Richard Sharpe Shaver, born 1907 in Berwick, Pennsylvania, turned a nationwide sensation within the forties along with his dramatic accounts of a extremely superior civilization that inhabited Earth in prehistoric instances. An itinerant Midwesterner, he’d been employed as a panorama gardener, a determine mannequin for artwork courses, and a welder at Henry Ford’s authentic auto plant. He gained public consideration as a author who asserted that descendants of these early beings nonetheless reside in hidden underground cities, the place they wield terrifying expertise able to controlling ideas. Many readers agreed with Shaver, and a splashy controversy ensued.

Public fascination along with his writings subsided through the fifties, however Shaver continued trying to find proof of a terrific bygone civilization. In about 1960, whereas residing in rural Wisconsin, Shaver formulated a speculation that may captivate him for the steadiness of his life: some stones are historic books, designed and fabricated by individuals of the distant previous utilizing expertise that surpasses something identified at the moment. He recognized complicated pictorial content material in these “rock books.” Pictures reveal themselves at each angle and each stage of magnification and are layered all through every rock. Graphic symbols and lettering additionally seem in what he referred to as “essentially the most fascinating exhibition of virtuosity in artwork existent on earth.”

Annoyed that the tools wanted to completely decipher the dense rock books was misplaced to time, Shaver undertook methods to make at the least a fraction of the books’ content material clearly seen. Initially, he made drawings and work of pictures he discovered within the rocks, growing idiosyncratic strategies to venture a slice of rock onto cardboard or a picket plank. Shaver additionally produced typical black-and-white photographs utilizing 35 mm movie, typically displaying a cross part of rock alongside a ruler or a coin to point scale. Typically he highlighted imagery by hand coloring the prints with felt pens. He hooked up photographs to typewriter paper the place he added commentary: he describes the rock books, interprets pictures, particulars his photograph strategies, and expresses disappointment on the conspicuous lack of educational or journalistic curiosity in his findings.

Shaver and his spouse, Dorothy, moved in 1963 to Summit, Arkansas, the place he established his Rock Home Studio on their small property. There, along with portray, he processed and printed movie. His efforts at illuminating the rock books moved away from portray and towards images in his closing years. That shift could have been influenced by his notion that viewers interpreted the work as a product of his creativeness fairly than an goal file of historic artifacts. Shaver wrote, “Folks will consider photographs and gained’t consider drawings or work… the digicam wins, by being trustworthy. Which doesn’t say a lot for artist’s honesty, I suppose. We strive… however individuals assume we lie.”

Shaver made small books on paper at his studio—some illustrated along with his drawings or collages of rock photographs—which he produced with a neighborhood printer. He stored his manuscripts in file folders with colourful hand-lettered titles. As many as twenty booklets had been deliberate; 5 of them, plus a brochure about “pre-deluge artwork stones,” are identified to have seen print. Every one views the prehistoric library in stone from a distinct angle. “Big Night Wings” is called after swarming ape-bats that threatened the traditional Amazons; “Blue Mansions” options the undersea Mer individuals; “The Vermin from House!!!” paints a bleak image involving rock books, thoughts management, and flying saucer sightings: “We’re a remnant of an historic race, adrift on a dying world and the parasites of area circle us, searching for a spot to sink of their sucking tube.”

In distinction with defective reconstructions of human historical past from bone fragments, “any longer … we are able to learn the books written by individuals who truly lived the pre-history.” He describes how rock books, which as soon as crammed nice libraries, had been tossed the world over by a cataclysmic deluge that “burst the traditional libraries like ripe nuts. The seeds of ages of studying had been scattered over the earth. They await solely fertile psychological soil to develop once more.”

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To strategy Shaver’s rock images—a course of he generally known as “rokfogo”—it’s helpful to contemplate his earlier success as a author and to introduce Ray Palmer, the journal editor who turned an inextricable a part of his public life. Ray Palmer was, by the early forties, editor of Superb Tales, the primary American science fiction journal, and a line of different pulp fiction periodicals printed by Ziff-Davis in Chicago, Illinois. Along with fiction, Palmer’s Superb Tales included common sections on “Scientific Mysteries,” “Scientific Oddities,” and a wide-ranging discussion board for letters to the editor beneath the banner “Discussions.” Within the January 1944 challenge of Superb Tales, a letter signed by S. Shaver seems with the headline “An Historic Language?” It included a glossary that hooked up meanings to every letter of the English alphabet. (The excerpt quoted under is drawn from a later, expanded manuscript of his glossary, most likely written within the seventies. Shaver’s “Alphabet of the Ancients” remained necessary to him for many years; it was typically generally known as the “Mantong” alphabet.)

