Hunting for the Cosmic Egg - An Easter Dispatch from the Zone.

“If Jesus had returned in Europe, anywhere from AD 300 to perhaps AD 1800 he would have been very likely burned at the stake. Perhaps he did and was.” - Jack. D. Forbes

As the crow moon wanes and the world prepares to celebrate the death and resurrection of the old messiah I find my thoughts returning to the events that first motivated us to relocate, body and soul, to this mountainous backwater and set up headquarters in the isolated Pyrenean village of Montsegur. Life in the shadow of the pog is no pony ride in spring sunshine, let me tell ya – at least not in winter when Our Lady of the Snows descends from the heights of the Tabor to blanket the Zone in her deathly, still, white shroud. Most of the locals, even the redoubtable Madame Couquet, draw down their shutters, lock their doors and head for places south. The cobblestones become a skating rink and the main road that snakes down the gorge to Belesta, the D.9 cut by Madame Couquet's late uncle, becomes a deathtrap of hair pin curves and black ice. The path up the pog grows increasingly treacherous, as Madame's former tenant, the controversial German Jewish Grail historian Otto Rahn found to his dismay back in the thirties, making access to the ruins of the Cathar citadel all but impossible. The village sheltering beneath its walls becomes a veritable ghost town. The few remaining locals huddle with their animals beside their hearths and what talk there is turns to the bears and tall tales of who may or may not have seen them. There are supposedly still fifteen bears left in this particular neck of the woods or thereabouts, the exact number being subject to constant daily revision and hot debate.

As above, so below: Bear tracks at Morenci

We thought we saw their tracks in the morning powder near the crossroads at Morenci and while blazing a new trail, searching in vain for the site of the ancient Gaulish oppidum, we came across deep claw marks scored into the leafless trees. A tall fir had been virtually ringbarked and nearby lay the gnawed foreleg of a small deer or izard, which strictly speaking is more like a cross between a deer and a goat. Whatever it was it had been violently killed and all too recently devoured, prompting us to head back down the mountain and curtail our efforts at searching the underbrush any more closely for the elusive 'oppidum', a long abandoned gathering place where the Romans had apparently come in days of old to trade pottery for iron.

As above: Natural snow sculptures formed by the wind at Morenci So below: The bear festival at Saint-Laurent-de-Cerdans , photograph courtesy of long term Shadow Theatre irregular James Edward Bourne

Despite the fact that wild bears have all but disappeared from northern Spain and southern France along with the native Pyrenean wolf many of the small villages such as Arles-sur-Tech, Prats-de-Molo and Saint-Laurent-de-Cerdans continue to celebrate the bear as a symbol of virility, in yearly festivals steeped in pagan ritual and richly reminiscent of the 'wild man' traditions of central and northern Europe. Typically a villager dressed in a thick bearskin rampages through the streets of the town harassing women and violently accosting anyone foolish enough to cross his path. Many of the local men feel compelled to wear drag for the occasion for reasons which I admit are not altogether clear to me. The 'bear' is finally chased down and captured by ’hunters’ whose job it is to shave and humiliate him in front of a cheering public, disempowering winter and welcoming in the spring by symbolically shaving off the old to bring in the new.

Little by little the wind begins to lose its bite, the first daisies open to the sunshine, the birds return and buds begin to appear overnight. 'Our Lady of the Snows' packs her bags and slowly creeps back over the mountains, her presence still felt only in the highest crags. The owls and bats return, shutters open, doors slam and slowly the sleepy, rustic enclave of Montsegur returns to life.

Standing outside the Shadow Theatre headquarters one morning having a smoke, I noticed a robin struggling to pull a fat worm from the thawing ground. The next day up at Hannibal's Point, a gigantic golden eagle came soaring up from the deep gorges of the Caroulet right behind Miss Scarlett's head with an viper clutched in its beak, a terrifying hieratic beast out of medieval heraldry, looking for all the world like the logos for the Luftwaffe and the AMA rolled into one.

“ Damn. That thing was big!”

Miss Scarlett turned, watching as the huge bird soared away, the muscular looking serpent still thrashing vainly in its grip. It was a savage looking creature. For a moment we stared after the beast in silence as it soared across east side of the pog before disappearing from view. We didn't have to say anything but we both knew that Spring had come and it was high time we got our asses back up the mountain to reacquaint ourselves with its invisible denizens.

The night of Monday March the 30^th was still and warm, albeit a little overcast. We paused at the top of the 'Camp de Cremat' to relight the candle from the grotto of saint Anthony that we had left on the small altar some two weeks before to commemorate the anniversary of the fall of the castle and the martyrs who had perished there in the flames of 1244. Behind us the lights were already coming on in the village as we climbed above the tree line, offering a passing salute to the familiar granite profile of Maurice Magre, the local poet, mystic, and author of 'The Blood of Toulouse', whose graven image adorns the westward facing crag of the magic mountain.

The castle courtyard was much as I remembered it, like a dream that always returns. The scene of so many wonders, terrors and strange events it now stood silent and deceptively tranquil in the gathering dusk like a stage awaiting its dramatis personae. A ring of ash could still be faintly distinguished at the base of the narrow steps leading to the battlement where the witches from Rennes had cast their circle the year before. We found our way up to the ramparts and watched the last of the fading sun dwindle across the vernal hills until the limits of the zone were lost in darkness and the first bats had already begun to circle in the deepening well of shadows below.

Retracing our steps to the stubby remains of the 13^th century settlement on the pog's sheltered eastern face I knelt, mouthing the words of an all but forgotten litany as I placed a candle in one of the sconces besides the time worn stone pentagram that we had first come across under rather strange, not to mention downright far fetched, circumstances some two years previously. In the light of the flickering taper we noticed that quite a few of the trees had been cut back over the last twelve months, revealing the ruins of more terraced settlements further down the mountainside. Dismayed by how naked and unprotected this side of the castle felt we vowed to replant the area at the soonest possible juncture. It's about time the pog had a decent laurel and the unmarked grave of Ferrocas, the last Cathar, deserves to have its flowering May tree, lopped down just over a century ago at the command of an outraged local priest, rightfully restored.

