White Light Black Light

Buddha With A Thousand Hands
May peace break into your house and may thieves come to steal your debts. May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet for $100 bills. May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips! May your clothes smell of success like smoking tires and may happiness slap you across the face and may your tears be that of joy. In simple words ............ May 2007 be the best year of your life!!!

by Erik Davis

The trivial is as deep as the profound because there is nothing in creation that does not go to the profound. — Robert Duncan

The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum. — Philip K. Dick

You have probably already heard the one about the yogi huddling in his mountain cave who believes he's finally cracked through the cosmic egg. Having reached enlightenment, he decides to clamber down to the village below and spread the love. As he wanders through the town's crowded market, some poor slob jostles him; without a thought, the holy man turns on the guy with anger. The point is that it's easy to get clear on a mountain top, but much tougher to manifest the light in the messy world most of us actually live in. But the tale also makes an ecospiritual argument, of sorts: mountains are the sites of mystical transcendence, while the human towns below embody the ordinary grind of this world.

In "Time is the Mercy of Eternity", the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth — anarcho-leftist, Buddhist, and proto-Beat — describes his own mystic moment in the Sierras. This slice of time does not put him in touch with God or cosmic forces, but with the simplicity of ordinary material life: "The pale new green leaves twinkle / In the rising air." What he sees is the "holiness of the real," an experience he contrasts with the faraway city, "burning with the fire of transcendence and commodities." In a key Californian insight, Rexroth recognizes that the urban market, rather than the Zen mountaintop, is the zone enflamed with transcendent desires — or rather, that the desire that enlivens the commodities of the urban milieu is, at its essence, a desire for transcendence. Arising from the core of human suffering and dissatisfaction, the essential energy of desire is not separate from the sacred, even through it gets funneled into the secular and frequently crass fantasies that drive city life: lust, entertainment, distraction, power.

By the same token, spirituality, for us anyway, takes place in the midst of the market and its commodified fantasies. This feedback loop is especially true in California, where esoteric spirituality has long been a part of a feverish and mercantile popular culture rife with trash. What religious seeking and California culture share most essentially is an investment in fantasy — fantasy not simply as "illusion," but as the forms that fuse imagination and desire. As both ironic and populist fans of low-brow culture can attest, the ferocity of fantasy can lend a delirious dreamlike power to corny things like UFO cults and commercial entertainments like B-movies or comic books.

This paradox gets us close to the heart of sacred Los Angeles, a city that dreamt (and sold) itself into existence through real estate hype, Hollywood, and the siren call of the perfect bod. The very architecture of Los Angeles suggests this material dreaming: in the teens and twenties, the town exploded with "fantasy" buildings like Babylonian ziggurats, pyramids, witchy cottages, castles, teepees, and restaurants shaped like derbies. This slap-dash and often garish architectural raid on the collective unconscious looked forward to Disneyland, fast food signage, and the corporate "thematization" of contemporary urban space. The exotic imagination crudely stimulated by these buildings, which were often equally crudely made, also prepared the ground for the Orientalist moods and esoteric concepts that exerted enormous influence on LA's spiritual scene. In other words, the construction of trashy fantasy in the built environment created the cultural and psychic "space" for exotic, imaginative, and otherworldly faiths and experiences to grow.

Some fantasy architects were themselves active in California's spiritual fringe. The most notable was Robert Stacy-Judd, one of countless Brits who long ago transformed Los Angeles into a sort of London-on-Pacific. As a young architect in England, Stacy-Judd designed various Orientalist structures, but in California he discovered his deep and abiding love: the Maya. He built the amazing Aztec Hotel in Monrovia, which is well worth a visit, and used Mayan stylings for private homes, a Baptist Church in Ventura, and a Masonic hall in the San Fernando Valley. A kooky self-promoter, Stacy-Judd styled himself a Mayan explorer-archeologist; he also hobnobbed with Theosophists and the Philosophical Research Society's Manly P. Hall. Stealing a few pages from febrile crypto-archeologists like Ignatius Donnelly and Lewis Spence, Stacy-Judd argued in his Atlantis: Mother of Empires that the Maya descended from the Atlanteans. Presumably, Stacy-Judd believed that by creating a regional architectural style rooted in Mayan culture, the West Coast would tap into that mighty spiritual source, though it's tough to say whether the history of the Aztec Hotel — a brothel and speakeasy during prohibition — bears this out.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a restless hunger for exotic fantasy and escape helped make Los Angeles ground zero for California's paradoxically popular esoteric scene — what I call its pop occulture. "No other city in the United States possess so large a number of metaphysical charlatans in proportion to its population," wrote local Willard Huntington Smith in 1913. "Whole buildings are devoted to occult and outlandish orders — mazdaznan clubs, yogi sects, homes of truth, cults of cosmic fluidists, astral planers, Emmanuel movers, Rosicrucians and other boozy transcendentalists." These groups drew from the creative imagination and a common pool of psycho-spiritual motifs in order to sculpt a range of sects, fads, and mental health regimens. Futuristic pseudo-sciences fused with the ancient lore introduced by Theosophists, astrologers, and encyclopedists like the afore-mentioned Hall, author of the classic omnibus folio The Secret Teachings of All Ages and collector of one of the world's greatest library of hermetic and alchemical texts (the best of which were recently pawned off to the Getty). Even Protestant fundamentalism was transformed into Hollywood spectacle by the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who wore costumes, played jazz music, and hired Hollywood special effects guys for her "illustrated sermons."

Given all this activity, Los Angeles grew into a kind of theme park of the soul, a carnival of transcendence offering esoteric sources of entertainment, transport, and commodified wonder. Understandably, many of us react to this spectacle with mockery or befuddlement, sometimes leavened with pity for the poor dupes who get taken in. The metaphor of Oz lies heavy over California (L. Frank Baum wrote all but the first Oz book on the coast), and its pop occulture is dense with humbug and hucksters in wizard capes. But cynicism about this scene is the easy road. Such mockery usually comes from secular people--in other words, from people who believe that religion is just a cultural invention. But if this is the case, why not appreciate and enjoy the creativity? By recognizing religion as, at least partly a cultural creation, we can appreciate how, in a rootless place like Los Angeles, this creativity can and does run riot, generating novel and mutant forms for ever more deracinated souls. In its own plastic, Hollywood-backlot way, sacred LA came to resemble ancient Alexandria or modern India. Different times and places smashed into one another in a restless quest for the beyond. Syncretism reigned: esoteric notions and symbols mingled and mixed; forms of practice were nailed together as quickly as they imploded. By the time the counterculture arose, everything had become a potential source of mystic lore and spiritual intensity: surfing and comic books, sado-masochism and pharmacology, electric guitars and military research.

There is a gnawing absurdity at the heart of this mystic carnival, this tacky tinseltown of snakeoil simulacra. At its most extreme, LA's restless sacred imagination grows violent and apocalyptic; at its most banal it becomes the "spiritual supermarket," a California condition of mix-and-match cafeteria religion that has now gone global. But even the spiritual supermarket, with its Sufi audio books, Tibetan trinkets, and pre-packaged ayahuasca vacations, has a truth to tell. The truth is that the universe is pluralistic, down to its very marrow. There are many ways to God, and some of them dodge the Big Guy altogether. My way is not your way, and my way will probably change as my perspective, and the self that holds that perspective, changes.

In contrast with the absolute claims of traditional monotheism, a creative spiritual life is fundamentally relativistic. This does not mean that it denies the Beyond, only that it distrusts the packaging we give it. Whatever essential truths it seeks, such a life demands that we artfully shift between different forms, adopting multiple perspectives on a reality that remains an essential mystery. One is called upon to shake up the usual binary distinctions, like sacred and profane, trash and treasure, commerce and consciousness. Perhaps the spiritual culture that emerges from such a shake-up is, in the open-source software guru Eric Raymond's terms, not a cathedral but a bazaar. In any case, by the middle of the century, California's pop occulture was a popular market dominated by fragments, fusions, exotica, invention, and juxtaposition — a bazaar of the bizarre. But this garish and sometimes exploitative scene also suggested a more subtle lesson: that a conscious spiritual affirmation of relativism gifts us with creative uncertainty and an openness to ordinary things that can become, in the right hands, simply extraordinary.

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California's heterodox market of "transcendent commodities" helps explain why the best postwar California art of the 1950s and 60s was so overtly concerned with spirituality. Here I want to dodge the well-tramped territory of Beat mysticism and ramble around the formal territory of juxtaposition, particularly as it was manifested in assemblage, collage, and other appropriation-based arts and practices. Though rooted in any number of popular and folk practices, assemblage and collage represent distinctly modern artistic strategies that reflect the twentieth-century experience of a cultural landscape densely cluttered with signs, commodities, and urban detritus. Juxtaposition was important to Surrealist Europeans like Max Ernst and New Yorkers like Joseph Cornell, but, for a variety of reasons, it also flourished in the postwar West. As Peter Plagens noted in his book Sunshine Muse, "Assemblage [with its essential logic of juxtaposition] is the first home-grown California modern art." Simon Rodia's cathedral-like Watts Towers, constructed out of broken pottery, chicken wire, and the fragmentary flotsam of consumer culture, prophetically foreshadow a number of postwar artists — like Jess, Bruce Conner, Larry Jordan, George Herms, Wallace Berman, and Helen Adam — who appropriated and recombined images, styles, and materials in a variety of media.

If West Coast spiritual bricoleurs had a guru, that person would have to be Wallace Berman, a quiet but powerfully influential mensch whose work and life seemed to achieve the Beat blend of sacred and quotidian. Though he crafted some remarkable work, particularly a series of collages made with an old Verifax machine, Berman was less a formal trailblazer than a germinator of scenes and styles, a diffuse presence who influenced his peers with an underground Beat sensibility both hip and human. Berman was a disseminator. In a brief cameo appearance in his friend Dennis Hopper's film Easy Rider, he plays a sower of seeds.

Berman grew up a secular Jew in Los Angeles' Boyle Heights and Fairfax districts. Hebrew letters were scattered throughout his environment, on newspapers and in butcher shop windows. Later this alphabet became his signature sign, especially the letter aleph, which he painted onto his motorcycle helmet. In the 1950s, Berman created faux-Dead Sea Scrolls parchments using the alphabet, and placed the letters in assemblages; later he would paint them on rocks. But these letters never formed actual words; they remained conventionally "meaningless", at once surface decorations and hieroglyphs too deep for common sense. If you want to, you can go Kabbalistic on all this, though Berman himself was typically incommunicative about his intent. During one early show of the parchment paintings, Berman told the actor Dean Stockwell about the work's Kabbalistic dimensions; to the poet Philip Lamantia, who, unlike Stockwell, actually knew something about Jewish mysticism, he denied any connection.

In Kabbalah, language is not seen as a human filter that we overlay onto some more primordial reality; instead it is that reality. There are many visions of this original Torah, and a few of them anticipate Berman's linguistic assemblages. One eighteenth-century rabbi from Syria claims that, before creation, the original Torah was "a heap of unarranged primal letters." In response to Adam's actions, this original alphabet formed the particular words that made the world the way it is today. But it does not have to be this way; some kabbalists suggest that the messianic world will come about through a renaming. Berman's "meaningless" combinations are in a sense a kind of sacred "cut-up." Though he ignored the divinatory and synchronistic potential of the cut-up that so compelled Brion Gyson and William Burroughs, Berman does gesture towards the redemptive potential of hermetic nonsense. His letters are playful but profound mysteries - an attempt to invoke the creative plenitude of language as if it were the jazz scat singing that Berman imbibed as a zoot-suit-wearing hepcat in LA's 1940s jazz scene.

David Meltzer, the West Coast Beat poet and sometimes Kabbalist, approaches Berman's mysticism in a less literalistic way. Meltzer explains that his friend was acutely "aware of an unarticulated imperative to sacralize and somehow repair the broken post-war world." He compares the operation to tikkun, the notion, drawn from Isaac Luria's messianic Kabbalism, that humans must put back the fragmented pieces of creation. For many twentieth century mystics, this sort of labor is placed under the goals of unity and wholeness — noble goals that don't often make great art. More subtly, Meltzer compares the work of tikkun to the hipster trick of "digging" something, which he characterizes as "appropriating the most mundane object, the most vilified or rejected artifact, and restoring it to a primary glory." Meltzer describes in loving detail the marvelous bric-a-brac found at the Berman's home, and most of us know of or live in "bohemian" spaces whose poverty is redeemed by strange and gentle shrines constructed from marvelous ground scores or thrift store finds. Once these objects have reached the end of their life cycle as commodities, another kind of life is possible, the life of sacred appropriation. Explains Meltzer: "It was a hybrid kind of anti-materialism or counter-materialism, privileging the continuously-new beauty of a particular stone or a time-deformed mass-produced object found in the gutter in the same way it embraced Cocteau's Orphee or Vivaldi."

Berman actually made only a few assemblages during the 1950s, and many of those are arguably sculptures or installations. However you pigeonhole them, his most important mixed media show took place at the Ferus Gallery in 1957. His religious concerns were palpable. Temple resembled a large wooden sentry box or confessional. Inside, a robed figure stood with a key hung from its neck, while its head turned away from the audience. The floor beneath the figure was strewn with pages of Semina, a collage-like "magazine" of images and poems by friends and heroes that Berman sent for free to his circle of compatriots through the early 1970s. Though it came in different forms, Semina was essentially a folder of loose paper that had to be arranged, Tarot-like, by the reader; Michael McLure, whose "Peyote Poem" debuted in Semina 3, called it a "scrapbook of the spirit."

Panel were a much denser piece than Temple: a mysterious wooden cabinet that incorporated photos of his wife, hidden compartments, mirrors, letters, and a long narrow image of swimmers surfacing into the light. There was a hushed mystery to the piece, at once a wrestling and an opening. Cross featured a slender wooden cross; from its left arm dangled a small shadow box that included a mandala-like photo of a cock plunging into a cunt above the inscribed motto factum fidei (true facts). As Rebecca Solnit points out, in the hypermodernist American art world of the mid-1950s, such hieratic objects — which "pointed at something beyond themselves and drew their meaning from that beyond" — had the force of blasphemy.

Local law enforcement also found them blasphemous. Summoned to the gallery because of Cross' photo, they ironically overlooked the graphic shot, but busted Berman for an sketch included in the Semina issue scattered on the floor: a lusty, almost Frazetta-esque fantasy of a demon taking a woman from behind. The item was drawn by Cameron, Berman's most direct connection to LA's occult underground and a woman whose full story remains to be told. The red-headed artist, scenester and occultist had been married to Jack Parsons, the CalTech rocketman who led the Los Angeles Agape Lodge of Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templar Orientis and took the Beast's sex magick even more seriously that Crowley himself. Cameron served as Parson's muse during the latter part of his apocalyptic "Babalon Working". Following Parsons' mysterious death in 1952 (he exploded in his garage lab), Cameron became LA's pre-eminent bohemian witch, making the odd talismanic art piece, upstaging Anais Nin as the Whore of Babylon in Kenneth Anger's 1954 "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome", and even frightening Dennis Hopper. She also clued Berman's scene into the power of magick (which, as Anger's film shows, is itself all about acute psychic montage). George Herms, whose assemblages would outpace Berman's tiny output in both formal power and enigmatic fire, said that Cameron "molded and formed me."

Berman's Ferus installation was a pretty hermetic deal; you get the sense that you kinda had to be there, maybe be part of the scene to really get it. But in the early 1960s Berman began to work on his most accessible and compelling works, a series of collages that seemed to tune directly into the collective mind. Using an obsolete Verifax photocopier, which used negatives and treated paper, Berman made a series of pieces that channeled the overwhelming spew of images, ads and information that came to define the 60s mediascape. Each image contains single or multiple repetitions of the same visual placeholder: a hand holding a small AM/FM transistor radio. Within the "frame" of the radio, Berman placed an enormous range of images, including magic mushrooms, cheetahs, astronauts, hermetic glyphs, naked ladies, pot leaves, Buddhas, airplanes, Indian chiefs, popes, starbursts, movie stars, dolls, and clocks. Originally Berman used a TV set for the frame, but the transistor radio fused speech and image into a deeper alchemy that Christopher Knight called "a visual chant." The resulting collages suggested that the emerging global mind, for all its image storms, had the magical intimacy that McLuhan called "acoustic space."

Berman's Verifax collages had a modest influence on the art world, earning Berman a spot in the gallery of oddballs that Peter Blake created for the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Berman's repeating figure and appropriated images also clearly anticipate Pop Art's later obsession with mechanical reproduction and commodity images. But as with other California artists, Berman's relationship to the signs on the street carries a more esoteric intensity and fragile sense of yearning than the self-conscious impersonality of Warhol, Lichtenstein or Rauschenberg. Part of this difference is environmental; New York was at the heart of the secular world of media, whereas California's strong media culture, however dominated by the culture industry, has always radiated an air of fantasy and transcendence, however garish. But much more important is the lived context within which Berman and his fellow friends and artists worked: a life authentically rooted in the noncommercial margins of bohemia, a magic circle of art and fellowship and esoteric romanticism that transmuted the objects and images it embraced.

Berman was by no means the only spiritual collagist on the West Coast. Another artist was Helen Adam, an obscure Scottish-born San Franciscan who wrote morbid ballads and, beginning in the mid-1950s, made simple but intensely witchy collages of women interacting with strange beasts; to these she attached textual fragments drawn from folklore and Victoriana. Adam's great inspiration was her friend Jess Collins, the godfather of California collage. Abandoning his career in atomic chemistry in the late 40s, Jess pursued abstract expressionist painting at the California School of Fine Arts until he gave himself over to making "Paste-Ups" out of pop ephemera. 1954's Goddess Because Is Is Falling Asleep — whose regal central figure sprouts a huge foot beside a lobster bouquet surrounded by text like "Of Nature and Art and a Puppy Pilgrimage" — is halfway between Max Ernst and Terry Gilliam. At the time Jess also made seven Dick Tracy comic-strip collages called Tricky Cad; by placing odd text in the dialogue balloons and mocking the authoritarian slant of a comic he had loved as a kid, Jess not only anticipated the Situationist detournement of comic strips but the vital postwar strategy of scrambling high and low art.

By the 1960s, Jess' earlier, more satiric and disjointed paste-ups had evolved into fantastic landscapes assembled from hundreds of puzzle-like fragments. Dense and fluid, and with an architectural sensibility lacking in many later pothead collages of this type, these worlds are chock full of visual puns, curious correspondences, and shining denizens of the archetypal otherworld. Even in reproductions, which make large scale collages look flat and busy, Jess' work still radiates an intense hallucinogenic suggestibility. Many, like his incomplete Tarot series, directly engage esoteric themes; others pursue a hermetic homoeroticism that reaches its apex in his late work Narkissos. In light of later hippie excesses, such esoteric subjects may seem banal, but in the late 1950s the material had not yet gone the way of mystical kitsch. Jess engaged the mysteries with a romantic intelligence both modern and anti-modern. On the one hand, he was an appropriation artist celebrating the possibilities that arise when art world hierarchies are inverted and fragments torn from the passing surfaces of modern life are slammed together. At the same time, these possibilities also suggest the old romantic heresies of magic and transcendence: faced with a jumble of resonant and juxtaposed images, our minds inevitably start playing the game of analogies and correspondences. As we connect fragments into hidden networks, the logic of those connections becomes dreamlike, even erotic. Such subconscious montage, which is what real magic entails, was well known to the Surrealists, but by using appropriated materials, Jess moves even closer to a direct enchantment of the ordinary fragmentary world.

For all their immersive intensity, many of Jess' collages are marred by the giddiness inherent in such dense and richly colored overlays, and they largely lack the clarity and power of his "Translations". This series of oil paintings, which he began in 1959, are based directly on images Jess would lift from old yearbooks, alchemical tomes, bubblegum cards, or moldy stacks of Scientific American. Strictly adhering to the outlines (though not the colors) of the original images, the Translations gesture towards Warhol's later by-the-number paintings. Though they are tinged with a similarly tart sense of belated irony, the Translations more closely resemble the internal theater of creative memory, which remakesÑor translatesÑ random but resonant snapshots of the world into internal phantasmagoria. When Jess reproduced the Translations in books, he paired them with texts from sources as wide-ranging as Plotinus, the Popul Vuh, and the American John Uri Lloyd's 1895 proto-psychedelic fantasy Etidorpha. Oftentimes these parings juxtapose modern and mythic, as when a somewhat bilious image of a nineteenth-century grinding machine is paired with a scene from Celtic lore where the hero Fionn mac Cumhal asks Finnegas for the craft of poetry. These pairings deepen the question of what, exactly, is being translated: is it the images, the words, or some more ineffable spirit behind such markers and correspondences? What fuses fragments when they remain, for all intents and purposes, fragments?

Like the Paste-Ups and his later Salvages (thrift-store canvases reworked on the easel), Jess' work relies on his own resonance with largely marginalized pre-existing images. "I salvage loved images that for some reason have been discarded and I come across them. I've, at times, found wonderful things on the street, just thrown away. If you find something that you really respond to that someone else has thrown away, it's a kind of mini-salvation." This is the alchemy of trash. Though recognizing his high art predecessors (the "Translations" quote Kandinsky and Gertrude Stein, and Surrealism looms large), Jess also tipped his hat to the popular and folklorish dimension of the art of appropriationÑan affirmation of premodern sources that set the West Coast apart from Europe and New York. When discussing influences, Jess would place San Francisco's Playland-by-the-Beach and John Neill's Oz illustrations alongside Ernst and Gaudi. Today this kind of hip populism is tediously de rigueur ("Margaret Keane and Esquivel are geniuses!"); in the 1950s, before the self-conscious ironies of Pop, it was scandalous, visionary, romantic, and, perhaps most importantly, rooted in the ordinary truth of modern experience. Jess, who grew up in LA, talked about visiting old mining towns in the Mojave Desert with his dad. The fabled prospector Old Sourdough was still alive, and Jess remembers the slapdash collage of calendars, posters, and ads that graced one of his ramshackle cabins: "a little palace assembled from scrap wood, pieces of aluminum, junk, tins, almost any type of found object you can imagine."

Jess was no gutter artist, though, and his most profound work of mythopoetic collage achieves a high tone of lyrical and philosophical intensity. Narkissos is an immense paste-up assembled from hand-drawn copies that Jess made, in pencil, of bits and pieces he had cataloged over the decades. Based on a sketch first made in 1959, Narkissos stands almost six feet tall and took Jess over twenty years of obsessive work to complete (and then only after he gave up the plan to execute a mirror image of the work in oils). Narkissos is a masterpiece, perhaps the single greatest work of collage by an American, and, for my money, the high peak of spiritual plastic art in California. It is a dark and playful palimpsest of fairy tales and heavy gnostic truths, a hall of hieroglyphic mirrors that reflects on the myth of Narcissus until the reflections — and the desires that motivate them — melt into the empyrean. Narkissos drips with allusions, inside jokes, puns, and echoes (including Echo). The figure of Pan, for example, is a composite figure drawn from a Pan-amanian flute player. Similar, if less corny, gotchas await those who contemplate the woman on the tricycle, or the ergot of rye that lies near the pool, or the figure of Eros himself, which Jess assembled from a Hellenist bronze, a hunk from The Young Physique, and a trippy design from the Symbolist painter Charles Filiger.

Behind all this archetypal ping-pong lies the mystical real deal: an elusive and many-layered invocation of the romantic imagination based on Jess' deep study of the hermetic, Neoplatonic and Romantic transformation of Ovid's classic telling of the myth. Of course, Jess doesn't hand you such meanings on a platter, and not just because he wants you to do your own conceptual and spiritual work to make the meanings real. In Jess' romantic conception, meaning itself is infinite, not in the endlessly deferred sense of the deconstructionists, but in the excessive, almost carnivalesque sense of dream's endless labyrinth. But even as Jess' esoteric reading resonates in the primal Platonic cave of myth-making and desire, its echoes can also be heard in the clamorous din of commercial culture. Metropolis and a Maurice Sendek frog both make an appearance in the work, and the figure of Narcissus prominently clutches a strip of Krazy Kat panels (whose creator, the brilliant George Herriman, lived and worked in Los Angeles). Myth-time is always ready to burst through modern time, or even the personal mythology of the individual, countercultural artist. In other words, if Jess' romance is true, then the forces he evokes are much larger than the individual artist: the imagination we discover working in this hermetic cartoon does not, as he once said, "stop where my imagination leaves off."

As with Berman, Jess wove together his work and his life. And that life in turn was thoroughly intertwined with the life of poet Robert Duncan, whom he first me in 1951. A Bay Area denizen whose poetic voice matured in the 1950s and 60s, Duncan's standing among popular readers of poetry has suffered unfairly from the fact that, while he wrote some of the most spiritually mighty poetry in postwar America, he was not a Beat. It also can be difficult stuff. As a poet, Duncan was more an heir of H.D. and MallarmÂŽ than of Whitman or William Carlos Williams, and, though he shared the romanticism of figures like Ginsberg and Snyder, his tastes and sensibility were almost anachronistic. The mountain-man populism and loud-mouthed, self-promoting sass of so much Beat poetry, which for all its marvels is largely to blame for horrors like the 1990s poetry slam scene, was alien to Duncan, who was deeply versed in hermeticism, mythology, and gnostic literature. Like Yeats, he was beholden to a high and esoteric romanticism, but a romanticism whose spectral beams he redirected through a postwar filter of Freudian self-consciousness, social fragmentation, and an acute awareness of the violent contradictions of eros and the mercurial inconsistency of the psyche.

Commentators often explain the Beat celebration of drugs, mysticism, and Zen as just ways that bohemians could resist the mundane values forced upon them by their upbringing. This pat reading, which tends to reduce transcendence to rebellion and the spiritual to "culture," does not work with Duncan, whose adoptive parents were bourgeois occultsts — members of a small Bay Area Hermetic Brotherhood that had spun off the UK's proto-Theosophical Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Duncan's parents picked the baby based on his astrological chart, which suggested to them that his last incarnation occurred during the fading days of Atlantis. As a boy, Duncan had a recurrent apocalyptic dream that he came to believe was a memory of Atlantis; this dream later formed the psychic nut of one of his most famous poems, "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow."

Though a lifelong acolyte of the romantic imagination, Duncan was never a true believer, and he never became a public mystic like Ginsberg or Gary Snyder. But though his appreciation for the occult was in a large part aesthetic — one senses that he loved Hermes Trismegistus the way he loved Tic Toc of Oz — he intimately understood that esoterica was, in essence, a spiritual assemblage. Syncretism was the name of the game. Duncan was fascinated, for example, by Madame Blavatsky's core texts Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, which are both frothing stews of astrology, alchemy, numerology, neo-Platonism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, and Vedic systems. He called them "midden heaps where, beyond the dictates of reason, as in the collagist's art, from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different picturesÉto form the figures of a new composition." While he did not believe Blavatsky's mystic claims, he still bought her basic line. As Duncan put it in his amazing H.D. Book: "until man lives once more in these awes and consecrations, these obediences to what he does not know but feels, until he takes new thought in what he has discarded, he will not understand what he is."

Duncan tried to live and write his life in obedience to these "awes and consecrations," thoses transpersonal forces that surround and in some sense compose the self. Rather than "express himself," like the heroic Beat soul, Duncan took the passive part, opening his soul to influences incoming from literature, dream, painting, the newspaper, the gods, and the spontaneity of language itself. Poetry was the "opening of a field" where such forces would meet, combine, and clash; as the poet, he was as interested as anyone to see how it all came out. Of course, there is an oracular dimension to all this. Duncan did not revise his poetry much, and his great "Medieval Poems" were essentially channeled a la surrealism.

On a more intimate level, this field is a frame of spiritual collage. Duncan's relationship to the forces of the psyche was essentially that of an appropriation artist who, as Jess once described it, allows found images to find him. On a broader level, Duncan believed his writing was part of a "grand collage" of aesthetic and imaginative life, a belief reflected not only in the numerous citations he weaves into his verse, but also to his poetry's almost Borgesian ambiance of allusion, reference, and bibliomania. His long series of "Passages" cite Emperor Julian and Ezra Pound, and occasionally simply lists cool books like The Aurora, The Secret Book of the Egyptian Gnostics and The Princess and the Goblin. "Apprehensions," perhaps his single most haunting and convulsive work, weaves quotations from Marcilio Ficino and Bruno of Nola into a poem that reads like the tendrils of a fast-fading revelation tickling you from the far sides of dream.

Duncan's citations and allusions are hardly bubblegum cards found at the side of the road, but his work is still an extension of the Californian alchemy of trash — the "midden heaps" of its pop occulture, the ugly bric-a-brac of a mercantile frontier awaiting transformation. In "Nel Mezzo Del Cammin Di Nostra Vita," written in 1959, Duncan reflects on this alchemy in his praise of the Watts Towers, built in the flats southeast of downtown LA by the untrained Italian tile-setter Simon Rodia:

scavenged from the city dump, from sea-wrack, taller than the Holy Roman Catholic church steeples, and, moreover, inspired; built up from bits of beauty sorted out-thirty-three years of it- the great mitred structure rising out of squalid suburbs where the mind is beaten back to the traffic, ground down to the drugstore, the mean regular houses straggling out of downtown sections of imagination defeated.

Unlike most writers on the Towers, Duncan recognizes the hieratic dimension of the three spires; in one of the poem's smattering of citations, he quotes Rodia himself claiming "They're taller than the church." For Duncan, these weird marvelous towers, which continue to stand today despite planning commissions and Rodia's own lack of architectural training, are icons of spiritual collage. The Towers are the cathedral of a scavenger's art, "dedicated to itself," that moves through but transcends the structures of religion as it jury-rigs its form of the realized imagination from "bits of beauty" and stones rejected. What results is scandalous to both traditionalists and moderns:

an original, accretion of disregarded splendors resurrected against the rules, having in this its personal joke; its genius misfitting the expected mediocre; an ecstasy of broken bottles and colored dishes thrown up against whatever piety, city ordinance, plans, risking height.

Nothing shocking here: these are good old twentieth-century Bohemian values. Duncan praises the outsider artist, who goes against the grain, risks height, ignores dogma. This is all part of our "alternative" myth these days, but it remains to be seen whether the margins still exist — culturally, economically, spiritually — that could allow such creative feats to flourish. Juxtaposition has become an advertiser's art. Trash is not the same thing today, in our belated self-conscious world of thrift-store savvy, mediated hipster rebellion, and omniverous collector mania. Before you know it, it's on Ebay. Many of us still hear the spiritual call of redemptive refuse, of glimmers, junk, and "bits of beauty." But it remains to be seen whether we can join the ranks of those who, in Ginsberg's howling words, "dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed..."

From Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age, by Stay Free!

The laws governing "intellectual property" have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork—as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s—will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed.

The irony here couldn't be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas but is now being used to stifle it.

The Illegal Art Exhibit will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the "degenerate art" of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court.

1. Negativland—U2: Special Edit Radio Mix (5:46)
2. Biz Markie—Alone Again (2:52) *
3. People Like Us—Swinglargo (5:20)
4. Culturcide—They Aren't the World (4:30) *
5. The Evolution Control Committee—Rocked by Rape (4:28)
6. Beastie Boys—Rock Hard (4:53) *
7. Dummy Run—f.d. (1:23)
8. John Oswald—black (2:01)
9. Corporal Blossom—White Christmas (3:19)
10. Tape-beatles—Reality of Matter (2:37)
11. Public Enemy—Psycho of Greed (3:11)
12. The Verve—Bittersweet Symphony (4:35) *
13. Wobbly—Clawing Your Eyes Out Down to Your Throat (1:21)
14. De La Soul—Transmitting Live from Mars (1:07) *
15. Buchanan and Goodman—The Flying Saucer (4:18) *
16. The JAMs—The Queen and I (4:50) *
17. Elastica—Connection (2:20) *
18. Steinski and Mass Media—The Motorcade Sped On (4:26) *
19. Invisibl Skratch Piklz—white label edit (5:30) *
20. Xper.Xr—Wu-chu-tung (1:43)
21. Boone Bischoff—Happy Birthday To You (0:28)

Submitted by Mitch Horowitz on Wed, 27/12/2006 - 10:27pm.

The following article appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of Esopus (www.esopusmag.com), a biannual of arts and culture. It is also available at: www.mitchhorowitz.com.

OUIJA!

How this American Anomaly Became More than Just Fun and Games

By Mitch Horowitz

Ouija. For some the rectangular board evokes memories of late-night sleepover parties, shrieks of laughter, and toy shelves brimming with Magic Eight Balls, Frisbees, and Barbie dolls.

For others, Ouija boards – known more generally as talking boards or spirit boards – have darker associations. Stories abound of fearsome entities making threats, dire predictions, and even physical assaults on innocent users after a night of Ouija experimentation.

And the fantastic claims don’t stop there: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill vowed until his death in 1995 that his most celebrated work was written with the use of a homemade Ouija board.

For my part, I first discovered the mysterious workings of Ouija nearly twenty years ago during a typically freezing-cold winter on eastern Long Island. While heaters clanked and hummed within the institutional-white walls of my college dormitory, friends allayed boredom with a Parker Brothers Ouija board.

As is often the case with Ouija, one young woman became the ringleader of board readings. She reprised the role of spirit medium that had typically fallen to women in past eras, when the respectable clergy was a male-only affair. Under the gaze of her dark eyes – which others said gave them chills – the late-night Ouija sessions came into vogue.

Most of my evenings were given over to editing the college newspaper, but I often arrived home at the dorm to frightening stories: The board, one night, kept spelling out the name “Seth,” which my friends associated with evil. (Probably connecting it with the malevolent Egyptian god Set, who is seen as a Satan prototype.) When asked, “Who’s Seth?” the board directed its attention to a member of the group, and repeatedly replied: “Ask Carlos.” A visibly shaken Carlos began breathing heavily and refused to answer.

Consumed as I was with exposing scandals within the campus food service, I never took the opportunity to sit-in on these séances – a move I came to regard with a mixture of relief and regret. The idea that a mass-produced game board and its plastic pointer could display some occult faculty, or could tap into a user’s subconscious, got under my skin. And I wasn’t alone: In its heyday, Ouija outsold Monopoly.

Ouija boards have sharply declined in popularity since the 1960s and 70s, when you could find one in nearly every toy-cluttered basement. But they remain among the most peculiar consumer items in American history. Indeed, controversy endures to this day over their origin. To get a better sense of what Ouija boards are – and where they came from – requires going back to an era in which even an American president dabbled in talking to the dead.

SPIRITUALISM TRIUMPHANT

Today, it is difficult to imagine the popularity enjoyed by the movement called Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, when table rapping, séances, medium trances, and other forms of contacting the “other side” were practiced by an estimated ten percent of the population. It began in 1848 when the teenaged sisters Kate and Margaret Fox introduced “spirit rapping” to a lonely hamlet in upstate New York called Hydesville. While every age and culture had known hauntings, Spiritualism appeared to foster actual communication with the beyond. Within a few years, people from every walk of life took seriously the contention that one could talk to the dead.

For many, Spiritualism seemed to extend the hope of reaching loved ones, and perhaps easing the pain of losing a child to one of the diseases of the day. The allure of immortality or of feeling oneself lifted beyond workaday realities attracted others. For others still, spirit counsels became a way to cope with anxiety about the future, providing otherworldly advice in matters of health, love, or money.

According to newspaper accounts of the era, President Abraham Lincoln hosted a séance in the White House – though more as a good-humored parlor game than as a serious spiritual inquiry. Yet at least one vividly rendered Spiritualist memoir places a trance medium in the private quarters of the White House, advising the President and Mrs. Lincoln just after the outbreak of the Civil War.

MAKING CONTACT

In this atmosphere of ghostly knocks and earnest pleas to hidden forces, nineteenth-century occultists began looking for easier ways to communicate with the beyond. And in the best American fashion, they took a do-it-yourself approach to the matter. Their homespun efforts at contacting the spirit world led toward something we call Ouija – but not until they worked through several other methods.

One involved a form of table rapping in which questioners solicited spirit knocks when letters of the alphabet were called out, thus spelling a word. This was, however, a tedious and time-consuming exercise. A faster means was by “automatic writing,” in which spirit beings could communicate through the pen of a channeler; but some complained that this produced many pages of unclear or meandering prose.

One invention directly prefigured the heart-shaped pointer that moves around the Ouija board. The planchette – French for “little plank” – was a three-legged writing tool with a hole at the top for the insertion of a pencil. The planchette was designed for one person or more to rest their fingers on it and allow it to “glide” across a page, writing out a spirit message. The device originated in Europe in the early 1850s; by 1860 commercially manufactured planchettes were advertised in America.

Two other items from the 1850s are direct forebears to Ouija: “dial plates” and alphabet paste boards. In 1853 a Connecticut Spiritualist invented the “Spiritual Telegraph Dial,” a roulette-like wheel with letters and numerals around its circumference. Dial plates came in various forms, sometimes of a complex variety. Some were rigged to tables to respond to “spirit tilts,” while others were presumably guided – like a planchette – by the hands of questioners.

Alphabet boards further simplified matters. In use as early as 1852, these talking-board precursors allowed seekers to point to a letter as a means of prompting a “spirit rap,” thereby quickly spelling a word. It was, perhaps, the easiest method yet. And it was only a matter of time until inventors and entrepreneurs began to see the possibilities.

BALTIMORE ORACLES

More than 150 years after the dawn of the Spiritualist era, contention endures over who created Ouija. The conventional history of American toy manufacturing credits a Baltimore businessman named William Fuld. Fuld, we are told, “invented” Ouija around 1890. So it is repeated online and in books of trivia, reference works, and “ask me” columns in newspapers. For many decades, the manufacturer itself – first Fuld’s company and later the toy giant Parker Brothers – insinuated as much by running the term “William Fuld Talking Board Set” across the top of every board.

The conventional history is wrong.

The patent for a “Ouija or Egyptian luck-board” was filed on May 28, 1890 by Baltimore resident and patent attorney Elijah H. Bond, who assigned the rights to two city businessmen, Charles W. Kennard and William H.A. Maupin. The patent was granted on February 10, 1891, and so was born the Ouija-brand talking board.

The first patent reveals a familiarly oblong board, with the alphabet running in double rows across the top, and numbers in a single row along the bottom. The sun and moon, marked respectively by the words “yes” and “no,” adorn the upper left and right corners, while the words “Good bye” appear at the bottom center. Later on, instructions and the illustrations accompanying them, prescribed an expressly social - even flirtatious - experience: Two parties, preferably a man and woman, were to balance the board between them on their knees, placing their fingers lightly upon the planchette. ("It draws the two people using it into close companionship and weaves about them a feeling of mysterious isolation," the box read.) In an age of buttoned-up morals, it was a tempting dalliance.

TRUE ORIGINS

The Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore employed a teenaged varnisher who helped run shop operations, and this was William Fuld. By 1892, however, Charles W. Kennard’s partners removed him from the company amid financial disputes and a new patent – this time for an improved pointer, or planchette – was filed by a 19-year-old Fuld. In years to come, it was Fuld who would take over the company and affix his name to every board.

Based on an account in a 1920 magazine article, inventor’s credit sometimes goes to an E.C. Reichie, alternately identified as a Maryland cabinetmaker or coffin maker. This theory was popularized by a defunct Baltimore business monthly called Warfield’s, which ran a richly detailed – and at points, one suspects, richly imagined – history of Ouija boards in 1990. The article opens with a misspelled E.C. “Reiche” as the board’s inventor, and calls him a coffin maker with an interest in the afterlife – a name and a claim that have been repeated and circulated ever since.

Yet this figure appears virtually nowhere else in Ouija history, including on the first patent. His name came up during a period of patent litigation about thirty years after Ouija’s inception. A 1920 account in New York’s World Magazine – widely disseminated that year in the popular weekly The Literary Digest – reports that one of Ouija’s early investors told a judge that E.C. Reichie had invented the board. But no reference to an E.C. Reichie – be he a cabinetmaker or coffin maker – appears in the court transcript, according to Ouija historian and talking-board manufacturer Robert Murch.

Ultimately, Reichie’s role, or whether there was a Reichie, may be moot, at least in terms of the board’s invention. Talking boards of a homemade variety were already a popular craze among Spiritualists by the mid-1880s. At his online Museum of Talking Boards, Ouija collector and chronicler Eugene Orlando posts an 1886 article from the New-York Daily Tribune (as reprinted that year in a Spiritualist monthly, The Carrier Dove) describing the breathless excitement around the new-fangled alphabet board and its message indicator. “I know of whole communities that are wild over the 'talking board,'” says a man in the article. This was a full four years before the first Ouija patent was filed. Obviously Bond, Kennard, and their associates were capitalizing on an invention – not conceiving of one.

And what of the name Ouija? Alternately pronounced wee-JA and wee-GEE, its origin may never be known. Kennard at one time claimed it was Egyptian for “good luck” (it’s not). Fuld later said it was simply a marriage of the French and German words for “yes.” One early investor claimed the board spelled out its own name. As with other aspects of Ouija history, the board seems determined to withhold a few secrets of its own.

ANCIENT OUIJA?

Another oft-repeated, but misleading, claim is that Ouija, or talking boards, have ancient roots. In a typical example, Frank Gaynor’s 1953 Dictionary of Mysticism states that ancient boards of different shapes and sizes “were used in the sixth century before Christ.” In a wide range of books and articles, everyone from Pythagoras to the Mongols to the Ancient Egyptians is said to have possessed Ouija-like devices. But the claims rarely withstand scrutiny.

Chronicler-curator Orlando points out that the primary reference to Ouija existing in the pre-modern world appears in a passage from Lewis Spence’s 1920 Encyclopedia of Occultism – which is repeated in Nandor Fodor’s popular 1934 Encyclopedia of Psychic Science. The Fodor passage reads, in part: “As an invention it is very old. It was in use in the days of Pythagoras, about 540 B.C. According to a French historical account of the philosopher’s life, his sect held frequent séances or circles at which ‘a mystic table, moving on wheels, moved towards signs, which the philosopher and his pupil Philolaus, interpreted to the audience...’” It is, Orlando points out, “the one recurring quote found in almost every academic article on the Ouija board.” But the story presents two problems: The “French historical account” is never identified; and the Pythagorean scribe Philolaus lived not in Pythagoras’s time, but in the following century.

It is also worth keeping in mind that we know precious little today about Pythagoras and his school. No writings of Pythagoras survive, and the historical record depends upon later works – some of which were written centuries after his death. Hence, commentators on occult topics are sometimes tempted to project backwards onto Pythagoras all sorts of arcane practices, Ouija and modern numerology among them.

Still other writers – when they are not repeating claims like the one above – tend to misread ancient historical accounts and mistake other divinatory tools, such as pendulum dishes, for Ouija boards. Oracles were rich and varied from culture to culture – from Germanic runes to Greek Delphic rites – but the prevailing literature on oracular traditions supports no suggestion that talking boards, as we know them, were in use before the Spiritualist era.

OUIJA BOOM

After William Fuld took the reins of Ouija manufacturing in America, business was brisk – if not always happy. Fuld formed a quickly shattered business alliance with his brother Isaac, which landed the two in court battles for nearly twenty years. Isaac was eventually found to have violated an injunction against creating a competing board, called the Oriole, after being forced from the family business in 1901. The two brothers would never speak again. Ouija, and anything that looked directly like it, was firmly in the hands of William Fuld.

By 1920, the board was so well known that artist Norman Rockwell painted a send-up of a couple using one – the woman dreamy and credulous, the man fixing her with a cloying grin – for a cover of The Saturday Evening Post. For Fuld, though, everything was strictly business. “Believe in the Ouija board?” he once told a reporter. “I should say not. I’m no spiritualist. I’m a Presbyterian – been one ever since I was so high.” In 1920, the Baltimore Sun reported that Fuld, by his own “conservative estimate,” had pocketed an astounding $1 million from sales.

