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Illusive Lexicon

By Patrick Loisel

Since Augury's lyrics often replace descriptions of current sets of events with quick references to similar occurrences or people in history, a few words often hold multiple details. You could see it a bit like a sort of code... Unless you are a total nerd or a history buff, some of them might be hard to decipher and put in context. Hence this little piece of work. Please take note that, since it is a work of art, I took much more liberties than if I intended it as a strictly scientific publication. I other fields, I did not hesitate to eliminate texts I had previously written upon finding anything untrue. There is a bit of fantasy here that I let loose.

The central point of "Illusive Golden Age" is the recurrent downfall of civilizations and it offers a glimpse at some of the factors that prevent them from reaching their "golden age". I added an underlying fiction-narrative about successive waves of telepathically linked individuals who memorize all the knowledge that they can, then secretly move to the wild. There, they live in hiding and supply telepathic insight to further escapees to restore civilization when it collapses. Over time, they become what primitive people call woodsmen or oracles. When one of them feels that his end is coming, he mentally calls for a younger apprentice to come take his places. This story is set in a near future and I call that bunch "The Escapees".

Lines sung in bold print

ILLUSIVE GOLDEN AGE

Illusive golden age, tantalizing eternal wait

This is the starting context: Civilizations often viewed themselves as headed toward an evolved and peaceful future that they never reached (just remember how science-fiction movies in the 80's told us how we would colonize Mars by 2008), that due to social resistance to progress or to moral weakening, and they were invariably erased by warlike neighbors who disapproved of their lifestyle and values. Quite a recurring situation as clues of a similar pattern clearly emerge now...{' '}

Crestfallen Hypatias flayed

Hypatia (360-415) was a Greek female scientist in Alexandria. A Christian mob, belonging to a sect called Nitrians, grossly murdered her. As they settled in Alexandria, they went on a rampage to eradicate pagan intelligentsia, and a woman leading a science school was a prime target. She now has contemporary counterparts who suffer the same fate.{' '}

Aborted Golden Age, Nitrians swarm in to fall your idols

Self-explanatory. Whatever happened to Pagans in the first millennia AD now happens to parts of our civilization.{' '}

Cult progenies pervading cull progenies defiling

Refers to various historical attempts by religious radicals to infiltrate higher societies: Settle among the targeted people and breed; then, once numerous enough, attack.{' '}

Taking census of knowers

Since society appears more tolerant, people normally perceived as deviants in authoritarian cultures now behave more freely and start exposing themselves. Some others discretely take notes for future use, like in...{' '}

Foundations for Tuol Sleng

In Pol Pot's Cambodge (1975-1979), the whole population was forcefully removed from cities and sent to live in slavery on collective farms. Pol Pot ordered the extermination of all intellectuals (who had been accounted for prior to the war), and people were killed for simply knowing foreign words or wearing glasses. Tuol-Sleng was the worst of 150 schools turned into extermination camps, where inmates were tortured and mutilated for days. Out of the 17000 total who went in, around 250 went out alive, and only seven people survived beyond 1980.

"Slaves learned to read, business' running slow"
They need the progenies that bleat and grunt
Dumbed down cheap labor. Downtrodden...

If cows became smart, farmers would go bankrupt. Back in early 1800's, authorities forbid to educate slaves, for they became rebellious and demanding. Since then, around 300M intellectuals were killed by their own governments. Simply, it has become a discrete process...

Kept in neotenic sessility, prepped for servility Neoteny: Permanence of the larval stage, when creatures remain immature all their life.{' '}

Sessility: Absence of locomotion; refers to creatures that remain fixed and motionless as adults, such as sponges, corals, computer addicts...{' '}

Bottom line: Today's ideal slave is an eternal child that does not move much! A good parallel example would be the way we keep companion animals in perpetual infancy, since their adult features are highly undesirable in households. Some view us the very same.{' '}

Crusaders in virtual war
Daydream simulated uprisings
But Svengali is slowly pulling the plug....

Refers to keyboard warriors who declare war on the cyberspace but do very little in real life. Svengali is the term used when a person in power secretly exploits and dominates an artist in order to serve a nefarious concealed agenda. Unbeknownst to them, creators often work in projects that will eventually reveal to be detrimental to them. When no longer usable, they are often abandoned. The "pulling the plug" part: We are dependent on those who enslaved us, and once they withdraw services and technology, most of us will perish.

TRANSLATIO IMPERII

Latin for "transfer of rule", when an empire or a dynasty crumbles, and the next in line rises.{' '}

As Ignorance swarms in

Most invaders destroyed the culture and science of the conquered. None is innocent.

