As with other “occult” subjects, there has been much nonsense written about ghosts & hauntings, accompanied by all manner of individual & group crank-supporters. And of course there have been equal numbers of ghost-debunkers. Collectively this makes for an entertaining hobby on either side of the fence.
A serious Black Magician will eventually be interested in investigating such substance as there may be behind the surface imagery. Do ghosts exist either in some sort of “traditional” way or in a less-obvious “scientific” sense?
Let’s start with three basics [there are exceptions to each, but on the whole these hold true]:
(1) If a ghost is a departed spirit-essence of a previously-living person, it might conceivably manifest itself as an ethereal image of that person’s body, but non-parts of that body, such as clothes, carriages, horses, or chain-saws wouldn’t make the trip. Ghosts which do not appear in human form are sometimes called specters. [This term comes from “spectrum”, as the ancient Greeks considered specters to appear in a variety of colors. Remember this in the discussion below.]
(2) By and large, ghosts tend to be associated with specific viewers (such as a relative) or specific places.
(3) Ghosts are unreliable. They show up, if they do, unexpectedly and irregularly.
If a ghost appears to a specific viewer, and particularly if that viewer has a history or “talent” for seeing or manifesting ghosts (i.e. a medium), your first consideration is whether it is deliberate fakery. Such may be innocent [as in stage magic ghost routines] or fraudulent [if the person is trying to put over a scam].
If you decide that the person is being honest, then either it is a subjective universe experience - out of control, as it were - or that individual’s senses are adjusted in some subtle way that most others’ aren’t, enabling him/her to sense something they can’t. We’ll come back to this later also.
If a ghost appears only in a specific place, such as a particular room in a particular house, then it stands to reason that there is something about that particular location that is conducive to such a manifestation. [Here it would be even more helpful to narrow things down to see if only certain individuals sense the ghost in that location, and what common perceptive threads there may be between those people.]
Here we enter the marvelous magical world of
shape dynamics and their impact on human consciousness. Like proxemics, shape dynamics is a force which routinely exercises a tremendous psychological influence on people without their conscious awareness.
#6O on the reading list is Roger de Lafforest’s
Houses That Kill. By now this paperback is probably next-to-impossible to find, so eventually we will get the good stuff in it synopsized and made accessible as a
Ruby Tablet-file. But for now let’s consider dL’s basic premise: that there is a “hidden science” of buildings and other closed environments (such as caves or groves). When you enter such a building, you are exposed to these principles, which may have either an immediate or a long-term effect on you [HPL devotees will note that delayed-effects were often an HPL staple, as in
The Color Out Of Space or
The Shunned House.]
This is somewhat along the line of the well-known Chinese art of
Feng Shui, according to which there are certain good and bad ways to build and landscape buildings in terms of their effect upon occupants.
Feng Shui is an interesting mix of psychology and superstitious tradition, and there are lots of books available on it. A pleasant, coherent, and knowledgeable introduction is Derek Walters’
Feng Shui (NY: Simon & Schuster/Fireside, ISBN 0-671-66790-4), 1988.
Houses That Kill, as its name conveys, focuses less on how to build good houses as how to recognize, avoid, and escape bad ones. I labeled it TS-5/OT-5 for the simple reason that someone with sinister intentions could use the same information to create such architectural Frankensteins. Don’t fool around with this stuff for the same reasons that you shouldn’t fool around with other -5 material unless you know damned well what you’re doing and have a very sublime reason for doing it.
Reading
HTK is a bit like reading the
Necronomicon or
The King in Yellow: There is a lot of craziness and raving, and you have to look for the occasional flashes of near- and para-sanity. When these appear, they are illuminating indeed.
Assume that you have come across a house with a rotten reputation; people die, go crazy, believe in the Warren Commission, etc. when they live there. De Lafforest offers this checklist:
1. Location: The house may be built on impenetrable ground, over an underground stream of water, an ore deposit, a geological fault or a closed cavity, or in a place vulnerable to electrofiltrations or infested with harmful waves for one reason or another.
2. Shape waves may be responsible.
3. There may be ionization of the air.
4. The materials of the house, or of the furniture and other objects inside it, may be malignant by nature.
5. The house, in whole or part, may be under a curse or an interdiction.
6. The memory of walls or the bad breath of the past may be poisoning the house in the present.
7. The bad luck and the evil eye of one or more of the occupants may have impregnated the house and the atmosphere inside it so thoroughly that they in turn emit harmful waves. There are then reflections, echoes, repercussions, backlashes a kind of abominable tennis in which increasingly harmful waves are sent back and forth indefinitely between the house and its occupants.
In the space of this
Scroll article I can’t go through the ramifications of all of these; the reading list will be helpful. For instance Nigel Pennick has written a lot about geomancy, and there’s a tasty chapter on it in #14M. [The British generally appear to be especially interested in geomancy, ley-lines, and that sort of thing.]
Here I’d like to focus on waves and vibrations, as dL mentions in items #1, #2, & #7.
Assuming that all readers of the
Scroll got “A”s in their high school physics classes, we know what W&V are. When they get going under certain circumstances, they create additional phenomena called fields. You can see and measure at least some kinds of waves, but fields are trickier. Often you can ascertain the presence of a field, but cannot be sure why it is there or even what it is composed of. For instance, a magnetic field can be measured, but what is it? And gravity is something that might be a field-phenomenon, but no one’s quite sure. Einstein’s idea of the Holy Grail was a “Unified Field Theory” interrelating gravity & electromagnetism, but he never quite found the castle.
