Understanding the Unknown 9781848884397

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Understanding the Unknown

Inter-Disciplinary Press Publishing Advisory Board Ana Maria Borlescu Peter Bray Ann-Marie Cook Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Peter Mario Kreuter Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig Inter-Disciplinary Press is a part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net A Global Network for Dynamic Research and Publishing

2016

Understanding the Unknown

Edited by

Laura Thursby

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2016 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

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Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-439-7 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2016. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction Laura Thursby

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Hearing the Dead: Supernatural Presence in the World of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) in Reference to the Balikligöl Statue Alistair Coombs

1

Making the Secular Sacred, or the Sacred Secular…? Other-Worldly Sacrum in This-Worldly Philosophy of Confucius Paweł Zygadło

11

Gothic Meets Neorealism: Trauma, Ghosts and Broken Community in Tommaso Landolfi’s An Autumn Story Julia Brühne

23

The Solipsist as Satanist: A Philosophical Reading of Chesterton’s ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’ Regan Lance Reitsma

33

Asemic Occultism: The Magical System of Austin Spare’s Sigils Riikka Ala-Hakula

45

Hidden in Plain Sight: Open-Source Occultism in the Age of Information Cavan McLaughlin

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The Trauma of Missing Time in Alien Abduction Laura Thursby

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Paranormal/Supernatural Experiences and Loss Camilla Pagani

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Introduction Laura Thursby ‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown’, H.P. Lovecraft famously theorized in his study Supernatural Horror in Literature. 1 Yet the unknown does not just arouse the intense sensation of fear; it can also be the source of profound fascination and desire, the site of both nightmares and utopias. It is these ambivalent responses to the unknown that make it a particularly attractive object of inquiry, and it has been forever part of the human condition to attempt to make sense of the unknown – to seek explanations for the unexplainable. In March 2016, the authors of this volume met in Budapest, Hungary for a three-day conference to address one facet of the unknown: the supernatural. We came from all over the world and from various disciplines – from archaeology to history, literary studies to religious studies, media and cultural studies to psychology – and employed language from this wide spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds in an attempt to speak about this unspeakable category. What follows is a record of our brief encounter and is our modest contribution, both individual and collaborative, to grapple with this timeless human project of interrogating the unknown. It seems appropriate that we would all meet on Castle Hill in Budapest to discuss ideas about magic, the occult, the fantastic, and the supernatural. Overlooking the Danube, the city of Buda was once the former capital of the Kingdom of Hungary, and many of its charming, crooked streets still follow their old medieval paths, and some of its buildings date back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Underneath the visible cityscape, moreover, lies a mysterious, hidden underworld – a meandering labyrinth – which has become known for its most famous inhabitant, Vlad Tepes, who many believe was the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (We would be pressed to find a more fitting fantastic character!) The labyrinth has become a popular tourist destination for the city, and walking through its near total darkness while choking on the thick, musty smell of mould and mildew, one can instantly feel transported back in time to the fifteenth century when Tepes was a prisoner there. Suspended in time, the labyrinth conjures images of a period when magic was part of everyday life, engrained in the worldview of the early modern period. Magic is often seen as inseparable from old world, and it is frequently claimed that it has now departed from our modern experiences. The assumption that modernity rationalizes social processes and human beliefs, and that this rationality, secularism, and progress are leading to the disenchantment of the world, was first proposed by Max Weber. 2 We have been told that modernity supplants superstition – those ideas held to be traditional, irrational, nonsensical, or inexplicable – and we are advancing towards a world where there are no longer any mysteries and where

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__________________________________________________________________ everything is potentially knowable. Yet, evidence indicates that religious and occult forms not only survive, but thrive in the modern world. Many of the papers in this volume gesture to the way that modernity and the enchanted actually seem to go hand in hand. Perhaps modernity creates cracks and fissures through which the strange and fantastic continue to seep through. Elements of the supernatural are rooted in the deep past, but also thrive in our present, and will forever captivate our futures. The supernatural may takes different shapes and forms as it is conditioned by different societal and cultural experiences, but the world beyond our compression is part and parcel of the human experience. The supernatural, this theme that united us together, is a complex and loaded term that conjures a multitude of ideas. At face-value, it is a word that inspires fear and desire, fascination and trepidation, joy and sadness; it evokes images of strange entities, like gods, demons, devils, angels, spirits, ghosts, and monsters; it brings to mind certain places, like haunted houses and cemeteries; it educes specific, strange experiences, like visions, contacts, and channellings; and it summons ideas about secret societies and occult religions. It is also a salient theme in popular culture, and supernatural imaginings feature prominently in film, television, and novels. The supernatural has become a widely used category to describe a plethora of strange, uncanny phenomena. Yet it is important to caution scholars not to take the term ‘supernatural’ for granted as a catch-all one. The supernatural does not encompass the entire spectrum of the unknown, but is a specific term with its own designations, inclusions and exclusions. In part, this brief introduction provides an opportunity to reflect on the concept of the supernatural, beyond its commonly assumed usages. The Oxford English Dictionary defines supernatural as an adjective describing that which: belong[s] to a realm or system that transcends nature, as that of divine, magical, or ghostly beings; attributed to or thought to reveal some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature […]. 3 Sociologist, Émile Durkheim, offers further explication of the term: ‘in order to say that certain things are supernatural’, Durkheim writes, ‘it is necessary to have the sentiment that a natural order of things exists […] that the phenomena of the universe are bound together by necessary relations, called laws’. 4 By ‘supernatural’, he further clarifies, ‘is understood all sorts of things which surpass the limits of our knowledge; the supernatural is the world of the mysterious, of the unknowable, of the un-understandable’. 5 Supernatural denotes emphasis on those things that fall outside of, or are distinct from the natural world; it describes a category that is beyond our capacity to understand because it operates outside of our rules.

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__________________________________________________________________ The implications of this designation are complex and recently the term has been challenged for its overuse in academia. In a special issue of Anthropological Forum devoted to the supernatural, Roger Lohmann initiates the discussion by questioning the use of the term in anthropological discourse: Does it exist as a concept or as a phenomenon […] among all people? What does it mean as a cultural construction and as a response to reality? What is the relationship to religion and spirituality, to experiences of ghosts and ideas about gods? What part of the ineffable world that informs cosmologies is captured by the term ‘supernatural’, and what is distorted or left out when we use it? Why is it such a contentious term in anthropology, vigorously condemned by some, championed by others, and blithely used by the rest? 6 This special issue calls attention to the need for reassessing the use of the term in anthropology. As Lohmann explains, ‘critiques of the […] supernatural grow out of the fact that it is a rather old word carrying many meanings and much cultural baggage’. 7 For instance, Lohmann addresses the stigma often attached to supernatural beliefs and the challenge of approaching the supernatural without condescension and ethnocentric prejudice. 8 He also calls attention to a warning made my many anthropologists, and most popularly by Morton Klass: that the implication of dividing reality between that which is comprehensible and ‘natural’ and that which is mysterious and somehow outside, is a western-centric and modern conception that ignores cosmologies which view spirits as part of the natural world, not distinct from it. 9 Hence, it must be used cautiously as an etic perspective. Jospeh Bosco, another contributor to the special issue, disagrees with the dismissal of this etic application. For Bosco, the supernatural can be defined in an etic sense, as ‘beyond the observable universe and transcending the laws of nature, recognizing that the concepts of nature vary from culture to culture, and over time’. 10 In examining the supernatural ghost stories told to him by Hong Kong students, Bosco explains his position: by identifying these stories as etically supernatural, he argues, we are able to access the language to interpret the ghost stories on a cultural level, rather than investigating the ghosts as a natural phenomenon. 11 The etic perspective allows us to treat ghost stories, and other similar phenomena, as ideas, not as the independent physical realities described by informants. 12 The special issue leads to no final consensus, but highlights both the challenges and uses that the term brings to the study of ineffable phenomena. Lohmann offers the following as a way of conclusion:

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__________________________________________________________________ The more closely one gazes upon the idea of the supernatural, the more complexity becomes visible. Through this exercise, we become aware of connotations and implications that infuse all language and, indeed, all mental models. We cannot speak at all without saying some things that we do not mean, but we can at least take greater control of the messages we project by using terms with thoughtful explanation. 13 The uses and challenges of the term extend not just to anthropological research; as our interdisciplinary conference gathering indicated, the term is not simply valuable (and problematic) for scholars of religion or anthropology, but inspires rich debate across many disciplines. The supernatural remains a relevant category for thinking about the unknown, as it points to the way that the human mind and our experiences sometimes exceed that which is defined by science. It remains a fundamental category of religion, as it offers us language to address the belief that there is an other reality outside of, or transcending, the reality in which we live our everyday lives and it points to the limits of scientific rationalism, by calling forth the forces that operate outside of the merely instrumental. The supernatural reveals how the scientific paradigm is too narrow to capture the phenomena and experiences that are often the most important to people. At the heart of this volumes lies a sincere effort to question the ineffable category of the supernatural – the realm of the inexpressible, of that which transcends descriptions and lies beyond the scope of human thought and language. It became our task to dive into the unknown, knowing full well that we would never be able to grasp it. But if we cannot depict through language what lies outside of our own knowledge – what belongs in the realm of the supernatural – then why would anyone even want to attempt such an impossible project? A considerably amount of debate and discussion went into developing these papers, and while we never touch upon concrete answers, the process – our work of pondering – reveals quite a bit about those doing that pondering. Moreover, while we may not be able to uncover the secrets of those mysterious forces that operate outside of our own laws, the discourses surrounding the supernatural tell us much about those who have experienced and believe in these forces. Ultimately, the projects in this volume help teach the fundamental necessity of maintaining an open mind and a respectful stance, and they offer an appreciation for those mysteries that we will always talk about but will never solve.

Notes H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (Abergele: Wermod & Wermod, 2013), 1.

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__________________________________________________________________ Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 155. 3 ‘Supernatural, adj. and n,’, OED Online. June 2016. Oxford University Press. Viewed on 19 June 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/194422?redirectedFrom=supernatural. 4 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Dover Publications, 2008), 26. 5 Ibid., 24. 6 Roger Ivar Lohmann, ‘Introduction: Naming the Ineffable’, Anthropological Forum 13.2 (2003): 117. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 118. 9 Ibid., 117; Morton Klass, Ordered Universes: Approaches to the Anthropology of Religion, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 30. 10 Joseph Bosco, ‘The Supernatural in Hong Kong Young People’s Ghost Stories’, Anthropological Forum 13.2 (2003): 143. 11 Ibid., 145. 12 Ibid., 147-148. 13 Lohmann, ‘Naming the Ineffable’, 123. 2

Bibliography Bosco, Joseph. ‘The Supernatural in Hong Kong Young People’s Ghost Stories’. Anthropological Forum 13.2 (2003): 141-149. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Dover Publications, 2008. Klass, Morton. Ordered Universes: Approaches to the Anthropology of Religion. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Lohmann, Roger Ivar. ‘Introduction: Naming the Ineffable’. Anthropological Forum 13.2 (2003): 117-124. Lovecraft, H.P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. Wermod, 2013. OED Online. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Abergele: Wermod and

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__________________________________________________________________ Weber, Max. ‘Science as a Vocation’. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129-157. New York and London: Routledge, 2009.

Hearing the Dead : Supernatural Presence in the World of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) in Reference to the Balikligöl Statue Alistair Coombs Abstract: This chapter discusses the possibility that the Balikligöl statue, referred to more commonly as the ‘Urfa Statue’, or ‘Urfa Man’, to-date the earliest human-size statue of a man yet discovered in the world, was designed to embody the presence of the dead or ancestors. It is suggested that notions of his deceased status are communicated to the perceiver through characteristics of his design. It is suggested that the feature of his absent mouth does not constitute a peculiar aesthetic but forms part of a stylistic design that symbolically insinuates the presence of the dead. Other characteristics of the statue’s design together with a cross-cultural examination of comparative classes of statuary are considered to support my assertion. Key Words: Supernatural, Neolithic consciousness, Göbekli Tepe, archaeology, ancient religion, magic, divination, auditory hallucination. ***** 1. Urfa Man The Balikligöl statue, named after the area in Şanliurfa in which it was found, is an imposing, 1.80m high limestone figure of an apparently naked man who is shown embracing his genitals. The face consists of a fractured nose, hollow eyesockets filled with obsidian crystal and, suggestively, a purposely absent mouth. The statue’s base is conical, which implies it would have stood vertically when implanted in the ground. The statue was not found at the Göbekli Tepe site, which is located approximately 16 kilometres north of Şanliurfa. The precise details of its finding are unclear but it was discovered by accident during the 1980s in the vicinity of Şanliurfa’s old town in the foundation pit of a car park, slightly north of Şanliurfa’s holy springs, which today are renowned as the birthplace of Abraham. Since the statue eluded classification, for many years it stood abandoned in the cellar of the city’s museum. 1 Although modern settlement prevents further archaeological excavation of the area, together with the whole Balikligöl basin, it is estimated the area in which the statue was found was a sacred site and place of pilgrimage of the Stone Age. 2 Discovered in the 1990s the PPN site of Göbekli Tepe is notoriously without context. Although hailed in popular media as ‘the world’s first temple’, there is no consensus about the site’s purpose. Consisting of a series of stone circles, or enclosures, the earliest discovered dated to 9600 B.C., the site has been proposed as a religious sanctuary, cult centre, or holy place of the Stone Age and was

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__________________________________________________________________ purposefully buried c. 8000 B.C. The site, perhaps analogous to a glorified hunting lodge, was not permanently inhabited and likely served as a place of seasonal ritual and celebration that united different tribes. Cult feasting activities have been proposed. 3 The small portion of the site excavated so far reveal the circles are not coterminous in age; there are significant gaps between the progressive construction of each. The older structures are larger and more elaborately constructed. Though its ultimate function may evade us, together the evidence suggests the site served a multitude of functions over its near two-millennia of use. Though Urfa Man was not found at Göbekli Tepe he is cognate in age with the site’s use. Furthermore, preliminary observations made by Klaus Schmidt also indicate a connection with the symbolic thought-world of its builders. 4 Urfa Man’s V-shape neck design closely resembles that of the neck or ‘collar’ markings of Göbekli Tepe’s much larger twin-pillars that occupy the centre of each enclosure. Though ambiguously anthropomorphic, the central T-shape pillars are definitely humanoid; they are depicted wearing belts, loin fox-pelts, and have clearly defined arms stretching down and meeting at their navels. As cultic monuments stood in the open, the symbolic V-shape or chevron design identifies Urfa Man as a figure belonging to the sacred sphere of these people. Though Urfa Man is more realistically human than Göbekli Tepe’s humanoid T-shapes, Schmidt discerned the statue as minister to them in the sense of an inferior or intermediary. 5 Pillars 18 and 31, the central pair of Enclosure D and the largest and oldest T-shapes at the site, are depicted with similar V-shapes at the neck as are other pillars. Despite the precise meaning of the V-shape remaining unclear, its shared presence on this statuary indicates it designated ancestors, the dead, supernatural beings, or was used in affiliation with them. Further relationship between Urfa Man and the pillars can be sought in their respective postures. Urfa Man is shown embracing his genitals, whereas the twinpillars of Enclosure D are depicted embracing the navel. In both instances, however, ascribing these bearings to familiar concepts of fertility or eroticism would seem questionable. 2. Mouth Symbolism The stone artisans of this period were remarkably skilled and Urfa Man’s absent mouth was intentional. What did it signify? Mouth symbolism conveys complex notions through many cross-cultural media, but it can yet define postmortem states consistently. The Mesopotamian ‘mouth washing’ ceremony involved statue-gods who would have their mouths ritually washed in a solution consisting of herbs and odours before being installed in their shrines, and was a ritual process repeated periodically to rejuvenate the voice of the god. Similarly, the ancient Egyptian mortuary ritual known as the ‘opening of the mouth’ first specified in the Pyramid Texts, 6 details a symbolic reanimation of the deceased pharaoh, enabling him to

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__________________________________________________________________ breath, eat, drink, but also speak in the afterlife, allowing the voice of the king to continue after death. In these instances, the mouth was the entry and exit point of life and life characterised as the word, or voice, both in this world and beyond. Elsewhere in Asian folklore, a class of ghosts are said to be characterised by an absent mouth, a feature which in their post-mortem environment implies they are unable to eat. Within a different category, attention has been drawn to the mouths of wild animals depicted within Neolithic contexts, from where supernatural potency could be drawn upon by shamans. 7 This relationship has been proposed to explain an otherwise complex and unlikely connection between the death and dismemberment-inflicting beaks and bared teeth of spirit-animals, with lifebestowing breasts. Though these examples are context-neutral since they do not suppose any cultural connection, they illustrate how mouth symbolism has been adopted to distinguish figures of the dead and for inscribing them with supernatural qualities. Considering these examples in view of Urfa Man, might the absent mouth emphasise a continued presence of the dead in the world of the living with allusion to a, likewise, disembodied voice? 3. Eye Skulls and Statues Besides the humanoid pillars human depictions, in statue or relief, are not in abundance at Göbekli Tepe or adjoining regions. However, it is noteworthy that at Göbekli Tepe four human-size stone heads, heads that once belonged to statues very similar to Urfa Man, were found beneath backfill and wedged into walls. 8 Significantly, like Urfa Man, one of these human-size heads was depicted without a mouth, while another bears damage around the mouth. Though it is inadequate to construct thought-worlds of the past solely from archaeological evidence, the cultural expression of the PPN cult of skulls attested elsewhere presents points of comparison with the cultural environment of prehistoric Urfa. The near eastern skull cult in which sanctified human skulls became objects of power emerged from post-mortem skull removal of important, most likely sage-like, members of society as a part of burial ritual. As with the skulls of Jericho discovered in the 1950s, these amputated skulls were both filled in and modelled over with plaster and sometimes painted. A number of these predominately male skulls have also been noted for their ornate eye embellishing. Though it is uncertain what purpose these treated skulls served before they were buried, given their aimful burial in circles or rows in purposely dug pits beneath the foundations of houses cut off from the living, they were not ancestor portraits or death masks intended to idealise their subjects in an exclusively mundane sense, but were objects or relics that talismanically related to them. The seashells or precious stones fixed upon the eyes of the skulls emphasize an importance of seeing, but would normal sight in itself need to be rectified? Given their cultic

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__________________________________________________________________ burial, it would be more tenable that the eye enhancements they feature correlated more with a supernatural sight or seeing in the afterlife. Evidence for similar beliefs and practices come from a collection of statuettes excavated during the 1980s at Jericho’s sister-site ‘Ain Ghazal. ‘Ain Ghazal became settled, it is believed, after part of the population of Jericho moved there. As with the Jericho skulls the ‘Ain Ghazal statuettes are of the younger Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPNB) rather than older (PPNA). There is yet evidence for congruencies in the beliefs behind their construction and use. The curious ‘Ain Ghazal statuettes number 32 in all and are divided into two sets or caches, following the collective pits in which they were found. The first comprises 13 full-body statues and 12 oneheaded busts and is dated to 6750 B.C. 9 The second cache that numbers two full statues, three two-headed busts and two fragmentary heads, is dated at 6570 B.C. Although these statuettes comprise bodies, emphasis was noticeably given to their heads, the eyes especially. As with the Jericho skulls, their finding in pits reflects little of the purpose behind their use, but the way in which they were ritually disposed indicates their status as sacred objects. Considering their supporting busts and bodies, however, the ‘Ain Ghazal statuettes were designed to stand upright. A markedly different eye aesthetic characterises the two caches. The older bear round, disproportionate eyeballs that are surrounded and enhanced with oval ridges of black bitumen. Their irises, or pupils, are also round. Contrastingly, the younger group possess almond-shaped eyes with diamond-shaped irises or pupils that cast a strange feline, or non-human impression. In all instances, the statuettes are facially minimalistic besides the eyes so that despite stylistic differences between the two caches the eyes were the central focus. Their unique, millennia-spanning percipience has been duly noted, somewhat impressionistically, by archaeologist Brian Fagan: The compelling human images that were pieced together by the technicians’ expert handiwork had stared at me with serene, almost ghostly confidence from a display case in the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery. Androgynous and near life-size, the 9,000-year-old plaster figures gazed wide-eyed across the centuries, as if possessed with boundless wisdom. It felt as if their eyes were following me around the room – their impact upon me lingers still. 10 Although etched with a compelling degree of sight, the ‘Ain Ghazal statuettes were persuasively also commissioned to arouse nuances of perception and of awareness, and to convey these presences to the onlooker as a primary aim. While caution must be exercised between observation to the more subjective terrain of interpretation, the seeing-power these figures possess which has been emphasised tends to neglect dimensions of reciprocity they facilitated – indeed, to overlook

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__________________________________________________________________ motivating factors behind their creation. Arguably, the ‘Ain Ghazal statuettes were not intended to replicate human seeing alone and seeing for their own sake rather than evoke a supernatural sight that, as mnemonic devices, placed them at the boundary of the living and the dead. 4. Seeing or Hearing? Later in period than the Jericho skulls and ‘Ain Ghazal figures emerges a class of eerily observant statuary referred to as eye idol. Sourcing from the so-called ‘Eye Temple’ of Tell Brak where thousands were discovered, ‘eye idol’ is the most fitting description of these figurines. Unlike earlier examples, eye idols are barely humanoid in form. Thin, elongated bodies fashioned from limestone or alabaster support a pair of unrealistically widened eyes infilled in black or green paint. 11 Some of these figurines possess three eyes or two pairs of eyes one above the other. While some are shown to ‘embrace’ a minor and others bear markings symbolising gods, they are otherwise depicted with no anatomy and their physiognomy is featureless apart from the eyes. As with the Jericho skulls and ‘Ain Ghazal statuettes, there is no overarching consensus behind their purpose, other than their relationship with sacred areas of religious sites. Seeing, especially in shamanic contexts, is often privileged above the other senses as the primary means of perceiving supernatural worlds and the realm of the dead and for maintaining links with beings which inhabit them. Given that archaeological deposits only preserve visual culture – excepting rare instances of lithophony or stones that make musical sounds when struck, which generally does not extend to statues – then this preference is understandable. But are we then to assume that despite auditory dimensions not being amenable to preservation in the archaeological record that sound, in one form or another, played no role in establishing encounters with and continuity between the worlds of the living and of the ancestors? Might not this missing element be reflected in otherwise silent, inanimate statuary? The psychologist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997) produced a significant interpretative model that united ancient religion, archaeology and human neurology in his hypothesis of the bicameral mind. Though his hypothesis has attracted criticism from the time of its reception it is far from being discredited. Jaynes perceived eye idols belonging to a category of non-ornamental statuary, which would include the Jericho skulls and ‘Ain Ghazal statuettes, that served as ‘speaking statues’ or figurines assisting as aids in the production of hallucinated voices. For Jaynes, these hallucinated voices chiefly concern verbal commands of archaic authority issuing from the dead or ancestors from memories and impressions stored within the right cerebral hemisphere of the brain. Jaynes summarises the psychological collaboration between eyes and voice in the following way and how a statue might simulate it:

