IMPORTANT NOTICE: I'm using my blog here to warn other members that stella008, weah22, and nora4love are 'honey trap' identities. In fact, they're almost certainly the same person (male), who signs on as a member to send messages to various in-boxes professing romantic attraction, and urging an exchange of emails. Yeah, right. If anyone is rash enough to fall for this, then one or two emails later, they'll casually comment that they need to transfer a large amount of money, and could you please just send your bank account number to receive the transfer? One givaway is that these Internet honey traps are almost always based in Africa. A previous experience of a personal acquaintance of mine alerted me to this practice. I hope this serves as an adequate warning to other on-the-level members.  - Davy -

(I have had declarations of love as forwarded Paranormal House emails here from all three above names. So for the record: stella008, weah22, and nora4love: Not only do I have a long and happy marriage, I didn't come down in the last shower of rain either. lol.)

I'm not sure where everyone else has been for the last few months, but I do know what I have been up to. Yes, I finally took the plunge and created my own website. It's in the form of a weblog, because that gives me the flexibility both to write and to keep adding new stuff. Having given myself a crash course in rewriting and customising HTML codes, only now do I truly appreciate something of what Michael goes through getting his own site up and running and in good working order: it's bliss when everything goes swimmingly, and misery when you overlook typing just one crucial character and the whole thing gets screwed!

Still, it's been a good hands-on learning experience, and with web design it seems that the only way to learn the steps is when you're actually on the dance floor. And to complete my webby baptism of fire, I even went through Michael's unhappy experience of getting hit by hackers just when everything was more-or-less in order, and had to reinstall everything. Grrrrr...

As to the theme of my site, anyone who recalls my 'Between Dreams and Nightmares' topic on the old site will know what to expect: examination of some of the rather darker and more quirky aspects of the world of art, although I've also taken the liberty of rewriting and republishing a couple of the blog topics which I have written about here as well.

So all my Paranormal House pals are welcome to visit me at my own 'home' (copy/paste the link below), and meet me in my guise as 'Hawkwood'. I chose as my online nom de guerre the name of the 14th century mercenary captain, the bold and ruthless Sir John. Why? Haha.. why not? You can read about this 'knight of dark renown' in my first post. Oh, and as my website is rather dark (yes, literally), it's best viewed at night with the room lights dimmed, so bring a flashlight and some stout nerves. Be advised that there are some elements of nudity in my work featured in the slideshow, although I don't think that anyone will be offended by this; it is discreetly treated. Best wishes to all, and you're welcome to drop by and visit me at:

http://theoppositeofamoth.blogspot.com/

- Davy -

(The above image is based upon Albrecht Dürer's 1513 engraving, 'The Knight, Death and the Devil'.)

Those on this site who know the kinds of things that ring my bells will have heard me mention the Nephilim before. In the ancient times before the Deluge, mysterious beings known only as the Watchers, the ‘sons of the gods', looked down from the heavens on high, and seeing the comely ‘daughters of men', descended to our world to party. The results of these unions were the Nephilim, human on their mothers' side, and on their fathers' side... well.. what, exactly?

Quite a body of speculative literature has grown up around this brief but oh-so-intriguing passage from the Book of Genesis. Were the Watchers perhaps all-too-Earthly visitors from a then-less familiar geographical region ^[1], strangers come from a strange land? Or were they even extraterrestrials visiting our planet to throw a few alien genes into the human mix, as has been speculated on the wilder shores of probability by some credulity-stretching ^[2] theorists?

There is a third possibility, and that is the Biblical one: that the Watchers were some kind of fallen (literally) angels, who during the long descent from their ethereal heights gradually acquired material bodies the closer to our world they became. But the Genesis account, as I've mentioned, yields only tantalizing glimpses of this episode, more shadows than substance. As with so much in Genesis, one has the feeling that there is more to tell, but that something, somehow, is missing. And it is.

I have just completed reading the ^[3] Book of Enoch. Enoch, the companionable prophet who was the seventh generation from Adam. Enoch, whose lengthy description of his visit to the heavenly abode is among the finest and most stirring passages of visionary writing that I have come across in literature (and trust me, I've read quite a bit). Enoch, who is the source for much detail that we feel is otherwise missing from Genesis. The identity of the serpent in Eden (and how it came to be there). A description of the actual fruit that hung on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (it wasn't an apple!) that grew in the Garden. The true cause of the Deluge (the brief reason given in Genesis, that it was ‘the wickedness of men', always did sound to my ears like a not-very-good justification for calling ‘time' on an entire planet). In short, it is the sympathetic voice of the prophet Enoch who supplies so much of the detail that seems to be missing from Genesis.
 

