“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 Christian faith there is a singular, distinctively American core religion that has more in common with the Gnosticism of the church of the first centuries AD than it does with the more doctrinal Catholic and Protestant churches that replaced it. Gnosticism is a religion founded on direct personal experience, direct knowing of reality (which goes by a variety of names of which God is only one among several).

If you think about it, UFOs are perfect symbols of such a Gnostic religion. For example, I Know What I Saw is the title of a recent documentary by James Fox (the most significant and sober film treatment of the subject of UFOs) and the phrase “I know what I saw” is expressed verbatim or in paraphrase by many of the interviewees in that film. Indeed it is expressed by UFO witnesses everywhere. (The phrase is also used by witnesses to Sasquatch and other extraordinary phenomena.) It means knowing that is based not on the testimony of science or mainstream common knowledge, but on direct personal experience with something most of society dismisses as impossible or as fantasy.

As more and more Americans witness unexplainable objects in our skies, and as more and more reputable authorities (military personnel, pilots, astronauts, government officials) go public verifying the reality of a UFO presence, the more I believe UFOs will become a central symbol in the American Gnostic religion. We don’t know what these objects are, or even if they represent a single phenomenon. There is no evidence they are from space, and the extraterrestrial hypothesis is losing ground among many believers—there are other explanations. But whatever they are, seeing is believing, and the more people see them, the more they will become central features in the American religion.

Jacques Vallee has written of UFO cults as harmful tools of manipulation. But I’m not sure that direct personal experience is such a bad basis for a religion, in the sense of belief in — or rather, knowledge of — something “higher” that passeth understanding. Awe and wonder, a questioning of common sense and of the limited nature of science, are the typical effects of such extraordinary experiences and thus are an effective destroyer of human arrogance, something churches no longer do a good job at.

Even the most rationalistic and empirically minded people are fundamentally governed by nonrational principles such as aesthetics. Like the rest of us–though they may not acknowledge it–even “hard scientists” are guided in their inquiries and in their interpretations by what feels most elegant and beautiful and right.

It is hard not to appreciate the elegance and beauty of the standard SETI picture of extraterrestrial civilizations: They are distant, ancient, and serene. “Contact” will take the form of radio signals sent years or centuries or millennia ago “across the sea of space.” It is a picture I like to call the “scientific sublime,” and Carl Sagan was its great prophet for a generation of young would-be scientists. Every Sunday morning we were glued to PBS, watching Sagan sail his “ship of the imagination” to the stars and explore the “intricate machinery of life,” and we felt inspired by this vast cosmic vision and the weirdly inspiring sense of the insignificance of ourselves and humanity.

Freud wrote of the “oceanic feeling” that stimulated religion. Sagan was a kind of prophet of science-as-religion; you could get that oceanic feeling from thinking about space and time and the incredible complexity of nature. (The recent “Symphony of Science” remixes of Cosmos and other classic science programs are nice reminders of this.)

In other words, the cosmos was, in Sagan’s picture, like God—a God we could actually believe in and celebrate because he was essentially indifferent to our tiny affairs. Throughout his career, Sagan was highly dismissive of UFOs, even though he acknowledged that it was statistically probable the earth would be visited by extraterrestrial explorers every 20,000 years or so.

I suspect this cherished sense of man’s insignificance in the cosmos is at the root of many scientists’ dismissal of UFOs: It simply violates their sense of aesthetics. It seems like a B-movie version of a state of affairs (“we are not alone”) that ought to be far stranger, far more awe-inspiring and serene. And it feels distressingly (and dangerously) human-centric, flying in the face of the wise and ethically inspiring cosmic vision Sagan and other proponents of SETI preached—the earth as a vulnerable tiny blue speck in the vast cosmos.

Other intelligences, in this view, should be far, far away, not buzzing around our planet like gnats. Alien minds should be contemplating the incredible intricacy of nature, the mysteries of existence, amid inconceivable monuments of glass and stone, not furtively spying on our army bases, molesting our livestock, and abducting suburbanites. An ET presence among us feels cheap and tawdry, deflating that sublime sense of distance and scale.

