The Ark in Space, The Talons Of
Weng-Chiang, Planet Of The Spiders, The Nightmare Of Eden – all
these episodes of Dr. Who from the mid to late 1970s seem like comic
strip versions of Kenneth Grant's Typhonian motifs... most strikingly
the title, “The Nightmare of Eden” being one syllable short of
Grant's astral travel guide to the qliphoth, Nightside of Eden...
I've often wondered whether the script writers were dipping into
Grant's work but temporally this doesn't quite add up. But I secretly
hope the obverse is true, that Grant was drawing inspiration from the
whacked out synopses of Dr. Who, which often read better than their
cardboard realisations.
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| Chislehurst Caves – Occult pop hot spot: Bowie played here and Dr. Who filmed "The Demons" here |
The Nightmare Of Eden features two
spaceships, the good mothership “Empress” and an evil trade ship
“Hecate” on board which are traffickers attempting to harvest
drugs from the planet “Eden”. Are the monikers of the ships
really Tarotic hints of the refractive sephira between the tree of
life and the tree of death that Grant dissects in his most Nephilim
drenched volume?
If Grant didn't program 70s children's
sci-fi, then incredibly it would seem that Dr. Robert Vaughan,
Ballard's “Maldoror Of The Motorway” played some part in the
creation of The Tomorrow People – ITV's derivation of Dr. Who.
Moreover, one of the sole interesting facts emerging from John
Baxter's recent churlish character assassination of JG Ballard, is
that Ballard wrote an episode of Jackanory in the late 1960s.
Hilariously, Baxter also claims that Ballard was hoping to cash in on
the success of Alan Garner's novels by writing a children's book,
resulting in the shamanic sperm quest of the Unlimited Dream Company.
One can only imagine how this could be scheduled along with the likes
of The Secret Garden but I'd like to fantasise that the exotic
parrots of Ballard's suburbia would abscond to the Blue Peter set,
fecundating its Italian sunken garden and making Priapus of Percy
Thrower.
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| Dr. Christopher Evans |
Dr. Christopher Evans, TV psychologist
and Ballard's self-actualising other, was the inspiration for Crash's Dr. Robert Vaughan. As well as writing the Mighty Micro, Landscapes
Of The Night and Cults Of Unreason, Evans edited two anthologies of
sci-fi and horror: The Mind In Chains and The Mind At Bay.
Pleasingly, both anthologies contain stories by both Ballard and M.R.
James – an unusual collage of authors that has exciting
meta-fictional ramifications pending their hybridisation. The Mind In
Chains, in particular, was the creative keystone for the Tomorrow
People and Evans' name appears on the credits of every episode of the
programme – as the scientific advisor. The Tomorrow People's
central conceit concerns a group of hyper evolved children with
psionic powers – the children are known as “Homo superior”...
taken from David Bowie's Oh you pretty things. This delicious
collision of glam and sci-fi is only heightened by the fact that the
Tomorrow People appeared as a comic strip in the Bay City Roller
obsessed Look-In magazine that so was popular with hormonal
adolescents in the mid-70s.The Tomorrow People cartoon strip first
appeared in Look-In on 28th July 1973 (the same year as Ballard's
Crash), to coincide with the TV series' launch. The cover of the
magazine shows four young astronautically attired characters from
the Tomorrow People, while the blurb for the magazine offers a chance
to win an album by the Fab 4. Most tellingly at the top of the page,
the contents of the magazine include a road safety quiz - epitomizing
the paranoia of the car crash that pervaded every pore of culture in
the early 70s.
The Tomorrow People explored and
extrapolated to cosmic proportions the whole weird pop
svengali/pretty boy band vampiric/faustian bargain in an amazing
episode called Hearts of Soggoth. One of the stars of the Tomorrow
People, Michael Holoway was also a member of Flintlock an Essex pop
group similar to The Bay City Rollers' and the Tomorrow People fused
fact and fiction when Flintlock appeared on the sci-fi programme as
“The Fresh Hearts”. In the storyline, they are approached by a
seedy silver haired chap called Jake who asks to be their manager. It
turns out that Jake is actually one Prof. James Marsden, the leader
of a religious sect known as “The Hearts of Soggoth”. Marsden has
a special metronome that causes the band to play at a certain beat
that will invoke “Lord Soggoth” who according to an old book will
return when a million people hear the beat of his heart. Marsden's
aim is to make “The Fresh Hearts” into a stellar pop band who
will be broadcast to an audience of millions, thus paving the way for
the return of Lord Soggoth. On returning, it is predicted Soggoth
will destroy the “Lords Of Heaven”.
