Spooky Spirituality

Spooky Spirituality: The World is Stranger Than We Think

Tom Rapsas, author of Wake Up Call

Behind the Thin Veil: Plant medicine, fairies, and otherworldly encounters. Image by Gemini.

How do you like your spirituality? Most of us prefer it to be predictable, wrapped in positive affirmations, guided meditations, and gentle reassurances that everything happens for a reason. But look beyond the surface, and you’ll find a much stranger landscape.

It’s a realm where entities that haunt our folklore—serpents, fairies, and otherworldly tricksters—visit us in the here and now.

Those who ingest ayahuasca often witness the weirdness first-hand.
A funny thing happens when most people take the powerful plant hallucinogen ayahuasca: They share a common vision that hasn’t changed for centuries. They enter a world where powerful spirits dwell, frequently encountering snakes, serpents and other strange beasts that often speak to the spiritual seekers telepathically.

Ayahuasca was first used by Indian shamans in South America as part of a sacred ritual. It’s a practice that continues today and has in recent years attracted many westerners seeking everything from cures to depression to spiritual enlightenment. In the book Supernatural, Meeting with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Graham Hancock writes about his own experiences with the plant medicine.

On ayahuasca journeys, many encounter benevolent creatures.
During one session, Hancock saw rows of writhing brown and yellow snakes laid out in front of him in an intricate pattern “winding around each other like the DNA double helix.” Another time, he came face-to-face with a large muscular man—with the head of a crocodile. He determined it was his guardian, there to protect him from any dark forces that might try to enter his life.

Hancock believes that “only a thin veil separates the world of everyday reality from the supernatural other worlds.” Ayahuasca allows us to break through this thin wall, showing us realties that exist just outside our field of perception. He believes that “the spirit world and its inhabitants are real, that supernatural powers and non-physical beings do exist.” Ayahuasca enables us to see what is already there.

So why do these spirits from the otherworld appear in such strange forms? Hancock speculates that “we are forced to cloth the external forces or beings that otherwise might be invisible to us, in a manner that we are able to recognize. Angels, demons, imps, elves, dwarves, are similar creatures but ones that appear in a guise that is culturally or personally determined.”

That may help explain why, in a National Geographic article, the adventurer Kira Salak wrote of ingesting ayahuasca and encountering a God-like being who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. She asked “Santa” why God seemed to hate her and was told “I have always loved you as my own child. Know that suffering is the greatest teacher on Earth. It leads us out of our belief in separation.” It’s a humbling reminder that even our most painful trials may carry a purpose, transforming our isolation into a deeper sense of belonging.

Same strangeness, different location.

Ayahuasca isn’t the only doorway to strange encounters.

Long before modern seekers headed to the Amazon, people in rural pockets of the world were already reporting close encounters with beings that didn’t quite fit human description. Take fairies, which are another category unto themselves.

In the book Fairies, Real Encounters with Little People, Janet Bord points out that at one time in rural areas of Great Britain and Ireland, encounters with fairies were so common that people took them for granted. She cites scores of examples dating back centuries. There are first-hand accounts of locals who have witnessed fairies, in all manners of dress, ranging in size from a few inches to a few feet tall.

They are frequently seen dancing and spinning in circles, other times running at incredible speeds. They have even been spotted playing the fiddle or engaged in acts of mischief. Like the UFOs in many first-hand reports, fairies have the ability to disappear in the blink of an eye, just as quickly as they appear.

Bord wonders if the strange entities people sometimes see and fairies are one and the same. She believes that there is a life force present in all living things that can sometimes manifest itself in strange ways. Similar to Hancock, she believes “people are influenced by their environment and upbringing” when trying to interpret their otherworldly experiences. Where some see aliens, the Irish see fairies.

For instance, she writes of a Reuters story out of Peru where in 1977 a student named Jorge Alvarez fell into a swamp. He was sinking fast when “four little creatures of human appearance, with three fingers on each hand” suddenly appeared and, holding out a branch, pulled him to safety. He later described them as three feet tall and covered with green scales. Had Alvarez been raised in Wales, might he have seen these entities as fairies and not little green creatures?

There’s a link between the various entities people see.

Read enough of these stories and you will ask the question: why are these strange creatures present and what do they want? Several of the books I’ve read come to the same unique conclusion—the unidentifiable crafts and strange entities that occasionally interact with our world, are rooted in mythology and are all interconnected. They may, in fact, be myths that have come to life.

The mythology angle was first put forth by the famed philosopher Carl Jung who tried to explain the meaning of UFOs in a book titled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. Jung speculated that the UFOs came from the collective unconscious, a vast repository of myths and dreams of people throughout the world, all connected in a complex matrix that transcends time and space.

While many believe that UFOs are spaceships from another planet, in the book Angels and Aliens, author Keith Thompson echoes Jung proposing that UFO encounters contain mythic elements—and may come from somewhere deep within our psyche. Thompson compares UFOs to visionary experiences like “angelic visions, shamanic journeys and folkloric encounters with fairies.”

Of course, it’s one thing to talk about the collective unconsciousness, and quite another to look one of these entities in the eye. There are stories galore of people who have encountered not just strange metallic crafts, but their inhabitants—beings described as everything from towering Nordic visitors to diminutive gray humanoids.

Here, Thompson also suggests that it’s our cultural upbringing and mindset that help determine how we interpret what we see, and whether our encounter is positive or negative.

Are these strange entities we see real or merely symbolic?

Are they living in another world that is parallel to our universe, occasionally slipping through the cosmic cracks? Or, like Jung suggested, are they powerful myths that have come to life, our imagination made real? Perhaps our ignorance is best summed up by the parapsychologist John L. Randall who, when discussing the possibility of parallel worlds, said:

What we regard as “reality”—the everyday world with its three spatial dimensions and linear time-flow—is no more than a distraction from a much more complex universe. We are indeed like the men in Plato’s allegory who, seeing the shadows of a higher reality on the walls of the cave, mistake these shadows for reality itself.

Maybe it doesn’t matter if these otherworldly encounters are real or psychological. They simply serve as reminders that we are surrounded by mystery, and the world is stranger and more complex than we ever imagined.

Maybe the real wonder isn’t that these strange entities exist—it’s that we ever convinced ourselves we truly had the universe all to ourselves.