MAGONIA REVIEW

SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE BOOKS

2025-03-22T18:53:00.002+00:00

I have been involved in the UFO/Fortean scene for 56 years, contributing to, editing and publishing MUFOB and Magonia as print magazines, and continuing with the on-line Magonia Review. This is something which I have enjoyed greatly, and which has introduced me to many interesting and entertaining correspondents across the world, who have all contributed to the Magonian legacy.

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I have now passed my 80th birthday and have decided that I will retire from active involvement in the UFO/Fortean field. I have particularly felt the loss of the contribution and support of my two dear friends Peter Rogerson and John Harney, who have both died in the past few years. I have also realised that there are a lot of books not connected with Magonian topics that I really must read!

For these reasons I will be winding down Magonia Review as an active website, although I will of course maintain it as an archive resource. The site contains 1200 entries for books on a huge range of topics; the Review's archive sites carry another 700+ reviews extracted from the printed magazines. The magazine archive sites preserve the bulk of the articles published in the two print magazines, a total of over 500 reports, commentaries and essays. These reviews and articles have been contributed by some of the most influential writers and researchers in the fields covered by the magazine and websites. And of course there is Peter Rogerson's important legacy, the massive INTCAT listing of entity reports. I will do all I can to ensure these will remain available for future readers and researchers.

Looking back on it I am amazed by what a massive creation Magonia and its spin-offs has become, nearly 60 years after it was started by John Harney and Alan Sharp as the Merseyside UFO Bulletin, a stencil duplicated newsletter for a local UFO group. Over the years we have had contributions from the most original and progressive writers in the UFO field from Britain, the USA, Europe and across the world. It would be invidious to pick out individuals, but a glance down the author listings on the blog pages will show who they are. In his Fortean Times tribute to Magonia when it ceased publication as a print magazine, Bob Rickard described them as writers "who were not afraid to challenge both the narrow-minded 'skeptical' bigots and the credulous following of 'nuts-and-bolts' flying saucery."

To them, and to those of you who have supported and enjoyed Magonia in all its incarnations, and to all my friends who have helped me in the work of producing and publishing it, my most sincere thanks, and I hope that you will still be able to enjoy the legacy that it has created.

John Rimmer

THE MAGONIA LEGACY:

Magonia Review: https://pelicanist.blogspot.com/

Magonia Archive: http://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/

MUFOB Archive: http://mufobmagazine.blogspot.com/

Book Review Archive: http://mrobsr.blogspot.co.uk/

More Magonia: http://moremagonia.blogspot.co.uk/

INTCAT Catalogue: http://intcat.blogspot.co.uk/

Aldeburgh Platform: http://aldeburghplatform.blogspot.co.uk/

NO PASSPORT NEEDED

2025-03-07T18:00:00.004+00:00

Jeremy Harte. Fairy Encounters in Medieval England. University of Exeter Press, 2024.

On the first page of this book, the author presents us with what is probably the best definition of 'fairies' I have seen: “the beings who broke into human life [who] were never very forward in identifying themselves”. Of course, it's a pretty good definition of a lot of other characters as well, many of whom have cropped up in the pages of Magonia over the last half-century.

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But these are characters who have popped up more than half a millennium ago, and their stories have gone through rather more transitions and interpretations than an encounter with Bigfoot or a UFO entity in last week's tabloid. And there are quite enough problems with those as well. Reporting and analysing entity encounters in the mediaeval centuries was entirely the job of the Church scholars. Whatever the witnesses may have seen or thought they had seen, the reports we have are more thoroughly edited to support the writer's world view than any UFO abductionist's blockbuster paperback.

Take one of the first cases Jeremy Harte describes. In 1171 a young man called Richard has to walk from Old Sarum (the predecessor to Salisbury) to Marlborough to tell his uncles that their sister, his mother, had died. Halfway across Salisbury Plain he was confronted by three men in white – or should that be Three Men in White, as these things always seem to need capital letters. They seemed to know a lot about him, even his dreams, and instructed him to return to Sarum and warn the Dean of the cathedral that he must go in procession around the town, otherwise “the greatest storm that ever blew will down his town”.

The tales record that the Dean believed him, and as Old Sarum lasted another 200 years before it was abandoned and replaced by the city of Salisbury, they presumably took the required precautions. Now you don't have to have too fertile an imagination to see here a template for a range of folkloric, paranormal or ufological encounters across the centuries.

Harte tells other such stories, in a lively vernacular manner; he says specifically that he wants to avoid 'translationese' when transferring the narrative from Latin to English, and he succeeds. “When a spectral hound says Da mihi gladium tuum! I have rendered it as 'Give me the sword, mate!' because – well, how else would a talking dog talk?”

It is this directness that reveals that these stories of encounters with fairies, spirits and other supernatural entities are not 'folk-tales, 'legends' or parables, they are direct accounts of real experiences, recorded more or less contemporaneously with the event. Harte shows that they are largely recounted by educated individuals, and recorded by scholars and clerics: “these sources moved in circles far removed from the tale-spinning of the village soothsayer or the cures of pauper cripples”. They were what the modern paranormal researcher would describe as 'expert witnesses'.

After recounting the stories of fairy encounters, and describing the shifting shapes of the figures that inhabit them, Harte devotes the second half of this book to explaining the stories that are hidden in the landscape and that are revealed in the names of the places where they happened. As in his earlier book, Cloven Country, he warns us that supernatural sounding placenames are not always what they seem. Maps which show a 'Giant's Grave' or a 'Devil's Bridge' are often dealing with “what you might fancy, rather than what is actually there”. The location itself has a character which seems to demand a supernatural name, which is then supplied, together with a ready-made 'local legend'. In Cloven Country Harte describes the 'Devil's Chimney', a dramatic gash in a cliff on the Isle of Wight, a name which can be traced as far back as, er, 1979.

The names he presents are not accompanied by carefully wrought stories, they are raw descriptions of what people believed – because of what they experienced – about these places. Harte describes them as “labels without the luggage”. Were they even 'placenames' as we use the term now, or just descriptions of an area? For instance Harte asks whether the name ælfrucge recorded in 933 on the outskirts of Canterbury was a place actually called 'Elf Ridge' or was it simply “that ridge where the elves were seen”, and everyone would have known exactly where that was.

In an appendix to the book there is a county-by-county list of 900 names of fields, hills, rivers, valleys, wells and other geographical features where the first part of the name represents a supernatural being associated with the locality. Each is a recording of an encounter which was as real as any other element of life. These names are the ur-evidence of the reality of the 'encounter experience', in a realm where life and landscape are inextricably linked to an alternative, hidden world of beings which in the author's words, “break into our society at will”.

This is a densely-written book which covers a huge and complex area of human experience, but the reader is led along by the author's lively style. One does not get lost in the jargon of the specialist. The discussion of the origin of place-names for instance is laid out clearly – you do not need to be a philologist or toponymist to find your way around it.

The author describes a place which at first seems very remote from our own lives, but the similarities grow as you read on. It is a place we have seen many times before. This book perhaps describes the world of Magonia before you needed a Passport to cross the border.

John Rimmer

SHORT AND MOSTLY SHOCKING

2025-03-06T18:36:00.004+00:00

Short Sharp Shocks. Vol 4. BFI, 2 x Disc set Blu Ray

Well, the BFI keep finding these obscure brief shorts and longer shorts in their archive. Are they worth reviving? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, when we get shocks, atmosphere and a creepy frisson from films going out on a limb (no pun intended). No, when even the description short is mistaken and the odd or experimental film soon feels overlong, pedestrian and clunky.

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Overall it’s fascinating to see what kind of films the BFI once commissioned and TV stations slipped onto their schedules.

Mario Zampi’s reputation rests on three classic comedies, The Naked Truth, Laughter in Paradise and Too Many Crooks. Yet in 1948 he directed and produced a 50 minute horror film called One Fatal Night. It’s a well worn idea of two friends persuading another friend to spend a night in a supposed haunted house. This is the kind of story that used to appear in paperback fiction like The Pan Book of Horror Stories of the nineteen sixties. But here we have a period tale of two women, one murdered and the other sent crazy by their intruder, inserted into the main plot. Before going asleep the sceptical ghost tester has read of the women’s story in a bedside book.

One Fatal Night maintains an atmosphere and suspense that rarely flags. There’s some impressive, menacing and bleary photography as an indeterminate human shape approaches the victim and the sound of footsteps fatefully coming up the stairs is potently done. I didn’t think the Victorian tale was fully incorporated into the contemporary. Yet the ending (despite some melodramatic over-acting) is abruptly violent and surprising after we learn from a local policeman what ‘homicidal maniacs’ can get up too. I will say no more about an effective and oddly chilling film.

Death in the Hand 1948 (43 mins) tackles the subject of palmistry. Cosmo Vaughan (a part touching and part sinister performance from Esme Percy) is a palmist with a guilty conscience who reads the hand life line of four people on a train and predicts they will die in a crash. His presence is made even more unsettling by the fact he’s defensive, hyper sensitive and the actor has a glass left eye. The after effect of Vaughan telling his story, to two boarding house guests, then informed by a waiter, that Vaughan is a compulsive fantasist, doesn’t detract, or belie the forceful pre-ordained rail tragedy they’ve just listened too. The film begins and ends with an eerie shot of a hand, first open then clenched. Death in the Hand is a cosy but well made tale of the semi-uncanny.

Strange Experiences: Halloween Party (3 mins) and Strange Experiences: The Laughing Clown (4 mins) are episodes of a TV series screened in 1955/56. The first Experience is a very slight drama of deception, coincidence and theft. However the second Experience is genuinely creepy and sad. Harry Barton’s laugh was noted, recorded and used for a clown mannequin at a fairground in Brighton. He makes a lot of money from this, then loses everything and falls ill and dies. Barton’s laughter turns, through a sound mix with the clown, into one of pain and suffering. A very sharp horror anecdote!

Night Ride 1967 (19 mins) is rough and ready stuff about the robbery and murder of a reclusive and eccentric author, with the ability to read minds, who lives in the country. It’s shot in colour on a battered 8mm. Now restored but remaining suitably raw and bloody – there’s a raw energy in its pounding close-ups, filtering and psychedelic visuals of occult art. Amateur filmmaking: confident and expressive if finally let down by some stilted acting.

Unfortunately Mirror, Mirror 1969 (8 mins) was far too amateurish for me. Nice idea about seeing another reality, from another century, being played out in a mirror. But the mirror episode from the classic Dead of Night (1948) realised this so much better!

On to Scarecrow 1972 (17mins) A simple story, set in rural Ireland in 1931, of a terrible drought affecting the lives of a farmer and his wife. The husband goes out each day to shoot at crows attacking his exposed crop seeds. Every attack inevitably reminds you of the influence of Hitchcock’s The Birds made nine years earlier. Violent, sweaty, intense, even gruelling and without human speech Scarecrow’s focus is unerring. Narrowly concentrating on landscape and a burning sun, proving to be as much an enemy as the crow, this is a memorable folk horror poem.

Red 1976 (24mins) was written and directed by Astrid Frank who says, “Red was a short horror film that startled many with its unapologetic blend of sexuality and fear. It was provocative, taboo, and unashamedly so. At its core, it was about the female body as both subject and site of terror.” Set in the eighteenth century England Red concerns an artist whose lost his way in the countryside and seeks shelter for the night in a house where there lives a maid and three young actors. During the night he fantasises that he sees the naked female actor being ritually be-headed by the two men.

What begins as a potential TV M.R.James, combined with Schalcklen the Painter, turns into something more personal. No ghosts but horror through the lens of a feminist critique: though I felt it bore the gory fingerprint of Hammer Films (The Gorgon?) without ever being exploitative. Fascinating.

Sanctum 1976 (19 mins). I’d sooner sit through the bad bits (there aren’t many) of Kenneth Anger or Ken Russell (a bit more here) than watch again the feverish, underground-movie looking Sanctum. An anguished, naked man torn between accepting a gay lover and rejecting his religion where he sucks the statuette of the virgin Mary and masturbates with it proved not to be shocking (perhaps so in the 1970s) but boringly self indulgent, over wrought masochism. Embarrassingly bad and easily the worst film in this collection.

Public Information Films of the late seventies were generally scary and packed with horror movie punches. Here are two examples, Play Safe: Frisbee 1978 (1 mins) and Play Safe: Electricity 1978 (11 mins). Their power to convey a health and safety message rested on their brevity. Of the two films I preferred Frisbee’s sixty seconds warning of the dangers of kids playing near live electricity. The other film has a strong dark moment about an accident for a girl on a bike but goes on too long in a preachy manner using some twee and unfunny animation.

And finally Black Angel 1980 (25 mins) which is a mythic and moody piece centred round Sir Maddox returning from war. It appears he drowns in a lake but then doesn’t and is presented with a quest to duel with the Black Angel warrior (or death itself) and save a maiden. Technically a lot of care and professionalism went into the making of Black Angel. It was chosen as the short film to accompany The Empire Strikes Back (1981). The director Roger Christian speaks of the influence of Bergman, Tarkovsky and Kurosawa. It’s visually beautiful and well crafted. But given that he had 25 minutes then there could have been less build up and atmosphere and more plot development. As it is it takes the film’s now obvious near-death experience reflection to echo what was achieved in say Robert Enrico’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962) without that film’s sense of intense shock.

Volume 4 of Short Sharp Shocks is much better than Vol 3. But not as interesting as Vol 1 & 2: though if you are collecting the box sets you’ll also want to acquire this one. And I’m sure that the BFI are planning more shocking instalments.

Alan Price. First published in londongrip.co.uk

A BRAVE ODDITY

2025-02-10T15:48:00.004+00:00

Golem (Piotr Szulkin) 1979. Second Run. Blu Ray.

My usual complaint about mainstream SF cinema is its dearth of ideas, whether they been politically satiric, philosophical or genuinely scientific. Very few films hit you with the power of their imaginative speculation to make you think and doubt.

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I propose five benchmark films that have stood the test of time to challenge and shake the viewer and deliver on a metaphysical level: 2001- A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Stalker, Brazil and The Stone Tape.

So now that Golem, an unseen for years, defiantly independent, SF artefact, has surfaced again I find my complaint is not that it has too few ideas but too many. I gratefully applaud Golem’s radical inventiveness but too often this meant a bewildering incoherence. But first a plot outline.

After an atomic war in 1943 a new human race is created. Doctors control the technology. One of these new humans is Pernat (Marek Walczewski) who is only a 60% success. He lives in a semi-derelict part of the city and puzzles his already alienated neighbours. Constantly observed by the doctors and interrogated by the authorities, Pernat becomes the model for a Golem-like figure (The Golem is an artificial human being of Hebrew folklore: a clay person brought to live by being baked in an oven). And Pernat’s identification number assists in animating this creature.

I stress the word animating because director Piotor Szulkin experimented, at the famous Łodz film school, with animation before shooting his first feature, Golem. In fact there are moments in Golem that for me show the influence of Polish animators like Jan Lenica and Jan Svankmajer. This doesn’t mean a cartoonish film but one that today could be adapted as a graphic novel. Yet more remarkably there are visual similarities with Tarkovsky’s Stalker that was released in the same year as Golem. Both use colour filters to create an eerie gold, green and brown palette.

Golem’s lighting (achieved by the acclaimed cinematographer Zygmunt Samosiuk) is compelling; indeed it keeps moving the film forward despite the often disconcerting twists and turns of the script. Marek Walczewski gives a very credible and beautifully understated performance. He’s a man unaware of what’s happening to him and bereft of sufficient mental faculties to do anything about it: existing somewhere between a holy fool and a controlled automaton.