After enjoying a good smoke and a hot cup of coffee, thanks to the brand new Shadow Theatre thermos flask, we began to circle the castle widdershins – that is anti-clockwise to the uninitiated.

We travelled by way of a secret path that we found last summer marked out by tiny glyphs cut into the rocks that resemble the phases of the moon. I'm not sure that this is the correct technical procedure for actively invoking the nebulous forces that reside here, but it's as good as any when it comes to protocols for dealing with the invisible world.

As above, so below: The marks that blaze the secret passages can be rendered visible to the naked eye by the liberal application of chalk

There are many such paths on the pog, ways that seem to open and close with the seasons. Self-styled, modern-day troubadour, Micheu Pierre, who haunts Madame Couquet's auberge in the summer months, once told me that it was dangerous to try and define these trails or describe them too carefully to outsiders as if by mapping the paths one might somehow cause them to change location so that the unwary might never again find their way back to the occult kingdom to whence they lead. It is this propensity for the pog and the wild, sparsely populated territory that surrounds it to somehow reboot and reshuffle the fixed certitudes of everyday life that has led us to nickname the area, a densely wooded hinterland of not much more than a hundred square kilometers, 'the Zone' in honour of Boris and Arkady Strugatky's seminal novel 'Roadside Picnic'.

The novel's title is derived from a metaphor proposed by Dr. Valentine Pillman who believes that extraterrestrial or more properly 'ultraterrestrial' beings have not only visited the earth, leaving behind areas where the normal properties of space time have been strangely altered but that there is ultimately no rational, humanly available explanation either for the visitation or the mysterious properties of the Zones and the artifacts uncovered there.

In the novel, he compares the creation of these Zones to "A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess -- apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow." The nervous animals in this analogy are the humans who venture forth after the visitors leave, discovering items and anomalies which were perfectly ordinary to those who discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to those who find them.

As above, so below: Andrei Tarkovsky's masterful screen adaptation of 'Roadside Picnic' - 'STALKER' ( 1979 )

This explanation implies that the ultradimensional beings in question may not have even noticed or paid any attention to the human inhabitants of the planet during their "visit" just as humans don't notice or pay attention to grasshoppers or ladybugs during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena left behind by them in the Zones are essentialy garbage, discarded and forgotten without any preconceived intergalactic plan to either advance or damage humanity. There is little chance that these God like visitors will return again, since for them, it was a brief stop for reasons unknown on the way to their actual destination. In the novel the government seeks to seal off these Zones and indeed suppress all knowledge of their existence, leaving it up to an emerging criminal underclass of self styled 'stalkers' to chart their own paths in and out of these hypothetical pockets of dysfunctional space time where the normal rules simply don't apply, driven, at least in part, by the oddly enduring rumour of an indescribable treasure hidden somewhere within the ever shifting labyrinth – a folkloric orb or cosmic egg capable of granting one's dearest wish...

The events described in the Strugatsky brothers' novel are pure fantasy, science fiction in the best sense of the term, yet it would seem, to all intents and purposes, that something very similar is taking place in real life in southern Europe, deep in the mountainous fastness of old Occitania only, with all due respect to Dr. Pillman, whatever mysterious force is at work here is far from random.

I first became aware of the unusual properties of the pog back in the early nineties while working as a researcher for Channel Four Television's religion department. Since then I have been propelled through a series of terrifying, disorientating, profoundly challenging and ultimately moving experiences that have left me in little doubt as to what this place is capable of. We cannot understand or hope to explain the causes of the phenomena at work but we can readily apprehend their side-effects, what Graham Hancock might have termed the 'fingerprints of the Gods'.

The widely reported electro-magnetic anomaly, which some insist is strong enough to effect aerial navigation, is readily demonstrated by the deflection of our compass needles every time we climb the pog. The geological composition of the area would tend to exclude the idea of the rocks themselves being in any ways conductive but there is a faint possibility that the magnetic fields could be effected by the action of subterranean waters. Researchers in the early nineteen sixties poured vast amounts of fluorescein into a sinkhole near the Roubelet where the Nazi's are said to have conducted their own illicit excavations during the dark days of World War 2. Some hours later coloured dye was observed emerging from the gorges of Le Moulin on the far side of the pog, demonstrating beyond a shadow of doubt that an underground river does indeed flow beneath the mountain.

In the early 13th century the then head of the Cathar church Guilhabert de Castries wrote to the lord of Montsegur, Raimond de Perelha, asking permission for the treasures and records of their faith to be moved to the fortress and its adherents to be allowed to live 'infra-castrum', a term taken by some to refer to the small settlement that once existed on the chateau's eastern flank while others believe that it quite literally means 'beneath the castle'. Maurice Magre describes a vast subterranean complex, a virtual hidden city with as many as forty galleries containing forges, treasuries and stables. Fanciful as this may be it is generally agreed that the defenders must have drawn their water from somewhere during the ten month siege and speculation is rife about the existence of underground cisterns and other cavities beneath the pog deliberately redacted from the official report submitted by the GRAME ( Groupe de Recherches Archeologiques de Montsegur et Environs ) for reasons that are, as yet, a good deal less than clear to me. There is no objective proof that whatever lies below the mountain could effectively cause the magnetic distortions commonly observed in the area but when confronted by the unknown the human mind tends to reach for whatever rational explanation it can find and right now the anomalous interaction of mysterious subterranean waters is the best I can come up with.

