Spaces of Nothing
In addition to the perimeters and gateways, a sense of liminality (in its psychological function) is evident in the spaces between the paths – empty stretches of shingle, ossified branches and rusting conduits. In the Kabbalistic Tree of life, paths join the sephira, but there are spaces between the paths, this is the neither-neither: the no-man’s land of the leaper into nothing, ATU 0, the fool in his negative reflex. We were told of the unexploded ordnance, but are the ordnance occult devices. What precisely is the nature of these lethal shells? As we shall see later, the shells maybe very much more than mere explosives.

Monuments To The Deep Ones
Prisoners of War held at the base were used to help build the airfield and flood protection walls. In 1918 a number of German prisoners died in an epidemic, supposedly influenza, and were buried in Orford churchyard. Their bodies were later transferred to a war cemetery. A number of these defences remain – uncanny in their geometry, monolithic in stature. Could the ‘flood’ be an Atlantean metaphor and who were the Neptunic entities the custodians of Orford Ness were so keen on keeping out – the Deep Ones of Cthulhian mythos? Viewed from another perspective, might the stones be magickal signposts constructed for exactly the opposite purpose? Were they built with the intention of awakening an ancient submarine God and of what unholy material are they composed. The slave builders of the stones succumbed to a mysterious epidemic, flu or occult poisoning from the toxic prima mater of these chthonic totems?

Sacred Geography And Cobra Mist
In the distance, toward the north of Orford, the visitor may observe the radar station that once housed the top secret Cobra Mist project. Ostensibly, it is believed, Cobra Mist’s purpose to construct an over the horizon radar system, a prototype of the infamous SDI ‘Star Wars’ technology. The myths around it are legion; the ufologist Jenny Randles goes as far as suggesting that Cobra Mist was a front for the development of psychotronic weaponry. The implications are that the fabled UFO scare at nearby Rendlesham Forest was in fact the result of hallucinations caused by the directing (accidental or otherwise) of a brain twisting laser beam from Orford Ness. She cites the groundbreaking work of neuropsychologist Michael Persinger, as evidence of the possibility that the military could be harnessing such mindbending technologies. Persinger posits that passing low level electromagnetic pulses across the temporal lobes can induce simulations of extraterrestrial encounters.

Aerial photography of the area occupied by Cobra Mist adds a sacred psychogeographic element to the mystery. Does not the fanning arrangement of the radar antennae look like a grossly deformed head. In fact does it not indeed the resemble a depiction of the extraterrestrial entity known as LAM – an entity which the black magician Aleister Crowley achieved rapport with in the early part of the 20th Century. Could it be that the region occupied by Cobra Mist is an elaborate Post Nuclear, Nazca line like codex, scientific simulacra constructed to facilitate the ingress of the Great Old Ones.

Cosmic Tinnitis.
Officially, the Cobra Mist project was terminated due to the fact it was plagued by a severe low frequency noise problem of undetermined origin. This resulted in a major reduction in detection capability of the radar system. A curious feature of UFO encounters is the accompanying sonic phenomena, often described as being like the humming of bees. The horror writer H.P Lovecraft, suggested that the ululations of certain insects heralded the proximity of the Great Old Ones. This raises an interesting question. Could it be that the project was closed down because, rather than failing in its purpose, it had actually succeeded in its real aim – that of achieving rapport with ancient alien forces?

The Apocalypse Bridge
Following the revelation of Cobra Mist, the visitor arrives at a small metal bridge. This will take them to testing range, the centre of the mystery of Orford Ness. Clearly the bridge is an architectural entendre, designed not only to facilitate the physical journey but also to deepen the visitor’s sense of liminality. Archetypally speaking, the bridge is replete with mythic resonance from Pooh Sticks to the Cinvat of Zoroastrian tradition. In the Kabbalistic model, between Kether and Tipareth resides the hidden sephira – representing the bridge over the abyss separating divinity from the not quite divine. Perhaps it is guarded by demons as with the Moso of SouthWest China?

However, does not our bridge even more strikingly approximate the Norse saga of Hadingus. In this tale the hero is led to a bridge over a river into which weapons have been discarded. On one side of the river is the loca aprica (the ‘glittering plain’) where, but a few very noble beings in purple frocks wonder among the flora. On the other side Hadingus sees two armies engaged in battle. They are, his fair guide explains to him, the souls of warriors who had fallen in battle, and now imitated the sword-games they had played on earth. Orford Ness once a top secret Cold War testing grounds is transmuted into a National nature reserve. Or is this the hallucination they wish to induce in us? As Victor Turner, in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society says “This place between places is also a place between times.”

