James Shelby Downard's Mystical War

Adam Gorightly
April 19th, 2009
http://www.examiner.com/books-in-denver/james-shelby-downard-s-mystical-war-by-adam-gorightly

Says the author in his forward to this one, “Downard. to some, is seen as too vague, derelict about providing attribution, and unwilling to credit plain old synchronicity as the source of many of the connections he has made.” James Shelby Downard (1913-1998), implicated Masonic alchemy as the true force behind John F. Kennedy’s assassination. He questioned apparent reality at least as much as the official version of what occured, stating, “The eternal pagan psychodrama is escalated under . . .‘modern’ conditions precisely because sorcery is not what ‘twentieth century man’ can accept as real.” I first read his famous essay, “King-Kill/33: Masonic Symbolism in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy” in the first edition of a book called Apocalypse Culture (Feral House). After reading it, I decided that, while I didn’t believe him completely, the amount of symbolism he amassed therein (for example, Dealey Plaza, which lies on the 33rd latitudinal parallel, was the site of the first Masonic temple in Texas, and Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was himself a high-ranking Mason as were future president Gerald Ford, CIA director William Casey, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and most of the Warren Commission) was every bit as credible as the official “lone assassin” theory.

In that book’s second edition, “King-Kill/33” was replaced with another Downard essay, “The Call to Chaos,” and Apocalypse Culture II contains another Downard essay entitled “America, The Possessed Corpse.” Feral House, a publishing group dedicated to promoting counterclockwise ideation, has been very good to Downard, who likely would have been dismissed out of hand and gone unnoticed without its support. Another Feral House book, Cult Rapture, curently out of print, contains “Riding the Downardian Nightmare,” a piece written by Parfrey about visiting Downard in Memphis, Tennessee. Adam Gorightly neatly summarizes Downard’s life and thought in this brief, engaging work, in the course of which he adds many details of conspiracy lore and hidden history. One goal of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control program was the creation of programmed assassins—Sirhan Sirhan may have been one of these, also John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, besides which, John Hinckley, Jr. who tried and failed to shoot Reagan, was a Bush family friend.

According to Downard, part of the Masonic conspiracy’s evil genius lies in the gradual revelation of its workings so nothing is ever completely hidden from the victims. Downard died in 1988, but managed to impact conspiracy thinkers with this brand of speculation. Accordingly, Gorightly devotes one chapter of Mystical War to the revelations of U.S. torture at Abu Ghraib as potentially a recent example of “revelation of the method,” and another to analysis of occult and mind-control symbolism in Stanley Kubrick’s film, "Eyes Wide Shut."