Nephilim, aliens, AI and other stuff

I speculate on English and the Weird, part 1

This is a bit of a grab-bag post as I’m rattling around some ideas for a opera libretto I’m working on (don’t you want to see this opera now???). There will be more parts as I work out these ideas. I hope you comment with your own thoughts on this zany but increasingly inescapable topic.

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I read the transcript of this absolute knockout of a podcast episode from Orthodox priests Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young, and now I’m speculating about humanity and our relationship (both past and present) with extra-human intelligences in the world.

I take it for granted that those intelligences exist; it’s part of my baked-in conservatism. Every society that has the ability to communicate—whether through pictographs, hieroglyphs, words—has accounts of interactions with things that aren’t human, aren’t animal, but are something else. These creatures (I choose the word deliberately) seem divine, but at second glance, they are oddly contingent on the created order. They are “above” the natural order, it seems (they can fly, or they are disembodied, or they have supernatural powers or insights), but they also apparently aren’t entirely self-sufficient. The democracy of the dead has spoken: there’s something out there.

Fr. Damick and Fr. De Young talk about the fact that a ton of cultures have Flood narratives, but they also get into a less well-known common element of those narratives: that these are narratives of decline. The Flood stories aren’t just stories of cities that got leveled and then rebuilt and we’re pretty much back where we started. They are stories of cultural and civilizational loss. The cultures that existed before the Flood were sophisticated and advanced; after the Flood, humanity took a big step backwards. We even see this in the story of Genesis, in those crazy verses about the Nephilim and the sons of God and the daughters of men (the priests do a deep reading of those verses, definitely check it out). Before the Flood, there were “men of renown” building huge cities (following the example of Cain). There were giants in the land, a description that certainly includes physical size, but could also have spiritual and intellectual connotations.

Fr. Andrew puts it this way:

• “And then later there’s this—and we’re going to talk about this later, I know—this fascination with the idea of lost wisdom that didn’t survive the flood, and how do you get these secrets. There’s this massive sort of line in history that’s drawn by the flood. There’s everything that happens before it and there’s everything that happens after it. I mean, now, of course, there’s the notion of BC and AD: before Christ, and then anno Domini, the year of the Lord, with the advent of Christ. And that is sort of, for Christians, the massive demarcating line in history. But before this, the flood is kind of it, and it’s worldwide, that there was this whole flourishing—from their point of view—human civilization. From God’s point of view, it was not flourishing in the right way! And then it’s gone. It’s all gone.”

Before the Flood, humanity knew something, or was in contact with something that knew something, that we’ve forgotten. After the Flood, these elements—the giants, the cities, the dizzying sense of cultural advance—have vanished. Something, it seems—some technology, some insight, some knowledge, some connection—was destroyed in the Flood. The story in Genesis And we, with all our darkest tendencies, have been trying to rebuild it ever since.

That’s all super interesting, but here’s what I am really intrigued by: the preponderance of UFO sightings in Anglophone nations (and a few other nations that all have something in common, I think), along with the Anglophone fascination with aliens in general.

UFOs/alien accounts often emphasize the technology of the unknown thing. Navy pilots talk about how UFOs can move in ways that seem impossible. Accounts of abduction by aliens often emphasize that the aliens seemed to be doing experiments using super advanced machines. Now, there is obviously interest in aliens from non-Anglophone cultures, such as the famous Dogon tribe with its mysterious origin story in Sirius B, a star invisible to the naked eye and not discovered by Western societies until the middle of the 19th century. But non-Anglophone alien stories tend—generalizing here, but it’s a pretty safe generalization—to be more legend/historical/origin stories, rather than sighting/abduction stories. In other words, non-Anglophone-society alien stories tend to be religious and cultural memories, rather than tales of unknown technologies.

There are many possible explanations here.

Is it because Anglophone nations tend to be advanced, and people in advanced nations are bored because they aren’t living in a subsistence society? (I would argue that many people, at least in America, do experience life in a subsistence way despite our national wealth, but that’s a different post.)

Is it that aliens are especially interested in Anglophone nations because of our apparent technological prowess?

Or is there a weirder explanation?

I’m a poet, so of course I pick the third option (not to exclude the first two, but because they don’t seem sufficient). Specifically, I want to know what is the relationship between contemporary English and UFOs? Is there something funky going on with our language that makes us unusually susceptible to this stuff? And what does all this have to do with antediluvian secret knowledge?

More to come.