The 2021 eBook by Martin Popoff  

Flaming Telepaths: Imaginos Expanded and Specified is… pretty indescribable. It’s a timeline-heavy expansion of Sandy Pearlman’s Imaginos mythos as draped across the Blue Öyster Cult albums. The ultimate aim, as was Sandy’s, is to deconstruct the occult origins of World War I, which, in this telling, is perpetrated by Imaginos taking psychic possession of a number of players on the world stage, including H.P. Lovecraft, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Winston Churchill. 

As the back cover sez: 

In 1967, a now deceased prophet known as Memphis Sam—H.P. Lovecraft reincarnated—wrote the rough outline of a cryptid-encrypted tall tale purported to explain the occult origins of World War I. 

Five years later, a band called Blue Öyster Cult would begin disseminating pieces of the story across their albums, with the biggest data dump coming in 1988, on a record of theirs called Imaginos. 

This book proposes, as the title suggests, an “expanded and specified” deep tissue massage of Sandy Pearlman’s crypto-wordology, with the author performing, as a mason would, the slathering of mortar between the bricks of the castle-keep that Pearlman built for the band he managed to great fame, most notably with Agents of Fortune en route to Fire of Unknown Origin, an alchemically charged grimoire much like the book with which you are absurdly about to interact. 

Come dance the dance of time, as “modified child” Imaginos shape-shifts his way through the 1800s toward the Great War, slashing and shredding the psychic fabric along the way through a series of possessions including those of Poe, Bierce, Lovecraft, Crowley, Austin Osman Spare and perhaps, as most recklessly speculated by the fevered author, Winston Churchill. 

Here’s one sample entry each from the last six centuries covered (the book starts in 5000 BCE): 

1599. Salt manufacturer—also called a councillor and salt boiler!—Johann Thölde, working under pseudonym Basilius Valentinus, or Basil Valentine, sees the publication of alchemical text The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine. Valentine conjured both hydrochloric acid and “oil of vitriol” (sulphuric acid), or as Blue Öyster Cult describes the scene in key alchemical track “Astronomy,” “Like acid and oil on a madman’s face, his reason tends to fly away.” As well, Valentine worked with alkali processes in the creation of ammonia, evoking images of BÖC song “Mistress of the Salmon Salt (Quicklime Girl).”

Further to the mysterious and dubious existence of a Basil Valentine, his birth date is cited as 1394. Still, there would be at least one drawing generated of the man (in 1717), which further perpetuates the story of his flesh-and-blood existence. 

December 1608. Death of John Dee. The power of the mirror is unloosed. The protector and keeper (swinger?) of the portal gate is gone. So much of Dee’s library is destroyed. A silverfish, a creature of the Imaginos saga, is an eater of paper, a destroyer of knowledge. Blue Öyster Cult, although regularly playing live, does not play songs from the album Imaginos. The record is forgotten knowledge, just like Dee’s library.

Publication date of William Blake’s feverish prophecy “America.” Writes Blake, “The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations.” Also this year, adjacent to Lovecraft and Pearlman country, Manchester, Vermont, a vampire is on the loose, until a suspect corpse is selected and as public spectacle, its heart is burned. Various European nation states are at war with each other and France is at war with itself, but what else is new? 

1853. British occultist Frederick Hockley forms the Croydon Circle. A scryer, Hockley claimed to be in contact with the Crowned Angel of the Seventh Sphere. It is said that Hockley’s writings were influential in the founding documents of the Golden Dawn. The Blue Öyster Cult spoke of its own golden dawn, namely the “Golden Age of Leather.” 

1905. Crowley’s Collected Works. His words on the page are merely another form of media analogous to what seems now like his preposterous level of ceremony. Crowley’s disturbing and yet sometimes amusing and trickster-like poems and longer narratives are also writings that, as Sandy frames it, test “our ability to respond to the challenge of evil.” 

November 26, 2020. Albert Bouchard issues a solo album called Re Imaginos. He calls it a correction, meaning a correction upon the 1988 Imaginos album. The songs have been re-sequenced, and the musical arrangements pared back, in accordance with Sandy’s original late ‘60s vision for the Imaginos album, when its sonic birthing into the world was but a fever dream, when the dance that was time. 

Also included are 39 pencil illustrations, two of which can be seen in Albert Bouchard’s lyric video for the song “Blue Öyster Cult” and one in the lyric video for “Black Telescope.” There are also the following appendices: 

Appendix 1: 1919 - 2020

Appendix 2: An Interview with Albert Bouchard

Appendix 3: “Wild Child Full of Grace:” The Magic Tale of How Imaginos Incarnated as Jim Morrison and Told Sandy Pearlman How He Rose from the Sea to Cause World War I

Appendix 4: From Aoxomoxoa to Oaxaca 

Learn more about Martin Popoff at http://www.martinpopoff.com 

Bonus! - This eBook is presented here as a full high-resolution PDF to maintain the layout of the original book, and provide images at the highest quality. 

eBook File Size - PDF Format – 6.13 MB (200 pages)