will kill most of the world’s population – especially the unspiritual ones – leading those remaining to a new era of peace and higher consciousness.
‘The Age of Aquarius,’ she says, ‘you must have heard.’
‘Is that the same thing as the New Age?’
‘Aquarius,’ repeats the orange beret, sounding confused.
A Kirilian photograph looks very much like a regular polaroid, as it turns out, but at $15 a shot it has to be different. In any case, Kirilian photographs are taken by a highly complex Kirilian mechanism, requiring the subject to place his or her palm on a metal plate and visualize the auric field while the booth assistant shouts instructions from beneath a piece of black cloth. There then follows a soft popping preceded by an intense white light, and the aura photograph spools from a flap in the side of the machine. Mine is a chemical green, with two livid haloes floating above it like aerial ringworm sores.
‘Oh my,’ says the booth assistant, ‘this is interesting. See that green? That’s healing. And the red is passion.’ Passion and healing, I’m thinking, not bad.
‘You have a young soul, not too many lifetimes here, full of energy, adventuresomeness, you’re highly active physically, probably travel a good deal, veerrry creative. I’d guess you make your living by your wits. You’re fascinated by what goes on in the world, are you in the news? Something like that, I’m only guessing.’
And she’s on to the next in line, orange beret. I indulge my ego in a small self-congratulatory moment. Young soul, fascinated, adventuresome. Hotdamn! My aura is telling me I’m the person I always wanted to be.
‘Oh my.’ The booth assistant is speaking to orange beret now, holding the beret’s aura image, ‘this is interesting. See that green? A young soul. Veery creative.’
I call Fergus collect to let him know first that my aura is green for healing, red for passion and second that the earth is about to implode. He seems unimpressed, but then he is a New Yorker. As I’m leaving the phone booth someone presses a flyer into my hands and invites me to a lecture at 4pm given by a Princess Sharula Dux who will be demonstrating the tools and format to bring the planet into the Aquarian Age as prescribed by the Melchizedek Temple of Telos. Topics covered will include passing through the astrological doorway of 12:12, and the restructuring of the Melchizedek Priesthood, the spiritual warriors and world leaders of the Golden Age. Pretty comprehensive.
At some point in my lost week I read about Princess Sharula and her theories. The Princess Dux I read about is a 267 year-old Ambassador from a subterranean city called Telos which is in turn part of the ancient underground kingdom of Lemuria, sister civilization to Atlantis and Mu.
At four sharp she arrives at lecture theatre number three, blinking at the crowd, an immensity in a marine-theme catsuit, and makes her way to the front of the room with that rolling gait peculiar to the corpulent, closely followed by a young outdoors type with long hair tied back in a ponytail, who introduces himself as Shield Dux and asks us to give a big hand to Her Excellency the Princess Sharula Dux, his beloved wife and distinguished Ambassador from the court of Telos.
Sharula wants her public to understand that the world is in disarray, convulsed by greed, natural disasters, cancer, urban violence, tax evasion and cruelty to animals. She wants us to know that we are standing at a crossroads in the 1990s. A crossroads, every generation needs to hear it. In the 1890s our great-grandparents were standing at a crossroads. We were standing at a crossroads when Martin Luther King took the fatal bullet, when Reaganomics was in vogue. We have always, I fear, been standing at a crossroads.
In Princess Dux’s opinion the New Age is coming pretty soon now, about as soon as it takes for the gargantuan crystal matrix computers of the universe to receive a cosmic refurbishment. There’s good news for Americans, says Dux; the United States of America is programmed to become the world’s first crystal matrix paradise because it is in America that the current global cauldron of ills is bubbling away the hardest.
Eventually, question time comes round, and no-one seems to have much to say so I stand and venture:
‘One thing I’ve always wanted to know is whether it gets a little smoggy down underground, you know, without the benefit of the wind?’
The princess smoothes her pearl-grey hair and winds a thread around one of the anchor buttons of her catsuit.
‘You must have learned such a lot in your 267 years.’
‘I have had the occasional enlightenment, it’s true. Actually, all our power comes from an electromagnetic injection into the crystal matrix that harnesses the ethereal power and provides energy for a million years. It is completely clean and entirely without ecological consequences. So, you see, we have no smog at all. You have yet to learn such technologies. Earth people are remarkably backward in some respects.’
‘You know, your majesty or whatever,’ I continue, emboldened. ‘I sometimes feel confused and barely human.’ There’s a rustle of recognition in the audience. ‘I do have this weird little birthmark on my back. Suppose I’m Lemurian, like you. I mean, how could I tell?’
She looks at me darkly, smile faded away to a little flicker about the nostrils.
‘I don’t think that’s likely, you’re probably just an extraterrestrial.’
Sometimes I can be so cheap it gets me down.
In the coffee bar, a Californian called Talon invites me to a free demonstration of his Tachyon energy bodysuits. Now, in different circumstances nothing would have kept me from Talon’s Tachyon energy bodysuit, but I am committed to the Brad and Sherry Steiger lecture at 5.30. No matter, says Talon, why doesn’t he swing by after the lecture, and he’ll give me an individual session ‘with no obligations’, so we fix a vague time and Talon wanders off back to his Tachyon energy booth and I never do discover exactly what Tachyon energy is.
Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger are New Age celebs, which is to say, they have made appearances on The Joan Rivers Show and can afford a half-page ad in the Whole Life Expo catalogue. Their books include Hollywood and the Supernatural and Mysteries of Time and Space. The most recent, Strange Powers of Pets, was a Literary Guild selection. In addition Sherry Hansen Steiger is a licensed publicist while Brad once won the Film Advisory Board’s Award of Excellence. The Milwaukee Sentinel apparently says they have ‘a wonderful understanding of the forthcoming changes.’
After a 267 year-old Princess, can anything surprise?
By their own account, Brad and Sherry Steiger stumbled across intimations of an answer to the question: ‘Who made us what we are?’, quite by accident. After years of painstaking research they discovered, almost as a by-product of their work into alien intelligence, that the great human tribe, far from being mere cosmic incidentals, had in fact been shaped many thousand years ago by collectives of advanced entities from other planets, and in particular from Venus. Suddenly, everything else made sense to them. The giant fossilized footprints they had come across in Peru (was it Peru? I forget) were obviously those of an advanced reptilian being which had evolved on earth and migrated to another part of the solar system; and the well-documented Mayan practice of elongating infant skulls by squashing them between boards was doubtless intended to be a sign of deference to the Indians’ oval-headed alien masters. Why, rock pictures show that the aliens even knew about photosynthesis and were employing it for their own ends, not least of which was to splice up some human genes and cross-breed them with other useful things – plants and
