Two alien vegetable sellers

In my recent post "Cucurbits from an alien land," I quoted this passage from Whitley Strieber's book Breakthrough (1995). Strieber is writing about an incident that occurred at his cabin in August 1991. He had invited a group of houseguests for the weekend, including the writer Michael Talbot (who would die less than a year later). Strieber wakes up at about five a.m., hears Talbot's voice, goes downstairs, and sees him at the door.

There was a shadow out there. I could see it clearly. It shocked me, because the likelihood of a stranger appearing at our door in this rather isolated area at five in the morning was vanishingly small. Then I saw that the figure was very thin, and seemed to have a huge head.

The idea that this was a visitor certainly hadn't crossed Michael's mind. . . . Then I heard him say, "are you trying to sell those vegetables?"

It stunned me practically senseless. Then I saw that the visitor was holding a big paper shopping bag full of squash.

In Ed Conroy's Report on Communion (pp. 77-78), the author reproduces a letter, dated 30 July 1988, sent to Strieber (in care of his publisher) by his childhood friend Bill Mebane. Mebane jokingly writes in the voice of Strieber's alien visitor and refers to himself in the third person. He hints at further "Elizabeth Road adventures" (where Strieber grew up) in addition to those recounted in Communion. The ellipsis and brackets are in the published version.

Dear Whitley,

The one chosen to commune with the cosmos. Last Saturday afternoon I have mistakenly landed (flying too low) on the Matterhorm. Carefully climbing down to Zermatt, I was very shocked to find our story on sale in the local bookstore. Without my permission, and most importantly, without my point of view! And what is this Transformation already announced? Have you had other visitors?

Yours jealously

Slant-eyed Sally

P.S. I also visited in Zermatt a certain Signor Mebane (Italo-Texano) who claims his own version of the Elizabeth Road adventures. For example, he does confirm the sighting of a long cigar-shaped "ship" in your back lot, but he also asserts that we had previous contacts in the numerous games of night hide-and-seek around the Flowers' mansion. That was not always Patricia hiding with him! And what about that time your grandfather chased him and Mike Ryan out of the house, who was really to blame? And the old "vegetable wagon" that used to come to Elizabeth Road, who was that mysterious seller? And all the towers and treehouses that you all constructed; those in Mike's backyard, even near his pool; that wooden platform near Bill's bedroom; and all those tree outposts in your front yard. Were you establishing, unconsciously, bridges to the sky? And all the weather balloon and rocket experiments. . . .

This Italo-Texano, a shady character, could go on and on. Perhaps you should establish a direct contact: [address in Rome, Italy listed here].

P.P.S. It's a great book. Congratulations,

Bill

Mebane's letter is obviously tongue-in-cheek, so it's impossible to know how seriously he is proposing that the "vegetable wagon" and its "mysterious seller" had something to do with the visitors. Still, the parallel with the Talbot story is interesting.

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Note: I found the illustration at the top of this post by running an image search for ufo vegetables (because, you know, you can find anything on the Internet). It turns out the same artist recently posted a birdemic cartoon.

Whitley Strieber's "new vision" of Jesus

Whitley Strieber is a one-of-a-kind thinker, and his book Jesus: A New Vision, published in January of this year, brings his unique approach to bear on the question of who Jesus is and what he did. It is a very exciting and stimulating book to read, full of surprising interpretations and insights. Unfortunately, in the end I don't think it really adds up to the coherent "new vision" of Jesus promised in the subtitle.

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Jesus the man

Strieber's foundational assumption is that Jesus was a man, and that everything he did is therefore within the range of human capabilities and would in principle be possible for others to do as well. This does not mean that Strieber tries to explain Jesus away as "just a man" in a secular way. He accepts many of the extraordinary things attributed to Jesus, including the resurrection -- but where a conventional Christian would see these as proof that Jesus was God incarnate, a sort of being fundamentally different from ourselves, Strieber sees them as proof that human beings have undreamed-of potential. Jesus did things no human being could do, says the conventional Christian, and therefore he was no mere human being but God. Jesus did things no human being could do, says Strieber -- and that proves that human beings can do such things after all.

This is broadly similar to my own assumption, that Jesus was a man who became divine, and that others may follow him and do what he did. He told his disciples on numerous occasions that they could be like him, even that they would work greater miracles than his own. The idea that Jesus was like Superman -- human in appearance but actually fundamentally different in origin and nature -- is incorrect. Jesus was not a God disguised as a man; nor did he have (as per classical theology) "two natures," human and divine; rather, he was and is living proof that human nature and divine nature are one and the same -- that "now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be" (1 John 3:2).

Strieber doesn't go this far. As I will discuss below, he holds onto the idea of an impersonal monotheistic God and therefore prefers to say that Jesus was not a god.

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Miracles

Strieber's approach to Jesus' miracles is a strange mixture of belief and secular explaining-away.

Jesus didn't literally turn water to wine because "that's impossible"; the story is symbolic. (By the way, Strieber reaches the same conclusion of Bruce Charlton, that the wedding at Cana was Jesus' own marriage to Mary Magdalene.) Most of his healings were probably just the placebo effect. When Jesus raised someone from the dead, what probably happened was that he revived a seemingly dead person with smelling salts, a trick he may have learned from the magicians in Egypt. Strieber accepts the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of James but goes Jefferson Bible on it -- "once the miracles attributed to him are stripped away," he says, it probably offers a pretty accurate account of his childhood.

Walking on water, though -- yeah, that probably really happened. There are many accounts of levitation, with multiple witnesses, in the historical record, and so gravity-defying miracles are credible. What Strieber does not mention -- he's trying to be Whitley the scholar here, not Whitley the weird-experience-haver -- is that he himself has experienced levitation and knows firsthand that it is real, and that that is his real reason for finding this particular miracle more credible than the others.

One reason for Strieber's seemingly inconsistent approach to miracles is his assumption that miracles are "not supernatural, but caused by natural forces that remain to this day little understood, but which [Jesus] did understand, at least well enough to make use of them." Jesus was not God, and his miracles are not proofs of his omnipotence. He didn't have the power to do anything, only some specific things, for specific reasons. Therefore, his working one miracle is in no way evidence that he could also have worked another, entirely different miracle.

For Strieber, Jesus' miracle fall into three categories: (1) those we can explain away, at least in principle (healings via placebo effect, smelling salts, etc.); (2) those we cannot yet explain away, but which are well enough attested that they probably did happen (walking on water, the resurrection); and (3) those which we can dismiss as "impossible" (turning water to wine, making clay sparrows come to life, etc.).

I guess I'm in broad sympathy with this approach, but I think Strieber is a little too quick to put things in the third category. As someone who has sometimes experienced six impossible things before breakfast, he really ought to be more willing to suspend judgment even on some of the less believable miracle stories.

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Hidden helpers

One interesting point Strieber raises is that Jesus seems in the Gospels to have had a group of people -- distinct from his disciples -- secretly helping him behind the scenes. He mentions, for example, that on Palm Sunday there was already a colt waiting for him to ride on, and someone had provided the people with palm branches in preparation for his entrance. Other mysterious figures -- the man in white who runs away in Mark, the woman who anoints him in Luke -- are also tentatively connected with this group. I made a similar speculation in my notes on John 1:

When John says, "he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me . . . ," I wonder if he is describing a direct communication from God himself, or John had some human master or teacher out in the desert, lost to history, who gave him these instructions.

Strieber reaches no conclusions about who these people may have been, but it's an interesting hypothesis.

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The sacrificed god

Many (beginning with Frazer in The Golden Bough) have noted the parallels between Jesus' story and those of other "sacrificed gods" who rise from the dead, such as Osiris and Tammuz. Believers see this as God inspiring the pagans to create myths that foreshadowed Christ; skeptics see it as evidence that the story of Jesus is fake, cobbled together from myths and not from history. Strieber's own take is unusual.

I think that there is another way to look at it, which is that Jesus was re-creating these earlier passions, using the same theory of sympathetic magic that had inspired the would-be messiahs who had come before him to recreate the Moses entry into the Land of Canaan. Having seen that this method had failed, he was attempting another.

Strieber elaborates on this at great length, explaining how Jesus "goaded the Romans into executing him" and deliberately did it in such a way as to echo various myths about "scapegoat gods," even when this had little to do with fulfilling the messianic prophecies of Judaism.

Strieber is not clear on what purpose this served -- or if indeed it served any purpose at all. He describes it as another instance of the same sort of "sympathetic magic" that had failed in the past. Did Jesus' resurrection somehow depend on enacting this mythological drama? Was it done to ensure that his story would resonate with the Greeks and Romans and be remembered? Strieber never really reaches a conclusion here; he merely proposes that Jesus was consciously attempting to be a second Adonis as well as a second Moses and David.

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The resurrection

Strieber discusses the Shroud of Turin extensively, seeing it as very strong evidence that Jesus' corpse was transformed in a blast of radiant energy into -- something else. 

When there is proper testing of the Shroud, what we are almost certain to find is that Jesus turned into a version of himself made of light. He may have appeared human to those who saw him, but he was no longer an organic being. What happened was that a rare energetic event occurred that projected him back into the world for a time.

This misses the whole point of the resurrection, which is that it was a resurrection of the body. There's nothing revolutionary about people living on after death as spirits or "beings of light," but the resurrected Jesus made a point of demonstrating that he had a body of flesh and bone. Strieber's weird non-explanation, that he "may have appeared human" because "a rare energetic event occurred" (what?), does not make it clear how Jesus' post-resurrection appearances were anything other than ordinary "ghost" apparitions. Ghosts, whatever they are, are commonplace and were accepted as such in the ancient world; appearances of the ghost of Jesus would not have led to the belief that a dead man had come back to life.

Strieber says that Jesus showed that resurrection is possible for all of us but isn't clear on how. At times he seems to suggest that we can find the key to resurrection by further scientific examination of the Shroud of Turin. At others, he says we can transcend death by "following the Jesus path" -- meaning, uh, living by the Beatitudes or something. At any rate, he doesn't think we need to actually follow Jesus or believe in him; the book's closing sentence is, "Belief or faith or none, it does not matter: Jesus is there." How he got that message from the Gospels is anyone's guess!

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God

Focusing on the burst of radiant energy evident in the Shroud of Turin, and on Jesus' appearance to Saul of Tarsus as a blinding light, Strieber connects these with other "incidents of light" such as the burning bush, the Transfiguration, and so on.

I think that there was a consciousness with high intelligence behind the resurrection event and all the other incidents of light that I have discussed. . . . I think that part of the message of the Shroud is that, by following the Jesus path, we all have the potential to enter the same state of light that he did.

Basically, he identifies this conscious light with God -- or rather, with his typical hedging, "a higher entity that, for want of a better word, we might as well call God." In what seems to me to be a remarkably obtuse misreading of the message of Jesus, he says that this God is entirely unlike a human being and that we need to stop anthropomorphizing it.

This conscious energy -- this light -- is concerned about us or it would not intervene in our lives. . . . But how can we relate to a consciousness that does not have a nature that we can understand or even a form that we can detect? . . . We have never in all our history had a concept of god that is not sentimentalized in some way like the vague idea of "God the Father," or personalized like the old gods of the Romans and the Egyptians. There is every reason now for that to change.

Strieber somehow fails to notice that the "idea of God the Father," far from being some "vague" and "sentimentalized" holdover from the infancy of our species, is in fact one of the central, and most revolutionary messages of Jesus. Even the notoriously skeptical Jesus Seminar (which Strieber references with depressing credulity) lists Jesus' calling God "Father" as one of his most undeniably authentic teachings. And this was a radical new doctrine, not a traditional Jewish idea. Jesus called us not to abandon anthropomorphism but to take it seriously. The vague idea which we really need to move beyond is the Hellenized view of God as an abstraction "that does not have a nature that we can understand."

When Saul asked the blinding light, "Who art thou, Lord?" the answer was, "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest" (Acts 9:5). If, as Strieber says, the "conscious energy" behind these "incidents of light" is to be identified with God, then Jesus had become God without ceasing to be Jesus, without ceasing to have a human nature. 

Moved by this experience, Paul was later to preach:

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent (Acts 17:29-30).

We are the offspring of God, and therefore God is not like unto gold or silver or stone. What is he like, then? Like us. The impersonal, "non-sentimentalized" God promoted by Strieber is just another example of the ignorance that God winked at in the past, but which is no longer so excusable now that Jesus has come.

As so often, William Blake put it best: "God appears, and God is Light, to those poor souls who dwell in Night; but does a Human Form display to those who dwell in realms of Day."

Synchronicity: A butterfly Mason?

Sometimes I write something I think is just too bizarre to publish -- and then I usually publish it anyway, and as often as not I soon get an email from some stranger saying, "You too? What an amazing coincidence!"

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Early this afternoon, I was sitting in my living room. We have a large window in the front, but it was a very sunny day and the curtains were drawn. Suddenly, my tomcat Geronimo (a highly accomplished jumper) got between the window and the curtain and started jumping up on the glass again and again like a maniac. My wife said there must be a bird or something outside, so I popped out to take a look.

It wasn't a bird; it was a white cabbage butterfly, steadily beating its wings and flying directly into the windowpane. The glass was of course an impassable barrier, but it wouldn't alter its course in the slightest, and the result was that it just sort of hovered there. Now everyone knows that a normal butterfly's flight path resembles that of a drunken skywriter. Straight lines are simply not in their repertoire; nor is this sort of persistence when confronted with an impassable obstacle. Nevertheless, it persisted.

