“Here is sudden reticular observation that struck me:
Galileo famously reintroduces that doctrine of primary and secondary qualities.
I looked upon this description of the reticulum and its additive and subtractive nature,
Of course a primary and secondary qualities account of a thing imagines a space not unlike that but in a different way.
Here in a sense we have not only stripped the secondary qualities away but also the primary qualities, Both seem to become relational threads.
Since the threads themselves are the only way we can describe them and not really threads at all.
This in turn made the whole reticulum look to me like a vast diagram.”

Seranoga (1964)

This transcript is of a conversation between the CEO’s Balthazar Schlep and Lis who has been experimenting with various sorcery techniques. We do not recommend emulating Lis’ experiments at home.

Lis is italicised to differentiate the voices.

CC is Carlos Castaneda. DJ is Don Juan.

Ok so something weird happened. You said to try to use the ally-thing to make something happen. So after thinking of the wind and feeling one with it, I seem to have summoned my cat to a place of power. During a trip, there was an imbalance, a discomfort brought up by the fact of the left eye now seeing and moving differently. The suggestive state of the psychedelics allied with this asymmetry (with the metallic thing appearing from one corner only) made so that my body kept being sucked into that corner. But after some weird poking around, I started thinking about the cat and seconds after she appeared here and asked to enter (the door was closed), then entered and went straight to the place counter the corner, ending the discomfort immediately. This has become a motif. The cat itself has become part of the circuitry of this performance spell. It’s like an accretion tapping, like you said. It’s like the routine of the cat, myself, and the plants/fungi are now entangled in this motif

Started to understand the ally better because I’m now jnteracting with nodes. Nodes appear as semi-physical balls defying both light and darkness, the size of watermelons, and they can be felt anywhere, be it in the middle of the air or inside a closet. The only distinction is that nodes cannot move from their place, and there cannot be two nodes too close together, as if they repel each other. So I started using the trick of the light with the left eye (using the comer of the room to shift the level of brightness) to see them better. It’s a faint aura most of the time and, using this trick, I can rotate the the nodes (although for them to move seems impossible).

Rotating the nodes changed the perception of color (beyond that of brightness) and mood of each thing in flux through the air, probably IOBs, creating the sensation of a big circular slide that vibrates and can change to places existing only at the edge of the corner of the eyes. So it feels like moving really fast in a car-spaceship while sitting down, and seeing multiple paths inside a normal 3D space (like a series of broken mirrors).

This field of a type of magnetism that the nodes emit feel like they could be harnessed for energy (it feels like a plant, with the flying IOBs feeling like it’s their habit to “eat” this energy the nodes give off. So they’re like moths to a flame, clustering around the nodes.

Does the metallic thing go away if you want it to?

That’s a good one. Up until now I hadn’t thought about it. Just never wanted it to leave. Seemed weird and disrespectful.

Well ally relationships of use (if that’s what it is) are supposed to have you in control as I understand it. I’m not overly concerned about it but obviously it’s not your ‘friend’ as such, it’s some kind of reciprocal relation thing. It is reasonably said I think that IOBs will try to be whatever you obsess over. Now weirdly yours already looks like a weird multidimensional thing but then this level of complexity and weirdness is in your makeup. I mean I don’t know, it might not be one but whatever it is you should probably be able to have it here or not.

I would say the relation is definitely more like a refined respect that you would find among big animals like a jaguar and a anaconda, they won’t fight because both of them would get very destroyed with no gain.

That’s why it’s so weird to want to control its summoning. It feels like imposing my will into it like an imprint, a name. Which I might be able to do, but I could either tarnish this thing that feels so free and kill myself (acknowledging here the flair of the dramatic like DJ)

It seems related to light (as in reflexions and reflections) and time (as in captured moments). These two main categories seem to govern as the main principles of its effects. It bends light and plays with time. I can feel its presence even when not appearing visibly. And it has since become more fluid in the way that it doesn’t need to appear to work anymore. To make it appear feels each time more important, as if each appearance is supposed to teach me something and each time I learn something it gets harder to properly make it appear (energetic snowball effect). Maybe it is an IOB being something other than an image necessarily. I think the silence was achieved to a different point where the obsessions might have dissipated. It was unbelievably hard to keep this for so long. It honestly feels like Plato seems to have felt about ideas.

It’s a very strange situation, I don’t want to sit here spouting things like the CC books know the truth, besides which this is way beyond any of my occult interactions. I partially think ‘has some weird neurological phenomenon afflicted them?’ But then I think this so. The Warao tribe has a tradition of dark ‘killer’ shamans (that’s how they mostly function) that are trained largely through tobacco, so their bodies are steeped in, by the time they’re (the apprentices) cooked and ready to go, the tobacco has physically altered their bodies, they smell awful on the breath, they look scary from what we would think of as various toxicity effects and their eyes are suited to the twilight apparently another effect we can understand physiologically. But of course from the tribes perspective these alterations are the transformations into the shaman thing, they aren’t ‘really’ the western descriptions. So as I say, if anything you’re experiencing could be explained through neuroscience, it doesn’t really help since the sorcery ontology is in the first place. But it seems to sit well with me that sorcery is very much a physiological thing. I suppose I have in my mind the general sense in magick etc. that other worldly beings generally need restraining and that you can’t trust them and so I exercise a degree of concern for you.

I think it goes straight from trying to work through logoi and nomoi to work on forms that are deliberately created somehow through rituals so that they can alter their new form. Your concern seems to be the case all around the world. DJ is always afraid for CC. Magick shares this with sorcery. And it’s not really clear how they differ.

And that fits with CCs understanding that the giving you what you want could be a kind of trick, maybe?

Yes, the reciprocal trade seems to be a thing that needs care. The giving too much is always a weird sign that something might be wanted from the one sustaining the presence. That’s why I’m not keeping anything. I let it use me as a foil, but it asks before. This feels like payment.

Hmmm, be so careful and consider that you are in quite serious sorcery land here, I don’t know about the death bit but a lot of the hyperbole is clearly appropriate. I’m thinking more that this is a lonely world in a sense, and yes the books do say that but you can see how it’s true, you end up something truly other. It’s not just something that will be there and then ‘now to get on with my proper life’

That thing about IOBs being things one obsesses over. This very thing seemed to manifest differently, as small obsessions then a big one (the pink river dolphin) before it cracked and this time-warper light thing emerged. Yes, definitely. I will be timing this and closing shop by the end of the month. It’s a limited vacation.

This transcript is of a conversation between the CEO’s Balthazar Schlep and Lis who has been experimenting with various sorcery techniques. We do not recommend emulating Lis’ experiments at home.

Lis is italicised to differentiate the voices.

CC is Carlos Castaneda. DJ is Don Juan.

I mean to be fair to standard Thelemite or otherwise practice they all want inner silence, but equally they use words to direct acts. Sorcery seems to bypass words entirely. Let’s think: if pneuma was real real, then it seems to me sorcery is playing in unaccreted pneuma. Where maybe the nagual would be the umbratic?

Do you think the following of a magickal writing system, like the Qabbala underlying Thelema, is a marker of the difference between the occult and sorcery, maybe? With sorcery having no writing system because it prevents the apparatus of recording to actualize? (Very Derridean)

It seems a fair distinction.

The nagual as the umbratic would make for something very cool aesthetically. I just want to say this is the case, but caution makes me want to think some more

Yes I don’t think it’s right.  It is good aesthetically, but it doesn’t fit, as it was the pneuma that altered the umbratic which played the role of underlying structure. Maybe this just doesn’t work here. The pneuma umbra thing was specifically designed for a very human magickal interaction description and we seem to be way out of that here.

Maybe nagual is a category distinct to a sum-property of an object, its identity. Maybe nagual is itself the perspective of the pneuma in its interaction with something that from the tonal perspective is incoherent (the umbratic). And that’s why one becomes a nagual, yet it was already there (negative form). This would make it still pneuma, but in a freer state of accreting. Which would be like a Spinozian hierarchy of being. So the umbratic, in this case, is like a zone of the vestigial encounters events and acts of naguality (and similar states). But pressed against the tonal, so it’s pitch-black incoherent and inorganic from this perspective.

What you say would seem to fit with the notion of sorcery dealing with unaccreted pneuma: unaccreted pneuma is the nagual? Though I’m not sure I have quite got your take on the umbratic here, it seems to me to be what DJ labels the unknowable. To be a Nagual would also fit with this I think insofar as its a maximally unaccreted person

Yes for both. I think it makes sense for example that the unknowable is like the eagle itself. The nagual can experience the unknowable differently from the tonal, like a second-attention vs first-attention thing. That’s why I mean that maybe the nagual understand the umbratic better because interaction is maximized. Exactly, and that’s why impeccability is the most important rule, because as sorcery opens the individual more, it puts the body in contact with more generated energy and so the expenditure always increases. So much that DJ says that even to cook an egg he needs all his attention, because the umbratic has invaded the world through him once he nagualized. Sorcery indeed has the potential equal or superior to philosophy and indeed is like an experimental ontology possible beyond fiction.

I suppose though this will always be a problem i.e.  no matter how out there with Laruelle or whatever people get, most academics/thinkers don’t have serious truck with any of this. They dip their toes in the occult or they metaphorize Lovecraft. You can’t bring these pearls back to them which sadly is also why the sorcery thing is correct again —that only some people will get it. I suppose another reasonable question is ‘why would you want to mess with this stuff?’ This that your live in is reality, this is all the reality you need. And this is true, sorcery is pretty useless in a way. Having said that, and I don’t know how much you want to go down this road, I wonder if you could get that potential IOB to ‘do’ something?’

I’m pretty sure it’s not even a question of my want (with regards to ‘messing’ with this stuff) in a straightforward way. Meeting this thing is like seeing the circuitry of your life so far and understanding that there were always tracks that I deviated as part of the plan all along. Something opposite to how ontology thinks. The accidents are above in the hierarchy of realness. As if a species is an iterative error of cell-replication in a simulation of cancer, and the individual that sees this is the true product and we just happened to, despite being unspecial, crash into.

Yes you’re right, I cannot put the investigation even if down if I wanted to. It gnaws at me.

This is amazing because it’s like we finally have a tool to talk about the impersonal individual

Again, another failure of the other nonsense (speculative realism/ooo) totally achieved here. Thinking in terms of this circuitry and the Castaneda-updated accretive model, the outside is accessible

Yes. The transcendental critique is still correct, but it describes a historical condition rather than a telos or final state.

Yes the Kantian subject is a contingency itself.

It is not absolute, like Newtonian mechanics. It’s local. Exactly.

This transcript is of a conversation between the CEO’s Balthazar Schlep and Lis who has been experimenting with various sorcery techniques. We do not recommend emulating Lis’ experiments at home.

Lis is italicised to differentiate the voices.

CC is Carlos Castaneda. DJ is Don Juan.

This isn’t ground breaking but I think CC is kind of like on the phenomenological path but in a more ridiculous way; it’s like the epoche but then you don’t return to the world to constitute it. The procedures of stopping the world etc. seem like something the preliminary of which is the attempt to perceive the vector field or hyle as Husserl would have it. But phenomenology is interested in reconstituting the world at the pneuminous level of concepts, so this raises the question, accepting that pneuma always was a phenomenological tool, when you dip below the vector field into the weird shit where are you? Phenomena like the green fog in the water, still take classification in the sense that there is still a vector field which we can break into regions and call it things, bubbles, fog etc. So I guess it is still necessarily pneuminous, but there seem to be states that try to be described where thinking has genuinely stopped so conceptualisation is only a posterior event that happens in recollection, there is still awareness going on but could that be called pneuma? Or maybe I just mean is it totally devoid of accretions?

