Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (37 page)

An exaggeration? The UFO phenomenon as made possible, that is, as interpreted by an author like Jacques Vallee, not only challenges our most basic notions of consciousness and reality. It calls into serious question “the entire history of human belief, the very genesis of religion, the age-old myth of interaction between humans and self-styled superior beings who claimed they came from the sky, and the boundaries we place on research, science and religion” (FS 1:429). One would be hard-pressed to come up with a more radical proposal with respect to the study of religion.

Certainly Vallee experiences this gnosis as profoundly dangerous. He thus references Gershom Scholem's classic study
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
and its discussion of Merkabah or “chariot” mysticism, a tradition based on Ezekiel's vision of that mysterious chariot and abduction. Jewish tradition, Vallee notes, forbade the study of the chariot until the scholar was over thirty. Angels and archangels were said to attack the unprepared traveler, and a great fire was said to burst forth from inside the visionary's body in order to devour him: “I think I know what that great internal fire is,” Vallee notes elliptically in his journals (FS 1:185).

There is, again, more here than meets the eye. Vallee is not engaging the history of Western esotericism as a scholar of Western esotericism. He is
engaging
the history of Western esotericism as a Western esotericist. This becomes particularly obvious when we look at his personal relationship to the Rosicrucian tradition, one of the more well-known esoteric traditions of the modern West. Here, in
the gnosis of the rosy cross
, we arrive, finally, at the third secret of Vallee's thought.

Vallee was first introduced to the Rosicrucian tradition in college at the Sorbonne, when a young woman with whom he had many philosophical conversations approached him one day after her grandmother's death. She presented Vallee with a package that contained one of her grandmother's books, Sédir's
Histoire et Doctrines des Rose + Croix
(FS 1:17–18). The book would have a major effect on the young man. He treasured it for years. It taught him the basic structure of esoteric thinking. In 1960, he applied for formal membership in the Rosicrucian Order through a French branch. He received course materials every month in the mail, complete with simple ritual instructions. By the first day of 1964, however, he was expressing disgust with the contradictory mumbo jumbo of occult literature, and by 1966 he had dropped out of any formal relationship with the Rosicrucian tradition. But he never abandoned what he took to be its most basic teachings: its insistence that there are many levels of truth in scripture, history, and science; that private study, solitude, and a fierce independence of thought are all crucial to the search for esoteric truths; that, for the sake of not being noticed, one should adopt the religion of one's place and time, but also realize that the external forms are irrelevant, since the path is the same; that such secrets cannot be institutionalized and are available to a sufficiently prepared intellect at any time and anywhere; and, finally, that an effective initiation into these secrets cannot come from any human being or human institution (FS 1:222).

Nor was he alone in his Rosicrucian inspirations. Astonishingly, Allen Hynek was equally indebted to the exact same tradition. On Saturday, November 12, 1966, Hynek picked up Vallee in a little white sports car at Stapleton Airport outside Denver. They were both on their way to a meeting of the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado in Boulder. On the way, Vallee was surprised to hear Hynek begin waxing eloquently about why he became a scientist: to discern the limits of science and to fathom that which lay beyond it. He was even more surprised to learn that Hynek had been studying the Rosicrucian tradition for years. Hynek explained to him how his own hermetic studies had begun with Max Heindel, after which he moved on to Manly P. Hall (whose
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
he had purchased, at great cost, on May 1, 1931, at the age of twenty-one
⁹⁸
), and finally to Rudolf Steiner, whom Hynek considered “the
deepest
of the group.”
⁹⁹
He also joined the American branch located in San Jose, California. Vallee then records the following comments from Hynek, still, I gather, in the little white sports car somewhere between Denver and Boulder:

I always admired the old traditions which state that there is no such thing as a physical Rosicrucian organization. The only valid Rosicrucian Order, they claim, is not on this level of existence. And they insist that the true initiation, the only illumination of the spirit that counts, cannot come from any human master, but only from nature herself. When I read this I dropped my membership to the San Jose group. I continue to wonder if there may be a genuine Rose + Croix that remains invisible. (FS 1:233)