Emboldened in captagon craze

Captagon was the stimulant used by soldiers in the Syrian war to keep them fighting relentless.{' '}

Sired Lebensborn, our way come raging hordes

Lebensborn was a eugenic operation orchestrated by Nazi Germany during WWII. Its goal was to increase the birth rate of desired "Aryan" people, corollary to the Final Solution, and it aimed at completely replacing the European population with Aryans. That word actually depicts a level of enlightenment and not a race; still... People with the right genetic features were thus encouraged to conceive multiple children, often with perfect strangers, and to yield them to the state. Some of the offspring were placed in special families, others were raised in a near industrial setting and brainwashed since infancy to become the "perfect soldier". They took bits from the Spartans here. Today, some others claim that they do the very same in order to attack the Western world.

Inescapable Dark Ages ahead for sons of enlightenment...

The emancipation the Age of Enlightenment brought to commoners clearly angered some elites who wish to reverse the process.{' '}

New workforce coming, business resuming

This is the end goal of current movements of population.

Feign ignorance,{' '} they need the progenies that bleat and grunt

In Pol Pot's Cambodia or Pinochet's Chile, that was often the only way to live on, since anyone smart enough to criticize politics and lead others to do so were simply eliminated. They want your muscles; your brain gets in the way. Remember the cows...

For sons of enlightenment welcomed darkness with open arms

Formulated this way: Beneficiaries of a civilization often directly help those set to destroy it.

THE LIVING VAULT

Leave, the corralled heaving plebe

Before the gates close upon crying herds

A few individuals heed an inner call to stray away from the masses, since liberty's demise becomes increasingly apparent. Each of them is compelled to learn and memorize as much knowledge as possible, collectively becoming a depository of civilization, a "Living Vault"...

Men farms lost their illusive comfort

The masks have fallen and the true nature of society have become obvious.

Time to exfiltrate ferments of recursion

Exfiltration: Furtive removal of personnel from an area under enemy control.

Recursion: (Normally a mathematical term, I saw it once in a science book.) Recursion is the faculty to duplicate something out of a small sample. To start a new bacterial culture, you need samples from an old one like when you make yogurt. I applied it to civilization. To restart culture or knowledge, you need people able to transmit it from samples, so that knowledge spreads and civilization restarts... Moreover, to avoid its cultural version, some dictatorships went great length to get rid of anyone who could seed back knowledge and rebellion... A discrete exit from society is the only sure way to avoid this.

Newfound breakaway tribes

Even though they travel alone, escapees often gather and cooperate.

Living Vault in mimicry
Behind deceiving primal decoys
In apparent inexistence
Specters quietly ease away

They live in total hiding; blend with vegetation and fake primitiveness when found. They learn to live with near nothing, cover their smell and leave no waste.

Seekers call hierophants, in wait for signs

Hierophant: Interpreter of sacred mysteries. If someone tries to contact them, they will let them wait and scrutinize them from underground.{' '}

An obscure design woven through the vines

People who live secretly in the forest will often leave discrete signs like this, perceptible only to the initiated.

Endless recurrence of odd dreams

Those mentally summoned are not always aware that someone tries to call them, and often mistake it for nightmares.

Apprentices in awakening, awaiting...
Understand their distrust
Just wait for the call

Time is required to evaluate the honesty and competence of a candidate before revealing oneself.

Spirits murmuring higher and higher
Becoming beacon of illumination.

When they recognize each other, allied spirits disincarnate, gather and flock like starlings (when a big mass of birds swirls in mid-air, that is called "murmuring"). Knowledge passes on and can shine onto further generations.

And that since the time that heavens were at war
To keep the lore alive

This process has been going on since current humankind appeared. Multiple traditions state that humans exist not for cognition but for servitude, and whoever brought intelligence to them was heavily fought by another faction desirous to keep its servile workforce, and deemed "evil". In many faiths, the gods warred over conflicting views about humanity: Upgrade vs enslave... Think about Prometheus/the Snake in the Bible, Enki vs Enlil, the Rama Weapon and many others...{' '}

Living Vault in mimicry
Behind deceiving primal decoys
In apparent inexistence
Any hole becomes residence
Just wait in silence, hear the verdict

see above

A stone rolling sideways
A burrow for them to crawl down
A calling gesture from under the roots
Acknowledged apprentices enter the realm

The entry to the lair revealed to the seekers.

They will live as troglodytes for a while...

Spirits murmuring higher and higher
Beckoning beacon of illumination.
And that since the time heavens were at war

To be continued in the song "Anchorite"

CARRION TIDE

They fly, the swarming poison clouds swirling overhead
Eons of worldly pestilence set to rain down on us all

Many contaminants dumped in the oceans evaporate and return above continents with rain clouds. They will eventually find their way back into our streams and our food chain.

