Apocalypto Now, or Proper Care and Feeding of the Archons

Images of frog and demons in collage above from The Iraq Museum.

I've been thinking along the lines of Jeff Wells, whose latest blog post is synchronistic with what I've been meaning to discuss here. In short, we're witnessing a tremendous amount of high weirdness these days (see the O'Hare UFO post below, for one example), which is coinciding with a dramatic rise in bloodshed, gloom, and fear.

Years ago, I was introduced to a concept that has continued to resonate with me -- the idea of Archons, as posited by the ancient Gnostics and elaborated by Jim DeKorne in his excellent book, Psychedelic Shamanism:

"...The gnostic Archons, then, are intelligences existing in the imaginal realm in 'bodies' consisting of thought and feeling. They are able to tune into our awareness through our affinity with their wavelength, that is, our beliefs. They feed off of our allocation of energy to their dimension, and compete with other Archons on other levels in the overall hierarchy for their nourishment."

"...What may be a belief in the Christian Trinity or Islamic Jihad to humans, may be the equivalent of a T-bone steak to entities of the imaginal realm who depend upon that belief for their existence."

See my entry on the UFO/Occult nexus for more on this topic.

Now, admitting I actually believe that human pain and suffering feeds the hunger of extradimensional entities might be overstating my attraction to the metaphor (or my familiarity with one of the age-old tropes of horror and the occult). But sometimes I have to wonder:

From the Kansas City Star:

In a Najaf soccer stadium, troops from the Iraqi army, the police and other emergency units paraded for an hour before a reviewing stand filled with U.S. and Iraqi dignitaries.

Then, in what seems to have been the high point of the affair, the members of a commando unit gave a dramatic demonstration of their courage.

According to published accounts, each commando plucked a frog from his pocket, bit off its head and flung aside the twitching lower parts. Then their leader cut open a rabbit and passed it to the others to chew on its still-beating heart.