โ€œPassport to Magoniaโ€: from folklore to alien myth

Finally, more than half a century after its release, thanks to Venexia Editrice it has been translated into Italian "Passport to Magonia: from Folklore to Flying Saucers โ€by French researcher Jacques Vallรฉe, theโ€œ Book of the Damned โ€of the so-calledโ€œ paraphysical hypothesis โ€.

di Marco Maculotti

Cover: David Huggins,ย Coming Through.ย 

"Man thus, who seems to us supreme,
Perhaps it is the second of an unknown sphere.
Moves a wheel, or tends to some purpose:
That we see in part, and not in everything. "

alexander pope, Essay on Man, 1733

Pmore than half a century, to be precise 52 years: that's what the Italian public waited to be able to read the translation of Passport to Magonia: from Folklore to Flying Saucers by the French researcher Jacques Vallee, fundamental text in the line of UFO studies, initiator of what has been defined "Paraphysical Hypothesis", we have already talked about on our pages and also on other occasions [1]. The publication, with the simplified title of Passport to Magonia, was put on the market a few months ago by Venexia Publisher, who in recent years had already (re) proposed other key texts of the paraphysical current of both Vallรฉe (now over eighty) and his American colleague John Keel [2], who since the end of the 60s sided with the former to highlight the points of contact hitherto ignored between close encounters of the third and fourth types with self-styled "extraterrestrials" and the ancient folklore concerning entities "other "(alien, precisely, according to the original Latin etymology).

It is curious that it took so long, especially considering the success now mainstream of other lines of UFO research, such as the "classic" one that sees the UFO phenomenon longa manus, at least in part, of the secret services and the US military, and that "paleoastronautics", Disseminated by Sitchin and Von Daineken and recently taken up by an increasingly large group of" biglinians ", taking advantage of the media echo of the" History Channel "broadcast Ancient Aliens [3]. The paraphysical current, on the other hand, has never reached the general public either in bookstores or on television screens, although some hints from Whitley Strieber's book Communion (bestseller on its release in 1987, from which a film with Christopher Walken was made a few years later) are quite significant in this regard, and almost certainly inspired at least in part by the studies of Vallรฉe and Keel [4].

Jacques Vallee

Storm Mages, Sylphs, Siddhas and Siths

Ithe reason why Passport to Magonia, even without selling millions of copies, it became a "cult" work (not only in Western countries such as the United States, Canada and France, but even in the Soviet Union where a "pirate" translation circulated illegally) is evident. Vallรฉe not only collated testimonies of "Supernatural encounters" happened in the decades preceding the infamous 1947 (long considered the "Year Zero" of the storyline alien due to the self-styled Roswell UFO-crash), often framed in a "gray zone" between the nascent extraterrestrial narrative and the old folkloric perspective; but the French researcher went further back, also analyzing some much more ancient cases, taken from Folklore fairy pre-modern and from the great cauldron of the witchcraft and demonology medieval.

The title of the work itself refers to a series of mysterious events that took place in XNUMXth century France, which came to us thanks to an enigmatic account by the archbishop of Lyon. Agobard, one of the most important of his time, who died in 840 AD:

"However, we have seen and heard many men sunk in such stupidity, lost in such madness, that we believe that there is a certain region, which they call Magonia, from which ships sailing in the clouds depart, to bring back to that region the fruits of the earth that are destroyed by hail and storms; the sailors pay homage to the storm wizards and in turn receive grain and other products. "

Agobard, Liber de Grandine et Tonitruis, xi [5]

If on the one hand the consideration with modern extraterrestrials who travel in the skies on the so-called flying saucers, from a historian's perspective of religions one cannot fail to notice them as enigmatic "Wizards of the storm" from "Magonia" appear indissolubly connected to agrarian cults and to meteorological magic, and therefore the belief in their presumed existence is primarily related to religious cults of this type, of the type of Benandanti Friulians studied by Carlo Ginzburg, who fought in heaven against witches and evil spirits, four nights a year, for the salvation of the harvest or, to quote the precise words of one of them, for the love of the snake.

The hermeticists, in fact, immediately put up in relation the "storm magicians" of Magonia with the elemental spirits, and precisely with the Sylphs (or, in the feminine, the Sylphs), spirits esoterically connected to the air element. The well-known kabbalist, among others, was of this opinion Zedekiah, who in the eighth century devised a plan to show entities to crowds: "Those beings were seen in the sky in human form, sometimes lined up in battle, marching in good order, or holding up weapons. [...]. Sometimes on beautifully built air ships, whose flying squadrons traveled at the behest of the Zephyrsยป [6]. During the Renaissance era, they had "shops" with them in all likelihood Paracelsus and without a shadow of a doubt Jerome Cardano, who described his encounter with seven strange "elemental" visitors in terms that predate the modern extraterrestrial myth by five centuries:

โ€œ[โ€ฆ] They replied that they were men composed, as it were, of air, and subject to birth and death. However, their life spans were much longer than ours, and could be as long as three hundred years. When asked about the immortality of our soul they stated that nothing that is peculiar to the individual survives. [...] When my father asked them why they did not reveal treasures to men if they knew where they were, they replied that it was forbidden by a particular law, under the heaviest penalties, to communicate this knowledge to men. "

G. Cardano, De Subtilitate, XIX [7]

Vallรฉe also related them to the siddhas and Vidyahara, "Perfect men" and "possessors of knowledge" mentioned, among other sources, in the ancient Indian treatise on astronomy Surya Siddhanta from the XNUMXth-XNUMXth century AD, but whose doctrines are probably much older; in the text it is also said that Siddha and Vidyahara "revolve under the Moon and above the clouds". According to the Hindu tradition, the Siddhas could become "at their will very heavy or light as a feather, travel into space and disappear from sight" [8].

READ MOREย  The abductions of the Fairies: the "changeling" and the "renewal of the lineage"

Vallรฉe, however, escapes an at least curious assonance: the one existing between the siddhas Indians and sidh of the Celtic tradition, entities that have much in common with the first and that in pre-Christian times were associated with the glorious Tuatha De Danann. As well as i siddhas, the "perfect men" of the Indian tradition, possess named supernatural powers Siddhi, mirroring the Scottish term sidh we mean both the members of the "secret people" and the superhuman powers that the latter hold, and which they can sometimes temporarily transfer to a human individual, under the oath not to tell anyone about this election.


Fairies and Demons

Land the aforementioned peculiarities, in fact, bring modern extraterrestrials closer, as Vallรฉe guessed, also to the fairies of the tradition of the British Isles, and more generally to the endless ranks of fairies, elves, goblins and other "subtle" entities well known in folklore all over the world. The French author cites in particular, to demonstrate the validity of his hypotheses, two key texts of the so-called Fairy-Faith: that of the Scottish reverend of the seventeenth century Robert Kirk (The Secret Commonwealth) is that of Evans-Wentz released in the early 900s (The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries).

Particularly clear are the correspondences between the mythicals kidnappings of fairies to the detriment of human beings and modern ones abductions alien, with an eye to the phenomenon, well known in folklore and which we find in the modern alien myth, of the so-called Missing Time ("Lost time" or "forgotten") and widespread post-experience amnesia [9]:

โ€œBut often a strange phenomenon occurs: people who have spent a day in Elfland they come back to this world aged a year or more! [โ€ฆ] There, time does not pass as it does here. [โ€ฆ] The disymmetry of the temporal element between Elfland and our world is present in the stories of all countries. "

โ€œThe general belief was that fairies were spirits who could be seen or not be seen at will. And when they took people, they took body and soul together. "

โ€œA person's mind coming out of fairy land it is usually emptied of what has been seen and done there. "

W. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries [10]

Another section of Vallรฉe's essay analyzes some parallels between modern alien abductions and torture, sometimes even erotic, attributed in medieval times to demons, succubus and nightmares. In fact, if Betty Hill, famous addict in one of the first "textbook" cases of ufology, dating back to the early 50s, "under hypnosis, reported that a long needle had been inserted into her navel" by extraterrestrial kidnappers, which caused her excruciating pain, specularly "a French calendar of the fifteenth century [...] shows the tortures inflicted by demons on the people they kidnapped [...] depicted as they pierce the abdomens of their victims with long needles" [11]. The correspondence was later elaborated on by Graham Hancock in his essay Supernatural (trad. it .: Shamans).

READ MOREย  At the origins of Laรนro, the Salento nightmare sprite

The mention, by Vallรฉe, of the De Dรฆmonialitate, et Incubis, et Succubis, a seventeenth-century work by the Franciscan Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, which inspires the French researcher a juicy analysis of a dozen pages, focused above all on the question of copulation with transcendental entities ("demonic" or "alien" they may be) and, consequently, on that of hybridization between the human species and the "extra-human" one, topos which moreover finds itself, as we have amply demonstrated elsewhere, in folklore fairy. However, with regard to the hypothesis that modern aliens can be seen as diabolical entities, the author specifies [12]:

โ€œOne point intrigued a lot of Sinistrari: such demons do not obey exorcists. They are not afraid of relics and other sacred objects, and therefore do not fall into the same category of devils by which people are possessed [โ€ฆ]. But then, are they really creatures of the devil? Shouldn't we put them in a class of their own, with fairies and elementals they resemble so much? "


A "Book of the Damned"

Chowever, apart from the absolutely captivating approach, which goes hand in hand with the hypothesis put forward in terms of originality and intuition - also thanks to a more coherent and systematic writing than that of his colleague Keel - in this first work of the "paraphysical cycle" of Vallรฉe are also collated and disseminated multiple inexplicable or at least bizarre episodes, which would not have disfigured in the Book of the Damned by Charles Fort, taken from ancient chronicles or from the biographies of historical figures of primary importance: one passes from cattle mutilation [13] to the "small bright lights, arranged in steps one on top of the other" that appeared one evening in 1768 in Leipzig to the young man Goethe, inside a ravine, dazzling him as they jumped "in every direction" (the poet spoke of it in book VI of his Autobiography, and the discovery is due, by explicit admission of Vallรฉe, to Kenneth Anger, a "cult" character of the Hollywood Babylon of the 60s!) [14].

You go by "Fairy rings", which "in the early days of Rationalism, we tried to explain [...] as electrical phenomena, a consequence of atmospheric effects" [15] to the semi-legendary Jump heel Jack, the bizarre "flying assailant" of London in the 30s (and later reappeared in 800 in Hampshire), endowed with "bony fingers of immense power that resembled claws", ears "cropped or pointed like those of an animal "and eyes that" resembled iridescent fireballs " [16]. Reference is made to the passage of Talks at the table of Martin Luther in which he said he was convinced that "a certain person, in his opinion, [was] un changing - O killcrop, as they were called in Germany ยปthe people" replaced "by the fairies [17].

We talk about the Moon-Eyed People of Cherokee folklore [18] and to the Ikhals than that of the Mexican natives, less than a meter tall black humanoids who "fly, attack people and, in modern accounts, carry a kind of rocket on their backs and kidnap Indians", after having paralyzed them, to lead them into the underground cavities where they dwell [19]; of the transalpines Korrigan e Leprechaun; from Troll e nix, di Dames Blanches e Sleagh Maith; and so on and so forth.

READ MOREย  Shamanic initiation and the ways of the afterlife in the North American tradition

Even Vallรฉe (perhaps first of all scholars of the phenomenon, anticipating by about twenty years Las Apariciones Marianas of the eclectic Jesuit Salvador Freixedo) advanced the hypothesis that even the very famous Marian apparitions of Guadalupe, Knock, Lourdes and Fatima [20] could be ascribed, mutatis mutandis, to the same invisible realm "of an elastic semi-material essence, ethereal enough not to be detected by physical sight" and which can "change shape according to certain laws" [21]; "a kind of parallel universe, which coexists with ours; it becomes visible and tangible only for selected people, and the "doors" that cross it are points of tangency between the two worlds " [22].

Looking forward to working personally on a long essay on the issue [23], for the moment the gloss of this inextricable mystery, enigmatic especially when considered in relation to the history and evolution of humanity, we leave it to Vallรฉe [24]:

โ€œThere remains a faint suspicion of a gigantic mystery, far greater than our current preoccupation with life on other planets and far deeper than the reports of quiet housewives about lights zigzagging across the sky. [โ€ฆ] Yes, there is a deep hidden current to be discovered and mapped behind these seemingly absurd stories. Emerging sections of the basic model have been discovered and mapped in past ages by long-dead scholars. Today we have a unique opportunity to witness the reappearance of this current. Colored, of course, with our new human prejudices, our concern for "science", our desire for the promised land on other planets. "


Note:

[1] We dealt with the topic as speakers at I national convention of ufology and esotericism ("Oltre", organized by the Society of Sulfur), in our speech entitled "Alien folklore" (available the full video, on "AXIS mundi TV", and the PDF of the slides used, on the site). In addition to the writer, Roberto Pinotti, Massimo Centini and Stefano Masella attended the conference.

[2] In particular Venexia had previously published the following texts:

[3] Pseudo-documentary series, which sees the participation of authors "sensationalists "such as Erich Von Daineken, David Hatcher Childress, Giorgio Tsoukalos and David Wilcock, known in our local programming as Alien puzzles.

[4] Among other things, the distinction of aliens into two distinctly separate races is significant: one shorter, stocky, dark and hairy and another taller, thin, light and hairless; the first recalls the gnomes, the dwarves, the kobolds and more generally the elementals of the earth; the second the sylphs or elementals of the air, or the fairies and the fairies Irish. See in particular Vallรฉe, Passport, pp. 82 and 206-207.

[5] Cit. Ibid, p. 27.

[6] Ivi, p. 29.

[7] Cit. Ibid, pp. 32-33.

[8] Ibid, pp. 26-27.

[9] Ivi, p. 143.

[10] Cit. Ibid, pp. 96 and 121.

[11] Ivi, p. 130.

[12] Ivi, p. 167.

[13] Ibid, pp. 68-72.

[14] Ivi, p. 33.

[15] Ivi, p. 61.

[16] Ibid, pp. 111-113.

[17] There, p. 143.

[18] Ivi, p. 82.

[19] There, pp. 89-90 and 147-148.

[20] There, pp. 173-182.

[21] Ibid, p. 95

[22] Ivi, p. 139.

[23] There is the will, on the part of the writer, to draw up an essay on the subject in paper format, to be written jointly with a second author, occasional collaborator of ยซAXIS mundiยป; indicative publication date 2022. For the moment, those interested in reading something substantial in some ways connected to the topic discussed here, can obtain the 2020 annual register of the journal of traditional studies "Arthos", which contains my wise The cult of the Fairies in Celtic countries: an eschatology of death and rebirth.

[24] Vallee, op. cit., pp. 72-73.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *