The Trickster and the UFO

BY: GΔRRΞTT @libertybirb on X.

The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Carl Jung was among the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. Jung explored many subjects considered to be on the periphery of culture and common discussion. Many are familiar with Jung’s concept of “integrating the shadow”, an idea in which a person accepts and understands the hidden, often negative, parts of their personality to become a more complete, authentic self. Jung enjoyed studying Parapsychology, Alchemy, and Mythology. He even authored a book on flying saucers — at one point curiously referring to them as “technological angels”(h/t to author Peter Levenda for pointing this phrase out in a recent interview). While this phrase may seem like an impossible contradiction, that may be the point here. [1]

The UFO phenomenon is often described as having a transformative, symbolic, or “trickster” quality. Over in the Uinta Basin in Northeastern Utah, there is a 512-acre property that has gained fame as a hotspot for strange events, including UFOs, called Skinwalker Ranch. Former owner and billionaire Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) research team included names like Eric Davis, Colm Kelleher, Jacques Vallee, and former Los Alamos Labs Head of Nonlethal Weaponry, Col. John B. Alexander, among others. The NIDS team spent an extensive period of time at Skinwalker Ranch in the late 90s through the early 2000s. Rumors swirl today about what these men discovered while studying at Skinwalker, and much of their research remains classified. A regular guest on Jeffrey Mishlove’s YouTube show, New Thinking Allowed, Col. Alexander made this comment in a 2019 interview,

“As you know, I worked with Bob Bigelow at the ranch, it’s called Skinwalker Ranch. The whole program’s around that. And I came away with a notion that I call the ‘precognitive sentient phenomenon’. And that really applies, I think, to your suggestion here, and that was that there was a ‘they’ and it was always one step ahead. And many people who have studied phenomena, and have had several that when you study it, you’re doing instrumentation and you don’t get any results, and then just off camera something happens, or something else comes, and the phenomena itself keeps morphing, and it’s like ‘they’ — ’it’ — whatever ‘it’ is, it is in control. It says, “Oh you like that? Try this!” And you get something totally different.” [2]

Considering Jung’s ideas and what we’ve heard from Skinwalker, let’s examine the so-called “trickster” connection to UFOs. “Precognitive sentient phenomenon.”

Jung regarded the Roman God, Mercurius/Mercury (Greek Hermes), as a mythological symbol of the transformative process. Alchemically, when the substance mercury is added to any ore, it is supposed to extract all of the gold held within the ore. One of the fascinating myths surrounding Mercury was the belief that Mercury was unique because of his ability to move between the “Spiritual World” of the gods and the “Physical World” of human beings seamlessly. Because Mercury is the messenger of the gods, it was not uncommon to believe that the “gods” residing on Mount Olympus were sending humans messages through their chief messenger, Mercury/Hermes, and his winged sandals. Thus, when these people felt a divine connection towards a passion, person, or path, they could attribute Mercury for their enthusiasm. In fact, the modern word ‘enthusiasm’ stems from the Greek term, ‘Entheos,’ which means: “inspired or possessed by a god.” The belief, essentially, was that the ancient gods speak to us through our individual natures and proclivities. In a sense, Jung thought of Mercury as a representation of multiple complex aspects.

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“The multiple aspects of Mercurius may be summarized as follows:

(1) Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites. He is thus quite obviously a duality, but is named a unity in spite of the fact that his innumerable inner contradictions can dramatically fly apart into an equal number of disparate and apparently independent figures.

(2) He is both material and spiritual.

(3) He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa.

(4) He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God’s reflection in physical nature.

(5) He is also the reflection of a mystical experience of the artifex that coincides with the opus alchymicum.

(6) As such, he represents on the one hand the self and on the other the individuation process and, because of the limitless number of his names, also the collective unconscious.”

