Albert Elmer Page belongs to that class of philosophers for whom words are cheap, and meaning elusive. He repeats himself, again and again, piling word upon word, to make his point.
Although it usually is, this prolixity and redundancy isn’t necessarily a fault. Sometimes ideas are obscure, and repetition helps make them clear. Sometimes, especially to invent novel ways of thinking, words have to be used in unusual ways. But Page’s discursive style seems to be the result not of a hope to clarify, but because he’s not sure how to say what he wants to say. And so words get used, and used again, their meaning shifting until the ideas they attempt to convey are lost—the ink not from a pen, but a squid, with meaning blurred. To his credit, Page acknowledged the difficulty of understanding his philosophy in a letter to The Fortean Society, published in October 1941:
“I have made no effort to make my ideas known other than sending them to the above Academy of Sciences because the nature of this work is so incompatible with the present scientific ideas of the world that it would be useless.
“In fact, my ideas practically reverse and overturn every notion of our present science, and I hardly have any idea of trying to reveal them unless some very exceptional change came over the world.
“It is even hard to give expression, in common terms, to my philosophy and I also experience trepidations at the thought of expressing that which has had no response previously drilled into the mental attitude of the world.
“In fact, its repulsion would be expected because it denies every established idea, even the individualistic interpretation of the Universe, or even the personification of knowledge, supported by a monistic philosophy rather than a dualistic conception of antithetical tendencies to the extent of an endless diversity.” [Albert E. Page, “Letter,” The Fortean Society Magazine, 5 (October 1941): 4-6.]
The Academy of Sciences that he mentions in the first paragraph? It was the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden. It sent him a letter acknowledging receipt of his book, “Philosophy of Parallelism, or the negative answer to the question: Is the Principle of Cause and Effect or Antecedent and Consequent, True in Reality.” The Academy had even catalogued the book—Thayer wouldn’t have to get that done—but it had not given Page what he most wanted: The Nobel Prize.
Albert Page was born 29 April 1885 in California to Charles A Page and Sarah J. (Wheeler) Page. He was the second of three children. The Pages had been married four years before. Charles had come west from Maine, Sarah south from Washington, to Santa Rosa, in Sonoma county. [US Census.]
The family was in the same place in 1900, according to the census. (The 1890 census was destroyed by fire, so there is no way to check on the family then.) In 1910, at the age of 25, he was living in San Francisco with his wife, Minnie, and two kids, Valene (3) and Zola (2). He worked as a conductor. Later censuses would put his first marriage in 1904. Page may have been in San Francisco a year earlier, working as a clerk—at least there’s an Albert E. Page in the 1909 San Francisco city directory. Indeed, he may have moved about California a lot during his late twenties—the San Diego city directory has an Albert E. Page there in 1912, a janitor, and the Sacramento city directory has a clerk named Albert E. Page there in 1914. Whether those are the same people or not, it is true that Page underwent some major life changes around this time. According to his World War I draft registration card he was living in his hometown of Santa Rose, working as a rural mail carrier, and was married to a new woman, Myrtle E. Page. 9I could find no subsequent information int he census on Minnie, Valene, or Zola.) The 1920 census further elaborates on his new family situation: by then he had a daughter, Ruth, aged two. The family rented a home. Likely, Myrtle and Albert had married in 1915, when she was 17 and he was 30. [US Census.]
By 1930, thee family’s fortunes had increased. There were two new children, another daughter, Evelyn (8) and a son, Albert E. Jr. (5). Albert Sr. owned his home, then valued at about $3,500. The family also owned a radio. Albert had come far on a high school education. Ten years later, and the family had weathered the Great Depression well. The house had lost value—it was then worth $3,200—but Page had worked 46 weeks in 1939, averaging about 54 hours per week. He also had income from another source—likely his philosophical books, which he did distribute to more people than the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. [US Census.]
Albert E. Page died 15 April 1964, two weeks shy of his 79th birthday, and almost five years after Thayer and the Fortean Society. [California Death Index.]
According to his letter, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had acknowledged receipt of his publication in October or November of 1930. Clearly, he had been stewing on the ideas for a long time. He would write, “Much of the writer’s life has been, if not a study, at least an experience with theological and scientific dogmatism. No one more than I has practiced religion more devoutly, to the point of fanaticism, as well as scientific principles to the point of idolatry and glorification, in which delusions of grandeur have obsessed the simpleton. And yet I fell confident that few, if any, are more certain in pessimism and skepticism, privately, than I.” (Albert E. Page, Controversy on Civilization’s Decline: Part Five. Little Blue Book 1804, Girard, KS, page 59.)
