To the ones . . .

M. C. Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere

Communion is subtitled A True Story, and almost the first words out of the author's mouth are "It is a true story, as true as I know how to describe it." Elsewhere in the book, he states flatly, "I don't lie." (Note: This statement may not be strictly true!) But the book begins with a curious dedication in verse, culminating in a dedication to "the ones who must lie."

To the ones who have slipped into the mirror,

And the ones who reflect it in their eyes.

To the ones who must hide everything,

And the ones who lose what they hide.

To the ones who cannot be silent,

And the ones who must lie.

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Let's go through this line by line.

To the ones who have slipped into the mirror,

Slipping into the mirror recalls Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass, in which this is Alice's way of entering a sort of dream-world.

"Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through --" She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she enters the magical world by falling down a rabbit-hole. Here, while talking to her cat, she begins pretending or imagining, and then somewhere along the line what was pretend becomes real, and she is in a mist, and suddenly -- she hardly knew how she had got there -- she is in another world. The parallel to Strieber's own story is obvious, and at one point he directly suggests that his visitors have something of Looking-glass Land about them.

A visitor once said to an abductee, "On is off and off is on. We confuse the language." There is something of the mirror image in all this . . .

When Strieber reports his hypnosis sessions with Dr. Donald Klein, he titles that section of the book "Hypnosis: The Uncertain Mirror" -- presumably because hypnosis is an unreliable way of looking into one's own mind, and the risk of "slipping into the mirror" of delusion is non-negligible.

"What had my life really been," Strieber asks, upon discovering that he had long been living a secret life with the visitors, "and how many other lives have been lived like mine, skidding the surface of this dark mirror?" The dark mirror suggests St. Paul's famous lines: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Cor. 13:12). Given Strieber's evident interest in and knowledge of Aztec mythology (extensively referenced in Communion), perhaps there is also a hint of Tezcatlipoca, "Smoking Mirror," and the obsidian mirrors used by Aztec shamans to gaze into other worlds.

Why does the human mind wink back from the dark? Because there is something truly human about it, or because we are being fooled by our own reflection? When you look through a window, you see what is outside -- but when it is dark outside, the window becomes a mirror, and you see only yourself. Actually your reflection is there on the glass all the time but is drowned out by the much brighter stimuli coming in from outside, just as the stars shine all day but are visible only when the Sun has withdrawn.

When you study most things, you learn about the object of your study. But when you study a true unknown -- like the visitors, or God -- so little unambiguous information is coming in from "outside" that the bulk of what you learn is about yourself.

And let's not forget Anne Strieber' assessment of the visitor experience -- "this has something to do with the dead" -- and how that ties in with the window/mirror imagery with which Nabokov opens Pale Fire. (I'm sure Strieber is exactly the sort of guy who read Pale Fire at the age of 17, when it first came out.)

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow

Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

As to make chair and bed exactly stand

Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

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And the ones who reflect it in their eyes.

Very clever double meaning here. One reading is "the ones who reflect in their eyes the fact that they have slipped through the mirror." When Dante walked the streets, passersby in their naïveté used to whisper to one another -- not, "There's the man who wrote the Comedy!" but, "Look, there's the man who's been to Hell!" People swore they could see it in his eyes. Some even said his hair had been preceptibly (and apparently permanently!) singed and curled by the heat. When someone has spent time in other worlds, it shows.

Look, there's the man who's been . . .
uh, someplace really strange.

The other possible reading is "the ones who reflect the mirror in their eyes." Imagine putting on a pair of mirror shades and looking into your bathroom mirror. You'd see your reflection in the mirror, and in the reflection's shades a reflection of your reflection, and in that reflection's shades . . . well, you'd have an infinite series of reflections, like one of those Yaoi Kusama "infinity room" installations. (Strieber is exactly the kind of guy who would have gone to see those when they first appeared, the same year as Pale Fire.)

Now take off the shades. You may not have all-natural mirror-shade eyes like a Gray, but your pupils are dark. They reflect. Look closely, can you see your face in there? Stare as hard as you can. You might want to get a little closer to the mirror -- closer -- careful now, don't slip!

