So far we’ve talked about visits from dead relatives and from entities of all different types. The next most obvious place to take this conversation might be religious figures. Has anybody out there had any otherworldly encounters with religious or mythical figures?
I’ve actually had two. Well, one definite, and one maybe. The maybe one occurred while I was in the middle of a really serious intense bout of research into a Hindu goddess named Durga. I dreamt that I was in a small home of an exotic woman who sat me down across a small table, and made me look through an illustrated book of blue-skinned gods and goddesses, presumably Hindu mythology. I leafed through the book until I realized who it was I was talking to, and asked her about it. She didn’t reply, but smiled knowingly. So that one could go either way.
But I’ve definitely had a dream where I met Jesus. If that makes me sound like a nut, then who cares. We’re obviously way past that point here anyway, aren’t we? It was actually pretty wild and happened just about a year ago. I dreamt I was laying in an ancient town square under a purple evening sky amidst a crowd of beggars and travelers. We’d come to see Jesus and hear him speak. It was night time, but he was making his way through the crowd. He stopped at my blanket, smiled and looked down at me. His eyes glowed orange against the sky. He then told me a parable about what my life’s mission was to be. It was about a person who’d gone to the doctor to be healed and the doctor only made them sicker. It seems very appropriate of a parable for the work I do with religion and spirituality.
In any event, I’d like to hear about other people’s experiences with religious figures, saints, mythological characters - however you want to slice it. It doesn’t need to be as dramatic as this example either. It could simply be a voice you heard or something you’re sure was beyond ordinary reckoning (but likely not a ghost, monster or other entity).
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35 Comments
When I was first getting interested in AFrican religions I went on a date with this girl named Joy to this Mexican restaurant in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco.
She was this very beautiful, flirtatious blackgirl from philadelphia and she showed up for dinner wearing a yellow dress. Anyway, a bunch of friends of hers showed up too - just sort of white hipster kid types.
One of’em had black and red greasepaint stripes on his cheeks. And I said “Why are those there?” And he said, “well thats because I identify with Eshu, he’s this trickster god in this Cuban religion called santeria.”
And then this other friend of hers showed up wearing a green sweater. His name was peter and believe it or not he was a blacksmith. So naturally this reminded me of theblacksmith god Ogun who is syncretized with St Peter - his colors are green and black.
She had like 4 or 5 other friends show up. In some eerie way they all seemed to represent different gods to me. But none of them knew me, obviously hadn’t planned this and neither they nor Joy knew that whether or not to go further with this stuff was something that had been weighing on me seriously for the past week or so or even that I was interested in it. With the exception of the one kid with the greasepaint I doubt any of the rest of them even knoew what it was. Anyway it was strange.
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WHen I was 25 I was living in NYC and going to SVA. I went with two friends to see the lion king on my b-day and when we came back there was this little cat camped out in front of our apartment building and the kids had poured gasoline on her and were going to set her on fire!
So I took her away from them and brought her to an overnight clinic. She was wild - a homeless feral cat - and very vicious, real fists of fury, she could and still draw massive amounts of blood with claws that move faster than the human eye at the least provocation or sometimes none at all.
Anyway, my roomate promised to keep her if I moved to california at the end of the summer but then suddenly announced that he didn’t want to. WHich was fine with me because as antisocial and violent as she was she had really grown on me. This was ten years ago - she is sitting on my lap as I write this.
Anyway I named her Durga, she has been with me through thick and thin, sometimes even accompanies me in my dream adventures, I love that little cat.
Briefly
1. Once had a dream I was riding in a canoe in egypt, through reeds. Came across a marble pavillion with big columns, floating on the water. Jesus and an unidentified man sat with cups of KoolAid, and there was already a place for me at the table.
2. When I was a kid I literally thought that George Burns was God.
3. Along those lines, once when I was stoned out of my gourd some friends took me to see Moulin Rouge as the $1.50 movie. During the film I was utterly convinced that Nicole Kidman was an avatar of the divine, and that she was trying to reveal herself to me.
4. On some lonely college new years night I got totally wasted and as I puked into the toilet I felt like The Devil was “milking” my head for all my internal juices. Later, in a daze on the back patio, I saw an old man walk by in a walker and became convinced he was actually “Father Time”.
5. Early on in my drinking career someone told me that if you drank enough gin you would hit all of the chakra’s at once. I tried this and ended up in the shower with all of my clothes on, shaving my feet. Apparently I started to scream jibberish about the virgin mary and, this is no joke, my nose started to bleed. Here is a picture from that night:
There are probably some more legitimate encounters, but these are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head. Most of these in retrospect seem like adding too much flair to otherwise ordinary life experiences, but on the other hand, at the time I was more than convinced something sacred was occurring.
are pictures not allowed in comments?
Here, I swear it’s funny.
I’ve had several very vivid, lucid dreams in a realm I can only describe as a sort-of mock hell–one was listening to a bizarre sermon these malformed, short little humanoids were giving, and I think that gave me more insight into what a “demon” might be than anything else, at least, I got a powerful paradigm to work from. In any case, whenever I end up in the “hell” setting, I always feel like it’s beneath me to be there, sort of like it’s a cesspool for stupid theories, bad religions, and cruel feelings. This is in contrast with those feelings of sheer terror that manifest sometimes.
While I have no real “wiccan” background, and think it’s often a bunch of boring, king-of-the-sandbox type stuff, I’ve encountered “the white woman”–whom most archaeologists assume was the death-archetype in earth-centered religions, but also may be a Zorasterian demon. I actually had two roomies who had frightening dreams with a near-identical figure, and I knew someone who, on mescaline, saw her on the stairwell in a house I lived in. It only sort of came out gradually, after we’d each had these experienced, that we’d all seen the same thing, so in no conscious way had we suggested the story. Again, I tend to avoid attributing objective reality to “entities”, but it was odd noticing how pedestrian our attitude towards the thing was. I think Joel Birocco discusses similar encounters in one of the most under-rated occult works ever, Kaos 14…
After a massive, massive, massive dose of DXM (”Take the red pill… Good. Take another seventy-nine of the red pills.”), which I suggest no one do because the stuff is very hard on the liver, the brain, and the kidneys, and will make you a good candidate for the parkinson’s ward for about a week afterwards–I encountered another earth-centered-entity, the horned man, and he scared me worse than I’ve ever been before. Pretty sure I saw–close eyed–Abraham or maybe Moses during my most recent mushroom/syrian rue cocktail; he seemed to relating something about Yahweh, the sacredness of letters, and sigilization–I could actually see the alphabet, and sigils I had cast and would cast like burning letters, which felt more “divine” than most anything, save maybe that horned-man encounter.
I met Ganesh one semester in college. In intermediate sculpture. I don’t know why I chose him to be the subject of my wood carving, but by the end of the term, he and I had an intimate understanding. Hammer and Chisel to wood, calloused hands, the eventual failing grade I got when I could not complete the project in time, probably taught me more about obstacles, determination, adversity than anything else in my life.
Something really weird happened recently and I’m not sure what to say about it. I guess I should preface this with the fact that I am not a follower of either Native American culture or Egyptian culture and let you make of it what you will.
2 days after Hurricane Katrina hit, I followed my normal routine and went to bed after watching the Daily Show. As I closed my eyes the color purple flooded vision field, and I became unable to move. Mind you, I had just gotten in bed and closed my eyes. I was not yet asleep or at least I dont think so. Emerging from the purple darkness was a wingspan and suddenly I was aloft on the back of an immense hawk. We soared in the darkness, I wasnt afraid but confused. I had to keep asking myself if this was real. Slowly we descended on air currents, and although I couldnt see anything yet I felt an oppressive heaviness in the air and started hearing weeping. As I looked down al I could see was destruction and wisps of smoke like things emerging from the rubble. I was told these were souls trapped and disoriented by their own deaths and that we were there to guide them to the other side. I was told to mentally beckon to them to get their attention and invite them to follow to their next destination. At the end of the journey I was not allowed to pass on through to the next destination but deposited back in my bed. If I were to make a guess, my teacher was Horus, the hawk headed God of ancient Egypt, but perhaps Rev Max or someone else with a different lineage ould help me figure this out.
r.a.w., in the cosmic trigger talks about andreja puharich`s experience looking into uri gellars`s eyes and seeing him turn into a hawk. the ancient egyptians would call that spirit horus, but the human neurology creates this out of the collective consciousness as a symbol of part of our selves. when i think of a hawk i think of a hunting machine eqiupped to fly fast, see great distances and kill effectively a survivor. this part of yourself was trying to show you experiences needed for your growth. providing you with tools to live. that`s what this is all about. living.
the lesson in that dream is in what you were shown and how you reacted to the images and what you`ve decided as a result.
Please forgive me sporkfoo, but you comment triggered something in my mind:
Does that sounds vaguely familiar to anyone else? Making an elephant in a shop class and eventually failing? Just sit and think a moment. Where have you heard that before?
It immediately reminded me of Brian’s dilemma in the movie The Breakfast Club - remember he had to make a elephant lamp that turned on a light when you pulled the trunk - and it ended up being a major obstacle for him I wonder if Ganesh decided to make a collective unconscious cameo when John Hughes wasn’t looking!?
Okay, i’m sorry, i seriously JUST woke up.
The interesting thing is that the hawk was allowing me to be co-involved in acts of compassion in helping these souls travel toward their final destination. I understand that there is something in Shamanism that corresponds to guiding souls. I saw it mainly as a call to combine compassion with action. I think the most disturbing thing is that this experience materialised so quickly, without active meditation or spiritual preparation.
I got in bed and BAM! was on this journey. That was a bit frightening.
Wow, Gina’s post sounds like a textbook abduction with a false-memory overlay.
I had a vivid dream a few years back that begins at my grandparents old house, which I haven’t been at in over 15 years or so. I was sitting in the back of my grandfather’s pickup truck, just amazed at the crazy activity going on in the sky. It was incredible, the sky was shifting crazy psychedelic colors, and there were all kinds of UFO’s flying around, they were chasing each other around, some were getting blown up, it was mayhem. Then these three very ebony brothers appeared out of nowhere to see me, they were dressed in the most sumptuous, very royal attire. They were just loaded down with gold and jewels, and they had long beards. Their presence was so heavy, that it seemed like I was now in some kind of vacuum with them. I don’t think we actually spoke, but it was a very intense and solemn kind of emotional bonding. Then there’s a great explosion in the sky, and sparkly glittery stuff falling out of the sky everywhere. A piece of it lands close to me, and now there’s other people all around me watching me anxiously. This thing that has fallen from the sky looks like a glittery, glowing slice of cantaloupe, so I walk over to it pick it up, and kind of gesture to the others looking on to see if they want to share, but no one is interested. They seemed really freaked out that I had picked it up and was holding it. So I take a bite of it, and that’s where the dream ends. Anyway, I had the impression that these three figures were some sort of “wise menâ€.
To me Gina’s journey is exactly that, a shamanic Journey. This really is textbook, classic. That’s one of the main things that shamen do is serve a psychopompic function - guide spirits who have become disoriented in the wake of disasters or mass deaths and cannot move on.
I have friends who do this, Michael Harner of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies trains people how to do this, people have been doing it for thousands of years in exactly the way that you have described here.
For some reason Horus thought you were a good candidate that either you enough juju or enough compassion or both to help him so you did. Well, good on ya, that’s kind of amazing! I wonder if that was a one time thing or if Horus has taken an interest in you. You might want to investigate this.
SHamanism is not a religion it is a technique that a lot of different religions use, if you can it with no training or prep then you may just be a natural.
If that’s who it was was horus. Maybe it was just the hawk as hawk. THe animal in itself, not necessarily with any connection to ancient egypt. Just as a shamanic power animal, period.
As anthropologist, Dr. Michael Harner, who has studied shamanism all around the world, stated in a recent interview, “When you start shamanic journeying, if you’re the kind of person the spirits feel compassion for and want to help, you’re going to get lots of teachings you never asked for and never expected. Because once you go through those doors – whatever those doors are – the spirits will teach you according to your preparation, and your life will change. Even one journey may start changing your life.â€
gina–
was it a deep purple, or more pinkish?
i had some crazy experiences some time ago with what i later concluded were malevolent olmec jaguar deities. these things are half baby and half jaguar and all scary as shit. i’ll elaborate when i have more time . . . .
Jeremy, don’t you think that’s a little weird, seeing as your last name is “puma”?
Do you wear pumas? If you were an old school rapper that would be awesome too.
No it was deep purple, and the shape of the wings emerged as if out of smoke or purple clouds. There is no doubt the scene was New Orleans and that the whisps were human souls. I could feel them, sense them and sense their disorientation, and desperation. As
I beckoned and comforted them, for some reason a human voice comforted them and they then followed or were swept up willingly. There is a bit more. I had the feeling of being recruited and being told this was part of my path.
I have had 2 other lucid dreams one 15yrs ago, that alerted me to a calling, and another 3 years ago which hinted more specifically towards a path. Then I had my gnosis experience which I spoke about earlier in Jeremy’s blog. I’ve experienced some other random phenomenon and revelatory experiences, this dream was just the most recent .
I have never been religious, I was raised RC, though I always known there was more than organised religion. I started examining Tibetan buddhism by age 13 and by age 15 had used just about every entheogen available at that time.
I live a quiet contemplative life in the country, with my family and my animals. I have always been close to and been able to heal animals. I am not a hermit or a recluse, but just an ordinary soccer mom kind of person. Oh yeah and my early experience with Catholicism has killed any desire for ritualised practice.
Jeremy we have a center for MesoAmerican studies here. What was the name of your entity?
GINA:
This lady knows her shit you might drop her a line
heh, my last name actually comes from the latin word pomum, for ‘apple.’ same root word as ‘pomme’ in french. i wish it was the shoe company, ’cause then i might be frickin’ wealthy. but, no relation, alas. nearest we can figure is that we were apple farmers in sicily waaaaay back in the day.
and yes, i do own a pair of euro-style puma kicks– they’re comfy and rad.
as to the jaguar deities, who were methinks actually manifestations of a single entity of some kind (god or critter, who can say?), it wasn’t a name i’ve ever found in the literature, and believe me, i’ve looked. we don’t have any real record of the names of olmec deities, but i studied this area in depth as my minor in college (pre-conquest mesoamerican mythology). it’s related to the werejaguar concept that later found its way into mayan religion; the term some might recognize is ‘nagual,’ but this particular entity was somehow connected to what would later be called ‘tlaloc‘ by the aztecs.
this happened one evening back in 1981 or 2, when i still had hair. i came out the side door of our house onto the gravel driveway and looked up into the sky in a southerly direction about 11 o`clock high. there was a red circular haze forming, not unlike the northern lights, but reddish. the haze spread as i stood and watched to the point where it spread across the sky and radiated out like spokes on a wheel. all the time this was happening my dad and brother were on the driveway too but were speechless and still, like they were in a trance. i have no idea how long the episode lasted or whether they saw the phenomina. i never brought it up with them. it`s like i dreamed the whole thing, yet it happened in broad daylight.
it has puzzled me ever since.
then there was the time i was hit with a beam of light as i lay in my bed. it pinned me to the matress and i couldn`t move. i must have fell back to sleep because i woke up later and was able to move again. some acid flashback!
Ah, tlaloc, so you’re killing and eating babies, are you?
I just thought of another really good quasi-religious dream I had about a year and a half ago. I was staying at a friends house at the time and in the dream I went out into the street because there was some commotion. A small group of people had assembled on the corner and were pointing up at a ledge on the second story of a building. Perched on it was a living breathing two-headed eagle, with a brown body and black heads, as I recall.
I stood there looking at it when a girl tugged at my sleeve and I turned around to see what she wanted. She asked if I remembered her, and I kind of did but kind of didn’t. Then she took me down this hidden path next to my friends house which I’d never seen before. A big hidden valley was suddenly behind his house and we went down into it. At the bottom we found an ancient temple and the girl took me inside.
Once in, I found priests and holy people from all over the world gathered together. In turn, each one unrolled scrolls and tapestries depicting this bicephalous eagle throughout the ages. Supposedly it only appeared once every thousand years or something.
I’ve told this dream to a variety of people and nobody’s ever really given me a solid lead on what the two-headed eagle is all about. I didn’t know anything about it at the time, but the symbol of it appears in fucking everything as far as esoteric traditions are concerned.
I mentioned it to a friend once who is a Mason and he looked at me like I was nuts and asked me how I knew about it, but wouldn’t tell me what he thought it meant.
My Adidas are fresh and you know its true.
There an explanation of this in the book ARt and SYmbols of the Occult IIRC
Well what did it say? I’ve seen alchemical references to it as well, about the coniunctio or something to that effect.
can’t remeber i think they might have posited some connection with Levi’s verison of the baphomet symbol
this kooky homeless guy I used to know claimed to be a high level mason, he also claimed to have two tailbones and said that’s what the two-headed eagle represented, the descendants of kings with unusual mutations most evident in the spine
fun guy edmund. Took everything he said with a huge boulder of salt tho
heheh, not personally, they’re a bit too fattening for my tastes.
one thing i wanted to mention: most of these encounters we’re looking at have been with anthropomorphized versions of deities (werejaguars, talking hawks, ganesha, etc.)– they all ‘communicate’ in explicable terms. what about honest-to-goodness mystical encounters with deific powers? i’ve had more of those than i can shake a stick at.
you’d be amazed at some of the phenomena that have manifested during gnostic eucharist celebrations, for instance, which i consider direct physical presence of divinity. well, *you* might not be amazed, but lots of people would.
i won’t leave you hangin’. during gnostic mass, i’ve experienced. hopefully the gnostic mafia won’t cut out my tongue for describing this stuff. ;):
- choruses of extra voices singing during hymns and chants
- bright pinkish lights in my head
- the fluttering of wings on the top of my head
- candle flames that move in time with the prayer
- visible ‘heat’ above the chalice (like on a hot car hood)
- columns of ‘angelic’ figures standing on each side of the altar
and that just scratches the surface. it’s not just me, either– these phenomena have been verified by other congregants. it doesn’t happen every time; in fact, more often than not none of this stuff happens. but, when it happens, you definitely notice.
it’s not as though a bearded guy in a dress is standing there passing out flyers, but it’s definitely the god saying ‘hey, look, pay attention!’
Wow thats amazing
FOr some reason I had always imagined that official church gnosticism would dismiss these sorts of phenom as demiurgic illusions or psychic atavisms to be discouraged -
folks i met on usenet gave me the impression that the deeper you got into organized gnosticism the more austere and ascetic everything became, word rejecting vegetraian celibacy, mistrust of art & beauty etc
its really nice to hear thats not true
heh, no way, at least not in our chapel. we celebrate the presence of odd phenomena.
now, when you turn ‘em into the be-all-end-all, there’s a problem. we recognize that they’re interesting and unique experiences, but they’re definitely *not* gnosis, nor are they the point of the eucharist. we’d still celebrate eucharist even if nothing like this happened.
Puma: What Gnostic church or group is this? If there’s an affiliate in the wormy big apple, I’d like to check it out.
My last semester of college, which was the first time I strayed from being a lamer (this was an affectionalte self-identifying term some of us kids from back home who were teet-totaling but did lots of crazy shit anyway gave ourselves. We weren’t punks and weren’t *usually* holier-than-thou so we didn’t identify with the term “straight edge”). Anyway, when I first started using pot, I decided I wanted to do more with it than just sit around and laugh at stuff and eat junk food (nothing wrong with that, but if that’s all you’re doing with it, I felt it was a waste…so much for not holier-than-thou!). I’d read a section in Keith Johnstone’s improvisational theater book Impro dealing with “mask work” and its relation to Hatian rituals and ancient religious rites in general. So I made myself a mask and one night, after smoking up, I went to my dorm room, locked the door, and started kneeling and praying, then chanting and prostrating myself. I also, grabbed a piece of porno and decided to stare at it intently without fantasizing or arousal or anything like that, just to see through it…I started to see lots of interesting things that I can’t quite remember, but after doing this for awhile, I decided it was time to put on the mask. There was a mirror on the back of my dorm room door and I had the intuition to look at the reflection of my mask-face. I put my head straight up against the mirror and eventually found myself staring at the reflection of my right eye in the mask. Suddenly, it was like the pupil of my eye was all that was there. And then the pupil was a window at the end of a tunnel and it was like I traveled down that tunnel until I saw into a dusty, bare room in which there stood an old, bearded man with tan skin, who was deep in prayer.
A couple of weeks later, I went into the room of a Baha’i guy on my floor who had a hookah that he smoked flavored tobacco through with some other guys. It was the first time I’d been in his room and as the hookah was pased, I noticed a picture in his room of the guy I’d seen through my eye in that pot vision. I asked him who it was and he told me it was Abdul Baha, who was the son of the founder of the Baha’is. I told him about the vision, framing it as a dream and not mentioning the pot or the ritual (I was his RA!). He ended up telling me that he’d met a man in Guyana (where he was from) who had had a similar dream and later became a Baha’i. I’d never seen a picture of Abdul Ba’ha before, so it was exciting and wierd. Thus began an 8 month investigation, consideration and flirtation with the Ba’hai faith for me.
In the end, of course, I ended up reading some hidden history of the mevement that made that skeptic’s spirit awaken in me, but I still hold that vision to have been pretty significant nonetheless.
Anyone ever seen Neil Jordan’s “The Butcher Boy”? Great flick with Sinead O’ Connor in a small role as the Virgin Mary. This post and the comments bring up certain things that remind me of that movie.
I saw Jesus once, and some angels in a dream, though the angels were pretending to be human. I saw a version of hell, and I’ve been to Purgatory and spoke to a ‘woman’ there who had bronze skin that was both liquid and solid at the same time, like molten metal. Once when I was sick with a fever a long time ago, I spoke to this thing that didn’t have form, the only way I can describe it is if you closed your eyes and see how that looks, except have that blackness moving in a blobby shape while your eyes are open watching this thing. I didn’t remember what we talked about or have a clue as to what that thing was.
Two nights ago I had a dream where I was in some place with different entities and one I met look like a Satyr, he was short fat had long hair and a beard, small horns though he had what looked like pigfeet instead of goat feet, and he kinda made me think of Ron Jeremy the way he looked. I also saw a much smaller one skipping around. I made a comment on him being a satyr or having pigfeet I forget what exactly I said and he got pissed off and we got into a fight, his chest started to expand and get bloated and he fell over on his back and couldn’t get back up. He kept expanding like a balloon until he blew up and there were small remains that looked like a popped balloon that I knew had to be destroyed, so I moved my hand in some gesture and the remains lifted up and were consumed by an invisible fire. So does anyone know of any mythical creatures like this? A satyr with pigs feet?
I used to have these dreams as a kid that I was in a reddish pink hospital room where they applied some kind of a sticky brown paste to my nipples and whatnot. Doctors and other adulty figures would stand around my naked body and remark that I was coming along. The most emotive point I recall about these dreams I had, long, long, long before I understood the difference between genders was, that in them, I became a girl, I experienced being a female before I even knew such a difference existed.
Whoa. Did I just blurt that out?
Sometimes I wonder if this is because of some form of early in life “ritual abuse”, outside of my parents’ tender care. But I was a sick kid back then and spent apparently a lot of time in Denver Children’s Hospital with insane fevers as an infant. So I believe these dreams have everything to do with the fact that I was hospitalized for quite some time at a very early age. I honestly have no idea where this affinity with being female came from as far as my time spent as a proto-sentient human is concerned.
Nevertheless, those images of brown paste being painted around my nipples in a reddish pink room, filled with nondescript big people has never left me.
I honestly have no idea where this affinity with being female came from as far as my time spent as a proto-sentient human is concerned.
Well, I see one obvious possibility. But I normally take a skeptical view of early memory, or at least fixed interpretations.