalonia consecrated to Venus.

The name of the route we took from the upper station, St.Michael's path, (Rifa M., Montserrat Official Guide –text -1998) would tend to confirm this, suggesting aggressive Christianization.

I was starting to seriously doubt the icon had simply been abandoned on the mountain by that 'fleeing gothic bishop' conveniently fingered in the church's official account.

She had been here all along, since before the Christian faith existed and despite the Roman Church's every attempt to bring her under the yoke of their patriarchal dogma she was still here in the heart of a web spun over countless generations, at the heart of her holy mountain reigning in undisputed dominion over an invisible empire.

Quite possibly the original icon rested in the locked chapel before us and the one on display in the basilica was the replica rather than it being the other way round as some would have it and equally plausibly the sepulchral chamber in which we now stood might have the original site of her worship rather than the somewhat shallower (barely an overhang!) grotto indicated by the guide books indicating Her kinship with Kybele/ Kubaba / Magna Mater/ Meter Orie (mountain mother) the goddess of caves and caverns who was worshipped on mountaintops and deep within the lightless hollows of the living earth long before there were words or language to tell of it. As with Baptists touched by the Holy Ghost, the devout Mexican Catholics in the presence of the Virgin of Guadelope or the Haitian Voodooists at Saut d'Eau during the feast of the Virgin of Mount Carmel it is not hard to imagine the primal state of ecstasy that might have gripped Her followers in the proximity of the original icon, in the 'Pla de les Tarantules' - 'the place of the dancers'….

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occurred, but hailed from other territories, traveling through various Christian and Muslim communities as they sought out shrines and graveyards to perform in.

The largest and best documented dance plague, that of 1374 involving throngs of"dancers"in Germany and Holland was precipitated by"pilgrims"who traveled according to Beka's chronicle, from Bohemia, but also from Hungary, Poland, Carinthia, Austria, and Germany. Great hosts from the Netherlands and France joined them"(Backman 1952, 331).

Modern historians assume that these"secret gatherings . . . probably led to considerable guilt and conflict"which triggered collective hysterical disorders. Dance frenzies appeared most often during periods of crop failures, drought and social upheaval, leading Rosen (1968) to conclude that this stress triggered the hysteria, prompting desperate attempts at divine intervention through ritualized dancing, and often producing trance and possession states. Many symptoms associated with tarantism are consistent with sleep deprivation, excessive alcohol consumption, emotional excitement and prolonged physical activity. A German chronicle reports that during a dance frenzy at Strasbourg in 1418,"many of them went without food for days and nights"(Rust 1969, 20).

Viewed with the eyes of faith however it is a different matter. I put it to you, my brothers that these episodes were not 'spontaneous' but highly structured and involved unfamiliar quasiLovecraftian sects engaging in strange customs and religious practises that were defined as behavioral abnormality only by those who incapable or unwilling to see any sense or value in their actions. 'Gibberish' as opposed to 'algebra' you could say.

The ringleaders of this merry mayhem did not reside in the principalities in which the epidemics

Radulphus de Rivo's chronicle Decani Tongrensis states that"in their songs they uttered the names of devils never before heard of . . . this strange sect."Petrus de Herenthal writes in Vita Gregorii XI:"There came to Aachen . . . a curious sect."The Chronicon Belgicum Magnum describes the participants as"a sect of dancers.". The chronicle of C. Browerus (Abtiquitatum et Annalium Trevirensium) states:"They indulged in disgraceful immodesty, for many women, during this shameless dance and mock-bridal singing, bared their bosoms, while others of their own accord offered their virtue."290).

The chronicles would seem to indicate on closer reading that these 'hysterical' or ' outbreaks were in fact highly structured displays of worship that occasionally attracted locals. Radulpho states,"persons of both sexes, possessed by devils and half naked, set wreathes on their heads, and began their dances"; Johannes de Beka's Canonicus Ultrajectinus et Heda, Wilhelmus, Praepositus Arnhemensis: De Episcopis Ultraiectinis, Recogniti, states that in 1385,"there spread along the Rhine . . . a strange plague . . . whereby persons of both sexes, in great crowds . . . danced and sang, both inside and outside of churches, till they were so weary that they fell to the ground".

Far from being a random unprovoked eruption of repressed sexual energy the epidemic seems to have been deliberately spread by the cult's strolling players, the original Pandaemonium Carnival in all its motley glory. This is evident in a first-hand account recorded on September 11, 1374, by Jean d'Outremeuse in his chronicle La Geste de Liege, who states that"there came from the north to Liege . . . a company of persons who all danced continually. They were linked with brightly coloured clothes, and they jumped and leaped and fiercely clapped their hands."

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Whether this 'white Voodoo' hailed from Africa, the East or if its roots sprang from the shamanic ur-religion of our cro-magnon ancestors is impossible to tell with any clarity from the available texts and perhaps impossible to ever truly know. That its characteristics are seemingly identical in many respects with the secret traditions of the Haitian Bizango and Makanda societies is beyond question. The Voodoo societies trace their roots back to Guinea, Benin and places south but also incorporate aspects of western esoteric mysticism such as the pentagram and the Masonic notion of the 'Great Architect'. The standard textbook definition of Voodoo (which simply means 'faith' in local parliance, a broad church by any standards) as essentially an Afro-Caribbean tradition brought over by the slave trade and over written with the images of Christian saints as a result of their forced Christianization doesn't even begin to cover all the bases.

Medical historian Jean Russell states that taranti would typically commence dancing at sunrise, stop during midday to sleep and sweat, then bathe before the resumption of dancing until evening, when they would again sleep and sweat, consume a light meal, then sleep until sunrise.

A pattern immediately familiar to anyone who has witnessed the great annual Voodoo festivals of Souvenance, Saut d'Eau, Plain du Nord or Soukri in which this ritual is usually repeated over four or five days, and sometimes for weeks on end requiring a degreed of organization and crowd control that would put Glastonbury to shame. German magistrates contracted musicians to play for participants and even serve as dancing companions.

The latter were intended to reduce injuries and mischief during the procession to the St. Vitus chapel (Hecker 1970 [1837], 4). Hecker states that the dancing mania was a"half-heathen, half-Christian festival"which incorporated into the festival of St. John's day as early as the fourth century,"the kindling of the 'Nodfyr,' which was forbidden

by St. Boniface."

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This ritual involved the leaping through smoke or flames, which was believed to protect participants from various diseases over the ensuing year. A central feature of the dance frenzy was leaping or jumping continuously for up to several hours through what they claimed were invisible fires, until collapsing in exhaustion.

This has echoes not only of Zoroasterism but of the original pagan folk traditions of Central Asia, suppressed by Islam but still practiced in parts of Afghanistan and Northern Iran to celebrate 'Noruz', the Muslim New Year. Coins and sweets are given out so that one might start the year with a sweet taste in one's mouth and participants make wishes by secretly tying knots in blades of grass before jumping over a bonfire while chanting what roughly translates as:"I give you my yellow and take your red."(ie: I get rid of all the crap in my life and take on the energy of the fire) Sometimes a fish, herbs or an egg are placed on the fire as an offering , the painted egg possibly the pagan origin of our modern Easter egg.

Not only were episodes scripted and directed by the ring leaders but as the dance processions were swollen by spectators so the festivals began to take on the typical characteristics of any great rock event, a chaotic, swirling life of its own, the crowd including children searching for parents who were among the dancers, and vice versa (Haggard 1934, 187). Some onlookers were threatened with harm for refusing to dance (Backman 1952, 147) . While many took part out of loneliness and carnal pleasure; others were curious or sought exhilaration (Rust 1969, 22). Hecker remarks that"numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a temporary livelihood,"while gangs of vagabonds imitated the dance, roving"from place to place seeking maintenance and adventures."Essentially stealing your cameras and creditcards from the tents while you were out thrashing to Gogol Bordello or was it Iggy and the Stooges? (*see 'Twilight of the Brits')

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(essentially homegrown LSD but please don't try this at home - laboratories exist for a purpose! Like supercooling really helps if you don't want your arms and legs to drop off from self induced gangrene) Convulsive ergotism can cause funky behavior and perhaps even premature enlightment, but chronic ergotism more commonly results in the loss of fingers and toes from gangrene, a feature t not associated with dance manias (Donaldson et al. 1997, 203). Neither did outbreaks coincide with floods or wet growing or harvest periods. Quite the opposite. Tarantism was thought to occur only during July and August and was triggered by real or imaginary spider bites, hearing music, or seeing others dance and involved structured annual rituals. Also, while rye was a key crop in central and northern Europe, it was uncommon in Spain and Italy. Quite possibly a few participants were hysterics, epileptics, mentally disturbed, or even delusional from ergot, as some hold outs stubbornly insist but the large percentage of the populations affected, and the circumstances and timing of outbreaks, suggests otherwise. Episodes were pandemic, meaning that they occurred across a wide area and affected a very high proportion of the population (Lidz 1963, 822; Millon and Millon 1974, 22). Besides if the 'Tarantula Cult' drew the emotionally disturbed, the unstable and those suffering from poisoning or other physiological disorders it was because they sought the strange piping music as the cure rather than the cause of their symptoms."As there is scarce a disease to which the body is subject but what they think proceeds from the bite of the tarantula, this method of cure is practiced and with so much success that it seems miraculous and is esteemed the effect of the music"(Turnbull, H. Report to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, 1771)

Archaic techniques of ecstasy - a quieter moment at Soukri 'Miraculous' events of this order were as much of an affront to Enlightment philosophy as evidence that would tend to support the defacto existence of magic and alchemy is to clinical psychiatry and medicine today. In fact modern psychiatrists and orthodox social historians routinely classify 'tarantism' as a form of hysteria due to its 'psychological' character and often erroneously claim those affected were mostly female (Sigerist 1943, 218; Rosen 1968, 204).

This typically sublimated Freudian patriarchal cognicentricity in the guise of so-called 'rational thought' informs our view of the 'medieval' period and its attendant phenomena, best illustrated by the seemingly endless series of 'nunsploitation' movies kicked off by the breakthrough success of Ken Russell's 'THE DEVILS' 1971.

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And just for the hell of it...

Based on Huxley's 'THE DEVILS OF LOUDON') Russell's modish misreading of the possession phenomenon wraps its misogyny in the crushed velvet cloak of pop psychology. Male supremacy is reasserted through the notion that all the witchy, 'freaking out' (if not all 'religion' in toto) is a symptom of female sexual hysteria that could probably be put right by healthy recourse to a bit of the ol' in-out in-out with a 'real man' like Ollie Reed.

The slew of imitations that followed in its wake include such 'gems' as Walerian Boroczyk's 'BEHIND CONVENT WALLS' 1977, Joe D'amato's 'THE NUNS OF SAINT ARCHANGEL' 1973 and Bruno Mattei's 'THE OTHER HELL' 1980 originally titled'L'ALTO INFERNO' or 'THE OTHER INFERNO' in a gloriously misguided attempt to pass itself off as a semi-sequel to Argento's own 'SUSPIRIA' sequel. (sadly Bruno passed over while this blog was still in the pipeline. , dude. Lest we forget...

Images from Bruno Mattei's 'THE OTHER INFERNO' 52

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Listing the titles of these potboilers alone would require more patience than I have, let alone sitting down to review them but of 'THE DEVILS' spawn one title stands out as a workable compendium of the sub-genre's pathological underpinnings : - 'FLAVIA THE HERETIC' aka 'FLAVIA - HIGH PRIESTESS OF VIOLENCE!' aka 'FLAVIA THE MUSLIM NUN' ('LA MONACA MUSULMANA') aka 'THE REBEL NUN' ('FLAVIA LA DEFROQUEE') Gianfranco Mingozzi 1974.- Set in 15th century Italy the pic concerns a suitably 'frustrated' nun played by Florinda Bolkan (star of 'DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING!' and 'LIZARD IN WOMAN'S SKIN') incarcerated in a Byzantine monastery decorated with images of Saint Michael. She finds temptation not in the form of Ollie but in the unlikely Jewish scribe come handyman, Abraham, played by hunky Claudio Cassinelli ('THE SCORPION WITH TWO TAILS') leading to the usual series of visions and her defection to the Muslim cause. Along the way a naked nun emerges from the carcass of a dead cow, people get impaled and Flavia is eventually tied to a tree and skinned alive for her sins by the resurgent Christians thus restoring patriarchal order to the community. The demented pot pouri of elements includes the arrival of a black Madonna by boat as a cover for a Muslim sneak attack on unsuspecting Europeans and the appearance of the only 'Tarantula Cult' ever to have been named as such on screen.

And what of the real life Tarantula Cult? What are we to make of it on the basis of the available evidence?

An examination of a representative sample of medieval chronicles would tend to indicate the so-called 'medieval dancing epidemics' were in fact the work of a heretical or openly pagan sect that briefly gained a mass following as its adherents made pilgrimages through Europe during years of turmoil. The symptoms (visions, fainting, tremors) are predictable for any large population engaged in prolonged dancing, emotional worship, and fasting. Their actions have been"mistranslated"by contemporary scholars evaluating the participants' behavior at a remove from its original cultural and temporal context and either unwilling or unable to deal with the possibility of the 'supernatural' existing in the first place let alone playing an active or causative role in human affairs…

(4) That Which is Not Dead...

And there it was, the bold outline of an arachnid daubed on the interior wall, eight legs splayed invitingly. It was impossible to tell in the half light how old it was but at a glance it looked old enough.

"Well I'm glad it turned out to be just a symbol after all."

"What I'm trying to say is it's not like we were ever going to run into real spiders up here.

Tarantulas aren't indigenous to Southern Spain anyhow! There's nothing dangerous up here… 'cept maybe a few stressed out Catholics…"

I fell silent which was a good thing because we all heard the sound of movement on the path at once and froze. Cowering back against the rock wall we watched in trippy disbelief as two panting attack dogs hurried by, paws crunching lightly over the gravel, working as a tightly co-ordinated team, their sleek silhouettes moving almost in unison.

"Nothin' dangerous, huh?"

"I mean it could be worse. At least we're downwind…"

We waited until we hoped the dogs were out of earshot before starting the other way down the trail. There were more lights coming on below us now and a moment later we heard the big wheel in the upper station lurch into motion. Ducking for cover behind the statue of Saint Dominic we watched the cablecar glide slowly towards us, the hiss of radios and the faint babble of Spanish rising out of the dark.

"Oh man, we're f****d! We are so f*****g f*****d!"

"It's okay! Just be cool. I mean what can they do?"

The car was close enough now to make out it's occupants, two uniformed figures in flat military caps carrying what looked like flashlights or nightsticks or probably both.

"That depends, amigo, on who 'they' are…"

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The Second Key I was a year out of Afghanistan and had been in tighter scrapes, besides we outnumbered them but there was no way of telling in the half light if the newcomers were packing or not. We didn't even know if we were breaking the law to begin with.

Technically we were probably trespassing but there were no signs to say we were on private property so in the end we did the only thing that made sense. We gave ourselves up and pretended to be three stupid know nothing gringos who had gotten lost in the dark which we were so our performance carried a certain conviction.

There was the usual unpleasantness at first but once the goons with the flashlights realized we weren't just idiots but celebrity idiots 'they' lightened up. Up close it became evident the newcomers weren't cops or run of mill security guards. Their uniforms were too formal for that and bore odd flashes and badges - two silver keys crossed like bones with a crown set above them in place of a skull, a motif that I was to see again a few years later under somewhat different circumstances. As we waited for our captors to escort us to the lower station we gladhanded out the Marlboro reds, mustering with the aid of our local companion enough Spanish to break the ice. I never did find out what happened in the library but we did learn one thing.

The mountain was private property after all but it wasn't owned by any corporate entity, or even the Spanish state. In fact we weren't even under Spanish jurisdiction… The older of the two kept bitching about how they weren't paid nearly enough for their long hours and loyal service. His brother apparently worked for the civilian fuzz down the pike in Manresa and was not only better off but because he was paid by the local council his cheques arrived on time whereas our man here had to wait for weeks on end for the Vatican's legal affairs people to clear the necessary cashflow.

I commiserated, nodding silently as I tried to work out what the hell the Pope had to do with this and why the Holy See felt it necessary to patrol the privately administered enclave with attack dogs and two-way radios in the first place? I was starting to pull the pieces together in my head but I knew the real answers lay in Rome and on the strength of tonight's performance the prospect of having to break into the Vatican didn't appeal.

Instead I decided to box smart and bide my time. I had friends in Rome but I was going to make sure I did my homework first and shore up my paranoid hypothesis with a few hard facts before putting it to 'il maestro'.

(5) The other side of the mountain "So the Pope's in on it, huh? Part of this… what did you call it?"

"Tarantula cult."

Elizabeth narrowed her pale green eyes, digging in her sticks and drawing herself to a halt at the verge of the frozen lake. She wasn't much older than me, kind of cute too in a Liv Tylerish sort of way but most of all she was a journalist with time on her hands and credit to burn at TF1. It was the winter of 1990. American forces were standing by off the coast of Kuwait and I was in Switzerland on official business. 'HARDWARE' was playing in competition at Avoriaz but most of all I was hoping to see Dario who had promised to come if we could only find some decent smoke to make his trip worthwhile.

As we were approximately three thousand meters up a goddam mountain in what were fast approaching white out conditions this was proving to be a tall order.

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"And I suppose the Spanish government are in on it too, right?"

"They'd have to be to cede authority to Rome. Franco had a real hard on for the Black Mother and this Escriva guy…"

"Who?" "Josemaria Escriva. Founded an order called 'Opus Dei' after experiencing some kind of epithany on the mountaintop.."

"Opus what?"

"Dei. 'The Work of God' - they're supposed to be dedicated to encouraging lay Catholics to lead a more holy life but they're seriously secretive, mega-rich and have wormed their way right into the police force, army and government, certainly in Spain. Worse still 'they' have an agenda…"

"C'mon, you're making this up! If you want to pitch Dario at least come up with something commercial. Something a little less 'out there', y'know?"

"But it's true! The whole worlds drifting to the right like we're sleepwalking or something and these guys are a rear guard action helping tidy us along, a sort of Catholic Taliban…"

"Que?" "The hard right in Afghanistan. They're supposed to be Muslims but they're backed by Saudi and American money, probably as a check on the power of the warlords but…"

I couldn't see Elizabeth's eyes any more but I could tell from her body language she wasn't buying it. Conspiracy theories don't always go over big with the opposite sex. Like Dario Argento movies.

"Anyway they're big in Spain. Opus Dei, I mean. Not the Taliban…"

"And you don't think this whole thing is just your way of dealing with what happened to you out there, y'know, in the war? You're too arrogant to get religion so instead you create a conspiracy to rationalize the chaos, to impose order on otherwise painfully random but essentially meaningless events?"

"Well… yeah. It had occurred ."

"Well you should listen to yourself sometimes."

"That's why I need proof. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

That's why I need to speak to Dario…"

"And you smoke too much…both of you…"

The light was draining from the day , visibility fading, the details of the landscape fading into opalescent nothingness. Far out on the ice a shadowy figure lurched unsteadily through the haze, a reeling outline that stumbled forward, slipped, then stumbled again.

"Richard?"

"Okay. But I still don't see how I ended up in Montserrat after buying that statue or why the Catholic church is venerating a pagan goddess in the first place! And they're fixing on canonizing this Escriva dude any day now. Just like Saint Ignatius and Saint Dominic and their hearts were'nt exactly overflowing with what you'd call Christian charity. And that process, that whole routine of making someone into a Saint normally takes lifetimes. It requires proof of at least three miracles and that kinda 'extraordinary evidence' is pretty hard to come by, let me tell you!"

"Do you think we should help him?"

"Help who?"

"That guy over there…"

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I followed her eyeline, watching the bedraggled figure right itself, a freezing wind whirling down off the piste, beating against him as he tried to make headway.

"He looks sick…"

"Probably drunk. Or dying. Who cares? We're on a mission, remember! Unless we get back to Dario in the next half hour there's no way il maestro's getting on that plane, no way in hell…"

The stranger took a half step, then his legs folded and he pitched face first into the snow.

"Oh my God …"

"He'll be fine…"

"It's Michael Cimino!"

The man who single-handedly brought down United Artists had been flown in to replace Brian de Palma as head of the jury after de Palma was recalled to LA following the disastrous reception of 'BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES' (1990). Nobody seemed happy about this, least of all Cimino who had a sort of 'drowning, not waving' look in his eyes as he struggled to regain his footing..

"So?" "He made 'The Deerhunter!"

"So what?'

"We can't just leave him!"

"And Dario co-wrote Once Upon a Time in the West! Where are your priorities!"

"What about 'Thunderbolt and Lightfoot!"I mean we have to at least get him back to his hotel…"

"Oh God, okay …"

"C'mon ..Get the other arm…"

So I never did see Dario or give him the statue that waited on the windowsill back at the lodge, watching the snow silently pile against the double glazing.

I had breakfast with Alejandro Jodorowsky the morning the Gulf War broke out. Alejandro was on the jury and avoided contact until after the awards had been announced but I persevered. In the light of Dario's non-appearance I was hoping the director of 'THE HOLY MOUNTAIN' might be able to put things in their proper perspective. The storm and the impending Apocalypse however had put Jodo' in an unusually bad mood. Worse still the voting hadn't gone his way. For him Clive Barker's 'NIGHTBREED' had been the film of the festival and 'the first gay fantasy movie'.

Instead the vote had been split between 'TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE' and 'HARDWARE', which had received a big, jagged chunk of glass called the 'Prix science Fiction', the only major award of it's run, the 24/7 CNN news making it seem more topical than it should have been in any sane or sensible world but possibly pulling Mr.Cimino out of that snowdrift hadn't hurt not that I feeling particularly pleased about the decision. 'JACOB'S LADDER' plainly stood head and shoulders above the rest of the competition despite a weak third act but was inexplicably ignored by the panel, possibly because they refused to accept that Adrian Lynne had made a decent movie. My judgement was probably a little skewed as I was only a year out of the war myself and couldn't help identifying with the protagonist.

Jodo' was galled by the decision, having reacted with antipathy to 'HARDWARE' which he found 'philosophically vacuous' and 'weakly derivative' of American action cinema, a genre he despised. I politely buttered my toast as he dismissed my work in a sentence before launching into a diatribe about the lack of respect shown by the critical community for gay cinema. About halfway through his monologue the Gulf War broke out and any further attempts at conventional conversation were abandoned as all eyes turned to the bank of monitors arranged behind us for the morning press conference. Sometimes in life the esoteric just has to take a back seat. It doesn't do mornings well, I know that much. Besides this wasn't any ol' morning. Tiamat, the Babylonian goddess of chaos had been let out of her bottle and things were really starting to slip out there. The future had taken root in the past and the rolling news was starting to look more and more like one of my bad dreams. So I sat there watching the same nightvision footage of heavy ordinance starbursting over Kuwait City as everyone else and then reached for a Lucky.

"Why do you smoke?"

I glanced up to find Jodo' fixing me with a withering basilisk gaze.

"Sorry?"

"You can never hope to be an artist unless you stop smoking. Art is resistance also!"

"Fuck art. That's why I smoke."

Pushing back my chair I said goodbye to the holy mountain and walked.

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(6) Dying Light Sometimes the esoteric has to take a back seat.

Sometimes the underground stream ducks out of sight so seamlessly you might forget it was there but it never dries up. It flows on beneath the soles of our shoes and out of sight behind the peeling wallpaper. It fills our dreams and those interstitial spaces between worlds that never quite connect with waking life.

My second feature 'DUSTDEVIL' had been put into production in the rush of euphoria that followed 'HARDWARE's initial boxoffice, but, by the time we reached post-production the writing was already on the wall for British independent cinema. Palace Pictures was experiencing grave cashflow problems that exerted a heavy toll on the production and although Nik Powell and Steve Woolley continued to choose their projects wisely with 'THE PLAYER' (1992), 'RESERVOIR DOGS'(1992) and 'HOWARD'S END' (1991) awaiting release they found themselves hard hit by the recession and forced against the wall by the new corporate culture that was steadily taking control of the industry. When Polygram reneged on a deal to buy the group outright Palace were left with little choice but to file for administration, winding up the company in May 1992 and leaving debts outstanding all over Soho. Polygram promptly took over their back catalogue including 'DUSTDEVIL' which remained trapped in the distribution pipeline.

I never saw my fee for the production and was forced to pour my remaining funds into it's completion, bringing myself and the Shadow Theatre to the verge of bankruptcy, trying to finish the cut while fleeing the bailiffs from one safe house to another.

By the winter of '92 I was on the street and after a grim night in a bus shelter in South London Jane Giles, the Scala's new programmer allowed me to take refuge in a room above the ticket office.

The Scala had developed some major problems of its own by then. The building's lease had expired and the unscrupulous landlord was doing his best to force out the cinema and the freaks that ran it. The expanding video market had eaten into the Scala's attendance, reducing the audience to a trickle, none of which was helped by the programming growing a little stale given the absence of new product or the necessary revenue to procure prints from abroad. The allday-all-nighters had simply dried up as people preferred to abuse themselves in the privacy of their own homes and the auditorium had fallen into increasing disrepair. As King's Cross slid into decline the surrounding streets began to grow so crime ridden few people wanted to risk getting beaten up just to catch a few scratchy old Italian horror flicks that everyone had seen a million times before.

At first we believed the advent of home video would bring about a revolution in mass communication, an age of wider public access and unprecedented freedom but in the end it was a flickering CCTV image that really brought the house down. The ultimate British horror film turned out to be a simple thing. One static wide angle and just one location - a shopping centre on the outskirts of Liverpool - and a cast of three, their backs turned towards camera: two children leading a toddler by the hand like friendly older brothers, the crowd flowing by oblivious, extras in an unwitting drama.

It was february 1994 and two year old James Bulger had been abducted by two older boys from 56

outside a butcher's store in Bootle. The rest of this simple, awful story is too well known to need re-telling but the key point, in this context, is that, once the two boys who were charged with killing Jamie were in custody, it was only a matter of time before talk turned to their viewing habits, a move encouraged by the police releasing to the press a list of video titles which their parents had recently rented. Although there was no discernable connection between the titles in question and the facts of the Bulger case itself the reality that an emotionally disturbed ten year old might have gained access to a string of violent '18' certificate horror movies in the first place gave the average punter and in the end the Conservative government an easy way out, a convenient explanation for an otherwise unthinkable crime. The abuse that at least one of the young killers had suffered at the hands of his own family was tacitly ignored while child psychiatrists pontificated endlessly on chat shows about the effects of 'violent media ' on fragile young minds.

The tabloids had a field day, reviving the popular myth of the 'video nasties' ('snuff' movies apparently available over the counter freely to kids somewhere in the phantom zone) their front pages sporting images of hysterical ad hoc neighbourhood watch committees rounding up horror titles and ceremonially burning the tapes on communal bonfires. It was like the Beatles versus Jesus thing all over again only on VHS with tits and blood. A classic example of shooting the messenger. No-one could give Jamie back his life or begin to solve the social problems that had created the conditions of his murder. The last thing they wanted to do was examine their own hearts or the possibility that children could be capable of such a thing in the first place so instead the horror genre provided a simple, larger than life outside evil that could be safely tackled in public to show the leadership had the situation in hand and were taking the necessary measures to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.

Liberal democrat M.P. David Alton skilfully rode the wave of opinion, using the Bulger case to lobby for tighter state controls over the mass media, threatening to introduce a measure which would have effectively banished most horror titles and perhaps all titles unsuitable for children from the shelves of British shops.

Under the circumstances I did the only thing I could.

Putting on my surviving suit I infiltrated a subparliamentary committee hastily convened to debate the bill. I was the only film-maker and apart from a drowsy looking Martin Amis the only 'creative' person to appear before the committee.

At one point a number of box cover illustrations were passed around as an example of the sort of filth that the Alton bill was designed to put a lid on. Il Maestro's oeuvre was ably represented by 'DEEP RED', 'TENEBRAE' and 'INFERNO' along with a host of other by now familiar titles including good ol' 'FLAVIA THE HERETIC' which

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had recently been re-released by Nigel Wingrove's 'Redemption Films'. In fact some of the other titles in the catalog tut-tutted over by the assembled politicos and social scientists included silent movies such as F.W.Murnau's 'NOSFERATU'(1921), Benjamin Christensen's 'HAXAN' (1921) and Carl Dreyer's 'VAMPYR'(1931) which had fallen into public domain and been routinely tarted up

by Nigel with S and M orientated covers for the mail order market. I couldn't help remarking on the fact that a handful were old enough to have run into trouble once before: in Nazi Germany where another set of 'idealists' tried to rid society of decadent art, a campaign that scarcely resulted in a kinder or gentler society. Of course I realize I should have kept my mouth shut but I was young then and new to politics.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ INTERMISSION ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Well I happen to be Jewish…"spluttered one of the care workers, 'and you have no right invoking the spectre of the holocaust at this table!'

I made a hasty, half-assed apology but the damage had been done. Although anxious not to be portrayed by the right wing press as 'soft on crime' the Conservative government nonetheless recognized that tighter controls on film and video would inevitably impact on the lower end of an industry already hard hit by the recession and struggling to maintain a share of a marketplace dominated by American product. You need the low budget exploitation sector to maintain the ecology that makes the high end product, the E.M.Forster and Hugh Grant movies possible so I put my case as succinctly as possible, appealing to the consumer/capitalist bottom line and avoiding any further reference to the thornier issue of so-called 'artistic' freedom. When I was done Lady Howe of the Broadcasting Standards Commission (wife of Sir Geoffrey whose ill-advised visit to Islamabad in the wake of the Rushdie affair had nearly gotten me killed back in 1990.- * see 'KINGDOM COME!") looked me in the eye and summed my whole life up in a single rhetorical question.

"Are you a mother, Mr.Stanley?"

I wasn't. So she went into her 'well, I happen to be a mother' routine and after that it was all downhill. She'd said it all before but she said it again anyway and I'd heard it all before so I didn't bother listening. That's what politics is about in the old country.

The last nail in the coffin was driven home by the Scala's projectionist when he grassed on a long standing practise of illegally screening Stanley Kubrick's 'CLOCKWORK ORANGE' (1971) as a 'surprise film' filling out a triple with Lindsay Anderson's 'IF' (1968) and 'O Lucky Man!' (1973). The bill drew a loyal core of local skins and wannabee droogs who sometimes brought their staffies and bulls with 'em but if the Scala came to rely on their unsteady revenue it was against the iron will of Kubrick himself who had personally withdrawn the film from distribution in the U K. The projectionist earned a fat tip from the great auteur and guaranteed sheltered employment at an MGM preview theatre in return for testifying against the Scala's management in the subsequent legal action doggedly pursued by the reclusive genius and just over a year after the death of its parent Eyes wide shut? company the cinema finally went dark.

'KING KONG' (1933) was the last print to run through the gate at the ape house.

Those of us still there were either drunk or weeping or both. But then I always cry when I see the big guy go through his jerky motions, progressing once more to Calvary atop the Empire State, confused, outflanked and outnumbered by the swooping, droning avatars of an uncaring new age.

The beast took the fall as usual and Carl Denham proclaimed his eulogy but I was already in the foyer stealing the posters, not wanting to see the lights go up.

The underground stream resurfaces in the next installment in which I am re-united with the Argento clan, learn what's lurking in the catacombs and find out just why the Black Mother is black after all! And it ain't anything to do with Malcolm X, Egypt, candle smoke or Arabic root words. All will be revealed in our rousing preHallow'een finale! Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. On the subject of which I'd like to to acknowledge some of my sources...

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References • Bartholomew, R. E.. T dancing mania. Feminism & Psychology 8(2):173-183.

• Carson, R.C., J.N. Butcher, and S. Mineka. 1998. Abnormal Psychology and Modern life (tenth edition, 1998 update). New York: HarperCollins.

• Chibnal S. 2002 . British Horror Cinema. De Montfort university Leicester, Routlege NY • de Martino, E. 1966. La Terre du Remords (The Land of Self-Affliction) [translated from Italian by Claude Poncet]. Paris: Gallimard.

• Donaldson, L.J., Cavanagh, and Rankin, J. 1997. The Dancing Plague: A public health conundrum. Public Health 111:201-204.

• Fulcanelli 1922 Le Mystere des Cathedrales (first edition) Canseliet FCH • Grant, B.K. 1984 Planks of Reason - Essays on the Horror Film (first edition) Scarecrow Press Inc. Metuchen. N.J. • Fulop-Muller, 1910? Puissance et Mystere des Jesuits (Power and Mystery of the Jesuites) • Kaplan, H.I., and B.J. Sadock (eds.) 1985. Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Volume 2. Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkins.

• Lidz, T. 1963. Hysteria. In A. Deutsch and H. Fishman (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Mental Health, Volume 3. Pp. 818-826. New York: Franklin Watts.

• Lieber, E. 1970. Galen on contamination of cereals as a cause of epidemics. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 44:332-345.

• Lindsay, J. 1970. The Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt Frederick Muller Ltd. • Loyola, I. 1522 Spiritual exercises - Fifth exercise of the first week|: contemplation of Hell • Millon, T., and R. Millon. 1974. Abnormal Behavior and Personality: A Biosocial Learning Approach. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: W.B. Saunders.

• Mora, G. 1963. A historical and socio-psychiatric appraisal of tarantism. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 37:417-439.

• Rahn O. W. 1933. The Court of Lucifer. Urban Verlag.

• Rosen, G. 1968. Madness in Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

• Sigerist, H.E. 1943. Civilization and Disease. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

• Sirois, F. 1982. Perspectives on epidemic hysteria. In M. Colligan, J. Pennebaker and L. Murphy (eds.), Mass Psychogenic Illness: A Social Psychological Analysis. Pp. 217-236. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Chapter Six - 'THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD' will follow shortly +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ TRANSMISSION ENDS +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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Richard Stanley

LACHRYMAE III The Devil’s Chessboard Current mood: savage

Blog Archive Sunday, November 25, 2007

Hallow'een night. What's left of it. Still exploding in gaudy shreds and tatters about my ears. Been too much going on to even begin to explain but at least it's moving so I can't complain. Wish there were six of me or more hours in the day. Which is a way of apologizing if I have been perhaps a li'l scarce lately but it was ever the way and there are times in this life for words and times only for action.

My time is coming and I gotta get my bags packed and start paddling if I'm gonna catch that wave. I'm headed west to the land beyond beyond where the fire winds blow, the black smoke turns the light all Hardware red and Hallow'een orange and the setting sun bleeds into ten million swimming pools a man can hide in. With luck and the grace of God (or whatever it is) the next time you hear from me I should be safely at large in California and back in the game as promised.

And I also promised a Hallow'een story.

And I will not disappoint you.

Hope you're sitting comfortably…

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THE TRAIL OF THE THREE MOTHERS (1) The Devil's Chessboard

Once upon a time in the Pyrenees there lived an old widow who's daughter, Marie, is said to have met the Devil himself and struck a bargain with the Prince of Darkness.

Marie, like her mother, had the dark eyes and high colour of her heretic ancestors but despite her beauty she chose to remain by her mother's side, ignoring her countless suitors and remaining chaste and pure as her biblical namesake. By day she tended the land and the diminishing herd of goats and by night when she could afford to burn a candle she would pour over the old books left by her deceased father in the hope of mastering the secrets of reading and writing so that she might better her position in the world and satisfy her natural curiosity about the world outside her village.

Now times were hard, this being the latter part of the 19th century and Marie's mother was forced to take in a lodger to help make ends meet. Being a God fearing sort the widow was at pains to find a tenant who's ways were as frugal and virtuous as her own, sifting through any number of candidates and finding each one wanting.

The village church had fallen into disrepair and Sauniere set about its immediate restoration, having become aware of a small fund set aside for this purpose by the town mayor. It was barely sufficient to stabilize the dilapidated building and much of the initial work was carried out by Sauniere himself and volunteers from his congregation. One of these volunteers, a venerable gentleman with a drooping silver moustache who's name, Captier, in our tongue means simply 'Keeper' had been bellringer and sacristan since time out of mind and took a personal interest in the matter, fussily tidying up after the workmen had left and the young priest had repaired to his lodgings for the simple evening meal prepared by Marie and her mother. Finding the altar had been shifted off true Master Captier stayed on after ringing the Angelus one evening to set matters right and in the course of his solitary labour found to his surprise that the ancient column had in fact been hollow all along. There was a glass tube hidden within the cavity containing a number of jumbled, nonsensical documents apparently drafted by one of Sauniere's predecessors. The bellringer duly handed them over to the younger priest and at first thought nothing of it but something about the parchments seemed to capture Sauniere's imagination.

Marie couldn't help watching over his shoulder as he struggled to decipher them and she saw the light burning beneath his door at all hours of the night.

On June 1 1885 a tall man dressed in black, a broad brimmed hat on his head and a battered valise in one hand dismounted from a passing coach and started on foot up the hill. Berenger Sauniere was a man of the cloth, a young priest who's outspoken anti-Republican sermons had caused him no end of trouble in his previous parish and had lead to his punative posting to the rural backwater of Rennes les Chateau, a constituency of fewer than forty houses. He was just the kind of man Marie's mother had been looking for and before long he found himself securely ensconced in the widow's austere homestead. Deciding to make the best of his reduced circumstances Sauniere set about winning over the hearts and minds of his congregation who found his words carried an unusual humour and emotion as if the young firebrand really cared about what he was saying and not just going through the motions like so many priests before him.

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Rennes les Bains - late summer - 2007 The actual parchments are lost to us now and indeed might never have existed but there are many who believe Berenger Sauniere found the key he was searching for. What is certain is that he consulted his peers on the matter - Antoine Gelis, the aging priest of Coustassa, a neighbouring village set on a hilltop overlooking the coiling River Aude and the Reverend Boudet who hailed from Rennes les Bains, a crumbling spa town on the far side of the plateau where the Romans had once come to take the waters in search of a cure for leprosy.

Boudet fancied himself as a poet and an amateur archaeologist. He was also the author of an extremely strange (some would say impenetrable) book entitled 'LaVraie Langue Celtique' ('The True Celtic Tongue') which purports to be an academic work cataloguing of the standing strones and sundry prehistoric sites in the area but written in a spiralling, allusive manner concealing any number of codes and punning, word games, not dissimilar to the parchments themselves.

Whether it was Boudet who helped find the key or whether Sauniere was simply 'inspired' is impossible to know nor can we be certain the solution handed down to us is anything like the truth.

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Boudet fancied himself as a poet and an amateur archaeologist. He was also the author of an extremely strange (some would say impenetrable) book entitled 'LaVraie Langue Celtique' ('The True Celtic Tongue') which purports to be an academic work cataloguing of the standing strones and sundry prehistoric sites in the area but written in a spiralling, allusive manner concealing any number of codes and punning, word games, not dissimilar to the parchments themselves.

Whether it was Boudet who helped find the key or whether Sauniere was simply 'inspired' is impossible to know nor can we be certain the solution handed down to us is anything like the truth.

It is said the vital clue was found in the ancient rules of chess and that by making a series of knight's moves, starting from a fixed point on the parchment the following can be deciphered:-"SHEPHERDESS NO TEMPTATION PEACE 187 POUSSIN TENIERS HOLD THE KEY BY THIS CROSS AND HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE OR CONJURE THE GUARDIAN OF THE DAEMON AT NOON - BLUE APPLES…" A second parchment contains the scrambled phrase: - 'TO DAGOBERT II AND TO ZION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE - DEAD Leaving all other esoteric speculation aside for a moment it behooves me to remind the constant reader that the Sicambrians, the ancestors of the Frankish Merovingians worshipped the mother Goddess, CYBELE, as DIANA OF THE NINE FIRES or as ARDUINA - the Goddess of the Ardennes.

The huge DIANA / ARDUINA idol which once towered over Carignan in north eastern France, between the black virgin sites of Orval, Avioth and Mezieres and Stenay where the Merovingian king and saint Dagobert II was murdered in 679 points to a link between the two cults.

l'Abbe Henri Boudet - priest of Rennes les Bains

Dagobert II and his trepanned skull Whatever you do never, ever bet the devil your head!

One of Dagobert's most important acts when he accepted the throne after his Irish exile and education in Tara was to continue the ancient tradition of Gaul, the worship of the black virgin.

The black virgin is really ISIS, reborn as NOTRE DAME DE LUMIERE - Our Lady of Light.

The black virgin of Mauriac dates from 507 when Theodechilde, daughter of Clovis, first Christian king of the Franks, found haloed by light in a forest clearing a statuette guarded by a lioness and her cubs. Clovis met his queen, Clotilde, at Ferrieres, the first Christian village in Gaul, where the cult of the black virgin had its origin in AD 44. Not long after the destruction of the church and town by Attila (AD 461) the Merovingian dynasty lavishly restored and augmented the cult and its last reigning members made it their place of residence. (Irrelevant admittedly but I can't help mentioning that the Merovingian dynasty traced its own origin not to the union of Christ and Mary Magdalene as some contemporary authors would have it but to the somewhat more Lovecraftian legend of its original matriarch having been raped by a tendrelled sea monster named Merovee. Just thought you'd like to know)

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Whether this made any more sense to Sauniere than it does to you and me is a moot point but he seems to have set to work with renewed vigour. Recruiting the help of the aging bellringer he shifted the altar aside and prised loose the stone it rested on to reveal a further inscription, a pre-Christian bas relief showing a faceless knight and a woman with long hair and severere countenance gazing into a shining, ceremonial mirror. Later Master Captier claimed to have seen bones and shiny things glinting in the hollow beneath the stones but he had no chance to examine them before the priest hastly dismissed him and locked the church doors to ensure his privacy. Later when questioned on the matter by the town mayor Sauniere dismissed the rumours concerning the so-called 'treasure', insisting that the 'shiny things' had been worthless 'Lourdes medallions'.

Instead he dug franticly deeper. Working alone with pick and spade Sauniere excavated a narrow flight of stone steps that lead steeply downwards into a partly flooded natural cavity beneath the plateau. In the flickering light of his guttering oil lamp he glimpsed what looked like ancient tombs carved with coiling serpents and other less familiar creatures, eight legged like spiders or octopi. One of the sarcophagi was larger than the others, its slab sealed with curious glyphs and unfamiliar geometric markings. Using his pick as a lever the priest summoned his nerve to push the slab aside, blanching at the foul air that came from within, the dust of centuries…

Speculation was rife in the parish about Sauniere's labours and he knew he had to hurry, that it was only a matter of time before the mayor tried to intervene and in his haste he grew careless. He did not hear Marie's footfalls or sense her hooded eyes watching from the shadows, following his every move and inwardly noting every tiny, incongruous detail as she had from the day the handsome preacher first arrived in her isolated world. Whether she confronted him with what she knew as he emerged from the vault, realizing she finally had a power over him or whether (as some of the locals believe) she was forced to come to Sauniere's rescue after he either slipped or became endangered by rising floodwaters caused by the subterranean river's phreatic source is hard to say just as it is impossible to know at this distance in time when they first became lovers. Certainly he had no choice but to either silence her forever or make her his partner and co-conspirator in all that followed. Pledging herself to the man she loved Marie vowed to keep his secret no come Hell or high water…

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It was decided Sauniere should leave town for a while until the gossip died down and taking leave of his baffled congregation he set out for Carcasonne and then Paris where it is claimed he consulted with various high ranking individuals in certain fin de siecle occult lodges in addition to purchasing a number of reproductions of paintings by Poussin and Teniers as well as more traditional images of Saint Anthony and the Magdalene. It has never been established exactly what Berenger Sauniere found beneath the church or how he came into his sudden wealth but on his return to his diocese he began to spend considerable amounts of money, far more than he could have dreamed of on the stipend accorded to him as a priest, enough to make him a multimillionaire by our standards.

His first priority was to seal the entrance to the cavity as firmly as possible and to build a high wall around the property with impregnable steel gates. Having made the area safe he set to work

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in earnest redecorating the church in a flamboyant, wildly off kilter manner as if driven by Poe's 'Imp of the Perverse' to not only hide his crime but to simultaneously draw attention to its hiding.

The chapel floor was redesigned to resemble a chessboard...

At one end a statue of Christ peers mutely down and at the other squats the grotesque life sized effigy of a shrieking daemon, commonly identified as Asmodeus, the guardian of Solomon's temple who fought the arch-mage after he lost his seal and was wounded in one knee before being cast out into the wasteland. Esoterically he is the guardian and teacher of all occult knowledge. Above the daemon which serves as a font are the words: 'BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CONQUER HIM' and a bas relief depicting five angels who appear to be making the sign of the cross but it isn't hard even for an untrained eye to notice they are really forming a pentagram. On the wall beside them and directly above the confessional is a three dimensional tableau of the sermon on the mount, traditional enough save that the mount is depicted as hollow and the cave beneath it filled with sacks of gold that have no place in the biblical episode they are supposed to illustrate.

The increasingly physical relationship between Sauniere and Marie had become an open secret and she publicly disported herself wearing jewellery and expensive, daringly cut gowns that would have put her mother to shame had not the good widow passed suddenly that spring just after the priest's return. The causes are obscure but she at least died in her own bed with her beloved daughter at her side and Sauniere himself in attendance to hear her confession. Nor was she the only one to have lost her life that season under less than certain circumstances..

Sauniere had severed all ties with his fellow priests, Henri Boudet and Antoine Gelis who was said to have become irrationally frightened of something he either couldn't comprehend or dared not explain to his friends and family. By the spring of 1893 he had become so paranoid that he refused to leave his rectory and barred the door to all comers save his niece and nephew who brought his food and tended to the laundery. Despite his precautions someone managed to get to him. There was a fierce struggle and Gelis was bludgeoned with a poker before being finished off with an axe while apparently trying to crawl to the window to scream for help. When the local authorities finally dared to enter the house they found the elderly priest's mutilated remains layed out in a strange, reputedly ritualistic manner. If Berenger Sauniere was in any ways implicated in these events then he showed no sign of attempting to flee the scene of his crimes.

If anything he appeared to be digging in, commissioning a magnificent new residence facing the church where he intended to live with Marie as man and wife.

A second cave appears on a bas relief on the altar itself, lovingly hand painted by Sauniere himself. An image of the Magdalene or what might just as well be young Marie kneeling in a grotto before a grinning skull, the silhouette of what Sauniere claimed was Jerusalem visible on the distant horizon. Time forbids a fuller listing of the décor's oddities and inherent contradictions which include any number of images of Saint Anthony, a personage known for his temptations both daemonic and sexual. Two of the scariest cherubs imaginable adorn the wooden doors above which appears the maxim: 'TERRIBILIS LOCUS ISTE' - 'Terrible is this place' Genesis 28:17 - being the words Jacob spoke on awakening from his dream of the ladder. Beside this phrase appears another statue of the Magdalene, again bearing an uncanny resemblance to Sauniere's nubile 'housekeeper' and the legend:- 'MEA DOMUS ORATIONIS VOCATIBUR' - 'My house is called the house of prayer' innocent enough unless you trace it to source where it continues: - ' And you have turned it into a den of thieves…'

Not that the increasingly disorientated parishioners needed to be given any further clues as to the diabolic origins of Sauniere's newfound largesse. The secretive priest and his young neophyte had been spotted working alone at night in the graveyard, digging up and moving some marker stones while obliterating the inscriptions on others, seemingly leaving signs to draw attention to themselves while deliberately hiding other already existing clues, a seemingly pathological activity all too familiar to long term affictionados of the esoteric. Graverobbing and necromancy were the least of the accusations made against Sauniere, initially behind his back and later more openly when the enraged mayor demanded an official investigation from his superiors in Carcasonne.

