CALL OF CTHULHU, SANDY PETERSEN ET AL. (1983)

Role-playing games are one of the closest things to a shared hallucination you can enjoy without taking hallucinogenic substances. You can find yourself in a very strange, altered space of shared imagination – an almost telepathic state of being. This is one developed in the early 1980s called Call of Cthulhu. It was based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, the early 20th-century American writer. The game allows you to adventure within the Lovecraftian universe.

H.P. Lovecraft is one of the authors who has stayed with me since I first began to read on my own. There’s something about his universe   of indifferent cosmic horror that keeps drawing people back, perhaps because it’s so close to the world that’s growing around us. There’s also no doubt that he was an insane racist. He wasn’t just as racist as his time, he was pathologically so. It’s somewhat bizarre that he’s become a canonical literary figure; now, Penguin does a collected H.P. Lovecraft, and this game, Call of Cthulhu is, I believe, second in popularity only to Dungeons & Dragons.

I’ve had this book since I was 14. It was the first UK edition, published by Games Workshop, now Warhammer. It has stunning, uncanny, often disturbing artwork, with full colour paintings amidst the usual, scratchy black and white line art, depicting what were once only the denizens of Lovecraft’s disturbed mind.

RAPID EYE, ED. SIMON DWYER (1989)

Rapid Eye was a DIY production that perfectly reflects many of the obsessions of the radical British counterculture of the mid-to-late-1980s. You’ve got William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Derek Jarman, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, William Blake, Jim Jones, and more mysteriously, cattle mutilations and the hollow Earth. It was a real primer for my youthful interests. Rapid Eye was totally independently self-published, financed and distributed, and printed in a large format for extra visual impact, and reading discomfort. There are things I’d forgotten that were in here that I became interested in later in my own life, like black box devices. People made these sometimes-empty, sometimes-wired-up boxes with switches, dials and buttons on them, that they would use to curse people or cure illnesses or addiction. They’re at the meeting point between witchcraft and technology, and are sort-of technological fetishes. This issue also includes essays about the repressive police state of Thatcher’s Britain, which encapsulates the angry, transgressive cultural underbelly of Britain at the time. Simon Dwyer, the editor, tragically died of AIDS very young, and Rapid Eye folded with him. I have the first two journals, but for some reason, probably financial, I didn’t buy the third one, which has Gilbert & George on the cover. It gives you a sense of both the positivity and the darkness felt in the underground of the time. Rapid Eye was a key influence for me when considering the first Strange Attractor publication, our Journal, back in 2003/4.

THE BLACK GAME, ELLIC HOWE (1982)

This was one of the first books about the crazy disinformation operations run by the Allies during the Second World War, such as printing tens of thousands of copies of fake magazines and distributing them around Germany. Ellic Howe was a young printer hired by Sefton Delmer, an operative for the Political Warfare Executive, a centre for British wartime disinformation strategies. One of the main things they did was to print forgeries like passports and IDs for special forces, but they also faked letters, stamps, magazines and leaflets. They had armies of grannies in England writing depressing letters in German to send to German families with relatives on the front line in order to lower enemy morale. The bureau discovered that Himmler, Hitler and others in the Nazi high command were interested in astrology, so they created a fake German language astrology magazine, Der Zenit, that slightly skewed the astrological dates for when the Germans had big operations planned. This was then distributed around Germany in the hope it would reach its leadership. They flooded postal mail systems with junk mail and chain letters, the equivalent of today’s digital Denial-of-Service attacks, which is when you bombard a server with billions of emails. These are the origins of many of the communications deception operations that exist now – the equivalent of the troll farms out there creating memes, fake news and media reports that flood our social media and email servers in an attempt to manipulate our political consciousness. Ellic Howe also wrote one of the early books about the ritual magic organisation the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. A number of early wartime intelligence and deception specialists were occultists, which makes sense – both worlds are secretive, clandestine and cultic.

THE SECRET WORLD, RAY PALMER (1975)

This is a real curiosity from the mid-1970s and one of my rarer possessions. While Ray Palmer’s name is on the front, much of the writing is by Richard Shaver about his own visionary artwork and experiences – though “visionary” would not likely be a word he’d have used. Shaver was an artist, writer and mechanic living in Pennsylvania during the first half of the 20th century. After the death of his brother, he developed a delusional psychosis that all-powerful beings living in the centre of the Earth – the deranged robotic remnants of an advanced, once benign alien race – were speaking to him telepathically and directing his activities. He wrote long, detailed descriptions of his experiences and adventures under the Earth’s surface, including his discovery of a new language, Mantong, in which every sound had a meaning, almost like aural hieroglyphics.

In Mantong, the beings he encountered were called Deros, a contraction of “detrimental robots”. Shaver wrote at great length about this ancient language and the activities of the subterranean Deros, who used advanced technologies, including mind control beams and flying saucers, to control life on the Earth’s surface. Shaver sent his writing to Ray Palmer, editor of a popular pulp magazine called Amazing Stories. Palmer was also partly responsible for inflating the flying saucer accounts of the late 1940s, and some people have credited him with helping to invent the UFO phenomenon. Shaver’s first account, “I Remember Lemuria”, appeared in Amazing Stories in March 1945 – I have a battered copy at home – and became a sensation. Shaver also collected what he called “rokfogo”, rocks and crystals into which images of the world had been projected before the Deros destroyed it. Shaver would crack open the rocks, meditate upon the rokfogo and paint the images he saw – he considered these to be accurate holographic records of a lost age, preserved in crystal and rock. The Secret World consists of photographs of rock surfaces and the often-hallucinogenic paintings that emerged from them. 

The images include strange vistas of great beauty, lysergic walls of melting faces, and scenes of the Deros’ barbaric, brutal existence underground. Shaver was a mechanic; I’ve come across an account elsewhere of a guy whose teeth became coated in fine metal grains to the point where he began receiving radio transmissions in his head. While mental illness was clearly a component of Shaver’s visionary experience and graphomania, I do also wonder if something similar could have happened to him and created an initial trigger, compounded by grief over his brother’s death. For over a decade thousands of people were reading his accounts in Amazing Stories, and some would write in saying that they’d had the same experiences – “I went into these caves and I met the same beings, and the robots chased me, and I had to have a gun battle with the robots to escape”. Today there are a small number of collectors of Shaver’s rokfogo, which also get a mention in Philip K. Dick’s tragicomic 1975 novel Confessions of a Crap Artist.

THE LONDON ADVENTURE: AN ESSAY IN WANDERING,
ARTHUR MACHEN (1924)

Arthur Machen was an early 20th-century Welsh author of some of the most elegantly sinister weird fiction ever published. He was one of the writers that H.P. Lovecraft venerated, and there weren’t many. He was primarily a mainstream newspaper journalist and critic, and his fiction wasn’t fully celebrated until later in his life. This is a meandering memoir of his explorations of London. You get a sense of a multi-layered existence in which he existed in multiple planes at once. He’s always looking for what’s happening behind the immediate, tangible layer of reality: “Honestly, I have grave difficulties over Westminster Abbey, for example. Perhaps, because the Abbey has been the text for so many discourses... and perhaps, also, because, as I believe, the surfaces of its stones are not really old English but early Victorian, so that one gazes rather at an image and spectre of a church than at the very church itself.”

In Machen’s explorations of London, here and in his masterpiece, the novel The Hill of Dreams, layers of time and history emanate out from buildings, peeling back the past to connect to something ancient. In this respect, he connects to what John Michell was doing (see below) half a century later. Machen also wrote a fantastic story, N, in which men looking out of a Stoke Newington pub window into Clissold Park experience reality disintegrating before them. Everything starts to shift and take on a new perspective, and the horror comes with the discovery that what lies behind the surface is bleak: reality is desolate and barren. Machen’s books were quite difficult to find for many years, but like Lovecraft, he’s now a Penguin Classic.

MAN, MYTH & MAGIC, ED. RICHARD CAVENDISH (1970)

I bought these 25 volumes at the Strand Bookstore in New York about 20 years ago, and had to buy a new wheelie bag just to get them back to London. Partwork compendiums like this were sold as magazines that built up into a complete encyclopaedia. They were quite a big thing in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. This American set collects all of Man, Myth and Magic, which ran in the late 1970s. It’s a kind of anthropological encyclopaedia, but with a focus on mysticism – unusual ritual practices, magical beliefs, mythology and folklore. Each volume presents well-researched, serious essays and articles from contributors, including its editor Richard Cavendish, the novelist Robert Graves, esteemed folklorist Katharine Briggs, Aleister Crowley’s biographer John Symonds, the psychologist William Sargant, occultist Kenneth Grant and many others. Charity shops were full of them at one point, but two of the many things the Internet has ruined are the joy of serendipitous findings and the notion of the book-format encyclopaedia. There was another partwork later in the early 1980s called The Unexplained, which focused more on paranormal and Fortean material – UFOs, ghosts, cryptids, spontaneous combustion. One of the covers is an image of a burnt leg with a Zimmer frame next to it: the aftermath of a spontaneous human combustion. This does seem to be a genuine, if astoundingly rare, natural phenomenon, of which there have now been survivors. It also happens to a character in the Dickens novel Bleak House, which he based on a real account.

MEGALITHOMANIA, JOHN MICHELL (1982)

This was published in 1982 amidst a wave of interest in magic, lost histories, and esoterica – much like the one in pop culture at the moment. It sounds pat, but I think it’s true that as people’s day-to-day lives become harder, as the world begins to feel more on edge and unstable, they start to reach to things beyond the quotidian; manifesting meaning and wonder in their lives through fantasy, world-building and dreaming of other possibilities, new realities. This might be the unknowable past, unprovable alternative theories, or new spiritualities. I’m mostly all for it and believe strongly that mystery can be a valuable, positive force in people’s lives – though as we’ve seen, it can also tip into wilful ignorance of the sort easily exploited by cult leaders and authoritarian politicians. John Michell, this book’s author, was an important figure in later 20th-century English underground history, although as an old Etonian, he wasn’t exactly living on the fringe.