Assaulted from a land that we cannot walk on
A liquid desert left for us to behold

Most of those airborne particles falling back on us come from oceanic garbage patches (the "Seventh Continent") where billions of tons of plastic refuse are grinded to molecular level and those too evaporate in the atmosphere. Where those patches occur, all life dies off down to great depths.

Longing for clear and quiet waters
Navigating with carrions in our wake

It will become harder and harder to come across untainted water. Wherever man set sail, life there withers...

Fear settling in as the scene gets clearer
Conscience burdened us with all the weight of the worlds

This is how you feel when you sense a danger but only a few seem to care.

They swarm the clouds, seeded with the
Morgellons plague
Falling like manna, tapeworms weave through your brains

There is a belief that parts of geo-engineering consist of airborne parasites set to affect our neuronal activity. They could use those plastic particles as carriers.

Witness the parasite becoming a host
Witness the anthill get boiled down

Scientists expect the seas of the future to be replete with undesirable creatures, a lot of which are parasitic or aggressive toward humans. Exposure to tainted water will signal the demise of large human settlements.

Setting to sail the carrion tide
Oceans brimming with decay
As far as eyes can see, waves of churned waste
Exude vapored slime that long ago ceased to bring life

It becomes more and more obvious that some very advanced civilizations in the past caused their own demise by exhausting the environmental resources they depended on...

MATER DOLOROSA

One of the things that brings down humankind is how a relative small number of individuals can deliberately ruin everything out of selfishness and cruelty. How could you expect some people to care about someone or something at the other end of the world when you see this? The most horrible part is that this is not fiction at all. I simply put together bits from multiple reports, some making it to mainstream media, which I came across in the news over the last two decades to create this character. This song is a case of an omniscient narrator (in parentheses) suggesting that this specific child should seek incarnation in another body...

Snap. Crackle. Pop. (Kellogg's did not sue me yet.)
Apprentice started with bugs
Moving on to the usual stray
Graduated to the bipedal ones
Purse full of tie wraps and blades
Miss Caligula again skipped school...

The majority of people who develop sadistic pathologies do so at an early age, and they most often manage to conceal their mind frame from their entourage. They gradually desensitize themselves by starting to kill insects, then more evolved creatures; the lowest of the low aim at younger children. Remember James Bulger... (British toddler abducted and tortured to death by two 10 years old in 1993. They were searching for a victim long before and supposedly still exhibit deviancies up to this day.){' '}

Conceived the plan long before she could conceive you
Wished that laying with fools was unnecessary
Pondering torments waiting in store for you
Labor pains so voluptuous comparatively
(Please, remain a ghost...)

Many sadistic psychopaths have unusual response to pain and pleasure, and will often ignore normal stimuli to focus only on those related to their condition.

Pain extracts the essence of life
Like fire brings iron out of the ore
A carnivorous flower
Sets to feast on her yield
Daydreaming over
Cheerful eyes... and rusty hooks

Some cultists believe that they can actually consume other people's energy, and that said energy is at its best when the subjects suffers a lot. Therefore, some will go very imaginative when conceiving "rituals".{' '}

Steadily gathered scalpels and probes
Left them oxidize for better abrasion
Fantasies arising as she felt you grow inside  

Many perpetrators visualize or rehearse their deeds years beforehand, occasionally in the presence of their unsuspecting victim...{' '}

(Shall raise a being of light!)
Precious things are more pleasurable to break
Dreamed of her spit blending in with your tears
Through a decade long theater play
Acolytes have rehearsed for years
(SHOULD HAVE REMAINED A GHOST!!!)

In the initial draft, the character initially planned to dispatch her baby at birth, then changed her mind and opted to raise it until pre-teen age, since sensibility to pain and betrayal would be much higher then, increasing the perpetrator's gratification. She kept in tow those she initially designed as accomplices. I had to skip a few line to save breath!{' '}

Immah... Lama Sabachtany?

(Aramic for "Mother, why thou have betrayed me?")

Blindfolded for the surprise
Serenaded by "uncles" that you never met
Soon they will...Snap. Crackle. Pop...
A bone every hour!

Remembered a case in 1997 with victims lured this way. In Germany, a woman offered "subjects" to fellow sadists for a price, and had a soundproof dungeon built in her basement. She charged a fee to "finish" the victims. I do not remember all the details, but "Hostel" looked like Disneyland compared to that. It was in the daily newspapers and not on some conspiracy site...{' '}

Flayed meat now lays wiggling in pain.
Crying through lidless drying corneas
Watching the world slowly fading away
Exhausted soul at last liberated
Eludes like a ghost

In testimonies about ritual abuses, witnesses insisted that many victims were mutilated then kept conscious the longest possible. The energy gathered is proportional to the suffering caused.

Really, the stuff that you wish is a hoax... 

MARITIME

(Patrick)

While Escapees head to the forests, others decide to board makeshift rafts and head toward polar lands, sparsely inhabited and bound toward a more temperate climate in a close future...{' '}

Onward a new thalassocracy

Thalassocracy: When one reigns over a territory that is chiefly maritime, or from a fleet rather than from land. The last one recorded was L Ron Hubbard's'!

Uprooted souls sailing off again
On makeshift vessels, northward we drift

In the past, multiple people traveled oceans on mere rafts assembled from scratch. However, most of those vessels where hard to steer, thus many tribal sailors ended in unexpected places.

Riding the storm toward the frigid unsettled
To reclaim those lands of renewal

As you read this, some people consider settling in areas that used to have a polar climate but are in the process of thawing.

First dwellers of the forged landscape
Turned our backs as their breath froze
As their temples fell, we radiated away

All the while, currently settled areas gradually become inhospitable. This also implies that, in the end, the Escapees will be the only ones to prevail.{' '}

The Feral, the Skraeling, the unwanted mutts
They are now dragging the pack
The pampered chiefs, they all died off.
Upon our sighting

Feral: Animals that escaped captivity and returned to the wild, and their descendants.

Skraeling: Derogative term used by Vikings to dismiss North American Natives, and by extension whoever reverts to a more primitive lifestyle. However, Vikings were defeated and fled to Greenland. Without the Skraeking's help, anyone who stayed on the continent died within a few years. When higher civilizations collapse, people who heavily depend on comfort and services are the first to go. The less dependent primitive people are much more likely to carry on.

Hollowed lands, collapsed all at once.
Wormed for centuries, accelerated subduction

The multiple mines and oil wells that men have drilled in the ground have undermined the structures that normally stabilize Earth's crust. It is the same than removing all tree stumps and roots from a mountainside; soon you see landslides, and erosion worsens. Worrying, with the sinkholes multiplication worldwide.

Subduction: The process of renewal for Earth's crust. It occurs when a tectonic plate slides underneath the adjacent one and plunges downward into the magma. It then melts and incorporates into the mass inside the planet and will eventually re-emerge as lava through volcanoes. 

The Feral, the Skraeling, the unwanted mutts
We will raise our flags on newly emerged lands
New world waiting for names
As the old world conveyed down.

If you understood how subduction works, the "conveyed down" part is downright scary! Moreover, if very ancient civilizations have existed, their remains were probably still visible when their land sank down to Hell.

MESSAGE SONORE

Since this song is instrumental, let's talk instruments a bit: A great matter of pride for us (especially me) is the fact that all strings instruments used on "Illusive Golden Age' 'were built locally. The oldest instrument of the three is Forest's bass, conceived in the mid-90 by Michel Fournelle and built by Jacques Simoneau. Since then, lefty six strings were not a thing, so it spent years on display at MF's store until Forest acquired it in the early 2000's. It has a koa top, all active circuitry and a rosewood fingerboard. Forest's fretless bass is exactly the same build from Jacques Simoneau. He also owns another six-strings built by Marc Chicoine and a Fender Jazz Bass.

Our second oldest instrument is Mathieu's guitar (built around 2002). After I tried a guitar built by Marc Chicoine, I recommended him to Mat. The guitar is made of mahogany with a maple top, and has a maple neck with a bubinga ply in the middle. This guitar the only instrument Mat ever used with Augury, save for some clean in studio. Mat uses chiefly 13-56 strings but prefers to switch the sixth strings for a .62. or a .64. He also owns a Fender Strat and a...Danelectro!

I am a luthier and I built my own guitar around 2008, completed it in 2010. It is made entirely of African Paddauk, save for the ebony fingerboard. I was already doing repairs, but a friend of mine pushed me to start my business after failing to find fanned frets and 8-strings in stores. So my very first instrument in 2005 was a 8-strings, long before I actually saw one from the industry in person! My personal guitar was like the tenth I built. I have since built another one adapted for the live shows while I will keep the orange one for recordings. It is simply a downscaled RR with fanned frets 24.5" bass, 24" treble. I have to stick to very short scales due to articular problems. I was able to put the action very low (thus to avoid up-pitch from fretting) by using ultra huge strings: 12-16-24w-44-56-76 for low B tuning. This enabled me to use shorter scales.

All our guitars a fitted with EMG's and we removed all circuitry from them, save for the volume potentiometer. The difference in gain was visible onscreen when we did that move in the studio while recording "Fragmentary...". Our studio sound is mostly Peavey with some engineering tinkering. For live, we used either 5150's or Rectifiers over the years, both driven from an old Boss GX-700!

