I doubt it has ever occurred to these scientists that perhaps these people do not have a medical condition, it is merely that, unlike normal people, these individuals have the ability to see what is actually inside a person.
Do these faces look like demons to YOU? Doctors say you might have an extraordinarily rare condition.
Their distorted features would be the stuff of nightmares for many. But this is what everyday people look like to people with a rare condition called prosopometamorphopsia (PMO).
For the first time, researchers have been able to create realistic clinical pictures based on a patient’s experience of the facial distortions experienced by an individual with the ultra-rare condition.
‘Prosopo’ comes from the Greek word for face ‘prosopon’ while ‘metamorphopsia’ refers to perceptual distortions.
Perhaps what these people are seeing is merely a perceptual distortion, but given the historical lore and the complete absence of any material cause, logic suggests that it is more likely – especially in light of the fact that Clown World is literally demonic – these scientists studying PMO have been ordered to get out in front of the revelation of the true face of the clown-servants of Satan.
It rather reminds me of George MacDonald’s haunting description of the gift of the rose-fire that the princess gives to the young protagonist in The Princess and Curdie.
‘When there is a necessity for your knowing, when you have to do important business with this or that man, there is always a way of knowing enough to keep you from any great blunder. And as you will have important business to do by and by, and that with people of whom you yet know nothing, it will be necessary that you should have some better means than usual of learning the nature of them.
‘Now listen. Since it is always what they do, whether in their minds or their bodies, that makes men go down to be less than men, that is, beasts, the change always comes first in their hands—and first of all in the inside hands, to which the outside ones are but as the gloves. They do not know it of course; for a beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast the less he knows it. Neither can their best friends, or their worst enemies indeed, see any difference in their hands, for they see only the living gloves of them. But there are not a few who feel a vague something repulsive in the hand of a man who is growing a beast.
‘Now here is what the rose-fire has done for you: it has made your hands so knowing and wise, it has brought your real hands so near the outside of your flesh gloves, that you will henceforth be able to know at once the hand of a man who is growing into a beast; nay, more—you will at once feel the foot of the beast he is growing, just as if there were no glove made like a man’s hand between you and it.
‘Hence of course it follows that you will be able often, and with further education in zoology, will be able always to tell, not only when a man is growing a beast, but what beast he is growing to, for you will know the foot—what it is and what beast’s it is. According, then, to your knowledge of that beast will be your knowledge of the man you have to do with.’