Reality Checking
Strange Hypnotic Incidents
By Brent Raynes
“It’s quite obvious a control was being used so I would not tell anybody what had taken place or what I had learned,” the Massillon “abductee” wrote me. He shared how he and his wife were often taken by the aliens in an induced altered state of consciousness. “They come and communicate with us when in a light trance, not deep sleep. I feel that it’s similar to hypnosis and you remember only certain things, possibly only what they want you to remember.”
Madeline stated that while she and two others had seen the “helmet”, another person present had not.
In 2004, a hypnosis attempt with an “abductee” named Dan in Alabama was also mysteriously interrupted. While the subject was under, Georg Breckmann, author of Contact and Cosmology, unexpectedly observed a strange watery looking mass that appeared to be perhaps twice the size of Dan’s head positioned above him. “To me it appeared like a circulating column of water atop his head,” Georg explained to me. “To my friend and hypnotist, retired CIA agent/Marine Captain/Treasury agent/still practicing-lawyer-in-his-seventies, John DeNora….it appeared as a ball of flame. I saw his light-sensitive sunglasses (you know, the type that change color automatically in harsh light) darken even though it was a darkened room. My tape recorder got nothing. His tape recorder simply stalled out. Very, very weird! Some offworld entity really did not want whatever Dan knew to come out!”
“I channeled a being that called itself ‘Xerra,’” Dan told me. “For me it was very unnerving and I never want to feel that again!” Back in April 1977, while investigating a wave of Bigfoot activity that had fallen below the media radar down in the area of Somerville, New Jersey, I was introduced to a gentleman who had personally known the famed 1950s contactee Howard Menger, then of High Bridge. He had become involved in a number of investigations and himself had some pretty odd experiences. In one instance, a bellhop at the Mount Airy Lodge at Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, had reported being burned when a UFO reportedly swooped down on him one night as he had stepped outside for some fresh air. During an investigation there back around the early 1960s, the bellhop was hypnotized and while entranced instructed the group to visit a nearby ravine, that there was UFO activity in the area. My informant described how they went to the apparent location that had been described and recalled seeing: “A vertical beam [estimated at 12-15 feet high], like a thin stick, and then suddenly it pulsated out at the center and become like a double sine curve and then it went back into the ground. It came from the ground and went back to the ground. The tree was marked, (we found) the next morning, as if the branches had been pushed up because the underside of the branches were all peeled off, and this was at a height where no animal could reach it. We checked the ground for footprints but there was nothing there but deer tracks and tracks of the two guys that went down there. It was marshy land. I didn’t hear it [he was at a greater distance, on a ridge overlooking what was going on below] but Rob was talking to this voice and the guy that was about 10 feet from him heard the conversation. I was there and saw the light, but I didn’t hear the conversation.”
During my time in New Jersey I also paid a visit on noted author and psychiatrist Dr. Berthold Schwarz, who at the time lived in Montclair. Dr. Schwarz investigated the Howard Menger story himself and had also interviewed this same informant. Details of his investigations can be found in his book UFO Dynamics (1983).
A few months ago, I interviewed Robyn Andrews, a hypnotist from Atlanta, Georgia, who described how she was working with an extremely good subject who wanted to explore his past lives. Such regression work was this hypnotist’s main area of work and there was some impressive information, she claimed, that emerged from these sessions. “Whatever culture he was in he would speak that language and he could also write it while he was under,” Robyn explained. “Some of the ancient Egyptian had been verified and all kinds of interesting things.”
The subject had been studied by others, including the Mental and Psychiatric Research Center at the University of Virginia, which Robyn says described him as the deepest trance subject they’d ever studied. Robyn worked with him daily for many weeks, and noted: “This is when my life really started feeling like I was in a science fiction movie because in the middle of most of the regression sessions – and sometimes a whole crowd of people would come over to watch him – psychologists, psychiatrists, and all kinds of people interested in this man – so anyway, in the middle of these sessions he would start to channel a so-called alien – and that part I really was sceptical of – and the alien would say ‘Have him eat more spinach’ and ‘Teach him to meditate,’ ‘Teach him to be more spiritual,’ and all kinds of things they were telling me to do like I was his mother or something.”
