American Ley Line: Route 66

"Well if you ever plan to motor west

Travel my way, that's the highway that's the best
Get your kicks on Route 66
Well it winds from Chicago to L.A.
More than two thousand miles all the way
Get your kicks on Route 66"
-- Bobby Troup, "Get Your Kicks on Route 66"

It is the spine of America, a two-lane ribbon of asphalt, chat, concrete, and gravel that for fifty years channeled dreams
and sweat from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. America's energies stretched out along the Mother Road, coming
to life in democratic kitsch and quiet desperation on the bones of cowboys and Indians, gangsters and rebels. Born of
the automobile, it died by the automobile, paved over and broken into pieces by the new interstates, but still visible in
frontage roads and overgrown side-tracks. It is America's ley line, a dragon curve of magickal power laid down by the
benevolent hand of Calvin Coolidge and buried deep beneath the American consciousness. Buried -- but not dead.
Route 66 lives and runs forever, beneath the wheels of John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac, in a West where jackalopes
roam and the Big Rock Candy Mountain is always over the next ridge.

I've noted before that weirdness is where you find it; you can Illuminate anywhere by picking out details and shining
your own personally bisociated highlight on them. Take advantage of the human instinct for pareidolia, for pattern-
matching and false positives. Anything interesting can be Significant, can become a Sign, a Portent pointing to
whatever madness or mystery you desire. On a highway running more than 2,400 miles, through eight states and
countless small towns, there are more such details than anyone can possibly utilize or comprehend. The Signs don't
stop with Burma Shave and come-ons for the "Famed But Tamed Killer Rattlesnakes" of the Regal Reptile Ranch in
Alanreed, Texas. (Although just like that, we've tied hexagrams and serpent cults together.) In this series, I've picked
only a few of the multifarious possibilities and details available, building to a few recognizably Suppressed themes.
Your mileage, especially on Route 66, may vary. I definitely recommend checking out any of the many websites
dedicated to Route 66 for your own details; I'm especially fond of the way the word "alignment" (used so often in
stone-circle and ley-line contexts) is used to refer to the old Route 66 roadbed. I also recommend reading Michael
Wallis' Route 66: The Mother Road for a sepia-colored gestalt into which you can settle the details you select. Wallis'
1990 book gets much of the credit for renewed "Route 66" nostalgia and interest, and I certainly give it much credit for
spawning (eventually) this column, and especially the paragraphs coming around the curve just ahead.

"The association is formed to promote the early completion and secure permanent maintenance of U.S. Highway No.
66 between Chicago and Los Angeles, commonly called 'The Main Street of America,' and to encourage the people at
large to use the same . . ."
-- from the charter of the National U.S. 66 Highway Association

Route 66, as such, came about as a result of the 1921 Federal Highway Act, which tied federal road assistance for the
states to state upgrades on key interstate roads. This act was the result of decades of lobbying, primarily by farm
interests, but the lobbyist who jumped on it the hardest was one Cyrus Avery, a realtor and oil-patch investor from
Tulsa, Oklahoma. He held a number of official and semi-official positions in highway planning, most significantly that
of the Department of Agriculture's consulting highway specialist. He mapped out a system of interstate roads, and
selected the old Gold Road running through Oklahoma (and coincidentally right past his gas station) as the main
transcontinental route from Chicago to Los Angeles. He originally wanted to call the road Highway 60, but better-
connected highway officials in Virginia snaffled that number, so he settled for "66." On November 11, 1926, a joint
federal and state committee officially approved Avery's map, and Route 66 became a reality.

Only 800 of the 2,448 miles of Avery's route were paved in 1926, but Avery and his booster compatriots in the other
seven states it crossed steadily promoted the "Main Street of America" in statehouses, small-town newspapers, on
billboards, and everywhere else they could. Route 66 got another big boost from the Bunion Derby, a 1928

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 transcontinental foot race that followed Route 66 from Los Angeles to Chicago (and lesser roads to New York).
Fittingly, an Oklahoman named Andrew Payne won it, to great celebration and fanfare by Avery and his team. By
1937, with the Dust Bowl in full blast blowing Okies down "the Mother Road, 66" to California, the whole route was
paved. Route 66 carried Patton's soldiers to maneuvers, and then to their new homes in Southern California after the
war; driving down Route 66 became an American vacation and migration standard. The TV series Route 66, a family-
friendly knockoff of Kerouac's On the Road (filmed mostly in Florida) ran between 1960 and 1964 and made the
highway synonymous with adventure and romance.

However, midsummer had come and gone for the Mother Road; Dwight Eisenhower, whose jeeps had gotten stuck in
one too many two-lane mires before the war, was president. He signed the 1956 Federal Highway Act, which called for
German-style autobahns instead of farmer-friendly two-lane highways on America's prime interstate routes. The
interstates began crossing, and then bypassing, and then gobbling up, the old Route 66. Rather than I-66 (which went
to a road in Virginia), the Chicago-Los Angeles route became a Frankenstein linkup of I-55, I-44, I-40, I-15, and I-10.
The last vestige of Route 66 disappeared from official Department of Transportation maps in 1984.

"My first ride was a dynamite truck with a red flag, about thirty miles into great green Illinois, the truck driver
pointing out the place where Route 6, which we were on, intersects Route 66 before they both shoot west for incredible
distances."
-- Jack Kerouac, On the Road

One can, as Charles Fort assured us, measure a circle beginning anywhere, and one can measure a highway beginning
at least two places, but in America, the West is in front of us, so Route 66 begins in Chicago. I've discussed the
superabundance of Chicagoan sacred geometry before, but I'll note specifically that the highway begins at Buckingham
Fountain, the largest fountain in the world, in the middle of Grant ("the whole world is watching") Park. Built in 1927
by Kate Buckingham, an eccentric millionairess obsessed with Alexander Hamilton (among other things), Buckingham
Fountain resembles a compass rose or a mandala from the air; four seahorses spray water from the cardinal directions.
As if that weren't enough, a mile or so west of the Fountain, Route 66 runs right beneath the Sears Tower, the tallest
skyscraper in the country. Lingam and yoni, anyone? Spear and Grail? Dark Tower and Holy Well?

Running southwest out of Chicago, Route 66 parallels the Archer Avenue ghost road, mirrored by the Des Plaines
River, and enters Al Capone's old stronghold of Cicero. It then runs through towns called Romeo and Juliet (now
Romeoville and Joliet), continuing the esoteric theme of doubling reflected in its eerie numeral designation. Route 66
picks up a Lincolnian eldritch charge running through Springfield, Illinois, past the slain deity's home and the rotunda
where he last lay in state. From thereabouts, it follows the path of the French voyageurs down the Pontiac Trail, named
for the Ottawa Indian Chief Pontiac, who died (under mysterious circumstances) at the southwest end of the Trail --
and hence, at the southwest end of Route 66 in Illinois -- near Cahokia. Cahokia itself, of course, is a mystic site and
ley nexus in its own right. Founded around 1050 A.D., it contains the largest pyramids north of Mexico City (packed
earthen mounds) and was laid out using faultless sacred geometry to channel the magical energies of the sun god for its
sorcerous priesthood. Human sacrifices filled the plazas and streets of Cahokia with power -- power that Route 66
perhaps taps into on its way past on the old Collinsville Road. Intriguingly enough, a mysterious secret society called
the Monks of Cahokia held rituals on top of the mounds and, beginning in 1911, lobbied to "preserve the mounds as a
national park." Did any of them get involved in highway legislation? Who can say?

"There are only two great transit arteries in the United States that have taken on mythological connotations: the
Mississippi River and Route 66."
-- Douglas Brinkley

Route 66 actually crossed the Mississippi at three different places in its fifty years of official history, none of which
are accessible to cars right now. (The central crossing, at McKinley Bridge -- named for another martyred king, our
third so far -- is about four miles due west of the Cahokia Mounds.) For my money, there's something very
"Christabel," almost Lovecraftian, in the 135-degree turn the northernmost crossing (the Chain of Rocks Bridge) makes
in the middle of the river. This eerie feeling is not slaked by the knowledge that at least one person died building the
Chain of Rocks Bridge in 1929, in a shade of the old custom of sacrificing a builder to the river-god in Roman times.
The southernmost crossing, at MacArthur ("son of Arthur") Bridge, runs right past that Modernist megalith, the

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 Gateway Arch. One hardly even needs to wonder if the Masons were perhaps involved somehow: the Gateway Arch is
a catenary ("chained" or "linked") curve, and its 18-degree-off-North alignment mirrors the angle of a pentagram
pointing due west (where else?) but perfectly aligns with sunrise on Halloween. The Arch itself, of course, reflects the
Arch of Heaven, and the seven stars (for the seven states still to come?) of the Pleiades (from whence our Nordic alien
friends arrive) shine below it ("through it") in Masonic emblems. After splitting its Cahokian energies into a Hecate-
style triplicity to cross running water, Route 66 draws down the celestial power of the Arch and powers west through
St. Louis -- birthplace of hot dogs and ice cream cones, among other essential sacraments of American identity -- and
down into Missouri.