So where is Enoch? Or rather: where is Enoch's Book? Because (except, curiously, in Ethiopia) it failed to make it into the Biblical canon. The reason, apparently, was that the Church fathers considered aspects of the Book to be heretical, particularly the key question of immaterial angels being able to take on material bodies. And so Enoch hit the cutting room floor. Which I for one consider a tragedy of editing, not just because of the information that without it remains puzzlingly uncertain, but also because the book is frequently referenced, and was clearly known and respected, to the writers of both the Old and the New Testaments. And I can offhand think of at least two other instances in the canonical Bible where angels do indeed take on the bodies of men; or at least, are so indistinguishable from ordinary folk as to be mistaken for them.

So let's look at the situation in reverse, which is in a sense what we do on this site anyway. We are born, we live our lives, and we die. And afterwards? Are some ghosts really sightings of spirits of the departed? And this being so, if material bodies can become immaterial, then why should the reverse not be possible? Was what Enoch was claiming for the Watchers so unimaginable? As I've said before in other entries of this blog, perhaps it is so-called heresies which contain the real truth.
 

And the Nephilim? Because Enoch certainly provides us with more information about them than their brief mention in Genesis. Haha, another time, perhaps. This blog entry is already way longer than I planned, and on this site, speculation is a virtue.  - Davy -

[1] "From the Ashes of Angels", by Andrew Collins. Well-researched and well-expressed original ideas by an author who really knows how to take the reader on a journey, proposing that the Watchers were people from another geographical region.

[2] "The 12th Planet", by Zecharia Sitchin. I realize that Sitchin has a huge fan base, but for my taste his left-field ideas are too easy to disprove. Still, if you like the ‘ancient astronauts' style of speculative theories, then this book will do it for you.

[3] "Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil", by the aptly-named Elizabeth Clare Prophet. This gem not only contains the complete translated Book of Enoch and other ex-canonical texts, but much additional explanatory material (including all Biblical references to Enoch), and hints at intriguing personal ideas of the author's regarding the continued existence of the Watchers in our own world.

Also: "The Lost Prophet", by Margaret Barker. An excellent short introduction to the material by a recognized Biblical scholar who really knows her subject.

A good book can make an agreeable companion. We commit ourselves to what a writer wishes to say and worlds, experiences, insights can open to us. A master storyteller such as Argentinian author Julio Cortázar knows just how to give those everyday realities that slight half-degree twist that plunges the familiar into events both edgy and uncertain. The other evening found me thoroughly immersed in one of Cortázar's crafted *stories, and I had actually progressed a way into the scene (which takes place mainly in a hotel restaurant in Zagreb) before the uneasy thought began to dawn on me (as I'm sure the author intended it to) that not all of the characters in the scene might actually be alive. I won't give any more of the story away here, but let's run with that thought for a while.

We all tend to have an idea of the way ghosts and apparitions should look, and usually that involves something spectral, whispy, and rather sinister. And they tend to come with an appropriate gloomy setting in which do their haunting: old mansions, secluded graveyards, and the like. But supposing that a ghost is (to use what I hope is the correct term) fully-materialised? And not just that, but appearing in a setting that we would not normally associate with such things - say: at a shopping mall, or in an office somewhere?

The question has to be asked: given these conditions, would we actually know that the ‘person' that we are seeing is, in fact, a ghost? Indeed, have we all seen ghosts without even realising it? That sad-looking man in a dark suit standing silently waiting for an elevator might have been waiting there for far longer than we imagine. The woman who always stays unmoving in the shadows at the back of the store might prefer to stay in the shadows for a good reason. These thoughts in their turn invite the question: this being so, how do these ghosts among us, who interact with ‘our' world, actually see us?  - Davy -

*"Encounter Within A Red Circle", from the collection "A Change Of Light", by Julio Cortázar.

Today, February 12th, 2009, is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday. The occasion is being marked in various ways internationally, so this blog is my own small contribution to that commemoration.

Darwin's fantastic voyage on the 'Beagle', and his sojourn on the islands of the Galapagos which laid the practical groundwork for his ideas, has become the stuff of scientific legend. And the theory of evolution which is Darwin's landmark contribution, both to science in particular and to human knowledge in general, is now so widely applied in so many fields of science, that the simple notion that something evolves has become entrenched in our general consciousness; even to the extent that we now even think of an idea as 'evolving' from a raw and private first thought to a more fully-formed topic of conversation that we can discuss with others.

