Mass Mutability: Holding The Protean Fast

“We are like the spider.We weave our life and then move along in it.We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.”

― Upanishads

I recently became interested in Whitley Strieber’s accounts of his experiences in upstate New York which led to him writing and publishing about them in the book Communion, which continued establishing the image of the Grey extra terrestrial form into collective consciousness. Although, Strieber refers to the beings as the “visitors” and has always held that he doesn’t know for sure exactly what they are. Watching the movie version of Communion where Christopher Walken plays Strieber there is definite suggestion of what he encounters with kinds of little people, faery and troll like beings. Indeed, even the incident of the alien type creature inserting something into his head is reminiscent of old English warnings of elf shot, strikes with enchanted arrows, and the small nose and large slanted eyes of the classic Grey do indeed resemble elvin features. Strieber connects these beings to the dead, the earth, magnetic ore, the tension between the light and the dark, reorganized memories and encourages us to find a way to integrate liminal experiences into our lives. In an interview he even mentions that his wife Anne upon her deathbed insisted he memorize a Yeats poem which includes cutting hazel branches by the riverside, something fans of the grimoire genre might recognize from goetic magical procedures in making a wand which allows for communication with spirits in the invocation process.

Tighe O' Donoghue/Ross (also above)

This had me thinking about the overlap between what popular imagination and contemporary culture has bracketed as aliens, ET’s and UFOs as a modern mytheme of what was once faery lore before we developed advanced technology and started framing the celestial via telescopic astronomy and space program discoveries. Much research and commentary has gone into drawing these parallels and exploring them in meaningful ways. I began to look into this research as well as into Celtic mythology and folklore in particular, especially the Tuath Dé Danann who retreated into the sidhe, or hills, mounds and mountains, as the human civilization progressed. This became of particular interest as I’ve been recently looking into the origins of anthropocentrism and what made homo sapiens have technological, interventionist responses to change and unpredictability in their environment whereas neanderthals and homo erectus species contemporaneous to early homo sapiens practiced adaptive behaviors instead for many, many millennia previous, along with very sophisticated language and medicine lifeways. Some Irish folklorists have commented that the faery folk became small over time as humans believed in them less and less, while others equate them with Lucifer and the fallen angels, which continues the goetic alignment, and that they seek to return to heir original status or destroy the world if they cannot achieve this aim. This latter thread which weaves through Enoch also migrates attention to the inception of anthropocentrism and the oddity of human civilization banishing beings who once had a closer relationship to humans. Indeed, at the conclusion of the Communion film the Strieber character dresses sharply and wears a brimmed hat he only does previously when he seems to be channeling the muse for creative writing, then travels to the place of encounter having told his wife he’s out to buy cigarettes despite not being a smoker, enters into the hill side through a portal of light where he befriends and dances with the trollish beings, encounters his own doppelgänger, and realizes the “visitor” won’t reveal their true form in a very Black Lodge type sequence complete with a Laura Palmer look alike and Walken delivering the line “I am the dreamer you are the dream”, although Communion was released a year before Twin Peaks aired. Many goetic elements run through Twin Peaks, especially in the infamous Black Lodge sequences which parallel dynamics that appear in many spirit engagement traditions, and Strieber/Walken’s approach to direct engagement with the “visitors” and Co. follows along with dressing up as daimon, involving tobacco and interfacing with the spirit world familiar in invocationary methodology. After the encounter he wakes up in his vehicle as if he never even arrived at his destination in the first place, the encounter had occured in the imaginal or dream world and afterwards the timeline was distinctly reorganized. This reshuffling of storyline will be familiar to anyone who has practiced goetic magic or an analogue; I sometimes refer to these practices as narrative conditioning.

Robert B. LeLieuvre concludes in the paper “THE CELTIC ALIEN: FAIRY FAITH IN THE UFO ERA” that both faeries and aliens possess a 'subtle body’, are shape-shifters, are matrixed or legionary, protean, shining or luminous, daemonic, offer developmental potential, both positive and negative influences, have a need for humans despite disliking or fearing us, tend to hide and posses abilities to enchant in a variety of ways. LeLieuvre mentions that W. B. Yeats stated that faeries were dangerous for mortals to explore and they themselves have warned “Be careful, and do not seek to know too much about us”— similar to the conclusions Strieber/Walken draws in the finale of Communion. Abductions, disorientations,,genetic modifications, baby swapping and particular interest in dna and bloodlines in general overlap across both alien and faery accounts.