Southwest of St. Louis, the Mother Road runs through Hecate's hounds -- a wolf sanctuary affiliated with Washington
University -- and then drives the connection home by passing the Black Madonna Shrine consecrated in Eureka,
Missouri in 1938. Syncretic conspiracies can also note that the "black Madonna" is often taken to be subversive Prieuré
de Sion code for Mary Magdalene, of blessed memory and occult association, or of our own Lady of Weirdness, the
Queen of Sheba. Further on, the highway passes Times Beach, tainted with dioxin harpy-style and thence past the
mysterious and spooky Meramec Caverns. The dark ladies don't have it all their own way: in Springfield, Missouri,
Route 66 runs past another "woman in white" ghost, the phantom bride of Phelps Grove Park. Before that, however,
the highway has taken another hit of cosmic alignment, running past the half-scale model of Stonehenge on the campus
of the University of Missouri at Rolla. Technically, Route 66 never passed the mini-megalithic monument -- it was
dedicated on the summer solstice of 1984, the year the government officially tried to bury the Mother Road. (For more
spookiness, the Rolla Stonehenge's trilithon ring was completed during a solar eclipse.) Passing Rolla and Springfield,
Route 66 jogs the "Devil's Elbow" (the last stretch of 66 in Missouri to be buried by I-44), named for lumberjacks'
frustrations with the nearby twists in the Big Piney River. Not yet content, Satanically speaking, it then runs through
Joplin onto the "Devil's Promenade," a road known for spook-lights and other eerie phenomena. Mystical sparks
thrown off by the Route 66 ley line, or the stigmata of telluric energies that drew Cyrus Avery (or the occult
geographers whose bidding he did) to run the highway through that corner of Missouri? Does the road follow the
magic, or does the magic follow the road? Next week, we'll follow both of them further west.

Coming Up In Part Two: Oklahoma City Looks Oh So Pretty, Etc.

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 American Ley Line: Route 66 (Part Two)
"Now you go through St. Louie, and Joplin, Missouri
Oklahoma City looks oh so pretty
You'll see Amarillo, and Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona, don't forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino . . ."
-- Bobby Troup, "Get Your Kicks on Route 66"

Last week, we set out down Route 66, America's secret spine, its Mother Road of dreams and despair. Like the
Highway itself, we began in Chicago and wound our way through the mystical landscape of the Midwest, through
Illinois, across the Mississippi, and into Missouri. This week, our pilgrimage continues, through five more states, along
the phantom ribbon of concrete that defined the freedom of the open road for three generations. As with last week's
column, we won't be slowing down for every single Sign alongside the path -- it can't be done. Each Sign speaks to the
driver who wants to see it; every town or mesa might be magical, if your headlights catch it just right. I can only
mention the ones that reflect in my windshield, the ones that look like suitable shoulders to support a Suppressed
connection. Let's roll.

"There is a highway from coast to the coast,

New York to Los Angeles,
I'm a goin' down that road with troubles on my mind
I got them 66 Highway Blues. . . .
Sometimes I think I'll get me a gun,
Thirty eight or big forty fo',
But a number for a name and a big 99,
Is worse than 66 Highway Blues."
-- Woody Guthrie, "Highway 66 Blues"

Route 66 enters Kansas through a desolated district known as "Hell's Half Acre" outside the lead-mining town of
Galena. From this blasted heath, it crosses over the "Rainbow Bridge" (built in 1923) outside Riverton, Kansas, and
then swings south to meet the Black Dog Trail, named for the Osage Indian chief Black Dog. Black Dog was born,
intriguingly enough, where Chief Pontiac (who gave his name to the Trail through Illinois that Route 66 followed)
died; in Cahokia, Missouri. And so the spirit of the land, and of the trails across it, moved west in psychopompic
progress. Black Dog's route (which follows Route 66 as far as Claremore, Oklahoma) crosses the site of Fort Blair,
near Baxter Springs, where the Confederate raider William Quantrill massacred 87 men on October 6, 1863. Route 66
connects Baxter Springs to the also-haunted battlefield of Wilson's Creek, Missouri, where Quantrill also fought, and
killed, in 1861. Victims of Quantrill haunt both battlefields, perhaps caught in the psychic undertow of the Black Dog
Trail, where the Osage believed the dead walked to the afterlife. Here are more spooklights (near Quapaw, Oklahoma)
and the town of Catoosa, Oklahoma is named for the Cherokee legends of the Gi-tu-tzi, the "shining people."