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To the ones who must hide everything,

This is presumably referring to those of Strieber's fellow close-encounter witnesses (surely a large majority) who feel that they can never reveal their experiences ever, to anyone, for any reason. Thinking you've been abducted by aliens is a byword for kookiness. Reveal that particular fact about yourself, and you permanently brand yourself as a laughingstock, never again to be taken seriously by anyone who counts. You can see a ghost, you can have a near-death experience, you can experience astral projection, whatever, and still not take as severe a blow to your credibility as you would should you ever be so gauche as to be taken aboard a flying saucer. (If I were an abductee, I would deny it. And no, I'm not one.)

Another possibility is that this refers to the government and the military -- who, according to some popular theories, are being forced to cover everything up by what they view as credible threats from the visitors if they do not.

Or it could be the visitors themselves. They certainly do hide. Is that what they want to do, or do they accept it as an unfortunate necessity.

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And the ones who lose what they hide.

It's probably just a coincidence that I was reading a Whitley Strieber book -- his novel The Grays -- when my attention was drawn in a seemingly paranormal way (related in detail here) to this passage in Helaman 13 in the Book of Mormon:

O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us. Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them. Behold, we are surrounded by demons, yea, we are encircled about by the angels of him who hath sought to destroy our souls. Behold, our iniquities are great. O Lord, canst thou not turn away thine anger from us?

(Do people still say "probably just a coincidence" non-ironically?)

One also thinks of the parable of the talents in Matthew 25.

Then he which had received the one talent came and said, "Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine."

His lord answered and said unto him, "Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents."

Yet another scriptural resonance is with the candle under the bushel (Luke 5, Matt. 11). If you try to hide a candle's light by covering it up, the light will go out.

Why do people lose what they hide? Well, in the simplest analysis, to hide something is deliberately to make it hard to find, and that also makes it harder for you to find. You might lose they key, forget the password, lose track of where you buried it. In Helaman 13 and Matthew 25, what is hidden is not so much lost as taken, by the Lord, as a punishment.

What is lost by close-encounter witnesses who hide their experiences? Do the experiences cease to occur? Do they lose their memories of the experiences they have already had? Or do they simply lose the thread? By hiding something away, compartmentalizing it, refusing to connect it with anything else you know or have experienced, you make it impossible to understand. Even more impossible, I mean.

⁂

To the ones who cannot be silent,

And the ones who must lie.

You just have to say something, but you can't tell the truth -- largely because you can't admit it, even to yourself. Strieber describes this in Communion. He wakes up with "a very improbable but intense memory" of having seen an owl at his window during the night -- a memory he doesn't really believe himself but feels a compulsion to share.

I remember how I felt . . . when I looked out onto the roof and saw that there were no owl tracks in the snow. I knew I had not seen an owl. I shuddered, suddenly cold, and drew back from the window, withdrawing from the night that was falling so swiftly in the woods beyond.

But I wanted desperately to believe in that owl. I told my wife about it. She was polite, but commented about the absence of tracks. I really very much wanted to convince her of it, though. Even more, I wanted to convince myself. So intent was I on this that I telephoned a friend in California for the specific, yet unlikely, purpose of telling her about the barn owl at the window.

I have had a somewhat similar experience myself, which even involved a confabulated bird of prey. When I was perhaps 12 or 13, I was walking to Hell Hollow (a park near our home), going down a country road that gets very little traffic, when a Cadillac pulled up beside me and rolled down its window. Inside, an old woman with sunglasses held up her hand and beckoned with one finger. She looked really extraordinarily old and thin, and her fingers seemed unnaturally long, like those of an aye-aye. I was absolutely terrified and sprinted all the way home without looking back, running as fast as I have ever run in my life. Later I told everyone that while I was walking to the park, I had seen a red-tailed hawk perched on a telephone pole, and that it had flown down and landed on my shoulder. No one, including me, believed the story.

Later Strieber relates some improbable anecdotes he used to tell about his travels through Europe in the late 1960s, anecdotes that he now believes were never true, but may have served to cover up something even more improbable.

But why do I need these absurd stories? They are not lies; when I tell them, I myself believe them. I don't lie. Perhaps I tell them to myself when I tell them to others, so that I can hide from myself whatever has made me a refugee in my own life.

The apparent psychological purpose of this confabulation is to replace something deeply confusing and therefore distressing with something that, however improbable it may be, is at least clearly defined. Even after the fact of a close encounter has been admitted, the temptation remains -- the temptation to force the infinite strangeness of it all into some comprehensible frame, such as that of teams of alien scientists flying around in spaceships conducting experiments, or representatives of a galactic federation come to save us from global warming.

Among witnesses, Strieber is notable for his determination to resist all such temptations and to let the unknown be the unknown.

⁂

Note added: On March 21, three days after writing this post, in which I tell a tangentially relevant story about a Cadillac I saw about 30 years ago, I was in Taichung with my wife (who doesn’t read this blog and has never heard the story), and a very old Cadillac drove past us. She said, “Wow, a Cadillac! I think the last time I saw a Cadillac was 30 years ago. From the looks of it, that might even be the same one!”

Incidentally, I never consciously thought of the car in my own story as a Cadillac until I wrote this post. I’ve never had the slightest interest in motor vehicles (except tanks), and I’m quite sure my 12-year-old self couldn’t tell a Caddy from an Olds. My visual memory of the car is still clear enough, though, that I can now say with confidence that a Caddy is what it was.

A familiar face

Yesterday before work, I picked up Communion and started reading it yet again. I became interested in the cover art and did some searching online for other work by the artist, Ted Seth Jacobs. In particular, I was trying to find his original (unpublished) cover art for Majestic, which had shown a soldier standing over the body of a Gray. The published version was edited in ways that Jacobs found outrageous, including messing with the lighting (Jacobs' particular area of expertise) and airbrushing out the soldier. I remembered the original painting had been published in an online interview back in the nineties, but it seems to have vanished from the Web since then. In the process of searching, I happened upon his original cover art for Transformation (later briefly used on the cover of one edition of Ed Conroy's Report on Communion), and decided to put it in this blog's sidebar.

So, after spending some time thinking about the art of Ted Seth Jacobs, and his cover art for Whitley Strieber books in particular, I went to work. Mondays are pretty easy for me, as I only have a few classes to teach. When the last one was finished, I came down to the lobby of the school.

In the lobby, there's a small section of wall that has been transformed into a whiteboard by sticking something on it. This stick-on whiteboard surface is now old and cracked, but the kids still like to draw on it. It had been clean when I arrived, but at the end of the day I found that at some point someone had doodled a face on it -- a face that reminded me of something.

If this had been the result of a remote-viewing experiment, I would have considered it a pretty strong "hit." So what happened? Subconscious telepathy, with the kid "reading" an image from my mind, or just one of those weird coincidences? Or it could be subconscious precognition on my part, I suppose, with my sudden interest in Jacobs' art triggered by the "premembered" whiteboard image. (I am very sure that none of my students have seen my Strieber books or know of my interest in that author.)

This is far from being the first time one of my students has drawn or written something that seemed to have been taken (with some slight distortion) directly from my mind. In one of the most striking cases (recorded here), I had dreamed about writing a book called Pineapples and Apple Pies -- thinking in the dream that the two terms used the same two morphemes in differing sequence, and realizing only after waking that pie was not the same as pine. The day after the dream, my student wrote, for no apparent reason, the word applepine -- explaining when asked that it was "like pineapple but the other way." (Note: This was many years before "Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen.")

Darkness and Light

"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."

These lines were penned by William Blake,
but others have a different take:
Stare long into the deepest black;
the human mind is winking back.

Whose perceptions can be trusted?
Those whose eyesight has adjusted.

