Part 71

That rows of cup marks have often been likened to footprints.

But, in this similitude, their unilinear arrangement must be disregarded--of course often they're mixed up in every way, but arrangement in single lines is very common. It is odd that they should so often be likened to footprints: I suppose there are exceptional cases, but unless it's something that hops on one foot, or a cat going along a narrow fence-top, I don't think of anything that makes footprints one directly ahead of another--Cop, in a station house, walking a chalk line, perhaps.

Upon the Witch's Stone, near Ratho, Scotland, there are twenty-four cups, varying in size from one and a half to three inches in diameter, arranged in approximately straight lines. Locally it is explained that these are tracks of dogs' feet (Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scotland, 2-4-79). Similar marks are scattered bewilderingly all around the Witch's Stone--like a frenzy of telegraphing, or like messages repeating and repeating, trying to localize differently.

In Inverness-shire, cup marks are called "fairies' footmarks." At Valna's church, Norway, and St. Peter's, Ambleteuse, there are such marks, said to be horses' hoofprints. The rocks of Clare, Ireland, are marked with prints supposed to have been made by a mythical cow (Folklore, 21-184).

We now have such a ghost of a thing that I'd not like to be interpreted as offering it as a datum: it simply illustrates what I mean by the notion of symbols, like cups, or like footprints, which, if like those of horses or cows, are the reverse of, or the negatives of, cups--of symbols that are regularly received somewhere upon this earth--steep, conical hill, somewhere, I think--but that have often alighted in wrong places--considerably to the mystification of persons waking up some morning to find them upon formerly blank spaces.

An ancient record--still worse, an ancient Chinese record--of a courtyard of a palace--dwellers of the palace waking up one morning, finding the courtyard marked with tracks like the footprints of an ox--supposed that the devil did it. (Notes and Queries, 9-6-225.)

16.

Angels.

Hordes upon hordes of them.

Beings massed like the clouds of souls, or the commingling whiffs of spirituality, or the exhalations of souls that Dore pictured so often.

It may be that the Milky Way is a composition of stiff, frozen, finally-static, absolute angels. We shall have data of little Milky Ways, moving swiftly; or data of hosts of angels, not absolute, or still dynamic. I suspect, myself, that the fixed stars are really fixed, and that the minute motions said to have been detected in them are illusions. I think that the fixed stars are absolutes. Their twinkling is only the interpretation by an intermediatist state of them. I think that soon after Leverrier died, a new fixed star was discovered--that, if Dr. Gray had stuck to his story of the thousands of fishes from one pail of water, had written upon it, lectured upon it, taken to street corners, to convince the world that, whether conceivable or not, his explanation was the only true explanation: had thought of nothing but this last thing at night and first thing in the morning--his obituary--another "nova" reported in Monthly Notices.

I think that Milky Ways, of an inferior, or dynamic, order, have often been seen by astronomers. Of course it may be that the phenomena that we shall now consider are not angels at all. We are simply feeling around, trying to find out what we can accept. Some of our data indicate hosts of rotund and complacent tourists in inter-planetary space--but then data of long, lean, hungry ones. I think that there are, out in inter-planetary space, Super Tamerlanes at the head of hosts of celestial ravagers--which have come here and pounced upon civilizations of the past, cleaning them up all but their bones, or temples and monuments--for which later historians have invented exclusionist histories. But if something now has a legal right to us, and can enforce its proprietorship, they've been warned off. It's the way of all exploitation. I should say that we're now under cultivation: that we're conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it all to our own nobler and higher instincts.

Against these notions is the same sense of finality that opposes all advance. It's why we rate acceptance as a better adaptation than belief. Opposing us is the strong belief that, as to inter-planetary phenomena, virtually everything has been found out. Sense of finality and illusion of homogeneity. But that what is called advancing knowledge is violation of the sense of blankness.

A drop of water. Once upon a time water was considered so homogeneous that it was thought of as an element. The microscope--and not only that the supposititiously elementary was seen to be of infinite diversity, but that in its protoplasmic life there were new orders of beings.

Or the year 1491--and a European looking westward over the ocean--his feeling that that suave western droop was unbreakable; that gods of regularity would not permit that smooth horizon to be disturbed by coasts or spotted with islands. The unpleasantness of even contemplating such a state--wide, smooth west, so clean against the sky--spotted with islands--geographic leprosy.

But coasts and islands and Indians and bison, in the seemingly vacant west: lakes, mountains, rivers--

One looks up at the sky: the relative homogeneity of the relatively unexplored: one thinks of only a few kinds of phenomena. But the acceptance is forced upon me that there are modes and modes and modes of inter-planetary existence: things as different from planets and comets and meteors as Indians are from bison and prairie dogs: a super-geography--or celestiography--of vast stagnant regions, but also of Super-Niagaras and Ultra-Mississippis: and a super-sociology--voyagers and tourists and ravagers: the hunted and the hunting: the super-mercantile, the super-piratic, the super-evangelical.

Sense of homogeneity, or our positivist illusion of the unknown--and the fate of all positivism.

Astronomy and the academic.

Ethics and the abstract.

The universal attempt to formulate or to regularize--an attempt that can be made only by disregarding or denying.

Or all things disregard or deny that which will eventually invade and destroy them--

Until comes the day when some one thing shall say, and enforce upon Infinitude:

"Thus far shalt thou go: here is absolute demarcation."

The final utterance:

"There is only I."

In the Monthly Notices of the R.A.S., 11-48, there is a letter from the Rev. W. Read:

That, upon the 4th of September, 1851, at 9:30 A.M., he had seen a host of self-luminous bodies, passing the field of his telescope, some slowly and some rapidly. They appeared to occupy a zone several degrees in breadth. The direction of most of them was due east to west, but some moved from north to south. The numbers were tremendous. They were observed for six hours.