By Rollo Tomassi

(Rollo Tomassi is a film critic, author and social revolutionary. He chooses to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.)

Part One – The forbidden planet of ouiji love

New Age “channelling” - similar to but significantly different from old age “mediumship” - was all the rage in the metaphysical ‘90s of the last century. There was Ramtha and Lazarus, Joseph and St. Germaine, not to mention such classic space brother transmissions as those of the Altereans, the Ashtar Command, and of course the Pleiadians. But, as the world lurched unsteadily into the new world order’s new age of unremitting war on “terrorism,” these quaint pronouncements of galactic good will and cosmic aspirations faded like photos of the last “metaphysical” decade at the turn of the 19th century. Even Shirley Maclaine, Hollywood’s Queen of the New Age, has moved on to more traditional forms of spirituality, as demonstrated by her last book, The Camino, about walking the ancient pilgrim track in southern France.

Yet, the New Age has one last rising superstar, one last message from the beyond that in its own bizarre way punctuates the earlier blather of the bliss ninnys. To the connoisseur of such arcane matters, the new message from the Cassiopaeans has all the hallmarks of greatness. Who could resist a new age doomsday message with such a potent mixture of sex, lies and ouiji boards?

The Cassiopaean message is very simple – Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid. The Cassiopaean view of reality is one in which government mind control plots go hand in hand with evil and selfish reptoid aliens from the future who rape and abduct at will among the complaisant population. There is no protection, no succour or salvation, save in the “knowledge” bestowed by the Cassiopaeans. This is in fact one of their favourite slogans: Knowledge Protects, Ignorance Endangers. Never mind that “knowledge” without the wisdom to understand or use it is about the most useless thing in the universe, the Cassiopaeans claim that it is enough to “know” the Truth, as revealed by them of course. Their “truth” however is deeply suspect, and not just on philosophical grounds.

From graphic depictions of rape by 4D lizard beings, to discussions of circumcision and its after effects, all the way to tantric innuendoes and speculation on Jesus’ sex life, and that of his descendent according to the Cassiopaeans, Yassar Arafat, the polymorphously perverse world of the Cassiopaeans is a marvel to behold. If we may speculate, along with Jungian psychologist James Hillman, that the contents of such “channelling” represents the depth of archetypal trauma in the channeler’s life, then we may rightly conclude that where ever this stuff originated, whatever rock in whoever’s subconscious it crawled out from under, that entity was one seriously disturbed “individual.” And we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface yet.

Mix those potent sexual metaphors in a broth of end of the world hysteria, add a dash of pure Nazi-Aryan racial theory, a pinch of essence of anti-Semitism, a strong dollop of bad science fiction, and fold carefully into pseudo-rational physics and mathematical jargon, being very sure you understand nothing about them of course, and then flavour to taste with the conspiracy du jour, and voila! Out comes the Cassiopaean message…

So just who are these Cassiopaeans? According to their website, www.cassiopaea.org (which, if we are to believe the hit counter, is very popular and growing more so daily), they are a collective entity, not unlike a nascent Borg hive, who transmit through the constellation Cassiopia, that irregular W in the northern sky. This intriguing constellation was once known as the Throne of Set, the ancient Egyptian god of chaos, disruption and evil, and even in the Greek version by which it is known today, the myth of Cassiopea, a mother who sacrifices her daughter to the great lizard sea serpent, takes us into dark mythological waters. These clues alone should be enough to warn those sensitive to symbology: Here be monsters from the Id…

But the Cassiopaeans are not the Krell, and Laura Knight Martin Jadczyk, the official Cassiopaean mouthpiece, is no Dr. Morbius. Think rather the idiot who was possessed, and whose demon - “My name is Legion” - was cast into the Gandarian swine by Jesus in the Gospel of Mathew. Demons, monsters from the Id or game playing 6D aliens who are us in the future, these are all symptomatic of a deeply rooted pathological condition, one that if described in detail to a psychiatrist would result in commitment proceedings. However, if transformed into “channelled” material and properly packaged, this pathology can make one famous and perhaps even wealthy. At the very least it can provide the cottage industry basics for survival outside the pressures of society.

Or so Ms. Knight-Jadczyk has always hoped.

Laura - we will call her Laura because it humanizes her and we will need all of that we can manage as the tale goes along - has never been shy about telling her story. At over a million and a half words, the word count of her two-volume autobiography approaches the verbiage of the complete works of Balzac. To give the reader some idea of this incredible degree of inflated self-importance, the combined word count of the most extensive biographies of the three most prominent men of the 20th century, Gandhi, Einstein and Hitler weigh in at barely 3/4 of Laura’s total. We can only wonder what she has done even in her own fantasy to rate more words than those three.

When we take the pains, and it is indeed painful, to wade through the thickets of purple prose and impassioned self-justification and read these tomes, we find that Laura was a disturbed child with a dysfunctional home life, such as a kidnapping by her stepfather at age four, suicide attempts and other self-destructive behaviour, who grew into a disturbed adult, plagued by hypochondria and often unsure exactly who fathered each of her five children, and who in the end divorced her first husband because she believed he was a reptoid zombie.

We fortunately don’t have to take Laura’s word for all of this. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tom French followed her around off and on for several years and published his account as The Exorcist in Love in the Sunday February 13th issue of the St. Petersburg Times. While the article is somewhat sanitized, at Laura’s insistence, it does cover all the major points with one important exception. We will come to that in due course.

From Tom French’s article we also learn the details of how the messages from the Cassiopaeans were delivered. Unlike most New Age channelling, the Cassiopaeans preferred a method that is as old as modern Spiritualism, the Ouiji Board. This is a large slick-surfaced board with letters and symbols placed in a circle around the edge. A question is asked, and a small plastic or glass pointer called a planchette spells out the letters of the answer. Originally called the spirit board, it gained a mass audience in the first channelling craze 150 years ago. Queen Victoria was rumoured to use one when her Scots gillie and medium was unavailable to chat with long departed Prince Albert and to speculate on the true identity of the White Chapel murderer.

Those students of the occult arts who claim to know of such things dismiss the ouiji board as the lowest form of astral communication, good only for talking with the shells of the dead and the most earthbound of astral entities. Without allowing for actual spirits, we might say that the ouiji board, as with automatic writing and active imagination, allows one to come into direct contact with the depth contents of the collective unconscious.

The Cassiopaeans however seem to prefer this method of contact. From Tom French’s description of a session at the board, we find that in addition to Laura, another person’s hands or fingers were always on the planchette as it spelled out the letters. Although Laura seems willing to go to great lengths to deny that the other person’s fingers on the planchette had any effect at all, it is obvious that this intra-personal connection exerted enormous influence on the outcome.

The other person was Fredric Irland, her friend and confidante at that period. Fred, as we will call him, seems by all accounts, including Laura’s and the Cassiopaeans themselves, to have been the key, the catalyst, through which the channelled message emerged. Even though Laura has attempted several times to retro-actively make Fred’s presence on the ouiji board completely disappear, the very amount of verbiage she has expended on the subject is enough to alert us to his importance in her life. Fred’s role in the Cassiopaean saga must be taken into consideration.

By Laura’s account, Fred is an androgynous being struggling to come to terms with his sexuality and riddled with interpersonal problems to the point that he is completely incapacitated. He is painted as such a jerk and screw-up that one’s immediate reaction is: If Fred was so bad, why keep him around? Unless of course, his participation was key, if not central, to communicating with the Cassiopaeans… And here we find Laura impaled on the first of many Catch 22s to come.

Because Fred is a private person not given to flights of grandiosity or driven by self-justification, we have little but Laura’s endless and patently distorted version of events by which to gauge him. And of course, not a hint of these “problems” can be found in Tom French’s article. Those who know him, or even exchange emails with him, discover a vastly different person from the “Frank” so viciously portrayed in Laura’s autobiography. This discovery is so jarring that one is immediately wary of any of Laura’s subsequent conclusions.

