Supernature - A Natural History Of The Supernatural

Supernature – A Natural History of the Supernatural (1974) by Lyall Watson
Coronet — ISBN 0340188332
Condition: Good

There was a glorious period in the 1970s when perfectly respectable books could discuss telepathy, psychic plants, mysterious animals, inexplicable human abilities and the possibility that reality itself was behaving suspiciously — all while maintaining the calm expression of a university lecturer who had merely noticed something slightly unusual behind the curtains.

Lyall Watson’s Supernature is one of the great products of that age: an ambitious attempt to explore the strange territory where established science runs out, folklore wanders in and somebody at the back quietly asks whether plants can read minds.

Watson was a biologist, anthropologist and wonderfully enthusiastic collector of anomalies. Rather than simply assembling traditional ghost stories, he set out to examine reports of phenomena which appeared to sit somewhere beyond conventional scientific explanation. Telepathy, precognition, unusual animal behaviour, biological rhythms, strange coincidences, altered states of consciousness and various other disturbances in the supposedly orderly administration of the universe all find their way into the proceedings.

His central idea is essentially that nature may be considerably stranger than our current description of it.

This is an attractive proposition because nature is already fairly peculiar. Electric eels manufacture electricity. Bats navigate by shouting at walls. Birds cross continents without consulting Google Maps. Caterpillars dissolve themselves and emerge as butterflies, which would be regarded as an absurd plot device if somebody put it in a science-fiction novel. Against this background, Watson asks whether some phenomena dismissed as supernatural might instead belong to aspects of nature that science has simply not yet understood.

And off we go.

Supernature roams cheerfully across biology, psychology, physics, folklore and parapsychology, rarely allowing disciplinary boundaries to interfere with a good mystery. Watson examines reports and experiments involving human perception, animal senses and apparently unexplained connections between living things. The approach is speculative, enthusiastic and very much characteristic of an era when the border between serious scientific curiosity and paranormal investigation was sometimes marked by little more than a particularly adventurous publishing contract.

Modern readers should therefore bring a healthy supply of scepticism.

Some of Watson’s claims have aged better than others. Certain ideas presented as intriguing possibilities in the 1970s remain intriguing possibilities; others have subsequently encountered the inconvenient obstacle of scientific evidence. Watson could occasionally move from “something interesting has been reported” to “perhaps the universe works like this” with the exhilarating speed of a man whose brakes had recently been removed.

But that is also much of the book’s charm.

Watson isn’t merely trying to convince you that paranormal phenomena exist. He is attempting something broader and more interesting: to make the familiar world seem unfamiliar again. His nature is alive with connections, patterns and possibilities. Even when you disagree with his conclusions, the questions themselves can be fascinating. How much do animals perceive that humans cannot? How much of human behaviour is governed by biological mechanisms beneath conscious awareness? How confidently can we distinguish impossible phenomena from phenomena for which we simply don’t yet possess an explanation?

These remain excellent questions, even if some of the proposed answers have spent the intervening half-century looking increasingly nervous.

The book also belongs to that wonderful tradition of popular science writing in which the author assumes the reader is perfectly happy to move from laboratory experiments to tribal beliefs, then onwards to psychic phenomena, obscure animals and the mysteries of consciousness without demanding that everybody stop for a departmental meeting first.

Published in paperback by Coronet in 1974, this is very much an artefact of its intellectual moment: adventurous, provocative, sometimes convincing, sometimes distinctly questionable and almost never dull. It captures the optimism of an era in which it seemed entirely plausible that conventional science might shortly discover something astonishing hiding just beyond the edge of accepted knowledge.

This copy is offered in Good condition. It has therefore survived roughly half a century of perfectly ordinary physical processes, with no need to invoke telekinesis, morphic fields or unexplained cosmic energies. Some signs of previous existence may be present, but nothing sufficiently mysterious to justify contacting the Society for Psychical Research.

Ideal for collectors of paranormal literature, Forteana, vintage popular science and 1970s investigations into the unexplained — or simply for readers who enjoy books written by intelligent people enthusiastically poking at the edges of conventional knowledge to see whether anything pokes back.

Crappy Old Books verdict: Plants may have feelings, animals may know things we don’t, humans may possess mysterious abilities and nature may be hiding an entire additional rulebook. Alternatively, the 1970s may simply have been an exceptionally exciting time to be a paperback publisher. Either way, tremendous fun.

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