Ascensions and synchronicities

In the past week I've experienced a couple of strange synchronicities.  In the first, I was talking with a friend about the strange Swedish musical instrument called the nyckelharpa -- it's sort of the unholy offspring of a fiddle and a typewriter -- and only a couple of hours later, a (different) friend sent me a link to a video of two women playing a nyckelharpa duet.

The second occurred just two days ago.  A post I saw about conspiracy theories brought to mind the be-all-end-all conspiracy theory novel, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.  In particular what I'd read reminded me of the character of Agliè, who said he was the Comte de Saint Germain -- a strange figure from French history who claimed to be immortal.  (If you want to know more about this curious fellow, I did a post on him back in 2023.)  Then, later that day, I was on the way back home from helping out my wife at her art show in Rochester, and I was listening to the wonderful radio show This American Life -- and I caught the tail end of a story about, you guessed it, the Comte de Saint Germain.

The Comte de Saint Germain by Nicolas Thomas (1783) [Image is in the Public Domain]

I'm dubious that these kinds of synchronicities Mean Anything.  If it's a message from the Powers That Be, it's a pretty fucking obscure one.  And if this is some kind of Glitch in the Matrix -- well, I'm a little baffled as to why the Matrix works fine in most respects, but struggles with nyckelharpas and the Comte de Saint Germain.  Me, I think this is likely to be nothing more than dart-thrower's bias -- our tendency to notice (and give undue weight to) oddities and outliers, and ignore all the random background noise that fills our daily lives.

After all, yesterday I was thinking about King Louis IX of France (research for my current novel), and no one later on said to me, "So, how about old King Louis IX of France, amirite?"  Most of the random stuff that occurs in our heads never gets weirdly repeated, so we simply forget about it.  But strange, rapid-fire repetitions?  Those we notice.

In any case, the bit of the story I heard from This American Life seemed to indicate that there was some kind of odd connection between the Comte de Saint Germain and Mount Shasta, in northern California, which was new to me, so I thought I'd look into it.

And holy shit.  This stuff makes Glitches in the Matrix sound like hard-edged science.

You ready?

In 1930, an American mining engineer named Guy Ballard was hiking on Mount Shasta, and had an encounter with a young man.  Here's how Ballard himself described it:

It came time for lunch, and I sought a mountain spring for clear, cold water.  Cup in hand, I bent down to fill it, when an electrical current passed through my body from head to foot.

I looked around, and directly behind me stood a young man who, at first glance, seemed to be someone on a hike like myself.  I looked more closely and realized immediately that he was no ordinary person.  As this thought passed through my mind, he smiled and addressed me saying:

"My Brother, if you will hand me your cup, I will give you a much more refreshing drink than spring water."  I obeyed, and instantly the cup was filled with a creamy liquid.  Handing it back to me, he said: "Drink it."

So he did.  At this point, the young man identified himself as the Comte de Saint Germain, who was an "Ascended Master."  He appointed Ballard and Ballard's wife and son, Edna and Edona, as the "sole accredited messengers" responsible for bringing Saint Germain's teachings to the world.

The result was what is called the "I AM" Activity (later called the Saint Germain Foundation), which attracted tens of thousands of faithful adherents despite stuff like Ballard claiming that in previous lives he'd been Richard the Lionheart and George Washington, and Edna (not to be outdone) saying she'd been Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I of England, and Benjamin Franklin.  They published a couple dozen books, including Unveiled Mysteries and The Magic Presence, before Ballard's death in 1939.

You have to wonder who he was reincarnated as this time.  My guess is Deepak Chopra.

Anyhow, what appears in Ballard's teachings is really nothing more than a rehash of stuff from early twentieth century Theosophy and other occult philosophies, although it is notable that Ballard et al. make the unusual claim that the books they published weren't written by him, but dictated to him (or through him) by other historical figures.  For example, one of them, Comte de Gabalis, he said was written by Francis Bacon. 

What strikes me about all this -- and, in fact, I have the same objection to most "revealed knowledge" -- is that it hardly ever tells us anything we didn't already know.  A lot of it is usually well-intentioned advice (of the "we need to be loving and kind to each other" sort), a lot of it is stuff about famous people who are allegedly now Celestial Guides or whatnot, and almost none of it is anything that would count as a scientific revelation.  I mean, Ballard was working back in the 1930s, so just think of what an Ascended Master could have told him about discoveries which were at that point still in the future -- the nature of DNA and its role in genetics, the plate tectonic model, where to find evidence to confirm the Big Bang, how to make an interstellar warp drive, or even practical stuff like how to make antibiotics and do gene therapy to cure human diseases.

You'd think that Ascended Masters would be eager to give us critical information, instead of vague pronouncements that impress a handful of people for a while and then leave the world pretty much loping along as it always did.

Because that, honestly, is what happened to the Saint Germain Foundation.  After Ballard's death his wife Edna took over; she saw it through the pivotal moment of July 1, 1956, when the Age of Aquarius officially started, at which point Jesus retired as Grand Ascended Master and the Comte de Saint Germain took over (I swear I'm not making this up).  Edna died in February of 1971, but her death wasn't reported publicly for months because -- direct quote -- "The movement doesn't believe in death."  It still maintains a temple in downtown Chicago and presents an annual pageant on Mount Shasta every August, but the number of true adherents worldwide apparently only amounts to a few thousand total.

In any case, I find all this curious, but more because of what it tells us about human psychology and our desire to find meaning than any kind of big revelations about the cosmos and how it works.  As far as synchronicities go, I'm still inclined to attribute them to dart-thrower's bias.  On the other hand, we'll see if the universe decides to teach me a lesson.  If I start seeing random references to King Louis IX of France showing up in unexpected places, I may have to eat my words.

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Mystic mountain

The brilliant composer Alan Hovhaness's haunting second symphony is called Mysterious Mountain -- named, he said, because "mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man's attempt to know God."  Having spent a lot of time in my twenties and thirties hiking in Washington State's Olympic and Cascade Ranges, I can attest to the fact that there's something otherworldly about the high peaks.  Subject to rapid and extreme weather changes, deep snowfall in the winter, and -- in some places -- having terrain so steep that no human has ever set foot there, it's no real wonder our ancestors revered mountains as the abode of the gods.

Hovhaness's symphony -- which I'm listening to as I write this -- captures that beautifully.  And consider how many stories of the fantastical are set in the mountains.  From Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth to Tolkien's Misty Mountains and Mines of Moria, the wild highlands (and what's beneath them) have a permanent place in our imagination.

Certain mountains have accrued, usually by virtue of their size, scale, or placement, more than the usual amount of awe.  Everest (of course), Denali, Mount Olympus, Vesuvius, Etna, Fujiyama, Mount Rainier, Kilimanjaro, Mount Shasta.  The last-mentioned has so many legends attached to it that the subject has its own Wikipedia page.  But none of the tales centering on Shasta has raised as many eyebrows amongst the modern aficionados of the paranormal as the strange story of J. C. Brown.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michael Zanger, Sunrise on Mount Shasta, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Brown was a British prospector, who in the early part of the twentieth century had been hired by the Lord Cowdray Mining Company of England to look for gold and other precious metals in northern California, which at the time was thousands of square miles of trackless and forested wilderness.  In 1904, Brown said, he was hiking on Mount Shasta, and discovered a cave.  Caves in the Cascades -- many of them lava tubes -- are not uncommon; two of my novels, Signal to Noise and Kill Switch (the latter is out of print, but hopefully will be back soon), feature unsuspecting people making discoveries in caves in the Cascades, near the Three Sisters and Mount Stuart, respectively.

