Speaker 1: You're listening to the paranorl UK Radio network and this
is six Degrees of John Keel.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the six Degrees of John Kill podcast.
I'm your host, Barbara Fisher. This evening, I'm talking with Alexandra.
We've spoken with her before, early on, fairly early on.
She is a shamanic practitioner and an anthropologist, and tonight
we're going to talk about the similarities between alien abduction
scenarios and experiencers and shamanic initiation among shamanic practitioners. Hello, Hi, Barbara,
it's good to see you again.
Speaker 1: You too, Thanks for having me back.
Speaker 2: No worries. Now, if anybody hears any like little dog chortles,
it's because Alexander has a really cute dog who sometimes
wants to add her you know, feelings on the matter.
So if it happens, it happens, don't worry about it.
So the reason I brought this topic up with you
is I was I went underwent shamanic training with one
of your same teachers, and so we have that in common.
And you know, alien abduction is something that I of
course know about, but for a long time I just
kind of went it's over there. I'm not going to
look at it, you know. So, I mean, I've read
Whitley Strieber's book Communion and the second book, Transformation, in
a couple of his other books. I did read some
of Bud Hopkins' books, but I was I was very
distraught when I read the transcript of some of his
some of his work, because he was asking under hypnosis,
which he was an artist so probably shouldn't have been
hypnotizing anybody, but under hypnosis he was asking leading questions,
the same exact leading questions that I was taught as
a journalist to kind of ask and sort of manipulate
a CAGY source into saying what you knew. They knew
but they didn't want to say. So I was like,
you're basically giving them information and they're spouting it back
at you. That's not that's not no. So for the
longest time, I pretty much you know, oh, that's the
X Files thing. I'm not gonna you know, bother about it.
I didn't read much about it. I didn't pay attention
to John Mack. Mostly, I just didn't read about it.
And fairly recently within the past year, a friend suggested,
he's like, you know, you really should read some of
the more interesting stuff. He said, you know, because I
agree with you on Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs. He's like,
they're no. He was like, but there's there's some cases
that are really really unique and really strange. And he said,
and I think with your with your experience with shamanic work,
it's gonna sound familiar. And so that's what I did,
and then I started seeing things going oh oh, oh, okay.
So when you when you talk about shamanic initiation or
shamanic journeying, can you explain kind of what that entails
to the listeners.
Speaker 3: Well, it's a big question. Sometimes I just tell people
when they ask me what it's like, I'm like, have
you seen the movie Started Away?
Speaker 1: Because a lot like that. So let me see, what
would you like me to.
Speaker 3: Approach it from the point of view of my personal
experience or sort of the anthrothological literature on shamanic initiation.
Speaker 2: Go ahead and start with your experience, and then you know,
we can kind of go well, as Mercia Elliott says,
or as Michael Harner says, these are the steps, and
then we can go right.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you know, like you. I didn't pay a
lot of attention to the UFO abduction stuff either, and.
Speaker 3: I'm looking forward to learning more about it tonight because
I do listen to all the right podcasts. I listened
to this one and Strange Familiars and Where did the
Row Go? So you know, I hear people's account there.
But when I was a kid, I was really really
scared of UFOs and aliens up.
Speaker 1: And so I just didn't want to go there.
Speaker 3: I was super into fairies and folklore and mythology and
spirits and ghosts and all of that, but I was
scared to death of aliens. So anyway, I come from
a family that on my mom's side basically has done
a lot of cunning cunning craft type stuff, and so
when I was a kid, it was always accepted that
people in my family had the ability to you know,
see spirits or have you know, quote unquote psychic abilities
or something. So I was never poo pooed for any
of that. But my mom didn't want me to go
there because over time, every generation it had sort of
gotten more and more something that you keep quiet about.
And because I also was a.
Speaker 1: Major nerd, my mom was like, follow the academic path
because that is a safe route, and.
Speaker 3: I did, and I went all the way through to
the PhD. And I never had any sort of a
plan be and when I got well into my.
Speaker 1: Graduate school period, I.
Speaker 3: Started to get really depressed. And when I started to
bring me out of that depression was when I when
it occurred to me that the things that I had
started to think about as like flaws in myself, such
as being very sensitive and open to things, and you
know that actually these could be strengths, just in a
different context. And I started to consider that although I
really loved the academic work, and I love our anthropology
and archaeology, and I'm really passionate about that, but I
started to think, maybe I need to find some outlet
for this other side of me, because it wasn't allowed
to come out and play within academia.
Speaker 1: And so then I.
Speaker 3: Well, just as I was about to finish up, my
mom got really sick, and so I hurried up and
finished my dissertation defense and finished writing the dissertation, and
I moved back.
Speaker 1: To California where my mom was living.
Speaker 3: To take care of her. And at the time, I thought,
you know, it looked like she might have, you know,
weeks or months to live or something. She was in
intensive care at the beginning, but fortunately she ended up
living for another four years. And I was her giver
during that time. And I know this sounds like I'm
not addressing the questions, but but I am.
Speaker 2: You are, You'll get there.
Speaker 3: Being a caregiver is incredibly stressful. And it was like
twenty four seven, three sixty five, and there was this
constant like is today going to be the day that
she dies? Kind of thing, and my mom were very
and I were very close, so you know, I was
really I'm so grateful to have had that time, but
it made me lose a bunch of hair, honestly.
Speaker 1: I mean it was very stressful. So I started meditating
to try and cope with the stress.
Speaker 3: And when I was meditating, I started having these spontaneous
I guess you could call them sort of visions, but
they weren't with.
Speaker 1: My physical eyes. They were with like my mind high.
Speaker 3: But they were not something that I deliberately called up.
Like when we talk about daydreaming, you know, that's we
usually imagine something where somebody is fantasizing or they're deliberately
imagining something. And this was more like a dream and
that it came spontaneously, but I still had my waking consciousness,
so it was a lot like a very lucid dream
when the stuff that I was seeing was really weird.
And little by little I started to these creatures and
beings that would appear, and sometimes they would also show
up in.
Speaker 1: My dreams, like my sleeping dreams. They'd say things to me,
and they would usually turn out to be very wise
in the long run, and.
Speaker 3: They didn't start out by you know, demanding anything. Oftentimes
it would just they would just sort of show up
and leave me wondering what the heck was that. I
actually had a friend when I was in grad school.
I mean, we're still friends, but when we were in
grad school together, she did a workshop on shamanic journey
and her area of focus is Anglo Saxon, England, and
so she for her this you know, related to her
research and that she was doing, and so she told
me about the experience and she kind of, you know,
she just holds space for it, kind of like, well,
that was really interesting. I don't know what to make
of it, but that was fun and cool. I couldn't
do it with her because I had to teach at
the time they were doing it. Well, anyway, my research
was on my dissertation research was on mirrors in basically
all across temperate Eurasia, so from Britain to Japan and
in late prehistory pretty much.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 3: If you've read any of the ethnographic accounts or like
you were saying, Eliotta, if you've read any of those
works on shamanism, you will have read about how Central
Asian and Siberian shamans often have mirrors as tools and
as part of their regalia. So as I was doing
this research that I was also doing research into shamanism.
Speaker 1: You know, related specifically to SMRs.
Speaker 3: Well, so when these spontaneous things started happening, there was
a part of my.
Speaker 1: Mind that was like, this looks a lot like you know.
Speaker 3: Some of those accounts that I've read where you know,
people start getting a call from spirits, But that can't
be happening to me, I mean, not a little.
Speaker 1: Old man so up with it.
Speaker 3: Even after my mom passed away, I was still meditating
and I didn't I didn't try to discourage these things
or anything, because I was curious about them, and I
at one point I had a classic shamanic journey happened during.
Speaker 1: One of these.
