On Contact, Secrecy, and Ancient Mysteries

There is a cluster of features in human experience that recurs across cultures, millennia, and traditions that had no contact with each other. Once you start cataloguing the elements of that cluster, the consistency is oddly specific.

Luminosity or overwhelming light. An initial response of terror transitioning to calm. Time behaving abnormally. Information arriving as reception rather than deduction, more download than derivation. A felt sense of presence registering as more real than any ordinary experience. Lasting personality change, typically toward reduced fear of death. And frequently, an injunction: go back and tell them something.

This shows up in the Hebrew prophetic “call” narratives, where figures like Isaiah and Ezekiel are seized by the presence of God and commissioned to speak on his behalf. In Paul on the Damascus road, struck blind by light and given a new identity and mission. In Muhammad’s first revelation in a cave outside Mecca, where the angel Jibril (aka Gabriel) gripped him and commanded him to recite. In Sufi accounts of fana, the annihilation of the ego in direct experience of the divine. In Hindu darshan, the apparition of or direct encounter with a deity. In Amazonian ayahuasca ceremonies, where participants report contact with intelligent non-human entities. In near-death experience reports, now catalogued in the thousands by medical researchers. In a specific subset of UFO close encounter reports, not the lights-in-the-sky material, but the contact experiences, where witnesses describe interaction with a presence and come back changed.

What are we talking about here? Neurology? Temporal lobe activity? Oxygen deprivation? The spontaneous release of endogenous DMT? Any one of these is plausible as an explanation for any single instance but the aggregate has a cumulative problem. You end up needing a different mechanism for every occurrence of what looks like the same phenomenon, across every culture, every period of recorded human development, every context. At a certain point the patchwork of dismissals becomes less likely than the thing it’s trying to dismiss.

The ancient world, instead of dismissing these phenomena, built institutions around them.

For roughly two thousand years, a similar span as the entire Common Era, from the birth of Christ until today, the Greeks ran the Eleusinian Mysteries, an annual ceremony at a temple complex outside Athens. Thousands participated each year. They fasted, walked fourteen miles in procession, drank a psychoactive mixture called kykeon, and entered a great hall called the Telesterion. Something happened there in the dark. We do not know exactly what, because participants were sworn to secrecy under penalty of death, and almost none of these hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people across two millennia, broke that oath. What we do know is that there was “something done, something said, and something shown.”

We do have testimony about the effects. Plato, Cicero, Plutarch, and others said the experience fundamentally altered their understanding of existence and removed their fear of death. These weren’t credulous peasants. Cicero said Athens had given the world many things but nothing finer than the Mysteries. Plato’s case is particularly telling: his famous allegory of the Cave, with its prisoners chained in darkness, mistaking shadows for reality, until one is led into the blinding light of the actual world, reads less like abstract philosophy and more like a man trying to describe what happened to him at Eleusis without breaking his oath. His insistence that the visible world is a dim reflection of a truer reality, that genuine knowledge comes through direct apprehension rather than reasoning, that the philosopher’s task is to return to the cave and tell the others, these are the structural elements of the initiation experience, translated into a system of thought.

Whether the kykeon contained ergot-derived psychoactive compounds, a plausible hypothesis advanced by none other than Albert Hofmann, the chemist who first synthesized LSD, or whether the experience was generated through fasting, staging, and ritual technology is debated. What isn’t debated is the output: something reliably produced a transformative encounter in participants, year after year, for two millennia. Which no one talked about. Best not to call that theater, or suggestion. It seems more a technology of consciousness, whatever its actual mechanism.

And the people who controlled access to the Mysteries held power. The priest-king model, the original form of political authority in Sumer, Egypt, and the Vedic world, wasn’t a metaphor. Pharaoh was understood as Horus incarnate. The Sumerian En was a political priest or priestess who functioned as intermediary between the human community and the divine realm. Authority flowed from proximity to and secret knowledge of the phenomenon.

Follow that thread forward to arrive at a question the modern world does not comfortably entertain, though many do anyway: did the connection between esoteric practice and political power ever actually break, or did it just go underground?

The historical record through the late-twentieth century is unambiguous. John Dee advised Elizabeth I on statecraft while simultaneously conducting what he called Enochian workings, elaborate ritual sessions using consecrated equipment and scrying techniques to establish communication with what Dee understood to be angelic intelligences, and from whom he claimed to receive a complete language and system of knowledge. Sir Isaac Newton produced thousands of pages of alchemical and occult writing, far exceeding his published physics. The Founding Fathers operated in an intellectual milieu saturated with Freemasonic, Rosicrucian and other esoteric thought, which the architecture of Washington DC illustrates all too plainly. Jack Parsons, a literal rocket scientist, co-founded Jet Propulsion Laboratories in 1936 while practicing Thelemic ritual magick. The CIA’s MKUltra program was explicitly an attempt to operationalize consciousness manipulation, and its roots in earlier esoteric experimentation are documented. The U.S. Army’s Stargate project, begun in the 70s and operational into the mid-90s, was all about attempts to harness psychic abilities for military application. Analogs for all of these examples, which are but a subset of many more, can be found in countries around the world. Dating back centuries.

