Fortean-themed music, from opera to metal

Prompted by some comments on a previous post, I thought I'd write something about "UFO-themed songs". But after looking into it, I decided there isn't really anything I can add to the many times it's been done before (even Wikipedia has a list of songs about close encounters with aliens). Instead, I've decided to focus on a selection of more substantial musical works (e.g. operas and concept albums, such as those pictured above) that fit my broad definition of "fortean". These include several less well-known items, including some I discovered while researching my two books about music - SofSFM (2020) and SofM (2023). Here's what I came up with, grouped under the 6 headings of Aliens, Ghosts, Atlantis, Esoteric Traditions, Science Fiction and Comics.

ALIENS

Christus Apollo (1969) by Jerry Goldsmith. An obscure work by a far-from-obscure composer, this was one of several interesting discoveries I made while writing SofSFM. It's a religious cantata with words by SF writer Ray Bradbury, portraying Christ as a spacefaring super-being known by different names on different planets.

Alien Encounter (1996) by Phil Thornton - a purely instrumental album with tracks including "Arrival of the Mothership" and "Visions from the Homeworld". It comes from one of my all-time favourite CD labels, New World Music, which was particularly popular in the 1990s. I've got quite a collection of these  - other artists on the label include Medwyn Goodall and Terry Oldfield (brother of Mike Oldfield).

GHOSTS

There's never been any shortage of operas with supernatural themes - several of them featured in my Fortean Opera post. Here are two more:
 
The Lighthouse (1980) by Peter Maxwell Davies - another discovery I made while writing SofSFM. It's based on the same real-world "Flannan Isle incident" as the 1977 Doctor Who serial "Horror of Fang Rock". In the latter, the mysterious disappearance of the lighthouse-keepers is down to an alien; in the opera, it's caused by a series of ghostly apparitions.

The Turn of the Screw (1954) by Benjamin Britten. This is based on the classic "psychological" ghost story of the same name by Henry James - but whereas the ghosts turn out to be imaginary in the original version, in the opera they're very real.

ATLANTIS

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that one of the CDs pictured above also featured in my recent post about Lemuria - and that's the 2004 album of that name by the symphonic metal band Therion. But there are two other albums worth mentioning in this category that I only have in intangible form in my Spotify library:

Atlantis (1969) by Sun Ra. A fascinating individual who claimed to come from the planet Saturn, Sun Ra featured prominently in SofSFM. But not all his albums are about outer space - this one has tracks called Mu, Lemuria, Yucatan and Bimini, as well as the really excellent 22-minute title track.

Atlantis Ascendant (2001) by Bal-Sagoth - another symphonic metal band, and definitely my favourite (their music always makes me think of a Masters of the Universe cartoon, for some reason). Their concept albums also have really great plots; according to Wikipedia, this one "centres on the exploits of a fictional 19th-century archaeologist and adventurer who has dedicated his life to the field of antediluvian anthropology".

ESOTERIC TRADITIONS

Voyage of the Acolyte (1975) by Steve Hackett - the esoteric tradition in this case being the Tarot. All the tracks are inspired by specific Tarot cards, such as "Hands of the Priestess", "The Hermit" and "Shadow of the Hierophant". There's also a Tarot connection in The Lighthouse, as PMD explains in the liner notes: "The structure is based on the Tower of the Tarot, whose number symbolism is present in all the music".

Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) by Yes, based on Hindu mysticism. In its original form as a vinyl double album, each of the four sides comprised a single "movement" relating to the four categories of Hindu scripture: the shruti (revealing), the smriti (remembering), the puranas (ancients) and the tantras (rituals).

Zos Kia Cultus (2002) by Behemoth. A previously unsuspected music genre I discovered while writing SofM was what you might call "highbrow" metal, and of the bands I listened to, Behemoth was the one I liked best. This particular album is based on the occult writings of Austin Osman Spare, who I first heard of when he featured on the cover of Fortean Times in March 2001.

Masonic Music (1783-91) by Mozart. I mentioned last week that The Magic Flute was featured in my Fortean Opera post, one reason being its inclusion of a Masonic-style secret society. Mozart himself was a Freemason, and this CD contains several works incorporating Masonic ideas. One in particular, the "Little German Cantata" of 1791, must have seemed as blasphemous to some listeners as Goldsmith's Christus Apollo, with its reference to "the creator of the universe, whether named Jehovah, or God, or Fu, or Brahma" (Fu being a Chinese deity and Brahma a Hindu one).

Also featured in my Fortean Opera list was Wagner's Parsifal, which could equally fit here with its strange fusion of the Grail legend with the mystical writings of Schopenhauer. It features quite strongly in Philip K. Dick's novel VALIS (1981), which brings me neatly to the next item...

(Fortean) SCIENCE FICTION

VALIS (1987) by Tod Machover - a short opera based on Dick's novel. Most of PKD's writings are fortean to some extent, but none more so than the mishmash of metaphysics, religion, alien super-intelligence and conspiracy theories that is VALIS. As for the opera, it's discussed in some detail in SofSFM, so all I'll say here is that anything that combines Wagner and rock music has got to be worth a listen.

The Chronicle of the Black Sword (1985) by Hawkwind. There's always been a close connection between Hawkwind and the writings of Michael Moorcock, but this album (their best, in my opinion) has particularly strong fortean credentials, being based on the adventures of Moorcock's sword-and-sorcery hero, Elric of Melniboné.

(Fortean) COMICS

The Power Cosmic (1999) by Bal-Sagoth. No excuses for mentioning this band a second time, as even the album title reflects one of Marvel's more fortean superheroes, the Silver Surfer. He's also referenced, under his real name of Norrin Radd of Zenn La, in the song "The Scourge of the Fourth Celestial Host", together with several other Marvel characters, including Arishem of the Celestials - the archetypal "ancient alien".

Miss Anthropocene (2020) by Grimes. There were two reasons I sought this album out while writing SofM: (a) I was under instructions to include popular young artists, and (b) she'd spoken out in praise of AI in music, which was one of the topics in the last chapter of the book. I have to say I enjoyed her style much more than I expected, and was pleasantly surprised to find two songs inspired by the distinctly fortean comics that Jack Kirby did for DC in the 1970s: "Darkseid" and "New Gods".

While I could have found plenty more items to go in the preceding categories, that's not true here, as beyond those two albums I'm not aware of any other fortean comic-inspired music (unless you want to include "Grimly Fiendish" by The Damned). But there's a picture of Doctor Strange on the cover of the Pink Floyd album A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), and he's as fortean as superheroes get (see my post Master of the Mystic Arts). The picture, drawn by Marie Severin, is taken from Strange Tales #158, and it's quite hard to see unless you peer very closely. Here's a photograph I took of my CD version, where I've  contrast-enhanced the relevant part (and outlined it in red), to make it a little clearer:
 

Colin Wilson, Philosopher of the Paranormal

Back in the 1970s, Colin Wilson was one of the big names of what might be called "mass-market forteana". But while I did borrow a copy of his 600-page blockbuster The Occult circa 1978, it was only much later that I started to discover just how interesting his ideas are. It began in 2001, when I bought a book by Fortean Times contributor Gary Lachman called Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (which I'm sure everyone spotted in my recent shelfie post, towards the right-hand end of the middle shelf). Colin Wilson made an appearance in Lachman's book in the context of the H. P. Lovecraft revival of the 1960s - including the wonderfully surreal cover of Wilson's 1967 novel The Mind Parasites. As evidenced by the photo above, I bought a second-hand copy as soon as I could find one, as well as two later novels in the same vein, The Philosopher's Stone (1969) and The Space Vampires (1976).

The other paperback shown above is a non-fiction one, The Psychic Detectives (1984), which I bought in 2016 when I was researching my own book, Pseudoscience and Science Fiction. Here's what I said about Wilson there:

As his career progressed, he became increasingly fascinated with the world of strange powers. A recurrent theme throughout his fiction and non-fiction is that most people live a robotic existence far below their real potential.

That use of the word "robotic" brings me on to the main subject of this post, which is the Kindle book shown in the above photo - Gary Lachman's Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson (2016). I only became aware of it last month, when Gary posted the following on Facebook:

I've just heard that the paperback of Beyond the Robot, my book about Colin Wilson, is now out of print. If you are among the many who didn't buy a copy, there's still time to not get the Kindle edition too.

Since I'm a chronic sufferer from the "Why do friends never read my books?" syndrome, I clearly had to buy it immediately! I'm glad I did, as I found it a fascinating and information-packed read which got 5 out of 5 stars from me on Goodreads. However, this post isn't really a review of the book, so much as a summary of a few things I found particularly interesting from a fortean point of view.

To start with, Fortean Times (as well as some of the "Unconventions" they organized) makes several appearances in the book. At one point Lachman specifically mentions "writing pretty regularly for the Fortean Times", and after Colin Wilson's death in 2013 Gary's obituary of him appeared in FT 310 (the same issue as my review of a comic-strip book about particle physics, FWIW). Although I've never actually met Gary, I did spot him at a couple of Uncons - and, I think, in the audience at the "Aliens and the Imagination" event I mentioned on this blog in 2011. Way back in 1978, in the guise of his musical alter-ego Gary Valentine, Lachman also wrote Blondie's paranormal-themed hit "I’m Always Touched by Your Presence, Dear".

As for Colin Wilson himself, he only came on to fortean-type subjects a decade or so after he started writing. His original focus was on existential philosophy, and his first book on that subject, The Outsider, was published in 1956 when he was just 24. It received a lot of rave reviews, including one in The Observer - which Lachman describes as one of Britain's "highbrow Sunday papers" (which pleased me a lot, since they published a two-page feature by me just a couple of months ago).

In hindsight, it's not surprising that Wilson's own personal take on philosophy eventually led to an interest in the paranormal, since it's ultimately all about widening human consciousness beyond the normal trivialities of everyday life. That's why he was drawn to the Lovecraftian style of fiction - he had no time for the more mainstream kind of novelist "who, in the service of realism, simply portrays life as it is". Another fortean favourite who made an impression on Wilson was Aleister Crowley. According to Lachman, Crowley was the model for one of the characters in Wilson's early novel Man Without a Shadow (1963) - Carradoc Cunningham, an occultist and master of "sex magic". Apparently Wilson himself harboured interests along the latter lines, believing that sexual orgasm can unlock higher states of consciousness and "open the doors of perception".

When Wilson came to write about the paranormal - The Occult (1971) being his first and best-known, but far from only, book on the subject - he did so in a way that was almost diametrically opposed to the standard approach for the genre. As Lachman puts it:

If scientists and other skeptics were ever going to broaden their minds about the occult, then it had to be presented to them logically, in a way that made sense, not in a sensational "believe it or not" manner.

As with his first book about philosophy, Wilson's first book on the paranormal also got rave reviews. In part, this was because "highbrow" readers were far more open to such topics at that time than they are today. Referring to a favourable review that New Scientist gave of Wilson's follow-up book Mysteries (1978), Lachman says:

Such acclaim from a scientific publication for a book about the paranormal is unusual today, and shows that in the 1970s, the paranormal was treated with respect by many scientists, unlike in our more narrowly skeptical times.

Another thing I remember myself from those times, is that interest in fringe topics was much more wide-ranging and eclectic than it is today. The "paranormal", for example, meant a lot more than just ghosts and poltergeists. Listing some of the topics that Wilson covered in Mysteries, Lachman includes "plant telepathy, psychic surgery, transcendental meditation, biofeedback, Kirlian photography, multiple personality and synchronicity". All great stuff - makes me feel more nostalgic than ever for the 20th century!

Colin Wilson was an incredibly prolific author, and I kept noting down titles of books of his that I ought to seek out. The most intriguing-sounding of all is Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals (2006) - something I should have known about already, as Wilson mentioned it in an article he himself wrote for Fortean Times, called "A 100,000-year-old Civilization?" It appeared in FT 272 in March 2011, and I have to admit I'd forgotten all about it (although I looked back at it just now, which is how I know it mentions the Atlantis book). In any case, I've already acquired my copy of Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals from eBay, as you can see here:

The Changing History (and Geography) of Lemuria

A peculiarity of certain fortean topics is the way the details develop and change over time. To pick an example, there's the legend (which, as we'll see, didn't even start out as a legend) of Lemuria. As lost continents go, it's far less well known to the general public than Atlantis, but just as intriguing to those in the know. It's been featured in at least a couple of Ancient Aliens episodes, in "They Came from the Pleiades" (2020) and "The Mystery of Mount Shasta" (2021).

In the first of these, we're informed that Lemuria was a now-sunken continent located in the Pacific, which Hawaiian folklore links to benevolent visitors from the Pleiades star cluster. In the later episode, we're told that survivors from Lemuria may still be living inside Mount Shasta - one of California's best known UFO hotspots. As with most things on the show, these ideas are wonderfully entertaining, and surprisingly credible-sounding if you restrict your knowledge of the subject to what you're being told by Tsoukalos, Pope, Childress et al. But as soon as you do a little independent research, things get a lot murkier (the Pleiades, for example, didn't even exist until the Earth was billions of years old and swarming with Cretaceous-era dinosaurs - so hardly a likely home for ancient astronauts).

My first encounter with Lemuria was probably in the Marvel Comics adaptation of Lin Carter's Thongor stories, though I've subsequently read the original 1965 Wizard of Lemuria novel, pictured above. A much more controversial novel was Richard Shaver's I Remember Lemuria (1945), which purported to be based on fact rather than fiction. My copy (edited by Ancient Aliens regular David Hatcher Childress under the title Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth) is also pictured above, together with a novel I've previously mentioned on this blog, Ron Goulart's Hello Lemuria Hello (1979). Also featured in the picture is the album Lemuria (2004) by symphonic metal band Therion.