Speaker 3: So I saw this hole in the ground at the
foot of a tree, and I knew I was supposed
to go into that hole, but it was dark and scary,
and I said, I just spontaneously said, who's whol guide
me down this hole?
Speaker 1: And this guide appeared and said I will, and we
go down the hole and then it.
Speaker 3: Was full of all kinds of just really weird stuff and.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, so that's what that's like.
Speaker 3: And again, you know, this thing of like going through
a hole into the earth that takes you down into
the lower world.
Speaker 1: That is just a classic testbook kind of experience. And
then meanwhile I started having.
Speaker 3: Spontaneous dreams and appearances of a a person who could
shape shift but basically appeared like a hag, kind of
you know, your classic fairy tale hag. And she would
tell me things that you know, turned out to be true,
and she wouldn't tell.
Speaker 1: Me who she was for years. She made me work
for that.
Speaker 3: And then at the same time, I started getting sick,
and it was you know, your basic chronic illness type thing.
You know, it's pains, trouble sleeping, exhaustion is just really bad.
Conic fatigue went to the doctor. Nobody could diagnose it.
Mostly they weren't even really interested in trying. Honestly. There
was a lot of just kind of like shrug, well,
you know, everybody's tired, Like, yeah, everybody's tired, but most
people don't find one flight of stairs and then have
to lie down for a while, especially when in their thirties,
you know.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 3: At some point, again there's this part of my mind
that's going you know, this sounds a lot like that
whole thing where.
Speaker 1: You get sick, you get the call from the spirits,
and then you get sick and nobody can fix it,
and hmm, what do you think about that? I'm like,
I don't know, but that can't be happening to me.
And just when I finally.
Speaker 3: Was sort of coming around to like, there, this is
way too much coincidence to just be I think this
actually is happening to me, my cousin said to me, Hey,
I'm gonna take this workshop, this like shamanic workshop. Do
you want to do this with me? And I was like, yeah,
I think I better. And so that was how I
connected with the teacher that we have in commons and
since then I've done the full apprenticeship and completed that.
So it was just kind of funny because if I
didn't have that anthropological background, I probably wouldn't have known
where to file this information, so to speak. And so
when this happens to people who don't have that background,
I can imagine it being even more traumatic. I mean,
getting chronically ill is for.
Speaker 1: That to begin with. But I feel I was.
Speaker 3: Very lucky because I had a way of contextualizing, and
I I also I did my grad work in Minnesota,
and there's a large long community in the Twin Cities
and they still have practicing shamanic traditions, continuous traditions, and you.
Speaker 1: Know, I had friends who there. You know, they would
have to excuse their students from exams because it would
be like, oh, you know, my brother's going through his
shamanic insues.
Speaker 3: Our illnesses of the family have to be there. So
that was like a thing that happened. So I was
aware that this, you know, it's still a real thing that.
Speaker 1: Is still happening to people all over the world all
the time.
Speaker 2: No, it does, it makes it makes perfect sense. And uh,
one of the one of the ways. I've looked at
the commonalities of shamanic practice or initiation and spontaneous UFO
abduction experiences, because of course these are processes. It's not
just a one and done. Usually it's a continual communication
with a non human intelligence. One of the things that
I think, particularly in the Western world, is most of
us don't have a living shaman, living shamanic tradition to
point to look at understand see. I mean, we don't
even have movies about it so much in the West.
I mean there's a few, but mostly no, there really
isn't you have been and pieces, you have some folklore.
How many people actually study that? Not very many. But
I feel almost like, you know, we did our best
to get rid of those practices because they were quote
unquote primitive, and we were all scientific and materialists and
we're way too logical, so we don't need that. We're
all you know, the Christian Church tells you this, this,
and this is true. There it is boom cut off,
done and to the point where, now you know, atheism
is more Western than you know Church anymore. So we
kind of just shut off our spirits. And you know,
if you have traditions with communication with spirits and then
you cut it off. That doesn't mean the spirits are
going to go away. And if you even if you
don't believe in them, they're not going to go away. Yes. Yes,
It's like I don't believe in Bigfoot. Well Bigfoot believes
in you, buddy, and he just walked in front of
your car. It's like, you know, what do you say
when you have just you know, a normal person suddenly
wake up and there's these little guys with you know,
big heads and big eyes and a bright light.
Speaker 1: What do you?
Speaker 2: What do you do? There's no context for that. And
that's that's where when I really started looking at some
of the more unusual experiences, I could find the threads
that went with my grmonic experience and other people's shamanic
experiences and go, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute,
something is happening here. Uh So, one of the things
that I just saw that was really interesting is there's
a folklorist called Thomas Bullard does great work, and he's
done a lot of comparative folklore with UFOs and UFO abduction. Essentially,
he thinks of it as an emergent folklore that describes
something that's older than what we think it is, and
he says that UFO experiences have these these stages in
common generally not all the time. But there's the stage
of being in captive, captivated or captured and you so
you're abducted, there's an examination, and there's physical procedures that's
often where you get the implants, or there's surgeries that
are done, or psychic surgery or sexual contact of some sort.
Then there's a conference where they talk with you. And
this isn't all happening in the same instance, it's sort
of a it's steps. Then they give you a tour
of their quote unquote ship, which sometimes is overtly made
to be like a ship, but in other cases. There's
a really famous case with Streeber near the end of
his first book where he talks about going into this
into the craft and it was dark and it was dank,
and it was damp, and it smelled funny and it
smelled kind of like dirt, and I was like, dude, dude,
that's the underworld, dude. But yeah, so you get a tour,
and sometimes it's not really a ship, it's just some chamber,
and then you have other worldly journeys where you fly
on the ship quote unquote, or you go through these
long hallways and you come to these lands that are
all these different colors and I'm like, oh, that's celestial stuff.
Sometimes there's castles made of crystal and I'm like, oh, yeah,
I've heard about that too. And then there's usually a
message you have a job. You can be a healer.
If you listen to what we say, you can help
other people. And people come back changed, and a lot
of people become vegetarians or vegans, a lot of people
become activists for human rights or animals or both. Some
people come back pacifists, and most of them come back
with some kind of ecological awareness that they didn't have before.
And I'm sitting here going, well, that's Mother Earth talking
to you right there. I don't know what else to say.
And so what I started looking at it that way?
I remembered what Michael Harner said. You know, you have
your selection where the spirits come and say, oh, hey,
we'd we'd like they did with you. You know, Hey, we're
over here, Hey come here, talk to me. Hi, I'm
looking at you. So you have the selection. Then you
have an initiation, which sometimes involves dismemberment uh or some
kind of you know, opening up of the head or
the chest and putting things inside like sacred stones. So
that's you know, that's just like those UFO implants. Sometimes
they change organs with you, so the spirit will take
something out of himself and put into you, and then.
Speaker 1: You have.
Speaker 2: Magical flights. You you go into the upper world realms
and talk to other spirits and you talk with higher
entities and you come back with a job.
Speaker 1: Yep, and you don't.
Speaker 2: No, you do not. And it's the same way with
so many times when people have said to the quote
unquote aliens, the grays or whatever, you have no right
to do this to me, they say, we have every
right to do.
Speaker 4: This to you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I actually asked my spirit teachers about this.
And now this is just my personal notices. I'm not
saying that, you know, this applies for everybody out there.
But they said, I was like, why do you wreck
our lives when we don't accept the call? And they said, well,
we only kind of sort partly wreck your life. They said,
we call you in multiple lifetimes. If you if you're
being called in this lifetime, you've probably been called in
another lifetime, and we will keep calling you until you accept,
and then once you accept, we'll keep calling you still
but like you. But they said, the thing is, if
you've accepted the call in a past life, guess what
you still are committed in our view. And they said,
the thing is part of the reason your life gets
so wrecked is that once you stepped into that agreement,
you can't go back to living a normal life. And
the metaphor that they gave me was that as as
a drum is to a shaman, right, Who's because frequently
we use drums to as a sonic driver to inner trance, right,
they said, as the drum is to you, you are
to us. And they said you are basically hollowed out
and you're given a very loud voice so that you
can transmit from us to other people. And we will
beat you like a drum.
Speaker 2: So that we will beat you so that that voice
you know comes out.
Speaker 3: And it's they from their point of view, and from
what they tell me, see, the need is so urgent
that they don't have time to aff around and find out.
And but it's not always that they're just being jerks
about it. It's just that one and I know this
from my own personal experience because I at one point,
after I had accepted this and.
Speaker 1: Everything, I had a little uh.
Speaker 3: Tip with one of my spirit teachers and I was like,
screw you guys, I'm going home. And they were like,
a ha ha, you can You can't go home because
this is home now. And I very quickly realized they
were right, because you can't.
Speaker 1: You know, once you are.
Speaker 3: Doing spirit work, you can't just go back to like
work in your office jobs. I mean it's not to
say that you can't function or anything. You can, but
it's like, you know, you're going to be doing stuff that,
especially in modern Western society, is regarded as.
Speaker 1: Really really weak.
Speaker 3: And if you try and hide that or in order
to get in or you try to somehow you.
Speaker 1: Know, deny it, it just and that's why I.
Speaker 3: Got so incredibly depressed in grad school, and I mean
I was we're talking suicidal ideation. It was a really
deep depression because you know, at my job, I'm like
seeing spirits out of the corner of my eyes and stuff,
and yet I'm in this world where I don't dare
admit to that because I will lose all my credibility m.
Speaker 1: It's funny.
Speaker 3: I listened to the Weird Studies podcast and one of
the hosts was saying that it's, you know, in some
way so silly that it academia a lot of times.
What is what it seemed to give you the credibility
to talk on a subject is the fact that you've never.
Speaker 1: Experienced with was just so backwards. But it's absolutely true.
It's absolutely true, especially if you're in a science or
science adjacent kind Yeah, and so that was, you know,
that was why.
Speaker 3: Like internally psychologically, everything was falling apart from me. And
I think possibly part of the reason why in in
the West, in modern times, why the initiation often seems
to go along with your life just falling apart, is
because in traditional societies that had a continuous shamanic tradition,
there were all of the protocols in place to train
the and guide them through the initiation that were ritual
ceremonies and all this kind of stuff. We don't have that,
and so a lot of the initiation plays out both
on this spirit level, but it also like it manifests.
Speaker 1: In your life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you don't just do an underworld, you know,
journey in the it's not just like your spirit journeys
to the underworld, but like in metaphorical senses sometimes or
even literally because sometimes people have near death experiences and stuff.
But the time that I was caring for my mom
was very much a kind of a death experience because,
as I said when I mentioned that I had no
plan B, what I was gonna. What I'm bringing that
back to is that by caring for my mom, I
had to leave my academic career. There was no way
I could go back into it because I couldn't participate
in stuff that you need to do to become a professional.
I couldn't go to conferences. I couldn't publish papers, I
couldn't do research. I couldn't even whip my dissertation into
shape to publish it, which is standard practice.
Speaker 1: It is freely accessful, but it's not quartally published.
Speaker 3: And that was a huge grief for me, and not
just because I really love archaeology and anthropology, but because
my whole identity was in that. You know, I was
an academic. I was like a fourth generation academic on
my dad's side, and that was just what I was
going to do. And I had to completely die to
myself basically, and there was also this experience of being
of like helplessness where it's kind of like.
Speaker 1: There's nothing I can do to really change my situation.
This is what it is.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess technically I could have just told
my mom Sia, but I.
Speaker 1: Wasn't gonna do that. That wouldn't be right, and and
you know, I loved her very much, so so there
was this sort of this.
Speaker 3: I really perceive, and it's not the only initiation I've
been through, because really I.
Speaker 1: Feel like it's just kind of one after another thing.
But there's like the first thing that happens is this
experience of kind of the old you dies and then
you are in this like kind of burial.
Speaker 3: Phase and like decomposition where the old you is dead
but the new you hasn't come into being yet, and
you feel really disoriented and very just like what is happening?
Speaker 1: Real?
Speaker 3: Even am I? What does the need of this mean?
And there's no point in starting any new projects, there's
no point in trying to reinvent yourself at this point
because you you can surrender to the helplessness and just
go with the flow, which makes it easier somewhat, but
it's going to happen regardless, and then there's the sort
of a reaver and that's when you come into your
new phase of life and you can sort of presume
being that active agents in your life.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. One of the one of the things that
I think is very interesting when we talk about initiatory experiences,
and one of the one of the things people have
said to me is like, well, it's not exactly one
to one, and you know what, what are these these
UFO initiates supposed to be doing. What is their job?
And I'm like, well, they tell you what their job is.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: There's there's some people like Ted Rice who became a
psychic and he's he was, well he is, he's still alive.
He was very very accurate with his with his readings,
and as he went back through his life and looked
at it through a different lens, he realized he had
been essentially educated to do that from the beginning and
he never really had a normal life. You know, his
started in childhood, so he was he was essentially put together.
And there's some initiative activities that happened. He's he's in
a book called Masquerade of Angels and he wrote it
with doctor Carla Turner, and she did research into abduction
scenarios and abduction experiences because she had the experiences herself
and her whole family did. And so one of these experiences,
he finally near the end of the book, figures it
out and he said, you know, I was a child
and I watched them pull a body out that looked
exactly like me. Oh, and then they gave me this
drink and said drink this. And I'm like, oh, here
we go, here we go. Don't drink stuff in fairy,
don't do that, yeah, you know, and he did because
he was given really no choice, much like you were
given no choice, and there's no right of refusal, as
you say, So he drank it and he died. He
became paralyzed. He fell down, and then he said he
was floating above his body, and he watched as they
dismembered his body. And then they used this black box
to pull his sole out and put in the box,
and then later on it was taken from the box
and put into the new body. As soon as I
read this, I'm like, oh, it's just like when bear
takes you apart and puts you back together again. With
extra stuff, right, you know, it's just a more more
sort of technological looking version of that. And you know,
he was like, I I came back, and I was
really sick when I when I you know, came out
of that dream or whatever it was, and I was
really sick for like, you know, five six months, and
my my family, you know, was worried about me. I
was always having fevers and they couldn't figure it out.
And I'm like, uh huh, yeah, okay, the shamanic sickness, Yes, yes,
this happens. And but his story is so it's so
not your typical UFO abduction story, and yet there are
so many parallels with the shamanic story. You know, these
these stories just go together really interestingly. And one thing
that really got me is he has an experience with
reptoid beings, the you know, of the bipedal, alligator headed
nasty people, and they do nasty things. They're terrible. All
I could think of was the part in one of
Michael Harner's books where he said, you know, I went
into the underworld and I met up with these terrible creatures.
They had, you know, these big alligator teeth and the
big heads and they're following me around and they're all like,
you're terrible, we own you, will eat your soul, you know,
and all of these awful things. He said. So when
I came back, I told the shaman, I'm like, these
guys my it's my favorite response. He just laughed and said, oh, them,
it's just them. They do that. Don't listen to them.
They want you to listen to them and and feel
bad and and do the wrong thing. They're just trying
to make you do the wrong thing. Ignore them. They're
just those guys at all. I was like when I
read that book, I was like, oh, Ted, man, it
was those guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've had a few brief run ins
with those guys. They didn't appear with the reptilian form
to me, but uh, same vibe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you belong to us, we created you. Yeah, they're mean.
But at the same time, if you run into them
over and over and you have support from your spiritual allies,
you kind of go, oh, yeah, there you are again.
