The Evolving Treasure of Oak Island

 

(courtesy of Bing Image Creator)

This is basically a sequel to last week's post, about the way certain "fringe" topics evolve and adapt to changing times. There's another link to the previous post too, in the form of Britain's most fortean free-to-air TV channel, Blaze. This is home to Ancient Aliens, which prompted last week's musings, and The Curse of Oak Island, which set me thinking about this one (both shows originated on America's History channel, then came over to the UK's subscription-only Sky History, before ending up on Blaze where cheapskates like myself can enjoy them).

Wikipedia has a fairly substantial entry on the Oak Island mystery, which begins as follows:

The Oak Island mystery is a series of stories of buried treasure and unexplained objects found on or near Oak Island in Nova Scotia. Since the 18th century, attempts have been made to find treasure and artifacts. Theories about artifacts present on the island range from pirate treasure to Shakespearean manuscripts to the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant.

As cool as that sounds, the legend of Oak Island isn't widely known, even in Canada (my cousin in Montreal said she hadn't heard of it until I asked her yesterday). Probably most people who have heard of it did so through the TV show, which is now in its 11th season. In contrast to Ancient Aliens - which is hugely entertaining, but ultimately mostly nonsense - The Curse of Oak Island is a really great show. I can see why some viewers are cynical about it (because it's a TV show first, and a serious archaeological project second) but this really doesn't bother me. I find it fascinating to watch them digging up the island's history even if, treasure-wise, it's mostly all dead ends. On top of that I really like all the participants, who strike me as much nicer people than the cast of most TV shows (several of them remind me of the sort of people I've worked with over the years).

Browsing through various online forums, I get the impression some viewers think the Oak Island "treasure legend" was artificially created for the series, simply because the people behind it own the island and wanted a premise for a reality show. But I was aware of the Oak Island mystery long before the TV series hit the airwaves in 2014. I first encountered it in the 1990s, either in a talk that Lionel Fanthorpe gave at one of the Fortean Times Unconventions, and/or his short-lived but fondly remembered Fortean TV series. It also features in a book I've got by Lionel and his wife, Mysteries and Secrets of the Templars (2005), as well as another book I read around the same time. That was when my then-work colleague (and subsequent co-author on Random Encounters on the London Tourist Trail) Paul Jackson lent me his copy of The Secret Treasure of Oak Island by D'Arcy O'Connor.

So I can vouch for the fact that most of the speculative theories (as well as historical snippets, such as the fact that future US president F D Roosevelt took part in an Oak Island dig in 1909) that crop up in The Curse of Oak Island were around long before the show started. Of course, there's nothing intrinsically fortean about a legend of buried treasure, but what makes Oak Island so fascinating is the sheer number of theories associated with it. While none of these are really far-fetched - nothing paranormal or involving aliens or other dimensions, I mean - several of them are sufficiently fringy to make them interesting. To paraphrase a list from the Fanthorpe book, here are some of the explanations put forward to explain Oak Island's elusive treasure vault:

• Constructed by the British during the American war of independence to protect their army's payroll;
• Built by Sir Francis Drake and his men to hide gold they'd seized from the Spanish;
• Dug by William Kidd or some other pirate in the 17th century;
• Designed to house precious manuscripts, possibly ones proving the true authorship of the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare;
• Constructed by ancient Celtic or Norse sea rovers as a burial place for a great chief;
• Built by the Knights Templar to protect the secret treasures they'd uncovered beneath Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

What jumps out is that some of these theories are more exciting than others. To be specific, the first three (which personally I'd class as boring) could comfortably fit inside the scope of accepted history, while the last three (all of which I find a lot more interesting) are way outside it. Not surprisingly, the TV show gives more prominence to these "exciting" theories - as do the Fanthorpes in their book, where they firmly align with the Templar hypothesis.

The thing that worries me slightly (and the main point I wanted to make in this post) is that the exciting theories came into existence after the boring ones. The earliest speculations and "legends" were solely about pirate treasure (yawn), with no Templars, Celts or lost manuscripts in sight. As the Wikipedia article says:

According to the earliest theory, the pit held a pirate treasure buried by Captain Kidd; Kidd and Henry Avery reportedly took treasure together, and Oak Island was their community bank. Another pirate theory involved Edward Teach (Blackbeard), who said that he buried his treasure "where none but Satan and myself can find it".

So the rational part of my brain tells me that, if there's any truth at all behind the Oak Island treasure, it was probably nothing more dramatic than a pirate hoard. On the other hand, my mystery-loving side insists it could have been the Templars' secret hiding-place for the Holy Grail, or the Ark of the Covenant, or something equally spectacular!

Half-way through writing this post, I realized it could do with a picture of the two books I mentioned. The only problem was that one of them belongs to Paul Jackson, who lives 60 miles away. But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, he'd taken a photo of it and I'd saved it on my computer within 3 minutes of me asking him for it! So here's Paul's copy of The Secret Treasure of Oak Island, alongside my copy of Mysteries and Secrets of the Templars:

A Weird Offer!

As mentioned last week, Weird Wessex: A Tourist Guide to 100 Strange and Unusual Sights by Paul Jackson and me (*) has just been published by the CFZ Publishing Group. Lavishly illustrated with over 200 full-colour photographs, the book takes you on a journey across the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Berkshire in search of some of the weirder and sometimes little known sights waiting to be discovered.

For a limited time, you can order your copy of Weird Wessex direct from the publisher for just £10 – a massive discount of 18% on the recommended retail price of £12.50. What’s more, for customers in the UK postage is absolutely free, and the first 16 copies sold will include a bookplate signed by both Paul and me (*).

