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BOOK OF THE DAMNED
By Charles Fort
CHAPTER: 01,
02, 03,
04, 05,
06, 07,
08, 09,
10, 11,
12, 13,
14, 15,
16, 17,
18, 19,
20, 21,
22, 23,
24, 25,
26, 27,
28
ONE of the most extraordinary phenomena, or alleged phenomena,
of psychic research, or alleged research -- if in quasi-existence there never has
been real research, but only approximations to research that merge away, or that
are continuous with, prejudice and convenience--
"Stone-throwing."
It's attributed to poltergeists. They're mischievous spirits.
Poltergeists do not assimilate with our own present
quasi-system, which is an attempt to correlate denied or disregarded data as
phenomena of extra-telluric forces, expressed in physical terms. Therefore I
regard poltergeists as evil or false or discordant or absurd -- names that we give
to various degrees or aspects of the unassimilable, or that which resists
attempts to organize, harmonize, systematize, or, in short, to positivize --
names
that we give to our recognition of the negative state. I don't care to deny
poltergeists, because I suspect that later, when we're more enlightened, or when
we widen the range of our credulities, or take on more of that increase of
ignorance that is called knowledge, poltergeists may become assimilable. Then
they'll be as reasonable as trees. By reasonableness I mean that which
assimilates with a dominant force, or system, or a major body of thought --
which
is, itself, of course, hypnosis and delusion -- developing, however, in our
acceptance, to higher and higher approximations to realness. The poltergeists
are now evil or absurd to me, proportionately to their present unassimilableness,
compounded, however, with the factor of their possible future assimilableness.
We lug in the poltergeists, because some of our own data, or
alleged data, merge away indistinguishably with data, or alleged data, of them:
Instances of stones that have been thrown, or that have
fallen, upon a small area, from an unseen and undetectable source.
London Times, April 27, 1872:
"From 4 o'clock, Thursday afternoon until half-past
eleven, Thursday night, the houses, 56 and 58 Reverdy Road, Bermondsey, were
assailed with stones and other missiles coming from an unseen quarter. Two
children were injured, every window was broken, and several articles of
furniture were destroyed. Although there was a strong body of policemen
scattered in the neighbourhood, they could not trace the direction whence the
stones were thrown."
"Other missiles" make a complication here. But if
the expression means tin cans and old shoes, and if we accept that the direction
could not be traced because it never occurred to anyone to look upward -- why
we've lost a good deal of our provincialism by this time.
London Times, Sept. 16, 1841:
That, in the home of Mrs. Charton, at Sutton Courthouse,
Sutton Lane, Chiswick, windows had been broken "by some unseen agent."
Every attempt to detect the perpetrator failed. The mansion was detached and
surrounded by high walls. No other building was near it.
The police were called. Two constables, assisted by members of
the household, guarded the house, but the windows continued to be broken
"both in front and behind the house."
Or the floating islands that are often stationary in the
Super-Sargasso Sea; and atmospheric disturbances that sometimes affect them, and
bring things down within small areas, upon this earth, from temporarily
stationary sources.
Super-Sargasso Sea and the beaches of its floating islands
from which I think, or at least accept, pebbles have fallen:
Wolverhampton, England, June, 1860 -- violent storm --
fall of so
many little black pebbles that they were cleared away by shoveling (La Sci.
Pour Tous, 5-264); great number of small black stones that fell at
Birmingham, England, Aug., 1858 -- violent storm -- said to be similar to some
basalt a few leagues from Birmingham (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1864-37);
pebbles described as "common water-worn pebbles" that fell at
Palestine, Texas, July 6, 1888 -- "of a formation not found near
Palestine" (W. H. Perry, Sergeant, Signal Corps), Monthly Weather
Review, July, 1888); round, smooth pebbles at Kandahor, 1834 (Am. J.
Sci., 1-26-161); "a number of stones of peculiar formation and shapes,
uncommon in this neighborhood fell in a tornado at Hillsboro, Ill., May 18,
1883." (Monthly Weather Review, May, 1883.)
Pebbles from aerial beaches and terrestrial pebbles as
products of whirlwinds, so merge in these instances that, though it's
interesting to hear of things of peculiar shape that have fallen from the sky,
it seems best to pay little attention here, and to find phenomena of the
Super-Sargasso Sea remote from the merger:
To this requirement we have three adaptations:
Pebbles that fell where no whirlwind to which to attribute
them could be learned of;
Pebbles which fell in hail so large that incredibly could that
hail have been formed in this earth's atmosphere;
Pebbles which fell and were, long afterward, followed by more
pebbles, as if from some aerial, stationary source, in the same place.
In September, 1898, there was a story in a New York newspaper,
of lightning -- or an appearance of luminosity? -- in Jamaica -- something had struck
a tree: near the tree were found some small pebbles. It was said that the
pebbles had fallen from the sky, with the lightning. But the insult to orthodoxy
was that they were not angular fragments such as might have been broken from a
stony meteorite: that they were "water-worn pebbles."
In the geographical vagueness of a mainland, the explanation
"up from one place and down in another" is always good, and is never
overworked, until the instances are massed as they are in this book: but, upon
this occasion, in the relatively small area of Jamaica, there was no whirlwind
findable -- however "there in the first place" bobs up.
Monthly Weather Review, Aug.,
1898-363:
That the government meteorologist had investigated: had
reported that a tree had been struck by lightning, and that small water-worn
pebbles had been found near the tree: but that similar pebbles could be found
all over Jamaica.
Monthly Weather Review, Sept.,
1915-446:
Prof. Fassig gives an account of a fall of hail that occurred
in Maryland, June 22, 1915: hailstones the size of baseballs "not at all
uncommon."
"An interesting, but unconfirmed, account stated that
small pebbles were found at the center of some of the larger hail gathered at
Annapolis. The young man who related the story offered to produce the pebbles,
but has not done so."
A footnote:
"Since writing this, the author states he has received
some of the pebbles."
When a young man "produces" pebbles, that's as
convincing as anything else I've ever heard of, though no more convincing than,
if having told of ham sandwiches falling from the sky, he should
"produce" ham sandwiches. If this "reluctance" be admitted
by us, we correlate it with a datum reported by a Weather Bureau observer,
signifying that, whether the pebbles had been somewhere aloft a long time or
not, some of the hailstones that fell with them, had been. The datum is that
some of these hailstones were composed of from twenty to twenty-five layers
alternately of clear ice and snow-ice. In orthodox terms I argue that a
fair-sized hailstone falls from the clouds with velocity sufficient to warm it
so that it would not take on even one layer of ice. To put twenty layers of ice,
I conceive of something that had not fallen at all, but had rolled somewhere, at
a leisurely rate, for a long time.
We now have a commonplace datum that is familiar in two
respects:
Little, symmetric objects of metal that fell at Sterlitamak,
Orenburg, Russia, Sept., 1824 (Phil. Mag., 4-8-463).
A second fall of these objects, at Orenburg, Russia, Jan. 25,
1825 (Quar. Jour. Roy. Inst., 1828-1-447).
I now think of the disk of Tarbes, but when first I came upon
these data I was impressed only with recurrence, because the objects of Orenburg
were described as crystals of pyrites, or sulphate of iron. I had no notion of
metallic objects that might have been shaped or molded by means other than
crystallization, until I came to Arago's account of these occurrences (Oeuvres,
11-644). Here the analysis gives 70 per cent red oxide of iron, and sulphur and
loss by ignition 5 per cent. It seems to me acceptable that iron with
considerably less than 5 per cent. sulphur in it is not iron pyrites -- then
little, rusty iron objects, shaped by some other means, have fallen, four months
apart, at the same place. M. Arago expresses astonishment at this phenomenon of
recurrence so familiar to us.
Altogether, I find opening before us, vistas of heresies to
which I, for one, must shut my eyes. I have always been in sympathy with the
dogmatists and exclusionists: that is plain in our opening lines: that to seem
to be is falsely and arbitrarily and dogmatically to exclude. It is only that
exclusionists who are good in the nineteenth century are evil in the twentieth
century. Constantly we feel a merging away into infinitude; but 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. The thing that we do, however, is
to make our own outline, or the difference between what we include and what we
exclude, vague.
The crux here, and the limit beyond which we may not go
-- very much -- is:
Acceptance that there is a region that we call the
Super-Sargasso Sea -- not yet fully accepted, but a provisional position that has
received a great deal of support--
But is it a part of this earth, and does it revolve with and
over this earth--
Or does it flatly overlie this earth, not revolving with and
over this earth--
That this earth does not revolve, and is not round, or
roundish, at all, but is continuous with the rest of its system, so that, if one
could break away from the traditions of the geographers, one might walk and
walk, an |