Whatever satisfaction Fuld’s success may have brought him was soon lost: On February 26, 1927, he fell to his death from the roof of his Baltimore factory. The 54-year-old manufacturer was supervising the replacement of a flagpole when an iron support bar he held gave way, and he fell three stories backward.

Fuld’s children took over his business – and generally prospered. While sales dipped and rose – and competing boards came and went – only the Ouija brand endured. And by the 1940s, Ouija was experiencing a new surge in popularity.

Historically, séances and other Spiritualist methods proliferate during times of war. Spiritualism had seen its last great explosion of interest in the period around World War I, when parents yearned to contact children lost to the battlefield carnage. In World War II, many anxious families turned to Ouija. In a 1944 article, “The Ouija Comes Back,” The New York Times reported that one New York City department store alone sold 50,000 Ouija boards in a five-month period.

American toy manufacturers were taking notice. Some attempted knock-off products. But Parker Brothers developed bigger plans. In a move that would place a carryover from the age of Spiritualism into playrooms all across America, the toy giant bought the rights for an undisclosed sum in 1966. The Fuld family was out of the picture, and Ouija was about to achieve its biggest success ever.

The following year, Parker Brothers is reported to have sold more than two million Ouija boards – topping sales of its most popular game, Monopoly. The occult boom that began in the late 1960s, as astrologers adorned the cover of Time magazine and witchcraft became a fast-growing “new” religion, fueled the board’s sales for the following decades. A Parker spokesperson says the company has sold over ten million boards since 1967.

The sixties and seventies also saw the rise of Ouija as a product of the youth culture. Ouija circles sprang up in college dormitories, and the board emerged as a fad among adolescents, for whom its ritual of secret messages and intimate communications became a form of rebellion. One youthful experimenter recalls an enticing atmosphere of danger and intrigue – “like shoplifting or taking drugs” – that allowed her and a girlfriend to bond together over Ouija sessions in which they contacted the spirit of “Candelyn,” a nineteenth-century girl who had perished in a fire. Sociologists suggested that Ouija sessions were a way for young people to project, and work through, their own fears. But many Ouija users claimed that the verisimilitude of the communications were reason enough to return to the board.

OUIJA TODAY

While officials at Parker Brothers (now a division of Hasbro) would not get into the ebb and flow of sales, there’s little question that Ouija has declined precipitously in recent years. In 1999, the company brought an era to an end when it discontinued the vintage Fuld design and switched to a smaller, glow-in-the-dark version of the board. In consumer manufacturing, the redesign of a classic product often signals an effort to reverse falling sales. Listed at $19.95, Ouija costs about 60% more than standards like Monopoly and Scrabble, which further suggests that it has become something of a specialty item.

In a far remove from the days when Ouija led Parker Brothers’ lineup, the product now seems more like a corporate stepchild. The “Ouija Game” (“ages 8 to Adult”) merits barely a mention on Hasbro’s website. The company posts no official history for Ouija, as it does for its other storied products. And the claims from the original 1960s-era box – “Weird and mysterious. Surpasses, in its unique results, mind reading, clairvoyance and second sight” – have since been significantly toned down. Given the negative attention the board sometimes attracts – both from frightened users and religionists who smell a whiff of Satan’s doings – Ouija, its sales likely on the wane, may be a product that Hasbro would just as soon forget.

And yet...Ouija receives more customer reviews – alternately written in tones of outrage, fear, delight, or ridicule – than any other “toy” for sale on Amazon.com (280 at last count). What other “game” so polarizes opinion among those who dismiss it as a childhood plaything and those who condemn or extol it as a portal to the other side? As it did decades ago in The Exorcist, Ouija figures into the recent fright films What Lies Beneath and White Noise. And it sustains an urban mythology that continues to make it a household name in the early twenty-first century. There would seem little doubt that Ouija – as it has arisen time and again – awaits a revival in the future. But what makes this game board and its molded plastic pointer so resilient in our culture, and, some might add, in our nightmares?

“AN OCCULT SPLENDOR”

Among the first things one notices when looking into Ouija is its vast – and sometimes authentically frightening – history of stories. Claims abound from users who experienced the presence of malevolent entities during Ouija sessions, sometimes even being physically harassed by unseen forces. A typical storyline involves communication that is at first reassuring and even useful – a lost object may be recovered – but eventually gives way to threatening or terrorizing messages. Hugh Lynn Cayce, son of the eminent American psychic Edgar Cayce, cautioned that his researches found Ouija boards among the most “dangerous doorways to the unconscious.”

For their part, Ouija enthusiasts note that teachings such as the inspirational “Seth material,” channeled by Jane Roberts, first came through a Ouija board. Other channeled writings, such as an early twentieth-century series of historical novels and poems by an entity called “Patience Worth” and a posthumous “novel” by Mark Twain (pulled from the shelves after a legal outcry from the writer's estate), have reputedly come through the board. Such works, however, have rarely attracted enduring readerships. Poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes wrote haunting and dark passages about their experiences with Ouija; but none attain the level of their best work.

So, can anything of lasting value be attributed to the board – this mysterious object that has, in one form or another, been with us for nearly 120 years? The answer is yes, and it has stared us in the face for so long that we have nearly forgotten it is there.

In 1976, the American poet James Merrill published – and won the Pulitzer Prize for – an epic poem that recounted his experience, with his partner David Jackson, of using a Ouija board from 1955 to 1974. His work The Book of Ephraim was later combined with two other Ouija-inspired long poems and published in 1982 as The Changing Light at Sandover. “Many readers,” wrote critic Judith Moffett in her penetrating study entitled James Merrill, “may well feel they have been waiting for this trilogy all their lives.”

First using a manufactured board and then a homemade one – with a teacup in place of a planchette – Merrill and Jackson encounter a world of spirit “patrons” who recount to them a sprawling and profoundly involving creation myth. It is poetry steeped in the epic tradition, in which myriad characters – from W.H. Auden, to lost friends and family members, to the Greek muse/interlocutor called Ephraim – walk on and off stage. The voices of Merrill, Jackson, and those that emerge from the teacup and board, alternately offer theories of reincarnation, worldly advice, and painfully poignant reflections on the passing of life and ever-hovering presence of death.

The Changing Light at Sandover gives life to a new mythology of world creation, destruction, resurrection, and the vast, unknowable mechanizations of God Biology (GOD B, in the words of the Ouija board) and those mysterious figures who enact his will: Bat-winged creatures who, in their cosmological laboratory, reconstruct departed souls for new life on earth. And yet we are never far from the human, grounding voice of Merrill, joking about the selection of new wallpaper in his Stonington, Connecticut home; or from the moving council of voices from the board, urging: In life, stand for something.

“It is common knowledge – and glaringly obvious in the poems, though not taken seriously by his critics – that these three works, and their final compilation, were based on conversations...through a Ouija board,” wrote John Chambers in his outstanding analysis of Merrill in the Summer 1997 issue of The Anomalist.

Critic Harold Bloom, in a departure from others who sidestep the question of the work’s source, calls the first of the Sandover poems “an occult splendor.” Indeed, it is not difficult to argue that, in literary terms, The Changing Light at Sandover is a masterpiece – perhaps the masterpiece – of occult experimentation. In some respects, it is like an unintended response to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which not one man acting alone, but two acting and thinking together, successfully pierce the veil of life’s inner and cosmic mysteries – and live not only to tell, but to teach.

One wonders, then, why the work is so little known and read within a spiritual subculture that embraces other channeled works, such as the Ouija-received “Seth material,” the automatic writing of A Course In Miracles, or the currently popular Abraham-Hicks channeled readings. The Changing Light at Sandover ought to be evidence that something – be it inner or outer – is available through this kind of communication, however rare. It is up to the reader to find out what.

VOICES WITHIN?

Of course, the Merrill case begs the question of whether the Ouija board channels something from beyond or merely reflects the ideas found in one’s subconscious. After all, who but a poetic genius like James Merrill could have recorded channeled passages of such literary grace and epic dimension? Plainly put, this wasn’t Joe Schmoe at the board.

In a 1970 book on psychical phenomena, ESP, Seers & Psychics, researcher-skeptic Milbourne Christopher announces – a tad too triumphantly, perhaps – that if you effectively blindfold a board’s user and rearrange the order of letters, communication ceases. A believable enough claim – but what does it really tell us? In 1915, a specialist in abnormal psychology proposed the same test to the channeled entity called Patience Worth, who, through a St. Louis housewife named Pearl Curran, had produced a remarkable range of novels, plays, and poems – some of them hugely ambitious in scale and written in a Middle English dialect that Curran (who didn’t finish high school) would have had no means of knowing.

As reported in Irving Litvag’s 1972 study, Singer in the Shadows, Patience Worth responded to the request that Curran be blindfolded in her typically inimitable fashion: “I be aset athin the throb o’ her. Aye, and doth thee to take then the lute awhither that she see not, think ye then she may to set up musics for the hear o’ thee?” In other words, how can you remove the instrument and expect music?

Some authorities in psychical research support the contention that Ouija is a tool of our subconscious. For years J.B. Rhine, the veritable dean of psychical research in America, worked with his wife, Louisa, a trained biologist and well-regarded researcher in her own right, to bring scientific rigor to the study of psychical phenomena. Responding to the occult fads of the day, Louisa wrote an item on Ouija boards and automatic writing adapted in the winter 1970 newsletter of the American Society for Psychical Research. Whatever messages come through the board, she maintained, are a product of the user’s subconscious – not any metaphysical force: “In several ways the very nature of automatic writing and the Ouija board makes them particularly open to misunderstanding. For one thing, because [such communications] are unconscious, the person does not get the feeling of his own involvement. Instead, it seems to him that some personality outside of himself is responsible. In addition, and possibly because of this, the material is usually cast in a form as if originating from another intelligence.”

For his part, the poet Merrill took a subtler view of the matter. “If it’s still yourself that you’re drawing upon,” he said, “then that self is much stranger and freer and more far-seeking than the one you thought you knew.” And at another point: “If the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become!”

TO OUIJA -- OR NOT TO OUIJA?

As I was preparing for this article, I began to revisit notes I had made months earlier. These presented me with several questions. Among them: Should I be practicing with the Ouija board myself, testing its occult powers in person? Just at this time, I received an email, impeccably and even mysteriously timed, warning me off Ouija boards. The sender, whom I didn’t know, told in sensitive and vivid tones of her family’s harrowing experiences with a board.

As my exchange with the sender continued, however, my relatively few lines of response elicited back pages and pages of material, each progressively more pedantic and judgmental in tone, reading – or projecting – multiple levels into what little I had written in reply (most of which was in appreciation). And so I wondered: In terms of the influences to which we open ourselves, how do we sort out the fine from the coarse, allowing in communications that are useful and generative, rather than those that become simply depleting?

