Our Bloody World -- Book of the Damned (Part Three)

(Note: The quotes in this post are from the Project Gutenberg version of the Book of the Damned. Below is a link to this book, which is downloadable for free.

Book of the Damned)

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, when Charles Fort wrote the Book of the Damned, the biggest catalyst for scientific and philosophical ideas has seemed to be Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity. In fact, Einstein is still influencing us all, even today! But Charles Fort's philosophy seems to be based about a hundred years back, in Hegel's theory. And the real modern catalyst for Fort's philosophy seems actually to have been the invention of the airplane.

Fort says, "I think that the stronghold of Inclusionism is in aeronautics. I think that the stronghold of the Old Dominant, when it was new, was in the invention of the telescope."

It's interesting to see that, rather than seeing people's ideas being the catalyst for other peoples' ideas, Fort sees inventions, mechanisms, as being the catalyst for other people's ideas.

Now, Fort's chief focus for anomalous is matter that falls from the sky. Near the end of his book, Fort confirms this for us:

"Throughout this book, the datum that we are most impressed with: -- Successive falls."

The study of matter falling from the sky took up about the first third of Fort's book. But, even once Fort has moved on from that topic, he continues to return to it.

Fort feels indebted to aviation for opening up the skies to him. But the skies are full of monsters for Fort. And, in the last third of his book, Fort is constantly giving warnings to aviators to be careful when they go too high up into the skies.

These warnings are largely based on Fort's expression that there are regions in the sky that contain water, ice, and even some kind of gelatinous material. So, making reference to the watery areas in the sky -- areas like actual lakes in the sky -- Fort warns aviators to wear bathing suits.

When making reference to the gelatinous areas of the sky, Fort warns aviators about flying into these areas:

"The shaky, protoplasmic seas of the Genesistrine -- against which we warn our aviators, or they may find themselves suffocating in a reservoir of life, or stuck like currants in a blanc mange."

Fort also mentions areas in the sky where gravity is inert and material collects, decays, and dried out. He assumes that there are areas in the sky where blood has collected and dried. He claims that, in the future (his future), aviators will go up into the sky and map these vast Deserts of Blood, where the blood has decayed and dried to the point of being like sand.

All in all, the sky sounds like a terribly dangerous place to Charles Fort. And I think there's a reason behind this. When aviators started tearing open the sky, they began tearing open -- symbolically -- a portion of the human psyche, a portion of the human unconscious. I think for Fort this had a very strong impact when it was realized that aviators could pierce through, or "tear open," in a sense, the daytime sky.

During the daytime, the sky is blue, and the sun makes everything light. During the night, it's like the sky is gone, revealing a vast, dark universe. In this sense, one could think of the daytime sky as consciousness, and of the nighttime sky as the unconscious.

But it became obvious, as aviators began to float higher and higher into the air, that the daytime sky could be pierced, eventually, and that the daytime sky, the symbol of our consciousness, would be pierced through, leaving even our conscious life open to the vast, dark expanse of our night sky, our unconscious.

I'm sure people are still working through the problems of this. Our concern with the ozone layer is a very valid and serious physical concern. But it can also be equated with our conception of the effects of aviation, and how it has permanently torn a hole in our daytime sky, our conscious sky, leaving us constantly open to intrusions from the night sky, the unconscious.

Now I'm sure that Fort also thought of the earth, the ground, as an element of the unconscious. So, as Fort saw that, if travel out of the earth's atmostphere became possible, then the equating of the daytime sky with the nighttime sky would be a possibility. And the night sky has already, for millennia, been equated with the earth. So, now, the day sky would also be equated with the earth.

Because of this, I believe that Fort began to work out the theory he did work out, based on elements from the earth or the water (another symbol for the unconscious) falling to the earth from the sky. But Fort worked this theory out based on genuine data related to various newspapers and journals about their experiences with anomalous phenomena.

It seemed, about halfway through the book, that Fort would start to call up more data on objects actually arising from the earth. He started listing data of material found in the ground. But as this material took on less of a purely natural element, and became more like human artifacts, the material then took on a human, living character. It seemed as if we may even start to encounter data showing real, living, intelligent beings.

But as soon as Fort reached this point, he seemed to get afraid. All the data he began to express first went back up into the sky. The areas he'd seen up in the sky, which had, up to that time, been mainly gelatinous, first became watery. They then became ice. Then they seemed to fragment.

Keep in mind -- all of these things happen -- as if it were all a story. But it really is a story of data -- collected data, that Fort relates to us in a method I term as narrative-manipulation. He takes this genuine data and uses the imagery of the data to form a story of his own. He himself almost admits this, saying that he fashions his notions to the data.

But once these icy patches in the sky fragment, all the phenomena Fort relates to us suddenly blast far out into space -- all the way to the sun, in fact, i.e. -- to our real center of conscious -- the main symbol of our consciousness. From this far away point, the data begins coming back to us.

But when the data disappears and shows up near the sun, it takes on the appearance of planets. These planets aren't in any orbit. They all begin floating back toward the earth. And, when the data has reached the earth again, it takes on a personality much like that of the Devil. It's a planet known as Melanicus, which is some kind of Devil-Vampire-Bat, floating between the earth and the moon and watching over us, probably with some kind of evil intent.

I thought that at this point, Fort would definitely begin to show us data of actual visitors to our planet. In fact, through the last third of the book, Fort talks over and over again about visitors to this planet. In one instance, he even wonders "whether sometimes there are visitors to this earth who might be pursued and captured and questioned."

But as soon as Fort mentions that we could capture these visitors, the visitors seem to become huge dragons. Fort returns to his favorite subject, the rains of bloods, and conjectures:

"It may be that an interplanetary dragon had been slain somewhere, or that this red fluid, in which were many corpuscles, came from something not altogether pleasant to contemplate, about the size of the Catskill Mountains perhaps."

And, from this sudden realization that these "visitors" who might be "captured and questioned" could possibly be "something not altogether pleasant to contemplate," Fort goes from thinking of it being at all possible for us to capture our visitors, to thinking of ourselves as the ones who are to be captured:

"Our greasy, slimy brains. That they may be of some use after all: that other modes of existence place a high value upon them as lubricants; that we're hunted for them."

Fort revisits this possibility when he discusses unidentified objects in the sky (a long time before the term Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO, went public). One UFO looked like a hot-air baloon with fishing nets attached. Fort says:

"I think that we're fished for. It may be that we're highly esteemed by super-epicures somewhere. It makes me more cheerful when I think we may be of some use after all."

Now this last statement of Fort's is very interesting. "It makes me more cheerful when I think we may be of some use after all."

This could be considered a sarcastic remark. But Carl Jung has often pointed out the passage in the Upanishads where the singer rejoices, "I eat food! I eat food! I am food! I am food!" Fort expresses the same sort of happiness. There is a greater cosmic principle to Fort's searchings. If he ends up being food for aliens, this is fine with him, just like it was fine for the singer of the Upanishads, because it was for some greater cosmic principle.

This is, interestingly, at odds with some of the ideas of modern investigators into these anomalous phenomena. Some of them, such as Laura Knight-Jadczyk, seem to believe that, indeed, the aliens do want to harvest and eat us. But this is bad for Knight-Jadczyk, whereas it seems to be okay for Fort and the Upanishads.

I'm pretty much a baby, but I don't seem to have any soft spots on my skull. My skull is actually really thick. So I'm pretty sure that's why I didn't see all of this until I'd gotten most of the way through the Book of the Damned. But it suddenly began to dawn on me that Fort's encounter with the unconscious was a much larger encounter than a personal encounter. It was a cosmic encounter with the unconscious.

In fact -- Fort's first encounter with something like a living, intelligent element in his unconscious was *almost* with fairies and giants, but it was *really* with poltergeists, which he rejected pretty much right out of hand. Fort's unconscious maintained its intelligence. However, it went all the way to the sun before coming back.

When Fort's unconscious came back, it was as huge as a small planet. But it was still intelligent -- in the form of Melanicus.

And, really, the final third of Fort's book begins with phenomena that Fort describes as eclipses. But, Fort claims, these eclipses were not predicted by astronomers. They were spontaneous. Fort asserts that these eclipses were caused by these smaller planets, or these super-constructions (Fort's term for what we would think of as gigantic spaceships) coming into close contact with the earth.

Fort asserts that these bodies can actually get pretty close to the earth, because the same band of gravity-inert space surrounding the earth can actually neutralize the planet getting close to us, so that the two planets aren't drawn completely together. However, certain parts of the two planets occasionally still manage to get sucked down from one to the other planet. This would account for some of the dirt-rains, fish-rains, etc., that follow these strange eclipses.

Since these eclipses, or planetary encounters, are often accompanied by earthquakes, Fort calls his theories surrounding this idea "Advanced-Seismology." He gives four major characteristics of Advanced-Seismology:

"Our data: -- We take them from four classes of phenomena that have preceded or accompanied earthquakes: -- Unusual clouds, darkness profound, luminous apearances in the sky, and falls of substances and objects commonly called meteoritic or not. -- Every one of them is datum of a quaked body passing close to this earth or suspended over it."

Fort also mentions luminous objects moving along with earthquakes, implying that the luminous objects were affecting the gravity of the earth somehow, so that it seems the luminous objects were like planets.

Fort then mentions howls, like wolf-howls, that have accompanied some of these strange earthquakes. Fort relates this wolf-howl sound to the attraction of the planets. But he does so in a way that imputes feeling, if not actual intelligence, to the planets themselves:

"The loves of the worlds. The call they feel for one another. They try to move closer and closer and howl when they get there. The howls of the planets. I have discovered a new unintelligibility."

What's most interesting to me about all of this is that the sky is directly equated with the earth. The daytime sky is eclipsed, or turned into a night sky, by another planet, which passes so close to our own earth that it actually in our atmosphere -- in our daytime sky, in other words. But this other planet draws our earth up to it, while we draw its earth down to us. Our earth and the sky's earth are both opening.

Later on in the book, Fort asserts that we have a mirror world up in the sky. He claims that our earth's spring, in our northern hemisphere, is that mirror earth's autumn, in the hemisphere matched up with our northern hemisphere. So we occasionally get unseasonal falls of leafs, or actual rains of leafs, from that planet, when the planet passes close enough for our gravity to affect it.

