The Return of the Dero

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aeon
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The Return of the Dero

Post by aeon » Mon Jun 06, 2016 12:17 pm



The Return of the Dero!


In 1943 Ray Palmer, the editor for the past five years of the quarterly Sci Fi magazine Amazing Stories, was contacted by his publishers, Ziff-Davis Publishing, and informed that an extra supply of paper was available for an increased print run of his magazine (possibly taken from other cancelled magazines, given the paper shortages of the war).

Keen to boost the circulation of the magazine Palmer was on the lookout for sensational material. He found it in a letter from one Richard Sharpe Shaver, who had sent Palmer an account of Mantong, a primeval phonetic language that Shaver claimed was the Ur source of all human languages. This was the language of Ancient Lemuria and Atlantis, Shaver claimed, originally brought to Earth from Outer Space. But this was no cheesy sci fi tale, Shaver was convinced his information was absolutely factual.


Mantong was strangely similar to English, and very unlike say Chinese, but Shaver insisted that this was not only the root of all human languages but also of all languages in our region of the Milky Way! What's more it was based on a logical structure that enabled any word in any language to analyzed to ascertain its true meaning! But instead of writing anything in Mantong or supplying a lexicon he supplied its 'key', the Mantong Alphabet. Oddly this was identical to the 26 letter English alphabet, with each letter having a phonetic equivalent, complete with a symbolic meaning. Translation of any word was simply a matter of breaking it down into its letters or phonetic parts and extracting its 'true meaning'. But there were no consistent rules here and sometimes the definitions were just ad hoc and intuitive..

Mantong (Ur Language and Alphabet)

• A (An) - is for Animal or Life Form (with a Self Centered Ego)
• B (Be) - is to Be or to Exist (or Command) and Beings
• C (Con) - means to See or to Perceive (C-on : to understand)
• D (De) - means the Harmful Energy from the Sun (Destructive, Degenerate, Depression)
• E (Ee) – means Energy
• F (Fe)- means Fecund or Life Force
• G (Ge) – means to Generate or Create
• H (H) - means Human (H-you-man).
• I (I) - means I or Ego
• J (Ja) - is the same as G – Generate, but more animalistic, the generation itself.
• K (Ki)- means Kinetic, as in motion or energy
• L (Li) - is Life or Organics
• M (Ma) - means Man
• N (Ni) - means Child, Seed or Spore, as in 'ninny' or (neotic) OR a Charm.
• O (O) - means Orifice, a Source (or Womb)
• P (Po) - is Power or Potency
• Q (Qu) - means Quest or Question
• R (Ar) – Horror or Fear; signifies a large amount of D present (Radiation)
• S (Sis) - means the Sun, which emits D
• T (Te) - is the Beneficial Energy, the opposite of D (Integration and Creativity). The Cross.
• U (U) - means You (Other).
• V (Vi) - Vital; in Shaver's words, 'the stuff Mesmer calls animal magnetism'. Libido.
• W (Wi) – Will.
• X (Ex) - Conflict, sometimes meaning De and Te in opposition ('crossed lines of force').
• Y (Y) - means Why (the inquisitive drive in mind). Related to Wi?
• Z (Zi) - means Zero, or when Te and De cancel one another out (The Void).

Thus CAT is a life form which perceives positive energy and DOG one that produces negative energy (as presumably was GOD, but Shaver spots this and corrects it to GOTT!).

Other 'Mantong' words seem more like Pigeon English: Prison, meaning Price On meaning Ransom; or a mix of the forms: Devil, meaning De Vile; Absent, Animal Be Sent and Arrest,
Animal At Rest; Deviate, De Vital Force Ate; Lady, Lay De / Allay De; Mean, Me Animal; and Obscene, Orifice Be Seen as Charm ('obvious meaning!').

A base of the Dero was known as the Trocadero, from 'Tero See Dero'.

Despite the absurd nature of this oddly English pigeon-like tongue, or perhaps because of it, Ray Palmer was intrigued and published the letter in the January 1944 issue, against all advice from his staff. But as Palmer predicted his readership was fascinated and requested more detail. Palmer thus wrote to Shaver and requested more information on his mysterious sources. The correspondence that followed initiated an incredible saga of ancient aliens, subterranean mutants and visitors from outer space which would transform the circulation of Amazing Stories over night.


Ray Palmer was more than just a Sci Fi editor, an eccentric character of dwarfish appearance, due to a growth stunting childhood accident, he was also an early Fortean, and something of a mystic, who had successfully turned his hand to writing sensational pulp science fiction, sometimes with a hidden message, but always with an eye to sales. Later he would be at the centre of the public perception of the emerging UFO phenomenon, at first employing Kenneth Arnold himself as an investigative reporter into the mystery, soon after his famous Saucer sighting, as well as being closely associated with the pulp writer and notorious UFO investigator/ hoaxer Gray Barker, who would become one of his chief writers. Later Palmer would give the saucer scare new impetus through publications like Flying Saucer magazine.

But his key involvement in UFOlogy would become entangled with his increasingly obsessive promotion of what he would dub the Shaver Mystery. Shaver himself had declared as early as the October 1947 issue of Amazing Stories that the Flying Saucers were from Outer Space and were kidnapping Earth women, long before anyone else had the idea! Thus even prefiguring the Abduction Phenomenon of later years. But it would be Palmer who would relay these tales to an enthralled audience. In fact Fortean writer John Keel claimed it was Palmer who created the whole Flying Saucer mythos that would shape UFOlogy from then on, and it was the Shaver Mystery that made it so scary to many.

In 1945 Shaver had responded to Palmer's request for more information with a long rambling 10,000 word account, 'A Warning to Future Man', which Palmer rewrote as the fictional 30,000 word tale 'I Remember Lemuria!', and published in the March 1945 issue. His co-editor regarded the whole thing as crazy, but according to him Palmer wanted to show that anything could sell with the right marketing and showmanship. In some respects 'I Remember Lemuria!' became a psychological freak show, but none the less Palmer always professed his belief that there was a core truth to it (opinions are divided as to to his integrity in this).

In his first work Shaver revealed that the primeval Earth (then known as Mu) had been colonized by several races of extraterrestrials, who in their turn had bio-engineered many other lifeforms, including the human race, and had created a highly advanced culture on Mu (on the largest Muan continent of Lemuria, sometimes associated with North America, with its most advanced descendant civilization being Atlantis). However due to harmful radiation emitted from the Sun Mu became hostile to these life forms, and the civilization built underground cities to protect itself. Alas the underground world would also prove to be stunting and harmful and so the advanced races left Mu and headed off into Outer Space. Those left behind, mostly a slave class composed of a mix of diverse extraterrestrials and artificial life forms (including some of the first humans), were referred to as 'Abandonero', as they were left behind, and these recolonized the underground cities where they interbred.

Most of these would gradually mutate into monstrous hybrid creatures called the Dero (pronounced 'day ro'), signifying a degenerate being, or 'detrimental robot' as Shaver called them, who was driven entirely automatically by instinct, and had no control over their 'evil urges'. The De in Mantong also signified 'negative energy' as we have seem. Their degeneration was amplified by their use of what Shaver called 'shocking sexual-stimulation devices', in which some spent most of their lives! Interestingly in Shaver's description of Mantong he gives the name of their inner sanctum as the Trocadero, which he claimed meant 'Palace of the Dero'. Yet the real Trocadero was a libertine gambling den and place of ill repute in San Francisco, named after the equally Bohemian Trocadero in Paris, with its famous underground vaults. Could Shaver have known about these places, we certainly know he travelled extensively at one stage of his life. Perhaps the name Dero actually came from here?

These demonic beings of various forms were the cause of all sorts of trouble to Mankind through their inheritance of the advanced technology of the aliens or Elder Gods (in particular their 'Ray Machines' which put thoughts into the minds of humans and made them 'hear voices'). The Dero were thus also often known as 'Ray Beings' because this was the medium they manifested through to most people. Those of you familiar with psychoanalytic literature on the 'Influencing Machine' by Victor Tausk, which describes a paranoid delusion of thought control via mysterious devices, will see strong parallels with Shaver's descriptions of not only the 'Ray Machines' but also his 'Sex Stim Machines'. Its clear he was suffering from delusions, but things would prove to be more complex than this simple analysis.

Fortunately Shaver optimistically added that not all the Abandonero had degenerated, as small pockets of healthier, 'integrative' humanoids had survived in the cave worlds, which he called the Tero, and it was these beings that fought the Dero and sometimes helped us against them. Though even these were to some extent depraved. As was the whole of humanity, whom he believed were descended from Abandonero who had not spent as long in the caves and had escaped to the surface early on.

