amarok2005
Ephemeral Spectre
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2005
- Messages
- 370
When I got it into my head to write about anomalous phenomena, the problem was where to begin? I decided to start from the ground up, with definitions of what sort of things I'd be writing about.
The first thing Charles Fort would say would be "There can be no definitions, because nothing has ever been defined." Still, I've started looking into the literature, seeing how other writers have classified and defined anomalies. I might add that my definitions are not terse dictionary entries but chatty discussions of what various anomalies are. Well, here are the first few:
MEMORAT. William Montell, in his Ghosts Along the Cumberland, notes that some of the legends he passes on to us are more than folk tales. They are memorats “because they are often first-hand experiences” (p. 14). He further defines memorat as being an account of “supernatural or unnatural creatures and happenings” (p. 219), so an anecdote about doing the laundry or shopping would not count. Therefore a memorat is an account of a paranormal, supernatural, or fortean occurrence actually witnessed by the informant.
I always referred to a person’s story of what happened as a fortean “report”, but some informants, true enough, have to have stories coaxed out of them. I will continue to use the words “report” and “memorat” interchangeably, however.
PHANTASM. Frederic W. H. Myers tries to define the sorts of reports the Society for Psychical Research collected into the monumental 1886 volume Phantasms of the Living. He classes them as apparition reports, but not apparitions of the dead, and he further adds: “And these apparitions, as will be seen, are themselves extremely various in character; including not visual phenomena alone, but auditory, tactile, or even purely ideational and emotional impressions. All these we have included under the term phantasm” (p. ix)
Should we write a book categorizing ghosts, hauntings, and other psychic experiences, we’d probably have examples for a spectrum of definitions, from vague “phantasms” to crisis apparitions to the most over-the-top poltergeists, so it’s good to have a name for our “lowest” category. I always used the word “impression” for these vague phenomena, and I will probably use the terms interchangeably.
SUPERNORMAL. “I have ventured to coin the word ‘supernormal’ to be applied to phenomena which are beyond what usually happens – beyond, that is, in the sense of suggesting unknown psychical laws. It is thus formed on the analogy of abnormal. When we speak of an abnormal phenomenon we do not mean one which contravenes natural laws, but which exhibits them in an unusual or inexplicable form. Similarly, by a supernormal phenomenon, I mean, not one which overrides natural laws, for I believe no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits the actions of laws higher, in a psychical aspect, than are discerned in action in everyday life.” So Frederic Myers explains in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. III, p. 30 (reprinted in Phantasms, p. xvii). Since he was writing of telepathy and other psychic powers, he used the word “psychical”; nowadays we would define “supernormal” as a phenomenon apparently overriding any so-called laws of nature or physics. “Para-“ also means “beyond”, so this definition could work for “paranormal” as well.
WESSEXING. After some philosophical rambling at the beginning of The Book of the Damned, Charles Fort starts throwing accounts of strange falls at the reader: black rains, red rains, giant snow flakes, gelatinous substances, and ever more curious materials. Red rains, in Britain and Europe at least, were blamed on dust drawn up by whirlwinds, which mixed with raindrops in the clouds. A fall of red dust in February 1903 particularly interested Fort due to its immense scope:
Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 30-56:
"That, up to the 27th of February, this fall had continued in Belgium, Holland, Germany and Austria; that in some instances it was not sand, or that almost all the matter was organic: that a vessel had reported the fall as occurring in the Atlantic Ocean, midway between Southampton and Barbados. The calculation is given that, in England alone, 10,000,000 tons of matter had fallen. It had fallen in Switzerland (Symons’ Met. Mag., March, 1903). It had fallen in Russia (Bull. Com. Geolog., 22-48). Not only had a vast quantity of matter fallen several months before, in Australia, but it was at this time falling in Australia (Victorian Naturalist, June, 1903) – enormously – red mud – fifty tons per square mile."
On April 2, 1903, a Mr. E. G. Clayton read a paper before the Royal Chemical Society concerning a local fall of the red dust. He had examined the substance and suggested that it was “merely wind-borne dust from the roads and lanes of Wessex.” Fort thereupon coined the phrases “the Wessex explanation” and “wessexing”: An attempt to explain away an extremely widespread unusual occurrence by diminishing its size or extent to fit one’s solution, “to interpret the enormous in terms of the minute.” (pp. 33-35)
Fort, Charles Hoy. Complete Books of Charles Fort (Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 1974).
Montell, William Lynwood. Ghosts Along the Cumberland: Deathlore in the Kentucky Foothills (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1975).
Myers, Frederick, “Introduction,” in Sidgwick, Eleanor Mildred, ed. Phantasms of the Living (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1962).
The first thing Charles Fort would say would be "There can be no definitions, because nothing has ever been defined." Still, I've started looking into the literature, seeing how other writers have classified and defined anomalies. I might add that my definitions are not terse dictionary entries but chatty discussions of what various anomalies are. Well, here are the first few:
MEMORAT. William Montell, in his Ghosts Along the Cumberland, notes that some of the legends he passes on to us are more than folk tales. They are memorats “because they are often first-hand experiences” (p. 14). He further defines memorat as being an account of “supernatural or unnatural creatures and happenings” (p. 219), so an anecdote about doing the laundry or shopping would not count. Therefore a memorat is an account of a paranormal, supernatural, or fortean occurrence actually witnessed by the informant.
I always referred to a person’s story of what happened as a fortean “report”, but some informants, true enough, have to have stories coaxed out of them. I will continue to use the words “report” and “memorat” interchangeably, however.
PHANTASM. Frederic W. H. Myers tries to define the sorts of reports the Society for Psychical Research collected into the monumental 1886 volume Phantasms of the Living. He classes them as apparition reports, but not apparitions of the dead, and he further adds: “And these apparitions, as will be seen, are themselves extremely various in character; including not visual phenomena alone, but auditory, tactile, or even purely ideational and emotional impressions. All these we have included under the term phantasm” (p. ix)
Should we write a book categorizing ghosts, hauntings, and other psychic experiences, we’d probably have examples for a spectrum of definitions, from vague “phantasms” to crisis apparitions to the most over-the-top poltergeists, so it’s good to have a name for our “lowest” category. I always used the word “impression” for these vague phenomena, and I will probably use the terms interchangeably.
SUPERNORMAL. “I have ventured to coin the word ‘supernormal’ to be applied to phenomena which are beyond what usually happens – beyond, that is, in the sense of suggesting unknown psychical laws. It is thus formed on the analogy of abnormal. When we speak of an abnormal phenomenon we do not mean one which contravenes natural laws, but which exhibits them in an unusual or inexplicable form. Similarly, by a supernormal phenomenon, I mean, not one which overrides natural laws, for I believe no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits the actions of laws higher, in a psychical aspect, than are discerned in action in everyday life.” So Frederic Myers explains in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. III, p. 30 (reprinted in Phantasms, p. xvii). Since he was writing of telepathy and other psychic powers, he used the word “psychical”; nowadays we would define “supernormal” as a phenomenon apparently overriding any so-called laws of nature or physics. “Para-“ also means “beyond”, so this definition could work for “paranormal” as well.
WESSEXING. After some philosophical rambling at the beginning of The Book of the Damned, Charles Fort starts throwing accounts of strange falls at the reader: black rains, red rains, giant snow flakes, gelatinous substances, and ever more curious materials. Red rains, in Britain and Europe at least, were blamed on dust drawn up by whirlwinds, which mixed with raindrops in the clouds. A fall of red dust in February 1903 particularly interested Fort due to its immense scope:
Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 30-56:
"That, up to the 27th of February, this fall had continued in Belgium, Holland, Germany and Austria; that in some instances it was not sand, or that almost all the matter was organic: that a vessel had reported the fall as occurring in the Atlantic Ocean, midway between Southampton and Barbados. The calculation is given that, in England alone, 10,000,000 tons of matter had fallen. It had fallen in Switzerland (Symons’ Met. Mag., March, 1903). It had fallen in Russia (Bull. Com. Geolog., 22-48). Not only had a vast quantity of matter fallen several months before, in Australia, but it was at this time falling in Australia (Victorian Naturalist, June, 1903) – enormously – red mud – fifty tons per square mile."
On April 2, 1903, a Mr. E. G. Clayton read a paper before the Royal Chemical Society concerning a local fall of the red dust. He had examined the substance and suggested that it was “merely wind-borne dust from the roads and lanes of Wessex.” Fort thereupon coined the phrases “the Wessex explanation” and “wessexing”: An attempt to explain away an extremely widespread unusual occurrence by diminishing its size or extent to fit one’s solution, “to interpret the enormous in terms of the minute.” (pp. 33-35)
Fort, Charles Hoy. Complete Books of Charles Fort (Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 1974).
Montell, William Lynwood. Ghosts Along the Cumberland: Deathlore in the Kentucky Foothills (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1975).
Myers, Frederick, “Introduction,” in Sidgwick, Eleanor Mildred, ed. Phantasms of the Living (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1962).