In the lyrics of that album's title song, the name Lemuria is used interchangeably with Mu - as indeed it was on Ancient Aliens. But originally Mu and Lemuria were completely separate, and disentangling them involves going quite a way back into history. An excellent source in this context is the final book pictured above, Lost Continents (1954) by L Sprague de Camp. Best known as a fiction author, he turns his hand here to non-fiction - and does his background research far more conscientiously than Ancient Aliens ever bothers to.

The surprising fact, as I mentioned at the start, is that Lemuria didn't start out as a legend, whether in Hawaii, California or anywhere else. It began as a short-lived scientific hypothesis, developed in the latter half of the 19th century, to explain similarities between Mesozoic fossils found on the Indian subcontinent and in south-east Africa. The idea was that there used to be a land-bridge joining these two regions, stretching right across the Indian Ocean. Now mostly sunken, all that remained would have been the island of Madagascar - famous for its lemurs, from which the land-bridge got the name Lemuria.

You'll notice a couple of significant features here - first, that we're talking about a time millions of years before humans existed, and secondly that we're nowhere near the Pacific Ocean. What's more, we don't even need this hypothesis any more, because we know that, back in Mesozoic times, India was attached to southern Africa instead of being in its current position.

But instead of going away, the idea of Lemuria adapted and evolved. And it did so in a way that was peculiar to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In those days, the notion that sensitive individuals could pick up valid information by psychic means - by going into a trance and "channelling" messages from spirit entities - was well accepted in certain quarters. And that's how a lot of the key facts about Lemuria came down to us.

One strand to the Lemurian story lies within the realm of Theosophy, whose complex and confusing teachings were largely derived through psychic means. In this context, here's a passage from de Camp's book that clearly foreshadows Ancient Aliens:

Beings from Venus, which had already developed a high civilization ... guided faltering humankind to the point where the Lemurians became capable of individual immortality and reincarnation.

Most Theosophists were content to leave Lemuria in its original setting of the Indian Ocean, but several American writers of the time endeavoured to move it to the more familiar (to them) locale of the Pacific Ocean. An important development in this context came in the form of a book, A Dweller on Two Planets (1894). A cynic might describe this as a work of fiction, but it's actually presented as the channelled autobiography of a spirit entity called Phylos the Tibetan. Here, too, the second planet in question is Venus, but Lemuria is now indisputably located in the Pacific - and the connection with California's Mount Shasta is also made for the first time.

The final step towards the modern "legend" of Lemuria came in the 1920s and 30s, with a series of books by James Churchward concerning a sunken continent called "Mu", which he proposed as a counterpart of Atlantis in the Pacific. Churchward's arguments were based (albeit shakily) on the interpretation of purely physical evidence, in contrast to the earlier mediumistic channellings relating to Lemuria - but the distinction didn't last long. The legend soon crystallized into the form most often encountered today - that Mu and Lemuria are alternative names for a single lost continent, situated in the Pacific Ocean and having strong links both with Mount Shasta in California and with benevolent aliens from outer space.

Since I love showing off my book collection, here are a couple of classics to round the post off - James Churchward's The Children of Mu (1931) and Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882):

 

From Atlantis to the Roswell Incident, via Wikipedia

 

There's a game where players compete to get from one specified Wikipedia article to another in the minimum number of jumps, just by clicking on internal wiki-links within an article. I thought I'd try a fortean variation on this, navigating my way from the Atlantis article to the Roswell Incident. But instead of going for the shortest route, I've tried to make it more interesting by, wherever possible, including items from the tag cloud on the right-hand side of this blog. Here's the route I came up with:

STEP 0: Atlantis. A long-time favourite topic of mine, this scores 12 in my tag cloud (meaning this is its 12th appearance on this blog). My most recent brush with it was a video I made last year based on an old comic story by Steve Ditko. Historically, the oldest surviving references to Atlantis appear in the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato, who consequently is one of the very first wiki-links in Wikipedia's Atlantis article.

STEP 1: Plato. Wikipedia's article on him mentions his prominent appearance in Raphael's painting The School of Athens, with an onward link to its article on that subject.

STEP 2: The School of Athens. This is one of my all-time favourite "fine art" paintings - a fanciful depiction of a host of famous philosophers of various time periods all congregated together in a classical architectural setting. I've seen the original in the Vatican, and written a blog post about the fortean credentials of some of the people featured in it. An interesting bit of trivia mentioned early in the Wikipedia article is that Raphael's depiction of Plato (top left in the montage at the start of this post) is modelled on Leonardo da Vinci - whose article Wikipedia then links to.

STEP 3: Leonardo da Vinci. The second "hit" for my tag cloud, Leonardo scores 8 in it (which is either a measure of his fortean relevance, or my interest in him, or both). I've seen the originals of several of his paintings, including the most famous, the Mona Lisa, and the most interesting, The Last Supper. Both of them are linked from his Wikipedia article,  but there are no prizes for guessing which one we're going to click on.

STEP 4: The Last Supper (Leonardo). This, of course, is prominently featured in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which scores 11 in my tag cloud. And since Wikipedia's article on The Last Supper links to the one on The Da Vinci Code, that's where we're going next.

STEP 5: The Da Vinci Code. Of the many interesting links in this wiki-article, the one I'm going to pick out is another item from my tag cloud (with a score of 9), the Knights Templar.

STEP 6: Knights Templar. More than anything else, I associate this mediaeval organization with the legend of the Ark of the Covenant, but surprisingly their Wikipedia article doesn't mention it. So we'll have to take a roundabout route via something it does link to, the Temple of Solomon.

STEP 7: Solomon's Temple. OK, now there's a link to the Ark of the Covenant, so without further ado let's click on that.

STEP 8: Ark of the Covenant. This is another favourite fortean topic of mine, with 5 hits in my tag cloud. To most people, however, it just means one thing - Steven Spielberg's 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark - which Wikipedia conveniently links to.

STEP 9: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Astute readers will probably see where we're going now (if they haven't worked it out already)! This, of course, was the film that introduced everyone's favourite archaeologist, Indiana Jones - and the Wikipedia article helpfully links to all his subsequent appearances, including Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).

STEP 10: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. By far the most fortean instalment in the series, I love this film - and it neatly provides the last (wiki-) link in the chain, straight to our target destination: the Roswell Incident.

STEP 11: Roswell Incident. With a count of 5 in my tag cloud, this is the ultimate "modern myth", which I thought was a fitting final destination after starting out from the "ancient myth" of Atlantis. Hope you enjoyed the tour!

I Call It Research

As mentioned in last week’s post, I’ve just embarked on a new writing project. It’s a book about the cross-fertilization of ideas between Fortean-style speculation and popular culture (which is why I was reading up about the X-Files last week). Obviously that’s a subject I’ve often written about on this blog, and there’s already a lot of potential material (books, magazines, comics, DVDs) lying around the house. But being ultra-meticulous about research, I also tracked down various other relevant fiction and nonfiction books on eBay. A selection of these are pictured above, together with some nostalgic DVDs I bought from my local HMV store (all in the interests of research, of course).