Harder to adequately explain away is the manner in which those pesky 'arrow slits' in the keep tend to break the light into sharp beams, at times even splitting the rays into their component colours such as that deep, lustrous red regularly exhibited on the morning of each successive summer solstice, something that any number of professional photographers and lighting technicians have assured me should be technically impossible without a prism. Once again the GRAME glide around the question by simply stating that the “solar phenomena in the keep have not been scientifically witnessed, recorded or verified” despite the fact that the lightshow in question appears on postcards for the area and is reliably witnessed by hundreds of visitors every year.

As above, so below: Summer Solstice 2008

The pog's freaky acoustical properties are likewise only too apparent to even a casual ear. On the aforementioned anniversary of the burning ( March 16 ) Miss Scarlett and our friend Emiliano, a budding film maker from far off Turin were standing up by the stone cross, drinking a toast to the martyrs with yours truly and munching olives whilst clearly overhearing a whispered conversation taking place between a Swiss couple in the parking lot at the base of the hill. On the other hand, those who have spent enough time here know only too well that you can be standing right behind someone in the keep or the courtyard, screaming your lungs out without them being able to hear so much as a single, sodding sound. Then there's that smell - akin to rosebay or the icing on a wedding cake, spiked with just a hint of almonds. The haunting aroma associated with the immortal mistress of Montsegur and similar apparitions of the so-called 'white lady' reported at Lourdes and Fatima. The 'smell of sanctity' would seem to exist at the opposite end of the olfactory spectrum from the smell of rotten eggs - hydrogen sulfide - the 'fire and brimstone' commonly associated with devils, minor demons and other denizens of the pit just the pog would seem to stand at a sort of crossroads between paradigms, a place where several quantum worlds or time periods intersect and periodically overlap.

Perhaps the so-called 'Cathari' or 'pure ones' attained, as Magre suggests that realm where 'fire has no heat, water no fluidity and matter no substance and still exist alongside us in some 'otherworld', a place that is as 'real' if not more real than our own experience of the 21st century. It would seem to be no mere coincidence that their immortal chatelaine, the 'saint of saints of an unknown religion', the blessed Na Esclarmonda herself, the 'White Lady' of Montsegur has been conflated with the queen of the faeries by popular mythology. The word 'Albi' and 'Elf' would seem to be basically interchangable - both signifying 'white', just as just the pog's defenders, the sons and daughters of Belisenna have been conflated with the 'white people' or faery folk and Na Esclarmonda's kingdom with the folkloric concept of 'Elfame'.The good lady and her courtiers 'vanished into the mountain which closed around her' just as the little people are said to have disappeared into the hollow hill.

As above, so below: The notorious 'arrow slits' in the keep or 'donjon tower'

The ghostly blue light that Magre describes as emanating from the keep when Na Esclarmonda and the parfaits gather to undertake their spiritual exercises in the later chapters of the 'Blood of Toulouse' and the lightshows myself and others have habitually experienced prior to our encounters with the pog's mysterious denizens is richly evocative of the phenomena associated with the passage of light through the visible human spectrum. A glow might be observed first, sometimes a reddish glow marking the emergence of a person or object from the invisible band of the spectrum into infrared and then into the narrow band of visible light. If the figure is passing through the visible band to the higher frequencies it is cyan ( blueish-green ) before it fades into blue ( hard to see at night ) and then enters the ultra-violet range. The chills experienced by Miss Scarlett and other members of the team may well have been caused by microwaves above the infrared just as the sensation of one's skin 'tingling' or 'crawling' or the air literally thickening about one are reminiscent of the effects of ultrasound or infrasound operating outside the commonly perceptible sonic frequencies.As for the experience of lost or missing time reported all too frequently by myself and the other members of the group, well, the jury's still out...One cannot see a fourth dimensional object with the naked eye but theoretically one can perceive its three dimensional shadow. This should not be confused with the object itself but is simply the closest our somewhat limited senses can come to describing the essentially indescribable. There may a very good evolutionary reason for our apparent inability to get our heads around the broader picture and to effectively experience these encounters with the unknown in their naked totality. As Lovecraft intimates we would almost certainly go mad from the revelation and at the very least experience a good deal of trouble holding on to any sense of ourselves or the so-called 'here' and 'now'.

Testimony of Scarlett Amaris March 30 2010.

After making another circuit around the castle I stopped to rest on a set off rocks underneath the tower-dunjeon while Richard climbed the stairs to enter it's inner sanctum. The moon was still hidden and shed a murky light. I sat gazing out at the low lying clouds below that through some sort of optical illusion were lit a glowing red on the top, lit by the city lights of Lavalanet in the distance. I watched them spread out across the valley for a while, but they seemed to be moving in slow motion. Indeed, the whole night was ultimately still, like the landscape was holding it's breath. A low humming started up through the ground at my feet and spread into the rock making it feel electric, almost like a switch had been turned on and the mountain was springing to life. Then before I could even exhale the moon came bursting out of the clouds behind me, changing the terrain so dramatically that it gave me vertigo. The castle threw off an enormous pyramidal shadow on the valley below, so sharply defined and so black that I wondered if it wasn't an enormous abyss or a crack in the world. Shadows are the mirror image of reality, but when they are so powerfully and sharply defined it almost seems the other way around as if all that we see or seem is merely the poor reflection of that inchoate darkness.

The voice of an nearby owl broke me out of my reverie and I followed it's call around to the courtyard where I found Richard standing, drenched in the moonlight, the air around him dense with fluttering, unseen presences.

“They're here...” He smiled, looking more at home than I've seen him in weeks. He took off his hat, inclining his head to greet the shadows that seethed and whispered about us. “All my friends...”

The long, dark winter was finally and truly gone and the castle was making its presence known. Whatever the hell else came down the pike there was no doubting that this was looking set to be a summer like none other...

Above: R.S in the courtyard - midnight - March 30 2010
Note the presence of 'orbs' and other unspecified 'digital artefacting'
in the upper left of frame...

To be continued...

The Hole of the Ravens

“Can you see the hundred thousandth part of what exists ? Take the wind for example, the most powerful force in nature. It blows men over, knocks houses over, uproots trees, raises the sea into mountainous waves, destroys cliffs and drives great ships onto reefs. It kills, whistles, moans, roars. Have you ever seen it ? Can you ever see it ? But it exists all the same...”
- Guy de Maupassant, 'the Horla'

( I )
North west of Montsegur the road snakes through a wild untenanted region cradled between domed hills and trackless thickets where weeds, briars and beds of scrub myrtle grow in unsettling abundance. In the cold winter light the tops of those oddly symmetrical crags look like the winged backs and stooped crowns of watchful daemons. Just before you reach the marching, leafless trunks of the forest of Belesta, a dense grove once consecrated to the all but forgotten Celtic-Iberian moon Goddess Belisenna, you come across an isolated crossroad guarded by the ruins of a small chateau whose name is now lost to us, its blind windows and gutted walls long since given over to the chilly caress of the wind and rain.

As above, so below: The house on the borderlands


If you take the right fork at the crossroads you will find the track curves away between the barren fields and sloping, rock strewn meadows towards a remote area still known on the map as 'Couquet', the site of a long abandoned settlement where in the late nineteenth century, the renowned shire archeologist Jean Tricoire uncovered the remains of three humanoid skeletons, dating in all likelihood to the late bronze age. The corpses seemed to comprise a symbolic family unit including the remains of a woman and a seemingly grotesquely overdeveloped male whose prodigious height, estimated at close to two meters, recalls the other suspiciously outsized artefacts previously unearthed in the region, including the so-called 'Giant of Stenay' and the enigmatic steatite talisman commonly referred to as the 'Hand of Morenci'. The third skeleton found by Tricoire was that of a child, still curled in a foetal position.

The 'Couquet' clan whose ancestors hail from this backwater remain one of the oldest surviving families in the area, an ancient lineage whose present day scion Madame Amie Couquet still runs the tenebrous auberge in the rustic hamlet of Montsegur where I first sojourned in the mid-nineties. Some thirty very odd years earlier Madame Couquet's late uncle, the former mayor of the village had set about blasting a road through these dark hills in order to connect Montsegur to the outside world, laying the foundations of the tarred highway ( route D9 ) that exists today. During this construction work a tunnel was apparently unearthed at the base of the pog containing a flight of stone steps leading deeper into the mountain. ( * see 'The Lost Caves of Montsegur' ) The former mayor was a bullish individual who hoped to be recalled in the annals of local history as the man who revitalized this tiny, time warped community. Above all he wanted to be remembered for 'his road'. He knew that if anyone found out about the tunnel they would be forced to call in the archaeologists and accordingly halt construction so he did as small town mayors tend to do the world over. Swearing his workmen to secrecy he ordered the entrance to the cavity to be sealed by an immovable concrete rampart. More than three decades have passed since then but the the wall erected by Madame's uncle at the base of the pog remains undisturbed.


Above: R.S. at the mouth of the blocked tunnel – Dec 25 2009

The outgoing mayor had every reason to want to safeguard his legacy. Madame's auberge had harboured the notorious German-Jewish Grail historian and future Ahnenerbe SS Obersturmfuhrer Otto Wilhelm Rahn during his tour of the Zone during the fall of 1932 and their family name has been further tarnished by dark rumours of collaboration with the Vichy regime during the second World War.

Above: Otto Skorzeny

Reports of SS-Colonel Otto Skorzeny's visit to the area with Germany's Special Forces in March 1944 are probably greatly exaggerated and little evidence exists to support the outlandish claims made by the retired Allied army surgeon, Colonel Howard A. Buechner ( 3rd BN, 157 Inf., 45th Inf. Div. ) and the countless other psuedo-historians that followed in his wake concerning Himmler's plans to secure the so-called 'treasure of the ages' although, I suppose, it doesn't hurt to speculate. There is certainly no doubt that the Nazis were active in this vicinity during the war, executing several locals in the town square in reprisal for alleged partisan activity and there are persistent rumours concerning excavations carried out by the Germans at a site further up the gorge of the Lasset at the base of the Tabor itself, in a place known as 'Reboule'.

As above, so below: Deep in the woods – Dec 25 – 2009


The Nazis were said to have unearthed the remains of a ruined settlement and identified pictograms including crosses and strange markings resembling runes.

As above, so below: Vestiges of Reboule




At present it is impossible to tell who authorized their excavations and what, if anything, they may have found...

As above, so below: The Way through the woods


( ii )

Transcripts from the Zone – Xmas – 2009 – The Hole of the Ravens

It was surprisingly warm and sunny for December in the Pyrenees and the Christmas holidays had turned the village of Montsegur into a veritable ghost town. Gunning the Mark XII Interceptor we followed the curving road into the woods, passing over a couple of narrow, stone bridges before reaching the ruins of the abandoned chateau. Taking the left fork at the crossroads we followed the trail still higher into those verdant, oddly domed hills, feasting our eyes on a succession of fields and steeply walled valleys we never knew existed before.


We passed a late medieval stone cistern dug into the embankment at the side of the road, its vaulted stone roof shielding a deep, clear pool of fresh, icy water.


The track finally petered out a few hundred yards from the cistern in an isolated farmyard.


A steep, stony path wound upwards, leading further into the silent forest where patches of hoarfrost lay thick beneath the trees and beside it we spotted a signpost bearing the legend 'True des Corbeaux' – 'Hole of the Ravens – followed by the ominous word 'Gouffre' – betokening quite literally 'Gulf' or 'Abyss'.

