Merrily & Patrick Harpur | Mystery Big Cats, Daimons, & The Otherworld

00:00 Welcome to another free first hour episode of the Hireside Chats. I know we want to get into the action, but i have to ask that you help me armor us up a bit for the bumpy road ahead because I bring you the first hour of this show without unrelated ad nonsense as proof-of-concept and if you value it then come over to THC Plus for $8 a month and hear full 2 hour interviews as they were designed to be and as you would enjoy them most Go to thehiresideshots.com or just click the link in the show notes to get started and within a minute you'll be plugging in your new Plus Show RSS feed into a hopefully decentralized podcasting 2.0 supported app. Feed the things you want to grow and starve the things that gotta go, and we will reach the promised land! Think about that...and enjoy the show

00:54 In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats. His aim was to reassure the common man that society would recover from its troubled times. From 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire For a new era of worldly frustration we offer a I'm Greg Carlwood piece on The Hireside Chats Alright Hiresight Chatters from sunny San Diego, I'm Greg Carlwood and just beyond the soapboxing politicians and bright flashy busyness of modern life is a subtle world of mystery and myth that struggles to be seen yet alone understood by modern man. And a culture that's as preoccupied with digital screens as it is desperate to restore meaning from its current shallow state

01:45 Today, encounters with the anomalous are written off as mistaken identity stories made up by attention seekers or some cable network money grab. But nearly every culture outside of our arrogant own has a place for spirit myth imagination and beings between the worlds From elves, fairies in Bigfoot to lake monsters, sea serpents and the siren we have a very long history of strange sightings stories and encounters with entities unexplainable by materialist context but we dare not change the model. And despite our disbelief these things don't go away but some say actually shift form to reflect the changing times or command attention in a distracted world

02:28 But try as they might, even Mothman, grey aliens and men in black still struggle to get a seat at the table of our awareness. Well that's what todays guests are here to correct, as they've studied the old ways of Greek philosophers and other cultures who mapped these realities were both raised in a family that kept the door to spirit wide open And have written great books to help the rest of us get back on track You might remember Patrick Harper from an interview we did in 2018 covering his books Daemonic Reality, A Field Guide to the Otherworld, The Secret Tradition of the Soul and The Philosopher's Secret Fire. And as great as it is to have him back today, we're also joined by his sister Merrily Harper who's recently released a revised and updated edition of her book Mystery Big Cats. A very thorough expose on one particular type of demonic manifestation that she says is now the commonest encounter with the unknown in Britain

03:22 After reading her book i am very psyched to get into it so let's do at the dynamic duo from dorset restoring that they monic reality for a culture lost merrily and patrick harper welcome to the higher side. Thank you great like dynamic do it for doorstep yeah good flow to that You know i still get people saying that of the interviews and episodes i've done it explore the paranormal side of life and explain the structure of all that. Yours is a real standout so its great to have you back on board for this and merrily does a pleasure to meet you as well when patrick told me about your book mystery big cats i was interested but just wasn't quite sure,

04:09 We could build a full show around it because even if what are called anomalous big cats ABC's are more than just undiscovered animals they obviously resemble known animals so they don't have the epic punch as something like mothman or the chupacabra or fairies that talk to people or take them underground even and we have all this lore surrounding that. But your book is about as dense and thorough as a book on this subject could be, and the mystery does run quite deep. I guess i would ask though what is it about anomalous big cats that captured your attention over other demonic manifestations let's say?

04:50 Well, Greg listen it's an honour to be on your show. Patrick has told me that I should be very honoured and I am! So thank you very much But the thing about these mystery big cats is they are commonly seen And Britain of course as you know is a country that doesn't have any big cats native to it at all. We hardly have anything bigger than than a pig really. We have deer I suppose but you know that's a different matter so i'm always a bit nervous about American listeners because they would assume that naturally you would have pubes roaming around in the way that perhaps you'd do in your part of the states, but they're a very shocking sight to us Brits! You would see them in a zoo or sometimes in a private collection or something like that

05:48 But one of the most fascinating things about the mystery big cats of Britain are, I suppose thousands are seen every year but they're nearly all i suppose about 85% of them are black and i mean completely black not in the way that a melanistic leopard is black which is to say very very dark brown but you can see the spots shining through in sunlight that actually get black and that's a very rare thing. And the other sort of 15% I suppose are sightings of brown or tan animals that resemble pumas as we call them, mountain lions maybe, or cougars... The confusing thing is that we call it the black animals that we see, black panthers whereas in fact you know in real life

06:49 panthers aren't a separate species, they're just a word for black leopard basically. So it's confusing from the outset that not only do we have big cats but we have what look like very rare black leopards only not even rare black leopards because they seem to be blacker than that so there seems to be a separate thing again But some of the most interesting sightings are of American pumas and There's lots of different suggestions where they could have come from. One of them is that perhaps GIs who were stationed in Britain during the Second World War left them behind as mascots and they bred, which is a sort of rather interesting thought but not very practical. There's a lot of speculation about where they could have come from these big cats people see them fleetingly, they cross the road, they see them in the woods, they see them crossing their gardens

07:52 they appear here and there, and then sort of magically disappear. Or when I say magically people are terrified at the sight of them obviously, and they call the police and the police search and go up in helicopters with thermal imaging equipment and everything... And they never find them! So it's kind of disturbing The awful thing is that there is a huge discrepancy between The evidence from eyewitnesses, which is incredibly detailed and usually absolutely cast iron. And the amount of physical evidence on the ground people still haven't found you know the body of a black panther they still haven't found anything that they could really pin on being an actual species living out here in Britain undiscovered

08:49 So it reminds me of your Bigfoot searches in America, and I suppose northwest of your country particularly. On Sasquatch as you call them. You know there's masses of evidence and it's all anecdotal And its absolutely brilliant evidence but they're still looking for that body aren't they? Yes, they are and that's a pretty good introduction to the mystery as you say Nowhere in Great Britain are big cats like this native and people can do all kinds of mental gymnastics To try to figure out how physical big cats would have gotten there but nothing really holds water sometimes in these sightings the cats take the shape of a mountain lion or a puma and

09:42 But a lot of the time they are a velvety jet black. So if these are real animals out there, now you have to find multiple species of big cat so the mystery grows deeper then Of course You gotta contrast thousands of sightings some very odd with their being zero dead bodies but there even more good points that further the case that these are not wild animals or escapees from a zoo or some private collection What would those be? Give the people a little more in that regard. Beyond just the lack of dead bodies, what are some of the other bullet points that let us know this is much stranger than it might seem at first? Well Greg, there are sort of three main mysteries about these creatures One is that the big cat experience which people have when they see them strolling across their fields and the second mystery is as I've just said

10:41 So many of them are jet black, a few of them are brown. And the third mystery is there are no spots. So the thing is that people really scrape the barrel when they try and imagine how these creatures could have come to pass in our country Indeed, and so often we just accept the easy answer and don't look any further into it. Although as you said that was another one of the big ones not only are they never found dead or even trapped but there are thousands of reports of tan ones, thousands of reports of black ones but no reports with spots

11:20 I think your notification kinda drowned you out at that point and i'm sorry it got you in this precarious situation with this new software and your sharing a single set of earbuds, i know is not easy but anyway. It's significant because the leopards with the spots are the same species as cat as the black ones and spots are far more common people also claim to see links and pumas with links like ears so They're definitely not describing some wild animal or even the same thing. If you know anything about big cats, these three mysteries as you put it should be enough to make the case that conventional explanations don't stack up

12:00 And we didn't even talk about the paranormal aspects of these sightings yet. But let's fast forward to that a bit, so we've established there is more to the mystery than anyone might think at first Well Patrick let me bring you in here because the long and short of it is that these big cat sightings might be Diamonds and its been awhile since that last talk we had Remind people how the Greeks described Diamonds and what their place and function in reality is definitely important context if that is in fact what we might be dealing with here yeah sure i mean i want to emphasize the merrily went the naturalistic route great lengthening great depth first before she had to turn in desperation to buy theory of diamonds it's not like that was her first port of call. Yeah i basically

12:54 borrowed from the ancient Greeks, the term daimons as a general word to stand for those supernatural creatures which all cultures at all times have recognized. It's not like they're exceptional I mean, there are the fairies in Ireland. There are the elves in Europe. There are the djinn in Arabia. Every First Nation tribe in the United States would attest to demonic beings who they interact with and so it's all the more remarkable that the Western world has now completely ignored these creatures but one of the reasons they're ignored is because

13:40 Oh, you know they have at least five characteristics which just don't fit our model of the world. For example they're always ambiguous and contradictory for example they can be both benevolent and malignant like the fairies. Diamonds are always tricky or is mischievous so they can be anything from extremely helpful to life-threatening But their main contradiction, of course and the one that is the great stumbling block to all investigators of paranormal anomalous animals is they can be both material and immaterial. And that's something it's very difficult to get your head around. It's not like they are either physical or kind of spirit things. They seem to be able to manifest as one or the other or both at once

14:36 Secondly, they're always elusive. Usually fast moving and usually disappearing in the twinkling of an eye that's a characteristic of all daimons. Very important thirdly is that they shape shift not just in space but across time interestingly so that whenever we try to banish them from one field of study, they pop up in another. For example in daemonic reality I try and make the case that when the daemons that appear naturally in nature were discredited banished poo-pooed altogether they appear in another place altogether and in this case in the Victorian drawing rooms as spirits at the seance

15:25 who manifested the same strange, tricksterish quasi-material substance as the diamonds in nature did. And I would even argue that when they were banished from... When spiritualism went out of fashion they may well reappear as subatomic particles. If you describe an electron, for instance it has all the daemonic characteristics – it's contradictory, it's both a wave and particle, it's very elusive, fast-moving etc So these creatures are marginal They always appear in what is popularly called liminal zones Threshold places, bridges, crossroads

16:12 seashores, things like that. And also at sort of threshold times midnight, Midsummer Eve – that's the great time of the fairies Halloween – that's an old pagan festival which was a kind of a hinge of the year and so on They also appear of course between sleeping and waking for instance That's a liminal zone, a more psychological one They appear as it were between consciousness and unconscious So all attempts to categorize them or bring them into mainstream orthodoxy, whether it's in the olden days the church who banished them and didn't believe in them. Or nowadays science which just ignores them or suppresses them they'll never actually become mainstream as Bigfoot researchers or ufologists know their costs and so on