The wild hills along Route 66 played host to considerably darker sorts, as well. Not only legendary outlaws like Belle
Starr (born on the future Mother Road in Carthage, Missouri) and Jesse James (reputed to have hidden out in
Missouri's -- and Route 66's -- Meramec Caverns), but lesser owlhoots such as the Black-Yeager Gang, the Dalton
Gang, and the Doolin Gang swarmed this corridor. Bonnie and Clyde killed a man in Commerce, Oklahoma (on the
Highway) in 1934, and robbed a bank in Baxter Springs, Kansas (as did Jesse James, according to local lore). Pretty
Boy Floyd held court at the Kentucky Club in Oklahoma City. But Route 66, as befits a road dedicated to the frontier,
the liminal space where things change timelessly, also runs through the spot where the Old West is buried. Chandler,
Oklahoma holds the grave of Bill Tilghman, the legendary lawman "born on the Fourth of July" (a proxy for America,
sheriff as the tanist-substitute for the sacred king). He cleaned up another "Hell's Half Acre" (in Perry, Oklahoma, a
ways off the Road) but was gunned down on Halloween Night, 1924 in the "last gunfight of the West" in Cromwell,
Oklahoma as he grappled with a knot of three persons, including a "rogue Federal agent." Rogue agent or sacred
executioner, charging Route 66 with another slain king as it headed west, into the Red Lands of the Dead?

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 "Eldorado fins, whitewalls and skirts
Rides just like a little bit of heaven here on earth
Well buddy when I die throw my body in the back
And drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac."
-- Bruce Springsteen, "Cadillac Ranch"

Route 66 runs through Shamrock (for luck) and then McLean, Texas (whose founder died on the Titanic) in
ominously-named Gray County, past the Leaning Water Tower of Groom, and into the "Jericho Gap" right before
Amarillo. This boggy stretch of black mud mired travelers on the Mother Road before its eventual paving in 1937, but
its dangerous reputation continued for another thirty years. Amarillo itself, although plagued with UFO flaps in 1956-
57 and 1965, is a placid backdrop to the real nexus on the Road's path, the "Cadillac Ranch" monumental sculpture
constructed by the Ant Farm collective on May 28, 1974 (25 days after the Sears Tower was completed). Ten
Cadillacs, from a 1949 Club Coupe to a 1963 Sedan, lie embedded in concrete at the same angle (51 degrees 50
minutes) as the slope of the Great Pyramid. This powerful transformer no doubt helps secure ley transmissions despite
the almost complete obliteration of the Mother Road by I-40 in the Texas Panhandle; its vintage Caddy tailfins pull up
the telluric energies from the road they rode over, and blast them into the emptiness Beyond.

"The highway, oh, the highway. No place, in theory, is boring of itself. Boredom lies only with the traveler's limited
perception and his failure to explore deeply enough."
-- William Least-Heat Moon, Blue Highways

Eastern New Mexico and the western Texas Panhandle past Amarillo are the Llano Estacado, the "staked plains," so-
called (according to local lore) because Coronado had to drive stakes into the ground to navigate across the featureless
prairie. Coronado was looking for the famed Seven Cities of Cibola (recalling the Seven Stars seen beneath the
Masonic arch) and may well have traveled along the "one route by which this plain may be safely traversed," in the
words of a later explorer, Captain Randolph Marcy of the U.S. Cavalry. Whether or not Coronado was trying to find a
mystical ley nexus to cement El Camino Real or was just seeking El Dorado, Route 66 likely parallels his march. From
Tucumcari (from the ominous Comanche tukamukaru, "place of lying in wait"), Route 66 runs west to Santa Rosa,
where U.S. 64 runs south to Roswell. Just past Santa Rosa, Route 66 originally turned north to Santa Fe, passing
another Civil War battlefield at Glorieta Pass, head-faking toward Los Alamos, and drawing off mojo from the Pecos
and Santa Fe Trails (east and north of Santa Fe) and El Camino Real (west and south of Santa Fe). After 1937, the
Highway simply arrowed west from Santa Rosa into Albuquerque, where the white lady who occasionally dogs the
Mother Road reappears as La Llorona.

