"Weird" Far West

On the occasion of presentation of the book tomorrow in Turin, we publish the preface edited by us exclusively for our readers.

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di Marco Maculotti
preface to the book by Gian Mario Mollar “The mysteries of the Far West. Unusual, macabre and curious stories from the American frontier ", Il Punto d'Incontro Editions, 2019
cover: George Catlin, "Interior View of the Medicine Lodge / Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony"

 

I had the pleasure of getting in touch with Gian Mario Mollar by virtue of my position as founder and curator of the site AXIS world, online magazine of the history of religions, anthropology of the sacred, folklore, esotericism, literature of the "Fantastic". His writings struck me immediately, for the uncommon ability that must be acknowledged to the Author of knowing how to dissect topics in short narratives "border”Such as those that the reader will have the opportunity to read in this publication.

If I define them in this way, it depends on the fact that the wide range of beliefs, stories and curiosities that Mollar collates in this sort of "Bigino del Weird in Far West " it oscillates between two opposite poles, what we could define as “mythical” and the purely historical or scientific-rationalist one. And yet - it should be noted - the arguments examined in this collection of writings rarely appear capable of being read from only one of the two perspectives; thefolklore interpretation and the historicity of the facts narrated thus constituting two parallel tracks for the purposes of the investigation into the "Mysterious" - tracks parallel but nevertheless, more often than one might believe, they end up meeting in a curious and unexpected way.

But not only the issues dealt with by Mollar can well be defined as "frontier", since their space-time sphere is, as we have said, that of particular "Shadow areas", occult spaces existing between the category of History and that of Myth; "land K"Of the imaginary that still at the dawn of the twentieth century, as the author will well demonstrate, were a fundamental part of the "mental life" of "Indians and cowboys". "Frontier" are also the luoghi that Mollar's pen set out to investigate: the Far West wild, in which European settlers flocked from the sixteenth century onwards, in search of fortune and adventure, often finding themselves immersed in a peculiar reality, very different from the one they were accustomed to in the "Old Continent", still steeped in Amerindian folklore (see the chapters on Wendigo, Yenaldooshi, Si-Te-Cah) and yet not reluctant to absorb the corpus di popular beliefs of European import (the chapter on Ghost Riders and the "Wild Hunt" is indicative in this regard).

More: the approach adopted by Mollar itself can be defined as "frontier" since, wisely avoiding to lean towards a interpretation rather than for another - for example, favoring a vision of a historical or scientific type in spite of the "mythical" aspect of the topics covered, or vice versa -, he limits himself to reconstructing the facts witnessed by ancient sources and the different perspectives from which they can be analyzed, remaining as it were equidistant from each of them: between the two parallel tracks - that typical of the traditional societies ofantiquity (not always, as will be seen, so distant in chronological terms from our Third Millennium) and that, at the antipodes, of the modern West - shifting carefully and never inappropriately now to one, now to the other.

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The themes of local mythology and mystery are predominant in the first part of the work, "The dark side of folklore": we pass from the description and the mythical-historical framing of legendary figures of the Native American tradition, such as the Wendigo and the "skinwalker"Yenaldooshi, to the treatment of entities common to mythologies around the world or almost, such as vampires or giants, which the Paiute tradition of Nevada calls "Si-Te-Cah" and whose reddish hair (connected to the alleged antediluvian lineages of giants in different corpus foklorici of the globe, from Peru [1] to New Zealand) are considered a "medicine" [2] very powerful within the Southwestern shamanic sapiential body.

Particularly interesting, in the chapter dedicated to Si-Te-Cah, is the discourse on Mounds, pre-Columbian mounds dating back thousands of years before our time, whose builders are still unknown: in fact, scholars have never been able to prove that their construction was the work of the tribes of Amerindians known by ethnologists. For their part, the native traditions themselves relate these enigmatic constructions with mysterious "proto-human" races, much older and clearly distinct from those settled in the territory more recently: lineages, precisely, of giants and titans, which the traditions of the whole world connect to the era preceding our own and to the famous Universal Flood. These themes reflect the theosophical ones [3] particularly in vogue between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which, in part, are also found in the most famous literature of the Fantastic of the twentieth century [4], as for example in HP Lovecraft's hallucinatory visions [5].

The chapter dedicated to Texan legend of the Ghost Riders allows Mollar to analyze similar mythologems in other parts of the world, especially the European one of the "Wild Hunt" and of theexercitum mortuorum [6], which sees as its conductor "underworld" divinity (or, better, of the Other World - which is that of the gods deaths but also of spirits) of the type of Odin / Wotan, King Arthur and Hellequin / Erlik Khan; all numinous figures that trace the archetypal function of the Ancient Sovereign ousted from his throne, who is believed to reign again in a future time ("Rex quondam, Rexque Futurus»), Whose coming will mark the return of the Golden Age.

The study that closes this first part is dedicated to the exploratory mission west of the Mississippi (1804-1806) of Meriwether Louis and William Clark. The travel diary of the two daring adventurers is full of references to native traditions whose origins are lost in the mists of time (such as that of the ghost of the Mound of Black Bird Hill or that on the Little People) as well as of peculiar phenomena such as that of "Grumble", a sort of "thunder rumbles from a clear sky" coming from the subsoil. Even oddities of this kind - in one space time as liminal as that of the Far West in which Mollar places the reader - they lend themselves to being interpreted according to the most varied perspectives, the scientific-rationalist one as well as the most borderline, belonging to the folklore of the tribal populations residing in the area beaten by the two explorers.

