Divine Encounters

A long day past, starting off around 9:30 AM with an morning shift working until six o'clock, then picking up my fiancée from her new bartending job, a brief sit-down dinner, some to and fro driving to pick up old money, and finally back home around 10 pm. For the time being I'll take a short break, write this post, then get back to reading Rudolf Steiner's Atlantis and Lemuria, which, in its quirky , occult way, is becoming a very fascinating study of the growth of the modern cosmology of UFOs, extraterrestrials, and outer space bugaboos of the imagination. I am not calling this sort of stuff hokey, and not worthy of study, but, quite the opposite, I believe it is highly un-recognized as part of our own modern, imaginative poetics, or language of the cosmos, as well as literature. From the Theosophical movement of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner to a modern recent writer like Zecharia Sitchin, or even the supposedly mad Scientologist L. Ron Hubbard, writer of Dianetics -- such writers have absorbed and re-vised the essential tale of a foundation myth in our modern, popular imagination -- developing a new cosmic aetiology or genealogy for the human race (guided by a poetics and vision from outer space). As far back as the classical, medieval and Renaissance periods, and perhaps even up until recent history (and still) writers have invented stories of heritage, empire, and authority drawn from other past, great Empires, such as from Troy to Rome (Aeneid), to England (Geoffrey of Monmouth), or France (Christian de Troyes), or from Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire (Napoleon or Hitler), or some other great classical hero, or perhaps some old biblical patriarch like Abraham or tribe of Israel, or St. Paul for Catholics--you get the point.

The historical veracity of these tales is questionable, and certainly imaginative at best, but it represents, I believe, a new, albeit common powerful vision adopted by the Imagination (adapted) from the past, to establish a new (or more appropriate) set of images or metaphors for the present, cosmic (or technological) human existence. It sounds rather convoluted when I write it down, but that's because these are just the fresh, immature seeds of thought, not fully developed or matured by an imagination guided by reason. Or maybe I'm just crazy, as my co-workers keep telling me.