Things from the Otherworld

The Corn Demon is a part of a wider context, a category of phenomena that have been observed for a very, very long time. There are memes and myths and theories in the aether of human collective consciousness that many of us - thoroughly rational, reasonable people - regard as strictly fantasy. This is precisely how such things remain hidden, and it may even be a part of their overall ecology; by deceiving us and remaining concealed because we are willing participants in our own experience of being deceived, they somehow are able to satisfy needs.Whatever they are, however many shapes and sizes and sorts they come in, we know them now as we have always known them: They are the Others.

The precise nature of the needs and motivations of the Others has been a concern primarily taken up by those in the circles of occult knowledge prior to the present age, but a thing unconscionable in earlier times has transpired with the advent of the internet and related forms of storing, communicating and accessing knowledge. Now, members of the occult community and all of the interlinked secret societies that represent and collect us, are able to interact and discuss openly these sorts of topics with people from all walks of life without fear of any sort of retribution. Much of the reason for occult things being occult (secret) in the first place is the fact that for much of human history, the really critical and important types of information have been deadly to possess and dangerous to seek.

As a case in point: Humanity is not the highest form of life on the planet.

This is actually pretty obvious, but there are significant limitations present in mundane thinking that makes this a difficult pill to swallow. But stop and think about it for a moment: How many epochs have transpired since this world first brought forth life? And how many ages went by unnoticed by man or woman or any creature at all properly called human? Earth is old, my friends, and the cosmos far older, and time has a good deal more wick to burn before the gradual slowing down and dwindling away of the original and most critical sparks of creation. Lovecraft's works may in the end prove more prescient than horrific, and the human need for knowledge and understanding may take us into much darker corners than we yet realize.

There is not a panacea specific to this or any other field of inquiry, since even science must set aside certain prejudices if it is to really embrace the quest for understanding of the unknown. It is true that the unknown induces fear. Perhaps this is a part of the purpose of such otherworldly happenings. It is also true that there are a great many intentionally generated myths - either outright hoaxes or stories created for their entertainment value and presented as true for effect. But there are possibly powerful forces behind even these conventions. We must not forget the belief in the Muses of old; spirits may encourage us to tell false tales of true things so that these formerly unknown beings can enter our reality and pursue whatever ends they desire.

A good example of this is Slender Man, created for gaming purposes and as an internet-based phenomenon. But he is drawn from the mythos surrounding Shadow People, a very frequently reported paranormal - or simply other - experience. Shadow People even have specific identities as well, including one in particular that appears as the silhouette of a man wearing a hat and what appears to be a duster or long trench coat. It sounds like the stuff of good horror fiction - and perhaps it is - but for those who have experienced the phenomena associated with Shadow People, this is a very real and very terrifying thing. 

Something divine was assumed by our ancestors to reside in virtually every sacred space, and every space that came to be considered sacred had a story or two to recommend its reputation as other. This is the difference between secular and spiritual, sacred and profane. There are legendary events in the past that set aside locations like Mount Olympus and Mount Sinai, sacred groves in the forests of antiquity, Glastonbury Tor in Britain, Monk's Mound in Cahokia, Illinois. A comprehensive list would take up far too much time and space. The reality is clear - our ancestors believed they were positively surrounded by spirits and inundated with them. Everywhere they looked, the other was cleverly and carefully concealed, but equally impossible to ignore.

We often deride the past and take earlier eras to task for their foolishness and superstition, but this is perhaps in part because we would like to forget what the ancients did for us. We would not have gotten to where we are today without the mysticism, shibboleths and faith of our forebearers. Their supposedly imaginary realities and fallacies have led to science sufficient to land human beings on the moon, and a sophisticated series of robots on Mars. Would there be chemistry without there having been alchemy, or astronomy without there first having been astrology? And could psychology benefit a world in which there had not first been the power of faith, the desperate hope of divine intervention, and the mystic wondering of the philosophers? It was the dreamers and the creators who came first, and the bean-counters who wandered along later to make a thorough mess of things. The purpose of all this science is simple: It takes the magic out of things. The only problem is, many things refuse to stop producing magic and others just ignore the scientists and their findings entirely.

There are many places with magical, mystical significance, and a great many markers have been erected since ancient times to commemorate events and to increase the spiritual value of such geographically encoded meanings and messages. This is the precise way in which theories of ley lines came about, and how so many theorists and speculative scholars around the world and throughout time have come to conclude that another race of beings or another collection of forces influences the course of this world and the history of our species, virtually without our conscious and collective awareness. The chosen few are given to experience the presence of the gods, and to have knowledge of their goings and comings.

