Stalking the Great Whore: Downard Unfiltered

As far as conspiracy theorists go, James Shelby Downard has exerted an outsided influence given the limited material of his which has been in common circulation. Though he seems to have been active since at least the 1970s, this was largely through a series of taped interviews he conducted with Jim Brandon – AKA William Grimstad – known as the Sirius Rising tapes. Circulating in very limited numbers among conspiracy enthusiasts, these made few waves beyond Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger, in which the Illuminatus! co-author described Downard’s JFK assassination theory as the most far-out and weird one of them all.

That may have been part of the motivation for Adam Parfrey of Feral House including Downard’s King Kill/33° in the first edition of Apocalypse Culture. It would be replaced by another Downard essay, The Call To Chaos, in the second edition, whilst an expanded version of King Kill/33° (the shorter version having been edited and tightened up by Michael A. Hoffman II), retitled Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism would be released in Jim Keith’s Secret and Suppressed.

In whichever version you read it, King Kill/33° is bizarre. It theorises that the JFK assassination was carried out by the Freemasons and loaded with hidden symbolism as part of a “Killing of the King” ritual, not unlike those outlined in The Golden Bough, intended to have potent magical effects reshaping the very mindset of the American people. The Call To Chaos used similar methodologies to tie the Trinity atomic weapon into a similar ritual framework. In the Downardian worldview, the world is the playground of occult secret societies, the Freemasons being a particularly powerful one, who use sex magick rituals bound up with what he called “mystical toponomy” – meaningful coincidences of the names of places, people, groups and so on, sone of which are purposefully engineered towards these ends – in order to exert occult mind control over the masses.

After this, beyond the brief polemic America the Possessed Corpse in Apocalypse Culture II, the Downard well seemed to dry up. Downard died in 1998; a few years later, Feral House put out The Carnivals of Life and Death, Downard’s biography covering his childhood and early adulthood. Significant chunks of this, by Downard’s admissions, were based on recovered memories of a strange type, Downard claiming that he’d discovered he could through concentration remember secret details about incidents in the past he previously hadn’t recalled. (It’s called “imagination”, James.) This revealed a childhood in which Downard was constantly menaced by nefarious secret societies, but overcame this menace through the deployment of extraordinary levels of violence for a child as young as he was at the time.

Carnivals breaks off at some point in Downard’s early 20s, and Adam Parfrey, who edited the published version, believed the rest of Downard’s writing to be lost. This, however, was not the case. Adam Gorightly is a historian of Discordianism and was therefore interested in Downard as a result of Wilson’s citation; this led him to write the brief biography James Shelby Downard’s Mystical War (currently very out of print, due to Gorightly being dissatisfied with it).

It’s perhaps as a result of that that William Grimstad got in touch with Gorightly with a bombshell: a Downard manuscript running to hundreds of typewritten pages, outweighing the extent published material handsomely, that was apparently a draft of a book that Downard had attempted to write in the 1970s. This was it, the Holy Grail of Downwardology; at first it overlaps with Carnivals of Life and Death (it covers the mishaps on the Texas-Mexico border that Adam Parfrey notes that Carnivals ends on, but cut from the Feral House version), but early on the biographical aspects get shunted into the background. They still pop up here and there, but Downard becomes more focused on his exposé of the intersection of ritual magic and mass psychology, culminating in The Mysticism of the Necromancers – the sprawling final chapter which takes an intense, deep look at the Kennedy assassination through Downard’s unique lens, and a comparison of the two makes it brutally apparent that King Kill/33° is a massively abbreviated version of this final chapter. This is especially evident when reading the expanded version in Secret and Suppressed, which Michael Hoffman is not credited as a co-author on – minus Hoffman’s editorial tweaks and changes, the general tone of the expanded essay and The Mysticism of the Necromancers and even much of the phrasing is very close indeed.

In other words, this is like discovering the hypothesised “Q” Gospel (not a QAnon thing!) which the synoptic Gospels are believed to have drawn on. This is the Ur-text, the most comprehensive statement of Downard’s worldview. The Call To Chaos and King Kill/33° were mere fragments of this; The Carnivals of Life and Death was nothing more than the warm-up act. This, for better or worse, is what Downard wanted to communicate to the world.

