THE MAGONIA BLOG

FIRST READ: ENTER THE SCEPTICS

2013-05-19T12:07:00.001+01:00

Donald H Menzel. Flying Saucers. Harvard University Press/Putnams, 1953.

Yah boo hiss, here is Donald Menzel the first great pantomime villain of ufology, until that role was stolen from him by Phil Klass. In this first book Menzel sought rational explanations for UFO reports; in particular he was interested in the role of mirages, phenomena produced by ice crystals and other similar meteorological explanations. This didn’t exactly enamour him to the ETH supporters, which of course included the 11, going on 12-year-old Peter Rogerson, and I didn’t find his arguments very persuasive. After all I knew that flying saucers came from outer space because Aimé Michel and Donald Keyhoe had told me they did, and Michel had some impressive looking maths - which I couldn’t follow, but they surely proved Menzel was wrong.

Actually much of the time, Menzel was wrong, for like a lot of other people who think they have THE answer to UFO reports Menzel took his ideas far too far. Thus the Skyhook balloon that Thomas Mantell chased to his death was a mock sun in Menzel’s eyes, and he devised complex explanations involving mirages, although there were probably much simpler explanations.

But on re-reading I noted that he didn’t quite push the irage hypothesis as far as ufological folklore suggests that he did, and it is interesting to see that he was one of the first people to try and place modern UFO reports in a historical context - there are some fascinating historical snippets included in this book. There is, of course, the same literalism that also infects ETH believers. Thus Menzel argues the vision of Ezekiel was a sun dog, just as others have argued that it was tornado, plasma vortex, extra-terrestrial helicopter or a prevision of railway locomotives. That it is essentially a work of allegorical fiction is not considered by any of these authors.

I rather suspect that, every bit as much as debunking the ETH, Menzel was actually motivated by using popular interest in flying saucers as a hook on which to hang a study of peculiar atmospheric phenomena aimed at a general audience.

Within a decade Menzel had abandoned the mirages for a much more general sceptical approach, but they were resurrected decades later and in a much more extreme fashion by Steuart Campbell.

The section on life on Venus and Mars now looks very quaint indeed, with Venus being granted warm oceans and how the dark areas seen on Mars “have proved to be vegetation”. How many of our current scientific views will appear as naïve, old fashioned and just plain wrong in another 60 years’ time. – Peter Rogerson.

LIFE OF PSI

2013-05-15T11:22:00.000+01:00

Rosemarie Pilkington (Editor), Men and Women of Parapsychology, Personal Reflections: ESPRIT Volume 2. Foreword by Nancy L Zingrone. Anomalist Books, 2013

This is the second volume of Rosemarie Pilkington’s surveys of aging parapsychologists, (the youngest is my age, several are in their 80s, and two died in the course of the writing), the first volume of which was reviewed HERE.

There are 21 people included in this collection, 15 of whom are American or have spent most of their adult life in the States, there are just three women; Mary Rose Barrington, Sally Rhine Feather and Serena Roney-Dougal. Looking through their biographies a few things stand out; one is how little conventional Christianity and its defence plays a part in their upbringing or their passion for psychical research, the main ‘spiritual’ impulse seems to be forms of eastern mysticism; the second is how many of them endorse claims that the likes of the Sidgwicks would have regarded as arrant nonsense.

It is interesting to see the same sort of radicalisation in parapsychology as we see in ufology, where once sober ufologists like David Jacobs, Bruce Maccabee and Bill Chalker start promoting radical claims and implausible individuals; in parapsychology we have Erlendur Haraldsson endorsing Sai Baba, Stephen Braude endorsing the ‘Gold Leaf Lady’ and various peoples’ backing of Uri Geller. There do seem to be charismatic individuals who can persuade people that they have experienced the most extraordinary things, and to be most unwilling to subject their claims to critical analysis. Many of these sorts of people use their charisma simply to get people into their beds or to persuade them to surrender their life savings, a minority use them to rise to the top in business and politics, but some use them to enchant people into believing almost anything.

On the whole the group represents a cross section of those interested in the subject from the eminently sensible such as Richard Broughton (currently president of the SPR and a welcome changing from some of the characters involved in that organization in the recent past) or Sally Rhine Feather, through to the slightly odd to the downright flaky. Some of the talk of spirituality is not to the taste of many of the Brits of my generation or older, and I can’t help wondering if some of the obsession with that and “nonlocality” and “connectedness” in the States is not a reaction to the very individualist official culture of that country. All this talk of spirituality can seem very uplifting and touchy feely, but as one contributor, Charles Tart admits, he didn’t know how to respond to a correspondent who argued that if you believe in nice spirits and so one, what about demons. Oops, that’s the reverse side isn’t it, bringing back demons and boggarts, witchcraft, the evil eye, curses and menstruating women turning the milk sour. It’s that thought which impels many people into groups like CSI(COP)

What is also evident is that the “paranormal” or “psi” are rather vague terms for a whole range of anomalous experiences or phenomena which may actually have no connection with each other at all. Why should anyone assume having a dream about your sister’s death on the night she died have the remotes connection with the mysterious appearance of water in a group of houses, or either with some anomalistic case of healing. Like UFO reports the only thing that connects these things is that they are investigated by the same people or within the same sub-culture. -- Peter Rogerson.

A GOOD GUIDE TO STRANGE STUFF

2013-05-12T13:54:00.000+01:00

Roy Bainton. The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena. Constable and Robinson, 2013.

This is yet another of those monster books from Constable and Robinson that try to cover as much as possible, with the inevitable result that some parts are better than others.

For me the best part of this book was the one dealing with sea mysteries, because it is clear that this is a topic that Bainton, a former merchant seaman with multiple family connections to the fishing industry, knows and cares about, and his comments here are always critical and to the point. He provides an excellent summary of the Eilean Mor lighthouse mystery, exposing the myths generated by generations of writers from the poet W. W. Gibson to the American mysterymonger Vincent Gaddis. He shows

He also takes on the story of the Philadelphia Experiment and the mystery of the Ourang Medan, whose crew were said to have been found dead with a look of terror on their faces. It proved impossible to track down the ship, but Bainton wonders if its origins lay in the secret transport of nerve gas out of the ruins of Nazi Germany. Throughout this section he shows a willingness to concede where he has been taken in, in the past. He is also a poet, which shows in this little paragraph, which sums up the essence of the sea and its mysteries:

“Passengers on cruise liners, mistakenly thinking that they that they are spending their dollars on some luxurious floating hotel, will rarely stop to think between the changing shoreline scenery that below the thin steel hull keeping them afloat lies a deep, dark graveyard. Between this cemetery’s tragic, tombstone wrecks swim bizarre creatures; things with tentacles, singing whales, chattering dolphins, flying fish, creepy crabs and rapacious sharks, all part and parcel of a variety of earth’s biology whose fantastic limits are still unknown. Down there in the darkness the bones of men disintegrate, but the haunted sunken skeletons of their ships endure.” (pp.365-6)

There are some other really good portions; the critical examination of the activities of various mediums and psychics, especially those who go in for endless merchandising, and a lovely little piece on the cranky world of Cherie Blair; the legions of weird archaeology, and an excellent round up of panics and paranoia, covered with journalistic good sense.

There are some weaknesses; the section of cryptozoology is often reduced to half page features, that on Near Death Experiences relies far too much on Ms P M H Atwater (her “honorary doctorate” comes from something called Medicina Alternativa based in Sri Lanka, denounced as a diploma mill HERE.

The ufology section is rather superficial also, and I was surprised to see Bainton recommend the arch-credulous Tim Good (a guy who even now takes the tales told by George Adamski seriously) as a paragon of ufology. I suspect these problems are due to adding material on which he has not made much of a study to bulk out the work.

But the good outweighs the bad and much of this makes a good inexpensive introduction to Fortenea.

-- Peter Rogerson.

REMEMBERING DOCTOR DEE

2013-05-08T15:58:00.000+01:00

Regular visitors to Magonia Review will have noticed that little panel on the right asking for donations to set up a permanent memorial to the Elizabethan magus, scholar, scientist, alchemist, mathematician, astrologer, and navigator, Dr John Dee, in Mortlake church, close to the house where he lived for much of his life and established his great library and alchemical laboratories.

After a long campaign by the John Dee of Mortlake Society, which involved a sometimes frustrating path through the seemingly Byzantine bureaucracy of the Church of England, we finally succeeded in our aim. Last night (7th May, 2013) Dee's biographer Benjamin Woolley unveiled a beautifully inscribed plaque commemorating the doctor's life and his otherwise unmarked last resting place in the church. This is, as far as we know, the only public commemoration of the life of one of the most influential figures of the Elizabethan era anywhere in the world, and as such is sure to become a site for all admirers and students of John Dee to visit.

The plaque was elegantly designed and cut by Emily Hoffnung, one of the finest letter-cutters working today, using slate from a Welsh quarry in a tribute to Dee's own Welsh roots. Here are pictures of the plaque in-situ on the wall, and Ms Hoffnung displaying the plaque before installing it in the church.

Many Magonia readers have responded to our appeal, both by direct donations and by purchasing the book John Dee of Mortlake by Nicholas Dakin, proceeds from the sale of which go towards the costs of the plaque, and we thank you for your generous support. Although the plaque is now in place, we still need to raise further donations to cover the total costs, and we invite you to join the John Dee of Mortlake Society, and to get involved in future events to celebrate John Dee. The next event for your diary will be the now-legendary John Dee Tea, on his birthday, 13th July, which Magonia has now officially designated 'John Dee Day'.

Just click on the picture of Dr Dee in the side panel for full details of the Society.

ART OF ALCHEMY

2013-05-05T13:57:00.001+01:00

Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. The Arcane Doctrine Of Alchemy. Thames and Hudson, 2013.

The French alchemist Stanislas Klossowski de Rola is a delightful enigma. From being an aristocratic hippy-socialite and reefer-smoking roué of the 60s (friend of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Paul Simon), he is now considered to be a serious scholar of alchemical engravings.

1988 saw the publication of his Florilegium, The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century (UK translation published 1998). It was preceded by the current book, which was first published in 1973 in Thames and Hudson’s ‘Art And Imagination’ series as Alchemy: The Secret Art, more as a coffee-table book than anything. It took the form of a long essay on philosophical Alchemy plus a reprint of Eirenaeus Philalethes’ comments on the poetic ‘Vision’ of Canon Ripley (from his Twelve Gates), interspersed with dozens and dozens of alchemical engravings, mostly in beautiful colour. (This style of alchemical presentation is very much in the old tradition, with the process often being shown mainly through pictures. One book (the Mutus Liber) has almost no text.)

These images, at one level, are a coded formula for chemists but, at another level, they become meditation pieces for students of the philosophical/spiritual approach to Alchemy. The choice of images shows the author’s understanding of Alchemy. Though they are functional images and all are accompanied by notes explaining what part of the process they relate to, they also make a glorious gallery of alchemical mandalas. The French have always been more philosophical and astrological in their approach to Alchemy than the English-speaking world and Klossowski de Rola is firmly of that tradition. A few of the pages reproduce well-known, engraved sequences of the alchemical process but most of the book is given over to imagery, often exotic never-before-seen paintings and hand illustrations, copied from obscure manuscripts. The author, obviously, sees Alchemy principally in Art.

His essay focuses on the practical work with plants and dew in order to make a perfect elixir which acts in both the spiritual and the medical worlds. It is the philosophical ‘Gold of a Thousand Mornings’. Alchemy, for Klossowski de Rola is not about physical gold but about illumination.

The current reprint is enigmatic in that it is not an exact reprint. The title has been changed. The first book was large format while the new book is half its size. The text has been changed ever so slightly. Plates have been shuffled around and some which were full-page are now quarter-page. Some more general b/w plates (I counted around 6) have disappeared completely. The notes to the plates have been re-written and some plates have been re-scanned so that missing pieces of text at the top have reappeared but text at the bottom has disappeared!

The new edition feels tighter and more beautifully presented: the glorious colours of some of the plates seem more alive in a smaller format. But, in the older large-format book, more plates are full-page and the original (often manuscript) writings around the pictures are far more legible. If you want a beautiful alchemical read, the new edition has to be your choice. If you want to study every detail in the images, you would be better off with the old edition. Except that you can’t easily find the old edition anymore!

Though they are both firmly about Alchemy, this book is totally different, almost diametrically opposed in spirit to the Lawrence Principe book, reviewed below. Principe is a chemist and sees alchemical philosophy in terms of the mechanics of the Natural world and the product of the laboratory while Klossowski de Rola sees the process in terms of life-long magical artistry. Both scientist and artist are scholars of the same Art. -- Caroline Robertson

SECRETS OF ALCHEMY

2013-05-03T16:41:00.000+01:00

Lawrence M Principe. The Secrets Of Alchemy. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

This is a book that every general student of Alchemy, and particularly those interested in the Western (including the Arabic) history of Alchemy, should own for it is, by far, the best book on the history of Alchemy ever yet written. No other book compares to it. The author, a scholar and a chemist, has been a student of the subject for 35 years and he has distilled his learning into this work.

It is not large (only 200 or so pages) and it is written in a lucid and simple style, almost as accessible as a coffee-table book, but it moves effortlessly through some 1400 (and more) years of alchemical writing, theory and practice, leaving no Stone unturned.

Lawrence Principe has built himself a formidable reputation as a scholar over the last two decades with his writings on the subject. Some books have been co-authored with another luminary, William R Newman (Alchemy Tried in the Fire (2002) and George Starkey: Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks (2005)) but he has steadily built his own body of writings too. They are all well worth reading.

Up to now, his emphasis has been on the Golden Age of British Alchemy, the age of Newton, Boyle and George Starkey (Eirenaus Philalethes) in the late 17th century, but, in this book, he extends his vision long into the past, to trace the development of alchemical thought from the Greco-Roman period, through the Islamic period and into the European period from the late Middle Ages onwards. And it is this historical overview which is the prima materia of the book: no other writer has come near the sheer magisterial depth and sweep of his research. The Islamic period, often ignored by other historians because of problems of text translation, is dealt with fully. It is not clear how many languages Principe has but, for the first two chapters of his book alone, Principe notes that he read 200 books, only 10 of which were written in English!

He places the roots of Western Alchemy firmly in the marriage of two things: late Egyptian scientific artisanship (from metalworking and the making of artificial gems to dyeing) with the Greek philosophies about the origins and structure of matter and Nature itself. From this marriage, mysteriously, was born the notion that, instead of just tingeing metals (making silver look like gold, for example), metals might be actually transmuted into other metals.

From these beginnings in the 1st to 3rd centuries AD, Alchemy developed through the Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of the early 4th century with the beginning of the method of expressing chemical processes through secrecy and the hiding of names, through code-names and dream imagery where writers ‘call a single thing by many names while they call many things by a single name’. And, also, we are introduced to the idea that Gnosticism (specific Egyptian Christian mythology and spiritual ideas) might have become fused with, or influenced, the Greek metaphysical principles behind the developing notion of the possibility of transmutation.

From Zosimos, the next major characters are the Arabic alchemists Jabir of the early 8th century, Razes (10th c) and Avicenna (11th c) until the tradition crosses into European culture around the middle of the 12th c. Now, the point here is that Principe is not doing biographical lists but is tracing the development of alchemical ideas as expressed by its main protagonists. We see, for example, how the concepts of elements and humours and atoms become integrated into the Arabic metallic philosophy of Sulphur and Mercury (and eventually Salt) and how, from that conceptual mixture and its application in the laboratory, emerges a new philosophical science.

Once into Western alchemy, the book becomes more exciting because the author, a Professor of Chemistry, can replicate the experiments of people like John of Rupescissa and then, eventually, those of Boyle and Newton and Starkey and, through meticulous decipherment of those enigmatic engravings which usually accompanied European alchemical works, unlock the keys to the ingredients and processes and, even, discover (to his own surprise)the mysteries revealed by seemingly unscientific procedures like continued circulation and cohobations at extremely low temperatures.

For this reviewer, the gold of the book is the description of Principe’s own work on Stibnite (Antimony), his trials and errors, until he finally reproduces that stage of The Work, which so fascinated Newton, of watching ‘trees’ grow inside the Philosophical Egg, as though the mixture were truly alive. As Principe says “My first reaction to this sight was utter disbelief and then – after becoming relatively certain that I had not taken leave of my senses – a sense of awe and wonder. Imagine, then what any chrysopoeian of the seventeenth century must have thought when he witnessed such a sight.”

