Book of the Damned — Chapters 15-16

15 Short chapter coming now, and it's the worst of them all.

I think it's speculative.

It's a lapse from our usual pseudo-standards.

I think it must mean that the preceding chapter was very efficiently done, and that now by the rhythm of all quasi-things--which can't be real things, if they're rhythms, because a rhythm is an appearance that turns into its own opposite and then back again--but now, to pay up, we're what we weren't. Short chapter, and I think we'll fill in with several points in Intermediatism.

A puzzle: If it is our acceptance that, out of the Negative Absolute, the Positive Absolute is generating itself, recruiting, or maintaining, itself, via a third state, or our own quasi-state, it would seem that we're trying to conceive of Universalness manufacturing more Universalness from Nothingness.

Take that up yourself, if you're willing to run the risk of disappearing with such velocity that you'll leave an incandescent train behind, and risk being infinitely happy forever, whereas you probably don't want to be happy--I'll sidestep that myself, and try to be intelligible by regarding the Positive Absolute from the aspect of Realness instead of Universalness, recalling that by both Realness and Universalness we mean the same state, or that which does not merge away into something else, because there is nothing else.

So the idea is that out of Unrealness, instead of Nothingness, Realness, instead of Universalness, is, via our own quasi-state, manufacturing more Realness.

Just so, but in relative terms, of course, all imaginings that materialize into machines or statues, buildings, dollars, paintings or books in paper and ink are graduations from unrealness to realness--in relative terms.

It would seem then that Intermediateness is a relation between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute.

But the absolute cannot be the related--of course a confession that we can't really think of it at all, if here we think of a limit to the unlimited.

Doing the best we can, and encouraged by the reflection that we can't do worse than has been done by metaphysicians in the past, we accept that the absolute can't be the related.

So then that our quasi-state is not a real relation, if nothing in it is real.

On the other hand, it is not an unreal relation, if nothing in it is unreal.

It seems thinkable that the Positive Absolute can, by means of Intermediateness, have a quasi-relation, or be only quasi-related, or be the unrelated, in final terms, or, at least, not be the related, in final terms.

As to free will and Intermediatism--same answer as to everything else.

By free will we mean Independence--or that which does not merge away into something else--so, in Intermediateness, neither free-will nor slave-will--but a different approximation for every so-called person toward one or the other of the extremes.

The hackneyed way of expressing this seems to me to be the acceptable way, if in Intermediateness, there is only the paradoxical: that we're free to do what we have to do.

I am not convinced that we make a fetish of the preposterous.

I think our feeling is that in first gropings there's no knowing what will afterward be the acceptable.

I think that if an early biologist heard of birds that grow on trees, he should record that he had heard of birds that grow on trees: then let sorting over of data occur afterward.

The one thing that we try to tone down but that is to a great degree unavoidable is having our data all mixed up like Long Island and Florida in the minds of early American explorers.

My own notion is that this whole book is very much like a map of North America in which the Hudson River is set down as a passage leading to Siberia.

We think of Monstrator and Melanicus and of a world that is now in communication with this earth: if so, secretly, with certain esoteric ones upon this earth.

Whether that world's Monstrator and Monstrator's Melanicus--must be the subject of later inquiry.

It would be a gross thing to do: solve up everything now and leave nothing to our disciples.

I have been very much struck with phenomena of "cup marks."

They look to me like symbols of communication.

But they do not look to me like means of communication between some of the inhabitants of this earth and other inhabitants of this earth.

My own impression is that some external force has marked, with symbols, rocks of this earth, from far away.

I do not think that cup marks are inscribed communications among different inhabitants of this earth, because it seems too unacceptable that inhabitants of China, Scotland, and America should all have conceived of the same system.

Cup marks are strings of cup-like impressions in rocks.

Sometimes there are rings around them, and sometimes they have only semi-circles.

Great Britain, America, France, Algeria, Circassia, Palestine: they're virtually everywhere--except in the far north, I think.

In China, cliffs are dotted with them.

Upon a cliff near Lake Como, there is a maze of these markings.

In Italy and Spain and India they occur in enormous numbers.

Given that a force, say, like electric force, could, from a distance, mark such a substance as rocks, as, from a distance of hundreds of miles, selenium can be marked by telephotographers--but I am of two minds-- The Lost Explorers from Somewhere, and an attempt, from Somewhere, to communicate with them: so a frenzy of showering of messages toward this earth, in the hope that some of them would mark rocks near the lost explorers-- Or that somewhere upon this earth, there is an especial rocky surface, or receptor, or polar construction, or a steep, conical hill, upon which for ages have been received messages from some other world; but that at times messages go astray and mark substances perhaps thousands of miles from the receptor: That perhaps forces behind the history of this earth have left upon the rocks of Palestine and England and India and China records that may some day be deciphered, of their misdirected instructions to certain esoteric ones--Order of the Freemasons--the Jesuits-- I emphasize the row-formation of cup marks: Prof. Douglas (_Saturday Review_, Nov.

24, 1883): "Whatever may have been their motive, the cup-markers showed a decided liking for arranging their sculpturings in regularly spaced rows."

That cup marks are an archaic form of inscription was first suggested by Canon Greenwell many years ago.

But more specifically adumbratory to our own expression are the observations of Rivett-Carnac (_Jour.

Roy.

Asiatic Soc.

_, 1903-515): That the Braille system of raised dots is an inverted arrangement of cup marks: also that there are strong resemblances to the Morse code.

But no tame and systematized archaeologist can do more than casually point out resemblances, and merely suggest that strings of cup marks look like messages, because--China, Switzerland, Algeria, America--if messages they be, there seems to be no escape from attributing one origin to them--then, if messages they be, I accept one external origin, to which the whole surface of this earth was accessible, for them.

Something else that we emphasize: That rows of cup marks have often been likened to footprints.

But, in this similitude, their unilinear arrangement must be disregarded--of course often they're mixed up in every way, but arrangement in single lines is very common.

It is odd that they should so often be likened to footprints: I suppose there are exceptional cases, but unless it's something that hops on one foot, or a cat going along a narrow fence-top, I don't think of anything that makes footprints one directly ahead of another--Cop, in a station house, walking a chalk line, perhaps.

Upon the Witch's Stone, near Ratho, Scotland, there are twenty-four cups, varying in size from one and a half to three inches in diameter, arranged in approximately straight lines.

Locally it is explained that these are tracks of dogs' feet (_Proc.

Soc.

Antiq.

Scotland_, 2-4-79).

Similar marks are scattered bewilderingly all around the Witch's Stone--like a frenzy of telegraphing, or like messages repeating and repeating, trying to localize differently.

In Inverness-shire, cup marks are called "fairies' footmarks."

At Valna's church, Norway, and St. Peter's, Ambleteuse, there are such marks, said to be horses' hoofprints.

The rocks of Clare, Ireland, are marked with prints supposed to have been made by a mythical cow (_Folklore_, 21-184).

We now have such a ghost of a thing that I'd not like to be interpreted as offering it as a datum: it simply illustrates what I mean by the notion of symbols, like cups, or like footprints, which, if like those of horses or cows, are the reverse of, or the negatives of, cups--of symbols that are regularly received somewhere upon this earth--steep, conical hill, somewhere, I think--but that have often alighted in wrong places--considerably to the mystification of persons waking up some morning to find them upon formerly blank spaces.

An ancient record--still worse, an ancient Chinese record--of a courtyard of a palace--dwellers of the palace waking up one morning, finding the courtyard marked with tracks like the footprints of an ox--supposed that the devil did it.

(_Notes and Queries_, 9-6-225. ) 16. Angels.

Hordes upon hordes of them.

Beings massed like the clouds of souls, or the commingling whiffs of spirituality, or the exhalations of souls that Dore pictured so often.

It may be that the Milky Way is a composition of stiff, frozen, finally-static, absolute angels.

We shall have data of little Milky Ways, moving swiftly; or data of hosts of angels, not absolute, or still dynamic.

I suspect, myself, that the fixed stars are really fixed, and that the minute motions said to have been detected in them are illusions.

I think that the fixed stars are absolutes.

Their twinkling is only the interpretation by an intermediatist state of them.

I think that soon after Leverrier died, a new fixed star was discovered--that, if Dr. Gray had stuck to his story of the thousands of fishes from one pail of water, had written upon it, lectured upon it, taken to street corners, to convince the world that, whether conceivable or not, his explanation was the only true explanation: had thought of nothing but this last thing at night and first thing in the morning--his obituary--another "nova" reported in _Monthly Notices_.

I think that Milky Ways, of an inferior, or dynamic, order, have often been seen by astronomers.

Of course it may be that the phenomena that we shall now consider are not angels at all.

We are simply feeling around, trying to find out what we can accept.

Some of our data indicate hosts of rotund and complacent tourists in inter-planetary space--but then data of long, lean, hungry ones.

I think that there are, out in inter-planetary space, Super Tamerlanes at the head of hosts of celestial ravagers--which have come here and pounced upon civilizations of the past, cleaning them up all but their bones, or temples and monuments--for which later historians have invented exclusionist histories.

But if something now has a legal right to us, and can enforce its proprietorship, they've been warned off.

It's the way of all exploitation.

I should say that we're now under cultivation: that we're conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it all to our own nobler and higher instincts.

Against these notions is the same sense of finality that opposes all advance.

It's why we rate acceptance as a better adaptation than belief.

Opposing us is the strong belief that, as to inter-planetary phenomena, virtually everything has been found out.

Sense of finality and illusion of homogeneity.

But that what is called advancing knowledge is violation of the sense of blankness.

A drop of water.

Once upon a time water was considered so homogeneous that it was thought of as an element.

The microscope--and not only that the supposititiously elementary was seen to be of infinite diversity, but that in its protoplasmic life there were new orders of beings.

Or the year 1491--and a European looking westward over the ocean--his feeling that that suave western droop was unbreakable; that gods of regularity would not permit that smooth horizon to be disturbed by coasts or spotted with islands.

The unpleasantness of even contemplating such a state--wide, smooth west, so clean against the sky--spotted with islands--geographic leprosy.

But coasts and islands and Indians and bison, in the seemingly vacant west: lakes, mountains, rivers-- One looks up at the sky: the relative homogeneity of the relatively unexplored: one thinks of only a few kinds of phenomena.

But the acceptance is forced upon me that there are modes and modes and modes of inter-planetary existence: things as different from planets and comets and meteors as Indians are from bison and prairie dogs: a super-geography--or celestiography--of vast stagnant regions, but also of Super-Niagaras and Ultra-Mississippis: and a super-sociology--voyagers and tourists and ravagers: the hunted and the hunting: the super-mercantile, the super-piratic, the super-evangelical.

Sense of homogeneity, or our positivist illusion of the unknown--and the fate of all positivism.

Astronomy and the academic.

Ethics and the abstract.

The universal attempt to formulate or to regularize--an attempt that can be made only by disregarding or denying.

Or all things disregard or deny that which will eventually invade and destroy them-- Until comes the day when some one thing shall say, and enforce upon Infinitude: "Thus far shalt thou go: here is absolute demarcation."

The final utterance: "There is only I." In the _Monthly Notices of the R. A.

S.

_, 11-48, there is a letter from the Rev. W.

Read: That, upon the 4th of September, 1851, at 9:30 A. M.

, he had seen a host of self-luminous bodies, passing the field of his telescope, some slowly and some rapidly.

They appeared to occupy a zone several degrees in breadth.

The direction of most of them was due east to west, but some moved from north to south.

The numbers were tremendous.

They were observed for six hours.

Editor's note: "May not these appearances be attributed to an abnormal state of the optic nerves of the observer?"

In _Monthly Notices_, 12-38, Mr. Read answers that he had been a diligent observer, with instruments of a superior order, for about 28 years--"but I have never witnessed such an appearance before."

As to illusion he says that two other members of his family had seen the objects.

The Editor withdraws his suggestion.

We know what to expect.

Almost absolutely--in an existence that is essentially Hibernian--we can predict the past--that is, look over something of this kind, written in 1851, and know what to expect from the Exclusionists later.

If Mr. Read saw a migration of dissatisfied angels, numbering millions, they must merge away, at least subjectively, with commonplace terrestrial phenomena--of course disregarding Mr. Read's probable familiarity, of 28 years' duration, with the commonplaces of terrestrial phenomena.

_Monthly Notices_, 12-183: Letter from Rev. W.

R.

Dawes: That he had seen similar objects--and in the month of September--that they were nothing but seeds floating in the air.

In the _Report of the British Association_, 1852-235, there is a communication from Mr. Read to Prof. Baden-Powell: That the objects that had been seen by him and by Mr. Dawes were not similar.

He denies that he had seen seeds floating in the air.

There had been little wind, and that had come from the sea, where seeds would not be likely to have origin.

The objects that he had seen were round and sharply defined, and with none of the feathery appearance of thistledown.

He then quotes from a letter from C. B.

Chalmers, F. R.

A.

S.

, who had seen a similar stream, a procession, or migration, except that some of the bodies were more elongated--or lean and hungry--than globular.

He might have argued for sixty-five years.

He'd have impressed nobody--of importance.

The super-motif, or dominant, of his era, was Exclusionism, and the notion of seeds in the air assimilates--with due disregards--with that dominant.

Or pageantries here upon our earth, and things looking down upon us--and the Crusades were only dust clouds, and glints of the sun on shining armor were only particles of mica in dust clouds.

I think it was a Crusade that Read saw--but that it was right, relatively to the year 1851, to say that it was only seeds in the wind, whether the wind blew from the sea or not.

I think of things that were luminous with religious zeal, mixed up, like everything else in Intermediateness, with black marauders and from gray to brown beings of little personal ambitions.

There may have been a Richard Coeur de Lion, on his way to right wrongs in Jupiter.

It was right, relatively to 1851, to say that he was a seed of a cabbage.

Prof. Coffin, U. S.

N.

(_Jour.

Frank.

Inst.

_, 88-151): That, during the eclipse of August, 1869, he had noted the passage, across his telescope, of several bright flakes resembling thistleblows, floating in the sunlight.

But the telescope was so focused that, if these things were distinct, they must have been so far away from this earth that the difficulties of orthodoxy remain as great, one way or another, no matter what we think they were-- They were "well-defined," says Prof. Coffin.

Henry Waldner (_Nature_, 5-304): That, April 27, 1863, he had seen great numbers of small, shining bodies passing from west to east.

He had notified Dr. Wolf, of the Observatory of Zurich, who "had convinced himself of this strange phenomenon."

Dr. Wolf had told him that similar bodies had been seen by Sig.

Capocci, of the Capodimonte Observatory, at Naples, May 11, 1845. The shapes were of great diversity--or different aspects of similar shapes?

Appendages were seen upon some of them.

We are told that some were star-shaped, with transparent appendages.

I think, myself, it was a Mohammed and his Hegira.

May have been only his harem.

Astonishing sensation: afloat in space with ten million wives around one.

Anyway, it would seem that we have considerable advantage here, inasmuch as seeds are not in season in April--but the pulling back to earth, the bedraggling by those sincere but dull ones of some time ago.

We have the same stupidity--necessary, functioning stupidity--of attribution of something that was so rare that an astronomer notes only one instance between 1845 and 1863, to an every-day occurrence-- Or Mr. Waldner's assimilative opinion that he had seen only ice crystals.