Sauniere (right) and Marie (left) in the gardens of the Villa Bethania No expense was spared in furnishing the weird art deco mansion that he named the Villa Bethania, its interiors decorated by gold leaf, swirling mosaics and distinctly psychedelic velvet wallpaper. The Villa's windows and those of the greenhouse that abutted it were fashioned from a deep, lustrous stained glass that caught the Meridional sunshine and filled the fallen priest's domain with every incandescent shade of red and deep pools of midnight blue that seemed to remain cool even in summertime..

But this was only the beginning of his grand design.

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Blueprints of the Villa Bethania showing the underlying pentagonal structure of Sauniere's design 65

The Belvedere - 5.18 pm October 8 1992 - Tour de Verre As the parallel investigations by the civil and clerical authorities gathered pace Sauniere contrived to enclose his house, the church, graveyard and a good part of the plateau with a gothic belvedere surmounted by a strange high tower he christened the 'Tour Magdala' and which was to serve as the repository for his burdgeoning library. The tower commanded an extraordinary 360 degree view of the plateau and surrounding valleys and foothills, its narrow windows, patterned after the 'arrow slits' in the abandoned heretic castles faced to the west and at the far end of the 66

belvedere, inclined towards the rising sun he raised a second tower, a tower of glass whose myriad panes were of the same strange hue as the others already installed in the villa itself. As much work seemed to be going on beneath the ground as above it and the walled garden became a veritable paradise with any number of rare, exotic species nurtured by an elaborate system of subterranean aqueducts, its orchards bearing strange fruit such as the locals had never seen before.

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Shortly after the turn of the century the incoming bishop of Carcasonne, Lord Bishop De Beausejour, finally succeeded in having Sauniere removed from his position and barred from holding mass in the village church. Engaging the best lawyers he could afford the rogue preacher blithely ignored his incipient excommunication and continued to hold services in his greenhouse where he had a statue of Saint Michael erected amidst the prehistoric ferns and orchids. Retreating into their private world Marie and her lover entertained lavishly and received many important guests from Paris and Rome in grand style, plying them with rum imported from Martinique, the lights blazing all night in the Tour Magdala which had been equipped with scientific novelties, telescopes, microscopes and purportedly a curious 'magic lantern' akin to an early motion picture projector with which Sauniere hoped to illustrate his hellfire 'sermons'. Among their guests were said to be several members of the Hapsburg dynasty, the legendary chanteuse Emma Calve and two popular authors of the period, Maurice le Blanc and Jules Verne who frequently holidayed in the area and whose novels contain tantalising allusions to the miasma of myths and rumours that had already begun to accrue about the priest's beleagured domain.

Mount Bugarach - the view from Verne's farm - October 31 1992

Two of the Verne titles in question 'Clovis Dardentor' concerns a byzantine conspiracy surrounding a lost treasure, none other than the gold of Clovis.

The story is set on a ship under the command of the heroic Captain Bugarach - seemingly a reference to the farm where Verne spent his holidays 'Les Capitains' on the slopes of the nearbye Mount Bugarach, a dormant volcano in the vicinity of Rennes les Bains. As far as I know neither title has ever been translated into English. The continuing seismic activity would tend to indicate the volcano is far from extinct and tectonic forces have been held to blame for some of the freaky electro-magnetic activity including ball lightning and other unidentified atmospheric phenomena.

The bald mountain was central to local faery lore in days of old and in more recent times has been dubbed a 'window area' by a growing community of 'contactees' and concerned UFOlogists.

While Sauniere couldn't halt the continuing investigation into the mysterious source of his newfound wealth he was able to deploy sufficient legal muscle to slow the enquiries to a snail's pace and by the onset of the Great War in 1914 the situation remained unchanged, the church remained locked and the disgraced cleric and his lover remained firmly ensconced in the rambling hilltop estate, presiding over a divided village.

An entire generation perished on the battlefields of western Europe and while there was scarcely a househol not touched by tragedy the locals were unable to turn to their minister or attend official services as Sauniere's legal action effectively blocked the appointment of any new priest to the stricken parish. Be it guilt over ill gotten gains or the sheer stultifying weight of the mounting bureaucracy that clogged his study but the consequences of the rebel cleric's secrecy exacted a heavy toll. He continued his obsessive construction work as if racing against time, spending the initial years of the war gathering rocks from the bed of the River of Colours and carrying them one basket load at a time up the steep slope of the plateau to construct a 'Lourdes grotto' outside the disused church, insisting that one day the village would become a place of pilgrimage.

At the centre of his handmade cavern he erected another image of the Magdalene this time resting on the hollow altar column in which the coded documents were said to have been found.

In the base of the column he enscribed two simple but telling words:- ' PENITENCE…PENITENCE…' In December 1916 while still apparently in good health Sauniere visited the local undertaker and commissioned a bespoke coffin to be made according to his measurements. He was a tall man with the broad shoulders and barrel chest of a southerner and he wanted to make certain the box would be an easy fit. Shortly there afterwards he suffered the symptoms of a massive stroke although there were some who for obvious reasons suspected poisoning.

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A minister was hastily summoned from the neighbouring parish to hear the dying man's confession and administer the last rites and it is said he departed Sauniere's bedroom ashen faced at what he heard and according to popular account 'never smiled again'.

Whether it is true that all the dogs began to howl in the village or that Marie really muttered"Thank God it's over…"as Sauniere breathed his last is hard to say. Certainly if she did utter those words she was hopelessly misguided…

The death certificate filed in Caracasonne records that on the 17th of January 1917, a date commemorated in the locality as 'Blue Apple Day', Berenger Sauniere, the former priest of Rennes les Chateau met his maker. The following morning his body was moved to the greenhouse where it was propped up in an old armchair and exhibited to a procession of anonymous mourners who were said to have come from as far afield as Paris to pay their respects. Legend has it that each one took a tassel from the hem of his gown as they passed by way of a keepsake.

It was snowing and the ground was frozen, making hard work for Master Captier's eldest son who had taken over his father's duties, maintaining the locked chapel and the tiny graveyard How many came to grieve and how many others gathered out of morbid curiosity is a moot point but those who had expected the secret of Sauniere's wealth to finally become public knowledge were in for an unpleasant surprise. When the contents of his will were divulged it became clear the rogue cleric had died a pauper, his only income being the meagre stipend accorded to him as village priest. The Villa Bethany, the Tour Magdala, the domain it commanded and the seemingly bottomless bank account that paid for its upkeep had either been signed over or perhaps had always been registered in the name of Sauniere's loyal 'house keeper' Marie Denarnaud who remained good to her promise and kept her lips stubbornly sealed.

Noel Corbu with Sauniere's hand painted altar piece

Marie Denarnaud in her declining years (left) with unnamed companion Marie lived on in the big house without servants or family, feared and ostracized by the other villagers, trusting no-one, the garden growing wild, the greenhouses turning into a jungle as one year faded into another and a second war came and went. Set aside from the great events that convulsed Europe life continued much as it always did in Rennes until the collapse of the Vichy government in 1945 and the decision to reissue the Franc note in order to catch out those who had directly profited from the fascist regime. Unable or perhaps unwilling to explain the source of her cashflow Marie found herself impoverished overnight and there are stories, doubtless apocryphal, of the aging spinster raking bundles of useless currency together and burning them as if they were leaves in her back garden.

After the elaborate negotiations were completed and the contracts finally exchanged Marie moved back into her former lodgings, leaving the domain to its new tenants, Noel and his young daughter, Claire who was little more than a child at the time. Any expectations on the businessman's behalf that he might be the one to finally penetrate the enigma were cruelly dispelled when on the anniversary Sauniere's demise Marie suffered identical symptoms, a sudden, violent stroke which left her paralyzed and more crucially incapable of speech. It is hard to imagine what her final days must have been like as Noel Corbu tried in vain to wrest, tempt, threaten or cajole the secret from her but at least she died in her mother's bed surrounded by those who cared for her well being even if it was for all the wrong reasons. Marie DenarnaudBarthelemy, to give her full family name as it appears on the headstone, passed on January 29th 1953 without uttering so much as a single coherent syllable.

Looking ruin in the face Marie confided in a recently widowed businessman from Paris, Noel Corbu, that if he bought the Villa and the domain and promised to look after her until the end of her days she would tell him"a secret that will make you bothj rich and immensely powerful".

Noel wasn't a total sucker. He did his homework first before signing on the dotted line but in the end the mystery drew him in to its malignant embrace as surely as a black hole draws in light.

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Some think sheer frustration alone drove Noel to drink or perhaps drove him…well, a little funny. Others believe he was always a little strange to begin with. Like attracts like and the house had found him after all, not the other way round. Not knowing where to dig or even what he was digging for he sank arbitrary shafts and started on the network of tunnels that honeycomb the plateau to this day, re-opened and reworked by every successive generation to have followed in his hapless steps. Of course he never found a dime but one more piece of the jigsaw did come to light on his shift. In March 1956 the skeletal remains of three men were found buried in the Villa's flowerbed. All three were aged between thirty and forty and had apparently suffered multiple gunshot wounds.

The gendarmes were summoned and an inquest opened but no conclusions were handed down.

The bodies were never identified and regardless of whether it was local score settling or as some have suggested a showdown with a trio of hired assassins it does tend to indicate not only Marie and Sauniere's skill in defending themselves but the lengths they were prepared to go to in order to guard their secret.

The Devil's Bridge - autumn 2007

Noel Corbu was killed in a freak accident on May 20th 1968 when his car left the road while apparently trying to return home to the plateau where his daughter, Claire, awaited him. While speculation over the circumstances of the 'accident' continues it remains a matter of considerable delicacy and I am loathe to discuss the details further in so public a forum. Less than a month later, Abbe Boyer, Vicar General in the Carcasonne diocese and a motivating force behind the

ongoing internal enquiry into the Rennes enigma was himself the victim of an identical accident when his car was apparently forced off the road by persons unknown near a spot on the Carcasonne- Andorra highway known locally as 'the Devil's Bridge'.

After that the trail appeared to go cold. At least for a while…

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(2) All Roads Lead To Rennes.

The Ethiopian Jews claim to this day to have the Ark under lock and key in Axum but in truth there is almost no archeological evidence to suggest that the Temple of Solomon itself existed outside popular folklore, let alone its contents. Even if the Ark, the carrying case supposed to hold the ten commandments, the literal word of God brought down by Moses from Mount Sinai) or something like it had existed its wooden frame would surely have turned to dust over the long millenia but bolstered by fool's courage and an open tab to cover my costs I gamely set out to pick up the trail.

The temple of Solomon is believed to have been destroyed in 70 AD by the Roman general Titus and its treasures borne back to the eternal city to swell the coffers of his father, the Emperor Vespasian. A triumphal arch in Rome records the arrival of the Ark along with the other relics, the sacred Menora and the Cup of Abraham, a chalice carved by master Afghan craftsmen to consecrate the temple the prophet built in Ur of the Chaldees and identified by some as the mythic Holy Grail of medieval chivalry.

Rome was itself looted in 410 AD by the Visigoths under their great king Alaric who in turn is said to have carried the treasure back to his capital, the lost city of Rhedae, whose ruins apparently lay beneath the streets of the tiny Pyrenean town of Rennes le Chateau, the confluence point of all great 20th century conspiracy theories.

"When I drew nigh to the nameless city I knew it was accursed…"– H.P. Lovecraft They say the devil makes work for idle hands and by the mid nineties mine were more idle than they should have been. The music video work dried up as the grungy eighties were consigned to the toxic waste drum of history along with midnight movies, long hair, leather and psychedelic drugs swept away by a rising tide of amphetamines, tracksuit tops and consumer friendly new Labour bling. River City was getting stale and when Channel four Television's religion department offered me a suitable mission I jumped at the chance without the slightest comprehension of where the chain of events would ultimately lead me.

Channel Four had recently broadcast a hit show entitled 'THE REAL JURASSIC PARK"concerning efforts to extract dinosaur DNA from amber and were looking at a potential follow up, 'THE REAL RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK' for a similar child friendly early evening slot. There is no point recapitulating the details of the Spielberg film here. In essence Lawrence Kasden's script, a homage to Saturday matinees of yesteryear, makes good use of two very separate strands of popular mythology: - the survival of an ancient, supernatural or religious relic into the modern day and the continuing web of rumours and dangerous fallacies surrounding the very real activities of the Ahnenerbe SS and the archeological work conducted by their Race and Settlement Department under the command of deranged Brigadefuhrer Karl Maria Wiligut-Weisthor.

There is no evidence to suggest Adolf Hitler had the slightest interest in occultism or that Weisthor or any other member of the Nazi regime ever actively pursued the ark of the Covenant or the equally fabulous 'Spear of Destiny' linked to the developing post war mythos by the fabrications of 'psuedo-historian' Trevor Ravenscroft. While these legends may have a symbolic value central to the Judeo-Christian myth they have little relevance to the aggressive brand of Aryan neo-paganism adhered to by Weisthor and his sinister comrades 70

Author Gerard de Sede has set the ball rolling with the publication of two almost identical accounts of the affair 'L'OR DE RENNES/THE GOLD OF RENNES' and ' LE TRESOR MAUDIT DE RENNES LE CHATEAU/ THE CURSED TREASURE OF RENNES LE CHATEAU' (both 1967) which had in turn formed the basis of a hit BBC documentary 'THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL' (1982) and the accompanying international bestseller authored by its principal researchers - Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Taking off from the known facts of the case 'HOLY BLOOD' unpacks a bizarre and highly unlikely conspiracy theory predicated by the notion that Christ married Mary Magdalene and had issue, a sacred bloodline that survives to this day protected by a typically shadowy secret society known as the Priory of Sion, dedicated to the preservation of the 'Sang Real' or royal blood that the 'Sangraal' or Holy Grail was said to represent, a lineage notoriously said to include such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci and the film-maker and artist Jean Cocteau.

The documentary argues that Saunier uncovered proof of this bloodline and was paid to keep his silence by the Priory and its cohorts. It is well known that the three young researchers were deliberately mislead by a series of forged documents lodged in the Bibliotheque Nationale by Pierre Plantard, a right wing fantacist connected to an obscure society dedicated to the creation of a United States of Europe named the Ordre AlphaGalates and who seems to have fabricated the paper trail in order to imply that he was the descendent of the son of God as well as rightful heir to the throne of France.

Whether Plantard had genuine delusions of

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Jean Cocteau - hard at work on his famous 'Black Sun' mural in a chapel off Gerard Street, London W1

Pierre Plantard de Sinclair

grandeur or if it was simply a surrealist joke that got out of hand is hard to tell but something in the iconoclasm of the conceit seemed to strike a chord with the public.

'THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL' spawned a slew of sequels and spin offs, teasing out this slender premise to ever more ridiculous extremes including 'THE MESSIANIC LEGACY' , the original trio's official follow up and ' THE TOMB OF GOD' (Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger - 1996) which by now argued that Saunier not only discovered proof of Christ's lineage but that the church concealed the literal body of Christ itself. (presumably along with the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail) Deranged surveyor Donald Wood took the whole thing to a different level with 'GENISIS' and its equally bizarre sequel 'GENESET' which introduced the rather more radical notion that Saunier had stumbled upon some sort of space time portal to another world, linking Rennes to the then current UFO craze and arguing that clues hidden in the natural proportions and 'sacred geometry'of the surrounding landscape indicated not only the intervention of extraterrestrial (or fourth dimensional) beings but that mankind itself was the product of alien (essentially Lovecraftian) Gods mucking about with recombinant DNA. Saucer cults flocked to the area from the late seventies onwards, setting up 24 hour 'sky watches' from the surrounding hills, laying out UFO friendly pictograms in the scrub and formulating elaborate 'landing protocols' in the hope that someone might stop by to pick them up. This however never happened and by the close of the century the number of reported 'sightings' had thinned to a trickle. The 'space time portal' idea stuck around however, recycled by Henry Lincoln's opportunistic and all but incomprehensible entry 'THE HOLY PLACE', the 'Rennes Pentagram' first documented by Woods providing the jumping off spot for any number of geomancers and sacred cartographers drawn by the admittedly freaky topography.

There is an enduring folkloric belief that if you zero the clock on your mileage before driving the points of the pentagram you will find it covers a grand total of 666km. Apparently at some point the Devil went metric. The prehistoric standing stones that dot the area and the natural geological formations do seem to be aligned with unaccountable precision (something hinted at by Boudet in his original ur-text 'La Vraie Langue Celtique' or 'The Cromlechs of Rennes le Bains') but by the mid nineties the matter of Saunier and what lay beneath the church itself seemed to have been largely forgotten.

Hardly surprising since there were no bars, restaurants, hotels or other inducements to welcome outsiders and only one sign in the world, at the very base of the plateau itself that bears the village's name.

Although a short hop from Cannes and the beaches of the Cote d'Azur Rennes might as well be living in another world. If you slip a copy of 'DAMIEN: OMEN II' into your CD player as you pull out of the rental lot at Carcasonne airport you should, if you crank the volume a li'l, reach the outer edge of the pentagram by approximately track six. ('fallen temple') South of Carcasonne the trees press slowly closer, branches meeting over the narrowing blacktop as you follow the winding course of the Aude towards its headwaters.

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It is only when you pass that one signpost and start up the plateau itself that the rustic setting begins to take on a more sinister, otherworldly property. Just what exactly is the matter with Rennes is hard to finger immediately. It's narrow streets are as quiet as any other Merdianal backwater but that odd sensation of being watched never quite leaves you and there is perhaps something a little too furtive in the manner of the locals to quite set the visitor's mind at ease.

By track ten on a good day you should be parked up beside the Tour Magdala and on a clear day in Rennes you can see, if not forever then as near as dammit, the smudgy blue foot hills rolling away and away on all sides which is why the visi-goths chose it as their capital in the first place.

The more jarring details don't become apparent until you've paused long enough to catch your breath. The weird sun dial / clock on the tower above the parking lot that never seems to tell any recognizable earthly time, the big, white Pyrenean mountain dog that looks more like a wolf loitering in the shade of the gothic belvedere, the pentagrams on the manhole covers and the only store in town is of course a bookshop rather than a grocers whose sign reads 'Over 666 titles in stock'. By the time you catch sight of the church and those famous words 'TERRIBLE IS THIS PLACE' above it's door it is difficult for even the most unobservant pilgrim not to conclude that there is something, well… a li'l wrong with Rennes.

At that time, being the early nineties, Noel Corbu's successor, Henri Buthion, had only recently disappeared leaving the Villa Bethany in disarray. Buthion's attempts to continue the obsessive tunnelling begun by his predecessor and his later recourse to dynamite to try and break through to the vaults below had destabilized the presbytery and cracked the chapel's starry dome. The domain lay abandoned, gardens and greenhouses neglected and overgrown and in the noontide silence of Saunier's garden I reflected on Poe's words from 'THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER' : -"I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all."

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Villa Bethania - 6.15 pm October 7 1992 - The Greenhouse Although I had come to the Pyrenees with the intention of channelling the spirit of Indiana Jones it was another cinematic tradition that obtained. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Argento's 'Three Mothers' trilogy or indeed the works of his mentor , would have been struck at once by the odd familiarity of Saunier's art-deco diabolism, the fading velvet wallpaper that would have been right at home in the 'Markos Tanz Akadamie' and the primary coloured shards of glass that still clung to the frames of those dilapidated greenhouses, filling the sepulchral chambers with deep, lustrous reds, blues and ambers. The plethora of Catholic icons, tortured, sorrowful virgins and stricken, guilt ridden Magdalenes all but absorbed into the creeping foliage put me in mind of Argento's mentor, the great Mario Bava.

The artist, the wallpaper and his selected works

'I VAMPIRI / THE DEVIL'S COMMANDMENT' (1956) is the first identifiable Italian horror film and the source from which all others flow. The original director, Riccardo Freda, was a former member of the Italian Board of Film Censors who decided to emulate the commercially successful American imports by producing a horror film of his own. When he lost interest in the project the young Bava who had been recruited to work on the special effects took over the project and made it his own. Bava's dad had apparently manufactured lifelike mannikens for window displays and the director's continuing necrophilic tendency to objectify his leads as if they were living dolls contributes a uniquely creepy frisson to his more powerful works. After salvaging a second Mexican bound Lovecraft pastiche 'CALTIKI - THE IMMORTAL MONSTER' (1959) begun by his mentor, Riccardo Freda, the young Bava embarked on an extraordinary solo career with 'BLACK SUNDAY' (1960) was loosely inspired by Gogol's 'VIY' while 'THE EVIL EYE' (1962) is arguably the first identifiable giallo, a genre Bava continued to hone in 'BLOOD AND BLACK LACE' (1964) in which a masked assassin cuts a cathartic swathe through an array of manniken like fashion models setting the template for modern 'stalk and slash' in the process. Boris Karloff turns in one of his best performances n 'BLACK SABBATH' (1963) but apparently caught the cold that killed him in the process of completing the final shot subsequently shorn from American release prints. Christopher Lee got nasty in 'WHAT?' aka 'THE WHIP AND THE BODY' aka 'THE WHIP AND THE FLESH' (1963) while 'KILL, BABY… KILL!' (1966) aka 'CURSE OF THE DEAD' (UK) aka 'CURSE OF THE LIVING DEAD' (US) aka 'THE DEAD EYES OF DR.DRACULA' (Germany) may well be the genre's masterpiece. The plot (concerning a cursed aristocratic family at the centre of a series of supernaturally motivated murders) merely serves as an excuse to crank up the dry ice, stirring the frozen archetypes into a vortice of winding alleyways and Kafkaesque dreamscapes exemplified in a sequence where the protagonist literally pursues himself through a series of identical chambers, slowly but surely gaining ground only to find he has typically gained nothing at all.

The irrationally terrifying ghost from 'Kill Baby, Kill! ' Quite possibly the scariest screen ghost of all time.

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If there was one title that reminded me most of Rennes and its demented denizens it was Bava's 1972 funeral fest LISA AND THE DEVIL aka 'THE DEVIL AND THE DEAD' that had caught me unaware one Hallow'een under the influence of a particularly good crop of magic mushrooms and simply knocked me for six.

To say it tickled my funny bone would be putting it mildly. I couldn't get up off the floor and every time I tried another off kilter moment or effortless non-sequeter would knock me straight back on my ass again. Elke Sommer plays a dazed blonde who strays from a tour group viewing a fresco showing the devil carrying away the dead to meander through a string of encounters with a ghostly aristocratic family and their daemonic servant, Leandro, played by Telly Savalas complete with lollipop, kid gloves and a fetching range of quasi-Masonic accessories.

"Neither glue nor splintered heads can stop the funeral..."Telly Savalas improvises to a captive audience in 'LISA AND THE DEVIL' (1972) The entire film seems unstuck in time and place with names, identities and relationships fluctuating alarmingly but as all are apparently dead or damned to begin with this seems quite in keeping with the nightmare logic of the plot. Pure essence of Rennes.

How else could I put it? You'd have to be there…

A special mention to Alida Valli whose deranged matriarch in 'Lisa and the Devil' (1972) is played as blind in some scenes whilst plainly sighted in others...

Although at times quite evidently off his trolley Bava's work innovated many of the stylistic conventions 'borrowed' by American franchises such as 'Friday the Thirteenth' and 'Scream' as well as defining the genre in which his successors, Dario Argento and the late, lamented Lucio Fulci were to distinguish themselves.

Daria Nicolodi starred in Bava's last completed work as a director 'SHOCK' (1977) aka 'SHOCK TRANSFER SUSPENCE HYPNOS' and his final credit was as special effects creator of il maestro's 'INFERNO' (1980) Dario returned the favour by producing Mario Bava's son Lamberto's early work , 'DEMONS' (1985) and its trashy, throw-away sequel in which a horror film invades the life of the audience members before bringing about some form of daemonic apocalypse.

To some extent Lucio Fulci's notorious gothic trilogy 'THE GATES OF HELL' aka 'CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD' (1980) 'THE BEYOND' (1981) aka 'SEVEN DOORS OF DEATH' (US) aka 'THE SEVEN DOORS OF HELL' aka 'EIBON. GHOST TOWN OF THE LIVING DEAD' (Germany) and 'HOUSE BY THE CEMETARY' (1981) could be seen as an excremental Freudian reposte to Argento's essentially Jungian work, a maggot ridden return of the repressed replete in the latter entry with a grotesque flesh eating thing in the basement named 'Freudstein' who speaks in a sublimely creepy child like whimper.

At times it appears the cast are simply making it up as they go along and one can only imagine the director's imperfect grasp of English allowed some of the weirdest dialogue in cinema history including mangled chunks of Jim Morrison and even the Rice Crispies jingle to find its way into the script. Apparently Bava's dad made mannikens for shop windows and here the director's tendency to portray human beings as living dolls reaches it's lunatic apogee in one of the most overblown acts of sustained necrophilia ever inflincted on the viewing public.Bracing stuff. Too bracing for the producers who cut the film by nearly half it's length and shot additional scenes involving a bewildered exorcist played

by Robert Alda who strives to make sense of the diabolic shambles released in some territories as 'HOUSE OF EXORCISM' and credited to fictional director 'Micky Lion'.

The original while admittedly an acquired taste remains unsurpassed in all it's baffling glory.

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Apart from the by now habitual setting of a 'large house with many rooms' and the inevitable flooded basement Fulci's works display a Bavaesque disregard for conventional logic and share a common mythology courtesy of screenwriter Dardano Sachetti who also contributed to the Amityville cycle.

The lunatic events in 'THE BEYOND' from the swarm of face eating spiders in the library to the blind girl ravaged by her own seeing eye dog are justified by the simple, catch all expedient that 'this house, this whole town is built over one of the seven dreaded gateways of evil!"Which brings us neatly back to Rennes…

By the end of the 20th century years of speculation had left the natives riven, brother divided against brother, any fragile sense of community that might have existed overwhelmed by an influx of treasure hunters, occultists, cranks and conspirators. As the various 'revelations' and increasingly far fetched theories as to what lay beneath the church tended to be mutually exclusive it followed that Rennes itself remained something of a black spot in consensus reality where no two people seemed to agree as to what the hell was really happening.

President Mitterand had visited the church in person a few years previously before returning to Paris to enable a law that made the use of metal detectors and ultra-sound equipment illegal in the area, thus forestalling an alleged bid by the Vatican to conduct a scan of the plateau as well as slowing the efforts of the various human moles and Indiana Jones wannabes who continued to tunnel incessantly through the crumbling bedrock.

President Mitterand had visited the church in person a few years previously before returning to Paris to enable a law that made the use of metal detectors and ultra-sound equipment illegal in the area, thus forestalling an alleged bid by the Vatican to conduct a scan of the plateau as well as slowing the efforts of the various human moles and Indiana Jones wannabes who continued to tunnel incessantly through the crumbling bedrock.

Mitterand goes walkabout

The modern pyramid commissioned by Mitterand outside the Louvre The basic 'Rennes story', the essential facts and the level you received them on were by the early nineties very much determined by who you spoke to first or were seen with in public. Such was the degree of mistrust and creeping paranoia in the hamlet that after generations of internecine rivalry an unspoken protocol dictated that the moment a newcomer was spotted conniving with another resident or percieved to be aligned with whatever group or society they represented all other doors were closed to them making it hard to penetrate more than one layer of the onion at a time without inordinate subterfuge and a deep knowledge of local politics. Hence it was to my good fortune as a 'Rennes virgin' blissfully unaware of all this gothic game playing that the very first individual I spoke to on arrival in the village turned out to be the best possible person I could have chosen when it came to unpacking the zone's multifold mysteries over the months and years that followed.

Celia Brooke was a striking looking redhead with soaring cheekbones and patient, long suffering blue green eyes as deep and kind as the rock pools in the River of Colours itself.

At that time the church was still closed to the public, in desperate need of repair and Celia was helping out in the small museum connected to the disused rectory. I sought her out, taking her to be the curator and was pleasantly surprised to find that she was not only English but seemed to take an immediate shine to me. I don't know why she trusted me the way she did rather than instantly dismissing me as another treasure hunter and the all round esoteric opportunist that I was. Maybe she was just bored that day and grateful for the chance to shoot the breeze with someone from the outside world. She was certainly a big fish in a very small pond but what a weird and 'wonder full' pond it was!

The elect visit the Tour Magdala

Celia was the grand daughter of H.H. The Dayang Muda of Sarawak, Gladys Brooke who had been evicted from the family's island fiefdom by the Japanese and cast adrift in post-war MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

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London society. Before becoming guardian of Saunier's domain Celia had rehearsed her role as gate keeper, first as a hat check girl in London's Groucho Club, then as first secretary to the Rolling Stones fan club, acting as Mick Jagger's official signature and autographing thousands of photographs on his behalf, a legal wrinkle that had continued to keep her in pocket for many years. Celia had flirted with various belief systems and their attendant gurus over the years and had sojourned in Afghanistan and Gilgit in the early seventies before marrying the grandson of Sufi master musician Hazrat Inayat Khan and moving to the south where they had purchased a tract of land on a hilltop overlooking the Rennes plateau following a vision described to them by aging Nazi seer Joseph Geibel who had insisted the young heir to the throne of Sarawak would one day 'find treasure there'. Sadly Celia's marriage had gone south too although she continued to live alone on the hilltop with her daughter Grace in 'La Metairie Blanche', the extraordinary white house she had constructed over the years with her own hands and the help of the locals.

Walking in the woods near 'La Metairie' in the mid eighties Celia had found an ancient gold coin washed free by the spring rains. Following the run off she dug slowly back into the mulch to unearth a hoard of Carolingian coins just as Geibel had foretold, thus becoming one of the only people to have ever found actual treasure in Rennes. By the early nineties most of the hoard had been smuggled out of the country but at least three of the coins can be seen in the local museum to this very day.

Celia had begun to spend more time in the village and had started helping out in the abandoned domain where the verger and official grave digger, Marcel Captier, had taken her under his protective wing. Marcel was of course the grandson of Saunier's bell ringer, the man who had uncovered the 'Rennes documents' in the first place and wore on a steel ring on his belt the 'sixty-eight keys to Rennes le Chateau' which he would deliberately rattle from time to time as he showed me around the dilapidated estate as if to remind me of the dreadful responsibilities incumbent in his dynastic role of 'keeper'. The pressure weighed all too heavily on his remaining family and by the early nineties had driven a wedge between him and his brother, Antoine, who had married Claire Corbu and contested him for control of the domain.

The Tour Magdala 76

"Twenty two steps", muttered Marcel, tapping the tip of his shoe numinously against the topmost flight as we emerged onto the roof of the Tour Magdala, his eyes taking in the familiar panorama, the vista of surrounding hilltops that defined the limits of his strange, intensely private world.

Everything in Rennes seemed to be precisely patterned, aligned and innumerated according to some ellusive, diabolic logic which like a bad acid trip kept threatening to make some kind of sense without ever quite dropping the other shoe.

A flight of steps exists on the hillside several hundred metres beneath the Tour Magdala and with recourse to a laser or theodolite a straight line can be drawn through the tower's westward facing window (modelled on the 'arrow slits' found in the ruined 12th century castles that dot the area) using the second set of steps as they were the sites at the tip of a gun barrel. If the line is continued across the valley below it clearly indicates the mouth of a cave on the far side of the River of Colours, one grotto amongst many in an area honeycombed with similar limestone formations.

Knowledge is power and as any secret society worth it's salt knows you can't just give away a halfway decent secret but you can't hold it back forever otherwise the rubes get bored and drift away. Instead to maintain ones precarious position in the invisible hierarchy the secret needs to trailed every so often, just enough to keep the average sucker/ initiate hooked, a practise the denizens of Rennes had perfected to a fine art. A kind of esoteric flirting, stonewalling and gliding around direct questions while casually dropping hints of a larger truth but giving away only enough trivia to keep their mark's coming back for more. It is the job of an impartial investigator to weigh the evidence accordingly and decide for themselves who if anyone really holds the key.

I met Jean Pierre Montes, a self proclaimed expert in 'secret societies' who spoke at length about the Priory of Sion and looking me in the eye when he saw I was in danger of nodding off tossed in the immortal remark;"Hah! If you could only learn who held the patent on the calorimeter then you would know the true identity of Fulcanelli, the master alchemist!"Not that he had mentioned the 'F' word previously either. It just popped in from nowhere to make certain he kept my attention and I remember trying very hard not to crack up laughing there and then. Harder still to keep a straight face with the grizzled Jean de Rigney, who lived alone in his old wooden farmhouse at the source of the 'Salz', the saline river that emerged from the ancient salt mines in the woods east of Sougraigne.

De Rigney believed that there was an underground UFO base beneath his property and had made countless recordings of the aliens by connecting microphones to his floorboards and was keen to play us his weird tapes filled with hissing, sputtering semi-human voices right out of 'The Whisperer in Darkness'. I rationalized it as a variant on common or garden electronic voice phenomena (E.V.P.) and tried not to think about it but it was all too easy to imagine Lovecraft's Old Ones winging their way over those domed, densely wooded hills. Later I took samples of river water from the stream behind the farm house which we found to be mildly radioactive, possibly a factor in the legendary curative properties of the springs at Rennes le Bains. > I met Elizabeth van Buren, great great grand daughter of the eighth American president who had recently printed a commentary entitled 'Finis Gloria Mundi' which she claimed was an esoteric unveiling of Fulcanelli's third 'lost' manuscript 'The Overture to the Invisible' and who seemed to honestly believe that the immortal Count Sainte Germaine and several other players in the mystery were in fact good ol' fashioned vampires after all. She had issues with extraterrestrials too, this being all the rage back then and had decoded all the heavenly constellations hidden in the local ordinance survey map, what she called the 'Rennes Zodiac'. Elizabeth had recently been found weeping and crawling on all fours in the bottom of a neighbouring garden having apparently saved the world by driving a metal stake into the 'Achille's heel of the Great Bear', an emotionally cathartic act of earth acupuncture . There were rumours she had suffered a nervous breakdown but rather than bow out quietly she had come back strong, deciding that she was in fact the reincarnation of Joan of Arc and showing up on the anniversary of Sauniere's death (known locally as 'Blue Apple Day' for reasons I will return to later) dressed in full armour to demand admittance to the church and the vaults below. Celia had managed to get her sword away from her and finessed the situation admirably, showing good humour in the face of the yearly influx of shadowy adherents congregate in the chapel to mark this weirdest of weird anniversaries.

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At least Elizabeth had the breeding and deep pockets to give her fancies full flight and somehow stay at large, buying and restoring the Visi-Goth tower at the base of the plateau and planting thousands of roses in designs that could only be seen from the air as a signal to her space brothers. Most of the flowers died within weeks in the thin soil despite Celia's efforts to water them although other weeds had taken route in the towers shadow that helped put proceedings in their proper perspective. A sign on the road into the valley proclaimed 'F***K' in bold, block capitals and a few feet further back from the trail I came across a vast waist high field of marijuana plants in the midst of which stood a single pole bearing a box marked 'aide humanitaire'.- a highly egalitarian 'take as much as you need and leave what you see fit' deal that suited me to a tee. I suspect this had something to do with a local wildman named Danielle who lived in wheeless bus partly buried in the hillside along with his sun struck girlfriend and about a hundred badly diseased cats. Danielle looked just like Charlie Manson only shorter and spoke like Charlie too but in French which leant an additional opacity to his crypto-astrological banter. His main source of revenue was drawing treasure maps which he mass produced in their hundreds and sold at the roadside to curious tourists in between decorating the trees with the countless tiny swastikas he made from broken mirrors, bones and barbie-doll legs.

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Granted it helps to get a certain perspective on proceedings and getting out into the boonies did just that. It was only when I surveyed the area by horse or took those long walks with Marcel and his huge white Pyrenean mountain dog, Dagobert, that I began to notice the extent of the underlying earthworks, the outlines of ancient roads, houses and crumbling dry stone walls reminiscent of Zimbabwe ruins and possibly as old if not older, running for mile upon mile beneath the scrub, the remains of Rhedae, the capital of the Visi-Goths presumably although it appeared distinctly Lovecraftian at first glance.

Marcel professed disinterest in the treasure and deflected direct discussion of the church by insisting that the real problem with Rennes was that the area was infested with 'little people' who played tricks with people's minds, pointing out the limestone geomorphology and the labyrinthine tunnels both natural and manmade that honeycombed the plateau. He was possessed of considerable artistic talent and insisted that one day he would draw a comic book version that would explain everything. Until then the world would just have to be patient. To some extent he seemed like the sanest man in the village and between him and Celia he quietly did everything that needed doing. He picked up after the tourists, emptied the bins in the parking lot, cleaned the public toilets, changed the flowers on the altar, dug the graves, kept the treasure hunters from digging them back up again and stopped the Vatican from getting into the church and conducting their long mooted ultra-sound scan of the cavity. ("It was horrible, horrible… "muttered Celia under her breath."Those little Italian men in their little white gloves crawling all over everything…") All in a day's work in Rennes.

The barrage of data was by now becoming so formidable I had taken to carrying a dictaphone and noting down everything I saw or heard in the manner of a forensic pathologist, hoping to sift through the material at a later date when I had the insight to be able to separate the essential from the trivial.

The following are transcripts from surviving tapes:TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE ZONE - October 13 1992 R.S.:"Hey sister, it's approximately 9.34 am. Tailing Celia and Marcel on a road beneath the plateau. Just turned left off the dirt track and are doubling back towards the River of Colours, the Rousseau de Coleur from which the village draws its water supply, so named because of the red mud. Area looks as if it has been terraced with extreme care. Now passing a rock marked with a circle, a cross and a triangle in white. No apparent explanation. Heading towards the second flight of steps built by Reverend Sauniere…"

Prolonged silence…. Unintelligible whispering….

R.S.:"10.32 local time. Now in the largest chamber of the cave immediately opposite the tower.

It's obvious that the view across the river is identical to the view portrayed on the hand painted altar piece portraying the Magdalene kneeling in the grotto and it is now apparent the buildings portrayed on the skyline are not Jerusalem after all but the Tour Magdala from the reverse angle.

Have managed to penetrate about fifteen metres into the cave. There is a second tunnel forking to the left seven metres from the start of the crawl. The passage seems to have been artificially filled with red earth and it is only thanks to recent erosion I have been able to penetrate this far.

At the end of the crawl there is evidence someone has been trying to dig further using an empty tin…"

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The Church - 3. 28 pm October 1992 R.S.:"Now facing the bas relief on the altar. It does seem to portray the same cave I entered earlier. A series or triangular and oblong markings surround the hand pinted image… Rosy cross imagery remains curiously persistent…same deal with the ol' skull and bones. Then of course there is the matter of the blue oranges…"

CELIA:"Blue apples".

R.S.:"Sorry. Blue apples. As in the second Rennes document_ This apparently relates to the blue fruit like objects that appear in the borders of the designs in the stained glass windows although they look more like grapes to me. Which relates to the theory that on, is it the winter solstice?

CELIA: The seventeenth of January...

"The second cave was a lot deeper. Wormed my way at least twenty metres before it widened out enough for me to be able to stand. Again there were signs of recent human activity and I managed to retrieve an abandoned flashlight bearing the name 'RAY JOLLY' and what looks like a partially erased telephone number. Flashlight still has some juice in it and is marked by three deep striations that look like… well… I dunno… kinda like teeth marks…must have been a big mother, whatever it was…"

Odd hissing feedback - unpleasantly similar to the de Rigney tape R.S:"I mean it's not like this place is supposed to have a monster in the first place. No hounds, beasts, black dogs or ABC's (Alien Big Cats) but it's got every other goddam mystery so why not? It's not like you can drop your flashlight and not notice it and these gashes are pretty... pronounced.....

Feedback returns, obscuring words.

R.S:"...measure the teeth marks so we can figure out just what sort of critter we're dealin' with here...

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Blue Apple Day - Approx. 12.00 am 17 Jan 1993 - The Church Once a year on the anniversary of Sauniere's death the morning sun shines through the chapel windows in such a manner as to create an almost three dimensional holograph . Unfortunately it looks too much like a Monet painting to make any real sense like everything else in this burg but it's mighty pretty whatever the hell it is.

Intriguingly the date seems to run right the mystery. The winter solstice is also marked by the curious sun dial on the wall of the tower overlooking the parking lot . Sauniere is supposed to have ordered his coffin on the tenth while still in good health but on the 17th inexplicably passed away…"

Feedback momentarily obscures words. "…lettering on the left hand side of the door appears very old, older than the 19th century. On the left hand side the letters are clear but on the right they have been inexplicably erased. In fact they appear to have been chiselled out…"

Feedback reaches crescendo. Then fades.

R.S.:"On the right hand side the words above the door are paraphrased:- ' This is the house of God. Be aware that you are in the temple of God. In this House the treasure is within you' Sauniere plainly understood that the key to the treasure is the treasure.

Which brings us back to Asmodeus…"

Loud recurrence of feedback. Words again indistinguishable.

TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE ZONE - Cont.

I hesitated, hearing Celia' s voice as she chatted to a friend outside the presbytery, Dagobert barking in the distance.

To get any closer I would have to clamber through the missing panel and although I might make it down the steps I knew I'd be caught in the act before I had time to extricate myself and it seemed wrong to violate Celia and Marcel's trust so blatantly. I might find out what they were hiding but I'd screw up our friendship in the process and that mattered more to me.

So I put the board back in place, silently vowing to settle the mystery's hash at a later date. At least now I knew where the entrance was even if I didn't know what the chamber held, nor would I find out what lay at the base of those steps for another fifteen years, not until the summer of 2007, just after posting the first instalment of this blog when the mystery finally unravelled and the last pieces of the gaudy, gothic jigsaw fell into place.

Despite the presence of a black Madonna in the neighbouring hamlet of Limoux nothing I had seen readily connected to the earlier events in Montserrat so I might have been forgiven for not realizing the two seemingly separate stories would somehow turn out to be part of the same enigma, a unified conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories.

On the strength of what I had seen and heard I didn't honestly believe there was anything supernatural going on in Rennes at all. The real story seemed to be in the character of its participants and not in any hypothetical 'sacred treasure'. It had been two long years since I had walked into that botannica on the lower East Side and in the interim I had gone a long way towards convincing myself the whole thing was just a ludicrous chain of 'coincidence', that nothing inexplicable had truly occurred. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and caving in to faith just isn't my bag. The mind is a monkey and back then mine was too busy swinging through the multi-dimensional jungle jim of the Rennes pentagram to see the wood for the trees.

For starters there was that business with the 22 steps that Marcel had been at such pains to point out during our initial tour which I now realized corresponded not only with the steps of Jacob's Ladder but the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, taking my investigation quite literally to the next level…

The Church - Approx. 3.30 pm - October 13 1993 R.S:"It appears as if the statue of the devil is spreading five fingers on his knee. In the neighbourhood of Rennes les Bains is a rock known locally as the 'Bread Rock' (Pere du Pain) in which are five hollows called the 'Devil's Hand'. Just below the formation known as the 'Trembling Rocks' is a stone seat cut into a boulder resting in a kind of natural amphitheatre named the 'Devil's Armchair' (Fauteuil du Diable) that Marcel referred to as the 'Centre of the Circle' and in point of fact the fingers of the devil's other hand do form a circle as if he were holding something, a missing staff or trident… Hang on… the lights just went out…"

I waited for a moment beside the font for Celia to return, giving the chapel a last once over before locking up and heading for the car, still just as baffled and thoroughly amused as ever. On a whim I found myself drawn back to a certain area, let's say for the sake of this blog, it might have been the interior of the confessional and to my growing surprise found a loose board that came away all too easily in my hands. Barely a cosmetic gesture but the premises was barred to the public at the time and I had momentarily found myself in what you might call a 'security gap'.

I felt a breath of stale, dank air against my face and as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I quite plainly made out the curve of a narrow flight of stone steps leading steeply downwards to connect with what could only be the vault beneath the church.

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(3) Terza Madre - The Third Mother

"Three Mothers: Aleph Mem Shin…"

"But that's… that's impossible…"Dario, shook his head, one of those rare goofy smiles lighting up his face as he tried to take it in, taking it pretty well under the circumstances, all told.

"A great, mystical secret covered and sealed with six rings…And from them emanated air, water and fire… And from them are born Fathers, and from the fathers, descendents…"Our host, Adam Simon narrowed his eyes, reading slowly and carefully from the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation. Adam was a fine screenwriter in his own right and the director of a weird and wonderful low budget brain surgery movie 'BRAINDEAD' starring the two Bills, Pullman and Paxton and sporting a plot that was a virtual dry run for 'PI' without the pretension. Despite his years in the trenches turning around such noted epics as 'CARNOSAUR' and 'BODY CHEMISTRY II' on a dime our host was a man of considerable taste and no mean intellect who possessed one of the finest private libraries west of Arkham and knew more about the nuts and bolts of the kabbalah than myself and il maestro could fathom in a month of sundays.

Adam and his namesake - Simon Magus "But I had no idea. It is… unbelievable…all of this…incredible…fantastical…"

"Go on. Tell him the rest."

I turned away as Adam took a deep breath, adjusting his specs. It was the day before Hallow'een and a full moon hung over the shining Pacific and the LA basin, traffic seething along the PCH far below, part of another world separated from us by more than geographic distance. I had been firmly ensconced in Adam's guest room all summer, preparing 'THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU' and enjoying the seclusion of his crumbling, open plan hacienda just off Big Rock that had become

a veritable home away from home. Part of the building had slipped down the hillside in the previous earthquake and one side of the lounge was now somewhat lower than the other, a split-level arrangement that gave rise to our affectionate nickname - 'the crack house' The original icon of La Morenita, Our Lady of the New World, was perched on an impromptu shrine overlooking the bay and since her installation had presided over a swarm of Mexican killer bees, a second quake, the Malibu fire which had reduced every other house in the vicinity to a gutted stub and the subsequent mudslides, rocking backwards and forwards on her pedestal but never giving an inch, seemingly extending her implacable grace to all that surrounded her. It was a precarious perch but on a clear day you could see as far as Point Dume, it came rent free and above all I was happy there.

I was in love or at least I thought I was, cresting my fifteen minutes of fame, at the peak of my powers and on the brink of the biggest feature film project of my career, the eternal uncatchable dream so close I could taste it. What could possibly go wrong with a scenario like that?

"The Tetragrammaton actually only relates to the Ten Sefirot. There is however an aspect of creation that existed before the Sefirot. In the language of the Kabbalists this is known as the Universe of Chaos (Tohu).

In this state, the Vessels, which were the proto-Sefirot could neither interact nor give to one another. Since they could not emulate God by giving, they were incomplete and could therefore not hold the Divine Light. Since they could not fulfil their purpose, they were overwhelmed by the Light and 'shattered'. This is known as the 'Breaking of Vessels'…"

"The what?"

"The Breaking of Vessels…the broken shards of these Vessels fell to a lower spiritual level and subsequently became the source of all evil. It is for this reason that chaos is said to be the root of evil…"

"And this book is how old?"Dario inclined his head a little closer, not understanding where any of it was heading but liking the sound of it more and more.

"It's without question the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabbalistic texts. I think the first commentaries were written in the tenth century but the text itself is quoted as early as the sixth. References to the work appear as far back as the first century and tradition attests to its existence even in pre-Biblical times…"

"So, it's the business, right? The motherload. The Urtext."I prompted.

"The root of all evil…"whispered il maestro and he said it in such a way that Adam and I sat as if turned to stone. It was a voice that had haunted us since we were teenagers, the voice of the maniac in half a dozen giallios, the voice of the one and only, inimitable Dario Argento and although we loved him dearly he could still scare the crap out of us sometimes without even knowing it. He was just wrapping up 'TRAUMA' at the time and a timecoded VHS of the workprint rested on the coffee table beside a copy of 'Mystery of the Cathedrals' and the official guidebook to the Mountain of Montserrat.