Going Down… Beneath the Bermuda Triangle

I’ve just read two stories – a longish novelette and a shortish novel, both dating from the 1970s – by an author I’d barely heard of, called Jane Gallion. Previously I’d only seen her name in the context of a notoriously violent post-apocalyptic novel called Biker, which dates from 1969 and is still banned in the UK. But the two stories I did get hold of are quite different in tone, and it’s a shame they’re not better known. They’re both clever, well-written and interesting, and the longer of the two is bordering on a masterpiece.

To start with the shorter story – it’s called “Beneath the Bermuda Triangle” and it was published in the June/July 1979 issue of Galaxy magazine. This was a few years after the Skull the Slayer comic series I mentioned earlier this year, and it’s just as wacky a take on the Bermuda Triangle mystery. It’s got jewel-smuggling hippies, malevolent aliens, survivors from Atlantis, underwater pyramids and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

As far as I can tell, “Beneath the Bermuda Triangle” is the only story Jane Gallion ever wrote that doesn’t have any sex in it (apart from a couple of indirect references to Tantric Sex). But there is a tenuous connection to the world of erotica. The stand-in editor for that particular issue of Galaxy was “Hank Stine” – an alter-ego of Jean Marie Stine, who used the same byline on one of the avant-garde erotic novels published in the late sixties by the short-lived Essex House imprint (see my post about The Geek by Alice Louise Ramirez). Jane Gallion’s Biker was another Essex House novel – and according to an autobiographical note, she also worked as an editor there. At the same time, she seems to have been active in science fiction fandom – see this photograph of her (there were other links between Essex House and science fiction – Philip José Farmer also published several novels with them).

The novel I just read, and found so impressive, is called Going Down. In her autobiographical note (which dates from 1990), Jane Gallion says the book was written for Essex House but never published (partly because it broke two of their house rules – “no humour” and “no politics”). However, it was eventually published as an ebook in 2001, two years before the author died.

Unlike Biker (which is available as an ebook in America but not in Britain), Going Down is listed on the UK Kindle store, which is where I got it. I don’t think the listing does the book any favours – there’s no cover image or preview, the blurb is misleading and it’s classified as erotica, which it isn’t really – it’s a dystopian SF satire in which sex (or the suppression of sex) plays a significant role.

Going Down is written in the kind of avant-garde literary style that was popular in the early seventies – all in the present tense, and with no quotation marks around dialogue. In that sense, and in other ways, I found the style reminiscent of Barry Malzberg, who was one of the big name writers of the time. Thematically, on the other hand, the novel is closer to Philip K. Dick – all about a sharply stratified future society in which information is tightly controlled, and the government knows more about you than you do. The book’s structure is also reminiscent of PKD, with the point of view alternating between three different characters – one high up in government, one at the very bottom of society, and one who is a major figure in the (ultimately fruitless) rebel movement. Also, like both Dick and Malzberg, the novel has a strong undercurrent of humour, even though it’s basically a very angry book.

I mentioned science fiction portrayals of the future last week – and Going Down is one of the most prophetic I’ve come across. The society it describes is ultra-capitalist and ultra-puritanical. The government has electronic spying machines everywhere, ready to pounce at the first hint of subversive or “perverted” behaviour. Giant corporations charge people (who are always referred to as “consumers”) for absolutely everything – including having sex and going to the toilet. If you try to avoid paying for something, it’s a serious crime because it “damages the economy”. Also prescient (given recent headlines) is the utter hypocrisy of the ruling class, who impose puritanical laws on ordinary citizens while indulging in the most disgustingly obscene behaviour themselves.

Although Going Down was originally written in the early seventies, I’m not sure if it was revised for its ebook publication in 2001. If it wasn’t, then it contains one amazingly prescient reference. I can’t remember anyone back in the 1970s worrying about Genetically Modified crops, but one of the characters in the novel does. It’s in a scene between a high-ranking member of the government, named Hennering, and his boyfriend Penrod (“a slender lad of eighteen”). Hennering wishes to deep-throat a certain part of Penrod’s anatomy after said anatomical part has been thrust up a chicken’s backside:

The pullet had been organically raised. Penrod refused to have anything to do with a chicken exposed to genetically engineered or chemically adulterated food. He was afraid it might give him high blood pressure or possibly a rash. There’s a lot of that around. But Hennering made sure the bird was clean before he gave it to Penrod. Heavens to Betsy, he couldn’t have Penrod catching anything, could he?

This scene struck me as doubly prophetic – not just the reference to genetic engineering (and pathological aversion thereto), but also the way a conservative politician indulges in behaviour that’s so perverted it wouldn’t even cross a normal person’s mind. Remember this news story from a month ago?

The History of Atlantis

I wrote another short article for eHow last week: What Did Atlantis Look Like?. The editorial instructions said the piece should draw on multiple “credible expert sources”, but when it comes down to it there is only one really credible source on the subject :  the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who described the sinking of Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias in the 4th century BC. Everything that has ever been written about Atlantis draws in one way or another on Plato’s account.

Modern proponents of Atlantis seem to fall into three broad camps:

• Academics (and pseudo-academics) who scour the world looking for archaeological and historical evidence of a lost Atlantean civilization. This approach really took off with the publication of Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882.
• New Agers and other mystics who emphasize the spiritual and high-tech aspects of Atlantean culture, often receiving their information through telepathic “channelling” as opposed to more materialistic methods. This idea seems to have originated with the Theosophical movement in the late 19th century, continuing into the 20th century with the writings of Edgar Cayce and others.
• Fictional treatments of Atlantis often portray it as still existing, thousands of years after it sank beneath the waves, in the form of a highly advanced underwater civilization. The best-known representative of this version of Atlantis is probably Namor the Sub-Mariner from Marvel Comics, although the earliest occurrence of the idea that I’m aware of is Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Maracot Deep from 1929.

The thing about Plato’s account that makes all this variety possible is that virtually no-one imagines he was telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That leaves people free to pick and choose the bits they like, and add whatever further details they feel necessary.

Plato was a philosopher, not a historian, so he wasn’t in the business of recording purely factual accounts of historical events. He used the story of Atlantis as a vehicle to make specific points about moral and political philosophy. At the same time, however, Plato wasn’t in the business of writing imaginative fiction either. It’s hard to see why he would have gone to the trouble of fabricating such a convoluted story when he could have conveyed the same message in a more straightforward way. So it’s reasonable enough to conclude that some of what Plato said about Atlantis was based in fact, and some of it was made up.

But which is which? Translated into modern-day terms, the essential elements of Plato’s account are as follows:

1. Atlantis was an island which sank beneath the sea as the result of a catastrophic earthquake.
2. The island was large, perhaps 2000 or more miles in extent, and located in the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. After it sank, Plato says it “became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean”.
3. According to Plato, the sinking of Atlantis occurred around 9600 BC, when Atlantean civilization was at its height. Although Europe, North Africa and the Middle East were still in the early Neolithic period (New Stone Age) at that time, Plato’s Atlantis boasted a rich and thriving Bronze Age culture of a kind not seen elsewhere until 6000 years later.

As a general rule, the closer an Atlantis-hunter is to the academic mainstream, the fewer details of Plato’s account they seem prepared to accept. At the most hardnosed extreme, they just accept point (1) and ignore the rest. The second point – an island of that size located where Plato said it was – really isn’t credible in light of what is now known about the north Atlantic seabed. Similarly, the idea that such an advanced Bronze Age culture could have existed 12 millennia ago, without leaving the slightest trace in the neighbouring parts of Africa and Europe, just doesn’t fit with academically accepted chronology.

The figure of 9600 BC comes from Plato’s dating of the sinking of Atlantis to 9000 years before the time of Solon — a Greek statesman who lived around 600 BC. But one of the references cited in my eHow article claims that “Studies have shown there would appear to be a ten-fold error in all figures over a hundred in Plato’s work, due probably to an early translation error.” This would give a date of 600 + 900 (not 9000) = 1500 BC, which neatly coincides with the Bronze Age eruption of the small Greek island of Santorini – often cited as the most rationalistic explanation for the origin of Plato’s story.

But rationality is for the academics. At the other extreme, the mystics and New Agers are perfectly happy to accept Plato’s date of approximately 10,000 BC. They’re generally less interested in the location of Atlantis than in its level of technical and spiritual advancement – so they tend to focus on point (3) above rather than the first two. From their point of view, the idea of Bronze Age technology presents no problem at all, even when the rest of the world was back in the Stone Age. In fact they’re likely to advocate an even higher level of ancient Atlantean culture, complete with such things as flying vehicles, ESP, teleportation and maybe even space travel!

Retro-Fortean Answers

Here are the answers to last week’s Retro-Fortean Crossword. Wherever possible the clues were based on previous blog posts – in which case I’ve included a link to the relevant post.

ACROSS

1. AMBROSE Bierce, who vanished without a trace in December 1913 (See The Ambrose Collector)

5. Generic term for a mystery animal: CRYPTID (As in the Cryptid Casebook series – see The Science of Bigfoot for my contribution to the series)

9. Nickname of Raymond A. Palmer, pulp magazine editor who popularized the Shaver Mystery: RAP (My copy of the special “Shaver Mystery” issue of Amazing Stories, dated June 1947, can be seen in the photograph above)

10. “The EERIEST Ruined Dawn World”, short story by Fritz Leiber

11. Secretive organization that Edward Snowden used to work for: NSA (As featured in Satire and the Internet)

12. Fictional country which is the source of Doc Savage’s wealth: HIDALGO (The Doc Savage trade paperback pictured above includes a comic-book adaptation of Doc’s origin story, set in Hidalgo)

13. “POST HOC ergo propter hoc”, a logical fallacy popular with some conspiracy theorists

14. A short 16 mm film clip from 1967 purportedly showing Bigfoot: PATTERSON-GIMLIN (See Patterson-Gimlin Film Fake or Fact)

19. Village in the South of France reputedly associated with a great mystical secret: RENNES-LE-CHATEAU (See The Devil of Rennes-le-Chateau)

21. Ankh, cross and pentagram, for example: SYMBOLS

24. A Runic alphabet: FUTHARK

27. LEN Wein, creator of Wolverine and Swamp Thing (My copy of Wolverine’s first appearance was featured in The Marvel Age of Comics)

28. Hard to pin down, like many Fortean phenomena: ELUSIVE

29. Like a UFO, but not unidentified: IFO

30. An unexplained event: ANOMALY

31. SHANNON McMahon, X-Files super-soldier played by Lucy Lawless

DOWN

1. Early type of UFO widely reported across America during the 1890s: AIRSHIP

2. Bigfoot, for example: BIPED

3. Denny O’NEIL, author of The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer (See Hitler’s Astrologer)

4. If the Gunpowder Plot was a False Flag operation, this person may have engineered it: EARL OF SALISBURY (As described in my Conspiracy History book)

5. A famous Fortean mystery from Barbados: CREEPING COFFINS (See Creeping Coffins)

6. Himalayan giant apes (real or imaginary): YETIS

7. Enigmatic alien creature in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death: TENCH (My copy, which I originally read in 1980, is pictured above)

8. A type of scientific analysis applied to Bigfoot and Richard III: DNA SCAN (See Bigfoot, Richard III and Outsider Science)

15. The TEN Lost Tribes of Israel

16. The Third EYE, by T. Lobsang Rampa

17. IRA Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives

18. First name of JFK’s alleged assassin: LEE

19. A water nymph in Slavic mythology RUSALKA (As mentioned in my novelette The Mechanical Gorilla)

20. Pulp magazine which featured Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier in its first issue: UNKNOWN (See Sinister Barrier: the first Fortean novel and Pulp Forteana)

22. Planet ruled by Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon’s universe: MONGO

23. The Magic Flute or The Flying Dutchman, for example: OPERA (See Fortean Opera)

25. Huge volcanic eruption which may have been responsible for the Atlantis legend: THERA

26. Entity from another planet: ALIEN

Retro-Fortean Crossword

I thought I’d do another crossword puzzle this Christmas, since last year’s seemed to go down well. I assume it went down well, anyway, because it got an above-average number of page-views... but then the annotated list of answers the following week got below-average views, so maybe people just took one look at the puzzle and decided not to bother with it!

As before it’s an old-fashioned non-interactive crossword, so you’ll have to print it out or do it in your head. I originally wanted all the clues to refer to something I’ve written about on this blog in the last 12 months, but once I started filling letters in I realized that wasn’t going to be possible. Still, I’ve tried to stay on-topic as far as possible. I’ll print the answers (together with an explanation of the Retro-Fortean connections) next week.

ACROSS

1. ------- Bierce, who vanished without a trace in December 1913 [7]
5. Generic term for a mystery animal [7]
9. Nickname of Raymond A. Palmer, pulp magazine editor who popularized the Shaver Mystery [3]
10. “The ------- Ruined Dawn World”, short story by Fritz Leiber [7]
11. Secretive organization that Edward Snowden used to work for [3]
12. Fictional country which is the source of Doc Savage’s wealth [7]
13. “---- --- ergo propter hoc”, a logical fallacy popular with some conspiracy theorists [4, 3]
14. A short 16 mm film clip from 1967 purportedly showing Bigfoot [9-6]
19. Village in the South of France reputedly associated with a great mystical secret [6-2-7]
21. Ankh, cross and pentagram, for example [7]
24. A Runic alphabet [7]
27. --- Wein, creator of Wolverine and Swamp Thing [3]
28. Hard to pin down, like many Fortean phenomena [7]
29. Like a UFO, but not unidentified [3]
30. An unexplained event [7]
31. ------- McMahon, X-Files super-soldier played by Lucy Lawless [7]

