In my recent wanderings I have reacquainted myself with the Psion Guild. It has been nearly 8 years since I last had any dealings with them. There was this big thing about how we were all evil and mad and dangerous and needed to be saved from the evil symbiote vampire that was Core, to which end they were going to burn us out. Or something.

Maybe that whole thing was how come that journalist contacted me asking me why there was a price on my head in the vampire community; and how I was made an honourary member of the Highgate Vampire Society without being asked.

Although it’s not why I was reported to the FBI. That’s a different story all together.

Either way, I thought I’d see if I could find out if there was anything, anywhere, that might indicate what they thought of us these days, and I came across the following:

Excellent psychic combat techniques under “Miscellany”.
*WARNING*
Construct on website may be aggressive and invasive. Do not access the site without ample defenses, or if you are a novice.

This had me somewhat confused. Further investigations revealed that a member of the Guild had found a ‘construct’ on our site that he described as being a worm that attempted to infiltrate the reader through the third eye and change his thought patterns so that the reader regarded us positively and was possessed of a desire to join.

First things first. We scanned our CGI bin and our root directory for wooey.foo but found nothing.

Next thing to do is check our various tenants. Blank faces all round there. It was possible that someone had one up as an experiment but everyone denies it.

As those who have contacted us in the past with such messages as:

“Yo! Sis! You an’ me, we’re like >THAT

will be able to tell you, generally we are actually fairly resistant to people attempting to join our little gang of flakes and weirdoes. So the idea of there being some sort of inflatable pineal worm on our website caused us some consternation.

After some further investigation we believe we have found the solution.

Many readers will be familiar with the concept of the ecological niche. A particularly fine example of this are the hot smokers found along the mid-oceanic ridges. These are, of course, also known as hydrothermal vents and are a byproduct of the geological process of oceanic plate formation. As the two plates move away from one another, hot magma wells up from underneath the Earth’s crust, creating what most would consider to be incredibly hostile conditions for life.

And yet, as Alvin discovered, these places are teeming with life and, indeed, it would seem that hydrothermal vents mimic the conditions of the early Earth and may even give us some insight into how life started on this planet.

Other examples of ecological niches include the underside of damp logs, hot springs, the African Lakes and even the tundra. What they all have in common is that the organisms in there have a particular facility for dealing with that particular niche. So at the hot smokers you’ll find the worms, now made famous by the little yellow submarine. In the African Lakes you’ll find the many species of Acara fish that are found nowhere else.

We think that what we have here is a version of an ecological niche. We think that maybe, just maybe, our website has attracted a community of scavengers whose normal sustenance is the easy pickings found in the more gullible members of what is commonly known as the pagan community, particularly the energy-worker community. They are somewhere between scavengers and viruses, parasites that change the behaviour of the host to make sure they are provided with an ever-ready food supply. Parasites that change the behaviour of the host are well known to science — toxoplasmosis changes the behaviour of rats, so they are more attracted to cat urine, enabling the next stage in the life cycle. See some more examples here, here and here.

These parasites evidently wish their hosts to expose them to as many potential new hosts as possible, and so instil in them a desire to be amongst others, people other than their usual group, who are likely to have been infected already. Because we turn them away, we produce a steady supply of people who go away disappointed and yet still seeking other groups to join. We suspect that those turned away by us may not find satisfaction in the groups they do eventually join and may always feel a hankering to try something new.

As far as we can tell these parasites resemble woodlice rather than worms. Scavengers: feeding on the detritus and waste that is the by-product of energy work and using those energy workers as hosts for their breeding cycle. They seem to exist in meme-space, but there is, as any experienced cyber-pagan knows, a significant degree of crossover between meme-space and the internet.

We would like to thank the Psion Guild for bringing this effect of our website to our attention and giving us the opprtunity to uncover this brand new genus in the taxonomic table of all things Weird. We’ll get the bleach out.

Well. The thoughtform that is the concept of bleach, anyway.