Chronos Apollonios' "Home on Olympus" Chronos Apollonios' "Home on Olympus"
On The Magickal Science of Shape-Shifting:
Our title is partly a quote of the title of a "psychedelic", "hallucinogen-soaked" song by the legendary guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, which in its time, even in the form of this phrase alone, poetically embodied the aspiration for the future and the full acknowledgment of our rich legacies of legends. Legends of sea-beings who could live in the water, whose bodies were partly those of the fish, who were some of the most beautifully outstanding of countless more legendary characters who could change their shapes as they pleased. It would in fact be an overwhelming task to recount a history of such legends here.
Our title is also made of a single and possibly most concise physical possibility, and of course the inevitable ultimate application of such abilities.
We have a constant struggle as we attempt to re-become the heirs and the keepers of magick, myth, and legend, a complex struggle to balance coming to terms with how much truly was known, how much such knowledge truly needs our benefaction, how much it's appropriate to advocate such knowledge, and how much expectations of ourselves we should try to create of ourselves.
Hence, shape-shifting is something that I've long felt more comfortable thinking about than talking about. The ramifications are staggering, profound, and capable of shaking the world far harder than bringing into reality the full spectrum of the innovations you see on "Star Trek".
Still, if it would surprise you to find out that the subject is taken very seriously, if very secretly, by certain powers in this world, we may have a problem here. Of all the atrocious contents (and some that are not) of Alfred Bielek's fabulous accounts of the story of the Philadelphia Experiment, it was, oddly enough, his assertions that the government had mastered this art already, that promised to lend him some of the strongest credibility, because he had put forward a premise that would have accounted for the dichotomy between the infinitely probably origin of UFOs right here on earth as part of "secret" military science programs, and the countless reports of contact with their occupants, which contain anything but reports that their personnel were "that fellow up the road who joined the army when he was 18".
The Native American wise persons became suddenly silent in their ancient musings about the time of the second World War, not ironically. Since then, the whole public conception of shape-shifting has been steered, so deliberately as to imply an unholy degree of control of the media, toward a perception the whole phenomena being nothing but the product of the shamanic imagination, of hypnotic imagery, of drug-induced fantasy.
I have the deepest resentment for the latter of these, since the last several decades have seen so much "blacklisting and witch-hunting" of every psychotropic that can be senselessly lumped in with the truly frightening stimulants and opiates of abuse, that the mere mention of the world is enough to give the observer a false and premature license to take someone else's traditional belief system and totally disregard it, and sweep it under the rug, whole. The very word has become the tool of bigotry and prejudice.
I also bear as much resentment toward the wholesale advocacy of unnecessary use of hallucinogens, even if takes the form of cultural interpretation, especially when such advocacy is inevitably if unintentionally directed at those who have not received the proper instructions with such materials, particularly at an age when they may automatically assume everything you need to know about getting along comes automatically with falling in love, or that everything you need to know about parenting conveniently coincides with pregnancy. Like broken hearts or bouncing babies, these materials seldom come with instruction manuals. They are pharmaceuticals, and even to medicine men, there are contraindications, as well as standards of purity.
There's also something very frustrating when something happens or occurs to you that you wish you could share with the entire world, but the scientific practice of giving all the details that you possibly can, suddenly becomes impaired by the prevailing threat of legal troubles because such substances were involved. It's also frustrating when the role of substances is allowed, somehow, to prevail as an almost automatic death-blow to one's credibility in general. It's not like I can advocate any of these substances to anyone, quite the contrary, not matter how promising they may sound, and whatever literature insists on being oblivious to that fact, seriously risks being a sheer waste of time for that very reason alone.
Now that that rant is out of the way, none of the modern waves of modern shapeshifting, however, of "psychically attuning to your totem animal" type of shamanic practice, seem to bear that much resemblance to the traditional components of the cultures in question. Of themselves, they have value, and of worst they're harmless fun, but they still somehow tend to give one the same impression one gets when seeing a living animal made into a fur. It's beautiful, but there's something very important missing. We can't even talk about reincarnating most of the time without implying that even the spiritual blueprint for the physical body can change form.
Hindu tradition of course has it that shape-shifting into animals as one changes incarnations is commonplace. Unfortunately, this line of thinking, one which is merit-based, is both derogatory to beloved housepets and seems to be so inherently tied to the prevailing curse of the Caste system, that one easily wonder who at the moment would want to believe it? It seems somehow akin a belief in Heaven that affords a Christian the attitude that they can make as big a toxic mess of the earth as they wish to in this life through utilitarian ineptitude's, and go on to another one without having to worry about tidying up after themselves. Karma might in fact dictate we come back as something with the hands and brains to clean up those very messes. We can't all come back as the declining earthworm, can we? Somehow, all of this leaves something to be desired.
