Gerd wrote: My thought may be stuck in the religious mode (I just finished reading some Eliade),
Eliade has the same effect on me... but I think what is being referred to hear is an encounter with something that in the past is referred to as angelic, today as extraterrestrial. No matter which way one views these things, angelic or alien, it is an experience that is very individual. Good point - Baroh's problem is personal, indivisable as he puts it, and therefore the solution, Phares, is probably also a unique personal experience. I find your comment doubly interesting because Baroh's trials and salvation have always struck me as similar to a shamanic initiation According to Eliade and others, at the shamans's level of spiritual experience his gods and his relationship to them is uniquely his own, even when these gods have recognizable names. So many of the typical shamanic motives are also in Baroh's story: he goes through a typical breakdown of personality, he lives more and more in his dreams, he becomes isolated from society, he becomes sick with the ills of society, madness overcomes him, he is seen as a psychopath, he develops a direct relationship with his dead ancestors, he becomes a sort of psychopomp, and he is finally saved by a spiritual visitor who is going to teach him "what he does not yet know". There are other parallels to shamanism such as the connection with art, creation of the world, mystical experiences, and of course psychological death and rebirth. While Baroh's experiences are typical of any mystical initiation, they are more - they are at the level of the priest of the mystery cult, the shaman, the spiritual expert, rather than of the mystes or simple tribesman. In my youth, I was a member of a church that had a belief in personal experiences with God, and I met many people who claimed to have had God in some way speak through them. I no longer believe they were experiencing what they thought, but it is not a question of them out and out lying, for the most part. On the contrary, they believed in what they experienced very deeply. It could have been auto suggestion, or it most certainly could have been some kind of psycho-pathology, or it could have been something more profound. Those who were convinced of the metaphysical reality of these experiences tended to believe not just in one or two instances, but wanted to be convinced of the reality of all of them. Those unconvinced generally will see such things as a sort of pathological symptom. My point is that Phares is a visitor of some sort. The key may be in his name (Phares = seraph, i. e. Seraphim) as well. Ever met anyone who said they saw an angel? Or that one applied for a job with them? How about an ET? I know that Junger has explained Phares as Seraph in reverse, but I think there are also other levels to the name. Phar -oah, Phar-os, Phan(r)es (from the Orphic theogony) - lots of similar sounds. (And the answers are no, no and yes. The ET experience, whatever it may have been, drove this friend into the madhouse - literally. The man had seemed quite normal until this 'contact' - no drugs, no religious obsessions, no weird dietary regimes! Afterwards he got into all of the above and then others. An odd case. There are lots of them on this side of the Atlantic. But enough of this UFO thing.) Thomas Friese Association Eumeswil Vancouver http://www.eumeswil.org/
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