Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  Just as much as it has been light, religion has been darkness. Today it is twilight. In the past it was mercy and charity and persecution and bloody, maniacal, sadistic hatred—hymns from chapels and screams from holy slaughterhouses—aspirations going up from this earth, with smoke from burning bodies. I can say that from religion we have never had opposition, because there never has been religion—that is that religion never has existed, as apart from all other virtues and vices and blessings and scourges—that, like all other alleged things, beings, or institutions, religion never has, in a final sense, had identity. (WT 999)

  And we could go on, for a very long time, citing other similar passages. Perhaps we should. Then at least we could recognize the unrecognized “damned” fact that Charles Fort was as radical a theorist of religion as any. But we won’t.

  The present Dominant of science has taken over and copied the Old Dominant of religion. The priests have changed their vestments for lab coats and exchanged religious dogmas for scientific ones. Thus Fort can write of a “scientific priestcraft” who shout “Thou shalt not!” in their “frozen textbooks” (NL 315). The spirit and structure of their arguments retain the same, essentially religious dimension. As does everyone else’s for that matter: “Every conversation is a conflict of missionaries,” he writes, “each trying to convert the other, to assimilate, or to make the other similar to himself” (BD 171). But this does not mean that science has made no advances on religion. It most definitely has. Nor does it mean that we should stop proselytizing one another. How else could we make any progress? Thus after comparing a particular chemist to an imbecile, Fort has second thoughts: “I take some of that back: I accept that the approximation is higher” (BD 32). Well, that’s a relief.

  As his language of “old” and “new” Dominants makes crystal clear, the present Dominant of science is an unmistakable advance over the Old Dominant of religion for Fort. This hardly makes science omniscient or absolute, however. Where science errs for Fort is in its pride, in its arrogance, in its failure to recognize its own limitations. Its absolute materialism and mechanism are particularly odious as well: they are powerful half-truths that imagine themselves to be the whole Truth. Fort hears a storm approaching: “We are in a hole in time. Cavern of Conventional Science—walls that are dogmas, from which drips ancient wisdom in a patter of slimy opinions—but we have heard a storm of data outside” (NL 396). Such thunder outside signals for Fort the approach of a New Dominant, a new era, of which he is the prophet: “affairs upon this earth” are “fluttering upon the edge of a new era,” he asserts, “and I give expression to coming thoughts of that era” (LO 712).

  He does not imagine, of course, that his particular expressions of this new era are absolute, only that they include more and exclude less and so better approximate the Truth of things. This is why he also calls his New Dominant a species of Intermediatism. This is hardly a grand or arrogant term. It is a humble term. It implies, after all, its own demise. It is an open-ended system “intermediate,” in between, on its way to the Truth. But it is not the Truth, and it too “must some day be displaced by a more advanced quasidelusion.” It is this sense of being intermediate, of thinking in between, that constitutes Fort’s central insight. For him, at least, such a sense opens up to a potential gnosis or awakening in one of his most striking passages:

  our differences is in underlying Intermediatism, or consciousness that though we’re more nearly real, we and our standards are only quasi—

  Or that all things—in our intermediate state—are phantoms in a super-mind in a dreaming state—but striving to awaken to realness.

  Though in some respects our own Intermediatism is unsatisfactory, our underlying feeling is—

  That in a dreaming mind awakening is accelerated—if phantoms in that mind know that they’re only phantoms in a dream. (BD 257–58)

  Such an awakening is not restricted to some personal enlightenment or private illumination. Rather, it involves all of human intellectual activity: “In our acceptance, logic, science, art, religion are, in our ‘existence,’ premonitions of a coming awakening, like dawning awarenesses of surroundings in the mind of a dreamer” (BD 126). Evolution or Progression, in other words, is not restricted to the astrophysical or the biological dimensions. It involves all of human culture.

