Originaly posted on December 2005, by B-Chan in Free Republic
As a hobby, I have spent many years collecting art and publications from various esoteric sources -- End Times tracts, religious pamphlets, Communist propaganda, survivalist manuals, nuclear war stuff -- which I collectively refer to as Nut Lit and Nut Art. (I guess the technical term is Ephemera, but let's face it -- the best stuff comes from people and groups who could be accurately described as "nuts".) Most of these I enjoy out of mere historical or artistic interest. Over the years, however, a select few of my Nut Lit finds have provided the Tingle -- that creepy and voyeuristic thrill that comes from peeking into a world outside of the one the rest of the human race inhabits. There's a certain esoteric frisson in looking inside the fevered imaginings of kooky cult, or from seeing the pages that you'd have been frantically flipping as the Soviet missiles began to fall, or from otherwise getting a look at the occult, the confusing, or the just plain crazy.
However, there are works in my collection that I consider to be classics -- Ruckman's Apocalypse, In Time of Emergency, Salem Kirban's End-Times library, and others like them -- which are as valuable for their sensational (and often unintentionally humorous) artwork as they are for the amount of the Tingle I get from them. I am an artist by trade, and I enjoy seeing well-executed art, even if it was executed by some mentally-ill hillbilly preacher, moronic heavy-metal high-school kid, or slick political outfit. I just like the pictures. Certain people and groups tend to put out Nut Art that stands head and shoulders above the rest, however, and of these classics of the Nut Art genre, none stands above those produced by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society -- the propaganda arm of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
In many ways, the JW art published by the Watchtower is the Cadillac of the Nut Art genre. Their books, magazines, and pamphlets tend to feature big (usually full-color) illustrations (often paintings), well-executed by obviously-professional and always-anonymous artists, each dripping with oversaturated color and often featuring group shots of faces and figures bearing the peculiar stiffness that comes from the copious use of photo reference. These masterpieces of religious imagery often depict sensational Watchtower themes like the fiery destruction of Earth during the Apocalypse, the Scarlet Harlot on her Seven-Headed Beast, and (natch!) the Roman Catholic Church, which the JW hierarchy reckons to be the tool of Satan extraordinaire. Many religious organizations produce art for publication, of course, but only the Watchtower puts out consistently good product. (Art produced on behalf of the Seventh-Day Adventists, for example, is generally of high quality, but tends to be much more directed towards bourgeois tastes and consequently tends to lack the artistic flair that one finds in JW art.) However, other than the Jack Kirby-esque subject matter and the technical quality of the art, there is little Tingle in Watchtower art itself -- no hidden messages, secret symbols, or cryptic cribbings.
That is, until now. Those of you with even a passing interest in Nut Art dare not miss the website I found tonight, a page which opens up a whole new world in the universe of JW art -- a world not just of goofiness and technical prowess but of Tingle (and I mean big time Tingle) -- a world found at the astonishing website of Saifai, a man dedicated to exposing the dark underworld of hidden Satanic images in Watchtower art.
Page 35 of the book "THE KNOWLEDGE THAT LEADS TO EVERLASTING LIFE":
The site itself is nothing special. As is usual for a Nut Site, it's a mess of Jean-Teasdale-quality bad formatting and pointless crap, but please persevere; once at the URL, scroll down until you see the "Derren Brown" graphic; the three Watchtower covers below are the links to the actual images I'm talking about (see example above. Creepy, huh?)
The page is produced by Saifai and his wife Joanne, not by any anti-JW group or other entity. Saifai himself seems to be a fairly nice British bloke of the sleeveless-tee-and-mullet-wearing sort, and his wife Joanne is by all appearances a nice lady and mother, but what they have to show you regarding Watchtower art will chill you to the marrow. It creeped me out, and I am a difficult person to creep out indeed. Their modus operandi is taking JW art as printed in the Watchtower publications and placing a mirror in an specific point inside each piece of art, creating a new image composed of one-half of each piece viewed forward and backward at the same time -- sort of the visual equivalent of backwards masking in audio. (It sounds complicated, but it's really nothing more than the old funhouse mirror technique -- a trick some of you might remember from Prince's video for "When Doves Cry" -- applied to a piece of static art.) And -- as much as I hate to admit it -- when viewed in this way, the new images formed really do appear to contain composite images that resemble devil's heads, moaning, tortured faces, and psychedelic shapes suggestive of madness and evil.
Cover of “The Watchtower” magazine, June 15th, 2003:
Page 27 of “The Watchtower” magazine, issue August 15th, 1993:
The following picture is on page 3 of “The Watchtower” magazine, issue March 15th, 2003. It is also on page 16 of “The Watchtower” magazine, issue March 1st, 2012 // on page 32 of “Awake!” magazine, issue January 2012 // on page 230 of the book “Draw Close Jehovah”// on page 18 of the watchtower magazine, issue February 15th, 2006:
Page 87, story 38, of the book “My Book of Bible Stories”, issue 1978:
