Alchemy Crossword Puzzle

Here is this year’s Christmas crossword. I tried to stick as far as possible to the theme of Alchemy for this one, although a few of the questions stray off topic. As in previous years (2013 and 2014) you will either have to print out the grid or treat it as a quiz and do it in your head. Some of the answers are quite obscure, but you should be able to find all of them on Google. I will post the answers as a comment to this post on 1 Jan 2016, so if you’re doing it after that try not to scroll down too far!

ACROSS

1. The art or science of changing one chemical element into another [13]
8. Oxford museum founded by a 17th century alchemist [9]
10. Place in Egypt where alchemists obtained galena [5]
11. ---- Pound wrote “The Alchemist: Chant for the transmutation of metals” [4]
12. “Thus is the Devil ever God’s ---” (Martin Luther) [3]
13. “The Ripley ------”, an important 15th century work of symbolic alchemy [6]
15. School of alchemy founded by Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim [11]
18. “-- above…” [2]
21. “-- below” [2]
22. Place in Somerset where John Dee reputedly found the Philosopher’s Stone [11]
26. An alchemical process of whitening [6]
28. Energy in Chinese Alchemy (Wade-Giles spelling) [3]
29. “--- Alchemica” by W.B. Yeats [4]
32. French for tin [5]
33. Contemporary of Shakespeare whose works include “The Alchemist” [3, 6]
34. The Tabula Smaragdina of Hermetic alchemy [7, 6]

DOWN

1. Greek philosopher who held that the first principle of all things is water [6]
2. Chemical reaction not requiring heat [8]
3. Michael ----, mediaeval alchemist who was reputed to have occult powers [4]
4. Mary ---- Atwood, Victorian author of “A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery” [4]
5 & 6. Seventeenth century natural philosopher who wrote extensively on the subject of alchemy [5, 6]
7. Powerful beings who are embodiments of natural forces, according to DC Comics [7]
9. The third card of the Major Arcana in Tarot [7]
13. Research establishment that pioneered Remote Viewing [3]
14. ---- Gustav Jung, author of “Psychology and Alchemy” [4]
16. “Beginner’s Mind” in Zen Buddhism [7]
17. Nix ----, alchemical name for zinc oxide [4]
19. Analysed a metallic substance [7]
20. The protagonist of “Three Hours after Marriage”, an expert on alchemy among other subjects [2, 6]
23. Co-author of “Alchemical Equipment in the Eleventh Century” [3]
24. In alchemy, to separate a component by removing the upper part [6]
25. “The ------ is an iron stone, and so attracts iron to itself” (Paracelsus) [6]
27. Alchemists are punished in the Eight Circle of Hell, according to this Italian writer [5]
30. In Kabbalah, the Sacred Marriage is represented by the union of ---- (father) and Imma (mother) [4]
31. Arnold de Villa ----, 13th century translator to whom many alchemical texts are ascribed [4]

A Few Fortean Novels by Ian Watson

UFOs and the Men in Black – Temporal anomalies and the Tunguska event – Tantric Sex and the Tibetan Book of the Dead – Alchemy and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch – Space Gods and a Martian Inca… The novels that Ian Watson wrote in the 1970s and 80s certainly aren’t short of Fortean ideas. I don’t always remember to make a distinction on this blog between fictional works that are “good” (i.e. enjoyable to read) and ones that are “interesting” (i.e. thought-provoking). So I’ll say right away that Ian Watson is very much a master of the second category, without always finding his way into the first. I’ve read six of his novels in three short bursts – three in 1997, two in 2004 and one just last week. Some are definitely better than others, but here’s a quick rundown in the chronological order that I read them:

Miracle Visitors (1978) is one of the books on my Charles Fort in Fiction list. I bought my copy in 1997, from Watkins esoteric bookshop in London. They’d shelved it among the non-fiction UFO books, which is quite appropriate really. Although the story has “characters” and a “plot”, they’re primarily vehicles for the author to get his ideas across. I’m not averse to novels of this type, as long as the ideas are good ones – which they are in this case. There are countless science fiction stories about UFOs, but almost all of them are based on some variant of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH). What’s unusual about Miracle Visitors is that Watson opts for a Psycho-Social Hypothesis (PSH), in which the whole UFO Phenomenon (with a capital P) is a manifestation of a higher state of consciousness. Still more unusual, he actually manages to make the PSH sound interesting – he even works the Men in Black into the Phenomenon as well as the different kinds of Close Encounter.

