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.