#

Cap.

PP.

1.

The Nature of Things

17-41

2.

The Origin of Things

42-66

3.

Taking Things Seriously

67-89

4.

The Social Life of Things

90-115

5.

Things Like Us

116-44

6.

From Things to Machines

145-78

7.

The Ghost in the Machine

180-218

p. 17

"Assume ... that humans have an aura. ...

p. 18

Suppose ... that the energy which leaves its mark on an object is a kind of life-force, something which can make things, especially man-made things, mimic life in some way. Then, the more complicated the artefact, the more complex its behaviour is likely to be. ... If the auric field exists, then it will be strongest between people and those things they value most. ... You would be astonished how often lost objects ..., on their own, without any conscious effort they their owners, find their way home, often over long distances or periods of time, sometimes on significant days or anniversaries".

p. 25

"the lava slopes of Mauna Loa" : "an old man in Hawaii warning them not to remove any stones from the mountain for fear of offending the goddess who lived there. ... The National Park Service in Hawaii now gets an average of forty packages a day containing souvenirs that people are no longer very anxious to have around. ...

p. 26

In Hawaii Mauna Loa is the home of Pele, goddess of the fiery volcano. ... Many who collected casual souvenirs there knew, or soon got to hear, tales of the curse."

"a collection of ritual stones from ... Vanuatu in the South Pacific ... used by a local priest-diviner" could render an unauthorized buyer of them "lethargic, constantly sleepy and so weak that he was forced to spend days on end in bed."

p. 30

"a zoologist in Britain in the early 1970s ... was tracking horseshoe bats with an ultrasonic detector and near dawn was surprised to hear a strong and regular signal coming from a group of standing stones. He ... left with the strange feeling that the megaliths themselves were the source of the pulsing sound ... . ... Such possibilities were explored between 1978 and 1982 by the Dragon Project, an informal group of scientists interested in anomalous energies.

p. 31

They took sensitive wide-band ultrasonic detectors and Geiger counters to a number of megalithic sites and found that many of them produced readings that could not be explained ... . Some, such as the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire, proved to be the source of seasonal signals that reached a powerful peak most mornings at dawn". [reference :- D. Robbins : Circles of Silence. Souvenir, London, 1985.]

p. 35

"The discoveries of the Dragon Project make it quite clear that electromagnetic and mechanical forces do behave strangely at some prehistoric sites, and that such anomalies are directly connected to the stones themselves."

gem

bodily protection provided by it

ruby

blood pressure

amethyst

lungs & throat

sapphire

circulation

opal

pineal gland

p. 42

"metaphors are living things. They are slices of truth, evidence of the humans ability to visualise the universe as a coherent organism. Proof of

p. 43

our capacity ... to change the very nature of things. When a metaphor is accepted as a fact, ... it can also take on an existence in the real world. It can become a metaphorm."

"Words can actually structure and reorganise reality ... . Naming is a powerful and magical act. ... I suggest that we may be making the world up as we go along."

p. 53

"Animism, that oldest of religions, suggests that all objects have two aspects. One ... is imperceptible, except perhaps to gifted individuals. And the assumption is that manipulation and control of the world depends primarily on our ability to influence ... the animus, that imperceptible phase of reality. ... Metaphors evoke the metaphorm. ... Wax dolls used in witchcraft demand embellishment

p. 54

with nail-parings or hair ... . ... If you want to transfer the energies of life into an inanimate object, you need a go-between that contains matter which is or was alive, such as wood, leather, fur, feathers or shells; that is shaped like a living being; ... that has been given the name of something or someone alive."

p. 55

"In 1941 ... Stefan Ossowiecki unhesitatingly launched into a detailed description ... from the entire range of Palaeolithic prehistory. ... And in each instance he produced detailed information about daily life in those enigmatic times." [reference :- J. Goodman : Psychic Archaeology. Berkeley-Putnam, NY, 1977.

p. 56

As of the 1850s, University of Boston’s William "Denton believed that psychometry was a talent which everyone had or could develop."

p. 57

"The first modern archaeologist to make professional use of such psychometric talents is Professor Norman Emerson, President of the Canadian Archaeological Association. ... Emerson calls his new approach ‘Intuitive Archaeology’ ... . ... The archaeologist simply follows his tame human bloodhound, ... and then excavates the structures later at his leisure." [reference :- J. N. Emerson : "Intuitive archaeology : a psychic approach". NEW HORIZONS 1 (1974):14.]

