The late 80’s and early 90’s were a very active time for The Cloak, especially along the I-5 corridor in the United States. One of the most significant hotbeds of activity at the time was in Southeast Portland, centering around the Morningside Encroachment situated in the South Tabor neighborhood.
The Morningside Encroachment’s membership at the time swelled to well over 600 documented members, though many of those members cannot be historically verified. The success of the Encroachment at the time can be credited largely to Virgil Bell, who conducted many activities which garnered considerable attention and helped renew interest in the Cloak.
Chief among the outreach efforts carried out by Virgil Bell included the formation of the “Morningside Players” – a renegade performance troupe who gained significant notoriety through their staging of public, free-for-all performances of classic and original plays in public spaces. The group utilized flash mob tactics to conduct protests and anarchist agitations, including an alleged involvement with the clash with police outside the X-Ray cafe in downtown Portland in July of 1994.
One of their more notable performances – a staging of the cursed play “The King In Yellow” atop Mt. Tabor in early June of 1993, drew such a crowd it had to be dispersed by police, prompting several arrests. Very few copies of printed flyers for these events exist today, as many of them were archived in the encroachment center and subsequently lost to a fire which consumed the building in late 1997.
In its heyday, the Morningside Encroachment was a sight to behold. A medium to large sized warehouse which used to store imported rugs, the inside was hollowed out and a barracks was installed. Along one of the long walls were lines of bunks, each with colorful privacy curtains customized by the occupants.There was a common area in the center, walled off by huge sheets of cellophane plastic stretched around the steel beam support columns. Inside this huge cellophane room were an assortment of chairs and reclining furniture, arranged in a 270 degree open circle centered around a small elevated platform with a microphone and lectern.
At one end of the building, there was a large kitchen with a long buffet table where they would take their occasional community meals. Most days the inhabitants were on their own as far as feeding themselves, but three nights a week on average they would prepare very large meals which were open to anyone who wanted to come. They doubled as occasional community soup kitchens where struggling and homeless folks could eat for free. Temporary tables would be set up and decorated with brightly colored tissue paper flower arrangements and littered with Cloak literature and pamphlets. There would be live musical entertainment provided by several groups of performers who would roam amongst the tables, regaling attendees while they ate.
Drunkenness and intoxication were always frowned upon by the Cloak, with particular regard to the encroachment grounds, which were always to be treated like a temple. Drugs and alcohol found little place inside the temples, the Cloak’s general opinion on them ranged from “mostly unnecessary” to “the most effective distraction tool of the adversaries of goodness imaginable.” Either way, while many continued to use drugs and alcohol outside of the encroachment grounds, sobriety was prized among its members with only one exception made for the milk of the slug which they occasionally consumed in communal rituals and rites.
The primary function of Encroachments was to support and nurture the harvest, collection, and expression of creative energy known as “Prana” or “Spiritus Vitae.” It is this energy alone they believed, which contained the power to shape and reconstruct the fabric of reality itself. It is this energy with which everything is built, a source material with which we as a species over countless millennia have unknowingly and impulsively constructed the whole of experiential reality.The Cloak believed it could be manipulated and used purposely, to make certain changes in the world around us. The ultimate goal of The Cloak, therefore, could be described as an effort to rewrite the codex of reality itself, in a very deliberate way. Humankind was ill and had ceased evolving, and it was the inevitable result of the causal chain that humankind would perish again and again, forever trapped in a tragic loop, until it finally learns to wield the Spiritus Vitae with an aligned intent. This intent would shift the causal wave in ways which would eventually rewrite it completely, until finally the outcome was a true age of ascension instead of recurring endless tragedy.
The Cloak believes breaking this staunch wave of causality is the only way to allow the Shining One to find peace and finally die. The death of the Shining One will mark the beginning of a new and magical evolution among humans which cannot even be imagined. None of this is for a lack of trying, as Nazillic poets love to ponder wild fantasies of our future selves, inspired by visions of what such a refined version of humans could achieve. The societies they would create together, based on creativity, compassion, and adaptation were mental models and concepts many in the Cloak held dear.
Much about the inner working of the Cloak remained somewhat secret or at the minimum, perhaps “clandestine” so not much is truly known about their sacred rituals and rites, but some such as “The Rite of The Rising” had been leaked by participants who began practicing their own enactments of the the ritual outside of the central Encroachment, in their private residences and in mini-renegade encroachments, of which there were many. Especially in the years immediately following the warehouse fire in ‘97, when the larger encroachment divided up into many smaller cells and scattered themselves further along the I-5 corridor into cities such as Ashland and Redding where The Cloak found substantial footing in the decades to come. (We will describe the Rite of the Rising elsewhere at another time where it can be documented in its proper context.)
When the charter which created the western seaboard pan-invasion pact was signed by Virginia Bellwether and Chess Flagman in late 1997, it created and linked a more geographically spaced collection of encroachments along the Pacific coastline, with notable encroachments operating in San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose, Bakersfield, Los Angeles and even stretching down into Tijuana Mexico.
During this time there was a lot of Samizdat style printing and reprinting of Nazillic literature in order to disseminate it between the scattered settlements. It became a full time position in the administrative sector of The Greater Cloak to print and deliver stacks of these between encroachments, providing personalized training when needed, to ensure a cohesive vision and a functional network through which ideas could be shared. At its peak in the early 00’s total circulation of Cloak related pamphlets, zines and other printed materials totaled well in excess of a million xeroxed documents per week produced by its members and hurtling down highways stuffed into boxes and stacked high in unmarked delivery vans. The whole operation was so voluminous at one point, the group who operated the delivery vans were given their own official name, “The Apollo Group.” They continued to serve as a sort of “underground post office” where Cloak related materials could be distributed quietly and in most cases without notice, by specially trained and suitably indoctrinated couriers.
The Cloak as an organization and quasi-religious practice were by design extremely fastidious documentarians of popular culture and any place where the buried “shards” lay in wait, the Cloak would uproot and document them. These would then be compiled onto complex timelines and taxonomical frameworks which would then be redistributed in periodical form by the master organization.
Since the spread and accessibility of internet based repositories, many of these activities were switched over to digital servers which could be freely accessed by those with the keys. However, the main work done by the “Nectar Collectors” continued to be captured by hand in small spiral notebooks which would then make their way through the integrational process by which they became connected to the central mythology of the group. Once sifted and integrated into the more central digital repositories, they would make their way once again into the servers where they would be accessed and disseminated on demand. Under the wider umbrella of what the Cloak refers to generally as NC’s, there are several different roles. These are divided up into smaller groups of “Miners,” “Finders,” and “Binders.” They work in tandem to dig up resources to consume (Miners), those who do the actual locating of the embedded shards within the materials (Finders) and the Binders, who format, tag and organize the extractions.
Overall, the Nectar Collectors play an extremely valuable role in the scheme of the Cloak, documenting any and all cultural expressions which even vaguely fit the mythological framework. An example of this might be that one night, a group of NC’s are watching a popular movie together, and a character or plot point in the movie suddenly touches on a concept congruent with the central cosmogony of the Cloak, it would be documented. The character who said it, the movie it was in, the minute and second it appears in the movie, and the publication date of the movie, would all be written down in the notebook. If a character or a situation in the plot was for instance, talking about or making a reference to the idea of eternal recurrence, it would be noted immediately. There were many criteria taught by which the NC’s were to evaluate these instances as they occurred, but the majority of their training was in learning how to be especially sensitive to signals produced by the mind or body when encountering one of these “shards.” The experience is always accompanied by a physical sensation (dubbed a “causal correction” or more colloquially, a “neuron bomb” or simply a “twitch”), though it may be subtle enough to be easily missed if not paying proper attention.
Thus, inside any proper encroachment of the day, one would often find several televisions, vcr’s betamax machines, dvd players, all manner of new and obsolete delivery devices – and gathered around them are the NC’s who sit transfixed, in a meditative state, open and receiving signal. The NC’s themselves identify with bees, and they are often tattooed with bees or honeycomb, and many have collections of figurines and stuffed animals celebrating bees of all imaginable types. They will gather around the “flowerings of culture” – be they tv’s, books, magazines, all types of media, and ingest them with the intent of uncovering even the most subtle or diluted references or parallels to their own mythology. Their attention is profoundly intense and they do not like to be disturbed when collecting.
Many outsiders quickly become suspicious of the Cloak, wondering where they get the money to sit around all day reading comics and watching movies – many of the Cloak have no other jobs, but live a rather monastic existence within the Encroachments. The Cloak actually encourages this – pressing its members to detach from the poison host and dedicate their lives to the pursuit of “totality” through the Cloak. Not much is actually known about where the operating and sustenance budgets of the Cloak comes from, but it is speculated that there is one, and possibly many hidden benefactors, including the mysterious and enigmatic “Gleam Foundation” which appears to subsidize the existence of these Encroachments across the world. It is also rumored that the Cloak are behind the recent resurrection of the long defunct and legendary SHINE record label, with many of its original pressings once again seeing the light of day as they are remastered and packaged into special bundles in very pricey, but very exclusive collectible releases. Very few of these releases are ever seen in “the wild” because they are primarily sold through an advance bidding process by which the pressings are funded and created on demand for primarily wealthy collectors.