Who made the world?

It's shaping up to be a strange, strange summer

“We truly are a species with amnesia. We have forgotten a very important part of our story.”

― Graham Hancock

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The Vatican has just issued a *very* unusual press release.

In it, they notify the general public of their intention to release a robust document on May 17th 2024 that will provide detailed, formal guidance on how to discern and navigate “supernatural phenomena”.

Yah. They use those exact words.

According to the press release, “The Catholic Church urges "extreme prudence" before ascribing phenomena to a supernatural force, warning that being too quick to attribute divine origin to explainable occurrences can damage the faith and warp belief.”

WUT.

According to the Vatican, the forthcoming proclamation will provide Catholics the world over with the “proper protocol” for contacting local diocesan bishops, so that they can document and scrutinize any “alleged apparitions” on behalf of the experiencer and, as necessary, forward them to Rome for formal investigation.

My translation?

Don’t believe your lying eyes and ears. You’re not a professional spiritual subject matter expert, and drawing your own conclusions about your own supernatural experiences— which we anticipate occurring in the very near future— could get you into real trouble. Better to outsource your critical thinking skills to a more experienced and knowledgable “authority”.

Now, I could be a bit paranoid… but it does sounds a bit like someone is trying desperately to get ahead of and control the messaging around something.

But what could that something be?

Short answer: I don’t exactly know.

Long answer: I have some theories, and these theories hinge on a few clues:

• As we recently wrote about in our post “It’s like staring at demons”, mainstream media— and clinical psychotherapy— are adamant that when you see a distorted, demonic face (what might be considered a “supernatural apparition” in Vatican press release words), you’re actually just suffering from an obscure, brand new psychological condition. Checks out. I mean, it’s not like it could actually be demons, whatever they even are. That would be crazy, right? Well, it would be except that I’ve personally noticed a very aberrant and substantive uptick in what I call “negative entity” activity in the last year, myself, which I shared in this post on Substack. Maybe I need to call my local Catholic Bishop to sort it out for me;)

• The mainstream media— and the Pentagon— are going out of their way to discredit and dismiss the increase in credible sightings of UAP (unidentified arial phenomenon), asserting that these objects are simply weather balloons or drones. But, despite this “popular sentiment” (which I would call propaganda), the U.S. House of Representatives have instituted a formal Subcommittee called "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency." And that Subcommittee has found substantive evidence of the existence of a secret government program designed to retrieve crashed “craft” and study them. I had my own, very first (and only) encounter with a UAP last summer, which I detailed in “A New Song” here on Substack.

• Mainstream archeology is in a full tizzy over new digs and discoveries that set the clock on advanced human civilization back further and further— by orders of magnitude— challenging previously held beliefs about our shared history and when, precisely, “civilization” started. The recent discovery of underground civilizations dating back more than 7,000 years in Saudi Arabia is just one of many such sites. In other words: things keep getting older and more sophisticated. Seems like an oxymoron, right? I mean, we evolve in one direction (forward), right?

Personally, I don’t see the explosion of demon face sightings and UAP sightings and paradigm-shattering archeological digs and weird notes from the Vatican as random, disconnected elements of separate phenomena.

To me, I think it’s all kind of converging around the same thing.

And while I don’t exactly know what that thing is, I do think an imminent, major shift in the conversation about “who made the world” is at the horizon line, sparking a summer of high strangeness and worldview-shifting Woo.

I believe this collective phenomena, whatever specific manifestations it eventually takes, will knock the socks off of secular atheists and religious believers alike, taking us into the largely uninhabited, exotic and tumultuous terrain of the truth, located smack dab at the crossroads of the messy middle.

You know. The place where us antisocial shamans hang out.

The messy middle

My first foray into the spiritual messy middle came 20 years ago. I was assigned to read the Book of Genesis in Hebrew as a part of my Biblical Hebrew studies at Spertus Institute, and boy oh boy did it generate a big, unexpected surprise.

I distinctly remember reading the sentence, “And the Elohim made man in Their image” in Hebrew, audibly gasping when I realized how different this wording was from the more standard, Sunday School, King James Bible Version: “And God made man in His image.”

After re-reading the sentence to make sure I wasn’t having a stroke or totally messed up the translation (after all: reading Hebrew requires you go from right to left on the page- a hard trick to learn at the age of 20), I remember looking frantically around the library, searching for someone to help me navigate this incredible discovery that just upended my views of religion and the potential origins of our species.

I remember wondering, “Do other people know about this?”, stunned as I considered that Judaism and, consequently, Christianity and Islam (collectively referred to as the “Abrahamic religions”) aren’t really the monotheistic faith system that we were taught they were in Sunday School.

In fact, they were distinctly polytheistic. And, in the text’s native languages, it all read a lot more like Philip K. Dick science fiction than religious text.

You see, in Biblical Hebrew and in the practice of Kabbalah, there are 72 names for God. Like the Greek language’s many words for various kinds of love, these various names for God were meant to depict specific “emanations”, or incarnations or manifestations, of the divine. Within this linguistic taxonomy, the word “Elohim” is very, very distinctly meant to be used as a plural noun for multiple divine beings.

Reinforcing this was the use of the capital T in “Their” in this line, adding to the suggestion that there were multiple gods that made our species in their image.

And, when I dug further into my Kabbalah studies, I found more detritus of this strange, polytheistic and unusually secular-sounding version of events.

In one case, I was reading the Zohar and found a whole subsection about the “Greater Elohim”, defined as the “world-builders”, and the “Lesser Elohim”, described as incapable of building worlds but occupying a supporting role beneath the Greater Elohim.

In other words, the Elohim had a tiered society so complex that there was a worker class and a ruling elite class, each with differing roles and tasks.