Something occurred in the late 1930s, though, that changed his mind about the need to see his ideas spread. Thayer would later say, “Brother Page carries a membership card which indicates he joined the Church soon after the Twelve Apostles” [“The New Scholiasts, Doubt 61 (Summer 1959): 75-6.]—as late as 1937, it seems, when the first issue of The Fortean Society Magazine appeared, or maybe even earlier. Also in 1937, he published his ideas in two volumes of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius’s “Little Blue Book” series—joining several other Forteans who wrote for the series, including John Cowper Powys whose paramour actually worked for the publisher. His work appeared in numbers 1800 and 1801 as The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization's Decline Parts One and Two. (He may have privately published this in 1935 as well: Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars, NY: Penguin, 2010, 17). Several of the chapters seem to have been spun out into separate publications (sometimes given Little Blue Book numbers that correlate with other titles, such as 1804, which official records give as belonging to “Bunk about Marriage,” but there is a copy of Page’s work at the University of California which is clearly labelled 1804) and formed the basis for private publications. These are mostly dated in 1937, with one also coming in 1942.
I have not read all the various versions but have gone through the “Little Blue Books” as well as a later private publication, “The Scientific Principle of Parallelism,” so I can say that I am familiar with his ideas, even if I might not understand them all, their ramifications and nuances. From what I can make out, he was disturbed with the development of relativity theory on physics, especially, but also the general drift of science, thinking that the world had eschewed universal verities for temporary ones—civilization was going to hell in a hand basket because it had lost the Old Time Religion.
More specifically, Page invented a system of philosophy that subverted all scientific theories. The basic ideas owed a lot to Plato (particularly the Allegory of the Cave) and the French philosopher Henri Bergson (He only mentions Plato once, in the 1959 publication, and also cites Bergson just once, in the second part of his essay for the “The Little Blue Books,” but their ideas are very prominent.) Page asserted that underlying everything were “elementary quantum of manifestation” [Albert E. Page, “The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization’s Decline,” Girard, KS: Little Blue Book 1800, 11] which were constant and unchanging. Page hated the relativistic turn in physics, and the breakdown of the atom into constituent parts: he believed in an old-fashioned indivisible atom. And so he used as his model the ‘Vortex Atom.’ He did not cite any sources for this model, but the vortex atom came out of the work of Lord Kelvin and J. J. Thomsen in nineteenth-century England [Helge Kragh, The Vortex Atom: A Victorian Theory of Everything Centaurus 44 (July 2002): 32-114; Steven van der Laan, The Vortex Theory of Atoms: Pinnacle of Classical Physics, Master’s Thesis, Institute for the History and Foundations of Science, Utrecth University, 2012]. Likely, he picked up the idea from Oliver Lodge, a physicist and popular science writer who had also been a spiritualist, and continued to advocate aspects of the theory long after they fallen out of fashion in the academy. [Peter Rowlands, Oliver Lodge and the Liverpool Physical Society, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990, 105, 206-7, 241.] According to this model, atoms are vortexes—the spinning of the ether, with hollow insides—that form themselves into rings, the rings then knotting themselves into matter.
Page put his own interpretation on this model of the atom, not thinking them as knotting into matter but expanding into perception. From these vortex atoms emerge—or bud—what we think of as the world. Think of a book falling, he said: the book is the object, and its movement is really just an emergence. Or—obviously he was fascinated by electronics—he said think of the newly-invented television. The elementary quanta are the “scintillating points of light.” [Albert E. Page, “The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization’s Decline,” Girard, KS: Little Blue Book 1800, 36.] Emerging from these are the things we perceive. There is a parallel between the underlying continuum and our perceptions—but only one was real.
And the real was not what we perceived: lines are not real, nor are dimensions, space or time. Instead of gravity, he said, imagine a system of interlocking electrical vortexes stepping up from the imperceptible to the perceptible, stacked like Russian dolls, until everything is interconnected: as though the universe were a giant radio composed to electrified tubes. [Albert E. Page, “The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization’s Decline,” Girard, KS: Little Blue Book 1800, 37.] Only the continuum was real. At every instant, all phenomena are manifestations of this underlying continuum. And this underlying continuum—these vortical atoms—were parallels too—as above, so below—composed of matter and non-matter, stuff and shadow.
The problem with science, he concluded, was that it tries to measure and quantify the emergents, without ever paying attention to the underlying unity. It is caught up with the effects—the parallel world—and ignored fundamental reality. And then it colonizes the mind, teaching generation after generation to look at the shadows, the dancing lights, and ignore what is real. Thus, science has put civilization on the wrong path—Progress is not real. Civilization was dying.
Page’s ideas tapped into a pessimism prevalent in the 1930s. [Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars, NY: Penguin, 2010]. As Paul Forman has shown, even those physicists who had dispensed with the ether and broken down the atom were pessimistic about the future—although based on a very different model of the atom. [Paul Forman, ”Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory: adaptation by German physicists and mathematicians to a hostile environment," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 3 (1971): 1-115.] The Great Depression, the rise of communism, the gathering clouds of war over Europe—these only fed the sense that the world was running down. Page thought that the only way forward was backward—scrapping science, rejecting communism and atheism, and embracing faith.