"Even Thor couldn’t thunder, he was hammerless, until he put on the garments of the goddess Freya and pretended to be a bride. ... the saviour Heracles was first pressed into service to the queen of Lydia in women’s clothes. And Achilles hid among the women before going on to become a proper hero. Siberian shamans often did the same."

p. 72

"Triangular shark’s teeth and spiral ammonites have been found out of context on dozens of palaeolithic floors, chosen it would seem for ... their symbolic value. And they kept on being chosen and collected in pre-dynastic Egypt, Bronze Age Malta, medieval Italy and Renaissance France." [reference :- K. P. Oakley : "Decorative and Symbolic Uses of Vertebrate Fossils". OCCASIONAL PAPERS OF THE PITT-RIVERS MUSEUM, No. 12 (1975).]

p. 73

"In Ireland it was a common practice to bury the dead with a pure white quartz pebble in their mouths". {The reason for the choice of quartz is that it can function as a receiver of radio-signals, so that the dead can receive via radio guiding messages from the divine world as concerning the pathway which it is to take on its journey toward metempsychosis (an antient Keltic belief).}

p. 76

"At Terra Amata, near ... Nice, ... a campsite over 400 thousand years old ... there are sixty pieces of iron oxide shaped into rough pencils ... . They are early crayons used by hunters, it seems, to paint each other’s skin. ... But red ochre, sometimes known as bloodstone, haematite or ruddle, has everywhere exercised extraordinary powers ... firmly associated, for instance, with disposal of the dead. It was used as a last bed or funerary decoration throughout the Stone Age. It was packed around bodies in Bronze Age burials in Bavaria. It was painted on skulls at the earliest known town in Anatolia. It adorns the funeral chambers of the Shang dynasty, and the cists and sarcophagi of Etruscan and Roman tombs."

p. 77

"ignis fatuus, fireballs, ghost lights, corpse candles, ball lightning or assorted will-o’-the-wisps ... are apparently harmless to human beings, ... and move in ways that are often described as ‘playful’. ... A group of scientists who investigated them ... in 1983 ... associated the nocturnal lights with outbreaks of ‘UFO sightings’ ...; and they discovered that ... these areas stand astride prominent geological faults. ...

p. 78

There are ... ‘earth lights’ ... for most UFO sightings ... .

p. 78

"Emabomvini, ‘the place of the red’, in Swaziland" : "at every point where the modern miners broke into the mountain of iron they found that others had been there before them. ... Radio-carbon assays show that these excavations at Emabomvini took place at least 45 thousand years ago." [reference :- A. Boshier : "The earliest miners". SOUTH AFRICAN J OF AFRICANA 1 (1978):9.]

p. 79

"where the haematite had faulted ..., the red iron oxide crystallised out in the form of glistening black metallic flakes ... . This is what those hardy men with their stone tooks were looking for, specularite or ‘iron glance’, which the local Swazi still know as ludumane, ‘the thunder four times’, and recognise as something of great power, which only ... the most highly-qualified priest-diviners may smear on their bodies or rub into their hair." [reference :- L. Watson : Lightning Bird. Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1982.]

p. 78

"Many tell of humming sounds and phosphorescent shapes underground. In Japan the subterranean glows are seen often enough to have earned the name of chiki. {These are traditionally known to European miners as ‘kobolds’ and the like.} And two English geologists writing in the eighteenth century reported that some of the old tin and copper mines were first located by prospectors who tracked down the source of ‘fiery coruscations’ or ‘igneous appearances’ which broke out of the earth through cracks or faults and shot like blazing stars up to the sky." [reference :- G. Bird : "Mining Lights". LEY HUNTER 102 (1986):42.]

p. 81

"No vein of ore was easily discovered. It had to be revealed by spirit intermediaries or ... the elusive ‘earth lights’. {The ‘earth lights’ may be manipulated by spirit intermediaries.} The opening of a new mine ... had to be attended by ritual and sacrifice, lest the spirits of the earth be offended ... . Many ores, it is said, ...

p. 82

show sympathy and respect for the proper ceremony. In Malaysia, ... the rites that attend the opening of a new mine must ... still be held in accordance with ... those appropriate to the ‘masters of the place’ ". [reference :- W. W. Skeat : Malay Magic. London, 1920.]

"I suspect, for instance, that dollar bills accumulate and carry energy as efficiently as love letters. ... It is even possible that the epithet ‘filthy lucre’ may derive ... from ... the fact that it comes from so many conflicting sources."

p. 100

"Coins have been found in the mouth and on the eyes of the dead in Greek graves dating as far back as 470 BC, placed there to pay the fee required by that hard old ferryman Charon for carrying shades across Acheron and into the underworld." [reference :- L. V. Grinsell : "The ferryman and his fee". FOLKLORE 68 (1957):257.]

"the English custom" : "A pilgrim en route to a chosen shrine would ‘kill’ a coin, usually by doubling it over in the middle, making it unacceptable as currency, dedicating this sacrifice to a spirit ... and making an offering of it at the sacred place. Silver pennies bent in this way have been found ..., and hundreds have been dredged up from ... holy wells. There are records of coins being bent above a sick person or animal, or in times of danger such as imminent shipwreck. Many were mutilated in attempts to stop the spread of the Great Fire of London in 1666. During the reign of Edward I coins were bent once a year to ensure the health of the king’s hawks and chargers." [reference :- R. C. Finucane : Miracles and Pilgrims. London, 1977.]

p. 101

"The practice of giving a lady a bent coin as a pledge of love appears frequently in Elizabethan literature, which is littered with ‘bowed groats’ and accompanying innuendoes." [reference :- M. Baker : Folklore and Customs of Rural England. London, 1974.]

p. 106

"The keris or kris ... is an elongated knife with a wavy blade ... . Tradition insists that the first kris was made from celestial iron. Some certainly were forged this way from fragments of a meteorite that fell near the temples of Prambanan in Java in the eighteenth century."

p. 107

"The key to the power of all of them resides in the blade, which is known as mata keris, the ‘eye of the kris’. This reflects the soul of its maker or owner and accounts for reports throughout the Malay archipelago and Indonesia, of kris which can talk, fly, swim, turn into snakes or even father human children."

p. 109

Many bells are not only baptised, but named,"

bell’s name

its location

Big Ben

Westminster in London

Great Tom

St Paul’s Cathedral

Great George

Liverpool

p. 109-10

‘Queen of Bells’ (Tsarine Kolokol)

Kremlin in Moscow

p. 110

‘Voice of Buddha’

Chion-in at Kyoto

"Eight of the twelve largest in the world are Russian, products of ... the eighteenth century."

"what Arthur Koestler called intervention by the ‘Library Angel’ who causes volumes to leap from the shelf {induce a person browsing to pick them out of the shelf} and open at the precise page that contains the reference you require, even if you are not yet consciously aware of such a need."

_mancy

with __

catopto-

mirrors

cyclico-

cups

hydro-

water

onycho-

fingernails

p. 157

"Owners with personal machines that stop and go erratically are often the victims of the neurological condition known as Parkinson’s disease or shaking palsy. ... . ... Critchley and others have found that drugs such as levodopa, which restore nervous balance in the patient, have the side-effect of regulating their wristwatches." [reference :- L. Watson : Beyond Supernature. Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1986.]

p. 159

"The motif of the clock that stops ... when someone dies, is a very common one in folklore. The most illustrious is one that became known as ‘The Clock of Death’. It was made in 1540 for Henry VIII and is said to have stopped at the moment of his death in 1547. The boisterous Henry VIII was succeeded by his son Edward VI who died six years later at the age of sixteen, whereupon the clock stopped again. It paid the same homage in 1619 to Anne of Denmark, queen consort to James I, grinding to a halt in mid-strike precisely as she died." [reference :- E. O’Donnell : "psychic clocks". PREDICTION 1963.]

p. 160

"Robert Pavlita ... a Czech ... turned ... to ... the alchemical texts housed in the libraries of Prague, ... to recreate some of the experiments described. ... Since then Pavlita has designed and built ... ‘psychotronic generators’. ... The Hungarian and Czech Academies of Science are satisfied that ... Pavlita and his daughter seem to be able, by simply concentrating on such devices from a distance, to switch them on and off at will." [reference :- D. Hammond : The Search for Psychic Power. Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1975.]

