Forteana

The End of Books

2012-02-28T10:23:00.000Z

The picture above, showing passengers on the Paris metro listening on earphones rather than engrossed in reading books, was drawn almost 120 years ago by a man named Albert Robida. It’s an illustration for Octave Uzanne’s short story “La Fin des Livres” (“The End of Books”), published in 1895 -- when the most advanced audio technology consisted of cumbersome Edison phonographs with wax cylinders, hand-cranks and brass horns.

As 19th century predictions of future technology go, I think this one is pretty impressive. The story is set in London, and concerns a group of Victorian gentlemen who discuss what the future might hold. When one of them is asked about the future of books, he says “If by books you speak of our countless collections of paper, printed, sewn and bound... I tell you frankly that I do not believe—and the progress of electricity and modern mechanics forbids me to believe—that Gutenberg's invention should not soon fall more or less into disuse as a medium for our intellectual products.”

“Gutenberg’s invention” refers to the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. Ironically, the text of Uzanne and Robida’s “La Fin des Livres” is now available in electronic form on a website called Project Gutenberg!

The picture of the metro passengers shows them plugged into communal devices built into the train, but Uzanne and Robida also predicted personal media players (as depicted on the left): “there will be recording cylinders as light as celluloid pens... devices for the pocket, around the neck or on a shoulder strap that will be held in a single tube like a case of spectacles.” This strikes me as particularly impressive, because miniaturization is one aspect of modern technology that most early science fiction failed to predict -- even into the 1930s and 40s.

So is the prophecy of “the end of books” coming true? In one sense it is, and in another it isn’t. Uzanne and Robida imagined that the printed word would die out, to be replaced by voice recordings. There is little sign of this happening -- there are such things as “audio books”, but only as a fringe interest. Most people use the written word as much as they ever did... if not more. But the “written word” appears increasingly on LCD screens rather than printed paper -- so in that sense this is one Victorian prediction that was spot on!

Angels in Machines

2012-02-22T09:41:00.000Z

Most of the planets and moons in the Solar System are named after characters from Greek mythology. The moons of Uranus are an exception, with most of the names swiped from Shakespeare’s plays. But two of the moons, Umbriel and Belinda, aren’t Shakespearean characters. They sound like they might be, but actually they come from a narrative poem by Alexander Pope. It’s called The Rape of the Lock, and it’s the daftest poem in the English language.

The phrase “The Rape of the Lock” may bring a bizarre image to mind, but you’d be wrong. It’s not a lock in the sense of a keyhole, but a lock of hair. Pope was writing in the genteel and sophisticated 18th century, when young women were obsessed with following all the latest fashions in clothes and hairstyles (times have changed since then, obviously). In those days, to go up behind a woman and snip off a lock of her hair was a crime of the utmost seriousness -- and if the victim was at all important (or thought she was), then it would very likely start a war. Well no, it wouldn’t... but Pope was a satirist, so he was allowed to exaggerate. The Rape of the Lock is a heroic tragedy modelled on Greek epics like the story of the Trojan War.

Belinda is the heroine of the story. When she discovers that a lock of her hair has been cut off, she goes into what can best be described as a hissy fit. Or that’s how it might be described today -- in Pope’s time, it was called a “fit of spleen”. Unknown to the people around her, Belinda has a whole host of invisible sprites who look after her every need. Umbriel is one of them. When she has her hissy fit, he heads off on an undercover mission to the Cave of Spleen (in the internal logic of the poem, this all makes perfect sense). The cave turns out to be a pretty cool place: “Now glaring Fiends, and Snakes on rolling Spires, Pale Spectres, gaping Tombs, and Purple Fires: Now Lakes of liquid Gold, Elysian Scenes, And Crystal Domes, and Angels in Machines.”

I’ve no idea what “Angels in Machines” means, but it sounds distinctly surreal. The surreal aspect of the poem was picked up by Aubrey Beardsley in his illustration The Cave of Spleen from 1896 (detail below):

So what happened to the lock of hair? It rose up into the sky and became a new star which could be seen through telescopes (“Galileo’s eyes”). Maybe that’s where they got the idea for the moons of Uranus!

A Virtual Spaceship

2012-02-16T14:27:00.000Z

Last month, the BBC ran a show called Stargazing Live over three consecutive nights. The middle instalment was the most interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it featured a surprisingly (for television) level-headed segment about UFOs, featuring cameos by David Clarke and Mark Pilkington. Secondly, a young astrophysicist from Oxford University called Andrew Pontzen showed a computer simulation of galaxy formation (the screenshot above is taken from a clip he posted on his YouTube channel).

The simulation interested me because that’s the sort of thing I did for my PhD thirty years ago... except that in those days we had to wrestle with mediaeval technology, so the results didn’t look as impressive (example on the left, complete with hand-written labels). But the principle was exactly the same. In one of Andrew’s videos (called “This is a Galaxy”), he uses graphics technology to fly through a simulated galaxy. The result is enormously impressive, but he wasn’t the first to have this idea. I looked back through my thesis, and found the following:

“I devised an interactive program based on GAL64, which produces axonometric projections [of the simulated galaxy] on the screen of the Vector General unit at the University of Manchester Computer Graphics Unit. Unlike the GAL64 views the magnification and viewpoint of these pictures are not fixed, but can be set arbitrarily by means of the Vector General hand control units. Because the operation of the program thus bears a marked similarity to piloting an intergalactic spaceship, it was given the appropriately spaceship-like name of VALKYR.”

Why did I call the program “VALKYR”? I don’t think it stood for anything, unless I made up some extremely contrived acronym. It’s just that in those days, program names were limited to six characters (I told you the technology was mediaeval). I was a big fan of Wagner at the time, and that was the closest I could get to “Valkyrie”!

In those days, my science fiction reading inclined towards the arty end of the spectrum, with authors like Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard. However, I discovered long afterwards that a much more downmarket writer named Alfred Coppel did write a couple of stories featuring a spaceship named Valkyr -- “The Rebel of Valkyr” in 1950, and a sequel “Forbidden Weapon” the following year. As you can see from the scan below (taken from the British Edition of Marvel Science Stories), Valkyr was an appropriately mediaeval spaceship!

Devilish superstitions

2012-02-10T13:40:00.000Z

Paul Jackson sent this photograph of a Bronze Age round barrow at Wilsford Cum Lake near Amesbury in Wiltshire. The barrow—a prehistoric burial mound—is the grassy hump in the background (it can be seen more clearly in the inset, which comes from Google Street View). Barrows of this kind are fairly common in Wiltshire, as well as other parts of Britain, but this is a particularly well-preserved example. It’s 4.4 metres (14½ feet) high and 36 metres (118 feet) in diameter; it dates from circa 1000 BC.

Round barrows are artificial mounds, built during the Bronze Age for the burial of high-status individuals. Over time, however, their original purpose—and man-made origin—was forgotten. They were widely considered “the work of the devil”, and in some parts of the country round barrows are known as “Devil’s humps”.

Over the centuries, ignorant superstition has attributed a wide range of phenomena to the “work of the Devil”, from eclipses and fossils to warts, migraines and masturbation. As mentioned in The Devil of Rennes-le-Chateau, masturbation continued to be demonized well into the nineteenth century. Production of excessive amounts of semen (to get back to the subject of the photograph) was thought to lead to loss of energy and vitality. Ejaculation twice a week into the marital uterus was good; ejaculation six times a day over your jeans was bad.

One of the most vocal proponents of the anti-masturbation movement was William Acton, who wrote in 1857: “Apathy, loss of memory, abeyance of concentrative power, indisposition for action and incoherence of language are the most characteristic mental phenomena resulting from masturbation in young men. The large expenditure of semen has exhausted the vital force.”

