On Macrobes

Over the course of several prior posts I have noted encounters with what appear to be supernatural beings. An entire article, Contact, dealt heavily with this topic, noting the similarities between encounters with clowns, UFOs, mythological beings, and visions seen in entheogen induced states. In The Nine I recounted how a group based around Dr. Andrija Puharich (which included high society types such Arthur Young, as well as members of the Forbes and Astor families, among others) became convinced that they were channeling the Great Ennead. The Great Ennead, the gods of ancient Egypt, in turn claimed to be an advanced alien species looking to guide the spiritual development of humanity, or something along those lines. Finally, I recounted the supernatural encounters of members of Project Grill Flame, the US Army's remote viewing program, in a more recent piece.

At this point I would like to delve more into what exactly these beings are. In the process the cart will be put before the horse somewhat in that I will not attempt to explain heavily how these being's coexist with us upon the Earth while largely avoiding detection. This is, of course, an important topic but at present I still have more research I wish to do before writing at length on it. For the time being, I present my readers with the occult view of reality:

"...there was fabricated a secret theological system in which God was considered as the Grand Man and, conversely, man as the little god. Continuing this analogy, the universe was regarded as a man and, conversely, man as a miniature universe. The greater universe was termed the Macrocosm -the Great World or Body -and the Divine Life or spiritual entity controlling its functions was called the Macroprosophus. Man's body, or the individual human universe, was termed the Microcosm, and the Divine Life or spiritual entity controlling its functions was called the Microprosophus. The pagan Mysteries were primarily concerned with instructing neophytes in the true relationship existing between the Microcosmic man and those of the Macrocosmic Man constituted the most prized possession of the early initiates.
(The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly P Hall, pgs. 222-223)

In other words, the 'Microcosm' is the physical realm that we human beings inhabit. The 'Macrocosm' is the hidden realm inhabited by supernatural beings. As an interesting side note, I must present the physicist David Bohm's views on the nature of reality and the plausibility of this occult perception of it:

"One of Bohm's most startling assertions is that the tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image. Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all objects and appearances of our physical world in much the same way that a piece of holographic film gives birth to a hologram. Bohm calls this deeper level of reality the implicate (which means 'enfolded') order, and he refers to our own level of existence as the explicate, or unfolded, order.

"He uses these terms because he sees the manifestation of all forms in the universe as the result of countless enfoldings and unfoldings between these two orders. For example, Bohm believes an electron is not one thing but a totality or ensemble enfolded throughout the whole of space. When an instrument detects the presence of a single electron it is simply because one aspect of the electron's ensemble has unfolded, similar to the way an ink drop unfolds out of the glycerine, at that particular location. When an electron appears to be moving it is due to a continuous series of such unfoldments and enfoldments.

"Put another way, electrons and all other particles are no more substantive or permanent than the form a geyser of water takes as it gushes out of a fountain. They are sustained by a constant influx from the implicate order, and when a particle appears to be destroyed, it is not lost. It has merely enfolded back into the deeper order from which it sprang. A piece of holographic film and the image it generates are also an example of an implicate and explicate order. The film is an implicate order because the image encoded in its interference patterns is a hidden totality enfolded throughout the whole. The hologram projected from the film is an explicate order because it represents the unfolded and perceptible version of the image."
(The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot, pgs. 46-47) 

Here we see the Macrocosm and Microcosm recast as the 'implicate' and 'explicate' orders, respectively, yet the principles remain remarkably similar. We can also find overlap between the concept of the Macrocosm/implicate order and what shamanistic beliefs often referred to as the 'Otherworld'; or, as researcher Patrick Harpur dubs it, the 'daimonic reality':

"The Otherworld is always imagined as beginning at the edge of our known world. It can be the wilderness outside the city walls or the unexplored regions at the edge of maps, labeled 'Here be dragons.' It can begin at the brink of the ocean -or at the golden gate. As the boundaries of the Unknown are pushed back, the world largely mapped, the Otherworld is located in outer space. Early aliens claimed to come from Venus, Mars, or the Moon; later, when these planets seemed more local, less remote, they claimed to come from distant star systems such as Zeta Reticuli or the Pleiades.

