The first Vallean secret constitutes what we might call the gnosis of the future. This involves a particular hermeneutic that privileges the imagination, and more especially the imaginaire of modern science fiction, in order to interpret the past and the present from the perspective of the future. In many ways, this is simply an “impossible” extension of standard historiography, which involves a thinking about the past from the perspective of the present. Here that structure of historical consciousness is radicalized further to the extent that it is projected into the future and imaginatively applied back to the present. In essence, it renders the present past. Put a bit differently, Jacques Vallee thinks backwards, from the future to the present and then, like the rest of us, to the past.
Thus, even when he entertains a very traditional idea like that of reincarnation, he finds himself asking a very untraditional question, namely: Why must reincarnation move from the past to the present? Why not from the future to the present? Why, that is, might not reincarnation also work “backwards”? “I’ve always wondered why people have always reincarnated from the past,” he muses in a 1993 interview. “Those few times when I’ve had feelings of remembering another life, it was from the future.”95 Whether understood as a specific memory of a real future life, as a tapping into some larger cosmic Memory Matrix, or as an active fantasy become hermeneutic, such a feeling from the future expresses perfectly what I want to call Vallee’s gnosis of the future.
The second Vallean secret is very much related to the first. We might call it the gnosis of multidimensionality. This, of course, is the idea with which we began this book, namely, the idea of multiple dimensions of space-time and its implications for thinking about the history of religions. But such an idea is hardly restricted to the hyperabstract categories of space and time. The idea defines Vallee’s understanding of mysticism as “a direction of thought away from ordinary space-time.” It also, potentially at least, might inform and expand our most basic models of mind and text, of consciousness and culture. It might morph, that is, into a new paranormal hermeneutics. Within such a new way of reading, we might perhaps better understand how multiple dimensions of consciousness become crystallized into the multiple meanings of a cultural system, or how a vast Mind becomes a vast text with multiple levels of meaning, each, as it were, an altered state of the Mind that projected it. Nothing is simple. Nothing is one. Everything is multiple. Everything is many. This is the mind-blowing secret that both the believer and the skeptic miss, as each tries to collapse the many dimensions of reality into a fundamentalist Flatland of simple faith or pure reason. In the end, neither move can possibly get us to where we want to go for the simple, but fantastically complex, reason that this is not what is.
This second secret is crystallized in Vallee’s central symbol of Magonia. Within such a multiverse, historical events of a profound religious nature cannot be read as strictly causal or materialistic processes. They cannot be exhausted by reason or context. How could they be? Time is not structured like a one-way arrow, despite what we naively assume in our “behind the times” pre-Einsteinian imaginations. Rather, the structure of time, like that of space, is multidimensional. It can be bent, manipulated, transcended. There are alternative worlds, even whole parallel universes, beyond the ken of our little Flatland and the pathetic little strip of the electromagnetic spectrum that we are able to detect and record with our itty-bitty senses. We are so many “electromagnetic chauvinists,” as Michael Murphy likes to put it.96 That is to say, we assume that what we see and hear is all there is. But it’s not. Not even close. Trained in astrophysics and the immensities of space revealed to him through the super-vision of the modern telescope, Vallee never makes this gross epistemological mistake. He is not an electromagnetic chauvinist. He is keenly aware of the smallness of our sensory perceptions and the normal intellectual capacities that they shape, control, and limit.
But he is also personally familiar with other modes of intuitive knowledge, what I have called gnostic modes, that do not rely on these senses. His journals, for example, are peppered with examples of tantalizing precognitive dreams and remarkable synchronicities or what he calls “intersigns,” the latter which he takes as evidence that reality itself—very much like a Freudian dream—is “overdetermined.”97 One does not explain or “prove” such thinking to others. One recognizes it in another as something of one’s own impossible truth. One has either been resynthesized by Valis, or one has not. “Whoever possesses this ‘other kind’ of thought,” Vallee wrote as a young man, “recognizes it at once. It comes with the feeling that we do not really ‘exist’ any more in this world than a single note in a symphony exists, or a single spark in the fireplace. We are both creators and tributaries of the universe we perceive” (FS 1:20).
