The Society for UAP Studies has been sharing videos from its last conference, most recently, that by Dr. Brenda Denzler, author of the canonical The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs (2001). I was fortunate enough to get in the last question following her lecture, and I have written briefly on her talk (which you can now read). However, because my intervention touched on matters pertinent not only to Denzler’s lecture but to its presuppositions, which are shared by other luminaries in the field—Jacques Vallée, Jeffrey Kripal, and D. W. Pasulka (with caveats), among others—I want to develop my thoughts on the matter in somewhat greater depth.

Let’s begin our excavation with the end of Denzler’s lecture and the questions and remarks I posed after. Denzler contends that “The authentic study of UAPs [sic] and their NHIs [Non-Human Intelligences]” must go “back to the beginning of the materialist age and the rise of a science with materialism as one of its fundamental premises” (@1:10), “to a world before…the expulsion of the gods and elementals and fairies and djinn and demons and spirits” (@1:06). This return (which imaginably might entail a desedimentation, Destruktion, or deconstruction of the era following on the Scientific Revolution) calls for a revolution in, at least, religious studies.

Mining the wealth of data buried in the world’s religious traditions for insights about the nature of UAP occupants is going to require a hybrid approach. It will mean studying the “gods” themselves for the first time as active actors on the world stage in and for themselves, not just in terms of how they relate to and affect human beings. It will mean using the methods of the social sciences, the physical sciences, and historical-critical scholarship. It will mean putting under the metaphorical microscope the NHIs that our hard-wiring has led us to regard with awe in the past and who still strike us with awe today. It will mean looking at their interactions with humanity in much the same way that we look at political, economic, and cultural interactions between, say, ancient city-states in the Middle East. It will mean treating them first and foremost as independent entities apart from any consideration of the ways in which they may stimulate our religious impulses.

Let me make myself a bit clearer. If we studied whales the way we have so far studied “god/the gods,” we would study traditions about alleged human contacts with whales, devise belief systems that invoke whales as a reason for how things are or should be, perform rituals to honor or appease whales, build monuments in which to ritualize our relationship to them…. Or, in a more modern vein, we would study how the idea of whales has been shaped by human culture and thinking, or how groups of humans have behaved and continue to behave in the name of whales, or the role of beliefs about and practices invoking whales in the rise of commerce in human society, etc. We would know little to nothing about the unique (compared to humans) nature of whales’ skin or anatomy, how they live and move through a medium that we can only visit, how they organize their social life (if any), how they communicate with each other, exactly where in the vast oceans are the areas they call “home” (if any), how they propagate and care for their young (assuming such exist), and how they fit into the larger ecology of reality…. We would know little to nothing about whales as and for themselves, and mostly know only about them as a mirror of ourselves in one sense (theological) or another (sociological).

What’s at stake in Denzler’s proposal are very involved and likely abyssal considerations around just how we are to understand that “wealth of data buried in the world’s religious traditions,” for that “data” is not, strictly, data but texts (as if data as data escapes the differance of textuality…), texts demanding interpretation. It was precisely this issue I raised in the Q&A following her talk, asking if we should read the story of the vision of Ezekiel as an account of (1) an actual experience, whether in an ordinary waking state (in which case others could have witnessed what Ezekiel is said to have witnessed) or an altered state of consciousness (in which case only Ezekiel would have been privy to what he is said to have witnessed, i.e., he would have had a “mystical” or “religious” experience) or (2) as a monumental work of religious poetry (which the symbolic content of his vision strongly suggests). Scholars of Ezekiel and Merkabah mysticism which his writings inspire are in no agreement on this question. Her reply was both sophisticated and telling (@ 1:21:38).

Her response works towards articulating itself as a question. She begins by stating that she wants “to understand the role of imaginative writing in antiquity” (itself a telling formulation). She goes on to reflect that literacy and its immediate, required materials (e.g., papyrus and pen) were for much of history very limited, which leads her to ask, given that scarcity of literacy and its materials “How much of your cultural capital…are you going to spend in writing down things that …are fanciful, things that are poetic?” admitting as she formulates this question that ancient societies in fact invested a lot of their cultural capital in recording fanciful, poetic things (her example is the Book of Psalms). She confesses to not know the answer, but wonders aloud why one would think, e.g., Ezekiel to be fanciful, why we might think “it’s not true?” in the first place. With regard to my posing the example of the Old Testament prophets employing, in general, formulae such as “The Word of the Lord spoke to me,” asking why we should take these words literally instead of rhetorically, as a way to claim prophetic authority, Denzler admits that these formulae “may be rhetorical. It may also be…the rhetoric of that phrase may be bound up in what was originally some kind of experience that did involve, that created, awe and the tendency to worship…”

On the one hand, it would be uncharitable to scrutinize too closely Denzler’s response, whose exploratory provisionality she herself underscores. On the other hand, as any student of psychoanalysis knows, it’s precisely spontaneous speech which is most revealing. Denzler’s response is hardly unreflective, unguarded (“uncensored”), but the spontaneity demanded of it by the situation causes her to reach for certain “ready-to-hand” concepts, concepts that are significantly loaded.

On the one hand, her response is grammatological, focussed on writing, its history and nature. On the other, cannily, her first thoughts are framed economically (materially): the division of labour in ancient societies and their economic base makes the literate an elite and their tools scarce. This tendency of thought determines how she phrases her question: “How much of your cultural capital…are you going to spend in writing down things that …are fanciful, things that are poetic?” But her question, no less, betrays an all-too-modern (i.e. bourgeois) prejudice, for the instrumental (useful, informative, referential, if not efficient and profitable) over the “imaginative,” the “fanciful,” or “poetic.” That the cultural record speaks against this modern prejudice, even she is forced to admit, the example of the Book of Psalms derailing her train of thought. That this prejudice for the referential over the aesthetic is an historically local development is put well by poet Ron Silliman in his essay “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World:”

What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of ‘realism,’ the illusion of reality in capitalist thought. These developments are tied directly to the function of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed, narrowed into referentiality.

What is, indeed, demanded is some digging into not so much “the role” of but the very question of “imaginative writing in antiquity,” especially since, in the West, the very concept of “Literature” as “imaginative writing” is an invention of the Romantic movement, a reaction against the “referential” prejudices of the Enlightenment, which itself is determined by the context of the Scientific Revolution and that wider horizon of the development of capitalism. It should come as little surprise, then, that a similar debate, however reversed, should be found in the Greek Enlightenment in Plato’s famous criticism that the poet’s lie (an accusation, it must be underlined, is spoken by a character in a novel genre, the Platonic dialogue, cast most emphatically not in the language of reference and truth). The very opposition between factual and fictional is not as simple as our modern moment might make it seem, then, but one demanding rigorous, vigilant, reflective “historical-critical scholarship.”

But this modern prejudice for the referential, the factual, the real(istic) is further betrayed in Denzler’s wondering why the question of the fictionality of Ezekiel’s vision or the rhetoricity of the prophets’ claims to authority should arise, as if the immediate, unquestioned reception of their texts should be that they are “true.” In the case of the prophetic books, Denzler’s inclination is to lean toward their words being inspired by “what was originally some kind of experience [my emphasis] that did involve, that created, awe and the tendency to worship…” But the same question could just as well be posed: Why assume the prophets’ words in the first instance refer to an experience? This interpretive stance seems merely a prejudice, one underwritten not so much by the historical-critical scholarship but by more recent tendencies of thought governed by science and capitalism. Given the way the function of language is narrowed down in the present horizon, focussed on “the real” (the defining genre of the capitalist era is, don’t forget, the realist novel), should it come as a surprise that Christian fundamentalism and its “literal” reading of scripture grows from the soil of Nineteenth-Century America? Taking antemodern and antewestern texts to be in the first place “literal” or “referential” is a reflex conditioned by our modern, capitalist horizon, not necessarily the linguistic practices of antemodern, nonwestern cultures.

Even more fundamentally, I’d wager that at the foundation of Denzler’s thinking, here, is an Enlightenment realist ontology and pre-philological notion of language. Denzler seems to assume that “reality,” the cosmos or nature, is a system of self-identical objects (including thoughts, concepts or ideas) whose characteristics or “truth” is independent of human observation or thought and that language is a referential system that mirrors or otherwise represents these objects and their order, correct reference determining the truth if not meaning of our utterances about the world. From this perspective, “imaginative,” “fanciful,” or “poetic” language lies, is false, because it fails to transparently refer to the real world, condemned even more (as it is by Francis Bacon) because of its luxurious self-regard in its stylistic ornamentation that obscures the efficient communication of clear and distinct ideas or truths. Moreover, there seems at work a vaguely Empiricist prejudice, perhaps seeped into and through the tradition of religious studies, that the ultimate datum of knowledge is experience, that religion is inspired by numinous experiences (as per her inclination that the inspiration behind the prophetic books may well “be bound up in what was originally some kind of experience that did involve, that created, awe and the tendency to worship”). Ironically, one might detect in Denzler’s formulation here Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, an overtly neo-Kantian work intent not so much on discussing the “reality” or nature of the holy but in investigating the human capacity for the experience of it, quite apart from any claims or assumptions about its reality or nature. There is, therefore, an even more profound irony is just how much Denzler’s thinking is determined by “the beginning of the materialist age and the rise of a science with materialism as one of its fundamental premises,” precisely the historical juncture she would have us revise.

Methodologically, what these reflections entail is that any attempt to pursue Denzler’s proposed research program, “mining the wealth of data buried in the world’s religious traditions for insights about the nature of UAP occupants,” to study “the ‘gods’ themselves…as active actors on the world stage in and for themselves” is first and foremost a hermeneutic project. Its primary “data” is texts, which need first be understood, i.e., interpreted, a task which traditionally falls under hermeneutics, both as the art of specialized interpretation (here, of “religious” texts, a category calling for no little reflection) and of interpretation in general, especially since Schleiermacher (the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, especially concerning “effective history,” and Hans-Robert Jauss’ Reception Theory are not ungermane, as what’s precisely at stake is the reception of these texts over time). Denzler herself admits that her research program “will mean using the methods of… historical-critical scholarship,” but, counter to the syntax of her original statement, which lists the social and physical sciences before the historical-critical, I contend that the very possibility of the application of the former must attend on the determinative labour of the latter.