FIGURE 7. The vision of Ezekiel, copperplate engraving by Matthäus Merian for his Iconum Biblicarum (1630). From the reprint of Iconum Biblicarum by AVB Press (Wenatchee, WA), 1981; used with permission of Directed Media, Inc.
Ancient Abductees
LET’S PAUSE TO TAKE STOCK.
I led off chapter 3 with the bold claim that the abduction phenomenon of the late twentieth century can be traced back, like humanity in the Bible story, to a single pair. These were the New Englanders Barney and Betty Hill, a black man and a white woman, together channeling a collective memory of his ancestral trauma, her ancestral crime.
A paradox: it was her people and not his who were destined to reenact his trauma over and over in the coming decades. The overwhelming majority of the abductees since the Hills have been white. It’s as if the UFOs took on the role assigned to the Mother Wheel, their counterpart in the apocalyptic doctrine of the Nation of Islam (the so-called Black Muslims), of inflicting measure-for-measure retribution on white America for its atrocities against its blacks.34 Psychologically, this makes perfect sense. In a vast historic crime, like the slave trade in the eighteenth century or the Holocaust in the twentieth, perpetrators and victims become entwined, enmeshed, bonded. Both carry for generations the wounds of the atrocities they suffered or inflicted.35
As the abduction tradition grew—from a trickle of reports in the late 1960s and early ’70s, turning into a stream in the late ’70s and a torrent at the end of the ’80s—it accumulated additional baggage of personal trauma, mostly of a sexual nature. Yet these factors together still won’t account for the abduction phenomenon, and for its meaning to those who’ve experienced it. The staring, compelling eyes of the Predionica head bear witness: there was something before that.
Beyond the abused children of the twentieth century, beyond the European American mass atrocity of the eighteenth, centuries before UFOs were ever called such or space visitors even an option for the imagination, there was a human experience akin to UFO abduction. Our task now is to acknowledge that kinship and, if possible, to understand it.
EZEKIEL’S “CHARIOT”
There was once a group within the Jewish people—a group of men, almost certainly—who called themselves “descenders to the chariot,” the Hebrew word for “chariot” (merkavah) being shorthand for the fantastic entity that Ezekiel described in the first chapter of his book. In their convoluted, half-intelligible writings, these people spoke of undertaking mystical journeys to the merkavah-chariot on its home territory, of going there to view it as Ezekiel had. One might naturally assume that territory to be in heaven. Strangely, though, they called their journey to the merkavah a “descent” and the return from it an “ascent.” We don’t (yet) know why.
These men lived centuries after Ezekiel, and no doubt they read many things into Ezekiel’s text that the prophet never intended. Yet if we’re to make sense of their encounters with the merkavah, we need first to ground ourselves in the Biblical vision itself. “Ezekiel saw the wheel/Way up in the middle of the air,” runs the African American spiritual—and that wheel has more than once been called a UFO. Was it?
“And I looked, and behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud, with a fire flashing up, so that a brightness was round about it” (Ezek. 1:4). I read those words as a child, wandering on my own through the double-columned pages of our family Bible, and I remember going to my mother and telling her I’d read something scary. I don’t know if I made my way through the rest of the chapter, which I would no doubt have found even scarier.
As Ezekiel watches, four “living creatures” emerge from the fire-cloud, essentially human in appearance but each with four wings and four faces: human, lion, ox, eagle. Then a single wheel appears, not in the middle of the air, but on the earth beside the creatures. The one wheel turns into four, rising with the creatures from the earth, “for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.” They’re constructed as “a wheel within a wheel,” their rims “high” and “dreadful . . . full of eyes round about.”
Ezekiel’s attention is at last drawn to a crystalline expanse over the heads of the living creatures and to a sapphire (or perhaps lapis lazuli) throne above that expanse, where a humanlike figure of blazing fire sits, surrounded by prismatic shimmering. Recognizing this as the “glory” of his God, Yahveh, Ezekiel falls on his face.
The voice that addresses Ezekiel from the throne dispatches him as Yahveh’s messenger to the Judean people, a nation on the eve of its destruction. A substantial chunk of its population, Ezekiel included, have already been carried into exile by their Babylonian conquerors. Most of those who remain in the homeland will soon follow. Ezekiel is sent to preach the sinfulness and doom of their city Jerusalem. This message anchors Ezekiel’s vision in the Near East of the early sixth century BCE, and it stands as an obstacle to any notion that an encounter with “ancient astronauts” is what it’s about.