I was sufficiently impressed with Miracle Visitors that I went out and bought two more Watson novels. The first of these was Chekhov’s Journey (1983). This has nothing to do with Star Trek – the title character is the playwright Anton Chekhov, who really did go on a long and somewhat mysterious journey in 1890. The novel is set a century later in 1990, when a documentary film is being made about Chekhov’s journey. Since so few facts are known about it, they use a form of “past-life regression” hypnosis to fill in some of the details. This brings all sorts of wacky weirdness to light, including a connection to the Tunguska explosion (which occurred in 1908) and a spacecraft from the future which is hurtling backwards in time. Of all the Watson novels I’ve read, this is probably my favourite – certainly in terms of being exciting and enjoyable to read.

The other Watson novel I read in 1997 was Alien Embassy (1977). This is set in a strange future society based on Tibetan Buddhism, in which the space program ostensibly uses Tantric sex rituals as a mystical means of travelling to the stars. Now I may be wrong, but this strikes me as the single most brilliant idea for a science fiction novel that anyone has ever come up with. Unfortunately the execution doesn’t live up to the concept, and Watson heads off on a deeply undesirable tangent. Ignoring all the potentialities of sex, mysticism and space travel, the novel is almost exclusively about (wait for it) … politics. Aaarghh! It’s not surprising that it was another seven years before I picked up another Watson novel.

When I did, it was another really good one. The Gardens of Delight (1980) is based on the intriguing concept of a planet modelled on The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. This extraordinary triptych can be seen in the Prado Museum in Madrid, which I’ve visited a couple of times (that’s my souvenir postcard at the bottom of this post). It’s arguably the strangest, most baffling artwork of the Renaissance period, and there are innumerable theories and speculations as to its meaning. According to one school of thought, it depicts an allegory of the alchemical process… and that’s the interpretation Watson opts for here. The result is a really fascinating and original novel, which ought to be read by anyone who’s a fan of Bosch’s painting.

The other Watson book I read in 2004 was God’s World (1979). I have to be honest and say I don’t have a clear recollection of this one. The back cover blurb sounds promising enough: “Earth has been alerted by messengers of God and summoned to the planet of angels, 82 Eridani. Powered by a mysterious space drive found in the Gobi desert, a crusading space ship is launched through High Space to explore this heavenly world.” Beyond that, all I can remember is a bunch of rather dull people on a spaceship talking to each other. As with Alien Embassy, I suspect that if the reader took the blurb and wrote their own novel around it, they’d have a lot more fun.

Much the same is true of the novel I’ve just read – The Martian Inca (1977). I bought this one several years ago, but it kept slipping down the pile before I got round to reading it. As with all Watson’s novels, the basic premise is fascinating. An unmanned sample-return mission is sent to Mars, and on its return it crash-lands in a remote part of Bolivia. The soil sample contains a psychoactive substance which causes one of the villagers to have a revelatory vision (or a pseudo-revelatory one – it isn’t clear which), after which he claims to be a reincarnated Inca with special powers (again, it’s ambiguous as to whether these powers are real or self-delusion) – and promptly sets off to lead a populist revolution. At the same time, a crewed mission lands on Mars and is exposed to the same substance, with equally strange results. I imagine that’s pretty much how Watson pitched the novel to his publishers, in which case it’s not surprising that they jumped at it. Unfortunately, however, the end-product doesn’t live up to the pitch. In particular, the details of the flight to Mars and the Bolivian revolution are too sketchy for the reader to engage with, or believe in, to any great extent.

I don’t want to end on a negative note, though. There is so much trite, unchallenging, formulaic science fiction around that novels like these are a much-needed antidote to all that.

Cambridge Oddities

Cambridge is one of the few tourist hotspots that it actually makes sense to visit in August. There are crowds of tourists, of course, but that’s offset by the fact that there aren’t any undergraduates (and if you stay in your old college, you don’t have to share the lavatorial facilities with half a dozen barely housetrained students). That’s why I decided to spend a couple of nostalgic days there last week. Here is a quick rundown of some of the more unusual sights in the town:

One of the oldest buildings in Cambridge, dating from circa 1130, is the Round Church opposite St John’s College. Round churches are often associated with the Knights Templar (as with the Temple Church in London), but this one seems to have been built by a lesser known order, active at the same time, called the “Fraternity of the Holy Sepulchre”.

As I mentioned a few months ago in Isaac Newton and me, I spent my undergraduate years at Trinity College – as did Newton himself. Standing outside his old rooms in Great Court is an apple tree, pictured below. There probably wasn’t an apple tree there in Newton’s time (it’s clear from his account of the falling apple that it took place at his home in Lincolnshire), but Newton did keep a small private garden on this plot of land. He also had a large wooden shed which he used as a laboratory for his alchemical experiments – it may have been here, or inside Great Court itself.

(For more about Newton and alchemy, see my book Isaac Newton: Pocket Giants).

Sometimes erroneously associated with Newton, but actually nothing to do with him, is the Mathematical Bridge at the back of Queens’ College. The present bridge is the third to occupy this site, all using same timber-framed design. The first was built in 1748; this one dates from 1905. The mathematical nature of the bridge lies in the ingenious way the wooden ribs are arranged so that “each member is in compression with little or no bending moment”.

Cambridge has seen more than its fair share of scientific discoveries, and even one of the pubs claims to have played a part in one of them! Outside the Eagle in Bene’t Street there is a plaque that reads:

DNA Double Helix 1953: “The Secret of Life”. For decades the Eagle was the local pub for scientists from the nearby Cavendish Laboratory. It was here on February 28th 1953 that Francis Crick and James Watson first announced their discovery of how DNA carries genetic information.

One of the newer oddities in Cambridge is the Corpus Clock, dating from 2008 and belonging to Corpus Christi College. It stands at the end of Bene’t Street right opposite King’s College, giving it one of the highest tourist footfalls in England. The clock is unusual for several reasons: it has circles of LEDs instead of hands, and it only tells the correct time every five minutes (the rest of the time it runs erratically fast or slow). It also has a monstrous, animated insect called a Chronophage squatting on top of it.

It was somewhere near Corpus Christi College, back in the 16th century, that a man named Thomas Hobson used to rent out horses from a large livery stable. Although he had dozens of horses, customers always had to take whichever horse he wanted to hire out next. This gave rise to the phrase “Hobson’s Choice” – still used today to mean “no choice at all”. In his old age, Hobson helped to set up a new water supply to the town, which became known as “Hobson’s Conduit”. Cambridge doesn’t seem to have a monument to Hobson’s Choice, but it does have one to Hobson’s Conduit – on the corner of Lensfield Road and Trumpington Street:

From a Fortean point of view, the Haunted Bookshop – tucked away in a narrow alley called St Edward’s Passage – sounds highly promising. I had visions of shelves packed with occult and paranormal books – or horror fiction, at the very least. Unfortunately, however, the stock turned out to be predominantly antiquarian children’s books. The name comes from the fact that the building (previously an alehouse) is supposed to have its own ghost in the form of an occasionally glimpsed “White Lady”.

Cambridge has numerous free museums, of which by far the largest is the Fitzwilliam Museum on Trumpington Street. The quirkiest thing I spotted there was a pair of paintings by William Hogarth called Before and After, dating from 1731. At first sight they look innocuous enough – partly because the eye (my eye, anyhow) tends to be drawn to the girl rather than the bloke. But the latter is worth a second look in both pictures. In Before there is the distinct hint of a “bulge in his trousers” (I’m quoting from the official blurb), while in After “the man’s unbuttoned breeches reveal a tuft of pubic hair and his penis, chafed red from its exertions”. Sleazy stuff for the genteel 18th century!

Here’s Before...

... and After:

Isaac Newton and me

The studious-looking geek in the above photo is me, at the age of 21 in 1979, posing in front of a portrait of Isaac Newton. The picture was taken in Trinity College, Cambridge, at the top of I staircase where I had a room during my third year at university. I staircase is about 200 feet along the east front of Great Court from E staircase, where Newton himself lived for many years (although I staircase, which is a 20th century utilitarian monstrosity, wasn’t there in his time).

Along with Einstein, Newton was one of the scientific heroes of my teenage years. I read a biography of him in 1973 (as I’ve mentioned before, I kept a list of all the books I read) and visited his birthplace in Lincolnshire a year or two after that. So I was pleased to end up at Newton’s college, Trinity, even though I had no say in the matter. The school I went to (a comprehensive in the West Midlands, before you ask) had a tradition of trying to get its best science student into that particular college each year. All I needed to do was get three grade As at A-level (I got four, just to be on the safe side).

After I graduated (the day that photo was taken – I didn’t always dress like that) I went to Manchester University to do a PhD on the computer simulation of galaxy dynamics. That may sound very modern and state-of-the-art, but the only science involved was 100% Newtonian. In three years I never had to use a single equation that isn’t present, either explicitly or implicitly, in the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica that Newton wrote in 1687. So I owe Newton my doctorate, too!

Just over a year ago the History Press (which published my first book, Bloody British History: Somerset) started a new series of short biographies called Pocket Giants. I was intrigued by this idea (as I’ve said before, I like short books) so I contacted the series editor, Tony Morris, to see if there was anything I could do for him. After batting a few ideas around, we eventually zeroed in – perhaps not surprisingly – on Isaac Newton. Tony was as enthusiastic about the project as I was, and with his encouragement and constructive input the proposal was accepted by the History Press, the contract signed and the book written in the space of a few months last year.

Despite being a lifelong fan of Newton, I still learned a lot about him while I was researching and writing the book. Perhaps the oddest thing about him – which is more widely known today than it was in the 1970s – is that he spent less time on the scientific work for which he’s remembered than on pursuing non-scientific interests like alchemy, Hermeticism, theology and ancient history. There’s a common tendency to view the scientific and non-scientific (or even anti-scientific, by modern standards) activities as separate and non-overlapping. Scientists see the non-scientific work as an irrelevance and embarrassment that ought to be ignored and forgotten, while mystics and New Agers see the scientific work as the irrelevance – a kind of smoke-screen of acceptability designed to hide Newton’s real achievements.

I came to the conclusion that both these views miss the point. Everything Newton did stemmed from the same world-view – the idea that the universe was designed, by God, according to a simple code that could be rediscovered if it was searched for carefully enough. Newton looked for the code in the Bible and other ancient writings, and in the work of alchemists and Hermeticists. But he also looked for mathematical relationships that applied to the material world – something that seemed just as mystical and improbable to his contemporaries. But Newton’s “applied mathematics” worked – and worked so well that it’s become synonymous with mainstream science. Both scientists and New Agers have forgotten, or can’t see, what a profoundly mystical notion it is.

This was the point I tried to make in a blog post I wrote last week for the History Press. My original title was “Isaac Newton and the Key to the Universe”, which I thought was quite clever, but they wanted to tie it in with the series so they changed it to Why was Isaac Newton such a giant? (It was meant as a rhetorical question, but one clever lady on Twitter replied “Because he stood on the shoulders of giants”).

Needless to say, all these ideas are explored in more detail in the book itself, together with lots of other fascinating facts about Newton (such as how he perpetrated a UFO hoax as a teenager, predicted the end of the world and became “17th-Century London’s Dirty Harry”). You can order your copy from any good bookseller or from Amazon.

Chinese Alchemy

In a second-hand shop a few years ago I picked up a large-format book called Ritual and Magic, which consists of material recycled from Peter Brookesmith’s partwork The Unexplained from the 1980s. It’s really very good, and full of things I’ve never seen mentioned elsewhere. Here’s an example from the very first page of the first chapter:

“Sexual symbolism was in common use among alchemists and some of them interpreted such symbolic phrases as the marriage of the Red King and the White Queen not only chemically but also sexually. Some went so far as to attempt to manufacture the philosopher’s stone – the mysterious substance that would transmute base metal into gold – from human semen. Thus 18th century German records tell of an alchemical group that engaged in experiments of this sort. The leader of the group, an officer of high rank in the Austrian army, collected the raw materials for this curious research by paying soldiers to masturbate. The soldiers under the officer’s command were so enthusiastic to supplement their meagre pay that they neglected their military duties in almost incessant masturbation.”

The idea of collecting semen for use in the transmutation of metals seems a bit far-fetched, to say the least. But there was another side to alchemy, which was concerned with the prolonging of human life rather than the production of gold. In this context, the use of semen – as the basis for an elixir of life – makes a lot more sense. Enough sense for a work of fiction, anyway.

There’s just one problem with the scenario. Without going into gratuitous detail, if the secret of eternal youth simply involved the consumption of human semen, someone would have noticed by now. So there has to be some gimmick that makes the elixir of life really difficult to synthesize in practice.

Something else that’s been on my list of potential story ideas for ages is Chinese five-element theory. The topic has fascinated me ever since I first came across it in the 1990s – particularly as it relates to the interaction between different personality types (as illustrated in simplistic form in the accompanying picture). I produced my Zen Dynamics website more than 12 years ago, but I always thought the five-element cycle would make a good framework for a story as well.

Chinese element theory comes from Taoism, and the Chinese form of alchemy also comes from Taoism... so things were coming together. Taoism even makes a big deal about semen (see Wikipedia if you don’t believe me)... but it’s all about the retention of semen, not its collection. Needless to say, semen retention doesn’t have the same narrative potential that semen collection does. The great thing about fiction, however, is that you don’t have to tell the truth – in fact the whole point is that you’re supposed to make things up. So I made up my own form of Chinese Alchemy.