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'TRAUMA' was Dario's first purely American work and Asia's debut in the leading role had brought something new and faintly unsavoury to the mix. The Tom Savini severed heads looked a li'l rubbery and some of the ungraded photography unduly murky but it was hard to judge in it's raw, unfinished state so we avoided comment, dutifully waiting for il maestro to wave his wand and work his usual magic, to somehow smooth over the rough edges and transmute base matter into gold..

"The three Mother letters, AMSh also spell out the Hebrew word Emesh, meaning 'yesternight'.

This occurs in the verse,"You slept last night (emesh) with my father (Genesis 19:34) The word emesh also denotes deep impenetrable gloom, as in the verse,"Gloom, waste and desolation"(Job 30:3). This is the inky gloom that existed before creation, in the Universe of Chaos, the 'yesternight' before the Sefirot were brought into being. At least according to what Laban told Jacob…"

Adam's white labrador, Merlin snarled, getting up and shaking himself as if hearing a coyote calling out in the Malibu dark somewhere just below human audio range.

"The Three Mothers represent the reconciliation of opposites but as there is logically no way in which opposites can be reconciled they represent a mystery that cannot be penetrated by logic ."Sealed with six rings", remember?"The script which is written in the King's name and sealed with the king's ring cannot be reversed"(Esther 8:8) "As in the Seal of Solomon, right? Bringing us back to the goddam pentagram…"

Dario shook his head, trying to follow the elision.

"According to this the rings here would be the rings of the King's name, that is, the letters YHV. The Kabbalists therefore say these six letters are the six directions… One commentator states that the letters AMSh contain the mystery through which one can walk on fire…"

"Figures".

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"The three Mother letters, AMSh, represent cause, effect and their synthesis. Shin is cause, Mem is effect and Alef is the synthesis between the two opposites. Three Mothers, AMSh, in the Universe are air, water, fire. Heaven was separated from fire. Earth was created from water and air from breath decides between them.."

"Suspiriorum…the breath…"

"Well, in the simplest physical terms 'water' represents matter, 'fire' is energy and 'air' is the space that allows the two to interact. On a somewhat deeper physical level, fire, water and air represent the three basic physical forces. 'Fire' is the electromagnetic force through which all matter interacts. The atomic nucleus, however, consists of like positive charges which would repel each other if only electromagnetism existed. There must therefore exist another force which can bind the nucleus together. This is the 'strong nuclear' or pionic force which binds the nucleus together, represented by 'water'. If this nuclear force were to interact with all particles, however, all matter would be mutually attracted together, forming a solid lump denser than a neutron star. On the other hand, even within each elementary particle there is a need for a cohesive force to counteract the electromagnetic repulsion within the particle itself. This force can be neither electromagnetic nor pionic. This is the 'air', the 'suspiriorum' , the third mother representing the weak nuclear force which decides between the other two. It is this force that allows light particles (leptons) to exist…"

"What Fulcanelli calls the 'art of light', si?"

"Gotcha. Unscramble the symbolism and what we're really talking about here is sub-atomic structure. According to the publisher, Eugene Canseliet, the real Fulcanelli was an old man working at the Paris gas works who had been aging backwards for some years before changing gender. Ridiculous, I know, but at face value the facts check out. At least I can't dismiss Canseliet's claims out of hand…"

"And this device he was supposed to have patented?"

"The calorimeter? I dunno. Measures calories as far as I can figure it. Minute heat exchanges.

Which is exactly the kind of by-product you could expect from someone carrying out research based on the third law of thermodynamics."

"Sorry. But you have to talk more slowly. My English…"

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"Entropy. I mean according to Einstein energy cannot be destroyed but according to the third law of thermodynamics it can dissipate to the point where it can no longer be measured. So long as we're living in a 'flat' universe rather than a closed system and the fabric of spacetime continues to expand so things will continue to get older rather than younger, champagne goes flat, ideas go stale and people die. Figures that if you were trying to find a loophole in the third law you'd need a device for measuring the unmeasurable, for keeping track of the rate of entropy. Hence the 'calorimeter'…"

await the return of Christ yet he will appear neither before nor after but during the planetary chaos, not in human form but as pure light, a light that will break the cycleof incarnation and bring all of us back to God, an autodafe next to which all the suffering the world has ever seen will be the merest taper. Fulcanelli indicates the cross is the hieroglyph of the alchymical crucible in which matter is purified and INRI which signifies exoterically Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews means esoterically 'Igne Natura Renovatur Integra' - Nature is regenerated or made whole by the fire…"

Sensing il maestro's confusion Adam pushed back his chair, putting together the makings of another smoke."The OSS were given a specific brief to round up everyone in occupied Europe who knew anything about nuclear power but apparently came up with squat. The CIA have been carrying a file on Fulcanelli for years but the only thing you can be sure of is that he isn't really hiding beneath the floorboards."

I nodded."The real Fulcanelli disappeared just before the war after writing the second book. As far as we know the third book is only a myth but I brought Elizabeth van Buren's commentary just in case.."

Dario narrowed his dark eyes, paging through the softback edition of 'FINIS GLORIA MUNDAE', trying to make head or tail of Elizabeth's turgid text;"The end of the glory of the world…'in ictu occuli'… in the blink of an eye…"

"As far as I can work out the earth seems to be the 'negrido', the black stone that has to pass through the nuclear fires of the third great war…of the alchemical crucible, so to speak, in order to become the whitened Philosophical Stone of the completed Arcanum - what our man refers to as the 'supreme hour' - the time of death for some and martyrdom for others. Granted Elizabeth might be a little nuts but right now her commentary to the third book is all we've got to go on… if the third book exists at all. .."Looking over il maestro's shoulder I read slowly and carefully:_"The universal spirit incarnated in man exists to teach the Truth, the Word and the Secret. All Christians

(*Needless to say the 'calorimeter' does a lot more than just measure calories.

These are two genuine images of the full 'bomb' calorimeter in all its apocalyptic glory. But I'm getting ahead of myself again...)

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"So we're.. how would you say in this country? Fucked! Bottom line, no?"

"Save the elect. There's a get out clause, see? No flesh shall be spared save that of the elect.

That's what this is. Again in Fulcanelli's words 'a self-censoring secret available only to the elect'.

Literally hidden in plain sight…"

"But it is written in code… in pictures…"

"A secret language passed down from God knows when. If the knowledge exists then it figures it must have come from somewhere to start with. Mythology would have it that the famous soothsayer Tiresias had perfect knowledge of the 'language of the birds' which Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, revealed to him. It is said he was deprived of his sight - there are penalties see, for breaking what you call 'silentium' for revealing the secrets of Olympus to mortals although he lived for 'seven, eight or nine ages of man' and is supposed to have been successively man and woman."

"Like Fulcanelli, no? The original alchymical hermaphrodite…"

"No shit. The 'language of the birds' was spoken also by Thales of Miletus, Melampus, Apollonius of Tyanna and Adam's namesake, Simon the magician who was eventually buried alive by his own congregation, insisting that on the third day he would rise again. He didn't."

Adam coughed."I mean these are folk stories. Fairytales. Metaphors in their own right. According to the Torah the language of the birds was spoken before the building of the tower of Babel, an act of hubris which caused the ancient common tongue to become perverted and forgotten by the grater part of humanity."

"Analogous to what the Inca's called the 'Court Language'. The double science - both sacred and profane. Solomon was the last mortal to have spoken the language of the birds in some apocryphal accounts but he too forgot it when he lost his seal and was forced to battle Asmodeus to regain his treasure. At least that's what it says in the 15th century magical treatise… where the hell is it now?"

"The 'Lemegeton'? I dunno. You had it last… in the Hebrew versions he's called Midrashim. He was wounded in the knee before being cast out into the wasteland…"

"Right, a devil by any other name, hence the posture of the daemon on the font…"

I indicated one of the stills on the tabletop. The grimacing plaster figure glaring down at the floor of the church and the sixty-four black and white flagstones laid out as a chessboard, its corners indicating the cardinal points.

"And what we're doing is like speaking a language without really understanding it… Like…y'know, phonetic English or Italian…"murmured Dario under his breath, enough of it connecting to finally make some kind of sense;-"a symbolic language we can read in our dreams…"

"Who knows where the concept of the motion picture apparatus, the modern mass media even begins. Griffiths and Melies licensed the invention from the Lumiere brothers who drew their inspiration from Roget's famous pamphlet on fusion frequency which in turn is derived from the zoetrope or the Jesuit monk Athanasius Kircher's 'moving picture wheel', the 'toy of the devil', the heretical 'illusion of life' shunned for centuries by Islam and the Holy Roman Church. I mean it figures that the 35 mm projector with its Maltese cross configuration that throws the strip of film past the picture head and the light generated by the burning carbon rod that like the Holy of Holies you may not behold with the naked eye but which is enclosed within the ark of the projector body has become the new conveyor of the art of light, that we can find within the mass media and in particular the modern horror film as exemplified in your goddam work the attributes of Dante's ancient common language…"

'Particularly 'Inferno'. The one no one understands…"

"Even the title's on the money."

Dario's smile broadened. Taking a last toke he stared out over the waves rolling silently in and the distant lights of the LA basin as if expecting a nuclear flash at any moment.

'C'mon, guys."Adam rose, noticing the headlamps of a stretch nosing its way uncertainly up the dirt track from Big Rock."I think it's time…"

"Already?"

"Can't keep 'em waiting, dude. We've got about an hour, Aleph Mem Shin depending on traffic we should be okay…"

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Dario paused, catching his breath. John Landis and Joe Dante had arranged for pristine prints of his work to be struck and screened one by one for the top brass at Raleigh Studios. Everyone who was anyone was going to be there and it was il maestro's best chance at an American career.

An early draft of 'STENDAHL'S SYNDROME' was on the table and Bridget Fonda was notionally attached. The time had come for il Maestro to show the world what he was really made of, to distinguish himself, to draw the line.

And as ever I was along for the ride.

"So the Three Mothers represent more than just the root of evil but the root of matter.

The key to the very fabric of what you call space-time? What our world is made of…or at least how it's made…"

"Considering that it's being made by someone or something in the first place. The same way you make movies only on a far, more sophisticated level. I mean it's three dimensional to start with. Not to mention inter-active. You can smell it, taste it, touch it…"

"So who's making it? And why?"

I wasn't used to il maestro asking questions and right now I didn't have any more answers; -"I dunno. But it would explain a lot. Like how these things got into our work without us consciously putting them there in the first place as well as this whole slide area between fact and fiction. Like there's really no difference between the two any more. Maybe there never was. When you get right down to it even the fact we're having this conversation is pretty damn unlikely…"

"Is strange, yes? Unlikely…"The maestro giggled, clapping me on the back as I ushered him towards the idling stretch.

"Gotta move, man. Gotta move. Never assume any audience is friendly. Particularly this one.."

"Don't forget this!"Adam hurried after us, brandishing the 'Sefir Yetzirah' and the 'TRAUMA' screener."You never know who you might run into out there."

"And if this whole place is an illusion? A programme? What difference does it make?"

"Beats me. But if you know you're being watched, especially if you don't know who's watching then all that matters is to try and look your best…"

And in the spirit of complete honesty il maestro wasn't looking too good. Right now he looked a l'il stoned and while our conversation had plainly engaged him he still looked gaunt and painfully thin. Working with American crews in an elusive second hand language had proved to be trickier than he thought and the shoot in Minneapolis had taken a lot out of him. He had always had 'issues' with food but since setting foor in California he had been under tremendous pressure and I had barely seen him touch a morsel, seemingly so daunted by the size of the portions and the expected protocols of 'taking lunch' with a series of strangers that he didn't know where to even begin, allowing one plate after another to arrive and depart unsullied.

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My own allegiances had been challenged by the casting of 'DR. MOREAU' and my precarious position at NewLine. Asia was up for the part of 'Aissa the cat lady' but the studio heads were more inclined towards Fairuza Balk following negative avance word on 'TRAUMA' I knew the long knives were out and did what I could to protect him from the malicious gossip spread by lesser mortals, the bellicose Bill Lustig among them who deliberately misinterpreted and exaggerated Dario's psychosomatic anorexia for their own evil ends, encouraging studio chiefs and distributors to believe utter nonsense, namely that my friend and mentor was either a heroin addict or a closet homosexual (Alan Jones please stand up) suffering from a sexually transmitted disease. I have no qualms naming names and in the case of Signor Lustig I have good reason as I learned later the big man from the Bronx had made similar claims about myself, apparently for no other reason than the fact I had inadvertently bedded a girl he had his eye on. Sweet. But that was ever the way in the Hollywood snake pit, the market where lies are sold. If you're reading this Bill just remember that line from 'Good, the Bad and the Ugly' –"I like big men. When they fall they fall harder and sometimes they never get up…"

up. Jettisoning his usual reticence Dario was right with the mike, still clinging to his copy of the 'Sefir Yetzirah' all ready to knock that curve ball right out of the stadium.

"I am… very proud of this film. It is perhaps… my masterpiece. But the critics they do not understand. When it is released they say it has no plot, no characters but they do not understand it is written in a kind of code… like a secret language…"

There was a stony silence. Then someone coughed.

"You mentioned Truffaut earlier", prompted John Landis, sensing the audience's growing uneasiness."You mean what he termed 'total cinema?' Essentially a cinema of visual experience?"

"But you cannot analyze or deconstruct this film by conventional means. It is like the work of the alchemist in my story. A symbolic language…"His eyes roved across the auditorium, lighting on a gap in the third row."Where is Richard? Richard can explain…"

But I wasn't there.

Just for once I wasn't there. I had seen the movie so many times I didn't think it mattered if I snuck out after the first couple of scenes. I can't help it if the opening sequences happen to be the ones I like best and like 'SUSPIRIA' the film doesn't quite sustain the momentum of its opening half hour. I thought I'd make it back in time for the Q and A but there was a certain young lady involved who must for now remain nameless and I was across the road having a drink with her when Dario needed me most. It may not have been my responsibility to explain my mentor's work for him or to put words in his mouth but I still feel as if I failed him, that like the trusted disciple I was I betrayed him and left him to be fed to the sharks.

And after that things were never quite the same for either of us…

It was a full house at Raleigh studios, black tie and evening dress. Invitation only.

I had been there every night of the week and sat through Dario's ouvre all over again, enjoying the personal introductions and the q and a that followed. It was like an episode of 'This is Your Life' with members of his old cast and crew popping out of the woodwork at every turn. Like the master I eschewed appearing in public myself and settled anonymously into the third row, content to watch proceedings from a distance. ' INFERNO' had always been a personal favourite of mine for reasons that by now should be more than obvious to any reader foolhardy enough to have stayed with this blog from the very top. I had seen it more times than I could remember and knew every beat by heart like an old, familiar tune. It marked a watershed in il maestro's career but tonight he would have the chance to turn that around and arrest his declining American fortunes. Tonight he had all the ammunition he needed to finally be justly proud of the film he was presenting and face down his critics.

There were a few walk-outs but that was to be expected although the remaining viewers were perhaps unusually silent as the Keith Emerson score played out and the houselights finally went

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Chapter Four. Luxae Tenebris - Darkness Visible.

strange book: - ' EMERALD CUP - ARK OF GOLD '.

Buechner seems to believe that the 'treasure of the Cathars' (an obscure 12th century heresy once prevalent in the south of France) was none other than the mythological 'Holy Grail' itself which he equates with the 'cup of Abraham', carved by master Afghan craftsmen from a single emerald and used by Salem to consecrate the temple in Ur of the Chaldees. The cup allegedly became part of the 'sacred treasure of the Jews' and resided in the 'holy of holies' before being removed to Europe by the Romans.

In the dark days of the 'Moreau' affair I all but forgot about the Ark of the Covenant but Channel Four Television hadn't quite forgotten about me.

On my return to London I had duly submitted a treatment concerning the rival treasure hunters in the Rennes area entitled 'Raiding the Lost Ark' and my words were duly read, dissected, filed and regurgitated. I can't blame the suits for not being too happy about what I'd come back with. Not only had I failed to deliver an Ark but I didn't even believe in the blessed thing. Worst of all there were no Nazis in my treatment and the religion department wanted Nazis. Nazis were good for ratings apparently but Rennes had not only had a quiet war, there was simply no evidence that the occupying forces had come anywhere near it, nor at any time was anyone involved with the Hitler regime ever seriously looking for the lost Ark.or for that matter Ravenscroft's fictional spear of Longinus.

If necessity is the mother of invention then desperation must be its grand daddy and when asked to take a second pass at the treatment I jumped at the chance, hoping to find a way to fit the material into the requisite Indiana Jones shaped hole. While Rennes failed to deliver on either Ark or stormtroopers there was a story associated with one of the neighbouring villages that seemed to fit the bill and I resolved to massage the facts accordingly.

Although essentially a political ideology the quest to define an esoteric aspect to National Socialism and reposition 'Mein Kampf' accordingly as a mystical or quasi-religious text had begun even before the war but acquired a renewed impetus after the collapse of the Hitler dictatorship.

Thousands of SS men and ordinary Wehrmacht confined to detention camps or facing ruin in post war Germany sought an ideal they could cling to that was beyond the reach of the conquering Allies and unsullied by the criminal actions of their vanquished leadership. Some retreated into denial while others found reassurance in seeing their defeat as an inevitable chapter in a millennial struggle between the forces of good and evil that would eventually see their beliefs exonerated and the greater Aryan race triumph over its imaginary oppressors.

The earliest published accounts of these so-called 'Nazi mysteries'appear in Pauwels and Bergier's ' THE DAWN OF MAGIC' aka 'THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS' (1960) and 'HITLER ET LES TRADITION CATHARE'' aka 'THE OCCULT AND THE THIRD REICH' (US paperback edition - 1971)

by Jean-Michel Angebert , a joint pseudonym for Michel Bertrand and Jean Angelini and appears to be the source both for Lawrence Kasden's 'Raiders' script and the wildly mendacious self published memoir of retired Texan army officer and chilli cook-off champion Colonel Howard Buechner.

The former army surgeon's main claim to fame, that he was the 'first Allied doctor to enter Dachau' has gone largely unchallenged but these events take up less than a chapter of his very 86

According to Buechner the Nazi's not only located the sacred treasure in the ruins of the cathar stronghold at Montsegur but succeeded in securing it from the Allies in a daring commando raid lead by none other than Otto Skorzeny himself. The 'emerald cup' was later spirited to safety in Antarctica by a secret U-boat convoy along with the 'real Adolf Hitler', his surviving brass and pretty much every other lost, mythical treasure you can shake a stick at. In a loony tunes take on the 'myth of the eternal return' further embroidered over the years by countless pseudohistorians and sundry right wing mythomaniacs the fuhrer survives, safe in the protective womb of the hollow earth, presiding over an esoteric struggle against the war's exoteric victors and waiting for the stars to come round to their right place before rising like King Arthur, Osama bin Laden or Cthulu before him to conjure a glorious Fourth Reich from the frozen embers, symbolized by the 'black sun', the 12 armed Merovingian rune wheel that appears on the floor of the Hall of the Supreme Leadership in the SS Order Castle (the Wewelsberg near Padeborn) and is believed to re present the dark light of the 'world within'.

I've heard enough shaggy dog stories to be able to smell one a mile away and whilst entertaining enough in it's own silly Boys Own Adventure kinda way I was all too aware that Buechner's fantasy had a potentially dangerous downside. Since the assassination of their leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, in the sixties the American Nazi Party has taken a much more subtle and insiduous approach to the media adopting the neo-Trotskyite policy of 'entryism' by secretly infiltrating thriving pop cultural movements such as the late 20th century UFO community or the modern New Agers (via intermederies such as David Icke and 'NEXUS' magazine) to sow the seeds of militant pan Aryanism without drawing attention to their racist agenda. The socalled 'Nazi mysteries' (ie: Ravencroft's spear, Kasden's Ark and Buechner's 'Emerald Cup') have been adopted into the canon of these warped beliefs and there is no doubt the modern neoNazis reaped some benefit from ol' Indy in the process, something Stephen Spielberg definitely wouldn't like to consciously consider. All publicity is good publicity after all, a factor demonstrated by the way Opus Dei recently capitalized on the 'Da Vinci Code' with membership soaring despite their portrayal in the film as comic book bad guys. It is possible that these seemingly harmless fantasies can inadvertently prick the curiosity of young minds while simultaneously distracting from the cruel memory of the Third Reich itself in suggesting that the Nazi's were an interesting, potentially spiritual people with something to say rather than a bunch of common or garden thugs.

Accordingly I approached Buechner's yarn with due trepidation, setting aside just 24 hours to familiarize myself with the village of Montsegur before returning to the Rennes area where the real story seemed to be. If I could only find out once and for all what lay beneath the church I figured Channel Four would have to take notice and hoping that I could quietly drop the Indiana Jones angle I had prepared an alternative treatment entitled 'The Devil's Chessboard' that in point of fact remained largely unread until it eventually formed this blog's opening chapters. Ironically another researcher working for a company contracted to Four has been in touch lately, picking my brains for an almost identical Jones related brief and in her most recent mail mentioned that I may well have become the acknowledged English language expert when it comes to the subject of 12th century Occitanian history and the 'Nazi mysteries' in particular, a dubious distinction which comes with age but in those far off times I had little or no interest in the cathar faith and the story of their persecution was largely unknown to me.

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My companions on this outing were a researcher and occasional writer for the 'Fortean Times' who was struggling to rework the Rennes treatement for Channel Fours consumption and a young lady whom I had foolishly invited along for the ride. Like the post war Nazi's I had sought to ease the recent wounds of 'Moreau' debacle by taking refuge in an apparently immutable but effectively illusory past by attempting a half assed reconciliation with my first girlfriend, Kate, whom long term readers may recall took such violent exception to Dario's movies all those years ago. I had enjoyed my previous visit to the area and having come to the conclusion that a material rather than supernatural treasure lay at the core of the 'Rennes mystery' I had no reason to believe that I might have been putting the lady in danger by bringing her with me.

We arrived in the village of Montsegur late in the day and I resolved to hike up to the ruined castle on the mountaintop to watch the sun go down. We were due to make an early start the following morning so this would be my one and only chance to take in the remains of the 12th century citaedel fancifully identified by Buechner as the 'Grail Castle'. As we climbed higher our writer friend seemed to grow visibly more nervous and by the time we came in sight of the walls of the keep was feeling too uncomfortable to continue further. Demanding that we hand over the car keys he turned tail and made a hurried descent leaving Katie and myself to enter the castle

alone. It had been a beautiful, clear late summer day and the light and space of the high mountains as well as the thrill of being back on the trail had lifted my spirits but in hindsight our friend's nervous behaviour and the abrupt disappearance of his usual good humor was the first sign that Montsegur was not a place to be taken lightly. As the sign on the fence at Stonehenge puts it : ' WARNING! ANCIENT MONUMENTS CAN BE DANGEROUS!' Shrugging off our friend's abrupt departure we found our way to the highest point in the castle, the broad white battlement overlooking the gorge of the Ers river far below.

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Even then it occurred to me that there was something a little strange about the castle's construction as if it were constructed backwards, to keep something in instead of out but there was so little left of it other than those oddly calcinated walls that it offered scant clues as to the true purpose of its construction. Montsegur, literally the 'secure' or 'safe mountain' was the greatest of the cathar strongholds widely held to represent the earliest examples of gothic architecture to appear in Europe, a fact of history that was yet to assume its true import in my muddled post-Moreau mind. After all the knowledge that Fulcanelli seemed to decode from the gothic cathedrals had to have come from somewhere to begin with but I had yet to engage with the obvious implications of what exactly that ancient technology might have entailed.

the fields far below, their lowing amplified and distorted by the weird Alpine acoustics. I tried, like I say, but at the time I was reduced to a cowering state of gibbering 'medieval' terror which is doubtless what I deserved for having been dumb enough to take the Holy Grail as a joke to begin with.

While immediately impressed by the fact that anyone could have built such a beautiful and complex construction at this altitude I had not come to terms that what I thought I knew about the distant past had been filtered through the minds of dark age monks and inquisitors and as a result I suffered from the typically smug 21st century assumption that the inhabitants of 12th century Occitania had been our scientific and intellectual inferiors, rustic, unlettered, superstitious, essentially 'medieval' with all the mud spattered, gurning, Pythonesque barbarity that word implies. For good or for bad I was about to have that misconception shattered forever.

I was gripped by a sense of unreality similar to the way it felt the first time I had gotten too close for comfort with a Great White while diving as a teenager off the Cape of Good Hope, a sense that I was somehow watching a special effect rather than the real thing. It had looked just like Bruce the mechanical shark in 'Jaws', dorsal fin cutting the water, rubbery grey skin dappled by sunlight and that lightshow in the keep looked like dodgy optical effects from the last reel of a Hollywood supernatural thriller, the bolts of plasma so insanely bright they might have been scratched into the emulsion with the tip of a scalpel. Only it wasn't a movie…

As the sun settled behind the Pic de Saint Barthelemy (from whence Sauniere's 'housekeeper' drew her surname 'Denarnaud-Barthelemy since you ask) a golden spume of cloud boiled up out of the west, moving so fast it was as if we were watching real-time animation or some form of time lapse photography. In fact it put me in mind of another Spielberg movie entirely and this being the nineties and UFO's being all the rage we half expected the 'mothership' from 'Close Encounters' to show up at any moment.

We paused as we reached the courtyard. We were both convinced we could see something moving in there, what at first appeared to be figures but I rationalized it as the shadows of dense, fast moving clouds projected by random flashes of lightning against the stonework. Then Kate began to scream…

But it wasn't a bunch of benevolent aliens. It was a sudden, violent late summer storm and it was coming right at us.

Forked lightning flickered within the thunderhead and realizing we were perched on the very highest point in the landscape we decided to make ourselves scarce. We got as far as the natural buttress just below the castle wall when the storm closed around us and lightning began to strike into the walls of the keep and the flanks of the mountain below, close enough to make our hair stand on end, much closer than I ever wanted to get to that kind of voltage. The cloud swirled about the peak as if the castle were somehow sucking in the lightning, four or five streamers of writhing white hot plasma intertwining at a time, reaching down out of the vortex like a vast inhuman hand and all the while a blinding light streamed from the doors and curiously angled 'arrow slits' - a light so bright I thought I might never see anything again.

Warm rain squalled over us and the light drained from the day as we huddled together like trapped animals, trying to make ourselves as small as possible. Let's face it we know very little about lightning to begin with and if the 'supernatural' is merely the natural to the power of ten then this was the genuine article. A single bolt of lightning can kill you without even touching you. The electro-magnetic pulse alone is enough to stop the human heart even at a distance and there were literally hundreds of thousands of volts earthing themselves within a few feet of us.

The sheer existential terror of it came upon us as suddenly as if we had been caught in a violent riptide, the belittling sensation of being caught helplessly in the jaws of something far bigger and more powerful than ourselves along with the dawning suspicion that we might at any moment be reduced to a smouldering grease spot.

There was a strange half familiar smell that I took at first to be the smell of the wet mountainside, a sweet smell vaguely reminiscent of the icing on a wedding cake.

A hint of almonds. Kate had been whimpering in sheer panic but when that smell began to grow stronger she curled more tightly against me and fell silent as if she were too scared to make a sound, too frightened to even breathe or open her eyes in case 'it' somehow saw or sensed her. And there were other sounds that seemed to come from out of the storm. Hard as this is to believe or accept there were sounds like voices, like the cries of human souls burning in hellfire.

Later I tried to justify this absurdity by telling myself it was merely the bellowing of the cattle in 88

The only way out lay the way we had come and we tried to insulate ourselves as best we could, getting rid of all the metallic objects on our bodies, discarding money, watches and jewelry before crawling on our hands and knees towards the maw of the keep and the source of that strobing incandesence.

In years to come I would learn the walls of the castle form a 'Farraday cage' and the voltage coursing through them that night would have inevitably effected the electromagnetic field within the keep itself. All I knew at the time was that as Katie stepped through the archway she began to quiver and thrash, eyes rolling up in their sockets as if in the grip of an incipient grande mal, her body shuddering with such violence that I truly believed she was being attacked, caught in the grip of some unseen presence from out of the dark. My nightvision is normally 20:20 but the lightning was playing hell with my visual purple and between bursts the gloom was impenetrable.

Grabbing her flailing figure I tried in vain to put myself between her and whatever seemed to be attacking her, physically dragging her out of the courtyard and part way down the mountainside where her pulse and breathing seemed to gradually stabilize.

"What did they do here? What did they f*****g do in this place…"

Those were the only words I can recall her saying, repeated over and over like a mantra in my mind through the long years to come but at that time I had no answer for her.

Strange, drifting points of green light seemed to fill the night around us and when we reached the treeline we realized the woods were alive with glow worms, presumably roused by the sudden rain. Kate's breathing became quicker and more tortured as we reached the base of the slope and she began to tremble violently, unable to move any further on her own. Then there was another fusillade of lightning and she collapsed into what I would have taken to be a fully blown seizure had she had any previous history of epilepsy, thrashing like a broken bug on the wet grass, screaming and screaming, looking for all the world like one of those 'possessed' nuns from the eponymous Ken Russell movie. I caught hold of her and she raged against me but I refused to leave her to lie, not there, not at that particular spot, anywhere but there. The last of the cathars had died at Montsegur in 1242 but they didn't die in the castle. They had been dragged down the mountainside by their persecutors and burned alive on what has come to be known as the 'Camp de Cremat', the first level place where the crusaders could build a stockade and gather the necessary brushwood. Kate didn't know she had fallen at that very spot and I had no intention of telling her or allowing her stay put.

Whatever it was that had found us on the mountaintop seemed to follow as we struggled back to the nearby village and the tiny auberge where we had taken lodging. We banged franticly on the door of our writer friend's room, demanding he give us back the car keys but for whatever reason he refused to open the door or allow us in. I heard Kate utter my name and as I turned

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towards her she reached out, the clasps that held back the steel shutters on the window immediately behind her torn abruptly free by the storm as her voice tailed off into a hideous, rattling moan. Her hand caught hold of my right arm, so tight the bruise took more than a week to fade, her eyes bulging as the veins seem to force their way to the surface of her purpling skin, her twisted face as livid and engorged as a week old corpse, the lashing shutters slamming crazily against their quivering frame like something from the 'Amityville Horror', white light blazing in at me as if whatever it was we had encountered in the keep was right there outside the window or perhaps already in the room. Digging Kate's nails from my flesh I lunged towards the window and narrowing my eyes against the light reached out into the roaring void. Catching the wildly swinging shutters I drew

them closed, wedging them sensibly in place with a steel bar. And at that very moment Katie caught her breath and folded to the floor, losing consciousness as if the plug had been pulled on whatever force that animated her. Normal color had returned to her cheeks and while our relationship was dead on arrival I contented myself with the fact that she was at least breathing. I settled myself in an armchair beside her, too shaken to sleep and while the storm howled outside began to reread everything I could find on the castle's history.

Dawn was clear and cloudless as if the night before had never happened. Our writer 'friend' was sullen and withdrawn at breakfast, refusing to discuss the events of the night before other than to bitch about all the screaming and banging having interrupted his sleep. The British psyche being what it is I imagine he assumed we were either on drugs or had been engaging in some form of rough trade sex and slamming the furniture around accordingly. When pushed on the subject he eventually suggested we had probably been suffering from a 'shared hallucination', not the last time I would hear such an excuse in the course of my enquiries but for now it seemed to fit the bill.

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The only person who believed us was our hostess, the auberge's aging landlady. We were lodging in what turned out to be the oldest house in the village and Madame Couquet had lived there all her life and her father before her.

She was as wise as the wild, green hills and had seen enough to know we weren't play acting or 'hallucinating'. After all, she explained, we had been sleeping in Otto's room.

It was obvious at a glance that things had changed in Rennes and not for the better.

And who the hell was Otto?

And for the first time I heard the story of the young SS officer who had come to Montsegur in the days before the war in search of the most sacred relic in Christendom, the most high holy Grail and how some believed he had attained that quest. Madame Couquet had been a little girl at the time but she remembered the tall, silent German well and had kept his room just as it had been back in the day he had taken lodging there. Rahn had seen something in the keep on his first visit, something that failed to gell with his rational, typically German intellect, something he couldn't adequately explain that drew him back to the castle again and again and ultimately turned him against the corrupt regime he had initially served. Apparently Rahn was an old man now but according to Marius Mounie, the former mayor, he still visited the area. Marius was no spring chicken himself and for his story to be true Rahn would have to be a septogenerian but then it does say in Wolfram von Eschenbach's 12th century troubadour epic, 'Parsifal', that whoever has the Grail or comes near to it"will have eternal life…"

Of course our friend from the 'Fortean Times' wasn't having a word of it. The events of the night before had left him increasingly convinced that Montsegur was a dangerous distraction from the main story and despite the fact I had undergone something of a Damascene conversion I could scarcely disagree. There was unfinished business in Rennes and the matter of what really lay beneath the church remained tantalizingly unresolved although I was starting to suspect that what seemed to be the missing piece of the puzzle, the treasure itself, would probably add up to less than the sum of the increasingly strange details that surrounded it. The fact that I was starting to become a 'believer' probably alienated my co-writer even more than the ruckus the night before but for the first time my waking mind had begun to admit to the possibility that something genuinely inexplicable was at work, something that couldn't be readily put down to the antics of the cranks and treasure hunters drawn to the area but I lacked the perspective and maturity to join the dots and in the end grudgingly agreed to omit all mention of the Rahn affair from the report submitted to Channel Four.

The breakdown of the relationship between Celia and her former husband had unforeseen consequences and the international Sufi movement had foreclosed on La Metairie Blanche', forcing her to vacate the property only a few days before we arrived in order to install one of their own, a visiting Sufi sheik in the white house on the hilltop where she had found treasure all those years ago.

Marcel had taken her into his own home in the village but she was in a wretched, black dog mood and we feared she might be on the verge of attempting suicide or losing the plot entirely like so many others in the zone.

Despite his usual good humor the years had evidently not been kind to Marcel. His brother, Antoine, had gained the upper hand in the running feud, forcing Marcel to give up the keys to the kingdom. Antoine and Claire Corbu had taken control of Sauniere's domain and working hand in glove with a shadowy consortium known only as the 'Association de terre de Rhedae' were 'restoring' the church and the Villa Bethany with an eye towards capitalizing on the mystery trade by opening the grounds for the first time to the public. In the course of the 'restoration' many if not all of the original furniture and fittings including Saunier's books and the original brightly colored panes of glass from the crumbling greenhouse had mysteriously gone missing. Whatever remained of the truth was vanishing rapidly from ken, replaced by what increasingly resembled an esoteric theme park complete with waxwork effigies of Sauniere and an incongruously aged, suitably 'witchy' looking Marie. In real life she had been a relatively young woman at the time, just one of the many misconceptions that had taken root as the events receded and the story took on the substance of myth. Worse still Marcel's gout was playing up and the new mayor, an unscrupulous right wing martinet with a very chequered history of military service in North Africa was giving him hell over the upkeep of the parking lot and the public toilets which remained his uninspiring responsibility.

In the meantime Marcel had completed his comic book, a graphic exegesis that while lovingly detailed coyly omitted any details about the nature of the treasure itself. It did go as far as showing the staircase leading to the vault however before cutting away which was enough to raise a few eyebrows at least amon seasoned Rennes watchers. While Marcel had no trouble in finding a publisher he had typically been cheated of his royalties and was as down on his luck as ever. Although public interest in the area continued unabated, fed by a slew of documentaries

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and paperback bestsellers promising new revelations very little revenue had found its way into the pockets of the locals themselves. The only sign of civic rejuvenation was the appearance of a restaurant named the 'Pomme Bleu' although it was in the hands of a British couple who had bought into the area and was accordingly shunned by the locals. While there was still no hotel in the zone and the cuisine sucked you could at least get a decent drink in a relaxed, paranoid atmosphere surrounded by fellow treasure hunters and conspiracy theorists who habitually fell silent every time the music stopped for fear whoever was sitting at the next table might overhear whatever it was they were plotting. And they were always plotting something in Rennes.

The first law of magic was written on the ala carte menu and the waitresses wore black with matching silver pentagrams of the sort now commonly available in the local bookstore which was looking more like a gift shop every day, replete with bumper stickers, tee shirts and novelty pens that when shaken showed Sauniere escaping from the Villa Bethany with his treasure in a wheelbarrow. The commercialization of the enigma although a little sad was not without its pleasures and I was pleased to note the works of H.P.Lovecraft and accompanying facsimile 'Necronomicons' were now habitually stocked on the plateau which seemed like a tacit admission of sorts.

Things had begun to change off plateau too and life in the zone just wasn't the same.

The incoming mayor had done a clandestine deal with another town and had sold them most of the local water supply. The River of Colours had dwindled to a muddy trickle and fields that had once been filled as far as eyes could see with luxuriant waist high marijuana plants now lay fallow and desolate. Most of Danielle's cats had finally died and although he still sold treasure maps since his girlfriend had left he had taken to wearing a dress and now answered only to the name of 'Ariane'. Possibly because of the lack of water he made no effort to shave or depilate although his shaggy appearance rested incongruously with the hand-me–down feminine attire. He was close to the only surviving 'freak' in the area now that the UFO community had given up the ghost.

Even the new agers pitched on Celia's former land were having a lean season. The incoming Sheik had recently acquired a gun and was apparently threatening to shoot any squatters found on 'his' land.

I'd had some truck with the Sufi movement over the years and while it was perhaps none of my business it was obviously high time someone had words with the Sheik and gave him a li'l perspective on his actions. Since my time in California I had internalized the kabbalah and set about learning the ninety-nine secret names of God and the sigils that accompanied them which like the 'Weirding Way' in frank Herbert's 'Dune' could be used as fighting words, to strike and kill like stones even if pronounced correctly.

Realizing that I was sympathetic to Celia's plight and perhaps sensing a showdown in the wind the Sheik decided to head me off at the pass by inviting us to break bread with him instead, an event that lead to undoubtedly the strangest and most diabolically Bavaesque dinner parties I have ever had the privilege of surviving putting even my days with the Brando clan to shame.

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Chapter Five: The immortal's feast Being the south the soiree was alfresco, served at a long table set up on the hilltop overlooking Rennes. The Sheik, being the lord of all he surveyed, sat at the head of the table, giggling at his own jokes and grinning like a malignant Chesire cat at the merry mischief that surrounded him.

The first thing that struck me was that he didn't look like a Sheik at all and there was nothing eastern in his genetic make up or even vaguely centered in his manner. In fact he looked exactly like 'Bob' from 'Twin Peaks', his long grey hair tied back in a tail and he spoke with what sounded like a Canadian accent. He didn't bother rising when we were introduced and presumably imagined the magnum in the holster ostentatiously slung over the back of the chair and his good grace with the secret society that had mysteriously installed him had given him a blank cheque to behave as he pleased.

number"He knows a lot more about that place than I do…"

"That place…"Katie pushed back her chair, opting out of the conversation, fear and confusion flitting across her face as the Sheik earnestly passed me the handset.

"He's been studying it all his life. Made a film about it…about… what was it again?"

I listened to the cell ring and then somewhere on the far side of the world I heard Michael Mann's answering service click on.

"The Keep…yeah.. that was it…"

I terminated the call, deeply grateful no-one actually picked up."That movie sucked."

I was seated at the far end of the table with Katie on one hand and Celia on the other, both by now so deeply traumatized neither were much good for conversation although Kate wore it better. Celia did her best to bear up, her daughter, Grace, glowering quietly at her side, administering kicks to her mother's shins every time she started blubbing openly. Our writer 'friend' sat about as far away from myself and Kate as he could get, mindful of the events of the night before and possibly fearing a further bout of unprovoked daemonic possession, safely buttressed by Marcel and a nervous looking Dutchman named Harry and his equally nervous girlfriend who apparently worked for the 'Association'. Claire Corbu, Noel's orphaned daughter, had been invited but unsurprisingly, considering the bad blood between Marcel and Antoine, failed to show which turned out to be a smart move on her behalf. Dagobert, the big, white Pyrenean mountain dog, filled out the assembly, ensconced beneath the table and keeping a rheumy eye out for whatever scraps came his way as the malefic meal wound its way painfully from course to course.

"But it's not fair…"

"It's horrible…"muttered Harry."

"I hear you there, dude."

"But it's my house…"

"Care for some salad, Celia?"Our writer 'friend' smiled politely, his efforts at keeping up appearances developing a slightly cracked edge.

I met Marcel's eyes across the table and he raised one hand to his head, miming a gun and smiling as he pretended to pull the trigger.

"When you work for the 'Association' you find out things the public don't know …"

Harry's girlfriend nodded sympatheticaly , something a little mechanical in the gesture as if they had gone through this routine a million times before.

"My table…my chairs…"

"Try the wine... of course it's got no legs at all"Our 'friend' raised his glass, swilling it in the fading light.

"I don't know how much longer I can take it, personally…"

"My plates…"

"Shut up! It's your fault you lost the place, you stupid old bat"hissed Grace.

Dagobert growled uneasily beneath the table.

"How much longer any of us can take it…"Harry tailed off, gazing past me into the gloom. Dusk was rising from the ground now as it usually did, the trunks of the trees marching away into the twilight, the hump of the Rennes plateau looming from the mist behind me like Bocklin's 'Isle of the Dead'.

"My knives. My spoo… owhhch!!"Celia grunted, absorbing another kick.

The Sheik giggled. Then he stopped, catching the look on my face."I bet you don't believe there's anything 'supernatural' going on around here at all, do you, Mr…Mr…?"

"Mister is okay with me. Yesterday I would have said no but after last night I don't have any choice. There is something going on around here and 'supernatural' pretty much covers it …"

"You were in Montsegur?"

I nodded silently and Kate shuddered as if the mere mention of the name might set her off all over again.

"You should talk to my friend Michael."said the Sheik, reaching for his cell and keying in a 92

"Well it can be a bad thing to be obsessed…"mused the Sheik, eyes wandering over the darkening treetops as if trying to see what Harry was looking for."You can lose perspective, y'know.."

"The music was alright I suppose…"

"Hang on… what was that?!"

"Tangerine dream?"

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"No! That!!!"The Sheik was pointing past me and turning I saw a distant pinprick of light moving across the sky, so high up it was probably on the outer edge of the stratosphere .

"Looks like a satellite to me…"

"Definitely a satellite", concurred our writer 'friend' hurriedly. Ignoring him the Sheik started across the lawn and after a beat Grace followed .

"The mad hatter's tea party!"chirped Harry's girlfriend."This is it!"

"So, which one are you?"I asked, deciding I might as well make a game of it."Alice or the dormouse?"

"And you? No, don't tell me. I can guess… You're the march hare!"

In the momentary lull we all caught the Sheik's hushed voice as he pointed out the retreating speck of light to Celia's scowling daughter.

"They come at the same time every night. Like clockwork…"

Grace edged closer, scowl deepening as our host stared intently up at the empty sky, breathing deeply and rythmicly, in through the nose and out through the mouth. .

"Can you hear 'em?"

"Who?" "Them… Y'know… The people from the Pleides.."The Sheik closed his eyes, one hand trailing lightly against Grace's surly fifteen year old ass. She didn't seem to notice or make any effort to step away."I can talk to 'em. The same as the way I talk with the dolphins. From here and from here…"He indicated his pineal gland with his forefinger, then his plexus.

I narrowed my eyes ."What dolphins?"

"He used to work with dolphins all the time back in the States. Him and his partner. Right?"

The Sheik nodded smiling goofily."Yeah. Dr John, man. He taught me everything. Everything I needed to know…"

"Dolphins, huh?"This was starting to make some kind of ghastly sense to me, the info shrapnel steadily snowballing into a cohesive outline. Michael Mann. The international Sufi movement. Dr John. Cetaceans. People from the Pleides.

"Something on your mind, mister? Go on,.."The Sheik smiled, unbuttoning his shirt to reveal his graying chest hairs."How old do you think I am?"

"I don't know, dude. I don't care if you're 48, 58 or 158. But there is one li'l bone I'd like to pick with you …"

"Shoot."

"Mkultra" The Sheik went pale. He opened his mouth as if to say something and then closed it again, fear sparking in his eyes."I don't know what you mean… I …"

"Operation Artichoke?"

"FUCK!!! Who sent you? I'm out of it now, man . I'M OUT OF IT!!!"

"It's too late, dude. Don't give me regrets."

"How much do you know?"

"As much as I need to".

"Shit. You're one of Whistler's boys, right? You saw the file…"

I nodded, winging it.

"I can't fuckin' believe it… That piece of shit in Aspen blabbed. We're fuckin' fucked now… they

killed my brother. They killed my fucking brother…"

I didn't have to turn to sense Kate and Celia hovering behind me.

"I don't suppose you mind telling us what you people are on about?"

"I was just fishing. Thought I'd throw in a couple of trigger words and see how he reacted. I didn't know he'd take it this badly…"

"Jim! Jim!!!"The Sheik took a step backwards and then fell to his knees, clawing at his hair and clothes.

"What the hell did you throw at him? One of the ninety-nine secret names of God?" "Mkultra and Operation Artichoke. They're codenames for a CIA mind control programme…"

"How did you know that?"

"Read it in a book. 'The Search for the Manchurian Candidate' by John Marks. (1979) How else? I mean I don't think it's even classified any more" Tearing at his shirt the Sheik began to sing in Hebrew, tears streaming helplessly down his cheeks.

"He looks really sick. C'mon. We'd better get him inside…"

"Jim…" The interior of 'la Metairie' was exactly as Celia left it the day the Sufi movement sent her packing. The 'Sheik' didn't seem to have any personal effects other than his recently acquired firearm and there was only one conspicuous addition to the existing furnishings A huge reinforced steel safe stood in the corner of the room and the sight of it seemed to reassure our host no end.

Steadying himself he spun the combination lock first one way and then another, listening for the soft click as the tumbrels disengaged. I already had a pretty good idea about what we would find but the sight of those thousands of tiny, gleaming ampoules arranged in rack after rack within took the others by surprise.

"The hell is that stuff?"muttered Katie, taking a step back as the 'Sheik' tore open a packet of disposable needles, still running on auto-pilot.

"Elixir vitae, man. Alchemical mercury…"whispered the 'Sheik', expertly filling one of the syringes.

"It's a tranquiliser named 'Kettamine'- used mostly by veterinary surgeons. Also known as 'Vitamin K' to the great and the good"I explained, turning one of the ampoules in my hand to examine the lot number."This batch seems to have come straight from source. Dr.John Lilly's lab in Aspen, Colorado" "I mean how old do you think I am,"muttered the Sheik, tying off.

"You round up the others and try and get them home, okay? Anyone who wants to leave. Now would be the time…"

"And you?"

"Someone has to stay with him. We can't just leave him like this…besides it's high time we found out what's going on around here.

"Okay. Just don't go getting into that stuff. Whatever it's called. We've got an early start tomorrow. We're due in Rennes les Bains at seven thirty, remember?…"

"I'm cool. Don't worry…"

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His real name was Adam Trumbull and he claimed to be a close relative of Douglas Trumbull the special effects creator of Kubrick's '2001' and director of such offbeat entries as 'SILENT RUNNING' (1971) and 'BRAINSTORM' (1983). The Trumbull family was from old French Quebecois stock and according to Adam they were directly descended from the Templar grand master who founded Montreal. The Templars had more or less invented banking by coming up with the first chequebook at the time of the crusades and after their persecution in Europe had alledgedly fled to the New World from whence they had plotted their revenge on the kings of France, instigating the French revolution and the 'nights of fire' in Hait. At least according to Adam who unearthed a slew of geneologies and crumpled identity documents from a cardboard folder. For all I know they were probably elaborate forgeries, no more authentic than the famous 'Rennes documents' at the core of the Baigent/Lincoln/Leigh book and in point of fact resembled nothing more than hand-outs in an elaborate roll playing game. Adam had always had a strong interest in the paranormal in general and telepathy in particular. In the early seventies his research had brought him into contact with John C. Lilly, M.D. a fellow physician and psychoanalyst who focused on biophysics, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, electronics and computer theory. In essence he also studied consciousness - human and animal consciousness. Lilly had been involved in electro-shock therapy and sensory deprivation studies since 1956 when he had begun immersing volunteers in a tank of lukewarm water. The subjects wore a face mask that enabled them to see only blurred light. The maximum time a volunteer could tolerate these conditions was only three hours. The volunteers reported feelings of unreality and tremendous loss of identification. They literally did not know where they were, or who they were, or what was happening to them. Due to this enormous mental pressure most of them abandoned the experiment.

