The Outer Edge

Celebrating the Dead: The History of Dia de Muertos – Marie D Jones Writes

October 27, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

Every October 31st, Americans head to parties or hit the streets dressed in elaborate, often spooky costumes, in celebration of Halloween, a time when the veil between this world and the world beyond death is said to be at its thinnest.

We decorate our homes and yards with scary monsters, witches and ghouls, provoking a fun sense of repulsion of all things terrifying. We cut up pumpkins and light with candles, and watch out for black cats. We spend a ton of money preparing for and enjoying one of the biggest and most anticipated holidays in the United States, rivaling Christmas for some people!

But throughout Mexico and parts of America with large Hispanic populations, another holiday offers a truer reverence for the dead with a rich history dating back thousand of years. Dia de Muertos, or Dia de los Muertos, is the “Day of the Dead” to millions of people that both playfully mocks, and joyfully reveres, death. The tradition began over 3,000 years ago when Aztecs and other Meso-American cultures created rituals that honored the duality of life and death. One of their core beliefs was that reality was the dream, and that death was when we truly became “awake.”

Dia de Muertos celebrations lasted three days, as they still do today, and end on November 2nd. Because they began on the same night as Halloween, the two traditions are often confused and mistakenly intertwined. The major difference is in the tone of the celebrations. Again, Halloween looks at the scarier side of death, while Dia de Muertos celebrates it with colorful dances, decorative skulls and candles, and other festivities, including the construction of elaborate private altars called “ofrendas,” with pathways of marigolds that are meant to welcome the dearly deceased. The Mexican “cempasuchil” or marigold, is the traditional “flor de muerto” or Flower of the Dead. Altars can be decorated with sugar skulls and other foods and spirits (including tequila or mescal) that the deceased loved most, as well as pictures and objects once owned by the deceased. If the deceased was a child, the altar might include toys and trinkets including favorite candies. Families hold vigils at their homes, or at cemeteries, and take pride in decorating the gravestones of their dead relatives, leaving gifts of food, flowers and sugar skulls, or actual possessions that belonged to the deceased person.

Family homes are decorated with skulls and skeletons, made out of cardboard or tissue paper, and always colorful and bold. Because of the Spanish colonization of Mexico, often Christian objects are found on altars alongside much more pagan objects. This might include crosses, rosary beads and statues of Christ or the Virgin Mary.

As with most major holidays, food and drink is a big part of Dia de Muertos festivities, with cakes and breads such as pan de muerto (bread of the dead) that have been baked around a small skeleton or skull. In fact, the garishly painted skulls now most associated with the holiday period are sold in shops and markets, but those made by hand are most cherished. Some are meant to eat, and are made of sugar or chocolate or even wood, with the name of the deceased etched into the forehead, but others are purely decorative and have become a popular collector’s item in the Southwest for those wishing to give their homes a distinct Mexican traditional flavor. To show the difference between our Halloween and the Dia de Muertos, in our culture, a skull is an object to be feared and signifies death in a terrifying way. We even use it to identify substances that are toxic and deadly, while to the Mexican people, a skull is a symbol of life, death and rebirth.

Prayer and remembrance also mark most Dia de Muertos festivities, something we do not do at Halloween, even though Halloween also has at its roots a time of reverence and celebration of the dead before it became commercialized. Some cultures wear shells and use other noisemakers to dance around and “wake the dead.” Others actually wear the clothing of their deceased loved ones. From village to village, traditions might vary, but all would be centered on honoring, not fearing, the dead and treating them with love, respect and a sense of sacredness. This attitude towards death has obvious pagan roots where the cycles of life were not only understood, but also accepted and honored, unlike today’s more modern cultures that have all but wiped nature off the map and made death something to be dreaded and avoided at all costs.

Like Halloween, Dia de Muertos was altered by the course of history when the Spanish colonization of the 16th century prompted the Catholic Church to move the original August three-day celebration period to coincide with Allhallowtide, All Saints’ Eve, and All Saints’ Day. Yet, scholars state the original festivities most likely lasted the entire month of August during which the dead came back to visit their loved ones. These summer festivities honored a goddess, the Lady of the Dead or La Calavera Catrina of modern times. “Calavara” is Spanish for skull, and the word is also used to signify a poem playfully mocking the dead, a custom that originated in the 18th century. La Calavera Catrina is a fun parody celebration of a Mexican goddess or upper class woman, complete with little dolls called “Catrinas” and men and women wearing costumes with skull masks. They also might get tattoos of the names of the dead, or carry dolls of the dead with them for good luck, much like we carry a rabbit’s foot or tattoo our children’s and lover’s names on our bodies.

The use of costumes and masks no doubt influenced or at least coincided with dressing up for Halloween and taking on the persona of a spooky entity, ghostly being or today, a trampy French maid. In modern urban areas that mark the Dia de Muertos, children do wear costumes and walk the streets, knocking on doors to ask for a “calaverita,” which might be a small gift of money or some candy treats, and even ask passers-by on the streets for goodies, something our Halloween kids have yet to figure out (twice the candy!).

The Spanish conquest of the Meso-American cultures resulted in changes to their old traditions, just as the Celtic holiday of Samhain, a celebration of death and renewal which gave Halloween many of its symbolic traditions, was suppressed and absorbed by the Catholic celebrations as well, something that happened with most major pagan holidays and traditions (Easter, Christmas…). Dia de Muertos also is linked to an ancient Aztec festival that was dedicated to a goddess named Mictecacihuatl and was once only a day of celebration for indigenous peoples in a very specific part of Mexico, before spreading further into the world in the 20th century. Holidays honoring goddesses and women often later became morphed into Christian holidays honoring male saints, or degraded and disempowered the women figures, much like our Halloween took the pagan crone, a wise old woman, and turned her into an ugly, wart-covered witch. Because the Spanish who conquered the Aztec became the dominant force and religion in the Mexican region, their influences naturally became interwoven with those of indigenous peoples, when they didn’t completely wipe them off the map.

Recently, the Mexican government made Dia de Muertos a national holiday in line with educational policies enforced in the 1960s that encouraged the practice of national traditions that unified cultures and regions of indigenous peoples. Many modern regions in Mexico honor different things on each of the three days, with one day devoted to dead children, and one to adults. Children are honored on Dia de los Inocentes, Day of the Innocents, and Dia de lost Angelitos, Day of the Little Angels. November 2nd was reserved for Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead focusing on adults.

More recently, other nations such as Fiji, Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia have their own versions of a Day of the Dead, borrowing from the Mexican culture. South American nations celebrate as well, especially their indigenous populations. One of the more unusual rituals comes from Bolivia and is celebrated on May 5th. The Dia de los Natitas, or Day of the Skulls, comes from an ancient practice of actually spending the day with the skeletal bones of the deceased relative. Nowadays, they just keep the skull around, decorating it with flowers and trinkets, and making offerings of cigarettes and alcohol to thank the dead for watching over and protecting family members.

In America, the three-day festival now welcomes those of all cultures and races, who take part in enjoying a different perspective of the dead. Instead of being terrorized by ghost, ghouls and demons, those involved choose to celebrate the ones who have come before us with color, music, food and festivities alongside more serious prayer and remembrance. Though most festivities occur in the Southwest, a region with a high Hispanic population, cities throughout the country take part in this unique mash-up of Mexican and American cultures that, although they retain their classic Aztec origins, change with the times to adapt to new celebrations that honor the dead and embrace activism, environmental awareness and community involvement.

Sadly, the Spanish conquest thought the customs surrounding Dia de Muertos as being barbaric and primitive, not understanding the dual nature of life and death, light and dark, male and female, and other nature-related elements that were such a powerful part of the worldview of older tribes and cultures. Because of that, we may never know all the traditions and symbols used to show respect to the dead, since many of them were probably suppressed by Catholic Church leaders, who probably threatened punishment upon the lowly pagans who continued to practice such rituals and festivities. But like the old Aztec and Meso-American myths, their traditions remain at the core of many holidays we Westerners now like to think we created and evolved.

The subject of death is remembered mainly here in America as a time to mourn and grieve, as in our many holidays devoted to those lost in war or terrorist attacks. But other cultures that retain more pagan roots, while grieving death (as we are all human), instead look upon it as one part of a cycle or a wheel that turns over and over again, just as the natural world is a wheel of planting, harvesting, and planting again. Because our ancestors were so in tune with the earth’s cycles, whether they be the phases of the moon, the shifting tides, the changing seasons or the growth of animals, plants and humans evolving towards death, they came to see each part of the cycle as something to be cherished, and not feared or dreaded. Without death, there cannot be room for new life. Without the change of seasons, there can be no renewal of plant life in the spring, and new harvests of crops in the fall. Everything was in tune and in perfect order and harmony.

The Dia de Muertos may be just a time to party and eat great food and wear crazy skull masks for many people. But to millions of others around the world, it is an acknowledgement of a critical part of the ever-spinning wheel of existence, and a way to thank those who came before us and were a part of that wheel.

—

Marie D. Jones is the author of several books about the paranormal, metaphysics, and cutting-edge science (many coauthored with Larry Flaxman), including PSIence, The Déjà vu Enigma, Destiny vs. Choice: The Scientific and Spiritual Evidence Behind Fate and Free Will,11:11 The Time Prompt Phenomenon and Mind Wars. She has appeared on more than 1,000 radio shows worldwide, and on television, most recently on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. Her website is mariedjones.com.

Doomsday Cults: Why Do People Have End Times Obsessions and Apocalypse Dreams? – Marie D. Jones

September 19, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

The band REM sang about the end of the world as we know it, and they felt fine. In fact, many people not only feel good about the world ending, but actually welcome it with open arms, often joining with others of like mind to predict, plan, and prepare for the demise of humanity and the extinction of existence. But why? Who in their right mind would want the world to come to a crashing halt, taking all of life with it?

Just recently, an end of the world prediction for July 29th went bust. A group calling itself End Times Prophecies predicted a solar flip, which would lead to an apocalyptic chain reaction ending all life. Never happened. Days later, another prophesized end was all over the place, courtesy of a YouTube psychic named T. Chase who warned the world of the apocalypse to come in the year 2017…complete with a giant alien spaceship invading earth, shooting out death rays upon humanity. Chase went on to predict that Jesus himself would lead an alien army in UFOs against Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, who will start the third world war. This alien army will stop us from extincting ourselves in a nuclear showdown.

Chase claims he gleaned this revelation from, well, the New Testament Book of Revelations (specifically chapter 19) and the teachings of Nostradamus. But fear not, because according to Chase, the alien-army of Christ will win and we will all be happy living under a one-government confederation (New World Order?)

These are not the first predictions of end times, and they certainly won’t be the last. Prophecies of the end go back probably as far as the beginning, when the first humans pondered their own mortalities and wondered how long their like would hold up against vicious animal predators, wicked natural disasters and marauding tribes. But to actually form a club, or a cult, with a leader whose sole purpose is to drive his or her members to their deaths in a pre-emptive bid on immortality? That’s more of a modern thing. Remember the followers of a man named Harold Camping? In May of 2011, the then 89-year-old self-claimed scriptures expert stated the world would end on the 11th day of that month. It didn’t. Yet he ended up making millions of dollars off of believers and those who had hopeful expectations of the end. You could say, end times predictions turn a good prophet, I mean, profit. Just ask all those who benefited off of the alleged Mayan Calendar end date of December 21, 2012. Or maybe I should shut up because I wrote a book about the entire shebang that did quite well (although in my defense I wrote about the mythologies and predictions and not that I thought they would come true. I never did!)

Doomsday cults, also known as Apocalyptic Cults, or End Times cults, usually have at their basis a fundamentalist religious belief system that focuses on the literal interpretations of symbolic and metaphorical texts. This unhealthy focus on the final destruction of earth leads some of them to mass suicides in an attempt to be taken elsewhere before the apocalypse occurs. Two such cults that made the international news were the Guyana/People’s Temple, led by Jim Jones, and Heaven’s Gate, led by Ti and Do, which occurred right in my own area. But before we get to them, a little more background into these cults in general.

There are two basic types of belief systems driving doomsday cults; apocalypticism and millenarianism. Apocalypticism suggests there will one day be an apocalypse that will end the world in a fiery global catastrophe, resulting in the end of civilization itself. Some groups believe they will be spared, or that if they commit mass suicide first, their souls will be taken to heaven before the rest of the wicked ones on Earth perish in agonizing suffering.

Apocalyptic end times cults often believe in a messiah and that their own leader is that messiah, following him or her blindly to their own deaths. The leader may instead claim to be a representation of God’s will on earth or an offspring of the messiah, but some are so arrogant as to claim that title for themselves. In fact, many Biblical scholars refer to Jesus Christ as a type of apocalyptic messiah prophesying the end of the world for the Jews and a final judgment day to be unleashed upon humanity. He was said to return on a cloud as the “son of man” and the divine judge during the end times spoken of in the Book of Revelation.

Millenarianism is a belief in a coming mass transformation of society by a specific event or catastrophe. This was a widespread force behind a lot of predictions surround the year 1000 A.D. and then again on 2000 A.D., or Y2K when religious sects and cults alike awaited doomsday, or at least utter technological breakdown that might lead to it. Christian millenarian cults await the Second Coming of Christ and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth and in Heaven that will free the oppressed and usurp the powerful status quo. Often this goal can turn to mass suicides or violent acts of terrorism, such as the acts of Aum Shinrikyo, Heaven’s Gate, The Manson Cult, The People’s Temple and the Branch Davidians (led by David Koresh). Other millenarian cults include the Cult of the Holy Spirit and The Living Church of God, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, Cult of the Holy Spirit, Joachimites and the Lord’s Resistance Army.

There are some common tenets shared by these extremist cults.

A charismatic leader who calls his/herself a God/Messiah/Messenger.
A specific prophecy members must believe in and adhere to.
A powerful and compelling argument for cult members being special and the chosen/saved.
An exit strategy or plan should said prophecy not come true, or should the government crack down on them first.

