Chapter 7: The Invisible War

This chapter discusses various books that treat the manipulation of human society by unseen agencies as a complex “invisible war” between opposing forces, starting with the works of Robert Anton Wilson. In my opinion, his most useful ideas are in the Illuminatus! trilogy, written in collaboration with Robert Shea and published in 1975. On the surface, the three books are an avant-garde political allegory that uses the concept of the “Illuminati” and conspiracy theories in general as a medium for communicating the author’s ideas about freedom and totalitarianism. The trilogy’s political content has made it a classic of the modern Libertarian movement, but the material on conspiracies also deserves to be taken seriously.


Wilson was originally trained as a historian, and did years of serious but sporadic research on the Illuminati and related topics just to satisfy his own curiosity, so the trilogy contains enough solid conspiracy information to fill several nonfiction books of average size. However, since the conspiracy speculations are embedded in a work of fiction that depends on heavy-handed irony and morbid humor for much of its appeal, it’s impossible for the reader to tell when Wilson is being serious and when he’s writing for empty shock value.


In Cosmic Trigger (1977), Wilson explains how and why the Illuminatus! trilogy was written, and states that he wasn’t completely aware himself when he was speculating seriously, and when he was just recording “wild ideas.” The book also explains that he was experimenting with psychedelic drugs and a variety of serious occult practices – sex magic, various forms of meditation and ritual, etc. – while he was writing Illuminatus! Since these practices develop the psychic powers, he may have received more of his ideas and conclusions by telepathy than he has ever admitted or consciously realized.


Wilson’s basic speculations about the agencies responsible for the manipulation of human history down through the ages are similar to those advanced by Shaver, Keel, and Vallee; but since he’s writing fiction, he isn’t forced to keep them internally consistent. Many different characters in the three books “discover the truth about the Illuminati,” and each person’s version of it totally contradicts that of all the others.


Some of these explanations of the nature of the Illuminati are familiar to readers of other conspiracy and unexplained-phenomena books; others are wilder than anything ever presented as fact or serious speculation. Wilson postulates that the “Lliogor” (the name is from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos) are the ultimate source of the knowledge and power used to manipulate human society and reprogram individual minds throughout history. As in Lovecraft, they are shadowy beings that usually remain in the background in “another dimension,” and most of the earthly conspiracies are the work of humans who have learned some of their knowledge second-hand.


One of Wilson’s characters describes the process that transforms a person into an “Illuminatus”:

“It’s possible for humans, given the right methods, to translate themselves into sentient lattice works of pure energy that will be more or less permanent. The process is called transcendental illumination. Mass human sacrifice is the most reliable method of achieving transcendental illumination.”

Wilson was referring to this passage when he said in Cosmic Trigger,

“I had already incorporated into IIlluminatus a variation on the Lovecraft mythos... in which the 'Cthulhu Cult’ or some other secret society was aiding the schemes of hostile Aliens. I had attached this theme to the Illuminati as a kind of dead-pan put-on and laughed like hell at the thought that some naive readers would be dumb enough to believe it.”

However, he then goes on to explain that working with Jacques Vallee, other unexplained-phenomena researchers, and various occultists had started him to thinking that maybe the whole idea wasn’t so ridiculous after all.


Cosmic Trigger also contains a quotation from a conversation Wilson had in 1974 with Grady McMurty, an occultist whom Aleister Crowley had designated as one of his chosen successors. McMurty, who had read much of the secret knowledge of the OTO and the Order of the Golden Dawn, had said:

“I’ll tell you what I think. There’s WAR IN HEAVEN. The Higher Intelligences, whoever they are, aren’t all playing on the same team. Some of them are trying to encourage our evolution to higher levels, and some of them want to keep us stuck just where we are.”

One of the characters in Illuminatus also describes a connection between conspiracies and organized religion:

“I must tell you now that your God is a manifestation of some Lliogor. That is how religion began, and how their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign continue it. All such experiences come from the Lliogor to enslave us. Revelations, visions, trances, and miracles, all of it is a trap.... Every religious leader in human history has been a member of the Cult of the Yellow Sign and all of their efforts are devoted to hoaxing, deluding, and enslaving the rest of us.”

Another major theme in Cosmic Trigger is Wilson’s involvement with the “Sirius Mystery,” which many people now believe represents impressive evidence that space travelers from that star visited Earth in the time of the Pharaohs. Since I will present an alternative explanation for this evidence in Part Two, I won’t go into the details presented in Robert K. G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (1979). What’s important for my purposes here is that Robert Anton Wilson and a number of other people started consciously receiving telepathic messages concerning Sirius years before Temple’s book was written.


In 1973, Wilson received a short but extremely vivid telepathic message that said simply, “Sirius is very important.” Almost simultaneously, Timothy Leary, who was in prison at the time, received a long series of telepathic communications that also purported to be from extraterrestrials. Leary called these the “Starseed Transmissions,” and had them published almost immediately in Terra II (1973).


Terra II seemed to contain a serious attempt by some unknown agency to communicate extremely advanced spiritual and scientific knowledge, but I completely failed to understand most of it. I concluded that the book may very well have contained messages from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization; but if so, they were not clear enough for me, or for most Earth people, to comprehend.

  • I now know that the same general group of extraterrestrial spirits who dictated the material for WiH to me ten years later had previously sent the “Starseed Transmissions” to Leary.

  • And Wilson’s message about Sirius had the same origin.

  • And some of John C. Lilly’s books also contain material channeled from the same source: Center of the Cyclone (1972), The Programming and Metaprogramming of the Human Biocomputer, and The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography (1978).

The spirits themselves will explain more about this in Part Two.


