Celebrity Numerology

One from the Victorian Squares blog:

Okay, now this is creepy: I just found a "Celebrity Numerology" site that has a page about me, breaking down my personal numerology profile, astrological info, and biorhythm charts.

Even though I think it's all a buncha fried baloney, I have to say some of their observations about me are fascinating. Check out their "Soul Urge" page about me:

Jeffrey Scott Holland wants success in its fullest meaning - wealth, power, and material comforts. He has an enormous ambition. Jeffrey dreams of big projects, great undertakings, and rewards.

Holland is a visionary. He sees the horizon and the promise. In general, Jeffrey Scott Holland also sees the methods necessary to fulfill that promise. But he is not especially good with details; Jeffrey needs others to help him deal with the smaller parts of the picture. His challenge is to make full use of the full spectrum of his abilities, as indicated by his other core numbers. In the same way, Holland must bring forth the best from others and orchestrate their talents toward the realization of his vision. In short, Jeffrey Scott Holland must lead by example, demonstrating the standard for commitment, determination, and excellence.

Pretty wacky, eh? Wait, it gets wackier. This is from their numerological personality profile of me:

He is hard to get to know, and is often withdrawn. It is common for people to see Jeffrey Scott Holland's focus turn inside of himself in the middle of a conversation. Jeffrey has the makings of an intellectual and an aristocrat but he has to guard against arrogance and an attitude of "I have got it all figured out". There have been periods in Jeffrey Scott Holland's life when he had little concern for his clothing or fashion, while at other times he is very aware of his clothing and uses it to make a specific impression. Jeffrey appears dignified no matter how he dresses, but a well groomed seven with a touch of dash definitely has an advantage. Holland's confidence increases when he knows he is well dressed.

Jeffrey Scott Holland is recognized as spiritual and religious, with his very own ideas regarding the purpose of life and the Creator. He is an inspired speaker, but only when discussing subjects that really interest him. Otherwise, Jeffrey is not one for chatter. His love of knowledge and wisdom shows.

Wow, that's actually hitting a little too close to home. In fact, I had some trepidation about next clicking their "Destiny" page about me. Turns out I'm an "11", which it says here is "the most highly charged destiny number" of them all (say it like Jim Morrison):

Jeffrey Scott Holland has always sensed that he is different, but it was an indefinable feeling. Jeffrey is enormously sensitive and aware, especially as a child. This made Holland vulnerable to all conflicts and painful situations. For most of his upbringing, however, Jeffrey Scott Holland did not realize that other people did not possess the same sensitivity, nor did they see the same things he was seeing.

Holland compensated for his sense of separation in childhood by creating an elaborate fantasy world. He daydreamed more than other children. He had a lively imagination and even in adulthood has a hard time separating reality from fantasy.

Jeffrey Scott Holland's challenge is to bring forth his primitive, earthy strength. He needs to be grounded in order to deal with his lightning bolts. The more Jeffrey is able to call upon his inherent human strength, the greater his capacity to take advantage of his extremely sensitive awareness. Once this is accomplished, Holland's antagonist becomes his benefactor.

Jeffrey is highly emotional and dependent upon relationships. Emotionally, he goes up and down with the fortunes of his love life.

He is idealistic, impractical, and at times disorderly. Holland is often unrealistic in his expectations.

His reasons for doing things are usually born of a mixture of logic, emotion, and intuition, which can rarely be explained satisfactorily to his more rational associates.

I don't know whether to be insulted because the unflattering parts are absolutely spot-on, or to be pleased about the hyper-mystical stroking it's giving me at the same time. I think I'm just gonna try to forget about the whole thing and go lay down and listen to The Monkees some more.

Abraham Lincoln, Spiritualist?

I've often read accusations of President Lincoln - our nation's only Kentuckian President - having been an occultist, a pagan, or even an atheist. These sort of things usually come from those sort of people (and I think you know who I mean) who have an agenda in wanting to smear Mr. Lincoln's name.

But far from dashing my respect for him, I actually have greater fascination than ever for ol' Abe after doing some research on his involvement with the Spiritualism religion. Strange as it may seem, The President of the United States and the First Lady actually held seances right in the White House.

To many, Spiritualism may seem not all that different from Theosophy. The main difference, aside from Theosophists having a greater flair for ritual and grand-poobah hats and medals, is that "mediums" like Annie Besant and Helena Blavatsky believed that they were contacting some sort of higher life forms to receive divine wisdom and cosmic knowledge. Spiritualists, on the other hand, just wanted to call up Uncle Davenport on the horn and ask him how's the food in Heaven. Wikipedia says: "Spiritualists at that time viewed Theosophy as unscientific and both occultist and cult-like. Theosophists viewed Spiritualism as unsophisticated and uncosmopolitan."

