One of the problems with not being a conspiracy theorist is that one has no easy explanations when faced with some of the more glaring oddities of the world around us. It is, for example, passing strange that the dollar bill features an all-seeing eye and pyramid and the fact that it can be explained does not mean that it has been explained, if you follow my drift. Similarly, the non-conspiracy theorist is forced into some fancy mental gymnastics when considering glaringly obvious phenomena, such as the presence of two Skull-and-Bonesmen in the 2004 presidential election (the Bonesmen won either way), the screwy layout of Washington D.C., and the pentagonal shape of the world’s most powerful military headquarters. Mundane explanations exist for all of these, but since they are bizarre facts to begin with, the mind is more comfortable with bizarre explanations involving the Illuminati, aliens, or the occult.

since they are bizarre facts to begin with, the mind is more comfortable with bizarre explanations

My own personal example of this began one morning when I was considering the Public Lands Survey System (PLSS) township layout, the 6×6 boustrephedonic square made up of 36 square mile ‘sections’. ‘Boustrephedonic’, incidentally, is the word for the right-to-left, left-to-right layout of the square – it’s from the Greek, and means ‘as an ox plows’ and in this case describes the descending, switchbacking layout of the square – see the illustration. I’ve always wondered about the township layout; why, for instance, is it boustrephedonic, and why is it 6×6, and not some other number? Idly, I added up the columns and rows, to see if there were any ‘magic square’ properties in the design. The columns all add up to 111 – try it yourself. A little experimentation showed that this is a feature of boustrephedonic squares with even, but not odd, numbered sides, so this is not mysterious. The rows, on the other hand, seemed to yield no pattern of interest… until I took one more step. I ‘reduced’ the numbers numerologically to yield a single digit number. That is, I added together the digits of the multi-digit numbers, and if the result was multi-digit I added again until a one digit number resulted. As seen below, the numerological sum of all the rows is three, and it takes no special flash of insight to see that the numerological sum of 111, the column sum, is also three. Curious.

I should say, here, that I am not much of a numerologist. I don’t work out year numbers, or look for numerological significance in the dates of my life. Still, I did read a book about it once, and took away numerological reduction as a sort of ‘mental fidgeting’. And number mysticism has a history in the West that goes all the way back to Pythagoras and his followers. Many great minds have succumbed, and the results are not always pretty. Isaac Newton, for example, spent at least as much time on numerical Biblical exegesis as he did on scientific work and his writings on those topics strike modern readers as deranged. Many movies, such as Pi and A Beautiful Mind, explore the tendency of the mind to project numerological meaning onto complex phenomena.

Be that as it may and ignoring, for the moment, the possibility that I was succumbing to number mysticism, the undeniable fact remained that the Government Land Office (GLO) township is a numerological magic square. I worked out boustrephedonic squares from 2×2 to 9×9, and only the 6×6 square has this property.

So; now what? Well, not having all that many facts at hand, I immediately began to theorize. Eventually, I came up with rather an elaborate scenario involving Thomas Jefferson, the Illuminati, and aerial photography – it was good for at least 20 minutes of happy hour conversation. But, upon investigation, the hypothesis broke down. Jefferson, for example, preferred a 10×10 square and there is no evidence of Illuminati involvement… but then, there wouldn’t be, would there? So I began to tire of the whole thing; not that I disbelieved my nutty theory, necessarily, but I began to bore even myself.

Kaballah?

It turns out that conventional magic squares are important in Kaballah, and are associated with the planets and astrological magic. The 6×6 square is associated with the sun, and is therefore the most powerful of these. One text of Western Occultism (for which Kaballah is a major source), dating from the 1400s, says of it, “The figure of the Sun is appropriated for kings and princes of this world, and it is square and has a grid of six, and it is the figure of total power.”

early Americans were determined to stamp the ‘figure of the Sun’ across the entire Continent – and nearly succeeded

Now, I only sort of believe in astrological magic, or rather, I’m learning to suspend judgement about the exotic belief systems of others, but it is a fact that humans have apparently always used the progressions of the night sky for mystical purposes, and after 1,000’s of years, astrology very much remains part of our world – something about it is irresistibly seductive to some human minds. And interestingly, amazing feats of engineering have a long association with astronomy and astrology. The Pyramids, of course, and Stonehenge, are just two of the many examples of major ancient accomplishments which are now believed to have been largely motivated by astrological concerns. But considered as a whole, the township system is this planet’s most significant man made feature – it would swallow thousands of Great Walls. It is easily visible from space. Which leads to the rather strange thought that future archaeologists, investigating the wonder that was America, will uncover the whole system of townships and naturally conclude that early Americans were determined to stamp the ‘figure of the Sun’ across the entire Continent – and nearly succeeded.

An Apocalyptic Sum

Here is the key; and anyone who has intelligence may work out the number of the beast. The number represents a man’s name, and the numerical value of its letters is six hundred and sixty-six. –Revelation 13:18, New English Bible

Now What?

Now what is the poor non-conspiracy theorist to do, faced with such a rich source of peculiarity? Probably the best thing to do is to ignore such rabbit holes, but instead I began to wonder about possible motivations. That is, if there were some shadowy group behind all this, what might their motives have been?

Because the GLO square has definitely had a major effect on the United States, quite aside from its impact on surveying. Fly over the United States, or look at aerial photos. You will see a grid, a chessboard; square fields or developed blocks bounded by straight roads. No other sector of the Earth is laid out like this. Fly over any part of Europe, or Asia, or South America, or… anywhere but here, really. You will see roads and fields that follow contours, that give way to hills and mountains, that nestle up to forest edges and creeks. You will see a human landscape that is shaped by the natural world; but in the United States, most of us live in a landscape that is—thanks to ownership lines imposed arbitrarily—imposed upon the natural world, laid over it like graph paper on a map. The township system is part of the structural underpinning of U.S. culture, part of every American’s mental furniture. It may not be, quite, the air we breathe but it is certainly the ground we walk on. It shapes our visible world and it shapes us.

Is it too crazy, too speculative, to say that Americans are a different people as a result of our different environment, that our national culture is partially a product of our national landscape? As a nation, we do tend to ride roughshod, at times, over the natural world. Could our straight roads and square fields be shaping us as much as we shape them?

Now here I speculate wildly, but bear with me. One word for the tendency to impose order on nature is ‘Apollonian’. The sun god, Apollo, has long been associated with classical order, control, discipline and masculinity – as opposed to the Moon Goddess, traditionally associated with wildness, paganism, and femininity. As a nation, the United States is considerably more ‘solar’ than ‘lunar’.

But since the 6×6 square is a solar device, a fascinating (and, yes, nutty and conspiratorial) possibility comes to mind. There is the interesting, unlikely, crazy possibility that some person or group manipulated the choice of GLO township layout in an attempt to cast a Kabbalistic spell over an entire nation… and there is the possibility that it worked.

Of everything I’ve written, the above piece has generated by far the most response. I’m glad. It’s one of those stories that took a couple of years to write, as different puzzle parts fell into place. There were a couple of things I didn’t try to include in the published article (which first appeared in a magazine for land surveyors) or on my radio show. For one, it was really odd how information came to me about this. For example, the occult book mentioned (it is alarmingly titled, Conjuring Spirits) practically jumped out at me from a bookstore shelf and opened in my hands to the Kaballah square that began to tie everything together. Another, weirder, happenstance had to do with my study of a classic ‘master’ conspiracy theory known as the Sirius Mystery, and centering on a book of that title by Robert Temple, and also on an underground bestseller by über conspiracy theorist Robert Anton Wilson titled Cosmic Trigger. The basic idea of the Sirius Mystery is that beings from the Sirius star system visited several ancient civilizations to jumpstart human technology, while also providing the magickal basis for every conspiracy since, from the Knights Templar to the Priory of Sion (don’t ask). Naturally, they are in psychic contact with some humans, and intend to return fairly soon…

Anyway, Wilson’s book mentioned that he and two other writers, Doris Lessing and Phillip K. Dick, all wrote books about aliens from Sirius at more or less the same time, and without having any contact each other. I’d read Dick’s book, and decided to read Lessing’s, Shikasta. It’s a good read, but most notable for me was one of the book’s concluding passages, which described the gridded look of the sectionalized United States and attributed it to the evil ‘Shikasta’ influence! It was an odd moment; two separate conspiracy type thingies that I had been studying and thinking and talking about obsessively for more than a year suddenly and unexpectedly came together with a bang. For a couple of days, the world was a different place for me.

