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Christmas is traditionally a time for ghost stories, a subject for which I have an immense affection, so much so that I once spent an entire decade or so, on and off, researching and writing a book about poltergeists and their implied social and psychological meaning. Or, at least, that what I thought I was writing. Innocently beginning it in about 2010, before the word “woke” was even known to the world, it subsequently turns out that what I was actually writing was a work of far-left French-style deconstructionist philosophy.
When it comes to inadvertent errors, that’s quite a large one. How could such a situation have come to pass? Like Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past, I shall draw back the veils of time and explain.
A Weighty Issue
During the 1930s, whilst living in exile in England, the Hungarian-born Freudian analyst and parapsychologist Nandor Fodor (see my previous piece on him here) came across a cheerfully obese 18-stone poltergeist medium named Harry B. Brown, whose chief paranormal skill was that of levitation: quite a difficult-sounding feat for someone who was, in the words of Fodor, “built like a floating dock.”
But why would a ghost bother returning from the grave just to keep on tossing a fat lad about a bit like a giant human juggling ball? Because the “ghost” wasn’t really a “ghost” at all. Instead, said the shrink, it was a repressed psychological complex in disguise. Obsessed with the theories of his fellow Mitteleuropean Jew Sigmund Freud, Fodor felt poltergeist phenomena often represented paranormal expressions of their human victims’ secret subconscious desires manifesting in the outside world, rather than being the invisible spirits of the dead, as most people automatically presume.
In Brown’s case, Fodor psychoanalyzed him as desiring to go on a diet, but being thoroughly ashamed of his complete and physically demonstrable lack of will-power to do so. Being in possession of psychic powers, therefore, the compulsive overeater took matters unconsciously in hand by magically producing a poltergeist from inside his capacious skull to make him “lose weight” in another sense. Counterintuitively, said Fodor, the whale-like Harry was actually “an ideal man” to levitate, on the grounds that “Heavy people often dream of floating in the air. Such fantasies annul the [physical] limitations imposed upon them by their own weight.” Simply by wishing it, implied Fodor, Harry B. Brown could quite literally alter the innate physical qualities of his own body. [1] In our own day, Lizzo must devoutly wish she could do the same.
Ha ha ha, many would laugh, what a stupid Olden Days idiot! No one rational and modern would ever think like that today, would they? Oh, but they would—and, what’s more, they’d get published by accredited left-wing academic presses to do so, too.
In 2019, an (alleged) academic book aimed at undergraduates, named Critical Dietetics and Critical Nutrition Studies, was published, arguing that scientific and medical assessments of objectively obese bodies were no more useful modes of examining the likely negative health effects of being overweight than other, more subjective, lenses of scrutiny were: if a man so morbidly porky he couldn’t even winch himself out of bed to visit the toilet self-identified as being a skinny, long-distance runner to put the Ethiopians to shame, then that’s just what he/she/xe was, OK? Simply via the innate power of your own will, you could shed half your body-weight overnight, at least when you personally looked into the mirror and saw yourself naked, if not when anyone else did.
Killjoy doctors who prejudicially explained that weighing 35 stone might just possibly one day give you a small heart attack were simply “fatphobic”, argued another self-styled academic expert in this sphere, Charlotte Cooper, in her 2016 book Fat Activism. Such bigoted quacks’ supposedly “objective” evidence (trifling little things like x-rays, blood samples, heart monitors, etc.) should be routinely downplayed in favor of “research justice” instead, she wrote. That is, asking fat people themselves, as living, waddling incarnations of “embodied community knowledge”, whether they felt healthy or slim or not. If they said they did, then who was any mere doctor to argue? [2]
Someone should really have introduced mad ideologues like Cooper to Harry B. Brown. He could have floated up towards the ceiling, turned the gravity back on, then dropped back down and squashed them.