On this hangs so much: Since the earliest human stories and memories, the truth has been conveyed to a handful of sacred few, whilst the rest of the species is left in silence and darkness to wander, wonder and blunder forward. One of the most common and tired of the arguments against the validity of strange phenomena is that UFOs do not land on the White House lawn, and ghosts do not pause for photo ops. Furthermore, it is often argued, there ought by now to have been a Bigfoot shot and delivered to the Smithsonian. Fae beings like fairies and a whole host of related beasties fit for inclusion in the Monstrous Compendium of Gygax (bonus points for those in the know) once populated the fringes of firelight and the deepest parts of every forest. Now, we regard these things as silly.

Do phenomena like Black Eyed Kids, Mothman, Men in Black, Shadow People, Chupacabra and the Corn Demon really only derive from a deep-seated human need to terrify ourselves? Are these merely ghost stories and tales of the strange? Most people have personal experiences that they describe as weird. When the Vicar brings up synchronicity in his clinical work with psychotherapy Groups, there are almost always stories of spiritual significance told by every Group member. And in this, the Vicar is hardly alone - this is a well known way of getting people who feel disconnected from the divine to engage the search for a higher power they can rely on and believe in to combat mental illness and/or addiction. It is therefore odd that so many people accept providential divinity but so few will openly identify a belief in things that are neither providential nor divine, but which are definitely not mundane in origin or powers. We may try to ignore or discredit the supernatural and the strange, but that only leads us to a conundrum.

The problem is - as Vallee and Tonnies so often demonstrated - the others are still very much with us. Campbell and Jung before him made much of this; human experience is spiritual experience except for when we work very hard for it not to be. In a real sense, this is what the organization and design of the modern, technologically-dependent Western world is all about. We spend most of our time focusing on things of our own agency and making, certain that nothing else matters. We obsess about 401K and stock reports, tracking figures, job performance data and diagnostics. We worry about how lines of code are impacted by interface with rogue lines of code, only rarely fully admitting to ourselves that we have created a collective artificial intelligence and populated it with "viruses" that mimic - and therefore are in many ways the same as - living beings. We pay close attention to television shows that reflect our own baser nature and our desperate need for fame, validation and wealth back at us. By doing these things - stressing about jobs, relationships, politics, research, entertainment and religion - we manage to avoid entirely any personalized spiritual experiences that might cause or permit the intrusion of the Others into our mundane existences. We are safe from the Fae, who after all only interact with those few mortals who bother to take note of them.

There is considerable fear when we confront some of these otherkin like the Grinning Man or the Raven Mockers. And there are accounts from not so long ago of creatures or entities capable of destroying human life. The Bell Witch comes immediately to mind as an Other of considerable power - although not, admittedly, in the face of a powerful personality like Andrew Jackson.

What we do not like to admit is that we learned this way of interfacing with reality from experience with the Gods and demons and sprites of the past. Too often, the tales are told of children or hapless travelers or overly curious peasants who pay too much attention to this or that supernatural thing, only to have unpleasant experiences or bad ends come about for their trouble. In a very real sense, Science and skepticism may be little more than reaction formation: the development of defense mechanisms that protect us from the dangers of a wider and more bizarre existence than we have proven capable of dealing with over time.

It is by these mechanisms that we do not have a Bigfoot body on display and we do not have regular psychic communication with the beyond as an option through our internet browsers. This is why the UFO phenomena are no closer to resolution, the Loch Ness Monster has not been found, and wizardry is not a government-regulated industry (and we wizards like to keep it that way). Just as a skeptic might argue that only fools believe these are valid events, the rational person recognizes that the skeptic is foolish and fearful enough to discard millions of reports of the unknown, the bizarre and the out of place. At least one or two of the stories told will have some weird truth at the center. Statistical reality alone suggests that a certain percentage of bizarre reports relates to an actual event that entails utterly unknown or at least unexpected factors. These are the works of the Others.

Victims & Visions of the Corn Demon

A sinewy man in his 60s - hale and browned from the sun and dusty from the road - walks alongside the edge of a fallow field. He carries a gas can - the old type, metal and dome-shaped, the kind with a thin rubber spout. There is a dry and chill breeze, and his coat is not enough for this time of year. A light dusting of snow is falling, and the sun is lowering. Dusk comes early in an Iowa February, and the tough old farmer wants to find help before dark.

He pauses to rest on the shoulder, hopeful that he will soon see the welcoming sign of headlights or run across a farmer patching fence line or inspecting his drainage system. He's left his truck just a few miles back so he knows if he can hitch a ride, he can still make it home before it gets too late.

He crouches down on his haunches and blows on his hands. The left one in particular is stone cold from being exposed to the wind. The right has fared better, since he can keep it stuffed in his pocket while the other hand carries the gas can. He decides to light a cigarette, but the breeze kills the lighter flame. He looks around, and notices that he can get out of the wind by climbing down the little embankment beside the field that leads up to the shoulder of the road.