The question arises - If she could so defame one of her closest friends, and the person most responsible for the Cassiopaean transmissions, then what would she do with someone who truly disagreed with her? Fred’s crime was apparently leaving Laura without permission, and of course, without a connection to the Cassiopaeans. In Laura’s eyes, this was completely without precedent, unheard of, and something she could not stand for. When she found that Fred was simply not coming back, then the increasingly vicious attacks began. Hell hath no fury, as the old saying goes, like that of a woman scorned.

But as always in the Cassiopaean soap opera, the sexual issues are deeper and more convoluted than appear on the surface. You see the Cassiopaeans had already supplied Laura with the love of her life, performing a couple of genuine miracles in the bargain, long before Fred decided to leave.

The story, extracted from The Exorcist in Love and volume two of Laura’s autobiography, goes something like this. After a few years of channelling the Cassiopaeans, Laura suddenly realizes that her husband has been abducted by the reptoids and replaced with a zombie replica designed to monitor and interfere with her activities. She divorces him, goes into a deep depression, from which she is miraculously saved by the Cassiopaeans.

Never in the annals of parapsychology and the history of communication with astral entities has there been such a bizarre three-way relationship as that between Laura, the Cassiopaeans and her long lost love from another lifetime. Directed by a synchronistic comment from the Cassiopaeans she connects, via email, with a Polish physicist by the name of Dr. Arkadiusz Jadczyk: “B.Sc, M.A., theoretical physics, Wroclaw University, February 1968; Ph.D., theoretical physics, Wroclaw University, March 1970; Dr. Hab., Wroclaw University, May 1977,” reads his published curriculum vitae.

Impressed, Laura immediately began to weave a fantasy about karmic lost love, lovers separated by the Holocaust and restored by the good graces of disincarnate beings from “6th density.” Beguiled by 20-year-old photos, love letters and her romantic fantasy, Dr. Ark allows himself to be seduced. Of course, like any good love story, there are obstacles. Dr. Ark is married and stuck in a dead end teaching job at a second rate Polish university with little hope of even travelling to the States, much less moving there.

But those rascally Cassiopaeans were insistent, and amazingly enough, a series of very strange events lead directly to Dr. Ark’s arrival in February of 1997. These strange events, as chronicled in Adventures with the Cassiopaeans, volume two of Laura’s autobiography, include a quick visit to the Central European University in Budapest, a George Soros front organization for the political development of the former Soviet satellites, and an astounding about face concerning his status at the University of Wroclaw along with the offer of a job connected to the University of Florida at Gainesville. To the casual observer this suggests that perhaps the Cassiopaeans have a few political connections. Or that someone who had those connections had become very interested in the Cassiopaeans.

Dr. Ark finally arrived however. He spent a few days visiting, sat in on a few ouiji board sessions, the transcripts of which show him as completely unimpressed, if not hostile, and then he left. Apparently with no desire or intention to return. But those wily Cassiopaeans knew better. And they were right…

Dr. Ark returned to Poland to find that someone had alerted his wife to his affair, sending her reams of the private emails exchanged between him and Laura. The same person had also spammed his university with tales of his cultic involvement. His wife divorced him, taking all his assets and giving them to the church, and his university simply cut him loose. By the summer of 1997, all of his bridges burnt for him, Dr. Ark had no choice but to return to Laura. The Cassiopaeans were right all along. It was a true miracle, and the lovers were reunited.

Except, logically, the only person who could have sent Dr. Ark’s wife those private emails was Laura. By doing so she made sure that the Cassiopaeans prophecy became self-fulfilling. Perhaps at the time, Dr. Ark didn’t think that part through carefully enough. Perhaps Laura and the Cassiopaeans convinced him that it was some intelligence agency tapping his emails, who knows? In hindsight however, and with years of Laura’s erratic behaviour exposed for all to see, it is possible to define a pattern. We will find her using the exact same tactics later, against Fred, Vincent and other members of the “Rebel Alliance” when she feels under attack.

With Dr. Ark’s permanent return, things began to change on the Cassiopaean front and Laura began a campaign to get noticed on the Internet. The Cassiopaean website, which for a while resided on the University of Wroclaw’s server began to grow in depth and complexity. By the time Tom French’s article appeared in February of 2000, the future of Cassiopaea, the Cs as the growing group of admirers called them, seemed assured.

