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I currently reside in what some term ‘Bunyan Country’, that is in the hills of rural Bedfordshire immortalised by Pilgrim’s Progressauthor/puritan proselytizer John Bunyan (1628-88).
Although associated with his particular brand of vaguely militant Christianity, the “Delectable Mountains” of his fancy conceal a more complex past than mere Nazarene flummery. For example, the Iron Age fortress at the county’s Sharpenhoe Clappers (the term “Clappers” is derived from the Latin word claperius meaning “rabbit hole”) outcrop of hills, where the cloud-like wraith of Celtic chief (and foe of Julius Caesar) Cassivellaunus supposedly haunts the heights of Bunyan’s ‘Mount Pleasant’.
Why?
According to Medium magazine:
“the restless spirit of this fearsome warrior chose this special place for his haunting and if you have ever been to Sharpenhoe Clappers you will certainly have seen him - unless you visited on one of those rare days of totally blue skies - for his defiant face is manifest in the clouds that regularly wreath the hill: none of that low-end ghostly rattling of chains, white sheets or ghastly whoo-hooing from Cassivellaunus.”
In fact, the warrior wasn’t actually killed in the Clappers, but was betrayed and killed in 54AD, either at the pallisaded oppidum at Devil’s Dyke near Wheathampstead in nearby south Hertfordshire, or at the Ravensburgh Castle (the largest hillfort in The Chiltern Hills, where much material from the first century BC through to the Roman Conquest in AD 43 has been found) a few miles up the road from Sharpenhoe.
More on Cassivellaunus: He ruled the territory north of the River Thames, leading the native tribes in opposition to Julius Caesar on his second British expedition in 54 BC. The character of Cassivellaunus appears in Caesar's self-serving 'Commentarii de Bello Gallico' an account of the Gallic Wars, which he narrated in the third person. Their lands correspond with the area occupied by the Catuvellauni tribe at the time of the later Roman invasion under Emperor Claudius, which roughly consisted of the Southern English counties of Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Eastern Oxfordshire. The Catuvellauni were the most powerful Belgic-related tribe in Iron Age Britain. Their name derives from two Celtic words: 'cat', which means battle, and 'vel', which is thought to mean 'leader', therefore 'the battle leader'.
The sign at entrance to the Devil's Dyke, Hertfordshire, by Colin Riegels (2 July 2006)
In recent years, accounts of a ghostly, naked, woad-painted, warrior riding a horse through the fort has been reported. Witnesses say they have seen the long haired, moustached horseman gallop through the woods and vanish into the banks of the dyke.
Naturally enough, they are taken to be the shades of Celtic Warriors long since deceased - or even members of the Wild Hunt, on the lookout for souls to collect.
But, for whatever reason, Cassivellaunus chose the Clappers as his spectral home, as it were:
The Sharpenhoe Clappers
Cassivellaunus
Cassivelaunus - The New York Public Library Digital Collections
Anyway, my recent interest was sparked by the distinct similarity between Cassivelaunus haunting the skies, and the War God Borri, from Roy Thomas and Barry Smith’s adaptation of Robert E Howard's tale "The Grey God Passes" in their Conan story, "The Twilight of the Grim Grey God!" (Conan the Barbarian #3; February, 1971).
Borri was seen as a cloud-like figure watching as the battling kings Tomar and Brian duelled and killed each other simultaneously. The God then summoned the rains and sent The Choosers of the Slain to collect their souls - for the very last time, as even the Gods will die when their all worshippers have passed away. As the two kings were.
Conan and the Grim Grey God comic book by Roy Thomas and Barry Smith Conan and the Grim Grey God comic book by Roy Thomas and Barry Smith
Not to be confused with Thor’s granddad Bor:
So, if you’re ever in the vicinity of The Sharpenhoe Clappers, cast an eye skyward beyond the ramparts - you just might see the shade of Cassivelaunus casting a baleful eye at you...
Cassivelaunus in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Pareidolia - the phenomenon seeing images in clouds, planets, and other places
Pareidolia (a type of apophenia) is the tendency for some to detect an object, pattern, or meaning where there is perhaps none. Typical examples include apparent images of faces in cloud formations; and lunar pareidolia like the ‘Man in the Moon’ and the ‘Moon Rabbit’.
Pareidolia was found to affect brain function and brain waves. EEG Research in 2022 demonstrated that responses in the frontal and occipitotemporal cortexes begin prior to when one recognizes faces and later when they are not recognized. This helps explain why people can generally identify a few lines and a circle as a "face" so swiftly and without hesitation.
Incidentally, if you live in Bedfordshire - or nearby, and have an interest in the supernatural, you may wish to visit the Midsummer Witches Market on 23rd June in Leighton Buzzard, organised by my friends at the Raven & Broomstick store, who also are the proprietors of the Museum Of Curiosities aka Raven’s Folly folklore museum opposite.
Dealing with bias is part of life. But what happens when the people claiming to show you how to be unbiased, are themselves quite biased? What if instead of presenting the unvarnished truth, they’re just promoting their own belief system? This is what most skepticism you’re likely to encounter is like: a belief system presented as a method of rational thinking. And where you have belief systems, you often have organizations of like minded people which promote those beliefs.
For example, portraying mediums as grief vampires, or psychics as frauds is common among skeptics. This isn’t the result of a careful evaluation of the evidence, but rather it’s a deep bias based on beliefs about the nature of the universe. It’s neither scientific nor rational to make those assumptions.
When I first started investigating skepticism, I began to realize that people who very much into skepticism as an identity were all atheists. This was novel to me, because skepticism is normally neither an identity, nor attached to a particular way of thinking. Yet I found an entire subculture built around a very specific interpretation of this idea.
What is this form of skepticism that I’m talking about?
Self identified skeptics do not focus their skepticism in a neutral way. They target certain areas as being non scientific nonsense. These beliefs can be summed up as atheist materialism. The easiest way to describe it is that they don’t believe in God, and they don’t believe in a soul. They believe that when we die we are gone forever and nothing remains of us. What this translates to is an absolute rejection of any science or practice that does not rely exclusively on things that are material in ways that they can understand.
With an atheist materialist belief system, consciousness is not real in the same way a shoe is. Thoughts are just brainwaves and the possibility that consciousness may be something more than that is rejected out of hand. It’s not wrong to begin with a set of assumptions about the nature of reality, but the problem is that they don’t acknowledge that it’s not the only way to perceive the universe. There are two paths: either the universe is material, like a giant clock, or it’s conscious, like a giant thought. If the universe is material, then thoughts aren’t real. If the universe is conscious, then the material isn’t real.
The scientific truth is that there is no easy to tell which universe it is that we’re living in, because we would not be able to tell the difference between a truly material universe and one that was an extremely realistic dream. They both behave in a nearly identical fashion.
Subjects like parapsychology, the science of psychic ability, point to a conscious universe and are therefore are rejected out of hand. Consciousness is not supposed to interact directly with the physical world in a materialist system regardless of the accumulated scientific evidence.
These materialists believe that the speed of light is an absolute limit to space travel and therefore no one is capable of visiting us from beyond the solar system, so they characterize the UFO debate as fringe and the study of UAP’s as pseudoscience.
Only western conventional medicine is real to them. So chiropractic care, naturopathy, acupuncture, aromatherapy, Reiki and a host of other acceptable medical practices, many with peer reviewed studied to back them up are all considered pseudoscience. They reject all forms of holistic medicine and seek to minimize the importance of the placebo effect.
They categorically reject all unproven energy generation technologies which don’t conform to known physics. This included LENR, (low energy nuclear reaction, aka cold fusion), free energy and other unconventional energy generation.
A 2013 atheism study at the U. of Tennessee, Chattanooga https://www.atheismresearch.com/ divided atheists into six different groups. My opinion is that the skeptics belong to the anti-theist group, (aka New Atheists) as a more radicalized subgroup.
The Skepticism is a Mixed Bag
It’s not all bad news with them, they have generally liberal politics and are against climate change denial and anti vaxxers, while being for diversity and inclusiveness. They are a complicated bunch. Because they are so confrontational, it’s debatable whether they are persuasive or are merely preaching to the choir. They are incapable of a nuanced discussion that acknowledges other points of view, so they end up polarizing discussions instead of moving things forward.
Now that we know who they are and what they believe, it’s time to talk about the echo chamber. I’ve made reference to it in other articles, but never spelled out exactly what it is.
It begins with the Center for Inquiry, a non profit organization dedicated to spreading atheism in the world. They have been around for a long time, first as the Committee for Skeptical Investigation for Claims of the Paranormal, (CSICOP) which was later shortened to Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and then folded into the Center for Inquiry.
The Center for Inquiry states on their tax returns that they are an organization dedicated to spreading atheism. To be fair, they are very focused on their goal and achieve meaningful results for their efforts, They do what they are supposed to do. Whether one agrees with their mission, they are good at it.
They manage the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry which publishes the Skeptical Inquirer. This magazine is widely regarded in scientific circles as poor quality. George Hansen wrote as far back as 1992: (Hansen, 1992)
In examining the scientific status of CSICOP, sociologists Pinch and Collins (1984) described the Committee as a “scientific-vigilante” organization (p. 539). Commenting on an article in SI, medical professor Louis Lasagna (1984) wrote: “One can almost smell the fiery autos-da-fe of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition” (p. 12). Engineering professor Leonard Lewin (1979) noted that in SI articles “the rhetoric and appeal to emotion seemed rather out of place” (p. 9).
Bernardo Kastrup, philosopher, with a PhD in Engineering, had this to say about a Skeptical Inquirer review of a paper he authored in which the author of the review admitted that he did not understand the paper:
How can a magazine with ambitions to "promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason" publish this kind of juvenile garbage? Where were the editorial controls? This "review" does no harm to me, but to the magazine, its readers and science in general (more on this below).
These criticisms exist because the real goal of the magazine is to promote a specific type of atheism, not critical thinking or actual skepticism. And the reason that these criticism are relevant is that they can be applied across all the different publications and websites that the Center of Inquiry either controls, supports or is aligned with as well as the individuals who are part of the organizational web.
Skepticism and Wikipedia
The echo chamber starts with Wikipedia. The Center for Inquiry is aligned with a volunteer operation run by Susan Gerbic, who runs the Guerrilla Skeptics of Wikipedia which is more or less in control of about 2,000 different articles related to the paranormal, holistic medicine, UFO topics and cryptids on Wikipedia. These Wikipedia articles are altered to reflect their materialist atheist beliefs and include Center for Inquiry sources, which boosts their visibility and reputation on Google and in the media.
Various areas of science and medicine come under attack from different websites:
Quackwatch and Chirobase, run by Stephen Barrett, attack mainstream, perfectly ordinary chiropractic care. There is no balanced assessment of alternatives vs. regular medicine and their corresponding risks here. They are just sites looking to say as much bad stuff as they can.
What’s the Harm, run by Tim Farley, attacks a hodgepodge of various areas of holistic medicine, singling out some rare cases where people were injured or died. It makes no attempt to compare these statistics with the risks of modern medicine or other ordinary risks people face, so scientifically speaking this is possibly dumber than a fence post.
Metabunk, Contrail Science and Morgellon’s Watch by Mick West. Debunks everything UFO related.
Skepticieum by Joe Nickell. Chief editor of the Skeptical Inquirer. Can’t say what it’s about because they apparently were skeptical of the bill for the website. It’s been suspended.
The Skeptic’s Dictionary by Robert Todd Carroll. A badly written and overly biased collection of skeptical rants about various paranormal and alternative medicine topics.
Skeptoid: a podcast by Brian Dunning. A former federal prisoner (for fraud) is apparently trustworthy enough for skeptics to listen to.
Free Inquiry: Paul Fidalgo is editor of Free Inquiry. An atheist magazine devoted to questioning religion. Managed by the Center for Inquiry.
The Skeptic’s Magazine: by Michael Shermer. A very typical example of the complexities of skeptics. Argues against racism, the opiod crisis and global warming, all good things, while lumping in holistic medicine with anti-vaxxers.
Science Based medicine: by Steve Novella and David Gorski, this is an anti-holistic medicine site, that like its badly done cousin, Quackwatch, ignores overall postive outcomes while hyping any failures they can find.
The American Rationalist: A magazine managed by the Center for Inquiry promoting atheism.
In addition to these publications, you will generally see the following people, all CSI fellows, spreading their disbelief in the paranormal whenever something paranormal makes the news.