The “too much ejaculation is bad for you” superstition is surprisingly widespread. As well as Victorian England, similar beliefs can be found in the Tantric Yoga and Kamasutra-style “sacred sex” practices of India, and in Taoism and Qi Gong in China. In the context of the latter system, the loss of ejaculatory fluid is associated with a corresponding loss of “qi”, the vital life force -- resulting in premature aging, general fatigue and susceptibility to disease.

The word “cum”, by the way, is Latin for “with”. Wilsford Cum Lake is a parish made up of two small villages, one called Wilsford and the other called Lake. I’m sure that’s what you thought as soon as you saw Paul’s photograph.

The History of Biblical Literalism

2012-02-04T10:41:00.000Z

Here is another photograph I took on my recent visit to the British Museum. It’s one of the most famous items in the Museum -- the 11th tablet of the Gilgamesh epic. It recounts an ancient, and supposedly fictional, story that was popular in ancient Babylon and Assyria (this particular example comes from Nineveh in Assyria, and dates from the 7th century BC). The 11th tablet has become famous, or notorious, for its description of a great flood sent by the gods to destroy the world. A character named Utnapishtim is forewarned of the event, and he constructs a large boat in order to save as many living things as possible.

Undoubtedly the Hebrew scribes who were exiled in Babylon a hundred years later would have encountered writings such as this... and that, of course, brings us on to the thorny subject of Biblical Literalism. It dawned on me a few weeks ago that the notion that Christianity begins and ends with the Bible is a relatively recent invention. Christianity is 2000 years old, but Biblical Literalism (as a widespread concept) can be no more than 500 years old. Printing, in the context of European culture, was only invented in the 15th century, before which Bibles were rare and expensive hand-written manuscripts. They were written in Latin, too, so most people wouldn’t have been able to read them even if they’d got their hands on a copy.

In its early days, Christianity was typical of the religions of its time. Religions in those days were centred, not on writings, but on symbolism and ritual... a wide variety of rituals, but all of them in one way or another aimed at personal transformation. This was true, in broad terms, of the Mystery religions of Graeco-Roman Europe as well as the “Eastern” religions of Persia and India. While there are great differences of detail, the basic concept was much the same. Writings, if they existed, were for the priesthood, not the people... and usually they were meant for guidance only, not as a central focus of belief.

Early in the 5th century AD, St Augustine wrote a treatise called “The Literal Meaning of Genesis”... but he was arguing for a symbolic, spiritual interpretation of that work, not a literal interpretation in the modern sense. Augustine’s mother was a Christian, but in his early years he turned to another Mystery religion of the time, Manichaeism, before converting back to Christianity. So he was able to look at Christianity from an outsider’s perspective, and see that people who insisted on the word-for-word truth of the Bible were merely making themselves look stupid: “Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world... If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?”

The notion that Christianity should be centred on the Bible, and not on its rituals, originated in 16th century Europe, as more and more people gained access to affordable copies of the Bible in a language they could understand. This was a brand new type of religion... one that belongs to a period in which books are common and everyone can read. That simply wasn’t the case when Christianity started out.

The English Puritans of the 16th and 17th century were amongst the earliest Biblical Literalists. They were persecuted by the established churches (both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England), and to escape this persecution many of them emigrated to America, where they were among the first European settlers. In some sense, therefore, America is founded on Biblical Literalism. That’s probably why most people in the English-speaking world today (atheists just as much as Christians) see Biblical Literalism as the “purest” form of Christianity. That may be true... but the fact remains it’s only a quarter the age of Christianity as a whole!

Annual Report

2012-01-29T09:56:00.000Z

The Forteana blog has survived its first year! When I started it in January 2011, it was only meant as a quick test to work out how to use Blogger... hence the rather unimaginative title. But since then I’ve done 130 posts, on a wide range of topics including (clockwise from top left): unusual museums, weirdness in renaissance art, out-of-place aliens, folklore, cryptozoology, retro-futuristic science, ancient civilizations and witchcraft.

Much to my surprise, I see that I’ve had 47,000 page views -- an average of 360 views per post. So a big “Thank You” to everyone who reads the site and links to it... especially Patrick Huyghe and Rick Stokes at The Anomalist, who are by far my most consistent referrers! I’m also grateful to the various people who’ve supplied me with material when I was in danger of running out of ideas... particularly Paul Jackson, who has travelled the world in search of photographs for the blog (or more accurately, he’s travelled the world taking photographs, which he’s then kindly let me post on the blog).

An obvious mistake to make when starting a blog is to post all your good material early on, before anyone has started reading it. That’s what I did, and it’s meant that some posts that were really interesting (in my biased opinion) have languished with virtually no page views. In this context, I could mention: Dinosaur Orbit, Precogging Philip K. Dick, Nick Pope at the MOD, Seth Shostak on SETI and Cosmic Geometry in the West Country.

Several of the earliest posts were based on letters that I’d sent to Fortean Times over the years, but were never printed. These included The Da Vinci Code and Mediaeval Symbolism, The Great Moon Hoax and Alien Simulacrum (left). As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, my success rate at FT has shot up over the last few months -- I’ve even got a full-page “Forum” article in the current issue. I’m getting very bigheaded about this -- I’ve just set up a new web page to keep track of my appearances in Fortean Times!

On the Diverse Benefits of being Struck by Lightning

2012-01-23T14:27:00.000Z

A couple of days ago I came across two unusual tales from the past, which demonstrate that being hit by lightning isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The first is recounted in Mark Pilkington’s excellent little book Far Out: 101 Strange Tales From Science's Outer Edge. It concerns an event that is reputed to have occurred during a service at Wells Cathedral in Somerset in 1596 (the cathedral is famous for the sculptures on its west front, shown on the left, which illustrate the Day of Judgment).

According to Isaac Casaubon’s Adversaria, written a few years after the incident, the Cathedral was struck by a bolt of lightning and the congregation inside was thrown to the floor. When they recovered, no-one was hurt, but they all bore tattoos of the Cross on their bodies. Even the Bishop of Wells and his wife were marked in this way. This was an early example of what later came to be called “keranography”... the theory that lightning could imprint images on the skin in a kind of spontaneous, natural photography. Although the idea is dismissed as pseudoscience today, it’s perfectly true that non-fatal lightning strikes can leave tattoo-like marks on the body. No doubt the pious people of Wells in 1596 interpreted these as the sign of the cross!

A few hours after reading Mark’s book, I got an e-mail from Ray Girvan drawing my attention to a curious story about Mary Anning (1799 - 1847), who lived in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast... about 40 miles south of Wells. Mary Anning is the greatest figure in Lyme’s history: she discovered the first fossilized ichthyosaur when she was just twelve years old, and went on to become one of the most highly skilled and highly regarded fossil-hunters of the nineteenth century. She was recently voted the third most influential British woman in the history of science. And—if you believe a local legend—it’s all because she was struck by lightning when she was a toddler.

Much as I hate Wikipedia and its militant skepticism, there’s no denying that if something appears there—and remains there for more than a few hours without being tagged or deleted—then it must be undisputably True. And the story about the lightning strike is right there in the Wikipedia article on Mary Anning. Apparently, when she was 15 months old, she was sheltering under a tree with three women when the tree was hit by lightning. The three women were killed, but little Mary survived. That much is fact. But what of her family’s claim that the lightning strike turned her into a genius? Obviously no-one can know, but I’d like to think it was true!

Green Children from Outer Space

2012-01-17T15:05:00.000Z

On a visit to East Anglia last week, Paul Jackson found time to make a short detour to the old village of Woolpit (left). From a Fortean point of view, Woolpit is famous for just one thing: the legend of the Green Children who mysteriously appeared in the village some time during the 12th century. The children were dressed in strange clothes, and spoke a strange language... but did they really have green skin? There are a number of possibilities, ranging from the mundane to the truly bizarre. It might be that their “strange clothing” was green in colour, and garbled retellings over the years transformed this into green skin. Or their skin might have had a mildly green tinge, caused by some medical condition or a peculiarity of their diet. But if they really were bright green... surely that can only mean they came from another planet!

I first came across this theory at a talk given by Duncan Lunan at the World Science Fiction convention in Glasgow in 2005. Apparently he gave a similar talk at the Fortean Times UnConvention in 1997, but I missed it (looking back at the programme, this was because I was listening to Paul Devereux’s talk on Earthlights in the other auditorium!). I can’t remember all the details of Duncan’s theory, but I do remember being very impressed with it. His basic idea was that the children had been teleported to Earth from a distant planet which always keeps the same face towards its sun, and hence has a permanent “twilight zone”. The Knights Templar were also part of the theory, although I don’t remember exactly how they fitted in (they came into the story after the children had arrived on Earth... I don’t think anyone has ever suggested the Templars themselves came from another planet!).

I buttonholed Duncan after his talk, and told him he ought to write a book on the subject (this was just after The Da Vinci Code had come out, so mediaeval weirdness was the height of fashion). To my astonishment, he said he had written a book about it but it had been rejected by a string of publishers. However I’m pleased to see that the book will finally appear later this year: Children from the Sky: A Speculative Interpretation of a Mediaeval Mystery. (As an aside, Duncan Lunan is one of two famous people I’ve introduced myself to who insisted they’d met me before, even when I’m sure they hadn’t... the other was Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal!).

The idea that the Green Children came from another planet isn’t original to Duncan Lunan, and he doesn’t pretend it is. In fact, the idea is just about as old as it could possibly be. The notion of “coming from another planet” can’t really predate the notion that the planets are other worlds like the Earth. In the 12th century, when the Green Children appeared, “planets” were simply points of light in the sky that moved independently of the fixed stars. In The man who invented aliens, I described how the true nature of planets was first speculated on by Giordano Bruno in the 16th century. This speculation was picked up by the English writer Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621: “If the earth moves, it is a planet, and shines to them in the moon, and to the other planetary inhabitants, as the moon and they do to us upon the earth: but shine she doth, as Galileo, Kepler, and others prove, and then per consequens, the rest of the planets are inhabited.”

But are they inhabited by Green Children? Quite possibly, according to Burton a few sentences later: “Then (I say) the earth and they be planets alike, moved about the sun, the common centre of the world alike, and it may be those two green children which Nubrigensis speaks of in his time, that fell from heaven, came from thence.”

Art and Archaeology

2012-01-11T11:38:00.000Z

Ever since it was featured on the cover of Fortean Times last November, I’ve been intending to go to the Tate Gallery’s John Martin: Apocalypse exhibition... and I finally got round to it just before it closed. It certainly lived up to its billing -- a huge exhibition of huge canvases, by one of the most imaginative and technically brilliant painters of the nineteenth century. Photography wasn’t allowed inside the exhibition, so I had to settle for the outside of it (see left). In any case, Martin is one of those painters whose work loses virtually all its impact when it’s reproduced photographically... even the twelve-foot high poster shown here failed to capture the vivid, glowing colours and almost three dimensional depth of the originals.

The most astonishing fact about John Martin is that he is so obscure. I only stumbled across his work last year, when I was doing some picture research for this blog... and then by coincidence read the article in Fortean Times a couple of months later. In his own time, Martin was immensely popular with the general public, but reviled by the British art establishment -- who saw him as a mere “entertainer” or “showman” rather than an “artist”. This pigeonholing seems to have sealed his fate for posterity.

Martin’s depictions of the Apocalypse (such as the one shown in the poster above: The Great Day of His Wrath) were late works, dating from the 1850s. His best paintings actually came thirty or forty years earlier. Many of these portray vast, decadent cities that in one way or another incurred the Wrath of God: Sodom and Gomorrah, Gibeon, Nineveh, Babylon and even Pandemonium... the Capital City of Hell. All these monumental cityscapes—some of them distinctly science-fictional looking—came from Martin’s own vivid imagination. His painting of the Fall of Nineveh, for example, dates from 1827... twenty years before the ruins of that ancient city were first excavated by archaeologists.

John Martin had to conjure up the capital city of the Assyrian Empire from his imagination. I, on the other hand, merely had to travel two miles from the Tate Gallery to the British Museum... where there are several rooms filled with wall sculptures plundered from the ruins of Nineveh. Unlike the Tate, the British Museum does permit photography: the picture on the right depicts Ashurbanipal, the last king of Assyria (685 – 627 BC), killing a lion. This panel comes from Ashurbanipal’s Northern Palace in Nineveh, and of course it would have been on display in 612 BC when the city finally fell to Babylon (though perhaps not quite as spectacularly as John Martin imagined it).

In Graeco-Roman culture, Ashurbanipal was referred to as Sardanapalus, and in this form his downfall can be seen in a painting called The Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix -- a French contemporary of John Martin. The Sardanapalus painting dates from 1827, the same year as Martin’s Fall of Nineveh, and it’s as vast and spectacular as anything Martin produced. The French, however, don’t have the same hangups as the British when it comes to labelling cool stuff as art: they put it on display in the Louvre!

Fortean statistics

2012-01-05T13:56:00.000Z

There’s another letter from me in the current issue of Fortean Times. They’ve printed it under the title of “Damned Data” (which of course was Charles Fort’s term for Fortean data), although my original title was “Damned Data and Statistics”... alluding to the cliché about “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics”. Personally I think statistics is a very useful tool for organizing and understanding data, and it’s a shame it has such a bad reputation with the general public. Presumably for that reason, there have been very few serious attempts to apply statistical methods to Fortean data: one notable exception can be found in Damon Knight’s biography Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (the picture on the left comes from Paul Jackson’s copy of the book).

People often think of statistics as just “number crunching” -- for example analysing how often events of a particular type occur (as in the case illustrated above). But another, more interesting, use of statistics is to test a hypothesis against the observed data. The Bayesian approach (which I mentioned in the letter to Fortean Times, and which was discussed by Ian Simmons in an FT article way back in June 2000) is a case in point. If you have a number of competing hypotheses (or “theories”, in the everyday sense of the word), then Bayes’ Theorem allows you to calculate the probability of each hypothesis being correct given the observed data. The catch, however, is that any old arm-waving hypothesis won’t do -- it has to be a hypothesis with precisely defined mathematical predictions. And that’s where most Fortean hypotheses fall down!

But the situation isn’t hopeless. After I sent the letter to FT, I did happen across a scientific paper that addresses a quasi-Fortean problem using Bayesian statistics. I mentioned this a few weeks ago in Searching for Alien Artifacts -- the paper is called “On the likelihood of non-terrestrial artifacts in the Solar System”, and it uses Bayes' Theorem to estimate the probability that an undetected alien space probe exists somewhere in the Solar System. The reason this problem is amenable to mathematical treatment, when so many Fortean problems aren’t, is that you don’t need to know anything about the properties of the alien spacecraft or where it came from or what it’s doing -- all you need to know is whether current technology could detect it or not. You could extend the same idea to other Fortean subjects, such as searching for the Orang Pendek, Yeti or other cryptids.

With regard to my own Fortean statistics, things are looking up. When I started this blog at the end of January last year, I mentioned that Fortean Times hardly ever printed any of my letters. This was true: I’d sent them fifteen letters over a period of fifteen years, and only three of them had seen print. Since then, I’ve sent five more letters and all of them have been printed! On top of that, I’ve had one erratum and two book reviews printed as well -- making a grand total of eight appearances in twelve issues. I’m not sure how long this “lucky streak” will last, but it makes a good impression on my Fortean CV!

