The Modern Fairy Faith -fad or deceptive reality
Noah's Dove
The Modern Fairy Faith -fad or deceptive reality
In our times there is a revival of sorts going on. This revival
is the post modern fairy faith. There are signs of it in several
feature films*, festivals, art work, books, Fairy shops and
numerous web sites, if you are observant you should spot some
indications of it in the malls of America and other English countries.
..there are all kinds of
fairy things for sale: cards, calandars, fairy ornaments, fairy
costumes, fairy statues for gardens etc. This last June
the Third Fairy Congress was held in the Cascade Mountains of
Washinton state. Some of the speakers were from the Findhorn New
Age community of Scotland. Workshops included talks on how to contact
nature spirits (fairies) for guidance and help. Some casual observers
who
have noticed this growing interest in the fey or fairies
consider it a fad. Is it
just an innocent fad as some say or
is there a reality and a darker side to the world of fairie?
The following news clip, quotes from articles and information web links
may answer this question.
*Films with fairy theme or fairy encounters
Fairy Tale a True Story
Photography Fairies
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Legend
Willow
Ladybrinth
A faerie affair
Elusive folk and their followers to alight in Sedona for all-day
festival
Michael Kiefer
The Arizona Republic
May. 6, 2003 12:00 AM
Amy Ford sees fairies.
Some are as small as houseflies, others 18 feet tall. They're pixielike
or feminine, sometimes androgynous, and once, she claims, she woke up
in the woods near Cornville to find herself held captive.
"It was just like Gulliver's Travels," she says. "The fairies had tied
me down with dried grass," while one laughed right in her face.
"It scared the crap out of me."
Ford claims she's seen fairies all her life, and though she won't say
exactly how long that is, it looks to be 30-some years. She's a
musician and astrologer from Scottsdale, short and buxom with long,
dark hair and darker eyes. And though she seems reasonably sane, she
acknowledges, "I'm wired way different."
Ford is part of a growing subculture of fairy folk, not all of whom
claim to see fairies - though that number is bigger than you might
expect. The concept has allure for children, folklorists and
all-purpose whimsical folk, as well. There is fairy music, much of it
borrowing Celtic sounds and rhythms; there are T-shirts with fairy
pictures that sell big at teenage boutiques, and fairy cards and
posters in New Age bookstores. And a British artist named Brian Froud
has sold more than 8 million large-format books of paintings of
fairies, which he, like most fairy folk, spell the old-fashioned way:
"faeries."
"Faeryland is like the sea," Froud says. "It's like the tide, and
sometimes the tide is out a long way and Faeryland is very difficult to
reach. And sometimes the tide is in. And it does seem to me that the
tide was out for some years, but it's really come in now."
That tide has come in far enough that promoters expect more than 4,000
people to attend an all-day Faerieworlds Festival on Saturday at Sedona
Cultural Park. The festival will include music, multimedia shows, live
interactive performances and, especially, Froud and his artwork.
The expected attendees will be true believers like Ford, but also
Renaissance Faire fans, families with young children, masqueraders, New
Age dabblers, Goth kids who have "discovered Faery," as one promoter
put it, and even "folks factioning out of the old Grateful Dead days
who don't have anywhere to go."
Fairies originated in Celtic folklore, and, more often than not, they
were frightening, otherworldly forest beings that were blamed for
unexplainable events, such as ill children, people turned mad and dark
thoughts.
"They're about expression of things in everyday life that we can't
express openly," says Ari Berk, a professor of folklore at Central
Michigan University. "Fairies have always spoken to the human desire to
have some kind of conversation with the environment around them."
They've populated art and literature for centuries, not just as fairy
tales, but also in Shakespeare and in the poetry of William Butler
Yeats. More recently, they appear in the Lord of the Rings films, as
the elves.
Although children are naturally drawn to fairy tales, the current pop
phenomenon is not really about children. Froud's art, for example, is
not only well researched but very adult.
"Fairies have been relegated to the nursery for far too long," Froud
says. "That's a 20th-century point of view really. Fairies have always
been dangerous creatures. That's why they had to be placated. That's
why little gifts were left out at night, little saucers of milk, or,
otherwise, your cattle died, or, indeed, your children were stolen or
people died. The word 'stroke' comes from 'elf stroke' because a fairy
had touched you. So fairies have always been dangerous. And one way
that people have tried to make them safer is to turn them into fairy
stories, something that was safe, and say, 'Oh it's just for children,
isn't it?' "
Froud, 56, lives in Dartmoor, England, an area he says is slightly wild
and desolate, and whose landscape influenced his palette.
