Closer Encounters

I.

Closer Encounters is a book that has the correct general idea but fails in its particulars; and this is unfortunate, for its author, Jason Reza Jorjani, has come up with an elegant explanation for the UFO phenomenon; an elegant explanation that he mars by an insistence on particular details that are plain wrong or illogical—and, finally, by a curious decision to endorse Satan.

Jorjani’s primary thesis is that UFOs are time-travel devices from a future humanoid civilisation—a future humanoid civilisation that extends into our own past. Essentially, Jorjani holds that we live in a loop: at a certain point in the 20th century a few humans developed time travel; they then established new civilisations on Mars (to travel in time implies an ability to move in uncanny ways in space) and on Earth in the distant past—eventually, these civilisations diverged, mainly through genetic self-enhancement, from humans to an extraordinary degree; in turn, these diverged and enhanced species created man. The human race is its own grandfather. Secondarily, Jorjani holds that UFO manifestations in a particular class are emanations from a cosmic trickster—related to Aeon, a concept familiar from Jung—that is in turn related to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and Gnostic ideas around the goddess Sophia.

The general thesis converges several hypotheses that have been used to explain the UFO phenomenon—namely, the extraterrestrial hypothesis; the time travel hypothesis; and the spirit hypothesis—with historical accounts from the world’s religions and various occultists, such as Rudolf Steiner. As a result, Jorjani has produced what could be called “a unified theory of the paranormal”, since his thesis can be used to explain everything from telepathy to UFOs to Bigfoot. In part, this is where the weakness in Closer Encounters lies: it wants to tie everything extraordinary that has ever been recorded in history into a single narrative, but grand narratives are always hard to sustain against reality—ironically, Jorjani himself thinks that narrative collapse is essential to divine play in the cosmos.

It has now generally been agreed, after decades of ridicule, that UFOs exist; to be specific, there are objects that traverse Earth’s skies and oceans that behave in ways that confound the way we understand physics today. These objects have been recorded on various sensors and testified to by sober witnesses—mainly from the US military. The US Government has admitted that it has no explanation for what these objects are, but it has confirmed that certain footage, leaked several years ago, that features so-called “Tic-Tac” UFOs is real; and it has allowed pilots who shot the footage, such as David Fravor, to speak publicly about what they saw.

Since “UFO” has become a synonym for “extraterrestrial” or “alien”, the revised term used by the US Government is now “UAP”—“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”. Although many, Jorjani included, make much as to this change in nomenclature, I think it just represents a move by the Americans to clarify that what their military has recorded remains “unknown”; strictly, “UFO” just means “unknown object”—yet semantic drift over the decades means that to say “UFO” is taken to mean “an object consciously created and controlled by forces beyond man”.

If you say, “I believe in UFOs,” it will generally taken to mean something to the following effect, “I believe these unknown objects are craft, probably developed by extraterrestrials or a force beyond man as currently constituted.” Nobody thinks you mean, “I believe there are objects in the sky that are unidentified.” If the American government said, “UFOs exist and have been recorded by our military’s sensors,” it would generally be taken to mean, “Aliens exist and have been recorded by our sensors.”

I know it sounds pedantic to wade through this semantic distinction, but if you read the UFO literature you will find that much is made over semantic distinctions in the way people craft narratives around UFOs. When we speak about the “need to believe” as regards UFOs, in the X-Files “I want to believe” sense, what we really mean is “the need to believe that these objects are not created by man and are related to Atlantis (or whatever narrative you want to impose on the phenomenon).” Hence UFO literature often has a soupy or swampy quality, since the various reports—many false—have to be knitted into a favoured narrative, a narrative sustained by, frankly, lies and attendant illogic; and it is the illogic—or the peculiar anti-logic and elision that goes with lies—that gives UFO literature its soupy characteristic (a quality it shares with journalism); essentially, many “factual” narratives about UFOs are very bad fiction, not an attempt to state the facts.

All this aside, in this article I will use the term “UFO”, basically because I think it sounds better than UAP and because I think these objects are more than unknown objects—i.e. I use UFO in the sense it is generally taken, a reference to an object that originates and is controlled by an organism other than man as currently constituted.

II.

Jorjani’s move to identify UFOs as time-travel devices from a human—or human-derived—future is acute. I think his assertion holds water because a certain common type of UFO is a silver doughnut-shaped object, a torus. While other putative UFOs appear to be balls of light—indeed, this type often appears next to lightning storms; a fact that suggests ball lightning rather than craft—the torus type can be linked to a concrete means by which to travel; and even to travel through time. “The torus is the only manner by which self-sustained motion can exist in a given medium,” according to Arthur M. Young, an engineer and occultist. Further, the shape also relates to space-time, toroidal space-time; and so it would be a good candidate for a shape to travel through time. As I understand it, there have been suggestions that the universe itself is toroid in shape—a shape deeper than common geometry; a shape related to infinite configurations, such as the Möbius strip. In short, with aid from novel materials and energy, it strikes me that a torus would be an ideal shape to travel at unusual speeds and through time.

