The Journey 103. Peter Levenda: Are “They” Weaponizing Consciousness?

Publisher Kris Millegan speaks with Peter Levenda about mind control, secret societies, and Peter’s three-volume SINISTER FORCES: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft, wherein the roots of coincidence and conspiracy in American politics, crime, and culture are examined and new connections between religion, political conspiracy, and occultism are exposed.

Peter researched the material for these books over the course of 25 years, visiting more than 40 countries and gaining access to temples, prisons, military installations, and government documents.

Kris: In high school I [discovered] Edgar Cayce and Aleister Crowley. In college I did independent study on magick and mysticism. Then later, when I tried to suss out how secret societies operate, I was glad I had that background, because it seems that the secret societies pay attention to that kind of stuff.

Peter: It started for me pretty early as well. In 1968, I was graduating high school. And a friend and I were researching ways to stay out of Vietnam. One of the ways was to form your own church. Be an ordained clergyman and you got a deferment. My friend had all kind of religious [garb and paraphernalia]. We were experimenting with rituals of ceremonial magick.

We decided to gate-crash Bobby Kennedy’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. [I was a big fan.] We dressed in Russian Orthodox robes and rented a limousine. When we pulled up, we were ushered inside. [Everyone assumed we belonged there.]

[After the ceremony] we knew an underground way to get out [we wanted to leave before people got wise to us]. During this process, we ran into a couple of weird bishops who were not allowed in because they looked even weirder than we did. They were from The American Orthodox Catholic Church, the AOCC. They gave us brochures. We decided to check them out. They were also headquartered in the Bronx (where my friend and I lived).

That’s the beginning of an odyssey. Because the AOCC is the same church that David Ferrie and Jack Marin belonged to, who were considered co-conspirators, potentially, in the Jack Kennedy assassination, by Jim Garrison.

The AOCC was an anti-communist front operation run by a Ukrainian Orthodox priest, who was made a bishop by some very strange individuals, one of whom was the head of the Rosicrucian Society in America.

I was embedded with this group for more than a year I would say. And we saw some very strange people coming in and out. A lot of foreign people coming in, getting their papers as bishops, going back to their home countries to run some kind of operation there. We had embassy people, consulate people visiting us. This was a weird little church in the Bronx. It took me years to find out really what this was all about. That was the beginning of my SINISTER FORCES travels.

Kris: Reading your book is an alchemical experience. Reading your book changes a person. Because there’s just so much information in there. You go deep and wide. [About those tubes in the brain, for instance.]

Peter: That’s a discovery that’s still very controversial. [Dr.] Stuart Hameroff and [Sir] Roger Penrose were trying to figure out where consciousness came from, and if consciousness is somehow a quantum effect. They believe they found the connecting link, which are these tiny, tiny tubes in the brain, and their chemical reactions are at the Planck level, where quantum effects take place. And they believe that consciousness is a quantum function.

Now they were giving speeches to the military establishment on the possible weaponization of these processes. If you can get down there and manipulate this process, you could perhaps create ESP, paranormal-type effects. They thought they kind of learned how to do it themselves [to create effects like ESP or telekinesis or anything like this]. This runs parallel to [studies] in the 1950s about weaponizing the paranormal, thinking that you could possibly use this in a military application.

The reason I got into this and was writing SINISTER FORCES was because I was stunned by the degree to which there was a military and intelligence dimension to [what we discussed – magick and mysticism and secret societies]. If you study what happened with [the CIA’s mind control projects] Operation Bluebird, Artichoke, MKULTRA, you realize there was a really deliberate attempt to understand how consciousness itself was structured and how it could be weaponized, or how we could defend consciousness against its weaponization by other people.

That’s the connective tissue to, in my mind, American history, at least, of the 20^th Century, now going into the 21^st. As you know, I wrote about [Maurice] Maeterlinck’s play THE BLUE BIRD extensively because the whole play is laying it out. It’s kind of an initiatory process. It’s like a Masonic initiation, the entire play.

He also wrote a couple of others that are very revealing. THE CLOUD THAT LIFTED, for instance, is about an assassination. And it’s the assassination of a king. The king is shot at from a grassy knoll. The guy who does the shooting is called Alec, which was Lee Harvey Oswald’s nickname in the Soviet Union. And in the play, they’re not sure if Alec was working for Russia or not. And that was a play that was written before Jack Kennedy was even born. The whole scenario is laid out there.

There’s a deeper set of connective tissue behind the events that we see and sense with our other senses. There’s something else going on, what I call the sinister forces.