John A. Keel spoke often in his books of self-stylized paranormal investigators. The expression always seemed kind of curious. I mean aren’t all paranormal investigators self-stylized? There aren’t any schools (to the best of my knowledge anyway) for paranormal investigators. But I think the point Keel was trying to make was that they were all created in their own image, they didn’t take cues from other documented cases and they had no sense of the broader history of the endeavour in which they found themselves. Perhaps they really were just making it up as they went along. Regardless they clearly felt they knew what they were doing, and would present themselves as experts in this dubious field.

I’m quite sure expertise is always relative. Anyone who knows more than you do about any given subject has the potential to be an expert in your eyes. You might know nothing about snake oil and your ‘expert’ might have divined that it has an oily quality about it.

I don’t mean to be critical. I really do believe in learning by doing and certainly to some extent learning on the job. But I’m concerned for the people who don’t have a broad enough scope to appreciate the degree of ‘expertise’ – or lackthereof – they are receiving (and paying handsomely for). I’ve known self-stylized social media ‘experts’ who haven’t the faintest idea how to update their own website. I’ve seen people preaching the merits of blogging who have had four or five short and rather uninspiring blog posts about nothing in particular. Internet marketing ‘gurus’ who have cluttered difficult-to-even-look-at websites. To people with a more nuanced understanding of these subjects the omissions are glaring.

Ultimately the advice for consumers is the same as with everything else – do your homework and get a lot of advice, and be mindful of any bias that might be in the advice you receive.

Oddly I find many of these self-stylized ‘experts’ as inspiring and instructive as I find them perplexing. I mean, if you actually do have skills and experiences that can help others now is certainly not the time to start being modest.

Following on from thoughts expressed in this week’s Sensational Sabbath, I thought we should consider the idea of predestination beyond a religious perspective. John A. Keel is an author and paranormal investigator, best known for The Mothman Prophecies. He writes of predestination in The Cosmic Question (Chapter 22; pages 194-195):

You and I are biochemical robots controlled by the powerful radiations being broadcast from the Eighth Tower. Our brains are programmed like computers, and many of us are suddenly and completely reprogrammed at some point in our adult life. At birth our entire lives are planned for us, and as we weave and trotter through our allotted three score and ten, we find ourselves manipulated by ‘luck’, by strange coincidences, and by sudden changes in ourselves and our environments.

Visualize a mad scientist who needs someone to clean out his secret laboratory in his castle on a forbidding mountain-top. He constructs a mechanical robot for the job and programs it so it can move freely within the lab, but if it should open the door and try to move out of the laboratory, it is programmed to self-destruct.

The robot calls it slavery. We call it free will. We are free to pursue our life in our own way so long as we conform to the hidden master plan. If we try to circumvent that plan by zigging instead of zagging, we self-destruct.

Keel should know. He has outlived many of his contemporaries in a field – paranormal research – where life expectancy is curiously low. Take for example The Mothman Death List (compiled by Loren Coleman).

Human history is filled with examples of people who self-destructed when they dared to step beyond the outer limits, when they consciously tried to alter history in ways that did not conform to our hypothetical cosmic plan. Religious and political leaders have frequently been cut down by wild-eyed assassins obeying voices in their heads or following the dictates of the loathsome entities who materialized before them during cultist rites. Then historians invent a rational lie to replace the irrational facts. Charles Guiteau is remembered as a ‘disappointed office seeker’ who shot Pres. James Garfield. ‘Serbian nationalists’ knocked off Francis Ferdinand and started World War I. Lincoln was murdered by a nutty actor who sympathized with the South. And so on. But if you dig into the original records, you will find some surprising details. John WIlkes Booth, for example, was one of ten coconspirators, all of whom were religious fanatics (as was Guiteau), Francis Ferdinand had something in common with Mohandas Gandhi. Both men were assassinated by fanatical cultists.

An intriguing theory, certainly.

Is author and paranormal investigator John A. Keel (best known for The Mothman Prophecies) a demonologist? Loren Coleman seems to think so…

There is so much involved in Keel’s works that it is difficult to condense and summarise it. Indeed, at different points throughout his books he will entertain any number of theories, but I think on closer reading you can ascertain which theories Keel thinks are more workable, or likely.

