On many occasions I’ve had to discuss the somewhat thorny issue of “extraterrestrial life.”
That’s a fairly inexact term, which tends to encompass a great deal in its blanket description—for instance, it may comprehend everything from the traditional understanding of alien biological life inhabiting other planets, moons, or other celestial bodies elsewhere in the solar system or universe, or it may comprehend beings that inhabit realms or dimensions that are co-extensive with our universe, and could even be present upon the earth, even if hidden from our perception due to a number of factors.
As is probably natural for a person of my unusual intellectual predilections and experiences, I’ve had a great deal of truck with people who are firmly convinced of the existence of extraterrestrial life and have adduced many evidences for that existence in the form of documentary, archaeological, palaeontological, linguistic, and other such proofs.
I’m not speaking merely of the “true believers” and UFO cultists; those earnest but sometimes misguided souls who have a deep need to believe in the presence of nonhuman forms of life, but yet have no real means of proving its existence beyond the occasional unfocused or blurry photograph or video clip.
What I am talking about are certain occult groups of savants and scholars of the recondite and abstruse, including the College of Seth and even such organizations as the Sodales Chaldaici, that speak of the reality of extraterrestrial and trans-dimensional life in no uncertain terms. The Collegians, for instance, have shown me fossil impressions of what they call the “Martians,” an ancient form of alien life that might actually hail from the farthest future; and I am aware that some theurges of the Chaldean Brotherhood claim that the “gods” they are capable of summoning and binding to their wills are in fact beings that inhabit parallel facets or dimensions of reality that intersect closely with our own.
But what is the Traditionalist take on such matters? Is it possible to communicate with extraterrestrial forms of intelligence, as the advocates of such programs as SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) would have us believe?
Intriguingly, the matter was dealt with in his usual thorough and meticulous fashion by no less illustrious a personage than René Guénon himself. In his masterpiece The Spiritist Fallacy, Guénon discusses at some length the difficulties—if not impossibilities—of establishing any form of communication with a truly alien form of life.
The great metaphysicist’s observations appeared in a chapter that had to do with the oft-bruited claim of the Spiritualists that they possessed the power to communicate with the dead—a condition of existence which they frequently represented as connoting a kind of rebirth of terrestrial life (particularly human life) upon alien planets.
Guénon’s argument hinges most importantly on the matter of sensory incompatibility, arguing that the material senses of terrestrial life are suited to our own planet, and that the sensations of beings of truly alien worlds must be of a different nature and order altogether. Therefore, as with the matter of time travel, Guénon concludes that communication and intercourse with truly alien life is not possible:
“For two beings to communicate between themselves by sensory, that is perceptible, means it is necessary first of all that their senses be the same, at least partially. If one of them cannot have sensations or if they do not have common sensations, no communication is possible. This may seem obvious enough, but there are truths of this kind which are easily forgotten or to which one gives no attention, but which have an unexpected significance. Of the two conditions mentioned, it is the first that establishes in an absolute manner the impossibility of communication with the dead by means of spiritist practices. As to the second, at the very least it gravely compromises the possibility of interplanetary communication…
“If we admit the theory that explains all sensations by more or less rapid vibratory movements, and if we consider a chart showing the vibrations per second corresponding to each kind of sensation, we are struck by the fact that the intervals representing what our senses transmit to us are very small in relation to the whole. They are separated by other intervals wherein nothing is perceptible to us; and further, it is not possible to assign a determinate limit to the increasing or decreasing frequency of the vibrations, so that we must consider the chart as subject to prolongation on both extremes by indefinite possibilities of sensations, which for us correspond to no actual sensation. But to say that there are possibilities of sensations is to say that these sensations may exist with creatures other than ourselves, and who by contrast may have none of the sensations which we have. When we say ‘ourselves’ we do not mean men only but all terrestrial creatures in general, for it does not appear that sense faculties vary to a great degree, and even if these faculties are susceptible of a variable extension they always remain fundamentally the same. The nature of these sense faculties, therefore, seems to be determined by the terrestrial milieu; it is not a property inherent to this or that species but a function of the fact that these creatures live on earth and not elsewhere. Analogically, on any other planet the sense faculties must be similarly determined, but it may be that they coincide in no way with the faculties possessed by terrestrial creatures—and it is even extremely probably that this must be so. Indeed, every possibility of sensation can be realized somewhere in the corporeal world, since all that is of the nature of sensation is essentially a corporeal faculty. These possibilities being indefinite, the chances are quite slim that any one of them would be realized twice, that is to say that two beings inhabiting two different planets should possess faculties that totally or even partially coincide. If it is supposed, however, that despite everything this coincidence could be realized, there is again only the slenderest of possibilities that they would be realized precisely in those conditions of temporal and spatial proximity which might permit communication. These chances, which are already infinitesimal for the entire corporeal order, are illimitably reduced if one envisages only the heavenly bodies existing simultaneously at a given moment; they are reduced immeasurably more if, among these heavenly bodies, only those near to one another, such as are the planets of a given system, are considered. It must be so because time and space themselves represent indefinite possibilities.”1
In other words, the chances of human civilization coexisting with an extraterrestrial civilization capable of perceiving the universe in a similar or at least analogous fashion to us, and thereby opening up the possibility of meaningful communication, and one moreover that is near enough to make such communication feasible, are so mathematically remote as to be imponderable.
Nevertheless, Guénon maintains that beings or intelligences possessing a radically alien sensory apparatus, with whom no communication can be meaningfully effected, might be much closer at hand than we imagine:
“We do not hold interplanetary communication to be an absolute impossibility; we only say that the chances for something of this kind can be expressed only by a quantity infinitesimal to several degrees and that if the question is posed in a determined instance, as, for example, the earth and another planet of the solar system, one hardly runs any risk in regarding those chances as practically nil. All this is, in sum, only an application of the theory of probabilities. What is important to note is that the obstacle to interplanetary communication does not lie in the difficulties experienced by two men totally ignorant of one another’s languages; such difficulties would not be insurmountable because the two beings could always find some measure of remedy in faculties common to both of them. But where common faculties do not exist, at least on the sensible level where communication is presumed to operate, the obstacle cannot in any way be avoided because it arises from a difference in nature of the beings under consideration. If such beings are of such a nature that nothing which provokes sensation in us provokes sensation in them, then so far as we are concerned these beings are as if they did not exist, and conversely. Even if they were at our side we would be no better off for it, and probably would not even perceive their presence, or in any case would probably not recognize them as living beings. Let it be said in passing that this allows us to think it not impossible that there may exist in the terrestrial milieu creatures entirely different from those known to us, creatures with whom we have no means of relating. But we will not dwell on this, especially because if such creatures exist they would have nothing in common with our humanity.”2
This is an important observation, and one that is well worth remembering. Based on conversations that I have had with members of the College of Seth, as well as with the members of many other secret and occult organizations that I have mentioned in these pages, I believe that Guénon’s speculation about the existence of beings within the terrestrial milieu that are so alien as to be totally unrecognizable to us is manifestly the case.
More importantly, it is also true that these beings may sometimes become recognizable, as it were, whether through theurgic rites and preparations or practices that might be classed under the black or goetic (sorcerous) arts. In other words, these creatures may be identical to the negotia perambulantes in tenebris, which I have spoken of before; in fact, the very same excommunicated member of the College of Seth who related to me the story of Funky Stardust also spoke of an affair with which he was directly connected, and which involved the nefandous evocation near Deem City a decade ago of just such a trans-dimensional, totally alien being by a sect of the Elder Race living in South Florida.3
All of which is to say that while extraterrestrial visitants to the earth may not be real, there is a very real possibility that there are nameless Things much nearer at hand, and that—did we only have the senses with which to properly perceive them—we might discover that even the bright and sunlit mundane world of our quotidian waking experience is peopled with unimaginable horrors…
L’Erreur spirite (Les Éditions Traditionelles, 1923). [The Spiritist Fallacy (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001) pp. 156-8.]
Ibid., pp. 158-9.
The Being, which is nameless (often the case with these sorts of things), was unable to maintain a lengthy presence in our material and dimensional dispensation, and was quickly dispatched back to its natal realm. It might be cognate with that which is called “Yxyaenilith” (τὸ Ἰξυαίνιλιθ), or the Indagator Forium (“Seeker of Doors”) or Habitator in Sphaeris Nubilosis (“Dweller in Dark Spheres”) in the De Rebus Occultis of Apuleius.
John, I've recently discovered your substack and am very much enjoying it.
Last year I wrote a series of articles on Evola. Unlike you, I am new to all of this material; my essays are written from an exploratory rather than expert viewpoint and I don't think you'll find much you didn't know. That said, here they are:
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/nerd-among-the-ruins-part-i
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/nerd-among-the-ruins-part-ii
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/nerd-among-the-ruins-part-iii
Since I have never encountered another human being with expertise in Evola or Traditionalism I have 10,000 questions to ask you... For now let me just say thank you for the work you're doing.