Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
A friend of mine recently posted, "And poof! Just like that, 1975 is fifty years ago."
My response was, "Sorry. Wrong. 1975 is 25 years ago. In five years, 1975 will still be 25 years ago. That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it."
I've written here before about how plastic human memory is, but mostly I've focused on the content -- how we remember events. But equally unreliable is how we remember time. It's hard for me to fathom the fact that it's been six years since I retired from teaching. On the other hand, the last overseas trip I took -- to Iceland, in 2022 -- seems like it was a great deal longer ago than that. And 1975... well.... My own sense of temporal sequencing is, in fact, pretty faulty, and there have been times I've had to look up a time-stamped photograph, or some other certain reference point, to be sure when exactly some event had occurred.
Turns out, though, that just about all of us have inaccurate mental time-framing. And the screw-up doesn't even necessarily work the way you'd think. The assumption was -- and it makes some intuitive sense -- that memories of more recent events would be stronger than those from longer ago, and that's how your brain keeps track of when things happened. It's analogous to driving at night, and judging the distance to a car by the brightness of its headlights; dimmer lights = the oncoming car is farther away.
But just as this sense can be confounded -- a car with super-bright halogen headlights might be farther away than it seems to be -- your brain's time sequencing can be muddled by the simple expedient of repetition. Oddly, though, repetition has the unexpected effect of making an event seems like it happened further in the past than it actually did.
A new study out of Ohio State University, published this week in the journal Psychological Science, shows that when presented with the same stimulus multiple times, the estimate of when the test subject saw it for the first time became skewed by as much as twenty-five percent. It was a robust result -- holding across the majority of the hundreds of volunteers in the study -- and it came as a surprise to the researchers.
"We all know what it is like to be bombarded with the same headline day after day after day," said study co-author Sami Yousif. "We wondered whether this constant repetition of information was distorting our mental timelines... Images shown five times were remembered as having occurred even further back than those shown only two or three times. This pattern persisted across all seven sets of image conditions... We were surprised at how strong the effects were. We had a hunch that repetition might distort temporal memory, but we did not expect these distortions to be so significant."
So when someone says "I know it happened that way, I remember it," it should be as suspect with respect to timing as it is to content.
"People should take away two things," Yousif said. "(1) Time perception is illusory. That is, our sense of when things occurred is systematically distorted in predictable ways. (2) These distortions can be substantial, even if their causes are simple (i.e., the mere repetition of information)."
More and more it's seeming like what we think of as our rock-solid memory is an elaborate but rickety house of cards, composed of bits of accurate recollections mixed in with partial truths (real memories in the wrong sequence, or correctly sequenced memories that are being remembered imprecisely), along with a heaping helping of complete fiction. Add to that the unsettling truth that unless you have a fixed, factual reference point, there's no way to tell the difference.
Makes you wonder how eyewitness testimony can still be used as the sine qua non of evidence in courts of law.
In C. S. Lewis's novel Perelandra, the protagonist, Elwin Ransom, goes to the planet Venus. In Lewis's fictional universe Venus isn't the scorched, acid-soaked hell we now know it to be; it's a water world, with floating islands of lush vegetation, tame animals, and a climate like something out of paradise.
In fact, to Lewis, it is paradise; a world that hasn't fallen (in the biblical sense). Ransom runs into a woman who appears to be the planet's only humanoid inhabitant, and she exhibits a combination of high intelligence and innocent naïveté that is Lewis's expression of the Edenic state. Eventually another Earth person arrives -- the scientist Weston, who is (more or less) the delegate of the Evil One, playing here the role of the Serpent. And Weston tells the woman about humanity's love for telling stories:
"That is a strange thing," she said. "To think abut what will never happen."
"Nay, in our world we do it all the time. We put words together to mean things that have never happened and places that never were: beautiful words, well put together. And then we tell them to one another. We call it stories or poetry... It is for mirth and wonder and wisdom."
"What is the wisdom in it?"
"Because the world is made up not only of what is but of what might be. Maleldil [God] knows both and wants us to know both."
"This is more than I ever thought of. The other [Ransom] has already told me things which made me feel like a tree whose branches were growing wider and wider apart. But this goes beyond all. Stepping out of what is into what might be, and talking and making things out there, alongside the world... This is a strange and great thing you are telling me."
