The World of T.C.Lethbridge

© Tom Lethbridge 1976 [1]

We have talked about a considerable amount of differing subjects in this study. Much of it probably does not make sense to those who read it. However, it may be less difficult to those who read psychology, although I think that all the evidence is that we are dealing with a Superconscious [2] and not some obscure part of the subconscious mind.

All sorts of nonsense is attributed to this corner of the subconscious mind’s mischievous tricks with ouija boards and such like. But, if a human mind can be shown to exist on a higher level than the mind on earth, is there any reason to suppose that it might not amuse itself at the expense of minds which did not treat it with proper respect? When approached reasonably this unknown factor of mind is most serious and extremely exact. It is the method of approach which is at fault. If you treat a higher version of yourself as if it were an idiot child, what can you expect but ridicule?

It seems to me, although I am not of course really capable of giving an opinion, that this unknown quality of mind is really our own self on the next level of the Spiral of Evolution. It knows far more than we do because (its vibrational level being much higher) it does not have to use a brain to filter out everything, except such parts of its experience as are suitable to life on earth.

It lives in a timeless zone and can consider everything at leisure. It is far more our real self than we are in bodily life. Time being instantaneous to it, it knows the earthly future of its own projected self. Yet, owing to the fact that each whorl of the spiral extends further out than the one beneath, there is bound to be some distortion when its knowledge is transmitted to the whorl below. This is clear when we draw it out in diagrams.

This part of our mentality appears to live forever, yet there are at least two higher whorls on the spiral. The one above our own has no rate for death. Somehow the mind appears to move on from the timeless state and re-enter a world where time passes once more.

There is no need to bother about this here. Obviously we are not meant to do much about it, for we seem to be here to gather information which can be contemplated higher up. But the spiral shows us a great deal which should be comforting to those who worry about what happens to themselves or their friends when they die.

As I have said, the next whorl of the spiral is larger and extends further out than the one on which we live. Nearly all things which we know here are on it also. Blue is blue and gold is gold. But when people’s minds slip up on to the higher level, either by accident or by illness or in sleep, they not infrequently report looking down on their earthly bodies from a height of a few feet above and to one side of them.

The spiral explains this completely. Being on the higher whorl, the viewer is both above and to one side of his body. Until he reaches the second whorl, he is in his body. When he is somehow jerked on to the second whorl, he is then higher up and at one side. This is not strange, it is obvious when once you have found the clue.

Divination with the pendulum is one reasonably exact way of learning things about higher levels of vibrations that is of whorls on the spiral, which are known as planes of living. The pendulum itself is no more than a piece of apparatus. It is not something with a mind of its own, nor magical in any way.

It can be nothing more than a lump of chewing gum on a length of cotton. But the operator’s mind has control over what the pendulum shall do. It can tell it for instance that it will count ten years for every turn the pendulum makes when tuned in to the 30-inch rate for age and held over a given object. Or the mind can tell it to count one year for each turn and it will apparently do so.

This does not mean the whole operation is mental. As I write this my mind is telling my brain so to control my pen that it will write down such words as I wish it to do. But the pen is the necessary inanimate instrument for the writing. So is the pendulum for this form of divination.

With a pendulum you could learn what was happening to a spacecraft on the far side of a planet, as easily as you can find out what is happening to the inside of somebody’s body to whom you are linked in Australia. We have done this, checked it and know that it is quite simple. Why it happens is another matter and it needs much practical, scientific study to find out. [3]

We are still finding ancient beliefs, which appear to be correct. Telepathy exists, as hundreds had affirmed it did, and now we appear to find that the mental side of our being owes something to those blood relations of ours who died long ago. There was some sense in it when the Arabs hung the pedigrees of their horses round their beautiful necks.

It seems probable that far too little attention is given to this kind of thing. After all you do not expect a Suffolk Punch to sire the winner of the Grand National; or a poodle and a fox terrier to produce the winning collie at the sheepdog trials. Such things are known to be absurd. Why should man be an exception to this heredity?

With sheepdogs at any rate it is mental qualities which you are testing at the trials, as anyone must know who has watched these beautiful animals. Many a time, at anchor in a Highland loch, I have watched three or four dogs bring along hundreds of sheep from a whole rugged mountain face, perhaps two thousand feet high or more, and never miss one amid the gullies and boulders.

Don’t tell me that this skill is due to environment. It is the result of careful breeding over hundreds of years. The same must be true of human beings and could be studied without too much difficulty. My wife’s boat skill or my attempts at drawing appear to be direct memories from single individuals and nothing to do with a nebulous subhuman part. I think it must have a direct connection with individual minds on a higher and not a lower level. It is superconscious rather than subconscious.

Hereditary memory is private to you and not available to humanity at large. I do not really believe that anything of this sort can be the subconscious tribal memories postulated by psychologists. It is too individual for that and there is no apparent distinction between different grades of it.

Of course this could be used as an argument in favour of reincarnation. It may be your own memory from a former existence that you are tapping. But it does not look as if this is the right answer, because you can get these memories from more than one ancestor. My drawing appears to come from my father but the love of the Hebrides seems to come from my mother’s people. These attributes could not have come from a single individual ancestor.

All the way through an investigation of this kind, it is the small indications which we must look for. Slowly they will build up into a great whole.

The Buddhists have their Wheel of Life, which is similar to our compass rose of rates; although they do not seem to have got as far as the spiral. But the general idea seems to be much the same. They believe that the mind goes on developing until it is at last absorbed in the whole of Mind (Nirvana). I think much of this must have been guessing, for it seems unlikely that their thinkers could have risen many whorls in the spiral. Still it does not appear to differ to any great extent from what the pendulum is trying to tell us.

As indifferently explained and comparatively misunderstood in the West, the Doctrine of Nirvana does not seem particularly attractive to those with a Christian background. But examined more closely, it seems to make more sense than the celestial concert parties which we were brought up to expect in a future life.

The Buddhist quest for Nirvana was a highly developed idea. Life on earth was thought to be an unpleasant experience; but you had to endure it again and again, not necessarily perhaps on the earth whorl, until you improved your mind to such an extent that it could join up with the greater one. Although this is often translated as oblivion, that seems to be a most unlikely answer. The smaller mind is simply joined to a greater one and an increased sense of perfection and bliss could well result from the union as the Buddhists believe; but individuality remains.

A few people may think that their intelligence is perfect but the great majority know its limits and would welcome additions to it. Whether the Buddhist Nirvana is far higher still is a matter of guessing both for us and for them. However, I can see little at fault in the Buddhist theory as far as we are instructed by the pendulum. It might well be that Christianity would look much the same as Buddhism, if it were stripped of the barnacles of dogma, which have grown on its hull through the ages; but the barnacles have grown so thick that it is hard to see the ship inside.

The Lord Buddha probably never saw the sea and his doctrine, produced far away from it, was bound to be unsatisfactory in some directions. It did not account for the men who moved on what seemed to be a totally alien element. Christian, Moslem and Hebrew all knew the beauty and fear of the ocean. Not so the Buddhist and therefore he was condemned to an almost endless circle of boring lives.

No, there is not enough of the seaman ‘chancing his arm’ in Buddhism. I have quoted elsewhere the fine remark on this subject in the Orkneyinga Saga. When Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, asked his mother whether he should go to Dublin and fight in the war against the native Irish, she replied: ‘I would have raised thee in my wool-chest had I thought that thou shouldst live for ever.’ Sigurd went and did not return. But he won an honoured name in the process and perhaps his mother was consoled with that. My wife once said: ‘I can’t understand people who are always looking for security. Surely the whole point of life is to learn how to deal with insecurity.’

No real artist can ever be secure, for he knows that he can never create a perfect picture. Whatever he does he will see flaws in it. It was for this reason that the Moslems always used to put an error in the weaving of a rug. Allah would not like it to be perfect. Only Allah could make the perfect thing. I like this idea. Many of their ideas are good and their ancient literature shows a sense of humour far in advance of anything in contemporary medieval Europe.

Now the only faith you need in order to get to this stage of thinking is a belief that your observations from your own experiments are reasonably accurate. You do not start with somebody’s statement that God wishes you to do this or that. You collect observed fact, which appears to tell you what I have written now and from these facts you reason. To this extent you are far nearer to the scientific approach.

But the reasoning from what you have observed brings you closer to the faith of the religious people. What is the obvious conclusion that you are likely to draw? Surely it must be that somebody, long ago, worked all this out in a scientific manner and that much religious teaching today is the survival here and there of part of what was once knowledge.

Endnotes

[1] Source: final two chapters (12 & 13 pages 104-110) of the published writings of T.C. Lethbridge; The Power of the Pendulum; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1976, ISBN 1-85063-003-8 published five years after Lethbridge’s death.
[2] 'The human mind possesses an unconscious basement, full of black beetles and vermin, but it also possesses a superconscious attic, which is as much ‘above’ ordinary consciousness as the basement is below it…it is this ‘attic’ which is responsible for paranormal powers like telepathy, second sight and precognition.’ Colin Wilson’s summary of Aldous Huxley’s views in the epilogue to Aleister Crowley (page 163-166). [Ed]
[3] Source (from here): final chapter of The Power of the Pendulum by T.C. Lethbridge.

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1976 [1]

For most of Christendom, since the Dark Ages, God has been thought of and illustrated as an august human father figure with a beard. According to the Bible, God suggested and made man in His own image and so it was reasonable to suppose that God bore some resemblance to the bearded men of the age.

But this is mainly based on a Hebrew view of God. Other races had other ideas and some even applied the term to living men with outstanding qualities. Roman Emperors, for instance, became gods and Herod, before his unfortunate infestation with worms, had been hailed as a god.

It seems probable that many gods of the ancient world had had their origin in living men who had once been famous in their day. Things became even more confusing when we appreciate that the word ‘Devil’ in reality refers to a god of a different faith and is not necessarily evil at all. In fact the ‘div’ or ‘dev’ part of the word means ‘holy’. It is easy to see that this conflict of meanings, when added to that of the difficulty of ‘spirit’, becomes very complicated for laymen and professional religious alike.

When confronted with a tangle of this sort, and especially a tangle whose origins go back into the mists of time, the best thing to do seems to be to cut out all the dead wood. Then we can regard both God and Spirit as something mental. Let us say that God is Mind. We will no longer regard God as a bearded old man. Man is created with a mind in the image of the Great Creator. The beard is of no importance, for this is not mind but body. In fact man is created with a bit of mind, which can think.

There is no reason to suppose that I have got this right, but it may be worth thinking about as we progress in this investigation. Man may be a little bit of mind separated off from the Universal Mind of the Creator of Everything. Of course this does not fit in with the doctrine of chance, but it is really very hard to see how you could get anything at all unless someone started it. Why should there be anything on which chance could operate?

Although I cannot bring myself to believe in the old man with a beard, I find the chance idea still less probable. Even man can create to a moderate extent; why should not a much greater mind create far more extensively? To assume, as many do, that any trivial human mind can know the purpose and intention of a mind which can sprinkle the Universe with numberless stars, seems to me to be little more than gross presumption.

To get any sense out of the idea, it seems necessary to assume the existence of a vast hierarchy of minds in descending order from the Great One at the top to the tiny human specimen beneath. But it might go farther than this, with a spark of mind existing in every living organism.

I hope to show presently that man appears to have the ability of detaching portions of his mind and locating these in the things he makes or uses. In this way perhaps our assumed hierarchy could be formed. It would be thought into existence and each unit would be an image of the Creator; not in bodily appearance, but in the way in which it thought. It is interesting to note that this story of the creation of man in God’s image is not confined to the Bible but is found in much the same form in the pre-Spanish legends of America.

The study of thought is of fundamental importance. With it you seem to be able to create. It is the force with which Mind operates. Enlarge your thinking and you extend your mind. Do not do so, or rely on the products of other people’s thinking, and you are more useless than a slug creeping on the surface of the earth.

For evolution appears to be a command from the Creator of the Universe, though it differs very much from the evolution of the Darwin and Huxley variety. Although I have taken little interest in the theory of reincarnation, yet it seems very probable that those who cannot be bothered to develop their minds will have to return to earth again after death and do the whole business again.