I must admit Loren Coleman’s suggestion that Keel is a “demonologist” has always left me scratching my head. Keel writes in The Cosmic Question, pg. 189:

“A small band of scholars known as aretalogists still quietly study cases of contact between humans and parahumans, sifting the messages and noting comparsions. The less precise angelologists try to catalog the ‘endless genealogies’ of the parahumans who claim divine origin, a task as frustrating as trying to list the names of all the planets described by the flying-saucers entities. Demonologists have drawn up massive directories of names of the demons and demigods who have marched in Fort’s ignoble procession of the damned. We never seriously heeded the biblical warning to beware of those who pretended to represent ‘principalities and powers’.

“It would be more productive to join all these futile pursuits into one single broad study stripped of belief, a study that would be aptly named chimeralogy.”

So far from being a Demonologist (something Keel obviously sees as a futile exercise!), he is surely a chimeralogist!

Chimeralogy, a term seemingly coined by Keel himself, sees a more inclusive study of the experiences of percipients that tries to examine the experiences beyond the frames of reference presented – that is beyond face value itself.

Keel seemed to think the manifestations (ghosts, ufos, etc.) were of less interest than the cosmic force that he anticipated produced them. The Cosmic Question (originally published as The Eighth Tower) seems to be his definitive work on the subject. Moreover, much of the book considers psychological aspects of human experience – especially the ever important ‘devil theory’, which has applications extending beyond the paranormal.

His theory behind the mechanics of that cosmic force is somewhat complex… that of a theoretical Super Spectrum. He writes on pg 67:

“The superspectrum is made up of biological energies with gravity at the bottom of the scale (figure 7). Beyond gravity there are other biological forces that produce all psychic and occult manifestations.”

Keel points out that the human eye wasn’t constructed to be able to see the whole spectrum of light. (He suggested in a talk to a Fortean group that the ‘purple lights’ he famously recorded seeing in The Mothman Prophecies may have been much larger, consisting of other elements he was unable to see. Admittedly he did this somewhat whimsically, but the point still stands.)

Now, admittedly this next section comes out of my interpretation of what I have read… but from my reading of The Cosmic Question I anticipate Keel is suggesting that either this ‘cosmic force’ is:

a) a natural part of the earth or the universe (the “earth organism” as conceived of by Ivan T. Sanderson); or

b) some sort of computer programmed for self preservation, of origins unknown, that regularly intervened in the affairs of men to inspire devil theories, provide frames of reference and, in effect, create the destiny of mankind for reasons largely unknown;

With regard to the second possibility, Keel has this to say (pg. 210):

“Like [Arthur C.] Clarke’s monolith [in Childhood's End] and my projection of tomorrow’s supercomputer, it doesn’t look like much. It is a cube of black stone. Muslim scientists who have seen it have described it as being a kind of metal alloy like some of the iron and nickel meteorites that rain on us. Whatever it is, when some men stand in its presence, they are zinged by the cosmic energy that produces Illumination. Their minds open up for a fleeting moment and they view the whole cosmos, as it is, not as we think it to be. And they are overwhelmed by a fanatical urge to protect and defend this black lump with their lives.”

Actually back when Keel penned The Eighth Tower he seemed quite optimistic about that mysterious cosmic mechanism, or superspectrum, being understood by science in a short matter of years. He wrote on pg. 222:

“… In a few years, perhaps even in our own lifetime, all sciences will suddenly converge at a single point, and the mysteries of the superspectrum will unravel in our hands. We will finally understand – truly understand – the forces that have directed our destinies throughout history. But it will be a costly discovery. Organized religion will crumble in the face of the new knowledge. Many of the religious and political fictions that have nourished us during the long night will collapse. The beams of energy that now stride our landscape like a giant on stilts may fade away when the entire population has been programmed and reprogrammed. Folklorists, mythologists, and historians will have to throw away all of their learned interpretations when they realise that man has substituted myth for history and history for myth.”

Although in later interviews – notably appearing in Colvin’s The Mothman’s Photographer – Keel seems a little wearied and disillusioned by the lack of progress made in this area.

