THE MAGONIA BLOG

THE STRIEBER ENIGMA

2012-01-27T16:22:00.001Z

Whitley Strieber. Solving the Communion Enigma: What is to Come? Tarcher/Penguin, 2011.

If the book by Maloney was redolent of the 1960s, and that by Torres and Uriate was about a case from the 1960s ( reviewed HERE), the latest contribution by ufology’s answer to Carlos Casteneda is redolent of the 1990s. In fact it looks very much as though it is some manuscript or WPS script from that time, taken down, tarted up a bit with some more recent references and sent in to the publisher.

It is full of the fringe ufolore of the 1990s, implants (Strieber has one, but his is introduced by mysterious humans and not the grey meanies), tales of childhood abuse on military bases (Whitely now has vague memories of this), complete with swipes at the False Memory Association, crop circles and their amazing messages, as well as animal mutilations and the like. There are also hints at the hybrids (not yet fully developed, that will come I presume), along with one new motif, the dead alongside the visitors/fairies. I remember predicting that this would be a coming motif back in the late 1980s, and indeed being told of some actual cases, by Bertrand Meheurst at a conference in Leeds in 1991.

If taken at face value, Strieber’s stories suggest he is having so many anomalous experiences that it is difficult to know how he has the time to eat his breakfast let alone write books. It is not surprising then that the more cynical among the UFO community suggest he is nothing more than a bandwagon jumper, leaping on one fashion after another. If this is the case, on this occasion not only has the bandwagon long departed, but has now crashed and is lying in a heap of twisted metal.

Perhaps there is another way of looking at Strieber, that as a trickster figure and that the Communion series are a form of postmodernist fiction, in which the novelist Whitely Strieber has created a fictional character of the same name (as he did in his post nuclear apocalyptic novel Warday) who is given many of the experiences reported in the UFO literature and in the many letters sent to him; this being a way to promote his spiritual and religious beliefs.

Perhaps in some sense he is all three and perhaps more, someone who has so blurred the realms of real life, dream and fiction that there are no boundaries at all between them. Perhaps his ‘real’ self is now completely taken over by a character of his own creation, a sort of online avatar in the head. – Peter Rogerson.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

2012-01-25T17:01:00.003Z

Mack Maloney. UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn’t Want You to Know. Berkley Books, 2011.

Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte. Aliens in the Forest: The Cisco Grove UFO Encounter Roswell Books, 2011.

Mack Maloney’s book is another of those time warp affairs, a bog standard 1960s UFO book appearing some 45 years late. By that I don't mean that it was written in the 1960s, it looks as though it was written some time in the 1990s, as the latest war mentioned is the first Gulf War of 1991, but its style both physical (an 18cm paperback) and content styles are redolent of that period.

It is essentially just a collection of UFO anecdotes put together usually without any reference to source or the kind of investigation involved, so that stories which reflect actual events, however interpreted, are interspersed with what look like classic “my amazing adventures in the forces” tales told decades after the events. It is probably best applying the test, the more dramatic the story, the less likely it is to be true. In some cases sources are given, which doesn’t exactly add to the confidence. There is the amazing tale of the ‘Red Baron’ von Richthofen, the German WWI ace, and the flying saucer, referenced to that well know scientific publication Weekly World News (he gets the name wrong, calling it ‘World Weekly News’ and wrongly calls it a British tabloid). The WWW does not follow the usual tabloid approach of mingling fact and fiction, in the WWW its all fiction.

Though Maloney briefly deals with the Scareships of the 1900s and First World War, he clearly has never examined any of the studies by Nigel Watson, David Clarke, etc. Much of the work is devoted to the Second World War, and I rather get the impression that it is mostly taken up with material from Keith Chester’s Strange Company, (Reviewed in Magonia 96) only without the notes which allow you to work out what were genuine contemporaneously reported stories and which are the decades later “strange tales from the forces” tales.

Maloney has found that he had a bigger problem, there just weren’t enough UFO stories from war zones to go round, so by arguing the whole of the 1950s and 1960s were the cold war, he was able to add in some of the classic UFO stories from the 1950s, as well as Robert Hasting’s tales of UFOs over the missile sites. Is there even the slightest independent evidence for any of his tales?. We get the usual Jim Penniston version of Rendlesham, but at least Maloney is sceptical of Roswell and does not regale us with tales of abductions and hybrids

Unlike many of today’s UFO books, Aliens in the Forest features a case which was actually investigated, and not too badly by the lights of the times. It refers to a classic CEIII report of the 1960s. The INTCAT summary, though not entirely accurate gives a good idea of what it involved.

September 4 1964 2200 CISCO GROVE (CALIFORNIA:USA)

While hunting in the Cisco Grove mountains, factory worker Donald Shrum (28), became separated from his two companions, and found his expected route back to camp ended in a sheer drop. He was forced to retreat to a canyon with a granite outcropping, sparse bush and few trees. He briefly took refuge in one of these trees, when he heard what sounded like a bear crashing about. When the creature had gone, he got down and made three signal fires. Shortly after he saw a light, which he thought was a lantern, below the horizon. When the light darted up and over a tree he changed his mind and assumed it was a rescue helicopter. However it came closer and hovered without sound or motion, he realized it was something extraordinary and climbed about 3.5m up the 8m tall tree.

The light was white, 20-25cm diameter, and was accompanied by 2 or 4 other objects a regular distance away. The light circled the tree, there was a flash and a dark object fell to the ground, and he noticed a dome shaped object about 400m away. His attention was attracted by noises, as two figures emerged from the bush from slightly different directions. The figures seemed to be curious about the hoot of an owl. A third figure, moving in a noisier and clumsier fashion than the first 2, then arrived. Shrum climbed further up the tree. He now saw that the first two beings were about 1.6m tall, dressed in silvery grey hooded suits. The 3rd was a of darker grey, had no neck, two red flickering eyes, and a rectangular opening for a mouth, these features suggesting it was a robot of some kind.

The two humanoids then tried to climb the tree, one boosting the other up, but without success. The robot then proceeded to attack him with some kind of gas, which made him pass out for a few moments, then awake retching, He fired three arrows at the robot, which struck with a spark, then some of his clothing, which he set alight, his bow, canteen (which the two men examined with interest), and some silver coins, The attacks continued through the night, the men trying to climb the tree all the while. As dawn broke a second robot joined the first, they stood face to face and sparks flew between them, and the area became filled with the gas which rendered Shrum unconscious again, for some time.

When he awoke again, nauseated and suffering from exposure, the beings had all gone. He then made his way back to the camp, being found by one of his companions en route. Back at camp, he found the 3rd man had also nearly got lost, and had seen a large bright glowing light descend. Back at the scene he retrieved two of the arrows, the metal heads of which appeared to have been ground by a file.

The story was reported by Shrum’s family to a local astronomy professor shortly after the incident, and was subject to a perfunctory air force investigation. In early 1965, after reading an article by Donald Keyhoe in True Magazine, Mrs. Shrum wrote to him, which launched a NICAP investigation by Paul Cerney and others.

The authors have acquired Cerney’s archive on the case and conducted their own investigation. Various stages of these investigations are reported here and seem to be fairly consistent as far as memory allows. Fearing publicity Shrum refused to allow his name to be used. though it seems to have circulated through the UFO community for some time, Shrum blames the Air Force for this, but I doubt they were to blame. His full name was first revealed, obviously without his permission, by Ronald Story in his 1980 UFO Encyclopedia (the story is not republished in the in the 2001 2nd edition, so I assume that Cerney, whose notes appear to have been used by Story without attribution, complained). By 2004 it was already across the Internet.

Though Cerney’s investigation was not bad for the time, the transcripts show a fair degree of prompting and uses of terms like “the ship” by the investigators, revealing their belief in the ETH. They attempted to have the little remaining physical evidence, the arrow heads, analyzed, without success. What does, crucially, seem to be lacking is a detailed on site investigation, which should have involved staying the night at the site at the same time of year, to assess visibility, animal and human activity etc.

Like many such cases, this story is essentially intractable, unless you believe that extraterrestrial not only look almost exactly human beings (their description short beings in white uniforms is curiously reminiscent of those in several accounts of the April 1964 Socorro case) are accompanied by robots with more than a passing resemblance to Gort out of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and who are afraid of fire, then the ETH does not look like a plausible explanation. Like Barney Hill, Shrum seems especially afraid of strange eyes (like welders goggles, behind which some kind of fire lurked) on the creatures.

The story is almost certainly not a simple hoax. Shrum seems to have been genuinely traumatized by his ordeal. There is a chance he could have been the victim of some horrible prank, but I am not sure that is a good runner. Explanations must be dependent on the exact viewing conditions, just how much could he see by the light of a low fire on a dark night in the middle of nowhere.

Could the beings with strange luminous eyes and flat faces have been owls? - in the original reports they seem to communicate with hoots like owls. This is likely to be more than a straightforward misinterpretation, perhaps external events are acting as a template for dreams and hypnogogic imagery that continue to intrude, as the affects of fatigue, drowsiness, sensory restriction and anxiety mount. Without site investigation it is impossible to say whether such an area of explanation has any validity. -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson

THE INFINITY PUZZLE

2012-01-21T16:39:00.000Z

Frank Close. The Infinity Puzzle. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Described is the scientific journey taken by particle physicists, leading from the 1930s to today's experiments at CERN, where the Large Hadron Collider is attempting to detect the Higgs boson – suspected of giving other particles the property of mass.

The book's title comes from a fundamental stumbling block encountered in the early part of the journey. When trying to develop mathematical models to encompass three of Nature's forces – electromagnetism, the Weak Force and the Strong Force – physicists found that the value of certain terms in their equations kept becoming infinite, hence showing that the equations were wrong.

Frank Close, the author, is himself a particle physicist, familiar with the scientific papers published over the years. In writing the book he has fleshed-out details of the discovery trail by contacting many of the subject's key players and recording their recollections of seminal moments, and reading unpublished contemporary notes. It's a major review that illustrates the degree of intellectual effort required in advancing the subject, the competition between different researchers, the way knowledge infuses groups, the desire to be first to publish an idea and how unclear it can be, with hindsight, who really was first. Umpteen researchers won the Nobel Prize en route to the World's biggest experiment, at CERN, whilst other, seemingly equally deserving individuals, were bypassed. Also, the name Higgs boson is itself a misnomer. As Professor Higgs modestly points out, the group that essentially proposed the field now known as the Higgs field included five others. But although not fair on them, it is his name alone that the media insist on attaching to the most sought after particle.

A fascinating and well researched book that explains advances in particle physics over the last 80 years or so, largely without mathematics, in the context of the undoubtedly great physicists and engineers involved. It will be of interest to those working in the field and anyone wanting to know the scientific history behind the Higgs boson. -- David I. Simpson

HITLER'S JEWISH 'PSYCHIC'

2012-01-15T14:19:00.001Z

Arthur J. Magida. The Nazi Séance: The Strange Story of the Jewish Psychic in Hitler's Circle. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

It seems to be a characteristic of some of the more successful and charismatic stage magicians and mind-readers that they eventually believe their own publicity and start to imagine that they do genuinely have extraordinary psychic powers. Usually this results in nothing more that a severe dressing-down from sceptics such as CSICOP, but in the case of Erik Jan Hanussen (née Herman Steinschneider) this delusion had the most tragic result.

Hanussen was born in 1889, just fifteen minutes after his mother, Julie Kohn, was released from a prison cell. She had eloped with Siegfried Steinschneider, and her father had them arrested for vagrancy. Siegfried escaped from prison shortly afterward the birth, and traced his wife and son through the infant's crying. Or so it says in Hanussen's autobiography.

This autobiography, Meine Lebenslinie, also tells of how as a child he woke in the middle of the night, rushed to a neighbour's house and saved their daughter from a deadly explosion; leapt onto a farmer's cart and drove it away from a tree a moment before it was struck by lighting and helped capture a notorious criminal in Bohemia. At the age of 14 his elopement with his 45 year old cabaret singer lover was only frustrated by his father's unexpected return home, and later he worked in a circus, when one night the lion-tamer was too drunk to do his act, the youngster, with no previous training, walked into the lion's cage and subdued the animal with a blow across the face with his whip.

If you conclude from this that Hanussen's autobiography should be taken with a massive load of salt, you would be quite right. However Hanussen/Steinschneider did find work in circuses and variety shows across what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Posing as an opera singer, he made his way to Istanbul, where, after the company he was in went broke, staged a fake opera performance, and conned enough money to make his way back to Greece, claiming to be a famous Italian tenor. In the course of this he unmasked a phoney fakir who was stealing jewellery from the wealthy passengers. Of course, almost everything in that account should be prefaced by the word 'allegedly'.

