Monday, April 18, 2016

The Bottomless Pit

Perhaps one of the most fantastic stories connected with Charles Manson and his "Family" is that of their attempts to locate a "bottomless pit" in Death Valley where they would ride out the Helter Skelter race war brought on by their lethal Cielo/Waverly jumpstarts.

Leslie Van Houten recalled the "Family's" attempts to locate the bottomless pit in her interview with her attorney Marvin Part on December 29, 1969 (Transcript courtesy of Cielodrive.com): 

MISS VAN HOUTEN: "But we — after that, we started decide — seeing where we were in this position, because we knew that we were part of this Revolutions — of the Revelations in the Bible. We knew that we had a part in it.

"And so we read, and it talked about a hole in the desert or going to the Kingdom. We found out — we started looking into the Death Valley, what’s underneath Death Valley, and we found out there was the Armagosa River and blind fish and all kinds of things that just made us believe that there was a whole world underneath. And that some of the Montezuma’s people are already under there waiting for us.

"And that what would happen is that about a couple thousand of the chosen people — white people — would go down into the center of the earth and stay there for about fifty years. And then there would Athens or — I can’t remember all the names, but something was going to happen. And then we were going to come back up.
And this was when we — the earth would be all black.

"Because to go into the hole, you would have to be perfect in your mind and in your body."

MR. PART:  "Now, how were you supposed to get down to the center of the earth?"

MISS VAN HOUTEN:  "Well, we hadn’t quite figured it out yet. We were looking for the hole.

"That’s what we were doing in the desert with the dune buggies. And that’s why we needed more dune buggies.

"And we were — we had a good idea that it was in the Death Valley area, but we weren’t sure just where.

"And we weren’t quite — we weren’t quite sure of how it was going to work, where we’re going to get in there.

"But maybe it was going to be rigged up from someone who’d gone down before, that it would have water on the top and then like the water would like move away — go away somehow by some kind of mechanism.

"And if we played around the hole enough that went down there, we’d find it out.
And then we could just walk down it and then we’d have to float down a river, one of the rivers, and then it would take us down and take about — I think about two weeks, we figured it out, to get down to the center.

"And then once we got to the center we’d be tiny, and everything would be great big, magnified, like the pearls.

"It talks about the pearls. There’d be giant pearls, and we’d be just little tiny, about maybe five inches compared to everything else."

MR. PART:  "You say it talks about the pearls. Who talks about the pearls?"

MISS VAN HOUTEN:  "At the end of Revelations, in the very last book, almost to the last page, it says that the kingdom will have giant pearls.

"I don’t know who said it — I don’t know who wrote it — but it talks about that, and gold everywhere."

(Van Houten also discusses the Hole briefly in this interview from 1975.)

Recalling Charles Manson's alleged obsession with the pit, sometime Manson associate  Brooks Poston told Inyo County deputy sheriff Don Ward during an October 3, 1969 interrogation at Barker Ranch that the pit was "a cave that he [Manson] says is underneath Death Valley and leads down to a sea of gold that the Indians know about…. [Manson said] every tuned-in tribe of people that's ever lived have escaped the destruction of their race by going underground, literally, and they're all living in a golden city where there's a river that runs through it of milk and honey, and a tree that bears twelve kinds of fruit, a different fruit each month…. and you don't need to bring candles nor any flashlights down there. [Manson] says it will be all lit up because…. the walls will glow and it won't be cold and it won't be too hot. There will be warm springs and fresh water, and people are already down there waiting for him." (Helter Skelter, page 313)

Whence sprang this weird story of paradise in an infinite hole in Death Valley? 

With regard to the "Manson Family" there are several supposed sources for the belief that Manson and his associates could disappear into a bottomless pit to wait out Helter Skelter. One of these sources, as mentioned by Van Houten in her Part interview, was from Chapter Nine from the Book of Revelations in the Bible, specifically,  "And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit…. and there came out of the pit locusts upon the earth; and unto them was given power, as scorpions of the earth have power…." 

Another supposed reference to the pit and "the Family's" equally supposed obsession with it comes from the Beatles' song "Helter Skelter," the alleged anthem behind the Tate-LaBianca murders, wherein Paul McCartney sings, "When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide," a lyric which, according to the prosecution at Manson's murder trial, referred to "the Family" going into the bottomless pit and then returning to the Earth's surface post-Helter Skelter. 

Although Charles Manson very possibly made some note of the bottomless pit mentioned in Revelation 9, he likely did so because he had already heard of another bottomless pit, namely the one mentioned in Indian and mining lore in the area around Death Valley. 

In his 1930 classic book Death Valley author Bourke Lee explained. "The Great Basin Paiute lived surrounded by weird, unearthly beings. They lived in the air above him and in the ground beneath him. They were in the trees, below the surface of the water, in caves and niches in the rock, on the plain and high in the mountains. The U-nu-pits were the commonest of this host of evil spirits. Most evils and mishaps were attributed to the activity of the U-nu-pits. They made their homes in the high cliffs and searched the desert for foolish and unwary people, whom they carried of to toss of the brink of some high canyon wall. No Paiute ever slipped off a high trail to his death solely as a result of his own carelessness or because a rotten path had crumbled beneath him. To the Paiute mind it was clear that the man who fell had been tripped by a U-nu-pits, or that a U-nu-pits had prepared the trail to trap him.

"The Yan-tups were the evil spirits of the springs. They lived in the ground around the subterranean sources of the mountain waterholes. They came out of their deep hiding places at night and say on the surface of the water singing in low, doleful voices. The often seized little children who went to the springs for water and carried them off to hidden caverns."

Besides these examples from Native American lore there are also fairly modern day stories about seemingly bottomless pits and the people who supposedly dwell therein. Here are two of them, as recounted in Mysterious California, by Mike Marinacci (and previously presented here on the MF Blog): 

"Tom Wilson [was] a Charoc Indian who was a Death Valley guide in the 1920s. Wilson said that when he was a boy, his grandfather told him he had found a tunnel that extended for miles beneath the valley. Walking its length, the man ended up at an underground chamber where a race of fair-skinned people dwelt.

"Welcomed by these subterraneans, Wilson's grandfather lived with the for a while. The people spoke a strange foreign language, wore clothes made of a leatherlike substance and illuminated their home with a pale greenish-yellow light of unknown origin.

"The Indian eventually resurface and returned to his people, who were understandably skeptical about his adventure. But Tom Wilson believed that the old man hadn't lied, and he spent the rest of his life searching for the entry of this underground world, convinced until his death in 1968 that it actually existed somewhere beneath Death Valley."

[1968! - GS]

"At one point, Wilson teamed up with a prospector named White, who claimed that he too had found strange underground dwellings in Death Valley. White had been exploring an abandoned mine in Wingate Pass when he fell into a hidden tunnel that led to a series of rooms.

"The rooms were filled with leather-clad human mummies. Gold bars and other fabulous treasures were stacked in piles around them. There was a passageway leading beyond the rooms as well, lit by an eerie greenish-yellow light. But White dared not explore any further, fearful of what might lie beyond.

"White visited the rooms three more times, once with his wife and once with another miner. But he was unable to locate the cavern later when accompanied by Tom Wilson and a group of archeologists, although they did find a curious dead-end tunnel into the solid rock. The area around Wingate Pass was eventually absorbed into the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, and is now closed to the public." 

If there is a bottomless pit in the Death Valley area, where might its entrance be?

One likely candidate is the Devils Hole, a water-filled opening in the earth located about a dozen miles northeast of the town of Death Valley Junction. Although explored extensively, the depth of the water in Devils Hole has never been determined, thus making it an excellent candidate as an entrance into the pit. 

The entrance to the Devils Hole

In June of 1965, just a little over three years before Manson et al.'s initial arrival in the desert,  three amateur scuba divers from Las Vegas ventured into the Hole for some surreptitious recreational diving. Two of them never returned to the surface, and despite a days-long search by scores of would-be rescuers from all over the western U.S., no trace of them was ever found. Manson and his companions absolutely knew about this tragedy, as Catherine "Gypsy" Share referred to it when she was interviewed for the June 25, 1970 Rolling Stone magazine article on "Charles Manson, The Most Dangerous Man Alive."

Headline From the Santa Cruz Sentinel, June 23, 1965

A scuba diver in the Devils Hole during the search for two divers who vanished there in 1965

Just a few hundred yards away from the Devils Hole to the north is another mysterious entryway into Death Valley's subterranean world, the Devils Hole Cave. The Devils Hole Cave also has no known bottom. In fact, it is not even known whether the Cave and the Hole are even connected, despite their close proximity to each other.  

The entrance to the Devils Hole Cave is secured by a welded steel cover to 
prevent unauthorized persons from entering. 

Also in the area are several spring fed pools that likewise have no known depth or origin.