So what are you waiting for? It’s the perfect opportunity to add to your “Weird” collection (mine is pictured above). For full details, click here to visit the CFZ Publishing website.

You should also be able to get Weird Wessex (ISBN 978-1-909488-35-9) from any other book retailer, such as Amazon UK, or as a Kindle ebook.

(*) Until a week ago I would never have written “by Paul and me”, but “by Paul and myself” – which sounds more elegant, more polite and more grammatical to my ears. But when I used that phrase on Facebook, someone pointed out to me that “myself” is a reflexive pronoun. That means it can only ever be used in a sentence where the subject is “I”. You can say “I wrote the book myself” but you can’t say “The book is by myself”. You have to say “The book is by me”. Putting another person in the mix doesn’t change things – so “The book is by Paul and myself” is equally wrong. I will probably forget this almost immediately, but at least I got it right in this post.

Weird Wessex

The latest book to feature my name on the cover is a collaboration with Paul Jackson of the
Random Encounters with the Unusual blog. It’s called Weird Wessex: A Tourist Guide to 100 Strange and Unusual Sights. Here is the blurb:

At its height, the Saxon kingdom of Wessex sprawled across Southern England, encompassing Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset and parts of Devon and Berkshire. Even before the Saxons arrived the area had a reputation as a weird place, with Stonehenge and its Druids, Glastonbury and the Holy Grail, the bizarre chalk figure of the Cerne Giant and the reputed location of King Arthur’s Camelot. In more recent times the tradition of weirdness has continued, with flying saucers sighted over Warminster, intricate Crop Circles popping up around Alton Barnes and hordes of spaced-out hippies converging on the mystical hubs of Glastonbury and Totnes.

This book is a tourist guide with a difference. It describes 100 of the weirdest sights in Wessex, ranging from world-famous places like Glastonbury and Stonehenge to hidden oddities that may even surprise the locals. Divided into ten thematic chapters, it is lavishly illustrated with over 200 full-colour photographs.

The ten chapters, each featuring ten sites, are arranged thematically as follows:

• Weird Archaeology
• Weird Buildings
• Weird Constructions
• Weird History
• Weird Landscape
• Weird Legends
• Weird Religion
• Weird Science
• Weird Secrets
• Weird Tales

In terms of content, the book is pretty close to a 50:50 collaboration. Paul lives towards the eastern end of the area, on the border of Wiltshire and Hampshire, while I live further west near the Somerset-Dorset border. So it was quite easy to divide the legwork between the two of us!

The book is published by Jon Downes at CFZ Publishing, under the Fortean Words imprint (although most of the sites are “quirky” rather than out-and-out Fortean). The book is in full colour, 200 pages long, with an average of one photograph per page. I’m amazed, and very pleased, that Jon has managed to keep the cover price down to £12.50 (it would have been more like £18 if we’d used CreateSpace).

There are several ways you can get hold of your copy of Weird Wessex:

• You can buy it from Amazon UK (or any other Amazon site). The book is print-on-demand, so don’t worry if Amazon says “out of stock”. As soon as you order it, the printer will run a copy off for you.
• You should also be able to order the paperback through any other book retailer – the ISBN is 978-1-909488-35-9.
• The book is available in a Kindle edition, though unfortunately not in any other ebook format.
• In the near future (probably about a week from now) the CFZ website will be running a special offer on Weird Wessex. If you order the book direct from the publisher it will cost just £10 plus p&p, and include a bookplate signed by both authors (wow!)
• People in the local area who cross paths with either of the authors can order a copy direct from us. We will be happy to sign it for you, and may even offer a discount (depending how generous we’re feeling).

Old Books of the Fortean Kind

Pictured above is a genuine piece of retro-forteana – Phenomena: A Book of Wonders, produced way back in 1977 by John Michell and the founding editor of Fortean Times, Bob Rickard. It’s one of several books I picked up for a pound each from the Bookbarn shop, just off the A37 about half-way between Shepton Mallet and Bristol. Until a few years ago, this was the best bookshop in Somerset – literally a giant warehouse packed with second-hand treasures. Unfortunately the main warehouse was closed to the public after they catalogued all their decent stock and put it online. But visitors can still browse through the leftovers – the books that were too uncommercial to be worth cataloguing – in a smaller warehouse next door. Everything is a pound – which sounds cheap, although I somehow managed to spend a total of £18 on my visit last week!

You can get a pretty good idea of the contents of the Phenomena book from the words on the cover. It’s a pretty standard compendium of all the usual fortean topics – frog and fish falls, spontaneous human combustion, cattle mutilations, levitation, teleportation, cities in the sky, entombed toads, werewolves and so forth. The last two items on the list are rather more cryptic – “Arkeology” is shorthand for the archaeology of Noah’s Ark, while “Accidents to Iconoclasts” refers to mishaps that befall people who dare to interfere with ancient sites. The “Mummy’s Curse” is the best known example of this, but another case described in the book occurred less than five miles from the place where I bought it.

