New Lands (Annotated)

The importance of Charles Fort's The Book of the Damned as a precursor of pseudoscience

New York publisher Boni and Liveright Inc, one of the most influential and daring publishers of its time, published The Book of the Damned in January 1920. Confused by the title, many readers bought it thinking it was a crime and mystery novel. Undoubtedly, its contents would be the strangest thing they had ever read. The twenty-eight chapters rattled off a series of documented and real, but unbelievable events: rain of stones, metallic objects found inside coal mines or inside the bark of a tree, animals of impossible shapes, meteorites of unknown chemical composition, vision of unidentified celestial bodies... The author, Charles Hoy Fort, had spent twenty-five long years in libraries obsessively compiling those events that could not be explained by science. In his house in the Bronx he had an improvised archive in shoeboxes with more than sixty thousand notes on paranormal phenomena, strange cases that defied physics and mathematics: traces of extra-terrestrials, poltergeists, stigmata, rains from the sky of implausible objects, substances and animals... These were " the damned, those excluded by the scientific paradigm, all those who according to Fort had been scorned from knowledge for not conforming to the margins of official knowledge. These were not cases of ghosts or apparitions in séances (to Fort it seemed a fad for people in search of alternative amusements), but anomalous physical" phenomena, which could occur without prior invocations or trance, in the street swept by a waterspout of frogs or in any kitchen where objects flew and crashed against the walls. Fort believed to discover in these events, empty spaces of science, a pattern of anomalies, as if within the random and improbable there was also a sinister correlation.

Frantically reading scientific journals and magazines, all that was published during the 19th century until 1916, Charles Fort defended research free of prejudices, constant doubt against what we were told to believe and, above all, a great sense of humour, enough to combat criticism. As a vital umbrella against the incomprehension of his peers. In spite of the slyness of his style, or rather because of it, this work is not the occurrence of an allologist or the naïve amateur of curious data. The Book of the Damned is far from being a catalogue to become engrossed in rarity, very different in its approach from those cabinets of curiosities or rooms of wonders of the Modern Age, where rare or shocking objects were grouped together, aristocratic antecedent of today's museum. So often used in bibliographies and for filler content, the book has been misunderstood since its publication and used for purposes contrary to what it advocated.

Fort used a working method to systematize his notes and attempted to explain not only the reason for these phenomena, but that of the Whole, by means of a philosophical theory, which is daring even for our time. His intermediarism was ahead of the ideas of postmodern philosophy. For Fort, these condemned cases would be the key to approach the Truth, an impossible enterprise because we are immersed in a metaphysical totality, besides being constrained by the excluding and rigid scientific and religious systems. The only solution: to open ourselves to a new kind of thinking, to embrace the impossible as the only sensible thing to do, to tear down the walls of dogma and language. Before surrealism, before Dada, Fort dared to look at the world with the new eyes of the 21st century. His readings on quantum physics proved that mysticism was not far from the science of the future. And most interestingly, the damned were not only those unexplained phenomena. People who willingly isolate themselves from the collective, those who think for themselves on a level that does not reject the irrational or asystematic, will be able to generate another consciousness, similar to that of the shaman or the witch.

What for some was simply the text of a crackpot, for others became the beginning of something promising. With his sceptical endeavour, Fort inaugurated (to his regret) the field of " pseudosciences". The commercial terrain of the paranormal world and modern research in cryptozoology and ufology. A group of enthusiastic readers founded clubs and fanzines where they continued to discuss space visitors, the existence of the Yeti, or why there are instruments dating from prehistoric times that are made of ultramodern materials. Fortean Times magazine continues to be a reference for all those in search of that other reality. When he returned to the United States from his stay in England, Fort found these fans of the shocking, wishing to crown him king of the damned. He flatly refused: his purpose was not to look for oddities, but to solve the riddle. Others, less scrupulous, would enrich themselves by collecting strange data and selling it as spam in the press to this day. Take a look at digital newspaper blogs, infested with quirky news and characters, including estimated reading time.