West of Albuquerque, the ancient Acoma Pueblo (the oldest continuously-inhabited town in the United States) and the
sacred mountain of the Navajo, Mount Taylor (which they call Tso'dzil, or "tongue mountain"), regard each other
across the Road. Further on, the Malpais lava flows stretch beside the road, frozen giant's blood from Ye'iitsoh,
variously translated as "Big God" or "The Monster Who Sucks In People." The twin sons of Changing Woman,
Monster-Slayer and Born-of-Water, killed this giant, inhuman mountain entity about 800 years ago, if the geological
dating on the lava flows can be trusted. This ties in eerily well with the accepted date of the sudden disintegration and
decline of the Anasazi -- whose Chaco Canyon road network (itself bizarrely, perhaps ritually, straight) intersects
Route 66 right around Anaconda, New Mexico. Once more, the Mother Road sucks in the energies of the first
Americans' sacred geography, and transmits them along its own route. That route crosses the Continental Divide, and
then passes the intriguingly named Pyramid Rock and Rehoboth, New Mexico before reaching Gallup (the county seat
of McKinley County -- and again we meet a slain king of America in the road). Here Route 666 once branched off
and headed north for Cortez, Colorado (it's been U.S. 491 since May of 2003); the real Mother Road, however, heads
resolutely west into Arizona.

"It is because in Arizona the arresting framework, the very skeleton of the earth, is exposed that the scenery is so
compelling and meaningful. Its bone structure is superb."
-- Josef Muench

If New Mexico is thick with the spirits of "Those Who Came Before," then Arizona peels back even that stratum and
lays the Highway across the bare bones of America. Route 66 passes through the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest,

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 gaining who knows what eldritch power from wood that has become stone. Just past Winslow, Arizona is Window
Rock, which was Ni'alnii'gi, or "Earth's Center" to the Navajo. Just beyond this omphalos, a Stone Fallen From
Heaven lies a mystic seven miles off the Road in a bowl of diamonds and cold iron -- Meteor Crater, which roadside
promoters of the 1930s (delightfully) identified with the Star of Bethlehem. (The Meteor Crater Observatory is now a
ruin, in fine Gothick style.) Route 66 pours all this mystical juice past the maneless mountain lions of the bankrupt
wild-animal park near Two Guns, through Canyon Diablo (perhaps acting like a resistor in an electrical current -- or
as a capacitor for deadly orgone), and past an ancient Pueblo (or Anasazi?) ball court, first excavated in 1936.

The kachinas -- mysterious and powerful spirit entities of Hopi lore -- look down on Route 66 from atop the San
Francisco Mountains, as it runs from Winona ("don't forget Winona") into Flagstaff, county seat of Coconino County.
Against these stark mesas, the commedia dell'arte love triangle of Ignatz Mouse, Krazy Kat, and Offissa Pupp, from
George Herriman's surreal Krazy Kat comic strip, unfolded during the years that Route 66 itself slowly emerged from
the half-world of conception into hard-paved reality. Whether Krazy Kat and company were the commercial American
versions of the "kachina dancers" whose similarly ritualized movements and masks stave off disaster among the Hopi
must remain opaque to us -- although it is interesting to note, perhaps, that Krazy and Ignatz ended their dance in
1944. The next year, Robert Oppenheimer exploded the atom bomb and became "Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Looking back at the kachinas from the top of Mars Hill northwest of Flagstaff is the Lowell Observatory, founded here
by Percival Lowell in 1894 because nowhere else on Earth would show him the phantom patterns of Mars' canals so
clearly. In 1930, working at Lowell Observatory, Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto and perhaps thereby
opened a pinhole to the kingdom of the dead god. As the desert stretches west, the Highway pulls all these planetary
energies down and channels them into its great ley conduit past Flagstaff, balanced between Sedona and the Grand
Canyon, a veritable Hoover Dam of etheric power. Rumors of Egyptian ruins in the Canyon need not delay us (though
we may come back to them another time), nor that of the UFO crash near Kingman, Arizona on May 20, 1953, nor
even the Alchemical Wedding of the King and Queen of Hollywood, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, in Kingman's
Methodist church on March 29, 1939. Here, the terrain has become an unearthly Waste Land, with the names floating
over it but not touching it in Eliotesque anomie -- Valentine, Antares (the eye of the heavenly Scorpion), Sitgraves,
Kingman, Goldroad, finally Red Rock ("come into the shadow of this red rock") at the edge of the state. "And," as
John Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath, "66 goes on over the terrible desert." In two weeks, so shall we.

