Welcome
January 10, 2013
This is the place where I share my thoughts on UFOs, religion, and other subjects dear to my heart.
My perspective: That UFOs, like religion, are a human phenomenon. They have nothing to do with space travel or life on other planets. They’re about us–our hopes, our longings, our terrors. Particularly the greatest terror of all: the end of our existence.
Are they alien visitors? Yes; but not in the sense of coming from outer space. Inside our own minds, our own souls, there’s enough alienness to fill a universe. Some of it is emerging …
With messages for us? Perhaps. We just need to learn to decode them.
by David Halperin
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Lost Horizon, Deadly Paradise – Quaternity Tales (Part 3)
May 23, 2013
“Conway went to the balcony and gazed at the dazzling plume of Karakal; the moon was riding high in a waveless ocean. … He was only partly unhappy, but he was infinitely and rather sadly perplexed. He did not know whether he had been mad and was now sane, or had been sane for a time and was now mad again.”
- Lost Horizon, chapter 11 (the scene where Conway makes up his mind to leave Shangri-La with Mallinson)
How does Lost Horizon end?
Shangri-La, from "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (2004)
My old friend Professor Marc Bregman, to whom I owe the impetus to read Lost Horizon–and whose reading of the book is quite different from mine–tells me that the movie version ends without too much ambiguity. As in the book, Conway leaves Shangri-La with the Mallinson equivalent (Conway’s brother George, in the movie) and the Lo-Tsen equivalent. The wintry journey is grueling; the porters abandon them. Lo-Tsen (“Maria,” in the movie) falls down in the snow. The men turn her over to find her dead–and that she’s become an old woman.
The lamas were right after all. “Maria’s” youth, preserved for decades by the magic of Shangri-La, has been shattered by her departure. “George” goes mad and jumps to his death. Conway’s the sole survivor. At movie’s end, we find him struggling to find his way back to Shangri-La, the paradise from which he’s foolishly banished himself.
Thus far the movie. The novel’s entirely different.
Recall what I said in the first of these posts: it’s a story within a story, a third-person narrative framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The third-person narrative, the body of the book, consists of the novelist Rutherford’s recollections of the story Conway told him, on the basis of Conway’s once lost, now recovered (more or less) memory of his time in Shangri-La. Rutherford writes his recollections down, then hands the manuscript to the unnamed narrator of the prologue and the epilogue. In the epilogue, Rutherford and the narrator together try to puzzle out what happened to Conway, Mallinson, and Lo-tsen after they left Shangri-La. This is the part of the story that remains, perhaps permanently, lost to Conway’s memory.
Conway’s story ends with the line I quoted in my last post. He and Mallinson have reached the porters’ camp, where Lo-Tsen meets them. Plainly she’s in love with Mallinson, eager for their departure. “It seemed to him [Conway] that the little Manchu had never looked so radiant. She gave him a most charming smile, but her eyes were all for the boy.” What happens next? No one knows–and in that mystery lies the book’s profundity and power.
What’s known is that Conway turned up, feverish, at a French mission hospital in Chung-Kiang (Chongqing?), China, without any papers or memory of what had happened to him. The Chinese doctor who admitted him remembered that he’d been brought in by a woman, Chinese, who herself died of fever shortly afterward. Of course Rutherford, who at the end of the book has managed to track the doctor down, asks him: “About that Chinese woman. Was she young?” And is told: “Oh, no, she was most old–most old of any one I have ever seen.”
So Lo-Tsen has turned into an old woman, as Conway and the lamas said she would? (Take her beauty away from Shangri-La, Conway tells Mallinson, “and you will see it fade like an echo.”) That’s the impression the book gives, and it seems to be what the narrator believes. But this is very unclear. The old woman could be someone Conway met in the course of his wanderings, young Lo-Tsen either dead or gone off with (or without) Mallinson to someplace no one knows. When you think about it–is it really likely the old woman is Lo-Tsen? If Lo-Tsen indeed came to Shangri-La in 1884 at age 18, as Conway’s been told, she’d have been born in 1866. That would make her 65, or conceivably 66, at the time of Conway’s reappearance. “Most old of any one I have ever seen”? As one who’s 65 myself–I sure don’t think so.
So where does the truth lie? Was Conway sane at Shangri-La, insane before and after–or the other way round? We’re left to speculate, and thereby to search out on our own the mystery of Shangri-La.
Here’s one solid, or more or less solid fact: Lo-Tsen seems eager to go off with Mallinson. Surely she must know she’s really young? But not so fast. Perhaps she knows, or at least suspects, she’ll age as soon as she leaves with him–and goes anyway, believing with Robert Ingersoll that love is worth the price of mortality? Or as a self-sacrifice, a supreme act of devotion, to redeem the man she loves from a place she knows he hates, knowing also that he’s apt to reject her once she’s no longer the youthful beauty he imagines?
Howard Schwartz's novella, "The Four Who Entered Paradise," with commentary by Marc Bregman (1995). The ancient story continues to inspire.
The possibilities are endless. This open-endedness is a mark of great art, secret of its immortality. It leaves us with no fixed lesson, no cut-and-dried answer to the great human questions. With its ambiguities, its unsolved riddles, it teases us to go wandering on our own.
Which brings us back to the original Four Who Entered Paradise. (Or whatever it was that they entered.)
Reread the ancient rabbinic story, which I quoted at the beginning of my first post. Mysterious, hauntingly evocative, like Lost Horizon carried to the nth degree. As in Lost Horizon, the issue of sanity and insanity, the question of where true reality lies, comes into play. It’s represented through the “madness” of Ben Zoma. It’s emphasized in an addition to the story found in the Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 14b. Rabbi Akiba says to the other three as they set forth on their expedition: “When you draw near the stones of pure marble, do not say, ‘Water, water.’ For it is written, ‘He who speaketh lies shall not be established in My sight’ [Psalm 101:7].” The “stones of pure marble” apparently create an illusion of water; Akiba warns us not to fall for it.
3+1 patterns everywhere. Three live, the fourth dies (Ben Azzai). Three bear the wounds of their unearthly experience; the fourth emerges safe and sound (Akiba). Three, who are named, remain within the accepted bounds of Judaism. The fourth, cryptically called “the Other One,” breaks through those bounds. He “mutilates the young plants,” “suffers his mouth to bring his flesh into guilt”–and it’s left to us to imagine what these metaphors hint at.
Within the overall Four-ness of the story, there’s a polarity of the godly and the godless, the pious and the heretic. These are embodied in Akiba and in his shadow, “the Other One.” If I’m not mistaken, this is the same polarity as we find in Lost Horizon between Conway and Mallinson. Conway is devout, faithful, trusting in the revelations of that supreme master of faith, the High Lama of Shangri-La. Over against them Mallinson brings his reason, his senses, the evidence of his eyes and his flesh. Thus confronted, Conway’s faith dissolves. He leaves with Mallinson.
Who is right? We never really find out. We are Conway–he’s the hero, the point-of-view character. But this doesn’t guarantee that he sees reality as it is, nor does it rule out the possibility that illusion may have a higher value than reality. (Whose illusion?) The “Other One,” even if ultimately wrong, speaks a truth that must be heard.
In the story of the Four in Paradise, we are Akiba. He’s the good guy, the orthodox teacher, the one with the white hat. But the “Other One” also, even when his mouth brings his flesh into guilt, is a full-fledged member of the Four. What comes out of his mouth are words that the faithful need to hear.
But what were those words? What did “the Other One,” a.k.a. Elisha ben Abuyah, say? What did he do?
I’ll post on this next week.
by David Halperin
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Posted in Belief, Judaism, Psychology, Religion | 
Tags: "Lost Horizon", Conway, Elisha ben Abuyah, four who entered paradise, James Hilton, Lo-Tsen, Mallinson, merkavah mysticism, paradise, Rabbi Akiba, Shangri-La | 
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Lost Horizon, Deadly Paradise – Quaternity Tales (Part 2)
May 16, 2013
(Continued from last week’s post:)
The secret of Shangri-La is this: Living there, you age with preternatural slowness.
Unlike in the archetypal paradise of Eden (at least according to some interpretations), you’re not exactly immortal. Sooner or later you’re going to grow old and die. But the process can take centuries rather than decades, and you preserve your youthful vigor and appearance for much of the process. The High Lama, who reveals all this to the Englishman Conway–whom he’s picked as his successor–turns out to be the same French priest who established Shangri-La in 1734, when he was 53 years old. Do the arithmetic: he was born in 1681, died in 1931 at the age of 250.
James Hilton, "Lost Horizon"--entering the world of Shangri-La
Exactly what accounts for this miracle is never made clear. It seems to have something to do with the air of the valley, combined with the meditational and narcotic practices of the lamasery. What is clear is that if you should be so foolish as to leave Shangri-La, the effect vanishes with devastating speed. Your chronological age catches up with you, with a vengeance.
