Encounters With Aliens in A Mystery School Text

by John Lash

2005

from MetaHistory Website

Spanish version

Here and there the Coptic Gnostic materials contain passages that describe encounters with the ET-like beings, sometimes with explicit advice about how to handle these entities.

• What beliefs are implied in such testimony?
• And what are we to believe about such testimony?

I will attempt to address both these questions in this brief topical essay.

 

Occult Instruction

For a first-hand look at the testimony, let's consider a passage from The First Apocalypse of James (NHC V, 3), a revelation dialogue in which an unnamed teacher (the "Lord" or "Master") confers secret knowledge upon a Gnostic named James:

The Master said:

James, behold, I shall reveal to you the path of your redemption. Whenever you are seized and you undergo death-pangs (mortal fear), a multitude of Archons may turn on you, thinking they can capture you. And in particular, three of them will seize you, those who pose as toll collectors.

Not only do they demand toll, but they take away souls by theft.

• Now, when you come under their power, one of them who is the overseer will say to you: "Who are you, and where are you from?"
• You are then to say to him, "I am a child of humanity and I am from the Source."
• He will then say to you, "What sort of child are you, and to what Source do you belong?"
• You are to say to him, "I am from the pre-existent Source, and I am the offspring of the Source."
• Then he will say to you, "Why were you sent out from the Source?"
• Then you are to say to him, "I came from the Pre-existent One so that I might behold those of my kind and those who are alien."
• And he will say to you, "What are these alien beings?"
• You are to say to him: "They are not entirely alien, for they are from the Fallen Sophia (Achamoth), the female divinity who produced them when she brought the human race down from the Source, the realm of the Pre-Existent One. So they are not entirely alien, but they are our kin. They are indeed so because she who is their matrix, Sophia Achamoth, is from the Source. At the same time they are alien because Sophia did not combine with her like in the Source (her divine male counterpart), when she produced them."
• When he also says to you, "Where will you go now?"
• You are to say to him, "To the place when I came, the Source, there shall I return." And if you respond in this manner, you will escape their attacks.

(NHC V, 3. 33 - 34: 1- 25. Translation from NHLE 1990, pp. 265-6 and Kurt Rudolf, Gnosis, p. 174-5.)

Considerable information is packed into this exchange.

The resemblance to contemporary reports of close encounters is undeniable: the Archons induce a state of mortal panic, they often appear in threes, they perform abductions ("take away souls by theft"). These details present a striking match to contemporary ET/UFO lore.

But in an equally striking departure from the current literature, the Gnostic teacher gives explicit instructions on how to face the alien entities.

The vast amount of testimony on the ET/UFO phenomenon available today presents almost nothing on defense against alien intrusion. Contactees and abductees are passive witnessed, overwhelmed and overpowered by the aliens. But Gnostic writings not only describe such encounters, they also prescribe defensive action.

The Master offers cogent counsel for keeping the Archons in their place.

Gnosis is a remembering of our origins. The student is instructed to remember the cosmic birthright of humankind, and to affirm its direct link to the Pleroma, the Source. Specifically, the student is taught to recall and repeat the key episode in Gnostic mythology, the fall of the Aeon Sophia, and thus effectuate a defense against the Archons.

By recounting the myth of their origins, the student demonstrates initiated knowledge of the origin and identity of the entities s/he is facing. Intentional recall of cosmic matters disempowers the Archons. This, at least, is a clear inference from the above passage.

The tactic of remembrance accords closely with indigenous wisdom - consider, for instance, the saying of the Na-Khi, a Tibetan people of southeastern China:

"One must relate the origin of the medicine, otherwise it cannot work its magic."

Shamans heal, not only by their knowledge of the properties of plants, but also by their recounting the story of the plant.

Likewise, Gnostics defeated the Archons with the "medicine" (occult power) of mythological recall.

The Coptic materials become increasingly relevant as we realize they do not merely present pedantic or recondite commentaries on a dead religion, but vital insights on the timeless spiritual dilemmas of humanity, insights as valid today as they were 2000 years ago.

Describing the find at Nag Hammadi, Tobias Churton writes,

"Had Mohammed Ali not broken open the jar, we would not be able to hear these things. In the truest sense of the word, these things are dynamite. One might have imagined headlines throughout the world..."

The Gnostics, p. 12

But there were no such headlines, even in the tabloids.

It took many years before the codexes were translated and still, even today, no scholar will allow that these rare Coptic codices contain reliable accounts of encounters with ET-like entities.

 

Ideological Virus

In another passage of The First Apocalypse of James, the Master refers to those people "who exist as the type of the Archons" (30: 20).

Gnostics were not only alert to the intrusion of the Archons, they were also acutely aware of the possibility of humans becoming totally "Archontized."

This threat appears to have emerged in a particularly alarming way in that era to which Philip K. Dick often refers:

the first century of the Common Era, when the incarnation of Christ is said to have occurred, according to Christian belief.

Both the time and the place where Archontic molding of human character set in strongly are specified in the Nag Hammadi texts. In his Gnostic view of the human condition, Dick assumed that the spiritual life of humanity was arrested at that moment.

It is as if the behavior of those "who exist as the type of Archons" locked into place in that era, and came to dominate all subsequent centuries - until the moment in 1945 when the Nag Hammadi texts were discovered.

In a close parallel to Philip K. Dick's vision of "the Empire," Wilhelm Reich saw the rise of a similar syndrome which he characterized as "the mechanico-mystical" complex (see The Mass Psychology of Fascism.) Its signature is "authoritarian ideology," the mindset of fascism and patriarchal domination.

Significantly, archon was the common term for "governer," or "authority" in Roman times.

In some translations of the Coptic materials, archon (plural, archontoi) is rendered as "the authorities." Reich's analysis of what I propose to call the mystico-fascist complex focuses on National Socialism, the Nazi movement, which he experienced first-hand, but The Mass Psychology of Fascism contains ample references to Catholicism and the Holy Roman Empire, the millennial ancestor of the mystico-fascist program.

For more comments on this subject viewed in a contemporary vein, see Armageddon Politics.

In allusion to the fascist ideology of the "authorities", Philip K. Dick wrote:

"The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one."

Valis, p. 235, citing entry 41 from "The Exegesis."

This is purely a Gnostic insight, compatible with passages in the NHC and deeply resonant with Reich's views on the massenpsychosen of Roman Christianity.

It might be argued that the Nazis were not Christians, but in fact Hitler imagined himself as a Grail Knight, modeled after Wagner's Parsifal, and the savior complex of Judaeo-Christian belief is wholly transposed into Nazi racial ideology - hence the "Aryan Christ" identified, and, to some degree, embraced by C. G. Jung.

The Holy Reich, published in 2004 by Richard Steigman-Gall, professor of history at Kent State University in the USA, argues that Hitler was sincere in calling himself a Christian, and reveals to what extent Christian ideology was embraced by the Nazi party and contributed to the advancement of their cause.

Wilhelm Reich warned that since the breakdown of the pre-Christian ethos of earth-oriented Paganism,

"the biological core of humanity has been without social representation."

(Ibid., p. xii)

This is a staggering observation, to say the least.

The "authorities" exhibit the behavior of spiritual zombies, people who exemplify a baffling mix of mystical and militaristic fixations.

(What I have called behavioral cloning - see below insert - is widely evident in both militaristic and mystical behavior, such as we see today in neocon religious realpolitik, although it is also embodied in the mass conformity of global consumerism and the rites of technophilia.) 

To read on, go to http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_alien/alien_archons03.htm 

and scroll to Behavioral Cloning