But let's face it - what could be more occult than conjuring up the souls of the dead and communicating with them? And some Spiritualists, like Vermont's Achsa W. Sprague, claimed that they used the powers of the spirits to cure their medical ills. This would actually make Sprague and her ilk the first sort-of "faith healers", even before Mary Baker Eddy or William Branham.

In defense of Lincoln, the White House seances were largely organized by his wife Mary Todd (who was also a Kentuckian, born in Lexington). Lincoln very well could have just gone along with it all to appease her.

Even if he was genuinely a believer in it, he may have still taken it only as seriously as people today who go to Psychic Channellers, which is to say, hopefully not much aside from entertainment's sake.

Then, too, the Lincolns' interest in mediums and spiritualists was to try to contact their dead son, who they still grieved for heavily. (And after the President's murder, Mary Todd went even deeper into Spiritualism - and madness.)


On the other hand, Lincoln himself admitted that he "always had a strong tendency to mysticism", and Lincoln's friend and law partner, William Herndon said that Lincoln actually wrote a treatise in defense of Thomas Paine's anti-Christian and anti-religious booklet The Age of Reason in 1835, and that their friend Samuel Hill destroyed it to save Lincoln's political career from the controversy it would have surely caused.

Colonel Simon F. Kase, a powerful railroad lobbyist and Washington insider, wrote a book after Abe's death called The Emancipation Proclamation, How, and By Whom It was Given to President Lincoln in 1861 In it, Kase relates how he and a local Judge decided to attend a seance at a home in Georgetown, out of curiosity. There, they were astounded to see President Lincoln and the First Lady in attendance as well.

Kase reported that a young teenage female medium approached the President, eyes closed in a trance, and lectured him (through a spirit voice speaking through her) on how he must put an end to slavery and how the nation would forever be locked in Civil War until he did so. Lincoln, who entered the Civil War with no intention of abolishing slavery, soon changed his philosophy and took the young psychic's advice.

That girl was Nettie Colburn, who went on to write about her experience in a book called Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist?. She tells of how a piano was made by one of the spirit mediums to rise by itself, lifted by the hands of unseen ghosts. Seemingly skeptical, Lincoln joked "I think we can hold down that instrument". He and three others including Col. Kase all sat on the piano, and yet it continued to rise up and down by itself, carrying the President of the United States off the ground with it. Colburn says, "We were convinced that there were no mechanical contrivances to produce the strange result, and Mr. Lincoln expressed himself perfectly satisfied that the motion was caused by some "invisible power."


Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was himself a Spiritualist, and he said that Lincoln's seance with Nettie was "was one of the most important events in the history of the United States. This spirit message strengthened the President in taking a difficult step to which he was not yet firmly committed."

Fortune Telling!

Whilst wading through the manure that is Kentucky's Revised Statutes yesterday in assembling my post on Kentucky's Nudist Society Act, I also happened across good ol' KRS 231.110.

It deals with "Places of Entertainment", and what is forbidden in them. And in typical KRS fashion, it's frightfully vague and disturbingly arbitrary.


Did you know you can't have "drunken" persons in a place of entertainment? I guess that makes every nightclub in Kentucky against the law.

Did you know you cannot have any unmarried man or woman occupy a secreted place together out of view of the public? What year is this, anyway? Sounds more like Saudi Arabia than America to me.

Also says here that persons with a "lascivious reputation" are not allowed to congregate in places of entertainment.

Wait, that can't be right. Can it? Let me just look at that again... hmmmm. Yep, that's what it says.

So, uh, what is the governing body responsible for determining one's "reputation"? Or is it just left to the individual determination of fine morally upstanding law enforcement officers? You know, like Chris Dison.

I know, I know - they always say "oh, those laws aren't really enforced, even though they're still on the books." Yeah. Not enforced much. Except maybe when they need to be, selectively, by serious detectives seeking justice. You know, like Crystal Marlowe.

But most peculiar of all to me is that the statute spends more time being concerned about fortune telling than anything else. Maybe it was a bigger deal in 1978 (when this statute was passed) than it is today, I dunno. Says here an establishment must go through the rigamarole of obtaining authorization to tell fortunes from the county clerk. (Why does an expert in Tarot need to pass muster with some bureaucrat? Is any county clerk knowledgeable about the necromantic arts? Does he/she possess some sort of innate ability to instantly sense the fakes from the "genuine" fortune tellers?)

