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Entheogenic Shamanism

 

Up the Appian Way, Cowardly Temptations, Klaus Kinski’s Fury, Natural Hierarchies, and an After-Death Message

As I watched the Atlantean islanders in those last few centuries going about their affairs and completely unaware of what was soon to befall them, I had a moment quite common among many observer angels. It was similar to, but not quite the same as, the state of mind I’ve heard my ward describe as déjà vu. Unlike that more ephemeral effect generally taking no more than a second or two, my moment was long-lasting, and went hand-in-hand with a sense of collective dread. The effect certainly wasn’t ephemeral.

I was surprised at the intensity of my feelings. I’d seen catastrophes enough before (although I admit I’ve tried to avoid them too), so I had to assume it was changes in my own emotional body that must have been allowing me a deeper response.

I had been aware for some time how I’d been gradually more and more affected by what I’d been observing. It felt as though my emotional body was a balloon being stretched in every direction.

Angels are not particularly sentimental by nature—which is a blessing, because what we observe going on among the mortals in our everlasting lives would tear us to pieces if we had the capacity to become overemotional or nostalgic. That was how life has always been for us. And no doubt it still remains that way for those of my colleagues remaining aligned with MA and who maintain their posts on worlds not subject to the angelic revolution.

Yet I could feel this gradual coarsening of my emotions. It was a curious experience, quite unlike anything I might have imagined. Whereas formerly if I were to witness a human tragedy, a hut burning down, for example, with an extended family trapped inside, I would take note, count, and care for those leaving their bodies as my order requires and turn away unaffected to fulfill my next task.

Now I was not only inclined to approach far closer to an event like a hut full of burning people, but, because I was no longer tasked with attending their ascending souls, I found I was developing an unpleasant fascination with the emotional features of the human death processes. It’s not unlike the macabre human urge I see acted out these days on the highways of the world: slowing down for a better view of an accident. I too found myself wanting to test the intimations of a momentary mortality. These feelings drew me, and yet simultaneously they repulsed me.

Previously, when I’d felt danger approaching—as with Caligastia’s war, or Lemuria’s final downfall—I’d found good reasons to be off-planet to avoid the worst of the devastation. This time I was determined to resist that cowardly temptation, or at least resist it for as long as possible.

However, there was no reason for me to stay around agonizing unnecessarily, given the event I was anticipating was still seven hundred years in the future. Besides, I’d spent so much time focusing on Atlantis and the human developments in that part of the world that I realized I needed to broaden my scope.

It was still so new to me to make such a decision, to travel on my own intention rather than allowing myself to be drawn by necessity to this or that situation. I could still feel that original magnetic draw, but now I could override the impulse, or make the choice myself, independently. This I did when I turned my face eastward, back to the territories in the Middle East dominated by Prince Caligastia and his gangs of midwayers.

And what a social and racial mash-up I found there!

I’m no cultural ethnologist, but even I could see how the genetic strains of a number of the different races of humanity were gathering, or colliding in some cases, throughout the eastern end of the Mediterranean trough. I understood there’d been a flowering of civilization in the Nile Valley. Egypt had been benefiting for well over ten thousand years from a constant influx of the more lively and artistic mixes of the bearers of violet blood emigrating west from Mesopotamia.

Those with a healthy dose of violet blood tended to be a gentle, peaceful people. I knew they’d been threatened over the centuries back in Mesopotamia by the local tribes who regularly swept down out of the hills, sacking the town that lay between the two great rivers. The inhabitants would wisely move out ahead of the invasions and set their camps well beyond the reach of the aggressors. When the warriors had stolen enough, and drunk and feasted enough, and wrecked enough to have gorged their hunger for violence and mayhem, they would grow bored and hanker for their women and for their lives at home.

After the warriors disappeared back into the hills, the citizens of the town would quietly return and patiently rebuild their dwellings and their lives. Until the next invasion. Understandably, this created a steady level of attrition over the years as the young and ambitious set out on the long journey across the increasingly desertified Arabian Peninsula to the Nile Valley.

There came a time when the population of the town between the two rivers had shrunk to barely a few thousand individuals. Those who remained were unwilling or unable to risk the hazardous trail across the desert. They were also just as unwilling and incapable of taking up arms against the invading tribes. They had long considered the invaders an inferior race, and they believed it beneath their dignity to fight with them. So by the early part of the fourteenth millennium their once thriving town set on the fertile ground and watered by the two rivers lay deserted and in ruins, the last of its population scattered far and wide. Some ended up on the Indian subcontinent; others settled throughout the Persia and Afghanistan region; the bulk moved up northward, some turning west toward Egypt to join their predecessors. Still others bravely made it through the mountains into the heart of Europe.

