{"id":701,"date":"2014-09-26T00:38:19","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T07:38:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=701"},"modified":"2014-09-26T00:38:19","modified_gmt":"2014-09-26T07:38:19","slug":"the-shaver-mystery-sermons-in-stones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2014\/09\/26\/the-shaver-mystery-sermons-in-stones\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shaver Mystery: Sermons in Stones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"rm4efa72ed\"<\/a>Supernormal revelations arrive in many forms: dreams, voices in the head, fevered visions, the lyrics of a Beatles song, a flash of light on the road to Damascus.\u00a0 But one of the strangest-ever vectors of epiphany has to be the one that kept Richard Shaver busy for the latter years of his life: a bunch of rocks.<\/p>\n

Richard Shaver (1907-1975) was one of the two men at the centre of the infamous \u201cShaver Mystery\u201d that enthralled SF readers in the 1940s and 1950s.\u00a0 In his pre-Mystery existence, by his own account, he was a trained artist who took a job on a factory floor in Detroit to support his wife and child\u2014but his life went off the rails on the day his welding torch began picking up mysterious voices that told him terrible things.\u00a0 At that point, the narrative splits into two rather different versions.\u00a0 In the boring version, he went nuts after his brother died, lost his job and family, and ended up spending eight years or so in a mental institution, until his parents sprang him in 1943 and took him to live at home.<\/p>\n

The other version was much more exciting.\u00a0 The voices in his welding torch came from sinister beings called Deros, who lived in vast, ancient\"Amazing0647PD\"<\/a> warrens of caves and tunnels deep in the Earth, and delighted in torture, sadistic perversion, and the taste of human flesh.\u00a0 They were ugly, too, with noses like the trunks of mutant elephants.\u00a0 Both telepathically and with advanced technology inherited from the vanished Elder Race, the Deros harassed, implanted dire suggestions into, worked malicious mischief against, and generally made life miserable for the poor sods who lived upstairs (the human race). \u00a0It was, indeed, a Dero named Max who had killed Shaver\u2019s brother, and was now on the trail of Shaver himself.\u00a0 In fear, Shaver quit his job, took to the road as a hobo, and ran afoul of the law\u2014but while he was in jail, he was spirited away by a lady Tero, one of the good<\/em> denizens of the underplanet, to spend eight years below ground observing the Deros and having adventures that would certainly make some amazing stories.<\/p>\n

So he duly wrote them down, and in 1943 contacted the editor of Amazing Stories,<\/em> a low-grade pulp SF mag.\u00a0 The editor was Ray Palmer<\/a>, who had a nose for anything that might improve his magazine\u2019s circulation, and thus a thirty-year partnership (or folie \u00e0 deux,<\/em> depending on whom you ask) was born.\u00a0 Palmer bought everything Shaver could give him, edited it extensively, and published it as nonfiction.\u00a0 The back-story involved a long-vanished supercivilization of whom the Deros (DEtrimental RObots) were the degenerate troglodyte descendants, rather like Morlocks of HG Wells; and like the Morlocks, they had inherited all sorts of fabulous high tech, which they put to the devilish uses mentioned above.\u00a0 We surface-dwellers could not only be tormented at a distance by the Deros\u2019 mind-control rays, but also kidnapped for use as slaves, sex toys, or\u2014like the Eloi\u2014for meat. (Shaver also claimed, though, that the Deros often climbed up into human cities to buy groceries.)\u00a0 Overall, the Dero mythos comes across like theosophy rewritten as soft porn, with dollops of hard SF, the Fortean Society, and Abraham Merritt<\/a>, a writer from the 1920s who also influenced Lovecraft.<\/p>\n

\"C2_RaymondPalmerRichardShaver\"<\/a>
Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At any rate, it all struck a resounding chord in the burgeoning SF scene of the mid-1940s.\u00a0 Readers wrote in with their own experiences of Dero torment, blaming the underworld demons for their misfortunes in much the same way as people once blamed witches.\u00a0 Clubs were formed and new magazines were spawned, all centred around what became known as the \u201cShaver Mystery\u201d\u2014until two things happened, towards the end of the 1940s.\u00a0 First, the saner side of fandom rebelled against what they recognized as credulous bilge from a certifiable nutcase; second, the Shaver Mystery was gradually overtaken and pushed aside by an even more intriguing pop culture phenomenon, also at least partly midwifed by Ray Palmer: the advent of the UFO craze.\u00a0 The Fortean writer Bruce Lanier Wright<\/a> puts it neatly:<\/p>\n

Despite its obscurity, the Shaver Mystery still resonates for some of us. A few optimists even believe it gave birth to the entire post-1947 flying saucer phenomenon, although I prefer to think of it as a failed twin, like one of those unsuspected, calcified fetuses that turn up from time to time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By the mid-1950s, the Shaver Mystery was pretty much sidelined, except for a shrinking core of true believers, which naturally included Richard Shaver.\u00a0 Although Palmer and Shaver remained friends and occasional collaborators, Palmer phased out publishing Shaver\u2019s stories, and the writer faded from view.\u00a0 He did not, however, give up on the Deros.\u00a0 Living on a small farm in Wisconsin, and hideously hampered by the sort of Dero interference that the rest of us would call headaches, he continued to write and publish his own material in \u2018zine form.\u00a0 And he received a major revelation when his wife brought him a bunch of agate pebbles, and said it kinda looked like they contained pictures.<\/p>\n

