Conspirinormal 445- Adam Gorightly 6 (Stalking James Shelby Downard)

okay welcome back to conspira normal everyone we took a little bit of a break there with uh A nice little live stream in between. But we've got a great show for you guys tonight. But before we get to that, Sergio is back. I'm back from a long journey. I'm now in the undisclosed location of the northwestern part of the United States on a journey that began near the grave of Meriwether Lewis there on the Natchez Trace.

outside of Nashville, Tennessee. But I am here now, but still on Conspiranormal, though with a Pacific and Lemurian orientation. That's right. That's right. I'm still in the Atlantean orientation. So someone has to represent, I suppose. The eternal conflict. Right. Well, tonight's show, hopefully going to have two guests, But right now we've got Adam go rightly with us and we are going to talk to him about his book, stalking the great whore. Well, the last, I say it's James Shelby Downard. I say it's your book, but it's actually, I guess the writings of James Shelby Downard.

So with the forward by go rightly with the forward by go rightly. And we're hopefully going to have Dr. Richard Spence here with us as well. So hopefully he'll show up here in a bit. But I guess where do we want to start, Sergio? I guess we could talk about the basics of John, or do we want to start with how he came to have this manuscript? Well, I just wanted to say that we've been waiting on this for a long time, and it was quite the effort. We know you had a real intense job in having to compile and edit and get the stuff transferred over to a medium that we can all check out. And it was a lot more material than I expected and was very happy with the stuff. We're really looking forward to it, like I said. And yeah, I guess to start out, we kind of have to give a brief introduction to James

Shelby Downer and who he was and why his stuff was so influential. Because it's been a long time since we actually did talk about James Shelby Downer in episode 33, by the way. But that was a long time ago. That's been probably 10 years ago now. And that was probably about Adam's previous book about James Shelby Downard that he did write. But, yeah, we should get a little primer on who the great James Shelby Downard was. Oh, man. Now I'm wishing Spence was here. He has all the dates and everything. But let's see what year. He was born in, I'm trying to remember. I know his birth date is the same as mine, March 12th. But I think without looking at Wikipedia, sometime in the early 1910s, maybe 1913.

I think it was 1912. Okay. Somewhere along there, yeah. And so he came up through a family. And if you listen to those great episodes of our friend Nathan, and why am I spacing on the name of his show now? Penny Royal. Penny Royal. They get into a lot of great downed history in one of those early episodes. But yeah, he was born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, I believe. And his father was a, among other things, he got the early patents for asphalt paving and road construction.

So he kind of came up through his family had a little money. So he had that going on. But there's a lot of oddness there, too, that Spence can speak to if we get him on. They moved around the country quite a bit. And a lot of this Downard's perspective of what was going on comes up in his early books, The Carnivals of Life and Death, which was the first part of his autobiography. or that's how it was advertised when it was put out by Feral House several years ago. And Downard claimed basically that he was the victim, you know,

at a very young age of this kind of Masonic alliance fraternity of people that were out to get him or screw him over for some reason. And it seemed to have connections with his family as well. And also in the mix, they had the Ku Klux Klan were enemies of his early on. And he battled, according to Downard in his book, Carnival of Life and Death, at a very young age, he battled these people who were trying to set him up as some type of sacrifice. He calls it the pharmacos, kind of a ritual sacrifice of these groups.

It's never quite clear why they were harassing him and persecuting him. But this harassment, according to Downard, went on through the course of his whole life until he ended up passing away in Nashville in the late 1990s. And there's the legendary stories where he traveled across the country, towing his Airstream trailer constantly with the Illuminati on his tail, the Illuminati or the Masonic sorcerers or whatever you want to call them. And he was also somebody that was into looking at 240ian anomalies.

So that was part of the thing he was doing when he was traveling across the country, allegedly. A lot of people suspected that the downer persona was made up for many, many years, that he was perhaps a literary device, a literary construct created by really the handful of people who claimed to have met him starting in the early 70s, such as William Grimstead and Michael Hoffman and a guy named Charles Sanders. Sanders and later on Adam Parfrey as well met with him kind of started corresponding in the

late 80s and the 90s they got to know each other and it was really Parfrey who brought down or helped push him more into popular culture and you know people started really learning about him and his crazy theories in like the late 80s. I think it was 89, the first edition of Apocalypse Culture came out with the mind-blowing essay called King Kill 33. Yes. Which had to do with this far-flung conspiracy theory he had

that the JFK assassination was part of this Masonic conspiracy that was based on latitude, longitude, the 33rd degree in particular, and all part of a kind of alchemical ritual that was set in action, basically to bring about a new eon, perhaps a new world order, something that the Masonic sorcerers were plotting and devising. And part of it had to do with the moon landings and rituals associated with them and connected with Jack Parsons.

He was on the 33rd degree there in California, an adept student prodigy of Alistair Crowley. And it all had to do with the making manifest of all that was unseen. Once again, this alchemical ritual that really started, or once again, downer theorized with the Trinity bomb blast that took place as part of the Manhattan Project near White Sands, Alamogordo area. And that was kind of the beginning of that ritual. And once again, that's on the 33rd degree or kind of, sort of, on the...

He takes some topographical liberty sometimes. Uh-huh, right. And once again, this kind of had to do with the... similar to what Parsons was supposedly up to of creating a homunculus. And Parsons was an explosive expert, and he helped create the original liquid-fueled rocket technology. And it basically had to do with splitting the atoms and creating this new entity. And part of it is kind of based on at least Downard's interpretation of the Kabbalah

them and how originally the male and female were one entity and at some point they were split, perhaps, you know, in the Garden of Eden, Adam's rib, and so they became separate. The male and female energies, the male and female principle, you know. And so part of the thing Downer talked about was these experiments, the type of stuff that Parsons was involved with. And what maybe was going on at Trinity was to, once again, recombine these male and female principles and bring them back together.