Pernat encounters a series of almost Dickensian characters, especially the female doll maker and the eccentric scholar who wishes to give Pernat a book that will explain his predicament. These odd people, along with a man who looks like a replica of Pernant, keep appearing and reappearing in an arbitrary and plotless manner. What grounds the weird narrative of these lost souls is Szulkin’s funny and disturbing intercutting to scientists and politician’s discussing the Pernat case.

I love the opening sequence, when realising that they have a failed creation on their hands, a doctor announces, as if it’s his childbirth duty, that maybe they ought to give Pernat a spanking like in the good old days. Cut to today’s newspaper, stuck in Pernat’s mouth, that the doctor says he hasn’t got round to reading yet, a darkly comic moment that pulls successfully away from the grim fate of having to cope in this crazy Golem world.

Unfortunately there’s too much that’s annoyingly mystifying in Golem. The episode set in the TV studio when the reality of an audience is doubted; the interruptions of the supposedly happy members of a brass band; the doll woman sitting on the steps championing her dolls and a general confusion other whether we are watching Pernat or a copy of Pernat are paraded throughout the film in an illogical manner. Absurdism is rife and absolutely central to Golem but it never quite digs deep enough to shock but remains in a strange dismembered state. Even on a second viewing I felt an information overload. Where was Golem going?

There is a resolution of sorts but I won’t reveal it. Golem both spurts out ideas and then gnomically hides them. Some work but many don’t. A film to chew over then even though there’s less meat on the bone. A serious and uncompromising fable that risks pretentiousness yet never actually falls flat on its face. All is kept watchable by its technical skill, the central performance and a defiant desire to not be classified. That last intention I don’t mind. I just wish the film had been better scripted and idea-wise reigned in. Golem is a brave oddity: an out to lunch curiosity that equally attracts and repels. It’s great that Second Run have made it available again. Pity it didn’t overwhelm me, though it’s destined to become a cult film of sorts.

Alan Price. [First published in London Grip]

PAGANISM PERSISTING

2025-01-31T19:15:00.002+00:00

Robin Douglas and Francis Young. Paganism Persisting. A History of European Paganism Since Antiquity. University of Exeter Press, 2024.

The first question of course, is 'what is Paganism?' The word 'pagan' arose amongst Christians in the fourth century to describe their unconverted neighbours. It was derived from the Latin paganus, which has a number of possible translations, including 'civilian' and 'villager'. It is not clear why this term was used, but it is clear that it was meant to have negative overtones.

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It eventually came to describe anyone who was not a Christian, Jew or Muslim. In modern usage it is almost exclusively used about 'Old World' peoples; outside of that terms such as 'indigenous religion' are used. The authors admit that the usage of the word has its problems, which they discuss in a lengthy introductory chapter. This becomes even more of a problem when when exploring the concepts of 'pagan survival' and 'pagan persistence.' They say “Whereas the word 'survival' implies something left over, a relic of a former world view that is somehow preserved beneath the accreted weight of subsequent religious and cultural developments, 'persistence' implies no such claims”.

They look at the rise of Christianity across Europe, firstly replacing the pagan gods and practices of the Roman Empire, and spreading, usually through conquest or dynastic ambition, across Europe, until the 'conversion' of the last pagan nation, Lithuania, in 1317. They argue that little if any practice of actual paganism survived for any length of time after a tribe, people or nation had been converted to Christianity. Any later ostentation has been through deliberate attempts to revive historical pagan ideas. They dismiss the idea of pagan survival in some underground form that occasionality breaks through into the mainstream, but equally dismiss the idea that later pagan revivals were 'concoctions' with no connection to any historical forms of paganism.

The first attempt at a serious revival which they examine is the reign of Emperor Julian 'the Apostate', who restored worship of the classical gods at a time when Christianity was becoming ascendant in the Empire. His version of paganism, although it involved rituals such as animal sacrifices, itself had many Christian characteristics. He introduced a set of rules for pagan priests that “resemble the canonical rules that were later drawn up for Catholic clergy”.

Julian died after being Emperor for less than two years, and his rather pale version of paganism rapidly faded away. In fact it was so pale that some Christians complained that it failed to give them the opportunity to become martyrs. Rather than a last-ditch attempt to shore up classical paganism, Julian's experiment seems closer to the 're-created' paganism of the following centuries. And this is the pattern which is described in the rest of this book.

An early attempt at a revival in the Eastern Byzantine Empire was the work of the eleventh century philosopher, politician and monk Michael Psellus. Although outwardly professing as an Orthodox Christian, he promoted a pagan revival on Neoplatonist principles, which he believed would reverse the Christian conquest of Europe. Although he did create a small following in Greece, his main influence was as a teacher of pagan philosophical ideas.

The Renaissance brought classical ideas and arts into the mainstream of Western culture and this involved a reassessment of the nature of classical paganism. Figures such as Marcilio Ficino attempted to interpret classical paganism, particularly the works of Plato, into a Christian context. He also translated the collection of texts known as the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin. Although Ficino probably was not a practising pagan (this is however contested) his work provided sources for later philosophers, theologians and revivalists,

Although pagan art, literature and philosophy became part of cultural life at the time of the Renaissance, it was not until the eighteenth century that any real challenge arose to what the authors term 'the Christian monopoly', pointing out that the series of religious wars and the arrival of the scientific revolution had discredited the established churches in the eyes of many. The Catholic Cardinal Pierre de Bernis wrote “Even women began to free themselves from prejudices. The spark of unbelief travelled through the whole world … it was no longer fashionable to believe in the Gospel”

Colonialism and increased contact with non-Abrahamic religions also led to interest in and even attachment to various faiths. Confucianism in particular was attractive to figures such as Liebnitz and Voltaire, and was even looked upon sympathetically by Jesuit missionaries.

The French Revolution provided the only state organised attempts at establishing a formal 'pagan', or at least non-Christian, religion, with the revolutionary Cult of Reason performing elaborate classically derived ceremonies in Notre Dame Cathedral, and the Cult of the Supreme Being promoted by Robespierre. These represented the first attempted revival of pagan practices since the Roman Empire. The attempt failed, but the authors comment, “there was nothing inevitable about that.”

Writers such as Shelley and Schiller explored pagan themes as part of the literary Romantic movement, expressing a libertarian reaction to the repressive political and religious establishments of the era. This also found expression in the 'Hellfire Clubs' of Sir Francis Dashwood and others. Alongside this there was a poetic and Romantic pagan movement, which the authors term 'Shelleyism', centred around that writer. They describe it as an expression of 'counter-cultural liberation', and though it did not long outlive Shelly's circle, they see it as a direct ancestor of modern Paganism.

Far from being a period of strict religious orthodoxy, the nineteenth century was, particularly in England, an era of “profound religious change and disturbance”. Partly this was due to the urbanisation of society and the breaking of traditional links and communities, but also factors such as the growth of a scientific scepticism and influences from overseas.

The French magus Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant) is reputed to have conducted the first pagan ritual of modern times in 1854, at the request of a “mysterious wealthy elderly lady”, drawing on Greek traditions. This seemed very much a 'one off' ceremony, and any serious revival of paganism did not come until later in the century. As with Shelly and the Romantics this took the form of a literary and artistic revival, with figures like Swinburne and George Meredith writing poems in praise of the Great Mother Goddess. Later writers like Kenneth Grahame and Arthur Machen similarly evoking the figure of Pan as a pagan manifestation of Nature.

The authors also examine what has been described as 'responsible paganism', derived from the Shelleyan paganism of the Romantics, but which “drew on the idealistic strand ... rather than the transgressive strand”. It linked paganism with healthy living, any nudity being more to do with vigorous exercise than sex magic, and with a sort of mystical socialism, exemplified in the writings of the utopian poet Edward Carpenter.

The authors define the final stage of Victorian paganism as a return to the occult world of Eliphas Lévi, being an element of a more general cultural trend, which included mass movements like Spiritualism as well as elitist and ritualistic societies such as the Golden Dawn, which they see the as “the first successful attempt at creating something like a modern pagan religion in the sense of a fully developed system of ritual, symbolism and belief”. Paganism was in the process of being “reinvented as a mass movement”, but was still an élite preoccupation.

This came eventually in the twentieth century with the creation of Wicca, but there were a number of diversions and dead ends before that happened. One considered here in some detail was the 'woodcraft movement', originating in America as an attempt to incorporate indigenous Native American spirituality into Euro-American culture, in groups such as the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry and the Kibbo Kiff, which also included themes from traditional European paganism. As an organised form of paganism it faded away after World War II, but elements have re-emerged in 'Deep Green' movements.

The authors look at other early twentieth century movements, including ethno-nationalist revivals in the Baltic region and Russia, before arriving at the most successful pagan creation so far, Gerald Gardner's Wicca, and ask why this movement achieved the success denied previous revivals. They suggest that this may be because it was was not an attempt to revive any specific historical pagan religion, which they put down partly to the influence of Margaret Murray: “... the very title of The Witch Cult in Western Europe proclaimed that the religion was not nationally specific”, and helped it to spread internationally.

This book chronicles the various flowerings of the 'seed' of paganism throughout European history, and explains how, although they may have borrowed ideas and images from earlier manifestations, each was individual to itself, and none represented the revival of an underlying thread of 'actual existing' paganism hidden beneath the Christian establishment. Paganism Persisting demonstrates that the idea of paganism rather that its practice has survived for two millennia, to be revived at various times in history for a variety of reasons, from the growth of a national identity or a search for an enhanced spirituality, to a countercultural rebellion against the religious and often secular establishments.

It is quite a short book – 158 pages of the main text plus 68 pages of notes, references and index – and it is densely written, sometimes the sheer number of names packed into it seemed overwhelming, but the writing is clear and avoids the extremes of 'academic' jargon. The only downside really, is the 'academic' price.

John Rimmer

STATISTICAL REVIEW

2025-01-22T20:00:00.011+00:00

As I wind down Magonia Review, I thought it might be interesting to see what were the reviews that attracted the most readers over the past fifteen years. Of course the older reviews will have had a longer time to attract readers, but some more recent entries feature in the Top Ten as well. I don't really know what it says about the value of the books, the acuity of the reviewers or the tastes of Magonia readers.

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There are one or two surprises (to me), but they are all books that stimulate and often provoke. I suppose I should never be really surprised at what Magonia readers read, otherwise you wouldn't be reading Magonia, would you?

Thank you to our readers and reviewers - and authors and publishers as well of course - as we sail into harbour for keeping the Magonia ship floating this long! So here in reverse order are the ten most read Magonia Review reviews as of January 2025

At number ten is Sharon A. Hill's Scientifical Americans; The Culture of Amateur Paranormal Researchers. This is a study of the phenomenon of ARIGs – Amateur Research and Investigation Groups. Written from an American perspective this gives a good summary of amateur paranormal research groups, although sometimes with the attitude of an anthropologist who has stumbled on a previously unknown tribe. In my review I concluded: “Overall though, she raises many valid criticisms, which members of such research groups would do well to consider.

Ninth place is The Men Behind The Flying Saucer Review, from Steve Holland and Roger Perry. It gives us a fascinating account of the chequered history of what was possibly the worlds most influential UFO magazine. With strange links to Fascism, boy's comics, super-intelligent Martian bees and Communist djinns, it steered a wayward path from hard-line contacteeism, through scientific rationalism under its greatest editor Charles Bowen to end in a stew of paranoia and conspiracy mongering.

Jacob Middleton's Spirits of an Industrial Age: Ghost Impersonation, Spring-Heeled Jack and Victorian Society takes eighth place. It looks at ghosts, and just as importantly ghost impersonators, seeing them as a reaction to the urbanisation and industrialisation of the Victorian era. Spring-Heel Jack provoked dozens of imitators their pranks ranging from the mischievous to the criminal. Reviewer Peter Rogerson sees these as urban versions of the 'guiser' figures of English folklore “before these things were tidied up by the mid-Victorians.”

Number seven is Whitley Strieber's Solving the Communion Enigma, but there is little in it which Peter Rogerson feels goes in any way to doing that. Some have suggested that Strieber was a bandwagon jumper leaping on to the then-fashionable abduction wagon. However Peter writes “on this occasion not only has the bandwagon long departed, but has now crashed and is lying in a heap of twisted metal. 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."

Our number six title although posted online in August 2013, didn't really take off for two years with a sudden surge of interest in 2015; S.D. Tucker's Terror of the Tokoloshe. Peter Rogerson explains that the Tokoloshe is “a hairy dwarf”, but what distinguishes him from similar petty supernaturals such as boggarts and djinns “is his rapacious sexuality, as evidenced by his giant penis.” He suggests that the Tokoloshe, like witches in early modern Europe, may be a product of the tensions of modernisation.

Fifth on the list is my own review of Christopher Josiffe's brilliant Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-special Talking Mongoose. This account of an amazing combination of poltergeist, cryptozoology and Celtic legend has become a classic of historical paranormal research. My verdict on it was that it “not only gives the definitive account of the Talking Mongoose himself, but also supplies an insight into the society of the era. A Magonia Must-read!”

Peter Shaver's The Rise of Science: From Prehistory to the Far Future is a straightforward history of science and scientific thought from prehistoric times, through Greece and Rome to the modern era, noting that science has fallen and risen again at least three times in that period. Reviewer Gerrard Russell concludes that “it is an ideal introduction to the development of scientific thought for the interested general reader, and could well be a standard textbook for schools, which would instil a real enthusiasm for science.”

Up to number three now, and it's Damion Searls' biography of 'the man who made the blots, The Inkblots - Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing. Reviewer Kevin Murphy points out that although his 'inkblot' test is well know, the man himself and his life much less so. The book paints a vivid picture of his life and background, his work helping patients in mental hospitals and the development of his famous test, ensuring that thanks to this “very fine biography, Hermann Rorschach will deservedly be remembered as a man as well as a name.”

Jack Brewer's The Greys Have Been Framed: Exploitation in the UFO Community has been praised elsewhere as one of the best UFO books of recent years. I describe it as the definitive deconstruction of the 'abduction industry', taking a scalpel to hypnotic regression and its practitioners, none of whom come out unscathed from Brewer's scrutiny. It exposes the 'seamy side' of UFO research, but also acts as a warning to researchers in other areas of paranormal research that they are dealing with human beings, not just 'phenomena'.

Top of our list is Jonathan Powell's Rare Astronomical Sights and Sounds. As well as being a guide to astronomy and the cosmos, the author describes the development of the science from myth, legend and observation, discussing “... how our ancestors were continually challenged in the way they saw the skies and how they corrected and augmented their findings over thousands of years.” Reviewer Gerrard Russell feels that the author has caught the wonder of the universe and that “all in all, it is a comprehensive book on the sights and sounds of the night sky and all its mysteries.”

There then are the 'Top Ten' most read review on our Blog, but of course there are 1,200 others reviews out there for you on this Blog, as well as nearly 800 older titles in our Review Archive. That should keep you busy!

John Rimmer

The Magonia Review Blog: https://pelicanist.blogspot.com/

Book Review Archive: http://mrobsr.blogspot.co.uk/

THE VERY GREEN PARTY

2024-12-30T16:10:00.003+00:00

John Clark. The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England. University of Exeter Press, 2023.

The story of the Green Children, a boy and girl, coloured green and in green clothing, who appeared mysteriously in the Suffolk village of Woolpit some time in the mid twelfth century has been around for centuries, hovering between folklore, fairy-tale, Forteanism, and most recently ufology.