The idea that UFOs are time-travel devices comes, I must admit, as a disappointment to me: I have no interest in time travel, so the thesis goes against my desire—unfortunately, reality was not created for my benefit. However, there is a good synchronistic reason, aside from the rational reasons associated with the torus, to think that UFOs are time-travel devices. A notable UFO incident is the Kecksburg event; essentially, what appeared to be a bell-shaped object appeared in a wood in Pennsylvania before it was whisked away by the US Army. The synchronicity here lies in the name “Kecksburg”; it contains, in a certain form, the word “Kek”. Now, “Kek” has been attached to various ructions since about 2016, essentially as a chaos or trickster god associated with the mischievous green frog, Pepe.

In fact, Kek is the “hidden spirit” in Ancient Greek (to kekrymenon pneuma); a hidden spirit instantiated in the sacred number 1746 (666 + 1080), itself related to “the grain of mustard” alluded to in the Bible. Put simply, Kek the chaos creature is Aeon’s avatar—eternity’s divine child at play, as talked about by Jung (more on this anon). Naturally, Aeon is instantiated in an amphibian because the frog moves between the water and the land; it lives in two realms—in the esoteric formula: as above, so below. In its completeness, the frog can access Aeon and the divine possibilities that come about when dark and light are united.

So it is entirely appropriate that a time-travel device should pop up in Kecksburg—the entire incident is a divine joke. Further, as Jorjani notes, the recent alternate-universe science-fiction TV series The Man in the High Castle, inspired by a novel by the neo-Gnostic Philip K. Dick, features a timeline where the National Socialists won the war; and they have mastered time travel, opening a portal in…Kecksburg. The portal is called “the Keter” or “Crown”—a reference to the top point on the Tree of Life in Kabbalah. In short, as I noted earlier, Jorjani’s thesis is that the human race is its own grandfather; to be specific, we are all the grandchildren of…the Nazis. Welcome to the twilight zone, a place where people really hate dad—or, if you like, grandpa Adolf.

For Jorjani, the UFO as time-travel device originates with a clandestine Anglo-German elite organisation that has worked on the project—technically, forerunners to time-travel devices—since the 19th century; as an important aside, this organisation is also fascinated by eugenics. Jorjani holds that this group helped to sponsor the National Socialists in Germany and has essentially constituted a “Breakaway Civilisation” for well over—from our perspective—100 years. For Jorjani, key 20th-century figures in this group include J.P. Morgan and Prescott Bush—paterfamilias to the Bush clan. Jorjani thinks that this Breakaway Civilisation exported itself to Mars and—in a suitably eugenically enhanced form—came back to Earth’s past to become, after some internal political shenanigans, the race behind Atlantis and also the mysterious “white gods” who built the Mayan and Egyptian pyramids, along with other monumental architectural projects across the world. Further, this fact accounts for why many abductees report encounters with “Nordic” aliens; quite beyond human, after centuries of genetic enhancement, and yet humanoid and icily Germanic. This race is helped by robots (possibly bio-robots), the almond-eyed “Greys” that have become a visual synecdoche for “aliens” over the decades.

Jorjani holds that the National Socialists won; we are the degraded children—and the fathers—of the future Aryan race. In the future, this race perfected itself and managed to access telekinesis and other psychic hacks; and so when they came to Earth—created us—they were regarded as gods, and this, for Jorjani, accounts for the traditional religious scriptures, from the Bible to the Mahābhārata. Jorjani accounts for psychic powers through the idea that the universe is not a simulation—as many say today—but rather a reprogrammable computer, reprogrammable through consciousness; a fact that accounts for the “Mandela effect” where people think Nelson Mandela died in the early 1990s and synchronicity, as the timeline is changed back and forth.

This is probably true; if you look at the mathematics connected to cybernetics you will find that it produces forms that resemble the Tree of Life in Kabbalah (and Tantra)—cybernetics is mysticism; fully developed it will allow us to reprogram reality at will, to develop what are generally regarded as paranormal powers. Especially important in this regard will be the mystery of “0”, the null point where the cybernetic machine meshes. Perhaps the universe is Turing complete; so that—as with the computer game Minecraft (mein kraft?), where objects in the game can be arranged to make a program within the game—we can make sub-programs within the program; it is not so much that we live in a simulation versus reality, rather we can have a great many sub-realities if we choose.

Jorjani agrees with William S. Burroughs and Nick Land that we live in a time war; various factions—Aryans and Jews, or entirely stranger future races?—are locked in a competition to eradicate each other from the timeline; hence Land and Burroughs both reference “Lemurs” extensively—a homage to Theosophy’s founder H.P. Blavatsky, who first established contact with this race and associated it with its own vanished continent, Lemuria, and the Atlantis legend in general.

The Lemurians represent one group among various races that traverse dimensions and edit and re-edit reality; the various iterations being saved—as a computer game is saved—in the Akashic records so beloved by occultists, according to Jorjani. For Jorjani, there is no multiverse; we have one universe but the timeline is tugged back and forth by various factions in the time war. These factions include “the gods”, the Nordics or direct descendants from German eugenic experiments; “the Titans”, the Nephilim or fallen angels who created man and sympathised with him—this group created Atlantis; failed eugenics experiments or attempts to create slave species, perhaps secreted in hidden locations or time-pockets scattered about the Earth (cryptids); and assorted stranger things.