Much of the detail of his tale clearly derives from well known fictional sources, from Jules Verne and H G Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as more contemporary horror authors such as H P Lovecraft. One author in particular, the pulp writer Abraham Merrit, a friend of Lovecraft's, who had inspired a whole genre about lost alien civilisations of subterranean dwarves, was even mentioned by Shaver as a fellow witness of what he would call the horrific 'Cavern World', a world which he none the less insisted was absolutely real. But it remains unclear how much of this can be attributed solely to Shaver and how much to Palmer's rewriting.

There was an obvious element of folklore in all this as well, strange beings inhabiting caverns have been part of the mythic imagination since tales were told, perhaps accounting in part for its appeal, though Shaver would claim these were in fact ancient ancestral memories, and in later accounts would claim that the ancient Gods of mythology, and the later faeries, elves and goblins, were all Abandonero in various stages of degeneration. In fact one alien character in an early story is called Tim Shanter. Tales of underground races like the Nagas of India and the legends of the hidden worlds of Agharti and Shambala also found their way into the mix. There was also an overlap with the many bizarre phenomena described by Charles Fort, who was also the first author to suggest an alien ancient astronaut thesis, which Shaver claimed were also the work to the Dero, along with all psychic phenomena. This Ur Myth obviously had great appeal to Forteans like Palmer as well as multiplying the sales of his magazines.

However something even stranger was about to happen. Shaver's tales not only fascinated Palmer they would have an even greater fascination for many readers who wrote in supporting Shaver's claims, saying they too had been victims of the 'Ray Machines', heard the voices, and even directly experienced the Cavern World and its denizens. One of the most disturbing letters came from a woman who claimed to have gone into a deep basement of a building in Paris via a secret lift, only to find it was linked to the Cavern World. Here she encountered ape-like trolls who hunted reptiles in the caverns and humans on the surface, whom they hung on hooks till they were eaten raw. After months of rape and other torture, as well as enforced drug taking, the woman was freed by the more benevolent Teros, and allied 'Star-Men', whom she described as silver-suited, gaunt faced, grey beings, who none the less subject her to medical tests and memory erasure. Nothing is really new. The tale was also one of the first to indicate a group of surface dwelling humans who worked with the Dero and shared their sadistic tastes, perhaps anticipating aspects of the Men In Black.

Its anonymous writer confessed that sadly no one believed her story and considered her to have severe mental problems. In fact it may have been the case that many of those who wrote in to Amazing Stories in the late 1940s were suffering from similar conditions to Shaver himself, or were simply attention seekers, but they certainly magnified interest in the story and Palmer expressed his shock at the sheer number of letters he was receiving that confirmed Shaver's account, or elements of it. Some were clearly delusional while others sounded like genuinely strange encounters with beings associated with deep caverns and mines, which other readers began to explore in search of these beings. Many of these tales would dovetail with early UFO reports. This is one of the oddest features of the mystery. Though it is equally possible that some of these letters were being fabricated by Palmer himself to boost the Mystery .

Fortean historian Mike Dash has observed that such sadomasochistic elements were also a major element of many of Shaver's tales. Perverted Sex was a central part of the tales, another factor explaining their popularity no doubt, and the main target of the Dero appeared to be young, nubile women who they captured in order to deprave and turn into sex slaves. As Shaver put it, “Stim rays were played over their naked bodies, and a frightened, prudish woman could be easily transformed into the depraved, willing participant in a Dero orgy!”. Palmer also claims he had to censor much of Shaver's writing due to it pornographic content, but he knew he was on to a winner and commissioned and edited more and more work from Shaver, generating what came to be called the Shaver Mystery. This peaked in the June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories which was entirely devoted to the Shaver Mystery, and related tales, and the Shaver Mystery would from then on dominate Palmer's magazines for over a decade.

But this development disgusted many 'serious' Sci Fi writers, who saw it as cheap exploitation and bemoaned the decline of Amazing Stories, such as a vociferous faction led by Forest Ackerman, who had all previously written for the magazine, and including a young Harlan Ellison. These were now displaced by what they termed the 'Shaver Hoax', and claimed Palmer had made most of it up himself. Though it didn’t stop Ellison later writing his own short story based on it, The Elevator People. P K Dick was a little more sympathetic to Shaver's mythos and used it in his description of a UFO cult in his 'straight novel', The Confessions of a Crap Artist in the 1970s (as would the spoof religion the Church of the Sub-Genius). But more sceptical writers launched a campaign to get Palmer fired and return Amazing Stories to its former serious style. This initially failed as subscriptions had tripled under Palmer, but by late 1947 his publishers were becoming increasingly concerned about his obsession and restricted his involvement with the magazine. In response Palmer would claim the truth was being suppressed and created two new publications of his own, Other Worlds, a Sci Fi magazine, over which he had total control, and Fate, a 'factual' magazine specialising in the bizarre and paranormal, both of which would heavily feature the Shaver Mystery in its various aspects.

