William Blake: The Vision of Ezekiel (1805)
The study proposed here is based on Andrea Franco’s article “The Occult War, UFOs and the Eighth Sphere” published in issue 2 of the magazine “Anthroposophy” in 2003
. Moreover, in this regard you can read a related article by our anthroposophist friend Tiziano Bellucci: “Extraterrestrials, aliens, UFOs, crop circles: testimonies of other worlds?
In Italy, lately, we often hear about Mauro Biglino’s work and his Old Testament exegesis, but this author is only the last of a long line of scholars of sacred texts, after Zecharia Sitchin, Erich von Däniken, Peter Kolosimo, Mario Pincherle and others who replace the apparitions of angels and other spiritual entities with the aliens proper to ufology. They are all modern authors, who have undergone the sensational fascination of UFO mania so much that they have made it not only a science, but also a religion. Rampant since the 1950sonwards by the United States and Russia during the Cold War, at that time souls filled with the terror of being spied on or attacked from the sky were scrutinized in the skies. Heaven had long since ceased to be the Heaven of the spiritual worlds, so instead of being an inspiration to high ideals and the home of spiritual beings, it became a cold and deep space full of threats, all the more fearsome the more hidden. The scenario of an occult war.
The cited authors propose the so-called “Theory of the Ancient Astronauts”, whose main feature is to replace the spirit in the sacred texts of all ancient cultures (Babylonian, Hebrew, Egyptian, Aztec, Mayan and so on) with ufology. By doing this, these ufologists carry out a real operation of counterfeiting of the spirit, which however has its basis in the influences that spirit itself undergoes: for the precision of the spirit of the cold knowledge Lucifer who, as usual, allies himself with Ahriman, the spirit of materialism.
These ufologists, proponents of the theory of the ancient astronauts, in fact, are people whose strong feeling of religious obedience (“Catholic” in the moral sense of the term) has completely merged with their scientific materialism so that on the one hand they are exposed to the attacks of luciferic spirits making the dogmatism of the literal interpretation of the sacred texts (even if imaginative or mythological) reborn and, on the other hand, to that of Ahrimanic spirits who replace the spirit with matter, i.e. angels with aliens. These aliens, unlike the spiritual hierarchies of which the sacred texts studied by them actually speak, have properties of the physical world: weight, number and measure. They belong to matter! They are disconnected from the physical-chemical laws of earthly nature only by virtue of their organic evolution, preceding that of human beings and life on earth (theory of guided panspermia).
In fact, ufology is a spiritual pseudoscience: in other words, it is a counterfeit of the spiritual science. It uses the method and terms of materialistic science (data, hypotheses and theories) studying paranormal phenomena able to catalyze the interest of the masses, in fact replacing the ancient mysteries of initiatory cults with X-Files good for TV shows. The phenomenological approach through “ideas and direct experiences” is in fact abhorred, as ufology ninth only uses the means of materialistic science, but aspires to become part of official science. Its pseudoscience status is considered by its supporters only temporary, waiting for official science to recognize it as its equal. Official science for its part indefinitely condemns ufology to pseudoscience, since even though it uses its methods (good or bad) it considers its object of investigation (UFOs and aliens) explainable in other, simpler ways, following Occam’s rationalist razor principle. Following this principle, from the point of view of materialistic science, however, the theory of the ancient astronauts is more likely than the initiatory mysteries beyond the Threshold!
Thus we obtain a true decadence of spirituality in materialism. The paradox is that this ufology even proposes itself as religious (see the Raelian movement) when instead it is more similar to materialistic science than official science believes. The same concept of ancient astronaut theory is found as the foundation of Scientology cosmology, where L. Ron Hubbard’s science fiction novels are used as accurate descriptions of the past of cosmic history.
This was predicted by Rudolf Steiner, in a way that we could summarize how:
When materialism reaches its extreme limit, it will result in a materialistic spiritualism, uniting the efforts of Lucifer and Ahriman in a single combined attack on the human soul.
Just like the temptations in the desert. Of course, given the success of such speculation in the public, one can deduce how difficult it is to understand the absurdity of such statements in the spiritual sphere. We are too addicted to materialism to understand the deception of such fabrications, which are good at best as metaphors in novels and cinema.
More specifically, in the texts of these authors, in fact, the word “alien” is perfectly replaceable with those of “angel”, “God” or “gods”. Random mutation or voluntary genetic modification is often invoked instead of spiritual evolution, effectively nullifying the tripartition of man in body, soul and spirit or in any case making the higher part (spirit) “genetically” determined by the lower part (body). This is due to the progressive and general sliding of human consciousness into materialism as a result of the growing activity of Ahrimanic spirits (particularly active since 1879, i.e. the end of Michael’s struggle with the spirits of darkness). The theory of the ancient astronauts would imply instead that in the previous human epochs the state of consciousness was exactly identical to the present one, or rather to that of humanity in the 1950s when UFOs appeared in the collective consciousness, thus sinking also into the collective unconscious, ready to re-emerge. Jung rightly believed UFO sightings of mass visions, collective hallucinations derived from the suppression of the imaginative part of the unconscious. For Jung, too, consciousness had extremely changed since the mythical times of angelic visions (however, we will see in the next article where such visions spiritually originate). So the assumption of the constancy of consciousness today is rather an imaginative lack of the authors in Ancient Astronauts theories and at the same time a sign of our materialistic times.
