Hair of the Alien by Bill Chalker

Author:Bill Chalker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2005-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

A Shamanic Perspective

Credo Mutwa’s story offers us a chance to reconsider the shamanic perspective on such extraordinary experiences. At the turn of the last century, anthropologists Walter Spencer and Francis Gillen, in their book The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, provided a classic account of the remarkable shamanic tradition. An aborigine, Kurkutji, was set upon by two spirits, Mundadji and Munkaninji, in a cave:

“Mundadji cut him open, right down the middle line, took out all of his insides and exchanged them for those of himself, which he placed in the body of Kurkutji. At the same time he put a number of sacred stones in his body. After it was all over, the youngest spirit, Munkaninji, came up and restored him to life, told him that he was now a medicine-man and showed him how to extract bones and other forms of evil magic out of them. Then he took him away up into the sky and brought him down to earth close to his own camp, where he heard the natives mourning for him, thinking that he was dead. For a long time he remained in a more or less dazed condition, but gradually he recovered and the natives knew that he had been made into a medicine man. When he operates the spirit Munkaninji is supposed to be near at hand watching him, unseen of course by ordinary people.”

This is an excellent description of the initiatory experience of an Australian aboriginal shaman. Ritual death and resurrection, abduction by powerful beings, ritual disembowelment, implanting of artifacts, aerial ascents and journeys into strange realms, alien tutelage and enlightenment, personal empowerment, and transformation—these and many other phenomena are recurring elements of the extraordinary shamanic tradition. 103 Obviously, these worldwide native aboriginal experiences share many impressive similarities with the bizarre complex of human experiences now holding sway on the world stage, namely alien abduction encounters.

Whitley Strieber, in trying to come to terms with his own abduction experiences, wondered “if the shamanic language of symbol and myth would offer a better insight into the visitors’ motives.” In an interview for Terror Australis magazine, Strieber stated that “shamanism is the shattered remnants of mankind’s early attempts to control this [visitor] phenomenon.”

In shamanism we see individuals who seem to have a strong measure of control over the set of realities they operate in. But in UFO abduction experiences we appear to have generally helpless victims who have no control over the bizarre “reality” that overwhelms them. The two types of experiences appear to be on opposite ends of a control continuum. Perhaps we as a culture have lost an ability that other cultures and generations may have had to some extent. Are we now undergoing “rites of passage” that will enable us to achieve some level of understanding and control over the UFO abduction experience?

A comparison of accounts of alien abductions and shamanic initiations is revealing.

Folklorist Dr. T. E. Bullard lists the following elements of UFO abduction narratives:

capture

examination (which includes tales of specimen taking, reproductive

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