Downard’s planned title for this book was, in fact, Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism, the title eventually used for the expanded version of King Kill/33°, and in order to distinguish the text from this and from any other version of Downard’s book which might be stashed away out there, Gorightly has dubbed this book Stalking the Great Whore.

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This is not an arbitrary choice of title; the Great Whore is a figure who looms large in the Downardian landscape. This is surprising, given that she is not overtly mentioned at all in King Kill/33° or The Call To Chaos. In The Carnivals of Life and Death there’s a sequence where Downard is visiting his buddy Enrique, who’s been confined in a mental hospital, and Enrique leads him to an out-of-the-way room where a mysterious woman, given an almost angelic quality in Downard’s description, is sat playing with a doll. It is evident from references here that this is the woman who would, eventually, become known to Downard as the Great Whore, but the events surrounding how this happened are not spelled out by Downard.

In fact, he only briefly refers to her by name, saying she was known to him as Ann and to others as Mary. An exact identification of her is left to other hands. In a biographical afterword in, Richard B. Spence presents an updated version of an article he wrote for Paranoia magazine back in 2012 trying to corroborate the details of Downard’s life story. As one might expect, whilst Spence can’t find evidence of the more outlandish incidents in The Carnivals of Life and Death, he is able to discern that Downard worked a lot of real details into the tale, at least in terms of his father’s line of work, places he lived, figures in the local neighbourhoods, and so on.

It’s through Spence, in fact, that we are able to figure out a lot of the details of Downard’s life after the period he covers in detail in The Carnivals of Life and Death and the sojourn in Mexico discussed towards the start of this book (during which, if you believe Downard, he got caught up in a weird feud between local Mexican witchcraft cults harkening back to the darkest side of the Aztec era and an Illuminati operation headed up by an exiled Leon Trotsky). It seems that Downard had a patchy career – here a liquor store operator, there a radiologist for the US military during World War II, there some manner of assistant or business partner in a cranky-sounding alternative health clinic. Despite breaking out the odd anecdote from his life in Stalking the Great Whore, Downard is outright evasive about his movements after the 1930s, either because 1940 onwards was sufficiently recent for him that he couldn’t persuade himself he’d “remembered” lost incidents there or because he wanted to obscure his movements, perhaps because of involvements in shady business, and quite likely also due to the way he’d convinced himself that the Masons had picked him out to be a ceremonial scapegoat.

However, through his research Spence is able to identify someone who is by far the most likely candidate for being the Great Whore. This is Mary Annette Partin, who after her second marriage would became known as Anne Witwer, and during her first marriage would be known as… Mrs. Downard!

Yes, it turns out that James Shelby Downard, despite the originality of his beliefs, was in at least some part a fairly well-known flavour of oddball: the dude who got divorced from his wife and never, ever got over it. (Elon Musk is providing us with a very public example of the type in the present day.) Downard’s outraged blustering about Masonic “sex circuses” predating on innocents takes on a new dimension if we see this as oblique references to Downard’s belief that he and Anne had been sexually interfered with by outside forces – a delusion not unknown in some types of paranoid belief system – and Downard’s allusions to the Great Whore’s movements line up with Anne’s life after she split from him rather well. Most bizarrely, Witwer’s second husband would also involve himself in Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theory, claiming to have hosted various notables including J. Edgar Hoover at his hotel where they expressed surprisingly antagonistic views concerning JFK. As Spence points out, not only is it a curious coincidence that Anne should keep marrying JFK conspiracy theorists, but the hotel connection here could only turbo-charge Downard’s suspicions about what she was up to.

You see, the Great Whore is both the ultimate villain and the ultimate victim in Downard’s conspiratorial cosmology. Brainwashed through occult and scientific means into doing the bidding of the Masons, she is the ultimate “bionic witch”, the horniest participant in the Masonic sex circuses, whose depravity turbo-charges the potency of their rituals. Both the perfected prototype of the cybernetically and magically altered human being the grand conspiracy wishes to create and a powerful lynchpin of the sex cult that rules the world, the Great Whore is a microcosm of which the conspiracy is the macrocosm.