Brown's cave, though, was different -- or so he said.  It was eleven miles long, and led into three chambers containing a king's ransom of gold, as well as 27 skeletons that looked human but were as much as three and a half meters tall.

Brown tried to drum up some interest in his story, but most people scoffed.  He apparently frequented bars in Sacramento and "told anyone who would listen."  But then a different crowd got involved, and suddenly he found his tale falling on receptive ears.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia might recall a post I did last year about Lemuria, which is kind of the Indian Ocean's answer to Atlantis.  Well, the occultists just loved Lemuria, especially the Skeptophilia frequent flyer Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy.  So in the 1920s, there was a sudden interest in vanished continents, as well as speculation about where all the inhabitants had gone when their homes sank beneath the waves.  ("They all drowned" was apparently not an acceptable answer.)

And one group said the Lemurians, who were quasi-angelic beings of huge stature and great intelligence, had vanished into underground lairs beneath the mountains.

In 1931, noted wingnut and prominent Rosicrucian -- but I repeat myself -- Harvey Spencer Lewis, using the pseudonym Wishar S[penley] Cerve (get it?  It's an anagram, sneaky sneaky), published a book called Lemuria, The Lost Continent of the Pacific (yes, I know Lemuria was supposed to be in the Indian Ocean; we haven't cared about facts so far, so why start now?) in which he claimed that the main home of the displaced Lemurians was a cave complex underneath Mount Shasta.  J. C. Brown read about this and said, more or less, "See?  I toldja so!"

And, astonishingly, people didn't think to ask (1) why no one had seen any Lemurians until now, and (2) why, if there was a cave with jewels and gold underneath the mountain, Brown hadn't gone back to get some of the goodies himself in the intervening almost-three decades.  Instead, they were like, "Hell yeah!  Sign me up!", and before you knew it Brown had eighty people volunteering to help him go back to his cave, which he said he could relocate with no difficulty.

There was a six-week planning period during which the volunteers got outfitted and prepared.  An interesting point here -- the relevance of which will become clear in a moment -- is that no one gave Brown any money; he'd made it clear he couldn't afford to equip anyone, so people were responsible for their own gear, lodging, food, and so on.  He was apparently enthusiastic that finally, finally, someone was listening to him, and he'd have a chance to go back to Shasta and prove all the scoffers wrong.

Then the day of the expedition arrived -- and Brown failed to show.

He was never seen or heard from again.

The June 19, 1934 front page of the Stockton Evening and Sunday Record [Image is in the Public Domain]

People seemed more concerned than miffed at Brown's disappearance.  Since, as I mentioned, Brown himself hadn't profited from the lead-up to the planned trek, there were no accusations that he'd swindled anyone.  A police report was filed, a search initiated -- but no trace of Brown was ever found.  It was as if he'd suddenly evaporated.

The superstitious speculated that the Lemurians (or their human agents) had done away with Brown because he was the only one who knew where the entrance to the cave was, and had to be stopped before he gave away the game.  The more pragmatic said that Brown had successfully painted himself into a corner with his tall tales, and couldn't face leading eighty people into the wilderness only to find bupkis.  The truth is, we don't know what happened to him, although being someone who generally casts a suspicious side-eye at claims of the supernatural, I'm a lot more likely to give credence to the latter than the former.  

I have to say, though, that it's pretty odd that the guy had hung around the area for thirty years saying, "You've got to come see this crazy cave I found!  It's amazing!  I'll show it to you!" and then when people finally said, "Okay," he noped his way right into the ether.

And weird stories about Mount Shasta and the Lemurians continue, lo unto this very day; it's no surprise that the main "power center" of the August 17, 1987 Harmonic Convergence, during which the planets were supposed to align and cause a "resonance" which would cause "a great shift in the earth’s energy from warlike to peaceful," was on Mount Shasta.

It's even less surprising that ever since August 18, 1987, people have gone on killing each other just like before.

