Michael Prescott's Blog

Things to do on Jersey when you're dead

For two years during the early part of his long exile from France, Victor Hugo engaged in regular séances using a planchette – a forerunner of the Ouija board, which worked by tapping out words one letter at a time. Two small tables were employed, a three-legged table perched atop a four-legged one. The tilting of the tables produced the taps. Hugo and his family and friends, exiled to the Isle of Jersey (and later the Isle of Guernsey) would gather in the evenings and coax messages from the Beyond. Hundreds of messages were received, and the material appears to have had a profound effect on Hugo's thinking and on the writing of Les Miserables, in which he was presently engaged.

This intriguing corner of the great novelist's life is exceptionally well documented in Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World, by John Chambers. Chambers, the first person to translate the séance transcripts into English (in an earlier edition of this book), does a fine job of evoking the atmosphere of the exiles' home away from home, their bitter homesickness and burgeoning fascination with the occult. His book is unusually well written for a study of this kind, laced with keen character sketches and absorbing sidelights on William Blake, James Merrill, and Kabbalah. He presents the facts without undue speculation and lets his readers draw their own conclusions.

The first question to ask is, naturally: Were these phenomena really paranormal? Nearly always, Victor's elder son Charles – who seemed to have the most natural mediumistic ability – would be one of the two persons operating the planchette. Charles' constant participation has led some critics to suggest that he unconsciously fabricated the messages to please his domineering father. But some of the messages were tapped out in languages of which Charles was ignorant – Hungarian and English, for instance. And in some cases (e.g. the January 22, 1854 séance, described on p. 113 of Chambers' book), Charles did not operate the planchette.

Other apparently paranormal events that took place in conjunction with the séances cast additional doubt on the skeptical view. When dogs throughout the area began barking in the night, the planchette told them sternly to shut their mouths – and they did. Strange singing was heard in different parts of the house when Hugo's son was ill. A communicator calling itself the Lady in White arranged for a rendezvous at three AM; no one was bold enough to keep the date, but at three AM the Hugos' doorbell inexplicably rang.

Some of the spirits' statements are intriguing and possibly prescient. Distance, we are told, is illusory, and the entire universe can be found in – and reconstructed from – its smallest part. These ideas remind John Chambers of Michael Talbot's book The Holographic Universe, which explores the cosmology of David Bohm.

But for the most part, the communications are rather banal. Nothing of evidential value was produced, and the sitters don’t appear to have pressed the spirits for proof of identity. When the spirits did make factual claims about their earthly lives, these claims were often wrong. The great Carthaginian general Hannibal, purportedly speaking through the planchette, described the city of Carthage as a vast expanse of six thousand temples on streets three hundred feet wide. This grandiose portrayal does not tally with any historical or archaeological findings. (On the other hand, when "Shakespeare" insisted that he had not died on April 23, 1616, we might wonder if it was the shade of Edward De Vere that the sitters were hearing from ... But the channeled Shakespearean drama produced by the sitters, though highly interesting and creative, does not bear any resemblance to the earthly Bard's work.)

Then there is the case of the Lion of Androcles. At times the sitters heard from the spirit of this beast, famous in folklore for having spared Androcles in the arena. It is, of course, quite unlikely that this folktale was based on fact, and even more unlikely that the noted lion was communicating with the Jersey exiles from beyond the grave. But what makes the Lion especially relevant is an incident that occurred on April 25, 1854. The Lion-persona, tapping out a lengthy poem, suddenly stopped after writing the lines

They raise against the saints their sacrilegious paw

And bury their blood-stained claws in the liv–.

A pause followed after which the Lion rewrote the last two lines, which apparently dissatisfied him. But in the interim, Victor Hugo wrote his own ending to the stanza, and showed his work only to one person (who, like Hugo, was not operating the planchette). Hugo's lines read:

They ripped open the saints dying in the mire

And their hideous claws enlarged the wound

In the side of Jesus Christ.

