The Elder Sign

[TransconaSlim]

Yeah, renaming a vessel is unlucky. Worse than having females aboard

Say, that's pretty wild about Sea Shep having a sub. I remember the Neah Bay tribes renewing whaling way back when. Was it both the Quilleyute and the Makah? I forget now. I did hear from someone no one had any idea any more how to cook whale, and were asking friends to track down some Japanese cook books for them.

Hey, that also reminds me of a conversation I had with a Sea Shep veteran once. It was all Zadok Allen-like, but what I remember was he and perhaps some others in or around the group were thinking about targeting Chukchi mink farms in Siberia, blowing them up or something, maybe sneaking in in the night and letting all the mink loose. Some Soviet bureacrat had the great idea of rerouting Siberian native whale hunts to mink farming, but to feed the mink they used whale meat, presumably now caught by Soviet trawler. In Greenland the natives pretty much hate Greenpeace. They're barred from trading seal fur with the EU now, and Greenpeace sends up vessels on various harrassment missions, the latest I know of being to screw around the Cairn Oil oil drilling platform near Disko Bay. I think they even arrested a few of them and held them overnight the last time, and the next morning they all scidaddled away never to return. I got the impression they blame Greenpeace for the seal fur ban in the EU, but I might be wrong about that. That's pretty much Greenland's mainstay, so now they're branching out into oil exploration contracts, rare-earth mineral ventures and so on. I guess there's a law against uranium mining, but to get some of the rare earths (or was it gold?) they have to kick up some uranium dust from the ore. So Greenpeace has certainly provided themselves with fund-raising opportunities into the far future by screwing up Greenland native seal hunting, or so it appears.

I know that when te Neah Bay tribes renewed whaling put allot of activists in a bind; on the one hand, ecologists want to stop whaling all together.  On the other hand, we want to respect aboriginal sovernty and first nations rights to self-determination.  There is a really funny video on youtube of American Indian Movement activst Ward Churchill and Sea Shep founder Paul Watson getting into a massive argument at a conference (you want to see two of the biggest egos in North American activism, there it is). 

Maybe there is another CoC RPG story nugget: a group of greenpeace activists are beset by the followers of the West Greenland coast's cult of degenerate Eskimos. 

[old book]

Or the degenerate Eskimos living high up on the iceshelf in Western Greenland commandeer a Greenpeace vessel, dispose of the activists and begin raiding settlements under the Greenpeace banner?

Yeah, I can see the ideological bind at work there for the ecologist activists. I can also see natives pretty much saying screw that noise. I'm not sure how it fits in, but I know the Nazis in Germany had a strong sense of fighting for their cultural survival as an endangered group, and also a lot of respect and mysticism regarding "pure" aboriginal peoples, such as Nubians. I also remember seeing some pretty misguided and harmful actions perpetrated in the name of environmentalism, such as the weekend warriors in the Florida everglades going out in their 4x4s with chainsaws to cut down "invasive exotic" trees, namely the Australian she-oak (I think it's called, it looks like a pine but isn't, and has hard wood).

I guess when the Ice Age hits again fur won't be dead anymore and we can all get back to more important things, like flint-knapping and making fire using a wooden drill and tinder. The Makah as I understood it were pretty much just exercising their traditional right so people couldn't say in the future their right had expired, plus they wanted to initiate some of the younger people into the old hunting techniques. Isn't it true that right there off the coast of Washington state is home to the world's only sedentary whale pods? I read somewhere they only started migrating due to ice age displacements (which ice age I do not know) of their stomping grounds, but that the coast off the Olympic Peninsula was left pretty much unchanged or something.

One more thing: I thought the term "killer whale" was really a misnomer, they don't attack other whales and are really just a kind of glorified porpoise with blakc and white markings. Why did the Sea Shepherd people think painting their sub like an orca would scare other whales off? Anyway, I'm sort of glad they never attacked the Soviet Union, that could've easily escalated to something nasty, tit-for-tat attacks against America's Sea World amusement park, or even worse.