— ‘Alchemical Studies’, by Dr. CG Jung (par. 284) [3]

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It is casually mentioned in Chapter 14 of Homer’s ’The Odyssey’, that Hermes was the son of the god Zeus, and the nymph Maia (who was one of the seven Pleiades sisters and the daughter of a titan, Atlas). In many of the tales about Hermes, such as the ‘Homeric Hymn to Hermes,’ for example, it is explained that Hermes was born in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. By noon, the infant Hermes had killed a tortoise and created the first lyre instrument after adding strings to it. By evening, baby Hermes had stolen many cattle from his half-brother, Apollo, deceiving him by having the cattle walk backwards to avoid being tracked. After settling their dispute, Hermes gifts the lyre to Apollo. According to the story, “When Hermes had said this, he held out the lyre: and Phoebus Apollo took it, and readily put his shining whip in Hermes' hand, and ordained him keeper of herds. The son of Maia received it joyfully, while the glorious son of Leto, the lord far-working Apollo, took the lyre upon his left arm and tried each string with the key. Awesomely it sounded at the touch of the god, while he sang sweetly to its note.” [4]

In Arthur Cotterell’s THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHOLOGY, it says that Hermes is usually depicted as a young man with a wide-brimmed hat and winged sandals, carrying a herald’s staff crowned with two snakes. In Ancient Greece this staff assured the messenger safe passage even during the time of war. Hermes’ greatest passion was love for the goddess Aphrodite. Hermes easily crossed the boundary between the living and the dead, and the Greeks believed he guided the dead to the realm of Hades, the Underworld. Also worth mentioning is the battle between the Olympic Gods and the evil monster Typhon. Hermes played a crucial part in this battle.

The story goes, Typhon was a terrible, serpent-like monster whose eyes shot out flames. He was conceived by Gaia, mother earth, when she was banished to Tartarus along with the other defeated Titans. According to the Greeks, Typhon endeavoured to establish himself as the ruler of the world, the supreme deity, but the recently victorious Zeus destroyed him with a mighty thunderbolt. The volcanic activity of Mount Aetna in Sicily was believed to be caused by Typhon's imprisonment beneath the crater. The struggle between Typhon and Zeus was an evenly balanced fight, however. At one point Zeus was left helpless in a cave, weaponless and without his sinews. Fortunately the messenger god Hermes came to his aid on this occasion. Before his final defeat, Typhon sired the Chimaera, the huge sea monster killed by the hero Perseus. In Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, its describes the battle being so severe that many of the Olympian Gods transform themselves into animals and try to escape to Egypt, "Inspired the heavenly gods with fear, and how they all turned their backs and fled, until, weary, they found refuge in the land of Egypt and the seven-mouthed Nile. How even there Typhoeus, son of earth, pursued them, and the gods hid themselves in lying shapes: Jove thus became a ram, said she, the lord of flocks, and so Libyan Ammon even to this day is represented with curving horns; Apollo hid in a crow's shape, Bacchus in a goat; the sister of Phoebus, in a cat, Juno in a snow-white cow, Venus in a fish, Mercury in an ibis bird." [5]

Investigative author Jim Marrs has written a number of books that discuss Hermes in a more esoteric way. Providing background to the machinations of secret societies and knowledge of the occult, Marrs connects Hermes to a number of cultures and beliefs in his book ‘Our Occulted History: Do The Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens?’, stating:

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“To speak against the Church opened one to censorship, excommunication, or even death. The suffocation of free thinking led to the growth of secret societies and sects, many of which began in biblical times and vied with one another for control over ancient secrets. Much like the later Invisible College of Elizabethan times, these societies collectively were considered mystery schools, reservoirs of esoteric knowledge that was largely incomprehensible and thus fear-inspiring to the general public. Their literature was carefully constructed to both conceal and reveal some of their knowledge.

One such repository of ancient knowledge was the Sumerian "Table of Destiny," thought to be the same as the Tables of Testimony mentioned in Exodus 31:18, as other Bible verses — Exodus 24:12 and 25:16 — make it clear that these tables are not the Ten Commandments. British author Laurence Gardner believed this ancient archive may be the legendary Emerald Tablet of Thoth-Hermes. This tablet, considered one of the most ancient and secret of writings, is claimed to be the work of Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice-Greatest), a composite character of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, called Ninurta in ancient Sumer. Thoth/Ninurta was said to be a survivor of Atlantis who passed along antediluvian knowledge to a son of Noah — Ham.”

"He was the essential founder of the esoteric and arcane underground stream' which flowed through the ages," stated Gardner, "and his Greek name, Hermes, was directly related to the science of pyramid construction, deriving from the word herma, which relates to a pile of stones. Indeed, the Great Pyramid is sometimes called the Sanctuary of Thoth."

