"The Eighth Tower" - Algorhythms

When I was fresh out of High School, rare books were still hard to find. Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia was prohibitively expensive, and his Invisible College was just plain vanished. Now they're both back in mundane paperback print, just in time for a new generation of utterly illiterate iPad mouthbreathers to ignore them.

Even more rare, though, were the Occult tomes that were barely 'in print' to begin with -- one of which was "War in Heaven" by Kyle Griffiths. Thanks to the tireless archival work of the Biblioteca Pleyades, the whole thing is archived online. I tracked down "War in Heaven" at around the same time I finally got ahold of James Shelby Downard's "King Kill 33," which was simply a photocopy of his original typed manuscript, and Kerry Thornley's rambling "Confessions." The Downard turned out to be a disappointment, more poetry than anything else. I'm still thinking over Thornley's book years later. Kyle Griffiths, however, did lasting damage to my psyche.

I could ramble for days, but let's inject some meat solution into the mix:

Chapter Six: In The Eighth Tower (1975), Keel concluded that UFO contact reports had a common origin with certain very intense religious and occult experiences, such as visitations from gods, angels, or demons. He postulated that the cause of all these events is a natural phenomenon, which he names the “Superspectrum.”

Keel’s Superspectrum seems to be based loosely on Jung’s concept that the human race possesses a “collective unconscious,” but he carries the idea much further than Jung did. Jung had conceived of the collective unconscious only as a body of information stored in the subconscious minds of many different individuals that causes all of them to think or behave in similar ways.

Keel carries this concept much further, and postulates that the Superspectrum involves specialized forms of matter and energy unknown to present-day science. He borrows concepts from occultism and coins scientific-sounding new terms to describe them. His Superspectrum simply seems to be another way of saying “influence by spiritual beings and psychic powers.”

However, he doesn’t conclude that the Superspectrum is a being or group of beings, as the occultists usually do with their concepts of gods, demons, and spirits. Instead, it is simply a kind of natural phenomenon with a “computer-like intelligence.”



EELRIJUE is being finalized this month, and all of the themes we baked into that cosmic casserole are coming back to haunt us. I mean that in a perfectly literal sense: our lives are haunted by a cast of characters that is barely even humanoid. Be careful what you make songs about, kids...