In fact the very positive tone of Tom French’s article helped establish Laura and the Cs as a force to be reckoned with in New Age circles. Laura however did not feel that the article was positive enough and wrote her own article debunking and deriding it. Naturally, her version was almost twice as long as the original. It took almost a year before Laura decided that the St. Pete Times article was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

By then of course, the Cassiopaeans’ message had become the dogma of a new and potentially dangerous doomsday cult, one that in its essential world view was hardly distinguishable from that of Heaven’s Gate or the Solar Temple. How this occurred forms the second portion of my story…

Part two – The ouiji matrix, or the spy who didn’t shag Laura

I stumbled on to the Cassiopaeans by accident, but in a manner that I would later find entirely appropriate for the situation. As a film critic and freelance social gadfly, it’s my job to explore the intersection of psyche and pop culture. One of the truly fascinating developments of the last few years has been the acceptance of The Matrix - a good special effects science fiction action film marred by, in my opinion, a profound lack of depth - by fringe UFO and conspiracy groups as the literal truth about our reality.

Some of The Matrix’s ideas can be found in the early Matrix volumes produced by the intriguingly named Val Valerian, but it was only after the movie became a hit that its symbolic resonance became a part of the “mainstream” New Age movement. I found this entertaining at first, but as more references began popping up in all sorts of strange places, I found myself contemplating what the New Agers like to call a paradigm shift. The importance of The Matrix appeared to be as a species of “text” for a new kind of Gnostic or Manichean Dualism, one that sees resistance to the imagined “matrix” as the source of all positive action. For the lotus-eaters and bliss ninnies in the space brothers’ camp, this was a radical notion indeed.

And so, late last year, I decided that I’d write an article on this curious development. I went surfing through the strangeness available on the Internet and one fine day the wave landed me at Cassiopaea.org. At first glance, it appeared to be the mother lode. Not only was The Matrix one of Laura’s favourite movies but also the worldview and orientation of the Cassiopaeans seemed to anticipate some of the core elements in what I was calling The Matrix Mythos. She apparently didn’t use the term until after the film, but there was no doubt about the priority of her concepts.
Highly intrigued, I downloaded and printed out hundreds of pages of The Wave, Amazing Grace and more oddly titled articles than I could imagine. I read The Exorcist in Love and waded into the posted transcripts. As I read, the idea of an article on The Matrix faded. I was hooked on the pure stuff, the inside poop from the Cassiopaeans themselves.

I joined one of the Cassiopaean discussion groups, looking for more information and was totally disappointed by the level of intellectual discourse. Laura never posted, and Dr. Ark’s comments were those of a hall monitor struggling with a group of unruly 3rd graders. I was contemplating moving on to the next level of their egroups, since the one I was in was apparently only for those who couldn’t be trusted on the main group. However, before I reached that point, something happened that changed my whole point of view. Dr. Ark called a flame war.

Now, flame wars are common in cyber space, and I admit I have participated in my share, but his one was different right from the start. Dr. Ark was refusing to answer questions from someone called “Elvis Baggins.” The questions concerned their treatment of and involvement with someone named Vincent Bridges. Eventually, Dr. Ark called in reinforcements from within the group and even invited the opposition from another discussion group to come and watch the fight. The end result was that Dr. Ark blinked, and completely refused to answer even one of the questions put to him.
I found this all quite fascinating, especially as I had somehow missed the pages about Vincent Bridges and his alleged attempts to destroy the Cassiopaean material. I looked them up, read them, and found myself with even more questions on top of the unanswered ones put to Dr. Ark by Bridges and Baggins. Nothing about the whole affair made any sense.

By Laura’s account, Vincent Bridges was a two-bit con man playing on new age sensibilities to provide him with expensive cars, black clothes, stereo equipment and designer drugs. She also depicted him as a hack writer who had no credits to speak of and needed to inflate his resume by claiming works that didn’t exist. The holes in her depiction were glaring and her “expose” didn’t seem to have any real bit to it. I wondered why she was even bothering with such an inconsequential individual.

So, I did a web search on Vincent Bridges and discovered literally hundreds of citations and scores of articles under his by-line. He was the co-author of a well-respected book on alchemy, A Monument to the End of Time: Alchemy, Fulcanelli and the Great Cross, and a bizarre little work on communicating with the ghost of Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s black mistress, Interlude with Sally Hemings: Diary of a Spiritual Healing. His work was well represented on other websites, including sangraal.com, diregnosis.com, rense.com and many others. His unpublished book length works, available on the internet, included The Gnostic Science of Alchemy, The UFO Enigma: spirits of the dead, phantom airships and flying discs, The Apocalyptic Secrets of Rennes-le-Chateau, Arthur and the Fall of Britain, High Weirdness and others.

In addition, his articles included “Innocent Murder: The Real Story of JonBenet’s Death” which was described by former Boulder police detective Steve Thomas on the Larry King Live Show as the best article, and the most likely solution, ever published on the JBR case. The google search also revealed that he was the author of “Death of the Feminine,” the 1997 article about the death of Princess Diana that for more than a year was a major link on every Diana oriented website.

To cap what was an already intense melange of weirdness, I learned that Vincent Bridges was also a collaborator with Dan Winter, a person concerning whom I had heard quite a bit. Mr. Winter, now apparently an international fugitive from a copyright infringement suit, was the role model for the central figure in Darren Aronofsky’s PI. In fact, the inside buzz was that the entire movie was modelled on Dan Winter’s dispute with Stanley Tenen of the Meru Foundation. And Vincent Bridges had apparently been Dan Winter’s publisher at the time. From the remaining articles of Mr. Winter’s on the web, it appears that he had appropriated as much from Vincent Bridges’ work as he had from Stanley Tenen’s.

And there was more. Vincent Bridges was also apparently a well-known and widely respected dowser and “earth grid engineer” as well as a pagan political activist and world traveller, leading tour groups to southern France, Egypt and India. He had produced his own translation of the I-Ching, his Egyptology work was quoted by scholars as diverse as John Major Jenkins, John West, Daniel Colianus and Robert Temple, and he had helped found three schools or educational organizations, the Fifth Way Mystery School, The Newport Earth Institute in Newport, Hew Hampshire and Pendragon College.

No matter how you slice it, the person I discovered on the Internet bore little resemblance to the person portrayed in the Cassiopaean expose. Vincent Bridges was anything but a hack that needed to claim non-existent work in order to have a resume. And that I found extremely curious and disturbing…

After the flame war died down, I tried to ask a few questions myself. I was first warned then unceremoniously booted from the group. So, I joined the opposition’s discussion group, Matrioshka.
There I found a community of ex-Cassiopaeanists who were not only willing to talk, but anxious to do so. And I found the elusive Vincent Bridges and discovered that he would courteously answer any question I asked him, thoroughly and in great detail. This was so different from what I had experienced on the Cassiopaean egroup that I was quite frankly charmed. I settled in to observe developments and my Matrix article began to jell into the article you are now reading.

And developments were not long in coming. Fred reappeared and asserted his right to be considered as a co-author of the Cassiopaean material by publishing the raw unedited version of the transcripts. These were a real eye opener, revealing that Laura was selectively changing certain comments and predictions of the Cassiopaeans to make them more accurate in the published versions. There were also embarrassingly long sections pleading for financial advice, pick-three lotto numbers and endless demands for a way to make the experiment pay for itself. In short, the unedited transcripts showed the world a mean-spirited, vindictive and money hungry Laura. It is no surprise that she took violent offence at these revelations. They permanently tarnished her self-proclaimed sainthood.

But another incident along the way revealed an unexpected aspect of Laura’s past, one that even Tom French chose, for his own reasons, not to mention. Laura announced, as some kind of pre-emptive strike against what she felt was impending revelations by what she now referred to as the Bridges/Irland gang, that she had indeed been arrested and tried for attempted murder back in 1970, when she was just 18 years old. The only problem was that the “gang” had said not a word about any of it.

