Are There Doors in the World?

A novel that I like quite a bit is Charles deLint's The Little Country. In that book he allows the reader to believe that there are places where [my phrase now] "the world grows thin" and one can pass from one reality to another --- for we Earthlings, Terra to Faerie, or whatever one wants to call your favorite "other place". In deLint's book, the transporting place was the Men-an-Tol in Cornwall. 

I used the picture above long ago { 11/21/09 } on this blog to lead off a wildly Out Proctor claim by an old Alaskan copper miner that he had in fact stumbled through such a portal and knew exactly where it was. He had written of all people a UFOlogist about this, and his letter was passed on to Allen Hynek, who I presume did nothing about it --- it would have been a cold rough trip to the Yellowknife Copper Mountains region of upper Canada. 

This was the general region that he described....

.... and this was the specific. There is a Willow Creek running west/east on the left side of the map, and a lake pooling in it. He mentioned Willow Lake as his main camp. {so get your tickets}.

The countryside is not scenic. The ground is mainly rock with a moss and lichen cover. His job was to wander about this area pounding on promising looking surfaces, and if lucky taking samples for lab analysis. It was near the end of a tenure out in this wilderness when he was finished with his job and just decided to wander, when his adventure happened. Before I go into it though, here is why I'm writing about this again: a regular reader of this blog noticed that this story, slightly different [as it came from a relative of the witness whose letter Hynek had] had been been posted on another site. As the story was the same [all the settings were identical plus the beginning and ending], but different [the original witness correspondence had left out some high strangeness], this "news" cried out for a new hearing.

The part of the story that I had had him walking into a nearby but new area and coming upon a narrow gully, almost a cleft, in the low mountain there. This cleft was only four feet wide and about 50 feet long. It took a 50 foot drop to get down there. {some of this fellow's description is a bit unclear to me, but I'm going to assume that it was the initial gouge in the cliff-face which was 4x50 and after that you got out into a small gully which widened out a little.}

Once into this gully he saw some odd rocks which were very puzzling to him plus one old dead tree and no other signs of life. What fixed his attention though was a "stable" highly localized fog bank shaped like a tube. This was too much to resist so he walked into it.

In "my" letter, he walks two steps into the mist and begins to see a vast grassy field which increased in height as he walked until it was three feet high. Startled, he walked back out. He couldn't resist however and again walked back in.

As he penetrated the mist further, he began to see more to his left and right which allowed him to see much greenery and even what he called "an oasis", as the mist left him. In my letters at this moment he says his mind went blank except for a fight or flight instinct, and he forced himself to stagger and crawl out of there, soon returning to camp. But with the new material from his relative, it appears that he left a little something out --- understandable when you read it and consider that he was trying to get people to believe his story so as to go back up there with him to reclaim this location.

So what happened when the mist cleared and he was surrounded by the beautiful green world?

He had company .... apparently interested company. My composition above isn't exactly accurate [ robes only went to the knees and they had sandals ] but the feeling is creepily in synch with the way these entities made our fellow feel. ... which was almost nauseous with fear and shaken. He said that these "persons" just hung there in the air staring at him from their vantage of three feet off the ground. They never addressed him nor one another ... just silently stared.

This, understandably, made him want to get-the-hell out of there, and he scrambled up a nearby slope to put distance between them. One of the entities continued to turn in his direction as he climbed. There was one more Whackland experience before he "got back to reality." He came to a small hillside lake, or something. This "lake" consisted of two triangular bodies of water separated by a regular row of plants, and generally looking geometrically constructed. Well, OK, so what?

The "lake" sloped seriously downhill AND ITS WATER LEVEL SLOPED PARALLEL TO THE HILLSIDE. Uhhhhh .... WAIT A MINUTE!!! He was so shook up at the moment that the impossibility of this [in our reality of physical law] didn't fully register on him until he was well away.

Somehow he got into familiar rocky mossy country and found his way to camp.

