Viva Las Vegas

 

Alt Right gadfly Vox Day is currently enbroiled in some drama with Erika "Gutsick Gibbon", a science influencer on YouTube who questioned his critique of evolutionary theory. 

Says Vox: "It’s probably best that Ericka runs away now, considering what happened to the last woman who tried to debate me. For those of you who weren’t around then, she literally abandoned the debate after three rounds and ran off to Las Vegas to start a new career as a prostitute at a legal brothel. I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating for effect. You can look it up. You can probably still buy her services, for that matter."

Oookay. The Internet is forever, as they say...

At the cremation ground (part 2)

 

So what´s the difference between Ananda Marga´s stints at the cremation ground and that of other extreme sects...or even Buddhists? 

Explain how Ananda Marga's Kāpālika practice compares with the actual Kāpālika tradition, Aghori cremation-ground sādhana, and Buddhist śmaśāna meditation.

Yes. They look similar on the surface—night, death, cremation grounds, fear, skulls, corpses—but they belong to rather different religious technologies. The most useful comparison is to ask what the corpse/cremation ground is doing in the practice.

Tradition	Main setting	What is confronted	Main aim	Role of Bhairava/deity	Corpses/skulls
Ananda Marga Kāpālika sādhanā	Preferably cremation/burial ground, often around new moon	Fear, pāśas (fetters), ripus (mental enemies)	Mental/spiritual mastery and concentration	Tantric background, but not primarily corpse worship	Not the ritual centerpiece
Historical Kāpālika	Cremation ground	Death, impurity, ordinary social/religious boundaries	Bhairava-oriented liberation, powers, transformation	Central; Bhairava is a major focus	Central; skulls and bones are characteristic
Aghori	Cremation ground	Aversion, disgust, duality of pure/impure, fear of death	Non-dual realization of Śiva/Aghora	Central, especially Śiva/Aghora/Bhairava dimensions	Can be extremely important; some advanced practices involve corpses
Early Buddhist śmaśāna meditation	Charnel ground	Impermanence and identification with the body	Vairāgya, mindfulness, insight, non-attachment	Generally not the focus	Corpse is an object of contemplation

1. Ananda Marga: the cremation ground as a psychological laboratory

This is probably the least materially transgressive of the four.

Ananda Marga's Kāpālika practice deliberately retains the old cremation-ground atmosphere, but its stated purpose is to confront the practitioner's psychological obstacles. Scholarship on the practice describes cremation/burial grounds as preferred locations, particularly around amāvāsyā, because they are regarded as places conducive to confronting the pāśas and ripus.

So the logic is approximately:

dangerous/liminal environment → fear arises → maintain meditation → fear loses its power → mind becomes stronger and less bound.

There is no requirement that the practitioner manipulate corpses, consume substances from skulls, summon ghosts, or perform a Bhairava sacrifice.

That makes Ananda Marga's use of “Kāpālika” partly an inheritance of the older Tantric symbolism and partly a reinterpretation of it.

---

2. Historical Kāpālikas: this is much closer to what the name suggests

Here the resemblance to what we were discussing earlier becomes much stronger.

The historical Kāpālikas were Śaiva ascetics associated with Bhairava, cremation grounds, skulls and the mahāvrata. They carried a human skull as an alms bowl; the skull was so characteristic that it gave the tradition its name.

And some of the surviving Tantric material associated with the Kāpālika milieu is genuinely extreme.

For example, the Brahmayāmala describes cremation-ground rites involving:

• skulls arranged on a maṇḍala,
• blood,
• alcohol,
• human bones,
• hair and other bodily materials,
• a corpse as part of the ritual setting,
• and Bhairava.

One described rite uses nine skulls containing blood, alcohol and other substances, with the ritual performed on a corpse.

This is therefore quite different from Ananda Marga.

The Kāpālika isn't merely thinking:

“Death is frightening; I should overcome my fear.”

The ritual is deliberately entering the religious world of Bhairava and the cremation ground, using precisely those things that conventional society regards as impure or terrifying.

And this is where the term transgressive Tantra becomes meaningful.

---

3. Aghori: superficially closest to the Kāpālika, but not identical

The Aghori tradition is probably the one people most readily associate with the stereotypical image of:

ascetic + cremation ground + corpse + skull + Bhairava/Śiva.

There are genuine historical connections between Aghori traditions and older cremation-ground Śaivism, but Aghori should not simply be equated with Kāpālika. The historical Kāpālikas and later Aghoris belong to different historical formations.

The central Aghori idea is expressed by the word aghora: “not terrible,” “not dreadful,” or “without horror.”

The practitioner seeks to overcome the ordinary mind's division between:

pure / impure
beautiful / disgusting
sacred / profane
life / death

That can lead to practices involving substances and objects normally considered profoundly impure.

Some contemporary descriptions of advanced Aghori practice include śava-sādhanā, meditation in direct physical relationship with a corpse in a cremation ground.

This gives Aghori practice a very different emphasis from Ananda Marga.

Ananda Marga:

“Can I remain spiritually concentrated when confronted with fear?”

Aghori:

“Can I directly experience the underlying Śiva-nature without maintaining the conventional distinction between pure and impure?”

Those overlap, but they aren't the same proposition.

---

4. Buddhist śmaśāna meditation is radically different again

This is perhaps the most interesting comparison because Buddhism has a very old and well-documented cemetery tradition.

The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta describes the monk seeing a corpse in various stages of decomposition and reflecting:

“This body of mine too is of the same nature.”

The corpse becomes a mirror for the practitioner's own body. The meditation proceeds through stages including decomposition, skeletonization, scattered bones and finally bones reduced to dust.

So the fundamental movement is:

“That corpse is me.”

Not literally in identity, but in the sense that my body is subject to exactly the same process.

The point is to undermine attachment to the body and develop insight into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and non-self.

And historical Buddhist monastics really did practice in cemeteries. Recent scholarship argues that cemetery residence and corpse meditation were not marginal curiosities but could form part of Buddhist monastic life in India.

But notice what is not happening.

The Buddhist meditator doesn't need to:

• invoke Bhairava;
• propitiate a cemetery deity;
• use a skull as a ritual cup;
• obtain supernatural power from the corpse;
• overcome purity rules through transgression.

The corpse is primarily an object of insight.

---

The deepest similarity

All four recognize something like this:

The ordinary human mind wants to avoid death.

The cemetery makes avoidance difficult.

But then the traditions diverge.

Buddhist

Death → impermanence → detachment → insight

Ananda Marga

Death/fear → confrontation → mastery of mental fetters → spiritual development

Kāpālika

Death/impurity → deliberate transgression → Bhairava → transformation/liberation

Aghori

Death/disgust → destruction of pure/impure distinction → Aghora/Śiva → non-dual realization

That's why I'd resist treating all four as variants of “necromantic meditation.”

They are actually four different answers to the same existential problem.

---

There is also a fascinating distinction concerning fear

This is particularly relevant to your earlier questions about Bhairava.

For Ananda Marga, fear itself is something to be mastered.

For Buddhism, fear becomes an opportunity to observe the conditioned mind and the impermanent body.

For Aghori, the deeper target is the dualistic categorization that makes something “horrible,” “impure,” or “untouchable.”

For Kāpālika Tantra, the terrifying environment is also connected with Bhairava's own domain. The practitioner isn't merely trying to become psychologically fearless; the terrifying aspect of reality is incorporated into the sacred.

That last point is why the Kāpālika tradition is particularly interesting alongside Bhairava.

Bhairava isn't merely the deity who protects you from the cremation ground.

In the more radical Tantric imagination, Bhairava is the Lord of the cremation ground itself.

And that is a substantial theological difference from simply using a cemetery as an unpleasant environment in which to test one's meditation.

One final caveat

We shouldn't imagine a neat historical sequence:

Buddhist cemetery meditation → Kāpālika → Aghori → Ananda Marga.

The traditions overlap historically and influenced one another in complex ways, but they aren't simply successive versions of one practice. In particular, the surviving evidence for historical Kāpālikas is fragmentary, and some practices attributed to them come from Tantric texts that scholars identify as closely related to the Kāpālika milieu rather than straightforwardly as surviving Kāpālika manuals.

So the visual similarity is real, but the underlying theology can be dramatically different.

And, interestingly, Ananda Marga is probably the closest of the four to a deliberately controlled “fear-of-death meditation,” whereas historical Kāpālika and Aghori practice go considerably further into the ritual transformation of death, impurity and the body.

At the cremation ground (part 1)

 

Let´s see if ChatGPT is ready for the *really* heavy questions...

What is "Kapalik meditation" within Ananda Marga?

Yes. “Kāpālika meditation” in Ananda Marga is a specialized Tantric practice, but it is quite different from the historical Kāpālika sectarian practices we were just discussing. In particular, Ananda Marga presents it primarily as a method of confronting and overcoming fear and the lower tendencies of the mind, rather than as necromancy or ritual use of human remains.

Ananda Marga's own literature lists Kāpālika meditation as one of five systems of sādhanā, alongside Prārambhika, Sādhāraṇa, Sahaja and Viśeṣa Yoga. It is described as an advanced practice, reserved for practitioners who have already progressed considerably in Sahaja Yoga.

What does the practice involve?

The distinctive feature is the setting.

Traditional descriptions from within Ananda Marga say that Kāpālika meditation is performed in a graveyard or cremation ground, normally during the deep night. One account describes the period as approximately midnight to 3 a.m., with practice at least monthly around the new moon.

The purpose is explicitly psychological/spiritual:

the frightening environment brings the practitioner's latent fears and lower tendencies to the surface, so that they can be confronted and mastered.

Ananda Marga's terminology describes Kāpālika sādhanā as a practice that causes the aspirant to confront and overcome the inherent fetters and “enemies” of the mind.

So the logic is roughly:

cremation ground → fear/death imagery → mind becomes concentrated → fear is confronted → attachment to the lower self decreases → greater spiritual control.

This is why the practice has a very different character from ordinary meditation.

Why a cremation ground?

The cremation ground is essentially being used as an extreme psychological environment.

Ananda Marga's explanation is that under ordinary circumstances the mind can avoid confronting things such as:

• fear of death
• fear of darkness
• fear of ghosts or spirits
• instinctive aversion
• attachment to the physical body
• sexual or other instinctual impulses
• social conditioning concerning purity and impurity.

Put the practitioner in a cremation ground at night, however, and those things become psychologically difficult to ignore.

The practitioner then has to maintain spiritual ideation and concentration despite the fear.

Ananda Marga sources explicitly say that this challenge makes the mind more concentrated and can strengthen renunciation.

It isn't simply “meditating on corpses”

This is an important distinction.

The historical Kāpālika tradition is associated with skulls, cremation grounds, Bhairava and transgressive Tantric practices. Ananda Marga deliberately distances its Kāpālika meditation from the sensationalized image of Kāpālikas as practitioners of black magic, cannibalism, ritual sex, etc. One Ananda Marga account explicitly says that this popular characterization is an injustice to the Tantric tradition.

So although the name and cremation-ground setting deliberately evoke the Kāpālika tradition, Ananda Marga has reformulated the practice around its own spiritual psychology.

Is Bhairava involved?

Conceptually, yes, in the Tantric background; but Ananda Marga's presentation is not simply a Bhairava pūjā.

This is an important difference from the practices we were discussing earlier.

Ananda Marga's founder, Shrii Shrii Anandamurti (Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar), presented Ananda Marga as a modern synthesis of Tantra and Yoga. Its ordinary meditation system is centered on mantra, personal spiritual ideation and realization rather than deity ritual.

Thus you shouldn't imagine the Ananda Marga Kāpālika practice as:

“Go to a cemetery at midnight, put alcohol in a skull, and invoke Bhairava.”

That's not what it means in Ananda Marga.

Rather, it takes the Kāpālika/cremation-ground archetype and turns it into an advanced yogic exercise in confronting fear and the lower mind.

Why is it called Kāpālika, then?

Because kapālika literally relates to the kapāla, “skull,” and the historical Kāpālikas were associated with cremation grounds and radical confrontation with death.

Ananda Marga is therefore drawing on the symbolic and Tantric heritage of the term while giving it a different practical interpretation.

There's actually a striking continuity here:

Historical Kāpālika:
“Confront death, impurity and conventional fear directly.”

Ananda Marga Kāpālika meditation:
“Confront the fear and lower tendencies that arise when you place yourself consciously in the presence of death.”

The second is considerably more psychologically disciplined and less ritually transgressive.

And this makes it particularly relevant to your earlier question

You were asking about necromancy, skulls, Bhairava and cemetery practices. Ananda Marga Kāpālika meditation sits right at the historical boundary between these things—but it shouldn't be classified as necromancy.

The cremation ground is the setting, not the object of worship.

The dead are not being summoned for information.

The skull isn't being used as a ritual drinking vessel.

And the goal isn't obtaining occult power from corpses.

Instead, death is used as an existential confrontation through which the practitioner seeks mastery over fear and attachment.

That is much closer to a cremation-ground meditation / fear-confrontation practice than to Western-style necromancy.

One other fascinating detail is that Ananda Marga's ordinary meditation system consists of six progressively taught lessons, while Kāpālika meditation belongs to a much more advanced category; the organization's own introductory material does not present Kāpālika meditation as something beginners should simply try on their own.

If you're interested, I can also explain how Ananda Marga's Kāpālika practice compares with the actual Kāpālika tradition, Aghori cremation-ground sādhana, and Buddhist śmaśāna meditation—because superficially they look remarkably similar, but their underlying aims are quite different.

Folklore in the making (part 2)

The Dogman inquest continues...

Are all or most Dogman reports recent (or recently retold)?

Not all—and “recently reported” versus “recently retold” is a very important distinction here.

After looking at the historical record, I would divide Dogman/upright-canine reports into several layers.

1. The specifically named “Michigan Dogman” is overwhelmingly modern

This is the weakest part of the alleged historical continuity.

The familiar Michigan chronology—1887, 1937, 1950s, 1967, 1977, 1987, etc.—looks impressively old when presented as a continuous timeline. But the crucial problem is that the pre-1987 Michigan cases don't have the kind of contemporary documentation one would want. The famous 1887 story, in particular, has not turned up in a contemporary newspaper or other independent source; it appears in the form in which we know it through the mythology surrounding Steve Cook's 1987 song.

So I would not currently regard the standard 1887→1937→1967→1987 Michigan chronology as an established historical record.

And the particularly neat pattern of years ending in 7 is even more suspect, because that was explicitly built into Cook's 1987 The Legend.

2. But reports of similar creatures definitely predate the Internet

This is where I would modify the overly skeptical conclusion.

The Beast of Bray Road is a good example. Linda Godfrey's first newspaper investigation was published in December 1991, and she subsequently said that witnesses came forward with reports going back as much as ten years, i.e. to roughly 1981. She also recorded a possibly related 1936 incident in Jefferson County, Wisconsin.

More importantly, the early Bray Road accounts weren't simply copies of the standardized modern Dogman. As we just discussed, they included:

• large quadrupedal animals;
• animals sitting/kneeling;
• something that stood upright;
• something that apparently alternated between quadrupedal and bipedal movement;
• apparently bipedal creatures.

That makes the early Wisconsin phenomenon considerably more interesting historically than simply saying, "People started seeing Dogmen after the Michigan story."

3. There are older traditions—but they're not necessarily “Dogman”

If we broaden the question from “Dogman” to “large anomalous canine / humanoid canine”, the historical record gets much older.

There are longstanding traditions of:

• werewolves;
• black dogs;
• wild men;
• dog-headed humans/cynocephali;
• supernatural canine guardians;
• human-animal transformations.

But I would be very cautious about taking an old story about a werewolf or black dog and labeling it a Dogman sighting. That's retrospective classification, not historical evidence.

4. The really interesting period is roughly 1980–1995

This may be the most revealing period.

You have:

pre-1987:
some alleged upright-canine encounters, but relatively little well-preserved documentation.

1987:
Steve Cook creates the Michigan Dogman as a fictional radio legend. Listeners then begin calling him with alleged experiences, including experiences they say occurred before the broadcast.

1989–1991:
the Bray Road reports occur and are investigated contemporaneously by Linda Godfrey and Walworth County authorities. Godfrey's original 1991 reporting provides an actual paper trail.

1990s onward:
the Michigan Dogman, Beast of Bray Road, werewolves and other upright-canid reports increasingly become merged into one broad “Dogman” phenomenon.

That last stage is important. Once the Internet, books, television programs and paranormal culture start using Dogman as an umbrella term, older reports that originally described an enormous wolf, hairy humanoid, werewolf, etc., can retrospectively become “Dogman encounters.”

So are most reports recent?

If by “Dogman” you mean reports explicitly using that modern concept: yes, overwhelmingly.

If you mean reports of strange large canine-like beings, including bipedal or partly bipedal ones: no. There is a much older and broader folklore/reporting tradition.

And there's a third category that I think is particularly interesting:

Old reports that were only recognized as “Dogman” retrospectively.

Those deserve to be treated separately rather than automatically accepted or rejected.

The Bray Road material is particularly valuable because we have contemporary 1991 investigation, rather than somebody in 2010 saying, "My grandfather saw a Dogman in 1936." Godfrey says the 1991 article itself prompted people to come forward with older experiences, but that means we still have to distinguish the date of the alleged experience from the date it entered the documentary record.

So I think your instinct is right: the historical question isn't simply “Did anyone see Dogman before 1987?” but “When did reports of anomalous canine humanoids actually begin, and how much of the apparent antiquity is retrospective relabeling?”

That is a much more interesting question—and one where the evidence is surprisingly messy.

Folklore in the making (part 1)

 

So I looked into Dogman...again. It seems the skeptics are mostly right about this one. While strange reports of doglike creatures are as old as civilization, the modern Dogman seems to be a piece of emerging folklore which can be traced back to an April Fool´s Joke in 1987 (Michigan) and to Linda Godfrey´s article on the Beast of Bray Road in 1991 (Wisconsin). Godfrey´s subsequent book (published in 2003) plus the Internet popularized the Dogman and also "streamlined" him. 

Previously, there wasn´t really a single Dogman phenomenon. Now, there is. The creature is virtually always depicted as large, bipedal, intelligent, extremely dangerous and obviously canid. It´s also a flesh-and-blood creature. Finally, note the difference between Dogman and werewolves: the latter are said to be humans who can shape-shift into standard quadrupedal wolves.

Of course, a paranormal explanation is also possible, and the Dogmen would then be fairies taking whatever form we expect them to...

Can you look specifically at the earliest Bray Road reports and list what each witness actually said about whether the creature was walking on two or four legs?

Yes. I went back specifically to the earliest material, rather than relying on later Dogman summaries. The picture is actually more nuanced than I suggested before: some of the earliest Bray Road-area reports explicitly involve four-legged movement, while others involve upright movement or a transition between the two.

The most important source is Linda Godfrey's contemporary December 29, 1991 article in The Week, because it records testimony and the Humane Officer's files at the time, rather than decades later.

Earliest reports, approximately 1989–1991

Witness/report	Approx. date	What was actually reported about locomotion
Lorianne Endrizzi ("Barbara")	1989	Kneeling, not simply standing. She saw the creature beside Bray Road eating roadkill. Its knees were bent "like a human would do"; elbows were up and it held the food in its hands/paws. She did not actually describe seeing it walk on two legs.
Scott Bray	~1989	Reported a very large dog/wolf-like animal. Later accounts describe it principally as quadrupedal. The available contemporary 1991 article does not give a detailed locomotion account for his sighting.
Russell Gest / Heather Bowey group	~1990	This is particularly interesting. Heather and the other children initially thought they were looking at a large dog. It then stood up, and subsequently ran toward them "kind of like a dog," with bigger leaps. Thus this account explicitly contains both four-legged and upright behavior.
Mike Etten	~1990	Reported seeing a large animal sitting on its haunches, holding roadkill. This is not necessarily evidence of habitual bipedalism; the posture could be interpreted as a quadruped sitting upright.
Doris Gipson (Pat in the original article)	Oct. 31, 1991	Saw the creature running toward her after she got out of her car. She specifically qualified her interpretation: "you could suggest that it was on two legs," because she could see its chest so clearly. Thus probably bipedal, but she herself expressed some uncertainty.
Other reports in Jon Fredrickson's "Werewolf" file	pre-Dec. 1991	At least one report involved a hairy, pointed-eared creature chasing a deer on two legs. Another involved a fast "man-like" creature. These were already in the Humane Officer's files before Godfrey's article.
Robert Bushman and wife	reported as 1991 in later chronologies	Four-legged animal, described as running/chasing a deer. This is consistent with the quadrupedal strand of the reports.