One of the pools in the Devils Hole area. Nobody knows anything about them either. 

There are hundreds of vertical mine shafts in the Death Valley area that could also lead to an underground paradise. And still another entry candidate is the "blow hole" located in the southwestern side of  the Striped Butte in Butte Valley, just a half dozen or so miles from the Myers and Barker ranches.

And another mysterious natural phenomenon of the Death Valley area that might figure into the story is the Amargosa River, which flows in a generally southeasterly direction in the Amargosa Valley east of Death Valley proper adjacent to California Highway 127. Certainly it is one of the strangest rivers in the world. There are portions of the Amargosa that only exist as dry river beds. In other places it flows over the desert floor just like any other substantial stream. No one knows the origins or the source of water for the Amargosa River. Its beginnings and ends are mysteries, as is what happens to it between its wet and dry segments. Still, despite all of the unknowns, it is still regarded as "the longest underground river in the world." (Death Valley and the Amargosa, by Richard E. Lingenfelter)

*      *      *

So, how would all of these legends from Indian lore and miners' stories wind up connected with Charles Manson and his "Family?"

Because of his background of being raised in institutions Charles Manson is an extremely paranoid-type person, and his resulting proclivity for awareness means that he has an intense interest in anything that is going on around him. He likes to talk with people and find out what they know. And there can be no doubt that during his time in the desert Manson spoke with as many of the local residents as he could and that he absorbed everything they told him. Thus there can also be no doubt that Manson was aware of every Indian legend, every miner's tall tale or hallucination, and every legitimate news story about anything that occurred in Death Valley before he got there. Further, Manson's interests can be infectious, especially since another of his characteristics is that he likes to point out the interests of the life experience to those around him and, if possible, channel those interests into positive energy. Therefore, I find it completely believable that Manson, upon learning of various stories about a bottomless pit in the Death Valley area, would not only communicate those stories to the persons around him but that he would also even channel them into some kind of activity for his friends to engage in, as in, "Hey, I heard that there's a bottomless pit somewhere around here. Let's try to find it!" 

And that's where we get reminiscences of people like Leslie Van Houten who recall "the Family's" earnest search for such a hole.






40 comments:

  1. and they decided to parole that horse faced, looney tooney, murdering bitch?
    WTF?

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  2. Much of Hopi and Navajo myth also involves transitioning from a vast alternative existence into our acquired reality by passing through a single physical porthole - also a water spring in the desert. Not only just a bible myth.

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  3. If you check Wiki, you will understand that the Armagosa River is not a huge mystery. The USGS knows the source of the river and where it drains.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amargosa_River

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  4. Pale beings living under the earth reminds me of the H.G. Wells' book, "The Time Machine". The 1960 film adaption of this book was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. The Morlocks were pretty creepy.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. O.T. What's wrong with this picture? The Yahoo home page has a picture of Debra Tate. The caption says, Debra Tate calls sister's killer a "monster".

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  7. Here GEORGE has opened a can of worms, which actually deserves an entire book or movie. As soon as you mention "Revelations" you've entered the world of Fantastic (drug induced) Story telling, which IF discussed intelligently and completely will take you all the way from NO one God to many Gods including the God of the Muslims.

    Then add the Story of Native Americans and you have a history of "Legends" that could FILL an entire library.

    The story of what the WHITE Europeans did to the Native Americans makes torture, slavery and savagery appear humane in comparison.

    BUT here's something positive: You can NOW visit the old Rockedyne mountain top "TEST" site, just above the old Spahn Ranch site. This was also once ancient Chumash Indian sacred ground.

    The Simi Valley mountains are also filled with ancient Indian caves with drawings on the walls etc.
    BUT the public will likely NEVER be allowed to go there.

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  8. And rightly so Robert. Modern visitors to ancient sites will only fuck them up. Time and time again we see this happen.

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  9. Cool article Mr Stimson.

    I enjoy British prehistory, and earlier on they appear to have been quite keen on seeing the reflection in bodies of water as a world below.

    So much so they would bury items upside down with the dead, supposedly the right way up if you happen to live upside down I guess, however they usually broke the items before burying them.

    This is way back 10,000 years or more, so the underworld has a long history.

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  10. I have had a most rare vision.
    I have had a dream, past the wit of man to
    say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go
    about to expound this dream.[...]
    The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not
    seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue
    to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream
    was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of
    this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream,
    because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the
    latter end of a play, before the duke:
    peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall
    sing it at her death.