And one of the things he talks about, there was this thing called the jumbo there, this large, basically empty canister, I guess you could call it. And nobody was really quite sure what the purpose was of this thing. But, you know, Downer theorized that they were using that to basically create this hermaphrodite entity, the homunculus. Like one does, you know, on a normal weekend. So there's a lot to chew on there. in the 30s another key part of the story is this woman he married by the name of ann parton

who uh good old tennessee girl as i found out today well yep who downer later claimed that his masonic harassers uh basically uh mind controlled her and recruited her into this cult. Kind of like the whole thing about, if you've read the Project Monarch stuff about presidential candidates, they basically, according to Downard, and he started calling her the great whore, they were using her in these rituals across the country that the political elite were involved in, the rich,

these sex magic rituals, once again plays into this whole larger conspiracy. And she was basically abducted and manipulated by, once again, Masonic sorcerers, he calls them at times. Other times he refers to them as the Illuminati. And through the books, he actually talks about two warring groups. One are the Masonic sorcerers, and the other are a bunch of Mexican brujos. And they're kind of, those two groups are both pitted against Downard, or he ends up in the middle of these two different factions.

And these two factions sometimes overlap and cooperate together, and other times they're opposed to each other. And so that also, those two groups, they show up in this latest book, Stalking the Great Whore, The Lost Writings of James Shelby Downard, now available on Amazon. Yes, sir. Why don't you help me fill in the gaps here? I know you know a lot about Downard. What haven't I touched upon there? I just wanted to say that the impact of James Shelby Downard's writings, you mentioned King Kill 33.

And I think for a lot of people, it was nothing less than, you know, almost initiatory because it was introducing you to a whole way of thinking, a whole worldview that enchants the world and sees, you know, sorcery and magic everywhere in, you know, mundane, modern, modern life. And so I think, you know, that's really what this is about. And it's a foreshadowing of so much stuff. It's a continuation of, I think, older things from like the early 20th century anti-occult conspiracy theory. But it really brings it into our modern times. And like you said, it's so much foreshadowing of these themes that would become so prevalent in conspiracy theory of targeted individuals.

monarch mind control and uh you know this uh these new writings are especially elaborating on things that he kind of mentioned in passing and in some other uh writings uh he's really detailing the the mechanisms uh behind how he thinks this the sorcery is works and i think the other really important thing is that by bringing sorcery into this modern world he is viewing science and the development of science and technology through this lens as a continuation of sorcery whereas these groups maybe used to use things like mesmerism they would take those same principles and use technology to control people

you know, in the same kind of model. Right, yeah, and he talks about mesmerism a bit in the book as well and how it's been combined with technology by the so-called Masonic sorcerers. Yeah, and along those same lines, I mean, a lot of the stuff that was going on with 9-11, people were using the term predictive programming. I mean, that was all very downwardian. Oh, yeah. And then later, synchromysticism came in, which was a little bit, you know, there was a fun sort of element with some of the synchromystic stuff. But there was also a lot of paranoia that seeped into that kind of scene, I guess you could call synchromysticism a scene or something for a while.

I don't know how. Yeah, like a blog scene kind of in the first decade of the century. Yeah. While a lot of them were not public and outwardly influenced by Downard, you can see it everywhere. And what Downard represents is a kind of proto-synchromysticism for sure in his methodologies. And that's another thing I think makes Downard so interesting is that his methodologies involve these exhaustive etymological stuff. which is him dissecting words and their meanings, and words having layers of esoteric meanings. How they're connected to certain places.

He calls that Masonic word wizardry and traces it back to the ancient pagan world. And another characteristic is that it's often nonlinear. um so you know things become like intertwined and connected uh mostly like through this word wizardry and it's really hard for a lot of people to read some of the stuff i mean it's hard for me to read it and uh everyone has difficulties with it because it's just all those places for me i'm kind of the uninitiated here like i tried i tried to read carnivals of life and i tried yeah exactly i tried to leave i tried to read carnivals of life and death i mean and a lot of carnivals of life or death are just these like really just outlandish stories that he tells a lot of this

was much more it was just word association all over the place he says and and this this means this which sounds like this which is all about this which also sounds like this and it just goes on and on and on and it's just uh we were we were talking before we started recording that like the way i started just like the way i just took this book was just like okay i don't know if i'm going to retain any of this but i'll just go along for the ride and that's kind of what you have to do you just kind of got to go along for the ride of what he's writing and not worry about whether or not like try to understand it because it will probably it will probably drive you crazy As it very well might have driven James Shelby Downer crazy, because that's what some of the book gets into.

He makes allusions to different mental facilities that he may or may have not been in. And it kind of starts with Walter Reed Hospital. And it basically stated, well, man, it gets really involved, but partly it had to do, Downard claims that he was in contact with Franklin Roosevelt during the period Roosevelt was president, claimed he visited him in the White House. He had conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt.

And Downward was always coming across treasures, and some of those are the million-dollar gold certificates. Others are these strange decoding or weird devices that seem to be early forms of computers. and these things would always just show up and he'd go, wow, you know, I found perhaps, you know, this is really something of great importance to the world or a great value. And then for some reason, he'd, you know, stumble upon these things

and they'd be taken away from him. and one had to do with a bunch of books he came across that were filled with scientific wonders or something, I think he says, and part of it had to do with early atomic or nuclear fission technology, these type of things, and he thought Franklin Roosevelt should have those books, So he got a hold of Roosevelt and Roosevelt said, yeah, I want those scientific wonders and we'll pay you a good amount. And he got a huge check and he was just like, wow, crazy. They seem to pay me way more money. But then the check was worthless for some reason.

And it gets into the silver million dollar gold certificates stuff. And so he bought himself a sporty sports car, a Bugatti or something he called it. And he was in Washington, D.C., and he parked it, started walking. The next thing he knew, he was in Walter Reed Hospital. That's kind of in that first chapter. It talks about that. That kind of is the beginning of what he is suggesting or hinting was this mind control scenario that was played on him through various means, through drugs, through different type of implants, electronic implants.

