Colin Wilson, Philosopher of the Paranormal

Back in the 1970s, Colin Wilson was one of the big names of what might be called "mass-market forteana". But while I did borrow a copy of his 600-page blockbuster The Occult circa 1978, it was only much later that I started to discover just how interesting his ideas are. It began in 2001, when I bought a book by Fortean Times contributor Gary Lachman called Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (which I'm sure everyone spotted in my recent shelfie post, towards the right-hand end of the middle shelf). Colin Wilson made an appearance in Lachman's book in the context of the H. P. Lovecraft revival of the 1960s - including the wonderfully surreal cover of Wilson's 1967 novel The Mind Parasites. As evidenced by the photo above, I bought a second-hand copy as soon as I could find one, as well as two later novels in the same vein, The Philosopher's Stone (1969) and The Space Vampires (1976).

The other paperback shown above is a non-fiction one, The Psychic Detectives (1984), which I bought in 2016 when I was researching my own book, Pseudoscience and Science Fiction. Here's what I said about Wilson there:

As his career progressed, he became increasingly fascinated with the world of strange powers. A recurrent theme throughout his fiction and non-fiction is that most people live a robotic existence far below their real potential.

That use of the word "robotic" brings me on to the main subject of this post, which is the Kindle book shown in the above photo - Gary Lachman's Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson (2016). I only became aware of it last month, when Gary posted the following on Facebook:

I've just heard that the paperback of Beyond the Robot, my book about Colin Wilson, is now out of print. If you are among the many who didn't buy a copy, there's still time to not get the Kindle edition too.

Since I'm a chronic sufferer from the "Why do friends never read my books?" syndrome, I clearly had to buy it immediately! I'm glad I did, as I found it a fascinating and information-packed read which got 5 out of 5 stars from me on Goodreads. However, this post isn't really a review of the book, so much as a summary of a few things I found particularly interesting from a fortean point of view.

To start with, Fortean Times (as well as some of the "Unconventions" they organized) makes several appearances in the book. At one point Lachman specifically mentions "writing pretty regularly for the Fortean Times", and after Colin Wilson's death in 2013 Gary's obituary of him appeared in FT 310 (the same issue as my review of a comic-strip book about particle physics, FWIW). Although I've never actually met Gary, I did spot him at a couple of Uncons - and, I think, in the audience at the "Aliens and the Imagination" event I mentioned on this blog in 2011. Way back in 1978, in the guise of his musical alter-ego Gary Valentine, Lachman also wrote Blondie's paranormal-themed hit "I’m Always Touched by Your Presence, Dear".

As for Colin Wilson himself, he only came on to fortean-type subjects a decade or so after he started writing. His original focus was on existential philosophy, and his first book on that subject, The Outsider, was published in 1956 when he was just 24. It received a lot of rave reviews, including one in The Observer - which Lachman describes as one of Britain's "highbrow Sunday papers" (which pleased me a lot, since they published a two-page feature by me just a couple of months ago).

In hindsight, it's not surprising that Wilson's own personal take on philosophy eventually led to an interest in the paranormal, since it's ultimately all about widening human consciousness beyond the normal trivialities of everyday life. That's why he was drawn to the Lovecraftian style of fiction - he had no time for the more mainstream kind of novelist "who, in the service of realism, simply portrays life as it is". Another fortean favourite who made an impression on Wilson was Aleister Crowley. According to Lachman, Crowley was the model for one of the characters in Wilson's early novel Man Without a Shadow (1963) - Carradoc Cunningham, an occultist and master of "sex magic". Apparently Wilson himself harboured interests along the latter lines, believing that sexual orgasm can unlock higher states of consciousness and "open the doors of perception".

When Wilson came to write about the paranormal - The Occult (1971) being his first and best-known, but far from only, book on the subject - he did so in a way that was almost diametrically opposed to the standard approach for the genre. As Lachman puts it:

If scientists and other skeptics were ever going to broaden their minds about the occult, then it had to be presented to them logically, in a way that made sense, not in a sensational "believe it or not" manner.

As with his first book about philosophy, Wilson's first book on the paranormal also got rave reviews. In part, this was because "highbrow" readers were far more open to such topics at that time than they are today. Referring to a favourable review that New Scientist gave of Wilson's follow-up book Mysteries (1978), Lachman says:

Such acclaim from a scientific publication for a book about the paranormal is unusual today, and shows that in the 1970s, the paranormal was treated with respect by many scientists, unlike in our more narrowly skeptical times.

Another thing I remember myself from those times, is that interest in fringe topics was much more wide-ranging and eclectic than it is today. The "paranormal", for example, meant a lot more than just ghosts and poltergeists. Listing some of the topics that Wilson covered in Mysteries, Lachman includes "plant telepathy, psychic surgery, transcendental meditation, biofeedback, Kirlian photography, multiple personality and synchronicity". All great stuff - makes me feel more nostalgic than ever for the 20th century!

Colin Wilson was an incredibly prolific author, and I kept noting down titles of books of his that I ought to seek out. The most intriguing-sounding of all is Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals (2006) - something I should have known about already, as Wilson mentioned it in an article he himself wrote for Fortean Times, called "A 100,000-year-old Civilization?" It appeared in FT 272 in March 2011, and I have to admit I'd forgotten all about it (although I looked back at it just now, which is how I know it mentions the Atlantis book). In any case, I've already acquired my copy of Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals from eBay, as you can see here:

Scottish Skepticism

I met up with my Canadian relatives for a few days in Scotland last week, and while I was waiting for them to arrive in Glasgow I walked over to Kelvingrove Park to see the statue of Lord Kelvin pictured above. Despite his high-sounding name, Kelvin wasn’t really an aristocrat – he was born plain William Thompson, and only acquired his title at the age of 68 in recognition of his scientific achievements (he took the name Kelvin from the river that flows past Glasgow University, where he worked). Today – rightly or wrongly – Lord Kelvin is best remembered as the archetype of the arrogantly self-confident scientist who refuses to believe anything that isn’t already enshrined in a textbook.

This reputation is only partly deserved. It’s true that Kelvin was overly skeptical about technological advancement – for example in 1902, the year before the Wright Brothers’ first flight, he confidently predicted that heavier-than-air flight would never be practical. However, his most famous pronouncement was actually cleverer and more perceptive than it appears at first sight. In 1900 (at the age of 76) he gave a speech suggesting that scientific theory was virtually complete except for what he described as “two little clouds in the sky”. With hindsight, given the huge revolutions in quantum theory and relativity that would turn physics on its head over the next few decades, Kelvin’s assertion looks ludicrously pompous. Yet the two clouds he was talking about – the Michelson-Morley experiment and the ultraviolet catastrophe (or lack thereof) – were pretty much the only phenomena known at the time which couldn’t be explained without relativity or quantum theory. So Kelvin’s only mistake was to assume that these “two little clouds” would turn out to have simple explanations, rather than domino-toppling, paradigm-shifting ones.

Personally I don’t believe Lord Kelvin was the blinkered and close-minded skeptic that history makes him out to be. If you’re really looking for the patron saint of skeptics, you need to go back to the 18th century and another Scotsman – David Hume. I wrote about him in some detail five years ago (David Hume: a skeptic in the 18th century) so you can just click on that link if you want the details. To put it in a nutshell (and again this is just a personal opinion), Hume was a nasty piece of work who pioneered the aggressively hardnosed “If I haven’t seen it with my own eyes, it doesn’t exist” brand of skepticism.

