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To Coast to Coast George Nori with you. Derek Mason with US writer, researcher and award winning travel and documentary photographer. He hosts the award nominated podcast called spirit Box, best known for his work on the gin Ye Gaudi. Lives in East Sussex, United Kingdom, and that's where we're going live right now. Darrere, welcome to the program.
Good morning Georgia. Say, it's an honor to be here.
How do people hear your podcast? By the way, spirit Box.
Yeah, it's the podcast has been around for but just over four years now, and I look at all all the different types of spirit encounters, folklore and the interview modical practitioners about their experiences.
So guess it's a fun chow fantastic.
How did you get involved in the unusual like this?
Well, it started, It started ready from the of my photographic work. I used to be a travel and documentary photographer and I spent a lot of time in India in particular, and I just started bumping up against this this stuff when I investigated certain subjects like like the Gin, which are these beings that are said to be made of smokeless fire, most known within kind of the Arabic
world and Islamic worlds. I also did. I did a documentary piece on a Hindu sect known as the Agori, and they practiced some extreme magical rituals and strange things started to happen when I investigated and got into this area, and that repiqued my interest and I wanted to understand my experiences more and I just started researching and it and one thing led to another reading.
Did the strange things there happen to you or just whenever?
Yet, some strange things did happened to me, particularly when I went to Delhi in twenty sixteen to shoot a story related to the locations within the city of Delhi that are associated with the Gin. The famous book by an author called William dal Rymple called A City of Gins, and it's about his time as a young correspondent in Delhi. So I went to the Deli to shoot these locations and kind of build a story about the Gin looking
at it from such a more paranormal perspective. And I just had a list of disasters from from day one I had a quite intense nightmare which I found out was located in one of the locations that I was going to shoot it. So basically I was sitting down in during a Susi celebration and there are lots of fantastic music in a place called Nismodine Dark, which is the tomb of a very famous Supi Saunds. People go there to be healed by the Gin a hill from
the Gin Rother. And during that nightmare, there was a man.
Sitting to my left.
And he turned and looked at me and his face was decomposed. Yeah, it was quite intense. He was wearing a white hat and said, don't come here. And my camera broke. There was two weeks before I was supposed to go. I couldn't get it repaired. No one could figure out what was wrong with it. My my father came with me. His tooth broke in Heathrow Airport before we even left on the flight. We had to change hotels like three times in two days, like just everything
was difficult. But when I got finally got to this location Nismoden, I was directed to an area where there was a small.
Enclosure where people people were waiting.
To be treated by the by the stuffies to help help them with Gin problems, so to speak, Gin possession. And there was a man sitting there, and he had a white hat on, and he was staring directly at me, and I believe he was being possessed. He was possessed and sessed by Gin, and the Gin was staring at me. It's the only time I've ever been afraid to take a photograph of my life.
Have you ever been heard Gara in your work.
I haven't been hurt, but I have had some like frightening experiences, experiences that challenge my worldview. If you ask me five year years ago if I believed in spirits and believe the magic, I would have said now now, I absolutely believe those things are real.
Hence the book Song of the Dark Man, which we're going to get into in a big way.
Yeah.
Here in the United States, we talk a lot about shadow people in the hat Man. Now yours is the dark Man that's different than these entities, is it not?
It's I would say the hat Man and some of the shadow.
People are lower emanations of the.
Same force, which is an evil force.
I think it's more ambiguous than that I think the expedience because the experience is so intense and frightening for people that they can often believe it to be evil, but it's not necessarily the case. That's not to say that people don't have the evil experience, but it is often an experience that leads to people's worldview being changed
and bringing in creative forces into people's lives. So that's the reason it's called Song of the dark Man because people sometimes when people have these experiences, these initiatory experiences with the dark Man, they get a form of creative energy coming through them. They also get a form of magical energy coming through them, so it's almost like an initiation into creativity or initiation into into magical practice.
There are who coined the phrase dark man?
Oh goodness, Yeah, that's a that's a great question.
There's so many names for the spirits and this force that I could tell you where that that name originally came from. But I heard names like that and and others from a lot of the medicitions. And which is that I interviewed.
Has the name the devil been associated with the dark man.
What they would call the folk devil, not not the Christian devil.
What's the difference, Well, the.
Folk devil is more of a trickster type character, so it would be like the devil and folklore that essentially tends to be an in morality plays the stories that people's character gets questioned, whereas the the Christian devil is more of that kind of opposing, opposing figure that is set up to be diametrically opposed to God.
There his website is his name he spells a E A R R A G. H. Mason dot com linked up at Coast to coast am dot com. There are what if you had to explain, and you will, who the dark man is, What the dark man is? What would you say?
I'd say it's the disruptive force, a destructive force that reminds us that we are part of nature, that we're not. We don't own nature, we don't rule over nature, but we are part of it. And that's what I mean about the folks that will be in this kind of trickster character. It makes people understand that whatever you think about the world, how it's how it works, who's in control that all those things can be undermined in an instant.
Is the phrase the dark man pretty well known in the United Kingdom.
I wouldn't say so, No, it's more well known in.
Like occult circles.
Why is the dark man experience to some so terrifying? What happens?
