The Symbol for God or UFOs?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.


P.V. Glob’s The Mound People: Danish Bronze-Age Man Preserved [Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 19704] identifies this image (No.74) as “The goddess of Earth meets the god of heaven, Slänge in Bohulän”:



Barry Fell’s America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World [Simon & Schuster, NY, 1978. Page 73] identifies this as a “cross” from a Basque tombstone in the French Pyrenees:



Stuart Piggott’s Ancient Europe from the beginnings of Agriculture to Classical Antiquity [Aldine Publishing Co., Chicago, 1965, Page 143] presents these images (in one panel) as Rock-carvings of chariots or carts, horses and wheels. Late second-early first millennium B.C. at Frännarp, Sweden:





Philip Van Doren Stern’s Prehistoric Europe from Stone Age Man to the Early Greeks [W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., NY, 1969, Page 229] shows this as a Norwegian rock carving of a large boat carrying a sun disk:



We have all seen the cross-within-a-circle image in many cave drawings and primitive artifacts.

(And it is seen as a wheel in many later primitive drawings and paintings.)

In its later incarnations, it is listed as a pagan symbol adopted by Christianity, and shows up in many venues of the British Isles (Ireland, particularly).

But the uppermost drawing here comes from a time period between 3000 B.C. and 600 B.C., well before an articulated Pagan era.

Why the cross in a circle then?

The boat drawing comes from the Neolithic era (about10200-8800 B.C.) and shows the symbol for the sun god, according to Stern – the larger circle on the boat-deck, but what about the two circles above the boat, in the sky?

There are not two suns in the Earthian sky, and the Moon and Sun would not show up congruent to one another as depicted, even in Velikovsky’s therories.

The Basque tombstone carving may be a Christian articulation of a Pagan symbol, but is it just that?

Carl Jung’s mandala symbols, derived from Oriental cultures, are said to be unconscious manifestations of the God archetype – the wholeness of existence as reflected in the ornate symbols revered by holy men and religions indigenous to the Asian sub-continent mostly.

But the earlier “mandalas” depicted, as shown above, primitve as they may be, indicate something else – something otherworldly: divine or ?

Can we extrapolate a reality that impinged upon early man, which caused them to note that reality?

And if so, what was the essence of that reality? Divine interpositions or Extraterrestrial intrusions?

Can we ever know? Does it matter?

RR

Again, why cave art, and did other-worldly agents bring it about?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.


Secrets of the Ice Age: The World of the Cave Artists by Evan Hadingham [Walker and Company, NY, 1979], pictured above, makes clear that no one knows, for sure, why primitive mankind painted on cave walls or produced stone art.

And some cave art is not representational such as this abstract rendering from Abri Leuillet in the Paris Basin, dating from the Neolithic period:


Page 285

Mr. Hardingham presents the mystery of why art seems to have waned after the Ice Age:


Page 267

The idea that cave art was totemic in nature, or created for magical rituals is wrong, writes Mr. Hadingham.

Of course, there are some totemic drawings, just as there depictions of a sexual nature or hunting scenes.

And the idea that such art stemmed from a leisure, art-for-arts sake has been discounted also.

Why do I persist in presenting the cave art scenarios here?

I think that something happened that encouraged the primitive or aboriginal mind, as was the case on Easter Island; that is, either paranormal, extraterrestrial, or supernatural (an intrusion by divinity) agents instigated or sparked such art, maybe by just being present.

And UFOs or other-worldly beings played a controlling part in this esthetic turn by early mankind, which disappeared for a while to show up at the outset of the Sumerian/Egyptian cultural beginnings.

But if “outside” agents brought on the creativity, why didn’t it continue in an overt form?

Also, there is no and has been no overt esthetic thrusts or evidence of such artistic endeavors by those beings encountered in UFO events of the modern era.

Beings imagined or real, encountered by humans, have been unique in their unesthetic contact.

Was the artistic spark lit long ago and left to geminate on its own?

Did the gods or ET infuse humankind with an artistic DNA factor and then let it fester on its own, and if so, why?

Or is an outside agent needed at all?

What caused early man (and modern man) to draw (or paint)?

Do we need an outside source as an explanation?

Even the Ancient Astronaut theorists are loath to wax enthusiastically about aliens inculcating art among their processes for humanity’s “evolution,” pressing the alleged primitive technological and/or architectural input.

But there’s more here….something not quite right, about early mankind’s sophisticated approach to rendering pictograms when writing and speaking were hardly developed,

And is there a UFO tie-in?

RR

ET is in the Eye of the Beholder

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

Jacquetta Hawkes’ The Atlas of Early Man [St/ Martin’s Press, NY, 1976] presents her views on the Çatal Hüyük peoples (covered in an earlier post here).

Ms. Hawkes, in her splendidly illustrated book, marvels at the beauty of the Çatal Hüyük art, and writes that “…the most memorable manifestations are painted vultures with vast wings, their hooked and feathered beaks pecking at little headless human bodies":



Her book’s art reproductions also included this statue found at Eridu, Mesopotamia from the al-Ubaid period [circa 4000 B.C.]:



What are we to make of the Çatal Hüyük “little people” or the Eridu “alien”?

Do we accept the idea that primitive artists, like their modern counterparts, created imaginary figures and representations which belie the reality that encompassed them?

That is, did primitive peoples visualize, in their minds, what they depicted? And why, considering the vicissitudes of their existence, did they portray the images they did?

Do peoples under stress slip into psychotic-like reveries, which they lay down on walls or as sculpted works?

The Çatal Hüyüks were obsessed with placing murals on their walls; murals that contained images of death, leopards, and vultures eating headless, little people.

Why?

And the peoples of Eridu reproducing amongst their realistic art…



a piece (further above) that looks an awful lot like the beings described in UFO encounters.

What causes such transformations – from the real to the “unreal” by Neolithic cultures that had stresses more pertinent that the distained stresses of the modern artist?

There are clues to something in early art – something more than febrility or creative posturings.

But what could that be?

An actual representation of something unearlthly? Perhaps.

Or a neurological glitch that is intrinsic to human kind, and could even be called “Original Sin” should one want to bring Augustine’s views into the topic.

RR

UFOs and Çatalhöyük

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

A review in The Atlantic [March, 2012, Page 74 ff.], lauding Ian Hodder’s new book (pictured above), published by Thames and Hudson, tells of a Neolithic settlement extant 9400 years ago:
Çatalhöyük.

The settlement of about 8000 people, who built and lived in mud-brick houses, was odd for an umber of reasons….

The inhabitants built their houses so close together that entry had to be through the roofs. The propinquity didn’t allow for streets or walking paths.

The houses also acted as cemeteries; the dead buried beneath the floors or in the hearths.

“The inhabitants decorated their interior walls with plaster reliefs and with elaborate murals depicting wild animals…and such cheery scenes as vultures swooping down on headless people.

They regularly – annually or even monthly – replastered their walls and floors, covering these bizarre and beautiful murals…creating a blank canvas for new pictures.”

This compulsive, obsessive behavior was not extrinsic to the Çatalhöyük society, but endemic.

The people didn’t create their settlement near arable land but chose, rather, a site that was an insect-infested marshland that had a proximity to the dense clays they needed to make the plaster for their murals and drawings.

The whole purpose of the Çatalhöyük life-style and existence was the ongoing creation of those murals – nothing else, Hodder conjectures, mattered more to them.

As with the Tassili and other cave-wall paintings we’ve inserted at this blog, one wonders what possessed these primitive peoples to place “art” about anything else in their lives.

To use the Çatalhöyük model, can we conjecture that those who pilot or inhabit UFOs also are obsessed with something – not art, but the archeological wonders that Earth presents and which is unknown in their environments.

The intimations of extraterrestrial intrusions that Ancient Astronaut theorists see in cave paintings may indicate an obsession by galactic or dimensional visitors not unlike that of the Çatalhöyük people.

That is, beings, alien or Earthian, have obsessions that make little sense to “normal” people, which keeps archeologists and “ufologists” flummoxed.

Can we ever really know what primitive man was thinking, or what possible extraterrestrial visitors have as a raison d’être?

RR

Constantine, Joan of Arc, the Camisards, and Fatima….A UFO Connection?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

Roman Emperor Constantine’s alleged sighting of a UFO – a burning cross in the sky – in 312 A.D. represents, if it’s true, a UFO sighting.



And that sighting led to, ostensibly, Rome’s adoption of Christianity, which has caused more harm than good ever since.

In the late 1420s A.D. Jeanne d’Arc – Joan of Arc – acting at the behest of voices she heard, helped the French reclaim their land from their English conquerors.



In the early 1700’s, a Protestant sect of the Huguenots – the Camisards – revolted against the dictates of the Roman Church and the King of France, Louis XIV, who had revoked an edict ((Nantes) that gave Protestants freedom of worship.



The Camisards acted at the instigation of “little prophets” – especially “the fair Isabel” -- who heard from lights in the sky that the reign of the AntiChrist was about to begin, ushering in the Second Coming of Christ.

In 1917, three peasant children in Portugal told of having been visited by The Lady Of Fatima, assumed by many to have been Mary, the mother of Jesus, who provided messages about what was impending for humankind.



(Philip Coppens has recently dealt with this canard of the Church and I suggest you seek out his exegesis of the affair.)

What do these somewhat significant episodes have to do with UFOs?

Nothing, really.

Aside from Constantine’s supposed vision, the other three incidents involved intrusions or intersections between human beings and externals – some kind(s) of paranormal or ultranormal entities or, at least, extra-normal sensations.

Each of the accounts noted here affected human society in semi-serious ways. They didn’t alter the evolution of civilization -- well, maybe Constantine’s devious use of a ruse did; his adoption of Christianity, a political and Machiavellian-like move (well before Machiavelli defined such) has produced a entity – The Church of Rome – whose actions over the years have been deleterious to humans in many ways. (Need I cite the problem with Galileo or the Inquisition’s actions that destroyed Joan of Arc, Giordano Bruno, and countless other paragons of mankind?)

But they did cause an alteration or crimp in civilization’s progress.

And the Camisards being induced to insurrection by lights in the sky is interesting, is it not?

The Fatima “miracle” didn’t do much, but it created a mind-set that bolstered the Church for much of the European faithful, giving strength to Catholicism, which had altered the messages of the externals, including Jesus/Christ, since his death., and continues to do so even today.

My point?

There were, on occasion, intrusions by something or somebodies, that hoped to influence the evolution of mankind.

But such once-upon-a-time, transcendental intrusions have been replaced by the bizarre scenarios delineated by Jose Caravaca, Jacques Vallee, and dozens (even hundreds) of supposed UFO or flying saucer witnesses who have been punked by entities and events with a mischievous or nonsensical bent.



UFO entities have gone silent but still act out, in mime, strange behavior.

But why have UFO encounters become weird rather than eschatological in nature?

Or did we once deal with and are we still dealing with a profound mental chimera?

RR

The Gods or UFO’s Externals?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

A paper by Thomas L. Thomas, How Yahweh Became God: Exodus 3 and 6 and the Heart of the Pentateuch, published by Sage in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament is an exegesis of the names of entities who interacted with the Hebrews at the time of Moses, between 450 B.C, and 150 B.C.



The paper is exceedingly erudite and convoluted for the non-scholar.

But you can access an abstract and see the whole paper, if you are engaged with Sage in a professional way.

Click HERE to access the abstract and Sage

Thomas Thompson was with the Institute of Biblical Exegesis at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark (of course) when he wrote his paper, published by Sage in 1995.

For me, the historical texts, whether Egyptian, Sino-Indian, Hebraic, or Greek (Homer even), were accounts of things seen and experienced by the writers first-hand or recorded by them from second-hand accounts, with all the caveats that second-hand accounts present.

But even an approximation of reality, as recounted by humans (as we’ve indicated in our cursory Tassili postings indicate), have a core of truth within the accounts, as Jung and his acolyte Joseph Campbell convincingly insisted, and even Von Däniken accepts as he did in his book, Odyssey of the Gods.



That is, mythical tales, theological tracts, and other ruminations by our ancestors are replete with truths and realities, and are not fictive accounts of fevered imaginations.

So when Thompson provides the intercessions of supposed divine entities and names those divine entities – yhwh, bͨ l šmm, ͨlywn, et al. – he assumes and examples that the entities and their names are manifestations of one divine form, Thompson resorting to, in footnote 14, the Platonic/Aristotelian axiom that individual realities are material representations of a single form.



But when reads the accounts, in the original Hebrew and/or Greek translations, one is struck by the distinct personalities and commands, which can only, using common sense, point to separate individuals, not one singularity acting through various guises.

For example, Thompson cites Exodus 23.20-24.8: “Here, closing the so-called covenant code, a deity, speaking in the first person as ‘yhwh your God’, promises to send his ml^k to attend Israel as a kind of enforcer.”

Now these divinities (or divinity, as Thompson would have it, to conform to the Hebraic idea of monotheism) are flesh and blood entities, and I often cite the Biblical passage found in Exodus 4:24 (where God/Yahweh seeks Moses to kill him, appearing to Moses’ wife who talks him out of the foul deed) to indicate that God/Yahweh was not ephemeral.

There are other passages that show a physical God interacting with humans. These are not angelic messengers, but God, Himself [Genesis 18:1-15].

Thompson’s thesis is that this Divine Being shows up in various incarnations, using various names to identify Himself.

But doesn’t it make more sense to accept that the Divinities extrapolated by Thompson from their identities are many, and not just one?

Otherwise, we’d have to see the singular Divinity as schizophrenic, which the Gnostics believed and to which I am overtly sympathetic.

Setting aside the theological argument, let’s assume that we’re not talking about Divinities here at all but, rather, externals, with form and substance; externals that were working with early mankind for some admittedly obscure reason.

The Ancient Astronaut theorists consider the externals to be extraterrestrials, from worlds beyond Earth.

The late Mac Tonnies thought the externals were beings from a concomitant race on Earth, hidden from view for millennia but interacting, sometimes, with mankind, with whom they share the Earth.

Jacques Vallee sees, I think, the externals as “spiritual” or evanescent beings who intrude on humankind for various reasons, some nefarious, some beneficial.

The Divinities enunciated by Thompson, from the Biblical tracts he uses [Exodus 3 and 6, but also Maccabees, Kings, Isaiah, et cetera] are human-like, but glorified in essence, much like the Gods in Homer or the Sumerian texts.

None of the Gods or externals have the appearance of the greys in UFO lore.



But it seems clear that someone or something interacted with humans early on, and came to be seen as Gods or God, if we let Thompson have his way.

As I’ve suggested, in earlier postings here and at our RRRGroup blog, have the Gods of old diminished in stature, appearing as small beings sighted by UFO witnesses from 1961 on, or are we dealing with a different group of externals, not Gods (whom I think died long ago, as they were wont to do by nature of their physical – not transcendent – being)?

Are UFO entities remnants of the old Gods or a different species altogether?

Whatever your view is, you can only, by reading the early accounts in the Torah of Moses or the Biblical Pentateuch, conclude that entities were on the Earth once and applying machinations that directed humans, confusingly I’m afraid, to behavior and existence that makes little sense but is actual and real in every material way.

The Gods were tangible, and often loopy, as Homer noted, and the Hebrew Bible hints.

Today’s UFO entities behave similarly but lack the attributes of divinity that the early entities adopted or displayed.

What does this tell us, if anything?

RR

A Saucer Scoop?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.


Joan and Ron Whritenour, of St. Petersburg, Florida, along with others, published Saucer Scoop (pictured above).

In this undated issue, from the 1960s, Volume 2, Number 5 [August], Denmark’s Willy Olsen offered a saucer sighting, in his area, by two young boys.



This is a saucer encounter with a few elements that intrigue. (No date for the encounter is given.)

A “flying saucer” was spotted by (the) two boys, flying low, over Sjellands Odde while “playing in front of a big stack of hay.”

As it was becoming dark, the boys started for home when one noticed a dark grey object in the sky.



The object was traveling slowly, and seemed about to land, as three legs “were lowered through the bottom.”



But when it got to about three feet from the ground, the legs re-entered the craft and “it speeded up.”

