A FORTEAN LIBRARY
NO 51. NOT QUITE AN EXPLANATION FOR EVERYTHING
Every so often a book appears that, without taking the encyclopedic format, surveys the gamut of fortean phenomena, presents an argument, and derives an hypothesis from it – or at least provides the basis for an intelligent comprehensive reflection on its material. Colin Wilson’s Phenomena (1978) was one such. Mike Dash’s Borderlands (1998) was another. Both of these will find a place on this bookshelf in due course.
Between the two came Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality, which took its cue from Jungian psychology and with, by way of the anima mundi, a hefty, refreshing leavening of William Blake’s concept – or vision – of Imagination. For some the Jungian flavour may taint it, while the same quality may make others embrace it before a single page is turned. But Harpur’s virtue is that he makes a case for taking what he calls the Otherworld seriously without at all demanding that the reader swallow Jungianism whole: the psychological theory is more like a frame on which the line of reasoning is draped and ordered.
We’ve perhaps given an erroneous impression above of the way this book works. It’s less like an esoteric clotheshorse in fine raiment than an unfolding, along a track shaped somewhat like the spiral on a snail’s shell, or one of those strange ancient emblems on cave walls that hint at shamanic entoptic visions. Harpur is trying to come to grips with visionary experiences, apparitions, and even artefacts – not quite all of forteana, but taking in a spectrum from angels to aliens, saintly experiences to secular crop circles; even spontaneous human combustion gets a passing nod. Daimonic Reality isn’t an attempt to explain forteana: Harpur explicitly remains aloof from that kind of crudity, although he’s not above making gentle digs at presumptive rationalisations – which beg questions – such as the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs, or the notion that ghosts are revenant spirits of the dead. Rather, it’s a cumulative effort to expose the dynamics of apparitional phenomena – how, and to some extent why, they erupt into the quotidian world. While anyone undertaking such a task needs all the help they can get, Harpur has chosen wisely, as we shall see. And the implicit problem for starters is therefore: what then is quotidian reality?
Harpur approaches this monstrous question somewhat as the great Sephardic sage Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) pondered how one might describe or define God. Maimonides concluded that one could say only what God was not, and discreetly retreated from the rest.
Harpur argues that what we take as the everyday is underpinned by a whole series of assumptions, which boil down to a “dreary, mechanical materialism”, an outlook that excludes as variously irrational or impossible – and perhaps just a bit vulgar – anything that can’t be crumbled in the hand, trodden underfoot (by microscope or mathematics, if those boots fit), or otherwise minced with the aid of Aristotle. So far this is no more than Weber proclaimed in his ‘discovery’ of the world’s ‘disenchantment’. Which doesn’t make his insight untrue. On the other hand, its truth shouldn’t be taken to mean it’s complete, the last word. As any scrupulous folklorist can tell you, the wider world was never really disenchanted, as folk tales, council-house poltergeists and grand-mansion ghosts, phantom hitchhikers, flying saucers, pixie visitors and the rest robustly attest. They never went away. What changed from (roughly) the mid 17th century to the collapse of the French Revolution wasn’t people’s experiences, but what the establishment deemed the respectable, proper attitude to them, which shifted from broad acceptance to broad, even sometimes vitriolic, disapproval. Harpur considers this cultural repression to have deleterious effects on the psychic health of a society, and thus “if these strange visitations have any purpose at all, it is to subvert the same modern worldview which discredits them.”
But there is a hole in that argument, if left to its own devices. If apparitions in this day and age are a kind of unconsciously propelled anti-establishment protest, that characterisation raises the question of what they were when there was no “modern worldview” to kick against. Harpur calls on various traditional pre-industrial societies to resolve that difficulty. By and large (and at risk of oversimplifying), faeries were just faeries, ghosts were ghosts, and what we with our technological fixations might call aliens were spirits or gods. He gives a humorous account of Rhodesian/Zimbabwean ufologist Cynthia Hind questioning one Clifford Muchena. He had witnessed several tall beings dressed in silvery suits, who were apparently associated with the passing of a large, orange ball of light. He was inclined to think they were ghosts or the spirits of ancestors. But, objected Ms Hind, were silvery overalls appropriate attire for ancestors? Didn’t ancestors “wear fur and necklaces of crocodile teeth? ‘Times change,’ said Mr Muchena.” Indeed they do, and no doubt Mr Muchena’s own garb reflected the fact.
