Transmitting and Receiving High-Strangeness

The Strange Bottle, an experiment in making life a little more interesting

I just finished reading John Keel's seminal document of high strangeness, The Mothman Prophecies, a book which features an alarming shortage of Mothman and lots and lots of stories about Men In Black.

Most folks want to avoid encounters with these beings. I am not most folks. Act like you know.

Years and years ago I formulated a three-step plan that was consistent with my tendency for big ideas and little follow-through. I wanted to engage my local area in a campaign of ontological terrorism. See, back in the 1950's and 60's, this part of the country was balls deep in a UFO flap. The Air Force's 501st bombing wing was stationed out of a nearby Strategic Air Command base, meaning that Boeing B-52's were constantly flying in and out of the region, along with tankers that flew out and refueled them as they orbited the planet, flying out as close as they could get to Moscow without triggering an international event. Each plane carrying megatons of radioactive death in their cargo bays. Naturally, this attracted UFOs.

One town over from where I write this, the thing to do on Friday nights in the mid-50's was drive out to the main thoroughfare and park along a particular stretch of road where B-52s flew over. As it stands, there's not much to do out here but even by the standards of rural American boredom, plane spotting is pretty boring shit. Alas, these people were not there for the planes. They were there for the UFOs that would buzz them and harass them as they flew over. Witnesses saw one such plane in 1959, flying in the distance, struck several times by a beam of light from an unidentified craft. All 8 crew members parachuted to safety, were sworn to secrecy by the US Air Force, and the plane broke up into literal pieces, scattered across a nearby swamp. You can still find pieces of the plane today if you go for a hike out that way. Two more high profile sightings occurred several years later about which books have been written and movies have been made. UFOs were sighted all up and down the state until the mid-90's when the base closed, the 501 having no one to drop their bombs on (ICBMs pretty much replaced them in the 70's, anyway) and service of nuclear vessels at a nearby Navy yard also slowed. Big fun, I tell you, finding out later that my neighborhood would likely have been vaporized had war broken out. It brought all of those mysterious "Evacuation Route" signs posted up here and there into stark, terrifying focus.

For a long time, this area had a cool scene to it. Being a teenager here in the 90's meant having a punk rock show to be at several times a week. There was art, music, and adventure. We had a cool coffeehouse hangout spot by day that became a venue for music and performance at night. There were punks, goths, and skinheads everywhere and the city had personality. There was nothing deliberate about it, either. It just popped up. People would do weird stuff just to do weird stuff and give the night some flavor. I stood on the stoop outside the local record store one night, enjoying a smoke, when a guy in a gorilla suit sprinted by, followed shortly behind by several men in white lab coats yelling after him. When he came by later on, casually sauntering down the street with a bunch of bananas in his hand I asked him what he was doing and he replied, "Just having a good time."

Indeed.

But this doesn't happen anymore. At a certain point, the city caught the eye of real estate speculators. Times weren't great for the city in the early 2000's. Business began to slow. Shops closed. 2008 hit like a bomb and whole blocks were rendered to something akin to sets from a post apocalypse movie. Empty windows looked in on dusty, empty spaces which used to house boutique clothing shops, an amazing consignment shop where you could get Manic Panic before everyone had it in stock, an even cooler record store than the one that managed to survive the crash. Capitalism hates a vacuum, though. When there's a resource left to be exploited, money finds a way. A few bold investors came in and bought up vulnerable real estate. They tore down what was there and replaced it with luxury apartments and hotels. The city started showing up on listicles listing the top 10 hidden gems in America, which brought more investors. More buildings were torn down and more generic luxury real estate went up. You started seeing Ferraris and Lamborghinis driving around the city in the summer time. It doesn't look like it used to, and change is an inevitability but the resulting city's face looks like the design of the Archons. It was deliberately stripped of its character and any spark of divine Will was snuffed out on purpose. There's a summer music and theater series in the park and these newcomer jackoffs have the balls to complain to the city about the noise. The city representatives, being the venal cowards that they are, prostrate themselves before these investors. And I say fuck that, friends.

On top of just being a shitty facelift that did nothing for us but flood the city with boat shoes-wearing neo-yuppies, it drove real estate prices up; way up, in fact. And they kept building outward. The kind of scuzzy outer lengths of commercial zoning even fell prey to developers once the city's inner landscape had been ground up. The only things that remain are the historic landmarks and I'm sure there have been petitions to somehow get around those and build faceless dwellings on their corpses as well. After all, what did the Christian missionaries do in the middle ages to subjugate the barbarians? They tore their sacred sites down and built churches on them. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Not even the more upwardly mobile residents of the area can afford to hang in the city anymore and there's nowhere for culture to go but away.

My original plan was to make the city unappealing to developers by plunging it into a permanent state of high strangeness. Step one was a small and personal ritual to signal to extraterrestrials and trans-dimensional spirits that I wanted to work with them toward this purpose. Step two was to perform a public ritual where the end-goal would stage a mass UFO abduction of all in attendance. In spite of step three, this was the most ambitious and involved adopting an entire character at the time, a magical persona that was a sort of proto-Frater Pera by the name of Kia Das Vega. Step three was to plot a pattern of sacred geometry over a map of the city and leave behind a permanent sigil at each nexus that, when activated on Halloween, would tear open holes in the veil around the city, allowing spirits to pass freely through them with the caveat that the city's artists would be off-limits. The goal was to subject the entire city to a haunting that could never be dispelled. Basically, the second act break in Ghostbusters when Walter Peck turns off the containment grid.