"There is mention, in ancient Chaldaic philosophy, of an order of spiritual intelligences that were known as jynges and said to hold ‘unspeakable counsels’. ... In Aeschylus and Pindar there are descriptions of an iunx or ‘witch’s wheel’ to which was bound a live bird, in the belief that when the wheel was set in motion, people were drawn along with it and charmed into obedience. The hapless bird was the wryneck ... Jynx torquilla ... . Apart from this, there is no mention of a jinx ... until ... 1911."

See "Onomastic Origin of Jinx," Popik & Cohen, _Comments on Etymology_, Oct 2001, Vol. 31, No. 1 for a complete summary." ("JO")

" "jinx" is actually an American misspelling of the much older (and even weirder) European word "jynx," which dates back to a suitably ancient 1649." ("WB")

And according to Antoninus Liberalis, (Metamorphoses 9 – "M"), the bird was one of Pieros (king of Emathia)’s 9 daughters who were all transformed into birds : "the grebe, the wryneck, the ortolan, the jay, the greenfinch, the goldfinch, the duck, the woodpecker, and the dracontis pigeon."

"Ralph Nader made a good start with his polemic Unsafe at Any Speed". [reference :- Ralph Nader : Unsafe at Any Speed. Grossman, NY, 1961.]

p.

repairing

194

... a computer healer in Britain. When a fault occurs in a machine, his colleagues go and fetch him. He switches the machine back on and it is functioning normally. It has been known that the very mention of his name corrects the fault"." [reference :- M. Shallis : The Electric Shock Book. Souvenir, London, 1988.]

195

"professor of parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh, describes the experience of a colleague plagued with a malfunctioning cryogenic magnetometer. When the repairman came into the room, it started up again. As soon as he walked out, it shut down once more. They brought him in and out, in and out ... . And each time he got close to the instrument, it functioned perfectly". [reference :- R. L. Morris : "Applied psi in the context of human-equipment interaction systems". PROCEEDINGS OF SYMPOSIUM ON APPLICATIONS OF ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA. Leesburg (VA), 1983.]

p.

computer’s screen

206

[Stockport nigh Manchester in England] "it was already unplugged. ... . ... the computer ... flickered into life as letters appeared on its screen. The display consisted of random words which made no sense ... . ... A selection of the recordings made during this period were so bizarre, they were shown publicly at a computer exhibition in London in 1988. The tapes clearly show the ... machine with its plug loose, draped over the keyboard. Then ... the ‘power on’ light glows red and the computer begins its start-up procedure. Jumbled words and phrases flash across the screen ... . And thirty seconds later, ... it switches itself off again. There are several sequences like this. ... ‘... The words and phrases that appear are chilling – as if someone was trying to get a message out.’ " [reference :- NEWS OF THE WORLD, 5 June 1988.]

207

[Meadow Cottage nigh Chester in England] "over 300 ‘messages’ appeared on the screen, some as long as 400 words, many in response to direct questions left on file on floppy disk memory – and most of these were in sixteenth-century English. ... . ... messages were received even when a computer was provided, and sealed into a locked room, by outside investigators. And most of the material was signed by ‘Tomas Harden’ who claimed to have lived on the same site four centuries before." [reference :- P. Trinder : "Notes on the messages". Postscript to :- K. Webster : The Vertical Plane. Grafton, London, 1989.]

p.

psychokinesis

209

"consciousness and intent play an unexpectedly large role in the physical world. ...

210

In other words, consciousness resonates with the material world."