This would seem weird and contradictory were it not for Downard’s allusions to the ultimate powers behind the various secret societies he sees as holding real power in the world being not human beings, but what he terms “Minds of Mystic Power” – after all, whilst Downard believes he is a big enough smartypants to detect the pattern of mystic toponomy after the fact, it would take a truly superhuman intelligence to create it before the fact. It’s not altogether clear to me whether Downard things that the Minds of Mystic Power are godlike intelligences like those Roberts and Gilbertson contemplated in The Dark Gods or egregore-like collective intelligences woven from the pooled psychic potential of the members of the secret societies they puppet, but they, like the Great Whore, are keystones of the Downardian worldview which until now has been held back from us.

The material here can verge on the repetitive – Gorightly suggests that the text he has may have been cobbled together from several drafts – but offers enough detail to expose where some of Downard’s thinking may be coming from. For instance, Downard puts great stock in the idea of Brunel University hosting a computer deeply involved in all this. His explanation for why it’s relevant has to do with Brunel being somewhat close to High Wycombe (except… not really, it’s in Uxbridge which is half an hour down the motorway from High Wycombe), which is connected to the Hellfire Club. However, he cites A Clockwork Orange enough that I suspect the real reason is that at some point he learned that key scenes at that movie were shot at Brunel (to make use of the brutalist architecture there) and on some level the connection lingered in his mind.

That said, despite his heavy reliance on imaginary material (he believes he found a lost Brunel University supercomputer in a neighbour’s barn in the 1930s, before Brunel existed as an institution), Downard is clearly erudite and capable of researching a subject when he has a mind to; he seems to have been onto the connections between L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons well before that story became common knowledge, and indeed seems to be very much up on Scientology as a subject. and is sufficiently hostile that one wonders if he was a member at some point and then became disgruntled; his discussion of looking back at his own memories and analysing them to find hidden dimensions sounds like a lot like a homespun version of self-auditing. Downard also alludes to a number of Mexican true crime cases, like the Rancho El Ángel prostitution and murder ring or the Yerba Buena human sacrifice cult, that I hadn’t heard of, though he’ll mangle the facts to fit his symbolic pattern. For instance, whilst Rancho El Ángel was run by a group of four sisters, Downard insists that there were three, in part because this better fits his recurring reference to Three Sisters symbolism, a nod to the Fates who he saw himself as opposing. (It is notable that as much as he condemns what he perceives as a Masonic manipulation of symbols, it is Downard himself who seems to be the primary symbol manipulator and modifier here.)

The Mexico material is one area where the darker side of Downard’s personality is evident, and it is far from the only instance. Downard appears to have been positively terrified of Mexico, considering it the dark heart of a foul empire of witchcraft run by what he calls the Tres Hermanas gang – more Three Sisters symbolism! – and which is even more depraved that the debased Masonic clique that seems to be largely in control of the United States. (All this cloak and dagger stuff between competing conspiracies sometimes gives Downard’s worldview a similar tone to the Illuminatus! trilogy. He even talks up the idea that a mass hippie love in – this time in New Mexico instead of Bavaria like in the novels – may have been intended to summon dark forces.)

The Great Whore stuff, naturally, involves a certain amount of misogynistic snarling; Downard seems to have had one heck of a Madonna/whore complex going on, also evident in the way he speaks of Marilyn Monroe, who he regards as a fellow victim of the conspiracy and a fellow sufferer to him. (Literally – he seems to think he and Marilyn were subjected to brainwashing experiments at the same facilities.) There’s also a weird tone to the way he talks about the assassination of Martin Luther King. It’s clear from The Carnivals of Life and Death that Downard has absolutely no affection for the Klan, but the way he talks about King suggests contempt, not respect, evidently believing him to have been a Masonic stooges to induce a certain rebelliousness on the part of the Black community for nefarious ends and then slain in his own Killing of the King ritual.

And here is where I say the bit that neither Adam Gorightly, in his introduction running down how he came by this book, nor Richard Spence in his afterward, seem to have felt able to say. Gorightly in particular talks about how Michael Hoffman and William Grimstad (AKA Jim Brandon) formed this weird little trio of their own, Hoffman and Grimstad convening at Downard’s airstream trailer to eat Downard’s home-grilled hamburgers and get their mind filled with his unique viewpoint. This trio is described by Gorightly as a “Fortean study group of sorts”.

