Mr. Peanut: Another autobiographical bit in Whitley Strieber's Cat Magic

Mr. Peanut as he appeared in the 1950s, when Strieber was a child

In addition to the dead owl in the suitcase, there's this.

In this passage from Whitley Strieber's 1986 novel Cat Magic, it is mentioned in passing that Amanda Walker (the heroine, based on Dora Ruffner, and the niece of George Walker, who saw the dead owl) was once chased by a man dressed up as Mr. Peanut.

Mother Star of the Sea came forward, prancing, mincing, her arms akimbo, her head lolling from side to side, her jaw snapping.

Perhaps she intended to be amusing, but she could hardly have chosen a more unwelcome appearance. Ever since she was three and she'd been chased by a man dressed up as Mr. Peanut, Amanda had loathed and despised all forms of puppets.

In the non-fiction Communion, published the next year, Strieber reveals that this is a memory of his own, but one that he judges to be false, a "screen memory" to cover up something more traumatic.

Many of my screen memories concern animals, but not all. I remember being terrified as a little boy by an appearance of Mr. Peanut, and yet I know that I never saw Mr. Peanut except on a Planter's can. I said that I was menaced by him at a Battle of Flowers Parade in San Antonio, but I now understand perfectly well that it never happened.

I would say that Cat Magic -- an uneven and extremely bizarre novel, but one that is full of evocative ideas and images -- is essential reading for anyone interested in Whitley Strieber's non-fiction, as it prefigures not only isolated incidents like Mr. Peanut and the dead owl, but also many of the major speculative and philosophical themes of his later work, much more so than any of the other Strieber novels I've read. Despite the way Strieber tried to distance himself from Cat Magic by publishing it under the byline "by Jonathan Barry, with Whitley Strieber" (Barry does not exist), it is the most personal of his novels. He would later name his personal publishing company (which produced such works as The Key and The Path) Walker & Collier, after Cat Magic characters Amanda Walker (or her psychotic Uncle George?) and Constance Collier.

Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl

Doesn't that sound like the title of a Surrealist painting? Or perhaps something from a really weird version of Clue? (Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick? No, it was Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl!) Actually, it's just another in my series of footnotes to the works of this very unusual writer.

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Cat Magic

In Whitley Strieber's 1986 fantasy/horror novel Cat Magic, this very strange memory of one of the characters is mentioned in passing; it just comes out of nowhere, has no effect on the plot, and is never mentioned again.

[The smell of paint] reminded him of the six weeks of the summer of 1968 he had spent in Florence. There had been college students from all over the world there, art students, working on the restoration of the Uffizi masterpieces which had been damaged in the flood of the year before.

He had met Irish magical Roisin, with whom he had cohabited for weeks, before he had found, jammed into her suitcase, the terrible rubble of a dead owl.

He had run terrified from her. Roisin, lost in the dangerous clutter of time.

George Walker, the character whose reminiscences these are, is unsympathetic and obviously deeply disturbed; one of his other memories involves setting fire to a live cat as a joke. While one can see the relevance of the cat-burning incident -- Walker's intense and strangely sexualized hatred of cats is an important plot point -- "Irish magical Roisin" with her suitcase full of owl rubble (rubble?) seems to have nothing to do with anything. The only possible purpose of the passage is to further establish that George Walker is a pretty seriously messed-up guy, and apparently delusional to boot.

Would any reader have guessed that this bit was actually pretty much 100% autobiographical?

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Communion

Communion, Strieber's famous non-fiction book about his close-encounter experiences, was published in 1987, just a year after Cat Magic. Here we find the first hints that the incident of George Walker and the owl-rubble may be based on some real experience of Strieber's.

In 1968 I ended up with four to six weeks of "missing time" after a desperate and inexplicable chase across Europe.

So both Walker and Strieber spent six weeks in Europe in 1968. Walker spent the latter part of his trip "running terrified" from Roisin, while Strieber characterizes his trip as "a desperate and inexplicable chase."

Later, in a discussion of various times owls have unexpectedly turned up in his life, Strieber mentions this:

I saw an owl once before, too, during the events of 1968.

So not only were Walker and Strieber both in Europe at the same time, for the same period of time, but they also each saw an owl there. There is no indication (yet) that the one Strieber saw was a dead owl, in a suitcase, but that's still quite the coincidence.

Later Strieber adds more details about his trip in Europe.

I took the train to Italy, second class. On the train I met a young woman and we began to travel together. At this point my memories become extremely odd. If I do not think about them they seem fine, but when I try to put them together they don't make sense. I recall that we went to Rome, but that we spent a few days in Florence on the way. For eighteen years I told the story that I stayed in Florence for six weeks. But when I went there in the summer of 1984 [. . .] I realized that I had almost no memories of the place. Even so, I placidly accepted this anomaly. For some reason, I left the young woman in Rome and dashed off on the train with no ticket, traveling almost at random. I ended up in Strasbourg.

 

Now we know that he stayed -- or used to think that he had stayed -- in Florence for six weeks, just like George Walker, that he met a woman there, just like George Walker, and that his "desperate and inexplicable chase" apparently involved running away from her -- just like, as you may have noticed, George Walker.

At the time he wrote Communion, Strieber seemed to have no memory of why he had left the girl; it was just "for some reason."

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Transformation

Transformation, Strieber's second non-fiction book about his close encounters, was published in 1988 -- a year after Communion and two years after Cat Magic. He once again revisits his travels in Italy in the summer of 1968.

In 1968 I was living in London. During the summer I spent between two and six weeks on the Continent, and have been unable to account for most of that time. As I reported in Communion, I crossed to the continent on a ferry and took a train south to Italy. On the trip I met a young woman. I remember her name and her nationality but have not been able to trace her. We went first to Florence and then to Rome. In Rome something happened that terrified me. My screen memory is that I got lost in the catacombs under the Vatican.

Whatever happened, I literally rushed back to my pensione and threw my things into my suitcase. Something I saw in the room horrified me. I have tried to recall what it was, but all I have been able to find out for certain is that I told a friend at the time that I had seen "a dried owl" somewhere in the room. If that is indeed what I saw, I am not surprised that I ran!

I made an unsuccessful attempt to extract more of this memory via hypnosis, but my feeling is that the material that emerged is not correct.

Strieber mentions that he remembers (but does not disclose) the woman's name and nationality. Given how much of this experience was apparently imported wholesale into Cat Magic -- leaving even such details as the date, the city, and the duration of the trip unchanged -- my money says she was an Irishwoman called Róisín, and I will go ahead and refer to her by that name. (It's just a guess of course, but it will be more convenient than constantly referring to "the young woman," "Strieber's traveling companion," etc.)

The owl puts in another appearance, and this time we are told that it was "dried" (and therefore presumably dead, as in Cat Magic). In the past I had always assumed that Strieber was referring to only one horrifying experience in this passage -- something that he (mis)remembered as getting lost in the catacombs under the Vatican and seeing a dried owl in one of the rooms there. Rereading it now in the light of Cat Magic and The Super Natural, I can see that the room where he saw the owl was probably the pensione he was sharing with Róisín, not in the catacombs. He saw something in Rome that spooked him, decided to leave, and then saw something else that spooked him in the pensione as he was packing.

Strieber still seems to have no memory of what exactly he saw; he "tried to recall what it was" but failed. The "dried owl" is something a friend remembers him saying at the time, not something that Strieber himself recalls at the time of writing Transformation.

What material, I wonder, emerged from the hypnosis session he mentions, and why did it seem incorrect? Did it involve seeing a dried owl (or the "terrible rubble" thereof) in Róisín's suitcase? And did he reject it as incorrect because he recognized it as coming from his fiction rather than from his life? We can only speculate.

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The Super Natural

Cat Magic, Communion, and Transformation were published in three consecutive years, from 1986 to 1988. We now jump forward almost three decades (and nearly 50 years after the events of 1968) to The Super Natural (2016), a non-fiction book co-written with Jeffrey Kripal. The symbol of the owl comes up, and Strieber once again tells his story.

Later, in 1968, I had a profoundly unsettling experience involving an owl. That year, I was living in London and attending the London School of Film Technique, now called the London Film School. During the summer break, I decided to travel on the Continent. On an overnight train to Florence, I fell in which a girl. We began traveling together. For a couple of weeks in Florence, we had a lovely time, living together in chaste intimacy. But then we went on to Rome, and when we toured St. Peter's, she became crazy, stalking through the church in raging silence. She scared me. I was living with her in a small pensione near the railroad station. I decided, "No more," and headed off to the pensione to collect my suitcase and get out of there.

I went into our tiny room, threw my toothbrush into my suitcase, and started to leave. Then I stopped. Her suitcase was lying on the foot of the bed. I have always been a bit too curious, and I opened it. What I saw shocked me to my core. In it was a nun's habit and, lying beside it, a dry, flattened owl carcass. I didn't get off the train again until I was in Strasbourg.

And we've come full circle, back to the Cat Magic version of the story, in which the dead owl is in the girl's suitcase. It's a "flattened" carcass, too, so perhaps this damage is what is intended by Cat Magic's strange description of it as "rubble."

As in Transformation, there are two scary events that precipitate Strieber's flight from Rome and Róisín. The first, though is not getting lost in the catacombs (which even in Transformation is admitted to be a "screen," or false, memory) but rather seeing Róisín "stalking" through St. Peter's Basilica "in raging silence." The second, of course, is the dead owl -- described as being in her suitcase, for the first time since Cat Magic 30 years before.

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What really happened?

If we take the anecdote in The Super Natural at face value, it means the one in Cat Magic is 100% true -- a real event from Strieber's life, inserted without any modification at all into one of his novels. (In fact it may even be truer than the non-fiction versions. Does anyone really believe that a 23-year-old American film student backpacking through Europe in 1968 would be "living together in chaste intimacy" with a young woman rather than "cohabiting"?) This raises the question of how many other bits of unmodified autobiography lie hiding in plain sight in Strieber's pre-Communion fiction. (I can think of a passage in The Wolfen that is a strong candidate.)

If we take the anecdote at face value -- but that would be just a tad naïve, wouldn't it? Strieber himself would be the first to admit that he is what is called an "unreliable narrator." Here are some possible ways of interpreting the texts.