A Tricky Subject
What, precisely, do Nandor Fodor and modern-day fat activists have to do with one another? Well, as I mentioned at the start, in 2020 I published a book, Blithe Spirits: An Imaginative History of the Poltergeist. It came out in the very same month Covid-19 lockdowns were enforced by the government here in Great Britain, thereby meaning nobody could physically get out to the bookshops to buy a copy. And then, a few months later, George Floyd became a spook full-time too (literally. See my article briefly detailing people trying to contact his spirit here), but the fact still didn’t improve my sales figures. Nandor Fodor’s old colleagues at the Society for Psychical Research liked it, though, even if it did sometimes gently mock the fellow.
I do, personally, believe in poltergeists, although the book itself did not require the reader to do so, taking instead a more literary and metaphorical approach towards matters. My text argued that poltergeist hauntings were best thought of as contemporary manifestations (or tall but socially loaded tales of such, if you’re a skeptic) of Trickster phenomena, the Trickster being that near-universal figure known from world mythology embodied by figures as varied as the Greek Hermes, English Puck, the Coyote of the Native American Indians, or Loki of the Norsemen of old. Tricksters are con-men, prank-players, change-makers, liars, liminal or borderline personalities, gods of crossroads, locks, keys and borders, all of which barriers they help erect only to then help subsequently undermine in turn by habitually crossing them.
Often male and female concurrently (‘Hermaphroditus’ was the name of the godlet’s mythological son/daughter) and cunning fools, both wise and stupid simultaneously, Tricksters help undermine the notion of solid binaries, like male-female or clever-stupid… or heavy-light, fat-thin, maybe. Similarly, I showed in my book, poltergeists help undermine boundaries like real-unreal, by providing seemingly ridiculous evidence which only acts to undermine the plausibility of their own existence, or permeable-impermeable, by allowing solid objects to pass through one another during hauntings.
If Fodor was correct in saying polts emerged from within men’s minds, then they also undermined the boundary between the internal and the external. Another key boundary I identified poltergeists as helping dissolve was that between science and pseudoscience. Hermes’ closely-related brother is Apollo, the god of light, logic and scientific rationality.Hermes himself is god of night, irrationality and supernatural anti-logic.
Having an innate love for mystery and wonder, I rather romanticized all this kind of thing, and poltergeists in general. I concluded my text by lauding spooks as “agents of aporia”, aporia being that state of unsolvable paradox originally identified by Socrates, and said hauntings should really be considered as unresolvable paradoxical zen koans (answerless queries like “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”) rather than as scientific problems to be “solved”. Poltergeists are inherently inexplicable, I argued, and are likely to always stay that way. Indeed, I explicitly hoped they stayed that way, as they thereby helped insert a sense of the numinous into an increasingly arid, deromanticized world. [3]
Non-Binary Spirits
I still do basically believe all this. However, I no longer feel the poltergeist’s root inexplicability to be quite so unalloyed a positive as I did whilst writing.
One fringe paranormal theorist I discussed in my book (and, just like Nandor Fodor, mock slightly) was Jason Reza Jorjani, author of the 2016 work Prometheus and Atlas, which warns that, if the current mental dominance materialist science holds over mankind ever wanes to the extent that mass belief in the paranormal dominates our Weltanschauung instead, the entire basis of civilization might become fatally undermined. Jorjani thinks the paranormal acquires actual strength from being believed in, so the more belief in objective science wanes, the more supernatural wonders will begin occurring left, right and center, to the extent that society descends into total chaos, enabling a kind of epistemic terrorism against the current Richard Dawkins-style materialist world-order to take place all across the planet. [4]
Metaphorically, in light of the current wave of woke anti-scientific discourse now sweeping over the West in relation to nonsensical fields like fat-studies and transgenderism, I now wonder if Jorjani might not be in some sense correct, at least by analogy, if not exactly literally.
In my book, I demonstrate how poltergeists, like typical Tricksters, even act to erode the traditional basis of Aristotelean logic, that of binary oppositions known as A and Not-A. Traditionally, something could not be both A and Not-A simultaneously: a door being locked (A) and unlocked (Not-A), for example. Hermes managed to make doors both A and Not-A simultaneously, though, by transforming into mist and floating through the locked keyhole in ancient Greek myth, and it seems as if poltergeists can pass through locked doors similarly, both literally and metaphorically. [5]
Eroding binaries like A and Not-A also seems to be one of the key aims of the woke left currently dominating Western academia and our other captured institutions of social power. As I have argued elsewhere, Hermes would seem to be the presiding tutelary deity of transgenderism, for example, and of the mass immigration-enabling dismantling of the West’s physical external borders wholesale, profoundly unwelcome twin social developments which will only result in ultimate social disaster.
There is an old saying, “Hermes is the midwife to Dionysus”, Dionysus (another brother of Apollo) being the ancient god of wine, women and song, whose priestesses used to tear apart their human victims whilst drunk on orgies of Dionysian excess. In other words, Hermes, when brought too far into the center of any given civilization, only ends up tearing it apart. Just read Euripides’ The Bacchae for proof of that.
The Hermes archetype, and his current supernatural avatar the poltergeist, are both potentially dangerous. As such, I now rather hope, contrary to some of my prior feelings on the matter, that each remain, as they have traditionally been, liminal deities of the margins. Unfortunately, I suspect it would be perfectly possible, in a world in which heart attack patients are now encouraged by pseudo-academic activists to think their fate doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the fact they weigh approximately half an elephant, or in which midwives are taught to believe it is possible for expectant male “mothers” to give birth to babies through their penises, for the paranormal in general, and a book like my own in particular, to be disingenuously hijacked to further such deluded ideological agendas.
Quite inadvertently, then, I feel I may accidentally have written a work of unwitting French-style deconstructionist philosophy, or lefty Critical Studies nonsense!
I Want To Believe
As you may just possibly have noticed, there is currently an ongoing assault upon both objectivity and the rational scientific method taking place within the academy in favor of what is termed “other ways of knowing”, that is, claiming such methods of discourse are racist, sexist, homophobic, fatphobic, etc, etc, ad infinitum, and simply accepting the word of Marginalized Groups™️ like blacks, transgenderists, and the morbidly obese about anything at all, even that eating sixteen donuts for breakfast every day won’t do you any harm whatsoever. This is analogous to certain of the most credulous of paranormal believers, whose response to even the most devastating debunkings of any given total non-event like the Roswell UFO crash or the Vampire of Croglin Grange, is the simple and unanswerable rejoinder, “Well, that’s just what I believe.”
There is talk these days of something called “epistemic injustice” and “epistemic oppression” which holds that, for example, traditional Maori folk-beliefs about how the twin islands of New Zealand were formed by ancient gods reeling them up from the sea one day whilst out fishing are every bit as legitimate and true as Western-derived scientific ideas about them being formed by actual processes of real geological action.
The source of much of this nonsense lies with the far-left French deconstructionist theorist Michel Foucault and his later epigones, who saw science and rationality as a kind of unjustly distributed capital imposed upon mankind at large by the wicked white heteronormative capitalist West, which had to be forcibly stolen and redistributed to the world’s oppressed, like Robin Hood gone Marxist. The world we lived in was always intellectually governed, Foucault said, not by any actual “truth”, which was humanly unobtainable, but by one of many potential false “regimes of truth”, such as religion or science—not a million miles away from the teachings of Charles Fort, by the way, another man whose books could quite easily be picked up and abused by activist academics. [6]
One day, however, the ranks of the epistemically oppressed identified by the likes of Foucault could potentially also be bolstered by several famous alleged poltergeist mediums like Tina Resch or Eusapia Palladino who, as I demonstrate in my book, are also very often socially borderline personalities: lower-class, female, ill-educated, of criminal inclination, sexually incontinent, etc. The stereotypical poltergeist focus, after all, is the teenage female Victorian serving-maid, who makes plates jump and glasses smash in unconscious paranormal protest against the drudgery she is instructed to perform by the rich and patriarchal Lord of the Manor under whose domination disadvantageous economic circumstance forces her to toil. [7] How fashionably anti-capitalist.
Such an interpretation would not necessarily be entirely wrong-headed, either, by the way, I just think it could all too easily become open to potential ill-meaning political abuse.
