In today’s world, it seems like there’s little room for imagination. Why is the sky blue? Electromagnetic scattering. Why did the chicken cross the road? Chemical and electric transmissions from its cerebellum to its central nervous system, obviously. The world of fantasy is shrinking with every rotation our Earth makes around the Sun and with every study that gets published in a scientific journal.
Sure, we’ve all heard stories of fairies and demons and ghosts, but how many of you reading actually believe in these things? Imagine a world where you look up into the sky and you don’t see planets, but Olympian gods gazing down upon us mortals. Imagine looking into the woods at night and knowing that there are mischievous pixies waiting to lead you into trouble.
Of course, scientific advancement is important to the survival of our species and has benefited humankind in innumerable ways. However, I still feel a strong longing for the times when the world was explained by mythologies, magic, and the supernatural. There’s something romantic and epic about this sort of worldview that I feel has been lost in our modern world of cold, hard science.
In this column, I’ll be examining the superstitions and mythologies that still exist in remote parts of the world as well as certain revivals of occultism in the more interconnected areas. It seems that there is still room in our modern world to acknowledge that not all phenomena can be explained in a purely scientific way.
In fact, people all over the globe are somehow able to believe that penicillin is an effective antibiotic and, at the same time, that their world is inhabited by ghosts, goblins, and ghouls.
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The purpose of this column is not to convince readers to believe in the supernatural, but rather to preserve the history of these superstitious beliefs and to open your minds to the possibility that there could be truth to some of these mythologies and folklores.
At the very least, I hope that this column will entertain you, as many of these stories were intended to do. Wrapped up in all of these superstitions is the verbal tradition in which groups of people would share stories in their homes or around a campfire, hoping to scare or thrill their audiences.
So, in the interest of keeping these oral (or, in this case, written) storytelling traditions alive and adding a little bit of fantasy back into your life, enjoy Occult Captured, a collection of the world’s folklore and superstitions.
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