"When I looked at trees and rocks and hills when I moved to the
country, I wondered what the inside of them looked like," Froud says.
"And as I was wondering that, then I started painting fairies, and they
were indeed at the souls of trees and landscapes."
He was inspired by illustrations of fairy tales and did a lot of
research with his collaborator, Alan Lee, for his first book, Faeries,
which they published in 1978. It has sold more than 5 million copies,
including more than 100,000 since last October, when a 25th-anniversary
edition was published.
Froud followed up with several other titles, including Good Faeries/Bad
Faeries, whose paintings sometimes verge on the erotic, with lithesome
near nudes, a merging of several tingling and anticipatory fantasies,
and decidedly not for children. His art was the inspiration for the Jim
Henson films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, and Froud's wife, Wendy,
was one of the puppetmakers who designed Yoda for the Star Wars films.
Since he began painting fairies, Froud says they now present themselves
to him as, he believes, they present themselves to others. The
paintings, he says, are like maps that allow people to safely go on
their fairy journey, as he puts it.
"A lot of people go on the journey and don't return because they lapse
into madness," he says.
Saturday's festival in Sedona promises plenty of controlled madness.
"Right now, everything's so heavy and intense on the planet that I
think people need a fantasy to go to where they feel like they have
power, where they feel they have something to go to," says Emilio
Miller-Lopez, one of the festival's organizers. "What our events offer
people is a chance to participate. Everybody's part of the show."
Miller-Lopez is a spritely fellow of 28 with a shaggy gnome's beard and
a shock of hair long enough to evoke memories of the early 1970s. His
wife, Kelly, 27, has cascading Maid Marian locks and glittery makeup.
Both dress elfin, in earth tones and billowing sleeves. They draw
stares even in Sedona.
The couple perform in Woodland, a band with Celtic-music roots and a
rich New Age sound, which will play at the festival. Kelly says she has
seen fairies since she was a child, and she first latched onto Brian
Froud's work when she saw The Dark Crystal and then bought the Faeries
books, which she eventually showed to her husband. Together, they
sought out Froud's agent, Robert Gould, who is also a fantasy artist,
well known as the illustrator for Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone
novels.
Working with Gould's company, Imaginosis, they staged multimedia fairy
shows in Prescott, Santa Fe and Los Angeles. Fairy fans turned out in
droves.
"It was incredible," Gould says. "People were standing in line for an
hour. Everyone was in costume. Families came. It was pretty wild."
The Santa Fe show took place on Halloween, and the upcoming Sedona
festival is just after May Day, which, as Kelly Miller-Lopez explains,
are those times of the year when the veil is thinnest between the real
world and the fairy world and human-fairy encounters are more likely.
Gould would like to take the show on the road and maybe develop it into
a Cirque du Soleil-style of interactive performance.
As for the people who claim to see fairies, even Froud is not sure how
many really do.
"It took me a long time to actually work that out," he says. People
constantly ask him how they can see them, too.
"You don't use your eyes," he answers. "You see a fairy through your
heart."
Fairies have been attributed many origins, from natural causes to the
darkest element.
They are the creatures of the wild, primitive and untouched realm of
fantaisy that exists beside each society.
Fallen angels. In the lore of Scandinavia, Scotland, and Ireland, when
God cast out the arrogant angels from heaven, they became the evil
spirits that plague mankind, tormenting us and inflicting us with harm.
The ones who fell into hell and into caves and abysses became devils
and death-maidens. However, those who fell onto the earth became
goblins, imps, dwarfs, thumblings, alps, noon-and-evening-ghosts, and
will-o'-the-wisps. Those who fell into the forests became the
wood-spirits who live there: the hey-men, the wild-men, the forest-men,
the wild-women, and the forest-women. Finally, those who fell into the
water became water spirits: water-men, mermaids, and merwomen. These
angels were condemned to remain where they were, becoming the faeries
of seas and rivers, the earth, and the air.
Nature spirits : in most pagan religions, supernatural forces are
associated with animals, the five elements and the Goddess. Sometimes
the fairies were called Goddesses themselves. In several folk ballads
the Fairy Queen is adressed as 'Queen of Heaven.' Welsh fairies were
known as 'the Mother's Blessing.' Breton peasants called the fairies
Godmothers.
Are fallen angels now appearing also as aliens, new age spirit guides,
pagan gods, spirits of shamans, Marian apparations, etc?
The following is from the book "The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries'
published in 1911/ and a quote form a web site on theories of fairy
origins.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/ffcc/
Taking Evidence (Section I, Chapter II, part 2)
III. IN SCOTLAND
Introduction by ALEXANDER CARMICHAEL, Hon. LL.D. of the University of
Edinburgh; author of Carmina Gadelica.
The belief in fairies was once common throughout Scotland -- Highland
and Lowland. It is now much less prevalent even in the Highlands and
Islands, where such beliefs linger longer than they do in the Lowlands.
But it still lives among the old people, and is privately entertained
here and there even among younger people; and some who hold the belief
declare that they themselves have seen fairies.
Various theories have been advanced as to the origin of
[85]
fairies and as to the belief in them. The most concrete form in which
the belief has been urged has been by the Rev. Robert Kirk, minister of
Aberfoyle, in Perthshire. (1) Another theory of the origin of fairies I
took down in the island of Miunghlaidh (Minglay); and, though I have
given it in Carmina Gadelica, it is sufficiently interesting to be
quoted here. During October 1871, Roderick Macneill, known as 'Ruaraidh
mac Dhomhuil, then ninety-two years of age, told it in Gaelic to the
late J. F. Campbell of Islay and the writer, when they were
storm-stayed in the precipitous island of Miunghlaidh, Barra :--
'The Proud Angel fomented a rebellion among the angels of heaven,
where he had been a leading light. He declared that he would go and
found a kingdom for himself. When going out at the door of heaven the
Proud Angel brought prickly lightning and biting lightning out of the
doorstep with his heels. Many angels followed him -- so many that at
last the Son called out, "Father! Father! the city is being emptied!"
whereupon the Father ordered that the gates of heaven and the gates of
hell should be closed. This was instantly done. And those who were in
were in, and those who were out were out; while the hosts who had left
heaven and had not reached hell flew into the holes of the earth, like
the stormy petrels. These are the Fairy Folk -- ever since doomed to
live under the ground, and only allowed to emerge where and when the
King permits. They are never allowed abroad on Thursday, that being
Columba's Day; nor on Friday, that being the Son's Day; nor on
Saturday, that being Mary's Day; nor on Sunday, that being the Lord's
Day.
God be between me and every fairy,
Every ill wish and every druidry;
To-day is Thursday on sea and land,
I trust in the King that they do not hear me.
(1) It was the belief of the Rev. Robert Kirk, as expressed by him in
his Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies, that the fairy
tribes are a distinct order of created beings possessing human-like
intelligence and supernormal powers, who live and move about in this
world invisible to all save men and women of the second-sight (see this
study, pp. 89, 91 n).
[86]
On certain nights when their bruthain (bowers) are open and their lamps
are lit, and the song and the dance are moving merrily, the fairies may
be heard singing lightheartedly : -
Not of the seed of Adam are we,
Nor is Abraham our father;
But of the seed of the Proud Angel,
Driven forth from Heaven.'
Theories of Fairy Origins http://home.att.net/~waeshael/origins.htm
Many of the folk theories of the fairy origins have a theological
Christian background, and that highlighted by Professor Christiansen is
the one common to Ireland and the Scottish Highlands - the fairies are
fallen angels. A vivid and detailed account of this is given by
Alexander Carmichael in Carmina Gadelica and repeated in The Fairy
Faith in Celtic Countries.1 According to this some of the angels
seduced by Satan were not prominent in his councils, but might rather
be counted his dupes. When Michael hurled the hosts of Satan out of
Heaven they were followed by an almost endless stream of these
comparatively innocent victims of his unholy eloquence. The Shining
Host of Heaven was thinning rapidly, and the Son, seeing the danger,
cried out: 'Father, Father, the City is being emptied!' God raised his
hand; the gates of Heaven closed, the seduced angels stopped bewildered
and recollected themselves, and those who were already descending
stopped in their tracks, some in the sky, some in the sea, some on
mountains and in woods, some further on their way towards Hell, in
bowels of the earth, and the foremost angels, wholly committed to evil,
in the burning lake. This origin makes the final position of the Sidh
at the Day of Judgement a very perilous one. In Scotland Kirk, the
author of The Secret Commonwealth,2 describes their destiny as
'pendulous' until the Day of Judgement, but according to Christiansen
the general verdict in Ireland is that they are damned souls. He
mentions several Irish anecdotes in which a human is anxiously
questioned by some of the Sidh as to their final destination. The
human, pitying them, asks the question of a Saint, or of the priest
during the elevation of the Host when he cannot lie. Always the answer
is unfavourable, and when this is reported to the Sidh they break out
into terrible lamentations. A similar story is told by J. F. Campbell
of Islay in his Popular Tales of the West Highlands.3 The Scandinavian
assessment of the fairy fate is more charitable, but as Christiansen
points out, their supposed origin is different, and allows more
possibility for hope. There are variants of this legend, but the most
commonly told is of the hidden Children of Eve. After the fall Adam and
Eve settled down to domesticity and were the parents of a large number
of children, so many that Eve was ashamed of them. On day God, walking
through the world, called on Eve and asked her to present her children
to Him. Eve sent half of them to hide and brought out those she thought
most presentable; but God was not deceived. 'Let those who were hidden
from me, ' He said, 'be hidden people.' A different story is that the
Huldre were the offspring of Adam and his first wife, Lilith, about
whom there was much apocryphal information. At any rate in the
Scandinavian beliefs the fairies were half-human in origin and were not
creatures of another order as the angels were, good or bad.
An earlier investigator of fairy beliefs, though still of this century,
was Evans Wentz, from who book, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, I
have already quoted.
In 1908 Evans Wentz, an American of Celtic descent, who had worked for
some years under John Rhys, the Oxford Professor of Celtic Studies, set
out on an exploration of the Celtic area - Ireland, the Highlands of
Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Brittany. He began by
consulting the leading folklore experts of each region, Douglas Hyde in
Ireland, Alexander Carmichael in the Scottish Highlands, John Rhys of
Wales, Henry Jenner of Cornwall, Sophia Morrison of the Isle of Man and
Professor Anatole le Bras of Brittany; then he travelled through all
the regions, for the most part on foot like J. F. Campbell and
Alexander Carmichael, visiting and living in peasant cottages and
collecting material from people of all classes of society. It was no
doubt a help to him in his researches that he was himself a believer in
fairies, so that though he researched as a folklorist he encountered
believers without any trace of scepticism or condescension, and was
therefore given access to experiences and beliefs that would have been
withheld from a more sophisticated investigator. Most of these point,
as do many of Lady Wilde's4 stories, to a strong connection between
fairies and the dead. Christiansen still found traces of this, but
believed that the fairies were the captors and guardians of the dead
rather than the dead themselves. The recently dead are certainly often
described as being among the fairies, but the dead of the ancient
tribes of Ireland are also thought of as The Gentry. John Boglin, for
instance, of Kilmaeean, near Tara, who was about sixty years when he
gave his evidence, reported this of the fairy tribes:
"There is said to be a whole tribe of little red men living in Glen
Odder, between Ringleston and Tara; and in long evenings in June they
have been heard. There are other breeds or castes of fairies; and it
seems to me, when I recall our ancient traditions, that some of these
fairies are of the Fir Bolgs, some of the Tuatha de Danaan, and some of
the Milesians. All of them have been seen round the western slope of
Tara, dressed in ancient Irish costumes. Unlike the little red men,
these fairy races are warlike and given to making invasions."5
Later on in giving his evidence, John Boglin said:
The Fairies are the Dead - 'According to the local belief, fairies are
the spirits of the departed. Tradition says that Hugh O'Neil in the
sixteenth century, after his march to the south, encamped his army on
the Rath or Fort of Ringlestown, to be assisted by the spirits of the
mighty dead who dwelt within this rath. And it is believed that Gerald
Fitzgerald has been seen coming out of the Hill Mollyellen, down in
County Louth, leading his horse and dressed in the old Irish costume,
with heartplate, spear and was outfit.'6
In Scotland, which was next visited by Evans Wentz, the evil fairies,
The Host or Sluagh, were thought of as the dead, and the fairies or
Shee are spirits who were decoyed out of their natural allegiance by
The Proud Angel. In a footnote to one piece of evidence, taken from
Carmina Gadelica, (p. 108), Alexander Carmichael explains the
difference:
Sluagh. 'hosts', the spirit-world. The 'hosts' are the spirits of
mortals who have died...According to one informant, the spirits fly
about in great clouds, up and down the face of the earth like
starlings, and come back to the scenes of their earthly transgressions.
