It was the turn of the millennium. I had just read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and, like many, became fascinated with the mythology surrounding Rennes-le-Château. I became a Freemason like generations of my family before me (four, at the very least). I was deeply into making electronic music, reading and writing "avant-garde" poetry, studying esoteric and Masonic literature, and drinking. Lots of drinking. I was also working at Cornell University's Olin Library, and Cornell has an extensive collection of Masonic books. Thousands. Literally. I was like a pig in shit, but to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, my snout was pointed at the stars. And France. I moved here in 2002.
A friend of mine, a short-term former bassist of Galaxie 500, worked in a kind of head shop-slash-porno outlet-slash-occult bookstore, and turned me on to The Black Flame and Dagobert's Revenge magazines.
At the time, I had been working on a lengthy article about the connections between Freemasonry and Scouting, and more specifically, the BSA honor society called the Order of the Arrow. I submitted that article to DR with high hopes; it was rejected. But Twyman liked it and published it online.
Twyman also inducted me into a fledgling esoteric order, now defunct, called the Ordo Lapsit Exilis -- the "Order of the Fallen Stone," as a 1st° "Legionnaire." Motto: Ab initio (“From the beginning...”). I thought it a bit odd, never took it very seriously, but was still rather chuffed. God knows why. I don't know if the OLE ever existed beyond a website, a mission statement, and a series of written degrees, but I think Twyman had founded the Order with Boyd Rice and Vadge Moore, occultist and former drummer of The Dwarves.
(Off-topic, if you get a chance to see them live, do it! Singer Blag Dahlia probably has a rep as a madman, but when I met him, he was a soft-spoken and very nice dude).
Years passed. I read at some point the OLE had folded. Like with many Rice collaborations, it seems to have been an acrimonious parting. The list of disgruntled Rice collaborators is long: Giddle Partridge, filmmaker Larry Wessel, (perhaps?) Douglas P. of Death in June....etc. It didn't surprise me. Back then, Rice accused Twyman of turning the OLE into a money-making scheme, a scruple he didn't seem to apply to Anton LaVey. Twyman, I learned much later, accused Rice of being lazy and riding on her shoulders. Qui sait?
As I continued my esoteric studies over the years, I frequently came across Twyman's work. Some of it looked interesting. Some of her associations, like the so-called "Dragon Court" and Dragon bloodline, seemed like utter bullshit. They seem like people who confuse the SCA with reality.
Everyone wants to imagine their ancestors were Princes or Dukes, or a least minor Lords. But alas, most of our ancestors were peasants, anointed more with pig shit and flies than the holy oils of Merovingian fish-men.
I later learned Twyman had gotten into QAnon-like researches into topics such as Project Monarch and CIA-sponsored kid-trafficking. I've seen lots of this kind of stuff. Before QAnon we had the "Satanic Panic" and waaaaay back, there were accusations that Jews trafficked kids for use in unholy rites. Blood-libel. The CIA certainly did some wacky mind-control experimentation back in the day, using LSD on unsuspecting soldiers, among other treats, but the idea that a "deep-state" runs a global ring of kiddy diddlers? Weinstein and. Epstein are real enough, and add just enough fact to make such a scenario believable. And hey! The Jooz!. (That's sarcasm, friends. LoS don't truck with no Antisemites). Just enough real shit to make the balderdash seem possible.
Disinformation. Psy-ops. If you prefer, Grade-A mindfuckery.
I don't know what it was I was looking for, probably something to do with recent posts about the Church of Satan and the 8-8-88 rally, ah yes, it was on Boyd Rice's Wikipedia page, where I read Twyman had died.
Searching "Twyman death" on Google I came across a couple of articles. Twyman had been researching sex trafficking rings involving the CIA and other such topics. Not really new subjects, to be honest. Cathy O'Brien is the fairy godmother of this bullshit. Her TRANCE Formation of America is one of the "classics" of what can be called a genre. Another is James Shelby Downard's Carnivals of Life and Death.
If the latter is an extended allegory, I don't know. If meant to be a real recollection, then Downard is either a bullshit artist of the highest order, or a schizophrenic.
