A tape recording of hell
Howdy!
Stop the presses! The crows brought us a present! Those clever birds brought us a nut in exchange for peanuts. They left this little red nut, from the construction site down the block, in the spot where I exit the garage to feed them.
This week our podcast is a little hellish. I mean, just look at that tiny Nosferatu holding an even tinier Nosferatu!
When reading about Nosferatu, I learned the word “egregore” which means, a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people. The occultists use it to mean spirits summoned by groups of like-minded magicians, but it seems like the world is pushing for the concept to have a wider meaning. Couldn’t Ronald be the egregore of McDonald’s?
In the early 1920s a group called Fraternitas Saturni dreamed up a creepy bald weirdo named Count Orlock and spent their own money to make a movie about him. They lifted the plot from Dracula, violating copyright, lost all their money, and a judge ordered that every copy of the movie be destroyed. A few copies survived and after the copyright on Dracula disappeared it was re-released. Now, 100 years later, I have an action figure holding a miniature version of an action figure of the creature they dreamed up.
The long-tail economy seems to have businesses rushing to monetize egregores. To figure out each distinct group of people and create a physical representation of their group mind and then sell it to them. Unfortunately, some egregores should remain unmanifested. Not every group-thought needs to be spread and elevated even if it might be profitable.
Also, I tell a story about the Well to Hell hoax of the 80s and 90s. At an old job, I had an HR person who tried to convince me magic was real by playing an audio cassette of the sounds of hell. The story told to me was that Russian scientists had dangled a microphone into a deep well and recorded the sounds of millions of souls in hell. When I remembered it years later, I did a little research and discovered that the endless caterwauling was actually a background sound from the Joseph Cotten movie, Baron Blood. Watch the video below if you’d like to hear what I heard all those years ago.
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Thanks for reading and listening,