The “UFO movement” (to slap a label on something that is highly diverse and varied, I realize) tends to contain a lot of highly human-centric assumptions. Almost any interpretation of the phenomenon assumes that humans figure in the plans of higher beings, or that they want something from us, or that they are intensely interested in us. If abductees are to be believed, aliens want to do things with, or take things from, our bodies, or they want to breed with us; perhaps they “need” our genetic diversity, or want to control us by creating some kind of alien-human hybrid. More optimistically, they are preparing to contact us and share their knowledge with us. Or they are here to protect us from destroying ourselves. Or they want to elevate us, facilitate our evolution to a higher, “posthuman” state, like the slabs in 2001.

In short, UFOs encourage us to think of ourselves and our planet as special—which, unfortunately, is a dangerous and retrograde perception—a throwback to the Middle Ages.

Is it possible to accept the UFO phenomenon and also somehow preserve the sublimity that Sagan preached? Some ufologists potentially do so by departing from the ET hypothesis. Mac Tonnies, for instance, thought UFOs could be “cryptoterrestrial” rather than extraterrestrial. Yet, he also liked the alternative view that they represented an ancient machine intelligence, and also blogged intelligently (and wrote a book) about the possibility of ancient ruins on Mars—more sublime visions. Jacques Vallee likewise believes UFOs may be far stranger than anything we can imagine–psychological or interdimensional entities–but that they don’t represent beings from outer space.

There may be no single answer to the UFO question. It’s quite possible or even probable that we’re not even talking about a single phenomenon. But I do think that much if not all of what we are dealing with represents beings that are more or less indifferent to our affairs or our existence. This indifference, to me, preserves at least some of the sublimity of whatever vast and ancient intelligences UFOs might represent.

Alchemy was and remains the only science and art of bowing to the perception, of submitting to what can describe, in worldly terms, as “beauty,” so long as we understand that true beauty, which is formed in the eye of the beholder, is a perception of spirit in flesh, not of flesh alone. (It was never flesh alone, and anyone who thinks that it is is misguided.)

The Hermetic meaning of the Annunciation has to do with the same problem treated in Genesis—what you could call “the Immaculate Conception of Will.” How do you generate something from nothing? Something as simple as an action?

Spirit is the mediator, but that means nothing without understanding what is being mediated. The receptive pole, Mary, the Virgin, is the easiest to understand. Yet we should not slip so easily into the cliché that she is simply the receptive vessel. We need to understand what is meant by her purity. Like an empty, clean cup, she is fully capable of being filled by spirit. Receptivity is an abstraction as long as it is not expressed through a gesture of allowing to be filled. The ‘Mary function’ is revealed in the moment she says “Be it unto me according to thy word”—that is to say, in her gesture of willingness. The decomposition of moments in the Annunciation by the Medieval painters amounted to an analysis of this key mystery at the heart of the feminine.

Willingness must not be confused with will. Essentially, willingness is one part of will. In the analysis of will, you must confront both its male and female components.

The male component of will is a form of perception first described in Genesis I: “He saw that it was good” and repeated, by proxy, through the mouth of the Angel in Luke: “You have found favor with the Lord.” This perception that sees, and is gladdened or heartened by what it sees, is also completed, given form, by a gesture, and the Medieval painters quite aptly expressed this aspect of the larger mystery via the courtly idiom.

So, we have in this scene a chivalrous gesture expressing a perception, met in a gesture of willingness. But to understand the true quality of willingness, we must understand its viscosity, its inherent resistance. Willingness is paradoxically both avid and hesitant. You can unfold it, as it were, in time, to examine its discrete aspects: There is an initial shock or surprise, which proceeds to inquiry, then reflection, and lastly culminates in an agreement. These “moments” unfold in an instant—they are aspects of the willingness function that can only be analyzed when decomposed. The Medieval painters followed the schema of Luke’s narrative, in which Mary’s response is separated into discrete moments, but this temporal unfolding is itself a declination to our human faculties of understanding, bowing to our mind so that we, in our own sluggishness, may be pulled upward toward knowledge, toward Gnosis.

How can we not also see the temptation of Eve as wonderful, in this way? There too we have a seduction, a beguiling through promises whispered, an inquiry and reflection, and lastly a collusion, though it earned such opprobrium from the simpleminded dogmatists that Eve’s sex has always been discredited. Innocent and hesitant, but also completely receptive, the Virgin, the Mother (whether we refer to Eve, our First Mother, or to Mary, the Mother of Our Stone) shows us the Matter of divine practice: the inert earth, the substance, the first substance of Our Art.