Well, Darwin's theory, which deals mainly with new species in the natural world, is clearly too vast for this blog. So I thought instead that I would use this space to do a little off-the-wall Darwinian-style speculation of my own.

Great thinkers whose ideas have changed our perception of our world have appeared in the past, and so it's a given that they will appear again in the future, even if their names are now unknown to us. Fast-forward to  2059. A brilliant young physicist is out for an evening stroll. The winter stars are crisp and bright, and seem unusually close. The scientist has been pondering the quantum problem of how to fold space into time, and so gain access to other dimensions. Overhead in the darkness a meteor streaks across the night, and suddenly, in that after-image of light which the meteor's path has traced, the scientist comes to a new human understanding.

All phenomena occupy their own frequencies within space-time, like different radio stations on a dial. The revelation is profound, and the consequences which flow from this insight are immense. Within the year, the scientist has a working prototype of the chronographic analog modulator (the CAM, as it has come to be known). Differences between the natural world and things which had previously been considered as 'paranormal', and therefore largely beyond the borders of science, become meaningless. All such phenomena are now perceived as belonging to a radiant whole, and human awareness extends into new worlds beyond the limited spectrum of previous understanding.

For simply by tuning the CAM in to the appropriate dimensional frequency, apparitions become visible at will, as do UFO's and other previously-elusive phenomena. New skills must still be learned before we can communicate effectively with these beings. But that will come. This as-yet unknown scientist, whoever he or she might be, will have opened a door just as momentous as the door which Darwin opened onto new knowledge exactly two centuries ago, and we will embark upon yet another fantastic voyage of human understanding.  - Davy -

The pen, they always say, is mightier than the sword. To keep the famous idiom moving with the times, let's presume that 'pen' also means 'keyboard'. After all, most of us now do our writing with a computer rather than by wielding a Parker, other than perhaps briefly to add our signature to a letter which itself has been written with a word processor and printed out as a hard copy.

I'm prompted to these thoughts because it is now exactly a year since I expanded my own Internet horizons beyond Paranormal House to post on other sites. And rather more by circumstance than through any specific game plan on my part, these other postings have come to concentrate upon the defence of scientific knowledge against minority (but vociferous!) religious fringe groups such as creationism. The Internet is a great leveller. You can be built like Schwarzenegger, but in cyberspace it doesn't mean squat. All that counts is how informed you are, and how succinctly you can argue your case. When writing is all that you have, then what you write is everything.

This blog is not the place to go into what I say in such postings, but the point is made that in such situations, my keyboard is my 'sword'. Still, that having been said, if I mention that the only martial art that has my attention is Iaijutsu, then there seems to be more involved here than just penmanship. Iaijutsu is the defensive art of the *katana (the traditional Japanese samurai sword), with emphasis on the correct manner of drawing and returning the weapon to its saya (scabbard). This is executed in a series of movements as ritualized as a tea ceremony, and when performed by a master, is as fluid to watch - and as stunning - as a perfect Olympic high dive.

So on the one hand, you have the power of the written word, and on the other, the movement of the blade. The first is essentially a cerebral activity. The other, seemingly all physical action. So the question is: what is the link, if any, between the two? Well, Iaijutsu, being Eastern, is bound up with an inner mystique that plays little part in Western swordsmanship. It is considered the supreme achievement of this art to defeat your opponent, not through any accomplished slicing and dicing, but without even needing to draw your weapon in the first place! The total poise, confidence and inner strength that the master projects makes any blade-crossing redundant, and no clash of steel ensues. This ideal state is expressed by the phrase: "victory comes while the sword is still in the scabbard".

So is the pen mightier than the sword? While I'm not entirely sure that my writing has much impact upon my swordplay, the focussed economy and purpose of the actions in Iaijutsu definitely imbue my writing. Am I going to tell you the way in which I use the specific techniques of Iaijutsu to underscore my Internet posting? Of course I'm not! After all, Paranormal House might be a pretty safe place, but the Internet can be a dark and isolated back-country road. And to be honest, if I really were in a tight spot somewhere on such a real road, I'd more likely prefer to reach for my katana than for the ballpoint in my breast pocket!

- Davy -

*Although the details are beyond the scope of this blog, a classic original katana (which is way beyond my budget!) is considered to be an object of art in its own right, and the supreme expression of the swordsmith's craft from any country or any period in history. Even the tsuba, or hand guard, is regarded as a collector's item in itself, and offers designs as unique as they are original. If anyone's interested, just Google image search 'tsuba', and you'll see what I mean!