When matter is exchanged between the two planets, Fort calls is celestio-metathesis. The celestio metathesis is usually of Fort's normal variety: mud-rains, fish-rains, frog-rains, and leaf-rains. But sometimes it is much scarier than that. Fort actually gives the testimony of a Humboldt, who, during the apparently anomalous earthquake of Riobamba, saw that "bodies were torn upward from graves;" and that "the vertical motion was so strong that bodies were tossed several hundred feet in the air."

Here you have dead human elements, buried in the unconscious, actually being pulled up into the mirror-earth of the unconscious in the sky. It's pretty scary stuff. Even scarier than this, though, is Fort's next piece of data, about an earthquake in Lisbon, where an entire quay, "we are told," went down into the water. But Fort claims it was actually sucked up into the sky -- up into the planet that was passing through our atmosphere at the time.

"The quay and all the people on it disappeared. If it and they went down -- not a single corpse, not a shred of clothing, not a plank of the quay, not so much as a splinter of it ever floated to the surface."

Fort then spends a little time theorizing about all these data. And right after that, he mentions the quote I included above, about Inclusionism being inspired by aeronautics. He then makes the question regarding our own ability to capture visitors. But those visitors, as we've seen, soon turn into gigantic dragons and beings who, besides owning us, hunt us, eat us, and use our "greasy brains" as a kind of lubricant.

But once these visitors have become this quantifiably a threat to us, they seem to shrink, in Fort's narrative-manipulation of the genuine data, from the gigantic, earthquake-causing planets to objects we would more normally, nowadays, consider to be UFOs.

Nevertheless, throughout this section of the book, Fort remains focused on this idea of a cosmic perspective regarding humanity, our own scientific positions, and the roles our own scientific positions, as instances of human thought, play in creating a larger universal awareness.

This all begins with Fort's discussion of the New Dominant. Fort has explained, throughout the book, that every era of thought is controlled by a Dominant. The Dominant is the system, or the organizing factor. Fort states that the Old Dominant was a system of exclusion. The system was organized in a certain way, and any phenomena that did not fit into that system were excluded from that sytem.

The New Dominant, however, is a system of Inclusion. The New Dominant, Fort says, "is calling for recognition of multiplicities of external things." In the era of the New Dominant, Fort claims, people will always be keeping an eye out for anomalous phenomena. They will then find ways to adapt their notions to the phenomena.

The New Dominant, the system of Inclusion, is more expansive than the Old Dominant, the system of Exclusion.

And, it seems to me, the Old Dominant, as a ground for investigation, would be the system on which Carl Jung based his psychology. In Carl Jung's system, various elements of the personality, conscious and unconscious, were integrated into the overall personality. In this way, a person would find enough organized, focused psychic energy to "individuate" as a person, integrating actively, as an individual, into society.

Fort seems to agree with this to some degree. But it seems like Fort's goal is a struggle for wholeness apart from society, as far as this can be achieved:

"Altogether, the point in Positivism here is that by Dominants and their correlates, quasi-existence strives for the positive state, aggregating around a nucleus, or dominant, systematized members of a religion, a science, a society -- but that 'individuals' who do not surrender and submerge may of themselves highly approximate the positiveness -- the fixed, the real, the absolute."

In this sense, I'd believe that Fort is so struck by these images which he then imagines to be evidence of worlds, even mirror-worlds, gravitating toward us because what he's really attempting to block out isn't, for instance, the unconscious of his shadow (the bad parts of himself he might not want to accept), but -- the collective unconscious.

All of us are connected to the collective unconscious -- whether we're "connected" by our genetic similarities to one another or by some underlying element of our spirits that is common to us all -- or by some kind of compromise between the two. In fact, a lot of people have claimed that UFO sightings have been the result of collective hallucinations: in other words, that everybody, for some reason, had some element of the collective unconscious engaged before their conscious sight in such a way that they had a vision that looked to them like a UFO.

There are elements of anomalous phenomena that are not so closely connected to the collective unconscious: namely, phenomena like telepathy, astral projection, and, possibly, psychokinesis. But UFOs, when (or if) they aren't actually genuine extraterrestrial vehicles, are very closely connected to the collective unconscious. So are all of the data that Fort includes in his book.

It's my argument -- could be totally wrong, that Fort knew about Freud and Jung -- I think he'd done some studying of them. He most certainly knew the works of Herbert Spencer, and of William James and the Society for Psychical Research. So, likely, Fort, when he began processing his data, and thinking of himself as something of an alchemist, and, therefore, something of a Jungian, probably began to process this data as a sort of method of individual development.

But it must have become plain that these elements of the unconscious couldn't be fit into personalities such as the anima (the female-figure in the male psyche) or the shadow (the dark side of our personality, which I'd originally equated with Fort's Melanicus). When Fort tried to fit these elements into, for instance the image of the shadow, the shadow became Melanicus, a huge planet, which then caused all kinds of earthquakes, then began sucking up dead bodies, and even live bodies!

But then Fort began to try and fit these images into an anima figure. The anima figure became a gigantic dragon (dragons are typical primitive symbols for the anima in Jungian psychology). But this dragon became something as big as the Catskill Mountains -- and was apparently so horrifying that Fort couldn't even describe it!

It becomes clear that these elements of the unconscious cannot be constrained in "individual" bodies -- unless the individual body is as huge as a planet. Therefore, these elements must actually be manifestations of the collective unconscious.

This would probably be why Fort is so interested in the idea of these alien visitors coming to earth and visiting with secret societies, "secret agents, emissaries," and "certain esoteric ones." The secret society -- in other words, the society of secrecy, is just another way of saying "collective unconscious." I'm not saying that there aren't secret societies. Secret societies may be another piece of genuine data. But for Fort, the secret societies seem to be a symbol for the collective unconscious.

But then Fort imagines or encounters the theory that perhaps the "visitors" are here, for instance, to eat us or use our brains for grease. Not to eat "him," but to eat "us." "We," as a collective, are their "property." So Fort has been able to transfer this element of the collective unconscious into something that has collective applications. Once he has done this, these elements become less gargantuan.

The first UFO to appear is simply a "super-dragnet" Fort imagines floating through the sky, fishing for humans, but accidentally catching birds or sky-high fish. The next one is one which appeared, to the people who gave testimony, as something like a hot air balloon with a dragnet attached to it.

These are kind of silly, kind of menacing objects. But they fit into our earth. They don't cause an apocalypse. Because their function has been quantified correctly: they aren't phenomena of the individual unconscious. They are phenomena of the collective unconscious.

Fort soldifies this point of view by developing his theory with two quotes that make the goal of this process one of collective individuation, so to speak, rather than individual individuation:

"All things -- in our intermediate state -- are phantoms in a super-mind in a dreaming-state -- but striving to awaken to realness."

And:

"In a dreaming mind awakening is accelerated -- if phantoms in that mind know that they're only phantoms in a dream."

Again Fort moves through a discussion of visitors to this earth, and their communications with "certain esoteric ones" on this earth, before he gets into an extended discussion of what we would nowadays think of as UFOs.

Interestingly, at the very beginning of his discussion on UFOs, Fort gives two statements regarding the individual versus the collective, in terms of the positive versus the system or versus the Absolute, of which everything is a part.

In the first statement, Fort says that individual success depends on his ability to surrender, to a degree, to the collective. In the next statement, Fort says that a stoutly, resolutely individual person, isolated from the collective, will suffer -- but that this suffering and isolation are, in a way, a kind of success of their own:

"Success, as it is called -- though there is only success-failure in Intermediateness -- will, in Intermediateness, be yours proportionately as you are in adjustment with its own state, or some positivism, mixed with compromise and retreat."

And:

"Intermediatism, then, is recognition that our state is only a quasi-state: it is no bar to one who desires to be positive: it is recognition that he cannot be positive and remain in a state that is positive-negative. Or that a great positivist -- isolated -- with no system to support him -- will be crucified, or will starve to death, or will be put in jail and beaten to death -- that these are the birth-pangs of translation to the Positive Absolute."

My favorite writer, George Bernard Shaw, might say the same thing about Saint Joan.

After the dragnet UFOs, Fort's next in-depth UFO subject are triangular shadows which appear on clouds. These shadows were seen, by the people who gave the testimony, to travel in pairs, and to remain in rather fixed positions on the clouds they traveled with, regardless of the speed of the clouds or the position of the sun. The shadows also retained their distinctive shapes.

Fort asserts that these shadows are actually created by a UFO trailing two triangular appendages along with it. The UFO traveled relatively to the clouds, but the triangular appendages intercepted light and thus threw shadows onto the clouds. The light apprehended actually came from -- the UFO itself. But this central vehicle, as well as the actual appendages themselves couldn't be seen.

Why? Because the light from these objects wasn't reaching the earth. The light from this UFO "extended down only about to the clouds."

Fort asserts that some types of light act as a force. As the atmosphere gets denser, in lower altitudes, the light cannot get through it. The object would be seen from higher altitudes, but not at lower altitudes. Fort says, "Altogether, it may be conceivable that there are phenomena of force that are interpretable as light as far down as the clouds, but not in denser strata of air, or just the opposite of familiar interpretations."

But before Fort makes these conjectures, he equates this UFO with Melanicus, the vampire-devil planet that preceded the near-apocalyptic earthquakes brought on by whole planets entering our atmosphere. Now, Melanicus is not as huge as the moon. Melanicus is able to fit in our atmosphere, without causing catastrophies. But Melanicus can't be seen from ground level.

Nevertheless, Melanicus has approached the sphere of the earth, has entered the earth's consciousness -- even if only as a poltergeist-like, invisible being. Fort has constructed a reverse-theory of light to accommodate Melanicus' appearance. But now Melanicus -- or these elements of the collective unconscious which had been equated with imaginal planets like Melanicus -- will traverse, like the rains of matter, through Fort's imaginary, but conscious, realms of thought.