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Its first appearance came in two near-contemporary chronicles from the 12th Century, compiled by William of Newburgh, and Ralph of Coggeshall. William was an Augustinian canon at Newburgh Abbey in Yorkshire; Ralph a Cistercian abbot in Essex. Their two accounts of the events tell a very similar story, but with some important differences, which the author examines in detail. The two versions, in the original Latin and in the author's translation, are given side-by-side as an appendix to the main text of the book.

One of the main differences between the two texts is that in Ralph's version the children immediately they were found were taken to the nearby home of Sir Richard de Calne at Wykes, where the girl lived for some time as a servant. Sir Richard is not mentioned in William de Newburgh's version but he adds the information that the girl later married a man from [Kings] Lynn. Both chroniclers state that the boy, the younger sibling, died not long after the pair were discovered, and before he could be baptised like his sister.

In both cases the stories are only small incidents in much longer historical texts, and Clark suggests that the specific story of the Green Children probably did not circulate in local lore very much after the supposed events themselves. The first specific mention of the story outside the Chronicles was not until it was picked up in the sixteenth century in John Leland's Collectanea, which did not appear in print until 1715. Clark says “Though [the story] was was then taken up by intellectuals speculating about the plurality of worlds, or of worlds within our own, there is no evidence of any popular survival or local circulation”.

Real public interest in the stories did not seem to arise until a combined version of the two stories was published in the 1859 edition of Thomas Keightley's book Fairy Mythology, which brought it to the attention of students in the then-new study of 'folklore'. It is possible that the story “gained prominence among folklorists because of the rarity of early mediaeval evidence of the belief in 'fairies' that they could compare to more recent accounts in oral tradition.”

The tale seems to have re-entered local consciousness through being included in a popular guidebook to East Anglia published in 1875, which itself was the source for a paper published by the Folklore Society in 1893. Gradually it became accepted as on old 'folk tale' and has ben interpreted and reinterpreted by writers, artist, composers – there are two operatic versions - and local historians, often to support a theory, as a moral fable, or just a good yarn. Versions have been particularly aimed at children as a 'fairy story', and it has appeared as a school play, pantomime and comic strip.

But what is actually behind this story? It appears to be firmly rooted in a particular place a a particular time. We see that there are two more-or-less contemporary records of the event which include several checkable historical details. But there are enough differences in the accounts to suggest that one is not a direct copy of the other and the two chroniclers received the details via different routes.

Apart from the curious way they appeared and the odd colour of the children there is nothing in either account which suggests any supernatural origin, and the surviving sibling, the sister, seemed to go on to lead a normal life, disappearing from the record without, for example being denounced as a witch.

When discovered, and eventually being able to understand English, they claimed to have come from the land of St Martin, where everything, including all the people, was green, that it was always twilight and the sun did not rise there. It was a Christian country they claimed, with many churches, St Martin being particularly venerated. They came to Woolpit through caverns by following the sound of bells until they emerged into the unaccustomed daylight. At first they were unfamiliar with the local food. One of the accounts, that of Ralph of Coggeshall, says that they refused to eat anything given them until they saw some freshly cut green beans, which they ate, but only after being shown that the bean was in the pod of the plant, not the stalk.

There is enough in the story to suggest that there may be some historical event behind it, but Clark points out that other elements in the text correspond to motifs which are familiar from fairy and folk tales. Obviously their green skin, but also their strange language, curious clothes, their appearance in a pit, a traditional entrance to a supernatural 'otherworld', and their unfamiliarity with 'human' food. But he concludes that “the presence of traditional motifs or folkloric elements in a story cannot prove that it is fiction.” As he points out, there have actually been wicked stepmothers!

Clark looks at individual elements of the tale, attempting to rationalise them, but this often brings more problems than it solves. Even the question of what is meant by 'green' is something which is discussed in detail, as perception and description of colours has varied over centuries and cultures. However in this case the answer is quite clear, Ralph of Coggeshall described the colour as prassinus color, 'leek-green' - the children were definitely green. Could this have been be the result of a disease? There are a number of possibilities, but none of them seem to fit the description of the children's circumstances.

A number of later commentators have put the sudden discovery and alien nature of the children down to them having strayed from a foreign family - possibly Flemish weavers, who travelled through the region to various markets - which might account for their unknown language and the unfamiliar nature of the children's clothes. Clark considers this a plausible, but not definite possibility. This has become an interpretation that has been very popular with modern re-tellers of the tale who have used it as a parable of immigration and integration.

Inevitably the story has been interpreted as an extraterrestrial encounter, but also as an actual traditional fairy encounter. Despite the original narrative being contained in just five pages of text (in original and translation) the amount of speculation and scholarship that has surrounded it has at times overwhelmed the actual story of two young children in an unfamiliar environment.

This is a extensively researched and referenced study, delving into a huge range of sources and commentaries, from medieval parish records to Fortean Times. It is a fascinating, and despite its deep scholarship, an accessible account of how stories and legends develop and are interpreted and exploited through antiquarian studies and modern re-workings. The only thing that stops me recommending this book to all Forteans is the 'academic' price tag.

In the end it is impossible to say that this is the 'last word' on the Children of Woolpit, for as the author concludes, “And yet we still don't know where the children came from or why they were green”. His italics!

John Rimmer

"A PLACE TO LINGER IN STRANGENESS"

2024-12-03T14:46:00.004+00:00

Greg Eghigian. After the Flying Saucers Came. A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon. Oxford University Press, 2023.

As I sign off from Magonia, this book seems to have arrived just in time. It is the definitive study of ufology from its exciting birth in the craziness of post WWII euphoria, the dreams of space travel, and the hope of encountering new worlds. But also there came the fears of the Cold War and possible nuclear annihilation, which might be avoided by the promise of new societies and new technologies the saucers might bring.

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And it ends at the turn of the twenty-first century, seemingly drained by the necrophilia of the abduction stories, and mummified in an endless Moebius strip of 'disclosure tomorrow' promises.

I say this is a history of ufology rather than a history of UFOs. Although individual cases are referenced they are not investigated and analysed in any depth, but are used as illustrations of the way in which the UFO phenomenon has been studied, promoted and exploited, and the people and movements behind its development.

Eghigian clearly identifies the early years of the saucers with the world in the aftermath of WWII, and the developing Cold War, drawing a clear distinction from pre-1947 historical phenomena such as the airships and earlier aerial visions, which he calls 'paleovisitology.

The early US reports from Arnold and through the 1940s were interpreted almost entirely in terms of secret weapons, either from the US or the Soviet Union. He quotes a Gallup Poll in 1947 which showed that 90% of Americans had heard of flying saucers, but the numbers who thought that they came from space was so small they did not have a separate category. This was against 29% who said they were misinterpretations and the 15% who suggested secret US weapons. The biggest group, at 39%, 'didn't have an answer'. Even as late as 1957 polling seemed to indicate that only about a quarter of Americans though that flying saucers were extraterrestrial.

But the trend was inexorably towards interpreting the saucer reports as evidence of extraterrestrial activity. Eghigian cites a 1952 article in Life magazine, 'Have we Visitors from Space?' as one of the key drivers of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, along with the wave of sightings in the summer of that year, particularly the McMinnville photographic case. At the same time as the US military began collating reports from personnel and the public, the first civilian UFO research groups emerged. Followed almost instantly by the UFO sceptic groups. By the mid-fifties 'ufology' was an established phenomenon in its own right.

He charts the rise of the major UFO groups like APRO and NICAP, describing in often amusing detail the various conflicts and controversies between and within them and the different paths they took. APRO was to a great extent a reporting organisation, with an extensive range of contacts in South America,

This came to the fore in 1957 when APRO's Brazilian contact, Olavo Fontes learned about the now-legendary Villas Boas case. At first Fontes was reluctant to be specific about the case's sexual content, feeling it 'inappropriate' to discuss it with APRO's female organiser Coral Lorenzen. In fact Lorenzen was quite happy to publicise the case, but in the end deferring to Fontes' view that the case – which they nicknamed 'Lover Boy' - was 'too lewd' for a wider audience. The details of the case were not released publicly until 1965, when Gordon Creighton began to translate them for Flying Saucer Review, after having sat on them for two years, hoping for further confirmation.

NICAP, under the direction of Donald Keyhoe concentrated more on pressurising the US government to open a public investigation of the UFO phenomenon, which Keyhoe saw entirely in terms of physical 'nuts and bolts' extraterrestrial machinery. That is until any of those nuts and bolts machines were reported as actually landing, at which point he rather lost interest in them.

Although they had different approaches to UFO research, Keyhoe and Lorenzen initially shared the distaste for the 'contactee' stories that developed parallel to the 'nuts-and-bolts' saucer phenomenon. Although many UFO historians like to see this as a quasi-occult movement that has nothing to do with 'real' UFOs, Eghigian makes it clear that from the very beginning – even pre-Adamski – contactees were an integral part of the developing UFO legend.

In the sixties contracteeism as a movement within the UFO world stagnated, although individuals such as Adamski and George Hunt Williamson still drew a cultist following. But increasingly it was pushed to the margins by accounts of sightings and interactions with figures associated with UFOs which seemed to fit in better with a scientific, 'secular' view of UFOs. These were usually straight reports of 'operators' working on or around a landed saucer, usually making little or no contact or acknowledgment to the witness.

The classic case, which perhaps gave the more conservative researchers the opportunity to take such reports seriously was the Socorro incident of 1964, which attracted investigators from MUFON and NICAP, as well as from the US military. It was a low-key account with a reliable police witness and no suggestion of any contact, physical or mental, with the landed craft's 'occupants'.

A number of such high-profile cases in the US, and the public's reaction to them, provoked the US Air Force to attempt a scientific analysis of the phenomenon, although carefully 'outsourcing' it. This was the Condon Report. Erdighan gives a fuller account of the personalities and politics that shaped the Report that I have previously seen. He charts the rifts between members and factions in the team, while maintaining an objective stance and describing the motivations and methods of all those involved.

Inevitably, when the final Report was issued in 1969, it seemed something of an anti-climax. Condon himself later described it as “the biggest waste of time I ever had in my life”. Team member Robert Low wrote to a friend “the whole [UFO] thing seems to be dead as a doornail.” But this was soon to change.

I feel one of the greatest values of this book is the author's understanding of the world-wide nature of the UFO research 'community'. Unlike other American academics who have entered this field, he is well acquainted with UFO researchers in Europe and across the world. He quotes one UK writer who was looking forward to the 1970s: “new and unexpected elements will be introduced into, and emerge from, the whole UFO problem rendering it not only more complex but considerably more interesting.” He comments that the writer “proved to be prescient”.

OK, that writer was me, in a piece for Merseyside UFO Bulletin published in 1969. I was surprised and pleased to see numerous other quotations from and references to pieces by myself and my MUFOB/Magonian colleagues John Harney, Roger Sandell and Peter Rogerson. Pleased not just from the satisfaction of seeing our work acknowledged, but as an example of how it demonstrated the depth of the author's research into the UFO literature beyond the canon of the established writers, and beyond the USA.

In the seventies the UFO phenomenon opened up beyond the limited perspectives of the ETH and contactee movements - “fresh voices emerged, bringing variety and a new vitality to the UFO scene”. Eghigian points out that this influx of new ideas was fuelled by young people, and that almost half of the 'ufozines' of the period were being published and edited by people under 20 years of age. As an example he describes the ufological career of Hakon Blömqvist and the growth of the UFO research movement in Sweden, and the growth of the AFU (formerly 'Arbetsgruppen för ufologi') now the Archive for the Unexplained', the largest UFO and Fortean library in Europe.

Also new in the seventies was the growing interest from social scientists who found in the UFO phenomenon and its followers an interesting topic for study, analysing both the psychological and social backgrounds of the UFO 'percipients' and in the social organisation of the researchers themselves. Eghigian points out that as early as 1970 Flying Saucer Review editor Charles Bowen readily accepted that ufology should be accepted as an area of parapsychological study.

Vallee's Passport to Magonia and John Keel's Operation Trojan Horse exploded on the UFO scene and stimulated ideas and discussions on the relationship between UFO belief and other forms of supernatural and folkloric ideas. Many of these ideas had been bubbling around in ufology for some time before, often as a variation of the pre-von Daniken 'ancient astronaut' theories. Vallee's ideas were developed much further by French ufologists like Michel Monnerie, Bertrand Méheust and Thierry Pinvidic as they created the basic principles behind 'psychosocial' ufology. This soon became a major influence on ufology in Britain and across Europe, but with one or two exceptions did not have a great influence on ufology in the USA.

What seemed to be a liberating movement in ufology met many obstacles. The ETH 'establishment' was still a strong barrier to new ideas. In the UK it was disparaged by critics as the 'fairies and folklore' tendency. Of course now many would see that as a perfectly accurate description of what was happening, as the search for the stimulus of the UFO phenomenon grew broader and away from the stifling corral of the ETH into a wider area of anomalous experience.

But in the USA another tendency began to emerge, as the research movement became dominated by the abduction phenomena, which in its turn became dominated by researchers like Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and John Mack. These figures were more activists than researchers, steering the witnesses and the phenomena into their own image, and imposing their own agendas onto the reports which they extracted from their research subjects. The 'abductionists' began a move into a cultist world, leading commentors like Elizabeth Lofus and Roger Sandell to make comparisons with the growing Satanic abuse 'recovered memory' advocates and their links to a massive range of conspiracy theories.

Many of the themes were the same: both involved the 'alien' invasion of the human – usually female – body; the use of women as 'breeders', for alien hybrids or for sacrificial victims, and of course the absence of any actual physical evidence. Eventually the abduction phenomena imploded with its own absurdities, but rather than opening up new horizons, for many researchers it resulted in a retreat to the cosy world of aliens, government secrecy and demands for 'disclosure'.

In his concluding chapter Eghidian surveys the UFO scene in the age of the Internet. He notes the closure of most of the open membership UFO groups, which have either folded totally or transitioned into archive organisations. He suggests that some observers believe that the hype over the abduction reports took “all the oxygen out of the room leaving ufologists with nowhere to go after its celebrity faded”. Or has ufology retreated into “true believers spinning their wheels”. He quotes my comment when I ended publication of the printed Magonia magazine in 2009: “... it has deteriorated into an endless scrutiny of issues that were once considered settled”

But the author ends on a less despairing note, and one which for all my scepticism defines my own viewpoint: “For those who have found themselves unable to look away, UFOs have offered a place to linger in strangeness.”

Eghigian has captured the true essence of ufology in this book, and has delved deeper into it than any other academic researcher who has braved the field. It is a balanced and open-minded historical survey of the UFO phenomenon and the people who have been involved in it. This book is essential for every ufologist's and Fortean's bookshelf.

John Rimmer

LA VIE PARISIENNE

2024-11-30T20:16:00.001+00:00

Tobias Churton. Aleister Crowley In Paris: Sex, Art, And Magick in the City of Light. Inner Traditions, 2023.

Aleister Crowley, ‘the wickedest man in the world’, a label attached to him by his strait-laced God-fearing mother, remains to this day a magnet for readers with an interest in the esoteric or the occult. Such readers will find in this book a mass of detail about Crowley’s life in Paris from his first glimpse of the city in 1883 until his involuntary removal from France by the French immigration authorities in 1929.

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The reader should note that because the subject of the book is Crowley’s time in Paris, certain passages in his life are omitted, notably from when he left Paris in 1914 until his return in 1920.

