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What's The Most Boring Fortean Subject?

hunck said:
I like the way the caption ‘demonic spirts’ pops up at 1.17. Totally convinced me..

The ‘sold his soul to the devil’ legend is way older than Bob Dylan as you’re no doubt aware. The first time I heard it was about bluesman Robert Johnson in the 20s & it may well predate that about people with an unusual talent.

Dylan is just talking about his early songs which he wrote in a purple patch of some years when he was young decades ago & which has now gone. He’s mainly talking about the lyrics. He admits he doesn’t know where they came from & can’t tap into that source again. Maybe the drugs helped - who knows.

The man’s an artist, an uber talented man who's written hundreds of songs over several decades, many of them classics. He’s still writing now in his 80s but he’s not the same as he was when younger.

He doesn’t admit he sold his soul to the devil. He’s just saying he doesn’t really know where or how some of the songs came to him. Many talented/gifted people will say the same. Some music comes to people in a dream.

I found this:


That’s in the 1700s.

I'm too scared to ask what satanic symbolism is Taylor Swift using..
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As a tangent/mirror to the idea of 'selling' one's soul there was the odd (and IMO definitely not-boring) case of Mr Johnny Cash. He was a believing Christian who was also a self-confessing sinner, always striving to repent. He 'visited prisoners' with his jail concerts partly out of it being a Christian duty. He's the example I refer to when people ask why aren't all Christians perfectly good and wholesome all of the time. One can believe and yet have serious personal devils.

Some of his songs are full of holy rollin' prophetic lyrics, and his last great song contains a lyric given to him in a dream:

"...The central lyric of the song came from an odd dream. Cash had a dream after having recorded the song "The Wanderer" with U2 for their album Zooropa. "The Wanderer" is an apocalyptic song inspired by the book of Ecclesiastes. (An early title of the song was "The Preacher" taken from Qohelet, the Preacher/Teacher of Ecclesiastes.) Apparently, the apocalyptic imagery of "The Wanderer" had gotten into Cash's dreams. In this particular dream Cash finds himself speaking to, of all people, the Queen of England. In the dream the Queen laughs, looks at Cash and says, "Johnny Cash, you're just like a thorn tree in a whirlwind." "

From https://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-theology-of-johnny-cash-part-8.html

The Man Comes Around...

 
Robbrent said:
One of the reasons fortean subjects are quite popular is that they are presented in a quite easy to understand way, not much academic rigour they would say, Dr Ian Stevenson gave reincarnation the academic once or twice over and I must admit it can be rather dry stuff however to me he is the definitive writer on the subject
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NDEs are a little bit boring, to me. I'm probably alone in that.
 
Do some subjects become less interesting because they are deemed explained or just out of fashion? Phrenology? Ectoplasm?Splanchnomancy? Haruspicy? Nordic Aliens from Venus?
 
I would count those as non-Fortean in some cases. Like if you're not seriously asking if it's real.... that what even is the question?
 
The Nordic humanoids were real in the sense that they were widely reported during the early contactee period (1950s-60s) and then we had silver-suited 'spacemen' in the 70s-80s before the greys became ubiquitous (there were of course many other aliens reported such as Bigfoot types and goblin types etc).
 
marhawkman said:
I would count those as non-Fortean in some cases. Like if you're not seriously asking if it's real.... that what even is the question?
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People did consider them real once so why not now? Is phrenology that different from palmistry? Not that you hear much about that now. Agree if they are disproved or perhaps if proved, they are not Fortean.But perhaps the belief in them was, has all the evidence been seen and disproved? Are Fortean subjects boring if disproved or proved?
 
Tunn11 said:
People did consider them real once so why not now? Is phrenology that different from palmistry? Not that you hear much about that now. Agree if they are disproved or perhaps if proved, they are not Fortean.But perhaps the belief in them was, has all the evidence been seen and disproved? Are Fortean subjects boring if disproved or proved?
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The point of studying a topic is to discern whether it is true or false.
 
My take on Fortean-ism is not whether the oddities are real and/or measurable - it's the how, where, when and who of the human experience of them!

It's appearing at the Roman arena contest of 'human perception vs. weird sh*t' and about how changing phenomena over decades or centuries informs our culture and reactions to it that is most interesting in my own opinion. We can float different ideas about the origins of all kinds of different weirdness, and something may well 'explain' it, or provide a fascinating tangent. I love weirdness :)
 
Tunn11 said:
Hmmm, philosophy? Or why something was thought to be true? Surely they are worth studying?
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Well it's about learning... what happened?, how, why?
AnonyJ said:
My take on Fortean-ism is not whether the oddities are real and/or measurable - it's the how, where, when and who of the human experience of them!

It's appearing at the Roman arena contest of 'human perception vs. weird sh*t' and about how changing phenomena over decades or centuries informs our culture and reactions to it that is most interesting in my own opinion. We can float different ideas about the origins of all kinds of different weirdness, and something may well 'explain' it, or provide a fascinating tangent. I love weirdness :)
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it's quite telling how many things are seen in this weird lens of being... sort of true for decades or centuries?
 
Ley Lines.

Never got it. Seems silly and dull in equal measure. Run a straight line between randomly chosen things from different periods on a map and you find you have a...er..straight line. I'm sure there's meant to be more to it than that but i can't listen long enough to find out.
 
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gattino said:
Ley Lines.

Never got it. Seems silly and dull in equal measure. Run a straight light between randomly chosen things from different periods on a map and you find you have a...er..straight line. I'm sure there's meant to be more to it than that but i can't listen long enough to find out.
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On an episode of Oak Island someone is demonstrating something on a map and he joins two areas on a map with a line and one of the Lagina brothers is amazed that it makes a straight line...
 
gattino said:
Ley Lines.

Never got it. Seems silly and dull in equal measure. Run a straight light between randomly chosen things from different periods on a map and you find you have a...er..straight line. I'm sure there's meant to be more to it than that but i can't listen long enough to find out.
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I find crop circles more ridiculous than ley lines but a bit less boring.
 
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