The idea that Ezekiel witnessed an extraterrestrial visit has been floated repeatedly since the UFO era began, with or without a linkage to modern UFO sightings. It took on its most appealing form in a 1961 article entitled “The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel,” by a specialist in aircraft mechanics named Arthur W. Orton. Through a close and mostly sensible reading of the Biblical text, Orton argued that Ezekiel 1 is “the account of an actual happening; the landing of extraterrestrial beings, reported by a careful, truthful and self-possessed observer.” But Orton’s exegesis broke down with the shift, at the beginning of chapter 2, from prophetic vision to prophetic discourse. Why should space visitors have cared so deeply about the religious violations and political blunders of a tiny, soon-to-be-destroyed Israelite kingdom? Orton couldn’t answer the question and chose to ignore it. His successors have done no better.
Surely it makes more sense—nearly all Biblical scholars will tell you—to look for the key to understanding the vision not in anachronistic space-age machinery but in the mythic iconography with which Ezekiel himself might be presumed familiar. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t get us very far either. There’s nothing from antiquity that’s quite like the entities Ezekiel claims to have encountered.
Human-faced animals are common in ancient Near Eastern art and sculpture. The Egyptian Sphinx is a famous example. So are the immense stone lions or bulls with wings and human heads that stood guard at the entrances to the palaces of the Assyrian kings. But animal heads or faces on human bodies, such as Ezekiel describes, are much rarer. A single human figure with four faces, comparable to Ezekiel’s “living creatures”? Very rare. In those few cases where it does occur, the faces are all human and are identical. And the ancient world offers nothing that might give sense or context to Ezekiel’s wheels, with their multitudinous eyes and their “high and dreadful” rims.
FIGURE 7. The vision of Ezekiel, copperplate engraving by Matthäus Merian for his Iconum Biblicarum (1630). From the reprint of Iconum Biblicarum by AVB Press (Wenatchee, WA), 1981; used with permission of Directed Media, Inc.
The merkavah resists all attempts to conventionalize it, reduce it to known categories of experience or belief, whether ancient or modern.36 Explaining it as the vehicle of ancient astronauts is a conventionalization, forcing it into line with a space-age sense of what’s real and possible. Calling it “visions of God,” as Ezekiel himself does (Ezek. 1:1), is a conventionalization of a different sort. Neither is adequate. It’s something unknown, indefinable, erupting from within Ezekiel yet outside his conscious control and even his normal conscious awareness.
In that sense, yes, it was a UFO, something truly “unidentified,” projected into the sky, though its proper home was the psyche. More than the Bible scholars or the ancient-astronaut theorists, Jung had a handle on it when he called Ezekiel’s vision “archetypal” and declared it to be “made up of two well-ordered composite quaternities, that is, conceptions of totality”—not to mention the mandala wheel, “wheel within a wheel,” unifier of opposites. As such, it may not be possible to interpret the merkavah but only to encounter it. “Symbols that have an archetypal foundation,” Jung wrote, “can never be reduced to anything else.”
Even as a child, I felt the stirring of its numinous fearfulness. Long afterward, as my path as a fledgling scholar carried me with increasing certainty toward Ezekiel and his merkavah—that is to say, back to my teenage UFOlogy in antique and therefore respectable guise—I learned how the rabbis of the early centuries of the Common Era had regarded his vision with a mixture of veneration and dread. The beginning of Genesis and the beginning of Ezekiel were among those Scriptures to be kept away from the young: the story of Creation might be a dangerous object of study, but the merkavah was even more so. No one might involve himself with it “unless he is wise and can understand on his own,” and even the wise and the understanding were at risk. Contemplate the entities described in the first chapter of Ezekiel, come to a sudden and all too accurate comprehension of them, and fire might leap out from them and burn you alive.
FIGURE 8. The “four faces” as Ezekiel described them (above) and as Arthur W. Orton imagined them for his “Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel” (below). How much better, Orton asked, could a man living six centuries before Christ have described the outfit of this extraterrestrial visitor? Both drawings by Orton, in Analog Science Fact-Fiction (March 1961).
“DESCENDERS TO THE MERKAVAH”
Somewhere amid that ambivalent engagement of the ancient Jews with the merkavah, the men who spoke of themselves as “descending” to it had their place.
Precisely what that place was—who these descenders were, when and where they lived, what exactly they did when they “descended to the chariot,” and why they thought of themselves as descending to something that ought to be in the sky—these are mysteries hardly less impenetrable than Ezekiel’s vision itself. Some researchers place them in Roman or Byzantine Palestine early in the Common Era, others in Islamic Iraq several hundred years later. But all agree that these “merkavah mystics,” as they’ve come to be known, bequeathed to medieval Judaism a peculiar Hebrew literature called Hekhalot (Palaces), in reference to the seven concentric “palaces” within which they imagined the merkavah to be enclosed. It’s from this literature that we know them.
Were they ancient abductees? Not exactly. The relation between the experiences described in the Hekhalot literature and those of modern abductees is subtler and more complex than that, with major differences that must be given full weight. But there are also continuities, leading us into a broad range of religious phenomena that seem to encompass both.