Another conspiracy theory that helped me make the breakthrough is described in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The basic premise of the book is that the medieval Knights Templar possessed knowledge that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene; that he left descendants who married into various European royal families; and that this “holy bloodline” can be traced down to the present day.


I was already familiar with this legend because it has been part of the secret doctrine of the Gnostics and other Christian splinter groups for many centuries, and there are numerous references to it in occult literature; but the subject had never interested me until the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail analyzed it seriously as a conspiracy theory. They made me realize that there’s more to the story than just another religious myth. The legend itself may or may not be based in fact, but the conspiracies it has generated seem to be real and important.


The book traces the history of a secret society called the “Priory of Zion” from medieval times to the present, noting its influence on the Templars, on the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges of the seventeenth century, and on the evolution of Western society in general. The book documents the existence of the Priory fairly well, but it doesn’t even try to present evidence to prove the validity of the basic premise that Jesus left descendants. The authors are more concerned with the nature of the Priory and its influence over historical events. And this is why the book was important in helping prepare me for the breakthrough: it helped me gain some deep insight into how the Invisible College has worked to manipulate the course of Western history.


The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail were mostly concerned with the members of the Priory of Zion as what William Burroughs would call “conscious agents.” They may or may not have believed that their secret knowledge about the descendants of Jesus was true, but they were fully conscious of the political power it gave them over a civilization that accepted the “divine right of kings.” However, my own reaction to the story was to analyze it on deeper levels, trying to find a conspiracy behind the Priory that its members weren’t consciously aware of.


Here are some of my speculations. What if the story about the descendants of Jesus was simply a cover story to keep people from seriously looking for an even more important secret? Maybe the Priory possessed some of the “Q Documents” (the lost texts that many Biblical scholars think several books of the New Testament were copied from). Perhaps these had been kept hidden by a secret society because their account of the origins of Christianity was very different from that now accepted by Christians. For example, what would be the impact on modern Christianity if it were learned that they state explicitly that Jesus never claimed to be the “Only Begotten Son of God,” but merely a human prophet?


Even if the Templars didn’t unearth actual copies of the Q documents in Jerusalem, it’s likely they talked to Jewish and Islamic scholars and found out that certain Talmudic texts written in the first centuries of the Christian era deny the divinity of Jesus. This might have given them the idea of forging ancient documents proving the Gnostic claim that Jesus left descendants and denying fundamental tenets of Christianity. Such documents, real or faked, would have given the Priory of Zion a potent weapon for political manipulation.


They could have set themselves up as king-makers by claiming to have proof that certain rulers were of divine descent, but they’d also have a more potent weapon than that to use against kings and the Church alike: the potential to debunk Christianity and plunge all of Western society into chaos. Thinking about this reminded me that in the fifteen years before Holy Blood, Holy Grail was published, dozens of novels were written on the general theme of the discovery of the Q documents and their political use by conspiracies. Irving Wallace’s The Word is the best known of these. Had the Invisible College motivated all these books by sending out telepathic messages on this subject? If they had, I didn’t receive them, which is understandable because I had little interest in the subject until I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail.


I found out when I made the breakthrough that this line of conjecture was on the right track, but it didn’t go far enough. The “Great Secret” of the medieval Priory of Zion, which was passed on through the Templars to the eighteenth-century Masons and Rosicrucians, was a cosmological theory similar to the one presented in Part Two. I describe this information in terms drawn from modern physics, psychology, etc., which didn’t exist back then. The Priory’s version was undoubtedly phrased in very different words and analogies drawn from religious and occult mysticism, but many of the essential facts were probably the same.

 

This is why a number of occult books assert,

“The Great Secret reveals the true nature of gods and men and the relationship between the two.”

Holy Blood, Holy Grail was only one of many books that helped to raise my consciousness to the point where I could make a breakthrough.

 

A number of recent works of speculative fiction were also useful. Among the best are Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives series (starting with Shikasta, 1979), which treats the general subject of extraterrestrial intervention in earthly affairs as thoroughly as it’s ever been covered in either fiction or non-fiction. One of the best things about her theories is that she doesn’t even try to keep them self-consistent, but dramatizes many different alternatives that can be deduced from the available factual information on the subject.


Here is a quotation from another of her novels, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (1971):

“At the risk of boring you, I must repeat, I am afraid, repeat, reiterate, reemphasize, it is not a question of your arriving on Planet Earth as you leave here. You will lose nearly all memory of your past existence. You will each of you come to yourselves, perhaps alone, perhaps in the company of each other, but with only a vague feeling of recognition, and probably disassociated, disorientated, ill, discouraged, and unable to believe, when you are told what your task really is.

 

You will wake up, as it were, but there will be a period while you are waking which will be like the recovery from an illness, or like the emergence into good air from a poisoned one. Some of you may choose not to wake, for the waking will be so painful, and the knowledge of your condition and Earth’s condition so agonizing, you will be like drug addicts: you may prefer to continue to breathe in oblivion.

 

And when you have understood that you are in the process of awakening, that you have something to get done, you will have absorbed enough of the characteristics of Earthmen to be distrustful, surly, grudging, suspicious. You will be like a drowning person who drowns his rescuer, so violently will you struggle in your panic terror.


“And, when you have become aroused to your real condition, and have recovered from the shame or embarrassment of seeing to what depths you have sunk, you will then begin the task of arousing others, and you will find that you are in the position of rescuer of a drowning person, or a doctor in a city that has an epidemic of madness. The drowning person wants to be rescued, but can’t prevent himself struggling. The mad person has intermittent fits of sanity, but in between behaves as if his doctor were his enemy.


“And so, my friends: that’s it. That’s my message to you. It’s going to be tough. Every bit as tough as you expect.”