Conway’s naturally curious about Lo-Tsen, the beautiful Chinese girl who plays classical piano for the four newcomers’ mealtime delectation, and on whom both he and Mallinson are developing a crush. Turns out she stumbled into Shangri-La in the year 1884, at age 18. Which makes her currently 65.
So Shangra-La is about as close to Eden as this world can possibly get. Where’s the downside?
Lo-Tsen exemplifies it–at least for some of us. Chang, who serves as the travelers’ host and guide at the lamasery, explains to Conway:
“Lo-Tsen gives no caresses, except such as touch the stricken heart from her very presence. What does your Shakespeare say of Cleopatra? — ‘She makes hungry where she most satisfies.’ A popular type, doubtless, among the passion-driven races, but such a woman, I assure you, would be altogether out of place at Shangri-La. Lo-Tsen, if I might amend the quotation, removes hunger where she least satisfies. It is a more delicate and lasting accomplishment.”
“And one, I assume, which she has much skill in performing?”
“Oh, decidedly–we have had many examples of it. It is her way to calm the throb of desire to a murmur that is no less pleasant when left unanswered.”
Which doesn’t mean you have to be celibate at Shangri-La. The lamas’ motto is moderation in all things–virtue included. The American among the four visitors is periodically taken by Shangri-La’s porters down to the valley below, for bouts of indulgence with the local liquor and the local women. (Whereas Miss Brinklow, if she has comparable impulses, will presumably need to content herself with cold showers.) But for many of us in the “passion-driven races,” this choice between the “lovely cold vase” that is Lo-Tsen, on the one hand, and faceless prostitutes on the other, is bound to be pretty grim.
I’m reminded of the remark I read somewhere in Robert Ingersoll: that given a choice between a world subject to death but with love, versus one from which both love and death had been banished, he’d pick mortality. I don’t know what Ingersoll would say about a place like Shangri-La, where love and death are present but in pale, muted, shadowy forms, stripped of all dread and ecstasy. My guess is he’d be less than enthusiastic.
Like the young Englishman Mallinson, who unlike his three companions hates, hates, hates Shangri-La and can’t wait to be away from it. And who’s discovered a side to Lo-Tsen of which old Chang has never dreamed.
Here’s where the book started getting good for me. I have to admit that when I read Lost Horizon, which I did for the first time about a month ago, I was bored and irritated through most of it. It wasn’t until the very last chapter, when Mallinson is finally given his voice, that I realized the novel’s depth and power.
“Come on, Conway, we’ve till dawn to pack what we can and get away. Great news, man … The porters are about five miles beyond the pass–they came yesterday with loads of books and things … tomorrow they begin the journey back. …. It just shows how these fellows here intended to let us down–they never told us–we should have been stranded here for God knows how much longer. … I say, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”
Conway, unbeknownst to Mallinson, is the new High Lama of Shangri-La, the old one having died hardly more than an hour ago. He knows what Mallinson doesn’t know: that the porters will never agree to conduct them to the outside world. Except that Mallinson assures him they have agreed. They’ve already been paid in advance for their service.
Conway protests:
“But–I don’t understand ….”
“I don’t suppose you do, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Who’s been making all these plans?”
Mallinson answered brusquely: “Lo-Tsen, if you’re really keen to know. She’s with the porters now. She’s waiting.”
“Waiting?”
“Yes. She’s coming with us. I assume you’ve no objection?”
And now Mallinson, who’s been made to seem so petulant and boyish, reveals himself as the thoughtful, passionate, ethical man he is. When Conway calls Lo-Tsen “very charming,” Mallinson bursts out:
“Charming? … She’s a good bit more than that. … Admiring her as if she were an exhibit in a museum may be your idea of what she deserves, but mine’s more practical, and when I see some one I like in a rotten position I try to do something. … After all, if you’re rescuing people from something quite hellish, you don’t usually stop to enquire if they’ve anywhere else to go to.”
Hellish? Shangri-La?
“There’s something dark and evil about it. The whole business has been like that, from the beginning–the way we were brought here, without reason at all, by some madman–and the way we’ve been detained since, on one excuse or another.”
Which is completely true, and someone’s finally saying it. A paradise that kidnaps its recruits and then lies to them has something wrong with it.
Masaccio, "The Expulsion from Paradise." Something to weep about?
“It’s unhealthy and unclean–and for that matter, if your impossible yarn were true, it would be more hateful still! A lot of wizened old men crouching here like spiders for any one who comes near … it’s filthy …. Oh, why won’t you come away with me, Conway? I hate imploring you for my own sake, but damn it all, I’m young and we’ve been pretty good friends together–does my whole life mean nothing to you compared with the lies of these awful creatures? And Lo-Tsen, too–she’s young–doesn’t she count at all?”
Because what I’ve called “the secret of Shangri-La” is for Mallinson “a fantastic rigamarole.” “Believing in people hundreds of years old just because they’ve told you they are”! Does Conway have one scrap of evidence for the advanced age of the people at Shangri-La, beyond the word of Chang and the High Lama? Conway has to concede the point: he doesn’t. “I suppose the truth is,” he admits, “that when it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.”
Which brings us back to Lo-Tsen.
She’s not young, he tells Mallinson. Reiterating the lovely-cold-vase theory of Lo-Tsen, he declares her beauty “a fragile thing that can only live where fragile things are loved. Take it away from this valley and you will see it fade like an echo.”
To which Mallinson retorts with the equivalent of an eight-letter hyphenated obscenity:
“Oh, what stupid nonsense it all is–about her not being young! And foul and horrible nonsense, too. Conway, you can’t believe it! It’s just too ridiculous. How can it really mean anything?”
“How can you really know that she’s young?”
Mallinson half turned away, his face lit with a grave shyness. “Because I do know…. Perhaps you’ll think less of me for it, but I do know. … She was cold on the surface, but that was the result of living here–it had frozen all the warmth. But the warmth was there.”
“To be unfrozen?” …
Mallinson answered softly: “God, yes–she’s just a girl. I was terribly sorry for her, and we were both attracted, I suppose. I don’t see that it’s anything to be ashamed of. In fact in a place like this I should think it’s about the decentest thing that’s ever happened …”
So Lo-Tsen is a creature of the flesh after all, a human being and no museum piece. Without another word, Conway is persuaded. He and Mallinson leave the lamasery and, at dawn, reach the porters’ camp. There, just as Mallinson had said, Lo-Tsen is waiting. “It seemed to [Conway] that the little Manchu had never looked so radiant. She gave him a most charming smile, but her eyes were all for the boy.”
So Mallinson is right. Conway was wrong. The High Lama was a liar, Shangri-La no paradise but a cushioned prison, from which Conway, Mallinson, and Lo-Tsen have a chance of escaping and finding a real life.
But the story’s not quite over …
(To be continued next week.)
by David Halperin
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Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon"
Posted in Belief, Judaism, Psychology, Religion | Tags: "Lost Horizon", agelessness, Conway, immortality, James Hilton, Lo-Tsen, Mallinson, paradise, Shangri-La | No Comments »
Lost Horizon, Deadly Paradise – Quaternity Tales (Part 1)
May 8, 2013
“Four entered Paradise. One looked and died; one looked and went mad; one mutilated the young plants; one entered safely and came out safely.”
No, this isn’t a plot summary for James Hilton’s wildly popular novel Lost Horizon, turned by Frank Capra into a somewhat less popular film. It’s the opening of one of the most famously cryptic passages in all rabbinic literature, preserved in slightly different versions in a number of ancient Hebrew writings. And I cheated in my quotation. The Hebrew word pardes doesn’t really mean “Paradise.” But maybe it does.
Poster for Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon" (1937)
I’ll explain in a minute. But first let’s listen as the ancient rabbis themselves decode their story:
“Ben Azzai looked and died. Of him it is written, ‘Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His saints’ [Psalm 116:15]. Ben Zoma looked and went mad. Of him it is written, ‘Hast thou found honey? Then eat only that which is sufficient for thee, lest thou become filled therewith, and vomit it’ [Proverbs 25:16]. The ‘Other One’ mutilated the young plants. Of him it is written, ‘Suffer not thy mouth to bring thy flesh into guilt’ [Ecclesiastes 5:5]. Rabbi Akiba entered safely and came out safely. Of him it is written, ‘Draw me, we will run after thee’ [Song of Songs 1:4].”
The four men named were rabbis of the early second century CE. The best known of them is Rabbi Akiba–scholar, martyr, possibly political activist–one of the great heroes of rabbinic Judaism. “The Other One” is a hushed designation for the man who was Akiba’s polar opposite: Elisha ben Abuyah, as learned as Akiba, but somehow gone bad–a notorious heretic, libertine, and blasphemer. Ben Azzai and Ben Zoma are more obscure. There’s a story, apparently relevant to this passage, about how another rabbi finds Ben Zoma sitting in what seems like a trance. To the rabbi’s question of what’s going on, Ben Zoma gives the distinctly spacy answer: “I beheld Creation, and between the upper and the lower waters there is only the space of a handbreadth.”
The kind of talk, in other words, that you’d expect from someone who’s gone insane.
As for the word pardes, it normally means “garden” or “orchard.” But the Persian word from which it’s taken is also the source of the Greek paradeisos, from which we get our word “paradise.” In the New Testament, 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, Paul speaks of himself as having been “caught up to the third heaven–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows … caught up into Paradise … heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.” In this passage paradeisos is apparently the same as the third heaven, or maybe located in the third heaven. (And the Greek verb harpazein, which Paul uses twice, really means “seized,” “abducted.”) Maybe the four rabbis were believed to have had a similar experience, and their pardes was “paradise” after all. Some versions of the story, actually, say that Akiba “went up safely and descended safely,” which would suggest his pardes was envisioned as somewhere up above.
Now cut to Lost Horizon. The year is 1931. Four people are abducted in a hijacked airplane into a paradise called Shangri-La, somewhere in the Himalayas. The foursome is made up of three men and one woman, three British and one American; there are probably other 3+1 patterns if we look for them. Jungians out there will know what I’m driving at: the archetype of the quaternity. I’m assuming the basic story is archetypal, and that’s what accounts for its power. That’s what makes it possible to do a comparison between two imaginative creations from such different historical contexts.
The four abductees are Mallinson, a hot-blooded young English diplomat; Conway, a somewhat older and mellower diplomat; Miss Brinklow, a not quite stereotypic missionary lady; and an American who initially introduces himself as Barnard, which turns out not to be his real name. (He’s a wanted man–a high-finance swindler of the Bernie Madoff variety.) The story is told from Conway’s point of view, he being, like Rabbi Akiba, the only one of the four who’s survived, or at least who’s come back alive.
Originally, it seems, Conway lost his memory of his stay in Shangri-La. It comes back to him, though in fragmentary fashion; and he spends a night telling his story to a novelist named Rutherford, who writes it down (in third person) and subsequently gives the manuscript to the unnamed narrator of the prologue and the epilogue. The story in between is that manuscript, which is to say, Rutherford’s recollection of what Conway told him. These details underscore the haziness of the story. We’re never quite sure how much to trust what Conway says–or, indeed, even if it is what Conway says, as opposed to Rutherford’s distorted memory of it.
Book jacket for James Hilton's "Lost Horizon" (1933)
The four end up at Shangri-La, a lamasery high up in a fertile, pleasant valley sheltered from the Himalayan cold. There they receive a magnificent welcome. Shangri-La might as well be a resort hotel, with central heating and modern plumbing, plus a stunning view of a conical mountain on the horizon called “Blue Moon.” But it’s also a center of learning, with a library rich in European as well as Asian classics. Conway is almost immediately drawn to the place. Young Mallinson, by contrast, can’t wait to leave. Boorishly he demands of their impeccably courteous Chinese host that porters be provided for them. When told it’ll be months before any are available, he rages like a child. Miss Brinklow and the American, meanwhile, make their own accommodations to life in Shangri-La. (Which, we slowly discover, will go on longer than any of them can possibly imagine–they’re never going to get away.) Like the four rabbis of old, each responds to this paradise in his or her individual way.
The High Lama of the place takes an interest in Conway, at first unexplained. In one of a series of private conversations, he confides to the Englishman that Shangri-La will be a refuge for human culture, preserving it through the new and worse Dark Ages that are coming. (Lost Horizon was published in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor of Germany.) Soon, says the Lama, there will be such a storm “as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos. … [T]he Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world in a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed. And Shangri-La may hope to be both of these.”
After speaking this prophecy, the High Lama dies. He leaves Conway as his successor, the new High Lama of Shangri-La. Almost immediately Conway has to face the restive Mallinson, who has his plan of escape all worked out–and a beautiful young Chinese girl from the lamasery ready to go with him, as his lover.
Except that lovely Lo-Tsen may not be so young. Shangri-La has secrets that Conway is beginning to understand, and Mallinson doesn’t.
Unless it’s the other way around.
(To be continued next week.)
by David Halperin
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Posted in Belief, Judaism, Psychology, Religion | Tags: "Lost Horizon", 2 Corinthians, Elisha ben Abuyah, four who entered paradise, Frank Capra, James Hilton, merkavah mysticism, paradise, pardes, Paul, Rabbi Akiba, Shangri-La | 3 Comments »
“Outtakes of a UFO Investigator” – What Do They Look Like?
May 2, 2013
No, I’m not talking about the UFO aliens. I’m talking about the main characters in Outtakes of a UFO Investigator–Danny Shapiro, his mother Anna, his father Leon.
For those of who you haven’t seen my earlier Outtakes posts, I’ve been posting PDFs of stories that were originally part of my novel Journal of a UFO Investigator, but had to be cut when the novel took its present shape. (Click for chapter 1, chapter 2, and chapter 3. For chapter 4, which I’ve just put up, click here or on the large picture at the bottom of this post.)
When I first started, I envisioned the Outtakes as a collection of materials from the cutting-room floor (as its title indicates), its “chapters” discrete episodes. But now I feel it taking shape as a parallel novel to Journal of a UFO Investigator, with an integrity of its own. It’s a story of Danny’s life in the day-to-day world, focusing on his investigation of a New Jersey UFO landing and the book he tries to write about it. All while his mother is slowly dying, and–while this is happening, and he can’t bear to see it–he finds himself presented with the trip of a lifetime.
"Outtakes of a UFO Investigator": Danny Shapiro investigates a UFO landing at Scofield, NJ. Painting by Rose Shalom Halperin
Looking over the chapters I’ve posted from Outtakes, I see that they’re missing something pretty important. The secondary characters, whom Danny meets in the course of his investigations, are described as they appear. But not Danny or his parents. Naturally–they were introduced in the published Journal of a UFO Investigator, and are again described in its sequel-in-progress, The Color of Electrum.
So here’s a few clues as to what they look like …
“She stands beside me, resting her weight on the back of my chair, touching my shoulder with her fingers. I lean forward. It makes me nervous when my mother touches me. I smell the sour sickness of her body. I don’t turn around, but I can see her in my mind: spindly limbs, gaunt, peaky face. Her thick cat eyeglasses, the lenses like teardrops. I wear glasses too.” (Journal of a UFO Investigator, chapter 1).
16-year-old Danny is describing his mother. But indirectly he’s also describing himself. His glasses, which he’s worn since he was a little boy, are an emblem of the bond the two of them share–which he’s ambivalent about, to say the least. The glasses define for him his physical appearance, which he normally doesn’t rate very highly. “I can’t stand him, I hate him, I despise him,” he says about himself in a convulsion of self-hatred; “with those thick glasses he’s the ugliest creature in the world” (Journal, chapter 30).
The beautiful Rochelle, his love interest in Journal, begs to differ:
“‘I’ve been wondering all evening,’ she said, ‘how you’d look without your glasses.’
“She reached up and took them off. ‘Oh, nice,’ she said. ‘Very, very nice.’ She raised her left index finger to my eyebrow and lightly traced the outline of my eye socket. ‘Marvelous socket. And a scrumptious curve here,’ she said, moving her finger up the bridge of my nose and then down to the tip. ‘And you cover it all up with glasses. Why do you do it?’
“‘I can’t see without them,’ I said.
“‘Ever hear of contact lenses? Ever read the Bausch and Lomb brochures? My glasses are twice as thick as yours, I’ll bet, when I’m not wearing my contacts.’
“‘I’ve worn glasses since I was almost six,’ I said.
“‘Doesn’t mean you have to keep on wearing them.’” (Journal, chapter 11)
In The Color of Electrum, Danny–18 years old, and a college freshman–gives a more balanced account of his now bearded self.
“His beard and mustache, after a sparse, awkward start, had come in full, reddish-gold in spots though his hair was still brown as ever. Did he look good in it? He’d never thought of himself as handsome, but maybe that was a mistake. Briefly he examined himself in the mirror. Nothing wrong with this face. Agreeable, kind. No obvious deformities, unless you counted the somewhat biggish ears. Or the thick horn-rimmed glasses he’d needed to wear since he was a little kid.” (Electrum, chapter 1)
Danny’s father Leon is described in Journal mostly by negation. Unlike Danny and his mother, he doesn’t wear glasses; therefore Danny attributes to him the “smooth, handsome face” that Danny doubts he can ever have (chapter 2). The Color of Electrum goes into a little more detail about Danny’s parents, whose pictures he’s hunted up in an old college yearbook:
“He was surprised when he actually did find their photos, as if his father and mother and Mrs. Colton could not have existed in their younger selves, and now behold here was the proof they did. Danny’s father, whom he’d imagined to have been a handsome young god, looked raw and twerpy in his yearbook picture, like a freshman who’d somehow gotten misclassified as a senior. His mother had been plain-faced and delicate, the sadness of her short life—even then she’d known her heart was weak, hadn’t she?—already imprinted on her youthful features.