This was undoubtedly the defining moment, the hidden skeleton and secret shame, of Laura’s life. By trotting it out pre-emptively, she turned it into a bid for sympathy. However, since Amazing Grace, volume one of her autobiography, covered those years in exhaustive and almost narcissistic detail without even a glimmer of a mention of the incident, the sympathy soon turned into realization. How could anyone ignore so completely such a pivotal incident in their life? If they did, how could anything else in their life story be trusted at face value? For the first time, Laura’s pathology began to show.

Vincent put up his own website, vincentbridges.com, with an open discussion board and a banner ad for the unedited transcripts, free to all for the time it took to download them. His co-author on A Monument to the End of Time joined the Cassiopaeans in attacking his credibility, and apparently even attempted to take over Vincent’s book company. The flame war erupted intermittently on Vincent’s discussion board as Laura launched into an incredible feat of typing and endurance; in just seven weeks she published on the site over 700,000 words of the second volume of her autobiography, Adventures with the Cassiopaeans.

As this latest unfinished tome emerged from computer keyboard, other skirmishes were taking place. But the more Laura wrote about Fred and Vincent, the more deranged she became. Chapters were spent comparing Fred to John Nash of A Beautiful Mind and Vincent to counter-culture trunk murderer Ira Einhorn. My personal favourite was the chapter long attack on Egyptology and Egyptologists that was clearly aimed directly at Vincent and his work on Egyptian history and religion. Hard to imagine in what reality hieroglyphic envy could be such a powerful motivating force, but that is apparently the case in the Cassiopaean universe.

Finally, in the last few weeks, the conflict has sputtered to an inconclusive stalemate. Fred signed away his rights to the Cassiopaean material for a return to his previously pseudononymous state and Vincent, in an attempt to reach an agreement, took down the articles and discussion board at vincentbridges.com. The Cassiopaeanists however have not relented and taking heart from their apparent victories have redoubled their efforts. A new version of the expose has appeared. Curiously enough, there is no new information, but a basic reworking of the original material. Vincent’s co-author, Jay Weidner, retracted his open letters attacking Vincent and Laura seized upon that as an excuse to attack Mr. Weidner. Other than that it is still full of the same old lies and distorted half-truths.

This is curious, since on the Matrioshka discussion group - a highly recommended resource for anyone wishing to explore this subject further – can be found an email from one W. E. Mckenzie describing his failed attempt to correct some of the inaccuracies in their expose. From this example, we can’t help but wonder what else they have chosen to delete or ignore. Particularly when we find not one mention of Vincent’s easily obtainable credits and accomplishments, as listed above.
I came into this drama enamoured of Laura and found myself both fascinated and repelled by the Jerry Springer Show level of trailer trash spirituality and cultic manipulation she displayed. I am now glad that I had as little contact with the Cassiopaeanists as I did. I suppose I am one of the lucky ones.

But I have spent almost six months now following this soup opera, and I have come to some conclusions on how a fairly harmless channelling hobby for two, or three if you count Dr. Ark, became an apocalyptic doomsday cult.

It wasn’t Dr. Ark’s arrival, the Internet, or even Tom French’s article that crystallized a cult out of this Matrix Mythos. Nope, the blame, if such we may call it, rests squarely on Vincent Bridges.
Vincent’s own reputation lent an air of credibility to Laura’s ramblings. His influence is obvious from the spring of 1999, when Laura first contacted him, through December of 2000 when Laura announced in The Wave that Vincent understood some of the Cassioapeans’ cryptic comments better than anyone else, including her. By February of 2001, Vincent was completely involved, to the point of making Laura and Dr. Ark the featured speakers at his fall conference. Other speakers included Moira Timms, author of Beyond Prophecy and Predictions, John Major Jenkins, author of The Tzolkin and Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, J. M. Allen, author of Atlantis: The Andes Solution, as well as Vincent and Jay. It was indeed high praise to be given the keynote spot in such company.