We are told that "almost immediately" after Hugo had written these words, the tapping recommenced, and the planchette spelled out

Their paws ripped open the martyrs here and there in the mire

And Jesus Christ slipped their claws into his wounds,

For a gift of nails to the gibbet.

The close similarity of the two verses suggests that the planchette operators – or the planchette itself – picked up the imagery from Hugo's own mind. But since the planchette operators had not seen Hugo's lines, the message must have been communicated via telepathy or via some even more mysteriously influence.

In the final analysis, if we view the sessions as spirit communications, they are unconvincing and unsatisfying. But if we view them as Consciousness interacting with itself – Consciousness creating a kind of feedback loop between the sitters on the one hand and the planchette on the other – then things get more interesting. To read excerpts from the transcripts is like reading an inner dialogue carried out at the unconscious level between Hugo and himself (with occasional contributions from other members of the party). The sessions perhaps can be best understood as the externalization of the unconscious, a breakdown of the seemingly solid barrier between objective and subjective experience. The stream of consciousness running through the deeper channels of Hugo's mind seems to have been objectified, brought out into the open. In a deep sense, Hugo was talking to himself.

No wonder, then, that the tables mostly told him what he wanted to hear. The tables reported that Hugo's archenemy Napoleon III would die in two years – when actually the dictator lived another two decades. The discarnate Shakespeare opined that French was superior to English. Other spirits verified Hugo's theory of a cycle of reincarnation that proceeds through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, and his idea of the universe as a vast darkness, with only the shining stars retaining God's pure light.

The strengths and weaknesses of the communicators matched Hugo's own talents. The spirits were good at improvising poetry and long, eloquent monologues; so was Hugo. The spirits were useless at composing music, even when Mozart himself ostensibly spoke through the planchette. Hugo had no musical training.

The appearance of so many famous names among the spirits – Aeschylus, Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, even Jesus – also makes sense in terms of Hugo's psychology. No one ever accused Victor Hugo of being humble. His self-regard bordered on megalomania. Who would seek him out, if not the spirits of world-historical heroes like himself? Nothing less would do.

And what of the more abstract or surreal entities, such as Civilization, Death, and Idea, or Balaam's Ass and the Lion of Androcles? In the highly intellectual atmosphere of Hugo's salon, large abstract concepts and mythological or folkloric imagery must have been part of everyday conversation. It was how these people talked, part of their mental furniture. And Hugo had a particular fascination – part sentimental, part mystical – with the idea that animals are ensouled, and was especially fond of the Lion of Androcles tale.

How about the most consistent, overarching motif to appear in the communications – that the earth is a prison, a penal colony for wayward souls? It matches up quite closely with the gloomy outlook of the dispirited, homesick exiles, persecuted by a dictator, stranded among fellow outcasts on a tiny outcrop of rock. All the more reason to believe that the tilting tables were reflecting the sitters' own ideas and feelings back at them. Perhaps the isolation of their exile, and the intense emotions it stirred up, actually made it easier for the sitters to access the unconscious mind, or universal consciousness itself.

Whatever the explanation, Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World is a superb contribution to literary history and to the study of the paranormal. I recommend it highly.

Guest blogger: Michael Tymn

Here are some thoughts from Michael Tymn (whose own blog is here) about the hullabaloo surrounding the release of Randy Pausch's book.

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I am curious as to how some of your blog readers react to supposed sage advice being given by the dying professor, Randy Pausch, in The Last Lecture. The media is treating it as if he has given some very profound advice, when all he has said is "always have fun."   His secondary messages are:  dream big, ask for what you want, dare to take a risk, look for the best in everybody, make time for what matters, let kids be themselves.   All that seems basic stuff to me. 

Actually, I think I would take issue with the "having fun" part of it.  That's the problem with the world today -- everyone is trying to have too much fun, especially the younger generation.  Of course, "fun" can be interpreted in different ways.  But do people need to be told to have fun?  I'm sure there are some people who, given only a few months to live, would stay in bed and mope, but does anyone really think that such a person would jump out of bed and start having fun just because another dying person suggests it.  Moreover, it is one thing for a man with a wife and three children to have fun (he can have fun though his children), quite another for someone without such a family to have fun.  What exactly does "having fun" mean?  Does it mean further escaping into novels or movies?  Does it mean going to Atlantic City or Vegas and playing the slots?  I can't think of anything I would do differently if given only three months to live.  I might consider an around-the-world cruise, but lack of medical care on the ship and in foreign countries would prevent that.  I'd have to continue with the same humdrum "fun" I am having.

I'm very curious as to what I am missing in Professor Pausch's message and why it is being made into such a big deal.

The future of reading - maybe

I'm a big booster of e-books. Not that I have anything against traditional printed books, but I think the publishing industry needs to be revitalized and reconceived.

These days, publishing is in a slump. I don't mean just an economic slump, although that's certainly part of it; the nationwide bookstore chain Borders recently announced they are looking for a buyer after posting disappointing revenues.

But the real slump is creative. There used to be 20 or more major publishers, but because of mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies, the number is now down to only five or six. All of them are located in Manhattan, within a short drive of each other. Editors move freely from one company to another. A trend at one company quickly becomes a trend everywhere. (How many ripoffs of The Da Vinci Code have we seen? And how much vampire porn can people read?) There is a kind of groupthink that stifles new ideas and shuts out books that might appeal to parts of the reading public unknown to New York intellectuals.

What's needed is to diversify the publishing business, to open the door to newcomers, to encourage new voices and new perspectives; and e-books (along with print-on-demand books) may be a way of doing this.

If they ever catch on.

So far they haven't. A small coterie of aficionados sing the praises of e-books, but the vast majority of readers want nothing to do with them. This is a shame, because in many ways e-books offer all the advantages of traditional books and plenty of new options besides.

Years ago I bought the Rocketbook, one of the earliest digital reading devices. It was a rather bulky gadget, but ergonomically designed and comfortable to hold. The screen was backlit and easy to read in dim light, but tended to get washed out in bright light. The Rocketbook had definite potential, but unfortunately its manufacturer, Nuvomedia, sold out to Gemstar, the company that owns TV Guide. Gemstar proceeded to run the Rocketbook into the ground, removing most of the free online content available for the device, setting up an online bookstore that carried only bestsellers, and coming out with a new version of the reader that had fewer capabilities yet managed to be more expensive. In short order the Rocketbook was defunct. However, an enterprising outfit called eBookwise bought up the unsold Rocketbook readers in Gemstar's warehouse, made some modifications, and started selling them as eBookwise readers. I guess they're doing pretty well, since they're still in business today.

The future, however, does not lie with backlit LCD screens. The new thing is digital ink, which simulates the look of a printed book and can be read in direct sunlight. Several new readers feature this technology, but the two most prominent ones, at least in the United States, are the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader.

Of the two, the Kindle, although aesthetically unappealing, seems to be more user-friendly. And it's linked to a huge selection of proprietary content on Amazon.com. Looking for a new reading device, I took a close look at the Kindle and I was definitely interested -- until I learned that the rollout of the device proved so popular that the existing units have already sold out; the product is now back-ordered.

Since I didn't feel like waiting a year or more for my device, I went with the Sony Reader instead. Aesthetically, the Sony is a big improvement over the Kindle. It does not have quite as many features, but on the other hand it's also not saddled with an ugly keyboard and a weird trapezoidal shape. Proprietary content is available at the Sony eBook Store, which offers about 20,000 titles. Some users complain that the site will lock up on them, but I haven't had this problem. I do admit that the site is not well designed for browsing. Actually, you're better off going to a brick-and-mortar bookstore, or to Amazon.com, and making a list of books that interest you; then go to the Sony site and see if those titles are available.