One of the exceptions to the Paris only rule is the inclusion of the visit to Cairo in 1904 because it was too important to miss out. It was here that he experienced, ‘what he was convinced was angelic dictation of “this three-fold book of the Law’’ ‘(p. 165). The surprising aspect is that it was his then wife Rose rather than Crowley who was the initiator of the unearthly visitation which inspired in Aleister the outpouring of writing that was to form the basis of his new occult religion, which he later dubbed Thelema. By 1907 poor Rose was a raging alcoholic, having consumed 120 bottles of whisky in 150 days, whereas ‘by contrast A.C. found himself “scribe” of the higher mind’ with Crowley believing himself, ‘on track to becoming a Master of the Temple, beyond ego: the universal Self’ (p. 202).

666 was a man of many parts. For example, his friendship with Rodin is explored in detail, his exploits as a pioneering mountaineer around the world is mentioned as well as his trip to Cairo and a sojourn in Sicily. He managed a draw at chess with a Russian chess genius and met various celebrities. It appears he was the inspiration for Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out and for a short and malicious story by Somerset Maughan, called The Magician that led to a Hollywood film. Hardly a day passed without ‘sex magic’ in hotel bedrooms. Of course, Crowley’s reputation as the incarnation of the Evil One did nothing but encourage women to sacrifice their bodies on the altar of his lust. For his part, ‘the sacrifice of the priest was the rendering holy the semen through sacramental orgasm’ (p. 245).

Significant passages in the book amount to a reworking in fantastic detail not only of his occult religious practices but also of Crowley’s life, telling us who he met, what he did and often where he ate and with whom he had sex, and all of this on an almost daily, even hourly, basis. Fortunately for him, Crowley had the good luck to possess a wallet large enough to enable him to live in grand style in some of the best hotels in Paris and on the Riviera. Oh, to have been an Englishman with money during the bel epoch! His memoirs (published in 1929) also reveal that his sexual proclivities were matched by his avid dining in the best French restaurants. My God, he had a good time!

On the development of Crowley’s philosophy, the book is hampered by the fact that the story of his life here told does not cover the adventures he had with his friend Victor Neuberg between 1909 and 1911 in French Algeria, nor the years 1914 to 1920 which one guesses may have been important to Crowley’s psychic/spiritual development. In any event the author does not discuss the ramifications of Crowley’s belief system, although the rituals of his spiritual practice are described in some detail. For myself, I find it interesting to note that Crowley was conversant with the Vedas and even at one point criticised a friend for having insufficient detachment from the world. At the same time, in keeping with his reputation he indulged, as we have seen, in the pursuit of a most extreme hedonism. How can we reconcile this? The topic is nor discussed, and at least in this book the reader does not get to learn from any comments and analysis of the author the nature of Churton’s own assessment.

The reader is therefore left to form his own judgement about Crowley’s life. This is not without its merits, but things are perhaps taken to extremes when, at a couple of places, without comment, Churton simply presents the reader directly with the source material (at the outset of the book with a series of press cuttings concerning Crowley’s expulsion from France, and at the end with an unedited diary extract from the memoirs). But one thing is sure: the reader will end the book having been richly entertained and amazed by this account of Crowley’s multi-faceted existence.

Robin Carlile.

SET IN STONE

2024-11-01T18:14:00.001+00:00

The Stone Tape (1972) Peter Sasdy (Director) 101 Films – Blu Ray (To be released on 9th December 2024)

Nigel Kneale is a master at fusing the genres of horror and science fiction. He often claimed he wasn’t writing genre TV and film drama but simply good drama. At one level he’s right. Although he does employ generic tropes what’s far more interesting is his engagement with speculative ideas (both paranormal and ‘normal’) and the psychological conflict of characters observed with great empathy, satire and irony.

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His 1952 radio play You Must Listen was recently produced for Radio 4 extra. It’s about a haunted telephone line and prefigures his BBC 2 Christmas ghost story offering, The Stone Tape. The first was more containable as a crossed-line nuisance turning into a psychic menace. At a surface level The Stone Tape is a psychic thriller/ghost story. But probe its script and a lot more is revealed.

A research team have moved into a partly renovated country house. They are attempting to discover a new recording medium that will supersede standard recording tape. Scientist Jill Greely (Jane Asher) encounters the ghost of a young maid who died in 1890. Peter Brock (the excellent Michael Bryant) the head of the team thinks this isn’t a ghost but that the stone in the room has preserved an image of the woman’s death. And this stone tape could be the new recording medium they have been seeking. Jill is disturbed by the maid’s presence. She investigates further to prove that the stone is actually recording incidents that go back thousands of years to reveal an unknown malevolent power.

Jill is brilliantly portrayed by Jane Asher. She represents an intuitive sensitivity, feminist determinism and also a deeper scientific curiosity that the male boffins round her lack. Jill is ambitious but more importantly she’s anxious to discover the truth of the horror they’ve experienced. And that’s imprinted in the stone tape – the fabric of a building that has recorded the energy of extreme emotions over a long time.

Peter is a macho leader who wants results. At first he pursues the idea of a ghostly recording device (“The room holds an image. A recording of what’s happened.”). Yet when he and team appear to have wiped clean the menacing sounds and the sight of the screaming ghost (“The vibration thing.”) Peter drops their research, returns to orthodox work practices and forbids everyone from continuing along the psychic phenomena road. But Jill persists.

Technically you have to allow for the fact we have 1970s special effects and The Stone Tape was shot on video (normally a terrible looking medium for drama). Yet the results stand up as well as earlier studio television drama with filmed location inserts. But perhaps the most powerful aspect of Kneale’s film (directed by the skilled Peter Sasdy) is the contribution of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It’s quietly effective score and the recording of intense ghostly screams continues to startle and chill: the notion of such a sophisticated soundscape, for a one off TV Christmas special ‘treat’, was then very rare.

Through the eyes of Jill The Stone Tape critiques the casual sexism of the seventies; its characters are well rounded and never become ciphers trailing behind its ideas; the set is atmospheric; a subplot about the commercialisation of science (A manic leader of a team developing an improved washing machine) is effectively ridiculed; the tense strain put on the scientists’ rationality well directed and above all the tragic consequences of interfering with paranormal phenomena are impressively conveyed in a uniquely disturbing story.

The Stone Tape is a TV classic and one of Nigel Kneale’s finest scripts.

This Film 101 blu-ray is a strong upgrade with an excellent film extra documentary called 'Children of the Tape' packed with enthusiasm for a high concept project that people felt privileged to be part of or simply viewers (writers, filmmakers) who were, and still are, inspired by the originality of Kneale’s vision.

Alan Price

Originally published in https://londongrip.co.uk/

HOLD THE BOILING OIL!

2024-10-15T16:26:00.003+01:00

James Wright. Historic Building Mythbusting; Uncovering Folklore, History and Archaeology. History Press, 2024

There's always a hidden tunnel, isn't there? Whenever you are being shown round some old mansion, castle, church or even pub, there will be someone who tells you about the hidden tunnel.

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Sometimes they are are dug by smugglers hiding their contraband, or thieves stashing away their booty. If you're very lucky they might reveal the resting place of the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant – this one is in Burton-on-Trent if you want to go searching. Quite often it's a bit of ecclesiastical naughtiness, linking the monastery with the nearest pub - or convent.

Well it doesn't take much to disprove most of these legends. One reputed tunnel in the author's own county of Staffordshire, supposedly linking an abbey with a local mansion house, would have been nearly two miles long, in difficult tunnelling terrain, and also had to burrow under the River Trent. A task which, the author comments “would have troubled even the prowess of the Cornish tin-miners” of the time. And apart from anything else there would seem to be no particular reason for constructing such a tunnel in the first place.

But not all stories of hidden passages are completely false. A blocked-up archway in a cellar may not be the entrance to a secret tunnel, but may hide secrets of its own, which although not as romantic as some of the tunnel legends can be even more important archaeologically. They can reveal store-rooms, wells, mines, drains, even actual tunnels built for access and escape. But these are all relatively short.

A lot of tunnel-lore is attached to castles, but these raise other problems. What is a castle for? Well obviously it's a stronghold of the local earl or baron, defending his territory against other barons, the king or the rebellious peasantry. This involved lots of sword fights, often on spiral staircases which turned in a clockwise direction going upwards so that right-handed swordsmen would have more room to wield their weapons against attackers from below. Sounds logical, and we've all seen the films. Unfortunately actually examining the way staircases turn in castles outside Hollywood, there is no particular pattern, the orientation depending more on the structure of the castle, and its architecture.

It is a myth in itself that castles were the scenes of dramatic battles. In England at least they very seldom were, and they never hosted daring sword-fights between defenders and attackers. And you can forget about pouring boiling oil on attackers, oil was far too valuable for that.

Oh, and whilst waiting to be called into action, swordsman and archers have probably never sharpened the blades and arrowheads on the side of the parish church, leaving noticeable grooves in the stonework. The priest would not have liked that. The real reason for those grooves is a much stranger phenomenon. As is the real source of the strange burn marks found on the timbers of old houses. It is far more interesting than the conventional explanation of careless servants leaving candles burning unattended.

Even more surprisingly the sometimes rather obscene carvings hidden away in churches were not put there by disgruntled craftsmen protesting over pay and conditions, but had the full authority of the clergy. Here you will find the very strange explanation of what was their real purpose.

And that emphasises something rather important about this book, it is not a 'debunking' exercise designed to show us how ignorant we are about history. The 'myths' are not just dismissed, they are carefully analysed, and the backgrounds to them unravelled, as usually they are based on actual historical evidence, which has been misinterpreted, by scholars and laymen, over the centuries. The story behind the myth is usually far more interesting and entertaining than the myth itself.

This is a book that will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in history, combining a depth of scholarship with an accessible style. The author is a professional archaeologist and he gives interesting insights into what that entails, having worked with local councils and conservation bodies.

By the way, if you're looking for the oldest pub in England there are a number of possibilities, but rather depends on what you mean by a 'pub', or 'inn', or 'tavern' or 'hostel'. But whatever, it's almost certainly not one that calls itself 'the oldest pub in England'. It seems the answer is all in the trees. Dendrochronology is your friend.

Film director John Ford is reputed – wrongly – to have said “when you have to choose between history and legend, print the legend.” This book demonstrates that invariably the history is far more interesting than the legend.

Richard Samuels

A CASE OF DEJA VU

2024-10-06T18:18:00.002+01:00

Starve Acre (2023) Dir Daniel Kokotajlo BFI Blu Ray.

At the beginning of Starve Acre a young boy named Owen cannot sleep. When his mother speaks to him he says that the whistling has gone now. The next day, when his parents are resting, under a tree, near a cricket pitch, they’re disturbed by a young girl’s scream followed by the cry of a distressed horse that’s just had one of its eyes injured. The attacker is Owen holding a bloodstained twig.

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It’s an arresting opening that makes you think of the folklorish horrors of M.R.James’s story 'O Whistle and I’ll Come to you My Lad' and Peter Schaffer’s play Equus which is about a disturbed young man who blinds horses.

When Owen is sent to see a psychiatrist we think we are in for a psychological horror film centring on him. Well, not quite. For a short time later the boy mysteriously dies. He has been sacrificed to be ‘returned’ in the form of an embodied spirit named Jack Grey who’s taken the form of a hare with all of that animal’s supernatural and mythological associations. (The wife’s subsequent cradling of the hare then has you thinking of Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Nigel Kneale’s TV film Baby, whilst a ghostly brief sighting of Owen, next to a TV screen evoked Poltergeist and Videodrome.)

I’ve no problem with references to other works of art but not at the expense of appearing derivative. And in the case of Starve Acre the referencing appears to make the film self-consciously cover familiar folk horror tropes. It’s as if the producer and director wanted to make a mainstream movie (not quite) still incorporating an experimental soundscape and an oblique (or not well plotted) narrative. The result is puzzlement about character motivation and development. The spirit, emanating from the earth and the bowels of a tree, locally described as a 'womb of nature' on the couple’s land in rural Yorkshire, persuades the couple to sacrifice people but the reason behind their malevolence isn’t coherently laid out.

Adding to the uncertainty of the narrative is the detached direction of Daniel Kokotajio. Despite the excellent performances of Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark, they convey very well their guilt and depression whilst grieving for their son, I still felt distanced from their troubles.

Visually Starve Acre is impressive with its brooding, often luminous photography of the landscape. And the striking music or soundscape by Matthew Smith adds considerably to the atmosphere. For a lot of screen time the music kept moving the story menacingly forwards when it ought to have been accompanied by script development.

So, we have a muted slow burner. Starve Acre might deliver more on a second viewing as I unpack its sparse story. Yet I’m more inclined to listen instead to its film soundtrack on vinyl and imagine the disturbing folk horror it should have been.

Alan Price

First published on https://londongrip.co.uk/

LITERARY CRITICISM

2024-09-24T00:17:00.003+01:00

Joshua Blu Buhs. Think to New Worlds; the Cultural History of Charles Fort and his Followers. University of Chicago Press, 2024.

In the days of the long forgotten UFO UpDates Internet discussion group, ufologist and Fortean Jerome Clark described much of Magonia's output as 'literary criticism'. He felt that, rather than studying the 'actual existing phenomena', we were more concerned about the manner in which they were described and written about and their influence on society, rather on examining what it is 'up there'.

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He was right to an extent of course, because mostly Magonia considered that there was actually nothing 'up there' and the words of the people who described the experience, and the people who subsequently wrote about it, were the only material available for study. If that was true for Magonia, it is even more the case for this book.

In his later life Fort became involved with a number of major figures in the American literary world, most notably Theodore Dreiser and Tiffany Thayer. Dreiser claimed to be key in getting The Book of the Damned published by his publisher Boni and Liveright, allegedly threatening to take his own work to another publisher if they refused. Buhs suggests that Dreiser had used this threat a number of times previously and the publishers were already keen to take on the work on its own merits, making it a priority for publishing after an extended printers' strike.

Fort's 'philosophy', a sort of nihilistic monism, chimed well with the modernist literary movements that had been given extra stimulus after the personal and social destruction of the First World War, which saw empires of thought as well as political empires, collapsing. Beside Dreiser and Thayer others praised Fort's work, including the journalist and screen-writer Ben Hecht, and Booth Tarkington, at the time considered the US's 'greatest living author' remembered now mainly for The Magnificent Ambersons.

But it was Tiffany Thayer who plunged into Fort's philosophy most enthusiastically, in between working on a projected series of twenty-one novels around the life of Mona Lisa. Three volumes of which were published in 1956, over 1200 pages and Mona Lisa had not even been born by the end of it. Despite being “overstuffed with sex, orgies upon orgies” critics were bored by its plot and overwhelmed by its size. No further volumes were published.

Thayer was the force behind the establishment of the Fortean Society, which Groucho-like was famous for the people who refused to join it, including Fort himself. He was also pretty much the force behind destroying the Fortean Society with his endless feuds with members and affiliated groups. At one point he 'excommunicated' the California branch of the society, and attempted to ban them from describing themselves as 'Forteans'.

His incessant need to offend dominated the Society's Journal, Doubt. Under his editorship it became an outlet for his own extreme right-wing, Fascist-adjacent, antisemitic views. His anti-science rhetoric grew even more virulent than Fort's, and his anti-war propaganda – rants about 'World Fraud II' – brought him and the Society to the attention of the FBI. After the War his claims that the A-Bomb and the Russian Sputnik were hoaxes took Fort's scientific contrarianism to pathological levels.

Although at times Buhs inserts transcripts of articles from Doubt (using a different typeface to distinguish them from the main text) we get little idea of its general contents. Mostly we learn about Thayer's editorship and his fractious relationships with other writers, including science-fiction authors, to which a whole section of this book is devoted. Fort's ideas, such as 'we are property', and his belief (perhaps 'alleged belief') that the planets of the solar system are little more than a day or two's travel away from each other, have been a motor for any number of SF stories and novels.

