If we are in harmony with a new dominant, or the spirit of a new era, in
which Exclusionism must be overthrown; if we have data of many
obscurations that have occurred, not only upon the moon, but upon our
own earth, as convincing of vast intervening bodies, usually invisible,
as is any regularized, predicted eclipse.
One looks up at the sky.
It seems incredible that, say, at the distance of the moon, there could
be, but be invisible, a solid body, say, the size of the moon.
One looks up at the moon, at a time when only a crescent of it is
visible. The tendency is to build up the rest of it in one's mind; but
the unillumined part looks as vacant as the rest of the sky, and it's of
the same blueness as the rest of the sky. There's a vast area of solid
substance before one's eyes. It's indistinguishable from the sky.
In some of our little lessons upon the beauties of modesty and humility,
we have picked out basic arrogances--tail of a peacock, horns of a stag,
dollars of a capitalist--eclipses of astronomers. Though I have no
desire for the job, I'd engage to list hundreds of instances in which
the report upon an expected eclipse has been "sky overcast" or "weather
unfavorable." In our Super-Hibernia, the unfavorable has been construed
as the favorable. Some time ago, when we were lost, because we had not
recognized our own dominant, when we were still of the unchosen and
likely to be more malicious than we now are--because we have noted a
steady tolerance creeping into our attitude--if astronomers are not to
blame, but are only correlates to a dominant--we advertised a predicted
eclipse that did not occur at all. Now, without any especial feeling,
except that of recognition of the fate of all attempted absolutism, we
give the instance, noting that, though such an evil thing to orthodoxy,
it was orthodoxy that recorded the non-event.
_Monthly Notices of the R.A.S._, 8-132:
"Remarkable appearances during the total eclipse of the moon on March
19, 1848":
In an extract from a letter from Mr. Forster, of Bruges, it is said
that, according to the writer's observations at the time of the
predicted total eclipse, the moon shone with about three times the
intensity of the mean illumination of an eclipsed lunar disk: that the
British Consul, at Ghent, who did not know of the predicted eclipse, had
written enquiring as to the "blood-red" color of the moon.
This is not very satisfactory to what used to be our malices. But
there follows another letter, from another astronomer, Walkey, who
had made observations at Clyst St. Lawrence: that, instead of an
eclipse, the moon became--as is printed in italics--"most beautifully
illuminated" ... "rather tinged with a deep red"... "the moon being
as perfect with light as if there had been no eclipse whatever."
I note that Chambers, in his work upon eclipses, gives Forster's letter
in full--and not a mention of Walkey's letter.
There is no attempt in _Monthly Notices_ to explain upon the notion of
greater distance of the moon, and the earth's shadow falling short,
which would make as much trouble for astronomers, if that were not
foreseen, as no eclipse at all. Also there is no refuge in saying that
virtually never, even in total eclipses, is the moon totally dark--"as
perfect with light as if there had been no eclipse whatever." It is said
that at the time there had been an aurora borealis, which might have
caused the luminosity, without a datum that such an effect, by an
aurora, had ever been observed upon the moon.
But single instances--so an observation by Scott, in the Antarctic. The
force of this datum lies in my own acceptance, based upon especially
looking up this point, that an eclipse nine-tenths of totality has great
effect, even though the sky be clouded.
Scott (_Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. ii, p. 215):
"There may have been an eclipse of the sun, Sept. 21, 1903, as the
almanac said, but we should, none of us, have liked to swear to the
fact."
This eclipse had been set down at nine-tenths of totality. The sky was
overcast at the time.
So it is not only that many eclipses unrecognized by astronomers as
eclipses have occurred, but that intermediatism, or impositivism, breaks
into their own seemingly regularized eclipses.
Our data of unregularized eclipses, as profound as those that are
conventionally--or officially?--recognized, that have occurred
relatively to this earth:
In _Notes and Queries_ there are several allusions to intense darknesses
that have occurred upon this earth, quite as eclipses occur, but that
are not referable to any known eclipsing body. Of course there is no
suggestion here that these darknesses may have been eclipses. My own
acceptance is that if in the nineteenth century anyone had uttered such
a thought as that, he'd have felt the blight of a Dominant; that
Materialistic Science was a jealous god, excluding, as works of the
devil, all utterances against the seemingly uniform, regular, periodic;
that to defy him would have brought on--withering by ridicule--shrinking
away by publishers--contempt of friends and family--justifiable grounds
for divorce--that one who would so defy would feel what unbelievers in
relics of saints felt in an earlier age; what befell virgins who forgot
to keep fires burning, in a still earlier age--but that, if he'd almost
absolutely hold out, just the same--new fixed star reported in _Monthly
Notices_. Altogether, the point in Positivism here is that by Dominants
and their correlates, quasi-existence strives for the positive state,
aggregating, around a nucleus, or dominant, systematized members of a
religion, a science, a society--but that "individuals" who do not
surrender and submerge may of themselves highly approximate to
positiveness--the fixed, the real, the absolute.