This tablet of knowledge was passed from ancient Sumer to Egypt and on to Greek and Roman masters such as Homer, Virgil, Pythagoras, Plato, and Ovid. In the Middle Ages and onward, it was passed through such secret societies as the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar and on to the Freemasons.

But such ancient knowledge had to be kept secret in the ages following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Christianity had gained absolute supremacy in the Western world, and until the Great Schism and the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1453, the Roman Church stood as the ultimate authority in the Western world. Through the lending of both its money and blessings, the Vatican dominated kings and queens and controlled the lives of ordinary citizens through fear of excommunication and its infamous Inquisition.”

— JIM MARRS, OUR OCCULTED HISTORY [6]

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Abrahamic tradition (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) describes a patriarch named Enoch (in Islam, Enoch is associated with the prophet Idris). While some texts mentioning Enoch are often considered Apocrypha, or non-canonical, it would be inappropriate to say they have nothing to offer. These texts describe situations that attempt to bring clarity to some of the more bizarre stories in the Bible, as the Book of Enoch is an expansion of Chapter 6 of the Book of Genesis, where the Sons of God created children with the daughters of men (as discussed in my previous article, ‘The Battle For Our Marble’). An interesting twist in some texts is that the patriarch Enoch is eventually transformed from a mortal into the angel known as Metatron. Similar to Hermes, the angel Metatron is considered quite powerful, and represents a dualistic figure — an entity bridging the spirit realm and the physical. The prophet and seer Joseph Smith used the name ‘Enoch’ as one of the code names for himself in early editions of the Doctrine and Covenants, a part of the early scriptural canon of Smith’s Latter Day Saint movement. [7]

Notable writer on heroism Joseph Campbell provided an interesting perspective explaining the trickster archetype in Native American mythology. Campbell states,

“There is a figure in American Indian myths that represents this power of the dynamic of the total psyche to overthrow programs. This is the negative aspect, and it’s called the trickster. It’s a very, very important figure in American Indian mythologies. In the east, in the forest lands of the northeast and southeast, it’s the Great Hare — a rabbit. When you go west of the Mississippi, in the planes lands, it’s Coyote. You get up in the northwest coast, and it’s Raven. These are smart, clever birds and animals. Now, it’s a great puzzler to well-trained christians to come across the trickster hero, because he’s both a kind of devil, and fool, and the creator of the world.

And so he comes in as an upsetting factor — he breaks through. He even breaks through the notion of what a deity ought to be, and this, I think, is about as good an example as you could find anywhere of the trickster hero.

Now, that trickster trait turns up in deities like Yahweh. Yahweh’s a trickster. He lets people build a building, and because it gets to be three stories high, he’s afraid it’s going to wreck heaven and he comes down and floods the world. That’s a trickster stunt! That’s a ridiculous act! And we think it quite normal for a deity to behave that way, if a human being behaved that way we would send him to the lunatic asylum. Here you have the deity coming through as the trickster, as the destroyer, as the disruptor of programs. Yahweh’s full of this kind of thing.” [8]

Campbell’s assessment of the trickster brings much-needed wisdom to the situation. The “upsetting factor” he mentions is crucial to his message. The trickster breaks through the notion of the way things ought to be. The UFO phenomenon, which the Pentagon has admitted is real, challenges our ideas of what subjects fit within a measurable scientific framework. In many ways, the overall UFO subject presents itself as a sort of cultural cosmic litmus test. If we study it as an entirely natural phenomenon, does that then ruin the spiritual component that so many starry-eyed cultists yearn for? Does it matter? Conversely, if we approach the UFO topic with an entirely (or simply too much of a) spiritual frame of reference, will we be stuck using ancient terms and stubbornly repeating ourselves? The direction of this breakthrough rests on our shoulders. My personal position is: the more scientific and secular the study of UFOs can remain, the better.

