The Temple of Set II

by Michael A Aquino

  reviewed were stress management, biofeedback, accelerated learning, psychokinesis (PK), extra-sensory perception

  (ESP) and dear old “remote viewing”.

  On December 8, 1987 the NRC report, entitled Enhancing Human Performance, was released. It concluded that

  most of the unconventional techniques were “scientifically unsupportable”, but that sleep-learning, guided

  imagery, and “super learning” programs were viable.

  Obviously this didn’t even slow “Project Star Gate”, which rolled merrily along taking the taxpayers on its $20

  million “remote viewing” amusement park ride. For a final nail in the coffin of “remote viewing” we turn again to the

  B&T series of experiments:

  Tests on human sensitivity to low levels of EM radiation: Five subjects were seated in a room

  with either a loop antenna or a horn antenna placed 50 cm from them. The source was in an adjoining room

  to avoid visual or auditory cueing, conscious or unconscious. The sources used were a tunable RF source in

  the 220-950 MHz range with a power output of 1 mW and a tunable MW source (both pulsed and CW) in

  the 6-17 GHz range with a power level of 5 mW. The switching on or off of the source was randomized by

  tossing a coin, the level of success according to chance thus being 0.5. The subject was then asked to sense

  the source being on or off. The results were not significantly different from chance.

  Telepathy/Distant Viewing: We only investigated integrated power levels, as enough power has to

  be radiated before a signal can achieve its desired effect, whatever modulation the signal may have. We

  investigated three subjects who claimed telepathic abilities and one who claimed distant-viewing

  capabilities [in which a subject is supposed to be able to describe accurately a remote site without being

  physically there]. No unusual EM signals were detected, nor were the subjects successful in telepathic

  transmissions.

  We have tried to detect EM signals emitted by people, and in particular the Fourier spectrum of such

  signals, to test the reality of ESP phenomena. All experiments failed to yield any unusual EM radiation. It is

  possible to conceive transmission of EM energy from one person to another, or of emission by one person in

  a manner undetectable by the apparatus we have used. This would have been so if very brief pulses of EM

  energy were used in such signalling with times less than the response time of the corresponding apparatus

  at the frequency used. There are no known mechanisms in the body able to produce such signals

  at the power levels required to produce the effects. We have also found that humans are

  insensitive to low levels of EM. A possible mechanism for such signalling is therefore clearly

  ruled out for telepathy and distant-viewing. The EM levels emitted to achieve metal-bending [in the

  microwave range to achieve the desired focusing] are joules, and there is no known mechanism in the body

  to achieve a peak power output of GW; it is difficult to suppose that this would be possible without severe

  tissue damage.

  Bottom line: By itself the human brain can neither send nor receive the stuff of which specific

  thoughts are made - save through the media of the physical senses. Therefore extra-sensory perception

  does not occur, nor do purely mental efforts to produce physical effects (psychokinesis/PK). “Successes” in these

  fields are either coincidental, the results of non-mental physical phenomena (magnetic fields, gravity, etc.), or

  deliberate deception by clever stage-magic trickery a la Uri Geller and Madame Zodiac.

  The principle of resonance as discussed above is not invalidated, however. Even though EM waves may not be

  detectable by human consciousness, they can still affect human brain-waves by inducing resonance at similar

  cyclical rates. So the possibility of subconscious, resonance-triggered changes to one’s general mental state ( alpha,

  beta, theta, or delta) remains.

  Psychological Operations specialists know that it is the conscious mind which must be reached for opinion or

  behavior modification, and that it is reached reliably and predictably through the normal communicative senses.

  Similarly the mind expresses itself through these same senses, and through media technology we have developed a

  multitude of ways to amplify and transmit such expressions. Communication between minds is no longer the

  problem; it is the content of that communication and the ethics underlying it which challenge us, particularly as

  old nation-state, ethnic, cultural, and social standards continue to mutate in this final decade of the 20th century.

  - 362 -

  Update 2010

  University of California, Irvine Press Release - August 13, 2008

  Scientists to study synthetic telepathy

  Researchers get grant to develop communication system based on thoughts, not speech

  A team of UC Irvine scientists has been awarded a $4 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Office to study

  the neuroscientific and signal-processing foundations of synthetic telepathy.

  The research could lead to a communication system that would benefit soldiers on the battlefield and paralysis

  and stroke patients, according to lead researcher Michael D’Zmura, chair of the UCI Department of Cognitive

  Sciences.

  “Thanks to this generous grant we can work with experts in automatic speech recognition and in brain imaging

  at other universities to research a brain-computer interface with applications in military, medical and commercial

  settings,” D’Zmura says.

  The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to

  let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would “think” a message to be transmitted

  and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence

  translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target.

