The Age of Unarius: The Ruth E. Norman Story

First a little housekeeping: You’re not having a seizure and nothing is wrong with your computer.Yes, it’s snowing (until Jan. 4th according to WordPress). Since I live in North Texas, this may be the only snow I see this December.

I wanted to do another post on a UFO religions like I did about the Raëlians in March of this year. I hesitate to use the word cult now, I feel it has been overused to describe everything from odd low-budget movies to the loyalty of Apple Macintosh users. On this blog, I classify UFO cults in the very vague Cultural Groups category for better or worse. This post is about one of the founders of the Unarian religion, the flamboyant and certainly unforgettable Ruth E. Norman. At some point next year, I will do a more in depth study on the beliefs of Unarius.

Ruth E. Norman (1900-1993) was the wife of Ernest L. Norman and together the two founded the new age religion turned UFO cult of Unarius (Universal Articulate Interdimensional Understanding of Science) in 1954. After Ernest died in 1971, Ruth AKA “Loshanna” and later “Uriel” became the leader of Unarius and has become the scapegoat for the laughable reputation the group has today. Like everyone who believes in past lives, she just so happened to be a half dozen historical figures rolled in to one little old lady. Isn’t funny how no one is ever Hitler or just a common everyman in their past lives, but great and influential people? Ruth E. Norman decked out in her spacey Liberace/Drag Queen costumes and her self-produced Unarian educational videos are very reminiscent of the original Star Trek TV series. After Ruth died in 1993, the Unarians seemed to have stopped being such snappy dressers and many of them started following the earlier teachings of Ernest L. Norman. Enjoy the YouTube videos below concerning the living light show’s parade of planets and a video about the arrival of “the space brothers” which was predicted to occur in 2001.

References and Links (All on-line information retrieved December 10, 2010)

http://ancientaliensinmassmedia.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/cultivation-the-raelians/

http://www.unarius.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_E._Norman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_L._Norman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unarius

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9FirISc5AJ8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WdRz4jVvRps

CULTivation: The Raëlians

Raëlians in South Korea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_gathering_of_Ra%C3%ABlians_in_South_Korea.jpg)

If only the Raëlians were just about bikinis and space boots… In this post, I’ll take a brief look at the UFO religion known as Raëlianism and how it is just one of several groups with an ancient astronaut creation story. Think of it as “The Controversy” as culture. At a glance it’s easy to say that the Raëlians are merely a cult of horny, New-Agey, UFO-worshiping, human-cloners, but there is more to the story. Founded in 1974 by French sports-car journalist and test driver, Claude Vorilhon A.KA. “Raël”, Raëlianism has gone on to become almost as well known as Scientology in regard to wacky space religions. The Raëlians have rubbed quite a few people the wrong way with their beliefs which can be read about at length at the archive of Religious Movements Homepage. Even the Raëlian symbol is offensive to many. Take a look.

Raëlian symbols - Note the swastika inside the Star of David in the original design. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raelian_symbols.svg)

Raëlianism’s Clonaid, a human cloning company, drew world-wide attention when it claimed that it has successfully cloned a human in 2002. Raëlians are also believers in intelligent design, although the ID folks would rather not have you point that out to them. I guess they already have enough to worry about trying to repackage creationism as science. Okay, so enough history! Let’s get to the ancient astronaut theory.

Raëlians believe that life on earth were scientifically created by a race of aliens known as the Elohim. These friendly DNA manipulating aliens where also kind enough to send us “prophets” such as Moses, Jesus and Buddha apparently to guide us on some sort of path of enlightenmen according to the group’s founder. No Muhammad as an extraterrestrial prophet in your little story? C’mon Claude or Raël-whatever your name is, you decided to offend everyone, but you forgot the Muslims? The story continues… blah, blah, blah… apolocolypse… blah, blah, blah… second coming…  blah, blah, blah… This sounds like a lot of work for a science project! What were the Elohim thinking? I think it is interesting that ancient astronaut theory has come full circle with these creation stories and find it fascinating that so many believe in them. I still can’t believe that the Raëlian website is available in 38 languages! I plan to do some other posts on similar groups in the near future to further explore how ancient astronaut theory is impacting human cultures.

Coming Next Month: A book review, more music, video games and television.

References and Links (All on-line information retrieved March 31, 2010)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Vorilhon

http://web.archive.org/web/20070706014110/http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/rael.html

http://clonaid.com/page.php?18

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elohim

http://rael.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_gathering_of_Ra%C3%ABlians_in_South_Korea.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raelian_symbols.svg