They supposedly did the same thing to his wife as well. And I forgot. Oh, so, you know, you look and there's different mentions of a Western state hospital that he, it's not clear in the book. He has great knowledge of this place where he's saying there's these atrocities going on with the Masonic sorcerers and the Ku Klux Klan involved in their mistreating the patients. But he doesn't really necessarily, in Stalking the Great Horse, says he was basically a patient there. But then other sources seem to suggest that T was.

Michael Hoffman had some information that T was in this Western State Hospital. I forget there's another name for this place, too. I think it's Boulevard. There you go. The Boulevard something institution in West Tennessee, I think. There you go, yeah. And so there's that going on. And then another, I think it's in that first chapter as well, he's talking about, he goes into a third-person thing sometimes where it becomes evident he's talking about himself. But for some reason in certain chapters, he talks about other people.

I think he's referring to himself, and he says that there were some men, three or two or three men that got sent to this facility out in the California desert and also Arizona desert, somewhere in that general area. And they were part of this mind control program where they were, it sounds like, clockwork orange type stuff that was going on with these guys. And at one point, they realized that they needed to escape. And these men tried to take off and not all of them made it.

And it's this kind of reference to this thing that had no context until Richard Spence in this where he could add some insight into it, came across some newspaper article that listed a James S. Downard and two or three other individuals escaping this mental institute in Arizona. at the same time Downard was living in the Arizona area. It's a little confusing because the James Downard mentioned in the article didn't quite match the age of James Shelby Downard by three or four years, but you often see those mistakes in newspaper articles.

Yeah. I think Spence says that it might have actually been a couple. They might have been reversed with one of the other escapees. Ages might have been reversed. It seems pretty obvious. It's him when you connect all these other dots of his names, having knowledge of these different mental institutions. So that was something going on in his life. And there's these blank periods, like in the latter part of the 50s, where we have nothing on Downert, and that might have been one of those time periods where, yeah, he was in a mental institution for quite a few years.

Yeah, it's really disjointed, and the biographical information is really scattered, but he talks about he is in the process, in these writings, of trying to recall and piece this stuff together. That too, yeah, right. The limbo of lost memories, like the title of Spence's essay in the end. But a lot of this is about his purported victimization by these cabals, by these evil scientists, puts him in this unique position to understand the role of this shadow world of sorcery. because he's been a victim of it, been targeted for this ritualistic assassination that he sees later,

like in the assassination of JFK or for this mind control stuff. So his role as a scapegoat and victim is what, according to him, initiates him into this world and that he's trying to share with us and make us understand. Right, right. We should talk about how you got this material that has been collected into Stalking the Great Whore. So part of it has to do, I wrote that book. God, I can't even remember the James Shelby Downard's Mystical War. It was an attempt at a biography of Downard.

And that was back like in the mid 2000s. And and so, yeah, I got interested in the topic and that book was kind of well received, but I was never real happy with it. But it was out there. So I was known as one of the downer dudes. and I did some correspondence with Michael Hoffman and Grimstead, the guys who claimed they knew Downard during the 70s or so. So I was kind of in that network of people interested in Downard trying to gather information. And Adam Parfrey as well was part of the people who were quote-unquote Downard fans.

And so he talked about the carnivals of life and death. Parfrey published that, which as far as the way he basically stated it, it was the first part of Downard's autobiography kind of ends. I forget what the dates, but it ends always like in his early 20s or so. I think in that book and most everybody assumed that was all there was. And that's how Parfrey stated it in the introduction of that, that it didn't seem like Downard ever finished writing his autobiography.

So, yeah, I was, you know, gathering information. I put my own book together, and at some point, I guess it was 2015, William Grimsted contacted me, and he said, something significant appears to have happened, and I have what might be part two of Downard's great autobiography. He wasn't quite sure what he had because what had been passed along to him came from a guy named Charles Sanders. Sanders was part of that group that met with Downard in the early 70s in St. Petersburg, along with Grimsted and Hoffman.

And according to Sanders, and whenever Sanders was never quite clear about the timeline, but it seemed like the mid-1980s or something before Downard left to live in Nashville, he left his manuscripts and different stuff with the Sanders guy. And somehow this material was placed on microfiche. If you're at all familiar, your listeners are with what microfiche is. You guys ever done the microfiche? Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Long, long time ago. I'm not sure how much machines are still around.

I was using them the last time was like 20 years ago. and a library near me. And the last time I went in, they were gone. History, but it was, you know, the state of the art at one time for storing information back in the 70s or whatever. So that's what this manuscript was on. And it looked to be a lot of stuff. He, Grimsted, took the stuff to his library where they had a microfiche reader, and he gave me a general idea of what it was. And he said, since I was like one of the key or main guys, you know, writing about Downard, was I interested in this manuscript?

And I said, oh, definitely. And he said, well, if you split the cost with me for converting it to TIFF files, then I'll let you have the manuscript, you know. but he wanted some financial help. So it was like only a hundred bucks or whatever on my part. And so he got them converted into TIFFs, whoever does that nowadays, and sent it to me, and that was like 2015 or 2016. And after that, it was just forever working on the manuscript and getting into a lot of inside baseball here. But, yeah, there was a lot, too, just, you know, taking the tips and trying to do the OCR thing to get them converted to a Word doc.

And that never worked out very well, you know. I ended up basically took some of that stuff, but it needed to be heavily edited. It probably would have saved more time if I just would have typed the whole thing myself to begin with. colossal formatting weirdness happened to these various documents. And at one point, I sent out, I did a post at Historia Discordia. I thought, maybe I can get a bunch of people to help me type this damn thing. And a bunch of people volunteered, you know, and I sent that out, and they were all helpful. But then various chapters, people typed up, and I fed this onto a document.

It was all formatted weird. And long story short, I spent several more years getting it, you know, so I could do something with it. Then, you know, probably spent a couple of years editing while I'm working on other projects, and I'd set it aside. And, you know, finally this last year, I said, I'm going to get this fucking thing done or I'll be hassling around with it forever. So that's kind of the, uh, you know, inside baseball stuff, probably not really exciting to, uh, most listeners for, but you know, for people who, uh, for all your amateur paranormal archivists out there, I'm sure. Yeah.

