Was Paul the Apostle visited by a UFO?

The Shamanic Paul, Part 1

Was Paul visited by a UFO—or something like it? I explore previous theories and a new connection that (I believe) I have discovered in Part 1 of my series looking at Paul through a shamanic lens.

The Damascus Road

The roads were rutted and uneven, and the pack mule Saul rode was beginning to flag. They were hoping to reach Damascus by sundown, but it was now midday, and the animals needed a rest. He turned to one of his companions, a man employed by the Temple authorities to facilitate these long, dangerous journeys.

“How much farther is the watering place?”

“Not much. See that outcropping up ahead? It’s just on the other side. No more than half an hour.”

After watering his animal and himself with the cool, spring-fed waters of the small brook, Saul took a walk around. He wouldn’t go far—these lonely roads in the Hauran highlands were frequented by bandits. But he did his best thinking on his feet, and after a week of riding, he needed to work out the knots of tension in his legs and his mind.

He’d been fortunate to get this opportunity to prove himself to the Temple. Though his lineage, as far as the elite priestly class was concerned, was nothing particularly impressive, his status as a Roman citizen and the education his father’s success had afforded him were. The Jesus followers were increasingly posing a threat, not only to the temple system of sacrifice and taxation but also to the delicately negotiated peace the priests and Sadducees maintained with the Romans.

Saul was a Pharisee, and a respected one. As one of Gamaliel’s favored students, he’d developed a reputation for his intricate knowledge of Hebrew law. Occupying the middle strata of the social hierarchy, Pharisees rejected the zealotry of the separatist Essenes while critiquing the excesses of the Temple aristocracy. Some of Saul’s colleagues had respected Jesus and even saw him as a fellow rabbi. Many of them, like that old goat Nicodemus, were rumored to be secret sympathizers.

But it was one thing to criticize certain rigid applications of the law. It was another to upend it entirely. Feasting with sinners, freely mingling with women, encouraging people to subvert the law for their own selfish ends—couldn’t they see that whatever those people who called themselves followers of “The Way” thought they were doing, it was liable to blow up the whole system and lead to chaos?

The Followers would have claimed, like any good Pharisee, that they were not rejecting the law but honoring it with a more humane interpretation. Most of them continued to practice Temple rites and remained in good standing with their local synagogues. But their taste for charismatic leadership and their insistence that even an unlettered Galilean hick could be a “teacher of the law”—Saul snorted at that one—made the movement a wild card the Temple could not countenance.

Saul had heard a rumor that the Jewish community in Damascus was becoming a hotbed of conversion to The Way and that one of his old schoolmates was at the center of the growing community. Here was his opportunity to prove himself to the Temple authorities. He might resent their aristocratic preening, but he was nothing if not ambitious. Since his earlier days sitting in the dust of Gamaliel’s feet, he’d dreamt of election to the highest place a Pharisee could hope to attain—a spot on the Great Sanhedrin, the council of Jewish authorities with the power to make and interpret law and try court cases. The same body that once condemned Jesus to death.

Saul looked up at the sun, still high in the sky but beginning to decline. He should be getting back if they were going to reach Damascus by nightfall.

The sun glowed strangely overhead. It was as though his eyes were playing tricks on him, though his sight had always been excellent. It looked for a moment to be moving, tracing the day’s arc in reverse, as the light grew clearer and brighter. Then it seemed to split into several suns, three orbs of bright golden light that began to dance and spin.

Saul squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. Everyone knew that if you stared at the sun for too long, you could go blind, and perhaps the long days of desert heat were inducing some sort of hallucination. He shook his head, willing himself back into sanity, and opened his eyes again.

It was then that the brilliant flash of light hit him, splitting his head with an intense pain as a high-pitched ringing filled his ears. After some minutes of agony, the light began to fade and the noise cleared. It was then that he discerned the form of a man emerging from the white-hot buzz. He reached out his hand, and as he came closer, Saul heard his words: “Saul. Saul. Why are you persecuting me?”

