THE PAUL IS DEAD conspiracy has had a long life with no conclusion. Its storyboard is unsatisfactory: in 1966 the original Paul McCartney “blew his mind out in a car“ and was replaced by an identikit musician likely known as William Shepherd (aka “Billy Shears“). This switch is a marketing line in the sand for the Beatles. Before then, the band is climbing still to an unrivalled ascendancy, uniform and suited, cheeky rascals on tour but contained within societal norms, John is the driving force. After, freewheeling individuality and dissent, always challenging society's comfort with their behaviour, studio innovation, illegal rooftop concerts and a cultural dominance driven by Paul.
The first Paul is seemingly a franchise and his later incarnation is referred to often as Faul, an abbreviation of Lennon's supposed early nickname for the interloper – False Paul. Ever since, snippets of evidence are found in songs, album covers, spoken asides and the publication in 2009 of The Memoirs of Billy Shears, purportedly a book transcribed directly from the horse's mouth; a revised edition was published in 2021. The Paul Is Dead story broke in October 1969 on American commercial radio, though allegedly the Beatle's death had been spoken of in London even in 1966. This might suggest the story was tiptoed purposefully, gradually into the limelight.
Nearly all of us are content to dismiss this as fabulous, even ludicrous. There seem to be, at least upon first sight, so many physical and musical consistencies between the supposed two Pauls that the conspiracy resembles incoherence. Nonetheless, this story reignites when Heather Mills, divorced from McCartney in 2008, declares herself deeply betrayed by the ex-Beatle, and she doesn't mean infidelity. “People don't want to know what the truth is,“ she says, “because they could never, ever handle it, they would be too devastated.“ The Ballad of John, Paul, George and Ringo is being questioned, and the McCartney idyll, Mills assures us, is ring-fenced. “I married a legend and there's a machine behind.“
The trouble with an oft-recited narrative, particularly one so lovingly teased apart by generations of adoring fans, is that there is little room left for doubt. Each of us remember the hits, the throwaway tidbits, hairstyles and guitar chords, Carnaby Street, all those headlines, straplines and footnotes of a mythology which met an abrupt end: John Lennon shot dead, New York, 1980. Yet the entire Beatles gambol, McCartney's most of all, is a fathomless helter-skelter.
When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride 'Til I get to the bottom and I see you again
Yeah, yeah, yeah, ha-ha-ha!
For all its familiarity – because of its familiarity – the Beatles story is remarkably oddball. I return to the False Paul fable contained within it time and again, partly through happenstance, partly because I mistrust the world, partly because there does seem something sappy and preternatural about Paul, indeed each of the Beatles. Cumulatively they don't make sense. Each appeared crafted as an accidental, anecdotal appendage to a world already custom built, as though they had been dropped in like manna from heaven, not quite as an afterthought but the decor had already been assembled and they didn't necessarily match it. Each exuded a happy-go-lucky mystique and none of them paid attention to the details whirling around them, especially the business aspect of their existence. Their disarming openness with fans, as if they had nothing much else to do with their time, is an indication of this. They had no need to pay much attention to anything, of course. Spoilt by the rush of record sales and adulation, their retinue were likely responsible for the abundance of clothing (different each day), studio bookings, photoshoot assembly, all else. But after Brian Epstein committed suicide in August 1967 and before Allen Klein became their manager in May 1969 it all becomes a fuzz. Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, their roadies and confidants, were bumblers bordering on the competent, and I read of no others who could remotely handle responsibility. Klein and the Eastmans emerged out of the neo-bankruptcy and chaos that was Apple Corps (A Paul Corpse), but there is a hint somebody behind the scenes is pulling the strings. The Beatles as marionettes? For sure, the “machine behind“ was in place long before McCartney married Heather Mills.
Each of us is curious to discover what it was to be one of them, smoking pot in the loos of Buckingham Palace or walking across a zebra crossing in St John's Wood, barefoot or otherwise. The Beatles, unlike the The Rolling Stones, remained the whole family's favourite even when the band embraced psychedelia and hippy culture, careless infidelity and the yards of mysterious death which peppered their journey. (So many attached to the group, personally or peripherally, have ended up dead before their time: Stu Sutcliffe, Rory Storm and his mother, Mal Evans, Terry Knight, on and on.) It follows we want to inhabit the intimacy we feel for them, the mythology we attach to them, it all meant so much to so many of us. Each of the fab four seemed as square cut as a loaf of white bread, well-groomed and loveable, charming and deftly humorous. That hardly comprises a scene of crime but there's the whiff of a rat (or perhaps a hidden corpse) for this remains true: if you wish to hide a truth, display it in plain sight so that everyone bumps into it, shuffles on by as though it were never there.
It's not as if a pop act had never travelled the world before, but the group's rise was remarkably meteoric and clinical. Four mop tops serve a rough and ready German apprenticeship one minute, become the toast of Liverpool the next, then conquer all five continents in rapid-fire. This ascent relies on the signs of the times – the new gizmos, technologies and artifice – and signs of the times are often signs of wonder. A wonder occurred one Sunday evening in June 1967 when the strains of All You Need Is Love were broadcast via four communication satellites and watched on live television in twenty-four nations by, it is said, up to 700 million people. Following the recent release of the Sgt Pepper album, the Beatles were surfing a tidal wave of acclaim, fame and unprecedented influence. Their diary was stuffed full of worldwide wonders, in fact; it's no surprise Elvis was jealous and subsequent superstars view them as royalty. We might describe all of this as the right thing happening to the right people in the right place at the right time. It is accepted that this occurs occasionally, but it implies a lot of coincidence whenever it does.
The fab four embellish an episodic timeframe of how society and, importantly, our own lives developed during their immaturity. It's a fake nostalgia for a time we never got to experience for ourselves (they say the swinging sixties swung only for the Beatles). None of this demands we trust the story though, and if you step back from any emotional investment in the folklore, if you don't run the cine camera of memory in its proper order, the story may appear also as contrived, even deceitful. That first ever satellite broadcast in 1967, says Ringo, was “Peace and love, people putting flowers in guns.“ But flowers in guns is how bad stuff in the world comes about, it is a deceit. Today those flowers are smart meters for our electrics, fifteen-minute cities for our comfort, 5G for convenience, bugs for cuisine and vaccines for health, all of which, we are told, are for our own good. Maybe for “peace and love“ read “peace and safety,“ then read what the Bible says about that. It's easy for a nervous person to be cautious about the Beatles even if the hype is brilliant.
Throughout 1967, that summer of peace and safety, each Beatle could shout like Cagney at the end of White Heat, “Made it, ma! Top of the World!“ But there's the rub. What do we really know of their childhoods? The two most important Beatles both lost their mas when young: McCartney when fourteen, John, already living with his aunt, when seventeen, and Ringo spent almost his entire childhood in hospital. We swallow the gist of any story thrown at us when we are made to feel cosy. But each story has a foundation, and it's not harmful to ask questions if it's a bit shaky.
If you are willing to notice, the group used masonic symbolism in abundance. McCartney, as all the Beatles, is obviously a high level mason, oaths and all, there is no question of that. Therefore their family backgrounds were certainly masonic. This opens up all possibilities, and is why many entertain Tavistock Institute involvement, the stuff sensible people term speculative extravagance. We'd do well to remember that mind control has been front row and viral these last three years when governments have relied on behavioural psychologists before economists, and we might be silly to dismiss its importance in civilian life elsewhere. It's not too difficult to imagine the Beatles as a chimera used for social engineering, that they were a manufactured product who needn't even have written their own music. If that's too much to bear, it's possible to meet halfway and argue that the group, once in society's shop window, was used to push a cultural agenda. How deep these suggestions of contrived sham are permitted to go is personal choice.