Invisible
. That is a significant and familiar word. It leads one to guess that when Hynek named their secret study group “the Invisible College,” he had much more in mind than the sixteenth-century scientists who still lacked royal protection and support. He had in mind the esotericists, the hermeticists, the Rosicrucians. The study of UFOs that Hynek, Vallee, and the Invisible College undertook in the 1960s and '70s, in other words, was no simple scientific pursuit. It was an esoteric practice, a secret school, a scientific mysticism modeled, partly, after the Rosicrucians whom both Vallee and Hynek loved and were reading, unbeknownst to each other until that little white sports car. Aimé Michel was certainly not far off the mark, then, when he wrote to Vallee that “Ufology is not a science but a process of initiation. One starts with field investigations and ends up studying Arab mystics” (FS 2:68). That certainly is an accurate description of Vallee's intellectual-spiritual path.

Or Hynek's. Hynek spoke passionately and often, if usually in private, of a twenty-first-century science that would take the paranormal seriously and so free us from our own present cultural provincialism (FS 1:5). He pursued an active interest in truly anomalous phenomena and became fascinated with parapsychology, especially the alcoholic psychic Ted Serios, whose impossible ability to imprint images on photographic film psychoanalyst Jules Eisenbud has documented and philosopher Stephen Braude has analyzed, both with great care (FS 1:240). Hynek was also interested in ghosts, astral travel, psychic surgery, and LSD research (FS 1:262). And he had a rich library of parapsychology, which he willed to Vallee on his death, on April 27, 1986. Vallee still proudly displays his deceased friend's parapsychological library in his own. He was especially pleased to show me Hynek's immense illustrated copy of Manly Hall's
The Secret Teachings
of
All Ages
, in which Hynek penciled notes to himself (and now to us) in the margins.

Three forms of secret knowledge thus shape the thought and so the texts of Jacques Vallee: the gnosis of the future, the gnosis of multidimensionality, and the gnosis of the rosy cross.

Toward the very end of
The Invisible College
, after invoking the psychological conditioning models of behaviorism to suggest that we may be a bit like rats in someone or something's giant experiment, Vallee writes this:

There is a strange urge in my mind: I would like to stop behaving as a rat pressing levers—even if I have to go hungry for a while. I would like to step outside the conditioning maze and see what makes it tick. I wonder what I would find. Perhaps a terrible superhuman monstrosity the very contemplation of which would make a man insane? Perhaps a solemn gathering of wise men? Or the maddening simplicity of unattended clockwork?
¹⁰⁰

This was not a new idea for him in 1975. Indeed, he had expressed the same sense of things bluntly in his journals as early as 1958, on December 22, to be exact: “Everything we see is fake, a stage drowned in movie fog. . . . Slowly, revolt after revolt, torture after torture, this earth will eventually emerge into its true history. In the meantime I am eager to learn what is outside all these events; I want to see the mechanism beyond time itself ” (FS 1:28). He was nineteen when he authored these lines.

Vallee returned to this sentiment again as late as 2007, in “Consciousness, Culture, and UFOs.” He was now sixty-eight. Although confessedly frustrated with “this festival of absurdities” to which the public prominence of alien abductions and hypnotic regression had effectively reduced the study of aerial phenomena, Vallee insists that he has not lost his hope that “someday we will be able to sort out the signal from the noise and get to work on the real UFO phenomenon” (FS 1:208–9). This is precisely what he and Hynek had written in
Challenge to Science
all the way back in 1966. Vallee no doubt has his old friend and fellow Rosicrucian traveler in mind when he writes:

Let me remind you again that the phenomenon is indeed a real manifestation in a physical sense. . . . We are dealing with physical objects that interact with their environment through the emission of light and other electromagnetic radiation,
through
mechanical and thermal effects, and through psychophysiological changes in the witnesses who are in close proximity to the phenomenon. . . . The believer's mistake is to ascribe meaning and credence to the secondary perception, the mental image created by our brain to account for the stimulus. The skeptic's mistake is to deny the reality of the stimulus altogether, simply because the secondary perception seems absurd to him or her. What we take to be reality may, in fact, be a mere appearance, or projection, onto the “screen” of our four-dimensional space-time world from a much more complex, multidimensional, more fundamental reality. More than two thousand years ago, Plato described this very scenario in his allegory of “the cave,” where sensory reality turned out to be mere shadows on the cave wall, projections from the higher reality of Ideal Forms beyond the cave. Real progress lies between the two equally close-minded attitudes of the believer and the skeptic.
¹⁰¹

Which is to say that real progress lies in the attitude of the gnostic, the man or woman who does not confuse the two-dimensional shadows on the flat cave wall with the “other dimension” outside, who understands that symbols are just that—symbols. They are not literally true. But neither are they completely false. Truth shines through them. They are not the truth.

