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The Book of the Damned
Time travel, UFOs, mysterious planets, stigmata, rock-throwing poltergeists, huge footprints, bizarre rains of fish and frogs-nearly a century after Charles Fort's Book of the Damned was originally published, the strange phenomenon presented in this book remains largely unexplained by modern science. Through painstaking research and a witty, sarcastic style, Fort captures the imagination while exposing the flaws of popular scientific explanations. Virtually all of his material was compiled and documented from reports published in reputable journals, newspapers and periodicals because he was an avid collector. Charles Fort was somewhat of a recluse who spent most of his spare time researching these strange events and collected these reports from publications sent to him from around the globe. This was the first of a series of books he created on unusual and unexplained events and to this day it remains the most popular. If you agree that truth is often stranger than fiction, then this book is for you.
228 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1919
About the author
Charles Fort
78 books115 followersCharles Hoy Fort was a Dutch-American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena.
Jerome Clark writes that Fort was "essentially a satirist hugely skeptical of human beings' – especially scientists' – claims to ultimate knowledge". Clark describes Fort's writing style as a "distinctive blend of mocking humor, penetrating insight, and calculated outrageousness".
Writer Colin Wilson describes Fort as "a patron of cranks" and also argues that running through Fort's work is "the feeling that no matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."
Fort's books sold well and remain in print. Today, the terms "Fortean" and "Forteana" are used to characterise various anomalous phenomena.
Jerome Clark writes that Fort was "essentially a satirist hugely skeptical of human beings' – especially scientists' – claims to ultimate knowledge". Clark describes Fort's writing style as a "distinctive blend of mocking humor, penetrating insight, and calculated outrageousness".
Writer Colin Wilson describes Fort as "a patron of cranks" and also argues that running through Fort's work is "the feeling that no matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."
Fort's books sold well and remain in print. Today, the terms "Fortean" and "Forteana" are used to characterise various anomalous phenomena.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 80 reviews
August 19, 2012
I'm actually surprised I managed to finish this book. It had a lot of potential, I thought - supposedly Fort's ideas inspired a great many writers whose work I enjoy, including H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, and Stephen King. As soon as I started reading, though, I could tell it would be a slog to get through; the writing is dense and unorganized and frankly most of it is crazy. But some of the basic premises are thought-provoking: for instance, excessive trust in current scientific understanding can cause people to work overly hard to fit all observations into the existing framework, missing places where that understanding is incomplete or incorrect. Where might those places be today? Also, there's the occasional hilarity of passages like the following:
"But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese."
But by the sixth or seventh consecutive chapter of lists of weird weather reports*, I very nearly gave up on the book. Fort will occasionally have a thesis or at least some kind of direction to his writing, but more often than not he just lists news blurb after news blurb, with little to no connection between them. He accuses scientists of cherry-picking data to fit their existing theories and then promptly turns around and cherry-picks stories to fit his own alternate explanations. And his writing style is strangely bipolar; he rambles on and on through maddeningly long paragraphs and then abruptly switches over to short phrases emitted as staccato non sequiturs.
I'm still not quite sure what kept me going through all that. I think it may have been just a simple change from talking about bizarre weather to strangely carved stones or something, and the novelty was enough to pull me forward. But for whatever reason I did keep going, and I found that what I tended to enjoy the most were Fort's theories trying to explain odd happenings. Some would make good premises for science fiction novels (Earth has been visited by aliens, but the reason that we don't see any of them any more is that one particular alien race has laid claim to our planet and is warning/fighting all the rest off - but why?) while others are kind of brilliantly searing horror scenes (a giant space snake has been slain in a cosmic battle and its blood and gore rain down upon the Earth). Most are just crazy, though - not just impossible as we understand the universe, but also poorly thought out and confusingly explained.
So in the end, I wouldn't really recommend reading this book. And I'm still kind of amazed I'm giving it two stars instead of just one (or none at all). But something did keep me going through it, and I felt the need to try and explain why, even to myself - hence the weirdly long review for a book I didn't like that much. I think perhaps I'll close with another quotation from the book, which I feel sums up the whole experience nicely:
"I have discovered a new unintelligibility."
*By the way, there sure were a lot of reports of strange things falling from the sky from the late 1700s through the 1800s, especially since as far as I know almost nobody any more reports rains of blood or "flakes of a substance that looked like beef" or "things like gelatinous hat crowns." I guess this illustrates the leaps we've made in communication. News reports are no longer collected by talking to someone who says "my second cousin's wife's best friend says that three weeks ago hailstones the size of cows fell on a farm three counties over," which results in a story published long after the fact and distorted by the weakness of human memory. Now, we've got tweets and cell phone videos and all kinds of ways to record and instantly corroborate or debunk stories. Kind of an interesting cultural shift along with the technological one there.
"But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese."
But by the sixth or seventh consecutive chapter of lists of weird weather reports*, I very nearly gave up on the book. Fort will occasionally have a thesis or at least some kind of direction to his writing, but more often than not he just lists news blurb after news blurb, with little to no connection between them. He accuses scientists of cherry-picking data to fit their existing theories and then promptly turns around and cherry-picks stories to fit his own alternate explanations. And his writing style is strangely bipolar; he rambles on and on through maddeningly long paragraphs and then abruptly switches over to short phrases emitted as staccato non sequiturs.
I'm still not quite sure what kept me going through all that. I think it may have been just a simple change from talking about bizarre weather to strangely carved stones or something, and the novelty was enough to pull me forward. But for whatever reason I did keep going, and I found that what I tended to enjoy the most were Fort's theories trying to explain odd happenings. Some would make good premises for science fiction novels (Earth has been visited by aliens, but the reason that we don't see any of them any more is that one particular alien race has laid claim to our planet and is warning/fighting all the rest off - but why?) while others are kind of brilliantly searing horror scenes (a giant space snake has been slain in a cosmic battle and its blood and gore rain down upon the Earth). Most are just crazy, though - not just impossible as we understand the universe, but also poorly thought out and confusingly explained.
So in the end, I wouldn't really recommend reading this book. And I'm still kind of amazed I'm giving it two stars instead of just one (or none at all). But something did keep me going through it, and I felt the need to try and explain why, even to myself - hence the weirdly long review for a book I didn't like that much. I think perhaps I'll close with another quotation from the book, which I feel sums up the whole experience nicely:
"I have discovered a new unintelligibility."
*By the way, there sure were a lot of reports of strange things falling from the sky from the late 1700s through the 1800s, especially since as far as I know almost nobody any more reports rains of blood or "flakes of a substance that looked like beef" or "things like gelatinous hat crowns." I guess this illustrates the leaps we've made in communication. News reports are no longer collected by talking to someone who says "my second cousin's wife's best friend says that three weeks ago hailstones the size of cows fell on a farm three counties over," which results in a story published long after the fact and distorted by the weakness of human memory. Now, we've got tweets and cell phone videos and all kinds of ways to record and instantly corroborate or debunk stories. Kind of an interesting cultural shift along with the technological one there.