It is this same gnostic or reflexive sensibility, this same notion of writing and being written, that inspired Vallee to write in his journals about an “esoteric history,” of a mysterious attraction he feels “of an unseen presence that seems to be speaking to us across the centuries of darkness” (FS 1:76). It is this same esoteric attitude again that teaches him that texts, and particularly mystical texts, are not rational objects with simple literal meanings. Each is a multidimensional universe of meaning designed, rather like a UFO, to shatter one’s inherited categories and so offer a potential passport into another, richer dimension of existence—a passport to Magonia. “For those who have pierced the barrier,” Vallee writes, “words have never represented more than the emerging part of thought. Beyond words are the second meaning, the third meaning, the true ones” (FS 1:41). One, two, and beyond both, a third: this again, at the risk of overemphasizing the point, is a classic mystical or gnostic structure of reading and thinking.
It is important to point out that none of this is an abstract, strictly intellectual project for Vallee. His entire alien corpus is based on intuitive glimpses, flashes of insight, and other planes of consciousness that he has experienced since his youth (FS 1:19). “Perhaps it is true that I have been here, inside this particular body, for nineteen years,” he wrote as a young man. “But in reality I feel that I have always existed” (FS 1:18). Indeed, even then he experienced his historical persona and body as something other: “I was created in the form of a man. This is supposed to be obvious: ‘I am a man.’ Yet there is an infinite distance between ‘me’ and ‘the man I am’” (FS 1:34).
Such an alien-ated gnosis is even more apparent in Vallee’s understanding of the God of the Bible, a rather disturbing deity whom some of the early gnostic Christians considered a demiurge, that is, a half-wit creator god who was not worth their worship or respect. This, of course, is Fort’s “bland and shining Stupidity.” It is also why Fort’s editor wanted to call his third book God Is an Idiot. The true Godhead of the ancient gnostics, of course, was none of this. The true God, the Father, the One, was something completely beyond the god of the Bible, a God beyond god. With Fort, Vallee shares an almost identical sensibility. He told me quite simply that he does not believe in “the God of the Bible.” He had put the same in print, though, and much more, over a decade ago: “The notion of the ‘good yet frightful God’ of the Bible and the Gospels seems like a swindle to me: It is the biggest, most cruel confidence game in history. . . . Simple human dignity should make us reject all that with indignation” (FS 1:113). Hence the “groveling plea” of the Catholic Requiem, the “religious malady” that gives us endless conflicts “from Ireland to Palestine,” and the utterly bizarre phenomenon of “good” Christians, “good” Muslims, and “good” Hindus building atom bombs (FS 2:124, 110).
Which is not to say that he rejects the various scriptural accounts as groundless. He accepts the ambiguous and always fallible historical record that something happened, that is, that a series of profound religious events occurred, which were then recorded in scriptures by way of human memory and community. But he sees no reason to assume that such paranormal events were authored by an ultimate deity. Quite the contrary. �
��The correct conclusion, in my opinion, would be to acknowledge that an unrecognized form of life and consciousness exists close to our earth” (FS 1:75). What we have, then, is a lower deity, a devilish demiurge, as the early gnostic Christians would have put it. “Other forces manifest,” Vallee wrote as late as 1996. “We call them ghosts, spirits, extraterrestrials. When all else fails we abjectly turn them into gods, the better to worship what we fail to grasp, the better to idolize what we are too lazy to analyze. I am in search of a different truth” (FS 1:434–35).
This is radical stuff, but it is radical stuff that many are likely to miss or too quickly dismiss. What, really, is going on in an author like Jacques Vallee? It is one thing to sneer at the ufological reading of the Marian apparitions at Fátima, which, as we shall see soon enough, were not originally Marian, or Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot, which even by internal textual standards was clearly no chariot. It is quite another to come up with an explanation for all those spinning disks, or to realize the theological implications of what is being suggested, symbolically, through such an alien hermeneutics. Just who is being more suspicious here? An author who frames the world religions in categories derived largely from Christian or at least Western philosophical assumptions about the nature of human being? An author who reduces the metaphysical to the present materialism of orthodox science or to the reigning contextualism of this or that social science? Or an author who denies all the traditional religions as well as the materialisms and contextualisms of modern theory for an imaginative leap into an impossible new world?
We need not believe in the literal existence of aliens—do not misread me here—in order to recognize and admire the boldness of such a move. Nor need we be surprised that such thinking occurs well outside academic respectability. Where else could it occur? Authors like Fort, Vallee, and Michel write entirely outside of the typical professional boundaries of the field. This leaves them open to the usual charges of inadequate linguistic preparation, a lack of appreciation for local context and historical detail, and so on. But it also empowers them, enables them to think things that no one within those safe, respectable boundaries would dare think, much less write about. As a consequence, they come up with impossible ideas that, if taken seriously, “could bring Theory to its knees” (FS 1:128).
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-one98), 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.
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 27