When a prophecy doesn’t happen, the cult leaders are adept at deflecting criticism and coming up with a new end times date, usually admitting responsibility for misinterpreting a date or time during their “vision.” However, cults like Aum Shinrikyo go as far as to help bring about the very apocalypse they desire with acts of violent terrorism. This Japanese New Religious Movement founded in the mid-1980s by Shoko Asahara Aum, released the deadly gas, sarin, into the Tokyo subway system in 1995 and procured military grade weapons from Russia. Their leader was eventually sentenced to death for various criminal acts.

The term “doomsday cult” was first coined by John Lofland in a 1966 study of the Unification Church, titled “Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith,” which eventually became a book in 1966 published by Prentice-Hall. He examined methods of conversion of members, the charismatic characteristics of cult leaders and how members were kept from losing faith and straying outside of the cult.

His book was followed by numerous psychological studies asking why and how ordinary people could get sucked into something as crazy as a doomsday cult hell-bent on death and destruction. One such study, by Leon Festinger and his colleagues, later published in a book, “When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World,” found that people tended to turn to such cults and the concept of the world ending in their lifetime when their own lives were meaningless. They found a purpose and meaning in these cults, becoming a part of a group with a very specific outcome, and belonging made them feel special. This is the driving mechanism behind why most people, in general, join cults, but the promise of salvation amidst a coming extinction served as extra magnetic fodder for the lost souls looking for meaning.

The study, and others like it, also found that even as some members would leave the cult if the proposed end times date came and went uneventfully, others would stick it out, perhaps because they had already given up so much, they felt they had nothing to lose awaiting a new end date. This would keep members from humiliation and embarrassment of having to face the fact that they gave up their lives…for nothing.

To many suicide cult members, the promise of eternal glory elsewhere was so strong they didn’t even wait for the end date. They took matters into their own hands and took their lives in a mass ritual to find glory and salvation elsewhere. Heaven’s Gate was a UFO millenarian group in San Diego, California, that was founded in the 1970s by two enigmatic humans; Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. They became known as Ti and Do, The Two, Bo and Peep and a variety of other names signifying their leadership and intergalactic connections. They taught their members to give up all material possessions and that the only way to “level up” and be free of all human and earthly attachments, which brought suffering, was to be ready to board the Mothership. The spaceship was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp and coming to take them to the “next level,” and doing so required 39 people to poison themselves to death. That’s how strong their belief was.

As the UK Daily Mail reported, “All but three of the bodies were arranged neatly on their beds with their faces and torsos covered with a purple cloth. Each body had a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets and along with packed luggage at their sides. They mixed Phenobarbital poison into applesauce or pudding and then washed it down with vodka. They then tied plastic bags on their heads to asphyxiate themselves and speed their deaths. The followers, age 26 to 72, killed themselves in three waves March 24, 25 and 26. The survivors always neatly arranged their dead comrades’ bodies before committing suicide themselves.”

In 1978, the charismatic church leader Jim Jones called for an act of “revolutionary suicide” at the Jonestown agricultural compound in Guyana, resulting in the deaths of over 900 people, a third of whom were children, who took poison-laced punch and died at the hands of a clearly psychotic man who thought he was a messiah. Many were said to not want to go along with the suicide but were forced to do so at gunpoint. The Jonestown Massacre would go down in history as the deadliest non-natural disaster in history, until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In order to make people take their own lives, one must have a blend of a truly charismatic leader with so much charm and magnetism, people would follow him or her off a cliff, with a mission or purpose so compelling, that death by cliff would seem almost holy and sacred. Add to that a variety of mind control and brainwashing techniques such as coercive persuasion and intermittent reinforcement, and members don’t have much of a chance of leaving or even thinking clearly enough to contemplate it.

With complete control of their members’ minds and thoughts and behaviors, cult leaders can do anything, or make you do anything. Absolute devotion to a cult leader is equated with devotion to a deity or to God, and rules must and will be followed…or else. But the promise of salvation and being among the chosen few overrides the free will and instinct of people caught up in the fervor of end times proselytizing. Charles Manson had over 100 followers who hung on his every word…even committed murders for him. And he was nothing but a down on his luck musician who tapped into the emotions of the young and angry, the troubled and disillusioned. In them, he found his tribe and was able to manipulate them into believing in a coming race war that drove the violent acts of his most devoted followers. “Charlie,” as his cult members called him, is still in prison and gets thousands of “fan letters” every year from people who want to become a part of his “family.”

Sometimes, the government catches on and tries to stop a doomsday cult from bringing about doomsday…and yet bring it about anyway. Think of the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists Church, led by David Koresh, who went up against a coordinated siege by the FBI, ATF and Texas National Guard in 1993 that ended after fifty-one days in the fiery deaths of 82 members, including children. Koresh was also a musician, like Charlie Manson, who became a prophet and was accused of sexual abuse of young women followers, which led to the government investigation. The leaders of cults are not special people, but disillusioned people who come to believe they are special, and who have the ability to get others to believe the same.

In some cases, such as the followers of Elizabeth Clare Prophet and her Church Universal and Triumphant, founded in 1975, it was all about prepping – doing what was necessary to prepare for and survive a disaster such as nuclear war. In this case, Prophet encouraged the building of fall-out shelters in the late 1980s, anticipating a nuclear catastrophe that never came. She has since died.

The prepper movement, like the survivalists, plan for disaster and apocalypse, but with a bit more of a practical bent. Their mission is to be ready either by building bomb shelters or buying up tracts of land in remote areas to live off the grid, growing their own food, stockpiling guns or training in various survival and disaster prep methods. Without the religious obsession towards total Armageddon, preppers may go a tad overboard in the eyes of most of us, but to them, they are just being smart and getting ready for the inevitable government takeover, nuclear war, or clamp-down on Constitutional freedoms.

I belong to an organization called CERT – Community Emergency Response Teams. We are fully trained disaster responders under FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. I am trained in medical triage, disaster assessment, heavy lifting, urban and rural search and rescue, psychological trauma, crowd control, fire control, and a host of other things, including ham radio operations in an emergency. Does that make me a prepper? Sure it does. Does it make me a doomsday cultist? Nope. I am banking on a few disasters happening in my lifetime, and hope to be ready and able to respond…but I’m not waiting and hoping for full-on Armageddon.

I have too much to live for.

—

Ancient Aliens or Awfully Smart Humans? – A Paranormal Braintrust Article

August 17, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

Marie D. Jones’ Outer Edge

People love to speculate that the only possible explanation for our leaps and advances in human technology, knowledge and ingenuity simply could not be explained as having happened naturally. We MUST have had some help getting this far, even overcoming the many challenges throughout history our species has faced, some of which brought us to the brink of extinction.

The popularity of the History Channel series, “Ancient Aliens” has led to some interesting speculations about what, or who, may have once visited our ancestors, imparting knowledge and technological advancement that lead to such progress in human development. Originally, the concept of ancient aliens, or “ancient astronauts,” pointed to extraterrestrial intervention occurring thousands of years ago, and possibly even a little genetic intervention as well, and we likely had some help from entities far more intelligent and evolved than we. Otherwise, how could we have built those amazing Egyptian and Mayan pyramids and erected those massive stone statues on Easter Island, or the meticulously intricate blocks that make up Puma Punku in Bolivia…and what of the many glyphs, cave and rock paintings, carvings, drawings and statuettes from our distant past that appear to portray “helmeted” figures that do not look quite human, or those strange craft whizzing by in the sky? Are all these “archeo-enigmas” proof that our ancestors mingled with the star people, and left us clues in their art, architecture, myths and religious texts?

While many argue there is no proof humans needed a little help from above to make those huge jumps forward in our evolution, there are many who insist the archeological evidence is clear…we were once hanging out with aliens, maybe even breeding with them, or having their DNA spliced into our own, possibly against our knowledge or will. The ancient astronaut theory also posits these aliens were from advanced civilizations, coming to visit lowly human Earthlings from locations both within and outside of our known universe, where the laws of physics might allow for travel between worlds and even timelines.

But the truth is, we do have ample evidence humans have indeed been capable of great advancement, even periods of time when ideas and innovations spread so quickly, it boggled the mind. Speaking of the mind, since most of those advancements happened external to us, in terms of technology, food production, medicine, societal issues and even just simple human hygiene and disease eradication, we may not have always kept up mentally, emotionally or spiritually. But that’s a whole other blog!

Moore’s Law was first posited by Gordon Moore in 1965, presented in a paper that described how the number of components in an integrated circuit, or transistors in a dense integrated circuit, would double every two years. This doubling led to an exponential increase in advancements in the electronic and digital fields, most notably with chip performance in microprocessors and memory capacity that has led, in part, to the tech frenzy we are living in today.

Moore, who co-founded Intel, saw his projections applied to a great deal of technology, even if it didn’t quite “compute” in the natural world. But we now can agree that our computer and related technology doubles at increasingly faster speeds, taking less time to do so, to the point where some have predicted it might one day lead to a singularity or omega point of a single explosive second when we will know it all, all at once.

So speaking of singularity, we have the Law of Accelerating Returns, which takes Moore’s Law further beyond it’s original intent, which was to describe the progress of semi-conductors, and apply it to more areas of technology, as well as written language, medicine, philosophy, scientific achievement, an understanding of our own anatomy and how it works, and more. Futurist Ray Kurzweil made the idea of reaching a singularity famous when he wrote his books “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and “The Singularity is Near,” laying out in detail his theory of accelerating technological progress in the 21st century that would evolve faster and in less time until it reached that flash point of infinite knowledge.

Escalating the potential of not just technology, but our own brains and consciousness to be able to live with that new knowledge, is part of the transhumanism movement, which seeks to enhance human potential with technology, thus creating a sort of semi-A.I., or artificial intelligence that is also, well, human. If we are going to experience this explosion of knowledge, why not make it work for us, to help us live longer, have less disease to deal with, age slower, or maybe even live forever? We saw a lot of advancement in this direction in the 1990s with various forms of gene therapy and even the rise of the Internet and how it has changed who we are and how we communicate at the most fundamental levels. Think thirty years prior, when there was no Internet. That giant leap was because of some really smart humans, not aliens, and led us out of the age of localization and nationalization to a more vast and global reach. I mean, you can talk to someone a world away on the Web! How did we ever survive before? (Well, telephones and mail come to mind…)

Transhumanism has its critics, though, who worry about the merging of mind and computer, of humanity and technology, and lessening our ability to be empathic, conscious…and human. That the removal of our flaws, inherent and otherwise, makes us no longer human. By transforming us beyond the limitations of our own humanity, do we risk becoming more machinelike in all areas of existence? Is the leap in technology worth that? Do we want to sacrifice the weaknesses and flaws of being human and become more robotic and perfect just to live longer? Rise above the limits of our biology to become more divine? Like the Gods? Some people would accept that trade off in a dead second and suggest we are on an inevitable path towards this new “post human” evolution, and that we already have been. Think contact lenses and surgical implants, plastic surgery, bionic prosthetics, gene therapies for cancer…

Artificial intelligence, artificial body parts, increasingly faster computer processors, and a vastly expanding Internet reach have opened up a world filled with new ideas, and new inventions as well. But, our brains have been a bit slower catching up. That is one of the biggest dangers of the outpacing of technology to our level of understanding and ethical use of it. Empathy, compassion, tolerance…if they are not on a parallel path with the external progress, the whole machine is at risk.

So even before the age of technology, we did see times in our history of great advancement, whether in industry, agriculture, or culture itself. We vaulted out of prehistory with the Stone Age leading to the Bronze Age leading to the Iron Age…and more recently we left the Agricultural Age for the Industrial Age. Now we are in the Social Networking Age. Go figure.

The Renaissance of the 15th – 17th centuries was a time of incredible progress in science that philosophers believe led to a true boost in our understanding of nature, and our role in it. The Renaissance was a leap for individual advancement, too, as we broke down some of the limitations that kept us from reaching a greater personal potential.

The Age of Enlightenment going into the 16th and 17th centuries brought us tremendous advances in the sciences, as well as the world of art and philosophy, that to our primitive ancestors might have seemed “unnatural.” But they were a perfect progression of where we were, and what we needed to adapt to in order to keep up with the necessities of our changing environment.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that progress is akin to a painful passage from the “barbarism of the past” into a more enlightened civilization. One of the goals of this is the end of all wars. Well, we have a ways to go on that one! Education, Kant believed, was the key to raising culture to a new level, allowing history to push civilization forward into new ground. Again, we have a ways to go on that one, as we now treat education, and educators, with terrible disregard.

Politically, and more recently, we have the American Revolution, signing of the Declaration of Independence and formation of the Constitution to thank for a huge leap in defining our particular nation and its laws and beliefs. The singular event of the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. defined a new religion that is a huge force of power today and “made” Christianity what we now know it as, thus quelling the power of more polytheistic and pagan cultures, including many matriarchal societies that gave way to the patriarchies we have today that suppress the feminine and demean women and girls.

We have had, throughout our history, times of decline and times of ascension – Golden Ages, if you will, when we seemed to first take three steps back, but then catapulted ourselves twenty steps forward in significant ways.

But it’s those times of decline, when we seemed to be caught in the Dark Ages, literally and metaphorically, that we appeared to need some extra help to get us out of the quicksand of our own actions, choices and even the advancements we’d made in the prior ages…And although we do see how it could have been us driving that help, there is still a lot of “circumstantial evidence” for alien assistance when we look at the human record of our primitive and ancient ancestors.

So maybe, when we most needed to move beyond our more base, primitive existence and enter what is now the Age of Antiquity, and then again when we needed to bust out of that age and move into technological revolution and a boost in our philosophy and knowledge, we got help. Those images on cave walls, rock art, and later in glyphs, mosaics, on walls of great ancient monuments and written of in world myths, religious texts, legend and lore were really telling us of the ones who came to give us the extra little ass kick we couldn’t give ourselves.

