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!

All Serial Killers are Satanic Pawns of the CIA: David McGowan’s Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder

There’s no such thing as serial killers. Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez and the likes were all framed by the government. None of these men committed all of the murders of which they were accused. They were all part of CIA mind control operations. Satanic ritual abuse and murderous Satanic cults exist, but they are just part of the US government’s mind control agenda.

This book starts off with a lengthy section describing different sex crimes committed against children. There really are a lot of sickos out there. The author claims that many of these crimes were committed by the US government to make their victims more susceptible to mind control. He points out that a high percentage of serial killers experienced sexual abuse as children. This was some bleak reading as proof of this. Paedophiles are truly the vilest form of life. Admittedly, I couldn’t help but giggle when a Satanic ritual abuse “victim” described how they were forced to play “poopoo baseball”

The next and longest section of the book details the crimes of America’s most notorious serial killers. McGowan includes all of the big ones with the noticeable exception of the Son of Sam. This is not because he thinks that David Berkowitz was any different to the other killers discussed but because he believes that Maury Terry said all that needed to be said about Berkowitz and his accomplices in The Ultimate Evil. This is fair; that book is exhaustive, and I’d imagine most of McGowan’s readers have probably read Terry, but the phrase “programmed to kill” actually came from one of the Son of Sam letters.

I went through a bit of a serial killer phase as a teenager, so I knew about John Wayne Gacy and Bundy, but most of my serial killer knowledge is limited to the names and lyrics of Macabre songs. I was aware that Edmund Kemper had a horrible temper and that Dahmer used to work in a chocolate factory, but although I knew that Richard Speck had done something outrageous, I didn’t know the specifics. It turns out this Speck guy killed 8 student nurses and was sentenced to life in prison. Some serial killers get murdered in prison due to their reputations, but Richard Speck managed to keep himself alive by injecting himself with estrogen and growing a pair of tits. In the late 80s, a lawyer snuck a video camera into the prison where Speck was locked up and made a video of him wearing blue satin panties, snorting cocaine and giving blowjobs to other inmates. What the heck Richard Speck ?

A lot of the reasoning presented here is utterly ridiculous. The book was written in 2004, just a few years before smartphones became ubiquitous, and the writing here makes that obvious. Whenever I would read about a killer I hadn’t encountered before, I would check their wikipedia page, and in most cases that would make it very obvious how hard the author was trying to put his slant on things. I’d like to assume that a person wouldn’t get away with this kind of distortion of the truth anymore, but unfortunately it seems that more people are buying into this type of shit than ever before. This kind of thinking is a direct precursor to the Pizzagate conspiracy and that kind of nonsense. As soon as you point out how the research is flawed, believers will accuse you of having being duped by the same system that created these “satanic” killers. Some of this book is verifiable fiction too. When discussing Aleister Crowley, the author discusses the story about Crowley performing a ritual that killed his friend and drove him crazy… the one that Dennis Wheatley made up. McGowan also assumes the existence of the Hand of Death, a Satanic cult of assassins that existed only in the mind of Henry Lee Lucas (more on that in matter in a couple of weeks),

The book’s central premise is total madness anyways. The message is that serial killers are made, not born. I get the appeal of that idea. It’s hard for me to accept the fact that some men enjoy murdering children, but it wouldn’t make me feel much better if I found out that it was actually the government putting those sick desires into its citizens’ heads. Also, the notion that the American government is organised enough to do stuff like this is ridiculous.

Programmed to Kill really only covers American killers. I assume other countries do have serial killers, but I can only think of a few. It does seem a bit odd that America has so many. I read an article that claims that the amount of serial killers has been dropping in the last few decades. The CIA must be devoting their attention elsewhere.

This is a ridiculous book. It could only be convincing to a person with no way of verifying the claims made within. I mainly read it because I knew it mentioned the 4 Pi cult, but it didn’t contain anything about that mysterious group that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. It did put me onto a few other books about Satanic killers. It also forced me to spend a lot of time thinking about how horrible human beings are, and I started getting nervous leaving my house.

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

After reading Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians a few years back, I stopped reading new horror. That book was fine, but there was so much hype around it that I felt like I had nothing original to say when I posted about it here. I was in an awkward situation recently in which I had to take a book out of my local library. I saw this near the front counter, and having a ague idea of what it was about, I grabbed it.

After meeting their favourite film director, pair of movie nerds get sucked into the terrifying world of esoteric Nazi occultism. This director guy made a few weirdo horror movies and then disappeared for decades because one of the films he made was cursed. It was written by a Nazi wizard and never completed. When the 2 friends help edit some of the footage from this film, it activates a spell (or is it a curse?) that the weird Nazi had begun before his death.

So yeah, this book has a Nazi wizard, murders, ghosts, human sacrifices, black magic, occult books, demon dogs and a main character clad in an Iron Maiden tshirt. Hell yeah!

I quite enjoyed Silver Nitrate. Unlike other books about Nazi occultism that I’ve read, the characters in here were fleshed out and generally very likeable. I’d like to see them in a sequel to be honest. Parts of this book do feel a little slow, but overall it’s very easy to digest.