Jorjani puts forward—along with Burroughs and Land—a Gnostic take on reality (although he rejects Gnosticism proper, he adopts the belief system’s essence), with an exoteric universe filled with (masculine) archons that is itself surrounded a feminine exterior; it is this feminine negation or null—essentially chaos, or “0” as mentioned above—that represents Sophia in Gnosticism. The outer feminine knowledge is pure but tricky, whereas the inner masculine knowledge is usually malign. Sophia is what lies within and without the torus-universe; she is the hole—all women are holes—but also the whole. Sophia’s esoteric knowledge penetrates our reality through technology, since technology is feminine in nature (men give their cars and machines female names for this reason); and cybernetics relies on the mysterious feminine “0” to function, itself an intimation of the torus. Gnosticism traditionally speaks for the feminine side against the masculine; exotic religion demands that we obey, but Gnosticism suggests techniques by which we know (Gno) and so is tied up with science, with chaotic invention and novelty; the alchemical path’s termination in natural science is consistent with Gnosticism, if you gno what I mean.

Hence science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s neo-Gnosticism had a technological inflection; he was zapped by a pink beam of light—Sophia—that seemed alien, as with a UFO, but also endowed him with paranormal knowledge and a religious sensibility; he received knowledge from the outside—and this knowledge led to paranormal powers. Accordingly, Dick conceived an alternate world where the Axis won, as in The Man in the High Castle; although nested in this world was an Allied victory, just not the Allied victory we know. There is no end to the edits and variations, a bit like Wikipedia—or the encyclopaedias Borges so adored: we live in the garden of forked paths, just as a computer program is forked to begin a new iteration.

Zero is a curious number; its invention destabilised the ordered cosmos inhabited by the Greeks, it is a paradoxical entity that exists and does not exist at the same time—a bit like a UFO that blinks in and out of existence. Zero suggested infinite horizons and possibilities, whereas the Greeks lived in an enclosed and self-contained world. Zero stands for absolute potential; hence it is essential to the Chaos Magic favoured by Land and others because it represents pure fluctuation and generation. It is the feminine chaos that undermines all; it generates and destroys, rather as does the Hindoo deity Kali. The feminine zero is essential to cybernetics, Kabbalah, and Tantra; it opens the door—and it can be symbolised by the ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. The Gnostic move is a move to zero, perhaps even to the Zero Point Energy that some think powers flying saucers.

III.

At this point, we should pause to consider Jorjani’s politics. A few years ago, Jorjani was burned by the media; putatively he supported the alt-right, Adolf Hitler, and wished to see all Muslims banished from Europe—at least, the media wanted you to think that was so. As a consequence, Jorjani lost his position as an academic at a New York college. Subsequently, Jorjani has distanced himself from the alt-right and from Arktos—the company he worked for and who published this book, along with his others. Throughout this work, Jorjani strikes a critical pose towards “our Aryan ancestors”; he argues that these ancestors are our prison warders—along with the traditional religions, both Abrahamic and Eastern, which are inspired by these Nordic creators.

Thus Jorjani rejects Traditionalism with a big “T”, as represented by Guénon and Evola; essentially, a position that defends the Hindoo caste system (i.e. “racism”, since the caste system was racial in nature). In this view, stone circles and megaliths represent a decayed higher order; if we could only rebuild them—along with the society that conceived them—we could return to the Golden Age, an age that was all about geometric Pythagorean harmonies and order. Jorjani says: the Traditionalists were mixed up about there being “gods”; these gods were our ancestor-children, and they created us as a slave race—there was no benevolence here; we should not go back to that system, we should forge ahead alone. We made the overman; he is our future and our past—pace Nietzsche we are stuck in an eternal return, but we should not settle for it.

You may have seen Ridley Scotts’s rather weak film, Prometheus (2012)—prequel to his Alien series—in which humans head out to find our creators, the grey-skinned warrior-giants, the Nephilim, only to find they hate us and want to abort the human race as a failed biological experiment (one among many). I think this is the situation as Jorjani sees it. Jorjani’s recursion is embedded in Scott’s Prometheus: the humans search for their creators, “the Engineers” (the fallen angels, or Nephilim); they also create an android, David, who fiddles with the Xenomorph’s DNA and, possibly, contributes to a new life—possibly human life itself, if you incorporate time travel into the story. The story is a strange loop: the creator creates itself. A strange loop, just as with Douglas Hofstadter—or in the strange shapes beyond geometry found in the torus and Möbius strip. We ourselves live and were conceived in a strange loop.

