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Necrolog (Deaths Of Folks Who Had Impact On The Fortean World)

I submitted this for the FT Necrolog and was told it was 'not right for FT' Despite the fact the guy was an orang-pendek witness and tiger shaman.


SAHAR DIMUS
February 3rd 1969- November 14th 2011
I first met Sahar in 2003 on the first of my trips to Sumatra in search of the orang-pendek. He was to be our chief guide and had been personally recommended by Debbie Martyr. I was surprised upon meeting him at hoe unassuming he was. A smiling, be-spectacled little man he could have easily passed for an accountant if dressed in a suit. A great example of how looks can be deceptive Sahar was a master of bushcraft and the most impressive guide I ever had in the jungle. He could tell what animal had passed and how long ago simply by the slightest disturbance of leaves that no one else would have noticed. He was immensely strong and fit and could carry huge weights up the steepest and most treacherous hills like an ant carrying a leaf up an anthill.
Not only that, he was a tiger shaman. His people held the tiger as a sacred animal, according to their tribal tradition the man who founded their tribe lived to a huge age before walking into the jungle and becoming a tiger. Tiger shaman are supposed to be able to call down the tiger spirit in tribal ceremonies. They are said to be able to look through the eyes of the tiger, observing far off things in the jungle and to become possessed by its spirit. Debbie herself had witnessed this and seen the happy, inoffensive Sahar turn into a feral, snarling dervish unrecognizable as himself.
He proved not only to be a great guide in the jungle but a great friend too. He was patient with slow bumbling westerners who found the terrain hard and the food harder. He held us spellbound around camp fires with stories of the jungle and the experiences of both himself and his late farther. He was a mine of information on both Sumatran folklore and wildlife.
So good was Sahar that we used him as chief guide all of the CFZ expeditions to Sumatra. We often stayed in his house at the foot of Gunung-Tuju with his lovely wife Lucy and his sons. Over our many trips we watched them grow up. His eldest Raffles was training to become a guide and accompanied us on our last expedition.
Sahar had lived and worked in the jungle for 14 years and had come across orang-pendek tracks and heard its call but never saw the creature until 2009 when he and Dave Archer encountered the creature in the clod forests of Gunung-Tuju. After the sighting he wept for a quarter of an hour due to the fact that he had no camera to capture an image of the beast on. Plans were afoot in 2011 to plant permanent camera traps in Kerinci Sablat National Park and had to pay Sahar to check the pictures each month.
On our last trip he seemed a little tired and slower than usual. His leg was hurting him. We all thought that in was nothing but age catching up with him and the rough terrain. I came home from the Fortean Times Unconvention 2011 to the news Sahar had died on 11th of November. He had been taken ill and was unable to walk. He was taken to hospital were apparently he was finding it hard to recognize people. He died shortly afterwards of what appears to be liver failure.
To me Sahar was Sumatra. He was just as much a part of Kerinci National Park as the lake, the mountain and the jungle. Sumatra and Sahar Dimus are inextricably linked in my mind; they are one in the same. Now he has gone it feels like a piece of Sumatra has died. The island can and will never be the same. He leaves behind him four children and a wife.
Goodbye old friend.
Sahar Dimus: Jungle guide, tiger shaman, orang-pendek witness and researcher.
 
Thanks for that. Pity it wasn't accepted for Necrolog. It still deserves publication in FT. Maybe send it in as a letter?
 
Don't know why they did't except it. I'm heading back out there in January so i'll do a write up of that and my 2011 trip and put a tribute to Sahar in that.
 
No Outing

The last two posts in this thread have been removed.

If a poster wishes to keep their identity secret, please respect their decision.
 
I'm really sorry about that, I didn't think. He's always linked to his stuff so I thought it was common knowledge.

Either way as I say I really do apologise.
 
Lordmongrove's public profile is quite minimal, so when their name was revealed, I presumed they wouldn't have ventured that info themselves.

Just me being cautious ;)
 
GARRICK92 WROTE..."Just a thought: If you are going to be globetrotting back and forth to that mysterious land, why don't you become a correspondent of sorts, or do your own orang pendek research while out there? I bet FT would bite your arm off if you turned up new cryptid news."