Ufology features here, but it is clear that Thayer had little time for it, seeming to think it was part of the same conspiracy as the atom bomb and the Sputnik, a government plan to maintain a high level defence expenditure. Buhs suggests that he had to be leaned on by his UK associate, the SF author Eric Frank Russell to publish any UFO-related material in Doubt. He quotes Thayer as saying “I am now killing every man, woman or child who says 'saucers' to me”. Thayer seemed to be fearing that Forteanism was slipping away from him, but eventually Thayer slipped away from Forteanism, on 23rd of August, 1959. Perhaps his form of Forteanism was not destined to last into the 'New-Age' 'sixties.

I am not sure how much this book is, as the tile page claims, “a cultural history of Charles Fort and his followers” as an account of the life and literary battles of Tiffany Thayer. It is largely an America account, and apart from Thayer's correspondence with Eric Frank Russell there is little about Forteans and Forteanism outside the USA. Just as there is little or nothing about Fortean influences on other arts, or the sciences. His story largely ends with Thayer's death. There is a fairly brief mention of Ron and Paul Willis, and the International Fortean Organisation and INFO Journal, and an acknowledgement of the arrival of new Fortean topics, such as 'earth mysteries'.

He acknowledges that in the 1970s “a plethora of Fortean books flooded the market”, name-checking Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman.. He gives a brief account of the origin and development of Fortean Times, “more cynical, light-hearted and materialistic than Fate, but working the same beat”. But he concludes that these 'improvisations' appeared in a different world to that which evolved from the original Fortean Society.

This book must be seen as 'literary criticism' in the classical meaning of that term - “the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues” according to Britannica - and at times the reader can get bogged down in the intricacies of American writing and publishing in the 'twenties and 'thirties. Despite that, it will interest anyone seriously interested in the history of Fort's work and its critical reception, as well as the development of Forteanism as a 'philosophy', but I feel it may be of most value to students of early to mid twentieth century American literature, who will probably lose little by missing out the 'case studies' which intersperse each chapter.

However, because of the 'cultural history' of Forteanism, which has been otherwise ignored by academia until recently, they will probably not be the people who will be reading this book.

John Rimmer

RECOVERING THE OUTCASTS

2024-09-13T13:31:00.005+01:00

The Outcasts (1982) BFI Blu Ray / Flipside. Robert Wynne-Simmons (Director) (24 September 2024.)

Very few films have a genuine Celtic/Pagan sensibility where environment and characters possess a mysterious and magical charge that feels authentically rooted in myth and legend. The cult favourite The Wicker Man is an obvious first choice. Then Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s still underrated Gone to Earth.

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And now to complete this pantheistic star trio we have the almost forgotten The Outcasts. All draw upon folk tales and ritual. The Wicker Man feels comfortably folk horror. Gone to Earth a ripe melodrama set against the wild forces of nature. And The Outcasts impresses as a strange story hewn out of rural folklore. Its subtle combination of dream and naturalism, pitted against supernatural forces, makes The Outcasts, with its early 19th century Irish setting, a truly intense tragic tale, to be narrated by the fire.

The period is pre-famine Ireland. Maura (an amazing performance from Mary Ryan) is naïve, simple minded, dreamy and taciturn. She’s captivated and disturbed by the fairy and folk tales told by her family who bully her for being so uncommunicative. Her only support comes from her sister who’s pregnant and about to get married. At the wedding Scarf Michael (Mick Lally) the fiddler of Dooney, appears and begins to diabolically charm Maura. He performs some supernatural tricks and claims to be a conjurer but not a shaman. When the family and village learn of her meeting with Michael they begin to blame her for every misfortune that affects the community. Soon she’s called a witch and driven out of her home to escape with the mysterious Michael.

The Outcasts is riddled with ambiguities. Scarf Michael could be both a benign conjurer and/or devilish trickster. He displays affection and is sexually attracted by Maura but his command for her to see (in a visionary sense) and acknowledge her supernatural powers has tragic consequences. Maura is, on a familial level, a bullied innocent yet she’s cunning. And though not a witch she may be able to be trained as a healer (the moment on the road where she encounters a sick old man, to create a serene emphatic radiance round him is a revealing and beautifully scene). Scarf Michael is amazed by Maura’s powers that he considers greater than his own.

Is The Outcasts really a film about people simply being different, possessing rare capabilities, gifts and talents that are misunderstood by the community? That outcasts and outsiders will not be tolerated is something that the local priest, played by Paul Bennet, sympathetically understands for Maura though not for Michael whom he’s convinced is an evil man, certainly Michael feels a threat to the authority of the church. It’s fascinating to compare The Outcasts with the Nigel Kneale TV film, Murrain about an elderly female recluse who’s perceived as a 20th century witch rather than a strange difficult woman requiring help from social services. Though even here a ‘magical’ incident occurs that’s muted and ambiguous.

The great strength of The Outcasts and Murrain is their flexibility of ideas and understatement. And in the former it accompanies a dreamlike atmosphere that never becomes folk horror – more weird folk poetry with its drawing on inspiration from Yeat’s poem 'The Fiddler of Dooney' and probably his 'Crazy Jane' verses. The Outcasts is superbly cast, rugged, earthy and raw in its conception. What contributes to its bewitching strangeness is the beautiful photography (Originally 16mm film blown up to 35 mm and then 2k digitised) of Seamus Corcoran. And the film’s director Robert Wynne-Simmons reveals great confidence and skill. This feels like a love project.

On a first viewing I found The Outcasts ambiguities to be more puzzling than pleasing. It took me a second viewing next day to appreciate how powerful fused are the film’s alternative readings. That its mysteries are complimentary and not contradictory: coherently intensifying its ancient rural world view. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” As Yeats might have applied his final questioning line, from 'Among School Children', if he’d viewed The Outcasts.

Of her birth Maura says to the priest “I know I was a mistake.” He corrects her by saying she’s only different and should speak up more to her family. Yet her silences, brooding and distracted air convey a need for respect not ridicule. Mary Ryan excels as Maura. Her performance alone makes for a memorable film. She intelligently embodies the spirit of being an outcast, instinctively comprehending Maura’s character: all of its repressed identity and lack of inner defences. Ryan’s performance is brilliant in a film that the Irish Film Industry can feel justly proud of.

The Outcasts is an important re-discovery from the 1980s and so appropriate for the BFI’s Flipside project.

Alan Price.

Republished from London Grip https://londongrip.co.uk/

TRACKING THE GRIFFIN

2024-08-30T17:46:00.005+01:00

A. L. McClanan. Griffinology, the Griffin's Place in Myth, History and Art. Reaktion Books, 2024.

A book previously reviewed in Magonia (1) suggested that the image of this mythical beast was created in Greece and the ancient Near East as a result of travellers finding the fossil remains of prehistoric creatures, particularly the protoceratops. These bones were often found on or near the surface in the areas to the north of the Caspian Sea, and the story of the griffin was built around them.

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McClanan vigorously challenges this thesis, most succinctly by presenting a wealth evidence for the creature's appearance centuries before they were described in Classical Greece, and in many cultures across Asia and North Africa. Winged lions appear in Mesopotamia 3000 years BC, depicted on cylinder seals. The combination of an eagle and a lion, the two 'ace predators' of air and land is such a basic archetype that there seems to be no need to any specific physical prototype.

Although the griffin's ferocity makes it a perfect image as both a protective and an aggressive figure, it was also connected with a number of divinities, including Nemesis, where it symbolised divine retribution. Rather more surprisingly the creature was associated with the wine god Dionysus. Its image is found on drinking vessels, an example from Greece, 350 BC shows Dionysus in a griffin-drawn chariot, flying above a satyr filling his jug of wine from an urn.

The 'griffin's claw' became a part of the iconography of drinking, and mediaeval examples show images of griffins carved onto drinking horns. One such - the 'pinte de Saint-Denis', actually nearly 1.5 litres – was used in a ceremony in the French town where on Ascension Day four priests would take the 'griffin's claws' around to calibrate the measures in local taverns.

15th Century German 'Griffin Claw' Drinking Horn

More typically the griffin is part of the imagery of weapons and the heraldry of war, from Iron Age belts and weapons to the helmets of Roman gladiators; from Central Asian clan symbols to the decoration of modern fighter aircraft. The origins of heraldry were on the fields of battle, and it is the heraldic depiction of the creature which is most familiar today. The Tractatus de armis, a fourteenth century manual of heraldry states “To bere a gryffyn in armys is a tokyn of a grete man and a strong fighter”

The author examines the moral messages behind the depiction of the griffin, and finds many contradictory indicators. Although it is often shown as a fierce and brave fighter, with its legendary role as a guardian of treasure it was often used to symbolise 'avarice and duplicity'. But also it could be depicted as a guardian. The Bird's Head Haggadah, a Jewish manuscript probably written in Main c. 1300, griffins are depicted as defenders of the community during a period of antisemitic massacres.

This book tracks the images and legends of the griffin from the art and myth of ancient Mesopotamia to the images and stories of Hollywood and J K Rowling and Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll's artist John Tenniel codified the image of the griffin for a century or more with his classic illustrations, but McClanan shows us that Carroll's own interpretation was a far stranger creature.

This is a many-layered history which demonstrates that the griffin is so often the mirror of the age that contemplates it. Although complex, it is a fascinating story that the author presents clearly, helped by a treasury of well chosen illustrations, many in colour. We have come to expect very high production standards from Reaktion Books and this volume is another fine example.

Richard Samuels

1. Adrienne Mayor. The First Fossil Hunters; Dinosaurs Mammoths and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton University Press. 2022.

DRAINING THE NAZI UFO SWAMP

2024-08-16T18:40:00.005+01:00

Maurizio Verga. Flying Saucers from Naziland. The Real Story of the Nazi UFOs. Volume 1. Verga, 2023.

The 'Nazi UFO' stories have been haunting ufology and ufologists, even from before the official birth of the saucers in 1947. Promoted by a coalition of naïve ufologists, cynical exploiters, conspiracy theorists and actual real-life Nazis, they have created a hugely complex network of myth, rumour, fraud and political intrigue.

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This book helps us navigate this complex and contentious landscape. Verga identifies two distinct but linked 'Nazi Saucer' myths. Firstly the 'German secret weapon' phase, which lasted from probably just before the end of WWII, until about 1954. This involved stories of secret weapons, some with an element of believability. The knowledge that captured German scientist were being used by the victorious Allied nations in their own weapons and rocket programmes boosted the idea that they had information on German weapons which had been designed, perhaps even constructed, but were never used before the end of the war.

Approaching the 1980s, Verga suggests that the myth morphed into more fantastical and overtly neo-Nazi political propaganda, boosting ideas of German/Aryan superiority, and promoting theories about surviving Nazi scientists developing advanced technologies in secret laboratories. This began to move to neo-Nazi propaganda into a form of political science-fiction which was able to accommodate the whole range of 'saucer' iconography. This aspect Verga will be exploring in a forthcoming second volume.

Rumours about secret German weapons were circulating even before the outbreak of World War II, with stories of secret 'death-ray' experiments causing mysterious car-stop incidents. As early as October 1939 there were reports of mysterious light in the sky in the north of England during the blackout, “created and put there by German scientists to act as aerial guideposts for German raiders”.

Towards the end of the War there were the well-known foo-fighter reports which fostered ideas of newly developed weapons that would drastically change the course of the war in the final few months. These included claims of the testing of what would have been a tactical nuclear weapon in the island of Rugen allegedly witnessed by an Italian journalist, and a 'freezing bomb' which could trap ships on the high-seas.

Verga looks at these, and other claims of mystery rockets, super-fast aircraft, and Russian flying saucers that circulated in the years after the end of the war, as well as stories of mystery submarines full of Nazi scientists with secret weapons, a theme which was to be repeated, with a Russian origin, off the coast of Sweden in the 1970s and later.

The first actual claim of a German-built saucer emerged as early as 1948 in a Brazilian newspaper. A Noite carried an interview with a German calling himself Nils Christian Christiensen who claimed to have been working on the construction of a disc-shaped craft, which was successfully flown in secret laboratories in Hamburg in 1941. Christiensen – real name Starziczny – was later the head of a Nazi spy-ring in Brazil.

Other early claimants to the creation of 'saucers' included the Italian engineer Giuseppe Belluzzo, and German taxi-driver Rudolf Schriever, and reports of flying saucer inventors multiplied through the 1940s and early 50s. Some of these came from apparently respectable sources such as the American radio commentator Henry Taylor, who later become the US ambassador to Switzerland, who claimed that they were actually two versions of top-secret US inventions.

Verga describes how many individual 'engineers' and publicists took advantage of the stories to promote their own ideas and finances. Others were just plain fantasists like Lino Saglioni, a handyman from Northern Italy with a very chequered war career. This did not stop him from weaving an elaborate story involving Mussolini and a group of Italian scientists, an experimental saucer factory in Norway, and involvement is an unsuccessful mission to destroy the factory by an Allied paratroop patrol. If this sounds vaguely familiar it is basically the same story as the sabotage of the German heavy-water plant in Norway, dramatised in the film The Heroes of Telemark.

By 1950 the various rumours of German secret aircraft, and stories of Hitler's survival began to coalesce into the 'Secret Antarctic Base' concept, which formed the basis for the development of the entire 'Nazi Saucer' mythos. Verga points out that in the years immediately after the War the idea of Hitler cheating death and escaping to plan a Fourth Reich was rather less of a crank idea than it is today, as was held by a number of serious commentators

Fictionalised accounts of the construction and use of saucer-weapons appeared in a number of European papers in the 1950s, including accounts of Allied bombers being destroyed by German saucers. This story provided a template for a number of writers promoting the later 'Nazi Saucers' rumours, including figures such as Wendelle Stevens and Renato Vasco. The story of the fake 'Spitzbergen' UFO crash, was 'post engineered' into the crash of a German saucer on its test flight.

In an appendix to the main timeline of the German saucer narrative, Verga looks at the reality and the rumours behind German attempts to create a nuclear weapon, and how these fed into the Nazi Saucers stories. Post-war claims by characters with peripheral connections to the wartime German military spread stories about German development of atomic weapons, including claims of actual German atom-bomb tests, and even the use of atomic weapons to destroy Allied bombers over Germany.

Maurizio Verga has scoured the world's on-line press archives to present us with the widest possible range of published material relating to the origins, growth and eventual form of the Nazi UFO stories. The referencing and reproduction of source material is perhaps the main value and purpose of this book. Newspapers and magazines from Europe, the USA, South America, Japan and elsewhere are quoted at length, giving us the earlier available versions of the rumours, lies, propaganda and sometimes even facts that have built this legend.

It is a hugely detailed account and the sheer wealth of information sometimes seems overwhelming. Verga has foreseen this potential problem, and each section of the book concludes with a summary of the preceding account, a 'Recap'. This goes over the principle points of the development of the story, signalling the new elements which have been introduced, a reminder of the personages involved, correlations with other aspects of the UFO phenomena. He also lists 'Unconvincing Elements' which in most cases seems to be just about everything reported, and a brief 'timeline' of the issued covered in that section.

There is also a huge selection of illustrations usually taken from magazine and newspaper articles. In some cases – especially the reproduction of newspaper pages – these are rather too small to be studied in detail, but they help give an impression of the way the topics were dealt with in the media of the period. This English translation is by the author, and there are a few infelicities which do not detract too much from the narrative, but I did find it very confusing at times that titles of books were not shown in italic type, particularly with non-English titles. An index of personal names is provided, but a more comprehensive indexing would have been appreciated.