But by 1949 the hype had worn off and subscriptions to Amazing Stories fell, at which point either Palmer resigned, was fired, or was forced out (according to diverse accounts of events) and the magazine returned to its pre-Shaver format by the promoted co-editor. Palmer then devoted himself to his own projects, first Fate Magazine, which he edited till 1955, and then Other Worlds. He also produced a short run publication, Hidden Worlds, which published Shaver's raw unedited writings. 

Palmer had become increasingly interested in the UFO phenomena since the Kenneth Arnold encounter and had hired Arnold to write on the phenomenon for the first issue of Fate back in 1948. Oddly he had also received letters from the mysterious Fred Crisman, who claimed to have battled the Dero in their underground caverns. Crisman was known as a Walter Mitty type character full of tall tales, but many also believed him to be a contract operative for the CIA (including the infamous D.A. Jim Garrison, who would later briefly implicate Crisman in the JFK assassination), while others claimed he was close to George Wackenhut, a security expert and a gay S&M fanatic.

But back in 1947 Fred Crisman had also become the central figure in the Maury Island UFO incident, the second big UFO story of that year, in which a 'flying saucer' allegedly dropped some slag-like discharge on Crisman's own boat, two USAF intelligence officers died in an air crash after retrieving its samples, and the first 'Man in Black' was reported. Crisman later confessed the whole thing was a hoax gone wrong, but later still would claim that this confession had been forced on him by mysterious agents. The case remains one of the biggest mysteries of the period. Whatever the truth this proved a link between the Shaver Mystery and UFOs for many readers and Ray Palmer was from then on hooked on the UFO phenomena and increasingly added them to his mythic repertoire. Shaver had initially described the beings in his story using rockets, but both Palmer, and Shaver himself, would increasingly link their craft to the mysterious 'flying saucers' being reported across America at the time, an identification justified through references back to Merritt’s 'shell shaped hovercraft' used by his high tech subterranean dwarves in his short stories. Palmer's magazine soon changed its name to Flying Saucers from Other Worlds and in 1957 became just Flying Saucers, which by the 60s became a little less centred on the Shaver Mystery and more of a typical ET centred UFO magazine as was the market of the time. However themes from the Shaver Mystery would still inform popular conceptions of UFOs and their occupants for decades to come, and still do. 


Shaver's most amazing claim came early in the mystery when Palmer asked him how he knew so much detail about all this. Initially Shaver declared that the information came from Tero thought transference via their Telaug Ray, a process begun when as a welder his welding tool began to 'pick up voices from the Cavern World' and transfer them to his mind. He soon added that this contact had led to him actually living in the Cavern World with the Tero, for anything between a few weeks and eight years. Shaver's claims were often inconsistent. Palmer at first took this at face value, publishing it uncritically in his magazines. But by the early 1970s he claimed he had later discovered that Shaver had actually been in a mental hospital for these eight years, and was described by his doctors as being in a constant catatonic state. Unperturbed Palmer published this, but declared it confirmed his own belief that Shaver's experiences were psychical and occurred when his mind left his body at the hospital. From this Palmer would soon develop a completely paranormal account of the Shaver Mystery. A claim denied by Shaver himself, who insisted his experiences were physically real and his hospitalization was a lie concocted by the Dero!

The events of these years in Shaver's life are very controversial, Shaver denied hospitalization, admitting to only a few short hospital stays for 'sunstroke', and some longer spells in prison. While Palmer's own claim of access to his private medical records is itself dubious, most cases of catatonia are known to last only for a few days, and only rarely for a few weeks, but never for years. Palmer's source seems to have been a nurse at the hospital and the account may be inaccurate or elaborated. Existing records seem to indicate a more fragmented life of frequent hospitalization and imprisonment up till the mid 1940s, punctuated by a nomadic lifestyle. Despite many readers supporting Palmer's paranormal theory, a equal number still maintained the caves were real and inhabited by a strange race.

