One of the first articles I wrote for this newsletter—well, the first, actually, excepting only the introductory article—was on the subject of what is commonly called these days “the paranormal.”
There was a reason for this, and it is not only because this is a subject that I find perennially fascinating. There are many subjects that I find perennially fascinating, but it doesn’t always follow that the subject is perforce important. With the so-called “paranormal” or “paranatural,” however, it is an altogether different matter: for this is a subject that is objectively and dispassionately meaningful and always shall be.
For one thing, the species of phenomena that is grouped under this heading is of the kind that provides a brief but elucidating glimpse of that which lies back of the fitful rent in the Veil of Reality; it puts the lie, in other words, to the banal and artless assertions of the materialists, and demonstrates to us in unmistakable terms that there is vastly more to our “reality” than is compassed by the material or physical plane alone.
Well…I’m hardly the first to point out this manifestly obvious fact. Truthfully, it’s obvious to pretty much everyone who isn’t prey to the materialistic and scientistic mentality—that is to say, to very few people indeed. This is the age of the “new barbarians,” after all, the late Kali-Yuga, a degenerate and declensional period of history when men’s minds are awash in the pervasive and inescapable system of the Antichrist—a system that has as many names as there are stars in the sky.
In my previous article on the paranormal, I evolved some of my own thinking on this topic, and invoked the argumentation of the Traditionalists—including the likes of René Guénon and members of the enigmatic Gruppo di UR—to support a more sophisticated understanding of this aspect of reality than one is likely to encounter in most scientistic, spiritualistic, or parapsychological treatments of this subject. Nevertheless, as with my discussion of the topic of time travel, the Traditionalist perspective is hardly the only one; and, as with that subject, I wish to present an alternative view—in the interests of objectivity and the free exercise of thought, of course. So, once more, I will appeal to the authority of the College of Seth, whose long experience in these matters ensures that its opinions carry a greater weight than most.
In short, the opinion held by the perfecti1 of the College of Seth anent the matter of paranormal entities comes down to this: they are in all likelihood the consequence of the inhuman science of palaeogean civilizations and races that pre-existed mankind by many millions of years, and in fact lived in shockingly remote periods of time that belong to the earth’s “deep history.” Specifically, the Collegians arraign two such races—the “Serpent Men” and the “Rmoahals” (see below)—and their foolish and malevolent experimentation as the culprits responsible for the existence of sinister paranormal entities.
That not all paranormal entities and phenomena must be sinister in nature is a deduction that apparently eludes the College’s foremost sages; as I have pointed out before, their philosophy is hopelessly materialistic, and it is why I take many of their conclusions with a healthy heaping of salt. Still, their members possess a great deal of wisdom, as I have had occasion to see for myself—as well as benefit from in no small measure—and that is why I wish to respectfully submit their views on the matter in this article.
Really, I can do no better in stating the views of the College’s perfecti than by quoting the words of their own occult history of the world. From the eighth section in the first chapter of this work comes this description of paranormal entities, which are referred to in the College’s technical language as the “Pestilences That Walketh in Darkness:”2
“The seventh race of non-human entities, those negotia perambulantia in tenebris or ‘pestilences that goeth in darkness,’ is much more generic in nature than the others—it is, in fact, really more of a catch-all than anything truly scientific, a mere placeholder designed to receive within in its ambiguous definition all those ‘ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties’ that go bump in the night, and which cannot be pigeonholed in any pat category so neatly as the others. It comprises those supernatural terrors for which we possess only vague and general names—demons, ghosts, shades, revenants and lucifuges; the Roman manes and larvae infandae; the Grecian Ἐμπούσαι and ἐπωπίδες, those ‘silent watchers of the night;’ the Romanian vampires and soul-feasters, the strigoi and moroii and vârcolaci, and all those myriad reanimated corpses of the dead that haunt and fascinate human nightmare.