Arriving in Berlin shortly before the First World War and buying a selection of conjuring tricks from a magic shop he began a series of jobs as singer, entertainer, waiter and conjurer at cafes and cabarets in the city. He also took his first stab at journalism, taking over the editorship of Der Blitz, a scandal sheet which makes today's tabloids look very mild indeed.

Soon after, the war broke out and Steinschneider as he was still calling himself, was sent to a nightmarish posting on the eastern front. Here he began a series of fund-raising performances where he started developing his 'mind-reading' skills. Eventually he was spending so much time away from the fighting that he became virtually a deserter. Thanks to a lucky meeting he was asked to perform in Vienna, and at this point he adopted the name Hanussen, posing as a Danish minor aristocrat. This enabled him to escape detection as a deserter, and distanced himself from his Jewish roots.

Under this name he performed at the Vienna Konzerthaus in April 1916, finding to his consternation that Emperor Karl and members of the Imperial Royal Family were in the audience. He gave a creditable mind-reading performance, using the technique of 'muscle reading' with members of the audience. Asked by a member of the Royal party to perform another show, he became an overnight sensation.

After a disatrous tour in the USA with a strongwoman act, Hannuson returned to Europe, settling in Berlin, where he began the most successful stage of his career as a mind reader and hypnotist, calling himself "The world's greatest hypnotist" and "Europe's greatest oracle since Nostradamus". Despite brushes with the law in Czechoslovakia and Berlin, his reputation, and fortune grew. In 1930, Hanussen was introduced to the Nazi Wolfgang-Heinrich von Helldorf, head of the Berlin SA stormtroopers. With antisemitism and political violence rising in the city, Hanussen felt in need of a protector within the establishment. With Helldorf's profligate spending, and Hanussen's growing wealth, the ever-increasing piles of IOUs that Hanussen was receiving from the Nazi felt like an insurance.

At this time, he was not only still hiding his Jewishness, but also seemed to be enthusiastically supporting Hitler's rise to power. He had started his own newspaper, Eric Jan Hanussens Berliner Wochenschau, a weekly which comprised of horoscopes, movie news, lonely heart advice and plugs for Hanussen’s own psychic salon, as well as adverts for his magical paraphernalia. But soon it began enthusiastically supporting the Nazis, giving its pages over to praise of Hitler as the coming superman and saviour of the German nation..

But as the rumours around Hanussen grew - that he was Hitler's astrologer and that the Fuehrer relied on his advice and foresight, which was quite untrue - his world began to crack. His Jewishness was revealed by a Communist newspaper; and eventually coming to believe in his own impregnability and his powers as a psychic he was loose-lipped with advance knowledge he had gained of the Reichstag fire. His pile of IOUs proved an ineffectual shield when the stormtroopers' guns were held to his head.

Magida looks carefully at Hanussen's alleged powers, attempting to define what - if any - were real, how his showmanship worked, what was rumour, what was fact, and what was sheer invention from the stories that surrounded him. Ultimately the powers that he had convinced himself that he wielded were shown to be shadows against the greater shadow that engulfed and destroyed. A fascinating, meticulously researched account of a life that stretched from the broadest farce to the darkest tragedy, and with lessons about power and belief that have a wider resonance. -- John Rimmer

HYSTERIA AND HYSTERICS

2012-01-13T13:49:00.003Z

Andrew Scull. Hysteria: The Disturbing History. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Jan Goldstein. Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux Princeton University Press, 2011

In April 1602 a teenage London girl, Mary Glover, had a run in with a neighbour, Elizabeth Jackson, after which Mary, developed strange symptoms such as fits, a constriction in the throat, which made eating difficult, paralysis, swelling belly and etc. This led to the conviction of Elizabeth Jackson for witchcraft, for which she had to suffer a year’s imprisonment and several visits to the pillory. It also led to a fierce dispute among experts as to whether this was a natural disease occasioned by the wandering of the womb, or indeed the result of supernatural influence.

Two hundred and twenty years later, in the summer of 1822, “Nanette Leroux” (pseudonym) an 18 year old servant girl in the Piedmont dominated semi-state of Savoy was sexual abused by a rural policeman after which she developed symptoms including convulsions, lethargy, periods of mutism, periods of profound rigidity, and periods of somnambulism in which she re-enacted scenes of various kinds, including that of her assault.

The first story introduces Andrew Scull’s history of hysteria, which traces its often winding path from classical medicine's assumptions that it was caused by the wandering of the womb, through the rise of early modern medicine, through the age of 19th century psychiatry to the psychological battle scars of the twentieth century. The second is the subject of Jan Goldstein’s ‘microhistory’, which includes a full reproduction of the doctors’ reports.

In his book Scull traces the arguments between those who saw hysteria as a mainly physiological problem and those who saw it primarily psychological terms. The former included the French neurologist J-M Charcot, who ran the Salpetriere asylum which all the authoritarian élan of the ‘Napoleon of the Neuroses’, a term he took fairly literally judging by his photograph on p110! (left). The latter included his one time pupil Sigmund Freud.

They were united by one main thing though, the idea that hysteria was mainly a disease of women ‘the weaker sex’, though gay or otherwise ‘degenerate’ men may also suffer from it. This idea was only overthrown with the traumas of the First World War. Scull provides some graphic accounts of the circumstances which could lead up to ‘shell shock’ as it was then called. On no account should this chapter be read while eating!

Another common factor across the ages and interpretations was the harshness and casual cruelty of the treatments proposed. The surgical removal of the clitoris, multiple bleeding, Charcot’s circus-like exhibition of his ‘grand hysterics’, Freud’s treatment of Dora K, a teenage girl who appears to have been handed to the husband of her father’s lover as a sex toy in compensation, all the way to the grotesque treatments of the other ranks with battle stress.

Scull notes that after the First World War, grand hysteria disappeared, though all sorts of psychosomatic or possibly psychosomatic conditions survive, and are fiercely contested between those who see them as physical conditions and those who see them as primarily psychological. Examples include ME, Gulf War Syndrome and related disorders. See for example HERE and comment.

Such debates tend to be based on a false dichotomy fuelled by an essentially dualist separation between mind and body. Today there is increasing recognition of mind/body unity, and given the probability that the unifying factor in also these hysterical syndromes is stress and what we now know of the effects of stress on the immune system, then it is entirely probable that such stress related disorders will include greater vulnerability to all sorts of viruses, bacteria and contaminants which might be otherwise harmless. It should also be pointed out that many “hysterical” symptoms can be seen in other animals under stress, suggesting that they are rooted in deep biological adaptations.

Some of these points come out especially strongly in Goldstein’s analysis, though her own analysis probably owes too much to Foucault and Freud. She does however position the case in his historical setting in counter-revolutionary Savoy, back under Piedmont’s control after previously being annexed by revolutionary France. ‘Nanette’ is a peasant girl who is servant in a bourgeois household, who has had a little more education than many of the girls of her class and time. When she falls ill she comes to the attention of Dr Despine, the Superintendent of the Spa in the main town of Aix-les-Bains. The good Dr Despine is a devotee of ‘animal magnetism’, the ancestor of hypnotism. Under his influence she develops a series of wild talents of the sort that would later be given the title “the higher phenomena of hypnotism”. These included telepathy and the ability to read with various parts of her body including her elbow and her nipples.

Her treatments at the hands of this doctor prefigure the exploitative performances produced by Charcot. These include an occasion in which, when she is bathing nude, various unauthorised spectators are allowed in to watch “the success of the treatment”.

A central figure in her story is a fellow servant Joseph Mailland, who becomes her ‘caretaker’ and note taker (words like ‘manager’ and even ‘’pimp’ come to my mind). He seems to occupy a sort of liminal zone between father and lover, with a definite bias to the latter. It is interesting how her symptoms abate when he puts his hand on her breast. He is a character in her various somnambulistic dramas (the later is quite literal, they really do involve little playlets), and is the testifier to some of her more dramatic feats. She can read his mind (on one occasion coming up with the comment which can be translated as “Babe you know I’m not the sort of girl who hangs around in bars!” Quite)

She decides that there is a sure way to cure her, or at least help her, that is for her to be bought a watch, a rare and expensive item at the time. It is hard not to translate this into modern terms - all will be well if you will only buy me a Porsche. She eventually cures herself (for a time at least) by masturbating to orgasm in the bath. Or so she says. The issue of the watch may give us the clearest clue as to what this might all be about, though I suspect the answer may be simpler than suggested by Goldstein’s rather complex hypothesis involving Nanette’s menstrual periods.

My reading of this story is as follows; in the beginning Nanette’s problems are an expression of what we would now call post traumatic stress disorder occasioned by the sexual assault, but there is more to it. The assailant as a police officer is an agent of the oppressive state, and it is not difficult to suspect that he may have used this to intimidate her, and to imply that she is nothing more than a village slut he can have his way with whenever he wants. This incident reminds of her position as being part of a oppressed age group in a oppressed gender in a oppressed class in a oppressed occupied state in a wider oppressed empire. She is at the bottom of the hierarchy, little Miss Nobody. She has been made to feel utterly worthless. We can thus see that the ownership of the watch is a symbol that she is worth something after all, she is a somebody, she has something that the other village girls do not. Here we see the beginnings of the modern consumer culture, where people’s worth is measured in terms of the consumer goods they produce.

The watch may also be a symbol of order, as Goldstein suggests, and it seems there is an element of taking control of her sexuality, as the semi sexual relationship with Maillard seems to imply. She is in control of that relationship, she determines how far he can go. Should he want to go too far she reminds him that she is not “that sort of girl”. Her cure by masturbation also implies her control over her sexuality, but it also implies something else, her turning the tables on the doctor and hangers on who have voyeuristically exploited and embarrassed her, she now sets out to embarrass him.

But sexuality does not strike me as the main source of her behaviours, the somatic disorders and subsequent learned behaviour start with quite another emotion, repressed rage, and the fear of where that rage might take her. Her periods of mutism echoes the silences imposed on the oppressed, and her fears that in revealing and denouncing the assault she might have said too much. The paralysis a way of preventing her striking back (at a biological level it represents the repression of the flight/fight response). The dramas she enacts act as a form of release, as do periods of altered states of consciousness. In her “normal” consciousness she takes on the role of the demure “proper lady”, she can be released in periods of altered states, which included hours of gaiety followed by tears, behaviour which resembles that of intoxication.

She may not be the sort of the girl who hangs around in bars, but she has other techniques of liberation, inherited from folk traditions of altered states.

As with the various patients of Charcot and others, Nanette, by being a ‘hysteric’ can become, at least a local, celebrity, then as now a way in which a working class girl could escape the prison of her environment, but as now, at the price of being the object of public voyeurism. The magic tricks such as reading with various parts of her body are clearly forms of

performance, but they also feature some symbolic aspects of ways of saying that she knows things that she shouldn’t.

Eventually Nanette marries, but when she becomes pregnant for the first time, her symptoms start to reappear, as she realises that being a peasant wife and mother is going to be far from a bed of roses. Was she seeking another escape, is so she failed for neither Despine, nor his correspondent and editor Alex Bertrand show any enthusiasm for renewing their studies. Indeed Bertrand is aware that many of her claimed phenomena have only appeared when she met Despine, and many were only authenticated by Maillard.

Perhaps the biggest enigma of grand hysteria is its disappearance, this seems to have coincided with the emancipation of women in the first half of the twentieth century, offering new escape routes. New media may also have washed away the folk culture which sustained it, and we should not ignore the possibility that some of its phenomena were the result of physical illnesses which were gradually eradicated though improved nutrition and sanitation. -- Peter Rogerson.

WRITTEN IN STONE

2012-01-12T22:46:00.004Z

Richard Cassaro. Written in Stone. Deeper Truth Books, 2011.

The ancient megalithic buildings of the world are, for the most part, a mystery to us in the current era. From Stonehenge and Avebury here in Britain to the Pyramids in Egypt and Macchu Picchu in Peru, structures built with massive stones by methods that are fiercely debated today are the subject of puzzlement and curiosity. One the one hand, someone comes along and ‘solves’ what the structures do, only for this to be shouted down by the next theorist. Stonehenge is an observatory, but then becomes noted for its acoustic properties. The Great Pyramid is a tomb until it is suggested that it is a mechanism for transporting the Pharaoh’s soul to the Pleiades.

And so on and so on. From our vantage point in the 21st Century, because our science has achieved so much in a few hundred years compared to the thousands before spent travelling by horse and lighting our houses with candles, we now seem to feel it as an affront that we cannot solve every problem going, including that of what these enigmatic edifices, some incredibly old, were used for. Were they temples? Were they developed for something more intricate than that? Or were they, as quite a few folk writing today would have it, keepers of occult knowledge that can speak meaningfully to us even now.