There is a lot more in the book: too much to cover in a review. It must be read by anyone with even a passing interest in the subject. As well as the 200 pages of text, there are 36 pages of excellent notes and 20 pages of first-class bibliography. The author has said (elsewhere than in the book) that he wanted to write a work that would be readable by anyone but would contain the resource for anyone to research the history without overlaying obfuscation. That he has achieved.

Any reservations? Only one with regard to the book’s text. The author (being an academic) is very conscious of the light shone upon laboratory alchemy by modern scholastic and academic research, as though academics were the only ones involved in the field. He gives no credit (because he may not know them) to the hundreds or maybe thousands of alchemists working in the world, some of which will, undoubtedly, have taken the laboratory work far further than he has. And who knows how far?

And elsewhere, in filmed lectures (on Youtube), he seems to mock the idea that Alchemy, in any way, concerns psychic development or the ability to become personally as the gods. This flies in the face of the fact that the earliest Alchemy of all – that of the Chinese – began as Neidan (Inner Alchemy – a system of meditation and energy-mapping) and only later developed into Waidan (Outer Alchemy – involving the alchemical preparation of elixirs and other medications). It betrays in the author a modern, scientific-rationalistic dogmatism which runs counter to his often-made assertion that to understand the processes of the alchemists, you had to get into their mind-set.

Quibbles apart, buy this book, then buy a copy for your best friend too. It honestly is money well-spent. Those who live in London and who visit the British Museum may have viewed the ‘magickal’ display cabinet which houses John Dee’s magic mirror and his wax pentacles. In that same cabinet is a pen-knife with a blade half silver and half gold and the half-gold part is said to have been done by alchemical means. This book will tell you how to effect such a transmutation to the astonishment and delight of your friends!

It was a joy and a privilege to be asked to review this work. -- Caroline Robertson

BIG, BAD AND ABSOLUTELY BEASTLY!

2013-04-30T15:41:00.001+01:00

Michael Largo. The Big, Bad Book of Beasts. William Morrow, 2013.

Having browsed through this book, I think I can say that the Komodo Lizard is the most disgusting creature on earth, but it’s a tight race. The Komodo’s bite is usually fatal, as it keeps it mouth full of deadly bio-toxins by chewing on faeces and eating rotting carcasses, as well as through its own bleeding gums. That’s quite apart from the venomous glands in its lower jaw.

Its family life isn’t much better. The newly hatched young instinctively fear their parents who view them as nothing other than food, so they head for the trees and stay up out of mummy and daddy’s reach (they’re too fat to climb) until they’re four years old and are better able to fight back.

After telling us this Michael Largo asks, with commendable open-mindedness “do they make good pets?” Although admitting that some have been trained to jump through hoops for food, he points out that they cannot be trusted not to kill and eat their owners. So that’s a ‘no’ then.

Not all the creatures in this fascinating compilation are quite so hellish, in fact not all of them are quite so real. It’s a nice mixture of mythical, semi-mythical, possibly, and definitely real. From the descriptions it’s sometimes difficult to tell which category applies.

The Hallucigenia is one such unlikely individual. A worm-like animal with “seven pairs of pincer legs, six sets of tentacles across its back, and a blob of a head without eyes, ears or mouth”. Its eating habits are suitably bizarre: “It is not know if the creature had small, chewing mouths at the end of each leg, or if the food it captured was handed off from one pincer to the next like a baton … and then inserted into an eating hole somewhere near its blobbish head”.

Just as well, I think, that the Hallucigenia was only about an inch long and died out in the Cambrian period.

Lots of our favourite crypto-creatures are here as well, the Jersey Devil, the Kraken, the horse-headed men of the Philippines, and the Mongolian Death Worm. Largo outlines the legend of the Death Worm and points out that although expeditions to find the creature have come back empty-handed (and more importantly with their hands still attached), locals are convinced of its reality.

However there is a creature called the ‘Bobbit Worm’ (I am not making this up, although I cannot be sure that no-one else is) that has a similar MO to the MDW: it lives in the ocean depths buried under the sand ready to leap out and slice any passing prey in two. These unlovely creatures grow up to ten feet long and live for over 100 years.

Our old chum the Griffin features here also, although Largo fails to ask, as he does for some other mythical beasts ‘is it real?’ Magonians, of course, know the answer to that!

But you don’t have to worry too much about the mythical creatures, as the real ones are as weird and anything dreamt up by the like of Pliny the Elder or fantasy writers from West London. Here we have the inch-long millipede with 750 legs; the Demon Duck of Doom (you’ll just have to read the book); the Balkan Bonnacon which defends itself from predators by aiming massive farts at its pursuers, and the Velvet Worm from the hotter and sticker parts of the southern hemisphere; the male impregnates the female by carrying its sperm on its antennae and inserting its whole head into the female. Don’t try this at home!

Lots of fun for all the family here and an essential book for anyone compiling pub quizzes or who enjoys Stephen Fry’s QI quiz show. Probably best with a PG rating though! -- John Rimmer

FIRST READ - ED RUPPELT

2013-04-28T15:37:00.002+01:00

Peter Rogerson continues his personal reminiscences of the iconic UFO books of the 1950s that influenced the early generations of ufologists, and whose ideas still cast a long shadow over today's researchers and writers.

Edward J Ruppelt. Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Victor Gollancz, 1956. -- By Peter Rogerson

This was one of the first UFO books that I read in what was to become my long UFO book reading and buying career. It was taken out from Flixton Library, one of the many borrowed on my dad’s library tickets, as I found that the stuff in the kiddie’s library was for, well, kiddies. Flixton Library was a magnificent 1930s building, with lots of books, armchairs, a reading room and reference library, everything having a feel of scholarship and calm. How sad that it has now been relegated to an unstaffed room attached to a swimming baths! [It appears that the old library building is now used as the band-room for the Flixton Brass Band, so it’s still serving local culture. – JR]

Edward Ruppelt had been head of the US government’s Project Bluebook in 1952/3 and this book was the result of that involvement. It looks as though either he or his ghost writer chose to emulate Donald Keyhoe, and the book was written in the first person, almost diary-like fashion. For the not quite twelve-year-old schoolboy Peter Rogerson, I have to say it seemed dull compared with Keyhoe’s breathless prose. One reason was that it essentially covered the same ground.

A few years later I bought the Ace paperback edition, and at seventeen it had a rather different impact; it seemed to be evocative of warm summer nights in the American Midwest, where strange lights and silvery objects would skim across the twilight, redolent of space and freedom.

Edward J. Ruppelt

Looking back again, I see this as an attempt at a serious look at the subject as it was over 60 years ago. Many of Ruppelt’s tales were of strange lights seen by pilots, and of dramatic military encounters. Some of the things seen, from hindsight, were almost certainly experimental jet aircraft, unfamiliar to the lower ranks such as Ruppelt. The book contains accounts of classics such as the Lubbock Lights, which were probably reflections off low flying plover, though Ruppelt, having gone with that explanation originally, later claimed that he knew the real answer but was not able to reveal it. Years later this explanation turned out to be moths rather than plover reflecting the street lights.

Ruppelt did not go in for tales UFO landings in general. Indeed he claimed that these were all put in the waste paper basket; this does not actually seem to be true though. There is one landing report in the book, that of the Florida scoutmaster Desverges, who claimed to have been burned by a landed UFO. On investigation, his background began to look more suspect, and he did not help his story by adding more and more to it - in one version he saw a creature too hideous to describe, in another he fought three grey suited aliens. On the other hand Ruppelt found it difficult to explain burnt grass at the site.

Most people reading this book would have come to the conclusion that Ruppelt was leaning towards the ETH, though he clearly understood that there was none of the real physical evidence that would have been needed to allow an official endorsement of such a position. Ruppelt however felt that the answer would not be long in coming, “ I am sure that in a few years there will be a proven answer” coming from space research and various scientific advances.

But the ‘proven answer’ never came, and by 1958 Ruppelt was becoming more sceptical, his journalistic forays into the contactee world, constant badgering from Keyhoe and general ill health may well have contributed to this, as perhaps did the disenchanting effect of time and distance. The revised edition of this book (my copy of which disappeared into the vaults of ASSAP) published in 1960 took a much more sceptical line. By the time it was published Ruppelt was dead from a heart attack at the preposterously young age of 37.

Now nearly sixty years after this book was written, there is no ‘proven answer’. When I read this and other similar books in the mid-1960s, the idea that ufology would be around when I grew up seemed absurd. At that time I had become very much a convert to the ETH, and I suppose that I imagined that ‘They’ would have landed by then. Here we are, and still have no answer, and many of the once dramatic looking stories, with the benefit of hindsight, and what we now know of perception and memory, are much less impressive. The ETH that people like Keyhoe and his supporters in the Air Force believed in looks hopelessly naïve, its technology already that of a dead age.

We would be delighted to hear from Magonia Review readers about the books that first influenced their interest in ufology, forteana, psychical research and the other topics which we cover in this blog.

STILL SEARCHING

2013-04-24T12:44:00.000+01:00

Paul Murdin. Are We Being Watched? The Search for Life in the Cosmos. Thames and Hudson, 2013.

This is one of a number of recent books which have combined astronomy with biology in order to discuss the prospects of finding evidence of extraterrestrial life. This study is, not surprisingly, called astrobiology. The main problem with astrobiology, as the author admits, is that it is "a science about something that might exist, not something that exists for certain". This lack of convincing evidence perhaps inevitably leads the author to resort to padding out his treatment of the subject to produce a book rather than a pamphlet.

Evidence for the possibility of extraterrestrial life has become available only fairly recently. It was not until 1992 that radio astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan, when timing a rapidly rotating pulsar, noticed unusual features which led to the conclusion that there were three planets orbiting it. Many other stars with planetary systems have since been discovered and the increasing use of computers has enabled the process to become at least partly automatic.

Further evidence comes from organic compounds found in meteorites. Thousands of complex organic compounds were found in samples of the meteorite which broke up over Murchison, near Melbourne, Australia, in 1969. Study of these compounds caused controversy as the organic compounds formed by non-biological processes are 'racemic', which means that they consist of equal numbers of left-handed and right-handed molecules, unlike those formed in living organisms which are left-handed, with few exceptions. The amino acids in the Murchison meteorite proved to be predominately left-handed.

A chapter is devoted to the experiments to look for signs of life on Mars. As in other observations and experiments the evidence obtained is inconclusive and the interpretations of it are highly controversial. Of course no one expected Martians as depicted in science fiction stories, but it was thought that it was possible that micro-organisms might live in the soil.

Two main methods have been used to investigate this possibility. The first was the experiments carried out by the Viking landers of 1976 which produced results indicating either the presence or absence of living organisms, depending on which scientists you asked. The second, and cheaper, method was to examine meteorites which came from Mars. This resulted in the discovery, in a meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984, of a microscopic tube-like structure which either is or is not the fossil of a Martian micro-organism, again depending on which scientist you ask.

Apart from Mars, Murdin considers the possibility of life on one of Jupiter's satellites, Europa, as it is apparently covered by an ocean with a layer of ice on top. There has been much speculation about possible forms of life in this ocean, but at present no way of finding any hard facts.

Very little of the scientific speculation in this book is about the possibility of intelligent life, as consideration is given only to listening for alien radio signals from distant star systems. Only a very few anomalous signals have been reported and these have either never been repeated or have no independent confirmation. There is nothing about the possibility of alien space probes lurking in our solar system, or the search for large-scale engineering projects in other star systems, such as Dyson spheres. Some of these ideas have been discussed by serious scientists and engineers, yet Murdin ignores them but finds space for a few paragraphs about Roswell, which, not surprisingly, does not impress him at all. Then why mention it?

This is a book with few surprises for readers interested in the possibility of alien life, as they will already be familiar with most of the main facts and theories. A shorter version, with irrelevant or obvious material excised, might be a good idea for any future edition. -- John Harney

MADDER THAN MAD

2013-04-21T11:56:00.000+01:00

Will Storr. The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science. Picador, 2013.

The first thing that strikes me about this book is that Will Storr and Picador must have some pretty expensive lawyers; the second is that I would have loved to have seen the unexpurgated version. The reason for this is that Storr takes on a whole range of scientific and other heretics, and some of their critics. Several of these are known to be notoriously litigious, and there are some pretty minefield topics here.

Storr’s selection of heretics ranges from a homophobic creationist, to a well-known holocaust denier, to the battles in psychiatry between supporters and opponents of the 'hearing voices' network, through homeopathy to a UKIP climate change denier and conspiracy theorist, to recovered memory enthusiasts who unearth past lives, alien abductions and satanic abuse, through to the battles between Rupert Sheldrake on the one hand and Richard Wiseman and James 'The Amazing' on the other. Storr's search for the truth in the numerous accusations and counter accusations in these matters is always eye opening, and there is much here which should interest Magonia readers.

Storr does not however present these people, as Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson are apt to do, as grotesques to be laughed at, but rather uses some extreme examples to explore the very nature of belief, of how the brain constructs reality and provides overarching narratives, of how society and its various cultures and subcultures reinforce beliefs. Storr presents these stories against his own self-admitted periods of at least near madness, exploring the nature of obsession and irrationality. He explores how belief can make us impervious to contradictory evidence, even in front of the eyes.

The pervasive nature of group think is illustrated by how a sick hoaxer managed to persuade staff at a Macdonald’s restaurant to humiliate and even sexually abuse a staff member by pretending to be a police officer acting with the support of corporate headquarters. Storr evades perhaps the central lesson of this story, the dictatorial power of the boss-class in large corporations, and that there are far more concrete threats to our freedom than the 'new world order'.

This book shows how close madness and sanity are to one another, and how close are farce and tragedy. It also leads me to a heretical thought of my own. The people who hear voices in their heads, those whom society would label as 'mad', seem in many ways to be saner, to have more insight, than several of the 'heretics' reported on here, which perhaps hints that it is possible to be madder than mad. If madness is chaos and disorder, then on its other side there is a mirror order, which allows its possessors to function in society - sanity, but not as we know it.

Recommended. -- Peter Rogerson

DRAGONSLAYER

2013-04-17T12:06:00.001+01:00

Allan Chapman. Slaying the Dragons: Destroying Myths in the History of Science and Faith. Lion Hudson, 2013.

The history of the relationship between Christianity and the development of Western science is a complex subject, which gives rise to much misunderstanding and confusion, some of it probably deliberate, among people who are not very familiar with the subject. There are many myths about the role of religion, as well as ignorance about the involvement of churchmen in scientific work.

Potential readers, though, should not expect an entirely unbiased approach to this subject, as the author takes this opportunity to make a spirited defence of Christianity.

The book starts with a brief summary of the origins of religious belief and scepticism. Chapman remarks that in recent years interest in the relationship between science and religious belief has been stimulated by the "writings of New Atheists, extending from Richard Dawkins back to Bertrand Russell". I note that the New Atheists seem rather like a stage army, the same few names cropping up again and again! He also notes the activities of biblical literalists as influential, though not so widely read.

We then get more detailed descriptions of the facts and arguments, beginning with informing us that there is nothing new about atheism, or about conflict between different religious communities.

Particularly important for many readers will be the section which deals with the notion that the Church has always been opposed to science and has persecuted scientists in defence of its irrational ideas about the real nature of the world. In my reading I have usually found that scientists who write popular books on astronomy are often the worst offenders in this respect. For example, they simply repeat the allegation that Galileo was prosecuted by the Inquisition just for saying that the Earth orbits the sun. In fact, he first got into trouble, as Dr Chapman reminds us, for casting horoscopes (hardly a scientific activity). Altough he had plenty of warnings to put his arguments on a sounder mathematical and observational basis, he resorted to gratuitous insults to those who questioned certain details of his findings. Perhaps if he had followed the advice he was given he would not have made the mistake of insisting that the orbits of the planets were perfectly circular, rather than elliptical.

I remark on this matter at length because those who get their facts wrong have no excuse, as a number of excellent academic publications on these matters are readily available.

Another important topic involving apparent conflict between science and religion is the 19th-century controversy about evolution, and here Dr Chapman gleefully disposes of the mythology which has grown over the years concerning the debate between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (left) and T. H. Huxley at Oxford on 30 June 1860. This was about Darwin's then recently published On the Origin of Species, and the mythical version of the debate was that Wilberforce denounced it and insisted on the literal truth of Genesis, only to have his arguments convincingly demolished by Huxley. According to the few contemporary accounts, however, nothing of the sort happened and the discussion between the two men was on purely scientific matters, on which Wilberforce, contrary to the story as it has gradually developed, was very well informed.