The 'One World Dreaming' balloon was once a permanent fixture at the Glastonbury festival but since the young New Ager who owned and maintained the elaborate montgolfier moved back to France he had fallen on hard times. Considering the Jules Verne connection the opportunity to survey the zone from the air had proved irresistible and the itinerant aviator had jumped at the excuse to take us for a spin around Mount Bugarach, weather and cross winds allowing.

In the early 70's Lilly had been introduced to the drug Ketamine by Dr. Craig Enright in the hope of alleviating the chronic and oddly regular headaches he had been suffering all his life. As Lilly floated in the isolation tank fluid, Enright injected him with 35 milligrams. Within a few minutes, Lilly could actually visualize the migraine pain moving out of his skull and subsequently felt no pain whatsoever for approximately twenty minutes, until it once again reentered his head. When Lilly began moaning and groaning Enright shot him up with another 70 mlg. This time Lilly felt the pain moving farther away,"about twelve feet this time". When the pain returned Enright administered a further 150 mlg. This time when the pain left Lilly's head it didn't come back. An hour later Lilly climbed out of the tank a new man.

I figured that gave me enough time to hear the Sheik out and if things did get a bit heady then the light and space of the balloon journey was the best possible method of blowing away the cobwebs.

Marcel and Harry took charge of ferrying the confused guests back to their various beds while I built a fire on the hearth and waited to hear the 'Sheik' out. I don't know how much of that stuff he was mainlining but it seemed to do the trick, pulling his scrambled head together just long enough for me to pry his story out of him.

He assumed I knew far more than I did but that was ever the Achille's heel of the intelligence community and secret societies in general. As they are secret to begin with no-one ever really knows who's working for who and there's always a sneaking suspicion the other guy probably knows more than you do or is already an initiate of some more exotic order. Adopting a friendly, brotherly tone I settled myself on Celia's couch, casually throwing in the occasional 'buzz' word to spur the 'Sheik' along. In the event he didn't need much encouragement. It was an old story and I had already guessed its outlines. There are a million stories just like it in the zone, drifting through eternity...

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A week later when Doctor's Enright and Lilly met at the Esalen isolation tank, they agreed to join forces and conduct a joint research into the effects of Ketamine as a possible programming agent. The movie Altered States was based on one of their initial experiments. On this occasion, Enright injected himself with a measured dose of K and — with Lilly observing — began a strange odyssey into the primal/archetype regions of his psyche, returning to the"prehominid origins of man."Enright, in this programmed"altered state", displayed all the typical features, movements

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and sounds of an Ape Man; hopping around in a crouching position, grunting, growling, ranting and howling. Lilly assumed Enright was having some sort of seizure whilst his fellow researcher's 'reality' consisted of a confrontation with a leopard, which he drove away with his arms flailing, grunting and shrieking. Finally Enright climbed up into a tree and stared balefully down at his friend and colleague from the branches above.

An important factor in Lilly's decision to continue experimenting with Ketamine was its measurability. K's effects were extremely repeatable, in that you could determine exacting levels of dosage to correspond with the desired effect one wished to experience; whereas other mind expansion agents such as LSD and psilocybin are a somewhat quirkier and inherently less predictable. With Ketamine Lilly found a suitably empirical approach could be followed to achieve literally mind-bending results.

The potential inherent in the concept of 'mind control' had long been a source of fascination to both the US military and the wider intelligence community. In 1949 the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) initiated a program initially christened Project BLUEBIRD with a specific brief to conduct an"analysis of foreign work in certain unconventional warfare techniques, including behavioral drugs. This was evolved to become the blueprint and bible of mind control programs and psychological operations adopted by the west for decades afterwards. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 and the subsequent exchange of POWs encouraged western intelligence to delve even further into the program's potential. In August 1951 the program was renamed Project ARTICHOKE and in 1952 was transferred from OSI to the predecessor organization of the Office of Security. OSI did retain a responsibility for evaluation of foreign intelligence and in 1953 made a proposal that experiments be made in testing LSD with Agency volunteers in the hope of creating"sleeper"assassins who could be triggered by hearing a certain word or phrase. Captain John Mc Carthy, who ran the CIA assassination team that operated out of Saigon during the Vietnam war, told a friend that MKULTRA was an acronym for"'Manufacturing Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring Assassinations'"– which sounds like a reach to me but you never know.

Donald Rumsfield was involved in the program from its early days and the original 'Nam team (codename: ARCHANGEL) were reassembled when the program was reactivated as OPERATION PHOENIX for the second Gulf War and subsequent occupation and asset stripping of Iraq. Dr.Lilly later openly admitted that his early LSD and tank research had been conducted under the program's malignant auspices and while remarkably relaxed about his source of funding and the use to which his research had been applied Adam's seething paranoia and that loaded magnum slung over the back of his chair bore mute testimony to the long shadow MKULTRA cast out of time.

OPERATION ARTICHOKE and its kid brother MKULTRA were of course the direct inspiration for Richard Condon's 1959 novel 'The Manchurian Candidate' which in turn formed the basis for director John Frankenheimer's classic feature film. (*** probably doesn't mean anything but this section of the posting keeps dropping out for reasons that seem to defy conventional MySpace logic. I have duly reinstated the esssential details in thumbnail. Keep watching this space and see if it stays put! 22 Nov 2007 - R.S ***)

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Frankenheimer served as an advisor on J.F.K's campaign team and after the events of the 22nd in Deeley plaza the film was famously withdrawn from distribution. The president's brother was subsequently to spend the last night of his life as a guest at the director's mansion in north Los Angeles and Frankenheimer personally drove Bobby to his date with destiny at the Ambassidor hotel the next morning and was present at the fatal moment. Now I'm not suggesting the director of"The Island of Doctor Moreau' was a mindless, zombie assassin. Heaven forbid!

However whilst films like 'The Manchurian Candidate' and 'Seconds' are indicative of real talent the Frankenheimer I met seemed to have had his brains sucked out through a straw. His first action on assuming command of the island was to take down the reproduction of Herbert Draper's 'Fall of Icarus' from my office wall and replace it with a placque that read: 'John Frankenheimer Director."

You see and hear a lot of stuff when you don't exist and I saw some things during my time as a dog, I can tell you.

But I digress…

Working along initially separate but ultimately parallel lines to MKULTRA and OPERATION ARTICHOKE the US Navy had begun a secret dolphin project back in 1960, trying to discover whether the sleek physiology of the animals could be applied to the design of submarines, underwater missiles and torpedoes but this program had rapidly grown to encompass more sinister research including training of dolphins to attach explosives and electronic eavesdropping devices on enemy ships and submarines. By 1965, it became obvious that the USA was facing stiff competition from the USSR, raising the specter, according to the CIA, of"a dolphin gap."The Russian program, according to the CIA,"could enable the Soviets to evaluate the potential benefits of developing acoustic jamming countermeasures to US Navy dolphin programs. . ."In the 1981 issue of US Naval Institute Proceedings, Lt. Commander Douglas R. Burnett, an admiralty attorney, discussed the issue of combatdolphin escalation between the superpowers."There may be no choice except to destroy all dolphins,"he warned,"or any marine mammal representing a similar threat."

Despite disappointment and sadness,"the good doctor summed up,"we had to go on with our research: our responsibilities lie with finding the truth."

Kevin McCarthy'sd mad scientist in Joe Dante's 'PIRANHA' draws inspiration from the real life Dr. Lilly.

After years of state funded research Dr.Lilly had succeeded in perfecting a technique of implanting electrodes into the brains of unanaesthetised animals and stimulating the"pain and pleasure sectors"of the mind. After butchering monkeys by the dozen at the National Institute of Mental Health, Lilly concluded that judicious manipulation of these brain areas could inspire joy and well-being, or pain, anger and fear. Indeed, by using the electrodes to deliver reward or punishment stimuli, the animal could be entirely subordinated to human will.

By the time Adam had gotten involved with the program Lilly had turned his attention to dolphins under the pretext of wishing to"communicate"with these intelligent and highly perceptive creatures. To insert electrodes into the brains of the fully-conscious animals, holes were made in the skull with a sharp instrument and a carpenter's hammer and"the dolphin was held down but tried to jump up at every blow - not because of the pain, but because of the unbearable noise produced by the hammering."

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In a brief metatextual note it behooves me to mention that after Marlon Brando expressed his interest in the role of 'Moreau' I realized a man of his age would need a suitably detailed backstory and furnished the good doctor with an ex-wife deciding the young Moreau had fallen in love and married the Barbara Steele character from 'PIRANHA' and persuaded the great woman herself to reprise the role in some of the only scenes I managed to complete before Frankenheimer took over the shop. Needless to say Barbara is a veteran of Bava's 'BLACK SUNDAY' in which she essays another mother of darkness as well as featuring as one of the real statrs of Federico Fellini's notorious 'EIGHT AND A HALF' . During the shooting Babs showed me the screenplay for Fellini's uncompleted sequel 'JOURNEY TO TULUN' - the original artwork for which I came across some years later gracing the walls of the penthouse in Century City where I recieved a free mug courtesy of Hamid Karzai and the CIA. (* See 'Kingdom Come') 'TULUN' concerned the Marcello Mastroiani character's journey to Mexico to take over a big budget adaption of Castaneda's 'JOURNEY TO IXTLAN'. Alejandro Jodorowski was slated to play himself as the outgoing director and Don Juan turns up disguised as a hotel waiter, evidently living out one of his opaque 'sorcerous tasks'. The project foundered after Castaneda's brief sojourn in Rome ended with the'nagual' and his attendant witch retreating stateside, leaving their hotel room and surrounding corridors liberally spattered in rooster blood and odd, ritualistic markings.

Both sides blamed each other and Fellini backed away from the project, subsequently exploring the theme of the supernatural in his segment of the obscure anthology film 'SPIRITS OF THE DEAD'. Fellini's segment ('Toby Dammit') not only effectively reprises the ghost from 'KILL BABY, KILL!' but is perhaps the finest hour Italian horror has to offer as well as the definitive adaptation of Poe's 'NEVER BET THE DEVIL YOUR HEAD' which brings us back to the matter of Noel Corbu and the Devil's Bridge... and how come people always seem to end up losing their heads in devil movies anyhow? And should your humble narrator be worried? Again, I digress... or do I? Lamberto Bava, Mario's wayward son, turned in his own variant on the theme in 'DEVOURING WAVES' aka 'MONSTER SHARK' aka 'SHARK!' with the US military secretly funding a creature that was billed as a hybrid of Great White and octopus. The film is accordingly a dog.

Actually my favourite shark attack scenes take place in an underrated Spanish Mexican co-production featuring Susan ('Straw Dogs' 'Mandingo', etc) George and a score by Basil Pouledouris. The pic barely coheres and has almost nothing going for it beyond three unforgettable attack sequences featuring real sharks that took me back to some of the things I saw in my youth in False Bay, South Africa all too clearly... But lets not go there right now...

Further research beyond reason lead to genetic engineers crossing Piranha with flying fish in 'PIRANHA's sequel. Produced in Italy this epic marked the debut of James Cameron at the uneasy helm, a nifty turn by a young Lance Henriksen in the Robert Shaw/Jon Voight role and a high concept matched only by the pitch for 'HOWLING 3: THE MARSUPIALS'. ("This time they have pouches!")

The producer of 'PIRANHA 2 - FLYING KILLERS!' (aka: 'THE SPAWNING') Ovidio D. Assonitis is rumoured to have fired Cameron from the project and completed the film in his absence.

Assonitis contributed his own soggy entry to the cycle with 'TENTACLES' in which the titular inconvenient octopus is eventually torn apart by smart killerwhales trained by the US coastguard.

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By 1972, the US Navy had deployed a top-secret team of"warrior porpoises"in Vietnam, part of its"Swimmer Nullification Program", yet another Orwellian code name for killing. For at least a year, these experimental dolphins were utilised to protect strategic Vietnamese harbours against infiltration by enemy frogmen. According to Dr. James Fitzgerald, pioneer in dolphin research for the CIA and US Navy, after detecting an intruding diver, the animals were trained to pull off his face mask and flippers, tear the air-supply tubes, and finally"capture him for interrogation."In fact the dolphins serving in Vietnam seem to have been considerably less benign.

According to Adam, the Navy's dolphins had also been taught to kill, with knives attached to their flippers and snouts. Worse was to come however, when dolphins were equipped with large hypodermic syringes loaded with pressurised carbon dioxide. As the dolphin rammed an enemy frogman with the needle, the rapidly expanding gas would cause the victim to literally explode. Years later, it was revealed that the killer dolphins of Vietnam had actually been responsible for the deaths of 40 Vietcong divers, and accidentally, two American servicemen. As one former dolphin trainer for the CIA put it,"they can't tell the difference between a friend and an enemy."Indeed, perhaps the very concept of friend and deadly foe - a duality manifesting itself within the same species - is an alien concept to the dolphin.

Former trainers insist dolphins can sow mines a 'hundred times faster' than the Navy's elite frogmen and in October 1987 six of the experimental animals were deployed in the Persian Gulf to search for mines. According to the Pentagon, they would also be responsible for security patrols against potential saboteurs around Farsi island which served as a floating base for helicopter gunships and more than 200 American servicemen.

In spring 1989, Rick Trout (dig the name!) who worked as a Navy animal trainer between 19851988, revealed that the military's dolphins and seals had been starved as part of their training at the Naval Oceans Systems Center in San Diego, California, and even punched and kicked. Official documents show that 13 dolphins have died in Navy hands over the past three years, more than half suffering from starvation or stomach disorders."My second day on the job I saw a sealion kicked in the head for refusing to eat,"Trout testified."I also saw a dolphin punched in the face."An"independent"government commission has confirmed some of Trout's allegations, yet predictably tame, its final recommendation was that the Navy should capture no more marine mammals until it has hired more veterinarians. It currently holds, trains or deploys at least a 100 marine mammals, with one team of dolphins used to patrol the waters around Trident nuclear submarine bases in the states of Georgia, Connecticut and Washington. However, it is reported that significant numbers of dolphins and sea-lions have been escaping from their military tormentors. According to local conservation officials, several sea lions recently turned up on the beaches of San Miguel island off the coast of Southern California, still wearing Navy equipment harnesses. More recently attack dolphins have been deployed in the Persian Gulf at least two of which went AWOL shortly after the invasion of Iraq. A further test subject, armed with a 98

compressed air weapon capable of firing poisoned darts escaped from its pen during the havoc of Hurricane Christina and is presumably still at large in Florida's coastal waters. Unperturbed by these mishaps the US military have broadened their research to include the Great White and in a development right out of 'DEEP BLUE SEA' announced earlier this year that they have finally perfected what they described as a 'remote control shark' whilst another disillusioned trainer, the neurophysiologist Dr Michael Greenwood, has recently revealed that the US Navy has apparently trained orcas to carry nuclear warheads to enemy shores."Stopping a 'nuclear whale' on such a mission would be virtually impossible", Greenwood added to which all I can add is that sadly familiar tagline:- 'Be afraid. Be very afraid…'.

Lilly's work inspired the 1973 George C. Scott clinker 'THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN' which is really how I came to know about the matter and make the series of guesses that lead to my host's bizarre confession. Lilly had been one of the sources for the character of 'Dr.Moreau' in my abortive updating of the Well's original and I had been particularly intrigued by the way he succeeded in balancing cold blooded medical barbarism with high minded New Age 'doublethink'.

Moreau after all was conceived by Wells as both a pacifist and a vegetarian who sought to eliminate the predatory, carnivorous instincts in mankind and make good 'first one facet and then another of a whole and happy world'. That Moreau fails horribly is as appropriate as it is inevitable but his road to hell (at least in the novel and my initial screenplay) is paved with typically Wellsian good intentions.

My take on the 'Moreau' saga had accordingly included a promiscuous trio of sex crazed cetaceans and a couple of underwater scenes later abandoned for budgetary reasons. I had been intending to open the film with a shark attack sequence I had been planning and doodling all my life, a sort of post-nuclear take on Robert Shaw's 'USS Indianapolis' story in 'JAWS' in which a multinational posse of blue helmets and UN diplomats are dumped in the middle of the ocean after their plane is brought down by electromagnetic pulse and the onset of World War Three.

The lead character was re-imagined as a civil rights lawyer who initially survives by literally climbing over the others to save himself. In my desire to show the ticket buying public something they had never seen before I had elected to reverse Spielberg's approach for the crucial 'attack' shots by using real sharks and fake people - kicking mechanical dummies packed with meat and 'blood bags', carefully scaled down to make the sharks appear larger and hence more dangerous than they really were.

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An expert maritime second unit had been assembled to effect this including Ron and Valerie Taylor who had lensed the groundbreaking documentary 'BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH' (1971) and the line producer assigned to the project by New Line, Tim Zimmerman, was himself a veteran of ' DAY OF THE DOLPHIN'.

that they were being telepathically directed by an alien consciousness he referred to as (SSI), short for Solid State Intelligence, a supercomputer-like entity in the much the same techno-mystical vein as Philip K. Dick's VALIS. SSI was of a malevolent nature, eternally at odds with a second extraterrestrial network known as ECCO, an acronym for"Earth Coincidence Control Office"that Lilly thought was responsible for all the fortuitous coincidences in life. One evening after a particularly powerful shot Lilly was sitting watching the Dick Cavett show when an alien representative of ECCO appeared and — with some advanced form of psychic surgery — bloodlessly removed the good doctor's penis and nonchalantly handed it to him on a plate."They've cut off my penis,"Lilly exclaimed. When his long suffering wife Toni pointed out that his penis was still intact he immediately rationalized the situation by deciding the ET's had replaced his normal human penis with a mechanical version that could become voluntary erect when he wanted it to.

During the course of the 1973 production Tim had come up with a way of moving his star dolphins from one location to another by light aircraft involving a cradle system later adopted by oceanariums around the world and in the mid-seventies had been called on personally to help move some of Dr.Lilly's dolphins from one research facility to another. While hardly the most soft hearted or ethical of players Tim nonetheless recalled the incident with disgust.

Lilly's dolphins had been in 'terrible shape' he told me, their sides marked with 'weeping scars and infected wounds'.

Judging from the testimony of former trainers in the CIA and US Navy somewhat less inv asive"brainwashing"techniques had been experimentally employed on cetaceans since the mid 1970's. According to my somewhat less than reliable host marine mammals had been guneapigs in a"Program Plan for Anomalous Mental Phenomena", an effort conducted as part of government investigations into remote viewing and anomalous cognition. A declassified bibliography of research papers completed from 1976 to 1990 includes a 1987 report titled"A Remote Action Investigation with Marine Animals"by Dr. Edwin May and Dr. Charles Pleass that would tend to confirm this. The research was conducted for SRI International, Menlo Park, California, one of the primary research entities alleged to have carried out research for the U.S. military and intelligence service's Project STARGATE, a program that investigated E.S.P (referred to as 'anomalous cognition').

After Lilly attempted to call the White House to warn the President about an impending alien Apocalypse the powers that be realized the good doctor had finally flipped his lid and tried to have him committed to a psychiatric hospital. Unfortunately Lilly was an old friend of the hospital's director who saw to it he was released and after a second bid failed he was allowed to remain at large, continuing his ever-escalating regimen of 'vitamin K'. When their sources started to dry up Adam and Dr.John were left with no choice other than to start manufacturing the precious 'elixir vitae' for themselves in order to maintain contact with their"space brothers"from the Pleides. After leaving the employ of the US government Lilly supplemented his income as bestselling New age author and 'scientific advisor' to George Lucas by pushing Vitamin K. to the rich and the feckless. It was the perfect pitch. Not only did the drug induce a lucid induction state similar to an out of body or near death experience but it reduced hair loss and liquefied fat cells.

Of course it also drove you completely insane but that's par for the course in Hollywood.

Although the US Navy conceeds that it has been able to"program dolphins and keep them under control for distances up to several miles,"it strenuously denies allegations of brainwashing prompting Dr. Farooq Hussain of the Department of Biophysics at King's College, University of London, to ask:"How is an animal which for centuries has only been recorded for its intelligence and friendliness towards man, now taught by one man to kill another? They must use electrical stimulation of the pain and pleasure centres of the brain in order to induce and reward aggressive behaviour. Of all the depraved and disgusting activities of which man seems capable, this one in particular must rank highly."It was not until years later however that the increasingly unstable Dr Lilly finally admitted"I was running a concentration camp for my friends."

By now Lilly had succeeded in convincing both himself and subsequently his loyal disciple Adam

No-one surfs forever. The Inland Revenue inspectors and rampant paranoia had finally broken up the cosy scene back in Aspen. Dr. John had decamped to Hawai where he lived out his declining years in a state of advanced dementia and Adam had fallen back on his friends in the Sufi movement to blag his way to Rennes where he had run aground on Celia's hilltop. It wasn't all bad, he insisted. Although he could barely hold it together from one shot to the next he believed he had arrested the aging process and succeeded in holding back the growth of the cancer cells in his body by injecting ketamine directly into his tumours. Accordingly his personality was in a constant state of flux and while I never did get to find out who 'Jim' was for sure I suspect the 'brother' he referred to was supposed to be Christ. Either that or Jim Morrisson. I doubt he could tell the difference and by now imagined he had been both of them in some previous incarnation.

To be honest my attention had begun to drift. At some point in the course of Adam's unburdening I had begun to while away the time by snapping the necks off the ampoules and pouring them up my nose to see if it had any effect. I understand the full 'ketamine experience' can only be achieved by mainlining the shit but I have a few house rules of my own and staying clear of intraveinous drug use is one of them. Whatever that stuff was it was unadulterated and before long I found I was no longer in my body but listening to Adam's monologue from somewhere up on the ceiling. At first I predictably thought 'Shit. I'm dead' but then it occurred to me that I was still connected safely to my body which was comfortably resting on the couch before the fire.

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This was very reassuring and bore out at least some of the claims made by the good doctor. A sort of funnel had opened in the ceiling that hadn't been there in 'real life' and when Adam launched into a very bad rendition of 'Riders on the Storm' I began to move towards it, anxious to excuse myself of my present company and try out some of the possibilities inherent in the lucid astral state in which I apparently found myself.

This being Rennes the funnel opened into an octagonal shaft or stairwell that spiraled down and down into glowing darkness, there being no difference between up and down any more nor was I alone in this strange limbo. What looked like big day-glo Geckos or Salamanders scampered past, cllinging to walls marked by ancient glyphs and ciphers that became alien, antehuman circuitry before my eyes, suckered feet sending out random lizard signals through the trembling matrix.

Then the shaft opened abruptly into a vast cavity that lay at the heart of life where the eight limbed magna mater waited for me, venomous, twining serpents, alligators and other creatures unknown jostling to suckle at multiple breasts that were really spinnerets and wove a web that ran through everything…

On leaving the Santa Croce church, I felt a pulsating in my heart. Life was draining out of me, while I walked fearing a fall.

- Stendhal, Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio (1817) By the fall of 1996 I was back in River City at a loose end and predictably lovelorn. Channel Four had passed politely on the project despite my disgruntled writer 'friend's best efforts to cut the shambling, unfocussed treatment's hair and put it in a suit. Nonetheless I went the extra mile as usual for il maestro and broke out the Sunday best when 'THE STENDAHL SYNDROME' premiered at the National Film Theatre on the south bank, a privilege never granted to his work before or since and indicative of a formal, albeit grudging acceptance of his 'ouvre' by the wider critical community.

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After Dario's deal fell apart Stateside and Bridget Fonda parted company with the project he had taken the project home where 'THE STENDAHL SYNDROME' was funded by Berlusconi the closest il maestro ever came to achieving something like state subsidy for his work, enabling him to shoot on location in Florence's Uffizi gallery and put together a dream team of all-Italian talent including cinematography by Guiseppe Rottuno and an original orchestral score by Ennio Morricone. Asia had stepped into Miss Fonda's shoes continuing the abusive father-daughter director- actress relationship queasily embarked upon with 'TRAUMA' and now taken to a new extreme with the waif like actress forced to endure extended scenes of rape, torture and degradation. While her age worked against her credibility as the tough plainclothes cop she was supposed to be playing Asia brought with her a vulnerability and an unnerving borderline anorexic appearance that mirrored her fathers. It now became clear that Dario's parting of the ways with former partner, Daria Niccolodi and subsequent focus on their daughter had marked a sea change in the underlying sexual politics of his work. While his early films almost exclusively revolved around male artists battling castrating mothers and diseased sisterhoods the emergence of Asia as the central figure in his latter work marked an accompanying shift to masculine psychos, repositioning the threat as a virile, inherently patriarchal force against whose dominance the lead must struggle to win not only her freedom but define her shattered personality.

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The film's premise was promising enough, its title derived from Stendahl's observation that exposure to great art can be hazardous to your health, unleashing destabilizing, repressed emotions or actively infecting the viewer with the diseased thoughts and emotions of the artist. Asia plays a unnervingly youthful detective investigating a series of murders inspired by the real life 'il Mostro' killings in Florence. After an initial encounter with the killer in the crowded Uffizi gallery her character suffers a psychological breakdown and literally falls into one of the paintings, Brueghal's 'Landscape with the fall of Icarus', the boundary between so-called 'real life' and the work of art collapsing irretrievably. Seeing that opening reel on a big screen with a packed, expectant audience was a breathtaking experience that took me back to my very first night at the Scala but after that it was all downhill.

Asia's ability to enter and experience the paintings at first hand is never integrated in the plotline and vanishes right out of the flick approximately half way through, roughly the same time as the lead psycho taking a dive which robs the film of much of its dramatic tension. The second half becomes a gore free retread of 'TENEBRAE' and Asia battles to engage our sympathies an inherently unsympathetic character required to serve as both victim and killer while enduring a ceaseless barrage of flat lighting, trashy wigs and bad hair as if Dario were somehow trying to deliberately destroy her beauty, a suspicion further underscored by the scene in which the Thomas Krenschman character cuts at her face with a razor blade. The Morricone score is one of the great composer's least inspired with one increasingly annoying motif endlessly repeated between a jangling, swirling fuzz of discordant tones that makes one long for the glory days of Goblin or, God help me, even Keith Emerson.

The last nail in the textural coffin turns out to be Rottuno's unaccountably static camerawork as if the master has left his equally famous and respected d.p. to just get on with it and foresworn his usual kinetic style in the process. Even the murders are off beam with the decision to use the sort of handgun favored by 'il Mostro' instead of cutlery further hampered by some of the worst CGI work known to man.

The final result is undoubtedly one of Dario's most personal and bizarrely redemptive works but the cumulative effect for the casual viewer is more like watching paint dry than suffering the giddy rush of being sucked into the painting itself.

Accordingly the film sank like a stone at the box office and suffered the ignomy of being released direct to video in the United States by Troma, the only distribution company prepared to touch its broken body with a barge pole.

Dario was still riding high on his recent 'discovery' by the art house audience and if the punters seemed somewhat reluctant to speak up at the accompanying Q and A he failed to notice. He seemed more relaxed than I'd seen him before in public, effortlessly skating around some sticky questions from the arts maven chairing the discussion. He didn't bat an eye when she nailed him with the inevitable;"Dario, why do you feel the need to kill so many women in your movies?"

"Why?"There was a momentary hush. Then il maestro smiled as if as a particularly pleasant memory:-"Because women are so… so pretty… so beautiful… I like!"

I didn't know what to say so I didn't stick around. My career and love life were little more than a pleasant memory themselves at that point in time and 'STENDAHL ' had felt like less than a full meal, at least it hadn't filled me quite the way I'd wanted it to, the way I had come to imagine nothing could again. I pushed through the crowd gathering around the bar only to change my mind in mid flow and decide to get the hell out instead. Which is when I saw her. I didn't even know she was there and she had made no effort to show for the Q and A but she must have been looking in my direction and as I turned our gaze met.

She was the face on the screen, the woman in the picture. She was il maestro's daughter and for a moment that look of fear in her eyes seemed genuine.

"Ri - chard ...?"

I can't remember if I said anything. All I know is the crowd seemed to melt and just for once there was nothing to keep us away from each other.

"You've gotta help me... you've gotta get me out of this place..."

I saw Alan Jone's amused face amongst the onlookers and I recalled that long ago moment when I had first glimpsed Asia's eyes as the Teutonic knight knocked her mask to one side with his spear in 'La Chiesa' and how the nosy old bugger had simultaneously caught my outstretched hand by the wrist and told me to put out my smoke. But it was Asia's hand that held mine now and there was no objective difference any more between 'real life' and the movies except for one little detail. Living it out first hand was a big improvement over just being an observer...

"Anything you say, sister.."

My fingers pressed flat against the cold glass of an oddly convenient fire exit .

"I don't care where we go. Let's just go, okay?"

The door gave and the dream enfolded me as if instead of stepping onto the darkened embankment I had passed passed through the mirror into another world where it was all true, where all things were possible. I remember a full moon, fuller than I'd seen it before and a white curtain fluttering and belling like the wings of an angel in the wind. It was somewhere just south of Hallow'een 1996 and for just a while I was actually happy in a Richard kind of way, safe and secure in the arms of the mother of tears…

TO BE CONCLUDED SHORTLY

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STOP PRESS: Fulcanelli On- Line!!!

For those of you foolhardy enough to want to know more 'The Mystery of the Cathedrals' - the first volume of the master alchemists legendary grimoire is now available for download. Follow the hyperlink and don't say I didn't warn you: http://www.scribd.com/doc/48435/Fulcanelli-Le-Mystere-de-Cathedrales

The Zone - 4.55 pm September 4 2007 - More Fulci DVDs left on the perimeter fence - again the choice of titles is startling apt. Could it be some kind of warning? Find out in LACHRYMAE: THE FINAL CHAPTER in which your humble narrator will endevor to tie up the threads and reveal just why the black mother is black unless this whole site disappears down the electron plughole first.

Will your narrator be punished like Tiresias for posting this in public, for writing for the 'volgari e non literati', for choosing a popular medium to address his fellow citizens and thus breaking the laws of 'silentium' in the process?

F***k! I hope not.

Let's see… I mean it's been pretty damn lively around here, I can tell you!

Later perhaps.

'Til then this is Richard Stanley, the last free man in West London wishing each and every one of you in this burdgeoning tribe a happy Hallow'een! May the dark angels watch over you always!

Every dog man one of you. **************************************************************** ***************** BREAKING NEWS: 'TERZA MADRE - THE MOTHER OF TEARS' - the third and final part of Dario Argento's 'Three Mothers' trilogy will be screening twice as part of the American Film Market later this month in Santa Monica.

Although most of these screenings are open only to film execs, some are open to the public. Beg, steal or better still book a ticket now and perhaps I'll see you there... http://www.afmfilms.org/catalog/FilmDetail. php?id=4541

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Richard Stanley

LACHRYMAE - THE FINAL CHAPTER Current mood: working

Blog Archive Monday, January 21, 2008

Brethren, I have invited you here to this ancient, invisible theatre with the intention of not only unmasking the killer God responsible for these crimes against 'reality' but more cogently to provide an unambiguous solution to two or perhaps three long running esoteric enigmas…

I salute those who have stayed with the program from the top. For late joiners I include an index to conjure order out of the scrolling chaos and serve as an aid memoir for those hardy few who dare read further. I have very little keyboard time at present and less in the months to come. Until we meet again this strange saga is my gift to you.

Be warned the completed text contains 'spoilers' and may be hazardous to your belief systems.

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Chapter Six: She Who Must Be Obeyed "Oh mother! What is God?"- 12th Century graffiti - Wildenborg Castle

LACHRYMAE 1: The Trail of the Three Mothers (1) The Rain Queen (2) Out of Africa (3) The Art of Light (4) Our Lady of Darkness (5) Isis in New York (6) An audience with the Black Mother

LACHRYMAE 2: The Widow's Web (1) Gratia Lachrymarum (2) Mission Improbable (3) Kiss of the Tarantula (4) The Walls of Heaven (5) The Other Side of the Mountain (6) Dying Light

LACHRYMAE 3: The Devil's Chessboard (1) Blue Apple Day (2) All Roads lead to Rennes (3) Terza Madre (4) Luxae Tenebris (5) The Immortal's Feast 104

The Grotto of the Lombrives - Ussat les Bain - Approx 6.15 pm (the 'orbs' which first showed up in the pics I ran of the Devil's Bridge are commonly dismissed as a form of 'digital artefacting' but here they seem to have perspective as if they are somehow emerging from the grotto - and they sure pick their locations as if they somehow know when we're 'warm' or 'cold'...) *********************************************************** "There it is! Right there on the f*****g wall…"

"What?"

"The f****g spider!"

I steadied the flashlight, its beam picking out a familiar eight legged outline scrawled on the cave wall above us. Mr.Horn took a half step closer, eyes roaming taking in the ancient graffiti, the signature of a mysterious vanished cult identical to the markings in the grotto at Tarantula Square. I'm not sure it meant as much to him as it did to me but I was grateful for his company nonetheless. Mr.Horn while an expert documentary cameraman is a man of notoriously few words and as ever his true thoughts remained a mystery to me, his face lost in the shadows.

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The end of the century was in sight and we were deep in the bowels of the Lombrives, the largest limestone cave system in Europe whose galleries provided a sanctuary to beleagured Neanderthals and emergent cro-magnons alike, sacred to shamans, druids, medieval Christians and heretics in turn. Its myriad tunnels were part of a single conjoined labyrinth until a glacier sliced the system in half during the last ice age. While part of the system is open to the public with modern spelunkers having penetrated twelve miles or more into its depths some of the deeper capillaries remain unplumbed to this day.

Deep in the heart of mountain lies a subterranean lake beside whose lightless waters rises a glistening crystalline vault known as the 'Tomb of Pyrene' and identified in popular lore as the last resting place of the bride of Hercules from whom the mountains of northern Spain and southern France draw their name. Beyond the vast natural column named the 'pillar of Hercules' the passage's ribbed throat widens into a yawning honeycombed wombspace into which Westminster cathedral and Pinewood Studio's fabled 'Bond Stage' could fit with ease, its walls rising into a darkness that our meager lighting budget could never hope to dispel, the dank stone covered in an illegible tangle walls of dead languages, countless scrawled pentagrams and other less familiar geometric markings. Here amidst the dust of centuries I found the last piece of the puzzle that would complete the cycle begun all those years before in far away Montserrat, the final clue to the identity of the faceless goddess, the 'supernatural' force that had guided my steps and seemingly manipulated the day to day events of my life since the day I had first set foot in the Scala cinema and settled down to the all-day all-nighter that set the long, strange journey in motion..

My first encounter with Our Lady of Darkness had briefly jarred me out of the youthful cynicism I had mistaken for 'reason' but over the years I had somehow pushed the events to the very back of my mind, telling myself it had been little more than a ludicrous chain of 'coincidences' inspired by my overheated imagination and prolonged exposure to Dario's fractured ouvre. What happened at Montsegur in the summer of 1996 however had proved a whole lot harder to explain away. I tried to tell myself that it had simply been a freak storm that caught us unawares and that the voltage coursing through the walls of the keep had somewhere affected Kate's brainwaves and triggered the violent seizure that followed. Despite all I had seen my conscious mind refused to give in to the thought that she had been 'possessed' or that the citadel really was the 'castle of the Holy Grail' after all.

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Returning to the Pyreneees I spent months at a time camped out with Mr.Horn on the holy mountain, locked off cameras covering every conceivable angle, hoping to capture the 'hand of God' and those fiery, plasmic fingers on film for all to see but we waited in vain.

Our search for the missing Grail historian proved just as fruitless. We followed SS Obersturmfuhrer Otto Wilhelm Rahn's trail back to Germany and pulled every file we could. We found a few survivors, a family, a teddybear, a handful of notes and in the end we had found a grave.

It is not my intention to recapitulate the Rahn affair in this posting other than to touch upon those aspects that shed some light, inadvertently or otherwise on the dark domain of Mater Tenebrarum and her siblings. A full account of the sinister saga that lead rom the ruins of Montsegur to the ritual chambers of the SS Order Castle in Padeborn and on to the Arctic Circle and an abandoned U-boat pen deep beneath the volcanic crags of the Canary Islands would require a longer and darker night than currently available.

East of the sun and west of the moon...

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A disc containing some of the interview material generated during the ongoing quest was included as a freebie in last year's 'DUSTDEVIL' box kit under the working title 'THE SECRET GLORY'. Sadly the disc's murky, low-res visuals were further muddled by a soundtrack that wandered wildly out of synch as a result of a half-assed PAL –NTSC transfer, adding one more layer of confusion to an already opaque narrative. Normally I would have gone apeshit and demanded the disc be withdrawn but Subversive Cinema had done such a good job with the main feature it seemed churlish to kick up a fuss, especially as their backs were against the wall like every other retailer in the trade. Subsequent events have rendered that weak document wholly obsolete and while 'THE SECRET GLORY' may stand as a bare bones introduction to the enigma it does not reveal the true import of Rahn's work and the bizarre myth complex that surrounds him.

Otto The fact that Otto Rahn existed at all stretches credulity. He seems to have stepped alive from the pages of a thirties pulp complete with black coat, fedora and those pale green, oddly otherworldy eyes. Born and raised in the Black Forest not far from the ruins of Wildenborg where Wolfram von Eschenbach first committed 'PARSIFAL' to parchment in the 12th century Otto was a lonely, troubled child. Bullied at school he sought refuge from his peers and dysfunctional family in the myths of an immutable, vanished past, in the works of his compatriots and role models, the Brothers Grimm and the legends of the knights and troubadors of old. Otto's neice insists he was possessed of what she calls the 'seventh sight' and regardless of whether his alleged telepathic abilities were real of imagined there seems little doubt that he deliberately cultivated an aura of mystery about himself from the very beginning, a suspicion underpinned by his early thwarted

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ambitions towards a career in the film industry, two surviving unproduced screenplays and the macabre theatricality of the promotional stills for his first book 'Crusade Against the Grail' (1933)

When the Doyle clan began to smell a rat Grace and Ivan split to the Pyrenees where they spent the better part of the following year as guests of the Countess de Pujol Murat at approximately the same time as Rahn's own sojourn in the south.

Inspired by rogue archeologist Heinrich Schliemann's sensational 'discovery' of Troy the ambitious young philologist set about deconstructing 'PARSIFAL' in the same manner that Schliemann had approached Homer's 'Illiad', intending to prove the 12th century Grail romance was anchored in actual historic events.

While still in his early twenties Rahn was taken under the wing of the mysterious Countess de Pujol Murat, a leading figure in a secret society known as the 'Polaires' who drew their name from Stella Polaris or Arktos, true north symbolized by the swastika which is said to represent the seasonal positions of Ursa Minor around the Pole Star. To what extent their lodge maintained ties with other societies of its day such as the Thule Geselschaft whose leadership were to eventually found the National Socialist German Worker's Party that brought Hitler to power is hard to tell at this distance in time. While Rahn openly wore the Sieg Rune of the Thule on the sweater knitted for him by his mother the Polaires themselves seem to have been more closely affiliated to their British counterparts rather than the racist and increasingly anti-semitic German lodges of their day. They would later Conan and Grace suffer persecution under the Nazis who suspected the secret societies of either actively aiding and abetting the Jews or acting as unwitting pawns in a hypothetical 'zionist-Masonic' conspiracy. While the European Polaires were all but wiped out and their records subsequently destroyed in the war the British movement went from strength to strength, growing out of and eventually breaking away from Conan Doyle's Spiritualist Association of Great Britain (SAGB) under the auspices of charismatic Welsh platform medium Grace Cooke and her ambitious huband, Ivan.

Grace seems to have attempted to wrest control of the SAGB after the demise of its founder and mentor by audaciously channeling his talkative shade in closed sittings with Sir Arthur's bereaved family.

The only way to ever know for sure whether Rahn was either a Mason or a card carrying envoy of the Thule Society would be to access the surviving British order's records and to this effect I took to posing as a clairvoyant at the Spiritualist Association's mouldering West London headquarters, a routine ably abetted by one of the founder members of this virtual tribe, fellow MySpacer and one time television psychic Andre Phillipe. The White Eagles maintain close ties with the SAGB, recruiting heavily from their hapless membership and accordingly it took me little more than 48 hours to insinuate myself into a gathering of their west London chapter in a lavishly converted chapel not much more than a block or two from Harrods.

Grace Cooke in later years

The White Eagle's spotless unisex lab smocks and custom of 'scrubbing down' before and after ceremonies brought the works of David Cronenberg to mind as much as it recalled the witch cults of Argento's 'SUSPIRIA' and 'INFERNO'. Certainly it looked as if Cronenberg's resident production designer Carol Spier might have been responsible for the décor, the sparsely furnished interior dominated by a huge swooping Luftwaffe style eagle that had taken the place of the banished cross. Grace's grand daughter, the order's dynastic high priestess held court over her devoted following swathed in turquoise robes adorned with the distinctive silver star of the Polaires.

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Despite the exotic, crypto-fascist bling the essence of her address seemed to be pretty much the same vacuous, feelgood love thy neighbour gobbledygook spouted by preachers the world over so after half an hour or so I politely excused myself, taking the opportunity to avail myself of the small private library and adjoining reading room on the floor below. Browsing through the order's bound memos and archived copies of their bi-monthly periodical 'Stella Polaris' it became apparent that any reference to the war years had been assiduously removed. Noticing the high priestesses robed husband, Colm Haywood, watching me with naked suspicion from the reading room doorway I decided to brazen it out and broach my concerns directly. Colm blanched as I mentioned Otto's name, then recovering his saintly demeanor he greeted me with a fraternal third degree handshake, assuming that to know as much as I did to connect him with Rahn in the first place meant I had to be 'one of them' and confirming that the Polaires were in all likelihood just another franchise of the all-seeing eye. Hastening to set my mind at rest the high priest explained that earlier editions of the newsletter had been removed for safekeeping to the organization's lavish and closely guarded headquarters in Glastonbury. Then urging me to get in touch by e-mail should I wish to view the redacted material he politely showed me the door.

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I could tell my questions had rattled the high priest or grand wizard or whatever he liked to call himself and it came as little surprise when subsequent attempts to contact him at the address provided drew a blank. The Rahn affair was toxic spiritual waste and the last thing anyone needed was for some smart ass to forge a direct, clearly established paper trail linking Hitler's Reich to the burgeoning New Age movement.

It is impossible to gauge the extent of Rahn's immersion and complicity in the clandestine groups that funded and tacitly guided his early work. Regardless of whether he was a true Nazi, a Masonic fifth columnist or even a closet Zionist there can be little doubt that the Polaires not only supported and encouraged his research but deliberately steered his attention towards the heretic fortress of Montsegur which the young philologist was to subsequently identify with the 'Grail Castle' of song and story. The 'Cathar' castles that dot the Corbieres and the Ariege are the earliest known examples of gothic architecture to be found in Europe and Montsegur, the highest of the citaedels and hence last to fall was said to be the very oldest of them, foundations dating to an earlier epoch lost to us now in the mists of anterior history.

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The convoluted 'fourth dimensional' geometric charts drawn by Danielle/ Arianne who had thoughtfully taken to leaving his work pinned to trees and roadside fences in the Rennes area drew my attention to the similarity between the floorplan of the keep and the constellation of Arcturus, almost the star system's mirror image, inverted as if viewed through an ancient camera obscura. I only wish I had the smarts of the computer power to be able to calculate what those stars might have looked like a thousand years ago when the foundations of the keep were first hewn from the raw stone.

The castle's alignment to the sun and the subsequent lightshow in the north tower that marks the dawn of every successive solstice has lead historians and New Age gurus alike to lazily identify the keep's builders with the heliocentric Celts . In point of fact the building has little or nothing in common with the megaliths of Stonehenge, Avebury or Newgrange.

It's construction is without precedent and we have no clue as to its origins, purpose or how it eventually came to be destroyed.

Graphic representation of a pinhole camera

There is every reason to doubt the construction served any conventional defensive purpose. As Jugen Prochnow puts it in Michael Mann's 'The Keep' (1983) - the whole place is 'constructed backwards' as if to keep something in rather than keep something out. The so-called 'arrow slits' slant inwards and downwards in such a way as to make it impossible to actually fire an arrow through them with any degree of accuracy and no attempt has been made by conventional archeologists to explain the north facing slit which communicates not with the outside world but the interior of the keep itself.

Rays of light travel from the object, through the picture plane, and to the viewer's eye. This is the basis for graphical perspective.

A fingertip search of the courtyard conducted in August 2007 revealed a single area of worked stone, a rough ledge at the base of the north facing slit. No effort has been made by the original architects to otherwise flatten the mountaintop to provide a convenient floor space let alone seats or shelves yet climbing up onto the ledge I found at once that the narrow shelf was the acoustical focus of the keep, my voice carrying loudly and clearly throughout the edifice.

It is my considered opinion that the mysterious, almost vaginal slit in the north tower is alligned to the position of the moon at the spring equinox (the anniversary of the fall of the castle - March 15 1244) just as the east facing slits are designed to harness and concentrate the first, faint light of the solstice dawn.

This apparent allignment to both the moon and the stars dispells the notion of any simple heliocentric culture having been at work, hinting at a far more complex understanding of the physical universe. In fact what the castle resembles more than anything else is a vast pinhole camera...

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The history of the motion picture apparatus has long been intertwined with the 'dark art' of sorcery. The gimmick that ate the medium. A cheap conjuror's trick that eventually took over the auditorium and forced out the human performers.

Stage magician George Melies was the first to grasp the camera's capacity to lie after licensing the first projector from the Lumiere brothers who drew inspiration from Roget's famous pamphlet on fusion frequency which was in turn derived from the zoetrope or moving picture wheel, a toy of the devil shunned for centuries by the Catholic church who like the modern day Taliban deemed its capacity to mimic the 'illusion of life' inherently heretical...

The magic lantern enters the history books with Giovanbattista Della Porta's experiments in light and shadow using a device described as a 'thaumaturgic' in the' Magiae Naturalis' probably the same early form of motion picture projector as the Lucernae Magicae seu Thaumaturgae described by the Jesuit monk Kircher in the second edition of his 'Arsmagna Lucis et Umbrae'.

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The frontispiece of the 'Arsmagna Lucis et Umbrae'

"The third key is beneath the soles of your shoes"- A plate from the 'Arsmagna' betrays not only the origins of the cinematic apparatus but a funky taste in chessboard floors - a form of esoteric shorthand that should be instantly apparent by now even to the untrained eye

While some sceptics dismiss Cellini's account as pure fiction it seems more probable the author is simply exagerating an actual experience as was his custom throughout the autobiography. From the given account it seems the Sicillian warlock was using a mechanical device, possibly operated by hidden accomplices to achieve the ghostly illusion. This sort of skullduggery dates back to ancient times when concave metal mirrors were used in pagan temples to project brilliant lights and even images upon various surfaces including smoke, a theory supported by British historian and archeologist Sir David Brewster. The smoke from the fire may have caught occasional images but the mighty background of the Colosseum itself is the only sure solution to the mystifying effect otherwise the sorceror would surely have chosen some other, more convenient venue. The name of the thaumaturge mentioned in Cellini's account has sadly not come down to us but his Sicillian origins bring to mind the order of the 'Faithful in Love' described by Dante that allegedly traced its roots all the weay back to 12th century 'Cathar' prophet Nicetas himself.

