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Rice University Religious Studies Scholar Claims Renaissance Painting Shows Unknowable UFO Mystery Beyond Human Knowledge

11/21/2017

21 Comments

 
​Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and ought to know better when it comes to studying the role of space aliens in ancient history. Anyone who has risen to such a position, and who has written about the role of the paranormal in the sacred, ought to have a bit of conception of the difference between the scientific and the supernatural, and between the plausible and the implausible. And yet in the recent edition of Edge Science magazine (No. 31, Sept. 2017), Kripal has an article, taken from his new book Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions, rehashing the infamous claim that a gray splotch on a Renaissance painting of the Madonna and child is a flying saucer occupied by space aliens. He wants to accept all of the ufological evidence but sidestep the problems with claiming alien intervention by proposing that an unknowable “entity” manifests as shiny metal discs.
Picture
​Kripal’s argument for the splotch’s identity as a UFO-shaped “entity” offers little to recommend it, but his broader claim about the fact that scientific elites are unwilling to explore space aliens or interdimensional beings or whatever he thinks it to be is surprising for someone in Kripal’s position, and who is allegedly an expert in philosophy. This is not the first time Kripal has credulous embraced ufology. Among other things, he has coauthored a book with infamous anally probed abductee Whitley Strieber, spoken credulously of the alleged “UFO battle” over Nuremberg in the 1500s (actually a sundog), and alleged that science fiction is a “Trojan horse” opening the mind to the paranormal.
 
The painting in question is an anonymous work from around 1510-1520 known as the Natività, located in the Hall of Hercules in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. It depicts John the Baptist holding the infant Jesus on the hem of the Virgin Mary’s cloak. In the background, a rustic man appears to be gazing upward, and a grayish ellipse hovers in the sky over him. Golden rays surround the gray ellipse. While the depiction is not exactly standard, it seems to show an angel in the form of a luminous cloud, with a shepherd shielding his eyes from the divine glory, with the whole cameo scene representing the Annunciation. Later paintings would depict the angel in humanoid form, but the cloud form is not exactly unknown. The identity of the ellipse with an angel is confirmed by the three dots on the opposite side of the picture, representing a Byzantine synecdoche for the threefold virginity of Mary. This is pretty good evidence that the objects in the sky were meant symbolically, not literally.
 
Kripal disagrees with this argument, first because he simply refuses to review Renaissance art. Instead, he chose not to engage with someone who tried to explain it to him. “I didn’t have the courage to ask him what the Holy Spirit was doing in a scene that had nothing to do with the Annunciation, or why a man and his dog are staring at the thing hovering in the sky, whereas the Virgin seems completely unaware of it.” Had he taken a moment to review Renaissance paintings, he would find similar symbolic depictions of the Annunciation alongside the Nativity in other Renaissance paintings on the same theme, such as the Natività di Gesù by Vincenzo Foppa, from 1492, where an angel replaces the ellipse.
 
But let us dispense with his choice to minimize art history. His next point is that regardless of the intended symbolism, the anonymous artist must have modeled the cloud on a real life flying saucer because the indistinct, formless blob is too accurately UFO-shaped to be anything but real, despite his own belief that UFOs are not actually metal space discs. To this he adds the “fact” that the wheel-shaped divine appearance is the same as that seen by Ezekiel, which is also a spaceship. This argument—for Ezekiel’s vision of wheels as a spaceship—was, to my knowledge, first proposed in 1956, and it has advanced not a whit since Erich von Däniken and Josef F. Blumrich picked up the claim and ran with it. As Mike Heiser and others have long since explained, Ezekiel was describing a divine chariot in the form of a Mesopotamian transport for the statue of a god. Again, Kripal chooses to ignore the history of his subject (though pretending to embrace it) in order to follow the simplistic formula of “looks like, therefore is” with a side order of “ancient people are too stupid to do symbolism.” In fact, he chooses to cite only books about UFOs in analyzing Ezekiel. Remember, Kripal is a professor of religious studies. There is absolutely no excuse for this.
 