“But the real surprise was Meg Kupferstein, currently Mrs. Meg Colton. Unlike his parents she looked away from the camera as if from a disdained admirer, her lips parted, her expression hotly sensual. Her hair was light-colored, blond evidently, in the photo. The heavy breasts, that now gave her a dumpy look, must have turned heads all over campus. Man, she’s tough! the guys in the dorm would have said as they sat paging through the freshman photo book on a dull Saturday night, busting out of their skins with horniness …” (Electrum, chapter 3)
(“Mrs. Meg Colton” is Danny’s stepmother-to-be, who first appears in Journal, more fully in Electrum. You’ll meet her in Outtakes, too.)
None of this, of course, would make it possible for someone who’d never seen these people to pick them out of a lineup. But that’s not what writers do, when we describe people. Rather, we’ll pick one or two outstanding features that we think will resonate with our readers, remind them of someone they know whom they can use as a model for their own mental picture.
Which, of course, will never be the same as ours. You don’t envision Danny or Leon or Anna Shapiro the same way I do. If a movie is ever made of Journal or of Electrum, the shape they take on the screen won’t look like either your mental construct or mine. But if you have any mental picture of these people–if you can imagine them, as you read about them, standing and moving and talking–then I’ve done my job as a writer.
Which I hope I have. And that you do.
Click on the picture to download chapter 4 of "Outtakes of a UFO Investigator" (PDF). Cover art by Rose Shalom Halperin.
Click here to read Chapter 1 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Click here to read Chapter 2 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Click here to read Chapter 3 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Would you like to have these Outtakes as podcasts–free of charge? Let me know! I’ll see what I can do to provide them.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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The UFO Experience – “Although I Am Only a Child, Please Believe Me”
April 26, 2013
A gentleman named Jordan Hofer, with whom I’ve had a stimulating exchange of comments in connection with my post “Drawing Dirty Pictures – Philadelphia UFO, January 1974,” tells me he has no objection to my calling attention in a new post to some of the points raised in our conversation. So that’s just what I’ll do.
Jordan’s a research specialist in anthropology for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. He’s the author of the book Evolutionary Ufology: A New Synthesis, scheduled for publication next year; also a Young Adult novel on a UFO theme, Saucerville, scheduled for this October.
From Jordan Hofer's blog, on "Evolutionary Ufology: A New Synthesis"
Jordan writes: “I taught human evolution at Oregon State University for seven years before the recession hit and my position was cut. Around that time my best friend of 33 years had a very clear sighting of a large, black, equilateral triangle, with white flashing lights at each apex, fly low and slow over his house, emitting a deep thrumming sound that rattled his windows. He was astonished, to say the least. The sighting deeply affected him. He had told fellow coworkers about his sighting and was called a liar to his face. He was in need of a friend who would believe him, take him at his word of what he witnessed. I was skeptical at first, but my loyalty soon won out (especially after I left the confines of academia) and I joined him in his search for an answer to what he had seen.”
I was deeply moved by Jordan’s story, and I told him so.
“As you may gather,” I wrote in my reply, “I am fairly committed to disbelief in the physical reality of UFOs. (Except in the banal sense that the planet Venus, mirages, etc. have a physical existence.) The history of the past 65 years of UFOlogy seems to me to demonstrate this. Yet we do have stories like your friend’s, which it’s impossible to disbelieve without outraging all that makes us human.”
Several months ago, at a lunch with my old friend Professor Rachel Elior, a scholar of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I expressed the view that people experiencing journeys through the seven heavens of traditional Jewish cosmology, seeing angels, demons and the like, are hallucinating. A graduate student who was there accused me of “epistemic violence.” The charge seemed to me nonsensical. After all, when people report seeing things that we know don’t exist—like those seven heavens—surely they’ve got to be hallucinating, don’t they? (Unless they’re lying. And I don’t like calling people liars.)
Especially if we accept the point I gather Oliver Sacks made in his recent book Hallucinations, which I’m sorry to say I still haven’t read–that it’s simply not true what we often think, that having hallucinations is a mark of insanity.
But would I have the courage to maintain this remorseless logic, in the face of someone like Jordan’s friend?
One of the things that makes J. Allen Hynek’s 1972 book The UFO Experience such an affecting human document, is that this broad-minded, warm-hearted scientist seems continually to have struggled with this question. He quotes the “frank and artless remarks” of children who’ve seen UFOs. “This is the truth, and there is no hoax implied since that is a serious offense at this school.” “ … we give you our Scout’s Honor that this is not a hoax or optical illusion.” (Though of course if it were an optical illusion, the three Boy Scouts who saw it presumably wouldn’t have been aware of that.) “Although I am only a child, please believe me.” (Referring to a sighting, of a cigar-shaped object, made on January 19, 1967; all quotes from p. 14 of Hynek’s book.)
UFOlogist J. Allen Hynek (1910-1986), in his cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977)
Hynek also tells an awful story of the fate that befell an Ohio deputy sheriff named Dale F. Spaur who, in the early morning hours of April 17, 1966, chased in his patrol car a UFO “big as a house” and so bright “it’d make your eyes water.” Spaur wasn’t the only person who saw the object, or even who chased it; there were three other witnesses. Which makes what happened to Spaur all the more appalling.
“This,” Spaur told Air Force investigator Hector Quintanilla, “I have never seen nothing like it before or after or in the wildest far-fetched imagination. I know you can have an optical illusion or even see something moving or like if you look through a piece of glass or something … I can go along with this. But nothing this big. In my wildest dreams I don’t think I could have ever imagined or seen anything like it” (p. 106).
The outcome?
“Subsequently, Spaur was singled out for unbearable ridicule and the pressure of unfavorable publicity. The combination of events wrecked his home life, estranged him from his wife, and ruined his career and his health. He is no longer [as of 1972] with the police force, and, it is reported, he subsists by doing odd jobs” (p. 108).
I doubt if Dale Spaur is still alive in 2013, but it’s possible. I’ve often thought about what I would say to him if he confronted me, and my disbelief in UFOs, with his story. I know you’re not lying, I would tell him. (Although, to tell the truth, I don’t really know that.) And if you were hallucinating it wasn’t because you’re crazy but because the human mind has potentials we hardly begin to suspect, and hallucination is probably one of them. The bottom line is that I don’t have the slightest idea what you saw or what made you see it. I don’t think it can be a visitor from outer space, because if it was we’d surely have unequivocal proof of the presence of such visitors by this time, which after all is nearly a half-century after your experience. And there doesn’t seem to be any urgency in figuring out what you saw, because a half-century later we still don’t know what it was, or what any of the really baffling UFO cases were, and we don’t seem to be any worse off for that ignorance …
Except, of course, for poor Dale Spaur.
How lucky Jordan Hofer’s friend was, to have had a friend like Jordan!
And remember the little boy who saw the cigar-shaped object on January 19, 1967, and begged the gentlemen of the Air Force UFO project to please believe him, even though he was only a child?
There’s postscript to that one, too.
Go to the “Welcome” post on this blog, and sift through the “responses” to it.
And wonder.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Psychology, UFOs | Tags: Dale F. Spaur, hallucinations, J. Allen Hynek, Jordan Hofer, Oliver Sacks, Rachel Elior, religious experiences, UFOs | 9 Comments »
Trickster Tales – James Moseley, Sherlock Holmes, UFOlogy
April 19, 2013
I’ve been reading an unusual UFO book. It came out about six weeks ago, edited by Timothy Green Beckley, whom I’ve known from our teenage UFOlogist days in the mid-1960s. It’s entitled The Astounding UFO Secrets Of James W. Moseley: A Special Tribute to the Editor of Saucer Smear and the Court Jester of UFOlogy.
"The Astounding UFO Secrets ..." available from Amazon
Jim Moseley died last November, at the age of 81. Even those of us who didn’t quite approve of him are bound to miss him. By “us,” I mean those who are caught up in fascination with the bizarre, maddening, intriguing world of UFOs and UFO belief.
Though Moseley at least intermittently claimed to be a UFO believer, the skeptics were particularly fond of him. Naturally. He was their “Voltaire of the UFO movement” (Robert Sheaffer): a mouthpiece, wittier and more knowledgeable than they could ever be, of their contempt for the absurdities of the “UFOOlogists.” The more sober UFO researchers, who saw themselves as pioneers of a scorned and neglected science which didn’t need one more person making fun, were less amused. The late Richard Hall, responding to the claim that Jim Moseley “has been and remains a Presence in UFOlogy,” shot back: “Yes, like a steaming turd on the living room carpet. This sort of silly crap explains why you and your idol [Moseley], who constantly treat the whole subject as a joke, might just as well be on the Government payroll for UFO debunkers.”
Among the tributes to Moseley in The Astounding UFO Secrets is an academic-style article by George P. Hansen, entitled “James W. Moseley as Trickster.” Hansen, a magician and parapsychologist who’s the author of a scholarly book entitled The Trickster and the Paranormal, tries looking at Moseley from an anthropological perspective. More specifically, using the model of the “Trickster.”
“The trickster,” Hansen writes, “is a character type found worldwide in mythology and folklore, and trickster tales must number in the thousands. The trickster is something of an irrational being. He–the trickster is typically male–can be seen as a personification of a cluster of abstract qualities that often manifest together. These include deception, disruption, abnormal sexuality, boundary crossing, taboo breaking, supernatural/paranormal powers, marginality, and outsider-hood.”
The Trickster at Princeton, ca. 1950. From the obituary for James W. Moseley in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, April 3, 2013
Not only is Moseley personally an embodiment of the Trickster. To anyone who’s known him or followed his madcap activities–his long-running Saucer Smear, his merry pranks and hoaxes (often perpetrated in collaboration with his old buddy Gray Barker)–this is almost self-evident. But UFOlogy itself is a sort of collective Trickster. As Trickster, it’s “anti-structural,” and therefore “incompatible with hierarchical institutions. … UFOlogy has never established viable, long-lasting, well-recognized, widely-trusted institutions that study and comment authoritatively on the phenomena. … UFOs generate massive popular interest. UFO movies have grossed hundred of millions of dollars. In contrast, the more serious interest by MUFON, CUFOS, and other organizations gains meager support. Most research is done by individuals and small groups, who operate independently of larger institutions. This state of affairs illustrates the anti-structural nature of the field.”
This may contain an answer to the question posed by folklore scholar Thomas E. Bullard in his important book The Myth and Mystery of UFOs. “Why are UFOs at once so popular and so despised?” That’s the Trickster all over. Popular. Yet despised.
And not without reason. The Trickster is a type best enjoyed from a distance. Up close, he can be a pain in the butt. If you have to depend on him and trust his word, you may as well forget about keeping your sanity. I can sympathize, actually, with Richard Hall’s turd-on-the-living-room-carpet outburst. As a gravely serious 17-year-old UFOlogist, I pretty much shared those sentiments. At the Second Congress of Scientific UFOlogists in Cleveland, in June 1965, I presented a “code of ethics” that I recognize, from my 65-year-old perspective, as a slightly veiled denunciation of Moseley and everything he represented. (Photos and story on my Facebook Timeline for June 26, 1965.)
Yet it struck me, reading Hansen’s article, that one of my all-time heroes was also a Trickster. I refer to the world-famed “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes is a paradox: a Trickster devoted to defending the moral order, albeit with some modifications. (“After all, Watson,” he confides after allowing a confessed jewel thief to escape the law, “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. … I suppose that I am committing a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul.”) Yet if you run through Hansen’s checklist for the Trickster, Holmes turns out to have a lot of his features.
Deception. Holmes is a master of disguise. This is of course important for solving his cases. But often he indulges his talents, Moseley-esque, just for the fun of it. In the 1890 novella “The Sign of Four,” he shows up in his own apartment disguised as an elderly sailor fallen on hard times. Watson and Scotland Yard detective Athelney Jones sit with him, neither suspecting who their company is. Until …
“‘I think that you might offer me a cigar too,’ he said. We both started in our chairs. There was Holmes sitting close to us with an air of quiet amusement.”
Sherlock Holmes with Dr. Watson, as drawn by Sidney Paget for "The Strand" magazine. Holmes's pipe hasn't yet acquired its familiar curvature
(A note on “The Sign of Four”: it’s a jewel of a novella, brilliantly plotted, and developed with wit and suspense. It’s also grossly racist, and represents cocaine as a truly cool thing to do. NOT recommended as a Bar Mitzvah present.)
Supernatural/paranormal powers. Holmes wouldn’t call his powers supernatural or paranormal, of course. Unlike his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he has no belief in either one. (Check out “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.”) He describes and then explains his feats as “very simple pieces of reasoning,” or words to that effect. Yet they come across as pure magic. “So, Watson,” he announces out of the blue, apparently reading the good doctor’s mind, “you do not propose to invest in South African securities?” In the first chapter of “The Sign of Four,” he peers through his magnifying glass at a watch left behind by Watson’s deceased older brother. After complaining that the watch has been cleaned, “which robs me of my most suggestive facts,” he casually rattles off the following information about its owner:
“He was a man of untidy habits–very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died. That is all I can gather.”
No wonder Watson at first accuses Holmes of having snooped into his brother’s past, and faking the rest.
Abnormal sexuality. Unless Holmes’s total lack of interest in sex constitutes “abnormal sexuality”–which, come to think of it, it may–I don’t see this feature in the Holmes stories. But where the “Trickster” classification really fits him is marginality, outsider-hood, boundary crossing. He solves his crimes without the help and often with the active opposition of those he mockingly calls “the accredited representatives of the law.” To Scotland Yard he’s an airy intellectual, at best a nuisance and at worst a menace–until, as inevitably happens, they realize they’re out of their depths and come begging for his assistance. As for Holmes–well, he’s prepared to be sporting about them. (“He is not a bad fellow,” he says of Athelney Jones, “and I should not like to do anything which would injure him professionally.”) But he takes the official constabulary about as seriously as Jim Moseley took establishment UFOlogists like Richard Hall. Which is to say, not in the slightest.
Here’s Holmes in action, from chapter 6 of “The Sign of Four.” Pompous, preening Jones, Scotland Yard dunce, has turned up at a murder scene and is making arrests right and left:
“Ask Mr. Sholto to step this way.–Mr. Sholto, it is my duty to inform you that anything which you may say will be used against you. I arrest you in the Queen’s name as being concerned in the death of your brother.”
“There, now! Didn’t I tell you!” cried the poor little man, throwing out his hands and looking from one to the other of us.
“Don’t trouble yourself about it, Mr. Sholto,” said Holmes; “I think that I can engage to clear you of the charge.”
“Don’t promise too much, Mr. Theorist, don’t promise too much!” snapped the detective. “You may find it a harder matter than you think.”
“Not only will I clear him, Mr. Jones, but I will make you a free present of the name and description of one of the two people who were in this room last night. His name, I have every reason to believe, is Jonathan Small. He is a poorly educated man, small, active, with his right leg off, and wearing a wooden stump which is worn away upon the inner side. His left boot is a coarse, square-toed sole, with an iron band round the heel. He is a middle-aged man, much sunburned, and has been a convict. These few indications may be of some assistance to you, coupled with the fact that there is a good deal of skin missing from the palm of his hand. The other man–”
“Ah! the other man?” asked Athelney Jones in a sneering voice, but impressed none the less, as I could easily see, by the precision of the other’s manner.
“Is a rather curious person,” said Sherlock Holmes, turning upon his heel. “I hope before very long to be able to introduce you to the pair of them. A word with you, Watson.”
Masterful. Brilliant. It’s no wonder that in my “tween” years, in the late 50s, I was completely mad for Sherlock Holmes. (Of course, I didn’t know back then that I was a “tween.” As far as the 1950s were concerned, I was still just a kid.) He was my ideal, the image of the man I hoped someday I’d be. Somehow or other I got hold of a pipe that vaguely resembled his. Sucking on the empty pipe, I sat in a reclining chair and read the old Ellery Queen murder mysteries. I loved their “Challenge to the Reader” pages, maybe 50 pages before the end. (“Reader, you now have all the facts …”; you can guess, or rather infer for yourself, who the killer is.) I always tried out the deductive skills I assumed I’d need in the real world before very long. I always got it wrong.
A couple of months before my Bar Mitzvah, I read Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, which offers (on pages 129, 140) a “challenge to the reader” that’s precisely similar to Ellery Queen’s–except that Barker doesn’t claim already to know the solution. A new world opened. I put away the pipe, along with other childish things. I became a UFOlogist.
by David Halperin
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Posted in UFOs | Tags: "The Sign of Four", "They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers", Athelney Jones, Dr. Watson, Ellery Queen, folklore, George P. Hansen, gray barker, James Moseley, liminality, marginality, Richard Hall, Saucer Smear, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas E. Bullard, Timothy Green Beckley, trickster, trickster tales, UFOlogy, UFOs | 6 Comments »
“UFO 96″ – The UFO World of 50 Years Ago
April 12, 2013
"UFO 96," front cover: the UFO world of 1963, depicted by artist Gene Duplantier. Identifications on the back cover, at the bottom of this post. To download the first half of the full PDF of "UFO 96," click on this image; for the second half, click on the image at the bottom
If I wanted to do this properly, I suppose I’d issue an annotated edition. Something along the lines of Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice.
“No joke is funny unless you see the point of it,” Gardner wrote in his introduction to The Annotated Alice, “and sometimes a point has to be explained. In the case of Alice we are dealing with a very curious, complicated kind of nonsense, written for British readers of another century, and we need to know a great many things that are not part of the text if we wish to capture its full wit and flavor.” Lewis Carroll’s version of “You are old, Father William,” in chapter 5 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is funny no matter how you read it. But once you know the Robert Southey poem of which it’s a parody–provided by Gardner in his annotations–it’s about the most hilarious thing ever written.
The stapled-together UFO 96, offered here (un-annotated) as a two-part PDF file–click here for part 1, click here for part 2–was published in 1963, evidently by Gray Barker and using the resources of his “Saucerian Press.” The influence of Barker’s close friend James W. Moseley, departed from this world last November, is evident throughout. I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember how I got hold of my copy. I don’t think UFO 96 was ever sold commercially. I don’t know how many copies were made, or how many still exist. A search at http://www.worldcat.org/ turns up nothing. A Google search for “ufo 96″ finds only an MP3 of that name, distributed in 2008 by El Cosmo Group on an album entitled “Maha Lakshmi Dreams.”
UFO 96 was distributed, rather, among the cognoscenti; and although I was never really one of those, I did rub shoulders with them at the First Congress of Scientific UFOlogists in Cleveland, Ohio, in June 1964, and at the Second Congress a year later. (Described on the timeline of my Facebook Fan Page for June 20, 1964, June 24 and 26, 1965.) If I had to guess, I’d say my copy was given to me at some middle-of-the-night bull session of the 1965 Congress. I believe I was told at the time why it was called UFO 96. Some inside joke, which I’ve now completely forgotten and doubt if there’s any way to reconstruct.
When Gardner published The Annotated Alice in 1960, 95 and 89 years had passed since the original publication of Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, respectively. UFO 96 isn’t quite that old–a mere half-century. Yet the UFO world it reflects and satirizes sometimes feels almost as remote as Victorian England was from Gardner’s readers. UFO abductions, and the Roswell crash, are entirely absent. (Abductions didn’t enter the cultural awareness until 1966, Roswell nearly 15 years later.) Of the gallery of notables represented on its cover–in brilliant caricature by Gene Duplantier, perhaps UFOlogy’s most gifted artist–very few are still with us.
Jim Moseley and the beautiful Sandy, to whom he was briefly married, are at the center of the tableau, to the right of the Little Green Man. Gray Barker stands just behind them. At the lower right Orthon of Venus, one of the space people who shared their celestial wisdom with “contactee” George Adamski, holds a picture signed With Love, GA. At the lower left Gabriel Green of the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America (AFSCA), who ran in 1960 for the Presidency of the United States, wears a button saying GG for Pres.! (According to Jerome Clark’s UFO Encyclopedia, volume 2, “Green dropped out of the race before the election, but two years later, when he ran on a left-wing peace ticket for U.S. Senate, endorsed by no less than Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, he received a remarkable 171,000 votes.”) And of course Alfred E. Neuman, standing just beneath Moseley’s chin, is immortal.
I don’t believe Green ran again for President in 1964. But the last piece in UFO 96, entitled “A Moment With … the U.S. Air Force,” imagines what might have happened if he had. “On November 5, 1964, the two major U.S. political parties experienced their greatest upset in history. Gabriel Pink, running on the independent UFO Ticket, was elected President, along with his running mate, George Von Hassle.” (George Van Tassel was another of the 1950s “contactees.”) There follows a “Fact Sheet” issued by the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, as reorganized under the UFO administration with the promised “improvements in investigative techniques.”
Unfortunately a page is missing from my copy of UFO 96, so I can’t provide the details of “Case Number One.” (“CONCLUSION: The object was probably a scout ship from Venus.”) But enough remains of the post-1964 “Fact Sheet” to convey its drift. I imagine the younger people who read it will get enough of the joke to be at least mildly amused. But for us oldsters, who remember the solemn “Fact Sheets” issued by the 1960s Project Blue Book–with their incantatory reassurance, that if sufficient data were available the 2% “unknown” sightings could be explained away like the other 98%–it’s roll-on-the-floor split-your-sides-laughing hilarious.
Same for one of the early entries, The U.F.O. Instigator published by NIGHTCAP, “The National Integrated, Ghastly, Horrifying Theories Concerning Astral Phenomena.” (Takeoff on The U.F.O. Investigator of NICAP, National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena–the largest, most respected, and stuffiest UFO organization of the early 60s.) You really have to have known the original to appreciate the parody. Take the lead article, “WHAT WE DO HERE AT NIGHTCAP HQR.,” a takeoff on the articles of this genre–usually linked to appeals for money–that were a staple of The U.F.O. Investigator:
“Some members think of NIGHTCAP merely as a saucer magazine office. Others believe that the Fight for Congressional Hearings [on UFOs; NICAP's perennial obsession] take most of our time. Some think we are in it only for the money and point to the fancy home of the Director as an excuse for not donating. To give a more accurate picture, here is a partial list of the work done by our three full-time staff members, one part-time helper, and spies from SAUCER NEWS, who volunteer to work, pretending they are not stealing information …”
You see, SAUCER NEWS was Moseley’s publication (precursor to the later SAUCER SMEAR); and Moseley was the particular bete noire of NICAP, whose irascible assistant director Richard Hall–also now deceased–was long afterward to compare Moseley’s presence in UFOlogy to “a steaming turd on the living room carpet” …
That’s as far as I can get with The Annotated UFO 96. I’m still rolling on the floor.
by David Halperin
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"UFO96," back cover: in case you didn't recognize them ... To download the second half of the full PDF of "UFO 96," click on this image; for the first half, click on the image at the top of this post
“Outtakes of a UFO Investigator” – UFO Abductions Become Part of Us
April 5, 2013
There are some “banner years” in UFO history. 1966 was one of them.
It was a threshold year, leading from the classic UFOlogy of the 1950s and early 1960s to something new, which has left its mark on our culture to this day.
March, 1966: a rash of UFO sightings in Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan. Air Force UFO expert J. Allen Hynek explained the mysterious lights as “swamp gas”–and was hooted down for it all over the country. Congressman (later President) Gerald Ford and others demanded an investigation. And so the University of Colorado UFO Project of 1966-68, better known as the “Condon Committee,” came to be.
The Condon Committee’s conclusion: UFOs are hot air. Taking a hint, the Air Force dismantled in 1969 its 17-year-old “Project Blue Book.” End of an era. Almost since UFOs were first spotted in American skies in 1947, there’d been an official Air Force project charged with investigating them, more often debunking them. Now the Air Force had left the UFO business for good.
Look Magazine, October 4, 1966. Was it Elizabeth Taylor who made this issue an unprecedented best-seller? Or "Aboard a Flying Saucer"?
Meanwhile astronomer Hynek himself came out of the closet–not as a UFO believer, exactly, but as an open-minded scientist who argued that witnesses to the extraordinary should not be dismissed with a horse-laugh. It was Hynek who, among other things, devised the UFOlogical taxonomy of “close encounters” of the first, second, and third kinds–an achievement that won him a cameo role in a 1977 movie by Steven Spielberg, the name of which I surely don’t need to mention. (But I do, in the caption to the picture below and to the left.)
This was the small stuff.
The real UFO action of 1966 happened not in the sky but in the publishing world. In its issues of October 4 and 18, Look magazine ran a two-part series entitled “Aboard a Flying Saucer,” by John G. Fuller. The Look articles, excerpted from Fuller’s 1966 book The Interrupted Journey, told the story of a New Hampshire couple named Betty and Barney Hill.
Five years earlier the Hills, returning from a vacation in Canada, had been stopped on the road in the middle of the night and taken aboard a UFO. There they underwent bizarre medical or pseudo-medical procedures, and afterward were made to forget what they’d endured. Only under hypnotic regression, in a psychiatrist’s office, did their memories return–and Barney became so terrified that the psychiatrist was afraid he’d throw himself out the window.
In other words, UFO abduction.
UFO abductions have become so familiar that we forget that until 1966 no one ever heard of them. It was Fuller’s book, and still more his Look articles, that brought them to the national consciousness. I recall reading that the October 4 and 18 issues of Look outsold all issues before or since–and somehow I doubt if the cover picture of Elizabeth Taylor was entirely responsible.
Not that the UFO abductees–for Betty and Barney had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of successors–were the first humans to be taken aboard UFOs. The 1950s were the golden age of the “contactees,” who claimed to have met the UFO people. Your average contactee might be given rides on flying saucers, taken on visits to Venus and other planets, lectured by golden-haired “space brothers” about how we humans must abandon our wicked warlike ways. From time to time there might even be an interplanetary fling, like that of contactee Truman Bethurum with a gorgeous 500-year-old brunette, Aura Rhanes from the planet Clarion. (Mrs. Bethurum, filing for divorce, supposedly named Aura Rhanes as co-respondent.)
But the abduction stories were something new, scarier, more essentially alien. Also more convincingly true. There’s little doubt that most if not all the contactees were charlatans, playing on people’s gullibility for their own profit. Whereas some at least of the abductees, starting with Betty and Barney, were evoking something genuine and terrifying from within themselves–something that normally had strong sexual overtones, dark and grisly, compared to which Bethurum’s affair with Aura Rhanes was strictly PG. (And one more distinction: the contactees were almost all men, the abductees predominantly women.)
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, appearing (as himself?) in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
So what does all this have to do with Outtakes of a UFO Investigator, the third chapter of which I’m making available for download from this page?
This: When I initially wrote Journal of a UFO Investigator, my goal was to weave the personal odyssey of Danny Shapiro into the not-quite-world-wide web of the UFO myth. I kept this goal as I trimmed the manuscript, from its original 1500 pages to the 304 pages that it ran in the Viking Press hardback edition. But I had to trim the tapestry, as it were. I kept, as background to Danny’s adventures, some of the prominent features of the 1950s UFO scene: the Three Men in Black, the Philadelphia experiment. (Or, as we used to call it, the “Allende mystery.”) But the chapters in which Danny participated in the UFO world’s transformation in the middle 60s–these ended up on the cutting room floor.
Here they are back, in this and the next few chapters of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator.
In Chapter 3, which you can download by clicking here or on the picture below, Danny gets his first hint of the Hills’ uncanny experience from a man who’s learned about it from the author of the Look articles. He defends his investigation of the marks left on the ground by a landed UFO–a “close encounter of the second kind,” in Hynek’s terminology–near the town of Scofield, New Jersey.
(“Scofield,” though fictional, is based on an actual incident in Glassboro, NJ, the date of which I shifted in Chapter 2 of the Outtakes from September 1964 to April 1965. You can read the true story on the timeline of my Facebook Fan Page, https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator, for September 12, 1964.)
And Danny tries to answer the question of what Ezekiel saw, when “Ezekiel saw the wheel.” Unfortunately he doesn’t get very far, before he’s overcome by the spirits he’s drunk as part of his initiation into the “Nationwide UFO Consortium,” whose conference he’s traveled to New York City to attend.
In other words, our teenage “UFO investigator” has sallied forth from his suburban Pennsylvania home to become part of the UFO world of the mid-1960s. If by some chance you also were part of that world, you may recognize some of it.
Enjoy! And let me know what you think, here or at my Fan Page.
Click on the picture to download chapter 3 of "Outtakes of a UFO Investigator" (PDF). Cover art by Rose Shalom Halperin.
Click here to read Chapter 1 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Click here to read Chapter 2 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Click here to read Chapter 4 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Would you like to have these Outtakes as podcasts–free of charge? Let me know! I’ll see what I can do to provide them.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
Connect to Journal of a UFO Investigator on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator
and Find David Halperin on Google+
Posted in Journal of a UFO Investigator, Outtakes of a UFO Investigator, UFOs | Tags: "The Interrupted Journey", Aura Rhanes, Betty and Barney Hill, close encounters of the second kind, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Condon Committee, contactees, Ezekiel's wheel, Hillsdale UFO, J. Allen Hynek, John G. Fuller, Journal of a UFO Investigator, Look UFO articles, Outtakes of a UFO Investigator, Project Blue Book, Truman Bethurum, UFO abductions, UFOs | 3 Comments »
“Crucify Him!” – The Long Trauma of Easter
March 27, 2013
Easter. Not my holiday.
In an earlier post I’ve written about how, as a Unitarian Universalist of Jewish heritage, I’ve taken to celebrating Christmas. Not Easter, though. Too much historical baggage there for me.
The Christmas story is warm, inclusive, expansive. The poor Jewish shepherds of Luke’s Gospel join the rich Gentile intellectuals of Matthew’s–plus, in popular renditions, the stable animals–in kneeling before Hope newborn. By contrast Easter’s story is harsh, dramatic, apocalyptic. By all odds it’s the most powerful story ever told. There are definitely Bad Guys in it. And me–I’m one of the Bad Guys.
From the 12th-century Bury St. Edmunds Cross: the high priest and Pilate squabble over the inscription to be placed over Jesus, "King of the Confessors" (not "King of the Jews," as in the Gospels)
“Therefore when they [the Jewish crowd] were gathered together, Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ? … They said, Barabbas. Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified” (Matthew 27:17-23).
No wonder Easter was a time of dread for my ancestors in Eastern Europe. It can’t have been easy to sit still, after hearing a story like this read in church, about the torment and killing of the purest and best human being the world had ever known. You’d feel the need to go out, do something about it. And beating up on the local Jewish population was a natural choice for “something” to do.
Well-meaning, ecumenically minded modern people often deal with this side of the Passion stories by saying, Well, it didn’t really happen. Not quite the way the Gospel writers say it did. And it’s true: those stories, compelling as they are, have a lot of loose ends. It’s impossible to get a clear picture, for example, of just what information Judas betrayed about Jesus that was worth 30 pieces of silver. (Jesus was a public figure; lots of people surely could have identified him.) The alleged practice of releasing a condemned prisoner at Passover has left no trace in either Jewish or Roman records. And the Roman governor Pontius Pilate doesn’t come across in other sources as any tender-hearted humanitarian. Surely the Gospel writers have drawn him after the model of what they hoped the Roman officials interrogating them would be like: patient, fair-minded, sympathetic. Which means that Somebody Else must have demanded the crucifixion. Voila: blame the Jews.
Yet reading the Gospel accounts of how the Jewish crowd allegedly behaved, I can’t escape the sense that they ring true. This is how human beings will act, have always acted, when they gather in masses of the hopeful and desperate.
It seems to me to confirm this, not contradict it, that those Jewish crowds had such different feelings toward Jesus not long before. “And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest” (Matthew 21:8-9).
All’s sunshine and affection and enthusiasm. But beware. Very powerful emotions, especially if rooted in deep yearning, have a tendency to morph into their opposites. (“Then Amnon hated her with exceeding great hatred; for the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her”–2 Samuel 13:15.) “Odi et amo,” says the Roman poet, I hate and I love. Which side of the emotion winds up dictating behavior, depends on the flip of the coin.
That coin was tossed, I think, during the incident that’s come to be known as “the Cleansing of the Temple.”
“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it into a den of thieves” (Matthew 21:12-13).
Cleansing the Temple … hmmm, where have we heard that before?
Yes, that’s right–in the story behind the Hanukkah festival. 200 years before Jesus, more or less, Judah the Maccabee and his guerrilla fighters had cleansed the Jerusalem Temple of the “pollutions” (never clearly defined) introduced by the land’s Greek rulers. It was the first act in the liberation of Jewish Palestine from its alien occupiers. If I were a Jew in Roman-ruled Jerusalem, that Passover season when Jesus and his band came to town, my heart would have leaped in thrilled anticipation. This has to be the Maccabee, come back to life! Can the longed-for redemption, of my land and people and faith, be far behind?
And then the letdown comes. It’s not going to happen.
My latter-day Maccabee is in the hands of the Romans. The redemption that I was sure was going to come–that I’ve convinced myself he promised me was going to come–is one more exploded dream. Bad enough that this guy can’t fight off their soldiers, which is pathetic. The truth is even worse. He can but he won’t.
“Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” (Matthew 26:53-54).
Perverse. Evil. The worst betrayal of all.
As that awful Passover night wears on, my initial disbelief turns to despair. My despair, to blaming. Blaming, to murderous rage.
When I gather the next day, with hundreds or more likely thousands of people whose dearest hopes have been trashed in exactly the same way mine were, I’m not going to be in a generous mood.
Have you ever been part of a lynch mob–like, on the playground? I don’t think I have. But I think I can imagine the feeling. I have before me the embodiment of all that pollutes and degrades my world–all that’s false, disgusting, treacherous. This earth, life itself, can never be clean or safe or decent until he (or she, or they) is hustled out of it. Swiftly. Brutally.
“And they cried out all at once, saying, Away with this man … Crucify him, crucify him” (Luke 23:18, 21).
(But I don’t believe what Matthew 27:25 tells me, that they said, “His blood be on us, and on our children.” To say that, they’d need to have taken moral responsibility for what they were doing. Which a lynch mob, by its nature, can’t do. No–they’re good and pure and true. It’s the victim who crystallizes all evil, within his loathsome frame.)
I imagine the mood passed. I imagine the next morning, many of those who’d screamed the awful words had second thoughts. Regrets. Wished, maybe, that things had turned out differently. Maybe, even, that they’d done differently. But next morning was too late.
Too late–for a charismatic preacher from the Galilee, whose dazzlingly off-center take on his inherited tradition promised a stunning new understanding of what it meant to be Jewish, what it meant to be human.
Too late–for two faiths that might have remained one, or at least might have walked through the centuries hand in hand, not one’s hand at the other’s throat.
Too late–for the thousands or ten thousands or millions of innocents who perished in Easter-triggered violence, when new lynch mobs went out to purge the latest human pollutants from the fair face of their existence. And often succeeded.
Too late ever to bind up this wound? I don’t think so. In the last half-century Jews and Christians have come a very long way. Nowadays the ancient pain has become more like a dull, throbbing ache, which most of the time we don’t even feel.
When Easter comes around, I feel it.
What are your thoughts on this post, on the issues I’ve raised in it? Please share them below, or on my Facebook Fan Page, https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Belief, Judaism, Religion | Tags: anti-Semitism, Cleansing of Temple, crucifixion, deicide, Easter, Gospels, Hanukkah, Jewish-Christian conflict, Judah the Maccabee, Judas Maccabeus, Pontius Pilate, Temple | No Comments »
Best Book in the Bible – Akiba, Ingersoll, and the Song of Songs
March 21, 2013
Here’s a riddle for you: What did Akiba ben Joseph, the great rabbi of the 2nd century CE, and Robert Ingersoll, the great agnostic of the 19th century about whom I posted last week, have in common?
Answer: they both thought the Song of Songs (a.k.a. “Song of Solomon”) was the best book of the Hebrew Bible.
"Song of Songs," illustrated by Jossi Stern. Printed by Kshatot Arts
Ingersoll’s granddaughter, Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, quotes him as having approved the Song because it’s “a drama of love–of human love” (The Letters of Robert G. Ingersoll, p. 227). As for Akiba, the rabbinic book called the Mishnah represents him and his colleagues debating the Song of Songs and the Book of Ecclesiastes. Some claimed it’s the consensus that the Song of Songs is part of the Bible, while Ecclesiastes is kind of iffy. (Read the Book of Ecclesiastes, and you’ll see why.) Others said that Ecclesiastes is actually to be dropped from the Bible, and it’s the Song of Songs that’s iffy.
Whereupon …
“Rabbi Akiba said: God forbid that anyone ever had doubts about the Song of Songs! For all the world is not equal to the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel. For all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is Holy of Holies.” (Mishnah, Yadaim 3:5)
Strong words, for a little book (less than 7 pages, in the old “American Jewish” translation of the Bible) that at first glance seems to be mostly about sex. I peeked into the Song of Songs when I was 12 years old. I remember snickering to my friends: “He describes his lady love–naked!!!” Then I didn’t read it again for many years. I somehow sensed it wasn’t yet appropriate for me.
What can you make of a book like this, at age 12? The only thing I had to compare it with were my infrequent, furtive peeps into Playboy. I couldn’t have grasped, at that age, the gulfs that lay between Playboy and the Song of Songs.
Four years ago I was privileged to sit in on a wonderful seminar on the Song of Songs at Duke University, jointly taught by my friends Professor Ellen Davis and Professor (also rabbi) Laura Lieber. Ellen quoted a friend of hers, a Trappist monk, as saying that without the Song of Songs his Cistercian Order could hardly have existed.
I doubt if in another 2000 years anybody’s going to say that about Playboy.
The Song of Songs is thoroughly, unabashedly erotic. Yet it’s not a work of erotica, as we normally understand the word. I doubt if anyone’s ever had the Song of Songs in his or her mind while masturbating. Its lush eroticism is somehow not carnal–I’d call it “spiritual” if that word weren’t so inadequate. Not the eroticism that stiffens or moistens the flesh, but that snatches the breath (“soul”) away with its gorgeousness.
In the course of the seminar, Laura remarked that the Song of Songs is the only book of the Bible that doesn’t have a p’shat, a simple, literal meaning. She was referring to the theory of medieval Jewish Bible exegesis, that Biblical passages have four levels of interpretation, ranging from their obvious p’shat to their deeply hidden, Kabbalistic mystical significance. At first it sounds paradoxical to say the Song of Songs doesn’t have a p’shat. Come on! It’s about sex, plain and simple! About two eager young lovers in the springtime, when “the rain is over and gone … and the vines in blossom give forth their fragrance.” (Song 2:11-13. Which is why the Song of Songs is read in the synagogue at Passover–and which prompted me to post about it now.)
But once you try to say any more about this p’shat–who the lovers are, for example, or what the Song tells about the course of their love–you find yourself wandering in obscurities.
There seem to be two main speakers. The love-smitten girl, whose words begin and end the Song, is called “Shulamit,” or more exactly “the Shulamit” (7:1). Translators like to give this as “the Shulammite,” although it’s hard to see what that would mean, since no “Shulammites” are mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. Her boyfriend is apparently a shepherd. King Solomon is also involved; it’s never clear just how. One theory that used to be popular is that the Song is a drama in which Solomon and the shepherd compete for Shulamit’s affections, with the shepherd winning out. She resists the temptations of royal luxury, sticks with her rustic lover in the fields. But the action of this drama is barely visible in the Song; you can’t find it without a great deal of imagination. Alternatively, Solomon and the shepherd may be somehow the same. “Somehow”–because the historical King Solomon, unlike his father David, was never a shepherd.
I told you it didn’t have a p’shat.
Add to this that the names Solomon (Hebrew “Shelomoh”) and Shulamit are a natural pair, as if “Shulamit” is the feminine version of Solomon. Both come from the same root as shalom, “peace.” This connection may be hinted at in Shulamit’s speech near the end of the Song:
“I am a wall,
And my breasts like the towers thereof;
Then was I in his eyes
As one that found Shalom.” (8:10)
So Solomon and Shulamit both search for Shalom, the “peace” that comes with fulfilled love? Do they find it? Maybe not. Shulamit doesn’t say she’s “one who’s found Shalom,” but only that in her lover’s eyes she’s like one who found it. And the Song appears to end with the lovers still parted and yearning.
The longest sequential narrative in the Song is the eerie, dream-like episode in 5:2-8. Here the sexual images are so blatant you’d have to be blind to miss them–the “hole,” the “bar,” the fingers dripping with myrrh. Yet to reduce this passage to an obliquely symbolic account of copulation just won’t work. There’s too much else going on, and the ruling theme is separation and loss, not consummation. Shulamit is the speaker:
Marc Chagall, "Song of Songs IV"
“I sleep, but my heart waketh;
Hark! my beloved knocketh:
‘Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled;
For my head is filled with dew,
My locks with the drops of the night.’
I have put off my coat;
How shall I put it on?
I have washed my feet;
How shall I defile them?
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door,
And my heart was moved for him.
I rose up to open to my beloved;
And my hands dropped with myrrh,
And my fingers with flowing myrrh,
Upon the handles of the bar.
I opened to my beloved;
But my beloved had turned away, and was gone.
My soul failed me when he spoke.
I sought him, but I could not find him;
I called him, but he gave me no answer.
The watchmen that go about the city found me,
They smote me, they wounded me;
The keepers of the walls took away my mantle from me …”
Who are the “watchmen”? Why are they so hostile? Maybe the guardians of traditional morality, who can’t abide a young woman wandering about the city by night in search of her vanished love? The poet won’t tell us. Like a dream, the Song refuses to interpret itself.
The traditional morality of ancient Israel warned the young man: any woman who throws her arms around you in public, kisses you, and takes you home with her is bad news. Stay away, if you know what’s good for you (Proverbs 7:6-27). Shulamit, unlike the harlot-adulteress of Proverbs, is a good girl. Yet she hankers to behave in exactly the same way:
“Oh that thou wert as my brother,
That sucked the breasts of my mother!
When I should find thee without [outdoors], I would kiss thee;
Yea, and none would despise me.
I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house,
That thou mightest instruct me;
I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine,
Of the juice of my pomegranate.” (8:1-2)
“The juice of my pomegranate,” indeed. In a society that normally expected women to be passive and subordinate, Shulamit does her share, and more than her share, of the wooing.
Salvador Dali, "The Song of Songs: The Shepherd"
“Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field;
Let us lodge in the villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards;
Let us see whether the vine hath budded,
Whether the vine-blossom be opened,
And the pomegranates be in flower;
There will I give thee my love.” (7:12-13)
To the traditional Jewish and Christian expositors, all this was allegory–of God and the Jewish people, of Christ and his Church. (Or alternatively, the Divine and the Soul.) These allegorical readings could be clunky and ham-handed. It’s difficult to read without smirking what the chapter headings in the King James Bible do with the Song’s catalog of Shulamit’s unclothed charms–that same passage (7:2-6) that so titillated me when I was on the brink of puberty. “A further description of the Church her graces.” Yet to dismiss these interpretations as inept fig-leaves, pasted on to cover over the Song’s scandalous sexiness, is to miss the point. Why was the Song selected as Holy Scripture in the first place? Both Synagogue and Church could have simply left it out–if they hadn’t intuited something profoundly sacred in it, something not quite in the mold of conventional Biblical piety and yet an essential supplement (or corrective?) to it. Something which the sacred Book, like the Cistercian Order, couldn’t do without.
“God is love,” people say. (Actually it’s the New Testament that says it, 1 John 4:8.) The Song of Songs says something near the reverse, that love is God. “A very flame of the Lord” (shalhevet-YAH, Song 8:6); and I think of the flame that Moses saw, that burned within the bush without destroying the bush (Exodus 3:2). The God = love equation, it’s often seemed to me, can be taken either theistically or atheistically. God is love: an infinite Benevolence that transcends us yet suffuses and redeems our existence. Or, God is love, meaning that the love we make, the love we show one another, is the only Deity we’ll ever have.
For either of these perspectives, the Song of Songs can serve as Scripture. That’s why “all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is Holy of Holies.”
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
Connect to Journal of a UFO Investigator on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator
and Find David Halperin on Google+
Posted in Belief, Judaism, Religion | Tags: allegory, canon of the Bible, Ellen Davis, Laura Lieber, Rabbi Akiba, Robert Ingersoll, sex and religion, sex in the Bible, Shulamit, Shulammite, Solomon, Song of Songs | 2 Comments »