So that's our strange tale for the day.  Now that Hovhaness's Mysterious Mountain is finishing up, I might cue up Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony, and Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lake in the Mountains.  May as well keep the theme going for a while.

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Bats in the belfry

Over at the site Pararational a while back an article appeared describing a cryptid I'd never heard of.  Huge, brawny, with pointed ears and enormous, leathery wings, this character haunts the forests of the Pacific Northwest. As if they didn't already have enough problems with their Sasquatch infestation.

And despite living for ten years in Seattle, I'd never heard of him. So, dear readers, meet...

... Batsquatch.

The first thing I notice, being a biologist, is that Batsquatch seems to have no... equipment.  If you get my drift.   Above the waist, he's built like a bodybuilder, and below the waist he's built like a Ken doll.  So you have to wonder how there'd be more than one of them.  Maybe they reproduce from spores, or something, I dunno.

The other thing is that he's got kind of a small head in comparison to his body, and a rather derpish expression.  Low cranial capacity, you know?  A knuckle-dragger type.  The overall impression is of a demon from the redneck part of hell, where instead of stealing your soul, they just down a six-pack of Miller Lite and then take a baseball bat to your mailbox.

Beelzebubba, is kind of how I think of him.

Be that as it may, Batsquatch has apparently been seen a number of times, starting back in 1980, and has generated reports with some regularity since then. Here's one from 2009:

Me and my friend were hiking around Mt. Shasta and out of one of the crevices, flew out this big creature.  I mean this thing was huge.  It was as tall as a man, as stocky as Hulk Hogan and had leathery wings.  I believe the wing span was at least 50 feet from one end to the other. I was holding up my camera, but was paralyzed with fear as this thing flew by. I didn’t get a picture, sorry.  What do you think this might be?  Could it have been a pterodactyl?  It was flying or gliding fast, it seemed to have a head of a bat.  Thinking about it, it doesn’t have the head of a pterodactyl, I just saw a picture of a pterodactyl and the heads are not similar.   I would think it had the head of a bat or maybe more like a fox.  The damn thing finally flew into a clump of trees and vanished.  I heard you guys might be going back to Mt. Shasta, if you do, please look out for this thing.  If you see it, you will piss all over yourself, I kid you not.

Well, yeah, I guess that'd be a natural enough reaction to seeing Hulk Hogan with fifty-foot wings.

Then, we're told of several "fake" reports of Batsquatch.  I'm not entirely sure how one vague story with no proof differs from another vague story with no proof, but the author of the website says that some of the accounts are real and some are not, so there you are.

Because the fact remains that there isn't a scrap of hard evidence that Batsquatch exists, just a lot of anecdotal reports and a sketch of a sketch.  That didn't stop the folks over at Pararational from coming up with what may be the all-time silliest explanation for a cryptid sighting that I've ever read:

(Perhaps) Batsquatch is an extra-dimensional creature that dropped through a rift and got stuck here.  If the first sighting really was in close proximity to the Mt. St. Helens eruption, it seems probably that the force of the blast may have ruptured time/space allowing something to get sucked through.  In that case, it may have flown around for a while and died in some remote location, or else found a way home.

Because, of course, "rupturing space-time" is what happens when a volcano erupts.  Probably also happens during earthquakes, thunderstorms, and early cold snaps.  You know how fragile space-time is, at least if Star Trek: The Next Generation is to be believed.

So anyway.  If you're in the Northwest, look out for Batsquatch.  Given how big he supposedly is, I don't see how you could miss him, frankly.  If you see him, maybe he won't hurt you if you offer him a Miller Lite.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one: acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way: A New Look at how Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think.

It's been known for some years that a lot of birds are a great deal more intelligent than we'd thought.  Crows and other corvids are capable of reasoning and problem-solving, and actually play, seemingly for no reason other than "it's fun."  Parrots are capable of learning language and simple categorization.  A group of birds called babblers understand reciprocity -- and females are attracted to males who share their food the most ostentatiously.

