I have known Neil for fifteen years now, since he was a mod schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippy who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years; we are just both a tad older....It has often been theorised that a majority of ‘zooform’ creatures are 'tulpas', or unintentional manifestations created by the human psyche. There is also the possibility that such phantasms, or monsters from the id, can be created intentionally. One such example was researched by George Foot Moore, an American Orientalist and religious historian, who died in 1931, who took on the view that ‘monsters’ are mental projections, although it has never been explained as to how several people can muster a creature. However, over the centuries such ‘monsters’ have been born in the form of dragons, fairies, phantom hellhounds and the like, to the modern day manifestations known as Mothman, the Jersey Devil and the Bray Road Werewolf of Wisconsin.
Polish expert Julian Ochorowicz coined the term ‘ideoplastic’, which he used to describe the unconscious power of a medium to create tangible and apparently autonomous physical forms. Another Polish researcher, Franek Kluski was said to have caused the materialisation of more than two-hundred apparitions, mostly in the form of animals. His most famous manifestation, or projection was the shaggy ape-man which appeared at a séance on 20th November 1921, under the supervision of Professor Geley. The bizarre beast materialised and Geley felt the apparition rub shoulders with him, and also give off a pungent stench. This monster resembled a similar ape-man conjured on August 10th 1923, and was said to have lifted several chairs (which women were sitting on at the time) and also overturned a sofa. Famous ghost hunter Harry Price also partook in several séances where ‘ghosts’ of children were manifested.
This complex nature brings me to the tale of the ‘Mole Kingdom’. This strange place was created by the already mentioned Franek Kluski, but when he was a child. He described how he would often lay down for hours in the corner of the room of his parents house, and then as darkness drew in, he would arrange two chairs with a rug positioned over them, resembling a makeshift camp. Franek would then lie under the ‘camp’ and visit what he called the ‘Mole Kingdom’. Although his parents left him to it, knowing full well how the imagination of children worked, little did they realise that Franek was interacting with ‘creatures’ he’d manifested. On one occasion Franek invited a couple of friends to join him under the canopy of the rug where they all heard a vase break, a strike from a clock that had been broken for a long time, and the footsteps of the ‘Mole’. The vision appeared to be enshrouded in a bluish cloud, and was accompanied by two children who those in attendance knew had died some years ago. Franek told his friends that dead children often came back to life in the ‘Kingdom’.
Scientist Charles Richet called this ‘place’ the ‘cryptocosm’, or in occult circles it has been known as the ‘astral world’; places where dreams come to life. Of course, those who raise such ‘monsters’ seem able to dispose of, or control such levels of strangeness, but is this world, which we inhabit, plagued by forces or apparitions and monsters, which we have, over thousands of years, unintentionally manifested? It seems so, and certainly, in my opinion, the only way we can fully describe what Jon Downes originally coined as ‘zooform phenomena’, peculiar ‘monsters’ or forms with animal characteristics, which are not your average ghost of a pet. However, with the full power of the mind as yet not understood, what creatures could we create intentionally if we really wanted to? And should we attempt such a practice?
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