I blogged here before about things disappearing in my house — kitchen utensils, corkscrews, keys, etc. (See “Pixie Problems, or Working Things Out with the ‘Cousins’ (1)” and Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)
Things have been better since then. There is a pentagram pendant that has disappeared and re-appeared at least three times, but as long as I am wearing it or have it in my pocket, “they” leave it alone.
And then a book disappeared, almost snatched out of my hands.
The book was The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (2016), a collaboration between scholar Jeffrey Kripal (I think of him as “the professor of woo”) and author and experiencer Whitley Strieber. (The 2017 paperback edition had the subtitle “Why the Unexplained is Real.“)
Strieber had been a novelist with several bestsellers in the horror category, such as The Wolfen and The Hunger, both of which were adapted as movies. All this took a new path after publication of his 1987 bestseller, Communion, about his family’s experience with “the Visitors” at their Catskills home in 1985–86. Communion in turn spawned follow-ups, a podcast, and a whole website, Unknown Country, devoted to UFO-related paranormal experiences.
It’s important to note that Communion never states that the “Visitors” were offworld visitors who came from their home planet to study Earthlings, although many people assume that. Blame the thirty-five previous years of “flying saucers” stories and films. The first movie was, in fact, The Flying Saucer, (1950).
What it was, says Jeffrey Kripal, was a Goddess experience — and that was something many readers could not grasp.
Not only did [Strieber] speak his secrets in public, but he also spoke reverently and fearfully of a divine presences that was feminine, that broke and rode him like a horse . . . by so doing he spoke of a presence at the very heart of the unconscious of the religious West, a presence that has been repressed and denied for three millennia. He spoke of Her (151).
Beyond Kripal’s reading of Communion as fundamentally a work of Goddess mysticism, part of the eternal matter of sex, death, and the sacred, this is a book on how to approach these experiences as a writer.
But first, who took my book?
According to Amazon, I bought it in 2018. I found it to be profounding unsettling — and I have been around this block more than once. I think the sentence that stopped me was one of Strieber’s: “The living, who we call the dead, come close to us now, calling to us to open our minds to a new vision of ourselves” (245).
I write “one of Strieber’s,” because the book is arranged in alternating chapters, each author taking his turn. More on that below.
So Super Natural stayed in the bedroom bookcase, where live all the books that we don’t want casual visitors to be noticing. Then came a day earlier this year when I wanted to share something in with my wife. I pulled it off the shelf and set it down (on the bed?), but it was more like something took it, because I could not find it again. She and I both looked, to the point of checking under the bedroom furniture with a flashlight. No book. (And they have not given it back either.)
“OK, housewights,” I said, “Are you more powerful than Amazon?” I re-ordered another hardback copy, this time from an affiliate seller, a Goodwill store in Tacoma. It duly arrived, and it has not vanished. So I could re-read it and attach sticky notes.
‘Super Natural’ as a Writing Guide
I call it a guide to writing about “woo,” in other words, the paranormal, the Other, the unexplained, whatever you care to call it. Quoting William James, Kripal speaks of a “future science” of “radical empricism, that is, one that took every human experience, however strange or apparenty impossible, under its careful gaze without prejudice of assumption. This book is an attempt to practice just such a radical empiricism” (40).
What Kripal in particular has done is set out series of techniques by which scholars can approach something like Strieber’s experience — and which Strieber himself employs to some extent in his chapters.
First is the “phenomenological cut,” just taking the experiences on their own terms and seting aside “the questions of their possible external source, cause, or truth value” (44). It is hard to just describe what is happening without fitting it into your religous framework (or lack of one) or your world view.
There are more: Kripal also discusses techniques of comparison, history, hermeneutics, and erotics. For example, in his summary these these approaches, he notes under hermeneutics
Consider the possibility that some of these encounters may be mediated expressions of another form of mind (maybe ours) making contact with the human ego and transmtting some symbolic signal. Recognize that, generally speaking, extraordinary visions and experiences are ot what they seem on the surface, that they must be interpreted. Recognize the roles of fantasy and projection in the production of these potential signals, but do not assume that everything imagined is imaginary. Imagine double. Hone your Hermes practice, your hermenutics (341).
Super Natural is a book that I will return to on its own merits. But I urge anyone trying to work in Pagan studies, esotericism, or around the shunned mystic fringes of any other religious tradition to study is a manual of academic craft as well,
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