  “Such a system would require extensive training for anyone using it to send and receive messages,” D’Zmura

  says. Initially, communication would be based on a limited set of words or phrases that are recognized by the

  system; it would involve more complex language and speech as the technology is developed further.”

  D’Zmura will collaborate with UCI cognitive science professors Ramesh Srinivasan, Gregory Hickok and

  Kourosh Saberi. Joining the team are researchers Richard Stern and Vijayakumar Bhagavatula from Carnegie

  Mellon University and David Poeppel from the University of Maryland.

  The grant comes from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative

  program, which supports research involving more than one science and engineering discipline. Its goal is to develop

  applications for military and commercial uses.

  - 363 -

  A60: Dark Deco

  - by Michael A. Aquino VI°, GM.Tr.

  Runes #II-4, July 1984

  Order of the Trapezoid

  [ This article was later reprinted in The Sophisticate , Journal of the Art Deco Society of California,

  Autumn 1984; and then in the Los Angeles magazine Antique & Collectibles , October 1984.]

  The current interest in Art Deco often tends to be explained as an offshoot of the general fascination with 20th-

  century nostalgia-art. The style’s characteristic features have been explained by Bevis Hiller (in The World of Art

  Deco) as influences from Egyptian and pre-Columbian architecture;
an emphasis on straight lines, tight curves, and

  sharp angles; and a fascination with speed and streamlining associated with the dawning machine age.

  What is not so clear is why this particular type of art should exercise the allure that it does. Art Deco is never

  regarded with ambivalence; people are either obsessed with it or repelled by it. Since the reasons for its powerful

  effect are obscure, Art Deco always has something of the mysterious about it. It suggests that there are geometric

  and curvilinear forces at work which humans cannot quite understand, but which somehow have been captured and

  frozen in a particular piece of sculpture, furniture, or architecture. As with gravity or magnetism, the viewer cannot

  see the thing itself; he must be content with a glimpse of its “trail” in the material world. Hence one’s interest in

  collecting Art Deco derives at least in part from a desire to assert mastery over the unknown. If it cannot be

  explained, then at least it can be controlled or possessed.

  It is perhaps not surprising that Art Deco came into being during the heyday of Expressionism, another

  “mysterious” art form. If the most shocking Expressionist statements came from Weimar Germany, the difference

  between them and the more subtle impact of Art Deco might be explained by the greater French and American

  cultural influence in the latter. Yet both shared a common theme: the reduction of objects, shapes, and features to

  an “expression” of their essence - what Plato referred to as a “Form” or “First Principle”. Expressionist art and Art

  Deco are thus æsthetically satisfying because they appear to lay bare the controlling forces beneath and behind

  superficial images; they show the thing as it “really is”, not as it appears to be after being laden with peripheral

  decorations.

  Art, goes the old cliché, is in the eyes of the beholder. One might amend this to suggest that a work of art has no

  significance in itself; its power lies rather in the emotions, sensations, and revelations it evokes in the consciousness

  of each observer. Thus art is a trigger, a stimulus to the soul. It affirms something not about itself or even its

  ostensible subject, but rather about the psyche of the artist - and the observer.

  Hence the Art Deco enthusiast, like the devotee of Expressionism, is by that interest making a statement about

  the nature of his or her soul. He or she is impatient with surface images, bored with frippery, and drawn by the

  weird and the outré. Art Deco portrays the human being as one secretly wishes to be: a kind of Metropolis robot[rix]

  with a dispassionate, cool, and cruel disposition. Art Deco is never warm, cozy, reassuring; it is glacial and

  impersonal. Those fearful of, dissatisfied with, or contemptuous of human emotions seek in Art Deco a mirror which

  will show them - and reinforce in them - only the non-human aspects of their souls.

  Consider by way of illustration two well-known works of cinema art: Edgar Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934) and

  Robert Fuest’s two Dr. Phibes films (1971 & 1972).

  Ulmer, who had won his director’s spurs as an assistant to the great Expressionist director F.W. Murnau

  ( Nosferatu and Faust), created a story of sexual obsession and Satanism in which only the two key antagonists -

  Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) and Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) - truly comprehend the nature both of one

  another and of the the conflict between them. The young hero and heroine - a conspicuously naive American couple

  - are able to sense only that Poelzig is bad news and should be escaped from. Despite Werdegast’s efforts to help

  them, they mistrust him too - since he seems only slightly less menacing than Poelzig.

  Of particular interest is the emphatic and overwhelming Art Deco atmosphere of Poelzig’s home. Built atop the

  ruins of Fortress Marmoros, site of World War I slaughter and “the greatest graveyard in the world”, it exudes a

  sterile chill of modernity, accented by the Deco’s seeming mockery of the steel and concrete catacombs of the

  underlying fortress. Hidden within those ruins are the bodies of many beautiful women, suspended in Deco glass

  capsules by Poelzig; and deeper still lies his secret Satanic chapel. Therein eventually occurs one of the most graphic

  Black Masses ever portrayed on the screen [regrettably edited in most of the versions shown on television]. Again

  Art Deco dominates the chamber, with an abstract double-cross surrounded by four stark, burnished-metal obelisks

  and an altar-sculpture consisting of a starburst of metal triangles. Upon the chapel’s floor is a giant five-pointed

  star, whose shocking contrasts of black and white inspire the same terror in the viewer as do the Expressionist shafts

  of light in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s famous prison-cell scene.

  The Art Deco element in The Black Cat, therefore, is a deliberate device to generate fear - to shatter any

  reassurance the audience might derive from familiar surroundings. Unlike the totally fantastic and distorted sets of

  Caligari and Der Golem, the world of The Black Cat lies within the realm of the believable because its Deco

  atmosphere could in fact exist. The film’s artistic strength derives substantially from its statement that Art Deco

  - 364 -

  inspires and enhances much the same sort of audience disorientation as did the earlier Expressionist sets. Karloff

  and Lugosi are the icing on a cake that is already very sinister indeed.

  In The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Dr. Phibes Rises Again Robert Fuest surrounded his outrageously artistic

  villain (Vincent Price) with a phantasmagoria of Art Deco interiors and artifacts, to include a dance-band of full-size

  clockwork robots.* Phibes’ succession of gruesome murders is accompanied by period music as well - “Charmaine”,

  “Darktown Strutters Ball”, “Over the Rainbow” - and the mad doctor makes his dramatic entrances and exits on an

  elevating concert organ (with Deco pipes of illuminated crimson glass) to the tune of Mendelssohn’s “War March of

  the Priests”.

  In the Phibes films, as in The Black Cat, one is stunned by how singularly supportive the Art Deco is to the

  desired climate of horror and the supernatural. Price is inevitably a more tongue-in-cheek rogue than Karloff or

  Lugosi, but the Deco is just as effective in Phibes’ London mansion and Egyptian tomb-lair as it is at Marmoros.

  Poelzig’s necrophilia is echoed by Phibes, who safeguards the body of his dead wife against a time when she may be

  revived. Until then Victoria Phibes enjoys a succession of Deco sarcophagi, including a mirrored vault beneath a

  sundial, a neon-lit juke box, and an Art Nouveau canopy of glass shaped like a Rolls-Royce radiator and topped with

  two RR flying-lady ornaments.

  All this is hardly to suggest that Art Deco enthusiasts are frustrated murderers, sadists, or necrophiliacs. The

  style has its uplifting aspects as well. But perhaps out brief venture into the darker side of Deco has provided food

  for thought concerning lesser-known elements of its unique - and elusive - psychology.

  ___________________________________________

  Part II: Dark Deco II: House on Haunted Hill

  First published: Runes #III-6

  October XX/1985

  Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of

  the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the loathsome

  shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. Instead of describing any definite structure or building, he

&n
bsp; dwells only on the broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong to

  anything right or proper for this Earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs ... Twisted

  menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance

  showed concavity after the first showed convexity.

  - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

  Searchers after Dark Deco need not travel to R’lyeh (actually located on the Micronesian isle of Ponape and

  referred to as Nan Madol on conventional maps) to sample the Cyclopean architecture of the Great Old Ones. As you

  drive through the fashionable Los Feliz area of Hollywood, a glance up towards Griffith Park reveals - perched

  starkly on an isolated crag - what appears to be an ancient Mayan temple. A second glance belies this; its shape is

  too irregular and its atmosphere too sybaritic for any ordinary religious shrine. Although its dramatic presence

  dominates the hills and surrounding valley, few of the local residents can - or will - say much about it. One must

  prowl the pleasantly sordid little bookstores along Hollywood Boulevard in order to locate a faded Necronomicon

  setting forth the history of the structure; even then one receives suspicious looks from the furtive booksellers, clearly

  implying that no respectable antiquarian would presume to concern himself with such outre matters.

  The edifice at 2655 Glendower Avenue, one learns, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1924 as a residence

  for Mr. & Mrs. Charles Ennis.

  “Wright had been putting the finishing touches on it,” commented Anton LaVey in X/1975, “when his houseboy

  went berserk at Taliesen and killed seven people. It was said the house was cursed. He built it for a shoe magnate,

  and the man lost everything in the Depression. The next owner’s wife jumped off the parapet.”

  After 44 years and 6 owners, the house was acquired by a Mr. G. Oliver Brown. In 1980 he donated it to the

  Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage, which has undertaken its preservation and restoration. Since the

  publication of “Dark Deco” in its Sophisticate, the Art Deco Society of California has been after me for more of the

  same. This seemed as good a reason as any for an archaeological expedition to HHH this past September.