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| Amatue. |
So I was in this Christian Union meeting in university about twenty years ago now, and a girl (I think her name was Abi, but I'm not 100% sure) reported on a short-term missionary expedition to Uganda. She told a story of how she had witnessed someone who spoke only English praying in tongues over someone who was sick. By "in tongues," I mean glossolalia, which is a thing I've witnessed many times, and do still occasionally see. I never get used to it, but that's by the by.
Anyway, so this person that ProbablyAbi was with was praying in the unconscious spirit language and the Ugandans around were all astonished and stuff because apparently they were speaking in their - the Ugandans' - precise dialect. It was a miracle, the girl said.
A miracle two steps removed from me, but then they always are. I wish I could find her and ask her about it. But like I said, I am only about 50% sure of her first name, let alone the rest. No one else out of the people I know who might have been there remembers it.
A few years later, I met a Christian youth worker called Steve who swore blind that his teeth fillings had miraculously turned to gold in a worship meeting. He didn't show me. I wasn't terribly bothered by that fact.
And there's Mum. My mother is a spiritualist medium. She believes with absolute - absolute - certainty that spirits talk to her and show her visions, "pictures". Not one of the pictures she communicated to me when I was a teenager ever turned out to be true. She believed my old house was haunted.
I never noticed any ghosts.
The point is that I have a context for this stuff, and that while I have never personally seen anything that can't be explained in a mundane fashion, I have known many people who believe in the miraculous and the supernatural, and have believed that they have witnessed really weird things.
And here's the thing: the Atlantis mythology I'm working from is based upon things that some people believe to be not only spiritual truth, but material, scientific fact. Theosophy, which is the touchstone of all the new age Atlantis myths (Plato? Nope. Plato barely gets a look in) defines itself as esoteric science.
In the next few posts, I'm going to explore this stuff, and write some more about the people who believed and still believe that this, the inspiration for my fiction, is the fact. I'm starting with the present, and moving back through my lifetime and that of my parents, until we get back to the beginning, as is only proper. I'm regressing through lives.
Which brings us to Space Barbie.
If you inhabit the right parts of the internet you've probably heard of Valeria Lukyanova, the Ukrainian Human Barbie. But did you know she's actually a leader of a spiritual research group (as in, kindasorta a cult)? That she claims to be the reincarnated avatar of a dual-sexed part extraterrestrial, part Lemurian spiritual named Amatue? I expect you might have. It goes deeper, of course.
Of course Valeria is steeped in racial theory. In last year's GQ profile the writer Michael Idov called her a "racist space alien." She is "against feminism." She loathes children (a sign in my book of a deficit in basic humanity). Basically, the profile paints her as a truly awful person.
But then, she remembers a life as a godlike spiritual teacher in Lemuria. And her polygendered status is a function of her returning through the cycle of races and reclaiming the spiritual status of the multisexed being. A stage of human evolution, literally the ascension of the Aryan into the foundations of the Sixth Root Race. And like any good Lemurian, Amatue wears the Third Eye on her forehead (appropriated from Hinduism, and of course it is, because Theosophy was at its birth based upon whitened Hindu mythology). What is presented by magazines like GQ and Vice as bubble-headed New Age nonsense out of nowhere is actually New Age nonsense from a tradition going back a hundred and forty years, going back from Valeria, to Murry Hope, to Edgar Cayce, to CW Leadbeater and Rudolf Steiner right back to the one who started it all, Helena Blavatsky, who squats over the New Age like Baba Yaga.
Readers familiar with my other role-playing game work will know that back in 2005, before the core book was even released, I created a faction in White Wolf's game Mage: The Awakening called the Daksha, who were exactly this, beautiful - racist - people who became dual-gendered and third-eyed because they wanted to follow the cycle of races back to Lemuria. I'm not as far as I know psychic, although Mum always claimed I was, but the beautiful and warped Valeria is almost exactly what I was thinking of.
Why can't she extricate the racism from the mythology? I don't know. A lack of imagination? Upbringing? I have my theories.
It's crazy. I know it's crazy. You know it's crazy. But that isn't the point. It never is.
Edit: Here's a video of Valeria singing a Lemurian spiritual mantra.
