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A show about Weird Stuff, hosted by AP Strange. AP interviews cool weirdos about their work, and invites friends on to discuss second sequels in franchises in a series called "Third Time's the Charm". Other fun surprises await...
Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.
beatnik:But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.
AP Strange:Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Enjoying the the the program today, everyone? Yeah. That's good. A lot of fascinating people here.
AP Strange:If you're not familiar with me, my name is AP Strange, sort of. It's the name I have adopted for myself. I've been kind of a paranormal weirdo for my entire life, but more publicly under that name for better part of the last decade. So at this point, I'm doing my own podcast and stuff because everybody in the world has to have a podcast now. I figured I'd rather jump in with that.
AP Strange:So but I've been writing about this stuff and the Loch Ness Monster was one of the earliest things I ever wrote about online. So I used to just mess around on Twitter and share little factoids and tidbits. And when it came to actually writing stuff and setting up a website, I'm like, Nessie is the first place I'm going. And there's a whole lot of weirdness around the Loch Ness Monster that a lot of people don't necessarily talk about. And that's the kind of thing or they do talk about it, but they talk about it in what I think is the wrong way.
AP Strange:So that's kind of where we're coming from today is the misunderstood magic of the monster of Ness. Because I'm a I'm a well rounded weirdo. Yeah. I drew this. This is a little charcoal drawing I made.
AP Strange:What you see here is a magic square. This is something used in occultism for various ritual purposes. But the the thing is that I I like ghosts. A lot of this stuff's been about ghosts. I grew up with ghosts.
AP Strange:I hung out with them. Had lots of paranormal poltergeist activity. But I've also always been into, like, magic. But I've also always been into art and music and religion. I've delved into all kinds of religious stuff.
AP Strange:UFOs, monsters, everything, you name it. So I tend to, like, kinda roll it all into, like, one big puzzle. And so that's kinda what we're gonna do today. We're gonna pick it apart a little bit because everybody already knows what the Loch Ness Monster is. Right?
AP Strange:So we already know Nessie. Everybody knows Nessie. So, you know, we we all know the long neck, the humps on the water, and everything. It's in popular culture. You say Nessie to a South Park fan, and they're gonna say three fifty.
AP Strange:So they got that. For me, personally, it was like The Weekly World News on the newsstand when I was a kid. You'd always have, like, a headline about Nessie. If if she didn't get the cover, she was in there somewhere. Some wacky story about Nessie.
AP Strange:So, you you know, and then nowadays in our social media world, what we have is memes. So you have memes and cartoons, and Nessie will often appear in these. One I think of off the top of my head is, like, the Goth Nessie, and it's like a Goth Nessie. Or the Glock Ness monster, and it's Nessie with a gun. You know?
AP Strange:It's like little funny things like that. So people don't take Nessie seriously, which is alright. But but it's a it's that, to me, makes it more worth analysis. It's something that's incredibly wacky and way out there, means I wanna look at it more. So this serpentine form, the idea of the long neck coming out of the water, mostly comes from 1934, the Daily Mail.
AP Strange:This is the infamous surgeon's photo. So it's a small neck poking out of the waves, and you see it on the long neck there. The hidden body is usually thought to be that of, like, a plesiosaur. People will just imagine that below here, bigger body, four flippers, and a tail. Although with, like, a lot of the tourist type graphics and and trinkets and souvenirs, it's more like a snake that has little hoops of body going through.
AP Strange:So very recently, there was, like, a scientific article out that was like, that's anatomically impossible. Nothing could move that way through the water, and but that's not what anybody's ever reported. That's just the graphics they use for tourism. Right? So yeah.
AP Strange:But so, like, everybody knows what Nessie is. This is largely considered to be a hoax. The idea is that somebody put a a fake head on top of a toy submarine and put it out in the water and took the picture. There was a deathbed confession and all this other stuff. So, you know, be that as it may, the myth and the idea of Nessie is out there in the public consciousness.
AP Strange:So everybody knows what Nessie is even if they think that it in fact isn't. So we we're at a disadvantage as an investigator. If you're an honest investigator of paranormal claims, you're at a disadvantage right from the get go because regardless of what you believe it is, you're gonna have people assuming that you're saying there's a dinosaur living in Loch Ness or there's a breeding population of dinosaurs in Loch Ness. And this is one of those things that gets in my craw and I will never get it out is there's one guy on Twitter that used to comment every time I posted about Nessie. He's like, so you're telling me that there's an 800 year old dinosaur living in that lock, and it's just like, nope.
AP Strange:I didn't tell you that. I merely short shared an article from coast to coast AM about an essence sighting. I don't know what to tell you. Like so that's what you're up against. Like, if you're talking about ghosts, the prevailing belief is that somebody died there, probably traumatically, and their spirit is left behind.
AP Strange:So you can't say ghost without somebody thinking it's a dead person. Right? If you're talking about UFOs, what do we all think? Right? ET, the extraterrestrial.
AP Strange:You have something coming down in a spaceship from another world landing, and no other ideas are explored generally. I'm speaking very broadly in the popular culture. So you have to contend with that. If you have a more nuanced belief about any of these subjects, you the first hump that you have to get over, no pun intended, although I do love a good pun. The first hump you have to get over is I'm not talking about a living dinosaur.