However, I must note that Jorjani claims that Traditionalism endorses Theosophy; quite the contrary, the Traditionalists rejected Theosophy in very strong terms. Indeed, throughout this work Jorjani seems seems to have a weak grasp on what Traditionalism actually says; he seems to think, as many people who have not examined the material do, that it has something to do with support for what the Catholic Church says today—sometimes he strikes a pose rather akin to a Dawkins fan in his attacks on religion. Incidentally, I have heard that Evola produced an entire book on Theosophy; but they say it was lost shortly after he was injured by a bomb in Vienna—and, though many fantasists have claimed to have seen it, I fear this work may even have been erased from this timeline entirely…

Previously, Jorjani’s political stance—his association with Richard Spencer and his merry men—would have led him to endorse the Nordics, the National Socialist descendants. Now, Jorjani champions a Promethean Gnostic approach where the old paternal religions (the humanoid masters behind them) are rejected and the forgotten feminine, Sophia—as instantiated through technology, particularly psychic technology—is used to liberate mankind from our ancestral overlords. Jorjani takes a narrative found in Serrano’s esoteric Hiterlism—the argument that man was genetically formed as a slave caste, with whites as the Brahmin “supervisors” who had direct contact with “the gods”—and puts the accent on man in revolt against the gods, not in submission to the Aryan overlords; he lauds the Promethean rebellion attributed to the fallen angels or—in this account—the future supermen who broke with their own contemporaries and favoured man; subsequently, they became the creators of Atlantis. However, as noted, Jorjani would go further still and even break with the Titans who revolted against the gods.

The difference between this and, frankly, a neo-Nazi or esoteric Hiterist line is that Jorjani now claims to reject the Aryan supermen from the future—the spawn from National Socialist time-travel experiments. These Nordic aliens are, rather, portrayed by him as cruel overlords and experimenters on mankind; we might be their children-parents, but they are still the overman and hold us in little regard; we are the slaves who created our own masters. Jorjani’s appeal is for us to take back our own future, to embrace revolt against the cosmic cattle herders—or it is it?

Jorjani is somewhat a trickster himself, with a particular interest in Persian mysticism—being an Iranian, or half Iranian. Within these mystical traditions the path to enlightenment often involves various extreme poses, actions, and mischievous masks. In consequence, what Jorjani says can rarely be taken at face value. On one hand, despite his declared decision to disassociate himself with the racial right, he has published this book with Arktos; a publishing house that while not exactly “Nazi” could be said to produce books that interest those who generally think the New Order in Europe was more positive than not.

Jorjani might think that he can publicly dissociate himself from his former views—undertake “rehabilitation”—by publishing a book about how “the Nazis really won” as a supposed critique, although, of course, it will be read as supportive by a particular audience—a Straussian move, if you will; if you can read between the lines, the true message appears. Alternatively, the renunciation and critique is genuine—or, then again, each move was always sincere, a sincere mask in a mystical game where extreme positions, reversals, and actions are used to leverage enlightenment.

For example, those who bound themselves to certain Persian mystical schools were required to do whatever their master asked; if he said, “Throw yourself from this bridge,” the disciple was bound to do so, the idea being that if he acted without thought that he would survive the fall through cat-like suppleness; so this approach demanded absolute obedience and complete indifference to your death, to your ego’s demand to live. Similar shenanigans can be seen in the English trickster, David Myatt; a man who was involved in neo-Nazi terrorism, Sufi mysticism, and Satanism (at last check he was a pacifist). What lay behind all these extreme poses was initiatory action, possibly along the left-hand path (the path that embraces violence and sex)—a sort of, per Rimbaud, derangement of the senses to achieve supranatural insight.

Further to all these mystical peregrinations, Jorjani himself admires Plato and Socrates; he has stated that he enjoyed it when he consciously adopted a position he did not believe that would shock students and provoke them in a lecture; perhaps he is just at the Socratic game again—the next move in the dialectic, after he spoke for strict racial order, being to instigate revolt; he is a permanent gadfly.

Whatever the truth, I always get the impression Jorjani has struck a pose or a narrative and not quite given his true views on a subject. However, I can detect one constant in his thought: socialism and admiration for the feminine. In Closer Encounters, despite Jorjani’s ultimate declared allegiance to the Hidden Trickster, he manages to produce boilerplate feminism dressed up as Promethean chaos. All this goes to show that you can take the man out of an American university, but you cannot take the American university out of the man. This tendency towards feminism and socialism is connected to Gnosticism because leftists like to use Gnosticism—as does Jorjani, the parts he likes anyway—to have at the Abrahamic faiths, faiths that are identified with the tyrannical masculine.

For Jorjani, the Abrahamic faiths were created by the Nordics to enslave mankind; especially, notes Jorjani, women—whom they turned into property. From Jorjani’s rejection of women as property we can infer he is a socialist; he wants communism in one area, sex, and doubtless wants it in all areas—for the next step is to say that private property itself is an intrusion on “the divine feminine” and so should be abolished. You see a similar take from the more mainstream leftist Gnostic, Graham Hancock.