Other parts of the picture being developed here are less clear. Elite initiatory societies, like Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove, the higher-degree Masonic bodies, all really exist and involve ritualistic elements. Whether the esoteric content is the point or just social adhesive and grown up cosplay holding the network together is exactly the question no one on the outside can answer, and no one inside will. Both explanations are sufficient, which is what makes it hard to resolve.

The structural logic is clear enough, though. If a contact phenomenon is real and can be reliably accessed through specific practices, then controlling those practices or controlling the narrative about whether they work would be quite the power base and control function on human development. The people who had that control would have no incentive to advertise it, especially if the methods for access are learnable.

Interestingly, this connects to a split in the current UFO conversation that has not always but is frequently getting more attention: there are really two phenomena wearing the same label. One is a consciousness phenomenon, the contact experiences that overlap with mystical phenomenology. The other is an engineering problem of radar returns, infrared signatures, physical trace cases, claims about retrieved materials.

It seems increasingly obvious that these imply fundamentally different ontologies. The consciousness thread suggests something that interfaces with minds and may not be physical in any conventional sense. The materials thread suggests something with mass that can be put on a lab bench. Lumping them together degrades the investigation of both. The consciousness phenomenon gets dismissed because it’s bundled with blurry videos and talk of spaceships. The physical evidence gets contaminated by association with mystical claims.

Both are threatening to existing power structures, which may explain why they stay bundled. The materials question threatens military and industrial secrecy and as such is straightforward to understand, analogous to any advanced weapons program. The consciousness question threatens something deeper: the materialist framework that underwrites Western institutional authority. Science, medicine, law, economics all rest on an implicit metaphysics that consciousness is a byproduct of brains, that the material world is fundamental, and that legitimate knowledge comes through instruments and reproducible experiment.

A genuine consciousness phenomenon that resists neurological reduction certainly threatens the epistemological foundation of every major institution, especially the ones interested in hierarchy, order and control. There’s no press conference format for your elected representatives to lay that story on you.

The Old Testament, of all things, is instructive here, as it deals with stories.

The historical record behind the Hebrew Bible is thinner than most people assume, and than some want to believe. Moses has zero archaeological or textual attestation outside the biblical tradition. The Exodus as described left no trace in Egyptian records, and the Egyptians were way beyond being careful record keepers, they were a people who documented their individual brick workers by name. The further back you go, the less is supported by archaeology, be it the patriarchal narratives, the conquest of Canaan, the united monarchy under Solomon. The evidence contradicts the texts.

And yet.

From about the ninth century BCE forward, the biblical account does converge with recoverable history. Kings of Israel and Judah start appearing in Assyrian records. The Babylonian exile is confirmed. The return under Persian rule is documented.

What matters isn’t where the “real” history starts but why the whole thing was assembled. What were the stories for?

In 586 BCE, Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, razed the Temple, and deported the Judahite elite. Every pillar of Jewish identity was gone: the nation, the land, the dwelling place of God. That made the assembly of the texts during and after the exile a survival project. With no temple and no kingdom, the editors made the text itself the portable center of identity. You can’t burn down a story the way you can a temple.

The primeval history established Yahweh as universal creator, this universality being the important attribute when you’re surrounded by Marduk-worshipping Babylonians and need to argue your God is more than some defeated local deity. The Exodus narrative framed the Jewish people as defined by liberation from empire. The Hebrew legal material provided a behavioral code that could maintain group identity in diaspora. The Deuteronomistic History explained the catastrophic loss of land and nation as Yaweh’s divine punishment against his people rather than his by Marduk, because a god who punishes is still in control. Better that story than being the chosen people of a defeated god. History would not have much to say for them.

Marduk and his Babylonian people are gone. The Assyrians are gone. The Romans are gone. The People of the Book are still here, because the stories they organized around are still here.

That is an argument for the Hebrew Bible as potentially the most consequential editorial project in human history. And it was born from crisis, from the need to preserve cultural memory and identity when every external structure had been destroyed.

What does that say about what cultural memory is actually about, and what does this have to do with the phenomena we’ve been talking about here?

The secular academy treats the gods, the prophets, the angels, and the contact narratives as projections, as psychological mechanisms for encoding authority and rationalizing human experience. While that explains a lot of the function, it does so without engaging with the phenomenology, and it fails as an accounting for the consistency across peoples and time.

The honest position is probably this: something is going on that standard frameworks do not adequately cover. The cross-cultural consistency is too specific to be coincidence. The historical entanglement of esoteric practice with real power is too persistent to be theater. The phenomenological reports are too structurally uniform across millennia and across unrelated civilizations to be reducible to neurons misfiring in predictable ways.

We do not seem to have the framework to describe it accurately yet. And the reason we do not is at least partially because the institutions that would need to develop such a framework have active incentives not to. We also cannot disregard that the knowledge was lost in one of the all-too-regular purges, sackings, and persecutions of sects, libraries and heresies.

The simplest reading, that there is “something” to all of this, requires you to accept a single uncomfortable premise: that human experience includes a domain we cannot yet or any longer measure or reliably access under controlled conditions. The alternative requires you to maintain dozens of separate explanations for what looks like one thing, and to treat the oldest and most persistent category of human experience as uniformly wrong about its own nature.

One of those positions asks less of you than the other. It just happens to be the one that’s harder to say out loud in our hyper-rational, conditioned modern world.