The Blood Rose Cabal is a work in progress that we hope will never see completion. Like a shark swimming, I suppose. If we stop, we die. Therefore, momentum is necessary and to gain that momentum we need to actually be as dynamic as we claim to be, an ad-hoc movement of mystery schools, capisce? But how is that expected to work if this Invisible College is purely hypothetical? The public response has been excitement, yes, but no one has yet thought to ask, “How exactly does this work? What are we expected to do? What does this militant response to reactionaries look like?” Well, I’m asking it now, purely rhetorical, because I’m going to tell you.
During our long period of courtship, Frater Alastor and I discovered that we were both quite taken with the works of a writer named David Southwell. David is probably best-known for his writing on conspiracy theory stemming from the pre-Trump era when it still had an air of adventure to it. But to us, both of whom had never actually read David’s conspiracy books, David was defined by a corpus operis known as Hookland.
Hookland is hard to communicate in short-order, so I’ll let David explain himself more fully. For the purposes of this article I will simply say that Hookland is more a concept than a place. In David’s mind, as well as his readers’, Hookland is a memory of England that never was, but where nothing is made up. It is a celebration of the weirdness that lies around the places that we live. If the bricks in a brick wall are our cities, towns, and neighborhoods, Hookland is the mortar between the bricks which holds the wall together. Hookland is the strange roots of a place that we all experience in one way or another but being that the roots lie under the places we live, Hookland becomes easily dismissed by forces of materialism who wish to instead focus on the monetary value of that place rather than the circuits of it that connects us to it. Though, David’s Hookland is specifically geared toward the place he knows best, England, in a way, Hookland is everywhere and this eventually led to Alastor and I getting offline and meeting up in person for the first time. If Epping Forest is where England buries its secrets, then the closest approximation of this to the two of us was the strange patch of Massachusetts known as The Bridgewater Triangle.
The details of our trip are unremarkable. We saw no thunderbird, nor phantom, nor black helicopter but an electrifying excitement arose between the two of us. David uses a phrase which Alastor and I have since shamelessly lifted and injected into our own work: Ghost Soil. The parts of The Triangle which we explored were thick with it. Ghost Soil is the sedimentary rot of legends since forgotten, remembered, and then forgotten again, generation after generation. It’s a sort of folklore compost, rich in fertile elements, soaked in writhing spirits yearning to be free. All you have to do to free them is break the thin layer of earth and turn it over.
This led to conversations about our childhoods and a mutual feeling of being robbed as adults. He talked about a decades-long UFO flap and miles of tunnels which spread in every direction around his hometown and how badly he wants to explore them. I talked about the weird spots around Providence that inspired H.P. Lovecraft and the weird stone altars I’d find while stomping around in the woods near Narragansett where my family would spend our summers. We spend literally years of our lives cultivating rich imagination landscapes, embodying homemade hero archetypes, and bridging the divide between our dreamscapes and waking lives. It was a time of possibility and magic. But then we crossed a threshold without realizing it and we traded it all in for dross. There is no room for dreams in the life of a working person. In Alastor’s case, someone who should have known better told him that he’d be too poor to live if he chased his dreams of creativity. Thinking about it now, you always hear these trite commands, “Follow your passion and you’ll never work a day in your life,” But who is telling you this? Rich people who don’t have to worry about anything! Their passion is making money and stowing it away so no one else can have it. 99% of the world kills their dreams just to survive and the world reflects this! Everything is dying around us.
But what if we said no? What if we refused this mandate? What if we instead put a fork in the ghost soil beneath our feet and turned it over? What if we set the genius loci free? Most importantly, what if we dedicated ourselves to this as a magical act of ontological rebellion?
What followed was thousands of words in text message and Discord chats of theory about why anyone would want to do that and I feel that Alastor has covered that nicely in the foreword to his book. But a problem arose. What would that actually look like?
In many cases, you can take a ghost tour or buy a book about the folklore of your community. By all means, celebrate these historical facts. But what if we took another page from the Hookland Guide? What if we simply made things up? This took form in our earliest attempt to put ourselves out there and get something rolling and it was met with approximately zero interest. It didn’t help that our idea was half-baked at best and met with confusion from the people we hoped would help us sell our grift but it was something, at least.