What Jorjani reproduces in his feminism is really the feminism and socialism that was present in National Socialism. Yes, contrary to popular propaganda, the National Socialists were feminists—and they were feminists because they were inspired by a particular Gnostic view. Himmler was greatly chagrined at the seven million witches who were supposedly burned by the Christian Churches; when you know this—know that figure—the subsequent holocaust of Jews by the Germans, circa six million, is put in a new perspective; for the SS this was retribution for the “divine feminine” that had been destroyed by the Christians. Remember that the SS saw Christians and Jews as synonymous (Abrahamic), so in their mind the holocaust of European witchery was repaid by the holocaust of European Jewry—the people supposedly behind Christianity. The National Socialists also undertook breeding programs outside marriage, an attack on property—on the woman as her husband’s property—that was in line with their general socialism, albeit a socialism not as severe as in the Soviet Union.

This is why our ruling progressives get very nervous when men like Graham Hancock, otherwise an amiable stoner, start to talk about Atlantis, pyramids, and the sacred feminine; for the most part, Hancock’s ideas, especially about pyramids, come from R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz—and his ideas informed the National Socialists, right down to the knee-high jackboots. On one hand you have the Marxists with their revolt against capitalism—also Promethean, with their red flag and hammer and sickle; both symbols of the Promethean god Mithras—and their international socialism through technology; on the other hand, you have the National Socialists with their racial socialism, their protection of Aryan womanhood from the depredations of plutocratic Abrahamic capital (Jewish, effectively). Our leftist regime reads the fascists and the National Socialists as “right”; and they were relatively to the right, but not very far—substantially they were leftists, albeit without Marxism’s faith in materialist technology and with a faith in a spiritual technology that would provide unlimited plenty for all.

So you can see why Gnosticism, with its feminine symbology, can get mixed up in socialism; unfortunately, this leads Jorjani to make points that would be more at home in Salon or a milky mainstream publication—he has time and again affirmed that he is a progressive, after all.

This association with Gnosticism and the left is, I think, more a case where Gnosticism has been been infiltrated by leftism rather than being leftist in and of itself; paganism in the contemporary world is easier to turn to leftist purposes than Christianity because it is a dead religion—there is no existent hierarchy that will resist when you say, “Paganism is feminist.” Gnosticism has a particular concern for the feminine, true; but femininity is a metaphysical concept that maps on to biology: the most feminine person in the world is a biological woman, although there are feminine men and masculine women. However, to venerate the metaphysical concept—or see its neglected value—should not be confused with the idea that women are good or have been “persecuted” for a long time, and this is where the error in contemporary Gnosticism occurs.

You could worship the femininity in a man or a bear as much as in biological woman; and, anyway, Gnosticism, through alchemy, finally transcends the sexual duality through hermaphroditism, through the heavenly wedding (the hieros gamos)—it is both sexes and neither. It is only people infected with materialism who take this literally and think that they need to venerate literal women or literal hermaphrodites (transsexuals); sure, perhaps these groups instantiate aspects of the metaphysical principle, but to reduce the metaphysical to the material is a typical modernist error—one usually made by the left.

As with many trained by the academy, Jorjani is under the impression that there are such things as “Christian nations” with governments that fear to reveal the truth about UFOs because it would undermine Christianity (Jesus was an astronaut), so leading, in Jorjani’s view, to mass hysteria and psychosis. In reality, there is no such thing as “Christendom” and has not been for nearly three centuries or more—Christianity is barely believed by anyone in the West, except by progressives who have watched too many episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale and seriously think Donald Trump was a neo-theocrat.

Similarly, feminism, far from being an untried and risky Promethean path, has been in the saddle for at least two centuries; women are fully, as Jorjani wishes them to be, “liberated” and socialised; he makes allusions to tyrannical fathers who treat their daughters like property, but such men only exist—diminishingly—in Saudi Arabia and the like. If you want to unleash Promethean chaos today, you would be better to announce that women need to be—yearn to be—treated as property to be used and improved. Kek wills it: say that women are property and your opponents will really shit the bed, chaos will be unleashed—chaotic order, actually. Unfortunately, these ideas about property and women upset National Socialists, who are far too progressive—along with their sometime Communist comrades—to countenance such reactionary notions.

As with many people with a substantial interest in UFOs, Jorjani has been, despite his newly adopted “Give me liberty or give me death” worldview, captured by statism; in part, I believe—aside from his PhD from an American university, effectively left-wing brainwashing—because an important element within UFO narratives is an idea that the government is omnipotent and highly efficient. Consequently, people who identify as “believers”—people who believe fully elaborated narratives about UFOs, rather than thinking that, yes, there are UFOs but remain open to what evidence turns up—will be amenable to socialistic ideas; frankly, many are the dreamy and imaginative types—or lazy stoners, like Graham Hancock—who tend to like socialism as an idea anyway. Their belief system encourages them to see the government as ultra-capable and efficient, if it can cover-up UFOs and communicate with inter-dimensional beings it can surely run the economy; in reality, the government is a clown show—as regards UFOs, and everything else.

IV.

Formally, Jorjani has embraced a Promethean outlook that makes him sympathetic to what he calls “the Trickster” but could also be identified with Sophia or Kek—the Aeon, the child at play Heraclitus knew so well. For Jorjani, the Trickster originates UFOs distinct from those created by the Nordics (and their various genetic experiments, such as, possibly, Bigfoot). Rather, the Cosmic Trickster lies behind such phenomena as “the Men in Black” and the oft-observed connection between owls and UFO visitations—owls happen to be particularly active in my neighbourhood, so this interests me.

These issues, in turn, crop up in David Lynch productions; notably his TV series Twin Peaks, a series that features owls, inter-dimensional portals, and a killer called “Bob” (or is it al-bab, “the gate” in Arabic)—and Bob’s name is also a strange loop, a self-referential acronym (Beware of Bob). Everyone knows that Lynch produces films that exist in a dreamworld, a world where curious speech patterns slur about the soundtrack and events operate by an idiosyncratic logic. The contention here would be that Lynch records reality, except it is the reality you cannot see; the shapeshifts in dreams—in the dream we inhabit.

The shapeshifter is significant here. Jorjani notes that the octopus is an intelligent and mischievous creature that, thanks to its boneless body and flexible skin camouflage, is akin to the Trickster—reputedly it also enjoys psychic powers; a few years ago a German octopus proved quite adept at the prediction of football match outcomes. Further, the octopus has a peculiar genetic imprint that seems to separate it from other creatures on Earth. Jorjani notes that 33 scientists determined that the octopus is so anomalous that it must have come about through panspermia, with primitive octopus-like creatures shot through space to land in Earth’s oceans. He lingers on this number, for “33” has an esoteric (namely, Luciferian) significance; as Jorjani well knows, for he has a section entitled “33” on his Pinterest account.

Jorjani takes this thought and combines it with time travel to suggest that the octopus is merely a humble ride-along; it came through a portal, possibly with another tentacled shapeshifter that is even more intelligent and much more advanced than a psychic octopus that can predict football matches. Jorjani thinks that this octopus-like creature lies behind Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos—the name even contains “Thule”, a Hyperborean allusion. For Jorjani, Cthulhu was summoned by dissident factions within Atlantis—the Titans, the Nephilim—and then raged out of control, being more powerful than they are. Jorjani situates Atlantis in Antarctica—a common supposition—and goes on to suggest that it was destroyed, in part, by titanic hubris: the dissident Titans summoned the Cthulhu-creature from the future and found it impossible to control; now, per Lovecraftian lore, it waits beneath the Antarctic wastes, entombed in the ruined titanic architecture that constituted Atlantis.

It waits in the deep oceans, too. UFOs have regularly been observed and tracked—even in the officially endorsed footage—in descent into the oceans; and so Jorjani hypothesises an octopus-like submerged civilisation; a civilisation that makes excursions into our world via owls and the like. Its approach to life is not necessarily malevolent, nor is it—it is Cthulhu after all—kindly in intention; rather, as with the divine child described by Heraclitus, it wants to play—and play can become rather rough sometimes. The association with the sea can also be linked to another esoteric ancient astronaut theme, the Sirius mystery. Put forward by Robert Temple, this holds that the Dogon tribe from West Africa have advanced astronomical knowledge about the star Sirius; they acquired this, according to Temple (what a name!), from alien “gods” called “the Nommo”; and these gods will return on “the day of the fish”—they will spring from the oceans rather like, er, the UFOs that we currently observe engaged in about the same activity.

For Jorjani, the Nordics fear and despise Cthulhu; in their temporal adventures they encountered this super-powerful trickster—this cosmic Loki—and fled in terror; hence, says Jorjani, the monumental architecture found at the pyramids, Mayan and Egyptian, and, presumably, in Atlantis itself; the Nordic civilisation formed fortresses to resist the Trickster’s power. The stone circles and megaliths so beloved by Traditionalists are psychotronic control systems to keep the Trickster at bay. As a Promethean, Jorjani wants us to embrace the Trickster—to embrace Cthulhu and fall into her (its?) slimy be-tentacled embrace. In other words, get ready to tear your clothes off, smear yourself in foul substances, and dance around the bonfires hypnotised by the chant: “Xruthul, Xrutuhl, Antigotigon Xropl…” To live in the way Jorjani advises would roughly be to live in a David Lynch movie—do you have the stomach for it?

This radical reach to the outside is intended to open up new possibilities; we will transcend mundane civilisation, but we will also transcend the Nordic civilisation that gave birth to us—we will set the cosmic timeline on an entirely new path. There is a strong relation in Jorjani’s new-found affection for “the outside” with Nick Land’s thought (his Twitter username is literally “Outsideness”)—an approach that never gelled with the Spencerite alt-right and always looked to the “tentacled-one” for inspiration. Similarly, there is a relation here to Philip K. Dick’s Gnosticism: Dick identified “Zebra” as a camouflaged entity that shifted reality. Zebra is Cthulhu—or, rather, is the Aeon; the cosmic octopus that can shift its skin in an instant. Indeed, perhaps the café I sit in right now is not a café but rather a skin patch that Zebra has presented to me for its amusement. Dick, a bereaved twin, suspected all was not as it seemed, and that, indeed, the Roman Empire never ended and so continued while we live enmeshed in deception by an illusory spatio-temporal skin; he also noted in his stories that divine twins, particularly a divine girl twin, could be the path to salvation—or the path to knowledge, anyway.