It may be of interest to describe one of my attempts to investigate the old gods. [2] There was a god of the sea, Manannan, to whom the Celts of Britain paid homage. Very little is recorded about him, yet his name remains in Clackmannan in Scotland, which means Manannan’s stone. There are also well-known hobby-horse rituals performed on May Day down the coast of Devon and Cornwall by sea fishermen and it is assumed that the hobby-horses may well be the white horses of the sea, who also belonged to Poseidon. Therefore one might suspect that Poseidon and Manannan are two names for the one god. This happens to most ancient gods. Isis was said to have a thousand names.

Yet who really thinks that there was such an entity as Poseidon? I can’t say that it seems possible today to visualise anyone of the sort. But, if for hundreds of years men concentrated their thoughts on a figure of this kind and wished fervently for its help, what would happen? Each one probably detached something of his mind into the creation of this non-existent figure. Poseidon becomes a mass of detached thoughts and there was a Poseidon.

I think he would not be what we call alive in an earthly sense. But he would be a cloud of force, which some might be able to tap. We surely must not look on the old gods as never having existed. They existed as long as men believed in their existence. The old witches still believe that they can see them if they go through the correct ritual.

It is well recorded that the fishermen of the North of Lewis used to wade into the sea at the beginning of the fishing season and pour a libation of beer to a sea god, who has been named as Shoney. I do not think that this was his name but simply a distortion of the Gaelic for Holy One.

Recently I read a book by Lilian Beckwith called Green Hand. This interested me for it was a careful study of the fishing life of Mallaig and the Western islands. Miss Beckwith included a curious jingle. I felt she must have heard it aboard a fishing boat at a party described in the book. The little rhyme went like this:

Ickle, Ockle, Blue Bockle,
Fishes in the Sea.
If you’re looking for a lover,
Please choose me.

It was the Blue Bockle, which caught my eye. For Bocan is a godling in Gaelic and Bogle is the same in Scots. Blue Bockle is a blue godling and presumably he came from the Outer Hebrides. Then I got down to the whole rhyme. It is a quaint mixture of Scots and Gaelic. I think it can be translated like this:

Little, youthful, blue godling
(Of the) fishes of the sea.
If you’re looking for devotion,
Please choose me.

This appears to be the charm, which the men of Lewis called to Shoney when they poured beer into the sea. For many years I had waited for this clue. The Blue Men of the Minch were gods.

Now the normal Celtic god has three phases (or personalities), young, prime of life, and old. There would be three Blue Men, or just possibly nine, for each phase in turn might be triple. The Blue Bockle was the young one. To the old one (probably called bodach gorm) they sacrificed cattle. Are our coastwise hobby-horses with their emphasis on fertility, the steeds of the god in his prime? I think it is very likely, and we have the whole cycle of the worship of Manannan.

I don’t know if Poseidon was blue, but I seem to remember that he was dark. Even when ashore he was associated with white horses and fertility; while black bulls were thrown into the sea in his honour. It looks very much as if Poseidon and Manannan are synonymous. How would you describe a god of this kind? I think it would be as a cloud of past memories; but it is to some extent animated by the combined minds of those who created it. It can probably be seen and most certainly it can be felt.

A single individual can produce a ghost or ghoul by his thought or memory projected into an electromagnetic field. Many people together in a similar way can project a mass thought or memory and it becomes known as a god or a demon. Both types really belong to the second mental level on which time does not appear to operate and so to earth-living minds they may appear in past or future time. Without some other interference they would never end at all. The gods are immortal.

I have told in Ghost and Ghoul how a gypsy woman once came to my house in Cambridge and asked for a gold coin, which she was convinced that I had. She would not believe there was no such coin in the house. The coin was found many years later in Devon. She had got her dating confused owing to the absence of time on the next level whence she drew her information somehow.

This absence of time on one whorl and its presence on others, is a fundamental matter and until it is understood the errors in dreams and foretelling the future will remain inexplicable. Now, however, that we can begin to get our information collected in diagrammatical form, it should become easier to understand.

No doubt there will be mistakes in my attempts at explanation; but it is open to anybody to write down his dreams and examine them for himself and it is also possible for at least half mankind to experiment with the pendulum. (The idea that few can be dowsers is wrong).

The picture that seems to be forming is not utterly unlike Dunne’s theory of serialism. There appears to be a series of observers (if you can so describe a succession of degrees of mental awareness) but they are not exact counterparts of the original observer. The time succession is quite unlike his, for the second observer finds himself on a mental plane where there is succession but no movement of time. On the third plane, time begins to move once more.

It seems possible that the Roman Catholic idea of Purgatory originated in some knowledge of what appears to happen on the second timeless whorl. The more one looks into these subjects, the clearer it becomes that far back in the past ages men knew much more about them than they do today. One has only to look at the teachings of Jesus, Buddha and the Kahunas to see that this must be so.

It is hard to visualise what happens on the second plane. But perhaps it is not particularly inept to picture each particular incident as a stone thrown into quiet water with ripples spreading out in all directions. There will be an infinite number of these points and the ripples will have no troughs between them.

The earth level time will pass through a particular point in a straight line; whichever way it passes through, it will hit the same successions. However, some will go forward and some backward. If you happen to concentrate on the backward ripples, you will return from sleep with an impression of things moving backwards.

However, if you concentrate on the forward series, you will at first get ordinary memories of events which have already happened in earth time; and then, as the point on the second level does not move, you will receive impressions of things which have not yet happened.

Whether the second-level impressions are more true than those on the earth plane is difficult to decide. A little way back we had a hint that telepathy at any rate operated on this level. If this is right, then telepathic dreams must pass from the second level to the earth plane and so perhaps all do. The impact of the stone on the water may be spread out in earth time so that we can learn more from what we appreciate.

Although this is all most difficult to understand, yet it has to be explained somehow and for the moment I can get no further with it. We must not forget there is a third level above the second on which time moves on again once more. There is even a fourth level above this, where once again moving time appears to exist.

Of course the term ‘level’ is not correct. It would be more exact to speak of whorls of the spiral. Their number may be unlimited, yet we have as yet only found evidence of one (the second) on which time is static. On this one too there is no response to death at 80-inches although there is for black on the same rate.

Therefore the second whorl appears to differ very greatly from the one on which our minds normally appear to function. Although reds, greens and blues are still there and silver is still silver, there is no apparent passing of time and there is no need for you to go to sleep or die on it before moving on to the third.

Of course I am only getting this information from the pendulum; but numerous other experimenters are now beginning to get similar results to mine and at least at one point there appears to be a link with orthodox science.

Endnotes

[1] Source: Chapter 2 (pages 14-17) and Chapter 5 (pages 49-52) in The Power of the Pendulum; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1976, ISBN 1-85063-003-8.
[2] Lethbridge was influenced by the research and theories of his friend Margaret Alice Murray. See Dr. Murray’s The God of the Witches; NuVisions Publications, 2005, ISBN 1-59547-981-3. [Ed]

 

© Stephen Jay Gould 2001 [1]

The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap. Nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.

I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving, concordat between the magisteria of science and religion. This is a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a merely diplomatic solution. But it cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution.

In advocating this argument over many years, I have found that skeptical friends and colleagues do not challenge the logic of the argument - which almost everyone accepts as both intellectually sound and eminently practical in our world of diverse passions - but rather question my claim that most religious and scientific leaders actually do advocate such precepts.

We all recognize, of course, that many folks and movements hold narrow and aggressive partisan positions, usually linked to an active political agenda, and based on exalting one side while bashing the other. Obviously, extremists of the so-called Christian right, particularly the small segment dedicated to imposing creationism on the science curricula of American public schools, represent the most visible subgroup of these partisans.

But I also include, among my own scientific colleagues, some militant atheists whose blinkered concept of religion grasps none of the subtlety or diversity, and equates this entire magisterium with the silly and superstitious beliefs of people who think they have seen a divinely crafted image of the Virgin in the drying patterns of morning dew on the plate-glass windows of some auto show-room in New Jersey.

I believe that we must pursue a primarily political struggle, not an intellectual discourse, with these people. With some exceptions, of course, people who have dedicated the bulk of their energy, and even their life’s definition, to such aggressive advocacy at the extremes do not choose to engage in serious and respectful debate. All people committed to the defense of honorable differences will have to remain vigilant and prevail politically.

Even after we put the extremists aside, however, many people still suppose that major religious and scientific leaders must remain at odds (or at least must interact in considerable tension) because these two incompatible fields inevitably struggle for possession of the same ground.

If I can therefore show that the doctrine of Non-Overlapping Magisteria enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism, then its status as a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria - and not as a funny little off-the-wall suggestion by a few misguided peacemakers on an inevitable battlefield - should emerge into the clearest possible light.

Modern creationism, alas, has provoked a real battle thus supporting the Doctrine of Non-Overlapping Magisteria with a positive example of the principle that all apparent struggles between science and religion really arise from violations of the doctrine, when a small group allied to one magisterium tries to impose its irrelevant and illegitimate will upon the other’s domain. Such genuine historical battles do not pit science against religion, but represent a power play by zealots formally allied to one side, and trying to impose their minority views upon the magisterium of the other side.

The saga of attempts by creationists to ban the teaching of evolution, or to force their own fundamentalist version of life’s history into science curricula of public schools, represents one of the most interesting, distinctive, and persistent episodes in the cultural history of twentieth-century America. I have no problem with the largest and most potentially influential of all creationist groups in America, the Jehovah’s Witnesses - for they do not try to impose their theological beliefs upon public school science curricula, and they agree with my view that churches and homes are the proper venue for teaching such private and partisan doctrines.

Our struggle with creationism is political and specific, not religious at all, and not even intellectual in any genuine sense. Young-earth Creationism offers nothing of intellectual merit but just a hodgepodge of claims properly judged within the magisterium of science. The forceful and persistent attempt by Young-earth Creationists to insinuate their partisan and minority theological dogma into the science curricula of American public schools cannot be read, in any legitimate way, as an episode in any supposedly general warfare between science and religion.

In the early 1920s, several Southern states passed flat-out anti-evolution statutes. The Tennessee law, for example, declared it a crime to teach that ‘man had descended from a lower order of animals.’ In a challenge to the constitutionality of these statutes, the American Civil Liberties Union instigated the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925. William Jennings Bryan decided to make his last stand on this issue thereby giving the creationist movement both influence and contacts. [2]

John Scopes was a young free-thinker, who was quite popular among his fundamentalist students and worked as the physics teacher and track coach of the local high school. He had substituted for the fundamentalist biology teacher during an illness and had assigned the chapters on evolution from the class textbook, A Civic Biology, by George William Hunter. Scopes consented to be the stalking horse for a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the Tennessee anti-evolution law.

The rest is history, as filtered and distorted for most Americans, through the fictionalized account in a wonderful play, Inherit the Wind, written in 1955 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. Two film versions featured Spencer Tracy playing Clarence Darrow and Fredric Marsh as William Jennings Bryan in the first, and Kirk Douglas as Darrow and Jason Robards as Bryan in the later remake for television.

In the 1980s the creationists regrouped, and came back fighting with a new strategy designed to circumvent constitutional problems. They had always honorably identified their alternative system as explicitly theological, and doctrinally based in a literal reading of the Bible. But now they expurgated their texts, inventing the oxymoronic concept of ‘creation science’. Religion, it seems, and contrary to all previous pronouncements, has no bearing upon the subject at all. The latest discoveries of pure science now reveal a factual world that just happens to correlate perfectly with the literal pronouncements of the Book of Genesis.

In such a circumstance, legislative intervention becomes unnecessary. And besides, the creationists continued, we’re not asking schools to ban evolution anymore. Now we are only demanding ‘equal time’ for ‘creation science’ in any classroom that also teaches evolution. Of course, if they decide not to teach evolution at all…well…then…

A few years ago, I came across a theological term that tickled my fancy, both for its touch of the arcane, and its mellifluous ring - irenics (from the Greek word for ‘peace’), defined in opposition to polemics, as a branch of Christian theology that ‘presents points of agreement among Christians with a view to the ultimate unity of Christianity’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

By extension (and the word has crept out of theological circles and into general English usage), irenic people and proposals ‘tend to promote peace, especially in relation to theological and ecclesiastical differences.’ Now I’m an irenic fellow at heart - and I trust that most of us so regard ourselves, whatever personal quirks and foibles stand in the way of realization.

