I have been an avid reader of the Rigorous Intuition blog for some time now. It is always thought provoking. While trying to make a comment today about a post and the comments about it, I found I couldn’t. Having spent some time on it, I thought someone ought to read it.
It seems to me, at the heart of it, there are two distinct things at work here — a cause and effect that beget all the other effects.
First you have a cause: the true, strange things that happen. It is just as likely as not that real, physical phenomena do manifest as a variety of not-even-a-little-normal Forteana. Everyone knows strange things happen. I think it’s hard wired in humans to have a certain amount of reverence for such honest weirdness.
How people’s minds choose to interpret things they have no context for changes with the times. Nightmares don’t involve horses very often anymore, since most people don’t see them everyday. People are drawn to such mysteries because we want there to be more. Why didn’t people see greys before the 20th century? Maybe they did.
I am of the opinion that a lot of these phenomena must be related in some way, like the Skinwalker Ranch — a Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness.
It is possible that there is a very large force of some sort that is capable of focusing manifestations of rare physical events (such as "communication" between two dimensions or universes) that require a mind-boggling amount of energy. People with all sorts of intents might be interested in such forces, no?
As such, there are always those who would take advantage of that fact that such mysteries exist at all. All faiths have and do claim to associate themselves with the truly mysterious, and they all associate themselves with "miracles." And, there’s always a market for miracles.
Thus, the necessary second half of the equation are those who would make others (maybe themselves) think they have some level of control over such forces. There’s no reason to believe that such phenomena are new. It doesn’t mean they actually can. Rulers everywhere and independently have used a connection with divinity to establish and maintain power over others. Perhaps the appearance of such strange things is precisely what makes has made people want to have someone around to make sense of it for so long.
It is a testament to the power of the human mind and the sheer numbers of us there have been, that the stories and cults that have formed to explain them also give them form, in a sense. Perhaps not in a physical sense, but one that remains powerful nonetheless.
So, if you wanted to influence a large people you’d want to do it in such a manner as to get their attention, but not shouting from the skies. Messages are never given to a large group. They are always given to one or a few people, while the others who might be near are always treated to the parlor tricks.
It is possible that if there were energy or "bandwidth" considerations involved in how such things manifest, that it might be too hard to have two way communication between more than a few people.
You can look at it one way and say that such things must all be the doing of men or the other and say they’re all real. I think perhaps it is likely that a few things are real and truly strange and that those who would influence others have a great interest in mimicking the effects of strange. Like building a temple to Apollo on a site with a gas leak that does cause hallucinations.
Either way, like all things, strangeness is filtered by our minds — all they’ve picked up from the culture and environment around us as well as the direct influence of other people. Without even trying the effect is strong. Actually putting some effort into shaping a mind to react in a predictable manner to an other-than-normal stimulus seems plausible.
Those who would engage in so crassly influencing others as a career must become the same sort that would pack a plane with radioactive materials or have very odd fetishes. They probably would suffer from the sort of megalomania that is brought on when people begin to believe in their own outrageous claims to be on speaking terms with powerful forces.