Synchronicity: A parallel world with two moons in a book named after a year

Regular readers will know that I just recently read Whitley Strieber's 2007 novel 2012: The War for Souls. While it has a certain Strieberian charm that kept me reading to the end, it is basically a very poorly written book, and I can't recommend it. The story has to do with three versions of earth that exist in parallel universes. One of these is the earth we know. Another is a world in which the dinosaurs never went extinct but rather evolved into a race of (mostly) evil humanoid reptiles. The third is very close to our world but has several differences; they have McDonald's, for example, but it has "emerald arches" rather than golden ones, that sort of thing. (They also had no World Wars and no Communism -- but inexplicably somehow still had a Manhattan Project and have the hydrogen bomb! As I said, it's poorly written.) The most obvious difference, though, is that this parallel earth has two moons -- and "two-moon earth" and "one-moon earth" are used throughout the novel to refer to these two similar worlds.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, it just so happens that NASA has recently discovered a tiny asteroid that has been orbiting the earth for a few years, and the press is hyping it a "second moon" despite its diminutive size (just a few meters wide). I discovered this a few days after finishing 2012 when Vox Day linked to a news story about it, titling his post (qv) "We're living in 1Q84."

I knew that 1Q84 was a novel by Haruki Murakami, and that the title is equivalent to 1984 (the Japanese word for "nine" sounds like the English name of the letter Q) but had not read it and knew nothing else about it. (I read A Wild Sheep Chase years ago and enjoyed it, but not enough to try anything else by the author.) A bit of Googling revealed that, just like Strieber's 2012, it is about a parallel earth that has two moons.

Reading the Vox Day post so shortly after finishing 2012 was a coincidence, but it's also a coincidence that two novels were written within a few years of each other -- by very different authors in different countries -- but each with a year as the title, and each featuring a parallel two-moon earth. Strieber's novel was published in 2007; Murakami's in 2009 and 2010 in Japanese, with the English version following in 2011. Therefore, any direct influence would have to have been from Strieber to Murakami rather than vice versa, which seems highly unlikely.

It occurs to me that the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact -- released in 1984, just as the final volume of Murakami's 1Q84 was released in 2010 -- also has a plot that revolves around two moons, in this case two of the moons of Jupiter, not those of a parallel earth. Coincidence, or deliberate homage?

Whitley Strieber's prophecy checklist in The Secret School

Much of Whitley Strieber's non-fiction book The Secret School has to do with mental time travel. He recounts a vision of Rome around 50 BC, one of the world around 10,000 BC, and one of the near future (when he himself is an old man -- i.e., around now).

In an appendix, he writes, "I have assembled a short list of prophecies and predictions for the near future. I intend it to be used as a validating tool for my work, and trust that I have been sufficiently exact for this to be possible." There is no indication at all of where these prophecies came from; they do not overlap at all with the vision of the future reported in the body of the book. This vision would, I think, make a better validating tool, since it includes some very specific events (such as Air Force One being grounded in a sandstorm in Los Angeles) and also has a very specific deadline (the death of Whitley Strieber). At any rate, here are the prophecies from the appendix, with my comments. I have added numbers to what is in the original a bulleted list but have made no other changes. It's been 23 years since the publication of The Secret School, so at least some of these "near future" prophecies should have been fulfilled by now.

1. Our present system of government, made unstable by debt, public disaffection, and the vast chasm between its secret and public sectors, will change radically in the context of economic disruptions brought on by serious environmental difficulties of various kinds.

I guess the global birdemic coup of early 2020 sort of fulfills this, though "environmental difficulties of various kinds" weren't really a factor.

2. Specifically, I see problems with a food supply disrupted by violent weather: great storms in some places, horrendous drought in others.

Uselessly vague. There are always storms, droughts, and food-supply issues somewhere in the world.

3. I see huge clouds of smoke over a great city -- Mexico City. Popocatépetl is erupting.

This is one of the most specific predictions on the list, but unfortunately turns out to be worthless. According to the Smithsonian Institute's Global Volcanism Program (click on "Eruptive History" here), every year since 1994 has seen at least one eruption of Popocatépetl. If we count only "catastrophic" eruptions (VEI of 3 or higher), the most recent was in 1996, and the last before that was in 1663. The Secret School was published in 1997.

4. In the United States, there will be a struggle for control, fierce but not very bloody. The power of the military/industrial complex will end, and with it official secrecy. What will take the place of the old system will be freedom in the form of a republic that is real.

