Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Jornada del Muerto

On Monday October 15, Howard Barton Unruh, the nation's "first single-episode mass murderer," died in a nursing home at the age of 88.

Because synchromystics and conspiracy theorists often claim that mass murderers and other ne'er-do-wells are in fact sleeper agents--victims of government mind control experiments--they are often on the lookout for twilight language, e.g. the names and numbers that to the observant reveal the methods of the cryptocracy.

That's why when we came across this article we felt compelled to comment on some of the names and numbers in the story.

On the morning of September 6, 1949, Unruh left his home and began his so-called "walk of death." He'd been planning the attack for a year and kept notes, so we know some of the victims were intentional, some were people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There is a strange symmetry to his victims: 5 men, 5 women and 3 children. 5 and 3 are already mystically resonant numbers. No need to point out that the total, 13, resonates all over the place; bad luck, witches' covens, American colonies, layers in the pyramid, etc.

Also interesting is the Masonic resonance. He left the house with a Luger and 33 rounds of ammunition. The shooting occurred in the area of 32nd St. and River Rd.

Further advancing the idea that he was some kind of sleeper agent is the fact that he was a WWII vet and an expert marksman in the Army.

The name is also interesting. "Unruh" is a Prussian or Pomeranian place name and is said to mean a quarrelsome or restless person; it comes from Middle German words meaning "unrest" or "disturbance". It can also mean "careless" or "negligent." An unruh in current German is a technical word meaning "balance wheel" in a watch. Our boy was anything but balanced, one supposes, but he may have been just another cog in the mechanism.

Howard is an Old English name which means "noble watchman." Haha! Time and observation meet in the pun of "watch."

Anyway, a day after yhis unruly German went on his spree, the Allies gave back to Germany the assets formerly controlled by the Nazi Regime. One day after that, the Federal Republic of Germany was officially founded.

Not that there's a link between one and another. 1949 was an especially transformative year in Geopolitics. Indonesia was recognized. The People's Republic of China was officially proclaimed. The Council of Europe was founded. Basically, a busy year in the ongoing sloughing-off of the old colonial order in the wake of the Second World War.

And the "first"American single-episode mass murder occurred; what was shocking then is now a staple of today's nightly news.

One must imagine that being regarded as the first crime of this sort is a result of the fact that the victims were European-Americans and on American soil.

Incinerating countless thousands of Japanese thousands of miles away apparently doesn't count.

Four years prior the route towards the mass murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki began with the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site--deep within the Jornada del Muerto, or "single day's journey of the dead man"--a name is said to have originated after a German man died there fleeing the Inquisition in the late 1600's.

3 comments:

  1. I'm apparently on a bit of an Alan Moore kick lately, but this post resonates Moore's vision of Jack the Ripper as an agent of Evil who kicked off the bloodiest century the world has known.

    An interesting quote from the HuffintonPost article you referenced: "What finally set him off was his discovery that someone had stolen the gate to his fence."

    There's too much there to unpack in a short comment, but consider a couple connections with our recent conversations:

    * Apocalyptic thinking stemming from running out of space

    * The Garden of Eden as a cage

    Regarding the cage image: It's sort of horrifying to think of Unruh as a being uncaged by the opening of his gate.

    By the way, connecting the "walk of death" with a "single day's journey of the dead man" ... bloody genius insight, that was.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dang it; meant to have three bullet points about how the stolen gate ties into our conversation.

    The dropped point?

    * Tessellations of the plain

    Or in this case, the untessellation.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Shit, you flatter me, Gid! I can't believe that I totally zapped the bit about the Gate. Very insightful to pick up on that.

    Gates feature prominently in Enochian magick, "Gates of Wisdom" etc.

    Also recalls our post about the beer summit: (I will quote myself!)

    "Then there's the lovely evocative name "Gates." Crowley was if nothing attempting to open gates between this existence and another. In Magick Without Tears, just to give one example, Crowley speaks of the "fifty gates of understanding" in a chapter entitled "The Black Brothers". In the Enochian system Crowley explored the four Gates of the Watchtowers.

    But these examples only limit the field of inquiry. Gates, portals, liminal points of transition. It's all central to the Magickal universe. It's arguably the whole point of ceremonial Magick to begin with."

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for taking the time to comment!

Need to add an image? Use this code: [ximg]IMAGE-URL-HERE[x/img]. You will need to remove the the boldface x's from the code to make it work.