The Book of the Damned
1919
In 1919, a reclusive New Yorker published the first great work of forbidden knowledge. Charles Fort had spent decades clipping reports from scientific journals and newspapers around the world, collecting accounts of phenomena that mainstream academia refused to acknowledge: rains of fish and frogs, mysterious lights pursuing ships, objects falling from clear skies, impossible footprints, stigmata, creatures that shouldn't exist. The Book of the Damned is his meticulous, merciless catalogue of what science chose not to see. But Fort isn't simply gathering curiosities. He's mounting an argument. With corrosive wit and precision, he exposes how the scientific establishment damns data that threatens established theories, excluding whatever doesn't fit the approved version of reality. He asks uncomfortable questions: What knowledge have we lost by dismissing what we find inconvenient? How much of "truth" is simply what authority permits us to believe? More than a century later, the questions still sting. Fort invented the study of anomalies, inspired countless investigators of the unexplained, and created a genre of rational curiosity that remains vital. If you've ever suspected that the world is stranger than experts admit, this is your founding document.
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“It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came.””
— Charles Fort
“A procession of the damned: By the damned I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed will march. You'll read them, or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags. They'll go by, like you could, arm-in-arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will foot little harlots. Many are clowns, but many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices, whims and amiabilities, the naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound, and the puerile. A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety. The ultra-respectable! But the condemned, anyway.””
— Charles Fort
“It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was”
— Charles Fort
“I think we're property.I should say we belong to something:That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something:That something owns this earth -- all others warned off.””
— Charles Fort
“The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness. The aggregate voice is a defiant prayer. But the spirit of the whole is processional. The power, that has said to all these things that they are damned, is dogmatic science. But they'll march! The little harlots will caper and the freaks will distract the attention and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries. But the solidity of the procession as a whole, the solidity of things which pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on coming, the irresistibleness of things that neither threaten, nor jeer, nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass formations that pass and pass and keep on passing. So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.””
— Charles Fort
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Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-book-of-the-damned-67ce3807-2753-4006-b68c-3e1fd978ebda.Fort, C. (1919). The Book of the Damned. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-book-of-the-damned-67ce3807-2753-4006-b68c-3e1fd978ebdaFort, Charles. The Book of the Damned. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-book-of-the-damned-67ce3807-2753-4006-b68c-3e1fd978ebda.
