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.

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.

From Dragon bones to Chakra stones

I’ve just been reading a book called The Legends of Cracow, which gives me an excuse to use a few more of the photos from my recent visit there. Of the ten legends described in the book, the first and best known is that of the Wawel dragon, Smok. I’ve already mentioned this legend once, back in a post about Dragons and Dinosaurs. The story is associated with the founding of the city of Kraków by the legendary King Krakus, who is said to have built the royal castle on Wawel Hill in the 8th century. The dragon, before it was slain by a clever peasant, was supposed to have lived in a cave under the hill. There really is a cave there, which is now a tourist attraction – as is the 6-metre high fire-breathing bronze dragon that was installed in the 20th century.

Rather more bizarrely, there is a collection of huge “dragon bones” hanging from chains outside the main entrance to the 14th century Wawel Cathedral. When these were originally dug up, people may have genuinely believed they’d discovered the bones of a dragon. In fact, they come from a variety of prehistoric creatures... although there doesn’t seem to be any consensus on exactly which ones. The TV documentary I mentioned in my Dragons and Dinosaurs post suggested that they are (from top to bottom in my photo): part of the femur of a mammoth, part of the jawbone of a whale, and part of the skull of a woolly rhinoceros.

The legends of King Krakus and the Wawel dragon first appeared in print towards the end of the 12th century. That was around the same time the legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail were first written down. So as legends go, they are pretty old and venerable. Of course, all legends purport to be “ancient”, but some of them may have popped into existence in much more recent times.

I suspect that’s the case with the tenth and last legend in the book, concerning the Kraków Chakram – the sacred stone of the Hindus. To quote directly from the book: “According to Hindu mythology and contemporary Hindu initiates, centuries ago the God Shiva cast onto the earth seven stones concentrating cosmic and earthly energy... they say that one of the chakrams was cast onto the Wawel Hill and is located beneath the Royal Castle. The others fell in Delhi, Jerusalem, Mecca, Delphi, Rome and Velehrad.”

I have to confess this sounds like New Age syncretism to me. It’s true that Shiva has been worshipped in India for centuries, and it’s possible there’s an ancient legend about him casting seven mystical stones onto the Earth. But Hinduism is an inward-looking religion, and while its ancient sages might have known of sites like Jerusalem, Mecca, Delphi and Rome it seems doubtful they would have heard of Kraków or Velehrad (I had to look that one up – it’s a small village in the Czech Republic about 300 kilometres from Kraków).

Apparently the legend of the Wawel chakra stone first came to light in the period between the First and Second World Wars, when a group of Hindu pilgrims asked to go down into the crypt in one particular corner of the Royal Castle. A “mysterious radiance” was seen to emanate from the crypt while they were down there – and on such flimsy evidence a New Age legend was born! Fortunately I hadn’t heard of this legend when I visited last week, so I didn’t waste any time looking for the chakra stone (and apparently the crypt is closed to the public anyway). However, I think it’s more or less directly below the point from which this photo was taken.

Another reason I’m sceptical about this particular legend is that a Google search for “Shiva chakra stone” doesn’t turn up much of relevance in the way of Hindu primary sources. Most of the search results relate to the Shivalingam – a phallic-shaped stone that is one of the primary symbols of Shiva. And speaking of phallic-shaped stones... that gives me an excuse for one more photograph from my trip to Poland.

Pieskowa Skała is another royal castle, about 30 km from the Wawel, that was built by King Casimir the Great in the 14th century. Just adjacent to it is the 30-metre high free-standing rock formation pictured here, known as Maczuga Herkuleza (the Club of Hercules). The name suggests a legendary connection with the pagan hero Hercules, although there is also a well-known Christian legend concerning its origin (see A Polish Pact with the Devil). As far as I know, however, there are no legends connecting it with the Hindu God Shiva!

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.

Shadow of the Feathered Serpent

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

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

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

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

Cosmic Geometry in the West Country

A few years ago, there was a bit of a craze (popularized by Graham Hancock and others) for finding constellations mirrored in the arrangement of sacred sites on Earth. My immediate reaction was "I bet I could do that", so I gave it a try. The result of my efforts is summarized on the left -- the constellation of Aquarius traced out across the counties of Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. Given the association of places like Glastonbury and Stonehenge with the Age of Aquarius, I was very pleased with this!

The sites are marked with the Greek letter of the corresponding star in Aquarius, as follows: Alpha = Wells Cathedral; Beta = Warminster; Gamma = Glastonbury; Delta = Whitchurch Canonicorum; Epsilon = Stonehenge; Theta = Ilchester; Iota = Cerne Giant; Lambda = Ilminster; Tau = Pilsdon Pen. For details of the "Aquarian" significance of these sites, please see my original article in MysteryMag (which also gives some technical details about how the match was achieved).

People with money to spend might also like to look at the short novel (and Da Vinci Code parody!) that I wrote on the subject: The Aquarius Code.