Carnivals of Life and Death: The Bizarre Life of Conspiracist James Shelby Downard

A few months ago, my friend recommended that I read the autobiography of James Shelby Downard. I didn’t recognise the name, but it turned out that this Downard guy is a mysterious figure in the conspiracy theory world. It’s not that he was into mysterious topics (although he definitely was). His life, output and reputation are shrouded in uncertainty. I mentioned him recently in my post about Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger books. The reference to him in the first of these books is quite vague, and he’s only mentioned as Mr. Downard. Wilson describes hearing a tape recording of a conversation between Downard and Jim Brandon (aka William Grimstad, a notorious white supremacist). In this conversation (some of which can be heard here) Downard and Grimstad supposedly set out a theory about how the Illuminati are preparing the world for UFO contact. More than a decade later, an essay by Downard appeared in Feral House’s Apocalypse Culture. Apocalypse Culture is an infamous collection of essays from some of the most bizarre and disgusting fringes of society. Kill King 33, Downard’s essay, is one of the strangest pieces of writing in there. It basically blames the killing of JFK on the Freemasons. It’s an abridged version of a longer piece of writing that appeared in another Feral House book a few years later. The revised version of Apocalypse Culture replaces it with another essay by Downard, and Apocalypse Culture II features yet another essay by him. It was through these appearances that the work of Downard came to attention of mainstream conspiracists.

A few years after he died, Feral House published Downard’s autobiography. It such a bizarre piece of writing that it convinced some people that James Shelby Downard was actually a hoax perpetrated by Michael A. Hoffman II (his pal and collaborator) and Adam Parfrey. This doesn’t make sense to me as Robert Anton Wilson came across him well before these two collaborated. Also, I feel that if somebody was going to make up a person, they would put more effort into making things seem believable. The writing here is far too ludicrous for me to imagine that a person wanted me to believe it. How many 5 year olds would think of circumcising themselves to get out of a pickle? A lot of this book is made up of memories that were wiped from Downard’s mind as a young man which he later recalled. The way that he got these memories back isn’t clearly outlined, and most of them are so hazy and unbelievable that I suspect they were just dreams.

James Shelby Downard’s The Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth, 1913-1935

Unfortunately, while this book does touch on aspects of conspiracy theories, it doesn’t do so in a meaningful or interesting way. The enjoyment that comes from reading this text is derived solely from the surprise that an adult man could write such bizarre nonsense. I don’t normally summarize books chapter by chapter, but I have done so here for my own future reference and to save you from having to wade through this terrible, insane piece of writing. This is long, so if you’re only mildly interested and just want the craziest parts, I suggest just reading the bits I have highlighted. (I expect that doing so will convince you to carefully reread the whole thing.)

Chapter by Chapter Summary

Chapter 1
The author, a 5 year old boy, is kidnapped by the KKK after being arrested for smuggling alcohol. Goes on to kill KKK by blowing some up with dynamite and shooting others with gun he stole from a police officer. He later kills more men with dynamite.

Chapter 2
His mom makes him dress like a girl to go meet some men in a music shop. When be gets there he shoots one with a gun he had hidden in his outfit. Next day his mom sends him away with some other men. His gun is gone, so he packs a scissors for protection. The men poison him, but he spits it out. When he is left for dead, he gets an erection, so he takes out the scissors he has stashed in his outfit and circumcises himself. His screams of pain scare the bad men away. A few months later an old man tries to turn him into a golem by writing on his forehead with lipstick.

Chapter 3
Mom runs away with a “dirty greaser” named Count Eugenio, but she takes James with her. He is taken to Jekyll Island where he sees Alexander Graham Bell getting sucked off by a gambler. He later goes to a party where a man named “Cock Robin” chokes him in front of a cheering crowd. Cock Robin is shot dead shortly after. The KKK show up again and Alexander Graham Bell uses a machine to bring Cock Robin back to life. Then he gets sucked off by a klansman. Count Eugenio then takes James to some kind of toilet museum where James pisses all over the floor and walls. James will later see somebody cut off Count Eugenio’s bollocks and shove it down his throat.

Chapter 4
The gang move on. In one place they stay, James finds himself in a warehouse full of centipedes that are part of a mind control experiment. then his mother abandons him with a paedophile hotel-keeper, but James locks the paedo in a room, fills it with gas and then lights a match and throws it in. He then lives on the street with a coyote and eats cow shit.
He returns to try to kill the man he recently blew up, but the man actually sends a killer to get the boy first. The boy sets his pet rattlesnake on the killer and then beats him unconscious with a chunk of wood and steals his money. Mom comes back and says she took so long because she had been kidnapped.

Chapter 5
The KKK kidnaps the 7 year old narrator and his dad, and then they crucify the boy. Dad pulls the nails out and takes him home, but KKK kidnap him again and try to bum him, but his asshole is too small. They plan to cut his asshole to make it bigger, but their boss says no.
The narrator later tricks them into shooting each other by firing a cap gun in the air.
Days later, his mom tells him to go to scene of the shootout he caused to get a present. He doesn’t want to, but his mom forces him. When he gets there, another child gives him a dead cat in a box. He then attends a dinner in a Jewish family’s home, but he seems to suspect the food is poisoned so he throws it on the table, issues an anti Semitic remark and runs away.

Chapter 6
The Jewish man he insulted gets him a job at a local bar that is actually a front for a freemason’s hall. A man there takes a disliking to him so he tries to feed him to some carnivorous pigs. The kid befriends the pigs and sets them free and throws the skull of one of their victims through the bar’s window. The freemasons then conduct a trial to determine his guilt, but this is ended quickly when he takes out his willy and pees at the judge.
A man then tries to shoot him, but he fills the bar with gas and blows it up. After the explosion he sticks his pocket knife up the bad guy’s nose.
The freemasons are angry about this so they send a cowboy assassin to kill James, but James shoots him with a shotgun made out of a pipe and then smashes his face with a hammer and throws corpse over a bridge. This all happened when he was 8 or 9.

Chapter 7
The boy sees a snake charmer doing an act, betting people they cant lift his heavy snake. The boy gives the snake some meat and the snake is so thankful that it lifts itself onto this shoulders and makes it look like he is lifting it, much to the charmer’s chagrin.
A week later his mom sends him to the shop for cleaning fluid. He also buys a water pistol which he fills with said fluid. On his way home, the snake charmer threatens him with a real gun, so James shoots him in the eyes with the cleaner and stabs him in the belly. He then feeds him to the snake and opens a sewer drain so the snake can escape. He then goes into the charmers home, kisses another of his snakes and gives his Gila dragon an orgasm.
Three men jump out of a car and try to kill him on his way home, but he shoots 2 of them. He was 9 or 10 at this point.

Chapter 8
The klan and his mom plot to kill him again, but he sets them on fire. Then another man kidnaps him and tries to shoot him, but the kid shoots his eyeball out with his BB gun.

Chapter 9
He agrees to join the Order of DeMolay, a masonic youth group. His initiation ritual is held in a house owned by Count Cagliostro, and another boy tries to murder him with a ventriloquist’s dummy containing a spring loaded knife. He has a thick magazine stuffed down his shirt though, so he lives to get the dummy to stab the stabber. He then gets one of his mates to steal Cagliostro’s sword. Cagliostro, who may actually just be a man named Beppo, gets pissed so tries to kill James with a gun loaded with a needle bullet, but James shouts at Cagliostro that he is the devil and frightens him away.
Then he takes the needle bullet out of the gun and stabs Cagliostro with it before killing him by smashing his head with a telephone. His mom convinces him to go to the funeral, but he is kidnapped by Beppo’s friends to be buried alive with the corpse, but he stabs one of them and jumps out of the car.

Chapter 10
His teacher takes him on school tour and tries to abandon him, but he finds a way home. He electrocutes a pig-owner who was using his family’s faucet.

Chapter 11
Sister’s boyfriend introduces him to Arthur Rochford Manby, a con artist who later had his decapitated face eaten by a dog. His mom tells him to move out after he finds his dad living in an abandoned building. She gives him 75 cents and a shotgun and an address. When he gets there, he befriends a pack of wild boar outside. When he enters some men try to get him drunk and fuck a prostitute, but he runs away and sends his pigs to kill the men. Then as he is going through their pockets, the girl they tried make him shag comes and helps. She later tries to adopt him but it doesn’t work out.

Chapter 12
Mom throws hot coffee in two burglars’ eyes. A man in a quarry tries to kill him, so he hurts the man (presumably with a gun) and chains his buddies to a fence, fills the quarry with water and walks away.

Chapter 13
James goes to see a new oil pipe being laid. A man tries to kill him by shoving him into the pipe, so he shoots the man in the head with his “nigger shooter” (a slingshot). He is immediately taken to a house where another man sticks him in a wooden trap, but he escapes and forces the man into the trap where he probably dies.

Chapter 14
The KKK try to get him to join, but when they tell him to whip a black guy, he refuses. They try to kill him, so he shoots one of them dead and the rest run away. He then goes to free the black guy he didn’t beat from slavery, but he has to shoot the black guy’s boss to set him free.

Chapter 15
He finds a treasure chest but his friends basically steal it from him.

Chapter 16
A man asks James to look at his house. Initially his price is too high, but he drops it on the condition that Downard goes into his father’s tomb and takes some stuff out of it. When Downard gets there he finds the tomb booby trapped, so he steals the stuff inside out of spite.

Chapter 17
He looks through the stuff he looted from the grave. It’s mostly books attributed to him that seem to be written in a cipher. There is also a machine that he thinks might decipher them. He contacts the American government, but they are no help, and they actually steal one of his books, so he goes to JP Morgan’s house and gets a guided tour of his library.

Chapter 18
Downard writes to Franklin D Roosevelt because the government stole one of his books. The president apologizes and sends some secret service men over to collect everything Downard took out of the grave. He then sends Downard a cheque for a million dollars, but Downard’s dad won’t let him cash it.

Chapter 19
Downard befriends millionaire Mr. Proctor of Proctor and Gamble fame. Proctor borrows his book of cryptograms and when Downard asks for it back Proctor tells him to go to a pottery shop where 2 men show him a skeleton being cremated.
Proctor then tells him to meet him in graveyard but then doesn’t show up.
Downard’s da then brings him back to the pottery shop/crematorium where a man with a shotgun threatens to throw him into a fiery kiln. Downard runs to the car, grabs his shotgun and scares the bad man. The man’s workers then throw the man into the fire and burn him alive.
Downard never gets the book from Proctor back and deduces that it was part of an Illuminati scheme perpetrated by his own father.

Chapter 20
Downard visits another Downard’s house and claims to remember it from childhood. His mom tells him his dad has been lying to him because he resents what the klan did do him because of James. The book was written by Uncle Brad, but no further info on Brad is given.

Chapter 21
James starts a new school. One of the teachers sucks off the students. Downard exposes him at graduation ceremony.

Chapter 22
Mother and father are having trouble with some criminals who stole their house. They send Downard to a masonic lodge. The mason he meets tries to get him to hang a doll, but this makes Downard mad so he pushes the mason down the stairs and pisses in his face. He later meets a guy who tries to kill the president.

Chapter 23
Mom gets dad put into a nuthouse because he has started drinking too much. He tells Downard somebody will come to kill him, but then he hangs himself.

Chapter 24
Downard joins a military camp, but the guys in charge want to kill him so he gets discharged on purpose by deliberately getting caught sneaking out at night. As soon as he is discharged, he walks up to the Whitehouse, gives his name and the security let him in.

Chapter 25
He meets the president and both confess to being illuminati members to each other even though Downard is bluffing. The president then gets him a job at the the Bureau of Investigation but during training an Bureau of Investigation man points a gun at him so Downard shoots him.

Chapter 26
On a Bureau of Investigation mission, Downard goes to the docks to get work from mafia. They say they wont hire him because he looks weak, so he lifts a large man over his head to prove strength. He gets the job and steals some whiskey from a boat. Then he goes back to the Bureau of Investigation who send him on a secret mission to Cuba. When he gets there he buys a gun and meets an old school friend who tells him the Cuban police are going to kill him. Then he meets a man who pulls down his pants and shows him a castration scar. Several cars then drive by Downard and the men inside all try to shoot him, but he shoots each one dead.
He tells a story of how when he was a kid he used to feed some alligators and walk on their backs to burp them. Once he lured a bully into their cage and they ate him.
He kills some more Cuban police officers and meets another member of the secret society of benevolent castrati. He bribes a government official who puts him on a boat with an Obeah priestess who takes him to Haiti. From there he gets boat back to the USA.

Chapter 27
Downard buys a Bugatti but some men hit him in the back of head and take him to a military hospital where they wipe his memory with a mind control machine that gives him seizures and orgasms. He is allowed to escape after a while but he is then abducted again and poked with a syringe full of something. He loses his memory but somehow gets home.

He attends a few colleges but leaves because the people are weird. Has a meeting with military personnel but shortly thereafter passes out. When he comes to, he has a hiccupping fit so he goes to the doctor. The doctor vigorously fingers his asshole. No harm done. He says the doctor did this to stimulate his pudendal nerve. I don’t know why a doctor would do that to a person with the hiccups.

Chapter 28
In Memphis, Downard goes to a sex circus where he sees a woman, probably a witch, having sex with strangers. He leaves before she fucks a dog, but he is more disturbed by the fact that she “fucked and sucked a negro”. The next day he goes to another sex circus with the same girl sucking and fucking strangers, but this time he leaves when they bring a pony in to fuck her.
He tries to stop these sex circuses from happening with help from his Bureau of Investigation buddies, but they wipe his memory.

Chapter 29
He trades a million dollar certificate for an old shotgun and some other crap, but people dupe him out of his prizes except for a fancy archery bow.

Chapter 30
He gets a job on a Greek ship but discovers there are illegal immigrants locked in the hold. He sets them free and they take control of the ship. Both the men working on the ship and the men in the hold are referred to as greasers. I was a bit confused. I know that Mexicans and Greeks had a greasy reputation, but one of these men is referred to as a “chink-greaser”. I guess all foreigners were greasers.

Chapter 31
He goes to watch a boxing match and visits a fencing club and a concert. The Greek calls him and asks him to work on the ship again.

Chapter 32
A famous socialist asks Downard to retrieve some books by an author with the same name as Downard, but when he gets to the place with the books, the door is booby-trapped. He turns off the electricity to the booby trap, gets books and then goes back and punches the socialist in the face. Military guys offer him a job but he gets suspicious because the interview for the job is in the woods. At the second interview for this job, he shoots somebody. He gives the books that somebody with his name wrote to the Skull and Bones society.

Chapter 33
The books by “him” are science, telepathy and prophecy books. He has another job interview, but when he gets there the interviewer attacks him with a needle. He gets the needle and injects the other lad with it. This chap dies. Then he finds the lad who sent him to that interview and punches his face for him. He joins a secret carnival society who try to kill him, but he outsmarts them, steals their chickens and gives them to a black man. He goes to a party in Florida but it turns out to be a gunfight, so he flees.

Chapter 34
He joins a new college and pranks the dean by releasing some chickens into his garden. He finds some old stuff with his name on it of which he has no memory. He would have been about 23 or 24 at this point, but the book ends here.

This book covers the first 23 years of the author’s life, but James Shelby Downard lived until he was about 83 (dates of his birth and death vary by a few years online), and I am sure he had plenty more adventures before he died. I don’t know if I could stomach reading about many more of them though. This book took a lot of effort to read. It’s entertaining to take a look into the mind of a crazy person, but this is a lengthy, dense tome, and it took me more than 2 months to get through it.

Another book of his writings recently appeared, but I don’t think that it’s a continuation of his life story. I have been making my way through some of Downard’s essays recently, and I will do a separate post on them in the near future.

Catholicism, Conspiracies and Consciousness: Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger Trilogy

Robert Anton Wilson has been a hero of mine for quite a while. His Illuminatus! Trilogy was one of the first books I read for this blog. My reviews of his The Sex Magicians and Masks of the Illuminati are probably the best pieces of writing I’ve published. I’ve read a couple more of his books since posting those, but the contents of The Book of the Breast and Quantum Psychology aren’t exactly Nocturnal Revelries material.

