Monday, August 30, 2010

Part 17 - Rochester, NY - The Blood Sealed Vault of Cthulhu

This is a post you should probably not use for bedtime reading material because you are likely to find it rather disturbing. If you are one of my family or are already disturbed by what I've written in this series I would like you to pause and pray about whether to proceed. You may want to skip it, at least for now. I'm not being melodramatic. If you know me well at all you know I love to joke around - but there is no joking here. It should be taken very seriously.

A fictional short story featuring Rochester, NY's "Clock of Nations" was written not long ago. I discovered it last week while researching the clock. The story itself, the context of the story and the circumstances surrounding my personal encounter with the story mark it as something worthy of deep consideration. The Lord has a message in this. The story can be read at this link: An Untitled Short Story by Terry Mahoney - Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft

The story should be considered as a required part of this post, so please read it before continuing here.

Done? Ready? OK. What was the inspiration for writing such a story? I'm not asking the author, I'm posing it to you. Thoughtful and informed answers are going to suggest that there is indeed something special about the clock, something supernatural and significant.



The elements of the story are a mix of fact and fiction. The clock is real. In Rochester, NY on the 10th day of April, 1962, the grand opening ceremony of Midtown Plaza in downtown was attended by thousands. The celebration featured a ribbon cutting ceremony attended by Mayor Gillette and other politicians. Those familiar with H. P. Lovecraft will recognize some fictional elements like the Miskatonic University and Arkham Asylum, with which the character "Professor Alicea" was associated. Into which of the two categories are we to assign the plot's mystical elements? Is there in fact some magickal "seal on 'the vault'" influenced by the clock's location and relocation? Did the clock's removal require something like a sealing with blood, or is the core theme of ceremonial magick a purely fictional component of the story?



If you've been reading the blog you know I've declared several times that there is magick of some significance pertaining to the clock. Given its context and history, the kind of magick described by Terry Mahoney shouldn't be immediately dismissed as devoid of factual substance simply because the story is fictional. Was Jonathan Swift's unlikely description of Phobos and Deimos in "Gulliver's Travels" devoid of factual substance?

Consider this excerpt from the story. "The gist of the letter was that I needed to come to visit the professor in Arkham, or what I had done so long ago would be undone and some sort of vault or gate would reopen and creatures with a whole lot of consonants and not many vowels in their names would be free to terrorize Rochester."

If you've been reading this blog or listening to Tom Horn and Steve Quayle, or keying in to what many others are suggesting or declaring with mounting conviction, you are probably beginning to realize how that, when you read something about the opening of such a gateway, it warrants giving it further attention to consider what the Lord might reveal!

I believe Mr. Mahoney's inspiration was supernatural. It compares on some level to that of Geri Kavanaugh and Dale Clark, who were responsible for the clock. I have to believe that Victor Gruen, who designed the mall, Bill Stewart ("The Council") and everyone else responsible for the subjects of this blog series share a similar source of inspiration. As to whether the occultists associated with Freemasonry are directly involved with any of this activity, I cannot say because I have no direct proof; the members can be rather secretive, as you may know. As to whether the pharmakeia of the great city Babylon is involved with the objects and their inspiration, I can declare with confidence, yes.

Before I expand on the context of the short story and share the circumstances surrounding my personal encounter with it, I'd like you to consider what can be gleaned about Midtown Plaza and malls in general from the following excerpts from an article published in 2007.



"In 1964, Gruen declared Midtown Plaza the first living example of a theory of urban revitalization he called “transfiguration.” ... "But to Gruen, the non-retail elements of Midtown were anything but ornamental, and anything but mere enticements to attract shoppers. They were central to the project itself. And if they didn’t succeed, neither would Midtown." ... "In 1964, in the same book in which he outlined “transfiguration,” Gruen called for a new type of architect—an “environmental architect”—who would, among other things, possess a “restless seeking for deeper insight into the nature of man.”" ([PDF] The Life and Times of Midtown Plaza by Karen McCally, Ph.D. - Rochester History (Magazine) - A Publication of the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County and the Rochester Historical Society)

Transfiguration? A “restless seeking for deeper insight into the nature of man”? Hmmmmm.

As for the inspiration of the clock, well, if you happen to see an eccentric old guy hitchhiking and pushing the coffin on wheels he sleeps in, somewhere between Tombstone, AZ and ..., that would be Dale Clark, the artist responsible for the clock's design.

Now, given the fact that Mahoney's short story appears in "Short stories: Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft," plus the fact that it features fictional elements common to Lovecraft's work, the inspiration is obviously H. P. Lovecraft. The further inspiration that lies beyond is the serpent dragon. The link to the untitled story lists a string of keywords in its url, the first being, "lovecraft" and the second, "cthulhu," which offers more insight into source of inspiration. Cthulhu (commonly pronounced: ke-THOO-loo) is a fictional "cosmic entity" created by Lovecraft.

The following is excerpted from the Wikipedia entry for Cthulhu in the Cult of Cthulhu section.

"Cthulhu is depicted as having a worldwide doomsday cult centered in Arabia, with followers in regions as far-flung as Greenland and Louisiana. There are leaders of the cult "in the mountains of China" who are said to be immortal. Cthulhu is described by some of these cultists as the "great priest" of "the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky."
The cult is noted for chanting the phrase "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", which translates as "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." This is often shortened to "Cthulhu fhtagn", which might possibly mean "Cthulhu waits", "Cthulhu dreams", or "Cthulhu waits dreaming."
One cultist, known as Old Castro, provides the most elaborate information given in Lovecraft's fiction about Cthulhu. The Great Old Ones, according to Castro, had come from the stars to rule the world in ages past.
They were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape...but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.
Castro points to a "much-discussed couplet" from Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon:
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Castro explains the role of the Cthulhu Cult, stating that when the stars and the earth "might once more be ready" for the Great Old Ones, "some force from outside must serve to liberate their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented them from making an initial move." At the proper time,
the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from his tomb to revive His subjects and resume his rule of earth....Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

(Cult of Cthulhu - Wikipedia)

Soooooooooooooo, if explanation is required, methinks you arrived here by accident. The veil concealing the identity of the Watchers and Nephilim is so thin as to be practically nonexistent. Here is the inspiration for the story about the ceremonial magick of Rochester's "Clock of Nations."

And now, if you're still with me, I'm going to share some of the circumstances surrounding my own personal experience of reading of the story. Some of you will recognize this as the Lord's calling it to my/our particular attention. It's an affirmation that ceremonial magick is behind Midtown Plaza and the "Clock of Nations."

When I found the short story, I read with fascination enough to see there was magick involved with the clock. I was in the middle of researching a variety of related aspects of the clock and the mall, making notes and preparing a blog post. Since I could tell the story wasn't going to be in the current post and was satisfied for the moment, not wanting to be further distracted from the focus of the moment, I kept the page open in a tab so I could easily resume reading sometime later. When I returned to it, knowing how content on the Web tends to come and go, and, feeling that it was important enough to save a copy locally, I selected the story's text from each of the four pages and copy/pasted it into a text format document. Then I read it.

When I read a text format document I sometimes make it easier to read by resizing the application until the length of a line is more like you see in a book. When I did that, the desktop background was visible all around the outside. Most people have a fixed desktop background but mine was configured to rotate from one scene to the next every 20 minutes. It's a feature of Windows 7. Nice themes, nice backgrounds - adds a little variety, which is appreciated when I'm parked in front of the screen as much as I am. So, there's me, finally getting around to reading the story, looking at it in a window around which is the current theme's current background image.

I'm reading along and get to the place where the letter-writing lead character is having a really weird engagement with his birthmark/eye. He takes the scissors and heads down to the old Midtown Plaza. On the way, he begins to share about the appearance of wiggling sea anemones on the tips of the fingers of his left hand and how the birthmark/eye on his right hand basically assumed control.


As I'm reading I'm noticing the current desktop background. It looks like a sea anemone! The image above-right is a screenshot of the background I was looking at.

Reading on, with the letter writer's arrival at the mall where the clock had been, the scissors from the mall's red ribbon cutting ceremony began to engage with the wiggling sea anemone/octopus tentacles on his left hand. It is dawning on me that he's cutting off his fingers. As he chants the incantation he learned from the Professor, the ceremonial magick is performed and the fissure that had opened in the scarred floor where the clock once stood was sealed with blood. He observed that his fingers had all landed in the cleft, and he was happy to see that. That's weird.

You may not know this about me, but some fingers are missing from my left hand, cut off in a table saw accident in 1999. As I look back and forth between my left hand with its missing fingers and the desktop background, there was a definite creepiness factor beyond that of the story itself, which was already plenty creepy enough! Now, such a thing could really freak a guy out, but the Lord always prepares people for such things, and He has prepared me for such extreme weirdness on a number of occasions. While this was pretty high on the freaky scale, I could recognize His hand at work and gratefully acknowledge receipt of a message with some retained sense of humor. I get it. There may be more to it than I know at the present, but I get that he's affirming the magick of the clock as I've been presenting to you in this series.

Let me fill you in on more of the circumstances.

I'm a Netflix subscriber. I queue up a list of DVD's to be sent and they ship them in order. I don't usually pay much attention to what's coming and when. I usually have one or two at the top of the queue that get skipped over because they're not available for shipping yet. Sometimes, instead of watching a DVD, I watch one from their selection of instant "streaming" movies. No DVD. No Shipping. Available anytime. The Lord's hand in directing the content and timing of what I watch is sometimes really obvious because the interaction is seamlessly related to what He's revealing to me as I study and blog.

So, after I had read the short story and finished pacing up and down, saying "Whoah" and "Wow," and profound utterances like that, and praying, I thought about winding down for the night. I headed over to the counter to see what DVD I had on hand. "Stranger than Fiction." That's the title of the movie! "Stranger than Fiction." Well, that was hard to argue against! So, I had to watch it. You might think it related somehow, and sure enough, it did!

The movie was made in 2006, is rated PG-13 and is 113 minutes long. The Netflix description begins, "Harold Crick becomes aware of someone narrating his life in real time. Has a literary expert help him identify the author." During the course of the movie, the literary expert tells Harold that the expression he heard from the voice narrating his life, "Little did he know," revealed that it was what's referred to as "third person omniscient." What had been happening to me wasn't what Harold was experiencing, but I could sure relate to the "third person omniscient" bit! "Little did he know." Ha! Pretty amusing!

The next day when I was reviewing the previous day's bizarre happenings, yet another strange circumstance came to my awareness as I remembered how that in the nights before that I had been watching an A&E movie on Netflix titled "Ancient Mysteries: Human Sacrifice" The Netflix description begins, "The acclaimed A&E series "Ancient Mysteries" explores the gruesome and fascinating history of ritualistic human sacrifice across cultures worldwide. Why did practitioners believe spilling human blood could appease the gods?"

OK. I warned you this was some weird stuff. Some who read this will want to think I'm making this stuff up. You're welcome to think that, if you can't take what I shared at face value and that's what you want to think. However, if you know me better than that, you probably also know this is not uncharacteristic of how the Lord works. He does this to get our attention, to direct our focus of attention, to make a point. Are we paying attention yet?

There are some more things I'd like to share before I really close this out, but it can wait. Lord willing - to be continued...

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous2:30 PM

    It's interesting that in the Wikipedia entry one finds the following concerning 'the Great Old Ones', "...They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh preserved by the spells of Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection..." and that a very cursory glance into the meaning of the word 'Rochester' lends credibility to the whole story of Rochester, the Mall and the clock. I'll leave it to you to discover the meaning of 'Rochester', if you haven't guessed already. Cheers.

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  2. Anonymous5:07 PM

    Interesting that it is said of the Great Old Ones "...They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection..." when one considers the meaning of the word 'Rochester'. Cheers, Mark.

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  3. Very interesting occurrences. I live in Rochester, about 10 minutes from Midtown. The clock is now in our airport. The whole city is pretty creepy, come visit us!

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