Anyway, I spotted a statue of Hume a couple of days later in the centre of Edinburgh. Amusingly, it shows him dressed like an arty-farty ancient Greek philosopher – somehow I doubt that it’s a depiction Hume himself would have appreciated!

Some old X-Files

I don’t usually hoard old magazines (except Fortean Times), but I kept these three issues of Cinefantastique because between them they contain complete episode guides to the first four seasons of The X-Files. I was prompted to dig them out last week – not because of the “reboot” currently showing on Channel 5, or from any general sense of nostalgia, but because I needed to do some research for a new book I’m working on. In looking through them, I was struck by how highbrow some of the X-Files episode titles were. Here are a few of the more Fortean examples – two from each of those first four seasons (just focusing on the titles, not the storylines).

The Jersey Devil (Season 1, Episode 5). One of America’s lesser known cryptids, this one dates back to those pre-Darwin days when mysterious creatures weren’t required to conform to the logic of evolutionary genetics. According to Wikipedia it’s “a kangaroo-like creature with the head of a goat, leathery bat-like wings, horns, small arms with clawed hands, cloven hooves and a forked tail”. Wings AND arms AND hooves… they don’t make them like that any more.

Ghost in the Machine (Season 1, Episode 7). This cool-sounding phrase was coined by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1949, as a disparaging description of the dualistic theory of human nature (i.e. a spiritual soul inhabiting a material body).

Little Green Men (Season 2, Episode 1). A facetious term for extraterrestrials, which was already well established when Mack Reynolds wrote The Case of the Little Green Men in 1951 – a Fortean-themed detective novel I wrote about in a blog post last year.

Fearful Symmetry (Season 2, Episode 18). This phrase comes from William Blake’s famous poem “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright”. The poem isn’t very Fortean, but its author was – as I explained in A 19th Century Contactee. One of the strangest spiritual creatures Blake claimed to have encountered was “The Ghost of a Flea” – his painting of which I happened to see in the Tate Gallery last year (see photo at the bottom of this post).

Paper Clip (Season 3, Episode 2). This is a reference to Operation Paperclip, a real world “conspiracy” that brought hundreds of German scientists – many of them war criminals – to the United States in the aftermath of WW2, giving them clean new records and salaried positions working for the U.S. government. It may be no coincidence that “Nasa” sounds a bit like “Nazi”.

Talitha Cumi (Season 3, Episode 24). This is one of several X-Files titles derived from a foreign language. In this case it’s Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. It’s a quote from the New Testament, which of course is full of Jesus quotes, but most of them only appear in translation. This example (from Mark 5:41) is one of only about a dozen that are given in the original Aramaic first (I’d be interested to know why they were singled out in this way). From the King James version: “And he took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.”

Tunguska (Season 4, Episode 8). This, of course, was the site of a mysterious explosion that flattened two thousand square kilometres of Siberian forest in 1908. It was probably caused by a meteor impact, although several odd things about it have led to various alternative explanations (e.g. an exploding UFO). As mentioned in my post about Ian Watson last year, his novel Chekhov’s Journey offers a particularly weird interpretation of the Tunguska event.

Terma (Season 4, Episode 9). This has to be one of the most obscure X-Files titles of all. It’s a technical term from Tantric Buddhism, referring to secret teachings carefully handed down among the inner circle of adepts. Such as, for example, that Tantric classic “Sex Secrets of the Ancient Masters” (which I really must get round to writing one of these days).

The Number of the Beast

Over the years I’ve read a dozen or so books by Robert A. Heinlein, including novels and short story collections, but I wouldn’t count myself as a Heinlein fan. And The Number of the Beast – a huge, 556-page novel he wrote when he was over 70 – is really a book for die-hard fans only. It’s got a reputation as a dull and slow-moving novel, overloaded with Heinlein in-jokes and self-references. On the other hand, its basic premise is pretty fascinating – so I picked up a second-hand copy for a couple of pounds when I saw it in a bookshop earlier this year. I just got round to reading it – and while I can’t pretend it was an enjoyable experience, it was thought-provoking enough to be worth a blog post (plus I can’t think of anything else to write about this week).

The idea of “the number of the beast” – 6 6 6 – comes from the Book of Revelation. It’s one of the few things in the Bible that even non-Christians (and Satanists, for that matter) agree is quite cool. It’s normally rendered as “six hundred and sixty-six”, but in Heinlein’s novel it’s “six to the power of six to the power of six”. Written like that it’s mathematically ambiguous. 6⁶ is 46656, but there’s a big difference between 46656⁶ and 6⁴⁶⁶⁵⁶. Heinlein makes it clear that he means the first of these, which he multiplies out as 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056. That may look like a big number, but the second number is MUCH bigger. It starts with 223,872 followed by another 36,300 digits. I guess the reason Heinlein didn’t go for that one is because it would have taken at least 20 pages to write out in full!

In the novel, the significance of 6^6^6 comes from a six-dimensional theory of space-time developed by one of the four main protagonists. It’s supposedly the number of different universes “possibly accessible to us either by rotation or translation”. That’s pure technobabble, of course, but it’s an excellent starting premise for a science fiction novel. Unfortunately, however, Heinlein’s narrative doesn’t go the way most SF readers would expect it to.

That much was science – now for the philosophy. I like playing with words just as much as I like playing with numbers – especially if they’re really big words. There are three lovely big words on the back cover of the book – “Multiperson Pantheistic Solipsism” (that’s one of the reasons I had to buy it). Solipsism is the philosophical theory that the human mind creates its own reality. Pantheism, strictly speaking, is the theological belief that God is all-pervasive throughout the universe. But coupled with solipsism I guess you could substitute “the human mind” for “God”. The third big word, multiperson, is self-explanatory – the relevance here being that the book has four protagonists who are very much in tune with each other. Putting it all together, “Multiperson Pantheistic Solipsism” means that a whole universe can be created as a mental projection by a group of like-minded people.

This still sounds like a good idea – although closer to fantasy than science fiction – but again Heinlein doesn’t handle it the way most people would expect. I’d read in several places that the “universes” the characters create are based on pulp fiction, which immediately creates certain expectations in the reader’s mind. Even Wikipedia says “The novel lies somewhere between parody and homage in its deliberate use of the style of the 1930s pulp novels”. Having read the book I have to say that’s just plain wrong.

At its peak in the 1930s and 40s, pulp fiction encompassed a whole range of genres. The most popular of these were hardboiled crime (as typified by Black Mask magazine), supernatural fantasy (typified by Weird Tales), the “hero” pulps (e.g. The Shadow and Doc Savage) and the nascent genre of science fiction (pioneered by Amazing Stories, followed by various similarly titled magazines such as Astounding).

Near the start of The Number of the Beast, the protagonists do get into a brief discussion of pulp magazines – including Weird Tales, The Shadow, Black Mask and Astounding. But that’s pretty much it. When they start visiting “fictional” universes, only one of them has its roots in a pulp magazine. That’s a fairly brief episode involving E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman characters, who originally appeared in the pages of Astounding. As for tough-talking private eyes like Race Williams or Dan Turner, Robert E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria, Doc Savage and his trusty aides... there’s no sign of any of them.

The fact is, regardless of what Wikipedia says, The Number of the Beast isn’t even close to being a parody of 1930s pulp fiction. Instead, the dominant thread running through the fictional universes is children’s literature – classic books like The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Princess of Mars and Gulliver’s Travels.

They may not be pulp fiction, but these books are still essentially escapist adventures, with some very basic tropes in common. First and foremost is the idea of conflict. Typically this means protagonists versus villain – either the protagonists are desperately trying to stop the villain doing something bad, or the villain is trying to prevent them doing something good. Even if the story doesn’t have a human villain, it needs an impending natural disaster or other impersonal force to provide the same impetus and sense of urgency. The protagonists shouldn’t have time to catch their breath, let alone do any of the trivial little things you and I spend most of the day doing. If there’s a romantic subplot, then its course can’t be allowed to run smooth. That bit about living happily ever after comes at the end of the story, not the beginning.

Heinlein turns all of that on its head. If you think about it, in a universe governed by Multiperson Pantheistic Solipsism, he pretty much has to. I mean, if you created a universe out of pure thought, you’d give yourself an easy time too, wouldn’t you? Consequently the book is devoid of any sense of urgency. It’s the only novel I’ve read where the protagonists spend most of their time cleaning their teeth, taking a bath, deciding what to wear, eating breakfast, getting a good night’s sleep... and having long conversations in which everyone agrees with everyone else. They carefully plan what they’re going to do next, then do it in their own sweet time. On the rare occasions they come across anything resembling an obstacle or hindrance, they deal with it in half a page, then get back to eating, sleeping and agreeing with each other.

The result is a long and boring book, in which the protagonists thoroughly enjoy themselves but the reader doesn’t. That’s the exact opposite of a traditional escapist novel – it’s more like peeking in on someone else’s daydream. Maybe it is all a dream, in fact. The first two sections are called “The Mandarin’s Butterfly” and “The Butterfly’s Mandarin” – presumably a reference to a story told by the Chinese philosopher Chuang Chou:

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither... conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

Who Remembers Guru?

I’m sure that everyone who reads Fortean Times will be aware of Hunt Emerson’s perennial Phenomenonix strip (which must qualify as one of the most erudite cartoons of all time – especially the episodes written in collaboration with Kevin Jackson). But when I first started reading the magazine there was another regular cartoon feature as well – “Guru” by Pierre Hollins. According to his own website, the strip ran from 1991 to 1997. The example pictured above (just a single panel, as was often the case) comes from FT95, cover-dated February 1997.

Guru is a bovine-headed philosopher who talks like a 1960s hippie. I can’t say I ever found the punchlines particularly funny (the one above is one of the better ones), but I really enjoyed the strip anyway. I liked the surrealism of the Guru character, and the juxtaposition of deep philosophizing with “let it all hang out” hippie platitudes. I also liked the retro style of the art – in high-contrast black-and-white, with most of the characters wearing Victorian garb. These appear to be clip-art collages – something that probably involved a lot more time and effort in the 1990s than it would do today!

I just discovered that all (or most) of the Guru strips are now online at the Guru Files on Pierre Hollins’s website – reading through them stirred many nostalgic memories! There are also some colour cartoons, which I don’t recall seeing in the magazine. I particularly liked the one shown below. The caption (which is the punchline from one of the earlier black-and-white strips) is printed vertically up the left-hand side, for some reason. It reads: “If everyone knew the secret of the Universe, it wouldn’t be much of a secret”.

The Lafferty Paradox

Ever heard of Raphael Aloysius Lafferty? Not many people have, despite the fact that he was one of the most intelligent and prolific writers of Fortean fiction in the 1960s and 70s. That’s one of the lesser paradoxes surrounding R.A. Lafferty. Another is the fact that, around the time I started reading science fiction in the early seventies, he was one of the most ubiquitous contributors to magazines and anthologies – often appearing on the cover and being nominated for numerous awards – yet even in those days publishers were strangely reluctant to put out single-author works by Lafferty, in the form of novels and short-story collections (here in the UK, they were only ever issued as hardbacks for the library market). The 1984 paperback collection pictured above, Ringing Changes, proved incredibly difficult to track down – I eventually acquired it from an online US-based seller a couple of weeks ago.

The biggest Lafferty paradox, however, is in the stories themselves. Most of them are very short, and at first sight they appear to be whimsical, offbeat fantasies that can read quickly and forgotten quickly. His characters are often bizarrely cartoonish, with bizarre cartoonish names. His settings are surreal and his plots are outrageous. His writing style is chatty and filled with laugh-out-loud humour. This all goes to support the view that Lafferty’s stories are lightweight and ephemeral. But nothing could be further from the truth – which is that Lafferty was one of the most serious, deep-thinking writers of his generation. Almost all his stories have a carefully thought-through philosophical subtext, often on issues he felt strongly about.

When you think about deep-thinking SF writers of the 60s and 70s, the name that springs most obviously to mind is Philip K. Dick. Probably every SF fan in the world has heard of him, and academics write dissertations about his work. So why isn’t the same true of R. A. Lafferty?

One difference is in the medium they chose. Most of Dick’s important works are 70,000 word novels, while Lafferty’s tend to be 5,000 word short stories – a form whose popularity has plummeted since the 1970s. But a bigger difference is in the accessibility of their ideas. Dick’s idée fixe was essentially Gnostic – that the so-called “reality” we perceive around us is in some sense fake or substandard. That resonates perfectly with the uncertainty and paranoia of the modern world, and most readers can relate to it. There’s something screwy about reality in Lafferty’s stories too – but in a far more complex way, which even a Lafferty fan like myself often has difficulty getting to grips with.

In Wild Talents, Charles Fort wrote: “I conceive of nothing in religion, science or philosophy that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.” Does this mean that while reality itself is fixed and self-consistent, human attempts to understand it are constantly changing perspective over the generations? Or is it that reality itself is always shifting into new configurations? Lafferty seems to have believed the latter. His stories tell of times in the past – often the not-very-distant past – when the laws of physics were different, or human abilities were different, or animal species were different, or time itself was different. But the differences quickly get forgotten, because history reshapes itself to cover up the changes.

By my count, more than half the 20 stories in the Ringing Changes collection deal with one variation or another on this theme (the other stories deal with other, equally philosophical, ideas). I will get hopelessly muddled if I try to describe all of them, so I’ll just focus on the two most obviously Fortean stories.

The longest story in the collection, “The Rivers of Damascus”, is one of half a dozen that I’d already read (in this case, in the issue of Galaxy magazine in which it first appeared). Longest is a relative term, though – it’s still only 27 pages, although it could easily have been expanded into a novel ten times that length. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the original plan, since the story reads like the outline of a novel in places. For example, the backstories of the two main characters go into far more biographical detail than you would expect in a novelette of this length. One of them is a skilled dowser, who is capable of dowsing not just underground water but the past as well (this is explained with some first-rate technobabble about the heterodyning of brain waves – Lafferty was an electrical engineer by profession).

The other character has a psychic talent of a different kind – he can tune into mental impressions and turn them into solid reality. So between them, acting as a team, they can help academic researchers recreate the past in the form of a “para-archaeological probe”. But this is a Lafferty story, so it’s the wrong underground river they tap into... and the past thus revealed is completely different from the one in the history books. They become a laughing-stock of the scientific establishment, paraded before a billion-strong TV audience on an ultra-skeptical documentary show called “Science Supreme, the End of the Crackpots”. But the story has a happy ending – the entrenched academics are revealed as the true crackpots, while the world gives the para-archaeologists an open-door welcome!

The collection includes three stories that hadn’t previously seen print. One of them is burdened with the rather longwinded title “Oh Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?” (I guess that’s what happens when an author makes up his own title, without editorial intervention). It’s an excellent story, though. It features the same protagonist, Miss Phosphor McCabe, as “Nor Limestone Islands” which I mentioned in Charles Fort in Fiction. This story isn’t a direct sequel, but it’s equally Fortean and it has a stronger philosophical subtext.

The “well” of the title is the Collective Unconscious – a concept taken from Jungian psychology, though given a Lafferty-esque twist. This is the place people get their ideas and creative inspirations from, and one day it suddenly runs dry. Or does it? A group of Forteans knows better. They know the Collective Unconscious consists of countless sub-wells, and what has run dry is just the conventional-thinking one. There are plenty of others to choose from – but only if everyone in the world becomes as open-minded as the Forteans! Again, the story has a happy ending:

You know what rough and shouting people the Forteans had always been? You remember what rude strutters the Boschites were? You know the loud and glittering insanity of the Dalikites, and the perversity and perfidy of the Albionians? These shabby, crude, delirious dregs of humanity had always lived on rocks in the lower skies and in shanties on the outskirts of our towns. But now we all drank their water, we thought their thoughts (thoughts? some of their ghouly notions were enough to rot the flesh off your bones), and now we became indistinguishable from them.

The History of Atlantis

I wrote another short article for eHow last week: What Did Atlantis Look Like?. The editorial instructions said the piece should draw on multiple “credible expert sources”, but when it comes down to it there is only one really credible source on the subject :  the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who described the sinking of Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias in the 4th century BC. Everything that has ever been written about Atlantis draws in one way or another on Plato’s account.

Modern proponents of Atlantis seem to fall into three broad camps:

• Academics (and pseudo-academics) who scour the world looking for archaeological and historical evidence of a lost Atlantean civilization. This approach really took off with the publication of Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882.
• New Agers and other mystics who emphasize the spiritual and high-tech aspects of Atlantean culture, often receiving their information through telepathic “channelling” as opposed to more materialistic methods. This idea seems to have originated with the Theosophical movement in the late 19th century, continuing into the 20th century with the writings of Edgar Cayce and others.
• Fictional treatments of Atlantis often portray it as still existing, thousands of years after it sank beneath the waves, in the form of a highly advanced underwater civilization. The best-known representative of this version of Atlantis is probably Namor the Sub-Mariner from Marvel Comics, although the earliest occurrence of the idea that I’m aware of is Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Maracot Deep from 1929.

The thing about Plato’s account that makes all this variety possible is that virtually no-one imagines he was telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That leaves people free to pick and choose the bits they like, and add whatever further details they feel necessary.

Plato was a philosopher, not a historian, so he wasn’t in the business of recording purely factual accounts of historical events. He used the story of Atlantis as a vehicle to make specific points about moral and political philosophy. At the same time, however, Plato wasn’t in the business of writing imaginative fiction either. It’s hard to see why he would have gone to the trouble of fabricating such a convoluted story when he could have conveyed the same message in a more straightforward way. So it’s reasonable enough to conclude that some of what Plato said about Atlantis was based in fact, and some of it was made up.

But which is which? Translated into modern-day terms, the essential elements of Plato’s account are as follows:

1. Atlantis was an island which sank beneath the sea as the result of a catastrophic earthquake.
2. The island was large, perhaps 2000 or more miles in extent, and located in the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. After it sank, Plato says it “became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean”.
3. According to Plato, the sinking of Atlantis occurred around 9600 BC, when Atlantean civilization was at its height. Although Europe, North Africa and the Middle East were still in the early Neolithic period (New Stone Age) at that time, Plato’s Atlantis boasted a rich and thriving Bronze Age culture of a kind not seen elsewhere until 6000 years later.

As a general rule, the closer an Atlantis-hunter is to the academic mainstream, the fewer details of Plato’s account they seem prepared to accept. At the most hardnosed extreme, they just accept point (1) and ignore the rest. The second point – an island of that size located where Plato said it was – really isn’t credible in light of what is now known about the north Atlantic seabed. Similarly, the idea that such an advanced Bronze Age culture could have existed 12 millennia ago, without leaving the slightest trace in the neighbouring parts of Africa and Europe, just doesn’t fit with academically accepted chronology.

The figure of 9600 BC comes from Plato’s dating of the sinking of Atlantis to 9000 years before the time of Solon — a Greek statesman who lived around 600 BC. But one of the references cited in my eHow article claims that “Studies have shown there would appear to be a ten-fold error in all figures over a hundred in Plato’s work, due probably to an early translation error.” This would give a date of 600 + 900 (not 9000) = 1500 BC, which neatly coincides with the Bronze Age eruption of the small Greek island of Santorini – often cited as the most rationalistic explanation for the origin of Plato’s story.

But rationality is for the academics. At the other extreme, the mystics and New Agers are perfectly happy to accept Plato’s date of approximately 10,000 BC. They’re generally less interested in the location of Atlantis than in its level of technical and spiritual advancement – so they tend to focus on point (3) above rather than the first two. From their point of view, the idea of Bronze Age technology presents no problem at all, even when the rest of the world was back in the Stone Age. In fact they’re likely to advocate an even higher level of ancient Atlantean culture, complete with such things as flying vehicles, ESP, teleportation and maybe even space travel!

Buddhism and Human Rights

In last week’s post I mentioned the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, which also happened to feature in the very first thing I ever wrote for publication. That was a review of a book called Buddhism and Human Rights, which appeared in the Buddhist Society magazine The Middle Way back in August 1998 – sixteen years ago, in other words.

Since the whole purpose of human rights is to protect individuals against authoritarian governments, I took the (possibly over-simplistic) view that to oppose such rights is to show support for authoritarian governments. Yet for the most part the book’s contributors – mostly Western academics – seemed lukewarm about human rights at best. Since I can’t think of anything else to write about this week, here is an abridged version of my review:

Human rights are a man-made concept, developed within the specific context of modern Western culture. The concept is not native to Buddhism, but it is so central to the modern world that Buddhist thinkers must face the subject squarely if they are not to appear irrelevant or anachronistic. This book constitutes the proceedings of an online conference held in October 1995 to address just this issue.

A book of this kind needs to consider three important questions. First, exactly what are Westerners referring to when they speak of human rights? Secondly, are these concepts compatible with Buddhist morality and practice? And finally, can a Buddhist viewpoint help to alleviate suffering in countries with poor human rights records, whether the Buddhists in question are an ethnic minority or a government-supported majority? The book answers the first question very well, but gets so bogged down in the second that the all-important third question does not receive the attention it deserves. Earlier this year [1998], demonstrators in London were handing out leaflets accusing one particular government of waging “genocidal war” while being “propped up by a vicious fundamentalist Buddhist priesthood”. Whether or not there is any truth to this claim, it brings home the enormity of the issues at stake, and dispels any illusion that we are talking about a cosy theoretical abstraction.

