ecosophia | Magic Monday

It's just past midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.

The picture? I'm taking a momentary break from chasing down photos of my lineage. Today is the spring equinox here in the northern hemisphere, one of the holy days of the Druid calendar, and this is a photo of the spring equinox sunrise as seen from an ancient stone chamber at South Royalton, Vermont -- one of many astronomically oriented megalithic sites here in New England. The photo's courtesy of New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA), which was gracious enough to send it around yesterday morning.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hello Mr. Greer,

As someone who wrote a book on monsters I thought I would throw some bigfoot questions at you.

First, does it exist?
Second, does it have a supernatural component or is this just a rare evolutionary cousin of ours?
Third, do you have any thoughts about Native American legends concerning big foot?

1) People certainly encounter creatures of that kind, and have done so for a very long time. There are medieval European accounts of "woodwoses," described as hairy humanoids who lived in the forest.

2) BHMs (big hairy monsters), to use the Fortean term for them, aren't all of the same kind. I'm pretty sure that the yetis of the Himalayas and the sasquatches of the Cascade Mountains are large bipedal apes, probably descended from the Gigantopithecus known to paleontologists, but some other BHMs act like preternatural beings -- for example, they vanish into thin air, leaving tracks that just stop in the middle of nowhere. So each sighting has to be assessed independently.

3) Always worth reading or (if you have the chance) listening to, but don't take them in the simpleminded white-guy way.

1. If they did indeed exist today, wouldn't we have found their physical remains by now? (Much less clearly caught them on camera)

This question gets asked fairly often by people who don't spend much time in the woods. It's uncommon to find physical remains of any animal in a wilderness setting, even if it's something really common, such as deer; it takes a very short time for carrion feeders of various kinds to reduce remains to invisibility. In this case, if the sasquatch exists as a biological animal, we're talking about small relict populations of a rare, nocturnal, and highly intelligent animal that avoids areas frequented by human beings.

Meanwhile people have found a great many tracks, feces, and hair samples. Scientists refuse to look at them. The unwritten law of the scientific community -- "no one but a tenured academic is allowed to discover anything" -- is just as powerful a force now as it was when continental drift was dismissed as crackpot pseudoscience.

Edited 2023-03-20 19:36 (UTC)

As someone who never wanders very far off the trail while out hiking, you got me there ;)

That second part sounds so typical of any line of inquiry that strays even an inch from the consensus party line.

Somewhat related, I've really grown to despise the weasel-phrase "modern scholars" that seems to litter nearly every wikipedia article of consequence. It sounds to me like newspeak for "current tenured academic who doesn't stray one inch from the party line." Any article on topic related to polytheistic religions/ cultures or occultism is going to have at least 50 instance of this phrase thrown around, each papering over what turns out to be a dumb opinion with very flimsy citations attached.

Bingo. "Modern scholars" means "current intellectual fashions."

And of course, a tenured professor would never want to risk their cushy livelihood on peddling clap-trap about bigfoots and being laughed out of the academic circles!

And so the status quo continues!

(And that's before we get into the side of things where giant humanoid skeletons, when found, are spirited away by governmental forces to giant underground warehouses, à la Indiana Jones)

I'd want to see some concrete evidence of those giant skeletons, but I'm not ruling anything out in advance of the facts -- thus proving that I'm unfit to take part in science as it's practiced today!

I thought one of the benefits of academic tenure was the freedom to research and publish what you wish without endangering your tenured position. You could lose your job if the college or university abolishes the department you are in; otherwise, I think they can reduce your class load (throw me into the briarpatch) but they would have to accuse you of something pretty extreme to actually fire you, if you have tenure (not many do).

Magic Monday

Monsters and Bigfoot

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