“Rabbi Ishmael said: What are those songs to be uttered by one who seeks to gaze on the vision of the merkavah, in order that he may descend safely and ascend safely?” Thus begins The Greater Treatise of the Palaces, a Hekhalot text that’s not so much a book as a chaotic swirl of hymns, incantations, sacred names and unearthly landscapes, with a few snatches of narrative woven in. Rabbi Ishmael and his teacher Rabbi Nehunyah ben Hakanah are the main characters. Both men were historical figures, rabbinic scholars who lived in Palestine around 100 CE. Their involvement with the merkavah and the “descent” to it was a fiction, concocted centuries after their deaths. But fiction can sometimes be a projection of a reality known to the writer, and that may be what’s happening here.
Rabbi Ishmael is often the narrator. In one episode, he tells how at Rabbi Nehunyah’s command he assembled the other rabbis at an entrance of the Jerusalem Temple. There he and nine fellow initiates sit at Nehunyah’s feet while Nehunyah lectures on “the ways of the merkavah, descent and ascent, how the one who descends [to the merkavah] makes the descent, how the one who ascends can make the ascent.”
That “descent” is a deeply frightening experience. Reading the Hekhalot, you’re apt to wonder why anyone would want to make it at all. The angels you run into along the way are monstrous and horrible: “taller than mountains,” their bows drawn, sharp swords in their hands. Their noses drip fire; their eyeballs, bolts of lightning. “Their horses are horses of darkness, horses of deep darkness, horses of gloom, horses of fire, horses of blood, horses of hail, horses of iron, horses of the misty cloud . . . and they eat glowing coals out of their mangers.”37
These are not Hallmark greeting-card angels; they’re as savage in their habits as they are terrifying in their appearance. Pushing other creatures into rivers of fire is standard behavior for them. They do it to each other; they do it to the human visitor who’s slipped up in some way, revealing his unfitness to “see the King [God] in His beauty.” But with the right magic, a human being can do the same to an angel who refuses his demands. “I will push you into the lava flow of pressing fire and set up another in your place,” one of the descenders warns an angel, and there’s no reason to think this an empty threat.
In a “heaven” so saturated with aggression and brutality, treading gingerly is a must. Voyagers need the exact names of the angels they will pass, the right seals to show them so they’ll be let through. All this information Rabbi Nehunyah provides, until he mentions a detail his hearers don’t understand. They beg Rabbi Ishmael to intercede, to “bring him back . . . from the vision he is viewing” so that he can clarify what he’s trying to say.
Gershom Scholem, the past century’s greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism, explains what’s going on here. Nehunyah has been in ecstatic trance, telling his pupils what he sees in his vision of the things that Ezekiel once saw. He must be brought out of his trance so that he can respond to their questions, and Rabbi Ishmael knows exactly how to do it. A myrtle branch, infected with just the slightest taint of impurity, is placed on Nehunyah’s knees. At once Nehunyah is dismissed from the world of his vision, back to normal consciousness.
Fiction, of course—glamorized, transferred into the distant past. The setting in the long-destroyed Temple is enough to guarantee that. But as I’ve said, fiction can be a projection of the writer’s reality, and this story has the authentic feel of a shamanistic séance. The shaman journeys in spirit through fantastic and inaccessible realms. His body remains with the people who’ve gathered to witness his feats, while he reports to them on what his soul encounters along its way.
A parallel close at hand suggests itself: the hypnotic regression of the UFO abductee.
There are differences. The abductee is passive, put into a trance rather than actively creating it. The realm into which he or she journeys is that of memory, not of present events but of the past relived. Yet like the shaman, like the descender, the abductee is in two places at once, the therapist’s couch and the extraterrestrial spaceship. This duality, this drama played out on two planes simultaneously, is a staple of films about alien abduction, from the 1975 TV movie The UFO Incident—a powerful and authentic portrayal of the Betty and Barney Hill episode—to the 2009 thriller The Fourth Kind. The stability of this feature, through nearly thirty-five years of “abduction” cinema, suggests that it reflects something fundamental about the phenomenon.
Abduction and the “descent” have something else in common. Both focus on an aerial vehicle that is not, as one might expect, a means for flying somewhere else. The UFO, like Ezekiel’s “chariot,” is itself the goal. In only about a quarter of abduction stories do we hear of some travel beyond the UFO, often though not always to other worlds, after the real business in the spaceship’s examination room is done.