Everyone has heard of Avebury and Stonehenge, but far fewer people know of England’s third largest megalithic site, consisting of three prehistoric stone circles at Stanton Drew in Somerset. The reason for the site’s relative obscurity may be that, in spite of its sprawling size, it’s not really that impressive to the eye – the individual stones are quite small, and the overall plan of the circles is difficult to make out. But perhaps that’s the way it’s meant to be. According to Michell and Rickard, the first person to attempt a detailed survey of the site was the architect John Wood in 1740. The locals told him that merely counting the stones was a bad idea: “Several have attempted to do so, and proceeded until they were either struck dead upon the spot, or with such illness as soon were carried off”. Ignoring such superstitions, Wood continued with his task “and as a great storm accidentally arose just after, and blew down part of a great tree near the body of the work, the people were then thoroughly satisfied that I had disturbed the guardian spirits of the metamorphosised stones.”

Here is one of my own pictures of Stanton Drew:

Another of the books I bought for a pound was a 1978 paperback called Explorations of the Marvellous, containing the text of a series of lectures given by various scientists and science fiction writers. Featured among the latter is John Brunner, who I’ve written about on at least one previous occasion. Brunner lived in Somerset for many years prior to his untimely death in 1995, and I suspect that some of his personal library may have found its way to the Bookbarn. On a previous visit there (about ten years ago, before they went onto the internet) I bought a hardback anthology that was neither edited by John Brunner nor had a story by him in it – yet it has his signature inside. So maybe it was his own copy of the book (it was a collection of science fiction erotica, if you must know).

By a further coincidence, Brunner’s lecture is all about forteana. More specifically, it’s about how shockingly sloppy some well-known fortean writers are when it comes to research and fact-checking. One of the most amusing examples he cites relates to a book I’ve never actually read, although it’s a classic of the genre – The Morning of the Magicians, by Pauwels and Bergier. Apparently they make the claim that one Professor Ralph Milne Farley “has drawn attention to the fact that some biologists think that old age is due to the accumulation of heavy water in the organism. The alchemists’ elixir of life might then be a substance that eliminates selectively heavy water.”  Brunner recognised this idea as coming not from a serious scientific treatise but from a science fiction novel he’d devoured when he was 12 or 13! The book in question was called The Immortals, and it was indeed by Ralph Milne Farley... but the latter was neither a professor nor a scientist. In these days of Wikipedia, it’s easy to do the fact-checking that Pauwels and Bergier failed to do:

Roger Sherman Hoar (April 8, 1887 – October 10, 1963) was a state senator and assistant Attorney General, state of Massachusetts. He also wrote science fiction under the pseudonym of “Ralph Milne Farley”.

The other fortean book I acquired last week came via eBay. This was The Fickle Finger of Fate, which I mentioned I’d ordered in last week’s post about Satirical Superheroes. The most fortean thing about the book is its author, John A. Keel – who as I said last time went on to write about Mothman, UFOs and Men in Black. But this novel from 1966 is just a lighthearted superhero parody featuring Keel’s own creation, Satyr-Man. It has a couple of mildly fortean elements – one character believes he is under a “Mummy’s Curse” (see above), and there’s a running joke about swamp gas and weather balloons (the most common ways the authorities used to debunk UFO sightings).

A satyr is a mythological half-man, half-beast with an insatiable sexual appetite. Coupled with the “ADULTS ONLY” warning on the cover, you might imagine this is a somewhat dirty book. But 1966 was still a year before America abolished its obscenity laws (see The Man who Helped to Free the World), so the book is heavily censored. For those who are only interested in such things, here is its one and only explicit sex scene:

“C’mere,” she grunted, pulling him to her as she ****** her **** and ****** ******** until he ***** ******* ***** and they **** *****. He lifted his **** ****** to **** ******, rolling across the rumpled bed with his mouth pressed to her ***** ********. Then she ***** his **** ******* and her hands ***** ***** ***.

“Ooooo,” she said.

“Ahhhhhhhh,” he said.

“Ummmmmmm,” she said.

“Hmmmmmmmmm,” he said.

Finally they **** ********** **** *** ******* **** *******. And then he **** ***** ******* *****. She **** *** ************! Outside the window, the surf continued to pound the beach.

Camelot, maybe

Hill-forts are among the most impressive pre-Roman structures to be found in Britain. They are particularly common in southern England, as Paul Jackson described in his blog post A Handful of Hill Forts. Despite the name, hill-forts weren’t really military structures so much as small, self-contained towns that were defended by artificially built ramparts. An example can be seen in the photograph above, which shows Cadbury Castle in Somerset.

Cadbury Castle was built during the Iron Age, around 500 BC, and was continuously occupied until it was overrun by the Romans in the first century AD, in what seems to have been a particularly brutal and violent event. According to the Somerset County Council website, there is “clear evidence of destruction by fire and the massacre of a group of inhabitants”. However, after the departure of the Romans, the South Cadbury site was reoccupied and redeveloped in the early Middle Ages.

In 1533, a man named John Leland was given a commission by King Henry VIII “to make a search after England’s Antiquities”. This assignment took him to all corners of the country, including the Somerset village of South Cadbury, where he wrote “At the very south end of the church of South Cadbury standeth Camelot, sometime a famous town or castle” and that “The people can tell nothing there but that they have heard say that Arthur much restored to Camelot.”

In other words, Leland was saying that Cadbury Castle was nothing less than King Arthur’s Camelot!