Some of these migrations took centuries, while others took thousands of years for humans to creep across the landscape. The ice was steadily retreating, creating more and more territory available for human habitation. The ingenious among them were busy devising ways of surviving in the chilly temperatures.

The town between the rivers crumbled still further, centuries of sandstorms burying the ruined remains well beneath the surface. Millennia later, other towns and then other cities would unknowingly be built on top of the buried ruins in a cycle of destruction that has become a continuing pattern of human development. Although the final downfall of Mesopotamian culture in the fourteenth millennium was not the first collapse of a once successful civilization, as it was close to the edge of the modern era, the tragedy of its destruction has become one of the more dominating imprints in the World Mind. It reinforced the growing impression that however god-fearing or successful a human community became, it would be bound to end in disaster.

When I arrived in Egypt it was quickly apparent I had misjudged the state of the country’s development. It was woeful; quite different from what I believed to be occurring in this so-called center of learning.

Of course I already knew the damage the Atlantean pirates had inflicted had undermined any chance of an effective Egyptian oversight along the Atlantic coastline, but I hadn’t expected the state of decay I would find in the towns along the Nile Valley. I could see the river had recently altered its course as a result of a mild earthquake, leaving the towns, in some cases, as many as thirty-five miles from the river’s new course. The towns had once been entirely dependent on the waters of the Nile for fishing, as well as for travel, for the transport of goods, and, most importantly, for the regularity of the floods that watered the crops. These towns and settlements were now crumbling back into the desert.

I also learned there’d been countless years of famine in the south, and the Saharan people had been pouring into overstressed Egyptian towns for almost a century and a half. The boundaries of the towns had already been extended, with the influx of natives from the south and west squatting in a wide swath around the town walls.

The river changing its course (in a single night, or so I overheard) had evidently been the last straw. Life in the towns had already become intolerable for most native Egyptians, and they had left for the large coastal cities well before this most recent disaster with the river. Order had completely broken down and new conflicts had emerged. These conflicts were between the gods and goddesses (read, rebel midwayers) that the desert people had brought with them and the midwayers who were well established as divinities in the early Egyptian pantheon.

In the larger coastal communities the priests of the Egyptian gods and goddesses still maintained their power—although it had been much diminished. Yet the violence erupting in the southern regions, fueled by the conflicts between the rebel midwayers, was bound to move north sooner or later and disrupt life in the coastal cities.

However, as I’ve observed occurring among communities of human beings when the social order breaks down and people flail around not knowing which way to turn, or who and what to trust, or in whom to place their faith, sometimes out of all this darkness and strife will emerge a point of light. Often it’ll be a new approach to understanding the human condition and the ways of the cosmos. A Jesus Christ will emerge in the midst of a brutal Roman occupation; a Copernicus, when learning is buried beneath centuries of superstition; or a Nikola Tesla, when the world has slumbered in electrical darkness for three millennia.

In this case, though, it wasn’t a person or a creed; it wasn’t an enlightened leader or a loyal midwayer; it wasn’t a prophet or some religion’s savior. In this case these were far more ancient entities who had been lurking at the very edge of human life for as long as men and women foraged and fossicked around in the forests for grubs. These entities were the plant spirits who spoke loudest through certain mushrooms, or through the ergot fungus, or the bark of an iboga tree. They were entities who would terrify some people and entrance others, carrying a few to the highest heavens.

These plant entheogens became known as the Plants of the Gods. They were used in every culture throughout the ancient world and had many names, yet in all cases they reflected something of the sacred. The few individuals who found themselves drawn to working with these plant entheogens became the shamans and the healers of their communities. Thus, over the millennia, these shamans and their sacred plants spread their subtle influence all the way across the prearchaic world, from Mongolia to India, throughout the Middle East, and all the way across North Africa.

In many ways the shaman became a necessary antidote to the repressive influence of the rebel midwayers working through their compliant priests. This gulf is the same gap you’ll find between priests and shamans, which continues to this day in communities that still have a few shamans. Mein Host has had the chance to observe firsthand the intensity of the hatred and envy underpinning this gulf when he heard a pleasant and a well-meaning Hindu priest in Bali expressing his loathing of a powerful local shaman. Interestingly enough, my ward reports that on meeting this particular shaman, he saw no sign the healer held the Hindu priest in such a bad light.

