Because surrounding peoples of this earth would not assimilate with her
own colonists in the part of the earth that we now call England.
I don't know that there has ever been more nearly just, reasonable, or
logical wrath, in this earth's history--if there is no other wrath.
The wrath of Azuria, because the other peoples of this earth would not
turn blue to suit her.
History is a department of human delusion that interests us. We are able
to give a little advancement to history. In the vitrified forts of a few
parts of Europe, we find data that the Humes and Gibbons have
disregarded.
The vitrified forts surrounding England, but not in England.
The vitrified forts of Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia.
Or that, once upon a time, with electric blasts, Azuria tried to swipe
this earth clear of the peoples who resisted her.
The vast blue bulk of Azuria appeared in the sky. Clouds turned green.
The sun was formless and purple in the vibrations of wrath that were
emanating from Azuria. The whitish, or yellowish, or brownish peoples of
Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia fled to hilltops and built
forts. In a real existence, hilltops, or easiest accessibility to an
aerial enemy, would be the last choice in refuges. But here, in
quasi-existence, if we're accustomed to run to hilltops, in times of
danger, we run to them just the same, even with danger closest to
hilltops. Very common in quasi-existence: attempt to escape by running
closer to the pursuing.
They built forts, or already had forts, on hilltops.
Something poured electricity upon them.
The stones of these forts exist to this day, vitrified, or melted and
turned to glass.
The archaeologists have jumped from one conclusion to another, like the
"rapid chamois" we read of a while ago, to account for vitrified forts,
always restricted by the commandment that unless their conclusions
conformed to such tenets as Exclusionism, of the System, they would be
excommunicated. So archaeologists, in their medieval dread of
excommunication, have tried to explain vitrified forts in terms of
terrestrial experience. We find in their insufficiencies the same old
assimilating of all that could be assimilated, and disregard for the
unassimilable, conventionalizing into the explanation that vitrified
forts were made by prehistoric peoples who built vast fires--often
remote from wood-supply--to melt externally, and to cement together, the
stones of their constructions. But negativeness always: so within itself
a science can never be homogeneous or unified or harmonious. So Miss
Russel, in the _Journal of the B.A.A._, has pointed out that it is
seldom that single stones, to say nothing of long walls, of large houses
that are burned to the ground, are vitrified.
If we pay a little attention to this subject, ourselves, before starting
to write upon it, which is one of the ways of being more nearly real
than oppositions so far encountered by us, we find:
That the stones of these forts are vitrified in no reference to
cementing them: that they are cemented here and there, in streaks, as if
special blasts had struck, or played, upon them.
Then one thinks of lightning?
Once upon a time something melted, in streaks, the stones of forts on
the tops of hills in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia.
Lightning selects the isolated and conspicuous.
But some of the vitrified forts are not upon tops of hills: some are
very inconspicuous: their walls too are vitrified in streaks.
Something once had effect, similar to lightning, upon forts, mostly on
hills, in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia.
But upon hills, all over the rest of the world, are remains of forts
that are not vitrified.
There is only one crime, in the local sense, and that is not to turn
blue, if the gods are blue: but, in the universal sense, the one crime
is not to turn the gods themselves green, if you're green.
13
One of the most extraordinary of phenomena, or alleged phenomena, of
psychic research, or alleged research--if in quasi-existence there never
has been real research, but only approximations to research that merge
away, or that are continuous with, prejudice and convenience--
"Stone-throwing."
It's attributed to poltergeists. They're mischievous spirits.
Poltergeists do not assimilate with our own present quasi-system, which
is an attempt to correlate denied or disregarded data as phenomena of
extra-telluric forces, expressed in physical terms. Therefore I regard
poltergeists as evil or false or discordant or absurd--names that we
give to various degrees or aspects of the unassimilable, or that which
resists attempts to organize, harmonize, systematize, or, in short, to
positivize--names that we give to our recognitions of the negative
state. I don't care to deny poltergeists, because I suspect that later,
when we're more enlightened, or when we widen the range of our
credulities, or take on more of that increase of ignorance that is
called knowledge, poltergeists may become assimilable. Then they'll be
as reasonable as trees. By reasonableness I mean that which assimilates
with a dominant force, or system, or a major body of thought--which is,
itself, of course, hypnosis and delusion--developing, however, in our
acceptance, to higher and higher approximations to realness. The
poltergeists are now evil or absurd to me, proportionately to their
present unassimilableness, compounded, however, with the factor of their
possible future assimilableness.
We lug in the poltergeists, because some of our own data, or alleged
data, merge away indistinguishably with data, or alleged data, of them:
Instances of stones that have been thrown, or that have fallen, upon a
small area, from an unseen and undetectable source.
London _Times_, April 27, 1872:
"From 4 o'clock, Thursday afternoon, until half past eleven, Thursday
night, the houses, 56 and 58 Reverdy Road, Bermondsey, were assailed
with stones and other missiles coming from an unseen quarter. Two
children were injured, every window broken, and several articles of
furniture were destroyed. Although there was a strong body of policemen
scattered in the neighborhood, they could not trace the direction whence
the stones were thrown."