One of the lesser known aspects of Fortean monism, its terrible cosmology, which advocated the existence of planets scarcely dreamed of by the human mind, inhabited by beings of equally inconceivable age and appearance, our ancestors from very ancient times, inspired H. P. Lovecraft, who recognized in Fort a brother imbued with the same visions of the cosmos. Both had been lonely and imaginative people since childhood. A group of science fiction writers borrowed the powerful images of their doomsters to create science fiction reality fiction from their philosophical system (Henry Kuttner, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson...). The dark planets of immense geometric shapes, inhabited by evil beings who watch over us from the ends of the universe, were the starting point of reflections that did not disdain the esoteric and terrifying elements of literature.

Forteans would become legion in later years, especially with the esoteric revival of the seventies and the publication of another key book in the emergence of alternative knowledge, The Return of the Sorcerers ( Le matin des magiciens), an unprecedented best seller by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier.

Charles Fort is recognized worldwide for his study of the paranormal and for having developed a new theory of psychic and mental power. This facet is reflected in relevant works such as Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932). Another recommended essential work of the paranormal dimension, this time focused mainly on astronomical anomalies, is " New Lands " (1923).

The Editor, P.C. 2022

NEW LANDS

PART 1

Chapter 1

Lands in the sky—

That they are nearby—

That they do not move.

I take for a principle that all being is the infinitely serial, and that whatever has been will, with differences of particulars, be again—

The last quarter of the fifteenth century—land to the west!

This first quarter of the twentieth century—we shall have revelations.

There will be data. There will be many. Behind this book, unpublished collectively, or held as constituting its reserve forces, there are other hundreds of data, but independently I take for a principle that all existence is a flux and a re-flux, by which periods of expansion follow periods of contraction; that few men can even think widely when times are narrow times, but that human constrictions cannot repress extensions of thoughts and lives and enterprise and dominion when times are wider times—so then that the pageantry of foreign coasts that was revealed behind blank horizons after the year 1492, cannot be, in the course of development, the only astounding denial of seeming vacancy—that the spirit, or the animation, and the stimulations and the needs of the fifteenth century are all appearing again, and that requital may appear again—

Aftermath of war, as in the year 1492: demands for readjustments; crowded and restless populations, revolts against limitations, intolerable restrictions against emigrations. The young man is no longer urged, or is no longer much inclined, to go westward. He will, or must, go somewhere. If directions alone no longer invite him, he may hear invitation in dimensions. There are many persons, who have not investigated for themselves, who think that both poles of this earth have been discovered. There are too many women traveling luxuriously in Darkest Africa. Eskimos of Disco, Greenland, are publishing a newspaper. There must be outlet, or there will be explosion—

Outlet and invitation and opportunity—

San Salvadors of the Sky—a Plymouth Rock that hangs in the heavens of Servia—a foreign coast from which storms have brought materials to the city of Birmingham, England.

Or the mentally freezing, or dying, will tighten their prohibitions, and the chill of their censorships will contract, to extinction, our lives, which, without sin, represent matter deprived of motion. Their ideal is Death, or approximate death, warmed over occasionally only enough to fringe with uniform, decorous icicles—from which there will be no escape, if, for the living and sinful and adventurous there be not San Salvadors somewhere else, a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance, coasts of sky-continents.

But every consciousness that we have of needs, and all hosts, departments, and sub-divisions of data that indicate the possible requital of needs are opposed—not by the orthodoxy of the common Puritans, but by the Puritans of Science, and their austere, disheartening, dried or frozen orthodoxy.

Islands of space—see Sci. Amer., vol. this and p. that—accounts from the Repts. of the Brit. Assoc. for the Ad. of Sci.— Nature, etc.—except for an occasional lapse, our sources of data will not be sneered at. As to our interpretations, I consider them, myself, more as suggestions and gropings and stimuli. Islands of space and the rivers and the oceans of an extra-geography—

Stay and let salvation damn you—or straddle an auroral beam and paddle from Rigel to Betelgeuse. If there be no accepting that there are such rivers and oceans beyond this earth, stay and travel upon steamships with schedules that can be depended upon, food so well cooked and well served, comfort looked after so carefully—or some day board the thing that was seen over the city of Marseilles, Aug. 19, 1887, and ride on that, bearing down upon the moon, giving up for lost, escaping collision by the swirl of a current that was never heard of before.

