This latest Anomalist anthology offers a wide range of short(ish) articles to stimulate the fortean imagination – or provide “instant CPR for the head” as the cover blurb has it. As he does for FT’s ‘Blasts From The Past’, Theo Paijmans makes use of digitised newspaper archives from the US and further afield to examine the dispersal and modification of ‘Damned Data’ through time, including some of the classic examples covered by Fort. Ulrich Magin takes us on a tour of “out-of-place volcanoes” and imaginary eruptions across Europe – some being misinterpretations, others outright hoaxes. Dwight Whalen tells the fascinating story of aerial visions – including an immense house, marching children, an angel and a flag – reportedly seen above Hetlerville, Pennsylvania, in the days leading up to the outbreak of World War I, a visionary event lost to history – unlike, say, the Angels of Mons. Cameron Blount examines the Moché culture of ancient Peru and its relation to Nazca landscape art. Mike Jay looks at the tentative psychology of ghosts and visions developed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that fed into his more general theories of the imagination. Mark Pilkington describes some intriguing precursors to crop circles in Robert Plot’s Natural History of Staffordshire (1686) and the 1973 SF film Phase IV. Gary Lachman gives us his notes on Maslow, Adorno and Evola omitted from his recent book, Politics and the Occult. Richard Wiseman relates his discovery of the first ever film of a magic trick. And Tim “Torture King” Cridland describes the early career of Randall James Hamilton Zwinge (aka “the Amazing Randi”) as a phony psychic in carny sideshows, which the arch-‘skeptic’ has done his best to spin into oblivion.
There’s also a primer for measuring magnetic fields and temperature differentials in allegedly haunted locations; an examination of the witch and heretic trials recorded in the 15th-century ‘Black Books’ of Fribourg in Switzerland; an essay on chakras, energy bodies and auras (exhibiting qi, prana, orgone, call it what you will); and a mathematical approach (quite daunting) to the probability of thylacine survival.
The most contentious contribution is a piece by ‘Aeolus Kephas’ exploring the implications of treating anthropologist Carlos Castaneda and alien abductee Whitley Strieber as genuine witnesses of shamanic phenomena, conduits for superior intelligence. This is an intriguing thought experiment, but I still suspect The Teachings of Don Juan and Communion are ingenious fiction rather than travelogues from the Land of Magonia. However, this anthology deserves a place on every fortean’s bookshelf.
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