I thought I'd add this note just in case anyone might be wondering.. no, Iaijutsu is definitely not just a guy thing! Women excel at it. I've even seen a video of a fourteen-year old Filipino girl demonstrating her Iaijutsu skills that just has to be seen to be believed! Phenomenal..

"Is there anybody out there?". When *Pink Floyd sing these words, they convey all the anguished alienation of our times. We gaze up at the stars in the night sky, and perhaps the same question runs through our mind. But the context alters the question, and this time the words convey longing and a sense of wonder. Is there anybody ‘out there'? The truth is, we do not know, but science and recent advances in astronomy have shown us planets orbiting stars. And as each star is a sun, then there must exist planets without number, scattered throughout island galaxies in a universe containing too many such galaxies to count.

But if life exists elsewhere than on our home planet, what forms does this life take? Right here on Earth there are bacteria known as ‘extremophiles' - forms of life that not only survive, but live in such extreme conditions, such as in the cores of nuclear reactors, or in the boiling sulphur vents of Yellowstone, that to think of life as being only possible in benign conditions has become meaningless.

But what we really mean when we look up at the stars is: "Is there anybody out there?" We are not looking for extremophiles or bacteria. We are looking for another us - intelligent beings with whom we can communicate, with whom we can connect, with whom we can share experiences. So.. is there anybody out there? No direct evidence has yet been found, but the statistics of probability are - literally - astronomically in favor of there being so. Let's take the utmost conservative estimate and rate the chances at a negligible one in a million. Checking this off against the known (and only the known) star systems, these odds still mean that the number of planets capable of producing life are a staggering ten billion! Using this odds-against method of calculation, this in turn means that the number of actual advanced civilisations in our own local Milky Way galaxy could still be some ten thousand!

Rewind to the year 1600. In a tower in Rome the Dominican Giordano Bruno is awaiting trial for *heresy. His years of accumulating extraordinary and enlightened insights into many spheres of learning during his wanderings through Europe have drawn his maverick views to the attention of the Church authorities; a dangerous thing to happen in times that already are dangerous enough. It is the seventh year of his incarceration. He is given the chance to recant his views, but with resolution and extraordinary personal courage, he refuses. He is then tortured in ways too terrible to be mentioned here, and is finally burnt at the stake in a specific way which ensures the prolonging of his Earthly sufferings. Of the various ‘heresies' which he declines to recant is the key issue of his unshakable belief that the stars are not fixed in the firmament, but actually are bodies like our own sun, with their own planets on which life flourishes; a daring vision, unique for its time, of a fecund and densely-populated cosmos.

Is there anybody out there? I'm sure that there is. There really are just so many stars. And I'm equally sure that, somewhere, one of those stars is shining for the soul of Giordano Bruno.  - Davy -

*'Is There Anybody Out There?' from Pink Floyd's ‘The Wall'.
*See the note in my ‘Heresies' blog.

(I thought I'd write this blog, my first for this year, as my modest contribution to mark 2009 as being International Astronomy Year!)

Although I like to think of this site as a sort of base of operations, I do contribute to other websites. One of these is Scientific American, and when I saw an article on their site on the subject of visitations from the deceased, I naturally jumped right in! The author of the article proposed that the frequently-reported cases of the bereaved experiencing visits from the recently-deceased were in fact caused by the grieving mind, as it were, supplying the reassuring 'visit' that it needed for its own emotional comfort. In short: these experiences can all be put down to hallucinations.

Browsing through the comments that had previously been posted in response to this article made illuminating reading. Many (in fact, most) supplied their personal experiences whose circumstances refuted the author's conclusions. Some were even openly scoffing of the arrogance of someone who sought to dismiss all such experiences as mere fancies of the mind. Here is my own experience:

I was sitting on the porch of a European holiday chalet when I was overwhelmed by the feeling that my father, from whom I had become estranged, and who lived half a world away in Australia, had just died. Four months later I learned from my sister (who herself had just learned) that he had indeed died four months previously, at the time that I felt the event. Since I was not experiencing grief at the time, I could not have been, as it were, mentally primed for this event. In fact, my thoughts were simply with the holiday situation in which I then found myself. Given that this incident was emotional rather than a visual 'hallucination' did not make it less real, and neither, I am sure, is such an experience unique to myself. Science (at least, good science) proceeds by exercising humility in the face of the unknown.  - Davy -