And here the UFOs take on the appearances of glowing wheels. They can only survive in earth's thin atmosphere for a short time. They've come from a much denser atmosphere -- i.e. the gelatinous areas that float around the earth. Sometimes these gelatinous areas, to Fort, are like dimensional portals. So ships that come through these gelatinous areas and end up in the earth's atmosphere are coming, not from some space in our sky, but from some other dimension.

But, like deep-sea fish brought up to the air, these ships, more accustomed to denser atmospthere, will disintegrate or explode if they're in our air for too long. So they generally dive into water for relief. Once their bodies have re-attained stability, they can fly up into the air again.

Up until this point, Fort has always remarked that conventional scientists were like deep-sea fish, because things from above always hit deep-sea fish on the head, but they never question whether there is another world from which all these things come from. But now these glowing wheels are the deep sea fish -- for a completely different reason. But the metaphor has completely passed from conventional scientists -- i.e. humans in a system -- i.e. the collective -- and into a symbole for the collective unconscious: the glowing wheels.

Fort assumes that these glowing wheels have generally fallen out of their natural atmosphere and into ours by accident, "because of miscalculations, or because of stresses of various kinds." Earlier on, Fort claimed that a lot of the rains of different matter from these gelatinous areas were caused by atmospheric disturbances. So it wouldn't be surprising if atmospheric disturbances also brought down vehicles, too.

Fort has a number of very beautifully described instances of ships encountering these glowing wheels as they travel just below the surface of the water. And he has some rather harrowing descriptions of these ships plunging into the water. But, as far as I remember, the count of these vehicles actually ascending back out of the water and back up into the sky is rather slim.

Fort also relates how the wheels, after descending a certain distance under the water, disappear. Fort says that this is because the light can only penetrate through a certain amount of density. So it's like the lights in the sky: after a certain amount of density, the objects just become invisible.

Later on, Fort describes whole strings of lights in the sky. Among these groupings of lights, Fort describes the following:

"Three luminous objects, of different sizes, the longest having an apparent area of about six suns. When first sighted, they were not very high. They were below clouds of an estimated height of about one mile. -- Different sizes, and of different susceptibilities to all forces of this earth and of the air."

From this I would guess that there is a whole constellation of these elements, surviving at all different atmospheric and marine levels of the earth. However, these objects never appear visible. The objects come to rest in an area of the atmosphere or marine body which is equal with the level of density that conceals the force of their light.

In other words, the various elements of the collective unconscious find their equilibrium points in the atmosphere -- which would stand functionally for the global consciousness. Collective unconscious and global conscious.

However, after describing the wheels, and before describing the strings of lights, Fort describes an encounter with one glowing wheel that has a stragely mandala-like shape.

Normally, in Jungian psychology, a mandala can be thought of as a circle divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant is a type of personality. The way the types of personality are arranged in the mandala show what kind of psychological development issues a personality might be dealing with. Normally the two bottom quadrants symbolize the unconscious elements of the personality, while the two top quadrants symbolize the conscious elements of the personality. And usually each of the four quadrants gets and equal amount of space.

But in the mandala described by the glowing wheel in Fort's data, three of the sections are all shoved to one small edge of the circle, while the fourth section takes up more than three-quarters of the space. In addition, this huge section has a hook-like shape sticking out of it, even piercing through one of the three small sections.

This mandala would express, I believe, the power of this one unconscious element. It's so strong it pierces through the central element of consciousness, and even extends outside of the circle of the mandala. This would be, I would guess, the extreme strength of the collective unconscious.

However, this mandala then develops, through Fort's narrative-manipulation of the data, into an animal like a stringray floating through the sky. But it's not just one animal. It's a whole bunch of these stingray-like animals, which Fort actually describes as round and dark brown. But he also says they have tails. He lists some strange phenomena worth noting:

"Occasionally one fell to the ground. When the place of a fall was examined, there was found a film, which soon dried and vanished. Often, when approaching the sun, three bodies seemed to link together, or were then seen to be linked together, in groups not exceeding eight, and, under the sun, they were seen to have tails three or four fathoms long. Away from the sun the tails were invisible. Whatever their substance may have been, it is described as gelatinous."

Fort later says that "The datum is important to us, here, as an indication of disruption in this earth's atmosphere -- dangers in entering this earth's atmosphere."

Fort is frightened at how his glowing wheels had developed into a rather strong, tailed mandala figure, and then, straightaway, into a whole cluster of apparently living beings, something like copper-colored stingrays.

He quickly turns away, back into the fall of matter from the sky. But, just as quickly, he returns to instances of these animal-like floating beings, with a description from North Wales of "a disk from which projected an orange colored body that looked like 'an elongated flatfish.'"

This description is part of a huge paragraph full of UFO sightings of all kinds. It's pretty magnificent -- there are so many different kinds of UFOs sighted. But I think what's happened here is that, as the collective unconscious becomes more and more able to find its various functions, it is also allowed to individualize -- so that different people can function from different perspectives of the collective unconscios -- or so that one person can function by using different perspectives of the collective unconscious.

As this section ends, Fort theorizes: "It is one of the most deep-rooted of positivist illusions -- that people are persons. ... So we personify no more -- but we super-personify. ... Autocracy of Successive Dominants -- which are not final -- but which approximate higher to individuality or self-ness, than do the human tropisms that irresponsibly correlate to them."

This statement of higher approximation to individuality is followed by Fort's long discussion of torpedo-shaped or cigar-shaped UFOs. It's interesting to note, in conjunction with this seemingly increased development of the different aspects of the collective unconscious, and the progress it's made on making the collective unconscious less of an earth-shattering entity and more of a part of "individuality or self-ness," that these UFOs are often seen by the witnesses to be about six feet long -- or around the size of a human being. This isn't always the case. But it's often so.

This moves into the discussion of the strings of lights in the sky. The discussion of the strings of lights in the sky eventually merge, passing back and forth between rather calm, placid, almost cold imagery, and very hot, explosive imagery. But this whole section ends with a very frightening tale of a railroad operator seeing a UFO in 1896. The interplay, up until this time, between the cold imagery and hot imagery often stirred up feelings of conflict. But this final story is starkly terrifying.

The operator saw, "in the darkness of a heavy rain, a light that appeared to be round, and of a dull rose color." The object "seemed to be about a foot in diameter."

The operator thought the object was "ball-lightning." However:

"His awareness of 'something else' is expressed in other parts of his letters, when he says that he has something to tell that is 'so strange that I should never have mentioned it, even to my friends, had it not been corroborated... so unreal that I hestiated to speak of it, fearing that it was some freak of the imagination."

What this "something else" was is never discussed. But it was obviously distressing to Fort, who basically ends chapter 26 with this story and begins chapter 27 with this quote:

"Our slippery brains.

Showers of blood.

Showers of blood.

Showers of blood."

Fort doesn't get very far in this chapter, in terms of data, beyond showers of blood and more evidence for dragons exploded in space by comets, and their flesh raining down on this planet, or deserts of blood that aviators will someday map.

But Fort does manage to summarize his Super-Geography well in this passage:

"Gelatinous regions, sulphurous regions, frigid and tropical regions: a region that has been the Source of Life relatively to this earth: regions wherein there is density so great that things from there, entering this earth's thin atmosphere, explode."

He also engages on his most ambitious statement on the collective unconscious. In this statement, the very solar system we live in is conscious. The collective unconscious is a universal consciousness. The solar system is just as much a part of our psychic functioning as are our individual conscious and our individual unconscious.

"Rains of blood that vein albuminous seas, or an egg-like composition in the incubation of which this earth is a local center of development -- that there are super-arteries of blood in the Genesistrine: that sunsets are consciousness of them: that they flush the skies with northern lights sometimes: super-embryonic reservoirs from which life-forms emanate --

"Or that our whole solar system is a living thing: that showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrages --"

The final chapter of this book is devoted entirely, except the final paragraph, to a discussion of tracks found in the snow in Devonshire. These tracks were explained away as a number of things -- including a kangaroo that had apparently escaped from a zoo. Some people said the tracks were from a demon.

Fort gave no answer for this. It wouldn't be expected that he would. The aliens have appeared back on his earth. And -- again -- they are invisible. The tracks are "cup-mark" shaped -- which Fort often mentions, not as footprints, but as a method of communication: electric beams shot into rocks, even though these marks appear in the snow. So there's a chance that this chapter is supposed to be a subtle reminder of communications from these regions, as opposed to an actual presence -- which may be what Fort is advocating.

Seeing through Evil Eyes -- Book of the Damned (Part Two)

(All quotes in this post come from the edition of Book of the Damned on the Project Gutenberg website. This edition is available for free at the link below.

Book of the Damned)

In Charles Fort's expression of a quasi-existent world, there are three kinds of evil. One kind of evil is the things that have been good becoming too old for their time. Another kind of evil is the future good, which is not quite yet ready to be accepted as the good. As Fort says:

"Evil is outlived virtue, or incipient virtue that has not yet established itself, or any other phenomena that is not seeming adjustment, harmony, consistency, with a dominant."

Fort's third description of evil is simply being the use by things of other things for which the first things are useful.

Fort's third description is made in direct reference to the extra-terrestrial beings for whom Fort believes we are property.

This third description of evil is, of course, only evil for the things that are being made use of. In other words, Fort believes that we would see the aliens who "own" us as evil simply because they think of us as their property.

Fort's Book of the Damned is famous for his quote, "I think we're property."

Fort's opinion in this matter is quite serious, and his evidence for anomalous phenomena occurring throughout human history is all directed to point to this expression of his.

Fort doesn't believe things. He "accepts" them. This is a hard thing to remember, as I type.

Fort "accepts" that earth used to be a No-man's land, fought over by beings from a number of different planets. But one alien race has managed to gain control of the planet from other alien races. That alien race fends off all other beings from our planet and has complete control over us.

Fort also accepts that there is a group of human beings that has had contact with this alien race for a long time. He first mentions this group as a "secret society," that chilling phrase of modern history, made even more spine tingling by contemporary conspiracy. Fort hypothesizes that for every anomalous phenomenon reported, one might be able to trace an investigator to the area.

"But," Fort asks, "what if (this investigator) had no anthropological, lapiderian, or meteorological affiliations -- but did belong to a secret society -- It is only a dawning credibility."