The farther removed something was from the basic quanta of existence, the more corrupt it was. Associations were not to be trusted, while individuals were only one step away from the continuum [Albert E. Page, “The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization’s Decline,” Girard, KS: Little Blue Book 1800, 55-6]. Thus, Page’s philosophy of parallelism exalted the individual—and despised communism as well as science, since both were seen as forms of collectivism. In 1937 he wrote,
“Therefore, the facts are that one lone individual, if he has harmonized or competed his proof in accordance with the process of Faith, supported by reason, possesses Truth even if it is denied by a million persons. Truth lies not in the many, it lies only in being in harmony with original principles, the basis of all phenomena.” [Albert E. Page, “The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization’s Decline,” Girard, KS: Little Blue Book 1800, 88.]
He expanded on this idea in 1959:
“What I want today is what our fathers wanted. They seemed for a time to be approaching it, but now it seems we will never reach it. What they wanted was not only the independence of a nation, the independence of a state, but the absolute independence of the individual. People of today have completely lost sight of that goal. I, however, feel the need of it more than ever; I want it so that I, one of the children of Nature, can stand on an equality with every natural soul.” [Albert E. Page, The Scientific Principle of Parallelism, Ny: Exposition Press, 139.]
This exaltation of individualism was the foundation for his religious views, at least as put forth in his books:
“Religion would be based on unit effects or principles as exemplified by a Perfect Man (symbolized by Christ); in other words, religion must be individualistic. Hence, morality springs from this principle only: each individual is tuned to or is in harmony with the perfections of an EXEMPLARY ONE.” (Little Blue Book 1800, p. 77.)
And:
“Therefore we say: Back to the old, old Faiths; back to the age of individual obligation, back to the age of duty, back to the living religion of loving kindness, as exemplified by Christ, Confucius, Mohammed and others of recognized virtue.
“We must be guided, if at all, by Faith and love, fortified by reason. A man’s Faith is much more his own that his reason. His Being and Faith are one, both springing from ‘within’ and are unfailing; reason comes from ‘without’ and is often perplexed.
“Through Faith and love only is it possible to obliterate or soften the tyranny of the reasoned reflections, those extended and hardened links, of that great chain, that has held man’s soul in bondage.” (“Little Blue Book 1800,” 83.)
Despite Page’s insistence that this was a call to an old religion, what it more sounds like is a resumption of the New Thought and similar esoteric Christian faiths that erupted in America during the 19th century: Mormonism, Christian Science, and the like. Page’s God was not the God of the Old Testament, but nature itself—the continuum—and Faith was the emulation of the exemplary individual—“fundamental religion has nothing whatever to do with collectivisms, either social or communal.” [Little Blue Book 1800, 84.] This was not a return to Medieval Catholicism, or even some variety of paganism. It was a celebration of the individual against the confining definitions imposed by modern science.
There are obvious points of comparison between Page’s system and Fort’s ideas—and just as obvious points of disagreement. It seems clear that Page had encountered Fort sometime before he joined the Fortean Society, since he makes an oblique reference to Fort in the second part of his disquisition, writing,
“There is an extraordinary amount of mystery connected with the accepted ideas of the atoms. Its irreconcilable features are completely ignored (and ‘damned’), although if given proper consideration, they would raise doubts sufficient to destroy the idea.” [1801, 80].
Page’s valorization of the individual, his declamations against the tyranny of science and its ossified dogma, his very eccentricity—these would have appealed to Thayer, and brought some manner of agreement between Page’s system and Thayer’s Forteanism. Of course, Thayer would have rejected Page’s call for a return to faith—as would have Fort, for that matter, the Religious Determinant, like the Scientific one, giving way to the era of the hypothesis in his expression.
There is also a possible connection between Thayer and Page in the vortex atom. That model of the atom not only excited Page—in the 1910s, it had excited Ezra Pound, who saw in it a way to make the arts and humanities a kind of science. Art, thought Pound, should act out the same patterns and rhythms of the vortex. Vorticist art “aims at focusing the mind on a given definition of form, or rhythm, so intensely that it becomes not only more aware of that given form, but more sensitive to all other forms, rhythms, defined planes, or masses.” [Andrew Logemann, Physics as Narrative: Lewis, Pound and the London Vortex, Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, eds., Vibratory Modernism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 80-95, p. 87] Clearly, Pound’s was a very different use of the vortex atom—celebrating physics and its variables—and it would likely also have been very familiar to Thayer. He was both an ardent admirer of Pound and an avid collector of books, almost certainly, therefore, coming across Pound’s writings on the vortex atom.
