The United States is dotted with these places of mystery and legend, which do not comprise the rational and known world of our maps; rather, they occupy the darker parts of our psyche and history. Some places are marked with statues and sculptures as testament to the mystery; but there are many, many more that are only known in local lore, but will occasionally make it onto the Internet for a little more exposure or tourist dollars. Dudleytown in Connecticut; the Pine Barrens in New Jersey; Flatwoods, West Virginia; Roswell, New Mexico; Amityville, New York; Bray Road in Wisconsin; and Willow Creek, California, are just a few of the many places that occupy a place in the unknown history of the United States. Stop into any small town or large city, and you can find a ghost story.
We designate these places through folklore and legend, and people seek out these areas of mystery—whether nationally known, like Point Pleasant, or only locally known, like the Green Lady Cemetery in Harwinton, Connecticut—in an effort to encounter the mysterious. Bill Ellis describes legend-telling as “the communal exploration of social boundaries. By offering examples of the extreme of experience—unusual, bizarre, inexplicable, unexpected, or threatening incidents—members of the legend-telling circle attempt to reach some consensus on the proper response to what is ‘real.’ ”3 He also describes “legend-tripping,” in which adventurous souls, traditionally adolescents, go to places that are supposedly haunted—places associated with the supernatural—in order to not only test the legend, but test themselves as well. It has traditionally been an adolescent rite of passage, and these haunted areas afford teenagers the secluded places where they can engage in forbidden activities with the added thrill of a ghost story lingering in the darkness. Recently, seeking out legendary creatures and haunts has become a more popular and serious matter. In essence, it is no longer just adolescents exploring the boundaries of what is “real”; these legends and legendary places represent the boundary where the known world meets the unknown. We find these liminal places where the boundaries of the known and unknown meet in nearly every town across the States. There is invariably a haunted house, a haunted road, a story of a beast or lights in the sky; we designate these places in our collective consciousness as a way of assigning a totem for all that we do not understand or know, for those unexplained experiences in life for which science and modernity cannot account, and for which we ourselves cannot quite believe or disbelieve.
In essence, we need ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot.
A NEW AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY
The persistence of these legends—our need for them—is indicative of something deeper and more meaningful embedded in our paranormal culture. Every time we watch Ghost Hunters; every time we explore or stay overnight in a place that is haunted; every time we seek out a religious experience to be touched by God; every time we pay $10 to see a “true” story based on the paranormal; and every time we secretly hope that Bigfoot is out there stomping around in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, we engage in something more than legend. The persistence of these beliefs and what they say about our society point to the emergence of a mythology—one that has become part of the American experience. The melting pot of American culture means that no one mythology brought over from the Old World, either from Europe, Africa, or Asia, can symbolize the American experience. Thus, a new mythology is born from the old, and a new and unique country requires a mythology that has been reworked in the modern world and fitted to the American experience. Thus, it is not God who descends in a fiery chariot, but extraterrestrials from scientifically advanced alien planets; it is not a dragon that is seen in Lake Champlain and Loch Ness, but a plesiosaur that has somehow survived the millennia in deep lakes around the world. Our new nation has adopted a new form of mythology by which to experience the world and touch the mysterious.
Bill Ellis writes, “…institutionalized myths, in the traditional sense of the word, are used to explain and validate contemporary social practices … beliefs are combined and linked in legends; legends are combined and linked in myths. Contemporary mythologies thus are scenarios made up of many beliefs and narratives which are accepted on faith and used then to link and give meaning to stressful events in terms of continuous penetration of this world by otherworldly forces.”4 And Joseph Campbell writes, “Mythology, we may conclude, therefore, is a verification and validation of the well-known—as monstrous. It is conceived, finally, not as a reference either to history or to the world-texture analyzed by science, but as an epiphany of the monstrosity and wonder of these; so that both they and therewith ourselves may be experienced in depth.”5
Our various mythologies the world over are ancient explanations as to how the world came into being as it was understood in ancient times. Thus, there are gods and goddesses who frequently battle each other, commingle with mankind, and create magical and wondrous events that set into place things as average and mundane as the rising and setting of the sun. The Bible, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, the Mahabharata, and the Koran are all examples of this mythology—the mythology of us—recorded in ancient writings. These sacred texts are used to explain our existence and purpose, and thus, they guide our lives and our perceptions of reality. However, since the Copernican revolution and subsequent Enlightenment, advances in science, philosophy, and technology have rapidly broken down these mythologies.