However… Grimstad, who seems to have got in touch with Downard first, was for some time the chief editor of the American Nazi Party’s propaganda outlet, and has written multiple antisemitic books (including Antizion, which seems to be nothing more than a bumper collection of antisemitic quotes from throughout history, presumably so that if you want to add an air of erudition to your Naziism you have a suitable quote to hand). Grimstad, by his own account as quoted by Gorightly, was contacted by Downard after he’d run a photograph in a periodical he’d been editing (Grimstad is coy about which but there aren’t many options) showing Martin Luther King arm in arm with a Rabbi, with the subtitle “Kabbalah Konnection?” Downard seems to have wanted to talk up the esoteric aspects of what Grimstad describes as a “jest”, but given what publications Grimstad was editing the motivation for implying a link between King and the Jewish community is only too clear.

Michael Hoffman, for his part, was very much the junior member of this trio (Downard being the eldest); Grimstad and Downard made their connection in 1973 and assuming that Hoffman was tagging along at that time he’d have been 16 at the time; he was certainly in his early 20s when he edited Downard’s work into the first version of King Kill/33° for pamphlet circulation prior to its inclusion in Apocalypse Culture. Hoffman has gone on to have his own career in Holocaust denial.

Was Downard a Nazi? Nazi pageantry on the one hand shows a great deal of interest in symbolism of the sort which you’d think Downard would make hay out of, yet he’s comparatively quiet about Nazis in Stalking the Great Whore. His main animus is directed against the Freemasons – a group specifically targeted for extermination by the Nazis. And two thirds of his “Fortean study group” were fucking Holocaust deniers who would produce books very much mimicing the Downardian worldview, such as Hoffman’s Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare.

Gorightly and Spence both elide this, which only plays into Hoffman and Grimstad’s attempts to have it both ways, both men wanting to air their noxious views sometimes whilst at other times they’d prefer to be regarded as harmless, quirky chaps with interests in all things weird. This, after all, is the reason for Grimstad’s “Jim Brandon” persona. As William Grimstad, he’d put out books with titles like The Six Million Reconsidered – yes, folks, he really is that blatant – whilst as Jim Brandon he’d put out the Sirius Rising tapes and the books Weird America and his main Downardian effort, The Rebirth of Pan.

The Rebirth of Pan ended up being latched onto by the Hellier team as potentially relevant to the massive mystery they’d essentially yes-anded each other into believing in. Though I don’t have high opinions of their intellectual rigour, the folk behind Hellier genuinely seem to have been sideswiped by the Holocaust denial connection here. As Hayley Stevens has chronicled in her own look at Grimstad’s insinuation into Fortean circles, Greg Newkirk has repeatedly said the Hellier producers do not actively promote The Rebirth of Pan because of Grimstad’s authorship.

He’s also, not unreasonably, expressed quite some annoyance that nobody in the Fortean investigation community saw fit to mention this; it seems that there was (to use an ironic phrase) a conspiracy of silence around the subject, and that if the Newkirks had known about the Grimstad connection whilst they were filming Hellier season 2 they’d have yanked the Rebirth of Pan references entirely and found alternate sources. Stevens’ article breaks down how noted cryptozoologist Loren Coleman has been a participant in this conspiracy of silence. In not being honest about the nature of the men he chose to invite into his own, made into his research partners, and accepted the assistance of in propagating his ideas, Gorightly and Spence extend the conspiracy of silence to James Shelby Downard himself.

It is, perhaps, no newsflash that Downard was a bigot who surrounded himself with bigoted people; his own writing, even in its edited forms in Apocalypse Culture and Secret and Suppressed, exposed that easily enough. But Gorightly in particular, by playing along with Hoffman and Grimstad’s characterisation of their group without joining the dots, is also perpetuating the conspiracy of silence concerning Hoffman and Grimstad. Downard is too dead to produce much in the way of Nazi propaganda, and too incoherent for his material to gain much traction directly (though QAnon will adapt anything and everything into its omniconspiracy these days). Hoffman, unfortunately, is still going – more’s the pity. As long as the far right pushes an agenda based on bigotry, hatred, and prudery, the world just won’t be safe for a Great Whore and her sex magic cult. (I use “Great” here in the sense of “exceptional”. If sex work is real work, then we should celebrate professionalism and craft there as much as anywhere.)