Back to the television, another wonderful leap in technology, especially for those of us hooked on “Game of Thrones” and “The Walking Dead.” The huge audiences for shows like “Ancient Aliens” attest to the popularity of believing in help from our extraterrestrial friends. And shows like that appear to have plenty of fodder to support their theory, with visits to the world’s most ancient sites and ruins to show images that, to us, look like E.T.s and greys and space people and star sisters and brothers as they’ve been described to us by witnesses, abductees, and ufologists, or as they’ve been portrayed in modern entertainment.

Folklorists and anthropologists alike point to the written record, an offshoot of prior oral traditions, and the expression through art that existed even before that, as possible clues to the presence of other civilizations, or at least, “beings” that we may have once mistaken for angels, demons, spirits, wee folk, fairies, gnomes, sprites or whatever other names they have gone by. In the Old and New Testaments alone we have mentions of chariots in the sky, wheels in the sky, fallen angels, demons and what sound like interdimensional entities, giants, Nephilim, and other living beings that are not human, and quite clearly interacting with us, even, in some cases, breeding with us for the purpose of creating the direct lineage of what may now be modern humans.

It’s all still speculation, because we don’t have empirical proof. It’s that simple. But we don’t have proof it didn’t happen, and we sure do have those intriguing images and stories to figure out, don’t we? Study the expression of ideas and it becomes very clear that what went “viral” in ancient times was what was important to them at the time. And obviously the expression of these helmeted astronauts or elongated-skulled humanoids and mysterious flying machines was important enough to chisel into stone or paint on a wall, just as we today write and talk and create stories that reflect what is important to us.

But we also post pictures of cats, our latest bout with toe fungus and what we had for lunch on Facebook and Twitter.

As the UFO world awaits the moment of “disclosure,” when all the secrets our global governments have been hiding for decades about the presence of UFOs and the existence of aliens will be revealed for the public to see, we have to take a step back and wonder…what if there is nothing much to disclose? Maybe they have been visiting for thousands of years. Maybe they did get involved with the progressive evolution of our species, even teach us a thing or two about life and how to better live it. Maybe all the Gods and Demons of our myths and religious texts were aliens interacting with us and lording over us, even destroying us when we sinned too much. Maybe they helped us transcend times when we were on the verge of collapse or outright decimation because of our own perfectly human limitations and vast capacity for stupidity.

Then again, maybe they only stop by to observe us now and then the way we go to the City Zoo or Sea World…interacting a bit here and there, but without truly interfering, except for a few abductions to get some medical data on us…again the same way we tag and track wildlife to “study” it. Maybe the rule of the Cosmos is to help, but not save, any other world because in doing so, the citizens of that world never figure out how to survive on their own.

Progress, then, is the ability to survive and change and adapt to the feedback we get from our surroundings. Progress, then, is the chance to do it for ourselves before we go crawling for help from a cosmic parent, and that includes God. Progress, then, is being able to find the best of what it means to be human without having it told to us from aliens or deities. I know that will make some people angry, but it’s true. Our species seems to have a collective death wish, and also a collective “savior” wish. Either way, it does us little good if we never learn how to work towards our own salvation…and not repeat the lessons of history over and over again.

I think it is exciting to think that at various times throughout human history we’ve been visited and assisted, and maybe I have a little bit of alien DNA in my genetic code, and so do you, and maybe we are related to the same alien species and not two different ones who are constantly at war with each other on their home planets. I am well aware of the great bodies of work of researchers and writers and television personalities that tell me this is so. And I do not in any way rule it out. If a friend or family member were screwing up, I’d offer help, maybe even an intervention if one was needed…but not before I allowed that person the opportunity to find inner resilience and strength to help themselves. And once I helped, I certainly wouldn’t enable. I think this applies to a larger scale, too, like my community and my country.

But I am also excited to think that we humans, at our best, don’t need aliens to help us and can save our own asses and advance our own best causes when we have our backs against the wall, or when our surroundings dictate we adapt to them or perish. Sometimes perishing is the best lesson of all. If we were bailed out every time we created a ton of trouble, the place would be crawling with all sorts of extraterrestrial self help speakers and motivational trainers and political analysts. I wonder if they are Democrat or Republican?

As with a lot of things in life, maybe it’s a little bit of both? We get by with a little help from our friends…now and then.

—

The Destiny Question: Do I Have A Choice? Marie D. Jones’ Outer Edge

April 25, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

“Man was predestined to have free will.” – Anonymous

“You can’t avoid it, it’s written in the stars.”
“He was destined to be a success.”
“Life is what you make it.”
“Choose your thoughts and choose your life.”

Life can be so darn confusing. Social media and self-help gurus bombard us with contradictory claims that our lives are pre-destined, that Fate deals us the cards we will play our entire lives with, that whatever happens, happens for a reason. OR that our lives are what we choose them to be, that what we focus on expands and manifests according to some “Law of Attraction.” Or maybe it’s all just one big crapshoot. Is there a blueprint for our lives or are we making it up as we go along?

From our career paths to our love lives to whether or not we become parents, we wonder how much of it is a result of one choice atop another choice atop another…or if we had no choice in any of it at all. We meet people and feel as though we were “destined” to know them. We put out the word of our desire for a new job, and someone calls with a lead the next day. Yet other times, life doesn’t go as smoothly and we wonder if we’re slamming up against the wall of fate, unable to break it and have our will no matter what we do.

I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately, recently feeling this pull towards certain people and situations that genuinely seem as though they were “meant to be,” all the while pondering with some frustration other situations I cannot seem to fix or change.

The word “destiny” comes from the Middle English “destinee,” and simply refers to a predetermined course of events that are the result of an irresistible power or agency. But destiny has often been confused with fate, which is a little more constricting. While destiny implies that one has a bit of maneuvering room by which they can reach their destined end point, fate implies no such allowance for choice. Thus, some outside “agent” such as a God, Goddess or other entity was once thought to be the purveyor of one’s fate. This outside agent or force set down in stone how a person’s life would unfold, and there was nothing that person could do to change the course of events to come. The results were fixed, like some past presidential elections.

The Greek myths spoke of the “Moirae,” and the Roman myths, of “Parcae.” The Norse myths had their “Norns.” These were, in all three cases, a triad of goddesses that were given the role of imparting the circumstances and events that would make up a mortal’s fate. There are even goddesses that are responsible for giving out good fortune, such as the Greek goddess Tyche, and the Roman Fortuna, ruling out any role that choice might play in finding and keeping wealth, success and happiness. If the goddesses didn’t deem you fit, you were screwed.

In order for a life to be predestined, it had to be predetermined, and this is where science, philosophers and religious and spiritual leaders have long struggled to explain exactly who, or what, predetermined it. If we understand that all causes have a prior event, what was that first prior event? Which came first, the cause, or the event? One can easily see why the battle between destiny and free will has been an enduring one, just like the chicken and the egg.

While scientists might say it was just random, the result of the Big Bang and its resultant physical laws that fell into place by some kind of brilliant accident, philosophers and religious thinkers sensed that there was something that started the whole chain of cause and effect that laid down the path of each human life, maybe even the earth itself. This beginning of the chain is known as “first cause,” and without knowing first cause, we simply don’t know who or what destined us to our roles in life.

A lot of the debate centers on how mutable we view the future as being. If each moment of our future, and the future of everyone around us, were already planned to the minutiae, then would there even be a purpose to life at all? Why would we not then be robots, born to eat, reproduce and die with no dreams or goals or feelings or emotions or consciousness at all? The Buddhist concept of pre-destination might solve that problem. Known as “yuanfen,” it suggests we take the word predestination somewhat literally. Pre meaning “before,” as in what comes BEFORE destiny. Because there is no concept of God in Buddhism, this explanation suggests instead there is a linear fashion by which our lives are bound to happen. That doesn’t mean that’s how they WILL happen…but only how they are bound to and that we can change something, and thus lead to a new life that is bound to happen as a result. We get some control here, but still move towards what feels to us like a “chosen path,” even if we are doing most of the choosing.

The sacred Buddhist scripture, the “Samyutta Nikaya,” tells us:

“According to the seed that is sown
So is the fruit you reap from there.”

This sounds just like the Judeo-Christian concepts of reap what you sow and do unto others. Those important ‘golden rules” of life involve choices. And that’s the thing. We know we have choices…don’t we? We feel as though we have the ability to choose our spouses, our jobs, our homes, the kind of food we will have for dinner, and whether or not we will go to the movies on a Sunday night or just sit home and watch “The Walking Dead.” It’s up to us to decide. The founding father of political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, states that freedom is the ability to do what we wish without hindrance or constraint. Even within the confines of our social, cultural, sexual and behavioral conditioning, complexes and needs, we can do whatever we choose. Later philosophers added that perhaps freedom was not so much about being able to do anything one wanted to do, but to have the power to do anything one wanted to do.

Yet over thousands of years, we have battled with the sense that both destiny and free will or choice play a huge role in our lives, and certainly in how the world around us came to be. Our religions are filled with stories and proverbs and quotes about having a destined role or a predetermined fate, such as Christ’s destiny to be betrayed by Judas. He knew. He said it was his destiny, and he drank of that particular cup willingly, taking his final fate in his hands. But remember, he could have chosen not to follow through with it all. He could have chosen to say no.

MARIE’S BOOK ON THE SUBJECT: Destiny vs. Choice: The Scientific and Spiritual Evidence Behind Fate and Free Will

But what does science have to say about destiny and choice? If we look at our own bodies, we can easily see that we have a genetic blueprint by which we became blond or brunette, green-eyed or brown-eyed, short or tall, big boned or small boned, and any other physical characteristics that were handed to us by our parents and their parents and their parents. We didn’t choose our genes. And yet, when it comes to behavior we seem to be able to make choices, both good and bad, and have some say in the course and outcome of our life path. There seems to be ample evidence for both nature vs. nurture, and both inherent and adapted characteristics that make up a human being.

The Big Bang is often referred to as the starting point of our universe (we won’t even get into what came before it, or what first cause “caused” the Big Bang!), from which all the forces, laws and matter and form and energy and life came into existence. It was perhaps a blueprint of sorts, and yet many scientists will say that it did not have any kind of intelligent design behind it. It just happened the way it happened. There was nothing, then – BANG! – there was everything.

But there are those scientists who believe that the amazing sophistication and intricacies of how life came to be simply could not have been a lucky accident of chemicals and particles and gasses and heat and matter and energy all being in the right place at the right time, and in just the right amounts. To these men and women of science, there indeed seems to be a destiny that started and directs the cosmos, and that the first cause behind it appears to have had some type of intelligence, though not necessarily human. Perhaps the Universe, including us, is nothing more than the program of a giant Cosmic Computer, yet one would still have to ask…who or what is programming the computer?

Even in the quantum world there is interplay of both destiny and choice. At the level of the quantum, we are told that particles exist in a suspended state both as particle and waveform, until they are observed and their wave function collapses, thus fixing the particle into a position or outcome. Particles have a range of possible or potential states and until an observer effect occurs, those states remain in superposition, or happening all at once so to speak. Therefore, an observer can choose the state of a particle simply by observing it. At least that’s the simple man’s version of quantum physics. The truth is far more complicated and involving and I suck at math so I won’t even attempt to get into that! But the implication is exciting and has become the basis for hundreds of self-help and personal motivation books, empowerment tools and expensive webinars.

But if this is how we are creating our reality, as the popular Law of Attraction teachings tell us, with focus and intention and observing things into being, then how could anything be predetermined? Are we all just making our lives up as we go along? And yet, everyone can agree that we all are destined, once born, to die. Those who claim to have died, and return to tell about it, often tell stories of being told by higher guides or divine beings on the other side that they must return and fulfill their roles, or destinies, on the plane of the living. These are subjective and personal experiences, but the fact that so many report them is something to be considered. It is as if we must stay put until our pre-chosen destiny is fulfilled…even if we have to die and return to life again to find out.

Millions of people visit astrologers, palm readers, tarot readers, even love and relationship coaches wanting to know their destinies. Will I meet my soul mate? Should I change jobs? What is my purpose here? Some readers will tell people that their lives, according to the stars or rune stones or cards, are in some ways predestined, and yet, they have considerable choice in how they will reach that destiny. An astrologer might say that yes, the stars influence your life, but you still have room to move about within the confines of those influences. A tarot reader might tell you that you will meet with danger next week, but you can still make the choice to be hyper-vigilant and avoid a terrible car accident while leaving for work.

Love coaches will tell you that there are many soul mates out there for you, and not just The One, and that there might be someone destined for you in a sense that they will be the best fit, but they won’t be the only best fit out of billions of people on the planet.

There is little scientific proof of these tactics working, except when they work. Even in nature, we see both destiny and choice, even fate, play out. Animals kill prey to survive. The fate of the prey is to be food for another species. The destiny of the predator is to survive a bit longer. Both made choices, even the prey, choosing to not be fast enough to escape the predator! Flowers start as seeds and are “destined” to grow into stems and then petals. Not fated, because someone could come along and yank them from the ground, ending their existence. But nature is filled with examples of things that seem to work under the triadic influence of all three: destiny, fate and choice.

But our main concern is with our own lives, more than how they play out in the natural world. We take that all for granted. In our own lives, we want control, yet we want to let go. We want to feel as though something good is destined to be; yet we hope that we aren’t fated for something bad. We choose, pay the consequences for our choices, and end up in a particular place in life because of that trajectory, any of which we could have changed for a different trajectory.

Yet if we are honest with ourselves, many of us do feel called, as if we have a path, or a destiny, that we are moving towards. When we ignore that path, or deviate from it, we are unhappy and dissatisfied. When we feel on path and on purpose, life flows. And yet, always, we have choices. The choice to walk that path, to not walk it, to run or skip or bike it. There may be one destination we are moving towards, but we get to choose the route by which we get there.

I’ve known since early childhood I was going to be a writer. There was no doubt in my mind. It wasn’t fated. I also dreamed of being a jockey and had I been short enough and not fallen off of horses too much, who knows? But I felt “called” to write, and worked very hard towards that outcome, by making choice after choice that I felt would keep me on the path. When I made the wrong choices, I paid the price either with financial distress, physical illness or depression…I felt “off track,” which to me was an indicator that I wasn’t moving TOWARDS something that felt natural and “meant to be.”

Do I have proof I was destined to be writer? No. I don’t have a Certificate of Destiny on hand. Am I fated to be a writer? No. I can quit tomorrow and be a llama breeder. Can I choose to write? Of course, because a human life is absolutely meaningless if it’s all fated and fixed from the get go. We’d never learn, never grow, never expand and fulfill the potentiality of who we can become.

Now I’m starting to sound like one of those metaphysical gurus! But the truth is, there are forces at play in our lives that are unseen except in the effects and influences we can observe. Think of gravity. You cannot SEE gravity, or hold it in your hand, or put it in a jar. You can only observe the EFFECTS AND INFLUENCES of the gravitational force at play around you. Go jump off a table and try to fly. Videotape it please.

Much of investigating the paranormal involves looking at external effects and influences without any general understanding of the cause, or the forces behind them. We have yet to be able to prove that ghosts are real, aliens exist or cryptids roam the backwoods. We have yet to show in a purely scientific fashion that telekinesis or precognition or even remote viewing is real, although we do have some good data and even some hands on clinical testing to show they do happen. (We’re still grasping to understand the mechanics behind it!) We can read our spouse’s very thoughts, but still not be able to prove we are psychic.

For so much of life, we have no proof except our own experiences and perceptions. The same goes for whether our own lives are lived in a way that offer no choice, leading to sense of defeat at the “fixed” nature of it all…or whether we feel like the whole dang world is a peach tree of choices just ripe for the picking.
And the truth is, it’s probably a little bit of both.

—

Coulrophobia, Or Is That a Creepy Clown in Your Closet? – Marie D. Jones

March 15, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

I hate clowns. No, let me rephrase that. I DESPISE clowns. I have since childhood and chances are pretty good I’ll go to my grave hating the darn things. And I’m not alone in that sentiment.

Millions of people all over the world suffer from “coulrophobia,” or an excessive fear of clowns. In fact, fear of clowns is one of the most widely known phobias in the western world, alongside snakes, heights, and Sharknado movie sequels. But how and why did something so seemingly innocent as a man or woman dressed in polka dots, a funny wig and a big red nose become such an example of evil, a depiction of demonic, and a symbol of sinister?

It all began in our childhoods, where most traumas usually begin. In a 2008 study done by the University of Sheffield, England, 250 children between the ages of four and 16 were asked how they felt about clowns. Most of the children disliked them, and even feared them, including images of clowns, claiming that they were “odd” and not funny and also felt “unfamiliar.” No kidding. Most of us have been to the circus as kids and the clowns no doubt gave us the creeps, even if we did find some of their antics a bit silly. Clowns cloak themselves behind make-up and strange clothing, which, as children, sends a direct signal to our brains that “this is not someone I know,” and therefore, should have fear of. It’s pretty simple, according to one child psychologist. “Clowns are scary.”

Not to mention the fact that many clowns are more garish and gaudy than silly and funny, and their exaggeratory movements also cause children to recoil, not knowing what to expect or how to react. Clowns are obnoxious and annoying.

In another study (yes, people get paid to study clowns!) done by a psychology professor at California State University, Northridge, children were found to be “reactive to a familiar body type with an unfamiliar face.” This probably explains the love/hate relationship most kids have with Halloween, too, ya think? Other studies point to the inability of children, and most adults, to read a person’s facial expressions when covered in make-up and masks, thus giving a sense of distrust to all things clownish. Not being able to gage the person’s emotions or intentions behind the face paint creates a sense of anxiety and uncertainty, and on the flipside, allows the clowns to engage in manic behavior they wouldn’t even think of without the cosmetic coverings to hide behind.

Yet children continue to ask for clown birthday parties and flock to McDonald’s. Go figure. Perhaps it’s the balloon animals and greasy French fries.

But adults hate clowns, too, and no doubt it’s the deep trauma to the psyche they experienced in the past, a continuation of fear of unfamiliar, masked beings that often appear to be happy, yet tragic…nice, yet homicidal. In fact, clowns might even remind us of our own dual psyches and serve as mirror images for society in general, and the ongoing battle between good and evil, known and unknown, revealed and hidden, ugly and beautiful. They also serve as an archetype to the Peter Pan within us all, and the fear of “adulting.” The director of talent for Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus is quoted in a 2013 Smithsonian magazine story called “The History and Psychology of Clowns Being Scary” as saying, “So in one way, the clown has always been an impish spirit…as he’s kind of grown up, but he’s also been about fun, but part of the fun has been a bit of mischief.” This mischievous side of clowns often manifests as manic behavior and buffoonery that possibly reminds us of the darker aspects of ourselves that refuse to grow up.

But aside from the perspectives of child psychologists are researchers, clowns also have a dark side to their history. Dating back thousands of years, most cultures have some sort of clown, trickster, jester or joker that employed masks, make-up, wigs and bizarre clothing. Often, as with the pygmy clowns of Egypt in 2500 B.C.E., they were meant to entertain royalty, such as the pharaohs, or to serve as comical relief for an Emperor or King through song and dance routines. Ancient Greeks and Romans incorporated clowns into their theatre as “rustic fools,” characters that behaved and played as children or peasants did.

Native Americans have their own clowns, called “tricksters” who represent the mischievous Coyote spirit and are considered sacred to the community. Native clowns usually don masks instead of make-up and each one has a part in the greater mythology of the tribe.

The first known use of the word “clown” comes from the English “clowne,” meaning “rustic, boor, peasant,” and often clowns were considered clumsy, poor heathens in the 16th century. Shakespeare included such fools in some of his works, such as “Othello.” In the 17th century, clowns took on a more jester or harlequin appearance and were a mainstay of English theatre, when the word “clown” began to be assigned to the fool characters the way we might call someone an “extra” or “sidekick.”

More modern clowns don the recognizable red nose, big shoes, crazy colorful clothing and wigs, with features hidden behind makeup, and are comical in nature. Think Bozo and Ronald McDonald, certainly not sinister clowns in appearance. Known as Auguste, or “red clowns,” these happy clowns originated in the 19th century world of theatre and variety shows and all tend to look the same in general, and have separated themselves from what we know as tricksters, jesters and fools (each having their own distinct look and mode of dress). On the other hand, the French clown blanc or “white clown” was a more distinguished character, and often portrayed as sad and tragic. The 19th century also introduced the circus, originally in the form of a riding school in England that incorporated clowns to amuse spectators during the breaks between equestrian events. Soon, rodeos and variety shows featured either clowns or clown-like mimes, tramps dressed as hobos and bums, and eventually marionette/puppet versions.

Clowns usually perform routines without dialogue, but often involve props such as today’s squirt guns, unicycles and tricycles, hoses, fake flowers and hoops.

Today, clowns run rampant through our pop culture, with television, movies and novels offering up everything from Red Skelton’s tragic Dodo the Clown in the 1953, “The Clown,” to the popular 1960s television show, “Bozo the Clown,” to the guy who sits on benches in front of millions of McDonald’s franchises, Ronald.

But when the heck did clowns become so…EVIL?

Over the evolution of the clown, the exaggerated movements and increasingly garish make-up and clothing began to take on a more sinister tone. Some people blame Stephen King’s 1986 novel, “It” for putting clowns in the sewer, literally, with his horrific “Pennywise,” and others say it was that nasty clown doll in the movie “Poltergeist,” but clowns-gone-bad have a deeper history. We can look to the work of great authors and playwrights for evidence of evil clowns afoot, such as the notorious murderer “Pagliacci” in the Italian opera of the same name by Ruggero Leoncavallo. “Pagliacci,” which means “clown” opened in 1892 in Milan, Italy and told the story of a tragic character who takes in a homeless girl, only to be betrayed by her with his best friend. Today, most people only know of Pagliacci from the hilarious, yet anxiety-provoking “Seinfeld” episode where “Crazy” Joe Davola, obsessed with Elaine, plays the character in an opera the gang are going to see.

Many historians and writers point to Joseph Grimaldi as the father of modern clowns. Andrew McConnell Stott, Dean of Undergraduate Education and English professor at University of Buffalo, New York wrote in his “The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi” about the famous pantomime of the early 1800s Regency London stage, Joseph Grimaldi, whose theatrical portrayals of a clown are celebrated every year in an East London church where congregants dress as clowns in his honor.

Grimaldi wore bizarre costumes and stark white face paint with bright red cheeks, and a blue Mohawk. His physical comedy was masterful, with leaps and handstands mixed in with hilarious satire. But behind the scenes, his life was downright tragic and depressing. His first wife died in childbirth, his father drank himself to a young death, and because of his physical performances, Grimaldi lived in constant pain. He died a penniless alcoholic in 1837, Charles Dickens edited Grimaldi’s memoir and presented a portrayal of a bleak figure behind the colorful comedic mask. Dickens is sometimes credited with the first real “scary clown” story.

Grimaldi was followed by a more sinister clown figure in France in the early 1830s, that of Jean-Gaspard Deburau’s “Pierrot,” a white face clown with garish red lips and black eyebrows that mimed his performances. Deburau may have added to his clown portrayal’s dark nature when he (Deburau) killed a young boy with his walking stick in 1836 after the boy shouted insults at him.

Modern media allowed for new interpretations of the clown/joker/trickster archetype and spawned plenty of comic book characters such as the Joker from the Batman series, Bobcat Goldthwait’s pathetic and alcoholic Shakes the Clown, professional wrestler Doink the Clown, the Insane Clown Posse band, Sweet Tooth from the Twisted Metal video game franchise, the horribly campy “Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and Sideshow Bob in the “Simpsons” cartoon series. Horror movies in particular love to take liberties with clowns, turning them into psychopathic ghosts (“All Hallow’s Eve,”) or interdimensional ancient demons stealing children (“Sinister”), and perhaps the creepiest of all, the terrifying Twisty of “American Horror Story” fame.

Twisty was, in fact, so horrifying he spawned a formal statement in 2014 by the Clowns of America International group, who distanced themselves from this more brutal, negative portrayal of clowns in the media. President Glenn Kohlberger stated, “We do not support in any way, shape or form any medium that sensationalizes or adds to coulrophobia or ‘clown fear.’”

Being afraid of fictional clowns is one thing. Being terrified of real clowns is quite another. Plenty of urban legends exist of phantom clowns that terrorize towns all over the world, usually men dressed as clowns standing on the side of deserted roadways, or knocking on doors of lonely single women. In 1981, an actual “clown panic” occurred when a group of children in Brookline, Massachusetts reported men dressed as clowns trying to entice them into a van. As the panic spread like a virus, new reports turned up years later as far away as Phoenix, Arizona; Orange, New Jersey, and Chicago, Illinois. More recently in England a highway clown continues to terrorize drivers, even though all he does is stand on the roadside holding a single balloon.

In May of 1990, a Wellington, Florida woman opened her front door to a man dressed as a clown holding balloons and flowers. He shot her in the face, killing her, and drove off in a white Chrysler LeBaron, as per a story in the May 26th Sun Sentinel. The clown killer was never identified.

In 2014, towns across France experienced a wave of teenagers dressing as clowns and harassing people. Some clowns have gone further, such as the axe-wielding clown arrested in Besancon, France, or the clown who beat a 35-year-old man during an attempted robbery in Montpellier. Clown crimes have also occurred in Spain and the U.S. These are perfect examples of people preying on the public’s fear of clowns, despite psychologists insisting that the percentage of people who dislike clowns is low. I beg to differ.

The clown crimes in France gave rise to a whole new breed of vigilantes known as “chasseurs de clown,” or clown hunters, who stay on the lookout for aggressive clowns and costumed criminals. In Mulhouse, five teenagers were arrested after forming an anti-clown resistance with tear-gas, baseball bats, batons and brass knuckles. These vigilantes triggered an official warning by the Police Nationale that anyone, either clown or clown hunter, found with any kind of weapon, would be arrested. No word on whether clown crimes are down in France!

But perhaps the most notorious evil clown of all is John Wayne Gacy, Jr., the serial killer who also went by the name, “Killer Clown.” Between 1972 and 1978, Gacy raped and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men in the area in and around Cook County, Illinois. He did his dirty deeds inside his home, luring his victims, or taking them by force. His mode of death was strangulation or asphyxiation, and he buried many of his victims in the crawlspace of his house in Norwood Park Township. Other victims were discovered in a nearby river. Gacy was convicted in 1980 and executed by lethal injection in 1994.

Gacy created a character named “Pogo the Clown,” and would dress up for parades, children’s parties and local fundraisers in his clown costume, which, since his death, has become a popular Halloween costume annually. Gacy’s story has spawned a few movies and even “Gacy” Halloween parties where people dress up as Pogo the Clown. Luckily, all they do is drink and not actually murder anyone!

The association of clowns with the most horrific and brutal of crimes was solidified by Gacy, because he made real the imaginings of fictional stories. Up until Gacy, we could be afraid of clown killers, but figured we might never actually encounter one. That was the stuff of movies and comics and television shows. Gacy made the phobia ever more real to us all.

But not all clowns evoke dread. In a study published in the January 2013 issue of “Journal of Health Psychology,” the presence of “therapy clowns” actually helped reduce pre-operative anxiety in children being prepped for various surgeries. Another 2011 study in the “Natural Medicine Journal” showed significant improvement in children with respiratory illnesses after they played with therapeutic clowns. I looked up therapeutic clowns and they apparently use gentle play, spontaneous humor and fun activities, as well as less garish make-up and clothing. They also engage the children in wearing costumes and make-up to create less of a barrier between the clown and the child.

But I still don’t like them. They are still clowns.

Our collective fear of clowns is a basic part of our human psyche. We fear, and just plain don’t approve of, anything hidden or masked. We cringe at the inconsistency of a colorful clown with a terrible frown (forgive the rhyming!). We respond on a deep subconscious level to our childhood anxieties of the unknown, especially humans that don’t look normal. Think grown up stranger-danger. And we recoil at the modern media’s distortions of happy, bumbling clowns into diabolical, horrific, pointy-teethed killers who lurk in sewers and inside closets.

Then there are those clowns that really exist in houses just like the one next door, stealing our innocence with crimes of such brutality, it makes the mind spin.

“Clowns are frightening and unknowable,” Dr. Penny Curtis of the University of Sheffield says. They are an exaggeration of what we deem normal, and in that sense, an aberration.

Especially when they’re found under your bed.

—

The Paranormal Nature of Numbers – Marie D. Jones’ OUTER EDGE

February 24, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

We usually think of the paranormal as the invisible world of ghosts, entities and otherworldly abilities like remote viewing, ESP and precognition. Paranormal is “beyond normal;” things we cannot yet explain within the confines of modern science. But nature, and reality, holds mysteries equally paranormal, and yet utterly scientific in their origin and explanation. One of those mysteries involves the absolutely wild and wacky world of…wait for it…numbers.

Most of us cannot stand math and hate balancing our checkbooks (although most of us do that online now!). Mention numbers and people cringe, instantly associating them with bad memories of junior high school math quizzes and big, fat F’s at the top of the test. Those strange creatures that do love math, and its associated studies of geometry, algebra, calculus and physics, know that numbers go far beyond their appearance. They harbor a magical power of their own, both creative and destructive. In fact, physicists will tell you that at the heart of reality itself, the language of the universe and the foundational basis for life goes back to…numbers. Math. Mathematical ratios.

Throughout nature, we find grouped number sequences and patterns that form the underlying structures to everything from flowers to seashells to the way tornadic winds develop. Two of the most enigmatic examples of this are the Golden Ratio, and the Fibonacci Spiral, both of which imply a higher order of measurement behind what many of us take for granted, including our own physical bodies.

The Golden Ratio, also known as the Divine Ratio, the Divine Section, the Golden Ration and the Golden Mean, is an irrational number of approximately 1.618033988749. This specific ratio is considered more divinely inspired than any other because it is found throughout nature as the highest expression of balance, symmetry and aesthetics. The fundamental formula behind the Golden Ratio is described as the ratio whereby the ratio of the whole to the larger section equals the ratio of the larger section to the smaller section. It is also referred to as “phi.”

So where do we find this wonderful ratio at work? How about the Great Pyramid of Giza, the structure of a five-pointed star or Pentagram, the outline of the Acropolis near Athens, Greece (a Golden Rectangle), and most famously, our own bodies, as portrayed by Leonardo da Vinci’s famous “Vitruvian Man.” Look at the image and you’ll see the Golden Ratio at work in the correspondences between the body and its parts, the greater whole to the lesser limbs.

The Vitruvian Man comes from the ancient Roman architect, Vitruvius, whose “De Architectura” inspired da Vinci’s fascination with the Golden Ratio and his use of the ratio in his paintings The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. In fact, in the Mona Lisa, da Vinci used the Golden Rectangle for her face, presenting the perfectly symmetrical ratio of the width of her forehead compared to the length of the top of her head to her chin. Her face is said to have been considered the perfect face of a woman, at least by standards of the past!

The Last Supper contains three vertical Golden Rectangles, and one decagon, a Golden Ratio shape, for the figure of Jesus. You would never know this upon viewing the painting, and that’s on purpose. It’s an aesthetic that is pleasing to the eye, but without the observer really knowing why.

The use of Golden sections and geometric ratios are often done for their aesthetic value alone, but sometimes it goes beyond the looks of things. Certain Celtic and Indian labyrinths and mandalas used Golden Ratios to create spiritual resonance with symmetry and measurement, affecting the observer perhaps on a subconscious level, where symbolism and pattern reign supreme, as well as a physiological one.

One of the most widely known and most fascinating Golden Ratios is the Fibonacci Sequence or Spiral, originally discovered by Leonardo of Pisa, born in 1170 C.E. Leonardo also went by the name Leonardo Fibonacci, or just simply, Fibonacci, which basically means “son of Bonaccio.” Fibonacci, as we will call him, was the man responsible for the spread of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system into Europe, but he was much more widely known for a sequence of numbers that run as such: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 and so on…

Fibonacci wrote a book in the 13th century titled “Liber Abaci,” or the “Book of Calculations,” and in it, he presented his brilliant knowledge of Middle Eastern mathematical systems, and the above sequence of numbers. This particular sequence is a series of numbers designed so that each number after the first two numbers is the sum of the previous two numbers. The higher the numbers in the sequence, the closer the two consecutive numbers divided by each other approach the Golden Ratio of 1:1.618.

In nature, Fibonacci noted that this sequence is present in spiral structural patterns, as well as the way leaves grow on a stem in several species of flora, and the manner by which lightning branches out, the way rivers branch, even the proportions of bodies to wingspans of birds and flying insects. Even snowflakes had a distinct geometric pattern of formation, as well as our own DNA. These ratios and sequences were EVERYWHERE.

One of the best examples of the Fibonacci Spiral is the Chambered Nautilus, a marine cephalopod that actually grows at a rate matching the Fibonacci sequence! Some scientists have posited that this structure could just be a logical outcome of the natural principal of geometric designs and not necessarily some mystical, paranormal aspect of divine intelligence. Although we might argue that whatever created all of nature sure did an intricate job and seemed to enjoy sophisticated patterns and ratios!

And nowhere might this play out on such a massive scale as in the theory that our entire universe can be whittled down to just six numbers – well, mathematical ratios that if tweaked ever so slightly in one direction or another could have prevented biological life from ever evolving on Earth.

The most vocal proponent of the “just six numbers” theory is Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Royal Society Research Professor at Cambridge University, and the Astronomer Royal. In his book “Just Six Numbers,” Rees proposes six sophisticated ratios that allow for the formation of chemicals and gases, planets and solar systems, and…us.

Nu – “N” – with the value of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This massive number is the ratio of the strength of electrical forces holding atoms together, divided by the force of gravity between them.
Epsilon – 0.007. This ratio is the proportion of energy released when hydrogen fuses into helium. This ratio defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all atoms on earth were made. The value of Epsilon controls the power of the sun and how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table.
Omega – The cosmic number 1. This measures the amount of material in the Universe and refers to the relative importance of gravity and the expansion energy of the Universe.
Lambda – This is the force of cosmic antigravity, discovered in 1998, and is an extremely small number. It controls the expansion of the Universe.
Q = 1/100,000 – This is the basis for all cosmic structures – stars, galaxies, clusters, imprinted in the Big Bang. This is the fabric of our Universe and represents the ratio of two fundamental energies.
Delta – 3 – This is the number of spatial dimensions in our universe.

Rees and his colleagues all agree that if any of the above six ratio/numbers were ever-so-slightly plus or minus in variation, our Universe would be a totally different thing, if it could exist at all, suggesting an incredible sophistication to the design of all of reality. Though many choose to impose a religious connotation to the idea of Intelligent Design, many astrophysicists and astronomers suggest there is indeed an intelligence behind the incredibly intricate ratios and laws of the universe…although that intelligence does by no means imply an anthropomorphic one.

There is another number, called “N,” which dictates just how large our Universe is allowed to get. Beyond that value, or below it, the gravitational force might exceed the electric force, and the Universe would cease to exist. To think that our own existence is based upon such fine-tuned numbers is amazing, but also a bit terrifying, when we think of how one little slip of that tuning could lead to unimaginable catastrophe.

In his book, “The Goldilocks Enigma: Why the Universe is Just Right for Life,” physicist Paul Davies stated that our ancient ancestors were very much aware that beneath the surface complexity of the cosmos was a deeper, hidden code, and that code was written in the language of mathematics. Science, says Davies, “has uncovered the existence of this concealed mathematical domain.” Thus, the most fundamental basis for existence comes down to numbers, and as many scientists have suggested, any alien civilization that may want to communicate with us would do so in the language of mathematics, not words, because mathematics is a true language that goes beyond borders, boundaries, cultures and traditions. Mathematical laws, ratios and rules apply anywhere, anytime, to anyone. Aliens might indeed have their own specific languages on their home planet, as we do, for communicating with each other, but when it comes to speaking with those of another planet or civilization, they would most likely choose the universally understood language of measurement and ratio.

But most of us really don’t want to think about the structure of the cosmos. We are more interested in how numbers play a paranormal role in our day-to-day lives, and they do so via patterns. Whether we are talking about the structure of a flower on a stalk, or our own bodies, or the repetition of number sequences our brain might seek out in the forms of time prompts and number “pokes” from the spirit world, as some call them, there is a part of our subconscious that responds to the true symbolic nature of numbers and number patterns. Perhaps this is why so many of us are drawn to mandalas, labyrinths, and even intricate crop circles, whether manmade or otherwise. We are responding to the symmetry and the aesthetic value of the structure both consciously, and subconsciously.

The brilliant physicist and father of quantum theory, Werner Heisenberg, believed that the most fundamental aspect of nature was particle symmetry. F. David Peat, a physicist and author of a number of books on science and quantum physics, wrote in “Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Mind and Matter,” that “symmetries could be thought of as the archetypes of all matter and the ground of material existence.” But he went one step father, suggesting that it might be possible that archetypal symmetries might manifest themselves in the internal structures of the mind, as well as having the “immanent and formative role that is responsible for the exterior forms of nature.” If this sounds a lot like the ancient Hermetic “as above so below,” or as within, so without, well, that’s because truth is truth and stands the test of time. Our ancestors knew that there was a profound link, or perhaps we might say, symmetry, between what went on in the cosmos and what happened here on the Earthly plane, and our modern scientists seem to be catching up to that understanding.

Symmetries, patterns, ratios that are so magical they are considered “golden,” all of which form the perfectly tuned music of the spheres, the structure of the cosmos, and everything within them. So, does this suggest that some God was responsible, or perhaps a giant cosmic computer spitting out its and bits of information to create a sophisticated blueprint of creation? Is this a matter of “confirmation bias” in the human brain and our desire to seek patterns to fit meanings, or vice versa…or is there a hidden infrastructure of reality that is based entirely on the ratio of one measurement to another?

Either way, it all goes back to numbers.

—

FAKELORE – Marie D Jones’ Outer Edge

February 6, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

FAKELORE – Folklore, Urban Legends and the Rise of the Creepypasta (And I Ain’t Talkin’ Linguini!)”

From the dawn of humanity, we’ve told stories. Whether to convey important information, or just entertain each other, we’ve spun tall tales, woven fables and concocted legends, often of real people and events, embellished with fantastical elements layered thick as lasagna. And speaking of pasta, with the advent of the Internet and the ability to spread stories and information all over the world at lightning speed, we’ve become masters at the art of a type of viral storytelling called “fakelore.” Okay, so the pasta reference comes a bit later.

The use of myth, legend, folklore and fairy tales is an important part of our cultural development, both regionally and globally. Through stories, our ancestors give us clues to what their lives and experiences were like, even if those clues were embedded below levels and levels of sheer imagination. Oral tradition allowed for the conveyance of information, often via stories, to carry down through generations, somewhat intact, despite a few alterations here and there. With the advent of the written word, believe it or not, those alterations became more widespread. It may sound counterintuitive to say that oral passing of information is more accurate than getting it in writing, but our ancestors were a lot like we are today. When writing, they altered and embellished, simply because they had the time and the opportunity to do so.

Think about it. If you’re telling a story orally, you better tell it quick and you better tell it well, or you’ll quickly lose your audience. Unless it’s your dog. But with writing, one could take more time to get the story across, and even add in a little personal spin, a little personal style, and a little personal interpretation. A story that might take five minutes to tell via the mouth could end up a fifty-page novella complete with vampires, zombies and aliens. The written word may have allowed us as a species to communicate MORE…but not necessarily BETTER.

So today, we may look at legend, myth, folklore and fairy tales as sheer fiction, and yet, we are doing ourselves a disservice, because often at the heart of these incredulous tales, there is a nugget of truth. The stories may indeed be telling us key elements about a historical person or event, and it’s up to us today to properly interpret them. This is how legends come down to us from generation to generation, even to the point of being taught in schools. Remember the giant lumberjack, Paul Bunyan, and his blue ox, Babe? Blue ox? Really? How about Johnny Appleseed and the pan he wore on his head.

And yet, legends begin with people or events that are, well, legendary. In a thousand years, people will be telling stories about a goofy guy with a bad toupee who ran for president one year…or a grumpy cat that had more fans than Jesus. Oops, did I say that? Legends begin in reality, and morph into a more fictional scenario as they are passed on down the line.

The same might be said for folklore, fairy tales and even myths, which often portray events that history can back up, yet in the context of fiction. Mythology is a form of communication noted for giving us the “science” of our ancestors in a language they understood. Think of the gods and goddesses of planets and the ocean and volcanoes. These deities represented natural events our distant ancestors had no real scientific understanding of, thus their experience of it came out as wild, imaginative myths rampant with magic and strange beasts and ladies with snakes for hair. They didn’t know about seismic waves and fault lines and calderas, or tornadic winds and storm cells. They didn’t even understand how the stars and planets above them formed, but they sure held them in awe, which inspired their stories.

But the truth is, myths hid truths, whether scientific, behavioral or sociological that scholars today now uncover and look at the same way an archeologist digs up a pot and tries to determine its age, its use, and why it has “Made in China” on the bottom. Just kidding. Not everything is made in China. Vulcan working at his forge beneath the volcano was an ancient, albeit uneducated way of trying to figure out how the red-hot lava spewed out of the top of a shaking and shuddering mountain. Surely it had to involved a pissed off deity! The name “volcano” comes the island of Vulcano, located in the Mediterranean Sea near Sicily. Romans believed that Volcano was the chimney to the god Vulcan’s workshop. They also believed that the earthquakes that shook the ground around the island came from Vulcan working in his shop, creating weapons for the gods to make war on one another.

They knew what was happening, i.e. a volcano erupting, but didn’t have the scientific vocabulary or acumen to properly tell us, so they told us in a way that they could.. They told us a myth…a story.

Today, we have this lovely thing called the Internet, and with the advent of lightning speed communication of information, we can post a story on a website or forum and within seconds, someone across the globe will be reading it, and reposting it, and so on and so on. This is how stories today go viral, and yet some of them go viral under the premise they might be true, even as their creators insist they are simply fiction.

