From the Moorish Science Monitor, “Mad Science” issue

by David Tighe El

1.

“How do we know that stones cannot think; that the earth beneath our feet may not once have been endowed with a hideous intelligence? Entire cycles of animate evolution may have occurred on this planet before the most primitive of ‘living’ cells were evolved from the slime of warm seas… And how do we know that there are not survivals?” – Frank Belknap Long, The Horror From the Hills

“…upon this rock…” Matthew 16:18

2.

Aldo Leopold famously wanted us to think like a mountain. And what does a mountain think like? What does Azurite think like? Or Hematite? And why did the Qarmatians steal the Black Stone (al-Ḥajaru al-Aswad) from the Kaaba? What is the mineral world trying to tell us?

3.

Indonesian physicist P. Hardjanto is quoted by Ioan Couliano describing one of his great breakthroughs as follows: “I was siting in my office in front of a geode on my desk. I realized with a start that I was no longer at my desk. Slowly I understood that I was outside the universe. I saw the universe as a cosmic egg and its shell was hard, like stone. Above me I could see clouds illuminated by shining light. On the clouds was Amitābha, Buddha of the Pure Land, head almost aflame with nimbus. He was accompanied by two women that I recognized as Guanyin the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Dashizhi. I was overwhelmed by a sense of calm. From the forehead of Amitābha a beam of pure pink light slowly descended towards me, eventually enveloping my head in light. I experienced searing pain for a moment but the pain was replaced by a the same sense of calm and profound understanding. After an indefinite period I slowly began to lose the calm and to become anxious. It occurred to me that everything that I was seeing was a little unreal seeming. The colors began to subtly change, slowly growing increasingly gaudy. I realized that the whole scene was exactly as depicted in a cheap print that I had seen hanging in a Chinese restaurant. To my dismay the beam of light started to turn a sickly metallic green, muddy like pond scum. As it reached my head I was overwhelmed by an amphibian smell. I began to feel a suffocating pressure on my chest and had a muddy taste in my mouth. I wretched and snapped back to ‘ordinary reality’ coughing up slimy mud. I found the geode on my desk cracked open and glowing with the same sickly green light as in my vision. I blinked and it was gone but my brain was aflame. It was burning with green flames and the flames were mathematical equations. All at once I saw a complicated equation and thought, ‘is this the gateway to dimensions?’ I scrambled to write the equation down as it slowly faded from my mind’s eye. The fire in my brain was slowly dying and all that was left was the strong amphibian smell. An aquarium in a lab above my office had broken, its residents, a cohort of frogs, had escaped. The water was saturating the roof and would soon begin to drip onto my desk. How the geode on my desk cracked I don’t know. The equation was perhaps the most significant discovery of my career, if it was a discovery or could be characterized as mine. The meaning of the question that appeared in my mind did not become clear for several years.”

4.

Richard S. Shaver received channeled revelations from the hollow earth via his welding torch. This “true” information was edited by Ray Palmer and published in Amazing Stories starting in 1945. Shaver’s tales of Deros and Teros influencing human minds and kidnapping people from underground tunnels captivated and divided the scifi fan community. They were a huge success for Palmer, although they made him a controversial figure in scifi circles. At their best these stories that make up the Shaver Mystery are wildly entertaining and perhaps hint at strange truths, even if we don’t for a minute take them at face value.

One question raised by the Shaver Mystery is why so much channeled material is so bland. So unoriginal and vague. Why are all the members of the Intergalactic Federation of Enlightened Masters so vapid and banal? Why don’t the higher intelligences from the Pleiades have anything intelligent to say? Was Shaver’s revelation just superior to all the new age pap; were his informants better? Or was Ray Palmer even more brilliant than he gets credit for. What if Palmer had’ve edited the Urantia book or the Seth Material? Who knows what the voice of extra-terrestrial super beings might be like if they had a little color–even at the risk of purple prose – instead of being so washed out in white light.

Later Shaver discovered Rock Books; ancient texts inscribed on the insides of rocks. The Rock Books made an appearance in a syndicated cartoons strip: “When star-people visited earth 1000 centuries ago… they used a 3-D ‘camera’ to imprint photos on solid rock surfaces as a ‘stone history book’ for us to find today.” Gazing intently at the various amazing specimens in the hall of minerals at the Glenbow museum here in Calgary I have often been struck that the strange geometries and beautiful intricacies are both reminiscent of of Lovecraft* and almost certainly how higher dimensional beings would attempt to communicate with us. Our electricity is their gravity! These strange minerals are their even stranger missives to the intuitive genius / crazy person who can read them. Who will be our Athanasius Kircher to these strange hieroglyphs???

Shaver’s rock books are reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhist treasure texts. These special texts were often written by saints, sent into the future and hidden inside rocks or living plants. They are sought out by special monks and interpreted in ways that sound, to an outsider, similar to Shaver’s methods of interpreting rock books. Or for that matter, the interpretation of Angelic writing in early Christianity or of “tadpole script” in Taoism. There is a superficial similarity between channeled texts in Taoism and Buddhist treasure texts. Both represent ongoing revelation; a way to introduce new sacred material into their respective religious traditions.

– David Tighe El

* “The effect was that of a Cyclopian city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one underneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism.” H. P. Lovecraft – At The Mountains of Madness

Sources:

  • Richard Toronto – War Over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction (McFarland, 2013).
  • David Hatcher Childress & Richard D Shaver – Lost Continents & The Hollow Earth: I Remember Lemuria & The Shaver Mystery (Adventures Unlimited, 1999).
  • Peter Lamborn Wilson – “Shower of Stars” Dream & Book: The Initiatic Dream in Sufism & Taoism (Autonomedia, 1996).
  • I. P. Couiano – Out of This World: Otherworldly Journey From Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein (Shambhala, 1991).
  • Mike Jay – The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004).
  • George Frederick Kunz – The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (Dover, 1913, 1971).