Several of these supplementary journeys share an odd feature that “comes as a surprise even by the standards of UFO abduction stories” (Bullard) and leads us back to the merkavah by another path. Instead of flying up into outer space, the witness goes down, whether inside the UFO or not. Bullard gives several examples, including a UFO that “plunged into the sea and came out again, then entered huge crystalline caverns which broadened into a vast underworld” and an abductee’s recollection of how “beings escorted him to a beach, unlocked a rock and led him through a tunnel stretching beneath the sea.” In her 1977 hypnotic regression, Betty Andreasson was frankly puzzled by her sense of having traveled outward and at the same time inward. “Did you leave this earth and go through space—to another planet?” one of the investigators asked her. “Or did this all happen on this earth?”
Betty: “I left this earth, yes, I left this earth. I believe we were in space, and somehow I believe we were in the center of the earth. Now how can you be in both?”
How indeed? And how can it be that Ezekiel’s chariot, which by any rational accounting is part of the appurtenances of heaven, is reached by a process of descent? Writing nearly sixty years ago, Scholem called this “a very curious and so far unexplained change of phraseology.” Sixty years of research have done nothing to explain it. But we’ve already seen two of Budd Hopkins’s abductees insist on having gone down rather than up to the UFO. Hopkins, though perplexed at their conviction—“How’d you get there, underground?”—still couldn’t shake it.
“I don’t know! I don’t know. We’re down underground.”
There’s evidently something about the experience that, at least on occasion, creates a perception of descent so compelling as to overwhelm all realistic awareness that one ought to be going in the other direction. This was the case for some abductees at the end of the twentieth century—and, it would appear, for the merkavah mystics hundreds of years earlier. The lines, faint and shadowy, begin to be drawn.
THE TERROR OF THE EYES
In 1984 a conference on ancient Jewish mysticism, devoted mostly to the Hekhalot texts, was held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I was invited but couldn’t attend, so I sent my paper to be included in the Proceedings, which came out three years later. I don’t think the editor was very pleased with my contribution. The next time we saw each other, he told me with a sour face that I should have sent it in a plain brown wrapper. He published it anyway.
My paper was entitled “A Sexual Image in Hekhalot Rabbati38 and Its Implications.” Its starting point was a passage describing a harrowing experience that the descender can expect to have at the gate of the “seventh palace.” In that description I’d noticed something odd and uncanny, hard to put my finger on yet seemingly responsible for the visionary’s terror.
Ezekiel’s “living creatures,” says the passage, stand by the gate of the seventh palace. So do the “Ophannim,” Ezekiel’s “wheels,” turned by Jewish tradition into a class of angel. Whenever someone wants to descend to the merkavah, the doors of that gate are opened to him. He goes in and stands on the threshold.
The holy living creatures then look at him with their 512 eyes.39 Each of the eyes of the holy living creatures is split open, the size of a large winnowers’ sieve, and their eyes look as if they race like lightnings. Besides them, there are the eyes of the mighty cherubim and of the Ophannim . . . which look like torches and flaming coals. The man shudders and trembles and recoils; he faints in terror and collapses.
The angelic guards intervene, supporting and comforting the visitor. From above, a trumpet blows. “The holy living creatures cover their faces; the cherubim and the Ophannim turn their faces away.” Elsewhere in the Hekhalot, the terror the heavenly beings evoke is attributed to their size, their weaponry, their propensity for violence. Here, none of these is even mentioned. It’s their weird, enormous eyes that generate the visionary’s dread. As soon as they’re no longer staring at him, his fear is relieved.
What does it mean for an eye to be “split open”? To be comparable to a winnowers’ sieve? I found the clue in another passage, where, at the climax of an erotically charged scene involving God and the living creatures, the heaven “splits open like a sieve” before the intensity of their arousal. Evidence from rabbinic literature and Greco-Roman sources confirmed that the sieve—a concave instrument whose function involved being penetrated—was used in the ancient Mediterranean world as an image for the vulva.
These “eyes” were indeed eyes, yet like those of Whitley Strieber’s visitors they were something more than eyes. They were eyes like those seen by a patient of Freud’s who dreamed of a woman standing by a wooden fence, facing away: “At last she turned round and gave him a terrible look so that he ran off in terror. The red flesh of the lower lids of her eyes could be seen standing out.” The dreamer’s associations to his dream images led back to forbidden childhood peeps between the legs of little girls, and the punishments and threats that followed.40
FIGURE 9. The Kilpeck Sheela—the Sheela-na-gig on the church at Kilpeck, Herefordshire, England. Photo by Nessy-Pic, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sheela-na-gig,_Kilpeck_Church.jpg).
