This article is excerpted from Darklore Volume 6, which is available for sale from Amazon US and Amazon UK. The Darklore anthology series features the best writing and research on paranormal, Fortean and hidden history topics, by the most respected names in the field: Erik Davis, Martin Shough, David Luke, Robert Schoch and Nick Redfern, to name just a few. Darklore's aim is to support quality researchers, so it makes sense to support Darklore.

You can read more sample articles from the Darklore series at the Darklore website.

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Anthropology of the Weird

by Jack Hunter

Immersing oneself in another culture is always going to be a strange experience, and most anthropologists will be expecting to encounter different ways of thinking about the world when they first embark on their fieldwork. What they do not necessarily expect, however, is to start experiencing the world around them differently; to begin seeing and feeling things that, from the perspective of western science, simply cannot be possible. We might class such experiences, therefore, as “anomalous” because they do not sit comfortably with our rational scientific view of the world, but that is not to say such experiences are considered anomalous by the ethnographer’s host culture. Indeed while such experiences may not be particularly common or widespread amongst the population of the host culture, they may yet have a place, and significant meaning, within that culture’s broader world-view. In other cultures, therefore, experiences such as telepathic communication between two individuals, predicting the future in dreams, seeing the dead reanimate, witnessing an apparition, communicating with spirits through entranced mediums, or being afflicted by witchcraft (amongst others) may be considered entirely possible. Many highly respected anthropologists, in conducting ethnographic fieldwork amongst other cultures, have gone several steps beyond appreciating different modes of thinking about the world and have crossed the threshold into alternate ways of experiencing it. E.B. Tylor, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Bruce T. Grindal and Edith Turner all crossed this threshold during their fieldwork, and all interpreted and presented their experiences in different ways. Through examining the ways in which these ethnographers documented their experiences, and how their personal world-views accommodated such unusual phenomena, it is possible to gain an insight into both changing academic attitudes towards the anomalous and the mysterious nature of the paranormal itself.

Raps, Trances and Victorian Anthropology

E.B. Tylor (1832-1917) is widely regarded as the founding father of the anthropological discipline, and is also held up as the epitome of the so-called “armchair anthropologist.” Tylor preferred to carry out his research in the comfort of his library rather than in the field amongst the people he wrote about. It is a little known fact, however, that he did conduct a form of ethnographic fieldwork in 1872 with some of the most prominent mediums of the Spiritualist movement, which had spread rapidly across America and Europe since its advent in New York State in 1848. Tylor was intrigued, as indeed were many of the Victorian intellectual community, by the radical claims of the Spiritualists to be able to demonstrate the continued existence of human personality after death. Belief in spiritual beings was to become the central theme of Tylor’s highly respected anthropological theory for the origin of religion, and it has been suggested that his ideas developed in parallel with his researches into the Spiritualist movement. Tylor saw Spiritualism as a modern remnant, what he termed a ‘survival,’ of primitive animist beliefs and as such was keen to gain firsthand personal experience of the movement: to observe animism in action. Naturally Tylor entered into his fieldwork as a sceptic convinced that Spiritualist mediums possessed at best a “deluded belief” in the efficacy of their performances or, at worst, a malicious desire to con unsuspecting individuals with deliberate acts of fraud. Tylor’s personal field notes from the time, however, reveal a much more ambiguous state of affairs. Indeed, although Tylor did detect evidence of deliberate fraud in the performances of some of the mediums he observed, with others (most notably the famous mediums Daniel Dunglas Home, the Reverend Stainton Moses and Kate Fox), Tylor had some rather unusual experiences which challenged his initial suppositions. After a seance with Home Tylor wrote that he had “failed to make out how either raps, table-levitation, or accordian-playing were produced,” with Stainton Moses he described how “[h]is trance seemed real,” and concluded that his experience with Kate Fox was “very curious, and her feats are puzzling to me,” noting that her phenomena “deserve further looking into.” Tylor’s experiences with these mediums forced him to admit, in his own words, “a prima facie case on evidence” for the abilities of certain mediums and to state that he could not deny the possibility “that there may be a psychic force causing raps, movements, levitations, etc.”. Regardless of his experiences with the Spiritualists, and his inability to account for them in any normal terms, Tylor did not see it fit, or even at all necessary, to publish these observations in his public writings on animism. Tylor’s experiences, it could be argued, seemed to imply that such experiences were not by any stretch of the imagination limited to the so-called “primitives,” but could in-fact be had by anyone, including members of the Victorian intelligentsia. In the face of ridicule from the scientific community, as later happened in the case of the chemist Sir William Crookes when he published his findings in support of D.D. Home’s mediumship in 1874, Tylor opted to keep his anomalous experiences to himself.

