{"id":4628,"date":"2012-09-28T16:40:08","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T22:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4628"},"modified":"2012-09-29T21:04:23","modified_gmt":"2012-09-30T03:04:23","slug":"the-multivalent-mothman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4628","title":{"rendered":"The Multivalent Mothman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month I wandered off into Mothman territory<\/a>, but here is more, from the editorial blog of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

There is an annual Mothman festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and two entries deal with it: \u201cWest Virginia is one big portal!\u201d Reflections on the Eleventh Annual Mothman Festival \u2013 Part 1<\/a> and also\u00a0 Part 2<\/a><\/p>\n

Both are by Joseph Laycock,<\/a> who is known in my little corner of academia for his work on vampire culture in Atlanta. He muses,<\/p>\n

Driving away from Point Pleasant, I continued to think about Mothman and meaning.\u00a0 Mothman is more than just a mascot for Point Pleasant. It is a reflection of the people and their history.\u00a0 Scott Poole<\/a> has suggested that monsters often point to darker aspects of our history. The Mothman mythos connects many elements of the community\u2019s past that are generally not discussed with tourists: The murder of chief Cornstalk, the collapse of the Silver Bridge, and the pollution lurking just underneath the surface of the local wildlife preserve.\u00a0 Mothman lore also functions as a kind of art form that, as Clifford Geertz notes, can serve to capture the themes of everyday life and more powerfully articulate their meaning.\u00a0 Mothman even serves as a metaphor for the coal and power industries that dominate West Virginia. Like the smoke stacks and devastated mountaintops, Mothman is a portent of death and future disaster. But it is also a source of livelihood and closely connected to the identity of the people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month I wandered off into Mothman territory, but here is more, from the editorial blog of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. There is an annual Mothman festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and two entries deal with it: \u201cWest Virginia is one big portal!\u201d Reflections on the Eleventh Annual Mothman Festival \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-4628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1cE","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1173,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1173","url_meta":{"origin":4628,"position":0},"title":"John Keel Has Died","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 7, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Author and Fortean John Keel died Friday in New York.Not long after his signature book, The Mothman Prophecies was published, I saw on the Colorado Springs downtown library's new-books shelf and passed it by--repeatedly--because the title sounded too weird.From the Cryptomundo obituary:After years of writing parts of the story in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"books\"","block_context":{"text":"books","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0765341972","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4548,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4548","url_meta":{"origin":4628,"position":1},"title":"Mothman: High Strangeness in 1967","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 27, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The Mothman Prophecies, the late John Keel's first-person account of a paranormal investigation in West Virginia, may not answer the question of exactly what the Mothman phenomenon was, but it remains one of the best accounts of the shadowy world of paranormal investigation itself. (Skip the movie, except for laughs.)\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2885,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2885","url_meta":{"origin":4628,"position":2},"title":"Mothman, John Keel, and Weirdness","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 10, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Io9,com offers a reflection by Ed Grabianowski on the \"Mothman Prophecies,\" both the 1975 book by John Keel and the subsequent 2002 movie with Richard Gere, which has little in common except the title and infamous bridge collapse. Grabianowski's article is a level-headed examination of the \"flap\" of 1967, about\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"weirdness\"","block_context":{"text":"weirdness","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=weirdness"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1335,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1335","url_meta":{"origin":4628,"position":3},"title":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 17, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence Jesse Walker writes from Reason Online that \"We're living in Robert Anton Wilson's world.\" The co-author of the Illuminatus! triology, he says, is \"the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":121,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=121","url_meta":{"origin":4628,"position":4},"title":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 17, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence Jesse Walker writes from Reason Online that \"We're living in Robert Anton Wilson's world.\" The co-author of the Illuminatus! triology, he says, is \"the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1350,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1350","url_meta":{"origin":4628,"position":5},"title":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 17, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence Jesse Walker writes from Reason Online that \"We're living in Robert Anton Wilson's world.\" The co-author of the Illuminatus! triology, he says, is \"the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4628"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4636,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4628\/revisions\/4636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}