The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Posts tagged with “Gnosticism”
The Passion of the Space Jockey
Alienated Sentience and Endosymbiosis in the World of H.R. Giger by Eric Wargo The following is a paper presented in 2018 at the Rice University conference Gnostic Afterlives in American Religion and Culture. A final, fully sourced version appears in the journal Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 5(1), 2020. Giger paintings are used with permission […]
The Passion of Einstein: Light, Spacetime, and the Holy Grail
In David Lindsay’s bizarre Gnostic allegory A Voyage to Arcturus, space travel is accomplished by means of “back light”—light rays that strive to return to their origin. A bottle of back light gathered through a telescope aimed at Arcturus is used to pull a small ship and its passengers from an observatory in Scotland up […]
When Is It Hyperfootball Season?—Rethinking Eternalism
There are rumblings from the Internet that graphic novelist and magus Alan Moore is soon to drop a million-word novel on the world, called Jerusalem. It shows great courage and faith, in a world that no longer reads books, that Moore has stretched out his text as much as possible instead of compressing his ideas […]
Kafka and the UFO Gnosis
Rich Reynolds has a nice piece over on UFO Iconoclast comparing ufology to Samuel Beckett’s existentialist play Waiting for Godot. It’s a really apt comparison: The two main characters wait around for a person who is never going to come, and this waiting keeps them from becoming fully conscious and responsible for their lives. A […]
Mutants, Mystics, and Scientologists (Thoughts on Jeffrey Kripal, Gnosticism, and Sci-Fi Spirituality)
Call me a slow learner, but it took me until my early forties to realize that some of the best and most inspiring things in life, besides girls, are the things I was obsessed with as a 10-year-old boy (i.e., just before I discovered girls). At 10, I was a typical nerdy 1970s kid, curled […]
Seeing and Knowing: UFOs and the American Religion
“If a UFO lands in a forest and there’s no one there to see it, was there ever really a UFO?” – Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men The American religion, wrote literary critic Harold Bloom, is only superficially Christianity or any of its mainstream varieties. If you look under the surface of the diverse varieties of […]
