Mud huts, Communion, and the Tree of Life

On June 20, I posted "The Tree of Life and the flesh and blood of Jesus," which deals with the possible meaning of eating Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood. The next day, June 21, I posted the "earthen dwelling" meme in "Ethically modified schematic reconstruction of a meme"; and then, on June 23, in "Plus ça change éthiquement, plus c'est la même chose," a Winnie-the-Pooh meme referencing it and using the phrase "mud hut":

Today, reading Stories from the Messengers, Mike Clelland's second book about UFOs, I unexpectedly ran into a "mud hut" reference, closely followed by a reference to Communion -- the Christian ritual, not the Whitley Strieber book.

Clelland is writing about a woman called Denise Linn, who in the late 1980s was moved by an inner voice to eat three white owl feathers. (Yes, this is a strange book.) Here he quotes Denise's own account:

Without a further thought, I put the feathers into my mouth and swallowed them. (I don't recommend this. Feathers are very hard to swallow and not sanitary, but that didn't occur to me at the time.) The inner voice continued: As you have taken owl feathers into your body, the spirit of owl has permeated your being and shall always be with you.

On the next page, we read of Denise's 1994 visit to the South African Zulu holy man Credo Mutwa, who lived in what in our more enlightened times we would call an "earthen dwelling":

When Denise entered Credo Mutwa's humble mud hut, she was awestruck by his presence.

Mutwa, it turns out, has also eaten some pretty strange stuff:

Here's where things get really strange -- Credo Mutwa also claims to have eaten an alien. He tells of being given "a small lump of gray, rather dry stuff," by a friend, and told it was the flesh of a gray alien, or the "sky gods." He and his companion ate this together in a ritual ceremony . . .

Throughout my research I have equated the owl with the gray alien. For me, these have become symbolically intertwined. Like Credo Mutwa, Denise had also eaten of a being steeped in mythic powers, and in doing so, felt she had taken on the attributes of the owl.

Every Sunday, Christians around the globe partake in the rites of holy communion, the mandatory ritual of drinking the blood of Christ and eating his flesh. This sacrament is performed metaphorically with wine and bread.

My own recent post about Communion, you will recall, equated the flesh and blood of Jesus with the Tree of Life. Just now I looked up this Credo Mutwa character, and the opening paragraph of his Wikipedia article informs me that "His last work was a graphic novel called The Tree of Life Trilogy." Nephi's High Mountain Vision identifies the white Tree of Life with a woman who "was exceedingly fair and white." Somewhat surprisingly given that it's the work of a Black African, Mutwa's Tree of Life Trilogy uses similar imagery: