Myths, Mutes & More
Dennis Stallings
Anomalist #2, Spring 1995
footnotes in parenthesis
In the mid-1980s, I was industriously studying the symbolism behind nuclear weapons and, as part of those studies, I took several opportunities to visit such places as Three Mile Island, Lawrence-Livermore laboratories, and Los Alamos. After attending a conference in Santa Fe, I took the short detour to Los Alamos on my way back to Minneapolis. I wanted to get the flavor of the place.
I arrived in Los Alamos early in the morning. The sun was coming up, giving an orange glow to the high desert mountains. The ground fog was still quite heavy. My impression of all this at the time was that it was a biblical landscape. Los Alamos lies high up on a mesa that I was told has a significant religious history among the Indians. My tour of the town was brief. Nothing was open. On the way down the mountain, I went around one sweeping curve that gave a panoramic view of northeastern New Mexico and (at least in my imagination) southwestern Colorado. It struck me that I was viewing that region which had produced, perhaps, the majority of cattle mutilation reports.
The stories about anomalous cattle mutilations reached a peak during the middle and late 1970s, but seem to be making something of a comeback recently. The "classic" anomalous mutilations usually involve cattle, although there are reports of mutilated horses, pets, and even humans. These mutilations involve removal of various body parts, usually the genitals or anus -- which is "cored out." Ears, eyelids, and other regions of tissue have been removed with what is often reported to be "surgical precision."
Skin patches may be removed in geometrical shapes. Claims are made that the animals were completely drained of blood. Bones and horns have been broken as though the animal had been dropped from a height. There have been a number of studies of the phenomenon (which still continues sporadically), perhaps the most comprehensive and skeptical of which is Mute Evidence by Kagan and Summers (1). There was once even a small periodical devoted to the subject of animal mutilations, called (interestingly enough) Stigmata. (2)
In any case, as I stood on that mountain looking down at New Mexico, a fantasy arose spontaneously in my mind. It came to me that I had just left an area high on a mountain where a group of "high priests" (of science), almost all of Jewish extraction (including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Jeremy Bernstein, Erich von Neumann, and many others), had invoked the presence of Jahweh as the cloud and pillar of fire of the Old Testament. If you think that this is far-fetched, note that there is a passage in a history of the development of the Manhattan Project where the author says -- straight-faced and with no reference to the Old Testament sources -- that "Army serachlights were laid on to follow by simple triangulation the ball of fire by night and the mushroom cloud by day." (3)
Now, if Oppenheimer was Moses on the mountain, the Golden Calf would be in the valley. When Moses came down from the mountain after his momentous visit with Jahweh, he ordered the idolatrous Golden Calf torn into pieces. Here the cattle mutilations enter into the myth. The focus of cattle mutilations around Los Alamos already has been noted by those who study these phenomena. They have also noticed the frequency of mysterious mutilations near nuclear sites in other parts of the country (4).
This widespread connection of the "mutes" with nuclear installations constitutes a metastasis of the phenomenon (or at least the reports of the phenomenon) that maintains the symbolic link between nuclear weapons, Jahweh, and the mutilations. Let me note at this juncture that it makes no difference to my argument whether these assertions about nuclear installations and the reports of mutilations are true or not in the ordinary sense. What is of interest is the psychic fact that such assertions are made.
* * * * * * * * *
There are very few events of historical significance that do not eventually become elaborated by folklore and myth. In the realm of folklore and myth -- that is to say, in the realm of psychic reality -- it makes little difference whether or not an historical event "really" happened as reported. To the extent that the event has an unknown or unexplained component, a psychological vacuum is created which is readily filled by the mythic imaginings of the human psyche. This mythogenesis is not confined to such elusive exotica as Bigfoot or flying saucers;(5) it can just as well accompany completely "ordinary" events of the day.
The SDI ("Star Wars" -- "Strategic Defense Initiative") projects of the Reagan years, for example, were exactly analagous to the ancient notion of a War In Heaven at the end of time. The development of nuclear weapons, which, in their overwhelming fearfulness, and their relentless and all-pervasive influence on our economics, our politics, and our religious and philosophical thinking, can be -- and has often been -- compared to a return of the god Jahweh, a god who also appeared as a cloud and a pillar of fire. Scientific theorizing is itself not free of mythological projections. Speculations upon the "ghost planet" Nemesis (6) and "dark matter" (7) provide some of the best examples of this.
Let me pause here to tell you what is meant by mythopoeia or mythopoesis. It means simply "mythmaking." But it must be kept in mind that a myth can operate in the collective consciousness without one's being aware of the dynamic mythological configuration that has taken partial possession of one's thinking and perception. This has been amply demonstrated by the findings of depth psychology and other disciplines. It occasionally happens that one or more individuals in the population can formulate a more or less complete mythology based on the real or imagined facts surrounding the anomaly.
The fantasy that arose spontaneously in my mind as I stood on that mountain overlooking New Mexico in the mid-1980s is an instance of my own spontaneous creation of a myth. What I am going to discuss here is what that might imply with regard to the high energic value investing these reports, which are modern pieces of folklore. The stories about anomalous cattle mutilations are one example. However, I believe that what I have to say is relevant to other types of anomalies as well.
* * * * * * * * *
Let me emphasize that my Old Testament-based fantasies were not constructions of my conscious mind. They simply came to me, like movies of the mind. I thought it all very funny and decided to write it up as one of the little joking articles I often wrote for Artifex (8). But the "joke" turned somewhat more serious shortly after my return to Minneapolis.
While browsing through the shelves in a local bookstore, I came upon an issue of the Jungian journal Spring that I did not have. I turned a couple of pages and came upon an article by the well-known German scholar and theologian Wolfgang Giegerich entitled, "The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God: On the First Nuclear Fission." (9) In this remarkable paper, Giegerich traces the development of nuclear weaponry and its attendant imagery and symbols from the story of Moses and the Golden Calf. I do not have time to reproduce his argument here, but I can assure you it is a substantial one, and well-documented in the best European scholarly tradition. I was quite shocked to find this, as it echoed my bizarre fantasies.
To add a minor note, however, I remained somewhat unsatisfied with the comparison between Moses and the Golden Calf, the development of the bomb, and the cattle mutilations, because the Golden Calf had been made out of the jewelry of the Israelites. Where was the "jewelry" in this parallel? Three days later, my answer came in the form of a short article in the Wall Street Journal. (10) The article was about a peculiar individual who made jewelry out of animal parts. I then remembered the simple fact that we often associate jewelry with parts of the body: ruby lips, emerald eyes, the "family jewels," pearly teeth, skin like alabaster or like ivory, shell-like ears, golden hair, etc. I then thought about the mythology of the American West in general, much of which is tied up with Old Testament imagery, especially by way of Mormonism.
That an Old Testament myth might be operating behind the scenes to organize and energize the mass-hysteria over cattle mutilations began to seem possible, especially since this mythologem had sprung-up spontaneously in my own mind and had formed the theme of this scholarly essay by a German theologian. Another theologian, the ex-Jesuit Salvador Freixedo, connects UFOs and the cattle mutilations directly with Jahweh, thereby generating a myth of his own. According to Freixedo, Jahweh, no longer able to make people sacrifice animals to him, appears in the form of UFO manifestations in order to mutilate animals and obtain the blood and entrails for himself. (11)
These unconscious factors that organize perceptions around typical themes were termed "archetypes" by C. G. Jung and, as some of you know, Jung's theories about synchronicity are based on the conception of the archetype. This opens the possibility, at least according to Jungian thinking, that the constellation of a powerful, emotion-laden myth might itself generate paranormal events, i.e., real psychokinetic cattle mutilations. I just mention this in passing, since I am concerned here with psychodynamic processes associated with anomalies reports -- not with whether or not they are, in fact, paranormal in nature.
Later, I extended my researches into American Indian folklore about the Trickster. Trickster is an essentially formless entity -- usually called Coyote, or Raven, or Hare, that plays all sorts of tricks on other animals and human beings. There are hundreds of Indian stories about the adventures and misadventures of Trickster. This figure is also nearly universal. One variety of Trickster is the viscera-sucker of the Phillipines. (12) This particularly disgusting creature flies about at night, extracting the organs, body fluids, and fetuses of its victims by means of its long, thin, razor-sharp tongue. (Fetus extraction has also been reported in cases of cattle mutilation). In the Trickster lore of the North American Indian, Trickster is almost continually involved in animal and human mutilations -- decapitating, skinning, and eviscerating his victims. Remarkably enough, Trickster is even described as coring-out the anus of animals, (13) a staple feature of the reports of cattle mutilations.
In psychological terms, the Trickster is related by Jung to the unformed, preadolescent ego, which occasionally constellates the Trickster archetype to such an extent that poltergeist phenomena occur. (14) Trickster thus manifests in at least two aspects of interest to us here: (a) He appears to be a sort of folk personification of normal, natural events that might lead to erroneous reports of anomalous animal mutilations. (He is, after all, called Raven and Coyote, the animals that would eat at the carcasses of animals that died of natural causes). (b) He is a supernatural, "formless" entity that personifies certain reported phenomena of psychokinesis. Unfortunately, the cattle mutilation phenomenon -- like that of the UFO -- has not yet learned how to conform to our particular categories of thinking. We are entrenched in thinking "either/or," not "both/and."
Whatever the true meaning of the mutilations might be, it appears to me that certain prevalent notions deriving from both the Judeo-Christian and North American Indian traditions may well be operating on an unconscious level to organize our perceptions and ideas along certain lines consistent with the myth. The energetic quality associated with these anomalies emerges out of a subterranean interplay of archetypal imagery. This interplay gives rise to a whole fabric of connections with ideas of "messages from the beyond" (15) and other apparently unrelated phenomena such as UFOs.
It is my feeling that a thorough study of such things as the Bigfoot legends and the "abductee" cases from the standpoint of myth, folklore, and current sociological and religious issues may reveal the underlying structure of these webs of relationships that touch and affect the real living psychology of the times. When these contexts begin to be established, we may find it somewhat easier to address the question of what sorts of reality we are dealing with and what methods are appropriate for their study. On a personal level, it is of the highest importance for the development of individual consciousness to be aware of how, and to what degree, unconscious determinants -- such as the images discussed here -- organize our perceptions and thinking about these events.
Footnotes
(1) Daniel Kagan and Ian Summers, Mute Evidence, New York, Bantam, 1984, pp. 312, 403.
(2) Stigmata: The Project Stigma Report on the Continuing Investigation into the Occurrence of Animal Mutilations. (Available from Tom Adams, ed., Project Stigma, P.O. Box 1094, Paris, TX 75460).
(3) Leona Marshall Libby, The Uranium People, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1979, p. 220. Compare with Exodus 13:21: "And all the time the Lord went before them, by day a pillar of cloud to guide them on their journey, by night a pillar of fire to give them light, so they could travel night and day."
(4) Dave Perkins, Altered Steaks: A Colloquium on the Cattle Mutilation Question, Santa Barbara, Calif., am here books, 1982, p. 17.
(5) There is also a very odd relationship between helicopters and UFOs and connections can be easily made between helicopter "folklore" and the Trickster stories of certain North American Indian tribes. There are also some mythic and folkloric linkages between cattle mutilations, UFOs, and phantom helicopters. See esp., Tom Adams, The Choppers ... and the Choppers: Mystery Helicopters and Cattle Mutilations, Paris, TX, Project Stigma, 1980.
(6) A summary of evidence, theories, and speculations is to be found in David M. Raup, The Nemesis Affair: A Story of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science, New York, W. W. Norton, 1986.
(7) Dennis Stillings, "Images of High Numinosity in Current Popular Culture," Artifex 6, (April 1987), esp. "Addendum: The Mythology of Dark Matter."
(8) Artifex, now discontinued, was a publication of Archaeus Project, P. O. Box 7079, Kamuela, HI 96743.
(9) Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1985): 1-27.
(10) Wall Street Journal, March 29, 1986. "Give Her Roses, but Remember That Only a Fish Head Is Forever." Jung, in the Visions Seminars, Zurich, Spring Publications, 1976, p. 87, analyzes a dream in which the entrails are torn out of a sheep by Indians. The intestines are then draped around their necks where they change into "great red jewels."
(11) For a brief summary of Salvador Freixedo's ideas, see Crux 1, Summer 1985. Available from Tom Adams.
(12) Maximo D. Ramos, Creatures of Phillipine Lower Mythology, Manila, University of the Phillipines Press, 1971.
(13) Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study In American Indian Mythology, New York, Bell Publishing Co., 1956, p. 36.
(14) Radin, Trickster, p. 195.
(15) The "message" aspect of the cattle mutilation myth is put forward in different forms by Leo Sprinkle and Thomas E. Bearden. The former sees the mutilations as a coded message from extraterrestrials (Kagan and Summers, Mute Evidence, pp. 312, 403), while Bearden (in Excalibur Briefing, San Francisco, Strawberry Hill Press, 1980, p. 97) sees the phenomenon as arising from exteriorized psychokinetic manifestations of the collective unconscious, the symbolism of which, in Bearden's view, refers to the threat of a nuclear attack on the heartland of the United States.
edit: typo
