As it gets on towards my birthday, one of the more evil stars, Sirius, comes to dominate the sky. This period was classically observed as the “Dog Days,” when seas boiled and wine soured, when dogs ran rabid and the rains faded, and brothers plotted evil against one another.

I always find it interesting that historical violence and slaughter seem to upswing in this steaming season. Easily come to mind the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Watts Riots; and of course, the notable oeuvre of Chuck Manson.

I’m not going to recite those events—I’m taking it for granted that you know them well enough. The Manson Murders have become a darkly engraved chapter in our modern book of grim fairy tales, perhaps to be titled “The Strangers that Arrive in the Night.” Manson wasn’t the first mad prophet with a band of devoted killers, but he put his thumbprint on the type. His mixture of pulp fiction devices (a twittery satanic eschatology, teenie-boppers-as-programmed-killers, murder as personal expression) with proto-MTV sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll memes secured his all-too everlasting fame. He put the gore in guru.

That would have been true even if he hadn’t been turned into a cottage industry. Manson has certainly paid for Vincent Bugliosi to do a few house upgrades—assuring the latter an eternal career of commentary, if nothing else—and the various gonzo-journalist books and videos on the corpse of this bitter few weeks of terror keeps on giving. Forty years later, there is still a kick.

Manson has transitted from mere butchery into the conspiracy realm. Writers of various levels of credibility (including, shamefully, Bugliosi) have always hinted up an ever-convoluted storyline. Manson followers (and murders) in Europe? A connection to the Ordo Templi Orientis? An inspiration to Son of Sam? (A name which almost seems an anagram of ‘Of Manson.’) A drug and snuff ring connected to the highest level of Hollywood rollers?

Not widely discussed today, various Weather Underground-types then congratulated Manson for his “activism.” Bugliosi makes some Rockefeller Republican noises about the mishap of a young life twisted in prison, even while he converts his cash cow into a celebrity, a deviant rewarded for his own wrongdoing, made The Old Man on the Mountain in our whispered fright tales and waking suburban nightmares.

Group killers today are rated by their relevance to the Manson model. He’s always good for another toss on cable, yet another reiteration of the basic facts, linked up with new footage of old bloodstains. Nobody’s had their say until the victims are again numbered, until the conspiracies are hinted at, until Manson has been rated on The Most Evil list. There are the imago-affiliated musicians, artists, fan clubs, t-shirts. It is an industry.

The personalities reel in and out of the essential story: Sharon Tate, the Famous Movie Actress—Sleeping Beauty; Roman Polanski, the Lost Prince and later crooner of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” The Beached Boy who had to move out of his digs to shake the Family, later taken by the sea. Susan Atkins the Vampira. Charlie the Dark Horned God. Handy Bobby Beausoleil, the cute-faced acid-rock Cupid, trying to sew Gary Hinman’s ear back on with dental floss, later building synthesizers in his prison cell. The Rich and Beautiful, slaughtered for being rich and beautiful. The LaBiancas, slaughtered for being white (in Manson's race-war scheme)but vaguely ethnic, being too comfortable, too middle-class…

Even the places now have personalities. The Cielo Drive palace of movie star hijinx. The dirty ranch of lumpen-proletarian sexual excess. The Hideout (where else?) in Death Valley, where Manson said was the Bottomless Pit of Tehom, so near Wingate Pass where explorer F Bruce Russell long ago vanished, claiming he had found an entrance to a secret city of giants…

Manson has a staying power that other killers lack. He simply has more material—more opportunities for merchandising. Jack the Ripper lacked scope. Lizzie Borden was too hazy. Charles Whitman didn’t have a backstory. Ted Bundy didn’t have devoted followers. David Berkowitz—well, he was just paunchy, with a uni-brow.

Manson reeks of robot killers, ritual slayings, infernal pansexual pleasures, occult world revolution, a trickster figure that is forever beating the system. Like Loki, he promises you his head but not his neck—he can never exactly be executed. Deep in the childlike back of our brains we know someday he will escape, be free, to bring his mad world down over our mad world. He is his own Apocalypse.

