“Stars fell to earth in a blaze of light, and where they fell, monsters were born, hideous and blind.”
—Gore Vidal, Messiah
Did Gore Vidal believe in UFOs?
That was the question I asked myself, with some excitement, as a teen-age “UFO investigator” reading Vidal’s 1954 novel Messiah. This book—one of Vidal’s less successful—describes a world of some indefinite but not too distant future that’s been taken over by the death-cult of the “Cavites,” so named after their messianic founder, John Cave. The only holdouts are a few Muslim countries like Egypt; these protect themselves from the irresistible pull of the Cavite gospel by walling themselves off from it. The narrator, an elderly Cavite “heretic” who lives in Egypt as a refugee, reflects back upon the awful world transformation of which he’s been a part.
There were omens, he says near the beginning of his narrative, of what was about to befall. Notably, “the luminous crockery which was seen in the sky … never entirely explained.”
“Luminous crockery”? Flying saucers! And now I was intrigued. I still am, actually.
Vidal went on to refer to actual incidents which I’d known from reading my UFO books. “In daylight, glittering objects of bright silver maneuvered at unearthly speed over Washington, D.C., observed by hundreds, some few reliable.” These were the famous Washington sightings of July 1952. “In West Virginia, a creature ten feet tall, green with a red face and exuding a ghastly odor, was seen to stagger out of a luminous globe, temporarily grounded. He was observed by a woman and four boys, all of unquestionable probity; they fled before he could eat them.” Allowing for a bit of poetic license—the creature was never “seen to stagger” out of the luminous globe—this was the “Flatwoods monster,” a.k.a. “Braxton County monster,” of September 12, 1952, the Thing that launched Gray Barker’s UFOlogical career and whose story opens his They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. (See my post of February 1, “They Knew Too Much …”)
“Never entirely explained.” So—did Vidal believe? Could I enroll the distinguished novelist in the UFOlogists’ camp? I read on, waiting for some clarification. I never found it.
“Eventually all was satisfactorily explained or, quite as good, forgotten. Yet the real significance of these portents was not so much their mysterious reality as the profound effect they had upon a people who, despite their emphatic materialism, were as easily shattered by the unexpected as their ancestors … Considering the unmistakable nature of these signs, it is curious how few suspected the truth: that a new mission had been conceived out of the race’s need, the hour of its birth already determined by a conjunction of terrible new stars.”
Now, what was I to make of that?
I read the book to the end; the UFOs never reappeared. (Actually, they do, sort of, on p. 90 of the 1965 Ballentine paperback edition, which speaks of “the apparent wonders which had preceded the mission” and “the race’s need of phenomena as a symptom of unease and boredom and anticipation.”) Looking back at the opening chapter, I could see that Vidal went out of his way to gibe at Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches to UFOs. Yet my beloved “extraterrestrial visitors” theory also came in for gentle mockery. “[E]xplanation, in the end, was all that the people required. It made no difference how extraordinary the explanation was, if only they could know what was happening: that the shining globes which raced in formation over Sioux Falls, South Dakota, were mere residents of the Andromeda Galaxy, at home in space, omnipotent and eternal in design, on a cultural visit to our planet … if only this much could definitely be stated, the readers of newspapers would have felt secure, able in a few weeks’ time to turn their attention to other problems, the visitors from farther space forgotten.”
Calling UFOs visitors from outer space, in other words, was just as much a conventionalization as any other way of explaining them. Something I could not have understood at age fifteen.
Can I understand it now? Really, really understand it? What seems clear to me, rereading, is how seriously Vidal took the UFOs, and especially their enigmatic, unknown and perhaps unknowable quality. Also that, in some way hardly to be defined, they’re not about the external universe but about us, understood as a collective. “A new mission had been conceived out of the race’s need.”
Sounds very much like what Jung was to say a few years later in his Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Only expressed more concisely, more poetically, and—dare I say it?—more effectively.
Yet as a whole, Messiah is not a very effective novel. John Cave appears, preaching his message to humanity: “That it is good to die.” Conscious existence, Cave teaches, is an aberration to be escaped, extinguished as soon as feasible, in favor of the blessed darkness of oblivion. This is the doctrine, with its inevitable practice (suicide, now dubbed “Cavesway”), that we’re meant to imagine sweeping the world, irresistible.
Cave’s hypnotic presence is invoked to make his gospel’s appeal seem believable. I remain unconvinced—by the premise, by the story. The human, the animal impulse toward self-preservation, the drive to maintain one’s existence just one more minute, is a force of nature. A faith that runs counter to that impulse, is a faith that’s doomed.
But grant for a moment that a cult of death might become a world religion …
And grant that UFOs might be the harbingers of that cult’s explosion onto the world stage …
Wouldn’t it follow that, to Vidal, the deepest meaning of the UFO phenomenon—the UFO myth, Jung would call it—is bound up with death?
Which is pretty much my own intuition.
“Deep calleth unto deep” (Psalm 42:8). The depth of the UFO, to the depth of this great writer’s creative unconscious. The “call” then expressed in one of said writer’s less memorable creations.
Perhaps, sixty years ago, Gore Vidal had already solved the UFO mystery.
Responses? Reactions? Post your comments here, or, better, to my Facebook Fan Page, www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator. I’d love to hear what you think!
“Did Gore Vidal believe in UFOs?” No more, I think, than in the omens and portents that governed the career of the star crossed Emperor Julian the Apostate.
The phenomena, “observed by hundreds, some few reliable” and “all of unquestionable probity”, are the fantastic projections of the Scientism that governed the minds of the credulous and superstitious of the time. This, at least, is how I read the text when I was sixteen. I had already rejected von Daniken’s alien demons and deities as well as the fiery messengers of God’s grace and the dark principalities and powers of this world that I received as part of my Calvinist inheritance. Messiah and then Julian (amongst other texts) helped me to dig up the roots of my faith and lay them bare to the cold, dry and withering scrutiny of reason.
I understood the references to UFOs to be ironic. For me it pointed to the deep and irrepressible urge of humans to see demons and angels or, if not these, inimical and benevolent beings from another planet. In all truth I could then not distinguish my angels from my aliens and I think that Raelians and Tridentine Catholics alike would be hard pressed to slice nicely between them today.
I find no effort in Messiah to explain why this faculty, for seeing things that are not there, is dominant in human beings, only a bitter recognition of its sway and of its dark consequences. To say that Vidal takes UFOs seriously is to fail to recognise his playfulness. Here in Messiah he satirises the seldom seen signs, agents and manifestations of the divine whose disconcerting appearances are so central to Christianity and other forms of superstition.
Vidal’s point is that this human culture was ripe for the pseudo-scientific gospel of Cave, for the people were already recasting ancient human fears and hopes in pseudo-scientific terms. There is no “enigmatic, unknown and perhaps unknowable quality” in UFOs for Vidal any more than there is this quality in the cosmic upheavals that foreshadowed the conquests of Alexander, in the dove that descended on Jesus at his baptism or in the painlessness of the delivery of the Buddha.
It is true that we do not know why humans are so prone to superstition, but its reality and evil consequences are everywhere seen. That our experiences of the imaginary speak of us, and not of the universe, is a commonplace observation that has been made repeatedly throughout history and is hardly illuminated by Jung’s flights of fancy. Vidal, wisely, did not attempt to explain why. He simply conducted a thought experiment around the “what” and the “what thereafter” that became the brilliant satire of Christianity and religion that Messiah is.
From this perspective his remark “A new mission had been conceived out of the race’s need” is ironic. The last thing humans need is a pseudo-scientific religion that teaches us that to live is pointless and to embrace death is sweet, even if these assertions are both true and useful.
I suspect that you do not appreciate the novel because your knowledge of early Christianity is deficient. You write: “I remain unconvinced — by the premise, by the story” (ie that the “it is good to die” of Cavism could irresistibly sweep the world). You do not seem to know that this has happened at least once before in recorded history, specifically in the development of the primitive Catholic cult of death. It is to this life denying and death affirming horror potential within humans that Vidal addresses himself to in Messiah (and revisits in Kalki in 1978). A life denying and death affirming faith did triumph over reason, good taste and common sense a little less than 2000 years ago* and it may well again. Vidal’s parallel between the origin and development of Christianity and of Cavism is so well constructed that it brought anguish to my young believing heart**.
More terrible than its analysis of the past is Messiah’s dark assessment of human nature and its implications for the future. I remember thinking in 1976, “God this is awful, but, like 1984 and Brave New World, this never will be. We could never regress so rapidly and so thoroughly”. But we actually did so, didn’t we? Is not the advance of the New Age movement the progress of irrationality, vulgarity and folly? Does it not negate the life affirming Christianity born of the Enlightenment and in its returning transcend to a new form of death affirming Christianity?
You write: “The human, the animal impulse toward self-preservation, the drive to maintain one’s existence just one more minute, is a force of nature. A faith that runs counter to that impulse, is a faith that’s doomed”. Unfortunately empirical historical facts cannot be dispensed with by appeals to a priori principles; you cannot beg the question, you must prove what you assert and, alas, the evidence is against you.
———
*If you think that I am overstating this about early Christianity read The Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicita (c 210 CE).
** Dear God, is it possible that Peter, James and John lurked so close to Jesus at Gethsemane to ensure that He did not escape? Did they force Him to drink to the dregs, from the bitter cup that He Himself had mixed, so that His Word could survive and triumph? (Mark 14:32-42).
Deane—Many thanks for your thoughtful response. A few comments:
1) I agree: Gore Vidal believed in UFOs no more than he believed in the portents of the ancients. But also no less; that, I think, is his point.
2) Although Vidal’s tone in describing the (real) UFO episodes is frequently ironic, his introduction of them into his bleak, dystopian story seems to me entirely serious in its purpose. If his intent is to mock the deluded folk who see UFOs, why does he attribute a sighting to his narrator—with whom he seems to identify and whose name, Eugene Luther, is part of his own? (“I myself, late one night in July of the mid-century, saw quite plainly from the eastern bank of the Hudson River, where I lived, two red globes flickering in a cloudless sky …”—and I can’t help but wonder if this may reflect an experience Vidal actually had.)
3) Ditto for the portents and other religious phenomena. I do think that Vidal, though not a religious believer, perceives something numinous and mysterious at religion’s core. You don’t keep coming back to a theme in your fiction unless you feel it call to you within your own psyche.
4) I’d balk at seeing early Christianity as a death cult. Rather, it trumpets its victory over death (“I am the resurrection and the life,” John 11:25), and does so by redefining what it means to live and to die. Thus Paul uses death as a metaphor (“sin revived and I died,” Romans 7:9), while actual death becomes “falling asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:6). The goal is not death but a hyper-life, in this world and the (alleged) next, which skeptics can dismiss as fantasy but which has been real enough to ancient and modern believers. And which had the power to win over much of the world.
Thanks again for writing. Your perspective is much appreciated.