Fortean researcher John Keel wrote many excellent books on the UFO phenomenon and the occult faces that power them. His books have been recommended by Stanford’s Garry Nolan, the CIAs Jim Semivan, and To The Stars founder Tom DeLonge. Keel regarded many elements of UFOs and the paranormal to have a “trickster” element to them. According to Keel, human beings have been seeing UFOs as long as we have been recording history. As time passes, people begin to ‘see’ the phenomenon through different cultural frames of reference. The airships reported all over the world in the late 1890s eventually became starships and saucers as we leapt into the technological age. Yet, it seems that a complex hallucinatory process may also be occurring during UFO encounters. The various religions of the world describe a constant “good vs. evil” struggle occurring between God and the Devil. Keel associated many of the stories in religious and occult literature to the UFO phenomenon and its many absurd forms.

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"Throughout most of history, the manifestations of demonology and demonopathy have been viewed from a religious perspective and explained as the work of the Devil. The bizarre manipulations and ill effects described in the demonological literature are usually regarded as the result of a great unseen conflict between God and the Devil. In UFO lore, the same conflict has been observed, and the believers have explained it as a space war between the "Guardians" (good guys from outer space), who are protecting our planet, and some evil extraterrestrial race. The manifestations are the same, only the frame of reference is different.

The Devil and his demons can, according to the literature, manifest themselves in almost any form and can physically imitate anything from angels to horrifying monsters with glowing eyes. Strange objects and entities materialize and dematerialize in these stories, just as the UFOs and their splendid occupants appear and disappear, walk through walls, and perform other supernatural feats.

Did ancient man misinterpret UFO manifestations by placing them in a religious context? Apparently not. The literature indicates that the phenomenon carefully cultivated the religious frame of reference in early times, just as the modern manifestations have carefully supported the extraterrestrial frame of reference. Operation Trojan Horse is merely the same old game in a new, updated guise. The Devil's emissaries of yesteryear have been replaced by the mysterious "men in black." The quasi-angels of Biblical times have become magnificent spacemen. The demons, devils and false angels were recognized as liars and plunderers by early man. These same impostors now appear as long-haired Venusians.

All of the major religions, and most of the minor ones, accept the God-Devil conflict, and their scriptures outline some possibly real episodes in which human beings have had some direct experience with this conflict. A large portion of all holy literature consists of material purportedly dictated to men by supernatural beings, and a good part of this seems more allegorical or metaphorical than real. The phenomenon may have passed along information about man's origin and purpose carefully disguised in terms and fictitious episodes that could be understood by the minds of the people during the period when the messages were transmit-ted. Thus, the story of Adam and Eve might not be the actual truth but merely a great simplification of the truth.

In the Forgotten Books of Eden, an apocryphal book allegedly translated from ancient Egyptian in the nineteenth century, we are told that Satan and his hosts were fallen angels who populated the earth before Adam was brought into being, and Satan used lights, fire and water in his efforts to rid the planet of this troublesome creature. He even disguised himself as an angel from time to time and appeared as a beautiful young woman in his efforts to lead Adam to his doom. UFO-type lights were one of the Devil's devices described in the Forgotten Books of Eden.

Subtle variations on this same theme can be found in the Bible and in the numerous scriptures of the Oriental cultures. Religious man has always been so enthralled with the main (and probably allegorical) story line that the hidden point has been missed. That point is that the earth was occupied before man arrived or was created. The original occupants or forces were paraphysical and possessed the power of transmogrification. Man was the interloper, and the earth's original occupants or owners were not very happy over the intrusion. The inevitable conflict arose between physical man and the paraphysical owners of the planet. Man accepted the interpretation that this conflict raged between his creator and the Devil. The religious viewpoint has always been that the Devil has been attacking man (trying to get rid of him) by foisting disasters, wars and sundry evils upon him. There is historical and modern proof that this may be so.

A major, but little-explored, aspect of the UFO phenomenon is therefore theological and philosophical rather than purely scientific. The UFO problem can never be untangled by physicists and scientists unless they are men who have also been schooled in liberal arts, theology and philosophy. Unfortunately, most scientific disciplines are so demanding that their practitioners have little time or inclination to study complicated subjects outside their own immediate fields of interest.

Satan and his demons are part of the folklore of all races, no matter how isolated they have been from one another. The Indians of North America have many legends and stories about a devil-like entity who appeared as a man and was known as the trickster because he pulled off so many vile stunts. Tribes in Africa, South America and the remote Pacific islands have similar stories.”

