extraordinary%20encounters

Mafu
Mafu channeled through Penny To r res of Los
Angeles, beginning in 1986. T h i rty-two thousand
years old, Mafu claimed to have passed
t h rough seventeen incarnations on Earth. He
taught that God is in eve rything and eve ryo n e ,
and eve rything and eve ryone is in God. Be yo n d
that, he championed a macrobiotic diet, meditation,
and the adoption of a spiritual path.
In 1989, Torres, now Penny Torres Rubin,
made a pilgrimage to Hardiwar, India, in the
Himalayan foothills. She refashioned herself
with the title and name of Swami Paramananda
Saraswatti. Back in the United
States she created the Foundation for the Realization
of Inner Divinity and a subsidiary,
the Center for God Realization. Through
these she has disseminated Mafu’s teachings.
For a time Mafu was among the most popular
channeling entities on the New Age scene
of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was
sometimes said to be little more than a clone
of the famous Ramtha, channeled by the controversial
J. Z. Knight, though at one point
Torres Rubin charged that Ramtha was nothing
more than a fraud.
See Also: Channeling; Ramtha
Further Reading
“Interview: Penny Torres on Mafu,” 1986/1987. Life
Times 1, 2 (Winter): 74–79.
M
161
L’Ecuyer, Michele, 1986/1987. “Mafu.” Life Times 1,
2 (Winter): 80–82.
Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of American
Religions. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.
Magonia
The concept of Magonia entered the literature
of ufology in a 1964 issue of England’s Flying
Saucer Review. Ancient-astronaut theorist
W. R. Drake, author of a series of pieces highlighting
what he judged to be evidence of extraterrestrial
visitation, briefly cited a ninthcentury
French account of a “ship in clouds”
from a place called “Magonia.” A slightly
longer version appeared in Jacques Vallee’s
Passport to Magonia (1969), in which Vallee
went on to turn “Magonia” into the unknown
realm from which many unexplained phenomena—everything
from elves to demons to
UFO humanoids—emerge. He defined Magonia
as “a sort of parallel universe, which coexists
with our own. It is made visible and
tangible only to selected people” (Vallee,
1969). In his view, each culture experiences
Magonia in a fashion that conforms to its own
expectations concerning supernatural encounters.
Thus, rural Ireland experiences fairies,
while Space Age America has its ostensible extraterrestrials.
Vallee did not mean to imply