It's more than a little ironic -- and given Lewis's impish sense of humor, I'm quite sure it was deliberate -- that a man whose fame came primarily from writing fictional stories identifies fictional stories as coming from the devil, within one of his fictional stories. Me, I'm more inclined to agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."
Our propensity for telling stories is curious, and it's likely that it goes a long way back. Considering the ubiquity of tales about gods and heroes, it seems certain that saying "Once upon a time..." has been going on since before we had written language. It's so familiar that we lose sight of how peculiar it is; as far as we know, we are alone amongst the nine-million-odd species in Kingdom Animalia in inventing entertaining falsehoods and sharing them with the members of our tribe.
The topic of storytelling comes up because quite by accident I stumbled on Wikipedia's page called "Lists of Legendary Creatures." It's long enough that they have individual pages for each letter of the alphabet. It launched me down a rabbit hole that I didn't emerge from for hours.
And there are some pretty fanciful denizens of the "alongside world." Here are just a few examples I thought were particularly interesting:
The Alp-luachra of Ireland. This creature looks like a newt, and waits for someone to fall asleep by the side of the stream where it lives, then it crawls into his/her mouth and takes up residence in the stomach. There it absorbs the "quintessence" of the food, causing the person to lose weight and have no energy.
The Popobawa of Zanzibar, a one-eyed shadowy humanoid with a sulfurous odor and wings. It visits houses at night where it looks for people (either gender) to ravish.
The Erchitu, a were...ox. In Sardinia, people who commit crimes and don't receive the more traditional forms of justice turn on the night of the full Moon into huge oxen, which then get chased around the place being poked with skewers by demons. This is one tale I wish was true, because full Moon days in the White House and United States Congress would be really entertaining.
The Nekomata, a cat with multiple tails that lives in the mountains regions of Japan and tricks unwary solo travelers, pretending at first to be playful and then leading them into the wilds and either losing them or else attacking them. They apparently are quite talented musicians, though.
The Gwyllgi, one of many "big evil black dog" creatures, this one from Wales. The Gwyllgi is powerfully-built and smells bad. If you added "has no respect for personal space" and "will chase a tennis ball for hours," this would be a decent description of my dog Guinness, but Guinness comes from Pennsylvania, not Wales, so maybe that's not a match.
The Sânziană of Romania, who is a fairy that looks like a beautiful young woman. Traditionally they dance in clearings in the forest each year on June 24, and are a danger to young men who see them -- any guy who spies the Sânziene will go mad with desire (and stay that way, apparently).
The Ao-Ao, from the legends of the Guarani people of Paraguay. The Ao-Ao is a creature that looks kind of like a sheep, but has fangs and claws, and eats people. It is, in fact, a real baa-dass.
A statue of an Ao-Ao by Paraguayan sculptor Ramón Elias [Image is in the Public Domain]
The Tlahuelpuchi, of the Nahua people of central Mexico. The Tlahuelpuchi is a vampire, a human who is cursed to suck the blood of others (apparently it's very fond of babies). When it appears, it sometimes looks human but has an eerie glow; other times, it leaves its legs behind and turns into a bird. Either way, it's one seriously creepy legend.
The Dokkaebi, a goblin-like creature from Korea. It has bulging eyes and a huge, grinning mouth filled with lots of teeth, and if it meets you it challenges you to a wrestling match. They're very powerful, but apparently they are weak on the right side, so remember that if you're ever in a wrestling match with a goblin in Korea.
So that's just the merest sampling of the creatures in the list. I encourage you to do a deeper dive. And myself, I think the whole thing is pretty cool -- a tribute to the inventiveness and creativity of the human mind. I understand why (in the context of the novel) C. S. Lewis attributed storytelling to the devil, but honestly, I can't see anything wrong with it unless you're trying to convince someone it's all true.
I mean, consider a world without stories. How impoverished would that be? So keep telling tales. It's part of what it means to be human.
In the 1992 Winter Olympics, there was an eighteen-year-old French figure skater named Laëtitia Hubert. She was a wonderful skater, even by the stratospheric standards of the Olympics; she'd earned a silver medal at the French National Championships that year. But 1992 was a year of hyperfocus, especially on the women's figure skating -- when there were such famous (and/or infamous) names as Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding, Kristi Yamaguchi, Midori Ito, and Surya Bonaly competing.