That's nice. Away it's it. Yeah, And uh there's another
there's another story. It's from a documentary called Witness of
Another World. If you ever get a chance, I think
it's free in a couple of places on the Internet,
and it's about the UFO experience of a young boy
in Argentina. He was from a gaucho family on his
dad's side, on his mom's side. He was related to
some of the the indigenous people who were who who
had shamanic practices going back forever and uh. He as
a boy had been told by his father, hey, go
get the horses, and so he goes out with his
horse to get the other horses and it gets lost
in a fog. And as he's going through the fog,
he comes up to a hut, weird hut, and it
was on stilts and there was weird lights. And he
looked up and there was a ladder to get in there,
and he saw his dead grandfather in there, along with
some other beings. And he tied his horse to like
one of the struts or the legs and went in
and then you know, he talked with his grandfather and
then he came out, got on his horse, who was
really freaking out and not happy, and he went back
without the horses, and his dad was mad at him,
and you know, took a belt to him and yelled
at him. And he was like, but I saw this
thing and there were lights, and I don't know what happened,
and my horse has freaked out. His horse died like
a few days later. Yeah. Yeah, so there was something
not good happening, and it just the whole experience really
just shut this kid down. And doctor Jacques Vallet was
one of the first Westerners to talk with him about this.
This was back in the seventies and he had his wife,
Jeanine with him, who was a child psychologist, and so
he was really happy he had brought her because she
could help this child, and they spoke with him, and
what ended up happening over you know, a period of
like thirty or forty years, he just ended up becoming
a recluse. He had a farm. The only person he
really saw was his mother because she lived with him
and he had his animals, and that's who he interacted with.
That whole like UFO thing just it it just destroyed
him essentially personally. Well interestingly, a documentarian found out about
him and was like, you know, let's see what happens
if I bring doctor Valay back. Let's see what happens
if we you know, if we talk to people on
his mom's side of the family. And what ends up
happening is doctor Valay remembers him, of course, and he
remembers doctor Valay. They talk. He will not talk about
the exact instance. He just kind of talks around it
because he's still upset about it. And his mother's people said,
bring him, bring him to his ancestral village, bring him here,
and they do, and they initiate him and he can
talk again, because that's what they said. They were like,
this is what we do. That was a spirit and
it was coming for you, and that's why you haven't
been able to do anything right, because you didn't understand
a call and you weren't able to talk with your
ancestors the way we do. And so they taught him
and they initiated him and it essentially healed him. So yeah,
all those spoilers people, there's so many spoilers, but it's
been out for a while, so I figure you've seen it.
But it it it's very much a if you didn't
think of it as as UFO related at all, if
you didn't know anything about it, you would see it
as a shamanic story.
Speaker 1: Absolutely or even.
Speaker 3: It's very similar to a lot of the fairy folk
wore too, you know, they get abducted by the fairies,
they disappear, they come back and they're faery doctors now
and they heal po or like Bessy Dunlop, who was
one of the women in England or Scotland, and she
ended up getting prospers for witchcraft, which is why we
have a record of what happened her.
Speaker 1: But she was just.
Speaker 3: Walking along one day feeling bad because life was not
going well, when a spirit comes to her. Now the
spirit said that that he was actually a deceased human
but he lived in the fairy realm and basically the
Queen of Fairy had sent him to be her familiar
and like help her out with stuff. But she was
basically like.
Speaker 1: Oh way, I don't want any part of this. My
life's a lot of my place right now. And he's like, yeah,
well you don't gonna say no though, so so you know,
I mean, yeah, you know, Josh Cutchens, so like you
already know that there are these parallels, but it blows
my mind that how similar they are and that they
happened in such a similar way even within this context
of the society. That meaning the modern West.
Speaker 2: You know that doesn't Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of my favorite,
you know, fairy things that happened in the twentieth century
was supposedly not even a fairy thing. It was Joe Simonton,
the chicken farmer, minding his own business when he comes
upon a landed quote unquote ufo and little little, little
Italian looking guys were cooking pancakes and they asked for
water and he gave it to him. And and I'm
sitting here going how many stories are there of fairies
coming up to the door asking for water or grain
or whatever, and then they gave the dude some pancakes
and flew away. Well, Joe didn't ask for that for
one thing, and what is he supposed to do with that?
But it wasn't. No, they were crappy and they had
no salt, which again fairies don't like. So yeah, yeah,
And that's another thing about UFO occupants. They're always trying
to get you to drink something or eat something. And
I'm always kind of like, I don't know about that.
Maybe you shouldn't, I don't think so. But yeah, that's
that's one of the things that you know, maybe the
fairy lore was our last in the you know, Anglo
Saxon West and Celtic West that we had that was
shamanically involved. And when we've you know, finally destroyed that
and turned it into nursery tales and ignored it for
the most part, that's when we started getting I don't know,
UFOs and aliens and all that.
Speaker 3: They get framed in this materialist sort of way, technological
instead of looking numinous or whatever, because there's now the
news isn't allowed real, so they just put on the
skin and show up in a way it's like.
Speaker 2: Oh goy. Some of my favorite ones also are from
the fifties, similar to Simonson, And there's a couple of
uh Italian stories where women are either you know, wandering
around in the mountains and picking flowers and you know,
the woman takes her stockings and shoes off so she
can wade in the creek and and she's mining her
own business walking around and there's this egg shaped vehicle,
you know, sitting on three legs, and these little guys
wearing space helmets and capes because that's a thing whatever,
run up and they you know, they steal her flowers
and they yank or stockings off out of her hand
and run off.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I was like, there's another Italian lady who was putting
a wash on the line and they stole stockings and
ran off. And then they were in the same kind
of like egg shaped and they had these, you know,
these helmets, and I was like, that's the early when
they were like, oh, we're space people, and they just
weren't really good at it. You know, they hadn't they
hadn't figured out what space people do yet.
Speaker 1: No, they.
Speaker 2: Hadn't watched enough of the you know, nineteen fifties movies.
They're supposed to have tentacles and stuff. They didn't, or
maybe they just thought they were icky. I don't know. Yeah,
So when you look at all of these stories, I
mean I like to look at them as stories in
a way, and then analyze the motifs that you see
some kind of a Thomas Bullard person. I like to,
you know, dig in there and realize that these these
tales have been with us for a very long time,
and the spirits have been calling people for a very
long time, and in a lot of ways, I feel
as if there has to be some kind of way
to bridge the gap between modern shamanic practitioners in a
Western model and UFO abduction and kind of at least
get an exchange of information, you know, I think that
would help.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're really those of us who were brought up
within a modern Western cultural background.
Speaker 1: And that's a lot of.
Speaker 3: People, including even people who are actually indigenous, but you know.
Speaker 1: Their lands have been colonized by you know, this or
that empire, and so like it or not, they were,
you know, forcibly brought up within modern Western modernity and
all of those.
Speaker 3: Culturally specific trainings and more and rituals of initiation and
all this.
Speaker 1: You know that.
Speaker 3: That smooths the process of initiation, and without that, it's
all along the spirits to.
Speaker 1: Do all of that for us, they do most of
the training, they do the initiation, and it's it makes
it just a lot more difficult because you have to
you know, it's like you have to reinvent.
Speaker 2: Almost almost every time when you're talking about end. That's
got to be tiresome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's very.
Speaker 3: Psychologically difficult for the person who's going through it because
you'll notice, if he's listening to people's accounts of their
unexplained experiences, you know, whether it's bigfoot or ghosts or
UFOs or what have you. There's this performance that you'll
hear people go through over and over and over again,
which is, well, I'm a skeptic, but or I used
to be a skeptic, but and so the little ritual
performance that you do is where you say that you
didn't believe in this kind of stuff until the preponderance
of your experience got to be so big that you simply.