Those who wish to study the subject further might be displeased by the absence of references. Readers who are not Christians might perhaps find this book too biased for their taste, but if they take the author's beliefs into account they will find it an interesting survey of an important topic. -- John Harney

GLASTONBURY LEGENDS

2013-04-14T11:04:00.000+01:00

Justin E. Griffin, Glastonbury and the Grail: Did Joseph of Arimathea Bring the Sacred Relic to Britain?, McFarland & Co, 2013

Judith Faith, Glastonbury, the Templars and the Sovran Cloth: A New Perspective on the Grail Legends, The History Press, 2012

A steady stream of books testifies to the enduring allure of the traditions and mysteries of Glastonbury, in particular its association with the tales of the Holy Grail. Two of the latest offerings present their authors’ attempts to find the historical reality behind the myths and legends.

Glastonbury and the Grail sets out the personal investigation of Justin E. Griffin, by profession a network technologist at the University of Tennessee but one of the legion who have been bitten by the Grail bug – in his case, rather endearingly, from watching the Indiana Jones movies and wanting to emulate his hero. He’s produced two books on the Holy Grail and runs a web site devoted to Grail research. In this book he focuses on the Glastonbury connection, and the interwoven legends of Joseph of Arimathea.

Griffin’s enthusiasm for his subject shines through, and the book is engagingly written with a self-deprecation that is refreshing in the genre. Sadly, however, it does suffer from some major flaws.

Refreshing, too, is Griffin’s candour about his approach. He admits that he realised from the start that he had no definitive proof that either legend is based on historical reality, and that the best he would be able to do was make a case for, in his words (and his emphasis), the ‘possibility of such’. At first he tried to set out his case according to the rules of scientific argument but abandoned that approach because it ‘relies too heavily on empirical evidence, hard fact’ (thereby tacitly admitting he has little of either). He therefore decided instead to adopt a ‘court case’ approach, taking the part of counsel for the defence, representing the legends against the charge that they are merely inventions and fantasies, and placing the reader in the role of juror.

The obvious limitation in this approach is that it also makes Griffin responsible for setting out the case for the prosecution – akin to allowing the defence in a trial to do the prosecution’s summing up. In fact, he goes further, by more or less denying that there is a case for the prosecution; he maintains that he couldn’t actually find one to present, as the sceptical position on the legends is, he says, merely based on the argument that there’s no historical evidence to support them. All he therefore has to do is present some evidence in order to win his case, effective relying on the principles of innocent-until-proven-guilty and reasonable doubt to carry the day. All of which makes his task considerably easier than it might have been, as well as being a novel approach to a historical enquiry.

In dismissing the ‘prosecution’ case as just the result of academia’s narrow-minded and unimaginative inability to accept anything for which there isn’t tangible proof, Griffin seriously misrepresents their position to his jurors. In reality the case against the legends’ literal historicity is based on much more than that; historical and literary analysis has raised legitimate questions about the relationship between fact and imagination in the development of the Grail legend.

For example, there is a solid case that the Glastonbury story was a conflation of two entirely separate traditions. There was the Arthurian quest for a miraculous vessel, described as a, not the, grail (it was its powers, not its form, that made it special) which was based on Celtic folklore and made no connection with Christ’s Passion. Then there was a complex of legends about Joseph of Arimathea journeying to Britain and establishing the first Christian church at Glastonbury, and bringing with him a vessel or vessels, usually described as cruets, containing Jesus’ blood and sweat. The process by which these two independent traditions were merged in the thirteenth century can be readily traced. So can the evolution of the Grail itself, from the serving dish or platter of the first telling of the story by Chrétien de Troyes in the late twelfth century, which has only the most tenuous of Christian associations (being said at one point to hold a single host), through the dish from which Jesus and the disciples ate at the Last Supper and finally into the cup of that meal, with its more potent association with Christ’s redemptive blood. So a Celtic, pagan magical vessel was gradually transformed into a relic of the Passion.

This is supported by the etymological evidence – as explicitly set out in some of the early texts – that the word ‘grail’ derives from an Old French term for a wide, deep dish or platter, and only became applied to a cup or chalice by later writers who didn’t understand the term and assumed it to have a special and unique significance. A grail became the Grail and finally the Holy Grail. The origin and derivation of the word is a vital exhibit for the prosecution, but nowhere in this book does Griffin discuss it.

So when Griffin writes, ‘Although he [Chrétien] never specifically states that the Grail was an artifact of Christ’s Passion, his story created its image as the magical, mythical lost cup of the Eucharist that we understand today,’ he’s just plain wrong. Chrétien wrote a story about a magic dish that later writers turned into the Eucharistic cup.

Griffin doesn’t deal directly with the literary and linguistic case for the evolution of the Grail traditions, but rather sidesteps it. While he acknowledges that different strands of legend have been woven together, he attempts to show that each strand is ultimately based on a Grail. In his earlier books, Griffin reached the conclusion that there were actually several Grails – at least six - all of them genuine in the sense that they had at one time contained Jesus’ blood and which one way or another found their way to Europe, and that ‘Grail’ became a generic term for these relics. Legends were built on each relic and were eventually melded into the single story of the Grail. So Joseph of Arimathea’s cruets were one Grail, and the cup of the Last Supper - which Griffin believes really exists in the form of the Spanish Santo Caliz (of which more below) – another. On this line of reasoning, the conflation of the two traditions was therefore legitimate rather than a literary accident (and, by implication, performed by writers who knew the secret of the multiplicity of Grails).

This profusion of Grails makes for confusing reading, as Griffin insists on using the singular, and it is often unclear which Grail he is talking about. For example, the book opens with the assertion – repeated several times during the early chapters – that the key to demonstrating that the Grail was a real, historical object is proving that Joseph of Arimathea really did come to Britain in the first century. But later he talks about other Grails – again, most significantly the Santo Caliz – which have no connection with Joseph, and so don’t depend on the legends about him being true at all. Presumably in that opening assertion he means only the Grail brought to Glastonbury, but this doesn’t become apparent until we’re eleven chapters into the book.

Central to Griffin’s argument for the authenticity of the legends of Joseph of Arimathea in Glastonbury is the genuinely intriguing Prophecy of Melkin, which is possibly evidence of a very early belief that Joseph was buried in ‘Avalon’ with vessels containing Jesus’ blood and sweat. Although incorporated into a mid-fourteenth century chronicle, there are clues that the Prophecy really does date from the Dark Ages, thereby showing that the core of the legend at least predates the medieval period (when many presume it to have been invented to boost Glastonbury Abbey’s pilgrim-tourist trade). This was, for me, the most interesting and best presented chapter. However, it is a very slender support on which to hang all the rest of Griffin’s argument.

Another significant omission from the prosecution case – although one common to writers on the Glastonbury mysteries – is a critical examination of the Gospel accounts relating to Joseph of Arimathea. There is a simple acceptance of the accuracy of their portrayal of Joseph as a secret follower of Jesus, despite the contradictions between the Gospels themselves on this point.

There is a good case, put forward by New Testament scholars, that Joseph was simply the member of the Jewish council of leaders appointed to oversee Jesus’ burial, and that the idea that he was a secret disciple was a later embellishment introduced for theological reasons. If correct, this would undermine the entire foundation of the Glastonbury traditions. True, this interpretation may be debatable, but as such – and because of its fundamental importance to Griffin’s case – it should be debated, and not simply ignored.

Another fundamental objection to the whole notion of Grail as container of Christ’s blood comes from the Jewish abhorrence of blood – especially that from a dead body - as ritually unclean and contaminating, making it unthinkable that any Jew would want to keep it. It’s another reason for thinking that the ‘Eucharist cup’ form of the Grail was a much later invention, since the same prohibitions wouldn’t have applied in a Christian context.

Again, Griffin doesn’t deal with this basic and highly relevant objection. Indeed, he shows no awareness of it, although he appeals to Jewish burial practices when it suits his case. He argues that it is likely that vessels containing Jesus’ blood existed at one time, on the grounds that his (or, as Griffin prefers, quaintly, His) blood would naturally have been collected as part of the burial rites, since Jewish belief required that spilt blood be interred with the body. He then argues that after Jesus had risen the now-redundant containers would have been kept as mementoes by his followers; Joseph of Arimathea, for example, carried his as a ‘personal relic and link to his lost Master.’ But for the reasons just stated, no Jew would do this. So Griffin uses Jewish customs to support one half of a speculation, while ignoring them for the other half.

This example shows that Griffin has not only failed to master the prosecution’s case but also reveals one of the major shortcomings in his own case for the defence. It soon becomes apparent that he hasn’t gone into his investigation with an open mind and allowed himself to be led to a conclusion by the information he has uncovered, but that, like a lawyer assuming a client’s innocence because that’s what he has been hired to do, he’s started with his conclusion – he wants the tales to be true – and only looked for the evidence that fits it. Selectivity, in other words, of which there are many examples throughout the book.

From the outset, Griffin acknowledges that it is impossible, on the evidence currently available, to prove beyond doubt that the legends of Joseph of Arimathea in Britain are based on historical reality, and so sets out to answer a more basic question: is it possible that, in the first century, a man could have travelled from Palestine to Britain carrying a vessel with him? Since the answer to such a hypothetical question is clearly an equally hypothetical yes, we’re hardly surprised when Griffin reaches such a conclusion.

However, this initially modest conclusion becomes more and more self-important as the book progresses, and ends up exhibiting symptoms of delusions of grandeur. Towards the end, when summing up his conclusions, Griffin declares that he’s not saying that the Joseph of Arimathea legends are necessarily true (thereby, incidentally, failing to fulfil the goal with which he opened the book), merely that he’s raised enough reasonable doubt about the sceptics’ position. Yet on the next page he states that, based on his evidence, the legends ‘now appear more likely to be based in history.’ A few pages further on he asserts that there is now ‘ample evidence’ that the traditions are true. Which is it?

Unfortunately, Glastonbury and the Grail abounds with similar contradictions, often due to Griffin wanting things several ways at once. He gets in a particular muddle when trying to identify the ‘sourcebook’ that Chrétien de Troyes tells us he was given by his patron Phillip of Flanders and on which he based his first telling of the Grail tale. Griffin devotes much space to developing the argument that this mysterious text could have come from Glastonbury Abbey, since the then Abbot, Henry of Blois – the powerful Churchman who was the brother of King Stephen and grandson of William the Conqueror - was the uncle of Henri de Champagne, the husband of Chrétien’s previous patron Marie de Champagne. He speculates that Henri could have brought the book back to Champagne from a hypothetical visit to his uncle (a reconstruction that ignores Chrétien’s own statement that he got the book from Phillip of Flanders).

But in a subsequent chapter Griffin goes into the story of the Santo Caliz, the ‘Spanish Grail’, which was then the sacred relic of San Juan de la Peña in the Spanish Pyrenees. (It’s now in Valencia Cathedral. right) According to Griffin, this agate cup, subsequently much embellished with gold and jewels into an ornate chalice, is one of the ‘other’ Grails, in fact genuinely the cup used at the Last Supper, which reached Spain through a different route to the Glastonbury cruets.

Based on the facts that Phillip of Flanders is known to have made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella in 1172, and that pilgrims on that route often diverted to San Juan to see the Santo Caliz, Griffin speculates that Chrétien’s source was a book about that relic that Phillip brought back with him, apparently contradicting his earlier argument. Bizarrely, however, he goes on to declare that this ‘in no way invalidates Glastonbury as the source of the legend. Instead, it confirms it.’ He genuinely lost me here.

It is from the Santo Caliz, Griffin argues, that the most popular image of the Holy Grail derives, and it was through the two traditions reaching Chrétien de Troyes – both, note, via completely speculative routes – that the ‘British Grail tradition’, based on Joseph of Arimathea and Glastonbury, was fused with the ‘Spanish Grail tradition’ based on the cup of the Last Supper. That’s why Chrétien chose a British, Arthurian setting for his tale while describing the Grail ‘as a gold and jeweled chalice’ instead of cruets.

It’s a proposition fraught with difficulties, the most glaring being that, famously, Chrétien didn’t describe the Grail as a chalice, rather as a platter-like serving dish (derived from his Celtic source). And Joseph of Arimathea and Glastonbury don’t feature in his version of the story. So, in fact neither the British nor the Spanish traditions are present in his tale at all!

Ever candid, Griffin admits in his concluding chapter on the Grail traditions: ‘Nothing new has been presented here. There is still no proof the Grail ever existed in reality.’ He goes on: ‘My goal has ever been to make it clear that the supposition that there is no history, no evidence, and no reason to believe an object that could be called the Grail ever existed is entirely inaccurate.’

Maybe that’s the best that can be hoped for. Certainly, the ‘court case’ model simply doesn’t work for this kind of enquiry. If there is a legal model, it would be that of a coroner’s inquest, which rather than seeking to determine guilt or innocence is primarily concerned with establishing the facts of a case. And in the case of the Glastonbury legends, with all the historical uncertainties that can only be filled by speculation and best guesses, the verdict can only ever be an open one.

There is a genuine mystery in the Grail romances. The weird, heretical symbolism and imagery of, in particular, the versions by Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, do seem to be designed to conceal some potent truth. But the solution to the mystery lays in understanding the texts themselves, not in the quest for a physical object that might have inspired them. As has been pointed out, the mystery of the Grail isn’t what it is – every telling makes the Grail’s form clear, whether it be chalice, platter or stone – but what it means.

So what does it mean for Justin Griffin? Oddly, after expending so much time and energy on his personal Grail quest, the answer appears to be: not much. Although he believes that vessels that genuinely held Jesus’ blood really were around in medieval Europe, he doesn’t extrapolate any religious or mystical message from that; indeed, he dismisses all the Grail’s supposed miraculous and magical powers as merely the product of later romancing: ‘Stripped of all its medieval fantasy, the Holy Grail is simply a vessel that once held the blood of Christ.’

There’s no such reticence for Judith Faith in her Glastonbury, the Templars and the Sovran Cloth; for her the Grail is all about the ‘redeeming and transforming power of the Holy Blood’, and the object itself, as well as the legends about it, have a deep (yet ill-defined) spiritual significance.

Let me declare, up front, a preconception of my own. As the co-author of a book - Turin Shroud: How Leonardo Da Vinci Fooled History - which argues that the Turin Shroud is a fake (if the most remarkable fake of all time, coming from the genius of Leonardo da Vinci), I’m naturally sceptical from the outset about Faith’s thesis, which has the Shroud being the genuine burial cloth of Jesus and the object on which the Grail legends were based. However, even allowing for that personal bias, I don’t think I’m being unfair in saying that Faith fails to make her case on either point.

In fact, where the authenticity of the Shroud is concerned, Faith doesn’t really try to make a case at all, essentially just assuming it to be genuine. She devotes just three pages at the start of her book to the all-important argument for the Turin relic being the true burial shroud of Christ. She summarily declares that the 1988 carbon dating, which branded the Shroud a medieval or early Renaissance fake, ‘has almost unanimously been discredited’, which is, to put it mildly, a considerable overstatement. Such unanimity is only to be found among the community of believers in the Shroud’s authenticity – ‘Shroudies’, as they’re known with more or less affection – who have spent the last quarter of a century trying to pick holes, often desperately, in the carbon dating. And, like most Shroudies, Faith believes that the case against the Shroud depends solely on the carbon dating, whereas there are many other tell-tale signs on the image itself that show it to be a work of human artistry.

As for evidence that the Shroud is genuinely that of Jesus, she presents just one item: unbelievably enough, the pollen found on the Shroud in 1976, among which the Swiss criminologist Max Frei claimed to have identified species of plants that only grow in the environs of Jerusalem. This research has genuinely been discredited: specialists in the analysis of pollen (which Frei wasn’t) have pointed out that it is simply impossible to identify specific plant species using the method he employed. Yet the Shroudie world has blithely ignored this damning criticism. The fact that Faith is still using the pollen as the best evidence of the relic’s authenticity, nearly 40 years on, underlines the weakness of the case for the Shroud.

For her reconstruction of the Shroud’s history before the mid-fourteenth century, Faith largely, and uncritically, follows the theories of Ian Wilson, that it was given to the first-century King Abgar V of Edessa (in modern Turkey) and became that city’s most holy icon, the Holy Mandylion (left), until in the tenth century it was taken into the Byzantine Emperor’s collection of relics in Constantinople, from which it was looted by Crusaders in 1204 and brought to Europe, after which it was secretly kept by the Knights Templar. Suffice to say, there are serious problems with every part of this reconstruction.