Kircher's work in fluenced the creation of the henakitoscope (1832), the zoetrope (1860), the kinemetoscope (1861), the kineograph (1861), and the praxinoscope (1877) and finally Thomas Alva Edison's kinetoscope (1899). Edison had a pet name for the tar papered studio in West Orange, NJ where all his prototypical films were made. He called it the 'Black Maria' - a term richly if inadvertently redolent of the image to whom Inago de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, dedicated his life in 1522, the Black Madonna of Montserrat..."

Kircher wrote his treatise in 1646 but it is generally conceded that the device was in use long before its closely guarded secret appeared in print...

The famous Italian goldsmith, Cellini, recorded in detail his meeting with a notorious Sicilian magus during his visit to Rome in 1540. While discussing the 'magical arts' with the sorceror Cellini remarked that he would like to see someone invoke demons and the

older man calmly offered to produce a horde of them for his benefit. The ruins of the Colosseum were chosen by the magus as a suitable spot for such a demonstration and Cellini arranged to meet him there the following evening, bringing along one of his friends to act as as a credible witness. Within the silence of the vast amphitheatre the necromancer drew circles in the dust and kindled a fire upon which he tossed various substances that produced a dense column of perfumed smoke. He then began a lengthy incantation while there appeared about the circle a vast array of devils which according to Cellini completely filled the Collosseum. The sorceror called the demons by name while Cellini's friend shook with fear, pointing out four gigantic devils in full armour who seemed to be riding across the walls of the ancient auditorium. In an effort to reassure the trembling onlookers the magus told them the demons were in fact only smoke and shadows. Indeed they gradually diminished in number, their outlines fading from view as the smoke cleared...

Benvenuto Cellini

In his thought provoking novel 'FLICKER' (1992) Theodore Roszak speculates on how the 'moving picture wheel' may owe its ancestry to the flick books of the gnostics, apparently designed to demonstrate to the initiate how life as we know it is itself merely an illusion created by a constant subatomic flicker, a friction between positive and negative charges, between existence and non-existence, between spirit and matter, light and darkness...

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There seems little doubt that the Albigensians of the 12th and 13th century were an oddly civilized folk for their day with fragmentary records referring to a 'Jewish school of medicine' in Toulouse and a 'school of magic' in Salamanca. They had a form of protodemocracy in the form of elected 'magistrates' or 'capitouls' who acted as a check on the power of the church and the aristocracy and while not essentially matriarchal as some have claimed were at least unusually egalitarian in their gender politics. Some say they were Luciferians like the Yezzidis, others that they were the last of the true Christians but in the end it doesn't matter who they really were or why they fought or why they died. To quote Conan the barbarian -"all that matters is few stood against many"and as I learned the facts of their history I couldn't help but feel a growing affininity with the castle's stubborn defenders just as I had been drawn to the plight of the beleagured Kafirs of the Hindu Kush. At first I knew little more than what I had gleaned from the script of 'La Chiesa' but there was something about the high, wooded valleys and dim blue mountaintops that reminded me of Afghanistan and stirred feelings I couldn't adequately explain. In South Africa the Afrikaners called black people 'kafirs' (the word used by the Arab slavers for those who did not believe in Islam and hence could be bought or sold like cattle. It was a 'fight word', an insult like 'nigger' and I felt a natural, intuitive abhorrence for the apartheid system that alienated me from my family and birth place from the very top...

'does pain enoble a caterpillar?"Children and animals are innocent. Why should they suffer and die? The creator of this world (God / Yaweh / Jehovah/ Allah/ what you will) either doesn't exist or is quite evidently insane and does not necessarily love us nor mean the best for us. Although this force has the power to torture our physical bodies and even kill us when necessary it has no power over our immortal souls which the 'Cathars' believed were created by the true, good God and were apparently eternal. Needless to say this idea held great appeal in the middle ages when life was by all accounts nasty, brutish and short. In order to hide the evil in this world the 'Cathar' holy men or 'parfaits' believed an illusory veil had been drawn over our eyes.

Each of us however is supposed to have a divine counterpart, unfallen akin to a 'guardian angel' or Socrate's 'daemon' who is trying to help us awaken. This other personality is the authentic waking self. The one we have now is asleep and minor. We are in fact asleep and in the hands of a dangerous black magician disguised as the True Good God. The bleakness, the evil and pain in this world causes us to fall asleep into delusion early in life. Like Keanu Reeves we really do have superpowers but can't remember how to use 'em. The act of awakening, of slowly becoming aware of these powers is not so much an act of learning as an act of 'anamnesis', of remembering which implies there must be something to remember and that our actual lives extend beyond our apparent births and deaths.

Yet this malign force which deliberately manipulates and misleads us (Known as 'Rex Mundi' or 'the king of the Earth' to the 'Cathari') cannot be infallible otherwise you wouldn't be reading this blog in the first place. The all seeing eye is not all powerful but tries to decieve the children of the kingdom into believing so. And if the designer of the prison programme is fallible then it can be beaten. That is the true meaning of the first law of magic 'As above, so below... 'Gods' are only enlightened 'mortals' hence mortals might through the piecing together of seemingly dissociated information symbolically encoded in our minds over successive generations regain the key to their secret.

In Afghanistan I was moved by the plight of the 'kafirs', the pagan tribal folk of 'Kafiristan' - the land of the heathens and was opposed to both communist atheism and militant Islam. The word 'cathar' was used an an insult by the Teutonic knights and crusaders who took Occitania by force.

It too is a 'fight word', not a belief system. It is in fact the same word by another spelling. A heretic. An unbeliever. Someone who does not bear allegiance to the one God, be it Mohammed or Jehovah.

The basic principals of the dualist heresy should be well known by now to long term readers of this blog. In short the difference of opinion that sparked the third and last crusade springs from the simple notion that infinite goodness cannot create evil. Since there is evil in the world it follows that some other principal must be at work. The conventional monotheisms put this down to God's plan but while pain might enoble man as William Peter Blatty rightly points out 112

Christ (like the prophet Elijah) is said to have 'entered alive into the Kingdom of Heaven'. Possibly other ascended masters are rumored to have existed over the centuries. Maybe we can make it to the next level but it ain't easy as Gilgamesh found out. We are nothing more than an energy wave, a frequency after all . Maybe it's possible to change channels?. The last time anyone seems to have pulled this off was when Fulcanelli, the master alchemist is supposed to have transcended the fabric of space time at some point just before or during the Second World War having apparently unpicked the 'art of light' encoded in the gothic architecture of the great cathedrals and mansions of Europe. According to his principle disciple, the publisher Eugene Canseliet, Fulcanelli had been aging backwards for some years and seemingly changed gender before disappearing. Far fetched I know but I have not been able to satisfactorily dismiss the possibility.

All I know is he isn't really hiding beneath the floorboards as Leigh McClosky discovered in 'INFERNO'.

The trouble with these so-called 'ascended masters' is there never seems to be one around when you need them. While prepared to keep an open mind on the subject my attempts to track them down and better still obtain an interview have thus far proven, well... a li'l disappointing.

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When I first heard of Otto Rahn I was told by Marius Mounie, the former mayor that the celebrated Nazi Grail historian was alive and still visited the castle regularly which jived with the notion that he had found the Holy Grail and attained some form of immortality after all. A cursory search of the records in his home town however revealed a surviving family, a death certificate and a grave in short order. Only a DNA test could tell for sure whether it was really Otto in the grave but the brutal logic of Occam's razor would tend to indicate that the man is dead and not still swanning about the Pyrenees on some fourth dimensional etheric sabatical.

to this day, an ageless alchemical hermaphrodite operating out of a ghostly manor that cannot be found on any earthly map, existing seemingly in a fold in space- time.

The thorny matter of immortality aside the unmasking of the master alchemist raises more than a few cogent questions. The name 'Violle' immediately brings to mind the name 'Varelli' given to Fulcanelli's surrogate in Argento's 'INFERNO.' (1980) While the spelling may differ the names essentially sound the same in keeping with the rules of Fulcanelli's beloved 'phonetic cabbalah' yet it goes without saying il mastro denies any conscious knowledge of this apparent 'coincidence'.

It was a typically grey day in Darmstadt. I stood at the foot of Otto's grave thinking it through. In the end I left him twelve red roses and the blackbird feather from the cave I'd been wearing in the brim of my hat before turning away and getting on with my life.

Time and the limitations of the medium prevent a full discussion of the life of the Count Rakoczy also know as the Count St. Germain, a flamboyant Transylvanian diplomat, freemason and alchemical dabbler who was said to have invented a patent diamond making process in addition to having obtained the Great Work and hence the secret of immortality. He wore diamond buttons on his frock coat and once presented Princess Catherine of Russia with an artificial gemstone the size of an ostrich egg but history does record that he died in his late sixties in Schleswig, Germany. He was interred in 1779 in the local graveyard at Eckenforde and while I'm familiar with the usual argument that he somehow faked his own death and survives to this day the inscription on his headstone seems unequivocal:-"He who called himself the Comte de Saintgermain and welldone of whom there is no other information, has been buried in this church."

A split second after Leigh Mc Closky tears up the floorboards of his sister's apartment in the last reel of 'INFERNO' a cat leaps abruptly through the open window and then disappears into the newly opened hole in the floor while the Keith Emmerson score goes ga-ga on the soundtrack, signifying not only that we have found the alchemist's , and hence the Black Mother's hiding place but oddly recalling a similar moment in Poes' 'THE BLACK CAT' which Argento was to later adept for television, a matter detailed at some length in the first installment of this running saga.

Quick witted readers may also recall that this was the title given to Daria Niccolodi's illegitimate attempt to complete the trilogy with director Luigi Cozzi at the helm - 'THE BLACK CAT' aka 'DEI PROFUNDIIS'. (1990) "What secret could possibly lurk between these soundly put together walls?"

What secret indeed?

And so to 'Fulcanelli' - the author of 'The Mystery of the Cathedrals' and the last on this short, distressing list of ascended adepts and modern masters...

The work of Patrick Riviere among others dovetails with my own making it abundantly clear that the master alchemist was none other than the eminent French physicist Jules Violle, a member of the Academy of Sciences and inventor of the calorimeter. While undoubtedly a genius he would appear nonetheless to be a dead genius having apparently passed in his home town, the tiny village of Fixin on September 12, 1923, at the age of 83.

Of course there are a few irregularities surounding his demise. His son , Henri, signed the death certificate rather than the local coroner and I am fully aware of his pupil Eugene Canseliet's long standing claim of having met the master years later in Seville where he is meant to live and work

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In so-called 'real' life Jules Violle could be commonly found in his favourite drinking hole - the Parisian 'Cabaret du Chat- Noir' or 'Black Cat Club' which he warmly describes in the second volume of his trilogy 'The Houses of the Philosophers' (1929) : -"Many of us remember the celebrated Chat-Noir ... but how many knew of the esoteric and political centre that was concealed there, of the international masonry that was hidden behind the signboard of the artistic cabaret. On the one hand, the talent of fervent, idealistic youth made up of carefree, blind aesthetes in search of glory and incapable of suspicion; on the other hand, the confidence of a mysterious science mixed with obscure diplomacy - a dual faced picture deliberately exhibited in a medieval frame..."

The 'Caberet du chat Noir' was the home of the notorious anarcho-esoteric theatre company - 'Le Theatre d' Ombres' better known to us now as ' The Shadow Theatre' and whose first production at the Black Cat Club was a little confection entitled 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony' - a cracking show by all accounts and yet another 'coincidence' in the endless spiral of maddening synchronicity. Perhaps as Kazanian the aleurophobic book seller in 'INFERNO' so baldly and simply states:-"The only true mystery is that our very lives are governed by dead people..."

Some believe that Fulcanelli like the true Christ, the Cathar parfaits, Lovecraft's 'old ones' or the 'secret masters of the world' are really still alive after all on some other unreachable channel, influencing our affairs with seemingly magical powers, communicating with us in dreams, backward masking, lattices of 'coincidence' Glitches in the matrix. Call 'em what you will...

Text and sub-text: - Bas relief from Notre Dame de Paris - The two books representing the exoteric surface and its esoteric content are obvious enough to the casual observer but what are we to make of the tricky way he's holding that sceptre and the extended fingers on his left hand?

Fulcanelli said:"For an initiate to become an adept he must climb an 'analogic' ladder of correspondences."Or as Agent Cooper puts it in 'TWIN PEAKS':"When two things happen at once you should always pay strict attention"- although strangely it is our nature to disregard these moments or discard them just as we forget our dreams. In this way the 'matrix' defends itself. Consensus reality seamlessly rebuilds itself anew and we willingly fall asleep into delusion, willing jailors in our own living prison cells.

The earth is a bridge. We stand on a causeway between worlds are judged according to which power we give allegiance to. We cannot understand what the creator's plans are for us or what will happen once we cross the bridge...

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The 'Cathars' were typically stigmatized as 'devil worshippers' by Pope Innocent III who called a crusade against them in the 12th century. It was a war of extermination that claimed some eight million lives. By the time the dust settled the kingdom of Occitania had been wiped from the map and it's language, Romans, a form of Anglo-Saxon similar to English that came to be known to later historians as 'Occitan', passed into oblivion along with the tarnished ideals of chivalry. I suspect the kings of France were motivated more by greed than anything else, by the desire to possess the fertile lands and the notoriously beautiful daughters of the south. A psychological band-aid to help boost morale after the shock of losing Jerusalem to the Moors just as the US had to wage war on Iraq to make up for the trauma of 9/11.

The powers that were had to poison a couple of Popes to get their way and lacking the mechanization of the Nazi's it took them more than a generation to achieve their aims.

The castle fell to treachery just before the spring equinox in the second year of the siege when shepherds from the neighboring village of Camon showed the Teutonic knights who were accustomed to the icy Alpine conditions the secret path up the sheer side of the mountain by which the defenders smuggled in their supplies and on 16 march the last of the Albigensians, some 225 surviving men, women and children were dragged down the mountain in chains to perish on the Camp de Cremat.

The last stand of the Cathars took place at Montsegur, literally the safe or 'secure' mountain. The siege lasted two years and there were battles and skirmishes fought every day.

Ashamed of their ancestor's genocidal history it is hardly surprising that the French film industry has thus far avoided the subject matter and the outside world has little interest in what it considers to be a quirk of 'French history'. When the 'Cathars' do surface in films they are usually portrayed in the inquisition's terms - as fanatics or devil worshippers...

Many of the great heroes of chivalry fought and died there.

'Men such as Lantar, Belissen and Caraman' according to Magre and the mesmerisingly beautiful Esclarmonde d'Alion - also known as 'Esclarmonde the Bastard' , swordsmistress of the south who fought beside her twin brother Loup.

Through two winters the defenders of Montsegur held out against the Pope, against the Spanish inquisition, the Teutonic knights, the kings of France and Simon de Montfort - founder of the British bicameral parliamentary system, effectively against the world.

One of the few known surviving Cathar artifacts to be recovered from the site of Montsegur: a stone dove.

Now in a private collection in Toulouse.

The events of the last crusade were suppressed by successive chroniclers who all too readily took their lead from the inquisitors. The castle's history as, above all, a symbol of resistance made it impossible for the conquering orthodoxy to Christianize or take into the Holy Roman faith as they did at Montserrat and countless other pagan sites such as Montserrat, Lourdes or Fatima.

Otto Rahn's account 'Crusade Against the Grail' was the first to be published outside France and no mention of Occitania and its vanished tongue was made in the English language until 1940.

Despite the title surprisingly little reference to the Grail itself is made in Otto's opus. Like the Moors the 'Cathari' admitted to the existence of Christ but their evident disdain for the material world is at odds with the Catholic veneration of earthly relics such as the folkloric Cup of the Last

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Supper. Besides, as aforementioned, nobody seems to know what a Grail let alone who the damn thing belongs to. Theories range from the sacred bloodline or 'Sangraal' described in Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh's fanciful bestseller 'THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL' , Bran's cauldron, the lost Gospel of Saint John, the 'Book of Nicetas', a graven tablet or a 'hard, dark stone' symbollic of Christ's suffering according to Wolfram von Eschenbach's 'PARSIFAL'.

After his attempts to buy land in Montsegur itself were thwarted he moved to the nearby valley of Ussat, concentrating his efforts on the ruins of Lordat and the caverns of the Lombrives. A news item from a 1933 edition of the local newpaper 'La Depeche' headed 'Gold Rush in the Pyrenees' puts it succinctly: -"…an international secret society known as the 'Polaires' are digging up the foundations of the ruined castle of Lordat under the command of a shadowy German individual named Rams…"

An amused letter from Otto himself appeared in the subsequent issue.

"My dear sir - you are entirely mistaken! My named is Rahn, not 'Rams'…"

Rahn identifies the Grail with the 'Crown of Lucifer' that fell from the peacock angel's brow when he was cast out of heaven. The diadem fell to Earth in the Hindu Kush where it was carved by master Afghan craftsmen into the cup used by Salem to consecrate the temple Abraham built in Ur of the Chaldees and eventually borne back to Europe after those pesky Romans looted the Holy of Holies. According to Otto the servants of Lucifer still seek their master's lost diadem so that he might regain his rightful place in the kingdom of heaven. Searching from one lifetime to the next, down through the ages…

Legend has it that the Cathars counted the Grail amongst their treasures but just before the forces of darkness entered the castle a dove descended from on high and split the mountain with its beak. Eslclarmonde hid the cup within the solid rock before turning into a dove herself and ascending into the kingdom of heaven. Others believe the treasure was smuggled out by a small group who escaped by ropes down the sheer side of the mountain the night before the castle fell and were hunted like animals by troops acting under the Seneschal of Toulouse who had drafted in packs of bloodhounds expressly for this purpose. One band under Esclarmonde d'Alion was cornered in a cave on the banks of the icy Ariege and buried alive by their pursuers who did not dare to follow them into the labyrinthine tunnels in which they had taken refuge. Instead the crusaders sealed the cavern and pitched camp, standing guard until all signs of life from within the mountain had ceased. Then they struck camp, saddled their horses and rode away leaving behind them a rampart of stones that remained untouched for seven centuries…

Despite the emphasis placed on the Grail's essentially spiritual nature, a reminder that it is our sacred duty to strive towards perfection there is a disturbing literalness to Rahn's quest - a pragmatic, methodical, typically German approach to the mystery.

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In order to continue his increasingly obsessive investigations Otto negotiated the purchase of a small hotel near the mouth of the largest cave and equppied it with a dark room in order to process the hundreds of photographs taken during the course of his work which included extensive analysis of the graffiti found on the walls of the subterranean galleries that honeycomb the escarpments above the Ariege. Stories of this period are far too numerous to innumerate, Rahn's establishment, 'Des Maronniers' providing the focus for a convoluted web of local legends.

It's patrons were said to include the emissaries of countless obscure lodges and vanished secret societies, fancy women from Toulouse and Paris, English psychics, Basque, Occitan and Catalan nationalists, Italian fascists and German fifth columnists including Karl Wolf who was later to become personal adjutant to SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the historian Isabelle Sandy, Dr.Laffont and the mysterious Mr.Baby.

Staff included the seven foot tall Somali

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barman, Habdu, who was later to become Otto's bodyguard and closest friend, saving the young philologist's life when Rahn was swept away by the rising floodwaters in the grotto of Fontanet, identified by its phreatic source as Wolfram von Eschenbach's cave of the 'wild fountain'. Typically Rahn makes no mention of any of these individuals in his published works stating in 'THE COURT OF LUCIFER' that his sole companion during his time in France was his cat. To find the real Rahn we are forced to read between the lines…

Python movie where it belongs - which tends to rule out 'placebo effect' as a logical explanation.

Call it 'coincidence' then but needless to say she made a dramatic recovery and some six years later the cancer is still in remission…

In 1934 working closely with Antonin Gadal, the minister of tourism for southern France, Otto excavated the caverns of Ornolac, Fontanet and the Lombrives and amidst the blackened bones he is said to have found an ancient vessel forged from meteoric iron, a relic that never tarnished yet somehow secreted a substance akin to human blood, a cup dubbed by Gadal the 'graal pyrenean'. At first like most folk I found the story hard to believe until I saw the bleedin stones . for myself.

Sadly it didn't work out that way for ol' Otto. He was murdered by the nazi's in 1939 and the secret of the Cathars was thought to have died with him. Some believe the SS sealed the cup into a mineshaft at the base of a glacier near the abandoned Obersalzburg complex or that it was shipped to a secret U-boat base in Antarctica at the end of the war while others say it never left France at all and remained in the hands of wily old Gadal, the director of tourism.

Wolfram von Eschenbach puts it more baldly, simply stating that whoever has the stones or comes into contact with them"will have eternal life and will be healed…"

The 'Pyrenean Grail' was just one of many artifacts removed by Otto and his cronies including dozens of meteorites, the largest of which now forms the altar in the temple at the European Rosicrucian movement's headquarters in Amsterdam. The Q'aaba in Mecca is said to have been made of the same hard, dark extraterrestrial iron identified with the black stone of the alchemists, the negrido, lapis excoelus, a hyperdense alien alloy that never rusts but secretes a blood like ferrous solution 99% pure iron. It is easy too see how a superstitious mind (mine included!) would be affected by the sight of that blood, seemingly springing from nowhere.

It is iron oxide after all that gives the Ganges its sanguine tint at source that identifies it as the life blood of the goddess and for whatever reason, placebo effect, call it what you will it does seem to possess a healing virtue.

My first guinea pig was Andy Collins, one of the production assistants on the German leg of the 'SECRET GLORY' who burned his hand on one of the distress flares used during our descent into the lightless cavities beneath the Wewelsburg. The wound closed and healed over in days without leaving a trace. The second beneficiary of this apparent virtue was Beltane Fire Society founder Mark Oxbrow's then girlfriend, Liz, who was struck on the head by a bottle during the yearly bash on Carlton Hill. While Mark ran to fetch help. By the time he got back the paramedics were no longer necessary.

In 2001 my mother was diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of lymphoma that lead to the growth of tumours behind her eyes that slowly pushed them from their sockets and ultimately threatened the optic nerves themselves.

My mother is an author and illustrator by trade but an artist to the core. Knowing that further attempts surgery would possibly destroy her eye sight I resorted to the only cure I knew. I told her to lie down and rest while I put meteor blood in her eyes. She was so knocked out on medication that she didn't really know what was happening and later told me that she had dreamed there were angels standing around her bed healing her eyes, a particularly strange admission as my mother is a staunch, die hard atheist who then, as now, had little time for 'THE SECRET GLORY' or the whole Rahn fandango, believing like most people that the Holy rail should stay in the Monty

Gadal lived on in Ussat 'til his death in the sixties and after the war became the head of the European Rosicrucian movement, reforming it along his own strnge 'neo-cathar' lines. My previous research suggests the meteoric vessel remains in their hands and is probably used in their initiation rituals which continue to take place in the Bethlehem Grotto in Ussat. There is evidence the chalice was publicly exhibited at one point in the museum in Tarascon, the home of former president Mitterand and now a bastion of neo-nationalists and the French hard right.

The former curator of the museum had initially refused to be interviewed for fear he could be implicated in the 'Solar Temple' murders. The now disbanded ' Solar Temple ' was an obscure right wing sect that counted Princess Grace of Monaco among its members. The sect all but disbanded over a decade ago after a series of still unexplained mass murders in Quebec, France and the tiny town of Sion in Switzerland, the bodies of Temple members (all of them respectable local bankers, politicians and town functionaries) were found (after synchronised fire bomb explosions in Canada and France!) arranged twelve to a group like the spokes of a wheel, heads pointing inwards, hands tied behind them, gunshot wounds in the backs of their heads. All told some 74 people died in Switzerland alone and at least a further 16 in Quebec.

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About all you can be sure of is it wasn't suicide! Otto's journal mentions a similar arrangement of Cathar remains from a 12th century grave. There were twelve knights at the round table, the thirteenth chair being vacant, the Siege Perilous. Twelve disciples at the last supper, twelve houses of the zodiac, twelve little pips around the borders of the Cathar cross, twelve departments in the SS, twelve seats at Himmler's round table, twelve empty plinths in the circular Vallhalla room or Hall of the Dead beneath the Wewelsberg, twelve men to a workgroup at the local Niederghagen concentration camp (worked systematically to death under the principal of extermination through labour) and twelve standing stones surrounding Gadal's grave on the banks of the Ariege.

In deep space far heavier stable elements are known to exist, some of them dense enough to bend light or literally fold space-time, each one containing the latent energy of the original light, the 'big bang', still trapped within it and awaiting some future redemption like the souls of the 'Cathars' imprisoned in their 'tunics of flesh.' The 'Cathars' accepted Christ only as a prophet and awaited the coming of a true messiah who would incarnate not as a human being but as pure light, a light that would liberate us all from the 'sin of matter', cleanse the Earth, break the cycle of incarnation and bring us back to God. The 'Graal Pyrenean' is identified by some as the Emerald Cup, not because of its shade but because of what it holds within it, indetectable to mortal eyes, what the deranged Nazi Ariosophist Miguel Serrano described as 'the green ray' or the 'condensed light of the black sun.' There is some evidence to suggest that several artifacts from Rahn's initial excavations were shipped to the United States just before the war where they later came to the attention of one of Alberty Einstein's associates, a young physicist named Dr.Herbert Fleishmann who had a particular interest in the fields of superconductivity and supercooling. The military applications of his work remain classified along with the details of the first and second SS Polar expeditions in which Rahn seems to have played a role. Murky 16mm footage exists depicting some sort of radar apparatus reminiscent of the transmitters found today at the United States installation at Gaakon, Alaska and some believe that research continues in secret at the American airbase in Thule, Greenland, a former Nazi installation that came over to Allied administration after the war under 'Operation Paperclip'.

Despite my best efforts to co-erce or cojole the secret of the 'Pyrenean Grail's current whereabouts from the former curator I failed to ever get within striking distance of the relic itself although I believe it is still somewhere in the valley of Ussat and probably in the hands of a secret society who use it in their initiation rituals. After seven years I knew we were still only beginning to understand what the story was really about. I knew the stones had been prized since time out of mind and that men might kill or die for them yet without having yet conducted a full spectrograph had few clues as to their density or the true nature of the other mysterious properties attributed to them. Chemical density is determined within the first few seconds of the 'big bang.' On Earth the heaviest element in the existing periodic table is Uranium which can be artificially enriched to form Plutonium and of course there's really only one thing that Plutonium is good for…

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But it's all speculation and without tangible evidence will remain so. Like Fulcanelli's incomplete trilogy, the 'overture to the invisible', the notorious 'verbum dismissum' of the alchemists, Rahn's work remains incomplete. He speaks of three stones after all...

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looking for him. The body lay in the snow for months yet his family confirm that no-one ever asked after him or called to investigate his abrupt disappearance which is a little unusual in a police state such as Germany had then become. Of course the good folk at the SS Order castle acted as if they had known where Rahn was all along which they probably did …

Himmler's adjutant, Rahn's obituarist, Karl Wolff later became the Nazi ambassador to the Vatican and survived the war. He was granted immunity for his crimes by agreeing to testify against his former comrades at Nuremberg and later became well known as one of the principal interviewees and narrators of the BBC series 'THE WORLD AT WAR' as well as playing an active role in discrediting the 'Hitler diaries' for Stern Magazine and helping bring Klaus Barbie to justice in Paraguay. I was mercifully born too late to have attended Nuremberg but I did get to sit in on the famous libel trial at River City's high court a few ago that resulted in the subsequent downfall of British pseudo-historian and holocaust denier David Irving.

Irving had consistently attacked the credibility of the experts introduced to counter his claims that a deliberate policy of mass extermination had never been practiced at Auschwitz or by implication the other camps so when the prosecuting attorney introduced Karl Wolff's testimony he couldn't help quipping :"Someone like you would probably consider the Reichsfuher's personal adjutant to be a credible witness, would you not?"

Ignoring the polite murmur of laughter from the audience Irving screwed up his eyes and remarked; -"Well, it's a bit of a curate's egg, really.."

In the final pages of 'THE COURT OF LUCIFER' written in 1936 - a good three years before his lonely demise - Otto describes three completed manuscripts resting before him on his writing desk. On the first pile, the notes that comprised the substance of 'CRUSADE AGAINST THE GRAIL' rests one of the black stones he brought back from Montsegur, on the second - the text of 'THE COURT OF LUCIFER' rests a fragment of the Delphi oracle frieze and on the third, what he promised would be his final and greatest work rests a 'lump of amber, golden yellow' - reminiscent of Masonry's three degrees and the whitened final substance of the alchemical 'great work'. The third book of Rahn, begun at the Arctic Circle under the working title 'ORPHEUS' or 'A JOURNEY TO HELL AND BEYOND' is of course missing, either seized by the Nazi's when he fled the SS or (as Ingeborg would have us believe) burned by his mother at the end of the war.

Rahn's sensational earlier work lead to him being feted by the Nazi elite and for a few years his research had been lavishly funded by the Race and Settlement department. Then something went disasterously wrong. In 1939 he was accused of being both a Jew and a homosexual and placed before a military tribunal. The department responsible for commissioning him was disbanded and Rahn went on the run. The last people to see him alive were two children playing in the snow outside a farmhouse on the slopes of the Kufstein in southern Germany. According to the oldest of the children, Peter Meier, a tall man dressed in black appeared from the treeline and paused to ask the time. It was late in the day and fearing for the stranger their parents later went to look for him but even though the snow was more than a metre deep found to their surprise he had left no footprints. The following spring a body was discovered only a few hundred feet from the back of the house. Otto had apparently walked up the stream to avoid leaving tracks before sitting down under on of the trees to swallow a cocktail of pills. According to the report filed by the police in Zoll however the pills didn't kill him. He froze to death.

An obituary appeared on May 18 in the 'Berliner Ausgabe"filed by Rahn's former associate, Karl Wolff: -"In a sudden storm in the mountains in March or January SS Obersturmfuhrer Otto Rahn tragically lost his life. We mourn the loss of our comrade, a good and decent SS man and writer of noted historical, scholarly works - signed SS Chief of Staff Obergruppenfuhrer Wolff."

Of course we only have Wolff's word it happened that way and taking the SS's word at face value was never a good idea to begin with. There's plenty wrong with the official account not the least of it the fact that although Otto seems to have been on the run no-one seems to have bothered

And the funny thing is I know what he means.

Only it ain't funny…

In the course of my own research I collated, translated and compiled literally hundreds of pages of testimony, documents and journal entries that charted Rahn's quest for the roots of an authentic European 'Ur- religion', a body of invaluable folkloric data from a pre-war Europe now lost to us . His work has informed my own and opened my eyes to much of what I had inadvertently stumbled across. While the body of this material has now been transferred to disc and could be downloaded at the touch of a key Margaret Thatcher and Marie Denarnaud may have had a point. There are some things you just 'can't tell the public'.

Regardless of its merit Rahn's magnum opus was required reading at a certain level of promotion within the SS and inadvertently or otherwise contributed to the ideological underpinnings of the holocaust. The figure of six million Hebrew martyrs so hotly disputed by Irving and his dodgy ilke sadly obscures the wider picture. Let's get this straight, o my brothers, seventy two million people lost their lives in WW2 in mainland Europe alone and with those sort of figures you don't crap around with fate.

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Opus Dei Headquarters - Torreciudad, Spain - Summer 2007 Like Heinrich Himmler who took time off from hobnobbing with Franco to make obeissance to 'La Morenita' the founder of Opus Dei, the recently canonized Cardinal Escriva drew inspiration from the magic mountain and Savanarolla's 'Knights of Heaven. In practise they amount to a sort of Catholic equivalent of the Taliban and to make matters worse they're rich, relentless and in government right here in Europe. It's like the Spanish Civil War never even happened...

Sometimes the underground stream ducks out of sight. Sometimes the trail seems to go cold and so-called 'real' life takes pririority. Its just the way of things. There be no other...

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something well beyond my limited means. The only way to learn the truth about what happened to him at the Pole, Dr.Fleischmann and the continuing experiments at Thule would be to somehow track down the missing manuscript or access the redacted files which seems equally improbable.

We kept going until we ran out of funds and film stock and when we were done with 'THE SECRET GLORY' we split the artifacts we had recovered from the caves and Rahn's effects equally between myself, Mr.Horn and the other Shadow Theatre irregulars who had given freely of their time and energy along the way. We divided the stones as fairly as possible before reluctantly winding down the operation and going our separate ways. The four horsemen were abroad in the land and there were wars and rumors of wars…

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Secret Glory - Crew Photo - Self and Mr.Horn on the road to the Grail Castle - autumn 1998

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than ever that Asia would have to escape her father's loving clutches if she were ever to fulfill her own potential but to be fair on il maestro he wasn't the only director to be overwhelmed and ultimately defeated by Asia's presence, hampering her budding career with a string of high profile disasters.

I hadn't broken bread with Dario in some years and for a while I think I actively avoided him.

I acted partly out of guilt over having left him in the lurch at Raleigh Studios and unfinished business with his daughter I suspect the real reason I kept my head down was that I simply didn't know what to say. I mean what is there to say about 'THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA' other than 'no comment'?

Asia kept in touch for a while and I received postcards from distant cities on all four sides of the earth bearing cryptic, scrawled messages from cities . As my career idled hers hit the fast track with roles in 'La Reine Margot' and 'XXX' thrusting her into the fickle limelight she claimed to abhor. In the hothouse glare her talent blossomed just as the fortunes of all who loved and worked with her invariably seemed to flicker and wane as if the creative energy had been juiced right out of them. While they seemed made for eachother in theory her attempts to collaborate with her father seemed to consistently misfire.

While I had tried to defend 'TRAUMA' and love 'STENDAHL SYNDROME' despite its flaws 'PHANTOM' was in a class of its own and for once I had no desire to watch the film a second time.

Sitting through it was like being forced to watch my parents making love or more to the point contemplating their naked, tangled corpses. The experience left me defeated, demoralized and diminuished as if a part of my childhood had not so much died as been tarred and feathered, set on fire and then drowned in its own vomit. The continuing theme of rebellion against the dominating patriarchy, now explicitly identified with the paedophillic director of the opera house and the bland phantom's efforts to groom the young ingénue to stardom, only made it clearer 122

Michael Radford, recently feted by the Academy for 'Il Postino' fell head over heels for her hungry eyes and crafted the execrable 'B-MONKEY' accordingly. They say that love is blind but that's scarcely an excuse. Abel Ferrara fell just as hard and his erratic career took an abrupt nose dive halfway through 'NEW ROSE HOTEL' from whence it never fully recovered. And as for George Romero and 'LAND OF THE DEAD'? What can I say? But it hurt. It hurt bad. You know it did….

Asia had worked with some of the best directors in the business, legendary figures one and all and by now it must have been obvious even to her that she could do a better job with both hands tied behind her back. Betrayed by a string of would-be mentors and surrogate father figures she did the only thing she could and assuming responsibility for her own career took hold of the reigns to direct herself

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in 'SCARLET DIVA' - a ghastly autobiographical glimpse behind the mirror that comes across more like a cry for help than an actual for real attempt at a motion picture. Nonetheless it still packed a hell of a lot more anger and toxic energy than anything her old man had done in years.

Asia seemed to have not only inherited il maestro's pathological tendency to air his psychological linen in public but had gone one step further by casting her mother, Daria Nicoldi, as her abusive, alcoholic mother and recruiting her friends to largely play themselves, happily tearing down the remaining barriers between the movies and socalled 'real life', the two blurring irrevocably into a single skuzzy, softcore gestalt.

Interesting, I thought. Not exactly a movie I wanted to take home with me but definitely interesting.

Unsurprisingly the public failed to identify with 'SCARLET DIVA's central theme, just how damn hard it is to be Asia Argento, and the film subsequently vanished without a trace, performing just well enough on DVD to bankroll her second, more tightly focused opus.

While 'The heart is deceitful in all things marks a quantum improvement over Miss Argento's earlier work as a director I couldn't help but wonder if Asia wasn't the only person on the planet not to have realized that author J.T.Leroy was really just a woman wearing a funny hat rather than a bi-sexual rent boy or bonafide hermaphrodite. Although this second purgative offering failed to register any more strongly on the box office radar than its predecessor it was clear the maestro's heir apparent was learning fast and it seemed only a matter of time before she gathered the courage to steal her father's rain making magic while he slept and finally came into her own.

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risk of being upstaged by smart ass talking parrot with whom the visibly uncomfortable lead finds himself closeted for much of the flick's running time, the latest and surely most ludicrous addition to the long line of Argento's crime busting birds, friendly flies, cursed cats and other unlikely animal protagonists.

The neo-Goblin score was a distinct improvement over Morricone's recent contributions to the canon but il maestro's inexplicable obsession with dwarfs and the desperate slapstick that added the final height related insult to 'Phantom's aesthetic injury spilled over to infect even the normally dependable Claudio Simonetti who hit an all time low with an insufferable 'funny midget' theme that seemed to have strayed in from 'LIVING IN OBLIVION's darkest nightmares.

Asia's absence came as a breath of fresh air although she somehow managed to cast a deadening hand on the project even at a distance by penning the stilted nursery rhyme that the leads are forced to repeat over and over as if in the hope it might somehow improve in the telling.

According to Alan Jones this worked a lot better in Italian but I remain to be convinced…

I didn't run into Dario again until the premier of his subsequent feature at Gerardmer in the icy winter of 2001.

It had been seven years since that night at Raleigh Studios and at first I thought he wouldn't even recognize me. I had been at the height of my fifteen minutes of pseudo-fame the last time we had met with an office off Sunset, p.a to run my social calendar , limmo service the whole bit. Now I was an itinerant former dogman at odds with the intelligence community and up to my eyeballs in a smoky fug of post 9-11 paranoia but il maestro's gaunt, beleagured face lit up as our gaze met. The insouciance he'd shown at the National Film Theatre was gone, stripped away by the savaging 'Phantom' had received and while to some extent 'SLEEPLESS' marked a return to form the he was as keenly aware of its shortcomings as his sternest critic and grateful for a friendly face in a crowd he feared had come to bury him regardless. A director is a general in charge of an army of traitors like any showman. An audience will love you, laugh with you and wait outside your stage door when you're hot and on a roll but no audience is ever truly friendly. Not for long. Bore 'em or disappoint 'em - even once and they'll turn on you and tear you to pieces regardless of who you are or might once have been.

It was all the master could do to say a few short words by way of an introduction before making a bee-line for the exit, not wanting to stick around to see what happened and with no intention of staying for the traditional Q and A. Those days of easy interaction with the fans were gone for good it seemed or until the stars came round again to their right place and time. It was the winter of 2001. 'Donnie Darko' was plainly the film of the festival. My mentor was no longer the daemon he once was, no longer the undisputed master of the macabre but whatever I was I wasn't even a film maker anymore but that didn't matter to him now any more than it had when we first met.

All that really counted was that we were both still alive, still smoking and still friends despite it all.

Circling around the back of the cinema complex to avoid the festival organizers we struck out across the surface of the frozen lake, giggling like school children as the world faded behind us, the far shore lost in the icy mist as if we had passed alive into Fulci's 'beyond.' I had brought a li'l smoke for old times sake and for a while it really was just like old times, all the better perhaps because neither of us honestly gave a damn about what anyone thought any more.

While hardly vintage stuff 'SLEEPLESS' seemed a step in the right direction, a retreat from 'PHANTOM's abyss to the familiar territory of the 'giallo', the genre the master had made his own yet the familiarity of the material only served as a reminder of the trailblazing frissons of his youth offering a scratch mix of 'Deep Red', 'Opera' and the 'animal trilogy' that began it all en lieu of any real personality of its own as if we were watching a slickly rendered homage to his own work, ersatz Argento rather than the real deal, like Geoff Love or Hugo Montenegro covering a Morricone original. And if il maestro was running on auto-pilot then so was his star. The presence of Max von Sydow in the rehashed Karl Malden role raised my initial expectations but the great man was too far down the pike from 'THE SEVENTH SEAL' to be able to make any real difference to the formulaic material , sleepwalking through his turn as an Italian (!?!) cop every bit as unlikely as Asia's doomed Inspector Manni in 'STENDAHL SYNDROME' whilst grappling with some of the clunkiest English language dialogue in il maestro's ouvre and running the very real 124

When the cold began to seep into us we ducked into another preview theatre at random and found ourselves by chance in the front row of a sparsely attended screening of what turned out to be a Ernest Dickerson's 'BONES'.

We'd missed the first ten minutes but rapidly surmised that we were not only watching an uncredited remake of the 1979 blaxploitation thriller 'J.D's REVENGE' and a homage, intentionally or otherwise to our own material with the nods extending to Snoop Dog returning from hell complete with black hat, coat and glowing eyes.

The spectacle of Snoop trying to make like a certain demi-goth from Stevenage seemed somehow even more absurd than Ali G. trying to make like Snoop and before long we were both in hysterics."What have you done to these kids?"muttered Dario."It's not my fault. You started it…"

But it wasn't our fault at all. At least not directly. As the end roller duly made clear.

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Our mutual friend Adam Simon who had given Dario his translation of the Sefir Yetzirah, the Book of creation had been responsible for the screenplay if not specifically for Snoop's costume and the sight of his name brought us full circle to that night in Malibu, one more tiny link in the invisible lattice of coincidence, an ironic reminder of the forces that had really been in charge all along, that directed our actions through dreams, through pulses in secret rivers, through signs in heaven and changes on earth, heraldries painted on darkness and hieroglyphs graven on the tablets of our brains. They wheeled in mazes. We merely spelled the steps and tried to read the signals. They conspired together and on the mirrors of darkness our eyes had traced the plots our waking minds could scarcely contain. Theirs were the symbols. Ours the images that struggled to convey them…

Then the munchies kicked in and retreating to the far corner of a late night bistro I watched Dario put away two courses while I got him up to speed with what had happened in the Pyrenees, slipping the bleeding stones from my pocket as proof I hadn't been hallucinating all along. Then casting one eye over the dessert menu il maestro began for the first time to discuss the Third Mother. He had just gotten back from a sojourn in Haiti and like myself was increasingly convince that the ecstatic faith of the magic island was a living example of what had once been a pan-European phenomena, an ur-religion rooted in the Goddess worship of ancient Rome and the so-called 'Tarantula Cults' of the dark ages, a white Voodoo that survives hidden by successive masks down through the ages…

She had been waiting for her time to come round for some many years, haunting our dreams but from the very first time I heard the icy tinkle of those tiny silver keys and glimpsed her pale bowed face in my mind's eye there had been something hauntingly familiar about her high forehead and long, dark hair. There was even then only one clear choice, only one vessel, one conduit, one player who could truly embody the role…

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We both knew how much was at stake, Dario most of all and he had put off the inevitable for as long as possible but we were running out of time and he had to finish it, to complete the circle while there was still a chance.

He knew what was at stake and tried to distract himself developing a script entitled 'DARK GLASSES' and then abandoning it along with a rough sketch for a Venetian giallo, marking time with 'THE CARD PLAYER' while the last few pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

My mother had expressed a growing desire to see all the places I had told her about during her convalescence and when she was strong enough took her to meet the black Madonna. Again I rode the cable car through the curling eternal mists and joined the queue of pilgrims winding in single file through the basilica to touch the globe in La Morenita's extended hand and if I wished for anything this time it was merely for the right thing to happen, for my eyes to penetrate the toxic 21st century haze and my ears to hear her whisper once more, for my heart to know her mysteries ever more keenly so that I might at last find the words and images to express the inexpressible.

And in the meantime the lunatic soap opera we take to be 'real life' roared on.

The second Gulf War broke out just as I was sitting down to breakfast with Alejandro Jodorowkski in a dingy hotel dining room in Brussels. When I pointed out that this had happened before the last time we met Jodo' blanked on me, unable to recall the events in question. He was quite adamant we had never met before, nor had he ever seen or heard of my work or served on any festival jury such as the one I described. In any case he insisted he was a poet, not a film-maker and claimed to have no further interest in motion pictures which he considered a passing fad rather than a medium suitable for bona fide adult artists. I nodded along, keeping one eye on the television screen in the corner of the room, content that at least this time the great man didn't seem to have any problem with my smoking which passed unnoticed.

Jodo' had come to Brussels to perform his much touted 'magical cabaret' for the last time and anxious adherents had come from all across Europe to get the benefit. Sadly events in got in the way just as they had precluded any chance of esoteric discourse when we had first met back in 1990. Canceling his show at the eleventh hour Jodo' announced to a packed house that magic had no place in wartime and that instead he would read them an epic composition he had recently penned as an 'act of revolutionary poetry'. The screed was in French so I didn't stick around and later I heard Jodo' cut his impromptu reading short and bottled it when the crowd turned ugly.

Perhaps I should have reminded him that a magician and a poet is still a showman and a general like any other but I doubt he would have heard me. Not that I had an audience myself mind you but then I didn't need one. For now the magic was reward enough…

And that night I climbed the mountain and gazed by starlight once more upon the faces of those antehuman Gods. And I waited for a sign perhaps. And waited again. But the Gods were silent.

We made an early start and headed north across the Pyranees by way of Andora and the valley of Ussat to Montsegur and Madame Couquet's auberge where the first fire of the season already smouldered on the hearth.

Madame greeted us with open arms, looking somehow younger than when I saw her last. The old inn was the closest I had come to a real home over the years and despite the language barrier she struck up an instant rapport with my mother that was to become a lasting, almost intuitive bond.

Strange and oddly reassuring as it was to see these two matriarchs together at the long table the homecoming was not complete without a third mother, a third replica of the Madonna of Montserrat that I had purchased the day before in Spain and presented now to Madame Couquet to watch over the auberge.

"Merci. It's very nice. But we already have one."

"What?"

"She says she's already got one…"

"Thanks mom. I can…What d'you mean she's already got one?"

"Ouie …ouie…"Madame nodded, trying to explain in her heavily accented Southern French."Notre Dame la Lumiere!"

"You mean a replica like the one I got in New York?"

"No. A real one."

And it was true...

The third mother had been there all along, hidden in plain sight in the tiny church opposite the auberge. To be fair the chapel was locked six out of seven days and Sunday mornings in Montsegur had invariably found me either still in bed or camped out on the mountain. The last thing any of us had thought to do over the years in course of getting with the whole Cathar deal was to go to mass.

And there she was. Beautiful, cryptic, proud, staring out from the dust of three hundred years since monks from Montserrat had first brought Her from the far side of the mountains to symbolize their spiritual kinship with the hardy villagers of Montsegur, explicitly drawing together and linking the initiatory mountains in a way that Otto had scarcely guessed at. He had spent enough time at Montserrat to familiarize himself with the Benedictine library reading room and drew on its medieval texts in his research but in his haste to denigrate the Catholic faith responsible for the extermination of his beloved Cathari he blinded himself to the common pagan roots that bound these ancient sites together, roots that were deeper and older than Christianity and its heretical antithesis.

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"My ancestors were witches and I am a heretic…"wrote Otto and in his natural revulsion for the inquisition and championing of the lost ideals of the troubadours he missed what had been right under his nose all along. He derided the faith of Madame Couquet's father, the town priest who had given him lodging and never set foot inside the church to catch sight of that all important icon, the Black Mother who had been venerated in those mountains by one name or another since time out of mind.

If he did see the image in the church he made no mention of it, nor did he remark on the crude yet unmistakable outline of the arachnid daubed on the wall of the cavern where he first unearthed those bleeding stones that would help speed him towards his early grave. You can see that telltale graffiti for yourselves, large as life in the montage that opens the Subversive DVD release of 'The Secret Glory' where it simply flits by without comment or context. Yet it is there.