Chinese Alchemy (ISBN 978-1-611529-69-2) is available in Kindle format from Amazon.com and Amazon UK, and in other ebook formats direct from the publisher JMS Books – and hopefully from other retailers as well. Here is the blurb:

The secret of eternal youth is known to few, and attained by even fewer. It involves the preparation of an elixir, made from the sperm of five copulating couples, under conditions that make the undertaking all but impossible. The couples must represent specific physical and personality types, and ethical constraints rule out all the more obvious approaches to the task. Horny young bisexual Kelvin stumbles across the secret and decides to embark on the quest that has defeated so many before him. A fast-moving romp with a bizarre cast of characters, ranging from students and professors to porn stars and Satanists.

Museum Secrets

The third season of the Canadian documentary series Museum Secrets started airing a couple of weeks ago on the Yesterday channel here in the UK. It’s a series I particularly enjoy because it’s about unusual things in easily accessible locations. About half the museums featured I’ve already been to, and most of the rest are in cities that are relatively easy to get to. The programme’s format also suits my limited attention span – each episode consists of six short segments centred around various items in the featured museum. The series is unusual in that it doesn’t have a regular team in front of the camera – the only continuity is provided by the voiceover, and the people you see on screen are all local experts in the relevant fields. On one occasion, one of the experts was someone I once worked with – a former RAF pilot who was featured in the episode about the Imperial War Museum.

Here’s just one interesting fact I learned from each of the 14 episodes in the first two seasons:

Episode 1.1: The Vatican (Rome). During the renaissance period there was a lot nudity on display in the Vatican, in paintings and sculptures. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, completed in 1512, is a good example. But by the 1530s a wave of Puritanism was sweeping over Europe, and things started to get covered up with fig leaves and drapery. When Michelangelo tried to put dozens of naked people in his Last Judgment (begun in 1536), he encountered opposition from various quarters – not least a man named Cesena. Michelangelo’s response was to paint Cesena into the bottom right hand corner of the painting (detail reproduced here). It’s a rather unflattering portrait, with long pointed ears like a donkey, but Michelangelo was respectful enough to conceal Cesena’s genitalia... with a snake!

Episode 1.2: The Louvre (Paris). When the popular French King Henri IV was stabbed to death in a Paris street in 1610, the official view was that the assassin – like Lee Harvey Oswald – acted alone. But that didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists, many of them pointing the finger at Henri’s ambitious and politically well-connected widow, Marie de’ Medici.

Episode 1.3: Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto). In the museum’s collection is a 19th century Sioux headdress that has no established provenance... but it may have belonged to none other than Sitting Bull himself, who took refuge in Canada after the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Episode 1.4: The Egyptian Museum (Cairo). Over the centuries, the ancient Egyptians produced literally millions of animal mummies – especially of creatures like baboons and falcons that were powerful religious symbols. People used to buy the animal mummies to use as offerings to the gods. But mummies were time-consuming to make, and baboons and falcons aren’t the easiest creatures to come by... so most of the mummies were fakes!

Episode 1.5: Natural History Museum (London). One of the less well-known objects in the museum sounds like something out of a Victorian adventure novel. The “Cursed Amethyst” was stolen from the Temple of Indra during the Indian Mutiny of 1857... and ever since then dire misfortune is said to befall anyone who dares hold the jewel in their grasp!

Episode 1.6: The Metropolitan Museum (New York). When the Antioch Chalice was first displayed in New York early in the 20th century, it was popularly touted as the Holy Grail. Even academics believed it was a drinking cup from the time of Christ. But subsequent research has identified it as a humble lamp base from a 6th century church.

Episode 2.1: The Hermitage (Saint Petersburg). The story of the murder of the “mad monk” Rasputin in 1916 has been told many times, but the possible involvement of the British Secret Service is rarely mentioned. Yet the fatal bullet appears to have been an unjacketed round from a Webley revolver, and the only person on the scene with such a weapon was a British Secret Service agent. Rasputin’s death was very much in British interests, since he was pushing for the Russians to withdraw their support for the allies in the war against Germany.

Episode 2.2: American Museum of Natural History (New York). Despite its vast size and sophistication, the Inca civilization left behind no written records. What it did leave behind were countless knotted strings called quipu. Most of these were subsequently destroyed as being worthless... until it was realized that their variety and complexity meant that the knots must hold gigabytes of information. In fact it’s probable that the quipu are the Inca equivalent of written records – but no-one knows how to read them.

Episode 2.3: National Archaeological Museum (Athens). Many ancient Greeks, including philosophers like Pythagoras and Plato, took part in secret rituals known as the Eleusinian mysteries. Little is known about the rituals, except that they involved the consumption of a beverage known as Kykeon, and that they culminated in a revelatory state of consciousness. So it’s reasonable to suppose that Kykeon contained some kind of psychoactive drug!