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The promiscuous mingling of church and state left me slightly nauseated

On a recent visit to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, I happened across the Washington Memorial Chapel, which looks very like a small cathedral, except that larded in with the pulpit, pews, baptismal font and other trappings of ritualized Yahweh worship one also finds heroic statues, state seals, bad poetry and other elaborate encrustations more often associated with city halls, capitol buildings, and other excretions of Governmentlandia. The promiscuous mingling of church and state left me slightly nauseated and even a little shocked, for usually the two principalities have the decency to partially veil their incestuous intercourse. Not that they ever really take a break: the intertwining of spiritual and temporal urges dates at least to the days that popes crowned kings and though there have been spats down through the centuries the relationship is still passionate. And like any relationship that stands the test of time, the attraction is not merely physical—there are numerous practical benefits. Churches benefit when the state mandates, or at least encourages, religious observance and prohibits the use of psychedelics and other alternative spirituality. And governments are always happy to have their subjects sedated by the opiate of the masses and made ready for war or servitude, as the need arises. In business terms—and what other terms could possible apply?—the synergies maximize profit.

But whether we puny humans, struggling to achieve a bit of happiness in this vale of sorrow, also benefit is certainly debatable. It’s difficult, after all, to see institutionalized religion as anything but an expensive inconvenience and the best thing one can say for most governments is that they do a good job tidying up our corpses after we die in the wars they inflict on us. So reducing the reach and influence of these predators is greatly to be desired, and prohibiting their immoral congress is a good place to start.

Because I have a large brain, I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking, ‘Hey, here in the United States we do separate church and state’ but the separation I have in mind would be considerably more separate. Public officials would not be sworn in on the Bible or any other holy book, they would not be allowed to publicly express religious beliefs—ideally they’d be atheists, or at least agnostic—there’d be no such job as senate chaplain, and in every other way conceivable the two lovers would be thoroughly segregated, or at least adequately chaperoned.

I find it curious that believers are so eager to get in bed with politicians, and a little hypocritical as well. After all, if there is anything at all to this God they keep nattering on about, He is presumably able to take care of Himself, and even promote His preferred agenda, without the aid of government programs, pogroms, or other manifestations of politicized religiosity. And certainly His followers are able to cause more than enough trouble without the benefit of State support.

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I’ve been visualizing myself being tortured…

I’ve been thinking about torture lately. More honestly, I’ve been visualizing myself being tortured and because I have a weakness for compulsive thought this ‘self-torture’, if you will, is detailed and obsessive, rising almost to the level of sexual fantasy. There are good descriptions of waterboarding on the internet, and even videos, and my all-too-excellent imagination does the rest. TV is also inspiring, and has given me all the detail I need when it comes to picturing, and feeling, slivers under my nails, or electrical shock, or hanging from my wrists as they’re yanked up behind me. And of course there are far more demeaning and painful forms of torture practiced on males, things I can’t discuss for fear of offending my mother, who reads this blog occasionally.

I know that I’m sharing far too much information, and I’m certain that you are never bothered by unwelcome thoughts of mutilation and pain, given or received. And yet, I must not be entirely alone in my sickness, because we are certainly obsessed, as a culture, with meting out exquisite pain to our enemies. Torture is a staple of popular entertainment, and of course our government is torturing hundreds—or maybe thousands—in not-especially-secret prisons around the globe. I can’t help but wonder if all this torture, real and fictional, is somehow leaking into our—excuse me, my—psyche, making us, I mean me, more fearful, more brutal, more paranoid, and far more willing to go along with whatever evil the government is currently perpetrating.

So I am against torture for purely selfish reasons: I have this idea that if I lived in a country that just said no to waterboarding, I’d sleep easier at night. But it may be that we’d all sleep easier. It’s an axiom of psychology that personal sins repressed and kept secret find expression in psychosis, and it’s an axiom of mine, completely unsupported by verifiable fact, that the same is true on a national level. Perhaps, for example, our largely unacknowledged dependence on sweatshop labor makes us unsatisfiable, and maybe the blithely ignored evils of factory farming and corporate meat production are making us the fat and unhappy people we seem, statistically, to be. And maybe, just maybe, the practice of torture, in our name and with our tacit approval, affects us as a culture and a people, turning us into bigoted monsters.

Of course I could be wrong, though that always strikes me as unlikely. Perhaps there is no link at all between the torturers we employ and our national psyche, and maybe it’s perfectly possible to be a kind, loving people while also perfecting the arts of strappado and sensory deprivation.

But somehow I doubt it. In short, it seems to me that institutionalized torture is a national sin, and that confession and renunciation of that sin will be a form of national healing. And I say we get on with it.

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