I suspect that in this story's earliest version, Lucifer, like Prometheus, also gave Adam and Eve the secret of fire-making, as is suggested by his name. This violated God's policy of "non- interference" in the newly-created humans' affairs, and Lucifer remained an outcast as far as the supreme-and eventually monotheistic-Hebrew deity was concerned. Soon thereafter, disguised as a serpent, he tricked Adam and Eve into becoming fully sentient, that is, over and above an immediate awareness of their sexual natures. The best-known, albeit most misunderstood, of my three examples is Lucifer, the "Fallen Angel" who rebelled against the divine authority of Yahweh and was exiled from Heaven. the Old Norse god Loki, who built Valhalla but later turned against the supreme god Odin, and the pan-Polynesian god Maui, for whom the island is named) are mythological reflections of one or more extraterrestrial dissidents who rebelled against the Alien Raj's "Prime-Directive"-type policy of non- interference in human affairs-except when it suits the aliens' immediate agenda-and were punished for their actions by the Raj. I posit that these and other trickster deities (e.g. This article focuses on three trickster deities: (1) The Old Testament figure Lucifer, the "Light-Bearer," who, in defiance of Yahweh, brought self-awareness to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (2) the Greek deity Prometheus, who rebelled against the authority of Zeus and gave fire to mankind and (3) the ancient Mesoamerican god Quétzalcoatl, the "Feathered Serpent," known to the Maya as Kukulkan, who was forced into exile because of his efforts on behalf of mankind. Tricksters are typically reprimanded and/or severely punished for their actions, which, more often than not, involve efforts to transmit elements of divine wisdom or "technology" to mortals. The "Alien Raj" seems not to have been-and may still not be-monolithic, any more than was the British Raj, even in its nineteenth-century heyday.Īlmost every ancient mythology includes at least one rebellious deity, one who willfully violates the divine "rules." For the most part, such figures are what anthropologists call "tricksters," that is, gods or heroes who gain their ends by cleverness, stealth, and liberal applications of magic rather than by sheer divine power. With apologies to the "British Raj," which held hegemony over India from the late seventeenth century to 1947, I've come to conceive of this extraterrestrial presence as the "Alien Raj." Yet that may be a grossly oversimplified picture of the nature of human-alien interaction, especially in ancient times. Clarke's assertion that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") has allowed them to maintain a clandestine hegemony over this planet for at least the past 13,000 years.
are correct, humans have been the genetically exploited "lab rats" of one or more extraterrestrial civilizations, whose technological sophistication (evincing Sir Arthur C. The implications of the UFO phenomenon for anthropologists-or for anyone who would make rational sense out of the human condition-are profound. Thus, I've decided to "come out of the closet," as it were, and assert my belief that the UFO phenomenon is real-despite the carefully orchestrated attempts by our own and other governments to deny its existence, and the skeptics and debunkers who do their best to make persons who take the phenomenon seriously appear ridiculous. It is a literature that can no longer be ignored by responsible social scientists, including cultural anthropologists like myself. Serious UFO literature-including works by investigators such as Jacques Valleé, Budd Hopkins, John Mack, David Jacobs, Timothy Goode, Linda Moulton Howe, Jenny Randles, Raymond Fowler, Stanton Friedman, Bruce Maccabee, the late Allen Hynek, and Don Ecker of UFO Magazine, to mention a few-grow into an impressive body of data and theory.
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