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__________________________________________________________________ Eye-to-eye contact in primates is extremely important. Below humans, it is indicative of the hierarchical position of the animal, the submissive animal turning away grinning in many primate species. But in humans, perhaps because of the much longer juvenile period, eye-to-eye contact has evolved into a social interaction of great importance. An infant child, when its mother speaks to it, looks at the mother’s eyes, not her lips. This response is automatic and universal. The development of such eye-to-eye contact into authority relationships and love relationships is an exceedingly important trajectory that has yet to be traced. It is sufficient here merely to suggest that you are more likely to feel a superior’s authority when you and he are staring straight into each other’s eyes. There is a kind of stress, an unresolvedness about the experience, and withal something of a diminution of consciousness, so that, were such a relationship mimicked in a statue, it would enhance the hallucination of divine speech. 12 For Jaynes, the very phenomena of this species of eye statuary found in the context of early religious environments props up his bicameral hypothesis in that it provides an explanation, and typifies a cognitive experience, that had not previously been realised. Though a degree of scepticism might be directed at the cultural extent of his bicameral hypothesis, his analysis of an auditory dimension behind classes of ancient statuary lacks in other fields where seeing, rather than hearing, provides the only interpretative solution. Jaynes’ strength is his emphasis on the eyes of a statue mimicking living presences and an overlooked acknowledgment of an affiliation between eyes and voices specific statuary may have had, an aspect which the archaeological record does not, at surface, retain. Considering Urfa Man’s features we could subject him to the same scheme as a compelling candidate. 5. Grim Oracles A different though not unrelated category of beliefs and practices of the speaking dead sources from a constellation of folk traditions embedded in ancient Europe and elsewhere of the Cult of the Severed Head, typical examples including disconnected laughing heads, heads that entertain at enchanted feasts, and the head said to occupy some wishing wells. Talking head symbolism and the actual necromantic practice of, whether conceived to summon the voices of the dead or to produce aural hallucinations pertaining to, was prevalent. A famous, or rather infamous, necromantic use of the severed head took place close to Urfa Man's home, though distanced by millennia, in Harran, a major centre of Hermetic and Sabaean learning over the medieval period. The grimoire named Ghayat al-Hakim

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__________________________________________________________________ (Picatrix in Latin) relates devil-worshipers of ‘old Harran’ keeping a severed head acquired through a strange and sinister ritual that gave out prophecies. 13 If or not some of these magical traditions and divination rites preserve relics, or hallucinations, of Neolithic heritage is a matter of conjecture. 6. Conclusion Paved over and occupied by modern settlement, the area in which Urfa Man was found, which has also become a scared site of Islamic pilgrimage, is effectively sealed from further archaeological excavation leading to the potential discovery of similar ‘Urfa Men’ unlikely at the present time. Though Urfa Man is singular, the features of his enigmatic persona present symbolic evidence of a communicator from a supernatural world of the dead to the world of the living in a realistically human shape. His purposefully absent mouth suggests that seeing and hearing were not mutually exclusive in summoning the presence of the dead to the perception of the living within the mind-set that produced him. Indeed, his participation in the physical may have been enhanced further by his choicely pale limestone material that gleams with a spectral appearance as if shimmering between worlds.

Notes 1 Klaus Schimdt, Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia (Berlin: ex oriente, 2012), 191. 2 Bahattin Çelik, ‘An Early Neolithic Settlement in the Center of Sanlıurfa, Turkey’, Neo-Lithics. A Newsletter of Southwest Asian Lithics 2-3 (2000): 4-6. 3 Oliver Dietrich, et al., ‘The Role of Cult and Feasting in the Emergence of Neolithic Communities. New Evidence from Göbekli Tepe, South-Eastern Turkey’, ANTIQUITY 86.333 (2012): 674-695. 4 Klaus Schimdt, ‘Göbekli Tepe – The Stone Age Sanctuaries. New results of ongoing excavations with a special focus on sculptures and high reliefs’. Documenta Praehistorica XXXVII (2010): 247. 5 Schimdt, ‘Göbekli Tepe – the Stone Age Sanctuaries’, 248. 6 R.O. Faulkner, trans., The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), Utterances 20-57, 3-11. 7 David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 139-140. 8 Schimdt, ‘Göbekli Tepe – the Stone Age Sanctuaries’, 249. 9 Lewis-Williams, Inside the Neolithic Mind, 72-73. 10 Brian Fagan, From Black Land to Fifth Sun: The Science of Sacred Sites (Reading, Mass: Helix Books, 1999), 81.

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__________________________________________________________________ Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia (London: The British Museum Press, 1992), 79-80. 12 Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 69. 13 Jan Hjärpe, Analyse critique des traditions arabes sur les sabéens harraniens (Uppsala: Skriv Service, 1972), 105-112. 11

Bibliography Black, Jeremy and Anthony Green. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia. London: The British Museum Press, 1992. Çelik, Bahattin. ‘An Early Neolithic Settlement in the Center of Sanlıurfa’. NeoLithics. A Newsletter of Southwest Asian Lithics 2-3 (2000): 4-6. Dietrich, Oliver, Manfred Heun, Jens Notroff, Klaus Schmidt and Martin Zarnkow. ‘The Role of Cult and Feasting in the Emergence of Neolithic Communities. New Evidence from Göbekli Tepe, South-Eastern Turkey’. ANTIQUITY 86.333 (2012): 674-695. Fagan, Brian. From Black Land to Fifth Sun: The Science of Sacred Sites. Reading, Mass: Helix Books, 1999. Faulkner, R.O. The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Hjärpe, Jan. Analyse critique des traditions arabes sur les sabéens harraniens. Uppsala: Skriv Service, 1972. Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Lewis-Williams, David and David Pearce. Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods. London: Thames & Hudson, 2009. Schimdt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: ex oriente, 2012.

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__________________________________________________________________ Schimdt, Klaus. ‘Göbekli Tepe – The Stone Age Sanctuaries. New Results of Ongoing Excavations with a Special Focus on Sculptures and High Reliefs’. Documenta Praehistorica XXXVII, (2010): 239-256. 7 December 2015. http://arheologija.ff.uni-lj.si/documenta/authors37/37_21.pdf Alistair Coombs. Alistair studied ancient religion and archaeology at the School of Oriental and African studies (SOAS), University of London. He is currently writing his PhD on light symbolism within Buddhist consciousness (University of Kent).

Making the Secular Sacred, or the Sacred Secular…? OtherWorldly Sacrum in This-Worldly Philosophy of Confucius Paweł Zygadło Abstract The purpose of the present chapter is to highlight the importance and functions of the ‘Sacred’ 1 in Confucius’s philosophy. It takes Herbert Fingarette’s interpretation of Confucius’s 2 endeavour as ‘The Secular as Sacred’, as a starting point for the discussion. The core of the paper consists of the analysis of Confucius’s attitude towards spirits, gods and ritual as it appears in Lunyu (Confucian Analects). 3 It is followed by the analysis of Mircea Eliade’s interpretation of the ‘Sacred-Profane’ dichotomy that provides a little different perspective on the same subject matter. In conclusion, it attempts to determine if Confucian goal was to make the secular (natural) sacred (supernatural), or maybe quite opposite, to make the sacred (supernatural), secular (natural)...? Key Words: Confucianism, sacrum-profanum, ritual, religion, Chinese philosophy. ***** 1. ‘The Secular as Sacred’: Fingarette’s Interpretation of Lunyu The experience and significance of the ‘Sacred’ in Confucius’s teaching is a topic that has perplexed scholars for years. In Lunyu (Confucian Analects) we find quite contradictory narrations in regards to the supernatural and the ‘Sacred’. In one passage Confucius advises his disciples to respect ‘spirits and gods’ and puts emphasis on restoration of the ritual of Zhou. 4 In another, he emphasises learning (xue) of ‘moral character and virtuous action’ and not getting indulged in otherworldly matters. 5 Herbert Fingarette was very first among twentieth-century scholars who made an inquiry into the role of the holy in Confucius’s philosophy. As he pointed out, in the Analects we can find traces of belief in ‘magic’, ‘the power of a specific person to accomplish her will directly and effortlessly through ritual, gesture and incantation’. 6 Confucius saw himself as someone who found a way to the actualisation of that power – ‘The Rectification of Names’ (zhengming). 7 According to Confucius, it can be achieved through an ongoing process of living according to certain ceremonial pattern – the li of Zhou Dynasty, 8 a socially actualised cosmic order. 9 Fingarette disagrees with Confucius’s perception of his own, Confucius’s endeavour. As he points out, Confucius was more of ‘cultural inventor rather than as a genteel but stubbornly nostalgic apologist of status quo ante’. 10 Calling for the return to Zhou times, the sacred beginning, he actually ‘created’ 11 the past that he wanted humanity to return to. For Fingarette, Confucius’s true concern was to stop the continuous wars between states that marked his times. The only way to stop and prevent conflicts was

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__________________________________________________________________ the establishment of a unified system of beliefs and behaviour. The culture of the state of Lu 12 seemed to be a perfect framework for such an endeavour. In order to legitimise it, Confucius created a narrative of ‘meaning generating past’, a ‘sacred’ time, 13 and ‘transferred’ the source of his system into that idealised past. In Fingarette’s eyes, Confucius was then concerned with the realm of men. However, once he discovered the biological-spiritual dichotomy in human existence, he tried to push humanity beyond the biological dimension. 14 Confucius tried to create an egoless man whose only concern would be to pursue the sacred Way of the ancient sages – dao. Such a man would be a ‘Holly Vessel’ that would be sanctifying ‘secular’ order with the proper (‘sacred’) way of life and ritual. 15 2. Master Kong on Spirits and Gods As mentioned above, Confucius’s attitude towards everything we would call ‘supernatural’ was somehow ambiguous. Three main values in his philosophy, ren, li and yi, 16 are all marking the way of proper relationships in human society. Confucius was reluctant to make gods and spirits central to his endeavour. 17 Although he advised his disciples to worship spirits and gods, at the same time, he warned them not to be too occupied with other-worldly matters. For Fingarette, Confucius tried to create an egoless man that through the proper (‘sacred’) way of life and ritual could ‘sanctify’ the secular order. The ‘Sacred’ was then a construct that served a purpose of legitimisation of the ‘secular’ order. However, was Confucius himself aware of such inclinations? Did he really perceive the ‘Sacred’ as a historical and cultural construct that could be useful as a legitimisation of the order he tried to establish? Perhaps the relation between the ‘Sacred’ and the ‘Secular’ was somehow different to Confucius himself. Referring to Lunyu itself might shed some light on the matter. The first, and probably the most famous verse in which Confucius refers to supernatural beings, guishen (literally ‘spirits [ghosts] and gods’) is Lunyu 6:22. As it reads: Fan Chi asked about the wisdom. Master replied: “Righteousness in serving people, venerating spirits and gods when abstaining from getting indulged in them, that what is called wisdom”. 18 Confucius’s advice to Fan Chi seems quite peculiar. Spirits and gods should be respected and worshipped, but it does not mean that the matters of spirits and gods should be the main concern of humans’ life. Why so? Isn’t it quite contradictory to ‘respect spirits and gods’ and claiming that they should be kept at a distance? When we look at another passage which mentions spirits and gods (guishen) we might find Confucius’s approach a little less bewildering. In Lunyu 8:21 we read:

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__________________________________________________________________ The Master said, “In regards to Yu, 19 I cannot find any flaws in him. Himself, he used the coarse food, but displayed the utmost xiao [filial piety] towards the spirits and gods [guishen, by offering them the best food]. His cloths were simply, but his sacrifice cap and apron displayed the utmost elegance. He lived in a simple and crude house but expended all his efforts on building water channels. In regards to Yu, I cannot find any flaws in him”. 20 Here the veneration of the spirits and gods is paired with xiao, filial piety, another virtue crucial to Confucius. Yu, the mythological sage-king, is an exposition of the mythical ideal type. He displays all the virtues that are of the utmost importance to the Confucian endeavour. Being satisfied with ordinary clothes and coarse food, he is very scrupulous about the ceremonial garment. When he does not mind living in a simple and crude house, he serves people by building ditches and channels. Moreover, he is filial, xiao towards spirits and gods! The sage-king is clearly a manifestation of the ‘Sacred’ that appeared in the ‘Secular’ at the beginning of times, and that establishes and legitimises the order (cosmos, civilisation). However, it is not the power of spirits and gods that makes the sage king ‘sacred’. It is his way of life; serving people, performing proper rituals and being filial to spirits and ghosts that proves his ‘sacred nature’. This eternal mode of practise finds its channel to this world and the veneration of spirits and gods is a part of the whole structure. However, indulging in ‘spirits and gods worship’ would not be equal to evoking the original ‘Sacred’. On the contrary, it could lead to losing links with the source of power, the eternal way of life embodied in sage-king(s)! Yu displays filial piety to spirits and gods, the virtue and a feeling that in Confucianism is prescribed as an essence of the child-parent relationship. We can then quite plausibly claim that spirits and gods are the spirits of deceased ancestors. It becomes apparent that the beings that should be worshipped are not totally separated from the ones who should do the worshipping. The ‘Sacred’ is somehow hidden in the way of everyday life, the ‘Secular’. One comes from another, and one is in another. Spirits and gods are the ancestors of humans. Sage-kings, on their behalf, with their all ‘sacred’ nature were not even celestial beings. They were humans. They lived humans’ lives, and they died like humans. 21 The only difference between them and common human beings was the fact that they did embody the eternal pattern, the ultimate way of life. Rediscovering and realising that way of life is making these worldly matters ‘real’ and ‘valid’. Respect and veneration of the spirits and gods is a part of this way, but it is not the way itself. The essence of this way is ‘serving people and performing rituals properly’. As Lunyu 11:12 reads: Ji Lu inquired about the way of serving the spirits of the dead. Master said: “Not being able to serve people [properly], how could

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__________________________________________________________________ one proceed with serving [properly] their spirits?” He dared to ask about death. Master said: “Without a [proper] understanding of life, how can one understand death?” 22 Spirits of the dead cannot be served properly unless someone knows how to serve living ones properly first. The right way of serving spirits is to be found among humans. Death and the other-world are all meaningless without proper understanding of life and this world. The other-world is then an extension of this world. Yu is ‘filial’ towards spirits because in a sense they are his ancestors. Ji Lu clearly did not know the right way of serving people, including his parents most probably. How could he know the right way of serving spirits of his ancestors? Death and the life after can be a source of the ‘Sacred’ only if the proper way of life is actualised first. 3. Master Kong and Li As mentioned above, the factor that makes the legendary sage-kings like Yu sacred is his way of life. The essence of this way is ‘serving people and performing rituals properly’. Serving people properly should be an expression of benevolence (ren) and being guided by righteousness (yi). What is benevolent and right, is determined by the principle of li (ritual, etiquette). Li is not only a link between the ‘Sacred’ and the ‘Secular’ but is also a source of the ‘sacred’ virtues. As we read in the following verses: Master said: “Respectfulness without li [ritual, etiquette] becomes laborious bustle; carefulness without li becomes timidity; courage without proper manners becomes messiness; straightforwardness without li becomes rudeness.” 23 What constitutes the essence of all virtues so cherished by Confucius is the degree of their accordance with li. As the above passage states, it is not ‘respectfulness’ as such that should be cherished regardless of the way it is being expressed. Neither is courage something desired by its own virtue. What makes respectfulness something more than just a ‘laborious bustle’ is proper understanding and utilising of ritual and etiquette when respectfulness is displayed. Without proper ritual and etiquette, courage is nothing more than a simple messiness. Without proper ritual and etiquette, carefulness turns into timidity. The way of apprehending and displaying is a transformative element that turns simple emotional reaction effecting in certain actions, into an ideal type. Li does not only simply structure and restrain excessive display of certain affections. It also confirms the real nature of the virtues mentioned above. How important li (ritual, etiquette) was to the Confucius’s endeavour, can be easily seen from another passage from Lunyu.

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__________________________________________________________________ Yuan Yuan asked about ren [benevolence]: Master said: “Subdue one’s self and return to li [ritual, etiquette]. If one day it happens, all under the heaven will prize benevolence in the one. So [Yuan Yuan], practice of benevolence is a result of your own will, or comes from others?” Yuan Yuan said: ‘Allow me ask you this [as well]”. Master [then] said: “What is against li, don't look at it; what is against li, don't listen to it; what is against li, don't say it; what is against li, don't proceed with it”. Yuan Yuan said: “Although I am deficient in intelligence, I will proceed in accordance to these words”. 24 Again, ren is then only possible as a result of ‘returning’ to li. In order to be ‘benevolent’, one must be egoless and follow the requirements of li. It is then the lack of one’s own ego and obedience to li that makes one ‘benevolent’. It is quite clear, that li is not only the bridge that connects one with the mythical times of ‘real values’. Li itself is what makes the time mythical – ‘real’ and powerful. However, wasn't Confucius just an obsessive ritualist who cared about the (superficial) abiding to certain behavioural patterns? History of Confucianism in China, especially during Ming and Qing dynasty, shows how easily it was turned into powerful and oppressive ritualism. In Lunyu we find a passage that proves that simple ritualism wasn’t Confucius’s intention. As it reads: Master said: “The men of former times maybe were rustic; the men of these latter times have profound acquaintance with li [ritual, etiquette] and music [culture], they [seem to be] truly accomplished gentlemen. If I was the one to apply any of these [life styles], then I would follow the men of former times”. 25 Why does a proponent of li (ritual and etiquette) like Confucius suddenly advise to follow the way of ‘rustic men of former times’ instead of the way of ‘these time men of profound acquaintance with li’? Wasn't his intention to make people be acquainted with li and shape their lives accordingly? It is not explicit, but the intention is not difficult to decode. Pure ritualism, without a real intention of bringing an ancient, sacred order is not the purpose and cannot be prized. It is the way of the ancient that is to be followed. The true li, the bridge that links the ‘Sacred’ and the ‘Secular’, is the way of the ancient. 26 Even though their way of life could be ‘rustic’, it was the ‘true’ manifestation and realisation of the ultimate reality, the ‘Sacred’. 4. The ‘Sacred’ and the ‘Profane’ As mentioned above, Confucius was quite aware of the dichotomy of human’s experience and the necessity of its coherent conceptualisation. For Fingarette, Confucius created a framework that could accommodate both the everyday

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__________________________________________________________________ experience and the experience of the ‘Sacred’; although, according to his account, the ‘Sacred’ was a way of legitimising the secular order. It was the only tool available to Confucius in establishing a new world. Sanctification by ritual and etiquette of Zhou was the way to establish the culture of Lu as a ‘common practice’. Put in this way, Fingarette’s interpretation seems to be quite coherent and appealing. However, after looking closer to what is said in Lunyu, we might find his account not entirely convincing. Therefore, it might be worthy to take a look at another account on the quite similar subject matter. Such an account was verbalised by Mircea Eliade in his theory of religion as the ‘Sacred’ and the ‘Profane’. 27 According to Eliade, the ‘Sacred’ is the source of ‘reality’, ‘values’ and ‘power’. The ‘Sacred’ is the origin of, and the ultimate reality, itself. It can take different forms, such as God or gods, mythical ancestors or the ancient often quasi-mythologised teacher. The ‘Profane’ on the other hand has no ‘qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation [is] given by virtue of its inherent structure’. 28 The ‘Profane’ then is the common experience that in order to be considered being ‘real’ requires further ‘confirmation’ or/and ‘empowerment’. Things are ‘real’ or/and ‘valid’ only if they participate in the ‘Sacred’. How does the ‘Sacred’ bestow this ‘reality’ and validate the content of the common experience, the ‘Profane’? There are three notions in Eliade’s thought that might help us understand the whole process, and be of much help to our endeavour here. They are hierophany, the myth and the axis mundi. Hierophany as such is a manifestation of the ‘Sacred’ in the realm of the ‘Profane’. It can take numerous forms, from the burning bush to the appearance of God himself (‘theophany’). Hierophanies often ‘happen’ at the beginning of the time/society/cosmos/the world-we-know. The story that evokes such kind of events, the myths are crucial in bringing the hierophany back. The function of hierophany is to legitimise the ‘Profane’ structure as a valid reality and a life pattern. The ‘Sacred’ does not manifest itself all the time or whenever someone needs it. However, once it appears, it can be evoked again through a myth and/or by a ritual that takes one back to the primordial times and the sacred space. 29 As he states: In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythical hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically reenters the Great Time, the sacred time. 30 ‘Sacred’ and ‘Profane’ are separated; therefore, there is the necessity of a certain ‘link’ that could re-connect two worlds. According to Eliade, the Cosmic Centre, Axis mundi, is a necessary corollary to this division: In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible, and hence no orientation is established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a centre. 31

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__________________________________________________________________ This centre then is the place when the hierophany takes place, or where it can be evoked. It is the place where the source of knowledge, power and the ‘point of orientation’ is situated. Eliade noticed that as the new territories are being taken by a certain society, the rituals that establish the centre are performed and the representation of the axis mundi, usually temples, are built. 32 Axis mundi, the bridge between the worlds has its very concrete manifestation. Although what matters is not that manifestation itself but the meaning that it conveys: the return to the ‘sacred’ beginning. The ‘Profane’ world is then ‘confirmed’ and equipped with the sense of ‘reality’ through participating in the ‘true’ reality transmitted through the axis mundi by the means of myth and ritual. The order is being established and the chaos is being domesticated, turned into a familiar cosmos. The resemblance between Fingarette’s and Eliade’s theories is quite apparent. The ‘Sacred’ is a source of legitimacy, the power and reality to the ‘Secular (Profane)’. Although Fingarette sees the ‘Sacred’ as a ‘product’ of the ‘Secular’, Eliade considers the ‘Sacred’ as a genuine source of sense and meaning for the ‘Profane’. It is then that the ‘Sacred’ actually makes the ‘Profane’ something more understandable and meaningful. Eliade’s vision, unlike Fingarette’s, is not pragmatic, it is mystic. 5. Conclusion Confucius is often perceived as a moral teacher that was quite unsympathetic towards the matters of spirits and gods. Although, as Herbert Fingarette quite rightly pointed out, that it is not the case that Confucius lacked of religious inclinations. It is then explicit to Fingarette that Confucius used the narrative of what Eliade would call a ‘myth of return’, in order to establish his ideas as ‘conventional practices’. However, the question remains: Where did that idea of the ‘Sacred’ come from? Was Confucius really aware of the fact that he was ‘creating’ the ‘sacred tradition’? After reading Lunyu we may seriously doubt it. It is then a fact that he did not look for the ‘Sacred’ in the spirits and gods. What is clearly ‘Sacred’ is the Way (dao), that is eternal and to a degree, ‘transcendent’. However, that ‘Sacred’ is not somewhere out there. It is always here waiting to be actualised. Confucius seems to genuinely perceive himself as someone who had (re)discovered it and whose mission was to bring humanity this ‘Sacred Way’ back. It is almost a classical example of re-actualisation of the sacred space by the myth of return in Eliade’s sense. The truth, the ‘Sacred’ was revealed to humans at the beginning of time by sage-kings like Yu. He was the exposition and manifestation of the ideal type that Eliade would call hierophany. However, the essence of this hierophany was somehow different from what Eliade would see in other manifestations of the ‘Sacred’. Yu, was not a god, a celestial being or a supernatural event; he was a human. 33 What was ‘sacred’ was his way of life, not any divine power manifested through him. The ‘Sacred’ and the

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘Profane’, are not eternally separated. The ‘Profane’ is profane, unreal and invalid, not because it is not endowed in the ‘Sacred’ but because that endowment is not discovered and actualised yet. It is quite clear that li is the axis mundi that not just connects but allows actualisation of that original unity. What is special is the fact that li is not just an axis mundi that connects the ‘Sacred’ and the ‘Profane’ (‘Secular). Li is the ‘Sacred’ that is the source of reality, power and legitimacy. Confucius did try to make ‘Secular Sacred’; however, ‘Secular as Sacred’ was only possible when the ‘Sacred’ became the ‘Secular. He did not only try to turn his ideas into ‘conventional practices’ by mean of ‘sanctified tradition’, but he genuinely believed that that tradition was genuinely sacred. As such it was the only source of proper, real and valid order that could and should rule the world. The ‘Secular’ could then become ‘sacred’ (supernatural) only if the ‘Sacred’ was becoming ‘secular’ (natural).