Black Beacon, Tower of Silence
Across the bridge, the visitor is now in a lunar landscape par excellence . One is almost cast onto the drained dream beaches of Salvador Dali. With its mirages of discarded miltaria like the impossible shells of a nightmare crustacean, with its abandoned carcasses of rotting rowing boats, and with its spectral walkers in the shimmering distance, this is the painting Paranoiac Astral Image , collided through a nuclear reactor. One begins to suspect that this is an imaginary landscape, one forced into our minds by the psychotronic pulse of Cobra Mist.

Ahead, two towers punctuate the alien flatness: on the mundane side Orford lighthouse, on the unreal side, the creepy wooden Black Beacon. With its very name almost invoked from the pages of an outré occult grimoire, this building was erected in 1928 by the Royal Aircraft Establishment, to house an experimental 'rotating loop' navigation beacon. In other words this is a guiding system, but for whom or what? Would it be outlandish to suggest that this tower is the manifestation of a bizarre illustration by the magickal artist Allen Holub. Entitled “Andahadna on The Tower Of Maat ”, Holub’s painting depicts a crooked tower, circled by a teratogenic vulture. The edifice looks over a desolate path, in the distance is a weird castle, its turrets adorned with what look like transmitters or aerials. In striking reference to this tower, Kenneth Grant makes the following comment in Outside The Circles Of Time.
“The upper reaches of this lofty chamber comprise the Watchroom, or Watchtower wherefrom Man views the extra and ultra-human forms he is to assume in aeons to come”.

So does this not suggest that the Black Beacon is maybe not just a semantic cipher, but in actual fact a magically imbued receiver to enable the assumption of alien god-forms – a truly transplutonian pylon.

The Harlots of AWRE.
Leaving the tower, this visitor is now on that desolate path envisioned by Allen Holub; on the way to the nightmare dénouement of Orford Ness. Beyond him is the husk of Laboratory 1, where in 1956, the AWRE carried out tests on the first British Atomic bomb, codenamed Blue Danube. The laboratory is divided into a number of cells and it is within the cells that the white robed priests of science uttered the very formulas for hell on earth. In Hebrew, the word Qliphoth means literally “shells”, “cortices” or “cells”. It is actually the plural of Qlipha which translates as “an harlot”, and by extrapolation a “lot of whores”. So in a cabalistic sense the cells of this laboratory were incubation chambers, where workers prostituted themselves for the creation of a monstrous nuclear miscegenation. The Qliphoth in this light become the demonic energy specters of atomic research, glimpsed and construed as UFOs, heard as the low level insectival chatter of Cobra mist, smelled as the pungent olfactory hallucinations well documented in the vicinity of Orford Ness.

The shells alluded to us by the National Trust guide at the beginning of our journey reify in hideous alien aspect. We realize they are but the shades of the dead returning to earth, as if awakened from the pages of the Necronomicon by the atomic seizures of the 1940’s. They are the divine, shining ones seen by Hadingus, adorned in regal purple, the true rulers of earth, and we humans, the fodder like ghost soldiers with our discarded weapons engaged in eternal war, for the victual benefit of our cosmic overlords.

Mephitic Conduits Of Seth
In the passageways of laboratory one, the mephitic waters remind us of the dankest of the Tunnels of Set, those mythic conduits of Hebrew religion that link the cells of the qliphoth. This is the tunnel of Niantiel, the experimental cancer chamber. If we look back from inside the laboratory, the building seems to open out onto a runway to nothing. In a moment of liminal gnosis, the visitor understands the true purpose of Orford Ness. It was not designed as a weapons research establishment, nor as an experimental radar post, but as a runway for the Outer Ones. Its Chthonic defences were not to keep out the North Sea, but to serve as psychic magnets for the arrival of the Deep Ones. And of these testing cells, the atomic research projects are elaborate keys for its true intent, no less than the breeding and incubation of the Great Old Ones.

The Dolmens To Beyond
And this is where the trail ends. Our guided tour marked by red paint upon the paths prevents further access to the remaining cells. We see another dolmen beyond. This building, built in 1962, professes to be a storage room for bombs prior to their been taken to the Labs for testing. It was also said to have been used by the Bomb Disposal Unit, based on site from 1967, to store their explosives. But in our illuminated state can we not see through this conceit? The dolmen is another symbolic motif affording the visitor the means by which to enter a deeper liminal state, where one can see all the secrets of Orford Ness. The fabled Pagoda buildings, become malign monasteries as sinister as the black temples of the Atlantean priesthood. In this myth we unravel the cipher of “bomb storage” to mean the housing and nurturing of the Great Old Ones. Within and beneath the weird pagodas, could not lurk yet unleashed terrifying hybrids of Lovecraftian nightmare and military alchemy. And what of the official secret act on this site - the official secret act, a modern analogue of the Necronomicon if ever there was one, with its terrifying recipes of technological sorcery. When indeed it is opened on Orford Ness will it be too late? Will the visitors already be among us?