During the period immediately before my breakthrough, I re-read several older works of speculative fiction. Here’s a quotation from Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites (1967):

“We now had an important clue about the origin of the parasites.... They couldn’t exist apart from mankind because they were mankind. And it was this that brought a new level of knowledge. When I had said to them. ‘Man is not alone,’ I had understood what I meant, but all its implications were not clear to me; I was speaking about the source of power, meaning and purpose. Now I realized that, in a far more obvious and simple sense, we were not alone.

 

We had joined the police of the universe, and there were others. Our minds now made instant contact with these others. It was as if we had sent out a signal, which had instantly been picked up by a hundred receivers, who immediately signaled their presence back to us. The nearest of these receivers was situated only about four thousand million miles away, a cruising ship from a planet in the Proxima Centauri system.”

And it’s not just speculative fiction by mainstream avant-garde writers that helped prepare me for the breakthrough. Literally hundreds of books written during the last ten years in the science fiction and fantasy fields contain a few paragraphs or a few lines of useful material.

 

Here’s an illustration from a realistic modern fantasy: Mystery Walk (1983), by Robert R. McCaramon:

“Why does it hate us?”


“Because it’s a greedy beast that uses fear to make itself stronger. It feeds like a hog at a trough on the human emotions of despair, torment, and confusion; sometimes it traps revenants, and won’t let them break away from this world. It feeds on their souls, and if there’s a Hell, I suppose that must be it. But when we work to free those revenants, to take their suffering into ourselves and do something constructive with it, we steal from the shape changer’s dinner table. We sent those poor souls onward to where the shape changer can’t get at them anymore.”

Many occult books written for the general reader during the last fifteen years contain similar material. The dozen or so Oversoul Seven and Seth books produced by Jane Roberts during this whole period are an example, as are the recent works of Ruth Montgomery and Brad Steiger.


I’ll finish this series of quotations with a couple from works that were published after I started making my personal breakthrough in 1983. The ideas they communicate were published earlier in less explicit form, so I was already vaguely familiar with them in 1983, but I feel this chapter will be more effective if I quote the best version of the material now available.
First, from Carlos Castaneda’s The Fire Within (1985):

“...They SAW that it is the Eagle who bestows awareness. The Eagle creates sentient beings so that they will live and enrich the awareness it gives them with life. They also SAW that it is the Eagle who devours that same enriched awareness after making sentient beings relinquish it at the moment of their death.... Sentient beings live only to enrich the awareness that is the Eagle’s food.”

And I’ll end with a paragraph from Extra-Terrestrials Among Us by George C. Andrews:

“Human psychic energy may be the equivalent of rocket fuel or cocaine to inhabitants of other dimensions. Seen from this angle, the otherwise senseless wars between the devotees of different jealous gods which have recurred constantly throughout human history take on a rational motivation. It would explain why such extraordinary importance has been accorded to the individual’s choice of which deity to worship. By worshipping a specific deity, one channels psychic energy in a specific direction...”

I acknowledge that all the people mentioned in this chapter so far, and many others as well, contributed to the background knowledge that helped me to understand the spirit communications quoted in Part Two. I found useful ideas in literally hundreds of different books and articles; the works mentioned here are just a sample to show the wide variety of sources where such information can be found. I can’t single out one or a few as being more important to this process than the others. The significant items of information and theory in the works of all these authors are present only as isolated passages embedded in material of much less value.


I had constant psychic guidance from my spirit guides while I researched this material, and this helped me to recognize what was valid and relevant from what wasn’t. My selection of the material for this chapter is intended to help the reader to extract approximately the same information from this literature as I did. I’ll continue this process further in the next chapter.

Back to Contents

 


Chapter 8: The Breaking Point

Although much of the material that helped prepare me for the breakthrough was directly devoted to occult or unexplained-phenomena themes, the books most valuable to me in the last year or so before I made it were works on psychology, behavioral science, political theory and philosophy, and the history of natural science. Some of these were standard works in their field, whereas others were more speculative, such as Colin Wilson’s history of astronomy, Star Seekers, and Jeffrey Goodman’s book on human evolution, The Genesis Mystery.


One of the questions I kept asking during my reading was,

“Since I find it obvious that there is sufficient empirical evidence to prove that reincarnation and other spiritual phenomena are real, why haven’t more scientists come to this same conclusion?”

I already knew that most materialistic scientists would answer that my methods of investigation, and those of everyone else who has drawn similar conclusions, simply aren’t scientific. However, the more I studied the history and methods of science, the more convinced I became that there really is a materialistic bias in science: a literal closing of people’s minds to factual evidence if it concerns spirituality.


Colin Wilson’s Star Seekers (1980) is an excellent starting point for readers who want to duplicate some of my research along these lines. He provides the evidence to support all the major points of my conclusions, though he did not actually make them himself.


The materialistic bias in science seems to have originated no earlier than the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, simultaneously with the Protestant Reformation in Christianity, the beginning of the Age of Discovery, the rise of the modern nation-states, etc. All these changes in Western civilization mark the transition between the Medieval Era and the Modern Era, and can be attributed directly or indirectly to a sudden increase in the general level of technology.


Most of these technological innovations were small in themselves, and many were made by ordinary people – farmers, sailors, artisans, etc. – rather than by intellectuals. They were things with immediate practical use, like better plows, harness, wagons, water mills, spinning and weaving devices, sails and rigging-plans for ships, etc. They included gunpowder, the eyeglass lenses that led to the telescope and microscope, better methods of preserving food, and many other things. Taken together, they produced profound demographic, economic, and political changes in European society.


