Anthropology of the Weird
Posted by Greg at 13:35, 16 Dec 2011This 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.
Fortean Times UnCon 2011
Posted by Perceval at 12:29, 16 Nov 2011
Speakers at the Fortean Times Uncon know well that there's nothing that titillates a fan of the Fortean more than a choice new morsel of unlikely freakishness, and they seldom disappoint.
Jon Ronson was on excellent form introducing the topic of his latest book 'The Psychopath Test' (Amazon US/UK), exposing insanity at the heart of psychiatry, from the dangers of faking madness too well, to the natural affinity between corporate capitalism and psychopathy, via 24-hour naked 'crotch eyeballing' sessions for psychopaths on acid.
Brian Regal, warming up to his main theme, 'Science and the Sasquatch', a review of the career of physical anthropologist Grover Krantz, mentioned in passing the dog-headed origins of St Christopher and Linnaeus' category for cryptic species called the 'Paradoxa' and treated the audience to a medieval depiction of various monsters in speedos. While Krantz never achieved his goal of proving the existence of the Sasquatch, there's no shame in the trying.
Next up, David Clarke reported on his investigation into a Sheffield woman's death caused by her sighting of a ghostly apparition in an early example of spiritualism in 1855, a year which also featured many Fortean phenomena including Devil's hoof-marks in snow.
When speaking on his chosen topic of talking dogs and canine intellectuals on German TV, Jan Bondeson (Amazon US/UK) drew complaints from viewers about his lack of respect for Hitler! Jan, with his delightfully dry wit, served up various canine personalities including a reincarnation of Pythagoras, a dog taught to say 'How do you do Grandmama' by Alexander Graham Bell and a talking dog named Don, who won over a hostile priest by offering up the word 'Hallelujah'.
Struggling with his technophobia, the CFZ's Richard Freeman gave an update on their latest expedition gathering data from local inhabitants in search of the yeti (stumbling upon stories of giant snakes along the way) and the orang pendek. While it must require extraordinary tenaciousness to maintain the slow but steady progress of cryptozoological research, it's also a challenge to fill an hour's talk with your latest findings. Who knew that false vampire bats taste like rabbit?
Day one's talks concluded with Sarah Angliss building on the apparent theme of the weekend - talking animals and voices of the dead - treating us to a spooky 1890 recording of Florence Nightingale (although Otto von Bismarck singing a cowboy song might have been more fun), the New Jersey accent of Hoover the talking seal, and giving an audience member the chance of vocal immortality via the wax cylinder of an Edison phonograph. For her finale, Sarah treated us to the music of the aether, a performance on Theremin accompanied by a ventriloquist doll/automaton, inspired by John Logie Baird's doll Stooky Bill, who featured in his early televisual experiments.
Day 2 kicked off with Christopher Josiffe's account of a mysterious phenomenon which gripped the Isle of Man in the 1930s - Gef the talking mongoose - who took up residence in a remote farmhouse, but in his own words "knew a hell of a lot", including all the gossip from the bus garage in Peel. Josiffe's impersonations of various choice quotes from the creature were a highlight!
An allegedly cursed (but recently-carved) stone head joined David Clarke and Andy Roberts on stage as they entertained with examples of ancient and more modern rock-based lore, from Tigh na Cailleach, believed to be the oldest known pagan shrine in continual use, home to a stone family who watch over livestock during upland summer grazing, to the Hexham heads of evil repute, eventually discovered to have been cast in concrete as a father's demonstration of his occupation to his daughter.
This was followed by best-selling authors Picknett and Prince. Lynn put a Hermetic spin on the origins of science, explaining that its pioneers (Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Bacon, Kepler, Tycho Brahe) were all inspired by the occult. Clive followed up with the provocative conclusion that modern physics supports the idea of 'intelligent design'. Their book, The Forbidden Universe is available from Amazon US/UK).
In Ted Harrison's history of apocalypse-prediction, he shared just some of the stories behind the apparently 250 predicted apocalypse dates which have already passed, from one found on an Assyrian clay tablet from 2800BC, to Harold Camping's more recent attempt (which thankfully didn't dissuade Ted from preparing for his talk). Those seeking further information on the coming apocalypse might wish to refer to the Rapture Index.