Did our fine fellow not only walk trough a portal mist into Faerie but even encounter two of its inhabitants? His, as we know, is not the only such claim even in my files. Diarmuid MacManus has a few such tales of blundering across a threshhold onto "The Stray Sod". And it's intriguing, and annoying, that some UFO cases have these darn mists just before the weirdness happens.

Well, what can I tell you?: I like the idea. I liked going to deLint's portal in Cornwall too, and even going through the Men-an-Tol opening --- no, I wasn't too fat [and it was very unkind of you to think that]. But I WAS obviously unworthy as no Faeryland landscape appeared other than the Cornish landscape itself. [which can be pretty close].

So, once again, an abject failure ... but maybe it was a moment of fun for you.

Peace.

The Ghostly vs Biological Sides of the Central Asian Wildman

The work of Rinchen and his insightful idea about relating a disappearing ecosystem to the disappearance of the Wild Man, plus the distressing "news" about Tibetan alternative medicine make a case for the biological reality of the creature at least once upon a time, if not now. But there is the whole other side of the experiences which still lingers about the subject --- that many if not most of the encounters [in the end] don't result in anything particularly physical at all [except "footprints-in-the-snow."] To put it another way, the paranormal theory is still out there.

I'll not be able to be a lot of help on this conundrum, but it feels to me that some of the sanest-seeming materials gathered by the Russian Committee have that "ghostly" aura of "you can just about see me can't you?" that passes a bit of a chill over my mind when I contemplate these things. Today I'll report on some more of the things in the monographs which are so familiar to us: that the "thing" seems just there, but just not quite in reach.

A recurring commentary in these materials [which the Committee wants to ignore, as it is very enthusiastic about finding some crypto-bioform], is that many of the sources feel that the entity is a demon or in our terms some sort of paranormal being. When western-type hunters want to shoot the creature, the local people insisted that they stop --- apparently quite persuasively, as the hunters did so against their predilections. Many of the reports have the herder/peasant meeting the wildman and, naturally, running away, but the reporter insists on remarking that one MUST do this as the wildman is a demon and brings ill fortune. At least half of the stories involving lamas/monks have them running in fear of the demon, or maintaining "relics" [bogusly simulated or not] with serve as respect for these entities. Some of these "relics" are even employed in ceremonies. The lamas cannot be taking these entities lightly.

So what's going on? Shouldn't the lamaseries know what they're talking about? They should be the long-term memories of the region, and the foci for all manner of information. Yet they persist in thinking of the beings as preternatural. Are they just more ignorant than others living in the same locales? That seems to me to be like believing that The Vatican had less knowledge about what was going on in the Italian Alps in the Middle Ages than other people.

The Russian Committee gathered information about the two books illustrated above. Although I don't note that they mention this, these two documents were uncovered by a research team from Czechoslovakia which visited Mongolia and particularly Ulan Bator in 1958 to study Mongolian anthropology and archaeology. While at the former monastery of Gandan, the team discovered the top illustrated manuscript, and at the central library in Ulan Bator, the bottom one.

The top is originally Tibetan, and with a translation into Chinese. The bottom is in Mongolian with a translation into Manchurian. The bottom is, as best as I can determine from sketchy commentary, a "recent" book, dating perhaps to the early 20th century. The top book is at least one hundred years older. One is obviously the source for the other, and that source is Tibetan.

The text of the entire book [much longer than just the "wildman" pages illustrated] is entitled something  like "Anatomical Dictionary for Recognizing Various Diseases", and is a sort of "natural medicine" book. It is filled with illustrations and descriptors of Tibetan Flora and Fauna, and relates them, sadly, to their use in producing curatives for these diseases.

Although I remain disgusted by the idea, the wildman is described as a source of medical materials. The text which specifies the use of wildman materials is written beside the drawing in the 20th century version. "The wildman lives in the mountains, his origin is close to that of the bear, his body resembles that of a man and he has enormous strength. His meat may be eaten to treat mental diseases and his gall cures jaundice." [This is pretty similar to what books on Tibetan medicine say about Bears today]. Whether this is also stated somewhere in the older Tibetan version, I don't know. One assumes that something of the sort must be there somewhere.