It's crazy. Very interesting. I think you hit on like a common theme, right. With, um, calling it stalking the great whore so why did you choose that title because that's obviously not what this was originally titled there was no real i guess when you had it there when you got it there was really no rhyme or reason to any of it um i discovered later the title and i've got the uh manuscript open here so i can tell you but i'm pretty sure the original title of this thing was was Sorcery, Sex, Assassination, and the Science of Symbolism. And Downard, from what I can tell, started writing this in 1972.

And then he's always got this thing. He lost the manuscript. It was stolen from him. And I think he started another version in 76. And so that's basically the time frame. That's why the manuscript or manuscripts I got, they seem to be two or three different works. You know, you could tell it was different typewriters and stuff. And, you know, one manuscript was incomplete, and there was like overlap. So you can see the editorial confusion that comes in and trying to use the best parts, you know, but not be repetitive and on and on.

So anyway, that was the original title. And I found that through a FOIA request that we did a couple of years ago. Actually, Jack Brewer did it for me, and he brought it up. You want me to do a downer for your request? Yeah, sure. Why not? See what the hell we can get on this guy. And I need to actually share this with the world. I've had it for a couple of years. I'm very curious about that. Okay. I will do that. Because originally, the reason I haven't shared it before, I was going to put it into an appendix in this book. And that was another problem. It was like I had to make a bunch of put together very large appendix with stuff.

But then it was like, oh, shit, this is too freaking large of a book for different reasons. And so I plan to publish that material elsewhere. But anyway, what the FOIA files on Downard were basically a letter that Downard wrote to the director of the FBI, who was, I think it was the one after J. Edgar Hoover, Clarence Kelly, maybe. And basically, it's a rambling six-page thing accusing the FBI of all kinds of shit. The Federal Bureau of Inverts. Yeah. I should have mentioned them, too, as key enemies that are working in collaboration with the Masonic Sorcerers, the Federal Bureau of Inverts, and the CIA.

So nothing else came back on that FOIA request as far as the powers that be weren't interested in Downard like he thought they were? No, that's it. Just this letter he wrote. And anyway, in that letter, it mentions, I'm working on this book called Sorcery Sex Assassination and the Science of Symbolism. And some of the material in this letter was like, it's also in the book. So he's just pulling stuff out. And so it was obvious that was the title of the manuscript I had. But I suspect there are other people with some versions of sorcery, sex, assassination, and the science of symbolism.

They have maybe similar manuscripts or something, because Hoffman has mentioned this, that he knew about this name. So he might have a shorter version of this manuscript because he didn't have all the material I had. And just for fear of using that name and somebody else contesting it or coming out with another version, I just decided maybe I'll. And so, you know, that name popped into my head at some point, Stalking the Great Whore. And that relates to a recurring theme throughout the autobiographical parts, which is him and his ex-wife that you mentioned.

Yeah, at one point after they separate, he's following her across the countries because he's trying to bust this racket or find out what the Masonic sorcerers are up to, what they're doing with her. And he chases her around the country. And some of the scenes are in California. And other ones are like, where the hell was it? in Louisiana, where she was performing for Franklin Roosevelt and some Saturnalia magic ritual where this nightclub they were at burned up.

But then the other ones talks about he's in California, and he's traced her to Mount Palomar, where it has that history of not only like Georgia Damsky and flying saucers, but he claimed even before that that the OTO had some type of altar or temple set up there on Mount Palomar because it was like one of these energy points. Downer talks about that a lot in the book, too, that these witches and these sorcerers are using these different PowerPoints. And once again, that falls in line with the King Kill 33 stuff where they can channel the energies.

And, you know, there's a story that they were using the Palomar telescope that was connected to Jack Parsons and J.P.L. And that group, they were performing rituals in there and that they were focusing the light of, in some tellings of the story, Saturn. Other times they were focusing the light of Sirius, bringing in the power of the cosmos as part of these cult rituals that were going on that the great whore, his former wife, was involved with. But then again, you know, he talks about these sometimes, and he doesn't state for sure that he actually saw some of the stuff happen.

And he's just theorizing why was she at Mount Palomar? And he also traces some prostitution ring also that were active in this area that she was involved with. Yeah, you mentioned these places of power and these kind of like geomantic ideas. And that's what I think is the most interesting about Downert is that he's enchanting the American landscape also. And he really elaborates on these ideas in here, which I was really surprised about. Yeah, totally. I was really happy that he elaborated because I've encountered the same cartographic mysticism in treasure hunting cultures,

where they obsess over using these old topographical maps and place name and all this stuff. another part of his methodology, which is mystical toponomy. And the idea is that these word associations, this word wizardry, he has this idea that places are given names either based on some kind of power they had beforehand or to create some kind of power there. And that then when these events are orchestrated in these places, it amplifies the magical potential of what's going on. So he's, he confirms that he's going through America while he's stalking the great whore.

And, uh, he is just looking for weird place names. I think those place names are really like leading him into these symbol patterns that he explains. And he talks about this, uh, in the book, he talks about this idea of the tessellation of the earth. So like in the Masonic lodge floor the threshing floor of the temple of solomon black and white tiles of tessellation and like that's carried over into the establishment of latitude longitude lines and that the numerology behind it and actual trigonometry that's based on x and y axis but has this mystical significance

like all plays into the two so it's it's it's really wild but yeah i think he might have been around some treasure hunting circles also because they have some this the same obsession with secret societies focus on place names and numbers of latitude longitude etc so yes he gets pretty deep in the weeds all this jewish mysticism and stuff and i a lot of it i mean you explain that pretty well a lot of it goes over my head i don't know sometimes how accurate he is with a lot of the stuff he says and how historically accurate and you know it would have been great if i would

have had the time to spend 10 years you know yeah actually yeah and this the analyzing different paragraphs and stuff. Is this really based on historical fact? How much is he just kind of improvising here on certain themes? How much stuff is he throwing into this that isn't really based on historic fact? I'm not really sure, but he seemed to have a great grasp of a lot of different, like I said, for instance, Jewish mysticism and other Egyptian mystery religions