It further goes on to decree that even after an establishment jumps through all those hoops (and that doesn't even take into consideration each city's own peculiar laws and regulations), it must post in a conspicuous place a schedule showing a detailed breakdown of fees.

It's enough to make a fortune teller not wanna tell fortunes. Or at least go underground. Or at least repaint the sign out front to read "Life Coaching" instead.


I wonder if these statutes ever caused any trouble for Madame Zelda at Squirrely's Magic Tea Room? No wonder she's never there when I drop in.

Oh, how I wish it was 1942 again, when a man could discreetly drive to Madam Brent's trailer and slip through the beaded curtain to have one's fate assessed.

What would Edgar Cayce do?

February is Edgar Cayce Month

One from my writing blog:


In my latest installment of Commonwealth Curiosities, I'm layin' down the lowdown on "sleeping prophet" Edgar Cayce, whose birthday is celebrated every February at the Pennyroyal Area Museum in Hopkinsville, KY. Check out the new issue of Kentucky Monthly magazine at your local bookseller, or even better yet - subscribe!

Atlantis Fountain

Across the street from the Shelby County Courthouse - not far from the Shelbyville Time Capsule - stands this highly peculiar figural fountain. It features a reclining woman lounging with a mythological beast: a bat-winged lion that is either missing its lower half or is seemingly emerging from an opening. To make matters even more puzzling, the bat wings seem applied upside-down to the lion's sides.


There's a plaque nearby that reads: "This fountain was purchased jointly in 1895 by city and county from J. L. Mott Iron Works, New York. It was erected at intersection of Fifth and Main Sts. upon the completion of Shelbyville's first public water works. Moved in 1914 to public square to clear the street after construction of new courthouse. Figure chosen for top of fountain is 'Atlantis' pattern."


But... but... what's so "Atlantis" about spitting goat heads? (Insert "Goat's Head Soup" reference right about here)

And what's so Atlantean about a bat-winged lion? According to Plato, the temple in the center of the lost continent of Atlantis was dominated by a statue of Poseidon driving six winged horses, but horses ain't lions and the wings of Pegasus were birdy, not batty.

Since a complicated occult mythology was built up around the idea of Atlantis by Kentuckians such as the psychic Edgar Cayce and the uber-huckster Editha Salomon (aka "Laura Horos", aka "Anna Sprengel", aka "Ann O'Delia Dis Debar"), I'm curious if they ever saw the statue, and what they thought of it. Did they find it inspiring, or were they as kerfuffled as I?

Sqecial Media

The passage of time has nudged Sqecial Media (pronounced "skeshal", not "squeshal" or "special") from being a mere "hippie shop" into becoming one of Lexington's great historic treasures, a sort of elder statesman of Fayette County hipster retail.

Sqecial Media was founded in 1972 by Madison Countian David Adams, who went on to cofound Morgan-Adams Books in 1990. David died on December 1, 2005 at the age of 66. Originally, Sqecial Media had more of a "head shop" vibe than it does today - or at least had a notorious reputation for it - but today it's a more innocuous source for college students to obtain their prerequisite incense, candles, tarot cards, clove cigarettes, New Age books, essential oils, buddhist statuary, vegan cookbooks, gag gifts, zines, Salvador Dali posters, and Jack Kerouac postcards.

A great many other famous/infamous fringe businesses have graced the downstairs realms of the Sqecial Media building, including Bear's Wax Records, Sami's Music, Voodoo Video (my own weird video store), Paisley Peacock, and an ever-shifting lineup of restaurants.


Due to crazy construction ongoing in the area, you have to take a rather Rube Goldberg circuitous path to get to Sqecial Media. Consult the map below before traveling to 371 South Limestone, and remember, never, never, never park at the McDonalds parking lot adjacent to it. They have minions ready and eager to call a tow truck the moment they see you get out of your car and walk into Sqecial.



(Photos filched from Lori-Lyn Hurley and mightyquinninlex.)

Editha Salomon

Editha Salomon, aka Ann O'Delia Dis Debar, Laura Horos, Ellora, Madame Helana, Swami Viva Ananda, Della Ann O'Sullivan, Angel Anna, Claudia D'Arvie, Editha Gilbert Montez, Vera Ava and Blanche Solomons, was an occultist and scam artist whose exploits were once legendary around the globe, yet this Kentuckian's story is all but forgotten today.

Harry Houdini referred to her as "one of the most extraordinary fake mediums and mystery swindlers the world has ever known". Despite this, she was apparently sincere about the paranormal on some level, and was genuinely influenced by more legitimate occult practices such as Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy. Blavatsky (pictured below) believed that all religions were true at the core of their innermost teachings. Her writings, combining esoteric spiritual philosophy with modern science is considered by many to be the progenitor of "New Age" thought.



In 1870, under the name Editha Gilbert Montez, she swindled a lot of money by passing herself off as the daughter of famous dancer/actress Lola Montez. By the 1880s she was in a fraudulent Spiritualism racket and claiming to be related to West Virginia lawmaker Joseph H. Diss Debar. In truth, she was born Editha Salomon in Harrodsburg, KY and raised in Louisville.

In 1888 she was sentenced to six months in prison on charges of fraud. After getting out of jail, she went right back to her phony-medium cons (as Vera P. Ava), and her fake-royalty pose (as Princess Editha Lolita). In 1898 she was living in New Orleans and it was there that she married her partner in crime, Frank Dutton Jackson.

After a brief jail stay in Louisiana, the pair next popped up in Paris, where they met occultist S. L. MacGregor Mathers. By claiming to be Anna Sprengel, Editha managed to gain access to top-secret texts of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which the pair subsequently absconded with. The incident is mentioned in a footnote about Mathers in The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats:


Interestingly, as it turns out, historians now believe there was no real Anna Sprengel, having been a hoax concocted by William Wynn Westcott. But Westcott's backstory of this mythical Anna Sprengel includes her being the daughter of Lola Montez, which begs the question: was it actually Editha who created the character? Was Westcott a co-conspirator, or he was duped by her into believing this persona? Yet, one must ask, why would she need to return to steal the secrets of the Golden Dawn, if she was in fact its co-creator? What a mess.

They spent time at the Koreshan Unity religious commune in Florida, learning about Hollow Earth theories of its bizarre founder, Cyrus Teed. (At some point in her exploits, Editha also operated a fruitarian colony in Florida, which may or may not have been related to the Koreshan Unity organization.) After leaving Florida, Editha and her husband gallivanted across Europe claiming to be high-ranking representatives of Teed's organization, which they most certainly were not.


In 1890 they were in South Africa, opening a "College of Occult Sciences" in Cape Town. As "Laura Horos", she lectured on the stolen teachings of the Golden Dawn and gave clairvoyant readings under various pseudonyms. Their college had moved to England by 1900, and their curriculum had expanded to include magnetic healing, parapsychology, clairvoyance, divination, materialization of ectoplasm, thaumaturgy, and channeling divine entities.

Some twisted sex magick was apparently also a big part of their system: in 1901 they were arrested for rape and buggery of a sixteen-year-old girl, jewelry theft and false pretenses. Jackson (who was by now calling himself "Theodore Horos") got 15 years, Editha got 7. She was released early, on July 1906, for good behavior.


The New York Times was seemingly fond of covering her sensationalist antics, as can be seen by combing through their archives. In them, you'll find a whole treasure trove of odd gossip about her adventures in addition to those mentioned here.

One of the many notches on Editha's arrest record was an incident in which she was caught stealing money from an elderly woman who had hired her to try to contact the ghost of her deceased husband in a private seance. Hearing of this, I have to wonder if The Rainbird Pattern, the 1972 novel which became Alfred Hitchcock's 1976 film Family Plot, was inspired in part by Editha and her husband. The book and film are about a husband-and-wife con duo whose scams revolve around her phony-psychic routine.

Late in 1909, Editha was living alone in Cincinnati, Ohio, once again using the name Vera Ava. And then she just disappeared. We don't know where or when she died, and we don't know where she is buried. The proximity to Kentucky in her last known appearance nudges the imagination into supposing that she might have come back to her Kentucky.

Climax Cave

I've been in many Kentucky caves but I don't think Rockcastle County's Climax Cave is one of them. I just happened to read about it tonight while researching something else, as so often happens with this here internet thingie.

Someone named Jenna Martin has a very interesting report of a trip to the cave in 2000, an excerpt from which follows:

Climax is one of those caves that, once you get to a certain landmark, you can wander around the many passages and not get lost because they all, for the most part, lead back to that main room. We did some exploring. We sat in one passageway for a bit and let the bats zoom by our faces. And we carried on some deep, philosophical discussions while we crawled through the mud. Good times. Around 1 am, we decided to head for the exit. With some caves, you have to exit where you came in because the passage eventually becomes impassible. Climax, though, has a separate exit that spits us out into a hilly cow field with a winding trail that brings us about a mile down the road from the church. In the middle of the night, you not only have to watch out for giant cow patties all over the place, but you also have to pass one of those ancient, scary-movie cemeteries with the complimentary creaking iron gated archway while hearing what we imagine to be wild, rabid dogs barking and howling in the not-so-distant distance. Creepy as hell, but if you call yourself a caver, you've gotta at least pretend you've got some balls.

