Twin Peaks and the Twisted Language of Spirits

Short and packed weekend. Had Sodality on Friday, which was awsome. We worked path 20 between Tiphareth and Geburah. Talk of us writing up our experiences and methods in a book. We have been at this ritual project for 6 years now.

Today I went to the DVPN Summer social and gave an abbreviated talk on Wealth Magick. It was so good to hang out with old friends, and some newer ones, that I dont get to see anymore. Charles H gave an awsome lecture on Thelema - he dove back into the biblical use of the term, but missed the Hypnerotomachia, which for me has become key to understanding the whole thing...

Anyway, its to late and I am to tired to post anything significant tonight, but just to keep the ball rolling here is an old article I wrote for Behutet a couple years back. I was asked about it today by Xanthias...




Twin Peaks, and the Twisted Language of Spirits

I have had many initiations both formal and informal. One of the strangest and one that hit me completely from left field involved nothing more than watching Twin Peaks, every episode back to back followed by the movie, without stopping over the course of one weekend. When I refer to doing this as a magickal initiation, I think some people assume I am just using magickal terminology to talk about how much I loved the show. Friends who saw me at the Sunday Thelesis meeting just after finishing the series could see in my eyes and in my manner that it was something more. Let me be clear: I am referring to it as a magickal training technique[i]. I recommend it to any student of mine that wants to get into the business of dealing with spirits.



I had my first exposure to the spirit world when I was 5 years old. Certain things that happened I understood directly, some I understood intuitively but couldn’t explain, and some I just didn’t understand. I have been dealing with the spirits ever since. Some, especially ones that I seek out deliberately from grimoires and such, speak very plainly. Others, often the ones that I encounter in haunted places or attached to obsessed people, speak in visions, metaphors, and strange coincidences that I sometimes don’t fully understand until months later if ever. This is just the way work in the astral light.

Susanna Clarke in her Novel “Jonathan Strange and M. Norell” noted that Humans and Fairies have an inverse relationship regarding Reason and Magick. Humans having great capacity for the former and less for the latter, whereas fey have enormous magickal power but comparatively little capacity for reason. For this reason the Shaman and the Sorcerer who is not content to deal only with those incorporeal beings that are listed in the Occult Grammaries (who are themselves sometimes far from pleasant characters), must learn to communicate with the spirits in the spirits own round about fashion.

The Yaminahua Shamen of Peru, who are famous for working with Ayahuasca induced trance call this type of Spirit language “Tsai Yoshtoyoshto” which literally translates as "language-twisting-twisting.". The Anthropolohist, Graham Townsley translates this expression as “Twisted Language”. One Shaman he interviews states "With my koshuiti I want to see - singing, I carefully examine things - twisted language brings me close but not too close - with normal words I would crash into things - with twisted ones I circle around them - I can see them clearly. "

Direct and concrete language frightens the spirits and therefore according to Townsley must be "deliberately constructed in an elliptical and multi-referential fashion so as to mirror the refractory nature of the beings who are their objects." He concludes: "Yoshi are real beings who are both 'like and not like' the things they animate. They have no stable or unitary nature and thus, paradoxically, the 'seeing as' of 'twisted language' is the only way of adequately describing them. Metaphor here is not improper naming but the only proper naming possible."

Jason Louv in a footnote to his essay “Spooky Tricks”[ii] compares the Twisted Language of spirit with David Bourland, Jr.’s idea of E-Prime, an approach to English that banishes all forms of the verb “to-be”. While writing and speaking in e-prime can be an excellent exercise for re-training the brain to think in different ways, and even to help understand occult and psychic messages, don’t expect the spirits to adhere to any kind of fixed rule about verbs and nouns, or any kind of fixed rule at all! Which brings me back to Twin Peaks.

In Twin Peaks Dale Cooper is charged with solving the Murder of Laura Palmer, a murder which was physically commited by someone close to her (watch the show to find out) but was directed by the discarnate spirit BOB. In the course his investigation in Twin Peaks, his first real clue is given in a dream in which he appears as himself 25 years later in a room walled off by red curtains containing someone that looks like Laura Palmer, and a dancing midget in a red suit who tells him things like "That gum you like is going to come back in style", and "She's filled with secrets. Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there's always music in the air." The girl that looks like Laura tells him "I feel like I know her but sometimes my arms bend back…"

Later, after being shot, he encounters another spirit that manifests as a Giant who tells him: "The owl's are not what they seem.", "There's a man in a smiling bag.", and "Without chemicals he points." These all turn out to be valuable clues as to what is going on, and have very concrete meanings. Other mysteries in Twin Peaks are not so clear cut. The Log Lady for instance utters some zingers like: "Shut your eyes and you'll burst into flames.", and "Fire is the devil hiding like a coward in the smoke." There is also the spirits of a little boy and his grandmother who appear in the series as one thing, and in the movie as another, and are trying to get their messages across using creamed corn! And of course most famously, Mike, the one armed man (who points without chemicals BTW) utters the famous incantation:

“Through the Darkness of future past the Magician longs to see. One chance out between two worlds, Fire Walk with Me.”

Of course perhaps he was really saying “One chants out between two worlds” or perhaps be means both. That’s the twisted language for you.

Dale and crew discovers a portal to the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks that was opened up by Evil Tibetan sorcerers called Dugpas[iii], but in the end its not clear if the Midget and the Giant and the one armed man are agents of the Black Lodge, White Lodge, or perhaps in an attached waiting room with doors into both. You can’t figure the answers out with reason so don’t try. You must learn the twisted language.

After my 30+ hours of Twin Peaks I was literally in a trance state. So many things from prior working suddenly found their context. I went back through old journals and understood messages that had been given to me by the spirits that were lingering in my mind like timebombs which David Lynch and Mike Frost had set off with their creation.

So I wanted to write this article to suggest to people that don’t know: Twin Peaks IS an occult training video in modes of spirit communication. When you figure out who is in the Log Lady’s Log, what Creamed corn represents and if the Little Man from Another Place is the Giants, Black Lodge opposite, or the discarded Arm of the one armed man, than you will have graduated from the course.

I don’t like to make to publish much of my own channeled messages, but it seems appropriate to close with at least one example from my own life. After getting back together with an old girlfriend whom I was concerned I did not have enough in common with, a spirit appeared to me one night and told me that my new relationship was something like Baked Alaska. Having never had Baked Alaska, I didn’t understand this nugget of wisdom until I looked it up: it’s Flaming Ice Cream. Get it?

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[i] It should be noted that I watched them in 1996 just after establishing K&C of the HGA. It should also be noted the tapes were given to me by my Chthonic Auranian Initiator Cliff Pollick.

[ii] Essay appears in Generation Hex, Disinformation 2005

[iii] Lynch or Frost got this from H.P.Blavatski who viewed any of the Red-Hat (non-Gelukpa) schools of Tibet with derision and saw the Dugpas as being the epitome of Evil. In reality the Dugpas are a sect of the Kgyu school based in Bhutan, and are quite a bunch of peace loving fellows whose relationship with the Yellow Hats is no where near the strife that Blavatski and Theosophical influenced translators tried to pass off. Interestingly enough, though Blavatski was most definitely not aware of them, there is a secret DugMA cult near the Tsangpo Gorge region of Tibet. These Dugmas are women who poison travelers and tourists with laced offerings of Chang. The poison takes nine days to work so they definitely do not benefit materially by robbing their victims, but rather believe that the merit and blessings of their victim will transfer to them after the kill.