PERISTALSIS: A DIGEST Vol. 143, No. 2, March 2017 Problems with Strieber and The Key HEINRICH MOLTKE THE EMPTY MAN A MÔMO IMPRINT ABSTRACT THE KEY by Whitley Strieber presents a conversation Strieber claims to have had with an otherworldly visitor offering a “new vision” of God and man along with previously unknown scientific knowledge and pre- dictions for the future. This article critically examines The Key and uses textual evidence from Strieber’s previous books, articles, and interviews to show that ideas purportedly originating with the visitor appear throughout Strieber’s previous work. This article notes that scientific assertions made in The Key, far from being new and unknown, draw on the popular scientific literature at around the time Strieber wrote The Key. This article also examines the controversy surrounding differences between The Key’s two published versions, suggesting that contrary to Strieber’s improbable claim that his 2001 text had been altered by “sin- ister forces” without his knowledge, Strieber authored the text of both editions. Strieber’s inability to notice the similarity between his own public statements and the “breathtakingly new” ideas presented by his visitor combined with his unsupportable charge of censorship against his own self-published book call into question his credibility as a bridge between intellectual culture and the experience of the otherworldly. ] Page numbers in parentheses ( ) refer to the 2001 Walker & Collier edition of The Key unless otherwise noted. Numbers in superscript with brackets [ ] link to end notes. Quotations from digital texts are sic erat scriptum. • © 2017 The Empty Man Ltd • VERSION 1.05 PERISTALSIS: A DIGEST VOL. 143 NO. 2 PART ONE THE KEY was self-published by Whitley Strieber listing his company, Walker & Collier, Inc., as the copyright holder.[1] Whitehall Printing Com- pany in Naples, Florida was used as printer.[ 2] The book was available for purchase starting in January 2001 [3] at Strieber’s website, whitleysworld. com, and could be ordered by telephone. [4] A slim volume, The Key was 105 pages in length. The book consist- ed of four sections: The Master of the Key, The Conversation, Who Was He?, and The Prophecy of the Key. Of these, The Conversation contained what according to Strieber was a faithful transcription of a dialogue with an otherworldly visitor dubbed by Strieber the ‘Master of the Key’. The Conversation formed the main substance of the book at sixty-two pages long and nearly twenty thousand words. Two other sections, The Master of the Key and Who Was He? described what took place before and after the dialogue according to Strieber. The Prophecy of the Key was a set of glosses by Strieber on twenty or so excerpts from The Conversation. the scenario ACCORDING to Strieber in The Master of the Key , in the early morning hours of June 6, 1998 ( a Saturday ),[5] while on an author tour in Toronto and staying at the Delta Chelsea Hotel, a knock awoke him from a “deep sleep” ( 3 ). Confused and thinking it room service, Strieber went to the door and a man let himself into the room. At first ready to eject the man, Strieber in the course of a brief exchange became intrigued. Strieber would call the dialogue that followed “the most incredible conversation of my life” [6] and call Master of the Key an “awesome” and “extraor- dinary man”,[7] “the most brilliant person I have ever met” [8] with “the best mind I have ever encountered” (6). The ideas the Master of the Key presented Strieber with were “to- tally new and original”, [9] “deeply, profoundly new” (6), and “breath- takingly new” (5). There was a “soaring sense of newness” (79) to the ideas which according to Strieber were “unlike anything I had heard before”. [10] The ideas involved a “completely new view of man and G od”, [11] a “new image of God” (6, 7) that “lifted the veil between life and death” (7) by explaining “what the soul actually is and how death work s”. [12] ∙ 334 PROBLEMS WITH STRIEBER AND THE KEY The encounter seemed to last “about half an hour”. But according to Strieber “once our conversation was transcribed, it became obvious that more time was involved. He must have been with me for at least two hours” ( 5 ). The next morning, Strieber found that he had notes from the conversation which he had taken down in a yellow pad. By December 2000, Strieber had “transcribed” the conversation [13] calling the process “the most difficult writing struggle of my life” (7). The transcription would form the basic substance of The Key, a book that Strieber would call the “most important thing I have ever published”,[14] saying in 2001: “I think it contains more of value than everything else I’ve written all put toget her”, [15] and in 2003 “this is probably the most important book I’ve ever had the privilege of writing” and “[t]his is my great work. This is probably why I was born”.