The Sony is lightweight, about 10 ounces, and comes with a nice softcover binder that protects the unit and gives it something of the feel of a regular book. You can adjust the font size, within limits, and you can display grayscale pictures and play MP3 audio files. The main advantages of the reader, of course, are that you can download a book and start reading it instantly, and you can store a large number of books on the device. If you're traveling, you don't have to choose between three or four books; you can take them all. In fact you could take a hundred books or more, if you were so inclined. You can also download non-proprietary content off the Internet and read it on your Sony, in most cases with the help of third-party conversion freeware. Text, RTF, HTML, DOC, and LIT files are among the formats that can be converted. Given the huge number of free public-domain books available at Project Gutenberg and similar sources, there is an endless amount of material to choose from.

Will e-books ever catch on in a big way? I'm heartened by Amazon's decision to aggressively push the Kindle, and by the early success of that device. But it's too soon to tell if the public at large is ready for the next generation of reading. I suspect that most people will not give e-books a try until the reading devices are inexpensive enough to qualify as impulse purchases. Prices of the digital books themselves also need to come down; Amazon has taken a big step in this direction by lowering the prices of its most popular Kindle books to only $9.99, but many of their other books - and most of the Sony titles - are only slightly cheaper than their print counterparts. This is foolish; e-books, unlike printed books, have virtually no production, storage, or distribution costs, and their price should be adjusted accordingly.

One thing's for sure: as long as publishing continues to plod along with antiquated and inefficient 19th-century technology, there will be fewer books and fewer people who read them. The revolution can't come soon enough.

Sounds interesting ...

Here's a post about a book I haven't read. I'm mentioning it only because, from the description and some of the reader reviews, it sounds like it may be worth a look. The title is The Spiritual Brain, and the authors are Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary.

Here's Booklist's review:

Neuroscientist Beauregard is no flighty New-Ager or Creationist but, he says, one of a minority of neuroscientists who don't adhere to strictly materialist interpretation of the human mind. He and his ilk believe that scientists who strive to explain the mind as an illusion created by the brain's chemical reactions ignore or vastly miscalculate the expanse of all that goes on in the universe. That is, it is too limiting to strictly confine the origin of all human thought to material or chemical interactions. In this complex tome, he describes the intricacy of his work and proposes that humans don't so much generate as transmit thoughts, and that by virtue of human ability to mentally interconnect with a higher consciousness, the actions of the mind become distinct and separate from, though observable by means of, the brain. He set out to prove his theory by studying a group of Carmelite nuns as they experienced God in prayer and meditation. Beauregard would be the first to note that, while his work doesn't ipso facto prove the existence of God, it does lend scientific credence to the existence of a higher or universal consciousness.

Denyse O'Leary maintains a blog called Post-Darwinist, centered on intelligent design controversies, and she seems to have a hand in six, count 'em six, other blogs as well. (Check the blogroll at Post-Darwinist.)

Your Eternal Self

I've started reading R. Craig Hogan's Your Eternal Self, and I'm finding it very interesting. It's basically a compendium of evidence for the proposition that philosophical materialism is wrong - that the mind is something apart from the brain, and therefore likely to survive the death of the brain. In a way, it's like a much less academic, much more popularized version of Irreducible Mind - though much briefer and also, thankfully, not nearly as pricey.

Much of the material is familiar to me, but not all of it, and even the more familiar stuff is still worth having in an easily accessible format, rather than scattered across dozens of blog posts and Web articles.

One story I don't think I'd encountered before concerns Jay Greenberg, a twelve-year-old musical prodigy enrolled in Juilliard.

Greenberg says that music just fills his head and he has to write it down to get it out. He doesn't know where it comes from, but it comes fully written, playing like an orchestra within his head: "It's as if the unconscious mind is giving orders at the speed of light," he reports. "You know, I mean, so I just hear it as if it were a smooth performance of a work that is already written, when it isn't." ...

In fact, at around age two, Greenberg started drawing instruments. Before he knew what a cello was, he had drawn a picture of one and had written the name ... At age three, he was drawing the notes for a cello performance. He had not been taught how to draw notes, and certainly not how to create a cello performance, yet they came to him.

In 2007, [his mother] reported that "... he told us he often hears more than one new composition at a time. Multiple channels is what it's been termed." Says Jay, "... my brain is able to control two or three different musics at the same time - along with the channel of my everyday life." He doesn't revise his compositions. They usually come out right the first time. [p. 43, Your Eternal Self]

In any book that covers so much ground, there will be room for nitpicking. The weaknesses in certain cases are not always mentioned. For instance, in a discussion of Charles Tart's experiments with a clairvoyant, there is no mention of the fact that a (very dim) reflection in the room could conceivably have allowed the subject to see the target object - a flaw that Tart himself has acknowledged. Hogan often points to the credentials of scientists who support psi, but this is a slippery slope, since there are many other scientists with equally good credentials who oppose it. And some of the authorities he cites are not the ones I would choose.

But as I said, this is nitpicking. Your Eternal Self is an important contribution to the debate over psi and life after death. It presents a wealth of specific cases, many of them quite recent, to lend credence to the idea that "you are not your brain." And it's got its own Web site, which includes additional cases like these.

R. Craig Hogan, by the way, is the coauthor with Allan L. Botkin of Induced After-Death Communication, another highly interesting and important book.

Garden plot

Recently, Michael H. in comments suggested that I look into the ideas of Sydney Banks. I visited Banks's Web site and also checked out a Web video he produced. The video, a self-promotional piece titled "Letter to Oprah," left me distinctly unmoved; it seems to be nothing but an attempt to get the author booked on the popular talk show. Some of the material on the Web site, however, was interesting, so I ordered -- and read -- Banks's book The Enlightened Gardener.

The Enlightened Gardener is a series of conversations between an English gardener and four American psychologists visiting the United Kingdom for a professional conference. The idea is that the psychologists end up learning more from this apparently simple gardener than they do from their credentialed colleagues.

I have to say that some aspects of the book left me cold, especially the repeated device of having the American characters react with amazement to even the most seemingly banal statements made by the gardener. At one point, for instance, the gardener remarks that mind and brain are different -- that the mind has to do with the spirit while the brain has to do with the body. One of the psychologists responds in astonishment that he's never heard an idea like that before. Really? Where has this guy been living? In a cave?

There are a lot of moments like that. I began to feel a certain amount of sympathy with Tom, the most cynical of the psychologists, who is constantly making sarcastic put-downs of the gardener's wisdom (though of course he comes around in the end).

Despite the book's defects, there is something intriguing about The Enlightened Gardener -- a hint of larger and more transformative ideas hidden behind the title character's sometimes trite pronouncements. The book itself alludes to this possibility when one of the characters observes that the gardener's remarks are analogous to shorthand, and that to appreciate the full meaning of his philosophy, one has to look beyond the symbols.

The dominant idea seems to be that thought profoundly affects who we are, how we behave, and how we see the world. Now, this seems like the most obvious truism imaginable, ripe for one of Tom's knee-jerk retorts. But as the book gradually makes clear, what the gardener means by "thought" is not simply the particular thoughts that we happen to hold in our minds at any given time. Instead, he is talking about the process or phenomenon of thought itself.

At one point, there is a brief discussion about emptiness and its relation to being. The gardener compares emptiness to formlessness, while being is form. Form emerges out of formlessness. Similarly, what the gardener calls Universal Thought is formless thought, contentless thought, and it is out of this formless thought that our particular, specific thoughts (or thought-forms) emerge.

To me, this is an intriguing and meaningful idea -- though I grant that it may seem pointless and meaningless to others. It's useful to me if I see my own personal thoughts as arising out of a formless background, somewhat like ripples arising on the surface of a lake or, to take a more "scientific" analogy, like virtual particles emerging from the quantum vacuum. (This is only an analogy; I'm not saying that there is necessarily any connection between thoughts and quantum phenomena.)