Faith doesn’t really offer a ‘new perspective on the Grail legends’ as the book’s subtitle claims. The theory that the Grail was based on the Shroud – an object that ‘contained’ Christ’s blood in the sense that it had soaked into it – has been around for decades. It was suggested by Ian Wilson in the late 1970s, elaborated on by genealogist Noel Currer-Briggs a decade later, and then by historian Daniel Scavone a decade after that. Faith’s only new angle is in attempting to link the Shroud specifically to the Grail traditions relating to Glastonbury. Her case is, to put it kindly, not strong.

As in Griffin’s book, there is an uncritical acceptance of the Gospel accounts relating to Joseph of Arimathea, although Faith does at least include an appendix written by NASA official and Shroudie Ed Prior which examines both the question Joseph’s historical existence and the plausibility of the legends of him in Britain. This is by far the best part of the book (in fact, of both books) as it is grounded in proper historical analysis and deduction. Prior concludes that the Gospel accounts were based on a real man who organised Jesus’ burial - although unfortunately he doesn’t explore the question of why he took this role - but reaches what is effectively an open verdict on the legends: they can neither be proven nor disproven.

Faith, however, clearly takes a less compromising position, using the legends to bolster her thesis. She points out that, as well as the Grail containing Christ’s blood, medieval legends also connect Joseph of Arimathea with his burial shroud. But they would, wouldn’t they, given that both appeal to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ burial, in which Joseph plays a prominent role? And the many alleged (and unimaged) shrouds that were doing the rounds in Europe in the relic-crazy Middle Ages had to be given some kind of provenance to bolster their claim to be genuine, a provenance that had to include Joseph. So the existence of the legends proves nothing.

Faith cites a fifth-century Georgian manuscript that refers to Joseph collecting Jesus’ blood on two cloths, which she suggests could be the origin of the two cruets of the Glastonbury legend, which is a bit desperate. But all this is enough for Faith to conclude that ‘we must consider as a possibility’ that Joseph of Arimathea – or perhaps another apostle - brought the Shroud to Glastonbury shortly after the crucifixion.

A central part of her Shroud-Grail-Glastonbury connection involves the above-mentioned Henry of Blois. Faith tells us that Henry was ‘a descendant of the line of families believed to have been in possession of what is today called the Shroud of Turin’, families ‘sometimes referred to as the “Grail families”’ (although we’re never told by whom). It’s a curious statement, since, as Faith acknowledges, the first recorded owner of what is supposed to be today’s Shroud was the French knight Geoffrey de Charny, who lived two centuries after Henry, and according to her reconstruction of the Shroud’s history it was in the Middle East until at least 40 years after Henry’s death, so unless Henry’s Norman French forebears had Middle Eastern heritage he could hardly be descended from the ‘Grail families’. (Despite Faith’s assertion that ‘we know for certain’ that the relic owned by the Charny family is the same as today’s Turin Shroud, this isn’t so: as even believers in the Shroud’s authenticity, such as Ian Wilson, admit, there isn’t actually any conclusive proof of this, and there are reasons to doubt it.)

In support of her remarkable statement Faith produces a genealogical table showing the family trees of Henry of Blois and Geoffrey de Charny, captioned ‘Genealogy connecting Henry de Blois with the first known owners of the Shroud’. Not only does this make Henry the ancestor of the putative owners, not the descendant, but there is a remarkable feature of the two family trees: at no point do they connect. To say this left me bemused is something of an understatement; rather, my belief was well and truly beggared. Hasn’t Faith noticed that the chart doesn’t show what she says it does, or does she just rely on her readers not bothering to look for themselves?

Then there’s the ninth-century Book of Armagh’s reference to the ‘most holy blood of Jesus Christ… in a sacred linen cloth’ being among the relics buried with St Patrick – who, according to tradition, founded a monastery at Glastonbury before going on to Ireland. Surely, though, if this refers to Jesus’ shroud (which isn’t spelled out) that would mean it is buried somewhere in Ireland? (In Faith’s summing up at the end of the book, this becomes that the Book of Armagh ‘tells of St Patrick bringing the blood of Christ, in a linen cloth, to Glastonbury’, which is a blatant distortion of the text’s actual words.)

In a 1908 book, Somerset historian Reverend Thomas Escott recalls being shown, as a child, ‘diminutive fragments’ of Jesus’ alleged burial shroud that had, he asserted, come from Glastonbury – although he gave no details of the circumstances in which he saw them. Faith poses the question: were these fragments from the Turin Shroud ‘or some other cloth that had touched the Shroud’? The more obvious alternative, that they were completely unconnected relics, doesn’t seem to have occurred to her. She then asks whether these fragments could be ‘the reason that the legends of the Holy Grail’ became attached to Glastonbury? Well, frankly, no.

As these examples show, Faith seems to assume that every historical reference to a shroud is to the Shroud, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there were at least 40 other claimants to the title of ‘true shroud’ in medieval Europe.

The most specific evidence of a Shroud-Grail-Glastonbury connection comes from an appearance of Jesus’ burial cloth in one version of the Grail story, and the one that most explicitly links the tale to Glastonbury and Joseph of Arimathea: the anonymous Perlesvaus, AKA The High History of the Holy Grail, which is generally dated to between 1200 and 1220. In it the guardians of the Grail are Joseph’s descendants, as is the hero, Perceval. His sister Dindrane is given her own mini-quest, which is to cut a piece from Jesus’ shroud, called the ‘Sovran Cloth’, which is kept above the altar in the Chapel Perilous. She succeeds, in part because of her lineage, implicitly connecting the Sovran Cloth to, if not the Grail, then at least the Grail family. This, according to Faith, shows that the Turin Shroud was kept somewhere in the Glastonbury area at the time Perlesvaus was written, at which time it ‘was probably in the possession of the Knights Templar.’

The immediate objection is that this description says nothing about there being an image on the shroud, or even for that matter bloodstains. But more importantly, Faith doesn’t appear to notice that it utterly contradicts other key parts of her theory.

Faith dates the tale to the twelfth century (i.e. before 1200), apparently accepting the theory of Hank Harrison, an American Grail enthusiast (and one-time manager of the Grateful Dead), who believes that it was commissioned, or perhaps even written, by Henry of Blois, who died in 1171. There are several problems with his theory, but the significant point here is that, as noted above, Faith accepts that the Shroud was in Constantinople until 1204. She also accepts Currer-Brigg’s argument that the Templars acquired the Shroud from Otho de La Roche, a Burgundian knight who played a prominent role in the Fourth Crusade that sacked Constantinople in that year. However, Currer-Briggs dates the putative handover to the mid-1220s at the earliest, and more likely the 1240s, and Perlesvaus was certainly written before 1220 (as a separate text of that year refers to it).

How does Faith attempt to reconcile these contradictions? Quite simply, she doesn’t. She seems blind to the fact that evidence she presents as building her case actually undermines it. Every part of her evidence for a connection between Glastonbury and the Shroud conflicts with another part. Did Joseph of Arimathea bring the Shroud there in the first century (while it was simultaneously owned by King Abgar), or St Patrick in the fifth (when it was also the holiest icon of Edessa), or the Templars in the twelfth (at the same time that it was being venerated in Constantinople)?

Throughout, Faith displays a cavalier disregard for facts and logic, seeming to think that because she is dealing with a spiritual message, she is absolved of the need to present a coherent argument. This extends to what is a particularly irritating feature of her book, her repeated use of wild and unsupported assertions about the extent of scholarly support for her argument. I’ve already noted one example in her claim of the ‘almost unanimous’ discrediting of the Shroud’s carbon dating, but there are many more.

She states, for example, that ‘most experts now acknowledge that the image of Edessa or Holy Mandylion is the very same object as the Shroud of Turin.’ No, they don’t (assuming by ‘experts’ Faith means specialists in the history and iconography of that period, who overwhelming reject the association, rather than Shroudies). The identification of the Mandylion and the Shroud is fraught with problems, most glaringly that the former was, by all accounts and even by its etymology, a small face-cloth.

And then, ‘most Templar scholars agree that some time after the sack of Constantinople, the Knights Templar gained possession of the Shroud and were using it in their initiation ceremonies.’ No, the overwhelming majority of historians specialising in the Templars reject any connection between the Order and the Shroud, which they consider a fake anyway. (Faith can cite only one bona fide academic specialising in Templar studies who accepts the Templar-Shroud connection, the Vatican Archive’s Barbara Frale. Mind you, she also claims to be able to read Jesus’s ‘death certificate’ inscribed on the Shroud.) And again: ‘Many historians suggest that the Templars acquired the cloth… from Otho de La Roche.’ In fact, there is only one, Noel Currer-Briggs, who advanced it as a purely hypothetical route by which the Shroud could have reached the Templars.

While employing such sweeping, unsupported statements about scholarly backing for her claims, Faith – in a similar way to Griffin – uses equally sweeping, and equally misleading, assertions against the academic position when it suits her: ‘Modern scholars frequently dismiss the role of folk tradition and legend as of little or no importance to historical research.’ Actually, they don’t; they just approach it with caution, something which is distinctly lacking in Faith’s methodology, which hardly qualifies as ‘historical research’. Indeed, she has her own criteria for assessing the veracity of legend and folklore that lifts her above such mundane considerations as facts: ‘We can often intuitively sense a tale to be true, even though we have no firm evidence for this knowledge.’

Glastonbury, the Templars and the Sovran Cloth isn’t a book of history. It’s a book of conjecture supported by highly selective – and contradictory – evidence designed to bolster a nebulous spiritual ‘truth’. At least Justin Griffin was up front about his ‘court case’ approach.

In her conclusion, Faith suggests that ‘Both Shroud and Grail present a key to a different understanding of reality.’ Judging by her book, she’s right about that, but not in the way she means. – Clive Prince.

RELATIVELY ROMANTIC

2013-04-11T16:21:00.001+01:00

Katy Price. Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Despite its American publisher this is a very British study of the impact of Einstein on popular culture, in which Katy Price looks at the impact of “relativity” in various media from newspapers to high art.

Einstein and relativity were brought to Britain largely thanks to the work of Arthur Eddington, the Quaker astronomer whose observations on the island of Principe were held to have confirmed the General Theory of Relativity. The theory seemed to resonate with the mood of the times, with a world shattered and thrown off its secure foothold by the Great War.

Reception among British scientists were mixed, and Price shows how many, like the physicist, psychical researcher and spiritualist Oliver Lodge, argued for the retention of the ether, which was seen as British as roast beef and warm beer. British opposition to relativity continued well beyond the period covered by this book, in particular in the writings of Herbert Dingle.

For the popular press relativity, 'light caught bending', was one of the many sensations which filled their pages, and their comments showed little understanding.

From Price’s examples it’s not clear that the popular science press got it much better though it is intriguing to see how modern much of it was in the 1920s, with journals such as Conquest anticipating Omni, and Discovery anticipating New Scientist, with which I think it later merged. Expositions ranged from the technical to the frankly bizarre, some of the oddest coming from the self-styled 'Professor' Low in Armchair Science.

Price also shows how this interest was reflected in the British pulp magazines of the period, the very existence of these coming as something of a revelation. There were science fiction pulps, but relativity also featured in romances, though often only as ways of indicating the sophistication of a particular character.

Eddington, the man who introduced Einstein to Britain, became the leading home-grown exponent of his theories, was however a person of somewhat mystical bent, whose writings, along with those of Sir James Jeans, became the holy writ quoted by generations of cranks well into the 1960s and beyond. It was not just Eddington’s mystical views which had a deleterious attack on science, his rejection of what became known as black holes and denigration of Chandrasekhar, may have helped set physics back several decades.

Price also traces Einstein’s impact on such surprising literary products as the Lord Peter Wimsey stories of Dorothy L Sayers. I would also imagine that somewhere Einstein and relativity appear in Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, as these contained much satire on the social and intellectual movements of the 1920s and 30s. Price also examines its impact on the poetry of William Empson, whom I must confess I had never heard of. His poetry was also inspired by dreams of Martian and other extra-terrestrial life.

The short final chapter deals with J. W. Dunne and serialism, and notes its use by John Buchan, but not by Dunne’s main literary promoter J. B Priestley.

I found that the earlier chapters of this book provided a stimulating insight into the years in which much of what we now see as the modern world was forged. -- Peter Rogerson

COLD CALLS

2013-04-08T11:42:00.000+01:00

Callum E Cooper. Telephone Calls From the Dead: A Revised Look at the Phenomenon 30 Years On. Tricorn Books, 2012.

As new technologies arise they give rise to new stories of the paranormal surrounding them. The invention of the telegraph was one of the major spurs behind the development of spiritualism, with the idea of the 'Spiritual Telegraph'. So it is not surprising that the telephone, the means par excellence of communication at distance should be the centre of stories of paranormal communications, especially communication with the dead. This idea developed originally in the context of mediumship, but in 1979 two now deceased American psychical researchers D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless published a book called Phone Calls from the Dead. This was an intriguing work, which personally I found very interesting, but it received a rather short shift from scientifically minded parapsychologists, and had become rather forgotten.

Now British psychologist Callum Cooper has taken on the task of re-opening the question, in a very different environment, one of mobile phones, texts, the internet etc. In doing so he obtained the files of, and support from, the family and friends of Rogo and Bayless. He reviews some of their cases, presents some new ones, and sees the phenomenon (or phenomena) as falling into the following broad categories:

Someone hears the phone ring, they answer and they hear the voice of a person they know is dead. The call then ends abruptly.
The phone rings and the person answering has a more or less prolonged conversation with someone they do not realise is dead. They either remember this when the conversation is over or are told subsequently
Someone telephones a friend or acquaintance and gets a reply. They later find out that the person was dead at the time
Mixtures of one and two, particularly where they have prolonged and sometimes repeated phone calls from someone they know is dead
Not phone calls from the dead, but from the living, where someone claims to have received a call from a person who is adamant they never made the call.

Cooper examines examples of each of these types and looks for common features. For example category one is often associated with sounds of static or a rushing wind on the phone. He examines various normal explanations, such as hallucinations, pareidolia, errors in chronology, cruel pranks etc. Different categories he suggests will require different explanations.

Pareidolia (the seeing or hearing of patterns in random stimuli) and hallucination are more likely to account for the first category, while errors of chronology (i.e. the call was made before the person died, but is remembered as occurring afterwards, or a call made by/to a person still living is remembered as one from/to someone who had died the second and third. The fourth might suggest a nasty prank.

I would agree with Cooper as far as it goes, but I think he underestimates the role of dreams or dream-like phenomena in the production of such experiences, by assuming that people only dream when lying prone in bed. In fact so-called REM intrusion events, micro sleep, micro REM, micro ASP etc. can occur in almost any situation, particularly when people have disturbed sleep patterns. The various episodes of virtual banality discussed by John Rimmer include a couple of phone examples. I also note that the 'sound of wind', 'static' etc. in some of these reports bares a strong resemblance to the (presumably hallucinatory) noises reported in aware sleep paralysis.

The stories are dreamlike on other respects, for in dreams we encounter the dead, forget they are dead, or try to rationalise why we thought they were dead (they had been very ill but have now recovered perhaps), and some of the calls have the surreal quality of dreams.

Another possibility which should not be overlooked is that the presumed dead person is not dead at all, the information on their demise might be wrong, or the person giving the memorate has confused who has died. I have a personal experience of this. A few years back I felt quite outraged at what I thought was the cruel joke of someone using the name of a dead British ufologist on UFO Updates, I was convinced that Andy Roberts had written to me with the news of his death. It took quite some time for John Rimmer to persuade me I was wrong. What had happened was that this man, Mr X, had been taken seriously ill some time back, but recovered, however someone else, Mr Y, had suddenly died shortly before Mr X’s illness, and it was about Mr Y that I received the letter from Andy Roberts, I had muddled these two events in my mind. Of course that might be easy to do with people who weren’t even acquaintances, but much harder to do with close friends and family.

None of these explanations of course explain the case of the woman who had repeated phone calls from her deceased lover. This might have been a cruel hoax, or perhaps she just got a friend or call back service to ring from time to time and put the phone down so she could continue her conversations with her lover in her head. Or perhaps the whole story was made up by the narrator, her son. A good rule in all of this is that the more complex, circumstantial and prolonged the alleged experience is reported to be; the more likely it is to be the work of the crafted imagination. For many people, “stories of the supernatural” are simply exercises in creative writing, after dinner speaking or simply as way of making themselves seem interesting.

This is true even more of tales of emails from the dead, or 'Thomas Harden' and the haunted computer of Doddelston, which contained a number of errors, anachronisms and howlers, and was almost certainly a hoax. Cooper speculated about a number of possible paranormal explanations of these events, which strikes me as premature (and even if some of these events are truly anomalous, unlikely to be anything like the real explanation).

That should not detract from the value of studies like this, as studies of anomalous personal experiences, and of our ambivalent relationship with the technology which surrounds us, but which few of us have any real idea of how it works. Soon there will be Skype from the dead, haunted Facebook sites; people will see phantom television programmes on the static on old analogue TV channels. Will virtual worlds be haunted by virtual ghosts?

We don’t need the paranormal to understand that technology haunts us, the faces of the dead stare back at us from old photographs, they play on old cine-film and video that no-one watches any more, their voices on tapes and cassettes that no-one listens to, their voice last recovered on a telephone answering machine, X isn’t at home at the moment, or ever again. Web sites of the dead still haunt the vaults of cyberspace. -- Peter Rogerson.

WHEN SPRINGHEELED JACK WORE GALOSHES

2013-04-02T13:59:00.000+01:00

When Spring Heel Jack wore Galoshes.

Flash mobs, phantoms and Men in Black in 1920s Warrington

This is the full story of Spring Heeled Jack in Warrington in 1927 as told through the newspapers of the period:

Warrington Examiner

20 August 1927
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A GHOST IN GALOSHES

Hue and Cry in Haydock Street After Tall Figure in White

HUNDREDS IN THE CHASE

A very evil-looking man in a black suit.

A tall figure dressed all in white.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

These, literally, are the principal figures in a “Dracula” like story which comes from the Haydock Street district. Strange happenings have been reported during the week, and hundreds of people have had the not altogether unpleasant thrill of the “ghost” hunt. The most serious side of the story is that many women and girls have been alarmed, and a very sensible solution, told to the investigator, is that the “ghost” is either a practical joker or the accomplice of a thief who may be endeavouring to draw people from their homes to enable his confederate to have better facilities for breaking in.
The story begins last week when it is stated “a very evil looking man” in a black suit” was seen prowling around in a very mysterious manner. This fact is authenticated by several residents of Haydock Street.
In the early hours of Sunday morning the whole neighbourhood was thrown into excitement by the news that a “ghost” had been seen. It was stated that between the hours of one and two o’clock a “tall figure dressed all in white” was seen passing along the streets adjoining Haydock Street and completely disappearing from time to time. Two women who witnessed the apparition were so overcome that they fainted and had to be revived by the crowd which soon assembled. A diligent search was afterwards made, but no trace of a supposed visitor from another world was to be found.

SOLID ARGUMENTS FOR THE SHADE

Comparatively few people saw the figure on Sunday morning, but on Sunday night a crowd of some hundreds of people from all over Warrington gathered in Haydock and Furness Streets armed with pokes, bottles, shovels, brooms, carving knives and hay making implements prepared to lay the ghost. Many of them ridiculed the suggestion that anything had been seen, but they were less sceptical when, about eleven o’ clock the “ghost” made its appearance once again. Immediately the cry went up “There it is”” and the crowd set off after the apparition.
After beckoning to various people, the ghost took to its heels and, instead of vanishing as all well-bred ghosts should, darted down a narrow entry in Furness-street. At the end of the entry is a high wall, but this did not stop the ghost in its flight, for its placed its hands on the top of the wall and sprang over like-to use one woman’s expression-“the famous Spring Heeled Jack”. From that point on all trace of it was lost. The search continued, however, until four o’clock in the morning , but nothing further was seen.
The occurrence had such an effect on the people however that many of them could not get any sleep, and windows were bolted, extra fastenings were put on the doors, and some men even stayed up until daylight, in readiness for any other appearance that the “ghost” might make. On Monday morning however, many girls were hysterical and could not be calmed. If they moved from one room into another they had to take their father or mother with them, even when they were getting ready for work. Many of those who go early to work had to be escorted the greater part of the way. One girl said “ I was so frightened that I kept looking behind me for fear the ghost should get me."

WHAT EYE-WITNESSES SAW

Mrs Flanaghan of Furness-street and her three daughters were among the first to see the apparition. “I was standing at the door” said Mrs Flanaghan, about eleven o’clock on Sunday night and, happening to look across the road, I suddenly saw something white. I cried out “There it is” and my three daughters and a young man to whom we were talking, saw it too. The young man wanted to run after, but he was held back because we feared the “ghost” might have a knife under the white covering. The apparition was very tall, about six feet, and was covered from head to foot with something white, the only part of it visible being the eyes. When a chase was attempted it ran down the entry, taking off the white covering as it went, and we noticed that it had on a dark suit. It must of have had galoshes or something on its feet, for we heard the “pit pat” as it ran.”
          Another person who had a “close up” of the figure was Mrs Ellison of Scott-street, who was walking home with her husband on Sunday night after visiting a friend. “When nearing Furness-street” said Mrs Ellison “ I saw a ghostly figure in white. I was startled and cried to my husband “Oh a ghost”. He replied there were no such things as ghosts, but when he turned and saw it he said “My God it is a ghost!”. He said he would see if it really were a ghost and grabbed my umbrella. When the ghost saw this it put its hands up in the air, just like a ghost, and then ran down the entry.”
          Although another lady from Chorley-street states there are no such things as ghosts, the apparition frightened her when she came upon it suddenly on Sunday night. It was dressed all in white and was a very terrifying spectacle.
          The people of the neighbourhood are doing their best to lay the “ghost” as it is causing so much annoyance in the neighbourhood and the search was continued on Monday and Tuesday nights, but the ghost kept itself to itself.
          Each night through the week parties of people, mostly young, have waited until the early hours of the morning with the hope of seeing, and, as one young man said, “doing for” the apparition. One evening an “Examiner” representative spent an hour or two in the district but, until after midnight, nothing was seen or heard except for a few ghostly wails which , when investigated, were found to proceed from very human throats-those of young children who took a delight in trying to frighten the watchers. Time after time persons would shout “There it is” but their imaginations were playing them a trick, for the “ghost” did not show its face.

Manchester Evening News

Saturday 10 September 1927
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

FACE AT THE WINDOW

WEIRD HAPPENINGS IN WARRINGTON

DOGS HOWL

Warrington has a ghost!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Women in the Orford Lane district of Warrington have been terrified during the past week by weird happenings. A remarkable series of incident began three weeks ago when hundreds of people in the Haydock-street district chased a ghost-a figure in white which disappeared by jumping over a high wall,. Shortly before the appearance of the “ghost” the residents report that a person variously described as “ a very evil looking man” and “a tall strange man” was seen in the vicinity.
          Last Sunday the ghost reappeared. At about 10.15 on Sunday night Miss May Evans of 26 Neston-street was sitting in the kitchen, sewing, while her brother Bernard aged nine years, was playing with a toy engine on the floor. The back gate and the door of the shed adjoining the house were unfastened.
          While sewing she heard a peculiar squealing noise in the shed, and turned the key of the door leading into the shed. Thinking no more about the matter she resumed her work, and suddenly Bernard exclaimed: “Oh look at the window”.
          “I looked” said Miss Evans to our representative, “and had the fright of my life. There was a face, almost covered with something white, pressed to the window, while a hand over the bottom of the window held a big electric torch. It must have been a very powerful torch for it lit up the whole of the kitchen, thought the gas [light] was full on. I was frightened and could not move. At last I ran to the front and neighbours came out to see what was the matter. They made a search but could not find anything.”
          The only noise Miss Evans heard was the “squealing” before the apparition appeared at the window.
          Neighbours state that on the Sunday night all the dogs in the neighbourhood barked and howled for hours. Another appearance occurred in the Birchall-street district on Tuesday evening. Mrs Bird of 23 Chorley-street was sitting in the house with her little boy when she heard a loud rapping on a piece of three-ply wood which had been inserted in place of a broken window pane.
          “We went to bed” said Mrs Bird “and after a time we were awakened by a commotion at the back. We went down and found that the “ghost” had been visiting a house down the road”.

The Liverpool Express of the same date on page 5 also carried the story with even more alarming headlines:

“GHOST FACE” AT A WINDOW

-------------------------------------------------------------------

TERROR CAUSED AMONG WARRINGTON WOMEN

ELUSIVE FIGURE

RESIDENT ON LOOK-OUT WITH A TRUNCHEON.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

“Women in the Orford-lane district have been during the week been terrified by weird happenings in the night and crowds of people have gathered in Neston Street to watch for a ghost.
One man went about with a truncheon up his sleeve, and another with a blank shot pistol, but nothing supernatural or otherwise has been captured.

Excitement began three weeks ago, when the people in the Haydock Street district chased a “figure in white” which jumped over a high wall. Shortly before the appearences of the ghost, residents had reported that a person described as an “evil looking man” and a “tall strange man” had been seen in the district.”

The paper then went on report the story of May and Bernard Evans in almost the same language as the Manchester Evening News, adding that the little boy had to be given restoratives and that the face at the window had moved from side to side. Likewise the story of Mrs Bird. There was also the story of Mrs Bate of 44 Birchall Street. She and her family were going to bed when “one of the family went into the kitchen. There were three loud bangs on the window, and the woman ran into the kitchen and said she had seen a large fist come to the window and bang on it three times”

The next Saturday the Manchester Evening News had more on the ghost to report (17 September)

HOWLING GHOST

Warrington Disturbed Again

UGLY VISITOR

(From Our Own Correspondent.)

Warrington: Saturday
----------------------------------------------------

The now famous Warrington ghost has been up to his usual tricks again this week and the latest description of him which comes from the Birchall-street district is that he is “ a second spring-heeled Jack” who makes a noise similar to the howl made in “The Face at the Window”.
Mrs Garner of Birchall-street was in the front room with her husband when they heard weird noises at the back. There were tappings on the window panes and a peculiar howling noise in the air.
Although not unduly troubled about the matter, Mr Garner took the precaution of nailing up the back room window.

         It was just as well for the visitor came back again to the house on Tuesday evening and this time appeared to try and get in, for finger marks were found all over the window.
          Two days later Mrs Garner went into the back room and saw something at the window. A white light flashed.
          At the window was a man with “a very large mouth and ugly face”. The light which flashed was, according to Mrs Garner, about six times brighter than the light from the gas mantle.
          Although hundreds of people were out within three minutes after the occurrence, no sign of the man could be found.

UGLY FACE

A little later the same evening the ghost appeared to have made its way round to Algernon-street. A Mr Dunn was in the yard when he suddenly saw a man’s head and shoulders appear above the gate, which is 5ft 6inches [about 1.65m.] high.
          It was an ugly face and he made a smack at it with his fist. His hand however hit the top of the gate and the ghost made off.
          Mr Dunn opened the gate and ran after the “thing” but it disappeared like a shadow. It did not run but seemed to glide. It had a long white coat like a mackintosh (rain coat PR), and appeared to have no feet at all.
          The ghost also made an appearance in Hamilton-street, where it tapped a young man on the shoulder, and frightened him so much that he ran into a shop and fainted.
          Another unusual occurrence comes from Alder-street. A woman was in bed, and she told her husband she could heard a fizzling noise downstairs.
          Her husband went down to investigate and he found a plate of fried bacon in the back kitchen. He heard a sound as of someone running down the yard, but when he made a search nothing was revealed.

Here is how it was presented in the two weekly newspapers in the town on Saturday 24 September 1927. First there was the more populist paper, the Liberal Warrington Examiner. That went in for the sensational approach:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE GHOST!

Appearance Before an Armed Mob: White Robe and Folded Arms

“ MY TIME’S UP”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“We think it is somebody playing pranks and, more than anything else, it is women who “have got the wind up”, is the opinion of the police with regard to remarkable happenings which have taken place in the Orford-lane and surrounding districts during the past few weeks.
          This is probably a common sense view of the whole matter, but at the same time there is no doubt that the repeated appearances of some individual posing as a “ghost” have created a big sensation in that part of Warrington, and is causing a lot of discomfort and alarm amongst the more nervous women and children.
          The Examiner” learns that in many cases, parents have put their clocks on at night in order to get their children to go to bed before the time when the “ghost” is supposed to appear: and that the children themselves are becoming frightened of leaving their homes in the evening.
          Suring the last week-end another probable solution to the mystery was arrived at following a message shouted to some young men by the “ghost”, which was being chased. “My time’s up on Thursday” was the message, and this would make appear that the “ghost” is carrying out his queer programme for a wager.
          When the ghost was reported to be in Margaret-street on Sunday night, hundreds of men, women and even children, armed with pokers, fire tongues, bottles, truncheons, “chilalahs”, [shillelaghs] and other weapons rushed in a mob to the neighbourhood with the object of “finishing it off”.
          The Warrington “ghost” however is very brave and seems to care not what manner of revenge the public have planned for him, for he walked past the crowd with only a few feet separating them from him. “There he is!” shouted the people and after him they went. Down Margaret-street, which is blocked at one end by railings separating the street from the railway, he went over the rails “like greased lightning”. The crowd uprooted the rails to get on to the embankment, and there was the “ghost” in his white robes and folded arms, staring at them.
          They again took up the chase and after flashing his powerful torch on a wall of corrugated iron, which is very jagged at the top and is about 10 feet high, over he went, making the peculiar howling noise which generally announces his coming. From that point he disappeared. Later however, however, he was again heard in a backyard at the other end of the street, but before the crowd could get hold of him he had once more disappeared. One man got so close to him as to almost touch him, but his hand came into contact with a wagon or something, and the “ghost” got away.
          Thus matters went on until about two o’ clock, but although the people saw the light being flashed in various places, nothing came of their searching.

GREEN EYES

Earlier in the evening Mr Frangleton, of Margaret-street, was in his yard, which adjoins the railway, when he saw the “ghost” dressed all in white standing in the middle of the yard with its arms crossed, staring at him. According to Mr Frangleton’s daughter, her father called for his slippers, but the ghost disappeared from the yard as if by magic. It had an extremely ugly face, which must have been a mask, for no human could have a face so ugly, and the eyes appeared to be green and illuminated. On his chest was something that resembled an electric light switch.
          Mrs Denmade and Miss Fragleton saw the “ghost” again in a wooden building on the railway.
          On Monday night the people of the neighbourhood arranged a systematic search of the district around Margaret-street, but nothing unusual was seen.
          The extraordinary manner in which the “ghost” moves and the way it surmounts high walls lead people to surmise that is has springs on its feet.

THE MYSTERY BACON

Another unusual occurrence, which may or may not be associated with the ghost is reported from the Alder-lane district. The report goes that a lady was in bed when she thought she head a frizzling noise downstairs. Her husband went down to investigate, and found a plate of cooked bacon in the back kitchen. He heard a sound as of somebody running down the yard, but when he made a search nothing was revealed.

This was essentially the story that appeared in the Liverpool Express and Manchester Evening News of September 19th. They clearly had a common source. Similar stories also appeared in the Manchester Evening Chronicle but add no further details. The rival Conservative and somewhat more upmarket Warrington Guardian was much more sober in its reportage:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A SILLY SCARE

“GHOST” STORY “ALL BUNKUM”

EYE-WITNESS VISITS THE “GUARDIAN” OFFICE
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The silly pranks of some persons who have been referred to as the “Haydock Street ghost” has caused considerable disturbances in that neighbourhood. Stories have been circulated of an ugly face, weird noises and green eyes, and children and credulous people have been unnerved. It was reported early this week that the man shouted a message to some young men who chased him saying “I won’t be sorry when my time’s up on Thursday”

A CHASE DESCRIBED

Mr Stanley Trantum of 45 Laira Street, called at the “Guardian” Office on Monday and stated that at 11.30 on the previous evening he was at the house of a friend in Chorley Street when he heard screams. Running out, he saw a crowd of people in Margaret Street, where a man was being chased. Mr Trantum followed and almost caught the man when he scaled a corrugated iron wall. He says that on the far side of the wall he fell into an iron box and then became entangled in some wire: otherwise, the man would not have escaped. The man was wearing a light fawn raincoat and was carrying an electric lamp.

POLICE SUPERINTENDENT’S VIEW

Mr Trantum had not reported the matter to the police, and when a “Guardian” reporter visited Superintendent Holland with the information, he said he thought the story of the “ghost” was “all bunkum”. We think it is somebody playing pranks” he added and “more than anything else, that it is hysterical women who have “got the wind up” and imaged most of the things which are reported.