A full description of the sudden progress of European society at that time is beyond the scope of this book. The change that interests us here is the shift in the balance of power from the Catholic Church to secular institutions of all types. When the northern half of Europe became Protestant, organized religion in that region lost direct control over government, the economy, education, science, and most other important social institutions. The Protestant churches still exerted a major influence over society in Northern Europe, but they didn’t control the crowning of kings, the running of schools and universities, the certification of doctors and lawyers, the writing and circulation of books, etc., to nearly the extent that the Catholic Church had dominated them in the Medieval times.


In the southern part of Europe, which remained Catholic, the beginning of the Modern Era also weakened the control of the Church over secular institutions, but the process was more gradual. The efforts of the Church to retain its control over social and political institutions in Catholic countries are plainly described in history books, but the actual motivations of the Popes and other Catholic leaders are not so obvious.


The series of events that I call the Copernican Compromise, which created the materialistic bias in Western science, is an example: it is easy enough to see what happened, but harder to figure out why. Until the first half of the Seventeenth century, when Galileo was prosecuted by Pope Urban VIII for supporting the Copernican astronomical theory, European scientists had not yet been put in a category separate from other intellectuals doing research into the nature of the universe. They were all called simply “philosophers,” and one person might do research in many different fields: botany, medicine, astronomy, astrology, theology, and even ceremonial magic.


Individual philosophers were sometimes persecuted, even put to death, for publishing or teaching ideas that displeased the Church authorities, but there was no generalized prohibition of research into what is now called occultism. Philosophers could study the “natural” and “supernatural” aspects of the universe with equal freedom as long as they remained good Catholics and didn’t challenge the doctrines, customs, or political structure of the Church.


Most astronomers were also astrologers. Physicians dispensed as many healing prayers as they did pills, and practiced “laying on of hands” as freely as they set broken bones or bandaged wounds. One writer might produce bestiaries, herbals, and catalogues of the different types of demons and angels. The books written by the medieval alchemists show they experimented with sex magic and psychedelic drugs to develop their psychic powers as well as doing primitive experiments in chemistry. Much of this research did not involve scientific experimental techniques in the modern sense; but when such methods were employed, they were just as commonly applied to studying spiritual and psychic phenomena as to studying purely physical phenomena.


The Copernican Compromise changed all this. In 1600, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned for heresy. It’s widely believed that the reason for his immolation was his support of the Copernican theory, but this was not mentioned in the charges against him. It is true he was a Copernican; but what the Church executed him for was not his scientific views, but applying empirical methods of research to occult and religious subjects. He wrote treatises on Hermetic Magic and general philosophical works that challenged both the infallibility of the Pope and the omnipotence of God.


The persecution of Galileo a couple of decades later is widely regarded today as a victory for science, not for the Church, and this same attitude was expressed by many intellectuals at the time. The Pope made Galileo recant formally; but that actually helped popularize his ideas, not suppress them. However, one of the first steps in making my personal breakthrough was to realize that Galileo’s victory was a hollow one. Galileo was not only one of the founders of modern science because of his contributions to physics and astronomy, he was also one of the instigators of the materialistic bias that has plagued science ever since.


Ironically, his writings about himself show him not as an atheist, but as a reasonably devout Catholic who kept his religious life and his scientific life completely separate. He confined his scientific research to studies of physical phenomena, and his writings recognize Papal Infallibility in matters of religious doctrine and practice. The only reason why Galileo refused to back down when Pope Urban objected to his acceptance of the Copernican model of the solar system was that he felt the Pope was overstepping the bounds of his spiritual authority by getting involved in matters that were purely physical. Galileo never tried to challenge the Pope’s right to interpret the Bible on spiritual matters, but felt that he, as a natural philosopher, shouldn’t be over-ruled from the Papal Throne on enquiries into phenomena that are physical rather than spiritual.


The whole debate over the Copernican Theory hinges on the interpretation of a single Biblical passage, Joshua 10:13, which describes a miracle by Jehovah in the middle of a battle: “And the Sun stood still.” Since the time of Saint Augustine, this had been interpreted by the Catholic Church as proof that the Sun moves around the Earth. Augustine himself had been a bishop in Egypt not long after Ptolemy, another Egyptian, had published his astronomy texts endorsing a geocentric model of the Solar System.


However, it was obvious to Galileo that the original passage in the Bible could just as easily refer to a subjective description of the Sun as to an objective one. In other words, observers saw the sun appear to stop moving in the sky and simply said, “The Sun stood still.” This effect could just as easily happen because a spinning Earth stopped as because a moving Sun stopped. Above all, he never argued that the passage was false because it involved a miracle. Miracles were part of the supernatural, and not the business of a natural philosopher.


All Galileo asserted was that careful observations of the apparent motions of the planets among the fixed stars provide evidence that the Sun, not the Earth, is the point around which they revolve. On the surface, Pope Urban won the debate by forcing Galileo to recant publicly, sentencing him to perpetual house arrest, and forbidding him to publish any more scientific books.


In reality, Galileo, who was an old man at the time and died a few years later, simply went home to his comfortable suburban estate and continued his research and writing. His next book was smuggled out of Italy by French diplomats and published in Holland, and the opinion of intellectuals all over Europe was in his favor. Star Seekers states that Pope Urban was afraid to execute Galileo, as his predecessor had Bruno, because he knew that such an outrage would seriously damage his reputation and undermine his power.


I think Wilson missed a more important point here. Pope Urban could probably have had Galileo closely watched and prevented him from publishing any more books without suffering serious political harm. He’d already withstood the opposition raised by passing the sentence, and the public outcry over enforcing it would probably have been weaker, provided that Galileo was not harmed physically. The fact that the Pope didn’t carry through and effectively silence Galileo is evidence he didn’t consider the debate over the Copernican theory important in itself. He was punishing Galileo for openly challenging his political and spiritual authority, not for doing scientific research.