Human rights, as affirmed in the UN declaration, address the relationship between society and the individual, in particular protecting the latter from exploitation and persecution. The purpose of the declaration is not ethical or philosophical but legal. Although it is not legally binding in itself, it forms the basis of other documents which do have power in international law. To Western thinking, at least some of the clauses should apply to all cultures at all times – the right to life and to equality of treatment, for example. Others are more politically specific, such as the right to own property or to join a trade union, but it is only the former category of “universal” rights that needs to concern a book such as this. The various contributors achieve reasonable, though not total, consensus that these universal rights are consistent with Buddhist morality, the most persuasive argument being based on the Buddhist notion of compassion for all beings.

Despite this grudging consensus, only a minority of the authors represented here seem prepared to embrace human rights wholeheartedly within a Buddhist context. Others are deeply suspicious of the concept because they cannot find its germ in Buddhist teachings, which is akin to denouncing the Highway Code because the Buddha never said anything about road safety! Another stumbling block is the egocentric, though legally convenient, wording of “rights language” – even though the underlying concepts could equally well be recast in terms of the duties of a state towards its people. The worry is that the existing formulation may foster the wrong attitude in some people (“I know my rights!”).

The book’s weakness is its tendency to descend into pedantic hair-splitting, rather than squarely facing the reality of human rights violations and asking how Buddhist beliefs and practice could help to eradicate them. This hair-splitting is not just frustrating, it sends out the wrong message. Any government unwise enough to engage in the repression of minorities might take comfort from this book that Buddhists (or rather Western academics studying Buddhism) are divided over whether to condemn them or let them off. Sometimes even philosophers should come down off the fence.

[The photograph is one I took in the Musée Guimet in Paris last year]

The Promethean Galaxy

The Promethean Galaxy was the first book I ever wrote, way back in 1990. In fact it was the first non-fiction I ever wrote, apart from scientific papers. I tried it on a few publishers at the time, but they all said the same thing – that it didn’t fit into any of their categories. The book wasn’t popular science or philosophy or literary criticism or popular culture, but a weird mixture of all the above. It was a bit like this blog, in other words!

The original version of the book was 30,000 words long, but I tightened it up to 18,000 words in 2004 and self-published it as an ebook. I noticed a few days ago that some kind and discerning person just bought a copy from Amazon, which is what brought it back to mind. Who says self-published books never sell?

“The Promethean Galaxy” is a quote from a comic book – Jack Kirby’s New Gods #5, from 1971. Although I was a 13-year old comic reader at the time, I didn't buy that particular issue, or any of Jack Kirby’s 1970s titles for that matter. I didn’t want to be seen with them – they looked childish and old-fashioned to my sophisticated teenage tastes! It was only in 1989 that I bought a complete set of New Gods reprints and decided they were really very good. So it was all fresh in my mind when I sat down in front of my very first PC to write The Promethean Galaxy in 1990.

I managed to squeeze a lot of other cool stuff into the book, too, and then added a few more items to the mix when I revised it in 2004. Here is a list I made on the latter occasion:

...... Astounding Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov ...... Astral travel and astrology ...... Charles Fort and Erich von Daniken ...... Einstein and General Relativity ...... Jack Kirby and The New Gods ...... Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Jung ...... Linguistic relativism and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ...... Parapsychology and UFOs ...... Philip K. Dick and Gnosticism ...... Quantum entanglement and emergent phenomena ...... Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard ...... Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton ...... Star Trek and The Matrix ...... Tennyson, Shelley, Voltaire and Wagner ...... The Many Worlds Hypothesis and hyperspace ...... Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts ...... Warp drives and wormholes ......

– or as I said a moment ago, pretty much like this blog!

Let’s see if I can keep the ball rolling and sell more than that one copy. Here are a few links so you can choose your favourite format:

• Amazon.com
• Amazon UK
• Amazon Canada
• Amazon Australia
• iTunes
• Barnes & Noble (Nook)

... and here is the book’s blurb:

Planet Earth is a constituent part of the Galaxy, but only a microscopically small part – a tiny chunk of rock. Like Prometheus, we are chained to this rock, and constrained to view the Galaxy from this one perspective only. Why should we be interested in the Galaxy in the first place, and – with such a restricted viewpoint – how can we ever hope to learn anything about it? These questions are addressed in this book, which draws on an eclectic heritage of science, philosophy, mysticism, poetry and fiction.

Crossword Exegesis

I don’t really know what an exegesis is, but people expect a crossword compiler to have a big vocabulary. What I mean is, on the other side of the following image are the answers to last week’s crossword and/or trivia quiz, together with an explanation of the various Fortean connections.

If you want to do the puzzle but haven’t done so yet, reading beyond this point will take you into spoiler territory. But if you’ve done the puzzle, or just want to see the answers, scroll on...

ACROSS

1. Author of Chariots of the Gods: ERICH VON DANIKEN. An easy one to start with! But EvD’s ideas weren’t as original as many people imagine – see Reinventing Ezekiel's Wheel.

9. First of the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation: EPHESUS. A Turkish town and a major centre of early Christianity. It was also the site of one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Temple of Artemis.

10. “Their weapons were no match for the Bossonian LONGBOW" (Robert E. Howard). This comes from the only full-length Conan novel that Howard wrote, The Hour of the Dragon (also sometimes published as Conan the Conqueror). Not a particularly Fortean story, although some of Howard’s other fiction is. I think I’ll make that the subject of my next blog post.

11. "Voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to EVADE " (Charles Fort). This comes from The Book of the Damned, a few paragraphs after the oft quoted “I think we're property” – the voyagers in question being extraterrestrial ones.

12. Yggdrasil, for example: ASH. Yggdrasil is the World Ash Tree in Norse mythology.

13. The world ends without this, according to T.S. Eliot: A BANG. From The Hollow Men (1925): “This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.” Another Eliot poem from the same period, The Waste Land, is packed with Fortean themes – I’ll have to add that to my list of future posts as well.

14. Site of the Crucifixion: CALVARY. From the Latin Calvariæ Locus = “place of the skull”. The Hebrew equivalent is Golgotha.

16. "I had long hoped for a personal CONTACT with a man from a flying saucer" (George Adamski). A quote from Flying Saucers have Landed, co-authored with the far more interesting Desmond Leslie.

18. The queen of the fairies, according to Shakespeare: TITANIA. From A Midsummer Might’s Dream, of course. The picture (fourth image on top row) shows a detail from The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847) by Sir Joseph Noel Paton.

21. Sayings of Jesus that are not found in the Gospels: AGRAPHA. This is an obscure one, but anyone who’s tried compiling a crossword will know that the more words you fill in, the harder it gets to find unobscure words to fit the remaining spaces! But Agrapha isn’t so obscure that it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page.

23. Max ERNST, German surrealist. Perhaps the most Fortean connection here is Ernst’s bird-man creation called Loplop, which was adopted as a kind of mascot by Jon Downes and the Centre for Fortean Zoology (see picture – third image on the top row).

25. URI Geller, Israeli-born psychic. Geller’s 1973 appearance on the Dimbleby Talk-In was one of my Fortean Events that Shook the World.

26. "Thus SPAKE Zarathustra", by Friedrich Nietzsche. Written in the 1880s, this philosophical work focused on two concepts more often associated with the 20th century: “The Superman” and “God is Dead”.

27. Lenape people living in New Jersey when the Europeans arrived: RARITAN. This is one of two grid entries where I just couldn’t find anything Fortean that would fit. There’s a modern-day city in New Jersey named Raritan, as well as Raritan Bay between New Jersey and New York.