I think that it is fair to say that Richard Cassaro falls into the last category. In brief, Written in Stone tells of a spiritual message that transcends time and is part and parcel of every major ancient civilisation that left large stone buildings behind. When this vital piece of information to humankind was covered up, firstly by Judaism then by Christianity, it was smuggled into the holy buildings of the latter by the mediæval guilds of stonemasons so that the enlightened could decode it. The stonemasons evolved into modern, speculative Freemasonry where, although the message itself was still transmitted from one generation to the next, the meaning was forgotten and has had to be rediscovered now.

Some gripes. Firstly, I found that quite a few of the pictures suffered from being too small. I have nothing against pictures if you can see what points they are trying to make. If you cannot then it is a waste of time, effort, ink and paper to put them in. Early on in the book they tend to crowd around the text in a breathless fashion, competing with the writing for attention. I personally feel it is much better to have either fewer and larger pictures or a bigger book. It may seem a minor point, but it had enough impact for me to mention it specifically. I find this is becoming a trend in books dealing with speculative archæology, and an irritating one at that. As I say, pictures are only of any use if they can be seen clearly, so I hope that this is something that can be worked on for the future.

It could have been trying to read around the pictures, but I also felt that the author was rushing sometimes. The presentation seems very busy, and (in his eagerness to impart his world view) he segues from one subject to another at speed. I would have preferred more time explaining fewer examples, but maybe that is a personal issue.

The next point to be made is about the Freemasons, and it is this. No-one, not even the Freemasons themselves, knows quite how they originated. They themselves have speculated that they were descended from the aforementioned mediæval guilds of stonemasons who came over from the Continent after constructing the wondrous Gothic cathedrals and went around Britain to spread their (possibly occult) knowledge by building ours. When they, or rather their descendants, had finished this noble and holy task they settled here and kept their secrets by admitting members of the gentry to their lodge meetings. Thus, everything has been preserved until the present day.

The trouble with this is that there is very little evidence for it, and some Masonic scholars even dispute this version of events. There are also plenty of researchers who are convinced that Freemasonry came about as the Knights Templar were forced underground in 1307. Richard Cassaro does not address the issue of the uncertain origins of the Freemasons. He just assumes that speculative stonemasonry spawned the organisation, with no alternative offered or debated. I have to say that, to miss this point out in a book that hinges on the claim that the hidden knowledge descended specifically from actual builders in stone to a gentlemen’s club with rituals is baffling, to say the least.

Having said that, the book does raise intriguing questions as to the spread of both spiritual concepts and architectural features in the ancient world. The author’s observation that the triptych (in this case one feature flanked by two smaller, such as a tower or a doorway) as being universal is rather striking, and something that does not seem obvious until it is pointed out. Then, it seems widespread and something that asks for an explanation, which leads us back to the book.

Richard Cassaro’s theory, however, that the concept of the dying and rising god/king was fairly common in Europe then, with the advent of monotheism, was diverted from its use as a tool of Hermetic wisdom and changed into an instrument of general suppression is fascinating. Certainly there were many gods who died and rose again, and they were worshipped around the time that Christianity was forming. The idea that our old selves “die” and we, spiritually, are “reborn” is commonly available today – ironically, especially in the notion of the born-again Christian. It was not the case in a Western world dominated by Christian orthodoxy. I will stick my neck out and say that it is a fairly safe assumption that Freemasonry, especially in the ritual of the Third Degree, has preserved the idea of spiritually dying and rising, so in that respect at least I concur with the author. However, I remain to be convinced as to the road that this knowledge took to get there. -- Trevor Pyne

This book may be ordered here:
http://www.deepertruth.com/store.php#ecwid:category=0&mode=product&product=6675290

HISTORY OF SATAN

2012-01-07T19:12:00.000Z

Miguel A. De La Torre and Albert Hernández. The Quest for the Historical Satan. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2011.

On the face of it, this is not quite the same as writing about, say, ‘The Quest for the Historical Arthur’, which implies that there was a historical King Arthur underlying the mediaeval romances, as it is rather more contentious to suggest that there was a historical Satan. The authors begin with a chapter on ‘Satan in the Modern World’, a quick jaunt through legends that McDonald’s or Proctor and Gamble are in league with the Devil, Halloween, Satan on film (they assert that Hollywood means ‘Holy Wood’, an unlikely etymology which derives, I have been told, from a Terry Pratchett novel), the Church of Satan, alleged Satanic crime (they kindly refer to my own publication on this subject), the views of fundamentalist Christians such as Hal Lindsay (whose reputation does not seem to have been affected by the failure of his prophecy that “The decade of the 1980’s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it”), Catholics, and Liberal Christians who obviously take a milder view of the matter. After that they turn, not quite to the history of Satan, but ‘A Textual History’.

Probably the earliest references to Satan are in the opening chapters of the Book of Job, from which it appears that heaven was regarded as a celestial courtroom, in which God was the judge and Satan the prosecutor. (In those days you were not given a defence lawyer, neither on earth nor in heaven.) A prosecutor – the word Satan actually means ‘adversary’ - is not inherently evil, but, if one takes the view that we are all ‘miserable sinners’, then he is obviously someone to be feared.

Over the centuries many other concepts were added. Early in the sixth century (BC), the Hebrews were taken away to captivity in Babylonia. But in about 538 Babylon was conquered by the Persians under Cyrus the Great, and so they came into contact with the Zoroastrian religion, whose scriptures state that: “In the beginning, there were two Spirits, Twins spontaneously active; these were the Good Spirit and the Evil, in thought, and in word, and in deed.” Eventually, Satan would become identified with the Evil Spirit. This was quite different from the earlier concept that all things, good or bad came from God, as in Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”

One passage that has created considerable debate is Genesis 6:2: “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” The ‘Sons of God’ were presumably angels, who are normally supposed to be sexless, so how could this be? The inter-testamental Book of Enoch explained that Semihazah, the leader of the Watchers (angels whose task was to watch over the universe) persuaded two hundred fellow angels to engage in sexual intercourse with human women, as a result of which they were expelled from heaven. The early church father Origen connected this story with a passage in Isaiah (14:12): “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” “He rejected the notion that the passage could be a reference to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.”

Accordingly, Lucifer became the leader of the fallen angels, and was identified with Satan, though the latter was not mentioned in the Book of Enoch; among Christians the name Semihazah became forgotten. Ironically, Lucifer, which means ‘Light-bearer’, referred to Venus as the morning star, whereas at the very end of the Bible Jesus is quoted as saying that “I am . . . the bright and morning star.” (Revelations 22:16) Also, 2 Peter 1:19, in the Latin version, “suggests that the prophets of old are a lamp for light the way until Jesus as lucifer rises within our minds”, although the Authorised Version renders ‘lucifer’, as ‘the day star’.

In the New Testament, Satan appears by name, but also translated into Greek as Diabolos, which likewise means adversary, and whence we get the English word Devil. A vision of the future in Revelation 12:9 reads: “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” It may have been the phrase ‘the old serpent’ that led Satan to be identified with the serpent who tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, indeed I have known people who believe that this is stated in the Bible, although in fact it is one of many features of Christian belief and theology which have no scriptural authority.

Though some Jews and Christians thought that the deities of the Pagans were simply non-existent, most held that they were real, but actually evil spirits deceiving the human race. The Greek word daimon meant a spirit, or a God. Accordingly, the word demon came to signify a devil.

The millennia from the rise of Christianity to the present day are treated in less detail, including such matters as Dante’s Inferno, the witch craze, and the justification of the colonisation of the Americas on the grounds that the indigenous people were in league with the devil, and hence engaged in cannibalism and bestiality. They date “the start of Satan’s death pangs” to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which, on an important Catholic feast day, killed four people out of five in the city, and destroyed almost every church. This made people reluctant to believe in God, and this had a ‘knock-on’ effect, since there can be few people who believe in Satan but not in God. Curiously, though, it was in the nineteenth century that versions of the Faust story became particularly popular, and the theme of the “Devil‘s Pact” is to this day common in ‘horror’ literature and film. In particular, we now have the novels of Frank E. Peretti, This Present Darkness and its sequel, Piercing the Darkness, the latter being the winner of the Evangelical Christian Publisher Association Gold Medallion Book Award in 1990 for best fiction.

Despite the book’s wide scope, there are one or two other points that I feel should have been included. According to Revelations 20:10: “And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” Yet, in later tradition, it was the devil and his minions who were responsible for torturing sinners, and there was never any suggestion that they were suffering themselves.

Some other remarks need qualification. They say that “the deities of the former ancestral faith . . . became the demons of the new Christian religion”, citing the example of the “resemblance of the Devil to the Greek and Roman god Pan, who possessed cloven-feet, horns, and goatee”. There is some truth in this, for instance the 1723 engraving of the temptation in the wilderness by Anthony Vitre shows the Devil as a sort of female Pan, with horns, goat’s legs, and breasts. But more often he had bird’s feet, scales, and claws, not really looking like anything in Pagan art. Moreover, these images were comparatively late, perhaps thirteenth century. The mosaic on the floor of the cathedral of Otranto in south-east Italy, which dates from 1165, simply depicts Satan as a man, though with a large forked tongue.

If I may indulge in some nit-picking literary criticism, the proof-reading leaves something to be desired: they say that Satan was mentioned “three times across two verses in Zechariah (3:11-12)”. The third chapter of Zechariah has only ten verses; they meant 3:1-2. There is a reference to “Swanson 2005, 13”, but this work has been omitted from the bibliography. Also, the index could be better, there is for instance no reference to Enoch, although he is important to the story. -- Gareth J. Medway

KEEP OUT!

2012-01-04T13:58:00.004Z

Nick Redfern, Keep Out! Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About, New Page Books, N.J., 2012

In this romp through stories mainly about alleged strange goings-on at secret bases, Nick Redfern lets the reader decide whether they are true, partly true, or just misinformation, lies and fantasies.
He starts with one of the best-known cases, the claims of Bob Lazar that he was employed at a secret base in Nevada, the notorious Area 51, on the task of investigating the workings of a fleet of alien spacecraft which the US government had somehow acquired. Lazar certainly had some technical knowledge and experience, but he also claimed to have received an MS in electronics from the California Institute of Technology and an MS in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but no evidence could be found to support these claims. Some of the things Lazar claimed were true and some were false, the resulting confusion giving plenty for believers and sceptics to argue about.

Those who believe that the US government possibly holds the secret of the saucers are also fascinated by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Among these people was Senator Barry Goldwater, who wrote to a UFO researcher in 1975 stating that he had tried to find out what was in a certain building there.
Redfern informs us: "The building to which Goldwater was referring is allegedly a super-secret location that many UFO researchers believe houses the remains of one or more crashed UFOs, along with the cryogenically preserved remains of their deceased alien crewmembers. Its memorable moniker is Hangar 18."

One theory about the persistence of such stories is that they are encouraged by officialdom to hide research into new aircraft designs and weaponry. This is supposed to discourage serious journalists interested in defence matters from investigating because they don't want to be associated with a subject as disreputable as ufology.

Almost everybody who reads this review will have heard of the British hacker Gary McKinnon, who is awaiting possible extradition to the USA concerning alleged damage to NASA computers. Redfern mentions him in passing, as he has written about him at length elsewhere, but he gives more space to another British hacker, Matthew Bevan, who hacked into Wright-Patterson in 1994 and 1995 using a Commodore Amiga 1200, a computer that was primitive compared to those readily available today. However, Bevan got away with it, as the judge dismissed the case after the US authorities refused to supply the evidence to support their charges.

What puzzles me about such cases is why it was apparently so easy for such people to hack into US government computers containing lots of classified information. Why do the US authorities employ such incompetents to manage their computer systems?

The main theme of secret bases includes a chapter about bases on the moon, thought by some to have been built secretly by the USA (who else?). However, Ingo Swann used his amazing remote-viewing talents to determine that lunar bases were the work of extraterrestrials. If that doesn't seem incredible enough, it is true that Swann actually worked for the US government's remote viewing program, which investigated the possibility of using such talents (if they really existed) for intelligence gathering.

There are chapters on other topics, including one on stories of strange creatures, phantoms, and even cannibals haunting the London Underground railway system. This book is great fun to read, especially if you are unfamiliar with the topics discussed. -- John Harney.