Besides, who knows how possible mind control is. Some claim now to see the fulfilment of previous Hollywood dystopia as the normal, as though we live in a cardboard reality. There's plenty of cut-out sci-fi to grapple with the Beatles. We read McCartney sleeps with his eyes open (a sign of mind control) and that he (the first Paul, that is) lived for several years in the 1960s with a behavioural psychologist, Richard Asher, the father of Jane, his girlfriend at the time, whose professional interest was hypnotism. (Even Asher was found dead, in 1969 in the same room McCartney transcribed Yesterday onto a piano – one of those tunes that came in a dream.) This is the stuff of fantasy, but we are entitled to be suspicious of McCartney's background and how exactly he was nurtured.
So much conundrum. McCartney didn't attend his father's funeral in 1976 and doesn't maintain contact with his stepsister though there are plenty of photographs of them together in the early 1960s. In interviews he inadvertently refers to his “Liverpool parents“ as though he had alternatives elsewhere. Indeed, the only proof that this Liverpool family exists is overworked cliché: the Let 'Em In cabaret song, for instance, which lists a familial cast – Phil and Don, Uncle Jim and Aunty Gin, it's all so contrived – schoolboy nostalgia or an embarrassing pub skit from the 1973 TV special James Paul McCartney where he plays happy families. (James, incidentally, means the “supplanter“ or “substitute“.) Such well-publicised ancestral avidity smacks of a man trying too hard.
So the world sees one Paul yet some see two (one with different shoe size and hair parting, taller with peculiar earlobes, and he has different fingerprints, at least according to his 1980 arrest details in Japan). As twins or brothers, someone altered by surgery, maybe the original Paul hidden and writing the songs still. Perhaps the False Paul was used intermittently in the original lineup to compound the streamlining of photographs. All this is the magician's sleight of hand and magic gets whacky when it's magick. And magick gets improbable when it's Luciferean.
My guess is that the False Paul narrative shines through a glass darky on purpose: we are not to know of its mechanics. Not yet, at least. For now the McCartney mannequin, to borrow from Churchill, is “a riddle inside a mystery wrapped up in an enigma.“ So what would be the intent behind one Paul being substituted for another?
Nicholas Kollerstrom is innocently Marxian, and for him it's only an economic pantomime gone wrong. In his book The Life and Death of Paul McCartney, he argues that the Beatles were worth a fortune to our balance of payments, our exchequer forbad they crash, the rescue plan just gets out of hand; Kollerstrom see the solution as the secret service meets the village idiot. Mike Williams and Mark Devlin, two supersleuths of the Paul Is Dead discourse, are by turn bemused and choked by their findings. The deeper one mines this rabbit hole, the more earth is thrown up to obscure the light behind. Williams has resolved to slow his research until a breakthrough emerges; instead he is to concentrate more on the Luciferean impulse behind the Beatles.
Conspiracists draw much attention to the Luciferean impulse behind the Beatles. The group's imagery was endlessly occultist and masonic. Some say McCartney is an illegitimate child of Aleister Crowley. Throughout his solo career he has used the rites of Crowley and Egyptian symbolism in his music and its accompanying artwork. He can't stop using illuminati hand signals either, though his audience relegates them to harmless gesture. (It's Beatle Paul and we love him!)
But most conspiracy theorists, on this issue at least, stub a toe then fail to look properly at what they stub their toe upon, for Satanism and the dark occult do not exist within a vacuum: Lucifer, or Satan, that “serpent of old,“ is a creature of the Bible, so, too, the demonic force he wields. Understand that Lucifer's vaulting ambition is to “ascend above the heights of the clouds,“ to imitate the Most High God and squat the heavenly kingdom... then even the Beatles escapade can make sense.