PARALLEL BIOSPHERES

Everybody heard about parallel universes, where different timelines could occupy the same space unbeknownst to each other; a bit as if multiple radio frequencies fill the air but you only perceive one at a time, when a device is set to that specific frequency. It is a bit the same with life on Earth. We share this planet with multiple species yet a lot of them were non-existent to us until recently. When I was a kid, people laughed at me for believing in giant squids. Not only did we prove their existence, but also we found that they could grow even bigger than the sizes we though were impossible. There are, not only creatures, but also full ecosystems that we just found in place where we though there was nothing. I read claims that that most cryptids (Bigfoot, sea monsters etc.) actually exist, but that science kept it a secret to avoid people from wiping them out. To illustrate this, the movie "Jaws" alone is responsible for the decline of the Great White Shark... Pete Benchley openly regretted writing it on his deathbed...

Finally, if full ecosystems exist on this planet out of our knowledge, the possibility exists that other societies share it with us secretly, or that indeed unknown civilizations preceded us. Alignments of monuments follow what seem to be previous equators (the Earth's axis supposedly tilted a few times), there are hint about the use of telluric forces in the past; and we start to find more and more ruins that do not fit with official history. Moreover, add to that all the stories about Agartha or inner Earth people. The possibility remains. If you find it too far-fetched, remember that there are uncontacted tribes who think that we do not exist. Western world and its technology are mere legends to them, and they surely do not believe in the 8 billion of other human being the same way some people do not believe in UFO's. Occasionally, a hunter spots a plane in a distance and reports it to his village. Then the others tell him to quit drugs...

Indistinct shapes stir the fog, a pounding gait heaves the ground
The eyes in the forest, they have seen you
But you've seen nothing as they frolic out of view

Ordinary people who venture in the wild spot only a tiny part of the animals living there, even when it comes to very common creatures. Even dead ones are hard to find. Nature is so efficient at cleaning itself that, out of all the large creatures that die every year, we find very few carcasses.

Meet the ghost of creations past
Epiphytes clutching to the tree of life
As the undiscovered calls

Epiphyte: Plant that parasites another one and grows from its trunk. Some people really believe that humankind has a secret parasitic twin... For the most part, cryptids are the last survivors of species that we believed extinct. However, other "extinct" species were found and revealed to be thriving, such as the coelacanth. 

Strange lights scamper and vanish
Behold the orbs

I was a resident teacher in Native community in 2001-2002 and there I met old aboriginal women who spoke through translators and never watched TV. They talked about orbs of light zigzagging through the woods, as well as tiny people whom only children could see, and many other things that mirrors similar stories elsewhere... One invited me to a remote part where she found a giant humanlike footprint. I kept it short but I could write a full album worth of lyrics only with what those people told me...

Hidden in the landscape, miles wide patterns, the fifteen equators of telluric might

There are many theories about those ancient monuments forming giant drawings on the face of the Earth, a bit like some sort of energy grid that would have been the Ancient's power plants. Some of those lines actually follow the former equators. Near the Nazca lines, there are mountaintops shaved flat like with a laser, and drawings much bigger than the ones everyone know.

Indistinct shapes stir the fog
A pounding gait heaves the ground
The eyes in the forest, they have seen you
But you've seen nothing as they frolic out of view
Alamasti! Yateveo!

Alamasti: Name of Bigfoot-like creatures in Central-Asia

Yateveo: (Central-African dialect for "I have seen you!") Giant carnivorous plant in African folklore. A bit like a man-eating tree adorned with multiple eyes, hence the name. Two examples of legendary forest creatures believed to spy on humans.

Read the subplots of natural history
See filigrees behind the picture
Behold the bestiary of the empire beneath.

If real, those creatures are mere glimpse of much more complex ecosystems that thrive out of our reach and knowledge. Some assume that a few might simply be vagrants from an underground biotope. (Vagrant: Creature found outside of its species' normal range).

Finally, humans who live as hermits in the forests are often mistaken for supernatural creatures, which connects to...

ANCHORITE

Anchorites were hermits who were pronounced "dead to the world" and walled up alone inside a cell attached to a church. Through a small opening, they traded food for spiritual guidance. This is the one text where I can identify a direct inspiration from a specific piece of work, namely the God of the Grove in Anne Rice's novels.{' '}

We are where the wandering ends
Where the inner compass points down
This old tree, with a pit under the roots.
Spotting makeshift stairs going down

Some trees had a hollow cavity underneath; people often believed them to be inhabited by mysterious entities...

Senses the oracle in wait for a seeker
Anchorites sealed in their ground
Prometheus from the bogs
Whose spirits talk to pilgrims
Anchorites sealed in their ground

Such an ascetic life take its toll and soon the knowledge has to be transferred. Another vehicle is required to portray the oracle.