But Robyn’s scepticism didn’t last much longer. It seems that the subject came down with infectious hepatitis and became very ill, but refused to go to a doctor. “He looked terrible and he asked me to put him under,” Robyn explained.
“Anyway he asked me to put him under and I was very reluctant because he was so sick and I didn’t know what might happen. But he just insisted that I put him under, so I put him under. Well the alien didn’t usually come out right away but this time he came out immediately and said, ‘We’re going to cure Allen’s illness’ and I said, ‘Okay, go ahead.’ So he immediately gets up and starts walking in my entry hall, which was ceramic tile. I had a friend who happened to be there and he was walking behind him, and then he started going out the front door. There was ceramic tile on the front porch and concrete steps down to a concrete drive-way, which is steep and curvy down to the street. So we were very nervous because here he is in deep trance walking down these steps. We were watching his feet, naturally, so we got down to the driveway and then we see it. There’s a UFO over the house. It’s huge and glowing, and its 8:30 at night. There’s a poplar tree in the front yard that was about a 100 feet tall, we have estimated, and it wasn’t that far above that, just hovering and with kind of a glow around it. He stood out there and stretched his hands out and his palms up, looking up.”
“…he had been telling me about all of these encounters that he had had, which I didn’t really believe at the time. So then he turns around and heads back into the house. We of course have to follow him and get him settled and then rush back out there and it’s gone then of course. Well, he was cured of whatever was the matter with him – he was cured – and after that night he never did have any problem at all.”
Interestingly, many contactees are again and again noted for being deep trance hypnotic subjects. “In my experience it is also odd that contrary to the usual clinical experience of various degrees of hypnotisability of patients on the first trial, most of the gifted contactees I studied were, from the first, excellent hypnotic subjects,” noted Dr. Berthold Schwarz in his book UFO Dynamics. “Did their predilection for hypnotic somnambulism, a deep dissociative state, precede the experience, or did it follow the awesome, splitting event? We need hard facts – many of them.”
We also need “hard facts” that accounts for some “seeing” these curious apparitions and some not, or else seeing things quite differently? I cannot honestly say what’s going on there, but I’ve come across these curious details before. For example, some years ago, Merton Haskell up in Palermo, Maine, recalled for me a series of puzzling experiences that he and his parents had when he was a young boy back in the early 1930s, with mysterious balls of pulsating brilliant white light the size of a “ten quart pail.” “Once it was in a field of crops on our neighbor’s field and he was cultivating the rows with a team of horses and a two row cultivator when the horses approached it,” Merton explained. “Apparently neither he nor the animals saw it. As they passed over it it grew smaller until about the size of a baseball and from where we were standing, two hundred yards plus, it rolled with the dirt around the cultivator teeth and (then) immediately resumed its former pulsing size.”
“If it had been static electricity it would have gone to ground on the cultivator teeth and the animals would also have seen it,” Merton added. “The last time anyone ever saw it was the night my grandfather died and it was sighted by my father on a stone wall, a line between our farm and the next. This was the closest it ever got to our property. It was never seen by anyone after that.” I’ve come across these curious light balls and their synchronistic appearances in connection with someone’s death before. In fact, Kenneth Arnold (famous for his legendary UFO sighting back in 1947) was also well aware of this phenomenon. I wrote about Arnold’s beliefs, experiences, and similar phenomena in this column back in the May issue. As for some seeing one thing and someone else not at all (or seeing something differently) it should also be noted that the late Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Carl G. Jung was aware of such matters. He referred to them as rare “visionary rumours” and compared them to the extraordinary visions of the faithful believers at Fatima or the crusaders during the siege at Jerusalem. “Apart from collective visions, there are on record cases where one or more persons see something that physically is not there,” Dr. Jung wrote in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1959). “For instance, I was once at a spiritualistic séance where four of the five people present saw an object like a moon floating above the abdomen of the medium. They showed me, the fifth person present, exactly where it was, and it was absolutely incomprehensible to them that I could see nothing of the sort.”
Paranormal Reflections
In Dr. Greg Little’s book Grand Illusions (1994) he described at some length the thought-provoking mirror experiments conducted by well-known physician Dr. Raymond Moody, best known as author of Life After Life, a book that dealt with near-death experiences. One of his first subjects for these mirror experiments was the famous Hollywood celebrity Joan Rivers. “Her experience with the mirror was so profound that she showed footage of her experience on her talk show,” Greg wrote. “Rivers’ husband, Edgar, had committed suicide and Rivers was interested in somehow trying to make peace with him. She apparently did.”
In summarizing the results of Dr. Moody’s mirror experiments, Greg added: “Most of the experiences that took place consisted of visual images of the face and body of deceased people initially moving on the mirror. Then the images emerged from the mirror and moved about the room. Then they talked to the seated person, engaging them in conversation. By this point, they were no longer images, but solid figures materialized into the room. Some of the participants physically touched the apparition with reports of hugs and the wiping away of tears. The expected person was not always the one who appeared. Moody reports that his grandmother physically emerged from the mirror and that they had detailed conversations about his childhood.”
Greg also noted that this mirror experimentation could also be applied to ufology. “If Dr. Moody will alter his study a little, he can bring UFO abductors out of his mirror just as easily as he can bring out the dearly departed spirits so desperately sought by his subjects,” Greg wrote. Greg recently learned how one of his readers actually followed up on this idea and, using Aleister Crowley’s grey-like Lam image as his target, conducted his own experiment. “It took me about 20 minutes of staring at a candlelit dark mirror, tilted so that no image is seen, and concentrating on the idea of the alien and imagining what it looks like when three of them visually appeared for a few minutes staring at me, then faded. Upon fading I sensed an uneasy presence behind me and couldn’t manage to turn around. The feeling was identical to when you wake up from a nightmare and can’t quite bring yourself to move for a while. That is when I forced my arm over to a lamp next to me and turned it on. The presence and feeling immediately went away. In all honesty I was actually quite shocked by the success of this experiment.”
Janice Edwards of Arkansas shared this story with us. She said that back around Thanksgiving of 2003, she and her husband were staying at a motel in Mississippi. While Janice was taking a bath she happened to glance over toward the bathroom mirror. “It was kind of fogged up, but in the mirror, for the first time that I could recall, I actually saw an ET with the big eyes image in the mirror,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking of ETs or alien experiences at the time. I just looked over there and I saw these big eyes, what some people call the Greys, and then I looked away. I thought I’m just seeing (things), and I looked back again, and it was still there. I was like, ‘Am I just seeing things?’ But it was still there.
“The mirror was kind of foggy but yet you could see it clearly, the image of the face and the eyes in it. It’s like ‘Okay, are you enjoying the view here? I’m taking a bath. Do you mind?’ (Janice laughed) And it went away. So when I got out of the tub and got dressed and I went back in and told my husband.”
Though Janice doesn’t see herself as an abductee, she has a good friend from childhood who is an “abductee.” Janice attends UFO conferences, where she met abductee Sandy Nichols (who introduced us).
Other non-human appearing forms are reportedly seen in mirrors. Here’s one shared with me recently by Bret Oldham of Halo Paranormal out of Lebanon, Tennessee, who as a young man tried a mirror experiment that he was told would summon a demon! Bret wrote:
“My cousin and I, who were both 12 years old at the time, were talking paranormal stuff to the preacher’s son from the church we both attended. He got to talking about summoning up demons and such and we thought he was talking BS just to scare us so he told us if we didn’t believe him to try it ourselves. He wrote down some incantation which I don’t remember now what it was. I do remember that after we said the opening things on it then we just kept repeating a certain line. He had told us to shine one mirror into another as we said the incantation and that it would summon forth a demon. Having had so many paranormal experiences during my youth with so many of them being ghosts speaking to me, touching me, getting into bed with me and son on, I was more than willing to give this one a try. I thought at best that we might summon up a spirit but nothing more.”