Anomalous Lights Among the Azande

By the beginning of the twentieth century anthropological methods had made several advances since Tylor’s day. Armchair anthropology was out of fashion, and good ethnographic research, after developments put in place by Dr. Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), required the ethnographer to engage with the society under study in as intimate a way as possible.

This article is excerpted from Darklore Volume 3, which is available for sale from Amazon US and Amazon UK. The Darklore anthology series features the best writing and research on paranormal, Fortean and hidden history topics, by the most respected names in the field: Robert Bauval, Nick Redfern, Erik Davis, Loren Coleman, and Daniel Pinchbeck, to name just a few. Darklore's aim is to support quality researchers, so it makes sense to support Darklore.

You can read more sample articles from the Darklore series at the Darklore website.

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Shaking Stars
The Remarkable Guernsey Meteor and Earthquake of 1843

by Geoff Falla

Meteors or ‘shooting stars’ are not that uncommon, and most of us must have seen these at some time or another. Those of us who are interested in astronomy, and look at the night sky more often, will have seen meteors quite frequently. Usually seen as just a brief streak of light, lasting perhaps for a second or so, a meteor can be missed if we happen to be looking in just a slightly different direction at the time. Some meteors are much more spectacular, very bright and leaving a luminous trail in the sky, fading away after a short time. Even these occasional, much brighter meteors are not expected to be in view for more than perhaps five or ten seconds at most.

Meteors are not usually thought of as being related to earthquakes in any way. After all, meteors are a phenomenon of the sky, with only some of the larger ones continuing down to the ground as meteorites. Earthquakes are a result of movements in the Earth’s crust, mostly happening near ocean margins and in areas of geological fault lines.

Earthquakes or earth tremors of any intensity are fortunately rare in the Channel Islands, but they do happen very occasionally. The most significant event of this kind was recorded in Guernsey in 1843, and was preceded by what was thought to be a large and very slow moving meteor. However, all meteors travel at great speed as they burn away in the atmosphere. There is occasionally a report of a large ‘fireball’ type of meteor which remains visible for longer than normal, because of its size and the time taken to burn away, but meteors of any kind are certainly not known for slow progress across the sky.

The luminous object seen over Guernsey in December 1843 was something really exceptional.

The following is a modified excerpt from Paul and Charla Devereux's book Lucid Dreaming: Accessing Your Inner Virtual Realities (Daily Grail Publishing, 2011). Available from Amazon US or Amazon UK and other online bookstores.

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The techniques used for inducing out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are essentially similar to lucid dream inductions, but with a different emphasis. The power of place (spatial programming) takes on special importance, and ways of developing a dual awareness can be helpful. Most OBE practitioners agree that when inducing the experience, physical relaxation is most important. A state of relaxed alertness is the ideal to be sought.

There seems to be no special dietary advice for OBE induction, though pioneering 'astral projector' Sylvan Muldoon recommended fasting and a reduction in the taking of liquids on days when induction is being attempted. On the other hand, dream researcher Patricia Garfield found that she had her strongest (and most frightening) OBE when she had been “inordinately stuffed with food”! As far as posture is concerned, there are likewise no universal rules. Muldoon felt that sleeping on one’s back was best, and failing that, the right side. Garfield felt that lying on one’s back or left side best facilitated OBEs. Robert Monroe, one of the most prominent OBE proponents of the last half century, said that the aspiring OBE practitioner should lie with his or her head towards the north, but Garfield argued that it made no difference what direction one slept in. Perhaps the only golden rule is to simply experiment! You have to find what works for you.