The object continued toward the sea, and when it got near the shore, it threw out what looked like “boxes.”

(There are current accounts of strange boxes being found on the coastal beach at Bray’s Point, Oregon.)

When the object was out to sea - over the ocean – it lowered a large hamp or box via a large cable as “big as an arm.”



Then eight little persons came out through a hole in the bottom of the craft and climbed down the cable.

The boys said the persons looked friendly and actually waved at them – remember the Papua, New Guinea sighting of Reverend Gill – and smiled.



They didn’t wave in the normal manner, the boys said, but held their palms vertically and made quick horizontal movements.

One of the eight little persons (about the size of the boys themselves) wore a blue suit and the others wore striped suits.

They all, except the person with the blue suit, had containers on their backs with tubes going to their mouths.

They also had on striped caps and they seemed to have “had lights on their shoulders” – lights that looked like electric torches with a “light in both ends of the torches.”

That’s the SS/Willy Olsen account.

A date, the age of the boys or any follow-up information would be nice to know.

But taking the sighting/encounter as true, which I do when it comes from children and contains such explicit, bizarre details – kids who are lying will not provide such imaginative detail, deriving their falsehood from mundane or prosaic aspects of their daily lives or information from media they have read or seen – one has corroborating information that the boys surely wouldn’t know: The three protruding legs from the saucer (Socorro, et cetera), the Gill aliens waving, the cable descent (from two Medieval accounts that are part of UFO lore) and, of course, the boxes found in Oregon in 2012.

The uniforms, caps, and containers on the backs of the little persons, with (breathing?) tubes going to their mouths indicate a real sighting/encounter, not encumbered by mental machinations or a Distortion patina (although I imagine Jose Caravaca could make the case).

It’s these kinds of UFO incidents that matter, like Socorro, the Utterson episode, and the 1954 Rosa Lotti-Danielli case.



The appurtenances are what defines the sighting or encounter, and would have defined UFOs, had researchers realized that it’s not the forest – the overall UFO event – but, rather, the trees – the uniforms, caps, and back containers, for instance – that, like Zamora’s insignia, would go a long was to explaining such encounters and ultimately the UFO phenomenon.

Lights in the sky and daylight sightings of metal-like craft don’t take us anywhere.



But encounters like that noted above can take us to an understanding of what UFOs are: mental aberrations, encounters with “externals” (extraterrestrial or otherwise), or something like Senor Caravaca’s distortion scenarios.

Yet, just as UFO researchers have eschewed, pretty much, the Zamora insignia, they have ignored details like those recounted above, concentrating on the patina of the vent – the ET overlay as it were.

That said, I’m of the mind that UFOs are insignificant quirks that belabor idle minds and are dismissed by normal people, who have to contend with the exigencies and vagaries of our lot in life.

But UFOs have been and are addictive for some (me included) even as they continue to prove meaningless in the great scheme of things….

RR

The Tassili Paintings – what do they really tell us?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.


Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca has been kind enough to provide us with a slew of images from the Tassili paintings created between 4000 B.C. and 2000 B.C.

You can also Google Tassili and see many more. (There are about 15000 discovered drawings by the Neolithic tribe from the Saharan Desert region in and around Algeria.)

The paintings have received notice by painters, anthropologists, Ancient Astronaut theorists, and culturalists inside many scientific disciplines.

There is a story, a history, that one can derive from the drawings, but that story hasn’t been discerned in any significant way.

The paintings should be grist for serious examination, as they provide some kinds of seminal truths about early man and early attempts at social civilization, maybe even something about contact with the Tassili humans by externals – externals from outside the Earth or externals from other areas of the Earth -- externals who were extant in 4000 B.C.

Some of the paintings intrigue; others are prosaic, mundane actually, depicting hunting and tribal rituals.

One painting, noted below, is the only painting that is realistic, in the modern sense.

The rest are either symbolic representations or presentations of what the artists actually saw, and provided for posterity, as if the artist knew how important and/or significant what they had seen was.

Look at these images and tell us what you see.









Two detailed images from the painting above:











This painting has pictured what one might see in African tribes today:















This painting is very interesting, as we see it:































JS/RR