The Oracular Voice

Started this last Friday, I have been wrestling with some problems with security. It seems we got hacked, (once more!) and I am trying to figure out security settings etc.
Meanwhile, The Invisible College On Line PDF magazine is finished editing, all I have to do is assemble the PDF file, and we will upload it, hopefully today.
For all of you out there with a penchant for new and adventurous exercises in journalism, art and fiction, the new Journey Book is out! Rak Razam’s & Tim Parish have really done it this time! I am doing distribution for them State Side, but put your orders in at the website. More info soon… This is a great adventure for our Australian friends!
We will keep you posted on what is coming up next like…. Videos/ TV & Radio Free EarthRites for mobile phones? Keep Ya Posted,
Brigth Blessings,

Gwyllm

On The Menu:

Hakim Bey – Peter Lamborn Wilson Quotes

Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor I – Introitus and Kyrie

The Hound of Mons

Robert Graves: The Oracular Voice

Morphine – Cure for Pain

Art: Waterhouse & Godward

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Hakim Bey – Peter Lamborn Wilson Quotes:

“Sorcery: the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results.”


“Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.”


“The Law waits for you to stumble on a mode of being, a soul different from the FDA-approved purple-stamped standard dead meat — & as soon as you begin to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you — so don’t play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr — accept the fact that you’re a criminal & be prepared to act like one.”


“Moloch merely shovels babies into the fire of productive capitalism. Mammon hooks them on the dead heroin of envy.” – Peter Lamborn Wilson


“In the late 18th or early 19th century a group of runaway slaves and serfs fled from Kentucky into the Ohio Territory, where they inter-married with Natives and formed a tribe – red, white & black – called the Ben Ishmael tribe. The Ishmaels (who seem to have been Islamically inclined) followed an annual nomadic route through the territory, hunting & fishing, and finding work as tinkers and minstrels. They were polygamists, and drank no alcohol. Every winter they returned to their original settlement, where a village had grown.
But eventually the US Govt. opened the Territory to settlement, and the ~official~ pioneers arrived. Around the Ishmael village a town began to spring up, called Cincinnati. Soon it was a big city. But Ishmael village was still there, engulfed & surrounded by “civilization.” Now it was a ~slum~.
Hasn’t something similar happened to the Internet? The original freedom-loving hackers & guerrilla informationists, the true pioneers of cyberspace, are still there. But they have been surrounded by a vastness of virtual “development,” and reduced to a kind of ghetto. True, for a while the slums remain colorful – one can go there for a “good time,” strum a banjo, spark up a romance. Folkways survive. One remembers the old days, the freedom to wander, the sense of openness. But History has gone… somewhere else. Capital has ~moved on~.
Incidentally, in the late 19th & early 20th century the Ishmaels were discovered by the Eugenics movement, which declared them to be racial mongrels & degenerates. The Ishmaels were targeted for extinction; those who did not flee & disappear were institutionalized or even sterilized. The old slum was cleared & built over, and the Ishmaels were forgotten.”


“Physical separateness can never be overcome by electronics, but only by “conviviality”, by “living together” in the most literal physical sense. The physically divided are also the conquered and the controlled. “True desires” – erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual – are best attained in a context of freedom of self and other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation.”

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Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor I – Introitus and Kyrie

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Blasts from the Past – The News that Time Forgot

The Hound of Mons

A strange horror story from the battlefields of World War I, when a terrible devil-dog was said to haunt the allied trenches.

By Theo Paijmans

(found at Fortean Times..)


