The Book of the Damned

Introduction¹

Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932) was an iconoclast.

An impoverished newspaper writer from the age of eighteen, Fort spent his early twenties travelling the world on about eighty cents a day. He lived for many years in London, and spent much of his time there in Bloomsbury at the British Museum, where he researched and studied all that he could. He was an avid note-taker.

Returning to America, Fort married and settled down in New York, working as a journalist and a writer of fiction for newspapers and periodicals. At age forty-two, he came into a modest inheritance, and it was at that point that his life's work truly began.

In scientific research, much as in life, some discoveries can be made only through the exercise of inhuman patience. Charles Fort sat at a table in the New York Public Library every working day for over twenty years, reading and re-reading the back files of every scientific journal, old periodical, newspaper and manuscript that he could find. Whenever he found something out of the ordinary and not conventionally explainable, he made a note of it. Eventually he had thousands of these notes, written on little slips of paper, filed in shoeboxes.

From these notes, and those he wrote while studying in the British Museum, came Fort's four books: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932). In them, he organizes and comments upon a wide host of phenomena: flying saucers before the invention of aircraft; strange noises in the sky; falls of frogs, fishes, worms, shells, stones, blood, metal objects; red rains and black rains; discrepancies in the schedules of comets; sightings on and around Mars and the moon; disruptions of gravity; poltergeists; stigmata; spontaneous human combustion; the occult, and many other freaks of nature and the supernatural that have been explained away or disregarded by science.

Fort's term for all of these things is the Damned. His writings, which are absolutely replete with citations from his source material, describe these phenomena in what is, at times, one of the most brilliant literary styles of the early 20th Century. Fort himself never really explains any of his findings, beyond making vague hints at an organic universe, and extraterrestrial "super-structures" that exist in the farthest reaches of our atmosphere and beyond.

His work was greatly admired by many literary contemporaries and other regarded thinkers, such as Clarence Darrow, Havelock Ellis and Theodore Dreiser. Later, his books influenced the development of science fiction in what are regarded as "Fortean themes." While Fort's unique style of documented skepticism is still considered by many today as a "must-read", there are those who dismiss Fort as a crackpot journalist. I think he would find that amusing: that among his detractors, he himself is considered to be among the damned.

The Book of the Damned concerns itself mainly with phenomena that has been reported as having fallen from the sky. Like most of Fort's writings, it is useful as much as a reference as it is a linear narrative. Read straight through from beginning to end, or pick and choose from the chapters as you will — Fort would have approved of this: he wrote, "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere."

The chapters noded here on Everything2 are from the text of the original first printing in 1919, and are outside of copyright protection. Any errors, omissions or spelling anomalies are those of the original author, and have been authentically reproduced. As the content of the book is not my original work, I do not feel that I should have a node count benefit from its existence in the nodegel. Consequently, I had the chapter nodes moved to a separate account in March of 2002.

Dedication

I dedicate the two weeks I spent carefully transcribing², marking-up and hard-linking the 28 chapters of this book to the noble noders who have participated in the Everything Literature project, as well as the countless volunteers of Project Gutenberg.

I listened to this as an audio book and it was one of the most aggravating books I've finished. Charles Fort is the archetypal crank. He collects mounds of weird and unverifiable claims and rants about how scientists of his day ignore evidence. I'm cool with the claims. I like strange tales, cryptids, and the occasional haunting. Ranting in circles about the science being mere fashion and society being mass hypnosis, not so much.

Although Darwinism, then, seems positively baseless, or absolutely irrational, its massing of supposed data, and its attempted coherence approximate more highly to Organization and Consistency than did the inchoate speculations that preceded it.

- Chapter 3

This book goes through cycles of actual accounts of anomalies and ranting about epistemic deficiencies in science but Fort breaks it up with philosophical tangents about how everything strives for positiveness and how all things are just different proportions of stuff. Those parts are abstruse enough to tax my comprehension but I think positiveness is some sort of cosmic ordering principle like the Dao which all things strive for in their quasi-existance. Get used to the word quasi-existance because he uses it a lot. Quasi-system, quasi-soul, quasi-real, quasi-organization, quasi-logic, quasi-entity, quasi-different, quasi-terms, quasiness, all show up in the first five chapters.

If the whole world should seem to combine against you, it is only unreal combination, or intermediateness to unity and disunity. Every resistance is itself divided into parts resisting one another. The simplest strategy seems to be — never bother to fight a thing: set its own parts fighting one another.

- Chapter 4

It is galling that Fort makes good points about the inconsistencies of science in his time. Science, for all of its foibles and fads, has made significant progress as observed by germ theory providing better outcomes than Galen's humors. I've been alive a bit too long to have blind faith in the process but on a long enough timeline it delivers. Charles Fort predicts coal powered spaceships and floating islands. These remain damned to use his own vernacular. I'd be more willing to forgive that if he came at the orthodoxy with less derision.

The higher idealist is the positivist who tries to localize the universal, and is in accord with cosmic purpose: the super-dogmatist of a local savage who can hold out, without a flurry of doubt, that a piano washed up on a beach is the trunk of a palm tree that a shark has bitten, leaving his teeth in it.

- Chapter 10

I'm allergic to self-righteous truther types. Bad epistemology is all fun and games until somebody holds up a pizza parlor to locate the adrenochrome harvesting child torture dungeons. Given the breadth and depth of our world it would be shocking if there were no conspiracies but just spreading a generic skepticism about technical assertions is net negative. On average people don't form better beliefs after being broken out of dogmatism so much as they fall into the orbit of whatever forms the most compelling story. If it happens to be true that is great. If not you've just exchanged one error for a more tenacious one. The Book of the Damned casts aspersions at the whole edifice of science. For every brave independent thinker who challenges the establishment and moves science forward there are nine hundred ninety nine crackpots fighting reality and dragging others into their crusade. I read stuff by crazy people because I want to understand crazy and I have a fair bit more experience with the rambling blog posts of the sanity challenged than the average person. I don't know if it's convergent evolution or if Fort's style some how diffused into the parapsychology crowd but it's the same tone of smug derision for a world that does not see what they see, the same idiosyncratic language in favor of clarity, and the same whimsical mingling of fact and fancy. In conclusion I did not like this book and I think it reflects a toxic communication style common of iconoclasts.

IRON NODER XVII: ALL'S FERROUS IN LOVE AND NODING