However, this is not to blame science for ruining the party; much of the fault lies in the institutionalization of these mythologies and their adherents’ religious desire to hold on to these mythologies as empirical truth. “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that viewed as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to re-interpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it; temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.”6 In other words, the Garden of Eden story in the Bible, taken as literal fact and history, becomes absurd in light of scientific, anthropological, and historical developments. However, people still try to cling to that mythology as reality. This is not to say that there is no truth to the history of these texts; cities listed in the Old Testament have been uncovered by archeologists and have lent credence to the biblical stories. Moses composed the first five books of the Bible, and much of it involved him directly participating in the action. However, Moses could not record the beginning of the universe and man through direct experience because he did not yet exist. Furthermore, the stark similarities between the biblical story of creation and stories of creation in other mythologies as far away as the Orient indicate that the mythology of creation was spread across a vast number of cultures that substituted their own god or gods for the role of Yahweh. It is these mythologies that the ancients used to explain how life came into being; however, to regard these stories as actual histories eventually leads the believer into an unnecessary collision between mythology and science. Faced with impossible questions, believers feel that they must either abandon their faith or, conversely, follow their faith blindly as fact. Each tends to have dire consequences—either moral relativism or fanatical belief. Both have a long history of death and destruction.
Belief in the literal interpretation of these ancient texts substitutes faith for fact, spirituality for dogmatic religion, and gods for totems. The literal interpretation of these texts ignores the true importance and meaning behind them and their significance to our society. The mythologies of different cultures are, and should be, traditions meant to preserve those societies in their finest forms. They are codes of conduct meant to preserve a culture. However, literal interpretations of these myths, when confronted with emergent science, result in the exact opposite—a breakdown of that culture. When confronted with the Darwinian revolution, the atomic age, and the theory of relativity, the literal interpretation of a text su
ch as the Old Testament does not hold up and results in the fracturing of a culture. As the United States became the epicenter for scientific development, technology, and modernity, its young culture became fractured, as literal and dogmatic religion collided with science. This inevitably led to two different conclusions: A. that there is no God; or B. that science is wrong and the Bible’s story of creation is factual. While most people fall somewhere between the two extremes, the divide has resulted in a fractured society that has rather quickly given up any traditions that it may have formed in its brief history. The results have not been positive—fundamentalism clashing with moral relativism. It is dissolution of the American body.
The paranormal and religion are inseparable. Religion, throughout the history of the world, was the way in which man confronted the mysterious and experienced a revelation as to his place in the cosmos. However, the modern dissolution of religion has left a void in civilization. Man, due to his unparalleled intelligence, knowledge of his own mortality, and his communal nature has an innate need to confront the mysterious. Whether or not it is a genetically inherited trait, as Matthew Alper theorizes, is irrelevant. It could be argued that scientific development actually aids spirituality as science discovers our interconnectedness to the cosmos; we are, in fact, stardust. Likewise, science must confront its own mysteries and acknowledge that its understanding of even some of the most basic components of life is tenuous at best. Science and faith need not be mutually exclusive.
But where does this leave the world of the paranormal? The paranormal attempts to bridge the gap between science and faith—to form a new mythology and restore traditions that constitute a strong culture. Oftentimes, the true intent of the paranormal researcher is to be found between the lines, the place where the paranormal is most at home and most relevant. Take, for instance, the work of Erich von Däniken and his many, many imitators and collaborators. Däniken found a new interpretation for the ancient, mythological texts. He began to interpret them literally, as some religious fundamentalists have done; however, he interprets them through the belief that these were actual events caused by alien beings rather than gods. He uses the idea of a scientific and technologically superior race interceding in the creation and development of mankind, as a way to understand the ancient texts. Thus, he combines religion and mythology with technology and science. But, as Jason Colavito noted, as the belief in ancient alien creators progressed, it eventually became a moral, spiritual argument.
Instead, the authors talk about the decline of Western civilization and accidentally reveal the true reasons for their work. Alternative archeology was nothing more and nothing less than a way to reconnect to the primal magic of better days. The promise of scientific progress had faded in the twentieth century, and the egalitarian ideals of Western democracy clashed with the elitist, specialist nature of industrial science … Like creationism, it is a cultural revitalization movement of sorts. It is a replacement belief system, a faith in the greatness and goodness of the mysterious ancestors, be they human or alien, for a salvation through a return to the past, to childhood, to innocence.7
The paranormal has a long history of attempting to create a new mythology. The “alternative archeologists” who posit alien intervention in the creation of man and alien presence in our ancient texts are attempting to reinterpret the mythology that has formed the basis for our various cultures. These alternative archeologists find a way in which to encounter the divine through the study of ancient mysteries and texts. Prominent Spiritualists, such as Madame Blavatsky, would supposedly communicate with ancient spirits who talked of the lost civilizations of Atlantis and Mu. They would tell of technological wonders but also offer religious-like poetic proclamations about “the endless magnetic life of nature.”8 The Spiritualist movement, closely aligned with Christianity, was creating a mythology around mythical times and lands, but also incorporating Darwinian theory that life is all interconnected and sprang from one ancient source. It was the combination of Christianity and Darwinism, and communing with the dead was a way to assert the truth of Christianity told through a new mythos. UFO contactees during the 1950s and ’60s issued similar ambiguous, spiritual messages, and, occasionally, dire warnings about the progress of humanity.
The paranormal is a way in which to experience the mythical, mystical, and mysterious. This was traditionally the domain of religion, but its dogmatism and literalism was its ultimate undoing; in light of scientific and technological advances, people began to seek a new way to touch the mysterious. It is an essential part of our being. There is so much that is not known, and probably cannot be known, about the universe and ourselves. Scientists, too, live with and study ghosts. Stars, long ago extinguished, still shine brightly in our night skies and are studied by astronomers seeking to understand the story of our creation. Just as ghosts are windows to the past, pyramids and UFOs inspire rethinking of archeology and history, and Bigfoot leads us to question the development of Homo sapiens, so the ghosts of faraway stars inspire new questions and theories about the origins and purpose of man. The difference is that the paranormal offers a fleeting glimpse, which inspires the individual to seek his or her own answers, while the starlight offers more permanence for scientific study. But they are both ghosts—glimpses into the past that inspire us to seek our origins, our future, and our purpose.
A BRAVE NEW WORLD
The opening stanza of The Metamorphoses of Ovid offers a prayer: “My soul would sing of metamorphoses. But since, o gods, you were the source of these bodies becoming other bodies, breathe your breath into my book of changes: may the song I sing be seamless as its way weaves from the beginning to our day.”9 It is a book of the ancient myths that helped shape the Western world, some eerily similar to biblical stories. But Ovid’s prayer is that his book would help explain the changes that led to the world today. Mythology is ultimately about change; and the paranormal, if we are to understand it as a pursuit of modern American mythology, is also about change. As discussed earlier, times of great social change have often preceded times of great paranormal revival. Mythology forms the basis of culture. Therefore, the attempt to rebuild mythology in light of the modern world of science and technology is an attempt to rebuild the culture. But how are the paranormal investigators a part of this change—those believers who search for ghosts, demons, UFOs, and Bigfoot and offer up their lives and reputations, their money and beliefs in pursuit of something that has remained so elusive throughout the years? What does the mysterious offer that calls forth the pursuits of men and women toward the unknown?
The paranormal is ancient and influential. It is a reaction to modernism, but its pursuit is based in the mythological pursuits of ancient heroes—those who would change the world by touching the mysterious—thus it penetrates to the core of our culture and identity. It is a search for identity through a search for the mysterious. We ultimately remain mysterious to ourselves, alienated from our own understanding of purpose; and the search for our identity and meaning must touch the mysterious aspect of life. The paranormal offers answers—and questions—to investigators and believers. But, ultimately, it offers an identity and worldview that seeks to save those who believe. It is a new religion, much like many of the other new religions that have developed in light of the modern world. But this new religion is based on tradition, mythology, and spirituality rather than the atheistic base of scientism and modernism.
In his work Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the journey of the archetypal hero of myth and postulates that this archetypal hero is the one who alters the course of human history. Jesus Christ, Mohammed, the Buddha, Viracocha, and any number of the Hindu gods—they are the creators of our civilization and culture, and their stories are strangely similar and follow similar tracks. Ultimately, the hero is one who has come into contact with the mysterious—or in the case, of Campbell’s work, with the divine—and who then returns to society in an effort to change that society with the new knowledge he has a
ttained. To paraphrase Campbell’s summary of the hero’s journey: the hero is called to adventure by either internal or external forces and encounters a shadow presence that the hero must battle and thereby transcend our reality into the “world of the unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces”; he gains contact with and is illuminated by the divine and then returns to the known world; “the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).”10 The story of the paranormal closely resembles this model of the archetypal hero. Those who dedicate their lives to investigating the paranormal are fulfilling the role of the hero. They are typically called forth into action by a paranormal encounter, such as seeing a ghost or some other phenomenon, and then plunge themselves into the unknown world of the paranormal—something hidden from the light of rational day. Eventually, their beliefs in a personal quest are verified through different strange encounters or paranormal manifestations (real or imagined). Following such encounters with the mysterious or divine, the individuals or investigators return to the world of the rational and attempt to tell their story. However, this is more difficult than it seems.
While the insight or enlightenment the individuals have gained has changed their perspectives and given them a glimpse at a side of the world that is normally hidden from view, their ability to properly translate their story and express their enlightenment to the world is often more difficult. “As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes.”11 In essence, the experience of the mysterious does not often translate well into the realm of the rational, thereby rendering it easy for the individual to be labeled gullible, a kook, a liar, or just plain insane by those who have not experienced such a transcendental moment. Like the prophets before them, those who have had contact with the mysterious and been changed by it will have believers and detractors—both those who seek mysterious encounters for themselves and those who believe that the realm of night is only for dreams. But the vast majority of people who have a paranormal experience use it to further their own personal understanding of their place and purpose in the world; they walk amongst us with their own knowledge of the mysterious intact, content to let everyone else do as they please. Their stories are occasionally roused in conversation but rarely revealed in the light of day. “The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock-dwelling, close the door, and make it fast.”12
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