\"masonite\"<\/a>It was then that Shaver had his epiphany.\u00a0 These were no ordinary rocks.\u00a0 They were books<\/em>, permanent records and artworks left behind by the Elder Race, the nobler ancestors of the Deros; complex multidimensional images had been etched into their very fabric, using the same advanced ray-projection technology\u00a0 that he would need to read them properly.\u00a0 At last, he had physical artifacts of the Elder Race!\u00a0 At last, if he could only read the stones properly, he could learn so much more about the deep history of Earth and the Deros!\u00a0 Alas, lacking the proper technology, he was forced to accept only a fraction of the information embedded in the stones.\u00a0 He sawed them into sections, used a toy projector to enlarge the patterns, and painstakingly teased out the resulting images, enhancing them with paints, dyes, soap flakes, and other media.\u00a0 Eventually, discouraged by the reactions of skeptics, he simply photographed and annotated the images with the amazing revelations they contained.<\/p>\n

Can you spell pareidolia<\/em>?<\/p>\n

The images were astonishing.\u00a0 Shaver\u2019s interpretations<\/a> were even more so.\u00a0 The images opened up to him a whole world of different elder races:
\nthe half-man-half-woman Amazons, each born with one luscious breast; the Giants, who left Lovecraftian Cyclopean ruins behind them when they vanished; the mer-people, graceful and benign, who inhabited the sea; the forest races, with their long, fluffy tails, the ancestors of the Yetis.\u00a0 Shaver saw a lot of faces in the rocks, but the faces were also letters if you looked at them funny, spelling out texts in the bizarre alphabet he called Mantong. The annotations on one of his rock photos give a flavour of his method (ellipses in the original):<\/p>\n

With ordinary 20\/20 vision, the above [photo] can seem only confusing. But if you add some thought, some experience with \"\"<\/a>similar arrangements and if you squint at it until you see only the pattern and not the detail… ..or put a low-powered lens in front of one eye to throw one eye slightly out of focus and cause a stereo type vision… \u00a0you see an odd sort of man in the center with a pointed beard… and a great many squiggles which seem to have an arrangement… a meaningful and intentional arrangement.<\/p>\n

If you know that they used faces much as we do letters and symbols… and the slight difference in profile or hair-do was to them the same difference as adding a bottom bar to an F to make an E.\u00a0 (That is, one profile looks like another unless you know that to them, a sneer on one is the same as a squiggle on a C makes a G.)<\/p>\n

However, there is a great deal more to three-dimensional picture-writing than that.\u00a0 Certain angles of light turn all the faces into letters, and a cross-sectioning by the saw doesn\u2019t help this complex arrangement to be more understandable by bisecting the whole thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And on another photo:<\/p>\n

You do have to learn them [the images], like learning a foreign language.\u00a0 \u00a0They have a left and right profile in every face, and a \"rockbook1\"<\/a>top and bottom profile in every face…\u00a0 every hand gesture has its mirroring four-way fantastic reflection.\u00a0 This is what makes this art 4-way art, any side is the top, and every personality has four sides, four appearances.\u00a0 This means that they either MADE it that way, or they used an unscrambling 4-way mirror in the projection process.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Shaver was an honest man, a true believer, and clearly mentally ill, and he certainly did not get rich off the Dero mythos.\u00a0 Just before his death in 1975, he and his old collaborator Ray Palmer published a compendium of images and writings entitled The Secret World<\/em><\/a>, but only Palmer\u2019s name appears on the cover. \u00a0It seemed \"rokfogo\"<\/a>that Shaver was doomed to be forgotten. The kicker is, the paintings he created out of his delusions are now recognized as surrealist outsider art<\/a>, and have been both exhibited<\/a> and republished<\/a> in art-book format<\/a>.\u00a0 Some of them are stunning.\u00a0 Hollow Earth<\/a> theorists have adopted him, and the Deros still have true believers<\/a>; meantime, Shaver\u2019s excellent biographer, Richard Toronto<\/a>, has revived<\/a> Shaver\u2019s own \u2018zine, Shavertron<\/em>, and published facsimiles<\/a> of the originals.<\/p>\n

The Shaver Mystery and the Rock Books are bizarre footnotes to SF\u2019s formative years, but they are interesting for far more than that.\u00a0 As an example of pareidolia, the Rock Books are peerless.\u00a0 As for the Shaver Mystery, to quote Bruce Lanier Wright again, \u201cit marks a rare intersection between the worlds of science fiction fandom and paranormal kookery, two subcultures that share many curious links, as little as either side might wish to acknowledge them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"richard-shaver-1\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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