I read a lot of weird stuff. Let’s just get that straight up front, in case you haven’t been paying attention. While reading all this weird stuff, I like to look for trends which cut across a variety of backgrounds. You know, the sort of thing where a bunch of different people are essentially describing the same phenomenon, but using different terminology.

One of my favorite pursuits for a while now has been in tracking down this idea that some people are actually not people at all, but are impostors, or are entities posing as human for various reasons - usually nefarious. People talk about this possibility of there being fakes among us in a variety of different ways, from metaphorical to much more literally.

One of my first encounters with the idea was in an essay by Philip K. Dick, where he talks about spurious (fake) humans and spurious realities:

…the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. … Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.

He talks about this kind of stuff all the time in his novels, about what’s real and what’s fake. And just when you think you have a handle on which is which, he flips them upside down and reverses which one is good and bad until the distinctions are totally blurred.

From here, you can go off into any number of occult directions which describe something similar. One I just learned about is a class of people purported to exist who are “organic portals.”

…there are generally two different types of human existing on this planet. There are souled humans, meaning, those whose souls contain the spark of individualized consciousness, who exhibit human characteristics like having an independent mind, empathy, complex emotions, and personality nuances. Then there are “Organic Portals”, people who are biologically no different from souled humans, but spiritually they lack individualized consciousness and therefore function more like animal or plant species in the sense of sharing a single group soul. They function like open portals through which other intelligent forces may act, or empty vessels those forces may occupy.

Which is actually really spooky, if you start thinking about demons and extra-dimensional beings or aliens and weird shit like that. Or you could be much more concrete about it, and you could say that these “empty vessels” are indoctrinated culturally with autonomous software programs so they just keep feeding and growing “the system” whatever that means.

But let’s go back and think about aliens for a second. I read a couple things recently which tickled my fancy about aliens. One was by author Daniel Pinchbeck, where he offered some thoughts on the nature of the most common type of ET, the infamous grey aliens, so popular on bongs and black light posters everywhere:

I don’t think UFOs or the “grey aliens” who like to pop out of them are literal space travelers from another physical planet. I think the Greys are closer to goblins - infraterrestrial or subterrestrial entities, Ahrimanic, to use Steiner’s term. Apparently in the Islamic tradition, they talk about “soulless entities” that are pre-Adamic, pre-human, and the “Greys” seem to fall into that category. Clearly, they have some function to perform - perhaps they are workers or mechanics who help to hold together quantum reality.

This in itself was just sort of a curiosity to me until I accidentally happened across a quote about the Gnostic archons at Metahistory that matched that description almost exactly:

The stereoma is not alive, but it is animated in its own peculiar way. The virtual reality zone of the Archons is a fabrication of inorganic chemistry which they inhabit and keep running, like custodians who live in the structure they maintain. These entities can be imagined as fully employed cyborgs, extraterrestrial nerds in charge of the “celestial mechanics” of the solar system.

This whole idea that grey aliens or archons serve an actual purpose relative to the structure of reality is really interesting, I think. Also reminds me of Terence McKenna’s term, “machine elves” which are a sort of entity he encountered on DMT (which is supposedly very commonly conducive to alien encounters). It also starts to sound a whole hell of a lot like Agents in the Matrix which is a story based very closely on Gnostic mythology. The Agents are portrayed as evil by those who are seeking to overcome the artificial reality of the Matrix, but really they are just a maintenance function of the Matrix and nothing more. One characteristic of the Agents worth mentioning here is how they are able to inhabit people at will, just like as is described in relation to organic portals above.

While Pinchbeck suggests that greys “recognize their lack of souls, and they suffer for it,” the article at Metahistory goes so far as to say:

According to Gnostics, they are not merely passive inhabitants of the planetary system in which the Earth is captured. The take a keen, and not particularly healthly, interest in humanity. Gnostics taught that the Archons envy humans and crave to intrude upon the Earth. To do so, they must violate the boundary between the Heptad, the realm of celestial mechanics dominated by inorganic chemistry, and the biosphere. Gnostics repeatedly warn that the Archons are by nature inveterate boundary-violators.

Interestingly enough, apocryphal Gnostic scriptures recovered at Nag Hammadi actually contain accounts of abductions by Archons and instructions on what to do and say in order to avert their attacks (ie, anal probes). Also of relevance here is the suggestion in these gospels that people may “exist as the type of the Archons” or become influenced by and similar to the archons.

The Archons cast a ‘trance” over Adam… They put him into a sleepy state, but it was his perception they dulled… They make our hearts heavy that we may not pay attention and may not see. So we lose the reflection of the Divine Light within us.. . [Thus the Archons acted on humanity] with a view to deceive.

When the life-spirit increases and the illuminating power of the body strengthens the soul, no one can lead you astray into the lessening of your humanity. But those on whom the counterfiet spirit preys are alienated from humanity and deviated… The despicable spirit gains strength by leading us astray. The Archons burden the soul, attracting us to works of evil, and pull us down into oblivion, making us forget who we are. (The Apocryphon of John)

This is very damned similar to what Philip K. Dick describes in terms of fake or spurious human beings. Not coincidentally, PKD got really heavily into gnosticism towards the end of his life. Another nice example from sci-fi/fantasy writing is Madeleine L’Engle’s insidious ecthroi, which are creatures of absolute darkness and negation in the universe, which can take on the artificial form of humans at will.

While I’m on a roll, I also recently came across basically this same idea from a totally different and rather bizarre source: Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong, the spiritual & physical discipline which is being so rigorously squashed in Communist China. In a rather odd turn of events, he diverted an interview with Time Magazine several years ago to talk at length about how there are aliens who are posing as humans who are trying to take over humanity.

Switching back to calling them demons for a second, I also noticed a reference to this in the trailer of an another upcoming movie that I’m looking forward to seeing, Constantine. In this trailer, Keanu Reeves, playing Alan Moore’s quintessential occult investigator, John Constantine “baptizes” or initiates a woman so that she can see the demons who are masquerading as humans. The catch is, of course, they can also now see her as an enemy of theirs. Incidentally, this plot line is very similar to a fantastic sci-fi movie from 1988 starring pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper, entitled They Live. Piper finds a pair of sunglasses which allow him to see skeletal aliens masquerading as humans, and messages of social control saturating everything.

If I can close with another quote from the Gnostic gospel, which gives instructions on how to handle encounters with the archons, it says:

Then you are to say to him, “I came from the Pre-existent One so that I might behold those of my kind and those who are alien.”