Gail-Nina Anderson gave an amusing account of the mummy in popular culture, charting its appropriation and distortion by horror flick and comic book to the point where it has become a comical (and easily-dodged!) monster figure.
As a finale, we were treated to a screening of comedienne and ventriloquist Nina Conti's film tribute to her irrepressibly eccentric mentor Ken Campbell, who left his vent dolls to Nina in his will. The film follows Nina as she travels to a ventriloquist's convention, and to Vent Haven in the US (a museum-cum-rest home for bereaved vent dolls). Movingly funny and disturbingly odd.
I must try to make it to the evening event next year. Highly entertaining by all accounts!
Previously on TDG:
After the Carnivàle: BlackBxx
Posted by Greg at 07:56, 13 Nov 2011Daniel Knauf would probably forgive you for thinking that he’s the king of the ‘paranormal drama’ genre. After all, he’s the creative genius behind the epic, esoteric period piece Carnivàle, he’s written for Eric Kripke’s Supernatural series, and his latest ground-breaking project is BlackBxx: Haunted, a pioneering crowd-sourced media project designed for the new broadcast medium of choice: the Internet.
However, he will quickly point out to you that’s not exactly the case. “I don't think you could name a genre I haven't dabbled in at some point,” he clarifies. “I've also written on straight-up contemporary cop dramas. Romance. My Own Worst Enemy was a spy show. Blind Justice was a Western; The Phantom a superhero. I have very broad interests.”
But even if Knauf wanted to leave the paranormal genre behind, it may just be that the weirdness could follow him. During the recent shoot for BlackBxx: Haunted, he noted that “weird stuff” happened without the slightest need for special effects; in one instance, the cast praised the convincing nature of a pot flying across the room, only to find that wasn’t one of the designed effects. Though Knauf wasn’t overly surprised that such things happened: “With all the energy crackling in that house, I wouldn't be surprised if the cast had generated some parakinesis”.
Knauf says that he is open to the idea of genuine paranormal experiences, confessing that he’s personally seen “compelling evidence that there are some phenomena that cannot be explained. Whether it's ghosts or aliens or interdimensional anomalies is anybody's guess.” Nevertheless, he describes himself as a skeptic – just not of the knee-jerk kind. “I’m very leery of people slapping labels on [paranormal experiences] or leaping to conclusions simply because it gives them the comfort of context. To a lot of people, false knowledge is preferable to accepting a mystery - especially an unknowable mystery.”
So what about the central topic of his latest project, hauntings? “Personally, I believe in an afterlife,” he says. “I believe we have incarnate souls that survive physical death. I believe that there is an invisible world that is inhabited by souls. I also believe that the phenomena we know collectively as 'hauntings' may have absolutely nothing to do with my beliefs. When I see a T.V. medium telling some guy that his dead Aunt Eunice misses her tabby, Buttons, I think, ‘So wait. Aunt Eunice has gone to the trouble of actually breaching the wall that seperates the living from the dead, and she wants to talk about her fucking cat?’ That doesn't wash. When I see an object move, after ruling out a physical explanation, I'm willing to accept the cause may be supernatural. But was it moved by a ghost? Not necessarily.”
“Once the possibility of a hoax can be ruled out, there's certain evidence that can only be accurately classified as a mystery. It demands to be accepted as such. On the other hand, just because a piece of evidence is accepted as supernatural, it would be a mistake to use it as proof validating someone's religious or spiritual beliefs.” ... Read More »
Shaking Stars
Posted by Greg at 10:38, 10 Aug 2011This 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.
How to Have an OBE
Posted by Greg at 12:25, 27 Jul 2011The 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.