The
Hermeneutics of Light: The Cave Become Window

This same spirit was borne out beautifully in my first meeting with Vallee, with which I began and with which I will now close. As we sat in his living room and got to know one another that December day high above the city, Jacques began speaking of my books that he was reading and their specific use of the word “hermeneutics,” a term that was new to him but with which he was quite taken now. It is not difficult to see why. Recall that the term, as I have used it here at least, encodes an approach to the paranormal as meaning and story and insists on the interpreter's creative role in the interpretation. Such a definition could easily be used as a kind of poor paraphrase for Jacques Vallee's corpus of work on the UFO encounter. Since 1968, he has cautioned his literalizing readers away from any naive objectivist interpretation of the UFO phenomena. He has recognized for forty years now that these encounters have every mark of being staged, that they have something to do with the magical and mystical structures of human consciousness, and that they draw on ancient mythology and folklore—in a word, that they are
stories
. He has also shared with me a more personal fact, namely, that, although he has known some successful remote-viewing
experiments,
most of his own mystical experiences, which have involved intimations of the future, have inevitably come to him
during writing
.

It is not difficult, then, to see why he was so attracted to this particular term among the literally hundreds of thousands that I had sent him in the form of my books. It captured quite well what he had been doing his entire adult life. And then he went further still. He proposed an analogy, the analogy of stained glass for what he called “hermeneutics in action,” that is, an interpretation of higher-level symbols from the point of view, and for the benefit, of the common person. He spoke specifically of how stained-glass windows are able to refract an infinite cosmic light that has traveled from untold distances and times before it takes shape in the glass and is able to express itself in the human symbolic language of metaphor, symbol, and word. He also spoke about how the light of the imaged windows is never the same. It is different each day, each hour, even each minute, as the sun moves overhead and beams down on the glass at different angles and with different intensities.

Such an analogy took on an entirely different light, literally, when we entered Jacques's study. One entire wall is dominated by five beautiful stained-glass windows, each of which he has made with his own hands. It took him three years in all to construct them. Here are the central symbols of his literary corpus and his mystical life on display, in full living color, no less. At the top of each stained glass window there is a single glowing rose. Everything that takes place in that room is thus truly and literally sub rosa. There also, in the first window, is a familiar friend, Bishop Agobard. He is holding a book in his hand entitled—what else?—
Magonia
, as he blesses a man coming down from a beam of light to protect him from the crowd below, which no doubt wants to kill him as some kind of demonic magician.

I saw many other symbols in those five windows. As I looked, the light laughed as often as it shone. There was, for example, a grinning, cartoon-like devil modeled, Jacques told me, after a similar imp from the Cathedral of Chartres. He held a prism in his hands so that he could screw up the heavenly light beaming down from above. There was also a knight holding the Holy Grail, the Egyptian goddess Isis signaling secrecy with her finger over her mouth as she held the
Liber Mundi
or Book of the World (again, reality or nature as a secret text to be read). There was an alchemical furnace; the Queen of Heaven emerging, Picasso-like, from different dimensions; the priest Melchizedek; and the medieval nun, mystic, painter, and writer Hildegaard of Bingen. I must admit that I understood little of this. My time was too brief and the symbols too personal, intimate, and playful. But one thing was obvious enough. It was clear to me that, for Jacques Vallee, there
is
a cosmic light shining through the earthy metaphors and colorful symbols of the history of religion, mysticism, and folklore. The paranormal is very real, although it is always refracted, reflected, and filtered through the magical structures of human consciousness (including that little cartoon devil), which we still do not understand because we have continued in our science to look out instead of in. This is our most fundamental and most important secret, our psychic existence sub rosa.