17:10 And it may be finally that the role of the diamonds is, as Socrates said, intermediary between us and the gods. This ties up with their contradictory nature they mediate between the material and the immaterial, between the personal and the impersonal, between this world and the other world. They even mediate between fact and fiction. It's difficult to know in folklore whether personal encounters with folkloric creatures, supernatural creatures come before the stories that are subsequently told about them or vice versa. It's very difficult to disentangle fact and fiction in fact it may not be useful to disentangle them so experts in daimons they've always been experts as Socrates says you know that there are certain daimonic men and daimonic women who have conversation with this other world

18:17 and there used to be wise women, shamans, mediums, witch doctors whatever. Nowadays they tend to be poets, visionaries you know it still goes on so that would be my loose categorization or description of what daemons are like and what their characteristics are I love it the daemonic model does make the most sense to me But it does take a lot to get our attention these days. We're so distracted and on a different page that Mothman, grey aliens and thunderbirds can barely get us to look up from our phones! If these Diamonds can walk between the worlds and take different forms why this form at this time? Is there any logic or reasoning you guys could put into why they would choose to appear as big cats in the last few decades

19:15 Oh God, well that's the big question Greg. I don't think...I don't think I can answer that but when Patrick was talking about you know sort of demonic experiences and the impossibility of getting our heads around that demonic world I was just going to give you an example actually of a woman who just contacted me a couple days ago with the description of the big cat she had encountered And it was so interestingly tangible and real, and at the same time so strange that I thought it might interest you. Sure! The woman is called Joyce Thomas and she lives in Wales. She said it was September 2009 and it was past midnight and she bid goodnight to her husband who was watching television downstairs and had gone up to bed

20:16 and it was a warm night, and she opened her window to enjoy a few quiet moments breathing in the evening air. And this is what she said... She said, As I leaned out I saw a flash of movement directly below me as a shadow darted out around the corner of the porch and off into the yard area This movement was so fast and silent that i thought i must have been mistaken However, within a minute or two I became aware that the darting shadow had reappeared in the yard and to my astonishment as i stood there staring out at the garden. A cat dashed directly in the dead straight line across our yard right in front of my eyes and disappeared under the rose arch and out into the blackness of the garden itself

21:09 The speed with which this occurred was breathtaking, and it seemed that this animal was pursuing a dead straight line across my yard on a mission that I knew nothing of. She said it moved with a purpose and at a speed that had little to do with this reality...I think. It definitely was a cat but a strange one! It was black all over even blacker than the backdrop of a dark garden Its two ears were pointed and erect, but it was the tail that drew my attention. Held out behind its body absolutely ramrod straight even more curiously it seemed to be running slightly levitated as if it did not seem to have its feet on the ground I had the impression that he looked like a cartoon film A curious 2 dimensional quality graced the whole episode As if I was watching a silent movie

22:07 There was no noise of any kind. Absolute silence prevailed throughout the experience, and going down to the Rose Arch with a measuring tape next morning I reckoned it must have been about two foot six inches tall and five foot long – more the size of a panther than a domestic cat! Most puzzling of all to me... And you know, I interject here this is indeed very interesting and i'm not sure if Bigfoot literature has anything of this kind She said, most puzzling of all to me was the light which surrounded this black cat. I cannot account for it – it didn't glow – it was not translucent… The cat itself is not luminous and beyond a few inches surrounding the apparition I could see nothing but there seemed to be a pinky blue light around the phenomenon It was very faint and there seemed to be a vague swirl as the cat moved through on its quest

23:08 And in light of what Pat was saying about activities of daemons and their straight lines, she adds, Incidentally the path the cat was taking with such determination was at a direct right angle with the other straight line made by the footpath along the house. I was reminded of old folklore about not building houses on fairy pathways and if one did, to always let the fairy folk pass unhindered through open doorways and the like. In this case my rose arch." So I thought that was a really interesting letter because it sort of combines the experience of seeing what was apparently a panther-like animal and a lot of the characteristics that the old fashioned traditional demons have

24:01 Yes, I like that account a lot. Especially that little detail about the glow. I don't think i've ever heard of story like that in Bigfoot lore but it might be there somewhere and you do have some stories in the book where the big cats have glowing eyes You have stories where they just seem to fade out and dissipate Often times they walk into some tall brush and like that their gone. I read that several times But it's an interesting detail about the walking path too and I think that's where your book really takes off is when you get into the topography of the landscape, where these encounters happen. Because there do seem to be some commonalities to the sighting locations that might very well relate to the way energy flows through a landscape. That seems like a big deal can talk to us about that a bit?

24:52 Yes, indeed Greg. One of the things when I started to research this one of the striking things was that these big cats do seem to favour certain topographical features principally for instance railways they're constantly seen on and around railways and in fact one railway worker who's checking a line at night was followed several miles by a big cat a black panther type creature as he walked up the line. The other places they seem to find themselves are quarries and holes in the ground, and steep edges of things, precipices I suppose, railways gates tunnels anything that is like a hole in the ground generally it seems to attract those sorts of creatures or at least that's where they seem to manifest let's put it that way

25:55 One of the interesting things about big cats is that they've often been compared to the folkloric black dogs which occur in the folklore of Great Britain as well. Black dogs are generally found near watercourses and streams and rivers, whereas mystery for big cats appear along railways and rather unusual topographical features Shall I give you a little example? Golf courses too. They love a golf course for some bizarre reason! They do, I think it's because golf courses are very manufactured man-made arrangement of roughs and smooths

