Sinister New Age Channelings
Who or What is speaking?

I wrote "New Age and Armageddon: the Goddess or the Gurus ?" after the death of my oldest son from virulent cancer in 1987. He had become involved with Rebirthers, New Age therapists, with disastrous results. In the book I discuss, among other things, New Agers' reactionary and patriarchal worldview, their denial of life's natural cycles, their envy of birthing mothers (they believe in rebirth without the mother), and their concepts of poverty-and-prosperity-consciousness, which goes along with the "you create your own reality" thinking. They inevitably end up guilt-tripping the poor, oppressed and ill. This explains the self-satisfied and intolerable smugness of affluent white New Agers, who congratulate themselves on their good Karma and good fortune, claiming that "Money is my friend" (see note 1) and that physical immortality should be their birthright.

While I was writing and gathering material for the book I became increasingly alarmed and frightened by the right wing, racist, anti-feminist assumptions in much New Age thinking. What emerged was a hidden agenda behind the facade of Light, love and healing, an agenda that supports US corporate free market capitalism, patriarchal science and other horrors. At that time, however, I had not looked closely at New Age channelings. I have since done so and have found them frightening.

I am not an academic and will not apologise for perhaps at times sounding crazily unacceptable to the academic mind. In this article I am trying to follow the distorted, patriarchal, reactionary reasoning of New Agers/channelers, which leads me into having to discuss spirit communications, which I believe are possible, as well as Aryan supremacy theories, so prevalent in the West until recently. These theories have re-emerged in the New Age movement and elsewhere. As the mother of two sons who now live on in the Spirit-world, one of whom was/is of mixed race, his father African-American, I'm not speaking as an outsider, but as someone who experiences the Otherworld as forever present. I believe that my son and his distant Africans ancestors work through me now as I confront white supremacist, racist & misogynist New Age thinking.

New Age channeling of discarnate entities originated in and has been fashionable amongst the affluent whites on the west coast of USA since the early 80's. Many channelers have made fame & fortune for themselves. For example, Mrs. J. Z. Knight, who channels the supposedly 30.000 year old entity Ramtha from her securely guarded and armed " fortress" in the small town of Yelm in Washington State. It turns out that this supposedly ancient wise entity Ramtha, "The Enlightened One," admired "King Reagan" and supported the dismantling of the US welfare system. These just happen to be Mrs. Knight's own views, as expressed in her autobiography. While struggling to save my oldest son from cancer, and in despair over my youngest son's death at the age of 15, I got involved in Spiritualism. After a while I couldn't help but notice that the majority of the mediums were women, but women who hid behind male personae and voices, in a world where not long ago mediums /Wise women/Witches were burnt at the stake. Male spirit guides, Secret Masters, and now more recently ETs (Extra Terrestrials), adepts who mostly express right-wing patriarchal views supposedly speak through women mediums. These women seem once again to be acting as passive vessels for masterful male entities.

Are we to believe that even the spirit realms have been imperialised by the patriarchs? Why is it that one doesn't hear the messages and voices of the dark Neolithic women who created ancient cultures and had evolved mind and intelligence, as they had already studied the lunar cycles in the Palaeolithic? Nor do we hear the voices of the Wise women of Europe or the shamans (women and men) of indigenous peoples everywhere who were put to death for believing that Earth and all life is sacred and is born of and returns to the Dark/Light Mother. The emphasis on male channeled entities continues unabated in the New Age movement and the messages are mostly reactionary.

Many would dismiss New Age channelings as harmless if fanciful nonsense. That is a view I do not share. I want to make it clear, though, that I do believe in the possibility of spirit communications between the worlds or realms or dimensions. My two sons live on in the spirit-world, of that I am convinced, and they communicate with me in my dreams. All ancient, as well as present day indigenous peoples have gained the powers of prophecy and healing from the Ancestors in shamanic states. I have experienced such states at the ancient sacred sites of the Goddess in the land itself and such visions have inspired my art.

But the entities - whether Secret Masters, Extraterrestrials or spirit guides - that apparently speak through New Age channelers seem to be of another order entirely than the spirits of Earth and ancient realities. These channeled entities, so beloved of the New Age movement, give messages that are patriarchal and life-denying, they seem hostile to earth-based biological life and to the Earth Mother that gives us our life and being.

It is very convenient to be able to say, " It was my Spirit guide who said....." , thereby renouncing any responsibility for the message. As someone said, channeling is a monologue that no-one takes responsibility for. People seem to be in awe of and never question such entities.

I have not found any discussion or questioning of what the New Age channelings are about, or who the entities might be, and I have mostly found myself a lone voice when giving workshops and talks at camps and gatherings, challenging New Age Patriarchy and its channelers. It seems that people are either taken in by it all and lose their critical faculties OR they dismiss it entirely as irrelevant. I am trying to do neither.