But then even Keel himself concedes that “… this is an intellectual exercise. I have demonstrated how it is possible to take a set of known facts and develop a new and plausible devil theory. We are now beginning to understand the mysteries of the electromagnetic spectrum and those those energies control some of us completely and control the rest of us indirectly but decisively. The greatest control does not come from black roads or some radio transmitter buried in the ice of Greenland, but from ourselves. What we believe becomes more important than what we know. The Eighth Tower was built by men standing on the desert, staring awestruck at the starlit sky. It was built by priests, Pharoahs, popes, kings, generals, dictators, and madmen who believed in something – in anything. It inspired Stonehenge, the Nazca lines of Peru, the pyramids, the thousands of ‘Indian’ mounds scattered across the Americas, the voyages of Columbus, and the Apollo moon missions. Most of our wars and much of our human progress came because of men obsessed with some personal devil theory.” (pgs 211-212).

Our ability to make sense of the unknown may be impaired from our own human construction, first and foremost, and only secondly by any shielding forces by the force itself.

In short – belief is the enemy, and the reason Keel attempted to actively divorce himself from all popular frames of reference.

I am writing this near the Nowra Public Wharf, beside the vast Shoalhaven River and with a keen view of the bridge that connects Bomaderry and North Nowra to Nowra itself; and indeed to the remainder of the coast further south. (I point this out since it will not be readily obvious when I return home to turn my hand written scribbles into typed words.)

This has become my ‘home away from home’ which was fortunate since the familiarity of my own home had been driving me nuts. Its a strange combination of nature and industrial influence. The river literally sparkles in the sunlight everywhere but under the bridge itself and where trees close to the bank replace sun with shadow.

A lone Willie Wagtail performs acrobatic wonders before me, darting in and out of a deciduous tree. And now he or she is joined by a mate who seems to mirror the moves of the first, almost in some sort of ‘visual’ equivalent to a jazz trumpet call and response routine. The perfect accompaniment to Nina Simone’s “I Put A Spell On You” (the song currently playing on my iPod shuffle.)

It seems strange to feel so peaceful this close to a busy highway. For a time I had thought it might’ve been reassuring to know that civilisation wasn’t too far away. Today, however, I have reached a very different conclusion. What I really derive peace from is knowing that the Rat Race is over there and that I am no longer a part of it.

While the more responsible people of the world have been rushing to meet deadlines and bill payments, I have been basking in the sun. (I have long neglected my body’s Vitamin D requirements!) I have polished off the first five chapters of John A. Keel’s quest for Oriental magic, Jadoo. And I’ve been impressed by inspired performances from the likes of Jamie Cullum, Rickie Lee Jones, Carole King, Chet Baker and Miles Davis.

For me, personally, the question is no longer ‘When will I return to the workforce?’ but rather, ‘Do I really want to?’

The concept of the Rat Race is not a new one. While I did find myself waking up routinely at 5am, and sometimes working on unfinished projects until the early morning, it wasn’t the time demands that bothered me the most about my previous job. Rather, it was the mental demands. The truth was (whether intended or not) my workplace yielded an unprecedented assault on my psyche. Every moment of everyday my thoughts were purely work-centric. Even my dreams became a subconscious ‘playground’ for business ideas and concepts. I had, it seemed, surrendered all mental autonomy.

The constraints of no obvious source of income are fairly self-evident. I have been attempting to flesh out a business idea of my own, though have been frustrated by the obstacles I encounter. I can’t find a publisher who will produce what I envisage. I am presented with alternatives though I remain unconvinced that sufficient demand exists these alternatives. My dual desires to create a high quality product and keep overheads low are, predictability, at odds with each other.

Many of my friends seem to exist in a slightly different reality to myself. Most of them are students. (Indeed for most of them the most pressing need they have currently is finding a way to afford the new iPhone when it comes out.) Steve (QiRanger) suggested I get out and see the world. The idea didn’t instantly resonate with me. So I asked myself a slightly different question. Indeed a question I’ve asked myself many times before.

WHAT WOULD KEEL DO?

That’s essentially why I’m here, pouring over his first book; looking for inspiration, ideas and reassurance. I find it comforting to know my idol has been broke, lonely, and – incredibly enough – even terrified of the spectre of a blank page.

My typewriter collected dust in my hotel room. A few times I shoved a piece of paper into it, but a blank sheet of paper is a frightening, disheartening thing to a would-be writer. I always slapped the cover shut with the paper still blank.

- John A. Keel, Jadoo (“Broke In Baghdad”, pgs 77-78)

Four pelicans just flew over my head in a sort of V-shaped formation.

I guess I best get back to this book…