Heathens, Pagans and Witches discussion

I've been looking into Metaphysics and aspects of Fortean phenomena recently, and I thought I'd add a thread for it, in case others are interested. I'll add the books I've found and read in following posts.

"Examples of the odd phenomena in Fort's books include many of what are variously referred to as occult, supernatural, and paranormal."

Charles Fort. Charles Fort (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_...)

Thanks for the link Gina - Good thread idea! Love this quote from Fort from the wiki page:

People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.

Nell wrote: "Thanks for the link Gina - Good thread idea! Love this quote from Fort from the wiki page:

People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people w..."

Thanks Nell. I love that quote too. I'll add some books to the thread today. :):)

First I'm cutting and pasting a bit from that above article, for easy referencing:

"Fort and the unexplained:

Overview:
Fort's relationship with the study of anomalous phenomena is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented. For over thirty years, Charles Fort sat in the libraries of New York City and London, assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes on phenomena that lay outside the accepted theories and beliefs of the time.

Fort took thousands of notes in his lifetime. In his short story "The Giant, the Insect and The Philanthropic-looking Old Gentleman", published many years later for the first time by the International Fortean Organization in issue #70 of the "INFO Journal: Science and the Unknown", Fort spoke of sitting on a park bench at The Cloisters in New York City and tossing some 48,000 notes, not all of his collection by any means, into the wind. This short story is significant because Fort uses his own data collection technique to solve a mystery. He marveled that seemingly unrelated bits of information were, in fact, related. Fort wryly concludes that he went back to collecting data and taking even more notes. The notes were kept on cards and scraps of paper in shoeboxes, in a cramped shorthand of Fort's own invention, and some of them survive today in the collections of the University of Pennsylvania.

More than once, depressed and discouraged, Fort destroyed his work, but always began anew. Some of the notes were published, little by little, by the Fortean Society magazine "Doubt" and, upon the death of its editor Tiffany Thayer in 1959, most were donated to the New York Public Library where they are still available to researchers of the unknown.

From this research, Fort wrote four books. These are The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932); one book was written between New Lands and Lo! but it was abandoned and absorbed into Lo!.

Fort's writing style:
Fort suggests that there is a Super-Sargasso Sea into which all lost things go, and justifies his theories by noting that they fit the data as well as the conventional explanations. As to whether Fort believes this theory, or any of his other proposals, he gives us the answer: "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written."

Writer Colin Wilson suspects that Fort took few if any of his "explanations" seriously, and notes that Fort made "no attempt to present a coherent argument". Moreover, Wilson opines that Fort's writing style is "atrocious" and "almost unreadable". Wilson also compares Fort to Robert Ripley, a contemporary writer who found major success hunting oddities, and speculates that Fort's idiosyncratic prose might have kept him from greater popular success.

Jerome Clark writes that Fort was "essentially a satirist hugely skeptical of human beings' – especially scientists' – claims to ultimate knowledge". Clark describes Fort's writing style as a "distinctive blend of mocking humor, penetrating insight, and calculated outrageousness".

Wilson describes Fort as "a patron of cranks" and also argues that running through Fort's work is "the feeling that no matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity.

Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."

Fortean phenomena:
Despite his objections to Fort's writing style, Wilson allows that "the facts are certainly astonishing enough". Examples of the odd phenomena in Fort's books include many of what are variously referred to as occult, supernatural, and paranormal. Reported events include teleportation (a term Fort is generally credited with coining) ;poltergeist events; falls of frogs, fishes, inorganic materials of an amazing range; unaccountable noises and explosions; spontaneous fires; levitation; ball lightning (a term explicitly used by Fort); unidentified flying objects; unexplained disappearances; giant wheels of light in the oceans; and animals found outside their normal ranges (see phantom cat).

He offered many reports of out-of-place artifacts (OOPArts), strange items found in unlikely locations. He also is perhaps the first person to explain strange human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis of alien abduction and was an early proponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, specifically suggesting that strange lights or object sighted in the skies might be alien spacecraft. Fort also wrote about the interconnectedness of nature and synchronicity.