Comments:
cda: I feel a comment on the Goldwater matter is necessary. As far as I can tell, Senator Goldwater once requested access to the Blue Book files at Wright-Patterson AFB, nothing else. This was during the period 1961-65 while General Curtis LeMay was the USAF Chief of Staff. Goldwater's request was refused (presumably by LeMay himself). In March 1975 Goldwater replied to a constituent who had asked him about UFOs and related this story of "ten or twelve years ago". Although Goldwater used the phrase "above top secret", at no point did he say he was trying to access bodies or UFO wreckage. He was merely trying to access USAF files, like writers such as Keyhoe and organisations such as NICAP and APRO. It was only years later that the Goldwater story mushroomed into rumors about artefacts and bodies, and a top secret room known as the "Blue Room". Tim Good, writing in Above Top Secret, talks about Goldwater trying to see UFO artefacts but not bodies or actual craft. Nick Redfern appears to See more...
By cda on KEEP OUT! on 05/01/12

Nick Redfern: CDA: You say: "Nick Redfern appears to take the story a stage further and talks about the senator seeking the remains of bodies and crashed UFOs, all supposedly stored in a secret building known as Hangar 18." Where the hell are you getting that idea from? Certainly not from my book, I know that much! Here are my exact words from my "Keep Out!" book as they relate to what I say in the book about the Goldwater saga: QUOTE: 'On March 28, 1975, the late and renowned Barry Goldwater – who served as a Major-General in the Air Force, a Senator for Arizona, the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States in the 1964 election, and the Chairman of the U.S. Government’s Senate Intelligence Committee - wrote the following, highly thought-provoking words to a UFO researcher named Shlomo Arnon: “The subject of UFOs is one that has interested me for some long time. About ten or twelve years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information is stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret.” 'Well, it’s certainly not every day you receive in the mail a letter like that – and from a U.S. senator and a presidential-nominee. Unless, that is, the subject-matter of the letter left a deep, lasting impression upon that same senator and nominee, which it clearly did.' END OF QUOTE. I made no specific statement - at all - that Goldwater was on the hunt for alien bodies. Rather, directly after referring to Goldwater's letter to Shlomo Arnon, I state in the book that UFO researchers believe the place Goldwater was trying to access is where alien bodies are stored, and that it has become known as Hangar 18. Saying some UFO researchers believe there might be bodies at Wright-Pat is very, very different from, as you word it: "Nick Redfern appears to take the story a stage further and talks about the senator seeking the remains of bodies and crashed UFOs." There's no statement in my book about Goldwater seeking bodies or crashed craft, only that this is what some investigators conclude. By Nick Redfern on KEEP OUT! on 09/01/12.

cda: Quite right Nick. I ought not to have implied that you said this in your book (which I have not read). However it is true that some UFO extremists HAVE said this about Sen. Goldwater. I should have made this clear rather than extrapolating from John Harney's review. I am still curious who first used the term 'Hangar 18'. By cda on KEEP OUT! on 12/01/12

TREASURE TROVE

2012-01-02T17:47:00.003Z

Johannes Dillinger. Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America. Palgrave Macmillan (Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic). 2011.

When we think of treasure hunting today, the image that comes to mind is of an individual with a map and a metal detector scanning open farmland or on a beach. We see it in strictly practical terms: someone in the past has lost or hidden money, jewels or valuable artefacts, and the treasure hunter attempts to locate them through scientific equipment or by deciphering clues in maps, documents or the landscape itself. We tend not to think of it as a magical process. However, in this volume Johannes Dillinger, an expert on folk-belief in Early-Modern Europe, explains that this way of looking at treasure hunting is very recent indeed, largely developing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Historically treasure hunting has been a magical, even religious, pursuit. In medieval times it would often involve hunting for relics of the saints, which had both a commercial and spiritual power, and the treasure hunters would be guided by signs and visions. The locations of these relics would traditionally be guarded by saints and angels.

Secular treasure hunting took the same religious ideas and images and introduced them into popular belief. Treasure hunting became part of folk magic and began to develop its own complex set of beliefs. Many grimoirs included spells and incantations to discover hidden treasure, and individuals with special talents were deemed necessary to find such treasure. The religious and secular authorities were suspicious of the activity - the use of supernatural means to obtain wealth was an ungodly, possibly devilish, practice. And of course the secular authorities were greatly concerned as to whether or not any recovered treasure belonged to the state, the landowner of the location where it was discovered, or to the finder. The legal practice varied greatly across Europe and in different eras - from an almost complete lack of official interest to an assumption that all recovered treasure belonged to the local ruler.

It was generally believed that treasure hunters used supernatural means in their searches, but they were seldom linked with witchcraft, and punishments for unauthorised activities were usually more lenient. Victims of the witch persecutions tended to be people who had already antagonised the local community, which was not generally the case with the treasure seekers. Folk demonology was more concerned with alleged malefic activities against neighbours, crops and livestock, and although the law considered any form of supernatural activity to be the work of the devil, it was believed that treasure hunters, unlike witches, had not learned their craft directly from him. In fact one of the main techniques, dowsing, was in most places considered a perfectly natural activity, being used in an everyday manner by miners to detect new seams of coal and ore.

Among the perils that the hunters had to guard against were the guardians of the treasure, which took the form of ghost, demons, even dragons. However, it would often be ghosts and spirits who would also guide the seekers to their goal, a motif which lasted well into the modern era. An interesting example of this which has recently come to light was a haunting in Sheffield in 1855, described by David Clarke (Fortean Times 284, February 2012) where treasure-seekers attempted to dig up the basement of a house where a ghost had been reported to be guarding treasure.

Dillinger gives accounts of a series of bizarre treasure-hunting expeditions, many taken from the extensive records of the Duchy of Württemberg and elsewhere in Germany, as well as from accounts of English trials. A factor that seems missing from many of these records is any attempt to explain the origin of the treasure that was being searched for, still less any attempt to search for the treasure in a 'scientific' or 'archaeological' manner. There was sometimes an assumption that treasure might have been hidden by some religious foundation - this was particularly the case in England after the Dissolution of the Monasteries - and church or abbey ruins and wayside crosses were favourite spots to search - but more often the treasure trove would be sought for in a remote uninhabited location. In most cases the treasure would seem to just exist in its own right, unconnected to the society around it.

This is, according to Dillinger, the whole point of the treasure legend. People in pre-modern, traditional societies believed in the "image of limited goods" - that there was a fixed quantity of wealth in any one place, so that one individual could only become wealthier at the expense of another. In this society hunting for treasure allowed material gain to be socially acceptable, as the wealth that might be accrued came from the magical sphere and had no deleterious effect on other members of the community. As society and economic conditions changed and increased wealth could come from within the economic system, the need for 'magical' wealth declined. Treasure began to be associated with actual historical facts, which could be interpreted to find the trove.

This is a fascinating and complex book, and although scholarly is very accessible, even just for the remarkable collection of narratives of treasure hunting expeditions. -- John Rimmer.

ANIMAL MAGIC

2011-12-21T10:20:00.000Z

Paul A. Trout. Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination. Prometheus Books, 2011.

Pat Shipman. The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human. W. W. Norton, 2011.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch !
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

This verse from Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass summarise the thesis of Paul Trout’s book: the origins of language and religion in our ancestors’ fear and awe of terrible predators.

In his opening chapters Trout recounts the various giant predators our Palaeolithic ancestors had to content with from sabre toothed tigers, huge lizards, cave bears, giant bears and all sorts of other things that even the most fervent cryptozoologist would not wish to see surviving in remote places. He argues that much of our species’ history we were less the mighty hunter than often the defenceless prey. Theirs was a world in which the terror induced by powerful predators was ubiquitous, a terror the echoes of which he traces in the mythology of many peoples, quoting many examples.

He argues that the origins of language will have been in warnings about predators and how to avoid them, and in the mimetic performances needed to warn the young of their dangers. Perhaps it was women raising the young who first constructed languages.

The first gods, he argues were these great predatory animals, the lions, leopards, jaguars, crocodiles and such like; the terrible beasts of the earth, water and air.

They are the origins of the first true great fear, that of being torn to pieces, devoured and excreted by wild beasts, the sights and sounds of prey being thus torn apart and consumed being a matter of common experience. This experience is recapitulated by the visionary experiences of the shaman, wherein he or she is devoured, disembowelled then reassembled, reborn; and initiatory rituals for the young wherein the elders take on the role of the predators with appropriate masks. These experiences mimic the fear of being devoured and the ecstasy of survival.

The encounters with these awesome beasts are not only terrifying, the hormonal changes produced by the activation of the fight/flight response are also thrilling.

He is particularly persuasive in his argument that fear and awe of predators is the foundation of sacrifice, one member of the group is sacrificed to the predator so it may be satiated and the rest of the group may be saved.

A very important point that Trout makes is that human beings had to develop strategies for detecting and dealing with predators. One is what he calls an Agency Detection Device, sensing a predator behind any ambiguous stimuli, the second is a Theory of Mind Mechanism attributes that agency with human like feelings, desires and intentions. Thus even the absence of real predators we imagine invisible ones, 'spirits' and the like. These mechanisms are the ones which invest all sorts of natural phenomena with human like minds.

Pat Shipman also tracks the relationships between early humans and animals, and sees their interaction, along with the development of tools, as transforming human consciousness and aiding the development of language. Shipman takes what Trout might see as a more conventional course, that of concentrating on the role of humans as predators rather than prey, forcing their attention ever deeper onto the animals around them, particularly prey animals. Shipman also tracks the role of domestication, starting with the wolf, which she tracks back much further than has been usually supposed, perhaps back 100,000 rather than 10,000 years.

This suggests an important modifier of Trout’s thesis, predators are not just sources of fear and awe to our ancestors, but providers and guides. Humans tracked powerful predators in order to scavenge on the kill, later as they become more and more accomplished hunters they increasing admire the other predators, seek to learn their secrets, to emulate them. In this thesis the predator is not just an enemy but a dangerous, edgy ally.

The idea of invisible predators may lead to another intellectual leap, that of seeing all the really existing physical predators as manifestations or avatars of some archetypal cosmic Universal Predator. This predator becomes manifest not only in specific predatory animals but in the totality of wild nature, seen as the giver and taker of life.

For the hunters sacrifice to the “Universal Predator” is not simply to prevent him/her taking humans, but to prevent him/her taking too much of the game that humans also depend upon The “Universal Predator” is seen as master/mistress of the game. If the game animals are scarce it is because the Great Predator has taken them: the storms, floods, droughts and dearths are its rage. The awe and trembling once felt before a flesh and blood predator is now a fear and awe of the totality of wild nature and the One Circle of creation, destruction and recreation. This awe is what the Greeks called panic, fear of the god Pan, echoes of which are still to be found as forest and mountain terrors.

The predators of the imagination still haunt us, almost any large puddle can be seen as the home of a lake monster, the devouring water itself being seen as a predatory persona. We see beasts from the air like mothman or the chupacabra. Phantom big cats stalk the green fields of England. Once fear of the dead may have been occasioned by dead bodies attracting dangerous predators, now the dead are seen as predators, whether the physical bodies of zombies and vampires (zombies are just seen as walking hunger, vampires suck out the blood of their victims) or the more ethereal presences of ghosts, who bring something of the awesome terror of the wilderness into the settled home. The strange presences felt during sleep paralysis with their whispering noises echo predators stalking in the night.

Our pet cats and dogs are liminal creatures, the predators that we imagine we have domesticated but whose ultimate wildness we can never conquer. Call our cat by whatever human or cute name we can think of, one day they will bring a living screaming disembowelled bird or mouse as a present to remind you of what they really are. The dog is still a wolf, the predator we have had the most intimate and ambiguous relationship with. We think we have tamed it, but not a year goes by without Rover turning round and maiming or killing a child. The wolf/dog is par excellence the liminal creature, guardian of the boundary between habitat and wilderness, participating in both. With the wolf/dog we can be hunter and hunted. Like the phantom felines, phantom black dogs dog the lanes of England, in some folklore turning easily into the true, protean avatar of the Universal Predator.

In an age of the machine, where the only predator that most urban people have to fear is ourselves, it is not surprising that the phantom predators of our age are dominated by sacral or daemonic machines, the UFOs, nor that they first appeared in force after the war in which humans reached the apotheosis of their demonic predatory activity. The old image of the initiate being swallowed, dismembered and reconstructed in the maw of the predator becomes an image of being abducted by predatory aliens and subject to “medical experiments” by greys with the vast eyes of the Universal Predator.

Trout in his own final chapter argues that the modern predators are those portrayed in the range of science fiction and slasher movies, and in the reactions of the audiences. This brings us back to the themes of Monsters in America reviewed HERE. – Peter Rogerson.

UNDERGROUND, OVERGROUND, WOMBLING FREE!

2011-12-18T17:55:00.001Z

Tom Bolton. London's Lost Rivers, A Walker's Guide. Strange Attractor Press, 2011.