Whatever the differences, Page got along with Thayer’s Fortean Society for some time, at least. Page was among those mentioned in the January 1940 list of contributors—likely he had sent a privately published version of his philosophy. Two issues later—in October 1941—Thayer printed Page’s letter (very likely sent much earlier). Thayer introduced the letter, which ran well over a page, giving a brief summary of Page’s ideas:
“One of the earliest Forteans was Albert E. Page, author of The Chief Aspects of Civilization’s Decline . . . Since this work has had no general circulation in the United States, the Society will quote from it in this place from time to time for the benefit of students.”
It is Thayer’s assumption that Page’s book was not well circulated that indicates he had received an early version—not the one that appeared the “The Little Blue Books.” At any rate, Thayer never did quote from the books in any further issues of the magazine. This discrepancy might not mean much—Thayer hatched a lot of ideas that he never followed through on—but in this case might also indicate a lingering irritation.
Page was credited with sending in reports—probably newspaper clippings—several times over the years. He surveyed the membership for information on the behavior of compasses near the poles (echoes of the Drayson problem, and Isaac Newton Vail, although it is not clear what Page was getting at.) At times, Page’a views—although they seem dissonant with his philosophy—echoed Thayer’s quite closely. In January 1955, Thayer presented him with the Society’s (mock) prize for sending in the best bit:
“In a letter from MFS Albert E. Page, author of the Page Principle of Parallelism, who has been with us from the year I, he writes:
‘Our bankrupt intellectuals’ simplicitly [sic] and utterly with ulterior motives, which their hypocritical blindness overshadows, talk about the advantages of atomic influence for peaceful purposes instead of war.
‘They dare not face the fact that the release of radioactive-energy for domestic so-called beneficial or peaceful purposes is just as dangerous to living things as its release if for purposes of war.’
“That is the first tine we have seen the matter stated in its starkest simplicity and so we are happy to have the observation come from a Fortean.” [“First Prize,” Doubt 47 (January 1955): 316.]
Page even did some investigating for the Fortean Society. One of the Society’s members, John Lister, owned a plot of land in Gold Hill, Oregon, where the laws of physics were said to be suspended. Thayer noted that there was another such place in Santa Cruz, which was described in the press, “almost detail for detail.” Thayer himself thought it was all a crock—the carnival’s “House of Illusion” moved to the countryside, but suggested that Page might find a Vortex there—this was clearly meant as a bit of fun, and the term vortex was being used very differently than Page had used it in his writings. [“Steady, Boys . . .” Doubt 13 (Winter 1945): 193.] But it wasn’t exactly a joke. Page had already been up to Gold Hill, Oregon, visited the place—and declared that he had found evidence to support his theory. Which says something about Page’s own credulity—as well as Thayer’s willingness to twist Page’s words in the service of being funny.
Being involved with the Fortean Society seems to have effected Page’s writing to some extent—at least, in his 1959, “The Scientific Principle of Parallelism,” he took up that favored Fortean topic of the previous dozen years, flying saucers, uniting it with his own speculations on ancient science. According to Page, ancient humans had possessed vast powers—because they understood how to harness the vortex atom. That information had been used, for example, to build the pyramids. Control of the atom had been passed from generation to generation through the use of ancient symbols—and, unfortunately, the ability to read and understand those symbols had been lost, leaving humans that much poorer. (Apparently, Aristotle was among the last men to have access to this ancient knowledge.) Flying saucers, Page said in 1959, achieved their speed and agility by making use of the powers released by a true understanding of the vortex atom.
Or maybe Page was not necessarily influenced by the Fortean Society in this regard. In the 1950s, there were a lot of attempts to bring UFOs into the fold of the occult, and connect them with esoteric forms of Christianity. Page may have come across some of this in the pages of Thayer’s magazine, but he also may have been exposed to it in other reading.
Certainly, Thayer was aware of such attempts to build alternative systems of knowledge, and these attempts had made him dyspeptic. While it is true that Thayer would sometimes attempt create general system of thought, and he could be quite dogmatic in his eccentricities, he was still strongly influenced by Fort’s call for temporary acceptance, and rejection of overarching theories. By 1959, he had had enough. In the very last issue of the magazine before he died, Thayer called out “The New Scholiasts”:
“Between Art Castillo, whose drawings are familiar to all, and Jack Green, who publishes newspaper, at 225 east 5th street, N.Y.C., Your Secretary is kept abreast of a wordy wrangle reminiscent of ye olden times or an undergraduate bull session wherein abstrusities are pitted against abstractions with a jejune sincerity that passes both belief and intellect.” [The New Scholiasts,” Doubt 61 (Summer 1959): 71-2.]
Among the New Scholiasts was Page:
“an early contributor to DOUBT and we [illegible] to sell his first few books—but we never understood them. Apparently Plato bit him [illegible] in the Cave—Book VII of The Republic [illegible] he has been trying to apply that psychic [illegible] to the material world ever since.”