Many of these phenomena are now collectively and conveniently referred to as Fortean phenomena (or Forteana), whilst others have developed into their own schools of thought: for example, reports of UFOs in ufology and unconfirmed animals (cryptids) in cryptozoology. These 'new disciplines' are not recognized by most scientists or academics."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_...)

For anyone who has seen the film Magnolia (1999) by P.T. Anderson, this "has an underlying theme of unexplained events, taken from the 1920s and '30s works of Charles Fort."

"Science-fiction writers of note including Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and Robert Anton Wilson were also fans of the work of Fort."

And Metaphysics:

"Metaphysics is a traditional branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world that encompasses it, although the term is not easily defined.

Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:
What is ultimately there?
What is it like?

A person who studies metaphysics is called a metaphysicist or a metaphysician. The metaphysician attempts to clarify the fundamental notions by which people understand the world, e.g., existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into the basic categories of being and how they relate to each other. Another central branch of metaphysics is cosmology, the study of the origin (if it had one), fundamental structure, nature, and dynamics of the universe.

Prior to the modern history of science, scientific questions were addressed as a part of metaphysics known as natural philosophy. Originally, the term "science" (Latin scientia) simply meant "knowledge". The scientific method, however, transformed natural philosophy into an empirical activity deriving from experiment unlike the rest of philosophy. By the end of the 18th century, it had begun to be called "science" to distinguish it from philosophy. Thereafter, metaphysics denoted philosophical enquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence. Some philosophers of science, such as the neo-positivists, say that natural science rejects the study of metaphysics, while other philosophers of science strongly disagree."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics)

Now I'll add some authors I've found and books that I've added or since read:

John A. Keel
"John Alva Keel (born Alva John Kiehle) was a Fortean author and professional journalist. Keel wrote professionally from the age of 12, and was best known for his writings on unidentified flying objects, the "Mothman" of West Virginia, and other paranormal subjects. Keel was arguably one of the most widely read and influential ufologists since the early 1970s. Although his own thoughts about UFOs and associated anomalous phenomena gradually evolved since the mid 1960s, Keel remained one of ufology's most original and controversial researchers. It was Keel's second book, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), that popularized the idea that many aspects of contemporary UFO reports, including humanoid encounters, often paralleled ancient folklore and religious encounters. Keel coined the term "men in black" to describe the mysterious figures alleged to harass UFO witnesses and he also argued that there is a direct relationship between UFOs and psychic phenomena. He did not call himself a ufologist and preferred the term Fortean, which encompasses a wide range of paranormal subjects."
The Mothman Prophecies
Operation Trojan Horse
Our Haunted Planet


Jacques F. Vallée
"Jacques Fabrice Vallée (born September 24, 1939 in Pontoise, Val-d'Oise, France) is a venture capitalist, computer scientist, author, ufologist and former astronomer currently residing in San Francisco, California. In mainstream science, Vallée is notable for co-developing the first computerized mapping of Mars for NASA and for his work at SRI International in creating ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet. Vallée is also an important figure in the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), first noted for a defense of the scientific legitimacy of the extraterrestrial hypothesis and later for promoting the interdimensional hypothesis."
Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds


Patrick Harpur
Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld

Edmund Lenihan
Meeting the Other Crowd

Rosemary Ellen Guiley
The Vengeful Djinn: Unveiling the Hidden Agenda of Genies
The Djinn Connection: The Hidden Links Between Djinn, Shadow People, ETs, Nephilim, Archons, Reptilians and Other Entities
(The last book mentioned was in part fascinating, but also ridiculous. My review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...)


And finally parallel universes and quantum mechanics:
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

Now I'm off to clean out my chook and duck houses. :)

Forget the Rosemary Guiley Djinn book, here's a far better, non-sensational, non-fear based book: Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar by Robert W. Lebling

For anyone searching for a copy of Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds by Jacques F. Vallée, and who finds themselves reeling at the price (60-70 dollars for a second hand paperback and don't even bother about the price of a new copy!) Scribd has a pdf available for downloading (even paying for one day's access is far cheaper than trying to source this very rare book elsewhere):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8652147/Pas...