Mark Mason. Walk the Lines, The London Underground, Overground. Random House Books, 2011.

At first sight these two titles might seem to have little in common with the sort of topics we discuss at Magonia. Both are guide books describing the authors' walks through and around London - Bolton's book is specifically a guidebook, Mason's one by implication. Where I think they come into the field of Magonian interests is the way in which they both reveal what is hidden behind the mundane facade of streets and buildings. Both can be seen as examples of 'psychogeography', although I suspect both authors would vigorously challenge the use of that word (Mason certainly would, I've heard him do so!).

Magonia comments on "vision and belief" and we try to demonstrate the way that we perceive our surroundings is a product not just of our senses, but also our memories, our emotions and our personal visions and beliefs. Sometimes these visions conform to a consensus reality, other times they are deeply personal and cannot be challenged by an 'external' reality. The witness has seen an extraplanetary craft, an alien, a ghost, a coherent political philosophy, and nothing is going to convince them otherwise.

Similarly the images we construct of our surroundings may be just as rigid. We create mental maps that control our movements - "I never go to X, it's much too far away", when in fact it's far closer than Y, where we go every week to see our old grannie. But we have no reason to go to X, so psychologically it is far away, even if it's just twenty minutes on a frequent bus service.

Both these books set out to break away from that rigidity of thought by looking at the familiar in unfamilar ways. Even if you don't live in London, everybody knows the London Transport Underground diagram. 'Diagram', that's the correct technical term, and it's important because it's not a 'map', it's a type of representation of place and space that is now used for describing virtually every underground, subway, metro, tram or bus system in the world. But its relationship to 'consensus reality' is fragile. I'm sure many people have been in an unfamiliar city and tried to navigate by the equivalent local diagram, to find that after a journey involving a complcated change of lines we finished up just a short walk from our starting place. On one of my first trips to London I made the classic naive tourist's mistake of travelling from Queensway to Bayswater via Notting Hill Gate, coming out of Bayswater Station and looking down the road and seeing the familiar London Transport sign over Queensway Station, less than 200 yards away.

Mason subverts the tube diagram by walking along each line, and calling at every station on each route. In doing this he discovers a new topography of Greater London, replacing Harry Beck's calm linear grid and evenly spaced stations with a random journey that reverses the convention that what is below ground is hidden, what is above ground is open to all. The names on the tube maps are known, public, commonplace - North Wembly, East Action, Southfields, West Ham, the colour of the lines are familiar. But it's the above-ground bits, the suburban closes, the industrial estates, the tower blocks, the liminal semi-rural fringes, that are hidden more than any of the clearly-marked subterranian tunnel.

Consensus topography is also challenged by London's other underground, the network of lost, forgotten and mislaid rivers that we are led along in Tom Bolton's volume. These have no convenient multi-coloured maps pasted on station walls or tucked away in the back pages of pocket diaries. These have to be sought out, their presence detected through a slight dip in a road, a sound of rushing water from a manhole, an old street name or a road that meanders away from the rigid grid of a nineteenth century development.

Unlike the Underground, cut through newly delved earth, the rivers gradually shrank away, diverted into culverts and sewers, or creeping unseen in an overgrown channel behind suburban gardens, emerging occasionally as an ornamental pond in a municipal park. But imprisoned as they are they still define what lies above them. Between Brixton and Vauxhall stations there is nothing on the surface which indicates that thousands of people are travelling beneath on the Victoria Line. But the River Effra, passing unnoticed through the same locations, still influences what we experience above ground, explaining the straightness of Brixton Road and the reason why the Oval Gricket Ground is an oval. Those awkward steps in the middle of the pedestrian subway at the Croydon Flyover are there because an invisible river is still making itself felt.

There is the curious Neckinger, which seems to flow in a semi-circle from the Thames and back into the Thames, and the Wandle, once the most industrialised river in England, now a series of nature reserves. There is the Walbrook which flows from the poverty of the council estates of Hackney, beneath the riches of the vaults of the Bank of England, past the arcane mysteries of the Roman Temple of Mithras, emerging at Walbrook Wharf on the Thames, where rubbish barges are loaded and sent off to the splendidly-named Mucking Marshes in Essex. Make whatever analogies you may of that!

These books describe a world where the public space is hidden in an abstract diagram, where the hidden streams define the public space, a world where your view of reality can be redefined by an apparently random walk following a line on a map. Certainly a world suitable for Magonians. -- John Rimmer.

UFOS AND BEYOND

2011-12-15T10:58:00.000Z

Jeffrey Bennett, Beyond UFOs: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and its Astonishing Implications for Our Future, Princeton University Press, 2011.

This book is mainly about possibilities rather than actualities, as we have no hard evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life. We do, however, have plenty of scientific data which indicate that some forms of life similar to that here on Earth could exist on other planets and satellites in the solar system. Life could also be common throughout the universe. As Jeffrey Bennett reminds us, astronomers in the first half of the twentieth century thought that planetary systems around stars were rare because they favoured a theory that the planets of our solar system were formed as the result of a very rare near-collision between the sun and another star billions of years ago.

It is now known that planetary systems are common, although at present it is possible to detect only the larger planets. Expected improvements in detection techniques should soon result in finding extrasolar planets about the same size as Earth or smaller. This has encouraged much scientific speculation about life, intelligent or otherwise, throughout the universe.

The author states: "In terms of possibilities for life in the universe the first thing to understand is that the universe is big, really BIG." (He is obviously referring here to the observable universe. Some cosmologists believe that the universe is infinite.) To give us some idea of the numbers involved, we are told: "The total number of stars in the sky is roughly the same as the total number of grains of sand on all Earth's beaches put together."

A chapter is devoted to discussing the nature of life and we are informed that the greatest biomass and greatest variety of life on Earth consists of microorganisms rather than animals and plants. It is known that some of these can thrive under extreme conditions, so that they could undoubtedly live on other planets or satellites in our solar system. The only other planet which might support life is Mars, where microorganisms could live deep underground where liquid water could exist.

Life could also exist on a few of the larger satellites, such as Jupiter's Europa, which is covered by an ocean of water, frozen on the surface, but no doubt liquid below the ice, the necessary heat being produced by gravitational stress.

Of course, what most readers of this book will be interested in is not just life, but intelligent life, but despite the use of the term "UFOs" in the title, there is little in-depth discussion of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Bennett confines his remarks to the search for radio signals sent by civilisations.

He does mention the possibility that there is a highly advanced galactic civilisation but that we do not yet have the technology to detect its activities, but he doesn't mention the fact that for many years some scientists have advocated looking for signs of it somewhat closer than stars many light years away by trying to detect devices such as Bracewell probes (automated spacecraft sent to survey planetary systems and possibly making contact with any civilisations it might discover) and von Neumann probes (similar devices but having the ability to construct replicas of themselves from local materials).

The author has provided a useful introduction to the possibilities of ET life for the general reader, as no great scientific knowledge is assumed. In places, though, the writing seems a bit too informal, giving the impression that it is based on notes for lectures delivered to not-very-bright students. - John Harney.

MONSTERS, INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL

2011-12-11T16:48:00.012Z

W. Scott Poole. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Baylor University Press, 2011.

'Monstrous' may be the gigantic, the different or the plain just strange, but whichever they represent the other, the things that are not like us. Historian W. Scott Poole traces the American obsession with the monsters and the monstrous other from colonial times to the contemporary obsession with zombies and vampires.

From these earliest times the stories of monsters emphasise the otherness of the new continent and among that perceived as monstrous were the monstrous humans, the First Americans and the African Americans. For much of America’s history, Poole argues, many of America’s monsters have been projections of white America’s racial fears. For example he notes the essential racist idea of ‘African ape’ King Kong threatening the virginal white woman, and the similarities between the cinematic portrayal of mobs ranging after Frankenstein’s monster and the real life lynch mobs of the period.

He provides numerous examples of demonization, sometimes literally so, of the racial other in 17th to early 20th century discourse. Featuring quite significantly of this motif in the realm of fiction was the writing of the notoriously racist horror story writer H. P. Lovecraft. Sometimes this monsterization of the racial other reached truly grotesque proportions, as when the African Ota Benga was put on display in a cage in the Bronx Zoo, alongside an orang-utan.

There are, of course, other monsters. Some, like the great sea serpent or the bones of mastodons, may be held perhaps to represent the scale and grandeur of the landscape, as well as the sense of the wildness beneath the calm surface of the world.

As the 20th century unfolded, a further range of fears became expressed by monsters: atomic fears, the sense of a dark underside to suburbia, urban America’s fears of its rural hinterland, the rise of feminism, reproduction, doubts about science and America’s cultural wars. Poole traces these themes through a detailed examination of horror literature, film and television. This is clearly the area of Poole’s expertise and this book can be recommended to students and the generally interested in literature and film.

A caveat has to be entered, which is that this material has a far wider appeal than to a specifically US audience, and therefore must address wider concerns, or be capable of being read in a variety of ways. For example in Britain much of the image of the monster has to do with class rather than race. One can look at the 19th and early 20th century fears of the Mob, and current concerns about the ‘underclass’ who are seen as feral creatures of an urban wilderness.

Poole’s coverage of folk belief is much less assured than that of the crafted narrative. The coverage of the UFO and alien abduction lore is particularly poor, which is a pity as much of this lore would greatly illustrate Poole’s theses. For example many of the abduction stories contain motifs that question the role of women, address fears about reproduction, and those of David Jacobs for example, contain many of the motifs of racial fears (the racial other passing as white, fears of miscegenation, racial sexual threats to women, dangerous hybrids (half-breeds), and the sense that no walls are strong enough to protect from the depredations of the racial other that prowls by night. -- Peter Rogerson

Brad Steiger. The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopaedia of Shape-Shifting Beings. Visible Ink (2nd Ed.) 2011.

I have always associated Brad Steiger with eminently readable potboilers on topics such as UFOs, crypto-beasts, ancient astronauts and the like, so it is a bit of a surprise to see him editing a bulky encyclopedia. Although not as weighty as the two massive volumes on vampires which I reviewed a while ago, this is still a substantial 360 pages.

The entries vary in length from short essays on broad topics such as lycanthropy as a medical condition, the incubus, and the appearance of werewolf-type figures in a range of folk traditions and mythologies.

A large part of the book is taken up with descriptions of reports of werewolves within historic times, and there is obviously a considerable overlap with cryptozoology in many of these cases. Cases such as the Monster of the Gebaudon contains elements which combine the characteristics of a ‘paws and pelt’ feral beast with those of a more ambiguous type of entity. Creatures such as the chupacabras also fit into this borderland between folklore, mythology and cryptozoology, along with tales of wolf-reared children and feral humans.

Most cultures seem to have legends and folktales of human/wolf hybrids, although these are usually creatures of terror, some seem to be symbolic of wisdom, which can be accessed through shamanic rituals and the use of psychoactive substances. Many of these beliefs seem to date back to a time when early man and wolf-packs were competing for food and territory. In his introduction Steiger notes suggestions that at times the relationship between man and wolf may have been symbiotic, with early humans learning how to hunt in organized groups and overcoming larger and more powerful prey by following the techniques of wolf-packs. A powerful shaman would be able to take on the strength, skills and power of the wolf.

Not all of these legends are confined to the remote parts of the world. Theo Paijman’s contribution records man-beasts, shape-shifters and other demonic creatures appearing well into the 20th century from The Netherlands, many coming from Friesland, perhaps the nearest that country gets to a remote and liminal area.

Many of the entries deal with film and literary interpretations of the werewolf legend, and I am not sufficiently aware of this field to comment on it. Other entries look at violent predatory criminals, such as Harry Gordon, ‘the werewolf of San Francisco’ who terrorized the city in the late 1930s, and Thierry Paulin, ‘The Terror of Montmartre’, although I think including Jack the Ripper in this is pretty marginal.

In the review above, Peter Rogerson suggests that our fears of monsters are representative of our fears of the unknown ‘other’ – those separated from us by race, class, culture or physical or mental characteristics. I think largely this is true, but I suspect that the werewolf represents the fear of ourselves, of our inner monsters, the wolf, the pack hunter, the irrational violent core that we fear may lie within us. In the entry in this encyclopedia on ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ the writer describes the work as “revealing the potential power of the beast within the human psyche…” This is the real nature of the werewolf.

The encyclopedia is a fascinating collection of articles, but I cannot help feeling that it would be better arranged in a less rigid format, and would have been better presented as a series of linked sections - the werewolf in film, in folklore, in literature, the psychology of lycanthropy, the criminal as werewolf, the supernatural werewolf, etc. The book has an very good index so would still be easy to use as a reference work. -- John Rimmer

JOHN DEE: MAN, MYTH AND MORTLAKE

2011-12-06T14:28:00.011Z

Readers of the old printed Magonia who have long memories may recall that at one time our address included the line ‘John Dee Cottage’, as the world headquarters of the giant Magonian media empire was situated adjacent to the site of the house and garden of the great seventeenth-century magus, astrologer, magician, cryptographer, spy, alchemist, mathematician, navigator and all-round genius John Dee.

Coming up to the 400th anniversary of his death in 2009 a group of Mortlegians (that is apparently the correct name for a citizen of Mortlake) set up the John Dee of Mortlake Society to spread the word locally about our town’s most famous inhabitant, and to campaign to have a plaque in his memory erected in St Mary the Virgin’s church [left] where he is buried, which we believe will be the only extant monument to his memory anywhere in the world.

At the moment the application for permission to install the plaque is working its way through the Byzantine complexity of the Church of England bureaucracy, but we hope for a successful conclusion soon. The plaque will be of slate from a quarry near the Dee ancestral home in Wales, with an inscription by a skilled letter-carver rather than by mechanical means - this was a requirement by the Church authorities. As you can imagine, this will not come cheap!

Besides campaigning for a suitable memorial to him, the John Dee Society of Mortlake also organises talks and events, and in the past we have had a number of distinguished scholars speaking about Dee’s life, the era in which he lived and the instruments he used in his work. There is also the now-legendary ‘Dee Tea’ held at Mortlake and Oxford every year on his birthday. You can find the Society’s website and details of how to join HERE.

The local history society for Mortlake and the neighbouring village of Barnes (called, unsurprisingly, The Barnes and Mortlake History Society - link HERE) has just published a book on John Dee’s life and home in Mortlake, and below is the review I have written of it for the John Dee of Mortlake Society’s own website. At the bottom you will see the usual link to Amazon for buying this title, and I’d just point out that the profit on any sales made through this link will go towards the costs of crafting and installing the plaque.

Nicholas Dakin. John Dee of Mortlake. Barnes and Mortlake Local History Society, 2011.

Searching for ‘John Dee’ on Amazon brings up over 600 books by or about him. Many of these are detailed historical monographs, or attempts to understand and explain the details of his mystical and philosophical thought. And there are, indeed, some very interesting and readable biographies.

Nicholas Dakin’s book is not specifically a biography of John Dee (1527 - 1609), although it does give a broad outline of the life of this incredibly complex character. Nor is it an exposition of Dee’s occult beliefs, his mathematical work or his philosophical system. Rather it is a straightforward explanation of why John Dee is important and why Mortlake should honour the memory of its greatest resident

This book is called John Dee of Mortlake, and the ‘of Mortlake’ is the important bit. The author shows that John Dee’s house, with its library and its laboratory, was the centre of a great intellectual network that stretched across Europe, and in a way, across the Atlantic as well.

He reconstructs Dee’s house and garden in Mortlake High Street from the barest hints of description in Dee’s diaries, and accounts by people who knew him. He describes the Bibliotheca Mortlacensis, the great library Dee created at Mortlake, probably one of the largest collections of books in the world at that time.

Next to the river, and convenient for travelling to and from London and to the Queen’s palace at Richmond, the Mortlake house received many visitors: Queen Elizabeth herself, explorers like Martin Frobisher, as well as some of the great Tudor noblemen and foreign statesmen. He taught Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Lord Walsingham the art of code-breaking, others came to consult Dee for advice on navigation, for instruction in the use of mathematical instruments and maps, and in some cases to have horoscopes cast for them. Astrology was seen as a scientific practice, in the days before science and magic parted company.

But besides these affairs of state and Dee’s great project of promoting a ‘British Empire’ - a phrase he used first - we are also shown the domestic life of Dee and his family and his life in Mortlake. Although local children were sometimes frightened by his appearance, and reputation - entirely unjustified - as a sorcerer, he was also seen as a peacemaker in disputes between local families.

We learn of Jane Dee, a dutiful wife who bore him eight children, and sometimes despaired of the domestic chaos she witnessed around her, but who was very much her own person, juggling her domestic duties, but also helping organise the transport of her entire household across Europe when her husband travelled to the Court of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague.

The author challenges some of the stereotypes that have developed over the centuries, of Dee as a black magician, necromancer, or someone who raised the spirits of the dead, and shows him as a devout Christian whose so-called ‘occult’ work was an attempt to gain for himself a greater understanding of the word of God. He also gives a very clear explanation of the nature of Dee’s relationship with the medium Edward Kelley, carefully weighing up whether he was a charlatan, a chancer, or he genuinely believed he had talents which would be useful to Dee.

Dee was an astrologer, alchemist, mathematician, navigator, philosopher, spy, clergyman, traveller, and magician. Many of the 600 books on Amazon will tell you all about those parts of his life, but it would be difficult to find one which will give you a clearer, more entertaining and straightforward account of the man who made the little village of Mortlake into the centre of the world of scholarship and learning. -- John Rimmer

Buy the book here to help fund the John Dee Memorial Plaque (ignore Amazon's 'out of print' tag and use the 'jrimmer11' option):

ALCHEMY: WORDS AND MEANINGS

2011-11-30T12:08:00.001Z

Jordan Stratford. A Dictionary of Western Alchemy. Quest Books, 2011.

This is a useful book up to a point. It brings together a range of chemical symbols and offers a summary of the most important processes of laboratory alchemy and throws in a brief biography of a couple of dozen alchemists of note. But it is a curious book. It has been collected by a student of Gnosticism who is a great fan of the Jungian interpretation of Alchemy and yet it is, in most part, a collection of symbols and descriptions of chemical substances, such as would be useful to the purely laboratory alchemist.

Indeed, it doesn’t stop at alchemy, it contains symbolism and descriptions of chemical processes and substances (such as sugar and steel) which have little or nothing to do with pure mineral alchemy. One thing seems clear: that this is a work of general scholarship rather than a work written by a practising laboratory alchemist to be understood by his peers. It is possibly a work – given the ubiquity of the internet – which owes more to Wikipedia than to personal understanding.

Evidently, most of the symbolism is taken from a work on general chemistry, rather than from the fairly tight discipline of substances and processes that characterized alchemy until the late 17th century. These symbols for the elements, compounds and processes are important, both to interpret manuscript notes by alchemists like Boyle and Newton and to interpret the pictorial imagery which is so much a part of the alchemical message and which often gives the greater clues to the process than any associated words do. The ‘Mutus Liber’, for example, is a book relying solely on pictorial imagery and some of its images can only be deciphered if one knows the symbols for certain substances, since these are encoded into the pictures.

So this Dictionary is useful in this respect. But, it must be said, that the symbols are available in many other places on the Internet, most notably in Adam Maclean’s website and Jordan Stratford acknowledges the help given to him in his researches by Adam Maclean.

There are some obvious omissions in this Dictionary. Maybe the ‘dry’ work on Antimony has acquired some new terms during the current revival of interest in alchemy (especially in France) but on the alchemical web forums, there is much discussion about the Star Regulus, the ‘Eagles’ and the ‘Remora’ and these terms are not found in the Dictionary. Nor is the ‘Net’ (an alloy of copper and iron) of Eirenaus Philalethes, which was worked on by Isaac Newton. Nor is ‘Sal Mirabilis’ (Glauber’s Salt) or ‘Philosopher’s Wool’ (Zinc Oxide), the latter sometimes suggested as Archibald Cockren’s substitute for ‘Antimony’. Nor is ‘Adrop’ mentioned, nor ‘Sericon’, both possibly terms for Red Lead. And the ‘Green Lion’ is described as Sulphuric Acid which is not true in respect of Ripley’s ‘Green Lyon’.

Most significantly, in the book, is the lack of any reference to Spagyrics (plant alchemy), even though this field, named by Paracelsus, cannot be separated from the broader definition of Alchemy. So we have no indication of the Circulatum Minus of Urbigerus or of plant stones in general, though there is the odd reference to herbs like Valerian and Anise.

All this might seem like nit-picking but a good Dictionary is necessary. Alchemy, as a laboratory practice, is flourishing in the modern age. In the last 20 years, the Internet has thrown up at least a half dozen excellent forums, bringing together practising alchemists from around the world; and recent initiatives, such as those of Newman and Principe, to decipher Newton’s notebooks and replicate his alchemy have breathed life into this antique blend of art and science.

This Dictionary should step into that gap but, unfortunately, it does not have the legs to do so. It is too whimsical and patchy (something a good dictionary should not be) and spends a bit too much time concentrating on the etymology of the terms and too little explaining their place or relevance to the discipline as a whole. -- Caroline Robertson

ANCIENT ALIENS?

2011-11-28T11:57:00.004Z

Philip Coppens. The Ancient Alien Question. New Page Books, 2011.

Oh my, what a busy book this is! From the minute you pick it up, it vies for your attention in a number of ways. The cover’s bold font is squeezed around a photograph of what looks to be a Central or South American pyramid plus four small, circular inlays of what are presumably meant to be ‘mysterious’ objects. The effect is to make one think that the publisher is after readers looking for sensation as opposed to careful, reasoned argument. This over-the-top approach to graphics, unfortunately in my view, carries on inside with ‘alien’ writing jarringly placed on the outer border of each page, along with very bold chapter headings and the body of the text in rather large print. Subtlety is obviously not the effect that New Page Books are going for, then.

This would have made my heart sink, were it not for the name of the author, Philip Coppens. Although I had not read any of his books before, I had read one of his articles in Nexus magazine concerning Operation Gladio, the Italian “stay-behind” secret army of guerrillas and saboteurs that were in place during the Cold War in order to fight Communist forces should they invade or take over. Coppens tells how this group was taken over by right-wing individuals affiliated to the Italian government and, instead of protecting the country, went on a bombing campaign whilst putting the blame on Communist organisations. I was impressed by what seemed to be a methodical approach to an issue about which I had heard nothing before. I was, therefore, intrigued to see how he was going to tackle an issue as broad and contentious as the ancient alien question, or rather, questions which, of course, are were there any and did they land here?

The second jarring note for me, after the lively attitude to graphics, was that the foreword was by that veteran (or should that be notorious) writer Erich von Däniken. I will be honest and say here that von Däniken was one of the first authors that I read whilst becoming very interested in the UFO and ancient astronaut themes at school, even to the extent of debating such matters with my Religious Education teacher. The heady rush of such a dramatic intervention in humankind’s history (and, of course, prehistory) from such a radical influence was by far and away much more interesting to me than my usual subjects.

However, I and the rest of the world were to learn that the Swiss author was prone to embellishment. He tended to pull artefacts in to back up his claims which were not what he claimed them to be. One is the Iron Pillar in Delhi. He told the world that it never rusted and no-one knew who put it there. In fact, it is rusty and the emperor Chandragupta II put it there. There is also the distinct probability that von Däniken took much of his - shall we say, inspiration – from The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des magiciens) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. By way of contrast, later on in the book Coppens seems to single out the author Zecharia Sitchin and his works for criticism. The criticism does look to be justified but it seems in sharp contrast to the leniency he affords von Däniken, whilst the crucial difference between Sitchin and von Däniken is that Sitchin at least seems sincere, although maybe self-delusional. None of this bodes well for the book.

Encouragingly though, Coppens, when he is away from supporting or attacking other writers in this genre, seems more down-to-earth (or as down-to-earth as anyone can be, given the subject matter). Although he puts forward the story in the fashion by which it is known popularly, he then goes on to examine it in further detail. Sometimes, this will lead to his debunking the original story rather than just accepting it as it is initially found.

To give an example, The Sirius Mystery, a book written in 1976 by Robert Temple, details how two French anthropologists working with the Dogon tribe in Mali, West Africa, discovered that the tribe had knowledge of the star system that we see as Sirius. The claim is that this tribe, with no sophisticated technology, knew about the dwarf star Sirius B. Sirius B is invisible to the naked eye; therefore the Dogon had to have learned this from contact from somewhere – or someone – else. This someone else was supposed to be aliens from the star system around Sirius. However, after another expedition by other anthropologists, Coppens informs us that the new expedition could find no consensus amongst the Dogon about Sirius at all.

This continues throughout the book. An initial position is put forward then examined to see if it holds water and, for the most part, the author to his credit does not always take the statement at face value. However, there do seem to be some areas where the author lets his own faith in a viewpoint override his own good sense. It has long been a staple of alternative archæology that the pyramids on the Giza plateau mirror the layout of the stars that form the belt of the constellation Orion. A fair few astronomers have queued up to show that this may not be the case, and other alternative archæologists reckon that the constellation Cygnus is more accurately represented. Therefore, this is not something that can be taken as fact, and most certainly does not even have a consensus amongst alternative archæologists, yet it is uncritically accepted here.

