Deities & god-like presences

✦Appearance

Vast god-like presences — a supreme being, the Godhead, archetypal cultural deities (Egyptian, Hindu, Mayan), or a formless 'Universal/Gaian Mind' perceived through the visitor's own framework.

✦Behavior

Radiate authority and cosmic knowledge; may take keen interest or remain transcendent and aloof; range from infinitely compassionate to judging.

✦Communication

Telepathic, archetypal, revelatory; direct knowing 'through presence.'

✦Emotional tone

Awe, reverence, smallness before vastness.

✦Message or purpose

Revelation of ultimate reality; disclosure of 'the nature of things'; sometimes moral reckoning.

✦Further notes from the corpus

Quantified: 'divine' beings tagged in 17% of entity reports in the Lawrence 2022 Reddit corpus; 'religious personage' selected by 11% in Davis 2020. The Nexus lexicon's gods entry adds a characteristic detail: encountered god-forms span 'Hindu, Egyptian, Mayan, Celtic, African and plenty of unrecognizable types' and 'tend to be more sci-fi than you would imagine them from only reading sacred books' — technologized versions of traditional iconography. Culture-specific presentations are now broken out in the new Egyptian animal-headed and Aztec/Mayan entries.

✦What the sources say

Deities ≈ 17.0% of entity encounters.

~80% said the encounter altered their fundamental conception of reality; many former atheists came to believe in a higher power.

The 'Universal Mind / Gaian Mind' perceived or interpreted as God or any ultimate being from the visitor's framework.

'Gods & Goddesses' resembling cultural archetypal godheads; 'The Logos' as the Universal/Gaian Mind.

'Divine' beings tagged in 17% of entity-containing reports in the 3,778-report corpus.

'Religious personage' selected by 11% of respondents.

Gods entry: styles span Hindu/Egyptian/Mayan/Celtic/African and unrecognizable types, 'more sci-fi than you would imagine them from only reading sacred books'.