Fort later hypotesizes that this secret society might be akin to a cult, guiding humanity through various stages of development.

"All this has been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or overseers, directing us in accordance with instructions received -- from Somewhere else -- in our mysterious usefulness."

Fort has devised this idea, as he says, from the evidence he's found of anomalous phenomena. He has, he tells us again and again, compiled a mass of data. Accumulation of data, in Fort's expression, brings things from a phantomic or ghostly state into a state of substantiality. So as evidence piles up, the phenomena behind the evidence become less deniable and more substantial.

But as Fort compiles more and more data, he seems to have more and more ideas about what kind of existence this data justifies.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through this book. I'm actually surprised that I'm only this far along. I feel like I've studied my brains out. It's not a big book, and it's actually a lot of fun to read. But I feel like I've read a lot and hardly gotten anywhere.

Anyway, I'm about two-thirds of the way through this book, and already I've encountered the following planets:

Super-Romanimus -- The planet from which all the Romans came.

Super-Israelimus -- The planet from which all the Israelites came.

Azuria -- The planet from which all the Britains came. Azuria, actually, is a planet of blue people. The first Britains were actually blue -- they didn't paint themselves blue. Later on, the humanized Azurians no longer wanted the space-dwelling Azurians controlling them. So the Azurians left the planet. But before they left, they sent down huge rays of electricity to the earth, literally vitrifying a number of stone forts surrounding (but not in) England.

Monstrator -- A gigantic, spindle-shaped planet that has been seen on a number of occasions floating before the sun.

Melanicus -- Not really a planet at all, but a bat-shaped ship -- or a bat-shaped alien -- with wings hundreds of miles long. Actually, Fort's descriptions of Melanicus are so beautiful, I'll quote them:

"Vast dark thing with the wings of a super-bat, or jet-black super-construction; most likely one of the spores of the Evil One.

Fort clarifies the third conception of evil in this second quote on Melanicus:

"That upon the wings of a super-bat, (Melanicus) broods over this earth and over other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings, or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to tip -- a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which makes us useful. He obscures a star. He shoves a comet. I think he's a vast, black, brooding vampire."

Vulcan -- which is not a planet at all, but rather a whole bunch of objects which have passed between Mercury and the sun. But many astronomers, including one names Leverrier, have claimed these multiple phenomena to be one planet.

Fort claims that Leverrier believed in these phenomena being one planet so much that, when it was finally proved not to be so, he died. Fort says this was a "translation to the Positive Absolute," a kind of apotheosis a thing in the Fortean realm of quasi-existence (the plane on which we live) can experience when it holds so steadfastly to the things it identifies with that even total prove of its incongruity with reality will not shake its belief.

Incidentally, Fort also expresses that the stars in the sky are fixed, not moving. He says, as well, that stars are something like the souls of entities (human or otherwise) which have translated to the Positive Absolute. Fort says:

"Data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds and worlds in hordes; tremendous worlds and tiny worlds; some of them made of material like the material of this earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions made of iron and steel."

One super-celestial entity Fort does not mention in the cosmogoria above is the Super-Sargasso Sea, the vast, formless region in which sits the world of the Genesistrine, from which elements of our earth have been deposited, via sky-borne gelatinous regions, in free-fall.

These worlds seem to keep multiplying themselves. It's an incredible feat. And there's never a minute where I, as a reader, get bored with the experience. And I love all the data. But it seems so overwhelming that, as a new piece of data arises, Fort seems to invent a whole new story around it.

Fort claims to systematize. He even says that he's guilty of excluding, just as much as any of the scientists he berates are. But his universe just keeps on expanding. If a stone falls to the earth -- a new planet appears in Charles Fort's heaven!

I think there's an interesting quote of Fort's that connects both his tendency to multiply worlds and his belief in some kind of conspiracy theory involving humans and aliens:

"Unfortunately for myself, I look out widely but amorphously, indefinitely and heterogeneously. If I say I conceive of another world that is now in secret communication with certain esoteric inhabitants of this earth, I say I conceive of still other worlds that are trying to establish communications with all the inhabitants of this earth. I fit my notions to the data I find."

Fort has plenty of data. And plenty of notions.

But -- in spite of the fact that Fort says he looks out widely but amorphously, indefinitely and heterogeneously, there really is one point where his already bloating fantasy literally fragments. Fort himself commits an act of psycho-tropism, a mental "turning-away" from a subject matter. And not long after he does this, an image occurs in his work, which, although it is an objective piece of evidence, is truly an act of fragmentation.

This is the point where Fort speaks about poltergeists. He -- I should say -- barely speaks about poltergeists: only long enough to reject them.

However, for all the times he -- convincingly! -- shows how the rejections by conventional scientists of the reports of anomalous events are really only flimsy rejections, Fort manages to put up only a flimsy series of rejections against reports of poltergeists.

Fort gives two instances of all the windows of one or two houses being broken: one incident in Bermondsey in 1872, and one in Chiswick in 1841. In both of these incidents, people seem to have been puzzled as to where the stones could have come from. But Fort claims that the stones came from above.

This seems possible to me -- that the stones could have fallen from above. But to fly through windows, and at such an angle that they'd break furniture and even injure people inside the house -- seems like the stones would have to be coming from a much more horizontal than vertical angle.

Fort gives a few different types of conventional-scientific resistances to anomalous trauma, as one might think of it:

1. The thing was always there
2. The thing was swept up in a whirlwind and dropped down somewhere else
3. Complete disregard
4. Fraud
5. Identification with something else (without explaining how something else got there)
6. Amnesia

I would put Fort's resistance to this idea of poltergeists as a kind of counterpart to his second type of resistance. Fort says that if a bunch of stones come from somewhere, they have to come from the sky. They can't possibly have been thrown vertically by, say, poltergeists.

Fort admits that he's excluding, just as a scientist would, in this case. He claims, not long after rejecting poltergeists:

"I have always been in sympathy with the dogmatists and exclusionists: to seem to be is falsely and arbitrarily and dogmatically to exclude."

He then claims that he's rejecting poltergeists because he doesn't want the theories of his cosmology to burgeon into an unsustainable mass of concepts.

"So that this book shall approximate to form, or that our data shall approximate to organization, or that we shall approximate to intelligibility, we have to call ourselves back constantly from wandering off into infinitude."

However, I find it kind of interesting that Fort, right after rejecting the idea of poltergeists throwing rocks through windows, then goes on to rather drastically alter (in my opinion) his theory regarding the gelatinous areas in the sky -- these areas suddenly become vast icy areas in the sky.

Not only do these areas in the sky suddenly become vast icy areas instead of vast gelatinous areas -- but the earth itself becomes flat! The universe itself becomes flat. Fort says there may come a day when people will simply walk to Mars or Jupiter. Fort also envisions a future for aviators, where, at a certain altitude, they'll park their vehicles in something like a winter wonderland:

"Aviators of the future. They fly up and up. Then they get out and walk. The fishing's good: the bait's right there. They find messages from other worlds -- and within three weeks there's a big trade worked up in forged messages."

Not long after this, Fort says:

"We begin to suspect that this is not so much a book we're writing as a sanitarium for overworked coincidences."

But -- his coincidences, the ones that make his theories -- or the coincidences that the scientists are using to reject the evidence of anomalous phenomena?

What I find more interesting about the "Aviators of the future" quote is that Fort says mentions "forged messages," as if that's a big joke -- that the first thing aviators would be doing would be forging and selling messages after seeing how much demand there was for the actual messages.

This is interesting to me because in one of the sections preceding this one, Fort's topic of investigation was evidence of stones, wedges, other shaped objects, coins, and stone tablets -- all inscribed with characters that appeared to be letters. Fort asserted that these items were objects that had fallen to earth or been left on earth by alien races. But, largely, these items were alleged to be communications, either between aliens and earthlings or aliens and aliens on earth.

After this section, Fort gives a very clear description of Intermediateness, and the reasons that people have for resisting new phenomena in our current state of quasi-existence:

"Intermediateness, where only to "be" positive is to generate corresponding and, perhaps, equal negativeness. In our acceptance, it is, in quasi-existence, premonitory, or pre-natal, or pre-awakening consciousness of a real existence.

"But this consciousness of realness is the greatest resistance to efforts to realize or to become real -- because it is feeling that realness has been attained."

This section moves into a section of evidence relating to the visitation and even population of this earth by giants (or large beings) and fairies (or small beings). Two examples of fairies were extremely interesting to me. One was the phenomenon of "fairy crosses," or formations, in different parts of the world, of small cemetery-like areas of crosses. Another was a cave in Edinburgh, where in 1836, two boys found seventeen very small coffins, with wooden dolls inside.

This section is now followed by another philosophical statement by Fort on how Intermediateness attempts to reach Universal Reality -- or translation to the Positive Absolute -- or Localization of the Universal -- through the two processes of attraction and repulsion.

"'Everything' in Intermediateness is not a thing, but is an endeavor to become something -- by breaking away from its continuity, or merging away with all other phenomena -- is an attempt to break away from the very essence of a relative existence and become absolute -- if have not surrendered to, or become part of, some higher attempt:

"To this process there are two aspects: -- Attraction, or the spirit of everything to assimilate all other things -- if it have not given in and subordinated to -- or have not been assimilated by -- some higher attempted system, unity, entity, harmony, equilibrium -- and -- Repulsion, or the attempt of everything to disregard or exclude the unassimilable."

In other words, Fort, coming into the section where he rejects poltergeists, basically equates the process of individuation from the Absolute with the scientific processes of skepticism. But, in the first third of this book, Fort has equated the process of individuation from the Absolute with "abrupt transitions" from Nature, which assert their Positiveness in this world by defying the very systems wishing to defy their existence.

So -- Fort rejects the poltergeist explanation of the evidence of thrown stones. And, suddenly, the gelatinous areas in the sky become watery areas. The gelatinous areas seem to disappear.

Not long after this, Fort compares current scientific theories to "rag dolls that keep infants occupied and noiseless." He says there's nothing wrong with this. But the problem occurs at "the arrival of rag dolls into maturity."

This idea of rag dolls growing into maturity reminds me of the miniature coffins found by the two boys in Edinburgh. There were wooden dolls inside those coffins. Those dolls, though not rag dolls, hadn't just grown into maturity: they'd grown into old age and death.

But, in the normal course of life, I don't think society would be affected one way or another if a rag doll grew into maturity. In fact -- I think, for some people, rag dolls do grow into maturity. What would be of more harm (in some people's minds -- certainly not mine!) would be if the infant didn't grow out of its infancy. If the rag doll grew while the infant did not.

I think this is the image Fort has, while his metaphor disguises this image for him. Remember that, after he mentions the inscribed stones and coins, he speaks about a new consciousness being "pre-natal" in humanity.

Right after this consciousness is "pre-natal," it becomes composed of races of giants and fairies. Right after these alien beings, who, as far as I can tell, were completely missing, un-present from the earth, being sending writings -- actual writings -- though completely indecipherable -- to Fort's planet, they suddenly appear. But they appear as fairies and giants!

Fort is suddenly unable -- it seems to me -- and I don't know anything about Charles Fort -- so I'm not saying this is a knowledgeable theory -- to deal with actually having beings on this imagined planet of his.

So Fort, through his narrative-manipulation of the data -- causes the beings to disappear. Before he causes them to disappear, he chants a magico-philosophical spell at the giants and narratives: he excludes them, by empowering the scientific dogma for his own purposes. He removes the law of "abrupt transition" from the process of the Absolute becoming the Individual -- and he replaces it with Attraction and Repulsion -- under which fall all the processes of conventional-scientific resistance he'd previously mentioned.

But -- then -- once he has caused his giants and fairies to disappear (I suppose that would be a psycho-tropism), he is left with psychic force in this world of his -- this world of his is this world of his data. And this psychic force still has some sort of humanoid characteristics. But it doesn't have a form. It's invisible again. It's a poltergeist.

But as soon as it acts -- through the data -- Fort has to bind it. The stones can't have been thrown by a poltergeist. They had to have been dropped from the anti-gravity areas in the sky. And so -- the psychic force that began in the sky -- in Fort's description of his world to us -- through his narrative-manipulation of these genuine relations of anomalous experience -- has gone back to the sky.

I think there is a process here. Fort spent quite some time in his book talking about things dropping to the earth. In fact, after he'd gone through his relation of all the natural phenomena falling to earth from this Genesistrine region, through the anti-gravity gelatinous regions of the sky, he suddenly starts giving us evidence of stone objects like rudimentary artifacts falling to the earth.

Then these artifacts start being inscribed with things. But -- suddenly -- Fort's evidence starts finding things buried in the earth. Instead of things falling to the earth, Fort's evidence starts showing up as things -- things of a higher level development, by the way, things like nails, masks, and so forth -- being found buried in the earth.

There is a psychic development here. Objects from the unconscious couldn't reach Fort from the earth -- because he had such a resistance to the earth. But after so much "communication" from the earth, Fort was finally able to start finding objects buried in the earth. The objects themselves moved from being natural objects, vegetation, animals, or refuse, to suddenly being rudimentary artifacts. Then, more developed artifacts were coming up from the earth.

Finally the objects really began communicating with Fort, through the inscribed objects. But the objects led to actually embodied presences of giants and fairies -- or at least their implication. In fact, there was only the idea that these giants and fairies existed.

In the second third of this book, the closest I got to seeing the giants was -- giant bones in the American Museum of Natural History, which Fort says "have been reconstructed into terrifying but 'proper' dinosaurs."

In the second third of this book, the closest I got to seeing the fairies was -- the fairy coffins the boys found in Edinburgh.

So -- Fort, through his narrative-manipulation of the genuine evidence, still didn't even allow these primordially humanoid psychic forces to be completely embodied before he once again banished them to invisibility.

Although it's interesting to note that the fairy-doll still survives in metaphorical form -- threatening to grow up into a "mature" rag-doll, while Fort's side of the metaphor apparently still remains a little baby. (Again -- I don't have any problem with remaining a little baby. I think it's terrific.)

Now Fort has banished his psychic forces from embodiment. He then banishes them from having even the human force of poltergeists.

What's the first thing that happens? The gelatinous region in the sky turns into water. It then stops sending down human-like artifacts. No more coins, masks, nails, wedges, axes, etc. It starts sending down fish and frogs again -- fish and frogs were all that seemed to be sent down from the gelatinous areas, sometimes, in the first third of the book.

After this happens, the next thing to occur is that the watery area in the sky turns into -- ice! Ice starts falling from the sky -- not hail (which had fallen from the sky in the first third of the book), but actual chunks, sometimes even huge blocks, of ice! And sometimes frogs and fish are actually embedded in the ice!

Fort's emotional state is freezing back up -- because of this psycho-tropism he had regarding the psychic forces he was allowing to come forth (in his narrative-manipulation of this genuine data of anomalous experiences).

This ice then develops into large disks of ice floating in the sky. The large disks of ice even eclipse the sun -- which is interesting, considering the following sections of the book are all about bodies being tracked travelling across the sun, the moon, and other planets.

At one point, the disk of ice even fragments -- suddenly bursts into pieces.

Fort quotes the Monthly Weather Review, regarding an event that took place on June 3, 1894, in Portland, Oregon:

"(The sight) gave the impression of a vast field of ice suspended in the atmosphere, and suddenly broken into fragments about the size of the palm of the hand."

For the time being, I would say, Fort's communication has been cut off, at such a close distance, at least, with these unconscious elements which have been exchanging images with him through Fort's own narrative-manipulation of data.

Fort sees an icy area in the sky -- but it no longer has any real integrity. It's sagging in the middle, and it's even forming icicles -- melting. Fort tries to justify this with a philosophical invention:

"A vast field of aerial ice -- it is inter to this earth's gravitation -- but by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to the earth, and is susceptible to gravitation -- by cohesion with the main mass, this part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, and forms icicles -- then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes FALLS IN FRAGMENTS that are protrusive with icicles."

I capitalized the "FALLS IN FRAGMENTS" for emphasis. This is not a whole disk of ice. It's fragmented.

From this, Fort moves directly to a discussion -- which is as far as I've gotten for this post -- and it doesn't show any signs of stopping soon, where I stopped -- of sightings of celestial bodies passing in front of the sun, moon, and planets.

But right as Fort begins to discuss these far away objects (he moved them there himself, through his narrative-manipulation, after their closeness to his own psychic earth became too strong for him to handle), he makes mention of the Spirit of the Era. This, in Fort's theory, is the greater quasi-reality of which we are all a part.

All scientists adhere to a greater system of science. And this science is a product of the age. The age is charged with the Spirit of the Era -- which is the greater attempt at Localization of the Universal, to which, basically, everything in our quasi-existence surrenders itself.

"The dominant spirit of the era -- to which all minds had to equilibrate or be negligible, unheard, submerged. -- The system that was growing up independently of all (individual) astronomers."

In my opinion, Fort has been frightened by his own imagery. I believe he had to insist, at the beginning of his book that everything was falling from the sky (though a lot of it does really seem to have been falling from the sky!) was because he was afraid of the earth, the Dionysian, the feminine, whatever you want to call it. When he got over his fear, elements of the unconscious came to earth, showed up in the earth. But they took on too much power, and Fort had to banish them.

Banishing these forces from earth again, Fort suddenly saw the benefit of excluding things from his system. He started seeing things through the scientists' eyes. He now saw how a psychic life could benefit from excluding things that frightened it, like scientists excluded things that it couldn't handle.

Again, Fort paints a picture of a science that is false, a bubble which is about to pop. But it doesn't pop. Because now it is actually held together by this exclusionary tactic:

"Astronomy and inflation: and by inflation we mean expansion of the attenuated. Or that the science of Astronomy is a phantom-film distended with myth-stuff -- but always our acceptance that it approximates higher to substantiality than did the system that preceded it."

Before this time, Fort had mentioned planets. But the planets he mentioned did not have the personalities that they have after this point. Super-Romanimus, Super-Israelimus, and Azuria are all planets with people on them -- super-missionaries, etc.

But, now, suddenly, the planets themselves are the things with personality -- again, due to Fort's narrative-manipulation of the genuine data.

The first planet that begins to appear is Vulcan -- the most fragmented (so far) of all Fort's creations, but a planet so powerful that it actually manages to kill one of his characters. Leverrier makes all the wrong guesses about Vulcan, thinking it is one planet, when it is really a whole lot of different planets. He's so disappointed by this fact that he dies.

Vulcan is, in one sense, as far away from Fort as it can possibly be. But even at that range, the psychic forces are still felt so powerfully by Fort that they have the power to kill him.

Fort says that, "In a way, at this point occurs the crisis of our whole book."

I'd agree with him there. He continues, "Formulas are against us."

That's interesting. But how does Fort follow up, *after* he introduces another planet -- breaking up and then coming back to his Vulcan story?

"Our acceptance is that Leverrier never did formulate observations. -- That he picked out observations that could be formulated. -- That of this type are all formulas."

If Fort were looking at Leverrier as a part of his own psychic life, he'd see how he had banished the psychic giants and fairies from earth and sent them out to the distant reaches of space. But how this banishment of observations that could not be formulated actually managed to kill him, or to kill him in the character of Leverrier.

Nevertheless, as soon as Fort recognizes that he's gone too far by sending his giants and fairies (or his Monstrator and Vulcans?) all the way out to the sun, he already begins to draw them back in!

I think this is an incredible statement of Fort's psychic strength. And it is interesting that at this point, Fort talks about the physical evolution of life from the reptilian state to the mammalian state -- which I think Jung would attest is a symbol of the healthy psychic development of the personality:

"If, in an embryo, some cells should not live up to the phenomena of their era, the others will sustain the scheduled appearances. Not until an embryo enters the mammalian stage are cells of the reptilian stage false cells."

Again, Fort speaks of a reversal of action. Obviously he experienced a severe psycho-tropism -- a repulsion. His emotions froze, went all the way to the sun, and were powerful enough to kill the image of Leverrier within him. But he's hoping that psychic energy does not have to work according to what people nowadays accept as immutable physical laws:

"Some day some BRAIN will conceive a way of beating Newton's third law -- if every reaction, or resistance, is, or can be, interpretable as stimulus instead of resistance -- if this could be done in mechanics, there's a way open here for someone to own the world."

I emphasized "BRAIN" to make it clear that Fort was talking, at least partially, about a psychic process. Also -- "own the world" would mean take control of one's own world, instead of being property. It would mean allowing the personality to individuate.

Fort goes on to discuss his concept of "dirigible worlds," or planets and super-constructions (world-sized spaceships) without orbits, which can conduct themselves wherever they wish to go. In other words, Fort's pyschic energies may have been banished all the way to the sun. But they can direct themselves, as "dirigible worlds," back to the earth.

Here, Fort makes the extremely exciting statement: "The two great commandments: -- Thou shalt not break Continuity. -- Thou shalt try."

He follows it up with this statement, a kind of condensation of his understanding of the psychic process he's been through so far:

"It is the system that pulls back its variations, as the earth is pulling back the Matterhorn. It is the system that nourishes and rewards, and also freezes out life with the chill of disregard."

But Fort wishes to break free from the system -- and even sees that drifting too far into the system would be a loss of his identity. But he wishes to retain his identity. So he's willing to let his psychic life come back to him, to his "own world," this Fortean realm of imagination compounded of genuine data of anomalous phenomena.

It is at this point that Melanicus -- the Satanic planet described above -- becomes known.

Melanicus and Monstrator may have been planets with personalities. But Melanicus really is a personality. Melanicus is the Devil with wings as large as a planet.

Fort begins discussing the problem of evil at this point -- and, in my opinion, seems to be frightened of a too-humanized image of his pyschic life. He seems to flee from the image of Melanicus, and he drifts into a horribly convoluted discussion of philosophy.

But what's interesting in this discussion is that, whereas before Fort had always made reference to the Absolute as the Absolute -- in his philosophizing, anyway -- he now has a place in his philosophy for the Negative as well as the Positive Absolute.

"It would seem that Intermediateness is a relation between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute. But the Absolute cannot be related."

"It seems thinkable that the Positive Absolute can, by means of Intermediateness, have a quasi-relation, or be only quasi-related, or be the unrelatd, in final terms, or, at least, not be the related, in final terms."

Moving from a discussion of evil, through a discussion of the Negative Absolute (which, I'm pretty sure Fort has brought into his *philosophical* discussions for the first time), Fort now makes this comment about free will:

"In Intermediateness, there is only the paradoxical: that we're free to do what we have to do."

Suddenly, Fort's unconscious is communicating with him again -- through evidence collected of "cup marks," which he takes to be something like electronic lettering actually cut into stone faces, all over the world, "except in the far North, I think." In other words, except in the place full of ice.

At one point these "cup marks" are found all over a Chinese plaza. The people there assume a Devil (Melanicus?) made the marks.

Suddenly -- Fort moves from these communications into Angels -- bright hordes of Angels, which Fort assumes are making a crusade.

How quickly Fort's psyche has moved! It was all the way over in Mercury. Then it was flying to earth in the form of the Devil-Vampire-Planet Melanicus. Now it's already hovering over the earth in the guise of a multiplicity of angels!

"Hordes upon hordes of them. -- Beings massed like the clouds of souls, or the commingling whiffs of spirituality, or the exhalations of souls that Dore pictured so often."

But -- it's obvious here -- that Fort's major form of defense, as it has been all this time, is to fragment identity. He had to fragment his Devil Melanicus to make it into "safe" angels.

Fort seems to be afraid here of the control that the angels would have over him if they were all transmuted back into Melanicus:

"I should say that now we're under cultivation: that we're conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it to all our own nobler and higher instincts."

So the aliens, whose "property" we are, are cultivating us. If Fort weren't afraid (who wouldn't be afraid? I'd be afraid!), he'd realize that the Devil was involved in cultivating his soul. But Fort has to fragment the personality of the Devil into the multiplicity of the angels. He knows he's deluding himself in this.

Fort then relates -- a multiplicity -- of light and dark bodies that cause various levels of obscuration of the sun and moon. Sometimes these bodies are light, then dark, or dark, then light.

Suddenly Melanicus appears again! Fort seems to have allowed Melanicus to re-integrate into one figure. But first Fort asks the reader if *he's* forgotten Melanicus -- as if someone reading Paradise Lost could forget the Devil!

But Fort seems, again, to be serious about allowing the communications to return to him -- and, possibly, for personalities even to return to his earth. He understands the importaince of his work.

"Acceptance either way calls not for mere revision but revolution in the science of astronomy."

However, I think Fort -- who was really brave to let the giants and fairies come to his earth -- now realizes that, since he's living with one psychic structure, he can only develop an integrated personality by changing his currently dominant psychic structure with a different one. And that will take time and effort.

"All intellection is associative -- or that we remember that which correlates with a dominant."

And:

"Our own expression on evolution by successive dominants and their correlates."

However, the following quote is the most interesting statement by Fort so far. He seems to believe that he must change his psychic structure, or else he loses a chance at maintaining the integrity of his personality. But he also makes a comment about the moon -- where Melanicus seems to be hovering at this moment, that is also quite interesting.

"The point in Intermediatism here is: -- Not that to adapt to the conditions of quasi-existence is to have success in quasi-existence, but is to lose one's soul -- But is to lose "one's" chance of attaining soul, self, or identity."

"One indignation quoted from Proctor (an excluding scientist refuting the vision of swarms of angels) interest us: 'What happens on the moon may at any time happen to this earth.' -- That is just the teaching of this department of Advanced Astronomy."

This is the point where Fort gives his descriptions of evil as outlived virtue and incipient virtue.

Fort has developed his sense of evil from one of basically being possessed by the devil to one of either using an outmoded psychic structure in an attempt to integrate his personality, or using a too-young psychic structure in an attempt to integrate his personality.

I'll end this post by letting Fort have the last word. In one quote, he gives a good view of exclusion in science, and why conventional scientists are necessary to the world. In its plain sense, I think it's very good (though kind of cynical). But it also shows the point of view of Fort -- as needing a reinforcing element from his old psychic structure while his new one is developing.

It's also interesting to note that in the first quote, Fort again mentions a "shadow," which is how he recently described the planet-Devil-Vampire Melanicus.

The second quote shows that the new psychic structure, or "new dominant," is developing.

"It's bad for trade to have an intense darkness come upon an unaware community and frighten people out of their purchasing values. -- But if an obscuration be foretold, and if it then occur -- may seem a little uncanny -- only a shadow -- and no one who was about to buy a pair of shoes runs home panic-stricken and saves the money."

"But -- if we are in harmony with a new dominant, or spirit of a new era, in which Exclusionism must be overthrown; if we have data of many obscurations, not only upon the moon, but upon our own earth, as convincing of vast intervening bodies, usually invisible, as is any regularized, predicted eclipse. -- One looks up at the sky. -- It seems incredible that, say, at the distance of the moon, there could be, but be invisible, a solid body, say, the size of the moon."

Slimy Dimensional Portals -- Book of the Damned (Part One)

(Note: For anybody looking to read more on Abraham Cowley, I haven't stopped investingating his works yet. I will return with more information on Cowley very soon. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the post below.

Also, a free, downloadable copy of Charles Fort's Book of the Damned is available at Project Gutenberg. Below is a link to the HTML version of the text.

Book of the Damned)

I first became interested in Charles Fort's Book of the Damned after re-reading Stephen King's book Firestarter a few years back. Stephen King mentioned that he was inspired to write about the paranormal ability of psychically creating fire after reading one of Charles Fort's books. It may not have been Book of the Damned, but Wild Talents.

I'd already been reading paranormal literature somewhat seriously for a little over a year by that time. My really serious reading of psi literature began with the works of Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, notably their book Mind-Reach. From there I'd gone on to the works of J.B. and Louisa Rhine, Upton Sinclair, and all the members of the Society for Psychical Research.

But the works of Charles Fort, based on what Stephen King had said about them, sounded really interesting to me. They seemed to have a Lovecraftian element of darkness and dirtiness that some of the other paranormal writings didn't seem to have.

I tried to read Book of the Damned a few times. But, for some reason or another, I hadn't really managed to make it through. The examples throughout the book always seemed really interesting -- very different from the usual stories in psychical research books, in that, instead of revolving around a human drama, were just like a phantasmagoria of slimy objects falling to earth.

But I was never able to latch onto a through-line for the examples, and, absent the human drama of the overall story, without some other kind of through-line, I just wasn't able to keep my mind on everything that was going on.

The thing is, with Book of the Damned, I think Fort has three or four separate arguments, all going on at once. He develops them a bit at a time, weaving them all in and out of each other. So this time I've decided to take the book slowly and carefully, trying to pick out the different arguments, and giving each of them a through-line. We'll see if I actually end up doing that.

I believe that I've gotten about a third of the way through the book -- while I'm reading other things. I am still currently working my way through Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and I'm working on getting some more stuff on Cowley together.

So -- I have a lot of through-lines I'm working with, too. Ugh...

I guess one thing that interested me about Charles Fort after I learned more about him was that he spent hours and hours at the New York Public Library (The Schwarzman Library, the big one, with the lions in front of it), poring through scientific and other kinds of journals, searching out examples of anomalous occurrences. The idea that Charles Fort studied for hours and hours at the NYPL was always endearing to me, since, when I first got to New York, that was what I did.

But there are two other great intellectual figures who did the same thing: Karl Marx and George Bernard Shaw. George Bernard Shaw is my favorite writer of all time. But Karl Marx is, I think, the one with most in common with Charles Fort. Karl Marx, like George Bernard Shaw, spent a lot of hours studying in the British Museum reading room in London.

This isn't unique -- in fact, one of my favorite episodes in Virginia Woolf's book Jacob's Room is Jacob's observations of all the people who are studying in the British Museum. One girl Jacob notes is particularly hilarious: a girl who is trying to find the mystical relation between color and sound, or color and music, or something. I didn't get it when I first read it, but I think that's actually a reference to Annie Besant.

