Please note that this item is copyright Richard Alexander. It may be freely copied for non-commercial use, provided this copyright notice remains attached and the text is not altered without my permission. Commercial use of the text is forbidden without agreement as to payment. (Normally I will accept the usual wordage rate.)

"Kephas, Aeolus" The Lucid View: Investigations into Occultism, Ufology and Paranoid Awareness". Adventures Unlimited, Kempton, IL, USA., 2004. Pbk, 212pp, illus, bibliography. ISBN 1-931882-30-4 $14.95.

The main premise, if I understand this book correctly, is that beyond the paranoid worldview lies a form of lucidity, which reveals the "true" nature of reality. And by investigating certain subject areas inhabited (not exclusively) by those of a paranoid persuasion: the occult, conspiracies, ufology and the like, the author tries to show rational types who are still trying to cling to "Consensus Reality" what they're missing. How kind.

Now, I would agree that there is certainly a case for a detailed investigation into, amongst other things, a whole range of phenomena that became prominent in the 1980's and 90's, in particular those associated with ufos and wider conspiracies. In particular I would like to know more about those people who were promoting all manner of themes such as alien abductions and imminent alien invasion; the wide ranging conspiracy literature and so forth and whose agenda they were serving. Sadly this book doesn't begin to look into such matters.

Rather it takes the paranoid writings themselves and attempts to make sense on the other side of them in some form of occult understanding of the universe. Consequently the book is a mesh of fairly intelligent summary of paranoid writing, explication and quotation of such writing and much stock occult stuff, which, quite frankly I found unintelligible.

To be honest I found the whole thesis that the author was propounding that any form of lucidity can be found through an occult reading of paranoid texts to be hopelessly flawed. If you want a culinary analogy, it's like eating chunks of all the usual suspects: Blavatsky, Crowley, Cooper, Andrews, Streiber, Philip K. Dick, R.A. Wilson, Nietzsche, Charlie Manson, Hitler, the Freemasons, Casteneda, Fort etc, half-digesting them and then regurgitating them back onto the page. Not exactly appetising. Inevitably given the sources for much of his material some of this book is intelligible and makes (rather obvious) points about people being manipulated and exploited by the powers that be, but that has been better documented and expressed elsewhere. As for the quality of the occult material, I'll leave for others to judge.

I am not convinced that the author has much grasp on geography as he appears to locate Arabia in "darkest Africa" (p.98) and his art history is equally suspect as he describes artists as "apolitical" (p.106) on the same page as he discusses those very political of artists, the Surrealists. (OK not all were political but many were.)

Furthermore the book is not very reader-friendly. None of the quotations give the page numbers of the books they are supposed to come from (so you can't easily check them); there is no index and the bibliography is a shoddy affair with no publishers, dates of publication and so forth.

Whether anyone in the target audience - presumably those individuals who like to think of themselves as being outside "Consensus Reality" (but not so far that they don't buy books and read them) - and who are apart from (above?) the mass - will obtain any further illumination as to the nature of reality from this text is highly debatable. Personally I'd recommend people go back to the source material and construct their own belief system rather than bother with this one.

There's much better on the market - not recommended

3/10

Richard Alexander