"Other missiles" make a complication here. But if the expression means
tin cans and old shoes, and if we accept that the direction could not be
traced because it never occurred to anyone to look upward--why, we've
lost a good deal of our provincialism by this time.
London _Times_, Sept. 16, 1841:
That, in the home of Mrs. Charton, at Sutton Courthouse, Sutton Lane,
Chiswick, windows had been broken "by some unseen agent." Every attempt
to detect the perpetrator failed. The mansion was detached and
surrounded by high walls. No other building was near it.
The police were called. Two constables, assisted by members of the
household, guarded the house, but the windows continued to be broken
"both in front and behind the house."
Or the floating islands that are often stationary in the Super-Sargasso
Sea; and atmospheric disturbances that sometimes affect them, and bring
things down within small areas, upon this earth, from temporarily
stationary sources.
Super-Sargasso Sea and the beaches of its floating islands from which I
think, or at least accept, pebbles have fallen:
Wolverhampton, England, June, 1860--violent storm--fall of so many
little black pebbles that they were cleared away by shoveling (_La Sci.
Pour Tous_, 5-264); great number of small black stones that fell at
Birmingham, England, August, 1858--violent storm--said to be similar to
some basalt a few leagues from Birmingham (_Rept. Brit. Assoc._,
1864-37); pebbles described as "common water-worn pebbles" that fell at
Palestine, Texas, July 6, 1888--"of a formation not found near
Palestine" (W.H. Perry, Sergeant, Signal Corps, _Monthly Weather
Review_, July, 1888); round, smooth pebbles at Kandahor, 1834 (_Am. J.
Sci._, 1-26-161); "a number of stones of peculiar formation and shapes,
unknown in this neighborhood, fell in a tornado at Hillsboro, Ill., May
18, 1883." (_Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1883.)
Pebbles from aerial beaches and terrestrial pebbles as products of
whirlwinds, so merge in these instances that, though it's interesting to
hear of things of peculiar shape that have fallen from the sky, it seems
best to pay little attention here, and to find phenomena of the
Super-Sargasso Sea remote from the merger:
To this requirement we have three adaptations:
Pebbles that fell where no whirlwind to which to attribute them could be
learned of:
Pebbles which fell in hail so large that incredibly could that hail have
been formed in this earth's atmosphere:
Pebbles which fell and were, long afterward, followed by more pebbles,
as if from some aerial, stationary source, in the same place. In
September, 1898, there was a story in a New York newspaper, of
lightning--or an appearance of luminosity?--in Jamaica--something had
struck a tree: near the tree were found some small pebbles. It was said
that the pebbles had fallen from the sky, with the lightning. But the
insult to orthodoxy was that they were not angular fragments such as
might have been broken from a stony meteorite: that they were
"water-worn pebbles."
In the geographical vagueness of a mainland, the explanation "up from
one place and down in another" is always good, and is never overworked,
until the instances are massed as they are in this book: but, upon this
occasion, in the relatively small area of Jamaica, there was no
whirlwind findable--however "there in the first place" bobs up.
_Monthly Weather Review_, August, 1898-363:
That the government meteorologist had investigated: had reported that a
tree had been struck by lightning, and that small water-worn pebbles had
been found near the tree: but that similar pebbles could be found all
over Jamaica.
_Monthly Weather Review_, September, 1915-446:
Prof. Fassig gives an account of a fall of hail that occurred in
Maryland, June 22, 1915: hailstones the size of baseballs "not at all
uncommon."
"An interesting, but unconfirmed, account stated that small pebbles were
found at the center of some of the larger hail gathered at Annapolis.
The young man who related the story offered to produce the pebbles, but
has not done so."
A footnote:
"Since writing this, the author states that he has received some of the
pebbles."
When a young man "produces" pebbles, that's as convincing as anything
else I've ever heard of, though no more convincing than, if having told
of ham sandwiches falling from the sky, he should "produce" ham
sandwiches. If this "reluctance" be admitted by us, we correlate it with
a datum reported by a Weather Bureau observer, signifying that, whether
the pebbles had been somewhere aloft a long time or not, some of the
hailstones that fell with them, had been. The datum is that some of
these hailstones were composed of from twenty to twenty-five layers
alternately of clear ice and snow-ice. In orthodox terms I argue that a
fair-sized hailstone falls from the clouds with velocity sufficient to
warm it so that it would not take on even one layer of ice. To put on
twenty layers of ice, I conceive of something that had not fallen at
all, but had rolled somewhere, at a leisurely rate, for a long time.
We now have a commonplace datum that is familiar in two respects:
Little, symmetric objects of metal that fell at Orenburg, Russia,
September, 1824 (_Phil. Mag._, 4-8-463).
A second fall of these objects, at Orenburg, Russia, Jan. 25, 1825
(_Quar. Jour. Roy. Inst._, 1828-1-447).