Episode 2.4: Imperial War Museum (London). Now that it’s been released under the Freedom of Information Act, it’s interesting to contrast Britain’s top secret Civil Defence Plan, dating from the 1950s, with the cheerful public information films of the same period. The former stressed (for the benefit of the few people with security clearance to read it) that only those who got into underground shelters fast enough would survive a nuclear attack, while the latter assured the masses that they would be perfectly safe as long as they stayed in their homes for a day or two until the radiation had passed over.

Episode 2.5: National Museum of Anthropology (Mexico City). I was surprised to learn that some of the notorious “crystal skulls” are genuine pre-Columbian artifacts – I thought they were all modern fakes. But the real ones weren’t as special as their New Age devotees make out. Apparently it was quite common to use rock crystal to make ritual objects, and these took many other forms besides skulls. And ritual skull carvings are found in many other materials besides rock crystal – the skull being the symbol of the god of death.

Episode 2.6: Museum Island (Berlin). Although the Vikings boasted that their swords were indestructible, most Viking swords that are found have been shattered. Many of these shattered swords are stamped with the word Ulfberht, which was the name of an ancient steel foundry. In fact it was the greatest foundry in early mediaeval Europe. So did the Ulfberht foundry make swords that shattered the first time you used them? No – because the broken swords were all cheap fakes. As far as I know, this is the earliest example of poor quality goods being passed off with designer labels!

Episode 2.7: Kunsthistoriches Museum (Vienna). Everyone knows that alchemists claimed to be able to transform base metals into gold, but this is generally assumed to be charlatanism. Yet the Vienna museum has a gold medallion that, apparently, started out as a silver medallion. It was transformed into gold by a 17th century alchemist, who immersed it in a chemical solution in front of witnesses that included the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. However, it all appears to have been a clever conjuring trick. The medallion was probably made from gold to start with, and only coated in silver. The chemical may have been Nitric Acid (called aqua fortis by the alchemists), which would have dissolved the silver while leaving the gold untouched.

Episode 2.8: Topkapi Palace (Istanbul). “The Book of Ingenious Devices” is a lavishly illustrated manuscript by an Arab scholar named al-Jazari. It’s filled with drawings of sophisticated mechanical devices which al-Jazari claimed to have made for the amusement of the Sultan (a couple of examples are shown below). The book looks a bit like something Leonardo da Vinci might have produced... except that it’s dated 1206, two and a half centuries before Leonardo was born.

Fortean Opera

I recently came across this gothically surreal image, which illustrates an early 19th century opera called Der Freischütz. Reading up about this, it turns out to be quite a Fortean opera, which started me thinking. A Google search for “Fortean opera” turns up nothing of relevance, so I decided it was time to rectify the situation. Two or three titles sprang to mind, in addition to Der Freischütz, and some further research turned up a few others. In the end I came up with the following list (in chronological order of composition):

Il Mondo della Luna (The World of the Moon) by Haydn (1777). As the title suggests, this opera features a trip to the Moon and an encounter with its inhabitants. That wouldn’t be particularly Fortean... except that the “aliens” are fakes and the journey to the Moon is all a big hoax. As such, Il Mondo della Luna is probably the first opera ever written about a fake Moon landing – all the way back in 1777! It isn’t a well-known work (Haydn is more famous for his symphonies than his operas), but I found this clip on YouTube from a recent performance in New York. It looks quite jolly!

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart (1791). This is a famously nutty opera that turns fairy tale conventions on their head. It begins with the hero, Prince Tamino, running away from a giant snake and fainting with fright. He is saved by three young women, followers of the Queen of the Night, who give him a magic flute and a mission to rescue the Queen’s daughter Pamina from a man named Sarastro. And why is this Fortean? Because it’s all a lie! When Tamino eventually catches up with Sarastro, it turns out he isn’t a villain at all, but a wise priest of Isis and Osiris (I should have mentioned this takes place in ancient Egypt). It’s true that Sarastro abducted Pamina, but only to free her from her mother’s clutches. He was keeping her safe so she could marry Tamino... but only after the latter has proved himself worthy by undergoing an arcane, Masonic-style initiation ritual. Strange as it may seem, he is assisted in this task by his magic flute, which was given to him by the evil Queen of the Night... who incidentally also steals the show.

Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter) by Weber (1821). This is a Pact with the Devil story.... the specific pact in this instance relating to the manufacture of magic bullets which always hit their target. The catch is that the seventh and last bullet does what the Devil—or rather the demon Samiel—wants it to... after which he takes your soul as per the standard agreement. The picture above illustrates the Wolf’s Glen scene, in which the magic bullets are forged while various spirits and demons look on. The whole scene is viewable on YouTube in two parts, here and here.

Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) by Wagner (1843). The tale of the Flying Dutchman is a distinctly Fortean piece of folklore, about an old, ghostly ship that is occasionally glimpsed by sailors, its captain having been cursed to sail the seas forever. The original legend dates from the 17th century, but the opera turns it into a characteristically 19th century gothic romance. This is very early Wagner, and he went on to bigger and better things. It’s always struck me that, if the only thing that was known about Wagner was his operatic subject-matter, he would be considered an archetypal New Ager! You’ve got Celtic legends in Tristan und Isolde, the Holy Grail in Parsifal and paganism in the Ring – including this awesome invocation of the Earth Goddess!

La Nonne Sanglante (The Bleeding Nun) by Gounod (1854). Writing about Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796), H. P. Lovecraft wrote “In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes; notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and the cabalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor.” This sounds like a great idea for an opera, but unfortunately Gounod’s attempt at it was a complete flop. Interestingly, the libretto was also offered to Gounod’s great contemporary Verdi, but he turned it down. If he hadn’t, The Bleeding Nun might have been up there with Rigoletto, Aida and La Traviata!

The Makropulos Case by Janáček (1926). I watched a production of this on a portable black and white TV when I was a student more than 30 years ago, and even then it occurred to me that it’s one of the few operas where the plot actually makes sense. The central character is a young woman named Emilia Marty, who takes an interest in a legal case that has been running for a century – and who talks about events of the 1820s as if she had been there. It gradually emerges that she’s lived for hundreds of years, using various different names all having the initials EM. But there’s an explanation for this which makes perfect sense. Anyone who is familiar with the story of John Dee and Edward Kelley will know that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552 – 1612) was obsessed with alchemy and the search for eternal life. Rudolf was based in Prague, which is where The Makropulos Case is set (Janáček was a Czech composer). When an alchemist named Hieronymus Makropulos offered Rudolf a life-extending potion, the Emperor asked him to test it on the alchemist’s daughter, Elina Makropulos, first. This caused her to fall into a coma, and the Emperor changed his mind about using the potion... but when Elina woke up a week later she discovered she had stopped aging! Hence her survival into the 20th century.

Wagner Dream by Jonathan Harvey (2007). Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in February 1883, at the age of 69. But, according to this opera, he didn’t give up without a Tibetan Book of the Dead style struggle. He was just embarking on his last opera, Die Sieger, and he argues with his spirit guide Vairochana that he ought to be allowed to go back and finish it. Wagner Dream is an opera within an opera (Wagner’s opera Die Sieger, as imagined by Harvey, framed inside Harvey’s own opera about Wagner’s battle against death). Die Sieger is set in ancient India, where the Buddha is busy setting up his community of monks. The hero is a young monk named Ananda who is trying to persuade the Buddha to allow women to join the monastic order. But isn’t that a bit far-fetched? Wagner may have been into a few New Age beliefs like Paganism and Celtic mythology, but surely not Buddhism? And feminist Buddhism at that? But it’s all true. Back in the 1850s, Wagner really did write a synopsis of Die Sieger along exactly these lines, and he really did return to the idea shortly before his death. I was aware of that (it’s mentioned by Philip K. Dick in VALIS, and in turn I referred to it in my Worldcon talk about Parsifal as Proto-SF)... but I’ve only just found out about Wagner Dream. Now I’m kicking myself that I missed its London performance last year – although there is a short clip of an earlier Dutch production on YouTube.

A Fortean History of Somerset

I was very pleased to be given the opportunity to write a volume on Somerset for the Bloody British History series from The History Press. This is my kind of history – all the good bits and none of the boring bits. As well as the eponymous “bloody” history (prehistoric cannibals, Viking invaders, Catholic-massacring Puritans and Victorian murderers) there is no shortage of more offbeat items to interest a Fortean audience:

• Joseph of Arimathea is reputed to have brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury in 63 AD.
• Cadbury Castle may have been the inspiration for the legend of King Arthur’s Camelot – it was certainly the stronghold of a powerful warrior chief around the time Arthur is presumed to have lived.
• When the Saxons invaded Somerset in the 7th century, they found that the locals believed Saint Patrick was buried at Glastonbury... this may not have been true (see Saint Patrick of Glastonbury?) but it did wonders for the pilgrimage trade.
• During the 12th century, when Glastonbury Abbey was in desperate need of funds for rebuilding work, the monks dug up an even more lucrative pilgrimage attraction – nothing less than the bones of King Arthur himself!
• At their height, the Knights Templar owned much of the land in Somerset, and at two Templar sites symbolic “heads” have been found that might be related to the mysterious Head that the Templars are supposed to have worshipped (much more detail is given in Juliet Faith’s book The Knights Templar in Somerset).
• When Henry VIII ransacked Glastonbury Abbey in 1539, he found a vast treasure trove of gold and jewels that he was quick to turn into much-needed cash for the royal coffers. Relics – including the reputed horn of a unicorn – that had no obvious financial value were thrown away. Later in the 16th century, a man rummaging through the ruins of the Abbey found what he claimed was the alchemists’ secret formula that would transmute base metals into gold. That man was Edward Kelley... soon to become the most notorious and sought-after occultist in Europe.
• The “whistling” ghost of Mother Leakey from Minehead was famous enough to be described in some detail by Sir Walter Scott. Less well known is the role the ghost played in the downfall and execution of John Atherton – a man from Bridgwater who became the first and only Anglican Bishop to be hanged for sodomy.
• Much of the theoretical basis for the 17th century witch-hunts, in America as well as England, was laid down by the book Saducismus Triumphatus by Somerset-born Joseph Glanvill – who has a reasonable claim to having been the world’s first paranormal investigator (see The Daemon of Tedworth).
• One of the best-documented exorcisms of the 18th century took place in the Temple Church in Bristol, but the subject was a man from Somerset: George Lukins, the Yatton demoniac. In the same century, another Somerset man, a professional geologist named John Beaumont, wrote extensively about a race of demons that he believed had a personal vendetta against him.
• Some years before she wrote Frankenstein, Mary Shelley attended a lecture by the Somerset-based electrical experimenter Andrew Crosse. The latter subsequently gained an undeserved reputation as a “real-life Frankenstein”, when the press announced that he had created artificial life in his laboratory – something Crosse himself never claimed to have done.
• During the 19th century, a former Church of England vicar named Henry Prince set up a “free love commune” in rural Somerset that he called the Abode of Love, where he and the other members indulged in Hieros Gamos style sex rituals behind 15-foot high walls.

Bloody British History: Somerset is available from Amazon UK and all good booksellers.

Montségur and the fall of the Cathars

The above view of Montségur is another of the pictures Paul Jackson took in France last year. I meant to post it soon after the last one (The Devil of Rennes-le-Château) but I forgot!

About 50 km west of Rennes-le-Château, Montségur is a mountain fortress in the historic region of Languedoc. The site is famous as one of the last strongholds of the Cathars, a mediaeval religious sect who practiced a variant form of Christianity that was linked to Gnosticism. The Cathars became so firmly rooted in Languedoc that a crusade (called the Albigensian crusade) was launched against them. In March 1244, after a long siege, Montségur finally fell to the forces of the French king -- who promptly reduced the fortress to rubble (the castle visible in the picture dates from several hundred years later).

In their book Mysteries and Secrets of the Templars (2005), Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe state that the Cathars were offered a stark choice shortly before the fall of Montségur: "Provided that no-one left the fortress or attempted to take anything away from it, the garrison could more or less go home quietly as if nothing had happened -- but if anyone attempted to leave prematurely, they would all be burned." Instead of taking the first option, the Cathars elected to go with the second! During the night, a small group was lowered down the cliff face carrying something described as pecuniam infinitam - Latin for "infinite wealth". As a result, over two hundred Cathars were burnt alive. So the "pecuniam infinitam" must have been pretty valuable if it was worth that price! The Fanthorpes speculate that it may have been the Emerald Tablet of the alchemists, the Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Grail.

In October 2004, when the manuscript of Mysteries and Secrets of the Templars was still in draft form, Lionel Fanthorpe gave a sneak preview of it at that year's Fortean Times UnConvention. At a time when Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was making headlines, Lionel's talk was a real scoop for the event -- in effect the keynote speech. Then 18 months later, after the book had been published, Fortean Times covered it in their review section (FT211:62). It was one of the worst reviews I've ever seen! The book received a score of 2 out of 10, and was described as a "deeply cynical exercise" and "a dishonourable crock of a book". There's gratitude for you!

Fortean Times in popular culture

Towards the end of my mis-spent youth (about three years ago) I was sleep-walking my way through a rather tedious video game called Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space when I was jolted awake by a reference to my favourite magazine! At the cost of reliving some of the tedium, I've just replayed that part of the game in order to extract a video clip. When the player clicks on the object labelled ALCHEMY MACHINE the character Sam says "I'd bet my lifetime subscription to the Fortean Times that that's an Alchemy Machine!"