I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Vallee is among the most lucid of the mid-century ufologists. The modern internet does to the global mind what a close encounter does to individual minds.

The closest metaphor to a close encounter available in 1977 (other than being spirited away by faeries) would be an LSD trip. But being on Facebook or 4chan too long is a better metaphor.

It’s an entrance into a world of disconnected absurdities and interaction with alien others whose intentions cannot be fully understood, wherein assumption moves faster than the sense data to evaluate it & distorts that sense data itself.

Sure, all money is a bit like faerie gold (turning to leaves once the glamour wears off), but money in an information economy (money whose value is driven by speculation) is more eldritch and insubstantial than even that.

Don’t tell me that the last two (or five, or ten) years haven’t felt like a bad b-movie to you — the kind that combines gaping plot holes with completely unnecessary scenes.

We aren’t getting less religious. Instead (much to the chagrin of literalists/fundies, whose ‘religion’ is essentially secular because literalism denies the transcendental elements of ritual & scripture) our ritual spaces have encompassed the whole mundane world.

That’s probably bad & definitely dangerous. It’s Case Nightmare Green. We can’t close the circle.

Banishing with laughter doesn’t work so well when the laughter is cruel, or tinged with paranoia. It’s hard to dismiss the monster on the grounds of absurdity when everything is absurd.

Crowley couldn’t do Abramelin properly. What chance do we have — unschooled mages thrown into the ritual space by mere mechanism a decade ago?