ETs vs. Faeries: 2b What Do UFOs/ETs Mean?

Carl Jung the psychologist saw in flying saucers a sky-borne mandala; that is, an archetypal image of the integrated Self, meaning unity, wholeness of the psyche. Seen by some as carrying a message to Earthlings from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, to Jung, whatever in reality flying saucers might be, in human terms they were a projection from the human collective unconscious to the conscious ego-self, which in modern times, especially, is closed-off from the unconscious and so perhaps can only be reached by an illusion, vision, of a symbolic physical phenomenon, or perhaps even an actual materialization of some sort, so that it appears to the ego-self to be 'real', and so, hard to dismiss-- seeing is believing.

Jung had started collecting newspaper clippings of UFO sightings as early as 1946. He thought he might be on to the formation of a modern myth in the mass mind. But in 1951 he admitted to a friend that he couldn't determine whether UFOs were were physical or hallucinatory, or perhaps both of these at once. But his psychological theories led him to see them as to some degree, at least, an expression of the mass mind, whether they were real objects or not. And in this sense, they indicated a major shift in the collective unconscious of mankind, due to world-historical trauma from the horrific scale, destruction, and unprecedented atrocities of World War II and the ensuing threat of communist takeover or nuclear annihilation in the Cold War era. He also believed that we were experiencing the beginnings of a cosmic-astrological shift, due to the precession of the Earth's tilted axis, from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, in which a basic transformation of the human psyche was at hand, the transition causing great unconscious trauma which must express itself somehow to the conscious self. To me, the first theory seems fairly plausible, but astrology never made any sense to me. And since all the books I've read recently about UFOs/ETs generally concur in there not being enough hard evidence to support any one theory of the real nature of UFOs, making it possible to doubt that they are extraterrestrial craft, or physical objects as we understand them according to current knowledge of physics, it's then possible to see them, in accord with Jung, as psychic or 'paraphysical' manifestations. If so, what might be the meaning of them? Well, here a Pandora's Box of mythic speculation is opened, because what has been seen isn't just frisbee-shaped craft, but colored glowing plasma balls, huge dark triangular craft, cylinders, and strange crew-members appearing not only as the iconic ET, but as attractive blond 'Nordics', reptilians, insectoids, hairy trolls, robots, and people claim to be channeling beings from other planets or dimensions, or to have been taken aboard the craft and been told many things. It's a wild confusion.

Since I've read all these (eight of them?) UFO/ET books to get inspiration for advancing the Shaggy Mythos, I'll just be like Jung and present what they mean to ME, mythically, based on what UFOs/ETs seem to mean in the mass human psyche. And as I have said, I see them as a 'Sky-people' phenomenon, and so, wrong, counterproductive, despite their gradual replacement of warnings of nuclear holocaust by warnings of ecocatastrophe in recenter decades (according to John Mack, especially, in Passport to the Cosmos). I suppose that many 2012-related warnings have been reported, but I haven't read of them.

So, what is the mythic meaning of UFOs/ETs, basically? This I will answer in the next installment.

A Bit of Myth

The Drygand is a shape-shifter of all life-kinds, appearing betimes even as a Whirlwind of life-kinds.

The Wolken is unshaped, but all shapes do form in its cloudy shiftings, and so it is a Well of all life-forms from which the Drygand draws for his bodying (embodiment) as the Edhlifrith Drang for Heolor and Stadhol (ecological force for balance and stability) in the Edhli and thus in the Wolken.

Drygand= the Pan-chimaera.
Wolken= the Cloud-mind of the Edhli, World-Soul.
Edhli= the Biosphere.

ETs vs. Faeries: 2a New Age vs. Eco-pagan

My argument is that mythically, from an ecological standpoint, aliens are bad and wights are good. But before I get to that, I want to show here that the difference between them already lies in the difference between New Age and Pagan, which I see basically as Sky People versus Earth People. I know I am setting up a dichotomy here where the reality is more of a gradation, but I think it is still a valid distinction if not taken too far, and certainly explanatorily useful. I have seen New Age and Neopagan as the two wings in a single alternative spiritual movement, but gradually my sense has become that since they are so intermixed, their combined difference to Eco-paganism is really more important. And I have also grown disenchanted with most of what seems to be characteristically Pagan, mainly from an ecological standpoint. So is 'pagan' no longer a useful indicator? Well, since so much that seems pagan no longer seems ecological, even if it is thought to be so, I'd just prefer to jettison the term.. Terms-- terms-- terms-- they're seldom ideally descriptive. 'Deep Ecology', in a sense, is better for me now than Pagan, but like it, most of what is associated with it I find dubious. Well, onward from semantics to... semantics...

The mythic history of the peaceful, wonderful matriarchies of Old Europe under the aegis of the Great Mother Goddess being overrun by hordes of murderous enslaving patriarchal Indo-European horsemen from the East with their pantheon of mostly-male gods under a Sky Father-- it plays quite well for some. But I don't like to gender-dichotomize everything, with female equals good and male equals bad, or Goddess-is-everything and god just a harmless, doomed-but-replaceable little fertility figure with the unfortunately necessary penis. And then, matriarchy never seems to have actually existed, however good an idea it might be. But gradually, the sky/earth dichotomy came to seem fundamental to me, apart from the genderization, which is arbitrary and of dubious worth-- Mother Earth -- does this still have positive resonance for many people? If not, then forget it. However, I must admit that in the Shaggy Mythos, the female does not appear, which seems to be largely because I am not female, and maleness signifies more for me than femaleness does, and male-figures-only seems at once generic without being sexless abstraction and if you don't like this, don't call me bad names, just genderize as you please. We're variable, aren't we? And if it isn't authentic to me, it's just more meaningless uncontroversial product for the masses; so, inasmuch as the Mythos works for you, make of it something authentic to you. The time we live in is terrifically conflicted about how to deal with male vis a vis female-- we have traditional sexism and gender-blindness overlaid insanely with no resolution in sight.

But the Sky versus Earth orientations as an ecological critique has great power. And I resist the 'lumper' urge to balance/harmonize the two-- ecologically, Sky hardly signifies-- it's on the lands and in the waters that life reigns. And strong cultural sky-orientation is in effect egregiously anti-ecological. Which I will try to show you in the next piece.

Eco-yoga

Yoga is a Sanscrit word meaning 'yoking'. I keep thinking of that word 'yoke': "We need a practice to yoke the chaotic human to the Way of Edhli-frith (Ecology)." In Eormanz, 'yoga' is 'yokoth'. Eco-yoga is Edhlifrith-yokoth. Eco-yoga would be a means to fit the human psyche (ferth) to the Edhli (Biosphere), a total form of training (drawning) similar to what Hindu and Buddhist yogas are meant to do, but with a completely different aim: to produce the functional Edhli-self through a process of Ecological-Self-Realization (Edhli-self Santhning). What that might be and how it might be reached are interesting questions, which I am unaware that anyone has answered yet.

Seekers for such self-realization could be called Eco-nauts (Edhlimind Kannadhers (explorers). They would be like the early forest sages (Wald-wisers) who practiced the way of yoga in the midst of Nature, but seeking the Ecological God Within, so as to "Be as God" (i.e., ecological). Eco-yoga would re-engineer the psyche, yoking the deep mind to the real, biological world (Santh-- reality, truth), an opposite result, in fact, to the aim of traditional yoga. I'm beginning to think that humans can't really be "one with Nature," though. We are different to other animals, we don't fit. Maybe it is a mistake, trying to commune with them as persons like ourselves, and to be true animals ourselves. But part of any eco-yogic quest to yoke ourselves to Nature would be to find a niche in the Ecosphere where we could fit, as culture-bearing animals with a rather intractable, unruly nature that is a threat to the Biosphere-- if that is possible in humans no longer shaped-to-fit by natural selection . Let's see if it is.

the Drygand as Neo-God

The Drygand is "Life fighting for All Life, All Life fighting for Life!"

The Drygand is a numinous weirdness expressing the vast totality of Life (biological). The Drygand, the ultimate Chimaera, is a more adequate and appropriate expression for our time, the Age of Ecology, of the primordial God of all Nature, which was seen as the Snake, Naga (man-snake), and Dragon. And the Wolken, from which he derives, is the pantheist Godhead.