I’ve been reading a lot of books about conspiracies recently, and digging in this field this has led me to an absolutely bizarre individual called James Shelby Downard. There are rumours online that he’s not a real person, and that was was made up by Adam Parfrey and Michael Hoffman II for an essay published in Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture from 1987. This confused me as I had read that Robert Anton Wilson had mentioned Shelby in Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, the first part of Wilson’s “autobiography”, in 1977. There’s actually a quote on the cover of Shelby’s autobiography from Wilson that says, “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all”. I thought it only responsible to see what Wilson had to say about Downard, so I read all three entries of the Cosmic Trigger series.

So these books aren’t really an autobiography. There’s autobiographical elements, especially in the second volume, but, as a whole, they’re more a collection of Wilson’s big ideas and how he came to adopt them.

Final Secret of the Illuminati – 1977

The first book wasn’t that great. I’ve watched enough video lectures of Wilson to know his general outlook, and none of the stuff on Timothy Leary, the Illuminati, Discordianism, Aleister Crowley, and the author’s own alien contact came as a surprise to me. One of the big things that Wilson pushes is the idea of reality tunnels and how truth, by his definition, is relative. I accept this idea, and Wilson’s linguistic philosophy is one of my favourite things about him, but the examples he provides in this book are ridiculous. One of his favourite books at the time of writing this was Robert Temple’s The Sirius Connection, one of the worst pieces of crap I’ve ever read. He also presents the psychic powers of Uri Gellar as evidence for some of his claims. I was a bit surprised that a person who I thought was intelligent had been duped by such garbage. Also, there’s a bit near the end where Wilson presents Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness in significant detail. Admittedly, I am not a cognitive neuroscientist, but this idea absolutely stank of shit to me. The book ends with Wilson’s kid dying. This was heartbreaking to read, and I wonder if it had something to do with the second half of the book being far worse than the first.

Down to Earth – 1991

Part 2 was by far the most enjoyable in the Cosmic Trigger series. Wilson tells more of his life story in this one, and he comes across as the witty, interesting guy I know he was. He had spent much of the time between writing this and the first book in Ireland, and this is apparent in his writing. Much of the book is taken up with discussions on his “Irish” upbringing, James Joyce and the modern Irish legal system. He also gets into the P2 conspiracy. Honestly, you could read and enjoy this one without picking up the other 2 entries in the series. It actually deals with the earliest parts of his life more thoroughly than the first entry in the series, so it’d be a fine starting point.

My Life after Death – 1995

I don’t know if I’d been reading too much of the one author or that this book is just worse than the others, but I didn’t hugely enjoy the last entry in the series. Wilson had already covered most of his important life experiences in the previous books, and this one came out only 4 years after the preceding entry. Does enough stuff happen between the ages of 59 and 64 to warrant a new entry in an autobiography? Apparently not. Instead of offering new, insightful ways of thinking about the world, Wilson instead fills this book with cringeworthy claims about the threat of political correctness and how society oppresses men more than women. I am quite sure that Wilson wasn’t a bad guy, but these tirades are hard to stomach in 2024. Don’t get me wrong. I accept that some of the ways that people currently expect others to use language are utterly ridiculous, but in my experience, the people who are complaining about political correctness and “wokeism” are usually assholes. Again, I’ve read enough of Wilson to know that he wasn’t anything close to a bigot, and he does make some valid points about identity politics, but the way he sets his arguments up are a little too similar to your Trump voting uncle’s facebook posts. At one point he asks why there’s no such thing as a straight pride parade. Sigh. There’s some discussion of the Priory of Sion mysteries here, and it seems that Wilson had encountered similar ideas on this topic to Tracy Twyman’s. He also discusses Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Elmyr, the art forger. This wasn’t as interesting as the other books, but it’s still worth a read.

I read these books because I’m going through a conspiracy theory phase at the moment, and Robert Anton Wilson is something of a conspiracy expert. He does discuss multiple conspiracies in these books, but he’s using conspiracies as a way to explain his worldview rather than adding a huge amount to conspiracy lore. Some of his ideas were a bit naïve and/or silly, but Wilson was always self aware enough to avoid coming across as a complete tool. He also had a lot of really good ideas, and I think his ideas on language should be more widely read. The Cosmic Trigger books were amusing overall, and they’re probably an easier starting point than the author’s fiction. I’m sure I’ll get around to more of that in the future.

Beware the Rock People! Tom Dongo’s The Mysteries of Sedona

A long time ago, I read a book called Unseen Beings, Unseen Worlds by a guy named Tom Dongo. When I wrote about it here, I was relatively critical of it. Years later, somebody commented on a blog post I had written on Mac Tonnies’ Cryptoterrestrials claiming that I had given Tonnies preferential treatment to Dongo. This made me think. Had I changed, or was Dongo’s book actually deserving of more disdain than Tonnies’? I thought I’d better give Dongo another chance, so I read The Mysteries of Sedona, the first entry in his Sedona series.

The Mysteries of Sedona: The New Age Frontier

Dongo lives in a place called Sedona in Arizona, and he claims that it’s a hotspot of psychic energy. This very short book describes some of the phenomena he has observed and heard about. There are some bog standard accounts of UFO sightings and psychic channellings that aren’t remotely convincing. He spends a lot of the book describing vortices where you can meditate and become one with the cosmic consciousness. This book reads like a pamphlet for unbearable new-age, hippy-dippy asshole tourists.

Honestly, there’s only 2 interesting claims made in this book of trash. The first being that Sedona is actually in the same place as the lost continent of Lemuria and that’s why it has so much psychic energy. Lemuria, of course, never existed, but that doesn’t make much of a difference to the fools who read this garbage.

Dongo also claims that parts of Sedona are inhabited by rock goblins. They aren’t visible to everyone, but Dongo can see them and they look like this:

This reminded me of the Kentucky Goblins case. I recently started watching that Hellier series that came out a few years ago. I was intrigued by the mentions of the elusive Terry Wrist in the first episode, and I liked where things were going with the mothman discussions, but when the team turned to tarot cards to guide their investigation, I turned off the TV in a fit of rage.

Dongo’s work is as bad as I made it out to be all those years ago. This book is utter nonsense. At one point the author suggests that school children be forced to take a class in channelling extraterrestrial spirits. I think I said it best in 2016 when I described Dongo’s writing as “bunch of ridiculous ideas that popped into the head of a stupid weirdo.”

Beware the Cryptocracy! Michael A. Hoffman II’s Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

When I was reading 9/11 as Mass Ritual, I noticed repeated references to a book called Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Michael A. Hoffman II and put it on my to-read list. Recently, I’ve been researching a particularly bizarre conspiracy-theorist named James Shelby Downard, and it turns out that his most infamous piece of writing, an essay called Kill King 33°, was co authored by Hoffman. I did a little research on this Hoffman chap, and it turned out that most of his other books are about how much he dislikes the Jews. He’s a holocaust denier and a key proponent of the Irish slavery myth. I’m not interested in reading crap like that, but this particular text is focused on more esoteric topics, and it seems pretty influential among cuckoo crazy conspiracists. Bill Cooper spent a couple of episodes of his radio show on this text. I had to read it.

**Wiswell Ruffin House – 1992 (First published 1989)**

Michael A. Hoffman II – Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

The world is ruled by a shadow government. It’s not exactly clear who makes up this cryptocracy, but it’s almost definitely the Freemasons. This satanic cabal uses the media, shadow language and psychodrama to control the unthinking masses.

Hoffman claims that the cryptocracy produce traumatic events to scare the public and then wait a few years to leak information that basically admits their guilt. Jack the Ripper, the Son of Sam, and the Kennedy assassination were all examples of this. It’s this idea that 9/11 as Mass Ritual is based around. I covered the Son of Sam stuff before, and I’m going to be revisiting the JFK stuff with Hoffman’s pal Downard real soon. I’m also thinking of doing a deep dive into Ripperology at some point in the future. The main thing holding me back is the sheer volume of books about Saucy Jack. I don’t know where to start.

Shadow language is method by which the cryptocracy deliberately drop hints that they have done something terrible. Remember that time when an Ozzy Osbourne song contained the name of an airport where a plane landed on 9/11? You think it’s coincidence that Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was killed is on the 33rd parrallel and that there are 33 degrees in Freemasonry? I suppose crazy people forget that there is a finite number of words in and that some words will pop up in conversations about entirely different things.

Hoffman also claims that the murder of Sharon Tate was a sacrifice to the moon goddess after the first astronauts to land on the moon desecrated her by loading 50lbs of moon rocks into their shuttle back to earth. I hadn’t heard that one before.

In general, there are two big problems with Hoffman’s writing. The first is that it’s bad. I’m a big fan of clarity. My approach to argumentative writing has always been to state things as clearly and simply as possible. Don’t beat around the bush. Say what you mean and then provide examples and clarifications. Hoffman doesn’t do this. There’s no clear central thesis to this work. It reads like a frustrated rant.

The second problem is that most of what Hoffman says is glaringly obvious. In fact, many of his claims about the manipulability of the public seem understated given the events of the last 30 years. Human beings are exactly as stupid as Hoffman portrays them, but in reality, the forces that govern them are considerably more powerful (and sinister) than the freemasons. It would be pretty easy for a stupid person to read this book and see it as prophetic. In that way, it’s similar to the Unabomber’s manifesto. It came as no surprise to see that Hoffman actually contributed an essay on the Unabomber to the second volume of Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture.

People are dumb idiots, but I cannot believe that there is a well coordinated effort by a shadow government to control them. That idea gives us too much credit. Everybody is stupid, absolutely everybody. The Illuminati, if they exist, are morons too. As mentioned above, I am currently reading more of Hoffman’s work on conspiracies. It’s leading me to a lot of bizarre texts and sketchy characters. Take care. There’s a lot of freaks out there.

Lucilla Rebecca Hedley’s Mark of the Beast as Revealed by the Shape of the Head

I had initially planned another post for today, but as I was putting the final touches to it last night, I discovered something about the book that necessitated further research. Luckily, I’ve had this post lined up for an occasion such as this for a while. Do you want to know how to tell if a person is a deranged freak just by looking at the shape of their head?

The Mark of the Beast Revealed by the Shape of the Head – Lucilla Rebecca Hedley

The first 30ish pages of this 90 page book are a mildly entertaining description of how to spot a person with a savage instinct by observing the shape of their skull. Much of the amusement comes from the illustrations.

I bet most of my readers look like these absolute weirdos. Ewww.

The two tell-tale phrenological signs of a degenerate are a large gap between the eyes and a protrusion in the middle of the forehead. Spot these two together and you’re likely looking at a subhuman beast.

This is well and good and clearly backed up by science, but the last two thirds of the book descend into a jumble of Biblical hermeneutics and apocalyptic numerology. While the first part of the book deals with the mark of the beast (beast in the literal sense, pumas and lions and that), the rest of the book warns against the promises of the Biblical beasts, Mammon is the main threat here.

Honestly, the latter part of the book made me wonder about the sanity of the author. Phrenology is obviously a pile of nonsense, but there is some cohesion to the idea. The bulk of this book comes across as the incoherent ramblings of a devoutly religious lunatic. I read every word in here, but after the halfway point very little sank in. There’s a whole lot of words in here, but very few ideas.

Unfortunately, there is scant information about this curious text and its author online. I am assuming she was wealthy as she had this masterpiece published herself. There’s a copy online if you want to read it.

Harry Price and Borley Rectory: The Most Haunted House in England

It was roughly a year ago that I reviewed The Amityville Horror. That book is an unconvincing piece of trash, but if you read it as a novel (which it is), there are some genuinely creepy ideas. I recently saw somebody posting about this book, Harry Price’s The Most Haunted House in England, and I thought I’d give it a go in the hopes that it would creep me out.

The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory,

So Borley Rectory was a big house where a bunch of ghost sightings and poltergeist activity supposedly occured. From 1929 until 1939, Harry Price, a paranormal investigator, catalogued a bunch of the weird stuff that happened there.

People reported seeing a ghost nun walk across the garden. Others saw a black coach ride through the same area. Guests at the rectory heard creaking noises during the night and saw weird messages written on the walls. The people who lived there saw things falling off shelves without having being touched. One of the women who lived there claimed that a ghost punched her in the eye and flipped her out of her bed.

The (entirely fake) story of Borley Rectory could be interesting if told by the right author, but Harry Price’s book is very boring. He does his best to make the paranormal happenings seem unscary. These ghosts don’t mean any harm. They just want attention. I hate this idea. If I wanted a friendly fucking ghost, I’d watch Casper.

The other thing is that none of what Price claims in here is remotely convincing. There’s a part where the woman who owns the house goes upstairs to bed because she’s feeling sick, and then a few minutes later a ghost throws something down the stairs. Price claims that it couldn’t have been the woman because she was too sick. Shortly after this, the people below hear a clattering noise coming from upstairs. When they run up to the old lady’s room, they find her and mattress on the ground. Apparently the ghost had pushed her out of bed! Nice try Granny.

Not only is the book not convincing, but Price’s close associates came out after it was published and claimed it was lies. Price set most of it up. One man went into the house with Price to witness poltergeist activity. When he was walking in front of Price, he thought he felt small objects bouncing off his back. When he turned around, Price abruptly started whistling and checking his watch. Later on, the man noticed a bunch of pebbles falling out of Price’s pockets when he was taking off his jacket. When confronted, Price said that a ghost must have put them there.

Price wrote another book about Borley Rectory a few years after this one, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it. The Rectory actually burned down before the first book was published, so I can’t imagine the next book has anything of substance to add. I saw a trailer for a movie based on Price’s story. I couldn’t be bothered watching the movie, but it looks a lot more entertaining than this boring book of lies and nonsense.

I got a notification from WordPress during the week telling me that this blog is now 9 years old. I don’t know whether to feel proud or ashamed. There’s been ups and downs, but I’ve been really enjoying it for the last year though, so I’ll probably keep it going for a while longer. There’s still so many books left to read. Please let me know if you have any recommendations!

Jesus was the Leader of a Satanic Sex Cult: Tracy Twyman’s The Merovingian Mythos and the Mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau

Back in 2017, I reviewed Disinformation’s Book of Lies. Boyd Rice’s essay about the Book of Enoch, the Merovingian Dynasty and sea monsters turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of the book. That essay was originally published in an edition of Dagobert’s Revenge, a magazine about the Holy Grail, Merovingian kings and Priory of Sion stuff, that ran from 1996 until 2003. I gathered that it covered the more far out elements of that conspiracy, and I wanted to dig deeper, but at this stage it’s impossible to track down a complete run at a reasonable price. Tracy R. Twyman, the editor of Dagobert’s Revenge, published a book about the Merovingians the year after the final edition of her magazine came out, so I thought that would be the best place to get her version of the Holy Grail story.

It’s been a while since I’ve read any Holy Grail stuff. Just to remind you, some authors believe that the Holy Grail was a cup, some believe it was a rock from the crown of Satan, and some believe it was the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Twyman believes it was all of these things at once. I’ve read some pretty far-out stuff recently, but this book really surprised me with how far it pushes the subversion of accepted beliefs and ideas. This isn’t just round the bend stuff, it’s topsy-turvy silly-season over here.

First of all, we have to accept that the traditional Biblical narrative is muddled. This doesn’t sound too ridiculous, and I’m sure some Bible scholars would agree that certain Old Testament characters are actually the same people, and that the chronology is confused. Wait and see where Twyman takes this though.

In reality, Satan and Jehovah were actually rival Kings from the island of Atlantis. Cain was actually the son of Satan, not Adam. Enoch, the son of Cain was actually Cain and Noah. Jehovah tried to kill everyone because they had learned too much from Satan. (He had been teaching them light language through the Tower of Babel which was actually a quantum crystal computer.) Jesus Christ was indeed a descendant of Abraham, but Abraham was actually of the line of Cain, the son of Satan. Yes, Jesus Christ was actually a direct descendant of Satan. (One of his ancestors had also hooked up with a Jehovite, but I won’t get into that now. It involves the Nephilim, the race of mutant giants who were excised from more recent versions of the Old Testament.)

So Jesus was actually a descendant of Satan, and he was also the leader of a Satanic sex magic cult. Mary Magdalene was his scarlet woman, and they had Judas (or possibly Jesus’s twin brother) crucified in his place so that he could continue to perform Satanic sex magic rituals.

Jesus’s Satanism here isn’t really sinister in any way. He’s still the good guy, but somewhere along the way the church made Satan out to be the bad guy. This is one of the main ideas of Gnosticism. The Gnostics play their part in this story of course. The Cathars knew the truth and this is what led to their downfall, but they were able to pass on their secrets and the Grail before their defeat.

Anyways, Jesus had kids who had kids and eventually his ancestors became kings in France, the Merovingians. The Merovingians were a line of French kings who were traditionally said to have been descendants of a sea creature. This is technically true as they are descended from Satan who lived in Atlantis. The Merovingians were supposedly wiped out after King Dagobert was shot through the eye with an arrow, but this was just a cover up.

From this point in the story, Twyman follows the Holy Blood, Holy Grail narrative. I don’t know if you’ve read that book, but I have, and I can confirm that it’s utter bollocks. It’s based on a confirmed hoax. At one point Twyman describes how she contacted one of the authors of that book only to have him immediately disregard her ideas because they were so crazy. If one of those lads takes that stance on your work, you must be onto something special.

As entertaining as a Satanic sex-magic Jesus is, there’s nothing remotely convincing in this book. The narrative is based on a series of ridiculous conditionals, each one more bizarre than the last. At several points in the book, elves are mentioned. (Stories of elves may have originated from the mutant offspring of Atlantean “angels” and mud-blood humans.) I was actually quite surprised that Twyman never linked her Kings from the Sea stuff with Temple’s Sirius aliens.

Yes, this book was really stupid, but it was entertaining in its own crazy way. I’ve been recommended Tywman’s novel Genuflect, but I get the sense that it gets into that Pizzagate child abuse stuff, so I don’t think I’ll bother. Twyman died recently, and there seems to be some speculation online that she got too close to the truth and was murdered. I have no doubt that researching the stuff she did brought her into contact with some real sickos. This book was trash, but it’s a shame that Twyman died so young. It is quite likely I will look at more of her other non-fiction books in the future.

Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery: Did Mermaid Aliens from the Sirius Star System Save Humanity?

**Destiny Books – 1987 (Originally published 1976)**

The Sirius Mystery: Was Earth visited by intelligent beings from a planet in the system of the star of Sirius? – Robert K.G. Temple

I frequently come across mentions of the star Sirius in my reading, and I have long planned to read Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Connection. I’ve had a copy for ages, but I overdid it on ancient aliens books a few years ago, and I’m usually a bit hesitant to start books over 300 pages. I’ve read a few long books recently that I had been putting off and I ended up enjoying them. One of them, S.K. Bain’s 9/11 as Mass Ritual, references Sirius, and this gave me the encouragement I needed to finally pick up Temple’s book.

Jesus, this was atrocious, truly a pile of shit.

There’s a tribe in Mali, the Dogon people, that claim that amphibious aliens from the Sirius Star system came down to Earth around 5000 years ago. We should believe them because they know about a tiny little star in that system that’s invisible without a telescope. If you look back at the myths of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Sumerians, they all confirm this.

Most of the book is dedicated to proving the last (and least interesting) sentence in the above paragraph. Temple discusses every myth he can find that mentions Sirius, dogs, the number 50 or anything that rhymes with those words in ancient Greek, Egyptian or Sumerian. There’s nothing of any substance here at all, and the writing is extremely dense. If you don’t have a strong knowledge of mythology, most of the “evidence” will be too boring to meaningfully contemplate. I know a bit about mythology, and I couldn’t tolerate it at all. The chapters in this section are all followed by a summary because Temple acknowledges that what he has written is confusing. I mostly skimmed over these chapters and focused on the summaries, but nothing jumped out at me as even remotely convincing.

The idea of the fishy aliens is pretty cool, but Temple largely sticks to discussing the myths of the Dogon tribe and doesn’t speculate much. He mostly just talks about mermaids from mythology. Honestly, I didn’t get much out of this book that isn’t available on its wikipedia entry. At this point, it seems generally accepted that the Dogon people had been fed the information about Sirius B, the invisible star, by a European visitor.

Sirius does pop up a lot in my field of interest. It’s central to Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian tradition, and Robert Anton Wilson believed that aliens in the Sirius system have been sending humans, including himself, telepathic messages for millennia. I was never particularly hopeful that Temple’s book would provide a convincing argument for his claims, but I had hoped that it would approach the mysterious star system in a more interesting manner. I would far prefer to read a bat-shit crazy book about ludicrous beliefs than this pseudo-scholarly cowpat. There’s a few editions of this book. I looked through the original edition, an abridged version and an updated version from the late 1990s. Don’t waste your time with any of them.

Ozzy did 9/11! S.K. Bain’s The Most Dangerous Book in the World

I was still in school when I saw Loose Change, one of the documentaries that popularised the 9/11 truther movement. It was a formative experience for me. I was convinced that it was real for a few days, but after reading up on it, I came to realise that it was nonsense. I accept that the American government is a deceit machine that was at least partly culpable, but if they were deliberately going to do this to their own country, they wouldn’t leave as many clues and discrepancies as conspiracy theorists would have us believe.

I ignored the topic for almost 20 years, even after taking an interest in conspiracy theories. If the 9/11 attacks were staged, it could only have been political. There were no aliens or Satanic cults involved, so I wasn’t interested.

The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual

A few years ago, I saw this book and it caught my attention. Not only is the title unutterably stupid and potentially offensive, but it also promises a scintillating layer of black magic to the 9/11 truth movement. I knew I’d have to read it, but it seemed pretty long. The introduction was also written by Peter Levenda. I’ve read a few of his books, and my least favourite was his book on conspiracies. After recently reading and enjoying the Heck out of Milton William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse, another lengthy book about insane conspiracy theories, I decided to dive into Bain’s work.