Another Templar Head

2011-12-30T16:57:00.000Z

Several months ago, in Damned Data, I was musing about the huge gulf that exists between academics and ordinary people when it comes to the mysterious “Head” that was supposed to have been worshipped by the Knights Templar. The academics spit blood and say the Head never existed, while ordinary people wonder how they can be so sure. I mentioned the inconvenient fact that a panel painting of a Head is on display in the church at Templecombe in Somerset, which was formerly a preceptory of the Templars. And according to Juliet Faith, in a book I’ve just read called The Knights Templar in Somerset, there is another mysterious Head, in another church with Templar connections in another part of Somerset.

The second Head (pictured left) is a life-sized wooden carving found in 1959 in the church at Cameley, south of Bristol, during renovation work on the roof. Unlike Templecombe, the name Cameley doesn’t instantly suggest a Templar holding -- but it’s adjacent to another village called Temple Cloud which does. Both Cameley and Temple Cloud came into the hands of the Templars early in the thirteenth century.

Strangely (and conspiracy theorists can make what they want of this) the Cameley head is not on display to the public, and has never been made available for scientific analysis. Visually, it has striking similarities to the Templecombe head -- the wide, staring eyes, the forked beard, and the lack of a halo which you would expect if the image was meant to represent Jesus Christ. Another view of the Cameley head, which shows the unorthodox iconography even more clearly, is shown below.

Personally, I can't see why the Cameley Head couldn’t have been an “idol” worshipped by the Templars. The style and workmanship look mediaeval. It’s not as if the Head had to represent something really outlandish, like a demon or a pagan god. In the Middle Ages, the notion of “idolatry” would have encompassed the veneration of any unauthorized representation of a Christian saint, or even of Christ himself. Why academics find it so intolerable that the Templars could have worshipped such an image is beyond me.

The Mystic Nativity

2011-12-24T09:59:00.000Z

Botticelli's Mystic Nativity is one of the best known paintings in the National Gallery in London. One of the reasons it's called "Mystic" is because the painting is full of symbolism taken from the Book of Revelation. This is stated explicitly in a Greek inscription at the top of the picture, together with the date it was painted: the year 1500. Now 1500 may not be quite as round a number as 1000 or 2000, but it was round enough to attract its share of "End of the World" prophecies -- including the Second Coming of Christ, which is what Botticelli was alluding to in this painting.

As well as its religious symbolism, The Mystic Nativity is important for its "mystical" artistic style, which had a major influence on British painting of the Victorian period -- in particular that of the Pre-Raphaelites (in the year 1500 Raphael was 17 years old whereas Botticelli was 55 -- so he was literally a pre-Raphaelite!).

At this point it would be logical to include an image of The Mystic Nativity, but it's such a hackneyed Christmas image that I won't bother (there's a good zoomable version on the National Gallery website). Instead, here is a less well-known Nativity painting in the Pre-Raphaelite style. This is a huge watercolour by Sir Edward Burne-Jones called The Star of Bethlehem, which was painted in 1890 for the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. To me this captures the essence of the word "mysticism" much better than the Botticelli version.

Trojans in Taunton and Totnes

2011-12-18T14:22:00.000Z

The impressive mosaic shown on the left is on display in the newly refurbished Museum of Somerset in Taunton. The mosaic, which is 4.3 metres (about 14 feet) square, is one of a number unearthed in Somerset over the last hundred years. This one dates from around 340 AD, at which time it graced a Roman-style villa at Low Ham near Somerton. It consists of five panels illustrating an episode from the life of the Trojan hero Aeneas, as related in Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid. This particular episode concerns the encounter between Aeneas and Dido, Queen of Carthage (the story starts with the right hand panel, then continues anticlockwise via the top panel and left-hand panel to the bottom panel, and then ends with the central panel).

Although the mosaic is in the Roman style, and the legend it depicts was taken from a Roman epic, the people who lived in the Somerset villa would have been native Britons. Ancient Troy was a long way from Britain, so why did they pick this particular legend? It turns out that the British liked to trace their ancestry back to the Trojans, just as the Romans did. In the same way that Aeneas was the mythical founder of Rome, his grandson Brutus was the mythical founder of Britain (the very name "Britain" is supposed to be derived from "Brutus").

The oldest surviving reference to the Brutus legend can be found in Historia Brittonum, written by Nennius in the ninth century AD. A greatly embellished version was included by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his twelfth century History of the Kings of Britain. According to the latter account, Brutus arrived in what is now the county of Devon: he sailed up the River Dart and came ashore in Totnes, at a spot which is marked to this day by a "Brutus Stone" (if you believe the local Tourist Industry).

Over the last twenty years or so, Totnes has become a major New Age centre -- with more than its fair share of shamans, fortune tellers and alternative therapists. This may be a coincidence, or it may be that the New Agers find themselves attracted to such a critical site in Britain's legendary history, in much the same way that Glastonbury hippies are attracted to the spot where Joseph of Arimathea is said to have brought the Holy Grail.

Like all legends, the story of Brutus is likely to be made up largely of guesswork and wishful thinking. But is there any truth to it at all? Legends sometimes encode real history, with individual characters symbolizing whole groups of people. Maybe the Brutus legend was meant to symbolize the theory that the Celtic people of the British Isles originally came here from the Eastern Mediterranean -- a theory that at least some members of the New Age movement still subscribe to today!

Searching for alien artifacts

2011-12-12T17:03:00.000Z

For many people, the very idea of needing to search for alien artifacts is ludicrous. After all, alien spacecraft can be seen in the skies of Earth every day of the week, and virtually every archaeological specimen older that three thousand years was fabricated, if not by extraterrestrials, then by dim-witted humans under the guidance of extraterrestrials. So for people who think along those lines, there's nothing to search for: the Earth is already overflowing with alien artifacts. But scientists (who are part of the Conspiracy) aren't allowed to admit that -- they have to look further afield. I've just been reading three fascinating articles on the subject at arXiv.org:

The first paper is called On the likelihood of non-terrestrial artifacts in the Solar System. It's based on the idea that the most probable type of artifact would be an unmanned space probe between 1 and 10 metres in size. The authors use my favourite mathematical formula, Bayes' Theorem, to estimate the probability that such a probe exists in the Solar System but has not yet been detected (I'm annoyed by this, because I could easily have done the calculation myself, but I wasn't clever enough to think of doing it). They conclude that the probability that there are no NTAs ("non-terrestrial artifacts") waiting to be found on the surface of the Earth is 75%, that there are none on the surface of the Moon is 65%, and that there are none on the surface of Mars is 50%. But when it comes to the remainder of the Solar System, it's a different matter altogether: the authors say they "have almost no confidence that NTAs are absent".

There is a natural tendency to assume that any advanced alien civilization would send out interstellar space probes, just as we would ourselves if we had the money. But what if the aliens simply stay at home and mind their own business? We might still be able to detect their "artifacts", as shown in the second paper: Detection Technique for Artificially-Illuminated Objects in the Outer Solar System and Beyond. In this case, the artifacts in question are city lights. The night-side of the Earth (the side facing away from the Sun) is covered in bright little pinpoints of light -- and these add up to quite a lot of light coming from a place that, according to the laws of nature, should be pitch black. Any planet with a reasonably advanced civilization is likely to be the same, giving it a characteristic signature in terms of both the intensity and the spectrum of the light emitted.

The first two papers assume the aliens are at the same technological level as ourselves, or slightly ahead of it. But what if they were millions of years ahead? A really advanced civilization might be capable of harvesting the entire energy of a star, or of manipulating the structure of space-time. This possibility is addressed in the third paper: Black Holes: Attractors for Intelligence?