Five hundred twelve such eyes stare at the hapless descender, huge like the vulvas on the medieval sheela-na-gig figures—the grotesquely malformed female nudes, squatting with legs parted and hands tugging open their labia, carved onto churches with the aim (perhaps) of warding off evil through their revulsion and dread. No wonder he “shudders and trembles and recoils, faints in terror and collapses” beneath those eyes and their unblinking gaze. His archaic sexual fears have leaped out from within him,41 unwilled and uncomprehended, to confront him at the entrance to the seventh gate. In this lies the proof that the Hekhalot are no mere paper-and-ink exercises. Beneath their turgid, garbled rhetoric hides an authentic encounter with the unconscious—just as in the UFO abductions. Now, reader, kindly look back to the beginning of chapter 4, where the cover of Strieber’s Communion is reproduced. Hold the book so one of those eyes (preferably the left) is vertical, and the resemblance of its shape to the vulva is unmistakable.
Look deep into it. I think you’ll see what I saw there, one summer day about four years after I sent my “Sexual Image” paper off to the editor, when Communion had come out in paperback. Namely, a smooth cleft within the blackness, running from end to end, top to bottom, one corner to the other.
This was a “split-open” eye like the ones I’d written about, from cryptic Hebrew texts more than a thousand years old. Like the Predionica mask, it was witness to the essential antiquity of those things that emerged into our awareness a little over fifty years ago, when Barney and Betty Hill sank down into their hypnotic trances.
A BROADER CANVAS
As a parallel to the abductions from outside the world of UFOlogy, “merkavah mysticism” hardly stands alone. More than one researcher has noted about the abductions what we’ve observed with regard to the “descent to the merkavah”: they sound a lot like shamanic trance journeys.
The humiliating and sometimes painful ordeals that the abductees undergo on the examination tables—think of the needle through Betty Hill’s navel—are reminiscent of religion scholar Mircea Eliade’s account of shamanic initiation: “dismemberment of the body, followed by a renewal of the internal organs and viscera; ascent to the sky and dialogue with the gods or spirits; descent to the underworld and conversations with spirits and the souls of dead shamans.” Shamans are attended by helping spirits, usually in the form of animals: “bears, wolves, stags, hares, all kinds of birds (especially the goose, eagle, owl, crow, etc.).” The UFO aliens often appear to abductees under the “screen” of animals, like Whitley Strieber’s owl or Kary Mullis’s raccoon.
Strieber, who in his later years would look back on his “visitor” encounters as “a love affair with a goddess”—who intermittently saw in the face of his beloved wife Anne “a flickering shadow of the great-eyed being I’d painted for the cover of Communion”—would have well understood the experience of an early twentieth-century Siberian shaman, visited in his sleep by a spirit
in the form of a beautiful woman, who informed him that she had been the helping spirit of his dead ancestor shamans and that she would teach him to become a shaman. She also proposed to cohabit with him as his wife.42
“I love you,” she told him. “I have no husband now, you will be my husband and I shall be a wife unto you.” He resisted; the spirit was insistent. “If you will not obey me, so much the worse for you. I shall kill you.” Strieber, unlike his shamanic predecessor, wasn’t even offered an option. “On that night in December 1985, the most essentially and powerfully feminine presence I have ever known came to me and had me dragged out of the house and essentially beaten until I realized that she was real and I was not dreaming.”
The parallels are compelling. But no sooner are you persuaded that UFO abductions are a species of shamanism, adapted to an affluent industrial society of the late twentieth century, than another set of associations comes to tempt you in a different direction.
European folklore is rich in tales of humans kidnapped or enticed into fairyland, sometimes mating with their captors. Like the aliens of the abduction tradition, the fairies habitually make away with human children, leaving their own in place as stunted “changelings” (analogous to the “hybrids” of the abduction stories). Not visitors to our planet but our neighbors here from the beginning, “the wee folk” are distinguished from us mainly by their diminutive size. In this, too, they’re like the abducting aliens.
Do the sheela-na-gigs belong somewhere on this broadening canvas? No UFOlogist, as far as I know, has called attention to the “alien” quality of these powerful, repellent sculptures, found on medieval churches mainly in Ireland but throughout Great Britain and continental Europe as well. That fell to feminist scholar Georgia Rhoades. “I first encountered a sheela-na-gig in 1994, in a shop in Avebury, England, a reproduction of the famous Kilpeck Sheela . . . : Extraterrestrial-like, bald, and holding her vulva open with both hands” (the last two features being standard for sheela-na-gigs). I don’t imagine Rhoades was altogether serious about her ET comparison. It’s apt nonetheless.
The purpose of these bizarre figures, what they were intended to signify, what they were in fact taken by their contemporaries to signify—not necessarily the same thing—all these remain unsolved mysteries. They’ve been classed as erotic sculpture, but if erotic means something that evokes feelings of pleasure or excitement or comfort in connection with sex, the word doesn’t seem to fit. On the contrary, they seem designed to uglify sex to the extent possible.