Yet we should not get sidetracked into matters of chemistry. We were talking of will and its components. How can there arise in a universe of causes a truly original action? An Hermetic reading of Scripture gives us an answer: Will is not an exertion. It is a perception infused into an attitude, a response of the body to the divine, accepting the infusion of spirit. The act is originally empty of spirit. It arises as a natural consequence of this interpenetration of gestures; it is gestated by Nature in the womb of the Virgin. Christ, the birth, is the Act. The Act comes from God and goes back to God. Its perfection is solely a function of its exalted origins. It is Noble because it is of Noble birth. Its vicissitude is pain. Its result is the salvation of the world, the redemption of Man.

When I agreed to write on Hermetic philosophy for “The Nightshirt,” I never intended to discuss my accumulated knowledge of seduction, like those sites that teach shy young men “how to talk to girls.” My seduction art I teach on the other site. Yet there are numerous points of contact between Hermes’ teachings and the arts of Venus, and when I am asked about esoteric meanings contained in ancient myths I do like to remind the student of the occult not to forget that Venus concerns our Golden Art in direct as well as indirect ways.

Consider for example the story of the Annunciation and Incarnation, related in the Gospel of Luke. It is full of Hermetic symbolism, providing great insight into the true philosophical meaning of Jesus as Stone. But even before we dig that deep, there’s a more mundane but equally rewarding way of reading the story, which nevertheless, in a roundabout way, carries us back to the Hermetic layer of understanding.

Luke, as you know, is the only one of the canonical gospels to include the account of the Lord’s conception. But there are other accounts, including the apocryphal Protevangelum Jacobi, which elaborate somewhat upon what happened. That version says Mary was first addressed by the angel when she went out to the well. The angel then followed her back to the temple and concluded his business there.

I am sitting right now, even as a write these words, in a well. A cafe is a well. It is a place where I might very likely contrive to run into a pretty young woman who has caught my eye, greet her, perhaps tease her. I might even scare her a little, or shock her. The next part is to take her somewhere more private and tell her lies and exaggerations, telling her things about herself that she wants to hear.

I am obviously describing a game of seduction. The aim is obvious. And a young woman—the Hebrew word transcribed as “virgin” just means young woman, a nubile teenager—she wants the very same thing the man does, only there are somewhat greater and graver restrictions on her freedom and reputation. This delicious imbalance is what creates the game called seduction. It’s what makes life interesting, for both sexes.

So I will put it to you this way. What if you were a lovely 14-year-old girl in a tiny village in the Middle East, and a handsome stranger, perhaps a merchant, some Casanova, came through town and you caught his eye, at the well, and he pursued you. He would flatter you and tell you that you were so beautiful and so innocent, that God himself had even noticed it. In order to win his way into your heart and perhaps win a pleasant hour with you under yon fig tree, he would have appealed not to your baser nature but to your highest vision of yourself, and told you not only how lovely but also how virtuous you were. If he were very, very clever, he might have persuaded you that God himself desired it that you and he should give in to your urges.

If you are a ladies man, like I am, you know perfectly well the kind of story that gets a girl’s juices flowing. When I was younger, I myself used these kinds of tricks, although perhaps without quite that much theological audacity. And God knows how ignorant girls sometimes are about the birds and the bees, especially in the country.

The brilliance of the story of Mary and her divine visitor is that no one pays attention to the angel. He seems to be just the middleman, the messenger. It’s the perfect disguise for one who wants to achieve something in secret, and it’s the classic guise of the seducer. You can read the Gospel of Luke as a children’s story about how God sent an angel to Earth, but it’s really a story about an all-too-human seduction and its aftermath.

The ancient world was full of such stories. In the Romans’ religion, God seduced lots of earth women, usually in disguise—a shower of gold, a swan, et cetera. He did it to keep his wife from finding out. But you could turn a story like that around to protect a poor Jewish girl too. You take a small town, and a clever and persuasive girl who’s desperate to save herself, and perhaps a somewhat dotty family, and a foolish husband that loves her or needs her enough to go along with a ridiculous cover story … Or who knows, maybe her husband was sick, or there was some other reason he couldn’t get her pregnant, and everybody in the village knew why. Maybe it was an open secret. There are countless such marriages.

You get my meaning.

The story of Mary and the angel Gabriel and the whole “Be it unto me according to thy word” is the sort of thing, then and now, that children believe, and you say it like you say Santa Claus is coming, and you say it with a wink, and everyone winks. It’s a face-saving lie that anyone with half a brain doesn’t literally believe but they go along with it. They go along with it, I might add, because they are basically good people, humane people, and in the end they don’t want to see her or anybody humiliated, or anybody’s life ruined. We all keep open secrets, and dissemble at times to keep a façade up. Especially in the country.

