Supernatural Convention Quotes

Ethics is not a mystic fantasy--nor a social convention--nor a dispensable, subjective luxury...Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival--not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but the grace of reality and the nature of life.

If the supernatural in a conventional sense is no longer possible, what remains after the “death of God” is an occulted, hidden world. Philosophically speaking, the enigma we face is how to confront this world, without immediately presuming that it is identical to the world-for-us (the world of science and religion), and without simply disparaging it as an irretrievable and inaccessible world-in-itself.

The bus I am riding on must be on its way to a garbage convention. Never before has a more rancid assemblage of people congregated. I am at this moment privy to a momentous moment in the history of human smell. My name will probably be memorized by future students, preparing to answer this frequently asked exam question: Who demonstrated a supernatural ability to remain conscious on the most disgusting vehicle to ever disturb our debauched world?

I remembered talking with a writer friend who lived in Otisfield and supported his wife and two kids by raising chickens and turning out one paperback original a year — spy stories. We had gotten talking about the bulge in popularity of books concerning themselves with the supernatural. Gault pointed out that in the forties Weird Tales had only been able to pay a pittance, and then in the fifties it went broke. When the machines fail, he had said (while his wife candled eggs and roosters crowed querulously outside), when the technologies fail, when the conventional religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.

On the hearth, in front of a back-brand to give substance, blazed a fire of thorns, that crackled 'like the laughter of the fool.' Nineteen persons were gathered here. Of these, five women, wearing gowns of various bright hues, sat in chairs along the wall; girls shy and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New the parish-clerk, and John Pitcher, a neighboring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative pourparlers on a life companionship, sat beneath the corner-cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions. Absolute confidence in each other's good opinion begat perfect ease, while the finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity, was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever - which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale. ("The Three Strangers")

All pantheists feel the same profound reverence for the Universe/Nature, but different pantheists use different forms of language to express this reverence. Traditionally, Pantheism has made use of theistic-sounding words like “God,” but in basically non-theistic ways - pantheists do not believe in a supernatural creator personal God who will judge us all after death. Modern pantheists fall into two distinct groups in relation to language: some avoid words such as God or divine, because this makes listeners think in terms of traditional concepts of God that can be very misleading. Others are quite comfortable using these words, but when they use them they don’t mean the same thing that conventional theists mean. If they say "the Universe is God," they don’t mean that the Universe is identical with the deity in the Bible or the Koran.

It's suicide," Doc Holland said, shaking his head. "Fools, all of them. This isn't any conventional war- this is madness." The general let out a weary breath. "No, Doctor-this is fear . . . and fear makes fools of us all.

Again, I had no feeling of the supernatural, no belief that this was more than another nasty twist in the masque, a black inversion of the scene on the beach. That does not mean I was not frightened. I was, and very frightened; but my fear came from a knowledge that anything might happen. That there were no limits in this masque, no normal social laws or conventions.

Returning briefly to my novel and my sense that Jonathan might not survive its ending, I'm reminded of some thoughts I had regarding Howard's masterly story "Dagon". At the story's end we find its by-now crazed narrator cowering in his rented San Francisco room and planning an impending suicide that will deliver him from the appalling world of madness and delusion into which his maritime experience has plunged him. On first reading, I perhaps thought this a touch over-dramatic and sensational, although upon turning it over in my mind I realise that it's a wonderful counter-example of the problems I have previously noted in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Whereas in Stoker's book the final affirmation of conventionality and human values tends to undermine the very horror Stoker has so masterfully achieved in the preceding pages, Lovecraft's tale shows a reaction to the supernatural or super-normal (something which is by its very nature utterly incomprehensible) that is a lot more credible in terms of our human psychology: when faced with something which we know should not exist and for which we have neither name nor concept, we do not concoct an ingenious opposing strategy nor rally our defences. Rather, we go mad and kill ourselves. Although this is a bleak and pessimistic ending to a tale, it seems to me that in the realm of alien literary horrors that we are discussing, it is a far more believable and honest one. I somehow don't believe that the adventure mode of storytelling with its reassuring strictures and conventions (fearless heroes ultimately triumphing against some poorly-motivated adversary or other unlikely hazard) is appropriate to the variety of strange tale that I wish to tell.

We may still ask in what sense Revelation belongs to the genre of ancient religious literature we call the apocalypse. J. J. Collins defines the literary genre apocalypse in this way: ‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.2 The reference to eschatological salvation would be disputed in some recent study of the apocalypses. Although the apocalypses have conventionally been thought to be about history and eschatology, this is not necessarily true of all of them. The heavenly secrets revealed to the seer in the extant Jewish apocalypses cover a rather wide range of topics and are not exclusively concerned with history and eschatology.3 John’s apocalypse, however, is exclusively concerned with eschatology: with eschatological judgment and salvation, and with the impact of these on the present situation in which he writes.

THE BIG PIECE of secular conventional wisdom about Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.

If one no longer want the supernatural, it is necessary to be logical and to say: there is no good or bad, in and of themselves; nothing is just, or unjust. All our ideas of morality and law are due to circumstances of ancestral evolution and the social conventions that are the most severely sanctioned by opinion and by law have, in themselves, the exact same value as the rules to a game of cards.

It is natural to care for those who have cared for us, but at the point a man has been dead a hundred years, no one alive who yet cares for him has any natural reason for doing so. In the several decades following a man’s death, those who knew him might carry a torch for his memory, describe the love they received from him, and champion the spirit they have inherited from him. However, if people are still willing to listen to a man one hundred years after his death, he speaks from the grave. After natural affection passes, if any affection remains, it is supernatural.

I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them. Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face. I don’t know. But if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James again, “forbid[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Open-minded. And bemushroomed. That was me, now, ready to reopen my own accounts with reality.

nature might be what is outside you or inside you. it might be what is regular and systematic, or what is irregular and random. it could define what is fundamentally human or what is fundamentally animal. it might contradict the conventions of society, politics, culture, and art, or it might be their real meaning. it could be the heart of things or it could be the surface of things. politically, it could mean freedom (as a return to a lost or repressed human nature) or confinement (as the need to abide by an unchangeable human nature). artistically, it could mean the need to follow eternal rules of the need to forget all rules. theologically, it could mean what's permanent or what constantly changes, what is pure (and innocent of thought) or what is impure (and beyond any thought).

Horror movies -- of the genuinely fantastic, supernatural variety -- had not been invented yet, at least not in America, where convention dictated that supernatural occurrences always be "explained away," usually as the disguise or machinations of a criminal.