Accounts of anomalous occurrences, tall tales and yarns, superstitions and rumours – all are born in the confusion and upheaval of every great conflict, and World War I was no exception. French linguist Albert Dauzat treats several fascinating legends that emerged from military conflicts, and lists a number of tales from WWI in his Légendes, Prophéties et Superstitions de la Guerre. In his book, published two years after the war, Dauzat recounts how he experienced a number of these legends firsthand, such as the rumoured arrival of large contingents of Russian troops: “At Pont-Audemer, a friend told me, during the whole of the Winter of 1914–1915, people believed in the disembarking of the Russians who had come from Arkhangelsk to Honfleur (situated less than 30km [or 19 miles] away), saying ‘I saw them as I saw you.’” Or the bombardment of Paris by the German railway guns, that spawned rumours of curious aerial phenomena: “The first day of the bombardment of Paris by the long distance guns, many persons… declared that they saw parachutes or red ball­oons descending from the air: a hallucination in certain cases that I have observed myself…” [1]
The best-known legend of WWI is undoubtedly that of the Angels of Mons. In connection with this, Dauzat writes of various aerial phenomena witnessed during time of war and tells of another near the end of the war: “In the first days of November 1918, at the moment when President Wilson and the German government were holding preliminary discussions concerning a cease-fire, the tale ran across the American front that a ‘white dove of peace’ had, on a clear day, circled the lines for more than an hour. It was an aeroplane, according to the testimony of a colonel and two majors: they even recalled certain less truthful details, which proved that they too were the victims of a mild form of suggestion. It was, they said, a completely white aeroplane, of a type unknown on the western front, not carrying an insignia of any kind, and, flying very high, it passed over the American trenches, then circled the German lines.” It did so for over an hour, then turned north and disappeared. [2]
This account and many others were quickly forgotten in the turmoil following the end of the bloody conflict. The legend of the Angels of Mons fared better; as late as 1934, various news­papers were publishing all kinds of explanations for the miracle, and it has been the subject of a recent scholarly study. [3] But apparently another, darker rumour hid in the shadows of Mons. The curious tale was published in 1919, but this time bears witness not to miraculous apparitions of angelic beings, but to the evil doings of an enorm­ous hound of hell during those terrible days at the front:

That weird legend of No Man’s Land, the gruesome epic of the ‘hound of Mons’, has, according to FJ Newhouse, a returned Canad­ian veteran, been vindicated throughout Europe as fact and not fiction. For four years civilian sceptics laughed at the soldiers’ tale of a giant, skulking hound, which stalked among the corpses and shell holes of No Man’s Land and dragged down British soldiers to their death. An apparition of fear-crazed minds, they said. But to the soldiers it was a reality and one of the most fearful things of the world war.
“The death of Dr Gottlieb Hochmuller in the recent Spartacan riots in Berlin”, said Capt. Newhouse, “has brought to light facts concerning the fiendish application of this German scientist’s skill that have astounded Europe. For the hound of Mons was not an accident, a phantom, or an halluc­ination – it was the deliberate result of one of the strangest and most repulsive scientific experiments the world has ever known.
Teeth Marks in Throats

What was the hound of Mons? According to the soldiers, the legend started in the terrible days of the defence of Mons. On the night of November 14, 1914, Capt. Yeskes and four men of the London Fusiliers entered No Man’s Land on a patrol. The last living trace of them was when they started into the darkness between the lines. Several days afterwards their dead bodies were found – just as they had been dragged down – with teeth marks at the throats.
Several nights later a weird, blood-curdling howl was heard from the darkness toward which the British trenches faced. It was the howl of the hound of Mons. From then on this phantom hound became the terror of the men who faced death by bullets with a smile. It was the old fear of the unknown.
Howl is Heard

Patrol after patrol, during two years of warfare, ventured out only to be found days later with the telltale marks at their throats. The ghastly howl continued to echo through No Man’s Land. Several times sentries declared that they saw a lean, grey wraith flit past the barbed wire – the form of a gigantic hound running silently. But civilian Europe always doubted the story.
Then after two years, while many brave men lost their lives with only those teeth marks at the throat to show, the hound of Mons disappeared. From then on the Germans never had another important success. “And now”, says Captain Newhouse, “secret papers have been taken from the residence of the late Dr Hochmuller which prove that the hound of Mons was a terrible living reality, a giant hound with the brain of a human madman”.
Hound Had Human Brain

Captain Newhouse says that the papers show that this hound was the only successful issue of a series of experiments by which Dr Hochmuller hoped to end the war in Germany’s favour. The scientist had gone about the wards of the German hospitals until he found a man gone mad as the result of his insane hatred of England. Hochmuller, with the sanction of the German government, operated upon him and removed his brain, taking in particular the parts which dominated hatred and frenzy.
At the same time a like operat­ion was performed on a giant Siberian wolfhound. Its brain was taken out and the brain of the madman inserted. By careful nursing the dog lived. The man was permitted to die. The dog rapidly grew stronger and, after careful training in fiendishness, was taken to the firing line and released in No Man’s Land. There for two years it became the terror of outposts and patrols. [4]

