Stalking the Great Whore

The Lost Writings of James Shelby Downard

Book Review

STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE

Stalking the Great Whore: The Lost Writings of James Shelby Downard

Foreword by Adam Gorightly. Afterword by Dr. Richard B. Spence. 479 pages. Softcover. Illustrated. 2023.

Reviewed by Michael Hoffman

Our “library angel” remains as active as ever. Monday, February 28, this writer was interviewed on the crrow777radio program for two hours. In the first hour the eponymous host inquired about James Shelby Downward (1912-1998; the 111th anniversary of his birth is Sunday, March 12). To our complete surprise, that afternoon at around 3 p.m., the post office delivered Stalking the Great Whore, consisting of extensive material by our late friend, mentor and collaborator which was believed lost until discovered on microfiche in 2015.

Somewhere Shelby is smiling. We certainly are. We’re grateful that interest in his work is abiding.

He opens this autobiography with the words, “I walked ‘the crooked mile’ as a straight man.”

Later he writes, “I sure as hell know about the Sorcerers, and I intend to inform the Hoodwinked public as to what is going on!”

University of Idaho Prof. Richard B. Spence’s biographical afterword is an important contribution. He did yeoman work in the archives and it is free of spin. He keeps an open mind and demonstrates from numerous records that James Shelby Downard’s life, which critics have regarded as too preposterous to credit, was, to borrow a phrase from J.B.S. Haldane, stranger than we can imagine. Something similar was said of Downard’s research by his colleague Jim Brandon, who termed his take on the JFK King-Kill, the “farthest-out brain wave of assassinology yet.” Spence himself writes, “in a realm where the bizarro-meter is set pretty high, Downard goes straight to ‘11.” (What gaps there are in Dr. Spence’s biographical sketch are perhaps mainly due to him having chosen not to interview people who knew Shelby).

At long last Mr. Downard gets his due (!) in the wake of the less than stellar redacted Feral House version/edition of Shelby’s Carnivals of Life and Death, which was published without context —without apparatus that would indicate via marginalia or notes, those sections which were poetic expressions, or attempts at satire and jesting. For instance, on p. 12 of Stalking the Great Whore, after stating that some of his enemies think he may be protected by “the so-called demon Azazel,” he jokes: “…it’s nice to have friends and I welcome any and all help.” When Leon Trotsky offers to make him immortal (p. 57), Downard replies, “No, thanks Mr. Trotsky, all the immortals I know about are dead.”

Poète maudit and Scapegoat

The defiant jibe was his tried-and-true means of attempting to spook the spooks by demonstrating his insouciance and Biercean satire (on more than a few of Shelby’s envelopes containing letters which he mailed to correspondents was an ink-stamped quote from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of felony”).

James Shelby Downard was a poète maudit in the line of Antonin Artaud and all those who comprise, in the words of Alfred de Vigny, “la race toujours maudite par les puissants de la terre”—the race that will always be cursed by the powerful ones of the earth.

Like Artaud, Downard was a victim of various forms of vile experimentation, psychological torment and outright torture, including in a mental asylum (though not the one Dr. Spence mentions).

A word I heard often from him and which was paradoxically the source of his formidable mental and spiritual strength as well as his compassion for others who had been trapped in a similar “pattern” of abuse by the powers-that-be, was “scapegoat,” as well as “pharmakos,” which in antiquity were associated with fertility rites:

“…greening—having to do with all sorts of fertility and death, ritualism—which, according to their ‘Master Plan,’ if properly performed was to lead to a magnetic transference to a scapegoat-transferee, who to the sorcerers was the symbolic ‘Averter of Ills’ (Caper Emissarius and/or a Pharmakos).”

When Artaud wrote about Vincent van Gogh he called him “the man suicided by society” —propelled to suicide by a process of “psychic driving,” which has since been associated with the CIA and the MK-Ultra program, a version of which snared Charles Manson and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski. To what extent did those drug experiments cripple the moral agency of those two infamous men?

The fact of their psychotropic-chemical brainwashing has been published not in rare grimoires difficult to find, but in books freely available (Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties; and Harvard and the Unabomber), yet what Downard calls “the Hoodwink of a Secret Society” continues to dominate the narrative, and both individuals, Manson and Kaczynski, are regarded in the public mind as a guilty “lone nut”. (Concerning “lone nuts,” the psychiatrist in charge of the CIA’s San Francisco LSD dispensary where Manson was supplied and shepherded, was the same psychiatrist who had privileged access to the incarcerated “lone nut” Jack Ruby,” who murdered “lone nut” Lee Harvey Oswald).

Kaczynski’s case rather neatly confirmed Shelby’s practice of searching map coordinates and lines of latitude and longitude for relevant indications of “mystical toponomy.” For Mr. Downard, Kaczynski’s scapegoat status was confirmed symbolically when this writer notified him that the accused terrorist’s notorious Montana cabin was located in the midst of Montana’s “Scapegoat Wilderness,” on the Continental Divide.