I’m a pedantic dork when it comes to this kind of thing, and I was pretty impressed with the level of detail that went into Silver Nitrate. The bad guy is named Wilhelm Friedrich Ewers. I wondered if this was a reference to Hanns Heinz Ewers when I saw it. The author confirms this in an afterword. (The real Ewers wrote a few horror novels and movie scripts in the early 20th century, but his work has been ignored because he later became involved with the Nazis. I’ve been planning to read his books for a while now.) The attention to detail here made it feel like this book was written for weird nerds like me, but there seems to be some hype about this one. I was only able to borrow it from the local library for 7 days because it’s in such high demand. I’ve seen Silvia Morena-Garica being interviewed by big news websites too. It’s really cool to see an author with a background in Lovecraftian horror getting attention like that.

Cotton Mather – A 17th Century Jordan Peterson

I find reading about Salem Witch Trials a generally unpleasant experience. When I read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible years ago, I felt a horrible combination of claustrophobia, frustration and rage. I’m assume that my readers have a general background of what happened, but if you’re unaware, about 300 years ago, some stupid, bored teenagers in Salem made up stories about their neighbours being witches, and a bunch of innocent people were executed. I’ve had Cotton Mather’s On Witchcraft (Wonders of the Invisible World) on my shelf for a decade, and even though it’s short, I’ve put off reading it until now.

Cotton Mather – On Witchcraft (Wonders of the Invisible World)

**Dorset – 1991 (Originally published 1693)**

Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister at the time of the witch trials. I had thought he was a Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder, figure, but his role in the witch trials was minimal. I think he sent a few letters to the judges or something and then wrote this book as a defence of the court proceedings, assuming the guilt of the witches. It’s an extremely boring book, and I managed to get through it by downloading the audiobook version and forcing myself to listen to it every night for a week while I cleaned my kitchen. This Cotton Mather guy was a stupid asshole, but people seemed to value his opinion because he knew the Bible. He was basically a 17th century Jordan Peterson.

I’ve read about the Salem trials elsewhere, and there’s very little in the narrative of the book that was new to me. The most interesting thing here is what Mather’s writing tells us about how he thinks. Either he’s terrified and/or he wants his audience to be terrified. This was written in 1692. British colonies in America were still very new, and the Puritans were still adapting to their new environment. They had exiled themselves from the iniquity of Catholicism and Anglicanism, and they took the Bible seriously. Half of this book is Biblical references, and these references are not limited to the Gospels. Mather’s audience believed that God had a special interest in their daily affairs. It’s a genuinely chilling prospect to imagine yourself in their position, truly believing that the Devil himself was present and trying to destroy their community. Still, it’s pretty hard to forgive people who were stupid enough to condemn 20+ others to death on the testimony of some hysterical teenagers and jealous farmers.

Wonders of the Invisible World is an extremely important primary source for historians, but it’s generally a pretty dull read. I know that The Crucible isn’t entirely historically accurate, but it does a more entertaining job of telling the same story.

Narcosatanists: Across the Border by Gary Provost

Adolfo Constanzo was a drug dealer and occultist. He and his gang sacrificed humans in bizarre rituals. I had read about him online before, but he never really pops up in any of the books I read about occult murders. There’s a book by Edward Humes called Buried Secrets that came out in 1991 that seems to be a considered the definitive book on the topic, but I had a copy of Gary Provost’s Across the Border, so I went with that.

This is a really horrible story. Constanzo and his gang became known as the “Narcosatanists”, but they weren’t really Satanists. They were practicing a nasty form of Palo Mayombe, an African form of spirituality that came to the USA through Cuba, that involved sacrificing human beings and putting their remains into magical cauldrons. Apparently they had been doing this to rival drug dealers for a while, but things got messy after they kidnapped an American student. (They wanted a victim with a big brain.) They killed at least 20 people. It’s unclear how many of these victims were murdered for the sake of ritual and how many were drug hits. Apparently members of Constanzo’s crew used to drive around without any fear of being caught because they believed their boss had put an invisibility spell on them.

Provost’s book came out just months after Constanzo died, and it seems likely that more details about the crimes have come out since then. I expected this book to present a sensationalized version of the story, but I don’t think that it does. I noticed that Provost never even mentioned the fact that some of Constanzo’s victims were raped before they were murdered. This may not be an exhaustive account, but its not bullshitty either. There’s a section on other Satanic crimes that’s probably unnecessary given the fact that Constanzo and his crew were not actually Satanists, but Across the Border is relatively short, and the crimes and characters described within are fascinating. It certainly wasn’t a boring book. If I ever get my hands on a copy of Hume’s Buried Secrets, I’ll probably give that a go too.

Exposing Satanism or Exploiting Suicide Victims? Beatrice Sparks and Jay’s Journal

I’ve read a lot of messed up books, but Jay’s Journal by Beatrice Sparks is probably the most morally reprehensible piece of writing that I’ve ever come across. I don’t mean that in an ironic or funny way. This book and the story behind it are genuinely disgusting.