To be sure, though the accretions facilitate magick at the level of synchronicity and spells, for the really freaky levels they seem to be an encumberance, they are the clag that weighs us down, and I think about Land’s phrase the ‘human security system’, and how this is very much the thing Don Juan is engaged in cracking. To this extent CC is not bullshit at all, it only turns on again if the actual reality weird stuff is real or not -and we both know it is to some extent, but I what mean is, real or not, practices like these rigorously applied would disable the titanically strong conceptual apparatus we have erected around ourselves?

But back to the other thing, I like this idea that what we call magick has this essentially different levels or even natures, accretive manipulation -the application of a concept/accretion to a vector region that wouldn’t usually take it (pretty standard spells stuff), and vistas of just other weird shit that doesn’t seem to have any evolutionary function and this seems to be the domain of sorcery, I think this is a bit what you mean by the transversal shaman? It’s a line of escape that is neither healer or killer, just a Cooperesque (in Fire Walk With Me) ‘I’m going over here’

Before reading the art of dreaming I’m conducting some experiments to know how much they match the book’s. And I think I’ve just unlocked the eye thing (before seeing this). It is very similar to controlling each eye separately. It seems to synergize better in a room, and have some command over people. I mean by the eye thing = the left eye of the sorcerer. Remember that? The left eye changes somewhere along the path of sorcery. And I was going deeper into that, looking for some research on this and found that link*. Have you read it?

It startled me because it describes very well the process of guiding a group through a trip

It all seemed like my own way of getting comfortable, but I guess there are precedents for these being “magical passes”, something universal in the sense that taking these plants and synthetics will have an expected outcome

Yeah the phosphene thing, it was really interesting, interestingly I was just talking to a psychology Phd about this stuff, i mentioned the purple puffs that the reddit cc people see. She was interested because she says when they do transcranial stimulation on people (including herself) when they get passed induced phosphenes people often see purple puffs.

When I talked about achieving the eye, I meant that somewhere during the second night my left eye started behaving in a different manner than my right eye, and I started to use it unconsciously to slightly hypnotize people.

So is the left eye right eye thing to do with the tonal nagual sides of the body thing?

You’re aware I have some synaesthesia?

Yes, have you seen the purple puffs, if so can you touch them?

Here’s the biggest thing I’ve noticed regarding the puffs. Exactly, you anticipated me I can now touch it/them. Whereas before, fully sober and before practice, I couldn’t

So if the reddit people were right you should start grabbing it and sticking it on yourself as a regular practice

The sensation is the same, it’s the intention that counts

Yeah,  they say that too.

I’m not acquainted with this procedure yet, but now I’m thinking this makes a whole lot of sense because the way I feel like touching them is with my left part, especially left hand and eye. It’s like they’re entering the pupil by what appears like a constantly forming flux of metallic gas,

Though the dark room gazing focus is too much, I think quite genuinely just like compassion bolsters the buddhist void, impeccability protects the organism from the incursions that the second attention produces. I suppose my comment also means, do be careful, I don’t think all hyperbolic warnings of DJ are nonsense. Clearly your first attention is partially cracked already but if you widen it too much too quickly, you are inviting fuck knows what to pop through.

Indeed, I wasn’t scared but I have been before. That’s why I’m taking some time off this. Before in my life I would just power through it. But as DJ says, each times requires more energy. This moving ball-tube of metallic thing seems to appear over my head if I’m outdoors. But indoors it depends

Maybe it’s an inorganic being. Certain of these are supposed to live in in an assemblage position close to ours and hence from dreaming etc we almost always come across them. These are the ones that Dan etc has. They teach, apparently but want you to hang around in the weird honeycomb world. They teach, your give energy.