Annie Besant is one of the Theosophists -- a group of mystics who started up in the late 19th century under the tutelage of Madame H.P. Blavatsky. Besant had herself been an activist in the cause of Socialism in the 1880s. She then became a Theosophist, and, with another Theosophist, Charles W. Leadbeater, wrote a number of very interesting books on Theosophy, including books on Clairvoyance, Astral Projection, and Thought-Forms.

The book on Thought-Forms is basically a book describing auras. Auras are seen, according to Besant and Leadbeater, by the astral eye, a kind of psychic vision. The visions of the astral eye can then be translated into a physical drawing of a certain form and color.

There are plenty of illustrations of various auras. Different emotional states are related to different aura shapes and aura colors. The book ends with a discussion of the emotional states producing and produced by music, and how those emotional states show up when the music is actually played.

I personally accept the tenets of Theosophy as approaching something like a sympathy with my own feelings regarding mysticism and spirituality. I also believe that Theosophy has a thing or two in common with String Theory, even though I don't know enough about either Theosophy or String Theory to really talk about it.

But, seeing the drawings of the "auras" of a symphony, I can't help but feel that some people would be justified in smirking at them. And I think Virginia Woolf's portrait of the girl trying to find the relation between color and music, or color and sound, or whatever, was kind of making fun of Annie Besant -- even though Annie Besant wasn't a girl at that time.

But the main point is that a lot of people studied at the British Museum, and a lot of people study at the NYPL. Well, what connected Karl Marx and Charles Fort? Well, Karl Marx, who was already rather pumped up intellectually on Hegelianism and Economics, was going to the libraries, day after day, and looking through history books and journals to find more and more examples of the exploitation of, and the effects of the exploitation of, Labor in the production of surplus value.

Karl Marx gathered tons and tons of real-life, historical data, both from established history texts, and from newspapers, periodicals, and journals, to make his point. And what was he really trying to do? He was trying to show, as far as I can tell (and I do not know a lot about Marx -- or anything -- at all), that the sole element of importance in value creation was Labor. But the system of Capitalism doesn't give Labor the compensation due to it.

The persistence in not putting as much value into Labor as comes out of Labor leads to an imbalance in the system. This leads to economic crises. The persistences and the crises can be illustrated. And the living conditions of the people involved in Labor can be illustrated. A mass of phenomena -- of evidence is gathered, and it should be able to speak for itself. However, it may also be arranged so that arguments may be developed through the illustrations.

This is my understanding of Marx. And I have to be honest with you: it's been twelve years since I've read Marx. I only got through the first volume of Capital. I've tried to get through the second volume a couple of times and failed miserably each time.

But if my understanding of Marx is correct, then the similarity between Marx and Charles Fort is very obviously. At the same time as Marx was "turning Hegel on his head," Charles Fort was perhaps drawing out some of Hegel's monistic arguments and amplifying them with arguments which, to me, seem interestingly like those of Bertrand Russell and Sigmund Freud.

But both Marx and Fort were using newspapers, periodicals, journals, and history books to gather huge masses of evidence, which they felt would be arguments simply by their own weight.

Now -- one thing I like about Charles Fort which I think Fort has but Marx doesn't, is Fort's quality as what's lately been called an outsider artist. The supreme outsider artist, in my opinion, is Lee Brodie, who painted incredible works and sold her works on the steps of the Chicago Museum of Art.

But the supreme figure of outsider art is Henry Darger, who painted magical pictures of little girls and transsexual, or hermaphroditic girl-boys and wrote a gigantic, still-unpublished novel about these children, called In the Realms of the Unreal. Darger actually created a "bound" novel by writing on papers, then pasting the papers to the pages of phone books. He put together a few books this way -- by pasting his book into phone books!

Henry Darger and Charles Fort have a lot in common. Charles Fort and Karl Marx also have a lot in common. I'd like to see an exploration of those two relations.

But the basis of Charles Fort's studies does seem to have come, first, from a Hegelian belief in monism (if that is what Hegel believes in -- I'll admit that, for all the times I've tried to read Hegel, the best I've ended up with is a couple small glimmers of ideas). But Fort and Marx also seem to owe their spirit of going out and looking for data, not to Darwin, as might be expected, but, again, to Hegel.

The philosophical basis for Fort's work begins with the idea that the only Absolute existence in the Universe is an underlying oneness -- a Monism. Everything arises from this underlying oneness, and nothing ever completely separates itself from it.

Fort argues that if anything actually were to separate itself completely from the underlying oneness, it would become an Absolute in itself. Though this end result seems to be an impossibility for Fort, it is also what every form of existence is aiming at.

A particular existence, which, considered apart from the Absolute, is really only a quasi-existence, first attempts to free itself completely from the Absolute by creating a dividing line between itself and the Absolute. This could be considered something like a body, or a form, in physical entities.

But the perception also attempts to free either itself or an object of perception from the Absolute in the same way: by drawing lines around it, by creating a dividing line between one object and all other objects, thus allowing that one thing to be a particular.

The perception may attempt to free itself by freeing its entire sphere of objects of perception from all other objects of perception. In so doing, the perception creates the conception of something like a world, or a material universe. The better attempts at doing this will allow for all cause and effect to take place within the sphere of the world -- the line drawn between this world and the Absolute will be so sharp that nothing else will be able to get in from the Absolute.

In order for the particular thing, be it a world of objects perceived, or a single physical form or entity, to be as free from any cause and effect system as possible, it would need to have a highly complex system of cause and effect within itself, thus being as self-sufficient as possible. The higher a thing has evolved, the more complex are its internal systems of cause and effect.

But no system can ever be separate from the Absolute. Every physical entity is acted on by external forces, every world is acted on by forces from another world, and so forth. And every physical entity is defined, not only by its form, or the lines it seems to draw around itself, but by its relations to other objects. So while entities develop themselves and become able to achieve more of a complex stability, they never cut themselves off from external relations.

In fact, according to Fort, all motion comes from an entity receiving external forces and bringing its system back, as close as it can, to a state of equilibrium. So without external relations, no entities would be put into states of imbalance, move, and achieve states of equilibrium, which are sometimes complex, more highly developed states.

A state of being totally separate from the Absolute would be called a state of Positivity. And, just as entities attempt to be totally Positive, through excluding the rest of the Absolute from themselves, knowledge does the same thing.

Fort argues that Science is no different from the growth of a plant, or the set-up of a department store, or the development of a nation. All of these things are forms of organization, including some parts of the Absolute and excluding other parts of the Absolute. But, since all these organizations are still a part of the Absolute, and still related to the Absolute, they will still be affected by external relations, external forces.

Thought itself is a process of including and excluding: figuring out what things to include and what things to exclude. Fort defines intelligence as the state of disequilibrium in a mind, when it is re-configuring its system of inclusion and exclusion and re-attaining a state as close to equilibrium as it can.

Once a mind has re-attained a working system of equilibrium, it generally works by the use of mechanical reflex, which, despite what conventional wisdom calls it, is not, according to Fort, intelligence.

Science is a system of functional equilibrium. But it's not really a system of thought, as it stands in between periods of great discoveries or difficulties: it's a system of equilibrium, relatively self-contained, operating according to sufficiently predictable theories of cause and effect.

Just like other systems of organization, however, Science can attain higher and higher levels of organization, or evolution. But it can only attain these higher levels of organization if it accepts its relations to external forces. In this sense, Fort says that belief hinders development, while acceptance aids it.

Belief is a kind of intertia, working only on the internal principles of a system, while acceptance works with the internal principles of a system, always allowing in new principles, and, when it cannot process them with the present internal principles, works to create new principles.

However, the scientific system is, for human culture, anyway, stuck in a kind of intertia, where the mechanized reflexes by which we determine and predict cause and effect within the system are so embedded in our behavior that we almost act as if we are hypnotized into not seeing that anything might not actually fit with the internal principles of our current organized system.

Thus, when an external force or external influence occurs, Science, according to Fort, either acts as if it hasn't happened, or acts as if it can be explained away, through the internal principles of the current organized system. Charles Fort says that all investigation presumes an outcome from the outset, despite attempts at objectivity. This is due to the hypnosis which is a consequence of living in the inertia of such an established system as Science.

However, all things are related, and, in the Absolute, no thing (no thing really exists at all, apart from the Absolute) is different from any other thing. So the appearance of one thing from the gradual chain of cause and effect, while acceptable according to the provisional, internal principles of a system, is not the only way a thing can come into existence.

In fact, Fort explains, a system attempting to achieve greater independence from the Absolute will do so through abrupt transitions. These abrupt transitions could be within the overall system of objects. But often, there may be a part of the system attempting its own independence from the Absolute, which would, then, include independence from the system of which it is a part.

If this part were to draw on the Absolute to create an "abrupt transition," it could, conceivably draw on any part of it, thus creating or bringing into local existence, any manner of matter, familiar or unfamiliar to the overall system, or to the coordinate of that system in which the particular within that system is located.

So the paranormal phenomena that Fort presents to us, at least in the first part of his book, are based on a couple of facets of this "abrupt transition" idea.

The first facet of this "abrupt transition" idea is simply that earthlings aren't alone in the universe. So the "abrupt transition" would be a kind of upset to our expectations (or the expectations some of us earthlings have) of being alive on the only planet in the Universe which can support intelligent life.

Fort actually argues that spaceships, which he calls "aerial super-constructions," have, for centuries or millennia, or what have you, been travelling out among the stars, doing such things as propelling themselves, burning fuel, conducting commerce, transporting goods, and committing acts of warfare. All the accidents of these activities have ended up in materials, even body parts, being thrown into space.

After years and years, or after a not very long time at all, some of the refuse from these exploits have worked their way down to earth. This usually occurs in the form of rains -- material actually falling from the sky.

However, these materials falling from the sky are often accompanied by two other phenomena: a storm, and gelatinous material.

The gelatinous material is particularly puzzling, though it occurs in a lot of the examples that Fort gives in his book. So Fort has created a theory for this gelatinous material. He says that there are patches in the earth's atmosphere where gravity has no effect: these areas are basically gravity-inert.

Fort argues that this could be possible, as there are fields of magnetic neutrality a certain distance from magnetic sources. However, Fort seems to think of gravity-inert areas in the earths atmosphere as horizontal, like land masses, rather than vertical, or altitude-derived. Fort also seems to believe that these patches in the earth's atmosphere can move around.