Leonora Carrington

Along the way of seeking out overlaps between Greys in particular and denizens of the sidhe I stumbled upon Leonora Carrington’s mystical Celtic compositions. I hadn’t been previously aware this wanderer in the imaginal had followed much of a Celtic stream of consciousness, but there it was, and her depiction of the White People of the Tuath Dé Danann assembled around a meal table is a dead ringer for luminous Greys painted in 1954. Another visceral Otherworld embedded in the Irish imagination can be found in the work of Tighe O’Donoghue/Ross, American born but found to possess dna linking him directly to Rory Mór, a famed chief of Clan MacLeod, of a sept thought previously to be extinct. O’Donoghue/Ross who I read has been compared to William Blake and the strange American eccentric painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. The latter painter’s work had previously caught my eye as I had wanted to use his composition The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) in a recent forecast in association with Saturn in Pisces themes but I could not find an image of it which wasn’t too dark and/or blurry. I later learned that this was a result of Ryder’s tendency to work in unconventional and non-archival ways; mixing fast and slow drying paint layers, adding in candle wax, resins, oils, and working paintings continually for up to and over a decade. Many of his works have considerably discolored, darkened, cracked, split or deteriorated over time. He was renowned for brilliantly capturing mood in low light luminosity, frequently moonlit seascapes of which he drew upon his birthplace of New Bedford, Massachusetts at the time of Moby Dick. Apparently, the thick application and sloppy mixture methods he employed have led to him being perhaps the most counterfeited artist with multiple examples of fakes of his works being held in museum collections before they were discovered as not authentic. There is something about all of these dynamics which surround his story that seem to resonate with the current moment of everything mixing and mingling in a way which makes it decay and not last as well as be ripe for mimicry and impersonation. Pulling up his chart, voila, he has Saturn in Pisces as well as Jupiter in Gemini. I reflected on how the theme of aliens being perhaps spirit world entities we used to map as something other than a technologically advanced species from off planet led me tangentially back to Ryder and the Pale Horse painting and the coincidence of Milton William Cooper’s 1991 book being titled “Behold A Pale Horse” which catalyzed extra terrestrial conspiracy theories around his thesis which pivoted on events of world power and alien collaborations from 1954, the year Leonora Carrington painted faery folk that looked like Greys. I could feel themes I was exploring beginning to curl into baroque loops of a-causal association; the narrative rearrangement of synchronic story chains.

Albert Pinkam Ryder

My search into Whitley Strieber also led me to revisiting the low fi video and film productions of cult icon George Kuchar as Strieber had appeared in a work of his called “Secrets of The Shadow World”, which wandered around UFO phenomenon personae and their contributions to the genre. Whitley at one point says:

“underneath energy and matter there’s something called information. Physicists who work in this know it as fisher information. The problem is that the aliens when they come close to us cause what is called a derangement in the assembly of fisher information, and because of that we cannot allow anyone to verify that they’re real because if that happens reality as we know it will reassemble itself and our world will no longer mean anything to us that makes sense. And thats why the government and people like me will never admit that they are real, and neither will they.”

Whitley Streiber in Secrets Of The Shadow World

I had also recently watched a lecture from Harvard Mathematics Department by Lisa Piccirillo called Exotic Phenomena in dimension 4 where she sprawls in equations and notations across multiple blackboards displaying functions of reality levels we don’t readily experience. I don’t personally believe that these esoteric abstractions of theorems and equations run reality, but more display a level of complexity and mystery in how reality is assembled and occurs, as described by Albert North Whitehead for instance who himself migrated from deep end mathematics to metaphysics in philosophy, which encounters with entities in the more than human world can sometimes cause, as Strieber says, a derangement of how reality assembles itself. Such distortions could possibly then show up on the level of information, although you would likely not be able to catch it occurring, or be powerless to demonstrate the novelty as one minute things are quantifiable, classifiable and able to be constructed through certain logics and the next minute by completely alternate laws, functions and outcomes, like a volatilized Morphic Resonance. Rupert Sheldrake meticulously demonstrated his principles in examples like the melting points of natural compounds remaining steady and static over time whereas the melting points in related synthetic compounds increasing as time passes. The natural compounds were known and existed for a very long period prior whereas the newly existent and synthetic compounds were more subject to change. That which is true becomes more true exponentially as time progresses. The more you demonstrate something the more demonstrable it becomes. There is in a sense a drift in the fisher information related to that specificity in reality. But if there is an observable tendency to drift and exponentiate, then derangement and re-assembly of reality’s fabric is possible, which as Strieber is pointing out, may shuffle in response to direct encounters with non-human entities, which we can consider aliens and faeries and the like as not general but parallel in how our experiences effect us and the reality we inhabit.

From Sheldrake

I was speaking along a similar tangent at the most recent Astro Magia Conference about coherence/incoherence in the age of room temperature superconductors and quantum computing in an Air period in preparation for Uranus In Gemini. Quantum computers use entangled electron pairs in probabilistic calculations which far exceed the computational power of regular digital super-computers. The problem is that processing of this sort based off entangled electrons is extremely sensitive to environmental conditions which create noise and randomness, such as temperature, sound, vibration and so on— so the system must be extremely isolated. I was seeing the larger metaphor of the moment as we edge into a post energy crisis world where we are getting used to AI integrated search engines “hallucinating” for instance, and wondering how we might navigate coherently despite it all. As I’m a sailor myself and researching archaic forms of wayfinding I delved into actual navigational lifeways, mythos, technique and metaphysics as literal metaphors to be applied, namely the importance of criticality and kinetic direct engagement in how the world is metaphysically mapped as a function of keeping coherence in tact in an increasingly incoherent society and possibly incoherent reality itself. Polynesian navigators, for instance, have skin in the game, the astrological components which integrate into their navigational understanding are not loosely interpretive, they are critical for arriving at a destination and not dying lost at sea. Knowing there are maritime origins in other metaphysical cultus such as the Orphics suggests this may have been the case in many pre-civilized, indigenized, archaic, non-urbanized or otherwise underground traditions and cultures.

Odysseus' possible route

One avenue of interest this brought me to is the dutch sailor and researcher Henk van Oosten’s work which centers around Odysseus’ journey being circum-Atlantic rather than circum-Mediterranean. While reviewing the narrative of the Odyssey for myself, inspired by this convincing and compelling idea, I got pulled in by the mythological old-man-of-the-sea figure Proteus, son of Poseidon, from whom we derive the adjective ‘protean’ meaning mutable, changeable, versatile, taking on various forms. Remember “protean” is one of the words Robert B. LeLieuvre uses to describe when faeries and aliens are the same. Proteus comes from roots meaning primordial or first born, which reminds me of the second to last of the 28 cycle in the Prayer to Mene list, CHILD, and how CHILD-KEY would be the last 26ish degrees of tropical Pisces before Vernal Equinox and zero degrees Aries. CHILD brims with associations to Harpocrates, the newborn version of Horus, and later the Christ child. This is the rebirth of the soul, the renewal and return which unlocks a new world, another cycle of the zodiacal round. Proteus could transmit oracular knowledge about the past or future but to get him to deliver the goods you had to hold him despite his attempts to be as elusive as the sea and constantly shape shift and changing his form. In the Odyssey Menelaus holds Proteus through such a series of morphing and obtains information including that Odysseus was shipwrecked on the Isle of Ogygia and was being held captive by the nymph Calypso. The three beasts he took the form of in this process were a lion, leopard and serpent, which are also all on the Mene list and perhaps not coincidentally fall into tropical water signs, Scorpio and Cancer. The fact that Odysseus’ circuit is still up for debate and there is no accepted route academics agree on, that within the narrative itself he is gone from his home for twenty years and is multiple times interfered with, abducted or assisted by divine and semi divine beings which alter his plot line, and that he hides his identity for a period after arriving home all find some reminiscence to the types of dynamics discussed above whether they are fisher information derangement or the counterfeiting of sloppy masterpieces which morphed as they aged or synthetic compounds whose fundamental physics drift exponentially over decades.

The thoroughly investigated Ariel School UFO incident which occurred in Zimbabwe in 1994 in which over sixty children reported seeing a disc shaped vessel land, black clad humanoids emerge and telepathically inform the kids that technology was being misused and was threatening the health of the planet. Most of the sixty plus kids reported the same story although some division of accounts occurred where a few children instead of experiencing the beings as aliens saw them as folkloric dwarven water spirits called tikoloshes from their local cultural background. It is said in Shona and Ndebele tradition that a tikoloshe is prepared when a witchdoctor pierces the eyes and brain of a dead body with a hot iron rod so it can’t think for itself. This latter detail is reminiscent of faery blasting concepts of Newfoundland where the eyes and face are struck with piercing pain, elf shot in English folklore where faeries shoot arrows and enchant victims, and aliens insert implants in abductees brains as displayed in the movie Communion. Furthermore, the creation of such beings, environmental concerns, descent from the sky, apocalyptic visions, and attention to technology are reminiscent of the Watchers element of Enoch as well as the Sumerian myths in which it has roots.

The Sumerian story revolves around the figure Adapa and the south wind where after a flood in the kingdom humanity needed guidance, as it had no direction. Adapa was a mortal priest and lord of magic and knowledge who had great wisdom but not immortality. He was fishing at the Tigris to catch fish for offering to his tutelary god Inki when his boat capsized from rough sea due to a blast of south wind. He employed a magic spell to break the south wind preventing it from blowing for 7 days, which was highly disruptive as it was considered necessary for agriculture, so the goings on of the world came to pause. Anu, the god of writing, then freaks out in response and calls Adapa to heaven. Inki warns Adapa before his ascent that he should not eat the poisoned food he will be offered there. Anu suggests to Adapa that his refusal to eat or drink the food and water of life is the origin of human disease and in a logical loop the source of his magical powers is seen as the result of his ascent to heaven and return to earth. Much more can be said about the themes of flood, weather control, genetic engineering, off planet activity and the intervention of non human beings which thrive surrounding the progression of plant and animal domestication, agriculture, urbanization, writing, and monotheism which percolate in Sumeria and feed Christian and gnostic thought but a point notable here is spirits or deities of or interactions with water tend also to persist, like Odysseus’ dealings with Proteus or the tikoloshes  of The Ariel School UFO incident, which coincidentally also occurred with Saturn in Pisces.

Charles Eisenstein’s blog post from a few years ago frequently cycles back through my mind but is especially appropriate here, in which he contemplates how certain temples in Egypt have stones so large and heavy today’s most powerful cranes would struggle to lift them at all despite having also been quarried several hundred miles away from where they were installed. Since there is no explanation for such a phenomenon within the framework of our current technological understanding many begin incorporating the deus ex machina of alien intervention, although, this only continues the current paradigm into the past where advanced technology currently unknown but somewhat similar to ours just more advanced could be the only possible explanation. Instead, Eisenstein explores other ideas such as group prayer changing the solid stone into a liquid or otherwise malleable material which could then be more easily transported and sculpted. There is no reason such thinking is stronger than alien technological intervention, and often cultures will insist something occurs magically despite post-enlightenment status quo society not accepting that explanation as satisfactory— a colonizing dynamic which has had to be contended with in the field of anthropology in the last few decades. It may be that the “derangement of fisher information” which accompanied the transportation of massive stones in ancient Egypt will be cognate in the advent of teleportation quantum technologies which are are already becoming possible on small scales. Photons and information have both successfully been teleported vast distances in recent years, and some scientists believe moving human bodies through wormholes will not necessarily disrupt them. But what does happen when we start to disassemble and re-assemble things, beings, locality and the flow of events in the world we inhabit?

Albert Pinkham Ryder

Already there seems to be, especially since the stride into the Air period proper (the 200 year period where Jupiter and Saturn conjoin in Air signs), an increase in the frequency and strength of general synchronicity. Often this jumps in and out back and forth between real life to what we experience in the virtual. Events in history, components of culture, figures in mythology seem to be all of a sudden now written into the story as it unfolds that didn’t seem to have been in existence minutes before. This was, for our lives previously, when there was still some Earth period left to sustain the ongoing chronological feel of existence, more a dynamic which surrounded the results of sorcery and magical workings. Things were altered or came about in inexplicable coincidence and randomness or bizarre novelty when enchantment was involved, but now reality almost problematically behaves in this manner in the normal mundane functioning. I have been underwhelmed by the profundity of AI thus far and have found what it does rather predictable, commercial, and otherwise lacking in value or resonance, yet, I would guess that very many people regularly conversing, interacting and following the guidance of auto-generated thinking networks which can be readily inhabited by non-human entities would be enough of a contact situation, even passively or in an uninteresting way, to stimulate a protean response in how reality functions across the field of existence, and essentially initiate a morphically exponential “derangement of the fisher information”.