AP Strange:You know? I'm not talking about it could be a lot of things. Right? I just love Nessie. So, you know, you almost wanna be like, leave me alone, but you also wanna be like, hear me out.
AP Strange:Right? So given that the old girl has a lot of cartoonish representations about her and tabloid type things and appearances of pop cultures, jokes, memes, so forth, It's no wonder that people kind of brush it off. Right? That photo was a hoax. Nessie isn't real.
AP Strange:Nessie's a joke. All this all this good stuff. Now there are cryptozoologists still that believe there's a flesh and blood being in that lake, and they don't know what it is. Right? They just wanna go find it.
AP Strange:So and more power to them because I I really do think that there's there's room in this wide wide field of the paranormal and the weird for all different kinds of viewpoints, and they're all adequately worthy of respect, I think. They can all be explored unless you're just kinda shooting down the other guy and assuming what they think. So so they're there with their cameras in hand and they're waiting for that moment of scientific edification. And if you wanna be more on the academic bent talking about the Loch Ness monster and be taken seriously, I'm not worried about that personally. I have a deep fear of being taken seriously.
AP Strange:But you can always go to the fluke Floric route. You can talk about mythology. You can talk about water horses and kelpies. Things from Scottish mythology within The UK. It's emblematic, Saint George defeating the dragon.
AP Strange:In other cultures, you have dragons. You have in Asia, you got the Naga. You got, like, all kinds of representations of something dragon like, worm like, serpentine. And and you can study that as a folklorist or an anthropologist, and you you can it's noncommittal. You don't have to be like, real.
AP Strange:You can say Nessie's real as a story that we all share, and it's great, which is true. But there's no reason two things can't be true. So so I'm gonna start this because I'm not going back to the thirties and starting there. I'm starting with the seventies because the seventies is by far the weirdest time and the funnest time for me. We're gonna talk about FW Ted Holiday.
AP Strange:He liked Ted. So Ted was like a naturalist. He wrote for fishing and hunting magazines and that kind of thing. He had a long story long life story with lots of paranormal type stuff. But he had an interest in the Loch Ness Monster.
AP Strange:And he his first book about it was called the great Orm of Loch Ness. Orm being like a variation linguistic variation of worm. Because when they used to call dragons worms, it comes from the Germanic. I'm not gonna go through the whole etymology, but I am going to insist that I know it off the top of my head. You just have to trust me.
AP Strange:The and in the great ornament Vlognose, he does allude to dragons. Dragons. He wants to talk about how throughout history people have seen dragons. We know what dragons are, just like we know what Nessie is. It's in all of our heraldry, tapestries, paintings.
AP Strange:But he want his idea was the Loch Ness monster may be some form of Telemonstrum gregarium, which is a large mollusk, basically. It's a slug. It's a giant slug. The only ones we have in the fossil record are not giant. They're very tiny.
AP Strange:And we have that we only have the imprint that they left in the sediment, which formed around it. So, being that they have no bones, they're invertebrates, they're Veriform invertebrates. If you had a giant one in the lock and it died, that would probably break apart. It would never leave a fossil record and we wouldn't see them wash up on the shore. So it's pretty good as a biological theory goes.
AP Strange:But but he got kind of fascinated with this idea of the myth. So his second book comes around, and that's called The Dragon and the Disc. The Dragon and the Disc talks about the more super supernatural elements around the Loch Dess monster, but also UFOs. And he tries to point to a lot of things in ancient cultures that are circular, saying it's a it represents flying saucers and anything with dragons kind of represents monsters not unlike Nessie, which may or may not have a material reality. Because at this point now, he's looking at Irish lake monsters.
AP Strange:These Irish lakes are not like locknets. Locknets can be up to 750 feet deep. It's a deep lock. And in Ireland, they don't have that. So how could you have a giant monster in a shallow lake?
AP Strange:Where would it hide? You know? So he's going through all these folkloric things and he starts to explore these more metaphysical explanations for Nessie, which brings him even further out and further off the reservation as it were. So he talks about ley lines. He talks about all kinds of other things.
AP Strange:And he he kinda develops this unified theory of the paranormal, which he refers to as the Goblin Universe. And this is from the cover of the Goblin Universe, which is one of the coolest coolest pictures of Nessie I've ever seen. I love that one. His whole idea there is that there's kind of like another reality that's kinda tangential to ours, sometimes overlaps with ours, and things can kinda come through from the Goblin universe. As books go, it's not the best.
AP Strange:It has its problems, and part of the reason for that is because he never finished writing it, And he didn't intend to release it. He had his own weird encounters like I had said with UFOs and with the exorcism of blackness, which we're gonna get into. And with ghosts, all kinds of things, and with the men in black. Yeah. The he had a Men in Black experience where the guy was standing by a tree and he walked by and he thought that the guy was really weird looking.