Little wrote: "For anyone searching for a copy of Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds by Jacques F. Vallée, and who finds themselves reeling at the price (60..."

Wow. Maybe I should consider putting my beat up, well-and-frequently read paperback copy up for sale. Nah. It's part of the permanent collection.

Minsma wrote: "Little wrote: "For anyone searching for a copy of Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds by Jacques F. Vallée, and who finds themselves reeling a..."

I wouldn't let it out of my sight Minsma! I'm still hoping I'll stumble across a paperback in some dusty opp shop one day. Meanwhile I have the pdf on my kindle and am just about to embark. :):)

Little wrote: "Minsma wrote: "Little wrote: "For anyone searching for a copy of Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds by Jacques F. Vallée, and who finds thems..."

Good reading! I think you'll like it.

"How will you go back?" said the woman.
"Nay, that I do not know. Because I have heard that for those who enter Fairy Land, there is no going back. They must go on, and go through it."

I'm sure I will. :D Wish me luck!

Passport to Magonia is great, but the pdf I linked (scribd) does have formatting issues and weird typos. It's not slowing me down though, and for anyone interested in the Fey/Gentry/Djinn/First Ones/Elder Races, I recommend this one.

Next up for me will be: The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W.Y. Evans-Wentz and The Secret Commonwealth: Of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies by Robert Kirk.

Little wrote: "Next up for me will be: The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W.Y. Evans-Wentz and The Secret Commonwealth: Of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies by Robert Kirk."

I can recommend both of these. And that quote about only being able to go through Faery has become something of a watchword in my life whenever I'm faced with a challenge. :-)

Just finished Passport to Magonia, it slowed with the U.F.O stuff, which tends to bore me, but it was definitely a good read. I prefer the Irish tales of the Good People as in Meeting the Other Crowd, now embarking on The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.

Minsma wrote: "And that quote about only being able to go through Faery has become something of a watchword in my life whenever I'm faced with a challenge. :-) "

It's a good one. :):)

The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W.Y. Evans-Wentz is just wonderful. I'm finding it far more informative than Meeting the Other Crowd, probably because it was written far earlier, when more of the old folk were still alive to tell their tales, and before electricity arrived to blind us to things that can only be seen in twilight, shadows and half light: the betwixt and between times.

Interestingly in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries one of the Seer's descriptions of 'the shining ones' of the Gentry, coincided with Rudolf Steiner's description of the light transmissions from the fully functioning lotus petals of the awakened chakras, and the psychical heart center.

The other interesting difference is how scholars such as Yeats and Wentz approached the Fairy faith in comparison to the Fortean writers. The former are respectful, the latter far more suspicious and fearful, (especially John Keel who became increasingly paranoid during his time investigating the paranormal).

Wasn't sure where to post this.

Bright and Happy Imbolc to all of you and all those who love you.

Jaq wrote: "I might suggest The Magic Of Findhorn."

That's a great one to add to the thread. :)

Portia wrote: "Wasn't sure where to post this.

Bright and Happy Imbolc to all of you and all those who love you."

Lammas here. http://spheresoflight.com.au/index.ph... Best to all whichever way you celebrate it. :)

Do you celebrate Lammas like we do in the north or have your rituals molded themselves to a more Aussie sensibility? For imbolc I use pink, light blue, light green, and pale candels. I make Challah, the braided egg-based bread Iearned from from my Jewish friend's mother, and ham. Very similar to Easter dinner.

Me? I'm the slackest pagan known to humankind :D I do have friends that do though. I would suspect a loaf of bread, freshly baked, would play a part. I suppose I did enter into the spirit of things by bringing in the hay the other day, and by harvesting over the weekend.

This is the thread for Imbolc Portia: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... . I suspect there is one for Lammas too...yep, here it is https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I think we have a thread for everything in this group, and growing daily. :):)

Little wrote: "The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W.Y. Evans-Wentz is just wonderful. I'm finding it far more informative than Meeting the Other Crowd, probably because it was w..."

I've just thought that you might really enjoy Lady Gregory's Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, another classic from that era. She was a chum of Yeats, and I believe also of Evans-Wentz.