Arthur Rimbaud spoke of the derangement of the senses as a way to achieve unique compositional approaches, which was picked up on by Jim Morrison. There is cultural functionality in the event of derangement, of protean states which blur the lines of what everything is, was, and could be. Certain synesthesias allow for novelty and encourage synaptic bridging with meaningful as well as meaningless results. Although, as last Saturn in Pisces period saw the post Nirvanamania dilution of the underground piped into MTV and delivered to every suburban household triggering the emergence of middle American alternateens mimicking style signifiers once belonging to subcultural participants, and now this Saturn in Pisces round we see the flattening of subcultures altogether where each aesthetic component across all the subcultural sets can be bought and mixed into the temporary and morphing fashion sense of anyone in any strata of society without knowing from experience anything about any cultural gesture or ethos or lifeway whatsoever; an aesthetic hellscape of void and vapid eclectic homogeneity. What do we then do in this moment where nothing means anything at all anymore and whatever you express gets sucked into and cycled into the works of the autogenerating curation assembly? Perhaps we posture ourselves to participate resonantly in the derangement itself, holding Proteus fast as he shapeshifts, experiencing profound disassembly and reassembly of deep reality, and as Whitley Strieber encourages find ways to integrate our encounters with the liminal. The overlap between aliens and faeries likely has very real value if fully digested. Humans have had fruitful ways to steward the liminal and cohabitate with non-human beings which stretch back to the vanishing point of our experience on earth. It is always possible we are being re-enchanted right now, and it is how we adapt to this current reality which means everything to how we thrive within it. The disappearance of subcultures is not entirely unlike the disappearance of faeries or divine beings. Culture as a term is used as a concept in the context of society but is also present in biology and ecology. It would make sense that healthy mass culture has healthy subculture beneath it, and it would also make sense that healthy spiritual and imaginal fields can contribute to the health of mundane and manifest material reality. When we pursue dynamic subcultural flourishing and balanced and sound liminal integration and keep well informed of wisdom surrounding how to cohabitate with subtle entities we holistically condition the narrative, and maybe reassemble it for the better.

Tighe O' Donoghue/Ross

It’s worth noting that Whitley Stieber is also quite a controversial charachter, as he tends to contradict himself almost constantly, claiming things and later denying them, often placing the blame on the screen memories which result from his contact with the “visitors”. Jake Stratton Kent has often pointed out that goens, or archaic “goetic magicians” (funerary experts which carried out shamanic functions) were referred to as charlatans in the writings of the Theurgists. In one interpretation this had to do with elite, wealthy, urbanized and educated men having a derogatory view of more rural, indigenous, archaic and less “civilized” or learned magic. Another interpretation is that goens as people who played a shamanic role in their communities may have overlapped with tricksters, clowns, and contraries. They may not have been straight forward to deal with and could have carried more than a bit of moral ambivalence in comparison to the “high minded” theurgical Neo-platonic philosophers. Truth in the Communion moment was not as we currently attempt to practice it. Perplexing figures of the counter culture such as Burroughs were proponents of the axiom “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”. This phrase attributed to Hassan I Sabbah via the 1938 novel ‘Alamut’ by Vladimir Bartol found its way through Burroughs to the Temporary Autonomous Zone of Hakim Bey and myriad Chaos Magick manuals. The phrase now plays a central role, apparently, in the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise. This transposition in itself is a perfect display of the dilution and subculture loss rampant in our contemporary moment of overwhelming derangement calling for greater obscurity and a disposition of unpredictability and uninterpretable subterfuge outside of the localized, inner circle of associates and intimates who might understand the meaning behind the signifiers. This could be a situation of intentional cloaking, or simply good old fashioned attention span itself as the smoke screen. To make meaning in 2024 is to hide in plain sight, as dissociated, bite sized info in a deep fried remix is the digestible unit.

from video of Lisa Piccirillo talk: Exotic Phenomena in dimension 4

Holding fast to Proteus so as to receive oracular knowledge rather than simply be subject to continual, meaningless morphing; embracing the alien head as Strieber/Walken does in the end of Communion when he says its like a Chinese box, nested and legionary; as spirits were said to be bound in the goetic grimoires, made to stabilize in their presence so meaningful dialogue could occur; this larger mundane, contemporary moment of paradox and fakeness can also be grasped coherently when the enchantment of our gaze and the piercingness of vision is in an unyieldingness of scope.

"O, what Protean forms swim up from mens' minds and melt in hot Promethean plunder scorching eyes with divine shames and horrors and casting them down to Davy Jones. The others, still blind, yet in it see all the divine graces and to the Fiddler’s Green sent where no man is suffered to want or toil. This ancient mutable and unchanging as the she who girdles ‘round the globe. ”

--Wake’s burial from The Lighthouse