Ouija is intriguing, interesting, even oddly magnetic – a survey of users in the 2001 International Journal of Parapsychology found that one half “felt a compulsion to use it.” But, in a culture filled with possibilities, and in a modern life of limited time and energy, is Ouija really the place to search? Clearly, for a James Merrill, it was. But there exists a deeper intuition than what comes through a board, or any outer object – one that answers that kind of question for every clear-thinking person. For me, the answer was no.

It was time to pack up my antique Ouija board in its box and return to what I found most lasting on the journey: The work of Merrill, who passed through the uses of this instrument and, with it, created a body of art that perhaps justifies the tumultuous, serpentine history from which Ouija has come.

"When cells band together they increase their awareness exponentially." "In order to survive at such high densities, the cells created structured environments. These sophisticated communities subdivided the workload with more precision and effectiveness than the ever-changing organizational charts that are a fact of life in big corporations." "Division of labor among the cells in the community offered and additional survival advantage. The efficiency it offered enabled more cells to live on less. Consider the old adage "Two can live as cheaply as one." Or consider the construction cost of building a two bedroom apartment in a hundred-apartment complex. To survive, each cell is required to expend a certain amount of energy. The amount of energy conserved by individuals living in a community contributes to both an increased survival advantage and a better quality of life. In American capitalism, Henry Ford saw the tactical advantage of the differentiated form of communal effort and employed it in creating his assembly line system of manufacturing cars. Before Ford, a small team of multi-skilled workers would require a week or two to build a single automobile. Ford organized his shop so that every worker was responsible for only one specialized job. He stationed a large number of these differentiated workers along a single row, the assembly line, and passed the developing car from one specialist to the next. The efficiency of job specialization enabled Ford to produce a new automobile in 90 minutes rather than weeks. Unfortunately, we conveniently "forgot" about the cooperation necessary for evolution when Charles Darwin emphasized a radically different theory about the emergence of life. He concluded 150 years ago that living organisms are perpetually embroiled in a "struggle for existence." For Darwin, struggle and violence are not only a part of animal (human) nature, but the principle "forces" behind evolutionary advancement." "You may consider yourself an individual, but as a cell biologist I can tell you that you are in truth a cooperative community of approximately 50 trillion single-celled citizens. Almost all of the cells that make up your body are amoeba-like, individual organisms that have evolved a cooperative strategy for their mutual survival."

The deep meaning of these words can be understood by reading the excellent book “The Nature of Personal Reality” by Seth/Jane Roberts. Jane Roberts was one of the most well-known psychics in the world and lived to channel the teachings of the ’spirit’ Seth. Now, whether you choose to believe in that kind of ’set-up’ or not, Im sure you’ll find this to be a book that can actually change your entire life almost overnight. I did for me ! You will find yourself loaded with encredible powers, insights and love after reading this ‘out-of-this-world’ book. The mental stuff you can extract from this book will surely also make you a better and stronger runner (or anything else) that you ever - until now - thought possible. The challenge is yours - you create your own reality!

How water structure reflects our consciousness

by WellnessGoods.com

Water has a very important message for us. Water is telling us to take a much deeper look at our selves. When we do look at our selves through the mirror of water, the message becomes amazingly, crystal, clear. We know that human life is directly connected to the quality of our water, both within and all around us.

The photographs and information in this article reflect the work of Masaru Emoto, a creative and visionary Japanese researcher Mr. Emoto has published an important book, "The Message from Water" from the findings of his worldwide research If you have any doubt that your thoughts affect everything in, and around you, the information and photographs that are presented here, taken from the book of his published results, will change your mind and alter your beliefs, profoundly. How the molecular structure of water is effected...

From Mr. Emoto's work we are provided with factual evidence, that human vibrational energy, thoughts, words, ideas and music, affect the molecular structure of water, the very same water that comprises over seventy percent of a mature human body and covers the same amount of our planet. Water is the very source of all life on this planet, the quality and integrity are vitally important to all forms of life. The body is very much like a sponge and is composed of trillions of chambers called cells that hold liquid. The quality of our life is directly connected to the quality of our water.

Water is a very malleable substance. Its physical shape easily adapts to whatever environment is present. But its physical appearance is not the only thing that changes, the molecular shape also changes. The energy or vibrations of the environment will change the molecular shape of water. In this sense water not only has the ability to visually reflect the environment but it also molecularly reflects the environment.

Mr. Emoto has been visually documenting these molecular changes in water by means of his photographic techniques. He freezes droplets of water and then examines them under a dark field microscope that has photographic capabilities. His work clearly demonstrates the diversity of the molecular structure of water and the effect of the environment upon the structure of the water.

Discover how each source has an effect on the visual photographed structure... Snow has been falling on the earth for more than a few million years. Each snowflake, as we have been told, has a very unique shape and structure. By freezing water and taking a photograph of the structure, as Mr. Emoto has done, you get incredible information about the water.

Mr. Emoto has discovered many fascinating differences in the crystalline structures of water from many different sources and different conditions around the planet. Water from pristine mountain streams and springs show the beautifully formed geometric designs in their crystalline patterns. Polluted and toxic water from industrial and populated areas and stagnated water from water pipes and storage dams show definitively distorted and randomly formed crystalline structures.

With the recent popularity in music therapy, Mr. Emoto decided to see what effects music has on the structuring of water. He placed distilled water between two speakers for several hours and then photographed the crystals that formed after the water was frozen.

After seeing water react to different environmental conditions, pollution and music, Mr. Emoto and colleagues decided to see how thoughts and words affected the formation of untreated, distilled, water crystals, using words typed onto paper by a word processor and taped on glass bottles overnight. The same procedure was performed using the names of deceased persons. The waters were then frozen and photographed.

These photographs show the incredible reflections of water, as alive and highly responsive to every one of our emotions and thoughts. It is quite clear that water easily takes on the vibrations and energy of it's environment, whether toxic and polluted or naturally pristine.

Masaru Emotos extraordinary work is an awesome display, and powerful tool, that can change our perceptions of ourselves and the world we live in, forever. We now have profound evidence that we can positively heal and transform ourselves and our planet by the thoughts we choose to think and the ways in which we put those thoughts into.

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This article was written and published by Wellness Goods, where you can also order books written by Masaru Emoto. Photographs in this article are from "The Messages from Water" written and copyright protected by Masaru Emoto. Photographs are reproduced here by WellnessGoods.com under expressed permission and authority from the publisher.

To learn more about transforming water, click here.

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More Messages in Water

The Spirit of Ma'at interviews Dr. Masaru Emoto

by Reiko Myamoto Dewey

REIKO: We have read your book The Message from Water, and we introduced it on our website in our August issue (see "Conscious Water Crystals: The Power of Prayer Made Visible"). It has been our most popular article, with its readership increasing every week, and has raised many questions.

You mentioned in your book how you would type out words on a piece of paper and paste these written words onto a bottle, and see how the water reacted to the words -- what kind of crystals were formed from the words. From your research, are you able to discern whether the reaction of the water came from the vibration of the actual words that were pasted onto the bottles, or whether the intention of the person who was pasting the words onto the bottle influenced the experiment in any way?

DR. EMOTO: This is one of the more difficult areas to clarify. However, from continuing these experiments we have come to the conclusion that the water is reacting to the actual words. For example, for our trip to Europe we tried using the words "thank you" and "you fool" in German. The people on our team who took the actual photographs of the water crystals did not understand the German for "you fool", and yet we were able to obtain exactly the same kind of results in the different crystal formations based on the words used.

REIKO: Have you found that distance made any difference when people were praying over water? For example, if people in Japan were to pray over water in Russia, would this be different from people praying over water that is right in front of them?

DR. EMOTO: We have only experimented once with that in the book. But from that experiment, distance did not seem to matter. The intention and prayers of the person still influenced the water. We have not yet tried further experiments from a long distance. However, my feeling is that distance would not make much of a difference. What would make a difference is the purity of intent of the person doing the praying. The higher the purity of intent, the less of a difference the distance itself would make.

REIKO: Have you seen any difference between one person praying over water versus a whole group of people praying over water?

DR. EMOTO: Since the water reflects the composite energy of what is being sent to it, the crystalline structure reflects the composite vibrations of the group. So one person praying reflects the energy or intention of that one person. In terms of how powerful the effect can be, if you have one person praying with a deep sense of clarity and purity, the crystalline structure will be clear and pure. And even though you may have a large group of people, if their intention as a group is not cohesive, you end up with an incohesive structure in the water. However, if everyone is united together, you will find a clear, beautiful crystal, like one created by the prayer of a single person of deep purity.

In one of our experiments, we had some water on a table, and 17 participants all stood in a circle around a table holding hands. Then each of the participants spoke a beautiful word of their choice to the water. Words like unity, love, and friendship. We took before-and-after shots and were able to obtain some beautiful crystalline structures as a result of this. I have some slides that I will be showing of these crystals in my upcoming European tour.

REIKO: Is the water influenced immediately, or is there a time lag?

DR. EMOTO: In these cases we would freeze the water right away, so we could say that the water is changed instantaneously.

REIKO: Have you ever tested other human body fluids, such as saliva, blood, urine etc?

DR. EMOTO: Yes, we certainly have. However, fluids with other elements in them, like seawater, blood and urine, do not form crystals. However, we can dilute them with distilled water to something like 10 to the power of -12 or -20 or so. This dilutes the component of other elements in the fluid to the point where we can freeze the sample and obtain crystals.

REIKO: Could you then see the effect that energetic healing or prayer has on a person by looking at the crystals formed by their blood or urine?

DR. EMOTO: As far as experiments related to the human body are concerned, there are a lot of subtle influences that also need to be taken into consideration. So although we are looking at this, we have not publicized any information yet. However, you can look forward to hearing about our findings on this in the future.

REIKO: If we could imbue water with the energy of various words, for example, with the word, "health", could we then use the water that has that vibration in it and use it to do things like grow food, water plants, etc?

DR. EMOTO: We have not tried this, but some people who have read the book are experimenting with bottling tap water and taping words like "love" and "appreciation" on the bottle and using that water to water their plants, or to put cut flowers in. They are finding that their cut flowers are lasting much longer, and that the plants in the garden are much more radiant.

REIKO: Once a certain vibration is introduced to the water, how long does the water "remember" that crystalline structure?

DR. EMOTO: This will be different depending on the original structure of the water itself. Tap water will lose its memory quickly. We refer to the crystalline structure of water as "clusters." The smaller the clusters, the longer the water will retain its memory. If there is too much space between the clusters, other information could easily infiltrate this space, making it hard for the clusters to hold the integrity of the information. Other micro-organisms could also enter this space. A tight bonding structure is best for maintaining the integrity of information.

REIKO: What kind of words would create smaller clusters and what kind of words would create larger clusters?

DR. EMOTO: Slang words like "you fool" destroy clusters. You would not see any crystals in these cases. Negative phrases and words create large clusters or will not form clusters, and positive, beautiful words and phrases create small, tight clusters.

REIKO: You say that some negatives do not form clusters, but we see from your photos that they do still form characteristic patterns. How would you classify these patterns?