Nonetheless, Thayer was kind enough to give his readers the address to which they could send $4.00 and receive Page’s latest book.
Although it usually is, this prolixity and redundancy isn’t necessarily a fault. Sometimes ideas are obscure, and repetition helps make them clear. Sometimes, especially to invent novel ways of thinking, words have to be used in unusual ways. But Page’s discursive style seems to be the result not of a hope to clarify, but because he’s not sure how to say what he wants to say. And so words get used, and used again, their meaning shifting until the ideas they attempt to convey are lost—the ink not from a pen, but a squid, with meaning blurred. To his credit, Page acknowledged the difficulty of understanding his philosophy in a letter to The Fortean Society, published in October 1941:
“I have made no effort to make my ideas known other than sending them to the above Academy of Sciences because the nature of this work is so incompatible with the present scientific ideas of the world that it would be useless.
“In fact, my ideas practically reverse and overturn every notion of our present science, and I hardly have any idea of trying to reveal them unless some very exceptional change came over the world.
“It is even hard to give expression, in common terms, to my philosophy and I also experience trepidations at the thought of expressing that which has had no response previously drilled into the mental attitude of the world.
“In fact, its repulsion would be expected because it denies every established idea, even the individualistic interpretation of the Universe, or even the personification of knowledge, supported by a monistic philosophy rather than a dualistic conception of antithetical tendencies to the extent of an endless diversity.” [Albert E. Page, “Letter,” The Fortean Society Magazine, 5 (October 1941): 4-6.]
The Academy of Sciences that he mentions in the first paragraph? It was the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden. It sent him a letter acknowledging receipt of his book, “Philosophy of Parallelism, or the negative answer to the question: Is the Principle of Cause and Effect or Antecedent and Consequent, True in Reality.” The Academy had even catalogued the book—Thayer wouldn’t have to get that done—but it had not given Page what he most wanted: The Nobel Prize.
Albert Page was born 29 April 1885 in California to Charles A Page and Sarah J. (Wheeler) Page. He was the second of three children. The Pages had been married four years before. Charles had come west from Maine, Sarah south from Washington, to Santa Rosa, in Sonoma county. [US Census.]
The family was in the same place in 1900, according to the census. (The 1890 census was destroyed by fire, so there is no way to check on the family then.) In 1910, at the age of 25, he was living in San Francisco with his wife, Minnie, and two kids, Valene (3) and Zola (2). He worked as a conductor. Later censuses would put his first marriage in 1904. Page may have been in San Francisco a year earlier, working as a clerk—at least there’s an Albert E. Page in the 1909 San Francisco city directory. Indeed, he may have moved about California a lot during his late twenties—the San Diego city directory has an Albert E. Page there in 1912, a janitor, and the Sacramento city directory has a clerk named Albert E. Page there in 1914. Whether those are the same people or not, it is true that Page underwent some major life changes around this time. According to his World War I draft registration card he was living in his hometown of Santa Rose, working as a rural mail carrier, and was married to a new woman, Myrtle E. Page. 9I could find no subsequent information int he census on Minnie, Valene, or Zola.) The 1920 census further elaborates on his new family situation: by then he had a daughter, Ruth, aged two. The family rented a home. Likely, Myrtle and Albert had married in 1915, when she was 17 and he was 30. [US Census.]
By 1930, thee family’s fortunes had increased. There were two new children, another daughter, Evelyn (8) and a son, Albert E. Jr. (5). Albert Sr. owned his home, then valued at about $3,500. The family also owned a radio. Albert had come far on a high school education. Ten years later, and the family had weathered the Great Depression well. The house had lost value—it was then worth $3,200—but Page had worked 46 weeks in 1939, averaging about 54 hours per week. He also had income from another source—likely his philosophical books, which he did distribute to more people than the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. [US Census.]
Albert E. Page died 15 April 1964, two weeks shy of his 79th birthday, and almost five years after Thayer and the Fortean Society. [California Death Index.]
According to his letter, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had acknowledged receipt of his publication in October or November of 1930. Clearly, he had been stewing on the ideas for a long time. He would write, “Much of the writer’s life has been, if not a study, at least an experience with theological and scientific dogmatism. No one more than I has practiced religion more devoutly, to the point of fanaticism, as well as scientific principles to the point of idolatry and glorification, in which delusions of grandeur have obsessed the simpleton. And yet I fell confident that few, if any, are more certain in pessimism and skepticism, privately, than I.” (Albert E. Page, Controversy on Civilization’s Decline: Part Five. Little Blue Book 1804, Girard, KS, page 59.)
Something occurred in the late 1930s, though, that changed his mind about the need to see his ideas spread. Thayer would later say, “Brother Page carries a membership card which indicates he joined the Church soon after the Twelve Apostles” [“The New Scholiasts, Doubt 61 (Summer 1959): 75-6.]—as late as 1937, it seems, when the first issue of The Fortean Society Magazine appeared, or maybe even earlier. Also in 1937, he published his ideas in two volumes of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius’s “Little Blue Book” series—joining several other Forteans who wrote for the series, including John Cowper Powys whose paramour actually worked for the publisher. His work appeared in numbers 1800 and 1801 as The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization's Decline Parts One and Two. (He may have privately published this in 1935 as well: Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars, NY: Penguin, 2010, 17). Several of the chapters seem to have been spun out into separate publications (sometimes given Little Blue Book numbers that correlate with other titles, such as 1804, which official records give as belonging to “Bunk about Marriage,” but there is a copy of Page’s work at the University of California which is clearly labelled 1804) and formed the basis for private publications. These are mostly dated in 1937, with one also coming in 1942.
I have not read all the various versions but have gone through the “Little Blue Books” as well as a later private publication, “The Scientific Principle of Parallelism,” so I can say that I am familiar with his ideas, even if I might not understand them all, their ramifications and nuances. From what I can make out, he was disturbed with the development of relativity theory on physics, especially, but also the general drift of science, thinking that the world had eschewed universal verities for temporary ones—civilization was going to hell in a hand basket because it had lost the Old Time Religion.
More specifically, Page invented a system of philosophy that subverted all scientific theories. The basic ideas owed a lot to Plato (particularly the Allegory of the Cave) and the French philosopher Henri Bergson (He only mentions Plato once, in the 1959 publication, and also cites Bergson just once, in the second part of his essay for the “The Little Blue Books,” but their ideas are very prominent.) Page asserted that underlying everything were “elementary quantum of manifestation” [Albert E. Page, “The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization’s Decline,” Girard, KS: Little Blue Book 1800, 11] which were constant and unchanging. Page hated the relativistic turn in physics, and the breakdown of the atom into constituent parts: he believed in an old-fashioned indivisible atom. And so he used as his model the ‘Vortex Atom.’ He did not cite any sources for this model, but the vortex atom came out of the work of Lord Kelvin and J. J. Thomsen in nineteenth-century England [Helge Kragh, The Vortex Atom: A Victorian Theory of Everything Centaurus 44 (July 2002): 32-114; Steven van der Laan, The Vortex Theory of Atoms: Pinnacle of Classical Physics, Master’s Thesis, Institute for the History and Foundations of Science, Utrecth University, 2012]. Likely, he picked up the idea from Oliver Lodge, a physicist and popular science writer who had also been a spiritualist, and continued to advocate aspects of the theory long after they fallen out of fashion in the academy. [Peter Rowlands, Oliver Lodge and the Liverpool Physical Society, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990, 105, 206-7, 241.] According to this model, atoms are vortexes—the spinning of the ether, with hollow insides—that form themselves into rings, the rings then knotting themselves into matter.
Page put his own interpretation on this model of the atom, not thinking them as knotting into matter but expanding into perception. From these vortex atoms emerge—or bud—what we think of as the world. Think of a book falling, he said: the book is the object, and its movement is really just an emergence. Or—obviously he was fascinated by electronics—he said think of the newly-invented television. The elementary quanta are the “scintillating points of light.” [Albert E. Page, “The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization’s Decline,” Girard, KS: Little Blue Book 1800, 36.] Emerging from these are the things we perceive. There is a parallel between the underlying continuum and our perceptions—but only one was real.
And the real was not what we perceived: lines are not real, nor are dimensions, space or time. Instead of gravity, he said, imagine a system of interlocking electrical vortexes stepping up from the imperceptible to the perceptible, stacked like Russian dolls, until everything is interconnected: as though the universe were a giant radio composed to electrified tubes. [Albert E. Page, “The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization’s Decline,” Girard, KS: Little Blue Book 1800, 37.] Only the continuum was real. At every instant, all phenomena are manifestations of this underlying continuum. And this underlying continuum—these vortical atoms—were parallels too—as above, so below—composed of matter and non-matter, stuff and shadow.
The problem with science, he concluded, was that it tries to measure and quantify the emergents, without ever paying attention to the underlying unity. It is caught up with the effects—the parallel world—and ignored fundamental reality. And then it colonizes the mind, teaching generation after generation to look at the shadows, the dancing lights, and ignore what is real. Thus, science has put civilization on the wrong path—Progress is not real. Civilization was dying.
Page’s ideas tapped into a pessimism prevalent in the 1930s. [Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars, NY: Penguin, 2010]. As Paul Forman has shown, even those physicists who had dispensed with the ether and broken down the atom were pessimistic about the future—although based on a very different model of the atom. [Paul Forman, ”Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory: adaptation by German physicists and mathematicians to a hostile environment," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 3 (1971): 1-115.] The Great Depression, the rise of communism, the gathering clouds of war over Europe—these only fed the sense that the world was running down. Page thought that the only way forward was backward—scrapping science, rejecting communism and atheism, and embracing faith.
The farther removed something was from the basic quanta of existence, the more corrupt it was. Associations were not to be trusted, while individuals were only one step away from the continuum [Albert E. Page, “The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization’s Decline,” Girard, KS: Little Blue Book 1800, 55-6]. Thus, Page’s philosophy of parallelism exalted the individual—and despised communism as well as science, since both were seen as forms of collectivism. In 1937 he wrote,
“Therefore, the facts are that one lone individual, if he has harmonized or competed his proof in accordance with the process of Faith, supported by reason, possesses Truth even if it is denied by a million persons. Truth lies not in the many, it lies only in being in harmony with original principles, the basis of all phenomena.” [Albert E. Page, “The Chief Aspects of Western Civilization’s Decline,” Girard, KS: Little Blue Book 1800, 88.]
He expanded on this idea in 1959:
“What I want today is what our fathers wanted. They seemed for a time to be approaching it, but now it seems we will never reach it. What they wanted was not only the independence of a nation, the independence of a state, but the absolute independence of the individual. People of today have completely lost sight of that goal. I, however, feel the need of it more than ever; I want it so that I, one of the children of Nature, can stand on an equality with every natural soul.” [Albert E. Page, The Scientific Principle of Parallelism, Ny: Exposition Press, 139.]
This exaltation of individualism was the foundation for his religious views, at least as put forth in his books:
“Religion would be based on unit effects or principles as exemplified by a Perfect Man (symbolized by Christ); in other words, religion must be individualistic. Hence, morality springs from this principle only: each individual is tuned to or is in harmony with the perfections of an EXEMPLARY ONE.” (Little Blue Book 1800, p. 77.)
And:
“Therefore we say: Back to the old, old Faiths; back to the age of individual obligation, back to the age of duty, back to the living religion of loving kindness, as exemplified by Christ, Confucius, Mohammed and others of recognized virtue.
“We must be guided, if at all, by Faith and love, fortified by reason. A man’s Faith is much more his own that his reason. His Being and Faith are one, both springing from ‘within’ and are unfailing; reason comes from ‘without’ and is often perplexed.
“Through Faith and love only is it possible to obliterate or soften the tyranny of the reasoned reflections, those extended and hardened links, of that great chain, that has held man’s soul in bondage.” (“Little Blue Book 1800,” 83.)
Despite Page’s insistence that this was a call to an old religion, what it more sounds like is a resumption of the New Thought and similar esoteric Christian faiths that erupted in America during the 19th century: Mormonism, Christian Science, and the like. Page’s God was not the God of the Old Testament, but nature itself—the continuum—and Faith was the emulation of the exemplary individual—“fundamental religion has nothing whatever to do with collectivisms, either social or communal.” [Little Blue Book 1800, 84.] This was not a return to Medieval Catholicism, or even some variety of paganism. It was a celebration of the individual against the confining definitions imposed by modern science.
There are obvious points of comparison between Page’s system and Fort’s ideas—and just as obvious points of disagreement. It seems clear that Page had encountered Fort sometime before he joined the Fortean Society, since he makes an oblique reference to Fort in the second part of his disquisition, writing,
“There is an extraordinary amount of mystery connected with the accepted ideas of the atoms. Its irreconcilable features are completely ignored (and ‘damned’), although if given proper consideration, they would raise doubts sufficient to destroy the idea.” [1801, 80].
Page’s valorization of the individual, his declamations against the tyranny of science and its ossified dogma, his very eccentricity—these would have appealed to Thayer, and brought some manner of agreement between Page’s system and Thayer’s Forteanism. Of course, Thayer would have rejected Page’s call for a return to faith—as would have Fort, for that matter, the Religious Determinant, like the Scientific one, giving way to the era of the hypothesis in his expression.
There is also a possible connection between Thayer and Page in the vortex atom. That model of the atom not only excited Page—in the 1910s, it had excited Ezra Pound, who saw in it a way to make the arts and humanities a kind of science. Art, thought Pound, should act out the same patterns and rhythms of the vortex. Vorticist art “aims at focusing the mind on a given definition of form, or rhythm, so intensely that it becomes not only more aware of that given form, but more sensitive to all other forms, rhythms, defined planes, or masses.” [Andrew Logemann, Physics as Narrative: Lewis, Pound and the London Vortex, Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, eds., Vibratory Modernism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 80-95, p. 87] Clearly, Pound’s was a very different use of the vortex atom—celebrating physics and its variables—and it would likely also have been very familiar to Thayer. He was both an ardent admirer of Pound and an avid collector of books, almost certainly, therefore, coming across Pound’s writings on the vortex atom.
Whatever the differences, Page got along with Thayer’s Fortean Society for some time, at least. Page was among those mentioned in the January 1940 list of contributors—likely he had sent a privately published version of his philosophy. Two issues later—in October 1941—Thayer printed Page’s letter (very likely sent much earlier). Thayer introduced the letter, which ran well over a page, giving a brief summary of Page’s ideas:
“One of the earliest Forteans was Albert E. Page, author of The Chief Aspects of Civilization’s Decline . . . Since this work has had no general circulation in the United States, the Society will quote from it in this place from time to time for the benefit of students.”
It is Thayer’s assumption that Page’s book was not well circulated that indicates he had received an early version—not the one that appeared the “The Little Blue Books.” At any rate, Thayer never did quote from the books in any further issues of the magazine. This discrepancy might not mean much—Thayer hatched a lot of ideas that he never followed through on—but in this case might also indicate a lingering irritation.
Page was credited with sending in reports—probably newspaper clippings—several times over the years. He surveyed the membership for information on the behavior of compasses near the poles (echoes of the Drayson problem, and Isaac Newton Vail, although it is not clear what Page was getting at.) At times, Page’a views—although they seem dissonant with his philosophy—echoed Thayer’s quite closely. In January 1955, Thayer presented him with the Society’s (mock) prize for sending in the best bit:
“In a letter from MFS Albert E. Page, author of the Page Principle of Parallelism, who has been with us from the year I, he writes:
‘Our bankrupt intellectuals’ simplicitly [sic] and utterly with ulterior motives, which their hypocritical blindness overshadows, talk about the advantages of atomic influence for peaceful purposes instead of war.
‘They dare not face the fact that the release of radioactive-energy for domestic so-called beneficial or peaceful purposes is just as dangerous to living things as its release if for purposes of war.’
“That is the first tine we have seen the matter stated in its starkest simplicity and so we are happy to have the observation come from a Fortean.” [“First Prize,” Doubt 47 (January 1955): 316.]
Page even did some investigating for the Fortean Society. One of the Society’s members, John Lister, owned a plot of land in Gold Hill, Oregon, where the laws of physics were said to be suspended. Thayer noted that there was another such place in Santa Cruz, which was described in the press, “almost detail for detail.” Thayer himself thought it was all a crock—the carnival’s “House of Illusion” moved to the countryside, but suggested that Page might find a Vortex there—this was clearly meant as a bit of fun, and the term vortex was being used very differently than Page had used it in his writings. [“Steady, Boys . . .” Doubt 13 (Winter 1945): 193.] But it wasn’t exactly a joke. Page had already been up to Gold Hill, Oregon, visited the place—and declared that he had found evidence to support his theory. Which says something about Page’s own credulity—as well as Thayer’s willingness to twist Page’s words in the service of being funny.
Being involved with the Fortean Society seems to have effected Page’s writing to some extent—at least, in his 1959, “The Scientific Principle of Parallelism,” he took up that favored Fortean topic of the previous dozen years, flying saucers, uniting it with his own speculations on ancient science. According to Page, ancient humans had possessed vast powers—because they understood how to harness the vortex atom. That information had been used, for example, to build the pyramids. Control of the atom had been passed from generation to generation through the use of ancient symbols—and, unfortunately, the ability to read and understand those symbols had been lost, leaving humans that much poorer. (Apparently, Aristotle was among the last men to have access to this ancient knowledge.) Flying saucers, Page said in 1959, achieved their speed and agility by making use of the powers released by a true understanding of the vortex atom.
Or maybe Page was not necessarily influenced by the Fortean Society in this regard. In the 1950s, there were a lot of attempts to bring UFOs into the fold of the occult, and connect them with esoteric forms of Christianity. Page may have come across some of this in the pages of Thayer’s magazine, but he also may have been exposed to it in other reading.
Certainly, Thayer was aware of such attempts to build alternative systems of knowledge, and these attempts had made him dyspeptic. While it is true that Thayer would sometimes attempt create general system of thought, and he could be quite dogmatic in his eccentricities, he was still strongly influenced by Fort’s call for temporary acceptance, and rejection of overarching theories. By 1959, he had had enough. In the very last issue of the magazine before he died, Thayer called out “The New Scholiasts”:
“Between Art Castillo, whose drawings are familiar to all, and Jack Green, who publishes newspaper, at 225 east 5th street, N.Y.C., Your Secretary is kept abreast of a wordy wrangle reminiscent of ye olden times or an undergraduate bull session wherein abstrusities are pitted against abstractions with a jejune sincerity that passes both belief and intellect.” [The New Scholiasts,” Doubt 61 (Summer 1959): 71-2.]
Among the New Scholiasts was Page:
“an early contributor to DOUBT and we [illegible] to sell his first few books—but we never understood them. Apparently Plato bit him [illegible] in the Cave—Book VII of The Republic [illegible] he has been trying to apply that psychic [illegible] to the material world ever since.”
Nonetheless, Thayer was kind enough to give his readers the address to which they could send $4.00 and receive Page’s latest book.