Speaker 1: Couldn't deny it anymore.
Speaker 3: And so you had to concede that there's something going
on here, and we have to go through that because
it's it's like, you don't you have no credibility within
sort of Western what I think of as like meta culture.
You know, you have no credibility if you just straight
up to say, oh, yeah, you know, I've been seeing.
Speaker 1: Spirits with a little kid, never had any doubt about it.
Oh yeah, yeah, I do too. And but even so
I still put myself through that by doing that whole Well,
this can be happening to me. I mean I never
pooh pooed that this happens to people in like indigenous cultures.
That wouldn't you know, I totally take it for granted
that what they're describing is what they're experiencing, but surely
that couldn't be happening in me.
Speaker 3: And so, you know, even I had to go through
this thing. But it's such a waste of time. It's
such a waste of time, and it's so silly when
you look at it from a bigger perspective, in that
when you look at cultures.
Speaker 1: Globally and through time, this this tiny little phenomenon of
the past few hundred years, in this tiny little corner
of what claims to be a continent but is really
more just like a weird, bumpy peninsula that sticks off
the end of Asia, i e. Europe.
Speaker 3: And really it wasn't even everybody there. It was like
the land owning, educated white male, you know, elite essentially,
who decided to adopt this absolutely crazy perspective that the
stuff that takes up such a huge percentage of human
experience everywhere, in every win.
Speaker 1: Is not real.
Speaker 3: And I mean to say that, to say that that's
race is like an understate. But it also just when
you look at it from that perspective, it's like, I mean,
I'm not one to say that just because a lot
of people believe something that makes it true, but there's
no denying that this is a normal and natural part
of human experience on.
Speaker 1: The global scale. And for this one tiny little corner
of people in this very very.
Speaker 3: Very short period of time to think that somehow they
have a more accurate assessment of what constitutes reality is delusional.
Speaker 1: It is delusional.
Speaker 3: It is like a societal mental illness, and we're all
trying to basically wake up out of that societal psychotic
break with no help, with no help societally speaking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the things that I find, I mean,
it's even comedians see it. Eddie Hazard, you know, he
talked about how you're made these huge empires by going
into other people's countries and smacking a flag in it
and going it's ours now, and you know they're like,
we live here, and it's like it doesn't matter. Do
you have a flag? No, No, it's part of the
British Empire.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like that is so just psychotic. Really, I'm just
going to march into a country full of people and
because I'm European, I'm gonna take it over. And that's
that's just how it worked. And then all of the
beliefs that came with the colonization were better than the
beliefs that were already there, and so they tried to
beat those beliefs out of people.
Speaker 1: And I.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah that that also. Yeah, it's one of those.
I guess it just comes with the whole idea that
you can just walk into somebody's living space and say
it's yours now.
Speaker 4: I guess.
Speaker 2: So that everything is yours now, your thoughts are mine
now here have my thoughts there, you go, They're better
than your thoughts, you know, have have my philosophy, it's
better than yours.
Speaker 4: Wow, just it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really crazy, and it's amazing that there are
still so many Indigenous people that still keep trying to
help us, I know, right, and I you know, to
some extent, I think that there are just genuinely good people.
And to some extent I think they're just like, my god,
you guys are so dangerous, Like we have to snap
you out of this for the sake of everybody, because
you are just ruining it for everyone. Yeah, which is
absolutely true. And there's still spirits keep trying to help
them too, and but you know, we're so busy pretending
that they don't exist, that we don't listen to them.
So yeah, it's it's it's like a mental illness and
a spiritual one at the same time, and we are
Tyson Young Paporta calls it a civilizational curse that we
are basically living under, and we're all haunted because we
in the whole process of denying that anything that's not
physical exists, we have also neglected, you know, generations worth
of ancestors and genocided a bunch of people as well
of untended dead around. And so is it any wonder
that we have so many people going through mental health
problems and just experiencing this existential despair.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, and it's also the that we didn't believe in
psychology until recently either, true, you know, and the way
that we treated mentally ill people was you know, I
mean sixteenth seventeenth century. Oh just stick them in and
a dungeon and shain them to the wall and let
rich people pay to point fingers and laugh. Wow. That helps.
That does a good job. Nice, well done, very therapeutic. Yes, uh,
you know it if you look at the way that
even today mentally ill people are treated, it's it's shameful.
And it's not like we haven't known better for a
long time, so it's kind of you know, when when
the Athens Lunatic Asylum was built, it was built to
be humanitarian, and it was built on a humanistic basis,
you know, all of it, from the architecture, from the treatments,
from the food, from you know, having them work the
farms so they were doing something productive and learning skills.
All of this was meant to be compassionate care. And
it lasted for about ten years and then it became
overcrowded and awful, and.
Speaker 1: You know, but.
Speaker 2: So that was what it was right after the Civil War,
so it was the eighteen sixties. So we knew better
for a long time, and it's just that we would
backslide and we come to capitalism I think as being
part of the problem. Oh yeah, because everything has to
make money. It is in the service of making money
and continuing to make money and power. And while that's
going on, mind you you know, after the Civil War,
we were expanding into the West and committing genocide on
a large scale.
Speaker 1: So you know, if people wonder what evil's beards look like,
that's what it looks like. That is what it looks like.
Speaker 3: I mean, okay, it's my salty opinion, but yeah, it
looks like capitalism.
Speaker 1: It looks like thinking you're entitled to just.
Speaker 3: Commit mass burger because you would really like that patch
of land and there's somebody inconvenient on it already.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, it's also doing things like killing the
food supply on that patch of land that was keeping
that patch of land good and alive, because grazing cattaly
is not the same things as bison, and that's how
you get the dust bowl, and then you have the depression,
and then you have to have a world war to
get out of that. So now we've had a history
lesson on top of everything.
Speaker 3: Else, solutions somehow always end up being even worse than
the problem that they were supposed to solve.
Speaker 2: I know, yeah, it's just it's just ridiculous and and
it just it seems to well, it serves a very
small number of people, is what it does. So one
of the things that I was going to say, Oh,
and there's also other other commonalities that I didn't really
talk about in UFO experiences. There's often animals being cited
in places that are unusual, like you know, on a ufo,
but also like outside of people's windows looking in, and
they usually have very large eyes because that's that's the grays.
And I was like, you know, most of the people
who do alien abduction, before they knew anything about shamanic practice,
were like, oh, well, these are screen memories.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: You think you saw an owl, but you really saw
a gray and that's what it was. Or you think
you saw a deer, but it really was a gray
because they got big eyes. And and I'm like, oh,
but you know, shamanic practice, deer have always been, you know,
deeply involved with humanity. Owls have always been deeply symbolic
in just about every culture, whether good or bad or both.
You know, rabbits the same way, these these and and
of course in shamanic practice, we have animal spirits or
spirits that can be shaped like animals that can also
shape shift themselves. So of course, you know I'm reading
this this you know, well, that's just a that's just
a screen memory that they implanted in your head. And
I'm like, are you sure maybe the animal was just involved?
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean this is the thing about about animism,
right mm hm, is we are.
Speaker 3: Intricately enmeshed in this web of relationships with all the
beings and they and as you frequently will hear.
Speaker 1: Said about animism, it's like the world is full of persons,
only some.
Speaker 3: Of whom are humans. And in fact, humans are a
minority of the persons who are around. And there are
animal persons, there are persons, there are plant persons. Sometimes
there are geographical persons like rivers and mountains and so on.
And what makes them persons is that they have a
consciousness and an.
Speaker 1: Agency of their own. And so, you know, the shaman.
You'll always hear it said, well, the shaman, you know,
works for their community.
Speaker 3: And some people will say, well, you know, you can't
call yourself a shaman because that's something that the community
has to designate you. And in a traditional culture that's true,
but it's a little bit more tricky here in the
West because a large part.
Speaker 1: Of your community is denying that any of those excess
But what has been impressed upon me is that the
community is also all these other beings. Yes, and you
work for them too.
Speaker 3: Because you know ideally what your your mission sort of is.
I mean, at least this is how it was presented
to me. And maybe this is not true for everybody,
but is that you are trying to create a dynamic
equilibrium where everybody can flourish together.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't mean that there's no death and there's
no suffering or anything like that. You know, death is
there's life, and there's anti life.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: And and death is part of the dynamic equilibrium. But
what's not part of the dynamic equilibrium is, for example,
killing all buffalo, killing all the people who live on
land because you happen to want it. That's anti life.
And yeah, so I have no problem with the idea
because I see a lot, a lot of.
Speaker 1: The spirits that I deal with do with here as animals,
and I have no problem with the idea that they
actually are animals. Instantly, my mind is like, but what
even is an animal? You know? But I don't. But
at the same time, you know they do.
Speaker 3: They can shape change a lot, and maybe that's just
a skin that they choose, because you know, I really
like animals, and I am more trusting of animals than
I would be of spirits presenting as human most of
the time, probably mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm I'm a lot that I'm a lot the
same way.
Speaker 3: So it really seems actually like a lot of people
who end up getting this call to practice is do
you know shamanic practitioner as kids are very inclined to
kind of wander off in.
Speaker 1: The woods and talk to the animals and the plants stuff.
And interestingly, I have read that as well for indigenous cultures.
Speaker 3: It's not just kids in the West, but and so
that's sometimes in indigenous cultures that have intact shamanic tradition,
that is recognized as a sign that that kid is
probably a potential candidate. It all depends on whether they
actually get that call to the spirits, which happens when
they actually right dult.
Speaker 1: But but they're kind of seen as like now that
one's probably gonna get that call.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I I and yeah, how many of
us were wandering around in the woods talking to the
trees and you know, the animals, and I.
Speaker 1: Hear that over and over again. It's like something I
have in common with so many people who get attracted
to or called to the path.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's in fact one of the
I mean, one of the things that I remember even
as a small child was I trusted cats and dogs
more than I try did most human people, you know,
I could. And I also judged human people by how
dogs and cats and other animals reacted to them.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I still think that's a pretty good indicator.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean that's to this day, but even
as a really young kid, I could trust the sense
of animals around a person.
Speaker 1: When I was really little, we lived in the country.
Speaker 3: And I'm originally from northern California, and we lived in
a rural area. It's kind of I like to call
it the part of California that nobody knows exists, because
it's not it's not the Beach, it's not the Bay Area,
it's not the mountains, and it's not the wine country
like in tweet.
Speaker 1: But it's really rural.
Speaker 3: And we had a little, you know, five acre bottle,
you know, and I would just kind of go around
and like I was really interested in trying to learn
the names of plants and things, which is still something
that I am really interested.
Speaker 1: In, and but as a kid it was it wasn't
just like I would like to know what the taxonomical
binomial of this plant species is. Who was like, I
want to know who this person is, right?
Speaker 3: And we had dogs and my parents. And to be fair,
this is really more my dad, because he he was
kind of hands off, very His feeling was that dogs
are perfectly debating sinners and would keep me out of trouble,
and they.
Speaker 1: Did, so he wasn't wrong. And so I would just
like walk around with the dogs and you know, hang
out with the animals and and the plants and learn
their names and all that kind of stuff. And I
mean that's pretty close to my idea of paradise.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's that's a lot what I did at
my grandparents' house. So yeah, as long as I had
the dogs with me too, that if I had all
three dogs, I was fine, Nothing bad would happen, and.
Speaker 3: They would tackleog me too if I went something I
wasn't supposed to, so which I did anytime my dad,
whether he's paying close attentions often oops, well, I suspect
that I inherited my ADHD from him. So there's a
certain tendency to intentive. But interestingly, that seems to also
be something that's fairly.
Speaker 1: Common among people who end up on his past.
Speaker 3: It's certainly not like a required qualification, but it's definitely
not uncommon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I would think that some of those different,
differently connected brains would be, you know, part of the
whole gestalt of what we're talking about people who experience
UFO abduction and people who experience shamanic spirit calls, that
sort of thing. Yeah, I figured that that all sorts
of spectrums are involved. Yeah, yeah, because yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: I remember this one time where my friend was just looking.
Speaker 3: At me, like, are you great, because I was saying
I was really surprised by how much traffic there.
Speaker 1: Was on East State Street on this one day, and
she was like, well, it's like the Friday before Halloween
or something like that, so on holiday and you know,
everybody's out shopping. And I was like really, She's like,
how do you not know this? And I was like, well,
how do you not know what fad the moon is in?
I mean I know that, I know, you know, No,
I can't keep track of what day of the week
it is. So yeah, yeah, that that tendency to be
kind of uh, you tune out.
Speaker 3: A lot of the stuff that you need to do
or know in order to function within capitalist society, which
is a challenge, but you are very sensitive to a
lot of the kind of sparkles.
Speaker 1: You know that. M h, that are what I think.
You know, life is really all about.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, the important stuff. There's another interesting thing that
that I wanted to ask you about with well, okay,
so John Keel back in the sixties noticed this. He
was one of the first people who really started noticing
that UFO experiences UFO abductions were very similar to things
like fairy abduction, and that there were all of these
commonalities between US occurrences and UFO witnesses, like you know.
He was one of the first people to say, well,
you know, we can't. I mean, we've been staring at
the UFOs and getting the descriptions of what they've done,
and we've watched them do their things, but that doesn't
really tell us anything. The only thing that we can
actually learn from with UFOs is what the people who
witnessed them or experienced them experienced during that time and
then afterwards. And he said, if you ask any UFO
experiencer about their past, there's weird things there. Grandma was
a psychic. Let's see so and so saw ghost. There's
a poltergeist that came into the house right after mom
and Dad saw the UFO. Something started leaving the doors
open and unlocked. The TV goes out at the same
time every night, blah blah blah, and it just goes
on and on and on. One of the things that
he noticed and that he began to say in some
of his writings was he believed that the only quote
unquote materially real part of a UFO experience was the light.
Most of them start with a light in the sky
that then seems to turn into a solid craft. And
he said that there was something about the light that
was communicating with the witnesses, the people who saw it,
and that the rest of the experience was somehow communicated
either directly psychically or it was an imaginal kind of
dimension where he called it paraphysical. So they could be
physic sometimes, but they're not other times. One of the
things that is interesting is I've never had an experience
in shamanic terms with a strange light, like when I've
been doing underworld journeys or anything like that. On the
other hand, i can just walk, you know, down the
street or whatever and see a weird light, and I've
been seeing them all my life. So I was wondering
if you knew of any kind of anomalist light phenomena
through shamonic experiences or that you've read about.
Speaker 1: So I was thinking about this, and.
Speaker 3: I have read references that sort of say in passing
that there was some sort of light phenomenon that was
observed by the person who was having the shavonic initiation
call or something like that, but I have an actually
seen any that go into detail about it. But I'm
just trying to think, like, where do I even start,
because there's so much that could be said about it. Clearly,
from everything from folklore to artistic representations. Light is heavily
involved in this, and everything from like depicting holy people
with halos to lights in the sky, lights in the woods.
I do have one of my spirit my main spirit
teachers sometimes will appear as just light and then will
take on a more human life form. Although that wasn't
part of my like original experiences, but something that I
thought might be kind of interesting as more like background
context to this is when I was doing my dissertation
research on mirrors. Obviously, mirrors are shiny, that's like part
of their technological nature, and archaeologically, a lot of the
context that we find mirrors in are burials, Now, partly
that's just survivorship bias, because burials tend to be underground.
