How to teleport a hammer, by Miriam Sturdee.
Here in Moogieland we’ve been getting quite caught up in the excitement of the games, even going so far as to find out what trap shooting is.
In honour of the Olympian efforts of the world’s finest athletes, Moogieman performed a prose-poem at the Catweazle Club last night. Not about London 2012, however, but instead the 2013 Paranormal Olympics that took place in Encarnation, Paraguay.
The run up to the 2013 Paranormal Olympics did not take place in propitious circumstances. There was a state of high tension. The depression to end depressions had sliced and diced nations and societies in more ways than anyone could count; international relations were strained to breaking point.
Encarnation, with its cutting edge Crystal Ball stadium, had become the focus of every tin pot dictatorship with an arms-length insurgent movement, every country on the wrong side of the Axis Of Darkness, every freedom fighter, anarchist, nihilist, Maoist, Taoist and wobbly, every spy and agent provocateur sponsored by the great powers allied to the Axis Of Light, every lone gunman with a grievance, every nutcase, waste of space, every mercenary with an eye on the main chance, every privateer, pistolero and pseudo pacifist, and every palooka with a 2nd hand bazooka.
Paraguay was locked down. In Encarnation, parascientific paramilitaries patrolled the streets. In the Crystal Ball Stadium clusters of clairvoyant cameras looked down omnisciently while high above, parapsychologist paramedics paraglided on programmable parakeets, waiting for the next victim of a psionic attack.
The unrest extended to the sporting community. The world of psychic cycling had been rocked by a doping scandal – the Djibouti team had refused to take the ubiquitous psychoactive performance enhancer methyl phenylalanine. They claimed they could compete just as well without it but there were whispers that instead they were using Magik, with a ‘K’, and competitors, in all disciplines were just plain uncomfortable with this.
Then there was controversy as a member of the Swedish synchronised soothsaying team was arrested under suspicion of constructive Heisenbergian prediction with terrorist intent. There was an international outcry and widespread claims that the Paraguayan authorities were acting on behalf of the Axis Of Light – who were sponsoring a covert low-level war with the aim of pressurising Sweden into abandoning its semi-socialist welfare state model of publicly provided horoscopes and psychic healing.
Even the athletics hadn’t entirely escaped the taint of politics. The 400m egg and spoon bending race had been boycotted by the indomitable reigning champion, Uzi Gellner, as a protest against a Kabbalist cabal gaining power in Israel.
But the thing, above all else, on people’s minds was the prophecy of Michel de Nostredame – popularly known as Nostradamus. In 1559 he had identified a credible threat to the Crystal Ball Stadium involving an alchemical weapon that would detonate with catastrophic consequences during the 2013 contest, and he had thoughtfully composed a quatrain about it that would be available to later generations.
The world’s counter-parapsychology agencies were taking the portent extremely seriously. Whole offices of tea-leaf readers, entrail examiners and cloud decipherers had provided corroborative evidence and were trying to discern further details of the horrific event – the date, the time, where it would occur in the vast stadium, who was at risk –but so far their efforts had been in vain.
Crack telekinesis experts were focusing their energies on making minute adjustments to the trajectories of the planets in order to disrupt the coming astrological conjuncture that portended the attack, and thus thwart it.
But this did little to allay the fears of the public. Because, as everyone familiar with Greek tragedy knows, attempts to wriggle free from the stranglehold of destiny only result in the same calamitous outcome reasserting itself in a different way.
On the day of the opening ceremony a palpable sense of malice had settled on the Crystal Ball Stadium. The spectators were hushed and subdued. Menacing clouds had gathered overhead and the sky was uncharacteristically dark, even for night time. Birds did not fill the air, except for the programmable parakeets, which although blessed with a necromantic sentience, lacked the intuition of real flesh and blood.
Paraguayan paramilitary prognosticators were starting to pick up indications that the realignment of the planets had started to take effect. But their joy of discovering that the stadium was no longer under threat from alchemical attack turned to dismay as they realised that the latest auguries foretold a hostage-taking crisis. And it was too late to stop it.
The target was the celebrity long-jumper, Harry Halma, winner of 33 Paranormal Olympic gold medals. Restraining the world’s pre-eminent astral projectionist would be no straightforward task but the cadres of the Resurrected Rosicrucian Republic had been planning this abduction for 800 years. Almost 400 years, in fact, before Rosicrucianism was founded. But fortunately, or unfortunately for Harry Halma, a far-sighted neo-Platonist theologian had seen fit to plan for the opportunity that would present itself in 2013 and set in train a sequence of events that would result first in the inauguration of the underground Rosicrucian Republic and then, somewhat later, its entrance on the world stage in a dramatic hostage crisis.
The Rosicrucian Republicans, however, were not the only ones intent on using the opening ceremony for their own nefarious purposes. Militant Theosophists from the breakaway Blavatsky Brigade had been waiting for their moment too. Ham Hammarskjöld, the record-holding hammer thrower, was sitting in the VIP fortune-telling tent for a Tarot reading. By briefly re-imagining the multi-dimensionality of space, the top Blavatskian topologist managed to reshuffle the deck. As Hammarskjöld picked out his final card he was confronted with the The Tower, symbol of destruction and war.