Also Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx by John Rhys. I read that one hundred and fifty years ago when I took Celtic studies at UCLA from Patrick Ford (who did a great translation of the Mabinogion). Really sparked my imagination and I was Celtic mad for years after.

Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series by Lady Gregory and Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx. Volume 1 by John Rhys

Thanks Minsma. Adding them and seeking them out. :):)

Also I'm finding Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth: Of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies to be a bit of a slog. He's so sexist and anti Semitic too. He's also very fear based, his viewpoint shaped by his position. So far he's not saying anything new either. It's all been covered, in depth in the The Spiderwick Chronicles Box Set. :D Although I'm sure Black credited or acknowledged Kirk's life and book...

I suppose I'll just have to read on and find out if it gets better...

Also found a few books that may be of interest. I haven't read them yet. The first I found through an internet search and it could be absolutely terrible, the second (The Faery Faith) through someone I follow on GR, and I suspect it's a really good one. :

Our Invisible Bodies: Scientific Evidence for Subtle Bodies by Jay Alfred
and The Faery Faith: An Integration of Science with Spirit by Serena Roney-Dougal

Anyway have just bought a kindle copy of The Faery Faith will tell you how it goes. :D

Little wrote: "He's so sexist and anti Semitic too."

Oh yes, he's definitely a man of his age. The thing is, he was one of the first to write this stuff done in a comprehensive manner and he's influenced generations of writers. I think that's mostly why one reads Rev. Kirk, to see where a lot of this stuff came from, to understand the mindset of a "seer" from as far back as the 17th century.

UCLA research library had the original, very rare chapbook (only 200 copies printed or such like) and I read that the first time in the original 17th-centuryese. Quite a slog! But he'd been referenced in so many other books I'd read I felt I needed to see what he was about. So often the books that are heavily referenced by others wind up being a disappointment simply because they've been culled so much that it all seems old news by the time you get to the original. IOW, I can't promise it gets better. :-D

I've never heard of either of those books you mentioned. I'm interested to see what you make of them.

Minsma wrote: "So often the books that are heavily referenced by others wind up being a disappointment simply because they've been culled so much that it all seems old news by the time you get to the original."

Yes, I think this is the case. I'm reading Wentz's book at the same time, and Passport to Magonia cited Kirk's throughout too. I thought Kirk had actual 'away with the fairies' experience. Ist hand. Still reading on. :)

I've been looking at the unseen djinn/fairies/various spirit beings that don't belong to either of the previous categories, via different cultures and occult/religious viewpoints. It's fascinating, especially after reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead or The After-death Experiences on the Bardo Plane by W.Y. Evans-Wentz and How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation by Rudolf Steiner. The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black also got me thinking. The world is far more infused with magic for me than it was this time last year.

I have many thoughts but am saving them for after I've read these other books. What does get me already though is why didn't so many of the Fortean writers like Keel (and that very strange Icke man) etc read some of the esoteric and occult classics? Far more sensible answers to the phenomena they experienced in the fore mentioned books.

Little wrote: "Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series by Lady Gregory and Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx. Volume 1 by John Rhys..."

There's another I've been read, though I can't say I recommend it exactly: Running with the Fairies: Towards a Transpersonal Anthropology of Religion by Dennis Gaffin. I'd half recommend it, maybe, as the first half was quite fascinating. Here's what I wrote elsewhere about that first half:

"I’ve been reading a fascinating book lately: Running With the Fairies: Towards a Transpersonal Anthropology of Religion by Dennis Gaffin. He’s an academic (a Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York College at Buffalo) who has done something quite rare: a serious study of Irish fairy belief.

Academics are big on doing serious studies of the folk traditions of Buddhists or South Seas Islanders or Native Americans, et al., but there’s a prejudice against turning that same eye towards Western folk beliefs. It’s an inherently racist stand, I think, that Those People and their Quaint Beliefs are okay to study, but somehow Western belief structures must be dismissed as silly trash. It’s as if the people who are doing the studies have decided that First Worlders are 'too good' to have such ideas, that they must be ruthlessly derided and suppressed by Western academia so we can preserve our collective First World reputation.