This is important as it later becomes a central tenet to Coppens’ argument that, although there is no evidence to support major influence in humanity’s social evolution by extra-terrestrials in nuts-and-bolts spaceships, that in the distant past people managed to contact denizens of an inner-space akin to C. G. Jung’s collective unconscious who passed on the same information to people utilising shamanic rituals in different parts of the world, which would explain why many sights have similar, but not identical, layouts, buildings, pantheons of gods and mythologies. This does seem to be an answer that has some merit, and could even link into current UFO/UAP phenomena in a neater fashion than the (by now) quite clunky alien astronaut theory.

Philip Coppens has a straightforward writing style that is helpful in explaining some of the more intricate and technical areas that his book touched upon. Whether it is the ins and outs of geopolymers or the anomalies of the Piri Reis map, the explanation is fluid and easy to follow. This is very helpful indeed in a book that covers so much ground. He is capable of spotting flaws in accepted lore and exposing them so that we are not duped. This, then, raises the question as to why some subjects are let slip under the radar. It is, in my view, an inconsistent approach to answering the questions asked by the author himself. Maybe a re-examination and comparison of the layouts of the Giza Plateau, the pyramids at Teotihuacán and the Hopi reservations in Arizona, this time without star maps, might still back up the point that he is trying to make without having to use discredited information. – Review by Trevor Pyne

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PARANORMAL

2011-11-26T09:18:00.001Z

Tony Jinks. An Introduction to the Psychology of Paranormal Belief and Experience. McFarland, 2011

In this intriguing book, Tony Jinks, a lecturer on neuroscience at the University of Western Sydney, uses a wide definition of the paranormal, encompassing all the various topics covered by Magonia, and takes a detailed examination of the range of psychological explanations, both mainstream and exotic used to "explain" such experiences.

His introductory chapters discuss what is meant by the paranormal and the history of parapsychology. Here he points out some of the problems associated with the use of terms like "ESP" etc., most notably their often circular definition and lack of basis in mainstream science. He neatly sums up some of the many controversies in this field. However this does not mean that he is a die-hard skeptic, anything but as can be seen when he examines the various psychological theories in turn, broadly following a path of increasing complexity and heterodoxy.

These theories range from the simplest kind, such as those use to explain popular superstitions, through to theories of illusion, errors of judging probability, and the various studies which seek to correlate these with various personality types. Here he makes a number of very valid points, for example the automatic assumption among mainstream psychologists that not only do these things not happen, but that those who experience them must have some sort of syndrome or other. Another very valid point is that many of the terms used by psychologists to explain such experiences such as 'boundary deficiency', 'fantasy prone personality' or 'transliminality' (which strike me as possibly just different labels for the same thing, a tendency to confuse imagination with perception), can be every bit as circular as terms such as ESP.

He finds more convincing those explanations involving distinct neurological processes ranging from hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, highway hypnosis, sleep paralysis etc., through to temporal lobe epilepsy. Perhaps, though he underplays just how radical misperception can be in certain circumstances. In this set of discussions perhaps one noted omission is the role of false awakening, which may account for a number of dramatic paranormal experiences.

Having discussed the role of temporal lobe epilepsy, Jinks then goes into more exotic territory with a discussion of the (alleged) roles of electromagnetic fields, tectonic strain etc., and the work of Michael Persinger. I am not sure that these theories can rightfully be called psychological, perhaps 'environmental' theories would be a better description, though one might settle on psycho-enviromental as a decription. Though clearly intrigued by Persinger's ideas, Jinks correctly points out that they have come under fire from believers and sceptics alike though often for opposite reasons. He notes that attempts to replicate Persinger's findings by a Swedish team failed, and that it is not clear that some of the strange experiences undergone by those using Persinger's famous helmet are not simply the result of expectation and suggestion, The same may well also be true of alleged correlations between electromagnetic field anomalies and 'haunted' spots.

If these ideas are based at least to some extent on mainstream psychological theories, the next set are based on more controversial theories - the psychodynamic theories of Freud, Jung etc. In this section there is an extensive discussion of Alvin Lawson's birth trauma hypothesis, though Jinks concedes that this is controversial to say the least. In particular mainstream psychology denies that it is neurologically possible for memories of birth to survive multiple changes in the brain.

Jinks also discusses the theories, particularly those associated with UFO abductions, constructed by Hilary Evans, D. Scott Rogo and the younger Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman. These centre around such experiences being dramas which illuminate personal crises, and Jinks shows how they can be applied to the 'Kelly Cahill' abduction case. While intriguing, the theories of the latter two especially, involve mysterious paranormal processes, in Rogo's case the mysterious 'Phenomenon' which may or may not be a synonym for God. Such ideas are unlikely to appeal to mainstream psychology, or mainstream science in general. The same is probably true of speculative theories involving quantum mechanics.

While the coverage of psychological theories is wide, it is not exhaustive, and there could have been some discussion of theories involving family dynamics, and those which invoke social processes rather than individual pathology. Perhaps they could be covered in second edition, which might also correct the only other criticism I have, the fact that not all the references in the text are included in the bibliography.

But these should not detract from this very interesting study, one which makes a welcome exception from the usual partisan polemics by believers and sceptics, and which attempts a genuinely opened minded approach. We need more studies like this. -- Peter Rogerson

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO: MAGONIA 24, NOVEMBER 1986

2011-11-23T12:09:00.004Z

The appearance of Magonia 24 heralded a radical change in design and production of the magazine, being the first to be produced on a computer, the now legendary Amstrad PCW8512, with printout on a very noisy dot-matrix printer using a typewriter ribbon. It also marked our final A5 size issue, prior to the last of our numerous changes of format. It also heralded a period of experimentation with a variety of computer programs and production techniques, not all of which were, to say the least, entirely successful.

Most of the issue was devoted to the topic of BOLs , earthlights, fireballs or whatever, a subject which at one time dominated British ufology, but now seems to have faded into the background.

Mike Goss took us through a typically obscure aspect of folklore, with his investigation of the Japanese shito-dama, the ‘spirit fireball’. Like many such legendary manifestations of raw nature the shito-dama appeared to wreck vengeance on any individual or community that had offended it in someway, usually through some act of treachery or betrayal. Mike Goss then went on to demonstrate how similar phenomena have appeared in western folklore, manifesting themselves as ghostly ships or the corpse-candles which could be a warning of death or other calamity.

Spooklights and will-of-the-wisps (wills-of-the-wisp?) were the topic of David Clarke’s piece, which followed on. He noted the way that a quite genuine natural phenomenon became an object of mystery and fear, then generated its own legends, stories and reports, often bearing little resemblance to the original phenomenon. Much like UFOs then!

French researcher Claude Maugé took a long look at Michael Persinger’s ‘Tectonic Strain Theory’ which tried to show a a link between phenomena generated by geophysical activity in the Earth’s crust, and activity in the human brain which generated UFO related experiences. After looking at this in some depth, and with a degree of sympathy, Maugé concluded that “TST (Tectonic Strain Theory) seems to be unnecessary for the large majority of sightings”, but that if Persinger were able to develop his theory and clarift the processes involved, TST might still be able to earn the title of “the best scientific theory of UFOs.”

However, this never seems to have happened, and ufological interest in the subject veered off into fringe ‘electrical pollution’ theories.

Jenny Randles contributed some further information on the sequence of events surrounding Chris Allen and Steuart Campbell’s exposé in the previous Magonia of the man behind the Cedric Allingham hoax, popular British TV personality Patrick Moore. It was something of a (very small) tabloid sensation at the time, but I have no evidence that my phone was tapped as a result!

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

2011-11-22T12:02:00.001Z

John Hanson and Dawn Holloway. Haunted Skies, The Encyclopaedia of British UFOs: Volume 3, 1966-1967. CFZ Press, 2011.

Yet another great nostalgia fest for ageing ufologists, now covering the period in which the prehistoric ancestor of Magonia, the Merseyside UFO Group Bulletin operated. I note, in fact, that there are a number of references to MUFORG Bulletin and our archive website. This was perhaps the period of the high water mark of interest in UFOs in Britain, with large numbers of often ephemeral groups and little magazines, the brouhaha over Warminster and the "great waves" of the summer and autumn of 1967. Much of this material might be unfamiliar to today's ufologists, and reading this, they might discover that they have, in some cases, being trying to reinvent the wheel.

What strikes me is just how little of the material here relates to reports of "structured craft of unknown origin", and the wide variety of things which were reported as UFOs in those days. No doubt the vast majority of these reports were simply misidentifications and misperceptions of the usual meteors, fireballs, stars and planets (and I suspect more often than you would think) the moon, aircraft, helicopters and the like, as well as a variety of optical illusions. Some may however relate to a variety of uncatalogued and poorly understood natural phenomena. Some are very strange indeed, the pair of what look like flying boots seen in a car park in Bentilee, Staffordshire for example, or the encounters with "aliens" straight out of the pages of George Adamski (a testimony as to how influential his books were in British popular culture), the guy who invited "aliens" who twittered like birds as they bounced along, into his home and offered them whisky, cheese and biscuits (which they spat out), in return they gave him "diamonds" (rock crystals and seeds).

As an example of how wide a range of experiences were subsumed into the UFO mythos was the tale told by the novelist Dame Rebecca West of encountering a strange man on her land, and an object which "consisted of something like a metal band, grey-blue in colour, flattened at one point, so as to seem almost leaf like, crossed with a herringbone system of metal strips", attached to which was a sort of bag. The whole thing seemed to crumple to the ground. The stranger behaved suspiciously and made her uneasy. Presumably this was a deflated balloon or parachute with something attached, which might account for the case getting a 'restricted' category by the MOD.

This book is well illustrated with photographs, drawings and clippings, and provides faces to names. It is rather sad to see how people you remember from your youth have aged. The authors have done an excellent job in assembling this material, and just two years fills a substantial book. This is likely however to be the tip of the iceberg, as it is not clear as to whether they (or anyone else for that matter) had access to the archives of BUFORA let alone the many dozens of defunct groups and deceased personalities whose records and libraries are scattered to the winds. All of this stuff needs to eventually go to the AFU archives in Sweden to be preserved. -- Peter Rogerson.

NEW IN THE MAGONIA ARCHIVE

2011-11-19T18:44:00.001Z

I'm pleased to say that we have added another original article to Magonia's online archive, which had not previously been published in the print magazine. It's by UFOlogist-turned-religious-studies-professor-turned-novelist David Halperin, who writes:

“Magonia has been a feature of UFOlogical discourse for more than forty years, since Jacques Vallee published his classic Passport to Magonia. What was the original Magonia, mentioned in a 9th-century Latin text by Archbishop Agobard of Lyon? Who were the four people — three men, one woman — said to have fallen to earth from a Magonian airship?"

He compares Agobard’s story with a 17th-century sighting of a similar foursome on the moon, and comes to some startling conclusions.

The archived article may be read here:

http://magonia.haaan.com/2011/the-magonia-problem-david-halperin/

and you can read more of David Halperin's writings at his website:

http://www.davidhalperin.net/

GHOSTLY CREEPY HAUNTINGS!

2011-11-16T17:31:00.001Z

Jeff Belanger. The World's Most Haunted Places. New Page, 2011.
Bob Curran. The World's Creepiest Places. New Page, 2011.
Jim Harold. Jim Harold's Campfire True Ghost Stories. New Page, 2011

I'm not too sure what the exact difference is between 'most haunted' and 'creepiest', even after reading the first two volumes reviewed here, as they cover the same sorts of places and stories in the same way. Although both 'Creepy' and 'Haunted' describe hauntings in classical locations like old castles, spooky churchyards and crumbling mansions, many of the most interesting accounts relate to more contemporary and less traditional locales.

New Page is an American publisher, so the emphasis is on American locations, but both books give a fair bit of coverage to places in Britain and Europe. Bob Curran was born and now lives in Northern Ireland, so he gives somewhat greater coverage to creepiness on this side of the Atlantic, with several cases from his native island. Both books give often quite detailed accounts of the history of the places they describe, and in most cases show the way in which the ghost legend has mutated over the decades.

American orphanages, hospitals and sanatoriums seem to be great generators of spookiness, with abandoned buildings in remote places accruing legends of screaming children, mad doctors and the terrifying results of medical experiments lurking in wooded areas across the country. The abandoned buildings, and abandoned creatures represent the disturbing fears, social, political, scientific, the threat of 'aliens' of all forms, and the worry that our comfortable existence depends on a great number of things that we would rather not know about. In the daylight world we wish these things would just disappear, but we know that they will always lurk around the edges, ready to come lurching back if our defences of rationality and reason fail for a moment.