[16] Strieber would even say of The Key in 2011: “I regard this as a sacred text”. [17] everything he said was new IT WAS FORTUNATE for Strieber that he took notes. The notes were “not extensive”, but they had a “mnemonic power” (5) that allowed him to recreate what was said. Indeed, according to Strieber in 2001, The Conversation is “eighty to ninety percent accurate”. [18] Strieber has main- tained since its publication that The Conversation is a transcription of a conversation and not a fictional creation,[19] and over time his confidence in its accuracy appears only to have increased, saying in 2011 that the transcription was “easily ninety percent accurate, maybe more”. [20] The Key certainly differed from Strieber’s previously published work. Strieber’s close encounter books were first-person narratives featuring gripping novelistic descriptions weakened by sometimes too-poetic ruminations and sprinkled here and there with occasional brilliant ideas. The Key took the form of a conversation, resembling a philosophical dia- logue inasmuch as the “new vision” of the Master of the Key seemed to reflect a sophisticated and coherent system.[21] Unlike many philosophical dialogues, The Key is also successful as a literary creation. It effectively dramatizes a conversation with a real and possibly exceptional person. Strieber comes across as curious, out of his depth, and sometimes deeply moved, and there is a palpable tension as he tries to elicit answers from the Master of the Key. For his part, the Master of the Key speaks with a language that is compact and technical, but also evocative and poetic. Sometimes he refuses to answer questions put to him, and sometimes ∙ 335 PERISTALSIS: A DIGEST VOL. 143 NO. 2 he answers questions from an unexpected direction. His answers can be allusive or wonderfully clear, even aphoristic: ‘Being serves joy’; ‘path within, signposts without’; ‘in the fields, fear rides’. The reader gets the sense that the Master of the Key is someone who has much to say in a short amount of time. The Conversation is thus not the laundry list of assertions one might expect from an author using an invented figure as a mouthpiece. A good deal is said by allusion or by implication and the exact meaning is not always clear. In addition, a natural flow is maintained throughout giving the transcription of the conversation a certain believability. If one did not reject a priori the whole premise of the encounter, statements made by the Master of the Key might well be taken to suggest a whole body of authentically real knowledge. What did the Master of the Key figure say? At a glance, much of it — maybe even all of it — seems unheard of and new. Certainly none of it seems to reflect the prevailing orthodoxies of our day — as one again might expect of an established author championing private opinions. The following is a trajectory through the main points presented in The Conversation. key points 1. MANKIND is destined to “ascend or go extinct” over the next two thousand years (68). The earth can no longer “support” Mankind owing to “overpopulation” (13) and depletion of natural resources (56). Man was meant to leave the earth by now but because the Holocaust killed too many of Mankind’s “most intellectually competent members”, the “secret of gravity” was not “unlocked” (13). At the same time, a great calendar called the Zodiac was created which very precisely measured the rate of growth and the amount of time it would take for Mankind to run out of resources (56). Different ages mark different stages in Man’s evolution, and in the coming Age of Aquarius, Mankind must “surrender” (to God) and “return to the forest” or go extinct (43). Surrender and returning to the forest coincide with spiritual ascension since ego or self-will are what stand in the way of ascension (28), and ascension itself is a function of an evolutionary process in which the energetic body grows through the natural accumulation of lived experience (27), as souls are recycled into other bodies with deep dispositions (soul’s conscience, 74) and knowledge of past lives buried (33, 42). ∙ 336 PROBLEMS WITH STRIEBER AND THE KEY 2. THE UNIVERSE is elemental and energetic (29), with ‘elemental’ corresponding roughly to the physical, i.e. the periodic table of the ele- ments (15).[22] The energetic covers a spectrum starting with unconscious energy, then conscious energy, which moves in the direction of radi- ance (15) the higher its spin and the greater its complexity (17). Conscious energy is something like unconscious energy brought to bear on itself (it “knows itself”, 63) which is a sufficient leap in complexity and intensi- ty that it is qualitatively different.