The Owls Are Not What They Seem

[FauxOwl]

I've recently discovered the podcast "Mysterious Universe", which is kind of like "Coast to Coast AM" only a lot better.

This is a particularly good episode, which features much discussion on a book about owls: http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/01/15-02-mu-podcast/
http://www.amazon.com/Messengers-Owls-S ... 0967799570
The book is a compilation of strange accounts revolving around owls. I actually only started reading the kindle version but I did a search for "Twin Peaks" and there was no mention. But the author's interest in this subject only started in the 1990s, after the series. Listening to the podcast though my mind kept going back to Twin Peaks, as the mythology of the series involved owls seems quite at home with the discussion, even if it's never mentioned. Synchronicity is a key theme ("“When two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry we must always pay strict attention!")

Does anyone know anything about what the inspiration was for the owl mythology in Twin Peaks and whether there's some connection to the real life lore discussed in the book/podcast?

[Saturn's child]

I haven't watched the podcast you linked, but I'd imagine the owls got included because they symbolically fit the bill in several ways at once. In saying that, I know the 'factual' novel 'Communion' was a big hit in the late 80s, & owls (& deer I think? It's been awhile...) are famously used in that book as mask memories for strange encounters that the conscious mind can't process. There definitely seems to be at least a passing similarity in the way the owls are used in Peaks (eg: the Major Briggs 'abduction' scene), so I'd guess 'Communion' played a tiny part (likely via Frost).

This is probably pretty well-known (discussed in said podcast?), but owls are mythologically prominent in a variety of Native American cultures (not to mention elsewhere on the globe)... & there are always the interesting stories told by a few young girls about the 'Owlman of Mawnan' (in England). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlman
Doubt the last was any influence, but kind of reminiscent of the Point Pleasant 'Mothman' shenanigans in the late '60s.

Do you mind if I ask briefly what lore/mythology the podcast discussed? (I've got limited data at the moment, otherwise I'd tune in!)

[Saturn's child]

Eep, I just looked at the podcast url & saw 'UFO' & 'abductee' at the end... Did they discuss Communion?

[FauxOwl]

Yeah, Communion was referenced... I'm not sure if it was in the podcast or in the book. And there is indeed a lot of discussion of that "masking memory" phenomenon. You are right that the Major Briggs scene really seems to fit right in with that concept.

These are all accounts from people who claim they are real. I don't necessarily believe or dismiss that, but I'm fascinated such lore. I'm pretty much a sucker for any sort of ghost lore... UFO lore not so much but these accounts specifically are very interesting.

Twin Peaks seemed to briefly dabble in UFO or alien type phenomenon but then doubled back to a supernatural root of its mythology, and this book does toy with the suggestion that there's a connection between the two.

[Saturn's child]

I'm fascinated by the lore as well; have been since a kid! For better or worse it informed my uni studies & applies to some of my current work (freelance writer, occasionally writing articles on paranormal phenomena, with an eye to psychological underpinnings). That's not to say that I think it's 'all in the mind' (where are the barriers of the mind anyway?), as our understanding of the universe is pretty dim. Maybe it has to be, to save us all from some sanity-shattering Lovecraftian revelation, hehe.

Re: the connection between ufological & supernatural fields; I find that even though the stereotypical abduction experience is clinical/scientific, most actual individual accounts include a fair amount of mysticism, & often include loosely related phenomena (ghosts, spirit contact, apports, visions, precognition, even bigfoot hanging around!). With that in mind, I personally feel that the UFO thread that gets injected into Peaks season 2 kinda makes sense. I think it's best not followed up, just injected as a thread of speculation to broaden the scope of the whole thing.

One last ramble re: alien abduction... In many ways, it seems to me to be one of the modern mind's ways of throwing a mystical experience at us. It strongly echoes both birth & death imagery (birth canals, surgical tools, doctors, fetus-like entities, the "long dark tunnel" to death, etc), & also mirrors a lot of hunter-gatherer shamanic experiences. I think "it's happening" on a psychic level, but it seems hard to be able to pin down exclusively in any kind of objective, physical reality.

[Saturn's child]

... Why do greys sound like lodge denizens all of a sudden?

Btw, I'm not really a believer in the 'extraterrestrial hypothesis', I tend to side more on the Jacques Vallée / John Keel side of things... Sure, strange things seem to be infringing & even conflicting with our scientific dogma, but to reduce it to literal ETs is also to reduce it to a very human (& particularly modern) conception of the universe. It seems to be going on outside these parameters, outside our material senses (at least to a large degree). I don't believe the universe was created for us, so I likewise don't believe that we miraculously have the perfectly attuned faculties to comprehend everything within it. The human brain is very complex, but so is the entire universe, etc. So yeah, I guess when it comes to the paranormal in general, I flow more along an 'inter-dimensional hypothesis' / humans can't understand this shit... probably part of the reason why I dig Lynch/Peaks! (& Cosmic Horror too)

[FauxOwl]

Good points! Graham Hancock quite specifically draws the connection between the alien abduction experience and the classic Shamanic journey in his book "Supernatural". There's also the interesting appearances of greys in Rick Strassman's study on DMT. I can't recall if it is referenced in the documentary but in his book "DMT: The Spirit Molecule", he details accounts from test subjects where they encounter the greys which leads him to theorize that alien abduction experiences are actually caused by a natural, spontaneous discharge of DMT in the pineal gland (he isn't suggesting they are hallucinations, however, as he considers DMT an actual portal to other realities/dimensions/universes).

The shamanic journey usually involves a person being taken apart by spirits and reassembled as a shaman. It'd be really cool if they were going in that direction with Agent Cooper, his black lodge experience at the end of Season 2 being the first part of the journey (in this case, he is literally split into different people). I also hope there's a good deal of expansion of the owl mythology and it fits with the real lore.

[FauxOwl]

So I just finished The Secret History of Twin Peaks, which makes in explicitly clear that indeed, the owl lore in Twin Peaks is very much connected to the real life lore surrounding owls and UFOs. I wonder if that was the inspiration from the very start or if it became a retroactive association only after Mark Frost and David Lynch decided to return to the story. Back when the series was originally being written this owl lore would have been considerably more esoteric than it even is now.

[Tenel]

Someone on reddit offered this link:

http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legen ... uoddy.html

This is a paragraph from that link:

A man and his wife lived at the edge of their village near a stream. They had a beautiful daughter whom many young men wished to marry, but she was proud, no suitor pleased her. Her father, caught between his daughter's haughtiness and the rejected suitor's anger, hoped to appease both by promising to give his daughter to the man who could make the embers of his hearth blaze up by spitting on it. Naturally, since spitting tends to put a fire out rather than kindle it, none of the young men succeeded.

I noticed that Ben Horne, at the very beginning of the series, in the first episode, spits in the fire. It is I think the very first episode, when a seated Leland Palmer and Ben Horne are discussing how to convince the Norwegians to buy into the Ghostwood development. Ben Horne, rudely, spits into the fire, then apologises to Leland.
I don’t have a clue what this means, though the link speaks about owls and spitting, and we have Ben Horne spitting into the fireplace.
It is interesting to note that the first word out of Ben Horne’s mouth, to open his entry into the series, is ‘sorry’, apologising to Leland for spitting into the fire- spitting being the very-first act we see from Ben Horne. (gross!)

Make of this what you will


P.S. I am referring to the international episode, the double-episode one. I’m not sure about the regular US tv edits.