The voice that once whispered in their minds now fades away.
Devoted his last breath to welcome the successor...

Once the message transmitted, the channel closes down.

Digging. Worming downward the warren

A warren is a network of connecting burrows. While most are the work of small animals and are rather tight, some are spacious enough to shelter crawling humans.

Overhead, an emerald cathedral
Hermitage in digging, self-burial
The roots culminating to a nave

Human burrowers enlarge the cavity they live in, revealing moss covered rootsthat support a layer of earth as ceiling.

Heirloom passed down
To the one who will voice the tree

Newcomers assume their position. Like church anchorites, they will whisper advice through the mass of roots. Seekers bring food and other goods, under the guise of a sacrifice offered to the oracle.{' '}

Anchorite in an emerald cathedral
No longer, set to animate flesh
Anchorite at last falls asleep, and becomes wood

Once their duty completed, the withering veterans withdraw deeper underground to die and their remains are absorbed into the trees. As society crumbles, clueless exiles swarm the woods and survivors start forming communities. Occasionally, a few individuals come back from a stroll in the forest with unusual insight. The story goes on... {' '}

Appendix (not the one in your guts).

Lyrical contexts and details from previous albums: Many songs on Illusive Golden Age are further developments or other facets of the topics already addressed in our early works. While not necessarily linked by a narrative, they are indeed connected and supply additional bits in the puzzle.

Concealed **(2004)**

Beatus: When we first started Augury, I was kind of an honorary member since I lived far away North in a Native community and came to Montreal like once a month while Mat sough people to complete the line-up. There I was an elementary teacher. Many locals told me about their time in residential schools and I moved on to search about the history of what we could call an attempt at secret genocide. When France yielded Canada to England in 1763, during the Loyalist exodus in 1783, after the Patriot revolt of the 1830's and finally when England grew tired of its leftover colonies and encouraged them to merge in 1867 (to form the modern version of Canada), there were attempts to turn the obtained territories into "England 2.0". Problem was, when they first arrived, the local population was overwhelmingly French and the former regime had cooperated with Natives on a near equal basis and had not attempted to get rid of them or to reduce their numbers. There was lots of work to do. 

The struggle to rid the colony of French people did not turn the expected way since we are still about a quarter of Canadians and 80% of Quebeckers. This fact alone once fueled all the politic turmoil you hear about my home turf. Natives got it much harder, even though there were no mass killings like those that occurred elsewhere in the Americas. Forced displacement onto barren lands, destruction of food sources, contaminated garments and others means were used, but the most blatant official maneuver was entitled "Kill the Indian within the child". The MacDonald government decided to cut value transmissions by forcefully removing toddlers from their families and send them into remote boarding schools for up to six years, until they forgot everything and were unable to communicate with the previous generation (they also told both parties that the other had died to prevent attempts to re-establish contact). So multiple kids were violently hunted down and abducted, and they were submitted to unspeakable abuse at the hand of clergymen (and those who bent for "fresh meat" often were sent there). After a few years, kids who were not properly brainwashed got a "little extra" in their food or no food at all, and a lot committed suicide. Some of those schools recently revealed to have many, many little bodies buried under their yard.

...ever know peace again

A primal war call against imperialism. The first (and simplest) time that I addressed that topic... Someone is kind of turning the planet into a gigantic work camp.

Cosmic Migration

We were lead to believe that human souls could only communicate through the senses of the bodies they inhabit (unless, of course, you are dead). My personal belief is that they can do so during dreams or astral planes, and that spirits can migrate in masse between civilizations and universes. Shamans (or people like Edgar Cayce) were able to perceive messages coming from what is nothing else than disincarnate people. Cayce though that American spirits were the reincarnation of Atlantean ones simply carrying on a task that they had started millennia ago. The idea of early human knowledge transmitted telepathically from previous civilizations is a plausible thing if you believe in the above. 

Nocebo

Everyone knows the placebo effect i.e. a person given a fake drugs will heal from autosuggestion. Mat told me about the Nocebo effect and I made further researches about it. It's the opposite of a placebo, meaning that a person's wellbeing could equally collapse under autosuggestion; it's pretty much an explanation behind the principle of throwing a curse onto someone. The lyrics assume that society automatically applies a nocebo effect unto us in order to increase our dependency on authorities, overall consumption etc....

Alien Shores

I grew up with occult literature and had books about ancient civilizations and Atlantis even before I learned to whistle or kick a ball properly. I gave up on that as I got older until another student in university shown me pics of a mysterious underwater structure near Japan, and multiple others from elsewhere. There were close-ups of very intricate details, and I did not know that the next time I would see images that clear would be 20 years later (on "Ancient Aliens"!!!!) All the images I saw of it in between were muddy or over simplistic; worse: The BBC devoted a full special show to debunkers (who called the ruins bullshit) and implied that people interested into them were Nazis. I once shown a photocopy of the initial pictures to one of my teachers: He angrily went "what do they wait to blow up that damn thing?" Of all the conspiracy theories that I studied, the one about more advanced civilizations preceding ours long in the past is probably the one that got most of the recent debunking budget. In 2015, I met a retired Portuguese soldier. Upon learning that I taught history, he told me about one of his missions during the mid-late 80's: Circling the Azores Island with a destroyer to prevent anyone from diving or operating a sonar in some spots. The government was in total panic over some pyramids found at the bottom, and rushed to dynamite and bury them. It was the most absolute top-secret operation he partook. 

...in Russian dolls universes

IRDU was the very first song that we assembled as Augury and I got lyrics inspiration from my job. Before they assigned me back to history, I taught science and we often talked about the similarities between a solar system and an atom. I joked with my students about the fact that our world could be a simple molecule in a much bigger creature, or each molecule in matter is a universe by itself. Some scenes from Men in Black 2 actually inspired me (like the "people in the locker"...). Finally, the song implies that the whole universe operates by cycles and that nothing is eternal.

Becoming God

It is a take on the Ancient Aliens theory: Those were living beings deified by the primitive humans they tried to upgrade. I wrote the song from the perspective of the long gone Aliens who had returned and expressed disappointment at their creation. Indeed, we still carry on with primitive reflexes while reaching summits in technology; resulting in the demise of the Eden that we've been granted. I kept the lyrics vague enough so we could use them in other settings, such as colonists trying to civilize primitive people who deified them, and then find that those soon returned to savagery...

The Lair of Purity

This is actually a "thank you " song toward someone who saved me. For the second half of the 90's, my life was in a total downfall. Among others bad news, doctors had said that I would not make it past my mid-30's (as I type this, I just turned 48). Indeed, I was sick very often and found it hard to stand up on some days. During the worst period then, a former love interest of mine kept calling me every morning to cheer me up and give me a boost and that out of pure kindness. If you can read me now, it is a bit thanks to her...

From Eden estranged...

The swell volume solo over acoustic in the middle is the very first thing that Mat and I played together. It was loooooooooooooong ago!

...as sea devours land.

It is an old composition by Mat, and I was infuriated because his former band went on to record a very lame version of this song without him. They actually just dropped his parts altogether and kept only the solos from the other guitar player, and played the riffs (badly) in a difference sequence. Funny fact: Arianne appeared on both versions since she was also in that band. The lyrics here are about the fact that civilizations are periodically set drawn back by cataclysms, in this case a polar shift like the one that supposedly sunk Atlantis. In the meantime, I found out that civilizations did not even need such catastrophe to revert to primitivism. Human stupidity suffices enough...

Fragmentary Evidence (2009)

Aetheral

Various army corps around the world genuinely studied paranormal psychic powers. For example, the US Navy tested on soldiers with telepathic abilities. Pushing the concept further, I imagined a secret agency specialized in spotting and recruiting people able to leave their body on astral projections and use them to spy on people. If the target senses them, they pretend to be ghosts. The agents live sequestrated on very remote bases concealed within mountains. They vanished at a very young age, and will never see their relatives again; they simply ceased to exist as citizens...

Simian Cattle

Quite a recurrent topic is how our leaders look down at us as farm animals to make profitable. This specific song deals with the conditioning applied today unto us to make us productive and obedient. Fashion, ambition and others steer us the desired way and incite expected behavior. Obligate consumption has become the new slavery, the people who try to escape this face social rejection, and those who are efficient at warning others, well, disappear. We are conditioned to act a specific way, and whoever farms us rarely intervenes directly, our fellow cattle heads do the watching on their behalf...

Orphans of Living

This song deals with the phenomenon of "child-soldiers" who are taken away from their families and brainwashed into becoming killing machines. Terrorists nowadays use drugs and shock therapy, but other instances in the past were much more refined. You could go and read about Lebensborn again, or even darker examples such as China Lake or Duplessis' Orphans in my own Quebec...

Jupiter to Ignite.

For this one, the expression "far-fetched" is an understatement. Around 1998, I saw weird images on the Internet. In some old European historical boroughs, people had snapped pictures of strange stelas inserted in lieu of the bricks or slabs that were normally there the previous day. The images were hard to see, but described as a map of the Solar System with one big twist: The planet Jupiter looked like a small star and appeared much bigger than usual. Those stelas disappeared within days or turned blank by themselves. That was the only time I ever heard about them. The previous year, I had read that comet Shoemaker-Levi hitting Jupiter was actually an orchestrated attempt to add mass to this planet. Jupiter is thought to be made of hydrogen and helium exactly like the Sun; it just doesn't have the proper mass to compress the helium inside and have it ignite like the gas mix in a diesel engine (which explodes by virtue of compression and doesn't require a spark plug). And the year before, I had watched the movie "2010" (a sequel to "2001: A space odyssey"). At the end of that flick, Jupiter turns into a star, making our system a binary one and turning Jovian satellites into a mini solar system of its own (with most of them becoming inhabitable, save for Europe that already harbors life and that remains off-limits to humankind.) My mind made "1+1=2" and I woke up with that story about the elite building its own little private solar system and preparing to abandon us down here...