The Bible contains many “shadow stories.“ These cameos prefigure Yahusha/Jesus in narrative form and are imitative. These shadow stories are threaded through the entirety of the Old Testament. Melchizedek's brief encounter with Abraham, Abraham and his only son Isaac, David climbing the Mount of Olives, Jonah in the belly of the fish, so on. There are frequent forebodings of the Messiah's Second Coming, too. An awareness of this Biblical construct – the shadow story – may inform our understanding of the generic Beatles brand and why the False Paul story was broadcast. Many will be unwilling to run with this analysis, but that may be because their understanding of the Luciferean impulse is one-dimensional and seen only in a vacuum; it fails to take account of its diametric, the Christian gospel.
The Beatles story is a Luciferean "shadow" of the Tribulation in real time, and of the Antichrist and False Prophet described in chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation. The Tribulation, according to Biblical scripture, is the time in the end days when God prepares to judge the world. It is to last for seven years and, so it appears, is separated into two halves. The first half sees the reign of the first beast, commonly called the Antichrist. “And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months... And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him.“ Midway through the Tribulation, that is after three and a half years, the second beast appears, the beast commonly called the False Prophet who reigns for three and a half years also. “And he doeth great wonders... And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth... that they should make an image to the beast.“
The Beatles timeline is a dress rehearsal for the Tribulation for it matches exactly this prophetic sequencing. McCartney's press statement that closed the Beatles era was released on 10th April 1970, the last day of a seven year period of “reign“ that we can surmise started when their first number one hit, From Me to You, was released on 11th April 1963.
The first Paul's fatal car crash is thought to have happened on either 9th November or 11th September 1966, nobody can say with certainty which of these two dates. (It's all hearsay, no hard evidence exists.) “The former [date] was initially favoured,“ writes Kollerstrom, “because of the way the story broke in America...“ He then deciphers the alternate ways of reading numeric dates in the two countries, hence the initial debate and confusion. But for our purposes, as neither date is definitive and if we meet the two in their middle, we arrive at a compromise date of 10th October 1966. This is the last day of an exact three-and-a-half-year period after the Beatles released their first number one hit. (As an aside, the numerology of the year 1966 becomes more obvious when the “9“ is inverted to a “6.“)
At this point we can determine John Lennon is the Antichrist, Paul McCartney (or Faul, the False Paul) is the False Prophet.
Lennon formed the Beatles and was the band's first-named in its early press marketing. Appropriately, Lennon's father worked at sea for we are told the first beast shall “rise up out of the sea.“ And Lennon is the one who blasphemes, as the Antichrist does when he enters the Temple (described in the Book of Daniel chapter 9:27, "...at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation...") when he declares to a London journalist in March 1966 that “We're more popular than Jesus now.“ This press statement created a furore in America. The group's last tour there that summer was met by poor stadium attendance and Beatles LPs were burnt on bonfires. Lennon is the one who wrote Imagine, a paean for one world government and its one world religion.
McCartney, the False Paul, the False Prophet, is Crowley's Winged Beetle. A purported lineage from Crowley becomes more relevant when we read that the second beast comes “up out of the earth“ (the first McCartney's father was a cotton salesman). This refers to the Abyss, of course, a feature of Crowley's Thelema thinking. His 1913 slender volume, The Book of Lies, is an “official publication for Babes of the Abyss.“
The truth is that of itself it need not matter if there are two Pauls or not. That some imagine there are or has been two Pauls will suffice. But there is a spiritual rationale for their being a replacement Paul (and this will be explained elsewhere). Some conspiracists assume a disclosure of truth is soon to be delivered, as if the “machine behind“ – or the dragon of Revelation chapter 13 who “gave power unto the beast“ and that dragon is Lucifer – will be keen to have his own apocalypse, or revelation. Until then we are doodling on a palimpsest of befuddlement.
This apocalypse is underway. Mark Lewishon has dusted off tapes from September 1969 of John, George and Paul in earnest conversation about the recording of a next album; the film Get Back shows all four Beatles getting on together just fine. It complements the idea they were four puppets responding to an autocue fed by the machine behind, or the dragon. McCartney's death will no doubt hasten this story's rabbit being pulled from the magician's black hat.
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