there are elves in the woods

a comment on "The whispering ones" by Sam Kriss

I.

Sam Kriss writes:

“…while it was John Hinckley that fired the gun at Reagan, there’s another man involved whose relation to the whole affair is much more mysterious: Reagan’s then-Vice President, George HW ‘Poppy’ Bush.

Bush was not in Washington when Reagan was shot; he was visiting Texas. In his absence, General Alexander Haig barged into a press conference and appeared to announce that he’d taken over the government. As I wrote in “American Idols”, at the time, “it might have looked a lot like the United States had finally gone through its first coup. Maybe Bush was being held in an underground cell in Texas; maybe he was in on it. He had some creepy connection to the man who’d just taken down Reagan. The shooter’s father was a family friend. They had the same lawyer. Bush’s son Neil was supposed to be having dinner with Hinckley’s brother Scott the very next evening. It all stank of conspiracy.” In the end, Bush arrived in Washington that evening, around the same time Reagan regained consciousness in hospital, and the normal course of government continued. There was no crisis after all.

But there’s a problem with this official story, which is that it doesn’t make sense.

According to the alleged timeline, at the precise moment when Reagan was shot Bush was on board Air Force Two, flying between Fort Worth, where he’d just been attending a luncheon with the Southwest Cattle Raisers Association, and Austin, where he was due to address the Texas State Legislature. After being told about the shooting, he cancelled the rest of the day’s engagements. Air Force Two touched down Austin for a record-breakingly fast refuel before speeding at full throttle immediately to DC, where it arrived nearly five hours later. United will get you from Austin to Washington in three hours fifteen. The numbers do not add up. There is a gap of close to ninety minutes in which the Vice President’s movements are almost entirely unknown.

Thanks to testimony from an anonymous retired agent, we now know that contrary to the official timeline, when Reagan was shot Bush was not actually in the air. He was still on the ground in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The Secret Service were frantically searching for him, with absolutely no success: somehow, the second most powerful person in the world had simply disappeared, as if he’d quietly sublimated into the air. He wasn’t seen again until he presented himself at the gates of Carswell AFB, behind the wheel of an unmarked Plymouth Reliant. He refused to tell anybody where he’d been, or how he’d got the car. (It was later taken to a military scrapyard and destroyed.)

One other thing. Bush’s first stop that day, before the cattle ranchers’ luncheon, was at the Texas Hotel in downtown Fort Worth. He was there to unveil a plaque, commemorating the fact that nearly twenty years ago, President John F Kennedy had spent his last night there before being assassinated.

You can only talk about Poppy Bush for so long before you have to start talking about the CIA. Officially, Bush was brought in as Director of Central Intelligence for just one year, January 1976 to 1977. In fact, he’d been CIA his entire life. He was CIA in 1963, when he just so happened to be in Dallas while Kennedy was being shot. He was CIA before that too. What you need to understand about Central Intelligence is that it makes the things happen that would have happened anyway. On the day that Poppy Bush slipped away from his Secret Service detail, there was also man in Indochina growing opium for the CIA. He would have done it anyway, because it’s how he makes his money, but he did it because of them. Somewhere in Miami, there was a man smuggling small arms for the CIA. He would have done it anyway, because he wants revenge against the Communists, but he does it because of them. Somewhere in Vienna, there was a man who’d been assassinated by the CIA. He would have died anyway, because that’s the fate of every living thing, but he died because of them. The CIA does nothing, nothing at all. CIA is the name we give to inevitability itself. They killed Kennedy, but that’s not the real story. They also killed Lincoln and Caesar and your dog when you were four. CIA spins the wheels that power the Earth’s rotation in space. You can never know, when the leaves crinkle on the trees in autumn or when your parents tuck you into bed at night, whether this thing that was always going to happen happened simply by itself, or whether it’s the slow spinning hand of Central Intelligence, the hand that turns the weft of the world, that makes the winds blow and hangs a sunrise above the yellow fields of corn.