Notes What I mean by the ‘Sacred’ here, is more or less compatible with the idea of ‘Holy’ as expounded by Rudolf Otto in his book, Das Heilige - Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (The Idea of Holy). For Otto, ‘the Holy’ was numinous, a ‘non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self’. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. J. W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). 2 Confucius’s real name was Kong Qiu. He was also known under his courtesy name as Zhong Ni. In Chinese he is usually referred as Kongzi (literally: ‘Master Kong), or honorific title Kongfu zi, from which the Latinised form ‘Confucius’ comes from. 3 Confucian Analects (Chinese: Lúnyǔ), translated also as The Analects of Confucius or simply The Analects is a collection of sayings attributed to Confucius and his disciples. It is believed to have been written during the Warring States period (475 BC–221 BC), and it achieved its final form during the mid-Han dynasty (206 BC– 220 AD). It was later recognized by Zhuxi (1130 - 1200) as one of the Four Books. 4 One of the most famous sayings in ascribed to Confucius reads, ‘Master said, ‘Zhou did have the advantage of seeing the (etiquette) of two past dynasties. How perfect and elegant are their regulations! (Thus) I follow Zhou.’ (Lunyu 3:14) 5 Xinzhong Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 30. 6 Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, 2nd ed. (Long Grove: Waveland, 1989), 3. 7 The Rectification of Names (Chinese: zhèngmíng), was a call from Confucius for ‘return’ to the properly set up and carried on social relations. Only by doing so, as 1

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__________________________________________________________________ Confucius did believe, the proper (social, cognitive, ethical) order can be established and the full realisation of humanness is possible. 8 As it is clearly stated in Lunyu13:3. 9 Eske Møllgaard, ‘Confucian Ritual and Modern Civility’, Journal of Global Ethics 8.2-3 (2012): 227-237. 10 Fingarette, Confucius, 60. One of the most appealing arguments supporting this claim can be found in Lunyu 9:3. 11 As we read in Lunyu 2:23: ‘The Yin dynasty followed the regulations of the Xia; wherein it took from or added to them may be known. The Zhou dynasty has followed the regulations of Yin; wherein it took from or added to them may be known. Some other may follow the Zhou, but though it should be at the distance of a hundred ages, its affairs may be known.’ James Legge, trans., Confucian Analects (North Carolina: Project Gutenberg, 2002), np. viewed 24 April 2016, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=4094. 12 The State of Lu (c. 1042 - 249 BC, modern Shandong Province) was a vassal state established during Zhou dynasty period. According to Sima Qian (c. 145 or 135 - 86 BC), it was founded by rulers from a cadet branch of the House of Ji, ruling house of Zhou. Lu was the home state of Confucius. Sima Qian, Shiji: Lu Zhou Gong Shijia (Records of the Grand Historian: House of Duke of Lu of Zhou). 13 Fingarette, Confucius, 6. 14 One of the examples of this dichotomy and desire to overcome it, is Lunyu 2:7 in which Confucius denies man being filial, so essentially human, just by feeding his parents. 15 Fingarette, Confucius, 79. More on the meaning generating function of ritual see: Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press),118-142. 16 Ren (benevolence), li (ritual, etiquette) and yi (righteousness) are three main values put forwards by Confucius. Others, like zhi (knowledge), xin (integrity) were added later by Mengzi (372-289 BC) and Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BC). 17 Not like the once main critique and opponent of Confucianism, Mozi (ca. 470 BCca. 391 BC), that considered ‘those who do now believe in ghost and spirits and still performing rituals’ as acting illogically (Mozi 8 [III]:10). More on this see: Roel Stecx, ‘Mozi 31: Explaining Ghosts, Again’, Studies in the History of Chinese Texts: Mozi as an Evolving Text: Different Voices in Early Chinese Thought, ed. Carine Defoort and Nicolas Standaert (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 95-142. 18 Lunyu 6:22. 19 Yu, also know a Great Yu, one of the legendary kings of Xia dynasty. More on the quasi-mythical origins and importance of the three early dynasties see: KwangChih Chang, Art, Myth and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 9-31.

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__________________________________________________________________ Lunyu 8:21. One of the most striking example, we find in Lunyu 17:24, where even a gentleman (junzi), the one who realised the Way still ‘hates’. What he hates is the improper action, but the feeling is still hatred or disgust. 22 Lunyu 11:12. 23 Lunyu 8:2. 24 Lunyu 12:15. 25 Lunyu 11:1. 26 A very interesting account on this matter has been put forward by Eske Møllgaard. As he pointed out, only the proper li of Zhou can be considered a pattern to follow. As later Confucians insisted, there is a sharp distinction between li and su – the customs of commoners. Following true li, the li of Zhou is the sacred way, following the customs of commoners destroys the virtue. Møllgaard, ‘Confucian Ritual’, 228. 27 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans., W.R. Trask (New York: Harvest/HBJ Publishers, 1957), 1. 28 Eliade, The Sacred, 22. 29 Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans., P. Mairet (London: Harvill Press, 1961), 68-69. 30 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, trans., P. Mairet (London: Harvill Press, 1959), 23. 31 Eliade, Images, 21. 32 Eliade, Images, 32-36 and 40. It is a very well know custom of Chinese people to build either an Ancestral Shrine (sitang) or Confucius temple (wenmiao), once the community is established. Ancient Chinese cities were also constructed according to certain pattern that emphasised regularity and the clearly marked centre, usually a temple or a shrine. More on this see: Kwang-Chih Chang, Art, Myth and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 18-20. 33 More on Yu the Great see: Yi Dai and Shuduo Gong, Zhongguo Tongshi (History of China) (Zhengzhou: Haiyan, 2002). 20 21

Bibliography Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Chang, Kwang-Chih. Art, Myth and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.

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__________________________________________________________________ Chen, Yong. Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Dai, Yi and Shuduo Gong. Zhongguo Tongshi (History of China). Zhengzhou: Haiyan, 2002. Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Translated by R. Sheed. London: Sheed and Ward, 1959. Eliade, Mircea. Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. Translated by P. Mairet. London: Harvill Press, 1961. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by W. R. Trask. Harvest/HBJ Publishers, 1957. Eliade, Mircea. Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Translated by P. Mairet. London: Harvill Press, 1959. Fingarette, Herbert. Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. 2nd ed. Long Grove: Waveland 1989. Hall, David and Roger T. Amos. Thinking Through Confucius. New York: New Your State University Press, 1987. Jensen, Lionel. Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Lao Sze-Kwang. Xin pian Zhongguo zhexue. Taipei: Sanmin, 1998. Legge, James, trans. Confucian Analects. North Carolina: Project Gutenberg, 2002. Viewed 24 April 2016. http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=4094. Li Minghui. Ruxue yu xiandai yishi. Taipei: Wenchin, 1991. Liu Shu-hsien. ‘The Religious Import of Confucian Philosophy: Its Traditional Outlook and Contemporary Significance.’ Philosophy East and West, 21. 2 (1971) 157-175.

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__________________________________________________________________ Møllgaard, Eske. ‘Confucian Ritual and Modern Civility.’ Journal of Global Ethics, 8.2-3 (2012): 227-237. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by, J.W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923. Shu Dagang, Hua Peng. Zhong、Shu、Li、Rang – Rujia de hexie shijie, Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 2008. Stecx, Roel. ‘Mozi 31: Explaining Ghosts, Again’. Studies in the History of Chinese Texts: Mozi as an Evolving Text: Different Voices in Early Chinese Thought, edited by Carine Defoort and Nicolas Standaert, 95-142. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Tu, Wei-ming. Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiosity. Albany: SUNY press, 1989. van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology. 2nd ed. New York: HARPER & ROW, 1963. Yao, Xinzhong. An Introduction to Confucianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Paweł Zygadło is lecturer in the Department of China Studies at Xi-an JiaotongLiverpool University in Suzhou. While interested in traditional Chinese culture and religions, in his research he focuses on the adaptation and transformation of the tradition in the modern China. His recent writings revolve around the contemporary reinterpretation of Chinese national and religious identity.

Gothic Meets Neorealism: Trauma, Ghosts and Broken Community in Tommaso Landolfi’s An Autumn Story Julia Brühne Abstract Trauma and the supernatural: These categories seem to be entwined since Bulgarian author Tzvetan Todorov proclaimed the death of fantastic literature in the 20th century, arguing that the hitherto described ghosts, witches and vampires served the purpose of overcoming psychological traumas. This implied that with the emergence of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, phantastic literature was no longer necessary to express such traumas caused by sexual deviances such as homosexuality or necrophilia. Still, there seems to be a great need for supernatural appearances in 20th century culture. Interestingly, novels dealing with both phenomena – the supernatural and trauma – seem to turn up at crucial points of national history. Italian writer Tommaso Landolfi published An Autumn Story (1947) just after the Second World War. In this Gothic novel, he deals with the problems of (foreign) occupation and the fear of castration by vampire-like women. The work deals with the supernatural in a way that serves to overcome a trauma which is not psychological but inherently political. My hypothesis is that, by applying well-known supernatural figures and linking them with collective traumas such as war, Landolfi shows that it is not enough to come to terms with the past via a new Christian ideal of a solidly united community, but rather that those ideals are just transcendental ideas in the sense of Immanuel Kant: ‘Transcendental’ representations that try to veil the unsettling experience of the Lacanian Real. If Landolfi’s protagonist takes over the role of the old sadistic patriarch, apparently becoming one himself, he seems to suggest that democracy not necessarily implies peace. Landolfi hereby offers a rather alarming view of the historical circumstances – the Italy of the Democrazia Cristiana – showing that as long as the present discourse fears its own deconstruction, there is no way of overcoming the traumatic collective experience. Key Words: Gothic, neorealism, political trauma, war, democracy, community, castration, Landolfi. ***** Trauma and the supernatural – these two concepts seem to belong together. At least this is what Tzvetan Todorov implicitly stated several years ago, when he drew on the nature of the fantastic (literature) of the late 18th and 19th century. Todorov is convinced that one of the social functions of fantastic literature or the Gothic genre is the (metaphoric) expression of a repressed and often deviant sex drive, for instance necrophilia. 1 In the Gothic Novel, the repressed drives emerge

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__________________________________________________________________ and come to the surface. It is here, where the Gothic Novel becomes political: The demonic allegories are more than simple representations of individual sexual deviances or the author's expressions of the fear of castration, for example. Themes such as incest or people haunted by their bloodthirsty ancestors rather represent a serious disruption of the contemporary sociopolitical order. That is why Gothic Novels tend to emerge particularly during periods of sociopolitical crisis, such as the French Revolution of 1789, for instance. The resurrecting ghosts of ancient times thus mirror ‘how the past continues to shape the psychic realities of the present’. 2 Another famous topic – the young, innocent daughter threatened by her father’s incestuous lust for her body – stands for the discomfort with the new social order, which is about to replace the old feudalistic. An order, in which the ‘apparatus of alliance’ 3 has not yet been replaced by the ideal of romantic love and by the sensitive (empfindsame) family, and where the world has not yet been fully steeped in secularization and capitalism. If Gothic Novels boom in times of social crisis and change, the publishing of Tommaso Landolfi’s Gothic story Racconto d’autunno (An Autumn Story) just after the end of World War II may not be surprising – although it has to be added that the novel is not a purely Gothic Novel, as it contains elements of (neo)realism. I will return to that point later on. Racconto d’autunno starts with a nameless first-person-narrator telling us about his flight from fascist as well as allied troops. He wanders through a rainy, foggy autumn forest, trying to avoid either getting shot by the fascists or recruited by the allies, which he ironically calls the ‘so-called liberators’ (detto liberatore). 4 He relates how he has lost almost all of his companions during the chaotic flight. One evening, he eventually loses the last remaining friend as they split up after an argument, which remains indistinct to the reader. Alone, hungry and drenched with rain, he tries to find an occupied building somewhere. In the morning, he finally finds an old, patriarchal hunting seat. Though rather seedy, it seems to be occupied, but nobody responds to his knocking and shouting. The only reaction comes from two giant dogs barking furiously at the intruder. The starving protagonist cannot help but break in violently. Once inside, he finally meets the apparently only inhabitant: a tacit and mysterious old count who reluctantly allows him to stay for the night, but subsequently tries to get rid of the uninvited guest as soon as possible. The protagonist, however, ignores his host’s asperity; the more fascinated he becomes with the old house, the more he refuses to leave. One day, while strolling through the mazy corridors of the building, he finds the portrait of a beautiful, though latently disturbing woman. He starts to develop a fetishistic interest for the apparently dead woman and several of her metonymies: a scarf, a necklace, the mark of a fingernail on a book page etc. Strange things happen in the house: doors open and close as if by an invisible hand, he hears a gentle breathing in his bedroom at night, and footsteps in the cellar that he cannot relate to any real person. One night, he decides to spy on the mysterious count who disappears from the dining room every night and locks himself somewhere in the other wing of the

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__________________________________________________________________ house. However, what he sees there makes his blood run cold: the count scatters powder in the chimney and declaims a long incantation. 5 Some moments later, a female figure of drifting smoke emerges from the fireplace. Even though the smoky woman and the beautiful lady from the portrait the protagonist has fallen in love with look alike, he feels that something about the smoky woman is horribly wrong. Her appearance is bereft of the innocent and soft impression the portrait emanated, and all that was left, according to the narrator, was a demonic ‘devil woman’ – something like an incarnate threat of castration: […] era un’immagine perversa, terribile e cupa, e non aveva più nulla del di lei incantevole smarrimento. […] sembrava non esser rimasto che quanto di inconfessato e abominoso la natura di lei poteva contenere, e, delle sue care fattezze, che la sorda materia. […] L’orrore e il disgusto erano gli unici sentimenti che in me rispondevano a quella tanto agognata visione. […] Mi sfuggì finalmente un grido soffocato.’ 6 As he screams, the ghost immediately vanishes and the old man, furious and desperate, tries to shoot the narrator. However, he fails to pull the trigger and collapses on the floor. The hero leaves the house, rashly and terrified, and spends some time in the nearby forest. Anyway, after two weeks, an irresistible attraction chases him back to the haunted castle. This time, he finally finds what appears to have been his actual undertaking all along. In front of the house, waiting for him, stands a beautiful young woman who looks exactly like the woman in the portrait; she even wears the same scarf. The young girl turns out to be the dead woman’s daughter, and is also named Lucia. The two of them promptly pledge eternal love to each other, but the hero quickly discovers that Lucia is a tormented creature and a little insane. Simultaneously, she is angel and angel of death; she pets mice, birds, flowers and even furniture, and sometimes kills or destroys them only a moment later. Lucia explains that she cannot help her own behavior, since her childhood has been shaped by the sadomasochistic relationship of her parents. She tells her lover that both mother and father – the count – have had incestuous desires for her: The mother used to prick a needle into her stomach and then lick off her blood (here, Landolfi links vampiric behavior with a clearly sexual, defloration metaphor). The father, meanwhile, used to take her between his knees and caress her, until he became too old (another allusion to incestuous intercourse and the old patriarch’s eventual impotence). The protagonist wants to heal Lucia’s damaged psyche with his love, but he does not really get a chance. All of a sudden, the war befalls the creepy yet somewhat harmonic world of Lucia and the narrator. A North African troop of French allies storms the house and tries to violate Lucia. As she defends herself, a shot is fired and kills her. The narrator survives. He buries Lucia in the garden and leaves. After the war, he returns to the old house, which he now

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__________________________________________________________________ finds in ruins and ‘disemboweled’ (sventrata). Daylight illuminates the formerly gloomy hallways, but it is no positive (en)light(enment). Consequently, the novel does not end with some kind of (positive) progress, but rather with regress: The hero lingers at Lucia’s tomb and evolves into a revenant of the old count. Just like the latter, he now spends his time hoping imploringly for the resurrection of his beloved Lucia: ‘My heart is buried here. But will it not rise again, with hers? Will she not keep her promise, the promise she made as she lay dying?’ 7 At first sight, Racconto d’autunno seems to be quite a conventional Gothic story. The wondrous lady portrait, and the narrator’s obsession with it probably refer to E. A. Poe’s The Oval Portrait (1842). The woman’s ambivalent character, the strange mixture of maiden-like innocence on one hand and demonic phallic agency on the other, seems to relate to N. Hawthorne’s short story The Birthmark (1843). Here, a chemist finds his wife perfect with the exception of one small flaw: a birthmark on the chin. The castle itself finally reminds one of the first Gothic Novel that has ever been published, H. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) – another incest story, interestingly settled in Italy, which actually deals with the difficulties of illegitimate reign. I have already mentioned that Gothic Novels can function as political allegories. However, what kind of political interpretation could Racconto d’autunno possibly offer to the reader? The (neo)realistic parts of the book – the description of the narrator’s flight in the beginning and the intrusion of the violent partisans in the end – do not seem to fit the much bigger Gothic part of the novel. If it should be Landolfi’s intention to come to terms with the traumatic war and the Resistance (la Resistenza), why did he even choose the Gothic style in the first place? Why not just write a novel of the neo-realistic style that had recently emerged in literature and film? 8 Has the autumn story just been created as a distraction? I believe not. I think the key to a political interpretation of the novel lies at the fragile border between the Gothic and the neo-realistic elements, for this border challenges the uncertain status of reality as such. Hence, it brings us back to the topic of this convention, trauma and the supernatural. Immanuel Kant stated that there is a fundamental discrepancy between things and phenomena. The thing, he states, is not amenable to the subject; it can never be part of his or her direct experience. It is only via phenomena that the subject can gain access, however limited, to the thing. These phenomena, as Slavoj Žižek explains, are structured through so-called ‘transcendental Ideas’. 9 The transcendental Ideas function like a stand-in. They are representations necessary for the subject to be able to structure his or her reality. What we call our ‘reality’ is, therefore, always already virtual to a certain degree, because it consists of phenomena and transcendental Ideas. If we did not have them, reality would lose its consistency: ‘[…] as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency’. 10 Jacques Lacan’s concept of reality is quite similar to that of Kant. 11 ‘Reality’, in the Lacanian sense of the word, always needs

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__________________________________________________________________ a phantasm. ‘Reality’ is a necessary virtual construct located within our symbolic universe: [T]he ultimate guarantee of our ‘sense of reality’ turns on how what we experience as ‘reality’ conforms to the fantasy-frame. (The ultimate proof of it is the experience of the ‘loss of reality’: ‘our world falls apart’ when we encounter something which, due to its traumatic character, cannot be integrated into our symbolic universe.) 12 The Kantian ‘thing’ that strikes us and causes our world to ‘fall apart’ is what Lacan calls ‘the Real’. The Real is something beyond the fantasy-frame that constitutes my reality; something which is located outside the symbolic order. The Real brutally breaks into my reality without me being able to locate and evaluate it properly. That is why it produces terror and fear. For example, it was a widespread method in Early Modern Spain to cure a young man of his lovesickness (amor hereos) by showing him underwear of the beloved but unobtainable woman when it was stained with blood due to her menstruation. The bloodily underwear does not fit the enamored man’s phantasm. Although he knows that women menstruate, he cannot relate the sublime phantasmatic image of the lady to the disturbing real image that shows the threatening ‘creatureliness’ of women. Therefore, it was an effective antidote for men suffering from lovesickness: Once the Real had struck the phantasm, there would be fear and disgust instead of infatuation. This is where trauma comes into play. Trauma, for Lacan, occurs whenever the subject is confronted with the Real: […] there’s an anxiety-provoking apparition of an image which summarises what we can call the revelation of that which is least penetrable in the real, of the real lacking any possible mediation, of the ultimate real, of the essential object which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence. 13 Lacan defines a traumatic event ‘as an imaginary entity, which had not yet been fully symbolized, being given a place in the symbolic universe of the subject’. 14 At first glance, one could regard it in terms of a ‘conventional’ trauma in case of Landolfi’s novel. The hero falls in love with the beautiful lady from the portrait. Although she is characterized by a certain unsettling ambiguity, the hero’s reality is still supported by the love phantasm at this time. As his phantasm meets the Real in shape of the horrible ghost woman, a castration trauma takes place that urges him to leave the house immediately. However, as he comes back, his trauma can be cured at least partially as he meets the pretty, young Lucia. Although there is

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__________________________________________________________________ something threatening about her, he manages to suppress the original oedipal trauma and to build a new fantasy-frame around Lucia. One could insist that she actually needed to die in the end, so that he was able to keep the phantasm alive. What this interpretation leaves out completely is, however, the neo-realistic part of the novel. I suggest that the real trauma pictured here by Landolfi is not a ‘classic’ castration trauma. The real traumatic event is, rather, the experience of fratricide and the diremption of the population during war and occupation. The neo-realistic depiction has to swing to a Gothic story because the real trauma cannot be told without a phantasmatic backing within the symbolic universe. The Gothic elements provide the phantasm: The 17th-century-castle, the old-fashioned portrait of the lady etc., are the transcendental ideas that help to endure the traumatic events of the present. Where neorealism wants to show the post-war reality in all its ruthless severity, it still cannot help but rely on the phantasms it tries to avoid: messianic children, the sacerdotal sacrifice, or the Italian people, resisting bravely against the invaders, allegedly united by their steadfast faith in God. 15 While a ‘purified’ restart still seems possible for Italy in neorealism, especially in neo-realistic films, Landolfi’s ghostly women show that this is not the case. As the animalistic colonial soldiers storm the house and violate Lucia, they destroy the hero’s fantasy-frame – this episode is the pure embodiment of the Lacanian Real. It is striking that the violators are not fascist troops but ‘so-called liberators’. Landolfi shows the fundamental gap dividing the anti-fascist population and thereby states that it is not enough simply to erase the fascist past, as neorealistic films have attempted. The African soldiers are the prosecution of the last companion the protagonist loses right at the beginning of the novel; they point to the lack of unity within the Italian population. While neorealism tries to form an imagined community, 16 Landolfi frustrates every attempt to do so. At the very moment when the narrator decides to leave his companion, he trades the (illusional) homosocial bond 17 for an incestuous dyad that does not produce either offspring or companionship but only sterility and nostalgia. Therefore, the Gothic genre proves to be a useful narrative of crisis – but here it is only in the combination with neorealism that it really suits the needs of its time: It showed that ghosts are often the most adequate form of relating utterly traumatic events and that it is the supernatural that shows the limits of (neo-)realistic ‘treatment’. The ‘neorealist ghost’ is even more a figure of deconstruction than Derrida had in mind when he stated that ‘[t]he spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic’. 18 It deconstructs phantasms and forces the reader to come to terms with a present that has neither an intact past he could nostalgically long for nor an assured future – the only certainty is that the ghosts of the past will keep haunting until the collective trauma has been properly processed.

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Notes Tzvetan Tzvetan, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 167-169. 2 Valdine Clemens, The Return of the Repressed:Gothic Horror from the Castle of Otranto to Alien (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 4. 3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction by Michel Foucault, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 4 ‘Due formidabili eserciti stranieri si scontravano allora sul nostro suolo, conducendo una campagna cruenta e che parve infinita alla maggior parte della popolazione, la quale ne fu, come si immagina, direttamente e barbaramente danneggiata. Inoltre le esose pretese, in uomini e materiali, d’uno di questi eserciti (l’invasore, che lentamente s’andava ritirando, attraverso il paese, davanti all’altro, detto liberatore) [...]. Dove, coloro che ne avevano la possibilità o se ne sentirono il genio, si organizzarono per una resistenza armata o addirittura per l’offesa, altri resisterono almeno passivamente alle imposizioni degli invasori, altri infine badarono soltanto a togliersi dal folto della mischia. Poiché, dico, appartenevo a una di queste categorie, la mia vita fu lungamente quella del bandito [...].’ Tommaso Landolfi, Racconto d’autunno (Milan: Adelphi, 1995), 11-12. Engl.: ‘Two dreadful foreign armies were clashing on our soil, and most of us felt as if the ferocious campaign would rage on forever. Our population, as you can imagine, suffered direct, barbaric harm. And when the invaders slowly withdrew across the country, retreating before the other, the so-called liberating army, they made exorbitant demands for men and matériel. […] Those who had the possibility or the temperament organized themselves for an armed resistance or even offensive. Others put up at least a passive resistance to the overbearing demands of the invaders. And still others, finally, just made sure they got away from the thick of the fighting. Now since, you see, I belonged to one of those categories, I led the life of an outlaw for a long time’. Tommaso Landolfi, An Autumn Story , trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Hygiene, Colorado: Eridanos Press, 1989), 3. 5 His words originate from an incantation of the historical 19th-century visionary Éliphas Lévi. See Keala Jewell, ‘Gothic Negotiations of History and Power in Landolfi’s Racconto d’autunno’, California Italian Studies 1.2 (2010): 19. 6 Landolfi, Racconto d’autunno, 96. Engl.: ‘[…] this was a dark, dreadful, perverse image, which had nothing of her enchanting bewilderment. […] All that seemed to remain of her in this unrecognizable wraith were the unconfessed and abominable parts of her nature; and all that seemed to remain of her dear features was their crude matter. […] Horror and disgust were the only feelings that responded within me to that longed-for vision. […] At last, a muffled cry escaped me.’ Landolfi, Autumn Story, 104. 7 Ibid., 145. 1

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__________________________________________________________________ See for instance Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, new expd. ed. (New York: continuum, 1996), 31-73. 9 See Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 88; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 [1781]). 10 Ibid., 88. 11 Ibid., 88-89. 12 Ibid., 89. 13 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar: Book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954-1955), trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. JacquesAlain Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 164. 14 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London/New York: Verso, 1989), 162. 15 See for instance Xuan Jing, ‘Der ‚leidende Widerstand’ im Okkupationskino: Roberto Rossellinis christliches Sühneopfer Roma, città aperta (1945)’, PhiN 44 (2008): 35-52, viewed 27 April 2016, http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin44/p44t3.htm. 16 The term derives from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006). 17 Eve Sedgwick has coined this term in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 18 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, ‘Spectographies’, The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 37-52. 8

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006. Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New expd. ed. New York: Continuum, 1996. Clemens, Valdine. The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from the Castle of Otranto to Alien. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Stiegler, ‘Spectographies’. The Spectralities Reader. Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural theory, edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 37-52. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013,

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__________________________________________________________________ Jewell, Keala. ‘Gothic Negotiations of History and Power in Landolfi’s Racconto d’autunno’. California Italian Studies 1.2 (2010): 1-25. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 [1781]. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book 2: The Ego in Freud’s theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954-1955). Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Landolfi, Tommaso. An Autumn Story [it. Racconto d’autunno (1947)]. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1989. Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Xuan Jing. ‘Der ‚leidende Widerstand’ im Okkupationskino: Roberto Rossellinis christliches Sühneopfer in Roma, città aperta (1945)’. PhiN 44 (2008): 35-52. Viewed 27 April 2016. http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin44/p44t3.htm. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London/New York: Verso, 1989. Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993). Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Julia Brühne is a lecturer at the department of Romance philology at the University ‘Johannes Gutenberg’ in Mainz (Germany). Her PhD thesis focused on politics and psychoanalysis in Spanish post-war cinema.

The Solipsist as Satanist: A Philosophical Reading of Chesterton’s ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’ Regan Lance Reitsma Abstract Sometimes ratiocination, thinking hard and with exactitude, about an utterly bizarre idea is surprisingly enlightening – even if the relevant peculiar notion shouldn’t compel our all-things-considered assent. In this chapter, I will explicate a peculiar cognitive syndrome I’ll call ‘solipsistic little godism’. In G.K. Chesterton’s short story, ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’, Herbert Saunders, a youthful, gauche candidate for the ministry, adopts solipsistic little godism. Another character, Gabriel Gale, pitchforks Saunders to a tree – for fourteen hours, in the midst of a bone-chilling storm – to knock these ‘dangerous’ and ‘satanic’ ideas out of his head. These dramatic events prompt Gale to proffer several substantive insights about human wisdom and happiness; he surmises our happiness as human beings is grounded in our (recognition of our) own creatureliness and our consequent and consequential ability to feel gratititude and surprise. Solipsistic little godism is, Gale alludes, not only false, but lonely; a profound emotional ‘strain’; a form of invidious, even ‘satanic’, pride; and – surprisingly – a dangerous temptation ‘closer to the nerve of all thinking’ than most of us suspect. Chesterton’s well-wrought story is a wonderful philosophical tale. With some help from ancient Pyrrhonists, Descartes, and (especially) the oddball ruminations of an American actress and new age guru, Shirley MacLaine, this story becomes a vivid path – and so a great route, pedagogically – into some thorny, old epistemological and theological questions. In a future article, I’ll consider how best to argue, incisively, against Saunders’ and MacLaine’s bizarre ideas. Here, my predominant task is to clarify what their ideas are and how they came to them. Key Words: Chesterton, Gabriel Gale, solipsism, objectivity, self-apotheosis, creatureliness, satanism, Shirley MacLaine, Pyrrhonism, Descartes. ***** It’s a very good thing for a landscape-painter to see the landscape upside down. He sees things then as they really are; yes, and that’s true in philosophy as well as art . . . the rationality of topsy-turvydom. 1 What a chimera . . . is man! How strange and monstrous! A chaos, a subject of contradictions, a prodigy. Judge of all things, yet a stupid earthworm; depository of truth, yet a cesspool of uncertainty and error; the glory and refuse of the universe. Who

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__________________________________________________________________ will unravel this tangle? The philosophers cannot do so. The Pyrrhonists make man nothing, while others make of him a god; man is both great and wretched at the same time. 2 1. A Very Strange Idea Shirley MacLaine, an American actress and author of new-age books, relates how she once scandalized guests at a New Year’s Eve party: I began by saying that since I realized I created my own reality in every way, I must therefore admit that, in essence, I was the only person alive in my universe. I could feel the instant shock waves undulate around the table. I went on to express my feeling of total responsibility and power for all events that occur in the world because the world is happening only in my reality. And human beings feeling pain, terror, depression, panic and so on, in me . . . I knew I had created the reality of the evening news at night. It was my reality. But whether anyone else was experiencing the news separately from me was unclear, because they existed in my reality too. And if they reacted to world events, then I was creating them to react so I would have someone to interact with, thereby enabling myself to know me better [emphasis mine]. 3 You can understand why MacLaine’s fellow cocktail swillers are taken aback. To ordinary people, MacLaine’s thinking is utterly bizarre. But if you have the intellectual patience, let’s ask – since a human mind can contemplate myriad lunatic ideas – which particular oddball claims MacLaine is professing to believe. 4 I’ll isolate two. 2. Solipsistic Little Godism First, MacLaine takes the entire universe to be nothing more than the set of ideas that appear before her own mind’s eye. In her view, the totality of things – everything that exists – is a dream, her own dream. As she puts it, ‘the world is happening only in my reality’. Notice, for example, MacLaine supposes the people she ‘interacts with’ are simply figments of her own imagination; and so, their feelings, their ‘terror, depression, panic’, aren’t real, but are akin to the ‘feelings’ you suppose your visibly upset mother is undergoing until you wake up and realize you’ve merely been dreaming up a spat with her. MacLaine’s claim that the entire objective world is contained in her own subjective mind makes her a solipsist in the philosophical sense: she claims to believe only in her own existence and the existence of the ideas within her own mind, and neither in the existence of other, real people with their own internal experiences, nor in the existence of a mindindependent reality, external to her own subjective experience.

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__________________________________________________________________ Second, MacLaine’s solipsistic beliefs lead her to suppose she’s god-like in at least two senses. The God traditionally worshipped by many Jews and Christians is a greatest conceivable being, a being with every great-making quality to the maximal degree – God is taken to be not merely extremely powerful, but omnipotent; not merely extremely knowledgeable, but omniscient; not merely frequently just and gracious, but morally impeccable. MacLaine doesn’t claim for herself every such quality. She doesn’t assert her own moral perfection; and when she takes herself to be gaining greater self-knowledge, she implicitly denies being omniscient. But once she comes to believe the universe is nothing but a set of ideas in her own mind, MacLaine is overcome with the heady ‘feeling of total responsibility and control over all events’, that is, that she is the creator of the entire world, in sovereign control of everything that occurs. As she see it, without her was not anything made that was made. 5 Whereas there’s an established term, ‘solipsism’, for MacLaine’s first tenet, there isn’t for her belief that she’s sovereign creator. Let’s call this second idea ‘little godism’, which makes sense for two reasons. First, the universe MacLaine claims to sovereignly govern is no larger than her own mind, exceedingly small compared to the commonsensical notion of a vast, expanding universe containing billions of galaxies. Little universe, little god. Plus, as mentioned, MacLaine doesn’t ascribe to herself all of God’s great-making qualities, merely sovereign creator, who makes all things exist, ex nihilo. 3. What Hath the Mind of MacLaine Wrought? What, let’s ask, leads MacLaine to solipsistic little godism? One of her arguments is immediately clear. Her reasoning goes from solipsism to little godism. Once MacLaine supposes she’s the only being who exists, she infers there’s no one else to be the universe’s creator. Even more, her mind is – uncontroversially, it seems – the cause of her own thoughts, and in her view the universe consists in nothing more than these thoughts. Ergo – she infers – she’s creator of all. The firmament and heavens, such as they are, are her handiwork. But what drives MacLaine to adopt solipsism in the first place? The lengthy quotation above expresses thoughts similar to a classic skeptical argument, one which (second meditation) Descartes would recognize, though reject, and which ancient Pyrrhonist skeptics would seriously entertain. 6 This argument begins from MacLaine’s claim she knows with objective certainty what she’s presently thinking, as she has direct experience of her own internal thought processes. For example, she’s absolutely sure it appears to her mind as if she’s at a New Year’s Eve party: an image of cocktail swillers is, in the very least, currently before her mind’s eye. But – her reasoning continues – MacLaine lacks both this type of (direct access) evidence and this level of (complete, objective) certainty about whether any other thinking people and any external objects truly exist independent of her. She knows how things seem to her; but she can’t be absolutely sure these

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__________________________________________________________________ experiences track a mind-independent reality or that ‘the people’ she ‘interacts with’ are anything more than figments of her imagination. On these grounds, she concludes she ought to believe only in her own mind, its experiences, and the content of those experiences, nothing more. 7 MacLaine’s thinking certainly isn’t above philosophical reproach. There are pointed questions to ask. To wit, ‘Why, MacLaine, write a big book if you don’t positively believe in the existence of an audience for it?’ And, ‘You can’t, Shirley, be the only existent thing. Could you exist without there being something or someone else that created you?’ More, MacLaine’s arguments for her unusual ideas aren’t sound. To point out only a few objections, her argument for solipsism – note – commits her, as a matter of logic, to a particular principle for beliefformation, namely, ‘believe only what you know with objective certainty’. 8 This principle is ridiculously demanding: if assiduously obeyed, it would press MacLaine into such a crimped, constricted, all but all-encompassing, Pyrrhoniststyle, philosophical agnosticism that it’d be hard for her to live a recognizably human life. Not only that, this principle is also self-defeating, for it itself can’t be known with the requisite certainty. 9 So, what use could it be, you might wonder, for us to reflect on such lunatic ideas? 4. What’s the Purpose of Thinking About This? Perhaps your intellectual patience is waning. I should mention what I’m up to. In part, this: MacLaine’s mindset will help us understand the thinking of a central character in G.K. Chesterton’s wonderfully wrought philosophical tale, ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’. 10 Tall, gawky Herbert Saunders, studying to become a vicar, has outgrown his clothes, and he’s even more awkward socially than he is physically. 11 Saunders arrives at a social gathering soon after it has begun to rain, and an innocent joke that he’s to blame for bringing bad weather hits him as ‘a buffet’. 12 The eyes of other guests on him, Saunders shrinks – physically and psychologically – into himself. 13 An improbable sequence of events and some questionable fits of quasi-philosophical thinking lead gauche Saunders, seemingly innocent and emotionally vulnerable, to the same self-aggrandizing worldview as MacLaine. For the better part of some ‘fourteen hours’, 14 Saunders is a solipsistic little godist. Because of the insight and unorthodox methods of a certain Gabriel Gale, Saunders escapes this cognitive syndrome. An eccentric poet-painter who serially confronts lunatics, Gale professes to have only one practical use to humanity: he’s entertained – seriously – ‘every form of infernal idiocy’. 15 Time and again, Gale has inched up to, but evaded, the precipice of insanity. Seeing Saunders is succumbing to the idea he’s the omnipotent cause of all natural events, Gale pitchforks him to a tree to prove Saunders is merely a ‘creature’, not God. 16 Though Gale’s violent ‘cure’ is effective, several incredulous medical doctors – men with an empirical, ‘materialist’, 17 evidentialist bent – ask Gale how it could

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__________________________________________________________________ possibly be ‘necessary’ to ‘come precious near to knocking [Saunders] out of his body to cure him of being out of his mind’. 18 Gale obliges: he describes what nearly made Saunders go fully mad. More on that soon. ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’ is excellently crafted. The first half is told entirely from the perspective of one of the incredulous men of science, Dr. Garth, who is, with respect to empirically observable facts, sedulous. Garth relates (to the other doctor) the series of events that eventuated in Saunders’ pitchforking; and when it comes to the tangible facts – the details available, in principle, to any third person observer – Garth is utterly without error. Even so, this diligently observant doctor isn’t a skilled interpreter of the human heart. Poor Garth, suspecting Gale of lunacy, fails to identify the correct patient. 19 And he consistently misreads the personal, existential import of the events he so infallibly witnesses. 20 In the second half of the story, Gale casts the selfsame sequence of events in a new light, and his narrative receives the wholehearted endorsement of the very ‘grateful’ Saunders, who later remarks that, after fourteen hours playing the role of deity, he happily ‘gave it up’ as ‘it was too much of a strain’. 21 5. ‘Why, Saunders?’ Though Saunders and MacLaine profess the same self-aggrandizing worldview, Saunders arrives at his self-apotheosis by a distinct route, a contrast that will help us evaluate Gale’s attempted refutation of Saunders. So, what leads Saunders to solipsistic little godism? The proximate causes are three coincidences and a rain drop test. After having twice arrived at social gatherings on rainy days, Saunders attends, a bit tardy, a get-together at the Blakeney’s estate. When he arrives, there isn’t a cloud in the pure blue skies, and the crowd rejoices that the old joke ‘Saunders is the bearer of bad weather’ – playfully described as a scientific ‘hypothesis’ – is ‘falsified’. 22 Later, the boisterous party recedes into a windowless drawing-room in the estate house for tea. When everyone – perhaps forty minutes later – emerges, the once azure windows are black as night and spattered with rain. The empirically-minded Dr. Garth – who most certainly does not go in for superstitions – admits that even he found the storm, this third coincidence, uncanny. As for Saunders, this out-of-theblue tempest prompts him to revive the old ‘hypothesis’ that he controls the weather. So as to test it, he runs an experiment: he takes himself as having put down his mental chits on one of the rain drops near the top of the closest window, and he watches to see whether it wins a race to the bottom of the sill with another droplet. Once he supposes he has called, even caused, the race’s winner, Saunders runs out into the storm to declare his sovereignty over all that exists. At this point, Saunders presumes he’s God, ‘Omnipotence looking at two falling stars’. 23 But the coincidences and test aren’t the whole explanation. Saunders, who generally projects meager self-abasement, is – ironically – especially susceptible to deifying himself. Recall, Saunders has felt ill at ease in

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__________________________________________________________________ the world. He’s physically awkward, always a bit too long for his boots and britches. Gale sees this gawky lankiness as a symbol of Saunders’ inner sense of mercurial disorientation: when alone with his thoughts, Saunders feels an (everexpanding) colossus; when in the company of other people, an (ever-shrinking) mite. 24 This explains why the joke had such profound import to him. Though innocent and rather lame, the jest turned the crowd’s attention onto buffeted Saunders. His embarrassment, which prompted him to sink into himself, burned this memory into his mind, predisposing him to make much – far too much – of the next two coincidences. Also, as a seminary student, Saunders spent several years ruminating on grandiose but intractable theological questions: How does God manifest Himself?, What’s His nature?, How do we come to know Him?, and What is God’s relationship to His creation and to the so-called crowning glories of that creation, His image-bearing people? 25 So, Saunders is socially and theologically discombobulated. But to discern why he arrogated himself to the good Lord’s throne, there’s more to see. 6. A Question Closer than Expected to the Nerve of All Thinking Imagine you’re lying on your back in a meadow. One leg is bent, with the knee pointing up to the heavens; the other leg is sitting atop the first, crossed in front of you. As your crossed leg idly sways, you notice it mimics the waving motion of windswept trees off in the distance. Common sense says you yourself are controlling the motion of your swaying leg, the wind is causing the wavy motion of the far-flung trees. In a philosophical mood, you might wonder, ‘Why should I trust this particular dictate of common sense?’ As a matter of pure logic, it’s possible you control less than you suppose. What if the motion of your limbs isn’t really under your voluntary control? Alternatively, and also as a matter of pure logic, it’s possible you control more than you suppose, both your bodily movements and the activity of the distant trees. This thought experiment raises an unusually big question, one Gale regards as ‘closer to the nerve of all thinking’ than most recognize. 26 What, truly, is the ‘connexion’ between ‘the subjective and the objective’, that is, what’s the connection between the appearances you see before your mind’s eye and what’s happening in the so-called ‘external world’? 27 How can a person know the way the world of rocks and trees appears is the way it truly is? It’s not uncommon – whether in intellectual history or ‘these days’ – to hear challenges to the commonsensical idea that we control our own choices, such as my ‘decision’ to fling my legs forward in the coordinated, alternating pattern I call ‘walking briskly home after work’. This philosophical challenge comes from determinists – whether causal, genetic, social, or divine – who say we control nothing. Freedom of choice, independence of mind, determinists claim, is an illusion. Your ‘choices’ are dictated by the causal chains that make up the world, or

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__________________________________________________________________ your genetic make up, or your class upbringing, or your social environment, or God’s predeterminations. Importantly, Gale relates to the incredulous Garth that Saunders, when the three coincidences occurred, had been in this ‘dangerous moment’ in which he had been asking himself – in the quietude of his own immature mind – about the ‘connexion’ between his thoughts and the world. As it happens, Saunders tacks in the opposite direction of the determinists. Feeling out of fit with the universe; uncertain of God’s relationship to creation; encouraged by his own undivulged curiosity to speculate, Saunders has come across – in the weather patterns – a bit of evidence, however meager, that he controls far more than he thinks. He decides to believe he’s sovereign creator of the world. It seems Saunders first supposes the three coincidences and the rain drops test together ‘prove’ he’s in sovereign control of the cosmos. That’s the ‘godism’ aspect of solipsistic little godism. Next comes solipsism: one way for Saunders to explain to himself how he’s sovereign creator, is to suppose the world consists, and always has, in nothing more than his thoughts. The ‘connexion’ between the subjective and the objective, on this solipsistic outlook, is that his thoughts create reality because his series of thoughts are the whole of reality. Next, it follows from his solipsistic belief (that the world is his own dream) that he’s ‘God’ merely of a relatively small universe. Little universe, little god. More, given that it’s taken Saunders twenty odd years to discern his own (alleged) sovereign power, he can’t account himself omniscient. Even by his own self-aggrandizing ideas, he lacks the full panoply of great-making qualities of a traditional God. 7. Gale’s Attempted Disproof Himself once tempted by solipsistic little godism, Gale sees what Saunders is becoming. Here’s how he attempts to refute Saunders’ ideas. A gambler, Gale says, never supposes he’s omnipotent, for he’ll have taken a liking to a particular dog (‘number 5’) or jockey (‘the one in blue’), put his money down on this favourite, and subsequently felt the pain of an unbearable loss. By choosing the rain drops test, Saunders circumvents the possibility of suffering the gambler’s plight. Calling the winning rain drop gives him, in the very least, a half chance at ‘confirmation’. Worse, since rain drops intermingle on the way down the pane, is there any valid way to discern whether the droplet you identify as the ‘winner’ is the selfsame droplet you first chose? 28 Saunders ignores all such skeptical thoughts and regards his test as confirmation of his godhood. Hence, the ‘necessity’ of the pitchforking: Gale decides to put Saunders in a position, ‘half throttled and impaled on a pitchfork’, that will make him suffer. It takes hours, but Saunders eschews believing he’s god. At some point Saunders, with all his being, commanded the pitchfork to melt or the clouds to dissipate. They didn’t. Gale’s ‘cure’ has its intended effect: in the long run, Saunders – who gives up not only his belief in his own total power, but also his solipsism – becomes a good-humored, robust, athletic

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__________________________________________________________________ country vicar, beloved by many parishioners largely because he doesn’t seem much like a parson. Though willing to debate theological ideas if the village atheist demands, Saunders no longer broods over such things. More, recognizing his creatureliness, Saunders learns to feel very much at home in God’s good world, following the ‘plan of human pleasure’ he sees God as having instituted. 8. What Next? Several questions arise from my ‘philosophical’ reading of ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’. First, does Gale’s act of pitchforking disprove each element of Saunders’ solipsistic little godism? It seems not. Suffering Saunders must admit, contrary to his godism, that his power has limits; but does the pitchforking also compel him, logically, to admit that what he’s experiencing is a mind-independent reality (as opposed to, say, a nightmare)? 29 Second, would an ‘I-refute-you-thus’ 30 act of pitchforking function as an unassailable disproof of MacLaine’s incarnation of this ‘infernal idiocy?’ Or would a would-be Gale need to tailor-make arguments to undermine her idiosyncratic reasoning? (My view: tailor-made arguments are needed). Third, I suspect Chesterton, a Catholic author, intends this story to be a critique of not only the solipsist, a rare breed, but of several more common modern attitudes. Which? Presumably, Garth’s empiricistic, evidentialist, materialist mindset. But I suspect more targets. The solipsist isn’t the only character in the modern world whom Chesterton might accuse of being – ‘satanically’ – a half-step from arrogating the throne. Stay tuned.

Notes Said by the character Gabriel Gale. G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Fantastic Friends’, The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale, 1929 (Cornwall, UK: House of Stratus, 2001), 1-24. Project Gutenberg Australia, viewed 1 April 2016, http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900711.txt. 2 Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 1662, trans. W.F. Trotter, introduction by T. S. Eliot (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958), Pensees 434, Project Gutenberg, viewed 17 April 2016, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm. 3 Shirley MacLaine, It’s All in the Playing (New York: Bantam, 1988), np. 4 In her other books MacLaine has advocated for other, equally strange – and seemingly logically incompatible – new age ideas, such as the reality of channeling the spirits from the past. For the sake of clarity, I’ll write as though MacLaine is a consistent, persistent solipsistic little godist. 5 John 1:3; Collossians 1:16. 6 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641, trans. and ed. Jonathan Bennett, 1-34, Early Modern Texts, viewed 23 January 2016, http://ww.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/Descartes1641pdf. 1

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__________________________________________________________________ These are several of the claims Descartes, in his second meditation, endorses as ‘demon-proof’ knowledge, that is, claims that not even an all-powerful, allknowing genius, whose sole goal is to make certain Descartes has no true beliefs, could trick him about. A central challenge for Descartes, who is not ultimately a skeptical thinker, is whether he is able to demonstrate, with ‘demon-proof’ certainty, any claims beyond these several. Famously, he thinks he can. 8 This is the tacit assumption that leads MacLaine from the premise of her argument, ‘I know with objective certainly only that I exist, that I have some ideas, and what some of those ideas are’, to the conclusion, ‘I should believe only that I exist, that I have some ideas, and what some of those ideas are’.. 9 As a matter of fact, MacLaine does not think consistently with the beliefformation principle her argument for solipsism commits her to. To give only one example of her inconsistency, if she did follow out the principle’s implications, she wouldn’t have the positive belief ‘other people are figments’, since she does not know, let alone know with certainty, that they are. Her principle should lead her to agnosticism about the existence of other minds. 10 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’, The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale, 1929 (Cornwall, UK: House of Stratus, 2001), 68-91. 11 Chesterton, ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’, 72, 80. 12 Ibid., 74. 13 Ibid., 72. 14 Ibid., 91. 15 Ibid., 86. 16 Ibid., 86. 17 Ibid., 85. 18 Ibid., 85. 19 Ibid., 71. 20 Take evidentialism to be the claim that a belief is permitted by reason only if it is grounded in adequate evidence, and empiricistic evidentialism to be a form of evidentialism that regards the senses to be the predominant valid source of evidence. Garth is an empiricistic evidentialist, Gale is not. Gale often takes objects and events as having symbolic meanings that point to deeper truths. In this way, ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’ is, it seems, a critique of a modern, empiricistic, evidentialist, materialist frame of mind. For a clear, concise, boisterous example of empiricist evidentialism, see W.K. Clifford, ‘The Ethics of Belief’, 1877, Lectures and Essays, edited by Leslie Stephenson and Frederick Pollock (London: MacMillan and Co., 1886). 21 Chesterton, ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’, 91. 22 Ibid., 73. 7

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__________________________________________________________________ Ibid., 83. This appears to be an allusion to: Pascal, Pensees, 72. 25 Chesterton, ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’, 84. 26 For corroboration, see Simon Blackburn, Think (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15. 26 Chesterton, ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’, 75. 27 Gale does attempt a non-violent cure first. To get Saunders, as he peers at the rain-spattered window, to assess his ‘I am God’ hypothesis, Gale proposes the much better test, ‘Why don’t you call the chairs and they’ll come to you’. Chesterton, ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’, 75. 28 Ibid., 75. 27 Chesterton’s spelling of the word ‘connection’ is ‘connexion.’ 28 Ibid., 83. 29 Gale does seem to treat the pitchforking as a disproof of solipsism. Chesterton, ‘The Crime of Gabriel Gale’, 87. 30 The reference is to Samuel Johnson’s attempt to refute George Berkeley’s idealist philosophy by kicking as stone, a story related in: James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1791, volume I, edited by G.B. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 471. 23 24

Bibliography Blackburn, Simon. Think. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. Volume I, edited by G. B. Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935 [1791]. Chesterton, G. K. The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale. 1929. Cornwall, UK: House of Stratus, 2001. Project Gutenberg Australia. Viewed 1 April 2016. http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900711.txt. Clifford, W. K. ‘The Ethics of Belief’. Lectures and Essays, edited by Leslie Stephenson and Frederick Pollock. London: MacMillan and Co., 1886 [1877]. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. 1641. Translated and edited by Jonathan Bennett. Early Modern Texts. Viewed on 23 January 2016. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1641.pdf. MacLaine, Shirley. It’s All in the Playing. New York: Bantam, 1988.

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__________________________________________________________________ Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. 1662. Translated by W.F. Trotter (1904). Introduction by T.S. Eliot. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958. Project Gutenberg. Viewed on 17 April 2016. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm. Reitsma, Regan Lance. ‘Against Humility As Informed Contempt’. I Want To Do Bad Things: Modern Perspectives on Evil. Edited by Kristen Bone and Rivkah Greig. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 2016. Sextus Empiricus. Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism. c. 300 CE. Edited and translated by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Regan Lance Reitsma is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Honors Program at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. His interests are in meta-ethics, neighbour love, moral psychology, forgiveness, humility, tolerance, and moral rights.

Asemic Occultism: The Magical System of Austin Spare’s Sigils Riikka Ala-Hakula Abstract ‘Hidden in the labyrinth of the Alphabet is my sacred name, the Sigil of all things unknown,’ 1 wrote English artist and occultist, Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956). An influential figure in twentieth century occultism, Spare developed a magical technique named ‘sigilization’. The term relates to his theories of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self. The word sigil derives from the Latin sigillum, meaning ‘seal’. The current use of the term is derived from Renaissance magic, but its roots extend to the magical traditions of Antiquity. Spare used a method by which the words of a statement of intent are transformed into an abstract design; the sigil is then charged with the will of the creator. In this chapter, I propose that sigilization is a form of esoteric writing and one of its aims is to reject formal writing systems. Instead, Spare created a private writing system to communicate with his unconscious self. I analyse Spare’s sigils using the philosophical basis of Roy Harris’ theory of semiology, which includes the use of private languages in the field of semiotics. It can be deduced that, in contrast to the exoteric nature of formal writing systems, the purpose of Spare’s sigils is to be esoteric. Key Words: Asemic writing, Austin Osman Spare, esoteric writing, occultism, semiology, sexual magic, sigils. ***** 1. Introduction Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century occultist movement in Britain. In the history of occultism this period is called the Magical Revival, when newly formed societies such as the Brotherhood of the Silver Star, the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society arose, which focused on exploring the magic and occult ideas of the Western tradition, as well as renewing and developing them. During this period several artists and writers became inspired by occultism. One such person was Austin Osman Spare who, in addition to his artistic reputation, created a system of sexual magic upon which his creative work is based. In order to understand accurately Spare’s artistic reputation, we have to be acquainted with the form of magic that he practised and the occult sources of his artistic inspiration and creativity. This chapter on the magical system of Spare’s sigils highlights just one example of the esoteric writing systems, which form the basis of my doctoral thesis. In order to establish the context for this chapter more clearly, I will briefly explain the background of my research. The main aim of my thesis is to define the term asemic, referring to a private style of writing which does

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__________________________________________________________________ not express verbal meanings, 2 within the context of literary theory by providing effective examples within the tradition. Spare’s sigils are a private form of writing which fits into this concept. Next, I will shortly introduce the background of Spare’s occult thoughts on sigils in order to accurately understand his magical system. It is significant that Spare seemed to paraphrase in his texts Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy or Magic (1533). It has also been noticed that Spare transferred two of Agrippa’s signs to the Book of Pleasure’s sketches. 3 Moreover, Spare was inspired by medieval magical grimoires, The Goetia and The Greater Key of Solomon, and they have influences on The Book of Pleasure’s sigils. 4 The grimoires introduced types of magical seals that have been used in summoning and constraining angels and demons. In summary, Spare’s magical art was inspired by the Renaissance Magic and the Medieval Magic and his system of sigils was based on earlier forms of magical seals. 2. The Essential Symbols of Zos Kia Cultus Two of the main symbols of Spare’s cult he called the Zos and the Kia. It is important to note that while their meaning has a theoretical level, they are still part of a cult whose rituals are, typically for sexual magic, concrete. As Grant explains, [t]he cult of the Zos and the Kia involves the polarized interplay of sexual energy – positive and negative currents – symbolized anthropomorphically by the hand and the eye. These organs are the means whereby the sorcerer invokes primal energies latent in the subconsciousness. 5 It can be suggested that Spare rejected formal writing systems because he wanted to create a private, and personal, form of writing to invoke primal energies buried in the subconsciousness. This objective is not just part of the system of his sigils but a fundamental of his entire cult. Spare gave to these two main symbols several names which added to their meaning. The Zos is the hand which he also named All Sensing Touch. By contrast, the Kia is the eye also named All Seeing Vision. These elements are the magical instruments needed to connect to one’s primal desire or innate obsession. In his system, Zos fused together with its opposing energy, Kia, which renders them deities of the flesh. 6 The magical ritual of sigils is one way to actualize this aim. In order to completely understand these key symbols of the cult, the next definition is important. Zos’ he defined as “The body considered as a whole,” by which he included body, mind, and soul; it was the alembic of his sorcery.

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__________________________________________________________________ His other key symbol, the Kia, represents the Atmospheric “I”, THE Cosmic Self, which uses Zos as its field of activity. 7 Such are the concrete, abstract and universal meanings of the main symbols of Spare’s Zos Kia Cultus. In summary, these symbols can be seen as the feminine and masculine part of sexual energy where the Zos represents a masculine force and the Kia a feminine force. Moreover, when the images of hand and eye are presented together in Spare’s works this is an indication of the main symbols of his cult. He often added their graphical symbols next to the sigils and the interpreter has to recognise them and their meaning to analyse his writing accurately. 3. The Magical System of Sigils Having established the essentials of the Zos Kia Cultus it is now possible to examine Spare’s sigils in more detail. The main aim of the sigils was learning through enjoyment. Spare wrote: ‘Sigils are the art of believing; my invention for making belief organic, ergo, true belief’. 8 The true desire of a person is the starting point of creating a sigil. This desire should be written on paper by formulating it in a short sentence. Then, the letters of the sentence have to be reformulated by creating a glyph. 9 The next example illustrates the process of converting a true desire into a sigil. In a well-known example, Spare wished to obtain the strength of a tiger. In order to sigillize this desire, he put down on a piece of paper all the letters of which the sentence is composed, avoiding repetitions. Then, the sequence of letters is combined to form a single glyph. 10 Next, Spare stressed that after the wish has been sigilized, it has to be forgotten. Its creator must resist thinking about it consciously. 11 Instead, the creator must think of the sigil during ‘the magical time’ meaning any moment in which a person is convulsed by emotional or elemental reactions, for example, during an orgasm, pleasure, pain or rage. 12 Spare saw ‘the magical time’ as an open concept, which depended on the temperament of the sigil’s creator, and gave a wide range of examples of what it could mean including mantras, postures 13, women and wine, tennis, playing of patience or walking while focusing on a sigil. 14 One reason for this vagueness is most likely his idea that the sigils work at the subconscious level and it is not possible to instruct their actualization consciously. Grant sums up the two main aims of Spare’s sigils by highlighting the importance of the subconscious activity in his magical system: Sigils and the Alphabet of Desire[15] are used specifically to enable two things to occur. 1. Effective communion with elementals existing at subconscious levels. 2. The lodging of the desire or

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__________________________________________________________________ wish at such levels without the conscious mind being aware of the transaction, for ‘conscious desire is unattractive. 16 Exploring the sigils in the context of Spare’s Zos Kia Cultus clarifies not only the terms he used but also his magical system as a whole. In addition, it highlights the fact that Zos Kia Cultus’ magic refers not only to concrete sex rituals, but also to the artist’s creative process. Moreover, the symbols of the cult explain the magical system of sigils in following way: The hand signifies the phallic will, the creative urge to do or to make. The composite glyph of the hand and the eye therefore contains a simple formula: the Will and its means of expression through the agency of desire, or imagination. 17 The actual sigil which we can see does not contain magical powers. It is rather a vehicle of the desire whose power actualizes at the subconscious level of the creator. 18 These facts offer a justified basis for analysing the sigils from their material and aesthetic level, as we know one of the intended purposes of Spare’s cult was to create art. 4. Asemic Occultism Having established the basics of the magical system of sigils, it is now important to amplify the etymology of the term. The term sigil derives from the Latin sigillum and sigilla, ‘statuettes, little images and seal’ and it is a diminutive of the Latin signum ‘sign’. 19 The last meaning is especially pertinent from the perspective of a private form of writing. It can thus be suggested that each sigil has a specific meaning, but in Spare’s system of magic, the interpreter cannot read the meanings of the sigils just by looking at them. Spare’s method of writing through sigils is, therefore, esoteric, ‘not openly admitted; private’. 20 It is also clear that a sigil as an independent glyph does not contain verbal meanings, and therefore, the sigils are asemic. Monograms are another interesting term concerning sigils. The term is part of Benoît Grévin’s and Julien Véronèse’s classification where they have divided medieval characters into six families. Their definition of the term is ‘signs composed of identifiable elements such as letters’. 21 As we know, Spare’s sigils have been formed in this way; therefore, it is accurate to use the term on the sigils. Conversely, in examining Spare’s sigils through Roy Harris’ semiological theory, a different context for Spare’s cult is revealed. The main claim of Harris’ book is that, in the Western World, writing has long been seen as merely a transcription of oral language, not as its own medium of expression. Harris holds the opposite to be true. Spare is a notable example of an artist who created a form of writing that can

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__________________________________________________________________ be seen as its own form of expression. Harris gives several examples of this kind of poet and artist: Once it becomes obvious – by practical demonstration – that written communication does not depend either on the existence of an oral language which it transcribes, or on the existence of orthographic conventions which govern it, only the persistence of earlier and more rigid ways of thinking can prevent recognition of the conclusion that writing can create its own forms of expression. It took the genius of Mallarme, Apollinaire and Joyce, as it had taken the genius of Picasso and Braque, to turn theoretical possibilities into semiological realities. 22 Harris explains that if it seems unusual at all to create a private form of writing which is capable of possessing an important function it is due to our Western cultural context. He argues that we think the language is medium-transferable; we suppose that speech can be transferred into writing and then back into speech, 23 but that is not completely true. Clearly the Latin writing system and its different forms include characters that are not phonetic, for example, the punctuation marks, as Derrida noticed. 24 That is to say, it is accurate to think of speaking and writing as different forms of expression. We cannot read aloud Spare’s sigils, but we know that they contain a special meaning that their creator knew when he used them. We also now know the magical system of sigils, and it is possible for us to create them ourselves if we want. Spare’s sigils had a special function; their creator used them to communicate with his unconscious self, and that was something he could not do with formal writing systems. As Spare wrote, ‘There is nothing simpler than speaking to your inmost self, and nothing more difficult’. 25 5. Conclusion Spare’s sigils are their own medium of expression. They are an esoteric form of writing containing a special communicative function. After exploring the sigils from the point of view of Spare’s cult, it would be logical to continue analysing them on their aesthetic and material level. Spare’s one urge was to create a private art form, but is it also possible to find the meanings behind such private forms of writing, and in doing so, develop methods for analysing these intimately constructed characters on their aesthetic level? Since Spare’s death, his system of sigils has been developed by others. One such development is the hypersigil, popularised by the comic book writer, Grant Morrison. Morrison claimed in the Book of Lies (2014) that his series The Invisibles was a hypersigil, 26 indicating that the tradition of sigils continues its vibrant life as a part of popular culture and, therefore, one worthy of further investigation.

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Notes Austin O. Spare, The Writings of Austin Osman Spare: Automatic Drawings, Anathema of Zos, The Book of Pleasure, and The Focus of Life (Sioux Falls: NuVision Publications, 2007), 19. 2 ‘asemia’ n. Psychiatry. Inability to comprehend or use communicative symbols, as words, gestures, etc. [Gk ásēm (os) signless ( a- a-6+ sêm (a) sign + -os adj. suffix) + -ia’-IA] - asemic, adj.’, Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1st ed. (New York: Portland House, 1989), 87. 3 Hume Lynne and Nevill Drury, The Varieties of Magical Experience: Indigenous, Medieval, and Modern Magic (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2013), 195. 4 Ibid., 195. 5 Kenneth Grant, Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare (London: PCM Fulgur, 2003), 8. 6 Spare, The Writings of Austin Osman Spare, 23-60. 7 Grant, Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare, 7. 8 Spare, The Writings of Austin Osman Spare, 88. 9 Ibid., 92. 10 Grant, Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare, 55. 11 Spare, The Writings of Austin Osman Spare, 92. 12 Grant, Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare, 56. 13 He was probably referring to mudra postures. 14 Spare, The Writings of Austin Osman Spare, 92-93. 15 The Alphabet of Desire is another magical system of Spare, but it is not possible to analyse it given the limits of this chapter. 16 Grant, Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare, 55. 17 Ibid., 37. 18 Ibid., 57. 19 s.v. ‘sigil’. Collins English Dictionary: Complete & Unabridged, 6th ed. (Glasgow: Collins, 2003). 20 s.v. ‘esoteric’. Collins English Dictionary: Complete & Unabridged, 6th ed. (Glasgow: Collins, 2003). 21 Benoît Grévin and Julien Véronèse, ‘Les “Caractères” magiques au Moyen Âge central (XIIe-XIVe siècle)’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 162 (2004): 36467; also see for example, Lauri Ockenström, ‘Refined Resemblances: Three Categories of Astromagical Images in Marsilio Ficino’s De vita 3.18 and Their Indebtedness to “Abominable” Books’, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 9 (2014): 10. 22 Roy Harris, Rethinking Writing (London: Continuum, 2005), 224-225. 23 Ibid., 236. 24 Jacques Derrida, ‘La Différance’, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 25 Austin O. Spare, Zos Speaks! Encounters with Austin Osman Spare (London: PMC Fulgur 1999), 223. 1

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__________________________________________________________________ Grant Morrison, ‘POP MAGIC!’ Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult, ed. Richard Metzger (NY: The Disinformation Company, 2014), 21.

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Bibliography Benoît, Grévin and Julien Véronèse. ‘Les ‘‘Caractères’’ magiques au Moyen Âge central (XIIe-XIVe siècle)’. Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 162 (2004): 407481. Collins English Dictionary: Complete & Unabridged. 6th ed. Glasgow: Collins, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. ‘La Différance’. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Grant, Kenneth. Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare. London: PCM Fulgur, 2003. Harris, Roy. Rethinking Writing. London, New York: Continuum, 2005. Hume, Lynne and Nevill Drury. The Varieties of Magical Experience: Indigenous, Medieval, and Modern Magic. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2013. Morrison, Grant. ‘POP MAGIC!’ Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult, edited by Richard Metzger, 16-25. NY: The Disinformation Company, 2014. Ockenström, Lauri. ‘Refined Resemblances: Three Categories of Astromagical Images in Marsilio Ficino’s De vita 3.18 and Their Indebtedness to “Abominable” Books’. Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 9 (2014): 1-32. Spare, Austin O. Zos Speaks!: Encounters with Austin Osman Spare. London: PMC Fulgur, 1999. Spare, Austin O. The Writings of Austin Osman Spare: Automatic Drawings, Anathema of Zos, The Book of Pleasure, and The Focus of Life. Sioux Falls: NuVision Publications, 2007. Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. 1st ed. New York: Portland House, 1989.

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__________________________________________________________________ Riikka Ala-Hakula is a PhD student currently writing her doctoral thesis at the University of Jyväskylä. The focus of her research is on asemic writing, illegible writing and esoteric writing.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Open-Source Occultism in the Age of Information Cavan McLaughlin Abstract In the Information Age, keeping secrets has become increasingly problematic, as both elected officiates and clandestine groups the world over, demonstrate on an almost daily basis. Yet mystery schools, secret societies and occult practices lose none of their popularity; indeed, arguably occulture has enjoyed somewhat of a revival. As the line between private and public life continues to blur, how do such groups, which have long held concealment at the very heart of both their identity and functionality, navigate the sharing culture of the World Wide Web? Within the discourse of Western Esoteric Studies, we frequently find that members of the occult community are oath-bound, even on pain of death and destruction, not to reveal that which Google will instantly share. This chapter will pay particular attention to the rise of the esoteric group Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn (OSOGD), founded in 2002 by Sam Webster, and to Thelema, the philosophy/religion of renowned twentieth century occultist Aleister Crowley. His particular blend of ‘Scientific Illuminism’ provided Webster with a perfect philosophical underpinning, along with principles from within the open-source software movement, to inform the manifesto of the OSOGD, an online and new Aeonic approach to the old esoteric traditions. Has the time come for the ‘occult’ to become the ‘open’ and might the revealing of all secrets be a method of maintaining the mysteries? Key Words: Open-source, occult, occulture, Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn (OSOGD), secrecy. ***** Occult traditions, practitioners and occult practices themselves, have long held concealment at the very heart of both their identity and functionality. The very term occult, of course, derives from the Latin occultus, meaning ‘hidden’, ‘concealed’ or ‘secret’. Yet, since the onset of the Digital Revolution, and the subsequent meteoric rise of the World Wide Web, it seems almost all aspects of human endeavour and enterprise are entrenched in a continuous and often deeply troubled discourse regarding privacy, publication, information sharing, and the associated repercussions of political, socio-economic and cultural transformation. The world of Western Esotericism and the occult have far from escaped these now almost universal concerns. Such issues are far from new of course, but rather have been amplified by the arrival of new digital and communication technologies, by many orders of

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__________________________________________________________________ magnitude. Given secrecy is a defining characteristic of esoteric tradition, the erosion of privacy now occurring at an unprecedented scale, seems on the face of it, antithetical to its very nature. Yet conspicuously, there are few (in any) contemporary Western Esoteric Traditions, that have not embraced the publicity and connectivity afforded by the Web. Even the most earth-focused and natureloving Wiccans, can be followed online. Rather than a diminishment of occultism then, what we have in fact witnessed is an occult boom: what Egil Asprem calls ‘the rise of the occult information society’. 1 He attributes the initial cause of this boom directly to the increased, and subsequently free access, to esoteric information and the ever growing dissemination of magical texts. 2 The exoteric aspects of the Web have opened myriad avenues of digital communication (email, forums, file sharing, blogging, social networking et al) that have facilitated unparalleled acceleration in both exoteric and esoteric discourse: permitting sharing, publishing, research and peer review en masse, and ultimately leading to a multitude of new magical groups and systems. Asprem continues by focusing on such a group: One illustrative example of the impact of this infrastructural revolution is found in the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, established by Sam Webster in 2002 […]. Reasoning that the digital information revolution makes old institutional frameworks obsolete, this online magical order is based on the free dissemination of magical teachings, democratic leadership, and an open profile regarding which ‘traditions’ its members bring in and work with. 3 The radical shift from traditional forms of gatekeeping mass media to a nonhierarchal nexus of horizontal communication, organised around the infrastructure of the Internet and wireless communication, has been enormously catalytic and lies at the the very heart of the fundamental cultural – and thereby occultural – transformation seen in the latter part of the Information Age. 4 Furthermore, this democratization lies at the very heart of what occulture is (and as such, a more thorough and precise definition of occulture will be provided in due course). Concurrently, new systems of esoteric Order have emerged that actively participate in the embracing of open-source and democratized occultism—in both name and ideological construct. They are open yet occulted; public yet secret. In order to fully understand how such concepts may be paradoxical or oxymoronic yet nevertheless are far from inconsistent, the role of secrecy in the Western Esoteric Tradition requires further analysis. In relation to Western esotericism, secrecy takes a number of forms and serves a number functions. All of these can first be categorised into two primary orders: incommunicable ineffable secrets and communicable secrets. The former

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__________________________________________________________________ refers to the mystical notion that lies at the heart of many esoteric traditions, that there are orders of mystery that can never be communicated. As Antoine Faivre argues, such a secret does not need one to actively keep it, even if materials related to said secret are freely available, it still requires experiential insights and progressive multileveled understanding and penetration. 5 These insights can only be attained by way of direct experience and as such can never be told. By way of distinction, these ineffable secrets, will hitherto be referred to collectively as the Mysteries. The latter, however, are mediated; such communicable secrets are closed or disclosed and relate to barriers and the binaries that this infers. They interrelate but can still be sub-categorised as follows: 1) Magical efficacy. Secrecy here is the conservational barrier that is utilized for the purposes of efficacy within a magical operation, inasmuch as, there is ‘the widely accepted belief [by practitioners] that magic efficacy wanes with disclosure’. 6 This is of course incalculable and also presupposes an acceptance in the reality of magical operations, and so will remain beyond the scope of this investigation. 2) Invisibility. This is a perceptual barrier and pertains to the invisible quality of the subject of study itself: the hidden forces of nature. As Wouter Hanegraaff confirms, ‘Western Esotericism involves the study of nature and its hidden or secret laws and dynamics’. 7 Literally then, the forces being considered, simply cannot be seen by the human eye that observes them. 3) Safety. Barriers of secrecy are employed for the safety of the practitioner, or indeed, the would-be practitioner. There are two ideas at play here: Firstly, there are the difficulties that may arise from society’s reaction to the disclosure of one’s involvement in occult practices, and secondly, the concern that esoteric practices themselves may indeed be inherently dangerous, especially if undertaken without proper guidance or understanding. The first of these issues of safety is easy to understand, especially in a historical context where members of secret societies and occultists may have found their very lives at risk, if they did not keep their practices secret. Even in contemporary society where such practices can sometimes be deemed entirely innocuous, partly due to the mass proliferation of occult ideas, secrecy is still regularly maintained in order to avoid a swathe of negative interactions, consequences and assumptions (even in the OSOGD, non-identity disclosure is expected to be respected unless the individual elects to disclose themselves). 8 Anonymity then remains essential even in an open-source magical order, but perhaps this is unsurprising, given that ‘nondiscrimination’ is a core value of the open-source movement. 9 Freedom to act and communicate without discrimination is ensured by the protections of online anonymity. Moreover, Doug Cowen explains how online anonymity has also helped proliferate esotericism, insofar as, ‘online interaction involves identity

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__________________________________________________________________ experimentation. [People] try on, as it were, pagan or occult identities, identities that would never be sanctioned in their offline worlds’. 10 The second issue of safety is simply about creating a safe environment for the inexperienced. This is much discussed within the Western Esoteric community, and the desire to conceal information so that it can be introduced in a timely and appropriate fashion is a common reason cited for retaining and managing said secrets. As popular occult author Doreen Valiente asserts, ‘many people will tell you that occultism, witchcraft and magic are dangerous. So they are; so is crossing the road; but we shall not get far if we are afraid ever to attempt it. However, we can choose either to dash across recklessly, or to use our common sense and cross with care, and so it is with magic’. 11 4) Proprietary information. These are barriers relating to ownership. All restricted information can be commodified. Therefore, occult and esoteric intellectual property can also be trade secrets. Indeed, one only needs to consider the enormous market for self-help literature and popular New Age books that promise to confer the secrets of financial success, health, successful relationships and emotional wellbeing that have emerged from the New Thought movement. 12 Rhonda Byrne’s rather aptly titled, The Secret, has been an outstanding commercial success, with estimates of its sales (book and film combined) being $300 million. 13 This commercial aspect is important, because open, in relation to open-source, does not necessarily mean monetarily free. Therefore, issues of publication (in its widest sense) are often still linked with economic factors, for example, even in a digital world, storage and bandwidth cost money. 5) Power dynamic. This particular category may be seen as self-evident, especially given the ubiquity of the aphorism, ‘knowledge is power’. Power and its dispensation is in part managed with respect to both secrecy and transparency, once again further complexified in the network intensive digital world. Electronic civil liberty groups and cryptoanarchists fight for both the ‘right to know’ and the ‘right to be unknown’. 14 In this regard, it is not knowledge per se that is power, but the ability to control access to knowledge that defines the power dynamic. In relation to esoteric knowledge and secret societies, it is noteworthy that a sizeable portion of contemporary society embrace conspiracy theory, or are even adherents to what has recently been coined ‘conspirituality’. 15 Both of the movements are recognized as holding the core conviction that: ‘A secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order’. 16 It is clear that a direct correlation between secrecy and power is firmly embedded in the human psyche. Each of these forms of mediated secrecy found in Western Esotericism has a function in governing the interrelations that both facilitate and comprise occulture. Furthermore, the precise manner in which occulture is inherently open and democratized, is central to understanding the role open-source occultism has to play in the continuing development of Western Esotericism. It is essential to be clear, therefore, precisely what constitutes occulture.

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__________________________________________________________________ Occulture is an new sociological category introduced by Christopher Partridge as a way to make sense of what he deemed to be the ‘meaningful confluence’ of competing spiritual discourses within popular culture and the media. 17 On the one hand, with the advent of modernization, widespread desacralization and secularization were clearly evident in the West; yet on the other hand, there remained an equally widespread and conspicuously ‘vibrant interest in the paranormal, the pursuit of experiences of transcendence, the acquisition of occult knowledge, and the development of some form of mysticism or inner-life spirituality’. 18 Occulture, is explicitly not merely occult culture, especially not in the sense of a secretive or fringe culture. Rather, Partridge argues, it is an esoteric, paranormal and spiritual cultural milieu, ‘a resource from which people draw, a reservoir of ideas, beliefs, practices and symbols’, and crucially, it includes the very institutions, fora and networks that create them. 19 It is abundantly clear then, that the current occultural revival also has a direct relationship to the exponential growth and complexification of our communication networks. As Asprem clearly elucidates: ‘Occulture in this sense is becoming increasingly ordinary and mainstream, especially by functioning as a cultural pool of resources for popular culture’. 20 The ‘meaningful confluence’ is paralleled in the terminology itself; occult here, far from implies that occulture is itself hidden. Partridge explicitly clarifies this in his later work on the theory: Within the idea of “occulture”, the “occult” is radically modified by the word “culture”. As a compound, “occulture” suggests a democratized occult, an open esotericism – “occulture is ordinary”. 21 The ordinary and everydayness of occulture then, serves not to diminish the esoteric traditions, but rather maintains them. This is precisely the claim made by Jack Bratich, that ‘within public occulture, revelations do not eliminate the secret, but preserve and extend it’; and thus, ‘secret traditions are preserved by being out in the open, hidden in plain sight’. 22 With respect to these recently formed open esoteric Orders, the purposeful and strategic commitment to public transparency aligns with what Bratich has termed ‘spectacular secrecy’. 23 Moreover, he continues by arguing that ‘this spectacular form generalizes secrecy into public and private domains, making revelation no longer the end to secrecy, but its new catalyst’. 24 The ineffable Mysteries cannot be articulated or shared, so necessarily they must transcend culture because they cannot be passed through forms of communication from one generation to the next. As culture transforms, the Mysteries must be continually ‘rediscovered’ within individuals’ personal phenomenological experience. Occulture, however, by way of public secrecy, signposts the Mysteries and preserves their continuous rediscovery.

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__________________________________________________________________ Given this link between increased openness and occultural flourishing, and the further connections between public secrecy and its preservation, a case can be made that within the earlier occultural revival of Victorian Britain, the formation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the subsequent publication of its secrets, not only profoundly influenced – but actually served to assist in preserving – what has now been labelled as Western Esotericism. 25 The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was initially established in 1888 by William Wynn Westcott and his partners, Dr William Robert and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. Initially the Golden Dawn’s curriculum was based on the ‘cipher manuscript’, a highly suspicious document that Westcott claimed contained the coded teachings of an ancient German Rosicrucian Lodge. In 1891, a ‘Second’, or ‘Inner Order’ formed within the Golden Dawn providing additional teachings derived from personal communications between Mathers and the supposed ‘secret chiefs’ of the Order. 26 The legitimacy and authenticity of these secret chiefs became a contributing factor in insurrection and the eventual schism that befell the Order, however, Golden Dawn magic would continue under a number of guises and emergent Orders (Alpha et Omega; Stella Matutina; Independent and Rectified Rite of the Golden Dawn). 27 Alison Butler describes the Golden Dawn as ‘the most significant and influential occult organization of its era, and, arguably, of the last two centuries’. 28 Whereas the precise measure by which this significance and influence is evaluated is difficult to quantify, the fact that so many Golden Dawn Orders (including of course the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn) and Golden Dawn-influenced systems still exist today, certainly supports major, if not primary significance. Importantly, the influence that Golden Dawn magic continues to have today comes as a direct result of oath-breaking and the divulging of a huge body of their communicable secrets. The Golden Dawn’s propriety information was made public in 1909 and 1910, in The Equinox, the official periodical of Aleister Crowley’s magical order the A∴A∴. 29 Crowley appealed to the authority of the so-called secret chiefs, in attesting they had released him from his Golden Dawn oaths of secrecy but the publication almost certainly had more to do with his personal notoriety than any sense of democratization because when the next major release of Golden Dawn material was undertaken between 1937-1940 by Israel Regardie, Crowley corresponded with him claiming he had absolutely no right whatsoever to publish the material or to brake his ‘sacred obligation to secrecy’. 30 Regardie, however, explicitly argued that he made the work of the Order available to the public to avoid it being forever lost. 31 Yet, he also gained monies and notoriety in the process. Whether Regardie’s claims to openness are true or spurious, both sets of publications (along with a number of other smaller subsequent releases by various authors) did in fact propagate Golden Dawn teachings and add to the occultural reservoir. Nevertheless, then and now, traditional Golden Dawn oaths explicitly

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__________________________________________________________________ forbid the divulging of any information whatsoever, or the perpetrator would submit by their own consent to: A Stream of Power, set in motion by the Divine Guardians of this Order, […] They journey as upon the Winds— They strike where no man strikes— They slay where no man slays— and, as I bow my neck under the Sword of the Hiereus, so do I commit myself unto their Hands for vengeance. 32 In the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, oaths of secrecy are no longer taken. It is recognized that previously Hermetically closed secrets are now open public secrets, instantly available through search engines and book stores. Their manifesto endorses following the alleged ‘demonstrably advantageous practice of the Open Source Software movement’, where the sources of esoteric knowledge, akin to open-source code, should be available to everyone. The Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn are not unique in employing principles of openness, democratization and non-hierarchal structure in contemporary magical groups. For example: there is the Horus-Maat Lodge, a non-hierarchal and authority-rejecting cyberlodge with an open membership and there is even a direct offshoot of the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, that is, The Universal Order of the Morning Star. Furthermore, the reality is, even outside of such groups that actively align themselves with open-source occultism, those groups ostensibly adherent to proprietary based, authoritarian, hierarchical, and change-resistant esoteric traditions are consistently somewhat open-source in their praxis. Free association, open communication and the sharing of esoteric ideas is normative on the online world that they invariably inhabit, even if supposed oaths and principles of initiatic secrecy should indicate otherwise. Occultism is about the concealed, but correspondingly, it is about revelation, openness and the process of enlightenment, inasmuch as it is about knowledge transfer; whether that be in the sense of direct gnosis of ineffable mystery or the imparting of knowledge: it making the unknown known. As Hanegraaff notes, counter to early theories in sociology, where the occult was viewed as a ‘disconcerting phenomenon of social “deviance”’ that seemed to be regressive, in more recent years, the occult is increasingly seen ‘as a significant manifestation of modernity’. 33 Open-source occultism, as a manifestation of the Age of Information, is an evolution of this process on a mass scale, afforded by the exponential growth of horizontal communications networks wherein knowledge transfer can occur. In accordance with the general democratization of knowledge transfer that

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__________________________________________________________________ contemporary communications technologies facilitate, Open-source occultism actively participates in and preserves the Mysteries in a very public affirmation of secrecy, ensuring that the ordinary and everydayness of occulture, remains hidden in plain sight.

Notes Egil Asprem, ‘Contemporary Ritual Magic’, The Occult World, ed. Chris Partridge (Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2015), 385. 2 Ibid., 385-386. 3 Ibid., 386. 4 From Manuel Castell’s seminal work on the topic, The Rise of the Network Society: Economy, Society and Culture vol 1. (Malden, MA, Oxford: WileyBlackwell; 2nd Edition, 2010), xviii. 5 Antione Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 3233. 6 See Léon A. van Gulik, ‘Cleanliness is Next to Godliness, But Oaths are for Horses: Antecedents and Consequences of the Institutionalization of Secrecy in Initiatory Wicca’ Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies 14.2 (2012): Section 2.3. 7 Wouter Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013), 21. 8 Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, ‘Operational Principles’, OSOGD.org, viewed on 12 January 2016. http://osogd.org/about/the-constitution-of-the-opensource-order-of-the-golden-dawn/operational-principles. 9 Open Source Initiative, ‘The Open Source Definition (Annotated): version 1.9’, opensource.org, viewed on 21 February 2016. https://opensource.org/osd-annotated. 10 Doug E. Cowen, ‘The Occult on the Internet’, The Occult World, ed. Chris Partridge (Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2015), 533. 11 Doreen Valiente, Natural Magic (Washington: Pheonix Publishing Inc, 1975), 11. 12 Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism, 39 and a more detailed discussion can be found in Jeremy Rapport’s ‘Contemporary New Thought’, The Occult World, ed. Chris Partridge (Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2015), 216-218 where he notes, ‘New Thought in this format [as self-help literature] is enmeshed with the capitalist, free-market exchange system of the modern, Western world. Indeed, much of New Thought’s success, such as it is, has depended upon the ability of its proponents to present it as commodity in the marketplace of ideas and practices’. 13 Exact figures for these sales are not a matter of public record. The figure is derived from the most recent estimated figure published, Melanie Lindner, ‘What 1

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__________________________________________________________________ People Are Still Willing To Pay For’, forbes.com, 15 January 2009, viewed on 3 February 2016. http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/15/self-help-industry-ent-salescx_ml_0115selfhelp.html/. 14 This phrasing has been adopted from Jack Bratich, ‘Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies’ Cultural Studies 21.1 (2007): 53. 15 A phrase coined by Charlotte Ward and David Voas to describe a synthesis between New Age spirituality and conspiracy theory. See Charlotte Ward and David Voas, ‘The Emergence of Conspirituality’. Journal of Contemporary Religion 26.1 (2011): 103-121. 16 Ibid., 104. Developed from an earlier work on conspiracy theory by Mark Fenster. 17 Occulture was first introduced by Christopher Partridge in The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol 1. (London/New York, T&T Clark: 2004), 62-86. Although he has later recognized the term as coined in the 1980s by the performance-occultist Genesis P-Orridge, albeit with a quite different inference. 18 Christopher Partridge, The Occult World (Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2015), 10. 19 Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, 84; see also the excellent synopsis of Egil Asprem in Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 7. 20 Asprem, Arguing with Angels, 7. 21 Christopher Partridge, ‘Occulture is Ordinary’, Contemporary Esotericism, ed. Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm (Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2014), 119. 22 Bratich, ‘Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies’, 42-58. 23 Ibid., 43. 24 Ibid., 45. 25 See Alison Butler’s Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition (Houndmills, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) for an extensive discussion of an occult revival in Victorian Britain, especially in her introduction and opening passages of chapter one. Although the term occult revival is used rather that occultural revival, it is clear from our definition that the latter is also true. 26 This history is widely agreed by scholars and modern Golden Dawn Orders alike. The brief synopsis provided is sourced primarily from Butler’s Victorian Occultism, 1-4, and from Frater A.o.C., ‘A Short Treatise on the History, Culture and Practices of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’, osogd.org June 21, 2002, viewed on 12 February 2016, http://osogd.org/library/the-aerodynamicbiscuits/a-short-treatise-on-the-history-culture-and-practices-of-the-hermetic-orderof-the-golden-dawn/. 27 Bulter, Victorian Occultism, 1-4; Frater A.o.C., Culture and Practices of HOGD.

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__________________________________________________________________ Butler, Victorian Occultism, 2. Aleister Crowley, ‘The Temple of Solomon the King (Book II)’ The Equinox 1.2 (1909): 217-334.; Aleister Crowley ‘The Temple of Solomon the King (Book III)’ The Equinox 1.3 (1910): 133-280 30 Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn: An Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Dawn (Llewellyn Publications,U.S.; Revised edition edition 1986), 1. 31 Frater A.o.C., Culture and Practices of HOGD. 32 On saying the words, ‘Bow my neck’ Hiereus (one of the ritual officiates) also p1aces the flat of their sword on the nape of candidate’s neck. This excerpt is from the oath taken during the Neophyte Ritual cited from Israel Regardie’s, The Golden Dawn, (USA: Llewellyn Publications, Revised 6th edition, 1986), 123. 33 Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism, 9. 28 29

Bibliography Asprem, Egil. ‘Contemporary Ritual Magic’, The Occult World, edited by Chris Partridge. Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2015. Bratich, Jack. ‘Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies’ Cultural Studies 21.1 (2007): 42-58. Butler, Alison. Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition. Houndmills, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Castell, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society: Economy, Society and Culture Vol 1. Malden, MA, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell; 2nd Edition, 2010. Cowen, Doug E. ‘The Occult on the Internet’, The Occult World, edited by Chris Partridge. Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2015. Crowley, Aleister. ‘The Temple of Solomon the King (Book II)’ The Equinox 1.2 (1909): 217-334. ———. ‘The Temple of Solomon the King (Book III)’ The Equinox 1.3 (1910): 133-280. Faivre, Antione. Access to Western Esotericism, Albany: SUNY Press, 1994.

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__________________________________________________________________ Frater A.o.C. ‘A Short Treatise on the History, Culture and Practices of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’, osogd.org, June 21, 2002. Viewed on 12 February 2016. http://osogd.org/library/the-aerodynamic-biscuits/a-short-treatiseon-the-history-culture-and-practices-of-the-hermetic-order-of-the-golden-dawn. Gulik, Léon A. van. ‘Cleanliness is Next to Godliness, But Oaths are for Horses: Antecedents and Consequences of the Institutionalization of Secrecy in Initiatory Wicca’. Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies 14.2 (2012): 233-255. Hanegraaff, Wouter. Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed, London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013. Lindner, Melanie. ‘What People Are Still Willing To Pay For’, forbes.com, 15 January, 2009. Viewed on 3 February 2016. http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/15/self-help-industry-ent-salescx_ml_0115selfhelp.html. Open Source Initiative, ‘The Open Source Definition (Annotated): version 1.9’, opensource.org. Viewed on 21 February 2016. https://opensource.org/osd-annotated. Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, ‘Operational Principles’, OSOGD.org. Viewed on 12 January 2016. http://osogd.org/about/the-constitution-of-the-opensource-order-of-the-golden-dawn/operational-principles. Rapport, Jeremy. ‘Contemporary New Thought’, The Occult World, edited by Chris Partridge. Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2015. Regardie, Israel. The Golden Dawn. USA: Llewellyn Publications, Revised 6th edition, 1986 Valiente, Doreen. Natural Magic. Washington: Pheonix Publishing Inc, 1975. Cavan McLaughlin is a broadcaster, creative media practitioner and academic with research interests regarding the role of spirituality and occultism in contemporary visual culture. As a media professional of some 14 years he has been involved in almost all aspects of audiovisual production, specialising in music promos and album artwork.

The Trauma of Missing Time in Alien Abduction Laura Thursby Abstract In the 1980s, stories surfaced of otherworldly creatures who kidnapped human beings from their homes, brought them aboard their ships in the sky, and subjected them to physical examinations. 1 The unwitting human captives were allegedly forced to endure violent and invasive procedures, often including physical penetration, pregnancy tests, and the extraction of sperm, eggs, or foetuses. These extraterrestrials would erase their captives’ memories, leaving them only with the lurking impression that something had transpired, but where they could not locate what actually happened, and where their memories of the abduction could only later be recovered through hypnosis. These bizarre stories made their way beyond the fringes of American society and became popular topics of conversation in households across the United States. The stories of abductees were deeply personal; but I argue that through their widespread popularity, they also became part of the wider collective imagination, and hence resonated with anxieties particular to the United States. Hence, I question what these stories reveal about the greater social and political climate of the US at the time. This chapter explores the connection between abduction narratives and the academic boom in memory studies in the 1980s, where the language of abduction would parallel discourses over trauma and the politics of memory. It also considers how the trauma of abduction reflected changing discourses over time itself; in particular, the way that linear notions of time became disrupted, and where time was seen to have gone ‘missing’ – displaced, stolen, hidden, and repressed. I contend that the traumatic memories and experiences of abduction, and in particular ‘missing time’, spoke to the wider disorienting, ambiguous, and often ambivalent conditions of postmodern USA in the 1980s and 1990s, and hence the alien offers us a reading of this period unavailable through traditional documentary methods. Key Words: Alien abduction, missing time, trauma, modernism, postmodernism. ***** During the 1980s and 1990s many individuals across the United States came forward with strange stories describing their apparent abduction by extraterrestrial creatures. While aspects of these stories were variable, there existed notable trends in the way that these abductees described their experiences. These unwitting human captives explained how they were kidnapped from their homes or vehicles, were brought aboard strange ships in the sky, and were subjected to a series of highly traumatic and invasive procedures. The extraterrestrials would then erase their captives’ memories, leaving gaps of missing time, and only a lurking

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__________________________________________________________________ impression that something had occurred. The abductees, sensing that something strange may have transpired, but having no indication of what could have happened, often turned to hypnosis to ‘uncover’ their memories, only to discover their haunting and traumatic experiences of alien abduction. Abduction became the most significant story of alleged human-alien contact in the last decades of the millennium, and while these reports began on the fringes, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they became popular, if not ordinary, topics of conversations in households across the United States. My goal is not to question the objective truth of alien abduction, but instead is to consider why and how these stories resonated so deeply not just with those who reported the abduction experience, but with the broader American public at the time. While the stories themselves were deeply personal, they gained widespread popularity, featuring prominently as popular topics of conversation on talk shows and as the premise for various films and television programs. 2 These stories were taken up in popular culture and hence belonged not just to those who claimed the direct experience of abduction, but also to a broader collective imagination. Therefore, I argue that these narratives contained certain scripts that were fitting of their place in the American zeitgeist at the dawn of the new millennium. As Roger Luckhurst argues, it is important to look at how abduction became ‘embedded in cultural imaginaries in the 1980s and 1990s’ and he considers how the abduction narrative became part of the science-fictionalization of wider narratives of self and society. 3 Agreeing with Luckhurst’s assessment, I question how these stories of abduction evoke the postmodern condition, and I locate these stories in postmodern conceptions of time and concerns over traumatic memory. Yet, I find that this assessment of postmodern materialism only partially captures the complexity of these abduction narratives. Hence, I further maintain that while the abduction narrative does reflect the postmodern condition, it also reveals the intricate ways that the postmodern remains haunted by the modern. Abduction narratives reveal that there is not a simple, teleological movement and a dramatic rupture from the modern period to the postmodern one; but instead alien abduction signals the complex desire to embrace the modern and the postmodern simultaneously. In order to examine the complex ways that alien abduction came to embody postmodern rhetoric and subjectivity, while at the same time recoiling towards modern ways of thinking and being, it is important to trace the shifting discourses in the theories of subjectivity that allowed for the idea of alien abduction to take hold. Significantly, accounts of alien abduction bear considerable vestiges of the psychoanalytic revolution, especially in regards to gaps in time and hidden memories. Sigmund Freud (1865-1939), the founding father of psychoanalysis, articulates his theory of the subject which reveals that the ego is not the master of its own home; instead, the unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that remain hidden from awareness, but that can unwittingly guide human behaviours. 4 Based on his topography of the conscious, preconscious,

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__________________________________________________________________ and unconscious mind, Freud offers his conceptualization of trauma, where he argues that traumatic events are banished from consciousness through the process of repression. 5 Repression is meant to hide unspeakable traumas from awareness, and he argues that screen memories are created by the mind to substitute for what really happened in the traumatic event. 6 While a subject may experience periods of latency where the traumatic event remains dormant, ultimately what has been repressed in the unconscious refuses to stay buried and keeps trying to return. 7 Psychoanalytic conceptions of traumatic memory would offer a precursor to the ‘missing time’ and the lost memories of alien abductees by putting forth a language to describe how memories and experiences could lay dormant and forgotten – essentially ‘missing’ from the awareness of the subject. Freudian theory was debated from the beginning, but has maintained a powerful influence in the field of psychology, memory studies, and in popular culture more broadly. In the 1980s, for instance, disputes over psychoanalytic theories of trauma mushroomed as many psychologists questioned the reliability of repressed memories. On one side of the debate, and following Freud, professionals maintained that the mind could guard itself by repressing traumatic events from awareness, thereby ascribing traumatic memory with special properties that could only be uncovered through hypnosis. 8 The other side argued that events become stamped on the memory and are seldom forgotten, and that traumatic memories are no different in operation from ordinary ones. 9 This camp further argued that traumatic memories could be open to influence and contamination, and that false memories could be created by suggestion, especially through hypnosis. 10 It is important to stress the significance of how these debates over memory spilled out of the confines of the academic discipline and into popular and political discourse. It seemed as though all of a sudden allegations emerged from across the United States detailing stories of satanic ritual abuse, repressed childhood sexual assault, and alien abduction, and it was no coincidence that the revelation of these reremembered events paralleled this boom in memory studies. The language surrounding alien abduction in particular would borrow heavily from these discourses of trauma, and concerns of the traumatic experience and doubts over memory found their locus in the abduction narrative. Specifically, the gaps in time, the delays in reaction, and the paralysis of trauma were echoed in the concerns of abductees, who feared that their memories were erased, and could only be unlocked by hypnosis. Bridget Brown, in her ethnographic study of alien abductees, examines the way that hypnotists would use the therapeutic language of ‘trauma, diagnosis, and treatment’ when ‘recovering’ the memories of abductees. 11 She questions the way that so-called experts ‘treat’ abductees by framing their experiences in terms of psychological trauma, with ‘abductees as victims, and abduction experts as those capable, like the aliens themselves, of controlling the simultaneously painful and relieving process of confronting the past’. 12 Both extraterrestrials and experts share considerable resemblances; the only difference it

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__________________________________________________________________ seems is that the aliens are devoted to making the subject forget, whereas hypnotists entice the subject to remember. Brown draws attention to the ironic way that both aliens and those who treat abduction use the same powers over memory to control their patients, thereby demonstrating how concerns over missing memories and time in abduction are intimately connected with language over trauma and therapy, sometimes becoming so linked that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the alien’s abduction and the expert’s hypnotic examination. The recovery of traumatic memory through hypnosis, and alien abduction in particular, signalled the way that remembering and forgetting remained beyond an individual’s control, which was reflected time and again in the anxieties over missing time that became so central to the alien abduction reports. The first incident of missing time allegedly caused by extraterrestrials was reported in the early 1960s by Betty and Barney Hill, a couple who were returning back to New Hampshire after a holiday in Montreal, Canada. The Hills reported seeing a strange ship in the sky, but could not remember anything else from their journey home – yet when they arrived, they noticed that they were unable to account for over two hours of their return drive. The Hills turned to psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, and under hypnosis, the couple recounted their harrowing abduction aboard a flying saucer. Renowned supernatural author, John Fuller, published their account in his 1966 book The Interrupted Journey, thereby bringing the story of alien abduction to the public. 13 Many individuals came forward in the following decades to report their own abduction experiences – but it wasn’t until the ground-breaking publication of Whitley Strieber’s Communion: A True Story over twenty-year later that reports of abduction would reach their widest audience; Strieber’s novel hurdled its way onto the New York Times Bestseller list in 1987, becoming the most popular case of alien abduction in the twentieth century. 14 In his account, Strieber evokes psychoanalytic theory to describe how screen memories concealed his traumatic experiences, and he tells of how his memories were shielded from his awareness to protect him from directly experiencing the traumatic event of abduction by extraterrestrials: ‘something was hideously wrong, so wrong that my mind went blank’. 15 Strieber’s reflections importantly demonstrate the way that these wider debates about memory would become absorbed in abduction accounts. Abduction narratives became a manifestation of free-floating discourses of trauma and these stories revealed a fundamental obsession with time being missing, misplaced, or lost. The term ‘missing time’ was taken up by Budd Hopkins in his popular book of the same name: Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions. 16 Hopkins, an artist, prominent UFO researcher, and amateur hypnotist, traces the pervasiveness of inexplicable gaps in time by providing case studies with individuals who came to him to make sense of their lost memories and their anxious suspicions that something was wrong. Through hypnosis, his patients were able to uncover what had happened – they recounted traumatic tales of alien abduction and described how the intense, and all-powerful

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__________________________________________________________________ gaze of the aliens removed their memories, leading Hopkins to conclude that ‘surely hundreds, if not thousands of other such abductions must still lie buried in the silence of enforced amnesia’. 17 Hopkins finds that missing time masks ‘some kind of systematic research program, with the human species as a subject’, and his book cumulates with his revelation that there exists an invisible epidemic of alien abduction – anything could happen to any of us at any time and we would have no idea, except perhaps a feeling, and a sense that time had passed by far too quickly and could not be accounted for. 18 It was the perversion of time itself that often remained the only identifying feature of abduction, and I suggest that the ‘missing time’ in abduction accounts in many ways reflected concerns over the changing conceptions of time and space that accompanied the perceived shift from the modern era to the postmodern period. Hence, alien abduction can be taken up as an idiom for thinking about the American experience amidst these discourses in the 1980s and 1990s and as Roger Luckhurst contends, ‘abductees literally embody postmodern rhetoric’. 19 The post in postmodernity articulates a departure from the modern. The parameters of the ‘modern age’ are highly debated and have been used to describe the thought and culture of the West since the Enlightenment, or more recently to describe a historical category brought about by changes to the modes of production and new consumption practices as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 20 Whatever timeline one subscribes to, modernism was marked by the questioning (and often rejection) of tradition, a sense of the need for ‘broad philosophical, cultural or political principles that could reinvent and reinvigorate humanity’, and the embrace of grand narratives that offered comprehensive explanations of historical experience. 21 Modernity also emphasized a commitment to liberal-individualist discourse, and reinvigorating notions of humanism. Hence, stress was placed on human acts, and the modern subject was seen as an autonomous, rational agent. 22 Under postmodernism, this sense of a seemingly rational, individual and sovereign liberal subject was seen as giving away to an indeterminate, fragmented, fractured and schizophrenic one. 23 Our interior lives, according to Jameson have been disoriented by an intense waning of affect: we no longer feel as strongly as we once did. 24 Postmodernism suggests a disintegration of the subject, as our ways of orienting ourselves in the world (what Jameson describes as ‘cognitive maps’) are lost. 25 The postmodern age faces an epistemological crisis as older values become discredited and replaced by nothing new, and it has become difficult, or even impossible, to know what is real and true in the world, leading to a heightened sense of ambiguity and ambivalence. I consider how alien abduction embodies this postmodern panic, especially in its anxieties over ‘missing time’. As E.P. Thompson reminds, time is not something that is naturally given; rather perceptions of time are constructed and are subject to change. 26 As traditional, cyclical understandings of time gave way to

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__________________________________________________________________ linear notions, globalization and neoliberalism would bring about further changes to our relationship with time, leading David Harvey to advance his theory of timespace compression to describe ‘the condition[s] of postmodernity’. 27 Harvey argues that flexible accumulation, disarticulation of capital, and revolutions in telecommunications allow for the rapid movement of information across vast distances, which provoke dramatic changes in our relationship with time and space. Time-space compression describes the condensing of temporal distances and the shortening of common-sense perceptions of time as a result of the rapid acceleration and flexibility afforded by information technologies, which leads to a dramatic reshaping of our structures of experience. The organizing of the past in relation to the present and future is challenged in the postmodern epistemology, where linear and straightforward understandings of time have given way to experiences of time that are condensed, fragmented and non-linear. These conceptions of postmodern time echo the discourse of missing time in abduction accounts. Linear notions of time are fundamentally disrupted, as gaps in memory prevent things from fitting into a chronological, straightforward order. Additionally, the hidden gaps and periods of missing time that accompanies abduction evokes the postmodern fragmentation and the dissolution of the subject. The trauma of abduction reveals that the subject is not fully present to itself. Memories, which are supposed to be the anchor of identity, and which provides the body with a subject and subjectivity, becomes lost through abduction – signalling a dramatic failure not only of that memory, but of the subject itself. Amidst these debates over postmodern time and traumatic memory, it is no wonder that time was seen to have just gone missing. While the lost time and the hidden memories of alien abduction suggest the postmodern fragmentation and failure of the subject, there also exists a need to search for fixed and anchored identities. The popular attraction of these stories in the 1980s and 1990s, I suggest, is largely because they embodied the rhetoric of postmodern concerns over time and the failure of the subject, and yet also signalled an attempt at re-anchoring the modern, individual, and rational subject. In many ways, abduction becomes a reflection of the desire to preserve the ‘human’ aspects of the self – abductees are wanted by the aliens precisely because they are human – thereby reconfirming the importance of the rational, individual human at the centre of these accounts. When Strieber describes how the extraterrestrial visitors are ‘deeply afraid’ of us, he effectively demonstrates the way that abduction refocuses the importance of the human subject. 28 The creatures that Strieber and countless other abductees describe are largely automatic; their behaviour is unified and choreographed and their actions seem to be determined by some sort of hivemind. 29 These aliens, many abductees speculate, fear humans because of our astonishing individuality and agency, which they, as a group appear to lack; to quote Strieber: ‘If intelligence is normally centred in a hive or group context, a species such as mankind with individual independence of will might be a precious

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__________________________________________________________________ thing indeed’. 30 Importantly, the aliens have little sense of individuality – they are not free, autonomous, rational, individual agents like ourselves. In a sense, Strieber’s account re-establishes the importance of the human subject by romanticizing the modernist conceptions of the liberal individual. Additionally, while the abductees describe their painful and largely traumatic experiences, many abduction narratives conclude by expressing the powerful transcendence and spiritual awakening made possible by alien abduction. 31 There is a glimmer of hope in the missing memories and lost time of abduction, as the stories of the abductees suggest that these memories can ultimately be recovered. In contrast to the ahistoricity of postmodernism and the claim that we are no longer able access the past in the postmodern age, traumatic experiences, psychoanalysis suggests, provide contact with the past in all its immediacy and fullness, pointing to the real and explaining the cause of things. In describing Freudian theory, for instance, Cathy Caruth indicates that trauma is a movement from the event itself, to its repression, to its return, and she emphasize the belatedness of the traumatic experience: the neurotic repetition of trauma is ‘nothing but the unmediated occurrence of violent events’ and ‘the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits’. 32 Through trauma, and the recovery of memories by hypnosis, bits and pieces of the past could be recovered whole, offering a unifying and healing account, grounded in an originary moment – a master-narrative of sorts – that of the stable, if otherworldly, figure of the alien. This is the comfort of alien abduction: the traumatic memory is supposed to provide unmediated access to the past, and allows us to piece together time that would otherwise remain inaccessible, or missing. Hence, alien abduction demonstrates a recoil towards stabilized notions of the self and a desire to understand the past, which is seen as impenetrable in the postmodern condition. Yet, this attempt is ultimately thwarted, for (as those scholars who argue that traumatic memories could be subject to influence suggest), the traumatic memory that returns is not the original memory, but a reconstructed one – a postmodern simulation of sorts. The memory itself can be contaminated, just as the postmodern crisis of representation renders the real and fantastical as hopelessly intertwined. Hence, I find that the traumatic experience of alien abduction and missing time serve as powerful metaphors that reflect concerns of over the tendentious nature of remembering and forgetting that became cultural obsessions leading into the new millennium; and seemingly strange and otherworldly stories of alien abduction offer a means of reflecting on ourselves as humans in this moment of profound ambiguity and confusion.

Notes While this chapter is part of a volume on the Supernatural, it is important to acknowledge that the subject matter of extraterrestrials falls not exactly into the realm of the supernatural – a category, which suggests the transcendence of nature

1

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__________________________________________________________________ – but instead belongs more appropriately to the category of the paranormal or paraphysical. Aliens come from other planets or dimensions, and hence are part of the natural world, meaning that their evolution can potentially be made knowable through science. 2 Alien abduction was centrally featured in many of the storylines in the highly popular television program, The X-Files, produced/created by Chris Carter. (September 10, 1993-May 19, 2002; Fox), television; as well as the mini-series, Intruders, directed by Dan Curtis, written by Budd Hopkins, Barry Oringer, and Tracy Torme (May 17,1992-May 19, 1992; CBS), television. The subject also featured centrally in the following popular films: Fire in the Sky, directed by Robert Lieberman (1993; United States: Paramount Pictures, home release 2004), DVD; Communion, directed by Philippe Mora (1989; United States: New Line Cinema, home release 2010), DVD.; Close Encounters of the Third Kind, directed by Steven Spielberg (1977; United States: Columbia Pictures, home release 2011), DVD; to name a few. 3 Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction’, Science Fiction Studies 25.1 (1998): 29. 4 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Unconscious’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (1914-1916), trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Vintage, 2001 [1915]), 159216. 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Repression’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (1914-1916), trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Vintage, 2001 [1915]), 141-158. 6 Sigmund Freud, ‘Screen Memories’, On Freud’s ‘Screen Memories’, ed. Gail S. Reed and Howard B. Levine (Great Britain: Karnac, 2015 [1899]), 1-24. 7 Freud, ‘Repression’, 141-158. 8 See the following as examples: D. Brown, A. Scheflin, and D. C. Hammond, Memory, Trauma Treatment, and the Law (New York: Norton, 1998), 87, 196, 647; Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, rev. ed. trans. R. Ward (New York: Basic Books, 1997 [1979]), 2,6,131; Judith Herman and Emily Schatzow, ‘Recovery and Verification of Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma’, Psychoanalytic Psychology 4 (1987): 12; Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Sexual Abuse (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 22; Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 171. 9 See the following as examples: H. G. Jr. Pope, P. S. Oliva, and J. I. Hudson, ‘Repressed Memories: The Scientific Status’, Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony, vol. 1., eds. D. L. Faigman, et al. (St. Paul:

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__________________________________________________________________ West Publishing, 1999), 115-155.; Richard J. McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 2003); J. Kihlstrom, ‘An Unbalanced Balancing Act: Blocked, Recovered, and False Memories in the Laboratory and Clinic’, Clinical Psychology: Science & Practice 11 (2004): 34-41. 10 See the following as examples: Susan A. Clancy, et al., ‘Memory Distortion in People Reporting Abduction by Aliens’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 111.3 (2002): 455-460; Daniel L. Schacter, ‘The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights from Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience’, American Psychologist 54.3 (1999): 182; D. Stephen Lindsay and J. Don Read, ‘Psychotherapy and Memories of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Cognitive Perspective’, Applied Cognitive Psychology 8 (1994): 281. 11 Bridget Brown, They Know Us Better than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 40. 12 Ibid., 25. 13 John Fuller, The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer (New York: Dial Press, 1966). 14 Whitley Strieber, Communion: A True Story (New York: Avon Books, 1987). 15 Ibid., 24, 14. 16 Budd Hopkins, Missing Time: A Documented Study of the UFO Abductions (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1981). 17 Ibid., 1. 18 Ibid., 19. 19 Luckhurst, ‘The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma’, 39. 20 Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 163; Joseph Francese, Narrating Postmodern Time and Space (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 1. 21 Mansfield, Subjectivity, 163; Jean-Franҫois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 [1979]), xxiii. 22 Timothy Melley, ‘Postmodern Amnesia: Trauma and Forgetting in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods’, Contemporary Literature 44.1 (2003): 106107. 23 Ibid., 108. 24 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 72. 25 Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 353.

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__________________________________________________________________ E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38 (1967): 56. 27 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), 284. 28 Strieber, Communion, 175. 29 Ibid., 251. 30 Ibid. 31 McNally, Remembering Trauma, 234. 32 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 59. 26

Bibliography Bass, Ellen, and Laura Davis. The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Sexual Abuse. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Brown, Bridget. They Know Us Better than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Brown, D., A. Scheflin, and D. C. Hammond. Memory, Trauma Treatment, and the Law. New York: Norton, 1998. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Clancy, Susan, Richard J. McNally, Daniel L. Schacter, Mark F. Lenzenweger, Roger K. Pitman. ‘Memory Distortion in People Reporting Abduction by Aliens’. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 111.3 (2002): 455-460. Francese, Joseph. Narrating Postmodern Time and Space. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997. Fredrickson, Renee. Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Screen Memories’. On Freud’s ‘Screen Memories’, edited by Gail S. Reed and Howard B. Levine, 1-24. Great Britain: Karnac, 2015 [1899]. ———. ‘Repression’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (1914-1916). Translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, 141-158. London: Vintage, 2001 [1915].

