Book Review

The Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth 1913-1935 James Shelby Downard, Feral House (feralhouse.com), 2006 Review by Craig Heimbichner

At last James Shelby Downard’s autobiography has emerged from the underground like a Cowan from a Masonic crypt, breathing with vitality and tales of the bizarre. Previously only available in a rough but thorough form from Downard’s protégé, Michael A. Hoffman II (it’s still available and makes for an interesting comparison for savants of Downardia), the book is enlivened with an introduction by Adam Parfrey, recounting his personal experiences with Downard. The reader is in for a wild ride.

Downard needs no introduction to scholars of the occult and excavators of the arcane, having established himself in 1987 with his landmark deconstruction of the Kennedy assassination, King Kill 33, co-authored with Hoffman and published by Parfrey’s Amok Press. Downard’s essay sailed light years beyond prior investigators and he quickly became an underground cult figure (Marilyn Manson even wrote a song based on Downard’s work).

Downard opens with a stolen childhood in which he is identified as a Masonic pharmakos or scapegoat for reasons only hinted at, since the story is told through his own confused and developing understanding. Raised in an Insider family with high-level connections, Downard is pursued by Masonic “Elus” (subcontractors) slated to ritually murder him following a childhood ritual of exclusion. Through one occult charade after another he gains an education par excellence in the way the world works, honing in on the Man Behind the Curtain in a Land of Oz landscape.

Downard takes us on a Magical Mystery Tour of Jekyll Island and the “Land of Enchantment” of New Mexico. The KKK is an ominous and recurring theme, and Downard’s contempt is personal: he is a childhood Klan victim. Downard shows us firsthand how “Tavern Masonry” is set up, and we meet strange assemblages of devices and characters in places such as “Cagliostro’s Treasure House,” many of which could have appeared in an old Twilight Zone episode if Rod Serling possessed this book at the time.

As a backdrop to his insights into the charade of the Kennedy assassination in King Kill 33, Downard shows us repeatedly how the police, military and government officials are easily controlled when the Lodge pulls a few strings. No wonder Downard has insights the rest of us lack: he’s lived a life most of us will never live. From the Dayton Witch to Masonic sex circuses, Downard has practically seen it all.

The story is at times tragic and by turns hilarious, shot through with the dichotomies of the man himself. Downard uses racial slurs yet fights against racist exploitation; oscillates between eloquence and slang; denigrates immorality while operating by his own confessedly “situational ethics.” Above all we have a sense of a mind awake, a brilliant man who takes his dark life by the Devil’s horns and gradually discerns in his daily world a web of symbolic connections. As he does so, he frustrates his Stage Directors time and again by deviating from the script and outfoxing them all.

Downard relates his recovered memory as a victim of mind control experimentation. Indeed, it seems to run in his family, for his mother exploits him in a way which hints of her own subordination to others, although we never get the full explanation of her bizarre yet predominant role. The mind control theme in Downard’s work leads the reader to wonder how much of this account is real. Did Downard really meet FDR? Did he walk in on Alexander Graham Bell engaged in magica sexualis? Did “Wild Bill” Donovan try to recruit him?

Through his life story, Downard helps lift that blindfold enough so that after laying the book down, we can go out and see more than we did before, discerning charades, finding patterns, symbols, and even discovering a level of poetry and humor in our existence. We might even be inspired to step outside the script like Downard and fight the Cryptocracy itself.