Select from the following methods, which have been laid out in an order with developmental exercises first, then actual induction techniques following. Put these in the context of the skills and approaches you have learned from your dream and lucid dream work where appropriate, so you can devise your own elaborations around the core concepts offered here, if you so wish. These exercises and techniques derive from traditional methods as well as suggestions from workers in OBE and lucid dream research. We have also presented some new ones, based on sound principles. Remember that many of the techniques described as being for use at sleep onset can also be used equally well (and often even better) on re-entering sleep after waking up in the morning. As with the lucid dream methods in Chapter 4 of Lucid Dreaming, some of the techniques described here will work well together, others will not and are alternatives. Pick and choose as you wish, remembering that all such exercises often require the investment of time and effort to bring results.

The following is a modified excerpt from Paul and Charla Devereux's book Lucid Dreaming: Accessing Your Inner Virtual Realities (Daily Grail Publishing, 2011). Available from Amazon US or Amazon UK now.

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You enter the cinema. The lights dim and you put on your 3D glasses. They look deceptively like simple sunglasses. The film begins. Suddenly you are thrust into another world, a world with three-dimensional vision and sound. You are transported into a virtual reality, usually one of extreme fantasy, like the 2010 pioneer of modern 3D movie technology, Avatar. With the recent flood of 3D movies, and, increasingly, 3D television, this will happen more often to more people. In a similar vein, the dramatically effective virtual realities of computer games take their players out of their actual, physical worlds into cyber otherworlds. But in the way that audio and visual digital technologies are mimics of our natural senses, so too are these movie and cyber otherworlds merely technological versions of natural virtual realities we can access through our own minds. These are not mere pale acts of imagination, but altered states of consciousness, other realities so vivid and seemingly tangible that they make the fanciest digital technology fade in comparison. These inner virtual realities are far beyond simple dreams, but dreaming is the gateway through which they can be accessed.

A third of our life is spent asleep, and it has been calculated that in an average lifetime we experience about half a million dreams. Yet for most of us in modern societies that part of our existence is like a closed book. We might remember an occasional vivid dream, but usually our dreams are just vague, fragmented shadows that evaporate in our minds as soon as we open our eyes, or are extinguished by the raucous sound of our bedside alarm. Some people even believe that they do not dream at all. We take the loss of this part of our lives very calmly, but think how shocked we would be if we were suddenly told that a third of our lifespan was to be taken from us! Yet that is effectively what happens, especially in our modern culture, which does not place a very high value on dreams – not officially at any rate. One of the reasons for this loss is that dreaming represents a discontinuity in our mental lives: when awake we can barely remember any of our dreams, and when we are dreaming, we forget that we are not awake. It is as if a broad, dark river of forgetfulness, a moat of amnesia, separates the waking and dreaming parts of our lives. Yet we can reclaim the night-side of our existence by taking specific actions to increase the vividness of our dreams and make our recall of them much more effective. Our newly-released book Lucid Dreaming will enable anyone to do that, but it will also explain that such actions can be merely the prerequisite for achieving something much more remarkable – namely, how to stay awake while we are having our dreams.

Living Our Dreams

Train ourselves to be awake in our dreams? It sounds an utter paradox. Up until the late seventies, even most scientists studying sleep and dreaming dismissed the notion as nonsense. But as we point out in Lucid Dreaming, two enterprising dream researchers, Keith Hearne in England, and Stephen LaBerge in the United States, devised experiments that scientifically demonstrated that people can be fully conscious in a dream, while monitoring equipment shows them to be physiologically sound asleep. This remarkable mental state, in which a person becomes fully conscious inside a dream, is known as “lucid dreaming”.

This article is excerpted from Darklore Volume 5, which is available for sale from Amazon US and Amazon UK. The Darklore anthology series features the best writing and research on paranormal, Fortean and hidden history topics, by the most respected names in the field: Erik Davis, Martin Shough, David Luke, Robert Schoch and Nick Redfern, to name just a few. Darklore's aim is to support quality researchers, so it makes sense to support Darklore.