AP Strange:He was wearing like what looked like plastic black clothes and like goggles and a helmet. And then when he walked by and then he turned around and he's like, I'm gonna pretend to fall down and land on the guy so I can make sure he's really there. But when he turned around, the guy was gone and there was nowhere else to go. So it's like one of those spooky things. And then a couple years later, he had a heart attack in that very same spot and fell down.
AP Strange:That's what you're So so so he was scared of a lot of this stuff. And this is all kind of around the same time John Keel's releasing the Mothman prophecy widely. You know? Like, this is this is all this is all in in the air as it were. So right when he was kind of finishing up the book, there's a very famous photo that got taken and released.
AP Strange:This one right here. So this was an underwater photo. They put underwater cameras, and they tried to get a picture of Nessie down in their natural habitat at the bottom of the lock, and they got this. This isn't the best copy of the photo. I tried to enhance it a little bit, but this is in a lot of those old Fortean books.
AP Strange:And you got, like, the diamond shape right here, the fin there. It was so convincing to naturalist, sir Peter Scott, that he gave Nessie a Latin name based on this photo, Nesseteris rhombopteryx, which means the the nest dweller with the diamond shaped fin. This caused Holliday to look at the photo and sir Peter Scott's analysis and say, well, I'm kind of a dummy for thinking this was all metaphysical because clearly, it can be caught on film and it's a real animal now, so I'm out. And he didn't wanna publish Goblin Universe. He eventually passed away.
AP Strange:The writer, Colin Wilson, had had already read drafts of it and pushed his widow to help, you know, to publish it and they eventually did publish it. So this book is actually fairly rare. It's part of the Sci Tech series from Llewellyn Books, which was a very short run that they did that. And I think it's back in print now because as of a few years ago, I had I had to pay a $123 for this book because it's that rare. And I had to do some magic of my own to conjure the funds for that.
AP Strange:Now you can find it a little cheaper. I don't know if somebody else is reprinting it. I don't know what's going on with that. But but yeah, so that become that becomes a problem for Holiday. And the book itself is, like, 42 pages of Colin Wilson talking about the book and then about an equal amount of Holiday's writings.
AP Strange:So so, you know, you have this whole arc with Holiday's career. You you start off very material with a very rational plausible explanation, and then you kinda go out into the mythological and you get get into those deep waters of get bordering on the edge of reality, and then you go way out there with the goblin universe. You know, you're like the matrix here, you know. And and then back again. It comes full circle at the end of it.
AP Strange:So we can assume that maybe after Holiday died, he got the answers he was looking for. But we're all still here, you know, left to wonder about it. So with Ted's journey in mind, I wanted to bring this up. Just heard a conspiracy theory that the Loch Ness monster is actually the ghost of an ancient dinosaur. And since it affects nothing and nobody, I've decided to believe it as a treat for me.
AP Strange:So writer Kevin Vibert here Vibert Vibert. I'm not really sure how it's pronounced. He put this out, and, I mean, it's obviously a joke. I think it's pretty funny. I I don't think that's a conspiracy theory.
AP Strange:I have minor quibbles about that that wording. But I don't know what the conspiracy is. But the idea that Nessie is a ghost or at least not material isn't a new idea, really. But this guy just heard it, and he wants to believe it because it's fun to believe. And so it's meant as a joke.
AP Strange:Right? But sometimes jokes have this way of circumventing logic and arriving at something profound. So that's why my own personal practice of hilarious magic is so efficacious whether you believe it or not. And if you don't believe it, it's all the better for me. So let's see.
AP Strange:So the first time that you get this idea of Nessie being a spirit of some kind, you'll see this in every newspaper report about Nessie. Saint Columba in May, he was a was a monk and later sainted for going into Scotland and and as a missionary. Right? So there's a legend about Saint Columba that there was a monster terrorizing people in Loch Ness. And there was a river nest kind of where it needs meets the Loch.
AP Strange:And he got one of his monks to swim out into the water as bait. I don't know if the guy knew he was gonna be human bait, but he went out there. And the beast comes out and he sees Saint Colombo raising the cross. And he's saying something along the lines of, like, by the power of God, get back, peace. You know?
AP Strange:And then it just goes off into the water. So so we already had this is our original exorcism of the lock. And oddly enough, the one thousand four hundred and fortieth anniversary of this event was yesterday. So if that's not magical, I don't know what to tell you. I didn't plan that.
AP Strange:I certainly didn't plan it. So but the these are the kind of wonders and synchronicities that happen when you're talking about monsters. So we wanna get back into etymology again. Monster is derived from the word monstrom, which is a it means a divine warning, an omen, misfortune, or portent. So Monstrum has a couple different meanings, obviously, but that's kind of its origin.
AP Strange:It's what is is with portents of evil. It's with warnings of misfortune that are going to happen. And so so the name Loch Ness monster. Most cryptids don't even have monster applied to it. We don't say like the Bigfoot monster.
AP Strange:We just say Bigfoot. You know? So like, with Nessie, it's the Loch Ness monster. It's right there in the name that it's something mystical and something weird. So it it keeping a sense of humor about this is important though because it it it helps protect you from some of this evil.