All of mythology is a soap opera, and the New Testament is no different. I’m not going to explain the whole thing to you or even pretend that it is a single coherent plot. Let’s just say that it solves a lot of a man’s problems, removes a lot of the normal inhibitions, to know He’s not actually His father’s son. Such a story wrapped around one’s origins could lead a young man from humble origins to go on and do great things.

I’m increasingly interested in Tolkien’s Catholicism. It is through his Letters that I first began to grasp the appeal of the notion of the Fall, which previously only ever seemed like the most stupid, harmful idea. Really, it’s just a way of describing our human tendency, the fact that we are less than what we would be, less than what we promise, and in our essence bound to disappoint ourselves. It depicts the inevitability of strife between our ideals and the world we actually end up creating.

We may impose or try to form ourselves with technology and techniques and raise ourselves, but there is a fundamental gravity, a weight pulling us to ourselves, to our “thrown” being. Gombrowicz would call this downward force “sub-culture” or “immaturity.” It is the realm of other things, distractions, minor obsessions, faults, secondary priorities, imps of the perverse, and what have you, that derail and deflect us, pull us down to another level. Despite the vastness of our hopes for ourselves, we end up ‘middling.’ (Tolkien loved middles, and saw redemption in them.)

It is easy to see ourselves as fallen. It is not so easy, at least without reminding ourselves, of the fallenness of others. When we look at other people’s lives, we see them as having chosen what they are and who they are. We see them as hard and definitive. They wear those clothes because they want to, we think; they work where they do because they must have wanted that more than anything else. We have no trouble blaming them for their mistakes, because they surely intended them. Yet when we look at our own lives, it is as through wholly different eyes. We see a random and haphazard and oftentimes ill-thought-out meandering of action and happenstance. The decisions we made we see as, more often than not, not our own, or not completely our own. We see how random and unchosen much of it is. The exceptions, those rare moments when we have felt like we have actually chosen our fate, stand out and make us feel proud. But they are the exceptions.

Why do we view ourselves through such different eyes? Why do we apply so sterner a metric to the lives of other people?

In a letter to Tolkien, Auden says he experiences life as a series of choices: “Life, as I experience it in my own person, is primarily a continuous succession of choices between alternatives.” That to me seems most enviable, most what I would aspire after, yet what seems so elusive that it may only come once in a blue moon (if ever) that one would actually feel one’s ability to choose among alternatives. Mostly don’t we just persist in life? Stay a course?Don’t our choices get buried under the weight of dead desire and necessity? Beethoven’s “Es muss sein!”?

Sartre or Freud would say that we are always choosing, and even our avoidance of choice is a choice.. But those are strenuous, basically Nietzschean philosophies, that belong in a sci-fi universe like Dune. I think, in reality, choice takes energy, and eventually everyone gets tired. To consciously live each moment as if it was a choice between alternatives, and that you always had it in you to make a choice (not just passively accept one), would be wonderful, but I don’t believe it can be done.It makes me distrust Auden, that maybe he is not so honest with himself.

Auden’s larger point was that such a sense of life—as choices—naturally produces the quest or journey as a literary form of expression. I think Tolkien’s point was that he produced a quest novel not out of some special sense of living life as choices (though that may be laudable) but from its being a tried and true way of stringing together the things that matter most to oneself. And, mainly, even more importantly, because a quest, however objectively small, takes you out of the passive condition. In effect, a quest makes you choose, makes you experience your life objectively.

So they are both saying the opposite—

Auden: Conscious living produces the Quest as its natural artistic form. Tolkien: The Quest produces the feeling of consciousness that most people, most of the time, lack. (Tolkien’s view is, as always, the more pragmatic and humane, and seems more right on.)

In his reply to the poet, Tolkien talked about people making themselves, his faith that some people do manage to create themselves. Yet the ordeal of Frodo, Sam and Golluum shows that this can only be achieved through other people. That’s the beauty and fascination of the story. It’s what Gombrowicz was always on about too, in his Diary: the redemptive possibility of people forming each other, even deliberately using other people who are unlike themselves (perhaps not too unlike, but just-right-unlike), to alter themselves in desired directions.To help them, in other words, choose themselves.