I remember the first time my son used the word “creepypasta.” I was offended, thinking he hated my spaghetti, but he explained that there are websites and forums online that allow people to post stories, usually horror, for others to read and take viral. Some of these stories were taken so seriously by readers that they started actually claiming to see the monsters or the entities in the stories, which, please remember, were entirely made up by contributors and not real at all. I wanted to know more, because to me, this was a truly intriguing sociological phenomenon.

A creepypasta is fakelore, usually of the horror genre, or even just a picture or image that gets copied and pasted to online forums and sites, and goes viral. The term “creepypasta” actually comes from “copypasta,” which involves literally copying and pasting information to forums and sites that allow it. One such site, 4chan, is a cross between Pinterest, where people “pin” images they like onto their “page,” and reddit, a hugely popular forums site that younger people flock to with information on just about everything under and over the sun. I asked my son about 4chan and he said, “Mom, you don’t want to go there, trust me.” So I didn’t. According to him, the things people post run the gamut from pure smut to disgusting and gross, and I have enough of that raising a kid and a dog. One very popular meme that came out of the bowels of 4chan is the Rickrolling phenom that took the Internet by storm a few years ago, involving strange and unexpected videos of pop star Rick Astley suddenly appearing on screen singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” If you’ve never been Rickrolled, you’ve been living under a rock!

Creepypastas can be about urban legends, crimes and gruesome murders that never took place, but the tone of the stories is often so realistic, anyone who didn’t know they were fictional might be easily misled. Some of the stories on the various creepypasta sites and Wikis are downright bone chilling!

But my son was hooked for awhile on the Creepypasta stories, most notably one called “Slender Man,” which became such a huge rage, he even wore a Slender Man costume to Comic Con, and was one of thousands doing likewise. Apparently, this utterly sinister entity, totally fictional mind you, came from the twisted brain of one Eric Knudsen, also known as Victor Surge, for a forum called “Something Awful.” He created the image as a meme, of a very tall, slender man with no face wearing a black suit and white shirt and collar, with tie. This spectral entity was said to lurk near places children played or went to school, and legend had it (there’s that word, legend again!) if you looked at Slender Man, you would die on the spot. Slender Man would abduct children and was eventually linked to the more paranormal “shadow people” entities being reported worldwide. Yet this one was not real…

The frightening figure that is the Slenderman from creepypasta fame. — Slender Man

The stories proliferated, and the legend grew, and soon Slender Man was, as stated earlier, a popular Halloween and Con costume, but also a very scary example of how something totally fake could, well, take on a life of its own, even spawning potential acts of violence. In 2014, two teenage girls were arrested in Waukesha, Wisconsin after they stabbed a classmate and left her for dead, claiming Slender Man told them to commit the crime. The stabbing victim recovered, but will no doubt be scarred physically and emotionally for life, all because two girls believed in something that was nothing more than the brainchild of a creative imagination. IT WASN’T REAL. IT ISN’T REAL. And yet…if you read some of the alleged reports, they sound so authentic. Chalk it up to good writing skills!

Scholars have dubbed things like this “digital folklore,” and they are a real phenomenon worthy of study, combining true elements of folk tales with modern methods of fast communication. The perfect storm for spreading a story to millions of people even before anyone can say, “It’s fake!” The power of mass communication has taken fakelore to a new level. But where oral and written traditions of old have stood the test of time, fakelore suffers from quick burnout and the overwhelming amount of new stories available with a few keystrokes. Slender Man is no longer very popular. Now the “kids” are onto something else, like zombie apocalypses and human/alien hybrids in their schools.

Like folklore, fakelore can sometimes include nuggets of truth or be based on or inspired by a true person or event. One such piece of creepypasta fakelore is called Jeff the Killer, and involves a very sinister looking teenage boy named Jeff whose face was badly burned by a bully, causing him to go insane, and sport a sinister smile much like the Heath Ledger version of the Joker. Jeff the Killer became a serial killer with the M.O. of sneaking into his victims homes, whispering in their ear, “Go to sleep,” then killing them. Jeff the Killer is a feared person, if you read the stories, and it almost sounds like people believe he is real, possibly because of our inherent fear of “copycats,” who might be prone to take this fictional stuff and adopt the identities and characteristics and behaviors. Copycat killers pop up whenever we hear about real serial killers…why not those that aren’t quite real? To a crazy person, the mind doesn’t distinguish much difference.

There is also a humanoid entity called The Rake that has created its own place in the creepypasta Hall of Fame. Like Slender Man, this cyptozoological thing on four legs with glowing red eyes, said to attach people for no reason and cause severe psychological trauma in its victims, has spawned hundreds of eyewitness sightings (dating back to the 1690s!), if you believe the reports on the various sites. Some of them sound terrifyingly genuine, and herein lies the curse of storytelling…it can sound awfully close to the truth, and we are left to figure out what is fact and what is fiction. One glance at The Rake’s own Wiki page and you can see the many drawings and renditions people have made over the years. It’s like fan art and fan fiction!

Perhaps the creepypasta entities and creatures are not all that far removed from stories and reports of Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, Thunderbirds, and even Skunk Ape, a Florida cryptid with its own urban legend. And perhaps they are not that far removed from the paranormal entities many people report, such as shadow figures, black-eyed kids, apparitions and demons. Even urban lore such as Bloody Mary, you know, that chick you’re supposed to see when you stand before the bathroom mirror and chant her name three times, fall into the category of fakelore. Has anyone actually proven Bloody Mary exists, outside of bars and Super Bowl parties, that is? Some say she is the image of a woman named Mary Worth burned at the stakes during the witch trials. Another legend suggests she’s a fortune teller who will predict your future husband by making his image appear in a mirror if you follow her ritual. Another still suggests she is the spirit of Mary Tudor of England who had Protestants put to death during her reign, thus giving her the name “Bloody Mary.” Others suggest her popularity with young girls has to do with a connection between their anxiety over beginning menstruation manifesting in a spectral form. Hmmmm. And yet, that piece of lore continues to spawn countless trips to the bathroom at night by groups of giggling teenage girls or gullible boys. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary. Make mine with a sprig of celery, please!

My son has long since moved on from his fascination with Slender Man and his creepypasta friends, now that he is older and knows that even though Paul Bunyan might have been really, really, really tall, it’s doubtful he had a blue ox. And he knows that Johnny Appleseed was a real person important to the apple industry, but perhaps not quite as eccentric as stories labeled him. As we become more educated, we realize that stories are both a blend of the real and the unreal, the normal and the paranormal, the natural and the supernatural…Okay, I’ll stop. Stories combine fact and fiction in order to influence and affect the right and left brain, the subconscious and the conscious. Often stories contain symbols, motifs and themes that have a deeper meaning only understood by our subconscious minds. Often they contain fairies and elves and beasties and three-headed hydras, which may simply be the creepypasta creations of the subconscious realm.

The bottom line is, folklore and fakelore are almost indistinguishable, unless one has access to the exact origin point of said tall tale. In the case of Slender Man, we know who created the damn thing, and we know where and when. That is where its power should end. With other legendary beasties and entities, we may not have that information at hand, and that is why many legends continue to be passed down to younger generations. Until someone proves it’s true or false, and locates the original perpetrator of said story, we are left to guess. We are left to imagine.

Slender Man may simply be a monster created from the collective mind of humanity, birthed onto a website as a just-for-fun meme that caused real fear in the hearts of many. Whether or not he lurks around the elementary school or parks and takes kids, or is simply a symbol of the perverts that we truly need to fear that do abduct children, is a part of the sociological importance of legend and lore, even fakelore.

What is it trying to tell us about ourselves?

—

You Better Watch Out, You Better Not Cry: Christmas Legends, Lore and Ghost Stories – Marie D. Jones’ The Outer Edge

December 16, 2015 By The Paranormal Braintrust

As children lay snug in their beds, dreaming of sugarplums, or more likely, Xbox One and the newest Star Wars merchandise, Santa Claus prepares to make his way down the chimney and leave toys wrapped in bright paper under the tree. At least that’s what part of the world believes, for when it comes to Christmas, there are all kinds of traditions and legends, many of which take on a much darker tone than a jolly fat guy in a red and white velvet suit who works only one night a year and loves kids.

Legends are often based upon actual people who existed long ago. Their stories over time are embellished and altered according to whomever is telling the story, which makes it hard to discern fact from fiction. Often in the case of pagan traditions, newer religions tack on their own traditions or obliterate the original pagan symbols, creating a mash-up character such as Santa Claus. We all learned his story in school, but did you know there also exists an “anti-Santa?”

Bum bum BUUUUUUUM!!!

So, many of you may be familiar with Krampus. He’s even got his own Facebook memes, which in this day and age is the hallmark of fame. This German/Alpine legendary figure was said to be an actual companion to St. Nicholas, the gift-giving Greek Saint and Bishop of Myra, who later morphed into Santa Claus with a few modern add-ons (think Rudolph, ho-ho-ho and elves!), and has a distinct pre-Christian origin. This somewhat humanlike creature has a pagan bent, and is more associated with punishing children who don’t behave, than rewarding children who do (even though tradition states he did reward kids as well!). Krampus, which might be an offshoot of the pagan Horned God of the witches, or even a masked devil figure (which later became the Christian devil) is portrayed as hideous and frightening. He sometimes has brown hair, sometimes black, with cloven hooves and goat horns, and a long tongue. Sounds devilish, right? He carries chains, too, which he thrashes about, along with ruten, or bundles of birch branches he swats kids with. Other versions show him carrying a sack or tub that he uses to carry bad children in, and even drown and eat them in. Nice guy for a Saint to be hanging out with, am I right?

Parents would threaten to take bad children in a sack to be dropped off with Krampus (Good Lord, no wonder so many kids end up in therapy!). He even has his own celebratory night, December 5th, one night before the Feast of Saint Nicholas, when he would appear to the public as a hairy devilish creature, sometimes alone, sometimes with his pal, St. Nicholas, visiting homes and businesses. He appeared on Christmas cards in the 1800s and spawned a number of regional celebrations in his honor, featuring pre-Christian rituals and symbols.

Funnily, or maybe not so funnily, the Austrian government actually prohibited Krampus traditions after the Civil War in 1934, and in the 1950s, went so far as to hand out pamphlets stating poor Krampus was an “Evil Man.” It may have suppressed Krampus activities then, but today, Krampus celebrations are once again popular in many European countries, and now in the United States as well. Just this year in 2015, he even got his own movie!

Another German Christmas legend, because Germany cannot have too many twisted traditions, is the story of Belsnickel, a creepy figure in rags and old furs who carries a switch and threatens little children with a whoopin’ if they don’t behave. Belsnickel roams from house to house for weeks before Christmas. If he doesn’t show up at your door, be on the lookout for another crafty German creep named Knecht Ruprecht, which translates to “farmhand Rupert” or “Servant Rupert,” who wears a long beard, brown cloak and holds a staff. He goes around asking little children if they pray. If they do, they get a goodie like some yummy gingerbread. If they don’t pray, well, they can get a punishment in the form of junk, which, if the children refuse, then leads to a beating with a bag of ashes. Tip to the children of Germany – behave and no matter what, say you pray!!!

A similar tradition exists in Sweden and Finland, also involving a goat-like character that visits homes and demands food and alcohol. No, we’re not talking about your ugly drunk Uncle Peter. We’re talking about Nuuttipukki, who wears a leather or birch mask, horns and fur. The tradition has its origins in the life of Canute Lavard, a Danish Duke who was sainted after his death and given January 7th as a holiday. “Knut’s Day” is still celebrated today, albeit with a more positive slant. Apparently, the Swedes and Finns didn’t like anyone taking their food and booze!

In the upper German region of the Alps exists another tradition of a pagan goddess of both good and bad, darkness and light, bodacious beauty and butt-ugly! Her name is Perchta (also known as Berchta) and is often identified with other goddesses such as Holda, Frija, Diana, and Herodias. Perchta appears in two forms, either beautiful and snow white, or as an old hag. Perhaps this is where the Snow White story originated from, for Perchta was indeed a lovely goddess of spinning and weaving, adorned in a white robe, pure as snow. Yet she also led the wild hunt, had one foot bigger than the other, and could shape shift into animals.

Perchta roamed the countryside, going from house to house (a lot of these legendary figures sound like Jehovah’s Witnesses!), leaving a coin in the shoes of good little children who were well behaved. If they weren’t well behaved or hadn’t completed their chores, then she took a whole different tactic. She would gut the children by slitting their stomachs open and take out their guts, replacing them with straw and rocks. She would even do this if someone missed her feast day or ate something she didn’t approve of. Not a very nice lady, which makes you wonder why anyone opened their door to her in the first place!

She was accompanied by an entourage of Perchten, usually men wearing ghoulish animal masks, some of which were beautiful and for good luck, and others, hideous, with horns and fangs. Of interest to the paranormal crowd, men dressed as the ugly Perchten in the 16th century would go from home to home to drive out demons and spirits. Were they the original exorcists, or just celebrants of this highly symbolic goddess of duality?

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Don’t just blame Germany for all the angst in children; Iceland has its own country legend, a terrifying lady ogre named Gryla who feeds on naughty little kids. She has three heads, three eyes per head, ice blue eyes at the back of her head, long fingernails like talons, and goat horns. (There’s that goat symbolism again). She also sports a chin beard. Gryla is said to have trolls called Yule Lads that help her find children to cook and eat. She had as many as three husbands and 70+ kids, some of which were murderous little buggers. Iceland had the good sense in 1746 to prohibit talk of Gryla because it scared children too much. Let’s hope the United States does something similar with Common Core math!

Another Iceland myth involves a cat, Jolakotturinn, or the Yule Cat. The Yule Cat was an evil kitty that ate lazy children, or at least that’s what parents used to tell their children to get them to finish their chores. I’ll take Grumpy Cat any day over this crazy feline.