In some of these ancient cultures traditions arose that coupled the significant yearly rituals with the mass consumption of an entheogenic brew and a guided tour of the underworld. In other communities the shaman became the one to take the sacred brew; thus it became only the shaman who spoke with the spirit of the plant. It was the shaman who used the plant’s visions to guide the hunters, who assisted the dead in finding the light, and who could reassure the living of an afterlife to come. The shaman’s credibility stems from the depth of his or her knowledge of the transcendent realms.

I have heard it said by more than one shaman that the plant spirits have told them of a wonderful secret they’ve held for their human cousins-in-the-flesh. These shamans say the plant spirits have been the recipients of the informational waves that ripple regularly through the ether, supporting and illuminating the flowering of consciousness in the higher primate brain/mind connection. It was the vibrational frequency of these incoming information waves, the ones originally intended for the mortal mind, that were now being diverted to the plant realm after the Lucifer uprising.

“It is the spirit of the sacred plants who comes forward when the need is there,” an entranced shaman announced when I encountered him in the midastral realms. “It has always been so. They are our allies and guides. We ignore them at our peril.”

As I considered in retrospect this claim that the wisdom of the plant spirit appears when the need is present, the most recent occurrence of this would have to be the almost simultaneous development of the atomic bomb in the early 1940s and Dr. Albert Hofmann’s synthesis of lysergic acid diethylamide from the ergot fungus.

There was a resonance here, I thought, with that period in the mid-to-late fourteenth millennium, when it seemed once again that another human culture was drifting into decay and disillusion. The general ambient psychic atmosphere I experienced in Egypt when I first arrived there was akin to what I’ve felt accompanying my ward over the latter part of the twentieth century. The fear and distrust generated in human beings by cruel and manipulative midwayers masquerading as divinities (which is why the ancients were always so desperate to appease and propitiate their gods) was not altogether dissimilar to the fear and the sense of personal impotence produced by the constant threat of thermonuclear annihilation.

I’ve observed that the causes of individual powerlessness in the face of an overwhelming and pitiless threat, whether the threat is a rain of atom bombs or a Zeus-like creature with a short temper and a free hand with thunderbolts, are of less relevance to a concerned human being than the challenge of regaining personal power.

One of the problems humans have in facing the concept of “regaining personal power” is that most mortals are not aware they have any personal power, beyond the most rudimentary, in the first place. I’ve heard it said among humans that it’s necessary to lose something of profound value in order to treasure it sufficiently to wish to regain it.

In the narrative I’m following of my ward’s life he is at the stage of having given away his personal power to Mary Ann and the Process and isn’t yet aware of what he has done, or how serious his situation really is. Nor is he aware of the dues yet to be paid.

*  *  *

My ward set off in a taxi with Donyale Luna and his old friend Peter, now Father Malachi—his Processean pair for the evening’s outing—to meet this mysterious friend of Donyale’s in his villa up the Appian Way.

The taxi driver was proudly proclaiming how ancient the Appian Way was. “The oldest road in the world,” he’d told them. “We call it the Queen of Roads. It’s long, long road!”

“When was it built? What century?” my ward leaned forward to ask. The three of them were crushed together in the backseat, so in reaching forward he brushed awkwardly against Donyale’s body. I heard him say later that the physical contact was like a burst of exotic scents and that the air in the cab suddenly filled with her musk.

“Maybe three century, four century . . .,” the driver mumbled. Surely he should know the facts more exactly, if he was so proud of his Queen of Roads.

Malachi asked, “BCE or CE? Before Christ, yes?”

“Si, si.” For some reason that I couldn’t discern, the driver’s voice had taken on an impatient tone. “What I said . . . maybe four century before Jesus,” and then his tone became softer again; the thought of Jesus must have touched him. “But it’s long road . . . long, long road.”

My ward leaned back again as the cab bumped along the oversize cobblestones of the oldest road in the world. Out of the window could be seen old trees draped over stone walls, then an ancient villa, then a stern line of cypress trees, then it was wood gates and churches, and then more churches. All this flickered briefly in the taxi’s headlights as the car jolted along the narrow road.

“Like being in an old black-and-white Italian film,” Father Malachi said, and they all laughed because that is exactly what it looked like. Yet, the laughter had an edge of nervous excitement to it. Donyale, ever secretive, hadn’t yet told the others the identity of this mysterious person they were about to descend upon.

If the Appian Way was threatening to be a “long, long road,” I imagined all three were mightily relieved when the cab finally lurched to a halt after a mere half an hour.

Sliding and wriggling their bodies out of the backseat of the tiny Fiat taxi, they stretched their long limbs. Malachi was well over six feet tall, as were most of the senior male Processeans. He was more thickly built than my ward, or Donyale of course, so the ride had been more of a squeeze for him.

Malachi had a broad face with high cheekbones set under a heavy brow, a visage that might have looked vaguely threatening if it wasn’t for the twinkle in the man’s eyes. Occasionally his face would crinkle with smile creases, and he’d throw back his large head with a great guffaw of laughter. His hair, beard, and mustache at that point in his life were dark, and his long hair tended to be uncombed and curled around his head and shoulders. Together with his black cloak and Process uniform, this gave his whole ensemble the saturnine gloss of dark matter. In short, Father Malachi was a fine-looking specimen of Irish manhood, even if he did have something of the brigand about him.

Yet for all that, Malachi has remained one of the kindest, most gentle, most viscerally averse to expressions of violence, and one of the most thoughtful and gifted of my ward’s close friends. And certainly among the most humorous!

His friendship with my ward stretched back for a few years before they’d both joined the Process. Thus have they now been the best of friends for more than fifty years. They’d first met when they shared an apartment with four others in London in the early 1960s. This was when Mein Host was studying architecture and Malachi was working as a time and motion expert, measuring and assessing worker efficiency for a major English food corporation colloquially known as “Joe Lyons.”

Two floors beneath the London apartment in which they had lived, the blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson was staying with Giorgio Gomelsky, who is known for being an early manager of the Rolling Stones. Giorgio was a sometime manager of the Yardbirds and of Brian Auger and the Trinity as well as some other progressive jazz-rock bands. Giorgio was a farsighted man who has long been recognized by those in the know as one of the seminal influences on progressive rock and jazz fusion—and yet, who had chosen to remain behind the scenes. Much later, in 1989, Giorgio produced a successful benefit concert in New York for the subversive Czech group the Plastic People of the Universe. This not only made the band more widely known in the West but has been credited for helping inspire the Czech Velvet Revolution later that same year.

Malachi and my ward are both musicians who enjoy jamming together—Malachi playing keyboard to Mein Host’s acoustic guitar—yet neither had chosen to try to make a career out of music . . . let me pause for a moment: My ward wants to assure me he never played well enough to become a professional musician.

“Besides,” he’s telling me, “I’ve always wanted to go on actually enjoying playing music. If I had to do it professionally I can’t imagine actually enjoying being a success and having to play the same damn song a thousand and one times. Or, if I failed—a far more likely prospect—I’m not sure I’d know when to quit . . . I’d go on plugging at it forever and ever . . . and then I expect I’d start resenting the music.

“I love music and still play for the pleasure of it, so I’m glad for the good sense of my young self for not falling for the glitz of the music scene. As far as I know, Malachi feels much the same.”

So it was that Malachi and my ward would sometimes find themselves downstairs hanging out with Giorgio and listening to Sonny Boy Williamson wailing on his harp, getting the most otherworldly range of sounds out of a simple, single-key, blues harmonica.

Malachi has always been a man very much of his own mind—I’ve heard him been called stubborn more than once. Yet he had been swept up by the Process much as my ward had been when he’d originally volunteered to be Mary Ann and Robert’s guinea pig while they were perfecting their new system of psychotherapy. Malachi had first met Mary Ann and Robert through Mein Host, and, although he had joined up a few years later than his friend, he had risen rapidly through the ranks. As an Irishman with the gift of the blarney, Malachi, who was both erudite and extremely funny, had proved his worth as editor of PROCESS magazine. In this he worked alongside Mein Host, its art director. The pair knew each other so well that they were able to work remarkably smoothly together despite being so different in temperament.

Let’s follow these three unlikely characters as they entered the courtyard to the mysterious host’s villa through the creaking, wooden double doors.

And, yes, they were a most unlikely sight!

After having unwedged themselves from the taxi, the three of them regrouped. With Donyale in her flowing white silk in the middle of the two black-garbed Processeans, it gave the trio the momentary look of an immense, squished Oreo cookie. They appeared to have fused together during the bumpy cab ride in a similar way to certain saturated solutions that sometimes crystallize when physically shaken. They seemed to be moving as one person in slow motion toward the front door of the villa. The place looked far smaller than the two Processeans had been led to believe—smaller and a great deal darker.

Donyale yanked hard on the bellpull and paused. She was still holding the chain and looking at the others with an amused expression on her beautiful face, as somewhere deep inside they must have heard the stuttering of a bell. Another yank on the bellpull from Donyale and yes, they were sure of it. They straightened up and waited . . . and waited . . . and waited.

Just as Donyale reached again for the bellpull, the curve of her high brow furrowing with concern, a loud buzzing issued from an archaic intercom set in a side wall, which they apparently hadn’t noticed. Odd that! Donyale must have been there before. A harsh, metallic voice ordered them in, and the intercom screeched electronically at them before clicking off as suddenly as it had buzzed on.

The hallway was dark and led to the left, directly into a large, square room with a ceiling some twenty feet high and ringed on three sides by a balcony that led to the upstairs rooms. The carpeted floor of the large room was four steps lower than that of the hallway, its wood parquet flooring forming a low platform across the end of the room closest to the entrance.

The room itself was dark, and, from what they could make out in the gloom, it was sparsely furnished. All the woodwork of the paneling and balustrade was stained dark brown with age, making it feel unused and uncared for. It was a room that didn’t invite people in.

The three of them were standing side by side on the platform, clearly unwilling to take any further steps. There was no one there. The place appeared empty. I’m sure that was strange for them, although perhaps not so much for Donyale, who must have had some idea of what was happening.

Malachi leaned forward slightly and caught my ward’s eye, his formidable brow wrinkling with amused concern.

There was then a loud click, rendered all the louder by the sullen silence of the place, and a light flicked on up on the balcony at the far side of the room. There was still no one to be seen. The three of them made no movement.

Was this as puzzling for them as it was for me? Shouldn’t Donyale call out to the host? Whatever could she be waiting for? Whomever this mystery person was going to be, he certainly wanted to make a dramatic entrance!

As this thought occurred to me there was a sudden movement upstairs, and then appeared a figure dressed entirely in white, his face limned into shadow from the light behind him, making it unrecognizable. He didn’t speak but stepped forward grasping the balustrade with both hands, his arms spread wide, his body leaning forward like a gargoyle on the facade of a Gothic cathedral.

It was only then that the two Processeans got a glimpse of his face. It was distorted into a hideous mask of fury (and this was no metaphor; his face could have been the template for a mask of a Chinese demon). He looked from one to another of his guests, who remained standing below him, still in a line at the entrance.

Then he spoke. No, he didn’t exactly speak. Right off the top the man was shouting, screaming harsh and bitter words as spittle sprayed out of the corners of his mouth, catching the light like falling sparks. His guttural roar was incomprehensible. Was he speaking English? German? Was it Italian? Was he directing his fury at Donyale? At my ward? At all three of them? He didn’t appear to be that selective.

Was this all a terrifying practical joke? Was it the Roman way of greeting strangers? Was the man certifiably mad? Was he rehearsing for the role of a wrathful deity?

But no. Surely he would have stopped by now had it been a joke or a rehearsal. The shouting continued unabated. No one could get a word in; no one was even trying. There was no point. The words, if that’s what they were, were pouring out in an unbroken torrent of ferocity, slashing at the ether with thoughtforms of swords and daggers.

Donyale and the two Processeans stood as though pinned to the wall by those daggers as the tirade continued. I believe it was at about this point in the mystifying drama that Mein Host finally realized who it was raging at them.

Had Klaus Kinski stopped there, they all might have been able to laugh it off. Both Processeans were familiar with some of Klaus Kinski’s movies and knew the actor made no secret of his emotional instability.

But, of course, the man’s fury couldn’t, or wouldn’t, allow him to cease. He was so entirely carried away by the grandeur of his outrage, so consumed by a madness that would have him railing as uncontrollably at Werner Hertzog (and everybody else within earshot) some years later, and so clearly admiring of his display of passion that he’d no intention of stopping. Or indeed, he may have been so possessed by his demons that stopping was out of his control altogether.

As the three of them edged out of dark, embittered room, Kinski’s raving curses followed them through the door and may well have been continuing as they picked up another taxi back into the city.

Donyale was strangely quiet as they bumped back along the Appian Way. She was a very cool customer. At the time it didn’t appear that she’d been in the slightest bit perturbed by Kinski’s unaccountable outburst.

But, then, she would have had to know something the Processeans did not! And it didn’t look like she was going to tell them the truth just yet.

*  *  *

The emergence of shamanism—and I’m using this term to cover a wide variety of practices centered on personal communication with the spirit world—in the fifteenth and fourteenth millennia was really a reemergence of a far more ancient series of beliefs. Over the many previous millennia shamans had appeared intermittently in different places all over Asia before getting chased out of their communities, as they frequently were, by the local priests who’d fallen under the influence of Prince Caligastia’s rebel midwayer. Yet there have been shamans as long as there have been souls courageous enough to work with sacred power plants to explore the psychic and spiritual realms.

Shamans were afforded great respect in the later period of the Lemurian civilization, and because they were considered essential to a healthy community many of them emigrated with other islanders on the Pleiadean arks. However, well before the Islands of Mu had been threatened with destruction, the community elders encouraged a number of their local shamans to accompany the various Lemurian diasporas across the globe. Some of the more influential shamans settled in Mongolia and Tibet, and you will still find echoes of Lemurian shamanism in the pre-Buddhist practice of Bon. The long-lasting belief in the Divine King, for example, stemmed directly from the Lemurians’ profound love and devotion they felt for Vanu. While the more profane and corrupt tyrants, those who’ve become convinced of their own divinity, owe more to Prince Caligastia’s influence and his spurious claim of being the God of this World.

Ironically, Vanu, wherever he currently is, must surely be boiling mad at his posthumous promotion to godhood. In his view it would have been a blasphemy that he absolutely forbade all through his long life on Earth. However, after MA recalled Vanu and Amadon and they mysteriously disappeared from Lemuria some twenty millennia earlier, cults had grown up around both of them. They would come to be known and worshipped as the Divine Twins in much of the American continent as well as in many other parts of the world.

Thus it was that this erroneous belief in god-kings was spread far and wide following in the wake of the Lemurian missionaries. Vanu and Amadon would have been shocked at the way this unfortunate misconception has been so brutally abused down through history. The concept of the god-king has exerted such a hold over the popular human imagination that it has weathered the horrors of megalomaniacal Roman emperors—such as Nero and Caligula, as well as many other self-anointed god-kings like France’s Louis XIV—to persist into the modern era as the Divine Right of Kings.

The root of this delusion is not hard to diagnose. It is deeply coded into the animal aspect of human behavior. As with any creature that lives in a pack or a social group there will be a natural hierarchy based on strength and/or intelligence. Pack leaders become clan leaders become tribal leaders become national leaders become the tyrants, kings, premiers, and presidents—some of whom may well still believe themselves divine. Or, the delusion’s more hypocritical version, a leader who claims to be representing God’s wishes when taking a nation into war merely to further the leader’s own personal ambition.

In fact, with the exception of Adam and Eve’s attempts to create and develop a well-balanced people, there has never been in the history of the world a truly egalitarian society—as such an ideal is currently understood. This should indicate that such hierarchies with their leaders and followers are an unavoidable factor of human social development. Take courage, therefore, that the tyrant’s days are passing, and know that Adam and Eve’s example, brief though it was, contained all the seeds of an ideal egalitarian society.

In fact, such a shift in viewpoint would have a significant impact on how different human societies attempt to manage themselves. Rather than the painful contortions that societies go through in trying to introduce greater equality—whether racial, sexual, or economic, or any other of the social injustices—would it not be far more appropriate to place the emphasis on a thorough training of potential leaders and on more effective methods of choosing them?

I’m sure the patient reader will be relieved to hear that I have no intention of pursuing this somewhat simplistic analysis any further. I feel no need to state the obvious, because the facts of social inequity are now clear enough for all to see. Besides, a program such as the one I would suggest is probably inconceivable under the current political circumstances.

I’ll simply make one final point: When you pass over to the higher realms you will find a hierarchy present among all celestial orders and ascending mortals. However, these are natural hierarchies. Each being is precisely where they can function at their highest potential. There is no competitive fight among them for the top spot. The competition, if there is competition, is with the self; to continually rise to the challenge of perfecting the self.

The reason I’ve taken this small digression is to suggest an intriguing similarity existing among the fading of the Nile Valley power in the fourteenth millennium; the rather more rapid fall of the Soviet empire; and the current problems facing the American hegemony. In these cases—and every other case too—such societies can survive and continue to thrive only when they have developed a way of ensuring the selection of a more enlightened leadership.

However, enlightened leaders tend to spring from the more mature cultures in which one of the general principles would be an emphasis on the perfection of the self. This is not mere narcissism but a far deeper impulse present in all beings—unless that impulse has been otherwise discouraged or repressed. It’s in constantly reaching for goodness, truth, and beauty, both in the self and the self ’s surroundings, that mortals grow in spirit.