The Agency might have chosen Poppy ten thousand years before he was born, and they might have chosen you too. There is no beginning. But in the more prosaic sense, they got him at Yale. That was how it worked in those days. You’d be invited to your professor’s house for tea and sandwiches with a few other promising students. A modest, dignified house, Dutch Colonial style, full of books. While you’re there, in the conservatory, looking out at the pond in the garden and praising your hostess’s work with the flowerbeds, you’re approached by two men in suits with neat slicked-back hair. George, isn’t it? We’ve heard a lot about you. We hear you flew surveillance in the war, snapping Jap naval installations, kept everything hush-hush, excellent work. And your father tells us you’re doing very well here. Fraternity president, baseball captain. A very promising young fellow. Bonesman. Magog, eh? Well, boys will be boys. Say, have you picked a major? Economics you say. A very wise choice. Set a young man like yourself in good stead. Precisely what we would have suggested. One of them would offer you a cigarette, and then nod approvingly when you declined. You know, George, there’s someone you ought to meet. How about dinner Thursday?

So you put on your tux and drive down from Connecticut to a nice restaurant in the city, 61st Street, and over the roast beef and potatoes and starched white linen you talk to another Yale professor. He doesn’t treat you like a student; he wants to know what you think about things. Will Mao and his Reds cross the Yellow River? Might extra-sensory perception be worthy of scientific study? And ought we, d’you think, ought we try to improve the status of the Negroes? He listens to your answers, nodding. Well, he says at the end of the night, I think it’s clear you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You should come and see me back in New Haven. And as he’s leaving, a final tossed-off thought: by the way, George, have you ever thought about getting into the oil business? You have? A capital idea. Precisely what I would have suggested. And then, just like that, you’re in.

More dinners. Interesting conversations with interesting people. The Agency likes interesting people. People who quip in Greek and Latin; pathici et cinaedi. A very neat, very buttoned-up group of probably latent homosexuals, but the way some of them talked, they could have been beatniks. Doper talk. They wanted to tell you about sunken cities, Lemuria and Mu. Tidal currents in outer space. The unknown race that built the Moon. But there were stranger folks and colder, glowering on the periphery of this little world. Poppy never saw them at the dinners, but in offices sometimes, or photographs. Mangy creatures with gunshot eyes. Maybe a village in the Ukraine had seen those eyes one cold day in ‘42, all those families marched to a riverbank and left facedown in the mud. Maybe a village in Guatemala would be seeing those eyes very soon.

But most of the Agency folks were actually pretty familiar. Yalies; he’d know them anywhere. It’s in the posture, the walk, the way you hold a martini glass. Yale University was founded in 1701 by Puritan settlers in Connecticut, then still a savage land of dark green forests, to provide a recruiting ground for CIA. To build a nation that might one day support CIA. Name from Iâl, a barony of Maelor in the scarred hills of Wales, where the wild hares might stand for a moment on two feet and sniff the air. Where the ancient eyes of a hare might see something moving in wisps on a hillside where there’s nothing else around.

Nobody ever told him straight out. But Poppy came to understand, over the course of all those interesting conversations, that this thing he called the United States of America was always, right from the very start, the long slow project of something else. A disguise sometimes worn by something else. A thin eggshell, hatching over the centuries into something else.

Then there was Midland. Drab scut of a town; cattle lowing under sandstorms. West Texas, still an only halfway civilised country. Poppy would drive over the basin, planting markers for wells. His company, Zapata Petroleum—it was an Agency front, of course, but he never asked what it might be fronting. Maybe there was nothing behind the mask. Maybe they were trying to disguise the fact that all Zapata did was drill for oil in Texas. It seemed to find plenty of the stuff. CIA does the things that would have happened anyway.

Dinners in Dallas now. There were lots of things he got up to in Dallas. I was thinking of moving into offshore drilling, he mentioned. Because he didn’t like the dust, but they gave him the same appreciative nod he knew from Connecticut. They knew what he was going to do before he’d even decided on it himself, and they always approved. At night, when the kids were in bed and his wife was asleep, he’d stand in front of the bathroom mirror and try to pull faces they wouldn’t predict. Half-afraid that at any minute his reflection would nod and say yes George, licking your own nostril, exactly the kind of smart decision we’d expect from a young man of your calibre.

They didn’t have to tell him to go into politics. The choice was made for him, by him, by the other him that sat in the seat of his brain and ordered him about. The black double of himself they kept in chains up in the temple complexes at Langley. Lash the creature’s back: it howls in pain, dribbles blood through a toothless wordless mouth, and now Poppy’s on a flight to China. An ambassador without an embassy, cycling through narrow Beijing hutongs all by himself, no Marines, no guard, nothing between himself and the roiling ocean of China on every side, high-pressure China bursting at its joins. The east is red! The sun is rising! China brings forth Mao Zedong! Well, Poppy got to meet the fellow himself. A short, slightly grubby old man; you wouldn’t recognise him from all those serene posters. Good-natured, but a low sort. He wouldn’t have made the cut at Yale. Cracked dirty jokes, and not particularly interested in politics. Only Poppy couldn’t help himself from searching the Great Helmsman’s face for some kind of clue. Is that really Chairman Mao in there? Could Mao Zedong have been one of them all along? Was there anything, even in the Forbidden City, even in the heart of Red China, that lay outside the system?

There was an Agency fellow that Poppy knew briefly back in DC, Teddy something, who’d gone over the edge. The higher you move up in this system, the less you know. Poppy had got in at the middle and ended up as Director of Central Intelligence, and the Director’s job is to be totally ignorant about everything CIA does. But Teddy they’d put in Indonesia, where he’d helped some of those men with gunshot eyes hack up little kids with machetes. Nasty business but it had to be done. Teddy came back talking about elves. Not Christmas elves; the other kind. The fairy folk. The shining ones. In Indonesia they called them the orang bunian, which means the hidden people. People who look just like you or me, except they’re faintly glowing and also invisible. Wait a second, darn it, how are you supposed to know what they look like? Good question. Folklore gives no answer. This is the mystery. The orang bunian live in the high mountains and the caves, far away from human society. They have their own kings and courtiers, invisible. Sometimes they steal human children and replace them with one of their own. When a household object goes missing, people say the orang bunian took it. Elves.

Teddy said every society has some version of them. In Hawaii there are the menehune, little unseen people who build entire villages overnight, right in the middle of the forest, for laughing purposes not ours to know. In China they have the fox spirits, immortals who pretend to be beautiful young women. Poppy’s ancestors, a thousand years back, mud-gawping peasants that they were, could have told you what happens at night, when you see the distant lights and hear the distant laughter of the good folk, who are always beautiful and always smiling, but who live underground, and who pay their tithes to Hell. Everyone in the world agrees that aside from the ordinary people you can meet in the daylight, there are also the other people. They live somewhere else, on the other side, but like the other side of a page it’s never far away. Even a whisper makes it through. And while they sometimes enjoy individual humans, our lives do not matter to them the way they do to us. They kill us the way you’d kill a fly.

Teddy thought they were real. He was giddy about it. At first it was hard to distinguish his madness among all those wet-lipped young aristocrats talking about orgones and Mu, but Teddy clung to his orang bunian with real desperation, as if only their existence could justify his life. He was going back out there, to Indonesia, to sweep the mountains with Geiger counters. Maybe the elves were his way out, his way of not having to think about the one million people he helped kill in ‘65. One thing you can say about the hidden people is that surely they are outside of the system. Only—are you sure? This was the thought that had crossed Poppy’s mind as Teddy, six martinis deep, slurred his way through the folk traditions of Upper Sumatra. You say every society has them: well, what about us? What would the elves look like, not in the legends of the gooks of the Minangkabau, but right here in the good old USA? The hidden people, the whispering people, who steal something here, build something there, play around with human lives like sport, and generally make things happen such that you can’t be certain they did anything at all. It’s us, Teddy. Our elf-lore is in spy stories. The fairies at the bottom of your garden are CIA. (“The whispering ones”)

II.

You still don’t get it, do you? Of course it’s elves, fairies, dwarves, gnomes, nymphs, sylphs, succubi and incubi. Of course it’s aliens, angels, demons, djinns, devas, interdimensional shapeshifters. It’s the “X” in the X-Files, it’s the goddamn Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster and the Little Green Men from Mars, it’s what John Keel referred to simply as “the Phenomenon”. It never began and it never fucking ends. Behind the Deep State is an infinite recursion of Deeper States. Behind the gods are more gods.

In Etruscan religion, the dii involuti (“veiled” or “hidden gods”) were a group of gods, or possibly a principle, superior to the ordinary pantheon of gods. In contrast to the ordinary Etruscan gods, including the Dii Consentes, the dii involuti were not the object of direct worship and were never depicted. Their specific attributes and number are unknown; Jean-René Jannot suggests that they may represent either an archaic principle of divinity or “the very fate that dominates individualized gods”.

Do you get it now? Even the aliens have aliens, even the demons have demons. It’s agents and agencies all the way down and all the way up. No matter how deep the rabbit hole or how vast the conspiracy, it’s always just the tip of the iceberg. Nothing is random, everything is connected, anything can mean something, something can mean everything.

The A.D. 1st century Roman historian Seneca the Younger observed: “This is the difference between us and the Etruscans. We believe that lightning is caused by clouds colliding, whereas they believe that the clouds collide in order to create lightning. Since they attribute everything to the gods, they are led to believe not that events have a meaning because they have happened, but that they happen in order to express a meaning.”

All things are full of gods. Trust no one.

II.

Seymour Cray was the father of modern supercomputing.
Seymour Cray talked to elves.

John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray’s home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said “Well, we have elves here, and they help me”. Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. “While I’m digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem”, he said.

This anecdote, the internet assures me, was a typical “Rollwagenism”, a tall tale told by its namesake (the CEO of Cray Research) in order to enhance Cray’s reputation as an eccentric genius.

Curious to know more about Cray’s elves, I did some digging of my own. The earliest source I can find is a 1988 blurb in Time Magazine, “Technology: Just Dig While You Work”.

For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. “I work when I’m at home,” he recently told a visiting scientist. “I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s. Now, as you can see, I’m up in the Wisconsin woods¹, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I’m having. Then I go back up and work some more.”

Rollwagen knows that Cray is only half kidding and that some of the designer's greatest inspirations come when he is digging. Says the chairman: “The real work happens when Seymour is in the tunnel.”

Curiously, it is Cray, not Rollwagen, who first mentions the Elves. Far from contributing to the legend, Rollwagen throws cold water on it, quickly reassuring us that his colleague is only half-kidding.

The one other primary source I can find is a stray comment by one Mr. Bali Hai on a boingboing.net blog post from 2006.

“I worked for Cray Research from 1984-1996, and I can tell you that the story of him tunneling under his house is largely a fabrication made up by John Rollwagen to enhance Seymour’s reputation as a quirky, visionary genius (which he was, but not because he was digging tunnels under his house). What actually transpired involved Seymour having some excavation work done on his basement by contractors. As far as I know, none of them were elves. Rollwagen also took an incident where Seymour burned a sailboat at his lake house and turned it into a mythic tale of Cray building a new sailboat every year, then burning it so he could design and build a new one the following year.”

Perusing Cray’s wikipedia page, I noticed something unusual.

Cray was mortally wounded in a rollover accident caused by a reckless driver while Cray was merging his Jeep Cherokee onto Interstate 25, near the Air Force Academy in Colorado. Cray died of his injuries on October 5, 1996, two weeks after the accident and one week after his 71st birthday.

…a ‘rollover accident’…in a Jeep Cherokee…

The Jeep Cherokee is a line of sport utility vehicles (SUV) manufactured and marketed by Jeep over six generations. Marketed initially as a variant of the Jeep Wagoneer (SJ), the Cherokee has evolved from a full-size station wagon (before the SUV description came into use) to one of the first compact SUVs and into its latest generation as a crossover SUV.

…roll…wagon…Rollwagen!!!

A likely story emerges: the elves did not appreciate Cray speaking out of turn about them. Having a sense of humor and fancying a good pun, the elves killed him so (how’s that for a “Rollwagenism”??!?). Ten years on, one Mr. Bali Hai (an elven name if I’ve ever seen one) leaves a short comment on an obscure blog post assuring us that Cray’s elves were merely a fanciful fabrication.