Universal Thought is one aspect of the gardener's holy Trinity; the other two aspects are Universal Consciousness and Universal Mind. Clearly, these are three different ways of looking at the same thing. There can be no thought without consciousness, and there can be no consciousness without mind. Again, what's useful is the idea of formless consciousness preceding and giving rise to the form of our particular consciousness; or formless mind preceding and grounding our particular form-specific minds. If we strip away forms and penetrate to formlessness, we encounter "wisdom," or "original thought," "uncontaminated" by the forms we impose. We can then see our particular thoughts, consciousness, and minds as what they are: constructions or fabrications, which may be helpful to us or detrimental, but which are not, in either case, the ultimate or true reality. And once we see them for what they are, we need not be imprisoned by their constraints.

This is, I admit, rather vague, and I'm not sure these revelations would have the life-changing effects that the book seems to grant them. But I think there's something here ... though I could be wrong. The Enlightened Gardener has the strange effect of suggesting the answers to great mysteries but not quite unveiling them. Maybe there are no answers and the whole thing is an exercise in self-delusion. Or maybe there are answers, but, like snowflakes, they melt away when you try to catch them in your hand.

I don't know what to think. And maybe that's the point.

Pure gold

Just finished Stephen Braude's newest book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, and found it entertaining and illuminating in equal measure. A very enjoyable excursion into the world of hands-on psi research, with all its rewards and pitfalls.

One of the most fascinating chapters is the last one, which I approached with some trepidation, because it covers astrology. I have trouble taking astrology seriously. So does Braude, but his attitude came up against a challenge when he married a Serbian immigrant who, in her spare time, cast horoscopes - and made a very good living at it. The method used by Gina Braude is considerably more sophisticated and refined than standard "by-the-numbers" astrology, and requires charting each client's life from the day (and if possible the hour and minute) of birth. Using her techniques, Mrs. Braude was able to forecast the fortunes of sports teams with remarkable accuracy. Braude's wry, winsome description of the couple's successful experiments in gambling is a highlight of the book, though no doubt it will leave skeptics more aggravated than ever.

On second though, most skeptics probably will stop reading long before the final chapter, and maybe even before finishing the preface, in which Braude vents his frustration with his more closed-minded colleagues, who are absolutely certain they can explain away all reports of psi without so much as looking at the evidence. This section is worth quoting, but I will refrain from doing so in order to give you further encouragement to buy the book.

The Gold Leaf Lady also features an interesting discussion of synchronicities, which prompted me to consider my own - highly speculative - notions on the subject.

I think many so-called synchronicities are actually premonitions. Some, like the famous incident involving Freud's bookcase, are probably PK. Of course, many are pure chance. As for the ones that are don't fall into any of those categories, I suspect that our true nature is divided between a Higher Self and our ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness is like a Flatlander, a 2D person walking through a maze like a dot being advanced along a series of intersecting lines. The Higher Self is like a 3D version of that dot, projecting perpendicularly from the axis of travel, and from that elevated vantage point able to see patterns and possibilities the Flatlander cannot see. The Higher Self sometimes guides the little Flatlander down the appropriate path, or at least calls attention to meaningful coincidences that would otherwise be missed.

I admit this is very vague and untestable, but for what it's worth, I also suspect that the Higher Self is part of a group of Higher Selfs, which in turn are part of a species-wide or even planetary consciousness, which in turn is part of Cosmic Consciousness. Each nests inside the other like Russian dolls or Chinese boxes. Ordinary consciousness is sometimes dimly aware of the Higher Self, but never aware of the others. The brain must be altered or shut down in order for us to ascend to progressively higher levels through mystical experiences, NDEs, OBEs, certain dreams, trance states, etc.

Braude himself does not wander into such arcane thickets of speculation. Unlike his other books, The Gold Leaf Lady is predominantly concerned with the nuts and bolts of psychical research. (With perhaps a slight emphasis on nuts.) He tells about his encounters with an apparently fake psychic, and about how a psi enthusiast did his best to sabotage a series of tests with a much more promising subject, simply from personal spite. His book is both a picaresque memoir and a cautionary tale. As he makes clear, if he had pursued his interests before obtaining tenure for more mainstream work, he would very likely have been ousted from academia.

