Everyone has had a paranormal experience at least once in
their lives – of ‘knowing’ a loved one was in danger or dying, a presentiment
of personal danger, a prescient dream foretelling an event to come, a bad
feeling about a place later confirmed as the site of a tragedy, even
ghost-sightings. There are billions of fans of astrology, for its knack of pin
pointing personality traits and providing a context for present and future
events. Ditto the I Ching and tarot.
Despite all of
that, when fiction or drama include the paranormal, there’s usually a
shame-faced quality which ascribes such beliefs to the mad character, or pushes
it into the realm of sci-fi. As if it were too embarrassing to validate a
strand of life that exists in the (admittedly largely unspoken) hinterland of
most people’s experience.
Why are we so
reluctant? Or put it the other way round why is the paranormal so resistant to
being dragged out into the light of day?
One culprit is the
present delusion that science has all the answers. Rather than following
Hamlet’s rebuke that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than
are dreamt of in your philosophy,” we assume if there’s no explanation for what
we experience then it must be bunkum. Which throws us into a double-bind of
knowing and not knowing at the same time. Rather than regarding it as science’s
failure to grapple with life in its entirety. 
There is a push
back from serious thinkers but only on the periphery. “The rise of modern science has brought with
it increasing acceptance among intellectual elites of a picture of reality that
conflicts sharply both with everyday human experience and with beliefs widely
shared among the world’s great cultures.”
Edward F Kelly: Beyond Physicalism.
“Theory is all very well, but it doesn’t prevent things from
existing.” Freud.
Another
complication is that certain paranormal experiences emerge from an area of the
mind that is perilously close to the deeper unconscious. Put succinctly by the
Christian occultist (white witch) Dion Fortune. “Those strange byways of the
mind the psychic shares with the psychotic.” Disentangling what is
hallucination and what has a foot in reality is not always simple. Psychics
have fewer of the defensive filters that most develop to keep the extraneous
noise of the universe at bay, so do live closer to the unconscious. It is both
a blessing and a curse, a talent and a burden. Knowing too much and madness
where the boundaries of reality are blurred, do sometimes collide. 
Astrology sits at the
most rational end of the ‘paranormal’, as yet unexplained but not depending on
intuition, hunches or visions. The cycling of the planets in our solar system
as seen from earth, for reasons we don’t understand, dances to the same rhythm
as events below. Direct causation is unlikely to be the reason. Synchronicity
is a useful word but it only means they happen in parallel. Who knows why?
This blog was
supposed to be about why it is so difficult to put astrology into novels
without sounding naff. ‘You’re Scorpio and I’m Aquarius so we’ll never get on’
- sounds sub-sub-chick-lit, even though it has more than a smidgeon of truth to
it. I weaselled round it in my crime thriller BY the LIGHT of a LIE by
concentrating on the astrology of countries and current events, which has an
element of gravitas to it (as well as being my thing). And giving my fearless
investigator heroine Tire the ability to understand people before she
interviewed them, by having the amplified, in-depth personality reader of their
full birth charts. But even I chickened out by making her hobby of astrology
covert to protect her serious reputation. 
As to
battle-hardened Herk’s superstitions about birds, all I can say is that the
ancient Greeks and Romans would have wholeheartedly agreed with him. Tiresias, the blind prophet portrayed by
Euripedes and Sophocles and later writers, had the gift of ornithomancy –
prophecy by the birds. Another of my things but that’s for another day.
Read my other blogs: on A Paradoxical Life of Writing: Do I Contradict
Myself? Novelists Can Be Whistleblowers, Fictional characters who live on,
Memory, Books Better Comforters than Parents, Choosing Names, How to cook up a
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