In the Fall of Gravity
Posted by Greg at 05:51, 14 Jul 2011Ron Cole's In the Fall of Gravity is an award-winning, fantasy stop-motion-animation short film that explores the deeper issues of life, consciousness and free will. Cole, following in the footsteps of the legendary Ray Harryhausen, created every aspect of the 11-minute-long film himself (apart from the score) on a non-existent budget, in his own basement. In the process he had to overcome several technical difficulties (not least, going from 35mm film to digital halfway through the project), but the end result is something wonderful. Anyone who has attempted stop-motion animation will be staggered at what Cole has achieved here - and, rather than aiming for a wide market via 'lowest-common-denominator entertainment', he has instead dedicated all those hours into creating a work of art that contemplates the mysteries of existence:
Upon a journey to the Takakjian Castle, the wizard Isomer and his traveling companion Trevor Verity discuss the nature of Life and the Universe. What Isomer describes is a philosophy that traces all the energies of the world back to one fundamental force, Gravity. But this philosophy is disturbing to Trevor as it also implies that even the workings of the mind are completely logical and predictable, over which we have no real control. The notion of free will is challenged and debated between the two.
The wizard goes on to explain there is more to this philosophy than is commonly understood and that Life is a force of nature that is non-physical and when properly understood, we will find our individual lives are but extensions of the life of the Universe. Trevor struggles to understand this concept as Isomer demonstrates this meaning, through the strings of a marionette whose performance mimics the wizard's words.
A work of 'cinematic poetry', In the Fall of Gravity is a film crafted to entertain the mind and eyes with new concepts for both.
Daily Grail interviewer Greg McQueen spoke to Ron Cole about the creation of his wonderful film and the art of stop-motion animation.
TDG: Ron, I appreciate that you've agreed to an interview for the readers of the Daily Grail website. Some readers may not be aware of who you are or what it is that you do. Would you like to tell the readers a little about yourself and also talk about what you do ? ... Read More »
Ten Amazing Timelapse Videos
Posted by Greg at 05:29, 13 May 2011Running through life at a frantic pace, living in the 'now', we often remain ignorant of those natural phenomena that take place over longer time scales (especially with the majority of our lives now also spent indoors). "The wheels of the cosmos turn too slowly for humans to watch", says José Francisco Salgado in the trailer to his upcoming feature Sidereal Motion. "Until now." With the advent of digital cameras, the art of time-lapse photography has risen to new heights. Through the lens of these artists we can see what the world might look like to a consciousness that perceives things over long time-scales: vehicles and people swarming like ants or insects (perhaps no better example than in the beautiful video "Hajj: A Journey of Purity"), clouds that move like oceans and rivers, and the billions of fixed stars in deep space that sweep into view as our planet revolves throughout the night, a real-life Total Perspective Vortex.
Here's ten* exquisite time-lapse videos that have made my jaw drop to the floor, listed in no particular order. Make sure you select the HD and full-screen options if possible! For more information on the videos and artists who created them - including equipment used, locations, and licensing queries - visit the linked titles.
Grab a beverage, sit back in your seat and enjoy.
10. The Mountain
by TSO Photography
A stunning time-lapse video from Terje Sorgjerd, filmed around Spain's highest mountain, El Teide - one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars, and the home of Teide Observatories. The shots of the Milky Way are breath-taking...indeed, if you break out of the 'twinkling lights in the sky rotating over the Earth' perspective, and instead grasp your viewing position as it really is - on a spinning globe, watching billions of fixed suns in the virtually unending depths of the cosmos sweep into view - the opening sequences to this video can pretty much bring a tear to your eye (well, at least they do for me).
The celestial viewing delights in this time-lapse are also at times framed by an Earthly phenomenon:
A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes.
Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds. The Milky Way was shining through the clouds, making the stars sparkle in an interesting way. So if you ever wondered how the Milky Way would look through a Sahara sandstorm, look at 00:32.
9. In The Land Of The Northern Lights
by Ole Christian Salomonsen
Six months and 50,000 images in the making, Ole Christian Salomsen's timelapse video of the Aurora Borealis ('The Northern Lights') is exquisitely beautiful. The time-scales aren't as stretched as in many time-lapse videos, in order to preserve the real-time speed of the aurorae as much as possible, "instead of the northern lights just flashing over the sky in the blink of an eye":
One can only wonder what ancient people made of this spectacular atmospheric phenomenon, in which spirits seem to rise from mountains and dance across the sky.
Introduction to Lucid Dreaming
Posted by Greg at 03:02, 28 Apr 2011The 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”.
Calling Cthulhu
Posted by Greg at 03:43, 15 Mar 2011This 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.
Vallee: Author of the Impossible
Posted by Greg at 05:11, 03 Dec 2010The 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 »