A stands for animal
B stands for be, to exist… to be.
C stands for imaginative and prescient, and the historical past of C because it pertains to the Greek-wave-pattern is attention-grabbing and backs up the amphibious or fish-lizard supply of the man-shape.
C additionally meant “sea-water clear water.. water by which imaginative and prescient was attainable..thus “Clear as crystal” means understanding as in “CON” for see-on ..used at the moment in phrases like conning tower…
Thus at the moment.. I see means I perceive…

Shaver wrote, “Am sending you this in hopes you’ll insert in a problem to maintain it from dying with me… This language appears to me to be particular proof of the Atlantean legend… That is maybe the one copy of this language in existence, and it represents my work over a protracted interval of years… I want a little bit encouragement.”

Response to the letter was so encouraging that Shaver quickly turned a featured creator within the journal. In his 1975 autobiography, Ray Palmer writes, “Many lots of of readers’ letters got here in, and the online outcome was a question to Richard S. Shaver asking him the place he received his alphabet. The reply was within the type of a ten,000 phrase ‘manuscript’ typed with what was actually the final word in non-ability on the typewriter and entitled, ‘A Warning to Future Man.’ ” In line with Palmer, Shaver’s textual content was not a brief story however a protracted letter detailing his beliefs in regards to the true historical past of clever life on Earth and the horrible hidden actuality that humanity at present confronted. Palmer noticed it as a “leaping off place” for salable tales. “Utilizing Mr. Shaver’s unusual letter-manuscript as a foundation, I wrote a thirty-one-thousand-word story which I titled ‘I Keep in mind Lemuria!’ ” Shaver disputed Palmer’s declare of authorship, however regardless, the story was featured on the quilt of the March 1945 challenge of Superb Tales.

“I Keep in mind Lemuria!” is ready in an underground civilization the place the protagonist, an aspiring painter, is humiliated by a brutal artwork critique. On the recommendation of his creative mentor, he units off seeking data. Uncommon for the pulp fiction of its period, the story consists of footnotes that elaborate Shaver’s scientific claims. Additionally uncommon is the creator’s preface, by which he writes, “To me it’s tragic that the one means I can inform my story is within the guise of fiction.”

Shaver insisted that his tales, nevertheless outlandish they could appear, had been true and grounded in firsthand expertise. In line with Shaver, sadistic creatures that reside contained in the earth manipulate human society. They torture and enslave, venture voices and ideas into individuals’s minds, and induce demise, mayhem, and conflict. Referred to as Dero—brief for degenerate or detrimental robots—these are the mentally impaired descendants of a super-sophisticated civilization that occupied Earth eons in the past. These ancients found they had been being poisoned by the rays of Earth’s solar, so that they constructed cities deep underground. Finally, they departed Earth in favor of a planet with a extra accommodating ambiance. A number of had been left behind within the cavern cities (the “abandondero”), and their highly effective equipment remained underground as nicely, together with the “ray” units that the Dero use to venture voices into the minds of latest people. A smaller inhabitants additionally exists underground: the benevolent Tero. This group didn’t endure the psychological and ethical decline that formed generations of Dero. It was the Tero who guided Shaver into the under-ground cities and educated him about Earth’s true cultural historical past. Tero protected him within the face of the Dero, such that Shaver, distinctive amongst males, may return to the floor to inform his story.

Touted by Palmer as “The Shaver Thriller,” these warnings a couple of legion of mind-manipulating evildoers discovered a receptive viewers within the instant aftermath of World Battle II; readers had been attuned to reviews of diabolical enemies and secret weapons. Shaver’s accounts additionally resonated with those that had been troubled by intrusive voices or delinquent impulses. Many wrote to precise assist for his claims; some affirmed that they’d personally heard voices or encountered malevolent Dero. In line with Palmer, demand for the journal grew explosively in response to Shaver’s tales.

The groundswell of enthusiasm prolonged past the pages of Superb Tales. Shaver Thriller followers set out seeking entrances to the underground cities and tried to construct working fashions of the Dero’s implausible machines. Earnest mimeographed publications, corresponding to “The Shaver Thriller Membership Letterzine,” appeared. A separate Shaver Thriller Journal was launched. The Shaver Thriller quickly met with opposition, a few of it from followers dedicated to elevating the literary status of science fiction. A decision on the 1947 World Science Fiction Conference condemned “The Shaver Mythos and associated absurdities” as a risk to psychological well being and a “perversion of fantasy fiction.” The controversy drew point out in general-circulation magazines, together with Life and Harper’s. The publishers of Superb Tales put an finish to the Shaver sequence in 1949.

