Marcia Moore
Spiritual
Psychedelics
Ketamine
Book
[1978 pdf]
Journeys into the Bright World by Marcia Moore
Articles
[1981] Skull of Marcia Moore, Seattle
Psychic, Found
Vault Papers #1 - "The Strange Case of Marcia Moore"
“The lows came about for a tangled variety of personal reasons,
including the inexplicable happenstance that I became the target for a vicious
onslaught by certain unknown persons who were willing to stoop to any means to
discredit our work. My TV program was cancelled by an impersonator claiming to
be me, and a vulnerable young female journalist who had interviewed me for the
local newspaper was sufficiently intimidated to withdraw the story. Repeated
phone calls to my coworkers in Ojai [California] conveyed scandalous lies, while
psychic attacks were launched… The climax came when a phone call to Barbara
Devlin in Ojai informed her that I had been critically injured in a car crash…”
[Moore, p. 20-21]
“One night while in a state between sleeping and waking I
had a dreamlike vision of two repulsive gray sluglike creatures coming at me,
one from either side. It was impressed upon me that this was an emanation
deliberately sent forth by the same satanists who had been so viciously
harassing my friends over the telephone, and that they were using an effigy of
my body in their rites. At that point my fatigue was so great I thought, ‘Oh, I
just don’t care. I’m not going to fight it.’ Thereupon one of the protoplasmic
masses seemed to penetrate my right side at the level of the hip joint.”
[Moore, p. 96]
Moore also makes numerous references to her belief that she
is doomed: her past life experiences seem to consist largely of incarnations
that resulted in some sort of untimely death at the hands of the larger
populace:
“The first lifetime to which I was regressed was one in which I had been a
young maiden on a South Sea island… conducted up a steep mountain and hurled
into a volcano as a sacrifice to the local deity. (Actually, I think I was
supposed to be bearing a message to the god and this seemed a logical way to
send it.) There was also a memory of having been shoved backward over an abyss,
and, of course, Old Mary [referring to a previous incarnation as a witch]
shivering on that damp dungeon floor. To this day it is hard to escape the
conviction that we will once again be immolated, incarcerated or rudely
dispatched as the result of engaging in forbidden practices.“ [Moore, p.
162]
With that in mind, I was not surprised to find what had
interrupted her until-then prolific oeuvre: she had mysteriously disappeared
from her home in Alderwood Manor, Washington on one rainy January night in 1979,
with no clue as to her whereabouts. Her death immediately took on an
archetypal significance in my mind: I simply could not stop thinking about what
had transpired that cold winter night near Seattle. I thought back to the
Ketamine FAQ: Had she been killed by some sort of cult that she had been trying
to expose? Absolutely nothing about it made sense. What made this story
even more bizarre was that it didn’t corroborate with the other popular story
circulating through ‘the underground’ – that her skeleton had been found in a
tree, indicating that she had climbed up a branch and injected herself with
ketamine and frozen to death. This version is detailed in Karl Jansen’s
excellent Ketamine: Dreams and Realities, an account corroborated by both her
late husband and John C. Lilly, M.D.: “Moore disappeared from her house on
January 14, 1979. Her husband spent a year searching for her, including journeys
to Hong Kong and Thailand, places to which she had traveled in the past. Her
skeleton was found in early spring, 1981, in the place where she had frozen to
death. She had made a journey at night into the dark world of the forest, a
potent Jungian symbol, curled up in a tree, and then injected herself repeatedly
with all of the ketamine she had been able to find. That night the pond froze
over, the moon rose, and Fire Lady was killed by the ice.” [Jansen, p.54]
In addition, her late husband further believes that her death was a suicide:
“Marcia became addicted to ketamine and committed suicide. The drug is dangerous
and its use should not be encouraged… I told her it was a seductress, not a
Goddess.” [Jansen, p. 54]
From the evidence presented, Marcia Moore’s fate seems
clear-cut: she more than likely became delusional after extended ketamine binges
and wandered out into the Washington forest where she endured some sort of
accident. However, there is a substantial body of evidence which not only brings
into doubt why Moore would have chosen to kill herself, but directly contrasts
to the account given above.
The account that crime reporter Ann Rule reported in her
“true-crime” book A Rage To Kill corresponds closely to the account that
I gleaned from other sources. While it is entirely possible that Moore walked
out of the house in a ketamine-induced delusion, it seems unlikely that she
would have committed suicide without at least leaving a note. Marcia’s brother,
Robin Moore, was close to his sister and knew his sister would never disappear
willingly: “She would not have disappeared without letting me know. She was
writing a book for my publishing company. If there’s one thing she had, it was a
very strong sense of deadlines. She would have called.” [Rule, p.258]
Rule’s account does not jibe with the “frozen in a tree”
account listed above. In her account, Moore’s whereabouts were completely
unknown until her skull was found at a building site approximately two years
after her disappearance. If this is true, then it could not be possible that her
skeleton could have been found in a tree – either one occurrence or the other of
her remains had to indicate her fate! Rule’s story seems to be the more accurate
of the two by a high magnitude – it was also verified by Carol Cunningham,
curator of Solstice Point (a memorial site for astrologers). In fact, the exact
latitude and longitude of her skull is given on the site “Marcia was last
seen at approximately 8:30 PM PST on January 14, 1979, in Alderwood Manor, WA.
122W14; 47N10.
Her skull was found on March 20, 1981, at 3:30 PM PST near 172nd and Bothell
Way, 122W12; 47N52.” [http://www.solsticepoint.com/astrologersmemorial/moorem.html]
.....The real bombshell in this conversation was that the Seattle Police
Department had lost her skull after they had recovered it for evidence. (You
can’t help but think of Homer Simpson on this one – the most high-profile crime
case in Seattle in the last couple of years, and the skull gets thrown out with
some stale Winchell’s).
Who was Moore's fourth husband? In the Concord Library information, her co-author of Journeys into the Bright World, and fourth husband is Alltounian (Howard "Sunny" Alltounian); in Rage to Kill Anne Rule writes of Dr. Walter "Happy" Boccaci as her husband living together in a duplex when she disappeared (chapter includes pages 251-262). What to do?