from EndEnchantment Website
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
- Cliché by Arthur C. Clarke
"Profiles of The Future", 1961When we see what we take to be magic, could we be looking at a sign of advanced technology?
A preposterous suggestion. It’s logically valid, of course, but so hypothetical. Who sees magic anyway?
Noted author Paul Von Ward, writing in Gods, Genes, and Consciousness shows how man’s early contact with what he calls Advanced Beings, gave rise to magical interpretations and magical religions, leading directly down the line to today’s supernatural religions and belief in God. Directly. People today who practice religion and believe in God - including members of the very SETI community just mentioned - have accepted for their personal and public truth the degraded remnants of the effects of early encounters with "Advanced Beings", however abhorrent they may find this assertion to be.
But "magic" itself never disappeared. It has remained important and an important influence on human society down the ages into the present. There are many many examples of the practice of magic within our society.
But it doesn’t "work", right? Many practitioners would say that it does. Do you suppose they might have some reason for saying so? And if it does, could there still be an advanced technology lurking in the background?
And if there is, could there be technology lurking behind religion as well?
Welcome to War in Heaven. This important book was self-published by Kyle Griffith in 1988 and has long been out of print; Griffith’s publishing company no longer exists, and his whereabouts had been unknown for years. We present here a detailed summary of the book.
Part One, the introduction to the book proper, is not included here, but portions of it will eventually be reproduced on this website or in the associated War in Heaven Forum. For example, an excerpt concerning the origins of materialistic science is available under the title The Copernican Compromise.
The remainder of War in Heaven (WiH) consists of a dialog between Griffith and a "disembodied spirit" who claimed to be a member of a group calling itself The Invisible College. The format consists of questions and answers. Griffith states that the answers were received by automatic writing and read back to the contacted entity for review and correction. The questions and answers that appear in the text are actually the result of several iterations of review and discussion.
The material thus generated is both convincing and compelling, and appears to be of vital importance to human society. That is a claim we see all the time; this time I submit that the claim is truly justified. Since there is at the moment no other way for readers to gain access to the ideas or information expressed in War in Heaven, I am undertaking to summarize the key points here.
The reader should be warned. This book is of direct concern to SETI. Yet it is about religion. It is about magic. And magic, at times, is about sex. These matters are all about the past, present, and future situation of the human race.
Contents
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