The area was quite spectacular and at first it was hard to feel anything but grateful to be in such a remote place on a day like this. We followed the slippery stone path deeper into the woods, the shadows thickening steadily about us as we climbed, the profusion of trees assuming a watchful, half sentient animosity. Then through their trunks we caught sight of of a recently erected viewing platform, its gleaming outline looking so incongruous in the midst of this wild, verdant landscape as to appear somehow obscene. Beneath the steel gantry a chasm seemed to appear out of nowhere, a huge, malefic hole in the earth whose shadowy floor opened far below us into the maw of a gaping cavern that extended over one hundred meters into the living rock.

Back in the 1920's Jean Tricoire partly excavated the vast midden of bones that covers the floor of the shaft, concluding that the 'Hole of the Ravens', otherwise known as the 'Hole of the Hearts' has been used as a dumping ground for human and animal remains since time out of mind.


Extracts from the private weblog of Miss Scarlett

I stood back for a minute, drawing my coat more tightly about myself, the air seeming to grow palpably colder. I couldn't help noticing that the trees surrounding the mouth of the pit were twisted and malformed, eaten away by disease or in one case apparently even blasted by lighting, their fallen trunks clogging the verge of the ravine, dried out roots reaching vainly skyward. Curiosity drove me further and I joined my companions, peering over the metal railing.

The place was so dark it was as if the light could scarcely penetrate the dead trees, even in winter. I could smell death here, so thick on the air you could almost see it, half sensing the cries of pain and confusion of the things that had been pushed over the edge and left to die.


The abyss looked hungry as if it were waiting for more blood. I knew there were the remains of humans and animals down there. I tried desperately to block this out but something in the cave caught my attention and held it. I kept expecting whatever it was down there to reveal itself, to come shuffling out in to the broad daylight. I stared and stared, starting to feel a little faint. Then the spell was broken as the other members of the party began snapping photographs. I tried to shake off that vague sensation of dread, putting it down to over tiredness and the stress of the holiday season.

I was the first to start towards the car. Glancing back for one last look I spotted a carving on a large rock beside the metal landing. At first I thought that it was some sort of ornate N but on closer inspection it looked more like a cross between an N and the omega symbol. Richard joked that the carving was an N for Noel and another member of our party shot back with the quip that perhaps it was only visible on Christmas Day. We laughed about this as we walked back into the sun filled meadows beyond the wood, the afternoon light glowing golden off the winter vegetation.

As above, so below. Christmas day 2009


We drove back down to the grounds of the old chateau, to poke around a little in the ruins before we lost the light. The building must have had lovely gardens at one time and was surrounded by beautifully derelect rusting gates. I stopped to peek inside as a friend snapped a couple of shots on her digital camera. I heard her voice behind me, “That's funny. There's a white haze around your head in this picture, almost like a halo...”


I laughed and replied something to the effect that it would suit the mood of this place. The light was fading fast as we bundled ourselves into the interceptor and headed back towards Montsegur where the carcass of the Christmas turkey still rested beside the oven, fully dressed and waiting to be cooked. After placing the bird in the yawning stove I went to the cabinet above the microwave to pull out some plates. When I opened the cupboard door the plates came flying out at me seemingly on their own accord, shattering everywhere. I stood in stunned silence for a moment, wondering how it could have happened. The strangest thing was that I had had that exact same experience when I was a little girl many Christmases ago. It was not a pleasant memory. My family had been very poor at the time and I had been severely reprimanded for all that flying crockery. I mused over this darkly as I swept up the broken shards. Xmas never has been my favourite time of year...

Somewhere in the middle of the supper I began to feel ill, like maybe the champagne wasn't settling too well. The odour of food made me nauseous, especially the smell of the turkey and the gravy. There was no way I could stay at the table for one more bite. I quietly pulled back my chair, not wanting to cause a scene and went and sat on the couch, casually checking my messages on the laptop. I was starting to feel fuzzy as if the edges of my vision were in soft focus and I was becoming increasingly cold, my hands and feet turning icy. I shivered under the blanket I had pulled around me and wondered if I wasn't coming down with some strange sort of 'flu. My thoughts grew darker and more paranoid, quite unlike my normal self.
“F**k it”, I told myself and decided to call it a night.

I woke up in a dream, looking down on myself lying in a hospital bed, slowly bleeding to death. An eerie detailed re-enactment of an accident that had happened to me in my early twenties. My dark hair hung over the hospital bed as blood pooled onto the white tiled floors. In the corner of the room a child appeared, a boy maybe three or four years old, who was horribly mangled and misshapen as if most of his limbs had been broken. He was shuffling slowly across the floor towards the bed and I recognized him immediately as what I had sensed at the 'Hole of the Ravens', only now he had finally taken shape. He stopped shuffling across the floor, tilted head turning on his shattered neck to stare directly at me, not where I was on the hospital bed but above, where my disembodied presence seemed to be hover in the dream. I screamed and woke up in the dark, heart pounding furiously.

( iii )
Extracts from Richard Stanley's journal - Dec 26 2009

I couldn't help noticing that Miss Scarlett seemed a little off-colour. She scarcely touched her food and retired early. I thought little of it at the time, Xmas still being Xmas after all and stressful enough, even here in the remote Cathar enclave of Montsegur. A 'flu epidemic had been sweeping the Zone and Madame Couquet, complaining of 'fatigue', had gone to stay with her relatives in Foix leaving us to do the cooking and cleaning in her absence.

I saved back a portion of chocolate 'pog cake', figuring Miss Scarlett would sleep it off but the following day she seemed even paler than before. She avoided eye contact and later I came across her hiding behind a pile of film cans and cardboard boxes in the storeroom, her knees drawn up tight against her chest. She looked dazed and frightened, unable to make head or tail of anything I tried to say as if still in a dream, fobbing off my attempts at getting her to eat with a muttered excuse about not having slept properly the night before. It was only afterwards that I realized she had been looking past me all the while, staring at a spot on the tiled floor just inside the kitchen doorway where the pile of crockery had exploded the day before.

