Craving for Doubt
And for todays bit oddity:
The word Fairy is derived from the the Latin fata, or fate. This refers to the three fates of mythology who spin and control the threads of life. There are five interesting theories on the origins of fairies. (1) Unbaptized Earthbound souls (me); (2) Guardians of the souls of the dead; (3) Ghosts of venerated ancestors; (4) Lucifer’s fallen angels, condemned to remain on Earth; (5) Nature spirits.
This leads into todays lessons on the dark bit of archaic thinking that we cling to with all our force because it allows us to believe in something greater than ourselves. This is a role that God used to play and still does play for a lot of us. But some of us are unable to believe in a God that is swayed by the political convenience of a 2000 year old church. I wanted to say cult but I don’t want to offend despite the fact that this is exactly how the romans saw it.
But this article is not about the church, it is about the truths that are clung to to make living a worth while experience. Living for life’s sake only works for hedonists, the rest of us are bound by responsibilities that make living a duty not a pleasure. We seek things to believe in, for each this magic Grail is different. For some it is the church and all it represents, others follow the quest of the alien, and still other the vampire and everything gothic. There are hundreds, even thousands of other paths each archaic and laughed upon by the nonbelievers. But each path fills a little bit of the human psyche with doubt. This doubt is very important, for it through the doubt that we contact something higher, brighter, and more. The Ufologist doesn’t have to believe so much as he doubts the dogma that such things can’t be, and where such things do exist there is something greater. He is no longer bound by the rules of conventional wisdom and psychology. He can look out to the stars and see Asgard the Elysian Fields, QI’tu’ (Klingon), and Nirvana all rolled up into one.
Science has eradicated to much of the doubt in the world around us, and so we create more by reaching further out into a world the hasn’t been conquered. Through this lens of doubt the ufologist sees an alien civilization, simply something greater than himself. His thousand year old counterpart would have called the aliens fairies, and he would look underground for Elfland. As late as 1922 Sir Author Conan Doyle, respected writer (and spiritualist) looking underground for the Fairies and believed so hard he was taken in by a faked photograph of “tiny, winged female figures dressed in fashionable gowns, holding tiny pipes and hovering in the air.”
Without the doubt of something greater life lacks meaning, and so we search within our own souls and to the outside in those few places where answers aren’t set.