The closer we look at the world, the more we realize just how impressive, expansive, even uncanny our reality truly is. Our human senses tend to limit us to only a few ways of viewing the world, but the more we welcome in the supernatural, the more clearly we can appreciate the magic — at times wondrous, at times menacing — that surrounds us.
Defining Supernatural
As we began approaching fall equinox, the endless, sprightly movement of the summer season started to die down, and amongst chilly-evening harvests of crabapples and wild plums, I found myself with more time to read. Of course, encountering books is always a Sisyphean task, as the list of books to read grows far quicker than I could ever hope to keep up.
Nevertheless, one warm September afternoon after the aronia berries were harvested, I was able to sit by an open window long enough to start a book that had been on my list for years: Ed Yong’s An Immense World, which explores the dazzling universe of beyond-human-animal senses. On a whim, I simultaneously began listening to Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which investigates how Earth might fare if all humans magically and immediately vanished. Reading both books, surrounded by more-than-human bodies offering their generous abundance, I couldn’t help but feel a certain kind of mystical pull. These books covered what is right in front of us, yet mostly intangible. Things we think of as normal, yet when we really scrutinize them, they’re anything but.
In accidental coordination, Yong and Weisman’s understandings of the world intersected to tune me back in to the mystical, omnipresent wonders of the world. Meriam Webster defines “supernatural” both as “departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature; attributed to an invisible agent (such as a ghost or spirit),” and “of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe; especially of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil.” Its etymology is obvious enough: super, from Latin, means “above” or “beyond” — something more or different than natural.
Normally, supernatural subjects and phenomena — ghosts, ghouls, or other unearthly beings — are either stigmatized as “eerie; occult” (Dictionary.com), dismissed as fanciful and fictional, or embraced as great entertainment in fantasy novels and TV shows. While the supernatural is surely more than what gets caricatured via popular tropes and trends, the wide allure of contemporary witchcraft and sexy vampires reveals that we’re keenly drawn to whatever lies beyond “natural.” As poet Tom Hirons reminds us through his tales of monsters and wild gods, when we encounter that which exceeds the narrow construct named “normal”, we can’t help but feel changed.
“There is an immense, uncanny, and mystical world beyond our human perceptions, one we catch glimpses of only when we try to inhabit the lives of our more-than-human kin.”
Capturing the Invisible
Every being has its own umwelt, or lived sensory experience of the world — how it feels to move through the world as a bat, frog, or oak tree. Our human umwelt is determined by the wavelengths of sound we can hear (roughly 20 to 20,000 Hz), the wavelengths of light we can see (what we anthropocentrically call “visible” light, from red to purple but excluding infrared and ultraviolet), and the roughly 5 million olfactory receptors we have for smell (compared to as many as 300 million for dogs). We’re heavily influenced by our particularly detailed vision and the location of our two eyes on the front of our heads (which we take for granted as the normal, default condition for animal bodies).
A bumblebee, alternatively, has five eyes with less detailed focus but capable of perceiving ultraviolet light. How we see, feel, and understand a field of wildflowers is entirely different from and virtually unimaginable compared to that of a bumblebee (though it’s certainly wonderful to try imagining a bumblebee’s umwelt).
If our umwelten are informed by what we perceive, then they’re determined by what exists to be perceived. We humans perceive only one small part of a grander available reality. There is an immense, uncanny, and mystical world beyond our human perceptions, one we catch glimpses of only when we try to inhabit the lives of our more-than-human kin.
Of all our senses, most humans rely predominantly on vision, and we’re so accustomed to how we see our surroundings that we rarely consider how different they look to everybody else. Yet many fish, reptiles, insects, and even mammals like dogs, cats, pigs, cows, reindeer, and rodents can see ultraviolet light that’s entirely invisible to us. Flowers, birds, scorpions, turtles, geckos, and even mammals have petals, feathers, skin, and hair with patterns only visible in ultraviolet light spectrums. Is this ultraviolet world one of faint ghostly wisps? Blazes of alien color that make the world glow?
We see white or yellow flowers; pollinators might see glimmering blurples and blazing groranges, or some other expansive range of exquisite colors we could never imagine. While illuminating flowers under ultraviolet light helps reveal the hidden visual layers to our reality, they still restrict us to our specific human understanding of color. Since we cannot possibly imagine colors beyond those we see, the UV universe will always exist as a parallel visual dimension to ours, a shadow realm (er… shimmering realm) of brightness and color woven into our world.
“The quakes left by human bodies are far from the only tremors we don’t notice. Like mediums tracing invisible energetic histories, animals sense all sorts of vibrations rippling through physical reality.”
Ways of Sensing
While some beings, like angler fish or venus fly traps, feel like creatures straight out of storybooks, our human bodies themselves are monsters of medieval legend: we are slow-moving giants lumbering blindly through delicate sensory universes. Some insects, for instance, see quicker than we can. Human eyes cannot identify individual images from each other if they’re flashed together 60 times in a second (or frames per second, also measured in hertz, Hz), which is why movies seem to flow continuously and not appear as jerky slideshow reels. Dogs can see up to 75Hz; birds up to 146Hz; flies, dragonflies, and honeybees can see up to 350Hz. As Ed Yong writes, to these animals, “the fastest of our actions would seem languid.” Insects like house flies can detect unnoticeable (to humans) changes in temperature, down to tenths of degrees.
Yong also comments on our clumsy obliviousness: “I suddenly reconsider the movements of every fly I’ve ever seen. Their paths, which always seemed so random and chaotic, now take on an air of purpose, as if the insect is threading its way through an obstacle course of hot and cold that I can’t perceive, don’t care about, and oafishly wade through.” Like Lovecraftian beasts, our simple movements send quakes through the tiny dimensions perceived and inhabited by our much smaller relatives.
The quakes left by human bodies are far from the only tremors we don’t notice. Like mediums tracing invisible energetic histories, animals sense all sorts of vibrations rippling through physical reality. Echolocation — sending out sound vibrations and receiving them back — allows bats to navigate spatial differences within a millimeter of accuracy and false killer whales to distinguish the thickness of objects down to fractions of millimeters.
Dolphins have X-ray vision, though it’s also a form of echolocation: they can see through bodies — fish, human, or otherwise — into organ and skeletal systems. Seals feel vibrations with their whiskers and trace the paths that fish moved through water without any visual cues, by feeling the wakes fish have left for hundreds of meters. Scorpions feel the faint vibrations from the vanishingly silent footsteps of insects. Elephants, dogs, and plenty of other animals detect earthquakes and tsunamis well before they’re felt by humans. (Elephants and dogs are also amongst the animals who can determine age, health, fertility, and individual identity through scent. They can track lingering smells for miles, recreate scenes of past events based solely on a handful of molecules left lingering around, and even smell diseases in humans.) These beings embody powers we once ascribed to witches, pagans, and shamans — the ability to know what is hidden, to divine through unseen forces, to act at distances unfathomable to us. What was condemned in women and healers as ‘witchcraft’ turns out to be commonplace in the wider living world.
“To these beings, there’s nothing special about how they live their lives. They, like us, are born into bodies that have slowly and comfortably developed their uniqueness over millions of years and become exquisitely attentive to their surroundings. Yet we have an easier time imagining fantastical beings like ghosts, goblins, or griffins than we do empathizing with the sensorial experience of animals we see and interact with every day — even those most overlooked and unappreciated critters, like flies, who we too easily dismiss as simple and stupid.“
Animal superpowers don’t stop at sensing: hundreds of species have figured out mind control. Horsehair worms force praying mantises to seek out and drown themselves in water. Emerald cockroach wasps inject venom into cockroach brains to make them docile and bring them back to their nests. The parasite toxoplasmosis makes rodents — and potentially humans — less risk-averse, and even attracted to the smell of cat urine, drawing prey to a feline end. The cordyceps fungus famously takes over insects — not just ants, but wasps, beetles, moth larvae, and cicada nymphs too — and can make them climb, burrow, or bite down in place. In the branches above our heads, grasses beneath our feet, and burrows further underground lie hoards of little zombies.
And then there are those creatures whose abilities are still unexplainable. Sea turtles, fish, mole-rats, dogs, salamanders, frogs, migratory moths and birds, and even some flatworms and mudsnails can feel some of Earth’s faintest energy: her magnetic fields. These fields are exceedingly weak — so weak that, as Yong observes, ”the random jiggling movements of an animal’s molecules can carry 200 billion times more energy. No creature should be able to sense such an absurdly weak stimulus.” Yet all these animals have been proven capable of feeling this invisible, non-physical, barely discernible trace of the universe.
From a human perspective, all of these senses are supernatural. Our more-than-human kin effortlessly transcend natural laws — at least, the laws our human bodies assume are natural — and engage with an overlapping universe of sensorial abundance inaccessible to us. Yet these alien umwelten are also super… natural. To these beings, there’s nothing special about how they live their lives.
They, like us, are born into bodies that have slowly and comfortably developed their uniqueness over millions of years and become exquisitely attentive to their surroundings. Yet we have an easier time imagining fantastical beings like ghosts, goblins, or griffins than we do empathizing with the sensorial experience of animals we see and interact with every day — even those most overlooked and unappreciated critters, like flies, who we too easily dismiss as simple and stupid. When we take just a little time to appreciate the parallel universes around us, we can appreciate that fungi are mind controllers, elephants are witches, and flies are magical. Unfortunately, all these mystical presences are being rapidly replaced by another supernatural power.
Born into Anthropocene
If the living world’s enchantment is one of multi-spectral flowers and continental migrations, then modernity’s is one of artificial flowers and continental contamination. Blinking street lights and discarded bottles might lack the charm and wonder of songbirds and bees, but their impacts are just about as otherworldly.
Umwelten are determined by what exists to be perceived, and modernity is drastically transforming perceptional existence. Animals experience a vast spectrum of visible reality, but our built environment is constructed with only the thin sliver of human vision in mind. While we can navigate the bizarre landscapes of our own making with relative ease, human-influenced environs must seem like cruel haunted mansions of deadly illusions for more-than-human beings. Skyscrapers, with either transparent or reflective windows, are confusing, shimmering horizons that harden out of nowhere to kill birds. Vultures and raptors so often fly into wind turbines — glaringly obvious structures to us; unpredictable, deadly wrath from above to them — because their focus and visual fields are understandably pointed downwards, not ahead of them. Car paint and wet streets shimmer like water, so dragonflies deposit their eggs on the sterile mirages.
The poor, confused insects who frantically skitter across windows might annoy us, but their vision is too low-resolution for them to understand why their flight keeps getting interrupted by an impassable forcefield. The billions of artificial lights at night shine a siren call that sucks in more insects, disorienting them into a frenzy of spins and crashes as they desperately try to understand why the moonlight they otherwise navigate by has become so distorted. Ambient light pollution exerts an eerie pull on hatchling sea turtles, luring them away from moonlit oceans and into a dry hellscape of concrete and traffic. Military sonar screams so deafeningly that whales beach themselves to escape the industrial banshee.
Then there are the even more pernicious — and often far less noticeable, though no less deadly — potions brewed up by modernity. The world without our extraction, manufacturing, warmongering, and disposal would have had no polyester, no dicamba, no BPA, and no mother insects laying eggs on car hoods. There’d be no enriched uranium, plutonium, or nuclear explosions. No synthetic fertilizer, of which we apply about 200 million tons a year, which produces enough overwhelming runoff it creates more than 500 ocean deadzones — vast areas so lifeless there are no more whales in them to be besieged by shipping traffic. (Never mind the pesticide and fertilizer damage to rivers and reservoirs). No windows, cables, or windshields to kill anywhere from hundreds of millions to billions of birds annually. No macro-plastics in 90% of seabird guts. No microplastics in brains. No dioxin in breast milk. No forever chemicals in everybody’s blood. No toxic tailings pond failures are demolishing rivers. No DDT, 2 kilograms of which would kill 74 million honeybees; no neonicitonoids, 10 grams of which could kill 2.5 billion honeybees (both figures from chapter 7 in entomologist Dave Goulson’s book Silent Earth). These materials are the unwelcome wraiths of modernity, haunting rivers and oceans, possessing soils and bodies, leaving eerie presences that linger amongst and will long outlast us.
Forget spookie witches’ brews that transform misled children into frogs: every year in the US alone, tens of thousands of people become poisoned from factory-produced chemical brews beneath their sinks. Forget curses that jinx unwitting victims: pesticides drift and toxic smoke cause debilitating illness from miles away; superfund sites damn innocent people from decades past. No need for demonic interference or god-sent plagues to cause the mass death of livestock or widespread human disease; DuPont and Union Carbide ensure those same outcomes with PFOAs and industrial accidents.
Modernity and Destruction of the Senses
Bizarrely, these ubiquitous and personally invasive materials, microscopic demons in our blood, end up feeling rather intangible. Industrial pollutions are often far too small, and though their impacts are easily manifest over a lifetime, often act too slowly on our own bodies for us to really be shocked into true awareness. Plus, we’re often too possessed by the shiny promises of modernity and jinxed by shifting baseline syndrome to fully recognize the ecological apocalypse we’re in: the world civilization has created is not normal.
What’s more unearthly than sterile landscapes, lifeless rivers, and emptying oceans, all graveyards of our beyond-human relatives and their umwelten? We’re surrounded by the spirits of vanished lives, destroyed homes, and erased cultures. These impacts will be felt for not just millions of years, but the rest of life’s history: some nuclear waste will be leeching radiation beyond the lifespan of the planet; extinct species and languages are permanent, forever losses.