That was that, with the police pronouncement the story left the presses. It was to linger in the memories of older people and in Ghost, Mysteries and Legends of Old Warrington by charity worker Wally Barnes (Owl Books 1990), where there is a wildly exaggerated account of his activities. Far from the back streets of the original reports Barnes has “Spring Heel Jack” bouncing up Horsemarket Street, (the portion of the main road leading up to Warrington Central Railway Station from the central roundabout) on shoes with springs on their soles. He is now seen bounding along in 15ft leaps along John Street and leaping as high as bedroom windows in Hardy Street and leaping along Cockhedge Lane in 20ft leaps.

The areas at the centre of this story were streets of terraced housing in a working class district to the north of Central Railway Station in Warrington. They can be seen on this 1910 map in comparison with a 21st century one here:

http://maps.cheshire.gov.uk/tithemaps/TwinMaps.aspx?township=D4625-12

Much of the housing was demolished in the 1970s, and though street names survive, the scene is quite different. There are no images of the streets at this period in the public domain (photographers concentrated on the main shopping streets and little of the working class housing was ever generated)

Ghosts were in the news in this period; in July a man in Towcester refused accommodation proffered because a man had committed suicide there 30 years before and it was said to be haunted (e.g. Western Daily Press 21 July 1927)

The Warrington “ghost” was just one of three according to this report in the Aberdeen Journal of 23 August 1927:

VARIETY IN GHOSTS

Police Baffled by Weird Apparitions. Three ghosts are stalking abroad, if the evidence received is to be accepted—one in London, one in Barry, Wales, and one in Warrington, who stalks six feet high with a menacing mien. That they were not members of the same Trade Union of Departed Spirits is very evident, for while the white-haired ghost of London gently kissed a sleeping woman on the forehead and silently stole away, he of Warrington shocked two women into a faint and leaped over a ten-foot wall like Spring-Heeled Jack, when angry husbands armed with bottles and carving knives, gave chase in the dead of night.

The ghost of Barry a mystic Peeping Tom, peering in at windows feet above the, ground, terrorising a mother and children in flat. The London ghost, whom two women and a girl say they have seen flit across the hall of an ancient mansion house within five minutes’ walk of Denmark Hill station, is declared by a spiritualistic medium to be that of George Tavener, born in 1854, and his present mission on earth he has revealed to be a quest for an old desk of his where, a secret drawer, lie papers proving that his earthly niece is entitled to his property.

The unearthly terror at Barry has been hunting a top-storey flat at 24, Dock New Road, near the docks. Mrs Christoforato declares his visits have extended over three weeks. A policeman has been keeping guard at night, but nothing happened while he was there. After he had gone a stealthy footstep was heard in the corridor, but when a woman dashed out there was no one there, the same night a child screamed with fright when a ghostly face appeared at the window and then vanished.

According to the Derby Telegraph of 6 September 1927 a ghost at Brampton in Derbyshire led to a drunken women ending in the police courts:

The Brampton Ghost.

Stories of a ghost have been, running about Brampton, and when a woman was charged Chesterfield police court yesterday with being drunk and incapable, a policeman said that when appeared, wearing his white overalls, the woman sank on her knees, bowed head to the ground, and shouted “ Oh, the Brampton ghost.” She was fined 10s

The Angus Evening Telegraph of the 27th September reports a poltergeist story

THE GHOST OF MARKINCH GASWORKS. FROM A MARKINCH READER.

For some time past a strange thing has been going on at the gas works in -the village of Markinch. There are two stokers employed at different shifts, and one of them is pelted with missiles always on his nightshift week. The other man is not interfered with. Stones, half-bricks, bolts, &c., have come flying all directions, but no serious damage has been done except the smashing of a gas lamp and mantle. The “ ghost” waits till the sma’ ‘oors ayont the twal “ before he begins, and sometimes the annoyance lasts till five or six o’clock. Fully score of men have tried to discover the culprit, but have failed, not even getting a glimpse of the “ ghost.” It must be an eerie job for the poor stoker, especially on the long dark winter nights”

The Dundee Evening Telegraph of 27 September 1927 reported “ghostly figures dressed in white” leading to women and children collapsing on the way to home in the north end of Dundee near Craigie Quarries. A 17 year old boy reported seeing two figures jump into the quarry, making strange noises. The next day the paper reported a flash mob on the site:

5000 HUNT DUNDEE “GHOSTS” EVENING SEARCH AT CRAIGIE QUARRIES

What the Residents Think: A “ghost” hunt on a large scale took place in Dundee last night, when over 5000 people of all ages went in search of the “ spooks” which have been appearing near Craigie Quarries. The crowd gathered early in the evening, intent on laying the “ghost” or “ghosts” which have been causing such terror in the district. Nothing, however, manifested itself, and although the crowd gradually dispersed, it was steadily joined by fresh arrivals.

Throughout the evening and up to late hour the crowd scoured the environs of Dalkeith Road and the quarries, but apparently the “ game” which they were after thought better of it than put in an appearance. Further instances of what had taken place was given by several persons who had been previously alarmed by the strange happenings. When coming home from evening School one night, a youth was greatly disturbed the sight of a white pony in one of the fields, on which was mounted a ghostly figure. There are a number of ponies grazing in a field nearby.

Ratner Have the “Ghosts.”

Residents in the district have been greatly troubled by these unusual ongoings, but according to many they would rather have had the “ ghosts” than the crowd which gathered last night. A white sheet has been observed by more than one person lying on the high ground near the quarries. It possibly part of the equipment of the “ ghosts.” The sheet has been lying for several days. Armed with lamps, torches, and even a miniature searchlight, the crowd surged over all the waste ground in the vicinity, but failed to unearth anything of an unusual nature.

The mob was back the following day:

THE CRAIGIE QUARRY “GHOST”

Big Crowd Again Visits the District

“The Ghost of Craigie Quarry,” Dundee, evidently quite pleased with the effect of its initial appearance, and refuses to give encore to the expectant crowds who would like to see it. A crowd of between 2000 and 3000 both sexes invaded the quarry and surrounding district last night in -the hope of seeing “ spectre,” and were disappointed at its non-appearance. It is unfortunate that the “ spook “ hunters are inclined to become rather noisy in their efforts to locate their “ quarry,” and the inhabitants of the district, particularly those in the immediate vicinity of the Quarry, are becoming rather annoyed their visits.

The next day however only a few hundred attended. The Western Daily Press of 27 August reported on a phantom perfume haunting a Monmouthshire farm.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

THIS ARTICLE HAS ALSO BEEN POSTED ON THE MAGONIA ARCHIVE:
http://magonia.haaan.com/2013/when-springheeled-jack-wore-galoshespeter-rogerson/

SCIENCE AND BELIEF

2013-03-30T16:20:00.001Z

Rupert Sheldrake. The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry. Coronet, 2013.

Lawrence M Krauss. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. With an afterword by Richard Dawkins. Simon and Schuster, 2012.

These books are excellent examples of how science can become caught up in culture wars. Even though he was trained as a naturalist, Rupert Sheldrake does not really like modern science at all. This is because he sees it as materialistic and atheistic. Lawrence Krauss represents just that sort of atheistic science that Sheldrake deplores. The science in Krauss’s book is fine, and presents modern cosmological ideas in a way open to the lay person, and shows some considerable scepticism towards string theory and the like. The problem is that it is used to bolster a personal ideological position, anti-theism. In itself the latter is also fine, it is the linking of the two together, so that science becomes a battering ram against ideas the author disapproves of that creates problems.

Equally there are aspects of Sheldrake’s arguments which are (at least to me) unexceptional, for example the possibly that physical ‘constants’ may actually fluctuate over time, and how standardisation of definitions may prevent this being detected. He is surely right in arguing that sceptics should not dismiss possible new phenomena on purely metaphysical grounds. The interesting thing is that in mainstream science, scientists don’t actually do this; when reliable claims for compounds for what were then called the ‘inert gases’ came in the 1960s they were taken up not suppressed. The claims for cold fusion and faster than light neutrinos both led to races to replicate the experiments not to suppress them; mainstream palaeoanthropology took the ‘hobbit’ in its stride, and now has taken ‘modern’ human/Neanderthal interbreeding on board. Physicists in Germany have now found a ‘trick’ to get a gas below absolute zero (at least on one metric), which is about as ‘impossible’ as it comes.

If science can entertain the possibility of faster than light neutrinos and below zero gases (regardless as to whether the claims will eventually pan out) then why do the claims advanced by people like Sheldrake lead to such ire? You might think it as something to do with evidence, but I suspect it is more to do with the fact that these claims are advanced by people like Sheldrake, who advance them not because they have an interest in the anomalies as a means of advancing mainstream scientific knowledge, but in order to subvert the whole scientific world view.

The particular claims advanced by Sheldrake may or may not be true, whether dogs can know when their owners are coming home, whether animal behaviour can predict earthquakes or people can tell when someone is staring at them, and so on, but they would not be any more ‘impossible’ than some other things that science has found an acceptance for, however difficult their explanation might be. The real problem is that he, and others like him, are not really interested in the anomalous ‘facts’ themselves, but as weapons in the ideological struggle against ‘materialism’.

The first problem is the use of that word ‘materialism’, actually Sheldrake means ‘physicalism’ or more generally ‘scientific naturalism’. Sheldrake says he uses the word ‘materialism’ because it is better known, I suspect he is being disingenuous here, and uses ‘materialism’ because it sounds more pejorative.

Now he is perfectly free to reject ‘naturalism’ as an absolute metaphysical truth, but not to reject ‘operative scientific naturalism’, because that is the rule of the game called science, a rule (with very few exceptions) accepted by theists, deists, agnostics and atheists alike when doing science, it allows people with very different religious and philosophical backgrounds to work together with a common language.

Despite his Jeremiads against ‘materialist’ science, and for a naturalist he gives me the impression of not actually liking the messy world of plain natural stuff very much, his own theories really do not make much actual difference. ‘Morphic fields’ if they exist are part of the natural, physical world, they must be to have an impact on the physical world, if some influence causes people to be aware they are being stared at, then this influence must be part of the physical world. Indeed the strange quasi-Platonic theory of vision that Sheldrake advances seems to be to be more materialistic than anything in the mainstream.

Add to that his wholesale rejection of much of modern biology and empirical experience, it seems there is little room for dialogue. Those with radical ideas, who tend to argue that everyone else is wrong fall into two classes; visionaries and cranks. The former come up with genuinely new ideas that no-one has thought of before, they are few and far between, and a fair proportion are genuinely mad. Cranks on the other hand look backwards to past ideas and the day before yesterday’s orthodoxy, they recycle old ideas, cite old sources and quote old authorities. I rather fear that Sheldrake is closer to the latter than the former.

That said there is no doubt that the kind of quasi-religious scientism increasingly promoted by Dawkins and his allies does science no real good. The strange fact is that Sheldrake and Dawkins come from rather similar backgrounds, middle class, religiously orientated boarding school educated, English naturalists and appear to have come to diametrically opposed world views, yet perhaps share a common intolerance of views other than their own, and quite impressive sense of self confidence. -- Peter Rogerson

KENTISH TALES

2013-03-27T09:28:00.001Z

Neil Arnold. Kent Urban Legends: The Phantom Hitch-Hiker and Other Stories. The History Press, 2013.

Blue Bell Hill, that sounds a nice place, doesn’t it? Redolent of Enid Blyton and sunny picnics with lashings of ginger beer.

Don’t go there. Literally. Don’t go there. According to Neil Arnold, you’re likely to bump into any number of phantom hitchhikers, whether they’re a bride killed on the way to her wedding, a cyclist mown down by a car or the end products of various other road-traffic accidents.

And if you miss the phantom hitchhiker, there’s a chance you’ll meet the Devil if you try to count the stones in the local stone circle, or come across the weird Voodoo Woman, dressed in beads and leaves, or the terrifying giant phantom rabbit. There’s phantom big-cats too, but you’d rather expect that by now, although you might not be prepared for the real big-cat that someone caught there.

Did I mention the phantom Black Dog, or even the White Dog, both obviously harbingers of doom.

And then you might come across into one of the Kentish Wildmen, although it’s not too clear whether they’re just some harmless old nutter dressed in animal skins, an actual out-of-time Neanderthal, a bona-fide Sasquatch, or just a seven-foot high hulking dark creature with glowing red eyes. Or maybe all of the above.

So Kent, you see, isn’t all Garden of England, H. E. Bates’ Larkin Family, rosy red apples and Cockney hop-pickers. According to Arnold you take your life in your hands (or rather put it in the Devil’s) if you run across Rochester Bridge. Having made it to the Medway towns you might encounter the phantom hair snipper of Rochester or the dreaded Sausage Slashers of Chatham.

Spring Heeled Jack popped up for a while in the nineteenth century, but he seems a bit old hat against such legends as the haunted radio of Gillingham or the giant razor-wielding squirrel of Oaklands Primary School.

But some of these Kentish terrors are not all they’re cracked up to be. “England’s Most Haunted Village” of Pluckley, for instance. Chock-full of scary spirits we’re told: the highwayman, a reliable favourite; the miller; the ever-popular monk; the Tudor Lady; the watercress woman, a bit of a novelty that; a screaming man; two White Ladies; and for a change a Red Lady; a schoolmaster and a colonel (sounds a bit like a game of Cluedo) and a traditional spectral coach and horses with the obligatory headless coachman.

The only problem is that no-one ever seems to have actually seen any of them. ‘Most Haunted Village’? Trading Standards should get down there and sort them out.

Kent has its own examples of more general urban legends too: the spider in the beehive hair-do, the deadly Chelsea Smilers football gang, children being abducted in shopping malls, the AIDS club, etc., which all seem a little bit more immediate because of course, they happened to the bloke who lived next door to a friend of a friend of Neil Arnold.

I don’t suppose that Kent is any more legend-haunted than any other county, but Arnold puts together a good collection, throws in a bit of local history, and recounts them entertainingly. But one thing I must challenge him on. Treacle mines in Maidstone? No, mate, the real ones are in Knotty Ash! -- John Rimmer

VIRTUAL BANALITY, PART 2

2013-03-25T12:12:00.003Z

Since writing ‘Virtual Banality’ (below), about low-strangeness paranormal experiences, our occasional columnist The Pelican has drawn to my attention an incident described in his column published in Magonia 98, September 2008.

The sceptical avian criticises ufologists who deny the possibility that some - or most - abduction experiences could have been the result of such psychological states as sleep paralysis, and quotes from a correspondent to the Physicsforums discussion group calling himself 'zoobyshoe', who describes how he was "abducted in broad daylight from a McDonalds":

This was in Minnesota about 25 years ago. I got up from a nap one day and walked down to a McDonalds where I always went because all my friends hung out there. As I was standing in line to get my coffee I suddenly fell backwards for no apparent reason right onto the guy who was standing behind me. A second later I was lying on my back, back in my bed at home. But I was lying on top of the guy I had fallen onto at the McDonalds’. He had my arms pinned and he was sniggering in my ear. I was pretty much paralyzed. There was someone else in the room, too. This guy paced back and forth slowly, not looking at me or the other guy, seeming to be waiting for something to happen. He looked depressed. The guy holding me down kept sniggering in my ear and seemed to be enjoying the fact I was paralyzed. I was completely terrified, to say the least, and couldn't even struggle.

After a few moments both figures disappeared, and ‘zoobyshoe’ was alone on the bed in his room.

“It had all been completely vivid in all detail: I could see, hear and feel them perfectly clearly while it was going on … What was especially peculiar was the "set up": the part where I hallucinated walking all the way to the McDonald's when I was actually still at home in bed.”

Like ‘Val’ and Johnny Mendoza he concludes: “Had it been two grey alien looking things instead of two humans, I'm sure I'd have been seriously considering that I'd been abducted by space aliens.”

So again, we have an example of an experience which is totally real to the percipient at the time it occurs, and is only seen to be ‘virtual reality’ when later events prove the unreality of it. Of course, if the virtual event is interpreted at the time as being interaction with extraterrestrial beings with super powers there is almost no way in which subsequent events can demonstrate its unreality – especially if those ‘subsequent events’ happen to be an investigation by ufological abductionologists!

TROUBLE UP AT T'HILL

2013-03-24T12:24:00.000Z

Jennie Lee Cobban. The Lure of the Lancashire Witches. Palatine Books, 2011.