You can read more sample articles from the Darklore series at the Darklore website.

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Calling Cthulhu

by Erik Davis

(Images courtesy Dominique Signoret)

Consumed by cancer in 1937 at the age of 46, the last scion of a faded aristocratic New England family, the horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft left one of America’s most curious literary legacies. The bulk of his short stories appeared in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine devoted to the supernatural. But within these modest confines, Lovecraft brought dark fantasy screaming into the 20th century, taking the genre, almost literally, into a new dimension.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the loosely linked cycle of stories known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Named for a tentacled alien monster who waits dreaming beneath the sea in the sunken city of R’lyeh, the Mythos encompasses the cosmic career of a variety of gruesome extraterrestrial entities that include Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and the blind idiot god Azathoth, who sprawls at the center of Ultimate Chaos, "encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws.” Lurking on the margins of our space-time continuum, this merry crew of Outer Gods and Great Old Ones are now attempting to invade our world through science and dream and horrid rites.

As a marginally popular writer working in the literary equivalent of the gutter, Lovecraft received no serious attention during his lifetime. But while most 1930s pulp fiction is nearly unreadable today, Lovecraft continues to attract attention. In France and Japan, his tales of cosmic fungi, degenerate cults and seriously bad dreams are recognized as works of bent genius, and the celebrated French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari praise his radical embrace of multiplicity in their magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus. On Anglo-American turf, Lovecraft has been enshrined in the august Library of America, while a passionate cabal of critics fill journals like Lovecraft Studies and Crypt of Cthulhu with their almost talmudic research. Meanwhile both hacks and gifted disciples continue to craft stories that elaborate the Cthulhu Mythos. There’s even a Lovecraft convention – the NecronomiCon, named for the most famous of his forbidden grimoires. Like the gnostic science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft is the epitome of a cult author.

The word “fan” comes from fanaticus, an ancient term for a temple devotee, and Lovecraft fans exhibit the unflagging devotion, fetishism and sectarian debates that have characterized popular religious cults throughout the ages. But Lovecraft’s "cult" status has a curiously literal dimension. Many magicians and occultists have taken up his Mythos as source material for their practice. Drawn from the darker regions of the esoteric counterculture – Thelema and Satanism and Chaos magic – these Lovecraftian mages actively seek to generate the terrifying and atavistic encounters that Lovecraft’s protagonists stumble into compulsively, blindly or against their will.

The following article is a modified excerpt from Jeffrey Kripal's Authors of the Impossible (available from Amazon US and Amazon UK). In his book, Kripal surveys the history of psychical phenomena, which he contends is an untapped source of insight into the sacred and an important but overlooked field of religious study. Kripal grounds his study in the work of four major figures in the history of paranormal research: psychical researcher Frederic Myers; writer and humorist Charles Fort; astronomer, computer scientist, and UFOlogist Jacques Vallee; and, philosopher Bertrand Meheust.

The in-text reference to IS, FS1 and FS2 are to Vallee's books The Invisible College, and Forbidden Science Volumes 1 and 2 respectively.

Jacques Vallee's The Invisible College

by Jeffrey Kripal

Jacques Vallee’s The Invisible College (1975) represents a development of the ideas and theories first set out six years earlier in his seminal book on the crossovers between UFOs and folklore, Passport to Magonia. There would be other developments and ideas, of course, but it is probably not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that these two books constitute the heart and soul of Vallee's thinking on the subject of UFOs. That the first is named after a legendary land in the clouds whose existence was denied by a major representative of the Church and the second after a group of contemporary intellectuals interested in paranormal matters who were meeting secretly in the late 1960s and 70s out of fear that such interests would threaten their academic and professional standing in the universities should alert us to the "impossible" nature of their subject matter from the perspectives of faith or reason. Vallee is perfectly aware of this. He states very clearly that his speculations "will contradict both the ideas of the believers and the assumptions of the skeptics" (IC 28). Again, beyond faith and reason there is gnosis.

