(For part 1 of this post, click here.)
“‘Aliens’ is a code word for something that exists, something that’s evidently wiser than we are or wise in a different way, and we don’t know what it wants or is able to do. Really, what’s the difference between an ‘alien’ and God? Different people give different names to whatever it is that’s on the other side of the veil: angels, Jesus, God, Mother Sarah, Buddha, ‘aliens’ and I don’t know what else.”
So Ariel Semmel–Israeli photographer and filmmaker, who poured the past 20 years into making a film that obsessively documents his abduction experience of 1996 and the role it’s played in his life–reflects on the meaning of his alien encounter.
Religious meaning, obviously.
Not that Semmel is ready to discard the conventional ET-visitors understanding of the entities that thrust themselves into his life that night 23 years ago (and, apparently, never since). In speaking of them, he falls back on a standard trope of UFO discourse, the supposed unlikelihood that we can be alone in the cosmos. “To say that there’s nobody besides us in this whole universe–well, on that point your guess is as good as mine,” he tells interviewer Nirit Anderman. “I say there are, and some of them are more advanced than we are. … Give us a thousand years and we’ll also be traveling around the universe, and we’ll be the ‘aliens.'”
We’ll be the aliens–odd words, susceptible of more than one interpretation.
Anderman asks Semmel about the aliens’ purpose here on Earth, and he responds, a bit huffily it seems to me: “They don’t come to kill, but only to find out what’s going on. Since when does an advanced civilization want to destroy? What’s this, something out of a George Lucas movie? On the contrary, it [the alien civilization?] wants to be at peace.” Which, given that Anderman never suggested the aliens might be hostile, seems a bit too defensive. As though he’s warding off a feeling he himself has, but doesn’t want to acknowledge.
It’s clear that Semmel sees his experience as conveying some hidden metaphysical truth, a mystery whose unfolding has become his life’s mission. He speaks of the camera, which he’s used to film his documentary “Parano” (from the French slang for “paranoid”?), as “the physical axe with which I’ll shatter the wall that separates me from knowledge of the truth, the instrument with which I’ll pull away the veil and see what’s behind it.” I’m tempted to call his encounter “transformative.” But in what way it transformed him, remains unclear.
“Before the abduction,” Semmel says, “I wasn’t spiritual, I didn’t seek a path, I wasn’t not one of the newly religious.” These last words are, literally, “I didn’t turn back in repentance,” a Hebrew idiom for secular Jews who undergo a religious conversion, “turning back” to God and to Jewish faith and practice. So he wasn’t any of these before his abduction; is he implying that he was different afterwards? Did alien intervention turn the free-living rebel into a frumme Yid, a “pious Jew,” humble and devout and monogamous?
Apparently not. The roving bachelor does marry, have two children, divorce and then remarry. One of Semmel’s friends speaks of his having become more easygoing since his abduction experience, less angry and confrontational. But all this sounds like the normal mellowing that comes with the passing of the years. A road-to-Damascus experience, this wasn’t.
Yet in the experience there’s something that feels deeply traditional, rooted in the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah, that won’t quite fit into the UFO-abduction framework into which Semmel tries to wedge it. Just how this is to be explained, I don’t know. But it’s there, and needs to be acknowledged.
“Suddenly,” Semmel tells Anderman, “I’m in space where there are a thousand illuminated cryptographies, turning and spinning about, and I realize that I’m looking at a three-dimensional language that has a mathematical logic. And as the letters turn about in front of me, I feel as if I have a super-intelligence, because these letters are always in motion, always forming new meanings. … And I feel like God … and I start talking in a crazy flow of words and I say to the girl who’s with me … ‘Find a pencil and write this down, because I don’t have any idea what I’m saying.’”
Have you ever seen anything like this in the UFO literature–a vision of letters, illuminated and three-dimensional, circling in perpetual motion in front of the witness? I haven’t. But visionary experience of this sort, focused on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, was the crux of the “prophetic Kabbalism” of the 13th-century mystic Abraham Abulafia.