I believe in an irenic solution under a large umbrella extending far beyond the purely Christian realm of official definitions cited above. I join nearly all people of goodwill in wishing to see two old and cherished institutions, our two rocks of ages - science and religion - coexisting in peace while each works to make a distinctive patch for the integrated coat of many colors that will celebrate the distinctions of our lives, yet cloak human nakedness in a seamless covering called wisdom.

Irenics sure beats the polemics of ill-conceived battle between science and religion - a thoroughly false model that too often continues to envelop us for illogical reasons of history and psychology. I do get discouraged when some of my colleagues tout their private atheism (their right, of course, and in many ways my own suspicion as well) as a panacea for human progress against an absurd caricature of ‘religion’, erected as a straw man for rhetorical purposes.

Religion just can’t be equated with Genesis literalism, the miracle of the liquefying blood of Saint Januarius (which at least provides an excuse for the wonderful and annual San Gennaro Festival on the streets of New York), or the Bible codes of kabbalah and modern media hype.

If these colleagues wish to fight superstition, irrationalism, philistinism, ignorance, dogma, and a host of other insults to the human intellect (often politically converted into dangerous tools of murder and oppression as well), then God bless them - but don’t call this enemy ‘religion’.

Similarly, of course, I pronounce my anathema upon those dogmatists and ‘true believers’ who, usurping the good name of religion for their partisan doctrines, try to suppress the uncomfortable truths of science, or to impose their peculiar brand of moral fiber upon people with legitimately different tastes. In the past, religion set the outlines that everyone had to accept, and science then had to conform. Irenics in this older mode required that the principles and findings of science yield religious results known in advance to be true. Indeed such conformity represented the primary test of science’s power and validity.

The Reverend Thomas Burnet (1635-1715), [3] a close friend and colleague of Isaac Newton, did not doubt that the biblical narrative recorded the earth’s actual history; his scientific job, by his lights, required validation of this known history in terms of causation by invariant natural laws rather than miracles.

But the spectacular growth and success of science has turned the tables for modern versions of syncretism. Now the conclusions of science must be accepted a priori, and religious interpretations must be finessed and adjusted to match unimpeachable results from the magesterium of natural knowledge! The Big Bang happened, and we must now find God at this tumultuous origin.

I also feel particularly sensitive about this issue because, as I wrote this book in the summer of 1998, a deluge of media hype enveloped the syncretist position, as though some startlingly new and persuasive argument had been formulated, or some equally exciting and transforming discovery had been made.

In fact, absolutely nothing of intellectual novelty had been added, as the same bad arguments surfaced into a glare of publicity because the J.M. Templeton Foundation, established by its fabulously wealthy eponym to advance the syncretist program under the guise of more general and catholic (small c) discussion about science and religion, garnered a splash of media attention by spending 1.4 million bucks to hold a conference in Berkeley on ‘Science and the spiritual quest'.

In a genuine example of true creation ex nihilo - that is, the invention of an issue by fiat of media reports, rather than by force of argument or content of material - at least three major sources preached the syncretist gospel in their headlines and vapidly uncritical reports: ‘Faith and reason, Together Again' (The Wall Street Journal, June 12); ‘Science and religion: bridging the Great Divide’ (The New York Times, June 30); and a cover story in Newsweek, 'Science Finds God’. Scientists could only be mystified by this last claim, but at least we can now be certain about one of God’s attributes: he sells newspapers and magazines.

The Times article admitted the intellectual torpor of the proceedings: ‘A kind of Sunday school politeness pervaded the meeting, with none of the impassioned confrontations expected from such an emotionally charged subject…The audience politely applauded after each presentation. But there was little sense of intellectual excitement.’

But from whence could such excitement arise in principle? If the Doctrine of Non-Overlapping Magisteria holds, then facts and explanations developed under the magesterium of science cannot validate (or deny) the precepts of religion. Indeed, if we look at the so-called arguments for syncretism, as described in these reports, they all devolve into a series of fuzzy statements awash in metaphor and illogic.

Darwin has been read as something of a moral dolt, or at least as a slacker on the subject, for his frequent disclaimers about drawing lessons for the meaning of human life from his revolutionary reorganization of biological knowledge. Shouldn’t such a radical reinterpretation of nature offer us some guidance for the biggest questions of the ages: Why are we here, and what does it all mean?

How could anyone look so deeply into the heart of biological causality and the history of life, and then offer us so little on the meaning of life and the ultimate order of things. To which Darwin responded: ‘I feel deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.’

Was Darwin just a coward? A desiccated intellect? A small-minded man? The very stereotype of a scientist who can describe a tree and ignore the forest, or analyze the notes and not hear the symphony?

I view Darwin in an entirely opposite manner. He maintained, throughout his life, a basic human fascination for the great questions of morals and meanings, and he recognized the transcendent importance of such inquiry. But he knew both the strengths and the limitations of his chosen profession, and he understood that the power of science could only be advanced and consolidated on the fertile ground of its own magesterium. In short, Darwin rooted his views about science and morality in the principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria.

Darwin did not use evolution to promote atheism, or to maintain that no concept of God could ever be squared with the structure of nature. Rather, he argued that nature’s factuality, as read within the magesterium of science, could not resolve, or even specify, the existence or character of God, the ultimate meaning of life, the proper foundations of morality, or any other question within the different magesterium of religion.

Endnotes

[1] Source: Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life by Stephen Jay Gould (Jonathan Cape, 2001, ISBN 0-224-06092-9).
[2] See The Last Stand of William Jennings Bryan by William Shepherd.
[3] Burnet wrote one of the most influential books of the late seventeenth century - Telluris theoria sacra, or The Sacred Theory of the Earth, a work in four sections: (1) on the deluge of Noah; (2) on the preceding paradise; (3) on the forthcoming ‘burning of the world’; and (4) ‘concerning the new heavens and new earth’, or paradise regained after the conflagration. This book not only became a ‘bestseller’ in its own generation, but gained lasting fame as a primary inspiration for Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nuova or New Science (1725) and George Buffon’s Histoire naturelle or Natural History (1749). [Ed]

© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

I have asked a lot of difficult questions already, but this one is more likely to land me in a pickle than most. All through history there have been occasional great teachers, often now spoken of by the Hindu term, ‘avatar’, whose births seem to have been inexplicable and teachings far higher than those of the surrounding populace. Did these avatars come down from higher levels of deliberate purpose to try to help people living on a lower level of vibration?

There appear to have been female avatars as well as male; although they are not often mentioned nowadays. Aradia, the avatar of the religion now known as witchcraft, was supposedly born of the goddess, Diana, and taught her disciples both how to handle the bio-electric power and the freedom of the individual, in a manner strongly reminiscent of the great male teachers.

The only candidate that I know of from America was Quetzalcoatl, also a character of mysterious origin. It is interesting, too, that, though he did not apparently claim that rank, Jesus did not deny that he was a son of God. He seemed rather to imply that all or many men were this, although they did not know it. At the same time he insisted that he was the son of Man. Presumably here once again we are up against the old difficulty of the real meaning of words.

The paternity of all avatars is mysterious. This of course may be an idea of the priestly caste to add glamour to the founder of their religion. Even Buddha, although claimed by the orthodox to have come from a respectably princely family, is said to have been fathered by an elephant. By this one supposes that the elephant-headed god, Ganesa, is implied. However to go into the maze of Indian mythology would be more trouble than it is worth. It is more incomprehensible to the western mind than that of ancient Greece or Rome.

The point to remember about three of the avatars at any rate is that they were able to instruct their followers not only with a general code of behaviour but how to control the power of living electricity, which is apparently what ESP is. The Buddhists took this teaching to much greater lengths than anybody in the west. The Christians largely either failed to grasp it or forgot it. The witches knew a lot about it and even bred people deliberately to increase their so-called psychic powers.

The importance of this in our particular enquiry lies in the fact that anyone living on a level of what we might perhaps call ‘higher potential’ would have to lower his voltage in some way before being able to cope with earthly surroundings at all. He would also have to register. That means that somehow he had to make allowances for the distortion due to the position of things on the two, or perhaps more, different whorls of the spiral.

It is here then I can see a possible error happening nearly two thousand years ago. In the Biblical story of the terrible future calamity in which the sun would be ‘turned into darkness and the moon into blood’, had there been a mistake in which ring in the sequence on the timeless level had been taken? Was Jesus really talking about something which had already happened?

If it has been recorded correctly, Jesus evidently thought that it would happen in the lifetime of some of his companions. Some of them may well still have been living at the time of Titus’ siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, but, although this was a revolting siege according to Josephus, it was nothing to compare with the events which Jesus apparently foresaw.

I am well aware that many far more clever men than myself must have spent many hours thinking about this discrepancy and my suggestion may be offending a lot of people. Yet one must tell the truth as far as one sees it. In this particular matter there was an error, either in foretelling the future or in the recording of what was said.

The great trouble, which looks like the description of an atomic war, had either happened long before or was not going to happen for perhaps two thousand years. At least this theory appears to be the explanation of all the conflicting statements in the Gospels. It surely explains too all the difficulties, heresies, schisms and the like which follow all attempts to make a coherent picture of an imaginary interpretation.

If the avatar were omnipotent, then surely everyone would believe in him at once and the whole world would become a good and kindly place. Instead of that, rival variations of beliefs pursued one another through the ages with fire and sword. Jesus realized this and said it would happen: ‘I came not to send peace on earth but with a sword.’

To return to the problem of UFOs. They may be either contemporary visitors from some unknown planet or they may be the work of people, spoken of today as dead, living in a timeless zone above that of our own earth. The first supposition would have seemed utterly impossible before the days of H.G. Wells, but is today quite a commonplace idea. It may be difficult to guess what planet they might be coming from but no longer utterly improbable. Even with our primitive modern rockets, it is possible to see that the problems of long space travel might be overcome by any fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, discovery in a comparatively few years.

The second idea would still seem fantastic to very many people who are still wedded to the concept of only one stage of living and that confined to the surface of a single earth. An earth with onion skins of different levels of existence cannot easily be grasped by people with a materialistic or rationalistic upbringing. Yet this idea would not seem particularly strange to advanced Buddhist or Hindu thinkers. The Buddhists with their ‘wheel of life’ are very near it but have not apparently as yet seen that the wheel is a double spiral. [2]

There are pointers to the occurrence of the second type of happening in the Bible itself, but since the witnesses who observed the incident clearly did not understand what appears to have been taking place, the orthodox interpretation is not particularly convincing nowadays. You can appreciate that much of the reporting in the Bible is true without believing a word of the dogma, which has been built up upon it through the ages. That is one of the difficulties today. Because of the incredibility of the dogma, people tend to throw away the baby with the bath water.

The two incidents which we must look at both concern ascents into heaven. The first is that of Elijah and is simply a traditional story somewhat dramatized by whoever wrote it down. The second is the Ascension itself and apparently a far more accurate account. But there is great similarity between the two stories. Not only that, but they are also very much like the dematerializations which are reported by Hindu and Buddhist sages to this day.

The Ascension is by far the most important and is entirely distinct from the vexed question of what really happened at the Crucifixion. At the Ascension a living man actually vanished in the sight of a large number of people. It is very hard to dismiss this as an account of a conjuring trick because it made such a great impression on those who saw it that it has not been forgotten for nearly two thousand years. Conjuring tricks are a commonplace in the Eastern world and had it been one, no such impression would have survived. The incident carried complete conviction. [3]

Having said this much, let us see what the Gospels appear to relate. I have taken the two following accounts from J.B. Phillips’ recent translations of the Gospels, but they are little different from the wording of the James I version:

'Then He led them outside as far as Bethany, where He blessed them with uplifted hands. While He was in the act of blessing them He parted from them and was carried up to Heaven.’ (St Luke)

'When He had said these words He was lifted up before their eyes till a cloud hid Him from their sight.’ (St John)

It is clear, I think, that the witnesses did not understand what had happened and the words ‘carried up to Heaven’ and ‘a cloud hid Him from their sight’ were added to the straightforward report in explanation of an apparently impossible event.