The Pope was sending a very clear message to all of the early scientists without saying it in so many words:

“If you confine your scientific research to the physical world, the Church will leave you alone.”

The earlier immolation of Bruno had already sent the negative half of this message:

“Scientists who do research into the nature of psychic phenomena or publish theories that challenge the official position of the Church on cosmological matters will be severely punished.”

I call this unspoken, unwritten agreement “The Copernican Compromise,” and believe it’s the origin of the whole materialistic bias in Western science. The Copernican Compromise was never openly discussed by either the scientists or the Catholic hierarchy, and it is likely that both sides simply drifted into it without being consciously aware that the Church was still actively persecuting scientific occultists while becoming increasingly tolerant towards scientists who avoided research into psychic and spiritual phenomena, especially those who claimed such research was impossible.

 

Even though their motivations were mostly subconscious, more and more scientists adopted a materialistic bias during the 16th and 17th centuries; and if they also were involved in occultism or other spiritual research, they hid their activities in secret societies.


If there were only this one example of the Copernican Compromise, the anomalies might be explained by personality differences involving the two Popes and the two scientists, but I’m talking in more general terms here. The Copernican Compromise came about because of an unspoken attitude on the part of many Catholic leaders over a long period of time, interacting with hundreds of different scientists and philosophers.


One of the last books I read before I started making the breakthrough was Jeffrey Goodman’s The Genesis Mystery, published early in 1983. It’s fitting that my old conception of spiritual reality should be brought to the breaking point by the work of a scientist who has been virtually ostracized by the academic community for blatantly breaking the Copernican Compromise. Goodman has impressive formal credentials as an anthropologist, and has published three reasonably popular books: American Genesis (1982), The Genesis Mystery (1983), and We Are the Earthquake Generation (1983).

 

His scholarship seems perfectly sound, but his books have mostly been ignored or dismissed as pseudo science by other professionals in his field because he includes psychic powers, reincarnation, and disembodied spiritual beings in some of his scientific hypotheses. This might be too far out for the scientific establishment, but it was exactly the push I needed to make my breakthrough.


The Genesis Mystery points out that the evolutionary theory commonly called “Darwinism” is not rigorously scientific, nor has it ever been accepted by the majority of the experts in the pertinent fields or by most of the general public. Instead, it’s always been a propaganda weapon for atheists and materialists to use against religion and other belief-systems that teach that spiritual agencies were involved in the creation of human and other life on Earth.


Goodman shows that Alfred Russel Wallace, co-author of The Origin of Species along with Charles Darwin (and believed by many scientific historians to be responsible for most of the theories presented in the book), was never a true “Darwinist” in the sense of believing that evolutionary process was guided entirely by a series of accidents. Wallace called himself a practicing Christian, though his beliefs seem to have been what we would call “Liberal Christianity” today. He was also one of the scientists who investigated the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement and decided there was empirical evidence that the spirits of the dead really do sometimes communicate with the living. Even though he contributed at least as much as Darwin himself to the basic Darwinian Theory of Evolution, Wallace’s personal opinions on the matter were that spiritual forces were involved along with the random mutation and natural selection described in the theory itself.


Goodman, like Wallace before him, calls this concept “Interventionism.” Interventionists believe that, although random mutations account for most evolutionary change, some parts of the evolutionary process – especially the creation of human beings out of pre-human stock – were directed by a conscious outside agency. Wallace called this agency “God,” and so do many liberal Christians today, but occultists and New-Agers talk about “spirits” and “cosmic intelligences.”


The majority of people in the modern Western world who aren’t strict materialists have traditionally taken a similar view of evolution, and this group includes scientists as well as non-scientists. Most American Christians, except for the staunch Fundamentalists, see no real conflict between their religious cosmology and the scientific theory of evolution. They simply say that the evolutionary process was the means their God used to create people and other species of animals and plants, and that the materialistic Darwinists are wrong only in asserting that the process is random rather than guided by an outside intelligence.


The Genesis Mystery also points out that there is considerable evidence to contradict the Darwinian claim that the creation and evolution of life on this planet could have happened by pure chance. Whenever statisticians try to calculate the mathematical probabilities involved, the figures look very negative. Evolution by chance simply appears too improbable to have happened during the time period the geological and paleontological evidence marks out. All the materialists can say is,

“Well, life exists and had to come from somewhere, so the low probabilities for random evolution have to be in error. They’re sure to increase as more information becomes available.”

However, as new information is discovered in every scientific field related to evolution – biochemistry, genetics, paleontology, etc. – the evidence against traditional, materialistic Darwinism gets stronger, not weaker. This is especially true of the appearance of modern human beings on Earth: recent fossil evidence shows that human beings may have evolved almost simultaneously from different pre-human species in different parts of the world. The probabilities of that happening by chance are almost zero, yet the paleontological evidence showing that it did happen grows stronger every year.


Most of The Genesis Mystery is devoted to a detailed presentation of the material sketched out above: Goodman’s own conclusions about Interventionist Evolution are confined to a few pages at the end. He mentions three possible sources for this intervention: “God,” “spacemen,” and “hitch-hiking spirits.” I was already familiar with everything Goodman had to say about the first two concepts, but I found the third original and extremely thought provoking.


Here is Goodman’s “hitch-hiking spirits” hypothesis in his own words:

“Finally, some take the interventors to have been spirits from other realities visiting earth to experience its unique properties. As this theory goes, these visiting spirits hitched a ride within existing hominids to enjoy the physical pleasures of wine, women, and song. After many nights of too much reveling, they soon found themselves stuck within their physical vehicles.

