As Below, So Above
Brent L. Smith
If you’ve ever held an immaculate gemstone in the palm of your hand and gazed into it, you’ve gotten a sense of their silent, alluring power. It’s a power felt at a deeper level, surpassing ego. It’s a fleeting moment that activates the imagination and spurs an instinctive wondering of where these things came from, the mystery of the universe, and our place in it.
There is the human kingdom, the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the mineral kingdom. The mineral kingdom is often most taken for granted.
The transcendental promise of crystals is searched for all over the earth with as much fervor as it’s searched for in dreams. What you discover, once you go digging around in mountains, and you break open some big, otherwise unremarkable rock, is that there’s this beautiful, crystalized, and radiant iridescence inside. Vast, subterranean, undiscovered artwork by an unseen creator. You then realize—nature is full of secrets. The universe contains mystery beyond our wildest imagination. The gemstone is a transcendent object, demanding communion with the human kingdom from deep below the earth.
There is another kingdom, however, that goes unrecognized. A kingdom more esoteric and one that eludes our consensus of reality. There is the alien kingdom, resident in nature with us on this planet, and as iconic UFO researchers like John Keel have proposed, on an entirely different spectrum altogether. Just as the manifestations of minerals are infinitely unique, so are the manifestations of the UFO, which first came to us as a spinning silver disc. A perfect circle. The UFO is a transcendent object, demanding communion with the human kingdom from deep beyond the earth.
As the son of a prominent alien abduction researcher, who was raised during the height of the hyped alien media mythos of the 90s, I have developed a particular lens about the phenomenon. The UFO and its inhabitants hail from the domain of the Other, abducting us into strange lands of our own subconscious. So that as you gaze into the saucer, you behold yourself—the alien within, you might say—clothed in the space age gloss of a technologically obsessed culture on the brink of its own destruction. I once heard that we are so alienated from our own soul that when it finally presents itself to us, we will think it comes from another star system.
“As above, so below” the old alchemical axiom goes. Or, in the case of gemstones, as below, so above.
It is our lore that gives them life.
What is this space where the UFO and the crystal converge? They are both objects, but objects that confound the rational mind. The spiritual object emerges. And while science scoffs at this notion, UFOs continue to haunt our skies, like a floating philosopher’s stone, with the symbolic promise of perfection and wholeness that our religions can only preach about.
Unless we’re fortunate enough to have a close encounter on some remote hiking trail (or unfortunate enough to be taken from our beds in the middle of the night), where else can we witness the transcendent, but in the imagination? That’s where artists like Mark Rogers come in. Philosopher and psychonaut Terence McKenna claimed the imagination isn’t merely some solipsistic canvas for make-believe, but a true, living dimension where denizens of our psyches come forth and reveal secrets of the collective soul. The work of Rogers takes such occult and deep subject matter and flips it on its head with cosmic glee. The myth of the alien, the myth of the crystal, and the myth of the American Frontier all converge in a playful never-neverland that weirdos like me wish we could partake in. And perhaps we can, each time our gaze falls on one of Rogers’ paintings, or into a crystal, or up to a silver disc in the sky, we are co-creating the myth ourselves—the lore.
What does the mystery reveal about you?