Kripal makes an excuse, however. His excuse is that any attempt to understand the past is impossible because we cannot properly evaluate whether an unprecedented event in fact actually took place. Specifically, he claims that any “reductive historicizing attempt to explain away the luminous cloud by citing a textual precedence backfires, since the texts themselves may well have been expressions of actual sightings and encounters.”
 
Oh, but this almost sounds logical. However, let us swap out aliens for angels using the well-known equation of the two. Now you can see how illogical the argument is: “Any attempt to explain the appearance of an angel in a painting with reference to a preexisting mythology of angels backfires, since this mythology may well have been inspired by actual meetings with real heavenly angels.” But if angels can derive from Biblical texts, then so, too, must Ezekiel-style wheels. Logically, to expect that silver wheels must be spaceships is to prove that angels are real. You can’t logically claim one and not the other since there is an equal paucity of evidence for both. Why give credence to flying metal spheres but not to glowing interdimensional humanoids? As I have explained many times before, “UFOs” are a phenomenon created by modern definitions, with no proof of an underlying extraterrestrial reality.
 
“Why, after all, privilege one relative historical moment and cultural framework over another?” Kripal asks, suggesting that there is no reason to doubt people thought of angels when they saw aliens. Here, though, he reveals his own bias: Why explain angels in terms of aliens and not aliens in terms of angels? It is because Kripal instinctively prefers explanations that sound like science even though he himself believes, per his own admission, that science is fatally flawed because it does not admit the paranormal. Yet if we were to admit the paranormal, there is no longer a reason to doubt the existence of the angels he wishes us to reduce to aliens! Worse, he seems to have no conception of how to delineate the difference between the paranormal and the material; for, it would seem that any phenomenon that actually existed would fall within the purview of science. 
​I think the reason the art historian is so troubled by the ufological comparison is the same reason that the conventional scholar of religion is so troubled: both the art historian and the scholar of religion are ideologically committed to a purely materialist history in which there can only be political, institutional, textual, and material influences but never, ever, interventions out of space and out of time. 
​But for there to be any phenomenon that does not fall into the realm of science, it would have to be both immaterial and unknowable through observation or logic. How, pray tell, are we to evaluate that which by definition cannot be known? And if, as Kripal claims, Italians and modern Westerners see, touch, and experience flying saucers, how can they be either immaterial or unknowable? An alien spacecraft is not a ghost or a spirit; this hypothesized object has mass and shape and force and therefore is an object for scientific study. If, on the other hand, it does not have any of these, then the burden is on Kripal to explain how exactly anyone saw, felt, or heard such non-objects to paint them, writer of them, and to describe their sounds and motions.
 
Bottom line: If a UFO interacts with the physical world, then it is subject to scientific inquiry and cannot be excluded from science due to “materialist” ideology. But Kripal would sidestep all of this by dismissing aliens and angels alike in order to conclude that UFOs are neither spaceships nor divine chariots but something new and unknowable. “I think these presences possess their own intentions and agencies, which we are in no position to understand or essentialize at this point in our cultural evolution.”
 
In true postmodern fashion, Kripal wishes to preserve the “mystery” of a phenomenon for which no real evidence exists by wishing away the very understanding that there is a knowable objective reality that can be discovered. He wants to reenchant the world by literally claiming that we have to accept mystical beliefs because reality is unknowable. Thus,
In the end, we have no answer for [the painting]. I think we should just say that and stop pretending that we do. Much better to begin reimagining the history of religions as a long and complicated series of real (as in “really experienced”) contact events…
​This is enormously frustrating because the assumption that “contact events” are “real” in any objective sense is predicated on the existence of a material world that can be studied and known. Without that assumption, there is no way to tell fact from fantasy, and paranormal encounter from hallucination. Try this thought experiment: Using Kripal’s rules, try to prove that H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos is fictitious and not based on “real” contact with interdimensional Old Ones. (Some so-called magickians already believe this.) It cannot be done even though we know damned well that it is so. Kristal’s rules would forbid a distinction between primary and secondary accounts, between original reports and embellished retellings, and between fact and fiction. He wishes to accept them all as equally valid reflections of some ineffable underlying truth under the mantra that, even in fictitious narratives written centuries after the events they describe, “Something is ‘out of place’ and ‘out of time’ here.” And he thinks there is no way to know what it is.
 
