Bottomless Pit in the Californian Desert September 5, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
There are two interesting references in Helter Skelter (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry), the description of the Charles Manson murders, to a bottomless pit in the Californian desert. First, a little background for anyone coming to this new. Charles Manson was a charismatic and unpleasant individual (a promising combination) who gathered a group of impressionable young men and women and created a nickel sect (the Family). The sect basically believed that a race war was coming (CM today sports a swastika tattoo on his forehead) and that Charles Manson would help his sect to survive this war by hiding in the desert. What was in the desert? Well, there are some allusions to a ‘bottomless pit’ (see Revelations). First we have a member of the family in prison telling another con about their escape.
Charlie was going to lead them to the desert, Susan said. There was a hole in Death Valley, only Charlie knew where it was, but deep down inside, in the center of the earth, there was a whole civilization. And Charlie was going to take the ‘family’, the chosen few, and they were going to go to this bottomless pit and live there.
Next, we have Bugliosi (prosecutor and author) try and give a synthesis of CM’s ideas about the bottomless pit. It seems to be the human equivalent of a seed bank, with each dying civilization sending representations of their last generation to feast on the tree of twelve fruit ‘or something like that’.
Also in Revelation, as well as in Hopi Indian legends, there was mention of a ‘bottomless pit’, Poston said. The entrance to this pit, according to Charlie, was ‘a cave that he says is underneath Death Valley that leads down to a sea of gold that the Indians know about.’ Charlie claimed that ‘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, or something like that [love this], and you don’t need to bring candles nor any flashlights down there. He 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’. Both Atkins and Jakobson had already told me about Charlie’s ‘bottomless pit.’ The Family loved to hear Charlie sermonize about this hidden ‘land of milk and honey’. They not only believed, they were so convinced that such a place existed that they spent days searching for the hole in the ground which would leave them to the underground paradise.
Note the contradiction here. The Family is out looking for the entrance, but, in the first passage CM knew where it was.
Beach always thinks that one of the acid tests of a really successful sect is not that it can encourage its members to kill themselves or others, but that it can convince them to believe really, really stupid things…
Anything else on the bottomless pit: drbeachcombing At yahoo Dot com
KMH, 29 Sep 2016: Charles Manson was a criminal sociopath, as an examination of his Wikipedia article shows. It appears Manson mixed everything he was exposed to into a incoherent witch’s brew – no one aspect being based on actual fact or experience. However, there are pervading legends about underground installations among the native Americans – for example, https://borderlandsciences.org/journal/vol/48/n05/Gaddis_Tunnels_of_the_Titans.html Avoiding all bottomless pits,
Ruth B, 29 Sep 2016, Well, I didn’t remember that Charlie Manson et al. were living in Death Valley so I had to check it out. You don’t say if the author thought they were living there or just looking for the bottomless pit. And I’m really unclear on how the Hopi legend got mixed in as they live in New Mexico.
Death Valley is on the eastern side of California, in the border area between it and Nevada. The Mansons were living on the Spahn Movie Ranch as caretakers and it is in Los Angeles county towards the coast side of California. Technically, Death Valley isn’t a desert, it’s a scrubland, and a damned unpleasant place to be. Miserably hot most of the year with very little water, deadly animals, and inhospitable plants that don’t even provide a modicum of shade. (There have been several out-of-country visitors who have died there this year from poor preparation and unfamiliarity with it’s weather.) The Spahn Ranch is sort of a scrubland that runs into trees. with less unpleasant heat and fewer cactus.
There is a story that has been around forever about some strange caves in California, but I think they were in the northern part of the state, where a civilization that was very advanced lived and someone stumbled on it one time. Take that with a very big grain of salt! The Hopi do have a legend that mankind came from a hole in the ground because they were from a failed civilization (not sure here) and that we are in the last stage before a rebirth, destruction, etc.
I remember when the Mansons went on their killing spree, and how sad and frightening it was even to people who didn’t live in California. It just confirmed most people’s opinion that hippies were the scum of the earth instead of being relatively harmless. He and his followers are still the scum of the earth even now, he has been refused parole again lately, and I think it was Squeaky Fromme who was just let out. She promises to create more havoc, but I think she’s too round the bend to do so.
Cults are a symptom of a society that has lost it’s anchor, or at least a good chunk of it who have. Most of them have just done away with themselves, unfortunately, while others have created more sadness than I can mention and stay sober. Jim Jones and his “Magic Kool-aid” (put me off drinking it for years, I can tell you), Heaven’s Gate, the Moonies, the Raelians, just to name a few. So many are still around and damaging even more people.
Bruce T, 29 Sep 2016: There’s the Book of Revelations angle, of course, but it seems to me Manson has taken the old folk/hobo song “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and transferred a variation of it into an underground hippy paradise? The song is an old one about the Hobo’s own version of Heaven. It was a standard in the jailhouses of Charlie’s youth and I’m sure he hit the rails a time or two. It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t cobble his own version of it and sing around the campfire to the Family at night and tell tales of it?
Burl Ives had a hit with it in the mid-40’s, about the time Charlie was swapped for beer and taken to the Children’s Home. Dorsey Burnette had hit with it again about 1960. Burnette was a rockabilly singer of the time. Charlie would have likely heard both in or out of jail.
Go to the Wikipedia page on the song, it lists the lyrics. There’s an old saying in entertainment, “If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.” In my opinion, Manson did just that for his underground happy land.
Add the 50’s/60’s sci-fi angle of people living underground, remember the film of H.G. Welles classic “The Time Machine” along with the film version of Verne’s “Journey To The Center of The Earth” weren’t that old at the time and consider state of the art. Both featured underground dwelling societies. The kids who come to comprise the Family, would have seen them either in the theater or on TV, likely both. The palette was there, Charlie simply painted the picture with the weirdness that seethed in his brain. He was conman with a lot of cheap acid creating a cult out of the cultural milieu of the time. He got them addled and sold them a fairy tale, along the lines of all religions, large or small. Scare them with their own fears about the inevitability of death and nothingness, then tell them there is pie in the sky if you just play along, or scare them with massive doses of acid, creating a chemically induced existential crisis, then hit them with the comfort of your tale of life in an underground world using the same angle. It works the same. Charlie put his Big Rock Candy Mountain hippy paradise underground.
That only answers for the kid’s Charlie ruined. Charlie himself was interested in the occult and read heavily about in jail. I’m sure the idea of the “Hollow Earth” would’ve came on to his radar one way or another. If not via his esoteric interests, just the ideas that were floating around post WWII about Nazi’s supposedly hiding in the hollow earth via the North of South Pole. Manson was and is a white supremacist, those hollow earth theories ran rampant in those circles in the 50’s and 60’s in the years before the formation of the Family. Even more material for Charlie to use. Far Right groups and many of those of a conspiratorial bent think the evil New World Order have underground bases honeycombing the country. What their purpose is depends on which group you ask. I’m pulling for the Catfish Men of Planet X. I find catfish damned tasty.