There are, or there are not, nearby cities of foreign existences. They have, or they have not, been seen, by reflection, in the skies, of Sweden and Alaska. As one will. Whether acceptable, or too preposterous to be thought of, our data are of rabbles of living things that have been seen in the sky; also of processions of military beings—monsters that live in the sky and die in the sky, and spatter this earth with their red life-fluids—ships from other worlds that have been seen by millions of the inhabitants of this earth, exploring, night after night, in the sky of France, England, New England, and Canada—signals from the moon, which, according to notable indications, may not be so far from this earth as New York is from London—definitely reported and, in some instances, multitudinously witnessed, events that have been disregarded by our opposition—

A scientific priestcraft—

Thou shalt not! is crystallized in its frozen textbooks.

I have data upon data upon data of new lands that are not far away. I hold out expectations and the materials of new hopes and new despairs and new triumphs and new tragedies. I hold out my hands to point to the sky—there is a hierarchy that utters me manacles, I think—there is a dominant force that pronounces prisons that have dogmas for walls for such thoughts. It binds its formulas around all attempting extensions.

But sounds have been heard in the sky. They have been heard, and it is not possible to destroy the records of them. They have been heard. In their repetitions and regularities of series and intervals, we shall recognize perhaps interpretable language. Columns of clouds, different-colored by sunset, have vibrated to the artillery of other worlds like the strings of a cosmic harp, and I conceive of no buzzing of insects that can forever divert attention from such dramatic reverberations. Language has shone upon the dark parts of the moon: luminous exclamations that have fluttered in the lunar crater Copernicus; the eloquence of the starlike light in Aristarchus; hymns that have been chanted in lights and shades upon Linné; the wilder, luminous music in Plato—

But not a sound that has been heard in the sky, not a thing that has fallen from the sky, not a thing that should not be, but that has nevertheless been seen in the sky can we, with any sense of freedom, investigate, until first we find out about the incubus that in the past has suffocated even speculation. I shall find out for myself: anybody who cares to may find out with me. A ship from a foreign world does, or does not, sail in the sky of this earth. It is in accordance with observations by hundreds of thousands of witnesses that this event has taken place, and, if the time be when aeronautics upon this earth is of small development, that is an important circumstance to consider—but there is suffocation upon the whole occurrence and every one of its circumstances. Nobody can give good attention to the data, if diverting his mind is consciousness, altogether respectful, of the scientists who say that there are no other physical worlds except planets, millions of miles away, distances that conceivable vessels could not traverse. I should like to let loose, in an opening bombardment, the data of the little black stones of Birmingham, which, time after time, in a period of eleven years, fell obviously from a fixed point in the sky, but such a release, now, would be wasted. It will have to be prepared for. Now each one would say to himself that there are no such fixed points in the sky. Why not? Because astronomers say that there are not.

But there is something else that is implied. Implied is the general supposition that the science of astronomy represents all that is most accurate, most exacting, painstaking, semi-religious in human thought, and is therefore authoritative.

Anybody who has not been through what I've been through, in investigating this subject, would ask what are the bases and what is the consistency of the science of astronomy. The miserable, though at times amusing, confusions of thought that I find in this field of supposed research word my inquiry differently—what of dignity, or even of decency, is in it?

Phantom dogmas, with their tails clutching at vacancies, are coiled around our data.

Serpents of pseudo-thought are stifling history.

They are squeezing Thou shalt not! upon Development.

New Lands—and the horrors and lights, explosions and music of them; rabbles of hellhounds and the march of military angels. But they are Promised Lands, and first must we traverse a desert. There is ahead of us a waste of parallaxes and spectrograms and triangulations. It may be weary going through a waste of astronomic determinations, but that depends—

If out of a dreary, academic zenith shower betrayals of frailty, folly, and falsification, they will be manna to our malices—

Or sterile demonstrations be warmed by our cheerful cynicisms into delicious little lies—blossoms and fruits of unexpected oases—

Rocks to strike with our suspicions—and the gush of exposures foaming with new implications.

Tyrants, dragons, giants—and, if all be dispatched with the skill and the might and the triumph over awful odds of the hero who himself tells his story—

I hear three yells from some hitherto undiscovered, grotesque critter at the very entrance of the desert.

Chapter 2

Prediction Confirmed!

Another Verification!

A Third Verification of Prediction!

Three times, in spite of its long-established sobriety, the Journal of the Franklin Institute, vols. 106 and 107, reels with an astronomer's exhilarations. He might exult and indulge himself, and that would be no affair of ours, and, in fact, we'd like to see everybody happy, perhaps, but it is out of these three chanticleerities by Prof. Pliny Chase that we materialize our opinion that, so far as methods and strategies are concerned, no particular differences can be noted between astrologers and astronomers, and that both represent engulfment in Dark Ages. Lord Bacon pointed out that the astrologers had squirmed into prestige and emolument by shooting at marks, disregarding their misses, and recording their hits with unseemly advertisement. When, in August, 1878, Prof. Swift and Prof. Watson said that, during an eclipse of the sun, they had seen two luminous bodies that might be planets between Mercury and the sun, Prof. Chase announced that, five years before, he had made a prediction, and that it had been confirmed by the positions of these bodies. Three times, in capital letters, he screamed, or announced, according to one's sensitiveness, or prejudices, that the new planets were in the exact positions of his calculations. Prof. Chase wrote that, before his time, there had been two great instances of astronomic calculation confirmed: the discovery of Neptune and the discovery of the asteroidal belt, a claim that is disingenuously worded. If by mathematical principles, or by any other definite principles, there has ever been one great, or little, instance of astronomic discovery by means of calculations, confusion must destroy us, in the introductory position that we take, or expose our irresponsibility, and vitiate all that follows: that our data are oppressed by a tyranny of false announcements; that there never has been an astronomic discovery other than the observational or the accidental.

In The Story of the Heavens, Sir Robert Ball's opinion of the discovery of Neptune is that it is a triumph unparalleled in the annals of science. He lavishes—the great astronomer Leverrier, buried for months in profound meditations—the dramatic moment—Leverrier rises from his calculations and points to the sky—Lo! there a new planet is found.

My desire is not so much to agonize over the single fraudulencies or delusions, as to typify the means by which the science of Astronomy has established and maintained itself:

According to Leverrier, there was a planet external to Uranus; according to Hansen, there were two; according to Airy, doubtful if there were one.

One planet was found—so calculated Leverrier, in his profound meditations. Suppose two had been found—confirmation of the brilliant computations by Hansen. None—the opinion of the great astronomer, Sir George Airy.

Leverrier calculated that the hypothetic planet was at a distance from the sun, within the limits of 35 and 37.9 times this earth's distance from the sun. The new planet was found in a position said to be 30 times this earth's distance from the sun. The discrepancy was so great that, in the United States, astronomers refused to accept that Neptune had been discovered by means of calculation: see such publications as the American Journal of Science, of the period. Upon Aug. 29, 1849, Dr. Babinet read, to the French Academy, a paper in which he showed that, by the observations of three years, the revolution of Neptune would have to be placed at 165 years. Between the limits of 207 and 233 years was the period that Leverrier had calculated. Simultaneously, in England, Adams had calculated. Upon Sept. 2, 1846, after he had, for at least a month, been charting the stars in the region toward which Adams had pointed, Prof. Challis wrote to Sir George Airy that this work would occupy his time for three more months. This indicates the extent of the region toward which Adams had pointed.

The discovery of the asteroids, or in Prof. Chase's not very careful language, the discovery of the asteroidal belt as deduced from Bode's Law:

We learn that Baron Von Zach had formed a society of twenty-four astronomers to search, in accordance with Bode's Law, for a planet—and not a group, not an asteroidal belt—between Jupiter and Mars. The astronomers had organized, dividing the zodiac into twenty-four zones, assigning each zone to an astronomer. They searched. They found not one asteroid. Seven or eight hundred are now known.

Philosophical Magazine, 12-62:

That Piazzi, the discoverer of the first asteroid, had not been searching for a hypothetic body, as deduced from Bode's Law, but, upon an investigation of his own, had been charting stars in the constellation Taurus, night of Jan. 1, 1801. He noticed a light that he thought had moved, and, with his mind a blank, so far as asteroids and brilliant deductions were concerned, announced that he had discovered a comet.

As an instance of the crafty way in which some astronomers now tell the story, see Sir Robert Ball's Story of the Heavens, p. 230:

The organization of the astronomers of Lilienthal, but never a hint that Piazzi was not one of them—the search for a small planet was soon rewarded by a success that has rendered the evening of the first day of the nineteenth century memorable in astronomy. Ball tells of Piazzi's charting of the stars, and makes it appear that Piazzi had charted stars as a means of finding asteroids deductively, rewarded soon by success, whereas Piazzi had never heard of such a search, and did not know an asteroid when he saw one. This laborious and accomplished astronomer had organized an ingenious system of exploring the heavens, which was eminently calculated to discriminate a planet among the starry host … at length he was rewarded by a success which amply compensated him for all his toil.

Prof. Chase—these two great instances not of mere discovery, but of discovery by means of calculation, according to him—now the subject of his supposition that he, too, could calculate triumphantly—the verification depended upon the accuracy of Prof. Swift and Prof. Watson in recording the positions of the bodies that they had announced—

Sidereal Messenger, 6-84:

Prof. Colbert, Superintendent of Dearborn Observatory, leader of the party of which Prof. Swift was a member, says that the observations by Swift and Watson agreed, because Swift had made his observations agree with Watson's. The accusation is not that Swift had falsely announced a discovery of two unknown bodies, but that his precise determining of positions had occurred after Watson's determinations had been published.

Popular Astronomy, 7-13:

Prof. Asaph Hall writes that, several days after the eclipse, Prof. Watson told him that he had seen a luminous body near the sun, and that his declaration that he had seen two unknown bodies was not made until after Swift had been heard from.

Perched upon two delusions, Prof. Chase crowed his false raptures. The unknown bodies, whether they ever had been in the orbit of his calculations or not, were never seen again.

So it is our expression that hosts of astronomers calculate, and calculation-mad, calculate and calculate and calculate, and that, when one of them does point within 600,000,000 miles (by conventional measurements) of something that is found, he is the Leverrier of the text-books; that the others are the Prof. Chases not of the text-books.

As to most of us, the symbols of the infinitesimal calculus humble independent thinking into the conviction that used to be enforced by drops of blood from a statue. In the farrago and conflicts of daily lives, it is relief to feel such a rapport with finality, in a religious sense, or in a mathematical sense. So then, if the seeming of exactness in Astronomy be either infamously, or carelessly and laughingly, brought about by the connivances of which Swift and Watson were accused, and if the prestige of Astronomy be founded upon nothing but huge capital letters and exclamation points, or upon the disproportionality of balancing one Leverrier against hundreds of Chases, it may not be better that we should know this, if then to those of us who, in the religious sense, have nothing to depend upon, comes deprivation of even this last, lingering seeming of foundation, or seeming existence of exactness and realness, somewhere—

Except—that, if there be nearby lands in the sky and beings from foreign worlds that visit this earth, that is a great subject, and the trash that is clogging an epoch must be cleared away.

We have had a little sermon upon the insecurity of human triumphs, and, having brought it to a climax, now seems to be the time to stop; but there is still an involved triumph and I'd not like to have inefficiency, as well as probably everything else, charged against us—

The Discovery of Uranus.

We mention this stimulus to the text-book writers' ecstasies, because out of phenomena of the planet Uranus, the Neptune-triumph developed. For Richard Proctor's reasons for arguing that this discovery was not accidental, see Old and New Astronomy, p. 646. Philosophical Transactions, 71-492—a paper by Herschel—An account of a comet discovered on March 13, 1781. A year went by, and not an astronomer in the world knew a new planet when he saw one: then Lexell did find out that the supposed comet was a planet.

Statues from which used to drip the life-blood of a parasitic cult—

Structures of parabolas from which bleed equations—

As we go along we shall develop the acceptance that astronomers might as well try to