Likewise, the "other" school of shape-shifting, the werewolf, of those who allegedly self-hypnotized themselves into the form of a wolf, and all too often hypnotized themselves into the undesirable behaviors of the wolf, might as well be one more shamanic medicine story allegorized as a monster tale (and probably is). Given the roots of shamanism, where the Siberian shamans and their allies have an assistant to bring them out of trance when they travel out of body, lest they fail to return and become trapped out of body, it would be wise to apply the same to this sort of shape-shifting were one not all to likely to eat their assistant first!
Whatever the actual specifics, however, anyone who has any enthusiasm for the subject of shape-shifting ought to include in their study of it, some of the more stirring references from certain native sources. These, too, will likely require large grains of salt because of the way they are written or phrased; the task is a bit like a salvage operation, but make no mistake, there could well be treasure down there.
Likewise, we are rapidly approaching, if we have not already arrived at, the point where we may have adequate science to explain any veracity we might find in the legends. Much of what I have had to say on these pages regarding the physics that may be embodied by the visions of Hildegarde of Bingen, for example, may wax "precipitously" close to such an understanding.
We find rather consistently, for example, details such as imply innate knowledge of sympathetic resonance and bioenergetics, just as we find rather consistently details such as the somersault which may in context be considered a physical expression and incorporation of the spinor coherer which may be a unifying feature of both relativity and quantum mechanics.
Our greatest challenge may be to emulate the conservative ethics of people who may prove to have once actually possessed such powers, for the ramifications of the reality might put the spiritual or moral development of a great many modern persons to shame.
It is in fact the very awkwardness and the impending sense of chaos, that make the very notion of literal shape-shifting into an irreplaceable and exacting marker of the inherent failures of our present modes of society. Unfortunately, there may be no getting around such a notion in the course of the true mastery of life and the physical world for which we, with whatever degree of actual sincerity, express so much enthusiasm and effort, and so much would-be justification of the courses of our lives. Whether or not we decide to utilize such a power in the drastic degrees that are possible, it may be an inevitable consequence of truly understanding the mechanics of the priceless gift that is life.
It may also be, whether we like it or not, an unavoidable occurrence as we drift helplessly from one incarnation to the next, unless we grasp hold of the solid anchor of possessing the means of physically expressing our true choices in the matter.
Here, then, replete with possible mischiefs, are some words from the wise, and perhaps some others as well.
From the article: "Hopi Notes from Chimopovy" Wilson D. Wallis and Mischa Titiev
(pg. 535-)
"Witchcraft:
When an infant is about thirty days old, someone may steal it away from its mother during the night, and give it to a spirit (witch?). When the child grows up it will be very clever and may know how to cure some kind of disease. If a youngster is taught this belief when five or six years old, it will certainly die soon. Someone may turn it into a coyote or crow. If you look closely at the face of a person who changes himself into an animal, you can see beneath the surface of the skin the features of the beast when he becomes when transformed.
When crows go into our fields and peck our watermelons full of holes, we know they are Navahos or Apaches who have come in this guise. Sometimes there will be two or three exceedingly bad crows which will keep pecking in corn or melons until they have consumed nearly all of them. When this happens, you may be sure that the birds are Apaches or Navahos. Sometimes we kill such a crow. Soon after this a man in one of those tribes will die, whereupon one of their medicine men will say, "Someone has shot that crow".
My brother’s wife was once sick. Their dog barked all night. "Something is wrong," they thought. About sundown the next day my brother went up on the housetop and lay down, with revolver concealed. He thought that something might come to the house. In a little while the dog began barking. It barked again. Soon he saw a cat coming along the edge of the flat roof. The cat climbed up, looked about cautiously, then went over close to my brother. It became frightened, turned around, ran away, and jumped off from the other side of the roof. My brother kept watch on the following night. Again the dog barked. Again the cat came, this time moving even more cautiously. When it saw my brother, it scampered away.
The next night my brother took his place, as before, too keep watch. This time a large dog came toward the house. Never had he seen a dog of that kind in any part of the village. It was a large yellow beast. The wife of my brother, who is a silversmith and has a small house, was not very sick, and lay groaning. Now that dog came along. "Ahem!," thought my brother. "I guess this is something else. Never have I seen a dog of that kind". He prepared to shoot. The dog started up, but instead of running straight [as a real animal would do], it ran a zigzag course. My brother sent one bullet, then another, at him. He did not tell anyone about this, for in that case someone would be sure to say, "you have killed my dog," and he would have to recompense the owner. After this, however, he kept his ears open for news. His wife improved a bit. A little while after this my mother’s sister’s daughter became sick. She was sick four days with a very sore side and pains in the middle of the back [near the kidneys]. A hole was noticeable on one side of her body. Over this place she had put some raw cotton. My sister saw this hole with the cotton in it. The woman stank terribly during this time, for fetid matter was oozing from the wound. She was sick a few days, then died. "I guess I shot her," my brother said. "I had never before seen a dog like that".
My grandfather told me the difference between a good and a bad man, illustrating his words by the use of two fingers. The bad man goes a very crooked road, first ahead, the back; the good man travels straight ahead. When the bad man regains consciousness after a swoon, dream, or other unconscious state, he goes back [morally] because he has been all this while thinking of a way in which he can kill some man, woman, or little child. These bad people who can change their forms are marked on the forehead. Such a man can turn over through a hoop, become a coyote, for example, go somewhere at night, return in the morning, and become a man again, without anyone knowing anything about it. People have often been detected in the act of transforming themselves, and their animal markings may be noticed under the skin.
A long time ago everyone nearly everyone had one of these hoops that are used in changing to an animal and back into human shape. Such a hoop is decorated with the feathers of an owl, crow, whippoorwill, and eagle, all birds of strong medicine. A man who is transformed will perhaps go to steal something and then will bring it home. Sometimes all the Indians who do such things, and white people, too, meet at night. Their transforming hoops must be made of hickory, for a strong wood is required. To them are tied pieces of animals (in addition to the feathers already mentioned), by means of the hairs of wolves or other creatures, or by leather thongs. If a man wishes to become a coyote, he places part of a coyote on top of the hoop; if a crow, he puts crow feathers on top, and so on. He places his head against the fragment of the animal whose likeness he wishes to assume, and prays: "Cause me to become a coyote!" Then he somersaults through the hoop.
I deliberated about these matters and eventually decided that my grandfather had told the truth. My grandfathers said: "I tried it..."
This, only of a number of accounts that can be cited, may strain one's credulity, but it contains a good number of astute details. In many ways, the description of the ritual process somehow closely resembles an account in which these things are not being made up. Known and established principles are supported, and while "sympathetic magic" has long been known, somehow, to an endless list of ancient or traditional people, it in turn has strong support from many aspects of our modern physics.
Some details may require a bit more thought or background. The idea of placing the sample of the animal, which in the so-called "radionics" or in radiesthesia is known as a "witness", to the forehead has intriguing precedents, including the ramifications of Ludo Chardenon's astonishing cure for sunstroke that stands out so from his quaint little herbal. This area, the location of the "third eye", or psychic center, is known to have the potential for unusual interactions with matter, if we only observe so through the use of this organ in "micro-psi" vision (psychic microscopy), but it's long been highlighted with related symbolism such as the extended meanings of the Egyptian uraeus as well.
Add to this the fact that certain endocrine bodies and effects would have to be credited, and this account of the methodology is not lacking in every appearance of knowledge of such a phenomena. Nor is it without parallel. The French expression for "werewolf", in fact, is easily interpreted to suggest the same or very similar tools are employed in a very similar magick in that part of the world. Be it hoops or girdles or rings that are the magick tool, there are striking and mysterious similarities in the elements of tales of transmographication.
Still, the most difficult thing to sort out here is whether this process is casting an illusion, a sort of modified invisibility- for that, too, has some very strong precedents- or actual shape-changing is taking place. Such a mechanism that may entail actual shape-changing may be challenging to explain, to say the least.
Conservatively, it's almost unthinkable that a physical body is being discarded, or de-materialized, let alone that this happens unobtrusively. On the other hand, either its an illusion that goes far out of its way to mesmerize its observer, or an illusion mixed with other feats, such as levitation, if a person become a bird is actually flying around in that form or squeezing into impossibly small spaces.
Even though the feat does have many earmarks of a classical mystical illusion, still such a phenomena is perfectly open to further interpretation as a reality, and one which most favorably allows "the destruction of the physical body without the destruction of the physical body", a rather refreshing challenge for physics.
While the anecdotes contain such a sense of deadly risk and utter fruitlessness that we cannot at all be sure that the persons in question indeed ever in fact attempted such a thing, we can be certain that the tales do serve as the vehicle for preservation and distribution of important insights. If such tales are nothing else, they are an important proof that those who will attempt explanation of a phenomena may have nature volunteer many of its secrets to them, whereas those who refuse to believe even for a moment will have nothing. It is exercise for the mind, that is beyond question.
It's also something of a sociological signpost, and an amazing one. We are able to experience a healthy and sobering discomfort as the possible reality of such a possibility is used as contrast to our own society. Suddenly, the inherent ramifications of the shape-shifting phenomena alert us that we have invested the entirety of our stock-in-trade in the "absolute" "nature" of human identity! If nothing else, we have built a game and fashioned its rules without even taking into consideration the possibility of exceptions to those rules, a fatal error we have made time and time again. Inevitably, doing so also puts us at serious risk of having virtually backed ourselves into a corner.
What should happen if, for example, we were to come to the realization that shape-shifting were the actualization of some of our most important goals in biology and medicine? Would we cheat ourselves out of such medicine because we have too much invested already in some robotic "belief" that such medicine cannot exist? Will we yet again put our livings before our very lives?
If there are any reasons shape-shifting has remained elusive and obscure, most assuredly it is these reasons, and not an inherent lack of possibility or reality to the phenomena in question. The very subject, and its serious treatment, however, is yet another indicator of our health as a society and the health, or lack of it, of our present way of life.
What is, however, a serious treatment of this subject?
While it's beyond the scope of this present work to juggle the full set of possibilities to produce a concise "prognosis" in one presumptously abrupt moment, there are possibilities here, and some of the most obvious possibilities exist not only as extensions of the same physics and logic that we can use to spot any veracity in these traditional anecdotes and accounts, and that is of course turning to holography to help us finish explaining what holography has helped us to begin explaining.
The very fact that ritual calls for only a part of an animal sample, for in holography the part contains (and can recreate) the whole.
Holography may also allow us the aspect of "implicate" and "explicate"- we could in fact describe the changes in David Bohm's ink drop experiment as "shape-shifting", where the dissolved ink drop has preserved the information about its whole form somehow within itself. The fact that this shape-shifting is purported to be so readily reversible may also be characteristic of this.
Holography also provides us with the possibilities of superpositioning- that one form, or the appearance of one form, can be superimposed upon another, without the permanent destruction of either.
Other sets of physics, however, provide us with further possibilities. One possibility of course is that the difference in physical forms in sheer matter has been dispensed with- that a form has been partially disintegrated and the remainder has been reconfigured.
Although this is not exclusive whatsoever to the application of holographic concepts, this is even closer to our constant goal of materialization as a result of magick, and it's enticing. After all, it is basically the ultimate goal of materialization to be able to "shape-shift" trash into new and usable items, providing for our material needs while reducing our waste, refuse and pollution down to virtually zero.
This alone dramatically underscores why the science of shape-shifting may be important enough for a good and honest people to dress it up with any "fibs" or half-truths that might have been woven in about who shot whose cousin whilst who was in the shape of a coyote or crow. It's highly unlikely, in fact, that the true "ethnology" of crop damage amongst the Hopi has ever been blame the Navaho and Apache or any other tribes, and that's only one example of mischief within the nonetheless astonishingly astute story.
There is also the possibility of dimensional techniques, and the reality of these techniques may be been better known to us as the mechanics of human mortality and the human experience of the afterlife. As has been stated before, reincarnation into another form, when the "spiritual" blueprint comes into harmony with the new physical form, is a "total" act of shape-shifting, if even the soul's form has changed. The transition in question is less than this.
The possible mechanics, however, of retention of information about multiple forms from multiple incarnations, or the possibilities as to what the disincarnate state actually is, may both very closely resemble this means of the simultaneous possession of a human form and an animal one.
We can also easily construct a shape-shifting model out of the "atomic gravitational hologram" model of object-identity that can be derived from the visions of Hildegard of Bingen.
On the other hand, we can look at the phenomena more from the point of view of the ritual apparatus, if such a deed indeed gives us an appreciably different assessment. There is a vast wealth of additional traditional information we can find if we follow the references given for this article, or follow the subject of ceremonial hoops, their materials and construction, and their precise ritual applications, and additional correspondences to our known physics may literally leap out at us.
One posibility here, besides the afore-mentioned possible synonymy between the sommersalt in this context and the "spinor coherer" which unites relativistic physics and quantum mechanics (in this practice, perhaps unites them in a most literal fashion), is that the hoops are embodying a sort of energy that allows the body to be enveloped in certain types of fields, very much like making a small soap bubble inside of a large one, by passing the smaller one through a hoop that is covered with adequate substance, or by analogy, an adequate field. Prodigal genius and "inventor of everything", Nikola Tesla, interestingly enough, talked of his ability to take electrical fields and do literally this same thing with them, to treat them as if they were soapy water and he was blowing bubbles with them using a ring, and to blow bubbles with them of any size or shape he desired.
Exactly what this methodology implies is uncertain, and yet it is obviously a very concrete beginning.
The use of a hardwood for a hoop may inevitably and eventually illuminate another unusual physics, one involving heavy electrons, or muons as they are also called, that seem to be relentlessly easy to implicate in a vast array of occult phenomena. The key may be that certain hardwoods and botanicals in general possess a structural integrity or strength, that for their particular physical constitution, cannot be accounted for except by muonized molecules, the non-cosmological kind of "exotic matter", that exhibits dramatic increases in physical properties. Some of the applications of oak, for example, seem to imply this, as does a great deal of botanical esoterica.
A great deal may be learned from making a list of materials traditionally used for shape-shifting hoops, and then looking up all of the known magickal properties of each of them. These properties often tend to be generic, and where basic common denominators are responsible, tend to appear together in the same groupings in many materials known to possess any of them.
The fact is that the reality of such a phenomena can be approached successfully in a number of ways, any or all of these aspects can be relevant at the same time, and all of them as supportive of one another as the understanding of a single aspect is supportive of our understanding the other aspects. From there lies the challenging ramifications, but even more than that, the wonderful, astounding, and infinite possibilities.
The real questions concern whether the military powers that be, in their infinite greed for any conceivable war advantage, have been able to, for the first time, resist a temptation to dive head-long into a technology that they're easily capable of enlisting the very best minds to fathom for them, while they deny knowledge or participation and while the same technology is utterly squandered to the detriment of practical peacetime uses... at least until such a time as jumping in at the last minute claiming the points for pioneering it seems to help make them sound a little more respectable to the inattentive citizen. One cannot easily imagine that they've found willing participants, and one shudders to imagine what one's service to one's country might entail nowdays- including the orders to "become" those grey, otherworldly "aliens", replete with medical technology so literally retarded that it cannot possibly be of extra-terrestrial origin.
The great irony has long been that those "terrifying" medical encounters with aliens have reminded me of nothing so much as a relatively routine trip to an average earth doctor, right down to the amniocentesis and the proctological probing.
Much of that, of course, is simply advantageous to the long standing favorite delusion that is induced upon the greater public that "UFO" technology does not yet exist on earth (even while NASA publishes the diagrams and schematics!), God forbid that the greater public should readily recognize that the militaries have decades of experimentation with these designs to their credit.
Let's hope it's all an archetypal illusion, a hypnotic effect, or a convincing illusion created with modified invisibility. Let's hope "Uncle Sam" hasn't managed the unmitigated Frankensteinian audacity to turn "the boy next door", against his will, into "E.T." genetically.
Then again, that's the same "Uncle Sam" who's given his blessing to the literally Frankensteinian genetic tampering of the hopelessly greedy, would-be world-dominating corporations instead of enlisting his troops to defend the public's actual wishes against such horrendous types.
In the end, at least, the Natives seem to often think themselves (in fact, it's probably not that often anyone asks) that UFOs, not to mention inevitably their little green occupants, are simply the handiwork of large earthly governments. The Natives seem to know a lot of things. No matter who is really who, who am I to disagree with such intelligent and honest beings?
References and Further Information in Literature:
"Tales of the North American Indians", selected and annotated by Stith Thompson Bloomington, Indiana University Press [1966] (Native American folklore motifs are assigned Thompson's motif-index numbers and cataloged in this work.)
"Hopi Notes from Chimopovy" Wilson D. Wallis and Mischa Titiev (pp. 523-) (Article)
"Love-magic and Butterfly People : the Slim Curly version of the ajilee and Mothway myths" / [compiled by] Berard Haile; Irvy W. Goossen, linguist in Navajo ; Karl W. Luckert, editor Publisher Flagstaff : Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1978
Note: I'm putting this page up as it is; it is a start. I do, however, seriously plan to update with a considerable amount of additional information as soon as possible, so please do check back to see what's new.
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