I'm still not entirely convinced Downard is even real, instead being a concoction made up by Michael Hoffman II and Jim Brandon, pseudonym of William Grimstad. Both are Fortean types who are also Antisemitic firebrands. Some even say Adam Parfrey was in on it, despite the fact he was half-Jewish. Or wasn't. He got pretty cranky when I mentioned it in a Facebook exchange, despite his claiming to be half-Jewish as a way of defending Boyd Rice against charges of being a Neo-Nazi. But Parfrey is dead now.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but his Feral House publishing concern is so frustrating. A mix of truly interesting and informative books mixed with some of the biggest balls of bullroar on the market. Downard's Carnivals, for one. I must also mention Dick Hoagland's NASA "exposé" Dark Mission. This latter book is such a rancid pack of nonsense it's almost criminal. If I weren't such a free speech defender I'd advocate banning it just for being so insanely stupid. Such is the mixed bag that is Feral House.
But I digress. Twyman was looking into sex trafficking by the CIA before her death and ended up being found in her garage, an apparent suicide by hanging. How could that not be conspiracy fodder?
I read some things about her death, and while I don't firmly believe Twyman was in fact murdered, there are enough suspicious facts to the case which warrant further investigation.
Before her death she talked of being stalked and threatened, both online and in the real world. She even made a YouTube video about it. And that video was here but "....is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Mystagogue Publications LLC." But of course.
One could (and some people do) argue that this is evidence she was murdered. It could also be used to prove that her mental state was deteriorating, that she was merely paranoid and losing the plot, breaking down.
I would urge anyone interested to read the testimonies of those who feel something is amiss (see below) and draw one's own conclusions. I don't claim one thing or the other, but I do feel that if these testimonies are true, her suicide might be more that it appears.
I didn't know Twyman personally and I have no dog in this hunt. Maybe the police did a proper investigation and she'd simply gone down the occult rabbit hole, never to emerge. She always seemed to be a decent sort. Bright, certainly. Off-kilter? Perhaps. But that doesn't mean she was totally off her rocker. Her interests were esoteric and she was prone to make connections I don't agree with. But the only time I saw her bear into whack-a-doodle territory was with the Dragon Court nonsense, but I don't even know to what degree she actually believed it.
I don't want to intrude upon her family's grief and wander into what may just be the sad affair of a smart woman who lost her grip and ended up taking her own life.
But if there is something to the claims that she didn't kill herself, it merits a further look, ne c'est pas?
This post won't convince anyone, anywhere, of anything. She was nice to me, and dug my work. After DR I didn't follow or read her writings, but what she did in that magazine was remarkable and valuable, if only for the poetry it brought into my life. For that, I salute her.
And I guess, in a way, I'm still a Legionnaire in the Ordo Lapsit Exilis, so in that small way, a brother of sorts.
Read the links I've posted below and decide for yourselves. Here in France, I can do naught but salute her from afar. Godspeed Tracy, whatever happened.
1. Who killed Tract Twyman?
The title already tells you the author's conclusions. If any number of things alleged here are true, than an investigation is surely in order. Thing is, are they true? How could I know? I'd like to know. The post is actually an answer on Quora by one "Providence Athenaeum" who has made zero posts and only one answer on the site. This one. The Providence Athenaeum, btw, is a private library located in Rhode Island. It was frequented, among others, by Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, which somehow seems germane.
The post claims she was murdered but is short on details. It's well-written, but comes across as well....paranoid. To say the least.
2. Tracy Twyman, Targeted Indivdual (podcast)
So, around 8:20 Twyman suggests that a sophisticated AI had hijacked not only her computer, what she was seeing online, but had hijacked her mind. That is to say, what she was seeing online was based upon what she was thinking. Not what she'd already visited -- Google algorithms do that to all of us -- but what was in her head, "up to the minute" (her words).
Most people understand that this is the way the internet works. Search for prices for plane tickets to Mallorca, and you start to see ads for flights to and hotels in....Mallorca. This is the obvious part.
What's less obvious is that your entire web history is used to point you towards things Google's AI thinks will interest you. It's a well-known fact. And problem. Leftists get results that confirm their biases. Right-wingers get results which confirm theirs. This is not always so blatant, and there has been a lot of hand-wringing about how the increasing polarization of the political landscape is being entrenched due to search engine algorithms.
With confirmation bias or frequency illuisions, the paranoid mind kicks into overdrive. The brain's natural tendency to render perception itself an organizing process becomes a kind of apophenia. With confirmation bias, the brain sees things that confirm pre-existing conceptions. You have a theory, start looking, and find plenty of data to support it, neglecting that which doesn't. Frequency illusion is when you see a thing, then see it again, then start seeing it everywhere. Like if I tell you the number 27 appears in a lot of media, you'll start seeing it everywhere (and trust me, in this case, you will). Of course, the 99 other times you don't see it won't be important, but the times you do: Mind. Blown. Apophenia is when you start seeing meaningful connections in unrelated things. (Sorry for these extremely simplistic explanations).