And that's the sad part of the story. If someone as knowledgeable, balanced, and cautious as Steve Braude can find himself branded a pariah just for investigating psi, then what chance is there of encouraging future researchers? Not much, I guess - which is one reason psi is likely to remain a marginal area of study for the foreseeable future, no matter how much evidence is gathered.

Hail Science

Here's an wryly amusing excerpt from the underrated 1978 novel The Far Arena by Richard Ben Sapir. The story involves an ancient Roman, Eugeni, who is revived after being cryogenically frozen in an ice drift. In this scene, told from the Roman's point of view, Eugeni is in conversation with two moderns whom he calls Semyonus (a Soviet doctor, a hardcore materialist, whose real name is Semyon) and Olava (Sister Olav, a nun fluent in classical Latin).

The excerpt begins with Eugeni asking:

"You mean your miracles are only recent? They have not been built carefully, like Rome?"

And at this, the man who called himself Semyonus the physician became excited. Olava had to talk quickly and sometimes to interrupt Semyonus to keep up with him.

"There is no such thing as magic," she translated. "There are scientific principles, which scientists discover and write down, and these principles are followed by engineers who invent such things as what you call the flying monster or the electric lights. Scientists discover principles, engineers act on them. Yes?"

"Hail the priests of Science and their temple slaves the engineers," I said. "Truly the god Science is a great god. You worship a great god."

"It is not worship. It is science." Semyonus angry, Olava smiling.

"I am sorry to have given offense to the god Science but you must understand this is a strange land to me. Will your god understand?"

Semyonus was very angry. Olava translated for him.

"Science, Eugeni, is immutable. It understands nothing and forgives nothing. It is what it is."

"A mysterious god, great for the Pantheon."

"Science is not a god. It would not like you calling it a god. If you think of it as a god, it will never let you know its mysteries. You must approach it in a scientific manner, with an open mind. Men devote years of their lives to it, their entire lives. It has given us everything we have today." Thus said Olava for Semyonus.

"Hail Science, giver of things," I said. "Let us sacrifice to it."

Darklore

Greg Taylor of The Daily Grail informs me that Darklore Vol. I is now available in paperback. Sample chapters, including mine, can be read online.

For details, click here.

Pluggity plug plug

Greg Taylor, whose Web site The Daily Grail has sent many eyeballs my way (I keep them in a jar in my fridge), now has an anthology out. Yes, that's right, an old-fashioned, dead-tree, printed book.

A more affordable quality paperback edition will soon follow, but for now what's being offered is a rather pricey ($40) hardback collector's edition.   

Here's what the Daily Grail has to say:

The collector's edition of the new Daily Grail anthology, Darklore Volume 1, is now available for purchasing from Amazon US and Amazon UK. Remember, there are only 66 copies of this hardcover collector's edition, so if you want a copy get in fast (I know already of 3 book collectors who have asked for a copy, which probably shows that the value of the collector's edition will only ever increase). Considering that purchasing Darklore also helps support future operations of the Daily Grail, and numerous other researchers and writers (such as Robert Schoch, Nick Redfern, Loren Coleman, Michael Prescott, Picknett and Prince and many more), and that the book is a great read to boot, it's a win-win situation for everyone.

Please note that the shipping time of 4-6 weeks on Amazon.com (1-2 weeks on UK) is likely incorrect - this is due to it being a new book, with no copies in the distributor's warehouse (and therefore not in their computer system). Once the first order is processed by the distributor, this will probably drop to 1 or 2 days.

Let's hope so, because I'm getting a little tired of this 4-6 weeks business, which also held true for Chris Carter's book. C'mon, Amazon, get with the program.

My essay "The Dark Side of the Paranormal" leads off the collection. Full disclosure: this essay was originally a Web article and is still available online. But many - I think most - of the other essays in the volume are new and are not available elsewhere. The design of the book is very nice, and though I have only skimmed the content, it looks highly intriguing.

I wish Greg a lot of luck with this bold venture into the baffling world of publishing.