AP Strange:We'll get into that. There's a poetic race in this tweet that he might decide to believe it as a treat, and it's something that a lot of us could could benefit from. This is sort of like what Robert Anton Wilson calls gorilla ontology or reality tunnels is is adopting a worldview temporarily, but wholeheartedly. And that being free to abandon it later. That way, you're not pigeonholed and stuck in your beliefs.
AP Strange:So there's a direct through through line from holiday and all of this stuff to Britain's best known Satanist, Alastair Crowley. So the this is the legend here that Crowley bought a gigantic house on Loch Ness and did a bunch of magic and opened a portal to another world where the Loch Ness monster came through. Now this is a theory. This is something that gets repeated often. What I have here I I had to bring my notes.
AP Strange:He bought the house in in 1899, and this is so that's a good almost forty years before we're really in Nessie, Nessie fever on the lock. So what Holliday wrote was that Crowley came into contact with the ideas of doctor John d while at Belleskin, and according to him, the abra melon ritual. And then he says that the narrative suggests that at Belleskin house, Crowley summoned kings and dukes of hell, but abandoned the ritual recklessly, leaving the infernal spirits to roam. So this culminated in the misfortunes that eventually bankrupted the guy, Crowley, and caused him to sell the property. But we have belief rearing its head here because the way Holiday frames this, first of all, he's calling Nessie he's calling Crowley a satanist.
AP Strange:It's not really accurate. But Holiday himself was a Catholic. So if he's reading if he's reading about the conjuration of demons, it's like, well, obviously, it's a if you're calling up kings and dukes at hell, what else do we gonna call that? Right? So so, I mean, this whole story, it's like you can find whole YouTube videos about the abra melon ritual and Crowley just wandering off and leaving these demons to roam the Scottish countrysides.
AP Strange:Podcasts talk about this. There's TikTok videos, books, magazines. TV does versions of this, but I don't know that this is the first time this ever came up. I don't know if Holiday was the first to make this connection, but it's the earliest one that I know of. Right?
AP Strange:So he gets a lot of things wrong, right, in in this in this thing. And and part of the reason is because he relied on a biography called The Great Beast, The Life and Magic of Alastair Crowley written by John Simons. So John Simons actually knew Crowley in real life, wasn't as much of an occultist as Crowley was and didn't care for the man, obviously, because he didn't didn't wasn't too flattering in his biography of it. So much so that Crowley's former secretary, Israel Regardie, had to write his own book to correct the wrongs. And Regardie had his own falling out with Crowley.
AP Strange:There was really no love lost at that point. But he did feel that the book was inaccurate and unfair. So he wrote his own book called The Eye and the Triangle. In the process, he's applying applying his his ideas ideas of of Wilhelm Wilhelm Reich and psychoanalysis to discover the real Crowley. So he's kind of you see his beliefs as a lens on top of Crowley.
AP Strange:So in a lot of ways, Crowley and Nessie have a lot in common because they're both beasts, the great beast, Alistair Crowley, the beast of Loch Ness. And and and there's a lot of stories that are told and a lot of different narratives, and it all has to do with the perception of the viewer and their the the beliefs they brought to it. Their a priori assumptions that they bring in. So so let's see. So, you you know, Crowley was a fan of John D as were a lot of the people at the Golden Dawn, but they Elizabethan's bio master and alchemist didn't really have anything to do with the book of abramelon.
AP Strange:So and Albert Crowley didn't get the book of abramelon while while at a Bolleskin house. He already knew about it. He bought the house actually because it was a perfect place to do the aberramellon working. He needed a secluded place, and he needed an area that had a door that faced north for the ritual, and he needed room to do it. Right?
AP Strange:So he bought the house for twice its asking price, which there was no asking price because the place wasn't for sale. He just showed up and said, wanna buy it, and then just kept offering him more money until they gave in. He was only 23 at the time. He's a young guy, but he already had accomplishments as a poet and a mountaineer. Through his mountaineering is how he got involved with the Golden Dawn.
AP Strange:He met the other mountaineers he was with that kinda connected him. And and so then let's see. So he's young and impetuous and a seeker after truth, but and he made some friends and he made some enemies in the Golden Dawn. And he was more loyal to S. L.
AP Strange:MacGregor Mathers who was which one of the founders. And Mathers is the one that found the book of Abramelin or the sacred magic of Abramelin the mage in Paris, in Bibliotheque Del Arsenal. He transcribed it to English for the first time. So and then so so the idea kind of is that Crowley didn't do it right. There's also been the ideas that Mathers didn't do a very good translation.
AP Strange:Mathers actually did an excellent translation of the French transcript, which itself was a transcribed from an old German book, which had some errors in that translation. So Mathers did a good job, but he was working with a faulty translation already. So we're traced the history of the Abbeh Melon book back down to the fourteenth century, written by a rabbi named Abraham Abraham von Worms. There's been a more recent release from Ibis Press that has all the different versions that we have access to kind of put, you know, aggregated and put into, like, one working translation written in readable language for today's English. So it's actually really cool.
AP Strange:But that that was mostly compiled by this guy, George Den, who just passed away last year. He thinks that the real author of the book was rabbi Jacob Ben Moses Levi Mollin. But whatever the case, it the what it is is it's like a rabbi talking to his son. Right? And there was a rabbi that was working for the aristocratic powers that were at the time doing magical stuff, astro astrology and all kinds of magic, and made a living doing that.
AP Strange:Of course, this was not a great time to be Jewish in Europe, but this place in Germany was one of the few places you really could make a living doing that. So, it's worth noting here with my slide that Worms, the town of Worms, is, is named after a dragon. It's just basically the verb name word Worm means dragon in German at the time. So it's kind of kind of interesting that we have this little connection there. So, the book of aber abermillen, much like Crowley and Nessie, has its own weird reputation with with a whole lot of stories told about it and a whole lot of superstition around it that may or may not be accurate.
AP Strange:If you choose to read it, what you got mostly is practical advice from a rabbi to his son. And it's not clear that he knows who his son is as a grown man. Like, maybe he moved away and he's gonna come back. But this is all just like how to be a good man from a rabbi to his son. It's couched in mystical language.
AP Strange:It does have a lot of the first book is like, a whole lot of, you know, what to look out for when you're learning magic. But most of it is just like, be a dude. Just be a good dude. You know? I feel like that's the way it is.
AP Strange:It's like this scary book. Like, oh, don't touch book of Avra Mellon. That's scary. And I'm looking at it, and it's like, be nice to people. And I'm like, okay.
AP Strange:I don't know why this book is so scary. But the purpose of the ritual itself is to attain knowledge and conversation with the guardian angel. So it's like divine union, basically. The guardian the holy guardian angel is thought of the way I read it, having a background in, like, Buddhism and Eastern philosophy and Vedanta is kind of like the idea of the Atman, you know. And then I was happy to see that Rigardi kind of agreed with this, and then even Crowley says as much in his book.
AP Strange:But the idea is that it's a spiritual force outside of yourself that contains yourself, but is a direct channel to the divine. But you can't really have a direct communion with the divine and still be a material person with with a sane mind. You need the some kind of intermediary. So it's like a buffer zone, basically. And you're allowed to kinda define the terms of your conversation with the guardian angel who's gonna direct you on how to do stuff.
AP Strange:So if you're trying to get a hold of an angel, it doesn't sound particularly satanic to me, but what do I know? It takes a long time to do this ritual, and and really it takes about eighteen months. You'll hear a lot of people say it's six, but there's a lot of preparation that goes in, gets involved in it. And a lot of it is based on purification. Yeah, you're purifying it.
AP Strange:But you're defining the terms from the outset of how you want to approach this working. And really the main goal is to attain that conversation conversation, which which you're you're gonna gonna have this angelic essence that's going to guide you on how to proceed with the ritual. Right? So with that in mind, wouldn't have really had time to get started because he left he left before you could have even started really doing the work. It requires a lot of fasting, abstaining from sex, stimulants, that all kind of stuff, being nice to people.
AP Strange:Some of it's just like you gotta stay away from women entirely so that you're not tempted. And this is directed specifically at men because the the the that's the way magic was at the time. They assume a man's doing it. Yeah. This this is around the time the Golden Dawn basically broke in half.
AP Strange:And you had the people that hated Crowley, and you had some of the people that liked him. He wasn't the main reason. There were it's a really, really complicated story full of fascinating characters that I do not have time to get into right now. But Crowley felt some manner of allegiance to matters, and he had to go to Paris to help him out. So he abandoned this ritual before he could have even really got started.
AP Strange:He's unless he was really jumping the gun and jumping to the back of the book, which he might have done. I don't know. Yeah. He's not getting to the point of invoking kings of dukes of hell. So what ended up happening instead was when he went went to Mathers, he also ended up marrying this girl Rose Kelly, who was the sister of a friend of his.
AP Strange:I guess she was in a bad spot. Marrying her helped them out helped her out. They ended up going to Egypt and that's where the book of the law was channeled. I think mostly by Rose, but that's where you end up with the book of the law. And then eventually he takes off for China.
AP Strange:And he doesn't come back until way after. And at that point, his he had a small child and lost the small child in the China trip, which he died. And then he comes back and he's a totally different guy when he returns to the Voleskine house. So and keep in mind, he's 23 years old. So oh, this is my I I don't know what number I'm on.
AP Strange:These are my pieces of Boaleskin House. Right here, have slate from the roof of Bolleskin after it burned down. These are a jar of ashes. So I'm I'm coming to this stuff. But you'll notice that as I was writing this, I decided to take this picture to the slide, and this jar of ashes has water droplets inside of it.
AP Strange:So I don't know what that's all about. It's a I activated the Billesken house ashes, I guess, by doing this finally doing this talk. So so while he's going through China, though, this is what Regardie is saying. He was on the back of a donkey or a pony. Let's talk about, like, he walked through China, but, really, he's on he's on an animal.
AP Strange:He didn't walk the whole time. But regarding talks about his ability to imagine the temple in his mind and continue carrying out this ritual while riding through China on the back of a animal. And at one point, he falls off a cliff with the animal, and neither of them got hurt. That's kind of a funny story. But and and and so, I mean, the house was super important originally, but considering how far removed away he was, Crowley made up this other way of doing the same kind of thing and renamed it as like the Ogoides ritual and continued it not at the house.
