MORTGEIST

Sometimes during the holidays, the bible is picked up and read on occasion because it is always nice to recount the story of Christ and his birth. I remember one year I received leather bound bible for Christmas and I was excitedly turning the pages reading many of the stories in the New and Old Testament.

While I often sound overtly religious at Christmas time, I have to admit that while I find the bible appropriate for personal study, you can’t help but publicly talk about some of the stories that if they happened today would wind up on the Discovery channel.

We have already seen many documentaries about ancient aliens that have been linked to biblical passages and the story of Mary being impregnated by an angel would be just as peculiar as someone appearing on a television special about alien abductions claiming to have been impregnated by an alien.

Another peculiar story worth mentioning is probably the first account of the “Men in Black” or the hooded angels of death.

In Chapter 19 of Genesis, Lot met two men at the gates of Sodom. The men were frightening as lot fell to them unable to look at their pallid faces. The men warned Lot that they were there to destroy the city and that he is to gather together friends and family and flee into the mountains.

Obviously these pale faced beings knew the secrets of bringing about the destruction of two cities. Abraham looked towards the wasted cities and said that it was if a hot furnace had baked the landscape. Lot’s wife wasn’t so lucky she had turned into ash as the city went up into a fiery cloud.

The only weapon we know of today that could annihilate two cities is a Nuclear weapon. Could it be that the two hooded figures knew the secrets of nuclear fission? Did they know the secrets of the creation and destruction of Primordial matter? Did they know that in order to create, they must destroy?

These are just a few basic keys to understanding the mythologies that seem to be cyclical in our existence on this planet. You see them multiply and repeat throughout ancient texts, mythologies, occultist spells, revelations, and in modern Science Fiction.

The hooded visage of the death mythos often straddles the post of science, occultism, revelation, and fantasy. It pushes our limits of understanding and the advent of an appearance of the shadow archetype or the contemporary shadow people has been reported for many centuries. However, I became aware that the sightings of hooded figures have increased in 2013, and historically these so called hooded death figures have appeared around the winter solstice and the New Year.

In the traditional Dickens story of “A Christmas Carol” the ghost of Christmas Present appears and just prior to the arrival of the ghost of Christmas yet to come, he lifts his heavy cloak and reveals two emaciated children with hollowed out black eyes. He calls the boy ignorance and the girl want.

On the forehead of the boy was a mark. The mark meant doom. When Dickens wrote his tale of an old miser named Ebenezer Scrooge, it was estimated that nearly half of all funerals in London were for children under the age of ten.

They would be interred in pauper’s cemeteries. In those times there was a story about the graveyard watchers or the L’ankou. The L’ankou was draped and hooded to hide his pale and wiry frame.

The legend comes from the old Celtic legends of Brittany or the lesser “Britain.”

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries legends would persist that the hooded figure would sometimes appear at Christmas Eve mass and if you were touched by his cloak you would die within the year. There were many historians that would write in their journals that the ankou would appear after the appearances of comets and fireballs.

If anyone was to see a hooded figure in their town, their town would be cursed with plague and dysentery. Dickens used this figure to represent the future, because death was inevitable in times of greed and ignorance.

I suppose that I can write off as sheer coincidence that I received two e-mails on Christmas Eve where concerned listeners had claimed that they witnessed either one hooded figure, or a gathering of hooded figures on Christmas Eve.

One e-mail I received was from a police officer that told me that he witnessed what appeared to be a gathering of three hooded figures standing in a circle. He said that they weren’t hard to miss because they were dark and standing in the snow. He guessed that they had to be at least 10 feet tall.

The other e-mail that I received was from a listener that said that he saw hooded figures walking behind a person was made to look like Krampus. He believed that it may have been some sort of stunt as it happened at a very popular area for families to see Christmas lights.

Both listeners were concerned and while one of the e-mails seemed to have logical explanation the other encounter that was described by the police officer seemed eerily supernatural.

During the Holiday weekend I started to catch up on some of the films I missed. One of the films I watched was the film “The Conjuring” which is a film about the infamous Harrisville Rhode island Haunting of the Perron Family. Even though the film takes liberties with the entities that allegedly appeared the house where they lived, I remember from Andrea Perron’s accounts in her book House of “Darkness House of Light: The True Story,” that one of the entities that appeared was hooded and dark. Perron had claimed that the entity had no facial features only that what was supposed to be a face looked like a cross section of a hornets’ nest or beehive with maggots and worms crawling through it.

Quoting Andrea: “It looked like a lifeless beehive with vermin crawling all over it. Its head was leaning off to one side. It was round and gray, resembling a desiccated hornet’s nest. I couldn’t see anything underneath it… no eyes or mouth…it looked like the cobwebs hanging in the corners of the cellar.”

In 2013 I was also intrigued with an Interview I did with Guy T. Simpson who told us that in his book “The Brotherhood of Olympus” he too encountered what he called the Mortgeist or guardians of purgatory. He also made the claim that these entities were like mercenaries, watching over the dead and policing them throughout eternity.

From 1906 I found a passage from a historical account which eerily describes the hooded phantom that we now call “death” and how it appears as a shadow archetype around the solstice which is why seeing this figure in the winter or in times of distress is no coincidence. It is further that we read that Death picks up a lady in a white dress and carries her across the river. The woman in the white dress is the plague.

“Amongst them all none was more interesting than a certain figure once commonly found all over Brittany, now rarely to be met with, though still remembered and held in reverence in some remote districts.

Sometimes this figure took the form of a tall thin man with long white hair and face shadowed by the broad felt hat of the country, sometimes of a skeleton, draped or undraped, whose skull turned on a pivot as though to signify that in a single glance it beheld the whole district over which it ruled.

Whether man or skeleton, it always held in its hand a scythe, the blade of which was turned forward, and it signified L′Ankou or Death.