Gershom Scholem, the 20th century’s greatest scholar of Kabbalah, used that phrase in the chapter on Abulafia in his masterwork Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. He quotes from one of Abulafia’s treatises:
“Be prepared for thy God, oh Israelite! Make thyself ready to direct thy heart to God alone. Cleanse the body and choose a lonely house where none shall hear thy voice. Sit there in thy closet and do not reveal thy secret to any man. …
“If it be night, kindle many lights, until all be bright. Then take ink, pen and a table to thy hand and … begin to combine a few or many letters, to permute and to combine them until thy heart be warm. Then be mindful of their movements and of what thou canst bring forth by moving them. And when thou feelest that thy heart is already warm and when thou seest that by combinations of letters thou canst grasp new things which by human tradition or by thyself thou wouldst not be able to know and when thou art thus prepared to receive the influx of divine power which flows into thee, then turn all thy true thought to imagine the Name and His exalted angels in thy heart as if they were human beings sitting or standing about thee. And feel thyself like an envoy whom the king and his ministers are to send on a mission. … Having imagined this very vividly, turn thy whole mind to understand with thy thoughts the many things which will come into thy heart through the letters imagined.”
Moshe Idel, whom many regard as Scholem’s successor as the leading Kabbalah expert of our time, remarks that Abulafia “cultivated the pronunciation of letters of the divine names inscribed variously in different kinds of circles. … These circles consisted of permutations of some of the biblical and later divine names according to different combinatory techniques.” They figured so prominently in the Abulafian treatise just quoted, it was sometimes given the title, The Book of Circles.
“No wonder, then,” Idel writes, “that one of the most elaborate visions reported by Abulafia is that of a circle, a Kabbalistic mandala including both cosmic and psychological structures.” Semmel’s experience of the letters as “turning and spinning about” is surely related to this.
Scholem quotes the testimony of one of Abulafia’s disciples, his name lost to us, who “set myself the task at night of combining letters with one another and of pondering over them in philosophical meditation.” He dozed off and, upon awakening, found to his amazement that the light in the room came not from the candle but from himself.
“The next morning I communicated it to my teacher and brought him the sheets which I had covered with combinations of letters.” Abulafia approves; the disciple continues his practice; and “the power of meditation became so strong in me that I could not manage to write down the combinations of letters … and if there had been ten people present they would not have been able to write down so many combinations as came to me during the influx.”
Is this the “crazy flow of words” that Semmel experienced, and had to tell his girlfriend of the evening to “find a pencil and write this down, because I don’t have any idea what I’m saying”?
The alphabetical fascination of Abulafia and other Kabbalist mystics is rooted in a brief, cryptic, possibly ancient Hebrew text called Sefer Yetzirah, “Book of Creation” (or “Formation”), in which the ten primary numbers and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet are treated as the building blocks out of which God fashioned the cosmos. Is it possible that when Semmel’s friend announced to him that “I can’t give you the genetic code”–which he remembered as “the weirdest sentence I’ve ever heard in my life”–she was alluding to these numbers and letters, the “code” for the “genesis” of reality?
OK, maybe a bit farfetched. And we have to acknowledge that the cultural contexts of the visions I’m comparing couldn’t be more different. On the one hand, medieval ascetic piety; on the other, the drug-enhanced carnality of 1990s bohemian Tel Aviv. Yet there’s a similarity in the experiences themselves that I don’t think can be written off as my imagination.
If Semmel hadn’t told me that what he underwent was an alien abduction, and if he weren’t about the last person I’d expect to involve himself with anything smacking of religious Judaism, I would say: this man is a Kabbalist in the Abulafian tradition.
Would Semmel have had any way to know about Abulafia and his Kabbalah? Absolutely. Scholem’s Major Trends was published in 1941, its third edition in 1954; Idel’s The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia came out in 1987. Both, particularly Scholem, were monumental figures in the intellectual world of late 20th-century Israel. Their theories and discoveries would have been reflected in the supplements of a highbrow newspaper like Haaretz. Without opening any of their books, Semmel could have learned all he needed to know to create his own vision along Abulafian lines.
Yet how extraordinary, the very fact that he had such a vision! As if something in his cultural genetics, bottled up for years within a shell of hedonistic secularity, came bursting out one night at a time and in a situation where no one, least of all Semmel himself, would have expected it. Be prepared for thy God, oh Israelite! Abulafia enjoined his reader, quoting Amos 4:12. Wholly unprepared, Ariel Semmel nevertheless encountered Him.
And called Him an abducting alien.
by David Halperin
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The illuminated letters and their rapid appearance reminds me of the glowing letters on the Rendlesham craft, and the series of binary symbols the ‘contactee’ soldier rapidly wrote down as he received them mentally.
Interesting! Thanks for posting.