But I'm puzzled by a whole number of things here. The Tibetan version pictures the wildman ["mi rgod"][ could be related to "mi-ge" as we've heard before] with some significant difference to the Mongolian. The Tibetan is black/dark not white/light and is very much more ape or even bear like. Though both are posed anthropomorphically, for some reason the later Mongolian version has chosen to make its "kumun goregesu" much more facially human. None of the later manuscript's facial features appear in the Tibetan original.

I don't know what to make of this. As a historian, I trust the primary manuscript over the secondary. If so, what is it telling us? Maybe that the wildman is more ape or bear or unknown like than the near-man of the Mongolian. One could see why the authors of a medicinal text would feel more comfortable slaughtering a bear-like or an ape-like animal than a human-like one.

But, if this seems to push the definition more towards the cryptobiological animal concept, what explains all the folkloric and "theological" stuff? We need a Tibetan scholar that's for sure. For me this is driving me to the concept of two wildly different opinions about Mi-Ge/ Gul-biavan/Yeti in Tibet.

Some Buddhists seem to regard it as an animal to be harvested. Some Buddhists seem to regard it as a spiritual entity or force. The former sounds like the old Bon Nature Religion. The latter sounds like "High Buddhism." Some of the everyday folks seem to see it in the Bon way; some seem to see it in the paranormal spirit way. Who's correct? It's possible, I suppose, that both are.

This is a big place rife with tales collected all over it. Rinchen's interest areas are mainly in the area shown, but the southwestern China mountains and rhododendron forests and the edge of the Himalayas don't even make it on the map. Can we have Almas in the regions above, and in the rhododendron forests they or some other cryptobio-beings? And can we at the same time have the Mi-Ge paranormal entity that the lamaseries of the Himalayas are so concerned about? Do the two [or three?] mysteries flow together in migrating stories all over the region, making their unraveling nearly impossible?

I'd like to mention one other thing. It is probably irrelevant but who knows? The Tibetan illustration for the Wildman chooses to pose the entity in a way which seems a little surprising to me. I get the upright stance, but I don't see why one would bother with the high-held left arm. Unless maybe it's originally meant to be symbolic.

Tibetan illustrations are extremely symbolic in how they portray limbs placement. What you find is that the left arm is rarely raised --- I don't know why, surely Tibetan scholars do. In the rare cases of a raised left arm, the entity is usually either threatening something or in one case I found up to no good. If the original picture of the Wildman used by the Tibetan medical book writer was in fact a Tantric illustration of a powerful spiritual being [which the later writer ignored because he was of a differing school of thought about Mi-Ge] then illustrating the Mi-Ge in this stance was merely copying "old knowledge", but with none of the original intent to convey the spirit meaning.

As I say, perhaps this means nothing. But there is plenty of room in Tibetan thought for wild humanoid form demon entities wandering the mountains and forests. "Bdud" [top] and "Ma-Mo" [bottom] are folks that I have no desire to run into.

For all my reading in these Russian documents, I, for what little this is worth, come away with two fairly strong impressions: 1). Rinchen and a slightly earlier Russian had a brilliant idea that one could correlate more convincing wild man tales with the inclusion within them of mentions of primitive horses and camels --- thus pointing to a signature ecology within which this creature [perhaps the "Almas-style version" of these things] might have existed; and 2). that the most realistic "evidence" for me have been the tales by observant hunter/explorers who speak of mysterious footprints not matching the known, and unidentifiable sounds in the night, and distant shadowy figures naked and hair-covered but uncatchable.

Rinchen makes me believe in the animal. The explorers make me lean back to the spirit entity. So, yes, as usual, the mystery remains robust.

I'll leave you with this guy with the forbidding raised left arm: he's using his formidable power to hold back the Sun in order to not pay his bar bill --- I kid not. Seems like an abuse of power to me.

Peace friends --- hope you had a Happy St. Pat's and paid your bar bill.