The Primordial Drygand

The Snake is the minimalist animal, of the simplest form.

The chimaerical Drygand is the maximalist animal, drawing on the forms of all living things.

Snake and Drygand are the two extremes that bracket the whole of Life between them. And like brackets, one is not found without the other.

The Snake, Were-snake (Naga), and Dragon (a snakish chimaera), represent a primordial God found in archaeological evidence and mythology from around the world. This God preceded the humanist gods of advanced civilizations which had conquered Nature and distanced themselves so far from it that the gods, apart from a few minor Nature-gods, were in the form of the human masters of antinatural civilization. This can be seen in the Olympian gods of ancient Greece, who came to preside over the most advanced civilizational humanism yet seen. These advanced civilizations found reassurance in myths of heroes slaying chimaerical monsters. In the case of ancient Greece, these monsters may represent the pre-Olympian Titans and even more archaic gods, who may not have been seen as monsters by their devotees, but as a numinous weirdness expressing the vast totality of Life. The Drygand, the ultimate Chimaera, is just a more adequate expression for our time of this primordial Godhood of all Nature.

ETs vs. Faeries: 1 Introduction

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that immersing myself in the UFO/ET mythos might trigger new ideas for the Shaggy Mythos. Over the last couple years I've had the urge and intent to bring the Mythos from its 'once upon a time' orientation into engagement with the present and future-- the future-primitive thing. It was about time for this, the next step to take, but how?

Well, I've been working on it, but it's problematic. I've read and taken notes on a great many books that are more contemporarily oriented and it's made me more sophisticated, but though it all puts what I'm doing into a deeper, wider cultural context, it doesn't inspire departures for the Mythos like mythic-folkloric material has-- it isn't directly usable, just serves as background information, I complain to myself-- but really, it does work indirectly, and some of it is pretty mythic-folkloric in its ideology. Thus the idea of investigating the UFO/ET mythos.

I hadn't read anything on 'space aliens' for two decades, when I read books by Whitley Strieber and Budd Hopkins on abductions. They were disturbing but I had my doubts-- a sci-fi horror-fiction writer? and a New York sculptor? Besides, a lot of the 'abductees' seemed to be pathetic cases who might have psychiatric reasons for what they claimed to be experiencing. And then there was the hypnosis, which became dubious as a means of retrieving objective memories after the 80s wave of child-abuse hysteria. Before that, I had read John Keel's Mothman Prophecies, which read like fiction instead of journalism.

Beyond my skepticism, I just don't like the idea of 'aliens from outer space' interfering with our planet-- don't we have enough on our plate without that? It detracts from our need to keep our attention on what we're doing to the Biosphere and mobilizing ourselves to rescue it. And counting on 'space brothers' to save the day is demotivating.

But I told myself," Well, I'll read for the mythic-folkloric stuff and skim the rest". But as I started reading I got sucked into the mystery of what UFO/ETs really are. I've gone through a half-dozen high-end books so far (except for one) that present a great deal of evidence and analysis before coming to the conclusion that UFOs, at least, are real, not just delusions or misperceptions, but the authors admit they don't know what they are, though they doubt they're extraterrestrial. I admit I have no idea, either. But everyone loves a mystery, even an insoluble one.

Well, I put in a lot of time, and effort taking notes, and ended up concluding the same as when I was a young man--"I can't be convinced merely by reading books". And since I have not had convincing personal experiences of UFO/ETs or of parapsychological phenomena-- and all the authors believe that the phenomena require an openness to parapsychological explanations if we are to go further in solving this mystery, well, it was intriguing reading, but only the mythic, psychological, and cultural critiques are likely to be of much use.

So I've been racking my brains trying to sort out all that material into discrete topics, which hasn't been easy because it all hangs together, as things do in reality, and we falsify that when we pick it apart to make a rational structure. But I've got it down to a few basic takes out of which discrete pieces can be written-- along the lines the title of this one suggests-- essentially, New Age vs. Pagan mentalities, and the symbolic meanings of UFO/ETs, and the process of Mazeway Resynthesis that seems very applicable to this whole matter. So, I will see what I can do to work these up into pithy pieces in the next few weeks.