wanted to shut the laptop, but now that she’d seen the link, there was no turning back. Its ominous title would fuel her nightmares unless she investigated. She clicked on it. The article was written in 1924, by a graduate student who’d trained under Carl Jung. She skimmed the introduction, which espoused the merits of alchemy, and started on page two:
—ravings of madmen.
Edgar Schermerhorn’s religion, Chaotic Naturalism, waned more than a decade ago, and only a scant few of his buildings remain. Most people don’t know that he was originally an architect, and did not found his cult until after reading Darwin’s On The Origin of Species.
His theory was founded on the notion that the human mind had evolved into a pattern recognition machine: man perceives cause and effect, and from this, extrapolates reason. For example, plants grow from seeds. This fact is now obvious, but back in 1000 B.C., the idea that wheat could be harvested triggered the Neolithic Revolution and transformed civilization from nomadic to agrarian. Because of pattern recognition, society emerged. Humans transcended their biology and ceased to be animals.
But Schermerhorn believed that the human mind was overactive. It miscategorized, and forced patterns where they didn’t exist. For example, natural observations assume that time is linear—Humpty Dumpty can’t be uncracked, and returned to the wall—but such narrow perceptions don’t account for Yeats’ widening gyre, alchemy, particle-wave duality, or time travel.
In the stead of realism, Chaotic Naturalists’ followers embraced chaos, which they reflected in their breeding practices (like good eugenicists, they abandoned or drowned imperfect newborns); the families they raised (most were bigamists, and it was not illegal for siblings to marry one another); and the buildings they designed (Schermerhorn had many disciples). In eastern Europe, they were hailed as visionaries, and even here in America, they achieved a brief celebrity. It wasn’t until the 1880s that their membership dwindled as their buildings crumbled one by one, and popular religious leaders of the Second Great Awakening proclaimed that they deserved it, for having made an enemy of God.
There were twenty-six true Chaotic Naturalist edifices all told.
Schermerhorn honed his craft, then returned to America with what he thought was a perfect design. Like the modern Gaudis in Barcelona, they were modeled after nature, not Euclidian geometry. But unlike Gaudi, they borrowed from the snails’ spiral, the winged bivalve, the honeysuckle vine, and then broke apart these natural patterns into a disjointed mishmash, as if to prove that not even God held providence over man.
The buildings’ tenants were self-selected crews who tended toward emotional instability. With so many neurotic personalities housed under one roof, they fomented each other’s afflictions, unleashing the anima and animus. It is Jung’s contention that it was this release of unconscious desires, and not the architecture, that is responsible for the wealth of reported Chaotic Naturalist hauntings.
Jung has stated that the buildings functioned as repositories for their tenants’ repressed desires, and over time, became closed universes unto themselves. Eventually, the tenants’ suppressions became animate, not solely to the dreamer who’d dreamed them but to everyone in the building: the singular psychosis reached the critical mass of collective mania.
Mirroring the structures of the buildings that housed them, the tentants’ thoughts fragmented, and they went mad. Their waking hours degenerated into Byronesque nightmares. Some took refuge in their opium pipes. Others ceased to go to work or care for their children, claiming that all efforts were futile, because the end of the world was at hand. In many cases, their journal entries started out in pen, and finished in childish, nonsense scrawl.
I would never contest the brilliant Mr. Jung’s conclusions, but in studying the history of Chaotic Naturalism, I’ve found cause to attach some qualifications to his theories.
As we learned from the Freiberg philosophers, it is anathema to his biology for man to embrace chaos. Even if spirits exist (watching us, haunting us, inhabiting alternate universes that subvert time), granting them entrance through the spaces in our minds, or the structure of our homes, and any other doors we might construct, can only result in man’s utter destruction.
Who is to say that the door, once opened, could ever be closed? And in these alternate worlds, what capacity might man inhabit? Witness? King? Or victim, host, slave. Both author (Schermerhorn) and interpreter (Jung) neglected one thing: because of pattern recognition, mankind has learned that kindness and fellowship are in his best interest. Society evolves slowly, through group effort and the education of its children. A world without pattern recognition