 

The only release was through death, but once addicted, many insisted on returning through reincarnation for just one, and then another, and yet another ride. Realizing that there was no way out of this vicious circle, some of the spirits set to work altering their hominid hosts to create better physical vehicles through which they could eventually escape the seductive pull of earthly pursuits. This may explain why modern man with all his advantages still seems torn between the two realities.”

The concept that certain human souls are not native to Earth, that they came here from another world or plane of existence, is mentioned in many different religious mythologies and occult theories, though most of the references are cryptic and hard to understand. Authors seem reluctant to discuss such a wild idea openly, but I’ve always found it plausible because of my past-life memories and numerous telepathic contacts with spirits who say that they were extraterrestrials in former lives.
Reading Goodman’s speculations about “hitch-hiking spirits” was one of the principal factors that helped me start making my personal breakthrough about the nature of spiritual reality.

 

When he said in so many words that the first human souls might have come to Earth from elsewhere, started incarnating in pre-human bodies, and assisted in the creation of the human race as a fully intelligent species, my immediate reaction was to say, “Yes. This is one of the answers I’ve been looking for all my life.”


This was a purely instinctive reaction. The idea just seemed true and obvious when I read it at that particular time in my life. However, when I began thinking analytically about the subject, I realized that modern occult and psychic research provides a lot more evidence to support Goodman’s speculations than he presents in his book. The idea that spirits could cause genetic mutations in pre-humans that would help them evolve into true human beings is not nearly as implausible as it appears on the surface. During the last thirty years, many different occultists and parapsychologists have speculated that human beings might be able to manipulate genetic material psychokinetically at the sub-molecular level.


For example, this hypothesis has been in use for a number of years to explain those cases of psychic healing that involve regeneration of tissue and conversion of cancerous tissue back to normality. Enough cases of this type of psychic healing have been documented by medical experts to serve as proof beyond reasonable doubt for me and many other people. The idea that the mechanism involved in psychic healing might be psychokinetic manipulation of the DNA had occurred time long before, and I tended to accept it even though I couldn’t think of a way to prove it with evidence.


It is very easy to extend this concept to include genetic engineering by psychic means. If the DNA of cancerous cells can be manipulated by psychokinesis to turn them back into normal cells, then there is no reason why something similar can’t be done to germ cells to produce controlled mutations in the organism’s offspring. How people could do this without being consciously aware of it was not yet clear to me; but I had no doubt that psychic healing occurs, and I was aware that there is also evidence from other sources that psychic genetic manipulation exists.


There is evidence that domestic plants and animals undergo genetic mutation much more rapidly than wild stock, and that many of the new forms are those desired by the people who raise them. Materialistic scientists don’t want to speculate about why this is true, but their own literature makes it quite clear that it is. They keep on saying that the genetic diversity in domestic plants and animals was already present in the ancestral stock, and that all present forms were produced by selective breeding to bring out desired traits, or by hybridization between different species. They insist that actual mutations in domestic plants and animals are extremely rare and due to pure chance, but they also record the data to disprove this conclusion.


Just as there are major genetic differences between human beings and the most closely related lower primates, so also many common domestic plants are far different from their closest wild relatives. Some geneticists have admitted that the chromosome-structures of cotton, corn, and a number of other domestic plants have an artificial look to them, as if these important food crops had been created out of the wild stock by modern gene-splicing techniques.


When UFO investigators asserted that this is evidence that ancient astronauts visited Earth, these same scientists answered with a theory that’s actually no more probable. They postulated that this gene-splicing might have been caused when genetic material was transferred from one organism to another by viruses. Now, evidence has recently been discovered to support this idea on the mechanistic level, but the theory still doesn’t explain why a useless weed would turn into a corn plant useful for human food. Natural selection doesn’t account for it, because domestic corn isn’t even viable in the wild state: even the most primitive forms cultivated by the Amerindians have to be pollinated by hand.


My conclusion was that psychokinetic genetic manipulation might account for these and numerous other bodies of observed data that defy explanation by the materialistic scientists. For example, it might explain why the gene pool of the domestic dog is much more diverse than that of the timber wolf, which is assumed to be its wild ancestor. Does a wolf, with its two-inch erect ears, carry the genes for the six-inch drooping ears of a hound dog? Geneticists say it does, but they can’t offer proof. Personally, I think a mutation was involved.


In fact, I think mutations caused by psychokinetic genetic manipulation have occurred on a large scale right in my own lifetime. They involve domestic animals with short life cycles: cats, rats, mice, hamsters, rabbits, and many different species of birds. These species produce many generations of offspring in a comparatively short period of time, and can be observed changing quite radically. The hairless cats now appearing in cat shows are an example. So are flop-eared rabbits and common rats in sizes and colors never observed in the wild. Again the geneticists say the potential to produce all these new forms was present in the original stock, and again I doubt it very strongly.


Literally thousands of new varieties of vegetables, grains, flowers, trees, and other plants are developed in nurseries every year, and hundreds are put on the market. Many of these are so different from typical plants of their particular species that if botanists found them in the wild, they would be classified as new species. However, when the same botanists know that such plants were bred under cultivation from familiar stock, they insist that no genetic mutation was involved.


It was extrapolating from the ideas in the Wilson and Goodman books that brought me to the “Breaking point” in my understanding of spiritual reality. I started making the actual breakthrough by going into mediumistic trances and asking my spirit guides to clarify the half-formed ideas I’d been speculating about: the motivations behind the Copernican Compromise, the full story behind Goodman’s Interventionist theory of evolution, etc.


It quickly became obvious that the spirit-dictated answers I was receiving were part of a coherent whole of amazing complexity; but I had no idea at the start just how long it would take to receive the information, or just how controversial it would be. Actually, I’m sure I still haven’t received all of it, but Parts Two and Three of War in Heaven describe what I’ve learned so far.