This is a work for a reference library, it is not something to read right through sequentially from page 1 to page 305, but anyone seriously interested in the social and political history UFOs, and particularly those aspects which today still spreads a sinister shadow over the subject, it is of great importance. And perhaps even more so when Volume II is published.

John Rimmer

Amazon link: https://amzn.eu/d/2yWBksa

YOURS SINCERELY, CHARLES FORT

2024-08-02T15:56:00.005+01:00

Chris Aubeck (Editor). Letters of the Damned; the Forgotten Investigations of Charles Fort. Aubeck, 2024.

We are all familiar with the four 'canonical' texts of Charles Fort, and mostly aware of, if not familiar with, his earlier literary works such as The Outcast Manufacturers and the lively short stories depicting working-class New York tenement life, which were published in magazines and newspapers.

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In this volume Chris Aubeck introduces us to a large and previously uncollected area of Fort's work. It turns out that Fort was a fearsome writer of Letters to the Editor, to newspapers across the world. These were mostly addressed to local US titles like the Chattanooga Daily Times but also to titles like the Kingston, Jamaica Gleaner, the Auckland Star and the Hong Kong Telegraph. These were written at the time he was living in Marchmont Street, London, leading some editors to conclude that he was an eccentric English scientist. The editors of local newspapers in the 1920s (this collection covers 1920 to 1925) seem to have been remarkably amenable to printing long and verbose communiques!

The letters mostly fall into a pattern. They begin by drawing the readers' attention to an anomaly that had perhaps occurred somewhere near the location where the paper was published, and asking if any readers would be able to supply further information on the event. For example a letter published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on the 29th July, 1924, draws the reader's attention to an incident in the town of Marshall where snakes, later identified as 'West Indian adders' had fallen from the skies.

He presents his favourite idea that these snakes were part of an on-going phenomenon of living things falling from the sky, quoting precise references from a range of scientific journals – the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Comptes Rendu, Recreative Science among others – which were unlikely to be immediately available to the majority of readers of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, but certainly look authoritative and very scientific.

In many of the letters he compares such falls to puzzling objects he imagines being washed up on the shores of Europe before 1492, the date of Columbus's landfall in the Americas. He makes this point so often that Aubeck comments that readers of this book may feel like they are in a time-loop. These pieces of random driftwood greatly puzzled the experts of the time, he says, as they believed that there was no land further to the west from which they could have come.

My first thought is if that was the case, where did they think Columbus was sailing to? Well mostly they thought he was sailing to China, or possibly Hy Brasil or any of a number of other rumoured or imagined lands beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Any curiously carved paddles or other bits of artificially worked driftwood that floated ashore would just confirm one theory or another, it wouldn't really upset anyone's view of the world.

But Fort suggests that anyone who suggested such a thing would be considered “eccentric fellows of neglected education, but were tolerated unless they persisted” Is there any historical evidence this was the case? Is there indeed any historical evidence that the various odds and ends washed up on the western coasts of Europe before 1492 troubled the thoughts of anyone?

Although the phenomenon Fort describes and his often laboured commentary on them, is amusing and interesting at first, having them repeated in almost identical wording in letter after letter soon becomes wearying. Clearly I was not the only person who thought this. Aubeck adds editorial comments like “here the Lebanon Daily News skips Fort's paragraphs discussing meteorites in general” and “repeats arguments from other letters”.

This might lead me to think that a good portion of this book could be replaced by the comment 'Repeats arguments from other letters', if it were not for editor Chris Aubeck's illuminating 'Notes' which are interspersed through the volume, explaining and amplifying the data presented in Fort's letters. In some cases this demonstrate how Fort misread or misinterpreted the periodicals he mined for anomalies, in other cases Aubeck able to add information from sources which were not available to Fort at the time. This helps to illuminates Fort's logic and the way in which he processed his raw data. Although Aubeck is able to offer a plausible post hoc explanation for many of the phenomena described, in other cases cases he is able to confirm the truly anomalous nature of the data Fort presented.

In reporting falls of various creatures Fort makes great issue of the fact that usually only one species is involved. He sees the explanation for this as being the result of some conscious sorting mechanism and dismisses the most obvious suggestion, that these might have been objects or creature that were drawn up in a whirlwind or waterspout, claiming that if that was the case why would the deposits be of a very specific type rather than a general mixture of wind-borne detritus, and why they should fall so specifically in a limited area?

In his letter describing the fall of snakes in Marshall, Minnesota mentioned above – he claims that the difficulty “is to explain how the snakes could have fallen so alone or unmixed with anything else”. Fortunately Chris Aubeck is at hand to explain exactly why, pointing out issues which may affect this such as the habits and living conditions of the animals, the likelihood that particular species are likely to congregate in large numbers in specific places at different time of the year, and the strength of the whirlwind and the nature of the terrain it scours.

Aubeck uses these consideration to make an important point. Far from being the open-minded philosopher to whom these anomalies are a stimulus to imaginative speculation, Fort is actually “obsessed over both kinds of phenomena [lights in the sky and animals falling from the sky] to support a very particular theory”. He uses the data gathered selectively to bolster the theory, which is reiterated over and over again in these letters, that there are lands in the sky and that the earth does not rotate. This, he claims is demonstrated by the way in which some types of creature or objects fall in the same place over a number of years. He is particularly excited by the falls of small black stones which have been recorded on a number of occasions in Birmingham and Wolverhampton, the two English locations mentioned most in this collection.

Aubeck suggests that if Forteans were more aware of the reason why Fort has assembled random anomalies they might “lose interest in what is basically a meteorological phenomenon.” But then he immediately reassures us that “none of this distracts from the fact that Charles Fort was one of the most original and independent thinkers of the 20th century.”

'Independent thinker' has become something of a euphemism for 'crank' and when we look at Fort's other 'original' ideas the term seems accurate enough. He claims amongst other things that the earth does not go round the sun; it does not revolve on its axis; the sun and planets are very near; the stars are holes in a shell that surrounds the solar system; and there are 'lands in the sky'.

Aubeck asks if these ideas might be dismissed as as 'thought experiments'. Perhaps, if they were throwaway ideas offered as random speculation, but instead they were referred to again and again in his books. They are an essential part of his concept of the cosmos, and not simply jokes to amuse and stimulate the reader's imagination. Fort saw his work as 'a symbolic critique of scientific authority'. The intensity of his research, the effort put into it, dominating his life, destroying his eyesight was not just an exercise in 'original thinking', it was a crusade. I wonder if Fort felt in science the dogmatic and cruel nature of his father, and it became a stifling, controlling force that he spent his life trying to destroy? But I'm no Freudian analyst so I'll leave it there.

As in his book Saucers, Chris Aubeck has done an amazingly thorough job mining the depths of the archives to present us with these intriguing examples of Fort's writing, but perhaps this is a book mainly aimed at the specialist and the completist. Most of the actual cases recounted in these letters are more fully described in the four classic volumes we all have in our libraries - but without the additional insights offered by the editor's Notes. Maybe it is really for the hard-core Fortean, but it also gives us all an intriguing insight into the motives and obsessions of the individual who provides the fuel for our own obsessions!

A remarkable book exploring the mind of a remarkable individual.

John Rimmer

SCREENING SATAN

2024-07-22T17:33:00.006+01:00

The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to the Devil in Cinema by Nikolas Schreck. Headpress, revised edition 2024.

“True to its mirroring nature, the satanic cinema has often portrayed the Devil as whatever force was perceived by consensus consciousness as embodying cosmic maleficence at the time.”

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Nikolas Schreck (formerly engaged in magic and spiritual practice) has written a highly intelligent, engaging and perceptive study of the Devil’s rupturing presence on film. Even when, according to the author, Satan’s authority has often been misrepresented and commercially diluted, the Devil’s been fore-fronted at the very beginning of cinema and will probably be around to play diabolic mischief at cinema’s end.

The first film to depict the devil was Georges Melies’s The Devil’s Manor* (1896). I recently watched it safely contained: trapped on my phone in the palm of my hand. A device that if transported back to the Middle Ages would have been seen as a heretical tool to conjure up satanic forces. My phone and further devices of the future may offer the Devil new immersive entrances and exits but Schreck is pessimistic about the Devil having yet found a serious home in our 21st century technological world.

For Schreck the forms and genres of the previous century have been degraded (digital triumphing over film) over-politicised and swallowed up Satan as a mere bogeyman, in a homogenised entertainment industry (In his final chapter 'The New Dark Ages' the only really important depiction of the Devil has been Robert Eggers 2015 film The Witch.)

Yet what of the cinema, television and pre-cinema history that accommodated the Devil before his cultural decline as a potent icon? Schreck’s journey from the days of magic lantern shows, camera obscura, silent cinema, movies of the 30s right through to the 90s is, in spite of much devil dross filmmaking, a century that occasionally hits the satanic marker. As Schreck remarks “I’ve restricted this exploration’s scope to those productions presenting the Devil as an actual supernatural intelligence.”

Inferno (1911) is the first full length feature to deal with the Devil. The films visuals having been influenced by Gustav Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. Then through the 1920’s The Student of Prague, The Golem, Murnau’s Nosferatu, D.W.Griffith’s The Sorrows of Satan and Rex Ingram’s The Magician (modelled on Aleister Crowley) powerfully introduce devilish practices. And with Christensen’s Haxan (1921) we have the most compelling demonic imagery of the decade: a film with a powerful, visually graphic and documentary-like edge that to this day impresses.

Dante’s Inferno (1935) also draws heavily on the art of Gustave Dore. Yet I agree with Schreck that the film is “a heavy handed morality tale” and that the most effective satanic films of the thirties are the third version of The Student of Prague and The Black Cat. The latter film is most memorable for its futuristic sets, the splendidly sinister performances of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and the dark sado- masochistic tone of director Edgar G. Ulmer.

'War is Hell' is the title of chapter four covering the 1940’s. And 1940 opened excitingly with Disney’s Fantasia containing some brilliant animation of the Devil accompanied by Mussorgsky’s music ‘Night on the Bald Mountain’ But the four most memorable Satanic offerings of the forties have to be The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Alias Nick Beale (1949), Le Beaute Du Diable (1949) and The Seventh Victim (1943).

The folksy charm of the Devil as New Englander Mr. Scratch (Walter Huston on superb form) and the city’s fallen angel Nick Beal (Ray Milland, tremendously suave) make for impressive Devils. The noir visuals of Alias Nick Beale and gothic look of Daniel adorn these Devils like a satanic crown. I was pleased to find Schreck applauding the performances of Gerard Philipe and Michel Simon (as Faust and Mephisto) in the now neglected Le Beaute du Diable. Yet the darkest film of this foursome has to be Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim. A great deal of the morbid power of The Seventh Victim is down to the screenwriter Dewitt Bodeen who was asked by producer Val Lewton to “see if it’s possible for you to go to a devil worshipping society meeting.” His research added greatly to the power of the film, making for a bleak realism - such satanic authenticity isn’t really on show again until Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby in 1968.

In the 1950’s the cinematic Devil’s competition was the popular spate of SF films concerning alien invasions and the threat of the bomb. However the period still produced two outstanding Devil movies, Night of the Demon (1957) and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)

“Kenneth Anger consciously utilised film as a magical weapon”

Schreck’s absolutely correct about that, for the great pleasure of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is the sense that we are watching a magic ritual: that this no staged performance but the real thing. Not exactly documentary nor fiction but a spellbinding in-between state. A satanic happening. With its experimental colour palette, haunting use of dissolves and the music of Janacek, Inauguration had a deep influence on David Lynch, Roger Corman and Martin Scorsese. It was based on the practices of Aleister Crowley and in Night of the Demon the character of Dr Julian Karswell (played by Niall MacGinnis) is also modelled on Crowley. Night of the Demon is in my, and many other critic’s lists, of the ten best horror films ever made. Arguments still continue to this day about showing a fiery monster to represent the demon but this hasn’t seriously compromised the impact of this gripping film.

The dark side of 60’s counter culture revealingly resulted in many interesting satanic films. Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), Black Sunday (1960), Faust (1965), The Devil’s Eye (1960),The City of the Dead (1960), Night of the Eagle (1961), The Skull (1965), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Haunted Palace (1963), Simon of the Desert (1965) The Devil Rides Out (1967), Quatermass and the Pit (1967), Dance of The Vampires (1967) Bedazzled (1967), The Gospel According to Mathew (1964) Teorema (1968) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

That impressive body of work includes such major directors as Pasolini, Bergman, Bunuel and Polanski. Yet I will only single out two films, that for me, and Schreck, meet the author’s criteria for the Devil as a “an actual supernatural intelligence.” Quatermass and the Pit and Rosemary’s Baby. In the realm of ideas Nigel Kneale, screenwriter of Quatermass and the Pit, convincingly proposes a disturbing existential question. Is not the Devil, whether of occult or extraterrestrial origin, really humankind itself?

Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby has become as iconic in the satanic movie canon as The Exorcist. The reason why it still retains its enormous power is not just because of Polanski’s subtle direction, brilliant performances, fine photography and the unsettling music of Krzysztof Komeda but because all the collaborators help to create an ambiguous atmosphere. Is this an authentic supernatural occurrence or a series of delusions experienced by Rosemary whilst giving birth - to a child of Satan?

Like Schreck I have never been able to take The Exorcist (1973) that seriously. It’s a perfectly good and effective roller coaster experience. Yet all those stories about terrified audience reactions have tended to wrongly mythologize it as the definitive screen statement of Devil possession. I don’t buy into its possessed child storyline, only believing in the authority that Max Von Sydow brought to his role as the priest. But the influential The Exorcist dominated the Satanic / Horror film landscape of the seventies to blight it with numerous poor sequels and imitations.

From here on the Devil, according to Schreck (and myself included), is culturally in decline. In the 80’s, only Mephisto and Hellraiser shine. Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999) is probably the most intelligent end of the century offering (A film I felt mixed about but Schreck’s writing has enthused me enough to watch it again). But generally the 90’s and early 2000’s result in not so much tarnished fallen angels than infantilised creatures playing in the darkness. Schreck is abrupt and sharply critical.

“Mysterious Mephistopheles, once understood as a cultural being who offered his adherents infinite knowledge, had degenerated into a one-dimensional cartoon representing adolescent nihilism.”

Schreck’s conclusion in his chapter, entitled 'The New Dark Ages', after “sifting through this century’s dross” is “If Satanic cinema can be understood as a modern folklore, it seems that the Ur-texts were all written in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

Even though the majority of Devil films produced got worse and worse, it hasn’t deterred Schreck from examining them in a witty and entertaining manner. He’s able to write about good, indifferent and downright bad Satanic cinema and illuminatingly reveal its cultural significance. Schreck cares about his subject. And to steal Kenneth Anger’s film title Lucifer Rising, Schreck and I hope that Lucifer revitalised will rise up again in a new film folklore that has Miltonian grandeur on its side. Whilst for the moment let the excellent The Satanic Screen be your guide and present history.

Alan Price

* The Devil's Manor - link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPflaKpZqCM

CHANCE'D BE A FINE THING

2024-07-10T18:16:00.002+01:00

Nigel Pennick. Fortuna; the Sacred and Profane Faces of Luck. Destiny Books, 2024.

'Chance' is a difficult thing to understand, 'randomness' even more so. There is the old trick question: if someone tosses a coin nine times and each time it comes up heads, what should you bet on for the tenth toss? Well any mathematician will tell you that it makes no difference what you choose as each individual toss is a 50/50 heads or tails bet.*

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That's what the mathematician will tell you, but the mathematician is wrong in this case. What you are actually betting on in that situation is the likelihood of tossing a succession of ten heads. The mathematician will tell you this is 1 in 1024, so the gambler will tell you to bet on tails.

Randomness is a difficult concept to understand, and is quite subversive. Pennick notes that “the concepts of randomness and mathematical probability are absent in ancient writing that ascribe all events to the agency of divine beings”. Any attempt to foresee the future, whether predicting the fall of a dice, or the future course of history can be interpreted as undermining the will of God.

But sometimes prediction is the work of the gods. In ancient Rome that was through the offices of the goddess Fortuna, who could be consulted at a number of shrines around the Roman world, and could be propitiated to ensure that she would shine upon you. The problem with oracles and shrines is that Fortuna could be – in fact usually was – rather ambiguous in her messaging, giving predictions that could be interpreted in any number of ways. A skill still homed by today's newspaper astrologers and political commentators.

Another way that the goddess Fortuna – or 'Lady Luck' as we are more likely to call her today – can reveal our fortune to us is by the interpretation of randomly created images and numbers. This is most usually done by the throwing of dice or the spinning of a 'teetotum', a sort of spinning top with numbers or symbols on the rim.

Different ages and cultures have come up with a huge number of methods of creating theoretically random numbers or shapes. Pennick describes a method of divination from his native East Anglia which involves counting the 'eyes' in potatoes to derive random patterns which have a divinatory meaning. Other random sequences can be created by tossing stones, bones or sticks and discerning meaning in the resultant patterns. he meaning of the pattern can then be divined either by reference to oral tradition or an 'oracle book'.

As usual when it comes to activities disapproved of by the Church or civil authorities, our earliest record of such books comes from a decree banning them, The sortes apostolorum, the key to a dice-divination system fell foul of the Church Council of Vannes as early as the year 465. Nevertheless divinatory books remained popular until well into the eighteenth century. Similar books for the US 'numbers game, otherwise known as 'Policy' were being produced into the twentieth century.

Not only is 'randomness' a difficult concept to understand, it is a condition that is almost impossible to achieve. None of the methods we can use, from dice or coin-tossing, to immensely complicated random-number generators can be said to be completely random. Some computer programmes have to have non-random inputs to allow for the apparently non-random artefacts that a genuinely random sequence would contain.

Pennick looks at the subterfuges and devices that have been used by gamblers to ensure non-random results from turning of cards or throwing dice. He describes the ways that the throw of a die can be manipulated to encourage them to land showing a particular face, and the way the dice themselves can be loaded. A 'true' dice will have the little cut-out dots filled with a material of the same specific gravity as the rest of the cube, but these can be removed and replaced, and there are dozens of other ways that dice can be cut, shaved or otherwise treated to produce non-random results. Although these tricks might only give a very slight advantage to one result, over the hundreds of games that could be played with them they will have a cumulative effect.

'Loaded' dice have been discovered in archaeological sites from various cultures and although the obvious assumption is that they were used by gamblers, Pennick suggests that some may have been used by oracles at shrines to deliberately skew the reading the oracle gave to their client.

Because of the mysterious nature of randomness, which seems to suggest that there is some hidden mechanism behind it, gambling is surrounded by superstitions and rituals. 'Luck' is often seen as a personal possession and must be protected and propitiated, and might sometimes even be stolen. The goddess Fortuna was worshipped and propitiated in shrines and temples in the Classical era, but is still appealed to every time a punter taps on wood before placing a bet on the 3.30 at Catterick.

The book is well illustrated, with many items from the author's own collection, and fully referenced, quoting material from historic and contemporary sources. It is an intriguing glimpse into a subject we may take for granted but which introduces an unsettling element into daily life. We may not believe in the goddess Fortuna, but we have all at some time, invoked her favour.

John Rimmer

* Unless, as rumour had it, you were using a Belgian 2-euro coin with the head of King Albert II, but that's another story altogether.

A HOLE IN THE THEORY?

2024-07-06T20:13:00.006+01:00

Brian J. Allan. The Hole in the Sky, Flying Disk Press, 2024.

This presents a heady brew of UFOs, the Philadelphia and Rendlesham incidents, Rosslyn chapel, dowsing, leys, magic, fairies, angels, mediumship, shamanism, drug-induced trances, coincidences, the Bermuda Triangle, Skinwalker Ranch, poltergeists, Biblical codes. It’s the whole paranormal nine yards plus, that could easily fill any hole in the sky.

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Allan contends that drugs, meditation, shamanistic and magical rituals or exposure to electromagnetic fields can induce altered states of consciousness which put us in contact with entities through these ‘doorways.’ These entities have been dubbed angels, ghosts, demons, extraterrestrials or ultraterrestrials depending on the context and interpretations made by the experiencers and the investigators.

As a historical example he notes that in 1581 John Dee was given a crystal stone by an angel called Uriel. Dee was unable to make much use of it, but his accomplice, Edward Kelley, was able to use it as a window to see ‘spiritual beings’ who taught him the Enochian language.

For a modern-day example, the experiences of John Martin are put forward. In the 1990s, Martin started seeing different sized spacecraft and small grey-type humanoids. He perceived that they lived in a domain ruled by a human-type king much like the structure of fairy kingdoms, and their silver spacecraft were sentient beings in their own right. He only saw these during a period when he suffered from lack of sleep and took amphetamines.

Window areas like Skinwalker Ranch, ley lines, prehistoric sites like Cairnpapple Hill near Bathgate, Scotland, stone circles and the like enable EM energy to be amplified and modified to form a world-wide communication network. Allan thinks that in the ancient past this technology was known to a select few and that it was used by Sir William Sinclair in the construction of Rosslyn chapel.

He goes on to speculate that a priest or shaman might have stood in the centre of a stone circle and allowed their own electrical field to meld with the pulsing energy of the stones that would transmit their thoughts and feelings to one or more human receivers Such sites could also be wormholes that are employed by ultraterrestrial types and all manner of other paranormal phenomena to enter our world/dimension.

Allan who was the editor of the online Phenomena Magazine, does a brilliant job of marshalling such diverse material together to prove that we are getting glimpses and visitations from beyond our own consensus reality. How ‘real’ these glimpses are is another matter that Allan leaves open for us to wonder about.

A short list of sources and references is given and Allan acknowledges his debt to the works of John Keel, Ted Holiday the author of The Goblin Universe and Alfred Watkins. I would add that The Dark Gods by Anthony Roberts and Geoff Gilbertson carried similar ideas about the ultraterrestrials back in 1980, and as with that book, The Hole in the Sky does make many assumptions based on flimsy evidence (need I mention Skinwalker Ranch).

If this book does stimulate you to look further I would recommend Hilary Evans’ Visions. Apparitions. Alien Visitors. A Comparative Study of the Entity Enigma published in 1984, reviewed by Kevin McClure at:

https://mrobsr.blogspot.com/2009/10/visions-and-apparitions.html#more

Nigel Watson

LOOSING TRACK OF TIME

2024-06-24T17:16:00.006+01:00

Tim R. Swartz and Sean Casteel (editors.). Weird Time, Zontar Press, 2024.

UFO and time-slip accounts have many similarities. Witnesses often enter a mist and/or feel that their environment has become silent and still. They feel disorientated and are puzzled by what they experience - the 'Oz Factor'. Such events seem to occur in localised ‘hot spots’ such as Liverpool's Bold Street, and certain people often have repeat experiences.

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Both have a fair amount of people who make outrageous and usually implausible claims. The contributors to Weird Time provide us with many anecdotes about people who have suddenly found themselves briefly back in time. The most famous incidents like that of Annie Moberly and Dr Eleanor Frances Jourdain who thought they saw Marie Antoinette when visiting Versailles in 1901, are recounted along with tales of people who say they are actually time travellers.

The most famous time traveller is probably John Titor who claimed to come from 2036 on online bulletin boards in 2000 to 2001, and predicted a civil war in the USA in 2008 and WWIII in 2015. The actor and TV presenter Pale Dale Roberts sensibly regards him as a hoaxer, but does interview an individual whom he calls ‘John Titor 2.’ He says his original predictions did not come true because he was able to change the timeline, and like a good contactee says; “We must master the issues here on Earth.”

Roberts states, like Annie Moberly and Dr Eleanor Frances Jourdain, that Titor is a hoaxer wanting attention. Nonetheless he does think that UFOs are from the future and the binary code message from the UFO at Rendlesham Forest that says it is from the year 8100 sounds truthful. Oh well…

Another well known case is the Philadelphia Experiment that Tim Swartz says is so fantastic that we are still talking about it 80 years later. This allegedly used massive generators to create electromagnetic fields to send the US Navy ship USS Eldridge forwards in time to 2137.

A less well known story is that of Mike Arkliniski who invented a ‘Sonic Resonator’ that can send people through time. Using a natural grid point he was able to transport himself to 1945 for six hours and a couple of hours to the old Wild West in 1895. On his third trip he went to 1969 where he was chased and shot at by Men in Black. He was told to stop travelling through time, and after being shot in the leg he woke up to find a mark where the beam had hit him. This makes Sean Casteel wonder if MIB are time travellers who police our timeline to keep it under their control.

Not surprisingly tales like this are as hard to substantiate as alien abduction stories and mix technology with the paranormal. With the aid of the Internet creepy stories by self-confessed time travellers are easily spread and become more ‘real’ with their re-telling.

Gene Steinberg offers a brief guide to time travel in popular culture and Swartz writes about homemade time machines. Along with the many time travel anecdotes several of the contributors discuss the philosophy and physics of time, which involve talk of relativity and mind-boggling Quantum theories. Like UFOs, the concept of time travel does make us wonder about our place in this Universe, and the nature of reality. And. like ufology you need a good dose of salt to explore the mysteries of time and space.

Containing numerous black and white illustrations and an index, Weird Time is an ideal source of popular ideas about the concept of time travel and time slips, and for the more critical it is a good starting point.

Nigel Watson

HOOKED BY THE QUEEN

2024-06-18T16:11:00.001+01:00

The Queen of Spades (Thorold Dickinson) 1949. ViaVision Imprint. Blu Ray

The Queen of Spades has been described as a horror fantasy, supernatural drama and ghost story. It has elements of all three. My preference, and elaboration, would be an early 19th century ghost story grounded in a much stylised Russian realism.

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As well as genre teasing The Queen of Spades has been generally viewed as resembling a Powell and Pressburger film. Indeed when a very young Martin Scorsese watched the film he muddled it up in his head with his love of P&P. Admittedly The Queen of Spades, and especially in the second half, does have the energetic physical pace of P&P but for me the biggest influences on the film are the grand designs of Sergei Eisenstein and the opulence of Josef Von Sternberg (Was Dickinson an admirer of The Scarlet Empress?)

The film is adapted from an 1834 story by Alexander Pushkin and as far as I know was Pushkin’s only prose venture into the supernatural and like the film only becomes so later on in the narrative. Both the film and the story tackle themes of class, avarice, friendship and romantic love: before something horrid goes bump in the night to alter the fates of all concerned.

Captain Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) is a Russian officer of the engineers in St Petersburg in 1806. Unlike his fellow officers and gamblers, Herman is acutely aware of his class status: compared to the privileged colleagues around him he will struggle for years to get promotion. He frequents gambling rooms where officers play a card game called faro. Herman learns of the ancient Countess Ranevskaya (Edith Evans) who knows the numerical secret for winning at faro.

Herman purchases a book called The Strange Secrets of the Count de Saint German, concerning people who sold their souls for wealth and power, which greatly impresses him. Countess Ranevskaya has a young ward Lizavyeta Ivanovna (Yvonne Mitchell) so Herman begins to write passionate love letters to Lizavyeta as a means to entering her house and persuading Ranevskaya to tell him the playing card secret. Herman threatens the countess with an unloaded pistol and she dies of fright.

Lizavyeta is appalled at being used in order to get at Ranevskaya. Gradually the couple become the catalyst for a visitation by the invisible ghost of the old countess.

Anton Walbrook superbly conveys his perceived humiliations with a twitchy nervousness and his money scheming machinations have a brooding power. His remarkable performance is only equalled by the screen debut of Edith Evans, supposed to be aged 100 and wearing an enormous upright wig to make her look like a grand dame crossed with a mummy/monster, who moans and snaps at everyone. Sandwiched between them we have the delicate low key acting of Yvonne Mitchell as the virginal love-struck Lizavyeta.

There are horror/supernatural films where the ghost is never shown but suggested. The Haunting (1963) has the menacing sounds of an old house, The Uninvited (1944) keeps ghosts in the shadows and The Queen of Spades has some of the most powerful hidden presence moments in cinema: the sound design of a mysterious wind, banging doors and Ranevskaya’s eerie whispering, of the three winning cards and request that Herman must marry Lizavyeta, are minimal, sufficient and highly effective.

Yet the cleverness of Thorold Dickinson’s direction also plays with the haunting idea that the presence of the living Ranevskaya is already a weird ghostly implant that attracts and repels. For me this haunting creature begins to spook her ward and murderer before the act of murder itself.

I love the placement of mirrors in scenes of high anxiety and unease as reflections of the main characters are underlined by the music of Georges Auric. And though more of a ghost than horror tale, the scene where the dead Ranevskya, lying in a coffin in the church, suddenly opens her eyes at Herman is a great horror picture moment that jolted me as much as the awakening of the dead sister in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers.

The atmosphere of Dickinson’s Russia is brilliantly created in a small English film set located next to a railway station! This allows Dickinson’s camera to fluidly journey through an amazing set designed by Oliver Messel that’s strikingly photographed by Otto Heller and recalls the look of German silent cinema. And throughout The Queen of Spades its visuals are truly vivid on this 4K restoration from the film’s original nitrate negative.

Perhaps the pace of the first half of the film is a little too leisurely and occasionally muffled – the wild, would-be orgiastic scenes in the gambling room are spoilt by the actress playing the seductive gypsy singer. She’s more flattened-out Hollywood than earthy European. And Ronald Howard as Andrei, Lizavyeta’s true lover, is a little wooden. But so much of The Queen of Spades remains genuinely thrilling. It’s an incisive melodrama with an irresistible Gothic flavour. How can you resist?

“Play interests me very much. But I cannot afford to risk the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous.”

That’s Herman, at the opening of the film, when asked why he comes every night yet doesn’t play at cards. This is his arrogance with a need to hit back; obtain a playing card system and hence a great fortune (the necessary) that instantly grabbed me. Once more I was drawn in and hooked by the haunting power of The Queen of Spades.

Alan Price

BLOOD, SOIL AND MORRIS DANCING

2024-06-07T15:47:00.010+01:00

Matthew Cheeseman and Carina Hart (Editors). Folklore and Nation in Britain and Ireland. Routledge, 2023.

The manner in which the collecting, study and publishing of folklore has influenced the understanding of national origins and identities has become a matter of concern to many in the field, who fear that the subject has been exploited for nationalist and political ends.

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The essays in this volume are based on papers delivered at the annual conference of the Folklore Society, in 2019, on the theme 'Folklore and the Nation', which Matthew Cheeseman describes in his introduction as “explor[ing] folklore and folkloristics within the diverse and contested national discourses of Britain and Ireland."

Terry Gunnell, a professor at the University of Iceland, outlines how at a time of rising nationalism the collecting and publishing activity of the Grimm brothers 'rippled out' from Germany to provide a model for the collection of folk tales and legends across Europe. He sees a distinction between how folklore and folktale collection and publishing developed in most of Continental Europe comparted to Great Britain, France and Sweden.

In countries like pre-unification Germany, Iceland, Norway and the Baltic lands the story collections were regarded as a way of creating and strengthening a national identity. The Icelandic collectors Jón Árnoon and Magnús Grímsson wrote in 1852, “These folktales are the poetic creation of the nation. In them we see both the nation's longing for history and the special feel that the nation's narratives tend to be veiled in.”

In England, France and Sweden there were no similar Grimm-like figures creating a national collection of such tales. Gunnell notes William Thoms ultimately unsuccessful call for material towards such a collection, which perhaps was only finalised by Katharine Briggs in 1970. In England and Sweden most folklore collection was based on local areas rather than the country as a whole, and mainly focussed on the areas which felt separated from the centralised state, like Scotland, Ireland, Wales and even the north of England.

David Clarke touches on this separation when examining the legacy of two figures in the folklore of Hallamshire, the area of South Yorkshire around Sheffield. He looks at the historical figure of the Saxon Earl Waltheof and the mythical outlaw Robin Hood. These two characters have become blurred into one, the Earl of Huntingdon. The Earl is seen as a local Saxon hero holding out against the occupying forces of the Norman French invaders, and has been conscripted to depict the region as having a tradition of “autonomous, radical and even revolutionary behaviour” expressed in modern times both in resistance to central government policies and a stronghold of the Brexit vote in 2016.

Robin Hood appears also in Carina Hart's chapter looking at the image of the heroic outlaw as part of the 'folkloric landscape', with Robin Hood again becoming an image of the 'free-born Englishman', often in relationship to England's historic opposition to France, and the perceived assault on commoner's rights in the Industrial Revolution and the Enclosures. Hart sees this folkloric image being reappropriated in recent years by the very contrasting figures of Boris Johnson and the Extinction Rebellion protestors.

Questions of authenticity in folklore study and practice are addressed in two chapters which look at the English folksong and dance revivals in the early twentieth century and the arguments for either strictly adhering to the earliest recorded versions of the song or dance, or allowing freedom for the further evolution of the tradition. This produced some complex political arguments. Was the strict adherence to tradition looking backwards to an outdated view of 'Merrie England', or was it, in the aftermath of the First World War a rejection of imperialism and a celebration of collective endeavour on a smaller national or regional scale?

One character who certainly took the latter view was Joseph Needham (1900-1995) a biochemist and expert of the history of Chinese science. He was attracted to the ministry of Conrad Noel – the 'Red Vicar' of Thaxted – who promoted a form of particularly English Christian Socialism. Needham saw morris-dancing as an essential part of his utopian vision. The chapter's author, Matt Simons described Needham's view of morris-dancing as “a manifestation of [...] 'the essential materialism of Christianity' as though the dance itself was a sacrament”. To Needham the morris-dance formed part of an “international unity consisting of a sustained multitude of distinctive national identities”. Simons concludes “Needham's dancing represented his own understanding of a radical, working class, culture”.

A very different approach to nationalism and folklore arose in Scotland in the 1920s and 30s. The Scottish Anthropological Society began as a breakaway from the UK-wide Royal Anthropological Society. One of its aims was a 'racial and ethnographic survey' of Scotland, but although this was something that had been attempted by other such societies in the past, by the 1930s the idea of the scientific classification of racial and ethnic characteristics was becoming linked too closely with Nazi ideas of 'racial science'. Many members of the society were alarmed by the SAS's proposals, and noted that the survey being compiled was based on a questionnaire from a European association that had fallen under the influence of Nazi organisations. Eventually after the intervention of the Folklore Society and the Royal Anthropological Society - and ironically the Free Church of Scotland on the grounds that it was 'teaching evolution' - it closed down as a research organisation, continuing after the Second World War as a publisher and lecture society.

Several other contributors look at the borders of folklore and politics. Tabitha Peterken's report on British fishermen's attitude to Brexit and the EU seems an odd fit in this volume, but the use of traditional folk motifs, songs and rituals for political purposes seems to be prevalent across the political spectrum. Andrew Fergus Wilson describes the way the far-right British Movement attempted to form a 'native' British religion by commandeering images and icons from largely Norse mythology. The problems of the boundaries between genuine belief in Pagan and Wiccan paths and their political exploitation are explored by Kate Smith, particularly in the ambiguous nature of the 'Charming of the Plough' ceremony of the Odinic Rite.

Other contributions which will be of particular interest to Magonians include Paul Cowdell's examination of the role Margaret Murray's witchcraft theories played as the 'MacGuffin' in Miles Burton's 1939 novel, High Elversham, and how the theme of remnant or revived 'pagan' rituals was used by novelists long after Murray's ideas were discredited academically. Cowdell suggests that Murray's own later work was coloured by her seeing the popularity of her earlier ideas in novels and films. Diane Rodgers' chapter, 'Et in Arcadia Ego', carries on from this with an examination of the use of similar motifs in the contemporary British 'folk horror' genre in film and television.

Although centred around the examination of folklore as an expression of nation and history, this collection presents a wide-ranging analysis of the topic from disparate viewpoints. One or two of the essays stray into the thickets of academic 'discourse', but many others, particularly Jeremy Harte's fascinating account of the role of the wood and the wolf in shaping English landscape and society, are both entertaining an informative. Perhaps overall not for the legendary 'general reader' but few Magonia readers will find nothing of interest in this collection.

Richard Samuels

For an example of the use of the Margaret Murray 'McGuffin' read this review of a survey of 'folk horror' detective novels from women writers:

https://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2023/02/magic-and-murder-queens.html

VERY HIGH STRANGENESS

2024-05-26T11:23:00.006+01:00

Rev. Alyson Dunlop Shanes. Mystic Visions: Spontaneous Supernatural Visions, Flying Disk Press, 2024.

There is no denying that Rev. Shanes has had a very active life filled with experiences and encounters with angels, demons, aliens and the paranormal. She grew up in a family that had supernatural experiences; at age four she started doing yoga exercises and at fourteen she communicated with a guardian spirit she called Norman using a Ouija board. At about the same time she was given a copy of The Exorcist by her grandfather who probably did not realise it was not age appropriate.

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Shanes tells the story of a friend who, being an alcoholic, was vulnerable to the nasty spirits that can get to you via the Ouija board. He got visitations from no less a spirit than Alastair Crowley and from an even more nasty demon called Quabula, who appeared to him as a child-sized black male with white eyes. After that he went missing for a day and told how he found himself on a golf course where guardian angels fought off Crowley and Quabula, and from that day on he no longer had a drink problem.

She has not used a Ouija board since her twenties, and although she does not have a problem with them, but warns that they can open the door to evil spirits, as in the case of her friend.

As a student of mysticism, shamanism and paganism, Shanes acknowledges that; “It is a struggle to unite spirituality with modern science and rational thinking.”

Her ability to see ghosts, angels, aliens and the like she attributes to being plagued with illnesses since childhood and has often been close to the “otherside.” Meditation and being in a relaxed state also allows you to see these visions.

Some of these entities have been incredibly frightening and have included seeing an old lady in her bedroom and an imp-like creature outside her window. Years later she discovered that a UFO was photographed over her home in the same time period.

Links like that are not too convincing, and easily put down to coincidence. Equally many of her visions can be explained as being due to sleep paralysis. Even less impressive are her precognitions of future events, that are fuzzy and unspecific. She put that down as being due to her lack of experience as a medium at that time. Also, her family’s cursed associations with tragic events like the Lockerbie and Herald of Free Enterprise disasters, although disturbing, seem more like examples of bad luck rather than anything more sinister.

I like her story of Malcolm Robinson teaching a pre-Beatle Paul McCartney the lyrics to, appropriately enough, Yesterday when travelling back in time on the astral plane. Shane herself has had out of the body experiences when she has flown over Glasgow.

Woven into and linked with her own accounts is a good deal of information about the occult, demonic possession, angels, Greek and Roman mythology, art, yoga and magick. It is quite a heady mixture, but fortunately she does offer advice on how to protect yourself from the darker side of the supernatural.

This short book covers plenty of ground and shows the complexity of high-strangeness experiences and how they are related to religion and mythology. From our modern-day perspective we might say all these experiences are caused by 'aliens'. Certainly that is an easy option but any single 'explanation' seems very inadequate.

Shanes describes her book as a training manual for mystics, and it could very well be helpful to people who have had similar experiences. For the rest of us we can only wonder what is going on. Are there forces out there we can barely understand or is this another example of psychosociological influences shaping how unusual experiences are understood and interpreted by the experiencer? Either way this makes fascinating reading.

A bibliography, internet sources, a listing of influential artists and links to artworks are provided.

Nigel Watson

LINING UP IN RENNES

2024-05-18T13:41:00.006+01:00

Simon M. Miles, The Map and the Manuscript: Journeys in the Mysteries of the Two Rennes, Ignotum Press, 2022.

This is really a book for aficionados of the Rennes-le-Château mystery and the multitude of others that spin out of it. Fortunately I am one, but I’ll try to rein myself in. That’s despite my excitement, as The Map and the Manuscript is a genuine gamechanger.

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Simon Miles has uncovered new evidence that adds a new dimension to the story - and which fatally undermines the sceptical line that the whole thing is just a hoax concocted by a French conman back in the 1960s.

Miles isn’t interested in what is to many the core mystery, that of the unexplained wealth acquired by Rennes-le-Château’s priest, Bérenger Saunière, at the end of the nineteenth century, which he sums up neatly as "a magnet for unreliable history, dubious theology and questionable theories". It’s rather the elaborate add-ons that link the Saunière affair to shadowy secret societies and world-shaking secrets, but which really don’t stand up to scrutiny. However, invoking Philip K. Dick’s concept of the ‘fake fake’, Miles asks Have some of the false elements woven into the story been introduced as a subterfuge to keep an authentic secret safe?’ He answers that question with a resounding yes.

Miles, a laser scientist, was beguiled by the mystery more than twenty years ago in his native Australia, eventually moving to a village near Rennes-le-Château so he could pursue his research on the ground. Here he presents the results of those two decades-plus of investigation. As the subtitle makes clear, it’s as much about Rennes-les-Château’s twin in the valley below, the thermal spa village of Rennes-les-Bains. Or even more so, as that appears to hold the real key.

What drew him in was an aspect of the mystery that usually turns me off, the ‘lines on maps’: natural features and manmade structures in the area that several researchers – most prominently Henry Lincoln – claim form significant alignments and geometric patterns. Intrigued by Lincoln’s claims, Miles set out to check them, and while he found that some didn’t stack up – particularly the geometric ones – others did to an uncanny degree of accuracy. Working at first with maps – Google Earth’s arrival was a godsend – he found more and more alignments of churches, chapels and castles that were so precise that they can only have been deliberate on the part of the builders. Despite my usual caution about these kinds of claims, cherry-picking of sites to fit a line or pattern being all too easy, Miles’ immensely detailed presentation won me over.

But the real gamechanger came when Miles was, inevitably, drawn into other aspects of the mystery that relate to the highly controversial, and very much alleged, secret society the Priory of Sion, and the collection of documents lodged in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale in the 1960s that supposedly prove its existence and purpose. They’re known collectively to enthusiasts as the Dossiers secrets. Most readers will know that the prevailing view is that they’re a simple hoax, concocted by that conman, a distinctly dodgy character by the name of Pierre Plantard, perhaps aided and abetted by a couple of his confrères, what Miles calls ‘the Team’. That’s it, story over.

However, Miles has conclusively identified the author of one of the most enigmatic of the Dossiers, an enigmatic prose poem entitled Le Serpent rouge that has generated a great many theories over the decades. And he’s not one of the Team, but a highly respected academic of the time: Jean Richer, a professor of literature who specialised in the influence of esoteric doctrines on some of France’s major writers.

Not only did Miles discover clues to Richer’s authorship in cryptic references in Le Serpent rouge and the professor’s own works, but he found that Plantard and the Team left their own trail of clues to him in their own writings, and that one of the Team, the journalist Gérard de Sède, even knew and worked with him. Knowing someone of Richer’s academic standing was involved in the Dossiers mystification blows the case for it all being down to a couple of low-level charlatans completely out of the water.

Curiouser and curiouser, although Richer was a literary scholar, just a few months after Le Serpent rouge was deposited in the Bibliothèque, he published a seminal book on ‘sacred geography’ that described his discovery (inspired by a dream) of alignments of temples and sanctuaries in ancient Greece, centring on the oracle site of Delphi – exactly the kind of alignments Miles had been tracing around the two Rennes for a decade. His conclusion is that Richer saw in Rennes-les-Bains a parallel to Delphi. (1)

And curiouser… Following clues from Le Serpent rouge he found the same alignments hidden in another of the baffling texts that has long had fans of the mystery scratching their heads, La Vraie langue celtique et le Cromlech de Rennes-les-Bains, written in the 1880s by the village’s priest (and friend of Saunière) Henri Boudet. So Boudet, in the nineteenth century, knew about the alignments, and Richer in the 1960s knew that he knew – but both hid their knowledge in works full of absurdities…

From there the trail becomes even more labyrinthine, while remaining startlingly coherent, in ways that it’s impossible to summarise even in a review of this length. It involves the works of nineteenth century proto-surrealist novelist and poet Gérard de Nerval (Richer’s literary hero), Jung’s theories on alchemy, Jonathan Swift’s Ars Punica, Goethe (one of whose tales, a major influence on Nerval, was translated into French as Le Serpent vert – bit of a giveaway), esoteric groups such as the Martinists, geometric codes in various documents such as the alleged parchments found by Saunière, and even Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which I’ve always seen as a sendup of works on these mysteries. And that’s just a few.

But while Miles’ discoveries take the story on, they don’t get to the bottom of it: it rather introduces a whole new level to what was already a hugely complicated business. At the end, Miles himself acknowledges he can only speculate about what it all means. Ultimately it all comes back to those alignments – the only testable element – but what they were for is itself a mystery.

The other path, the literary one, from Le Serpent rouge to Richer to Nerval and others, seems to be about opening the door to a different mode of consciousness, something discovered by Nerval through his exploration of symbolism – and possible involvement in esoteric orders – and eventually led to him being hospitalised as mad, although he insisted he was perfectly sane: he’d just found a different way of perceiving reality. Miles suggests that Richer followed Nerval’s method, resulting in the dream that was the key to his discovery of sacred geography. As Miles puts it, "If Jean Richer was able to recapture the poetic experience of peoples of the past, then we are in the presence of modes of transmission that we currently do not understand, nor do we readily concede even exist. To modern ears, this sounds strange, yet the Ancient Greeks would have had no problem with the concept."

So maybe the answer is impossible to find using conventional reason and logic.

Miles doesn’t claim to have got to the bottom of it all, and it’ll take more than one reading of his book to come to a view about whether he’s really avoided all the red herrings strewn along the path, as well as hitting on the right interpretations at every step. But the core of the book certainly hangs together.

The Map and the Manuscript is, of necessity, a big book, almost 500 pages, and it’s not a light read, though that’s due to the range and complexity of the subjects it covers, and as the dizzying connections between them, rather than Miles’ writing. He sets it all out as clearly as anyone can. It’s only when it comes to the geometry that it gets hard for a non-geometer like me to follow.

My only negative is the lack of an index, especially in a book with so many intertwining tales. I often wanted to skip back to remind myself what he’d said about a subject, but it took a lot of flicking through to find what I wanted.

Although Miles says at the outset that the reader doesn’t need a prior knowledge of any of the subjects, it wouldn’t make an easy introduction to the Rennes-le-Château and Priory of Sion mysteries – but then it’s unlikely to appeal to anybody not already bitten by the bug. Which is a pity, as there’s a lot more to the book than just those mysteries.

It really is indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in this affair. And it should be read by the detractors who dismiss the whole business as a fabrication and see those take it seriously as naïve and gullible. But I don’t hold out high hopes.

Clive Prince

(1) https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170705-the-mystery-behind-greeces-temples