The festive visit to the 'Hole of the Ravens' had left a deeper impression on our collective psyches than I had readily anticipated, reminding me of nothing so much as the woodland pit that disgorges an endless slew of ravening swine things in William Hope Hodgeson's classic of cosmic horror, 'The House on the Borderlands'.

Above: 'The House on the Borderlands' (1908) - illustration by Phillipe Druillet

I sat down to try and input my report only to find myself unable to focus clearly on the work at hand. Several times I distinctly heard the dry fluttering of unseen wings which I initially assumed to be a large moth caught in the lampshade but my efforts to investigate the source of the sound proved utterly fruitless. The moment I settled myself once more at the keyboard the fluttering would resume and there were odd creaks and rustling sounds from the direction of the deserted storeroom. As the shadows lengthened and the afternoon shelved slowly but surely towards a premature dusk and another chilly, wind swept night so the irrational notion that I was sharing the room with some other, invisible presence became increasingly hard to disavow. The air seemed thick with poised presences, and my skin trembled with the subtlest of vibrations, not unlike the sort of feelings I have experienced on entering certain rooms in old houses, the dilapidated old chateau I shinned into the day before not withstanding. The others had been too spooked to follow me through the opening in the boarded up window and although I had taken due care to be perfectly polite to the chateau's unseen occupants, doffing my hat and wishing them 'bonne noel' it was beginning to seem increasingly obvious that we had inadvertently picked up an unwanted hitch hiker along the way.

I had seen the plates fly from the cupboard, although I'd assumed at the time they had simply been stacked the wrong way around after the last wash. Normally I would have forgotten the matter soon enough but over the last 24 hours there had been a host of other petty irritations. The lights in the storeroom seemed to be intent on switching themselves back on whenever I looked away and packs of cigarettes, glasses of booze, mugs of coffee, sausages and even whole platters of food were constantly disappearing only to turn up later, if at all, in the most unlikely destinations. The bread and pate laid out for this morning's breakfast, now that I thought of it, had proved to be no exception, vanishing for most of the day only to be found several hours afterwards inexplicably stashed between the wall and the microwave.

Finally, giving up any further attempts at work, I rummaged through the audio files on my computer, loading an English language translation of Guy de Maupassant's 'The Horla', read rather hammily by Ian Holm. I was badly in need of advice as to how to go about getting rid of our unwanted guest and was hoping for some perspective on my situation. Killing everyone else in the building before burning the house to the ground and taking my own life like de Maupassant's hysterical narrator however didn't seem quite the way to go.

Above: The Horla

Perhaps there was a simple psychological explanation to the whole affair after all. Possibly the shattering crockery had awakened some, dormant recollection of an earlier trauma, a memory amplified by our relative isolation and the potent aura of superstitious fear surrounding the pagan site we had visited earlier. Yet if Miss Scarlett was on the verge of cracking up then so was I, hysteria being contagious after all...

I sat in silence for a moment, considering my options. Then I heard what sounded like a low sigh from the bedroom door which stood ajar behind me. It may have been nothing more than the night wind gusting down from the icy heights of the Tabor but I found the hairs bristling on my arms and on the back of my neck. I sat waiting, breathing as shallowly as I could, ears straining against the silence. Five minutes passed. Ten. Then the sound came again. A soft, suppressed whimper of sadness or pain. I rose, hesitantly pushing open the door to find Miss Scarlett seated upright on the bed, staring wide eyed into the gloom. I followed her eyeline and for a beat it was as if I could almost see what she was looking at. A dim, smudgy outline at the foot of the bed that seemed to fade before I had a chance to fully focus on it.
“I think we brought something back”, muttered Miss Scarlett.
“From the ruined chateau or from the hole ?”
“From the hole. Can you see it too ?”
“ Like someone was standing there a moment ago ? When I first walked in ? Standing right next top the bed ? ”
“Could you tell who it was ?”
“I know this sounds crazy but it looked like a child. Like a little boy...”

( iv )
Extracts from Miss Scarlett's private weblog – Montsegur Dec 27 2009

I tried to sleep while Richard kept watch, setting his laptop up on a table in one corner of the room. I lay there for nearly twenty minutes, listening to the soft tap of his fingers on the keyboard. After a while my eyes started to close and I began the long dark slide into sleep.

I was awakened by the sound of the door handle turning. It was dark outside, very dark, and there was a rippling wind blowing down off the mountains. At first I thought it must have been Richard coming and going from the kitchen to fetch another coffee but then I realized he was still seated at the computer, his eyes fixed on the trembling handle. For a moment I wished I were still asleep or that it were already morning. More than anything I wished I were anyplace else but here in the middle of this black, breezy night, with the house stirring and shifting about us as if it had come to life.
“What the f**k is that ?”
Richard shook his head. “I dunno. You want me to let it in and find out ?”
“Probably just the wind...”
We both held our breath. Then we heard another sound. A slow, deliberate creak like something heavy pressing against the outside of the wooden panelling.
“Go away,” I tried to sound as commanding as possible but my voice was barely a whisper. “You're not welcome here...”
For a moment whatever it was outside seemed to fall silent. Then the handle quivered again.
“No. Go away ! Please go away..”
“This is ridiculous.” Getting to his feet Richard started towards the door, moving as if in slow motion. “If there's something out there we might as well just open the door and get it over with.”
“You think we should try talking to it ? Like in that M.Night Shamalamadingdong movie ?”
“Can't hurt, can it ?” Richard reached hesitantly for the trembling handle.
“I guess not.” I took a deep breath, gathering my strength. “Alright, then. You can come in...”