And so Harpur begins with as a good a brief account as you’ll find of the collective unconscious, particularly as a source of psychic overspill, spending some time on Jung’s book on flying saucers in the process. He also, early on in the book,
adduces crop circles as a form of apparition. Apart from his accurate history of (ultimately failed) attempts to reduce that ‘phenomenon’ to mysterious workings of meteorology, his rather naïve take on crop art can safely be ignored: “It’s absolute crap,” as more than one veteran, not to say vintage, circle maker has said to us. Well, everybody makes mistakes; and fortunately this lapse doesn’t undermine the rest of the book. The argument from Jung is essentially that flying saucers and crop formations are tulpoid materialisations of imagery from the collective unconscious, a proposition one can buy at face value, as many do. Others prefer to see the term ‘collective unconscious’ as a mystification of a fairly straightforward observation: that in similar circumstances human beings tend to see things (in all senses of the words) in similar ways. But one of Harpur’s aims throughout the book is to (re) habilitate visionary experiences by giving them the context they have been stripped of by the dominance of scientistic materialism. Thus he aims to provide not just a useful backstory for contemporary apparitions – a pattern into which they will fit – but also the means by which they can be interpreted: bringing comfort and relief to the otherwise disoriented and bewildered. (We sometimes sense that Harpur is explaining all this to himself as much as to his readers, although he tactfully doesn’t regale us with baffling experiences of his own.)
One can take his reliance on Jung then as a handy metaphor, particularly since he (developing the centripetal spiral of his thought) next invokes the shades of the Neo-Platonists and their concept of the Anima Mundi, the soul of the world. So the emanations of the Otherworld are ‘ensouled’, in some sense alive, and by implication they and ‘the world’ share in the human collective unconscious, while remaining distinct from it. He notes (he’s not the first to do so) that the whole range of apparitions occurs in places and at times that cross or break boundaries (bridges for instance; or ambiguous occasions such as Hallowe’en) or exist in ill-defined, liminal spaces – trailer parks and caravan sites, for example, which are neither town nor country. By this reckoning, by the way, there ought to be a tradition of oddities occurring in suburbs, at least from when it was possible to distinguish suburb from city central, and one suburb from another without a roadsign to tell you. We don’t know of such a study, but if you do, please let us know. Perhaps mischievously, certainly slightly provocatively, Harpur includes urban legends in his account of liminalities, as they straddle the line between fact and fiction, and quotes Lady Gregory wondering aloud whether some of the faery stories she heard were actual experience or legend. We can infer from this that experience, legend, fact and fiction all draw elements one from another, and sometimes it takes great effort to disentangle them and find out what is, or was, really going on within any given account. Even true stories, independently documented, from the quotidian world can change over time – and may be subject to endless interpretation (consider the biographies of painters and politicians just for starters).
Having made the case for a kind of sentient and mutable universe, Harpur tops the mix with imagination, through which we make both our ordinary and extraordinary perceptions intelligible. (A similar argument was made by scientistphilosopher Michael Polanyi.) Harpur takes William Blake as his touchstone here, whose locus classicus on the matter of Imagination-with-a-capital-I comes from his Vision of the Last Judgment: “I assert, for myself, that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. ‘What!’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?’ Oh! no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying ‘Holy, holy, holy
is the Lord God Almighty!’ I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.” That is a description of an awareness of the sacred, which if constant and untempered would drive most of us mad – an aspersion cast at Blake more than once over the years, despite his manifest sanity. The implication is that the myriad entities that inhabit the apparitional universe are in some sense or to some degree sacred.
Citing Samuel Taylor Coleridge and WH Auden to good purpose, Harpur reminds us that there is a secondary imagination, which creatively evaluates, orders and ‘places’ the shocks of the primary Imagination. Harpur ties together what one might call his driving forces thus: “The sacred beings are the spontaneously appearing archetypal images [of Jung]. They are our gods and daimons. The advantage of Imagination as a model for daimonic reality is that it avoids the implication, however residual, of the term ‘collective unconscious’ that it is somehow purely interior, within us – when... it is also external to us. Similarly, the model ‘Soul of the World’ implies the opposite, emphasising externality over internality. The idea of the Imagination draws these two models closer together. Like the collective unconscious it is the source of autonomous sacred beings; like the Soul of the World, it locates these sacred beings just as often in the world as in our psyches (as dreams, visions, etc.). ‘To the eyes of a man of imagination,’ remarked Blake, ‘Nature is imagination itself.’”
Having armed his reader – and himself – with these seminal thoughts, Harpur is free to recount and ponder on all manner of further visionary and apparitional phenomena. He’s pleasingly dismissive of literalists, but on occasion too ready to take the words of pranksters, frauds and the deluded too literally – though to be fair, their ventures into artifical daimonality are not significantly different from what one can believe without undue qualification. Paul Screeton, an early reviewer (Magonia 50 September 1994), sums up Harpur’s endeavour perfectly: “Naturally the author [is] aware that the book’s perspective is partial and incomplete. Nevertheless it is a remarkable tour de force.” Definitely worth more than one read – and it’s eminently readable; and you’ll be pleased to know it’s among the esteemed and erudite FT editor’s all-time Top Ten fortean volumes. He hasn’t confided what the other nine are yet. We have the garlic and herbs ready for when he does.
“A BOOK MUST BE THE AXE FOR THE FROZEN SEA WITHIN US.” Franz Kafka