The Racist Legacy of Alice Bailey

The New Age movement has inherited many of its reactionary notions from the Theosophists. The Theosophical movement, founded by the Russian aristocrat Helena Blavatsky in the USA in 1875, was THE New Age movement of its time and was very influential. Alice Bailey and Rudolf Steiner, both of whose thinking has reached deep into the New Age psyche, started out as Theosophists.

Madame Blavatsky first channeled the so-called Hierarchy of Masters, occult adepts, Mahatmas or the White Brotherhood, who are said to be immortal, and to materialise and dematerialise anywhere at will. More recently New Age channeler Phyllis Schlemmer, for instance, has stated that her "Council of 9" are the same Secret Masters that Blavatsky and Alice Bailey channeled. These Masters are said to rule the world by occult means.

Alice Bailey's books (channeled to her through "Master DK") and the many organisations that she spawned (such as the Lucis Trust, the New Group of World Servers and the Goodwill Foundation), have had a reactionary and racist influence on the whole New Age movement. Her work has been avidly studied at Findhom, the 'Light Centre' and New Age Mecca, in Scotland. She adopted from Madame Blavatsky the thoroughly racist concept of Root Races, condemns indigenous dark peoples to extinction, to make way for the Aryan/white Caucasian peoples whose time this is to be. Alice Bailey was right-wing, light obsessed and demonised darkness. When the atomic bombs were exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, her "Master DK" welcomed this as a great spiritual event because it would "liberate" light from within the dark womb of the atom or matter; justifying the destruction of the Japanese people, who, they said, were due to leave their physical form and belonged to an earlier Root Race anyway! It should come as no surprise to find that the Nazis studied Blavatsky's writings. And like Blavatsky, Alice Bailey was also anti-semitic. (see note 2)

Racist thinking like this thrives within the New Age movement David Spangler, the American guru at Findhorn in the early 70's, was an admirer of Alice Bailey's teachings, and wrote of how we are to overcome the ancient shamanic (lunar/female/Goddess) mind which hears the voices of Nature. According to him it is with the "Aryan mind" that human mental powers came into their own and brought the Masters into being. This "Aryan mind" is the alienated dualistic onlooker consciousness of Western patriarchy which has set about dominating and destroying the Earth, turning Her from a biosphere into a technosphere.

Alice Bailey's Master DK also claims that the "Secret Masters" have all along been influencing men's (and I mean men's) minds, implanting ideas and sudden inspirations that have led to inventions and scientific "break­throughs" such as the splitting of the atom, and taking an instrumental role in the creation of patriarchies, industrialism, imperialism and the birth of male science.

When I consider the way that US controlled multinational corporations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and so on wage war against the Earth, holding Third World and Eastern bloc countries to ransom, wrecking entire economies as well as the livelihoods of peasants and women everywhere, destroying whole ecosystems all around the world in the name of freemarket capitalism and the New World Order, this doesn't seem totally far-fetched. I can't help wondering what the members of Alice Bailey's organisations might be up to. Are they in fact heading capitalist corporations, wielding financial and political power?

Calling in the Light

Christianity has demonised and desacralised Earth, seeing it as dark and female. The "God" of the Christians (Moslems, Hebrews, etc.) on the other hand, is eternal light and male by definition. I call him the absentee landlord as he clearly is not seen as indwelling in "his creation". This is in contrast to the ancient Mother Goddess who was/is both dark and light, both of this world and of the Otherworld, the Mother of the living as well as Mother of the spirits.

Ramala, an entity channeled from Glastonbury, advocates the removal of darkness from the world and is oblivious to the fact that life evolved in a world of both light and darkness, and that we grow in the dark womb, and that nothing would live, heal, or grow without darkness, nor would we dream or communicate with the spirits. In contrast, African shaman Malidoma Patrice Somé says in "Of Water and the Spirit" that for his people, the Dagara, who are matrilinear, darkness is sacred and it is forbidden to illuminate it since that scares the spirits away. The night is the day of the spirits, and of the Ancestors who come to speak with us and share their wisdom. I understand that the Neolithic people of Europe were most likely related to the present-day shamanic arctic peoples, they were not white and Indo-European. They saw the Dark Goddess as the lifegiving Earth while the White Goddess was the Mother of the Spirits.

"Archaic Goddess" 1996

Ramala says that since all matter is mortal, it is in order, in our quest for consciousness, to sacrifice aspects of Nature! This at a time when Earth has been abused & raped beyond Her endurance. It also assumes that Nature is not conscious. This reminds me of a spokesman for president Chirac who said to the Guardian newspaper (see note 3) that the continuing nuclear tests in the Pacific, under the Mururoa atoll and against world opinion, were about "the freedom of man rather than the contemplation of the innocence of nature." Many New Agers would agree with this and most New Agers live in cities where electrification is god and the maternal darkness is truly banished, and nuclear power, the Matricide which rips apart the womb of matter to create artificial light, is seen as a necessity.