The door exploded inwards before I had a chance to finish my sentence, almost knocking Richard from his feet. He tried to cry out, body bucking as if gripped by something unseen but unbelievably strong, one hand flailing at the frame as he tried in vain to stop himself from being wrenched straight out into the dark. I threw myself after him only to find myself grasped in a clammy, vice like hold. I lost balance, feeling myself being dragged inexorably from the lighted room and across the white, tiled floor towards the doorway of the storeroom and the place where the plates had fallen the day before. I screamed for it to stop, over and over again. Finally, gaining control of my right hand I slapped it hard against the tiling. “You will stop this NOW !!!” I shrieked only to wake up, finding myself back in bed, which I thought was shaking for a few disorienting seconds and Richard still seated obliviously at the keyboard, my pulse racing as it had the night before. Only this time I couldn't help wondering what in hell I had let in...

( V )
Extracts from Miss Scarlett's private journal - Montsegur Dec 28 2009

After a bitter night of tossing and turning with no sleep, I decided to head up to the castle to watch the sunrise and try and get my head screwed on a little tighter. There could be rational explanations for what had happened, some fractured part of my psyche that could have caused such an irrational, unexplainable depression and strange seemingly supernatural disturbances. But then again, we had both heard the sound of unseen wings overhead which we couldn’t explain away. Maybe that’s why that place was called the 'Hole of the Ravens'. Maybe it was some sort of sinister ancestral burial ground or slaughter house. These thoughts swirled around in my head but the day was turning out to be gloriously warm and I sat on the sun baked rocks just under the ramparts of the castle and picked up the book that I had been reading - “Darker Than You Think” by Jack Williamson. I slowly sipped coffee from my thermos and opened to the part where the psychiatrist character coolly rationalizes away all the psychic phenomena that had been happening to the lead character of the story. It caused a strange sense of déjà vu and I was laughing as I read it because it seemed oddly appropriate. I quit laughing as I read further on because the doctor was talking out of his hat and was a sinister part of the supernatural horror element all along. I had only picked up this book because I was interested in John Whiteside Parsons, better known as Jack Parsons, who was an American rocket propulsion researcher and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his work on the invention of solid fuel helped usher in the age of space travel.

Above: John 'Jack' Whiteside Parsons
Below: Parsons and fellow memembers of the Agape lodge


Jack was killed in 1952, at the age of thirty-eight, in an explosion at his home laboratory. He was a dedicated occultist and a disciple of Aleister Crowley (then head of the Ordo Templi Orientus or OTO) whom he referred to as his “most beloved Father”. Parsons devoted himself to the ritual of Babalon Working (along with magical partner L. Ron Hubbarb) to try and invoke a living goddess to change to destiny of mankind. The basic premise of the book is that there is an ancient evil that lies dormant within some people who have a genetic link towards a race of early ancestors that were witches (i.e. werewolves and all sorts of totem animal shapeshifters). These witches had been defeated by the race of men at some point but had been quietly gathering and breeding those with the latent gene’s carefully to bring about a new lycanthropic messiah that the book called a “child of the night”. This wasn’t quite what I had been expecting to read and it struck me how curiously close some of the material was to what was being discussed on the Terra Umbra forums.

Above: Darker than you think

Although fun to read there wasn’t anything that I could readily take on board. Just sitting in the presence of the castle was starting to lift my spirits and make me feel calmer. The tourists began to come and it was time to head back down to the village below. On the way down I resolved to go back to the 'Hole of the Ravens', to try and find some sort of closure. Whether I would be banishing an actual supernatural hitcher or some part of my psyche that had come bubbling to the surface due to the energy of that place remained to be seen. Either way I had to face whatever was going on and try and make it right somehow.

( vi )
Extracts from the journal of Richard Stanley – The Hole of the Ravens – Dec 30 2009

A full moon hung above the treetops like the eye of a madman, the narrow two lane blacktop curving away from us in the interceptor's headlights as we retraced the winding route we had taken into the hills on Christmas day. Neither of us were in much of a mood for words. Miss Scarlett was still trying to get her head around whether she was suffering from a nervous breakdown or incipient demonic possession and I was feeling a little cheesed off with the whole affair, my spirits further dampened by the news that my favourite Italian prog-rock band, 'GOBLIN', had finally and irrevocably broken up, cancelling all further tour dates. Turning up the volume on a remix of the 'Suspiria' score we took the left fork at the crossroads, barrelling up the road towards the 'Hole of the Ravens'.

I had decided to fight fire with fire by conjuring a daemon of my own to advise us on how to deal with the thing in the pit. Long term followers of this 'blog in its previous incarnations on MySpace and elsewhere will probably already be familiar with my benign , maleficent guardian, the daemon Moag who has bailed me out of any number of similar scrapes over the years. Almost all of us at least once in our lives, during a sleepless night or an illness, have heard a voice which, coming from nowhere, and, as it were, speaking silently, gives us advice. It is always, when we are in solitude and most often in moments of exaltation that this silent voice speaks. The Greeks called this being by the name of 'daimon', and the best-known of all, that which has been discussed at the greatest length by the philosophers, was the daimon of Socrates.

“The favour of the gods,” said Socrates, “has given me a marvelous gift, which has never left me since my childhood.” According to Maximus of Tyre the daemon was a sort of “inferior immortal, called gods of the second rank, placed between heaven and earth ”. Apuleius maintained, “They are intermediate powers of a divine order. They fashion dreams and inspire soothsayers.” Plato believed that a kind of spirit, which is separate from us, receives man at birth and follows him in life and after death. He called it “the daemon which has received us as its portionment.” This invisible helper seems, therefore to be analogous to the 'guardian angel' of the Christians.