Coming Up In Part Three: That California Trip, Etc.

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 American Ley Line: Route 66 (Part Three)
"Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino
Won't you get hip to this kindly tip
When you make that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66."
-- Bobby Troup, "Get Your Kicks on Route 66"

Two weeks ago, we continued to trace the ghostly pattern of Route 66 from Joplin, Missouri to Kingman, Arizona.
America's Mother Road, Route 66 remains archetypally alive in a way that I-40 has yet to attain. It's that "aliveness,"
that quality of Something Else Here, that we're mapping, and that you can possibly use in your own games. This week,
we reach the ocean, and the end, and look back to see where we've been. As before, there are too many roadside
seductions, too many possible map readings, to get to them all even in three columns. Over the thrum of the tires and
the roar of the air conditioner, I point out a few sights as we blast across the West and into the morning; I make a few
hesitant connections by dashboard light as the AM transmission crackles in, Suppressed by the heat and the distance,
and by the very intensity of its occult Signal. Stand on it.

"And 66 goes on over the terrible desert, where the distance shimmers and the black center mountains hang
unbearably in the distance. At last there's Barstow, and more desert until at last the mountains rise up again, the good
mountains, and 66 winds through them. Then suddenly a pass, and below the beautiful valley, below orchards and
vineyards and little houses, and in the distance a city. And, oh, my God, it's over."
-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Route 66 crosses the Colorado River at Topock, Arizona (sadly some 20 miles north of Lake Havasu, with London
Bridge at the north end and a 135-foot intaglio geoglyph of a serpent at the south end) and swings north to Needles.
Here, in Tom Joad's "murder country," it gathers steam for its tear across the Mojave Desert. Here, it passes the oldest
living things in North America -- the Joshua trees -- pulling who knows what sustenance up from the UFO-haunted
desert. It skirts an extinct volcano in Amboy, runs through Bagdad, then hits the ghost town of Calico (which still has
a few ghosts in its abandoned stores and saloons) and then turns southwest at Barstow past a pair of geoglyphs (a skull
and a turtle, death and the world). Here it follows the Mormon Trail, pioneered by Jedediah Smith, passing the
Victorville fane of yet another American king -- 33rd degree Freemason Roy Rogers, "King of the Cowboys."

At San Bernardino, the old mission dedicated to St. Bernardine of Siena, the patron saint of advertising, the Road
leaves the Waste Land and enters the suburbs. Perhaps appropriately, it passes below another significant arch, or in this
case, two of them -- the first McDonald's ever opened, in San Bernardino, on the Road at 14th and E. The Golden
Arches lead the way to the American Paradise, Southern California, and refract all along the Highway. Ray Kroc's first
franchised McDonald's is at the other end of 66, in Des Plaines, Illinois; America's largest McDonald's is at the
fulcrum of the Road -- actually in a bridge across it -- in Vinita, Oklahoma.

Running the length of the Inland Empire, Route 66 strikes the haunted Aztec Motel in Monrovia, with its echoes of
human sacrifice and lost rituals. (There is also an Aztec Motel in Albuquerque, and one in Seligman, Arizona.) Farther
west, our Rosicrucian hearts gladden to find Arcadia! Home of the Santa Anita Racetrack (where the rites of Poseidon
and Pelops no doubt play out), this is the second Arcadia along the Road -- Arcadia, Oklahoma was founded in 1889
and features an acoustically perfect Round Barn, no doubt useful for overall-clad Templars. In Arcadia, the Highway
passes under the eye of (a fancy way of putting "five miles to the south of") Mount Wilson Observatory, built in 1908
at the instigation of a "little elf" who appeared to the astronomer George Ellery Hale. The 100-inch mirror at Mount
Wilson, as it happens, was poured of green glass in 1917 -- another green glass grail, manifested by the will of an
emerald alien. (Hale's previous observatory, the Yerkes Observatory, is at Williams Bay, Wisconsin; well off the Road
-- but associated with the University of Chicago, and significant for all that.) Just a little farther along the Road, still in
the San Gabriel foothills, is Devil's Gate, where the rocket scientist and alchemist John Whiteside Parsons tested solid
fuel rockets for CalTech. Parsons also went into the Waste Land -- the Mojave Desert -- along the Road to perform
magickal rituals, including the Babalon Working of 1946. Between his Pasadena lair and his Mojave pentagrams, the

