The Swirling Black Void: An Examination

A comment from my new friend Cullen:

“Another thought I had last night before retiring to bed (I get all my best thoughts right before falling asleep): Have you considered that the “horrenda caribdis” on the Magnus woodcut we talked over is a reference to THE VOID that so often appears in zombie art?”

Cullen refers here to the “horrenda caribdis,” the Maelstrom, on the lower right of the Olaus Magnus woodcut, detailed in a previous post:



He compares it to the “void” described in many Tzombi testimonies as written about by Dr. Teresa Morgan through her work in Personality Reclamation using hypnotic regression. Her article in Sentience: A Journal of Consciousness 36, no 3 which describes the unique plight of the post-deceased, many of whom (87% by her count) have lost touch with their former lives. A quote:

One recurring motif in regression is the “swirling black void” or “vortex” which, if the subject is able to remember anything at all about his/her pre-decease existence, is the sole memory.

One subject had a very particular experience of this void -- a “vision,” if you will, while under hypnosis:

I saw a…black mass…which drew me to it. It was alive and…kind of—howling? But ‘howling’ isn’t the right word, because it was like everything was howling. Like a black hole would pull you apart if you fell into it? This was like a mental black hole. I could feel it would pull my thoughts apart-rip them right out of my head.

Compare this to my graduate work in which a small percentage of those experiencing NDE’s (Near Death Experiences) mentioned the “swirling black void”(Published in Thoughts on Thought: An Anthology of Consciousness, Brain Burst Books, 1992.)

At the time, I hypothesized this void to be the inverse of the commonly described “tunnel of light,” After years of studying the Tzombi, however, I am prepared to suggest another cause, the two of which need not be mutually exclusive: this “void” may be a genetic memory of the Black Rock of Cybele (or Assyrian Cenotaph, for those of you of Ashmolean bent) which imprinted itself on the DNA of the Tzombi race.