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:
 

The Hell-Fire Club

The evocatively named Hell-Fire Caves in West Wycombe were originally excavated for a very practical reason – to quarry chalk for a new road to neighbouring High Wycombe. But the person behind the project, Sir Francis Dashwood, had the tunnels carved in a strange symbolic design (see top left picture), somewhat reminiscent of a modern-day crop formation. The caves were finished in 1752, and for the next ten years they served as the meeting place of Dashwood’s mysterious “Hell-Fire Club”.

I wrote about the Hell-Fire Caves on a previous occasion, using a picture that Paul Jackson sent me (and Paul has written about the site on his own blog). But I finally got around to visiting the caves myself last week, so I can show some of my own photos!

Actually “the Hell-Fire Club” seems to have been a pejorative term applied by outsiders – Dashwood and company actually referred to themselves as “The Knights of St Francis of Wycombe” (or sometimes “Friars” rather than “Knights”). Many of them were prominent poets, politicians and doctors – Dashwood himself was Chancellor of the Exchequer at one point. Other famous members included the Earl of Sandwich (who served as First Lord of the Admiralty, as well as inventing the sandwich) and the great painter and cartoonist William Hogarth (who is fortean enough to have appeared on this blog at least four times – here and here and here and here). Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s Founding Fathers, wasn’t a member of the club but is known to have visited the caves on more than one occasion (as depicted in the bottom right photo).

The caves contain a strange mixture of Christianity (as in the references to St Francis and Friars) and pre-Christian mythology (such as the statue of Venus that can be seen in the bottom left photo). The final chamber has the pagan-sounding name of “The Inner Temple”, and is located some hundred metres directly below the Christian church on top of the hill. Undoubtedly this helped give rise to the various rumours of “satanic” goings-on at the Hell-Fire Club. Personally, I’m increasingly sceptical about this – remember it was a time when the God-fearing masses believed anyone who read a book other than the Bible was a closet Satanist. Instead, I think Dashwood and his circle were just indulging in fashionable romantic fantasies about Graeco-Roman culture (a bit like the Stourhead temples I wrote about last year, which also date from the 1750s).

Normally when I hear about a “family mausoleum” in a churchyard I think of something comparable in size to my garden shed. Dashwood’s mausoleum, which he built on the hill directly above the Hell-Fire caves around the same time, is more like a small fortress:

Tarzan versus Doc Savage

In my post about Jane Gallion last month, I mentioned in passing that the “pornographic” Essex House imprint published several novels by Philip José Farmer in the late sixties. By coincidence, on my visit to London a week later I saw one of these – A Feast Unknown – on sale in a second-hand shop. It was only a couple of pounds, and according to the blurb it featured a character based on my favourite pulp hero, Doc Savage, so I snapped it up. This particular copy is a mass market paperback from 1975, with no content advisory or age restriction, so I guess it’s heavily expurgated compared to the original Essex House version. Nevertheless it’s a really good novel – and quite a Fortean one too, with an unusual variation on the “Secret Rulers of the World” theme.

The book is set in the swinging sixties, when it was written. The first-person narrator is Lord Grandrith – an English aristocrat dividing his time between estates in Africa and the Lake District. He’s supposed to have been the “real-life” person on whom Edgar Rice Burroughs based the fictional character of Tarzan, who flourished circa 1912 – 1940. The name that Burroughs used was Lord Greystoke, but in A Feast Unknown Lord Greystoke is merely a near-neighbour of Grandrith’s estate in Cumbria (there is an amusing scene in which Grandrith accidentally demolishes a huge statue of Tarzan, which the locals have erected as a tourist attraction in the village of Greystoke, by crashing an Aston Martin DB4 into it). Although Grandrith is almost 80, he looks 50 years younger – and is likely to stay that way for thousands of years to come – thanks to a Faustian deal he made with a shadowy group of near-immortals called “The Nine”.

The deal involves being given regular shots of an “Elixir of Life”, in return for carrying out various tasks on behalf of the Nine when ordered to do so. At any given moment the Nine have hundreds, if not thousands, of such servants working for them – others include Grandrith’s wife Clio (presumably the inspiration behind the “Jane” of fiction). The Nine are master manipulators – not just of world history but of their servants too. At the start of the novel, Grandrith is deliberately put on a collision course with another servant of the Nine – one Doctor Caliban, the “real-life” inspiration behind Doc Savage (“A writer of pulps had somehow learned something of his strange rearing and training, his extraordinary, perhaps unique, qualities and abilities… The writer had used Caliban as the basis for a character, under another name, of course, in a series of wild science-fictional adventures, most of which were the result of his imagination.)