Italy celebrates the legend of the witch known as La Befana, who flies on her broomstick during the night of January 5 and fills stockings with toys and sweets for good children and lumps of coal for bad ones. According to the legend, the night before the Wise Men arrived at the manger where Christ was born, they stopped at the shack of an old woman to ask directions (men asking for directions? Surely this is a legend and not real?). They invited her to accompany them on their journey, but she was too busy and refused. A shepherd came along and asked her to join him, but again she refused. Later that night, she saw a bright star in the sky and was moved to join the Wise Men and the shepherd, bringing gifts that had belonged to her dead child to offer to the Christ infant.

Two of the more, well, interesting legends come to us from around Spain; the Catatonia legend of The Caganer, and the Spanish Tio de Nadal. Both involve something not usually associated with the holidays, unless you’re talking about Santa’s reindeer and a high fiber intake.

Poop. Yes, you read that right. Poop.

The Caganer is a legend from Catalonia, Portugal and Southern France, involving a rather ancient character, a peasant in a red had and trousers pulled down to his knees, who apparently, as legend has it, had to do a “number two” while the Christ child was being born. He is depicted as being evil, but maybe he just ate too much bran that day. Can you give a guy a break? Rumor has it when the Spanish city of Barcelona tried to ban the festival in his honor, there was enough of an outcry to restore the festival. I cannot even BEGIN to imagine what kind of festival it is, and what people do there. Use your imagination.

Some scholars note that this story is highly symbolic of the act of fertilizing the earth to bring about new life. I can buy that, especially with the belief that the Winter Solstice was symbolic of death and the return to light and the coming of spring. A little fertilizer goes a long way to ensuring new growth! Just ask anyone who lives on a golf course.

Tio de Nadal is actually not a person…but a log. A log that poops out goodies such as nuts and fruits. And if you sing to it and burn it in the fireplace, you might even get better gifts than trail mix. The English translation of part of the song goes as follows:

“Poop Log, poop turron,
Hazelnuts and cottage cheese.
If you don’t poop well,
I’ll hit you with with a stick, Poop Log.”

Look, I don’t make this stuff up, I just write about it.

Here in the United States, we have a much less sinister legend in the making, involving a cute little elf that sits on a shelf. “The Elf on the Shelf” started out as nothing more than a book written by a mother and daughter. They got the idea over a cup of tea and self published the book in 2004, which quickly became a sensation, spawning more holiday memes than Charlie Brown or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. The book is about Santa’s team of scout elves who visit homes before Christmas to watch over people’s behaviors before reporting back to the North Pole. Scout elves hide all over the house and it’s up to the family to find them, and name them. Oh, it’s all good fun and games, except for some critics who responded by labeling the elves bullies who spy on kids and invade people’s privacy.

Maybe they work for the NSA?

Perhaps we don’t have as many holiday legends as Europe does, but we do like our Christmas ghosts. The holidays serve as a time when the sun shines less, there is more dark than light, and we often turn our thoughts to those we no longer have around, loved ones who have passed on. Perhaps this in part helps to explain our obsession with one of the most famous ghost stories ever written, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” If you haven’t seen any of the numerous versions on television, in the movies or in book form, well, you are living under a rock. The famous Dickens tale is a part of accepted Christmas tradition for millions, maybe because it tells a story we can all relate to.

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English writer Charles John Huffman Dickens first published his novella, or short novel, “A Christmas Carol” under the shortened name Charles Dickens back in December of 1843. It has since become a true classic ghost story that is both parable and morality tale. It tells the story of one grinchy, grouchy Ebenezer Scrooge, a businessman in London whose partner Jacob Marley had died exactly seven years ago. Marley turns up one cold Christmas eve moaning and dragging chains, as many ghosts do, to tell Scrooge he will be visited by three ghosts that night. The ghosts represent Christmases past, present and future, and all are attempts to teach the selfish grump some humility and charity before it’s too late.

Over the course of the visits, Scrooge looks back at the error of his ways and begins to repent. On Christmas morning, when he awakens, he is a new man with a big heart, ready to make amends for the sins of his past.

Bah humbug.

But this tale is more than just a cool ghost story. It’s a story that reminds us of the importance of humility, love, caring and sharing. And it is certainly not the only old ghost story that sports a holiday setting. No doubt, the legends written about earlier became ghost stories of today that many a German or Nordic child hears at holiday time.

During the Victorian and Elizabethan eras, it was normal to sit around all those dark nights by the fire and spin a ghost tale or two, just as we would do today if we weren’t buried in technology or football games. Other authors such as MR James, Henry James, Washington Irving, William Makepeace Thackeray, and even the likes of HP Lovecraft have all written spooky stories set at Yule time. In his wonderful December 2011 article, “Christmas Spirits: The Origins of Ghost Stories at Christmas,” for Hypnogoria.com, author Jim Moon sums up the proliferation of ghost stories related to the holidays rather succinctly:

“In the long, cold evenings, when the soil had been tilled to the extent that climactic conditions permitted, the still predominantly agricultural community of early modern England would sit and while away the hours of darkness with fireside pastimes, among them old wives’ tales designed to enthrall young and old alike.”

Even Shakespeare understood the connection between the dark nights of winter and a good ghost story. “A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of Sprits and Goblins.”

For just as we love telling ghost stories over campfires at night, or huddled as children under blanket forts, our ancestors loved a good ghost story during the cold, dark winter nights that went on forever. What better way to pass the time than scaring the living daylights out of one another?

At least until television came along.

So while there may be a lot of ghost stories set during Christmas, and even told during Christmas, it most likely has much more to do with the symbolism of December 21st and the Winter Solstice as the darkest day of the year, than the idea that ghosts exist more abundantly over the holidays. Halloween probably holds that claim to fame.

The stories and legends of Christmas remind us of the past and those we left behind, but also of more ancient, even primitive times, when humans were more focused on nature than technology; when oral and written traditions were handed down from elders to youngsters; and when pagan beliefs were morphing into the Christian holidays we celebrate today.

It is in that “in-between” state, betwixt the old and the new, where spooky stories, like the mighty Evergreen, take root and spread.

—

Time Slippin’ and Space Trippin’: Timeslips in the Matrix – Marie D. Jones’ The Outer Edge

November 19, 2015 By The Paranormal Braintrust

“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”
-Henry Van Dyke

Time passes in a linear fashion, from the then to the now to the next. The past is what happened before the now. The future is what happens after the now. The now, as the gurus love to tell us, is the gift of the present. Get it? Got it? Good.

Enough has been written about time and our understanding of it, as well as our lack of understanding of it, to fill a million textbooks. I won’t bore you with a lesson on time. Look at your watch. The second, minute and hour hands are progressive forward. Sure, you could wind them back, but you’d be the only one on the planet living two hours behind and a lot of people would probably be annoyed with you.

Time is linear…at least to our brains. It’s a necessity to keep our lives in order, to give it meaning, and to keep us from being late to the dentist for our root canal.

But on occasion, time does strange and distorted things that throw us for a loop. It leaks, it slides, it disappears, it elongates, it shifts, it stops…it slips. And on those occasions, our brains feel discombobulated because we’ve been taken outside of the comfort zone of our usual experience of the “arrow” of time. It messes with our heads, big-time.A “timeslip” is, specifically, a bend or fold in the process of the linear unfoldment of the forward motion of time. It’s time out of order. A popular device for science fiction and fantasy stories, timeslips have been reported for hundreds of years, and most likely have been occurring for as long as humans walked the earth. Timeslips differ from missing time, in that missing time is often just a chunk of present moment activity and the normal passing of time that happens beyond our conscious level of awareness.

But a timeslip is another beast entirely. Ever see the Stephen King mini-series “The Langoliers” or read the story? It’s a great example of a timeslip. A plane full of crew and passengers find themselves suddenly in the past having gone through a bizarre electromagnetic timeslip…and the story follows them as they move to catch back up to “present point.” Another great example of timeslips in a popular television show is “Lost.” My goodness, that series was full of so many timeslips it even lost me after awhile. Are they in the past? Is this today? Are we now in tomorrow? AND WHO ATE MY POPCORN???

HUH?

Watching or reading about other people’s experiences of timeslips can be almost as disorienting as actually having one yourself. Witness reports abound and all have a common thread…time did not behave as it normally does. Science might suggest it is simply an anomaly of the brain or memory, like déjà vu. Theoretical and quantum physicists might suggest it could involve sliding into and out of a parallel universe, or a parallel timeline. It’s not time travel, per se, in our common understanding of time travel. It’s more about experiencing a different time reality while in the present. Again, much like déjà vu is a “memory” of something that hasn’t happened yet, or didn’t happen yet.

If we look at time as our brain’s ability to keep track of life events, then a time slip is our conscious experience derailing a little from that track, like when you go on one of those cheap rides at the local carnival that’s on a track, yet it’s jerking you left and right and scaring the crap out of your kids because they think it’s gonna send them flying. But I digress…

One of the best books ever written on these mysterious hiccups in time is “Time Storms” by Jenny Randles, a British journalist who has also written extensively about UFOs and time travel. She documented hundreds of cases of timeslips all over the world, and some of the more eerie common denominators, such as the presence of a “green fog” or mist that the person/s entered, within which their time distortion occurred. In many cases, a person or group of people would walk or drive into said fog or mist, feel a sense of disorientation and “electrical” charges (hair standing on end, nausea, dizziness) and upon returning to a normal state, find themselves hundreds of miles from where they were, and hours to days later!

Imagine you’re out walking Fido and you see a fog casting a slightly off color glow. You enter, thinking nothing of it, and start feeling sick to your stomach. You maybe even lose normal consciousness. You come out of the fog only yards from where you went in, and only say, about five minutes after you entered…except you are now 50 miles up the road on a highway you don’t recognize, and three hours have passed. The presence of this fog in so many timeslip encounters is reminiscent of the activity reported at the Bermuda Triangle and Devil’s Triangle, where the pilots of planes entering these mysterious zones often reported feeling the same disorientation, along with the chaotic behavior of electronic equipment and even compasses. The same goes for captains of ships and small craft entering these fogs who have come back to tell about it!

Could this fog be a precursor or “entrance” sign to the opening of an earthbound wormhole that, for just a short time, transports us through space and time?

Those common elements run through many timeslips, and the spooky thing is, we’re talking not just about a perception of time becoming distorted, but physical effects as well, including the movement of a solid object, such as you and your dog Fido, hundreds of feet, yards, even miles away! This is not just time playing tricks on your head, but on your body, too. It is both a temporal and spatial glitch in the Matrix, folks.

Many of the timeslips documented by Randles and other paranormal researchers involve the sightings of UFOs, ghostly apparitions, even UFO abduction experiences. Many involve physical sensations of skin itching or burning, ears popping as if the air pressure outside was drastically changing, and symptoms that suggest perhaps the presence of infrasound (dizziness, disorientation, vomiting…)

As a writer, I can attest to experiencing time distortions. If I’m deeply engrossed in writing something, I may think only an hour has passed, only to find when I come out of my “zone” that four hours have passed! Because my brain was engaged in the present moment of what I was doing, it lost a sense of the linear flow of time enough to misjudge the amount that had actually passed.

But…I never left my chair.

Yet another time I could be so engrossed in my work that not only do I misjudge how much time has passed…I might not even be consciously aware of the fact that I managed to get up, take the dog out and make a ham on rye until I come out of my “zone” and see the bread crust on my plate. HOW THE HELL DID THAT GET THERE? I DON’T REMEMBER DOING THAT? I HATE HAM ON RYE!!!

Therein lies a major clue to the timeslip experience. We don’t remember what is happening at the time of distortion. We remember going into the experience…and coming out of it. Perhaps there is a simple scientific explanation for the gaps in time we experience.

But how does that explain the physical nature of timeslips and ending up somewhere we did not intend to be?

Again, is it just science? Think of times you’ve been on a long, familiar drive and lost track of both time and distance traveled. Your brain and your body have this wonderful thing called “autopilot” that allows you to perform rote, familiar duties without much conscious attention. So, then, it’s possible that during a timeslip we are sent into both mental and physical autopilot, which results in us running at top speed to a road a mile or so away, which for many of us would take awhile, not being runners…Then when we “come to,” we wonder how we got there and why so much time has passed? Is all of this simply the brain and the body conspiring to mess with us by operating of their own accord?

Or are we indeed slipping into an alternate reality, fueled perhaps by something in the environment, whether it is electromagnetic or geomagnetic, even seismic and atmospheric anomalies, that open a “glitch” in time and space? It’s not scientifically impossible.

But perhaps we need to let the stories of witnesses and experiencers speak for themselves. Here are some snippets of “timeslips” experienced by people, gleaned from a variety of sources, including Randles’ book, internet paranormal forums and my own research for my time travel book with Larry Flaxman, “This Book Is From the Future” (talk about a timeslip, we published a book before it was even written! Try that!).

The most famous and well-documented timeslip is the “Moberly-Jourdain Incident” which occurred in 1901 at France’s Palace of Versailles gardens. Two women, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, were visiting the grounds when they got lost trying to locate the Grand Trianon. They suddenly found themselves on a lane off the main path, leading to an old deserted farmhouse. The people and things they saw on the lane were not of the present time, and both women later described the sensation of being thrown back in time and witnessing the location as it was in the late 18th century, including the garb of the people they encountered. They actually spoke to some of these “ghostly apparitions come to life,” and Moberly later described in a book, “An Adventure” written by the women (under the pseudonyms Miss Morison and Miss Lamont) a sense of the atmosphere around them changing, especially when they passed by a cottage with a young girl out front they described as frozen in time. “Everything suddenly looked unnatural…even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless…There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred in the trees.”

Eventually the two women came across a man who they sensed was evil and whose appearance repulsed them, but who showed them how to find their destination. Later, some researchers suggested the women had encountered The Comte de Vaudreuil, an enemy of Marie Antoinette’s, who matched their descriptions.

After their experience, the women wrote separate accounts of what they felt happened, and even returned numerous times to the same gardens, unable to find that strange lane they turned down to encounter a slip in time. But it affected them so greatly afterwards, something other timeslip experiencers agree on.