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  11. FOR NEW POST:

    Yes ORWHUT: And SHE mentions that Leslie will always be a danger to society.

    This could be based upon the fact that History has proven that a specific group will NOT drift away from its basic roots. IE: WHITE authoritarians will likely always murder BLACK men. WHITE men will likely always treat Indians as savages. AMERICANS will likely always interfere with the lives of other ethnic cultures. I believe this goes back to the days of the "Norths" (Vikings) who were the actual first NON Native Americans to inhabit what was to become America.

    BTW: A great discussion stills goes on under the VanHouton Parole POST thanks to Farflung.


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  12. How is Leslie Debra Tate's sister's killer? The only person I know of Leslie stabbing is Mrs. Labianca.

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  13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory

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  14. Robert,
    I'm confused about the location where you shot the nude bathing scenes at the waterfall, in your movies. I think someone said it was near someplace with devil in it's name. Was it near Devil's Hole, Devil's Canyon, or somewhere else?

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  15. ORWHUT: Someone used an incorrect byline. Tate said "Leslie is a monster.."

    "THEY are socicopaths" "THEY are domestic terrorists.." AND we are likely to see much more of this as time moves on.

    Donald Trump lumps ALL Muslims terrorists together. Hilary Clinton lumped all Cult Members at WACO together. This ties into the underground Indian issue here. Clem and TJ explained the Story very clearly, but apparently Leslie had a hard time understanding it. The story is obviously more of a guy thing.

    Before the Manson story, I traveled the SouthWest exploring the old Ghost Towns and latched on to ANY story the old timers would tell Craig and I. I even visted Panamint City, Ballarat, etc.

    Guys like Charlie, Clem and T.J. would be fascinated by the legends, just as I was. In Death Valley at Barkers, etc. Clem was a great story teller.

    I mean we're talking stuff here that NO public school teacher would even mention. NOW, I thinking maybe these legends are also fascinating to many others and that poses another attraction to the Manson Family Story. I gott'a admit, IF the opportunity arose, I might have rode with Jesse James or even the Daltons and as far as killing goes, I was a Democrat and like LBJ said: "Killing can be OK ... especially if you're stopping Communists."

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  16. Robert,
    That's what I was getting at. On the picture at the Yahoo site it said "Debra Tate calls sister's killer a "monster". When I finally clicked through to tne article "sisters killer" was changed to Leslie. Who ever made the mistake probably thought Leslie went out both nights. They probably weren't alive when the murders took place either.

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  17. Robert Hendrickson said...

    Clem and TJ explained the Story very clearly, but apparently Leslie had a hard time understanding it. The story is obviously more of a guy thing.

    Clem must have been two of the greatest actors in California. Clem even convinced a judge of how dumb he was and from Robert's movies, I was convinced that TJ wasn't much smarter than Clem. TJ was smart enough not to shoot Bernard Crow though.

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  18. You've got two great POSTs going at the same time MATT. How do I keep up ?

    YES ORWHUT: Devil's Canyon (water fall) near Spahn Ranch and Devil's Hole in Death Valley.

    NOW look at the issue YOU raised. TWO "Devils" in TWO primary Manson Family hang-outs.

    That's TWO out of TWO and in 1950s-60s Bible Land that means the "DEVIL" is at hand. Enter Charles Manson and wahla, we got ourselves an Evil Mastermind on the lose.

    AND that is exactly how the Religious Right thought back in the day.

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  19. Off message, but I've just realised that there's a possibility Vincent Bugliosi and Bob Dylan went to the same high school.

    Bug (b. 1934) and Dylan (b. 1941). Bug born in Hibbing, Minnesota and Dylan raised there.

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  20. Robert,
    Thanks! The devil is tricky and it's easy for me to get his namesakes confused.

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  21. I may take some issue with George's "conclusion" about Charlie's paranoia and HIS attention to surroundings. While this may be, in part, Charlie's motivation, it can also be explained as HIS genuine "childlike" curiosity with ALL things in LIFE. Phil Phillips also tells the story of Charlie and HIM sitting in a desert café late at night when a miner walks in and the resulting conversation.

    The desert also has a profound impact on ANYONE when they come to the realization that in this world there is ONLY you and the desert. Thus, YOUR world becomes exactly what YOU make of it.

    YOU only need to be LOST in the desert to fully understand where YOU fit into the scheme of things.

    Of course, this whole "Indian" thing is finally taking on a "meaning" ONLY a few people were even a-tuned to for the last hundred years. I mean, just look at all the liberals NOW calling for an environmental protection culture. Like, lets clear the land of ALL the Pollution and Commies so WE can live more clean and "pure" lives.

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  22. I have just read an article about the huge number of innocent African Americans shot by police in the US...WTF....Is it just me or does it look like the filth are actually in the middle of a race war!

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  23. It's shocking that a great number of people cannot see through bullshit. The Leslie Van Houten tape with Marvin Part has become somewhat of a "smoking gun" for those who buy into the Helter Skelter motive and Leslie supporters have of course used it for their agenda. The tape was made with the purpose of trying to convince the judge she was insane in an attempt to go for a Diminished Capacity defense.

    Just recently, cielodrive.com has made available her LAPD interview that was conducted a little less than a month before she made the tape with Part. Aside from being absolutely interesting, it also shows a far different person.

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  24. I think the bottomless pit is nothing more than a metaphor for bullshit concocted by various members, including the founder, of the Manson family. I'll show myself out now.

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  25. PENNY LANE: YES, but it is NOT an illusion, ONLY reality.
    I hate to say it, BUT someday we may wake-up to a real shocker - NOT unlike August 9 & 10 1969.

    AND think of this: BLACK people are likely to be more SAFE in jail than on the outside.

    Unfortunately, history has proven that nothing will change UNTIL the BLACK and WHITE "war" is over.

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  26. One Internet headline this morning is the famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald passing out leaflets on the street corner with the caption by the Enquirer saying: the "man" standing next to Oswald is "Ted Cruze's FATHER.

    So as I said before, this election year is going to be so fantastical - The Bottomless Pit, Helter Skelter and the Final Battle of Armageddon are going to seem as realistic as Death and Taxes.

    BUT the "result" of such "creative" story-telling is perfectly illustrated with the word "Communism." Oswald is passing out Communist Propaganda leaflets, BUT are they Pro-Communist or Anti-Communist or Pro-American. The Vietnam WAR was, according to LBJ, the way to STOP the Communists from taking over the world, BUT NOW the U.S. is FULLY embracing Socialist Communism as the new and improved "progressive" way of life.

    As the "old-way" was to "climb over bodies" it's NOW like, climbing a wall to a better life, is the ONLY thing that makes SENSE anymore.

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  27. Robert the day is already here, I find the wholesale murder of people at the hands of the police alot more shocking than anything the family did...and the cops do it daily it would seem....as lulu would say "now that blows my mind"!

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  28. There won't be a pit bottomless enough or a desert vast enough. This morning I walked through the ruins of the Imperial Palace above the Forum in Rome. And then through the Forum itself. I saw what remains of the shrine built at the spot where Julius Caesar was cremated after his own Cielo Drive moment. There were shattered vestiges of greatness and permanence everywhere. A civilisation too big, too great to fall. But a few missteps here, a slight miscalculation there, and an inexorable and irreversible death-spiral began. It wasn't noticed at first. It began slowly, but ended very quickly.

    We are already past our own tipping point. The giant Trojan horse is already inside the city walls. We did not destroy Carthage. The ground is rumbling beneath our feet but we don't notice it over the sound of our partying. We're too dumb and too entertained to notice the irreversible death-spiral into which we are descending.

    It's not silent in the Canyon. You only imagine you can hear the ice rattling in the cocktail shakers in the homes down the Canyon. You tell yourself you cannot hear that deeper rumbling and cracking beneath you, but it's getting louder and louder. Racist cops, and racist blacks, and children with knives, and petty wars and coalitions of the wilting - all will soon be done with and swept away. And people crueller than us and harsher than us will marvel over our ruins and wonder how the civilisation which built such awesome shopping malls could possibly have been swept aside by the blind currents of history.

    Coming down fast, good people. Keep looking for that pit.

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  29. Robert we have a new enemy, Muslims, communists are now our friends.

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  30. Farflung said...

    Wow!

    Fiddy 8 said...

    MNH kinda scared me.


    Matt Said...



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  31. Wow...MHN you certainly picked the scab of that one!

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  32. YES Penny, BUT notice that NO female COPS seem to be doing the KILLING of Black folks.

    Morning MICHAEL: IF, as they say, words can really KILL, you'd be just another MURDERER like Charlie Manson. So it's really ALL about WHO gets to the bottom of the PIT first and sets up a $$ making shop. YOU can serve "crumpets and tea" right next door to MY "Belladonna" dispensary.

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  33. Yes Robert..but men kill more than women in general..so perhaps I will set up shop and sell man repellent...perhaps then we will have a peaceful pit...

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  34. Well, Seger completely missed the point. Oh well.

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  35. "There's been a lot of talk about a bottomless pit. I found a hole in the desert that goes down to a river that runs north underground, and I call it a bottomless pit, because where could a river be going north underground? You could even put a boat on it. So I covered it up and I hid it and I called it 'the Devil's Hole' and we all laugh and we joke about it. You could call it a Family joke about the bottomless pit. How many people could you hide down in this hole ?"

    These words were spoken by Charles Manson during his trial in November 1970. Just after it he went on to say something rather interesting:
    "And then you get to conspiracy. The power of suggestion is stronger than any conspiracy that you could ever enter into. The powers of the brain are so vast, it's beyond understanding. It's beyond thinking. It's beyond comprehension"

    I've long felt that Charlie's life experiences plus his meeting with LSD had a profound influence on his post '67 direction. So much of what is purported to have come from him from an arresting number of different directions are indicative of classic symptoms of acid usage. When one considers that early on acid was used in an attempt to help patients with mental health issues {dredging up all kinds of past buried thoughts, nightmares and delusions but causing them sometimes to appear as reality} and Charlie's own words during a prison interview that acid, far from making a person controllable can actually make the mind uncontrollable, it's not hard to see how some of these notions came to be. Pat, though speaking in another context, put it succinctly when she said "well, it was just a thought. But the thought came to be." There has been a lot of hoo~hah written and said about the bottomless pit over the years, in the main by those that think it's all a load of rubbish. But something that is almost never said is that Charlie himself testified about it, explained it and to him it was, at least in 1970, real. So by extension, it's no surprise to find Family members thinking of it as real too.

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  36. Fiddy 8 said...

    Much of Hopi and Navajo myth also involves transitioning from a vast alternative existence into our acquired reality by passing through a single physical porthole

    In Robert's book, he has an interview with a guy called 'Phil' Phillips, an old prison friend of Charlie's and Charlie gives him his first acid trip. At one point, Phillips relates: “I wanted to get out of the bus and I looked out the window and the bus was about 10,000 feet up in the air and all I could see down there was the earth. So I changed my mind, I said ‘I don’t wanna get out of the bus.’"
    The way acid can distort time, space, shape, dimension and feeling, giving people the idea that they see sounds and hear colours takes the notion of shrinking to enter the bottomless pit into something understandable to anyone that actually wants to gain insight into how such matters can be believed. Many people of religious, spiritual and native persuasions believe such things and stake their lives on them.


    christopher butche said...

    I've just realised that there's a possibility Vincent Bugliosi and Bob Dylan went to the same high school.

    Bug (b. 1934) and Dylan (b. 1941). Bug born in Hibbing, Minnesota and Dylan raised there


    I've long wondered if the two ever crossed paths without ever having known it.


    Manson Family Archives said...

    It's shocking that a great number of people cannot see through bullshit

    Never more so than in some of what you come out with !

    The Leslie Van Houten tape with Marvin Part has become somewhat of a "smoking gun" for those who buy into the Helter Skelter motive....the tape was made with the purpose of trying to convince the judge she was insane in an attempt to go for a Diminished Capacity defense

    And who made the tape ? Who was the one going for the DC defence ? Who tried to get the judge to hear it so Leslie would be found to be insane ?
    Marvin Part.
    You make this point frequently but it always blows up in your face for the same reasons. You try to make it seem that Leslie was behind it all but she was the one that sacked Part, refused to be seen by psychiatrists and in the end blocked any DC defence. And the judge refused to listen to the tape.
    Part believed Van Houten was insane. In his thinking, you'd have to be to believe all this and to normalize murder. The entire Family schtick was that it wasn't murder but a righteous doing that had to be done. To Part, that was insane. It's nothing to do with looking for a smoking gun because the gun was smoking long before that tape was made, from a variety of sources, many before Bugliosi was even on the case.


    Just recently, cielodrive.com has made available her LAPD interview that was conducted a little less than a month before she made the tape with Part. Aside from being absolutely interesting, it also shows a far different person

    What it shows is someone who, at the time, was not known to have engaged in murder who is trying to box clever. A week after that interview, Susan Atkins had landed her well and truly in the shit and the game changed, forever.

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