Having just written this, I find I’m bound to question the Lucifer Rebellion in light of the claims that all sentient beings reach for perfection at the ongoing invitation of the Creator.

If Lucifer, Satan, and other key players in the angelic rebellion have been dismissed as insane by MA’s agents, and the rebellion itself regarded as a product of that insanity, then what could have become of this impulse toward perfection among the protagonists? Am I to believe the urge toward goodness and truth was suddenly swamped by this so-called insanity? In all of them? Simultaneously? Surely not.

Is it then reasonable to suggest that the original success of the rebellion in attracting so many angels to its cause was also simply the result of Lucifer’s insanity? Or as MA’s records state, that we angels were dazzled by Lucifer’s rhetoric? Or that we were unable to discern that we were being led astray by the leaders we’d long respected and revered?

I’m sure I don’t need to highlight the arrogance of these assumptions and the inherent contradiction in suggesting we angels might have been dazzled by the brilliance of our leaders who they claim were insane. I don’t find insanity dazzling or particularly brilliant!

Although I’ve previously noted that I believed Prince Caligastia had been showing signs of a growing mental instability, as demonstrated by his claims of divinity, insanity is simply too simplistic, as well as inflammatory, a label with which to dismiss Lucifer and his revolution.

If the rebellion and its leading protagonists could be so conveniently dismissed, then doesn’t this suggest there can be little or nothing to be learned from such an act of insanity and its consequences?

I’m sure you can tell by now it’s thoughts such as these that take me back to one of my central themes in this narrative: Was there a level of intentionality and meaning to the Lucifer Rebellion that transcended the social and political exigencies of the Local System? Was there a larger drama being played out, which, for its own reasons, needed a rebellion? Were Lucifer and Satan and the other rebel leaders merely pawns in light of the designs of an even higher agency?

If it is true, as MA claims, that the values being specifically studied and displayed in this Local Universe are “mercy and forgiveness,” then doesn’t Lucifer’s revolution and its many consequences, at the very least, provide the most fertile turf for the practice of mercy and forgiveness? And, if mercy and forgiveness are to have any real meaning, then surely it is axiomatic that the forgiveness and mercy needs to be open to the most unforgivable acts and the most merciless beings.

Given the significance of the Local Universe tone of mercy and forgiveness (with each of the 700,000 Local Universes exploring and displaying its own particular tone), then a rebellion among the angels would ensure an appropriate arena for such profound acts of compassion.

I hasten to say I’m simply reviewing the circumstances of the revolution and what may have been behind it. I am not excusing or justifying any of the rebel protagonists or their acts. That is up to each one of us to assess in the larger historical context, given our individual level of self-awareness.

This narrative is the way I’m choosing to examine the past, to untie the knots of my many misconceptions, and to understand the hidden dynamics that lay beneath the rebellion and the past 203,000 years of chaos, violence, and the continuing injustices and social inequity on this planet.

As a Watcher—a rebel angel who has been declared an enemy subsequent to the rebellion—I can only remind MA’s local agents of Christ’s admonition for us to love our enemies.

So saying, I rest my case.

As I watched the spread of entheogenic shamanism reach the Nile Valley at the same time that the priests were losing their power over the people, I feared for the worst. I’d seen so many shamans killed or chased away by priests or followers of different midwayer cults, and I knew the Egyptian priests were facing a crisis.

What I didn’t expect was what the priests actually did.

The priests agreed between themselves that rather than opposing the shamans, who were already starting to usurp their influence, the priests opened up to them and chose to learn from them.

Thus it was from shamans that the Egyptian pantheon and its cosmology became enriched by their far deeper practical experience with the subtle realms. The priests, being of a generally priestly nature, were not generally willing to follow the shamans in their entheogenic trances but instead constructed a virtual underworld based on what they were told by the shamans returning from their out-of-body voyages. This was one of the few times over the course of early human history that I’ve observed the priest class of any religion choose to assimilate, rather than suppress, a rival system of belief.

Yet just as there was a revival of culture in the Nile Valley due to this fortuitous entwining of psychic and spiritual influences, a new series of natural disasters was about to descend on this troubled world.

*  *  *

Donyale knew perfectly well why she had dragged Father Malachi and Father Micah along to Klaus Kinski’s villa. She may even have counted on the actor’s absurdly overheated reaction. She might even have staged the whole event for reasons of her own.

However, these were not the ideas Mein Host was entertaining in the cab back to Rome, as Malachi and he bantered together about their bizarre encounter, hoping, I imagine, that Donyale would tell them what all that shouting was about.