We turned the last corner before we got to the exit. Before us, lining the 30 foot high and about 50 foot wide mouth of Climax, were about 100 or so lit candles. For years and years, this area has been thought to be highly paranormally active. (Not to mention all of the creepy "Deliverance" parallels we've noticed, on occasion.) Spirit hunters attribute ghost sightings and strange events to civil war activities that occurred in the area, extreme suffering of people living and dying in these "hollows", and the bizarre fundamentalist religions and occult rituals that were practiced by reclusive clans of Kentucky mountain people.

Climax Cave can be entered by way of an opening near the Climax Baptist Church, which is located in the small town of Climax, KY (home of Climax Mountain Spring Water). If you go, note that Climax Cave is closed from September through April, to allow the indigenous population of endangered Indiana Bats some quality alone-time.

Climax Cave is 1.554 miles long, which puts it at #626 in the Top 1000 Longest Caves in the USA.


These photos were filched from here. Click it to see some more great photos of Climax Cave.

"Witch's Grave" - Not!

One of the graves in Eastern Cemetery has unfortunately developed a ridiculous reputation as a "Witch's Grave" or "Satanic Grave", for the stupidest of all possible reasons:

1. It has a five-pointed upside-down star on it.

2. It says "I'll live again".

And that's it. No, really.

First of all, it's commonly known (seriously, it's very commonly known) that a Masonic-oriented Bible-based organization for women known as the Order of the Eastern Star employs a five-pointed upside-down star as its emblem. It is seen on countless headstones in cemeteries. It's no big deal. It has nothing to do with satanism, witchcraft, Wicca, paganism, etc. and has no symbolic relation to Baphomet or the inverted pentagram symbol that pop-culture-overloaded youth, in their ignorance, so readily and superficially associate with all things occult.

Secondly, "I'll live again" is an extremely common sort of Christian sentiment found on graves, referring to the promised Biblical resurrection wherein the dead return to life, either literally on Earth, or spiritually in Heaven, depending on your interpretation of the Scriptures. Any old cemetery is filled with inscriptions like "I Will Live Again", "I Shall Return", "We Shall Meet Again", "I Am Not Dead But Only Sleeping", etc. It's no big deal.

There is every indication that this was simply a nice little old lady, a devout Christian, who spent time with her Eastern Star gal-pals knitting and tatting. Grow a brain and stop perpetuating this ridiculous rumor about someone's dead grandmother.

Ordo Templi Orientis in Kentucky

I like to keep up with unusual religions (you may have noticed by now that I rarely use the word "cult") and am often surprised to see the variety of belief systems one can find in our fair state.

Why, there's even a Louisville O.T.O. chapter, believe it or not.

The O.T.O., or Ordo Templi Orientis, is described on their own website as a "hierarchical, religious membership organization" whose mission is to "effect and promote the doctrines and practices of the philosophical and religious system known as Thelema, with particular emphasis on cultivating the ideals of individual liberty, self-discipline, self-knowledge, and universal brotherhood".

Though the group was founded in Germany in the late 19th century by Karl Kellner and Theodor Reuss, it is most famous today because of Aleister Crowley, who joined in 1910 and was running the British lodge by 1912. Because of his drug experimentation, hedonistic sex magick rituals, and general disdain for a significant portion of mankind, he was dubbed "The Wickedest Man In the World" by critics and wags in the media.

Crowley once said: "the O.T.O. is in possession of one supreme secret. The whole of its system is directed towards communicating to its members, by progressively plain hints, this all-important instruction."


The Louisville O.T.O. publishes a quarterly paper called the Fleur de Lis, which, much like the Eastern Accent before it, features a "Peanuts"-inspired comic strip called "Crowley Brown".

Madam Brent

Today this scrap of a 1942 Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper fell out of an old book - a 1930s RCA catalog of radio tubes that I bought in Madison County in the late 1980s. I've shlepped the book around the many different places I've lived since then, and never noticed the scrap tucked into it until 2009.

The scrap seems deliberately torn out of the paper for the purpose of saving Madam Brent's advertisement, since the reverse side is only a truncated portion of an article.

I can't stop staring at it, wondering what it must have been like to drive down Preston Street (before it become Preston Highway) to a "tent and trailer" to see Madam Brent while World War Two raged on. And the longer I stare at the ad, other questions enter my head. Even in a 1942 economy, how did someone support themselves giving "special readings" way out past the edge of town for fifty cents? And being open for business from 10am to 9pm, seven days a week?

Was Madam Brent possibly, just possibly, selling something else besides psychic readings?