I'm coming back to the old plan but without all the pageantry and showboating. I've learned so, so much since then and I need a little flavor in my life. Also, that big old plan is a real pain in the ass that involves vandalism, climbing around the city, and somehow organizing a performance that won't be broken up by the cops. Encounters with the cops are a lot less predictable when you're a grown-ass adult than when you were a teenager.

The new plan is much simpler but follows a similar format. I intend to draw in the weird energy associated with with places that were subject to UFO sightings, landings or abductions, and people who make it their business to investigate this weird stuff. The unknown has a magnetic energy to it. Once you touch it or it touches you, you end up carrying some of it around with you and you can't get rid of it unless you take deliberately mystical steps to wash it off. It's like taking a magnet and touching a piece of iron with it. The iron ends up magnetized a little. To magnetize myself with strangeness I am building a series of transmitters and a receiver in the form of spell bottles.

The ingredients are:

• 1 5ml bottle with cork

• lavender

• star anise

• honey

• 2cm of pure silver wire

• shards of amethyst

• shards of quartz

• small sigil wrapped in aluminum

Let's break it down, shall we?

Everything in the bottle corresponds either with Mercury or the Moon. Mercury is the primary spirit that'll move the energy from transmitter to receiver, so they get the bulk of symbolism. Lavender speaks for itself. It's a Mercurial plant. Star Anise does, too, but I primarily chose it for the Star quality of the name. I was lucky enough to find out later that it also corresponds to Mercury. I also like how it smells. Black licorice can eat my dick. It's a terrible candy. But at the very least, its herb smells pleasant. Quartz and Amethyst shards are broken off of a larger piece and placed in the bottle first. For all of the elements in this network, it is important that they all come from the same originating piece. They'll carry the same resonance and vibration, this way. Amethyst is primarily Jovian but it also corresponds to the moon. I chose it because of its profound psychic properties. Quartz tends to be associated the planet Venus but in my work with it, it tends to have an all purposes quality to it. Its presence in large amounts under certain locations in North America (Sedona, AZ, and Somerset, KY, for instance) acts as an attractor for strangeness and that's what I'm going for here, after all. I cork the bottle at this point and tumble the contents to mix them up. Then I add honey. Honey is the binding factor. It joins the contents of the bottle and aligns them to serve the same purpose.

Years ago, before I even started associating with Poke Runyon's group, The Ordo Templi Astarte, I was meditating while listening to Voyager 1's recording of the sounds that Saturn's rings make and I received a sigil while tuning my consciousness to the Sirius star system. This was one of the first truly profound moments in magic for me. I was a new guy, rudderless, working the Chaos current to the best of my rather poor understanding of it, and this came through. I still use this sigil to identify myself on the astral. When I asked what it was, the reply was "The Astarte Sigil" and that's all I ever got. It sticks with me, though. I drew it on the pages of my very first magic journal and later refined it on a black card in gold ink. This is the sigil I'll be using to link up the nodes in the network, sort of a unique network identifier to direct the energy to my temple. Like the rest of the material components of this working, the sigils will be drawn on small pieces of paper cut from the page of the journal where I first drew the Astarte Sigil. Then I wrap them in aluminum foil and place them in the bottle. I was originally planning on using actual mercury as the metallic symbol for Mercury but that shit is incredibly hard to order on the cheap. Its vapor is also extremely toxic and if I planned to bury these bottles and mail them to people, I would essentially be sending them poison and placing this poison in the earth. So I opted for herbs and folky old witchcraft to represent my Will.

The last step is to poke a hole in the cork with a paperclip and feed a couple cm of silver wire through it. This is the antenna. When you find things linked together in spiritual spaces, like the astral plane, they're usually linked up by a silver thread. As above, so below, there's a symbolic linking here on the lower fallen plane with a silver antenna.

Purity of metal is important here, as in all alchemical operations. Most of the silver wire I found for sale was either silver plated or it was Sterling Silver, which is an alloy. Sterling is pretty close to pure, but the alloy, whatever it is that makes it sterling, corrupts the silver component, which is the important part here. So I hunted down some 99.9999% pure silver thread on Etsy. The stuff is pretty soft and pliable and I think I might actually take the time to harden it as best I can. Cursory research tells me that I just need to hammer it some to harden the material since I know a dude with an honest-to-God anvil. I also found out that the aluminum in aluminum foil is remarkably pure.

The final step will be to consecrate the bottles and seal the deal with Mercury and Luna. To do this, I'll invoke their powers as outlined in The Picatrix, without all the hairy shit where I sacrifice a bird and eat its liver and then beat a bunch of goats to death with a stick around a golden table.

I'm keeping it simple. I'll invoke the powers on the next full moon, at the hour of Mercury, make my petition, and then seal each bottle with the wax from a yellow candle. Then I'll get them in hands of people with weird energy and bury them at locations that are relevant to my mission. Updates to follow.