28. "IMMORAL Tales" (1974), featuring Paloma Picasso as Countess Erzsébet Báthory. The Báthory segment focuses on the historical countess, not the later legends that associate her with vampirism. So she doesn’t slaughter large quantities of female virgins and bathe in their blood in order to restore her youth. She just slaughters large quantities of female virgins and bathes in their blood because she enjoys it (see picture – first image on bottom row).

29. Britain's best-known cryptid: LOCH NESS MONSTER. In light of the upcoming Scottish independence vote, perhaps I should have worded this as “Scotland's best-known cryptid” to stay on the safe side.

DOWN

1. The building pictured [in last week’s post]: EXETER CATHEDRAL. Another non-Fortean one – I needed a 15-letter word or phrase beginning with E and ending with L, and this was the best I could do. The answer was actually written on the image, if you can read Latin: Exoniensis Ecclesiae Cathedralis.

2. Eldest son of Abraham, according to the Book of Genesis: ISHMAEL. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Ishmael is less important than his younger half-brother Isaac. In Islam, however, Ishmael is the more important of the two, being a direct ancestor of Muhammad.

3. Herman HESSE, author of Siddhartha. According to Wikipedia, this 1922 novel “deals with the spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautama Buddha.... It was published in the U.S. in 1951 and became influential during the 1960s.”

4. The James OSSUARY is inscribed "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus". If the inscription is genuine, it might constitute archaeological evidence for the Biblical Jesus... but quoting Wikipedia again, “most scholars hold the last part of the inscription to be a forgery”.

5. The DELPHIC Sibyl, prophetess of Apollo. The illustration (second image on top row) is from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

6. Professional assassin in feudal Japan: NINJA. I’m not sure if this is an easy one or not – everyone uses the word “ninja”, but do they really know what it means?

7. An esoteric branch of Judaism: KABBALA. When I compiled the crossword a few years ago, I convinced myself this was a valid spelling – although “Kabbalah”, “Cabala” and “Qabbala” are more common.

8. A type of hippie found in 1980s Britain: NEW AGE TRAVELLER. Again the spelling may look wrong to some people, but that’s how it’s spelled here in Britain. And hey, spelling rules are just another fascist conspiracy anyhow. If you catch my drift, man.

15. ANN Greenslit Pudeator, hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692. It was tragic, of course, that so many innocent women were accused of witchcraft in the 17th century... but really, with a name like Ann Greenslit Pudeator, what do you expect? She probably had a pierced nasal septum and wore black lipstick, too.

17. "Alles Vergangliche ist NUR ein Gleichnis" (Everything transient is only a symbol - Goethe). These words are sung by the Chorus Mysticus at the end of Mahler’s 8th Symphony (see The Curse of the Ninth).

19. "The Serpent Power: Secrets of TANTRIC and Shaktic Yoga" by Arthur Avalon. The author’s real name was Sir John Woodroffe, who derived his pseudonym from Arthurian mythology. Oddly, though, the book isn’t about Arthurian mythology but about Indian mysticism. Woodroffe was one of the first proponents of the New Age formula “if it’s old, and it doesn’t come from the Judaeo-Christian or Graeco-Roman tradition, then it must be good.”

20. Thomas AQUINAS, author of "Summa Theologica". Aquinas was a 13th century scholar who specialized in interpreting the works of Aristotle (that’s what scholars used to do in those days, in lieu of thinking for themselves). He was often depicted trampling on a rival Aristotle-interpreter named Averroës, as seen in the painting by Gozzoli in the rightmost image above.

21. Belief that all living and non-living things have a spiritual essence: ANIMISM. Closely related to paranoia: the belief that all living and non-living things are out to get you.

22. Generic term for Indian languages related to Sanskrit: PRAKRIT. Most mystical and religious Indian writings are in Sanskrit, although the earliest Buddhist scriptures are in a Prakrit language called Pali. “Karma” and “Nirvana” are Sanskrit – the Pali equivalents are “Kamma” and “Nibbana”.

24. The largest moon of Saturn: TITAN. One of the few bodies in the Solar System that astrobiologists believe may support alien life – thought probably not as advanced as the alien life envisaged by Philip K. Dick in The Game-Players of Titan.

26. SIMON Magus, a sorcerer mentioned in the Book of Acts. All the Bible says about Simon is that he became a Christian, but not a very good one. However, later writers describe him as one of the founders of Gnosticism, and presumably for that reason he’s one of the many highbrow figures namedropped by Philip K. Dick in VALIS.

Fortean Crossword

Apparently the crossword puzzle marks its centenary this month. A few years ago I put together a Fortean-themed crossword which I thought would be worth repeating here. You can either print it out or do it in your head... or just ignore the grid and treat the questions as a trivia quiz.

Answers next week – together with an exegesis of all the Fortean connections.

ACROSS

1. Author of Chariots of the Gods [5, 3, 7]
9. First of the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation [7]
10. “Their weapons were no match for the Bossonian -------“ (Robert E. Howard) [7]
11. "Voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to -----" (Charles Fort) [5]
12. Yggdrasil, for example [3]
13. The world ends without this, according to T.S. Eliot [1, 4]
14. Site of the Crucifixion [7]
16. "I had long hoped for a personal ------- with a man from a flying saucer" (George Adamski) [7]
18. The queen of the fairies, according to Shakespeare [7]
21. Sayings of Jesus that are not found in the Gospels [7]
23. Max -----, German surrealist [5]
25. --- Geller, Israeli-born psychic [3]
26. "Thus ----- Zarathustra", by Friedrich Nietzsche [5]
27. Lenape people living in New Jersey when the Europeans arrived [7]
28. "------- Tales" (1974), featuring Paloma Picasso as Countess Erzsébet Báthory [7]
29. Britain's best-known cryptid [4, 4, 7]

DOWN

1. The building pictured below [6, 9]
2. Eldest son of Abraham, according to the Book of Genesis [7]
3. Herman -----, author of Siddhartha [5]
4.The James ------- is inscribed "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" [7]
5. The ------- Sibyl, prophetess of Apollo [7]
6. Professional assassin in feudal Japan [5]
7. An esoteric branch of Judaism [7]
8. A type of hippie found in 1980s Britain [3, 3, 9]
15. --- Greenslit Pudeator, hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692 [3]
17. "Alles Vergangliche ist --- ein Gleichnis" (Everything transient is only a symbol - Goethe) [3]
19. "The Serpent Power: Secrets of ------- and Shaktic Yoga" by Arthur Avalon [7]
20. Thomas -------, author of Summa Theologica [7]
21. Belief that all living and non-living things have a spiritual essence [7]
22. Generic term for Indian languages related to Sanskrit [7]
24. The largest moon of Saturn [5]
26. ----- Magus, a sorcerer mentioned in the Book of Acts [5]

Fighting Philosophers

The cover story in the April 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction was called “Fighting Philosopher”. While it’s not a great story, it’s a great title. Philosophers are notorious for spending all their time sitting and thinking, so the idea of them getting involved in any kind of physical activity, let alone fighting, goes against the stereotype.

I was reminded of this story by a recent item on the BBC website: When philosophers attack! – “Two men were waiting for a beer at a store in the southern Russian town of Rostov-on-Don. Somehow, the subject of the philosopher Immanuel Kant came up. Discussion morphed into argument, argument descended into fisticuffs... One of the combatants pulled out a pistol, and shot the other one several times with rubber bullets before running away. He was later arrested and has been charged with causing serious bodily harm.”

Kant was the archetypal philosopher: deep thinking, meticulously precise and (to most readers) impenetrably obscure. One of his most famous notions is the Categorical Imperative – the idea that human beings have an unconditional duty to behave in a morally correct way. This duty overrides all other considerations, and includes the usual moral injunctions such as “Thou shalt not kill”. And lying is out, too.

A French philosopher named Benjamin Constant wasn’t so sure about the “unconditional” nature of Kant’s imperative. What if a would-be murderer, searching for his victim, asked you where that victim was? If you knew the answer, should you tell the truth, which would indirectly lead to the victim’s death? Kant said yes, you should tell the truth even if it leads to someone else committing a murder – moral actions are an end in themselves, irrespective of the consequences.

Kant’s bizarre assertion was the inspiration for a murder mystery set in an Oxford college – Death at the President’s Lodgingby Michael Innes. It’s also referenced in an equally bizarre essay by Thomas De Quincey entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”. Much of the essay is concerned with the unlikely topic of the assassination of philosophers: “It is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. As these cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.”

Of course, this is all nonsense – a product of De Quincey’s rather peculiar imagination. He was a contemporary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and had a similar interest in chemically induced states of consciousness (De Quincey’s most famous work is Confessions of an English Opium Eater).

In the real world, philosophers just aren’t the sort of people who get assassinated. Or are they? A few years ago an academic came up with the theory that Descartes was murdered by a Catholic priest who wanted to silence his heretical pronouncements: “French philosopher was killed by arsenic-laced holy communion wafer” (this photograph of the memorial to Descartes in the Palace of Versailles comes from my recent visit to France).

Getting back to the subject of “fighting philosophers”, these are even less common in the real world than assassinated philosophers. The only example I could find was a biggie, though. Plato was arguably the greatest of all the ancient Greek philosophers, and one of the most influential thinkers in history. But according to his biographers he started out as a wrestler, and some say that “Plato” (meaning broad-shouldered) was his wrestling nickname. Wikipedia, with its usual po-faced sincerity, includes Plato under Category: Ancient Greek wrestlers.

Plato was an exception, and most philosophers are pacifistic by nature. The archetypal example is Archimedes, who was stabbed to death by a Roman soldier because he was too engrossed in a diagram to recognize the threat that was looming over him. The situation is even mentioned in the blurb to the Astounding Science Fiction “Fighting Philosopher” story: “Archimedes was the philosopher who wouldn’t bother to fight the Roman soldier and had his philosophical work terminated permanently”.

Wikipedia, in its effort to make sure the world knows everything it ought to, has a helpful article on Deaths of philosophers. Unaccountably, however, it misses out what must be the coolest philosopher-death of all (or the grossest, depending on your point of view). Arius was an early Christian theologian who spoke out against the doctrine of the Trinity. When he died in 336 AD, he was at least 80 years old. An eyewitness account of his death suggests it was a truly spectacular event: “As he approached the place called Constantine’s Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius, and with the terror a violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore enquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine’s Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious haemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died.”

I’m not convinced that, under the natural course of events, it’s really possible to defecate one’s own liver. But the opponents of Arius’s theology didn’t believe his death was natural – they promptly declared it a miracle!

Not Even Wrong

Following my deconstruction of Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d have a go at another hackneyed quote from the world of physics. “Not even wrong” was coined by Wolfgang Pauli in the 1950s, and it’s widely used by scientists to describe theories that are fundamentally non-scientific. The phrase may sound like a contradiction in terms, but actually it has a precise and literal meaning. I still get annoyed when people use it, though. That’s not because it’s used incorrectly, but because the people who use it think it means “worse than wrong”, which it doesn’t. Even Pauli himself seems to have used the phrase as a pejorative (the correct equation was photoshopped onto the blackboard by me, as if you hadn’t guessed).

There is no such thing as “worse than wrong”. Right and wrong are extremes, and anything that is not right, and not wrong, must lie somewhere in the indeterminate region between the two extremes. A theory that is “not even wrong” is one that is permanently stuck in a state of indeterminacy. There is simply no way of telling whether it's right or wrong.

When the scientific method was first developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was understood that it was applicable only to a subset of human experience – namely to phenomena that take place in the physical world. The kind of aggressive, materialistic atheism associated with science today was virtually unknown in those days. Even the greatest scientists accepted that the physical world—and hence the applicability of the scientific method—was only part of the sum total of human experience. In those days the distinction was between “earth” and “heaven”, although today we are more likely to say “physics” and “metaphysics”.

The physical world is the realm of experiment and objective analysis. The metaphysical world is the realm of belief and subjective experience. Materialistic scientists, from Wolfgang Pauli to Richard Dawkins, are perfectly entitled to hold the belief that the metaphysical world is non-existent. That belief is as valid as any other. What they aren’t entitled to do—and yet they insist on doing—is to attempt to disprove metaphysical theories through the application of the scientific method. You simply can’t do that. You can’t apply a tool that was specifically designed for the physical world to something that is non-physical.

One of the fundamental principles of the scientific method is the idea of the testable hypothesis. This is a brilliant concept when it’s taken in its proper context. The defining characteristic of the physical world is that it’s amenable to repeatable experiments. For a hypothesis to be “scientific” it needs to make predictions that can be tested by experiment. If the results of the experiment agree with the predictions, then the hypothesis may be right. If they disagree, then it must be wrong.

By definition, any meaningful hypothesis about the physical world must be testable.

Equally by definition, hypotheses about metaphysics aren’t going to be testable. Metaphysics is all about belief and subjectivity. It encompasses everything within the scope of human experience that isn’t part of the physical world. So a metaphysical hypothesis can’t be proved right, and it can’t be proved wrong. It may be right, and it may be wrong – it’s a matter of individual belief. That’s what people are referring to when they say “not even wrong”.

What I object to is the fallacious assumption that a non-testable hypothesis, on a metaphysical subject, is wrong by definition. It isn't. It’s indeterminate – it can never be proved one way or the other. If someone chooses to believe in such a hypothesis, then you’re free to disagree with them. But you can’t disprove their theory, and it’s a mistake to think you can.

The error comes about from half-understanding something that everyone is taught in university science classes. You’re taught that a scientific theory, about the physical world, is badly formulated if it isn’t testable. That’s true. But it doesn’t mean that a non-scientific theory, about the metaphysical world, has to be testable. In fact the opposite is true, because if it was testable then it wouldn’t be metaphysics.

The fault doesn't lie entirely with the scientists. There's a growing tendency for metaphysical theories to be presented as if they were scientific, in a misguided attempt to give them more weight. It’s perfectly valid to use the non-testable, “not even wrong” criterion to demonstrate that such theories are non-scientific. But that's as far as you can go. You can't say “also the theory is wrong”... the most you can say is “also I don’t believe your theory”.

Esoteric Mathematics

The I Ching is an ancient Chinese text dating back at least 3000 years. It is popularly associated with fortune-telling, but at a more profound level it is supposed to provide a comprehensive description of the esoteric dynamics of the Universe. According to legend, it was the work of a man named Fu Xi, pictured on the left. The I Ching is based around a system of symbols called trigrams, which Fu Xi can be seen holding in the picture. Each trigram consists of three lines, the lines being either solid (yang) or broken (yin). There are eight trigrams because there are eight different ways of combining the two types of line. In the I Ching, the trigrams are combined into hexagrams, with each hexagram consisting of two trigrams. There are 8 possibilities for the upper trigram and 8 for the lower trigram, so there are 64 hexagrams in all.

Despite the ancientness of the I Ching, the numbers 8 and 64 look quite “modern” because they tend to crop up a lot in the world of computing. This is because they’re powers of 2 (as are other geeky numbers such as 16, 32, 128, 256 etc)... and computers use binary arithmetic based on powers of two. Binary arithmetic has just two digits, 0 and 1, so it’s easier for a machine to work with than decimal arithmetic which has 10 digits. But binary arithmetic predates the advent of digital computers by more than 200 years -- Gottfried Leibniz published his “Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire” in 1703. But Leibniz didn’t take the credit for himself -- he believed he had merely rediscovered something that had been known to Fu Xi thousands of years earlier!

Leibniz recognized that the trigrams and hexagrams of the I Ching can be interpreted as binary numbers, as shown in this table from his paper on the subject. While Leibniz has shown the trigrams in a logical sequence, the I Ching itself presents them in what from a binary point of view is a completely random order. So Leibniz assumed that their originator Fu Xi had understood their true meaning—as a representation of a counting system—but that this meaning had been lost over the subsequent centuries.

Another mathematical concept that is common in the world of computing is that of Boolean logic, involving operators such as “OR” and “AND” instead of the familiar arithmetic operators such as “+” and “-”. Boolean logic is named after the 19th century mathematician George Boole, who first developed it. But whereas computer programmers use the Boolean variables “false” and “true”, Boole himself used the binary digits “0” and “1” (which of course is how modern computers encode “false” and “true” internally).

Boole was a contemporary of the Victorian computer pioneer Charles Babbage, but Boole had no interest whatsoever in Babbage’s calculating engines. According to Mathematics in Victorian Britain, which I reviewed for Fortean Times a few months ago, “his logic was oriented towards analysing thought, with a belief in the creative power of the mind”. Moreover “There was an important religious element in his logic. He was a Unitarian, a stance with which he associated his ‘1’, the Universe. For example, in his Laws of Thought he devoted a chapter to the analysis of two arguments; any context would have sufficed, but he chose two purported proofs of the existence of the one God.”

Boole seems to have been a bit of a mystic -- a predilection he passed on to his offspring. One of his daughters married Wifrid Voynich, the antiquarian who discovered the mysteriously Lovecraftian Voynich Manuscript in 1912. More relevant to the subject of “Esoteric Mathematics”, another of Boole’s daughters married Charles Howard Hinton: Pioneer of the Fourth Dimension -- the man who popularized the geometrical concept of the tesseract, and had a distinctly mystical view of its applications.

The Principle of the Excluded Middle

Aristotle (right, as imagined by Rembrandt) is often blamed for the prevalence of black-and-white thinking in Western culture. But the problem stems not from what Aristotle said, but what people think he said. The Principle of the Excluded Middle, as originally formulated by Aristotle himself, makes perfect sense. It argues that, if a statement X is demonstrated to be false, then the negation of statement X must necessarily be true. The operative word is ‘negation’... not ‘opposite’.

I mentioned the Bible’s Excluded Middle on a previous occasion. If you start with statement X = ‘Everything in the Bible is true’, and find something in the Bible that is demonstrably false, then you have proved that statement X is false. All this means, in strictly Aristotelian terms, is that the negation of X must be true: ‘Not everything in the Bible is true’. But far too many people imagine they have proved the opposite of X to be true: ‘Everything in the Bible is false’. It’s not just the Bible-hating atheists who take this view -- many Biblical literalists do as well. That’s why they get so upset if anyone suggests that pi is anything other than three.

For a more Fortean example, there is an analogous situation in the case of UFOs. In this case, statement X might be ‘All UFO reports can be attributed to sightings of extraterrestrial spacecraft’. If this statement is proved to be false, then all the Excluded Middle says is that its negation must be true: ‘Not all UFO reports can be attributed to sightings of extraterrestrial spacecraft’. But again there is a tendency to apply the erroneous logic that the opposite statement must be true: ‘No UFO reports can be attributed to sightings of extraterrestrial spacecraft’. And again, it’s not just the skeptics who think along these lines, but the UFO enthusiasts as well... hence their outrage when any specific report is ‘explained away’ as a weather balloon, the planet Venus or a flock of pelicans.

When Aristotle formulated his Principle of the Excluded Middle, he was talking about a statement and its negation, not a statement and its opposite. But the ancient Greek philosophers did have something to say on the latter subject. It’s called the Dialectic Principle, and in this case the statement is called the ‘thesis’ and its opposite is called the ‘antithesis’. According to the Dialectic Principle, the two sides should engage in a sober and rational dialogue, and come to some mutually agreed compromise called a ‘synthesis’ (don’t laugh -- the ancient Greeks really thought this might happen).

In the case of ufology, the thesis would be ‘All UFO reports can be attributed to sightings of extraterrestrial spacecraft’ and the antithesis would be ‘All UFO reports have mundane explanations’. If ufologists and skeptics were as enlightened as the ancient Greek philosophers, they would engage in a meaningful dialogue—without spelling mistakes, bad grammar and whole sentences in capital letters—and come to a synthesis from which the state of human knowledge could move forward. But the real world doesn’t work like that.

Forteans, of course, are an exception to the general rule -- we are at our most comfortable in the ‘excluded middle’ between thesis and antithesis. Charles Fort himself referred to the dialectic principle in Lo!, and even attributed it to Aristotle: “I am thinking of an abstraction that was noted by Aristotle, and that was taken by Hegel for the basis of his philosophy: That wherever there is a conflict of extremes, there is an outcome that is not absolute victory on either side, but is a compromise, or what Hegel called the union of complementaries.”

Sea Serpents, Logic and Lewis Carroll

Here's something I came across recently that struck me as rather amusing (although cryptozoologists might disagree). It comes from a book called Mathematics in Victorian Britain, and it's meant to illustrate the concept of a syllogism -- the basic form of logical argument in classical (Aristotelian) philosophy.

There are three parts to a syllogism: (1) a particular premise, (2) a universal premise and (3) a conclusion. The conclusion follows logically from the two premises, and must be true if the premises are. A common example of a syllogism given in textbooks is (1) Socrates is a man, (2) All men are mortal, (3) Socrates is mortal.

So what do we have here? Well, it's a syllogism, but a much more convoluted one than the Socrates example:

(1) That story of yours, about your once meeting the sea-serpent, always sets me off yawning [particular premise]

(2) I never yawn, unless when I'm listening to something totally devoid of interest [universal premise]

(3) That story of yours, about your once meeting the sea-serpent, is totally devoid of interest [conclusion]

This comes from a book called Symbolic Logic, written by Lewis Carroll... the same Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark. "Lewis Carroll" was the pseudonym of Charles Dodgson (1832 - 1898), who worked as a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University. Symbolic Logic is one of his less well-known works -- a light-hearted exposition of the subject aimed at a non-technical audience. Carroll/Dodgson devised a graphical representation (which can be seen in the illustration above) involving the placing of coloured counters on a grid after the manner of a board-game. Mathematical games were very popular in Victorian Britain, but I'm not sure if Carroll's "Game of Logic" ever took off!