Trojan Ghosts
One of the central inspirations for my own 2020 book was an earlier 2001 text by the American parapsychologist George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal. Here, Hansen does actually have a section dealing with deconstructionism’s relation to the paranormal, a section which, to be honest, due to my intense dislike for that kind of pseudish writing (on deconstructionists’ behalf, not Hansen’s), I initially skimmed over without too much interest. [8] Looking it over again now, in light of the dismal ‘Great Awokening’ of my own book’s 2020 year of publication, I feel it may actually have been rather more deserving of my attention.
Basically, says Hansen, deconstructionism (if you’re lucky enough not be familiar with the practice) was a literary, intellectual and academic movement which said everything in existence, not just books, newspapers, adverts and magazines, was really a kind of subjective “text” to be read. However, these “texts” had no definite objective meaning to them, and could be “read” in any way the subjective “reader” liked: a Maori today might “read” New Zealand as a giant magical object fished up from the waves by a god, for example, or a transgenderist might “read” his penis as undeniable proof he is actually a woman. The traditional bulwark against this kind of solipsistic delusion is science: but the paranormal (at least in my view and Hansen’s) is real, and exists in a particular and peculiar kind of way that science can do nothing with—ghosts just aren’t amenable to lab-work.
As I say, I think the poltergeist is a real phenomenon, but one that simply cannot ever be fully explained, and certainly not by science. As such, if deconstructionists ever actually latch onto this fact, and begin pushing belief in the paranormal as yet another part of their political agenda, they could very easily abuse this as an excellent Trojan Horse to undermine mass public belief in science and the scientific worldview in general, that is to say, to deconstruct the entire current intellectual basis of their hated modern West, the Enlightenment values they so often disparage (as to some extent do I in my own book, I must confess; but only in relation to specifically appropriate spheres like the paranormal, religion, art and poetry, not society in general).
But as Hansen points out, there must be shared common assumptions and social symbols (even if they ultimately prove to be arbitrary or false ones) for any given society to successfully function. I remember reading once that the anti-Establishment comedian Russell Brand had comically identified traffic lights as an arbitrary means of oppression and public control from on high, for example. Whichever privileged cis-hetero white bastard got to decide green meant “go”, one might ask? Who knows, but it’s a good job someone did, otherwise all the cars would just crash at every junction.
Likewise, if Hermes, the god of subjective interpretations, or hermeneutics, is ever brought so far into the center of things that we begin systematically dismantling all previously agreed-upon social meanings and binary oppositions (like that between green = go and red = stop, for example) then all that would happen in the end would be an almighty civilizational car crash. As the midwife to Dionysus, this ancient liminal god of the margins called Hermes, and his modern-day avatar the poltergeist, is in fact an exceedingly dangerous archetype, to be kept on the very edges of society, not at its center, and handled with immense care.
In his book, Hansen quotes an early woke-skeptical 1990s US academic to the effect that deconstructionist thought had only succeeded in robbing his students’ lives of shared social coherence and meaning, leaving a mere void in its place; a void which would one day have to be filled, as “the human psyche, like rest of nature, abhors a vacuum, and something will fill it.” Hansen’s own comment was that “That ‘something’ will almost certainly be supernatural, and academia hasn’t a clue.” [9]
Maybe so. Perhaps that supernatural “something” is actually a form of mass, unconscious and unrecognized Hermes-worship, like the trannies and the body-positive people pursue, a generic mental cult of which I suppose I am also something of a slightly regretful unknowing former member (or partially regretful, in any case – I still like Hermes very much when located in his proper place upon the margins).
The paranormal has traditionally been sidelined and marginalized by wider society. I once regretted this fact. Now, I am beginning to see its wisdom. If a financially disappointed author like myself can draw one consolation from the fact my book Blithe Spirits didn’t end up becoming a best-seller, then it is this: at least wider dissemination of its message and contents didn’t accidentally help the postmodernist leftists destroy Western civilization any further!
So, should I urge readers to rush out and buy a copy of my old book this Christmas…or not?
