Why the Fire won't be caught any time soon

I first posted this some time ago on my Patreon page. I've had a revamp of the Patreon recently; it's where all my writing is posted, although occasionally I'll put something here eventually. It's one American dollar for pretty much the full archive; there's options of higher tiers, including one that'll allow you to commission work from me. 

But for now, this is me in full polemic. 

The Devil Makes Work for Idle Imaginations

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.

The Unimportance of Being Earnest

[In 2004, seventeen years and six PCs ago, I pitched to the Christian website Ship of Fools a long form article about the upcoming Christian Union mission. I had thought it lost – it’s no longer online and I had long ago lost the file in the move from one machine to the next. But recently, I found a full printout of it in a drawer. This piece was written a long time ago, and it’s fair to say that I’m a much better writer than this now. It’s also fair to say that the students involved are now in their mid to late thirties, and the current crop of students were toddlers when this happened. We’re literally a generation down the line and, as you should hope was the case, as I’ve gotten older I’ve known better than to continue to mess with student politics. I am out of touch. I should be.

So how relevant is this piece now? Probably not very relevant at all. I’m keeping it because this was an important moment for me, professionally and personally. It’s part of my story.

If the practices of UCCF are anything to go by they have probably caught up by now with the cultural milieu as it was in 2004. They’ll hit relevance for 2021 sometime in the mid 2030s, I expect. I don’t know how much has changed. But certainly, the influence of evangelicalism was in a campus freefall in 2004 and I cannot see how that could have been reversed.

When I wrote this, I was not to know that the result of my weird week on the mission coalface would be to be publicly denounced and privately excommunicated by representatives of a national Christian organisation, and for the church I then attended to ban me from working with students. Did I deserve that? I think you should be the judge of that.

The one thing I think I learned from this experience is that you can’t ever expect to do this type of journalism and get an honest result. You know how you can’t observe quantum phenomena without changing the state of the thing you’re observing? Journalism is like that. It never gives you an unbiased view. I’ve annotated this piece to put it in context and perhaps think about what’s changed in the last 17 years.]

Cults, Politics and the 2020 Election

I know I've been quiet lately. It's been a pretty mad few months, and hoepfully normal service, inasmuch as anything you could call normal, should be resuming imminently. 

In the meantime, here's a video. My close pal Avril Korman is the only person I know who has so far correctly called every development of the American election. She's been doing videos about the process on Facebook which have been getting a ton of and the other day was asked about why some of the political groups currently active in the US seem like cults. She tagged me in the ensuing discussion, and we agreed to talk about it on camera.

The Room 207 Press Summer Webinar Series – a mid-season relaunch

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.

Here's a schedule of what's to come. 

Room 207 Press Webinars #6: The Color Turquoise

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.

Faking Ectoplasm: A Practical Demonstration

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.

And that's how you make ectoplasm. 

Anyway, this is one of the many subjects I'm talking about in my seminar series this Summer. On Monday 29th, I'm dealing with Identity Horror, as I approach The Question in Bodies. 

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.

Room 207 Press Webinars #4: Are You With Us, Mr Higginson?

In 1976, Britain's most influential and powerful spiritualist medium, coming out of what should have been an average presentation of his powers in a Bristol church, was accused of faking supernatural phenomena. A two year long controversy ensued, involving not only ordinary spiritualists, but parapsychologists and the mainstream news, which climaxed with an extraordinary and nationally reported public trial. But how did a figure as complex as Gordon Higginson – a man who never earned a penny from his psychic practice, and who maintains a fearsome reputation for accuracy even to this day – wind up cheating? Was he cheating at all? What could he hope to gain? 

In my next online seminar, I'll be presenting the result of five years of research into what really happened in that little Bristol spiritualist church in February 1976, and why it became the last great scandal of Spiritualism. I'll be putting it in the context of the history of Spiritualism and its eventual decline, and how that relates to where our culture was in the 1970s.

I will also be supplying a practical and exclusive demonstration of how to fake ectoplasm, which you can witness in the comfort of your own homes.    

Pictured: the author faking ectoplasm in 2019.

If you back my Patreon for more than $10/per month, you get to come to this and all the other talks I'm doing from now until September, along with access to the recordings if you miss them.