Later, I would come across Zechariah Sitchin’s work translating Sumerian cuniform tablets, many of which echoed precisely the stories and archetypes found in the Abrahamic religions— and Kabbalah more specifically. According to Sitchin, these “Greater Elohim” and “Lesser Elohim” were called the “Annunaki” and “Nephilim”, respectively, by the ancient Sumerians.

Sitchin believed that there was a time during which the “gods” and “angels” of the world’s religions walked the earth, ultimately fabricating and interacting with us humans.

In this way, Sitchin saw the “truth” as being in the messy middle between atheistic scientism and fervent religious belief: “This belief, known as Creationism, has taken on science as its adversary; and science, firmly wed to the Theory of Evolution, has met the challenge and joined the battle. It is regrettable that both sides pay little heed to what has been known for more than a century— that the creation tales of Genesis are edited and abbreviated version of much more detailed Mesopotamian text, which are [rooted in lived reality.]”

Sitchin saw ancient “religious” texts and their predecessor Sumerian cuneiform writings as a reflection of a very strange but very real history that fuses and explains both religious belief and scientific fact. In these cuneiform translations, incredible levels of detail are given regarding why, how and when the Annunaki made human beings on earth— including extensive bits about advanced genetic technologies.

Francis Crick, one half of the Noble prize-winning duo Watson and Crick that were the first to isolate the double helix structure of our DNA, came to believe that intelligent life from somewhere “beyond earth” left its fingerprints on genetic alterations to the human genome.

Mr. Crick gave many, many talks and wrote many, many tomes on the topic of Intelligent Panspermia, convinced he could see the telltale signs of what we have only very recently come to know as the marks of CRISPR gene-altering technology.

In simple terms? One of the men that discovered DNA and its structure also believes that other, more advanced beings had a hand in “creating” us. A view that aligns with the Sumerian cuneiform and ancient biblical texts that serve as the foundation of modern religion.

Wild, isn’t it?

It is only our paradigms and ideologies and thought prisons that prevent us from seeing both the scientific and spiritual “doctrines” as a part of the same, shared history of the origins of the human species, distorted and confused through an epic, multi-millennial game of telephone.

The audacity of possibility

I know, I know. I’m going to make literally everyone uncomfortable with this, but please remember: this is not my belief system, nor do I think it contradicts your belief systems— whatever that may be.

As a shaman, I’m supposed to collect and examine direct spiritual data without prejudice. I regularly reconfigure my own working spiritual theories as new and emergent data points come in, often resulting in me discarding old, outdated paradigms to accommodate these new insights and experiences.

One of the biggest sources of this data comes from simply observing the overt, banal behavior of otherwise “religious” individuals and institutions.

Take, yet again, the example of the Catholic Church, which spends millions of dollars every year to maintain their robust collection of astronomical telescopes and observatories. One of these telescopes is called LUCIFER, an acronym that stands for “Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research”.

Riddle me this: if the Catholic Church has it on divine authority from God himself that God (the singular) created us and everything else in six days via a strict Creationist scenario, why the f*ck would they need the most expensive and advanced astronomical telescopes on earth? What are they looking for out there in deep space? And why the f*ck, of all of the potential names, did they pick Lucifer?

Think I’m kidding? Check it out for yourself: Lucifer Instrument Helps Astronomers See Through Darkness to Most Distant Observable Objects

One possible “why” behind these investments is that Catholic leadership thinks there’s something very, very important and consequential to their business model (and it is a business) looming somewhere “out there”.

Why else would they need so many powerful (and expensive) telescopes? Or press releases about not trusting your own experience seeing supernatural beings?

After all: the purpose of a system is what it does, and all we have to do is observe these religious entities and how they operate in the world to discover their true purpose.

Another source of spiritual data is my direct, lived experience as a human and a shaman.

I mean, I used to be an atheist until I ran across something that behaved a hell of a lot like the Sumerian Nephilim as described in the cuneiform translations— a member of another, more advanced species that seems to be able to obscure our ability to observe and understand them at will the majority of the time.

As a result of this and many other experiences, I balance my inherent skepticism with a fundamental belief in the possibility of what we would call “supernatural”, defined simply as: “attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature”.

Worded another way, I see what many consider to be “magic” as technology we just don’t understand yet.

So, despite not having all of the answers, I can in good faith encourage all of you to open your minds, trust yourself and your own experiences, and operate on what are called First Principles: a foundational proposition or assumption that stands alone and is not deduced from any other proposition or assumption.

Aristotle, writing on first principles, said:

“In every systematic inquiry (methodos) where there are first principles, or causes, or elements, knowledge and science result from acquiring knowledge of these; for we think we know something just in case we acquire knowledge of the primary causes, the primary first principles, all the way to the elements.”

In other words: operating with a beginner’s mind and assessing the direct data you’re encountering in your everyday life— not the noise coming in from social media, television, media, news and more— is going to be a key success factor this summer.

Common sense, intuition and self-belief are going to be crucial tools in navigating the strange months to come!

Somebody’s coming?

Don't worry. I’m not going full weirdo on you.

I’m not going to start channeling entities on YouTube or whipping everyone up in a doomsday cult scenario. And I’m not turning into one of those Ancient Aliens grifters with criminally bad hair, insisting that literally everything is the result of some circuitous alien-based conspiracy.

But I do think “somebody” might be visiting planet earth very, very soon.

And I think the reality of this emergent phenomena will be much stranger than any fiction we currently roll our eyes at.

Pay attention. Look for the markers, like this press release from the Vatican. And, above all else, trust yourself as you process and navigate the high strangeness to come.

This is the heady stuff we came here to explore and experience.

There is no question more profound than, “Who made the world?”

And, while we may not get a full or comprehensible answer, we could get a glimpse.

And I, for one, am here for it!

-Rachel