Whether they were not very exclusive veils of a super-harem, or planes of a very light material, we have an impression of star-shaped things with transparent appendages that have been seen in the sky.

Hosts of small bodies--black, this time--that were seen by the astronomers Herrick, Buys-Ballot, and De Cuppis (_L'Annee Scientifique_, 1860-25); vast numbers of bodies that were seen by M. Lamey, to cross the moon (_L'Annee Scientifique_, 1874-62); another instance of dark ones; prodigious number of dark, spherical bodies reported by Messier, June 17, 1777 (Arago, _OEuvres_, 9-38); considerable number of luminous bodies which appeared to move out from the sun, in diverse directions; seen at Havana, during eclipse of the sun, May 15, 1836, by Prof. Auber (Poey); M. Poey cites a similar instance, of Aug.

3, 1886;

M.

Lotard's opinion that they were birds (_L'Astronomie_, 1886-391);

large number of small bodies crossing disk of the sun, some swiftly, some slowly; most of them globular, but some seemingly triangular, and some of more complicated structure; seen by M. Trouvelet, who, whether seeds, insects, birds, or other commonplace things, had never seen anything resembling these forms (_L'Annee Scientifique_, 1885-8); report from the Rio de Janeiro Observatory, of vast numbers of bodies crossing the sun, some of them luminous and some of them dark, from some time in December, 1875, until Jan.

22, 1876 (_La Nature_, 1876-384).

Of course, at a distance, any form is likely to look round or roundish: but we point out that we have notes upon the seeming of more complex forms.

In _L'Astronomie_, 1886-70, is recorded M. Briguiere's observation, at Marseilles, April 15 and April 25, 1883, upon the crossing of the sun by bodies that were irregular in form.

Some of them moved as if in alignment.

Letter from Sir Robert Inglis to Col. Sabine (_Rept.

Brit.

Assoc.

_, 1849-17): That, at 3 P. M.

, Aug.

8, 1849, at Gais, Switzerland, Inglis had seen thousands and thousands of brilliant white objects, like snowflakes in a cloudless sky.

Though this display lasted about twenty-five minutes, not one of these seeming snowflakes was seen to fall.

Inglis says that his servant "fancied" that he had seen something like wings on these--whatever they were.

Upon page 18, of the _Report_, Sir John Herschel says that, in 1845 or 1846, his attention had been attracted by objects of considerable size, in the air, seemingly not far away.

He had looked at them through a telescope.

He says that they were masses of hay, not less than a yard or two in diameter.

Still there are some circumstances that interest me.

He says that, though no less than a whirlwind could have sustained these masses, the air about him was calm.

"No doubt wind prevailed at the spot, but there was no roaring noise."

None of these masses fell within his observation or knowledge.

To walk a few fields away and find out more would seem not much to expect from a man of science, but it is one of our superstitions, that such a seeming trifle is just what--by the Spirit of an Era, we'll call it--one is not permitted to do.

If those things were not masses of hay, and if Herschel had walked a little and found out, and had reported that he had seen strange objects in the air--that report, in 1846, would have been as misplaced as the appearance of a tail upon an embryo still in its gastrula era.

I have noticed this inhibition in my own case many times.

Looking back--why didn't I do this or that little thing that would have cost so little and have meant so much?

Didn't belong to that era of my own development.

_Nature_, 22-64: That, at Kattenau, Germany, about half an hour before sunrise, March 22, 1880, "an enormous number of luminous bodies rose from the horizon, and passed in a horizontal direction from east to west."

They are described as having appeared in a zone or belt.

"They shone with a remarkably brilliant light."

So they've thrown lassos over our data to bring them back to earth.

But they're lassos that cannot tighten.

We can't pull out of them: we may step out of them, or lift them off.

Some of us used to have an impression of Science sitting in calm, just judgment: some of us now feel that a good many of our data have been lynched.

If a Crusade, perhaps from Mars to Jupiter, occur in the autumn--"seeds."

If a Crusade or outpouring of celestial vandals is seen from this earth in the spring--"ice crystals."

If we have record of a race of aerial beings, perhaps with no substantial habitat, seen by someone in India--"locusts."

This will be disregarded: If locusts fly high, they freeze and fall in thousands.

_Nature_, 47-581: Locusts that were seen in the mountains of India, at a height of 12,750 feet--"in swarms and dying by thousands."

But no matter whether they fly high or fly low, no one ever wonders what's in the air when locusts are passing overhead, because of the falling of stragglers.

I have especially looked this matter up--no mystery when locusts are flying overhead--constant falling of stragglers.

_Monthly Notices_, 30-135: "An unusual phenomenon noticed by Lieut.

Herschel, Oct.

17 and 18, 1870, while observing the sun, at Bangalore, India."

Lieut.

Herschel had noticed dark shadows crossing the sun--but away from the sun there were luminous, moving images.

For two days bodies passed in a continuous stream, varying in size and velocity.

The Lieutenant tries to explain, as we shall see, but he says: "As it was, the continuous flight, for two whole days, in such numbers, in the upper regions of the air, of beasts that left no stragglers, is a wonder of natural history, if not of astronomy."

He tried different focusing--he saw wings--perhaps he saw planes.

He says that he saw upon the objects either wings or phantom-like appendages.

Then he saw something that was so bizarre that, in the fullness of his nineteenth-centuriness, he writes: "There was no longer doubt: they were locusts or flies of some sort."

One of them had paused.

It had hovered.

Then it had whisked off.

The Editor says that at that time "countless locusts had descended upon certain parts of India."

We now have an instance that is extraordinary in several respects--super-voyagers or super-ravagers; angels, ragamuffins, crusaders, emigrants, aeronauts, or aerial elephants, or bison or dinosaurs--except that I think the thing had planes or wings--one of them has been photographed.

It may be that in the history of photography no more extraordinary picture than this has ever been taken.

_L'Astronomie_, 1885-347: That, at the Observatory of Zacatecas, Mexico, Aug.

12, 1883, about 2,500 meters above sea level, were seen a large number of small luminous bodies, entering upon the disk of the sun.

M.

Bonilla telegraphed to the Observatories of the City of Mexico and of Puebla.

Word came back that the bodies were not visible there.

Because of this parallax, M. Bonilla placed the bodies "relatively near the earth."

But when we find out what he called "relatively near the earth"--birds or bugs or hosts of a Super-Tamerlane or army of a celestial Richard Coeur de Lion--our heresies rejoice anyway.

His estimate is "less distance than the moon."

One of them was photographed.

See _L'Astronomie_, 1885-349. The photograph shows a long body surrounded by indefinite structures, or by the haze of wings or planes in motion.

_L'Astronomie_, 1887-66;

Signer Ricco, of the Observatory of Palermo, writes that, Nov.

30, 1880, at 8:30 o'clock in the morning, he was watching the sun, when he saw, slowly traversing its disk, bodies in two long, parallel lines, and a shorter, parallel line.

The bodies looked winged to him.

But so large were they that he had to think of large birds.

He thought of cranes.

He consulted ornithologists, and learned that the configuration of parallel lines agrees with the flight-formation of cranes.

This was in 1880: anybody now living in New York City, for instance, would tell him that also it is a familiar formation of aeroplanes.

But, because of data of focus and subtended angles, these beings or objects must have been high.

Sig.

Ricco argues that condors have been known to fly three or four miles high, and that heights reached by other birds have been estimated at two or three miles.

He says that cranes have been known to fly so high that they have been lost to view.

Our own acceptance, in conventional terms, is that there is not a bird of this earth that would not freeze to death at a height of more than four miles: that if condors fly three or four miles high, they are birds that are especially adapted to such altitudes.

Sig.

Ricco's estimate is that these objects or beings or cranes must have been at least five and a half miles high.