The Endrizzi report is especially revealing

This is the famous image that essentially became the visual prototype of the Beast of Bray Road.

Endrizzi did not see a seven-foot humanoid walking down the road.

She saw something kneeling beside the road, with its back toward her, eating something. Its elbows were raised and its claws/forepaws were turned outward. When she drove past, it turned its head toward her but didn't flee. She estimated it at about 5'7" and 150 lb.

Godfrey's original sketch consequently depicted a kneeling canine humanoid, rather than a conventional upright Dogman.

That is an important distinction.

And the children give us perhaps the clearest "shapeshifting" locomotion

The Heather Bowey account is particularly interesting because the creature apparently looked like a large dog while on four legs, then stood up, and later ran back toward the house in a dog-like manner.

Godfrey's 1991 article records Bowey saying:

"When it stood up, they looked bigger than a dog's or coyote's..."

And then:

"I looked back and saw it running toward us kind of like a dog would run but with bigger leaps."

So this isn't merely a later embellishment that somebody "couldn't tell whether it had two or four legs." The original 1991 reporting already contains an animal that alternates between the two modes of locomotion.

Gipson is somewhat different

Doris Gipson's Halloween 1991 encounter is probably the strongest early apparently bipedal report.

She saw the creature charging her after she had gotten out of her car. She could see its large, hairy chest and described its movement as extremely powerful. But importantly, she didn't say categorically, "It was running on two legs."

She said that one could suggest that it was on two legs because she could see its chest so clearly.

That's a useful piece of evidential caution that often disappears in later retellings, where the account becomes simply:

"Doris saw a seven-foot Dogman running upright."

The original account is more qualified.

So your original impression was correct

Looking specifically at the early evidence, I'd characterize the phenomenon this way:

1989–91 Bray Road reports were not consistently of a permanently bipedal humanoid.

Instead, there were several morphological/locomotive patterns:

quadruped → large wolf/dog-like animal

crouching/kneeling → Endrizzi

sitting on haunches → Etten

stands upright → Bowey group

moves on four legs, then stands → Bowey group

apparently runs upright → Gipson

explicitly runs on two legs → one of the reports in Fredrickson's file

That is considerably more interesting than the later standardized "Dogman" description.

One further wrinkle: pre-1991 reports

Godfrey herself later said that when her December 1991 article appeared, people came forward with additional accounts and told her that some sightings had occurred as much as ten years earlier. She also mentions a possibly related 1936 incident in Jefferson County, roughly 40 miles away.

So there really are two separate questions:

1. Was the Beast of Bray Road originally reported as a biped?
   Yes, unequivocally.
2. Was it originally reported exclusively as a bipedal Dogman?
   No. The earliest material contains a mixture of quadrupedal, crouching, sitting, transitional and apparently bipedal behavior.

And I think this is relevant to our previous discussion about the pre-1987 Dogman reports. The Bray Road material doesn't look like a simple case of people copying a pre-existing "Dogman = seven-foot wolf-man" template. The earliest witnesses were actually describing something considerably more ambiguous: a strange, unusually large canid that could apparently behave like an ordinary quadruped but sometimes adopted a remarkably human-like posture.

That makes the locomotion itself one of the most intriguing features of the case..

Touch grass, dude

 

It seems this dude is no longer a "moderate". Here, he goes all fringe, claiming that the Olmecs and other high cultures in pre-Columbian America had a selective breeding program featuring archaic species of humans (Neandertals, Denisovans, etc). The result was deformed Homo sapiens, who were venerated as gods or turned into rulers. 

Oookay. 

But sure, this *can* be empirically tested. Just show us the Neandertal and Denisovan DNA in Olmec skeletons. It has to be at least 50%. Or even 100%.

Won´t happen, of course. Next question!