My own guardian made his first appearance when I was a scant four years of age. After I had endured a life threatening illness I found myself entertained during my convalescence by a happy-go-lucky horned dude with glittering red eyes whom I rapidly surmised was utterly indetectable to either my parents or peers. He claimed that I was the first human he had been allowed to take onto his books. Apparently he had looked after various dogs before but had been assigned to my case by one of his superiors, a being he referred to only as his “awe full master.” I knew him initially as 'Moo Ug' because he resembled a cross between a cow or a goat and a primitive human being but in later years his name became gradually abbreviated to the somewhat more elegant appellation by which he is known today – 'Moag' pronounced with a sort of frog in the throat, the way a crow might say it. After serving as a teacher, confidante and all-round invisible playmate during my childhood years my relationship with my guardian inevitably deteriorated when I hit adolescence and began to suspect that he might be some sort of emergent splinter personality. Even if he was an independent entity as Moag insisted it simply wasn't cool to go on having conversations with invisible beings once I had hit a certain age and succumbed to peer pressure to conform to the generally accepted mores of so-called 'consensus reality'. It took the war in Afghanistan for me to get my priorities in order. There are, after all, no atheists in the fox hole and believe you me, when the chips were down and I finally saw combat I tried out every prayer, charm and mantra I could recall, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or otherwise but at the end of the day the only voice I knew I could trust was that of my childhood playmate who saw me safely through some of the hardest times I've ever known.

Like Guy de Maupassant's hapless protagonist in 'The Horla' I had no way of knowing for sure whether our Yuletide difficulties were of a psychological or metaphysical origin but it was perfectly clear that, either which way, some sort of exorcism was in order. Although I am an ordained priest I have never had to conduct a ritual of this nature and could think of no better personage to turn to for advice on a suitably non-denominational procedure.

So it was that Miss Scarlett and yours truly sat down to a light repast before saying a prayer and inviting our invisible guest to accompany us to the waiting car. The way through the woods seemed different in the dark and I did my best to ignore the smudgy, half imagined presence that seemed to hover in the rear view mirror as we drove. We parked up beside the ancient stone cistern, making our way silently past the lighted windows of the lone farmhouse at the end of the trail.

The forest seemed deeper and even more distressingly sinister than it had in the daylight. A thin, cold mist hung between the gnarled trees and the owls were out in force, nor did it seem that we walked alone upon that winding path. There were other sounds, like distant cries or muted voices but, like Miss Scarlett, I did my level best to ignore them. On reaching the maw of the pit itself we carried out Moag's instructions to the tee, lighting a candle and casting a circle with salt water before making an offering to the 'beast' of 'flesh, food and wine'. Tipping the Christmas turkey along with all its trimmings, the remains of the chocolate 'pog' cake and the contents of a bottle of homemade dandelion wine into the abyss we asked the 'grande bete' to help the dead child on his way before sealing the portal with the 'Elder Sign'.

Of course this was supposed to have been engraved on a 'stone of Mnar' but having no such stone to hand we settled for drawing the sigil with a felt-tip marker on one of the only plates to have survived the fall from the cupboard, setting it beside the graven rock at the lip of the hole. Then, kindling our lanterns, we turned away.

The wind had dropped and the night seemed surprisingly warm for so late in the year. The waxing gibbous moon, a mere 24 hours shy of full, was already low in the western firmament but the stars were still diamond sharp and behind us the 'Hole of the Ravens' yawned black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. Some day the trees that surrounded it might be felled and the hill itself bulldozered down, when greed has grown even greater than it is today and awe of nature even less, but for now it can still awaken an oddly primal sense of panic terror. I have never been too fond of so-called 'high magic', even though since moving to the Zone we've been knee deep in the stuff. Accordingly I had no idea whether what we had been through had any basis in reality or was purely a psychological double bluff but either which way I didn't breathe easily until we were safely back in the car and headed south.

That night, for the first time since Christmas eve, my sleep was dreamless and I did not awaken until dawn.

( vii )
We headed up to the castle just after the sun had set wanting a front row view of the lunar eclipse. The night was warm and the hike up seemed easier than usual.
The courtyard was obligingly empty of other humans. The moon was out but there were storm clouds gathering on the horizon. We climbed back to the keep and made our greetings and then retraced our steps to the courtyard. As the moon began to go into eclipse we set out a protective circle and then lit two candles giving our thanks to the spirits of the castle for being able to be with them on that night. The flames burned steadily and brightly for about five minutes in the silent darkness. Then the temperature began to drop rapidly.

“Richard, look at the moon”
“I don’t see it”
“That’s what I mean. It was there a second ago”

A sudden wind entered the courtyard and the flames of the candles struggled valiantly for a minute before being extinguished. There was a sound by the south door. First it sounded like a large scattering of dried leaves, then a watery sound, like a tide rushing up over the steps into the courtyard. For a moment I thought that something was being wheeled or propelled through the door the sound was so loud but the rest of the courtyard was eerily silent. We watched waiting for something visual to manifest but then it was gone as quickly as it had come. We quietly walked over to the north door marveling at the fact that the sky was completly obliterated by a heavy and dense fog that had settled in. There were darker low flying clouds that raced across the valleys looking for all the world just like knights on horseback. It was quite a sight to see and we watched for some time.

The temperature had turned icy and the skies were threatening to rain so we headed back down the path. Even without the moonlight the way seemed brighter than normal. We raced down laughing and jubilant as we made record time. Strange because even on the brightest of moonlit nights the path is treacherous in some places, but that night neither of us missed a beat or took a wrong step. We never once broke our stride. About halfway down it had started to rain and somehow we hadn’t noticed until we reached the Camp de Cremat and saw how wet the ground was and the water dripping off the monument. The funny thing was that we were perfectly dry. It wasn’t the New Year that we had expected but there had been something exhilarating and intrinsically spooky about it, so very different than all the misery that had clouded Christmas. Near midnight the fast moving storm had all but faded away. We watched the fireworks lighting up the skies over the village from Hannibal’s Point and welcomed in the New Year, safe and secure in the shadow of pog.


May the grace of the White Lady and the Sons and Daughters of Belisenna be with you this year of our Lord 2010.