However, if we remember the numerous reports of ‘out of body’ experiences and the evidence of the spiral, it is possible to see what had happened. Jesus, a master of bio-electronic power, had simply accelerated his vibrations and moved up on the next whorl of the spiral. There, as we have already observed, he would be invisible to the watchers. There are numerous modern Hindu accounts of this feat being performed by their learned men and also of their subsequent return.

The whole Ascension story in the Gospels is claimed as the promise of human survival of death and, as far as one can judge, indeed it is, but hardly of the type of survival which is generally imagined. This is in itself a glorified picture of what was believed to be the most happy situation two thousand years ago. The harps and the songs and all the rest of it are a reflection of that bygone age, when a feast was the height of enjoyment.

The Elijah story may well have once been similar. In fact some Hindu experts believe Jesus to have been a reincarnation not of Elijah but of his disciple Elisha, who was promised a double portion of Elijah’s spirit if he could see him carried into heaven.

The point about Elijah’s aerial exploit is that it has been quoted in various works as evidence for the former existence of flying saucers. What actually does the Bible say?

'Elijah said unto Elisha, Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee. And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me. And he said, Thou has asked a hard thing: nevertheless, if thou see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee, but if not, it shall not be so. And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more.’ Authorized Version. 2 Kings, 2, verses 9-11

This dramatic story had probably been handed down by word of mouth for a long time before it was put into writing. The vehicle, if there was one, was indescribable and so spoken of as a chariot. A chariot had to have horses and they were added, quite reasonably. But nobody emerged from the chariot; although Elijah apparently knew it was coming. When it came he vanished in a whirlwind.

One can see how this story fits in well with modern accounts of flying saucers; but we are left with a doubt whether anything more than a dust-devil, or willy-waw, was ever seen. Elijah, an accomplished practitioner of ESP (or shall we call it magic?) simply vanished. How he went nobody, probably not even Elisha, ever knew.

I don’t know how it strikes others, but I personally suspect that Elisha had to say he had seen the chariot to explain his subsequent magic powers. One wonders too whether the scribe who wrote the story down was familiar with the Greek beliefs in which Gods flew about the heavens in chariots drawn by horses.

Whatever may have been the truth of Elijah’s disappearance, a feeling remains that it may have been very like the Ascension. Unfortunately there was only a single witness and there is quite a possibility either that he may have been biased in his subsequent account, or that the author of the second book of Kings was somewhat carried away by the drama of the incident. On the whole it does not seem possible to use this story as an argument in favour of the former existence of flying saucers.

When we turn to the problem of how anyone could possibly pass from one level of vibration to one of perhaps four times faster rate, we are humbugged by a lack of general knowledge. It is a problem well ahead of science at its present stage.

We do know that a living scientist today is not the solid object he appears to be, but is really almost entirely empty space, a series of holes joined together by French knitting. In fact he may only be there at all because somebody else thinks of him. In any case you could have dozens of different scientists fitted into the holes in the first one.

People used to think that they knew all about matter; but today they do at least realize that they hardly know anything at all. Matter may be energy, still what is that? Energy may be vibrations. What are they?

All that is really known is that if you do certain things, certain results will follow and the range of action in which the foreseeable results are known is very limited. It has not even begun to dawn on the scientific world that, by changing the rate of vibration, you might land bang in another scientific world much more advanced than your own.

As I said at the beginning, I am only putting up questions to most of which there is no known answer. I do not believe in the answers I have put forward, except to a very limited degree. For instance I do think that I have got the right method by which the bluestones were transported to Stonehenge. But I hope that it will provoke enough interest for others to try to solve some of the problems which are too difficult for me to answer.

In any case this is all imagination and we do not really know what unidentified flying objects may be: ghosts, hallucinations, time machines or honest to God visitors from another planet. Whatever they might be, they offer us an interesting subject for talk and speculation and the answer may come sooner than anyone expects.

I shall finish now. Many people will think it is all rubbish. Others will see some sense in it, even if I have produced no hard and fast theory. At least I hope I have given a few something to turn over in their minds, to see whether they can produce anything more satisfactory than I have been able to.

Endnotes

[i] Source: The Legend of the Sons of God (1972) by Tom Lethbridge included as Chapter 11 in The Essential T.C.Lethbridge edited by Tom Graves & Janet Hoult; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, ISBN 0 586 05077 9.
[ii] In fact, as Jesus so rightly said, you have to ‘become again as little children’ and reorientate all your ideas from the start. This, thanks largely to the inventiveness of television script writers, children of today appear to be quite ready to do. It means little to them that people should jump about in time and place. I have quite a number of letters from teenagers who obviously have a good idea of the possibilities, although they tell me that their views are ridiculed by their elders.
[iii] I may seem unduly credulous here, but one must remember that very little history is in any way exact. As recently as the great battle of Jutland, when I was still at school, there was only one case of exact reporting. A boy seaman in a destroyer was made to write in the log the time and the exact bearing of every incident which took place. As a reward for this devotion to duty, the boy was taken ashore afterwards and given the best meal his heart desired at the expense of the destroyer’s first lieutenant. The lieutenant himself, the only man in the whole British fleet who realized the importance of a record, received no commendation at all, although he eventually retired from the Navy as a captain.

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

The problem of the stone circles and alignments is really one proper to the old world although others are known, particularly in Peru. The new world has others of its own. For instance, what are we to make of the remarkable animal mounds found in considerable numbers to the south and west of the Great Lakes? The Indians have no idea who made them and there seems to be little archaeological evidence for their date.

The largest of these appears to be the Great Serpent Mound of Adams County, Ohio. The mound is five feet high on a thirty foot base and if straightened out would be more than a thousand feet, say three hundred metres, long. The work necessary to produce a mound of this size is great and what possible purpose was it intended to serve?

Seen from the ground it is nothing but a bank. Only from above is its serpentine form obvious. It is the same with the tortoise, alligator, eagle, lizard, elk, bear, otter, wolf and frog mounds, while some apparently represent human beings.

When once the possibility of the stone circles and alignments of the old world having been used as beacons for aerial navigation has entered one’s mind, the same possibility can be appreciated with regard to the animal mounds of the United States. However, in their case the beacons would only be visual ones, unless there was some method of charging them with bio-electronic force. This is not so impossible as most people would think today.

Now I bring in a new puzzle, even if I seem to be involving the reader in the imagination of space travel. As before, I do not know the answer, but it is evident to me that an answer could be found and should be sought, even if the seeker may be greeted with ridicule by those who have not the imagination to look for it. Of course I refer to the huge and growing mass of statements, often by highly competent eye-witnesses, that strange flying objects are frequently seen in the sky. These are known widely now as UFOs, unidentified flying objects.

Now people may exaggerate and they may mistake what they think they see. I have seen photographs in the papers, which look as if they had been the shades of Tilley lamps and I have read accounts which were obviously distortions of the real facts. However there is a large residuum, which clearly needs an explanation. People as a whole report truly what they have seen to the best of their ability.

A recent announcement on the BBC News makes it obvious that something needs investigation. As far as I can now remember the radio said that the American Air Force was closing down a department formed to investigate reports on UFOs. They had examined thousands of reports of sightings and there were only about seven hundred which they could not explain.

Good heavens, could any official department expect to get away with that? Seven hundred unexplained cases of what might be visitors from another planet, and it was not worth the trouble and expense of trying to find out what they were! Suppose you had many reports that there were thousands of spies in your country and of these only seven hundred could not be shown to be innocent, what would you think of a government which gave up vetting them?

If correctly reported, this must surely be one of the most naïve announcements in history! I don’t know whether UFOs exist or not; but I do think that it is most important to find out whether they do. However, before talking more about these UFOs, let me return for a moment to the reports of wheels in the sky.

There may be nothing more in it than coincidence. Someone, being unable to describe it in any other manner, may call a revolving object a wheel; but it is at least curious that symbols described by archaeologists as ‘sun discs’ are by no means rarely found carved on stones of the megalithic and early Bronze Ages in western Europe. Sometimes they are simply a ring; again they may be a ring with a dot in the centre and, more curiously, a ring with a cross carved on it.

A sequence of these carvings, not infrequently found together with symbols for ships, is published from Brittany to Ireland and from there to the celebrated Swedish rock engravings. A case has been made out for the existence of a complete sequence of ship and sun disc symbols from Scandinavia to ancient Egypt. Frequently they are so crudely executed that without a knowledge of more perfect examples it would be impossible to interpret the pictures. But with a sequence available there can be little doubt what was intended by the carvers.

In the most celebrated burial cairn of New Grange on the Boyne in Ireland there is one of these symbols in the central chamber. No one would probably have been able to identify it without a knowledge of the Swedish and Breton engravings; but with this knowledge the intention is clear. Are these discs meant to represent the sun at all; or was the idea to picture the vehicles in which the gods were transported through the heavens?

For many years I have just taken it for granted that when the older generation of archaeologists talked of these things as ‘sun discs’, they knew what they were talking about. Now, as with so many other current dogmas, I am not so sure that they did.

Even if the ancient Egyptian symbol did come to represent the Sun God, Ra, and the boat in which he daily crossed the heavens, is this what was originally intended? Was not Ra himself one of the sons of God, venerated in later years as the great God himself?

Of course it would be much less trouble to leave it all unquestioned; to go on as if nothing had happened and nobody had ever reported seeing wheels in the sky, or photographed objects up there which could not be explained in terms of present day knowledge. But, if we have any real curiosity in our make-up, we cannot just shrug it off.

What we can say at this stage is that at the approximate time when men all over the old world were apparently beginning to venerate a multitude of aerial gods, they were also suggesting that they moved about the heavens in boats and things with or like wheels.

Through the ages these gods took on varying characteristics, but this was doubtless due to frequent repetition and downright invention by priestly castes, whose job it was to keep the beliefs in being.

All this too was imposed apparently upon a set of earlier beliefs in which men had a tribal totem in the form of some animal. The combination of the totem animal with gods in human form who flew about in the heavens produced some very curious creatures indeed.

Although I am not qualified to do so and have no real personal experience of the matter at all, I must try to make some estimate of how the problem of the UFOs strike me as an ordinary member of the populace.

I look on it with a completely open mind. I neither believe nor disbelieve. My object in writing this book is just this, to stimulate people to think, observe and experiment for themselves and not just swallow the sayings of the authorities of the time as if these were the Word of God.

However I do have one article of faith and that is that a witness should be believed until he can be shown to be either lying or mistaken. The answer so often returned to a report on the supposed sightings of a UFO, that it was the planet Venus, has added to the general popular disbelief in the announcements of specialists. Next to the sun and moon, Venus has always been the most well-known object in the night sky. One of the first questions asked by children when shown the darkened heavens is: “What is that bright star?”

When, in addition, the supposed specialists have on occasion claimed this well-known object to have been the cause of a report and it has been shown that the planet was not above the horizon at the time, one’s doubts of the specialists’ qualifications rise considerably.

In fact the frequent mention of Venus and the recent statement from America that there are about seven hundred reports which they have not been able to explain, convinces me that there is a case to answer. Either there is something to hide, or the authorities are completely stupid; one remembers Bernard Shaw putting into the mouth of a foreign politician: ‘For God’s sake don’t frighten the British.’ Now it should be changed to the ‘Americans’.

For obviously if there are people capable of flying here frequently in large machines from outer space, they would also be advanced enough to flatten America, Russia, China and the whole caboodle had they wished to do so.

The reports on the size of these objects vary very much, but all agree that they are often much larger than the present day aeroplane and that they travel at much greater speed. They can also change their course at right angles to the line of flight which no earthly plane can attempt to do.

Accounts of the lighting of these machines vary considerably. They may appear as silvery discs in daylight or glow with different colours at night. They may also, when seen fairly close at hand, appear to have a ring of windows or ports which emit bright light.

There are a fair number of reports that these machines have been observed to land and also that humanoid figures have been seen to emerge from them. It is doubtful whether any of these reports can be taken at their face value. However it seems possible that some of them may be true.

I rather discount the accounts that observers have talked to persons emerging from these things and messages on the soles of shoes seem most improbable. If any conversations have taken place, which I doubt, they have not been recorded in such a way to carry conviction.