Just how wrong is it possible to be? (To be fair, some Trump supporters still hold out hope that this is just about to happen.)

5. Despite all the chaos, science continues to move from success to success. We begin to understand our deepest selves. As we unlock the meaning of our genes, we will discover that human beings and human lives are constructed in such extraordinary detail that the presence of a level of super-conscious planning prior to and hidden within our lives, as suggested by the secret school, must be seriously considered.

Trivially, science is cumulative and thus "moves from success to success"; barring total societal collapse, it never actually moves backward. However, no spectacular scientific discoveries about "the meaning of our genes" or anything else have been made since the publication of The Secret School, and in fact science seems to have been treading water for several decades now. (The Human Genome Project was in progress when The Secret School was written, and perhaps Strieber believed the hype surrounding that.)

6. Fusion is perfected as an energy source and we will want to mine the moon for fuel, but there will be an obstacle to this that will be overcome only through profound personal and social evolution.

Fusion power is about 50 years away -- always has been, always will be. Mining the moon for helium-3 for use in fusion was first proposed by Gerald Kulcinski in 1986.

7. Antimatter will be successfully created, contained, and studied. It will offer us the ability to devise weapons of appalling destructive capacity and small size, but also the chance to use it for the greater good in mega-engineering projects that will need power on an undreamed-of scale. Given the explosive power of antimatter weapons, we will also become able to deploy a meaningful system of defense against asteroids and large comets. In understanding how to contain antimatter, we will also discover how to gain access to parallel universes and eventually to traverse the universe at speeds bordering on the instantaneous.

Antimatter was first created in 1955 and first successfully stored in 2010. Only tiny quantities (nanograms) have been created. No military or engineering applications so far.

8. A man presently working inside a classified program will reveal knowledge of how psychic power works. Many research programs now secret will become public, whereupon the work will proceed with explosive energy. Average people will gain access to their own enormous psychic abilities as they realize that we all possess them and can learn techniques to make them work. Effective methods of teaching them will come into general use.

The Stargate Project was declassified in 1995, just before The Secret School was published. Effective methods of teaching psychic powers have not come into general use.

9. Memory and prophecy will be understood to be tools of the hyperconscious level of mind, and people will begin to use them as such.

Too vague.

10. Time will also come to be a tool, and travel in time will become practical. As mind frees itself from time and thus approaches singularity of consciousness, nations as we know them -- directed by power, politics, greed, and lies -- will end. They will be replaced by the only valid form of government that has any meaning to the truly free: one that is founded in love and organized around compassion.

Time travel has not become practical. Nations are still directed by power, politics, greed -- and, above all, lies.

11. We will meet people from other worlds, the barrier between the living and the dead will collapse, and it will become possible for the individual to store and process huge amounts of knowledge.

This has apparently been going on for a long time, as Strieber knows from his own experience. No special developments in this area since the publication of The Secret School.

12. We will throw off the bondage of assumptions that we are small, weak, and frail, and discover ourselves a rare and precious creation, immensely talented and bearing upon this tiny scrap of stone called Earth a powerful responsibility to survive, to grow, and to partake of all knowledge in full consciousness. As we do this, we will also find that others on the same quest reveal themselves to us, and we will join hands with them.

Rather than discovering "a powerful responsibility to survive," the human race is more suicidal now than it has even been before.

13. As science becomes increasingly honest, open, and powerful, it will begin to detect the presence of deity in an incontrovertibly factual manner. At that point, a Niagara of joy will flood the world as the species consciously joins the companionship for which it was created.

Or consider the polar opposite: "As science becomes increasingly dishonest and collapses, atheism and nihilism will be taken for granted, and a Niagara of despair, anomie, and alienation will flood the world." Which better describes the world you see around you?

Verdict: Epic fail.

Synchronicity: Dancing with the Sister of Mercy

Late last night I was sitting in a McDonald's drinking coffee and reading The Secret School, Whitley Strieber's 1997 book about his childhood memories of attending -- as you may have guessed -- a nocturnal "secret school" with other children. These lessons took place in the Olmos Basin in San Antonio and were presided over by the "Sister of Mercy," a strange nun who did not appear to be entirely human. (For parallels in Strieber's fiction, see the secret school in The Night Church and the Sisters of Mercy in Cat Magic.)

Here is some of what I had just read, from pp. 157-160.

The result [of struggling to recall some suppressed childhood memories] was a total blank, and a return of the feeling that had worried me from the beginning, that this was nothing more than an act of the imagination, an interesting but essentially worthless exercise. [. . .]

I sat listening to the sighing leaves of the old live oak and trying to evoke memory without also bringing my imagination to bear.

I closed my eyes, thinking of the Sister of Mercy. Immediately, I remembered [. . .]

I remembered that I saw inside her wimple once, and it looked as if a giant moth was staring out at me. My whole being rocked with terror.

We would get up and go round and round, dancing. The sister danced with us, her habit whooshing in the dark. We danced the backward dance, going past the ages, deep into time. And as we danced in 1954, we joined to our dance in Rome, and to another dance, longer past.

Everything is dance, she would say -- dance of time; dance of life; dance of fate; dance of air, water, and light; dance of fire and future; history dance. Evil, love, good, hate, holy, cruel -- all the dances are the dance.

As I read that last paragraph -- dance dance dance -- I suddenly became aware of the background music that was playing in the restaurant. The line "Will I dance for you, Jesus?" caught my attention, both because of its incongruity (since when does McDonald's play religious music?) and because it synched with what I was reading. The song was soon over, but I looked up the lyrics on my phone to see what it had been, and it was "I Can Only Imagine" (2001) by a Christian pop band called MercyMe -- apparently a cover, since the vocalist had been female but MercyMe is an all-male group.

The synchronicity goes beyond the reference to dancing. A female cover of MercyMe syncs with the Sister of Mercy; and the name of the song, "I Can Only Imagine," reflects the concern repeatedly expressed by Strieber that his apparent memories may in fact be "nothing more than an act of the imagination." The song also contains the lines "I can only imagine / What my eyes would see / When your face is before me" -- which reminds me of Strieber's looking inside the Sister's wimple and seeing something very unexpected!

Whitley Strieber and the sinister serpents of luck and joy

Derbyshire, England -- not the planet Abaddon

In his non-fiction book Breakthrough (1995), Whitley Strieber recounts an experience in which he and one other person took a wrong turn off Route 17 in New Jersey and for several minutes found themselves in what seemed to be another world, before eventually finding their way back onto the highway. Strieber describes the scene:

The houses were set back from the street, in lawns heavily planted with shrubs and emerald-green grass. The house I could see most clearly was one story and had no visible roof, which made it look like a huge box. It appeared to be made of tan stone deeply etched with carvings of large serpents. [. . .] I observed another one just the same, then took a turn. The place was sinister, to be frank, and I really did not want to attract the attention of whatever it was that thought images of giant snakes were attractive decorations for a home.

In Strieber's novel 2012: The War for Souls (2007), Whitley Strieber stand-in Wiley or Wylie Dale (both spellings are used indiscriminately throughout this poorly edited novel) visits the Union, a little corner of the evil reptilian planet Abaddon where the reptilians are good -- or are environmentalists, anyway, which for Strieber amounts to the same thing. (In most parts of Abaddon, "mentioning global warming drew a death sentence," but in the Union, I kid you not, "it was illegal not to mention global warming"! Sound familiar?) Here Wylie describes one of the houses there. (I won't say whose house, lest I spoil what passes for a plot, but they're good guys.)

Wylie [. . .] watched the rich green Union land speed below them. [. . .] They came down on a pebble driveway before a modest old sandstone, its worn carved serpents of luck and joy barely visible in its ancient walls.

This is obviously the same sort of house described in Breakthrough, but now the carved serpents symbolize "luck and joy." Much like Tolkien, Strieber seems to work with memorable images which can be interpreted in more than one way. (Tolkien's Black Riders evolved out of a scene that originally featured Gandalf rather than a Nazgul.)