I always submit a write up to FT. Thet have two in hand currently Indian yeti from 2010 and orang-pendek from 2011.
 
PS I have no problems with people knowing who i am. Its probobly common knowlage. I'm actually David Attenborough.
 
lordmongrove said:
PS I have no problems with people knowing who i am. Its probobly common knowlage. I'm actually David Attenborough.
The secret may be out, but no need to broadcast it. Low profile, let's keep it that way! :lol:
 
lordmongrove said:
PS I have no problems with people knowing who i am. Its probobly common knowlage. I'm actually David Attenborough.

DA? I thought you had been eaten by an Orca while strolling along a beach.
 
lordmongrove said:
PS I have no problems with people knowing who i am. Its probobly common knowlage. I'm actually David Attenborough.

:yeay:

You get my vote.
 
9 December 2012 Last updated at 13:03

Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore dies, aged 89
British astronomer and broadcaster Sir Patrick Moore has died at his home at the age of 89, his friends and colleagues have said.

Sir Patrick presented the monthly BBC programme The Sky At Night, first broadcast on 24 April 1957 - making him the longest-running presenter of the same television show in the world

Good innings, but I'll miss The Sky At Night. A Great British Eccentric.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20657939
 
Timble2 said:
9 December 2012 Last updated at 13:03

Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore dies, aged 89
British astronomer and broadcaster Sir Patrick Moore has died at his home at the age of 89, his friends and colleagues have said.

Sir Patrick presented the monthly BBC programme The Sky At Night, first broadcast on 24 April 1957 - making him the longest-running presenter of the same television show in the world

Good innings, but I'll miss The Sky At Night. A Great British Eccentric.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20657939

Oh no! There I was the other day, thinking the old boy was bomb-proof.
He will be sadly missed.
 
Timble2 said:
9 December 2012 Last updated at 13:03

Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore dies, aged 89
British astronomer and broadcaster Sir Patrick Moore has died at his home at the age of 89, his friends and colleagues have said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20657939
OMG!

Just yesterday I posted:


The latest Sky at Night is on iPlayer:

The Sky at Night
- Mercury and the Moon

...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... _the_Moon/

...

Sad to say, Patrick Moore is not getting any younger, and his once characteristic clipped manner of speech has become quite slurred, so Chris Lintott does most of the SaN voice-overs now.

I'm not getting any younger either, so this could be my last chance to see PM on TV... :shock:

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 94#1284094
And so, it seems, it was. :(

(But I expect Sky at Night will continue - Chris Lintott can handle it just fine.)
 
I am sorry to hear this.

Sir Patrick reckoned that he was the only person to have met the first man to fly, Orville Wright, the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. He outlived them all.

Shouldn't that be Vladamir Ilyushin.
 
According to Mark Wade, editor of the space history Web site Encyclopedia Astronautica, "The entire early history of the Soviet manned space program has been declassified and we have piles of memoirs of cosmonauts, engineers, etc., who participated. We know who was in the original cosmonaut team, who never flew, was dismissed, or was killed in ground tests. Ilyushin is not one of them.
 
He could be pretty reactionary if you got him talking on the wrong subject, but he was one of the first celebrities I was able to identify - read his sci-fi as a kid, saw him on The Goodies, and lamented The Sky at Night was on so late I could never stay up to watch it. Self taught, I believe. Great British eccentric is a good way of putting it. RIP Sir Patrick.
 
I saw the very first Daleks episode, and yes, I hid behind the sofa. 8)
 
Patrick Moore

I once read or heard an interview with Patrick Moore where he mentions having met one of the Wright brothers.Someone ( I can't remember who ) described situations like that as the "telescoping of time ". Amazing to think there could still be people who also have similar memories.
 
I can't get over the fact that my father visited London Zoo just after the last thylacine had gone, he might just as easily have gone a few years earlier.
 
I met an Australian Aboriginal lady from the central desert region recently who talked about the time in the late 1960s that her tribe/clan first met a white person. The tribe had heard stories from other tribes about the mysterious white skinned figures and had wondered what sort of creature was sometimes seen in the sky (probably a Boeing 707) but never seen one until a white man arrived at a waterhole the tribe were camping.