“What these entities are and whence they come has never been satisfactorily explained; some assign them to the ‘Paracosm,’ a hypothetical parallel universe coextensive with our own, wherein evolved the strange and implacably malefic form of life these beings represent. Others suppose they originate in some hitherto undiscovered, mathematical dimension of our own universe, perhaps sharing our very planet in some collection of geometries imperceptible to us; still others suggest they come from the vague ‘Outside’—the terrifying and inscrutable Unknown beyond all universes and dimensions. But it seems likeliest that they are not native to our own spacetime; they seem not to always have been present in our universe, and there are definite historical references to their first appearance in the world, and that their coming was precipitated by the loosening of those spiritual and material boundaries that aforetime denied them access to our world. Specifically, it was the black sorceries and unwise tamperings of the Serpent Men that first permitted these entities ingress to our universe; later, with the theurgic experiments and evil sciences cultivated by the Rmoahals, the ‘pestilences that walketh in darkness’ came freely to come and go, virtually as they pleased, and began to consort promiscuously with the intelligences of the earth. We know from history, for instance, that both latter-day Lemuria and Atlantis for much of its existence was largely infested by these terrors; the supernatural horrors of our ancestors, that remain with us to this day, were not the products of a primitive response to the uncertainties of savage life, as the evolutionary psychologists would have us believe, but were as objectively real as the fear of falling or the racial animosity toward snakes. It was only through the activities of the Jewish King Solomon, who was deeply learned in matters of black sorcery—which he conned from a renegade member of the Elder Race—that the human race was largely, though not completely, freed of this menace; as the legends of many races have correctly preserved, he did indeed imprison the demons and spirits and djinn of prehistory in metal and earthen vessels, which were scattered and hidden throughout the world.
“Despite his efforts, these entities remain with us today—though they are far fewer in numbers and strength. Evidence for their existence is not difficult to discover; the lay historical records abound with examples of these ‘outer monstrosities,’ though—in the more recent accounts at least—they are often dismissed as merely products of the superstitious imagination. Occult researchers and religious scholars have attempted to categorize them and classify them; the most ambitious and fruitful attempt in this direction was the classificatory scheme devised by Michael Psellus in his Περὶ Ἐνεργείας Δαιμόνων Διάλογος (‘Dialogue on the Operation of Demons’), wherein they were divided into six races according to their place of habitation: upper air, lower air, terrestrial, aquatic, subterranean, and lucifuge (the ‘light-shunners,’ or dwellers-in-darkness). The Apocryphon of the sixth-century Byzantine saint and anomalist Theodore the Archimandrite (which may be consulted in the College Library) contains a detailed discussion and description of the types and kinds of these beings; the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus and the ageless St. Germain also possessed a great deal of occult knowledge about these ‘goers in darkness.’ A number of secret societies—most notably the Rosicrucians and the Asiatic Brethren—claimed the ability to summon and control these beings at will; considering the intellectual pedigree of these societies, which includes the Elder Race3 and possibly also the Rmoahals and Serpent Men, these claims may have validity.
“In recent decades there have been several noteworthy apparitions of the negotia perambulantia in tenebris. During the last century, in London, and more recently in certain parts of Europe and North America, the specter known colloquially as ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’ belonged to this class of beings; the so-called ‘Mothman’ that appeared twenty-three years ago4 in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, either is or is closely related to Psellus’ ‘lucifuges.’ A more recent phenomenon, dubbed ‘Shadow Men’—vague and terrifying entities that appear as umbrageous shapes at the limits of one’s peripheral vision—are undoubtedly lucifuges; moreover, the so-called ‘Men in Black’ are known to be a very ancient form of these creatures summoned and controlled by the Serpent Men. It is believed there is a connection between these beings and the Eldritch Entity;5 they are either native to the same far cosm whence It was begotten, long ago, or they are somehow manifestations of or emanations from It in some occult way that is not easily understood.”6
Now, as for those antediluvian races whom the College of Seth accuses of unleashing these beings upon the world, and loosening the duly constituted boundaries that separate our world from the inhuman Outside, the Serpent Men will have to await a more thorough treatment in another essay. The Rmoahals, however, deserve somewhat more immediate attention; for one thing, they are not quite identical with the Atlantean sub-race of that name mentioned in the detailed anthropologies of the Theosophists.7
The truth is, the Collegians have nothing good to say about this race. From the same book:
“There is not a member of our College who has not heard the name of the Rmoahals and shuddered; they are synonymous with all that is evil and most terrifying in the crowded prehistory of the earth. The Rmoahals were ever a debased and degenerate race; they never achieved anything like a high civilization, nor ever strove toward the pretense of one. They were savage and brutal and remorseless from the incipience of their race to its senescence, and were throughout their history the slavish votaries of the Black Sun—and knew no other god beside it. The Rmoahals are extinct, but their offspring are not, and their legacy lives on in the world, and is a thing to be guarded against.
“The Rmoahals—who are also known, less commonly, as the Lemouroi (οἱ Λημοῦροι), Zamzummim, or Yao-Yao—evolved out of the degenerate tag-ends of the Lemurian race, eking out a harsh and abject living upon the shattered remnants of Lemuria. For a time, in their earliest history, the Rmoahals were coterminous with the very last survivors of the Third Root Race—the isolated, peripheral relicts of a formerly widespread and world-treading species—and waged a constant and attritional warfare against the guttering vestiges of their ancestors. The Rmoahals were less starkly inhuman-seeming than the Lemurians, but still shocking for all that. The memory of them still lingers as an abhorrent mnemonic ‘aftertaste’ in the primitive subconscious of all human beings; they have become, in some ways, an archetype of our nightmares…
[…]
“The Rmoahals were cruel and brutish to a fault; they were devoid of even the most rudimentary instincts of empathy or compassion or conscience, and rejoiced in devising increasingly more imaginative means of torture or destruction for their fellows and the other living things of the earth. Our own anthropoid and hominid ancestors were frequently the object of their malign attentions and sadistic amusements, and were often sacrificed by the Rmoahals upon those smoking, bloody altars they erected to the Black Sun in the pursuance of their blasphemous ritual. And yet, we may be certain that some of the very highest arts we possess were conned from the Rmoahals—beyond any doubt, it was they who were the primeval originators and speakers of the abominable ‘Aius Infandus,’ the Ur-language of mankind, whence all other human tongues sprang long ages ago, the frightful character of the mother-speech obscured through the multiplying effects of linguistic evolution. To learn that our own languages—including the very words with which I record this—have evolved from that shuddersome root-stock, must forever constitute one of the profoundest and most jolting shocks to any student of the secret history of the world.
“With the final subsidence of the last relics—mere wave-washed mountaintops—of Lemuria, at the close of the Pliocene two million years ago, the Rmoahals were finally compelled to forsake their racial seat; some colonies of the creatures existed upon the island continent of Atlantis. But the proto-human races of the world had by this time waxed in numbers and intellect; Atlantis was their racial seat, the home of the hominid line leading toward sapient humanity, and the Rmoahals found their erstwhile prey less tractable and far less defenseless. The Atlantean proto-humans combined to slaughter the Rmoahals, destroying them mercilessly when found, and driving them ineluctably into the remote mountain fastnesses of southern Atlantis—what would eventually become the lesser island of Daitya. But the Rmoahals were not extinct—they were merely changed. Ere their racial holocaust at the hands of the proto-humans, some groups of them had interbred with the savage Atlantean hominids; these populations gave rise to the Tlavatli, the heroic second sub-race of the ‘Fourth Root Race,’ or Atlantean humankind, and it was why the Rmoahals were considered by the Theosophists to be the first sub-race of the Fourth Root Race. The peculiar Tlavatli, in their turn, begat the ‘Toltec’ race, in whom the admixture of Rmoahal blood was scarcely anymore distinguishable, and who forged the great Atlantean civilization of legend.
“But our greatest concern is with the direct evolution of the Rmoahals—the population which was forced to flee into the Daityan Mountains of Atlantis evolved into the ‘Elder Race,’ and those who were compelled to take refuge beneath the surface of the earth gradually mutated into the monstrous ‘Derroes.’ Both of these races remain among us today, and have played a prominent and sinister role in human history…”8
There is, as the kids say, a great deal to unpack here. The members of the College of Seth, as I have had occasion to mention often enough, harbor some rather peculiar notions about the history of life and the earth. I don’t necessarily agree with them, but I’ll be honest, reader—the thought that my own suppositions on this topic might be wrong, and that those of the College of Seth might be correct, is enough to give me pause, at the very least…and enough to give me some pretty awful nightmares, at the very worst.
Such is the lot of any Cyclopedist worth his salt, I suppose…
For more on the hierarchy and special terminology of the College, see my earlier article.
Cf. Psalm 91.5-6: “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday…”
I won’t go into any detail about what the members of the College of Seth have to say about these mysterious beings right now; suffice that it’s a real doozy, and probably constitutes some of the very wildest stuff in the College’s admittedly bizarre mélange of beliefs and ideas.
That is, in 1966; the book from which this passage is taken was published in 1989.
The “Eldritch Entity” appears to be the same with that force or being darkly alluded to by members of the College of Seth as “The Inhabitant;” in my conversations with certain perfecti of the College, I have gathered that there is a strong belief among many of them that this entity is also connected in some mysterious fashion with the flight of the so-called “Martians” from the far future into the deep past, as well as their demise nearly a quarter of a billion years ago.
Diomedes Palaeologus, The Slaves of the Black Sun: A Secret History of the World (London: Sethian Publishing House, 1989), pp. 22-4.
Cf., for instance, W. Scott-Elliot, The Story of Atlantis: A Geographical, Historical, and Ethnological Sketch Illustrated by Four Maps of the World’s Configuration at Different Periods (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896); or Arthur E. Powell, The Solar System: A Complete Outline of the Theosophical Scheme of Evolution (London: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1930).
Ibid., pp. 16-18.