DOWN

1. Early type of UFO widely reported across America during the 1890s [7]
2. Bigfoot, for example [5]
3. Denny -----, author of The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer [5]
4. If the Gunpowder Plot was a False Flag operation, this person may have engineered it [4, 2, 9]
5. A famous Fortean mystery from Barbados [8, 7]
6. Himalayan giant apes (real or imaginary) [5]
7. Enigmatic alien creature in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death [5]
8. A type of scientific analysis applied to Bigfoot and Richard III [3, 4]
15. The --- Lost Tribes of Israel [3]
16. The Third ---, by T. Lobsang Rampa [3]
17. --- Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives [3]
18. First name of JFK’s alleged assassin [3]
19. A water nymph in Slavic mythology [7]
20. Pulp magazine which featured Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier in its first issue [7]
22. Planet ruled by Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon’s universe [5]
23. The Magic Flute or The Flying Dutchman, for example [5]
25. Huge volcanic eruption which may have been responsible for the Atlantis legend [5]
26. Entity from another planet [5]

The Lemurian Conspiracy

As mentioned in a previous post, I went to the Science Fiction Worldcon in London last month. I was disappointed to find very few stalls in the dealers’ hall selling second-hand pulps and paperbacks – I guess nowadays it’s more cost-effective for them to sell such things via eBay. I did manage to get a few interesting items, however, including this 1979 novel by Ron Goulart: Hello Lemuria Hello.

The Fortean connections are obvious right away. “Lemuria” in the title refers to a reputed sunken continent, similar to Atlantis, which featured in a number of esoteric theories including the writings of Richard Shaver – the notorious “Shaver Mystery” of the 1940s. The latter is mentioned in the back cover blurb, as is the almost-as-Fortean “real reason for the death of Elvis Presley”.

There is another Fortean connection in the book’s hero – Jake Conger of the Wild Talents Division. “Wild Talents”, of course, was the title of Charles Fort’s last book. In the novel, the Wild Talents Division is made up of operatives with paranormal abilities – Jake Conger can make himself invisible, while his female sidekick Wizard Wells is an “87 per cent accurate” Precog. This is the last of three books featuring the Jake Conger character, although it’s the first that I’ve read.

The Shaver Mystery is something of a hobby horse of mine, so I won’t get sidetracked into pontificating about it here. Suffice to say that Shaver’s basic premise – involving decadent descendents of “ancient aliens” living in caverns beneath the Earth, and controlling human destiny through mind control and other methods – is also the underlying theme of Goulart’s novel, although Shaver isn’t actually mentioned by name. The most obvious difference is that Shaver, like all paranoid theorists, was in deadly earnest about everything he said. Goulart plays the whole thing for laughs – to much better effect.

There is a character in the novel, a crackpot author by the name of P.K. Stackpole, who broadly approximates to Richard Shaver – albeit a future version of him, since the action is set in 2022. “Hello Lemuria Hello” is supposedly the title of Stackpole’s latest non-fiction book – winner of the prestigious Goofy award at the annual convention of the Crackpot Writers of America (“all sorts of pea-brained yoohoos who specialize in writing about the weird, the occult, the paranormal...”).

The other person name-dropped on the back cover, Elvis Presley, also appears in fictionalized form, as a wealthy middle-aged pop singer named Amos Binky. He doesn’t have that much in common with Elvis – in fact British readers might detect a closer resemblance to the late unlamented Jimmy Savile (“I tell you that girl scout was over twelve. Somebody done falsified her birth certificate or somethin’ to make me look bad.”). The book was published in March 1979, just a year and a half after Presley’s death, so I guess it was a case of cashing in on a still-topical subject. It’s interesting, anyway, that the idea of a “real reason for the death of Elvis Presley” was already part of conspiracy culture by that time.

The book’s setting of 2022 is now just 8 years away – much closer than 1979, which is 35 years in the past. I love reading retro-futuristic stories like this, both for the things they got right and the things they got wrong. The novel is full of smart-aleck robots, automated skycabs, sentient shopping carts and such like... all still very much in the realms of science fiction. On the other hand, everyone still reads printed books and magazines, with no indication there is any electronic alternative.

But Goulart did get some things right. People pay for purchases by putting a plastic card in a slot. They check into hotels by signing their name on a screen with a stylus. They watch mindless garbage on satellite TV. Even more prophetic is the title of one of the bestsellers of the day: “I Blew the President” – clearly a timeslipped reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the mid-nineties!

The portrayal of the conspiracy theorist, P.K. Stackpole, also struck me as being closer to a 21st century stereotype than one from the 1970s. He goes on about how he’s persecuted by Lizard People, and how the FBI implanted a radio transmitter in his rectum. His writings include articles entitled “Here’s a Microwave Threat They Didn’t Tell You About” and “The Government is Building Concentration Camps Again and You are Footing the Bills.” Just the sort of thing you see on conspiracy websites today!

Ron Goulart (who is still alive, as far as I know) was one of the most prolific science fiction authors of the 1970s and 80s. He wrote literally hundreds of novels and short stories, maintaining the cheap-and-cheerful pulp ethos at a time when most of his contemporaries had switched to writing stodgy, pseudo-literary epics. I haven’t read as much of his work as I should have, given that I share his value system – my excuse is that very little of his output saw print on this side of the Atlantic.

I’ve read one of his non-fiction books – Cheap Thrills, a history of the pulp magazines – but he’s written several others, mainly on comic-book culture. I’ve read a handful of Goulart’s short stories in anthologies, and the three of his Vampirella adaptations that were reprinted in the UK. Apart from that, I’ve only read three Ron Goulart novels (all paperbacks imported from the States)... and Hello Lemuria Hello is definitely the best of them.

The Fortean Fiction of Robert E. Howard

For many people, the work of Robert E. Howard begins and ends with his most famous character, Conan – seen here in Savage Sword of Conan #7 (I dug the magazine out intending to photograph the classic cover by Boris Vallejo, then I decided I liked this frontispiece by Vicente Alcazar better). However, Howard’s Conan stories only represent a small fraction of the fiction he published in his lifetime. He contributed to numerous pulp magazines, but his most distinctive work appeared in Weird Tales between the late 1920s and late 30s... the very period the same magazine was publishing the most distinctive work by Howard’s slightly older contemporary H.P. Lovecraft. Although the writing style of the two men was very different, some of their preoccupations were surprisingly similar, and bordering on paranoia (a word that is often used as a pejorative, but we Forteans know better).

“Man was not always master of the earth—and is he now?” That’s a recurring theme in Lovecraft’s fiction, but the quote actually comes from a short story by Robert E. Howard (“The Black Stone”, which I’ll get to later). The same idea is at the heart of much internet paranoia today, particularly the kind that talks about shape-shifting reptilians infiltrating the corridors of power. That idea became widespread in the 1990s, but it’s present in fully fledged form in Howard’s novelette “The Shadow Kingdom”, published in Weird Tales in August 1929. This features a predecessor of Conan named Kull – an Atlantean warrior who becomes king of an ancient country called Valusia. He soon discovers that the Valusian court is riddled with non-human shape-shifters called Serpent Men, who are surreptitiously killing key officials and taking their place: “For as he watched, Tu’s face became strangely dim and unreal; the features mingled and merged in a seemingly impossible manner. Then, like a fading mask of fog, the face suddenly vanished and in its stead gaped and leered a monstrous serpent’s head... He plucked forth his sword and gazed more closely at the nameless thing that had been known as Tu, chief councillor. Save for the reptilian head, the thing was the exact counterpart of a man.”