and on and on and on. And there's also the people who wonder, well, how much help did he have with other people like Hoffman and Grimstedt? Did they write some of these chapters? How deeply were they involved in some of this? Because, you know, you look at some of Downer's writings I've seen. He's, you know, obviously a very intelligent guy, but some of the stuff I've read, he wasn't a real adept or deft writer, you know? Yeah. What do you think about the difference in style in here? because I'm not, I mean, just, just as a primer real quick for the audience who may not be

familiar with this stuff, his, his first writings that really came out were co-written by Michael Hoffman and had, you know, definitely had Hoffman style in it. And you can recognize that Hoffman writes in this like really, really dramatic, almost like, I would say it resembles like situationist and other ironically like radical leftist and post-Marxist stuff. Yeah. So that's, it's kind of strange, but he, you know, he has hallmarks of his writing. You can definitely identify it. Then in carnivals of life and death, there's like a little bit of that sprinkled in, but it's much more of like the pretty primitive, not very great writing. Like you're saying, I don't know why, but like, this is kind of in between, but I don't

really see Hoffman in this material. Well, I think he is there. But first off, I ended up in the role as another editor. You've had different editors. You had for Carnivals of Life and Death, you had that lady. She wrote like a book about harp and some other stuff. It'll come to me in a minute. So you had Hoffman involved in this and probably Grimsted at some level over the years. He was helping formulate a lot of these moon ritual stuff. And my job in this, I thought I wanted to make it a smooth read.

And so there was a lot of editorial things I did with just cleaning up the prose and making it read smoother, but also try to make it sound like it's in Downard's voice or some type of consistency as well. So if I gave you the rough manuscript of this, you would see where passages, several pages, were pretty damn well written. Other ones were like, oh my God, it's just repetitive and it really needs a lot of work on the prose.

And so I was dealing with that, too, a balancing act of not changing it too much where it didn't seem like it was down or telling the story. Right. And this could all be also evidence of someone who wasn't necessarily mentally stable and at certain times was a lot more creative. Yeah, you can see that in the book, and I tried to leave that in there, too, where he'd go on little mini rants about stuff, you know. So, it was that kind of balancing act to do that. So, you know, that's the kind of stuff that hasn't progressed over a few years. It's like, ah, God, how am I going to handle this, you know?

I got halfway through it, you know, after a few years. Is this even working? Do I want to do this, you know? uh and there's the element about the individuals surrounding downard and their reputation how you know is it worth going through this i haven't caught a lot of flack about any of that yet and i really don't probably don't give a shit at this point so you know it's all those type of things you have to weigh in when uh yeah for sure doing a project like this but um even though there may be other versions of this it did appear to you and it does seem that all of this were intended to be a collective body of work oh yeah it's definitely yeah and uh i didn't really uh i

might have added a couple little things here and there you know just to make it a little bit entertaining and but uh you know it's it's basically taken from that manuscript and that at times uh you know i had like i said had to do a lot of editing for some sections just to make it more readable and flow and sometimes that consists of well there's about 10 pages here that are crap And they're repetitive, too, and I don't think it's adding that much to it. I think what maybe I will eventually do, you know, kicking around the idea with Spence and, you know, getting some help with other people, putting out another biography on Downward with everything we've learned here in the last few years.

And at some point I might even take this whole manuscript and create a link where people can go read it. You know, if we do write a, if I do or with other people write a biography, then they can link directly to this manuscript to see what we're referring to. And people can see the raw, rough work. But, you know, there's a bit of, once again, you get on a little bit of a slippery slope there, you know, where people, it's like people need to see this work in context, but also understand that I don't promote the protocols of the elders of Zion and some of the other extreme stuff that shows up in the raw manuscript.

extreme being what people see could justifiably see as anti-Semitic or racist stuff yeah and in that he's definitely a product of this is a continuation of anti-occult conspiracy theory and that has a lot of baggage with it and a big part of it and it's become more evident that Downward was, you know, a lot of this is based on John Birch Society stuff, too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. I mean, this totally, I know Adam wanted to talk about the Trotsky chapter. Yeah, we'll get to that. But actually, I wanted to ask you, though, I am curious about this.

What's the chronology of the writings? So, I mean, what comes first chronologically? I mean King Kill obviously Is published first And then you got Carnivals of Life and Death But of the three When do you think that they were You mentioned this was written primarily Like 72 to 76 And you can tell because There's a lot of references to Watergate Gerald Ford So you have the book in front of you Yeah If you go to the table of contents. Yeah. And if you go to the last chapter, the mysticism

of the necromancers. Necromancers. Yeah. What that what is basically within that chapter is King Kill 33. Right, right. And originally Okay. Hoffman got the – he had some version of this manuscript, but he particularly had that stuff in that last chapter there. And it was in the original manuscript, it was Chapter 13, what I have. And I saw in Downard's letter, he's mentioned these were letters that Downard wrote in the early 90s.

He talked about, well, Hoffman edited chapter 13. And so the original King Kill 33 came out of this chapter in Stalking the Great Whore. And I don't think even Hoffman is totally aware of it because so many years have passed. And actually, I got his permission. I told him, you know, one chapter here is basically the early version of King Kill 33. And he was fine with it, you know, me using it for this book. So you're asking the chronology of his writings. basically this stalking the great whore

the other name it had the sorcery sex assassination and the science of symbolism was his first great work and from all of this came a lot of the other stuff the carnivals of life and death yeah that's a weird one that was like another manuscript he had And Alana Freeland is the one who edited it for. But there's another version of it that Michael Hoffman put out that seems to be more of Downard's original writings. And I think he did that later, maybe. And it's hard. It's hard to say it was after it was after this first manuscript.

