Featured Post

Operation: All Clear - The Oklahoma City Bombing

Oklahoma City Bombing The Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995 was alleged to have been carried-out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (alone...

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

What's With All the Death?

I'm just segueing up a storm here, huh?  Well, I'd wanted to say this earlier anyway, but knew I had a lot more on the Supernatural (and hauntings, in particular) to come, so I was biding my time.

Of course, Ghost Hunters just returned recently, and that has been good for some ghostly discussion and all, but the book I checked out from the library was actually due yesterday and I had to renew it -- just crept-up on me, to be honest -- because I am only halfway through it.  So, I figured I'd better go on and dispense with everything I can get from it while I have it.

This book is pretty old (pretty thorough in places, but still old) and doesn't have much in the way of theory and so forth, so I had to do a lot of cross-referencing, which has taken some time.  That's why I've been on this ghost kick lately.  Once you get this far into something, it's hard to change gears suddenly, then come back to it later.

But, the best thing about older books like this one is that they are so much closer to their sources.  Books nowadays provide so much theoretical scientific bullshit (well, that's a little harsh, but keep reading) that it seems like the author is apologizing for even bothering to write on the subject, much less taking it seriously.  Modern Science, Medicine, Pharmacology, Chemistry, and Surgery came from the study of Alchemy; Astronomy from Astrology and Weather-watching; hell, Archaeology was the result of a cat who read about the siege of Troy, took a spade to the spot, and dug it up!

The result is that a lot of the pertinent folklore with which we, as phenomenalists and researchers, should be concerned and need to know is excised from the accounts in favor of more "scientific" data.  I think a firm grounding in the Occult, Spiritualism, Religion, and Folklore is far more important to the study of the Supernatural than Science and Psychology.

But I agree that these fields have a very important place in Parapsychology and the research of all things Fortean.

© C Harris Lynn, 2007-2008

No comments:

Post a Comment