DR. EMOTO: Think of it in terms of vibration. It's easy to understand that language -- the spoken word -- has a vibration. Well, written words also have a vibration. Anything in existence has a vibration. If I were to draw a circle, the vibration of a circle would be created. Drawing a cross would create the vibration of a cross. So if I write the letters L O V E, then these letters put out the vibration of love. Water can be imprinted with these vibrations. Beautiful words have beautiful, clear vibrations. But negative words put out ugly, incoherent vibrations which do not form clusters. Language is not something artificial, but rather is something that exists naturally. I believe that language is created by nature.

REIKO: Does that mean that every word has its own signature vibration or cluster that is unique to itself?

Achieve greater hydration, better nutrient intake and toxin elimination. Read about the Precious Prills and ADR water structuring devices that have received such high praise.

DR. EMOTO: Yes. During our evolution, we learned what sounds were dangerous, what sounds were soothing and safe, and what sounds were pleasurable, and so on. We slowly learned about various vibrations of the laws of nature. We learned this through instinct and through experience. We accumulated this information over time. We started out with some simple sounds like "a" or "u" or "e," which evolved into more complex sounds like "love." And these positive words create "natural" crystalline structures -- which are all based on the hexagon.

In fact, the structure of all evolution in nature, from an informational perspective, is based on the hexagon. The reason hexagons are formed has to do with the chemical reaction of the benzene ring. I believe that anything that lacks this basic hexagonal structure is out of accord with the laws of nature and holds a destructive vibration. So when we look at things that do not exist naturally -- things that have been created artificially -- many of them lack this hexagonal structure and so they have, I believe, a destructive vibration.

This principle is what I think makes swearing and slang words destructive. These words are not in accordance with the laws of nature. So, for example, I think you would probably find higher rates of violent crime in areas where a lot of negative language is being used. Just as the Bible says, first there was the Word, and God created all of Creation from the Word.

So words actually convert the vibrations of nature into sound. And each language is different. Japanese has its own set of vibrations that differs from American. Nature in America is different from nature in Japan. An American cedar is different from a Japanese cedar, so the vibrations coming from these words are different. In this way, nothing else holds the same vibrations as the word arigato. In Japanese, arigato means "thank you." But even when there is this mutual underlying meaning, arigato and thank you create different crystalline structures. Every word in every language is unique and exists only in that language.

REIKO: Have you come across a particular word or phrase in your research that you have found to be most helpful in cleaning up the natural waters of the world?

DR. EMOTO: Yes. There is a special combination that seems to be perfect for this, which is love plus the combination of thanks and appreciation reflected in the English word gratitude. Just one of these is not enough. Love needs to be based in gratitude, and gratitude needs to be based in love. These two words together create the most important vibration. And it is even more important that we understand the value of these words. For example, we know that water is described as H2O. If we were to look at love and gratitude as a pair, gratitude is the H and love is the O. Water is the basis that not only supports but also allows the existence of life. In my understanding of the concept of yin and yang, in the same way that there is one O and two Hs, we also need one part yang/love to two parts yin/gratitude, in order to come to a place of balance in the equation.

Love is an active word and gratitude is passive. When you think of gratitude -- a combination of appreciation and thankfulness -- there is an apologetic quality. The Japanese word for gratitude is kan-sha, consisting of two Chinese characters: kan, which means feeling, and sha, apology. It's coming from a reverential space, taking a step or two back. I believe that love coming from this space is optimal love, and may even lead to an end to the wars and conflicts in the world. Kan-sha is inherent in the substance H2O -- an essential element for life.

REIKO: So if we were to develop a car that could run on water instead of gasoline, and return the water to the atmosphere and subsequently back into space in this way, would that be one way of fulfilling our task?

DR. EMOTO: I think that would be a wonderful thing, and for the sake of preserving Mother Nature it is the direction that we need to go. However, since water is the mirror reflecting our level of consciousness, a large percentage of the people on the planet, at least 10 percent of the people, need to have the love and the kan-sha awareness. When they do, then the time will come when water can be used to replace gasoline. And the reason I say 10 percent is that this ratio is mirrored in nature. When we look at the world of bacteria, for example, there are 10 percent good bacteria, 10 percent bad, and a majority of 80 percent opportunistic bacteria that could go either way. In looking at the various environmental issues we are faced with, and the tasks that we need to fulfill for the planet, if we could get more than 10 percent of the people consciously aware, than I believe we could pull the 80 percent in that direction, too.

And so I believe that the people who are following a spiritual path are promoting peace for the planet and for other people. If we could only unite on this level of consciousness, then we will be there.

I feel that my book The Message From Water has given birth to a convincing message through a common language for the whole world. Not because I wrote it, but because I know it was birthed through kan-sha toward mankind. I think this is why so many people from other countries want to interview me about the book. I am being invited to give talks at six different European locations. Things have been coming in non-stop from abroad.

REIKO: Do you believe that water itself is conscious and is reacting to the words?

DR. EMOTO: I understand that many of your readers are people interested in spiritual matters, and I would like to answer this question from that perspective. I believe that prior to Adam and Eve water itself held the consciousness of God -- that God's intention was put into the medium of water, and that this was used in the creation of Earth and Nature. In other words, all of the information needed for God's Creation was reflected in the water.

And then we -- Adam and Eve -- were placed on Earth to be the caretakers for this Creation of God. I believe that water held the consciousness of God until then, but that after the caretakers were placed on Earth, water became an empty vessel to mirror and reflect what was in the heart. It became a container to carry energy and information. Therefore, since this time, I think water has taken on the quality of simply reflecting the energies and thoughts that it is exposed to; that it no longer has its own consciousness. Water reflects the consciousness of the human race.

REIKO: Would you tell us your philosophical thoughts about what you believe these water crystals really are?

DR. EMOTO: After the book was published, I was wondering about this, and I came to the realization that these crystals are spirits. There are many parallels. When ice melts, the crystalline structure becomes an illusion. It's there -- and yet it's not there, because you can no longer see it.

Similarly, when a person dies their body loses several grams of weight -- what some people think of this as the weight of the soul. But then we can often visually see them. I think that the soul has mass, and that it returns to water molecules. And because it has mass, it is affected by the gravitational pull of the earth. And so sometimes the soul cannot transition over to the other side.

In Buddhism, we talk about attaining sattori, or reaching enlightenment. People who attain sattori do not become ghosts. They are able to achieve a certain stage of development at the soul level and return to God for a while before they move on to their next assignment.

We traveled here to Earth on the water crystals of spheres of ice [Editor's Note: You will hear more about this amazing phenomenon in an upcoming issue of the Spirit of Ma'at on the subject of water.] Earth is not our native home. There was nothing here. So these souls can return to their native homes for awhile. That is sattori, or enlightenment. However, most people on the planet are not able to attain enlightenment. To reach enlightenment means to be able to completely let go of the ego and our worldly attachments.

In the past 100 years the world's population has increased from 1 billion to 6 billion. During these 100 years, war and capitalism has dominated the planet. Rather than being able to detach from our desires, the opposite has been true. Our desires have grown and grown. Very few people have been able to attain enlightenment in this environment. Few souls have been able to go "home" and I believe they have remained on Earth in the form of water. This connects into the concept of reincarnation, where these spirits keep falling back to Earth and need to redo their lives here.

REIKO: So when a person dies, if they are unable to attain sattori at that time, their soul remains on this planet as water?

DR. EMOTO: That is what I believe, yes. The Japanese character for spirit is a combination of the words "rain" and "soul." People who have seen ghosts report seeing them in water or in places where there is a lot of humidity. It's as if the imprint of the soul, which is in the form of water, suddenly takes form when surrounded by water or moisture -- much like a mirage.

And so, looking at the pictures of the water crystals and the impact they are having, I came to the realization that these themselves are ghosts. Up until now, I had thought of ghosts as something to be frightened of, something that we could do nothing about. But watching these crystals, I realized that by simply projecting beautiful music and words onto them, the crystals or ghosts become beautiful. If that's the case, there's nothing to be frightened of. We need to let everybody know about this, and all use beautiful words and offer beautiful music, and create beauty in the environment.

By receiving beautiful thoughts and feelings and words and music, our ancestral spirits get lighter and are now able to make the transition "home." When we consider this, we can see the importance of traditions like Obon [a Japanese summer tradition where ancestral spirits are invited back to spend time with the family, and the ancestors are taken care of and respected].

When we are alive, the human body is at approximately 36 degrees Celsius. This is the temperature of the fluids in the body. When we die, this goes to zero degrees Celsius. When we die and go to the other side, crossing the river, we are no longer able to move our bodies. But the crystalline structure of our soul emerges. It's like water. When water turns to ice, the crystalline structure becomes visible, but it also becomes immobile. So "crystal" equals "spirit."

REIKO: Thank you very much.

See more pictures: http://www.adhikara.com/water.html

To learn more about transforming water, click here.

---

More Messages In Water

The Spirit Of Ma'at Interviews Dr. Masaru Emoto

By Reiko Myamoto Dewey, 07-04-2004

REIKO: We have read your book The Message from Water, and we introduced it on our website in our August issue (see "Conscious Water Crystals: The Power of Prayer Made Visible.") It has been our most popular article, with its readership increasing every week, and has raised many questions.

See how our structured water products can help you achieve greater hydration, better nutrient intake and toxin elimination. Read about the Quantum Tech water and BioRays water structuring devices that have received such high praise.

You mentioned in your book how you would type out words on a piece of paper and paste these written words onto a bottle, and see how the water reacted to the words -- what kind of crystals were formed from the words. From your research, are you able to discern whether the reaction of the water came from the vibration of the actual words that were pasted onto the bottles, or whether the intention of the person who was pasting the words onto the bottle influenced the experiment in any way?

DR. EMOTO: This is one of the more difficult areas to clarify. However, from continuing these experiments we have come to the conclusion that the water is reacting to the actual words. For example, for our trip to Europe we tried using the words "thank you" and "you fool" in German. The people on our team who took the actual photographs of the water crystals did not understand the German for "you fool," and yet we were able to obtain exactly the same kind of results in the different crystal formations based on the words used.

REIKO: Have you found that distance made any difference when people were praying over water? For example, if people in Japan were to pray over water in Russia, would this be different from people praying over water that is right in front of them?

DR. EMOTO: We have only experimented once with that in the book. But from that experiment, distance did not seem to matter. The intention and prayers of the person still influenced the water. We have not yet tried further experiments from a long distance. However, my feeling is that distance would not make much of a difference. What would make a difference is the purity of intent of the person doing the praying. The higher the purity of intent, the less of a difference the distance itself would make.

REIKO: Have you seen any difference between one person praying over water versus a whole group of people praying over water?

DR. EMOTO: Since the water reflects the composite energy of what is being sent to it, the crystalline structure reflects the composite vibrations of the group. So one person praying reflects the energy or intention of that one person. In terms of how powerful the effect can be, if you have one person praying with a deep sense of clarity and purity, the crystalline structure will be clear and pure. And even though you may have a large group of people, if their intention as a group is not cohesive, you end up with an incohesive structure in the water. However, if everyone is united together, you will find a clear, beautiful crystal, like one created by the prayer of a single person of deep purity.