Maybe that’s what the metallic thing is. It looks like a 5D bee-hive with an opening that is light itself and it had a pull. So maybe that’s what it is? I never felt like I entered it though. It’s more like a trade or conversation and the darkroom thing might be just a helper. I’ve seen the thing any time of the day and it actually can redirect the light into itself and make the day dark like night. Or the night radiate light like the sun is up. I will read the IOB stuff asap

Have you tried communicating with it?

Yes, the texture of the sound hits me like a bunch of little punches. Like the notes of an instrument on acid, they have a weight to it that can be felt on the skin where the opening is pointing. Mostly it feels like those weird massage techniques where someone taps you continually and fast.

That does sound weird, also highly reminiscent of the way cc describes the moth/ally talking. I’m sure it’s an iob. Not that I want to get all hysterical about that, I think as per the general magickal tradition and in the Art of Dreaming, you don’t belong to these things unless you agree to do so. The Art of Dreaming details how they will tend to teach and try to lure because they want human energy. This doesn’t kill humans at all, it’s just an exchange system. I think people Howard Lee (energy martial arts guy who taught CC some things) distanced themselves from CC because he was using spirits. Again it’s all there in the books really, DJ thinks CCs bent is more like the old sorcerers who did work with the allies a lot

I’ll read it (the Art of Dreaming). Let me guess something. DJ will tell CC that dreaming isn’t meant as simply dreaming (as in sleeping), by that one can dream awake and in other states of consciousness. Confirm? I want to compare how close my understanding of stalking is before entering the analogical definitions by DJ.

Yes.

Because the eye thing and the black metallic thing are both something that happens in a type of space of lucid dreaming, while awake.

It’s really interesting, I see part of the eye thing is in Tales of Power. I guess playing with these things alters what we call its physicality, which I think is part of the really interesting aspect of all of this. That what we’ve got here is something that really is trying to remove the sense of ‘occult’, to remove the notion of a particular set of practices as such.


*http://www.phosphenism.net/castaneda.html

By the way; I’m Doctor Buck Moon.

Thus starts session three-hundred thirty-five of that there New Therapy all’s buzzing about, so, as usual, u’ take a seat. By the way; I’m Doctor Buck Moon. Thanks for coming, great to see you, listen up pips’q eak’ s, listen up, here goes what; for today’s it’s not knowing the year’s a definite syndrome, ye’ very definite, yes, ‘s, as syndromes go is, so; given the logical progression of new topics I am presenting to you today, what is the next logical syndrome I am on the verge the bring the brink of the verge or both or put a little bit differently, about to present? Anybody got a good ga’s ‘ues’?

No?

No?

No—it then may be just as well nobody’s here, actually—because at least one of you, whoever that may be, will say the answer which I the answer which I do the answer I do not answer I do not want to know the answer to, it is; even it is coming too close to say I you know, that word you know that word I that when said stabs—and no doubt to most of you will sound very foolish—stabs you down stuck on an analysis board or prisoner’s trap you know, since everything in creation’s got a name—and sometimes several names—by now, it’s like there’s an insect to be studied pinned to a study board inside of itself so that it’s pinned immobile so that

someone or some other pinned immobile as well—just as you and all others refusing to ever step out from inside your big doped-out heads, but—a little bit differently each time its pinned—to be studied like this great auditorium this great roundy-bout room within which we’re presently set, so bit round starting here ‘hind this podium curving off toward—and that’s true no which te ka matta’ you stend it tall out from it curves round our and round and out and around and back there—see it? See it? Iy curvsey round back there and out to be met each by the other back there, way up there—‘bout the back of what looks like the back side of some nose and also just under those backhinded dual eyeball-backs there those. Yes those. Those that swivel for some reason here inside what we’re of the but the facts are the facts, past our backwalls we’ll never know what s is ss what sss for inside of here is where you me were put ssss and this sssss is where we’ll ssss most likely be staying unless we sss can’t ss be s right about everything ssssss well can you? So.

