Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
young child viewing a walking stick can easily imagine an army
of sticks, branches and trees marching for some ominous planty
purpose.
Many instances of this sort are described and illustrated in a
1979 book called Natural Likeness by John Michell, a British
enthusiast of the occult. He takes seriously the claims of
Richard Shaver, who - as described below - played a role in the
origin of the UFO excitement in America. Shaver cut open
rocks on his Wisconsin farm and discovered, written in a
pictographic language that only he could see, much less understand,
a comprehensive history of the world. Michell also
accepts at face value the claims of the dramatist and surrealist
theoretician Antonin Artaud, who, in part under the influence
of peyote, saw in the patterns on the outsides of rocks erotic
images, a man being tortured, ferocious animals and the like.
'The whole landscape revealed itself,' Michell says, 'as the
creation of a single thought.' But a key question: was that
thought inside or outside Artaud's head? Artaud concluded,
and Michell agrees, that the patterns so apparent in the rocks
were manufactured by an ancient civilization, rather than by
Artaud's partly hallucinogen-induced altered state of consciousness.
When Artaud returned from Mexico to Europe, he
was diagnosed as mad. Michell decries the 'materialist outlook'
that greeted Artaud's patterns sceptically.
Michell shows us a photograph of the Sun taken in X-ray light
which looks vaguely like a face and informs us that 'followers of
Gurdjieff see the face of their Master' in the solar corona.
Innumerable faces in trees, mountains and boulders all over the
world are inferred to be the product of ancient wisdom.
Perhaps some are: it's a good practical joke, as well as a
tempting religious symbol, to pile stones so from afar they look
like a giant face.
The view that most of these forms are patterns natural to
rock-forming processes and the bilateral symmetry of plants and
animals, plus a little natural selection - all processed through the
human-biased filter of our perception - Michell describes as
'materialism' and a 'nineteenth-century delusion'. 'Conditioned
by rationalist beliefs, our view of the world is duller and more
48