If visitors from elsewhere wished to make contact with people on earth, it does not seem probable that they would do so in American deserts or waste places in Scotland. Since they apparently can operate the machines at far greater speed than any earthly aeroplane, it would be reasonably safe for them to land openly on some civil airfield.

But they have been chased, so the reports go, and apparently attacked, with dire results to the attacker. There seems to be little doubt that these things have been picked up on radar screens and that warplanes have been sent up in pursuit; but whether this has only happened in America is not disclosed.

The term ‘flying saucer’ is not so inaccurate as anyone might suspect. A fair number of photographs appear to show large objects in the sky, not unlike a saucer with a rim facing downwards, but on what should be the base of the saucer there appears to be a small tower and something like a short mast. Seen from below these objects appear as discs and so we come to the description of ‘wheels in the sky’.

There are many reports of these things flying in formation and in quite considerable numbers. By that I mean you might observe eight or ten at a time. There are also reports of giant cylindrical mother ships on which the saucers home and into which they return. As far as I know there are no reports of such things from Britain, although there are several from France. More than one saucer is also not common in this country.

Of course all this rigmarole seems very improbable to many people and quite incomprehensible until this century. But students of the subject have noted that it is nothing new and that there are accounts at various stages of history, which could well be taken to refer to the same type of object.

Pride in the achievements of modern aeronautics and conceit in the intelligence of people on earth make it hard for most to look at all this objectively. For so long a time has humanity been taught that it is the highest product of nature that it is difficult for it now to believe that some other organism somewhere else might be more advanced. But this is not improbable at all. In fact it is more probable than not.

There are a few other significant points. For instance, it is not uncommon for it to be reported that the passing over of a saucer stops the magneto of a car, which in itself suggests some very powerful electronic device in operation.

Then some observers, including policemen in South Wales, have apparently observed a succession of saucers diving into the sea. They were well scolded for their pains!

Other policemen on night patrol in Devon have chased apparent UFOs in fast cars and been told that they were observing planes refuelling in the air. I am sure they did not believe this explanation. Policemen have to be good observers.

There are accounts, too, of filaments of unknown substance falling from these machines and known as ‘angel’s tears’. No one appears to have been able to collect and examine any samples. However ‘angel’s tears’ was the name given by German children to the fine silvery ribbons dropped by our planes during the war to deflect the German radar. I have seen plenty of these ‘angel’s tears’, but do not know of what metal they were composed.

This is a very brief summary of what appears to be known about a very curious subject. There are a host of books available from which the reader can attempt to form his own ideas. However, I think that it must be a very dull-witted person who does not want to know the answer. Is a very large proportion of humanity suffering from delusions or are we really having visitors from outer space? If the second is the right answer, what are they coming for?

The Russians are a hard-headed and incredulous breed, but years ago they let it out that they believed they had found evidence that there had been visitors from outer space. Of course they have also announced that some of their scientists had chased what we should call a Loch Ness Monster in a motor boat. This is another subject which is anathema to our orthodox zoologists.

Nether account may be true. We have no means of checking them. But here is a curious point; if either the Russians or the Americans had any doubt that the things were coming from elsewhere, one would surely have accused the other of infringing their air space. Both must have been having the same kind of visitors, or hallucinations, and they know it.

It is interesting too that both countries are working hard to find out the facts of extra-sensory perception or bio-electronics. They both hope to be able to talk by telepathy to people in rockets on the further side of planets which cannot be reached by radar. In our investigation then we appear to be chasing something which is cloaked in layer upon layer of official secrecy.

However, there is another school of thought with a far more original idea. This school believes that the visitors do not belong to our time at all; but are people living in the future who will have invented machines which are capable of coming back down the ages to see what was going on at a given time. We will now see whether we can conceive any possibility that this might be true.

However we must note that, in the event of it being correct, there is clearly no possibility that people in flying saucers could ever have been thought of as the sons of God or have fathered children on the daughters of men. They could only have been something resembling ghosts to the people in whose ages they appeared, for they would be on a different level of vibration, with no bodily functions comparable to the people they went to investigate. At least this is how the situation would appear to me with my very limited knowledge.

However if we remember what the pendulum has told us of future time and the second level of existence or vibration, there is much to be said in favour of this explanation of the appearance of flying saucers. Interest in the past is very widespread today and appears to be growing. It would be completely fascinating to be able to go back and see exactly what really went on in bygone ages. [2]

The ways that saucers are reported as remaining stationary in the sky for hours at a time is what you would expect if a party was examining a particular place at a particular period of time. The casual way in which only some people see them, while others do not, suggests that they may not be visible to anybody who does not have a high vibrational rate himself. In fact they are future ghosts if this explanation is correct.

We need not boggle at the word ghost. A ghost is something out of its normal earthly time sequence. All recorded television pictures are ghosts. They appear absolutely real on your television screen, but they are not there at all. Neither would this hypothetical type of unknown flying object be real in the sense that your breakfast is real. It would be something completely upsetting to what is called our ‘space time continuum’. But many upsetting things are always happening nowadays, so why not this.

This moving between two levels of existence, however, does not seem to demand any vehicle of transport. Our lady magician, who claimed to visit us in the night, also stated that she often talked with people living on the higher level. I asked her one day whether she could find out from her friends what flying saucers were. A few days later she returned with the answer: ‘They told me that they were made by the back-room boys. I asked them why and they said it was the kind of thing the back-room boys liked to do.’

I have no idea what degree of reliance to put on this statement. But if, by any chance, the saucers were the mechanical toys of experimenters on another level, it would explain why only certain people see them. There is no reason to suppose that men’s mentality would change after reaching the next level. Since everything else, but time, appears to be there, people with a mechanical bent might well experiment in many ways, and only those with a certain degree of psychic ability on this earth level would be able to see the results.

In one way this theory ought to be a considerable encouragement to the numerous people who work themselves into a fret through expectation of the destruction of humanity in an atomic war. If people are coming back from the future to look at us, there can have been no universal destruction before their time.

Still, once again this is not necessarily correct. The visitors need not be coming from the earth plane future. They may be people living on the second plane itself and be what is in earth terms described as dead. Of course if you have a rigid belief that life is confined to one short phase on earth, there is no point thinking about this possibility at all. But this is only a dogma and really the antithesis of any scientific outlook.

You do not know the answer and your belief is on a par with that of the moon being made of blue cheese. It is known that the composition of the moon is rock and not cheese, while such evidence as there is appears to point to the conclusion that life continues to infinity.

If it does, and people continue to live on a higher vibrational level on the next whorl and even on others above that, then presumably they might at times use the intelligences they had brought with them to study the past of the level which they had left.

They are not in the time sequence and not in the earth body, but it might be easier for them to lower their vibrations and even get out of their machines than people from the earth level itself. Have they ever done this? If they did, could they have had real personal contact with the earth humans they met on their trips?

Endnotes

[1] Source: The Legend of the Sons of God (1972) by Tom Lethbridge included in chapters 9 & 10 in The Essential T.C.Lethbridge edited by Tom Graves & Janet Hoult; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, ISBN 0 586 05077 9.
[2] Should the construction of such machines become possible, they might well become subject to commercialism. You could hire a seat in a saucer to watch the building of a pyramid or the Battle of Marathon. hey would be of the greatest value in the study of geology and for estimating the probable changes in climate or sea-level. In fact they would be of considerable importance in many ways.

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

I had been interested in the problem of who were ‘the sons of God’ for many years and had sought enlightenment from archaeologists, anthropologists and theologians at Cambridge and elsewhere without getting the slightest satisfaction. Nobody knew the answer.

If my ideas had any sense in them, nobody could have known the answer before the present generation, for travel to other planets was unthinkable. Since this has now changed, it is obviously time that people did begin to think about these matters which clearly affect the whole meaning of life on earth. Is there more than one species of Man and is he found on many different planets?

I could not be expected to know the answer, of course, but it is worth throwing a stone into the pool to see what then moves in it. My wife, who is my great helper and best critic as well as carrying the burden of typing it all, seems to think I am not crazy in formulating these ideas and so I will throw the stone and hope for the best.

Let me quote three verses from the sixth chapter of Genesis and see whether anything we have heard of really provides an answer:

'And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives all which they chose.’

That was verses 1 and 2. Then follows verse 3 which seems to have no connection with the first two; and after that verse 4 takes up the story again:

‘There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’

Now how does this piece of legend fit in with any known ‘ism’? It is not totemism, anthropomorphism or anything of that kind. It is a definite statement of fact that a race known as the sons of God intermarried with another known as the daughters of men. But who were the sons of God? This problem has puzzled me for years and I have met no one who can supply an answer.

There is the same kind of thing in Greek mythology where one race is apparently described as Gods. They have unions with mortal women and produce heroes. One finds it, too, in the northern lands. Many of our early Anglo-Saxon kings claimed to be descended from Woden, the same Odin of the Norsemen, who was the equivalent of the Greek Zeus, the chief of the gods.

Let us forget such terms as polytheism and see whether there is any other explanation which might fit this seemingly impossible situation. After all there are many people who believe that every word in the Bible is true and to them the sons of God must mean, not only that God had children, but that He also had a wife.

When I first thought abut this matter, it seemed obvious that the sons of God must have been some conquering race who thought a lot of themselves and to whom it was at first unthinkable that they should actually intermarry with the people they conquered.

The whole caste system was apparently based on such a situation. The race, formerly known as Aryans and now generally spoken of as Indo-Europeans, thought it sinful to mix their blood with that of the people they had vanquished. But they had gods of their own. If they had been or believed themselves of divine descent, they would have surely been called the ‘children of the gods’. Aryan appears to mean ‘noble’ and nothing more.

This problem is not entirely foreign to us in England. Very large numbers of people are known to have descended from Edward III. Edward III was descended in blood from Alfred. Alfred claimed descent from Woden. Are all these people then entitled to put ‘son of God’ after their name?

Of course, it sounds ridiculous when said like that but, funny or not, it is interesting to wonder whether they might be. Who was Woden anyway? Was he just the wandering chief of a barbarous war band, or was he something else?

So much difficulty lies in the meaning of words. A god to ancient Romans could be simply an outstanding man and he could be deified in his lifetime. We all know the unpleasant results of this process when Herod was hailed as a god by the populace! The practice of calling Roman emperors gods is also well known. It may appear strange to those who hold that the term only refers to the creator of the universe, but as a matter of historical fact it needs to be considered.

It is even more strange to find that the term ‘devil’ is simply a distortion of a word meaning ‘god’. The gods of one religious belief became the devils of another. Lucifer, the light bearer, a god to many races (including the Celts, who called him Lugh), was also the wicked angel who was thrown out of heaven.

Perhaps it is even more peculiar to learn that the original holder of the Greek title was the planet Venus and so female. Lucifer, Satan, devil, the dragon and the serpent all came to mean the spirit of evil, not only in the Christian world but in many others also, which brings us to the second curious puzzle: What was the war in heaven?

Unless the meaning is very obscure, I far prefer the language of the old James I Bible to that of the modern ‘told to the children’ versions and I think that there is nothing obscure in the following quotations which all bear on the same subject. The first is from Revelations, chapter 12, verses 7 to 9 and is the most complete statement of what was evidently, at the time of Nero, a very ancient legend.

‘And there was war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was there place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called e Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world; he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’

Also in St Luke, chapter 10, verse 18, Jesus himself is reported as quoting: ‘I beheld Satan as lightning fall from the heaven.’ These are not unique survivals in old Hebrew writings, for something similar is preserved by the Hindus, while the serpent or dragon is even found in old Norse mythology. There was a story spread widely in the ancient world that there had been a war in heaven and the vanquished side had been driven to live on earth.

Of course it is possible to reject anything of this sort as pure imagination by men long ago seeking for an explanation of the reason for the conflict between good and evil. In almost every ancient religion of which we have record there is this story of conflict between the powers of light and darkness.

The ancient Greeks did not have it, but then their gods were quite frankly ‘not respectable’ in a Christian sense; neither were those of the Romans, Saxons, Norsemen or Celts. These had all the vices as well as many of the virtues of mankind. They were simply men and women with greatly enlarged powers.

If we take the view that all legends of this kind are no more than fiction, there is no point in going on with this study; but as the years go by, it becomes increasingly clear that many, if not all, have some foundation in fact. They may be greatly embroidered and appear as fairy stories, but there is something in them based on memories of events which really happen.

They are not the same as myths, which are the counterparts of religious ritual; although these themselves often contain genuine pieces of tradition. The long labours of Sir James Frazer which resulted in that ponderous series of books known as The Golden Bough brought this home to many readers. Tradition itself tells that he was locked up in his study for many hours a day by his ferocious French wife to compel him to write his daily quota. Certainly he seemed to wear a haunted look.

I am going to take it for granted that there was some truth at the back of the two scraps of legend which I have quoted and see whether we can find anything to suggest an explanation. It is a kind of exercise in detection, but it is not fiction. The guesses may be wrong, yet there is something to be investigated.

Our questions then are: Who were the sons of God? And what was the war in heaven?

If anybody reads the early chapters of Genesis with care, it becomes clear that some editor has linked together at least two traditional accounts of the Creation with remarkably little skill. The Adam and Eve story is the kind of thing you might find in the religious beliefs of an African tribe today and we need not bother with it yet. However the other, which in itself looks like a blend of more than one tale, has a lot of legend in it.

At the very start of this we meet another puzzle in Chapter 1, verse 26: ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ Who did God say this to? We have always been led to understand that there was only one God and that He was absolute. He created everything from millions of nebulae and bacteria. Yet in the chief religious book of the early Hebrews he is pictured as talking to other of like form. Were they perhaps the sons of God? One can hardly assume that He was talking to Himself.

It is even more remarkable when we find a similar kind of story preserved on the other side of the Atlantic. There several descendants of God are reported as having more than one trial at making man like themselves. There were also failures of the same kind as described in Genesis. This is some world-wide traditional story and not confined to the Hebrews. It seems most unlikely that it is more than some ancient theory, but at the same time we must observe that it had once a very wide distribution. How was it spread from one continent to another before the days of efficient ships? There is a puzzle here which is not just a bee in my bonnet.

The question of who the Sons of God might have been is bound up somehow with the evidence for an extraordinary spread of people all up the western seaboard of Europe who put up a very great number of large upright stones for some apparently inexplicable reason. Single ones are perhaps not of very great interest, for they might mark the site where someone had been killed, or be the boundary between two different communities.

But when you find great rings and lines of stones set up in Brittany, Cornwall, Wiltshire, Ireland, the Outer Hebrides and the Orkneys, it surely means something of vast importance to the people who put them up. No one has the least idea why great rows of stones were set striding across Dartmoor, or why a huge ring was erected at Stennis in Orkney.

Only one thing is obvious and that is that a race of seamen must have done it for an important purpose. Why do seamen put up marks? As far as I know it is only for one purpose and that is to show themselves or other seafarers how to get to some place in safety. But many of these indicators are far inland and could not be seen from the sea at all. Although the suggestion may seem fantastic, could it possibly be that they were meant to be seen from the air?

No, I am not crazy, but although I have had no personal experience of the matter, I cannot fail to be impressed by the bulk of testimony that unidentified flying vehicles are frequently observed in our skies. Could it be that, in the Bronze Age, and before, they were also numerous and needed direction points?

Let us go back to the ancient Greek gods. Till the second half of this century, it would have been quite absurd to suggest that there might have been some truth in the flying chariots which the gods possessed and the thunderbolts which Zeus threw. Furthermore it would have been ridiculous to think that these gods might have come from an unknown part of the universe and sometimes begotten children on women of the earth.

It is no longer absurd - clumsy though our efforts may appear to be, man is already starting on his first tentative exploration of other planets and is there any reason to be sure that he is the first race to do so? Obviously the answer is ‘no’. We have really very little idea of what may go on in outer space and it is an impertinence to think that man on Earth is the most advanced of all creation.

The Greek gods passed with great rapidity from their home on Mount Olympus to anywhere they wanted to go and if they were said to go in flying chariots, this only described the fastest things that man had by that time invented. It was all rather fantastic and even a little comical, but why did men believe anything of the sort unless sometime, somewhere, something of a vague resemblance to this picture had once existed?

It was not only a product of Greek imagination, for there were Hindu stories too, of godlike personages who actually had remarkable flying machines and destructive weapons. Nobody knew how they worked, of course, and it was all long ago. So was the chariot of fire, which took Elijah up into the heavens.

I do not believe all this, of course, for there is very little to go on; but I do think that there is enough to make us wonder whether there is a possibility that for a short period long ago there may have been visitors to this earth from another and that they were so relatively advanced in technology as to be completely bewildering to the earth men of those days.

If there were visitors of this kind, it is more than likely that they would need landing signs here and there. Supposing that they were beginning to investigate an unexplored world, which was completely unmapped and they were putting down a few parties of explorers, it would be necessary to have indications where these parties had been dropped. What would be more natural than to enlist native help to set up such marks?

It is hard for us today to visualize the Britain of, for instance, five thousand years ago. The vast extent of natural woodland is unknown today, except in tropical vegetation. Brambles and fallen trees made pathways through it extremely difficult and it covered the bulk of the country. Only on some downlands was passage relatively easy and that was not free from large patches of juniper trees, thorn bushes, gorse and bramble.

The wide vista of rolling grassland did not exist. One can assume that exploration parties would be dropped at the edges of all this and traces of them would be found, if at all, in the kind of situations where we do find these stone set rings and alignments today. A stone ring would be noticeable from the air, just because such things do not often happen in nature. Neither would straight lines be frequent.

But there may have been another reason for setting up the stones, even if its object were the same. For untold generations it has been believed, especially by the devotees of the old witch religion, that by means of exciting people to execute wild circular dances, power could be generated and stored in stone and trees.

Actually this appears to be scientific fact. It has been demonstrated by Mr P Callahan in America that moths generate bio-electricity by the heat caused by the movements of their wings and they use this to locate their mates or food supply. I have described how I detected the same thing with beetles in an earlier part of this book. This is observed fact and no longer something on the fringe of knowledge.

Now if you have a large number of people dancing wildly round in a ring, you obviously generate a great deal of this bio-electricity, living electricity. If you carry out this performance in rings formed of stones with gaps between them, you have a form of dynamo.

It has been shown that the electro-magnetic fields of stones, trees and water will absorb bio-electricity from outside and this is the probable reason why some people see ghosts in situations which were favourable to such impressions being preserved. I have elsewhere suggested the names of oread fields for those of stones, dryad fields for those of trees and naiad fields for those of streams in accordance with the Greek belief that nymphs with these names were to be found in such places.

We now apparently see why my wife and I experienced electric shocks when trying to date the stones of the circle of the Merry Maidens in Cornwall. The bio-electronic force has been stored at one time by the exertion of dancers in that circle and it had never been taken out again. The circle is still complete. But why did anybody wish to store up electronic power in such places? What possible use could it be put to?

Well, experiments with the pendulum have shown that the electronic fields about an object are double cones of limitless height and depth. It has also been shown that a pendulum length of the same radius as the base of the double cones ill register contact with that cone.

If, then, you had an apparatus in a flying machine set to the right wave-length, you could pick up the rays from the stored energy in the stones and home in on it like the moth to its mate. These rings of stones could have been used both as visible and invisible navigational beacons.

This suggestion sounds absurd to those who have got no further than believing that the stones were set up by shaggy and uncultured savages whose only aids to life were stone tools and soft, badly baked pottery. But what if there were two completely different races of people involved, the sons of God and the daughters of men?

Of course, I may well be talking complete rubbish, but before the reader dismisses it as such, perhaps he will tell me why the stones were set up at all. In the whole of western Europe, it used to be done and in the same area the excited ring dances were once commonplace. No one can give a reason for either.

When explorers get up tributaries of the Amazon, they find the naked women of unknown tribes dancing in exciting rings in forest glades. It is no answer to say that primitive man does this as a primitive religious rite and you did it in a sacred circle of stones or trees to make it more religious.

Or children do it naturally and so it is a natural form of worship. But do any children do it unless they are first taught by some elder who has herself been taught as a child?

What were the dances of Baal which so upset the Hebrew prophets? The Baalim were little stone jujus of the gods and the people danced before them to put power into the stones. The One God, Yahweh, was not supposed to like it.

It was not only the Hebrew prophets who had this trouble. If you read the Koran of the Moslems, you find that Mahomet had the same difficulty with numerous godlings. We may think perhaps that these Baalim represented the sons of God, but with the passage of time nobody really remembered what that meant.

As a purely hypothetical exercise then, let us put up a probably absurd problem. Was there a long time ago, perhaps five thousand or more years it might have been, a series of exploratory visits to this world from another? Did they have considerable contact with the people then living on earth, including some degree of intermarriage?

Did the explorers persuade the natives to help them in setting up direction beacons and similar constructions in return for being taught how to work metals, practise agriculture and even build primitive towns? Then, for some unknown reason, did it all come to an end, leaving some degree of hybrid population behind it? Were the visitors known as the sons of God, because they had a belief in a single deity?

I think it is impossible to imagine a large immigration of people from elsewhere. Had there been anything of the sort and had settlements been formed of foreigners, it seems impossible for no trace of them to have come to light. So much digging and construction work has been done that some totally unknown culture of objects must have emerged somewhere for the acute bewilderment of archaeologists. This has not happened.

There are stories published of a very few unknown things being found in rocks, but until I see a numerous collection of such things I shall not believe it. Archaeological study is really quite advanced and I think we can say with confidence that no such foreign culture has come to light.

You may say that Atlantis, Mu and even Tartessos have not yet been found and I say we have no vestige anywhere of any Atlantian culture, which must have existed, other than on the drowned lands, if there had been one. The Atlantis at present claimed at the eastern end of the Mediterranean cannot be right, because Atlantis was outside the Pillars of Hercules, that is west of Gibraltar.

If it existed at all, one would have thought that the shoals off Cape Trafalgar might mark its grave. Yet the only unexpected things dredged from the bottom of nearby Cadiz harbour are Irish bronzes, and Irish goldwork has been found as far away as Palestine while Greek and Egyptian ornaments have been found in Bronze Age graves in Britain. People got about the world all right in those far off days, so where are the traces of the Atlantians who are said to have been so far advanced that they had flying machines?

Perhaps, however, Atlantis was just another explorers’ base and quite small. If so, there might be very little to find except the equivalent of the empty bully beef tins of the explorers of my day. At least we buried these out of a sense of decency, now lacking in the bulk of our population, even in the wastes of Jan Mayen or Baffin Land.

This investigation becomes more and more complicated as it goes on. Nothing seems to have an obvious answer and yet all sorts of books are written and hundreds of lectures given about this very period, none of which gives us much hint of the astonishing things which have taken place in a raw, new world some five thousand years ago.

Endnotes

[1] Source: The Legend of the Sons of God (1972) by Tom Lethbridge included as Chapter 9 in The Essential T.C.Lethbridge edited by Tom Graves & Janet Hoult; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, ISBN 0 586 05077 9.

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1976 [1]

Perhaps I could have called this book ‘Our Great Problem’ or, better still, refrained from writing it at all. The word ‘dilemma’ is really the right one, for it implies that whatever path we choose, we are liable to risk being hurt. Not only have we to try to solve a problem; but we have then to arrange our subsequent actions in accordance with this solution.

The problem is this: do we live in a planned life in a created universe; or is the whole thing a matter of chance? It must be one or the other. Either the ingredients for life were deliberately prepared for it, or it all happened by accident. [2]

This is where the horns of the dilemma come in, for if we decide that it was deliberately prepared, we are clearly under an obligation to make the best of it, employing as a guide an indefinable element known as ‘conscience’. If we decide it is all chance, then there is no point in acting in any other way than that which appears to offer jus the most pleasure. It is a matter of observed fact that either course may land us on one or other of the dilemma’s sharp horns.

Somewhere, I suppose, there is an ancient word picture, or even a drawing, of a dilemma; but it does not happen to be familiar with me. Perhaps the nearest ancient drawing of this kind of thing is the well-known Dark Ages one in the Vienna Gospels of a devil appearing to St Cuthbert, but this apparition has no horns and is not worth illustrating here. We do not know how a dilemma appeared to those who invented the term for use in logic long ago. I imagine it as a small, dark, shaggy, bull-like creature, with what the Americans call a ‘mean’ expression in its little, red, piggy eyes, and with sharp, forward-curving horns.