“Good God! I’ve never been screamed at like that before!” My ward was saying, fishing for an explanation and merely getting a sly smile from Donyale and a squeeze on his arm before she whispered in admiration, “No one does anger like Kinski.”

“You think it was put on?” Malachi wondered.

Donyale seemed to pause uncertainly. “It may have been . . . I couldn’t tell. I went back and forth on it . . . but, yeah, I feel all in all it was genuine. Put it this way—I’ve never known anyone so consumed with his anger, who just went on and on. I didn’t get a word of it . . . you?”

“I dunno, there was something very strange about the whole business,” Malachi was saying thoughtfully. I saw Donyale give my ward another nudge and the suggestion of a wink. I could feel her genuine affection in the gesture.

But what was it she was trying to get across? I was as puzzled at that point as was Mein Host, who, from the look of his emotional body, was a little more smitten with Donyale than he was admitting to himself. They’d become extremely close over the previous few days, and no young, healthy lad could be blamed for being flattered by the attentions of such an exotically beautiful creature. She had respected his vow of celibacy, yet as was to frequently occur with other young women under similar circumstances, Donyale had let her love and affection for him flow more freely because there were no second-chakra complications.

This loving attention was bound to have affected my ward, but I was pleased to note he wasn’t carried away with the emotion. It would not have been appropriate. Yet he has remained puzzled to this day about this entire scenario ever since it occurred more than forty years ago.

However, one of the benefits of his collaboration with a discarnate angel is that I can access this kind of information if his interest is genuine and if Donyale’s permission for said access were to be given.

(After checking this out I find Donyale willing, anxious even, to cooperate. She wants to tell the truth.)

As it turned out, after Donyale died in 1979 one of the issues of continuing concern during her afterlife review was the way she’d used my ward to further her agenda. Here is Donyale speaking for herself.

It wasn’t how I hoped it would turn out. All I wanted was to provoke a reaction from Kinski. I thought I was in love with him, but what a monster! I couldn’t get him to notice me. When I first saw Father Micah at the party I thought he’d be a good person to make Kinski jealous. I didn’t know Malachi was going to come along as well, although it sure got a reaction from Klaus.

So, yes, I did set out to make friends with Micah, but then I started really liking the guy. It was lovely—we felt like the same person sometimes. We got so close, so fast . . . I’d never met anyone like him. We could talk, you know . . . about real things. I think I kinda loved him.

Then, naturally, I started getting all guilty. Micah was a nice guy; I didn’t want to do this to him. I didn’t know how Kinski was going to react. I thought he’d probably get angry . . . but I didn’t know he’d go crazy like that.

I was going to confess what I was trying to do. Maybe Micah might have gotten off on meeting Kinski. But then Malachi turned up and I reckoned that with both of them there Kinski wouldn’t try anything. It was sad; it was awful to get yelled at like that, ’specially because they didn’t know why they were there.

I wanted it to be a surprise for Micah . . . I thought he and Kinski might get along after he’d cooled down. We’d talked about reincarnation and life on other planets . . . Kinski would have been interested. But I realize I’m still justifying dragging Micah, yes and Malachi too, into Kinski’s hell without telling them anything. Or warning them. Or telling them the truth afterward. That’s what I’ve been feeling bad about.

So, Georgia, if I may rely on your finding a way of conducting my apologies for my behavior as well as expressing my gratitude for my brief time with your ward. He will be surprised to hear my knowing him became an important turning point in my human life. He was the first person to really see me, to see through the beauty and stuff. He didn’t seem to want anything from me, and he kinda knew I was different. It didn’t freak him out. He was different too. He knew it! [Coauthor’s note: He didn’t! Not really!]

I felt awful, setting him up like that. And when I did get to be with Kinski, that was awful too. In the end he actually threw me and my friends out of the villa. Imagine that! We’ve made up since Kinski passed over, so that’s cool. I just had this one matter to settle up with Father Micah, and, now that I’ve done that, I can move on. Because I imagine this matter was of more concern to me than to him, I hope his forgiveness will be forthcoming.

“Well, of course it is, Donyale,” I hear my coauthor say on completing that sentence. “It was good knowing you too Donyale, however briefly. And I look forward to meeting you again under different circumstances.”

With that I will draw the curtain on this completely unexpected interlude and leave my ward back in the Rome Chapter to experience the next challenge facing the community. And this one will be every bit as unexpected as had been the Kinsky Encounter.