Now King Arthur is one of the most frustrating figures in British history. Almost everyone has heard of him, but there is no firm consensus on what century he lived in, what kingdom he ruled over, or even if he existed in the real world at all. As I said last year in The Lost Tomb of King Arthur:

Down here in the south-west, the prevailing opinion is that he was the King of Dumnonia around 500 AD, a century or so after the departure of the Romans. Dumnonia roughly corresponded to modern-day Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, which remained resolutely Celtic while Wessex to the East (Dorset/Wiltshire/Hampshire) adopted the language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

According to this view, it’s not that unreasonable to suggest that Cadbury Castle might have been associated with King Arthur – possibly even one of his main courts. It was occupied at the right time, and it’s in the right place. I made this point in my book Bloody British History: Somerset:

Cadbury Castle is one of the best natural defences on what would have been the eastern border of Dumnonia. Although the hillfort had existed for more than a thousand years in Arthur’s time, its modern name dates from precisely that period. Cadbury means ‘Cado’s Fort’... and Cado was king of Dumnonia around the time Arthur was born. Archaeologically, too, the evidence points to the site being an important military installation of the period. It was refortified in the fifth century with massive stone walls, and in the middle of the hilltop a timber-framed Great Hall was built – a splendid palace fit for a King!

These days, the only structure on the top of Cadbury Castle is a stone plinth dated “2000 AD” (see picture below). The plaque on top of this shows the directions and distances to a number of other places in southwest England. I struggled at first to discern a common theme to these, eventually deciding that they're all places dear to the hearts of hippies and New Agers! There are nine places in all, as follows:

• Two other “Arthurian” sites, Tintagel and Glastonbury
• Two other hill-forts, Ham Hill and Maiden Castle
• Another Iron Age site, Hengistbury Head, which was a busy seaport and trading centre
• Two megalithic sites, Stonehenge and Avebury
• Lamyatt Beacon, the site of a Romano-Celtic temple
• Alfred’s Tower, an 18th century folly commemorating Alfred the Great

The Cerne Giant

The Cerne Giant is one of the best known features of the Dorset landscape. In fact it’s such a familiar image that it’s easy to forget just how bizarre and unique it is. As I pointed out 18 months ago in my post about Phallic Symbols (mostly small ones), “gigantic erections are something you almost never see in mainstream European art”. Although they went to the trouble of inventing a word, ithyphallic, to refer to the artistic depiction of a sexually aroused male, it’s usually limited to ancient cultures and/or other continents. In this part of the world, ithyphallic images disappeared almost completely with the departure of the Romans in the fifth century. Nudity of any kind never really returned to British art, even during the Renaissance period when it was quite common in the rest of Europe (albeit with tiny little dicks).

Also from around 18 months ago is Paul Jackson’s “Armchair Tour of Britain’s Hill Figures”, the first part covering White Horses and the second everything else. In the latter category, there is only one other human figure besides the Cerne Giant – the Long Man of Wilmington. There’s a similarity between the two, in that both are simplistically drawn outline figures, but also an obvious difference – the Long Man of Wilmington hasn’t got his dick out.

A fact about hill figures that isn’t always appreciated is that they require constant maintenance – decade after decade, century after century. Paul gave a first-hand account of what needs to be done in his post Maintaining the Broad Town White Horse last year. The first step is weeding and trimming to prevent the outline from becoming overgrown, followed by re-liming (in the case of Paul’s White Horse, using over a ton of powdered lime) to restore the figure’s whiteness. Without this sort of attention, generation after generation, a hill figure would eventually be lost to sight and forgotten.

This brings us to the most contentious question about the Cerne Giant: How old is it? Only one of the figures in Paul’s survey – the Uffington White Horse – has been accurately dated to prehistoric times, with most of the others being a few centuries old at most (the Broad Town White Horse, for example, was created in the 19th century).

The oldest surviving records of the Cerne Giant date from the second half of the 17th century. As a result, many skeptical websites (Wikipedia among them) assume it must have originated around that time. One theory is that it’s a caricature of Oliver Cromwell – England’s puritanical leader following the Civil War of the 1640s. This makes sense up to a point. The obscene image would certainly have offended Cromwell and his followers (who took the Biblical injunction against graven images very seriously), and it’s placed in clear view of what would have been a busy road between Dorchester and Sherborne. But on closer inspection the theory is ludicrous.

It’s all very well for people in the 21st century to sit at their computer screens and say “maybe it was a 17th century political cartoon”... but does it look like a 17th century political cartoon? As I said at the start, nude figures – let alone rampant erections – were conspicuously absent from British representational art in those days. It’s true that the people who opposed the Puritans (and came back to power with the Restoration of Charles II) sometimes went to the opposite extreme – a notorious example being the satirical entertainment Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (which includes some great character names like Fuckadilla and Clytoris)... but that was only in discrete private circles, not on public display for everyone to see!

Also, why depict Cromwell bald-headed and whiskerless, when he wasn’t? Why depict him holding a club and not a pistol or musket? Real caricatures of Cromwell are quite different in style, leaving the viewer in no doubt as to his identity. Here is one of him dressed as a king and here he is consorting with the devil. Even crudely drawn cartoons of that period are quite different in style from the Cerne Giant, as you can see from this example or this one. All the adult male figures are shown with long hair and beards, and dressed in the fashion of the times.

The theory that the Cerne Giant is a 17th century caricature seems to be an internet-era thing. I looked in various history books, guidebooks etc that I’ve got (mostly dating from the 20th century) and couldn’t find a single mention of it. Out of 11 books I consulted, one says that nothing is known about the giant’s history, seven suggest it’s a depiction of Hercules from the Romano-British period, and three that it represents a pre-Roman deity.

