There’s going to be a bit of a UFOlogical flavour to some of my 2015 presentations so I thought I’d present a taste of my take on the subject from my Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus.
In my opinion there are two indispensable works on UFOlogy that establish the necessary perspective. In Passport to Magonia, Jacques Vallee suggested that there seems to be one phenomenon which has been interacting with the human race from our earliest days. It takes on different forms in various cultures.
Firstly, faerie lore yields suggestive comparisons with abduction cases. The classic tales tell of dome-shaped mounds with open lighted entrances. Once lured within them, time/space becomes dangerously relative. After partying it up with the Little People, and maybe even having sex with one of them, it would become apparent on leaving that fifty years might have elapsed.
During the Christian Middle Ages, the most far-out possibilities of experience would be a visitation from Jesus and the BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) or an encounter with an angel or demon. And such tales are by no means a thing of the distant past. Vallee studied modern accounts of apparitions of the BVM, most notably the 1917 Fatima event. I don’t think anyone could really examine that episode with an open mind and fail to feel that something genuinely very strange had occurred. A group of Portuguese children claimed to have seen and talked to the BVM. She initially appeared in a globe of light, telling them she would return at monthly intervals, prophesying a spectacular culmination in October. They kept their appointments, accompanied by increasingly large groups of people. Only the children could see her. They were clearly in some kind of trance state. Some minor, but odd, external manifestations would weirdly validate their stories. Branches of a tree where the Mary figure was supposed to be hovering bent as if supporting weight, and so on. The climax saw a huge crowd, approaching a hundred thousand in size, gather for the last appointment. They witnessed a seemingly miraculous heavenly phenomenon. It was as if the sun fell from the sky and plummeted, revolving, with a spectrum of colours towards the earth. Whatever it was that was happening, it was witnessed miles away. Many converted to Catholicism on the spot. It seemed that the woman clothed with the sun from the Book of Revelation was tangibly present.
At the very least, a group of small children had been able to assemble a Biblical multitude with exact timing, to witness a spectacular and obviously rare atmospheric event that if it had happened half a century later may well have inspired UFOlogical speculation. That in itself is extremely odd. Looking at other famous BVM cases like Lourdes, it’s interesting that the child visionaries at first don’t necessarily identify their “contact” as Mary. The response of adults that it obviously must be, conditions what follows. What the being looks like often changes to more fully conform to the archetypal Catholic visuals. Once this is established, messages of the “I am the Immaculate Conception” variety follow.
The earlier French case of La Salette in 1846 is another good example of fruitfully comparing the UFOlogical and Catholic realities. Two children saw a globe of light hovering above fields. It opened, disgorging a smaller but brighter light that came down and spoke to them. The Catholic children assumed it must be Our Lady. Prophecies were spoken concerning disease and pestilence which appeared to be validated within a decade. If this had happened in the America of the early nineteen-fifties it seems likely that the light would take on the form of the likes of the legendary Aura Rhanes, the female beach-babe flying saucer commander who wrecked the marriage of contactee Truman Bethuram. It has rightly been intuited that Crowley’s devotion to Nuit is akin to Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary. Nuit is Our Lady of Space and could be considered to be present in the UFOlogicaly aspected BVM manifestations.
The modern UFO era has mutated the forms and beliefs of an archetypal mythology to always be just ahead of the current science. In the fifties “aliens” talked of coming from Mars and Venus. Once it was established that those planets couldn’t support life, the messages changed. The phenomenon seems to be interactive. We are intimately involved with it. Vallee came to feel that UFOs and their apparent occupants are not necessarily extraterrestrial.