The twin is an important Indo-Aryan symbol; and, of course, Lynch made Twin Peaks—the divine twins represent a Jungian syzygy; and the female twin is Sophia. Similarly, Jorjani notes that Mantoid aliens are often associated with the Trickster; these creatures resemble the Praying Mantis, whose female mates with the unfortunate male and then devours him—“mantis” also means “prophet” in Ancient Greek. Hence we see again the solid connection between the feminine, divine wisdom, and these “alien” creatures from another world; recall that a recently nuked right-wing Twitter account of some renown, Bronze Age Pervert, had an affection for Lynch; his handle, @bronzeagemantis—the mantis again, Sophia again.

So Jorjani’s final appeal is for us to embrace the divine play found in Aeon; and for him the gateway to Aeon is Cthulhu, a creature he sees as a super-evolved beast from the future—or the past, if you see what I mean—who has popped back to our time to play. I think there is an element of projection in this view. For me, Aeon is “0”; it is the mysterious thing that exists and does not exist at the same time—a rather Zen concept. Indeed, historically Aeon was represented by a circle or an ouroboros; eternity is not the octopus-like Cthulhu, nor is it a divine twin, nor is it even the divine feminine; rather, it is zero: it can be anything you want it to be, although it is always no-thing. “You know who I am, you’ve stared at the Sun; well I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one,” as Leonard Cohen sang.

Zero is not directly analogous to the octopus, with its adaptable camouflage—nor is it a zebra—for there is nothing beneath zero’s camouflage, no body to it. At best, the zebra or Cthulhu or even Kek-Pepe are portals or ways to encounter the ultimate gateway or portal—zero, even its shape is a gateway (to eternity). Consequently, people see in zero, the ovoid mirror, what they project into it: Philip K. Dick saw zebras and divine twins, since he missed his dead twin sister and did not know who he was due to schizoid episodes; similarly, Jorjani’s name derives from the hideous mythical creature “the Gorgon”—albeit in Persian form, “Gorgani”—and so he sees, as with the Gorgon, a hideous monster in zero; and he sees it complete with Cthulhu’s snake-like tentacles, as with Medusa’s hair.

Zero is the vital centre; to know eternity is to know that “you” are nothing—you are an energy flux and interplay with indeterminate boundaries; Land puts this is scientific terms, so does Jorjani. Zero completes the cybernetic machine—allows it to function—and so underpins Kabbalah and Tantra. When one has not fully identified with zero residual projections enter into it; so, for example, you see yourself as a Gorgon in eternity, but that is egotistic illusion.

You can see Jorjani’s egotism in his insistence that there is free will; he thinks that without free will there can be no true artistic creation, not so—under determinism things will be as they are; and that includes all the art and science that has ever been created and ever will be. People reject determinism—it is determined they will do so—because it makes their ego feel unimportant; actually, to accept determinism is a great relief: everything that ever happened to you always had to happen that way and always will—sit back and enjoy the ride; if you cannot sit back and enjoy the ride, well, that is determined too. If you think free will is important you still have not accepted that “you” are nothing; hence Jorjani advises physicists to “read Heidegger and Bergson” to refute determinism, but offers no argument against determinism—and that is egotism, *name* philosopher means you are wrong and I am right. Really, it means nothing at all.

So I would be wary as regards Jorjani’s Promethean project, since he asks you to embrace Aeon in its destructive and malevolent aspect, as a sadistic player that toys with people. Yet it is not that; well, it is—if that is what you see in it. To be in tune with eternity is to be the axis—the axial point—upon which worlds turns; and the axial point has no particular content, just a certain gravity or occulted mass. The chaotic player found in Aeon is not pure chaos, since Aeon reconciles opposites in its own chaotic order; it is serendipity or, as Jorjani has it, daemonic inspiration—it is chaotic in the sense that it comes from “nowhere”. Unfortunately, as with his infatuation with women, Jorjani concludes Closer Encounters with sympathy not just for Lucifer—the Promethean light-bringer—but also with Satan himself. Not to sound too silly, but Satan-worship really is a bad idea; and if you want to see why just go and look up anyone who has decided to go in for overt Satan-worship.

Jorjani’s logic in this regard borrows from what he would call “the Nordics”; basically, in Gnosticism—particularly inflected through National Socialism—everything Abrahamic is flipped; so, as discussed, Abrahamic religions say women are bad and men are good; ergo, the Gnostic reality is that women are wonderful and men are awful. This leads to the assertion that Satan is good; obviously, Satan is “the lord of lies” and that means the “good God” of the Bible is the liar and Satan as described in the Bible is good. In this line, Satan symbolises the Aryan race that has been maligned by Abrahamic religion—per Nietzsche—by the ascription of all Aryan virtues (e.g. warlike mercilessness) to Satan and evil in order to enervate the race.