Room 207 Press Webinars #1: The Scam From Atlantis

Madame Blavatsky will never not be judging you.

The Scam from Atlantis, Monday 1st June 8pm BST and 8pm EDT

So I've gotta eat. And more specifically, I've been asked a bunch of times if I'll be doing more talks, because talks are a thing I do. Hi, by the way. If you've not come here before, I'm Howard David Ingham, and I've written professionally about occult history, religion and, most recently, movies for twenty years, and a couple of years ago I wrote a book called We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror (obligatory Amazon UK link) which got nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, which is nice.

I'm starting on 1st June with The Scam from Atlantis: the occult roots of fake archaeology, which deals with an abiding lifelong obsession of mine: Atlantis.

This is personal to me, has been since I was a kid, and my dad used to keep his books on the occult on a high shelf and one day I balanced on a stack of wobbly chairs and got them down, and there was this one about Atlantis, only I'm not talking about your Plato Atlantis or your Robert E Howard Atlantis, your Graham Hancock Atlantis or even your Doug McClure Atlantis, I'm talking about the dream Atlantis of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, William Scott-Elliot and Charles Leadbeater. The Hyperborean age of the Lhas. The Lost Lemuria.

This was a world invented by and for psychics. Mystics. Dreamers. Not filtered through any lens of pulp fantasy, either. I wouldn't read the American writers who riffed on this stuff until well into adulthood, and that was probably a good thing.

I was about eleven, and I'd discovered Dungeons and Dragons about the same time (I still have the box, purple sides, Erol Otus dragon, acquired second hand from some older lads down the road who couldn't make head or tail of it, at a time when everyone else had the Elmore dragon), and in my lonely head the blurry second-hand fragments of theosophical imaginations turned into lost ancient worlds full of psychic three-eyed beastmen who domesticated dinosaurs (and when you are eleven nothing catches your imagination like a giant with a dinosaur on a lead. Nothing), and tribes of sad blue giants who walked through lands scoured by the depredations of airship fleets commanded by crazed tyrant witch-kings. This was in the books. This was all there, I swear to God, with Chris Foss paintings of Sky-Chariots and diagrams of the concentric islands of Poseidonis and discussions of cosmic memory and theosophical root races. All there.

From my Dad's Atlantis book.

But the problem is, the more you read about it, the more you see the problems with it. As time went on, the magical Atlantis of my childhood began to exist in tension with horrific undercurrents. When you realise that the root races of man corresponded with the late 19th/early 20th century orthodoxy that humans had subspecies, and that the Lemurians were Black, and the Atlanteans were Asian, and they were replaced by the fifth race, and the fifth race are the Aryans... and that the history of Atlantis was tied up with this, it gets a little concerning.

Click to see the big version of this. It's from a family encyclopedia, dated 1927.

The Atlantis that mystics like Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce invented came from Ignatius Donnelly, and he had this whole “pyramids in Egypt and pyramids in South America – what are the chances?” thing going on, a basic error of misapplied imagination that has inspired a whole history of wannabe archaeologists – Graham Hancock, Erich von Däniken, and the others – who all work on the assumption that the Black and Brown people who yet live in the places where these awe inspiring monuments were built couldn't possibly be the descendants of the ones who built them, and that they must have been built by people from Somewhere Else.

This seminar ran on 1st June 2020. 
 
You can buy tickets for all the seminars in the series on the main seminar page.

On the abuses of the sincere

I was talking to a close friend last night about people she's seen doing literal simony, because that's the sort of thing we talk about, and it moved on to how sincerity is not a barrier to abuse.

So, the famous psychic I'm writing about who got caught cheating his phenomena (and kept getting caught cheating) is particularly interesting, for example, because he made a point of never earning a penny for his work (he made his actual living from owning a grocer's shop, what my American friends would call a general store), and the more interesting question becomes why? Why would you do that? Somehow it moves to a place where fraud comes from motivations we don't expect or assume.

In Search of the Miraculous #16: The Color Turquoise

The New York Times recently ran one of those "what books do you like reading?" Q&A puff pieces in its review section, featuring Alice Walker, the writer, as you probably know, of The Color Purple. In this piece, simply a list sent to the New York Times correspondent by email, she recommended a book called And the Truth Shall Set You Free and equally warmly recommended its author, David Icke.

Written in Water #22: The Miracle of the Sparrows

All I have to show you is this bird

I made with fingers, spit and clay.

I breathed on it like Jesus had, I heard,

To make it come alive and fly away.

•

At the end of the Gospel of John, the evangelist writes,

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

John 21:25

I've always liked that as an ending. It feels like a recognition of the shortcomings of the story's form and an assertion of validity in a humble, eloquent way. There are other versions of Christ's story, the evangelist is saying, and they are no more or less valid than this one.

Four Secret Stories from Calvary

I can't believe it's an entire year since I did that passion installation. But it is. So this morning it was Good Friday again, and this morning, I was asked to read Luke's account of the trial of Jesus.

For some reason, I found myself thinking of the other stories, the everyday stories that have become secret stories.

Expert

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.

Written in Water #23: Following Yonder Star

January 6th is the Feast of Epiphany, the official end of Christmas. It's when, traditionally, the tale of the Magi is told in churches. It bears telling again, for it is one of the strangest stories in a book full of stories whose strangeness we take for granted.

I am ambivalent about his death

Yesterday I received notice, sensitively given, that someone I had once worked for had died.

The Devil's Bridge

The village of Devil's Bridge (in Welsh, Pontarfynach) is not far from Aberystwyth. Its most significant landmark is a remarkable gorge across which stand three bridges, one built on top of the other, a visible story of a thousand years of history. The recent TV drama Hinterland makes a great deal of use of the area. It's a dramatic place.

The top bridge, the road bridge from which you go to see the gorge, dates to 1901. It sits on top of a bridge built in 1708. And that stands on a bridge that dates to the eleventh century.

And that bridge? That one was built by Satan.

Written in Water 21: For Whom the World is Flat

You can actually buy this shirt.

Before I start: I haven't blogged for a couple of weeks. A combination of illness (mine and each of the members of my family, in turn) and a short term work contract I couldn't turn down meant that I either couldn't find the time to write or couldn't, period. The film reviews will resume tomorrow, probably with a piece about Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Simeon Smith's guest post about Pan's Labyrinth.

But today let's talk about the world being flat, or round, or whatever shape it is, which was triggered when I read a couple of weeks ago that basketball legend turned sports pundit Shaquille O'Neal had made a statement to that effect. In fact he was kidding, but he wasn't the first prominent American – and all of them people of colour – to say that.

In defence of flowers taped to lamp posts

The tree, which stands alone on one of the gentle slopes of the park near my home, not far from the boundary of the local comprehensive, is entirely covered with hundreds of cloth flowers fixed to its bark with drawing pins, graffiti, gifts tucked in its nooks, laminated Christmas and birthday cards, letters. Beads and trinkets hang from its branches. A bouquet of flowers lies at its roots.

Deciduous

It is uncontroversial among many people in the West that this last year finished has been in some way bad; in fact, all that happened was that the horrors of the world finally began to visit themselves on us in a mediated, creeping way, and in our arrogance we realised for once that we were going to have experienced a year that was, if not quite as terrible as most recent years experienced by people elsewhere, more on a par. It is sad that a great number of beloved public figures have died; it is appalling that our certainties that fascism would never return, let alone be accepted as part of mainstream discourse, have been proven so very complacent. 2016's electoral catastrophes in Britain and the USA are still far from genocides and crusades, but for the first time since 2001, we suspect that these things might come to our doorstep.

2016 was the year that it came to us that we had the same problems as everyone else, on a level beyond the purely intellectual. Inasmuch as a year is a period of time to which we ascribe a significance and a limit, 2016 was for most people in the world, a year like any other. All that happened to us was that we finally got to share some of it.

For me, the disappointments, failures and heartbreaks of 2015 continued into the early months of 2016. But by April, it began to turn around. I started to succeed again. Modestly, perhaps, perhaps on penalties, but a win in the penalty shoot-out is no less valid a victory. I won, this year gone. I won.

My wish for you, friend, and if you're reading this far, I'll count you a friend whether I know you or not, is that you will achieve your own victory in 2017.

Win.