The association with Hercules is based on similarities of iconography. The ancient Greek hero, who was also popular with the Romans, was often depicted holding a club in one hand and a lion skin in the other – and archaeological evidence does indeed suggest that the Cerne Giant might once have held a lion skin (or something similar) which has since been erased. But Hercules isn’t usually ithyphallic. I said earlier that the Romans often depicted enormous erections, but that was almost always in the context of one specific deity, Priapus. Hercules, on the other hand, usually had a tiny little one (see the second picture in my earlier blog post for a particularly amusing example).

Personally I think it’s more likely that the Cerne Giant originated in pre-Roman times. The artistic style looks pre-Roman, for one thing, and the Uffington White Horse proves that chalk hill figures were not unknown in Iron Age Britain. Maybe it was subsequently adapted by the Romans into a depiction of Hercules, which would explain how it survived into the fifth or sixth century AD. But what happened then?

The full name of the village where the giant is located is Cerne Abbas – the “Abbas” suffix indicating that the village was attached to a mediaeval Christian abbey. At a time when anything pagan was automatically assumed to be the work of the devil, it’s difficult to believe the monks did any proactive maintenance work on the giant (and may even have deliberately tried to obliterate it). So perhaps it was lost to sight and forgotten until the 17th century, when it was rediscovered and restored – hence the misconception that it was actually created at that time.

Iron Age Oddities

If I can’t think of anything else to write about, I can always dig into my collection of photographs taken in various museums. I’ll start with two that show very similar-looking objects. The one on the left was taken in the British Museum last week; the one on the right was taken a few years ago in Lyme Regis Museum. They look so similar they might even be the same object... and in a sense they are.

The object in the British Museum is a bronze mirror that was unearthed during excavations at the Roman villa at Holcombe, a few miles from Lyme Regis. Although it was discovered at a Roman site, it actually dates from around 50 BC, about a century before the Roman invasion. That period of British history is referred to as the “Iron Age”, which makes it sound primitive and unsophisticated – but it clearly wasn’t, if they had fancy decorated mirrors like this. The mirror is displayed face down, to show the intricate engraving on the back – the other side would have been polished smooth to produce a reflective surface.

The mirror on display in Lyme Regis is simply a modern replica of the one in the British Museum. It looks a completely different colour, but at least part of this may be due to the different lighting conditions. Apart from that, however, the replica is astonishingly accurate. If you open the image full size, you can see that not only has the fine engraving been reproduced exactly, but so has the seemingly random pattern of corrosion on the metal!

Actually, I’d be more interested to see a replica of what the mirror looked like when it was new. One of the reasons people insist on thinking of archaeological history as “primitive” is because objects are in such a poor state when they’re dug out of the ground. I’m sure the mirror’s original owner would have thrown it out of the house if she’d seen it in this condition!

Bronze mirrors were popular high-status items in a number of ancient cultures, and dozens of other examples have been found at Iron Age sites around Britain. But there’s another object on display in the same room at the British Museum which is virtually unique. It’s the horned helmet shown below. This was found near Waterloo Bridge in London and it dates from the same period as the Holcombe mirror, or possibly even earlier.

I have to admit I’d never heard of the Waterloo helmet until I saw it last week, although I see now that it’s important enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Like most people I tend to associate horned helmets with the Vikings (even though the Vikings didn’t really use them that much)... but with an estimated date of 150 to 50 BC, this one predates the Vikings by a thousand years. Its purpose was almost certainly purely ceremonial – the thin bronze wouldn’t have given the wearer much protection against a heavy iron sword!

The Lost Tomb of King Arthur

Glastonbury in Somerset is a town about which many fascinating claims have been made. In previous posts I’ve mentioned its reputed connections with Psychic Archaeology, the Knights Templar and even Saint Patrick. My book Bloody British History: Somerset has no fewer than 18 references to Glastonbury in the index. Not all of these are literally “bloody”, although many of them are. There was the group of Irish pilgrims who were massacred while visiting the shrine of Saint Patrick in 708 AD. There was the first Norman Abbot of Glastonbury, who dealt with a group of unruly monks by having them slaughtered at the altar of the church. And then there was the last Abbot of Glastonbury, who was hung, drawn and quartered on the orders of Henry VIII in 1539.

Some of the Glastonbury stories in the book are not so much bloody as mysterious. An example is the supposed discovery of the bones of King Arthur in the grounds of the Abbey in 1191. In my brief account of this, I took the standard modern-day view that it was just a cynical publicity stunt, aimed at luring pilgrims to the Abbey when the monks were short of funds to rebuild it after a disastrous fire. But was it really that simple? I’ve just read a short ebook on the subject, The Lost Tomb of King Arthur by Oliver Hayes – and now I’m not so certain.

I reviewed another of Oliver’s ebooks last year – The Papal Prophecies. That book, although it was a fascinating story, showed signs of having been put together in a hurry to coincide with the election of the new Pope. In contrast, The Lost Tomb of King Arthur appears to be the end result of long and careful research on the subject. It’s part of a series called Celtic Twilight, which seeks to demystify some of the semi-legendary events that took place in the British Isles during the early Middle Ages.

King Arthur, of course, is as semi-legendary as they come. Different parts of the country have their own views as to who he was, when he lived, and what he did. Down here in the south-west, the prevailing opinion is that he was the King of Dumnonia around 500 AD, a century or so after the departure of the Romans. Dumnonia roughly corresponded to modern-day Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, which remained resolutely Celtic while Wessex to the East (Dorset/Wiltshire/Hampshire) adopted the language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

If it’s true that King Arthur really existed, then he must have been buried somewhere. To be honest, this blindingly obvious fact never occurred to me until I read Oliver’s book. Putting all the myths and legends to one side, where was the most likely place for a king to be interred? People have always buried their important leaders in important places. In Christian times, that generally meant a major religious establishment. If Arthur was King of Dumnonia, it makes perfect sense that he would have been buried at Glastonbury. The monastery there was an important centre of the Celtic Church, and it lay within the boundaries of Dumnonia as they existed in the 6th century.

For Oliver, this is just the starting point. The focus of his book is not on Arthur’s burial in the 6th century, but on the supposed rediscovery of his remains in the 12th century. Did Glastonbury monks really unearth his tomb in 1191, or did they fake it? Oliver’s surprising answer is... neither of the above! I won’t spoil the fun by giving his argument away, but it’s ingenious and persuasive – and it may even be right!

From Sardanapalus to Ashurbanipal

One of the most iconic works in the Louvre Museum is The Death of Sardanapalus, painted by Eugène Delacroix at the height of the Romantic Era in 1827. The painting is 5 metres wide by 4 metres tall, and it has to be seen to be fully appreciated – a small-scale photo like mine really can’t do it justice.

Sardanapalus was supposed to be the last king of Assyria, at the fall of that mighty empire in the 7th century BC. According to legend, instead of protecting the country against invaders, Sardanapalus spent his life in hedonism and debauchery, surrounded by wealth and loose women. When the enemy finally arrived outside his palace in Nineveh, rather than defending the city he had his concubines slaughtered and then set fire to his palace while he was still inside it.

The legend of Sardanapalus appealed to the romantic imagination – besides this painting by Delacroix, it was the subject of a play by Lord Byron in 1821. The source of the legend was a Greek historian named Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the first century BC – in other words, 600 years after the alleged events took place. In the 1820s, virtually everything anyone knew about the ancient world came from reading the Graeco-Roman classics – archaeology was still in its infancy.

The tide turned in the 1840s, when serious archaeological exploration of Northern Iraq was carried out first by the French and then by the British. It was the latter who made the greatest discoveries, under the direction of Austen Henry Layard and his local-born assistant Hormuzd Rassam, and as a result many of the best finds are now in the British Museum. On my last visit there I bought a book called Assyrian Sculpture. The picture on the cover shows one of numerous wall carvings found by Rassam at Nineveh, in the palace of Ashurbanipal – the Assyrian king from 669 to 631 BC. Although he wasn’t the last king of Assyria (and he wasn’t a drunken hedonist who committed suicide, but a great warrior who died a natural death), Ashurbanipal is generally believed to be the historical figure on which the legend of Sardanapalus was based.

The picture on the cover of the book is one of many in the British Museum depicting a favourite pastime of Assyrian kings, usually referred to as a “lion hunt”. It wasn’t really a lion hunt, though, but the ritualized slaying of a captured lion. At first sight the picture looks rather comical, due to Ashurbanipal’s rigidly upright posture as he runs the lion through with his sword. To some extent this is artistic licence – the Assyrians usually depicted kings and other dignified individuals in highly formalized poses. But more importantly, the lion is already dead – it wouldn’t have got near the king if it wasn’t! It’s got an arrow through its head, and Ashurbanipal is holding it up but the neck as he runs it through. You might think the lion looks unrealistically small, but this would have been an Asiatic Lion, not the much larger African lion seen in zoos today.

The book also includes a comic-strip style wall carving showing the sequence of events leading up to the slaying of the lion (this has to be read from right to left, like a Japanese manga comic). On the right, a small boy releases the lion from its cage. The boy is inside a little cage of his own, in case the lion is smart enough to turn round and try to eat him. But instead the lion runs leftwards towards Ashurbanipal, getting a first arrow in his back in the process. It then leaps up towards the king, who is protected by a soldier holding a shield and spear while Ashurbanipal fires point-blank at the hapless lion.

The contrast between the historical Ashurbanipal and the legendary Sardanapalus could hardly be greater – the first indulging in warlike bloodsports (and fighting human foes, as depicted in other sculptures) while the latter spent his life shagging the opposite sex in the comfort of his palace. From a moral point of view both are equally reprehensible, but the first is more consistent with the leader of a militaristic empire, while the latter only makes sense in the cosily decadent imaginations of poets and artists!

Looking back, I see that I mentioned the Ashurbanipal-Sardanapalus link once before, in Art and Archaeology. The ancient Assyrians also featured in The Bible's Excluded Middle and The Siege of Lachish.

I also spotted this small-scale sketch of The Death of Sardanapalus in another room in the Louvre – I assume it was a trial version that Delacroix painted before embarking on the full-scale one. The woman in the foreground who is having her throat slit in the final version looks like she is being decapitated in this one!

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.

Cosmic Relics

There’s something very appealing about “ancient aliens” – the idea that it might be possible to find archaeological evidence on Earth (or elsewhere in the Solar System) of alien visitation in the distant past. In the popular mind, of course, the subject is associated with the fringe theories of people like Erich von Daniken, David Hatcher Childress and Giorgio Tsoukalos... but there is a more serious side to the subject as well. From an a-priori point of view, the probability that aliens visited the Earth at some random time in the last 4.5 billion years is a lot higher than the probability that they should suddenly arrive on the scene in the last 65 years, just when human civilization got to grips with the idea that interstellar travel might be possible.

I’ve already mentioned a scientific paper with the intriguing title “On the likelihood of non-terrestrial artifacts in the Solar System”, in my post on Searching for alien artifacts. There is even a scientific name for the subject – xenoarchaeology. But when scientists say they’re looking for alien artifacts, they mean real technological hardware. A chunk of limestone bearing a vague resemblance to a Soyuz re-entry capsule doesn’t count.

Sadly, “alien relics” that are unambiguous enough to convince hardnosed scientists are yet to be found in the real world. But in science fiction it’s a different matter. The discovery of an obviously artificial construct on the Moon is the starting point for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was developed from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 short story “The Sentinel”. Another film from the same period, Quatermass And The Pit (1967), deals with the unearthing of an ancient spacecraft, deep beneath the streets of London, in the same archaeological strata as five-million-year-old fossil hominids. Again, that film had its origins in the previous decade (a TV serial that aired in 1958/9).

Overlapping to some extent with the ancient astronaut theories is the idea of ancient high-tech civilizations here on Earth – often associated with the “lost continents” of Atlantis and Lemuria. Like ancient aliens, lost continents are very much a fringe topic. Hard archaeological evidence for a high-tech “lost continent” is—like unequivocal evidence for ancient aliens—easier to find in the pages of science fiction than in the real world. And sometimes evidence for one turns out to be evidence for both! In my recent article in Fortean Times about Lionel Fanthorpe’s Badger Books, one of the titles I referred to was Space No Barrier (1964), which was published under the pseudonym of Pel Torro. All I said about the story in the article was that it “starts with an alien artifact being unearthed at an archaeological dig in Iraq”. In fact the artifact turns out to be a buried spaceship, inside which there is a robot-like alien in suspended animation. It turns out he’s been stuck there since the days of Atlantis!

An interesting inversion of this idea can be found in Eric Frank Russell’s short story “The Cosmic Relic”. This was originally published in 1947, and reprinted in the June 1961 issue of Fantastic Stories (from which the illustration at the top of this post is taken). The “relic” featured in the story isn’t an archaeological find, but a battered-looking spacecraft that lands on the Isle of Man one day. After much consternation among the locals, and lengthy investigation by scientists, the spacecraft eventually yields its secret. It isn’t extraterrestrial at all, but a product of Earth! The spaceship was built and launched by the lost civilization of Lemuria, thousands of years ago. The “Cosmic Relic” finally returned home after travelling all the way round the Galaxy! For an even longer-term version of the same idea, see my Dinosaur Orbit post from two years ago.

Bigfoot, Richard III and Outsider Science

Last month saw not one but two major news stories revolving around the subject of DNA analysis. In America, there was the long-awaited publication of the Bigfoot DNA results, first announced in a press release in November last year. In Britain, there was the just as eagerly anticipated announcement that the remains unearthed in Leicester last September are indeed those of King Richard III, who was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

At first sight, the latter might appear to fall squarely in the domain of mainstream academia, but this isn’t the case at all. The discovery of Richard III’s remains was as much a product of “Outsider Science” as the Bigfoot DNA study. The search was funded and motivated by amateur enthusiasts who (like the Bigfoot hunters) set out with an emotionally-charged agenda to prove a particular theory – an approach that is, of course, anathema to professional scientists. And the way the Richard III hunters went about their quest was unorthodox to say the least, as was the way they announced their results to the public. Yet in spite of all of this, no-one seriously disputes that they found exactly what they claim to have found. This is in stark contrast to the Bigfoot DNA study, which ever since the results were announced has been the target of intense criticism from all sides. Sometimes Outsider Science works, more often it doesn’t. I thought it might be instructive to compare the two cases in a bit more detail.

Like (I suspect) many other non-Americans, I’m not particularly interested in Bigfoot, and I’m constantly surprised at how passionate some people can become when discussing the subject. It’s a bit like ufology – not just an emotional battlefield between believers and skeptics, but between believers in one theory and believers in a rival theory. In fact, the most vitriolic criticism of Melba Ketchum’s DNA study has come not from mainstream scientists (who have generally ignored it) but from within the Bigfoot community. Much of the vitriol has focused on the way the results were made public before they had appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, which is held up as “not the way science works” (I’m not convinced this is true – see this Wikipedia article for a counterexample). When the full results were finally published last month, the journal in question turned out to be one that no-one had heard of, leading to allegations of vanity publishing.

The reason Dr Ketchum’s paper wasn’t published in a more respectable journal is, simply, that all the respectable journals turned it down. The paranoid conspiracy explanation for this would be that the scientific community is out to suppress anything done by independently-funded researchers working outside mainstream academia, and/or anything suggesting that there might be a living hominin species other than homo sapiens. But I don’t believe that. If Dr Ketchum’s samples had turned out to have mitochondrial DNA identical to a modern human (which they did), and nuclear DNA that was non-human, but closer to human than a chimpanzee or bonobo, I’m sure the mainstream journals would have fallen over themselves to get it into print. But to say “the Sasquatch genomes were novel and fell well outside of known ancient hominin as well as ape sequences” suggests that what we have here is a new kind of hybrid outside the accepted laws of zoology and genetics. It’s easier to assume that the nuDNA (unlike the mtDNA) was too badly degraded to allow a proper analysis... and I bet that’s what all those peer reviewers who turned the paper down assumed.

If the Bigfoot DNA study has a flaw, it will be found in the science and not (as a lot of the criticism has dwelt on) the way the results were announced to the world. Ten days before the Ketchum paper was published, the results of the Richard III dig were announced... not in a peer-reviewed journal, but in a morning press conference followed by a documentary on Channel 4 later the same day. On the face of it, that’s not a particularly professional way to go about things – an impression that was borne out by the documentary itself, which showed that at least some of the researchers were amateur enthusiasts motivated by a passion for their subject rather than professional detachment. That’s not a bad thing, of course (“amateur” comes from the French word for “love”, not “incompetence”), but it’s certainly unorthodox.

Ironically, most of what I know about orthodox archaeology comes from another Channel 4 series, Time Team. They often make the point that real archaeology is about ordinary, low-status individuals – the sort of people you can’t learn about from the history books. As a general rule, archaeologists aren’t very interested in the world of Kings and Queens. This was strikingly expressed in a recent episode when it was said that, to a real archaeologist, finding a low-value copper coin is far more exciting than finding a high-value gold coin. Or to put it another way, archaeologists hate treasure-hunters... and looking for a dead King of England is arguably the ultimate in treasure-hunting!

The Richard III dig set out to do something that was unthinkable to most serious archaeologists. There’s nothing wrong in excavating the site of a mediaeval priory... unless the sole purpose is a “treasure hunt” for one particular tomb. And that was unashamedly the case here. As soon as the body was found, the exercise switched from an archaeological dig to a forensic exhumation. The identification of the skeleton as that of Richard III was pretty strong even without DNA analysis, based on its age, gender, archaeological context, distinctive pathology (spinal deformity and battlefield wounds) and radiocarbon dating. In fact, the DNA analysis wasn’t complete at the time the announcement was made, having been limited to a comparison of the mtDNA with two living maternal descendants. Dr Turi King, the geneticist who carried out the study, was quoted in New Scientist as saying “As a scientist I would have preferred to finish the analysis, but I know the answer isn't going to change”. I’m sure she’s right, but I have the feeling that if Melba Ketchum had said the same thing she wouldn’t have been allowed to get away with it!

The discovery of Richard III’s burial site is one of the great triumphs of Outsider Science. It proves that when it’s done properly (and given a fair amount of luck) it really can come up with the goods. Sadly, successes like this are quickly appropriated by the mainstream, and people forget they were initiated by “outsiders” who were originally viewed as crackpots. In fact, they still would be viewed as crackpots, if the trench had been dug just half a metre from where it was – in which case the body would never have been found! That was the fate of another (superficially very similar) enterprise last month, when a group of amateur enthusiasts tried and failed to find a cache of WW2 aircraft they believed had been buried in Burma (Search for buried Spitfires in Burma called off).

The Siege of Lachish

Room 10b of the British Museum is devoted to a graphic portrayal of the Siege of Lachish, in the form of a stone frieze running around the walls -- just as it would have done in Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh 2700 years ago. Lachish, about 50 km south-west of Jerusalem, was one of the fortified cities destroyed by the Assyrian army when they invaded the Kingdom of Judah in 701 BC.

When Victorian archaeologists discovered the Lachish relief in the ruins of Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq, it caused a sensation. The events depicted had previously only been known from one source: the ancient Hebrew scriptures that Christians refer to as the “Old Testament”. As with other Assyrian artifacts (see The Bible’s Excluded Middle), the Lachish carvings provide independent evidence indicating that at least some of the events described in the Second Book of Kings did actually take place. More significantly, taken together with other Assyrian records, they more or less prove that there really was a Kingdom of Judah that had its capital in Jerusalem at that time, and that it was considered important enough for Sennacherib to bother having an extravagant frieze carved to record his victory over it.

While the Biblical connection was of immense importance to the pious Victorians, it’s not the thing that makes the Lachish frieze so fascinating to modern-day visitors to the Museum. It’s the detailed and realistic depiction of siege warfare in the ancient world, which brings events from almost three millennia ago to life in a uniquely vivid way. To modern eyes, the Assyrians are more interesting than the Israelites, simply because they were more modern in the way they went about things. Their world centred not around religion, as was the case with most ancient civilizations, but around warfare... and warfare conducted in a ruthlessly efficient style.

To find out more about the Siege of Lachish, get a copy of my new “ebooklet” on the subject -- just published by Bretwalda Books, and currently available from Amazon.com, Amazon UK and Smashwords, with more retailers to follow shortly.

My previous contribution to this series, The V-2 Offensive on London is now available from iTunes as well as Amazon and Smashwords.

Bacchus and Ariadne

Here is a picture for anyone who thinks classical mythology and/or renaissance art is dull. It’s the work of the 16th century Italian artist Agostino Carracci, and it depicts the legendary tale of Bacchus and Ariadne. In Greek mythology, Ariadne was a Cretan princess who fell in love with the hero Theseus. He dumped her on the island of Naxos, where shortly afterwards the god Bacchus arrived to help her get over him. While the legendary account has them indulging in a robust sex session, it’s not often depicted as explicitly as it is here! A more traditional version was produced by Agostino’s brother Annibale Carracci.

It was not unknown for artists to produce generic porn images and slap classical-sounding titles on them to “get them past the censor”. But that’s not the case here, since the scene really does depict the legend of Bacchus and Ariadne. The male figure is wearing a wreath of vine-leaves, which was a universally recognized symbol of the god Bacchus. And in the background you can see Theseus making a getaway in his ship... again a widely recognized symbol often seen in depictions of this story.

Bacchus is often euphemistically described as the “god of wine”, but actually he was the god of drunkenness, debauchery and all-night sex orgies. Not surprisingly he had a large cult following, particularly in the decadent times of the later Roman Empire. We even used to worship him here in Somerset, as can be seen from this (sadly rather damaged) statue in the Roman ruins at Bath.

Devilish superstitions

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

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!

Art and Archaeology

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!