Sssssss.

Any questions class s at this’s ‘s juncture, the same rules as for the last question do apply, know then well before deciding whether or not to say yes—and yes, listen hard now since you’ve all refused loudly to step out from inside your big doped-out heads—like, I have also never say yes I have, unless you actually have, may say clearly, and be prepared to defend the propriety of whichever question you pull from that sheaf of possible questions you come armed with in that quiver back there you don’t even know they got you strapped onto, y’ Robin sniff, Hood Robin, Hood even sniff, sniff, even Robin Hood knows as dumb as back there they all say was, knew a full quiver’s useless unless it’s packed with arrows and not those sicko damned questions you won’t give up the not knowing of, dull boy.

So any questions?

Any questions?

Any questions?

No? Plus got no big domed weapon to fire me back at me now, have you?

Of course not!

Sorry you are, sorry—you are to be so easily frightened down by mere words this is s study room not a fanned-out rockhurl, this is a learning room in here, not a fiery hosedown manned by big barkdogs. This is a place for knowing yes an opened up place for knowing so holy as to need total locking down as robbery’s inevitable so why in such a place as this do you refuse to know refuse tt to admit to ttt tell the truth don’t lie, don’t lie, tt t s ss sss you do!

You have questions!

Don’t lie!

Say them out single file, don’t lie!

At root there’s a reason that you cannot know.

Cannot know or.

So now; what year is this?

Spit it!

What year is this!

But is it closer at least closer at least or at least, a little bit closer now, than before?

See? There you go. It’s sure worth it. Don’t you think?

Hey.

Bu’, gak; that’s the end of session number three-hundred thirty-five of that there New Therapy all’s buzzing about—what? Oh no problem. You are very welcome—and be sure to attend what’s next, but—sorry. No autographs or photos. Not my fault! Bye.

These thoughts are the product of being an avid Twin Peaks (and Lynch generally) fan since its inception and reading Ballard’s ‘Cocaine Nights’ for the first time. I don’t think for a second Ballard tried or needed to try to copy Twin Peaks in any sense. His imagination seemed to have been perfectly self sustaining and the trope of the weird small town was not invented by Lynch -just perfected. However some things leapt out at me enough that I felt forced to commit them to writing.

Ballard once reviewed Blue Velvet saying it was ‘like The Wizard of Oz reshot with a script by Franz Kafka and decor by Francis Bacon.‘ Ballard’s gaze is spot on of course; Lynch is both a massive Wizard of Oz and Kafka fan. I think this is pertinent to Cocaine Nights insofar as there is definitely something Kafkaesque about the way Charles tries to penetrate the deeper layers of Estrella del Mar only to be perpetually told he’s looking in the wrong places, or won’t find answers. In the end Charles Prentice is assimilated by the Estrella del Mar machine, a move he believes works in favour of his investigation when really his subconscious complicity is greater than he understands as is his misrecognition of where the power lies.

My Twin Peaks observations are fairly straightforward. The most obvious is that Estrella del Mar is of the Twin Peaks ilk. A seeming small town paradise —albeit of a different kind to TP- with a seething underbelly of crime. Of course as the book evolves we can see that the two, whilst having a kind of structural isomorphy are functionally quite different. Twin Peaks dark side is shunned by the residents or at least repressed. Whereas in Estrella del Mar the life of the place emits directly from crime and deviancy that runs through it.

These are two analyses of societal functioning. Twin Peaks appears idyllic but is shot through with crime and corruption whereas Estrella del Mar appears idyllic in a different way. Estrella del Mar is very culturally active in a middle class way, Tai Chi, pottery classes, gyms, painting and all such activities flourish. The theory employed in Estrella del Mar is that if you awaken people by targeting crime at them in a specific way they become more alive, become involved in the community and want to partake in projects of all kinds. A persistent underbelly of crime in this way keeps people on their toes and keeps the machine ticking over. This is explained as the activation of primal defence parts of the mind which awaken the animal to a more heightened state generally -due to the threat of crime. But of course since the crime is not so perpetual that the state of alert is required all the time, the surplus energy of the people becomes sublimated into the various sports and arts.

In Twin Peaks one might say (if the theory was right) that a) the demographic is different -Estrella del Mar seems a largely 30-60 year old adult population whereas Twin Peaks seems to have a more normal age range of people and b) the crime is just regular crime and not the targeted crime of Estrella del Mar. In this way as ‘normal’ crime it exists only in certain peripheral zones which enable its repression thus disabling the mechanism that Estrella del Mar utilizes.

And what is the apparent driving force of Estrella del Mar’s crime-social machine? The answer is probably the key synchronicity between the two worlds. Bobby Crawford is the name of the part psychopath, part saint who creates and facilitates both the crime and social threads of the town. He seeks to reawaken people from their TV slumbers by generating a wave of aesthetic crime to bring them to life. One of his biggest associations is: fire. We have frequent sections in parts of the book where the protagonist refers to Bobby as having a taste for fire.

Bob and fire, where have we heard that before? Now Bobby Crawford is by no means straightforwardly evil and indeed his connection with the central conflagration of the book is largely rebuked by the end. This doesn’t however distract from his burning down a car and two boats in the course of the story. We’re repeatedly told that Bobby is dangerous and even though the protagonist becomes criminally complicit with him and sympathetic to his methods, we know that Bobby still facilitates rape videos and possibly worse. All the time everyone loves Bobby Crawford and his easy charm and playful nature —he is Bob eager for fun, he wears a smile, everybody runs. Bobby Crawford may have sincere motivations and be morally ambiguous in some ways, however his role as a kind of dark Dionysian agent is quite clear. Twin Peaks’ Bob is largely an unambiguously evil presence, except that there is some sense that Bob’s activities are in a sense just what is fun for him. It is not simply that Bob plots to be and do evil, it is just that he acts according to his nature —which happens to be terrifying and dangerous to humans. In this sense he is similar to Bobby Crawford —and they both like fire.

Another thread of connection I noticed was upon the introduction of Dr Sanger in a ‘tropical suit’. The eccentricity of the tropical suit at the introduction of the psychiatrist immediately brought to mind Dr Jacobi. The similarity continues insofar as the murdered (by fire) Bibi Jansen (a drug troubled young woman) was under the supervision of this psychiatrist. Sanger, like Jacobi is morally ambiguous. He seems to genuinely want to help and at the same time seems to sleep with his young female patients.

Lastly there is Charles Prentice as agent Cooper. Prentice comes to the town to hopefully free his ‘obviously innocent brother’ (a whole Kafkaesque routine in itself) Frank, from the accusation of burning down the Hollinger house which resulted in the deaths of five people. Like K of the Castle, Charles is sucked into the inner world of Estrella del Mar. The same thing that also happens to agent Cooper in Twin Peaks. Cooper readily allows his assimilation into the wholesome aspects of the town and in doing so permits himself to fall in love with Annie Blackburn. Ultimately though when faced with the test of the Black Lodge, Cooper fails. His soul is too riddled with guilt and he is doomed to 25 years of residing therein.

Charles Prentice is seduced by Bobby Crawford into helping with his criminal re-enlivening schema, believing this is the powerhouse of Estrella del Mar. He feels so close to uncovering the secret that he does not spot the dark machinations of the real power seat closing in on him -also involving a woman for whom he has feelings (Paula Hamilton). When Bobby Crawford is killed, Charles Prentice’s guilt makes him pick up the gun that killed him, thus implicating him in his murder and condemning him to plead guilty to it, as his brother has to the fire. Like Cooper, he has been caught by the Black Lodge, just when he thought he was on the verge of solving everything.