AP Strange:So one would have to wonder how this ritual affects the physical location on Earth if it was on the other side of the Earth where he's continuing it. Right? So so you have you have Crowley's own account of all of this and what's referred to as his auto hagiography, the confessions of Alastair Crowley. Now Crowley was a man that liked myth making. He liked to build up stories about himself anyway.
AP Strange:So we don't even know if we can trust Curly's account of this. But, you know, he kind of embraced the idea of being called the great beast six six six sometimes as a way just to thumb his nose at people. So you might forgive Tallade for calling him a satanist, but, you know, whatever whatever his failings, the way he he was doing things was designed for divine union. He had a holy and sacred goal in mind. And and it's up to you guys to decide if if that caused a Loch Ness monster to happen.
AP Strange:But for your Burleskin house, it has its own legends both before and after he owned it. You can't really blame the aberrimillan ritual for that, especially losing the house because Crowley again was 23 years old when he bought it. He came from a wealthy family that he did not like. He was brought up within the Plymouth Brethren Church and it was a very harsh and conservative Christian upbringing. When his father passed away, was left with a sum of money and nobody to teach him how money works.
AP Strange:So later in his life, he would even admit. In my youth, I didn't know it was possible to run out of money. So he just thought he had unlimited funds. So the fact that he went broke later and had to sell the house is really nothing to do with the curse and more to do with the fact that he was ignorant of, like, what you're supposed to do with it. Right?
AP Strange:So afterwards, you had stories about black magic being performed there and all kinds of spirits. You had its other owners that met gruesome ends. Eventually, Jimmy Page bought the place from Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Page was a big Crowley guy, so he bought the house, but he barely even lived there. His housekeeper that watched the property claimed all kinds of spooky things happened, but he continued living there for a long time, so it couldn't have been that bad.
AP Strange:Eventually, the place burned down. So they started building it back up and then it burned down again. And that's why I was able to buy some ashes and slate rock from the roof because that money went into restoring it. So it's almost done being built and ready to burn down again. So So you
beatnik:went over to to
AP Strange:to see see this this house? House? I did not. Yeah.
beatnik:So how did you
AP Strange:There there was a fundraiser online.
beatnik:So you bought it from this online fundraiser?
AP Strange:I bought it from the Bolleskin House Foundation. Was currently putting the finishing touches on the old mirrors.
beatnik:Went over there to the Loch Ness?
AP Strange:I didn't go to the lock itself. No. Yeah. I rarely ever leave New England. You're seeing a rare it'd be strange sighting outside of New England.
AP Strange:Really? So yeah. I'm always We're
beatnik:lucky. Yeah.
AP Strange:What's that?
beatnik:We're lucky to have you.
AP Strange:Yeah. Well, I well, I appreciate that. I sure hope so. You're you say you were living in New England, but you're not very far from it anyway. So Yeah.
AP Strange:I didn't go that far. No. It's not like I went to Scotland or anything. Or big moon or something. But I I was happy to buy the yeah.
AP Strange:I was happy to buy this stuff because I did wanna see the house rebuilt. And then someday when it's done, I'd like to go. You know? It's mostly done now. I mean, they've done a lot of work.
AP Strange:So Before it burns down. Before it burns down again. It's like that old Monte Python bit where it was like, the strongest castle in these isles. All the other kings thought it was damp to build the castle here because it's taken to the swamp. So I built the second one, and that's taken to the swamp.
AP Strange:Yeah. Not gonna do too much Python. Yeah. Maybe later. If I run short of time, I'll be doing some doing some parrot shop or sheep shop or something.
AP Strange:Because I'm going through this. I I think I I think I'm doing good on time, but I got a lot to get through. So you have the this whole narrative of black magic. Now George Den, again, the guy that passed away last year this past year and and did this translation of the Upper Melon ritual and basically was obsessed with it. He traveled all over the world just to collect old manuscripts and check out locations that are mentioned in the book.
AP Strange:I think he was pretty eloquent in describing how this goes, the misunderstanding around it, because he's worked with the text directly and worked with people who have all kinds of opinions about it. It's a problem of mindset according to him. And so, unconsciously applied superstitions, materialistic explanations for something that is in effect ineffable, spiritual, and has more to do with personal development toward the divine than anything else. The purpose of the evil diagrams and magic squares for invocations of the rulers of hell, he says, are designed precisely to test the aspirant. The devils one encounters are merely projections of the inward evils one has failed to own and dispel, to take account of and responsibility for.
AP Strange:For the dedicated seeker who follows the prescriptions of Abraham, recognizes the inward reflexive nature of the great work. There is nothing sinister about the ritual and certainly no no fear attached to a book or a place where the ritual was enacted. So that's my rewording of Dan's stuff. But, basically, you know, what he's saying is, you bring the demons with you. If you want demons or if you think there's gonna be demons, there's something in you that needs to heal first.
AP Strange:That's the whole point of being purified before you even attempt any of this. Don't skip to the back of the book. Read the notes. So returning to Ted Holiday and the conceit that the dinosaur is a ghost from that tweet, we have Devin Priest says Loch Ness monster may be a ghost. We we have this guy, the reverend doctor Donald Omont, a man after my own heart.
AP Strange:This guy is wonderful. He's kind of like, a funny little old man. You see him over there? He says, doctor Oman, the devil hunter. He casts out evil.
AP Strange:So, and and that he did. He was a curious old vicar from Devon who expressed the belief that Nessie was probably the ghost of an ancient animal. Now this guy started out in the circus as an exorcist. He was a priest before that, but he got his doctorate of theology in, in Germany, and went to work for the circus because people in the circus weren't often welcome at church wherever they showed up to perform. People didn't want them there.
AP Strange:So and they still wanted to go to services. So what they would often do is convince somebody, a priest, to come with them and do services in the circus tent on Sunday mornings. Sometimes they weren't even near a church, right? So they wanted a priest there so they could still go to mass. And that's what he did.
AP Strange:And that was where his first exorcism happened. There was a time where the lions became possessed and ate the lion tamer. So he got into the cage and was able to cast the demons out of the lions and tame them again, and that was his first really dramatic exorcism. I don't know if the crowd was still there when he did it, but I sure hope so. So from that from there, he also claimed to have exercised a phantom black dog at Kettleness, part of Yorkshire, that was driving people crazy.
AP Strange:And he thought that Phantom Black Dog was an actual otherworldly representation of Dracula himself, and he exercised it. That's a long story. Wrote about it. Well, I'll send you links later if you're actually curious about that. But the other things, he fought other vampires.
AP Strange:He would exercise roadways where there are a lot of accidents. He called those black spots. And more pertinent to this oh, and the Bermuda Triangle. He also exercised the Bermuda Triangle. You might think that's funny, but how many of us have heard about things getting lost in the Bermuda Triangle in the last twenty years?
AP Strange:Really makes you think. Nobody talks about that anymore. So more pertinent to this presentation, he encountered spots in the North Atlantic where there were sea serpents that a lot like, Norwegian ships captain captains knew about. They'd be like, oh, yeah. Well, they're sea serpents.
AP Strange:You just ignore them and you pray and then they go away. Like so so he would do exorcisms of spots in the North Atlantic where the sea serpents were. So so he didn't think Nessie was evil. He didn't think she was an evil spirit. He thought that she was a ghost.
AP Strange:And as long as she wasn't gonna harm anybody, if he didn't exorcism the lock, he would get rid of this evil overlay, this whole, like, mood of evil around the lock that drives people crazy. But Nessie is free to hang around if she wants to. So they had the BBC there. There's actual video of this that you can find Oman going out onto a little boat with holiday, and they go out onto the lock. Basically, the way you exercise a lock is you go to the North end and you do a ritual there.
AP Strange:You go all the way to the South and do a ritual there. Then you go somewhere up into the Northwest and then the Northeast. You form a cross, and then at the very end, you go right out into the middle so that you do that last little exorcism, and that's supposed to take care of the whole lock. At the end of it, he collapsed and he says that that always happens when he's successful. It's very similar to what he ended up doing later at Bermuda Triangle.
AP Strange:He went to different points in in The Caribbean to do that. So now because I'm a giant nerd, we're gonna do more etymology. We're gonna look at the word exorcism. So it's it it comes from the Latin exorcismos, which would be, like could could mean the calling up or driving out of spirits, where we mostly think of it as casting spirits out. It could mean either.
AP Strange:It comes from the older word exorcismos Greek, which means the administration of an oath. Because essentially what you're doing with an other worldly entity, whether demon, whatever, ghost, is you're making a deal with them. You're cutting a deal. When you see it in the movies, you even see this. The power of Christ compels you and like, then you have to tell them what it is you expect of this demon.
AP Strange:Leave this girl alone. Do not come back. Christ says so to you, know, like, so you make this and and when you call up a demon, you're supposed to make a deal, and there's supposed to be parameters for that. If you don't do that, then you might be in trouble. But that that this is all about all about compromise and agreement.
AP Strange:Right? So we got this image of Catholic priests mostly from the movies. Oman was not Catholic himself. He was associated with the Church of England. So he was a Protestant kind of they stopped doing exorcisms officially around this time because it was too much of a circus from a circus priest.
AP Strange:And they call it deliverance now. Deliver souls from people. So so when we get down to the the meaning of it, the numina the numinous quality of exorcism as a concept, we can see that the abram abramolent operations calling forth and controlling of demons is of the same spirit as it is for Oman. Right? So this brings us to the last one here, which is my favorite and the weirdest one.
AP Strange:This is Anthony Doc Shields. He was a very unique character in the annals of 14 studies. He was a stage magician, a surrealist artist, a musician musician, a huckster, and and a unabashed lover of a good pint of Guinness. He had his own wacky form of wizardry, which yielded interesting results. So if if you're if you're open to it, and I hope you are because nobody's locked up out of the room yet.