As in
Forbidden Planet, where a monster lay in ambush hidden in the
id of Dr. Morbius, de Lafforest suggests that similar “monsters” may lurk within the friendly, pretty range of the visible electromagnetic spectrum [remember that word from above?]:
Everything would be simple if we were limited to the colors of the rainbow. But besides the seven visible color-vibrations (violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red), the spectrum includes five invisible ones (infrared, black, negative green, white, ultraviolet). Belizal and Morel write that ‘in the sector between black and white there are many other vibratory points revealing great energy. This is an intensely radioactive zone whose center lies in negative green, which is the exact antipode of the green of the spectrum, or positive green.’ And they conclude: ‘It is the shortest and most powerful vibration in the universe.’
I will add that it is also the most dangerous. With green we are at the borderline between good and evil, the visible and the invisible. Both positive and negative, it is the most mysterious of all colors, the only one that is exactly opposed to itself. In any case it greatly complicates efforts to assign responsibility for the inexplicable harmful forces that contaminate some houses ...
The subject of colors provides a reasonable transition to the difficult and controversial problem of shape waves.
All the harmful rays I have mentioned so far can be detected and measured by scientific devices sensitive to microvibrations and electromagnetism. They correspond to gamma rays, which are similar to X-rays. It has been established that the shorter their wavelength is, the more harmful they are, and that they are extremely hard. It is precisely because of this hardness that they can so easily penetrate living tissues. In human beings and animals they destroy red corpuscles; in plants they attack the sap. They are thus responsible for a progressive disintegration of the human race. It can be said without exaggerating that the end of the world is near if man neglects to protect himself from the malignant rays that criss-cross the universe. Fortunately, as we have seen, it is possible to assure such protection by relatively simple means.
Provided these dangerous rays have a kind of physio-chemical plausibility, it is easy to convince people they exist. Since the idea of radioactivity is now familiar to everyone, it can be understood by analogy that there are cosmic and telluric waves which have detrimental effects on human beings. But it will be much harder for me to make my readers take me seriously when I say that by drawing two perpendicular lines with a point in common, we obtain the shortest and most powerful vibration in the universe, the one I have already mentioned in connection with colors: negative green.
These vibrations produced by a right angle are shape waves, that is, waves engendered by shapes as their name implies.
When they are emitted by symmetrical geometrical shapes, they are favorable to the equilibrium of living organisms. They are unfavorable when they come from shapes that are irregular, non-compensated, or dissociated to project malignant energy.
We have here come to the impassable no-man’s land that separates science from magic.
If it is true, as I believe, that this vibration is created by angular refraction, it is easy to imagine the superhuman power wielded by someone capable of aiming, wherever and however he chooses, the formidable artillery of shape waves contained in an ordinary geometry textbook.
We are already familiar with the Law of the Trapezoid, and with Mortensen’s observations in his
The Command to Look (#20J) about the psychological impact of different shapes and masses. De Lafforest is moving us another step towards the “machinery” involved, i.e. the impact of specific wave-lengths on the electromagnetic spectrum on the human brain & psyche. Further that angles of intersecting planes generate waves/fields which may or may not be within the visible EMS.
Isn’t this fun and weird? Look around the room right now and start worrying about all the negative green that you never knew was stalking you like one of Colin Wilson’s mind parasites ...
And that’s just within the visible range.
Back in 1975 a looker-into-strange-things named John Keel wrote a fascinating little book called
The Eighth Tower (NY: Signet #451-E7460). Its title takes off from that evocative passage in William Seabrook’s
Adventures in Arabia:
Stretching across Asia, from Northern Manchuria, through Thibet, west through Persia, and ending in the Kurdistan, was a chain of seven towers, on isolated mountain-tops; and in each of these towers sat continually a priest of Satan, who by “broadcasting” occult vibrations controlled the destinies of the world for evil.
Seabrook considered the Shrine of Sheikh Adi of the Yezidis to be the westernmost of these towers, and the entire legend formed the basis for the
Church of Satan’s IV°, whose Initiates were originally conceived to be such Sorcerers.
Keel’s “eighth tower” derived from this notion of “broadcasting”; his book was a journey through the oddities of the entire EMS. In this he was less rigorously scientific than Dr. Becker in #17F [cf. my “Salamander Bones and the Seven Towers of Satan”,
Runes #III-3], but interesting nonetheless.
At the bottom of the EMS (0-1,000 cycles/second) we have AC current, electric power motors, VLF radio, telephones, hi-fi audio, etc. In the 100 kilocycles-100 megacycles range LF/MF/HF radio. Moving on into the 100-1,000 kilometer range we encounter VHF and UHF radio, radar, infrared, microwave. Somewhere between 1013 and 1015 KM we have the visible light spectrum, i.e. everything that we can [normally] see. At 1016-17 you get X-rays, then Gamma rays 1018-19, then cosmic rays at 1020-21.
Keel went on to hypothesize a “superspectrum” that would account for field phenomena, magnetism, gravity, and linkages of the ESP type. Whether you care to buy that immediately, and I’m not suggesting that you do, he does make the point that there are a lot of things taking place around us all the time that we can’t [normally] see or hear, although we can measure some of it.
If you have a dog or a cat, you’re doubtless familiar with its occasional tendency to “see a ghost”. It starts, looks intently at some corner of the room, growls, etc. You look, and there is nothing there. Well, nothing that your EMS capabilities can detect!
Taking a leaf from
HTK and one from
ET, consider that certain environments may generate or alter existing EMS wave patterns, thus “shape waves”, and allow some or all persons in the vicinity to see or hear phenomena otherwise inaccessible to them. This depending upon the individual sensitivity of each person to his/her EMS range. And there you have haunted houses, ghosts, and those color-ful specters ...
The funnier postscript to this is that several of the Church's amulets were later imitated by mass-produced "head shop" medal-makers. For years thereafter you could walk into occult shops and find Anton's "rabbit ears" being sold in slick packaging as "an ancient amulet of wisdom".