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 connections spiral off too thick and fast for us to stop. Likewise, we pass the Huntington Museum in Pasadena with its
copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls, collection of Shakespearean folios, and early works of American cartography and
exploration -- nothing to see here, surely. The Road pours into Los Angeles, down Broadway (four blocks from the
ghost-built Bradbury Building) and onto Sunset Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard, and the end in sight of the
Pacific Ocean at Olympic.

"Jesus lived his life in a cheap hotel

On the edge of Route 66 yeah he lived a dark and
Twisted life and he came right back just to do it
Again"
-- Rob Zombie, "Supercharger Heaven"

Let's go back and take another look at the Road, this time as a sacred pilgrimage route. (66, kabbalistically, equates to
A-L-L-H, or "Allah.") Pilgrim roads are, of course, some of the earliest and most resilient; the Highway itself lies atop
the old Mormon Trail through Arizona and California. This stretch of Route 66 (all the way to the Llano Estacado in
Texas) was surveyed, and its first wagon road built, by Lieutenant Edward F. Beale of the U.S. Navy commanding a
train of 77 (!) camels especially imported from Turkey along with a drover, one Hadji Ali. ("Hi Jolly," as his American
teamsters called him, is buried in Quartzsite, Arizona beneath a pyramid surmounted by a copper camel -- not, sadly,
on the Road, but one can't have everything.) In the Zohar, camels paced out the borders of Eden; in the West, perhaps
they pace out the Sacred Way to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Sacred imagery runs all along the Road, from the Black Madonna in Eureka, Missouri (and the connections between
"eureka!" and gnosis we shall leave for the interested reader to tease out) to the "Holy Grail" in Flagstaff, Arizona (the
eyepiece of the telescope that discovered Pluto). Percival Lowell saw this, when he recast himself as an anchorite, a
"hermit" monk of astronomy, saying "Astronomy now demands bodily abstraction of its devotee . . . To see into the
beyond requires purity . . . Only in places above and aloof from men can he profitably pursue his search." These words
appear in the inscription on Lowell's tomb, on Mars Hill in Flagstaff. The astronomers (of Flagstaff and Mt. Wilson
alike) are the Grigori, the Watchers from the ivory towers of these American Irems. But the Road is not about
contemplation alone; it is about travel. As the anthropologist Victor W. Turner says, "If mysticism is an interior
pilgrimage, pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism." Or, in American: Go West, young man.

"The famous old American highway 'Route 66' was laid out by Freemasons with the apparent intention of sending
masses of automobile riders into a self-processing occult 'trip.'"
-- Michael A. Hoffman II, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

Route 66 is thus an initiatory journey, perhaps explicitly from the Crown (here understood as the mystical kingdom of
America) to Understanding (66 also being the mystic number of the path from Kether to Chokmah). Beginning with
the "fountain fed by four springs" of Buckingham's Eden in the city of the (reborn) phoenix, we progress through the
arch into peril and danger, enter death's chariot outside Amarillo, see the Ancient Ones and then the bones of the
Waste Land in the western desert where the Egyptians knew the dead dwelt. After the perilous journey, we arrive in
the Blessed Land Behind The Sunset, Brendan's paradise of apples and pure water -- or oranges and Coca-Cola.

One can mark the stages in many ways: for example, there are twelve cities mentioned by name in "Get Your Kicks
On Route 66." (Nat "King" Cole, he of the intriguing nickname, who first recorded Bobby Troup's classic hymn to the
highway, was a Freemason. Just thought you'd like to know.) That equals the twelve signs of the zodiac, much as
Robert Graves has assigned them to the Twelve Labors of Heracles or the twelve incidents on the voyage of the
Argonauts. Just running through them in an ad hoc way, we begin at Chicago, the slaughterhouse city of the Bulls
(Taurus); proceed to St. Louis from whence the "hidden twin" of Route 66, Lewis and Clark's hieratic voyage, departs
(or which is "twinned" by Cahokia across the river, Gemini either way); and so forth until you get to the Los Angeles
Rams (Aries). (Or you could go backward through the zodiac to the upstart St. Louis Rams for Aries.) Some of them
can be made to work out pretty well: there's another "white lady" haunting the Amarillo Natatorium nightclub (Virgo),
and Flagstaff makes a dandy metaphorical cave of Chiron, with its connotations of astronomy and withdrawal
(Sagittarius).

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 "It was a continuous carnival. . . . Around every curve was something amazing. Not only scenery, but . . . all the neon
signs . . . come-ons to get your dollar. Python pits and freak shows where you'd pay 50 cents to see 'The world's most
amazing snakes!' or 'the half woman-half man.'"
-- David Knudson, executive director of the National Historic Route 66 Federation

In general, this is the kind of thing where it will be up to you to add elements from your own game (or do more
research than I did) to really hammer stuff home. Pull up elements from your reading and illuminate them -- for
example, the quote above nicely combines snakes, the mystical androgyne, Carnival, and the Mother Road. Double the
incidence of incidents, and parallel the 24 books of the Odyssey. Or cut it back: you can perform the same trick with
the seven planets or the seven Sufi latifah (as we saw with Sinbad's initiatory journey) for seven states along the Road;
just leave out Kansas or consider whichever state you start from "Earth." You can draw an interesting parallel to
Coronado's Seven Cities of Cibola, too, or lift an idea from Greg Stolze's To Go and assign a chakra to each of seven
waypoints and recast Route 66 as the channel for America's kundalini. I'd recommend Chicago, St. Louis, Oklahoma
City, Los Alamos/Albuquerque, Flagstaff, the Mojave, and Los Angeles for a nice spread, but much of the fun of this
is coming up with your own tortured parallels and inflicting them on the players.

"Thus, the Gestapo's 'SS,' as well as Her Majesty's 'Secret Service,' Britain's 'MI6,' and the American military's
'Special Services,' all code for '66' as in 'Phillips 66' and 'Route 66 -- America's highway.' Historic accounts link all of
these to Rockefeller and/or Royal Family involvements."
-- Leonard Horowitz, "Kissinger and Vaccinations"

A final thought, a tentative shading of a secret history of the Highway for your consideration, to contrast with the overt
history covered in Part One of this odyssey. One notes with some interest the emergence of the "Good Roads
Association," begun by the Greenback-Populist currency-reformer Jacob Coxey in 1892 to lobby for road-building as
a farm economy panacea (and after the Depression of 1893, as a jobs program). Coxey's allies included such
interesting folk as Colonel Albert Augustus Pope, the owner of the largest bicycle manufacturing firm in America and
himself the founder of the League of American Wheelmen (66, kabbalistically, can equal G-L-G-L, galgal, or
"wheel"), and the fanatical and Ignatius Donnelly, the fiery Populist crusader, Atlantis theorist, and Baconian devotee.
A kind of steampunk ley-line knowledge corpus develops almost invisibly, from gears and chains, to ciphers and
maps, to the economic alchemy of Free Silver. The most interesting of Coxey's Associators was the fanatical
California Theosophist agitator Carl Browne. Browne combined the male and female spirit, having absorbed his wife's
ghost after her death, a mystical androgyne "born on the Fourth of July" in a log cabin, no less -- a possible candidate
for True King of America? Browne met Coxey at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 (where H.H. Holmes was carrying
out his own dark coronation), and converted Coxey to Theosophy, proposing a march on Washington -- a mystical
pilgrimage -- beginning on Easter Sunday, 1894 and arriving at the Capitol on May Day. Capitol police arrested Coxey
and Browne and "Coxey's Army" faded away. Where, precisely, might the threads might run between the
Theosophical Good Roads Association, the Rosicrucian NYMZA society secretly building airships in California and
Texas, and the 1896-1897 appearances of the Mysterious Airship above Chicago, Los Angeles, and St. Louis, among
other places along the future Mother Road? What was the Good Roads group to the government-approved Masonic
Road builders a generation later? A shadow organization? A parent faction? A Discordian rival? Who knows? Get on
the Road, follow wherever it leads, and get your kicks on Route 66.

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