Given the ascetic bent of the medieval Church, it’s at least thinkable that this was the point. But that doesn’t square with occasional hints that sheelas might be treated with reverence: coins deposited in the lap of one sheela, evidently for good luck; the stone of others worn away by caressing fingers; the testimony of late eighteenth-century writers that a sheela might be “vulgarly called the Idol.” An alternative theory makes them protective charms, aimed at warding off malign influences that might threaten the holy places to which they were attached. (A wide range of ethnographic data suggests that, in many cultures, the display of the female genitalia was supposed to have this effect.) It’s unlikely we will ever know for sure.
Most observers have seen the sheelas as depicting old women. But young women and at times even children are also possibilities. Rhoades writes that “some of the characteristics of the Kilpeck sheela are childlike: very large eyes, bald, no breasts”; she adds that “perhaps for some of us, the connection to children is so disturbing that we refuse to see.” A fourth option, even more disturbing, is suggested by the prominence of the ribs on some sheelas:43 that they’re the dead, or on the borderline between the living and the dead.
“Extraterrestrial-like”? Only if UFOs are considered extraterrestrial, which is precisely what I doubt. The habitual baldness of the sheelas connects them with the UFO aliens, at least in the post-Communion era—but going back farther; think of the ETs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind—who are invariably hairless, even though there’s no obvious reason why beings who are humanoid in other respects should be without hair. Nor is the reason for the sheelas’ baldness self-evident.
This parallel, of what seems an unnecessary feature, suggests that both are denizens of the same region of the human unconscious, capable of emerging in the Middle Ages and at the end of the twentieth century. Look again at the image of the Kilpeck sheela earlier in the chapter (figure 9). Then imagine Strieber’s “visitor”—goddess? lover?—with her genitalia in their proper place, not migrated upward to be her eyes. The two, admittedly, are not twin sisters, but they’re at least second cousins. The major differences? The sheela has a broader nose. And the sheela is smiling, not cryptically as on the Communion cover, but merrily and fully.
I begin to feel a tinge of unease. Is our canvas broadening too rapidly, too heedlessly? Are we succumbing to what one Bible scholar has called “parallelomania,” harping on possibly fortuitous resemblances and ignoring differences? Jerome Clark, one of American UFOlogy’s foremost thinkers, would no doubt say so. In a penetrating essay on the “psychosocial hypothesis” in his UFO Encyclopedia, Clark protests that for its advocates, “similarities, however slight, matter more than differences, however substantial. In science one must note similarities, of course, but one must also isolate differences. Psychosocial speculators seem to regard differences as irrelevant.”
As if to illustrate Clark’s point, in my drawing connecting lines between abductions and “descents to the merkavah” I ignored at least one major dissimilarity: The abducting aliens are normally small humanoids. The aliens of the Hekhalot literature are giants of near-cosmic proportions.
Clark’s criticism is well taken. It should function, though, as a blinking yellow “proceed with caution” light, not a steady red “stop.” I learned this as a graduate student in Biblical studies: “similar” and “dissimilar” are not an either/or choice, but a both/and. No two narratives could be more dissimilar than Genesis chapter 1, with its orderly unfolding of creation under the benevolent direction of a single deity, and the creation myth of ancient Babylonia, which has our world come into being through a monster-movie battle between the gods and the creatures of the wild waters. Yet the smooth surface of the Genesis story masks a myth much like that of the Babylonians, which haunted the imaginations of peoples across the ancient Near East, ancient Israel included.
Set Babylonian and Israelite creation accounts side by side, and the dissimilarities will far outweigh the similarities in both number and visibility. But the deep story lies in the similarities. So too with shamanism, “merkavah mysticism,” and their twentieth-century incarnation: the UFO abduction.
What is this “deep story”? Like the six blind sages of the Indian fable, feeling their way around the elephant that in its totality is beyond their power to imagine, we can grasp elements of it. We remain mostly in the dark about what unifies them.
It’s a human story, perhaps not entirely universal, yet with a demonstrated knack for transcending both history and geography. Sex is an important part of it—not, however, experienced as the transient relief of an itch below the navel, but as a living god(dess) into whose hands it’s a fearful thing to fall.44 Often it involves a descent, reported by people who don’t understand why they should be descending to locations normally regarded as celestial yet who can’t deny that this is what’s happening to them.
The place where they’re descending is surely the unconscious, the descent into which is a metaphor but, it would seem, one that naturally occurs to the mind. What they find there will be conditioned by their cultural expectations—hence the “differences”—but with subtle continuities. The abductees are taken into a circular spaceship and examination room. The “descenders to the merkavah” pass through seven concentric “palaces.”
This is a realm where the distinction between human and animal starts to blur. The Predionica mask lies on the borderline between the two; we recall the animal spirits of the shamans, the animals that morph into UFO aliens. Is this an aspect of a more profound fusion: of the “I” with the “not-I,” the alien, the Other? And if so, what of the ultimate not-I: death?