OPERATION TROJAN HORSE — JOHN KEEL [9

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While ‘Operation Trojan Horse’ is considered by many to be Keel’s magnum opus, it was only published in 1970. In 1986, Keel offered a brief position statement updating and clarifying his stance. In the statement, Keel remarks, "I abandoned the extraterrestrial hypothesis in 1967 when my own field investigations disclosed an astonishing overlap between psychic phenomena and UFOs. My findings were extremely unpopular at the time, but in the years since, most of the major European investigators, and many of the American scientists involved in the subject, have verified and accepted my conclusions.” Keel continued, "Basically, a large part of the UFO lore is subjective and many alleged UFO events are actually the products of a complex hallucinatory process, particularly in the contactee and CE III-type reports. The same process stimulated religious beliefs, fairy lore, and occult systems of belief in other centuries. A very small percentage of sightings (perhaps less than 2 percent) and events indicate that other strange, but natural, phenomena are often included, or absorbed, into the UFO data. While we cannot satisfactorily explain all UFO events in terms of present-day knowledge and technology, I feel that the ultimate solution will involve a complicated system of new physics related to theories of the space-time continuum. It is possible, even highly probable, that a subtle cosmological system of control has been in effect since the dawn of mankind and that UFOs are a part of that system.”

The statement concludes, "These objects and apparitions do not necessarily originate on other planets and may not even exist as permanent constructions of matter. It is more likely that we see what we want to see and interpret such visions according to our contemporary beliefs. The problem can be reduced to a series of difficult philosophical questions and might be best explored behavioral scientists and mathematicians."

The situation we are presented with as a species, if we ever want to seriously examine the UFO phenomenon, is one that is both a challenge and a paradox. In many regards, the bizarre UFOs described by contactees force us to tinker with our methods. Are UFOs a threat? If they have any sense of our species and history, another intelligence would likely consider humans to be a major threat. A non-human intelligence, bu simply showing themselves, may be enough of a jolt to hold up a metaphorical mirror to our species for self-examination. Forget reverse-engineering their craft — they may be forcing us to reverse engineer ourselves.

Mercury bleeds through our culture. His current frame of reference may be something resembling a saucer, but it’s possible we are soon scheduled for a new shift in frame of reference. You might recognize his pattern. He pops up in our fiction, as the beloved witch and ultra-intelligent Hermione (female variant of Hermes) Granger. He makes himself heard in our music, dominating rock music, fashion, and gender norms as Queen’s legendary singer Freddie Mercury. Even the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History pays homage to the great guide Hermes, in a special present from President Eisenhower. The President provided, as a gift to the institution, a bronze ibis statue with the description, “Ibis representing God Thot (Zehouti) god of wisdom and science, who corresponds to the Greek Hermes.” Ironically, Eisenhower, similar to the story of Enoch being “taken” by God, is rumored by many UFO researchers to have met, and possibly signed a treaty with, the others. It’s also curious that Eisenhower was the President to warn the United States about the emerging power of the shadowy Military Industrial Complex. Will we pave a new path forward or will we succumb to the repetitive errors of our species? Perhaps Jung’s characterization of UFOs as “technological angels” is a perfect reminder we lack the vocabulary to define what we are seeing. [10]

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Is it a trick? No, it’s a test.

“The meanest dog you’ll ever meet

He ain’t the hound dog in the street.

He bares some teeth and tears some skin

But, brother, that’s the worst of him.

The dog you really got to dread

Is the one that howls inside your head.

It’s him whose howling drives men mad

And a mind to its undoing.”

— Hermes, Hadestown [11]

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END OF ARTICLE

References:

[1] Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, by C.G. Jung

[2] John Alexander Interview Link:

[3] Alchemical Studies, by C.G. Jung

[4] Homeric Hymn to Hermes

[5] The Metamorphoses, by Ovid

[6] Our Occulted History, by Jim Marrs

[7] Joseph Smith Enoch Link: https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Enoch

[8] Joseph Campbell on the Trickster Link:

[9] Operation Trojan Horse, by John Keel

[10] Eisenhower Ibis Link: https://www.si.edu/object/ibis-statuette-wood-base:nmnhanthropology_8162380

[11] Hadestown — Wait For Me (Reprise)