Alpha I, March 1946-June 1948. The issues were serialized with the letters of the Greek alphabet and a number, with the first issue of a year (March) called alpha, the second (June) called beta, the third (September) called gamma, and the fourth (December) called delta, to which was appended a Roman numberal to indicate the year of publication. 32-36 typewritten pages, 50 cents a copy, $2.00 a year. Members of the Flying Roll Fellowship, started to help Layne defray expenses, paid an additional $5.00 a year for membership. 10 issues published in all. This seems to have been intended by Layne as his thoughtful ruminations on various of the topics broached in his Round Robin, like reports of various experiences with Sylvan Muldoon’s methods to astrally travel, and thoughts on the role (and necessity) of secrecy in occultism. It also carried regular transcriptions of Layne’s seances with Mark Probert (which included the befuddled remarks of a seventeenth-century Tibetan monk who was surprised to be communicating through Probert and to learn about he was in California, which he’d never heard of. The journal carried a short article by “F.G.H.” on “The Role of Sex” (”And I have seen many on the path of Hatha Yoga whom complete continence did not save from mental and physical disaster. Sex rightly used is a tremendous force for advancement; wrongly used it is an even more terrific poison.”), and followed its rather bland conclusions with notes on sexual energy and astral travel from the students of Muldoon, a discussion of electrical radiation (”Stim Machines”) as an aphrodisiac, and “Congressus Subtilis” (”Sex relations in dream or in astral and etherid bodies”). Other topics, such as premature burial, drugs, Deros, Gabalis’s Eve and the Serpent, Enochian Language, Huna, mirror visions, etc., were similarly handled. Regular contributions by Israel Regardie, Nandor Fodor, Vincent H. Gaddis, Max Freedom Long, et al., and excerpts from Aleister Crowley and others. The journal carried and regularly updated an open list of informed students in “the general field of illuminism (psychic research, parapsychology, spiritism, occultism and related subjects”) with addresses so those interested could communicate with each other.

Category: UFOs, Unexplained, Sexual Elements.