To seek the spirit, in fact, today we think of striking and inexplicable facts. Not only in the pseudoscientific field, such as ufology, but also in the field of official materialistic science that speaks of “God’s mind”, “God’s particle”, “theories of the whole” and so on. On these theories is then embroidered a lot by the followers of the milder New Age, mixing vague mysticism and scientific theories (provisional and in continuous revision), doing nothing but materializing the spirit and realizing in this way the will of Lucifer and Ahriman in a single stroke.
But as testified by the imaginative poetics of the sacred texts themselves, the state of consciousness of the ancient Egyptian, Persian or even more so of the Indian was totally different from the present one: while today consciousness is all turned to the material world, as we go back in time, the clairvoyant perception of the spiritual world was the norm. That is why in the sacred texts, written precisely in those past eras, there is so much talk of the intervention of the spirit: they were capable of perception before direct (Indian and Persian times) and gradually more symbolic (Egyptian and Greco-Roman). The older the sacred text is, the more its language is epic-poetic (for example in the Bible, Genesis), and its content is mythical. Later it becomes legendary (Old Testament) and finally literal (Gospel of John).
The words of a mythical text have much wider meanings than a literal text, the individual letters have not only alphabetical but also numerical (gematric) meaning and this breadth of meaning is due to the great differences in interpretation of older texts compared to modern ones. The meaning was grasped through imaginative clairvoyance, typical of the greater contact that man had with his spiritual abode before the fall (during the middle of the Lemuric Epoch). For an ancient Indian, Persian, Egyptian or Hebrew, the single word in one of their texts included a world: for example, in Genesis the seven days of Creation correspond to seven epochs of the Earth’s past, just as in Revelation the recurring number seven (trumpets, angels, cups) tells imaginatively about future epochs.
Therefore, “aliens” are not incarnated in a physical body…
Here on Earth we are surrounded by minerals, plants, animals and humans. We have also seen that beings that Christian esotericism calls Angels, Archangels and principalities, provide for earthly events; and that other beings have to do with the Earth, beings who send their forces to it from outside, from the Sun and the Moon. The question may arise in us today: to what extent can we compare one of the planets in our solar system, for example, with the Earth? Let us first look at the visible beings that surround us today. What are the beings that surround us as inhabitants of the Earth in relation to other planets?Are men like those who evolve on our Earth also found on another planet? We will answer from the point of view of spiritual science, we will talk about what the clairvoyant consciousness can know. It answers us: men, our fellow beings on Earth, are not on other planets in the same exact form. This confirms the fact that each planet, each celestial body has its own particular mission. Nothing is repeated in the cosmos. Different scenarios in the universe have different missions. Other beings have already crossed similar degrees to our humanity on Saturn, Sun and Moon. It would be easy to fall into the error of saying: but then there are humans on other planets! However, we must bear in mind that there the human degree was crossed under completely different conditions, and that on the ancient Moon, for example, there was still no solid ground, neither rocks nor stones like here. As humanity at that time, only the degree of humanity is meant. Let us say: there, they have crossed their degree of humanity. For example, on the Sun the Fire Spirits (Archangels) have crossed this stage in a completely different element. Even in the becoming of our Earth, nothing repeats itself in the same way. Everything is so in the process of becoming that in the great economy of cosmic existence each individual planet has its own mission. – Rudolf Steiner
On the other hand, it is true that spiritual science is able to put in relationship spirits belonging to different planets, which are increasingly coming into incarnation on Earth. But these are still in human form and think themselves as human. If we want to picture how spirits belonging to other planets interact with earthly evolution, we can read Steiner’s account:
Since the last third of the nineteenth century, we are actually dealing with the influx of spirit beings from the universe. Initially, these were beings dwelling in the sphere between moon and Mercury, but they are closing in upon earth, so to say, seeking to gain a foothold in earthly life through human beings imbuing themselves with thoughts of spiritual beings in the cosmos. This is another way of describing what I outlined earlier when I said that we must call our shadowy intellect to life with the pictures of spiritual science. That is the abstract way of describing it. The description is concrete when we say: Spirit beings are seeking to come down into earth existence and must be received. Upheaval upon upheaval will ensue, and earth existence will at length arrive at social chaos if these beings descended and human existence were to consist only of opposition against them. For these beings wish to be nothing less than the advance guard of what will happen to earth existence when the moon reunites once again with earth. Nowadays it may appear comparatively harmless to people when they think only those automatic, lifeless thoughts that arise through comprehension of the mineral world itself and the mineral element’s effects in plant, animal, and man. Yes, indeed, people revel in these thoughts; as materialists, they feel good about them, for only such thoughts are conceived today. But imagine that people were to continue thinking in this way, unfolding nothing but such thoughts until the eighth millennium when moon existence will once more unite with the life of the earth. What would come about then? The beings I have spoken about will descend gradually to the earth. Vulcan beings, Vulcan supermen, Venus supermen, Mercury supermen, Sun supermen, and so on will unite themselves with earth existence. Yet, if human beings persist in their opposition to them, this earth existence will pass over into chaos in the course of the next few thousand years.” – Rudolf Steiner