SubRosa_Issue6-Spread.pdf

Issue Six - October 2006

Sub Rosa | October 2006 1

CONTENTS

GREG TAYLOR

Editorial

October 2006

Editorial 1

News 2

ing faster every day. Already, we’ve

reached Issue 6 of Sub Rosa . . . I’m

not sure how that happened! And

although we’re on a quarterly schedule, the

deadline for each issue seems to be upon us

before we know it, and the hectic scramble to

give birth to our next baby consumes all of our

time yet again.

So much so, that the magazine has been

‘getting in the way’, so to speak, of numerous

other projects we are all working on. Consid-

ering the fact that this is really a labour of love

– we earn only a nominal amount from each

issue, certainly not in line with the hours re-

quired – we’ve had to make some hard deci-

sions. Certainly, we aren’t going to walk away

from something we enjoy so much. But the

need to free up some time is pressing, and as

such we have decided – for the short term – to

drop back to a half-yearly schedule.

This allows us have a few months in which

we don’t have to think about Sub Rosa duties

at all, freeing us up to work on our various

other projects. It also means that we can come

back to Sub Rosa with our full energy and fo-

cus, rather than trying to manage it with mul-

tiple other goings-on. It’s not an ideal situa-

tion content-wise, as we already can’t ﬁt all the

topics we’d like into each issue, and going back

to half the amount of magazines means cutting

another half of that content out of contention

for a slot in Sub Rosa.

However, it’s hardly as if we don’t have

other outlets for sharing content. As always,

we keep up daily news updates, and occasional

features, on The Daily Grail (www.dailygrail.

com). And for any readers who wish to share

information with others, there is also our

Digg-like site on which any member can post

to the front page, The Underground Stream of

Consciousness (stream.dailygrail.com).

Most importantly, the extra time will allow

us to give more consideration to a print run of

the magazine, something that we would love

to do. And if we are able to do that, then the

likelihood is there that Sub Rosa would not

just return to a quarterly schedule – instead,

I’d like to think that we would ramp up to a bi-

monthly publication (every 2 months). So bear

with us, while we try to improve everything

about Sub Rosa . Thanks for your support, in

the past, and into the future.

Columns:

Greg Taylor

Ian Lawton

Michael Grosso

Editor:

Art Director:

Illustrator:

Columnist:

News Editor:

Writer:

Writer

Ad Sales:

Greg Taylor

Mark James Foster

Adam Scott Miller

Michael Grosso

Ian Lawton

Rick Gned

Blair Blake

Fina D’Armada

Colette Dowell

Joaquim Fernandes

Mitch Horowitz

Robert Schoch

Rich Shelton

Feature:

Proﬁler: 54

666 Steps:

Being the Confessions of a

Crowley Bibliomaniac

by Blair Mackenzie Blake

The Mysterious Life

of Manly P. Hall

by Mitch Horowitz

Feature: 34

Feature:

Unraveling the Egypt

Code: An Interview

with Robert Bauval

A Divine Signal:

The Psychics Who

Predicted Fatima

by Joaquim Fernandes

& Fina d’Armada

Credits :

We use public domain images and artistic

tools, or gain necessary permissions where

appropriate. If you have a query regarding

our artistic content, please do not hesitate to

Artist Spotlight:

Adam Scott Miller

The Art of Corpus

Callosum

Adam Miller for the front cover

Robert Schoch and Colette Dowell

Duncan Blake

Reviews 80

To submit content or feedback, please email

us at subrosa@dailygrail.com

Crystal Ball 90

October 2006 | Sub Rosa

Sub Rosa | October 2006 1

T he hands of time appear to be turn-

News

by Rick Gned

“Warriors of the Clouds”

Pre-Columbian mummies discovered in Peru

News Briefs

A rchaeologists in Peru have

Tripping the Enlightenment Fantastic

found a burial site in an

820-feet deep cave, thanks

to a tip from a local farmer. Five

mummies have been found, two

of them intact with skin and hair.

Ceramics and textiles were

also found at the burial site. The

limestone walls are decorated

with paintings of faces and warri-

or-like ﬁgures, possibly designed

to ward off evil spirits.

