It’s a thought experiment. Honestly. I don’t really think this. Or do I? I mean, it makes sense?
No, no, hear me out.
What if David Icke is actually a tool of the true Conspiracy Bad Guys? What if he's an op? I mean I’m only half serious here, but 50% serious is still more than 0%. You know what I think about David Icke by now, and if you don’t maybe you’re on my Patreon and you can see the video I did. You’re all set. Go watch it. I’ll wait.
OK, David Icke, right. David Icke is an op. Totally certain of it. Let's look at the evidence.
So towards the start of the lockdown season, I started thinking about what I could do workwise. It's a brutal time for a freelancer. But then I got asked to do a talk for a lovely place in Nashville, and then I thought, you know what, I may not be good at everything but I do have a way with a useless but fascinating fact. So I thought, I'll have an online seminar series. And this has been fun, if exhausting. So far I've explored folk horror, faked ecctoplasm, explained how to brainwash someone and invented a whole genre of horror. But we're not quite halfway through the series, so there's a lot more to come.
The Details
When?
Seminars run on Mondays, and each one runs twice: the first is at 8pm, British Summer Time; the second at 8pm, Eastern Daylight Time (which is 1am BST). If you're in the UK or in a similar time zone, you'll probably want to book for the BST session; if you're in the US or Canada, you'll likely want the EDT session. But anyone can go to either if they can make it.
Where?
The seminars are going to run online, using Zoom, because that's what everyone uses, and honestly, it's about the easiest way to do this. Before the talk I'll mail everyone with meeting links and passwords (because there will be passwords).
How much? Backing my Patreon not only gets you a season ticket to all the talks, but access to videos after the fact, along with all the other benefits. If you don't want to commit to a subscription, each class is available on a Pay-What-You-Want basis (input how much you want to pay in the checkout box), and is limited to 50 attendees, because bandwidth (so please register, even if you decide to come for free). Suggested range for a ticket is £5-10, but seriously, if you can't afford it and you want to come, there's no guilt attached.
In late 2018, celebrated author Alice Walker was asked by the New York Times to do one of those regular “books I have on my bedside table” pieces that fill a few inches in the weekly book review supplement. And that quickly got weird, because one of the books she waxed lyrical about was by David Icke, and this quickly got picked up by people who pointed out that Icke's book was really antisemitic, in that it blamed all the ills of the world by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers. Who were in fact extraterrestrial lizards who have been ruling the planet for millennia.
And this reminded everyone that David Icke – prophet of conspiratorial, antisemitic extraterrestrial doom – existed. Every so often he pops up and we get that poisonous, vaguely ill feeling that Icke brings with him. Recently, he's been back with the whole “link between the novel coronavirus and 5G” question (spoilers: there isn't a link between the novel coronavirus and 5G), shortly before getting his YouTube removed.
But how do you get a David Icke? Where do ideas like his come from? What is the secret history that causes an idea to metastasise into a state where a professional goalie turned sports commentator turned Green Party politician becomes the visionary king of the conspiracy theorists?
In my next Zoom seminar, The Color Turquoise, I'll be explaining the strange origin of the ideas that led to David Icke, and the trajectory that led from the early origins of the New Age movement into its wildest fringes, and how a semingly benign New Ager could become one of the most popular antisemitic conspiracy theorists in history.
The talk was held twice on Monday 13th July, at 8pm BST (UK time) and 8pm EDT (Eastern US/Canada time). Patreon backers automatically get in, and get access to the videos afterward, so if you missed it, there's still the Patreon.
So the other day, for the seminar I did about the Gordon Higginson controversies, I decided to conjure some ectoplasm, the way the old school mediums did it. Here's what happened.
After having done ectoplasm, I decided to try spirit manifestation.
That second video took about seven takes. Not shown is the take where the spirit emerges from the curtains, trips over its own ectoplasm and falls flat on its face with an unghostly crash.
I mean, obviously, what you're looking at is a person with a sheet on their head, pretending to be a ghost. Don't underestimate that – in a dark room full of people who are expecting to see dead loved ones, and hear dead loved ones, there's a much higher chance than you would think that they will in fact see a spirit, even they were looking at a person with a sheet on their head. But where's the sheet? When parapsychologist Barrie Colvin investigated Gordon Higginson in 1974, he couldn't figure out where it was either. And then realised that one chair in the room was different to all the others. And that was the chair that was moved into the manifestation cabinet after each meeting started.
And he looked at the chair, and within 20 seconds found what was hidden in it.
Cheesecloth (or muslin if you prefer)is great stuff. It's light, it's got a loose weave and it's absorbent (which is why it's absolutely the best thing to mop up baby sick, fact fans).
When it's wet, it bunches up really tightly, and you can mould it. Here's the same amount, wet.
The old school physical mediums would sort of get it wet and scrunch it up into a tight sausage and feed it down their throats. As you can see from the video, I, not an expert at this, had a great deal of trouble keeping it down. The vomiting of the ectoplasm was only half-theatrical.
You can find the whole program here and support my Patreon (which gives you season tickets, archive videos of past talks and advance views of my other work) here.
We define an expert as someone skilled or knowledgeable in a given field, or at least that's the simple version. I think the real definition of that is more nuanced, truly, has more to do with the perception of others than with verifiable competence.
I've historically not been one for biographies, not modern ones at any rate. It's generally been the preserve of my Beloved; still, in the last few years I've seen a drastic change in my tastes in a lot of directions. Clearly, as I keep saying, I'm not the man I was.
Anyway, during the week and a half I've spent on London's waterways this Summer (Beloved's family owns a narrowboat and we are lucky enough to have regular excursions on it, across England) I found myself reading two biographies back to back, both of significant twentieth century London occultists: Austin Spare and Madeline Montalban.
This is my favourite picture of Dad, the one on the right.
In the course of my research into the emotional archaeology that is the foundation of Chariot, I've been steadily uncovering a whole lot of my Dad's stuff. He will have been gone fifteen years in February. Much as I do, Dad had aspirations toward being a writer.
In Search of the Miraculous was the defining work of Peter Ouspensky. As Ouspensky goes, he was certainly a lot more principled and honest than a lot of the New Age thinkers.