In many ways, this is normal, and helps us construct our relationship with reality. For an artistic mind, it can be a very useful tool. Surrealist aesthetics are in many ways controlled apophenia. Salvador Dalí called it the paranoiac-critical method. Dalí also said: "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." And that's the crux. He did say paranoiac, but he also said critical. I know confirmation bias, frequency illusion and even limited apophenia do not mean a person is crazy. But when it gets out of hand, it's no longer an artistic tool or a thing that makes you go "hmm." It could be the onset of schizophrenia.
What's more likely? That an AI had gotten so sophisticated it could show Twyman things she had only just thought? Or that her "perception organization tools" had gone wonky? When she says her computer was telling her to kill herself, is it more likely the computer was saying she should kill herself, or that her suicidal ideations were being externalized?
At the end of the podcast, it is, as the podcaster says, pretty "far out." Indeed, he says "....to me, at first, I think she's kind of flying off the deep end on some stuff that she's correlating to Biblical scriptures, and the Sumerian Bible texts, and the Book of Enoch, and some end days, uh, kind of virus versus flood, kind of scenarios, but this is the kind of research that she did, the kind of stuff she did...."
Believe what you want, I give you the choice. But a few minutes into her discourse something seems off, even with the tone of her voice. If she was being harassed, let's look into it. But it may have all been in her head. Some are claiming that the disappearance of her videos and other writings from the internet indicate a campaign to "erase" her from the internet (as if). Could it be that a grieving family, overcome, simply wanted to take down the paranoid content of a beloved member of the family who killed herself as a result of schizophrenia or another psychosis?
Like I said, by all means, look into the allegations of harassment and any other potential suspicious details. But make sure we're not twisting the data to "prove" something we've already come to accept as true. Let's not succumb to confirmation bias and/or apophenia.
3. Re-open the Investigation into Tracy Twyman and Isaac Kappy's Suspicious Deaths, a peitition initiated by Zachary Brian McQuaid.
If you think there is a valid reason to do so, sign the petition. The name pretty much says it all. The text accompanying the petition is awfully damning, though proves nothing. Any of the claims could be the ravings of a liar, a madman, someone misinformed, or someone actually in the know. If there's any truth to it, an investigation could verify or disprove it. I am in no position to refute or confirm any of it, but it would be interesting to see what a proper investigation turned up....
McQuaid speaks of producing videos which he says, unbeknownst to him, were disinformation. He names names. I Googled his name, unusual enough, and came up with a reference on IMDb to an actor with a single credit to his name, an actor in an episode of the Goosebumps series. Same dude? I don't know. But it could be an indication he had the means and skills to make the videos he claims to have been hired to make. A person with the same name donated to Just Adopt, Inc. on on 12/25/2021. If it's the same guy, maybe it indicates he's a decent sort. Then again, it's an organization for adoptions, and he does claim that trafficking children was part of the nefarious deeds of which his employers may or may not have been a part....
4. Tracy Twyman Official Website
The website is a single page with some odd graphics. It also contains the Latin phrase Nemo me impune lacessit: "No one provokes me without impunity." A death foretold?
It also includes an image with the motto "There is More Beyond." This serves as the title for the selected papers of Gardner Murphy (1895-1979), published in 1989. Murphy was a psychologist of some note, who in addition to more traditional psychology, researched parapsychology, that is to say, psychic phenomena. Whether it's a reference to Gardner or not, I can't say, but given Twyman's interests, it's possible. She was given to using the Latin phrase Plus ultra (on her website included), which means more or less the same thing. It was also Sir Francis Bacon's personal motto, for whatever that's worth.
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So, with lots of digressions, that's a brief account of my dealings with Tracy Twyman. I don't know, and have no way of knowing, what happened to her. But I was sad to learn of her death, and that it's become fodder for conspiracy theory. It may be exactly what it appears, and her grieving family just wants it go away. If that is the case, and any friends or family come across this post and are offended, my apologies. I liked our exchanges, and respected her achievements as a researcher, writer, TV presenter (In Search Of....) and the fact that she didn't just talk about doing things, she did them.
My respects Tracy, I regret that our brief encounter wasn't longer. Plus ultra!