In one of our experiments, we had some water on a table, and 17 participants all stood in a circle around a table holding hands. Then each of the participants spoke a beautiful word of their choice to the water. Words like unity, love, and friendship. We took before-and-after shots and were able to obtain some beautiful crystalline structures as a result of this. I have some slides that I will be showing of these crystals in my upcoming European tour.

REIKO: Is the water influenced immediately, or is there a time lag?

DR. EMOTO: In these cases we would freeze the water right away, so we could say that the water is changed instantaneously.

REIKO: Have you ever tested other human body fluids, such as saliva, blood, urine etc?

DR. EMOTO: Yes, we certainly have. However, fluids with other elements in them, like seawater, blood and urine, do not form crystals. However, we can dilute them with distilled water to something like 10 to the power of -12 or -20 or so. This dilutes the component of other elements in the fluid to the point where we can freeze the sample and obtain crystals.

REIKO: Could you then see the effect that energetic healing or prayer has on a person by looking at the crystals formed by their blood or urine?

DR. EMOTO: As far as experiments related to the human body are concerned, there are a lot of subtle influences that also need to be taken into consideration. So although we are looking at this, we have not publicized any information yet. However, you can look forward to hearing about our findings on this in the future

REIKO: If we could imbue water with the energy of various words, for example, with the word, "health," could we then use the water that has that vibration in it and use it to do things like grow food, water plants, etc?

DR. EMOTO: We have not tried this, but some people who have read the book are experimenting with bottling tap water and taping words like "love" and "appreciation" on the bottle and using that water to water their plants, or to put cut flowers in. They are finding that their cut flowers are lasting much longer, and that the plants in the garden are much more radiant.

REIKO: Once a certain vibration is introduced to the water, how long does the water "remember" that crystalline structure?

DR. EMOTO: This will be different depending on the original structure of the water itself. Tap water will lose its memory quickly. We refer to the crystalline structure of water as "clusters." The smaller the clusters, the longer the water will retain its memory. If there is too much space between the clusters, other information could easily infiltrate this space, making it hard for the clusters to hold the integrity of the information. Other micro-organisms could also enter this space. A tight bonding structure is best for maintaining the integrity of information.

REIKO: What kind of words would create smaller clusters and what kind of words would create larger clusters?

DR. EMOTO: Slang words like "you fool" destroy clusters. You would not see any crystals in these cases. Negative phrases and words create large clusters or will not form clusters, and positive, beautiful words and phrases create small, tight clusters.

REIKO: You say that some negatives do not form clusters, but we see from your photos that they do still form characteristic patterns. How would you classify these patterns?

DR. EMOTO: Think of it in terms of vibration. It's easy to understand that language -- the spoken word -- has a vibration. Well, written words also have a vibration. Anything in existence has a vibration. If I were to draw a circle, the vibration of a circle would be created. Drawing a cross would create the vibration of a cross. So if I write the letters L O V E, then these letters put out the vibration of love. Water can be imprinted with these vibrations. Beautiful words have beautiful, clear vibrations. But negative words put out ugly, incoherent vibrations which do not form clusters. Language is not something artificial, but rather is something that exists naturally. I believe that language is created by nature.

REIKO: Does that mean that every word has its own signature vibration or cluster that is unique to itself?

DR. EMOTO: Yes. During our evolution, we learned what sounds were dangerous, what sounds were soothing and safe, and what sounds were pleasurable, and so on. We slowly learned about various vibrations of the laws of nature. We learned this through instinct and through experience. We accumulated this information over time. We started out with some simple sounds like "a" or "u" or "e," which evolved into more complex sounds like "love." And these positive words create "natural" crystalline structures -- which are all based on the hexagon.

In fact, the structure of all evolution in nature, from an informational perspective, is based on the hexagon. The reason hexagons are formed has to do with the chemical reaction of the benzene ring. I believe that anything that lacks this basic hexagonal structure is out of accord with the laws of nature and holds a destructive vibration. So when we look at things that do not exist naturally -- things that have been created artificially -- many of them lack this hexagonal structure and so they have, I believe, a destructive vibration.

This principle is what I think makes swearing and slang words destructive. These words are not in accordance with the laws of nature. So, for example, I think you would probably find higher rates of violent crime in areas where a lot of negative language is being used. Just as the Bible says, first there was the Word, and God created all of Creation from the Word.

So words actually convert the vibrations of nature into sound. And each language is different. Japanese has its own set of vibrations that differs from American. Nature in America is different from nature in Japan. An American cedar is different from a Japanese cedar, so the vibrations coming from these words are different. In this way, nothing else holds the same vibrations as the word arigato. In Japanese, arigato means "thank you." But even when there is this mutual underlying meaning, arigato and thank you create different crystalline structures. Every word in every language is unique and exists only in that language.

REIKO: Have you come across a particular word or phrase in your research that you have found to be most helpful in cleaning up the natural waters of the world?

DR. EMOTO: Yes. There is a special combination that seems to be perfect for this, which is love plus the combination of thanks and appreciation reflected in the English word gratitude. Just one of these is not enough. Love needs to be based in gratitude, and gratitude needs to be based in love. These two words together create the most important vibration. And it is even more important that we understand the value of these words. For example, we know that water is described as H2O. If we were to look at love and gratitude as a pair, gratitude is the H and love is the O. Water is the basis that not only supports but also allows the existence of life. In my understanding of the concept of yin and yang, in the same way that there is one O and two Hs, we also need one part yang/love to two parts yin/gratitude, in order to come to a place of balance in the equation.

Love is an active word and gratitude is passive. When you think of gratitude -- a combination of appreciation and thankfulness -- there is an apologetic quality. The Japanese word for gratitude is kan-sha, consisting of two Chinese characters: kan, which means feeling, and sha, apology. It's coming from a reverential space, taking a step or two back. I believe that love coming from this space is optimal love, and may even lead to an end to the wars and conflicts in the world. Kan-sha is inherent in the substance H2O -- an essential element for life.

REIKO: So if we were to develop a car that could run on water instead of gasoline, and return the water to the atmosphere and subsequently back into space in this way, would that be one way of fulfilling our task?

DR. EMOTO: I think that would be a wonderful thing, and for the sake of preserving Mother Nature it is the direction that we need to go. However, since water is the mirror reflecting our level of consciousness, a large percentage of the people on the planet, at least 10 percent of the people, need to have the love and the kan-sha awareness. When they do, then the time will come when water can be used to replace gasoline. And the reason I say 10 percent is that this ratio is mirrored in nature. When we look at the world of bacteria, for example, there are 10 percent good bacteria, 10 percent bad, and a majority of 80 percent opportunistic bacteria that could go either way. In looking at the various environmental issues we are faced with, and the tasks that we need to fulfill for the planet, if we could get more than 10 percent of the people consciously aware, than I believe we could pull the 80 percent in that direction, too.

And so I believe that the people who are following a spiritual path are promoting peace for the planet and for other people. If we could only unite on this level of consciousness, then we will be there.

I feel that my book The Message From Water has given birth to a convincing message through a common language for the whole world. Not because I wrote it, but because I know it was birthed through kan-sha toward mankind. I think this is why so many people from other countries want to interview me about the book. I am being invited to give talks at six different European locations. Things have been coming in non-stop from abroad.

REIKO: Do you believe that water itself is conscious and is reacting to the words?

DR. EMOTO: I understand that many of your readers are people interested in spiritual matters, and I would like to answer this question from that perspective. I believe that prior to Adam and Eve water itself held the consciousness of God -- that God´s intention was put into the medium of water, and that this was used in the creation of Earth and Nature. In other words, all of the information needed for God´s Creation was reflected in the water.

And then we -- Adam and Eve -- were placed on Earth to be the caretakers for this Creation of God. I believe that water held the consciousness of God until then, but that after the caretakers were placed on Earth, water became an empty vessel to mirror and reflect what was in the heart. It became a container to carry energy and information. Therefore, since this time, I think water has taken on the quality of simply reflecting the energies and thoughts that it is exposed to; that it no longer has its own consciousness. Water reflects the consciousness of the human race.

REIKO: Would you tell us your philosophical thoughts about what you believe these water crystals really are?

DR. EMOTO: After the book was published, I was wondering about this, and I came to the realization that these crystals are spirits. There are many parallels. When ice melts, the crystalline structure becomes an illusion. It's there -- and yet it's not there, because you can no longer see it.

Similarly, when a person dies their body loses several grams of weight -- what some people think of this as the weight of the soul. But then we can often visually see them. I think that the soul has mass, and that it returns to water molecules. And because it has mass, it is affected by the gravitational pull of the earth. And so sometimes the soul cannot transition over to the other side.

In Buddhism, we talk about attaining sattori, or reaching enlightenment. People who attain sattori do not become ghosts. They are able to achieve a certain stage of development at the soul level and return to God for a while before they move on to their next assignment.

We traveled here to Earth on the water crystals of spheres of ice [Editor's Note: You will hear more about this amazing phenomenon in an upcoming issue of the Spirit of Ma'at on the subject of water.] Earth is not our native home. There was nothing here. So these souls can return to their native homes for awhile. That is sattori, or enlightenment. However, most people on the planet are not able to attain enlightenment. To reach enlightenment means to be able to completely let go of the ego and our worldly attachments.

In the past 100 years the world's population has increased from 1 billion to 6 billion. During these 100 years, war and capitalism has dominated the planet. Rather than being able to detach from our desires, the opposite has been true. Our desires have grown and grown. Very few people have been able to attain enlightenment in this environment. Few souls have been able to go "home" and I believe they have remained on Earth in the form of water. This connects into the concept of reincarnation, where these spirits keep falling back to Earth and need to redo their lives here.

REIKO: So when a person dies, if they are unable to attain sattori at that time, their soul remains on this planet as water?

DR. EMOTO: That is what I believe, yes. The Japanese character for spirit is a combination of the words "rain" and "soul." People who have seen ghosts report seeing them in water or in places where there is a lot of humidity. It's as if the imprint of the soul, which is in the form of water, suddenly takes form when surrounded by water or moisture -- much like a mirage.

And so, looking at the pictures of the water crystals and the impact they are having, I came to the realization that these themselves are ghosts. Up until now, I had thought of ghosts as something to be frightened of, something that we could do nothing about. But watching these crystals, I realized that by simply projecting beautiful music and words onto them, the crystals or ghosts become beautiful. If that's the case, there's nothing to be frightened of. We need to let everybody know about this, and all use beautiful words and offer beautiful music, and create beauty in the environment.

By receiving beautiful thoughts and feelings and words and music, our ancestral spirits get lighter and are now able to make the transition "home." When we consider this, we can see the importance of traditions like Obon [a Japanese summer tradition where ancestral spirits are invited back to spend time with the family, and the ancestors are taken care of and respected].

When we are alive, the human body is at approximately 36 degrees Celsius. This is the temperature of the fluids in the body. When we die, this goes to zero degrees Celsius. When we die and go to the other side, crossing the river, we are no longer able to move our bodies. But the crystalline structure of our soul emerges. It's like water. When water turns to ice, the crystalline structure becomes visible, but it also becomes immobile. So "crystal" equals "spirit."

REIKO: Thank you very much.

To learn more about transforming water, click here.