I now think of the disk of Tarbes, but when first I came upon these data
I was impressed only with recurrence, because the objects of Orenburg
were described as crystals of pyrites, or sulphate of iron. I had no
notion of metallic objects that might have been shaped or molded by
means other than crystallization, until I came to Arago's account of
these occurrences (_OEuvres_, 11-644). Here the analysis gives 70 per
cent. red oxide of iron, and sulphur and loss by ignition 5 per cent. It
seems to me acceptable that iron with considerably less than 5 per cent.
sulphur in it is not iron pyrites--then little, rusty iron objects,
shaped by some other means, have fallen, four months apart, at the same
place. M. Arago expresses astonishment at this phenomenon of recurrence
so familiar to us.
Altogether, I find opening before us, vistas of heresies to which I, for
one, must shut my eyes. I have always been in sympathy with the
dogmatists and exclusionists: that is plain in our opening lines: that
to seem to be is falsely and arbitrarily and dogmatically to exclude. It
is only that exclusionists who are good in the nineteenth century are
evil in the twentieth century. Constantly we feel a merging away into
infinitude; but that this book shall approximate to form, or that our
data shall approximate to organization, or that we shall approximate to
intelligibility, we have to call ourselves back constantly from
wandering off into infinitude. The thing that we do, however, is to make
our own outline, or the difference between what we include and what we
exclude, vague.
The crux here, and the limit beyond which we may not go--very much--is:
Acceptance that there is a region that we call the Super-Sargasso
Sea--not yet fully accepted, but a provisional position that has
received a great deal of support--
But is it a part of this earth, and does it revolve with and over this
earth--
Or does it flatly overlie this earth, not revolving with and over this
earth--
That this earth does not revolve, and is not round, or roundish, at all,
but is continuous with the rest of its system, so that, if one could
break away from the traditions of the geographers, one might walk and
walk, and come to Mars, and then find Mars continuous with Jupiter?
I suppose some day such queries will sound absurd--the thing will be so
obvious--
Because it is very difficult for me to conceive of little metallic
objects hanging precisely over a small town in Russia, for four months,
if revolving, unattached, with a revolving earth--
It may be that something aimed at that town, and then later took another
shot.
These are speculations that seem to me to be evil relatively to these
early years in the twentieth century--
Just now, I accept that this earth is--not round, of course: that is
very old-fashioned--but roundish, or, at least, that it has what is
called form of its own, and does revolve upon its axis, and in an orbit
around the sun. I only accept these old traditional notions--
And that above it are regions of suspension that revolve with it: from
which objects fall, by disturbances of various kinds, and then, later,
fall again, in the same place:
_Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1884-134:
Report from the Signal Service observer, at Bismarck, Dakota:
That, at 9 o'clock, in the evening of May 22, 1884, sharp sounds were
heard throughout the city, caused by a fall of flinty stones striking
against windows.
Fifteen hours later another fall of flinty stones occurred at Bismarck.
There is no report of stones having fallen anywhere else.
This is a thing of the ultra-damned. All Editors of scientific
publications read the _Monthly Weather Review_ and frequently copy from
it. The noise made by the stones of Bismarck, rattling against those
windows, may be in a language that aviators will some day interpret:
but it was a noise entirely surrounded by silences. Of this ultra-damned
thing, there is no mention, findable by me, in any other publication.
The size of some hailstones has worried many meteorologists--but not
text-book meteorologists. I know of no more serene occupation than that
of writing text-books--though writing for the _War Cry_, of the
Salvation Army, may be equally unadventurous. In the drowsy tranquillity
of a text-book, we easily and unintelligently read of dust particles
around which icy rain forms, hailstones, in their fall, then increasing
by accretion--but in the meteorological journals, we read often of
air-spaces nucleating hailstones--
But it's the size of the things. Dip a marble in icy water. Dip and dip
and dip it. If you're a resolute dipper, you will, after a while, have
an object the size of a baseball--but I think a thing could fall from
the moon in that length of time. Also the strata of them. The Maryland
hailstones are unusual, but a dozen strata have often been counted.
Ferrel gives an instance of thirteen strata. Such considerations led
Prof. Schwedoff to argue that some hailstones are not, and cannot, be
generated in this earth's atmosphere--that they come from somewhere
else. Now, in a relative existence, nothing can of itself be either
attractive or repulsive: its effects are functions of its associations
or implications. Many of our data have been taken from very conservative
scientific sources: it was not until their discordant implications, or
irreconcilabilities with the System, were perceived, that
excommunication was pronounced against them.
Prof. Schwedoff's paper was read before the British Association (_Rept.
of 1882_, p. 453).
The implication, and the repulsiveness of the implication to the snug
and tight little exclusionists of 1882--though we hold out that they
were functioning well and ably relatively to 1882--
That there is water--oceans or lakes and ponds, or rivers of it--that
there is water away from, and yet not far-remote from, this earth's
atmosphere and gravitation--
The pain of it:
That the snug little system of 1882 would be ousted from its
reposefulness--
A whole new science to learn: