Praying Mantis Beings

The Praying Mantis Being is a late-1990s sub-pattern of the broader Mantid narrative, distinguished from the abduction-research-era Mantid by an explicitly elevated, benevolent, or pedagogic framing. Where the Hopkins/Jacobs-era Mantid is described as cool, supervisory, and procedural, the Praying Mantis Being of the post-1995 channeling and online contactee literature is more frequently described as wise, ancient, and engaged in spiritual instruction or healing.

The Council treats this typology as a documented late-twentieth-century sub-pattern with identifiable origins in the channeling and online-contactee communities, not as an endorsed entity.

The reported pattern

Recurring details across the post-1995 literature:

• Morphology — broadly Mantid (elongated head, large faceted eyes, thin segmented limbs, robed or hooded), but often described with additional aesthetic features: iridescent or jewel-toned coloration, ornate robes, ceremonial adornment.
• Setting — frequently described in non-physical or quasi-physical environments — meditation states, “energetic” interactions, dreamtime encounters — rather than the clinical-craft interior typical of the abduction-research-era Mantid.
• Role — pedagogic, healing, or ceremonial. Frequently described as “elder” or “wise” figures.
• Communication — exclusively telepathic, frequently described as transmitting concepts, geometric forms, or emotional content rather than language.
• Attributed origin — variably attributed to specific star systems (Arcturus, Andromeda, an unspecified higher density), reflecting the broader channeling-community taxonomy.

Origins of the narrative

The Praying Mantis Being pattern crystallized through several documented streams in the mid-to-late 1990s:

1995 onward — early online contactee communities. Usenet groups (alt.alien.visitors, alt.paranet.ufo) and the early World Wide Web created cross-referencing channels through which contactee accounts could be shared, compared, and refined faster than the print era allowed.

Late-1990s — channeling literature. The “Pleiadian,” “Arcturian,” and related channeled-text traditions of the 1990s incorporated insect-form entities into their cosmologies, often positioned as advanced or elder civilizations.

2010s — YouTube contactee channels. A second wave of diffusion came through long-form video contactee material on YouTube, which gave the Praying Mantis Being a visual presence — typically through commissioned illustration — that the print-era abduction literature had not.

2010s — DMT-experience literature. A separate but adjacent stream emerged in the dimethyltryptamine-experience reports collected by researchers including Rick Strassman (DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 2001) and online communities, in which Mantis-form intelligences appear with notable frequency. This overlap has contributed to the Praying Mantis Being’s late-1990s and 2000s diffusion.

Cultural diffusion

Channels of spread:

• Channeling-community publication and event circuits (1995 onward).
• The DMT-experience report literature (Strassman 2001 onward), which provided a second, independent channel through which insect-form intelligences became culturally available.
• YouTube and podcast contactee media (2010 onward).
• Adjacent academic-religious-studies attention — Pasulka’s Encounters (2023) and related work has discussed insect-form contact narratives as a religious-studies phenomenon.

Skeptical and academic perspectives

Dr. Andrew Gallimore (Alien Information Theory, 2019) treats the DMT mantis-being phenomenology as a serious neurochemical-phenomenological question without committing to ontological claims.

Dr. D.W. Pasulka (American Cosmic, 2019; Encounters, 2023) treats contemporary contact narratives — including insect-form encounters — as religious-studies phenomena worth analyzing on their own anthropological terms.

Jeffrey Kripal (Authors of the Impossible, University of Chicago Press, 2010) provides theoretical framing for taking high-strangeness narratives seriously as cultural-religious data.

The skeptical literature notes that the Praying Mantis Being’s overlap with DMT phenomenology is a strong indicator that some portion of the report-pattern reflects a neurological perceptual mechanism rather than encounters with an external entity. The simultaneous appearance of insect-form intelligences in DMT experience and in non-DMT contactee accounts is itself a phenomenologically interesting fact regardless of how it is explained.

What the Council observes

The Council does not endorse the existence of Praying Mantis Beings as literal entities. The Council observes that the elevated, pedagogic Mantis Being is a documented late-twentieth-century sub-pattern with traceable origins in identifiable communities, that it overlaps significantly with DMT-experience phenomenology in ways that suggest a partial neurological component, and that the persistence and consistency of the pattern across multiple unrelated communities (abduction research, channeling, DMT experience) is worth observing as the report-stream evolves.