A Gnostic Lovecraftian Ragnarok, all
before the early evening news, this astoundingly mashed up episode of
the Tomorrow People explores similar themes to Robert Anton Wilson's
Illuminatus where frequencies issued at a Bavarian rock concert
invoke a Teutonic army from a lake to immanentise the eschaton. It
also promotes the dodgy pop impresario to the position of a minion of
the Old Ones. Perhaps the archetypal vampire impresario is Andrew
Loog Oldham – the androgynous gangster manager of The Rolling
Stones. His name is intriguing for us Grantian “scholars”. In one
of Grant's New Isis Lodge grimoires there is a cipher that gets
transliterated as “Loog”. Grant ruminates a great deal on its
meaning, exploring its qabalistic significance as well as its
phonetic similarity to Bela Lugosi speculating (wildly),
“there is an alternative
interpretation of Loogs which, although far-fetched, may be
legitimately considered since it is typical of the paronomasia traditionally used
by qabalists. Loogs... approximates too nearly to Lugosi to be
overlooked. Lugos is the name of the place in which Lugosi was born.
As a scion of one of the oldest families in Hungary he, more than
anyone, was particularly the part”.
Grant, in a footnote to the above quote
maintains that Lugosi, as well as identifying himself with Dracula,
also expressed an admiration for Crowley's magick.
More important than the academic
correctness of Grant's qabalism is his assertion of the importance of
paronomasia as a magical method. Here he shares much in common with some
of the theories posited by Dr. Christopher Evans in his study of
dreams, Landscapes Of The Night. Essentially Landscape Of The Night
is a slick paradigmatic argument for the software programming role of
dreams. Where it intersects with Grant is in championing the
psychological truth of the pun.
I speculate that paronomasia can be
used as a linguistic analogue of Dali's paranoiac critical method,
where Dali enters a waking dream to retrieve hand painted photographs
of the concrete irrational. Taking this analogy to Grant's work, I
suggest Grant was constructing hand written grimoires of the
walking dead names - in other words, Necronomicons.
One of the key refrains of Evans' dream
research is in elucidating the dream's "positive logic, quite
distinct from the day world". Evans recounts some fascinating
experiments in lateral thinking puzzle solving by dream narrative. In
one test, dreamers were asked to consider the letters H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O
- the solution to this sequence being a single word, "water",
since the sequence is phonetically H20, the chemical symbol of water.
Test subjects who had not solved the problem before sleeping
reported dreams which had water in them somewhere. The dream appears
to solve problems with imagistic word play. Moreover, the "giant
gelatinous pun" of Finnegan's Wake, as Ballard describes Joyce's
novel, is perhaps closer to Grant's Necronomicon's than one might
expect. And we must not also forget the argot of Fulcanelli's Mystery
of Cathedrals as an object lesson in Hermetic wordplay, where the
mysterious Alchemist states,
"People think that such things are
merely a play on words. I agree. The important thing is that such
word-play should guide our faith toward certainty, toward positive
and scientific truth..."
echoing the Evans' theory of "positive
dream logic".
Whatever the validity of the Grant's
vampiric logos, the spectres of Andrew Loog Oldham, Jonathan King and
Tam Patton assume a powerful pop GodForm, and the cartoon amalgam of
glam, sci-fi and the schlocky gnosticism in Hearts Of Soggoth raises
the question of who programs Who? Perhaps the answer lies in Dr.
Christopher Evans' anthology The Mind In Chains - where M.R James'
pederastic horror story The Lost Hearts lines up with J.G. Ballard's
Bowie-esque The Dead Astronaut. Maybe the programming by Evans of
these seemingly diametrical authors created the formula for this
episode?
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| English Heretic's Chrome plaque for Vaughan, anti-hero of Ballard's Crash |