  In order to hasten this eventual awakening, Fort shifts his epistemology within the New Dominant. Both belief and explanation, or faith and reason, are now replaced by a more humble acceptance and a more daring expression. The latter two ways of knowing are derived from a historical consciousness that recognizes how bound people’s beliefs and explanations are to their time period and, as we say now, its social construction of reality. “All phenomena are ‘explained’ in the terms of the Dominant of their era,” Fort points out in his own terms. “This is why we give up trying really to explain, and content ourselves with expressing” (NL 306). The epistemology of expression, in other words, is a self-conscious knowing that recognizes its own construction and its own relativity and so opens itself up to further evolution. Hence Fort’s hostility to naive religious beliefs, which lock us into a previous era’s revelations, which prevent us from progressing into the future: “That firmly to believe is to impede development. That only temporarily to accept is to facilitate” (BD 13).

  Fort’s philosophy of the three eras is important for my own thinking, as it helps clarify my two basic categories of the psychical and the paranormal. In the mirror of Charles Fort’s thinking, I would now say this. In Frederic Myers, in what we might precisely now call the psychical, the sacred made its transit out of the religious register and into a scientific one. In Charles Fort, however, in what we might now precisely call the paranormal, the sacred leaves both the religious and the scientific registers and enters a still undefined, still irresolvable parascientific register. I have adopted a literary or hermeneutical name for this new indeterminate order of things—the fantastic, the impossible.

  Fort, as we have noted, had a simpler name for it. He called it the New Dominant. At least three corollaries materialize out of Fort’s New Dominant—what I would call, or better, what I would express as a New Science, a New Religion, and a New Self or Soul. In truth, however, what I am calling Fort’s New Science and New Religion are really two sides of the same unnamed coin—a New Gnosis. Fort did not speak or write in such a way. But I do in order to rename that New Dominant of his, that new epistemology that draws deeply on both the data of faith and the methods of reason without being bound to either; that works, critically and reflexively, from the empirical data of firsthand psychological experience, however extraordinary or impossible.

  There were three scientific traditions that Fort rather liked, with his usual jabs: evolutionary biology, quantum physics, and psychical research. We have already mentioned the evolutionary biology. In both physics and psychical research, Fort detected a breakdown of Exclusionism or a “merging away into metaphysics” (BD 249–50). Both, after all, called into serious question the ultimate separation of things. Both, that is, thought toward the Continuity of Inclusionism. Both also rehabilitated the ancient notion of magic. Fort was especially struck by the magical implications of quantum physics. He was reading authors like Einstein and Heisenberg as they published their theories and experiments in the learned journals of the time. He saw immediately what it would take the broader culture another forty years to realize, namely, that the line between quantum physics and mysticism is a very thin one.

  Fort was worried about this in his usual humorous fashion. Alas, he could hardly find a physicist to argue with any longer, so close were their ideas now to his own pet theories, that is, to “an attempted systematization of the principles of magic” (WT 905). Why, this stuff could “make reasonable almost any miracle,” he concluded, like “entering a closed room without penetrating a wall, or jumping from one place to another without traversing the space between” (WT 905). Isn’t that exactly what electrons do in the new science?
He also recognized that these quantum effects could not be restricted to the atomic level. He had, after all, read his Einstein, Tolman, and Podolsky in the 1931 issues of Physical Review, and he knew that they were arguing the same. “The science of physics,” Fort concluded, “is occultism” (WT 974). Or again, the “quantum theory is a doctrine of magic” with all those electrons “playing leapfrog, without having to leap over the other frog” (WT 1003). Fort’s final conclusion follows logically: it is no longer possible to be a materialist. He thus makes fun of those who think of electrons according to the latest quantum magic, but then refuse to extend this type of quantum magic to things like people, despite the fact that people are made of the very same electrons. Such out-of-date dogmatists remain superstitious materialists, despite the embarrassing fact that matter as such has quite literally disappeared in the very best of their own science (WT 1004).

  Just as Fort offers the outlines of a New Science based on quantum physics and psychical research (and, as we shall see, evolutionary biology), he also offers the outlines of a New Religion through the same disciplines. Fort’s New Religion was, of course, really a New Heresy: “In my own still hereticalness—and by heresy, or progress, I mean, very largely, a return, though with many modifications, to the superstitions of the past” (BD 38). Heresy progresses by returning to the religious past, not to faithfully repeat or piously mimic it, much less to believe it, but to recover and reinterpret it. “To me,” Fort observes in this recovering spirit, “the Bible is folklore, and therefore is not pure fantasy, but comprises much that will be rehabilitated.” In any case, he won’t write about the Bible. It was written, after all, before 1800 (WT 965).

  Much better, because much more recent, are the data of spiritualism and psychical research. Again, much like Myers before him, Fort charts a gnostic path between and beyond science and religion here. He calls the spiritualists and the scientists the “two tyrannies” that bully the data. “On one side, the spiritualists have arbitrarily taken over strange occurrences, as manifestations of ‘the departed.’ On the other side, conventional science has pronounced against everything that does not harmonize with its systematizations. . . . One is too dainty, and the other is gross” (LO 576).

  The data in actual fact are as diverse as they are difficult. He wants to damn stone-throwing poltergeists, for example, until he finds numerous other cases of slow-falling stones in his newspaper and journal researches from all around the world. That gets him thinking. He also is suspicious of prenatal markings or maternal impressions on the developing fetus until he realizes that these are in perfect continuity with all sorts of other phenomena he has read about, like the kitten born with “1921” perfectly imprinted on its white belly (WT 963–64). He begins to suspect that the mind is more powerful than it thinks.

  Then there is prayer. This too he ends up rehabilitating. Sort of. Fort certainly does not believe in any personal God. But he recognizes how psychically useful such a God is. What is crucial, he concludes, is not the existence of God, but the focus such a belief provides: “The function of God is the focus. An intense mental state is impossible, unless there be something, or the illusion of something, to center upon. . . . I conceive of the magic of prayers.” Not that piety is necessary here. Only focus. “I conceive of the magic of blasphemies. There is witchcraft in religion: there may be witchcraft in atheism.” So great was the devotion of the faithful that the blood of St. Januarius boiled in its phial in Naples, Italy, reported the New York Evening World on September 19, 1930. If the desire would have been stronger to frustrate such a miracle, Fort mischievously suggests, the blood of St. Jaunuarius may well have frozen (WT 1001). Again, the content of the belief matters not. Not a whit. Only the intensity of the mental focus. It’s all about consciousness, not custom.

  Finally, before we leave the New Dominant, there is what we might call the Fortean Self or Soul, which will become the individuating witch or wizard in his last two books. This is where it gets really interesting, for Fort appears to suggest that the self or soul is not given, but consciously and intentionally created, that we somehow have the power to make ourselves, to bring ourselves into fuller and fuller being out of our quasi existence. The soul or self, in other words, is the result of practice. Fort turns to the historical data of witchcraft trials in order to suggest how such a practice may result in the attainment of a subtle body: “it is my expression that out of his illusion that he has a self, he may develop one.” After all, in the records of witchcraft trials, we often find “the statement that the accused person was seen, at the time of doings, in a partly visible, or semi-substantial state” (WT 995). Myers’s phantasmogenetic center lit up by the presence of a traveling clairvoyant again.

  Much of this soul-making, it turns out, has to do with the refusal to surrender to the social surround. Fortean individualism is extraordinary to the extreme. To quasi exist is to aggregate “around a nucleus, or dominant, systematized members of a religion, a science, a society.” But true individuals “who do not surrender and submerge may of themselves highly approximate to positiveness—the fixed, the real, the absolute” (BD 232). Quite simply put, the goal of evolution is the soul-actualizing individual, the self who does not submit to the community or consensual trance of society, who wakes up and so ceases to be a phantom in someone else’s dream, or, worse, in everyone’s dream.

  But there is another side to Fort’s psychology that is radically reductive, that dissolves the self into an apparent materialism or mechanism. He can be quite funny about this, particularly when he is pillaging Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am.” Here is Fort’s version: “I do not think. I have never had a thought. Therefore something or another” (WT 941). Such humor hides a quite sophisticated notion of mental processes. We do not think. We are thought. Fort can write long passages on this that could come straight out of a contemporary textbook on neuroscience (or a Buddhist meditation manual, or a book by Myers on personality as a “chain of memory”):

  I do not think, but thoughts occur in what is said to be “my” mind—though, instead of being “in” it, they are it—just as inhabitants do not occur in a city, but are the city. There is a governing tendency among these thoughts, just as there is among people in any community. . . . So far as goes any awareness of “mine,” “I” have no soul, no self, no entity, though at times of something like harmonization of “my” elements, “I” approximate to a state of unified being. . . . There is no I that is other than a very imperfectly co-ordinated aggregation of experience-states, sometimes ferociously antagonizing one another, but most maintaining a kind of civilization. (WT 941–42)

  But then he backs up and pulls away from such an absolute reductionism. Fort was no materialist, although his thought possessed profound materialist dimensions. He was, in his own words, a materialist-immaterialist. “We’d be materialists were it not quite as rational to express the material in terms of the immaterial as to express the immaterial in terms of the material. Oneness of all allness in quasi-ness” (BD 265). This was no simple abstract game for Fort. He recognized that modern science could only maintain its strict materialism by disregarding psychical phenomena. Once it recognizes the psychical, it would immediately become “no more legitimate to explain the immaterial in terms of the material than to explain the material in terms of the immaterial.” Why? Because the material and the immaterial appear together within every psychical act, “merging, for instance, in a thought that is continuous with a physical action” (BD 53).

  In the end, though, this individuality is always unstable in Fort’s texts. There is a One and a Many, but the Many appears in the One, not the other way around. “No statement that I shall make, as a monist, will be set aside by my pluralism,” he writes. “There is a Oneness that both submerges and individualizes” (LO 552). Hence any identity can only come to be by “drawing a line about itself,” that is, by excluding everything else that there is. Such an act appears to be finally futile for Fort, “just as would
one who draws a circle in the sea” (BD 6–7).

  The only thing, Fort points out with faultless reasoning, “that would not merge away into something else would be that besides which there is nothing else,” that is, the Truth or the Universal (BD 9). The individual, then, for Fort is finally not a subject, but a “sub-subject,” that is, a form of consciousness within an Ultimate Subject: “Of course we do not draw a positive line between the objective and the subjective—or that all phenomena called things or persons are subjective within one all-inclusive nexus, and that thoughts within those that are commonly called ‘persons’ are sub-subjective” (BD 51).

  The Philosophy of the Hyphen: Fort’s Dialectical Monism

  Fort’s paradoxical notion of the self as at once material-immaterial, as a sub-subject or a wavy circle drawn in the sea of the Universal Subject, is an expression of his wider “philosophy of the hyphen,” or what we have already encountered as his Intermediatism. This Intermediatism is in turn grounded in a deeper monism, but a monism striving to express itself within a real, if somewhat tenuous, plurality:

  Our general expression has two aspects:

  Conventional monism, or that all “things” that seem to have identity of their own are only islands that are projections from something underlying, and have no real outlines of their own.

  But that all “things,” though only projections, are projections that are striving to break away from the underlying that denies them identity of their own. (BD 6)

  This two-tiered system can also be expressed in the terms of a pure relationality in which there are no stable or independent things, but only relations. Fort’s local urban environment is called on to express this notion. He compares our existence to the Brooklyn Bridge upon which bugs are seeking some final base or foundation. They never find one, for, alas, even the girders, which they presume to be foundational, are in turn built upon other deeper structures. And so on. In truth, “nothing final can be found in all the bridge, because the bridge itself is not a final thing in itself, but is a relationship between Manhattan and Brooklyn.” Having recognized, like a puzzled quantum physicist, that the further one goes down into reality the more and more particles one finds and the less and less stable “stuff” there appears to be, Fort then zooms out and draws his conclusion: “If our ‘existence’ is a relationship between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute, the quest for finality in it is hopeless: Everything in it must be relative, if the ‘whole’ is not a whole, but is, itself, a relation” (BD 101–2).