In _Notes and Queries_, 2-4-139, there is an account of a darkness in
Holland, in the midst of a bright day, so intense and terrifying that
many panic-stricken persons lost their lives stumbling into the canals.
_Gentleman's Magazine_, 33-414:
A darkness that came upon London, Aug. 19, 1763, "greater than at the
great eclipse of 1748."
However, our preference is not to go so far back for data. For a list of
historic "dark days," see Humboldt, _Cosmos_, 1-120.
_Monthly Weather Review_, March, 1886-79:
That, according to the _La Crosse Daily Republican_, of March 20, 1886,
darkness suddenly settled upon the city of Oshkosh, Wis., at 3 P.M.,
March 19. In five minutes the darkness equaled that of midnight.
Consternation.
I think that some of us are likely to overdo our own superiority and the
absurd fears of the Middle Ages--
Oshkosh.
People in the streets rushing in all directions--horses running
away--women and children running into cellars--little modern touch after
all: gas meters instead of images and relics of saints.
This darkness, which lasted from eight to ten minutes, occurred in a day
that had been "light but cloudy." It passed from west to east, and
brightness followed: then came reports from towns to the west of
Oshkosh: that the same phenomenon had already occurred there. A "wave of
total darkness" had passed from west to east.
Other instances are recorded in the _Monthly Weather Review_, but, as to
all of them, we have a sense of being pretty well-eclipsed, ourselves,
by the conventional explanation that the obscuring body was only a very
dense mass of clouds. But some of the instances are interesting--intense
darkness at Memphis, Tenn., for about fifteen minutes, at 10 A.M., Dec.
2, 1904--"We are told that in some quarters a panic prevailed, and that
some were shouting and praying and imagining that the end of the world
had come." (_M.W.R._, 32-522.) At Louisville, Ky., March 7, 1911, at
about 8 A.M.: duration about half an hour; had been raining moderately,
and then hail had fallen. "The intense blackness and general ominous
appearance of the storm spread terror throughout the city." (_M.W.R._,
39-345.)
However, this merger between possible eclipses by unknown dark bodies
and commonplace terrestrial phenomena is formidable.
As to darknesses that have fallen upon vast areas, conventionality
is--smoke from forest fires. In the _U.S. Forest Service Bulletin_, No.
117, F.G. Plummer gives a list of eighteen darknesses that have occurred
in the United States and Canada. He is one of the primitives, but I
should say that his dogmatism is shaken by vibrations from the new
Dominant. His difficulty, which he acknowledges, but which he would have
disregarded had he written a decade or so earlier, is the profundity of
some of these obscurations. He says that mere smokiness cannot account
for such "awe-inspiring dark days." So he conceives of eddies in the
air, concentrating the smoke from forest fires. Then, in the
inconsistency or discord of all quasi-intellection that is striving for
consistency or harmony, he tells of the vastness of some of these
darknesses. Of course Mr. Plummer did not really think upon this
subject, but one does feel that he might have approximated higher to
real thinking than by speaking of concentration and then listing data of
enormous area, or the opposite of circumstances of concentration--because,
of his nineteen instances, nine are set down as covering all New England.
In quasi-existence, everything generates or is part of its own opposite.
Every attempt at peace prepares the way for war; all attempts at justice
result in injustice in some other respect: so Mr. Plummer's attempt to
bring order into his data, with the explanation of darkness caused by
smoke from forest fires, results in such confusion that he ends up by
saying that these daytime darknesses have occurred "often with little
or no turbidity of the air near the earth's surface"--or with no evidence
at all of smoke--except that there is almost always a forest fire
somewhere.
However, of the eighteen instances, the only one that I'd bother to
contest is the profound darkness in Canada and northern parts of the
United States, Nov. 19, 1819--which we have already considered.
Its concomitants:
Lights in the sky;
Fall of a black substance;
Shocks like those of an earthquake.
In this instance, the only available forest fire was one to the south of
the Ohio River. For all I know, soot from a very great fire south of the
Ohio might fall in Montreal, Canada, and conceivably, by some freak of
reflection, light from it might be seen in Montreal, but the earthquake
is not assimilable with a forest fire. On the other hand, it will soon
be our expression that profound darkness, fall of matter from the sky,
lights in the sky, and earthquakes are phenomena of the near approach of
other worlds to this world. It is such comprehensiveness, as contrasted
with inclusion of a few factors and disregard for the rest, that we call
higher approximation to realness--or universalness.
A darkness, of April 17, 1904, at Wimbledon, England (_Symons' Met.
Mag._, 39-69). It came from a smokeless region: no rain, no thunder;
lasted 10 minutes; too dark to go "even out in the open."
As to darknesses in Great Britain, one thinks of fogs--but in _Nature_,
25-289, there are some observations by Major J. Herschel, upon an
obscuration in London, Jan. 22, 1882, at 10:30 A.M., so great that he
could hear persons upon the opposite side of the street, but could not
see them--"It was obvious that there was no fog to speak of."