“We went into the bathroom of my house to do the experiment. There was a full length dressing mirror on the back of the bathroom door. WE got a hand held mirror that was approximately 12” x 12” in size. We lit a candle and other than some ambient light coming through a small window about the shower there was no other light in the room. We stood in front of the full length mirror and I held the smaller mirror in front of me facing directly into the larger mirror. We then recited what the preacher’s son had told us to. At first nothing was happening but we remained serious and continued on. Then we saw in the reflection of the mirror a small white ball of light appear. We kept reciting the incantation. The ball of light got bigger and brighter until it was larger than the width of the mirrors. At this point we were excited but not really that scared. Then the large ball of light suddenly disappeared and we could see in the reflection of the mirror a being standing behind us in the bathroom. It was in the shape of a human but was a shadow person. It was bigger than both of us. One of the strange things that I remember about it was that it looked like it had little slits in it and light was coming out of them. The eyes seemed to glow as well. I couldn’t see any more of it than that. We both stood there kind of frozen for a few seconds and then I put the mirror down so it wasn’t shining directly into the other one. We quickly opened the door and ran out of the room. When we got up our nerve to return there was nothing there, but both of us saw the exact same thing. I remember at the time that I felt that we shouldn’t have done it. Cousin and I both thought that maybe we did indeed conjure up a demon. Although now, I’m not a big believer in demons, I still can’t say for sure what it was or where it came from, but there was something that appeared to us.”
In his book, Greg offered an explanation for these mirror experiences based upon the Jungian theory of archetypes. “What is happening there is that the subjects are energizing archetypal forces within themselves that align their energy vibration (in their unconscious, their mind, or whatever) with that of a particular archetypal force. This force essentially alters its vibrational pattern to that of the person calling it and it subsequently emerges into physical reality. Certain types of physical matter with particular electromagnetic properties are used by the archetypal energies to assist in the physical manifestation – a mirror is an example. So too are crystals, certain rocks, water, and particular spots on the face of the earth where geomagnetic anomalies exist. Jung just said that an archetype is a psychoid factor – something normally invisible (and very powerful) taking on a physically real shape and form.”
For awhile Greg had constructed and used his own mirror arrangement at his home, which Dr. Moody called a “psychomanteum,” a term derived from the Greeks and their ancient method of contacting the dead using a mirror or crystal placed in a darkened room. Greg and others had some interesting experiences with his “psychomanteum.” “I did see a young girl about 7-8 years old sprawled across a recliner,” recalled our Native American friend/medicine woman Wanda “Dove” Reed. “She had a pink and white striped blouse on. A very clear vision. And also saw ancient ruins, (like an) Olmec temple pyramid.”
Laura Cyr of Washington state just shared this “reflection that was NOT me” personal story. “When I was in high school, many many mons ago, I had to deliver something to a lady I did not know. Two male classmates went with me. The address we went to was in a new neighborhood and all the houses were very well taken care of. We walked up about 5 steps to the front door. I was in the middle and my friends stood slightly behind me on my left and right sides.”
“The front door had a large window in it and I knocked on the wood. I looked up and a very attractive woman with flaming red hair piled up on top of her head seemed to be standing on the other side of the door looking at us through the glass. I thought, ‘WOW, she must have seen us coming.’”
“I heard footsteps approach, then the door was opened by an older woman that looked nothing like the red haired lady. Directly opposite the front door was a very large mirror with an ornate gold colored frame. This time the reflection of my friends and I stared back at me.”
“As soon as we turned and left the house I asked my friends if they had seen the red haired woman but they said NO.” One of the strangest mirror experiences I’ve ever heard was shared with me by Richard Barnhouse, an Ohio petroglyph researcher, back in 2009. Of Native American ancestry, Richard had always wanted to understand the meaning of Native American symbols. He felt that many were arranged in certain patterns to create certain psychic effects. He called this petroglyph manipulation. He began drawing patterns on paper, cutting them out and arranging them in various ways to see if anything happened. While doing this one day, he had an out-of-body experience – which he had never had before. Then about a week later, while sitting out in his car waiting for a friend he had taken to that area, he decided to try this experiment again.