So, Dennis Gaffin runs an academic risk here. True, he’s an anthropologist who’s gone native, so to speak, and is now perceiving fairies his own self. Which further risks his academic reputation, I suppose, but his point of view straddling both worlds is completely fascinating to me. I feel a kinship to him....

When it comes to belief, experience is the core of it, an emotional heart-to-heart with something beyond the narrow confines of personal ego. It’s not a received wisdom, which is why religion often fails to convince. “Belief cannot be transferred,” says Professor Gaffin, “for it is a function of experience.” These things often seem to go hand-in-hand with a closeness to nature. As we move more and more away from the natural world and more into a mechanized, urbanized environment those experiences become rarer."

However, once Gaffin gets through with the overview and philosophy and starts with the personal interviews, the book devolves into New Agey "there's no such thing as bad fairies" "everything is rainbows and butterflies" kind of stuff that left me cold. The core of the book revolves around people who think they are reincarnated-as-human fairies. I have no problem with people who believe such things. I have no idea what the Universe is up to, and being a reincarnated fairy is just as likely as anything else. But I do have a problem with people who reject millennia of traditional beliefs and experience with the Otherworld in favor of modern pie-in-the-skyism. They label the traditional beliefs as ignorance and superstition, but listening to them talk about their experiences, it feels like Joe Fisher all over again. Gives me the shivers.

So. I haven't finished it. Not sure if I will. There are currently no ratings for this book on Goodreads, but there are a few on Amazon.

Little wrote: " What does get me already though is why didn't so many of the Fortean writers like Keel (and that very strange Icke man) etc read some of the esoteric and occult classics? Far more sensible answers to the phenomena they experienced in the fore mentioned books."

I'm a jaded old so-and-so but I think maybe they didn't want to mitigate their sensationalist views. Sensationalism sells more books. :-)

We seem to be swapping posts here, but I'm off now in observance of the High Holy American tradition of football (the Superbowl). (Don't care for it, much, but attendance is mandatory in this household.) (At least the commercials are amusing.)

There are no such thing as bad fairies my butt. :/ That leaves me cold too. Very naive. Very New Agey. The opposite spectrum of Keel's paranoia but just as unbalanced.

Minsma wrote: ""Belief cannot be transferred,” says Professor Gaffin, “for it is a function of experience.” Very true.

Minsma wrote: "Little wrote: " What does get me already though is why didn't so many of the Fortean writers like Keel (and that very strange Icke man) etc read some of the esoteric and occult classics? Far more s..."

Too right sensationalism sells. David Icke must have made buckets. It's a shame though, such crap just muddies the water.

Have a great time at The Hight Holy American tradition of football watching Minsma! :D

Jaq wrote: "Little wrote: "There are no such thing as bad fairies my butt. :/ "

Obviously hasn't seen Labyrinth. ;)"

Exactly! :):)

Portia wrote: "Wasn't sure where to post this.

Bright and Happy Imbolc to all of you and all those who love you."

Thank you for the lovely wishes, Portia :) I've been offline for a few of days and was unable to post at the beginning of the month in the threads Little mentioned, although I did manage them in the newsletter :)

Been reading Caverns, Cauldrons, and Concealed Creatures: A Study of Subterranean Mysteries in History, Folklore, and Myth by William Michael Mott. I have been scoffing repeatedly but on following up certain claims have found them to be true. Not sure I'll make it all the way through the book, as it has a paranoid undercurrent that I'm not sure I like.

Anyway reading about Vimanas lead to some internet roaming, and I found these links about a vimana apparently found in Afganistan in 2011? Just how much truth is there in the find? I have no idea. The internet is a great source of both valuable information, and utter crap. Anyway posting it anyway:

http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.c...

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vim...

http://www.crystalinks.com/gc_egyptco...

Little wrote: "Been reading Caverns, Cauldrons, and Concealed Creatures: A Study of Subterranean Mysteries in History, Folklore, and Myth by William Michael Mott. I have been scoffi..."

Terrible book by the way. Wouldn't bother.