Perhaps in his haste to identify Montsegur with the mythical 'Grail Castle' he overlooked the fundamental contradiction of a heretical faith that viewed the material world as being inherently flawed having a material treasure to begin with. It was not in the nature of the Cathari to venerate relics in the manner of the Catholic church and the sight of the blood of Christ liquefying from the living rock tends to lose much of its superstitious charge if the attendant culture doesn't accept the existence or theological relevance of a flesh and blood messiah to begin with.

As with the consistent conflation of the ancient Celts, the Druids, Beaker folk and megalith builders of Stonehenge and Avebury into a single mythic culture by the modern New age movement it was all too easy before the advent of reliable carbon dating and other techniques common to modern archeology to misidentify the shrapnel of a dozen time periods as the residue of a single 'old religion' and it transpires that the caves of the Lombrives have been continuously inhabited since the end of the last ice age. It is my considered contention that Otto Wilhelm Rahn and Antonin Gadal did not find the 'holy grail' or the mythical 'treasure of the Cathars' but the relics of a far older cult that had held those caverns sacred long years before Christ and his cup, the Cathari or Abraham and the prophets. Before the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Black Madonna, before Kybele or Cybele or Sybil she was known as Kubaba the goddess of the caves who was worshipped in grottoes and on mountaintops since the dim red dawn of creation and known to her adherents as the Great Mother - Magna Mater or Meter Orie the 'mountain mother' and by who's name we know the black stones that have been associated with her worship since the fogs of timeless time. Meteorites - quite literally the 'stones of the Mountain Mother'.

The stones that fell from heaven were venerated not because of their extraterrestrial origins which primitive man could barely have guessed at but because of their alleged physical properties - the power to heal grave illness, protect against one's enemies and grant the gift of prophecy are so closely intertwined with the veneration of the Black Mother that the two are effectively one and the same.

The ideograms for the 'mountain mother ' in the Hittite alphabet range from a lozenge or cube, a double headed axe, a dove, a cup, a door or a gate - all images of the goddess in Neolithic Europe. The very name Kubaba may betoken a cave or empty vessel, a wombspace or possibly derive from kube or kuba, recalling at once the black meteoric cube of the Ka'bah that was brought into Islam after Mohammed routed its original idolatrous worshippers out of Mecca.

It is said that in pagan times the seven priestesses of the Ka'bah circled the black stone naked as when the world was yet young. Today that practice is still recalled in the tawaf, the sevenfold counterclockwise circuit of the shrine performed by all pilgrims to take the Hadj. The ancient rituals roots almost certainly descend from the Sumerian goddess Inanna and her Babylonian equivalent Ishtar who was supposed to have passed through the seven doors of death or 'seven gateways' on her journey to the underworld, each successive gate keeper demanding she remove a garment as tribute until she finally stood naked before her elder sister Ereshkigal, 'Queen of the Great Earth', goddess of the underworld, a dance of death clearly echoed in the later Christian myth of Salome and the 'seven veils.'

Erishkigal is also known by the epithet 'Allatu' (literally 'the goddess') which is beyond question an earlier form of Al'Lat or Alilat identified by Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. as the divinity worshipped in Mecca before the coming of the prophet, Mohammed and the substitution and subsequent veneration of her partriarchal counterpart, Allah - essentially the goddess Al'Lat with a soft 't') MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

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Al'lat has been identified with the three fold moon goddess codeified by Robert Graves into the archetypes of virgin, hag and whore whereas in the introduction to the Penguin edition of the Koran translator N.J. Dawood states that the three mothers Al'Lat, Al'Uzza and Manat represent 'the Sun, venus and Fortune trespectively' and the writer Alby Stone suggests that in early Mesopotamian art the only heavenly bodies to be depicted regularly were a trinity of the Sun, the Moon and Venus, tracing the roots of the names 'Al'uzza' and 'Manat' to an even more archaic source betokening 'strength' and 'destiny' respectively.

If the three 'daughters of Allah' are personifications of natural phenomena then Al'Lat / Allatu / Ereshkigal is suely the earth while the other two may well have stood for fire and water as in the Book of Creation, the sefir yetzirah or for that matter the 'banat', the three daughters of Baal, the Canaanite supreme being.

Islamic oral tradition (al-Hadith: 'the Talk') has it that Mohammed's original vision initially endorsed the notion that the three mothers were goddesses but he apparently later disowned this as a false teaching inspired by Satan. (Mircea Eliade 'A History of Religious Ideas', vol.3, p.68)

The original idol may still exist somewhere deep beneath the walls of the Vatican although it is said to have been lost in the fifth century. To some extent the Vatican's interest in Montserrat is indicative of the continuing power of the goddess cult within the edifice of the Church itself and the extraordinary degree of theological doublethink deployed to maintain the existing partriarchal order and keep the wool pulled over the public's eyes as to what force they truly serve.

At Petra the nabateans venerated a four sided stone named after Allat (Arthur Cotterell/ Dictionary of World Mythology, p 24) whose son Dusura is just another take on Tammuz / Dumuzi /Du'uzi the green man who dies only to be reborn every spring after six months in the underworld.

The Sumerians called him 'Dumu-zi'abzu' - 'faithful son of the abyssal waters' and believed that as in the later myth of Orpheus and Persephone the goddess Ishtar / Inanna was forced to descend to the underworld to retrieve him. Her actions provoked the wrath of the Gods and she was sentenced by the seven Anunnaki, the judges of the underworld the hellacious counterparts of the Sebettu, the seven sages venerated by the Babylonians and associated with the seven major cities that dominated their civilization.

Commonly asked Questions: Q: Is the Pope Catholic?

A: Do you believe in Santa Claus?

The three most sacred sites in Islam are mecca, Medina and the Dome of the Rock on Temple mount, Jerusalem which is identified in Judaism as the 'Eben Shettiyah' - the 'stone of foundation' around which God built the world. Deep beneath the rock is a partly flooded cavity known to Muslims as 'Birel-Arweh' or the 'Well of Souls' and Jewish lore maintains how when David dug the foundations of the first temple he found the 'Eben Shettiyah' - the block that holds back the Abyss. When he tried to move the stone the waters of the underworld burst forth mirroring a parallel tradition in Islam which holds that when Mohammed cast down the idol that once stood in the sacred complex at Mecca he unblocked an ancient well beneath the Ka'bah. The idol was said to resemble the body of a 'black woman' , a deity named 'Hubal' - almost certainly another mask of Kubaba or Cybele who was known to be venerated at that time in Phrygia. In fact a Phrygian statue of Cybele graven from a single meteoric 'aerolite' (Cumont 'Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism' 1911 pp.46-7) was apparently presented to Rome by King Attalus in 204 BC. The ecstatic rites of Cybele's worship whilst 128

initially a little alien to the Roman temperament seem to have caught on with the populace who venerated her in the Phyrgianum, the vast temple that once stood on the site of the present day Vatican. The high priest who presided over those frenzied rituals was known as 'Papus' or father, the direct ancestor of the present day Pope - the head of the patriarchal Holy Roman Church. As her worship spread throughout the Empire icons made in her image proliferated, painted black not because of the skin of the Egyptians, the dark alluvial soil of the Nile or some obscure Arabic root word but because the template on which she is based, the original statue that held sway over Rome was made of a black stone. Behind the masks of Christianity and Islam the Goddess, the Grail and the bleeding stones were one all along.

The last time I saw il Maestro was just before the death of the last Pope back in 2005. Rome was languishing in the grip of a greenhouse spring, the skies opening over the eternal city as if heaven itself were sinking and all the angels franticly bailing out water and somehow stay afloat. The Trevi fountain was not much good for postcards anymore, the Sistine chapel was closed for the duration and the Colliseum where Cellini had once met that mysteriou Sicillian sorceror was now a shallow lake.

We snuck into Dario's office early one morning with the collusion of his brother Claudio, giving Mr.Horn the time to light the suite in faux 'Suspiria' primary colors while I manned the camera and Simon Boswell took care of sound. We were already rolling by the time Dario opened the door and Miss Moor who was hidden behind him reached out to place a gloved hand on his shoulder.

It was only the lightest of touches but when he turned and saw her veiled figure hovering over his shoulder he gasped and I'm proud to say we actually got a spontaneous jump out of him on camera. Maybe he thought it was Asia or someone or something else behind that treble veil of crepe but for a moment, for little more than a second he looked actually scared. Then Miss Moor laughed and il maestro caught sight of our lens, regaining his composure as he realized he was on the Shadow Theatre equivalent of candid camera.

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But for a beat we actually had him!

Later he picked us up from our suite at the Hotel Astrid, the location for 'The Bird With The Crystal Plumage' and treated us to a lavish multi-course banquet at his favourite lbistro. He was officially preparing 'TERZA MADRE - THE THIRD MOTHER' or 'THE MOTHER OF TEARS' , the third and final part of the trilogy and it was our job to look in and haunt him just a little, to download recent war stories and offer whatever support and encouragement he might have needed.

To this day I do not feel any would-be reviewer has truly understood the man or his work. His ouvre exists outside the traditional conventions of the genre and have to be approached on their own terms. His critics and supporters rely all too often on the blunt tools of traditional pyschoanalysis searching for underlying traumas and hinting time and again at their inherent misogyny yet the glory of Dario's canon is that these pathological impulses were never repressed to begin with. Say what you will of the man but he was and always will be one of the most painfully, at times embarrassingly honest film-makers to have lived and breathed. His psychological dirty linen was openly displayed from the very off, his fears and desires foregrounded for all to see while something very strange and very different lurked in the background, barely hidden in the wallpaper, literally between the walls and beneath the soles of our shoes requiring audiences and critics to abandon conventional logic and adopt an altogether more Jungian approach. Tragically when he finally found a degree of critical recognition in the latter part of his career it only served to encourage his weaker works while continuing to misunderstand what really made him tick, derriding 'INFERNO' and allowing 'FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET' to slip into obscurity. Wile 'PHANTOM OF THE OPERA' remains widely available 'FOUR FLIES' was never digitally remastered and remains effectively unavailable on either VHS or DVD - and I don't count the existing fuzzy pirates! If you can't see the look in Mimsy Farmer's eyes as the windscreen explodes in the second last shot in the film then you're missing the whole point of the damn movie and in every video I've ever come across her face is reduced to little more than a grey blue blur.

I don't think even Dario himself knows what's really hidden beneath the peeling art deco wallpaper of his unconsciopus or quite how those things came together the way they did in his dreams but like it or not the man enlarged my mind. While some fans obviously get off on the

unhealthier aspects of his material the violence, misogyny, incest, anorexia and foreground body horror was never the point, only the window dressing, the aesthetic superstructure, a magician's trick deliberately misdirecting us from what was really going on. I was a cynic and an atheist when I first set foot in the Scala cinema all those years ago and without me even realizing Dario had offered me a way out of the darkness, a key to help me make sense of the world that had been handed down to me. My ex-girlfriend Kate had once lobbed a copy of 'THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE AT ME' claiming that it was 'Exactly the kind of shit' she 'didn't need' in her life but I had found more spiritual truth in those lurid, weird-ass, garlic flavored horrorshows than in all the grimoires and holy books I'd ever forced myself to try and read.

For better or worse they made me what I am today and when all is said and done I think I've made a pretty decent fist of my life and the limited opportunities available to me. No matter what happen now or what becomes of us Dario has always been a constant friend, a true ally and the best goddam surrogate father a prodigal son could have hoped to find.

We had all hoped back in the eighties that Mario Bava's son Lamberto might mature to inherit Dario's mantle and after it became apparent he lacked his vision and tenacity we looked to Michele Soavi to carry the tradition forward into the new century but again our hopes were dashed whenthe budding young director took early retirement to care for his own ailing son.

If 'Mother of Tears' was to be not only Argento's swansong but the death knell for the Italian Gothic as a continuing cinematic tradition then it made sense for him to take this last chance to make peace with his shattered family and repair the web of time where it had been broken, to bow out with Daria and Asia at his side. I think we both knew that what he was intending amounted to a kind of career suicide, a grande finale destined to bring the house down. It was a story only he could tell although I told him everything I could in the hope that he might find something he could use, that some small part of my experience could shed a little light on the Three Mother's dark domain.

I had only a day earlier been in a tiny Umbrian hamlet named Narni, ostensibly scouting locations for 'Imago Mortis' an unproduced screenplay taking off on one of the central conceits from 'Four Flies' ('thanatography' - ie: the use of dead people to take pictures, not conventional photographs but three dimensional 'thanatographs') but effectively still pursuing the ellusive trail of the Three Mothers. Recent repair work on a damaged aqueduct had revealed an ancient Dominican torture chamber walled up beneath the village streets, its sadistic apparatus and terrifying frescoes hermetically preserved since the dark days of the inquisition and there on the inner surfaces of the cell doors I found the graffiti left by the prisoners, the unfortunate heretics who had lived out their final days in that lightlless hellhole, geometric markings already familiar to me from the walls of the Lombrives including that inevitable telltale arachnid, the sign of the ellusive Tarantula Cult that had guided me slowly but inevitably back to the very centre of the web, to Rome and the gates of the Vatican itself.

Our conversation that night concerned what lay beneath that square and the current whereabouts of the original meteoric icon, surely indestructable by torch or the ravages of time itself, the Roman Sibyl that had presided over our dreams ansd seemingly guided our actions from the very off. I had written a lengthy treatment based on the theme from which I draw the title of this blog, 'LACHRYMAE', concerning the murder of an American actress during a freak thunderstorm in Saint Peter's Square. a subsequent investigation by the dead girl's twin sister and a hard boiled but hopelessly conflicted Roman copper uncover not only a pagan sect operating within the walls of the eternal city but ultimately the existence of the Mother of Tears herself yet on rereading the final draft realized the document said more about myself than it did about my master and accordingly it remained in the filing cabinet where it belonged. Il Maestro had started this thing and now it was up to him to end it the way it had begun. Where our thoughts dovetailed will be readily apparent to viewers of this latest, typically troubling and predictably problematic work yet for now I will say no more of 'TERZA MADRE - THE MOTHER OF TEARS' nor will I divulge its further secrets, partly out of respect for its auteur but most of all out of the sincere desire that you, the audience, should be allowed to come to it on its own terms and interpret it as you will with fresh eyes and open minds. If you have taken the trouble to plough through this convoluted, self-censoring blog then you already know more of the back story than pretty much any other human beings on this planet.

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What lies beneath....

Isis unveiled

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Images courtesy of Dario Argento and 'La Terza Madre - The Mother of Tears' (2007) We talked late into the night and il Maestro spoke with eloquence and passion, evidently grateful for the chance to unburden himself and at length, tiring of the subject he turned to more personal matters, to the wider world beyond our work in the genre, to the long unseen radiical anti-authoritarian documentaries of his youth. I had managed to use what limited visibility I had in the genre to place a sampling of my own nonfiction work before the public eye and Dario couldn't help but wish a little wistfully he could do the same, that he could somehow escape the genre he had made his own and return to his roots, to the shaggy anarchic idealism that motivated his early experiments in cinema only to lie dormant after the crushing box-office reception of his sole attempt at political satire, his atypical and all but forgotten black comedy 'THE FIVE DAYS OF MILAN.' Although of scant interest to his countless fans I do not doubt that it is this early documentary work that il maestro ultimately recalls most fondly and considers his most purely personal work.

I can only hope that some day he realizes his dream to remaster the material and place it before the wider public.

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Epilog - The Key to the treasure That this blog got out of hand is self evident. I set out to write a celebration of il Maestro's work and the ways it had changed, enlightened and deformed my life.

It mushroomed into an esoteric exegesis and while some mysteries have been clarified and put to bed others linger like smoke in the air, refusing to be quite so readily dispelled.

The Rennes Plateau - Summer 2007 - The Visigoth tower viewed from the valley of the River of Colors - Approx. 4.55pm Since my last visit the one restaurant in town, the 'Blue Apple' had been mysteriously burned to the ground and the shadowy 'Association' had taken control of the domain and forced Marcel to give up the cherished keys to the church. Celia took it all in her stride having bigger fish to fry.

She had married Marcel and was pusuing her claim to the throne of Sarawak with some success.

For the first time she had begun to consider moving away from the plateau and dreamed of an airy long house somewhere in the tropics where she might live out her days surrounded by her beloved Dayaks. Dagobert the mountain dog had sadly passed while Grace had moved to Paris and was a mother herself now, her son, Leandro, apparently named after the Telly Savalas character from 'Lisa and the Devil'. Given his heritage I suspect he has a long and interesting life before him. The right wing mayor is sadly still very much in charge of the town although his attempts to enforce some kind of order have thankfully made little headway against the demented status quo. Amateur treasure hunters still chip away at the church's leaky foundations and Danielle is still wearing a dress and mass produces ever more detailed and complex treasure maps, having developed a winning passion for cutting and pasting the covers of Italian horror DVD's and leaving them hanging from surrounding trees and fences as helpful clues to the initiated and warnings to the unwary.

Loose ends and unanswered questions - Nbr 22 in a series The puzzle box found on the altar in Saint Anthony's hermitage, Gallamus Gorge.

Crack the code and you too could qualify for a career in the Shadow Theatre Irregulars. Either that or become an Adept and make it to the next level under your own steam. The hours suck and there's no retirement scheme but it sure beats the hell out of Sudoku!

No sooner had I put up the first installment of this metatextual footnote to il Maestro's oeuvre than a new and stranger series of events caused in part by its posting turned everything I thought I knew about the Rahn affair on its head, forcing a major rethink of the subject matter and engulfing several of this saga's long term readers in the process.

Since embarking on this shaggy dog story I have returned twice to Montsegur and found myself back on Rahn's trail with a vengeance, a process only marginally slowed by my own contribution to the mythos of the dark Goddess finally going into pre-production.

After what I can only describe as some of the strangest events of my life myself and Miss Scarlett, a fellow MySpacer who ended up falling between the lines and getting sucked into the events she was reading about found ourselves back in the sleepy hamlet of Rennes les Chateau.

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Images from the Zone - August 2007 Danielle's work has been getting more and more detailed over the years but the appearance of the Italian horror material is a recent development. I suppose its reassuring to know that at least one other person out there seems to have figured out that the real problem with Rennes is that the town is built over one of Fulci's 'seven dreaded gateways.'

The exqusite choice of titles indicates that not does Danielle have a thorough working knowledge of the genre but considerable insight into the deep history of the area. The copy of Fulci's 'Beatrice Cenci' under its French release title 'The Passion of Beatrice' is a 'metatextual' gag par excellence...

Beatrice of course accompanied Dante during his journey to Hell where among other sinners he encounters his own mento , Guido Cavalcanti, who had been responsible for initiating the young poet into a heretical secret society known as the 'Brotherhood of the Faithful in Love' which traced its linneage back to the Nicetas himself, widely seen as the founding father of the so-called 'cathar' faith. .

Dante studied the lost tongue of the vanquished nation (Romans) and seems to have coined the term 'Lingua Occitania' in his treatise 'De Vulgai Eloquentia' in 1305 from whence we draw our name for what is now the southern most province of modern France - the Languedoc. In its original usage 'Oc' was simply 'Yes' in Romans, the equivalent of 'Oui' or 'Si' and the origin of the modern Anglo-Saxon use of 'okay' as an affirmative particle...

The cover of the French edition of Fulci's 'ZOMBI 2' (It. 1979) aka 'ZOMBIE' (US) aka 'ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS' (UK) - 'THE HELL OF THE ZOMBIES' had been customised with appropriate Veves making one wonder if Danielle hasn't been spending a li'l time in Haiti lately like certain others I could mention? The lad's done his homework alright...

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All of which connects on more levels that I have time to explain.

'Coincidence' perhaps but I stumbled across the shrine to 'Beatrice Cenci' on the same day that we had gotten back from Ussat and a closer inspection of the natural stone pentagram in the Bethlehem Grotto closely associated with the continuing Rahn enigma. The outrlines of a face are still faintly visible beneath the dust on the cave wall, allegedly the 'face of Beatrice' and needless to say the shallow octagonal depression is runored to be a 'gateway' of sorts...

The Bethlehem Grotto is so-named because of a natural shaft in the rock that causes a beam of light to fall on the ancient stone altar before the pentagram om just one day of the year - the 25th December. Members of Gadal's neo-cathar Rosicrucian movement undergo a three year period of study, meditation, indoctrination, fasting and general reprogramming before undergoing their final initiation in the pentagram, possibly in the presence of the 'Pyrenean Grail' which I believe may be in the movement's hands. Since the making of 'The Secret Glory' the grotto has been haphazardly fenced off by the neo-Cathars, destroying much of the site's natural beauty. Behind locked steel gates excavations continue in secret, yielding a steady trickle of fascinating, often contradictory artefacts.

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"I was looking for divinity yet I find myself at the gates of Hell. Still I may continue to walk, to fall, even in flames. If there exists a way towards Heaven then it crosses Hell. At least it does for me.

Well then... I dare!"

- SS Obersturmfuhrer Otto Wilhelm Rahn I labored for some years to pitch a TV sitcom based on the Rennes area and its inhabitants - a format I felt richly suited to the 'cat-in-the-hatty' material - an esoteric hybrid of two British war horses 'CROSSROADS' and ''ALLO, 'ALLO' set largely in the foyer of the titular 'SEVEN DOORS HOTEL' which happens to be built over... well, you can guess that part! A recurring character based on Danielle figured heavily in the treatment alongside a motley assortment of thinly disguised Rennes survivors. While the thought of slamming out a couple of low rent seasons tickled my funny bone the concept failed to raise any smiles from the powers that be and subsequently remained on the drawing board.

It's never been easy to actively profit from the mystery as Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh found out when they lost their shirts trying to sue Dan Brown in London's high court over alleged 'similarities' between the 'Da Vinci Code' and their one time 'groundbreaking' bestseller 'The Holy blood and the Holy Grail' effectively admitting that the whole Sangraal / Sacred bloodline was more or less fictional if not wholly their creation to begin with. Henry Lincoln wisely stayed clear of the legal fallout and still lives in the region of Rennes les Bains where he ekes a stipend conducting esoteric guided tours for lazy conspiracy theorists who can't be bothered to come up with a hypothesis of their own.

Regaining undisputed sway over the Domaine certainly doesn't seem to have done Claire Corbu or Antoine much good. I finally succeeded in getting them around the dinner table but being Ascension Day all the shops were shut and I was forced to turn to our old friend the Sufi Sheik for help with the ingredients. The Sheik's conviction that he could halt the growth of the cancer cells in his body by injecting kettamine into what he believed to be the tumours would seem to have been borne out and he is still happily alive and kicking albeit just a li'l confused about his current identity having hacked apart the Mettarie door with his Templar Sword so many times during a recent spate of violent 'past life related episodes' that the local handymen now refuse to take his calls leaving security at the house on the hill a little wanting. A deep frozen experimental Manta Ray scavenged from the former neurochemist's freezer however provided an adequate main course, fleshed out with local fruit and veg, a cheese selection and the Black forest gateau we'd saved for the occasion complete with the requisite chocolate sprinkles. All in all it slipped down nicely, despite the uneasy, conflicted allegiances of the assembled guests.

Relieved of his formal duties in the graveyard Marcel had not only found the time to completely redraw his graphic account of the plateau's history, this time boldly filling in the missing details but had even found a new publisher willing to take on the poisoned chalice. As aforementioned no one has ever really succeeded in making a dime from the Rennes mystery without losing their lives or their sanity, apart from Dan Brown anyhow but considering the enigma's track record I wouldn't rate his chances in the long run. Celia has recently completed a book of her own, her long awaited autobiography 'Muda Dayang' that I think will come as a true revelation to long term mystery watchers.

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After twenty years of foreplay it came as something of a disappointment when Celia and Marcel finally dropped the other shoe and simply told us what was really going on. Doubtless their account will be hotly disputed and inevitably overlooked in favor of countless more fanciful, more inherently dramatic theories. It's an old story and a simple one. There are a million other stories just like it drifting through the zone but I think you will find on further investigation it fits the known facts too snugly to be anything other than the truth.

And it goes like this The coded documents found by Antoine and Marcel's granddad in the hollow altar column were written in the 1780's by one of Sauniere's shifty predecessors - the Abbe Antoine Bigou. Among his duties as local priest Bigou acted as chaplain and confessor to the noble Blanchefort family who had counted at least one former Templar Grand Master among its illustrious forebears.

They were amongst the richest landowners in the area and fearing they would lose everything at the time of the French Revolution conspired with Bigou to hide their heirlooms and undeclared collateral in the family vault and the catacombs beneath the church itself where they assumed it would survive the attentions of the rapacious albeit superstitious Catholic serfs who had forced the noble line into what they had initially assumed to be temporary exile.

With Boudet's help Sauniere succeeded in partly decoding Bigou's cipher only to find that subterranean waters rising from the cavity beneath the plateau had caused subsidence in the ancient vaults that communicates with the chapel via that narrow stone staircase I first glimpsed all those years ago.

Realizing it would be harder work than he thought Sauniere was forced to recruit Marie Denarnaud's help and with her aid they succeeded in retrieving and frittering away a good part of the Blanchefort family's lost fortune.

A continuing suspicion lingers in the area that some part of the hoard still remains hidden in the increasingly unstable foundations and having gained full and unfettered access to the site in the early nineties Celia and Marcel had set about the laborious The door to the church - Rennes les Chateau task of pumping out the flooded vaults only to eventually reach the conclusion that there was nothing left to find. They had since lost control of the Domaine to the 'Association' who were now saddled with a rickety old building with rising damp.

"There's something moving down there!"

"I know…"

A scuffling, sliding sound came from out of the dark followed by the unmistakable sound of trickling pebbles.

"The hell is that?"

"Sounds like more than one…"

We stood squinting into the blackness.

"Probably just some deranged treasure hunter having a go at the foundations or Danielle hanging out more Fulci titles to scare the tourists…"

"It's not human."

"Oh, c'mon..."

"But it's not. Listen..."

There was a crackle of snapping twigs as one of the prowling shapes cut across the dry brush towards us.

"This place has no cryptozoological history whatsoever. It's not supposed to have a monster…"

"Maybe we should head before we find out…"

"It's cool. I've got just the thing. It's never going to be expecting this!"

Slipping the Arctic floodlamp I had purchased in Akuriri for the previous season's fact finding excursion to northern Iceland I flipped it onto full flood, bathing the base of the Tour Magdala in sudden violent wattage. But it didn't seem to surprise whatever was out there or even slow it down.

"The ***k?"

I narrowed my eyes, deciding that it probably wasn't human after all.

"Let's just go, okay?"

Brandishing the floodlamp defensively I started back across the parking lot to the car.

Big bugger. Some of 'em striations have gotta be at least three inches…. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ TRANSMISSION ENDS

"That's it, huh?"

"Looks that way…"

Miss Scarlett shook her head as we bade our hosts farewell and headed for our waiting hire car."It's just… I dunno… a little disappointing, I guess. Too Scooby Doo.."

"So what were you expecting? Like a space time portal to beyond infinity would have been great but hardly likely. Ditto the Ark of the covenant. And that bloodline thing. Human greed is something I can believe in…"

"What about those bodies they found in the flowerbed? Who killed them?""Collateral damage. I dunno. What does it matter anyhow? It obviously wasn't aliens or little people…"

"And that flashlight…"

"What flashlight?"

It was just after three in the morning and the plateau was dark and still, the outline of the Tour Magdala rising before us in the starlight, the windows of the Villa Bethany blind and silent.

"That flashlight you mentioned in the last blog. Y'know…the one you found in the cave…"

"What about it?"I froze, sensing a stirring in the shadows at the base of the tower.

"You ever get around to measuring those bite marks?"

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Richard Stanley

CEREMONIES Current mood: awake

Blog Archive Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Owing to the limitations of the MySpace medium I have been forced to post this dispatch in two installments. I apologize in advance to those of you whose p.c's force you to scroll from left to right in order to follow the text but sadly I have yet found a way of licking this problem. For those of you who'd prefer to avoid the eyestrain a cleaned up version of the earlier postings are available at: www.everythingisundercontrol.org/nagtloper/ This dispatch was further delayed by the death of my uncle David Elton-Miller who passed peacefully at home on the night of the full moon - July 18 2008.

Dave was a former Special Air Services officer who saw action in Kenya during the Mau-Mau and innovated the use of the boot knife and ankle holster as part of the standard issue SAS kit after finding himself trapped in a tree by his parachute straps and being unable to reach the rifle stowed in his pack when enemy soldiers passed directly beneath him. After being demobbed he settled in Devonshire where he ran a pottery works in Lustly Cleave for several years and became an acknowledged expert in the local iron age remains and faery lore.

Dave's maxim and most celebrated utterance was: -"The criteria of intelligence is the adaptability to circumstantial environment.". He was the only uncle I had and I shall miss him dearly - R.S. Junly 25 2008 138

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CEREMONIES "I am going to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones; but there are some I shall not put down at all . I must not write down the real names of the days and months which I found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Akklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the way to do them, for peculiar reasons...

Then there are the Ceremonies, which are all of them important, but some are more delightful than others - there are the White ceremonies, and the Green ceremonies and the Scarlet ceremonies. The Scarlet Ceremonies are the best, but there is only one place where they can be performed properly, though there is a very nice imitation which I have seen done in other places.

Besides these, I have the dances, and the Comedy, and I have done the Comedy sometimes when the others were looking, and they didn't understand anything about it. I was very little when I first knew about these things…"

Arthur Machen - 'The White People' 1. Breathing in At the time of the murder I was halfway through a telephone conversation with Rob at 'Transcend Media', trying to work out a mutually acceptable time to drop off the tapes from the Shepherd's Bush gig. The show had run like clockwork with Carl riding high, batting out two whole sets that comprised a sort of potted history of the 'Fields of the Nephilim' reaching all the way back to 'Preacher Man' –the very first single I had ever been involved with and evoking a flurry of memories. The Empire was a pleasingly old school venue somewhat more in keeping with the proceedings than the cloying atmosphere of the dying Astoria where the band had resurfaced last summer after a prolonged sabbatical. Some things improve with age and so it was with Carl who had emerged like a black butterfly from his fin-de-siecle chrysalis to finally become the man Himself, the living breathing embodiment of the larger than life hieratic figure he had at first only pretended to be.

The shifting line up had lead to the footage from the Astoria and Helldone gigs being shelved as the band found its feet but the sets were smoother and fuller now. The audience too had changed and while some cadres were sorely missed the ranks had if anything swollen since the previous season with new faces who brought with them strange new customs to supplant the ceremonies of old. The human pyramids that had first appeared in the nineties were still de rigeur but the shoal of inflatable fish passed eagerly across the heaving mosh pit were a new addition, taking the place of the fistfuls of flour that settled in our hat brims back in the nineties.

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West Indian accent and now her voice rose an octave or two. Cupping the receiver a li'l closer to my ear I raised my own voice to compensate. I'd been planning to hop a train to Hitchin, knock back a pint or two with Carl and discuss the way forward but other, more urgent business had come up as it is want to do on Fridays, a pressing personal matter that for all the best will in the world simply refused to take a back seat. It was after all Friday - July 18th 2008 - and a full moon which probably went a long way towards explaining those weird vibes at street level. I always get a li'l restless this time of month as long term readers will be aware and in the end I'd been forced to make a painful executive decision and postpone my parley with the preacher man 'til monday by which time the moon would be safely on the wane and my therian characteristics less to the fore. Of course I should've told Rob up front that having to make occasional allowance for the moon comes with the territory when hiring werewolf labor but I doubt he would've understood.

Besides there was no way anyone was gonna be lookin' at those digi-masters over the weekend and there was Shadow Theatre business afoot…

Something to do with Carl's outstretched hands, I was told, although at face value the connection between Nemo and the Nephilim would seem a bit of a reach. The proverbial 'one that got away.' Still, a cult is defined by its rituals and it is the task of an anthropologist to observe and document those rites without bias or subjective judgement, especially when those traditions are still growing, still alive and healthily evolving before our eyes and lenses. Scrambled into action at short notice the Shadow Theatre irregulars performed admirably providing enough cover to work around the fish if necessary. Along with last year's highlights and a few other li'l surprises I'm hoping we'll finally get the green light to go that extra mile into making the long awaited DVD into somethin' more than just your regular common or garden concert video.

The screams grew louder, a series of shrill, anguished cries that tapered off into an unhealthy rattle.There didn't seem to be any point in mentioning what was going on outside to Rob and what I'd been hearing didn't really settle in until a beat or two after I'd already hung up. Crossing to the window I saw a bemused ring of onlookers gathering on the far side of the square, their eyes turned towards what I took to be the source of the disturbance. They seemed frozen, impassive as mannequins or figures on a stage awaiting a cue, seemingly oblivious to the posse of kids who steamed through and past them like a school of bike bound barracuda, hands collectively rising to tug at hoods and caps as they disappeaed beneath the railway bridge to lose themselves the trackless headwaters of the Goldborne Road. The woman who had been making a fuss had stopped now and the vendors resumed their business, the pulse of life returning as the various onlookers began to drift sheepishly away. I lit a last smoke, double checking my kit before making tracks, deciding to throw in a copy of H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Dunwich Horror' for good measure as well as an extra pair of dry socks and a travel worn paperback edition of Arthur Machen's early tales. It was lookin' a li'l grey out there and I figured the extra socks might come in handy. With Blighty floundering through another greenhouse summer and the home counties sliding inch by inch into the swamp its all a man can do at times to keep his head and his feet dry, let alone hope to find peak viewing conditions for a July moon and it was July already - or so I was told…

By the time I hit the street the first coppers had begun to arrive, a pair of red faced foot soldiers in Kevlar vests huffing and puffing as they jogged nervously across the square, looking for the action that had already happened ten minutes ago. Two more rozzers were interviewing the lady who runs the restaurant/gallery space downstairs who was just telling them that she hadn't seen a thing. I could have chimed in to say it had been kids less than half my age but instead I nodded sympathetically and headed for the tube. I could have said at least one of 'em was white, another mixed race or Asian but I doubt it would have helped, nor had I actually seen which one had done the deed, only that a deed had been done.

At any rate I was going to have to to step lightly if I was going to make my connection. The 11.45 to Cardiff waits for no man…

Since the advent of digital technology the post-production personnel seem to absorb more of the budget than all of the other departments put together. As a matter of fact I was just on the 'phone to Rob, trying to rough together a plan when someone decided to stick a knife in the chick who had been yelling something on the far side of the square. The street was filled with the usual listless punters and hawkers crying their wares, this being Portobello road - the home of the Shadow Theatre's UK headquarters - and I have a well developed habit of screening out the constant throb of background sound, vaguely timing myself to its rythyms and enjoying its vitality without picking up on its specifics or getting emotionally involved unless strictly necessary.

The chick had been putting out a stream of alcohol laced abuse in a strident, somewhat hectoring 140

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2. The Secret Glory of Arthur Machen Mankind in its arrogance knows little of the earth.

Even as we plumb the dying oceans and the nearer reaches of space a rambler in the Welsh valleys might still feel a chill as the shadows lengthen and the airy silence presses in, a silence that is not a silence at all but an intricate symphony of subliminal sound, the white noise of things growing and dying. This quickening of the heart, one part terror, one part exhilaration in the face of nature at its most sublime is panic in its primal sense, what our forefathers knew as the proximity of the pagan deity Pan, the hieratic embodiment of the earth's fecundity, misunderstood and maligned by the people of the Book as the horned essence of evil itself.

education and his earliest surviving tales such as 'The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita' indicate a precocious fascination with all things esoteric.

His first novella, 'The Great God Pan' appeared in 1894 to reviews of unparalleled hostility, deemed '… the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable yet seen in English' by the Westminster Gazette and summed up by the Manchester Guardian as '…an incoherent nightmare of sex.' Machen's debut concerns a working class waif named Mary and her wealthy benefactor who grooms her to become a guinea pig in a grotesque experiment in early brain surgery. Under the scalpel she experiences a vision of the vast and formless deity of Nature only to awaken as a drooling idiot. She is found to be pregnant and before dying gives birth to a daughter who matures into a beautiful, voraciously seductive avatar of Chaos, a pagan antichrist who proceeds to cut a vengeful apocalyptic swathe through stuffy fin-de siecle London.

Following through with 'The Novel of the White Powder' and its companion piece 'The Novel of the Black Seal' Machen introduced one of his most cherished themes, the survival of the folkloric 'little people', the children of Danu who are supposed to have disappeared into the Welsh hills but live on in a kind of transdimensional 'otherworld' from which they continue to exert an obscure and baleful influence over human affairs. The sudden decline of his young wife, Amy, recently diagnosed with cancer, spurred the creation of 'The White People', one of Machen's finest stories and an acknowledged masterpiece of supernatural fiction, an unsettling first person narrative depicting a child on the cusp of puberty and her fatal communion with the inhabitants of faeryland.

The poet and mystic Arthur Machen came of age in those remote backwoods. Born in 1863 he spent his formative years at Llandewi Rectory in Gwent where one solitary summer afternoon he took an unfamiliar path through the hills and encountered something that touched his soul and chafed against his Christian upbringing, something that he struggled for the rest of his life to put into words.

Adrift in London he found employment as a journalist and translator, honing his craft by laboriously translaring the torrid prose of Casanova's 'Memoirs' before taking on a commission to compile a definitive catalogue of occult literature. This daunting part-work marked the beginning of his true

Machen's tale would inspire countless writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King but the genre he helped create held no further interest for him. A real life 'horror of the soul' took hold of him and working in a grief stricken frenzy he completed his first novel, 'The Hill of Dreams', deconstructing his opiate laced prose and returning to the half remembered landscapes of his youth to create a thinly veiled account of his own pursuit of the mysteries. The opening passage concerning an amorous tryst with an elemental woodland spirit is described with the lucidity of first hand experience, a conviction that places his work in a wholly different class from his imitators.

Eschewing the sensationalism of 'yellow' fiction Machen won critical respect but set himself on the road to ruin by alienating his readership. Turning to the occult for solace he was initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn on the 21st of November 1899, taking the name Frater Avallaunius and might have abandoned literature entirely had it not been for the Great War and the controversy sparked by the appearance of his hastily penned potboiler 'The Bowmen'. The tale of the ghostly archers of Agincourt coming to the aid of the retreating tommies was retold by a nurse on the Western front to cheer her wounded charges and repeated orally from one soldier to the next until it found its way back to the British papers as a statement of fact. In an echo of modern UFO hysteria Machen's attempts to set the record straight lead to public accusations that he was involved in a convoluted conspiracy to cover up the 'real truth'.

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The 'affair of the angels' puzzled Machen but above all gave him hope, a renewed belief in the power of faith that he saw increasingly embodied in the symbolic quest for the Holy Grail, the lost link between man and nature and the balm to both his and the world's pain. His various discourses on Anglo-Saxon Grail lore, collected in 1925 under the title 'The Secret of the Sangraal' give only a partial insight into the obsessive research that consumed his remaining years. 'The Great Return' (1915) concerns the miraculous reappearance of the sacred relic in an isolated Welsh village while his final masterpiece 'The Secret Glory' (1922) is a sustained attempt to reposition the quest in a contemporary post-war context. In Paradise Lost (1:780) when the peasant stumbles across the elves at their midnight revels Milton describes how 'at once with joy and fear his heart rebounds' and it is in the reconciliation of these two conflicting yet paradoxically complementary emotions that Arthur Machen principally concerned himself, his collected fiction charting the stations of an inner journey from the fear and inhibitions of his Anglican childhood to the joy and wonder of his final acceptance of nature and the yearnings of his own pagan soul.

Machen lived out his impoverished, declining years in Amersham where the locals in the King's

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Arms still remember his inexhaustible supply of baffling anecdotes. He died quite peacefully in 1947 at the age of 84. …'As he awoke there was a glinting that might have been the flash of sunlight and the branches rustled and murmured. He held out his hands and cried to his visitant to return; he entreated the dark eyes that had shone over him, and the scarlet lips that had kissed him. And then panic fear rushed into his heart and he ran blindly, dashing through the wood.'

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3. Breathing Out London passes.

The river passes.

The city passes.

Then come open spaces, trees and more trees and the first green fields.

What remains of old England spread out beneath the lowering, lustureless skies.

They wont let you smoke on the trains anymore but at least the trains are faster now when they run at all. They put so many chemicals in the filter tips these days you'd have to be crazy to smoke 'em anyhow and skinning up in a public compartment was never really an option. So I reread part of 'The Dunwich Horror' instead, at least the parts that concerned me before returning to my meditations on Machen, musing on how strange it was that he had produced almost all of his best work in one year - 'The White People', 'The Hill of Dreams' and a lengthy non-fiction work entitled 'Hieroglyphs', a sort of esoteric 'theory of everything' akin to Poe's 'Eureka' that the author himself placed great personal store in yet failed to find publication in his lifetime and which continues to leave even his most ardent fans cold to this day - I895, I think it was - the same year his wife passed away. And after that… nothing. Nothing for almost twenty years, until the Great War and the affair of 'The Bowmen'.

At first the voices around me are the clipped tones of white collar workers beating their retreat to the clotted home counties, quietly discussing the credit crunch and their prissy all too English sexual hang ups. Then as you reach the Severn estuary and places west the office workers drain away, the voices of the other passengers changing as they slip a rung or two down the economic ladder, the tone growing more raucous, the humor more ribald, the dress sense palpably shabbier, the hair-do's more ill-advised until with a whiff of cheap aftershave and greasy chip oil the all but incoherent p.a system announces that you have come at last to the land of the Red Dragon, the blighted, rain streaked kingdom of Wales.

Arthur Machen was born in Caerleon although you'd be hard pressed to know that as no plaque exists to mark his passing, let alone a statue or street name despite the fact he is beyond question one of the greatest authors of the uncanny to have ever lived and breathed on this not so fair green earth. In fact 'The White People' may well be the single scariest story ever written - at least according to H.P.Lovecraft who wheels out the superlatives in his ground breaking essay 'Supernatural Horror in Literature.' Unlike H.P.L. however Machen had a highly developed social conscience evident in the grotesque fate of his working class Mary at the hands of the patrician surgeons in the 'Great God Pan' or the snippy treatment of the young village girl ('who was quite poor') by the courtiers in 'The White People' yet for some reason the powers that be still find it far easier to idolize Dylan Thomas and Richard Llewelynn as stalwart scions of Welsh culture than risk giving serious consideration to something so palpably destabilizing, so inherently edgy, let alone pause long enough to figure out what the man was really on about…

West of Cardiff the Llanwern steelworks give way to the refininery towers, slag heaps and reprocessing plants of Port Talbot and the BP petrochemical plant at Baglin Bay. The view from the end of the M.4 by night is said to have inspired the opening images of Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner' and Terry Gilliam claims to have come up with the idea for 'Brazil' after hearing the eponymous song on his car radio while driving through Baglin Bay and being struck by the stark contrast between the swooning, romantic ballad and the grim, grey vista that surrounded him.

Not having a fraction of the budget available to either picture I settled on simply going on location to Port Talbot rather than trying to recreate it, the scrap heaps and refinery towers forming the heavily filtered skyline of 'Hardware's anonymous 21st century metropolis. Even the locals have gotten in on the joke, christening a local nightclub 'The Zone' after Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' . In fact I have fond memories of the venue having photographed the witchy all-girl and sadly now defunct metal band 'RockBitch' there some years ago but that, as they say, is another story…

The land of the Red Dragon has always struggled against the red cross of Saint George and the stifling double whammy of English cultural and economic imperialism and the years since the industrial revolution have not been kind to the green hills and winding valleys of Machen's youth.

The land has been raped, mortgaged, strip mined, remorgaged and raped again, turning some of the most beautiful country on God's Earth into a post industrial wasteland that in turn inspired a slew of dystopian cinematic futures.

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The cumulative effect of this despolation on the mass psyche of the zone's inhabitants has yet to be fully understood but it can be no mere coincidence that the area sports the highest suicide rates in the United Kingdom. On 19 febuary 2008 Jenna Parry was found hanging in the woods near the village of Cefn Cribbwr, some five miles from Bridgend, the last stop on the line before you reach Port Talbot itself. The 16 year old was the 17th teenager to top themselves within 13 months. Not only was this latest 'suicide cluster' remarkable for the comparative youth of the victims but , at least among a number of the dead, there were established relationships , familial, social and virtual that caused authorities to suspect the existence of some form of 'Suicide Club' operating through the conduit of the social networking sites, specifically Bebo and MySpace. (*see 'Bridgend deaths: Police warn of Bebo Suicide Cult ' The Independent - 27 January - 2008) The local authorities finally wised up to just how bad the state of malaise had become and in a vain attempt to boost morale poured funds into planting rows of trees, artfully landscaping the verges of the freeway so that you can no longer kick back, turn up the Vangelis music on the stereo and get the full benefit from the last few miles of the M.4 as once was our want although if you pull off at the Baglin Bay exit at just before 3.00 am, the usual hour for dumping the forges the effect is still impressive enough even now. There is a ragged gypsy encampment that has sprung up in the exclusion zone around the B.P plant where the M.4 finally peters out in a welter of concrete roundabouts and the trainlines curve inland to Neath where I disembarked, stocking up on a pint of water, a packet of chocolate biscuits and a very large bag of nightlights before asking directions to the local bus station. I was perhaps a li'l undersupplied for the rough territory I was headed for but I was on the tightest of tight schedules and had to limit myself to the bare essentials - a couple of books and a waterproof military sleeping bag.

Some believe the last of the Tuatha Danaan, the 'children of Danu', the mythic first folk who were supposed to have raised the standing stones before the coming of the Celts or the Mylesians vanished into a door in this great prehistoric rock. The surrounding hills are certainly hollow enough, honeycombed with abandoned mine shafts some of which open onto natural galleries in what is widely known by the spelunking community to be Britain's largest and least explored limestone districts. Over the years a plethora of subterranean mythology has accrued about the area ranging from the usual anecdotes concerning buried treasures guarded by sleeping knights and laborers in the pits hearing phantom miners, commonly known as'tappers', hammering and chiselling in hidden galleries to more contemporary shaggy dog stories concerning hidden UFO bases and the clandestine use of the shafts for storing nuclear or other more exotic forms of waste.

More wary daytrippers venturing into those hills, especially at that hour are prone to equipping themselves with tents or flashlights which is of course why they never see anything like Machen's woodland elementals to begin with. Some say the faeries left not with the coming of Christianity but the coming of electric light and there may be some truth to this. They didn't leave of course but people simply lost the ability to see them. To notice them mayhap you have to be able to see without looking, kinda like viewing those holographic 'Magic Eye' images that were briefly all the rage in the early nineties. It involves detaching the vision from the object by focusing beyond it and allowing the mind to rest. On a moonless night the aim when walking in the dark is not to franticly look for the path but to defocus the eyes and wait for the shape of things to emerge. Rest long enough and the rocks, trees and hedges will slowly reveal themselves. The modern world is filled with noise, artificial light and activities which stimulate the senses rather than allowing them to rest - the very opposite required for seeing. On a mission such as the one I found myself on this night a flashlight would have not only been unnecessary, it would have been out of the question. Bad sportsmanship to say the least…

I rode a rickety local bus as far as the tiny and rather nondescript village of Gllyneath where I shouldered my pack and struck out on foot. towards the great black hump of Craig-y-Ddinas...

A narrow track on the left hand side of the rock winds steeply upwards, threading its way past the mouths of the first set of shafts before curving down towards the junction of the Melte and Hepste rivers and the overgrown ruins of the gunpowder factory that predictably blew itself up more than a century ago now. It seems somehow curiously apposite that the only commercial activity the valley has ever been put to was the production of high explosives. The stubby walls of the gunpowder works are the last sign of human habitation before you reach the bunkhouse above the Clynwynn Falls - a good five miles as the crow flies. No great distance for a determined rambler you might imagine but the river winds and winds again and the mossy cliffs fall away more steeply on either side of the faltering path, the valley below lost in an undulating green canopy, beech and oak and hazel and ash and yew intertwining until you can no longer tell the one from another, the wild woods rising rampart upon rampart into the distances beyond. Unless you know this place like the back of your hand it might take you a full day or more to cover that kind of ground.

For a moment I wished I could break out the chocolate biscuits or throw myself down in the wet grass, to revel in the moment like Tarkovsky's stalker returned once more to his beloved 'Zone', to at least roll a smoke but business was business and I was running late. Consulting my pocket watch I took a second deeper breath before propelling myself down the path towards the woods.

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Greg Copeland, the cameraman who shot the first Nephilim videos had just met the Welsh lass who was to become his first wife and on one particularly sunny she bundled him and his slacker friends, namely yours truly and my buddy Anton Beebe (grandson of the man who directed the original 'Flash Gordon' serial) into her car for a guided tour of places west. We played 'Rust never Sleeps' by Neil Young - just the A-side- again and again on the tape deck until it got old and when no-one could stand it anymore Judith dropped Anton and myself at a local viewspot before spiriting Greg off to have her way with him. I was perhaps ill prepared for what became two days and two nights in the wilderness, equipped with little more than a sketchbook and a cigarette lighter.

3. A brief history of the Shadow Theatre "...And I went on, and at last I found a certain wood which is too secret to be described, and nobody knows of the passage into it, which I found out in a very curious manner, by seeing some little animal run into the wood through it. So I went after the animal by a very narrow dark way, under thorns and bushes, and it was almost dark when I came to a kind of ope place in the middle. And there I saw the most wonderful sight I have ever seen, but it was only for a minute, as I ran away directly, and crept out of the wood by the passage I had come by, and ran and ran as fast as ever I could, because I was afraid, what I had seen was so wonderful and so strange and beautiful. But I wanted to get home and think about it..."- Arthur Machen 'The White People' I first set eyes on the valley in the summer of '86. I was fresh out of Africa and had no idea what I was getting into, no convenient peg on which to hang the experience…

I remember the sound of the river most of all and the deeper, subtler rythms within it , like the rush of blood in my capillaries, the thunder of the falls melding with the beat of my heart, my body seemingly melting into the rock until I could no longer tell one from another. The stone was soft and warm like flesh, the churning beat of the falls becoming the throb of tom toms, a spiralling voodoo symphony that seemed to be coming from some other world entirely. I rememember convincincing myself that the world was a box, the sky its lid and that strange, insistent drum solo was emanating from the crack between the two. Then with a gasp I fell forward out of my body into the crack…

I remember another sound beneath the rush of white noise. A sound like a scream, thin and high at first but gaining volume, deepening into a roar. For a moment I thought I might be dead, that I must have fallen from the cliff. I breathed in, pulling back into my body, the light fading, the trees becoming trees once more. I slapped my hand against the rock to make it real again, a pulsing, revving shriek filling my world. I opened my eyes as a stealth jetfighter went hotrodding overhead, probably an American Raven barrelling over from Lakenheath, banking slightly as it followed the curve of the river, a rippling sonic boom catching up an instant later as it climbed away into the setting sun. Then I heard Anton yelling too. He had been lying quietly on a ridge overlooking the falls, watching the same golden afterglow and must have been roused from his revery as sharply. I started towards the sound of his voice, scampering barefoot over the rocks.

As I approached the top of the ridge I noticed what looked like steps and above them a row of seats hewn from solid stone. Anton was huddled in one of the throne like chairs, staring into the gathering gloom. He had stopped yelling now but still looked pretty phased, gazing past me, attention focussed on the glen below.

"The hell is this place?"

"It's the Shadow Theatre."

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"That door.."He nodded towards the eerie effulgence that radiated silently from the jumble of rocks behind us. At first I had thought the light was some weird reflected afterglow from the setting sun but then I began to grow less certain.

"They're really going for it down there! Partying down …"

Something flickered overhead and we heard what sounded like the pop of fireworks from the valley floor as the evening show got under way, a phalanx of what appeared to be armoured war machines advancing from the gloom.

"How do they fuckin' do that?"

"I don't know. But they're really good at it…"

"They're amazing! Just watch…"

"I don't want to just watch. I want to join 'em!

You think they'd let me audition?"

"I thought you already had. I saw you down there. To be honest I thought you'd arranged this whole thing …"

I settled back in my chair, front row, centre, firing up a reefer as a strange and terrible saga of future warfare unfolded before us."I don't know who those guys are or what we're lookin' at but I was made for that show…"

He said it with such certainty I didn't doubt him although I had no idea what he actually meant.

Following his eyeline I saw the valley below formed a natural amphitheatre with the flat rock at the top of the falls providing a kind of stage. Then as if on cue two figures appeared in the clearing beneath us like characters in a play. I blinked, realizing it was Greg and Judith, feeling somewhat relieved they had come back to pick us up after all. Waving to get their attention I started down the hill only to bring myself up short as I caught the sound of their voices. They seemed to be having some sort of argument and realizing they hadn't seen me I decided to hang back and let them get it out of their system - but their voices only grew louder. I couldn't make out the individual words over the rush of white noise, only anger. There was a rattle of stones.At first I thought she'd slipped and Greg was bending to help her back to her feet. Then I saw his arm rising and falling, something glinting in his hand. Was that a rock? A knife even?

I stood frozen in my tracks, still trying to work out what I was seeing, not knowing if I should try to step in or turn tail. Greg seemed to be beating her against the rocky ground, a frenzied strength to his asault that I could barely square with the Greg I knew. Then he lifted her in his arms and her body seemed to come apart, shredding into a mass of brightly coloured scarves and I realized it wasn't a woman at all but some sort of macabre rag doll.

"Fucksake…"

Greg paused, looking up at me as if he had known I was watching all along and I realized it wasn't Greg at all but someone taller and stronger who had been expertly mimicking his body language. I felt a sudden chill, the short hairs rising on the back of my neck.

"Who are those people?"

"The Shadow Theatre? Didn't I tell you.."'Greg' did a backward summersault, flick flacking away into the gathered gloom and Anton giggled :"They're incredible. I've been watching them all afternoon…"

I settled myself into one of the stone chairs, relieved at having an explanation to hang on to even if it were no explanation at all. I reached for my tobacco trying to decide whether we were audience members or victims but the seat was comfortable enough at least.

"What else did you see?"

"I saw you. Just now. On the edge of the cliff.…"

"No. That was real. That happened. Or at least I think it happened …"

"You were dancing on the edge of the cliff and then a plane flew over and flew into the crack…"

"You saw that?" " The Raven 111?…"

"No. The crack. I mean the aeroplane was real…"

"It was all right there. Like the door in the hill…"

"What door?"

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Later I had to come to terms with the fact that we had apparently 'hallucinated' the entire show although what triggered those 'hallucinations' remained a mystery . I told myself it was something to do with the valley's acoustics, the hiss of white noise, the convoluted manner in which the steep gorge twists and turns causing the light from the sun or moon to enter from unexpected, potentially disorientating angles, the shifting leaves and sparkling water setting up countless complex and oddly suggestive 'diffusion patterns', phosphorescence released by decaying fungi,

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energy stored and then spontaneously released by the crystalline rock formations or the magnetic field of the river somehow effecting our brainwaves. Subterranean waters. Sun spots. I don't know. Anything to try and get around the idea that there really were 'little people' living in that hollow hill playing tricks on our minds. Besides weird things just happened around Anton. He was prone to 'black outs', naturally occurring trance states that he could slip in and out of without warning, trembling and falling silent, eyes glazing as if he wasn't realy there at all only to return to fuller consciousness a moment later with some typically ridiculous observation. Maybe I was just spending too much time around him and had started seeing whatever the hell it was he'd been seeing all along, each of us serving to reinforce the others misperceptions to produce a textbook 'shared hallucination'.

So I came back and next time I brought reinforcements…

Mr Horn, my long standing ally and cameraman was next, then Kate my equally long suffering first girlfriend and a couple of old army buddies at least one of whom was already a member of the International Magic Circle, a juggler and practising stage magician in his own right. We figured that if whatever it was that lived down there was going to confuse us then we were just going to confuse it right back and answer it trick for trick. Perhaps on some level I was still auditioning, trying out for a company that didn't exist or at least didn't advertise in 'Spotlight' or 'Stage and Screen'. Whatever the hell we were doing we were learning fast, picking up on what we saw and imitating it, adding dots, details and curlicues of our own.The sheer cliffs that had guarded the valley since time out of mind ensured our privacy, providing us with the perfect psychedelic adventure playground which we duly made our own. Undisturbed by the outside world we acted out all the dramas, illusions and fancies the natural amphitheatre seemed to demand.

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I had studied stage magic myself while still in high school and based some of what we did on the work of the obscure conjuror Charles Nightingale who had toured Bitain and Ireland between the wars under the stage name 'Coleman Collins',playing opposite his partner, the chanteuse Rosa Forte and such vanished luminaries as Francis LeRoy the 'devil in evening dress', Bosco the Great Northern Wizard and Mr. Peet and his Wanderin' Boys. Their grande farewell performance at the Wood Green Empire on August 27 1924 was so gaudy no-one came out alive, not even the audience although some believe Collins faked his death by substituting another body for his own in a spectacular 'coup de theatre' before escaping to a new life in America. The details of those all but forgotten 'crimes against reality' are scarcely relevant now other than the fact they provided a jumping off spot for my own work in the mid eighties and early nineties. Some say the test of a true magician is that he does not use his powers in ordinary life. Uncle Cole however was adamant that "the test of a true magician is that he has no ordinary life"- an epithet I took to heart....

Its difficult to describe what I thought I was doing at the time other than to say it was at best a kind of dance - a duet with death or the unknown or whatever the hell it was down there. It would make a move so I'd make a move back and if we were on the money it'd come back with 148

what we referred to simpy as a 'response'. The responses came in all kind of shapes and sizes, improving on our efforts, gently mocking us, constantly forcing us to raise the stakes. At best it was a form of wordless communication, what the 80's UFO brigade might might have referred to as 'landing protocols'. Normally the 'faery folk' or whatever the hell you want to call 'em take flight at the first sign of outsiders so I figured it was our job to draw them out instead, to confuse 'em and hold their attention, to appeal to their natural sense of mischief. Of course you should never assume any audience is friendly, let alone an audience of invisible woodland elementals…

In the summer of 1987 we ferried in a team of dancers and crack lighting technicians to shoot the promotional material for the single 'Blue Water' , devising an elaborate cable car rig to literally fly the generators and heavier equipment over the treetops and down to the valley floor. Perhaps it was a step too far and it is a matter of record that we were rewarded for our hubris by running into one of the biggest hurricanes the United ( ? ) Kingdom had ever seen. Global warming hadn't yet been established as a fact of British life so like so many other things we ended up blaming it on the little people, deciding that perhaps we had been a just a li'l out of line in trying to involve genuine 'elementals' in what was still only a music video when you got right down to the nitty gritty.

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A midsummer night's dream ? The Nephilim in faeryland...

Secrets of the Shadow Theatre

Self and Carl back in the day. Could this be the origin of that gag about the 'one that got away'?

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The end of the rope for Carl's 'preacherman' persona

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Beating a hasty retreat we did our best to reconstruct the valley floor using some of the leaves and broken branches blown down by the hurricane, finishing off the promo in the relative safety of a desserted warehouse. While the end result is amusing enough it remains only a shadow of the epic originally envisaged.

Above and below: Rare images of an exploding life size wolf effigy smoking a Cuban cigar and wearing a nice white suit from Cordings that we blew up one solstice dawn to commemorate the assassination of the Chechen premier - the so-called 'wolf of Grozny'. It was one of the first pyrotechnic effigies I built and extremely dangerous ! A piece of shrapnel flew out of it just after taking the initial photo and hit the rock behind us, ricocheting right out of the valley...

After that I grew wary of taking cameras or electric lights into the valley and there are few images to attest to what followed. We did our best work there, five or six shows in a good year and all of it perforce went unrecorded.

In 1989 the valley was put on the market by the farmer who owned all the land north of the Hepste River. One hundred thousand pounds sterling would have made it our own forever but that kind of money was utterly beyond my reach at that time. I had barely enough to feed myself and more often than not ended up couch surfing or sleeping under tables in unsuspecting production offices. I tried in vain to put together a consortium of 'interested parties', taking prospective backers on guided tours of the Zone, including on one particularly memorable moon an Iranian stockbroker connected to the west London property Mafiosi who had recently bought Fulham Broadway and a young surgeon turned speed dealer who had just come off a double shift at the Royal Free Hospital…

The broker ended up reclining laconically in one of the stone seats at the top of the bluff, gazing at the pale, moonlit figures moving in the glade below muttering all the usual phrases to himself about it being the 'most amazing thing' he'd ever seen whilst the terrified surgeon ended up with his back against the cliff wall, threatening to kill anyone who came near him. You could never really tell how the valley might effect people although the broad rule of thumb tended to be that folk who were too fixed in their views or clung too closely to the notion of the universe being essentially mechanistic and hence explicable by science tended to have the harder time of it.

Accordingly we left the surgeon to his own devices and he seemed perfectly okay in the morning although I never saw him again after we dropped him off back in the city. I think his name was Peter…

I never did get that deal together any more than I could come up with a viable commercial logic to underpin the purchase to begin with. Accordingly the valley became part of the Craig –y-Ddinas Forest Park and a few years ago was officially declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site having been found to apparently be one of 'Britain's last unspoiled landscapes' to quote the free guidebook that came with my copy of the Saturday 'Guardian' which was frankly one of the worst things that could possibly have happened to the place. If I had taken over the land I'd have stocked it with wolves but now that it's officially up there with Snowdonia and the Lake District its been targeted by the sort of unscrupulous entrepreneurs who turn a fast buck by taking 'problem children', executives on weekend bonding exercises and other 'gifted' individuals through its winding

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gorges, usually in matching crash helmets, wetsuits and safety harnesses that make them look like walking talking sex toys or strings of living, long chained DNA threading their way laboriously upriver. And of course, the valley being what it is, the daytrippers began to die in droves. At first I kept the newspaper clippings but then I stopped bothering.

abandoned shed which began to burn, emitting a bright plume of orange flame. The bolt made an ear splitting crack, the grass was very green and the sun was shining and the rain falling all at once. Later a cold, heavy wall of mist rolled in, filling the gorge and the moonbeams streaming through the trees turned the whole valley into a shifting maze of light and shadow....

"…Jason and three other teenagers jumped into the river for a dip. The others got out but Jason was swept away. He was found 100 yards away by an outdoor-pursuits leader who pulled him ashore but he was already dead. Police and health and safety officials are investigating.

Bryn Davies, the principal of the college, said the course which can last up to 12 weeks was designed to 'instill self belief and motivation' for youngsters aged 16 to 18 who are not sure what career they want to follow. Jason had started the course on Monday…" - The Independent Saturday - Sept 10 2001

At some point in the early hours of the morning one of the trees seemed to stop touching the ground entirely and fell crashing into the gorge, ripping and wrending as it tumbled, bringing down other trees and boulders with it. I was in the shadow theatre in my usual seat and fortunately Paul and Grant were at a safe distance but we all froze in terror for an instant, the ground trembling beneath us as the debris impacted with the rock that served as our stage area, knowing we might easily have been crushed like bugs had our timing been just a li'l different.

And after that little sign posts began to appear and itsy-bitsy fences designed to prevent folk from plunging headlong off cliffs or plummeting to their deaths in the falls and rapidly Britain's last, great unspoiled landscape stopped being quite so unspoiled and the little people, if they existed, drew back even further into the hills.

I have never had any fear of the so-called 'supernatural' any more than I fear the darkness. I have simply never perceived it as a threat to me. Its people that are the problem. Human-bloodybeings every time ! Even as a child I felt more at ease in the dark, knowing I could hide there where the adults couldn't find me, that I was safe in the woods on my own where nothing could hurt me. The moment you take someone with you it changes everything. I learned not to take cynics, die hard sceptics or folks who were too set in their views but there were plenty of socalled 'neo-pagans' who claimed to make obeisance to the gods and goddesses of the woods and fields who melted into lumps of quivering jello when they got up close and personal with wild nature and felt themselves gripped by that same sudden inexplicable terror Machen describes so eloquently. Panic in its original sense. The feeling you get when you're swimming just off the reef and spot the outline of a shark or a dorsal fin briefly cutting the water. The sun is as bright and the water as warm as it was moments earlier but the sudden revelation of ones true position in the scheme of things tends to take the pleasure out of the experience and send even the stoutest soul lunging for the safety of the beach. Accordingly you can never really tell who's going to spin out or turn on you when the going gets weird so to hedge my bets I never took anyone the same way twice. Sometimes I went as far as blindfolding folk from the moment we turned off the freeway or spinnin' 'em around once we'd gotten into the woods. And even now, even in the 21st century once its past a certain hour and the shadows start to deepen between the trunks you can still count on a degree of privacy…

I was doing a lot of work with fireworks at the time, probably working out residual issues from the Afghan engagement and responded by launching another volley of rockets which yielded a last 'response'. Just before dawn a long, sparky stream of light appeared in the brightening sky that looked for all the world like return fire. It must have been a meteorite or some other form of space junk burning up on reentry but whatever it was went on falling and sparking and burning long enough for all three of us to look up from our various vigils and independently note its passing. There seemed something melancholy about it, as if it were the valley's way of saying goodbye…

After 'Blue Water' and the freak flashfloods that almost killed us during the shooting of 'Hardware's opening sequence near Efoud in the Sahara desert Carl became understandably wary of going on location with me and in the mid-nineties Anton was diagnosed with a potentially life threatening disease of the thyroid gland that went some ways towards explaining his black outs which had grown more frequent and severe in the interim. Although he has since been successfully treated he no longer sees 'littlle people' or if he does he no longer speaks about it.

In 1994 I turned Paul Carlin, the editor of 'Dust Devil' and 'Voice of the Mon' onto the place and he insisted on bringing his younger brother Grant with him on the return visit.It was a full moon and ideal viewing conditions with at least three physical phenomena plainly identifiable to all of us shaking up the proceedings. On the way up to the valley a bolt of lightning struck an 152

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Grant was quiet the next morning, scarcely uttering a word on the way back up to London and a few days later I heard he'd run into some difficulty after trying to ride his bicycle through a church door. Apparently there was a sign on the door reading 'Goods entrance only' and believing it meant 'Gods entance only' he rode into it full tilt, expecting to pass through into some other dimension. Instead the impact buckled the frame of his bicycle and caused Paul and his wife to hit the panic button.The word was that he'd been…well…a li'l funny ever since his trip to the valley.

Apart from anything else he now seemed to believe he could walk through walls…

Various shrinks screwed with Grant's head over the years, experimenting with various forms of medication to try and bring him back to something like 'normal' but as I had never met Grant before his 'breakdown' I have no clear idea what 'normal' was supposed to be. Along the way he started to produce drawings of his experience, initially as a kind of therapy, detailed charcoal images of the valley, complete and perfect to the last detail, the last rock and tree like data retrieved from the black box of his own private plane crash. God knows how many times he asked me to take him back to the place but I turned a deaf ear. The damage had been done however.

Paul held me responsible for what happened and still refuses to speak to me. If ever evidence was needed that whatever the hell we'd found down there needed to be left alone this was it ! Rumours started to fly that I was playing fast n' loose with people's minds, indeed their souls according to those of a more religious bent. There had been a gradual hardening of the arteries in the pagan scene as the freaks codeified their woolly worship into rituals in what I came to see as a gradual drift towards the right during the late eighties and early to mid nineties. Slander and malicious gossip clung to my Cuban heels and I began to feel I was perhaps getting a little old for the game.

To be continued...

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Richard Stanley

CEREMONIES II 1. The homecoming

Blog Archive Wednesday, July 30, 2008

I came to a halt at the top of the bluff overlooking the river.

Four and a half miles and twenty five years later. As the crow flies…

I took a deep breath, the sound of music drifting across the treetops, swelling and fading with the ebb and flow of the wind.

'Cry Cry Cry' then 'Folsom Prison Blues.'

I listened, singing along under my breath, trying to work out if I was listening to the real deal or the movie soundtrack. Then I caught the unmistakable opening riff of 'A Man Comes Along' from the American Sessions and that was alright.

Shouldering my pack I started down the bluff, grinning like a Jack o'lantern.

"There's a man goin' around takin' names, and He decides who to free and who to blame…"

Iit looked as if all that greenhouse weather we'd been getting recently had been good to the valley too. The bracken seemed greener and fuller, the trees more abundant but then perhaps it had always been that way. It had been so damn long after all…

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"Everyone won't be treated all the same. There'll be a golden ladder reachin' down…"

Johny's voice lulled as I took a sharp left off the path, putting the bunkhouse behind me, catching another beat beneath the rhythm. At first I thought it was the pulse of blood in my ears but there was no mistaking it now. Hearing the deep thud of approaching rotor blades, I decided to get a move on. It was just after nine o 'clock and although the sky was still bright enough there was no way it could be conventional civilian air traffic. Not at that hour…

Ever since getting out of the laughing academy Grant has been pouring most of his energy into a series of increasingly ambitious sculptures, his most recent being a take on the 'White Lady' herself, a larger than life Goddess who dominates the cavernous studio space in Bermondsey where she took shape, finally reaching something like completion just before the solstice. Mr. Horn, habitually underemployed, had been passing the time by shooting a haphazard record of her gestation and had somehow managed to get a signal on his mobile just long enough to reach me on the evening of July the 17th to announce he had decided to take Grant back to the valley in order to get some additional footage to open out the short. This had seemed like a pretty bad idea to me, for any number of reasons. First of all it was raining...

"Its Alpha and Omega's kingdom come..."

As it happens Grant had gotten into trouble almost at once. Thanks to years of confusion and deliberate obfustication on my behalf neither one quite knew the route and Grant had had ended up slipping during an ill advised attempt to cross the Hepste via a narrow path behind the cataract, falling on his own stills camera in the process and bearing out the notion that it was somehow bad luck to bring cameras into the Zone, let alone Grant or worst of all a combination of the two. The 'chopper however was for some other pilgrim who hadn't gotten off quite so lightly although quite how they had managed to fall off a rock that flat remained a mystery to me.

The RAF Sea King had been called in from Chivenor in an operation apparently co-ordinated by the BMR (Brecon Mountain Rescue) and the Longtown Mountain Rescue Team in Monmouth.

As I scrambled down the bluff it circled lower, hovering like a day-glo dragonfly above the falls.

Several members of the BMR were already on the ground, slowly and ritualisticly securing an inert figure sprawled on a ledge above the splashpool to a flimsy aluminium stretcher. At first I thought they'd come for Grant but then I noticed him standing beside Mr. Horn on the flat rock we used as a stage area, still apparently in one piece, poncho fluttering in the downdraft.

Swinging my legs into the abyss I sought purchase with the pointy toes of my Durango originals, finding the face subtly changed in my absence but still familiar enough to make the downward climb a doddle. It's the quickest way to reach the valley floor albeit not one for the faint hearted.

I descended slowly, working my way crabwise from one handhold to another, dimly hearing the Sea King's engines changing pitch as the automatic winch took up the slack . Just then the dude with the clipboard supervising the BMR guys on the ground glanced up and caught sight of Grant and Mr. Horn gazing quietly down from the rock. Gesturing franticly at his head he began to shout something, words lost in the roar of the rotors.

"What?"

"I think he's said something about our hats…"

"What?!!?"

"HATS!!! I THINK HE WANTS US TO TAKE 'EM OFF!" "WHAT?" "HATS!!! OFF!!!"

The BMR guy nodded fiercely and Mr. Horn complied, figuring the patient must have died and the gesture was required as a sign of respect whereas Grant insisted he'd heard the dude hollerin' somethin' about it being an RAF helicopter and assumed he was supposed to salute the flag on the tail fin. The bullet headed Mountain Rescuer stared , eyebrow twitching for a moment as if trying to figure out whether they were making fun of him or not. Then deciding to let it go he hurried away, disappearing into the cauldron of spray whipped up by the rotors.

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"The hell was that about?"

Mr. Horn grunted, noticing me behind him."I think I've just figured out how Tarkovsky did that shot in 'Mirror'…you know, the one with the gust of wind that comes out of nowhere…"He nodded towards the retreating 'chopper.

"It's really loud…"

"What?"

"LOUD! I mean it comes at the end of a dialogue scene…"

"So?" The Sea King rounded a curve in the ravine, climbing from sight, engines fading into thunder of the falls.

"I mean you know how Tarkovsky hated ADR…" "Yeah. And Werner Herzog didn't use a model boat either but I'd say its definitely worth checking out…"He watched as the turbulence in the treetops subsided. Then he put his hat back on."I mean how would you know if that scene's in synch or not? You don't even speak Russian.."

I nodded, turning to Grant."How 'bout you? You got an opinion on any of this?"

"I think I've broken my ribs…"

"You don't know for sure?"

"I fell on my camera…"

"Is the camera okay?"

"Yeah.It's got a really hard lens"He grimaced, rubbing ruefully at his chest.

"What are the symptoms? Have you gotten a second opinion?"

"Well, there's no real bruising but it hurts like fuck."

"Could be some sort of quantum thing. If there's no bruising and no-one has actually observed your ribs to be broken then it could still go either way. I mean you could be dying…but right now the chances are equally likely that there's nothing wrong with you at all…"

Grant thought this through, looking a little nonplussed . In fact he still seemed confused by the fact I was standing there to begin with.

"Have a bicky."I tossed him the packet of hobnobs.

"Got anything else in that bag?"Mr.Horn orbited closer.

"Only essentials…"I loosened the straps to come up with a tiny horned mannequin: -"I got Moag.

A copy of the 'Dunwich Horror' and a bag of nightlights."

"Any more food?"

"Just the biscuits. Had to keep it light to make time.."I cast about myself for a dry place to put the mannequin, eyes lighting on a strange metal contraption fastened to a length of cable resting beside the tent."What is that? Some kind of torture implement?"

"It's a camera mount."

"Looks more like a 21st century solution to witch pricking. Still it makes a groovy l'il chair for Moag…"I perched the mannequin on the camera mount which did indeed resemble a tiny throne."Get anything good with it?"

Mr.Horn grumbled something about the light, the vicissitudes of global warming and the lousy state of the nation in general. To be honest the mount's design seemed a li'l cumbersome and it occurred to me he might've been better off with some sort of rectangular arrangement with a cable running through casters on the upper bar and the camera clipped to the lower one instead but now seemed scarcely the time for it. Crouching beside the soggy woodpile I tried to gather the drier pieces of tinder into a volatile configuration.

"I mean it seemed sunnier in the old days.. or are we just getting old?"

"It was sunny enough in France. You should've been there…"

"Well this place is turning into a fuckin' swamp. This country's finished…"

"Sounds like I got here just in time."I spun the flint of my lighter, wishing there was more kindling.

"In time for what?"

"It's getting' dark. You know what this place is like when it gets dark…"

The tinder produced a streamer of grey smoke. I leaned closer to blow on it but it had already gone out.

"Have you got any newspaper?"

He shook his head."What was that book again?"

"Hand's off. that's'The Dunwich Horror' - recommended reading…"I worked the flint. This time the tiny flame found purchase and I fed it one twig at a time."It's a cheap edition so it doesn't 156

matter if it gets a li'l clammy. Help give the text some texture…"

"I'll get the coffee going,"Mr Horn started into the gloom, washing out the billy and refilling it from the stream. I stayed with the fire, feeding in the larger sticks, willing it to take hold. When I looked up I saw Grant silently leafing through the Lovecraft anthology, a chocolate biscuit in one hand.

"You ever read that?"

"I've got it..."

"Back home? Really?"

"No. With me."He reached into his knapsack, coming up with an almost identical paperback."I was planning on reading it down here…"

"Damn! That take the fuckin' biscuit!"

"What?"Mr.Horn crouched, propping the billy over the sorry excuse for a fire.

"We've got two copies of the same goddam book! No food, no fire, no decent drugs but two copies of 'The Dunwich Horror'! It's gotta be some sort of sign!"

"Yeah…probably not a good one…"

I paused, quite certain I heard something.

And there it was again...

A musical tinkle of laughter.

"What?"

"Sounded like a chick. Bunch of chicks even …"

Mr.Horn drew himself up to his full height, scanning the darkness."Shame no-one thought to bring a flashlight…"

"A flashlight's the last thing you need. Probably have the opposite effect. I mean that's where we always went wrong efore. With the 'Blue Water' shoot, for instance…"

I banked up the larger logs, hoping to dry out enough wood to keep us in business.

"So where does Lovecraft fit in to all this?"

"Lovecraft rated Machen very highly indeed.'Dunwich Horror' takes off on the premise of 'The Great God Pan' and incorporates elements from Machen's mythos. I was just goin' on instinct…

"Tearing open the polythene bag I began to stuff my pockets with fistfuls of nightlights."We've still got an hour or so before moonrise. I suggest you familiarize yourselves with the material…"I thrust the book into his hands before starting towards the falls, Behind us a great silvery glow was slowly spreading across the eastern rim of the valley. Somewhere beyond the hills the moon was already working her magic.

"Damn…but I've missed this place…"

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I got as close as I could to the cataract without actually getting my boots wet. Then hunkering down I dipped my hands into the river, splashing clear cold water over my face and hair, letting its current calm me, half hearing Grant's voice coming from the ring of firelight, faltering as he struggled to make out the typeface.

"Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before! They are transcripts, types the archetypes are in us, and eternal…"

Kneeling at the very edge of the void I began to kindle the footlights, slipping the candles into the natural depressions in the limestone that shielded them from the wind, a flickering semicircle widening slowly behind me. I don't know where the notion of the nightlights had come from, maybe that line in Jim Morrisson's 'American Prayer' about"looking for death at the end of a candle."All I know is that it evolved out of one of the first trips to the valley and being a good idea stuck. I worked my way backwards, sometimes on my knees, sometimes on all fours, setting candles adrift in the rock pools that dotted the undulating limestone surface and suspending others in overhanging trees, trying to recall those long forgotten 'landing protocols'.

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I stood gazing out over the footlights, trying to order my thoughts. At first I thought Grant had fallen silent but then I heard a familiar litany of glottal intonations, their jumbled consonants almost lost in the surge of the falls.

"Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah-e'yayayayaaaa… ngh'aaaaa…Y'bthnk…h'ehyen'grkdl'lh…"

I smiled, realizing he was only attempting the italicized phrases that appeared in bolder print. Inclining my head I started back towards the fire, picking my way from one pool of light to another. There was a trick to crossing the stage floor just like there was always a trick to everything here.

It entailed keeping your eyes downcast so as to block the direct glare of the flames with the brim of your hat but heaven help the fool who tried to set foot on that floor without appropriate headgear.

"Ygnaiii… Yog-Sothoth…"

The fire had subsided to a ring of embers that emitted so little light it took a beat to make out Mr.Horn's outline huddled in the deepening gloom.

"Where's Grant?"

"He crashed. 'Bout half an hour ago.."He gestured towards the tent."Said something about his chest hurting."

"I thought he was reading…I heard his voice…"

"He was. Then it got too dark to know exactly what he was reading so he stopped."

"Probably for the best…"The candle light slanted oddly through the smoke and I narrowed my eyes, trying to work out if I could see something moving in the blackness beyond."We don't want any repeat performances…"

"No reruns. Not here…"Mr.Horn's voice tailed off as he fumbled for his tobacco pouch:-"But I was hoping to see some original material …"

I nodded, noticing the first faint glimmer of moonlight in the trees at the top of the ridge."Time we took our seats then, wouldn't you say?"

"How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing.

They date beyond body - or without body, they would have been the same. That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence…"

I started off trying to lay out a pentagram but it mutated along the way into something more like that weird graven octagon we'd found last month near the summit of Mount Bugarach. The end result was pleasing enough, the leaping wicks setting off a dozen other dancing shadows and reflections, a labyrinth of light that was an elegant death trap, serving to blind the unwary to the abysses and precipitous torrents that coursed between the beacons. Once misstep in that maze and you'd be lost forever...

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Richard Stanley

CEREMONIES II 2. Wood Green Empire

Blog Archive Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Night and day are not so much different countries as different worlds, never more so than in the valley. Terrain crossed in minutes that afternoon now presented almost insurpassable obstacles. Great jagged slabs of dripping limestone reared up out of nowhere and black chasms yawned momentarily at our feet as we crawled, slid and clambered over that mossy jumble of cyclopean rocks, working our way slowly higher, towards the top of the ridge, towards the moon and whatever waited there.

I glanced up to see Mr.Horns outline stooped above me like a figure from a particularly grim faerytale , pockets stuffed with nightlights, kindling them as he went. His features, lit from below, seemed oddly transformed, grown stony and troll-like as the hill's alleged inhabitants. What the hell were we doing here, I asked myself? Grown men with lives and families scrambling over the rocks in the dark like children? And looking for what? It may have been one thing when we were still teenagers under the influence of whatever psychedelic had been the order of the day but surely we knew better by now? What in did we expect to find in this place except damp socks, wet scree and slugs. And more slugs. Bigger and fatter than I'd seen 'em before, swollen and emboldened by the unseasonal damp, etching slimy silver trails across the rain slick rocks as they inched blindly from the threatening light.

The going grew easier as I neared the top of the rise. The rocks really did resemble steps even though they were in all likelihood natural formations and in the moonlight I glimpsed the vague outlines of time worn oghams. At closer inspection some of those markings revealed themselves as little more than lichen and oddly geometric slug tracings but others were less readily defined.

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The logs I had banked up must have finally dried out enough for the fire to take hold, a brightening tongue of plasma rising from the forest floor, licking at the fluid night, giving the darkness form. I stopped, disorientated by the abrupt change in perspective, staring out over a kingdom of shadows, the guttering candles in our wake gleaming like campfires on the shores of another world.

"Damn.."I shook my head, trying to get my bearings."This place…"

Then the words caught and I took a sharp breath. There was something else moving down there, outlined for an instant by the firelight, something that didn't make the blindest bit of sense. The slopes below teemed with furtive movement yet that motion seemed as inherently inhuman as a brood of monitor lizards encircling their prey or a nest of maggots silently battening on carrion.

Only they weren't maggots. They were what Anton saw back in '85 and what Grant ran into the night he lost the plot.

I sat down, giggling helplessly.

Front row center. Best goddam seat in the house.

Everywhere the shadows teemed with incalculable, buzzing motion. Every rock, branch and hollow seemed to serve as only another perch, another nest, another bower from which flitting, insect eyes followed my slow mammalian movements with an inquisitive yet impartial sentience.

Their whirring, hopping forms made no real effort to flee my direct gaze as they might have done in the past, as by all account they were supposed to do but this time however I was not alone.

This time I had at my beck and call a professional video camera with night viewing capabilities!

But where was Mr.Horn?

"Immo?"

Could he see this? It was so busy down there, so blatant, so obvious he had to be able to see it too but where in hell was he? If we could get even a moment of this on tape…

"Hey!" He had been only a few feet ahead while we were climbing and I assumed he was just behind me watching from the shadows. A light flickered from the crest of the hill and I started towards it.

But it wasn't a nightlight and it wasn't Mr. Horn..

"Damn! That's out of order…"

A silvery luminescence was rising from a semicircle of lichen encrusted stones at the top of the ridge. I took a half step closer, trying to convince myself it was reflected moonlight but how could such a thing be possible? It seemed to be streaming upwards, from out of the earth.

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"That's so out of order…"

Not knowing what else to do I took off my hat, cautiously raising one hand in a sign of greeting and at that moment something within the stones seemed to silently pop, sending up a burst of pale sparks and incandescent vapour.

"That's impossible…"

But the beauty of it was it didn't care if it was possible or not. It was happening anyway.

"Mr. Horn! GODAMMIT …"

I don't know how long I sat staring down into the well of the night, back where it all began, but it was every bit as wild and unlikely as it had ever been in the years gone by, on drugs or otherwise.

After a while I managed to stop giggling long enough to skin up.

"Mr.Horn?"

Rim lit by that coruscating glow the stones looked almost like an altar… or a door? I rubbed my eyes but the illusion persisted. Not only that but the light was getting brighter with every step I took.

My rational mind kicked in, telling me Mr.Horn must have brought down some flares or fireworks and was hiding somewhere even now, trying not to laugh, getting a kick out of scaring the bejesus out of me. Sensing a flurry of renewed activity on the valley floor I turned to see him still standing beside the campfire, feeding another log onto the coals. I blinked, trying to figure out how he could have gotten all the way down to the river so quickly? Had I somehow skipped a beat while I was sitting in that ancient armchair, lost time being one of the classic hallmarks of this sort of malarchy? Had Mr.Horn really missed the whole show, gotten bored or simply buggered off?

Or had he ever really been there to begin with? Had I only imagined he'd been climbing beside me earlier? Admittedly he'd been kind of taciturn during the ascent but he was the silent type and had seemed real enough to pass muster at the time. And where in hell was he getting that firewood from? Half an hour ago there was hardly enough dry tinder to heat a decent cup of water. Now the flames were licking high enough to all but kindle the overhanging branches, sending great shards of jagged orange light leaping out across the flat rock at the top of the falls.

Judging by the colour of the sparks and the intensity of the conflagration he had to be using some form of accelerant which made a kind of sense but even if he'd been messing with chemicals again or had bought up a jobload of old fireworks how could he possibly be letting them off above and below me at the same time? Granted, a man of his ingenuity might have been able to figure out some sort of routine but the dank weather mitigated against the idea of running current off a concealed car battery and I didn't think he had the funding to go fully remote. Besides, getting the sort of basic ingredients you need to cook those pyro's nowadays has gotten hard. Even simple accelerants such as potassium nitrate are no longer available over the counter in the UK and have to be smuggled piecemeal from the continent. But why would anyone, even someone like Mr.Horn, bother? Just to pull off a lame fuckin' stunt like this? Unless it wasn't a stunt. Unless whatever the hell it was was actually happening…

I glanced back at the light streaming up out of the rocks behind me.

Maybe it was a door after all?

"Ahhh for fucksake …"

There was a throb of distant music and I caught the faint yet unmistakable peal of child-like laughter. Then the clouds parted high above and for the first and only time that night I saw the face of the swollen July moon blazing crazily down at me.

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What kind of music was that anyhow?

And were those drums at all?

Or rotors?

I watched without a word as if a hand were holding my mouth. I had sat out one murder that day but this was too much. By half...

I turned, raising one hand to the talisman at my throat, seeing flashlights weaving on the valley floor. The hell were they doing here? I thought the others knew better than to bring electric light into this place?

I felt a stab of indignation, crouching and averting my eyes as the probing beams raked past, too many beams to be able to put down to Grant or Mr.Horn. Had someone seen those lights we'd laid out earlier and come to investigate or worse still alerted the goddam BMR? The thud of engines was louder now or was it just my breath? Then I caught the flash of what looked like mountain bikes through the trees and heard the crackle of a two way radio. It seemed absurd to kick up this kind of fuss over something so trivial but this was the 21st century after all where anything was possible. Again there came that childish laughter followed by a string of raucous cries and creeping towards the edge of the bluff I tried to make some sort of sense out of what I saw. Those hooded, stunted figures that swarmed about our campfire sure as hell didn't look like they belonged to the BMR unless they'd gone plainclothes and taken to wearing baseball caps and baggy tracksuits for the evening. They looked more like children or young teenagers but whoever they were they were seriously angry about something, kicking vehemently at the fire, strewing sparking embers everywhere. I heard a metallic clang followed by a guffaw of ribald amusement as someone used Mr.Horn's billy for a football and for a moment I wondered what had happened to Horn himself and whether he was still down their in their midst or had fled to safety in the darkness? He had seemed to be there a moment earlier. And what could possibly have pissed those kids off quite so badly? Were they drunk? On drugs? Just naturally insane?

Could those BMR guys really be crazy enough to return under the cover of darkness to avenge some imagined insult or had the Welsh equivalent of the Chainsaw family moved in to the 'hood in our absence and were even now making sport with whatever campers they could find? They were certainly making merry with our belongings. I suppose they weren't worth a damn anyhow, not in material terms but while I despaired of my poor Moag mannequin and those scattered books there was worse mischief in the offing..

I saw the tent shredded apart and a pale, kicking figure disgorged like a grub from within. I couldn't tell if it were Grant or not but he was going to end up with more than a few cracked ribs judging by the way those kids were laying into him. His cries grew high and feminine as they grew intermittent but no matter who it was down there, noone deserved that treatment. At first

Slipping the SS dagger from my boot I found voice. Drawing myself to my full height I shrieked down at them but the kids only jeered and shrieked right back, making no effort this time to hide their faces. Then with a yell of laughter they scattered into the bracken, flashlights weaving between the trunks as I started at them but there were more than just a few feet of very rough ground between us and no ready way of closing it.

I slid to a halt on the brink of the cliff, visual purple shot to shit by those beams.

I needed to be pretty goddam limber to pull a routine like this, more limber than I felt just now.

Kindling a nightlight I tried to work my way back down that wet jumble of boulders at least a li'l more slowly but the breeze coming up off the river fought the flame every inch of the way, forcing me to shield and nurture the spark with the brim of my hat whilst simultaneously blocking the direct flare of its wick from my eyes so that I might have some chance of not breaking an ankle which forced me in turn to keep my knife firmly in my boot where it probably belonged. Only my boots kept skidding and the only way to go was down. Worst of all the wind kept loughing and changing tack, requiring me to keep my hat brim moving and the rest of my body moving with it, the sputtering wick casting a perfect pool of gliding light across the underside of the overarching canopy of leaves in the midst of which I saw my own madly dancing shadow effortlessly contained. It was all so out of order I began to giggle and then the giggling got out of hand and I couldn't stop. I skidded, caught myself and slipped again, my shadow leaping from rock to rock, down and down into the very maw of the ravine.

I was losing altitude fast and doing alright but I sure wouldn't want to try doing this at home. But maybe this was my home? I mean if any place had a right to kill me this was it. This one had my name on it from the top. Mayhap my heart belonged in Montsegur but this obscure corner of the Welsh backwoods had a most reasonable prior claim on my corpse. It wanted me to stay and to some extent I wanted to belong. Its chasms called me to rest my sleepy head and bury my bones, to allow its bugs and slugs and weevils to eat me, its grubs to fatten on my marrow and make me part of 'em, part of this place, part of the hill, forever and ever, world without end. Or worm without end. Whichever first. Leg before wicket. Amen.

God knows what any of it really looked like from the outside but then I don't believe in God. Not in that sense.

I do however believe in Cuban heels.

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CEREMONIES II 3. Hollow... Loosen…

I hit the ground laughing. It was one of the stupidest fuckin' things I'd ever done but I reached the bottom of the gorge in record time, candle clenched in my fist still miraculously ablaze, body upright, bones unbroken. Granted I was a li'l off course. The wind was rising steadily and there was more rain behind it, the other candles winking out one by one causing me to lose my bearings but then I caught sight of the campfire a hundred yards to my right and waded towards it, not enitirely sure if I was actually on the bank or floundering in the shallows. When you're that damp and crazy to begin with it can be hard to tell. After what happened back in Montsegur I'd learned to be cautious when it came to getting too close to the goddam water. Certainly that campsite seemed dark as a grave. Oddly peaceful too after the unholy chaos I'd witnessed earlier. But where were those goddam kids anyhow? I crouched... and froze.

Blog Archive Wednesday, July 30, 2008

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I mean I'd seen some shit that night but this went the extra mile…

As I brought up my knife hand I noticed what looked like long emerald blades of fine green grass trailing from my bare forearm as if growing out of it.

"The fuck… ' I brushed at the clinging blades and for a queasy moment they actually resisted. "…are you doing?!!?"

My hand pulled free, the gossamer threads curling away. I caught my breath, half convinced it had been a trick of the light after all. Then as I lowered my hand again those strands of grass coiled right back out of nowhere, seeking purchase.

"I'll be…"

It was alive and trying to hold onto me in the only way it knew.

"Damned…"

I was so preoccupied by this unsettling discovery I scarely saw the man shaped outline that loomed in my path. Then it cleared it's throat and I realized I was no longer alone in that well of shadows.

"Hey!" Mr. Horn stared silently back for the longest moment, each of us trying to work out whether the other was really human.

"Okay?"He ventured.

"Goddam grass was tryin' to grow into me…"

He nodded , doing his best to take this on board.

"Where in hell were you anyhow?"

He shuffled uneasily from one foot to another, trying to piece together the sequence of events:"I thought you were just behind me on the way up. Then I saw the lights in the valley and figured you must have gone back down to the campfire…"

"You mean you were up there all along?"I nodded dazedly towards the ridge and that eerie effulgence that radiated upwards from its crest. The storm was closing fast now and the moon was only a distant, fleeting memory lost behind an inky wall of cloud.."But I saw you… or I saw someone like you I guess… stoking up the fire…doin' a really good job too..just before those fuckin' kids turned up…"

"I just got here now. It was harder going down. Than up, I mean…"

"But the kids! You must have seen 'em, right? Those li'l fuckers with the flashlights? They were all over this place… like a MySpace.com Blogs - Richard Stanley

plague…"I noticed my pack still resting beside the neatly banked firewood that had seemingly never caught fire to begin with. I had seen blood running in streams in that non-existent light as those ugly, stunted children brayed with laughter but could find no trace of it now on the moist green grass. The campsite seemed a picture of tranquillity where only the liveliest awfulness had reigned before.

"I thought that was you running about with the flashlights…"

"I don't have a flashlight!"

"I know. It did seem out of character. Like there was more than one of you down here to begin with…"

I giggled, noticing Moag watching quietly from his crazy metal throne. I figured he'd come through okay. His credit was good in this place. Besides he's an inanimate object which gives him a certain edge; -"and Grant?"

"He crashed. Three…I dunno… maybe four hours ago now"Mr Horn gestured towards the tent."Said something about his chest hurting."

I followed his eyeline. The tent was still there and I had every reason to assume Grant was still inside. Either dead or asleep. It didn't seem to matter any more.

"Didn't you see any of it? The kids? The helicopter? The fuckin' lights…"

"The helicopter was real. This afternoon. I managed to get some of that on camera. Not much.

But some…"

"No. Just now, I mean… didn't you hear it?"

He shook his head.

"Damn. I must be really goin' crazy. Thought it was all goin' to hell down here. That my number was up for sure…"

Mr. Horn thought it slowly through: -"I did see something strange though. On my way back down to the camp…something I don't understand. Even though I'm not on drugs…I mean I'm not tripping or anything…"

"I know."

"But I saw what looked like these two mechanical arms, digging their way out of the ground with these… kind of jointed, machine fingers…moving…as if they were choosing or selecting something…"He demonstrated with his own hands, thrusting them stiffly out as if they were Waldo arms: -"then moving again as if making another selection…like shuffling cards…"

"Weird."

"You didn't see anything like that, right?"

I shook my head."But I'd like to know where you thought you saw 'em…"

There was only one remaining nightlight left now about halfway up the valley wall and Mr. Horn cast about himself in the deepening gloom, eventually indicating an area at the base of the scree."Seemed so clear for a while… digging … choosing … choosing again…"

"That's the exact spot where Carl digs his way out of the grave at the end of the 'Blue Water' video. Back when he still had that weird steel glove like Freddy Kruger… clawin' his way back up from hell.."I knelt, gingerly touching the moist earth, half expecting to still find it warm."Probably that same embryonic sequence that inspired a lot of the 'Hardware' imagery now you mention it…"

Mr.Horn shivered but whether it was from the cold or the damp or the thought of what he had seen I couldn't tell."This fucking place…"

"I know."I stood, wiping my hands on my jeans;-"It wanted to hold on to me. Hold on to all of us. And those children…whatever the hell they were… I didn't make that up. They were real too. I mean, it never actually happened but on some level you know it fuckin' happened… still happenin'…Look!"I glanced up, stabbing my finger at the shadowy figures that watched even now from the slope above.