In The Last of the Mohicans, a frosty redcoat major asks Hawkeye how he proposes to find his way through the hostile forests to the western frontier. The eternal frontiersman looks the incongruously dressed figure slowly up and down before replying with dry wit, "Well, I reckon I'll face north, then turn left kinda sudden-like, and just keep walkin'."! Hawkeye's classic answer underscores the fact that, far from being fixed and defined, the frontier was a moveable place. Two centuries or more ago, it was a shifting line on the map of continental America: a line which changed its position as it drifted ever westwards with the expansion of settlement. But where would we now find this line? To someone like myself who's a sucker for that whole frontier ethos, its echoes might be recaptured in re-enactments, or just by taking an interest in the historical items, places, and events of that era. But the fact remains that the frontier is something which belongs to a specific place at a specific time.

Or does it? The frontier was a state of mind as well as a line on the map: something which served to define what separated the settled lands from the virgin forests, the peaceable fields of the farmers from the dangers familiar to Hawkeye, James Fenimore Cooper's quintessential man of the wilderness.  In short: the frontier was - and still is - the line that separates the known from the unknown.

On the previous site I related an experience that I had years ago: of getting up early one very cold and snowy English winter morning to traipse with crunching white footfalls through nearby woodlands. It was a familiar place, and I knew the paths between the trees well. I never saw another soul, but I did come across a single set of fresh well-defined footprints in the snow, which I followed along the path to a low iron gate across the way. And there, right before the gate, the footprints stopped. I mean; really actually literally vanished, as if their maker had simply ascended bodily into the void. No sign that they went to right or left, or had been retraced, and no sign in the fresh snow on the other side of the gate that they continued on. The snowy tracks simply... ceased. I kept this experience quiet for years before finally sharing it with the others here, thinking it was just one of those quirky, but unique, ‘things'. But then Becca told me that she had once gone through much the same experience. And not only that, but by chance I later came across on the web descriptions by others which made it clear that my experience of the vanishing tracks in the snow was anything but the unique one-off event that I had thought it to be. I dare now to class the experience as paranormal.

That stretch of English woodland was a familiar place to me. But right there, with me standing alone by that gate staring in mystified silence at the unexplained, going-to-nowhere footprints, the frontier shifted, and was suddenly and unexpectedly very close indeed. The invisible line which divides the known from the unknown is not some abstract, historical idea. For those of us who pursue these mysteries, we can find ourselves standing at the frontier when we least expect it, right here, right now.  - Davy -
 

The photo above I took the day after the events told here. The path can be seen going from right to left, and the gate is about a hundred yards further to the left, at the edge of the trees. The woods are near Ewell, in Surrey county, southeast England.

When I'm introduced to someone, I always make a point of shaking hands. This is not just because the gesture is customary politeness, it also is generally a good pointer to what sort of person is in front of me. Is the hand that takes mine warmly welcoming, or does it feel more like I'm being handed a damp fish to hold? Or worse: is it (the sort I dislike the most) one of those vice-like grips that clamps on fast, not to my whole hand, but just to my fingers and knuckles, and then proceeds to squeeze them like some kind of lemon press?  Well, I'm sure that others reading this have had such experiences as these. Shaking hands by way of introduction is, after all, standard to our culture, and apparently originated as a right-handed gesture of friendliness to demonstrate that neither party could, at that critical moment of first encounter, draw his sword against the other (which would have given a staunch left-hander like me a definite advantage!).

But in all the times that I have shaken hands with someone, and of all the hands which have shaken mine, none have felt the same, nor have left such an impression upon me, as my experience of a few nights ago. There I was, lying in bed, just drifting in the darkness somewhere between being not really awake, but definitely not being fully asleep either, with my right hand trailing outside the covers over the side of the bed, as a hand trails in the water from a moving boat. In less time than it will take me to write this sentence, I felt my hand being suddenly taken and grasped, and I was one hundred percent fully awake and staring at my hand in a flash of time. The whole sensation lasted only a brief second or two, but no-one - and I mean really no-one - can tell me that it was ‘just a dream', or that I had ‘just imagined it', or other such phrases intended reassuringly to make us doubt the reality of such encounters with the unknown.

It happened. That's it. Something both unseen and unknown gripped my hand and held it just long enough to make me totally aware that it had occurred. Now, I know what you're probably wondering: what kind of a ‘handshake' was it? Was it a presence that felt reassuring, perhaps even ‘welcoming'? Or was it a fish, or maybe a lemon press? Well, even the brief seconds that it lasted were still long enough for me to identify the type. It was a lemon press. Lately I've tended to sleep with my hands under the covers.  - Davy -