This was enough to tip the highly-strung hammer thrower over the edge. Having achieved all his goals a long time ago, Hammarskjöld was already disillusioned and purposeless. The substituted Tarot card induced an all-encompassing revelation of the futility of existence.
Staggering from the tent in a bitter, inconsolable rage, he glanced at the front page of the Paraguay Pantograph carefully held aloft by a Blavatsky Brigadist planted in the Tarot-reading queue. His eye was drawn, irresistibly, to the prominently displayed photo of President Francisco Solano López II, who was due to attend the games that very afternoon.
Meanwhile, the far right Ariosophist Order Of The Golden Dawn had successfully penetrated the Olympic security lockdown by using a possessed fruit fly to deliver a tiny bomb into the Presidential box.
The psychic scanners deployed in this area of the stadium would have picked up the most miniscule weapon had it been of any known kind. But this was a thermo-astrological device – the first ever Zodiac bomb – produced in the most secret laboratories of the Axis Of Light and supplied with the connivance of various key figures in national governments and secret agencies to the state-sponsored assets within the Ariosophist Order Of The Golden Dawn via a circuitous trail of arms dealers, gangsters, forged end-user certificates, Ukrainian air force bases and a shadowy conduit called Mystic Myrah.
The opening ceremony reached its climax. Five enormous glowing Olympic rings darted furiously above the stadium spelling out the names of previous psychic champions and their feats of paranormal activity. President López rose to his feet along with other prominent Paraguayan cabinet members who were present with him in the state box.The spectators, athletes, security personnel, officials, and myriad stadium workers were all blissfully unaware that the Zodiac bomb had detonated. Even its intended victims – the President and his cronies – were indifferent to the profound effect it had wrought on them. The star signs of everyone caught within the blast radius had been dramatically shifted, thus altering their deeply held natures and foretold destinies.
President Francisco Solano López II, a Jupiterian Sagittarius of calm temperament and even-handed judgement was turned into a rash and aggressive Leo.
As he leant forward to begin his speech to the crowd he was seized with a sudden urge to take decisive action on an escalating trade dispute with Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. He denounced them furiously for undercutting the price of precognitive paraphernalia, declared the 2nd War Of The Triple Alliance, and ordered all Uruguayan, Brazilian and Argentinean Olympians to be rounded up and shot.
As if by a prearranged signal, the private army of the Ariosophist Order Of The Golden Dawn – the Yellow Shirts – surged forward from the stands and performed their distinctive one-legged salute. In fact it was by a prearranged signal as their leaders had been expecting all this to happen in the aftermath of the thermo-astrological explosion.
At that moment, however, an enraged Ham Hammarskjöld appeared in front of the presidential box, swinging his Olympic hammer. The presidential bodyguards in front of the box had been transformed by the Zodiac bomb from Tauran men of action to indecisive Virgos and dithered as the 7.3 kilo hammer shot towards the president, slowed fractionally on reaching his skull and continued, propelling Solano López II’s head towards the rear of the Crystal Ball Stadium while his body crumpled onto the fortuitously red carpet below.
For several days there was widespread unrest in Paraguay. The Armed forces were mobilised, poised to attack the three neighbouring countries but the order to engage never came. Power was seized by another victim of the Zodiac bomb – Fernando Ludo – a progressive former member of the cabinet, known for his powerful intellect and playful contrarianism but altogether too nice to take politics that seriously. His humane Libran ways were profitably disciplined when he was turned into a Capricorn.
Ludo resolved the dispute over the price of precognitive paraphernalia and stood up to the Axis Of Light, introducing a raft of redistributive policies, including the creation of a Swedish-style National Horoscope System. Relations with Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina were much improved and the four countries became key members of a trade block that started to create psychic prosperity across Latin America.
And what about Harry Halma, the astral projectionist long-jumper? Exactly according to plan, he escaped from a throng of mysterious brown-robed assailants by teleporting to the back of the stadium, behind the presidential box. There the Rosicrucian Republicans were waiting with nets and anti astralising spray. As Halma materialised, the head of Solano Lopez II thudded into him causing fatal haemorrhaging.
In the auspicious atmosphere of the Crystal Ball Stadium Harry Halma was transubstantiated into a benign ghost and was elected Chair of the Paranormal Olympic commission on a wave of popular sympathy. His ability to pass through closed doors and brown envelopes meant he was uniquely placed to stamp out corruption and political infighting, ushering in a golden period of fair play and supernatural Olympic achievements.
And years later, Harry Halma would quote from his ghost-written autobiography, ‘The best thing in my life was when I died … but old Nostradamus had it right all along when he said.
Time flies like a hammer
The golden dawn hops and stammers.
Great power does erode.
When the crystal ball explodes.
Tags: occult, Olympics, Paraguay, paranomal, parapsychology, parascience, psionics