"Religion sets the boundary of the Unknown at the limits of human life. In traditional cultures, the other world beyond life, after death, is immanent -another reality contained within this one. In Christianity, it is transcendent, a separate reality removed from Earth. Scientism recognizes no Otherworld, but... daimonic reality has a way of subverting it. Thus scientism constructs its own literal versions of a transcendent and an immanent Otherworld. The former appears in the weird models of the universe articulated by astronomers and cosmologists; the latter appears in the speculations of nuclear physicists.

"It is worth lingering a moment over the Otherworld of the nuclear physicists, if only because their discipline is widely held to be the doyen of sciences. They, above all, seek to establish the 'facts' of matter. I would maintain, however, that their subatomic realm is merely another variant of daimonic reality. Everything that is predicated of it could, for instance, be applied with equal justice to the land of Fairy. Both worlds invert the cozy Newtonian world we inhabit: laws of time, space, or causality and, of course, matter are ignored. (Once past the 'event horizon' of a black hole, say astrophysicists, time slows to a standstill; or, once inside the black hole, it 'runs backwards.') Subatomic physics introduce extra dimensions -'string theory' allows for ten, I think: our four, plus six more, compacted very tightly. Multi-dimensionality is a staple of science fiction and ufology.

"The 'daimons' of subatomic 'inner space' are called particles, although strictly speaking they aren't -electrons, for example, are both particles waves at the same time. They are paradoxical, both there and not-there, like fairies. Like UFOs they cannot be measured exactly: we can calculate their speed, or their position, but not both. This, roughly, is what Werner Heisenberg called the Uncertainty Principle, and it applies to all daimonic phenomena. We cannot know subatomic particles in themselves; we can only identify them via their daimonic traces. Like minute Yetis, they used to leave tracks in vats of detergent placed at the bottom of mines;nowadays they are more likely to leave their spoor on computer screens linked to particle accelerators."
(Daimonic Reality, pgs. 172-173) 

And this provides me with a fine lead into the concept of 'daimons.' These beings have been called various things over the years, but for the purposes of this blog they are dubbed 'Macrobes.'

The word Macrobe is generally associated with the work of Michael Tsarion, though it is much older. Tsarion claims the word was originally coined by the Elizabethan mage John Dee to describe the beings he encountered during his Enochian working. This is quite possible as I have yet to see anything that contradicts this account. Regardless, occultists had developed the Micro/Macro view of the world by at least the 19th century, though a hidden realm had been acknowledged since the beginning of time.

"Humanity has always been attended by invisible beings. Guides, guardian spirits and 'helpers' populate tribal lore and scriptural texts, they reappear as guardian angels in the Christian tradition, they form the basis of modern Spiritualism and channeling, and they vie for attention in spiritism of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Latin America. Throughout recorded history, an abundance of writing -ranging from the fervently religious to the studiously anthropological -testify to an oft-encountered sense of presence.

"Embracing all races and creeds, the non-physical guardians is generally endowed with a common aim: to protect its wards and to promote personal growth by encouraging adherence to the highest ideals. The names assigned to these spirits are as diverse as the cultures in which they appear: the Romans called them genii; the Greeks, daimones, the Zoroastrians, fravashis; the Mongols, Dzol-Dzajagatsi; the natives of New Guinea, tapum, to name but a few.

"Even before history was recorded, shamans worldwide were invoking guardian spirits for the purposes of healing and protection. The means of invocation have taken many forms, from sleep deprivation and the ingestion of hallucinogens to enforced seclusion and acoustic stimulation, usually involving extended exposure to loud and persistent drumming."
(The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, Joe Fisher, pg. 82)

Medieval occultist divided macrobes into different classes:

"According to medieval occultists, all invisible beings can be divided into four classes: the angels, the gods of the ancients; the devils or demons, the fallen angels; the souls of the dead; and the elemental spirits, which correspond to Kirk's Secret Commonwealth. In the fourth group are the gnomes, who inhabit the earth and correspond to mine-haunting fairies, goblins, pixies, korrigans, leprechauns, and the domovoys of Russian legends, and the sylphs, who inhabit the air. These subdivisions are obviously arbitrary, and Paracelsus himself would admit it is extremely difficult to provide definitions for those various classes. The bodies of the Elementals are 'of an elastic semi-material essence, etherial enough so as not to be detected by the physical sight, and they may change their forms according to certain laws.'"
(Dimensions, Jacques Vallee, pg. 90)

Daimons and elementals are considered to be similar beings in occult literature. 33rd degree Freemason and occultist extraordinaire Manly P Hall notes in his epic Secret Teachings of All Ages that "The Greeks gave the name daemon to some of these elementals, especially those of the higher order, and worshiped them" (pg. 330).

Even Dr. Samuel Sagan, in his clinical work at the Clairvision School of Australia, observed similar entities in clients he treated:

"...fragments, the astral bits that break off from the shattered astral bodies of the dead. We studied a few particular types of fragments -those left following a miscarriage, a termination, or a delivery, or after the natural 'death' of a twin in the womb..

"Fragments are not the only type of entities, but they are by far the most common. However, they can sometimes be confused because, even though they come from human beings, they do not necessarily look human."
(Entity Possession, pg. 102)

Personally, I am very skeptical of 'ghosts', based on both real life experiences as well as occult interpretations.

"Many a magician has lost his life as the result of opening a way whereby submundane creatures could become active participants in his affair. When Eliphas Levi invoked the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana, what did he hope to accomplish? Is the gratification of curiosity a motive sufficient to warrant the devotion of an entire lifetime to a dangerous and unprofitable pursuit? If the living Apollonius refused to divulge his secrets to the profane, is there any probability that after death he would disclose them to the curious-minded? Levi himself did not dare assert that the specter which appeared to him was actually the great philosopher, for Levi realized only too well the proclivity of elementals to impersonate those who have passed on. The majority of modern mediumistic apparitions are but elemental creatures masquerading through bodies composed of thought substance supplied by the very persons desiring to behold these wraiths of decarnate beings."
(The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly P Hall, pg. 317)

Sagan's concept of fragments, derived from his own observations and Eastern teachings, is more plauisible. What appear as 'ghosts' are not the spirits of the dead per se, but a fragment of the spirit. While insisting that most entity encounters are these fragments, he still acknowledges elementals:

"Elementals are nonphysical little beings that stand behind earth, water, air, or fire, or behind flowers, trees, or other plants. They can be related to the various spirits of nature of which can be found in nearly all the mythologies and folklores of the planet...

"Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan records on entities all mention the possibility of elemental spirits of nature behaving like entities at times and creating various health or mental disorders. If we analyze the symptoms reported by this client, we can see that they correspond to qualities the ancient medical lores (both eastern and western) used to relate to the earth elemental: heaviness, lethargy, inertia, feeling cold and craving for the Sun's warmth and so forth. The 'little people' are one of the ways elemental beings can be perceived. The elemental beings behind the elements have the reputation of being hard to see, for they are tricky and like to hide."
(Entity Possession, Samuel Sagan, pgs. 105-106)

The legendary Swiss psychologist Carl Jung also embraced the concept of 'daimons' in his theories of archetypes, of which I've written more on here. For our purposes, here are some of Jung's views on daimons as they relate to archetypes:

"In his earlier work Jung would have called the personal daimons complexes -those parts of his patients' unconscious psyches which, having as we find in cases of 'multiple personality disorder.' These psychic fragments are like personalities in their own right, with their own voices. The aim of psychotherapy was (broadly) to trace the cause of splitting off in the patient's history and bring it to consciousness so that the fragment or complex might be reintegrated and so cease to make itself heard through undesirable symptoms. Strickly speaking, we do not have complexes -they have us. We are powerless in the grip of obesessions, compulsions, fixations, aversions, and so on.

"But even as the complexes are unraveled they reveal contents which do not belong to personal history -contents which point downward, as it were, to the impersonal world of the archetype. Here we find daimons in whose grip we are equally powerless, no longer in the neurotic sense, but in the sense of being impelled by destiny, by a god.

"In addition, Jung recognized that it is the nature of the ego -the sense of 'I-ness' -to deceive us into believing that we are single unified personalities. But in reality the psyche is composed of many different personalities, each which claims its own, which the ego is driven to ignore, subordinate, or annihilate. Jung therefore wwanted to shift the center of the personality away from the ego and towards the self, which he conceived as a complexio oppositorum, a complex of opposites where our different and opposing personalities could be harmoniously accommodated, allowed to co-inhere as a kind of paradoxical multiplicity-in-unity.

"Jung granted the relative autonomy of the complexes by calling them the 'littlke people.' He saw that they related to the archetypes as the daimons related to, and flowed into, the gods. The relaionship is not static but dynamic: it forms archetypal patterns -narrative actions which we call myth."
(Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur, pgs. 45-46)

But being recast as a psychological complex is not the only thing the modern world has done to the macrobes. Another role they're speculated to play is the lead in the whole UFO phenomenon which has become a ligament modern myth. For years researchers such as John Keel and Jacques Vallee have pointed out the similarities between UFO encounters and those of the Middle Ages with elementals and in antiquity with daimons. I've written more on these links, as well as the relationship between mythology and UFOs to entheogens, here. Harpur notes on the growing modern myth of aliens:

"In one sense, the problem of the grays is not especially pressing. Only in the USA, it seems, have encounters with them risen to the surface and begun to be noticed by the instruments of official culture such as the press, the academic world, the Churches, and so forth. This testimony to the considerable groundswell of interest they have aroused in popular, unofficial culture. Books about them, unconsidered by 'serious' or literary people, have sold not merely in the thousands, but in millions. A 1991 survey of 6,000 American adults concluded that as many as 3.7 million abductions by grays may have taken place... it revealed that daimonic experiences are -as anyone who bothers to ask around knows -extremely common. Moreover, whatever the case may be as regards the number or actuality of abductions, they constitute a grassroots belief, a modern constellation in the collective unconscious, a stirring of our universal Imagination, which may justly be called a contemporary myth.

"I have no doubt that the grays will fade away as the imaginative configurations which contain them becomes exhausted... But the grays will reappear in different shapes, while new variants of their myth will be woven out of old threads. For daimons exist, and will continue to exist. Like the fairies, they retain the same shape as long as they are attached to a relatively unchanging landscape and to a relatively unchanging culture. But this does not make them any less mysterious. So, too, it is not possible to explain the grays; but we are entitled to ask whether a changig landscape and culture has anything to do with the form in which they have chosen to appear -to ask, that is, 'Why grays? Why now?'"
(Daimonic Reality, pgs. 267-268)

It's a good question, one Harpur largely avoids answering. I myself largely believe the rise of the modern UFO movement combined with the decline of the 'fairy-faith' has more to do with a changing world view. In antiquity and the Middle Ages the West was dominated by a religious world view. In the modern era our world view has progressively been usurped by science. Thusly our myths reflect a changing of the guard -now daimons appear to us as 'nuts and bolts' flying saucers that can theoretically be explained by Newtonian science if one doesn't go to deeply into the phenomena. This could also explain why, in non-Western countries, UFO contactees are as likely to see dwarves as grays in those spaceships. The ability to shape shift in relation to the observer's perspective would also be consistent with quantum physics:

"Perhaps most astonishing of all is that there is compelling evidence that the only time quanta manifest as particles is when we are looking at them. For instance, when an electron isn't being looked at, experimental findings suggest that it is always a wave...

"Bohr pointed out that if subatomic particles only come into existence in the presence of an observer, then it is meaningless to speak of a particle's properties and characteristics as existing before they are observed. This was disturbing to many physicists, for much of science was based on discovering the properties of phenomena."
(The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot, pgs. 34-35)

And that, I think, is enough on Macrobes and the other side for one installment. In a future post I shall go into more detail on interactions with these beings and the fallout that can occur.