“This is a discovery of tran-

scendental importance. We have

found these ﬁve mummies but

there could be many more,” said

Herman Corbera, the expedi-

tion’s leader. “We think this is the

ﬁrst time any kind of underground

burial site this size has been found

belonging to Chachapoyas or oth-

er cultures in the region.”

Known as Chachapoyas to

the Incas, which probably comes

from the Quechua word for

‘cloud people’, they were a pale-

skinned culture who once ruled

a kingdom stretching from the

Andes to the fringes of Peru’s

northern Amazon rainforest.

They built Kuelap, the ‘Machu

Picchu of the north’, a stone

citadel comprised of more than

400 buildings and massive exte-

rior stone walls. Conquered by

the Incas in the 15th century,

what little was known about the

Chachapoyas was destroyed or

lost during the Spanish invasion

that came soon after.

“The remote site for this cem-

etery tells us that the Chachapo-

yas had enormous respect for

their ancestors because they hid

them away for protection,” Mr

Corbera said.

A joint French-Syrian

archaeological team has

discovered an 11,000-year-

old temple with multi-

coloured geometric wall

paintings, including a bull’s

head in vivid red, black and

white, on the banks of the

Euphrates.

New study ﬁnds psilocybin has positive effects

by psychopharmacologist Roland Grif-

ﬁths, is studying psilocybin’s effects on

the mind in the most riguous scientiﬁc conditions

since Dr Rick Strassman’s work with DMT.

Grifﬁths’ study, published in Psychopharmacol-

ogy , is a combination of research on psychedelic

drug effects – very little of which has been con-

ducted in the past 40 years – with an increas-

ing scientiﬁc interest in the origins of spirituality.

“With careful preparation, you can safely and

fairly reliably occasion a mystical experience us-

ing psilocybin that may lead to positive changes

in a person,” he says. “Our ﬁnding is an early

step in what we hope will be scientiﬁc work

that helps people.”

Grifﬁths’ team minimized the power of ex-

pectation by keeping the identity of pills secret

from most participants in the study. A group of

36 healthy adults, aged 24 to 64, with no per-

sonal or family history of mental illness were

chosen for the study. Only one volunteer had

not graduated from college, and none of them

had previously used psychedelic drugs. They all

admitted to at least occasional participation in

religious or spiritual activities, including church

services, prayer, and meditation.

30 volunteers were randomly selected to

each attend two 8-hour drug sessions, the sec-

ond session scheduled 2 months after the ﬁrst.

At one session a strong dose of psilocybin was

administered, and at the other a high dose of

methylphenidate (an amphetamine known as

Ritalin) was given instead. They weren’t told

which drug they were taking, but were aware it

could be either.

The remaining six volunteers each received

methylphenidate at both sessions, the identity

of which they were taking kept secret. A third

session was scheduled, during which they took

psilocybin after being told what it was.

22 of the 36 volunteers described having

mystical experiences after taking psilocybin. All

but three of these cases occurred in volunteers

who didn’t know what kind of pill they were

taking. The mystical experiences included a

sense of merging with a different level of reality,

perceiving unity in all things, transcending time

and space, and being overwhelmed by feelings

of love and other positive emotions.

After the last psilocybin session, 25 of the

volunteers – including three people who didn’t

report mystical reactions – rated the experience

as among the ﬁve most meaningful and spiritually

signiﬁcant events in their lives. Two months after

their last drug session, 29 participants reported

a moderately or greatly increased sense of well-

being and satisfaction with their lives. The oth-

ers did not experience similar changes, however

no volunteer described any decline in well-be-

ing due to taking psilocybin. Family members,

friends and coworkers of the volunteers were

interviewed to conﬁrm the lasting positive ef-

fects and behaviour.

Grifﬁths plans to research how brain proc-

esses during psilocybin experiences compare

with neural activity in people who experience

drug-free spiritual ephiphanies. “There’s good

reason to believe that similar brain mechanisms

are at work during profound religious experi-

ences, whether they’re produced by fasting,

meditation, controlled breathing, sleep depriva-

tion, near-death experiences, infectious disease

states, or psychoactive substances,” he says.

