One of the most fascinating developments of the modern world is the notion of possible sentient extraterrestrial life living among the stars.

This possibility, presented as scientific speculation, is attractive to those who espouse a materialistic worldview,

those for whom the ancient cosmology in which they are meaningful patterns in the

heaven seems superstitious and absurd. But now these same people can nonetheless project their

mythological thinking into those very heavens. You see, the frame of alien life is presented

in scientific language. but as soon as we

attempt to imagine these creatures and their world, all the ancient patterns of human consciousness

come flooding in. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the ancient world, we find a universal pattern, the image of a center, an anchor by which

we interpret the world, our home, our family, our tribe, our temple, but also our own center

of consciousness, our heart.

As one moves further and further from this center,

one finds all that is not aligned with our identity,

the neighbor, that which we can still recognize first,

but soon we find the stranger, the foreigner,

and ultimately the barbarian,

and even animality itself,

the beast and the fantastical monster.

As soon as we move away from that which we know, we fall into a space where things don't

quite have identities yet, are not accounted for within ourselves, and these possibilities

will appear to us both in their positive or negative form,

either as a dangerous, destructive chaos or else as the promise of something more.

So the ancient Greeks, for example, had in Delphi, the umphalos, the navel of the world, just like the Romans had

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