He explained, “It was dark and I was arranging this stuff, in patterns again and playing with it. Here comes what I thought were two animals running side by side down the street, out of the darkness. When they get close to the car they’re running but it’s almost like watching them running in slow motion. Their leg movements were very slow, yet they are covering distance in a hurry. When they got even closer I realized that they weren’t even touching the ground. They were a foot above the ground. Then I thought that they looked more like wolves. I couldn’t make up my mind whether they were a dog or a wolf, or something in between, and I’m actually wondering what in the devil am I looking at. Then I looked in the side mirror as they went by and it was a boy and a girl, I’d say somewhere between 18 and 20. Naked, no clothes, no fur, and they’re still running. Kneeling down but they’re still running, just like I had seen coming up the street. Healthy, muscular, but definitely a boy and girl. When they got past the car, well I actually looked out the window once I seen that in the mirror all of this happening in a heartbeat and I stick my head out the window, I’m looking back at these wolves or dogs, whatever they are, with the fur all over them. So they’re past the car and then I look up in the rearview mirror and I can see the boy and the girl again and then in the darkness behind me they were gone.”
Singing Rivers – Then and Now!
Native Americans had traditions of many magical and sacred places. One of these was rivers where powerful spirit songs would manifest from. Back on Sunday, October 21, 1973, I had traveled to Pascagoula, Mississippi, in the company of New Orleans ufologist Milton L. Scott, to meet with Charles Hickson, 45, and Calvin Parker, Jr., 19, two area shipyard workers who claimed that just ten days earlier, on Thursday, October 11th, while quietly fishing along the Pascagoula River, behind the old Shaupeter Shipyard building, a small oval looking craft with bright flashing blue lights suddenly appeared nearby, hovering perhaps a mere foot over the ground. Three five foot tall mummy-like humanoid beings floated out and grabbed them, taking them aboard the UFO. Parker passed out while he was being taken inside the craft, while Hickson remained conscious. “Something big and round that looked like a big eye moved back and forth across my body,” Hickson recalled. “The two creatures moved me around so that the eye could check me in various positions. I just kind of floated without touching anything. I didn’t see any attachment for the eye. It was just kind of suspended in air.”
I later learned that the Pascagoula River was also called the Singing River and that there was an Indian legend associated with it where a mermaid-type woman sang to a tribe there known as the Pascagoulas. Our friend Tom of Alabama, who is of Euchee ancestry, told me that there were several variations on that story. “I talked to a person of Natchez ancestry and she said that the woman that came up that river came from the great salty lake. She got tired of the salt in the lake, the Gulf of Mexico. She came up into that fresh water and she was so happy that she started to sing down there.” Even to this day local residents in the area along the Pascagoula River claim to hear a mysterious unexplained humming sound. Tom also discovered that to the Euchee the Tennessee River of northern Alabama was also called The Singing River, or Nun-nuh-sae in their language. An elderly Euchee woman once told him, “We believed there was a young woman who lived in the river and sang beautiful songs to us there.”
David Walton, a good friend of Tom, shared with us how he is greatly inspired by nature and he himself hears melodies in trees and water. “You’ve got my flute CD,” David explained. “It is entitled Beauty of the Earth. The songs on there, like the song Oh Sacred Tree, I was sitting under a 3,000 year old Redwood tree meditating, when all of a sudden I heard this melody coming from the tree. It felt like a gift from the tree. I just pulled out my flute and started playing it. The same thing with the song for Tom’s great-great grandmother Te-lah-nay, and that was way back in 1975, and I had only been playing flute for a year and I was at a place on Cypress Creek [which runs into the Tennessee River], and I was meditating there for a number of hours, just listening to the water flowing when all of a sudden the melody just came up out of the water. As clear as a bell, and I knew that it was Native American. And the interesting thing about that song was that I never performed it in public until I met Tom, 27 years later.”
The Three World Shamanic Concept
To the Native American (as well as ancient people and cultures throughout the world) the earth was their Mother, a living sentient being. Ancient people were taught to respect this world and the world we call nature, and to live in balance and harmony with all of creation. A common theme frequently found was the three world concept, wherein there was an Upper World, a Middle World, and a Lower World, often represented as an archetypal Tree of Life. These different worlds were explained in some detail in the April issue of this column. “Curiously, shamans from all parts of the world have similar maps to the different lands,” Jose and Lena Stevens noted in their book Secrets of Shamanism. “A shaman from Siberia can understand the journey of a shaman from the South Pacific by relating to its relative position on the Tree of Life.”
The Greg Little EM Spectrum Concept
After my wife Joan and I joined Doctors Greg and Lora Little for a few days back in May as co-leaders of an ARE (Association for Research and Enlightenment) sponsored Indian Mounds Tour in Georgia, during which I spoke on these ancient shamanic concepts, I later wrote Greg these personal reflections:
On page 226 of your Grand Illusions you have a standard chart of the EM Spectrum that incorporates other energies and intelligent life forms that you speculate exist at various points along its length. Beginning with the heavens (the Upper World), which you associated with “creation, light, and vibration,” you descend down to our realm (the Middle World, the visible light spectrum) where spectral intrusions (UFOs, “angelic beings”, etc.) may enter our realm from either side of the spectrum “depending on their source.” You associated Sheol and hell (the Underworld, beginning in the infrared range) with the other side of the EM spectrum where everything eventually becomes “densely packed like a black hole.”
When you look at the shamanic three world concept that comes at us from many different global aboriginal cultures isn’t it kind of interesting how it compares with your science based concept of these energies and life forms/forces associated with the EM spectrum?
When you were developing your own version of the EM spectrum theory (which John Keel of course deserves credit for first introducing this concept in a significant way to ufology) did it occur to you that this was a more advanced version of what ancient people were simply trying to express centuries and centuries ago in an age that did not possess our technical jargon and sophistication?
Greg Little soon replied to my email with the following thoughtful remarks:
“The electromagnetic energy spectrum theory proposes three realms of what we would call reality. One is what the Native Tribes would call the middle world, the earthen plane of solid matter--in the EM spectrum it is the visible light bands. The lower end of the EM spectrum, starting at infrared radiation, vibrates slower and slower into radio waves and probably energy that is essentially static--unmoving. This would be the underworld, sometimes expressed as under water. The other end of the EM spectrum would be the upper world starting at UV and progressing to X-rays and various cosmic rays. It all fits the Native ideas of a 3-layered cake of existence with us in the middle. In a way, the shaman have found ways to move up and down through these layers, essentially using techniques that could be looked at like an elevator.”
Synchronicity here and there
Jungian synchronicity (or is it merely the tauntings of a Trickster spirit?) certainly can come to repeatedly and unexpectedly manifest itself in your life. You often find yourself trying to figure out the meaning behind such synchronistic riddles – all too often without any real definite success. On the first evening of our ARE program, on May 2nd, Dr. Lora Little led a meditation. During that meditation I had a strange “vision” of the head of a dark skinned man wherein it was like the crown of his head was cut out into a square with a dark vertical line going straight down into the center of his brain. Then it was like I was looking closer at this square area and I saw these small dark human-like figures, on the surface of this brain (which looked rather like cottage cheese) going around and around the center line at a very fast speed, making very fast movements.
The very next day, at the Ocmulgee Mound Complex/Museum in Macon, Joan and I led two separate meditations (in order to accommodate everyone in our group, as the space was limited) inside the semi-subterranean circular “earth lodge” (described in my April column). A lady from Dallas, Texas, later described to me how as I began drumming inside the lodge she began to “see” young Indian men dancing rigorously around the inside of the earth lodge in a counterclockwise direction. She said that their movements were so energetic that they reminded her of the whirling Dervish dancers of Turkey. She said that all of the men were dressed in typical Indian “skirts” that came down just above the knees with slits on the sides. Then she found herself viewing young Indian men and women moving in a counterclockwise direction around the earth lodge mound from a perspective above ground. She said that they were lined up in a single circle and by opposite sex (i.e., male, female, male, female, and continuing on in that manner). Again the men were engaged in the same kind of very rigorous dancing while the women, dressed in traditional leather dresses and wearing moccasins, were simply keeping the rhythm with a slow and graceful style of movement. Interestingly, she said that these men and women were transparent, while the men she had first observed inside the lodge were solid looking.
She said that she has seen Indian dancers before, but none that moved so rapidly. I asked her if she had noticed what the men had on their feet or if they had rattles or anything in their hands, but to both she replied that her attention was so focused on their rigorous movements that she failed to take note of those particular details.
Before doing the earth lodge meditation, Joan was smudging the area and making preparations for what we were about to do with the ARE group, while I was making preparations at another nearby site for another meditation we’d be conducting there later. Joan later told me that while she was inside this lodge alone she heard a growly, deep male voice speak from inside the lodge as well. However, she couldn’t understand what was said. She felt that it was a language that she was unfamiliar with. Perhaps an hour later, around 4:30 p.m., I ventured inside the lodge myself, also alone, and asked several questions. While I did not hear anything in real time, my digital recorder picked up a whispered sounding “spirits” seconds after I asked who my wife had heard. “We can hear the reply of ‘spirits’ right before you shut off the recorder,” Bret Oldham of Halo Paranormal informed me. “At first we thought it might be the shuffling of the recorder but after several listens it sure sounds like the word ‘spirits’ and it is a reply that answers your question.”
We also visited the magnificent Etowah Indian Mounds in Cartersville, Georgia, on May 5th. It was here, in their gift shop, that Greg Little purchased a book entitled Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, edited by F. Kent Reilly III and James F. Garber (University of Texas Press, 2007). This book, like others that mainstream archaeologists are now putting out, are also seriously examining the potential significance of the star system Cygnus (the Northern Cross) with Native American belief systems, and those of other ancient cultures around the world, as detailed first in Andrew Collins’s acclaimed and comprehensive book The Cygnus Mystery (2006). On our way back through the area a few days ago, my wife Joan and I stopped again at Cartersville and I also purchased a copy of this book by Reilly and Garber.
Again I was inspired to write Greg another email outlining some potential Cygnus related synchronicities that had occurred in years past, while engaged in sweat lodge ceremonies and visits to ancient sacred Native American sites, these incidents happening prior to my awareness of the northern and southern cross constellations being significant to various ancient global cultures as possible portals to the spirit world after death.
I wrote:
….over the weekend, it occurred to me how you had mentioned (as I recall how the encircled eqi-distance cross symbol (like the one I was wearing on my shirt with the four birds of the four directions) represented (they’re now saying it seems) Cygnus.
Then I thought of how Dr. [Arthur] Cushman last year showed us the gorget with the same symbol (which the spirit of a shaman allegedly told him was very important) and then I remembered one of my sweat lodge visions of this symbol, which I had to look up in my journals, and there it is (from a sweat on Sunday, July 8, 2001). It was a yellow circle, with a red interior, and the cross portion was black. As the vision progressed I saw like an eye toward the center of this. It seemed that Dove [sweat lodge leader at time] thought this represented a portal.
What’s also a cool bit of synchronicity is that when I got the “Southern Cross” impression (at the bi-lobe site) and found the bird’s foot [petroglyph] later that day in Alabama (Kinlock Shelter) it was Sunday, July 9, 2000, almost exactly a year earlier! In fact, I had written in my journal of being at the bi-lobe site, “I saw a cross within a circle…words ‘southern cross’ came to me.” I had honestly forgotten a lot of those details until I consulted my journals. I’m glad that I was keeping them back then.
Greg replied: “…almost al the archaeoastronomers now think that the feathered serpent was the Milky Way being represented and the cross was the dark rift – Cygnus.” In The Cygnus Mystery, Andrew Collins wrote about how many ancient people believed that after death their souls would travel along the Milky Way as they headed towards their final destination in the afterlife. “Strangely, it turns out that whether an Inca went to the afterlife in the ‘world above’ or the ‘world below’, both destinations were accessed via the Milky Way. Those going to the former would take the northern ‘bridge’ of the Milky Way, in the vicinity of Cygnus, whilst those heading for the lower realms would travel south towards the region of Crux, the Southern Cross.”
In Andean lore the Southern Cross was the afterlife twin star portal to the Northern Cross. Why are some of us seemingly having synchronistic incidents that may relate to such ancient archetypal associations? Are ancient clues or secrets long lost to mankind in the distant past about to be finally revealed once again?
(Greg and Lora Little together on top of one of Etowah's tallest mounds!)
(Greg Little and his mesmerized audience inside Russell Cave in northern Alabama.)
(Impressive statue inside Etowah Mounds Museum in Cartersville, GA.)
