Click here to support the Daily Grail for as little as $US1 per month on Patreon
The Box of Crazy

This is the Box. The Box of Crazy

By Gregon

The Voynich Manuscript may have a challenger for the most mysterious document: at Imgur.com, user TramStopDan2 posted this amazing gallery of images (update: and also a second gallery) showing the fantastical ufological/Fortean/religious texts and illustrations found within a mysterious box:

So a friend of mine found this box by the trash, it is full of wonderful, crazy illustrations. Clearly something happened to this guy that was very memorable. It measures roughly 29″ by 38″ and almost all the drawings are very large.

Drawings like this, combining both religious iconography with technical drawing:

The Box of Crazy - the Beast in the Machine

The cache of documents – which seem to date from the 1930s through to the 1990s – contains texts on UFO research, maps of the world, religious-themed illustration and much more.

What do you think? Viral marketing? Genuine ramblings of a fellow explorer of the strange? Or perhaps, the answer to everything…

Links:

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
Related

14 Comments

  1. Ezekiel Box

    “Was it the onset of acute schizophrenia, or was it a genuine mystic revelation?

    And then again, is there any difference??”

    ~From The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick

    Our good friend Theo Paijmans decided to call this ‘The Ezekiel Box’, which IMO is a far better name than the one given by the Redditors.

    I myself can’t stop thinking about the movie Knowing by Nicolas Cage, which was actually released 2 years after 1 year before the death of this man.

    http://youtu.be/2U7NyKxEeyU

    1. Ezekiel Box
      I haven’t read any of the text yet, but as for the imagery, the Ezekiel connection seems a valid one; the four-headed creature in this image (and repeated on other pages) features the four creatures of the zodiacal fixed signs depicted in the Biblical story of Ezekiel’s vision–human (Aquarius), eagle (Scorpio), bull (Taurus), and lion (Leo).

  2. not so crazy
    These really don’t look “crazy” to me. There are some maps and mechanical drawings, which could have been done for military, professional, or academic reasons. He saw a UFO; lots of people see UFOs. And he did some illustrations of a passage in Ezekiel; lots of people illustrate the Bible. I bet most of us have nuttier stuff in our apartments, especially when taken out of context. The drawings are lovely, though; nice find!

    1. wonderfully crazy
      [quote=Doug Skinner]These really don’t look “crazy” to me…[/quote]

      Sums up my thoughts too, Doug. We all mean ‘crazy’ endearingly (the original poster described it as “wonderfully” crazy). In my dictionary, crazy = normal anyway! I wear crazy like a feather in my cap. It’s nothing new to us, it’s wonderful creativity to be celebrated; but most muggles would consider sketches of seraphim and esoteric machines as pretty far out there. Heck, even recommending TDG to some people earned me the crazy cat person tag.

      Hmm, Red Pill Junkie keeps his sketch books pretty private… 😛

        1. Forward thinking
          [quote=Doug Skinner]My own papers would set off alarm bells. Maybe I should add explanatory notes, just in case![/quote]

          Now where’s the fun in that Doug? If you’re going to leave notes, make sure they’re nonsense gobbledygook, to ensure that cryptologists of the future spend many hours trying to decipher your ‘code’ to uncover the wisdom within…
          😉

  3. Hmmh
    First thing coming to my mind was Erich von Däniken, then I simply thought that the pictures are very precise and well drawn. Reminds me of Codex Seraphinus, though this one is bit more mysterious than dadastruck Seraphinus.

  4. Wheel within a wheel
    This is certainly an attempt to get a grasp of the technology Ezekiel described with his sighting. The doodling was a way to visualize the strange wording that Ezekiel used to explain what he had seen. His intention may have been to see how this could be used to make a movie or to bring back some of the lost technology the ancients may have used. There are several biblical references to technological devices that would be interesting to be recreated in a movie of those people in their time. I have often doodled some of the things myself to try and grasp a visual image of what they are describing and how it would look in a technical way without all the belief system that most people read it for. Technology of the ancients could be restored if we were not so locked into this “fossil fuel” era.

  6. Box of Crazy
    First thing, the box itself was designed for the storage of blueprints or mechanical drawings. Its owner was almost certainly a mechanical draftsman who was employed in an engineering office, and picked up a lot of engineering savvy during his employment. His attempt to patent a new design for a rail car wheel roller bearing gives us a strong clue that he probably worked for a firm that did engineering for heavy equipment, probably including rail equipment. I completely agree with the observations that many of his line drawings seem to be heavily influenced by the visions of Ezekiel, and I’m going to guess that this man was born and raised somewhere in the “Bible Belt”. The clue indicating military service and subsequent treatment at a VA facility may be telling. I would guess that this man was either a WWII or Korea vet, and that he suffered PTSD that was never adequately treated, and like so many others like him, spent periodic time in a VA facility for short term psychiatric treatment. The hint that there was some relatively racy pornographic material found in the box may indicate that there was a certain amount of sexual preoccupation that went along with religious preoccupation. This is hardly definitive, but that combination often occurs in people with bipolar disorder. Apparently he was a near witness to a tornadic event near Tampa, FL, and that trauma triggered what would commonly be described, these days, as a psychotic break. In times past, it might well have qualified him as a prophet. It involved a vivid vision that he later interpreted partly on the basis of his knowledge of the bible, and partly in terms of space technology and impressions from science fiction tales. Ancient astronaut mythology may have figured into it also. Some of the drawings in the box appear to be the work of children, perhaps this man’s grand children, that he stashed away safely as keepsakes. The sexual innuendo in those drawings may also hint at bipolar disorder, which is often hereditary. His Tampa experience seems to have had a profound effect on his world view, and he seems to have done some research looking for something like a unified theory of explanation. Some of that research apparently involved using some sort of obscure geometry to locate specific geographical regions using both purchased maps, and maps that he carefully drew for himself. As a former draftsman, I stand in awe of this man’s talent: especially his craftsmanship at free hand lettering. As far as his vision is concerned, and what that subjectively meant to him, I almost envy him.

  7. appropo of nothing in particular
    The Ezekiel Box annotated notes remind me of the style of the Carlos Allende annotations to The Case for the UFO. (Not that I have ever seen an actual copy of the book, but hope springs eternal.) By that, I mean the cramped style, all up in the margins, very horror vacui. Very interesting set of documents. I’m anxious to read their linked history.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mobile menu - fractal