The Conversion of St. Paul, by Domenico Morelli, 1876

Why is Paul so extra?

This dramatic event—the conversion of Paul on the Damascus Road—is perhaps, more than any other occurrence, including the death and resurrection of Jesus himself, the zero point, the defining event from which all of contemporary Western history unfolds. Without it, there’s no Christian religion, at least not the way we know it.

It’s Paul who takes what is a localized Jewish sect and, using the language of Greek and Roman philosophy, turns it into a movement that spans the Roman Empire, welcoming Gentiles into the fold. It’s Paul who develops a network of ekklesia—a Greek word for a civic assembly—that would eventually become what we think of as “the church.”

It’s Paul who develops the theology of the church as “the body of Christ,” a kind of vanguard of a new type of human for a new creation. And without Paul, we wouldn’t have the Eucharist as we know it, with the famous words of institution used across denominations:

“Take, eat; this is my Body, which is given for you: Do this in remembrance of me…Drink ye all of this; for this is my Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins: Do this, as oft as ye shall drink it, in remembrance of me.”¹

What would prompt someone who, by his own account, had been a persecutor of this odd, apocalyptic sect to become its greatest hype man? To leave his former career behind and become a kind of traveling salesman, living off odd jobs and patronage? To endure (according to him) beatings, imprisonment, stoning, and countless other dangers?

My opening vignette is, of course, an imaginative construction, designed to give us a sense of what it might have felt like to experience such a dramatic event. There’s a tendency of modern people to either assume his experience was simply an intellectual epiphany embellished after the fact or perhaps a “vision,” without really defining what that means or considering the phenomenology of what that actually feels like.

But it’s clear from Paul’s own testimony that what he experienced was something more than a mental image, intellectual epiphany, or emotional catharsis. All of those things seem to have been part of the experience, true enough. But Paul also claims, “I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.” ² The phrase is usually assumed to refer to the scars he’s received from being persecuted for his evangelism. But the Greek word he uses, stigmata, refers to branding. A symbol burned into the flesh of an animal or, in Paul’s times, a slave, to mark ownership.

When Francis of Assisi experienced his own revelation at the mountaintop sanctuary of La Verna in 1224, he saw a six-winged seraph embracing a crucified man. The man pierced Francis’ body, and he was left with bleeding scars in the classic “wounds of Christ” configuration—hands, feet, and side. His chronicler would use Paul’s word, stigmata, to describe Francis’ marks.

Like many natal Christians who sit in a somewhat uneasy tension with the faith, the person of Paul has both fascinated and frustrated me. He’s the author of some of the most transcendentally beautiful and mystical passages in the New Testament—consider his famous exposition of love in 1 Corinthians, or, as mentioned earlier, his metaphor of individuals in the ekklesia as members of “the body of Christ,” who, though different in shape and function, work together to form an integral whole.³

But the intensity of feeling and conviction that produces such compelling passages also lends itself to an off-putting zealotry, particularly when it comes to sexuality. Convinced that the end of the world is at hand, he insists on lifelong celibacy as the highest path, though conceding that “it is better to marry than to burn.”⁴

And despite his affirming mentions of female leaders like Phoebe, who he names a deacon, and Junia, who is referred to as an apostle, he insists that:

"The women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.”

Still, I can’t help but love Paul, a figure who has haunted me my whole life. In his passionate, tortured intensity, I see something very human, something that reminds me of my own experiences of transcendence, beatific visions of a more perfect world, and the struggle to make them real at the level of actual materiality, in the bodies of fragile and dysfunctional humanity.

Paul preaching in the Areopagus, Sir James Thornhill

This is my attempt to make sense of him not through the grime-encrusted stained-glass lenses of the last two millennia of Christian apostolic theology—though that will undoubtedly play a role—but through another paradigm, that of shamanism. To be clear, I am not claiming that Paul is literally a shaman—a term that has a specific cultural meaning as well as a broader application in the worlds of anthropology and religious studies—but rather that examining him through this particular lens might reveal something to us about who he was, what he experienced, and what he was up to.