For thousand of years there appears to have been no question of our problem ever arising. In general man, according to Christian teaching, may have been heathen; but he did believe in superior entities who had created the Universe, the earth, the animals and mankind itself.

Christianity, Sufi, Buddhism, Brahmanism, Muhammadism and the rest were really just sects of one belief in a Universal Creator. The dogmas which arose and the wars between conflicting ideas were about relatively small matters compared with that which has come upon us now.

The bulk of Western man today, if he can be bothered to think about it at all, favours the idea that everything happens by chance. It is no good for professionals of religion to tell their flock that they must have faith. The flock just has not got it and it disregards most of the dogma. They ask how God can possibly be Love when such frightful things happen to them.

I should be inclined to this belief myself, had not another possible explanation come my way. Since it has come, it is obviously a matter of duty to set it out for others to examine and think about. My ideas may well be wrong; but I do not think that they can be so conflicting with observed fact as is the theory of chance.

As a matter of interest, variants of ideas like mine are held by many people all over the world; but relatively few are prepared to write things which can lead others to regard them as crazy. It is perfectly fair. Many regard Darwinian Evolutionists as too simple to be allowed loose on humanity; but few dare to put this on paper.

A theory has become a dogma and this is kept alive by faith. To shift a dogma of this kind may take hundreds of years. Millions of children have been taught that all living animals have evolved from lumps of jelly in the sea, and why should they doubt it? Actually the idea is apparently already out of date and discarded; but the belief in it will go on.

The amoeba theory will take years to replace, for it has become a kind of religious belief. What was Voltaire’s remark on this kind of thing? I forget the exact words but translated they went something like this: ‘Religion is a series of inhibitions, which prevents a man from making full use of his intelligence.’ Of course this is only true of dogma.

Belief in Darwinian Evolution has reached this dogma stage. Darwin did not wish it but his enthusiastic followers overrode him. It is very difficult now even to discuss the possibility that it might be wrong. It is on this Evolution theory, which is not even supported by the fossils in the more ancient rocks that the whole idea of the development of the Universe by Chance rests.

The alternative is that the Universe was deliberately planned and created by an entity known as God. This cannot be proved either. Both beliefs are kept going by faith. Is there any way of finding out which idea is the more probable? For it is widely apparent that there is something wrong with the leadership of both ways of thinking.

There is another method of trying to solve our dilemma, which is the one we will try to use. If it could be satisfactorily demonstrated, both the other ideas could be combined. There would no longer be a gulf between science and religion; although this closing of the gap would certainly not be popular with some of the professionals of both groups.

I do not know whether I can present the facts in a readable manner and I know that I am certainly not the proper person to make the attempt; but , since nobody else appears to be doing so, I am prepared to try, even if it earns me nothing but contempt. At least I have spent a dozen years in practical efforts to find out the answer.

It is easy to say to oneself that there are these two views and it really does not matter very much which one is right. What can we do about it anyway? But it does matter, because, if the dogma of chance is established, there is nothing to prevent a rule of complete selfishness and greed overwhelming the world. The most ruthless people will come to the top and reign as dictators. The remainder will do what they are told to do.

The great example of this is Russia, where the patron saint, Karl Marx, built up his theory on that of Darwin. But we have not sunk as low as this yet and are hardly likely to accept as a paragon of virtue a man who was habitually hit over the head by his wife with a rolling pin. Yet the theory does corrupt and in the hands of clever men can cause great damage by its influence.

That in brief is one side of the picture. The other is of the church’s long rearguard action. Now and then attempts are made to update the theories which first took root well over a thousand years ago. The difficulty appears to be that, while the congregation is desperately willing to know whether there is such a thing as God, their teachers spend their time in telling them what God wants them to do.

Naturally enough the congregation would like to know how they came by this knowledge. They must have faith, they are told. Where do you obtain this commodity? God is Love they are told, and on looking about they can see very little sign of it.

To the outside observer neither faith seems to be correct. Somewhere between the two, or perhaps entirely independent of either, there must be a third. Although it may seem a very impertinent quest, I see no valid reason why we should not try to find it. We are provided with a thinking mechanism. Why not use it?

Endnotes

[1] Source: Chapter 1 in The Power of the Pendulum; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1976, ISBN 1-85063-003-8.
[2] In 1976, in Chapter 7 of The Power of the Pendulum Lethbridge remarked that ‘there can never have been many trained thinkers at any one time in ancient days, yet it is extraordinary how far they got with their thinking. Indeed it seems possible to me that the germs of their knowledge came in the first instance from outside this planet.’ [Ed]

© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

Some six hundred years had passed since the Life of Christ when Paulinus taught Christianity to the Northumbrians. In that long period Christian beliefs had been the subject of much debate and acrimony. Dogmas had been formulated and refuted and others had taken their place. Emperors had been converted and another had given it up in disgust and reverted to paganism. Whole sects, like the Gnostics, had been subjugated and their books destroyed. Beliefs held in reincarnation had been taught and then declared anathema.

What sort of Christianity did Paulinus teach? According to Bede this included the doctrine of Everlasting Life, Salvation and Eternal Happiness. However, we can feel certain that a belief in miracles was also taught, for when Oswald, who succeeded Edwin after a brief interlude in AD 635, was killed in battle by the pagans, acts of miraculous healing were said to have taken place not only by touching his remains, but at the spot where he was slain. After all, a great part of the Gospels is taken up by reports of miraculous healing.

It seems to be the fashion now to doubt the miracles recorded in the Gospels; but if these are explained away, what is left? When Christ was asked by the disciples of John the Baptist if He was He that should come, He replied with a list of miracles which He had performed.

The only creed of the earliest Christians was to say that they believed in Christ. Even in Paulinus’ day the creed was half the length it is now and apparent impossibilities like the ‘resurrection of the body’ were not in it. The whole belief of the original Christians seems therefore to have been confined by what is now contained in the Gospels, nothing else.

The theories of St. Paul and other apostles were not in it and certainly not many of the dogmas which have grown up since. There was nothing about the equality of Christ with His Father, a dogma that split the Greek church from that of Rome. There was little doubt about Christ being God. Indeed He said that he was Son of His Father, but He also said that other men were too.

It seems that you can be a perfectly good Christian and yet believe in nothing which is not stated in the Gospels. But you must believe in miracles, or, as we would say in our study, you must believe in Extra Sensory Perception. It is as simple as that. You have to accept a force which is not in the scientific text books. If you see and believe that there is this force, that is ‘the grain of mustard seed’ of the parable, nothing in the Gospels is any longer scientifically improbable. All follow laws of nature as yet uncodified.

We have I think ample evidence that this force exists. However, it is outside time and distance. It is probably incorrect to call it fourth-dimensional as I am liable to do. It seems in fact to be non-dimensional. Extra Sensory Perception works by means of a non-dimensional force and it works in other planes beyond the three-dimensional plane of earth. If you can learn how to use this force, you can work miracles.

In an extremely small way we do work miracles by using the pendulum. Our step in the dark appears to be one into the light. What can we infer from this hotch-potch of scraps and snippets drawn from many sources? I have always fished with a net of narrow mesh. My clues are small, but they are becoming very numerous. They are also almost entirely ones which result from our own experiment and observation carried out over a period of years.

If you add them all together you begin to see that man is something very different from the pictures drawn for us by three-dimensional science. He is not just a semi-animal resulting from aeons of chance evolution of millions of living cells.

All the evidence goes to show that these cells, each of which is in reality a living entity of its own, have not been put together by chance. Their arrangement is the result of a carefully prepared plan. The whole thing was worked out, apparently though a process of trial and error, which took no time at all, on the next plane to Earth.

Into this association of cells was put something quite distinct from it. This something was it seems an extension of what we may call a mind, or a soul, whose real dwelling place was on a plane above the Earth plane. We say above, but this really conveys no location in space; it is only a term to indicate a higher rate of vibration.

The two portions of one mind, or personality, are nearly cut off from one another owing to the refracting effect between the two whorls of the spiral. This is necessary, for the detached piece of mind is evidently located in its earth body to gain experience from life in a denser medium. It is an adventurer and explorer.

All that it learns can eventually be taken back to the parent mind. Of course if it becomes completely absorbed in animal matters, it learns nothing at all and the experiment is a failure. As far as one can see, a very large proportion of the experiments are failures. Presumably, however, since no time is involved on the higher plane, the parent mind can take its experimental portion when its body dies and send it out again. This would be reincarnation and the evidence as a whole, collected by other research workers seems to show that this does take place. The object of the whole exercise is surely the evolution of the mind on the higher plane.

There is obviously a Boss above, controlling the mind, and it seems reasonable to assume that there is a whole heavenly hierarchy. But it is also probable that messages from minds on Earth get no farther than contact with the individual’s own parent mind. If they do go beyond this, they would be passed on by the parent mind itself.

Elsewhere I once compared a life on earth to a cinema film, which a given mind was compelled to watch. This comparison can of course be only partly true. But if it is only partly true, then our main mind on the higher plane can unroll the reel of film and see what happens before and after the actual event as it appears to us.

If, by use of the unknown force, with or without some such mechanical aid as the pendulum, we can get through the refracting zone and contact our real self, then information is available to the earthly mind, which is quite outside the reactions of the five ordinary senses.

Perhaps in a way this is cheating, but it is not supernatural and it is making use of powers which are available to a large number of us. As Dunne pointed out, however, such interference may alter the chain of events depicted on the films. Our true self knows what will happen to its projected child in its earth-body; but if that child takes independent action on its own, the predicted course may be to some extent deflected.

This is surely the reason why prophecy, although in some cases correct, is in others widely wrong. Even Christ apparently predicted disasters, comparable to an atomic war, with an error of many hundreds of years in the date. It is this problem of time which is so very hard for us to understand.

With life on earth, time runs in a continuous stream from the earliest geological phase to the present day. Effect must always follow cause in the three-dimensional world. In the non-dimensional world it is not so. Yet the non-dimensional world is linked to the world we know.

When we try to find a rate for time on the first whorl of the pendulum’s spiral, it cannot be done. At least I cannot find a time rate. But I can find it on the second whorl. It is 60. That is 20 plus 40. This is quite a shock. We know that there is time in our three-dimensional world; although it may be of a different order for every living species. Why therefore does the pendulum behave as if it did not exist?

It took me some time to think this problem out, but the answer seems to be relatively simple. The pendulum gives is answers by the gyrational change in its movement. Some obstruction causes a block in the free flow of current and the swing of the pendulum is forced back and into a circle. With every concept we have tried except time this is the case. But there is no block with time in the three-dimensional world. It is running away ceaselessly.

In the next phase, however, we have reason to think that it does not move in this manner. I have said that there is no time on the next plane, but this may well be incorrect. We can find a rate for it and so it presumably exists. But it is something quite different to the time we know.

It is impossible for us to grasp the implications of a world of that sort, for we are not designed to do so. But there are people, sensitives, or mediums, who do appreciate things in this way. They foresee future events as clearly as if they were seeing them with their eyes. However, many of them appear to be lost in earth time and do not know whether an event has happened yet or not.

In the three-dimensional world of nature, time is of great importance. The most important case from our point of view is the development and growth of a baby. Here the whole organism has to change from one living in the airless dark into one living in light and breathing air. Enormous numbers of its living cells have to develop for these functions according to an exact plan and timetable. If anything goes wrong with this scheme, the baby cannot live and breathe.

But this is a prearranged plan. How can there be a plan without a planner? It is difficult to see how this point so frequently evades the attention of otherwise most brilliant men. So firm is the grip of the dogma of Darwinian Evolution on their whole outlook that they cannot bear to visualize the planner.

umed that there was a planner. He has been conveniently dropped out by later scientists. All sorts of clever ideas are put forward to try to show how the multitude of dividing and living cells in the baby know where and how to develop. No idea carries conviction, however many letters there may be after the author’s name.

You cannot expect the cells of Bolboceras arminger to develop into legs, wings, eyes, internal organs and so on without a plan to work to. Without a plan how can it change from an egg into a grub, from a grub to a chrysalis and from a chrysalis to a perfect flying insect? How can you produce an insect’s complicated wing by any chance development? It cannot start from a flapping leg gradually growing membrane. Besides, it comes from a different place. There can be no Darwinian evolution of an insect’s wing.