Sometimes they're in some sort of building that's made of
stone or something like that, and that to some extent
will protect them.
Speaker 1: But there's also obviously clearly something going on where mirrors
are deliberately placed in burials, and it's very common for
archaeologists to just be like, well, yeah, you know, it
was like a.
Speaker 3: Precious object because it's a big chuck of metal, and
you know, so it was like part of their fancy possessions,
and of course they were buried with it. Or sometimes
you'll get well, of course it's a woman's burial, and
you know women admirrors, right.
Speaker 1: But when you look at for example, Japan, you have
these burials that have dozens of mirrors, and they.
Speaker 3: Will be in many cases propped up vertically along the
side of the coffin so that the reflective side is
facing in towards the deceased person. Those mirrors are doing
something that's not just hey, look at me, Look how
rich I am when I have all this metal. There's
clearly a purpose that those mirrors are supposed to be fulfilling.
So as I was researching this what's the deal with
mirrors and the shininess and all that. Well, there's an
archaeologist named Nicholas Saunders, and he wrote a whole series
of articles. Keep gotten off on other topics now, but
he wrote a whole series of articles looking at different
shiny materials in the Americas and comparing the archaeological finds
and stuff with folklore and anthropological descriptions of cultures in
the Amazon and Mesoamerica and so on. And what he
talks a lot about is that there was all over
both North and South America there is this common theme
of shininess, which is to say, reflecting light being associated
with spiritual power and spiritual qualities. And this was part
of why when the Spanish arrived in the America, and
of course they were all like obsessed with gold and stuff,
and they were, you know, in some of their writings
they talk about how shocked they are that they can
get gold from these people in exchange for just some
glass beads or something, you know, broken bits of mirror
things like that from Europe. Well, what Sonders is saying is, yeah,
but those things had equal value from the perspective of
the people in the Americas because they're all shiny. And
so this this shininess factor connected not only human made
technologies like mirrors and things made out of metals, but
also things like feathers, shell, pearls, and stones, water, and
it forms this really complicated web of symbolism and analogy.
And you know, this thing like obsidian is connected to
jaguar eyes because you know they both have this shiny property.
And I think that that reaction is not just limited
to the cultures of the Americas. There's something about shininess.
Humans are like crows that way, right, There's something that
sparkles and that can actually be used in its own
right for inducing altered states of consciousness that then allow
for easier communication with spirits. There was a really interesting
article that I read in grad school. It's the author's
names are Lindstrom and Christofferson two thousand and one, I think.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 3: They were looking at what's called animal style art during
the migration period in Canadavia. So the migration periods so
called because.
Speaker 1: It's when Germanic speaking, the people's started moving around Anglo
Saxons to England, well they angles and saxons to England
to Britis and people into what's now modern day Germany
and so on, and so this is like after the
Roman Empire.
Speaker 3: Has basically fallen, and now there's opportunity for people to
like reshuffle basically.
Speaker 1: And so if you think about what Viking.
Speaker 3: Art looks like, you know, with the intertwined dragon type
surfit looking pieces, and also you know we see that.
Speaker 1: Like in in Ireland, for example, and there it's actually
getting there from Scandinavians. So in this article they make
the argument that this.
Speaker 3: Style of art is actually a kind of a hypertext
that either is itself a tool for accessing altered states
of consciousness or it's sort of incodes experiences that happen
in altered states of consciousness. And they say that, you know,
when we see these things now, we see them in
brightly lit museums or photographs and books and so on,
But how you would be seeing them in ancient times. Well,
during the daytime it would be in sunlight, but at
night would be by firelight. And that moving light that
comes from firelight creates a sense of movement in the
art itself, and if you kind of stare at it,
you can actually go into kind of a light and
not state and one of the things that they say
in the article that I found really interesting is they
said that, you know, we often talk about people who
are more easily slip into those kind of states, as
though they're more gullible or more susceptible, but they said
that actually it correlates in psychological studies with people who
have actually really resilient mental stability.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of during that particular period in
Scandinavia and also in Britain, a lot of the places
where like the main context where you would see this
art is on these big broaches that were found in
burials with mature women. So there's something about these women
that you know, yes, in a sense they're wealthy because
they have a chunk of expensive material there.
Speaker 3: But perhaps these are also people who know how to
read this text so to speak. They know they can
either use it to enter that trans state perhaps, or
they can perhaps use it as almost like a mnemonic to.
Speaker 1: Recall the lore that was obtained originally in that tran state.
And so I mentioned all this because all this has
to do with light. It all has to do with
our relationship to light and surface, and this is.
Speaker 3: Something that humans have been deliberately playing with forever. We
love shiny stuff, and we love to make it more shiny.
Speaker 1: You know. My my grad school adviser.
Speaker 3: Wrote this book called How Ancient Europeans Saw the World,
and he has a section where he talks about this
lighting issue, and he one of the things he mentions
is that the shapes of ceramic vessels, things that are
flat or square, tend to have a very the side
that catches the light is just kind of a flat
lighted area. Besides that aren't catching the light are just
sort of flat shadowed areas. But when you have curved surfaces,
the light plays over them. And he talks about how
the shape of iron age pottery in Europe.
Speaker 1: It's very curvellinear. It's really.
Speaker 3: You know, it's narrow based, and then it swells way
out and gets narrow again and it comes out again.
And he talks about how he took like a little
flashlight and played with changing the direction of light and
stuff and watched how the light played over it, and
he said, it's really mesmerized my own experience. When I
was doing my research, I went to the British Museum
and I was looking at the Celtic mirrors from Britain
there and this will forever be one of the greatest
experiences of my life because they have a room that
is hidden behind a door that looks like a bookcase
and you get to go in the back room and
like look at these artifacts and they're amazing. One of
the mirrors from a cyc called Holcombe, where the handle
attaches to the mirror plate, there's this basically little face
and there's been a little bit of debate about is
this a cat face, is this an owl face? Maybe
perhaps it's meant to kind of change between the two,
but the standard way to take photographs for archaeological publications
is to have the light coming from above, and I
think it's to the left of the artifact. And when
I actually was able to handle this mirror and change
the direction of the light, that face completely changed. It's
it's I don't think there's any doubt that it is
intended to change. That changingness is part of the point
of it. So like I do think it is a
face of an Eurasian eagle owl, but that's just my
personal opinion.
Speaker 1: So they're there and you think of you know, Celtic
art too, and it's got these very purbalineer kinds of design.
That all of this has like light and movement built
into it. It's a technology for engaging in fact. And
I so I think that they're even in Europe and
in Asia, not just in the Americas, and probably Africa too.
I just don't know as much about it. There's this
and Oceania and in Australia. If there is this connection
of light with the these neuminous beings, and I have
to say that we in living here in Athos County
are blessed with an abundance.
Speaker 4: Of weird life and Hamena, Yes we are.
Speaker 3: I never had any of the sorts that I could
see with the naked eye until living here, and then
I started to see the fireflies that are in colors
that fireflies don't come in mm hmm, and they don't
necessarily blink on and off like fireflight.
Speaker 1: Yeah they're really pretty. Probably they are no, yes, but
they're very pretty.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. The Native Americans always said no, no, no, no,
don't follow those. It's interesting when you were talking about
the use of light and art animal based art. One
of the things I read about fairly recently was in
the Neolithic caves in France that have the beautiful painting,
the cave paintings, a lot of them are very far
underground and in these places that are fairly inaccessible, and
in order to paint them, of course, there had to
be torches so that you could see to paint them.
There was no way natural light was you know, getting
back there. And so some people have have studied what
it looks like when you bring torches in, and the
play of light and the shape of the wall because
of course it's not perfectly flat, and the way that
they shaded the animals makes it look like they're moving,
and so that it's almost like that's our first movie,
you know that that's the first time that a movie
was made. But it's also of course I start thinking,
I'm like fire in underground, the oxygen and breathing, and
all I could think of was, you know, I wonder
if anyone went into an altered state of consciousness from
slight hypoxia, because and then you know, by the end
of the paper they got to that. I'm like, Okay,
so I wasn't. I wasn't the super smart one who
figured it out. Uh. But it's one of those things
that could be some sort of initiatory experience there underground
water will flash up with light, and that had to
have been an amazing thing. And also bioluminescent fungus and
in cave systems, and that again had to have been
something that was that was amazing. And bits of pie
right in the sandstone or in limestone sending the sparkle
had to have been an interesting thing. And then you
know the little firefly guys that aren't really fireflies. I mean,
who's the first one who followed them? And everybody else
was like, well, we're not going to do that again,
so that it becomes this tradition. Well Jim followed him
and look what happened to him, never saw him again,
and so now we're not going to do that.
Speaker 3: And of course the experience of entering into a cave
is also part of these shamanic lower world underworld journeys
that people have, and there's also acoustics that are weird
in underground. One of the archaeological digs that I went
on as an undergraduate is at the site of Chavine
It through and so this is a the pre Inca
site and it's in the Andes, and it's very interesting
because there's in their artistic style. There's a mix of
elements that are from the Amazon, like jaguars and things
like that, and then from the other side of the Andes,
which is you know, mostly desert and coast right and
they were a big, you know, hub for trade, and
it seems like people would come from all over the
place to this site, which is I mean, it's twelve
thousand feet up in the mountains.
Speaker 1: It's up there. It's not easy to access. Even when
I went there. And they created these they're not technically
underground because what they did was they built mounds up
and then they.
Speaker 3: Built passageways into the mounds. I believe there are some
passageways that actually do go underground, but mostly they're within
these mounds. And man, that the is it really plays
tricks with your head, is the way that founds bounce
around in there. And they were very sophisticated with putting
in a little fence for air and light to get in.
Speaker 1: And so there's one chamber. There's a passageway that goes
to a chamber, and it has this thing in it
called the lansolon, which is basically like a slab of
rock that is kind of like a narrow triangle in shape,
but it's carved all over with this being that's got
banged and like serpent hair. That a lot of the
imagery involves, you know, like intermediate hybrid human snake, human jaguar, human,
mountain lion kind of imagery.
Speaker 3: And man, if you saw that thing by torchlight, that
would scare the gebers out of you, or if not scared,
depending on how you were prepared, it would be like
aweed firing, because even seeing it with a little bit
of electric light was very awe inspiring. And I know
that the professor that I was working with then as
an undergrad the has has written a lot about sort
of the acoustical features of these passages and how that
could potentially be used in basically giving people these initiatory experiences.
And we do have imagery in that fight where people
are or actually probably not people, maybe these spirits.
Speaker 1: Or gods or something or carryings and pedro pats. So
that's hallucinogenic. And so there's there's some other images that
seem to have mucus.
Speaker 3: Running out of their nose, which is there are Amazonian
in theagens that you take as a snuff and they
cause you to just like produce tons of boggers. Basically
it's pretty gross looking. But so it seems like they
might have been using in the agents that we're both
you know, from the from the Amazon, from the rainforest
as well as.
Speaker 1: From the desert side. And so you know that again,
if you're in a dark passageway and there's or or
there's flickering light and there's crazy sounds and water sounds
and everything, that's pretty trippy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah, definitely a change of consciousness.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well New Grange is like that, the passage and New Grange.
That chamber has weird acoustics that will bounce your voice around,
so if you chant in there, it starts to sound
like you have extra voices with you. And of course
it has the opening that light comes in and and
you know, illuminates the whole place once a year.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I've never been in New Grange, but that's
that's a bucket list thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for for reals. And then there's a lost
the thought it went away went flying away. Oh yeah, okay,
So in theagens. One of the things that I've always
experienced with in theogens is light, light effects and not
always everybody else does, but it's one of the things
that I do notice, and I will see the flashes
of light, you know. The very first time, I was like,
it's a cordial like a abrasion. No, it's just looking
I don't know. And then I was like, girl, no,
you're fine. You can't always get rid of that twentieth
century logic that's you know, stuck in there, and so
you start getting freaked out. But yeah, I always saw light.
Speaker 3: I've heard that a lot from people talking about light
and color, and of course color is a property of light.
Speaker 1: Really, so yeah, oh yeah, I Actually I have had
experiences with a couple of indigents, but they were not
They're not the standard ones that you think of, right,
and only one of them was intentional, so oops, yeah, yeah,
And it's not that I it's not.
Speaker 3: So much that I chose not to, it just I
have not had an opportunity to. I don't view those
things as purely recreational.
Speaker 1: Neither do I. Yeah, yeah, and so but the context
in which I would have had the opportunity would have
been one where it was not. Ah, there would be
no opportunity to to have the I mean in theogen right.
It's theot. It literally means like it. It brings the
divine right, and that would not have happened, so except
except with the one that I did do intentionally, but
that wasn't That one wasn't a didn't produce visual effects.
So yeah, yeah, but I have heard, you know, from
people that they, you know, might is part of the
especially with mushrooms.
Speaker 4: I've heard that, mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, flashes of light happened with with those, although most
of the time most of what I've ever seen has
been without that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you know, you do.
Speaker 2: That's just kind of how it goes.
Speaker 1: I don't need the agents to see this stuff. They
kind of make it easier easier. Yeah, they're they're they're regardless, so.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. That's definitely true. Do you have anything else
you want to dig into in in this regard?
Speaker 3: So, I mean, as you can tell, and obviously I
can go on pretty much endlessly about anthropological stuff and
samon stuff. I can't think of a specific thing that
we have like left unaddressed.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's cool, Well you can always come back. I
will definitely have you back. There's a lot of stuff
that we got into that I'm like, oh, we could
go for another you know, hour or two on that one.
So yeah, I took notes, and so I would love
to have you back.
Speaker 1: Well, I would love to be back. I love these conversations.
I'm actually I like to I write a lot, and
I'm not saying I write well. In fact, I don't.
I write well.
Speaker 3: All of my practice, all of my writing has been academic,
and so I can write that style, but it's not
exactly the most readable. And I have not yet found
a good voice that's sort of like not super dry
and boring, but yet you know, scholarly, some people are
still good at that, and I really struggle with that.
Speaker 1: But I'm planning on.
Speaker 3: I'm probably it'll probably be a sub stack, not paywalled,
but just to write about some of the stuff. So
if anybody's interested in.
Speaker 1: That, I don't have it up yet. I'm also working
on my website, but I am crippled by perfectionism and
so it's not really yet. But I can give people
my email address if that's okay, if anybody is just
interested in this, or if they want to be advised
when that stuff happens.
Speaker 3: So my email is forrest weird work at Google or
gmail dot com. Sorry, so it's f O r E
S d W y R d w O r K
for work and just shoot me an email. I'm happy, clearly,
I'm happy to talk about this stuff, and I'll let
anybody know if I actually generate any public writing on it.
I'm also going to be teaching a workshop on how
to do shamanic journeying.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: It should be November fourth, and that will be somewhere
in the Apps area. But it's a possibility that it
could be hybrid as well if people zoom in.
Speaker 1: But we it's limited to eight students, so it's kind
of like, let me know if you're interested because they can't.
All right, Well, thank you, Oh you're so welcome. Thank
you for having me back.
Speaker 2: Well that's all for this week's episode of the Six
Degrees of John Keel podcast. If you have any questions
or thoughts about the podcast, or would like to come
and talk about your experiences of the paranormal, you can
contact us at six d JK six seven at gmail
dot com. We promised even answer you, and we are
always happy to hear from you.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 4: I spell
Speaker 1: And