This lady was in her 50s (although she looked much older) and can talk about a time before western civilisation. It almost made me jealous of her.
 
Writer, artist, visionary and priestess of goddess Isis
http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-styl ... -1.1619650

Olivia Melian Durdin-Robertson: April 13th, 1917-November 14th, 2013

Sat, Dec 7, 2013, 09:34

Olivia Melian Durdin-Robertson, who has died aged 96, was a writer, artist, visionary and priestess of Isis, who through her family’s social and cultural connections provided a link with the hermetic spiritualist tradition of the Celtic Twilight, as exemplified particularly by George Russell (“AE”) and WB Yeats.

The second of the four children of Norah (née Parsons) and Manning Robertson, she was born in London, where her father, an architect and town planner, worked for the ministry of health. In 1925, the Robertsons left Surrey and returned to their Irish ancestral home. Manning Robertson practised architecture, advocated social housing and town planning, and wrote prolifically and critically as Ireland’s first serious commentator on 20th-century architecture, while the family spent holidays at their family home, Huntington Castle, Clonegal, on the Carlow-Wexford border. The young Olivia was introduced to the “magic of the sidhe” through the mysterious “aged hermit” Mr Fox, who lived on a hallowed site beside the river Slaney.

When Yeats died in 1939, his widow asked Robertson to design the poet’s headstone at Drumcliff, Co Sligo. Many years afterwards Olivia told an interviewer: “My father designed Yeats’s tombstone, which carried the inscription ‘Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by.’ Later my mother met Mrs Yeats and asked her if she liked the tombstone, and she said ‘Yes, and Willie’s delighted too!’”

Olivia Robertson studied at Heathfield School in Ascot and the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. She worked as a volunteer nurse in England during the second World War, returning to Dublin to study history of European painting at University College, Dublin, in 1943. She spent four years working with Dublin Corporation’s enlightened inner-city playground scheme, drawing portraits of children which would feature as spontaneous, spirited line illustrations in her books: St Malachy’s Court (1946), Field of the Stranger (1948), The Golden Eye (1949), Miranda Speaks (1950), It’s an Old Irish Custom (1954) and The Dublin Phoenix (1957), all full of shrewdly observed evocations of the city.

In 1946, she received her first awakening into what she termed “the eternal reality . . . the source of our being and all that we hold to be good, noble and true” from the Egyptian goddess Isis. But it was not until 1960 that she joined her brother, Lawrence, a former Anglican rector and his wife, Pamela, who had decided to settle in their “land of heart’s desire” at Huntington Castle.

First they formed the philanthropic Clonegal Local Welfare scheme , then in 1963, their Centre for Meditation and Study. Regular seminars, esoteric site visits and discussions explored the inner meanings of the altered states of consciousness they had each experienced.

In the early 1970s she and her brother, she told an interviewer in 1992, “became aware of the imbalance in the world . . . Suddenly I realised the missing factor was the total ignorance of, and deliberate attack on the religion of God the Mother.”

Band of followers
The siblings sought the divine through comparative study, harmony with nature and creation, and a positive, instinctive, all-embracing new symbolic order. This led to Lawrence Durdin-Robertson’s The Cult of the Goddess (1974), Olivia’s autobiographical book The Call of Isis (1975), their formation of the Fellowship of Isis in 1976 and Olivia’s permanent return to Ireland.

Robinson attracted a growing band of followers through the colourful blend of rituals, liturgy, images and words she evolved in her mediation with the universal goddess. At Huntington Castle she and Lawrence built a temple in the dungeon with 12 shrines and five chapels, each dedicated to a particular goddess.

Over 40 or so years, she wrote a succession of booklets, illustrated by her drawings as the fellowship became multireligious, multicultural and multinational. In 1993, her travels included her representation of the fellowship at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, where she breakfasted with the Dali Lama.

She continued to write, paint, discuss, give presentations and meditations, travelling indefatigably until recently, when a fall in the castle grounds curtailed her activities. She died peacefully in Wexford, one of the last living links with the esoteric mysticism of AE and Yeats.
 
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