My idea was to build a device that looked suitably spooky. It would have a speaker in it and some other electronic and mechanical knick-knacks. This would finally be the thing that took advantage of my electrical engineering degree and satisfy Alastor’s desire to build strange devices. We would then take it out in public, claiming that we had discovered the mythical brown note and demonstrate it before a crowd of participants willing to risk poo in their pants for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We would do what The Butthole Surfers could not! Diapers accommodating all sizes would be available at the venue, Boston Common. We advertised on Facebook, posted the link in paranoid MAGA groups from bogus “patriot” accounts, warning that a satanic cult was planning on doing something nefarious and then to top it off, we took pictures of the machine’s guts and sent them to the Infowars whistleblower inbox with a story about how this device was advertised as a piece of performance art gimmickry but was instead supposed to activate a listener nano-machine in Covid vaccines and unleash hell on the vaccinated. Alex Jones was right all along! Caveat: If you find this sort of gag problematic, now might be the time to bail out. 128 requires, at the very least, a sense of humor not all possess and a magnetism toward discord.
Unfortunately, no one took the bait. The people least capable of critical thought could not be bothered. Not even the notoriously gullible Infowars staff. Sadness ensued, but that simply told us that we needed to think a little smaller and get better at selling the circus. And we intend to do this with aplomb!
Just recently, while reading a book about some of the strange events that took place in the life of Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, I came upon a strange story about how, while on death row, he petitioned a composer to write a requiem to be played during his execution. That composer is a man named David Woodard, a writer of particularly bizarre character. Woodard acknowledged McVeigh’s atrocity but also acknowledged that a dying man is a dying man and granted his dying wish. I don’t know what that music sounded like but the discovery of this unusual character led me to one of his projects, The Feraliminal Lycanthropizer. Reading through the pamphlet I was struck by how compatible he was with Current 128.
The device was similar in purpose to the aforementioned Brown Note device but instead of forcing you to drop a deuce in your shorts, it used several frequencies of sound to induce an altered state of consciousness in the listener bent toward a more animalistic state of mind, hence Feraliminal Lycanthropizer. According to the rather austere wikipedia article about it, mirthless skeptics were quick to point out that this is all nonsense and would not work, but these people miss the point. Of course it doesn’t work. The linked scan of the pamphlet is a document of a purely speculative device meant to inspire the reader to consider a world in which this device is real. It is a piece of post-modern folklore, creepypasta by some estimations. Our imaginations end up dying on the vine unless we engage them with bizarre, fantastic, and sometimes threatening musings on what could be.
Just before the internet came along and ruined everything a writer named Joseph Metheny created an ambitious piece of media which supposed that a clandestine coven of rogue scientists built a device in a lab secreted away in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. This device allowed them to cross through to other dimensions and land in alternate Earths, some of which were unpopulated. It was a piece of fiction with numerous qualities that stepped off the written page and into our waking world. So effective was this that when the internet did come along and ruin everything, Metheny completely lost control of his media and to this very day, people believe that it is a document of something real, harassing him constantly.
People want this. They want fiction to be reality. They want a little danger in their lives and if this be the age of monsters, we will give them monsters. Whatever it takes to slap them in the face and look up from their phones and tablets long enough to realize that possibility is alive and well. What we think becomes real through magic and even if this device is functionally impossible, the mere belief and need for belief, will make it real in the lives of the people who experience it.
We will build The Feraliminal Lycanthropizer to spec. It will be a working device which follows the pamphlet’s description. We will announce this to a smaller community’s facebook and hype it endlessly. We will hype it to their wasteland Facebook groups, to the local papers, we will flyer with a wheat paste means that preserves them for decades. We will make an event out of it. We will promise wild things that we cannot possibly deliver and stage a one-night-only event that is stuffed with magic and weirdness. The key is that we are getting offline and offering something in a world you can experience with your senses. Online performance is meaningless and only feeds the Archons to the Internet’s Rex Mundi. You must operate in the real world and simply use the internet as a tool to spread the word.
From there, we will bring more weirdness and from here we will bring you more examples, theory, and inspiration. You are encouraged to do the same. You must be every bit the showman as you are a magician. Aleister Crowley would have died in obscurity like his contemporary, Mathers, had he not been the carnival barker that he was. No one is certain what happened to Mathers. People alive today think that Crowley orchestrated 9/11 from beyond the grave. Who would you rather be?
When you do inevitably begin a campaign applied high strangeness, we want to know about it. Make sure that you email the story and details to thebloodrose@protonmail.com.