But to start, I am going to employ yet another framework—that of the modern UFO encounter.

UFO as Theophany

In his 1969 classic Passport to Magonia, astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallée suggested that modern accounts of UFO experiences had an awful lot in common with spiritual epiphanies found in religious texts and the fairy encounters of folklore. Vallée had served as a consultant on the U.S. Air Force’s UFO study, Project Blue Book, and as a result had access to thousands of reports of paranormal occurrences.

Strange lights flying through the air, a sense of lost or stopped time, and the distinct feeling of having been changed in some profound and life-altering way—whether or not that change is perceived as good or bad—are common features of both modern UFO encounters and historical accounts of divine encounters. From this perspective, St. Teresa’s description of a flaming angel piercing her heart with a spear and removing her entrails, yielding a pain so intense that it ultimately becomes pleasure, is not so different from the UFO abductee’s rectal probe.

Vallée and others have suggested that the biblical story of Elijah⁵ being carried to heaven in a “chariot of fire,” and “a whirlwind” might be something like a UFO account. Likewise, the prophet Ezekiel has a famous encounter with a heavenly chariot that begins with this evocative description:

“As I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north: a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber.”⁶

Vallée’s suggestion isn’t so much that saints and biblical figures were visited by men from outer space, but rather that we have not properly understood the encounters we call UFOs. Disdaining what he calls the materialist “nuts and bolts” explanation for these phenomena, he instead proposes that these events are interdimensional phenomena—appearences of beings from dimensions of reality that are contiguous with our own, yet not readily perceived by our senses.

My own insight that Paul’s experience might be consistent with UFO reports came as I was watching a video Q&A with a biblical scholar. Someone asked her the question, “Where do we get the idea that Paul had bad eyesight?”

The woman seemed baffled for a moment before replying that it probably came from the passage in Galatians 6 where Paul says “See what large letters I make as I write with my own hand.”⁷ Indeed, the typical scholarly footnote will say something about Paul likely having presbyopia and employing a scribe for most of his letters.

But my mind immediately turned to the Damascus road account given in Acts 9 and again in chapter 22: Paul is blinded by the light he sees, and remains so for three days, when a man named Ananaias heals him, causing “scales” to fall from his eyes and restoring his vision.

This story is assumed by most scholars to be somewhat fantastical. The most reliable, and the earliest, historical documentation we have for Christianity is in Paul’s letters. The Gospels and the book of Acts are narrative accounts written well after the events occurred. Acts in particular attempts to paint a picture of unity between Paul’s theology of grace and freedom for all and the more traditional Jewish law-abiding practices in the Jerusalem church of Peter and James. But there are some obvious contradictions between the Acts account and what we read in Paul’s letters, where the relationship is much more antagonistic.

I went back to Galatians, where Paul briefly refers to his his encounter near Damascus in Chapter 1, though not in any great detail. He certainly doesn’t mention his eyes. But in later, in Chapter 4, verses 13-15, Paul says something that caused me to take notice when I read it:

“As you know, it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you, and even though my illness was a trial to you, you did not treat me with contempt or scorn. Instead, you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Christ Jesus himself. Where, then, is your blessing of me now? I can testify that, if you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me.”

My skin pricked. The Galatians would have torn out their own eyes and given them to him? Was that just an odd turn of phrase, or were his eyes the cause of the illness? I sensed there was a connection with the Acts account, but it didn’t make sense. Galatia is almost 700 miles (1100 km) away and his visit there is presumed to be years after the Damascus encounter. Had the initial conversion story in Acts been embellished using an episode from later in his life? Whatever it was, I had a conviction that the core of this story, of being blinded by an apparition, must be true.