Vincent also offered to help them get their books into print, through his own small publishing company Aethyrea Books. Much has been made about whether or when this company actually existed, and whether it was an LLC or something else. Since court documents relating to Vincent’s involvement with Dan Winter clearly mention Aethyrea Books years before Laura entered the picture and by her own account money was collected and deposited and even refunded for the cancelled conference, all of which requires a bank account and a tax number, then we must conclude that some kind of company known as Aethyrea Books certainly did exist. Amazon.com apparently still thinks so.

By giving them this much credibility, Vincent unleashed a monster. For the first time ever, Laura saw that the elusive fame and fortune that she had begged the Cassiopaeans to provide was about to materialize. There was only one small cloud on the horizon, Vincent himself.

He was just too smart, too accomplished, too skilled of a researcher and too good a writer, and far too well connected. If Laura let him stay in the group, she risked being seriously overshadowed. Vincent might actually solve some of the enigmas the Cassiopaeans were so found of, and where would she be then? I’m sure that to her, it felt like a life or death situation. Fortunately, as so often in the past, the Cassiopaeans came to the rescue…

Following a now familiar pattern, the Cassiopaeans revealed to Laura that Vincent was an evil Black magician and/or a government agent and that she should have nothing further to do with him. (He’s lucky he wasn’t labeled a reptoid zombie like husband number one!) The behind the scenes machinations took a month, and at the end of that time the conference was in shambles, the proposed book deal was off and Vincent was well on his way to becoming the ultimate evil nemesis of the Cassiopaeanists. It was this last and most crucial ingredient that allowed the Cassiopaeanists to close ranks in the face of the imagined threat and become the cult that Laura had always dreamed of controlling.

Vincent played into this by first remaining silent and then, when they had already gutted his credibility, attacking Laura’s sanity and reputation. Too little too late, and he never did mount an effective response to their charges. Laura accuses him basically of resume fraud, and yet, out of perhaps some antique and misguided sense of ethics, Vincent never mentioned her own inflated resume.

On the Perseus Foundation biography page, one finds the following:

“Laura Knight, CHT, 26 years experience in hypnotherapy…” Assuming of course the CHT stands for Certified Hypno-Therapist, instead of Chief Terrorist, we might wonder at the section of Adventures where she openly admits that she has no training or certification whatsoever in hypnosis or therapy. Her only credential is a membership in a no longer existing professional organization, one that was open to anyone interested in the subject and willing to pay the dues. As for the 26 years of experience, that would imply she started doing hypnosis in 1976, whereas in Amazing Grace, we learn that her hypnosis career began in the early 1990’s. These are lies, by her own admission, prominently posted on the same Foundation website where Vincent is flayed for making a mistake in a blurb used by a radio show that went off the air in 1999.

And so, the whole sad and sordid saga comes down to sex, lies and ouiji boards. Laura’s actions, toward both Fred and Vincent suggest the emotional involvement of a jilted lover. As Laura’s choice of a new pseudonym for Vincent, Dr. Evil, reminds us, Laura saw Vincent as the spy who refused to shag her in true Austin Powers fashion. Hell, again, hath no fury, and so on…

The lies are obvious. Laura’s whole fictional account of her life is one big tissue of lies, as the carefully repressed and concealed attempted murder charge demonstrates. She has lied about Fred, and she has gone out of her way to squeeze out lies about Vincent. I’m sure she lies to herself, her children and even Dr. Ark when required. Why stop a good thing when it is working so well?
However, I do believe her on one point. She is without question the author and sole inspiration for the Cassiopaeans. Such slime could hardly have come from someone as nice as Fred, and as her life is based on maintaining the next lie, it is not hard to believe that she faked the entire ouiji board experiment simply to get some attention and a Polish mail order bridegroom.

The bottom line: The last gasp of new age channelling turns out to be, on even a cursory examination, merely a fake, a way for a lonely, overweight, sexually frustrated middle age woman to get some desperately needed attention.

And you know, that just about sums up the whole phenomenon.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Queen Victoria is coming over to watch Matrix2 on my wide screen scrying mirror before it hits the theatres and later we plan to dial up Laura as the Cassiopaeans and tell her the plot. She’ll be so thrilled…