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Mysterious subterranean beings who teach us how to work with metals—this is nothing new. Consider what is perhaps the oldest known reference to such lore:

In Greek mythology, the Cabeiri or Cabiri, were a group of enigmatic chthonic deities. They were worshipped in a mystery cult closely associated with that of Hephaestus, centered in the north Aegean Islands of Lemnos and possibly Samothrace—at the Samothrace temple complex—and at Thebes

In myth, the Cabeiri were sometimes identified with other fabulous races such as the Telchines of Rhodes, the Cyclopes, the Korybantes, the Kouretes, and the Dactyls. The Dactyls, a race of spirit-men associated with the Great Mother Cybele, were regarded as ancient smiths and healing magicians. In some myths, they are in Hephaestus’ employ, and they taught metalworking, mathematics, and the alphabet to humans.

The Greeks were taught mathematics and metallurgy.
Cray was taught how to build a supercomputer.

Hesychius of Alexandria wrote that the Cabeiri were karkinoi (“crabs”). The Cabeiri as Karkinoi were apparently thought of as amphibious beings (again recalling the Telchines). They had pincers instead of hands, which they used as tongs in metalworking.

Maybe it’s nothing, I don’t know, but Cray—it’s an unusual name, isn’t it? Naturally, one is reminded of that pincered crustacean, the Crayfish.

“Cray” is an old word for chalk, the soft limestone rock that forms much of southern England. It has nothing to do with ‘crayfish’ however, which is from the unrelated Middle English crevice , -visse, from Old French crevice.

What a strange coincidence, that Cray spoke to his elves in an underground tunnel, a crevice in the rock…

Seymour Cray, who was definitely not an elf

III.

You want Disclosure? You want them to release the files? I’ll tell you what’s in the damn files: Events. Enigmas. Anomalies. Synchronicities. Conflicting reports. Con artists. Charlatans. Missing persons. Madness.

They don’t have a fucking clue. All the agencies in the world couldn’t tell you a single thing that Fort, Keel, and Vallée didn’t already tell us.

They—or it, i.e. the Phenomenon—have always been here.

They are not from outer space. We are dealing with a multidimensional paraphysical phenomenon indigenous to planet earth…We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.

They are neither flesh nor figment of imagination, but can appear as either.

The Phenomenon does not consist of tangible manufactured objects but is a complex manipulation of energies within the electromagnetic spectrum, producing effects that can be temporarily solid or visible but are not permanent…The believer’s mistake is to ascribe meaning and credence to the secondary perception, the mental image created by our brain to account for the stimulus. The skeptic’s mistake is to deny the reality of the stimulus altogether, simply because the secondary perception seems absurd to him or her. What we take to be reality may, in fact, be a mere appearance, or projection, onto the “screen” of our four-dimensional space-time world from a much more complex, multi-dimensional, more fundamental reality.

Their invisible hand has guided our evolution and civilizational development. They have whispered to kings, passed secrets to scientists, granted visions to visionaries (and still do). They founded the major world religions. Jesus was one of Them.² The Buddha, too.³

There exists a natural phenomenon whose manifestations border on both the physical and the mental. There is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated. This would explain the fugitivity of UFO manifestations, the alleged contact with friendly occupants, and the fact that the objects appear to keep pace with human technology and to use current symbols... It also, naturally, explains the totality of religious miracles as well as ghosts and other so-called supernatural phenomena.

There is a tricksiness, a sense of humor. It enjoys bewildering and misleading us. It seems to delight in leaving easter eggs and leading us on wild goose chases.

The Phenomenon is deceptive in nature. It sometimes seems to be a deliberate hoax, designed to mislead us and confuse us. It is almost as if some kind of cosmic game is being played with us. It distorts our reality whimsically, perhaps out of boredom, or perhaps because it is a little crazy.

You know that Mitch Hedberg joke about bigfoot?

I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that’s extra scary to me. There’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.

It’s like that—the Phenomenon is epistemically blurry, intrinsically dubious and ambiguous.

Wherever there are secrets, you will find It. Before intelligence agencies, it was guilds, societies, fraternal orders, mystery cults. It remains hidden by associating with the untrustworthy, with those whose accounts will never be taken seriously: children, eccentrics, the deranged, the drug-addled, the deceitful.⁴

The phenomenon seems to feed on belief. The more we try to pin it down with our theories and explanations, the more it shifts to defy those explanations. Belief is the enemy.

The Phenomenon has achieved total crypsis. It is blended so perfectly into reality that for all intents and purposes It simply is reality (“….It makes the things happen that would have happened anyway…It is nothing, nothing at all.”).

Whenever a set of unusual circumstances is presented, it is in the nature of the human mind to analyze it until a rational pattern is encountered at some level. But it is quite conceivable that nature should present us with circumstances so deeply organized that our observational and logical errors would entirely mask the pattern to be identified.

There is a strange urge in my mind: I would like to stop behaving as a rat pressing levers—even if I have to go hungry for a while. I would like to step outside the conditioning maze and see what makes it tick. I wonder what I would find.

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1. Cray’s elves, native to the Wisconsin woods, were likely Memegwaans, the little people of Ojibwe lore, or descendants thereof.

According to Ojibwe folklorist Basil H. Johnston, a Memegwaan is a little person without definitive form which is terrified of adult humans. However, it seems to have a soft spot for children and will often approach in the guise of a child to any young person who seems upset, injured, scared or lonely and either protect them or keep them company until help arrives. If an adult sees one, they will often cower on the ground, screaming and crying hysterically before vanishing in the blink of an eye. They were also known as protectors of copper mines and were prayed to almost as patron saints of lost children.

We can see why they might not have taken kindly to Cray mentioning them in Time Magazine (of all places).

2. A newly translated Egyptian homily dating from the eighth century claims Jesus was a shapeshifter.

“Then the Jews said to Judas: How shall we arrest him [Jesus], for he does not have a single shape but his appearance changes. Sometimes he is ruddy, sometimes he is white, sometimes he is red, sometimes he is wheat coloured, sometimes he is pallid like ascetics, sometimes he is a youth, sometimes an old man …”

Another example of Jesus’ shapeshifting comes from the gnostic Gospel of Philip, which portrays him adapting his appearance to the perceptions of those around him:

Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not appear as he was, but in the manner in which they would be able to see him. He appeared to them all. He appeared to the great as great. He appeared to the small as small. He appeared to the angels as an angel, and to men as a man. Because of this, his word hid itself from everyone. Some indeed saw him, thinking that they were seeing themselves, but when he appeared to his disciples in glory on the mount, he was not small. He became great, but he made the disciples great, that they might be able to see him in his greatness.

One further example, from the apocryphal Acts of John (87-89):

For when [Jesus] had chosen Peter and Andrew, who were brothers, he came to me and my brother James, saying “I need you; come to me!” And my brother…said: “John, what does he want, this child on the shore who called us? And I said, “Which child?” And he answered me, “The one who is beckoning to us.” And I replied: “Because of the long watch we have kept at sea, you are not seeing well, brother James. Do you not see the man standing there who is handsome, fair and cheerful-looking?”…And when we had brought the boat to land, we saw how he also helped us to beach the boat. And as we left the place, wishing to follow him, he appeared to me again as rather bald-headed but with a thick flowing beard, but to James as a young man whose beard was just beginning.

3. Like Jesus, the Buddha engaged in all kinds of supernatural shenanigans.

The Buddha is reported to have performed miracles such as walking on water, multiplying his body (bilocation), reading minds (telepathy), and recalling past lives (precognition). During his enlightenment, he experienced visions of cosmic realms, akin to out-of-body experiences or astral projection in modern psi terms. His meditative journeys resemble reported alien abductions involving transcendent encounters with higher intelligences.

4. Ramsey Dukes, “The Charlatan and the Magus”

I am sure that, in terms of sheer numbers, the majority of mankind probably subscribes to some religion which insists that the world is an illusion or something less than really real; even our own scientists are increasingly making it seem like an illusion. And yet, when we want to find out about the world, so many of us still choose to seek the answers among those who search for absolute truth. Might you not find out more about the nature of an illusion by following those who deal in illusions? Might not the spiritual path lead through the world of mountebanks and charlatans, rather than away from it?