It is doubly frustrating that Kripal wants these “contact events” to be simultaneously “something really seen, really experienced, and something still unidentified” and also paranormal and beyond the purview of science. In other words, he is basically asking us to exempt his faith in things unseen from critical inquiry in order to protect an ineffable mystical quality that he fears will vanish if exposed to reason.
21 Comments
Only Me
11/21/2017 11:44:15 am

"Much better to begin reimagining the history of religions as a long and complicated series of real (as in “really experienced”) contact events…"

If we do that, we produce the very thing Kripal is railing against: a materialistic history with political, institutional, textual, and material influences as such events will be interpreted in numerous ways based on an individual's reading of them. Kripal himself is interpreting religious symbolism as evidence of extraterrestrial contact.

The cognitive dissonance he has is staggering.

Reply
Frank
11/21/2017 11:57:21 am

You say that Kripal is also a philosophy professor? He must not be familiar with Plato. And therefore is presenting a weak argument for the justification of not pursuing an object, or subject, or condition, for which he reasons they are unknowable. Therefore, according to him, not worthy of being researched further, whether scientifically or other.

MENO: And how will you inquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of inquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?
SOCRATES: I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that a man cannot inquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to inquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to inquire.
MENO: Well, Socrates, and is not the argument sound?
SOCRATES: I think not.
MENO: Why not?
SOCRATES: I will tell you why.................And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of inquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive.

I left out Socrates' the "why" because it deals with the soul, and most here will argue that the existence of the soul is not "scientifically" provable, just yet.

If only the Romulans had invented the cloaking device for spacecrafts before the painting was done, there would be less splotches on it.

Jason, you have clearly, and truthfully argued that professor Kripal is just another "slug", short for sluggard.



Reply
Joe Scales
11/21/2017 01:15:04 pm

"You say that Kripal is also a philosophy professor?"

No. His degrees are all in Religion, not Philosophy; where a logic course might have been of some benefit.

Reply
Americanegro
11/21/2017 02:21:48 pm

Eppur si muove. If the university says he's a philosophy professor he's a philosophy professor.

Joe Scales
11/21/2017 03:24:48 pm

Only his chair has anything to do with Philosophy, and it's in name only. Not surprising though, that a university would merge the departments. However, Kripal is only qualified to teach classes in Religion at the university level.

Americanegro
11/21/2017 04:10:53 pm

"in name only"? You know this how? Anyway unless you have your own university you don't get to decide. It's your opinion that he's not qualified to teach philosophy (what is philosophy?) and that's fine but opinions are like cowboy hats.

The department is Religious Studies. The Chair he occupies is Philosophy and Religious Thought. He's no longer Chairman of the department.

Joe Scales
11/21/2017 04:22:27 pm

In my experiences, philosophy professors had doctorates in Philosophy. Perhaps your experiences are different.

Next up? The sky is blue. Begin discussion....

Americanegro
11/21/2017 06:10:21 pm

Plato didn't. According to your view it would absurdly follow that Linus Pauling should only have been allowed to teach chemistry and mathematical physics.

Andrew Casson, former Chair of the Mathematics Department at Yale didn't have a PhD in math.

"Critics have argued that despite publishing widely on social and political issues, Chomsky has no expertise in these areas; to this he has responded that such issues are not as complex as many social scientists claim and that almost everyone is able to comprehend them, regardless of whether they have been academically trained to do so or not."

Where I am, the sky is not currently blue.

Reply
Negro
11/21/2017 06:36:26 pm

Negro please. When Plato was teaching your ancestors were eating each other and playing bongo drums.

Reply
Weatherwax
11/21/2017 11:01:01 pm

Sad drunk is drunk.

AMERICANEGRO
11/22/2017 03:38:09 am

Sad I am drunk and he is right.

Reply
David Bradbury
11/22/2017 02:22:03 pm

There's such a thing as being Right but Repulsive ...

