What is Anomalology? — Part 3
Part 3: Children of the supernormal
When forming an understanding of anomalous experiences, it helps to ask the history and meaning of the concepts and terminology it has evolved from, and what those words were attempting to do. For that, the word “Spiritualism” and the history surrounding it is a worthy starting point, keeping in mind that people have had what is conventionally now known as ‘spiritual experiences’ throughout the world and history. The Encyclopedia Britannica in the early 20th century described “Spiritualism” as:
“a term used by philosophical writers to denote the opposite of materialism, and also used in a narrower sense to describe the belief that the spiritual world manifests itself by producing in the physical world effects inexplicable by the known laws of nature.” ¹
The first thing I notice with the definition is the way it spans a broad philosophical meaning and then a narrow experiential one. The second thing I notice is that the second meaning subtly concedes: inexplicable by the known laws of nature — with the crucial qualifier, known. The authors did not write “inexplicable by the laws of nature.” The key distinction is the phrasing, “known laws of nature.” The exception is, thus, built into the definition as both precaution and foresight.
I’d also note that something interesting is missing from the definition. Nowhere in its words on séances, mediums, raps, and the whole apparatus of modern Spiritualism does the word paranormal appear. The entry is a fossil of its time — written when investigators used a different term entirely, one now almost forgotten: the supernormal.
As I follow the entry, my word search takes me to Hydesville, New York, 1848.
What began the Spiritualism movement, the entry shows, was the family of Mr and Mrs J. D. Fox and their two daughters, in Hydesville, New York, disturbed in 1848 by unexplained knockings. It was one of the daughters, Kate, aged eight or nine, who discovered the sounds would obey requests — that the cause was, according to their account, intelligent. With communication established, the rapper professed to be the spirit of a murdered pedlar.
From that single household came, over time, a transatlantic movement. From knocks agreed to mean no and yes, an elaborate technology of alphabets, table-turning, trance-speaking, and materialized hands. And from the story of a murdered pedlar came a claim that the dead never left, and can be reached by certain means.
The story’s entry is remarkable less for its history than for its record, for it leaves both sides of the account open.
The account continues to indicate that experiments conducted in 1851, as part of ongoing investigations into their claims, suggested the Fox girls produced their rapping sounds by partially dislocating and restoring their own joints. Additional investigations revealed that the conditions most favorable to obtaining phenomena were also precisely those most favorable for deception. According to one Stainton Moses, a leading Spiritualist at the time and himself a self-professed medium, people did not get what they wanted or expected in 99 out of 100 cases. Further experiments by a certain professor of physics at Geneva convinced him that the unusual experiences, séances in particular, were of an unknown force. The results of which, in addition to a listing of other investigations into these experiences and claims, were inconclusive at the time, indicating that it could be deception or some other conventially unexplainable phenomena.
What should an anomalologist make of a century like that one? Perhaps the calls of fraud and the possibility of truth are not mutually exclusive. They are the same history, of course, but even the exposure of frauds and conmen didn’t explain all accounts, including those by witnesses otherwise known to be competent and trustworthy. In the end, the claims of the Fox girls were never fully accounted for, leaving witnesses to draw their own conclusions.
If I view these accounts through the lens of Part 2: the Fox girls as witnesses, Hydesville as place, the communications as account, and Crookes, the Society for Psychical Research, and ultimately the Britannica itself as observers — each deciding what the phenomena would labeled and categorized. Such categorizations are never neutral, then or now.
It is worth pausing to examine the entry's vocabulary, because it lacks its own awareness and foreknowledge of how terminology and accounts would later evolve. The entry uses the term supernormal rather than paranormal, which came into context and the lexicon years later. Supernormal was coined by Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, based on a need for a term to include the beyond-normal without theological commitment. Supernatural belonged to the church. Supernormal was an attempt at a neutral perspective.
Paranormal came onto the scene in English in 1905, a loanword from the French, and for three decades the two terms competed, with the newcomer winning sometime around 1937-1938 due, at least in part, to J.B. Rhine’s experimental program at Duke University, which was part of the same shift that retired “psychical research” in favor of parapsychology, a term coined by philosopher Max Dessoir in 1889. The séance moved to the laboratory, and the vocabulary followed it, where it would, by the end of the 20th century, begin to fade from serious discourse and take up new residence in popular culture and mass media as entertainment.
What I find interesting, however, are the prefixes rather than the succession.
Super- means beyond. The supernormal rises above the normal; it claims transcendence, however carefully disclaimed. Para- means beside. The paranormal is the neighbouring country — not above the world, adjacent to it, a republic next door whose border nobody has satisfactorily mapped. And beneath both sits the parent term of this series: anomalous, from the Greek anōmalos — uneven, irregular; not against the law, not above it, not beside it, but simply off it. Outside the pattern.
Each prefix is a small, subtle ontology. Each word, in being chosen, redefines what kind of thing the phenomena were permitted to be: transcendent, adjacent, or merely unruly. There was no adjudication involved as to how these terms entered the vernacular of common discourse and conversation. The drift from supernormal to paranormal to anomalous was a century-long slide and the witnesses whose experiences were being renamed were, as usual, not part of the result.
There is a lesson here for the anomalologist, and it parallels a theme I began in Part 1: the classification of anomalous experiences is never neutral. Neither is the classifier's dictionary, often smuggling in biases and motivations masked by the veil of clinical objectivity, theological canon, or mystical desire.
Whatever became of Hydesville, the movement it began died long ago as an institution leaving behind only traces of the legitimate questions those events triggered.
Strip the séance rooms of their conjuring, the mediums of their cracked toes, the century of its documented fraud, and something remains that neither side has been able to remove. What remains still are the central underlying questions of what was left unexplained and why. This does not mean that investigation into the supernormal-paranormal have ceased. Merely to say that they have transformed over the decades since, from shocking domestic phenomena to religious propaganda to streaming jump-scare entertainment.
Despite this evolution, roughly one-third to one-half of the given populace report having personally experienced at least one such experience in their lifetime.² That’s not an insignificant figure. More interestingly, I suspect, is that most people avoid discussing such experiences openly, leaving any sharing of them to closed, confidential conversations with psychologists, priests, or sympathetic therapists. I would also presume that any resulting explanations or conclusions they arrive at are likely as varied as the people and encounters themselves. Experiences that occur within the world, framed as of the world — beside or outside its known laws.
Here the honest scholar meets the central problem, and I should admit it. A strange dream is not an anomaly. Noises in an old house are not anomalies. The feeling of being watched in an empty parking garage on a late Sunday afternoon is not an anomaly. Each is odd; none crosses any line an impartial observer could identify and explain. And yet somewhere between the odd and the anomalous there is a boundary, no one knows precisely where, and every party to this history — the grieving mother, Faraday with his unconscious muscles, the aged encyclopedia entry — has stood at that boundary and decided, or refused to decide, where the Hydesville phenomena belonged.
The anomalologist, I propose, does not adjudicate the truth or falsehood of such accounts, or draw the line between them. Certainly, each person who encounters them will draw their own conclusions, which may or may not change with time and experience.
What I’m left with is the position the anomalologist takes toward the vocabulary of the last two centuries. I’m not one to discard terms or choose victors. I gather them while keeping their history, meaning, and function.
The spiritual remains the oldest term, the manifestation of a spiritual world into the physical, the belief of the mourner at the séance. It deserves neither praise nor condemnation. The term simply identifies what the experience meant to those who lived it. The supernormal remains what Myers forged it to be, a term of careful trespass, beyond the normal without requiring theology. The paranormal remains the word that conventiionally won out a century ago. And encompassing both of them is the anomalous, making no promise about divinity, transcendence, adjacency, or meaning. It claims only that a pattern exists.
None of these terms is wrong. Each is a piece of a larger puzzle, forged by the people who needed them, the eras they inhabited, and the cultures they inherited.
Notes:
Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Volume 25 (1911).
Bauer E. (2004). “Panel Discussion: Counseling persons with exceptional experiences: The example of the IGPP.” in Paper presented at the 47th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association. 319–324.
What is Anomalology?
By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.