Alice Bailey's "The Great Invocation" has been promoted worldwide, becoming a sort of New Age hymn. It has been translated into 75 or so languages, and is used as a sort of hypnotic mantra, repetitively invoking Light, the Will of God, and the Plan on Earth. New Agers constantly call in "the Light" , in meditations and in gatherings, but the light they are invoking is not of this world, and I fear they are preparing for a mass death while speaking of Earth healing and Earth transformations.

I experienced the white light of the Otherworld as I flew with my brain-dead son on great white wings in a kind of 'near-death' experience.

New Agers' channeled entities, Masters and Extra-terrestrials, seem to be envious of, and hostile to Mother-born life on this Earth. What is called " Rebirth into light" seems to be about the destruction of the lifegiving Dark Mother, who all patriarchs, it seems, hate and fear.

Flight from the Body

In many channeled books - from "Starseed Transmissions: an Extraterrestrial Report" written by Ken Carey in 1982 during eleven days when he claimed to be overshadowed by the Archangel Raphael, (who sounds more like an Alien hostile to life on Earth), to the recently published "The Only Planet of Choice" channeled by the medium Phyllis Schlemmer over a period of more than 20 years from "The 9", a sort of Intergalactic council or cosmic board of directors from a "zone of cold and super­conductivity". There is a repeated theme that Earth is a lower and fallen realm, and above all that She has no autonomous creative powers to create life. Instead we are "seeded" from other planets, and/or we are a failed genetic experiment carried out by "space brothers". There is definitely something inherently wrong in being biologically human, living in a physical body. In many channeled books it is said that super-computers exist in space and one can be excused for thinking that "God" is the ultimate linear, left-brain, alienated computer-mind. This is of course our inheritance from Christianity and other patriarchal monotheistic religions that set out to desacralise and demonize the Earth, which they say is full of illusionary form and female darkness. The Devil is the creation of those who deny the Goddess. Christianity seeks to separate spirit from matter, mind from body, and declare matter and body female, lower, impure. It is said that Male spirit seeks to free itself from female matter. This is also what the digital/Net/Virtual Reality computerised revolution is about, as the computer/machine is envied for its "purity"; pure linear mind "fathered" by scientists, originally developed to facilitate the making : of the Hydrogen bomb in the 40's. A flight from the "messy"-bleeding-excreting body born of woman. Those who follow this line of thought clearly hate the dark Mother Earth so much that they welcome Her destruction or see Her as disposable.

Virtually all channeled books in recent years accept that our future will be computerised and genetically engineered. Most of the books are written by white Americans who are oblivious to what the USA is doing in the world at large, where US multi­nationals, who are a law unto themselves and aspire to create a US dominated World Order, rip off the Third World and indigenous peoples, stealing their land, seed and even genetic material. In return they have introduced the misnamed "Green Revolution" and sterile genetically engineered "improved" seed that can only be maintained at great cost and dependence on foreign petrochemical companies, the purchase of tractors, etc. Vandana Shiva, the Indian scientist and ecofeminist, writes in "Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development" that indigenous women peasants of India were always the guardians and care-takers of the soil, the seed, the trees, the waters, and perceive Nature and the Earth as a great sacred living Mother/Shakti. To claim that we are seeded or genetically engineered in an imperialist way from other planets strangely reflects today's realities. Genetic scientists plan to manipulate genes and our DNA, to produce hybrid animals and plants. They also imperialise women's bodies. Women scientists have warned again and again of how male scientists desire to become "male mothers", to clone themselves, that they speak of women as "foetal environments" and ovarian "egg farms". Surrogate motherhood has been created and birth itself becomes increasingly high-tech and alienated, especially in the USA, as women are wired up and "managed" by male obstetricians. In the ancient world, however, birth was considered a sacrament, an experience that opens one up to shamanic realms and states, and women gave birth within the sacred precincts of the Great Mother, presided over by priestesses who were also midwives and healers.

It has struck me when reading about the innumerable UFO abduction experiences, as retold by so many Americans - being taken into the computerised environment of a space-ship, being operated on and prodded/examined by terrifying masked alien beings in a blinding light - that this is strikingly similar to the actual experience of a hospital birth. The terrified new­born child dragged out of its bleeding mother - (in the USA it is now so common with perfectly unnecessary caesareans and also hysterectomies for that matter) held up and slapped by alien masked beings in a near-blinding light which hurts the child's sensitive eyes (see note 4). I wonder whether this experience is replayed and experienced as an alien abduction at times of heightened psychic emotion and/or stress? Just a thought.

It has also been suggested that the so-called aliens or ETs might be our own future (genetically modified?) selves returning on time-travel visitations. For what purpose I don't know. Barbara Hand Clow in "The Pleiadian Agenda" and Barbara Marciniak in "Earth: Pleiadian Keys to the Living Library" certainly claim that the Pleiadian beings, which they channel in a sort of stream of consciousness, are our past as well as future selves. For a change their books are not antifeminist; they even speak of the Goddess and of sexuality and women's blood as sacred. (see note 5)

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