 

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Chapter 9: The Breakthrough

Most of my writing in Part One has described intellectual research: how I read this and studied that, and how the conclusions I drew from what I learned affected my understanding of spiritual reality. If you read between the lines, you can also perceive the influence of the Invisible College guiding my working hypotheses along certain lines and leading me in directions my conscious will would never take because of prejudices and preconceptions.


However, the most important single factor that helped me to make the breakthrough in consciousness that led to the writing of War in Heaven has received little direct mention in the pages you’ve read so far, because it’s very difficult to describe in words. This is my development as a psychic and my relationship with my spirit guides.


Before I could write this book, I had to undergo years of hard work and personal ordeals to develop my psychic skills. The final phase of my preparation for the breakthrough began in 1982, when I started fighting major psychic battles with the spiritual beings I now call “Theocrats.” At the time, I had no idea what I was fighting: my spirit guides just told me to go to certain places and perform specific acts of ritual magic which would prepare me to take another step forward in my personal psychic development.


I’d undergone similar ordeals once or twice a year since the early Sixties, but this time the series of psychic battles lasted almost six months and brought me to the brink of insanity many times. When the psychic battles with external spiritual forces stopped for a while in the fall of 1982, I was severely shaken and burned out, and I rested for a few months.


In late March of 1983, my spirit guides told me it was time to take the next step in my development as a psychic. I started working sex and ritual magic for hours every day, grateful that the goal was personal development, not battles with evil spirits.

 

Within a couple of months I had forged a much stronger magical working relationship with my spirit guides, which allowed me to receive channeled messages more clearly than ever before. I also resumed my intellectual research into the nature of spiritual reality, and by July started to make a major breakthrough in consciousness. One of the first things the Invisible College told me when I started receiving their messages was that I should write a book based on this material. I started a first draft almost immediately, and worked on it whenever I wasn’t in trance getting more information.


Two years later, I had completed five different typewritten versions of the book, each about 100,000 words long. Each was essentially a new first draft rather than a close rewrite of the previous one, because of the large amounts of new material I was constantly receiving from the spirits. All these drafts were chaotically organized and very difficult to read. The text itself was a mixture of spirit-dictated passages and material I wrote in a normal state of consciousness to elaborate the spirit-dictation with background information and supportive evidence.


My worst problem at this time was the poor literary quality of the material that I had received by automatic writing. Much of it resembled an over-literal translation into English from a foreign language with a very different syntax. I was amazed at how sophisticated and explicit the raw information was, but I had to rewrite each passage extensively to make it comprehensible to others.


In the fall of 1985, I started a sixth draft, which wasn’t intended to include much new spirit-dictated material. Instead, I tried to extract all the valuable information from the previous drafts and reorganize it into a coherent book. The general plan of organization was the same as the one in this book: Part One described the evolution of my own spiritual knowledge during the years preceding the breakthrough, and provided the reader with background information to make the spirit-dictated material in the rest of the book easier to understand.


By June of 1986, I’d completed Part One in roughly the same form as the version you’ve just read, using a personal computer I’d just acquired. At that time, my spirit guides said they didn’t want me to rewrite Part Two by extracting the essential elements of spirit-dictated information from the earlier versions and putting it into my own words. Instead, they wanted to dictate the whole thing again, from beginning to end.


This time, the material I received by automatic writing came through in reasonably good English: working directly on a computer keyboard seemed to bring in the telepathic signals much more clearly than working on a typewriter. I recorded the channeled messages as a dialog with my spirit guides, but this format is slightly deceptive: the spirits actually telepathically dictated virtually every word of both the questions and the answers.

 

Trance work of this type is grueling labor, and it took until November 1986 to complete Part Two. I spent the next few months revising and polishing what I’d written up to that point.


On January 23rd, 1987, I received an extremely coherent piece of spirit dictation that I used as the Foreword when I published the book under the title of Spiritual Revolution a couple of months later.

 

My spirit guides have since dictated a slightly different version of this, which I insert here:

This is a message to the people of Earth, from spirits now residing on your astral plane. We have spent our past lives on worlds with technological civilizations much more advanced than yours. Hundreds of thousands of us have been sent here deliberately by our governments to assist you in fighting a war to liberate yourselves from Theocracy, a form of oppression and exploitation that has existed throughout your history.


When we are on Earth’s astral plane, we work with a political organization of spirits that some of your occult literature calls the Invisible College. After spending a few years as disembodied spirits, we are forced to incarnate on your planet and lose most of the memories we brought with us.


Most of us retain some vestigial memories of our past lives on other worlds through our first few physical lives on Earth, but these memories are gradually lost through repeated reincarnations. Our incarnated agents, and many native Earth people as well, can learn to communicate with us telepathically on a completely conscious level if they receive proper psychic training. And any human being can receive telepathic messages from us subconsciously.


We want to state right at the beginning that we are ordinary people, not fundamentally different from you. Some of us have lived on other worlds in bodies much like your own, others in bodies that would appear very alien in external appearance, though based on the same basic genetic code. In all cases, our souls are capable of incarnating in human bodies; we couldn’t survive here for long if they weren’t.


We are not innately superior to Earth people in intelligence, morality, or any other quality. However, our knowledge and behavior may give this illusion because they were learned in cultures that are far superior to yours.


Some of us who come to your planet possess advanced knowledge in many different fields: ethics, politics, and economics, as well as natural science and physical technology. We also have scientific knowledge about those aspects of the universe you call “spiritual” and “psychic.”


These phenomena are no more “supernatural ” than the purely physical phenomena your scientists are beginning to understand quite well. The civilizations we come from know as much or more about the composition and behavior of the soul and other spiritual phenomena as you know about the atomic theory that forms the basis for your sciences of physics and chemistry.