[LambethWarp]

Bumping an old thread here, but I reckon you could do a lot worse for an Elder Sign than the glyph or logo used by (pioneering German industrial/un-rock/performance art band) Einstürzende Neubauten:



To me it just has that quality of namelessness written all over it. I read somewhere that one of the band originally saw it carved on an ancient monolith at some Zapotec site in Mexico, something like that - whether that's true or one of them just made it up, I don't know. It's pretty cool though, I think. It's not uncommon as a tattoo design among people who haven't even necessarily heard of that band, which is also cool inasmuch as it's acquired a sort of memetic life of its own...

[old book]

Cf. Joh Dee's monas figure from his Monas Hieroglyphica

:

[LambethWarp]

Ah, of course! John Dee is one of those touchstone characters for fans of general weirdness, isn't he? Along with Roger Bacon, Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Nikola Tesla, Grigori Rasputin, William Burroughs, Hassan-i-Sabbah...

[old book]

Ah, of course! John Dee is one of those touchstone characters for fans of general weirdness, isn't he? Along with Roger Bacon, Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Nikola Tesla, Grigori Rasputin, William Burroughs, Hassan-i-Sabbah...

You forgot um Robert Anton Wilson and Nicholas Roersch (spelling?) and St. Germaine and some others

I'm not sure, LW, I only started reading and reading about Dee about 3 days ago, after downloading the free 350+ page PDF book at the website I mentioned in the Newport Tower thread in the General category. His career surely did take a weird course, going from prison under Mary to Elizabeth's most trusted agent (007, actually), then engineering the British empire conceptually and practically, then fleeing with his family under cover of darkness down the Thames to go live in Europe and counsel the alchemically-minded Rudolph II in Prague, Poland's King Stefan and assorted other royals.

The above-mentioned book pretty much makes the case Dee named Rhode Island after the first step in his project toward world domination. Rhode is a secret name. I haven't read far enough, or maybe the author never gets around to saying fully what it's supposed to mean, but I think it's a pun, both Rood (the holy Cross) and Road, the old name for sea-routes.

The above-mentioned book also makes a very good case that Dee's monas symbol, seen above, is actually an architectural symbol underlying the scheme of the Newport Tower in Rhode Island. Therefore the Einsturzende Neubeuten (Building Anew Destroyed Buildings? my German is rusty) likely used Dee's symbol rather than a Zuni or Zapotec or Hopi glyph, although the latter is surely possible as well.

The flag of Rhode Island, a stylized anchor with the line tangled about it and the word HOPE emblazoned underneath, is easily resolved from the monas symbol, and Dee used the old "anchor cross" in a woodcut drawing on the first page of the handbook he presented Elizabeth I for British domination through sea-power called The Limits of the British Empire (before there was a British empire). The anchor is an old early underground Christian symbol found in the Roman catacombs. The tangled rope is problematic, because it is a hazard to sailors and vessels, but likely incorporates both the base of the monas symbol, meant to symbolize Aries, and to hint at the caducaeus, the sceptre of power the child Mercury stole from Jupiter or Apollo or whomever it was, and used to mean health, and of course the analoguous symbol of the snake raised on the copper rod Moses raised and which was later reportedly destroyed to fight iconoclasm by a Jewish religious reformer. HOPE has that sort of general Christian religious feel to it, but Dee likely had a secret meaning in mind, perhaps an angelic word imparted to him, or a vision he experienced. Benedict Arnold (the great-great grandfather of the traitor and the early governor of Rhode Island) put his initials on the state emblem, so B was on the left of the anchor, and A on the right. This is almost like Boas and Jachin, the names of the two pillars which stand in front of the Temple in Jerusalem and which are a significant element in the rituals of Masonry (and very prominent on the High Priestess card in the Waite deck). And we are dealing with a strange combination of Freemasonry, medieval sorcery and Native American civilization in early America and the Newport Tower, I guess. An interesting coincidence is that the Tower now stands in Touro Park. Newport has the oldest synagogue in North America (although a group in New-York dispute the claim), the Touro Synagogue, named after the benefactor Touro who arrived with a group of Jews fleeing Brazil when the Portuguese won the upper hand against the Dutch there and New-Amsterdam's Peter Stuyvesant refused to allow the refugees who had fought on the side of the Netherlands to settle in his Dutch colony, because they were Jews. Tower and Touro sort of seem cognate somehow. BA called it his Old Windmill. Lovecraft certainly knew about it. The idea it was built by the Vikings almost makes a better fit in my mind because of the superficial appearance, which is much like the seat of the Catholic Church in Greenland at Gardar, now called the Hvalsey Chuch, I believe. Of course the Vikings in Greenland weren't very keen on arches so far as we know, so maybe that is a very superficial speculation on my part.

Dee really gets the weird reputation for the Enochian business he did with Edward Kelly. They were supposedly talking with angels and powers using an elaborate system and an angelic language. This has inspired a number of occultists to emulate their Enochian calls, including Crowley and Jack Parsons, who used L. Ron Hubbard as his Kelly-scrier. Crowley's name Thelema almost seems to be his misreading of a term in Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica, but I'm not qualified to say for sure. Blavatsky had a completely different system, and Tesla was a strict materialist who believed his powerful imagination and visions were mechanical effects. Rasputin probably looked something like Dee in his dotage, at least, but comes from the Siberian shamanic strain as opposed to Dee's rationalistic Western sorcery. Hassan Sabba probably only resembles Dee in his use of mind control, although the techniques were completely different. Dee was more like Timothy Leary, if Leary had been a presidential advisor and instructed the president to, for example, colonize space in such and such way, and the president had listened. Burroughs is probably like an anti-Dee if he can be compared at all.

I hope this hasn't been boring, I just wanted to share it all because I find it fascinating. You probably also noticed Elizabeth II appeared with the actor playing 007 at the opening of the Olympics. Dee's Rode or "Herode" is still there, under the surface, to be realized at a future time, I'm sure.

[Genus Unknown]

Ah, of course! John Dee is one of those touchstone characters for fans of general weirdness, isn't he? Along with Roger Bacon, Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Nikola Tesla, Grigori Rasputin, William Burroughs, Hassan-i-Sabbah...

You forgot um Robert Anton Wilson and Nicholas Roersch (spelling?) and St. Germaine and some others

I don't know anything about John Dee, so I can't contribute anything to that discussion, but the fact that BOTH of you left Charles Fort off your lists makes me weep. Weep, I tell you!

[old book]

Stop crying, Genus! If you look carefully above at

http://hppodcraft.com/forums/index.php?topic=1079.msg13685#msg13685

you'll see I begin with Cf., meaning Charles Fort, of course. I figured the initials were enough.

[Bob Lovecraft]

you'll see I begin with Cf., meaning Charles Fort, of course. I figured the initials were enough.

I sense deception here...

Bob

[LambethWarp]

Great post, old book! The name of the band means 'collapsing new buildings' and comes from a newspaper headline from the late '70s - buildings in Berlin put up since the war were simply called 'new buildings' and one of them, a tower block I think, was so shoddily constructed it just spontaneously fell down within a couple of decades. The band are (or at least were) all about destruction; at one of their very early gigs at the ICA in London they made a spirited attempt at actually destroying the venue using power tools. They're pretty much a health-and-safety officer's worst nightmare (along with Rammstein).

Ah, of course! John Dee is one of those touchstone characters for fans of general weirdness, isn't he? Along with Roger Bacon, Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Nikola Tesla, Grigori Rasputin, William Burroughs, Hassan-i-Sabbah...

You forgot um Robert Anton Wilson and Nicholas Roersch (spelling?) and St. Germaine and some others

I don't know anything about John Dee, so I can't contribute anything to that discussion, but the fact that BOTH of you left Charles Fort off your lists makes me weep. Weep, I tell you!

Oh yeah, Wilson! Top nutter. I looked up some of Roerisch's paintings for the first time the other day - very beautiful and haunting and I can really see how they'd have resonated with Lovecraft. Is Fort really a good one for this list? I thought he was too skeptical, all about finding rational explanations for 'weird' phenomena? Or was he more about just documenting them in a non-judgemental way?

If I may pimp some of my own work here, Dee and Kelly feature (incidentally) in one of my stories - http://dointhelambethwarp.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/the-house/

Some two months after the start of the restoration project, the conservator started to have experiences around the old house which he could not rationally account for, and which seemed to increase in frequency as he read more of Demontfort’s manuscripts. He’d start translating a page of cryptic French while the sun was shining brightly in through ancient diamond windowpanes and pause after what seemed only ten minutes to discover that it had become totally dark and that he was straining to read by the dull yellowish glare of street lights. On other occasions he would doze off at the desk he’d set up in the old study and suddenly awake in another room, standing bolt upright, with no idea of how he had come to be there. Once he fell into a reverie while typing up notes on his laptop and suddenly came to, finding that he’d typed half a page of nonsense. Chiding himself for working while clearly far too fatigued to pay proper attention, he was about to delete the meaningless text when he realised with a sudden jolt that the non-words he’d typed in his delirium bore an uncanny resemblance to the text he’d transliterated from the Enochian characters in the manuscripts. A quick reference to his notes from a couple of weeks earlier confirmed it; not only was the general sound of the nameless language the same as the text he’d typed, but many of the same ‘words’ could be identified.

It's not very long - comments welcome from anyone who'd care to read it.

[LambethWarp]

Also, Telsa may have been a materialist but I was given to understand that, at least later in life, he attributed his flashes of inspiration to data being beamed into his head by aliens using some sort of advanced microwave technology...but I was thinking more in terms of how he has been interpreted by others (specifically, he's often said to be the inspiration for HPL's 'Nyarlathotep' story).

And he spend much of his life trying to build a death-ray. Aww yeah.

[Genus Unknown]

Is Fort really a good one for this list? I thought he was too skeptical, all about finding rational explanations for 'weird' phenomena? Or was he more about just documenting them in a non-judgemental way?

The second one. I think Fort would be deeply offended if anyone ever accused him of trying to "explain" anything, rationally or otherwise. 

[LambethWarp]

Sure, I was maybe thinking of him as a sort of 19th century Carl Sagan but of course that's not right. Are his original writings worth checking out?

[Genus Unknown]

Oh yeah. Check out The Book of the Damned. It's... an interesting read. I've been into Fort for years now, and I still don't know whether he was crazy or, like, right.

[old book]

Fort's not completely against coming to conclusions, though. He sort of tries them on for size. Some of it almost seems like he's joking around at times, coming up with insane theories which fit the facts as he expounds them better than prevailing rationalistic theories and thinking. He seems to have an axe to grind with rationality as such. His chief joy seems to be in proving to his own satisfaction that science is wrong and just doesn't know, and things are much weirder than anyone ever thought. At one point he claims, jokes or postulates that humans are the property, chattle or playthings of beings from other worlds.

Cf. John Keel, who seems to emulate his tone and stance in Mothman Prophecies, but he becomes almost bogged down in trying to stand his agnostic ground while making brief forays into theorizing.

All of Fort's books (as far as I know them) are available for free on the internet, mainly as plain texts. The Book of the Damned is a fine place to start.

(Incidentally, Carl Sagan didn't wake up on the right side of debunk to begin with, either, he graduated to it, after briefing Pentagon officials and similar riff-raff on aliens, flying saucers and UFOs.)

I don't remember Tesla receiving the alien microwave internet signals, but it's possible, he had a very eccentric reputation near the end of his life. I think he lived in the Waldorf-Astoria as an old geezer. Early on he claimed, I seem to remember, receiving radio signals from Mars. This was at a time when there weren't really any earth-bound broadcasters. No one ever figured out what intelligent-seeming signals he had tuned in, iirc.

Thank you for the proper translation from the German and the link to the short story, which I intend to read, Lambeth Warp. Just scanning over the excerpt of The House here, the words "dull" and "glare" struck me as antonyms, although I've never thought about it before. "glow" might be a better fit?

Roerisch, yes, yet another globetrotting double-agent occultist. Some of his paintings are very nice. Cf. Aleister Crowley, Helena Blavatsky, and perhaps Dee as well. Nick's paintings are better than Al's drawings, and Al's short stories aren't all that short and aren't as good as Helen's, cf. Ensouled Violin, Butterfly Net, etc., etcf.