August 9, 2016
Some people dismiss Fort as an unscientific crank, some people embrace him whole-heartedly as a reporter of the paranormal, others just love him as a champion of the ABnormal. I like his language - wch may generally go undercommented on as people pay more attn to the more spectacular "Fortean" phenomena described. I find Fort's language to be EXTREMELY CAREFUL in its attempt to NOT BE DEFINITIVE & it's in this that, for me, therein lies Fort's extreme importance. It's not just that he stresses that scientists are capable of ignoring data/experiences that fall outside 'convenient' &/or 'consensus' 'reality', it's also that Fort describes things in such a way that's both expressive of & CONDUCIVE TO a state-of-mind of CONTINUAL QUESTIONING. Bravo!
July 31, 2011
This is four books: Lo! Wild Talents, the Book of the Damned and New Lands.
Lo!: List of strange phenomenon with possible explanations. Postulates teleportation as a means to fill a void in a niche. Example: instects to where there are few or none, water to drought regions--in a response to prayer? Also postulates earthquakes and volcanos related to the appearances of new stars due to a stationary earth (?). Dislikes professional astronomers.
Wild Talents: Strange fires that only burn beds and not other areas of a room. Postulates it is mental energy. Talks about disappearances--Ambrose Bierce. People unrelated being in clusters. One man falls dead, then others do too. Ships crews. "Gas" affecting one floor of a building. Money disappearing (because of need? or wish fulfillment?) Atavistic throw backs. Wounds, stigmata.Poltergiests. Stigmata. Typhoid Mary--discounts germ theory. Pictures flying off walls. Rocks at houses of the dying. Stunts, inventions that defy science debunked by conventionalists.
The Book of the Damned: rain of frogs, flood rain in same place successive days, cannon balls, gelatinous substance, fish, ice, luminous spoked wheels in Persian Gulf, footprints, strange auroral like clouds in South Devonsire.
New Lands: Manifest Destiny--now it is go to the stars, but when he was young, it was Go West. Space, the final frontier. Quakes, stones, odd lights, mirages at time Mars and Venus close to earth.
Just a thought: what would Charles Fort (died in 1932) have thought about the Philadelphia Experiment? UFO'S? JFK? Crop Circles?
Saw something on the internet about an astronomical event and a mention of fires and earthquakes, thought ruefully of Charles Fort and something in the back of my mind made me say ummmm.....
Lo!: List of strange phenomenon with possible explanations. Postulates teleportation as a means to fill a void in a niche. Example: instects to where there are few or none, water to drought regions--in a response to prayer? Also postulates earthquakes and volcanos related to the appearances of new stars due to a stationary earth (?). Dislikes professional astronomers.
Wild Talents: Strange fires that only burn beds and not other areas of a room. Postulates it is mental energy. Talks about disappearances--Ambrose Bierce. People unrelated being in clusters. One man falls dead, then others do too. Ships crews. "Gas" affecting one floor of a building. Money disappearing (because of need? or wish fulfillment?) Atavistic throw backs. Wounds, stigmata.Poltergiests. Stigmata. Typhoid Mary--discounts germ theory. Pictures flying off walls. Rocks at houses of the dying. Stunts, inventions that defy science debunked by conventionalists.
The Book of the Damned: rain of frogs, flood rain in same place successive days, cannon balls, gelatinous substance, fish, ice, luminous spoked wheels in Persian Gulf, footprints, strange auroral like clouds in South Devonsire.
New Lands: Manifest Destiny--now it is go to the stars, but when he was young, it was Go West. Space, the final frontier. Quakes, stones, odd lights, mirages at time Mars and Venus close to earth.
Just a thought: what would Charles Fort (died in 1932) have thought about the Philadelphia Experiment? UFO'S? JFK? Crop Circles?
Saw something on the internet about an astronomical event and a mention of fires and earthquakes, thought ruefully of Charles Fort and something in the back of my mind made me say ummmm.....
July 8, 2017
I started this book thinking Fort was some kind of proto-Alex Jones, 20th century conspiracy theorist, but I was missing the point. Fort doesn't actually believe the theories he puts forwards, he doesn't believe in a Super-Sargasso Sea, he doesn't believe in an extinct race of diminunitive fairies, it's all a thought experiment. He gathers anomalous data from the most reputable sources of the 20th and 19th centuries, and puts forth absurd theories that account for ALL the data. It's a mockery of his academic contemporaries' attempts at the demarcation and classification of all natural processes, and a statement: that all things are continuous, everything fades into everything else.
April 24, 2012
I can't deny Fort's importance as a pioneer in the study of weird and inexplicable phenomena, but surely he was one of the worst prose stylists of his generation. His love for incomplete sentences is maddening, and when he does write a complete one, it is usually awkwardly constructed and poorly phrased. As for his philosophy of "Intermediateness" (or whatever it should be called), one can scarcely weigh its merits when it is set forth so murkily. Adding to the confusion, Tiffany Thayer (the founder of the first Fortean Society) assures us that Fort did not believe any of his own explanations of the strange events he describes. Those interested in a "Fortean" approach to the bizarre should try John A. Keel, John Michell and Bob Rickard, before deciding whether they want to get bogged down in Fort himself.
January 7, 2019
"Bizarre" and "disturbing".
It is a shame that this book wasn't written by someone with a better writing style, as it was difficult to follow his train of thought. I have read few books that start so many paragraphs with the word "That".
And yet the citations of mysterious sky droppings certainly leave you scratching your head in wonder. Either the world is filled with cranks and pranksters, or what we think of reality is in need of readjustment. Charles Fort has his own suggestions, which will raise eyebrows, and are not totally satisfying, but he seems to try his best to come up with possible suggestions.
But just because they aren't believable doesn't mean they aren't correct.
It's one of those books that you may wish you hadn't read.
Or it could be a catalyst to break you out of a dull life and propel you into exploring more mysteries.
It is a shame that this book wasn't written by someone with a better writing style, as it was difficult to follow his train of thought. I have read few books that start so many paragraphs with the word "That".
And yet the citations of mysterious sky droppings certainly leave you scratching your head in wonder. Either the world is filled with cranks and pranksters, or what we think of reality is in need of readjustment. Charles Fort has his own suggestions, which will raise eyebrows, and are not totally satisfying, but he seems to try his best to come up with possible suggestions.
But just because they aren't believable doesn't mean they aren't correct.
It's one of those books that you may wish you hadn't read.
Or it could be a catalyst to break you out of a dull life and propel you into exploring more mysteries.
May 28, 2019
En un tiempo lejano, alguien escribió con cierto dejo de altivez y medida soberbia, que al hombre le bastaba con examinar aquellos libros que hubiesen sido escritos un siglo antes de ser leídos. Bajo dicha premisa me embarqué en la tarea de leer este libro que cumple su primer siglo de haber sido editado: “El Libro de los Condenados” resulta ser un texto complejo de leer. Navegando –a veces sin mucho rumbo- entre el ensayo, la crónica periodística y la novela- Charles Fort nos bombardea con su increíble colección de datos extraños y surreales, recopilados metódicamente durante años (más de 60.000 recortes de periódicos y revistas especializadas que datan incluso de finales siglo XVII); hechos que escapan a lo cotidiano y a cualquier explicación lógica: Lluvia de materiales orgánicos e inorgánicos (peces, ranas, arena, agua salada, sangre, carne, telarañas, carbón, lluvia negra, etc.); eventos meteorológicos extraordinarios; objetos inusuales sobrevolando el cielo y el mar; civilizaciones diminutas; hombres gigantes; visitantes de otros planetas… Para muchos, Fort es considerado como el primer Ufólogo (28 años antes del boom del fenómeno Ovni con el caso Roosevelt del '47) y uno de los primeros escépticos que se plantearon el objetivo de criticar al positivismo y a la ciencia ortodoxa que simplemente se dedicaba a ridiculizar estos fenómenos, sin dar una explicación lógica y certera a los mismos; fundando sin quererlo, la escuela de las teorías conspirativas.
Lastimosamente, la increíble capacidad de Fort para recopilar datos no se ve traducida en una buena manera de presentarlos. La prosa del autor es algo pobre y su presentación de datos y conclusiones resulta desordenada. Las hipótesis que formula aparecen a veces más extrañas que los datos que nos revela (El Supermar de los Sargazos y la basura cósmica que nos lanzan, a hoy día, resultan bastante risibles). No obstante todos los defectos que pueda tener esta obra, su influencia confesa en autores posteriores, obligarán a todo fanático de la ciencia ficción a volver al origen de todo. Tanto Philip K. Dick como Stephen King, han incluido a Fort y sus tesis, como fuente de inspiración para varios de sus libros. Sin embargo, será el genio y maestro del terror cósmico, su majestad H.P. Lovecraft, quien incluyó a Charles Fort y sus investigaciones, como fuente de inspiración para crear su universo literario de criaturas infinitas agazapadas en otras dimensiones, mezcladas con eventos reales.
Sin ser una joya de la literatura; por la temática tratada, por la cantidad de datos “malditos y condenados” aquí recopilados, por el espíritu rebelde, inconforme, crítico y contestatario de su autor, por la influencia que ejercería más adelante en autores y maestros de la ciencia ficción, “El Libro de los Condenados” merece ser abordado por todo fanático y seguidor de los eventos paranormales y/o la ciencia ficción: Basta ver al cielo estrellado en la noche y recordar que la verdad está allí fuera!
Lastimosamente, la increíble capacidad de Fort para recopilar datos no se ve traducida en una buena manera de presentarlos. La prosa del autor es algo pobre y su presentación de datos y conclusiones resulta desordenada. Las hipótesis que formula aparecen a veces más extrañas que los datos que nos revela (El Supermar de los Sargazos y la basura cósmica que nos lanzan, a hoy día, resultan bastante risibles). No obstante todos los defectos que pueda tener esta obra, su influencia confesa en autores posteriores, obligarán a todo fanático de la ciencia ficción a volver al origen de todo. Tanto Philip K. Dick como Stephen King, han incluido a Fort y sus tesis, como fuente de inspiración para varios de sus libros. Sin embargo, será el genio y maestro del terror cósmico, su majestad H.P. Lovecraft, quien incluyó a Charles Fort y sus investigaciones, como fuente de inspiración para crear su universo literario de criaturas infinitas agazapadas en otras dimensiones, mezcladas con eventos reales.
Sin ser una joya de la literatura; por la temática tratada, por la cantidad de datos “malditos y condenados” aquí recopilados, por el espíritu rebelde, inconforme, crítico y contestatario de su autor, por la influencia que ejercería más adelante en autores y maestros de la ciencia ficción, “El Libro de los Condenados” merece ser abordado por todo fanático y seguidor de los eventos paranormales y/o la ciencia ficción: Basta ver al cielo estrellado en la noche y recordar que la verdad está allí fuera!
May 4, 2016
We are still in Fortean Times
The Book of the Damned (first published in 1919) covers records and reports of odd and freak occurrences from around the world that were at the time, and mostly still are, unexplained.
UFOs and all
We are talking freak weather - rains that dumped small animals and inanimate objects like blocks of ice, pebbles; also black rain, triangular clouds and artefacts like axeheads falling from the sky. It also records some poltergeist activity, dirigibles (UFOs to us), and many more... These were being reported during the early 20th century plus back in the 19th century and even earlier, and found in publications, such as Notes & Queries, and newspapers at the time. For example:
'Science, July 31, 1896: That, according to a newspaper account, Mr. W.R. Brooks, director of the Smith Observatory, had seen a dark round object pass rather slowly across the moon, in a horizontal direction.'
'"A formation having the shape of a dirigible." It was reported from Huntington, West Virginia (Sci. Amer., 115-241). Luminous object that was seen July 19, 1916, at about 11 P.M. Observed through "rather powerful field glasses," it looked to be about two degrees long and half a degree wide. It gradually dimmed, disappeared, reappeared, and then faded out of sight.'
Fortean Times
Charles Fort's Book of the Damned later became the springboard for the Fortean Times magazine. What Fort was really getting at, with his double-edged sword, wasn't just to list the weird and wonderful but to confront the ongoing denial, or over-simple explanations, given by experts and scientists at the time, in response to these stories – that denial was the driver for his writing the book – the clue is, as they say, in the title.
A real oversight
One major drawback of the book is that it isn’t organised into proper chapters – so has no table of contents - and nor does it contain an index at the back. This is a real setback for a book so crammed with information and facts. One is therefore obliged to trawl through it to find the nuggets of information one is looking for. This is the reason and the only reason I give this book 4 Stars and not 5.
However, Kindle to the rescue here. Kindle provides a search facility and that does help enormously as an alternative to a proper index. You just need to have some idea of what it is you are searching for - be it 'dirigibles,' 'poltergeists,' or odd 'clouds.'
A great read
If you are into the ‘ghost in the machine’, the unexplained, you’ll find this a fabulous and an adventurous read. Fort is witty, incisive, even sardonic in places, as he takes the experts to task. The book gives you a real flavour of the time it was written in. Do get hold of it today!
This book is now in the public domain by the way!
The Book of the Damned (first published in 1919) covers records and reports of odd and freak occurrences from around the world that were at the time, and mostly still are, unexplained.
UFOs and all
We are talking freak weather - rains that dumped small animals and inanimate objects like blocks of ice, pebbles; also black rain, triangular clouds and artefacts like axeheads falling from the sky. It also records some poltergeist activity, dirigibles (UFOs to us), and many more... These were being reported during the early 20th century plus back in the 19th century and even earlier, and found in publications, such as Notes & Queries, and newspapers at the time. For example:
'Science, July 31, 1896: That, according to a newspaper account, Mr. W.R. Brooks, director of the Smith Observatory, had seen a dark round object pass rather slowly across the moon, in a horizontal direction.'
'"A formation having the shape of a dirigible." It was reported from Huntington, West Virginia (Sci. Amer., 115-241). Luminous object that was seen July 19, 1916, at about 11 P.M. Observed through "rather powerful field glasses," it looked to be about two degrees long and half a degree wide. It gradually dimmed, disappeared, reappeared, and then faded out of sight.'
Fortean Times
Charles Fort's Book of the Damned later became the springboard for the Fortean Times magazine. What Fort was really getting at, with his double-edged sword, wasn't just to list the weird and wonderful but to confront the ongoing denial, or over-simple explanations, given by experts and scientists at the time, in response to these stories – that denial was the driver for his writing the book – the clue is, as they say, in the title.
A real oversight
One major drawback of the book is that it isn’t organised into proper chapters – so has no table of contents - and nor does it contain an index at the back. This is a real setback for a book so crammed with information and facts. One is therefore obliged to trawl through it to find the nuggets of information one is looking for. This is the reason and the only reason I give this book 4 Stars and not 5.
However, Kindle to the rescue here. Kindle provides a search facility and that does help enormously as an alternative to a proper index. You just need to have some idea of what it is you are searching for - be it 'dirigibles,' 'poltergeists,' or odd 'clouds.'