Well, what I noticed going through the focalore and going through the trials of various twelve reports from seventeenth century when the Scottish witch trials is there is a the figure that often appears that it's part animal and part human. It also tends to be get black, and it has
it tends to interrupt journeys. So we have things like you know, like you get the fairy stories about someone's walking along the road at night and then a dark horseman comes up and challenges them to a race, and like the race, the prize of the race is actually their soul, you know, and at that part that dark and will be called like the King of the fairies. So these things tend to interlap quite a bit. People still have these experiences. People still have these interrupted journeys
where very strange things happen. But they might be called different things might be called like like crypto animals or things like that. But it's at the undercurrent the actual circumstances are the same. Somebody has a journey there in between one place and another. It's a liminal thing. They are maybe out somewhere that it isn't civilization, it's out somewhere wild, and their journey is interrupted. Something mysterious happens
to them, and their world changes. And what I mean by their world changing is their understanding of how the world works. The structure of the universe is utterly changed because they've had this experience that has turned their world on their head.
Let's break down the title of the book. First of all, Song of the Dark Man. What does that mean?
Well, particularly the reason I chose the words song is was active to the sagas and ancient mythologies and folklowers of Irelands which where performed these stories were performed. Parts of this were sung. This spirit is associated with inspiration it particularly things like music and poetry. So that's why I wanted to put that in there, to understand, to help people understand that this is part of this experience and part of the things that this spirit bequeaths people.
The cover of the book, that picture that illustration is done right.
Scary, yes it is, it is.
I had very little to do with that but yeah.
The subtitle of the book is one of Them Father of Witches. What does that mean?
So in the Scottish witch trials we have a repeated.
Pattern where a.
Dark figure came into someone's life and brought them into magic. So, for example, Margaret Alexander, she was tried in sixteen forty seven and she referred to a man in black clothes who made her go forward. She also spoke to this man being the king of the fairies. When pressed, she said his physical nature was cold. Another lady, Margaret Allen, was tried in sixteen sixty one and first servant testified so she saw black man go into Margaret's room and
appear to move around like he had hoops. Thomas Black Pride in sixteen sixty one that the devil appeared to him at night in the shape of a man. Agnes Clarkson Pride in sixteen forty nine spoke how her home was filled with a black myst and then then she saw this dark man with whom she has carnal dealings. So the pattern comes up again and again.
The second title is called Lord of the Crossroads.
Explain that, well, this is a reference to where people and like American countryman, and people have gone to negotiate with the spirit of the crossroads, and within certain magical schools, the crossroads believed to be a place of power, that these crossroads have emerged from migration paths of animals, and where they cross over, they're they're again liminal places. So people will go to the to the crossroads two initiate contact with the spirit there. The most famously Robert Johnson,
the blues musician. Legend has it that the dark Man took Robert Johnson's guitar, tuned it at the crossroads and handed back to him along with great talent, success and and money. And we find that pathion goes on and on throughout our music. Lots of luminaries talk about Johnson's music, Keith Richards, Robber Plants, Bob Dylan. I'm quite strikingly Bob Dylan in a in an interview in the early two thousands,
he was asked, I think it was sixteen minutes. He was asked why he was still working at through many years of success, and he replied, it all goes back to a destiny thing. I made a bargain with it a long time ago, and I'm holding up my end and went pressed to reveal whom he had made this deal.
He gave a right smile and laugh and said, with the chief commander on this earth and the world we can't see, which is a very striking thing to say, and really kind of jumped jumped out of me when I'm want to find that.
What what did Robert Johnson have to give up in order to get those benefits?
The legend said that he he he gave up.
His soul for this.
Not worth it?
Is it? I wouldn't say so now, I mean.
I wouldn't trade my soul for whatever Johnson thinks he got out.
Of the deal.
Yep, I would agree with you, which which makes you question of what was Dylan talking about?
Good point?
Point?
Does the dark Man inject himself in many events?
Yes?
What we what we found here is going through the going through the folklore mythology is I started to see this figure which in Irish is called on far dark or on far dove, so those terms in Gaelic translation as the dark man or the black man. Now those when I did some research within some of the Irish folklore collections which are available online, I started to see this figure come up again and again, and he was set up as this adversarial figure, this trickster figure that
would drive all these stories along. And one of the most famous stories that I found him in was in a collection known as the Senian Cycle. So the Fenian Cycle is a body of Irish distriture originally dating from the seventh century, and essentially the Fenian cycle is one where these noble warriors, the Fienna, spend their time hunting, fishing, and engaging with adventures in the spirit world and to help orientate people think and Irish knights to the round table.
That's kind of what we're looking at here. The p earliest compilation of the Fenian stories is found in Column Shana, or the Locally of Ancients. This text is made up of three manuscripts, two from the fifteenth century and third dating to the seventeenth century. But these manuscripts reflect a far older tradition, goes way back, and like Irish is the oldest vernacular language apart from Latin in Western Europe.
So these stories, the dark Man turns up only a very very small passage, and he sets the whole string of events of that create this great story, which is the story of the birth of Osheen, who is Sean mccool's son and essentially Sean McCool, who is the Irish Arthur is out hunting. He finds a strange deer. His dogs won't attack the deer, so he brings the deer
back into his force. That night, a beautiful fairy woman called five that comes into his quarters and begs his protection from this man, who she calls the dark the dark man of the she or the black medicition of the men of God. Now this is the dark man.
She's referring to listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot com for more