An accretion disk around a black hole is the most efficient source of energy in the universe. Such disks are known to exist in low-mass X-Ray binary (LMXB) systems, as shown in the NASA artist's impression on the left. It's conceivable that such systems could be created artificially by a sufficiently advanced intelligence -- but even naturally occurring ones might attract advanced civilizations to their vicinity, in order to tap into the readily available energy and possibly for other uses as well (such as time travel or ecologically friendly waste disposal). Even without understanding the details of the alien technology, the paper suggests that we might be able to detect it through anomalies in the energy flow from LMXBs.

Fossil Hoaxes and Simulacra

2011-12-06T15:24:00.000Z

Today, it's taken for granted that fossils are the petrified remains of once-living animals. This idea has been around since antiquity, but from the days of ancient Greece right up to the eighteenth century it was in constant competition with an alternative theory: that fossils, although formed in the shape of living creatures, have never actually been alive themselves -- they've been made of stone right from the start. As with so many "wrong" ideas, this one appears to have originated with Aristotle, or at any rate it was popularized by him. Aristotle believed that fossils were spontaneously created inside solid rock as the result of a natural creative force.

Inevitably, when Aristotle's ideas were appropriated by the early Christians, this "natural creative force" was interpreted as God. One of the last and most enthusiastic proponents of this theory of fossil formation was Johann Beringer, a Professor at the University of Würzburg in Germany. In 1726 he published a remarkable illustrated book, Lithographiæ Wirceburgensis, which can now be read online. You can skip the text (which is in Latin) -- the pictures at the end are the important thing. Beringer's fossils don't look like anyone else's, before or since. Here are just a few of them, depicting spiders on their webs, strange chimerical creatures and even frogs caught in the act of mating!

Of course, Beringer was the victim of a hoax. The fossils were carved out of limestone by students of his, spurred on by a couple of rival professors that Beringer later took to court over the affair. It's said that Beringer tried to buy up all the existing copies of his book so he could destroy them... it's a good thing for Fortean posterity that he didn't succeed!

One of Beringer's contemporaries was Johann Scheuchzer. Unlike Beringer, Scheuchzer held the "correct" view that fossils were the remains of once-living life-forms... except that he believed they were all deposited during the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis. Scheuchzer was particularly interested in fossil plants, and he wrote a book on the subject called Herbarium Diluvianum, published in 1723. Like Beringer's book, this is in Latin and can be read online.

The picture on the left, taken from Scheuchzer's book, appears to show a couple of human simulacra seen in fossilized bark. As far as I can make out from the Latin text (or rather, from the garbled translation of it that I got out of Google), the simulacrum on the right has been embellished by a crude rustic hand using a paint-brush, whereas the one on the left is entirely the product of Nature. Of these two assertions, I can readily believe the first but I'm dubious about the second. I suspect the engraver has subtly "improved" the original... the 18th century equivalent of photoshopping!

Sea Serpents, Logic and Lewis Carroll

2011-11-30T16:15:00.000Z

Here's something I came across recently that struck me as rather amusing (although cryptozoologists might disagree). It comes from a book called Mathematics in Victorian Britain, and it's meant to illustrate the concept of a syllogism -- the basic form of logical argument in classical (Aristotelian) philosophy.

There are three parts to a syllogism: (1) a particular premise, (2) a universal premise and (3) a conclusion. The conclusion follows logically from the two premises, and must be true if the premises are. A common example of a syllogism given in textbooks is (1) Socrates is a man, (2) All men are mortal, (3) Socrates is mortal.

So what do we have here? Well, it's a syllogism, but a much more convoluted one than the Socrates example:

(1) That story of yours, about your once meeting the sea-serpent, always sets me off yawning [particular premise]

(2) I never yawn, unless when I'm listening to something totally devoid of interest [universal premise]

(3) That story of yours, about your once meeting the sea-serpent, is totally devoid of interest [conclusion]

This comes from a book called Symbolic Logic, written by Lewis Carroll... the same Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark. "Lewis Carroll" was the pseudonym of Charles Dodgson (1832 - 1898), who worked as a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University. Symbolic Logic is one of his less well-known works -- a light-hearted exposition of the subject aimed at a non-technical audience. Carroll/Dodgson devised a graphical representation (which can be seen in the illustration above) involving the placing of coloured counters on a grid after the manner of a board-game. Mathematical games were very popular in Victorian Britain, but I'm not sure if Carroll's "Game of Logic" ever took off!

Wikipedia's Hive Mind

2011-11-24T15:34:00.000Z

Since I started writing this blog, I've been doing a lot more internet research than I used to. And, almost inevitably, I've been using Wikipedia a lot more than I used to -- if only because it features so prominently in Google search results. For most mainstream subjects Wikipedia provides a reliable and objective source of information, but lurking under the surface there is something sinister. Wikipedia, by far the largest collaborative undertaking the world has ever seen, has developed a distinctive personality of its own... and it's not a pleasant personality. It comes across not so much in the visible content of the encyclopedia, but in what is omitted (or more accurately, deleted) from it, and the stridently authoritarian justifications to be found on the "Discussion" pages.

I've talked before about Wikipedia versus Forteana and the Shakespeare Authorship Question, but these are not isolated occurrences. The deletionists have targeted other heterodox ideas ranging from conspiracy theories to complementary medicine and climate change scepticism. If the material being deleted was simply the raving of an irrational crackpot, the situation would be understandable. But as often as not the deleted material was soberly written, well-balanced and carefully documented. The Wikipedia "hive mind" is systematically wiping out views it doesn't agree with... even if those views come from a Nobel Prize winner. The plasma physicist Hannes Alfvén is a case in point. Despite winning the Nobel Prize in 1970, his views on the subject of magnetic reconnection differed drastically from those of the scientific mainstream. In March this year, Michael Suede tried to insert a short, carefully researched section on Alfvén's views towards the end of the Wikipedia article on the subject. It was promptly tagged with a warning that "An editor has expressed a concern that this section lends undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, controversies or matters relative to the article subject as a whole". Shortly after, the whole section was deleted and Suede was banned from making further changes to Wikipedia.

So where does the Wikipedian Hive Mind come from? How can a collaboration between a potentially vast number of individuals result in such a clear-cut personality, with clear-cut interests, beliefs, opinions and prejudices? To answer these questions, we need to look at just what Wikipedia is, and how it functions.

Wikipedia was launched in 2001 as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". In practice, of course, "anyone" means "anyone with a computer and access to the internet". And there are a few other selection effects which may be less obvious. Wikipedia is written using an HTML-like mark-up language, which while it's relatively straightforward may deter the less technically inclined. Wikipedia doesn't pay, so people who are motivated by financial gain are unlikely to contribute... while those who have full-time jobs, and families to look after, may simply not have time to become involved. And no-one looking for personal fame is going to waste their time on Wikipedia: the use of anonymizing handles guarantees zero recognition in the world at large.

A recent study by the United Nations University in Maastricht analyzed the demographics of Wikipedia contributors. Most contributors are male: 87 per cent compared to just 13 per cent female. The average age of contributors is 26 years. Amongst Wikipedians as a whole, roughly a quarter are under 18 years of age, half are under 22, and three-quarters are under 30. Two-thirds of those surveyed were unmarried, and only 14 per cent had any children.

These statistics paint a clear picture of Wikipedians as young males with no family responsibilities. This explains some of the well-known characteristics of Wikipedia, such as its bias towards left-wing politics and its bias towards contemporary popular culture... but does it explain the bias against non-mainstream ideas and opinions?