It was Vallee’s mentor, J. Allen Hynek, who suggested that they call themselves "the Invisible College" in order to capture the deeply felt sense that they were pursuing a kind of forbidden knowledge, that they were after a new form of science that was not yet acceptable to the powers that be.¹ The same year Vallee's book appeared Hynek explained the history of the expression in, of all places, the FBI Bulletin. The FBI had requested the piece; why, Hynek was never sure (FS 2.251). Vallee provides his readers with the relevant passage in his own Introduction. Here is Hynek writing for the FBI now, as quoted by Vallee at the beginning of The Invisible College:

Way back in the "dark ages" of science, when scientists themselves were suspected of being in league with the Devil, they had to work privately. They often met clandestinely to exchange views and the results of their various experiments. For this reason, they called themselves the Invisible College. And it remained invisible until the scientists of that day gained respectability when the Royal Society was chartered by Charles II in the early 1660s.²

And so Hynek, Vallee, and their confidential colleagues met too, throughout the late 1960s and early 70s, working quietly in the background and refusing to be intimidated by either the conservative attitudes of their professional colleagues or "those three fierce paper dragons, Bizarre, Magic, and Ridicule" (IC 114-115). They also hoped for their own Charles II, who never appeared, and for their own Royal Society, which never materialized. ... Read More »

The following guest article is by Christopher Knowles, whose latest book is The Secret History of Rock'n'Roll (Amazon US and Amazon UK). Chris blogs at his website The Secret Sun.

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Metallic Mysteries and Headbanging Hellenes

by Christopher Knowles

It's not a shocking new revelation to compare rock 'n' roll to ancient pagan rituals. Writers have been throwing the term "Dionysian" around since Elvis first showed that a white man could sing the blues. But as I discovered while writing my new book, The Secret History of Rock 'n Roll, the parallels go much, much deeper than that. So much so that if you strip away the surface details (and get past the whole sacred/secular dichotomy), the similarities between the ancient Mystery religions and modern rock 'n' roll can be downright mind-blowing.

Never mind that old pagan place-names like the Apollo, the Orpheum, the Palladium and the Academy are still used for concert halls, or that rock's Olympians (U2, Springsteen, Bon Jovi, etc.) still act out their dramas in "arenas" and "coliseums." The ancient world had its own guitar heroes, its own pop divas, even its own heavy metal bands and headbangers. And while studying the parallels of rock to the Mysteries, I wasn't surprised to see that it's genres like punk, hardcore and metal that seem to inspire something a lot like religion to their fans. Extremism and noise did the very same thing in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome.

Dionysus was not only the god of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, he was also the god of cross-dressing, "frenzy," and hallucination (entheogenic potions were the main course at the Mysteries of Eleusis, among others). Dionysus was also closely identified with various groups of long-haired, armored priests, whose thrashing musical performances were the headline act of Mystery rituals from Phrygia to Samothrace, from Eleusis to the Vatican Hill.

The legendary Greek historian Strabo was a student of the Mysteries and wrote extensively on these ancient headbangers, who went by various names such as the Korybantes, the Kouretes, the Dactyls, the Kabieri and the Telkhines. Strabo described them as "a kind of inspired people," who were "subject to Bakkhic frenzy" and induced "terror at the celebration of the sacred rites by means of war-dances, accompanied by uproar and noise and cymbals and drums and arms, and also by flute and outcry."

The Kouretes - who the historian Nonnus described as being "sane in their madness" - derived their name from their androgynous hair and clothing, much like any number of early heavy metal bands from the late 60s and early 70s. Strabo again:

This article is excerpted from Darklore Volume 2, which is available for sale from Amazon US and Amazon UK. The Darklore anthology series features the best writing and research on paranormal, Fortean and hidden history topics, by the most respected names in the field: Robert Bauval, Nick Redfern, Mike Jay, Loren Coleman, Jon Downes and Daniel Pinchbeck, to name just a few. Darklore's aim is to support quality researchers, so it makes sense to support Darklore.

Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy

by Mike Jay

At the beginning of 1797, John Robison was a man with a solid and long-standing reputation in the British scientific establishment. He had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics, and had recently been appointed senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would eventually contribute over a thousand pages of articles. Yet by the end of the year, his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensational book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written, and whose shockwaves would continue to reverberate long after his scientific work had been forgotten. Its title was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, and it launched on the English-speaking public the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy, masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati, was in the process of subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world and co-opting them into instruments of its secret and godless plan: the tyranny of the masses under the invisible control of unknown superiors, and a new era of ‘darkness over all'.

The first edition of Proofs of a Conspiracy sold out within days, and within a year it had been republished many times, not only in Edinburgh but in London, Dublin and New York. Robison had hit a nerve by offering an answer, plausible to many, to the great questions of the day: what had caused the French Revolution, and had there been any plan behind its bloody and tumultuous progress? From his vantage point in Edinburgh he had, along with millions of others, followed with horror the lurid press reports of France dismembering its monarchy, dispossessing its church and transforming its downtrodden and brutalised population into the most ruthless fighting force Europe had ever seen -- and now, under the rising star of the young general Napoleon Bonaparte, attempting to export the same carnage and destruction to its surrounding monarchies, not least Britain itself. But Robison believed that he alone had identified the hidden hand responsible for the apparently senseless eruption of terror and war that appeared to be consuming the world.

Many had located the roots of the revolution in the ideas of Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire, Diderot and D'Alembert, who had exalted reason and progress over authority and tradition; but none of these mostly aristocratic philosophes had advocated a revolution of the masses, and indeed several of them had ended their lives on the guillotine. In the early 1790s, it had been possible to believe that the power-hungry lawyers and journalists of the Jacobin Club had whipped up the Paris mob into their destructive frenzy as a means to their own ends, but by 1794 Danton, Robespierre and the rest of the Jacobin leaders had followed their victims to the guillotine: how could they have been the puppet-masters when they had had their own strings so brutally cut? What Robison was proposing in the densely-argued and meticulously documented pages of Proofs of a Conspiracy was that all these agents of revolution had been pawns in a much bigger game, whose ambitions were only just beginning to make themselves visible.

The French Revolution, like all convulsive world events before and since, had been full of conspiracies, bred by the speed of events, the panic of those caught up in them and the limited information available to them as they unfolded. The Paris mobs, cut off from the outside world by their heavily guarded city walls, had been convinced that counter-revolutionary forces had joined together in a pacte de famine to starve their communes to death. The French aristocracy, in turn, were convinced from the beginning that the King was to be kidnapped and murdered. Rumours swept the army that they were being betrayed by their high command. The cities of surrounding countries hummed with allegations of plots to incite their own peasants to revolt against them. In Britain, enemies of the revolution such as Edmund Burke had claimed from the beginning that ‘already confederacies and correspondences of the most extraordinary nature are forming in several countries', and by 1797 most believed -- and with good reason -- that secret societies in Ireland were plotting with Napoleon to overthrow the British government and invade the mainland. The power of Robison's revelation was that it identified within this buzzing confusion of conspiracies a single protagonist, a single ideology and a single overarching plot that crystallised the chaos into a concerted drama and elevated it into an epic struggle between good and evil, whose outcome would define the future of world politics. ... Read More »

This article is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of the 676-page opus on the history of science fiction, The World Beyond the Hill (Amazon US and UK), reproduced with kind permission of the authors Alexei and Cory Panshin and publisher Phoenix Pick.

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For the first two hundred years of the modern era — from the accession to the leadership of Western society by the philosophy of rational materialism in the late Seventeenth Century to the appearance of techno-warfare in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 — there was no such thing as science fiction literature. Through all this time, writers had no conscious awareness of working in a connected and cumulative SF tradition. Such a thing as science fiction was unthinkable, unimaginable. It didn’t exist.

How very different the situation is today! In the late Twentieth Century, nobody at all would think to doubt that there is such a thing as science fiction. Paperback racks are filled with books labeled “SF.” There is a great visible science fiction industry: writers, editors, critics, magazines, books, films, fans, clubs, conventions, awards, and much much more.

The difference between the situation prior to 1870, when SF could not be said to exist, and the situation we are heir to today, is the general acceptance by the Western world of the plausibility of scientific mystery. This acceptance, this new faith, began to take hold right around 1870.

As we have suggested, in order for myth to be an effective indicator of yet-unrealized possibility, there must be some basis for a belief in transcendence. We must think that there could be mysterious higher states of being and awareness, and we must be able to believe that we might plausibly attain those higher states.

In ancient myth, spirit provided such a groundwork for belief in plausible mystery. After 1870, science became sufficiently developed as a concept and a practice to serve as a new foundation for belief.

But this was not so prior to 1870, which is why we can say that during the first two hundred years of modern Western society, SF literature did not exist. It is only retrospective wisdom that allows us to peer into the past and single out a literary possibility here, a dynamic metaphor there, a subtle argument or an imaginary exploration, and identify these highly separated moments of special creativity as a connected series of advances necessary for the coming into being of SF literature.

It is our awareness of the nature of later science fiction — and our appreciation of the invisible working of the transcendent spirit of SF — that allows us to perceive what these varying bits and pieces had in common: All were attempts at the presentation of plausible scientific mystery.

But SF literature still did not exist as late as the advent of Verne in the 1860s. He was not working in an active tradition, a contemporary literary form. Rather, he was recognized as a marvel, a writer with his own unique product. It was as though Verne were a last solitary Romantic wizard with a formula all his own — like Captain Nemo, that master of his own special brand of electricity.

After 1870, however, in the very moment of Jules Verne’s imaginative retreat, modern Western civilization entered a new phase, the Age of Technology. And immediately, science fiction was born.

The new era was the result of a change in the attitude of society toward science. The consequence of the change was that after 1870 it was possible to set out consciously to write science fiction. No longer was SF a feat that a rare Romantic wildman, lit by inspiration while in some unique state of acute mental receptivity, might aim at once in a lifetime. Science fiction became a form that almost anyone could write, and after 1870 there would always be a number of writers at work producing SF.

The shift in attitude that made the Age of Technology and SF literature possible might be called the final fruit of the Romantic Period. The change was, in effect, the solution to the major problems that the whole Romantic Period had been attempting to solve.

One of these problems was the lack of plausible mystery in the world. Without transcendence, the Romantics felt like orphan children. They mooned after the old spiritual mystery that the Age of Reason had rejected. And they hunted vainly for new mystery everywhere in the hopes of finding it somewhere — and didn’t necessarily recognize it when they had it.

Another problem was the science and applied science that the Romantic Period had inherited from the Age of Reason. This rational activity was beginning to alter life, and the Romantics didn’t know how they felt about that. The Romantic Period looked upon monster science with the same ambivalence and apprehension that Victor Frankenstein felt for his creature.

It was the change in the practice of science during the Nineteenth Century that we have described that finally made it possible for the Romantics to see that one of their problems was the answer to the other. Through the course of two phases in Western society — the Age of Reason and the Romantic Period — the “practice of science” had meant the careful observation of the material world, the gathering and classification of fact. But in the later years of the Romantic Period, this familiar definition was strained beyond its limits.

First to appear were radical new mathematical systems like non-Euclidean geometry and symbolic logic. These systems were self-consistent but, by ordinary standards, irrational. They seemed to apply to something more or something other than the ordinary earthly realm.

These new forms of systematic thinking were followed in the 1860s by strange new scientific theories, all of which pointed beyond the known into the unknown.

There was Darwin’s theory of evolution. This suggested — from current scientific evidence — that both man and nature had once been something different than they now were. And further, that they might alter again in the future.

There was Pasteur’s germ theory of disease. This pointed beyond the new infinitesimal lifeforms that science had discovered to claim that similar living motes that were unknown might have crucial influence on our health and well-being.

There were Maxwell’s equations. These took the apparently separate electrical and magnetic phenomena of longtime scientific study and established them at last as part of a single continuous spectrum which even included visible light. And further predicted the existence of forms of energy then unknown.

There was Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements. Once again a generalization unified an ill-understood chaos of information, and then went beyond the known to suggest the unknown, in this case the existence of hitherto undiscovered forms of matter.

Wow! New powerful forms of life. New energy, new matter, new levels of being. Most important of all, a mutable mankind risen from lower forms and with a destiny that was unknown, instead of the old familiar conception of a fixed mankind specially created and loved by God.

Shifts in attitude had to take place. From being in the background of awareness, one element of society among many, scientific study and its technological application were now recognized as the most superior and advanced aspect of Western society. The leading edge, like it or not.

And science itself was no longer understood to be the practice of looking at familiar material things and taking their measurements. Rather, it was redefined. “Science” was now taken to be the sum total of that which is known and that which might be known. Anything that man might someday measure or bring under the rule of a scientific generalization, any knowledge that man might master, any possibility he might attain — that was the sphere claimed as its own by “science.”

This new science was no longer just the occasional discoverer of minor unknowns. The new science was mysterious by definition. It was the wisdom of a universe that was more unknown than known.

Oh my! A universe that was more unknown than known. That was a radical new concept indeed. It was this new valuation of science and understanding of its nature that brought the Age of Technology into being and made a literature of scientific transcendence possible. Science fiction in full flower was the post-1870 myth of the limitless unknown powers of science.

As we shall see, this new literature changed and developed all through the Age of Technology, which lasted from 1870 until the onset of World War II — and then transcended itself in the succeeding Atomic Age.

At the beginning of the Age of Technology, SF didn’t even have a name. And even very late in the day, in Hugo Gernsback’s time, it would pass under a multitude of different names. But from 1870 or thereabouts, it is at last possible to say that a literature that we can recognize as science fiction was visible and acknowledged.

After the beginning of the Age of Technology, when an SF novel was published, it would not be looked upon as a unique prodigy. Instead, reviewers might compare it to some earlier story. Writers would consciously answer each other and extend each other’s notions. A literary tradition existed.

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To read more, pick up a copy of The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence from Amazon US or Amazon UK.

by Ryan Hurd

Most people experience isolated sleep paralysis [ISP] at least once in their lives. This peculiar conscious vision state occurs at the boundaries of sleep, when we feel aware and awake. Sudden feelings of paralysis in bed -- can't move, can't scream -- give way to a terrifying encounter with a shadowy figure in the bedroom. Sometimes the figure materializes -- the Stranger -- who may sit on the side of the bed or on your chest, and breath its putrid breath into your face as it glares with glowing red eyes. This phenomenon is known around the world by different names. The Hag Effect. Ghost oppression. Supernatural assault. The Succubus.

In the West, no term has survived of this physiological state (SP) and its attendant hypnagogic visions. On this point, medical anthropologist and sleep paralysis expert David Hufford said in an interview in the 2008 documentary Your Worst Nightmare, “We have erased knowledge of these experiences from the cultural repertoire while these experiences are continuing to happen. That’s dramatic. That’s a level of social control that’s very impressive.”

But these negative manifestations are only one side of the coin. When isolated sleep paralysis is encountered with courage and intention, other doors open. New kinds of mythological creatures emerge. Some can be benign, and even helpful. This excerpt from my ebook Sleep Paralysis: A Dreamer's Guide explores these other kinds of meetings and journeys that are possible once the dreamer/visionary is ready to meet the SP encounter with open eyes and an open heart.

In Chapter 4 of the book, the 'terrorizing Stranger' is demystified as a visionary figure amplified by fear and distrust. However, this does not mean that is all it can be. When positive feelings of love, acceptance, and trust are focused upon these apparitions, they can transform into comforting presences that are literally the stuff of legend. At other times, the apparition may keep its original form, but become more communicative and less threatening when we become more accessible. Nature reflects the face turned towards it.

Rather than menacing black dogs, you may find your loved childhood pet. Instead of a creepy old hag, you may receive advice from a venerable wise woman. Succubi give way to pixies and aliens to angels. Let's review some of the classic manifestations that occur when we swallow our fears.