Mythos

Growing up, my siblings and I would watch a show called "Sightings" on Fox. The show described paranormal activities, mainly pertaining to close encounters with extraterrestrial life forms. Many accounts of which make for lampooned recollections.

With those recounting their experiences will undoubtedly state them as true, I have a more cynical interpretation of human memory. Maybe cynical isn't the right word. Jungian? A collective understanding of the misunderstood - an attempt to explain the unexplainable, from a cultural standpoint, rather than cognitive.

I've always been a fan of Joseph Campbell's interpretation of myth. A review of how culture viewed collective experiences. While the interpretation I offer here is by no means my own, I feel it needs to be restated more often in order to break away from a mystical view of structures and agencies both physical and philosophical.

The Greek myths of the Amazon's were varied, but the principle idea behind what they represented can be interpreted as the antithesis to Greek culture. An affront to the patriarchal power structure, a cultural aberration to the normative, set geographically outside of the Greek sphere of influence. I believe a similar interpretation of the Grey Alien mythos can be expressed as common cultural understandings of technology as mystical, and the abduction and violation stories as manifest anxiety surrounding our lack of knowledge about our world outside of its highly specialized fields.

Knowledge is power, and so, arguably, is money. Money can be used to acquire knowledge. Knowledge and information are the true form of currency, and keeping information from others or creating institutional barriers in order to achieve initiation into the culture of information is power. The dynamics of initiation follow those of clergy or cabals where there are rituals of passage. Today, we call it college.

The best example to demonstrate this idea, I think, is the health care system.

Think of doctors as those shaman who hold the knowledge of life. They have gone through their initiations attending medical school, erecting churches of clinics and practices in the parishes of our communities. The tithes we pay in health insurance premiums grant access to serums and potions in the form of tiny pills whose chemical makeup is far beyond the understanding of those skills taught in high school chemistry. The pharisees of claims reviewers determining our penance, our original sin being preexisting conditions.

 I can't say that those claiming abduction are uneducated. Some may even be doctors. The formation of this opinion in this post is akin to my understanding of sanitation workers when I was a child. I used my limited level of logical interpretation about that vocation much as I did, as all children do, with a languages grammar.

Just think of the -ed ending to past tense verbs and the irregular endings that a child cannot learn without cultural exposure for proper usage. You can extend this to the existence of Ebonics (an underprivileged class of society not having access or exposure to the cultural resources of the hegemony, thus their colloquial dialect follows logical rules of grammar rather than historical - though as with any language, it follows its own dynamic historical evolution), as well as the project of Esperanto (a language developed to make grammar follow a logical progressions, creating a universal standard easily adopted, attempting to eliminate class and cultural segregation).

In my limited logic as a child, I understood that garbage was picked up on Friday. I extended this to not just the garbage from my parents' house, but to that of everyone's house everywhere. To me, this meant that sanitation workers only worked one day a week. WHAT A LIFE! Of course, later on I realized that would be a logistical nightmare.

Another childhood myth was that the Moon during the day was a reflection of the Earth in the sky. This was shared by neighborhood friends during that period of childhood before initiation into science. Narrative interpretations of those childhood (mis)understandings manifest themselves in fiction all the time. Science fiction likes to play with the problematical interpretation of fact in order to discover new metaphysical truths, though often has to revise its canon after methodical research debunks the previous understanding.

I think about the trips to the dentists and doctors visits and those examinations for things I had never heard of as well as not understanding as a child. Strangers probing my mouth with metal tools, doctors requiring me to urinate in plastic cups. The world is full of scared children that don't understand the methods and reasons for practices by adults. Is it really a far leap to interpret such experiences as traumatic and collectively reinterpret them into abductions and violations by beings at once both familiar and completely foreign?

Or, perhaps, aliens do exist. Perhaps there is an ancient race whose race is a bunch of freaks who get off on looking up our bums. Of course, who's to say that such a culture of the stars would view us beyond clever little insects whose hives and anthills of glass and steel are anything more than where we might store our honey.