Joyce Froome Wicked Enchantments: A History of the Pendle Witches and Their Magic. Palatine Books, 2010.

Last year marked the four hundredth anniversary of the trial of the Pendle Witches, one of England’s most famous witch trials. Details can be found HERE. It was part of the run up to this event that these two books were produced by Palatine Books, an imprint of Carnegie Books dealing with Lancashire history.

Joyce Froome is a member of the staff of the Museum of Witchcraft in Cornwall, and in her study she places the story of the Pendle witches within the context of the folk magic of the period. Following the example of Emma Wilby, she sees the “witches” as representatives of the tradition of local magical specialists, and their ambiguous relationship with the community. Elements of the narrative are used to illustrate various magical beliefs and techniques of the period. This “witchcraft” might be an “old religion” but it was definitely not that of some supposed prehistoric survival worshiping the “Great Goddess” and other such fantasies. It was rather Folk Catholicism, and there is little doubt that all involved would have regarded themselves as Christians, and much of this magic involved appeals to God, Christ, the Virgin Mary and various saints. It was the magic of day to day life, healing illness among people and livestock, gaining love and money, doing down rivals and such. Such magical practices made life appear controllable and most resorted to them, but the church condemned them and regarded them as being every bit as evil as “black witchcraft”.

The story began in the most everyday fashion: a pedlar is approached by a teenage girl, she asks to buy some of his pins, he refuses, she gets mouthy, yells something like “I’ll lame yer!”. He walks away, trips on a pothole and hobbles away to the pub. The girl, now rather concerned he might have hurt him, follows, he gets more agitated, and some point has a stroke. His son comes to visit, and decides that daddy has been got at by the witch. Though Joyce Froome does not explore this possibility, I wonder if the pedlar had suggested that he would give pins in exchange for “services in kind”, which led to the outburst. Because the teenage girl, Alison or Alizon Device was the granddaughter of an old woman, Elizabeth “Demdike” Sothernes (sic, that name cannot be found in Lancashire), and this led to the spiralling witch hunt.

The value of Froome’s book lies in its detailed close reading of the accounts, and its reconstruction of a magical world of wise women and cunning men. She takes into various byways the folklore of black dogs, the use of scrying to gain altered states of consciousness, the relationship between elite and folk magic, the role of grimoires, and the spelling out of various spells, many of the don’t do this at home kids variety, especially, she notes the one involving taking a tooth from a live wolf.

This is the magical world described by Emma Wilby, and Froome follows her thesis closely, with, I suspect, the same willingness to consider everyone accused of being a witch as being a Wise Woman. The truth is that while some were, others weren’t, and we should not assume that folk magic and spells were the exclusive preserve of some kind of specialist. Nor does it seem reasonable to me to think that the folk healers had any kind of special mystical or occult interpretation of Christianity or would have been devotees of such elite works as The Sworn Book of Honorius. These would have been people who at best could read broadside ballads. The magical tradition would have been largely an oral one. The truth is, I suspect, that we don’t know whether these were local wise women, or people who traded on their neighbours fears to gain advantage over them, or local nuisances of the sort who today are awarded ASBOs, or just poor people who embarrassed the rich, people who had got out of favour with the sort of people it is not wise to get on the wrong side of, Catholic recusants or something of the lot.

The result is an intriguing intellectual tour de force with lots of fascinating insights, but one where the digressions often breakup the narrative.

Jennie Cobban’s book is a more slender work, which gives some of the background, but also concentrates on the ‘remains’ of the event, both artefacts and literary. She gives numerous examples of materials related to the archaeology of witchcraft, the gargoyles, poppets, charms and spells found in old properties around the area, some of which clearly inspire disquiet in this modern secular age.

Of more interest perhaps to Magonia readers are the artistic and cultural survivals. What is surprising is how soon the witches became the subject of comedy, even while the second great Pendle witch trial, that of 1634, was going on, it was the subject of a comedy on the London stage. Perhaps we always laugh at that which most frightens us. Over the succeeding centuries the witches became subject of humour, satire, romance and finally the tourist industry. They were the subjects of novels, films and plays, though even in the 20th century they were vilified by Christian fundamentalists.

Cobban warns us that witch hunts are not over, As examples we can bring out little over twenty years ago there was the massive Satanic abuse panic, covered in the pages of Magonia; the roots of which lay within Britain, rather than is often claimed, American fundamentalism, and there disturbing cases of the murder of 'child witches' in a number of African communities, and here in Britain. -- Peter Rogerson.

VIRTUAL BANALITY

2013-03-21T13:26:00.000Z

I’ve recently been scanning back issues of Magonia for reference use, and have been reminded of a topic which we reported on back in the 1990s, but which seems to have slipped out of sight over the intervening years. I think it’s worth revisiting, as it is a potentially important clue to the origin of many of the phenomena we discuss in Magonia and the books we review.

In an article first published in Magonia 48, January 1994 I commented:

“If any psycho-social explanations of the UFO and abduction experience are valid, then we need to assume that it is fairly commonplace for the human brain to create realistic alternative worlds, in which cognition is replaced by, as Peter Rogerson has called it, a kind of 'virtual experience', We must also accept that this 'virtual' world is, to the percipient, absolutely, totally, completely real, with no doubt whatsoever in their mind as to the physical, real-time nature of the experience they are recalling. And further, we must assume that this dramatic mental phenomenon happens to people who are, in every other respect, completely normal, and not just to a section of the population who can allegedly be distinguished via a few psychological tests or simple-minded public opinion polls.”

People, including writers in Magonia, who have suggested that particular ‘paranormal’ events certain individuals have experienced are due to the internal, psychological processes of the individual’s brain, have been accused of stigmatising witnesses as 'unreliable', ‘mad’, or ‘unbalanced’. The whole point of the psycho-social hypothesis however is that this is not so, and such ‘virtual experiences’ seem to be part of the normal functioning of the human brain.

I started to think more about this as a result of the experience of a colleague at work, who told me of an odd incident that had happened to her. You can find a fuller account of it at the link above, but in brief, she and her husband were woken during the night by a phone call from her husband’s workplace asking him to come out to deal with a computer problem. Although annoying this was not particularly dramatic, as he was often the out-of-hours contact for the company.

After he had left she found it difficult to get back to sleep, so started watching a small television they kept in the bedroom. She then drifted off to sleep, waking later to find that the TV and the bedside light were off and she could not switch them on, presumably because of a power-cut. After a few moments she heard her husband’s car returning, and looked through the window to see the car pulling into the driveway.

But they didn’t have a driveway, just a grassed front lawn!

She then rather perceptively decided that this must be all a dream, went back to bed, fell asleep, waking up at the usual hour in the morning. As I suggested at the time, this must have been the world’s most boring paranormal experience - The Mystery of the Phantom Concrete Driveway.

But of course, it was only because it was so boring that ‘Val’, as she was referred to in the article, realised that it was a dream. At the time, and in her memory, it was a totally real, wide-awake, completely un-dreamlike experience. In telling me the story Val made an interesting point. Her grandmother had died just a few months earlier. If she had awoken to ‘see’ her grandmother sitting at the foot of the bed, she would have been totally convinced that she had seen the old lady’s ghost. After all, the ghostly appearance of a dead relative is far more believable to most people than the overnight appearance of a concert driveway over a neatly manicured lawn!

In the next issue of Magonia, Hilary Evans made some typically astute observations:

“ … that your colleague's experience is essentially identical with the more exotic experiences of Linda Cortile and Betty Andreasson is, I would say, beyond question. The same process is surely at work. Val's story is welcome precisely because these exotic features are absent, because its everyday ordinariness - with its one little splash of extraordinariness - enables us to see the mechanism at work without the dramatic triggerings which distract us from the form to the content.”

After comparing Val’s experience to those of Andreasson and Cortile, Hilary concludes:

“No doubt Val's experience, too, was significant of something; no psychoanalyst worth his £50 an hour would fail discern a profound meaning in that imagined driveway, a symbolic clue to who knows what childhood trauma.. Well, if I were Val I'd let sleeping trauma lie. Though if next time she should see, not just a driveway, but a darned disc parked on it. with these three figures emerging …”

This was exactly the situation with the ‘Miss Z’ case which Peter Rogerson and I investigated in the very early days of MUFOB/Magonia.

I next came across an episode of ‘virtual banality’ in 1999, in issue 20 of the American magazine Strange, where there is a letter from a Johnny Mendoza. He describes an episode five years earlier, at a time that he was collecting Disney memorabilia, and exotic banknotes. Working a nightshift he slept during the day from 8am. On the day in question he was woken by his fiancée and told that a package had arrived for him which contained a set of Disney souvenir banknotes, neatly combining his collecting interest. He looked at the specimens, then still feeling tired put them aside and went back to sleep.

I think you’re ahead of me now. When he woke up in the late afternoon there were no Disney banknotes and his fiancée was adamant that she had not woken him in the morning with any post.

Like Val, he was clear about the nature of the experience: "I remember being totally awake when I looked at the money. The event did not have a dreamlike quality ... “ And like Val, he muses: “What if I had woken up and seen a little grey alien looking down at me? What if I saw a vision of an Angel and my father coming to visit me?"

Again, this experience has very little emotional baggage, and Johnny was not in any stressed situation or undergoing any personal trauma.

The next episode come in Magonia 67, June 1999, where I print a letter from Brian, the proprietor of a book and comic shop in the USA. Unlike the other episodes this event took place whilst Brian was totally awake and in a crowded environment. It had a bit more drama to it, but was still almost immediately recognised as unreal by the percipient. In this case it was a quite a few years earlier when Brian was in junior high school. Walking down a corridor between classes he comes across a “particularly obnoxious guy I'd had run-ins with before [who] made some remark: to me, and I immediately turned around, punched him and knocked him down, and continued to my next class.”

Arriving at the classroom he expected the “obnoxious guy” to be right behind him, ready to dole out retribution: “There’s going to be a fight” he told a friend in the classroom. But nothing happened. Brian sat down and began to calm down, and soon realised that he could not in fact have hit the guy, as by now he would either be in the room taking his revenge, or else Brian would be getting hauled off to the principle’s office by one of the teachers who must have seen the supposed incident.

Brian concludes: “I can still remember the incident clearly and except for the ‘coming down’ part where I realised I must've imagined it, and the fact that there was never any further mention of it, I'd still swear it happened. And if it had been a saucer or alien or ghost, I'm sure I'd be a true believer today.”

The final episode to come my way, which I record in Magonia 71 (June 2000) brings us back to my workplace. Another colleague, ‘Anne’, was like me a librarian at a suburban public library in south London. A few weeks before the time of writing she was woken by a telephone call from the security officer at the local council offices.. He told her that "People have invaded the main street here and are rioting. It's all under control, but we're just ringing to let you know what's happening.”

Annoyed at receiving such a pointless warning she hung up and went back to sleep. But not for long, she then got another call: "They're moving off in the direction of your library. But it's OK, you don't need to do anything, we've got it all in hand."

Now apparently totally wide awake, and rather annoyed, she decided to go downstairs and make herself a drink. She sat and drank some of it, then retired back to bed. When she woke in the morning there had been no more calls, and dialling 1471 she discovered that the last call recorded was one she remembers from early the previous evening. Needless to say there had been no rioting in the main street.

(Although I feel obliged to mention that eleven years later there was in fact some serious rioting in the main street of Croydon, the location of this incident, so maybe we can count this as a - very - precognitive dream! However the library where Anne worked was on the opposite side of town, and was not troubled by vandalism or gangs of youths).

There’s one small detail in Anne’s story which makes it a little more intriguing. When she got downstairs in the morning, she found the half consumed drink still on the kitchen table. So did she actually go downstairs in a somnambulistic state and prepare a drink? Was this a drink she had made before going to bed and forgotten about, and incorporated into her dream? Did she genuinely wake after the second call? How valid is this as a piece of ‘physical evidence’?

All these strange events, some quite mundane, some with an element of drama attached, happened to people who were totally unstressed at the time; who were in sound mental and physical health and - as far as I know - were one-off events in their lives. And, as in Brian’s case you do not even have to be in bed asleep to have such an experience. So next time someone tells you about their abduction, ghost sighting, or other encounter with weirdness, ask yourself if they have undergone the same kind of ‘virtual experience’ as Val, Johnny, Brian or Anne.

Anne’s account was the last I recorded in Magonia, but if you have had such an experience yourself - one which seemed real but you know couldn’t possibly have happened - we’d be glad to hear of it. The more boring the better! Use the ‘reply’ link below. I won’t publish full details unless you say so. Or if you have any general comments on the topic. -- John Rimmer.

THE MATHEMATICS OF THE PARANORMAL

2013-03-13T21:15:00.001Z

James D. Stein. The Paranormal Equation: A New Scientific Perspective on Remote Viewing, Clairvoyance, and Other Inexplicable Phenomena. New Page Books, 2013.

Dr Stein is a professor of mathematics and he believes that there are truths about the natural world that nominally fall within the domain of science that might be impossible for science to discover. He thinks that some as yet undiscovered natural laws might account for some of what appear to be paranormal phenomena.

Unlike some scientists and mathematicians who have studied such things, though, he is not fooled by the tricks of magicians, or the psychic researchers who resort to cheating and fiddle their results. He gives as one of his examples a BBC television show in which the physicist John Taylor appeared as a "scientific hatchet man" during a performance by the Israeli "psychic" and entertainer Uri Geller. Geller did his fork-bending act, followed by telepathy, followed by apparently mending broken watches just by holding them in his hands. Taylor was baffled by these tricks, and thought Geller had psychic powers, even though, like other skilled and experienced magicians, he could make his tricks seem inexplicable.

One of the first problems he considers is how to decide what is meant by paranormal or supernatural phenomena. This is rather difficult. In the case of ghosts, for example, Stein points out that there is no scientific framework in which one can prove that there is no such thing as a ghost. If one could provide scientific proof of the reality of ghosts, they would then be regarded as natural rather than supernatural. It seems to me, though, that this introduces the idea that they could have some sort of subtle physical existence, independent of the people who see them.

Stein, though, says that a law which is a law that cannot be discovered would legitimately be supernatural. "It would be a principle governing behaviour in the Universe which would be beyond our ability, or the ability of any sentient creature, to discover."

As Dr Stein is a mathematician, he gives us a discussion on arithmetic, a subject with which most of us have some acquaintance, and he shows us that some problems with numbers are not as simple as they look. He includes two interesting examples.

The Goldbach Conjecture states that every even number is the sum of two prime numbers. For example, 84 is the sum of prime numbers 41 and 43. Mathematicians have been trying to prove or disprove this for about 300 years, without success. It could, of course, be proved false by finding an even number which is not the sum of two primes, but as the natural numbers are an infinite series, this is not practicable.

To test the Collatz Conjecture, pick any number. If it is even, divide by 2. If it is odd, triple it and add 1. Apply these rules to the result and keep going, and you will always eventually end up with 1. Mathematicians have so far failed to establish whether this conjecture is decidable.

Dr Stein describes some of the counterintuitive results of experiments in quantum physics, and his belief that the universe is infinite. In his concluding remarks, he writes: "The time may come when we have made enough measurements to conjecture a relationship involving information transfer that has all the earmarks of paranormality". This book provides interesting ideas on attempts to discover how some kinds of apparently paranormal phenomena might be compatible with scientific principles. -- John Harney

THE BRISTOL VORTEX

2013-03-11T11:50:00.000Z

Peter Rogerson's research into ghostly and Fortean happenings reported in nineteenth-century local newspapers continues with this court report of an extraordinary series of events that feature in Charles Fort's Lo! (pages 152 - 154 of the Fortean Tomes edition)

................................................................................

The Bristol Mercury

13th December 1873

EXTRAORDINARY OCCURRENCE AT A BRISTOL HOTEL.

At the Council-house, on Tuesday, before the mayor (Mr.T. Barnes) and Messrs. G. Wiles and C. Godwin, a young man and woman of genteel deportment and address, and who gave the name of Thomas B. Cumpston and Ann Martha Cumpston, of Virginia-road, Leeds, were brought up on a charge of being disorderly and letting off firearms in the Victoria hotel, near the Terminus. Mrs Tongue the landlady of the hotel was first called, and she deposed that the defendants arrived at her hotel about eight o' clock the previous evening and engaged a room for the night, bringing luggage with them. She was away from the house when they came and they retired to rest about twelve o' clock.

About one o' clock in the morning she was alarmed by a great noise in their bedroom and found them in a very excited state, but she succeeded in pacifying them, and they returned to bed. At four o'clock she was awoke by loud screams, and cries of murder, and by the report of firearms. Being much terrified by the uproar she got up, and went down to see what was them matter and she heard Mrs. Cumpston exclaim, "keep that knife from me”. They both jumped from their bedroom window into the back yard, a height of about twelve feet, then made their way to the front street, and ran across the road up to the railway station. She then spoke to a police constable Mr. Godwin. They left their luggage behind them.

Mr Thomas Hawker, who stated that he was on duty as night superintendent at the Bristol and Exeter railway station was next called and stated that, he was in the booking-office about four o’ clock in the morning making up his report, when he heard a noise outside, and immediately the doors of the office were burst open a person rushed in. Someone tapped the window at his inner office, and screamed out "Murder". Witness was dozing at the time, and immediately went out on the platform see what was the matter. He there saw both defendants in the act of crossing to the express platform, and he spoke to them. The lady was in a very excited state. Her hair was flowing about, and neither she nor her husband had anything on their heads. Both of them were excited. They rushed toward him as soon as they saw him, and said they had been in some den or other, and had been waylaid by thieves, and were trying to get out of the way.

He (witness) could not tell what to make of them at first, and he took them into the parcels office by the fire. They appeared in a very excited condition; having succeeded in pacifying them, he put some questions as to who they were and where they had been. They told him they had been in one of the worst houses they were ever in their lives, Amongst a lot of thieves and rogues, and they had to do the best they could to defend themselves. He took them into the waiting-room, but scarcely anything would pacify them. They were under the, impression that someone was following them, to do them some bodily injury, and both of them expressed themselves to that effect. The lady told him her husband had a revolver. They made him go into the inside room and examine it, to see that there was no one there and they themselves went in and searched the room. The lady, took up the poker to defend herself.

Prior to this witness had sent for a city policeman, and during,the time he got he tried to keep them as quite as possible. He understood them to say that they had come, from the Victoria Hotel, and he told them there was nothing there to harm them and that it was a very respectable house, but nothing would pacify them until two of the city police arrived. They. searched, the gentleman and took from him a revolver and some knives. The male defendant declined to ask this witness anything - and a similar question being put to his wife, she also said she had nothing to ask him, adding, "I have to thank him for his great kindness last night."

Mr. Godwin (to witness)- Did the excitement appear to be from drink?

Witness- 'No. I thought they were labouring under insanity.

P.C.321 sworn, said he was called to the Victoria Hotel on Bath-parade, about five minutes to five o'clock that morning, and was told by Mrs. Tongue, the landlady that some parties who had been sleeping there had jumped out of the window and escaped to the railway-station. Upon proceeding to the railway station, he found both defendants to be comfortably seated before the fire in the waiting-room. He believed it was fright that caused them to run away. The witness produced a revolver and three knives, which he said had been found upon the gentleman. The revolver was here handed to Mr Brice (magistrates' clerk), who examined it. It was a small. weapon, but of apparently of highly-finished workmanship.

Mr. Cumpston, being asked what be had to say in answer to the charge, spoke with apparent incoherency, and his wife explained that he had an impediment in his speech. He said they came from Clifton previous day, and, has intended to proceed to Weston super Mare that morning. A porter took their luggage and they asked him at what hotel they could spend the night. He said he could take them to a very nice one and mentioned the George and the Victoria. He took them across the line and instead of taking them to the George he took them to the Victoria. They went to bed about twelve o'clock, and about one they became annoyed by a disagreeable row. He could not explain it. They were both frightened. The bed was peculiar one. It opened, and did all sorts of strange things. And the floor opened, and they heard voices, and then they jumped out of the window.

Mrs. Cumpston was asked to give her version of the affair, She said they were very much frightened about one o'clock that morning by what they heard, but the landlady came and reassured them for a time, and they went back to bed. About three or four o'clock they heard worse noises, but what they were they had no idea. The floor seemed to he giving way, and the bed also seemed to open. They heard voices, and what they said was repeated after them. Her husband wished her to get out of the way. The floor certainly seemed to open, and her husband fell down some distance, and she tried to get him up. She asked him to discharge his pistol to frighten anybody who might he near, and he fired his revolver into the ceiling. They got out of the window, but she did not know how, being so frightened; and when they got to the ground she asked him to fire off another shot, which he did. She certainly heard the repetition of their voices. Some one spoke every time they spoke.

In reply to the magistrates, she said she did not hear the noises so plainly as her husband.

In reply to Mr. W.K. Wait, who happened to be in court, Mrs. Cumpston gave the name of the parties with whom they were connected in Gloucester, and Mr. Wait thereupon remarked that they were most respectable people.

After a short delay, a gentlemanly young man, who said his name was Butt, and that be had just come from Gloucester, stepped into the witness-box. In reply to the Mayor he said the defendants were good friends of his. They were people who occupied a very good position. Mr. Cumpston was an independent gentleman.

Mr. Brice inquired whether he had any reason to believe that the gentleman had anything the matter with his mind Mr. Butt replied that he had not known him for a long time.

Mr. Brice remarked that Mr. Cumpston seemed to show some aberration of mind. The parties were then discharged, and the weapons and other property found upon the gentleman handed over to Mr. Butt.

From inquiries we have made of the police who examined the room at the Victoria Hotel occupied by the parties, there seems nothing whatever to warrant such conduct on their part. There is little doubt that the whole was an hallucination.

* * * * * *

The man at the centre of this story was Thomas Bowser Cumpston Jnr., the son of a Leeds linen merchant, Thomas Bowser Cumpston Snr., living at the time of the 1871 census at Woodfield House Potternewton, a posh suburb of the town (several of the Duchess of Cambridge’s more affluent ancestors came from there). He was baptised on the 13 October 1847. He married Annie Martha Carter, the daughter of a surgeon, in Leeds Parish Church on April 10 1873 and died on the 9th December 1893 at his home “Rosehurst” Grosvenor Road, Headlingley, making Annie Martha the executor of his £4,153 estate.

Some further details of his life can be found here:
http://www.cumpston.org.uk/#/thomas-b-cumpston-2nd/4539431388

This site however incorrectly attributes the “paranormal episode” to his father, which would have been problematic to say the least as he died in March 1873!

The story has elements of a shared hynopompic hallucination, with elements of aware sleep paralysis and or night terrors. No doubt if it occurred today, the police would be testing the couple’s blood for not altogether legal substances.

* * * * * *

This article has also been published on the Magonia Archive website:

http://magonia.haaan.com/2013/the-bristol-vortex-by-peter-rogerson/

MERLIN: THE MAN, MYTH, AND MAGIC

2013-03-06T12:25:00.000Z

Anne Lawrence-Mathers. The True History of Merlin the Magician. Yale University Press, 2012.

This intriguing volume centres around one fact that seems incongruous from the viewpoint of the contemporary world: for around four hundred years Merlin, who came to be known as the sorcerer of King Arthur, was considered to be a real person. It is the extraordinary journey of a fictional character that influences the medieval world much more than most real people. This meant that any writings associated with him were treated as those from any historical personage were, as opposed to the stories that some of them undoubtedly turned out to be.

The author, Dr Anne Lawrence-Mathers, is a senior lecturer at Reading University. Medieval magic is one of her specialist areas, and it certainly shows in this book. Geoffrey of Monmouth combined aspects of Myrddin Wyllt, the legendary Welsh prophet also known as a madman, and Ambrosius Aurelianus, the Romano-British war leader (who has also provided some material towards the stories of King Arthur) to produce the character he called Merlin Ambrosius. The journey from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pen to that of a prophet whose fame spread across Europe is documented here seemingly with no stone unturned.

The fascinating tale of how those prophesies (treated as if from someone with almost Biblical authority) fared is described here. Although the language is kept direct and unfussy (not too many long words to bamboozle this reviewer!), this volume is dense with facts. There is no fanciful speculation. Sources are judged as to their reliability by someone who is an authority in this field. The index is lengthy and the bibliography is rather long, even in quite small print, so plenty to check out if one wishes to do one’s own fact-seeking. Due to the sheer amount of information and attributed sources, this is an excellent reference work for those who wish to find out about the historical Merlin in depth.

The emphasis is very much on how the amalgam of shadowy myth and scantily-documented information rose to be both an historical individual and a powerful influence in both British and European affairs. Certainly, Dr Lawrence-Mathers’ familiarity with, and enthusiasm for, the subject matter communicates itself effortlessly. This is not is a New-Age work that puts together opinions and modern interpretations on spirituality, there are many other sources for those who crave such enlightenment, although it may be argued that perusing the genuine origins of the prophecies attributed to him would aid in this process.

Merlin is a figure so compelling that he influences people even to this day. Certainly the Neo-Pagan community abounds with witches and other ceremonial magic-workers who have taken his name as a potent talisman, both to inspire their own efforts and to advertise their powers to others. His legends are still broached in literature and his magic is still invoked. It may even be said of him that he stays a national figure, although without the authority that he carried nearer his birth. That authority and influence is documented in great detail here so this, then, is for the serious seeker after one great aspect of the truth of British mythology, or as close to the truth that research can get so many centuries since the original stories were spun. – Trevor Pyne

QUITE EXTRAORDINARY

2013-03-03T15:30:00.001Z

Peter Lamont. Extraordinary Beliefs: A Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

In this interesting book Peter Lamont, historian, psychologist, sceptical psychical researcher and one time professional magician examines the rhetoric used by both promoters and critiques of paranormal phenomena over the last two hundred years. He traces these developments across mesmerism, spiritualism, psychical research and 'scientific' parapsychology. He examines how the same experiences are framed differently by believers and sceptics, how each side manoeuvres for influence and the role of expert. He argues against simplistic sceptical notions that only certain kinds of subaltern people - the foolish, the ill- educated, women, non-whites, the working class - believe in extraordinary experiences, arguing that they are based on people’s actual experiences or the interpretation of the same.

He shows how these arguments remain fairly constant over the period, the same claims for and against ESP today echo those on mesmerism. By providing specific examples, he shows how each side interprets these experiences. Believers will often rely on the power of personal testimony; argue that failure on one occasion does not negate the possibility of “genuine” phenomena on others, that even being found out in fraud on some occasions does not mean it is present in all. Sceptics counter by arguing that human perception is fallible, that ordinary explanations should often be preferred over extra-ordinary ones, that fraud is always possible.

Often the battle over expertise revolves around the rival claims of scientists and magicians, those both sides will use the authority of both if they can. Lamont is particularly interest in the role of magicians, and the extent to which “true” psychic claims mirror the activities of professional “mind-readers”. He is clearly an expert on stage magic and the coverage of this topic is especially thorough.

Though these two are often seen as quite separate, and thanks to people like Houdini and Randi (who for some reason is not mentioned here) often seen as opposed, in reality the boundaries between the two were very porous; Lamont specifies the Piddington’s, Frederick Marion and Joseph Dunninger.

Dunninger is an interesting case; through much of his career his repute was of a psychic busting sceptic in the Houdini tradition, though one who was almost ambiguous as to his own “powers”. In his old age however he was promoted as a “genuine” psychic by Dr Berthold Eric Schwarz and was featured as such in some of the latter’s articles in Flying Saucer Review. Another modern equivalent that comes to mind was Kreskin who maintained a similar ambiguous position.

Another group of ambiguous performers are those like Darren Brown who aver that they neither use psychic powers nor trickery, but who use extraordinary normal abilities or psychological manipulation. Their sometimes rather convoluted explanations are often themselves misdirection. Of course this must be true of most magical tricks; if magicians reveal “how they are done” but can bet that either that explanation is misdirection itself, or the way it used to be done years ago. Magicians’ ethics do not allow for the revealing of trade secrets. For that reason Lamont does not tell us how the mind reading trick in the introduction was accomplished.

This raises an interesting point that Lamont does not cover, it is clearly in the interest of magicians to exaggerate the special skills, techniques training or even equipment in order to perform tricks adequately. Thus it appears even more improbable to psychical researchers that someone untrained (particularly, in their view, children, the working class, country folk, etc.) could fool them. The conditions are not of course the same; the vast majority of people who watch professional magicians know full well that they are watching tricks and are trying to work out how it is done. In the case of psychical phenomena we usually have people who predisposed not to think of trickery, much more confused and chaotic viewing conditions, pressure of group think etc.

Similarly sceptics, particularly magicians can come up with quite implausible and over complicated “normal” explanations. Lamont gives a good example from the early days of Rhine. A man and woman sit in adjacent rooms, she looks at the targets, and he writes down his guesses and shouts out when it is time for next guess. A loud fan is supposed to drown out any unconscious whispering. A magician came up with a complex explanation of how they could have cheated using a code. Lamont points out that this was quite unnecessary, for the woman who made the guesses also marked them, and nobody was supervising them! They could have just made the whole thing up (and for all I know spent the time having wild sex; a couple getting together was not all that easy in a strict religious university and here was manna from heaven courtesy of the naïve Dr Rhine).

In the final portion of the book Lamont looks at the rise of CSICOP and the formal ‘Skeptics’ movement, as an example of the construction of a new social category, one might almost say a new neo-tribe.

Though Lamont early on states that he does not believe in the paranormal, towards the end of the book he argues that the polarised division between believers and sceptics masks much more nuanced shades of opinion. He also notes that both believers and sceptics actually believe in things, it’s just that they believe in different things.

Lamont’s role as a historian of psychology does I think lead to something of an overlooking of social factors in both the promotion and rejection of unconventional beliefs; for example both believers and sceptics often adopt the role of moral crusaders, against materialism on one side and against irrationalism on the other, both have sought to defend various kinds of élite interests.

This should not detract from the value of this book to the historian of psychology, magic or psychical research and the lay enthusiast alike. – Peter Rogerson.

HAUNTED MINDS

2013-02-27T12:03:00.004Z

Stephen Frosh. Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Let me confess that there are large sections of this book, dealing with the “haunted “ nature of psychoanalysis and its Jewish roots, psychoanalytical interpretations of Old Testament stories, Freud’s ambiguous views on telepathy etc., which I am totally unqualified to review. It does not directly deal with “haunting” as understood by psychical researchers but it does contain some general themes which may be pertinent.

If there is a central theme, it is the influence of the unacknowledged past on the present, particularly where that past is hidden, locked away into what Frosh calls 'the Crypt'. Froth takes as example his own post-war British Jewish childhood in the 1950s, in which the Holocaust (not yet really spoken of) was present as something mysterious on the edges, a sense of something indefinably wrong in memory. Other examples would be that African American and African Caribbean people are haunted by slavery, or how the presence of American Indians haunts that country.

If the hauntings of victims is one thing, the haunting of the perpetrators and their descendants is another, Germany is still haunted by its Nazi past - can you imagine someone doing a German version of Who Do You Think You Are? - and similarly Russia and its former satellites are certainly haunted by the spectre of Communism and its crimes.

There are two kinds of ‘off-campus history’: the suppressed and hidden kind discussed by Frosh and the stuff that screams in your face, as for example in Northern Ireland, and it is perhaps a moot point as to which is the most dangerous.

An interesting connection between psychoanalysis and classical ghost stories are that they are both phenomenon of bourgeois repression. Both inhabit the realms of the respectable who repress those aspects of their personality and history that do not fit in with the idealised bourgeois self. As the studies by Owen, Stuart-Maxwell and Clarke have shown the working class ghost is something much more open and communal. The classic Victorian ghost belongs to the secret realm of the idealised middle class home, and its whisperings point to secrets that cannot be acknowledged. Such stories generate a “terrible fascination”, as witness the Cheltenham haunting, where the respectable family are haunted by the image of the woman who had fallen into the abyss.

Behind many ghost stories there is a kind of projection , it is not me who is haunted by the unwanted past and its traumatic memories, it is the bricks and mortar.

Such stories can be metaphors for that which cannot be spoken of. One story I was told concerned a door which resisted attempts to open it, in a house which was somehow “wrong” (further details were too traumatic to relate). It cannot be a coincidence that the person who told me this had a family riddled with secrets (a US marine father who turned out to be gay (this in the 1960s), and who worked with secrets (the family never knew quite what) and that the only place my informant knew as a real home in her peripatetic military childhood turned out to be a quintessentially American small town, under which was a massive nuclear arsenal!) No wonder that door was so reluctant to open.

One does not have therefore to be a psychoanalyst to realise that ghosts are not something that can be hunted down by pseudoscientific equipment. -- Peter Rogerson