The idea of an ancient race of malignant, humanoid reptiles (possibly the remnants of those from “The Shadow Kingdom”) appears in another story by Howard set in much more recent times, during the Roman occupation of Britain. This is “Worms of the Earth”, from the November 1932 Weird Tales, which August Derleth considered to be Howard’s best story. By this point the snake-like reptiles (“worm” is used figuratively) have withdrawn from human contact and live in underground caves. In a series of bizarre episodes the hero, a Pictish leader named Bran Mak Morn, tries to force the “worms” to do his bidding by stealing an object they worship called the Black Stone.

This isn’t the same Black Stone as the one in the story of that title I quoted from earlier. The latter, published in Weird Tales in November 1931, is one of Howard’s most Lovecraftian stories. It’s set in the present day, and the first-person narrator is a bookish academic – not Howard’s usual musclebound protagonist! However, rather than being set in New England, like most of Lovecraft’s own fiction, “The Black Stone” takes place in a part of Hungary that was invaded by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century... where the narrator encounters “a curious legend of a strange deity which the witch-people of Xuthltan were said to have invoked with chants and wild rituals of flagellation and slaughter”. As in any Lovecraftian story worthy of the name, the deity in question turns out to be a surviving representative of an ancient, inhuman race.

In “The Black Stone”, Xuthltan is the old name of a village in Hungary where unspeakable goings-on used to go on. But that’s not the only Xuthltan. In “The Fire of Asshurbanipal”, set in the modern-day Middle East, Xuthltan is described as having been “a magician at the court of Asshurbanipal” (cf. From Sardanapalus to Ashurbanipal), who acquired a gemstone of terrifying power that had its origins in the very depths of Hell. This story was published posthumously in Weird Tales in December 1936, six months after Howard shot himself (and I really wish he hadn’t done that).

Most of Howard’s stories have exotic settings – usually foreign countries, and often distant times in the past. But some, like “The Black Stone” and “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” are set in his own time, and a few are even set in the southern United States where he lived. Another posthumous story, “Pigeons from Hell” (Weird Tales May 1938) is a good example of this. Despite the silly-sounding title, it’s one of the best stories in the “voodoo” subgenre of horror fiction that I’ve ever come across.

Another Fortean theme that Howard returned to on several occasions is the “were-creature”. An intriguingly non-supernatural version – in this case a were-leopard – can be found in “Black Talons”, from the December 1933 issue of Strange Detective Stories: “A leopard man! I learned of them when I was on the West Coast [of Africa]. He belongs to a native cult which worships the leopard. They take a male infant and subject his head to pressure, to make it deformed; and he is brought up to believe that the spirit of a leopard inhabits his body.”

Another story with a cryptozoological twist is “Rogues in the House” (Weird Tales, January 1934), one of the more light-hearted of the Conan stories. The villain is a pet-gone-bad called Thak, whose erstwhile owner says of him “Some would call him an ape, but he is almost as different from a real ape as he is different from a real man. His people dwell far to the east, in the mountains that fringe the eastern frontiers of Zamora. There are not many of them; but, if they are not exterminated, I believe they will become human beings in perhaps a hundred thousand years. They are in the formative stage; they are neither apes, as their remote ancestors were, nor men, as their remote descendants may be. They dwell in the high crags of well-nigh inaccessible mountains, knowing nothing of fire or the making of shelter or garments, or the use of weapons. Yet they have a language of a sort, consisting mainly of grunts and clicks.”

Sounds like a Yeti to me!

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.

Giant from the Unknown

The Steve Ditko Comics Weblog has recently finished reprinting all the Ditko stories that are in the public domain. Looking through these, I found one with a distinctly Fortean theme, called “Giant from the Unknown”. This is a seven-page story that originally appeared in 1958, and begins with a farmer unearthing an apparently petrified giant while digging in a field. He calls in the archaeological experts, but as can be seen in the excerpt below, they assume it’s a hoax along the lines of the Cardiff Giant: “Back in the 1800s a farmer was digging a well near Cardiff, New York... claimed he found a giant petrified. It was no giant nor an ancient statue either. It was a fake. A fake that fooled a lot of scientists but made a lot of money for the farmer who let people see it for a price!”

[If you want to read Ditko’s story in full, you might want to read it now because I’m going to give away the ending on the other side of the picture...]

Needless to say, the giant in the story isn’t a hoax but a real creature, in a state of suspended animation, “from a wonderful civilization in the distant past”. While this ending might seem perfectly logical and satisfying to those of us who were raised on a diet of Ditko weirdness, it has to be admitted that it’s a rather bizarre idea in the context of 1950s science fiction. When people think of digging up proto-humans from the distant past they think in terms of ape-like hominid skeletons, not smooth-skinned giants with “intricate electronic material like transistors or something”. However, the idea does have a precedent in the esoteric writings of people like Madame Blavatsky and William Scott-Elliot in the late 19th century -- who imagined that the lost continent of Atlantis was populated by a highly advanced race of giants much like the one in Ditko’s story.

Words and music by Desmond Leslie

The two items pictured on the left were both produced by the multi-talented Desmond Leslie in the 1950s. By far the better known of the two is the book Flying Saucers Have Landed, written in collaboration with George Adamski in 1953. Perhaps "collaboration" is too strong a word, as the book consists of two completely disparate sections -- the first written by Leslie, the second by Adamski. The book's fame (or notoriety) rests on the latter section, which records Adamski's alleged encounters with visitors from outer space. This was the beginning of the "contactee" phenomenon which was to dominate ufology in the 1950s -- naïvely written accounts of extraterrestrials coming to Earth in order to warn people about the naughtiness of atomic weapons.

Desmond Leslie's contribution is at the opposite end of the intellectual scale from Adamski's. It's still nonsense, but it's literate and well-researched nonsense. Leslie was the first person to try to link the UFO phenomenon with what would nowadays be called New Age beliefs -- bringing in everything from Atlantis and the Pyramids to Indian flying machines (vimanas) and Celtic mythology. Leslie also draws heavily on esoteric writings such as the Stanzas of Dzyan and the theosophical theories of Madame Blavatsky... and even inserts a few original ideas of his own. Foremost among these is the notion that Flying Saucers are powered by musical tones and harmonies: "A vimana can be moved by tunes and rhythms".

