In the late ’90s, when I bought tickets to an Australian show for the band Tool, I was surprised to see that the tour was titled “Et in Arcadia Ego”, a reference to the Rennes-le-Château mystery, which was something I had researched for many years. In subsequent years, I was thrilled to discover, through Tool’s website, that the band actually shared a common interest with me in a whole bunch of the esoteric topics that this website (The Daily Grail) has been posting about since 1997 – such as the occult, psychedelics and the UFO phenomenon.
Around 2002 I learned that most of the writing about these topics on the Tool website was done by one Blair MacKenzie Blake, and we became fast friends via email. I quickly found out that Blair has expert knowledge in many of these areas, having been interested in them for many decades and read and researched them voluminously.
So it was a real pleasure to sit down and chat with Blair recently about his journey writing for Tool, his interest in esoteric topics – and collecting rare books on those subjects – and some of his adventures out at Area 51…including one time when he and Tool drummer Danny Carey were arrested for trespassing on the base!
I’ve embedded the video below, or you can watch it at YouTube – please take the time to subscribe and be alerted for updates to our channel, as we’ve got some other great chats coming up soon (and smash that Like button if you enjoyed it). Oh, and you can help support us in doing more interviews like this by chipping in a dollar via our Patreon!
Blair has written for every release of our Darklore anthology series, including one essay (available here at the Grail: “Dirt Roads to Dreamland“) in which he detailed some of the many trips to Area 51 that he discusses in the above interview. For what it’s worth also, I found the Tool newsletter that Blair mentions during the interview, in which he posted photos of the Area 51 road sinkhole that he barely made it across, at archive.org’s Wayback Machine, for those who would like to read that account.
As mentioned in the interview, Blair has also written a number of his own books, from occult prose poetry (Ijynx) to non-fiction (The Wickedest Books in the World: Confessions of an Aleister Crowley Bibliophile), and his esoteric fiction trilogy (The Othering, The Paragon Junk, and Grumble’s Star), so feel free to check them out!