His influential book, The New View Over Atlantis (1969), knitted together mystical, ethnographic and historical ideas to create a cohesive framework of re-enchantment, which amongst other things re-popularised the idea of ley lines, an early 20th-century idea that had mostly been forgotten. Michell dug up the leys and associated them with stone circles, flying saucers and sacred geometry. It’s pretty much because of him that hippies started going to Glastonbury, Stonehenge and other enigmatic ancient sites. He also inspired the original Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival, providing the correct dimensions to those of the Cheops Pyramid at Giza, which was supposed to have magical energetic properties. I got to know John in his later years when he was obsessed with crop circles in the 1990s. I was part of a team making them at this time and had lively arguments with him trying to explain how they were made. A Dr Who-like figure (Jon Pertwee meets Tom Baker with a dash of Patrick Troughton), he liked to immerse himself in geometry and mysticism and was an enthusiastic dope smoker. He also wrote some really good, serious books, and Megalithomania is one of them. It’s a meta-history of our artists, writers and dreamers’ fascination with stone circles, megaliths and re-imagining prehistoric cultures. Around the same time, our mutual friend Neil Mortimer was editing a brilliant journal called 3rd Stone, which ran scholarly essays on folklore and archaeology. Together, we put on an event at Conway Hall called “Megalithomania!”, named after the book, and John Michell was one of the speakers. His importance can’t be understated. He was a good guy, but not a liberal on all matters. He was vocally anti-Europe long before Brexit, and much of his imagining harked back to a feudal Britain where the laird owned a patch of land and everyone else paid tithes to him.

I went to his funeral in Notting Hill, and Mick Jagger’s brother played a song in his memory, wearing an anti-metric T-shirt that John had made for him in the 1970s as Britain switched to a decimal economic system. These days, I’m lucky enough to live halfway between Avebury and Stonehenge, and the spirit of John Michell certainly lingers on amidst those magnificent, ancient monuments.

LIGHTNING, AURORAS, NOCTURNAL LIGHTS, WILLIAM R. CORLISS  (1982)

This is a catalogue of geophysical anomalies from the mid-1980s compiled by William R. Corliss, who wrote dozens of science textbooks and manuals for NASA scientists, amongst other things.

His private passion was collecting anomalies from science journals; gather enough of them, he reasoned, create enough little chinks, and eventually you can prise open the armour of scientific orthodoxy, exposing its hubris regarding anomalous phenomena. Corliss would be reading scientific journals as research in his other jobs, and would clip out individual stories of anomalies and file them away for these collections. Compile enough data, he felt, and these seemingly mysterious phenomena can no longer easily be dismissed by mainstream scientists. 

In this, he followed in the tradition of Charles Fort, the early 20th-century American author and collector of scientific anomalies, though Fort’s writing is far more literary in style. Corliss’ compendia are beautifully produced. There are about 20 volumes in all: A Handbook of Unusual Mental Phenomena, Handbook of Biological Mysteries, Handbook of Geological Enigmas, Astronomical Anomalies, A Handbook of Puzzling Artefacts, Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena, Strange Phenomena, volumes one and two, Strange Artefacts, volumes one and two, Strange Universe, volumes one and two, and so on. I have three of them, and they’re among my most treasured possessions.

This book is filled with reports of things like ball lightning, a real but seemingly impossible phenomenon that can move through windows, go through doors and follow people down corridors. Some people who encounter these balls of energy claim to sense an awareness or even a consciousness in their behaviour. Ball lightning could also account for some UFO accounts, something I’m also very interested in. There are all sorts of amazing stories here, presented as matter-of-factly as traffic violations. Corliss writes a short, descriptive outline, very bare bones, and then provides detailed accounts of each reported incident, fully referenced from scientific journals. What Corliss didn’t do, which is important, is try to interpret things. He’s not saying those balls of light are extraterrestrial spacecraft; he’s just saying they’re balls of light.

One of the unusual natural phenomena I’m particularly fascinated by, which is also documented in this volume, are accounts of vast, slowly rotating, luminous spoked wheels under the ocean that can be miles across. Sailors’ reports go back more than a century, while the most recent I’m aware of is from about 20 years ago; the Indian Ocean seems to be a good place to watch for them. They’re connected to bioluminescent plankton and dinoflagellates, but are impossible to predict and have never been filmed or clearly photographed, at least not to my knowledge. Years ago, I got a little bit of the way to proposing a documentary to National Geographic. This was in the days before commercial drones were a thing, and it became clear that you’d need to be on a ship with a helicopter or a balloon for months to try to capture one on camera. Not very practical, though it would be much easier these days with drones; unfortunately, they are most prevalent in parts of the world that are currently quite dangerous to be in. I also suspect that increasing oceanic temperatures and pollution could be having a detrimental effect on the organisms that produce them, and changing their behaviour patterns. .