Notes
[1] Fodor, Nandor (1959) The Haunted Mind: A Psychoanalyst Looks At the Supernatural, Garret Publications: USA, pp.192-3
[2] Pluckrose, Helen & Lindsay, James (2021) Cynical Theories, Swift Books: UK, pp.175-8
[3] Tucker, S.D. (2020) Blithe Spirits: An Imaginative History of the Poltergeist, Amberley: UK, pp.330-3
[4] Tucker, 2020, pp.133-135
[5] Tucker, 2020, pp.193-4
[6] Pluckrose & Lindsay, 2021, pp.34-5, 189-90; Charles Fort was an early twentieth-century American collector of anomalies. I write regularly for the UK magazine of strange phenomena which now bears his name, Fortean Times.
[7] Tucker, 2020, pp.105-20
[8] Hansen, George P. (2001) The Trickster and the Paranormal, Xlibris: USA, pp.375-83
[9] Hansen, 2001, p.378
8 comments
You touch on a very interesting topic. At first glance, the Vedic idea of an unconditioned, attributeless Self (the soul of every creature) in an illusory world that has no truly fixed rules seems to lend itself to the egalitarian, tabula rasa, worldview. Many moderns with spiritual pretensions are quick to claim the Vedas as their own because they think they are in congruence with social and racial equality.
The Vedas certainly teach that this world is an illusion — a virtual reality, if you will — and that the Self is free from any earthly identity. Yet the Bhagavad Gita simultaneously proclaims that those who mix their blood with other castes and destroy family traditions are destined for hell. It condemns those who desire to take on duties improper to their caste and it warns against sharing its teachings with fools and sinners.
The doctrine of karma and eternal (pre)existence of the soul puts the concept of the illusory world into a proper, aristocratic framework. You as a mortal are born into a particular body and particular environment due to your own choices. Mortality is synonymous with limitation, with ignorance. We clash with the rest of the cosmos in thoughts and external actions alike.
In any case, both ancient mages and modern occultists share the belief that this world is mental and malleable, but there is one crucial difference between them: the ancients knew that nothing is for free, not even thoughts. In the olden days, people understood that the manifest universe is an endless cycle of sacrifice. For this reason alone, the pitiful attempts of today’s occultists at magic can never amount to anything. They think magic is a miraculous shortcut to get free stuff when it is the opposite. It’s no accident that Odin had to hang himself to gain knowledge. The Bhagavad Gita also beckons us to transform each thought, feeling, and action into a sacrifical offering.
Thus, contemplation of metaphysical idealism and the paranormal in general supports egalitarianism only when it’s taken out of proper context. Coincidentally, I am currently writing a book where I elaborate on this topic. I’ll start publishing it as a series of articles on C-C when it’s more or less finished.
Boo!
…
An interesting read concerning psychic manifestations ( from where poltergeists originate) is René Guénon’s *The Spiritist Error*. It’s probably difficult to find a book version now. And it’s a little outdated ( spiritism is so passé ), but the knowledge is there.
The human subconscious is a conduit for a multitude of preternatural manifestations (especially in those whose conscious mind ( who should be dominant ) is fragile: the mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts, and adolescents tormented by hormones—hence the manifestations of poltergeists in young girls). The human subconscious plays tricks, but so do a lot of entities, all mini tricksters; our ancestors called them dark elves, goblins, fairies, etc.
Sorry for the multi posting, there is a translation mistake, the title is ” the spiritist fallacy ” 1923. I checked, it is easy to find it and in English online.
Steve, where can we find the book? I’m not seeing it on Amazon.
I just finished reading Mysteries of the Goths by Edred (Thorsson?) and I got this impression that paganism is the right choice. But given your description of Hermes above, and Hermes = Mercury = Odin, then are we risking much by letting Heathenry rekindle?
I’ve also had two life experiences which were clearly related to something like a poltergeist so I’m in the camp of believers as you, but to allow them back into the world might not do us any good.
It’s only now that I realize that the equivalence of Odin to Mercury/Hermes is Tacitus trying to discredit Germanic religion, considering what you’ve written above. If anything, Loki = Hermes and it’s clear what was thought of him by Germans.
Also, here’s how to be a Progressive Conservative:
Hail Prometheus!
Hail Hephaestus!
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