So, for example, the Yazidis in Syria, who were a particular target for Israel’s cat’s paw ISIS, exoterically endorse Islam but esoterically worship what amounts to Hindooism; in particular, they worship the Peacock Angel, a deity that is equivalent to Lucifer or Satan—more Satan, at least in the view of the tribe’s more Abrahamic neighbours, who frequently wish to exterminate them as “Satanists”. The Yazidis carry on an old Indo-Aryan religion, one that has been disprivileged by Abrahamic hegemony—and so they are unfairly stigmatised as “devil-worshippers” when really they continue an old tradition and possibly represent a biological continuity to an older race.

I think the problem is that Lucifer is different to Satan, whereas Jorjani wants to conflate these archetypes; in my view, Satan is straight out lies—and so the cause of evil in the world. Lucifer, on the other hand, actually provides truth; but it is truth from the darkness—he has a dark light, equivalent to the Black Sun in alchemy and its green rays; often it is a destructive truth, though still a necessary truth. As Jung did with his quaternary—Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and Lucifer—you can bring Lucifer into relation with more benevolent archetypes in order to complete individuation and escape projection.

However, it is usually a mistake to put Satan into the quaternary—let alone to just worship Satan. One group that played fast and loose with Satan in its quaternary was the 1960s cult The Process Church of the Final Judgement—an organisation that caused considerable mayhem and damage to its own members, let alone others; and this is what happens if you start to worship Satan. If you worship lies you worship delusion then, ultimately, this will destroy you as an organism—along with those around you—and so it is counter to our biological imperative and reason to worship Satan. I agree with Jorjani’s non-dualism, so I will not say it is always wrong to invoke Satan; but I will say Satan is like arsenic—a substance that can only be curative in absolutely trace amounts; for example, it is permissible to lie to people who want to hurt you—then you can evoke Satan, but it is unwise to make this habitual; and Jorjani seems to argue in this book to make it habitual.

Lucifer is another matter; he offers destructive truth—too-perfect earthly “666 truth”, as Jonathan Pageau would say—and so can be used more liberally; for example, the advice found on PUA blogs or in Machiavellian political treatises is Luciferian; it is extremely effective forbidden know-how, very slick—it is not actually evil, though it is regarded as such; it just represents the way knowledge manifests when legitimate structures have been broken down with lies (e.g. the PUA life is degenerate; but it arises when the correct way to treat women as property, marriage, has become illegal and lies about the real relations between the sexes predominate). At this point you need Lucifer, you need the Black Sun, to break down the lies; Lucifer against Satan, if you will—Lucifer obeys nobody, not God and not even Satan. This is real Promethean revolt.

Perhaps his decision to venerate Satan, lord of lies, explains why Jorjani’s book is littered with factual errors and logical inconsistencies, far too many for me to recount here. A representative sample can be found in Jorjani’s assertion that the Germans were far in advance of Allied research during the war; apparently they had night-vision technology whereas the Allies did not—except the Allies did, as three minutes on Wikipedia will tell you (please be patient, I have autism). Similarly, if the Germans outclassed the Allies and if their Breakaway Civilisation covertly controls the CIA, NSA, and the military-industrial complex, as Jorjani maintains, why not just overtly take over and declare a “Man in the High Castle” regime? In reality, people with overwhelming technological superiority do not wait around in some elaborate game (4-D chess?Trump gnos) while their ideas, in this case about Hitler, are completely demonised.

The high technology around UFOs is apparently, according to Jorjani, concealed because oil barons want to benefit from fossil fuels and so hide it; but nobody thinks like that in reality, this is wonky logic: if you have a superior technology, even if it displaces your current investments, you run with the superior technology—the returns will be greater; only socialists think the rich hoard technologies to themselves. Similarly, Jorjani maintains that mankind will be driven insane if it is revealed that UFOs exist; he then suggests, almost on the next page, that governments are going to tell some of the truth to establish a pretext for absolute tyranny—and that will somehow not drive people insane? We live in an age of almost total disbelief in the old religions; most people have probably entertained at some level the idea that the gods were really UFOs or UFOnauts; and most people would be delighted and excited if this were true, not disappointed—I know I would be. Revelation would be a long way from Lovecraftian insanity.

Jorjani takes Bob Lazar—a crook and, according to body language analysis, a liar—seriously in his accounts about interactions with UFOs. This is a shame, for Lazar tours with the entirely credible David Fravor; as is all too common with UFO accounts, there is a desire to believe the entire narrative and so the credible witnesses and the fantasists are presented together and believers want it all to be true.

Ultimately, Jorjani recommends world government to meet the threat from “the others” and develop a Promethean civilisation; so we have in Jorjani world government, socialisation of property (namely, women), and a feminised outlook—i.e. we have progressivism, the system we already live under. Promethean revolt will not come about through a socialist, feminist world government—people should be free to leave nations, not roped into global government. We have spent at least two centuries mired in these ideas, ideas that destroy genuine progress. Jorjani holds that we could stand to lose 99% of the world population—not the 80% that maniacs, such as myself, hold out for—in order to establish a Promethean regime: all very well, except, when you worship Satan, the chances that you are going to extinguish the wrong 99% are very high indeed.