And so then everything else, you'll see different articles and essays. It comes from this bulk of material here. Most of his writings, I guess, were probably in the 70s and maybe some stuff in the 80s. There was a couple. There's the Carnivals of Life and Death, and there's also another thing called Skullduggery. Like I was saying, the manuscript I got were manuscripts, you know. there was like seems to be three different things on different typewriters and i'm thinking the carnival of life and deaths maybe are part of this puzzle too is all this stuff he wrote

basically in the mid 70s things get chopped up and he loses stuff and working with different people on things it's yeah it's not but that seems to be the 70s is probably his most prolific period And the stuff was kind of, you know, cut and paste from there and edited with other authors later on. Yeah. And by the 90s, I have some letters. He couldn't really even see that well by then. You know, so obviously he did most of his writings once again in the 70s and other people took that stuff and edited it. And I actually, we're talking about the carnivals of life and death.

I prefer the version that Michael Hoffman put out of that, which I think is closer to Downward's writing. I don't want to bash Elena Freeland, you know, because she did her own thing with that. But I kind of like the version Hoffman put out, which I think is closer to Downward's writing. Once again, we're getting pretty inside baseball here, but there's some downer fanatics out there. Yeah. Well, that's what's, I mean, one of the things that's so compelling is that you've just got this series of enigmas because his claims and his ideas are fascinating enough. And then you have the mysterious authorship, his actual historicity.

I mean, there's so many mysteries that makes it especially a great research project for someone like Spence, who I hope we get on later to talk about his chapter in there. Since he's not here, you want to just give a rundown about Spence's essay in here and the history of that? Yeah, it's called The Limbo of Lost Memories. And he really spends time, you know, going, looking through different materials. He uses different resources, you know, newspaper.com, chasing articles down and since, you know, U.S.

censuses to basically track down or during different periods and pull it is pulled up a lot of information. So it's kind of a blow by blow of what we know about Downard, what factual information we know about Downard, where he was at certain times. And, you know, there's still a lot of questions out there. And he actually started working on this essay, have you, on Downard maybe 10 years ago or so. And we were communicating back then. And when I got around to doing this book, I asked if I could use it for the book.

And so there you are. In the course of writing this, like I said, once again, editing it, putting it together, he would learn new stuff. So every couple of years, it was like, hey, Rich, could you update afterward and add this other stuff he just found? And so the version here that appears in Stalking the Great Whore is pretty close to his latest version. But he's found out more things about Downard since we published this as well, which he can talk about when you talk to him. One of the things that I found particularly interesting was that Downard lived in my hometown for a little while in the 40s.

that is chattanooga yeah oh yeah he um with the great whore him and the great whore lived on a house on south crest road which um i looked on the map and it's right down the street from where a relative of mine used to live have you went and looked at the house no i just found this out today oh wow when i when i read uh spencer's afterwards so is the relative around or people who visited them um yeah i mean yeah i mean well they don't ever went to a tupperware party with the gray well no i mean this was it's not at the same time okay okay but but yeah i mean i looked at i looked on google maps today and found found the house um so yeah uh that that kind of blew me away

apparently he was i mean he was i guess stationed at fort oglethorpe which was at that time a working army base i think this was like 1942 1943 something like that so yeah there's been a lot of sleuthing going on with the once again spence and uh nathan isaac as well we were kicking stuff back and forth and uh he was real nathan was dubious for a while did this was this even a real dude you know or Were they just the group around him using him as a literary device and writing this stuff? And one of the things was the photo of Downard on the carnivals of life and death, where you see this house behind him.

Pretty nice, older style house. And I remember Nathan was started. We had we had an address from some letters I had, you know. And so my mind that kind of proved, well, you know, if somebody concocted this thing, they were using an address in Nashville, living there, pretending to be downer. downer to you know it seems like this would be too much work to go to go through to uh concoct this whole thing around him and the address we had i remember nathan had a uh private detective

around that area look and i think they had the wrong address they basically had the same name and numbers, but they had like the south version of that, where the house was on the north version of that street. And I finally got on Google Earth one time, street addresses, and confirmed that indeed the house where Downard is posing in front of is the same address that was on his letters. And that's where his sister owned that house. So, you know, that was one of the other things. Was he in Nashville or was he in Memphis? Oh, excuse me, Memphis.

So we should talk about Trotsky. Well, and I want to also say this, that there's the first couple of chapters really kind of start off as a, or two or three chapters, start off, I'm almost kind of like, just like carnivals of life and death. Yeah. Where he's talking about himself and he's talking about these atlantic stories that make it would make a really great movie. He's inserted himself around a lot of historical figures. And there's actually some couple of paragraphs that are in carnivals of life and death that are in this. That's what I'm saying. The chronology of the writings. But anyway, yeah. So carry on. so he meets trotsky and what happens what happened in mexico yeah mexico city i guess

but what happens with trotsky this is where you can look at these writings and uh see it's kind of like uh one theory i have it's kind of semi-shared by nathan and rich maybe to some extent is that part of this whole story was like a take on John Birch society stuff that they were creating this narrative and Downward was just a kind of device to push out this political propaganda. Yeah he was probably inundated with it at the time I mean a lot of people would go to meetings they were getting I believe it's called American Opinion there were bookstores so

Right. And so part of it has, you know, with the whole John Birch Society stuff, if you've read None Dare Call It Conspiracy, there's a basically American industrialists and Wall Street people were funding both sides against each other. They were funding the communists and the Nazis and whatever. And it's all part of this thing to undermine the U.S. and turn us into socialists or whatever. So that's kind of the deal. Then you have the thing about the million dollar gold certificates that Downert is always coming across.

And it seems to have And Downard also was I guess at The Jekyll Island When the Federal Reserve was formed So it all deals with these themes That you see in John Birch Society Literature about The gold standard and the manipulation Of markets and the Federal Reserve Is a bad thing And on and on and on I think that all is all those elements are in the story about Trotsky. And Trotsky, once again, going back to none dare call it conspiracy, was one of, he was funded by these manipulators, the international bankers,

the international Jewish banking conspiracy, some call it. None dare call it conspiracy, though. And so anyway, this chapter on Trotsky, Downards in Mexico, and it's not clear. He doesn't state the date exactly, but it appears to be like 1937 and 38. And he's with a girl he's traveling with. And it's obviously that's his wife, who he later called the great whore. And I don't know why he calls this girl he was traveling with this girl. They were married at this time. That's one, you know, another oddities about these writings. Yeah, that's odd.

