THE SHREVEPORT TIMES

Shreveport, Louisiana, U.S.A.

17 August 1958

(page 50)

Man’s Pursuit of the Miraculous

Nourishes Authors and Prophets.

Many will have been relieved to hear that Carl Gustav Jung, the wise old alchemist of Zurich, did not, after all, categorically affirm the existence of flying saucers, spacemen and the like, but was misquoted. What Jung did was to offer an hypothesis, which might account for some if not all of the saucer sightings.

Some persons probably see flying saucers, Jung said, just as, in less machine-minded times, some persons saw crosses and angels and other portents of the skies. The saucers may be expressions of modern man’s craving for a miraculous intervention, of his hope that a new savior will descend from the skies—perhaps in the form of a spaceman, representative of a culture incomparably superior to our own—to save mankind from the seemingly inevitable nuclear holocaust.

Perhaps Jung is right—almost certainly he is right in some cases—and in any event there is no disputing the fact that men seem to crave, in this super-scientific age, bigger and better wonders of a supernatural as well as of a natural order.

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Witness particularly the great revival of interest in the “Magick” of the late Aleister Crowley—black magician, sorcerer and scoundrel extraordinary. Since the publication of John Symonds’ life of Crowley, “The Great Beast,” followed by “The Magic of Aleister Crowley,” books both by and about Crowley have begun to flood the market—and Crowley, perhaps better than any other Western occultist, offered the means for drastically altering consciousness, for evoking demons, the spirits of the dead, or whatever: That is, for the production of hallucinations.

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