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BOOK OF THE DAMNED
By Charles Fort
CHAPTER: 01,
02, 03,
04, 05,
06, 07,
08, 09,
10, 11,
12, 13,
14, 15,
16, 17,
18, 19,
20, 21,
22, 23,
24, 25,
26, 27,
28
ONE of the damdest in our whole saturnalia of the accursed--
Because it is hopeless to try to shake off an excommunication
only by saying that we're damned by blacker things than ourselves; and that the
damned are those who admit they're of the damned. Inertia and hypnosis are too
strong for us. We say that: then we go right on admitting we're the damned. It
is only by being more nearly real that we can sweep away the quasi-things that
oppose us. Of course, as a whole, we have considerable amorphousness, but we are
thinking now of "individual" acceptances. Wideness is an aspect of
Universalness or Realness. If our syntheses disregard fewer data than do
opposing syntheses -- which are often not syntheses at all, but mere consideration
of some circumstance -- less widely synthetic things fade away before us. Harmony
is an aspect of the Universal, by which we mean Realness. If we approximate more
highly to harmony among the parts of an expression and to all available
circumstances of an occurrence, the self-contradictors turn hazy. Solidity is an
aspect of realness. We pile them up, and we pile them up, or they pass and pass
and pass: things that bulk large as they march by, supporting and solidifying
one another--
And still, and for the regiments to come, hypnosis and inertia
rule us--
One of the damdest of our data:
In the Scientific American, Sept. 10, 1910, Charles
F. Holder writes:
"Many years ago, a strange stone resembling a meteorite,
fell into the valley of the Yaqui, Mexico, and the sensational story went from
one end to the other of the country that a stone bearing human inscriptions had
descended to the earth."
The bewildering observation here is Mr. Holder's assertion
that this stone did fall. It seems to me that he must mean that it fell by
dislodgment from a mountain side into a valley -- but we shall see that it was
such a marked stone that very unlikely would it have been unknown to dwellers in
the valley, if it had been reposing upon a mountainside above them. It may have
been carelessness: intent may have been to say that a sensational story of a
strange stone said to have fallen, etc.
This stone was reported by Major Frederick Burnham, of the
British Army. Later Major Burnham re-visited it, and Mr. Holder accompanied him,
their purpose to decipher the inscriptions upon it, if possible.
"This stone was a brown, igneous rock, its longest axis
about eight feet, and on the eastern face, which had an angle of about
forty-five degrees, was the deep-cut inscription."
Mr. Holder says that he recognized familiar Mayan symbols in
the inscription. His method was the usual method by which anything can be
"identified" as anything else: that is to pick out whatever is
agreeable and disregard the rest. He says that he has demonstrated that most of
the symbols are Mayan. One of our intermediatist pseudo-principles is that any
way of demonstrating anything is just as good a way of demonstrating anything
else. By Mr. Holder's method we could demonstrate that we're Mayan -- if that
should be a source of pride to us. One of the characters upon this stone is a
circle within a circle -- similar character found by Mr. Holder in a Mayan
manuscript. There are two 6's. 6's can be found in Mayan manuscripts. A double
scroll. There are dots and there are dashes. Well, then, in turn, disregard the
circle within a circle and the double scroll and emphasize that 6's occur in
this book, and that dots are plentiful, and would be more plentiful if it were
customary to use the small "i" for the first personal pronoun -- that
when it comes to dashes -- that's demonstrated: we're Mayan.
I suppose the tendency is to feel that we're sneering at some
valuable arch�ologic work, and that Mr. Holder did make a veritable
identification.
He writes:
"I submitted the photographs to the Field Museum and the
Smithsonian and one or two others, and, to my surprise, the reply was that they
could make nothing out of it."