No soul of them is without the clouds of earth, dimming the brightness
of the works of God, nor can any win heaven, till satisfaction is made
for the sins of the earth.7
In Man again, the same belief of 'The Proud Angel' is held, though
there are traces of the fairies as the descendants of the ancient gods,
particularly Mannanon, son of Lir, a belief we also find in Ireland. In
Wales the origin is more vaguely given in such sayings as 'The old folk
thought them a kind of spirit from a spirit world'. In Cornwall the
connection between the pixies and the dead seems to be closer, at least
among the country people. On P. 172, for instance, we have:
Nature of Piskies - 'I always understood the piskies to be little
people. A great deal was said about ghosts in this place. Whether or
not piskies are the same as ghosts, I cannot tell, but I fancy the old
folk thought they were.'8
Abductions Through The Ages
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/abduct050.html
UFO-like abductions and alien sexual encounters are nothing new.
Witches supposedly were taken into the air for meetings with the devil.
People who had been abducted by fairies were left with distinctive body
scars similar to those in UFO abductees. And the incubus and succubus
of medieval times did the exact same things to their abductees as
today's sexually-inclined aliens do to their abductees.
According to fairy lore, fairies create a circular cluster of small
bruises as their mark. The phenomenon is known as "fairy bruising" and
is a sign of either favor or disfavor. The ring of bruises is often
found around the genitals. They did this, according to various 17th
century accounts, by pinching their victims:
If lustie Doll, maide of the Dairie, Chance to be blew-nipt by the
fairie. Marston's Mountebanks Masque
An Encyclopedia of Fairies (Briggs, 1976) gives numerous ancient
examples of fairy abductions. Almost always a special drink was given
to the abductee. This drink, usually described as a thick liquid, was
an essential part of the fairy abduction. Women are abducted much more
often than men and some fairies take special delight, in repeatedly
capturing women for amorous motives. In short, some fairies simply
liked having sexual relations with mortals.
Fairies abduct their victims through paralysis; then they simply carry
(levitate and fly) the abductee away into "fairyland." Fairyland is
always nearby; under normal conditions we can't see or perceive it. The
paralysis induced on the victim is how fairies get their abductee to
enter fairyland. The modem word "stroke" (meaning paralysis) is derived
from the ancient terms "elf-stroke" and "fairy-stroke." Fairies travel
in circular globes of light, sometimes called "will-o-the-wisp."
There are so many different types of fairies that going through them
would be tedious. Some of them, however, are virtually
indistinguishable from what have been described as demons. One
particular type, the "bogie," looks a lot like the traditional bigfoot.
Virtually every society has some lore of these "little people" and
myths of them forcing their sexual attentions on human victims.
Fairy lore has a tradition of thousands of years. Fairies have been
said to be abducting humans, human babies, flying in lighted globes,
striking paralysis and amnesia on their victims, forcing strange drink
on their victims, and having sexual relations with humans for all time.
If we could remove the mythological aspect from fairy abductions and
dress them a little differently, the folklore reports of a thousand
years ago would be virtually indistinguishable from present UFO
abduction reports. The same thing could be said for the reports of
demons.
Garry Bryan
myths. . .I'll try and find the title. . .something about a study of Communion
the Streiber book. . .
Garry
Garry Bryan
: There is a book that relates the fairy myths with that of the modern alien
: the Streiber book. . .
It is by Ed Conroy and is titled "Report on Communion: An independent
investigation of and commentary on Whitley Streibers Communion
MORROW, c1989
the online book catalog doesn't have the universal book code for it.
Garry
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam
© 1989 Ed Conroy
William Morrow & Company, Inc.
http://www.beyondcommunion.com/reportoncommunion.html
http://www.beyondcommunion.com/index.html
HIGH TIMES Interview: Whitley Strieber
WHITLEY STRIEBER & THE VISITORS BY GARBLED UPLINK
Whitley Strieber hasn't spoken to the press since 1989
and it's no wonder. As the prolific author of a number of
best-selling masterpieces of horror fiction, including
The Wolfen and The Hunger, he had no reason to stick his
neck out and announce to the world that he had experienced
a number of encounters with beings so utterly strange and
puzzling that to label them "aliens" would be presumptuous.
He has been subjected to a fair amount of vilification for
being so forthcoming, and he has responded to each and
every accusation directly and rationally.
In response to accusations of fabrication, he voluntarily
submitted to three different polygraph examinations.
It would seem that he is telling the truth. In response to
the suggestion that he suffers from temporal-lobe epilepsy,
he underwent extensive neurological examination.
His brain functions quite normally, albeit graced with a
magnificent sense of wonder, humor and imagination.
Mr. Strieber is not a user of mind-altering substances or
plants, but he graciously agreed to speak with us because,
as he put it, "HIGH TIMES is about changing the paradigm of
reality, from the paradigm based on assumptions and
expectations to a paradigm based on questions and surprises.
His experience with "the Visitors" are detailed in his books
Communion and Transformation (now in paperback), and his latest
work on the subject, Breakthrough, is available in hardcover
from HarperCollins.
HIGH TIMES: Could you briefly summarize Communion,
Transformation and now Breakthrough, for readers who
may not be familiar with that work?
Whitley Strieber: Well, in late December of 1985 I had
what I would describe as a forcible encounter with what
seemed to me to be completely nonhuman beings, and I was
unable to deny in my own human mind that it was a physical
thing that had happened. I began to struggle trying to
understand what had happened. The true nature of the
experience was very difficult to comprehend.
Out of those struggles came more contact and the book
Communion, and then Transformation. Now five years after
the publication of Transformation, I've written Breakthrough,
which is an attempt to make something more sensible of the
experiences, to say something about them that would be
fundamentally more useful than simply describing them.
HT: Communion was profoundly frightening, but in Transformation
there was this sense of a deeper contact beginning to come through.
In Communion I got a keen sense of a purely extraterrestrial source,
but you seem to be shifting away from the extraterrestrial
hypothesis. You also explored the transtemporal hypothesis and you
played with Celtic fairy mythology. Am I wrong about that?
WS: No, that's right. I did.
HT: The fairy encounters in the Celtic belief system resonate
with the experiences you're having. There's a certain whimsical
quality about them that particularly comes through in Breakthrough.
Would you care to elucidate on that?
WS: Well, first of all, this is the most complicated experience a
human being can have, and if you turn your attention toward it, it
quickly becomes the most powerful. It leads you at one time into
everything you are at its most intense, including, among other
things, your sense of humor. It is a big, powerful, extremely
subtle experience. Whatever's out there has got the sense of humor
of a dancing elephant. There's a lightness of touch and an amazing
kind of whimsy connected with the feeling of the giant that's amazing!
HT: In the accounts that you reported in Breakthrough, I very
much got the sense of a circus feel to what they were doing.
WS: Right! That's right. One of the witnesses who's not mentioned
in Breakthrough--simply because the experience wasn't one of the
ones I chose to write about--said it was like a troop of Ukrainian
acrobats, reminding him of the Flying Karamazov Brothers!
When they're in the house, you get a weird combination of emotions
as if you're dealing with a bunch of clowns. But there's also a sort
of sinister side to it. They're a little bit scary. There's the grin
that's a little too artificial, the collar that's turned up that
maybe shouldn't be.
HT: It's like having Cirque du Soleil come to your kid's birthday party!
WS: Right! Speaking of which, there's a figure that turns up in
Saltimbanco who moves around the tent before the show. When I saw
the way it looked, I thought, "So creepy yet so funny. God! Somebody
in this has got the Visitors in their lives. They have to!" A lot of
us do, you know, and we don't really acknowledge it directly. It's the
kind of experience that underlies a lot of artistic production, and I
think that somebody involved in the creation of that must be very
close to them.
HT: One of the consistent themes in your reportage is that what you
bring emotionally to the experience of contact will be what you get
emotionally; they seem to mirror what we deliver. If you harbor
enormous fear, then you will be greeted with something enormously
fearsome; but if you come with enormous joy, you will be greeted with
something joyous. In Breakthrough, Dora's child reported being taken
by a fairy.
WS: When I saw the Visitors with Dora's child, it was a terrifying
experience. What the child perceived was that she'd been visited by
fairies! For me, it was very different. In my estimation, I saw her
being attacked by what looked like some sort of monstrous goblin.
Her perception of it was that she had had a fairy in her room.
HT: So you brought the concerns of an adult to the experience.
WS: What's fascinating is that we're bringing all the costumes and
masks and putting them on these guys.
HT: Yeah! We supply the props, the tent, the costumes.
WS: What I discovered was that I could have fun with this.
Why not have fun? If this is really contact with someone from
another planet, they are really terribly, terribly cool, and we
can have an awful lot of fun with them if we quit taking it quite
so seriously. Go to a UFO convention and you will not find a lot
of humor. But when you are living with the Visitors every day of
your life, and doing it in a way that is comfortable, humor is the
center of the experience. Your fears and so forth can be worked
through with humor.
In a way, I'm reminded of Meister Eckhardt, the 14th-century German
philosopher, sort of the German answer to St. Thomas Aquinas.
Except he had fun! St. Thomas [Aquinas], I don't think, really did.
I mean, let's face it, most of the old church fathers were not fun
guys. You can't think of St. Augustine and St. Thomas doing a
soft-shoe together.
HT: There wasn't a lot of fun in those times.
WS: Not a lot of fun, no. He had a great creation myth,
Meister Eckhardt: His creation myth was that God laughed,
and the laughter of God begot the son and the laughter of
the son begot the Holy Spirit, and the three laughed together
and out of their laughter flowed the whole universe.
And I think that when we get to that level of material,
where laughter is a kind of art, then we're getting real
close to where the Visitors are coming from. In many respects,
that is what my book is about. Breakthrough is a discovery of
a new kind of freedom.
HT: An interesting departure in Breakthrough from your two
previous books--although the segue is quite visible--is the sense
of you as playwright.
WS: It is a visible segue, but I hasten to add: as playwright
and player. I have received over 140,000 letters all about this
stuff over the past few years. About 80 percent of the people
are puzzled and confused about their experiences, but not
necessarily scared. About 20 percent are somewhat scared, and
a small number of those are looking for help because they feel
really beat up. The reason the media promulgates fear about this
is that UFO investigators only get the ones who need help.
The vast majority of people don't need help. They'd like to know
what was going on.
I got a wonderful letter from a psychiatrist, who was lying in
bed one night in her apartment in a large city. She described what
she had seen as obvious aliens. I don't know what she meant by
that, but she said they looked like the face on the cover of
Communion. They came bebopping out of her closet in a conga line,
went around the room and disappeared into the wall of an apartment
building outside. That was just wonderful, and I talked to her
about it. The thing that was so much fun about it was that she
was totally serious. It was a big experience, it was a major
change in her life, but look at the whimsy involved. Of all the
people to do that to--a psychiatrist!
HT: I would imagine the first reaction on the part of the human
would be horror. Only in retrospect would you be able to see the
humor of the conga line. Unless you're equipped with a powerful
sense of humor and a relentless counterphobic impulse, you're going
to respond with shock and horror, at least initially.
WS: She was upset, no question about it. The way it operated was
the closet door flew open, and while she was clinging to the fact
they were real, they went out through the wall! But she still
maintained they were absolutely real.
HT: Well, "real," this is the fundamental question of this
work: What is "real"?
WS: No, it's more the fundamental question of this work.
It's the fundamental question of life! I'm trying to do a
very small thing--create a total revolution. The reason I
wanted to be interviewed for HIGH TIMES is that I think
that HIGH TIMES is about doing this, too. That is, changing
the paradigm of reality, from the paradigm based on assumptions
and expectations--which is what we live by now--to a paradigm
based on questions and surprises.
HT: Thank you! That gets us to a question. I want to reiterate
that you are not known as a recreational drug user. You were
tested extensively in the period around Communion, were you not?
WS: Yes.
HT: There have been accusations of temporal-lobe epilepsy.
I understand you've been tested three times for this.
WS: I've been tested by two different types of
electroencephalographs. One of them involves the placing of
leads up into the sinuses to get a really detailed picture
of what the brain function is like. These epilepsies are
transient events. If the test takes place while there is no
event happening, obviously the brain-wave patterns might show
something approaching normality. My brain-wave patterns are
not just normal, they are absolutely normal. In fact, my brain is
exceptionally stable in its patterns. It's a stable operating
system, a very, very normal brain. Temporal-lobe epileptics are
not supposed to have a sense of humor, and my humor defines
my existence.
HT: It's profoundly expressed in your fiction.
WS: In my fiction and also, I hope, in Breakthrough.
HT: Quite well in Breakthrough!
WS: My Communion experience started, let's face it, with my
little men ramming what looked like a telephone pole up my ass!
It wasn't the most amusing thing that's ever happened to me, but
I got over it. Now it's become more interesting, and more fun.
HT: The accusation of falsehood or derangement does not wash
when compared with not only your own work, but also the work of
Jacques Vallee. There seems to be a hardcore body of people who
are presenting themselves as skeptics who are not really skeptical,
because what they are doing is defending consensus reality as
opposed to genuinely inquiring in a skeptical way. There have
been a lot of accusations. Are there any specific things that you
would like to address that I haven't addressed that have to do
with the kind of questions that have been raised about this work?
WS: Well, let's see. If I could address some of the accusations
against me, the most delightful one is that I have frightened people
by telling them that I have seen their disembodied heads aboard
UFOs! This was used by certain UFO organizations who told people
that you've got to stay away from Whitley Strieber. He's very
dangerous and he tells people these terrifying things that
blow their minds.
What's fascinating about this is, I had a lot of neck trouble,
so I went to an orthopedist and they took X-rays of my neck.
The doctor asked, "When did you have the surgery?" I replied,
"What surgery?" He said, "Look at these two vertebrae fused
together--the result of surgery." I told him I'd never had
surgery on my neck. He said, "You're telling me this is not
a surgical scar." I said, "No, I've never had any surgery
whatsoever." He said, "Well, look, if you want to be treated
by me, I can give you exercises that will make your neck feel
better, but I'm not going to deal with you unless you tell me
what your actual medical history is." I said, "You're saying
to me that this is surgery." He said, "Of course it's surgery."
I repeated that I had never had any surgery and left.
Then I thought, "Well--hell!--what if it's my disembodied
head aboard the UFO!"
HT: You're familiar with the business about Arthur Koestler's
play, Twilight Cafe--the fact that there was a blackout, a power
failure associated with the Visitors in this play. Prior to this
play, there hadn't been any association of power failures with
encounter phenomena. Suddenly, power outages of various sorts
became ubiquitous in the reports.
WS: That's right, I mentioned it in Communion.
HT: How do these things enter into the human experience? I believe
the Greek word is egregora--if enough people believe in something
strongly enough, it will manifest.
WS: Hmmm.... Well, in this case, in this experience, what is
immediately and observably true in that the perceiver is the
architect of structures through which he sees whatever is out there.
In other words, there's like a veil between us and the Visitors,
and what you expect them to look like is what you see through that
veil, because the veil is just vague enough that you have to connect
the dots in your own mind. We create these things. We more or less
construct these things on the other side.
This is why it took me so long to escape from the fear trap, which
is so devastating. It is a psychic rape of the first order--to be told,
but also to convince yourself that this stuff is scary. You can see
it in an entirely different way. The exact same thing! A little girl,
to me, would be in a frightening situation. To her, it's fun.
It just depends on how you look at it.
There has never been any experience where it has been more clear that
the mind is the architect. At the same time, there is some kind of
objective reality behind that architecture, looking in at us literally
through the filter of the way we see it. I've tried to see it in a way
that's objective enough so we can have some darn communication, because
what I'm able to detect of what's back there behind all of this
perceptual static is fabulous! I want to see more of it!
HT: So the whole perception is that there is some sort of performance
going on here.
WS: Yeah! Exactly! I couldn't agree with you more. There is a very
theatrical, performance-oriented quality to the thing. In earlier
drafts of Breakthrough, one of the things I stressed--but which I
pulled away from--was the highly theatrical nature of the experience.
The reason I pulled back from that a little bit is that I didn't want
to distance it from people. There is a tendency to become passive
when you see the word "theater." Not for people who are in the theater,
but for people who are habituated as audience members.
HT: Particularly television-generation people.
WS: Yeah, right. What I want to do is to let people know that they
are the artists, the architects here. There is somebody there, somebody
who is alive on the other side of this. We have created the perceptual
envelope in which we live and they can't come to us except through the
concept of our own expectations. So we have to rise to our best, our
most open, our most questioning levels of expectation. We could really
have some fun with this and see what's really happening at the same time.
A couple of years ago there were so many sightings over Mexico City
that a lot of people in Mexico were left thinking that this had to be
real. If the same amount of sightings happened over New York or
Washington, and if the networks had taken photographs or video,
we would all know that there was somebody out there--that it was real.
What I don't want to see is the government hierarchies, the military,
all that horrible old, dead garbage from the past, to get between us
and what's there. I want to dance with this thing. I think we can!
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Monkey Business.............
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
America's Role in the 21st-Century World
by Gary Hart:
http://vander.hashish.com/articles/misc/garyhartforeignpolicy.html
And:
http://www.garyhartnews.com/hart/about/conversation.php
Bob100
somewhere.
"Garry Bryan" <ga...@soco.agilent.com> wrote in message
news:10702965...@cswreg.cos.agilent.com...