So far, we’ve seen a few hints of death as a theme in this “deep story.” Whitley Strieber’s abducting visitor appears to have been identical in his unconscious mind with his fictional Janet O’Reilly, who in turn is death incarnate. There may be a similar allusion in the skeletal ribs of some sheela-na-gigs. Strieber’s now deceased wife, Anne, sifting through the thousands of letters her husband received in response to Communion, was struck “that the dead and aliens seemed often to show up together in the lives of witnesses.” One day, a few months after Communion’s publication, Strieber stepped into his wife’s office and saw a yellow sheet posted to the wall, listing the recurrent themes she’d gleaned from the letters. At the top of the sheet Anne had written: “This has something to do with what we call death.”
“A MAN IN CHRIST”
One corner of the canvas remains to be filled in. This is the single abduction-like experience from antiquity that’s told in the words of the person who actually underwent it—and who, very strangely, speaks as though it happened to someone else. The experiencer was Saul, “a Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city” (Acts 21:39), better known to posterity as Paul the apostle.
I must boast; there is nothing to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.45
Was Saul/Paul a “merkavah mystic”? Gershom Scholem thought so. Or, to use Scholem’s more nuanced language: “It is obvious that Paul . . . was speaking of an idea with which his readers were familiar, a Jewish conception that he, as well as his readers in Corinth, had brought over into the new Christian community.” This idea was the journey to the merkavah.
True, there was an important difference. The descent to the merkavah was an active undertaking, done on human initiative and against the ferocious opposition of the celestial beings. Paul’s experience comes across as something unwilled, imposed on him. Caught up—the words Paul uses are passive forms of a Greek verb that means to “snatch away, carry off . . . seize hastily, snatch up . . . seize, overpower, overmaster . . . captivate, ravish . . . plunder.”
Or “to abduct.” With himself as abductee.
But why does he speak as though he weren’t the one abducted? As though the abductee is a “man in Christ” from whom he distinguishes himself? (Although, unless the “man in Christ” is himself, his appeal to “this man’s” experience makes no sense.)
The answer lies in what Jeffrey Kripal calls “the ancient human experience of being not one but two”—the feeling (as a Sioux medicine man described it) of “something within us that controls us, something like a second person almost.” Another experiencer recalled: “It was as if I had split into two parts. One part was watching this mantra arise within me, while the other part of me was the mantra.” Paul, too, had a “second person” inside, that he felt as distinct from his familiar ego-self: the unnamed and possibly unnamable “man in Christ.” Equipped with “this man’s” authority, he could “boast,” assert himself to his skeptical, at times openly jeering audience.
For Paul’s relations with his one-time admirers in Corinth had turned sour and nasty. The men and women he’d taught and nurtured had come under the sway of rival preachers, promoting a different and for Paul reprehensible version of the “good news” of the Messiah Jesus. They’d turned against Paul, mocked him as a wimp, powerful with his pen but not much else. No wonder he seems to write with gibbering rage—“I am talking like a madman”—while reeling off his accomplishments in the Messiah’s service. The sufferings he’s endured. The perils he’s faced. The “visions and revelations” when, as the greater him that was the man-in-Christ, he was snatched up into paradise in the third heaven.46
He must have seen something there (“visions”), but he doesn’t tell us what it was. He puts more weight on what he heard: arrheta rhemata, a dazzlingly paradoxical phrase which the Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates as “things that cannot be told” but which literally means “unsayable words.” (If they were unsayable, how could he have heard them? There’s the paradox.) Some nineteen hundred years later Betty Hill was shown a book, written in symbols “nothing like I had ever seen before,” aboard the UFO onto which she’d been abducted. Her captors told her she could take it home with her, but then reneged. Those words, whatever they may have been, remained unsayable and unsaid.
But some abductees have come away with souvenirs of their experience, and so did Paul.
And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:7–9).
For decades and indeed centuries, Bible scholars have debated what this “thorn” might have been—“epilepsy, headaches, sinusitis, eye disease, depression or other malady”—and eventually given the problem up as insoluble. The UFOlogists might have helped them out.
“Implants” have been part of the abduction tradition since 1977, when Betty Andreasson remembered under hypnosis a “little ball with little prickly things on it” embedded in her left nostril. Since then, scores of abductees have lived with the sense of alien matter lodged in the intimate space enclosed by their skin. Whitley Strieber was among them. In May 1989, he experienced something inserted into the upper edge of his left ear; he felt its presence afterward as a lump, occasionally red and sore. Like Paul, he wanted it gone. A physician tried to remove it—he glimpsed it as “a white disk”—only to feel it slip away, move on its own from the top of Strieber’s ear down to the earlobe.