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__________________________________________________________________ ———. ‘The Unconscious’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (1914-1916). Translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. London: Vintage, 2001 [1915]. Fuller, John. The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer. New York: Dial Press, 1966. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990. Herman, Judith, and Emily Shatzow. ‘Recovery and Verification of Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma’. Psychoanalytic Psychology 4 (1987): 1-14. Hopkins, Budd. Missing Time: A Documented Study of the UFO Abductions. New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1981. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Cognitive Mapping’. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 347-360. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1988. ———. ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. Postmodernism: A Reader, edited by Thomas Docherty, 62-92. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Kihlstrom, J. ‘An Unbalanced Balancing Act: Blocked, Recovered, and False Memories in the Laboratory and Clinic’. Clinical Psychology: Science & Practice 11 (2004): 34-41. Lindsay, D. Stephen, and J. Don Read. ‘Psychotherapy and Memories of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Cognitive Perspective’. Applied Cognitive Psychology 8 (1994): 281-338. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction’. Science Fiction Studies 25.1 (1998): 29-52. Lyotard, Jean- Franҫois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 [1979]. Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

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__________________________________________________________________ McNally, Richard J. Remembering Trauma. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 2003. Melley, Timothy. ‘Postmodern Amnesia: Trauma and Forgetting in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods’. Contemporary Literature 44.1 (2003): 106-131. Miller, Alice. The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. Translated and edited by R. Ward. New York: Basic Books, 1997 [1979]. Pope, H. G. Jr., P. S. Oliva, and J. I. Hudson. ‘Repressed Memories: The Scientific Status’. Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony, Vol. 1., edited by D. L. Faigman, David H. Kaye, Michael J. Saks, and Joseph Sanders, 115-155. St. Paul: West Publishing, 1999. Schacter, Daniel L. ‘The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights from Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience’. American Psychologist 54.3 (1999): 182-203. Strieber, Whitley. Communion: A True Story. New York: Avon Books, 1987. Thompson, E. P. ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’. Past and Present 38 (1967): 56-97. Film and Television Sources Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 1977. United States: Columbia Pictures, home release 2011. DVD. Communion. Directed by Philippe Mora. 1989. United States: New Line Cinema, home release, 2010. DVD. Fire in the Sky. Directed by Robert Lieberman. 1993. United States: Paramount Pictures, home release 2004. DVD. Intruders. Directed by Dan Curtis. Written by Budd Hopkins, Barry Oringer, and Tracy Torme. CBS, May 17,1992-May 19, 1992. The X-Files. Chris Carter, producer/creator. Fox, September 10, 1993-May 19, 2002. Laura Thursby is a graduate student in Cultural Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, ON, Canada. Her research interests, broadly speaking, include but

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__________________________________________________________________ are not limited to: conspiracy theories, alien abduction, Freudian theory, the uncanny, representation, postmodernism, American popular history, and communication.

Paranormal/Supernatural Experiences and Loss Camilla Pagani Abstract Scientific literature seems to indicate that paranormal/supernatural experiences are more frequent after negative life events or, in any case, after important life changes. This chapter presents some relevant results of an exploratory study which aims to thoroughly analyse the complex relationship between paranormal/ supernatural experiences and particularly challenging life events, like, for example, the loss of a loved one. Can we hypothesize that in these cases the paranormal/ supernatural experience and/or the interest in the paranormal or in the supernatural are mere instruments that some people utilize as simple defence mechanisms in order to escape a bleak and hard reality? Or, alternatively, can we hypothesize that through a particular experience of loss (which may not necessarily coincide only with the physical death of a significant other) some people attain an expansion of their awareness, a condition of special non-separateness from other living things in a multiplicity of new and interconnected perspectives, and an enhancement of their consciousness so as to get in touch with other, so far unknown, realities? This study especially draws on qualitative data, namely on in-depth interviews with adults who are interested in, and/or are in various degrees familiar with, the paranormal and/or the supernatural. Key Words: Defence mechanisms, expanded consciousness, in-depth interviews, loss, paranormal/supernatural experiences, qualitative data. ***** 1. Introduction The considerations I will present in this chapter constitute the first stage of an exploratory study which aims to thoroughly analyse the complex relationship between paranormal/supernatural experiences and challenging life events especially connected with the experience of loss. Paranormal experiences may be defined as experiences ‘that fall outside the realm of normative experience or violate scientific explanation or expectations of reality’. 1 Instead, supernatural experiences generally include profound mystical or spiritual experiences, like, for example, an ‘overwhelming feeling of peace and unity with the entire creation, or profound inner sense of divine presence’. 2 In this phase, the primary aim of the research focuses on the paranormal/ supernatural experiences, and not on the beliefs. Indeed, it is important to point out that most of the studies have so far dealt with paranormal/supernatural beliefs rather than with paranormal/supernatural experiences. 3 It is unquestionable that in many cases both the experiences and the beliefs may be part of the life history of an

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__________________________________________________________________ individual, but it is also unquestionable that the meaning of an experience and the meaning of a belief are per se specific and different. Besides, scientific research has indicated that there are significant relationships between paranormal/ supernatural experiences (and not paranormal/supernatural beliefs) and, for example, specific cognitive processes, personological characteristics or components of an individual’s history. Instead, in other cases, other significant relationships only refer to the paranormal/supernatural beliefs and not to the experiences. 4 It is generally assumed that paranormal/supernatural experiences are especially frequent after negative life events. 5 Given that traumas may predispose a person to go through paranormal/supernatural experiences, can these experiences simply be regarded and dismissed as mere defence mechanisms, that is as processes that the mind unconsciously uses to manipulate reality and, through this, to reduce suffering? Or, instead, could these experiences be viewed as other forms of knowledge through which the mind can further enlarge its potentialities so that it can attain a finer and larger (including supernatural) comprehension of reality? I argue this is a question of the utmost relevance. If we decide to consider the second hypothesis, we should also try to identify and explain the psychological processes leading to this supposed finer and larger comprehension of reality. Since reports of paranormal experiences are frequently correlated with reports of transcendent/supernatural experiences, 6 in this chapter I will refer to both these experiences and to their possible relationship to challenging life events. Finally, it is important to spend a few words in order to better explain the meaning I am here attaching to the word ‘loss’. In this chapter I am using this term in a broad sense. This means that it does not necessarily coincide with the loss (either physical or affective) of an individual (e.g., a person or an animal) or of an object (a significant property, like a home) but also with the loss of something that belonged to the characteristics of an individual’s personality and/or personal history, like for example her/his feelings of hope, trust, love, self-confidence, her/his good health or sense of identity. 2. Methodology This preliminary study especially draws on qualitative data, namely on in-depth interviews with adults who are interested in, and/or are in various degrees familiar with, the paranormal and/or the supernatural. The in-depth interviews were conducted with 20 participants (14 females and 6 males), aged between 30-68. The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed. The length of the interviews varies from 18 to 68 minutes. Participants were allowed to talk as long as they liked. All participants were people that I knew and, most importantly, that were to my knowledge, in a way or other familiar with and/or interested in paranormal/ supernatural experiences. The degree of my familiarity with these people was different according to cases. Some were relatives, others were close friends, others were just friends, and others were acquaintances.

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__________________________________________________________________ In this research area the use of questionnaires is frequent. A very good example of this methodology is provided by the two questionnaires developed by Kennedy and Kanthamani, 7 which focus on the effects of paranormal and spiritual experiences on people’s lives and well-being. These questionnaires are extremely useful. However, in this preliminary phase of the research, in-depth interviews were used – an approach that obviously has its advantages as well as its disadvantages – so as to permit participants to describe their experiences and views more freely. I was absolutely aware of the delicateness of the topic we were going to address, so I decided to leave each participant and myself all the time we needed to complete the task. At the beginning and during the whole course of our conversation I tried to create both in myself and in the person I had in front of me a ‘calm’, concentrated, and trustful disposition. I introduced the topic by using more or less these words: ‘I know you are interested in paranormal/supernatural experiences. I would like to know the story of this interest, how it started and developed. I am asking this question to some people I know and who share our interest in this field’. In a few cases I was even more clear and asked participants if there had been some kind of event that had particularly stimulated this interest. I knew that these people had had some kind of paranormal/supernatural experiences but I preferred to more generally refer to their ‘interest’ in this area. I also told them that the first person I had asked this question to was myself, thus providing a clearer idea of the aim of the research and, hopefully, also a deeper motivation to deal with their task as attentively and openly as they could. I allowed participants to use their own conceptualizations regarding the terms ‘paranormal’ and ‘supernatural’. Some participants’ experiences leant more on the paranormal, while other participants’ experiences leant more on the supernatural. Participants came from different backgrounds. They addressed the topic with different perspectives, different words, and different attitudes, according to their personal histories, including their educational background, and their personalities. In this stage of the research, in order to obtain data characterized by a minimum number of variables, none of the participants were from foreign countries, but all were Italians, who lived in cities or towns in central and northern Italy. No participant lived in southern Italy, a geographical area where the contact with the paranormal/supernatural is traditionally and culturally particularly present. Each interview is notable and unique in itself. And each interview would deserve at least a chapter of its own. Besides, when I listened to the taped interviews, I realized how also the sound, the tone, and the rhythm of the voice are important components of each participant’s talk. So, also the nuances of the sound of the voice, the rhythm of the speech and other formal characteristics of participants’ interviews were considered and contributed to the interpretation of data. On account of all these considerations I decided that in this very preliminary stage I would circumscribe my area of analysis to just a few aspects of participants’

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__________________________________________________________________ interviews. For this reason, here I selected and analysed only a few fragments of a small number of interviews. As I said before, my approach is qualitative. Hence, I thought I would analyse these linguistic fragments as if they were literary texts. 3. Is It Possible to Relate Paranormal/ Supernatural Experiences to a Significant, Often Negative, Life Event or Period? Some Extracts from Participants’ Interviews In order to address this question, I will quote some extracts from a small number of the interviews I conducted. The following are the words of a male participant, whom we will call Antonio. Antonio realized he had paranormal capacities and a special sensibility when he was 13. I was emerging from a childhood that had been particularly difficult. I have now realized that, as far as I can see, in 90% of cases, people who are predisposed to these experiences have had some traumas. They are people who have gone through quite a lot of suffering. […] Some of them avoid talking about it, are closed in themselves…however, one day one finds out that they also have suffered a lot. […] In my opinion, the point is that this suffering strongly compels a person to get in touch with her/his inner self. A child that is obliged to suffer all the time is more inclined to listen to her/himself, to be closed in her/himself and this is an aspect that can facilitate this predisposition. 8 Antonio’s view is clear: negative and painful events predispose a person to these experiences and they do it through a precise process: by obliging this person to get to know her/himself more thoroughly and more deeply. Another important point is made by Antonio: people sometimes prefer not to mention their suffering. I also hypothesized that some participants were reluctant to admit a link between their paranormal/supernatural experiences and their experiences of loss/suffering because they tend to deny their suffering. And this is what another participant, Sabina, said when she directly addressed my question regarding the possible antecedents of her interest in the paranormal/ supernatural: This happened more continuously and thoroughly after my husband’s death, as I felt I needed to be connected with him in a way and so I also consulted a medium.[…] However, I had been concretely attracted by and interested in the supernatural even before his death. […] Since I was an adolescent I have been interested in all the themes that are connected to spirituality, such

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__________________________________________________________________ as religions and philosophy […], also the artistic expressions, for example the symbolist painters of the early 20th century […]. […] As an adolescent I was interested in religions and the world of dreams as well, also because my mother used to tell me her dreams; in a way she lived two parallel lives […], it was almost as if she was more fascinated by her dreams than by real life, which on the whole was quite grey and repetitive, so I also approached this world and was fascinated by it. […] I would like to understand the importance of spirit guides, […] a possible supernatural world […], which interests me because it is the world where, I think, the people I have loved have gone. […] This has very much to do with my suffering and with having been abandoned when I was a child, having been separated from my parents and uprooted from my family, so that suffering generally prompts this question: ‘why do I have to suffer?’ […]. I wanted to know where he [her husband] had gone. I did not want to reach him and be closer to him, because …maybe I did not want to feel so lonely and, I don’t know, I wanted to know where he might have gone. […] I like the spiritual experience also because […] maybe I would like to get stronger. 9 There are at least three important points in Sabina’s interview: 1) the connection with the loss of her husband, 2) the connection with two childhood experiences – one, the closeness to her mother’s world through her mother’s interest in the world of dreams, the other her early separation from her family, and 3) the idea that pursuing this interest might possibly make her feel stronger. I will now quote an extract from another interview, given by a woman, whom we will call Franca: […] there was an event that opened me to the world […] I found out that he [her second husband] was not what I had seen. There was another world behind and I had started to see it and this was traumatic. After that, I fell in a deep depression. I found myself in an apartment, alone, with a child, the cold of solitude and depression. […] I had to search, to find […]. I started nourishing this spiritual faith, reading books on this spiritual part and I understood that I had a great sensibility and that many things arrived to me that I had not been aware of before. […] [This experience] helped me understand myself more deeply and […] acknowledge that I had to develop this spiritual part, like Joseph that was thrown naked into a pit by his brothers. Yes, sometimes we reach that level in the pit, where you can only climb up the pit

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__________________________________________________________________ again, because you cannot go below that point. Yes, I saw the pit, the darkness of the pit. 10 Franca’s talk emotionally introduces the listener into her drama and slowly accompanies her/him in her journey to her rebirth. She speaks calmly, solemnly, and spontaneously, as if she were in front of a big audience who is silently listening to her. Another participant, a woman we will call Teresa analysed her psychological and spiritual transformation with a strong emotional involvement and, at the same time, scientific accuracy. She describes a period in her life in her twenties: […] I felt empty […] I felt that every time I got what I wanted I was not happy […]. I began to realize the meaning of another dimension, which immediately filled me with a greater solidity and self-confidence, not as a specific person, with my qualities, my strong points, and my abilities, but as a part of a whole. It is a whole that has invaluable possibilities by itself. From this experience I got the feeling that nothing was impossible to me, but not as a specific body or a specific mind, but as a spiritual entity […]. At the same time […] I also experienced my smallness within this whole but I also felt I was a part of it and that I needed to embrace it more and more. [...] My childhood was not particularly happy. Suffering can certainly sharpen our sensibility, and at the same time it can strengthen the use of defence mechanisms, […] it is difficult to distinguish on a case-by-case basis. Since I was a child I had strange feelings I cannot describe well. There were moments in which I was particularly aware of myself – I might call them kind of experiences of loss of identity – suddenly, without any warning, it was as if someone were tapping on my shoulder – a sort of call, so that I felt that I could be anything, the leaf that fell from the tree, the wind I felt on my cheek, that passerby I met in the street; I lost the limits of my body and of my personality. In a way these were ambivalent feelings because they filled me with a sense of freedom and at the same time with a tremendous fear I might have lost my identity and so I fought against this feeling. […] Later on, these feelings were transfigured and produced less fear […]. I met a person, then others […] I became familiar with these teachings […] [Teresa is here referring to the principles connected to Hindu philosophy]. They gave me strength, serenity, and balance […] and produced an enormous difference […]. 11

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__________________________________________________________________ For reasons of space I will not comment on an interview given by a musician. It would especially deserve a chapter of its own as it connects the aesthetic and the spiritual/supernatural experiences. Suffice here to mention an experience she had at the age of three. She heard some music coming from a far window and felt she was ‘connected both with myself and with what was happening there […], a deep connection with myself and with everything […], a sort of matrix […], a cast of a basic experience of interconnection’. This experience had occurred in a period that had immediately followed a traumatic event, an experience of disruption, as she had been removed from her home. It almost seems that the experience of interconnection could counterbalance the experience of disruption. This example is all the more notable because research findings indicate that paranormal and transcendent experiences are positively and significantly correlated with interest in artistic creativity. 12 Finally, it is important to point out that some participants were not able to clearly identify some kind of antecedents to their interest in paranormal/ supernatural experiences. Most of them simply stated that this interest had always been part of themselves. 4. Conclusions We have to acknowledge that in most cases it is difficult, and sometimes very difficult, especially for the interviewer, to identify and understand the events, both exterior and/or interior, that fostered the emergence of participants’ experiences, interests, and capacities in the paranormal/supernatural field. Some participants more easily referred to specific events of their personal histories, others were more reserved as to mentioning specific life events and preferred to mention only their inner – both cognitive and emotional – experiences. This variety might also depend on participants’ personalities and on their degree of familiarity with the interviewer. However, in most cases, participants seemed to identify a specific event or situation when their interest in the paranormal/supernatural clearly developed, though at the same time they also reported that a predisposition for this kind of experiences had in a way been present in their lives even before. Participants referred to different kinds of experiences of loss: the death of a spouse, the betrayal on the part of a husband, the fear of losing one’s identity, their loss of hope, of meaning in their lives, or of their family. Some participants also seemed to envisage the emotional and cognitive processes through which they recovered from their experiences of loss. In these cases, suffering becomes a synonym for awareness through a sort of experience of death and rebirth and a struggle for survival. At this very early stage of our exploratory study we are not yet able to know whether these experiences can be simply defined as defence mechanisms. Further research is needed in order to better clarify this point. However, it is possible to hypothesize that in many cases these experiences may serve a consolatory function

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__________________________________________________________________ but that on the whole their meaning is not circumscribed to it. Indeed, it is highly conceivable that they contribute to expanding and intrinsically transforming the individual’s consciousness along new and still unexplored directions.

Notes Monisha Berkowski and Douglas A. MacDonald, ‘Childhood Trauma and the Development of Paranormal Beliefs’, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 202 (2014): 305-312, 305. 2 James E. Kennedy and H. Kanthamani, ‘An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Paranormal and Spiritual Experiences on Peoples’ Lives and Well-Being’, The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 89 (1995): 249-265, 251. 3 See for example Richard Beck and Jonathan P. Miller, ‘Erosion of Belief and Disbelief: Effects of Religiosity and Negative Affect on Beliefs in the Paranormal and Supernatural’, The Journal of Social Psychology 141 (2001): 277-287; Andreas Hergovich and Martin Arendasy, ‘Critical Thinking Ability and Belief in the Paranormal’, Personality and Individual Differences 38 (2005): 1805-1812; Harvey J. Irwin, ‘Belief in the Paranormal: A Review of the Empirical Literature’, The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 87 (1993): 1-39; Marjaana Lindeman, Annika M. Svedholm-Häkkinen, and Tapani Riekki, ‘Skepticism: Genuine Unbelief or Implicit Beliefs in the Supernatural?’, Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016): 216-228; Thomas Rabeyron and Caroline Watt, ‘Paranormal Experiences, Mental Health and Mental Boundaries, and Psi’, Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010): 487-492. 4 See Berkowski and MacDonald, ‘Childhood Trauma and the Development of Paranormal Beliefs’; Neil Dagnall, Andrew Parker, and Gary Munley, ‘Paranormal Belief and Reasoning’, Personality and Individual Differences 43 (2007): 14061415; Rabeyron and Watt, ‘Paranormal Experiences, Mental Health and Mental Boundaries, and Psi’. 5 See, for instance, Tony Lawrence, et al., ‘Modelling Childhood Causes of Paranormal Belief and Experience: Childhood Trauma and Childhood Fantasy’, Personality and Individual Differences 19 (1995): 209-215; Rabeyron and Watt, ‘Paranormal Experiences, Mental Health and Mental Boundaries, and Psi’. 6 See, for example, Kennedy and Kanthamani, ‘An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Paranormal and Spiritual Experiences on Peoples’ Lives and Well-Being’. 7 James E. Kennedy, H. Kanthamani, and John Palmer, ‘Psychic and Spiritual Experiences, Health, Well-Being, and Meaning in Life’, Journal of Parapsychology 58 (1994): 353-383; Kennedy and Kanthamani, ‘An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Paranormal and Spiritual Experiences on Peoples’ Lives and Well-Being’. 8 Extract from the interview with Antonio. 9 Extract from the interview with Sabina. 10 Extract from the interview with Franca. 1

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__________________________________________________________________ Extract from the interview with Teresa. See, for instance, James E. Kennedy and H. Kanthamani, ‘Association Between Anomalous Experiences and Artistic Creativity and Spirituality’, The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 89 (1995): 333-343. 11 12

Bibliography Beck, Richard and Jonathan P. Miller. ‘Erosion of Belief and Disbelief: Effects of Religiosity and Negative Affect on Beliefs in the Paranormal and Supernatural’. The Journal of Social Psychology 141 (2001): 277-287. Berkowski, Monisha and Douglas A. MacDonald. ‘Childhood Trauma and the Development of Paranormal Beliefs’. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 202 (2014): 305-312. Dagnall, Neil, Parker Andrew and Gary Munley. ‘Paranormal Belief and Reasoning’. Personality and Individual Differences 43 (2007): 1406-1415. Hergovich, Andreas and Martin Arendasy, ‘Critical Thinking Ability and Belief in the Paranormal’. Personality and Individual Differences 38 (2005): 1805-1812. Irwin, Harvey J. ‘Belief in the Paranormal: A Review of the Empirical Literature’. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 87 (1993): 1-39. Kennedy, James E., Kanthamani H. and John Palmer. ‘Psychic and Spiritual Experiences, Health, Well-Being, and Meaning in Life’. Journal of Parapsychology 58 (1994): 353-383. Kennedy, James E. and Kanthamani H. ‘An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Paranormal and Spiritual Experiences on Peoples’ Lives and Well-Being’. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 89 (1995a): 249-265. Kennedy, James E. and Kanthamani H. ‘Association Between Anomalous Experiences and Artistic Creativity and Spirituality’. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 89 (1995b): 333-343. Lawrence, Tony, Claire Edwards, Nicholas Barraclough, Sarah Church, and Francesca Hetherington, ‘Modelling Childhood Causes of Paranormal Belief and Experience: Childhood Trauma and Childhood Fantasy’. Personality and Individual Differences 19 (1995): 209-215.

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__________________________________________________________________ Lindeman, Marjaana, M. Svedholm-Häkkinen Annika and Tapani Riekki. ‘Skepticism: Genuine Unbelief or Implicit Beliefs in the Supernatural?’. Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016): 216-228. Rabeyron, Thomas and Caroline Watt. ‘Paranormal Experiences, Mental Health and Mental Boundaries, and Psi’. Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010): 487492. Camilla Pagani, PhD, is a psychologist and an associate researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council. She has been involved in the study of humans’ relationship with diversity. She is now interested in complexity theories and in paranormal/supernatural experiences.