A common feature of UFO experiences is some kind of radiation burn, not unlike a sunburn. Radiation—an intense burst of heat, light, or some other form energy—can burn the cornea, clouding the eyes and causing intense pain, tearing, and photosensivity. The layer of damaged tissue will sloughs off in 1-3 days, but the the eyes remain susceptible to infection, particularly if the burn has penetrated to the delicate tissues beneath. Modern antibiotics render this a negligible concern, but in first century Palestine an injury like this could have caused recurrent infections, inflammation, and corneal erosions, which would have been extremely painful.

Is this what Paul experienced? A painful, temporary blinding from the vision on the Damascus road which resolved in three days when the dead tissue sloughed off? Did it leave his eyes vulnerable to further injury, and is this what he referred to when he spoke of his “thorn in the flesh” and ”the marks of Christ?” I don’t know, but it seems plausible to me.

Ananias restoring the sight of Saint Paul, Pietro da Cortona, 1631

It turns out I’m not the only one who has read Paul’s mystical experiences this way. In the 2016 book The Supernatural: Why the Unexplained is Real, famed UFO experiencer Whitley Streiber and the religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal examine the phenomenology of UFO encounters and consider various interpretive frameworks.

Kripal notes the theory of another religious scholar, David Halperin, who suggests that Paul’s account of being “caught up into the third heaven” in 2 Corinthians 12:1-9, is that of a UFO abduction. Halperin is an expert in Jewish mystical literature and bases his theory not only on comparisons to other texts that involve mystical ascents—a subject I’ll return to in a later piece—but also the fact that the Greek word translated as “caught up,” harpazein, means “to seize, snatch, or carry away by force.”

While neither of them pick up on the eye injury as a clue, Kripal, following Halperin’s suggestion, compares the “thorn in the flesh” that Paul says was given to him by Satan to accounts of implants recieved by UFO experiencers, including a mysterious ear implant reported by Streiber. Kripal further suggests that these are analagous to stories in indigenous cultures of magical implants recieved from spirit beings—in the case of Aboriginal Australians, these are rock crystals—that are said to imbue the recipient with healing or other supernatural powers.⁸

Neither Kripal, Streiber, nor Halperin believe these encounters are with literal extraterrestrials—they are not even willing to go so far as Vallée’s Interdimensional Hypothesis, saying only that these are manifestations of transcendent experiences that occur cross-culturally and exhibit common features.

What does all of this mean? Both the UFO encounter and Paul’s experience have been compared to another classic paradigm of supernatural experience—that of a shamanic initiation. There are many accounts in the anthropological literature of people experiencing traumatic and unexplainable—at least from a modern materialist perspective—spirit encounters that precipitate an injury or illness that leads to the development of a supernatural gift and initiation into the role of shaman or healer.

I’ll explore this concept of shamanic calling and initiation more in my next installment, and over the course of this series I want to look at shamanism from a neurobiological and psychological perspective, compare it to other practices current to the Mediteranean world of Paul and Jesus' time, and look at the role of trauma in Paul’s life and ask what it was that he was trying to heal, both personally and collectively, and how we might make sense of it in our own time.

My Spiritual Work

In addition to writing this newsletter, I’m trained as an astrologer, psychic reader, and spiritual director. I offer Archangel Astrology Readings, Psychic Aura Healings, and Spiritual Direction/Coaching. Learn more and read testimonials from my clients at rebekahberndt.com.

1. From The Order for Holy Communion in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer

2. Galatians 6:17, RSV

3. Romans 12:3-8

4. See Romans 7 for the whole context, verse 9 specifically

5. 2 Kings 2:11; see Vallee, J. (2014). Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, p115

6. Ezekiel 1:1-28; see Passport to Magonia pp 23, 80, 107 & 115; and Strieber, W., & Kripal, J. J. (2016). The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained. Jeremy P. Tarcher-Penguin.pp 16-17, 198, 277 & 292 for comparisons.

7. Galatians 6:11

8. The Supernatural, pp 197-199.