Author: Francesco Cerofolini
The "memetic contagion" in the metropolitan folklore of Danilo Arona
A multifaceted author whose interests range from film criticism to fiction to non-fiction dedicated to alternative realities, Danilo Arona has become the singer of a particular and very personal declination of horror and weird that has its roots in the Italian context. In his essay "Media Possession", Arona wonders if it is possible that certain media, especially audiovisual ones, are capable of provoking in predisposed subjects a temporary cancellation of conscience whose place is taken by "something else", in a nutshell what in other places, times and cultures would have been called possession.
In the Realms of the Unreal with Henry Darger and the Vivian Girls
Today Henry Darger, who died a few months after the discovery of his gargantuan work "In the Realms of the Unreal", is considered one of the greatest exponents of the so-called "art brut", that artistic production made by people often on the margins of society, as inmates and psychiatric patients. Illustrated by more than 300 watercolors, his creation was set in an alternate world where the atheist and slave nation of Glandelia and the Christian and free nation of Angelinia, led to freedom by the Vivian Girls, fought.
From the Kelpie to the "Horned Serpent": lake monsters in Scottish and Amerindian folklore
In the contemporary world the so-called "lake monsters", of which Loch Ness in Scotland is certainly the most famous, are the subject of study of the pseudo-scientific discipline called cryptozoology; but in the past it was the sphere of myth and folklore that was interested in these creatures, both in ancient Europe where legends about kelpies and similar entities are widespread, and in native America, which Michel Meurger rightly defines "the 'Eldorado of the aquatic monsters Β».
Charles Fort and the restlessness of the extraordinary
Critic of science that he defined as "exclusionist", that is, inclined to accept only data that confirmed accepted theories and reject data that cast doubt on them, Charles Fort proceeded, in the manner of the ancient collators of "wonders", to collect and analyze all the so-called anomalies, those "damned facts" that had no place in scientific models, influencing to a certain extent the whole sphere of the "alternative reality" of the twentieth century, such as ufology, space archeology and cryptozoology.
The "Son of the Moon": the two faces of Jack Parsons
On the one hand, with his research on the propulsion systems of space rockets, he made a fundamental contribution to the space race; on the other hand, thanks to his esoteric knowledge and the meeting with Aleister Crowley, he devoted himself to occult practices such as the infamous "Operation Babalon": we present Jack Parsons, the "mad scientist" who used to sing the "Hymn to Pan "Just before his missile tests.
