A Special Issue of the Paranormal Review, the magazine for the Society of Psychical Research
With Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the major Warner Bros film written by JK Rowling, due to be released in November this year, our collective imagination is drawn to consideration of what these beasts are or might be and what constitutes ‘fantastic’.
Attempts at natural history since Herodotus and Pliny the Elder have constantly met with the prodigal and fabulous, of something beyond zoology. We shall call this parazoology: the biology of the supernatural; a study of the life of things that never lived. It is the world of mermaids and unicorns, confined now to fantasy, but once believed to exist; a world of the imagination that can still affect us today. It can also be extended to the study of parapsychological or ‘paranormal’ events concerning animals and their interaction with humans.
The scope and interpretation of this subject is deliberately left open and scholars from all appropriate disciplines are invited to submit a proposal.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words plus a short biography should be sent to the Editor, Dr Leo Ruickbie, at paranormalreview@spr.ac.uk before 1 July 2016, with chosen papers of 2,000 words to be submitted by 1 September 2016.
(Posted 15 June 2016)