So "bird brain" should actually be a compliment.

Here, Ackerman looks at the hugely diverse world of birds and gives us fascinating information about all facets of their behavior -- not only the "positive" ones (to put an human-based judgment on it) but "negative" ones like deception, manipulating, and cheating.  The result is one of the best science books I've read in recent years, written in Ackerman's signature sparkling prose.  Birder or not, this is a must-read for anyone with more than a passing interest in biology or animal behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Bats in the belfry

Over at the site Pararational a couple of days ago an article appeared describing a cryptid I'd never heard of.  Huge, brawny, with pointed ears and enormous, leathery wings, this character haunts the forests of the Pacific Northwest.  As if they didn't already have enough problems with their Sasquatch infestation.

And despite living for ten years in Seattle, I'd never heard of him.  So, dear readers, meet...

... Batsquatch.

The first thing I notice, being a biologist, is that Batsquatch seems to have no... equipment.  If you get my drift.  Above the waist, he's built like a bodybuilder, and below the waist he's built like a Ken doll.  So you have to wonder how there'd be more than one of them.   Maybe they reproduce from spores, or something.

The other thing is that he's got kind of a small head in comparison to his body, and a rather derpish expression.  Low cranial capacity, you know?  A knuckle-dragger type.  The overall impression is of a demon from the redneck part of hell, where instead of stealing your soul, they just down a six-pack of Miller Lite and then take a baseball bat to your mailbox.

Beelzebubba, is kind of how I think of him.

Be that as it may, Batsquatch has apparently been seen a number of times, starting back in 1980, and has generated reports with some regularity since then.  Here's one from 2009:

Me and my friend were hiking around Mt. Shasta and out of one of the crevices, flew out this big creature.  I mean this thing was huge. It was as tall as a man, as stocky as Hulk Hogan and had leathery wings.  I believe the wing span was at least 50 feet from one end to the other.  I was holding up my camera, but was paralyzed with fear as this thing flew by.  I didn’t get a picture, sorry.  What do you think this might be?  Could it have been a pterodactyl?  It was flying or gliding fast, it seemed to have a head of a bat.  Thinking about it, it doesn’t have the head of a pterodactyl, I just saw a picture of a pterodactyl and the heads are not similar.  I would think it had the head of a bat or maybe more like a fox.  The damn thing finally flew into a clump of trees and vanished.  I heard you guys might be going back to Mt. Shasta, if you do, please look out for this thing.  If you see it, you will piss all over yourself, I kid you not.

Well, yeah, I guess that'd be a natural enough reaction to seeing Hulk Hogan with fifty-foot wings.

Then, we're told of several "fake" reports of Batsquatch.  I'm not entirely sure how one vague story with no proof differs from another vague story with no proof, but the author of the website says that some of the accounts are real and some are not, so there you are.

Because the fact remains that there isn't a scrap of hard evidence that Batsquatch exists, just a lot of anecdotal reports and a sketch of a sketch.  That didn't stop the folks over at Pararational from coming up with what may be the all-time silliest explanation for a cryptid sighting that I've ever read:

(Perhaps) Batsquatch is an extra-dimensional creature that dropped through a rift and got stuck here.  If the first sighting really was in close proximity to the Mt. St. Helens eruption, it seems probably that the force of the blast may have ruptured time/space allowing something to get sucked through.  In that case, it may have flown around for a while and died in some remote location, or else found a way home.

Because, of course, "rupturing space-time" is what happens when a volcano erupts.  Probably also happens during earthquakes, thunderstorms, and early cold snaps.  You know how fragile space-time is, at least if Star Trek: The Next Generation is to be believed.

So anyway.  If you're in the Northwest, look out for Batsquatch.  Given how big he supposedly is, I don't see how you could miss him, frankly.  If you see him, maybe he won't hurt you if you offer him a Miller Lite.