Could there possibly be any truth in this outrageous tale? There are a number of ways of interpreting it; leaving aside the fact that the surgical procedure described above is quite impossible, the story does resemble plenty of other spurious tales of alleged atrocit­ies committed by the German troops. While legends concerning the Allied forces usually show them as being saved by angelic beings or the Christ-like ‘Comrade in White’, those concerning the German army tend to concern completely unproven atrocities committed by ‘the Hun’. Most of these tales have since been proven to be nothing more than crude propaganda (even if the same can’t be said of the German army’s conduct in WWII).
Then there is the element of that fiendish doctor Gottlieb Hochmuller – of whose existence I have found no evidence – and his bizarre medical procedures, which echo the dark experiments of his fictional fellow countryman of some centuries before, Baron von Frankenstein.
The story of the Hound of Mons remains one of the strangest to come from the front, although there are plenty more weird rumours to be found, such as those concerning free-roaming bands of derelicts and deserters from both sides who turned cannibal and stalked the labyrinthine trenches of no-man’s land.
The sudden disappearance of the Hound of Mons in Newhouse’s account has elements of the fairy tale and the various legends of demon dogs and hell hounds. But perhaps a huge dog really did stalk the trenches; perhaps, abandoned by its master as Mons turned into a battlefield, it turned feral and, in its hunger, prowled the battlefield, giving rise to this strange story. I have never heard of the tale before; but scattered accounts and sightings of a huge dog at Mons might have given rise to this tale that was all but forgotten after the much more dramatic – and much more favourable – one of the Angels of Mons.
Newhouse’s tale can also be seen as the clever concoction of an enterprising journalist, or of the Canadian veteran himself, forming a variant of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of The Baskervilles; this story, published in 1902, is reportedly inspired by legends of a black hound on Dartmoor – or elsewhere in Britain. In this regard we also note that famous thriller writer Agatha Christie placed one of her supernatural short stories, The Hound of Death (1933), in Belgium during World War I. [5] It is a strange tale with decidedly Lovecraftian undertones (his story The Hound dates from 1922), and one in which Christie makes use of another legend of the Great War, that of German soldiers attempting to take over a convent during the invasion of Belgium. In her story, as soon as the soldiers enter the building it explodes, killing them all. Dauzat remarks in his book that French author Leon Bloy, who died in 1917, tells of an event allegedly having occurred in 1914, where German soldiers tried to enter a church in which was housed a miraculous statue. Its doors would not open, so the German officer commanded them to be blasted away by the cannons. All of a sudden, the doors opened by themselves, as if magically; but the German troops who prepare to enter the church all fall dead at the spot. Writes Dauzat: “Similar legends have been formed or created in Bavaria, in Austria and all through the Orient.” [6]

NOTES

1 Albert Dauzat: Légendes, Prophéties et Superstitions de la Guerre, la Renaissance Du Livre, 1920, pp30–31.
2 Ibid, pp231–232.
3 David Clarke: The Angel Of Mons, Wiley, 2004.
4 “American Wolf Hound With Brain of a Man Was Terror to No Man’s Land”, Evening News, Ada, Oklahoma, 11 Aug 1919.
5 Agatha Christie: The Hound of Death and Other Stories, Odhams Press, 1933.
6 op.cit., Dauzat, p118.

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The Oracular Voice: Robert Graves


IN BROKEN IMAGES
He is quick, thinking in clear images;

I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;

I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;

Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;

Questioning their relevance, I question their fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;

when the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;

I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;

I in a new understanding of my confusion.


SYMPTOMS OF LOVE
Love is universal migraine,

A bright stain on the vision

Blotting out reason.
Symptoms of true love

Are leanness, jealousy,

Laggard dawns;
Are omens and nightmares –

Listening for a knock,

Waiting for a sign:
For a touch of her fingers

In a darkened room,

For a searching look.
Take courage, lover!

Could you endure such pain

At any hand but hers?


ON GIVING
Those who dare give nothing

Are left with less than nothing;

Dear heart, you give me everything,

Which leaves you more than everything-

Though those who dare give nothing

Might judge it left you less than nothing.
Giving you everything,

I too, who once had nothing,

Am left with more than everything

As gifts for those with nothing

Who need, if not our everything,

At least a loving something.


TO BRING THE DEAD TO LIFE
To bring the dead to life

Is no great magic.

Few are wholly dead:

Blow on a dead man’s embers

And a live flame will start.
Let his forgotten griefs be now,

And now his withered hopes;

Subdue your pen to his handwriting

Until it prove as natural

To sign his name as yours.
Limp as he limped,

Swear by the oaths he swore;

If he wore black, affect the same;

If he had gouty fingers,

Be yours gouty too.
Assemble tokens intimate of him –

A ring, a hood, a desk:

Around these elements then build

A home familiar to

The greedy revenant.
So grant him life, but reckon

That the grave which housed him

May not be empty now:

You in his spotted garments

Shall yourself lie wrapped.

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Morphine – Cure for Pain

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