Charles Darwin attended at seance in 1874.
He ghosted.
Leaving early, he found the the experience “Hot and tiring”
(this comes from a man who spent five years on the HMS Beagle and went into the jungle to collect bugs by his own choosing!)
While everybody is an amateur at death, that doesn’t stop us from trying to learn enough to defeat it. Or, possibly, just learn enough to come to terms with it.
In 1580 Montaigne wrote a wonderful essay entitled “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die” – the whole thing is worth a read, but I particularly like
Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death.
It was at the local library that I first remember realizing how much life and death are intertwined. Pawing through books in a basement corner at the earliest numbers the Dewey decimal system. But this didn’t feel like a nonfiction section. I’m pretty sure some PBS program taught me that nonfiction equals facts. But were these facts?
The paranormal. The occult. The unconscious. Stuff about the bible, but also stuff about aliens. This section was great.
Some things are natural. Some things a unnatural (non-natural, if you will). And some things are supernatural. Why not fiction, nonfiction, and superfiction?
The Dewey Decimal System classifies the 100 section as Philosophy. The 100 section stretches from Metaphysics (110) to Modern Western Philosophy (190), with my early love, Parapsychology & Occultism (130) right in the middle. Seems that to study death is to learn to philosophize.
People say, “If I only knew then what I know now.” But in that case you wouldn’t have learned anything since. What I’d like to know is what I knew then.
Roy Blount Jr.
With their rapping, and their tapping
Rap-tap-tap to wake our napping
In the restless dream of error
Hear the weird the spirit brings
Spirit rapping, a way of communicating with spirits through knocks, was very silly and very hip in the Victorian Era. On the list of “easy ghost sounds to fake” I’d imagine knocking was right up at the top. Nonetheless, it was quite the popular pastime – enough that the fad got a song with the excellent line “hear the weird the spirit brings” (weird is actually spelled “wierd” in the sheet music – pretty weird indeed). You can look up the song and hear renditions of it. Alternatively, you can assume I already did that and decided it wasn’t worth posting.
Spirit rapping was debunked after a few years. Over a century later, rapping would come back in a totally new (and utterly unrelated) form. But spirit rapping?
I mean, c’mon – Zombies? Afterlife? Skeletons? If that’s not spirit rapping, what is?!
To be fair, they don’t really discuss the afterlife in the song. But that video!
My favorite spirit rapping? Aesop Rock’s Jumping Coffin (with a video that a very different vibe for similar idea)
The song itself works as an invitation for spirit rapping:
Some try to combat any kind of odd force tryna make contact, nah
Let it in, let it in
Let it in, let it in
Some try to stonewall any kind of woo-woo tryna make a phone call, nah
Let it in, let it in
Let it in, let it in
*A post about rapping and the dead – and not a single mummy joke. You are welcome.
**When else am I going to get a chance to share a picture of Meechy Darko and me?
Death Becomes You 