A few days ago, I picked up a book at work. It was called Go Ask Alice, and the cover suggested that it would be a bit more interesting than the other stuff on the shelf. It’s supposed to be the real diary of a teenager who gets involved in drugs. I don’t use drugs recreationally, but I’ve read quite a few drug books, and most of them made taking drugs seem pretty cool. This one didn’t. I googled it, and it turns out that it’s not a real diary. It was written by Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon youth counsellor. When I was reading about her, I discovered that after this book was published and became a success, the mother of a 16 year old boy who had committed suicide approached Beatrice Sparks and asked her to help get his diary published. The mom hoped that this text would shed light on teenage depression and hopefully prevent further teen suicides.

Suicide is one of the worst things a family can go through, and while publishing the diaries of a suicide victim seems a bit insensitive, I can’t hold this against the mother. Think of the loss she had just suffered and how much that loss must have damaged her own mental wellbeing. I can understand her desperate attempt to prevent other families from feeling her pain.

Beatrice Sparks agreed to “edit” the diary into a publishable form. What this entailed was taking 21 of the 67 entries from the actual diary and supplementing them with 191 entries of Spark’s own imagination. Oh yeah, and at the time of writing her entries, Beatrice Sparks was obsessed with occultism, blood orgies, witchcraft and Satanism. The result is a book about a kid who kills himself after summoning a satanic demon. The real kid who died was a rebellious teenager from a conservative family. Sparks published a book that made him out to be an animal-sacrificing, perverted Satanist.

To do this to the family of the child that died was a shockingly nasty thing to do. The family were extremely upset. This book had other nasty effects too. It was first published in 1978, and while it’s not solely responsible, it is fair to assume that it stoked the flames of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Beatrice Sparks was truly a rotten, shit-smeared asshole.

Even if we manage to put the author aside, this book is awful. The narrator comes across as a tosser. He’s constantly talking about how great he is and how much he loves his parents. He gets into trouble for doing drugs and ends up in a boys’ home. There he meets a paedophile who tells him about his aura and teaches him to move things with his mind. Yes. This is not a book about a kid who gets caught up with realistic occultist types; the bad guys here can levitate objects over a phone. After meeting the new-age child molester, the protagonist falls in love with a witch and attends a blood orgy with her. They secretly get married and their wedding ceremony involves the murder of a kitten. Later, Jay and his friends go and mutilate a bunch of cows and drink their blood to get magical powers. Then an evil demon possesses and murders all of them. The author basically took all of the silliest rumours about occultism that were floating around during the mid 70s and stuck them together with no regard given to reality. Oh, and the suicide note that ends the book is one of the few entries that Beatrice Sparks didn’t completely make up. Think about that. She used the actual suicide note of a mentally ill child to end her novel about astral projection and cattle mutilation. Disgusting.

The worst part is that lots of people actually believed her.

A few years ago, a writer named Rick Emerson wrote a book about Beatrice Sparks and her other horrible books. It’s called Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries. If you want more details, go read that one. I only read the parts about Jay’s Journal, but the other bits I glanced through also made ol’ Beatrice seem like a filthy, lying sack of shit.

Urinate in My Footsteps: Marcus T. Bottomley’s 9 Proven Magickal Rites

I’ve been reading lots recently, but the way things lined up, I found myself without anything to post this week. I had a quick look through the archives and found this, a 17 page pamphlet of magickal rites from Finbarr Publications. It’s terrible. I reviewed another book by its author a few years ago. I recalled it being terrible too, but I actually forgot how much of it revolved around piss until I reread my review of it moments ago. Thankfully, 9 Proven Magickal Rites also relies heavily on the use of urine as a magickal tool.

Here are the main rites described in the book:

To break up a relationship without having to deal with awkward conversations, find your partner’s footprint and fill it with piss.
If you want to attract money, take a bath, but mix some sugar and white lead into the water before you get into it. I thought that maybe white lead was just a misleading name like “fools gold” or something, but minimal research shows that white lead is highly toxic and does cause lead poisoning.
If you want something, anything really, go to a crossroads and say the Our Father while looking at your feet.
To stop a person coming back into your house, flick some sulphur and black pepper at their back as they leave. I would have thought keeping your door closed would be easier, but I’m clearly no wizard.
Piss into a bottle containing your partner’s pubic hairs and bury it your garden. Your partner will never leave you. If you put some nails into the bottle they will become your servant.

Now you may be confused as to why I have only listed 5 rites when the title of the book is 9 Proven Magickal Rites. Well, there are 5 chapters in the book, each focusing on a different magickal procedure, but some of these procedures have variations, and there are actually 13 distinct rites described in the book. (Chapters 2 and 5 have 5 rites each.) No matter what way I counted these, I could not arrive at the number 9.

I’ve read more than a few titles from Finbarr over the years, and I am consistently shocked by their lack of quality, cohesion and moral standards. I sincerely struggle to imagine how this publisher remained active for multiple decades. This book is about taking a bath in lead water and pissing on your sweetheart’s pubes. I read another one from Finbarr about Hitler waggling his mickey in the mirror. Is this some kind of post-modern art project?

Sorry dear readers. Hopefully it will be a while before I have to resort to Finbarr again.