Many of the stories in both 'Creepiest' and 'Most Haunted' are of what Bill Ellis christened 'Legend Trips' - places which have become the focus of visits by groups of young people seeking a spooky thrill at a well-known haunted spot, and developing the legend as they do so. Perhaps the most remarkable case recorded here, in Bob Curran's book, is the small settlement of Stull, Kansas. Here, for no historical reason at all, other than perhaps because its name sounds a bit like 'skull', a bizarre legend has developed that the abandoned Emmanuel Church covered a gateway to Hell. Helped along by films like The Exorcist, the hamlet attracted crowds of teenage visitors at Halloween, who eventually had to be barred from entering by the local police.

Stull is an example of just how remarkable little is needed to create a 'haunted' location. In fact some places seem desperately to need a haunting, and it's noticeable how many of the 'Most Haunted' sites also happen to be hotels, bars, or tourist attractions. Given time anywhere can develop its neatly crafted haunting. Bob Curran's account of the mysterious disappearance of the lighthouse keepers of the Flannan Isles certainly brought a shiver to my spine, but mostly because it evoked forgotten memories of my grandmother reciting William Gibson's poem about the mystery, in her gas-lit kitchen when I was aged about eight!

The stories in Jim Harold's book are anything but neatly crafted, and are the largely unmediated, 'It Happened to Me' type of narrative that features in Fortean Times each month. Jim Harold is the producer of an on-line radio show, and these stories are sent to him by his listeners. Of course, almost everyone knows what a ghost-story should be like, and many of the tales here try to conform to that template. However it is much easier to see the raw account in these two or three page first-person accounts, than in the 'authorised' versions in the other two books.

Although Harold divides the stories up into a few basic categories, most of the narratives in this book would turn out quite differently if they were collected by a ghost hunter, a cryptozoologist, a ufologist, an abductionist or a SPR researcher. Most of all these three entertaining books demonstrate the extent to which the supernatural has been commodified in contemporary Western culture. -- John Rimmer.

MIB ENCOUNTERS

2011-11-15T12:13:00.002Z

I have just put a new page up on this site, as you will probably have noticed by the tab which has just appeared above. Clicking on this tab will take you to a listing, compiled by Gareth J. Medway, of accounts of experiences of Men in Black, and MIB-type entities. This is based on available published literatute and does not pretend to be a complete listing, although it does contain all the well-know cases and many more obscure ones. Although most of these accounts come from UFO-related experiences, this is by no means always the case.

I'm sure that many of our readers will know of other cases which could be added to this liting, and we would be most happy to hear from you. If you have anything to add please send a brief description of the characters and events of the case, as well as a full as possible list of sources. From time to time we will update this listing with new accounts. You may send any information you have to: pelicanist@rocketmail.com

UNCON 2011

2011-11-11T18:57:00.010Z

It's been a couple of years since I went to a Fortean Times UnConvention, and this one was a slightly different format from what I've been accustomed to. Although the lineup of speakers was excellent, the location rather limited the programme. Finding a Central London location that does not cost a fortune is becoming increasingly difficult, and the Camden Centre, although well located for accessibility in the shadow of St Pancras Station, is a much smaller building than previous venues, with just one large hall for talks.

This meant that there was only one sequence of talks, and although the two-strand format of previous UnConventions has sometimes meant that you had to choose between two must-see presentations, it also allowed for a wider range of speakers. Space limitations at Camden also meant that the various ancillary attractions, such as ASSAP's experiments, and stalls for other fortean/psychic groups, were reduced to just two or three bookstalls. The limitations of the venue also meant less opportunity for socialising.

OK, that's enough of the griping, let's look at the content. An odd sort of 'speaking animal' theme seemed to be developing, with Jon Bondeson discussing the talking dogs of the early years of the 20th century - which he has written about in the latest (December) Fortean Times - and the German 'New Animal Psychology' movement which promoted it. This eventually mutated into an exotic mixture of show-business and pseudo-science (a bit like ufology when you come to think of it!), with some vaguely sinister links to the Nazis.

Talking animals - 'Hoover the Talking Seal' - also cropped up in Sarah Angliss's exploration of the curious social background to the early days of sound recording; people were apparently quite disturbed at the idea that through the phonograph it would be possible to hear the voices of dead people. Besides the booming sounds of Hoover, we were able to hear the voice of Florence Nightingale marvelling that people would indeed be able to hear her words after she died.

London University librarian Christopher Josiffe (librarians, they get everywhere) outlined the story of Gef the Talking Mongoose from the Isle of Man. Although no sound recordings were available of this prodigy, Christopher did a fair job of recreating the animal's voice as he recounted its often foul-mouthed tirades. As a librarian, the speaker had access to Harry Price's case-notes on Gef, which are stored at London University. One curious byway to this investigation was discovering that there was probably a population of feral Manx mongooses, introduced in the 1910s as a measure to control rabbits, there being no foxes on the Island.

It's impossible to come to any conclusion on this case, and it's clear that much depends on the social background, psychology, and I suspect the sexual dynamics, of the family in the case, but these were issues which were not easily approached in the 1930s.

Dave Clark and Andy Roberts gave two totally UFO-free presentations; Dave Clarke presenting the only recorded case of someone officially being declared to have 'died of fright' on their death certificate, and the duo examining the legends of cursed stones and so-called Celtic Heads which were declared to bring bad luck on anyone who came into contact with them. Dave and Andy brought along their very own Cursed Head in case anyone wished to take a chance with it!

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince discussed the influence of Hermeticism on the rise of modern science, and considered whether contemporary developments in astronomy and quantum physics heralded a return to a Hermetical view of the universe. This produced some strong reactions from questioners in the audience. For another of Lynn and Clive's theories, check out the YouTube clip below.

Gail-Nina Anderson was as entertaining as ever, taking us through the impact of Egyptian Mummies on popular culture, including the artists' paint called Mummy Brown, which was actually made from ground-up mummies. Discovering this prompted the Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt to bury his tube of the colour in his garden in a simple ceremony. The pigment was apparently in production until the 1960s, when the director of a firm of London colourists found they had run out of mummies: "We might have a few odd limbs lying about", he said.

Ted Harrison, in reviewing apocalyptic predictions reassured us that the world had not ended in September, but alerted us to a few other dates to watch out for. I didn't see Brian Regal's Sasquatch presentation, or Richard Freeman on ape-men (cryptozoology is, I regret, a bit of a blind-spot with me, especially the paws-and-pelt variety) and only caught the end of Jon Ronson on psychopaths.

Despite the limitations of the venue, I think UnCon continued a great tradition, and it was good meeting so many fellow anomalists. And if any of you know of a spacious location in Central London, preferably with two lecture halls, exhibition space, and with a decent bar and cafe, available for hire at an unfeasibly uncommercial price, I'm sure the guys at Fortean Times would be glad to hear from you! -- John Rimmer

FISHY STORIES

2011-11-10T20:05:00.002Z

Anthony Milne. Fireballs, Skyquakes and Hums: Probing the Mysteries of Light and Sound. Robert Hale, 2011.

Lars Thomas. Weird Waters: The Lake and Sea Monsters of Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea. CFZ, 2011

It is probable that the relatively small number of UFO reports that are not simply generated by misperceptions of well-established phenomena will include among their number a range of uncatalogued atmospheric and other natural phenomena.

The first half of this book lists a wide range of these, from various forms of balls of light, through curious mirages, odd meteorites and the like, to say nothing of Humazduzzes and other anomalous sounds. These clearly suggest that there are all sort of, often very strange, things going on in our atmosphere.

Milne has made previous studies of asteroids, space debris and the like, and had he followed the example of the late William Corliss and assembled his examples from the pages of reputable scientific literature this would have been a useful compilation of material which should be of interest to the scientific community. However the sources tend more to be popular books, UFO magazines, newspapers and the like.

Even worse in the second half Milne enters the world of the paranormal and ufology, with little indication that he knows much above either subject. Here he relies ever more on popular sources, such as pulp paperbacks, and uncritical renderings of the various tales told therein. Thus instead of references to scientific publications or even the more serious and responsible works on these subjects, we get them to Charles Berlitz, Frank Edwards, 'Richard Lazarus' and others. I suspect a number of the stories here are complete fabrications by these and related authors. Indeed we get the old story of the Wroxham Romans trotted out, despite the fact that it is a complete fiction from a book of spoof ghost stories, Charles Sampson's Ghosts of the Broads, originally published to raise money for a yacht club.

This sort of material is OK if it is clearly labelled as folklore or story telling, but not as evidence for something or other. There may well be evidence for some very interesting things in this book, but it is likely to be buried in a heap of dross, which simply serves to prevent anything in this book being taken seriously. A wasted opportunity.

Fortunately we have to hand a much better example of how to present a compilation of strange and bizarre experiences. Unlike a number of writers in field of marine cryptozoology, Lars Thomas is a professional marine biologist, and his book a mixture of modern day accounts and folklore avoids the temptation of invoking surviving dinosaurs or completely theoretical creatures to explain the various water monsters. The monsters here are a variegated bunch and include some things that sound like American swamp apes, to say nothing of alleged encounters with merpeople, water horses, water cows and much more.

While some of the waters are wide and deep and could hide almost anything, there are other accounts which seem impossible to explain in terms of any kind of flesh and blood animal. The mysterious creature, said to drag dogs down into the depths, in the 'lake', actually a large duck pond, complete with fountain, in a Copenhagen suburb, for example In another suburb there is a not much larger mere, which is not only associated with strange lake creatures, but also ghosts and UFOs. These creatures seem to be beasts of the waters, bogeys invented to scare the children away from the water's edge, rather like Jenny Greenteeth, than anything which might end up on a taxidermist's table.

Iceland has some of the weirdest water monsters, including the mercow, the mouse-eared whale, the scaly monsters and the like, which the enterprising Icelanders have featured on a set of special issue postage stamps.

Language barriers prevented the author from gathering all the information he could from Finland and the Baltic states. - Reviewed by Peter Rogerson.

DENYING SCIENCE

2011-11-08T10:50:00.001Z

John Grant. Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions and the War Against Reality. Prometheus, 2011

One of the blurbs on this book describes John Grant as "the living heir of Martin Gardener", this is, I think, less than fair to Grant. Martin Gardner often took on soft targets and subjected them to ridicule, Grant takes on the big boys.

The assaults on science that Grant dissects are not, by and large, the products of isolated cranks, who are either just badly educated or who have mental health issues, they are the products of major, often well-funded and politically motivated campaigns.

Of the principle assaults Grant discusses, those which are closest to the issues often covered in Magonia are the promotion of creationism and intelligent design, the various forms of alternative medicine and the hidden memory/satanic abuse myths. The other examples are much closer to the scientific and cultural mainstreams, the campaigns against the MMR vaccine orchestrated by Andrew Wakefield; the claims that AIDS is not caused by HIV; the attempts by the tobacco industry to argue that cigarette smoking was not responsible for cancer; and the attacks on the growing evidence that human caused carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for global warming.

What is revealing is the extent to which many of the these apparently disparate campaigns all seem to have connections to each other and to figures on the far right of the US Republican Party. In the case of the climate change "deniers" a significant number seem to be funded by the US oil giant ExonMobile.

Unlike some of the soft targets that tend to be the targets of the 'skeptics movement', these anti-scientific crusades can have catastrophic consequences, take for example the endorsement of the idea that aids isn't caused by HIV by the former South African president Thabo Mbeki, that led to thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths, and it is possible that that figure could be dwarfed if actions are not taken to both cut carbon dioxide emissions and to develop technologies to counter the worst consequences of such warming.

While much of Grant's book does at times seem to have a rather parochial US focus, no doubt because of the desperate state of politics there, we in the UK should not feel too smug. Much of the climate change 'denial' is being orchestrated by the British right, including those noted Tory newspapers The Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.

Many of these campaigns get the support of credential scientists of one kind or another, the retired and those whose expertise is in distant subjects tending to predominate, and this can impress people who don't understand there isn't any position on any topic that you can't get some 'credentialed scientist' to endorse.

They also tend to rely on anecdotal evidence, appeals to emotion and to vague notions of 'fairness', in which any minority however tiny can claim equal status to the vast majority. Grant also notes how they often use fake statistics and quotes from their own publications.

It is perhaps from one the topics briefly mentioned that the final horror story comes; the execution of a prisoner in Texas for an alleged arson, the evidence for which was discredited. The governor responsible for refusing the appeal and thus sending a almost certainly innocent man to his death was Rick Perry, supporter of Creationism and climate change denier and now a Republican presidential contender. – Peter Rogerson