Unseen influences at Canary Wharf

I went to Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs recently for a seasonal get-together with a former workmate.  I arranged for us to meet outside the tall obelisk One Canada Square, also known as the Canary Wharf Tower.

Things started badly; I became very confused and disoriented after coming out of Canary Wharf station by the wrong exit. I waited outside the wrong building for a while. I had to send texts and find another meeting place, a big store that we could both see from where we were standing.

Now I know that many people have problems finding their way around the area, especially when visiting it for the first time. They rightly say that the signposting is inadequate and the multiplicity of levels and station exits makes navigation difficult.

The tall corporate buildings and their huge entrance halls with all the plate glass and marble look much the same at ground level, which doesn’t help either.

Although I have been to Canary Wharf several times, I always have trouble finding my way around - even with a map. It is as if something inside me is reset and I go back to square one each time I go there: previous visits have done nothing to familiarise me with the area. My inner compass often goes haywire; I set off in the wrong direction and sometimes get so lost that it takes a while to get back on track.

Cults and John Masefield’s Box of Delights

I have recently been re-reading John Masefield's children’s fantasy novel The Box of Delights.

I wanted to have another look at the references to Christmas Eve. I was also hoping to find some previously overlooked material about witches, but instead I noticed for the first time that a conversation between two of the characters resonates with what I now know about cults.

This dialogue was written in 1935. It is uncanny how relevant and significant it is when we look at the methods cults use to recruit their victims and what constitutes an effective resistance to these techniques. I missed all this in past readings of the book but can see it now.

Maria Jones and the evil witch

One of the characters in the book is a girl called Maria Jones. She is a friend of Kay Harker, the young hero.

She is just a small child; she is known to everyone as ‘little Maria’. She is blunt, tough and fearless, rather like Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite in The Cuckoo Tree. She loves guns and has gangsters on the brain.

Maria shows that she has more sense than many adults who are manipulated into joining cults or other unethical organisations when the witch Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her villainous husband Abner Brown decide that Maria shows promise and would be a good acquisition for their gang.

They kidnap and imprison her. Sylvia Daisy tries to persuade her to join them. Maria is not fooled; she is defiant and not at all daunted and she stands up for herself very well.

John Masefield and the magic of Christmas Eve

The writer and poet John Masefield’s two children’s books The Midnight Folk (1927) and its sequel The Box of Delights (1935) have been previously mentioned on here because of the witch Sylvia Daisy Pouncer.

Sylvia Daisy plays a much larger part in The Midnight Folk than she does in The Box of Delights, but the latter book is of interest for other reasons. 

Masefield’s words create beautiful pictures in the imagination - the descriptions of winter and the Christmas season are particularly good - and invoke positive magical influences which are ideal for helping to counteract seasonal depression and the sinister forces that are active at this time of year. 

The story, which features magic, adventure, time travel, sinister wolves, brave children and the battle between good and evil, begins a few days before Christmas with the young hero Kay Harker returning from boarding school for the holidays; it ends on Christmas Eve with a joyful and triumphant midnight service in the Cathedral. 

It is interesting that Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her evil associates try to prevent this service from being held. As was mentioned in this article, disrupting the midnight service on Christmas Eve is a big coup for practitioners of black magic.

A six-episode BBC TV series was made in 1984. Although for me books are always best and many associated films make me feel furious, disappointed and disgusted, I have found this series to be worth watching. I like the theme music very much.

The Box of Delights series is available on DVD, and some kind person has loaded the episodes onto YouTube.

I may come back to John Masefield’s children’s book again. In the meantime, I hope that this brief description and strong recommendation will inspire people who haven’t already discovered The Box of Delights to investigate this wonderful book and its TV adaption. 

Another beautiful Christmas card

Christmas carols and beautiful seasonal artwork help to counteract seasonal depression.

As I mentioned last Christmas, I scan the best cards I buy before sending them to people.

I also scan the pick of those I receive before recycling them.

This is another of the bargain cards I bought many years ago:

Depression at Christmas

Some of what I said in the article about depression at the autumnal equinox can also be applied to the Christmas holiday season: the winter solstice too may subtly affect us. 

There are obvious additional and external factors when Christmas is involved, however there is sometimes more to it than being overwhelmed and demoralised by practical problems: evil forces may be abroad!

I realised a while back that even if there are no energy vampires, emotional blackmailers and other undesirables in our lives, we can still be influenced negatively by people in general. 

I have found that Christmas is a time when this is particularly noticeable. There is a lot of stress, tension, misery and general bad energy in the air, in the big cities at least, and some sensitive people pick it all up. 

We may be badly affected by the cumulative inner states of both the large numbers of people who are rushing around with too much to do and too little time to do it in and the many unhappy, isolated people for whom this is the worst time of year. 

A tale of two foxes

I described some amazing coincidences and synchronous events in my life a while back in this article.

One incident involved a magazine with a picture of a fox cub; now I can add an anecdote involving two adult foxes.

I have only ever seen live foxes on two occasions, and in both cases unseen influences appear to have been at work.

The first encounter happened many years ago, shortly after I saw a beautiful fox in a TV advertisement - for whisky if I remember correctly - and realised that I had never seen a fox in real life, apart from a dead one by the side of the road which was probably left there by a motorist who had hit and killed it.

I used to take my washing to a launderette on a busy main road and go for local walkabouts while the wash was in progress. I favoured a circular route for which the timing was perfect. It took in a public garden and some interesting buildings and back streets.

Lucy M. Boston, her birthday and her memoirs

The English novelist Lucy M. Boston, who is often known as L. M. Boston, was born on December 10th 1892. She was over 60 when her first book was published, and she lived to the age of 97.

She is of interest to me mainly because of her book An Enemy at Green Knowe.  The enemy in the title is the scholar, black magician and demon-possessed witch Dr. Melanie Powers, who has been mentioned in passing in a few articles. This is the only book in which Lucy M. Boston writes about the battle between good and evil.

There is little in Lucy M. Boston’s life to explain where Melanie Powers and her very familiar characteristics and behaviour came from; unlike Nicholas Stuart Gray’s and Diana Wynne Jones’s witches, she was not based on the author’s mother: Lucy M. Boston’s mother was unhappy and neglectful, but not cruel and evil.

However, the magical house Green Knowe, whose name appears in the titles of her series of children’s fantasy books, is taken directly from Manor House, which was built by the Normans around the year 1130 and was her home for almost 50 years.

Manor House is still in the Boston family and is now open to the public. Maybe I will go to see it some time.

More wise words from Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair was just a name to me until very recently.

I now know that he produced some very insightful and inspirational material.

He could be a goldmine, so his writings are on the list to be investigated. In the meantime, a little research has found these very relevant quotations:

“I discover that hardly a week passes that someone does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns...”

From The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation (1918), Introductory, "Bootstrap-lifting".

He was speaking about American-style religious organisations, but his words apply to many other types of cult. There is no end to them, and many do indeed perform brain-washing ceremonies.

“He was burning with a sense of outrage. He had been tricked and made a fool of; he had been used and flung aside. And now there was nothing he could do — he was utterly helpless. What affected him most was his sense of the overwhelming magnitude of the powers which had made him their puppet; of the utter futility of the efforts that he or any other man could make against them. They were like elemental, cosmic forces; they held all the world in their grip, and a common man was as much at their mercy as a bit of chaff in a tempest.”

From Metropolis (1908)

Upton Sinclair could be speaking for many people who realise that they have been cheated, lied to and made a fool of and that there is nothing that they can do about it. They are helpless pawns; they are up against something huge, invulnerable, inexorable and remorseless.

This is a perfect description of how devastated some people feel when they realise that they have been used and destroyed by a cult or an energy vampire and there will be no justice and no compensation.

November 25th this year was the 50th anniversary of Upton Sinclair’s death.

A multi-level approach to finding explanations

When I am trying to understand certain phenomena and occurrences, my method is to start by considering the most obvious explanations. There is no need to assume occult influences or go into full conspiracy theory mode unless and until it is absolutely necessary!

If all the top-level possibilities I can think of are not relevant, if they are inadequate and insufficient to explain everything, if they are the symptoms as opposed to the cause, then I will move down a level to more subtle possibilities.

If these too do not provide a full and satisfactory explanation, I will go lower still.

For example, if someone acts unprofessionally and out of character and causes a lot of damage to the company they work for, I would first check for such personal factors as illness, money worries, family problems or a drink problem. I would then look at the employer and the job and to see whether they were tired from working very long hours, were living in fear of redundancy or had been promoted beyond their capabilities.