An article a few year ago on the Times Higher Education website suggested that "what matters on Wikipedia is not your sources but the support of the community... the Wikipedia community that is, within which there is much talk about consensus, civility and reliable sources. Yet on closer examination, Wikipedians seem an unappealing bunch -- computer fanatics, generally male, usually teenagers. They see the world only from a youthful cab driver's perspective. If anyone disagrees with the Wikipedian consensus, their edits are reverted and they can be banned indefinitely."

What has happened is a classic example of positive and negative feedback loops. Individuals whose interests and world-views match those of the Wikipedian Hive Mind find their edits retained, and their opinions applauded on Discussion pages. So they contribute more and more -- that's positive feedback. Dissenters are subjected to negative feedback: their contributions are constantly altered or deleted, and they find themselves on the receiving end of sarcastic, often viciously ad-hominem, attacks on the Discussion pages. So they go away, and switch to doing something more rewarding somewhere else. As a result, Wikipedia conforms to the "one per cent rule": half of all edits are done by less than one per cent of users, and over two-thirds of articles have been written by less than two per cent of users.

Over the years, Wikipedia's collective personality has become more and more one-dimensional, reflecting the personality of the majority of its successful contributors. You might be forgiven for imagining that, with its emphasis on factuality and neutrality, this personality of Wikipedia's would be calm and rational and supremely objective. But not a bit of it. As Nicholson Baker wrote in the Guardian a few years ago: "There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking people's work... They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away". He quotes one of the victims of deletionism as saying "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sandcastles", while another victim "likened the organized deleters to book burners".

Wikipedia's editors make a big thing about a "neutral point of view", but really no-one over a certain age demands or expects everything they read to be written in a perfectly neutral way. Grown-ups just want the basic information, from whatever point of view, so they can form their own opinions. Instead, with Wikipedia's practice of deleting all material that is deemed to be "not notable", we've ended up with something much more insidious than a biased point-of-view... an encyclopedia that is biased by what is included and what is excluded.

Wikipedia dimly recognizes that the inclusion/exclusion problem exists... or at least, it did at one time. There used to be a Help page providing specific guidance on how to avoid what it called "Information Suppression". However, the page has not been updated since 9 January 2007, and it's now prefixed with a statement that "This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear." In other words, the information has been suppressed!

Anthropic principles

2011-11-18T14:48:00.000Z

The Anthropic Principle is one of the most controversial conjectures of modern cosmology. And it's not just controversial among philosophers and scientists, but among Forteans as well... as evidenced by the less than warm reception given to the talk by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince at last weekend's Fortean Times Unconvention. I've always been a big admirer of Lynn and Clive's historical researches, but I have to admit that when they strayed onto scientific subjects they rapidly got out of their depth (I'm sure I get equally out of my depth when I stray onto historical subjects... which I will do, further down this post!).

The attraction of the Anthropic Principle for Picknett and Prince is its supposed link to esoteric Hermeticism -- in particular, the idea that the Universe (macrocosm) mirrors the individual (microcosm), as depicted on the left (from Utriusque Cosmi by Robert Fludd, 1617). The very word Anthropic, with its suggestion of "anthropocentric" or "anthropomorphic", seems to support this. But really the Anthropic Principle has a lot more to do with the difference between a priori and a posteriori probabilities than with human beings per se.

Current cosmological models involve a number of parameters that are observed to have certain values, but the theory doesn't explain why they have these values and not other ones. Yet if any of the parameters differed by just a small fraction from their actual value, human beings would never have existed to ask the question. Therefore even if the a priori probability of the universe is very small, the fact that human beings exist makes it an absolute certainty in an a posteriori sense. As Sherlock Holmes famously said: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

It occurred to me that the Anthropic Principle extends to other "low probability" events besides the small matter of the creation of the Universe. Another example is the emergence of intelligent life on Earth. Many people (including hardened UFO skeptics) believe that intelligent life is an extremely rare phenomenon in the universe, and that the a priori probability of it emerging on any given planet is extremely low. And they may be right. All we know, from the fact that we exist, is that the probability is non-zero!

As I alluded to earlier, you can even extend the Anthropic Principle to historical speculation. Throughout recorded history there have been branch points at which humanity might have been wiped out, or at the very least civilized society might have crumbled... but it didn't. And of course it didn't, or I wouldn't be talking to you now via the World Wide Web. But that doesn't mean that in 999 out of a thousand alternate time-lines human history didn't come to an abrupt end.

A good example is the Third World War. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, there was a widespread belief in the inevitability of a nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West that would have resulted in the decimation of the world's population and the destruction of civilization as we know it. Countless science fiction novels and short stories of that period either portrayed such a war, or the devastated world that would be all that remained after it. Most of those stories were set in what is now the past -- and yet here we are, still blissfully unobliterated. Maybe there was a 99.99% chance of a world-ending nuclear conflict in the 1960s, but in retrospect 0.01% is as good as 100%. And maybe other low probability events can be explained the same way. What about the physics-defying trajectory of the bullet that killed JFK? Highly improbable, certainly -- but maybe he was the one who started World War Three in those 99.99% of alternative time-lines!

The government asks an astrologer for help (1666)

2011-11-14T16:47:00.000Z

The Great Fire of London occurred early in September 1666, causing major devastation to a large part of the city. It came just a year after London had been ravaged by the Great Plague, and five years after the British Monarchy had been restored after a dozen years of Parliamentary rule. In 1651, two years after the Parliamentary coup and fifteen years before the Great Fire, an astrologer named William Lilly published a book entitled Monarchy or no Monarchy in which he purported to depict future events via a series of symbolic illustrations he called "hieroglyphics". According to Lilly's autobiography, the hieroglyphic on page 7 of Monarchy or no Monarchy represents "a great sickness and mortality", while that on page 8 depicts "a great city all in flames of fire".

In October 1666, the month after the Great Fire, the government ordered an inquiry into the incident due to concerns that it may have been the work of a hostile nation. To the amusement of many people, the Committee called Lilly to give evidence before them. He was nervous at first, because (based on past experience) he was expecting them to make fun of him. But he was pleasantly surprised to find the Committee took him seriously as a source of information, and just wanted to know whether his astrological skills could tell them anything else... such as the identity of the imagined perpetrators!

Lilly explained that, back in 1651, he was unhappy with the rule of Parliament (obviously a politically correct thing to say after the Restoration) and that he "was desirous, according to the best knowledge God had given me, to make enquiry by the art I studied, what might from that time happen unto the Parliament and the nation in general". He went on to discover "that the city of London should be sadly afflicted with a great plague, and not long after with an exorbitant fire"... but added that he could not discern any human culprits behind the fire and hence concluded that "it was the only finger of God; but what instruments he used thereunto, I am ignorant". He finishes his account by observing that "the Committee seemed well pleased with what I spoke, and dismissed me with great civility".

From the above, it's clear that as an astrologer William Lilly was taken more seriously than most. This is also reflected in the fact that there is an official City of Westminster plaque marking the site of his house on the Strand: "William Lilly (1602 - 1681) Master Astrologer lived in a house on this site". As can be seen from the photograph below, this plaque is attached to the wall of the disused Strand tube station (aka Aldwych station, before it closed in 1994).

Moon Aliens

2011-11-08T14:51:00.000Z

A few years ago I bought a second-hand copy of a book called Secrets of our Spaceship Moon by Don Wilson. This was first published in the USA in 1979, but the copy I bought was the British Sphere paperback from 1980. Inside it I found a newspaper clipping from the Sunday Mirror (a downmarket tabloid here in the UK) dated 9 September 1979. Headed "Moon Aliens: Riddle of two UFOs in crater as Apollo made historic landing", it cites various dubious pieces of evidence suggesting that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin encountered extraterrestrials while they were on the surface of the Moon in 1969 (see scan below -- click on the image for a larger version).

The alleged Apollo 11 encounter is discussed in Secrets of our Spaceship Moon (it's even mentioned in the teaser paragraph on the first page), but it's pretty tame compared with some of the book's other "revelations". One of the later Apollo missions found a discarded glass bottle on the Moon, while another produced metal shavings while drilling into its crust. Early reconnaissance photographs revealed huge monuments, pyramids and other structures on the surface. As far back as the 1920s, coded radio signals were received from an alien satellite in lunar orbit. In 1968, a male-female pair of Soviet cosmonauts landed on the Moon a year before Apollo 11, but the man was killed by a "mechanical monster" and the woman was forced to return to Earth alone. To top everything, as the title of the book suggests, the Moon itself is a hollowed out artificial megastructure of alien origin. NASA knows this, but insists on concealing the truth for nefarious reasons of its own.

You might think that all this comes from the author's imagination, but actually all the claims in the book are carefully referenced to third-party sources. It's just that the sources aren't especially reliable. The information about the metal shavings, for example, comes from an unnamed "high school student". Now call me an old cynic, but I don't find that overwhelmingly conclusive. And one of the sources for the Apollo 11 UFO sightings is Otto Binder, described by Don Wilson as a "former NASA researcher and writer". I'm not sure about the "former NASA researcher" part, but Otto Binder certainly was a prolific writer. Most of his output was science fiction, written under the pseudonym of Eando Binder (originally shared with his brother Earl: "E and O Binder").

In 1969, Binder wrote a novel called Menace of the Saucers (left) and its sequel Night of the Saucers. These are interesting because they're among the very few adult science fiction novels which buy wholeheartedly and uncritically into the UFO paradigm. The two books are full of references to "real" ufological cases and associated anomalies -- including lunar ones. At one point in Night of the Saucers, the hero (a skeptical journalist turned believer) says to his alien wife (a member of the Galactic Vigilantes) "By the way, Lunar Orbiter Two, in 1966, photographed perfectly shaped domes on the Moon, and also strange spires. The domes had moved, when next photographed. Anything of yours?" -- to which she answers "Yes, they are our mobile Moon bases, plus antennas, with which we keep a long-range check on Earth".

Descent into Limbo

2011-11-02T14:00:00.002Z

Here is an unusual painting I saw in the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery a couple of days ago. If you look carefully (click on the image and then click "Show original" to see a larger version) there are a number of odd things about the picture, but perhaps the most obvious is that it depicts Christ in a rather unflattering rear view. They say you should never turn your back on the audience, but that is exactly what Jesus is doing here! His identity is indicated by a halo and by the "Banner of the Resurrection" -- symbolism that would have been instantly recognizable in 1475 when the picture was painted.

The painting is entitled The Descent of Christ into Limbo, and is the work of the Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini. It is loosely based on an engraving by Bellini's brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna. The scene depicted was very popular in medieval Christianity, even though it is not mentioned at all in the Bible. The idea is that, during the three days between Christ's death and the Resurrection, he descended into Hell to rescue all the Old Testament Patriarchs and Prophets who had been incarcerated there. The first to be released were Adam and Eve, together with their "good" son Abel: these are the three naked figures on the right of the picture (Abel's brother Cain, as the world's first murderer, was left in Hell).

The story of Christ's decent into Hell was first told in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, written several centuries after the canonical gospels. In the original version, the idea was that the Patriarchs and Prophets were suffering in Hell along with regular sinners, but as time went on theologians decided they weren't happy with this. They invented the concept of "Limbo" (a Latin word meaning "edge") which was a relatively nice part of Hell reserved for virtuous but unbaptized individuals.

By the time of the renaissance, when educated Christians were developing a new respect for the pre-Christian culture of ancient Greece and Rome, the idea of Limbo became indispensable. When Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in the early 14th century, it was in Limbo that he met his tour guide, the Roman poet Virgil. The latter still had a clear recollection of Christ's visit: "I beheld the arrival of a Mighty One, crowned with the token of victory. He delivered from this place the shade of our first parent and of Abel his son, and that of Noah, and of Moses the lawgiver and servant of God; Abraham the patriarch and David the king, Israel with his father and his sons and Rachel for whom he served so long, and many more; and he made them blessed."

The story of the descent into Limbo is what might be called "folk Christianity" -- a legend concocted for the masses which symbolizes a purely spiritual concept. As everyone knows (thanks to Robert Langdon) symbolism was of paramount importance in medieval Christianity. Some of the symbolism in Bellini's painting is obvious: for example the half-human, half-reptilian demons symbolize the torments of Hell, while the cross-holding figure on the left (Saint Dysmas, who according to the Gospel of Nicodemus was crucified at the same time as Jesus) symbolizes the followers of Christ. Ivy, which can be seen growing on the rock behind Dysmas, was a well-established symbol for everlasting life.

The strangest thing in the picture is close to the bottom and easy to miss. The figure of Christ is trampling on the broken gates of Hell, which of course makes perfect sense. But if you look closely, underneath the broken gates is something that looks like a large book. I've no idea what this is supposed to mean -- and it's one of the few features of Bellini's painting which is absent from the Mantegna engraving. A big book, in the Middle Ages, would inevitably have meant the Bible -- which doesn't make sense in this context. Possibly it's meant to be just the Old Testament, and to symbolize the fact that, by freeing the Patriarchs from Hell, Jesus is effectively bringing an end to the legacy of the Old Testament. But that still sounds decidedly heretical to me!

Con Artists

2011-10-27T15:30:00.000+01:00

It's Turner Prize time again. For non-UK readers who may never have heard of it, the Turner Prize is an annual award for upcoming young artists that has become famous (or notorious) for the fact that the creative content of the works is more often than not contained in the artist's "message" rather than the object itself. Although named after the great nineteenth century painter Turner, mere paintings rarely win the Turner Prize -- it's more likely to go to a cheap plastic garden gnome or a carefully preserved piece of elephant dung. Even pop-art is far too passé for the Turner judges. A meticulously executed painting of a soup can wouldn't stand a chance... although a real soup can, bought for 50 pence from a supermarket and accompanied by an appropriately trendy textual analysis, would be a sure-fire winner.

Coming to the title of this post: I don't mean to suggest that submissions for the Turner Prize are the work of con artists -- after all, they're merely pandering to the judges' tastes. That may be cynical, but it isn't deceptive. What I do mean is that by allowing banal objects and images to be transformed into expensive works of art, simply by attaching pretentious interpretations to them, does tend to open the doors to a wide variety of hoaxers, pranksters and con-men. This isn't a particularly new phenomenon -- the Museum of Hoaxes website lists quite a number of artistic con tricks that were perpetrated during the 20th century, including the following:

Disumbrationism was invented in the 1920s by an American named Paul Jordan Smith, who wanted to hit back at highbrow art critics who had been dismissive about his wife's rather conservative paintings. He produced a series of works that were as bad as he could make them, both in concept and execution, and exhibited them under the Russianized name of Pavel Jerdanowitch. Smith's master-stroke was to juxtapose these childish paintings with textual commentaries designed to appeal to the liberal academics of the time. As a result (and much to Smith's disgust) Disumbrationism was a huge hit with the critics.
Naromji was an artist who appeared out of the blue in 1946, with a painting called "Three Out Of Five" exhibited at the Los Angeles Art Association with a price tag of a thousand dollars (about $11,200 in today's money). Naromji was actually the well-known prankster Jim Moran who, like Paul Jordan Smith, wanted to make fools out of pretentious art experts. He succeeded in this, but not in the way he'd expected. The work was quickly revealed as a hoax, and summarily dismissed as worthless by the Art Association. But then an established artist named Leonard Kester claimed that "Three out Of Five" was actually his own work, and that Moran had pinched it from him. This caused a sudden change of heart at the Los Angeles Art Association, who decided the picture was worth displaying after all!
Pierre Brassau exhibited four paintings at an exhibition in Sweden in 1964. Opinions among critics were divided: one described him as "an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer" while another said "only an ape could have done this". The latter may have been meant as an insult, but actually it was spot on. Pierre Brassau was indeed an ape -- a four-year old chimpanzee from Boras Zoo. A journalist had decided to try an experiment to find out if art critics could tell the difference between human art and simian art. Apparently only one of them could!

Here is my own effort. A few years ago, the BBC ran a "Mock Turner" competition on their website, and this was my contribution. It's called $0.0001 and is intended to conceptualize the deplorably low financial value placed on artworks intended for mass consumption when contrasted with those aimed at society's elite. In strictly technical terms, the picture is a detail taken from issue 139 of The Mighty Thor -- a comic book originally published in 1967 at a price of 12 cents for 20 pages. Each page has an area of approximately 60 square inches, which means that one square inch of the comic (as shown here, magnified) was valued at one hundredth of a cent, or $0.0001. Although the original comic was drawn by Jack Kirby, the true creator of this work of art is myself, not Kirby, because I was the one who thought up the trendy left-wing message behind it. I thought it was pretty clever, but the BBC disagreed -- I didn't make it into their Mock Turner shortlist!

Lisztomania

2011-10-21T16:11:00.000+01:00

The great pianist and composer Franz Liszt was born two hundred years ago on 22 October 1811. Almost half-way back to that time, in August 1912, my grandfather E. P. Whitehouse (don't bother looking him up -- he was a junior clerk on the Great Western Railway) drew the caricature of Liszt reproduced on the left. The drawing is based on a small sculpture by Jean-Pierre Dantan that can be seen in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris (the sculpture itself dates from 1836, when Liszt was just 25).

The term Lisztomania sounds like a modern coinage, but was actually first used by the poet Heinrich Heine in 1844. At that time, however, "mania" had quite a different meaning. Nowadays it refers to an intense fad or craze, whereas originally it was a medical term referring to a serious derangement of the mind. Here is Heine's description of the audience reaction to one of Liszt's concerts:

"What tremendous rejoicing and applause! A delirium unparalleled in the annals of furore! And what is the real cause of this phenomenon? The solution of the question belongs rather to the province of pathology than to that of aesthetics. The electric action of a demoniac nature on a closely pressed multitude, the contagious power of ecstasy, and perhaps a magnetism in music itself, which is a spiritual malady which vibrates in most of us... all these phenomena never struck me so significantly or so painfully as in this concert of Liszt's."

Apparently it was female listeners who were affected the most: fainting, screaming hysterically, wearing his portrait on brooches, taking cuttings of his hair, and even collecting his coffee dregs and discarded cigar stubs. It all sounds a lot like the Beatlemania of the 1960s, or any of the countless manias since then. This leads one to suspect that, despite the apparent change in meaning, the basic "mania" phenomenon is the same as it always was. What struck people as a serious derangement of the mind in the 1840s is now seen as the normal behaviour of young human females when they get close to their musical idols!

Liszt died in 1886, two years before the oldest surviving audio recording was made... so sadly we will never know what all the fuss was about. However, in parallel with his performing career Liszt was also a prolific composer, and many of his works are still popular today. He was a great innovator, and single-handedly created the musical form known as the symphonic poem, as well as producing two full-length symphonies based on Goethe's Faust and Dante's Divine Comedy. These were considered revolutionary at the time, because they attempted to tell a story using purely instrumental music. For some reason, the musical establishment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century enforced the view that all non-vocal music had to be abstract, and that if it tried to represent something then it was garbage. This is similar (although with one subtle and easy-to-miss difference) to the view of the artistic establishment that all painting had to represent something, and if it was abstract then it was garbage.

The Loch Ness Monster, a cloned sheep and a dubious dog

2011-10-17T16:07:00.002+01:00

As mentioned in my previous post, the second half of Paul and Melanie Jackson's honeymoon was spent in Scotland. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to hear that they had an encounter with the Loch Ness Monster... or at least a reasonable simulacrum of Scotland's most famous cryptid (click the picture to see a larger version). The photograph was taken at Fort Augustus at the Southern tip of Loch Ness, and depicts a tree branch that has apparently grown naturally into the distinctive shape of the monster's neck and head. However Paul suspects the teeth were added by a human hand!

While in Scotland, Paul and Mel also came face-to-face with two other legends of the animal kingdom: Dolly the Sheep and Greyfriars Bobby. The former was the first artificially cloned mammal, while the latter was a dog who became famous for displaying exactly the sort of sentiment that sentimental humans think dogs ought to display.

Dolly the Sheep was "born" in 1996 at the Roslin Institute just outside Edinburgh (I put "born" in quotes for dramatic impact, though sadly it's not really necessary: despite being genetically engineered, Dolly was born in the usual way -- not synthesized in a vat of bubbling nutrients as one might have hoped). She died in 2003, after which she suffered the indignity of being stuffed and put on display at the National Museum of Scotland (right).

The birth, life and death of Dolly the Sheep were documented at the time with scientific precision. The same cannot be said of Greyfriars Bobby, the small dog who is supposed to have guarded his master's grave faithfully for fourteen years. As Jan Bondeson pointed out in his recent book Greyfriars Bobby: the Most Faithful Dog in the World, this supposedly well-established story is actually based on a confusing mish-mash of anecdotes, wishful thinking and possibly even outright deception. Jan's research was picked up by the British media earlier this year and reported quite widely (e.g. by The Daily Telegraph)... but it's a fairly safe prediction that the legend will live on unscathed. Why let facts get in the way of what everyone knows to be true?

The picture below shows the tombstone of Greyfriars Bobby (which is revered by humans far more than that of his owner), as well as the nearby statue on Edinburgh's George IV Bridge.

Shadow of the Feathered Serpent

2011-10-15T16:08:00.000+01:00

Paul Jackson and his wife have just returned from their honeymoon, which consisted of two weeks in Mexico followed by two weeks in Scotland. While in Mexico, they went on a day trip to see the thousand-year old Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzá. But they didn't go on just any day -- they went on the Autumn Equinox, when the direction of the setting Sun is exactly due West, making it a special day in the calendar. And as everyone knows, the Mayans were obsessive about the calendar.

The Chichén Itzá complex is dominated by the huge pyramid-shaped Temple of Kukulkan, who was the Mayan equivalent of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl -- the Feathered Serpent. As the Sun sets on the Equinox, the temple displays an unusual phenomenon that can be seen in Paul's photograph on the left. The phenomenon was described by Adrian Gilbert and Maurice Cotterell in The Mayan Prophecies (1995): "Twice a year, at the equinoxes, the Sun plays an amazing trick, which must have seemed like a miracle to anyone not initiated into its secrets. During the afternoon on these two days, shadows are cast on the balustrade which take the form of moving serpents gliding down the side of the pyramid. We can only speculate on what this symbolized, but perhaps it seemed to the onlooker as though some magical, ghostly Quetzalcoatl were in a sense coming back to life."

Although much newer than the pyramids of Egypt, or even the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome, Mayan archaeological sites like Chichén Itzá were lost in obscurity until comparatively recently. It was only in the early part of the 20th century that the scrub and overgrowth was cleared from the Temple of Kukulkan, and the mysterious shadow effect was rediscovered. Now, of course, with 2012 looming, everyone has heard about the Mayans and their alleged prophecy concerning the end of the world (Gilbert and Cotterill's book, mentioned above, scooped almost all the other writings on this subject by more than a decade). If you believe in the prophecy, and you want to see the shadow of the serpent god, you'll have to hurry. There are only two equinoxes left -- in March and September next year!

A full view of the pyramid, seen earlier in the day, is shown below.