Lost in revelation

Brad Steiger is a super-prolific writer of books on the paranormal. According to his Wiki entry, he has authored or co-authored 162 books! Nothing wrong with that, per se. However, I suspect that Steiger sometimes sacrifices quality for quantity.

"Revelation: The Divine Fire" was apparently first published in 1973. For some reason, this isn't mentioned in the 2006 edition. The book itself is a confusing, disjointed and badly edited smorgasbord of channelers, black magicians, UFO observations, astrology, the Jesus People, charismatics and very worried evangelicals. Steiger even quotes a paper by Clark Pinnock! (Yes, *that* Clark Pinnock).

The messages from the alien entities are as trite as usual, and their names are downright silly: Sut-ko, Ox-Ho, Thrishna, Ishkomar, etc. At least Ishkomar was somewhat original. Apparently, the poor guy is really a kind of computer program loaded down into a machine by his alien colleagues, so he must have liked being able to speak through the mouth of a human. Ishkomar also reveals that there are still people onboard the space ships who carry out "menial tasks". I hope they have labour unions! Then there's Ted Owens, who claims to have gotten supernatural powers from the Space Intelligences, which he invariably uses to hex football players. Presumably, they don't like football in outer space. Or perhaps they are just bored doing menial tasks onboard the mother ship? Meanwhile, the Ambassadors of Yahweh eat fresh fruit, chant the name of Yehoshua and pray to "Our Father who art on Orion".

Small wonder Steiger found Jane Roberts' Seth Material sophisticated!

On some issues, at least, Steiger is more down-to-earth than the usual, starry-eyed writers of this particular genre. He admits that some contacts with the paranormal are "demonic" in character, mentioning a case of a young man in Virginia named Mark who was possessed by an evil spirit named Asmitor after experimenting with psychedelic drugs and black magic. Eventually, the young man committed suicide to get rid of the demon (or perhaps his own personal demons).

Steiger also interviews a number of people who believe that one should "test the spirits" to see if their messages are genuine. This sounds trivial, but most contactees and mediums seem so gullible that virtually anything goes. Steiger's interviewees point out that the field is teeming with false prophecies, ego-tripped people who claim to be incarnations of Paul or the Virgin Mary, crazy cultists, etc. One of them feels that Aleister Crowley went downhill when he started channelling "Aiwass", and the same thing happened to Madame Blavatsky after her contact with "Koot Hoomi".

Unfortunately, the last chapter of "Revelation" is less sober, with Steiger suggesting that the use of psychedelic drugs can get us in touch with the Divine Fire. He even quotes - guess who - Huston Smith on the subject.

In the end, the author reveals his own belief in a Higher Being who can't be approached through organized priestcraft or dogmatic theology. We are entering a new phase of spiritual evolution, in which our consciousness will expand and turn us into highly evolved beings in communion with All That Is. In plain English, Brad Steiger is New Age and believes in the Age of Aquarius.

I can't say I liked "Revelation". And no, I didn't read literally every word of it. But then, that's part of my point. The whole work feels more like Steiger's draft notes for a book, than the book itself. It gets tedious to read after a few chapters, unless you have a very extreme interest in the subject. The message was lost in revelation, so to speak. I'm not sure who might be interested in Steiger's opus. Perhaps people nostalgic for the Zeitgeist of the early 1970's? Or a certain kind of ethnographers? Contactees surely won't like it - it promotes all their competitors!

I wonder what happened to poor Ishkomar. Was he ever freed from his computer and given shore leave on a better planet...?