AP Strange:So I guess you guys everyone here can agree to be on board with this a little bit. So he made headlines by calling out and conjuring the Loch Ness monster and even getting photographs of the Loch Ness monster. He's not really clear about his methods here, so he says he often says he was out doing surrealist things with sigils and Guinness. But if if we believe him, these methods are efficacious. He even reached out to other magicians around the world and had this Operation Monster Mind where they could all do the same things he was doing and try to conjure monsters where they were.
AP Strange:So, this included him getting going on a beach in Cornwall with a bunch of sky clad witches. I did not include a slide for that. I Oh my gosh. That's if you're interested, I'll send you a postcard later. So, but they they were conjuring the sea serpent Morgore, and there is video of this on YouTube.
AP Strange:So you can find those. He's standing on the beach saying, well, I sort of just make myself attracted to the sea serpent. He calls out to her, and he's going, Morgore. Morgore. So the side effect of this was he conjured a Mothman esque entity called the Owlman of Cornwall.
AP Strange:So Shields also died last year. He died in July. And right after he died, I went up to Maine and accidentally found myself in a town called Cornwall near a town called Falmouth near a bay that also had its own sea serpent at one point. So and and these are things that you see happen a lot with monsters. Right?
AP Strange:So this that's a name game. We call that in the 14 realm. It happens a lot. And it makes you think that there's, like, something outside of reality playing on this. So he wrote about this in a book called Monstrum, a wizard's tale he wrote for 14 times.
AP Strange:He did a lot of wordplay. It was called Lexilinx. And his stream of consciousness puns runs of words that sound similar to discover the strange insights and connections revealed by seemingly disparate things. His tongue never strayed too far from the interior of his cheek, but there's an earnestness to his approach that circumvents logic and gets straight to the heart of the mystery. He claimed the absurdity of his methods were precisely the reason they worked so well, especially since no one would be inclined to believe him after the fact.
AP Strange:It shielded him from the psychic fatigue that Holiday and Oman described, And he was very keen to talk about surrealism as being very important to understanding monsters. So what he said is monsters are essentially surreal. Involvement with monsters is an intrinsically surrealist experience with a high proportion of absurd, bizarre, disordered, or irrational elements. Monsters are mysteries loaded with latent meaning. He goes on later to say that monsters can only truly be seen with a savage eye.
AP Strange:When that eye belongs to a photographer, monsters are sometimes captured on film. And it's important to note here too. If you know anything about the history of surrealism, it's not just an art form. It's like a whole philosophy. And it borders on the mystical regularly.
AP Strange:They even use the same methods sometimes as like the spiritualists in conjuring. The automatic writing was used by both surrealists and spiritualists. So surrealism has mystical qualities. The word itself means super reality. It's the reality that's bigger than the reality that we all recognize.
AP Strange:So how could that be? How can we capture imaginary monsters on film? Are these the beasties? Oh, there we go. So are these beasties objectively real in the way that cryptozoologists would want?
AP Strange:Are they fictions, folklore, or products of enterprising hoaxters? I'm hoping that the presentation will show you a panoply of new answers in between. We can you know, over the years, people have adopted the ideas about things like tulpas and egregores, but those are very singular terms rooted in their own traditions that don't necessarily apply to everything. So I'm getting the time. Okay.
AP Strange:They have their own providence and meaning, and if they apply too broadly, they lose their meaning. So you might think about psychokinesis, projections, things like that. So there's a lot of different ways to think about it. But really, Nessie is a numinous beastie and avatar for all mysteries, writ large, mostly obscured by rippling waves of our preconceived of notions. What lies beneath the extended neck or humps visible from our comfortable shore is anyone's guess.
AP Strange:But such guesses often reveal more about the guesser than they do the beastie. Nessie exists somewhere between the setup and punchline of the joke, the surface of the water, and the air above, or the watery depths. Well, much of what we claim to know about the Loch Ness monster can be proved fairly proven as made up, but just because it's made up doesn't mean it isn't real. So this gets into a little anecdote that Curly told that sounds like a joke. Basically, he says the pre key to practical magic is contained in this little vignette.
AP Strange:A man's on a train. He has a box with holes in it. The kind that you would use if you're carrying a live animal somewhere. Somebody asks him about it, and he says it's for my brother because he's a terrible alcoholic. And he imagines snakes are harassing him all the time, so I'm bringing him a mongoose.
AP Strange:The other guy says, but those are imaginary snakes. And the man with the box says, that's as may be. This is an imaginary mongoose. Mhmm. So this shows you that Curly had a sense of humor as well.
AP Strange:But this humor is super important, and as is the super reality of surrealism, as is Kabbalistic ritual. Like, any which way that you want to use to get there, you'll get there. Do we need to conjure a giant mongoose to wrangle Nessie out of the lock? Maybe. But we don't have to go that far.
AP Strange:So perhaps this is the real magic of it all, the exarchismos we undertake in negotiating what we're willing to include within the bounds of reality. The surface of the water becomes a mirror with which we can choose to scrutinize ourselves or scry out new omens. For we all know what the Loch Ness monster is, and yet she's different for each of us. For her and for all mysteries, it's a worthwhile pursuit to believe in the seemingly absurd once in a while just as a treat and see what solutions arise. So that's, that's the presentation.
AP Strange:Presentation.