James Alcock, Kenny Biddle, Susan Blackmore, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Christopher C. French, David Marks, Joe Nickell, Bill Nye, Massimo Pigliucci, Ben Radford, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Wiseman. (You can find a more complete list here.)
he media tends to treat skeptics as balance for paranormal news, but in reality it’s just pitting one belief system against another. Skeptics offer no suggestions as to what would be convincing to them, no nuanced acknowledgement of the ambiguity inherent in the paranormal, no careful review of the evidence; it’s just one version or the other of “no I don’t believe it can possibly be real, therefore it must be something ordinary.” That’s not skepticism, it’s stubbornness.
These are strong beliefs and it’s coupled with a drive to persuade others. This is where The Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia come in. Their work is central to the atheist/skeptic effort because articles and people that are affiliated with the Center for Inquiry get boosted by Wikipedia citations and whole articles on the “open” encyclopedia, boosting their status in the media and on Google search, as well as AI. This completes an echo chamber of materialist atheism.
There is nothing wrong with the existence of this organization or its goals. The structure of Wikipedia made its takeover by special interest groups inevitable, so the fact that the Guerrilla Skeptics are one of them just means that they got there first. It’s not evil, just extremely biased.
What the world needs isn’t for them to be silenced, but rather for everyone to be educated about this brand of skepticism so that it’s portrayed correctly as just another belief system, unconnected to real scientific inquiry. Like so many other zealots, they twist facts or omit them when the truth is inconvenient. They aren’t inherently trustworthy because their strong beliefs create biases in their thinking.
This means that their claims require fact checking, just like anyone else. If we just recognize that they are basically in control of areas of Wikipedia and that they aren’t the objective observers that they claim to be, that will be enough.
The notion of dimensional doors to other worlds and planes of exisetence has long fascinated people, and has become a frequent entertainment trope in recent years with the 'Mulitiverses' of Marvel, DC, and other popular motion pictures.
Drawing of Roman Bath in the Strand by John Wykeham Archer, 1841 - Wikimedia Commons
Readers might be aware that institutions such as CERN in Switzerland are actively investigating the potential of creating gateways to alternate dimensions.
Piffle! You may well exclaim, but the notion of doors to other worlds goes back thousands of years, especially in what some still call ‘Merrie Olde England’. Ancient megaliths, Ley Lines, ‘Fairy Roads’ and more recent phenomena have apparently produced hyper-dimensional gateways, somehow powered by magnetic fields and the like.
Let us explore some of them, aided in part by the anonymously-written The Portals of London blog, which attempts to catalog the capital’s interdimensional gateways. My favorites include The Quaerium (aka the Strand Roman Bath, above), a no-longer functional gateway to other worlds, built by the ancient Romans. One Fabius Viatorio, who, (according to LP) accompanied Emperor Hadrian on his visit to the city in 122 AD, reported.
‘In Londinium, on a hill close to that settlement’s Great River, a Merchant, with help from wise men, has built a small but wonderful temple. No Gods are worshiped within its walls. Inside the temple is a bath of modest proportions, but to submerge oneself in the milky liquid is to do more than bathe. This merchant holds famous gatherings, at which women and men sink into the water, and onwards into other Worlds’
Other Portals
Other sites include The Crystal Palace Park Headless StatuesThe Crystal Palace Park features the haunting sight of headless statues, a poignant reminder of the crumbling Victorian era. Accounts suggest that one or more of them are still operating as gateways to very twisted places indeed - NEVER touch them.
A Crystal Palace Park Headless Statue
The abandoned Pedway Scheme was a post-war plan to link the buildings of London’s Square Mile with a futuristic network of elevated walkways. Glimpses are littered around the City; especially the ‘Highwalks’ of the Barbican Centre. But...when exploring the lonelier pieces, remember your exit path; you may not like where you find yourself...
Other portals supposedly include Wren’s Lost Churches, the ghost village of Elswick-on-the-Marshon in Walthamstow, the 1912 Woolwich Foot Tunnel, The Waterloo Arches Rift, Henderson’s Door (Step From This Earth in an Instant!), The Hell Gate of St Pancras Old Church, The Hampstead Heath Barrow (aka Boudicca’s Mount) and many, many other bizarre wonders.
Outside London, other entrances and pathways to other worlds have been recorded, including a crenelated ‘floating city’ above the seaside town of Hastings in East Sussex.
"This is crazy, what is going on? Is this some sort of sign?"