Randles reported several recent cases of this same kind of atmospheric shift, described in a number of situations as being palpable and disturbing. One such experience happened in Calder Valley, England in 1995, when a group of four people at a barbecue suddenly experienced a strange heaviness to the atmosphere and felt an electrical charge in the air, not unlike what one experiences before a thunderstorm. All then experienced a timeslip, which they described as a “compression” of time, during which objects moved on their own! They also reported a dark grey mass or mist that enveloped the area they were in, and a strange beam of light, followed by darkness.

Another incident in 2005 in Nebraska involved two men in a truck traveling to a local pit stop they were familiar with. The men suddenly had a feeling of heaviness to the air and a sense of something “feeling off,” and then the truck entered into a fog. When they emerged, they were at the pit stop; only it appeared as it had been a hundred years earlier right down to the clothing the waitresses and patrons wore. Other witnesses report the reverse of this type of experience, as in seeing a solitary diner on the side of a dark deserted highway, stopping in for a meal, then when attempting to RETURN to said diner weeks or months later, finding it not only abandoned and run down, but discovering the diner went out of business thirty years ago. “Ghost Diners,” coming soon to a TV screen near you! That’s my idea; don’t try to steal it…

One account in 1991 involved a Nova Scotia man going home on a bus ride, and experiencing the strange distortion of the bus going by the exact same tire factory twice. Also on board the bus was a loud family that, on the second time past the tire factory, was strangely quiet, as if frozen (remember the strange girl outside the cottage in the Moberly-Jourdain incident?).

Another report involved two men near a lake in Oxford, England who, at 3am in the morning, heard a strange noise and got in their car to investigate. They were suddenly enveloped by a colored glow and ended up instantaneously a mile up the road with the car pointing in the opposite direction and a stalled engine to boot.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell an actual timeslip from an encounter with a ghostly apparition, human or otherwise. In one reported, from 1971, three men in Ponca City, Oklahoma were working as cattle feed distributors when they had just such an experience. They pulled up to a remote area to pick up a feeder and entered a gate leading into the property. They noticed the grass was so overgrown and unattended; it was taller than the hood of the truck they were driving in. They pulled up to the tank near a red barn and got out, but once they realized the tank was too heavy to load onto their truck, they decided to leave and come back the next day. As they drove around the barn, they noticed an old two story white house.

The next day they went back to the cattle feed company and were told the tank would be fully drained so they could go back and pick it up. The three men went back the next night to retrieve the tank, and decided to check out the old white house…but it was no longer there. It had vanished. There were no signs of demolition, or even a pre-existing foundation. It just wasn’t there. The experience was seared into their memories for over 40 years and they still cannot explain what happened.

So are these diners actually traveling back, forth and in between time and space? Were the two women in the gardens literally walking down a lane into another dimension? Did our British barbecue party drink too much and have a shared drunken vision? And was our bus rider simply having a major déjà vu experience? Were our two lake visitors too tired to notice they’d driven their own car a mile and turned it around, not to mention shot the engine to high hell? And did the three cattle feed workers see a “ghost house,” and not experience a glitch in time and space at all?

If these timeslips only happened to individuals, we might pass them off as a misidentified natural phenomenon or memory screw-up. But when they happen to two or more people at a time, it’s not so easy to say, “It’s all in your mind” or “You imagined it.”

Jenny Randles goes on in her book to describe such phenomena as having the one great common denominator of a strange “teleporting” cloud or fog made of energy that can transport people and even vehicles into another dimension, both spatial and temporal. She calls it the “Oz Factor,” as in the Wizard of Oz, one of the best fictional examples of a timeslip involving both distortions of time and space. This Oz Factor could be purely explainable by certain atmospheric conditions, electromagnetic anomalies or even memory misfires. In other words, scientific stuff that isn’t paranormal at all except to the ones experiencing it.

Then again, they can be perfect examples of how little we truly understand time, space and our ability to travel the potentially infinite realities we may exist in, or have access to, when we happen to be in the “right place at the right time.”

Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore!

—

A Million Ways To Die – Marie D. Jones’ “The Outer Edge”

October 20, 2015 By The Paranormal Braintrust

“When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more
time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death son, and die like a hero going home. “
–Tecumseh

We are all going to die. It’s inevitable for those of us lucky enough to be born. But perspectives of death differ according to beliefs, geography, cultural and social traditions and personal experiences. To some, death is a terrifying finality, a ceasing of awareness and the “Fade to Black” of the story of a life. To others, it’s just another pit stop on the much longer, grander journey of the soul. But all cultures, all religious traditions and all belief systems understand that the death of the body does happen.

It’s what happens to the rest of “us” that gives rise to wonder, theory, fear, speculation and awe.

Across geographical boundaries, things are different when it comes to how we handle our dead and what it means symbolically. In fact, they may be so different, we here in the West with our traditional burials and funerals might think them utterly…bizarre.

Here is a virtual tour around the world of some of the stranger death rituals and traditions.

In Denmark and Scandinavian countries, when a person is on their deathbed, a window must be opened to allow for the soul to pass through. This symbolizes letting go of life. The sea-faring Vikings of old held their burials aboard a burning ship, a practice that has actually become popular again today, probably due to a few very popular television series!

In the Solomon Islands, a state of Oceania, east of Papua New Guinea, the dead are laid out on a reef and left as food for the sharks. A similar tradition occurs in Australia, where the Aborigines would leave dead bodies in trees, much like the Parsees of Bombay of India, who left their dead on the tops of towers to be eaten by vultures! The Aboriginal people would then take a souvenir of bones of the deceased and paint them with red ochre, then place the bones in a cave or inside a log. Sometimes relatives wore the painted bones as adornments.

If you think about it, this is not much different than today’s practice of wearing a dead loved one’s ashes in a small vial on a chain, or having a pet cremated and put in a small decorative box on your shelf.

The Dani of West Papua, New Guinea, once took the death of a loved one to an extreme, by cutting off their own fingers. This disgusting ritual included children! Fingers were tied with string and then cut off with an axe, with the chopped off digits dried and burned to be stored in a special place. This ritual is now banned, thankfully. I’ll give that two thumbs up!

In Bali, the dead are buried in a huge pit with other bodies, which are later unearthed and cleaned, to be stacked up on a large float that is decorated with flowers. The whole village takes part in the ritual decoration of the float, which is then paraded to a central square. Here, the bodies are burned in a mass cremation.

The Maasai tribe of East Africa bury their warrior chiefs, but the regular folk are simply disposed of outdoors for predators, symbolizing the tribal belief that bodies not be left to “poison” the earth and that death itself is final. Done. Over. Meanwhile, in Teshi, in Ghana the dead are often buried in specially designed coffins that represent something fantastical and larger than life, such as a giant piece of fruit, a car, a plane or something related to the job the decease held in life! Can you imagine the possibilities today? As a writer, I could be buried inside a giant book-shaped coffin.

The Maoris of New Zealand dress their dead in nice clothing and then place the bodies in a hut in a sitting position, to be viewed first by mourners wearing green wreathes who cry out and cut themselves with knives. Then they hold a feast and burn the hut. Speaking of huts, the Pygmies of the Congo literally abandon their dead by first destroying the hut they lived in, done by pulling it down on top of the body itself, then literally moving their entire camp somewhere else and never speaking of the dead person again.

The Malagasy people of Madagascar like to dance with the dead…literally. Imagine digging up the remains of your dead loved one, wrapping them up with a fresh cloth, then dancing with the corpse to the tunes of live tribal music. It’s a ritual called the “Famadihana,” which stands for the “Turning of the Bones” and can be thought of as the turning of the stomach for those of us not used to cha-cha’ing with dead Uncle Fred.

Alaskan Eskimos often make small igloos over the dead, leaving them forever frozen in time. The Haida of the Pacific Northwest cast the bodies of their dead into open pits behind the village, leaving them to be consumed by animals. However, if the dead were an authority figure, like a shaman or warrior, they got special treatment. The body was then crushed by clubbing and put into a small wooden box, then put atop a totem pole in front of the home of the dead to guard the spirit’s journey into the next world.

Other native traditions hold feasts with the dead present, which we today might consider a health issue, if not just downright gross, then burn or bury the body in a secluded area. The Navajo destroy the hut of the dead person and then allow relatives to burn the body, being careful to not take a direct route home should the spirit of the dead follow them. The Iroquois bury their dead in shallow graves that are later exhumed so that the bones, along with gifts for the spirits, can be brought to a central burial site after a mourning feast.

Jamaicans choose to party instead, celebrating the dead for nine nights to support the relatives and give the body of the dead a safe passage to the other side. There is dancing, singing, and eating…even some good rum, signifying a less fear-based belief in the finality of death. 40 nights later, the relatives return to sing again, symbolizing the completion of the passage of the departed’s soul, or maybe just another excuse for imbibing good rum.

The Muslim tradition requires that the body of the deceased be placed on its sides and washed with soap and scented water. Like the Hindus, the Muslims must wash the body an odd number of times, and the teeth and nose must be cleaned out in a spiritual cleansing rite called ablution. The body is perfumed and wrapped in white cloth. Prayers are said facing Mecca and a silent procession delivers the body to the burial grounds. Muslims bury their dead with their faces facing Mecca and all signs of grief by the families are discouraged as they are insulting to the acceptance of God’s will.

Buddhists call in the services of a priest on the first day of a family member’s death to come and recite a sutra, a literary narrative based upon Buddhist scripture or teachings. Incense is burned on the second day in front of a butsudan, or family altar. On the third day the body is burned at a funeral hall and the ashes are returned to the family home. The actual funeral is presided over by the priest as the family burns incense, and then the ashes are laid to rest at a graveyard. The family of the dead will visit the gravesite once a week for seven weeks and on the 49th day, hold a customary feast called the “Shiju-ku-Nichi” for friends and neighbors.

Hindus cremate their dead, first bathing the body and adorning it with garlands, then wrapping it in a pure white cloth. The body is burned upon a pyre and in the days to follow, mourners often remain inside and away from festivals, marriage ceremonies and other public events. In the 1800s, grieving widows in India practiced self-immolation (Suttee), burning themselves alive alongside their husband’s funeral pyre. Suttee was banned in 1829 by the British, then again in 1956 and 1981, proving that some traditions, like bad habits, are hard to “die.”

Tibetans once practiced something called Tibetan Sky Burial, where a corpse was dismembered atop a mountain and left for the birds. Called “jhator,” this giving of alms to the winged creatures involved monks with axes chopping up bodies into bird-worthy parts, laughing and joking all the while. But at its heart was the belief that the dead would be consumed by nature, as it should be, sort of like “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Some Chinese death rituals involve dusting the body with talcum powder before dressing the dead in their finest clothing. All other clothing owned by the deceased is burned. The body is then draped with a yellow cloth on the face, and a blue cloth on the body. The home of the deceased will no doubt include statues of deities that must be covered with red paper. All mirrors in the home are removed, due to the belief that if you see a coffin reflected in a mirror, someone in your family will be next to die.

This is just an example of some of the more unusual ways the world acknowledges the dead. No matter where in the world death occurs, there is some unique way to usher the dead to the other side, even if it involves strange oddities such as sharks, giant fruit-shaped caskets or disembodiment.

Even our own modern traditions have undergone some tweaking to include more “personalized” forms of remembrance, such as the popular “paddling out” funerals of surfers where ashes are disposed of in the ocean the dead person loved so much. Or hiking funerals where ashes are spread over a trail that was well loved by the deceased.

We now have “jazz funerals” where bands play boisterous music and the atmosphere is party-like. These are popular in places like New Orleans, rich in traditions of African origins and spiritual beliefs. Maybe you’d prefer a “green funeral,” using coffins made of environmentally friendly materials, and how about a “home funeral,” where families construct the casket themselves and everything is done in the family’s home (except, hopefully, burial!).
With cremation, funerals have gotten a lot more flexible and creative, as it’s a lot easier to spread ashes anywhere than it is to bury a body. The ashes can be thrown off a favorite bridge, spread across a racetrack or even tossed into a favorite fishing lake, as long as local laws allow it…or it’s done in the deep of night with no witnesses! Some might be offended at the thought of the ashes of the dead everywhere, but to the families, it’s a way of sending their loved ones off in a symbolic and meaningful manner.

I’m Italian. Italian families make MASSIVE amounts of food for the family of the dead, which to another culture might seem obscene or offensive. But to Italians, food is love symbolized and the offering of food is a way of sharing in the mourning and grief, which is why you will find enough food at any Italian after-funeral gathering to feed an army, and often go home with left-overs. Italians wear black and other cultures might wear only white. Customs dictate everything from what is worn, eaten, said, and done, including the burial and disposal of the body itself.

Death touches us all, and some old customs and traditions die as hard as a bad habit, but at their source are universal themes and symbols that stand the test of time…that death is a time to be sad and grieve the passing of a person once loved into another realm, another world, yet also to celebrate their life. That we the living can help usher the dead into that other world through various rituals and use of symbols. That we do fear death, only because of what we believe is lost. That we understand death, because of its transitory part of the cycle of nature. That we respect death and have a reverence for it.

It’s the way we do “all of the above” that differs.

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The Outer Edge

Every October 31st, Americans head to parties or hit the streets dressed in elaborate, often spooky costumes, in celebration of Halloween, a time when the veil between this world and the world beyond death is said to be at its thinnest.

Marie D. Jones’ Outer Edge

“Man was predestined to have free will.” – Anonymous

I hate clowns. No, let me rephrase that. I DESPISE clowns. I have since childhood and chances are pretty good I’ll go to my grave hating the darn things. And I’m not alone in that sentiment.

FAKELORE – Folklore, Urban Legends and the Rise of the Creepypasta (And I Ain’t Talkin’ Linguini!)”

CLICK HERE to check out The Haunted Housewife’s Holiday Gift Guide For The Paranormal Peeps On Your Shopping List!

CLICK HERE to check out The Haunted Housewife’s Holiday Gift Guide For The Paranormal Peeps On Your Shopping List!

“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” -Henry Van Dyke

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“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”
-Henry Van Dyke