Many are the beliefs and superstitions connected with L′Ankou, and though the representations of him have, as I have said, all but disappeared from the land, the people in many parts believe in and fear him as their ancestors did in the past.

They believe, for instance, that the last man who dies in the village during the year becomes L′Ankou for the year ensuing. That he has his chariot or cart in which he makes his royal progress, spreading terror and desolation wherever he goes. That he is usually drawn by two horses, one fat and well-to-do, the other lean as Death himself.

They say that he uses a human bone to sharpen his scythe, and goes about quite silently— him, his horses, and his cart. His great friends and helpers are supposed to be Plague and Dysentery, the former of whom being lame cannot move over flowing water by herself, but has to be carried by someone.—The Celtic Review page 274 1906

If one uses a Tarot deck they will know that the 13th Card in the deck is traditionally death riding in on a pale horse.

On the face of the card the dark figure tramples a monarch whether it will be king or queen with his white horse. On some cards Death carries a scythe or traditionally he has a flag that depicts the mystic rose. The mystical rose has been linked to immortality and in some cases the rose was another term for that of holy blood.

Also the death figure is welcomed by the Pontiff that clings to faith even though he faces his inevitability. The card also shows a young maiden who looks away in great sorrow and pain and a young boy, who may represent the young prince who will reign at the beginning of a new dawn. Some say what awaits is the New Jerusalem as the sun rises between the two towers of Judgment.

If we look at the 13th, card in the Tarot deck as a metaphor for 2013’s transition to 2014, we can conclude that what may happen in sequence would be abrupt change brought on by the sudden deaths of people who wield real power in the world. These power brokers are monarchs, rulers, current and past Presidents, Church leaders, Bishops, Cardinals and Popes. This will shake the faith of many people in 2014. It will pave the way for a Prince to appear as the appropriate leader to bring about the New Jerusalem.

If there was ever a paranormal image of the year that could grace the covers of TIME or Newsweek it would have to be the hooded image of death. It is also ironic that the hooded image of Trayvon Martin became symbolic of injustice and menace in the mainstream media. It can be argued that such an image of a hooded young man that shot dead, was the appropriate representation of L’ankou and triggered a very deep and well known core archetype that has been with us in the unconscious mind form the beginning of time.

Carl Jung had expressed that all humans have inherited a set of primordial images that are buried deep in the collective unconscious. These are called Archetypes and they tend to remain buried within the unconscious mind. Deep down we respond to them and they are programmed into us through religion, art, literature and films. The shadow archetype is the most dangerous one of all. Shadow archetypes have tendency to invade thoughts and when those shadowy thoughts become “group think” there is the possibility that through some quantum trick a manifestation can take place.

The shadow archetype becomes a real breathing entity fortified with the groupthink that prolongs its life and its image can be a harbinger to some other event that will eventually cause hardship.

Dr. Carol S. Pearson who has developed her own archetypical methods has stated that shadow archetypes surface at times when we as a collective are worried about the future.

It seems that shadow archetypes are here to carry out our destruction and if they become autonomous egregores we must pay attention to them and try to eliminate or at least protect ourselves from their influences.

According to Pearson each and every person has a death wish that can ultimately hurt them and the much larger society. Pearson further adds, “Even the healthiest individual will do or say things that hurt other people. Ultimately, the Destroyer turns us into villains when we refuse to acknowledge and take responsibility for the harm we do and we all do harm of some kind.”

I remember in my life a time where I also saw what appeared to be a hooded entity in my room, the appearance of this hooded entity happened in 2005 just prior to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

The entity was a dark figure and in my blurry gaze from my bed to my computer room it seemed to have entered through my open window. It stood in the small doorway, and my heart pounded as I wondered what it wanted with me. It did not move towards me and I was too terrified to move towards it.

It made no sound as it looked at me, with eyes that caught the glow of my computer screen. It just stood there, draped and hooded, and it finally delivered a message to me. It wasn’t audible; I only could hear its voice in my mind. I did not feel threatened as it spoke to me. It spoke in a soft voice, a whisper, like conscience speaks to us and reminds us that we are at peace when we do a good deed.

The entity first spoke in some language I did not understand, and the more it tried to communicate, the more the words were replaced by imagery. Much of what I saw was destruction and chaos. I was seeing people fleeing their neighborhoods. I watched policemen escorting people out of their homes and placing them in military vehicles.

It looked like major disaster and I feared that it was going to happen in Portland Oregon where I lived. I asked the entity what I was witnessing and before it disappeared it spoke to me as a whisper in my mind:

“It is medieval attitudes that bring about medieval pestilence. It is medieval attitudes that bring about medieval crusades. It is medieval crusades that unleash the demonic plague.”

In this time where we are deluged with stress and chaos, it is often difficult to be positive with the hardships and misgivings we all can feel about our future. We may not show it on the surface, but deep down we feel the pain and suffering of those around us. It is because we are all connected in some way. Things in our world are changing rapidly. We are all waking up to the possibility that our lives are hanging in the balance.

As the 13 trump card in the Tarot is called the Death card and the hooded entity rides the pale horse symbolizing the fall of kings, the death of young and old and all things fragile ,we must also realize that the card itself means that great change is about to take place.

The world as we know it is about to go through a drastic transmogrification and even our country will be seeing these changes as governments manufacture crisis in ordr to get a reaction from the people.

Usually that reaction includes demanding that stricter laws be made and in some cases the reaction includes war. Either way the bargain we all make includes the bloodshed that will be demanded in the process.

The year 2013 hinted at war; however we avoided the reality of new wars and new ways of killing each other. In 2014 we may not be as lucky. The agent of death is being seen by many people now, which probably indicates that many of them are in tune with what is transpiring in the spirit of the times.