Of course, the most famous portals of England must be those of ‘faerie’, ‘Earth Mysteries’ which punctuate the countryside and inhabitations, on ley lines, under lone trees, daisy rings, burial mounds, henges, odd grassy knolls, and suchlike. One can enter to meet and commune with the fairy-folk, but your stay may unwittingly run to decades. So watch out, if tempted.
Marvel Comics explored the concept of an English Faerie ‘Otherworld/Avalon’, a ‘pocket’ dimension adjacent to Earth accessed through ‘places of power’, including Glastonbury Tor, the Long Man of Wilmington, the Cheviot Hills, Stonehenge, the Tower of London, Avebury, Buckingham Palace, Hadrian's Wall, Cragside in Northumberland, Clifton Suspension Bridge (Bristol), The Cavern Club in Liverpool, Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, Alan Moore's greenhouse, London’s St. James Park, as well as various other hidden sidhe (fairy mounds) situated throughout the British Isles.
The Long Man of Wilmington, hill figure near Wilmington, Sussex.
Of course Marvel liberally referenced actual English folk lore in their concept of Avalon, including the use of Glastonbury Tor as entrance to the ‘Fairy Otherworld’:
In the UK, the cult TV series Sapphire & Steel (1979-82) centered on a pair of interdimensional operatives, the eponymous Sapphire and Steel. The duo were engaged in guarding the continuing flow of time, a ‘progressing corridor’ that surrounds everything. There are weak spots where the malignant entity of ‘Time’ – can break into the present and steal things for its nefarious purposes, as well as other evil creatures that lurk the corridor looking for the places to enter our dimension.
Sapphire and Steel
OTHERWORLD was a sci-fi television series that aired for eight episodes from January 26 to March 16, 1985, on CBS and was created by poet, recording artist, screenwriter, television producer and television director Roderick Taylor.
The Sterling family tour the interior of the Great Pyramid of Giza during a conjunction of the planets which takes place once in every ten thousand years. They are then transported to a planet which may or may not also reside in a parallel universe.
Otherworld
Neverwhere TV Show
Neverwhere is an urban fantasy television miniseries by Neil Gaiman that first aired in 1996 on BBC 2. The series is set in "London Below", a magical realm coexisting with the more familiar London, referred to as "London Above". The show was partially inspired by Gene Wolfe's fantasy novel Free Live Free - where a Mr Free offers free lodging to anyone who helps him locate a lost object hidden in his Chicago home. Four people (a mystic, a private eye, a prostitute, and a salesman) agree to his terms.
See also Ben Moor’s BBC7 radio series Undone from 2006, which focuses on the life of Edna Turner, a journalist for a listings' magazine who discovers a strange parallel version of London called "Undone".
And Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series of novels.
The 'Telectroscope' was the name of an art installation constructed by Paul St George in 2008, which provided a visual link between London and New York City. According to the Telectroscope's fake history, it used a transatlantic tunnel started by the artist's fictional great-grandfather, Alexander Stanhope St. George. But really, the installation used two video cameras linked by a VPN connection to provide a virtual tunnel across the Atlantic. The producer of this spectacle was the creative company Artichoke, who previously staged The Sultan's Elephant in London:
One local to me, The Devil's Jump Stone, near Marston Moretaine (Bedfordshire)
A stone marks the spot where the Devil played a game of leapfrog with three local boys - when they jumped over his back, a hole to hell opened, and they were never seen again. Sh*t happens, as our American cousins are wont to say.
The Bungay Druid’s Stone – a portal-ish instrument for contacting the Horned One?
Wikimedia Commons
In Bungay, Suffolk (allegedly the UK’s ‘Satanist Capital’), a rock known as the Druid’s Stone stands in St Mary’s Churchyard. Folklore asserts this stone is actually a portal for contacting Satan. If you desire direct line to Old Nick, you must either run around or knock on the stone 12 times. A bit like that old song by Dawn, but with more knocking. And running.
The Druid’s Stone is actually most probably a glacial erratic brought to Bungay in the last ice age.
Title page of the account of Abraham Fleming's account of the appearance of the ghostly black dog "Black Shuck" at the church of Bungay, Suffolk in 1577:
"A straunge, and terrible wunder wrought very late in the parish church of Bongay: a town of no great distance from the citie of Norwich, namely the fourth of this August, in ye yeere of our Lord 1577."
Other ‘Satanic Portals’, this time further afield:
Stephen Arnell’s 5* reviewed historical novel, ‘The Great One’