All through the evolutionary story, as told in the study of geology, it is evident to anyone with a mind unclouded by dogma that some entity was experimenting along many lines and with varied success. The experimenter was not infallible anymore than the designer of aeroplanes is infallible.

Many experimental animals were evolved which vanished from one cause or another. Each was evolved by improving on the one before, but it did not evolve itself. Someone made use of known laws and known material, each cell being a living and reproducing unit, to improve the design. But some main designs could not be developed far enough. The plan was then abandoned and a new one tried out.

The evidence for the existence of a planner or planners is clear for all to see. But there is not the slightest evidence to suggest whose mind, or minds, does the planning. There may well be very many planners in an ascending order up to the one who planned the whole universe. Who that is is quite beyond our comprehension and the problem is no concern of this study. But if we admit that there is a plan and a planner, surely our study does throw some light on this plan. The careful arrangement of the rates on our circular card can hardly be a matter of chance. Take just the four cardinal points on it again.

Why should Sun, Light, Red, Fire and East, each with a rate of 10-inches, come opposite to Moon, Sound, Green, Water and West at 30-inches? They might have been scattered anywhere around our forty-divisional disc. Why does Heat not come under 10-inches with Fire? The answer is that it is associated with Life at 20-inches and nothing could live without it.

But to those, who like myself do some painting in water colour, the question which at once comes to the fore is why is Green opposite Red? For years I have mixed blue and yellow to make green. Blue and yellow are primary colours so we were taught, green is not.

But green and not blue is the colour of chlorophyll, without which most of the vegetable world could not live. It is of primary importance. It is also far more easy for man’s eyes to see. If a vessel’s starboard light were blue and not green there would be many more collisions at sea. Once more we have to go back to the beginning to look at things afresh. To the planner green is the important colour, blue is not.

Then take the cardinal points themselves, the North, South, East and West. They are not the points of the Earth’s magnetic field, but those of the Earth itself. Magnetic North moves about in an area of Arctic Canada. Its bearing from Southern England changes about 15 seconds a year and it is far from the North Pole.

The North Pole itself has been relatively steady for much of man’s history; although this was not always so and what would happen if the Polar Ice caps melted is anybody’s guess. But compared with the magnetic pole it is fixed and immutable. There it is in a waste of frozen waters where there is no sun for half a year.

We find North at 40-inches along with Cold, Death and Black, the beginning and end of our scale, 0 as well as 40. For it is the beginning of the next whorl of the spiral. The Sun rises as a Red Ball of Fire in the East, all three on the same rate of 10-inches. It sets in the West at 30-inches and at its setting there is the phenomenon of the Green ray, or Flash, which, although few of us have seen it, is a natural phenomenon.

With the setting of the Sun the Moon takes over. All this is so elementary and obvious that one would have thought that a human living on Earth might have devised it. In fact a mind comparable to a human mind must have done so.

But is not our Earth mind simply a projection of our higher mind and is not this itself presumably a projection from one still higher? It looks like an indication that all mind works in a similar manner. The planner made his plan in much the same way as we might have set about it ourselves.

The ancient Biblical story of God saying: ‘Let us make man in Our Own Image’ has some sense in it after all. But God of this story said this to other planners. He was not doing it in isolation. On that particular level, which was thought to have planned man, there was still no ultimate Almighty. Just as Paulinus’ teaching appealed to the common sense of Edwin’s intelligent councillors, [2] so we, surrounded by so much scientific fact that it tends to become a bore, can begin to catch a gleam of truth from our unorthodox study.

We have built up our ideas very slowly from a long series of apparently trivial experiments, which are open to anyone who can work the pendulum, and most people can do so, to test for themselves. Several people have already written to me in confirmation. They get the same rates as we do. But, although we trust our observations, we are little qualified to reason from them and there may be numerous errors in our conclusions. Each person must draw his own conclusions if not from his own observations, at least from a confidence in ours.

The issues are of vital importance to everybody. They are those of whether our minds and personalities are temporary and perish with the brain, or if they survive death and the disappearance of the brain. The former belief leads to every kind of greed and selfishness. There can be no hope for a stable, happy world as long as this creed of materialism holds sway.

All we have learnt from our experiments tends to refute the materialistic belief. It tends to show very clearly that a part of our mind is not bounded by the earthly three-dimensional bonds of time and space. It also knows far more than does our Earthly one. Yet the two portions of mind are linked, although prevented from close co-operation by something comparable to the refracting layer between air and water.

Everything we know in our Earth life appears to continue on the next, but there are certainly additions. The biconical fields of force with which every fragment of matter seems to be surrounded, are evidently perceptible to our other mind. It can single them out with no difficulty and pass back the knowledge to us by the simple pendulum contrivance. The miracle of this world is the commonplace of the next.

To understand why this should be so, it is necessary to see if we can appreciate a little of what the pendulum has been telling us about our mind (or is it our spirit?) beyond the 40-inch rate. It has told us that this mind, as I shall continue to call it for convenience, can sense things hidden from us by a veil of matter whether they are beneath a layer of soil or behind a stone wall. It can also jump across thousands of years of our time and do this both forwards and backwards.

It has a further qualification which is quite beyond our earthly conceptions, for it can apparently appreciate objects in two places at once. Now the faster anything moves the closer it becomes to being in two places at the same time. If it moved at an infinite speed it would be in all places at once and appear to be at rest.

We can surely infer therefore that, to our mind beyond our earth life, things move very much faster than they do here. Everything, including ourselves, vibrates much faster on the next plane than it does on Earth. Green is still green and red red, but it is probably more intensely green or more vividly red.

Owing to this greatly increased rate of vibration, things which are solid and impenetrable to us are no longer so on the higher plane. Someone on this higher plane would be able to pass through the solid obstructions of Earth with as great ease as television vibrations pass through walls of houses or steel decks. This is more than half-way to understanding the mysteries we have been trying to investigate.

Solids on the next plane are vibrating so fast that we cannot sense them at all, but they are solid enough to the individual on the next level. Just as everything is now known to be in constant movement here, so it is on the higher plane. The only difference is the speed at which things move. There is nothing unnatural about the next level. Things simply move too fast for us on Earth to sense them.

Endnotes

[1] Source: first half (pages 136-146) of the final chapter (11) of A Step in the Dark; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967, ISBN 07100 1741 3.
[2] This story is told in Chapter 22: Saxon Britain. [Ed]

 

© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

To understand at all what is happening, it is necessary to take another look at what has been learnt about the rates. I have mentioned already how they can all be plotted on a circular diagram of 40 divisions. On this circular card north (40) is at the top together with death, cold, anger, sleep, black and so on. South is at the bottom with east, red on its right (10) and west, green (30) on its left. Round the circumference of the circle all the other rates lie according to their numbers. Some, such as the rate for psychic ability, which I call the psi rate (9½), are fractional. Copper is 30½, with blue and cobalt, and mercury 12½.

There are so many names now that I cannot construct a complete diagram which would print clearly. There is one in my last book, A Step in the Dark, but even that is not very clear. Therefore I have been content with diagrams illustrating various groups of ideas. Now several ancient religions appear to have hit on something resembling this circular plan. Someone, a long time ago, did a lot of work and knew a lot about this subject. In the lore of the druids, alchemists, gnostics, witches and so on, as well as in our own folklore, there are signs that once a great deal had been discovered.

And in the teaching of the Buddhists of Tibet great stress is laid on ‘the wheel of life’, and on the ‘four quarters and ten directions’. The Tibetans have of course studied this subject with great thoroughness in their own way. While we try to approach it along the path of science, their method is entirely mental and their aids are not instruments but contemplation.

Relationship with colours. Rates in inches. I have not included north, south, east and west in this diagram, but of course north is at the top and is true, not magnetic, north.

It is interesting then to see that they place seven colours in the halo of Buddha. Excluding black, white and grey, which are hardly colours, we have the rates for seven as well: brown (7), purple (9), red (10), yellow (29), green (30) and blue (30½). These are not the primary colours of the artist, who believes green to be a compound of yellow and blue, but are primary colours in nature. Orange (12) makes seven. [2]

Now it is possible to arrange all these rates in another way. You can take your circle arranged in spokes, and mark the length of each rate up from the hub along its appropriate line. The resulting picture is an Archimedean spiral ending at 40.

Each dot, which, when joined to the others next to it, forms part of the spiral, is in reality the central point of the base of a double cone at right angles to the plane of the original circle. The circumference of the base of the cones cuts the point at which the observer stands.

Since the points 40, 10, 20 and 30 can be shown to be oriented to the true as opposed to the magnetic points of the compass, it is clear that the rays from even the smallest objects proceed outwards at right angles to the surface of the earth. But a far more important point is apparent.

The spiral cannot possibly end dead at 40. The spiral must go on, and this is what the Buddhists believe and teach. Their wheel recurs for ever unless you can get free from it.

It is quite easy to show with the pendulum that our spiral of rates also continues. It passes the point of death at 40 and repeats the rates exactly as they were before, but with 40 added to their number. Purple is thus 9 + 40, or male is 24 + 40.

However there is one great difference. The central point of each double cone has shifted. You can thus place a material object on the floor and find a circle around it. The object is there for you to see, touch or smell. But there is also a mock position for that object and round that position you can find a circle with the original rate and a new rate with 40 added to it.

You cannot perceive the object in its second position by any of the five senses. However you can find it there with the pendulum. It exists in another plane. The whole range of mental ideas exist in another plane beyond the rate for death. But there are exceptions and they have a bearing on what we have been talking about.

You cannot find a rate for time on the first whorl of the spiral. This is presumably because time is always passing here and you cannot pin it down with the pendulum. On the second whorl, beyond the rate for death, you can find a rate for time. It appears to be static, although this is beyond our comprehension. It is the same as the second whorl’s rate for life, 20 + 40.

In other words, if you happen to pass the point of death and are living on the second whorl, it takes no time to do anything you want to do. If that is so, anyone engaged in creating a species has only to draw up his design and he can then put it through all its evolutionary stages at once.

Diagrams of examples of rates, in inches, from two levels on the spiral. A is the normal ‘earth’ level and has no rate for time because this is moving away and affords no obstruction to rays sent from the pendulum. Time appears to be static in B, the next level. There is no ‘death age’ nor ‘distance’ in B; but colour and metals are as in A. Sex persists in B.

Diagram showing the spiral track on which the rates lie. The great extent of the spiral can easily be demonstrated by taking the figures from the table at the end of the book measuring them on to a forty divisional circle.

There is a third whorl outside number two. It is rather a trouble to investigate, for its rates are those of the first whorl plus 40 and again 40. This makes a very long cord on the pendulum, which is difficult to measure and awkward to use. I use the well of the staircase for experiments.

As far as I have investigated, number three is again a replica of number one; but on it there is once more no rate for time. Events are evidently once more in time sequence as they are on the first whorl.

There for the moment I must leave it, for I have nowhere suitable to look for a fourth whorl. It seems most probable that there is one and that what we have been examining is a measured demonstration of the truth of the Buddhist belief in the endless repetition of life and everything else.

If so however there seems to be something left out in what is reported about their belief, for I have never heard of timeless intervals between the lives.

Of course I may have reasoned incorrectly from the information at my disposal. I do not trust my powers of reasoning. But others must experiment and see that the facts are there as I have told, for this appears to be something of vital importance.

Endnotes

[1] Source: The Monkey's Tail - a study in evolution and parapsychology; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, SBN 7100 6598 1.
[2] Lethbridge overlooked the rainbow colour violet (32) and has not provided a rate for the seventh rainbow colour indigo. [Ed]

 

© Brian Greene 2004

When we use our eyes, we use the electromagnetic force; when we use powerful instruments like electron microscopes, we also use the electromagnetic force; when we use atom smashers, one of the forces we use to probe the ultrasmall is, once again, the electromagnetic force. But if the electromagnetic force is confined to our three-brane, our three space dimensions, it is unable to probe the extra dimensions, regardless of their size. Photons cannot escape our dimensions, enter the extra dimensions, and then travel back to our eyes or equipment allowing us to detect the extra dimensions, even if they were as large as the familiar space dimensions.

to be continued