"What the…"

"There! Do you see 'em?!?"

He nodded, narrowing his eyes, trying to focus on the pale, oddly childlike forms caught for an instant in the guttering halo of the failing candle, the last honest to God point of light for seven miles or more as the crow flies.. The wind blew stronger causing the flame to leap momentarily higher, those hunched figues gaining resolution, crowding closer.

Then the wind loughed and their outlines came apart, becoming something meaningless, disintegrating into shadows, into billowing foliage, into nothing.

"It's like…grass…blowing in the wind…but…"

"Yeah? Look again!"The taper flickered, brightening for an instant, briefly illuminating the barren scree."There's no fuckin' grass there! Not now…look… nothin' but bare fuckin' rock!"

Mr. Horn blinked. But it was true.

Then the night wind rallied, the shadows changing tack and those trembling, swathing strands curled back into existence, becoming or trying to become people again.

"What is that?"

"You tell me! Don't suppose you've got a flashlight by any chance?"

Mr. Horn shook his head, staring ashen faced as the watchers wove themselves together, one emerald strand coiling about another, tightening and thickening before our eyes.

"Why does no-one around here ever have a flashlight when we fuckin' need one?"

He shrugged; -"I dunno… what we're looking at… what in hell that is…"

"I don't think it knows either. One moment its grass, then children, then whatever the hell it wants to be. It was trying to grow into me but I think I caught it just in time, trying to get under my skin or into my veins somehow. Like somethin' out of 'Invasion of the fuckin' Body Snatchers'…

"I raised my hands, wishing it were bright enough to be absolutely sure."Probably runnin' this whole goddam country by now. Maybe that's why everything's so fucked up…"I brought the palms of my hands together as if in prayer, just to make certain they were still warm, to make sure I was still human after all, my gaze returning to that weird, coruscating light that flickered silently upwards from beneath the spine of the hill."And while we're at do you feel like venturing an opinion on where that light's coming from? Can't be reflected moonlight 'cause the moon's long gone. At first I thought you were lettin' off flares or pyro pots up there. But you weren't, were you?"

He shook his head again, getting the drift:"As a matter of fact I had a bunch of stuff on order but it didn't turn up in time. . It hard to get the right ingredients these days…"

"So, Mr. Lighting cameraman, tell me, where's the fuckin' light source?"

"Looks like its coming up somehow… out of the hill…"

"Out of the earth… Pity we couldn't get so much as a single soddin' frame on tape, wouldn't you say?"

"It's too dark. Not enough light to even register…"

"Not now."The candle sizzled ominously as if the light were being sucked out of the air the outlines of the watchers gaining focus with every breath, seemingly more solid than ourselves now.

"Shit! What are those things?"

"Djinn? Spirits of dust and fire? Elementals? Nature spirits? At least they've probably got more in common with wood lice than with you or me. Or Tinkerbelle for that matter…"

"And if you had gotten one on tape? What then?"

"I would've posted it on YouTube! At least folk wouldn't have had to take our word for it then.

They could've seen for themselves…"

"They'd just think you were using some sort of weird ass animation package…"

"I know.But it would've been a start. You believe in faeries right?"

Mr. Horn pursed his lips. The pale figures were all around us now, gliding silently across the scree, the faltering taper no longer enough to keep them at bay.

"Well, you'd better. 'Cause you're lookin at 'em!"

All that remained of the old, warm world, all that we knew or understood was confined to that rapidly tightening circle of light. Outside the circle lay everything that was strange and frightening and the darkness seemed to reach higher and higher and further away to the end of the world itself.

"Go on…"

The tiny tongue of plasma clung precariously to existence for a moment longer.

Then it sputtered and went out .

"Make a wish!"

There was musical tinkle of child like laughter.

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Richard Stanley

CEREMONIES II 4. Their ways...

Blog Archive Wednesday, July 30, 2008

"All through July I came upon traces of evil rumours affecting this most gracious corner of the earth. Of course no first hand evidence was available. There was never any first hand evidence in these cases. But A knew B who had heard from C that her second cousin's little girl had been set upon and beaten by a pack of Welsh savages…Yet all the while the story grew more more monstrous and incredible: visitor's children had not only been beaten, they had been tortured; a little boy had been found impaled on a stake in a lonely field near Manavon; another child had been lured to destruction over the cliffs at Castell Coch… I was telling my landlord about these beastly children and wondering who they could be when he broke into Welsh, something like"the battle that is for age unto ages; and the People take delight in it.""

– Arthur Machen 'Out of the Earth' "Morning?"

Grant emerged cautiously from the tent, to see me still sitting beside the cold ashes, a book in my lap.

"Been up all night?"

I nodded.

"Reading mostly. Got through 'Dunwich Horror' and then went back to Machen…"

"Quiet one, then?".

"Quiet enough."

"I thought I heard voices…"He staggered down to the riverbank, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, a little surprised to find the billy lying so far away from the fire."You haven't seen anyone else up here?"

"No-one you'd want to meet."I turned the page, picking up where I had left off. "…I recollected: a matter of our little boy straying away more than once, and getting lost among the sand dunes and coming back screaming, evidently frightened horribly, and babbling about 'funny children'. We took no notice; did not trouble, I think, to look whether there were any children wandering about the dunes or not. We are accustomed to his small imaginations…"

Grant rubbed at his teeth with one finger and then stood once more, gazing out at the brightening skyline.The clouds swirling over the treetops were starting to break up, showing the first patches of blue.

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"What?"

"There's something on your jacket…"

"What sort of something?"I glanced down at myself, thinking for a moment he meant the adhesive back stage pass still clinging to my sleeve.

"I dunno. I thought maybe it belonged to you. You want me to get it off?"

"I suppose you'd better. It might be poisonous…"

I stood still for a moment as he dusted at my lapel."Damn…its stubborn."

"Don't hurt it."

"The hell is that thing?"

We stared down at the dislodged critter as it wriggled in the dirt. It looked a bit like a cross between a woodlouse and a scorpion only they don't have scorpions in Wales. It was pale white and had more eyes and legs than I could get an easy fix on. Then it righted itself and vanished into the rocks.

"Whatever it was sure seemed to like you. Didn't want to let go…"

"Nice to be wanted, I guess. I mean I 'd love to stick around and all but we're on a schedule here."I checked my watch. It was exactly 24 hours since I'd placed that call to Rob and if I was going to get those tapes up to Hitchin' then it was high time we hauled ass and patched ourselves back into the mixing board of human experience. Four and a half miles to the road.

Downhill all the way…

"Hence the explanation of what puzzled you at first; the rumours, how did they arise?

They arose from nursery gossip, from scraps and odds and ends of half-articulate children's talk of horrors that they didn't understand, of words that shamed their nurses and their mother.

These little people of the earth rise up and rejoice in these times of ours. For they are glad, as the Welshman said, when they know that men follow in their ways…"

For a moment there was only silence and the soughing of the wind in the trees.

"You got the time on you?"

"Probably time we woke up Mr.Horn and struck camp…"I gathered my leather jacket, slipping the paperback horror anthology into its pocket beside the bag of husked out nightlights I'd retrieved earlier.

"Just hold on…Hold on one minute…"

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Epitaph At the mouth of the valley, where the Melte River flows out into the Vale of Neath stands the remains of an abandonned Nissan hut, decorated with images of various terrifying struggles between man and fish. The shed once housed an organization known as 'Nomad's Deep Sea Angling Club'...

Not only is it a considerable distance from anything that could be remotely described as the sea but stands perhaps as an obscure metatextual reminder of those oddly persistent links between the 'walkin' man' and the 'one that got away'.

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A few hundred yards beyond the hut is a tiny well tended churchyard containing the last resting place of Richard Stanley.

It was a peaceful enough corner of the Empire and I might have stopped off to skin up on my own grave if I hadn't been running against the clock but noticing how long our shadows had become I thought it best to shake a leg.

Jenna Parry, the 17th victim of the Bridgend suicide 'cluster,' who had been found hanged in the woods last febuary was a direct descendant of Elizabeth Parry and hence a not so distant blood relative. As for the 'Rees' part - well, my current flatmate's ex-husband is named 'Rees' but that's probably just a meaningless coincidence....

This is Richard Stanley, the last free man in River City, signing off...

The presence of several sons of the Rowlands clan in the neighbouring plots hints provide a clue to the broader narrative. My celebrated ancestor Sir Henry Morton Stanley was born out of wedlock in Denbigh, Wales in 1841 where he was chistened John Rowlands after his presumed father. His mother Elizabeth Parry surrendered him to the not so tender loving care of Saint Asaph's workhouse from whence he fled as a young teenager, working his way to the States as a cabin boy and a bare knuckle boxer before enlisting in the American Civil War on the side of confideracy. He survived Shiloh and a Yankee internment camp before switching sides, desserting and returning to the old country to seek out his birth mother who promptly rejected him all over again. Vowing to have nothing more to do with Wales he cobbled together the pseudonym Henry Morton Stanley from the names of his first employers and returned to America to re-enlist.

Several members of the family that had rejected him as a child later adopted the nomme de plume to emphasize their blood ties with the famous explorer and despite the fact that the very mention of his birth place was an anathema to the great man his name proved to be a popular one back in the 'hood . When directly asked by Francis Galton in front of a crowd of three thousand people at Brighton on 18 august 1872 to confirm whether or not he was really a Welshman Stanley somehow managed to slide around the issue with a typically long winded answer concerning the multitude of ethnicities making up the modern 'British Empire'…

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Richard Stanley

Year Zero As you may have heard today will be the day when the Large Hadron Collider - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built will be test fired and particle physics finally comes of age. The most powerful atom-smasher ever built will produce collisions of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light in the circular tunnel, giving off showers of particles that will provide more clues as to how everything in the universe is made by re-creating the conditions of the"big bang,"the explosion that theoretically created the cosmos.

Blog Archive Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, moving around the 17-mile tunnel at 11,000 times a second at full power. When the LHC is running at full throttle it will imbue each of the particles travelling around its 27 km circumference with approx. 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV) which may not be much in everyday terms, barely matching the kinetic energy of a mosquito but it can do extraordinary things to the fabric of the universe.

Leading physicists such as Stephen Hawking say the atomsmashing experiment will be absolutely safe although some skeptics fear the proton collisions could unleash microscopic black holes that might literally swallow the entire planet starting with Switzerland as a hors-d'oevre.

If it is 8.41 am Greenwich Mean Time or later and you are still alive and reading this 'blog then it would tend to indicate that Dr.Hawking is correct...

The experiment could reveal more about"dark matter,"antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time as well as possibly finding evidence evidence of the hypothetical particle — the Higgs boson — which is sometimes called the"God particle"as it is believed to give mass to all other particles yet if a pair of Russian mathematicians are right any advances in our understanding of 'dark matter' could be overshadowed by a truly extraordinary event. According to Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich, the LHC might just turn out to be the 21st century's first academically acknowledged time machine. It is a highly speculative claim, that's for sure but if Aref'eva and Volovich are correct, the LHC's debut at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, could provide a landmark in history. That's because travelling into the past is only possible - if it is possible at all - as far back as the creation of the first time machine which means 2008 could become Year Zero: a must-see for the discerning chrononaut.

Taref'eva and Volovich are sensible and well respected mathematicians based at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, so they are not actually suggesting that visitors from the future or indeed the past are imminent. What they are saying is that since causality - the idea that effect must follow cause - is one of the fundamental principles of physics, the notion that it may be tested at the LHC is worth pushing as far as possible.

Their work has yet to be recognized by a peer reviewed journal but that hasn't stopped other physicists from taking a keen interest.

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According to general relativity everything in the universe is played out on a stage that has three dimensions of space and one of time. The strange thing about this 'space-time' is that it gets warped by the mass and energy of the universe's contents.

This is what apparently lies at the roots of gravitational attraction. The mass of the Earth, for instance, distorts the surrounding space, causing everything in its vicinity to feel a pull towards it. It's harder to visualize the distortion of time but it does happen to a tiny extent in the presence of any matter or energy. What's more a large enough concentration of mass or energy can distort time so much that it loops back on itself like a rubber sheet rolled up to make a cylinder. These loops are known to physicists as 'closed timelike curves' and they ought at least in theory to allow us to revisit some past moment in time.

Each particle travelling through the Large Hadron Collider at CERN creates a kind of shock wave in space-time, a gravitational ripple that distorts the space-time around it. When two such waves

are heading towards each other the outcome could be spectacular and under the right conditions the colliding gravitational waves are capable of literally ripping a hole in the fabric of the universe - what was initially dubbed a 'wormhole' by Kip Thorne and his colleagues at the California Institute of technology who first got their heads around the math back in 1988. (Physical review Letters, vol 61, p1446) These 'wormholes' make it theoretically possible to travel in time by closing the loop, rather like taking a tunnel under a hill instead of going over it - the same technology by which mankind hopes to some day reach the stars and any of the potentially habitable worlds that surround them - a matter not so much of scientific curiosity as deep rooted genetic imperative, being the only chance our species has of physically surviving beyond the lifespan of our planet. A wormhole to the stars or to another time period or quantum world would open up a pipeline to survival by placing our ailing civilization within striking distance of all the natural resources it needs to replenish the atmosphere and scrape through the existential bottleneck at which our species currently finds itself. Even the generally more circumspect Dr.Hawking has been forced to backtrack on some of his earlier statements and admit to at least the theoretical possibility of time travel (ie: sending organized bundles of particles through time) although in his introduction to 'The Science of Star Trek' the good doctor claims you would need a Faraday cage, a superconductor and more energy than you can shake a stick it to make it remotely feasible...

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Few contemporary journalists or researchers are aware that the project, organized by the 20 member nations of the European Organization for Nuclear Research — known by its French initials CERN — has only been made possible thanks to the cornerstone work of French physicist Jules Gabriel Violle (1841 - 1923) one of the founders of the Institut d'optique théorique et appliquée and the École supérieure d'optique who improved and invented a number of devices for measuring radiation and the behavior of sub-atomic particles. Monsieur Violle patented the first calorimeter, the protype for the large barrel calorimeter used by the CERN project, apparently by decoding the secret symbolic language of gothic art and architecture and literally back-engineering the technology of the ancients, the hermetic alchemical science and sorcery that the industrious physicist dubbed 'the art of light'.

Violle outlined his theories in two books - 'The Mystery Of the Cathedrals' and 'The Houses of the Philosophers' which he authored under the pseudonym 'Fulcanelli' - a play on the names of 170

'Helios' and 'Vulcan' - the weaponsmith of the Gods. A third and final volume entitled 'Finis Gloria Mundi' concerning the cataclysmic possibilities of reversing the Earth's magnetic fields was later withdrawn from publication after the physicist realized the awesome destructive potential of his work.

Although he is supposed to have died of natural causes in 1923 there are some irregularities in his death certificate which was in fact signed by his own son rather than the local coroner and there are those who believe the master alchemist is not only still alive, having achieved immortality through the completion of the 'great work' and effectively assumed the identity of his own offspring but is still at the helm of the shadowy HELIOS CORPORATION responsible for installing the large barrel calorimeter at CERN. (pictured below along with the installation team)

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Jacques Bergier, co-author of the best-selling 'The dawn of Magic' (1963) claims to have met 'Fulcanelli' in June 1937 while working with the nuclear physisist Andre Hellbronner and as a result of his testimony the American Office for Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, made a search for the elusive alchemist after the end of the war in 1945, anxious to prevent the alleged immortal from defecting to the east.

Wherever he may be the Shadow Theatre congratulates Frere Chevalier Heliopolis Jules Louis Gabriel Violle aka: 'Fulcanelli' on the completion of his great work and his unravelling of the mystery of the 'first stone' of creation.

'Fulcanelli's disciple, the publisher Eugene Canseliet claimed to have last seen his master in 1954, some 31 years after his supposed death. According to Canseliet 'Fulcanelli' was continuing his work from a laboratory outside Madrid that seemingly existed in a fold in space time. The immortal alchemist was not only said to be aging backwards but somewhere along the way had changed gender, adopting the appearance of a young woman Canseliet nonetheless insisted was his ageless master...

Omnia ab uno et in unum omnia!!!

Since Canseliet's death in 1982 the myth complex surrounding the mysterious inventor has served as an inspiration for a growing body of novels, comic books and movies including Dario Argento's 'INFERNO' (1980) Michelle Soavi's 'LA CHIESA' (1989) and Guillermo del Toro's 'CHRONOS' (1993) Be he alive or dead however there is no denying the master alchemist's seemingly far fetched theories are about to hit pay dirt!

For those who care BBC Radio 4 (92.4-94.6 MHz; 198kHz) will be carrying live coverage of the test firing from 6.00 - 9.45 am GMT and returning for comment and analysis from 3.45 pm onwards should the world as we know it still be here. The full English language text of Fulcanelli's masterwork is available for free download from: - http://www.everythingisundercontrol.org/ nagtloper/ [LINK NO LONGER LIVE]

THIS IS RICHARD STANLEY, THE LAST FREE MAN IN WEST LONDON, SIGNING OFF....

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Richard Stanley

Terra Umbra Current mood: awake Terra Umbra - Empire of Shadows (1) The light of the world Darkness first.

Darkness and hunger.

The hunger that drove the beast down from the mountain, down from the snowline into the world below.

Blog Archive Thursday, December 04, 2008

It had been a long winter, a hard season that wouldn't quit and a few nights shy of the vernal equinox in the year of Our Lord twelve twenty two the hunger finally became too great to be denied and leaving the safety of its den the beast picked its way through the maze of broken rock and lightless scree at the top of the gorge and slid thin as a sigh into the world of men. It was more like an impulse than anything else, a silent undulation of form and fur alert to the shifting patterns of the night, the living embodiment of desire. It didn't know it was a beast or why or how it had come into being. It was a beast after all and incapable of reflection. It only knew it was hungry.

Emitting a growl so low it was almost a purr the beast paused, tasting the air. Then it stiffened, hackles rising as it caught a subtle olfactory tremor in the wind.

The scent lay faint on the frozen air, the feel of it vibrating from the empty notches between the hills. Coming out of its crouch the shadow flowed without thought or hesitation towards the distant sound of running water and the unmistakable hum of life, towards a place where the high pastures gave way to fallow fields and barren vineyards where other wild things feared to tread and shepherds allowed their fat tailed flocks to roam as they pleased by night.

The first kill was a mercy.

Severing the lamb's jugular the beast drank deep, husking out the secret contents of its blood dewed fleece, devouring the soft parts of its prey first, its terrified, quivering genitalia and living entrails, rejoicing in the sweet, thick nectar at its core.

The second kill was a grace. The third a gift. The fourth and fifth a blessing. But the beast wasn't keeping track. There were so many of them. These mewing, newborn things. The grey shadow fell upon them in an ecstasy of rage, ripping and ravening, joyously tearing lambs and ewes alike into stupid, senseless pieces, sparing nothing in the fields it visited that night or the next. The beast did not understand the depth of its hunger until the emptiness inside, the emptiness that chafed against the limits of its being was filled, its thirst slaked.

On the third night there were more men. Men with sticks and lanterns and crossing the headwaters of the Ers the grey shadow slunk away into the skunkwood and wild myrtle, into the deepest, darkest part of the forest where it could go safely to earth and consider its options. The master of the sheepfold at Caussou where the first predations were noted duly alerted his bayle who tasked his chatelaine to take word to the seigneur that a wolf was stalking the meadows of the Ariege and a hunting party would need to be raised.

Raimond Drut, the lord of the Ariege and master of all he surveyed was ensconced at his Pamiers estate at the time. He was no longer a young man and now his illustrious whiskers and curling shoulder-length locks were streaked with grey the seigneur found himself increasingly disinclined towards affairs of state and the intrigues that haunted the draughty halls and turrets of his feudal seat, the rambling gothic citadel of Foix, the material embodiment of his family's temporal power which had clung since time out of mind to the great white rock above the rapids where the churning waters of the Ariege receive the icy springs of the Arget. He had taken to blaming this disinclination on the long winter nights and incipient bronchial catarrh, exaggerating his cough for the benefit of those few retainers and members of the clan grown familiar enough to dare question his motives but if the truth be told it was the sharp tongue of his spouse, the Countess Phillipa that drove Raimond more often than not from his great hall and made the rustic fastness of the ancient manorial farmhouse at Belpech seem so oddly appealing now that the first breath of spring had come to the flatlands and the bluebells broken in a silent wave through the woods.

He had married the Aragonese noblewoman as part of a peace treaty with the house of Montcade and while the feasting had lasted for over a week Raimond had never been sure whether Phillipa had ever really loved him. At first she had seemed to care enough to tolerate him, to make allowances for his ways but after the arrival of their second daughter, Caecilie, she had grown distant and moody, taking refuge in her faith and her own increasingly quixotic interpretation of the scriptures. Raimond's closest friend and confidante, old Roiax, the former captain of the guard who had lost an eye in the battle of Muret had done his best to counsel his baffled master. Fixing Raimond with his lopsided owlish gaze he tried to tutor him in the ways of aristocrats and the manner by whence a civilized gentleman of substance should comport himself towards a spouse. Be nicer to her, he chided. Treat her better. Try to listen to her. That sort of thing. But the Countess would go to her duenna and cry and there were days Raimond suspected her and the whole court of plotting against him. This spring as was his want he had donned his battered, broad brimmed hat and leather doublet and resorted to the only course of action left to him. Gathering his men at arms Count Raimond coughed pointedly into his grubby handkerchief and announced it was high time they repaired to the light and space of Belpech, to extort a fresh tithe from the locals and inspect their fiefdom's western guard towers.

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No attack had ever been made on the valley but there was a slight danger that roaming armies made up of those whom the northern barons had defeated and driven from their lands might wander into Raimond's domain foraging for food and towns to loot although there was in truth seldom if any news at all to report from his territory's western flanks. It was the very isolation of his Belpech estate with its crumbling crimson tiles and octagonal sarascen tower that the lord of the valley cherished most. Tacitly withdrawing from the responsibilities of office and turning a deaf ear to the drumbeat of distant wars he devoted himself instead to affairs of hill and stream, to his threadbare memories and the comfort of his cups, to the sweet red Pamiers wine, the pulse of the tum-tum and the plaintive jangling of the darbourka.

It was hunger of a different order that drove Raimond Drut from the sanctuary of his baronial manor and out into the high, wild woods beyond the fields he knew, hunger for the good, gone days of his youth, for the thrill of the hunt and the quick blood of the kill. Under different circumstances he might have dispatched his men at arms to safely take care of the matter but something in the breathless words of the chatelaine who came hotfoot from Caussou must have sparked his interest for it is recorded that it was the lord of the valley himself astride his great black stallion Rhodiamant who rode out with his most trusted sergeant, old Roiax, at his side that spring to face the beast.

They rode out with the hounds at the break of day, their steeds clad in the bright livery of their house, the red and gold blazon of Foix and the crimson cows of Bern and with their traps freshly greased, packed in an ornately woven willow basket that Roiax wore with the shoulder-straps loosened so that the base of the basket rested against the cantle of his saddle. They rode with the sun slanting in their eyes, the forests of Montbel marching away trunk upon trunk into the lonely blue grey foothills to their left and to the right the fallow, patchwork fields of Mirepoix and Lavelanet strewn out like prayer mats in the morning mist. Before them the horns of Soularac and the Pic de Saint Barthelemy climbed above the clouds, high and white and lonely, forming a natural bowl that cupped and held the dark hump of Montsegur whose summit rose like a island from a curling sea of frozen fog, its ramparts seemingly the outermost bastion of some other elder kingdom remote and imperiously aloof from our own.

Raimond knew little of the mountain then, only what he had heard as a child but it was enough for him to instinctively give its sheer, densely wooded flanks a wide berth even at this hour of day. There was something oddly symmetrical about it's contours and whether or not its crags had really been hewn by giants from the raw bedrock of creation according to some obscure principle of ante-human sorcery it was evident even to the most casual onlooker that Montsegur was no mere hill or hummock, nor was it a mountain like any other. It was, according to those who knew, a 'pog' which in the old language meant something in between. Not just any pog but 'the pog' which conveyed perhaps something of its singular nature. No-one knew even in Raymond's day what forgotten hands, what vanished race had raised the abandoned keep that clung like a mirage to it's crest or for what purpose it had been designed. The ancient fortifications from whence Montsegur drew its name (the 'secure' or 'safe mountain') had been there since before the first scratchings of recorded history or the invention of written words yet in the morning light its white walls shone as if newly created by some God who had yet to puzzle out a use for them.

It was mid-afternoon before the hounds picked up the beast's scent on the outskirts of Bellesta where an old ram had been slain the night before. The animal's carcass had been pulled apart and the pieces scattered across the snow. At first Raimond could find hide nor hair of their prey but then old Roiax blew the fresh fall from a single paw mark that lay crystalline and perfect beneath the morning powder, a print far bigger than any the lord of the valley could remember seeing before. Crossing to the south bank of the Ers the seigneur and his sergeant set their first trap just below the mouth of the Pas de l'Ours where they knew the beast must have crossed the night before. Digging a shallow hole in the frozen loam Roiax delicately primed the trap's spring-loaded jaws before covering it with lattice of twigs, sifting dirt over them and then sprinkling humus and wood debris over the dirt.

By sundown they had laid all four of their traps before stabling their horses and taking dinner at a tiny farmstead at the base of the Gorge de la Frau. They sat in silence before the spitting

hearth, feasting on a rich stew of beans marinaded in goose fat and Raimond's thoughts turned once more to the days of his youth when he had stalked a different prey, when he had courted and famously won the heart of Etienette de Penautier, the youngest and fiercest daughter of the House of Caberet, known to her countless ill-fated suitors and the troubadours who celebrated her exploits as 'Loba the she-wolf of Caberet'. She had been the loveliest woman in the Languedoc and the name of her castle had become synonymous with the great summer gatherings of musicians and minstrels who had flocked to her domain before the war. She had fought bravely, helping organize the resistance against the northern barons and was remembered as a heroine to the people of the south but Raimond thought of her now as she had been in that brief, rapturous summer when she had, God be praised, been his and his alone. Few men cannot count some days of perfect happiness but Raimond did not know if there were any who could count their happiness in years. His had lasted but a single season and now when he recalled the few short nights he had spent in the arms of that young enchantress in the balmy heights of Monte Lupo they seemed to be a solitary island of tranquility amidst the storms of his later life, the demands of class and clan that had driven him into a loveless marriage and the chilly arms of the Countess Phillipa.

“You think we can catch her?"old Roiax asked at length.

“I wouldn't be here if I didn't"muttered his master, gazing into the embers.

“You think she's made another kill by now?”

“We'll see in the morning."Raimond nodded."We'll see…”

That night as the Count slumbered on the cot beside the hearth and his sergeant dozed in the stables the beast came down from the heights and picking up their tracks at the mouth of the Pas de L'Ours it tasted the air, separating out the chemical signature of humans, horses and hounds, untangling the delicate skein of pheromones. Within fifteen minutes the beast had found all four of the traps and giving them a wide berth it took a calf at a place named Pelail, not half a league from where Raimond Drut lay moaning in his sleep for his long lost love with her porcelain skin and open thighs. The beast fed 'til its belly could hold no more for although it did not yet understand how much trouble it was in it knew enough not to return to a kill. Then a rent appeared in the leaden cloud. A waxing gibbous moon swam momentarily into view above the dark outline of the pog and raising its snout the beast howled and howled again into the freezing night.

The hounds caught the fresh scent and the riders took off up the col at first light, following the pack. The snow lay thick in the pass and their horses trod the drifts in high, giddy grace, swinging their steaming muzzles over the frozen reefs and peering down through the dark, leafless thickets that choked the mountain's flanks. It was very cold in the pass and at first they could find no further tracks in the fresh fall. A league or so to the south they forded a burn so black against the snow it might have a crack in the world and on the far bank they picked up the beast's trail once more where it had paused to drink before zig-zagging away down the mountainside towards the Col de Sept Freres and the sheepfolds of Prades and Comus. At the edge of the woods the trail turned and doubled back along the edge of the pasture. Thumbing the brim of his hat Raimond tried to mentally reconstruct what had happened earlier. And again he thought of Loba and the children he might have had. Then he rode out down the pasture and then up and back again, finding no trace at first of what the beast had been running after. On the second pass a flock of crows rose shrieking and wheeling from the verge of the forest and Roiax's gelding took fright. As it reared the ragged girth-strap gave way on his saddle and the one eyed retainer somersaulted backwards, sitting down hard in the hoarfrost and watching his mount bolt away from him.

“Are you well, old friend?”

“Yessir. Well and good, my liege."Roiax rose, dusting off his bruised haunches, his eyes focused on the red ruins of a two year old heifer that lay on its side amidst the tangled roots of an ancient oak. The scent of death was still thick in the air and Raimond's stallion wanted no part of it, arching its neck and rolling its eyes. Patting Rhodiamant's neck the graying seigneur spoke gently but firmly to his steed before climbing down. Tying the reigns to a branch he walked around the fresh kill, studying it. The beast had eaten the creature's liver, dragging its offal out over the snow before shearing away several pounds of flesh from its haunches. The dead animal was not quite

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stiff, not quite cold and where it lay the heat of its cooling body had melted the snow in a great shadowy halo. Raymond walked back to his horse and slid his crossbow from its scabbard as Roiax retrieved the remains of his fallen saddle.

“Can it be fixed?”

“Billets must have rotted. It can be fixed soon enough…”

“When was the last time you looked at it?”

“This old saddle was never up to much, my liege.”

“That old saddle is the only saddle you had"muttered Raimond, checking the mechanism on his bow. The action was stiff with the cold. Roiax cursed under his breath, watching as his master slid a bolt into the breach and mounted up. There was no point in letting the trail grow cold, not when they were so very close. Riding with the bow across his lap Raimond Drut followed the pack down along the edge of the woods, livery flickering red and gold between the trunks until he was lost from view, the clamor of the wolfhounds fading into the eerie silence of the glen as his loyal servant hurried about his task as if struck by a sudden presentiment, knowing every passing minute made the gap between himself and his master more irremediable.

The lord of the Ariege followed the beast all afternoon without seeing it. Once he chased it up out of a bed of scrub myrtle where the beast had been asleep in the sun. Or thought he chased it up. Raimond stooped and placed his hand against the crushed leaves to see if they were warm but whether they were warm from the beast or the sun he was in no way sure. Twice he lost his quarry's tracks in the snowmelt and twice the hounds picked it up again. On the far side of the Col des Sept Freres he saw smoke and came across three shepherds in battered felt hats and ragged woolen mantles taking their dinner. They seemed terrified by the very sight of him, bowing and scraping before Raimond's champing horse as he tried in vain to question them. The serfs had heard tell of their lord and master often enough in song and story, indeed paid tithe to him yet the fact of his physical presence seemed beyond their ability to readily comprehend. Averting their eyes they groveled helplessly in the slush, tongues paralyzed by fear, each hoping the other might answer for them.

Measuring the remaining light with his right hand at arm's length Raimond turned west towards Prades and Caussou, the scene of the beast's first depredations. He took a winding downward trail through the woods and as he crossed the narrow sward at the base of the dolmen just below the col de Chioulla the beast rose up to meet him.

Rhodiamant stopped and backed and stamped as the largest wolf Raimond had ever seen broke cover, bursting soundlessly from the green gloom where it had lain in wait. It was a lot bigger than he had gathered from the prints, bigger than a mastiff and burlier even than the terrified wolfhounds, almost the size of the half grown heifer it had brought down that afternoon yet monstrous as the beast's size and aspect may have been its eyes were more so. It was the epitome of all things wild as if the forest had taken flesh, as if the very land Raimond had loved and sought to tame had turned against him and at its heart and very core there lay a void that could never be filled, a hunger that blazed with an intensity fiercer than life.

The instant seemed to expand upon itself, Raimond's heart slamming in his chest as he brought up the bow. Then the stallion spooked and reared, spoiling his aim. The wolf's great nostrils flared rhythmically as it narrowed the gap, scenting its prey's weakness as if it could already taste Count Raimond's blood and the adrenaline that surged in his veins. The beast was close enough that Raimond could smell it too - a deep intoxicating musk of sweat and savagery that only served to further panic his skittish horse, mitigating against all efforts to reign it in.

Once upon a time Raimond Drut had been at grace with the world. He had slept in the arms of his she-wolf, secure in an unspoken half imagined pact with nature and the elemental spirits of his land. His pagan soul recognized in other creatures a kindred spark, a splinter of the same primal light that infused all things for good or bad. He was still only a human being with all the frailties and vanities that went with it, a hunter and a warrior, a philanderer and a rake but for his sins Raimond was at least kind to animals, unusually so for his day. He spoke to his horses and falcons as he addressed his own kin and during the long winter nights in his feudal demesne he had 174

penned any number of treatises on land stewardship, one of which, a manual on the raising and care of hounds was to remain the standard text on the subject for over three centuries. Whilst the prospect of such posthumous fame would have been cold comfort to him now it was the hounds that saved him at the last…

Coming between their beloved master and his sleek grey nemesis the wolfhounds bowled into the beast, bringing it down, three of the dogs going down with it, rolling together in a lashing, snarling ball of teeth and fur.

The beast for its part fought in complete silence.

One of the hounds yelped, nursing a wounded foreleg as it circled, disengaging from the melee while the beast seized a second by its lower jaw, throwing it to the ground and straddling it before snatching its grip from the stricken animal's jaw to its throat, biting again for better purchase, sinking its teeth into the loose folds of skin and the muscled neck below. Left to its own devices the beast would have killed the dog there and then but realizing its peril it abruptly abandoned its hold, spinning on its haunches to face the Count as he steadied the crossbow with his forearm. The beast's implacable yellow eyes bored into him, ignoring the circling hounds, coat bristling grayish dun in the slanting rays, the setting sun at its back, flaring in Raimond's pupils .

Go on, he said to himself. If you think you can.

And the beast leaped. So quick he could scarce pull the trigger. It was as if time and motion were suspended for all eternity, between day and night, rising moon and setting sun, Raimond's body arching backwards, one stirrup tearing free as he parted company with his saddle, crossbow spinning from his hands. Then the sun disappeared behind the treetops and night came rushing in., the lord of the valley hitting the ground with sufficient force to shatter the spine of any lesser man, the beast on top of him. While the beast's weight was not much more than his own its strength and momentum were far greater driving him into the frozen loam.

Managing to get his right elbow up under the creature's jaws Count Raimond fumbled numbly with his left hand for the hilt of his dagger, hearing his doublet tearing and the links in his mail shirt giving way with sharp metallic snapping sounds as they grappled in the dirt like lovers.

Despite straining with his every muscle Raimond felt his right forearm being bent slowly back as the ghastly, gaping fangs and the dripping shaft of the crossbow bolt that projected from the ruined red socket of the beast's left eye pressed ever closer to his terrified face, a viscous streamer of blood and cerebro-spinal fluid sliding from its clotted feathers. Drawing back his left arm he felt with the tip of his knife for a place in the body of the beast, thrusting blindly upwards.

The beast's hide seemed unnaturally tough but a frantic heave drove the blade home. Champing its jaws the creature uttered a silent grunt. Raimond thrust again but at first his assailant did not seem to feel the bite. Only gradually did it weaken…

Doubling his legs and driving them into the belly of the beast Raimond rolled free. For a while he lay on his back, panting like a dog as he tried to catch his breath. The first stars were dusting the blue vault of the sky and he could see the silvery incandescence of the moon already rising from behind the cromlech, .Gathering his strength Raimond forced himself upright only to sit back down wishing he were ten years younger. The beast said nothing. Eventually he rose again and retrieving his sword from the saddle he walked over to where the beast crouched. It flattened its ears as he approached, slobber swinging in white strings from its jaw as it shook its head, trying in vain to dislodge the bolt that had passed clear through its cranium and the soft tissues within, the barb protruding from the back of its skull just below the cerebellum. Raimond crouched beside the dying animal and reaching out, spoke gently as he stroked its head but the beast only cringed and trembled.

It's no use fighting it, he said.

Clasping the hilt of his sword with both hands Raimond Drut cut off the beast's head. It took two blows. Then, wiping the sticky stuff from his whiskers the lord of the Ariege filled his lungs with clean, cold air and placing his horn to his lips blew a deep resounding blast that echoed from col

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to col so that old Roiax and indeed the whole wide world this side of the mountains might know he lived and the beast was dead.

Day and night are different worlds. Two worlds occupying the exact same geographic space as different in character as death is different from life or the heavens above from the abyss below yet the only real difference between them is time. The time of the earth's turning. The moon was out now and its light made the way through the woods seem strange and unfamiliar as if Raimond had miswandered on his homeward path and now found himself in a land he only dimly recognized, a kingdom of ghosts and shadows whose boundaries stretched as far as eyes could see or his thoughts readily contain into an future of old age, error and ruin.

At least its all downhill from here he told himself.

As if that made the going easier.

The tired wolfhounds lagged behind so Raimond clasped the beast's head closer for company as he rode as if to draw the strength he needed from his trophy to propel himself forward into the well of uncertainty ahead. As he came down from the mountains and the last of the beast's lifeblood cooled steadily against his dimly aching thighs the foliage grew more abundant, the branches curving above his head like the eaves of a vast dark cathedral consecrated to some unknown religion whose gods had names no tongue could shape nor throat pronounce and all about him the lord of the valley could hear the small, furtive sounds of its invisible parishioners, the scuttlings and slitherings, coughs barks and hoots of the night animals going about their secret business.

Moonlight fell in shards from the spreading canopy of new green leaves strewing the shadowy basilica's downward slanting knave with tiny flecks of light like the glowing glyphs and ciphers of an alien alphabet that crawled everywhere across lichen encrusted rocks and the rough, dark bark of the trees. At first their swirling letters and incoherent numbers seemed to lighten the way but in practice the fractured beams served only to deepen the gloom and further confuse his addled senses. He felt so tired it was all he could do just to stay upright in the saddle. Closing his eyes he loosened his grip on Rhodiamant's reins, allowing the stallion to choose his own way.

For a while there was only darkness. Sweet darkness. The rhythmic undulation of the saddle and Rhodiamant's plodding hooves. In his mind's eye Raimond imagined there was another figure beside him, guiding him through the night, her pale hand gently leading his tired mount by the bridle reigns. He imagined he saw his lost love now as she had been on that night before the war, before the events that had torn their world apart, on the night when she first lead him by a hidden path through the tangled thickets of Monte Lupo to a place known only to initiates, to those elect few who had passed through all four degrees and their attendant trials and mysteries.

Although Raimond was nobly born he had only arrived at this blessing, this great grace, this secret of secrets in precious, hard won stages adjudicated by the statutes of the Court of Love and the codes of chivalry for there was in those days a service of love just as there was a service of vassalage . There were four trials, four stations in that journey, four phases to his devotion - first that of humble aspirant or fegnedor, then supplicant or precador before he could even be openly acknowledged as Loba's recognized suitor, her entendedor but it was only when he was about to be was raised at last, God be praised, to the exalted realm of drut or accepted love that his betrothed finally took him by the hand and lead him through that narrow, spiraling path to the innermost thicket where the White Lady awaited them.

She had lain in her bower of figs and wild vines since the fogs of timeless time and the forest had grown up around her yet the passage of untold centuries had neither blackened nor tarnished the smooth, hard stone from whence she had been wrought and instead the White Lady had only blanched with age until her full, fecund breasts, pregnant torso and ancient empty eyes shone like a piece of the moon that had fallen to earth..

Raimond stiffened as if turned to stone himself, Loba's warm arms all around him, tugging at his doublet, her voice a hot, eager whisper in his ear, telling her virgin warrior how in Roman times the young men had ejaculated over the Great Mother's image in order to learn the secrets of magic and the true workings of their world.

“Have you worlds within you?”

She giggled, her tiny, blessed fingers slipping a layer closer to his expectant skin.

“Do you want dominion?”

He caught his breath, feeling a quickening within.

"But first…"

She paused and the young Count moaned softly, not wanting her to draw away.

“First Her suitors had to vow never to enter a Christian church again for they belonged to the White Lady now, bound body and soul, regardless of who or what they might become in later life...”

Raimond shivered, nodding wordlessly.

“Forever and ever…”

He closed his eyes as she pressed against him.

“World without end.”

He felt as if his soul were melting and clutched after it in vain. Amen. Amen. So long ago was that halcyon night it might have been part of some other life entirely yet for a instant the two worlds seemed to merge and the only difference between them was time. The time of an eyelid rising and falling…

Raimond opened his eyes to find the stallion had come to a halt at the end of the aisle of trees.

Before him a high white wall shone in the moonlight and catching sight of an arched gateway set into the crumbling masonry he climbed stiffly down, trying without success to get his bearings. The night was cold, the sky so clear and the moon so strong he feared he might become enmeshed in its beams forever unless he found shelter from its gaze. Whether dead, alive or simply dreaming he was still the lord of the valley and it was his right to demand admittance and take sanctuary where and when he pleased. Hanging the beast's head on a nail beside the door he pounded on its wizened timbers. Only when the beam was drawn and he saw the white habits and pale, startled faces of the nuns did he realize he had come to the door of a convent.

The tolling bell roused the abbess from her dreams. The dreams were always worse this time of month as if emboldened by the moonlight and Mater Ermingarda woke with a start, lips forming a silent prayer. She lay in her narrow wooden cot blinking into the dark, trying to puzzle out whether it was really the bell that woke her or the vision that possessed her sleep, the image of a knight on his coal black charger that bore relentlessly down on her across the years, a warrior clad in the shining armor and bright mantle of the summer sun. Then she realized the convent's bell was ringing the Tocsin, the swift double beat of the warning signal.

He is come. He is come. The one foretold in the dreams.

The man without a face…

She shuddered. Suppressing the childish notion Ermingarda swung herself from her cot, tidying away her tangled tresses and reaching for her wimple and neatly folded cassock. A moment later there was a soft knock on the cell door and she heard the voice of one of the novices stammering out what she had already guessed. A man had come to the convent gate, one who could not be refused.

He is come. He is come.

The dark one has come…

Scooping up her rosary the abbess followed the younger woman through the dimly lit cloisters, drawing strength from the murmured litany that came from the chapel, the endless reading of the chapters which, according to the order's rules, were to continue uninterrupted by fire or flood with the sister who started at eight in the evening relieved only at dawn and so on down through the years in unbroken relay until time and tide were done and the order and its works one with the dust of the stars and the void between.

Love would be like this, she told herself, coming unbidden at some strange hour. Like a thief in the night…

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Mater Ermingarda had taken the cloth on the outermost cusp of womanhood and although she had never known a man she knew about their ways. She knew about love and about the moon.

As a child she had wondered why the moon always came at night to perch in the tree outside her window, watching over her as if to mark her out for some special destiny, some nebulous purpose that receded year after year before her. And love might be like that too, she imagined. As constant as the moon yet as icy and as unattainable…

It had been all too many moons since her father's retainers immured her in the isolated convent that became her prison yet despite the slow passage of one sequestered season into the next and the juices that ripened only to sour again inside her she had not yet given up on love, on the absurd thought that the man she saw in her sleep might one day find her and bear her home to her true kingdom, a hope that never quite dried up despite her best efforts to scourge it from her thoughts with nettles, willow switch and barbed celice, to drown her dreams in prayer.

But I'm still dreaming now, she told herself. I must be…

Ermingarda paused, eyes widening at the sight of Raimond's silhouette waiting on the threshold.

The moon was at his back and in its radiance he looked more like a beast than a man, a creature from out the forest deep risen up on its hind legs to come a courting and whether the abbess shivered from the cold night wind or the sight of him was impossible to say. The novice raised her lantern and in its faltering glow the she saw that beneath his broad brimmed hat and dark, curling whiskers Raimond was a man after all.

Love would be like the stubble on his cheek she thought.

The rub and scratch against her skin…

She blushed, averting her eyes, knuckles whitening as she crushed the rosary beads into the palm of her hand.

“My lord…”

Then seeing the beast's blood on Raimond's thighs the abbess bade her pious sisters to bring him at once to her cell while she made herself busy fetching wine and vitals from the kitchen along with hot water and thread so that his wounds might be sowed. Banking up the fire she bolted the door to make certain they would be left well alone.

Love would be like a dog rose in the moonlight.

Like a dream made flesh. A dream that always returns…

“Is it day yet?”

“Set you down, my liege. Rest you.”

“But I see the dawn coming. It's so bright. Surely it must be dawn?”

“Not yet, my lord.”

“Where am I then? Am I not dead?.”

“Not yet."She smiled sadly and Raimond sighed, knowing it was true.

“God…"His heart turned ."I wish I could rest. Like any other man. I'd give my life for a quiet corner of the earth to lay my head …”

Stretching out on the cot he watched dazedly as a somber sanguine light crept across the floor of the cell, seeping over the worn flags and threadbare prayer mat, lapping at the simple stone washstand and the leather flail that hung beside it. Raising his eyes to the narrow cruciform window set high in the wall he saw the rim of the moon darkened by a scarlet penumbra, the

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shadow of the world spreading like a stain across its face, its reflected rays filling creation as if the earth had been bathed and baptized anew in the blood of the fallen beast.

“God help us..

"Soft now. The beast is dead.”

"You don't understand…”

"I understand enough to know you are not a man like any other. Nor could you be. The blood of kings runs in your veins…"A strand of flaxen hair escaped Ermingarda's wimple as she bent closer, pale features haloed and transformed by the glow.

“You are my Lord…”

"But you're just a child…”

He shivered, coming to the edge of something too difficult to readily comprehend. Feeling a pang of fear he perceived in the lines of her face an answer to the riddle that had brought him here, to the hunger that had driven him from his domain and for an instant he almost understood what it was that the White Lady wanted from him, what the Goddess required of her mortal servants.

A carnal fever gripped him and he felt the hot giddy rush of blood in his temples. The blood of kings. The blood of Christ. The blood of beasts and men. The blood of angels. Blood. Just blood.

The blood of all the world for only blood had the power to transcend time and give form to the void, to hold back the darkness that threatened moment by moment to devour it.

“My love…”

He freed her locks, golden hair falling over his upturned face, blinding him with its light, the feel of her supple body twisting in his arms driving him to blinder madness still. She had never given herself to a man before but in the end she gave him all she was, crying out as he entered her, thrusting helplessly into the void between her legs.

Love is like this, she thought. Like the first and final senseless moments of being. A cry as long and thin as a vein. Love is like dying…

Then Raimond shot his seed into the emptiness and fell upon her, spent. Holding him close in the dark Ermingarda ran her fingers through her warrior's graying hair, mouthing a wordless keening lullaby, a song as old as her race. The Count did not stir until first light when the sound of Roiax's horn came drifting over the treetops, calling him back to the world. He did not remember his dreams, only that he had dreamed, nor did he leave any keepsake to mark his passing, only the wolf's head hung on the nail beside the convent door and the new life that grew within her belly.

When her condition could no longer be hidden she was forced to leave the convent and return to her family estate in Telho where in the fullness of time she begat twins. Mater Ermingarda had known only a single night of love yet she would dearly for the dreams that drove her to temptation for it is recorded that while the midwives did all they could to stem the bleeding the Lord saw fit to forgive the pious woman and recall her to His side, weakened as she was by her journey north and public shaming.

The bastards were strong and heavy for their age, born with the dark hair and fierce good looks of their illustrious sire and the pale, cold eyes of the mother whose embrace they would never know. The boy was called Loup, after his father's exploit on the night of their conception and the girl was named Na Esclarmonda. - the light of the world…

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