And in these patches of the earth's atmosphere that are gravity-inert, there are also patches of a kind of clear, gelatinous material. These gravity-inert, gelatinous patches in the earth's atmosphere can, on occasion, gather on material from spaceships as the material falls to the earth. But sometimes the gelatinous patches can hold onto the material for a long time, long enough, even, for the material to decay. Then a storm or some other kind of atmospheric disturbance can shake the suspended matter down to the earth.

Fort dwells on this idea for a while before moving on the second facet of his theory, which I think is more plausible -- even though it is hard for me to agree with his idea of gelatinous patches floating around in gravity-inert portions of the atmosphere.

In the second facet of this "abrupt transition" idea, there is something like a parallel Universe, a neighboring dimension, which Fort calls the Super-Sargasso Sea. Within the Super-Sargasso Sea, there is some other place, which could be a planet like ours, or just a vast void, to which Fort gives the name Genesistrine.

Fort proposes that all life on Earth has come from the Genesistrine -- that, as Earth has made more and more attempts at becoming a more "real," more independently organized system, the increasing elements of organization have been brought into it through an "abrupt transition" from the Genesistrine.

In other words, things fall out of that dimension and into our dimension. And the portals for the dimension slip are these clear, gelatinous patches in the gravity-inert sections of our atmosphere.

So things can make a transition, and one would assume that if animals were to contribute to the increasing complexity of our Earthly system, they'd need to be alive. So there are rains from the sky of living things, such as frogs and fish. However, there are also, often, rains from the sky of dead and rotting fish, as well as torn up pieces of flesh, and blood.

Fort seems to believe that sometimes things come from the Genesistrine as if they were transported out of a lake, with water or mud, on Genesistrine, as if it were a planet. He also seems to believe that sometimes things come from the Genesistrine as if this area produced nothing but, say, a certain species of snail and then slipped them through the dimensional portal.

Fort also seems to believe that, even if things come from the Genesistrine to the gelatinous area, they could stay there a long time. In fact, Fort implicitly states that the only way anything can be shaken out of these gelatinous patches in the sky is if there is an atmospheric disturbance, which is why, he says, almost all the phenomena he records are accompanied by rain storms, hail storms, or lightning.

At one point, however, Fort seems to state that there is a kind of blank-space between the Genesistrine and the gelatinous area. It seems that this would be the place where things remain, and that an atmospheric disturbance shakes open the gelatinous area, allowing the things trapped in this sort of purgatory finally to fall to earth. This could happen with no lapse of time for the transition from Genesistrine -- and so living things would fall to earth alive. Or it could happen after a long time-lapse, in which case things would fall to earth dead, and in a state of decomposition.

Fort seems to believe that in the early days of the Earth, Earth was constantly receiving an influx of new life and new objects from the Genesistrine. But now appearances from the Genesistrine are what he calls "atavistic," or "vesitigial." The Earth no longer needs this constant influx of life to achieve its increasing complexity. So it uses the Genesistrine dimensional portals less and less.

One point Fort constantly brings up is that skeptics always have two arguments regarding these rains of odd objects from the sky: either they didn't really fall and were already there in the first place, or else that they were swept up in a whirlwind in one place and dropped back down in another place.

Fort refutes these arguments, largely with the evidence that built up the elements of the theory for what he calls his Principles of Geography.

First, things have stayed up in the air longer than usual (i.e., if a whirlwind could be found that could possibly have carried all the stuff into the air, it's generally on record a number of days or weeks before the event). Second, that there is a very narrow distribution of land on which the stuff falls -- a certain small band, a square of land, etc., unlike the randomness and path of a whirlwind. Third, that these things can fall for a long period of time, and day after day.

Fort also argues against the whirlwind theory by pointing out that in many of these reported falls of odd objects, there is nothing else -- other than gelatinous material. A fall of fish may be accompanied by water, or a fall of fish eggs by mud. But a fall of fish, fish eggs, snails, worms, what have you, is never accompanied by other things. It's a complete segregation of objects -- with no bands of segregation, or any indication that anything else within the environment of these fish, snails, etc., may also have been swept up by a whirlwind.

However, Fort does use the whirlwind theory to his advantage, at least in the part of the book I've read so far. He says that whirlwinds can, in fact, have swept things up into the air. These things can have been caught inside some of the gelatinous areas, where they, like the fish and so forth, decomposed. In fact, some of these materials caught by whirlwinds and swept up into the gelatinous areas can have decomposed to such a degree that they'd actually become soil, mud, which falls back to the earth.

This is about as far as I've gotten in the book. So this is about as well as I've been able to develop and delineate my understanding of his theory. I'm sorry that this discussion has been so light on quotes, as well. I may try to come back later on and pop some quotes in on a second run.

I find Fort's theory hard to stomach on a purely literal level. But I do feel comfortable with his ideas in a lot of points.

I'm not an Absolutist, but I do believe that one type matter can be translated into another type of matter via an abrupt transition. I just don't think we know how to do it. However, scientists are currently working on ways to "reverse engineer" matter and create building blocks from which any type of matter could conceivably be created. I simply go a few irrational steps further and say that the mind could make that happen, if it understood the correct way to do it. It would be a modified form of psychokinesis.

So I do believe in the idea of the abrupt transition. I also believe in the idea of matter being translated from one dimension to another. However, I don't think it's necessary to think of a holding station in the sky made out of gelatinous matter. It seems possible to me that when the falls Fort mentions are accompanied by gelatinous matter, the gelatinous matter could be something like ectoplasm, the matter which accompanies or signals spirit manifestations.

As things move from one dimension to another, I would assume that they manifest materially from some world that I personally would think of as spiritual, astral, or etheric, and that, in this manifestation, the things are accompanied by ectoplasm. But things in the other dimension are not things as we see them here. They do not become snails, eggs, etc., until they are fully manifested.

I do believe that the areas from which these things fall are akin to dimensional portals. But I don't think they necessarily need to be up in the sky, in the sky, or in the air at all. I think the fact that Fort has found so many aerial phenomena probably points to the fact that, because of our religions, we expect strange, mystical events to occur in the sky. So if we were going to have a sudden appearance of frogs, we'd have them from the sky -- or we would have had them that way. Our ideas might be more flexible now.

Why are there falls of such strange objects -- mineral, vegetable, and animal, or crudely artificial? I would guess that the falls are manifested due to some collective event in the minds of people in the environment. Jung claims that some UFO sightings are the result of collective hallucination. I would argue that physical manifestations producing visual phenomena that would appear to be UFOs would result in UFO sightings.

In other words, a collective will creates the visual phenomena of UFO sightings. In the same sense, a collective will would create the physical phenomena which would be translated out of these spiritual, astral, or etheric planes -- these other dimensions. But the collective will is an archetypal will. And the archetypal will would create physical phenomena more in line with symbols familiar to it. These would be more natural symbols or rudimentarily artifical symbols. Or they *would have been*. Times are changing, and this may be less and less the case.

Anyhow, I like Fort's theory, as I see it so far, because it seems, on a lower level, to concur with some of the ideas of Theosophy, which I don't know very well, but with which I do sympathize. And, seeing how there is an idea of a "connecting point" between dimensions, it may also, in some strange way I don't understand, concur with some of the broader ideas generally related to String Theory.

I'll try to wrap up the Book of the Damned and come back in another post with my reactions to the rest of the book. But to conclude this post, I thought it might be fun to include the broad "headings" (Fort doesn't really put anything into headings) of matter which Fort relates has being reported to have fallen from the sky.

The list is in order of appearance in the book. And it's just the broad elements, as "headings," not each specific instance. Also this list goes as far as I've gone in the book. So it's not a complete list. But I hope you enjoy it.

The book's phenomena actually begins with "blue moons," which, thankfully, don't fall from the sky.

Falling items:

Hailstones the size of an elephant

Snowflakes the size of saucers

Colored rains

Butter

Colored (and orange-water-flavored) hailstones

Punk

Silk

Paper

Wood

Silk

Resin

Beef

Blood

Stone, with an inscription on it

Yellow substance

Golden objects, minute, shaped like arrows, coffee beans, horns, and disks

Sulphureous rains

Black rains

Black snows

Red substance

Red-violet substance containing muriate of cobalt

Buff-colored, pulpy substance covered in a nap like a milled cloth

Fish (or fish-shaped objects, as Fort says in one case)

Beef flakes

Frogs

Spawn

Chironimus eggs

Larvae

Eggs that would develop into a chrysalis

Manna

Vegetable or edible substance (which people would often grind up and turn into bread)

Possible decomposed remnants of packaging

Cotton felt

Olive-grey powder (edible)

Silk

Cobwebs

Cereal

Butter or grease

Rancid oil

Turpentine

Orange water (nitric acid)

Ashes/carbonate of soda

Red meal mixed with fine sand

Wheat enclosed in hailstones

Burning sulphur

Sandstone

Limestone

Salt

Slag, Cinder, Ashes, Coal, Coke

Small frogs and toads

Fish (sometimes minnows and sticklebacks)

Sand eels

An alabaster block and, eight miles away, a turtle

Immature and larval forms of life

Snails (small land-snails)

Mussels

Lizards

Snakes

Winged and unwinged insects (ants) at the same time

Wingless, larval forms of life

Larvae of beetles

Caterpillars

Larvae and developed insects at the same time

"Ball of fire and light"

"Huge ball of green fire"

Triangular "comet" with a "red nucleus" (didn't fall to earth -- kind of hovered, then the red nucleus exploded after 13 minutes of being visible in the sky)

Manufactured objects of iron and stone

(Note: most of the objects below fell alone, not in a rain of objects -- thank goodness!)

"Thunderstones" (wedge-shaped stone objects, possibly rudimentarily artificial)

Flint axes

Pear-shaped "thunderstones" (possibly, Fort guesses, once molten "drops" from a larger source)

Wedges, spheres, and disks of stone or iron (implying that they are artificial)

Clinkers from a furnace (which Fort assumes is a huge furnace powering a spaceship)

Roundish object of iron -- oblate spheroid

Iron cannon ball

Stone ball

Bronze axe