26:39 If we're to go down the Taoist route, which I won't but maybe Pat will. Well we could also say golf courses in some cases especially here in the States are obviously developed but they're the closest thing to uninterrupted nature that we leave in place sometimes well that's it they are sort of liminal places in themselves because they're half nature but half civilized you know yeah And the words rough and smooth capture that kind of ambiguity that surrounds golf courses. You know, greens and fairways versus the rough – that sort of thing. There's a rather interesting account from a man who was out at night poaching with his friend. He was shining this huge lamp around and he saw big cat

27:33 disappearing up a railway embankment onto the line and he wrote, he said the following day in broad daylight I walked along the track opposite the gateway which is where we'd seen the animal emerge in the first place and he said this track runs across fields parallel to the railway lines About a quarter of a mile from the road, a large conduit pipe runs under the railway track and carries overflow water in the bad weather down into the stream that runs alongside the railway line on the field side. The height of the pipe is about four or five feet and the length of it I have no idea because my dog wouldn't enter it but whined and tried to pull off his lead

28:18 So there was a huge collection of interesting topographical features, tunnels, rails, holes, streams paths which if you were going to configure a place where big black cat might appear those are the features that you would expect one too. And it did actually appear and it terrified his dog and it terrified him too. Well that makes sense And to dig deeper into why those are features one might expect to have a sighting around and the comparisons with the spectral hellhound black dog phenomena, I saw a presentation that you gave at an event called Megalithomania. Really great name, great brand! You went deeper into comparing these two types of demonic manifestations along the lines of yin and yang or masculine feminine

29:16 And that some of these areas that these cats are found could be considered landscapes a feminine energy like you say tunnels even craters seem to be described quite often. I thought i was pretty interesting cuz we're talking about our relationship with these beans and earth energy or lay lines window area is some kind of electromagnetic connection maybe it relates the form You say that with the dogs, they're reported to be along train tracks way more often than they aren't which is of course a very straight conductive feature around the landscape. And there are other examples but these clusters and overlaps and trends I think they get us a lot deeper into understanding how this all works you know? Yeah absolutely Greg i mean it's such a gets deeper and deeper and more difficult the more you get into it

30:09 It really does. It's a bit of a nightmare, really but I was very interested by that Taoist approach where aspects of the landscape can be described as yin feminine sort of sunken low places marshy places winding roads and so forth, or yang masculine. I mean these are very broad definitions and i'm sure i'm doing a great disservice to Taoism when i describe it in this way but yang would be more elevated spots pointed areas and you know the Chinese art of feng shui and organization of the landscape was

30:57 mainly aimed at finding a harmonious balance between those two types of landscape feature and thus, harmonious balance between the energies inherent in the landscape. I mean we would call them masculine and feminine but those would be very broad ideas you couldn't really apply that to anything more specific The Earth Tiger is what the Chinese called it Again, I'm not really an expert on it. On that sort of philosophy but the very fact that these big cats appear in areas that perhaps... Well, I thought perhaps that the long straight railway tracks which would be a sort of Yang feature of landscape masculine straight organized might precipitate perhaps a complementary energy

32:00 in the form of a mystery big cat, which would be more... you could describe it perhaps as more like a yin sort of manifestation. But there again it holds on the ground tunnels pipes duponts bomb craters... quarries... thank-you! Where perhaps the yin energies would gather in those sorts of places and again perhaps they would precipitate the appearance of a big black cat as a representation of that particular kind of energy. I mean these are wild speculations, it was helped by the fact that this rather wonderful woman or rather well she wasn't a wonderful woman actually she was the person who wrote the book but the person did the research is a chap called Ivan Bunn

32:57 who plotted the sightings of black dogs in folklore along the rivers of East Anglia, which is the eastern coast of Britain and he found an absolute correlation between sightings of black dogs along these watercourses. And again you wonder if this sort of winding meandering paths of little streams and rivers would precipitate perhaps a complementary yang figure in the form of a doll. This is a very vague idea, Greg as you can see but it's interesting that these... I mean you just have to follow up every clue you can. I could give the example for instance of a friend of mine Jonathan McGowan who encountered a puma on a bridge over a river when i say puma it was one of these creatures but he wasn't black it was brown

34:01 and as he ran towards it, it ran towards him. And when he got to the bridge, it just vanished into thin air but what it had left on the bridge was a wet paw print which is unmistakably that of a big cat so you can see that they... whatever you can say about mystery big cats You could also say the opposite which is absolutely typical of the daemonic world and absolutely suited to Patrick as a subject because He's a bit like that himself. Leave me alone, will you? It is interesting that it is possible to correlate certain creatures with certain topographies for instance lake monsters there are

34:53 hundreds of sightings of lake monsters, often in quite small and unpromising lakes which wouldn't be deep enough to accommodate a monster. Yet you see them and you could even argue that Bigfoot or Sasquatch has its own special terrain as well – mountains particularly and forests or both but we don't have that sort of dramatic We don't have vast lakes in the British Isles, we don't have huge mountains. We don't have vast forests so it's more difficult to correlate this sort of... It is more difficult to say that these cats are connected to nature or are nature spirits in some sense So its difficult to know, to revert your question why cats? Its very difficult to know! Its tempting to say something like

35:51 If you live in a small country that is over tame and over civilized, it will throw up some... A bit like the repressed unconscious. Will throw up some vivid and dangerous and exciting wild creature! And it may be that's the case but why black cats? We don't know except perhaps their very blackness and their very strangeness, their very alien-ness is designed to show us that they're not just natural creatures, you know. That there is something that they resemble natural creatures but there is also something supernatural about them. But be honest if you try and say why cats and why there? You're clutching at straws or clutching in Merely's case of Taoism which is fair enough but it's hard to know

36:54 Yes, it's hard to find logic in things that don't play by the rules. For all we know maybe they actually think they're blending in by appearing as animals We can really only guess i like the idea that they're invoking some sort of initiation by being just outside of what is considered normal, so if you have the eyes to see if u reflect on the experience deeply you are led down a deeper path of inquiry. And merrily makes an interesting suggestion at one point that because we don't believe in this stuff anymore because we don't give it our respect like we might have been previous ages

37:32 They can actually attract more of our attention by appearing as an out of place animal cuz of course that is when they do prompt police hunts and deeper investigations. More so than if someone said they saw a fairy or a mothman have some kind the current culture wouldn't spring into action in the same way as they do for a big cat sighting, who are conscious attention or energy is a type of currency they consider valuable It's not a bad form to take because it's not as big of a stretch for a big cat to be out there and its also something people consider dangerous to just leave alone. So they engage with that they go looking for their more prone to explore and i thought that was pretty interesting take yeah exactly right, set up another life recognizable animal track the attention

38:30 and yet they're elusive enough to drive you nutty, if you know what I mean. After I'd been researching it for a while, I found that I managed to dispel most of the facts and fallacies about mystery big cats You know, I could see that they weren't escaped pets They weren't an indigenous species And I thought after awhile that...I had come to the end really, I couldn't think what else to think about them except that After a while, I think everybody who investigates these creatures and I would include Bigfoot in this people start to smell a rat. And you get the feeling that you're kind of being played with that you're being teased and i started to wonder whether in fact the whole point about their trickiness is the difficulty one has in pinning them down in any way even though forms they take aren't

39:39 consistent. And you start to wonder whether it's this very trickiness that has the significance and whether their ambiguity could be the key rather than the obstruction, to understanding the whole phenomenon? Of course that is where I derive great insight from Pat's books – but this is the whole point of Daelons – they confuse and they offer you, when you're climbing and think that you are going to go mad. They offer a different perspective on what reality is Every time you think that you've put your finger in it they squeeze out from under the finger every time you encounter that big cat on the riverbank You look down for one minute and its gone Even photographs are always interesting All photographs of daimons

40:42 Just slightly, none of them are quite as clear as you want them to be. There are photographs of Bigfoot there are photographs of UFO's there are photographs of big cats but none of them are unequivocal You know they're always if they're too clear They usually turn out to be fakes It's almost as if the diamonds know how to be photographed, to increase the mystery. To remain as blurry and ambiguous as the actual sighting itself. Absolutely! There are several photos in the book that are impressive but just shy of a real obvious smoking gun kind of image. Still cool though

41:30 But another question that I think might be on people's minds would be if there has been any sort of follow-up or investigation done to look for similarities in the lives of people following one of these sightings. Could they be an omen, a warning of some kind? These people tend to suffer tragedy in the weeks after a sighting things like that Obviously that was a theme with the mothman and i talked to my clown previously about weird owl sightings that tend to shape shift. Maybe another day monic manifestation but harbinger of doom talk does come up in conversations surrounding this sort of stuff, wonder if we have any commonalities among the people who have seen the big cat form and what it might've meant to them

42:18 Well, it's interesting that you should ask that actually Greg because the answer is broadly no. The black dogs of folklore are generally regarded as an omen of death or this or that or the other particularly if they appear in a house or in dreams but as far I know big cats don't really presage anything other than a complete change of life in the person who has encountered them They often say that they had been sceptical and what they had in fact encountered was a completely different type of reality because they knew perfectly well that there are no Black Panthers at large in England, and yet what they were was looking at one. And one chap that I quote from the book Mike Coggan was absolutely astounded to find one running ahead of his car

43:19 just a few feet ahead of it and he saw that it was a black panther, huge creature. And he was absolutely terrified but he noticed that it was chasing a rabbit and He said well you know I did see that black panther as clear as anything It was...that's what it was the big cat! And he said I also saw the rabbit But I saw the cat for longer than the rabbit but nobody questions whether or not I had seen a rabbit Yeah yeah That is a fair point for him to make I think when you mentioned initiation earlier, as you know Greg that's a subject close to my heart and i think that might be something to do with all the appearances of daimons but for one blinding moment people have a glimpse into something they just can't get their heads around. And yet it's unquestionably real more real than everyday life and people remark not just on the

44:16 natural nature of the, as it were, of the big cats but how sort of stunning they are. How beautiful they are! How graceful they are! How glossy! How shining you know? It's kind of like an epiphany in many cases people... You think they'd be terrified but often they're not Often they just sort of stare at the animal and this animal stares back And the experience is one of awe Not of fright So it seems to take place in its own space, as it were this encounter and people are left scarred by it. Their worldview has shifted It's been just pushed sideways I suppose most people forget it and carry on with their normal lives but it is at the back of their minds But a lot of people don't A lot of people think more deeply about Is the reality we take for granted The only reality or indeed The real reality

45:17 Yeah, I mean that's a very good point because... ...I'd say Greg that the effect these creatures have on people they're all struck very often and very often they do find them absolutely beautiful. I quote um..a couple called Ray and Evelyn Robson because they watched one of these black panther type animals strolling along a dry stone wall quite close to them And Evelyn said it was absolute huge and pure black and Ray said That's the gospel truth, he said. My wife and I were so shocked it had a beautiful shining fur coat It was gorgeous And another woman Jan Edwards saw something very similar and she said with the sun shining down on this creature She said it looked like liquid velvet. It was absolutely beautiful People constantly say how beautiful and awesome these creatures are

46:19 Rippling with health and muscular, and this unbelievable shine on the fur which is very interesting because a leopard doesn't shine in the same way. It shows up the rosette spots behind the blackness if it's a melanistic leopard. Actually I do compare perhaps rather weirdly black panthers to men in black which are as we know a feature of the UFO experience. Because blackness is a sort of feature of the men in black, obviously and it's very much a feature of these panther-like animals in Britain

47:03 Yeah, that's a worthy thing to note. It's a big theme with this stuff men in black, black eyed children shadow figures it seems to just relate to the void and the dark not so clear quality all this stuff and the overall mystery yeah I mean I couldn't help but notice the interesting sort of correlations The fact that you know many Black have old-fashioned suits they have the slick hairstyle of the 1950s, their very shiny hair and they drive these shiny black Cadillacs. They're black and they're polished and they're shiny much in a way that the big cats are

47:50 And once this idea had come to me, I thought well you know one of the striking features about men in black is that they're incompetent. You have to show them how to eat food and they never know what to do. They're clumsy as though they're not at home in this world and so I sort of re-read my data to see if mystery big cats could have something of that incompetence about them Sure enough, they do. They behave very strangely oddly when people encounter them they often are running but running hunkered down close to the ground which is a strange way of doing it and sometimes they are wandering along oblivious of their surroundings as though they're in a dream and sometimes they're running as if they're carrying from something that you can't see but very often they give the impression of mimicking

48:50 the purposeful actions of biological big cats but without a purpose in mind, rather in the way that men in black are sort of seen to be mimicking the activities of normal people humans. But not very successfully, Klaidof? I thought that was interesting Very much so the mimicking quality was something i was gonna ask you about because it seems like there are animal carcasses in the wake of some these big cats and obviously experts can tell the difference between prey that's been killed by a wall for a dog vs wild feline. They go about the process and totally different ways, add as you say in the book sometimes these carcasses are even up in trees which is clearly a big cat thing

49:38 But it's a little weird for them to do that, and it starts making me think that maybe my concept of what a daimon is could be a bit off. Because I tend to think of them as higher spirits that are just taking the shape of an animal... ...as a mask of some kind embodying that thing. But when we talk about them actually carrying out wild animal behavior then it gets a bit fuzzier! Maybe they just do it because it's fun? These situations do tend to be described as an encounter with something of a higher than expected intelligence. What's some human like reactions and aspects to their behavior things like once they're seen the creature will stop and stare back, make sure you see it disappear into the brush kinda like that have total awareness and control over experience so it becomes hard to know what to think

50:31 Yeah, exactly. Which isn't the natural behaviour of an actual wild animal particularly They're very cool they stroll across the road in front of cars and that's another feature of the Sasquatch apparently Whereas Germa and his guilt seem to wait till the car is nearly upon them then they cross the road And that's very much a feature of big cats as if they want to be noticed. Yes, as if they definitely want to be noticed but what you were saying Greg about the kills yeah they are associated with sheep kills in particularly Britain and deer and there are various photographs of poor animals that have been killed in a very cat-like manner which is to say very unlike that of a dog A cat kills very cleanly and eats very cleanly

51:30 Whereas a dog, you know, tears at it randomly. But a cat peels back the skin and in case of sheep the fleece which I dare say isn't very palatable and eats it from inside very neatly without tearing randomly at that skin You know many farmers have lost cheek and they attribute that to big cats they've seen on their land But one of the features also is usually very little blood on the ground and that's a feature also of demonic predation because, of course, blood is one of those demonic off-substances. It occurs in myth even doesn't it? And I'm going to let Pat describe

52:18 Hercules is summoning, filling trenches with blood. Come on! You know that one? Oh well you know blood is the life force and so on and when Hercules wanted to talk to the dead he filled a trench with blood and summoned the dead and they couldn't speak until they'd taken a mouthful of blood from out of the trench and then he could question them So yeah... The idea of blood and blood sacrifice too ancient and too widespread or too complicated to go into. I wouldn't go down that route myself. No, well...I don't really go down that route at all but... I mean human flesh is pretty much a demonic substance itself you know mysterious scars appear on it and certainly there have been people who have encountered a mystery big cat sometimes do fall foul of them and find that they have been damaged

53:16 one woman found she was leaving, well a big cat knocked her over let's put it this way but you didn't think it had in any way hurt her until she got undressed that night and she found three slash marks on her ribs. Her coat hadn't even been torn so how they got there nobody knows but that's a rather sinister aspect of the demonic world is that they can actually hurt you or mark you I should say, not hurt. Mark through your clothes it's a feature also of abduction experiences and people are left with abduction scars and so forth yes Pat would say any initiation involves scarring in my book Daimonic Reality you know i have a chapter called Daimonic Traces