A great read
If you are into the ‘ghost in the machine’, the unexplained, you’ll find this a fabulous and an adventurous read. Fort is witty, incisive, even sardonic in places, as he takes the experts to task. The book gives you a real flavour of the time it was written in. Do get hold of it today!
This book is now in the public domain by the way!
November 16, 2021
Uno de los libros más raros que leí ya hace muchos años. Me pareció un gran compendio de sucesos extraños en diferentes épocas y latitudes muy bien documentado, los informes basado en anomalías de todo tipo encarado siempre desde lo fenomenológico basados en; lluvias extrañas, resplandores en el cielo, personas desaparecidas, ovnis, seres mitológicos aparecidos, etc. datos e información que la ciencia de aquella época había ¨condenado¨ y excluido como objeto de estudio. Quizás este escrito fue el germen de lo que décadas después se denominó ¨sucesos paranormales¨ que en mi adolescencia tanto llamó mi atención.
June 10, 2017
Below you will find an assortment of highlights from The Book of the Damned pulled from the clipping file of my Kindle. Convenient, that. You can find the same super-version of the book as the one I read for free on Amazon. I'm still not sure if it's a best-of, Charles Fort's collected works, or what... There seems to be at least some content which doesn't match up with the text found on his four books as found separately.
Anyway, back to the quotes:
The data of the damned. I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back with the quasi-souls of lost data. They will march.
---
The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.
---
All sciences begin with attempts to define. Nothing ever has been defined. Because there is nothing to define. Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. He was never able to tell what he meant by a "species." It is not possible to define. Nothing has ever been finally found out. Because there is nothing final to find out. It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was—
---
The novel is a challenge to vulgarization: write something that looks new to you: someone will point out that the thrice-accursed Greeks said it long ago.
---
It may be that in the whole nineteenth century no event more important than this occurred. In La Nature, 1887, and in L'Année Scientifique, 1887, this occurrence is noted. It is mentioned in one of the summer numbers of Nature, 1887. Fassig lists a paper upon it in the Annuaire de Soc. Met., 1887. Not a word of discussion. Not a subsequent mention can I find. Our own expression: What matters it how we, the French Academy, or the Salvation Army may explain? A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20, 1887.
---
My notion of astronomic accuracy: Who could not be a prize marksman, if only his hits be recorded?
---
But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose? Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density. Sometimes I'm a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I'm a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.
Charles Fort was a trailblazer. What we call today paranormal or occult, together with all the relevant scientific investigations, in a few words what we'd expect from Mulder and Scully, to a large extent we owe to him. Here's a guy who lived in the '20s and researched old copies of Scientific American, Nature and other such periodicals and magazines, looking for the damned, the unexplainable, the excluded. For what good is science, if it only chooses to include to its dogma what it can explain, sweeping under the carpet all that can be used to challenge its grand theories?
Giant, village-sized wheels submerged in the middle of the ocean; periodic rains of fish, frogs in various states of decay and of a gelatinous mass of unknown origin; falling stone discs, as in the quote above; meteors; lights in the sky moving in formation (reported in the 19th century); footprints of impossible creatures; giant hailstones; cannonballs entombed in solid rock, and that's just a sample.
Reading about these mysterious exclusions was a delight. I love everything that challenges my way of seeing the world and allows me to contemplate alternative explanations for life, the universe and everything. To be fair, some of Fort's favourite theories were down-right bizarre, such as his insistence on imagining a realm above our own from which all the falling creatures and materials originated - what our own surface world would be, conceptually, for the "deep-sea fish with the sore nose", as in the last extract I quoted above. The existence of such a place sounds no less ridiculous now than it did in the 1920s, but I think Fort's point was that his arbitrary explanations were just as good as the official ones offered by the scientific dogma of the time, which our present, widely-accepted, matter-of-fact world theories of today mirror. To be sure, a part - I don't know how significant - of the excluded, would be possible to include today, but I'm sure that many of the phenomena Fort goes through in his Book of the Damned would be just as inexplicable today as they were in the centuries past.
There are two reasons this book isn't getting five stars from me. The first one is that it's twice as long as I think it should have been. I felt that Fort at certain points was simply repeating himself. It's also possible he was just saying the same thing in a different, more difficult to understand way, and this is precisely the second reason this isn't getting five stars. Fort's language and style was very hit or miss. To give you an idea, the quotes I've included in this review are some of the easiest parts to understand from the whole book. Others love it. Myself, I can't say I hate it, but I'm not sure it's as successful a writing technique as Fort must have hoped for it to be.
The same hit-or-miss-ness is applicable to the book as a whole. I thought it was tremendously interesting and a significant publication that should be studied further and give inspiration to present-day Charles Forts, but I don't believe the style is for everyone. Why don't you find out for yourself if it's right for you, though? It's free!
May 1, 2024
Fort thoroughly catalogued meteorological, astronomical, geological, archaeological and UFOlogical phenomena which he called “the damned”. Damned in that academia refuses to acknowledge or seriously consider them and therefore damns them to oblivion. These are typically given the label of hoaxes, human misperceptions or given a paper thin explanation that satisfies the status quo.
Fort writes in a very sarcastic and biting tone to the academia of his day, in between the pages of documented cases of red rain. Much of what he writes about was rain that was an odd color or fish that fell from the sky. His theory as to the cause was space had floating oceans that occasionally touched earth and caused unusual things to fall. He also theorizes cases where artificial items fell or archaeological discoveries were made that did not fit into the popular narrative, that these were evidences of space faring peoples that had claimed ownership over earth and humanity. In his words “I think we’re property.”
He had interesting ideas, all of which still viewed all of these things from the 1800s materialist perspective. Also interesting catalogue of lights in the sky before they were associated with flying saucers. Book itself was very tedious and work to get through.
Fort writes in a very sarcastic and biting tone to the academia of his day, in between the pages of documented cases of red rain. Much of what he writes about was rain that was an odd color or fish that fell from the sky. His theory as to the cause was space had floating oceans that occasionally touched earth and caused unusual things to fall. He also theorizes cases where artificial items fell or archaeological discoveries were made that did not fit into the popular narrative, that these were evidences of space faring peoples that had claimed ownership over earth and humanity. In his words “I think we’re property.”
He had interesting ideas, all of which still viewed all of these things from the 1800s materialist perspective. Also interesting catalogue of lights in the sky before they were associated with flying saucers. Book itself was very tedious and work to get through.
January 14, 2023
If you’re looking for three-hundred pages of stuff falling from the sky you’ve come to the right place.
September 6, 2019
In the fictional world of the TV show The X-Files, I can imagine this book being in Fox Mulder's library. It purports to be is a list of occurrences and UFO sightings that have been damned - that is, excluded from history - because there are no satisfactory scientific explanations for these incidents. Published in 1919, long before the Age of Space Travel, Charles Fort's major premise was that other worlds or entities, undetected by humanity, lurked nearby in the heavens, even closer than the Moon.
The money sentence from this tedious book (Boni & Liveright, 2nd printing, 1920 as found at Google Books) by Charles Fort is found on page 252: "I think that we're fished for." This sentence, made famous by William Gaddis in his masterful novel THE RECOGNITIONS where characters discuss Fort's ideas as part of an intellectual conversation taking place at a post-WWII social gathering in Manhattan, is Fort's humorous retort to an August 27, 1885 UFO sighting where a "'strange object in the clouds'" was reported to resemble a "triangular shape, and seemed to be about the size of a pilot-boat mainsail, with chains attached to the bottom of it." Fort wonders if there was "something [alien life] trawling overhead" fishing for humans below. As it turns out, the object was most likely a partially collapsed balloon.
As an impressive catalog of strange objects reported to have fallen to the ground since 1700 A.D., and as a collection of widely-scattered witticisms from Fort in his commentary upon these strange objects, this book retains some value, but don't expect much entertainment.
The money sentence from this tedious book (Boni & Liveright, 2nd printing, 1920 as found at Google Books) by Charles Fort is found on page 252: "I think that we're fished for." This sentence, made famous by William Gaddis in his masterful novel THE RECOGNITIONS where characters discuss Fort's ideas as part of an intellectual conversation taking place at a post-WWII social gathering in Manhattan, is Fort's humorous retort to an August 27, 1885 UFO sighting where a "'strange object in the clouds'" was reported to resemble a "triangular shape, and seemed to be about the size of a pilot-boat mainsail, with chains attached to the bottom of it." Fort wonders if there was "something [alien life] trawling overhead" fishing for humans below. As it turns out, the object was most likely a partially collapsed balloon.
As an impressive catalog of strange objects reported to have fallen to the ground since 1700 A.D., and as a collection of widely-scattered witticisms from Fort in his commentary upon these strange objects, this book retains some value, but don't expect much entertainment.
July 12, 2016
Charles Fort is a terrible writer. Simply terrible. I can just imagine friends and acquaintances diving into back alleys any time they spotted Ol' Charlie coming down the street. He is not a man I would want to have a conversation with.
As to the book, the bulk of it is mostly hearsay of mysterious and unusual things falling from the sky. Red rain, fish, white fibers, pebbles, etc. After poo-pooing all the scientific explanations of these phenomenons, Fort gives his own conclusion, which is...
Are you sure you're ready for it?
Seriously, this will blow your mind and make you question everything you believe in.
Ok, don't say I didn't warn you.
Hold on to your knickers.
Charles Fort's explanation is......
Aliens are dumping their garbage on us.
As to the book, the bulk of it is mostly hearsay of mysterious and unusual things falling from the sky. Red rain, fish, white fibers, pebbles, etc. After poo-pooing all the scientific explanations of these phenomenons, Fort gives his own conclusion, which is...
Are you sure you're ready for it?
Seriously, this will blow your mind and make you question everything you believe in.
Ok, don't say I didn't warn you.
Hold on to your knickers.
Charles Fort's explanation is......
Aliens are dumping their garbage on us.
March 14, 2019
Siempre es interesante leer de la mano de un experto de principios del siglo xx sobre temas paranormales. Esta obra es mas una enumeracion de estos fenomenos exhaustiva. Peculiar estilo ironico y mas peculiares todavia las deducciones a las que llega el bueno de Fort. A pesar de sus escasas 180 paginas se hace pesado de terminar. Solo para los entusiastas de los fenomenos inexplicables que vienen del cielo. Curioso libro.
March 11, 2016
I was hoping for alot more from this book. Seems to me it's just the ramblings of one man opinion without any proofs or really any conclusions. Lots of facts stated but nothing drawn from them. Not recommended
April 19, 2008
We're all bugs and mice, and merely different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.
November 25, 2015
I feel like I know nothing after reading this.
November 1, 2020
The Book of the Damned (1919) by Charles Fort: Charles Fort is an important figure in both paranormal circles and in the science-fiction and horror genres. Financially able to not work, Fort decided to work at compiling strange stories from journals and newspapers and historical accounts during lengthy days spent in New York's public libraries. The result was what sometimes reads like The Book of LIsts: Early 20th-Century Edition.
Buried under a mountain of metaphysical gobbledygook is a fairly simple thesis: things are not what the experts tell us! The 'Damned' of the title are any 'facts' either excluded from theories of the way things work or explained away as being explicable.
Unfortunately, Fort's writing is often tedious at its best and almost incomprehensible at its worse. The book falls into a fairly consistent tripartite pattern:
1) Metaphysical and philosophical theories that slide rapidly into endlessly repeated Fortean platitudes.
2) Lists of hundreds of items, most of which could profitably be moved to an appendix because once you've read about ten things that were reported as falling from the sky, the list of another 700 things that fell from the sky gets pretty boring.
3) Rinse. Repeat.
What saves the material is Fort's almost throwaway gift for specific science-fictional speculation. These speculations are the stuff that many stories can and have been made of. Do alien spaceships jettison spent fuel into Earth's atmosphere? Is Earth's atmosphere partially covered by a gelatinous dome? Does Earth occasionally pass through the debris fields left by ancient space freighters? See, that's great stuff!
Fort tries to pass himself off as a bold iconoclast. However, while he has oodles of derision reserved for scientists, he seems to accept that stories from newspapers and journals of the 19th century and earlier are for the most part reliable.
Another problem is that Fort perplexingly begins this, his first of four forays into the paranormal, with perhaps the most boring of topics -- weird stuff that purportedly fell from the sky. About 200 pages of it. This rapidly loses its interest long before the 200 or so pages Fort devotes to it is over. Frogs, fish, red rain, black rain, slag, cannonballs, thunderstones, rocks... on and on and on. You can almost taste the boredom -- and Fort's desire to get all that research he did into the book.
This is an important book when it comes to various genres. But if you read it, you will skim long sections. There's only so many strange rains of the 19th century one can find interesting.
Buried under a mountain of metaphysical gobbledygook is a fairly simple thesis: things are not what the experts tell us! The 'Damned' of the title are any 'facts' either excluded from theories of the way things work or explained away as being explicable.
Unfortunately, Fort's writing is often tedious at its best and almost incomprehensible at its worse. The book falls into a fairly consistent tripartite pattern:
1) Metaphysical and philosophical theories that slide rapidly into endlessly repeated Fortean platitudes.
2) Lists of hundreds of items, most of which could profitably be moved to an appendix because once you've read about ten things that were reported as falling from the sky, the list of another 700 things that fell from the sky gets pretty boring.
3) Rinse. Repeat.
What saves the material is Fort's almost throwaway gift for specific science-fictional speculation. These speculations are the stuff that many stories can and have been made of. Do alien spaceships jettison spent fuel into Earth's atmosphere? Is Earth's atmosphere partially covered by a gelatinous dome? Does Earth occasionally pass through the debris fields left by ancient space freighters? See, that's great stuff!
Fort tries to pass himself off as a bold iconoclast. However, while he has oodles of derision reserved for scientists, he seems to accept that stories from newspapers and journals of the 19th century and earlier are for the most part reliable.
Another problem is that Fort perplexingly begins this, his first of four forays into the paranormal, with perhaps the most boring of topics -- weird stuff that purportedly fell from the sky. About 200 pages of it. This rapidly loses its interest long before the 200 or so pages Fort devotes to it is over. Frogs, fish, red rain, black rain, slag, cannonballs, thunderstones, rocks... on and on and on. You can almost taste the boredom -- and Fort's desire to get all that research he did into the book.
This is an important book when it comes to various genres. But if you read it, you will skim long sections. There's only so many strange rains of the 19th century one can find interesting.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 20, 2023
This is a strange book, about strange events, written in a strange prose style. It was not really enjoyable to read, though at times the sarcastic wit did draw a smile.
Aside from being valuable as a compendium of baffling historical anecdotes, the book's real strength lies in two related aspects:
First, its significant challenge to the all-too-human aspects of the scientific establishment. Namely, the inability of authoritative bodies on a given subject to take seriously data which challenges the fundamental assumptions that their authoritative knowledge is based on.
This results in the suppression and denial of data which would threaten not knowledge but status within a given sphere. And humans are rather attached to their status, more so than to truth which threatens that status.
Fort's work is a jab in the eye to the hubristic claim that the scientific establishment is a purely truth-seeking entity.
The second strength is its common sense data-driven undermining of philosophical materialism. With a studied reticence to make any sweeping metaphysical claims, Fort nonetheless pokes holes into the veneer which materialism has enjoyed among the bien-pensants since the Enlightenment. He presents a carnival of inconvenient and vexing observations from all across the world. While many of these might have prosaic explanations, the cumulative effect of them all, page after page, from such a dizzying array of sources, is difficult to dismiss out of hand. Not that that has ever stopped anyone from doing it.
These ideas may be summarized pithily in Fort's own words: "Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all things."
Here we are, a hundred years hence, and this blindered certainty continues to characterize many skeptics and atheists. Their cultural authority is waning, however, as the West recedes from peak secularism. The new atheists had their day in the sun, but they have now shuffled off the stage.
The tide is now moving towards re-enchantment. The world is growing thin, and the non-material realities that were studiously ignored are making themselves felt once again.
I wonder what Charles Fort would have said about that.
Aside from being valuable as a compendium of baffling historical anecdotes, the book's real strength lies in two related aspects:
First, its significant challenge to the all-too-human aspects of the scientific establishment. Namely, the inability of authoritative bodies on a given subject to take seriously data which challenges the fundamental assumptions that their authoritative knowledge is based on.
This results in the suppression and denial of data which would threaten not knowledge but status within a given sphere. And humans are rather attached to their status, more so than to truth which threatens that status.
Fort's work is a jab in the eye to the hubristic claim that the scientific establishment is a purely truth-seeking entity.
The second strength is its common sense data-driven undermining of philosophical materialism. With a studied reticence to make any sweeping metaphysical claims, Fort nonetheless pokes holes into the veneer which materialism has enjoyed among the bien-pensants since the Enlightenment. He presents a carnival of inconvenient and vexing observations from all across the world. While many of these might have prosaic explanations, the cumulative effect of them all, page after page, from such a dizzying array of sources, is difficult to dismiss out of hand. Not that that has ever stopped anyone from doing it.
These ideas may be summarized pithily in Fort's own words: "Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all things."
Here we are, a hundred years hence, and this blindered certainty continues to characterize many skeptics and atheists. Their cultural authority is waning, however, as the West recedes from peak secularism. The new atheists had their day in the sun, but they have now shuffled off the stage.
The tide is now moving towards re-enchantment. The world is growing thin, and the non-material realities that were studiously ignored are making themselves felt once again.
I wonder what Charles Fort would have said about that.
January 9, 2021
Charles Fort's 1919 exploration of the paranormal and unexplained natural phenomena (incredible amounts of strange substances falling from the sky!) is one of the strangest, most ludicrous, yet amazing things I have read. The Fortean put-downs of certain types of scientific thinking (especially astronomy!) are unparalleled.
Highlights:
1. The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest— Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. "Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival." Darwinism: That survivors survive.
2. My own pseudo-conclusion: That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn or frogs' spawn, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences. Or there is only hypnosis. The accursed are those who admit they're the accursed.
3. My notion of astronomic accuracy: Who could not be a prize marksman, if only his hits be recorded?
(And most important) 4. Or raw meat should not be fed to babies.
To Charles Fort, with love indeed.
Highlights:
1. The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest— Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. "Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival." Darwinism: That survivors survive.
2. My own pseudo-conclusion: That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn or frogs' spawn, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences. Or there is only hypnosis. The accursed are those who admit they're the accursed.
3. My notion of astronomic accuracy: Who could not be a prize marksman, if only his hits be recorded?
(And most important) 4. Or raw meat should not be fed to babies.
To Charles Fort, with love indeed.
July 10, 2022
This cult book is often described as pseudoscientific amusement, a collection of weird facts, but it's much more than that: its core is deeply philosophical and deals with epistemology: the philosophy of knowledge (and, therefore science). In short, the author has collected over decades all published science that didn't fit in with scientific paradigm.
The first chapter of this book is genius. It contains a blistering epistemological analysis of what knowledge is, and makes the philosophical point that in this world there exists no such thing as a "thing". There is nothing in the world that can be separated from all the rest that exists, and thus be considered as an individually existing thing. It's an insight that comes very close to the Buddhist insights of interbeing, no-self and and impermanence.
"What is a house?
It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else, if there are no positive differences. A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird's nest is a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs' houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos—or a shell is a house to a hermit crab—or was to the mollusk that made it—or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington and a shell on the seashore are seen to be continuous.
So no one has ever been able to say what electricity is, for instance. It isn't anything, as positively distinguished from heat or magnetism or life. Metaphysicians and theologians and biologists have tried to define life. They have failed, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to define: there is no phenomenon of life that is not, to some degree, manifest in chemism, magnetism, astronomic motions."
That is not to say that Fort limits himself to conventional monism (the idea that all "things" that seem to have identity of their own are only islands that are projections from something underlying, and have no real outlines of their own). He also makes the striking point that "things", although they are only projections, are projections that are striving to break away from the underlying matrix that denies them identity of their own. So these projections construct an identity; and they do that by excluding other things. (I'm mostly using Fort's words here). This then also applies to living things or humans.
"Anything that tries to establish itself as a real, or positive, or absolute system, government, organization, self, soul, entity, individuality, can so attempt only by drawing a line about itself, or about the inclusions that constitute itself, and damning or excluding, or breaking away from, all other "things"".
"Just as would one who draws a circle in the sea, including a few waves, saying that the other waves, with which the included are continuous, are positively different, and stakes his life upon maintaining that the admitted and the damned are positively different."
This is a concise rational analysis of how the illusion of "self" leads to the negative effects of separation, of causes and effects, of karma, and is deeply Buddhist/Hindu in nature.
From here, Fort goes on to attack the idea of objective science. He demonstrates that positivist science can only exist by faulty definitions and the exclusion of many unwanted data.
Fort is the ultimate sceptic. He is sceptic of all attempts to model reality, and he is particularly sceptic of science: "All sciences begin with attempts to define. Nothing ever has been defined. Because there is nothing to define. Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. He was never able to tell what he meant by a "species.""
After this, Fort goes on to trash Darwin a bit more, demonstrating the tautology in Darwins most famous aforism (which was not really coined by Darwin, but still used by him in later editions of his work):
"The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest —
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. "Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival." Darwinism: That survivors survive."
Fort doesn't have a special thing for Darwin. He attacks all fields of science. Charles Fort spent the rest of his life searching for all the scientific data, published in scientific publications, that didn't fit in with the accepted theories. The "damned" data. And then he put all these damned data neatly together, and made up new exotic theories to accommodate them - knowing very well that they were mostly absurde. Hence the name of the book.