Three British research

teams are going ahead

with plans to create hybrid

embryos that are 99.9

percent human and 0.1

percent rabbit, aiming to

ﬁnd a ready source of

“human” embryonic stem

cells without the ethical

problems of tampering with

human life.

A private museum owner in

the US has offered $50,000

for what the Paranormal

Seekers of Malaysia claim is

a cast of the Johor Bigfoot’s

footprint.

(Source: independent.co.uk)

16 ‘New’ Planets in Milky Way

Scientists say galaxy may have billions more

A cigar-shaped, coal-black

UFO was witnessed over

a farm in Minnesota. Bigger

than a barn, hovering

quietly about 30 feet above

the tree tops. It ﬂew upward

at a 45-degree angle at an

incredible speed before

disappearing.

there are probably billions

of planets in the Milky Way

galaxy, after 16 new planets were

discovered at the galactic centre

using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Over 200 planets have been

discovered in the past 15 years,

but the latest 16 are of special in-

terest because they are at least 10

times as far from the Earth. This

signiﬁcantly increases the chances

of ﬁnding Earth-like planets.

“We all are dreamers, and part

of that dream is to ﬁnd life some-

where,” said Mario Livio, head of

the science program which coor-

dinates Hubble operations at the

Space Telescope Science Insti-

tute in Baltimore. “We’re ﬁnding

that the galaxy is full of planets,

and the chances are, somewhere

out there, we will ﬁnd one with

the conditions necessary to

be habitable.”

Scientists estimate that there

could be as many as 6 billion Jupi-

ter-sized planets in our galaxy.

Numerous oval shaped discs

were witnessed darting

about in the sky near

Invermere, British Columbia.

Identical sightings were

reported in nearby towns

of dark circular shapes ﬂying

in formation and performing

unusual aerial acrobatics.

(Source: sciencenews.org)

(Source: washingtonpost.com)

October 2006 | Sub Rosa

Sub Rosa | October 2006 3

A team from Johns Hopkins University, led

N ASA scientists believe

News

N ew images of the Face

News Briefs

I n the heart of Mexico City,

News Briefs

ing in the blanks. New research

demonstrates that this can lead

to misperceptions, including see-

ing human faces and other shapes

in natural formations.

“It’s a manifestation of over-

learning, such as when we ﬁnd a

man’s face on Mars’ surface or in

a forest or on a cloud,” Watanabe

explained. “We’ve over-learned

human faces so we see them

where they aren’t.”

According to an ESA media

statement, “the face remains a

ﬁgment of human imagination in a

heavily eroded surface.”

Michael McKay, an ESA engi-

neer on the Mars Express team,

doesn’t hold back what he really

thinks. “[With the original images

30 years ago] people automati-

cally thought, ‘My Goodness, it’s

a face. There must be intelligent

life on Mars. Maybe the Martians

built this huge monument to in-

dicate that there is intelligent life

and we should come and visit.’

Other people, squinting their eyes

looked at it and thought Elvis, The

King, is alive and on Mars.”

tion north of Mexico City, could

weigh as much as 12 tons. “It is a

typical monument of Aztec impe-

rial style. Taking into account its

position, the form, and what I can

see from a side, it should repre-

sent the Earth God (Tlaltecuhtli),

the Earth Goddess (Tlaltecuhtli,

Coatlicue), or a nocturnal deity

such as Itzpaplotl of Coatlicue.”

“What is signiﬁcant about this

ﬁnd is the early date of the altar

frieze,” said Susan Gillespie, an

Aztec expert at the University of

Florida. “With such ﬁnds archae-

ologists can begin to more ﬁrmly

trace the changes in state-spon-

sored religious practices at the

Great Temple.”

“The importance of the mono-

lith is what we are going to dis-

cover…It’s likely that it is part of

a chamber, of some offering. We

won’t know until we get close,”

said Alberto Diaz, a member of

the archaeological team. “First

we have to get the stone out.”

on Mars, taken by the

European Space Agency’s

Mars Express satellite, show it is

a natural formation without any

of the features that has caused

controversies and conspiracy

theories spanning three decades.