Sadly part of the reality of the case appears to be somewhat tragic. Shaver had begun an early career as an artist and writer, but in 1934 his brother Taylor died suddenly of a heart attack, the two were very close and he then took to heavy drinking, which eventually led to him being admitted to Detroit Receiving Hospital a year later. There he had insisted that a demon called Max had killed his brother, and was now after him as well. He was diagnosed insane and had to be restrained. On his release from an asylum in 1936 he returned to normal life, only to learn that his wife had been electrocuted when a heater fell into her bath. He then became convinced demons were persecuting him. He then became a homeless traveler, and confessed that he had trouble separating reality from his dreams and visions (including nightmares of giant spiders). During this time he attempted to stow away on a ship to England and was also imprisoned various times. Eventually suffering a complete breakdown he became a longer term mental patient (and was apparently catatonic for a short while) before being released in the mid 1940s. It was then he had started writing to Palmer, and would claim he had first been contacted by the Tero in one of these period of incarceration (the details changed as he told them over the years). One tale involved a beautiful blonde Tero woman who would materialize in his cell and take him to the Cavern World.



Over the years covering the late 40s and early 50s Shaver would supply Palmer with numerous 'historical accounts' of the Dero and other aliens, which Palmer, or his team of writers, would fictionalize as short novels. What is particularly interesting about these is the number of UFO tropes they would pre-date. Long before Adamski Shaver was writing about the Nortans, a name rather like Nordics, which he described as tall, pale blondes of a fey like nature, who dwelt in the darkness of deep space on artificial planets. Very much like Adamski's descriptions of his Venusians a few years later, who later still become the stereotypical 'Nordics' of cliched UFO encounters. By the mid 50s (post Adamski) Shaver was explicitly associating these Nortans with Flying Saucers, prior to this they flew rockets, demonstrating the influence was working in both directions. Some of the Tero were described in similar terms, while most were said to be tall, dark skinned, Latin-like men, another classic UFO entity type. If that wasn't enough he also describes the Freyans, small bald dwarves who kidnap people, the Outlanders, tall reptilian aliens, and various races of Goblins from other planets, one of whom once lived in a secret underground city in Arabia. Lovecraft is an obvious influence on Shaver, as well as other writers of that genre.

But all of these descriptions pre-date similar beings associated with UFO reports. Curiously he also wrote about a group called the 'Secret Ray of America', who were agents of the Dero who disguised themselves as FBI agents, about the same time as, or just prior to, the emergence of the Men in Black lore, whose own mythos was hugely influenced by the writings of Gray Barker, who as we've seen was one of Palmer's main writers. Later in the Sixties John Keel, an associate of Barker's, would claim one group of Men in Black identified themselves as the 'Nation of the Third Eye', a term he associated with the legend of Agharti, an ancient subterranean city of late Indian folklore. The entwining of imagery here is quite strange. Another curious trope Shaver used, which is also reminiscent of UFO encounters, is the use of names from human mythology by professed aliens. Though he seems to have been familiar with the writings of Charles Fort, who had long ago suggested that the entities of human mythology may have been extraterrestrials.

Later when the Shaver Mystery began to lose its appeal outside of a few cult magazines, some produced by Shaver himself, he focused his attention on his new discovery of Rock Books, which he believed were images from the past projected into rocks by advanced technology. Shaver would break open a stone and treat the inner surface in a way that he could project light through it onto a screen. The patterns so produced revealed to Shaver both beautiful and horrific scenes from the past, which he used as a template for highly surrealistic paintings. A modern observer might regard these images as a psychological gestalt, and they featured many of Shaver's obsessions, sadism, monsters, heroes and both seductive and helpless women, but Shaver insisted they were secret history books. These fascinating works attracted genuine art interest as some manifestation of Surrealism and Shaver managed to live on these proceeds and his continual reminiscences until he died in the mid 1970s (with Palmer himself dying a few years later).

It would be fairly easy to dismiss most of this as simply the delusions of Shaver developed into pulp Sci Fi by Ray Palmer in his various magazines, which later became entangled with the evolving mythos of the UFO phenomenon. Yet there are other aspects of the mystery that are harder to explain this way.

Palmer claimed that shortly after the success of the publication of I Remember Lemuria he visited Shaver and his wife in Pennsylvania, and had what he called "a novel experience and an eerie one." On his first evening there, Palmer claimed to have heard Shaver's Tero himself, as a chorus of five voices, sometimes speaking at once, describing awful tortures in a cave four miles below. Palmer searched the room for recording devices and microphones but found nothing. Others have said voices like this came from Shaver's own mouth when he entered some kind of trance. Palmer returned to Chicago a complete believer in Shaver's claims but increasingly saw them as a paranormal phenomenon rather than a physical one. Curiously later in life Shaver made a strange admission to the affect that those who say the Cavern World was not really beneath our feet but 'in the sky' in some other astral dimension might in fact be right, but either way the phenomenon was a real one.

All this of course could be dismissed as fabrication from Palmer who always sought to make Shaver's wild stories more believable to his audience. Yet there are other independent tales that appear to lend support to Shaver's claims. We have already heard the tale of an anonymous reader of Amazing Stories, which might have been another hoax, but there is one mote tale that is harder to dismiss.

A sub genre of the Shaver tales told in Amazing Stories included accounts from readers of haunted caves and mine shafts. Within this genre one notorious tale would emerge involving strange hooded figures emerging from a remote mine tunnel, who were said to be armed with 'ray wands' which could paralyze a witness, or even electrocute them, with a single zap. This account came from a curious character called Steve Brodie. Brodie was a mysterious artist who was encountered by the respected UFOlogist John Robinson in 1945. He was an imaginative painter like Shaver who produced strange otherworldly scenes, but when Robinson showed a copy of Amazing Stories to him, with its tales of the Cavern World, Brodie was shocked, allegedly exclaiming, “he writes of the Dero!?” He went on to describe his exploration of a disused mine and encounter with these cowled figures in black who captured him and imprisoned him in the caverns. His fellow prisoners, who were all 'missing people', told him his captors were slavers called the Dero, an ancient mutant race who could capture people even from the heart of the city.

The Dero used these wands to pacify people as well as placing electrodes behind their ears to control them, Brodie claimed. But one day he found himself in Time Square wandering as if woken from a dream apparently released by his captors. Robinson was sceptical at first but was shocked when Brodie brushed back his hair to reveal the electrode marks still burnt there behind his ears! It was this story that was later retold in Amazing Stories. Brodie later moved out of his flat and became untraceable, though there were reports of him there after as a drifter still telling his tales.

This is an incredible story but its hard to know what to make of it. Robinson was well known as a no nonsense, serious investigator, yet he constantly claimed this story was true,and because of this it has become to be regarded as independent confirmation of Shaver's tales by many and it is admittedly very odd. However things still remain ambiguous, Robinson was also a friend of Gray Barker, Palmer's most notorious writer, an association not uncommon in the then tiny field of UFOlogy, so could he have been hoaxing, as Barker was well known to have done. If so it seems to be very much in contrast to his reputation. Another oddity are the alleged burn marks behind Brodie's ears which as some have suggested sound identical to those produced by electro-convulsive therapy in mental hospitals. Yet this seems to confirm at least one aspect of reality behind Robinson's claims. But it obviously opens up speculation as to the real nature of Brodie's incarceration and exactly who he met there. 'Dero' appears to be a term coined solely by Shaver himself, could Brodie have previously met Shaver and heard his tales?

Alternatively could there be some underlying truth the Mystery? The notion of a secret subterranean race seems ridiculous, and almost certainly is, yet Palmer's reinterpretation of it as a paranormal phenomenon involving some other reality is more plausible. Even if only barely so. One thing that is clear is that the Shaver Mystery is deeply archetypal, in the loosest sense of the word, and relates to mythic tales of the Underworld found in the myths of all cultures. It can also easily be seen as a symbolic metaphor as well, with the subterranean realm representing the unconscious, and the home of all sorts of energies and complexes. These mythic and psychological perspectives are not incompatible of course.

Even if Shaver was unbalanced and delusional this would not detract from these possibilities, and if anything could make them more likely, if the barrier between his conscious and unconscious mind had been broken. Perhaps this was the case or perhaps Shaver was simply suffering from Schizophrenia, however that label is applied. We cannot now say for sure. One thing I can confirm is the ease of which similar images come to the mind of meditators who explore such mythological imagery in light hypnotic trance, as I have done on many occasions. A psychological phenomenon akin to the symbolism of dreams that today even extends to UFO imagery where underground colonies interact with star bases in a sci fi mythology.

The world remains a mysterious and complex place whose true nature we may never completely fathom, but phenomenon like the Shaver Mystery may open a window to it more stranger aspects.


The Shaver Mystery in its raw form continues to attract interest today, as evidenced by websites such as Richard Toronto's Shavertron and the continuing reprints of Shaver's original tales, all of which are recommended to those who want to explore this fascinating subject further.
Last edited by aeon on Wed Jun 21, 2017 10:52 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: The Return of the Dero

Post by seemore » Mon Jun 12, 2017 6:37 am

Long time no hear. Thoroughly enjoyed your chronicle of Shaver. Learned some new info too.

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Re: The Return of the Dero

Post by Ye Admin » Thu May 10, 2018 2:49 pm


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