Yeah, right. And so he's in, he's giving these sweet deals. He's looking for a place to stay. And there's this mansion that's just opening up run by some lady he doesn't like. But, you know, they're looking for people to stay there. It's going to become a like tourist resort or something like that. So anyway, he's got this prime like patio suite in this mansion in Mexico City. and he's as downer as often what to do he's uh now he's walking through the match and looking

around and he finds some safe or something that happens to be open with a bunch of these million dollar gold certificates which he takes into his possession considers these are great treasures the million dollar certificates you know he doesn't say he's stealing them he's just found them came across them and they're he wants to find out more about them are they really things and there actually was these things called the million dollar gold certificates if you look on wikipedia you can find information about the million dollar gold certificates they were basically based on that old

gold standard and when sometime during you know when fdr was president he basically got rid of that gold standard which you know pissed off a bunch of the industrialists and people because they want an alternative monetary system i'm getting kind of seems like i'm going off on tangents but these are the elements in these stories so he comes across these million dollar gold certificates he basically tells a few of his friends about them and he divvies them up into a couple batches and puts them in a couple banks in Mexico

and now the Mexican, seems like the Mexican government the Masonic sorcerer and the Masonic witches are all after him to get these million dollar gold certificates back which becomes, you know, yeah, it's a story like in Carnivals of Life and Death where he's like pulling out a water gun with like some ink in it to squirt his adversaries in the eyes and takes their guns away from them. The water pistol man. Yeah. And then he ends up, he finds out Trotsky is living there in Mexico City, which he was at the time. he doesn't know why trotsky wants to see him but there's an invitation and he goes

sees him and there's this like elaborate or convoluted episode where trotsky has these devices set up where he's going to electrify downer but downer turns the tables and he sees what's going on so he turns the switch and do hickey there and Trotsky ends up getting electrocuted and all the his other goons and stuff. Downard tricks them, but he also finds out that his the girl he was with was also there at that wherever Trotsky was at, there was some hanky-panky going on.

And perhaps it was the beginning when she got basically groomed or brought into that different Masonic sorcerer's cult. And so there's that scene. And basically, Downard takes off with Trotsky is like he's passed out. He got zapped or whatever. It's not clear he died. It seems like he might have got zapped or whatever. But then later in later chapters in the book, Downard states that that device killed Trotsky. Right. Yeah. I read that. Yeah. which it was he actually which yeah isn't i mean the story that uh you know mainstream mainstream

historians would want you to believe is that yeah some uh political opponent with a hatchet chopped up uh trotsky or something like that but it was the downer who actually was responsible, I guess. Quite the claim of fame there. So you can look at this chapter and it's like, okay, is this basically they're telling this kind of John Birch Society narrative about the FDR and the communists and using Downard as this Walter Mitty type character, or was this something that Downard confabulated what he he traveled a lot was he in mexico city names different names of people

that were there you know uh and some of it checks out i mean that's why this stuff is so fascinating because you can't so so is it partly true that he met some of this people and he confabulated stuff or yeah it's just uh hard to know or as you know yeah um one one thing i want to talk about um before we probably get close to wrapping this up is um something that nathan isaac is really into of course and that's fucking cybernetics man and uh you know elaborating a little bit on uh downard's belief that these emerging technologies that interface with the mind, like these primitive

implanted device or a continuation of things from mesmerism to turn people into what he calls servomechanisms. This whole idea that cybernetics is a continuation of sorcery. Well, yeah, that's the Masonic sorcerers who was doing that stuff as compared to, he talks about two different types of witches. there's the more primitive witches and there's the more the cybernetic witches or he says are the masonic sorcerers are bringing actual science into this taking yeah the primitive witchery and bringing it to the 20th centuries with cybernetics and mind control devices and also tapping into the

Earth's energies and et cetera, et cetera. I don't know if I have much more to add, but that's the basic theme. Yeah, that's a real interesting part of that. He had discovered this supposedly through his own dangerous web he got caught up in. Right. And I think Spence has been looking into a lot of that too, right? As far as that he may have this kind of inside view because he was actually trying to create these types of technologies that I guess could have been used for something like this. You know, I'd be best to get Spence to talk about that because he could rattle it off the top of his head.

But he's found, well, there's different people. There's also a researcher named Reed Marcus who found this article about Downard and his involvement. It's kind of like he's a mad scientist dude in this article from an Arizona newspaper. and this device he came up with called the ultrasound, which ties into all of this stuff. And it was one of the big revelations that's come here the last couple of years is that Downard was kind of, in some of his rants, he's projecting, it seems like, because he was trying to create the same sort of technology that he is admonishing these other people about basically to tap into human potential.

And I mean, that was the positive benefits by whatever, tuning your brain to a certain frequency or some of the stuff, you know, And Downard almost seemed like he was a contemporary of Jack Parsons almost of, in a sense of, what's the word, blending these different things, occult type stuff into modern day science. Yeah. He even hints at being caught up in that occult mess or something like that, I recall reading. So, so there's a question as to if he was, uh, you know, what side he might've been on

at one point. True. Yeah. As we, we wind this down, I want to just read a passage that particularly struck me. Uh, there's. Serfiel refuses to read a passage in his downer voice. I think Serfiel should read the passage. If you want to do it, Serfiel, you're more than welcome. But I will just say that there's a lot about sex, and there's a lot about talking about people's butts and his butt. There's all kinds of just... It's called stalking the great whore, and like Adam was saying to me earlier today, he was like, man, this guy is just obsessed with sex.

Yeah. But I mean, it's about essentially at the root of this, you know, sorcerous religion that he thinks rules the world. It really is a fertility cult. That's what he thinks. So everything really does revolve around sex. Yeah, right. I didn't even get into that part yet, but exactly. Yeah. What page was that on, Adam? It is the bottom of page 30 and the top of page 31. Okay, I'm going to try to do it. If it was on page 33, I would have really loved it. Oh, man. And I appreciate you blowing out your voice for this, but you did this earlier, and it was hysterical. Okay. Yes. I've done something similar before in here.