His boots hit the powdery soil of the field and he idly examines the tillage as he manages to light his cigarette. Here and there, half-buried in the dirt are the tell tale signs: the dessicated husks and stubble of a cornfield. He turns back to the road, watching for any signs of passers by. He has just made the decision to climb back up into the wind so that he can be seen on the road. As he begins to climb, he does not hear the thing that comes out of the dirt at his back with lightning speed. He feels the impact and the piercing, and he opens his mouth to scream as a terrible disorienting wave hits his panicked brain. Then the earth closes over him with terrible finality...

http://iowacoldcases.org/cases-by-county/winneshiek-county/ 

Indie Resistors and Media Transistors

In every art there is some artifice, and not a little intention. Often, the artist does not know what it is that he or she points to; this is why the ancients identified the Muses. The works of some artists transcend the norm and become recognizable as laden with content beyond the simple words we read or the imagery we see. This is clearly the case with Conrad and Shakespeare, to name but two. There are in truth thousands if not tens of thousands such artists scattered through time.

It has of late become trendy in the conspiracy circles to pursue the notion that Monarch Mind Control is at work in the lives of many, and that the whole or nearly the whole of the media presence and the music industry serves the will of the Illuminati. This is of course complete nonsense. With all due respect to vigilantcitizen.com and to ATS and all other sites out there, it is foolhardy to forget the one true and central fact that has maintained a barrier between truth and power since the beginning of civilization as we know it:  The desires of the artist are always incompatible with the desires of the powerful.

There are sellouts and there are those who were sold from the very beginning. This is an old trope - as old as time, most likely - and hardly one that will change. What makes Arcade Fire or Muse popular and gives them the chance to rise to fame and fortune is precisely what undoes them in the eyes and minds of so many fans. It is the random madness of the indie soul that is disturbed, and not the work of the artists or their own lack of integrity that leads to sellout status.

From the standpoint of conspiracy buffs it is true that some songs, images and works will suit the vile program of the masters, whereas others are created expressly for the masses, with the intention to support liberation. Not since John Lennon has any artist been big enough or a good-crazy enough to try and actually achieve liberation --- after all, look where that got him.

Sometimes, we believe that we know what a thing means, and we end up ascribing entirely too much significance to a random --- or even expected and reasonable --- coincidence. The one-eye-sign madness is an excellent example. I hate to tell my fellow conspiracy watchers this, but sometimes people just take trendy pictures. They do so without knowledge - necessarily - that the symbolism is something inserted into our pop-culture by Illuminati wizards.

This is the nature of our business, and we ought not forget that it is a business, after all. As such, it is just as susceptible to the manipulations of the powerful as any other endeavor. We make money one way or another by being writers who have the rare opportunity to observe and comment upon the strange. Whether we are watching the gradual dismantling of America or the headlong plunge into apeshit apocalypse is anyone's guess. Those of us who claim to know are probably more full of it than those of us with the good and thoroughly Socratic sense to recognize our own limitations. The truth remains that we do well not to get ridiculous in our denunciation of things. People don't have to secretly be reptilian shape-shifters in order to be evil and manipulative. This ain't friggin V. We owe it to our unique field of speculators to remember that mind control programming is unnecessary where sex and drugs are a potent enough mix to get the job done. Lizards need not apply for jobs that human beings can do at least as well, if not better.

We can get badly off in the weeds about a particular act or artist simply because we understand the overall Illuminati-driven purpose of a given form without recognizing that the people doing the work are only interested in success. Why shouldn't they be? Does pop music depress us? Is indie rock around mainly for the 18-35 year-old-crowd so they can get maudlin on lazy day afternoons about lost loves and what-might-have-beens? Of course. Do The Reflections exist to destroy western civilization? Not any more than did these guys. Sometimes the art form is serving one end, whilst the artists are making money and getting laid. This is child's play and an old form. The reason there are entertainment venues is because they make money. This was true of the Globe and it is equally true now of your local Wehrenberg or AMC.

If we will have venues, there must have been an industry to give them rise. The fact that there is a music industry is not proof positive that it is dominated by the Illuminati agenda. What is certain is that where there are gates, there are bound to be gatekeepers, and a smart plan for global domination will focus there. By owning or at least controlling the gatekeepers, we can control the message that gets disseminated by the companies they control. Aristocrats, now as ever, rule at removes. This is both their advantage and their weakness.

We cannot afford to forget, however, that a strong motivation for the modern artist is an unchanged core character quality that defines what it is to be an artist in the first place. There's a certain need to overthrow, to resist, to reflect and to demonstrate that power and its structures are inherently corrupt things. This is where http://www.artasaweapon.info/ gets born, and where revolutions are sometimes initiated. The reality of the need for armed resistance and eventually armed and organized politico-military action is unchanged, but the art can motivate, encourage and drive. A good song can make or break a revolution - particularly in the old days, when drum and fife kept the march order and managed the advance. The times have changed in that respect, but not in the former. A good revolution needs a good song, and we cannot forget that even the big acts sometimes still harbor a certain rebellious furor that needs transisting.