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The second section of the book, "Fires and dragons in the sky", focuses on equally mysterious themes, although in some ways more - so to speak - "science fiction". Here, a chapter is dedicated to the sightings of unidentified flying objects in the skies of the Far West, the fall of ambiguous celestial bodies and alleged encounters with bizarre alien creatures that a Jacques Vallée [7] would not hesitate to make it come from the dark intra-dimension of Magonia nor a John Keel [8] it would be difficult to situate in the so-called super spectrum [9]. These are testimonies dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century: in a period, therefore, in which the "modern myth" of flying saucers and encounters with extra-terrestrial beings had not yet "blossomed" [10].

There is also mention of the legends about Mount Shasta, a Californian volcano active until the nineteenth century that since ancient times was pointed out by the indigenous peoples as the home of mysterious beings, including the Shupcher, giants (similar to the aforementioned Si-Te-Cah) who killed Indians or kidnapped them and then led them into their underground mazes, and a race of small and invisible beings of the type of Fairies, whose laughter, similar to that of a child, can often be heard. The native myth of Mount Shasta was resurrected in 1886 by Frederick S. Oliver who, signing himself as "Phylos the Tibetan", plausibly influenced by Blavatskian theosophical conceptions, framed the legend of the Californian volcano in an occult novel entitled A Dweller on Two Planets, in which the presence of incalculable ages of a supposedly secret colony of "Lemurians" was affirmed in its bowels [11].

The other chapter of this second part of the book is instead a cryptozoological parenthesis: the sighting (and sometimes even the reported killing) in the Far West of antediluvian winged saurians of the type of pterodactyls, which Mollar connects to the Amerindian myths about the so-called "Birds of Thunder", legendary beings who, in accordance with the indigenous tradition, would be auxiliary spirits of the Great Spirit, connected to thunderstorms, lightning bolts and initiations of the "Medicine Societies".

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The third part of the work, entitled "Unusual encounters in the old west", is centered on some characteristic characters of the XNUMXth century frontier world, who have now become part of the most "low" and "popular" folklore of the heterogeneous and colorful communities of settlers: vagabonds, grave robbers, sellers of universal panacea claims such as snake oil. In my opinion the most meaningful chapter of this section is the one dedicated to the mysterious house built by the lady Sarah Winchester, which would not disfigure in a Borges tale:

"There are rooms contained within other rooms ... huge doors that lead into small rooms and small doors that lead into huge rooms ... stairs that end directly against the ceiling, others that have very low steps, still others whose ramps rise so absolutely bizarre… The collective impression is that of being catapulted into an Escher painting. "

Mollar questions the meaning to be attributed to such an abstruse structure, examining various hypotheses, including the "esoteric track" and the "spiritualist" one. A threefold section dedicated to the best known and most feared follows as a concluding chapter "Serial killer of the border", also somehow become part of the foklore of the communities founded by European settlers: Queho, Boone Helm the "cannibal of Kentucky" and the bloodthirsty Harpe brothers.

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In this agile preface we wanted to anticipate some of the themes of the work and the different perspectives from which the various interpretations of Mollar converge. In this way we hope that, from the beginning, the reader can immerse himself in the right spirit - that of the"Explorer of the unknown" - in this text which, in the words of the author, was «conceived as a kind of Wunderkammer, a “chamber of wonders” in a western version ». Why never like today, in an era completely desacralized and totally deprived of what we can define "Pleasure of the unknown", we consider it essential to recover the Marvelous and the Mysterious as interpretative categories and even experiential, in their broadest and most "playful" meaning, without claims of dogmatism or doctrinal aridity.

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Note:

[1] See M. Maculotti, Antediluvian, giant, "gentle" humanity, on AXIS mundi, 2017.

[2] Pan-Amerindian concept with which the native populations of North America name everything that, outside the sphere of human rationality, is perceived as "sacred", we could say (quoting Rudolf Otto) as "Totally Other". The Quechua term huaca it is the South American equivalent, as well as orenda among the indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Sub-Arctic.

[3] See HP Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (1888)

[4] See M. Maculotti, Underworld civilization in science fiction fictionin Cosmic Dimension # 2, Tabula Fati Editions, Spring 2018.

[5] See, in particular, HP Lovecraft, TheMound (1930) and The Curse of Yig (1928)

[6] See K. Meisen, The legend of the furious hunter and the wild hunt, Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria, 2001.

[7] See J. Vallée, Passport to Magonia. From folklore to flying saucers (1969).

[8] See J. Keel, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970)

[9] See M. Maculotti, Who is hiding behind the mask? Visits from Elsewhere and the paraphysical hypothesis, on AXIS mundi, 2018.

[10] The Zero Hour of the "modern myth" of flying saucers and alien visitors is, in fact, unanimously recognized in the Roswell episode, which took place in 1947; but cases of mysterious sightings of the same type on US territory seem to have occurred, as Mollar reports here, from much earlier.

[11] This belief remained alive throughout the twentieth century and still has some supporters, sometimes mixing with the testimonies on flying saucers and on their supposed underground bases as well as framed in the most recent spiritualistic currents of the type New Age. See M. Maculotti, "Underground" civilizations in myth, occultism and "alternative reality", on AXIS mundi, 2018.

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Anyone interested can buy the book by Gian Mario Mollar on website of the publishing house.