54:14 sort of physical contact with daimons is a bit like the photographs. Nothing is conclusive, but they're kind of there but they're not that significant in fairy lore you know a fairy will give you what the Irish call a blast or will touch you and we get the idea of being touched in the head from that if you're touched by a fairy you know you're a little bit balmy ever after Or you can be given a stroke by the fairy. And we still have used that word today for people who are paralyzed down one side, used to be attributed to being struck by a fairy and even if you encounter aliens from UFOs they can give you a nasty blast as well, can't you? They have their ray guns and you have rashes and you feel dizzy for days afterwards quite apart from the scars you get from alien abductions but

55:16 Big cats are the same, where there's a mystery big cats I mean wherever there is contact it always surprisingly slight. If it were a leopard, leopards are unbelievably powerful you could be walking along the road in as when I was walking along the road in the dark in Zimbabwe as a boy and I was picked up by man in the car who was white with shock at the sight of me doing that I was hitchhiking around didn't know better and he said you could be walking with five people and suddenly you'll notice there's only four of you. A leopard can just take you completely silently, could kill you with one blow and drag you up a tree before you can turn around. So clearly these mystery big cats they're scratches. A man cycling very near here in Dorset actually down the hill

56:11 was knocked off his bicycle by a big cat who jumped out of the hedge. If it had been a leopard, he'd have been dead! So these sort of physical contacts rather like the photographs are suggestive rather than conclusive and they always seem to be like that. It just deepens the mystery rather than providing the evidence we all crave Yes it speaks that coaxing quality we mentioned is just enough to hook people but never enough to confirm. I just really like that idea the maybe they take the form of these big cats today because its a more strategically effective book then something even more far out there we can't even deal with,

56:59 But Patrick, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on where we might be with a better understanding of these things culturally. Because Charles Fort had this theory that we'd go through some different ages or dominance as he said A dominant of religion followed by a dominant of science those definitely seem to shake out, but then we dinner a dominant of wider inclusion where we bring back the things we couldn't look at through up purely scientific lens and. These are wide arcs of course who knows where we are exactly or if it even follows that pattern And maybe I'm in a bit of a bubble because i do shows like this but it does feel like we're inching closer to a cultural curiosity if not acceptance of this sort of stuff more so than previous decades that I've been around for what do you think? You'd know more about that than me since I'm in a bubble of one in rural Dorset. But, the most outstanding change since I wrote Daimonic Reality

58:02 and the most outstanding changes, of course being the internet. The innumerable websites which... I mean when i was writing my book i had to go to libraries and read books and plagiarize and steal first-person accounts from various books you know it took forever but now you get on the internet and the actual people who've had the experience are there talking, you know. It's absolutely fantastic! For instance I'd never heard of dog men... Turns out there is a vast dog-men culture! You know? I got hooked on the dog-men sites these strange creatures who look exactly like the Egyptian god Anubis, you know, dog headed man and so i would say that yes awareness of the supernatural or of the demonic is much more widespread than it was

59:00 because we don't just have books, and there aren't any fewer books I don't think. Books are proliferated but we also have the vast resources of the internet and thousands of mysterious websites which you could link from one to another. Whole days go by when i find myself sucked into I don't know, Bigfoot websites, dogmen websites UFO websites. You can go quite mad! So yeah so i think it is more widespread but I don't think it's made any more converts amongst the mainstream bodies if you see what I mean? I don't think the scientists have changed their attitude nobody has been recruited from religion or science

59:51 or any more than they were in the past. I just think there are a lot more ordinary people who are aware of these things now, but whether they are intrigued by them or go along with them or believe in them or not...I just don't know! Maybe there's always only a certain number of people – a lot – who are just intrigued by mystery as I was from a child, you know? When i heard about messages from a child. I just couldn't get them out of my mind! I was fascinated, but a lot of my friends just they looked blank they didn't say anything. They didn't...I'd say isn't that mysterious they go well so what you know. That's a reaction I am quite familiar with

1:00:43 Well, guys! Looks like we did it. Two hours talking largely about mystery big cats I don't know what i was worried about It really is a fascinating subject If you want to explore these beings between the worlds, then you might as well talk about them in their most common modern form. And that's the ABCs! Before we go, we should certainly remind people of other works that you guys have written and any future plans for new books if there are any. Let them know! Oh, well I know this is the new edition of my book Mystery Big Cats Greg but Pat's got a few in the pipeline haven't you? Yeah. This is Merrily's show and I'm not going to do any advertising Greg if we could go to my website and feast their eyes Fair enough it's a classy move but of course it is all on the family yeah true Well I'll do the ad for him if he goes to his website

1:01:40 What is it? Harper.org. www.harper.org slash Patrick, that's me and you can see my books there Now who are James and John Harper other sibling authors of yours That's right Right on they seem to have some pretty interesting work out there too Oh my brother James is a fantastic poet A famous and acclaimed poet rightly so And my other brother is a fantastic man a wit raconteur and gypsy. So yeah, we live in their shadow really we're just humble sort of drudges you know writing churning up books and fabulous art but you know

1:02:26 Good stuff. Who knew there were more than just two interesting branches on the Harper tree? But it was a real pleasure, Patrick great to talk to you again Merrily nice to make your acquaintance and I'm glad Patrick showed me your revised edition of Mystery Big Cats It was a lot of fun enjoy the rest of your night guys Thank You Greg Bye now Praise be to he, good people of the internet. THC's return to cryptozoology! There we have it This was one where when we did the recording I was pretty worried that I couldn't make it sound good enough and I was gonna have to trash it. I was even more convinced that I would put a preface on it warning people about the quality

1:03:16 But when I got it back from our editor, I didn't think we needed that. Of course, I kind of just skimmed around but I didn't hear anything too terrible especially when it's compared to how I actually captured all this and...I can still tell that some of the technical stuff was distracting on their end a little bit though It is what it is. I apologize to the Harpers and I told you guys, I am testing new systems in July! I tried a new recording platform that was just a bit complicated on this one and of course I can't really help over the line...I can't see what's going wrong on their end but I was hearing myself in a terrible echo and we fumbled around with it for over 30 minutes

1:04:03 And eventually I just said, you know screw it let's record it and I will sort it out later. Something every audio professional would tell you to never do. Looking back...I think what happened is they used the link to join the session twice so we had an audio version of that effect where you're in a bathroom with a mirror on the wall in front of you and behind you and there's just like this crazy infinite visual echo? I guess you could call that But long story short, I spent many hours chopping this up and separating all of us onto our own tracks and boosting Merilee's levels and lowering mine and Patrick's. And...ugh Basically just getting it as good as i could before sending it off to our editor who in turn worked his magic and sent it back even better. I still hear some artifacts and some of the rustling parts that really couldn't be fixed

1:05:03 But they were sitting on a couch together sharing one set of earbuds. And again, in retrospect my guess is that those earbuds had a microphone on them like so many do and when Patrick would adjust it he might have been touching the microphone and didn't know it and thats why it got so crazy loud and thats why his voice was so much louder than her voice because he was right there up on it These are my guesses reverse engineering the issues we were having and not being able to see or help them really all that much. Yes, I'm sure i will still get some complaints but they're not going to understand how far we actually went to get this where it is and that's fine

1:05:44 On the positive side, the next two episodes I already have recorded and they sound pretty much perfect. I can close my eyes and actually think that we were in the same room And I have nailed the program i'm going to be using going forward and we are off to the races But content wise this is one of the most common requests I get To return to Cryptozoology When Patrick said hey man I am trying to throw a little attention on my sister's book Would you be interested in checking it out? I kind of roped him into joining us since i really loved his insights in the episode we did and i think he's highlighting the most appropriate framework for these things but i also did worry that it was a bit light for a two-hour conversation. I thought it was maybe too specific, but you know i didn't really feel that way after actually reading the book

1:06:38 I understand that it can be hard at first to shake the feeling that its just an undiscovered wild animal out there which is why that was the first thing I wanted to attack so this subject would keep your interest a little bit better. With a little knowledge of real Wildcats, its pretty clear this is something else plus the glowing eyes and fadeaways but skeptics would chalk that up as witness error although seems like a pretty hard thing to get wrong Oh, you're right. The big cat didn't just fade away in front of my eyes My bad So I thought this was a fun topic to say that we've covered and have in the archive When you stack up a list of the cryptozoology shows, I think this definitely has a place in the repertoire Marilee's book is the quintessential book on this topic And Patrick has a pretty deep knowledge of many esoteric and spiritual things

1:07:37 alchemy, ritual the cross-dimensional mechanism of exchange and I very much appreciated him joining us and adding a bit of flavor to it. Like most episodes around here we laid a good foundation in the first hour and got to meander into a lot of other topics in the second In this one we talked about Merilee's insights from the Sasquatch Chronicles show, Grimalkin and the notion of accidental summoning probably my favorite story of the day. Fairy whistling Hermes Silicon Valley and roast beef The paranormal abilities of Patrick and Merilee's grandmother Dealings and reciprocal relationships with the Diamonds

1:08:19 the food of the gods, and the daemonic spectrum that's out there. And yes I don't know that daemons and cryptozoology are topics at the forefront of a lot minds right now but i dont want to be so obsessed with the going on inside human culture we forget there is a bigger game in town There is a superstructure that is always fascinating beyond the narrative of the day or the political infighting and virus paranoia. It felt kind of important to let the THC pendulum swing back into that territory, but be ready because it's about to swing back in a big way! And I'll see you then! Big thanks to Harper siblings for taking the time, apologies to them for added complexity and to you guys for subpar audio

1:09:14 I hope it didn't take away from the content too much, but we do what we can. I'll see you next time! I've done my part… your move elusive spirits hidden energies and demonic companions… your fuckin' move Lucid dreams are so vivid, cause you go to bed at seven And your brain comes alive because you hate your nine-to-five You wake up with a dread and make sure your cats are fed Did your brain talk to a ghost who moved your coffee and toast As you listen to the higher side chats You get to your desk and your boss says it's a mess And your soul slowly goes To a place where nothing grows When you think he's not around, you insert a SETI sound The OM says turn it down and you say It's just the higher side chats Oh do ya think you'd be invited? To Bohemia Grove. To a Bilderberg club Do ya think you'd be invited

1:10:19 by a Rothschild to a party on a submarine. Diving down, to the center of the earth through the Marianas Trench your teeth begin to clench from the sulfurous stench The mask you're given doesn't fit cause you're not one of them Starting today, you'll make plans to get away. There's no one to hold you down and the what-ifs start to drown Then you wake to the glare of a cofluorescent stare And the light winks at you cause its life is almost through But it's holding on to quit time just like you It's time for The High Side Chats!

1:11:09 the