“I reach up,” Strieber wrote years afterward, “I touch my left ear, and I feel, over a quarter of a century later, the same agonizing nakedness and vulnerability I felt when I first realized it was there.”
That the implants—sometimes, yes, thornlike in their appearance—invariably turn out when retrieved and analyzed to be mundane earthly substances, is beside the point. What matters is the subjective experience of alien intrusion into the body, as a sequel to the equally subjective experience of abduction. Both are human experiences, which now reveal themselves as having kept some measure of constancy over nearly two thousand years.
To put it a little differently: the “man in Christ” is caught up into the third heaven. The fleshly Paul is left with the thorn.
Notes
34. Possibly intuited by the two white Mississippians abducted in October 1973 from the dock in the Pascagoula River, where they’d gone to fish and were themselves fished for, by something alien and unearthly. “They could have owned us son, they had us,” the older man afterward said to the younger, their words caught on a hidden police tape recorder. And we’re reminded that this was a part of the country where humans did own other humans and that was still badly scarred by that wrong. The Nation of Islam’s Mother Wheel, and its context in the African American UFO tradition, parallel to the white tradition yet distinct from it, is an area that cries out for exploration. Two scholars in particular, Michael Lieb and Stephen C. Finley, have done pioneering work.
35. Psychotherapists working with the Family Constellations therapy developed by Bert Hellinger have encountered this phenomenon in the children and grandchildren of Nazis and of Holocaust survivors. Joint therapy sessions have brought healing to both.
36. Including that of some early transmitter of the Book of Ezekiel, who fleshed out Ezekiel’s vision of the corrupted, desecrated Jerusalem Temple (chapters 8–11) with a recap of the merkavah vision. He identified the “living creatures” of chapter 1 with the human-faced monsters called “cherubim” who, in sculpted form, stood in the Temple’s Holy of Holies sheltering the Deity with their wings (10:20). In fact, the Temple cherubim bear only a distant resemblance to the “living creatures.” The equation of the two is a guess, probably mistaken, at the meaning of a vision that baffled the ancients as much as it does us.
37. Translated by James R. Davila. (Unless indicated otherwise, all other translations from the Hekhalot are my own.)
38. The Hebrew title of The Greater Treatise of the Palaces.
39. Through a multiplication process drawn from the Jewish exegetical tradition, the originally four-faced “creatures” are credited with a total of 256 faces and, consequently, 512 eyes. This of course makes them all the more frightening.
40. Another “eye” that’s more than an eye: the one that glares at the viewer out of the classic 1958 movie poster for The Astounding She Monster (“A CREATURE FROM BEYOND THE STARS, EVIL . . . BEAUTIFUL . . . DEADLY”). Film critic Tim Lucas describes the poster (easily found on the web by Googling “albert kallis she monster”) as “a forceful evocation of female allure, exuding luxuriant unknowability and power.” The She Monster stands voluptuous in a skintight leotard, dwarfing the male figure who crumples in fiery death-rays from two flying disks, his rifle jutting upward from a spot near his crotch. Her face is “withheld in mystery except for a single mascara-limned eye and arched brow. It seems to glow, that eye, from beneath a lioness mane of orange-yellow hair, burning forth between upheld forearms . . .” Lucas might have added that the eye is tilted as far as possible toward the vertical, located nearly on the axis running down between her breasts. Turn the picture upside down, imagine the She Monster’s elbows are in fact her knees; the upward displacement of that “eye” will be apparent.
41. Like the consuming flames in another Hekhalot passage, understood in a rare burst of psychological insight to come out of the visionary himself: “The one who looks upon it, or glimpses or sees it,/his eyeballs are seized by pulsations, / and his eyeballs emit and send forth flames of fire, / and they kindle and burn him up. / The fire that comes out of the man who looks kindles him and burns him” (tr. Elliot R. Wolfson).
42. The description is James Davila’s.
43. Like the one embedded in the town wall of Fethard, County Tipperary, Ireland, featured along with the Kilpeck sheela in the Wikipedia article “Sheela na gig.”
44. Paraphrasing Hebrews 10:31.
45. 2 Corinthians 12:1–5 (RSV). This portion of the composite text stitched together as the “second epistle to the Corinthians” seems to have been written approximately 55 CE, which would place the experience it describes—not, apparently, to be equated with Paul’s famous road-to-Damascus vision of Acts 9:1–9—around the year 41.
46. Ancient Jewish cosmology envisioned multiple heavens arching, dome-like, over the flat disk of the earth. The usual number was seven, possibly a distant echo of the Greek scientific theory of seven planetary spheres enclosing a spherical earth. Three-heaven models, however, occasionally crop up, and Paul was apparently referring to the highest heaven in one of these.
