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From The Founding Editors: Thinking Preternaturally After Ten Years

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.10.2.0159

2161-2196

Richard Raiswell, Kirsten C. Uszkalo,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

In his 1605 Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon advocated for a program that investigated “nature erring, or varying” as part of his general history of nature, its properties and limits. This “history of marvels,” as he went on to explain, would be distinct from that of the “history of creatures,” and the “history of arts,” in that it would center upon nature's digressions. That is to say, it would be concerned with those instances in which nature diverged in its operation from its usual course to produce strange effects. While he could find “a number of books of fabulous Experiments, & Secrets, and frivolous Impostures for pleasure and strangenesse,” he lamented, he could not find “a substantiall and severe Collection of HETEROCLITES, or IRREGULARS of NATURE, well examined & described” (Bacon 1605: sig. Bb4r). Yet such instances were important, he thought, for they might betray hitherto strange but wholly natural effects that might be harnessed to improve human welfare.Our goal when we founded Preternature was to take up Bacon's challenge once more, albeit a tad belatedly and to different ends. We fixed on the journal's title, for it nicely delineated that sliver of space between the natural and the supernatural haunted by the creatures of perception and imagination, whose existence defies mere rationalistic explanation. Preternature, as we originally conceived of the journal, was to be the home for the study of the preternatural—but the preternatural as the preternatural. It was to be a rigorous textual space for the study of this epistemological space.To be sure, the last generation has seen a burgeoning of scholarship on the likes of aliens, demons, revenants, monsters, ghosts and spirits, and on magic and occultism, too. But while these studies have been fascinating in themselves and have tilled new ground, many have tended to treat their subject matter from the perspective of modern disciplines. Much important work has viewed the construction and effect of instances deemed preternatural as case studies illustrative of more general trends in popular religion, folklore, or within the histoire des mentalités, or in terms of the extent to which such apparent instances contributed to developments within the history of science or the emergence of Enlightenment rationalism. This approach has brought with it discipline-specific methodologies, drawing from the likes of cultural or art history, philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, and anthropology. The effect has been to find in the preternatural examples of broader disciplinary concerns—of strategies for dealing with difference, for instance, or for explaining personal or communal misfortune.The advantage of studying the preternatural on its own terms, though, is that it allows scholars to seek out analogous causation for similar assertions; to look for patterns in the construction, detection, diagnosis, and social and philosophical consequences of perceptions of the unnatural across time and space—to group together these outliers that do not easily fit into our handy, rationalized post-Enlightenment analytical categories, whether they come from twenty-first century America, eleventh-century Japan, or the first-century Romanized Mediterranean, and to treat them as part of the same irrational, unnatural, decidedly human world—a world in which popular physics is informed by belief and anxiety, and which itself conditions perceptions of experience.The first decade of the journal has more than lived up to our expectations, publishing innovative and exciting works on subjects as diverse as spirit discernment, satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction narratives, Jewish vampires, Livonian werewolves, Japanese cursing kits, fanciful spaces, fairy spells, and fetal monstrosities. There are good stories, scary stories—sometimes downright silly stories—within its pages, to be sure. On a human level, though, these stories are important because they reflect the cultural gravity of the preternatural. To those who saw, in their experience of the world, the order of nature breached, and who grappled in vain for a rational explanation for things that seemed to defy their physics—their understanding of the way things should behave—the preternatural elicited a physical response, their eyes widening, stomachs clenching, and throat tightening in fear.Indeed, despite its sometimes gut-wrenching effect, there is, at some strange level, a desire amongst people for the preternatural: to hear stories about it, regardless of the uncomfortable way they can make us feel—and to believe. Despite the enormous technological strides of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, stories of ghosts, demons, revenants, and magicians remain staple fodder of publishing houses and film companies. And in many houses across Europe and North America, the night-lights remain on.As lived experiences, such incidents raise intriguing questions about the relationship between context and diagnosis. Why is it that people feel the presence of the preternatural in graveyards, dingy basements, under beds, and in isolated cabins in the woods more frequently than in well-lit, bustling shopping malls? To what extent does the emotional construction of place—a site endowed with a long pedigree of communal memories—inform the way we process sensory information? To what extent does place in this sense act as a mediator between people's inner mental world and their perception of the way things behave in the outer, physical world, causing them to “see” more than is actually there? Tied in all these ways to basic emotive and physiological responses, personal experience of the preternatural raises complicated questions about perception and cognition, about emotion, and the relationship of these things to aspects of evolutionary biology.But the preternatural is more often known—if that can be said to be the correct term—indirectly, through the traces it leaves in books and media, in niches in the built environment, in the chance survival of material objects, or in reports handed down over the generations. Invested in a rhetorical frame—whether textual, material, or visual—surviving in a form constructed by a third person whose purpose was often not merely to relate but to persuade, such remnants of the preternatural point to questions about the social construction of belief and the relationship between experience and authority—and prompt us to think more generally, about the natural and occult forces and the means and ability of human beings to manipulate and focus them to particular socially desirable ends.Ultimately, the study of the preternatural is exciting work—it is a locus for investigating the annoying, the inexplicable, the uncomfortable, even the elemental. It is work that looks at the processes by which the line between the natural and the supernatural are drawn and redrawn over time and between places. It is a study that delights in the liminal, that finds much scholarly grist in that which is excluded from the scientific and rational orthodoxy of the day—and in the effects of these apparent discoveries on the people who detected them. Like Bacon's history of marvels, even though narratives of sorcery, witchcraft, dreams, and divinations may lack any “cleer evidence of the fact,” such accounts are well worthy of consideration. But while Bacon thought that accounts of such superstitious beliefs and practices might help illuminate hitherto unknown secrets of nature, Preternature finds in them the root of more fundamentally human questions.Congratulations, Preternature on ten years—and to Debbie Felton, Michelle Brock, and Thea Tomaini for their exceptional work, keeping the journal an important venue for the examination of all things weird and uncanny.