As far as I'm concerned, the first chapter is the most interesting part, because it offers the philosophical foundation for everything Fort has written and done the rest of his life. Most of the rest of his writing is about the amazing and crazy facts he found over decades of research. Many of them are about things that fell from the sky: rains of frogs, rains of red jelly, rains of blood, rains of fish, etc. Many of these things have been explained by science later, or are still waiting to be explained.
But the fundamental point of Fort, which drives all his writing and efforts, is the insight that any effort to model reality and fit it in scientific theories, is always a violation of reality. It can only function by excluding, killing off, ignoring other parts of reality. In the Wikipedia descriptions of Fort's work, there is too much stress on the exotic quality of his findings and writings, and he is described as a kind of science fiction writer.
But the fundamental motivation for his search is deeply philosophical. He makes the point that all that exists strives to manifest itself as an entity, attaining to the Universal; but it does so by cutting itself loose from the rest of creation. Or as Fort says: "Our whole "existence" is an attempt by the relative to be the absolute, or by the local to be the universal. Every attempt—that is observable—is defeated by Continuity, or by outside forces—or by the excluded that are continuous with the included."
Chapter 1 is an incredibly concise description of the fundamental conflict of existence, which gives birth to the law of Karma, which gives birth to the despair of Existentialism. The Universal, as Fort describes it, also comes very close to Spinoza's definition of Substance or God.
I haven't finished reading it, so I can't really give stars. But chapter 1 is 6 stars for me.
The first chapter of this book is genius. It contains a blistering epistemological analysis of what knowledge is, and makes the philosophical point that in this world there exists no such thing as a "thing". There is nothing in the world that can be separated from all the rest that exists, and thus be considered as an individually existing thing. It's an insight that comes very close to the Buddhist insights of interbeing, no-self and and impermanence.
"What is a house?
It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else, if there are no positive differences. A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird's nest is a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs' houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos—or a shell is a house to a hermit crab—or was to the mollusk that made it—or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington and a shell on the seashore are seen to be continuous.
So no one has ever been able to say what electricity is, for instance. It isn't anything, as positively distinguished from heat or magnetism or life. Metaphysicians and theologians and biologists have tried to define life. They have failed, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to define: there is no phenomenon of life that is not, to some degree, manifest in chemism, magnetism, astronomic motions."
That is not to say that Fort limits himself to conventional monism (the idea that all "things" that seem to have identity of their own are only islands that are projections from something underlying, and have no real outlines of their own). He also makes the striking point that "things", although they are only projections, are projections that are striving to break away from the underlying matrix that denies them identity of their own. So these projections construct an identity; and they do that by excluding other things. (I'm mostly using Fort's words here). This then also applies to living things or humans.
"Anything that tries to establish itself as a real, or positive, or absolute system, government, organization, self, soul, entity, individuality, can so attempt only by drawing a line about itself, or about the inclusions that constitute itself, and damning or excluding, or breaking away from, all other "things"".
"Just as would one who draws a circle in the sea, including a few waves, saying that the other waves, with which the included are continuous, are positively different, and stakes his life upon maintaining that the admitted and the damned are positively different."
This is a concise rational analysis of how the illusion of "self" leads to the negative effects of separation, of causes and effects, of karma, and is deeply Buddhist/Hindu in nature.
From here, Fort goes on to attack the idea of objective science. He demonstrates that positivist science can only exist by faulty definitions and the exclusion of many unwanted data.
Fort is the ultimate sceptic. He is sceptic of all attempts to model reality, and he is particularly sceptic of science: "All sciences begin with attempts to define. Nothing ever has been defined. Because there is nothing to define. Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. He was never able to tell what he meant by a "species.""
After this, Fort goes on to trash Darwin a bit more, demonstrating the tautology in Darwins most famous aforism (which was not really coined by Darwin, but still used by him in later editions of his work):
"The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest —
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. "Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival." Darwinism: That survivors survive."
Fort doesn't have a special thing for Darwin. He attacks all fields of science. Charles Fort spent the rest of his life searching for all the scientific data, published in scientific publications, that didn't fit in with the accepted theories. The "damned" data. And then he put all these damned data neatly together, and made up new exotic theories to accommodate them - knowing very well that they were mostly absurde. Hence the name of the book.
As far as I'm concerned, the first chapter is the most interesting part, because it offers the philosophical foundation for everything Fort has written and done the rest of his life. Most of the rest of his writing is about the amazing and crazy facts he found over decades of research. Many of them are about things that fell from the sky: rains of frogs, rains of red jelly, rains of blood, rains of fish, etc. Many of these things have been explained by science later, or are still waiting to be explained.
But the fundamental point of Fort, which drives all his writing and efforts, is the insight that any effort to model reality and fit it in scientific theories, is always a violation of reality. It can only function by excluding, killing off, ignoring other parts of reality. In the Wikipedia descriptions of Fort's work, there is too much stress on the exotic quality of his findings and writings, and he is described as a kind of science fiction writer.
But the fundamental motivation for his search is deeply philosophical. He makes the point that all that exists strives to manifest itself as an entity, attaining to the Universal; but it does so by cutting itself loose from the rest of creation. Or as Fort says: "Our whole "existence" is an attempt by the relative to be the absolute, or by the local to be the universal. Every attempt—that is observable—is defeated by Continuity, or by outside forces—or by the excluded that are continuous with the included."
Chapter 1 is an incredibly concise description of the fundamental conflict of existence, which gives birth to the law of Karma, which gives birth to the despair of Existentialism. The Universal, as Fort describes it, also comes very close to Spinoza's definition of Substance or God.
I haven't finished reading it, so I can't really give stars. But chapter 1 is 6 stars for me.
February 11, 2020
I had heard about Fort and Forteana for years, so I definitely had expectations going into reading this. I expected a catalog of strange and unconnected phenomena, with no connecting links. I was slightly disappointed to find that there was a poorly thought out model which he kept coming back to. (Evidently his later books have dropped it). The idea of coal driven spaceships was pretty laughable at the time when he wrote the book, for example. The majority of things which he lists as having fallen to earth certainly don't suggest extraterrestrial origins. In short, his vision of outer space is pretty much a reflection of things on the planets surface. He didn't seem to have a grasp on the scientific explanations he dismissed (yes, Darwinism does purport to explain both camouflage and vibrant coloration, he seems to take that as a weakness rather than a strength).
On the other hand, the research which went into this book is impressive. A little Googling allowed me to verify the random citations he made. There are definitely a lot of weird events which have been reported in mainstream journals, and some of his criticisms of the 'logical' explanations are valid - yes, if that strange substance were a fungal growth one would definitely expect the locals to know about it. So maybe it was something else, or maybe the person reporting it didn't have the background to know what was usual in the region.
It was a bit of a slog to read, but I'm glad that I got through it. I don't know that I'll be looking for his later works though.
On the other hand, the research which went into this book is impressive. A little Googling allowed me to verify the random citations he made. There are definitely a lot of weird events which have been reported in mainstream journals, and some of his criticisms of the 'logical' explanations are valid - yes, if that strange substance were a fungal growth one would definitely expect the locals to know about it. So maybe it was something else, or maybe the person reporting it didn't have the background to know what was usual in the region.
It was a bit of a slog to read, but I'm glad that I got through it. I don't know that I'll be looking for his later works though.
December 15, 2019
My first encounter with this writer on the paranormal. He picked the title for this 1919 book to indicate his theories are "damned," in that they're cast out from the heaven of accepted scientific thought.
The best part is the sheer mass of examples. Multiple stories of fish, frogs, carved stones, cannonballs apparently falling from the sky. Blood from the sky. A rain of flesh. A cursory check elsewhere indicates some of them are indeed baffling or have unconvincing "rational" explanations. It's thought provoking.
The bad: Fort's own approach to such matters is a mix of groovy sixties mysticism and deconstruction to the effect we can't really know anything. He seems convinced the various eyewitnesses reports can't be contaminated by fraud or error, except the error of conventional thinking: various astronomers who thought they saw Vulcan (a planet supposedly inside Mercury's orbit) saw something real and amazing, they just assumed it was Vulcan instead of—
the Truth! which is where Fort really falls down, assuming that there's some kind of hidden flying fortress/UFO/planet near us from which everything falls and UFOs (not yet called that come). In fairness, it was 1919, but now that we've actually been up in space — well, it hasn't aged well as a theory.
The best part is the sheer mass of examples. Multiple stories of fish, frogs, carved stones, cannonballs apparently falling from the sky. Blood from the sky. A rain of flesh. A cursory check elsewhere indicates some of them are indeed baffling or have unconvincing "rational" explanations. It's thought provoking.
The bad: Fort's own approach to such matters is a mix of groovy sixties mysticism and deconstruction to the effect we can't really know anything. He seems convinced the various eyewitnesses reports can't be contaminated by fraud or error, except the error of conventional thinking: various astronomers who thought they saw Vulcan (a planet supposedly inside Mercury's orbit) saw something real and amazing, they just assumed it was Vulcan instead of—
the Truth! which is where Fort really falls down, assuming that there's some kind of hidden flying fortress/UFO/planet near us from which everything falls and UFOs (not yet called that come). In fairness, it was 1919, but now that we've actually been up in space — well, it hasn't aged well as a theory.
December 21, 2017
I first heard of Charles Fort when I read Stephen King's DANSE MACABRE in my teens. I'd never read any of Fort's writing but understood he is recognized as one of the pioneers in collecting odd facts and reporting on incidents of, for example, rains of frogs on towns.
And, in essence, that's exactly what THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED is. It's a collection of odd facts and occurences from across the globe. It's important to note the book was written in 1919 and it shows. This was before many great scientific discoveries and that can hamper the enjoyment of Fort's book because he presents his own theories throughout, theories which, in today's age, seem absurd and ridiculous.
Fort's ability to simply throw any science - dated while it may be by today's standards - clearly out the window can become frustrating as he discusses, as an example, why blood rained in a town in Spain. The man seems to have had no respect for science and would rather, and often does, apply his own twisted ideas to the events which took place.
However in saying this, the book is interesting in its accounts of incidents across the globe and makes for a decent reference point for strange phenomenon.
And, in essence, that's exactly what THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED is. It's a collection of odd facts and occurences from across the globe. It's important to note the book was written in 1919 and it shows. This was before many great scientific discoveries and that can hamper the enjoyment of Fort's book because he presents his own theories throughout, theories which, in today's age, seem absurd and ridiculous.
Fort's ability to simply throw any science - dated while it may be by today's standards - clearly out the window can become frustrating as he discusses, as an example, why blood rained in a town in Spain. The man seems to have had no respect for science and would rather, and often does, apply his own twisted ideas to the events which took place.
However in saying this, the book is interesting in its accounts of incidents across the globe and makes for a decent reference point for strange phenomenon.
November 17, 2019
I pretty much forced myself to finish this book. It took me a long time. I was interested in the book because I knew it was influential to HP Lovecraft who I do enjoy reading. HP Lovecraft even mentions Fort in a couple of his stories. The writing in The Book of the Damned is horrible though. Lots of incomplete thoughts, rambling, clauses and phrases parading as sentences. Fort writes in a voice contemptuous of science which at times reminded me of our current society. Just look to our president who doubts the science of climate change. The thing that kept me going though was the short exposés of unnatural phenomena, fish falling from the sky, red rains, lights in the night sky, hints of alien visitations. These blurbs in between the nonsensical writing were the most interesting parts of the book. Very X-Files like. Forts descriptions could be read in Mulder's voice describing something to Scully and you wouldn't even have to change the wording.
August 18, 2019
I bought this book as I have been reading the Fortean Times for over a year and thought I should know more about the man behind the title and the phenomena reported therein.
Wow.
This book is a slog. It's a work of it's time and is wordy to the point of becoming nonsensical. Fort tends to ramble on and on, finding different ways to express one point, which can take a whole page, and then all of a sudden we start getting lists of phenomena. I found this book equally frustrating and fascinating, but had to skim read the final third as I had run out of patience with it. I have 3 more of Fort's books on my TBR pile, but I think I'll be transferring them to my bookcase for now
Wow.
This book is a slog. It's a work of it's time and is wordy to the point of becoming nonsensical. Fort tends to ramble on and on, finding different ways to express one point, which can take a whole page, and then all of a sudden we start getting lists of phenomena. I found this book equally frustrating and fascinating, but had to skim read the final third as I had run out of patience with it. I have 3 more of Fort's books on my TBR pile, but I think I'll be transferring them to my bookcase for now
May 1, 2019
Un libro que, sin duda alguna, deja un espacio increíble para lo poco creíble. Fort no es siquiera un aficionado más, una persona que explica las cosas como un loco hambriento de credibilidad. Pone sobre la mesa las cartas de varios sucesos inexplicables y les da un sentido científico que nadie se atreve a hacer ahora. ¿Quién puede ahora negar que haya universos alternos cerca del nuestro y que por mera casualidad sus sustancias interactúan con este mundo? Estamos aun muy lejos de probarlo, pero una idea está ahí. Un día no seremos tan locos, y se comprobará.
Fort me ha hecho creyente...
Fort me ha hecho creyente...
December 26, 2020
One cannot deny the flare in Fort's writing style, which is unique and refreshing to read. However, the content has not aged well; rising secularism and scientific advancements almost guarantee most readers will rationalise his 'mysterious' and 'inexplicable' accounts into nothing more than 19th century intrigue. Despite this, the novel picks up towards the end and if anything, Fort's beliefs on "Negative Positivism" and "psycho-tropisms" are worth reading, and summarise how he "see[s] what [he] need[s] to see".
June 24, 2021
Книга совершенно неинтересная, нечитаемая и просто какая-то левая
На днях пересмотрел фильм «Магнолия», конечно меня больше всего заинтересовал феномен того, как лягушки валились с неба ….
Режиссёр (он же продюсер, он же автор сценария) Пол Томас Андерсон рассказал, что впервые узнал про феномен легяшек, падающих с неба именно в этой книги.
Так вот эта книга о том, что падало, валилось, летело и лилось с неба.
Читать это невозможно. Купил я ту книгу на Амазоне за $1. Больше и не стоило за это платить.
На днях пересмотрел фильм «Магнолия», конечно меня больше всего заинтересовал феномен того, как лягушки валились с неба ….
Режиссёр (он же продюсер, он же автор сценария) Пол Томас Андерсон рассказал, что впервые узнал про феномен легяшек, падающих с неба именно в этой книги.
Так вот эта книга о том, что падало, валилось, летело и лилось с неба.
Читать это невозможно. Купил я ту книгу на Амазоне за $1. Больше и не стоило за это платить.
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