And this is from, of course, there are audio recordings of James Shelby Downard on what is called the Serious Rising tape. So that's where I learned this effect here. He spent a lot of time listening to them. So that's, and it definitely is of a, um, it's been characterized as, as Appalachian. I think one of the, uh, Penny Royal guys said, but it also, it reminds me of some kind of high society, Tennessee folks. It would kind of fit into it. It's, it's kind of from another era though. Right. Yeah. Here's people talk like that anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so here we go. Then I recalled quite clearly that a great number of years ago I had suffered severe

pain that extended from my rectum through the sacrum along the spine and up behind both ears. I obtained some relief by contracting and expanding the anal muscles a great number times each day for several weeks. The expanding contracting of my asshole muscles brought about a great deal of gas elimination, and I thought that somehow the excessive gas might have been the cause of my pain. Then an abscess between the rectum and scrum came to a head, and from it I pulled a fine wire approximately 10 inches long. The wire was undoubtedly implanted in me by way of a long hollow needle and I have every reason to believe that this procedure was done

at Walter Reed Hospital. Brilliant. I had to put myself in mute there so I wasn't cracking up. That's Adam's favorite part. Yeah, it is. I read that and died. I don't know if I laughed so much You know, because I Like I said, I was editing this forever So I went through passages Again and again, but that definitely was One that struck me as odd You know Yeah, I mean, that would be a pretty Creepy experience, but Let's hope that he wasn't the one Doing that to people at some point

Yeah Running people into servo mechanisms I mean, I'm sure we're going to find out even more. Yeah, hopefully you get to talk to Spence. He can fill in some more of the information. I mean, he's much better than I am since he's dealt with a lot of the timeline of Downer and a lot of the factual information to kind of give you that. background on the man yeah he's one of the best scholars i know of who deals with very murky areas and tries to suss out some kind of you know historical facts out of that yeah i could too if i

studied up for a few days and knew i was going to give a presentation but you know me i'm always bouncing around working on some other projects so well speaking of you gave an excellent presentation on some of this stuff and a little bit of a preview of some of this material at the strange realities conference last year so we really enjoyed that and thanks i don't have new natural i'm critical of myself i didn't come off as uh as well as i thought it could have but you know i tried well we thought it was great and and i say that because uh you know doing public speaking sometimes uh some sometimes you just uh i've done some you know where you you're so

familiar with the topic, you can just kind of roll with it and everything will come to your, you know, the tip of your tongue when you need it. And after I gave that presentation there for you guys, it was like, oh man, I forgot this, forgot that. But you know, the information I shared was some of it was probably new to a lot of folks, you know, so that was good. Yeah. Yeah. A lot that i'd never heard before and i mean it a lot of it made perfect sense really so i think i told you that after uh when we were talking at the hotel right right yeah it does when you look at the whole psychological situation surrounding uh downer now there seems to be a lot in the material

There's a lot of projection, you know, things he talks about and what was really going on in his life, you know. Well, Adam, I want to thank you for coming on as always. This has been a great show. Well, I guess we'll just reconnect with Dr. Spence. We'll get him on at some later date. Talk a little bit more downed, I guess. I think you should. Too bad he didn't make it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't. Yeah. Well, I hope everything's all right. But what's next for you? Where can people find Stalking the Great Whore and all your other books? So I would tell them normally when looking for my books, you know, go to Amazon, Putch and Adam Go-Rightly.

But this one's Stalking the Great Whore is a little different. I think it's easier just to search James Shelby Downer since he's the main author and stalking the great whore than it will pop up. And that's basically where it's available is through Amazon. Yeah. And so shucks, I'm working on a few things, which I told you guys off the air, but I don't want to talk. I'm not ready to talk about them yet, but, uh, other than that, yeah, I'm just, uh, Hey things. We'll just put it that way. Yeah. And Sir field is going to hopefully assist me with one here because it deals

with the area he's living in now, which can't be disclosed since he's in a secret bunker there, but that's right. That's right. My, my conspiracy Quonset hut. That's good. Yeah. Are you still, your websites are still up, all available? Yep, there's adamgoreightly.com, and there's Untamed Dimensions, and there's one that maybe not everybody knows about is Chasing UFOs, which I'm kind of putting probably blogging the most to recently in the last year or so. So then there's Historia Discordia, which deals with Discordianism and Carrie Thornley.

There's a lot of material there for people into that subject. There's the film, The Hill and the Hole. People should check out if they got Amazon Prime. I play the role of Roger Person, a Masonic cult leader, serial killer, funnel cake maker. directed by chris ernst and co-starring tim banal yep bill darman is uh co-director on the film with chris ernst excellent film definitely everyone should go check that out too man i can't think of anything else all right well guys uh that's it thanks for listening to this episode conspira normal again usual spiels uh strange realities conference tickets will be

going on sale soon that's going to be November 3rd through the 5th of 2023 at SIR and then one day just online and I also produce YouTube channel Navea's Nightmare you guys can go check that out as well part of Strange Reality's family and we also have our Patreon which Serfiel can tell you guys about by the time this comes out we would have had our first Strange Realities online streaming event. Right, right. I'm sure it went well. That can be attended for free for members of the Mystic crew at the $10 pledge level over at patreon.com slash conspiranormal. The $5 level gets you exclusive Patreon episodes going back a few years now.

Tons of episodes on there for the $5 level. You get to join the International Association of Conspiranormalists. the aforementioned $10 mystic crew. And at the $20 level, you can join the ancient circle of strange realities of which, uh, Adam go rightly is rumored to be a member of, but you'll have to find out. He's such a secret member. He didn't even know. All right, guys. Thanks so much for joining us. Uh, next week we've got AP strange coming back. We're going to talk about exorcisms outside of the Catholic Church. And so join us next time on Conspiranormal.