Customer Reviews

Out Of The Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural

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This collection of scholarly essays, exploring the intersection of folklore and the paranormal, is a mixed bag -- but it gets an instant five-star rating for its opener, David J. Hufford's "Beings Without Bodies", a cracker of a paper which gives one of the most perfect frameworks for understanding spiritual belief I have ever seen. If only everyone followed it, argument on that subject would exist on a far higher level. Hufford, whose The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Publications of the American Folklore Society) has been so admired, cheerfully stands convention on its head and reveals the truth in an essay which should have caused a revolution in its field; given it was written in 1995, though, and I'm writing the only Amazon review in 2011, it probably didn't. :)

Hufford's idea is simple: people can hold spiritual beliefs for good reason, not being delusional, nor irrational, nor misinterpreting ordinary events according to dogma. If that doesn't sound so amazing, recall that this simple idea has been resisted in every possible way by our civilization for a very long time now. Hufford runs it all down -- the expected sociological 'disenchantment' of our world by materialism so well-foreshadowed by Max Weber, and the complete lack of any modern support for paranormal belief in the official belief system at this time, combined with the supremacy of techno-materialism, which together ought to have erased spirituality from existence long ago if it was always irrational, delusional or faith only.

It's not. People *will* go on having spiritual experiences, in significant numbers, even when they are told these don't exist. Carefully avoiding any questions about the actual truth value of such experiences, Hufford marshals the evidence for cross-cultural sleep-paralysis and NDEs and makes the case that these (and others) are 'core experiences', which no culture can edit out, and that they are not delusional nor irrational. They always occur, always have and always will, in some form, and they guarantee spiritual beliefs will survive in *any community whatsoever*, whether officially or not. Anyone who thinks that all spiritual belief is simply inherited and meme-driven (hello Richard Dawkins) is therefore definitively and provably incorrect. And whether such beliefs are true or not, they are certainly not necessarily irrational -- they're the result of people drawing the natural and obvious conclusion from their experience.

The paper has many buried gems. Hufford cleverly identifies a telling variable for instance -- "interpretability", of which a pencil on a well-lit disk has minimal amounts (it could only be a pencil) whilst a rorschach-test ink blot has considerably more. One theoretical assumption has been that, since spiritual experiences don't exist, they must be high-interpretability ordinary events. That viewpoint is instantly dispelled simply by talking to the people who've actually had the experiences, of course, so most materialists simply avoid doing so, unless to lecture them; in any case, people have always been reticent to talk about such things unless they are sure it's safe, the reason being it matters to them. Hufford is also very good on official vs. unofficial belief, and demonstrates how advisable it is to pay attention when 'folk' belief refuses to die despite having official pillows thrown over it and pressed onto it repeatedly in materialist-authoritarian Old Hag episodes! ^_^ So much cleverer-than-thou opinion, from David Hume to Auguste Comte to the Christian Church itself, aligned in the last couple of centuries to declare obsolete what turns out to be present in all societies and in all historical periods. Even now, the "skeptics" are trying to finish the job, but they are simply bound to fail yet again. (And yes, Hufford himself has already been accused of promulgating ideas which justify ethnic cleansing!)

Hufford doesn't talk about spiritual training, that is, the passing-on of 'core experiences' by techniques and systems, since that's not in the folklore remit, but his views carry over to it very well. Reading his paper in combination with David A. Palmer's Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China, for example, will show how the 'rationalist' and 'modernizing' approach *has* actually combined with an acknowledgement of the non-physical, to good effect, in the updating of the classic Chinese 'body technologies' -- an older example of this process can be found in the genesis of the Hermetic tradition. Hufford does still quite rightly avoid discussion, though, on the question what is actually 'real' about a spiritual experience, and in what sense -- for that you would need to turn to Patrick Harpur's now-famous masterpiece, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld, for example, and beyond.

As for the papers in the rest of the book, even the most interesting don't come up to that one for me -- in fact I found it quite telling how writers who agreed with Hufford still weren't necessarily able to grasp the full radicalism of his agenda. James McClenon, for instance, whom I've admired since reading his excellent Deviant Science: The Case of Parapsychology some time back, is completely in sympathy with Hufford when it comes to 'official' vs. 'folk' belief, and does his usual brilliant job of fielding real honest-to-goodness research which shows what a substantial proportion of belief is based on real experience. He does therefore write that there is an 'empirical basis for occult beliefs', but still, in the end he also opposes science and folk-healing on the "rational <---> irrational" axis -- just what Hufford's ideas show is unnecessary. (If experience supports a belief, what's irrational?)

I liked the rest of the book on an enjoyable-read basis. Barre Toelken's 'Moccasin Telegraph' was probably the most fun of the rest, and extremely evocative of a life that is unavailable to western city dwellers, for the most part. Strangely though, it managed to talk about and illustrate a fascinating 'cluster-logic' of event-sequences in Navajo life, and how it makes a rubbish of some of our notions of cause and effect, without once mentioning the word 'synchronicity' -- even though everything he relates is an ideal demonstration of that concept! (Is Jung now infra dig?). An entertaining examination of rural American hog-slaughtering by moon phases, a failed Hakka seance, and a downright hilarious recounting of the consequences of Hawaiian tourist myths, are the other standouts for me. The analysis of spiritualism, the experiences of some rather ignorant Catholic priests, and a patronizing study of UK folk psychic beliefs among the elderly, were more missable.

But any book with that first essay in it merits a five stars with no ifs ands or buts. Hufford has put his finger where the crux of the argument lies.