Other killers are judged by Manson. Every time teens stalk their schools with pistols and pipe bombs, we remember Manson prophesying that our children—now his children—would come at us with knives. We turn to the model whenever a group of sullen-faced Goths kill and drink the blood of their lonely peers. Did not Susan Atkins don the red tights of Vampira?

I can see a straight, if dotted, line from Manson to 9/11. Once more into the breech: another crank seer, killing the unknown and uninvolved victims grandiosely, ecking a reptilian eschatology out of white noise. Bin Laden uses the Koran, but Manson is a Beatles fan: the message is the same. The Killer then seeks his own level with a rathole in the desert.

Manson’s dry run of the Apocalypse made bin Laden possible: he is the sleep of reason that let the monsters in. He prepared the killing fields in our minds, sowed the slouching shape of things to come, put the shadows on the beachhead of our darkest expectations.

I was too little to know Manson firsthand. But television fills in the valleys of our lives, and levels its peaks. We knew Manson via Steve Railsback, in a performance so genuine you could call it theft of personality. Then from virtual to actual, as Manson was given his irregular televised soapbox; every Geraldo wanted to put his stamp on him, put him on the collection of think-pieces and probative work. Manson became like The David—every great sculptor has his own take. You want your turn on that lovely subject.

Manson filled our childhoods with fear. He became The Bomb personified. He was the giggling loony, the Killer on the Road, the scarecrow, the unguided missile. We painted him blacker than he was, and he responded to our attentions. He became patron of murderers and role model—a standard to be achieved and exceeded.

He is Johnny Smoke—emptier of saddles under the starlight, the Terror of the Far West. In the Anti-Californian rants of my Midwestern yokel neighbors, he was an important icon of What was Wrong with California. He may have been born in the Midwest, you see: but he was cast-out. Only in California, in those witchy starved and blasted lands, in the abomination of desolation, could he reach his full potential.

He was born in West Virginia as No-Name Maddox. Thus at birth he was ex’d out of our world. It is appropriate that the Prophet of Nihilism should have no name. Mad as an Ox. He confirmed our fears of hillbilly deviance, served as architecture for our cannibal fantasies of the empty places. If you thought Spider Baby was where The Hills Have Eyes and House of 1000 Corpses came from, I alert you to skip the cinema and turn on the news. Manson made us afraid of our neighbors and afraid of the figures—the killers—on the road. Now we double-lock the doors and think if we get mugged, there is something more of a social exchange about that, as long as we don’t end up as barbeque.

I read Helter Skelter at nineteen. In “The Eeriness of ‘84”, I described my hackles rising at 3AM, as I realized I was reading on “creepy-crawling”—the selection of victims—in a lit window-box, streetside. Ironically, I had just watched the breakout Sharon Tate flick—a satire on the mores of So Cal—rerun on the midnight movie. I locked the doors and went to bed, sleeplessly.

Manson still has the power to scare. It is forty years later—you knew this anniversary was coming up, the one after Woodstock—and we still look over our shoulders. He still retrieves our childhood dread. He is the great bogeyman of our generation. He admired Hitler; Hitler would have been proud—that sort of beast was so to his taste.

But Manson is not frightening now of himself; he is a dried-up little infirm old man. It is his message that terrifies; it is the knowledge that he can hardly be the last of this hardy new breed, that he represents something perhaps new in the human experience, the career killer, the celebrity homicide.

When he finally says goodnight, there will be a media sharkfeed. Perhaps Los Angeles will have to pay for yet another celebrity memorial. He will have died a famous and influential man, whose songs are sometimes still played and recorded, whose words have been printed and televised. He occupies his negative space in our culture as a philosopher. And you have paid for that life, with blood and treasure. He is the ultimate “welfare cheat.”

Manson, when born out on a shield, will be rewarded for being a werewolf. We would be nothing without our beast-men, who remind us, at least, of what we should never be.