As I looked at the butterfly, a question suddenly popped into my head out of nowhere: Are you a traveling man? -- quickly followed by the rest of this stock Masonic dialogue: Yes I am. Traveling where? From west to east. (I'm not a Freemason, but one picks up these things.) The feeling that I was somehow having this dialogue with the butterfly -- ridiculous on its face! -- was unmistakable. The whole time, the butterfly kept flying persistently straight into the windowpane, and on the other side of the glass, a highly neurotic tomcat kept bouncing up and down like a superball.

Finally I snapped out of whatever passing trance the butterfly had put me in and gently shooed it away from the window. It immediately resumed normal butterfly behavior, and the cat settled down.

Checking a compass later, I found that it had indeed been flying at a perfect 90-degree azimuth, from west to east.

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The weird feeling that I had been "communicating" (if reciting a stock dialogue can be called that!) with the butterfly made me remember that last year I had experienced a synchronicity in connection with the idea that the spirits of the dead can appear as moths -- I had read about this in Whitley Strieber's Afterlife Revolution and then heard the same thing shortly thereafter from a Taiwanese associate. Well, I thought, this was a cabbage butterfly, not a moth, but it's close anyway.

When I looked up my old post about the moth synchronicity, though, I found something that I had forgotten. The post showed the cover of The Afterlife Revolution -- illustrated with a picture of a white cabbage butterfly!

I ended the post thus:

I wonder how common this association is? I know Aristotle used the same Greek word to refer both to the soul and to the cabbage butterfly. (By coincidence, this same species of non-moth appears to have been chosen by Strieber's entomologically confused cover illustrator.)

I had forgotten that about Aristotle, too, but he does in fact use the word psyche ("soul"), in History of Animals 5.19, as a name for those insects that arise "out of those caterpillars which arise on leaves of green, especially on those of the cabbage-plant."

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Coming back to the ridiculous idea of a butterfly being a Mason, I remembered that Freemasonry's central symbol is the building of the Temple of Solomon, and that in the Rudyard Kipling story "The Butterfly That Stamped," a butterfly stamps its foot and makes King Solomon's palace (close enough!) disappear and then reappear. (It is actually Djinns that do this, but Solomon has arranged for them to make it look as if the butterfly is making it happen.)

Suleiman-bin-Daoud laughed so much that it was several minutes before he found breath enough to whisper to the Butterfly, "Stamp again, little brother. Give me back my Palace, most great magician." . . . So he stamped once more, and that instant the Djinns let down the Palace and the gardens, without even a bump.

Then I thought about the song "Build Me Up Buttercup" by the Foundations.

Building up foundations sounds like a mason's work, does it not? Buttercup is a bit like butterfly, but not quite close enough to be satisfying. Ah, but what's the very first thing Wikipedia has to say about the Foundations? "The Foundations were a British soul band." Soul = psyche = cabbage butterfly.

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Since Whitley Strieber had entered into this synch-stream, I thought of his "nine knocks" incident, documented in Chapter 11 of his book Transformation (a synonym for butterfly-style metamorphosis). Strieber recounts how he was at home, reading an essay by John Gliedman about quantum entanglement, when he noticed that his two cats were beginning to behave strangely, as if they are terrified.

The cats' fear didn't make sense to me at all. I decided there must be some animal outside, perhaps a deer. I returned to Dr. Gleidman's essay.

I read the following sentence: "The mind is not the playwright of reality."

At that moment there came a knocking on the side of the house. This was substantial noise, very regular and sharp. The knocks were so exactly spaced that they sounded like they were being produced by a machine. Both cats were riveted with terror. They stared at the wall. The knocks went on, nine of them in three groups of three, followed by a tenth lighter double-knock that communicated an impression of finality.

In his book A New World, Strieber refers back to this incident and connects it with Freemasonry.

I cannot know if this was intended, but the knocks reflected a tradition in Masonry where when someone is elevated to the 33rd Degree, they knock in this way on the door of the hall before being admitted.

He repeats this assertion in The Super Natural.

Also, when entering the thirty-third degree, a Mason must knock on the door of the lodge nine times in three groups of three.

I know basically nothing about the higher degrees of Masonry, but certainly "three distinct knocks" is a thing, and it wouldn't be surprising if they sometimes did three groups of three. Anyway, the point here is that Strieber, just like me today, (1) saw his cats behaving strangely, (2) assumed it was because of an animal outside, and then instead (3) observed something which he connected with Masonic ritual.