Our indefinite acceptance, by preponderance of three or four
groups of museum-experts against one person, is that a stone bearing
inscriptions unassimilable with any known language upon this earth, is said to
have fallen from the sky. Another poor wretch of an outcast belonging here is
noted in the Scientific American, 48-261: that, of an object, or a
meteorite, that fell Feb. 16, 1883, near Brescia, Italy, a false report was
circulated that one of the fragments bore the impress of a hand. That's all that
is findable by me upon this mere gasp of a thing. Intermediatistically, my
acceptance is that, though in the course of human history, there have been some
notable approximations, there never has been a real liar: that he could not
survive in intermediateness, where everything merges away or has its pseudo-base
in something else -- would be instantly translated to the Negative Absolute. So my
acceptance is that, though curtly dismissed, there was something to base upon in
this report; that there were unusual markings upon this object. Of course that
is not to jump to the conclusion that they were cuneiform characters that looked
like fingerprints.
Altogether, I think that in some of our past expressions, we
must have been very efficient, if the experience of Mr. Symons be typical, so
indefinite are we becoming here. Just here we are interested in many things that
have been found, especially in the United States, which speak of a civilization,
or of many civilizations not indigenous to this earth. One trouble is in trying
to decide whether they fell here from the sky, or were left behind by visitors
from other worlds. We have a notion that there have been disasters aloft, and
that coins were dropped here: that inhabitants of this earth found them or saw
them fall, and then made coins imitatively: it may be that coins were showered
here by something of a tutelary nature that undertook to advance us from the
stage of barter to the use of a medium. If coins should be identified as Roman
coins, we've had so much experience with "identifications" that we
know a phantom when we see one -- but, even so, how could Roman coins have got to
North America -- far in the interior of North America -- or buried under the
accumulation of centuries of soil -- unless they did drop from -- wherever the first
Romans came from? Ignatius Donnelly, in "Atlantis," gives a list of
objects that have been found in mounds that are supposed to antedate all
European influence in America: lathe-made articles, such as traders -- from
somewhere -- would supply to savages -- marks of the lathe said to be unmistakable.
Said to be: of course we can't accept that anything is unmistakable. In the Rept.
Smithson. Inst., 1881-619, there is an account, by Charles C. Jones, of two
silver crosses that were found in Georgia. They are skillfully made, highly
ornamented crosses, but are not conventional crucifixes: all arms of equal
length. Mr. Jones is a good positivist -- that De Sota had halted at the
"precise" spot where these crosses were found. But the spirit of
negativeness that lurks in all things said to be "precise" shows
itself in that upon one of these crosses in an inscription that has no meaning
in Spanish or any other known, terrestrial language:
"IYNKICIDU," according to Mr. Jones. He thinks that
this is a name, and that there is an aboriginal ring to it, though I should say,
myself, that he was thinking of the far-distant Incas: that the Spanish donor
cut on the cross the name of an Indian to whom it was presented. But we look at
the inscription ourselves and see that the letters said to be "C" and
"D" are turned the wrong way, and that the letter said to be
"K" is not only turned the wrong way, but is upside down.
It is difficult to accept that the remarkable, the very
extensive, copper mines in the region of Lake Superior, were ever the works of
American aborigines. Despite the astonishing extent of these mines, nothing has
ever been found to indicate that the region was ever inhabited by permanent
dwellers--"...not a vestige of a dwelling, a skeleton, or a bone has been
found." The Indians have no traditions relating to the mines (American
Antiquarian, 23-258). I think we've had visitors: that they have come here
for copper, for instance. As to other relics of them -- but we now come upon
frequency of a merger that has not so often appeared before:
Fraudulency.
Hair called real hair -- then there are wigs. Teeth called real
teeth -- then there are false teeth. Official money -- counterfeit money. It's the
bane of psychic research. If there be psychic phenomena, there must be
fraudulent psychic phenomena. So desperate is the situation here that Carrington
argues that, even if Palladino be caught cheating, that is not to say that all
her phenomena are fraudulent. My own version is: that nothing, indicates
anything, in a positive sense, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to
be indicated. Everything that is called true must merge away indistinguishably
into something called false. Both are expressions of the same underlying
quasiness, and are continuous. Fraudulent antiquarian relics are very common,
but they are not more common than are fraudulent paintings.
W. S. Forest, "Historical Sketches of Norfolk,
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