1. The owl incident is fiction and was invented by Strieber for Cat Magic. As time went by, he began to get bits of this fictional incident mixed up in his mind with real memories from 1968 -- first "remembering" that an owl had somehow been involved and then finally, by 2016, adopting the Cat Magic incident in its entirety as a "memory." It's easy to imagine Strieber trying hard to remember as much as possible about that long-ago incident, coming up with a clear and distinct image of finding a dead owl in his girlfriend's suitcase, and assuming it to be a real memory, having long since forgotten that the image came from a novel he had written 30 years before. The question this interpretation raises is why Strieber would invent the owl-in-the-suitcase image in the first place -- given how bizarre it is, and how little it has to do with the plot of Cat Magic. Perhaps it was originally a dream or something.

2. The owl incident took place more-or-less as described in The Super Natural but was buried in traumatic amnesia, so that when Strieber wrote Communion and Transformation he no longer had conscious access to those memories. The memories returned decades later, after Strieber had to some degree managed to overcome his fear of the "visitors," which is why he was finally able to tell the story accurately in 2016. The question then is how some of the "forgotten" details recorded for the first time in The Super Natural managed to find their way into the fictionalized version in Cat Magic. Well, perhaps traumatic memories are only traumatic if they are thought of as memories. Perhaps when one is fantasizing or engaging in creative writing, otherwise censored memories may be able to slip into consciousness disguised as fantasies.

3. Strieber consciously remembered the owl incident all along, but for some reason didn't trust some of these memories during the time he was writing Communion and Transformation and was unwilling to commit them to writing. Given how many extremely bizarre memories he recounts in those two books, this hesitance seems a bit odd. Perhaps the similarity to Cat Magic made it seem as if the memories had been contaminated, but apparently he had overcome these misgivings by the time he wrote The Super Natural.

Dora Ruffner on Oprah in 1987

Readers of Whitley Strieber's book Breakthrough (1995) will know that it prominently features one Dora Ruffner of Boulder, Colorado, a close friend of Strieber's, whose house he apparently visited in company with the visitors in 1987. Running a Google image search on "Dora Ruffner" doesn't turn up any photos of her, and the main purpose of this post is to rectify that. By a strange coincidence, she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1987, the same year as Strieber's experience with her. This is what she looked like at that time:

Whitley Strieber's friend Dora Ruffner on Oprah in 1987

Ruffner is (or was) into witchcraft, and the character Amanda Walker in Strieber's witchcraft-themed novel Catmagic (1986) is based on her. She appeared on Oprah, together with her much less sane-looking coreligionist Laurie Cabot, in order to explain to their poor bigoted viewers that "actual witches aren't like the Hollywood stereotypes." (I remember "clearing up misconceptions about witchcraft" was a thing back in the late 1980s.) The Oprah clip has basically no merit at all, except that you get to see what Ruffner looked like. She appears, billed as a "White Witch," at the 2:02 mark.

The million-year-old university

In my recent post The twilight of the brain, I make passing reference to the image of "a university a million years old," which occurs in Whitley Strieber's book Transformation (1988). On June 23, I happened to be reading one of the few Strieber books I'd never read before, The Super Natural (2016, co-authored with Jeffrey J. Kripal of Rice University) and found that it includes a retelling of the ancient university story, with many differences from the Transformation version. I took out my copy of Transformation to try to find the passage in question -- and found that I had opened it up directly to that very page! The synchronicity fairies have spoken, and a detailed comparison must be made.

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The two accounts

Here is the story as it is told in Transformation (pp. 108-111 in my copy, though I understand pagination varies among editions).

In 1972 a number of vivid thoughts surfaced that I now [around 1987] realize were connected to that summer [of 1968, when Strieber was traveling in Europe]. They involved a journey to a great desert. This desert had a tan sky that was so bright it was difficult to look at. It never really got dark there.

The little men took me into an oasislike setting that was bordered by tall, very thin trees and crossed by a narrow lane. Over this lane there stood an enormously high arch. One of the men with me -- who seemed very jolly and gay -- said that the arch was to commemorate "the achievements of the scholars." Ahead I saw a completely tumbledown building. It was on a cliff at the edge of the oasis and was so old that it seemed almost to have blended with the stones themselves. Beyond and below it I could see the tremendous desert.

I was told that the building was a university "a million years old." I was really very excited to go inside. We approached the building and I said, "Is it in ruins?" The reply was, "No, but the scholars aren't much good at maintenance." There was an imposing entrance, but I was taken around to a side door that was reached by clambering over sharp volcanic rocks. These stones were fearsome, and for years afterward I had a recurring dream of climbing through them and trying very hard not to cut myself.

As we approached the door we encountered two taller, thin men with gigantic, black, almond-shaped eyes. They were not nearly as friendly as the small men in blue. In fact, when they stared at me I felt naked. It was hard to be in their presence. One of them said, "He isn't ready yet." This deflated me. Things had been going so well; I'd felt very much approved. Now there was a sense of desperation. Why wasn't I ready? I wanted to go in.

The two tall beings left. One of my guides announced, "They said you weren't ready, but now they're gone." So in we went. I found an absolutely featureless corridor made of what seemed to be dark-green stone. The floors were dusty and felt like packed earth. There were doorways, and light shone across the floor from each. I was taken into the first room. Its floor was etched with a circle, and there was a large window looking out over the desert.

When I went into the circle I wanted at once to dance. There was no music, but when I danced I felt a sensation that I cannot describe. The best way to characterize it would be to call it a movement that led at once to great loneliness and great excitement. When I danced I found myself for moments inside other people and other lives. I was walking up a narrow, curved road. A portly redheaded man was running toward me. He was wearing a white toga, and my impression was that I was seeing something happening in ancient Rome.

The dance took on a great passion and intensity. Round and round I went, sailing through armies of lives, places familiar and unfamiliar. It was as if my soul had hungered for this. I sailed round and round and round, going faster and faster. I don't know how long I danced, but it was glorious.

Reluctantly, I left the university and was taken to another building. This building was a three-story adobe structure down the lane from the university. In it there was a room for me to live in. It was unfurnished. I slept on the floor. Once I woke up to hear somebody talking loudly in English. Two men appeared, both of them normal-looking. They were wearing khaki clothes that looked military. I had the impression that they were Americans. One of them had a Bell & Howell movie camera, which he pointed at me. They were standing outside the door to the room behind a white tape. The one without the camera said, "Why are they keeping you outside of the enclosure?" I replied that I didn't know, and he looked absolutely furious.

Next I was with a woman who was so pale that even her lips were without color. She handed me a piece of fruit that looked like a giant fig. She told me to eat it. I said that I didn't care to eat it. She replied that I had to.

Feeling very dubious, I bit into it. At once there was a terrible bitterness, and it seemed like my head was going to split open.

 

I was aware of a group of people, some with tears in their eyes, watching me from behind the line of white tape as I went off on my own. I found that the grass was very soft and fine, and I sat in it for a time. Then I started to return to the university, but one of the tall beings who's said I wasn't ready was there. He waved me away and I thought it better not to go. I went instead to an area of shacks made of what looked like adobe and dried tree branches. They were very rough and simple. In them I would find things like a single wooden bowl, or a discarded blue uniform. Some of the small men were there, and I was so surprised at the simplicity of their dwellings that they laughed aloud at me.

 

There isn't any more than that. 

Here's the version given in The Super Natural (Chapter 4; I'm reading an electronic edition that doesn't have page numbers).

[B]ack in our apartment on Fifty-fifth Street in New York, I had a more arresting experience with the kobolds.

It came in the form of another powerful dream. It probably happened in 1973 or 1974, but I still recall it vividly.

I was on a plateau in the middle of an enormous desert. The horizons were much too far away, as if the planet was two or three times its normal size -- or, I suppose, as if it was not this planet at all. Before me on the plateau was a narrow road, snaking elegantly through an expanse of close-cropped grass. There were tall trees, like cedars of Lebanon, in a grove off to my right. Ahead, the road passed beneath a tall triumphal arch. To my left was a squat oval building perhaps three stories tall, set in the side of a cliff. Beyond it was the immense desert view that I was seeing. The building was dark blue, and its windows had louvered awnings. The sun was bright and powerful, flooding everything with chalk-white light.

Having no idea what I should do, I decided to walk toward the building. As I went under the arch, I was joined by two small men wearing clothes that were busy with flaps, the overalls of workers. The clothes and the men themselves were a dark, iridescent blue, the same color as the building.

They drew me along to a little ravine. In it were some lean-tos made of sticks. They indicated that this was where they lived. I said, "These aren't even huts." One of them replied in a low, breathy voice, "They're all we need." At that moment, I got the impression of vast stretches of time, and how hard it was to maintain environmental balance, how you must waste nothing if you expect to survive long enough to matter. From that brief instant would later arise my own deep concern with the environment [. . .].

I asked them about the building. One of them replied that it was a university. Now that we were close to it, I could see that it was a wreck. I said, "It looks like it's in ruins." The reply, through bubbling humor, was, "It's a million years old and the scholars aren't very good at maintenance." Then they asked me if I would like to attend it.

I can remember the shocked delight and eagerness that flashed through me. I could see an arched doorway in the base. But as I drew closer, I found myself struggling through a field of sharp boulders. At that point, two very strange beings appeared, as tall as I was, very thin, with great, slanted black eyes that disturbed me very much as they bored into me.

One of them said, "He's not ready." This seemed to disappoint the blue fellows. It certainly disappointed me, and I tried to get around them, but they blocked my way. I sensed that the whole history and meaning of humanity must be known in that place, and that if I could matriculate there, I could learn the truth of us and the secrets of our lives [. . .]. I wanted to go in, and badly, but I understood that I had to obey them. The little blue men reacted with regret. They still thought I was ready. Finally, I turned away. The next moment, I woke up.

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The core story

Here is the core narrative, consisting of the overlap between the two accounts. This overlap is so substantial that these can only be read as two different versions of the same experience.

Strieber was in a large desert where the sunlight was very bright. There were tall trees, grass, and a narrow road or lane, which passed under a very large arch. At least from the time he reached the arch, and perhaps before that, he was accompanied by little men in blue.

He saw a building, built into the side of a cliff. He thought it must be in ruins, but the little men explained that it was a million-year-old university, and that the scholars weren't very good at maintenance. He had to climb through a field of sharp rocks to reach the entrance. At the entrance, he was met by two taller, thin beings with large slanted black eyes that stared into him in a way that he found disturbing. These two beings said he wasn't ready to enter the university. This disappointed both Strieber and the little men, who thought he was ready.

At some point, either before or after this attempt to enter the university, he saw some extremely simple dwellings made of sticks and understood that the little men lived in them.

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Differences

At first glance, the most obvious difference is that Super Natural presents this as a dream Strieber had in New York in 1973 or 1974, whereas Transformation presents it as something he actually experienced during his summer in continental Europe in 1968. Looking more carefully at the Transformation account, though, I see that he is careful to avoid actually calling it a memory. Rather, it was one of "a number of vivid thoughts" that "surfaced" in 1972, which he later decided "were connected to that summer" of 1968. In other words, nothing in Transformation is strictly inconsistent with the whole thing's being a dream or fantasy that he had in New York in the early 1970s.

The other glaring difference is that the Super Natural version ends when Strieber is prevented from entering the university, turns away, and wakes up -- whereas the Transformation version continues for seven more paragraphs, with Strieber entering the university after all, dancing there and seeing a vision of ancient Rome (a theme which he would revisit in The Secret School, this time placing it in his childhood), and even living in the vicinity of the university for a period of time. This seems awfully hard to square with Super Natural's "The next moment, I woke up" -- unless the narrative in Transformation is spliced together from several originally separate dreams or fantasies; he does introduce it with a reference to "a number of vivid thoughts." Apparently, by the time he wrote Super Natural, Strieber was no longer so sure that these scenes belonged together, or that they had any reference to 1968.

Besides these two biggies, there are a number of minor differences. Transformation refers only to "little men in blue," but Super Natural adds that the men themselves were "a dark, iridescent blue," too, as was the university building. In Transformation, we are told that the university "seemed almost to have blended with the stones themselves," which seems inconsistent with its being blue.

In Transformation, Strieber is led by the little men from the beginning; in Super Natural, he is on his own at first and is joined by the little men when he reaches the arch.

In Transformation, Strieber sees the little men's very simple dwellings after visiting the university, and their reaction to his surprise is to laugh out loud. In Super Natural, he sees the dwellings before the university, and the little men's reaction is to solemnly intone, "They're all we need," triggering a moment of insight which Strieber considers as marking the beginning of his concern with environmental issues. The supposedly transformative impact of this episode is missing in Transformation.

Kobolds aren't blue.

Apologies to Bill Watterson

In Chapter 4 of The Super Natural, Whitley Strieber attempts -- not for the first time -- to connect the little blue men of his close-encounter experiences with the kobolds of German folkore.

Like so many of the aliens believed to have recently arrived, little blue men have been with us for a long time. As is the case with most of the other forms, they were originally identified in folklore -- most frequently, in this case, in northern European folklore. [. . .] In the past, they were most often found in mines. Now they're known as "blue aliens." They were observed by German, Welsh, Cornish, and English miners. The folklore was most developed in Germany, where they were given the name kobolds. Because of its dark blue color, the metal cobalt, discovered in a German mine in 1735, was named after them. But the word "kobold" ultimately derives from the Greek for "rogue." Most appropriate, judging from my own experience with them. They were said to carry, at the level of the heart, a small orb, glowing red, and, in point of fact, I've seen that myself.

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Only in Strieber's books have I ever encountered the idea that kobolds are blue.

While "cobalt ores" were indeed named for the legendary kobold, this was because they are worthless and toxic, and were thus thought to be the handiwork of subterranean goblins -- not because they could be used to produce a pigment that was the same color as those goblins!

The glowing orb mentioned by Strieber can be found in the 1884 book Nineteenth Century Miracles; or, Spirits and Their Work in Every Country of the Earth, by Emma Hardinge Britten. I quote from p. 32.

From Mdme. Kalodzy, the writer of "Rambles in the Hartz Mountains," and "The Clock Makers of the Forest," &c., the author of this work has received the following account of these "Kobolds" or spirits, as witnessed by Madame Kalodzy and three companions, who spent a week in the hut of a peasant, one Michael Engelbrecht, in whose family the Kobolds seem to gave been perfectly familiar:--

"On the three first days after our arrival," said Madame K----, "we only heard a few dull knocks, sounding in and about the mouth of the mine, as if produced by some vibrations of very distant blows, but when on the third evening Michael came home from work, he brought us the welcome intelligence that his friends, the Kobolds, had promised by knockings to make us a visit. This we were right glad of, as Dorothea, our Michael's wife, had expressed her fears that they might be shy of so many strangers, and would not appear, unless we spent some hours in the mine.

"We were about to sit down to tea when Mdlle. Gronin called our attention to a steady light, round, and about the size of a cheese plate, which appeared suddenly on the wall of the little garden directly opposite the door of the hut in which we sat.

"Before any of us could rise to examine it, four more lights appeared almost simultaneously, about the same shape, and varying only in size. Surrounding each one was the dim outline of a small human figure, black and grotesque, more like a little image carved out of black shining wood than anything else I can liken them to. Dorothea kissed her hands to these dreadful little shapes, and Michael bowed with great reverence. As for me and my companions, we were so awe-struck yet amused at these comical shapes, that we could not move or speak until they themselves seemed to flit about in a sort of wavering dance, and then vanish, one by one."

The narrator went on to say, that she and her husband have since both heard and seen these little men, who always come and go very suddenly; appear as above described in the shadowy image on diminutive black dwarfs about two or three feet in height, and at that part which in the human being is occupied by the heart, they carry the round luminous circle first described, an appearance which is much more frequently seen than the little black men themselves.

Here is Strieber's glowing orb (though not described as red), but notice that the kobolds that carry it are unambiguously described as black, not blue. (That the kobolds announce their arrival with knocks is also relevant to some of Strieber's encounters, though he doesn't mention it.)

I suppose it's possible that Strieber's description of the kobold is based on other accounts than the ones I've been able to find, and that those other accounts describe the creature as blue. I doubt it, though. I strongly suspect that Strieber was alluding to this story by Madame Kalodzy and that he found it the same way I did: by checking up the references in the Wikipedia article on kobolds. Strieber writes, "They were observed by German, Welsh, Cornish, and English miners"; cf. Wikipedia's identical list of four countries: "Medieval European miners believed in underground spirits. The kobold filled this role in German folklore and is similar to other creatures of the type, such as the English bluecap, Cornish knocker and the Welsh coblynau."

The bluecap of Border folklore at least has the advantage of being blue! (Wikipedia describes it as "a mythical fairy or ghost in English folklore that inhabits mines and appears as a small blue flame.") No particular color seems to be associated with the knocker or coblynau. Kobolds themselves are variously described, but never as blue, and the color most commonly associated with the mine-dwelling variety is black.

How the giant planets protect Earth from massive impacts

An asteroid hitting Jupiter

In Chapter 14 of The Afterlife Revolution, Whitley Strieber writes:

The planet is shielded from strikes from cosmic debris by the gravity fields of the gas giants in the outer solar system and by the closeness of the moon. Jupiter and Saturn will take the first hits and if anything gets closer, the moon will work as a shield. The result of this is that large asteroid strikes are much rarer on Earth than they are on the other planets. Earth isn't pockmarked with craters because the moon is.

As a longtime reader of Strieber (who is a horror novelist and philosopher, not a scientist), I know he keeps informed about science -- reads the major journals and all that -- but also that his scientific knowledge is broad rather than deep and does not rest on any very strong foundation of basic scientific literacy. (I remember reading in one of his books that during the Mesozoic the earth was dominated by a single animal species and being completely baffled as to which species he might have in mind -- only to read on and find that he meant "the dinosaur"!) So when I read something like this, I know that it is almost certainly based on some real scientific research reported in the press, and also that he has almost certainly misunderstood it.

I'm a relatively clueless layman, too, but I won't let that stop me from taking a cursory stab at making sense of this.

Look up at Jupiter in the night sky. See how big it is -- not even a single arcminute in diameter? Assuming "cosmic debris" could come at Earth from any direction, what unimaginably tiny percentage of it would be blocked from hitting Earth because it hit Jupiter first? Even taking into account Jupiter's gravitational field, it would surely still only cover a negligible proportion of the sky and offer negligible protection.

As for the Moon's working as a shield, it is only from a naive geocentric perspective that the Moon is "up" and therefore stands between Earth and any incoming debris. There's no reason at all to assume that debris approaching the Earth-Moon system would tend to hit the Moon rather than Earth; on the contrary, the opposite must be true, as Earth is both physically larger than the Moon and exerts a stronger gravitational pull. Of course some sizable percentage of incoming debris will hit the Moon rather than Earth, and so the Moon probably is a "shield" in that sense, but to say that "Earth isn't pockmarked with craters because the moon is" is to betray a fundamental misunderstanding. Earth is less cratered than the Moon because it has an atmosphere -- burning up most meteors before they hit the surface, and eroding away the craters left by those that do -- not because meteors are somehow drawn to the Moon rather than to Earth.

Coming back to Jupiter and Saturn,  research by NASA's Tom Barclay and his colleagues, reported here about a year before the publication of The Afterlife Revolution, is presumably what Strieber is referring to. (His books consistently make reference to very recent science news, as documented by the pseudonymous Heinrich Moltke here.) Barclay's team did computer simulations of the early solar system "after Mars-size planet embryos had already formed in the system, and looked at cases with and without giant planets on the outer perimeter." The article reports their conclusions thus:

The researchers found that, with giant planets around, the remaining small solar system bodies were either ejected out of the system more quickly — because of the angular momentum the gas giants add to the system, Barclay said — or became a part of the existing planets sooner.

Without the influence of giant planets, the fragments formed a large, dangerous cloud orbiting close within the system that took much longer to disperse.

Elsewhere, the article quotes Barclay directly:

"If you have giant planets, your last giant impact happens somewhere between 10 and 100 million years [after planet formation], which is pretty fine — it's like what happened on Earth," Barclay said. "If you don't have giant planets, the last giant impact can happen hundreds [of millions] to billions of years in. This really is a risk to habitability."

While I am of course skeptical of any conclusions based on an oversimplified computer model of an imperfectly known situation, Barclay's theory at least has a prima facie plausibility that Strieber's version does not. The idea is not that any given object would tend to hit Jupiter rather than Earth, but rather that the presence of giant planets would, over a period of millions of years, tend to clear out much of the debris in the solar system so that there would later be much less of it around to hit Earth or any other planet.

Wordsworth's daffodils as a symbol of death in Strieber's Transformation

Past the streams of Oceanus they went, past the rock Leucas, past the gates of the sun and the land of dreams, and quickly came to the mead of asphodel, where the spirits dwell, phantoms of men who have done with toils.

-- Odyssey XXIV, A. T. Murray trans.

In Communion, Whitley Strieber's famous 1987 memoir of his interactions with apparently non-human "visitors," there is a scene in which one of the visitors strikes him between the eyes with a wand-like instrument and causes him to see terrible visions: the planet earth exploding, his father choking to death as his mother looks on impassively, and -- I would have sworn if you had asked me yesterday -- his son, Andrew, in a field of yellow flowers that represents death. And I would have said that, while the exact species of yellow flower is unspecified, some of Strieber's fiction (Majestic, if memory serves) suggests the evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) as the likeliest candidate.

But in my recent rereading of Communion, I noticed for the first time that this memorable image never actually occurs. He sees his son simply in "a park," and green is the only color mentioned; the yellow flowers are from another book, and they aren't primroses.

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The park of death in Communion

The park is first mentioned on p. 57, during a hypnosis session with Dr. Donald Klein to retrieve memories of the events of December 26, 1985 -- with a spontaneous regression to October 4, which is when Strieber saw the various wand-induced images.

"Oh . . . green. Shows me a park. I see my son. What's this got to do with him? Is this the devil? What the hell is this?"

After the hypnosis session, Budd Hopkins asks Strieber some follow-up questions (p. 57).

"What about the green?"

"It's a beautiful, green expanse. Was immediately relaxing when I saw that. And my boy. My boy is in the park. My boy is there. And he's happy. That's what I saw. But--"

"Why are you so upset?"

"Because I think the park represents death, and he's there because he's dead. That's what I think."

"Why should the park represent death?"

"I don't know. That's just my impression."

A later hypnosis session returns to this same material (p. 62).

"Now I see . . . a park. . . . My little boy is sitting there on the grass . . . he's all wobbly, and he's like he can't move his arms right. He's all wobbly and his eyes look funny." (They appeared entirely black, without any whites at all.) "I have to go over and pick him up and help him. If I don't help him, he's gonna die. [Long pause.]"

There seems to be a little confusion here. Is the boy happy, or all wobbly? Is he going to die, or is he already dead? At any rate, there is no hint whatsoever of yellow flowers. The only descriptive details refer to "grass" and "a beautiful, green expanse."

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The field of yellow flowers in Transformation

In Transformation (1988), Strieber's second "visitor" book, he relates another visitor-induced vision (pp. 134-135). This one has the field of yellow flowers, but Strieber's son is not there, nor is it explicitly called a symbol of death.

The next thing that happened was that my deck and pool dissolved into a magnificent vision. In this vision I was standing before a field of yellow flowers that rose up a low hill. The sky was black and full of stars so large and bright that it seemed as if I could reach up and touch them.

Even though the sky was dark the flowers were bathed in bright sunlight. As I watched I felt a wind blowing around me from behind. Suddenly children of all ages and sizes were running past me and out into the field, running and laughing through the sunlit flowers and up the low hill. They ran in a dense column, laughing and waving, and I felt an anguish to join them.

They ran up the hill and right into the sky, a glowing column of children, and when they reached the top of the sky they exploded into new stars.

A voice said to me, "This is the field where the sins of the world are buried." I wanted to go out to it but I could not, and that was painful, but I was filled with joy just to know that it was there. [. . .]

Later I told my brother about this experience, and he said "The odd thing is that I've had a private fantasy of a field of yellow flowers all of my life. When I'm relaxing I often imagine that field."

The following spring we were to make a lovely discovery at the house. After an absence of three or four weeks we returned to find that there actually was a field of yellow flowers where I had seen one the previous August.

It turned out that the landscape architect had planted the area with bulbs in October-without, of course, knowing of my vision. I had not even known that she had done the planting, let alone what kind of bulbs she had used.

By coincidence she had chosen yellow daffodils.

Is this another version of the same park? I guess a field is a bit like a park, and there are children, but that's about where the similarities end. The children are running and laughing, not sitting there "all wobbly" like Andrew in the park. There are no direct references to death, but the hints are there: The sins of the world are described as "buried"; and the image of children running up into the sky and becoming stars recalls the posthumous fate of many a mythical figure. Daffodils are, etymologically, asphodel, the flower of the underworld. Even the little detail of the wind blowing calls to mind Homer's description of the Elysian fields in Odyssey IV.

Still, the links to the park of Communion are by no means obvious. Why had my memory conflated the two visions?

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The Wordsworth connection

Later in Transformation (pp. 180-181), Strieber is on a flight which, due to an ambiguous prophecy from the visitors, he believes may well end in his death. As the plane flies into a storm and begins to shake, Strieber wonders what fate awaits those who die unmoored from any traditional beliefs regarding the afterlife.

What would be my way of death? What if in another moment there was a great roar and I found myself disembodied but still alive, hanging in the air of another sky? Where would my judges be, where my guardian angels? I would wander as helplessly as a cloud. I would drift, waiting for something to happen. But what if it was intended that we create our own realities after death? A man who dies with no expectations would be in danger of oblivion.

The sentence "I would wander as helplessly as a cloud" immediately jumps out at me. Wordsworth is not a poet I am at all familiar with, but I do know two of his poems. One, a poem close to many a Mormon heart, is "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" -- which, as it happens, Strieber had previously quoted from in an epigraph to Part Three of Transformation (p. 161). The other, short and much anthologized, is known by its first line -- "I wandered lonely as a cloud" -- and is, as everyone knows, about a field of daffodils.

Coming as it does in a book that quotes Wordsworth and prominently features a field of daffodils, this "wander . . . as a cloud" line is surely not a coincidence. But is it a deliberate allusion -- is the reader intended to recognize it and think, "ah, Wordsworth, daffodils!" -- or is it a case of subconscious influence, a result of the author's having had Wordsworth and daffodils on the mind?

Anyway, the story continues. While on the plane, Strieber confronts his fear of death head-on, overcomes it, and disembarks a changed man, for whom the world is once again enchanted and death no longer (for the moment, anyway!) holds any terrors. And this -- after a few paragraphs of Traherne-esque rhapsodizing on the wonder evoked by every ordinary thing in the world -- is how the author chooses to describe his new attitude toward death: "When I would turn my thoughts to death I was like a child amazed by a field of daffodils" (p. 184).

For me, this clinches it. The reappearance of the field of daffodils, in a rather unlikely simile, just a few pages after the cloud-like wandering, shows that the Wordsworth allusion is in fact conscious and deliberate. It also links the field of daffodils with death, and thus with the park in Communion.

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Here is the complete text of the Wordsworth poem, interspersed with my notes.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

In addition to daffodils and the wandering like a cloud, there is a reference to "the breeze"; cf. Strieber's "I felt a wind blowing around me from behind" -- and, as already mentioned, the wind that blows through Homer's Elysian fields.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Cf. Strieber: "The sky was black and full of stars . . . [The children] ran in a dense column . . . . They ran up the hill and right into the sky, a glowing column of children, and when they reached the top of the sky they exploded into new stars."

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

The children were laughing, and Strieber "was filled with joy just to know that it was there." 

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Strieber's brother said, "I've had a private fantasy of a field of yellow flowers all of my life. When I'm relaxing I often imagine that field."

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Update: I found a passage in Transformation (p. 155) that mentions the park of death. It is presented as a transcript of a letter from one Yensoon Tfai, "a very traditional Chinese," relating how Jo Sharp, a family friend, had been visited shortly before her death by "seven little Chinese men" who lifted her up to the ceiling. The letter itself was transcribed from Yensoon's diary.

She protested and ordered them to put her back to bed, but to no avail. In a trice, she found herself in a verdant park. The sun was setting. Although the surroundings were a joy to her eyes, no living things were visible, only the wind was soughing amidst the trees. It struck a note of desolation to her. She felt a sense of despair. The little blue man presented her with a blue silk flowing robe, which she happily put on because it was her favorite color. [. . .] After this episode, Mrs. Sharp's condition declined rapidly.

Strieber adds (p. 156),

Yensoon also pointed out that the deceased wears a blue silk robe in a Chinese funeral. [. . .] They effortlessly translated her from the physical world into another reality, one that seemed to be a sort of archetypal place of death.

Upon reading this account, I remembered my hypnosis session covering the events that occurred on the night of October 4, 1985. During that session I had seen my son in a beautiful but strangely desolate park. I had thought him dead and had experienced emotional devastation.

Could there be an actual place somewhere, in some parallel reality, where the dead linger in sighing gardens?

At first I had some doubts regarding the authenticity of this letter. Tfai is not a possible name in any Chinese language, and the vocabulary she uses seems to be Strieber's own. Soughing, for example, is quite an unusual word, unlikely to be in the active vocabulary of many non-native speakers of English, but it occurs in several of Strieber's own works (qv). On the other hand, the diary transcript (only a small part of which I have reproduced in this post) does contain subtle and characteristically Chinese grammatical errors regarding the order of adjectives ("the yellow little man," "a blue silk flowing robe") and the incorrect use of and to link attributive adjectives ("a stern and icy cold look," "a slimy and soft body"). I also thought that the name Tfai, while obviously wrong, was the sort of error that served to confirm rather than debunk. It's certainly not the sort of thing any American would come up with if he tried to invent a Chinese-sounding name; more likely, the letter had been written in somewhat old-fashioned longhand, and Strieber had misread Tsai (a common Chinese surname, but not one particularly well-known in the West) as Tfai.

Fortunately, part of the diary passage in question also appears in Lowell Tarling's 2017 book Sharper 1980-2013: A Biography of Martin Sharp. (Jo Sharp was Martin Sharp's mother.) In Sharper, Yensoon's surname is given as Tsai, and she is described as Martin's girlfriend (euphemized by Strieber as "a close family friend"). The diary passage as quoted by Tarling is identical to Strieber's version with two exceptions: It once uses Mrs Sharp where Strieber has she, and it has sighing instead of soughing. I found it very satisfying to have my speculations vindicated in this way; Tfai was indeed a misreading of Tsai, and soughing was indeed Strieber's word rather than Tsai's own.

So the diary entry is authentic and is not Strieber's work. The chance of its being influenced by Communion seems remote. Strieber did not know Tsai -- didn't even know her name! -- and hadn't had any contact with her boyfriend Martin Sharp since they were in London in the sixties (coinciding, according to this post, with Sharp's only period of interest in UFOs). Strieber found out about Jo Sharp's strange experience because Martin had contacted Philippe Mora (who would later direct the film version of Communion) about it and Mora had called Strieber. Communion was a bestseller, of course, and Jo Sharp may have been exposed to it, but it seems unlikely that she would have borrowed the little detail of the park of death while still describing her visitors as "little Chinese men" in "coolie hats" rather than as greys.

Notice also the wind in Sharp's park -- a detail not mentioned in Communion but tying it to the field of yellow flowers in Transformation (and, of course, to the Homeric afterlife).