by Charles Fort
Our state of the hyphen is the state of the gamble. Go to no den of a mathematician for enlightenment. Try Monte Carlo. Out of science is fading certainty as fast as ever it departed from theology. In its place we have adventure. Accepting that there is witchcraft, in the sense in which we accept that there is electricity, magnetism, or life, the acceptance is that there is no absolute poise between advantages and disadvantages—
Or that practical witchcraft, or the development of wild talents, might be of such benefits as to draw in future records of human affairs the new dividing line of A.W. and B.W.—or might be a catastrophe that would drive all human life back into Indians, or Zulus, or things furrier—
If by any chance the evils of witchcraft could compare with, or beat to an issue, the demoralizations of law, justice, business, sex, literature, education, pacifism, militarism, idealism, materialism, which at present, are incomprehensibly not yet equal and opposite to stabilizations that are saving us from, or are denying us, the jungles—
Or let all persons of foresight, if of sedentary habits, shift positions occasionally, so as not to suppress too much their vertebral stubs that their descendants may need as the bases of more graceful appendages.
But my own expression is that any state of being that can so survive its altruists and its egotists, its benefactors and its exploiters, its artists, gunmen, bankers, lawyers, and doctors would be almost immune to the eviler magics of witchcraft, because it is itself a miracle.
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Stunts of sideshows, and the miracles of pietists, and the phenomena of spiritualistic medium—
Or that the knack that tips a table may tilt an epoch. Or much of the “parlor magic” of times gone by, and now it is industrial chemistry. And taboo, by which earlier experimenters in the trained forces of today were under suspicion as traffickers with demons.
I take for a pseudo-principle, by which I mean a standard of judgment that sometimes works out, and sometimes doesn’t work out—which is as near to wisdom as I can arrive, in an existence of truth-nonsense—that, someday to be considered right, is first to be unholy. It is out of blasphemy that new religions arise. It is by thinking things that schoolboys know better than to think that discoveries are made. It is because our visions are not delirious enough, or degraded, or nonsensical enough, that all of us are not prophets. Let any thoughtful, properly trained man, who has had all the benefits of an academic education, predict—at least, then, we know what won’t be. We have, then, at our command, a kind of negative clairvoyance—if we know just where to go for an insight into what won’t be.
The trail of a working witchcraft—but, if we are traffickers with demons, the traffic isn’t much congested, at present. Someday almost every particular in this book may look quaint, but it may be that the principle of putting the witches to work will seem as sound as now seems the employment of steam and electric demons. Our instances of practical witchcraft have been practical enough, so long as they were paying attractions at exhibitions, but the exhibition implies the marvel, or what people regard as the marvel, and the spirit of this book is of commonplaceness, or of coming commonplaceness—or that there isn’t anything in it, except of course its vagaries of theories and minor interpretations, that won’t someday be considered as unsensational as the subject-matters of textbooks upon chemistry and mechanics. My interest is in magic, as the daily grind—the miracle as a job—sorceries as public utilities.
There is one manifestation of witchcraft that has been put to work. It is a miracle with a job.
Dowsing.
It is commonly known as water-divining. It is witchcraft. One cannot say that, because of some unknown chemical, or bio-chemical, affinity, a wand bends in a hand, in the presence of underground water. The wand bends only in the hand of a magician.
It is witchcraft. So, though there are scientists who are giving in to its existence, there are others, or hosts of others, who never will give in. Something about both kinds of scientists was published in Time, Feb. 9, 1931. It was said that Oscar E. Meinzer, of the U.S. Geological Survey, having investigated dowsers, had published his findings which were that “further tests . . . of so-called ‘witching’ for water, oil, or other minerals, would be a misuse of public funds.” Also it was shown that conclusions by Dr. Charles Albert Browne, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, disagreed with Mr. Meinzer’s findings. “On a large sugar beet estate near Magdeburg, Dr. Browne saw one of Germany’s most famed dowsers at work. Covering his chest with a padded leather jacket, the dowser took in his hands a looped steel divining rod and began to pace the ground. Suddenly the loop shot upward and hit him a sharp blow on the chest. Continuing, he charted the outlines of an underground stream. Then, using an aluminum rod, which he said was much more sensitive, he estimated the depth of the stream. A rod of still another metal indicated that the water was good to drink. When Dr. Browne tried to use the rod, himself, he could get no chest blows unless the dowser was holding one end. Dr. Browne then questioned German scientists. The majority answered that, with all humbuggery discounted, a large number of successes remained, which could not be accounted for by luck or chance.” For queer places—or for places in which scientists of not so far back would have predicted that such yokelry as dowsing would never be admitted—see Science, Jan. 23, 1931, or the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1928, p. 325. Here full particulars of Dr. Browne’s investigation are published.
The Department of Public Works, of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, has employed a dowser since the year 1916 (Notes and Queries, 150-235). New York Times, July 26, 1931—two Australian states were employing dowsers.
I don’t know that I mean much by that. The freaks and faddists who get themselves employed by governments make me think that I am not very convincing here. But I have no record of a dowser with a political job before the year 1916: and, wherever I got all this respectfulness of mine for the job, it is the entrance of magic into the job that I am bent upon showing.
In the London Observer, May 2, 1926, it is said that the Government of Bombay was employing an official water diviner, who, in one district of scarcity of water, had indicated about fifty sources of supply at forty-seven of which water had been found. The writer of this account says that members of one of the biggest firms of well-boring engineers had informed him that they had successfully employed dowsers in Wales, Oxfordshire, and Surrey.
In Nature, Sept. 8, 1928, there is an account, by Dr. A.E.M. Geddes, of experiments with dowsers. Dr. Geddes’ conclusion is that the faculty of water-divining is possessed by some persons, who respond to at present unknown, external stimuli.
It is not that I am maintaining that out of the mouths of babes, and from the vaporings of yokels, we shall receive wisdom—but that sometimes we may. Peasants have believed in dowsing, and scientists used to believe that dowsing was only a belief of peasants. Now there are so many scientists who believe in dowsing that the suspicion comes to me that it may be only a myth, after all.
In the matter of dowsing, the opposition that Mr. Meinzer represents is as understandable as is the opposition that once was waged by priestcraft against the system that he now represents. Let in, against the former dominant, data of raised beaches, or of deposits of fossils, and each intruder would make a way for other iniquities. Now, relatively to the taboo of today, let in any of the occurrences told of in this book, and by its suggestions and affiliations, or linkages, it would make an opening for an eruption.
Very largely, dowsing, or witchcraft put to work, has been let in.
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It has been my expression that, for instance, African fakirs achieved the harmless impalement of children by a process that would ordinarily be called imposing the imaginary upon the physical, but that is called by me imposing the imaginary-physical upon the physical-imaginary. I think that this is the conscious power and method of adepts: but I think that in the great majority of our stories, effects have been wrought unconsciously, so far as went active awarene
ss, by witches and wizards. I am impressed more with an experience of my own than with any record of other doings. I looked, or stared, at a picture on a wall. Somewhere in my mind were many impressions of falling pictures. But I was not actively thinking of falling pictures. The picture fell from the wall.
See back to the Blackman case—the four judges, who “died suddenly.” It was Blackman who called attention to these deaths. Why? Vanity of the magician? I think that more likely these victims were removed by a wizardry of Blackman’s of which he was unconscious. I think that if a man so earnestly objected to paying alimony that, instead, he went to jail four times, he’d overlook his judges and take a shorter cut, on behalf of his income, if he consciously reasoned about it.
It would seem that visualizations have had nothing to do with many occurrences told of in this book. Still, by a wild talent I mean something that comes and goes, and is under no control, but that may be caught and trained. Also there are cases that look very much like controlled uses of visualizations upon physical affairs. In this view, I have noted an aspect of doings that is a support for our expression upon transmediumization.
The real, as it is called, or the objective, the external, the material, cannot be absolutely set apart from the subjective, or the imaginary: but there are quasi-attributes of the imaginary. There have been occurrences that I think were transmediumizations, because I think that they were marked by indications of having carried over, from an imaginative origin, into physical being, or into what is called “real life,” the quasi-attributes of their origin.
A peculiarity of fires that are called—or that used to be called—“spontaneous combustions of human bodies,” is that the fires do not communicate to surrounding objects and fabrics, or that they extend only to a small degree around. There are stories of other such fires, which cannot be “real fires,” as compared with fires called “real.” In the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 2, or about Oct. 2, 1889, there is a story of restricted fires, said to have occurred in the home of Samuel Miller, upon a farm, six miles west of Findlay, Ohio. A bed had burst into flames, burning down to a heap of ashes, but setting nothing else afire, not even scorching the floor underneath. The next day, “about the same time in the afternoon,” a chest of clothes flamed, and was consumed, without setting anything else afire. The third day, at the same time, another bed, and nothing but the bed burned. See back to the fires in the house in Bladenboro, N.C, February, 1932. A long account of these fires from a San Diego (Cal.) newspaper was sent to me by Margaret M. Page of San Diego. In it one of the phenomena considered most remarkable was that fires broke out close to inflammable materials that were unaffected by the flames. Names of several witnesses—Mayor J.A. Bridger of Bladenboro, J.B. Edwards, a Wilmington health officer, and Dr. S.S. Hutchinson of Bladenboro.
It is as if somebody had vengefully imagined fires, and in special places had localized fires, according to his visualizations. Such localizing, or focusing, omitting surroundings, is a quasi-attribute of all visualizations. One vividly visualizes a face, and a body is ignored by the imagination. Let somebody visualize a bed afire, and exhaust his imaginative powers in this specialization: I conceive of the bed burning, as imagined, and nothing else burning, because nothing else was included in the mental picture that transmediumized, it having been taken for granted, by the visualizer, that, like a fire of physical origin, this fire would extend. It seems to me to be only ordinarily impossible to understand the burning of a woman on an unscorched bed as the “realization” of an imagined scene in which the burning body was pictured, with neglect of anything else consuming.
See back to unsatisfactory attempts to attribute punctures of windowpanes and automobile shields to a missile-less weapon. The invisible bullets stopped short, after penetrating glass. If we can think of an intent, more mischievous than malicious, that was only upon shooting through glass, and that gave no consideration to subsequent courses of bullets, we can think of occurrences that took place, as visualized, and as restricted by visualizations.
Doings in closed rooms—but my monism, by which I accept that all psychical magic links somewhere with more or less commonplace physical magic—
New York Times, June 18, 1880—Rochester, N.Y.—a woman dead in her bed, and the bed post hacked as if with a hatchet. It was known that nobody had entered this room. But something had killed this woman, leaving no sign of either entrance or exit.
It was during a thunderstorm and the woman had been killed by lightning.
The man of one of our stories—J. Temple Thurston—alone in his room—and that a pictorial representation of his death by fire was enacting in a distant mind—and that into the phase of existence that is called “real” stole the imaginary—scorching his body, but not his clothes, because so was pictured the burning of him—and that, hours later, there came into the mind of the sorcerer a fear that this imposition of what is called the imaginary upon what is called the physical bore quasi-attributes of its origin, or was not realistic, or would be, in physical terms, unaccountable, and would attract attention—and that the fire in the house was visualized, and was “realized,” but by a visualization that in turn left some particulars unaccounted for.
Lavinia Farrar was a woman of “independent means.” Hosts of men and women have been shot, or stabbed, or poisoned, because of their “independent means.” But that Mrs. Farrar was thought to death—or that upon her, too, out of the imaginary world in somebody’s mind, stole a story—that it made of her, too, so fictional a being that of her death there is no explanation in ordinary, realistic terms—
That here, too, there was an after-thought, or an after-picturation, which, by way of attempted explanation, “realized” a knife and blood on the floor, but overlooked other details that made this occurrence inexplicable in terms of ordinary murders—or that this woman had been stabbed in the heart, through unpunctured clothes, because it was, with the neglect of everything else, the wound in the heart that had been visualized.
The germ of this expression is in anybody’s acceptance that a stigmatic girl can transfer a wound, as pictured in her mind, into appearance upon her body. The expression requires that there may be external, as well as personal, stigmatism.
It seems to me to be as nearly unquestionable as anything in human affairs goes, that there have been stigmatic girls. There may have been many cases of different kinds of personal stigmatism.
There are emotions that are as intense as religious excitation. One of them is terror.
The story of Isidor Fink is a story of a fear that preceded a murder. It could be that Fink’s was a specific fear, of somebody whom he had harmed, and not a general fear of the hold-ups that, at the time, were so prevalent in New York City. According to Police Commissioner Mulrooney, it was impossible, in terms of ordinary human experience, to explain this closed-room murder—
Or Isidor Fink, at work in his laundry—and his mind upon somebody whom he had injured—and that his fears of revenge were picturing an assassination of which he was the victim—that his physical body was seized upon by his own picturization of himself, as shot by an enemy.
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In February, 1885, in an English prison, there was one of the dream-like occurrences that the materialists think are real. But every character concerned in it was fading away, so that now there is probably no survivor. From time to time repairs had to be made, because the walls of the prison were dissolving. By way of rusts, the iron bars were disappearing.
Upon February 23, 1885—as we say, in terms of our fanciful demarcations—just as if a 23rd of February, which is only relative to rhythms of sunshine, could be a real day—just as if one could say really where a January stops and a February begins—just as if one could really pick a period out of time, and say that there ever was really a year 1885—
Early in what is called a morning of what is so arbitrarily and fancifully called the 23rd of February, 1885, John Lee, in his cell, in the penitentiary, at Exeter, England, was wai
ting to be hanged.
In the yard of a prison of stone, with bars of iron, John Lee was led past a group of hard and motionless witnesses, to the scaffold. There were newspaper men present. Though they probably considered it professional to look as expressionless as stones, or bars of iron, there was nothing in Lee’s case to be sentimental about. His crime had been commonplace and sordid. He was a laborer, who had lived with an old woman, who had a little property, and, hoping to get that, he had killed her. John Lee was led past a group, almost of minerals. It was a scene of the mechanism and solidity of legal procedure, as nearly real as mechanism and solidity can be.
Noose on his neck, and up on the scaffold they stood him on a trap door. The door was held in position by a bolt. When this bolt was drawn, the door fell—
John Lee, who hadn’t a friend, and hadn’t a dollar—
The Sheriff of Exeter, behind whom was Great Britain.
The sheriff waved his hand. It represented Justice and Great Britain.
The bolt was drawn, but the trapdoor did not fall. John Lee stood with the noose around his neck.
It was embarrassing. He should be strangling. There is something of an etiquette in all things, and this was indecorum. They tinkered with the bolt. There was no difficulty, whatsoever, with the bolt: but when it was drawn, with John Lee standing on the trapdoor, the door would not fall.
Something unreasonable was happening. Just what is the procedure, in the case of somebody, who is standing erect, when he should be dangling? The sheriff ordered John Lee back to his cell.
The people in this prison yard were not so stolid. They fluttered, and groups of them were talking it over. But there was no talk that could do John Lee any good. This was what is called stern reality. The sheriff did not flutter. I have a note upon him, twenty years later: he was in trouble with a religious sect of which he was a member, because he ordered his beer by the barrel. He was as solid as beer and beef and the British government.