In Stalking the Great Whore he writes (p. 12): “Scapegoats are known to suffer greatly from the torture inflicted on them by those identified as Sorcerers. It's an old axiom in sorcery that occult knowledge comes from such suffering, and according to the axiom, a Scapegoat that manages to survive the cruelty of the Sorcerers can be imagined to have acquired occult knowledge.”

Psychodrama in American History

In raw, unedited manuscripts he published as photocopies which he had printed at the old Kinko’s Copy Centers, Mr. Downard wrote pedagogical stories that were no less true despite the fact that he did not always choose to present his life and research within the strict boundaries of PhD. thesis-type historiography. He was justified in doing so because his concern with American history was ultimately in terms of psychodrama.

He believed that the murder of President John F. Kennedy had been a spectacular case of stagecraft, in that it bore the hallmarks of an occult ceremonial in time and space. In atomic physics we learn that, “Time relations among events are assumed to be first constituted by the specific physical relations obtaining between them.” Upon that principle was founded the geomancy that conjured the British empire, which arose out of the geographical postulations of the royal Elizabethan mathematician and necromancer Dr. John Dee, who wrote General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, and his conféré, the visionary Richard Hakluyt, author of The Principal Navigations—ritually creating “facts on the ground” through their naming and mapping.

Like the most astute sleuths, James Shelby Downard thought with the mind of the perpetrators. He stated that they had planned the JFK assassination in Shakespeare, New Mexico and the Storyville section of New Orleans. In 1963 the significance of those locales would have been missed by most observers. Now in the third decade of the 21st century they amount to hiding in plain sight (or perhaps we should say “site”).

Cryonic Freeeze-Thaw Time Capsule

Observe the time capsule effect—the “cryonic freeze/thaw” as Downard termed it— frozen in 1963; thawed in 2023; which segues into his study of Camelot symbolism as denoted by the concept of the “once-and-future” king. And who was killed in Dallas that day if not the King of Camelot?

One might suggest that JFK is brought to life by the ceaseless poring over words, images and artifacts connected to his immolation in Dealey Plaza. This reminds us of our suspicion that the 5,000 objects left for Howard Carter to discover in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in 1922, at the time capsule tomb of King Tutankhamen, were intended to kindle not just the memory of Tut, but to reanimate the occult system of Pharaonic Egypt by focusing the magnifying power of the post-modern Group Mind upon it.

Recall a principle of quantum physics: it is observation that creates reality; measurement calls it forth into existence. To become like unto God is to evoke reality by witnessing it. And yet, a universe brought forth by observation entails “defining reality,” an act which necessarily is drawn from the preconceptions in the mind of the observer, which is by no means a tabula rasa. In this realm we approach the magic for which the Egyptians were sufficiently renowned to cause the architects of America’s “Great Seal” to incorporate within that seal an unfinished Pharaonic pyramid, the symbolism of which was so unmistakable as to prompt Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), professor of Art at Harvard University, to dismiss the seal as, “The dull emblem of a masonic fraternity.”

The sorcery Mr. Downard confronted was fingered by C.S. Lewis in his indispensable work, The Abolition of Man: “There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

Shelby intimated that after the Storyville, Louisiana and Shakespeare, New Mexico stagecraft, the workers of iniquity had an appointment at an another stop on the Jornada of the “Land of Enchantment”—Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, on the 33rd degree line of north parallel latitude.

Those who imagine that these themes and theses can be accounted for solely by the yardstick of linear academic rationalism are mistaken, and for that matter, outclassed. Shelby sometimes confined his narrative to academic perimeters; other times he wrote prose that was poetry. If it is said that such writing makes no substantial contribution to history, of what value then are Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer or Shakespeare? In “Macbeth” one may gain a better grasp of the Killing of the King on November 22, 1963, than in the 2000+ pages of Vincent Bugliosi’s tome, Reclaiming History.

Stalking the Great Whore is an autobiographical slog penned by a windmill tilter and real life Forest Gump who was in the company and at the center of some of the signal personalities and events of “the American century.” By accompanying him on his adventure one serves an apprenticeship which may lead to a counter-intelligence awakening and an initiation into a pattern-detecting world of wonder. Along the way, empirical facts and occult allegory are encountered, together with a cast of characters and events ranging from Enrique Esquinaldo and the “Tres Hermanas witchcraft gang,” Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as Miss Chudlleigh and Edith Bouvier Beale by way of  El - Bel - Baal - Be al - Beal - Beale.

Sprinkled here and there in the text is this writer’s contribution to Mr. Downard’s oeuvre, such as John Quincy Adams’ Letters on the Masonic Institution (p. 390). Fortean prodigy Jim Brandon’s input is visible, as well as that of Charles Saunders, a Florida-based multi-lingual scholar gifted with near total recall, who was also close to Jack Kerouac in his last days. (As a testament to the suffocating strictures of political correctness, as of this writing the politically incorrect Mr. Saunders has been excluded from every Kerouac biography).

The Invisible Empire

There is plenty of documentary material in Mr. Downard’s writing—facts, dates, names, places and events forming the chronicle of a peripatetic life of peril, as Richard Spence demonstrates. Shelby had a practical end in view as he set his observations to paper: the discrediting and dismantling of the FBI and the secret societies which he grouped under the name by which the Ku Klux Klan styled itself, the “Invisible Empire,” including the lesser known Mexican bruja tradition, among other tributaries of the sorcery that bedevils mankind. (He favored the Catholic Conquistadors for having nearly extinguished what he viewed as highly potent and virulent Aztec diabolism and he loathed its contemporary survivals, which he witnessed in the desert Southwest, the crucible of the Jornada del Muerto that terminated at the inception point where the bottle genie was summoned, at the atomic bomb’s “Trinity Site”).

The campaign to abolish the Federal Bureau of Investigation and start anew, was laughed to derision in 1963. Sixty years later, columnists in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have advocated precisely that once unthinkable take down of one of the pillars of the Federal leviathan.

At the thought of the relationship between the Dulles boys (Allen and John Foster), the Council on Foreign Relations and the Round Table Group, Mr. Downard draws one of his many allusions to the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table, Merlin, Glastonbury Abbey, and the “Holy Thorn/Hawthorn,” which induces sleep and even amnesia. It is at this juncture in his text that he introduces the “Great Whore” (“Aphrodite Porne,” cf. pp. 110-111), that he tracked for years, who happens to have been his estranged and later former wife, who he observed escorted from orgies in La Jolla, California bedroom bungalows operated by the American criminal elite in partnership with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI—then on to Mount Palomar, for ritual immersion in the rays of Sirius, when the giant telescope was focused on that star of the pharaohs, in the constellation Canis Major:

“A woman known as the Great Whore, who is a nymphomaniac and a prostitute for CIA agents and members of the Mafia, was protected in her pornographic practices by Federal Bureaucratic Inverts (FBI agents), as well as by both men and women agents of the OSS – CIA involved with witchcraft practices. Before I realized the depravity of that gal, I accepted a drink from her that she gigglingly referred to as HAWTHORN.”

Here begins a foray into a netherworld of recovered memories and “mystical charades” resulting from what we believe to have been not only mind control experiments on him, but attempts to harness whatever above-normal powers Downard possessed, reminiscent of the 2001 movie “Hearts in Atlantis” in which Anthony Hopkins portrayed the Ted Brautigan character, a man whose extrasensory abilities make him a target of abduction by a US intelligence agency.  (When he was 20, the future poet Richard Brautigan was confined for more than a year in the Oregon State Hospital’s mental asylum, where the torment of electro-shock therapy was administered to him repeatedly; he is alleged to have died at age 49 in 1984 from a self-inflicted 44 caliber gunshot to the head).

“Time’s Duplex” and “Mystical Toponomy”

Shelby: “I started investigating the possible whys and wherefores of…coincidences from the ancient Egyptian belief in the Double House of Life to the 1984 Big Brother story. In my research, I discovered that there has been speculation as to the possibility of a mental mechanism functioning below the threshold of conscious awareness (subliminal) that could be a type of psychic process that once sparked by a coincidental occurrence might provoke, after conscious recognition, the complete reenactment of previous happenings in pattern form.

“…With all the power that the sorcerers possess, they are not a power unto themselves, and in mystical charades they apparently must abide by certain rules designated by a Mind of Mystic Power. The mystical charades are very definitely associated symbolically with the tessellation of the earth, mystical toponymy and ancient religious symbolism. The mystical charades are performed in the same manner as such tessellated games as chess, checkers and Othello…Mystical toponymy has to do with the magic and mystery of words… and the science of symbolism…The study of place names with magic and mystery significance and science of symbolism import is also associated with latitude and longitude degree lines, and the division of a degree (seconds, minutes).”

James Shelby Downard’s survival through numerous cliff-hangers depended upon his personal “judo” of turning occult forces used by his antagonists to his own purposes. He knew the lingo, the ritual handshakes and gestures and the gnosis itself. He went by many names. At one point he describes himself as “play(ing) the part of the End man in the Minstrel Show of Life as I stand in for my shadow who is the real Mr. Bones.”

The “end men” in a minstrel show were often referred to as “Mr. Tambo, who played the tambourine, and Mr. Bones, who rattled the bones (a pair of clappers, named after the original material from which they were made)…The interlocutor, in whiteface, usually wore formal attire; the others, in blackface, wore gaudy swallow-tailed coats and striped trousers. The program opened with a chorus, often as a grand entrance…Then followed a series of…ballad(s)…The second part, or olio (mixture or medley), consisted of a series of individual acts that concluded with a…walk-around in which every member did a specialty number.…” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Occasionally there was a third part consisting of a charade.

Signor Two Rabbits

In the 1990s, after this writer returned from Britain, having sojourned in an isolated region of Wales where 2,000 year old yew trees encircled a local Stonehenge-like circle with stones so old only their tops protruded from the ground, we mailed Shelby a small card printed by the proprietors of a 1,400-year old church on the grounds, telling the tale of a local girl who, more than a thousand years before, hid a rabbit under her dress to prevent a prince who was hunting game, from killing it.

This was of significant interest to Shelby who had years before founded a psychic self-defense club he called, “The Belligerent Rabbit Society.” During his lifetime Mr. Downard maintained a duality around his identity wherein he, the “End man” stands in for his “shadow who is the real Mr. Bones.” How can a shadow be real?

With his rabbit society in mind, on one occasion he informed us that his preferred name was “Signor Two Rabbits.”

This duality was not itself any type of occult working. On the contrary, it reflected both the shadow side of his lived experience, which was so fantastic it beggared belief, as well as the psychic self-defense aspect of his personal survival tactic. Like the juvenile, ink-filled squirt gun which Shelby occasionally employed to disarm lethal pistol-wielding gunmen, the bunny, hare or rabbit is not considered dangerous and may hardly be considered “belligerent,” other than as a creature who purloins vegetables from farmer Brown’s garden, and therein lies some of its power.

Certain rabbits in literature and cinematic lore possess considerable potency, either as haunting harbingers of fate (Lewis Carroll’s white rabbit in his “Alice” story), or the mischievous yet protective spirit mentioned in 8th century Old English lore: a púca (“pooka, puck”). This creature materializes as a six-foot rabbit in Mary Chase’s 1944 Broadway play, “Harvey,” which in 1950 was made into a movie starring James Stewart. The “Harvey” film was a favorite of Mr. Downard. (Mary Chase’s son Colin was a professor at the University of Toronto where he pursued early medieval Saxon philological studies similar to those of his fellow Catholic scholar, J.R.R. Tolkein).

James Shelby Downard—“Signor Two Rabbits”—is an identity that indicates something more than the presiding spirt of a paradoxical “Belligerent” association. It is a doppelgänger (“double walker”) which he expects his perceptive readers will spot. Time and again in his writing Shelby identifies himself under various double names that are keys to his survival.

It is one of the oldest wisdom practices of isolated rural societies to create an effigy of one’s self which enemies will mistake for you. The effigy draws their wrath and attacks, which are thus rendered harmless. Mr. Downard’s life is strewn with the effigies he created and by which he survived.

(When this writer was a boy my maternal grandmother, who hailed from a rustic region of Europe, wordlessly taught me to form an effigy should I find myself in a particular situation that threatened my well-being; her folk wisdom is reflected in the “Jack Tales” as spoken in their authentic, undiluted form by American story-teller Ray Hicks).

Cross Road Information

Readers who have the endurance to traverse 446 pages of disenchantment, as demarcated in James Shelby Downard’s deconstruction of the sorcery of America mystica, may gain sufficient knowledge and inspiration to escape the fate of the robotized animality and psychopathic cognitive dissonance that decades ago Downard foresaw afflicting humanity as part of a process he identified as “The Revelation of the Method.”

Caveat: in his personal conversation and correspondence with this writer and others, we never knew him to use an obscene expression. “Oh, hell” or “Like hell” was about the strongest language we observed him utter or write. In Stalking the Great Whore, the “F” word appears on occasion, and s - - t (for feces) appears somewhat more frequently. We venture no theory about this seeming anomaly. The book is not for kids; a very mature sixteen-year old perhaps; no one younger.

“…to reconcile logical thought with mysticism can be a daunting task. When mysticism has to do with the Science of Symbolism, it can sometimes be found to be coordinated, and in the reckoning of coordinated symbols, meanings that are abstruse defy an immediate mental precept. In order to deal with them properly, it’s necessary to have a great deal of information that some might deem trivial, until the information is shown to be coordinated. Such information can be called Cross Road information.” — J.S. Downard

Copyright ©2023 by Independent History and Research

Michael Hoffman is a professional historian and a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press. He titled, edited and otherwise contributed to King-Kill/33, James Shelby Downard’s exposition of the occult aspects of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Michael’s books, Twilight Language and Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, in part build on Mr. Downard’s insights. Among Hoffman’s other works are The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome, and Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not. His podcast, “Michael Hoffman’s Revisionist History®” is heard on Spotify, Apple, Google and Transistor, among other outlets. He is an independent scholar free of corporate allegiance and university affiliation.