Sovereign Unknown

Live, I jokingly refers to this song as "Operation Highjump: The Musical"!!! Well... That's exactly what it is!!! I read tons of books about the Bermuda Triangle, and one written by Charles Berlitz talked about Admiral Byrd flying solo through Antarctica with his radio description broadcasted elsewhere in the world. According to the story, he reached a secret temperate area hidden there where some ultra-civilized people greeted him. Of course, the broadcast stopped fast.  Fast-forward to post WWII: Byrd returned to Antarctica leading a huge military expedition. From then accounts vary, but all point at the fact that his party got destroyed and only a handful returned home with no provable details about what caused such a demise. I simply wrote the song from the perspective of the beings he met there...

Skyless

Another story that fascinated me as a kid was about the green children of Banjo, Spain (and similar ones, or other versions were reported from other areas). The common elements go as follow: A mountainside crumbles, revealing a cave system inside that collapsed and is no longer reachable. In the main story, two children (a boy and a girl, usually siblings) with greenish complexion survived in what is left of the cave. They fear the sun, visibly exposed to it for the first time. The boy dies, the girls grow up enough to learn the language and tell her story: Their people live "in a land with no sky", with only a rocky ceiling everywhere and indeed an earthquake estranged them. In the meantime, I read about whole communities in Turkey who lived permanently underground 10 000 years ago, Hopis and Navajos referring to ‘Ant People" who temporarily sheltered them underground during a cataclysm and many others. But this probably the least addressed topic I ever read about and one of the most laughed at...

Faith Pupeteers

Actually a very old song from the late 80's, I am reluctant to let great music vanish in oblivion. The instrumental part before the end was actually written by Forest. Continuing where "Simian Cattle" left, this song is about how psychic vampires rule the world, and how they started to condition and control their flock using our appetites, emotions and devotion to trigger the desired behavior. It's a bit like fishing: If a bait doesn't work, you try another one. The tackle box includes religion, sexual attraction, worship of useless or fictive public figures and many others, this time those schemes are linked to chivalry and hereditary command.

Brimstone Landscape

I wrote this song after waking up heartbroken from a very vivid and traumatizing nightmare. In it, my friends and I got intercepted by some militia and arrested. Then they sent us to some barren quarry with smoke coming out of the ground. I remember a guard taunting me; He took me to the top of a pile of rubbish and shown me that the land was bare as far as eye could see, in an area normally very forested. He flatly told me that all life and habitats on Earth got the treatment all at once, and that all of humankind had been conscripted to forced labor like us in order to speed up the takeover. Having the planet deliberatly turned into a wasteland hit me much harder than my own predicament in my dream. I remember dreaming about makeshift hot air balloons to escape... 

Oversee the Rebirth

A bit of a sequel to "...as sea devours land", this one deals with the task of rebuilding civilization following a polar shift where much of today's inhabited lands disappeared underwater. Therefore, you have members of the new humanity sailing and throwing nets over what used to be their lands. They are stuck to live on areas that they first knew as mountaintops and have to adapt at settling areas that used to be barren but are now bound for a more hospitable climate since sea level rose, lowering their relative altitude in the process. Problem: Those areas have accumulated no fertile soil yet, and most accessories required to rebuild civilization are out of reach, at great depths....

Overall view: Do not take your civilization as granted. There are multiple examples where the safety, comfort, equality and openness that we knew have existed but eventually disappeared. Keeping common people at the bottom seems to be a mainstay in our elite's agenda. One striking example: Around 1500, China destroyed the most magnificent commercial fleet that ever existed (the "Treasure Fleet") and ceased all international trade, and that at the request of Nobility. The country's prosperity had also enabled poor people to become wealthy and to acquire luxury goods, thus blurring visible social divides. Nobles didn't hesitate a single second to send their land back into misery in order to secure the exclusivity of their privileges. Believe me, they were not the last ones to do so...

Big high fives and hugs to my bandmates Mat, Forest and Antoine, and to my wife Sylvie for putting up with my antics. A big thank you to the dozens of individuals who provided me with information and support. Thanks to{' '} Cory Dransfeldt {' '} for helping me editing this! Hail!!

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