This brings us onto the second item depicted above: Music of the Future. This is a modern CD, but the music on it was recorded by Leslie in the 1950s and originally issued as an acetate in 1959. "Music of the Future" is an accurate description of the sounds produced by Leslie, if not the technique he used. The music sounds electronic, but it isn't -- it was produced acoustically by various contrived means, and then processed mechanically on analogue tape recorders. The French term for this type of music, which was a short-lived fad among avant-garde composers, was musique concrète... the result sounds a bit like a cross between Revolution 9 by the Beatles and the closing sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The titles of the tracks clearly show Leslie's continuing interest in the mystical and esoteric: "Comet in Aquarius", "The Warhorns of Mars", "Coming of the Elementals" and "Death of Satan". The last-named is described by Leslie as an esoteric tone-poem, and contains the album's only recognisable tune (which can be heard in the clip at the bottom of this post) -- a distorted version of the theme from Richard Strauss's own tone-poem, Don Juan.

The first six tracks on the CD were written for a now-forgotten film called The Day the Sky Fell In. I don't think Leslie had anything to do with the plot of the film, but from the way he describes it in the sleeve notes it sounds like an archetypal "contactee" scenario. A mysterious stranger visits a defence scientist and tries to dissuade him from working on nuclear weapons. The scientist refuses, so the stranger gives a loaded revolver to the scientist's son... who happens to be mentally retarded. The point being -- this is no more dangerous than giving an atom bomb to a politician!

The School of Athens

The School of Athens is one of the huge frescoes painted by Raphael (1483–1520) in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura. It's always been one of my favourite paintings, and I knew the two central figures were meant to be Plato and Aristotle... but I've only recently discovered that many of the other figures represent real people as well. These include a number of philosophers, some of them contemporary with Plato and Aristotle, and others not! I've labelled these in the image below (click to enlarge), followed by a summary of their Fortean credentials.

From a Fortean point of view, Aristotle was one of the bad guys, because he invented the Law of the Excluded Middle so beloved of skeptics. Forteans, like the inhabitants of A.E. van Vogt's The World of Null-A, are non-Aristotelians (that's what Null-A means). In contrast, Plato was one of the good guys, since he emphasized the distinction between the world perceived by the senses and the reality that underlies it. Raphael's figure of Plato was modelled on Leonardo da Vinci, who was 58 when the picture was painted in 1510. I suspect Raphael rated Plato more highly than Aristotle, too, since the latter is gesturing downwards into the gutter while Plato is pointing up towards the sky!

It was Plato, of course, who produced the first detailed accounts of Atlantis, in his Timaeus and Critias. In those works, the history and geography of the "lost continent" are described by a character named Critias, in conversation with Plato's teacher Socrates... who is also shown in the painting, together with a group of his students including Antisthenes and Aeschines.

The core "School of Athens", comprising the great Athenian philosophers of the fourth and fifth centuries BC, stretch from the Socrates group on the left to Aristotle and his students (labelled "Peripatetics") on the right. Somewhat apart from the main crowd (in real life as well as in the painting) is Diogenes, who was the archetypal cynic. Although he was a contemporary of Aristotle, he had as little as possible to do with him. It's probably fair to describe Diogenes as an eccentric. On one occasion he was seen masturbating publicly in the middle of a marketplace, and was quoted as saying "If only I could satisfy my stomach as easily by rubbing it in the same fashion."

The figures around the edges of the picture (if the traditional attributions are correct) are a bit of a mish-mash both chronologically and geographically. The only one connected to the Athenian School (albeit somewhat later than the others) is Epicurus, who is standing in the left foreground. Epicurus was a materialistic hedonistic atheist, but unlike most materialistic hedonistic atheists, he's mentioned in the Bible. Saint Paul met some of his followers on his visit to Athens, as described in Acts 17:18.

The earliest philosopher depicted is Zoroaster (standing in the group on the right of the picture). Zoroaster wasn't even a Greek -- he was a Persian. He founded the dualistic religion of Zoroastrianism, which Philip K. Dick considered one of the major precursors of Gnosticism. It forms the basis of his early novel The Cosmic Puppets -- and later on, in his masterpiece VALIS, Zoroaster is described as the "first Saviour".

Another group that greatly influenced Philip K. Dick were the "pre-Socratics"... Greek-speaking philosophers from Ionia, in what is now modern-day Turkey. The most famous pre-Socratic was Pythagoras, who is pictured writing in the left foreground. Pythagoras is best known for his mathematical theorem, although he was a teacher of more esoteric subjects as well. In fact, the very word "esoteric" was originally coined in 1701 to describe the secret teachings of Pythagoras, as opposed to his public or "exoteric" teachings.

Other pre-Socratics, clustered around Pythagoras in the picture, include Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides. The latter two feature prominently in VALIS, and also in PKD's non-fiction essay "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later". Dick saw both Heraclitus and Parmenides as important precursors of Gnosticism, along with Zoroaster. In Raphael's painting, the figure of Heraclitus is modelled on Michelangelo, who at the time was working a few corridors away on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. This may or may not have been meant as a compliment to Heraclitus, since Raphael and Michelangelo didn't get on very well together!

Also in the Pythagorean group, and mentioned in Dick's essay, is Anaxagoras -- who is also reputed to have coined the word "panspermia". Well, maybe he did, but I doubt whether he was thinking of microbes falling to earth in meteorites... since I don't think anyone in those days was aware of the existence of either microbes or meteorites!

Unfortunately, the "Zeno" depicted on the far left of the painting is probably Zeno of Citium, who is far less interesting than his namesake Zeno of Elea. The latter was a pre-Socratic who was famous for his paradoxes... including one which proves that any kind of motion is impossible! Philip K. Dick featured Zeno's Paradox in his 1953 short story "The Indefatigable Frog".

Moving forward to the post-Athenian period, the centre of learning in the Graeco-Roman world shifted to Alexandria in Egypt. Two of the early Alexandrians, Euclid and Ptolemy (both in the right foreground), are - like Aristotle - more famous for being wrong than anything else. Euclid believed space was flat, which it isn't, and Ptolemy believed the Sun went round the Earth, which it doesn't. Sadly, their views held sway for more than a thousand years before they were proved wrong.

A less well-known figure from Alexandria was Plotinus, who is shown standing on the right of the picture. During the third century AD he developed a system called neoplatonism, which was probably as close as Western philosophy ever got to Eastern mysticism... complete with enlightenment through meditation and oneness with the World Soul.

A later disciple of neoplatonism, also from Alexandria, was Hypatia -- pictured over on the left with the pre-Socratics, even though she lived almost a thousand years after them. As well as being a mystic, Hypatia was a pagan and a female -- a dangerous combination in the early days of Christianity. A mystical, pagan female... she must be a witch! Inevitably, Hypatia met her death in 415 AD at the hands of a lynch mob -- arguably the first ever victim of a witch-hunt.

Traditionally, Hypatia's death marks the end of classical civilization and the beginning of the Dark Ages. There is a gap of 750 years until the next person pictured -- a mediaeval scholar named Averroes, who is looking over the shoulder of Pythagoras. Born in the Islamic part of Spain, Averroes was one of the first people to rehabilitate the works of Greek philosophy and translate them into Latin. The picture on the left is one of Raphael's preliminary sketches for the painting... but it amused me because it looks like something from a pulp magazine, or one of those old black-and-white comics like Savage Sword of Conan!