I’m really glad I did. I enjoyed this book a lot more than I was expecting, and I finished it in just a few days. Please don’t misunderstand. This is not a convincing book at all, but it’s easy to read, and its claims are so outrageous that I consumed it very quickly

The US government is run by Illuminati disciples of Aleister Crowley. These creeps organised the 9/11 attacks as a massive black magic ritual to usher in a new era of Satanic glory. The details that give this information away were not accidents. They were deliberately left there because the Satanic Elite are mocking us. I’ll just give a few examples.

George Bush found out that the planes had flown into the World Trade Center while he was visiting a school. Footage exists of him listening to the children reading a story called “The Pet Goat” as he is told that “America is under attack.” This is not a coincidence. The Pet Goat is a symbol of Lucifer. Even the text of the story depicts this particular goat as rebellious and violent. Also, the children in the classroom were mostly black. Seeing the pattern yet? (Bain’s insinuation, not mine!)

One of the many illustrations in this very important and serious book

The school that Bush was in was also close to the flight school where the terrorists had trained and a clown college with links to the Freemasons and the CIA. You think this is a coincidence? Guess again, idiot!

Flight 93, the plane in which the passengers overpowered the terrorists (who were armed with shanks), crashed down in a place called Shanksville. Bill Crowley (yes, CROWLEY!!!) was a Pittsburgh FBI guy who had jurisdiction in Shanksville. Flight 93 too! 93 was one of Aleister Crowley’s favourite numbers. You might brush this off and say that there’s loads of Crowleys out there and that the FBI guy’s name has nothing to do with anything, but Bill wasn’t the only Crowley involved.

Korean Airlines Flight 85 was supposed to land in Alaska on September the 11th, 2001, but because of some miscommunication, it was redirected to the airport in Whitehorse in the Yukon. The air traffic controller at that airport was one Tim Crowley. As if that wasn’t enough, please recall the lyrics to Mr. Crowley, one of the most famous songs about Aleister Crowley:

Mr. Crowley
Won’t you ride my white horse?
Mr. Crowley
It’s symbolic, of course
Ozzy Osbourne 1980

White horse? Whitehorse! The song was written more than 30 years before the events it describes, and the songwriter was at the peak of his legendary drug use, but to me, it seems almost impossible that Ozzy didn’t foresee the Korean pilot of flight 085 misunderstanding the message from the groundstation in Alaska. He is clearly in league with the Illuminati overlords.

Ozzy isn’t the only heavy metaller involved here. Judas Priest’s Some Heads are Gonna Roll forecasts the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Arizona in 2012. Rob Halford was in on it too.

Oh, by the way, if you’re reading that last bit and you’re wondering why you don’t remember the nuclear bomb detonating in Arizona in 2012, that’s because it never happened. Half of this book deals with the attacks of September 11th, 2001, but the other half describes what was supposed to happen in 2012, the year after the book was published. None of this stuff actually happened, but that’s probably only because Bain had predicted it, and the Illuminati backed off. It’s ironic that the subtitle of this work is “The World’s Most Dangerous Book” when it actually saved millions of lives.

There’s a lot more in here that I’m not mentioning. The Skull & Bones Society, the JFK assassination and the Insane Clown Posse all play their part. Did you know that the Statue of Liberty actually depicts Lucifer? This is ridiculous stuff, and trying to refute the claims made in this book would be entirely pointless. It was an entertaining read though.

2023, The Year in Review

I’ve had a pretty good 2023, but it was an odd year for this blog. In March, Google updated its algorithm and decimated the amount of traffic this site sees. This is particularly disappointing as I had more fun with this blog in 2023 than I’ve had for ages. After a few years of largely focusing on fiction, I forced myself to alternate between fiction and non-fiction on a weekly basis. This led me to some very weird books indeed. (All of the following images are links to the respective blog posts.)

I did a trilogy of posts on bizarre books about bizarre cryptids. How I wish I could ring in the New Year with Pigman, Goatman and Lizardman.

I also read a lot of true crime books this year. I don’t know why I hadn’t paid more attention to this genre earlier. Nearly all of the crime books I read had an occult/satanic/conspiracy angle to them. Some of these books were very upsetting to read, but they definitely renewed my interest in blogging. It’s terrifying how frequently texts, characters and authors I have covered here popped up in these books.

I think I read less than 15 non-fiction books during 2021 and 2022, so it was refreshing to spend so much time learning about the real world this year. I read plenty of fiction too, and most of it was of the Paperbacks from Hell variety. Some of these books were good. Others, especially Bradley Snow’s Andy, were truly awful.

My annual blog traffic. The beginning of the end?

It has been a bummer to see my traffic dropping. I blame google for this, but I have also been cutting down on social media in the last few years, and that may have made things worse too. Twitter was the only site I was still using last year, but Elon Musk is a piece of dog’s filth, so I only use twitter to link my weekly post at this point. (Even that is almost useless.) I guess we’re living in the era of the podcast now. I’d move on and try that, but I’d have nobody to do it with. I put a lot of work into this blog, and although it’s ultimately for my own enjoyment, it’s nice to get a bit of recognition now and then. Please share this website with anyone you know who would be interested, and comment or email me if you have suggestions.

Here are some more from this year:

Another thing I’ve noticed this year is an increase in requests from authors for me to read their novels. This always amuses me. Have these stupid bastards ever looked through the blog? I rarely read new books, and I trash 95% of the books I review. Keep your shitty steampunk zombie novel to yourself, you sad virgins. Also, speaking of bad amateur fiction, I don’t think many people got around to reading the short story I put out this year.

I’ll end this the same way I do every year. I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. You can also check out my index page for individual links to the 500+ books I have reviewed here so far. Also, check back soon. I have some good stuff coming up.

I sincerely wish you all a happy New Year!