_Annual Register_, 1857-132:
An account by Charles A. Murray, British Envoy to Persia, of a darkness
of May 20, 1857, that came upon Bagdad--"a darkness more intense than
ordinary midnight, when neither stars nor moon are visible...." "After a
short time the black darkness was succeeded by a red, lurid gloom, such
as I never saw in any part of the world."
"Panic seized the whole city."
"A dense volume of red sand fell."
This matter of sand falling seems to suggest conventional explanation
enough, or that a simoon, heavily charged with terrestrial sand, had
obscured the sun, but Mr. Murray, who says that he had had experience
with simoons, gives his opinion that "it cannot have been a simoon."
It is our comprehensiveness now, or this matter of concomitants of
darknesses that we are going to capitalize. It is all very complicated
and tremendous, and our own treatment can be but impressionistic, but a
few of the rudiments of Advanced Seismology we shall now take up--or the
four principal phenomena of another world's close approach to this
world.
If a large substantial mass, or super-construction, should enter
this earth's atmosphere, it is our acceptance that it would
sometimes--depending upon velocity--appear luminous or look like a
cloud, or like a cloud with a luminous nucleus. Later we shall have an
expression upon luminosity--different from the luminosity of
incandescence--that comes upon objects falling from the sky, or entering
this earth's atmosphere. Now our expression is that worlds have often
come close to this earth, and that smaller objects--size of a haystack
or size of several dozen skyscrapers lumped, have often hurtled through
this earth's atmosphere, and have been mistaken for clouds, because they
were enveloped in clouds--
Or that around something coming from the intense cold of inter-planetary
space--that is of some regions: our own suspicion is that other regions
are tropical--the moisture of this earth's atmosphere would condense
into a cloud-like appearance around it. In _Nature_, 20-121, there is an
account by Mr. S.W. Clifton, Collector of Customs, at Freemantle,
Western Australia, sent to the Melbourne Observatory--a clear
day--appearance of a small black cloud, moving not very
swiftly--bursting into a ball of fire, of the apparent size of the
moon--
Or that something with the velocity of an ordinary meteorite could not
collect vapor around it, but that slower-moving objects--speed of a
railway train, say--may.
The clouds of tornadoes have so often been described as if they were
solid objects that I now accept that sometimes they are: that some
so-called tornadoes are objects hurtling through this earth's
atmosphere, not only generating disturbances by their suctions, but
crushing, with their bulk, all things in their way, rising and falling
and finally disappearing, demonstrating that gravitation is not the
power that the primitives think it is, if an object moving at relatively
low velocity be not pulled to this earth, or being so momentarily
affected, bounds away.
In Finley's _Reports on the Character of 600 Tornadoes_ very suggestive
bits of description occur:
"Cloud bounded along the earth like a ball"--
Or that it was no meteorological phenomenon, but something very much
like a huge solid ball that was bounding along, crushing and carrying
with it everything within its field--
"Cloud bounded along, coming to the earth every eight hundred or one
thousand yards."
Here's an interesting bit that I got somewhere else. I offer it as a
datum in super-biology, which, however, is a branch of advanced science
that I'll not take up, restricting to things indefinitely called
"objects"--
"The tornado came wriggling, jumping, whirling like a great green snake,
darting out a score of glistening fangs."
Though it's interesting, I think that's sensational, myself. It may be
that vast green snakes sometimes rush past this earth, taking a swift
bite wherever they can, but, as I say, that's a super-biologic
phenomenon. Finley gives dozens of instances of tornado clouds that seem
to me more like solid things swathed in clouds, than clouds. He notes
that, in the tornado at Americus, Georgia, July 18, 1881, "a strange
sulphurous vapor was emitted from the cloud." In many instances,
objects, or meteoritic stones, that have come from this earth's
externality, have had a sulphurous odor. Why a wind effect should be
sulphurous is not clear. That a vast object from external regions
should be sulphurous is in line with many data. This phenomenon is
described in the _Monthly Weather Review_, July, 1881, as "a strange
sulphurous vapor ... burning and sickening all who approached close
enough to breathe it."
The conventional explanation of tornadoes as wind-effects--which we do
not deny in some instances--is so strong in the United States that it is
better to look elsewhere for an account of an object that has hurtled
through this earth's atmosphere, rising and falling and defying this
earth's gravitation.
_Nature_, 7-112:
That, according to a correspondent to the _Birmingham Morning News_, the
people living near King's Sutton, Banbury, saw, about one o'clock, Dec.
7, 1872, something like a haycock hurtling through the air. Like a
meteor it was accompanied by fire and a dense smoke and made a noise
like that of a railway train. "It was sometimes high in the air and
sometimes near the ground." The effect was tornado-like: trees and walls
were knocked down. It's a late day now to try to verify this story, but
a list is given of persons whose property was injured. We are told that
this thing then disappeared "all at once."
These are the smaller objects, which may be derailed railway trains or
big green snakes, for all I know--but our expression upon approach to
this earth by vast dark bodies--
That likely they'd be made luminous: would envelop in clouds, perhaps,
or would have their own clouds--