What I remember best, though, is what happened to Laëtitia Hubert. She went into the Short Program as a virtual unknown to just about everyone watching -- and skated a near-perfect program, rocketing her up to fifth place overall. From her reaction afterward it seemed like she was more shocked at her fantastic performance than anyone. It was one of those situations we've all had, where the stars align and everything goes way more brilliantly than expected -- only this was with the world watching, at one of the most publicized events of an already emotionally-fraught Winter Olympics.
This, of course, catapulted Hubert into competition with the Big Names. She went into the Long Program up against skaters of world-wide fame. And there, unlike the pure joy she showed during the Short Program, you could see the anxiety in her face even before she stated.
She completely fell apart. She had four disastrous falls, and various other stumbles and missteps. It is the one and only time I've ever seen the camera cut away from an athlete mid-performance -- as if even the media couldn't bear to watch. She dropped to, and ended at, fifteenth place overall.
It was simply awful to watch. I've always hated seeing people fail at something; witnessing embarrassing situations is almost physically painful to me. I don't really follow the Olympics (or sports in general), but over thirty years later, I still remember that night. (To be fair to Hubert -- and to end the story on a happy note -- she went on to have a successful career as a competitive skater, earning medals at several national and international events, and in fact in 1997 achieved a gold medal at the Trophée Lalique competition, bumping Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski into second place.)
I always think of Laëtitia Hubert whenever I think of the phenomenon of "choking under pressure." It's a response that has been studied extensively by psychologists. In fact, way back in 1908 a pair of psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, noted the peculiar relationship between pressure and performance in what is now called the Yerkes-Dodson curve; performance improves with increasing pressure (what Yerkes and Dodson called "mental and physiological arousal"), but only up to a point. Too much pressure, and performance tanks. There have been a number of reasons suggested for this effect, one of which is that it's related to the level of a group of chemicals in the blood called glucocorticoids. The level of glucocorticoids in a person's blood has been shown to be positively correlated with long-term memory formation -- but just as with Yerkes-Dodson, only up to a point. When the levels get too high, memory formation and retention crumbles. And glucocorticoid production has been found to rise in situations that have four characteristics -- those that are novel, unpredictable, contain social or emotional risks, and/or are largely outside of our capacity to control outcomes.
Which sounds like a pretty good description of the Olympics to me.
What's still mysterious about the Yerkes-Dodson curve, and the phenomenon of choking under pressure in general, is how it evolved. How can a sudden drop in performance when the stress increases be selected for? Seems like the more stressful and risky the situation, the better you should do. You'd think the individuals who did choke when things got dangerous would be weeded out by (for example) hungry lions.
But what is curious -- and what brings the topic up today -- is that a study inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that humans aren't the only ones who choke under pressure.
So do monkeys.
In a clever set of experiments led by Adam Smoulder of Carnegie Mellon University, researchers found that giving monkeys a scaled set of rewards for completing tasks showed a positive correlation between reward level and performance, until they got to the point where success at a difficult task resulted in a huge payoff. And just like with humans, at that point, the monkeys' performance fell apart.
The authors describe the experiments as follows:
Monkeys initiated trials by placing their hand so that a cursor (red circle) fell within the start target (pale blue circle). The reach target then appeared (gray circle with orange shape) at one of two (Monkeys N and F) or eight (Monkey E) potential locations (dashed circles), where the inscribed shape’s form (Monkey N) or color (Monkeys F and E) indicated the potential reward available for a successful reach. After a short, variable delay period, the start target vanished, cueing the animal to reach the peripheral target. The animals had to quickly move the cursor into the reach target and hold for 400 ms before receiving the cued reward.
And when the color (or shape) cueing the level of the reward got to the highest level -- something that only occurred in five percent of the trials, so not only was the jackpot valuable, it was rare -- the monkeys' ability to succeed dropped through the floor. What is most curious about this is that the effect didn't go away with practice; even the monkeys who had spent a lot of time mastering the skill still did poorly when the stakes were highest.
So the choking-under-pressure phenomenon isn't limited to humans, indicating it has a long evolutionary history. This also suggests that it's not due to overthinking, something that I've heard as an explanation -- that our tendency to intellectualize gets in the way. That always seemed to make some sense to me, given my experience with musical performance and stage fright. My capacity for screwing up on stage always seemed to be (1) unrelated to how much I'd practiced a piece of music once I'd passed a certain level of familiarity with it, and (2) directly connected to my own awareness of how nervous I was. I did eventually get over the worst of my stage fright, mostly from just doing it again and again without spontaneously bursting into flame. But I definitely still have moments when I think, "Oh, no, we're gonna play 'Reel St. Antoine' next and it's really hard and I'm gonna fuck it up AAAAUUUGGGH," and sure enough, that's when I would fuck it up. Those moments when I somehow prevented my brain from going into overthink-mode, and just enjoyed the music, were far more likely to go well, regardless of the difficulty of the piece.
One of my more nerve-wracking performances -- a duet with the amazing fiddler Deb Rifkin on a dizzyingly fast medley of Balkan dance tunes, in front of an audience of other musicians, including some big names (like the incomparable Bruce Molsky). I have to add that (1) I didn't choke, and (2) Bruce, who may be famous but is also an awfully nice guy, came up afterward and told us how great we sounded. I still haven't quite recovered from the high of that moment.
As an aside, a suggestion by a friend -- to take a shot of scotch before performing -- did not work. Alcohol doesn't make me less nervous, it just makes me sloppier. I have heard about professional musicians taking beta blockers before performing, but that's always seemed to me to be a little dicey, given that the mechanism by which beta blockers decrease anxiety is unknown, as is their long-term effects. Also, I've heard more than one musician describe the playing of a performer on beta blockers as "soulless," as if the reduction in stress also takes away some of the intensity of emotional content we try to express in our playing.
Be that as it may, it's hard to imagine that a monkey's choking under pressure is due to the same kind of overthinking we tend to do. They're smart animals, no question about it, but I've never thought of them as having the capacity for intellectualizing a situation we have (for better or worse). So unless I'm wrong about that, and there's more self-reflection going on inside the monkey brain than I realize, there's something else going on here.
So that's our bit of curious psychological research of the day. Monkeys also choke under pressure. Now, it'd be nice to find a way to manage it that doesn't involve taking a mood-altering medication. For me, it took years of exposure therapy to manage my stage fright, and I still have bouts of it sometimes even so. It may be an evolutionarily-derived response that has a long history, and presumably some sort of beneficial function, but it certainly can be unpleasant at times.
The brilliant composer Alan Hovhaness's haunting second symphony is called Mysterious Mountain -- named, he said, because "mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man's attempt to know God." Having spent a lot of time in my twenties and thirties hiking in Washington State's Olympic and Cascade Ranges, I can attest to the fact that there's something otherworldly about the high peaks. Subject to rapid and extreme weather changes, deep snowfall in the winter, and -- in some places -- having terrain so steep that no human has ever set foot there, it's no real wonder our ancestors revered mountains as the abode of the gods.
Hovhaness's symphony -- which I'm listening to as I write this -- captures that beautifully. And consider how many stories of the fantastical are set in the mountains. From Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth to Tolkien's Misty Mountains and Mines of Moria, the wild highlands (and what's beneath them) have a permanent place in our imagination.
Certain mountains have accrued, usually by virtue of their size, scale, or placement, more than the usual amount of awe. Everest (of course), Denali, Mount Olympus, Vesuvius, Etna, Fujiyama, Mount Rainier, Kilimanjaro, Mount Shasta. The last-mentioned has so many legends attached to it that the subject has its own Wikipedia page. But none of the tales centering on Shasta has raised as many eyebrows amongst the modern aficionados of the paranormal as the strange story of J. C. Brown.
Brown was a British prospector, who in the early part of the twentieth century had been hired by the Lord Cowdray Mining Company of England to look for gold and other precious metals in northern California, which at the time was thousands of square miles of trackless and forested wilderness. In 1904, Brown said, he was hiking on Mount Shasta, and discovered a cave. Caves in the Cascades -- many of them lava tubes -- are not uncommon; two of my novels, Signal to Noise and Kill Switch (the latter is out of print, but hopefully will be back soon), feature unsuspecting people making discoveries in caves in the Cascades, near the Three Sisters and Mount Stuart, respectively.
Brown's cave, though, was different -- or so he said. It was eleven miles long, and led into three chambers containing a king's ransom of gold, as well as 27 skeletons that looked human but were as much as three and a half meters tall.
Brown tried to drum up some interest in his story, but most people scoffed. He apparently frequented bars in Sacramento and "told anyone who would listen." But then a different crowd got involved, and suddenly he found his tale falling on receptive ears.
Regular readers of Skeptophilia might recall a post I did last year about Lemuria, which is kind of the Indian Ocean's answer to Atlantis. Well, the occultists just loved Lemuria, especially the Skeptophilia frequent flyer Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy. So in the 1920s, there was a sudden interest in vanished continents, as well as speculation about where all the inhabitants had gone when their homes sank beneath the waves. ("They all drowned" was apparently not an acceptable answer.)
And one group said the Lemurians, who were quasi-angelic beings of huge stature and great intelligence, had vanished into underground lairs beneath the mountains.
In 1931, noted wingnut and prominent Rosicrucian -- but I repeat myself -- Harvey Spencer Lewis, using the pseudonym Wishar S[penley] Cerve (get it? It's an anagram, sneaky sneaky), published a book called Lemuria, The Lost Continent of the Pacific (yes, I know Lemuria was supposed to be in the Indian Ocean; we haven't cared about facts so far, so why start now?) in which he claimed that the main home of the displaced Lemurians was a cave complex underneath Mount Shasta. J. C. Brown read about this and said, more or less, "See? I toldja so!"
And, astonishingly, people didn't think to ask (1) why no one had seen any Lemurians until now, and (2) why, if there was a cave with jewels and gold underneath the mountain, Brown hadn't gone back to get some of the goodies himself in the intervening almost-three decades. Instead, they were like, "Hell yeah! Sign me up!", and before you knew it Brown had eighty people volunteering to help him go back to his cave, which he said he could relocate with no difficulty.
There was a six-week planning period during which the volunteers got outfitted and prepared. An interesting point here -- the relevance of which will become clear in a moment -- is that no one gave Brown any money; he'd made it clear he couldn't afford to equip anyone, so people were responsible for their own gear, lodging, food, and so on. He was apparently enthusiastic that finally, finally, someone was listening to him, and he'd have a chance to go back to Shasta and prove all the scoffers wrong.
Then the day of the expedition arrived -- and Brown failed to show.
He was never seen or heard from again.
The June 19, 1934 front page of the Stockton Evening and Sunday Record [Image is in the Public Domain]
People seemed more concerned than miffed at Brown's disappearance. Since, as I mentioned, Brown himself hadn't profited from the lead-up to the planned trek, there were no accusations that he'd swindled anyone. A police report was filed, a search initiated -- but no trace of Brown was ever found. It was as if he'd suddenly evaporated.
The superstitious speculated that the Lemurians (or their human agents) had done away with Brown because he was the only one who knew where the entrance to the cave was, and had to be stopped before he gave away the game. The more pragmatic said that Brown had successfully painted himself into a corner with his tall tales, and couldn't face leading eighty people into the wilderness only to find bupkis. The truth is, we don't know what happened to him, although being someone who generally casts a suspicious side-eye at claims of the supernatural, I'm a lot more likely to give credence to the latter than the former.
I have to say, though, that it's pretty odd that the guy had hung around the area for thirty years saying, "You've got to come see this crazy cave I found! It's amazing! I'll show it to you!" and then when people finally said, "Okay," he noped his way right into the ether.
And weird stories about Mount Shasta and the Lemurians continue, lo unto this very day; it's no surprise that the main "power center" of the August 17, 1987 Harmonic Convergence, during which the planets were supposed to align and cause a "resonance" which would cause "a great shift in the earth’s energy from warlike to peaceful," was on Mount Shasta.
It's even less surprising that ever since August 18, 1987, people have gone on killing each other just like before.
So that's our strange tale for the day. Now that Hovhaness's Mysterious Mountain is finishing up, I might cue up Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony, and Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lake in the Mountains. May as well keep the theme going for a while.
The brilliant British astrophysicist Becky Smethurst said, "The cutting edge of science is where all the unknowns are." And far from being a bad thing, this is exciting. When a scientist lands on something truly perplexing, that opens up fresh avenues for inquiry -- and, potentially, the discovery of something entirely new.
That's the situation we're in with our understanding of the evolution of the early universe.
You probably know that when you look out into space, you're looking back into time. Light is the fastest information carrier we know of, and it travels at... well, the speed of light, just shy of three hundred thousand kilometers per second. The farther away something is, the greater the distance the light had to cross to get to your eyes, so what you're seeing is an image of it when the light left its surface. The Sun is a little over eight light minutes away; so if the Sun were to vanish -- not a likely eventuality, fortunately -- we would have no way to know it for eight minutes. The nearest star other than the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away; the ever-intriguing star Betelgeuse, which I am so hoping goes supernova in my lifetime, is 642 light years away, so it might have blown up five hundred years ago and we'd still have another 142 years to wait for the information to get here.
This is true even of close objects, of course. You never see anything as it is; you always see it as it was. Because right now my sleeping puppy is a little closer to me than the rocking chair, I'm seeing the chair a little further in the past than I'm seeing him. But the fact remains, neither of those images are of the instantaneous present; they're ghostly traces, launched at me by light reflecting off their surfaces a minuscule fraction of a second ago.
Now that we have a new and extremely powerful tool for collecting light -- the James Webb Space Telescope -- we have a way of looking at even fainter, more distant stars and galaxies. And as Becky Smethurst put it, "In the past four years, JWST has been taking everything that we thought we knew about the early universe, and how galaxies evolve, and chucking it straight out of the window."
In a wonderful video that you all should watch, she identifies three discoveries JWST has made about the most distant reaches of the universe that still have yet to be explained: the fact that there are many more large, bright galaxies than our current model would predict are possible; that there is a much larger amount of heavy elements than expected; and the weird features called "little red dots" -- compact assemblages of cooler red stars that exhibit a strange spectrum of light and evidence of ionized hydrogen, something you generally only see in the vicinity hot, massive stars.
Well, she might have to add another one to the list. Using data from LOFAR (the Low Frequency Array), a radio telescope array in Europe, astrophysicists have found bubbles of electromagnetic radiation surrounding some of the most distant galaxies, on the order of ten billion light years away. This means we're seeing these galaxies (and their bubbles) when the universe was only one-quarter of its current age. These radio emissions seem to be coming from a halo of highly-charged particles between, and surrounding, galaxy clusters, some of the largest structures ever studied.
"It's as if we've discovered a vast cosmic ocean, where entire galaxy clusters are constantly immersed in high-energy particles," said astrophysicist Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of the Université de Montréal, who led the study. "Galaxies appear to have been infused with these particles, and the electromagnetic radiation they emit, for billions of years longer than we realized... We are just scratching the surface of how energetic the early Universe really was. This discovery gives us a new window into how galaxy clusters grow and evolve, driven by both black holes and high-energy particle physics."
Every once in a while I'd have a student tell me, in some disdain, "I don't know why we have to learn science when it could all be proven wrong tomorrow." My response to that is that science's ability to self-correct is a strength, not a weakness. How is desperately hanging on to your prior understanding when you're presented with new evidence a good thing? People like to be sure of everything, but really, are we ever? Nothing is ever absolutely settled; we sometimes kid ourselves that we've found The Answer, but that's honestly a response born of a combination of insecurity and the desire not to think about the matter any more.
Richard Feynman, in his wonderful book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, summarized this brilliantly:
There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.
I've written here before about the fact that the continents are in motion, something that is only not staggering because we've all known about it since ninth grade Earth Science class. You can easily see why it took so long to accept. First, the motion is so slow that it was, for most of human history, beyond the limitations of the technology available at the time to measure directly. Second, it's just hard to imagine.
Continents? Moving in solid rock? What?
But move they do, and it's because if you go down far enough, the rock isn't solid. Get into the upper mantle, and it's the consistency of taffy, so it flows, pushed by subterranean convection currents. Those currents create drag forces on the undersides of the tectonic plates, shifting them around. Although this is an oversimplification, in general, there are three ways that plates can move relative to each other:
Convergent zones, where plates come together. When thin, brittle oceanic plates are pushed toward each other, one usually bends and slides under the other at a thrust fault or subduction zone; the subducted plate and the sediment riding on it eventually melt, and the hot, water-rich magma rises to form chains of volcanoes parallel to the fault. Examples are the Japan Trench and the Sumatra Trench. When an oceanic plate collides with a thick, cold continental plate, you still get volcanoes boring their way up through the continent -- this is the origin of the Cascade Range. If it's two continental plates colliding, the rock simply crumples up to form mountains -- such as what is happening in the Alps and Himalayas,
Divergent zones, where plates move apart. This is what's happening along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and is why the island of Iceland is volcanic -- the eastern and western halves of the island are moving apart, and new basaltic lave bubbling up to fill the gap.
A photograph I took at Meradalir Volcano in Iceland, August 2022
Strike-slip faults, or transform faults, which occur when plates slide in opposite directions parallel to the fault. Examples are the San Andreas, Hayward, and Elsinore Faults in California, and the Alpine Fault in New Zealand.
All of these movements can significantly transform the shapes and positions of the continents -- you probably know that 250 million years ago, most of the Earth's land masses were assembled into a giant supercontinent (Pangaea), and the seas into a massive superocean (Panthalassa), with huge consequences to the climate. Fascinating to realize, though, that Pangaea was only the most recent of the supercontinents; geologists believe that the same lumping-it-all-together occurred at least three or four times before then.
And the reverse can happen, too, when a divergent zone forms underneath a continent, and it tears the land mass in two. In fact, this is the reason the topic comes up today; a paper last week in Nature Geoscience about the Afar Triple Junction, the point where three faults meet at one point (the Red Sea Rift, the Aden Ridge, and the East African Rift). Geologists have found that underneath this region, there's a mantle plume -- an upwelling of very hot magma -- that is pulsing like a giant beating heart, driving convection that will eventually tear Africa in two, shearing off a chunk from Ethiopia to Mozambique and driving it east into the Indian Ocean.
"We have found that the evolution of deep mantle upwellings is intimately tied to the motion of the plates above," said Derek Keir, of the University of Southampton, who co-authored the study. "This has profound implications for how we interpret surface volcanism, earthquake activity, and the process of continental breakup... The work shows that deep mantle upwellings can flow beneath the base of tectonic plates and help to focus volcanic activity to where the tectonic plate is thinnest. Follow on research includes understanding how and at what rate mantle flow occurs beneath plates."
The formation of a new sea -- and the consequent turning of much of east Africa into an island -- isn't exactly what I'd call "imminent;" it's predicted that the Red Sea will breach the Afar Highlands and flood the lowest points of the rift (much of which is already below sea level) in something like five million years. The region will be highly tectonically active throughout the process, however, and there'll be enough volcanoes and earthquakes in the meantime to keep us interested.
It's a good reminder that although mountains and oceans have been a symbol of something eternal and unchanging, in reality everything is in flux. It recalls to mind the lines from Percy Shelley's evocative poem "Mont Blanc," which seems a fitting way to end:
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing Its destin’d path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shatter’d stand; the rocks, drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaim’d. The dwelling-place Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil; Their food and their retreat for ever gone, So much of life and joy is lost. The race Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream, And their place is not known. Below, vast caves Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam, Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling Meet in the vale, and one majestic River, The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves, Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.
In 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton published a novel called The Coming Race. The plot is pretty wild, considering that science fiction/fantasy only really took off as a genre in the early twentieth century. The story revolves around a young wealthy man who goes exploring with a friend, and they come upon what appears to be an abandoned mine shaft. They descend into the opening using a rope, but the rope snaps and the two men fall. The friend is killed; the narrator is stunned but largely uninjured, and finds himself in a complex of underground caves.
After blundering about for a while, he discovers -- or, more accurately, is discovered by -- a angelic humanoid who turns out to be (1) superintelligent, and (2) telepathic. In short order they establish communication with each other. The narrator learns that the people who live down in the caves belong to a race called the Vril-ya, that there are twelve thousand of them, and that they have harnessed an "all-permeating etheric fluid" called Vril that gives them their extraordinary powers. The end of the story is rather predictable (although it certainly was innovative for its time). The narrator falls in love with the Guide's daughter, Zee. While the Guide was okay with the narrator living down there, he couldn't condone any kind of Vril-ya/human hanky-panky, so he orders his son Taë to kill the narrator. Taë conspires to free the narrator, and Zee leads him to a tunnel that goes back to the surface. But Zee warns him before he escapes to safety that it's only a matter of time before the Vril-ya run out of space and resources, and at that point they'll come above ground themselves -- with the purpose of conquering the surface of the planet.
The novel did quite well, and was even adapted into a successful stage play.
[Image is in the Public Domain]
The whole thing reminds me of three other subterranean races -- H. G. Wells's Morlocks (from The Time Machine), the people of K'n-yan in the terrifying story by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop called "The Mound," and of course the Silurians from Doctor Who. ("The Mound" is similar enough to Bulwer-Lytton's story that I have to wonder if the latter was the former's inspiration; but in the Lovecraft/Bishop story the narrator's lover meets with a gruesome fate because of her betrayal, because Lovecraft didn't even do equivocal endings, much less happy ones.)
Okay, so we have a strange and atmospheric novel by a nineteenth-century British author, which so far is only mildly interesting. But of course the story doesn't end there.
Shortly after The Coming Race's publication, Bulwer-Lytton was shocked to find out that a significant number of people who read it apparently didn't know it was a work of fiction. The first bunch were the members of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, one of the sub-branches of the Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians were an esoteric sect that, like many others, fell victim to squabbling and infighting that led to schisms, to the extent that at one point the number of Rosicrucian sects exceeded the number of actual Rosicrucians. But this particular splinter group was going strong in the 1870s, and appointed Bulwer-Lytton as its "Grand Patron." Bulwer-Lytton was horrified, and said, more or less, "But... look! I made it all up! See? It says 'fiction' right here on the spine of the book!" This, predictably, had zero effect on the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, who if they had a firm grasp on reality probably wouldn't have been Rosicrucians in the first place.
Then the whole concept of Vril got picked up and popularized by the infamous Madame Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy. Blavatsky just loved the idea of Vril, and said that it was a real magical force that allowed for superior people to do supernatural stuff. The underground people from Bulwer-Lytton's novel were real, too, she said; they were spiritual guides who you could get in touch with if you purchased and read all of her books and then tried hard enough. Shortly afterward, the Scottish loony William Scott-Elliot got on board with the claim that the people of Atlantis had known all about Vril, and used it to power their aircraft. Oh, and the Atlanteans were the ancestors of the Vril-ya, who were driven underground when Atlantis was destroyed.
Then like some weird contagion, the idea was picked up by the Thule Society, a proto-Nazi group of German occultists that flourished in Münich between World War I and World War II. (Members included Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Karl Harrer.) While the Thule Society -- at least what was left of them -- was disbanded after the end of World War II, the Vril concept, and its connection to a superior, super-powerful race, persists to this day in neo-Nazi circles, where it's been wound together with ideas gleaned from Norse mythology to create a poisonous, if bizarre, amalgam.
So Edward Bulwer-Lytton created a concept that, on one hand, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and on the other generated a juggernaut that pretty much obliterated his original novel. What's wryly amusing is that this isn't the only time he wrote something that people took literally; his story The Haunted and the Haunters bears an uncanny resemblance to the legend of 50 Berkeley Square, the "most haunted house in London," which still figures prominently on "ghost walks" and antiquarian tours of the city.
Even though as a novelist, I'm a little envious of his success -- I'd be thrilled if one of my books was still being talked about a century and a half later -- I'm forced to the conclusion that Bulwer-Lytton really should have been more careful about what he wrote into his stories.
Anyhow, what we have is a fictional concept about a fictional substance utilized by a fictional race, as described in a work of fiction (not to belabor the point unduly), which nonetheless inspired numerous people over the following 150 years to believe that it was one hundred percent true. For me, it just reinforces my sense that I have no idea what makes most people tick. It should have just taken someone saying, "Hey, lookit, the whole thing comes from a novel, here's a copy, check it out," for the Vril-believers to say, "Ha! Wouldja look at that? What a goober I am," and then to run off and believe something completely different and hopefully more plausible.
But even after pretty much everyone knew that Bulwer-Lytton had made the whole thing up, there were -- and still are -- people who think it's all real.
So there you have it. Underground angels, telepathy, and Vril. Me, I'm dubious, but if at some point the Vril-ya start coming up out of mine shafts and want to take over the world, I guess I'll have to admit I was wrong. On the other hand, if they do, I'm all for giving them carte blanche. The Vril-ya couldn't do much worse than the set of incompetent, amoral wingnuts we currently have in charge.