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Shaver anticipated that his viewers would miss the purpose of the rock books due to the Dero’s baleful affect on their ideas. In The Hidden World, a sixteen-volume sequence later printed by Palmer, Shaver writes: “Please, pricey victimized and brutally mistreated individuals that you’re, PLEASE get up! It doesn’t matter what cavern idiots let you know behind your thoughts, take a look at these stones and perceive what they’re! How can anybody ignore these marvelous historic image books?”

Richard Shaver died in Arkansas in 1975. He produced the next photographs and texts at his Rock Home Studio over the past decade of his life.

I’m endlessly explaining prints like this photograph of Viet Nam rock to somebody by no means keen to be defined to.

The rock noticed has cross-sectioned a sequence of photo-like pictorials which run in 2 to 4 mm. sizes in scan-strips within the rock. IF you possibly can use a penetrative gentle as a substitute of odd gentle you’d see and perceive that such photos are photos..however the noticed cross-sections them. Thus they’re mutilated and s distorted..like bits torn out of an encyclopedia they’re unreadable and un-understandable.

HOWEVER they’re very attention-grabbing glimpses of an historic lifestyle and and a forgotten tradition and language now fairly unknown. As soon as it was world vast..now it lies forgotten and ignored as “mere rocks” on the panorama that “ought to” be cleaned off and thrown away..and often are.

We destroy all these rock books by making them into street gravel… and what had been as soon as treasured libraries containing the lore of tens of millions of years of research and psychological effort..are made into black high roads that go no-where for no actual goal.

Our entire civilization may be very busily speeding about to go no-where to no specific goal and many of the careening automobiles are in truth making journeys completely pointless is one thing you already know.

I get numerous requests for photos of rock … of this sort. I ship them small ones made like this on sheets of Zerox … or sheets of proofs in 35mm dimension. to present them a broad thought of the look of a number of the images. It’s too unhealthy we dont have obtainable the precise mixtures of lenses or lenses and mirrors to unscramble these 3-di photos from the far previous. However they’re fascinating anyway. Plenty of these rock books include youngsters’s tales..one can acknowledge previous classics like Puss-in-Boots or Pink Driving Hood. So one deduces that rock magnification gadgetry was obtainable in each house … and such may very well be the case at the moment if we actually had some enterprise in our monetary empires.

 

WEIRD AND WONDERFUL ART

within the rock books could be mistaken for “mere” accidentals solely by a superficial eye and careless thoughts refusing to look fastidiously.

When one has studied sufficient of them, the rock books start to imagine their true stature… the best of all books extant on earth.  How you can get this throughout toe a contemporary ignoramus, shorn of all proper to motive and study by a misguided and sabotaged college system…is a real drawback. That 3-di artwork means a 3-di thoughts, and isn’t to be appreciated in a single look any greater than 3-di chess could be discovered in a single sitting.

Such nice options are the faces of the immortals, virtually, with minds energetic over immense intervals of time, and their rock artwork is the artwork of claiming a lot in little area and with few symbols.

Their our bodies appear double-jointed, for they had been…amphibious races and area races ..but their faces are the faces of our ancestors, as wells the faces of our Gods. The little figures with the large inform the story in gesture, generally they’re musical rating.

 

Accenting a B&W print with coloured pens provides you faces like this, multiples of faces in sequence of sizes… what I’m speculated to do about it after I inform them I can by no means fairly determine. To the common Joe its an insane thought, as a result of he by no means heard of any “earlier civilization” the entire thing is a few type of delusion, I suppose. If I dont accent the prints, he “Cant see them” and if I DO accent them, I’m “making them from my creativeness”. Since I cant win, I dont strive very onerous.

BUT the rock books a re an enormous library from antiquity, of inestimable worth. These individuals had solved ecological issues like overcrowding. They lived underground, farmed the entire floor of the earth. They lived IN the oceans, too, as Mers and “Mermaids”. We consider mermaids as a mad type of delusion, however in truth they had been our direct ancestors.

What to do about common ignorance of man’s beginnings is an excessive amount of drawback for me. I cant even promote a rock e book! (“no sich animal”.)

Tailored from Richard Sharpe Shaver: Some Stones Are Historic Books, edited by Christine Burgin and Brian Lampert and with an introduction by Brian Tucker, to be printed by Additional Studying Library in April.

Brian Tucker is a professor of artwork at Pasadena Metropolis School who has researched the life and work of Richard Shaver since 1989. As an artist, he has exhibited work based mostly on the story of Shaver and Palmer at venues together with the California Institute of the Arts and Curt Marcus Gallery in New York Metropolis.