Joe Scales
11/22/2017 10:40:27 am

And yet Kripal does not teach Philosophy classes at the university level, only Religious studies. He is not a professor of Philosophy.

Now back to my blue skies...

Reply
Americanegro
11/22/2017 12:08:38 pm

How do you know his teaching schedule?

Pacal
11/21/2017 08:17:26 pm

Sounds like Kripal's position is incoherent.

Reply
bear47
11/22/2017 01:42:39 am

That makes him just about perfect to be a religious type. All religions are based on old myths. Joseph Campbell who was a scholar of myth said: "Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.........."
"Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that the science or history of mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the links between the two perspectives becomes dissolved."

Reply
Frank
11/22/2017 10:01:18 am

Really? "Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.........." Then how come Plato's Atlantis is not dead? Jason lives by it, trying to kill anyone's claim for which as much hints at Atlantis being real. That is, unless one is able to show him the Elephants. No pink elephants, please!

And what of Plato's most famous disciple, the "scientist" extraordinaire, and known simply as, "The Philosopher?" Aristotle is the name, the teacher of that other great maker of history, Alexander the Great. What does "the philosopher" say of poetry in relation to history?

Η ποίηση είναι πιο φιλοσοφική και σοβαρότερη από την ιστορία

Αριστοτέλης

It's all Greek to me!

But in the end, one cannot have the one without the other, as philosophy is religion, and religion is philosophy. Or as that nutty German professor once put it, "FOR CHRISTIANITY IS PLATONISM FOR THE PEOPLE." Which basically can also be stated as; Plato is Christianity, and Christianity is Plato."

Therefore, obviously, I fully agree that Kripal is not coherent. And, as I attempted to point out with my first post, unless one has a full grasp on true philosophy, one cannot be a professor of
religion, any religion. Much less an "art critic" without ever being a painter nor/and a dedicated student of art, as Jason really wanted to emphasize. Having a title, honorary or actual, is no reflection on truly understanding the subject matter for which the title points to. For example, take the title of, President of the USA................................................

Americanegro
11/22/2017 12:13:20 pm

I'm reminded of the Traitor Lincoln, who supported the Corwin Amendment, which would have enshrined slavery in the Constitution, and his Hitlerian roundups of dissenters in Maryland and the North.

An Anymous Nerd
11/22/2017 09:55:34 pm

Academics straying outside of their territory is no bad thing, but what is a bad thing is for anyone, especially an academic, to reach unconsidered conclusions about unfamiliar subject matter without consulting the relevant literature.

"What am I looking at?" is a great question to ask one's colleagues. Or to keep in mind while reading their books.

Reply
Walter E. Parker
11/28/2017 12:53:24 am

I think what Dr. Kripal is alluding to is as follows:
Dr. Carl Jung experienced personally and many times through clients the physical manifestation of a psychic projection. The
projection creates a "real", tangible material event (see: Tulpas of Tibet, Golem of Hebrew tradition, and the creation of Stephen the Ghost, all accessible through Google). These events have physical reality, all the nature of a material manifestation, but not the history or future traceable for all we ordinarily see as a material object. Psychic projections of particular power, especially that of a like minded group of people, can appear as aliens from another planet, angels, ghosts, paintings on a wall, or most any other temporarily but meaningful material event, yet not bound by the material limitations we normally experience. The power that is vested in these unusual but very real events is closest to a "spiritual power", an energy with which neither science nor art history has familiarity or an ability to document and reduce to a rational, logical "explanation". Attempts to do so are applying an intellectual tool that is inapplicable to this issue. The energy behind creations is for us ineffable, mysterious, and extremely
real and powerful, but cannot be captured by our current level of reasoning and logic. Capable of being known through transcendent experience, incapable of being reduced to our thimble sized intellect, these realities are purely mysterious, and exceptionally meaningful.

Reply
Riley V.
11/28/2017 04:25:55 am

Wow. Rice is usually much more selective in who they hire as faculty.
Nice of you to cite Heiser. I hope you a nice holiday.

Reply

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