The satellite’s cutting-edge

High Resolution Stereo Camera

has captured data that provides

the sharpest images of the Face

on Mars to date.

“These images of the Cydonia

region on Mars are truly spec-

tacular,” said Agustin Chicarro,

ESA Mars Express project sci-

entist. “They not only provide

a completely fresh and detailed

view of an area so famous to

fans of space myths all around

the world, but also provide an

impressive close-up over an area

of great interest for planetary

geologists, and show once more

the high capability of the Mars

Express camera.”

According to Takeo Watanabe

of Boston University, humans

have the ability to process in-

formation very quickly by taking

in basic visual cues and then ﬁll-

Scientists have found new

evidence that the Bering

Strait near Alaska ﬂooded

into the Arctic Ocean about

11,000 years ago, almost a

thousand years earlier than

widely believed, closing off

the land bridge thought to

be the major route for hu-

man migration from Asia to

the Americas.

surrounded by trafﬁc and bus-

tling businesses, Mexican ar-

chaeologists have discovered an

amazing 15th-century altar and

large stone slab at the ruins of

Templo Mayor. It is the most ex-

citing discovery since electricity

workers unearthed an eight-ton

stone carving of an Aztec god-

dess at the same site in 1978.

The temple site is over 600-

years-old, the Aztecs beginning

construction in the late 14th-

century. A major site of worship,

historians believe tens of thou-

sands of people were sacriﬁced

during a bloody ceremony in

1487. The temple complex was

mostly destroyed and used as

building materials by the Spanish

in the 16th-century.

“This is a really impressive and

exceptional Aztec monolith,”

said Leonardo López Luján, an

archaeologist at the Museo del

Templo Mayor. He estimates that

the stone, which was quarried

at the Chiquihuite stone forma-

New research suggests

that the active ingredient in

marijuana could be consid-

erably better at suppress-

ing the abnormal clumping

of malformed proteins that

is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s

than any current approved

drug designed to combat

the disease.

A new study has found that

insects were exceptionaly

large during the late Paleo-

zoic period because the air

was 35% rich in oxygen,

compared to 21% today.

Dusts and other particles,

swept into the atmos-

phere from Middle Eastern

deserts, may be changing

monsoon rainfall patterns

in Southeast Asia, according

to a recent study by NASA

scientists.

The US has agreed to wipe

20% of the $108 million

foreign debt owed to it by

Guatemala, in exchange

for the Central American

country investing $24.4 mil-

lion to protect its precious

rainforests.

Scientists have proposed

an enormous ring of super-

conducting magnets, similar

to a particle accelerator, as

a means of ﬂinging satellites

into orbit.

Chinese scientists claimed

to have made their ﬁrst suc-

cessful test of a thermonu-

clear fusion reactor, raising

hopes of an environmental-

ly-clean power source.

A witness to Princess Di-

ana’s death claims 12 men

in suits were lurking in the

tunnel where she crashed,

and that it was a stunt gone

disastrously wrong.

(Source: reuters.com)

(Source: space.com)

Chinese Target US Spy Satellite

A US agency has claimed

A study by the Nordic Co-

chrane Centre in Denmark

has found that pharmaceuti-

cal companies call the shots

in medical journals.

that China has beamed a

ground-based laser at US

spy satellites over its territory,

exposing the satellites’ poten-

tial vulnerability. The Defence

Department has refused to di-

vulge any further details.

The Pentagon’s National Re-

connaissance Ofﬁce Director

Donald Kerr acknolwedged the

incident but denied the laser did

any material damage to the satel-

lite or impeded its functions.

Theresa Hitchens of the

Center for Defense Informa-

tion cautions against jumping to

conclusions and thinks the Chi-

nese may have just been testing

equipment to track satellites

rather than cause damage. “We

don’t know their intent, and

we don’t have the capability to

know,” she said.

(Source: sciam.com)

Researchers at Duke Uni-

versity have built the world’s

ﬁrst invisibility cloak, but

the device works only in

two dimensions and only

on microwaves.