Towards the end of The World Without Us, Weisman writes, “The Earth holds ghosts: even of entire nations. Nations, tribes, species, entire ecosystems. The Earth holds more ghosts now than ever, and there are more, always more, all the time. We’re creating the ghosts who will linger on this planet forever.”
When we think of human impact, we tend to understand it through its unnaturalness. Climate change is hundreds of times more rapid than any previous heating events. The rapacity with which we’ve pushed beings to extinction far exceeds normal extinction rates across millions of years (with a few extreme exceptions, of course). Pollution is the “[contamination] of an environment, especially with man-made waste” (Merriam-Webster). For more than 540 million years before human existence, multicellular life on Earth existed “naturally.” Then, in the last 5000 years, metal refinement come into existence; 1200 years ago, explosives manufacturing started; and we’ve had 200 or so years of synthetic chemistry.
The novelty, diversity, duration, quantity, concentration, toxicity, and general destructiveness of these recent materials are a clear departure from “natural”. The very conception of “nature” as separate from humans is deeply questionable, but in extreme times like these, the term “unnatural” can still be somewhat useful. Whether modernity is “natural” because we come from the Earth is a philosophically interesting question, but one quite unhelpful in determining that regular oil spills, pesticide drift, and superfund sites — a clear departure from Earth’s routine — are clearly bad.
Besides, as pretty much any Indigenous worldview understands, “nature” is not a neutral descriptor of the living world, but a concept invented to draw a line between ourselves and the earth. The very idea of “nature” as a separate, unified realm — opposite to and distinct from “culture,” “society,” or “technology” — was a conceptual tool of the scientific revolution. The construct of “nature” allowed humans to imagine ourselves as the only beings capable of culture and meaning, while relegating the rest of the world to mute matter, inferior life forms, “natural resources,” and an inert backdrop. This separation underpinned the authority of science and empire alike, creating a purified realm of “Nature” that could be studied, measured, and exploited, while “Society” became the sole domain of politics and morals.
Of course, this is a blatant fallacy: the world is filled not with two neat categories, but with hybrids, networks, and entanglements. More-than-human participants in these entanglements have agency: a self-determination significant enough to co-shape reality. Widespread denial of this agency might be partly why the dominant culture seems to require the companion construct of the super-natural, as a place to hold all that won’t fit into the taxonomic organization of that which we crowd into our incredibly narrow, inanimate construct of nature.
The true awareness and animacy of the Earth, the everything-ness of nature-without-name, expands our spiritual umwelten. A world full of living matter and intertwined, free-willed beings means we can perceive and relate to a wider range of presences. Spirits live everywhere. Ancestors walk among us. Mighty forces have a higher meaning. Confused demons escape from oil wells and chemical factories, and rightfully scare us. Humans and more-than-humans commune with and exert influence upon the unseen. Monsters, ghosts, and witches are allowed to exist.
We can see that the category of “nature” is one of modernity’s most powerful spells. “Nature” enabled us to imagine our own uniqueness while dismissing the multiplicity of other worlds, senses, and agencies around us. To reckon with the “supernatural,” we must embody the knowing that there was never a natural: only countless entangling, co-influencing realities spilling beyond the binaries we are so eager to impose. To those of us raised under the fallacy of separation, that realization is so wild, so eerie, so mysterious that stepping out of the natural binary can itself feel supernatural.
Invitation to Join Supernatural otherWisdom Cycle
To notice the supernatural is not just to look away from the material or escape into flights of fantasy – though a little of that might be medicine too. It is to turn toward the uncanny that is already here. The supernatural is the umwelten of more-than-human beings, whose diverse senses expose the limits of our own. It broods in the monstrous excesses of modern industry and militarism, in poisons and plastics that warp life into unrecognizable forms. It flickers in figures like the witch, embodying knowledge, resistance, and survival that dominant powers tried – and failed – to annihilate. It lingers as noncorporeal presences, in lost species, erased cultures, poisoned waters, and the whispers of ancestors who still ask something of us.
As we move through this Supernatural cycle, we will be invited to meet monsters, witches, and ghosts, not as fantasies or costumes, but as tangible presences. We might find that what we call “supernatural” is not beyond nature at all. It might just be the overflow, the spillage that defies our attempts to contain the world we exist within. Perhaps it is the reminder that we are never entirely alone, never entirely intact, never entirely in control. To live otherWisely in a time like ours may mean learning to walk with monsters, heed witches, and be haunted well.