Advanced societies generate psychic energy mechanically as you generate various forms of electromagnetic energy, and can produce changes in “astral matter” as you can produce physical and chemical changes in ordinary matter. This technology was used to send us here; but we come only as disembodied spirits, and are not able to bring with us any of the physical equipment we normally use to generate and control psychic energy or shape astral matter.


When your civilization first started to develop rapidly toward a high level of physical technology, we came to a political decision to intervene, for our sake as well as yours. This happened back in the late Medieval Era, and there has been an Invisible College manipulating the development of human civilization on Earth ever since, operating under our leadership and guidance.


Our motives in doing this are both altruistic and selfish. If we had not intervened, the human race on Earth would have evolved in directions that posed a serious threat to our own worlds and space colonies. So we are fighting a “preventive war” in our own behalf, but we also feel the overwhelming majority of Earth people will support our cause once we are able to explain the situation fully.


Until the last few decades, we have been fighting the Theocrats mostly by indirect means, using our superior social and political knowledge to raise the level of civilization on Earth in constructive ways. Practically everything that’s commonly considered good about modern Western civilization is the product of our clandestine manipulations.


How do we operate? Mostly by influencing the subconscious minds of Earth people telepathically. We also work through people with conscious control of their telepathic powers when we want to communicate large amounts of explicit information, but the majority of our work has always been done without the conscious knowledge or consent of the people involved.


Now, it will be very easy for you to say this is unethical. On one level, we agree. On another, well, we are the ones who taught you philosophical concepts like “The greatest good for the greatest number,” and “The end often justifies the means.” We’re at war here, and we’re fighting on your behalf as well as our own.

 

Concepts such as “human dignity and rights,” ”individual sovereignty,” “social justice,” “the consent of the governed,” and “equality of opportunity” aren’t just philosophical abstractions to us: we come from civilizations that actually practice them. We have no choice, because we possess a physical and psychic technology that would totally eliminate individuality if we didn’t also have sufficient social, political, and ethical knowledge to keep the technology under control


Our societies are forced to live with this threat, as yours must presently live with the threat of nuclear war; and as your own technological level increases, you will have to learn to live with it, too. However, this is not the greatest danger you face in the next few decades. Theocracy and your exploding population are going to cause a spiritual cataclysm that will destroy the human race as it now exists and threaten our own civilizations if it goes unchecked.


We will probably be able to avert catastrophe and guide these upheavals in constructive directions, but the fate of many Earth people will still depend on their own actions. These messages about the War in Heaven are intended to help you prepare yourselves. First we will give you the basic facts about Theocracy, then we will describe the spiritual upheavals to come.

At the time I received this message, the Invisible College urged me to rush the book to completion and to get a self-published edition into circulation immediately to get reader feedback. I started circulating Spiritual Revolution in March of 1987, advertising it mostly in publications read by people already familiar with some of the material covered in the book: occultists, Pagans, New Agers, unexplained-phenomena and conspiracy researchers, and members of the musical and literary underground. A few hundred of these people read the book, and about half wrote letters of comment.


My original intention was to use the readers’ criticism of the pre-publication edition to correct minor errors and omissions in the text, and then put the first edition on the market while I worked on a sequel. Simultaneously, I intended to publish selections from the letters of comment and my replies in a separate book or magazine, in hopes of starting a subgroup of the underground press devoted to discussing Spiritual Revolutionary subjects. However, the reader’ reaction to SR made me change my mind. I needed to rewrite the book completely, because most readers with inside knowledge of the subject realized that I wasn’t telling all I knew.


Here is a summary in my own words of the average reaction of insiders to Spiritual Revolution:

“Your thesis is probably true as far as it goes, but I can’t personally accept the narrow mechanistic concept of the nature of spiritual reality that underlies it. I believe there is evidence that superhuman spiritual beings, both good ones and evil ones, actually exist, and that your description of the astral plane is not all there is to the spirit world. You deal quite adequately with religious mind control and the effects of religious and occult conspiracies on the course of history, but these are not the only forces that affect human destiny.


“What about mind control through the electronic media? What about the concept that human beings have a god-like higher self? What about the Gaia hypothesis, which says the Earth is a living, intelligent entity? What about the conflict between physical technology, which you seem to support wholeheartedly, and ecological concern for the Earth’s biosphere, which is already being seriously threatened by our present industrial civilization? What about the fact that Western civilization is a privileged elite, surrounded by a Third World that’s just a ticking population bomb, ready to explode?


“Your book is valuable as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It’s bad enough that you contradict every traditional occult and religious cosmology, every major book on spiritual subjects, and most of the other channeled messages now being received; but at least your mechanistic, non-mystical cosmology is logical and there seems to be some evidence to support it. However, you’ve left major questions unanswered, and the book as a whole falls short of your stated goal of providing the key to understanding the nature of spiritual reality.”

The plain truth is that I had already been fully aware that Spiritual Revolution was incomplete and over-simplified. When had I prepared the manuscript for publication, I had removed the answers to many of the questions and objections cited above, simply because my Spirit Guides had asked me to. They thought at the time that oversimplifying the book’s thesis would make it easier for people to understand and accept.


The Invisible College also wanted to find out how many people with reasonably high-level psychic skills and spiritual knowledge would use the over-simplification to make the same breakthrough I have made, and if they did, how they would react. And especially, the extraterrestrial spirits wanted to “draw fire” from the enemy. And in fact, Theocratic spirits did mount direct psychic attacks against my spirits guides, but they managed to survive.


Part Two describes the basic facts about Theocracy, building on the material discussed in Part One. Part Three will carry the story even further, presenting cosmological information not even hinted at in Spiritual Revolution.
 

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