Fish in a lagoon at a Hawaiian

resort began to jump out of

the water as if they were be-

ing jolted with electricity just

minutes before a 6.6 magni-

tude earthquake hit the is-

lands on October 15th.

More than 700 UFO sight-

ings have been reported to

the UK’s Ministry of De-

fence in recent years, but

only twelve of them are

worth investigating accord-

ing to MOD ofﬁcials.

October 2006 | Sub Rosa

Sub Rosa | October 2006 5

‘Face’ on Mars Unmasked

Amazing Aztec Discovery

News - SPECIAL REPORT

Pyramid No More

To cut to the chase:

Between the two of

us we could find no

human-constructed

pyramids in or

around Visoko

easily be seen how some researchers, especially

if not well-versed in sedimentary geology, could

be persuaded by the force of Osmanagic’s rheto-

ric that there must be at least a “little something”

in the way of human-made pyramidal type struc-

tures around Visoko. Instead, what we found

were totally natural hills composed of sediments

dating from the Late Miocene (about six to eight

million years ago).

The rocks composing the so-called “pyra-

mids” consist of layers of bedded mudstones,

siltstones, various types of sandstones, conglom-

erates, and breccias, all of which are of natural

origin. These rocks were formed in ancient lakes

and rivers. The rock layers (strata) have been

slightly tilted by natural geologic processes, and in

some instances folds and faults can be observed

in the rocks. Stresses on the rocks have split the

various sandstone layers and conglomerate lay-

ers (the Bosnians typically called these breccias)

into semi-regular structures that to the naïve eye

Sphinx geologist Robert Schoch and anomalies

researcher Colette Dowell report from Bosnia

Bosnia. Out of pure curiosity, we began to com-

pile various articles and news reports. We found

them to be contradictory and this led to our curi-

osity growing even more. Were there really pyr-

amids in Bosnia? We wanted to go to Bosnia to

see for ourselves, so we began communications

with the “Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid

of the Sun Foundation” and its chairman, Semir

Osmanagic.

We visited Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina,

in late July and early August at the invitation of

Osmanagic. Our purpose was to explore the hills

that Osmanagic (2005b, 2006) has claimed are

giant pyramids. He has even given them such ro-

mantic names as Pyramid of the Sun, Pyramid of

the Moon, the Dragon Pyramid, and the Pyramid

of Love, apparently inspired by his comparison of

the “Bosnian Pyramids” with the genuine Mayan

pyramids that he has studied (Osmanagic, 2005a).

There were several topics to research and docu-

ment so we assisted each other in our investiga-

tions, and we came prepared to study pyramids

and other ancient structures. We brought our

surveying, measuring, and lighting equipment as

well as a video camera, still photography cam-

eras, tripods, recording, and dictating devices.

We also carried with us articles, maps, and re-

ports that we had received from other scien-

tists documenting their ﬁndings while working

with Osmanagic and the Bosnian Pyramid of the

Sun Foundation.

To cut to the chase: Between the two of us

we could ﬁnd no human-constructed pyramids in

or around Visoko. This, despite the fact that we

were constantly being confronted by the high-

ly charismatic and personable Osmanagic who,

from the moment he met us at the airport, bar-

raged us with a non-stop stream of comments

that the hills must be pyramids, that they are

“clearly man-made,” that “geology cannot explain

such structures,” and so on and so forth. It can

Robert Schoch and Colette Dowell in Mostar, Bosnia.

newly found remains of ancient cultures

are excavated and catalogued. The dis-

covery of a new tomb, temple, or pyramid, es-

pecially in a region where none have been found

previously, can make us rethink our past. Thus

it was extremely exciting when we ﬁrst heard

that “pyramids” had been discovered in Bosnia.

But the international headlines did not all agree.

Some proclaimed the reality of the “pyramids”

while others suggested that they might simply be

the creation of fertile modern imaginations. This

was very curious indeed.

During the course of the last year, news con-

cerning the alleged pyramids in Bosnia rapidly

streamed across the internet, accelerating after

excavations had begun on Visocica Hill, Visoko,

Natural formation of stones attributed as an ancient pathway.

October 2006 | Sub Rosa

Sub Rosa | October 2006 7

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