The oldest members of the Nine are supposed to be at least 30,000 years old, and to have given rise to various legends of pagan gods and goddesses. This may sound like a hackneyed idea, but Farmer’s version struck me as distinctly different – and very clever – in one important way. Normally these manipulative, all-powerful, long-established Illuminati-type groups are assumed to be either (a) extraterrestrials, (b) terrestrial but non-human (e.g. shape-shifting reptilians) or (c) survivors of some ancient but highly advanced civilization from Atlantis or Lemuria. All these theories take a far-fetched idea and convolve it with something even more far-fetched. Farmer’s brilliant twist is to start with that one far-fetched idea (a 30,000-year-old secret society) and combine it with the mainstream academic picture of what Homo Sapiens was like 30,000 years ago.

To palaeontologists and anthropologists, that was still the Palaeolithic era, or Old Stone Age. In spite of anything misty-eyed New Agers might want to believe, human society in those days was intensely hierarchical, patriarchal, ignorant, superstitious and brutal. In other words, pretty much the way Illuminati-believers imagine “They” would like it to be today. So put that way, Farmer’s set-up makes a lot of sense. The most shocking scene in the book (one of the most repulsive scenes I’ve ever encountered in a mass-market paperback novel) involves ritual genital mutilation and cannibalism. Yet if there were secret rites dating back to Palaeolithic times, that’s probably the kind of thing they’d be.

The narrative adheres to the time-honoured “crossover” formula, whereby the two heroes spend most of the novel fighting each other, before finally realizing they ought to team up against their common enemy (who set them up in the first place). Because it’s told from Grandrith’s point of view, that means that for most of the story the “Doc Savage” character is presented as a bad guy. His very name, Caliban, is taken from the monstrous villain in Shakespeare’s Tempest (for a comic-book version of which, see my post from two weeks ago). Nevertheless, Farmer does eventually explain how such a villainous name got attached to someone who is essentially a “Super Boy Scout”.

The shop where I bought A Feast Unknown was 30th Century Comics in Putney. My next stop was The Book and Comic Exchange in Notting Hill, where I bought a reduced-price replica edition of the first Doc Savage novel, The Man of Bronze (pictured below). Although I’ve read more than a dozen Doc Savage books, I’d never got round to reading this one – until now! The plot revolves around a hidden city in Central America, where the inhabitants speak the all-but-dead language of the ancient Maya. Thanks to Doc’s enormous erudition, though, he’s able to converse with them in that language. Impressive as that may be, in A Feast Unknown Lord Grandrith (who has a PhD in linguistics from the university of Berlin) goes a step further – he can understand “Ursprache, the parent language of the Indo-Europeans”, as spoken by the 30,000-year old members of the Nine!

Master of the Mystic Arts

“Speaking of Marvel, what about Doctor Strange? There’s some interesting occult retro-Forteana for you. Very much a part of the occult and consciousness explosions of the 1960s.” That’s what regular reader Ross wrote in one of the comments to last week’s post. There’s only one thing wrong with Ross’s suggestion: I can’t understand how this blog has managed to exist for three and a half years without it ever crossing my mind to do a post about everyone’s favourite Master of the Mystic Arts.... So thanks for prodding me, Ross!

I did mention Dr Strange a couple of times in my Marvel Age of Comics post last year, in the context of my earliest encounters with Marvel superheroes. As I said then, there was a Dr Strange reprint in the first British black-and-white “Power” comic I bought, Fantastic #54, and another in Marvel Collector’s Item Classics #9 – my first ever Marvel colour comic.

The latter reprint came from Strange Tales #119, when the series was still being drawn by Steve Ditko and scripted by Stan Lee. These have to be among the most innovative and ground-breaking comic stories ever written. Eventually I managed to get hold of all but one of the issues of Marvel Collector’s Item Classics (later renamed Marvel’s Greatest Comics) that reprinted Lee and Ditko’s Dr Strange stories. “Beyond The Purple Veil”, “Witchcraft In The Wax Museum”, “The Demon’s Disciple”... you can’t beat titles like that!

Dr Strange first appeared as a short back-up feature in Strange Tales #110, cover-dated July 1963. Like Spider-Man, the character was co-created by Lee and Ditko (although in a letter at the time Stan apparently said “‘Twas Steve’s idea”). Ditko drew the series for three years until he left Marvel in mid-1965, by which time Dr Strange had become a well-established cult figure among the more spaced-out and mind-expanded members of the comic-reading public.

The combination of mystical plotlines with dream-like art, often bordering on surrealism, were foreshadowed in some of the more esoteric tales Ditko wrote for Charlton Comics in the 1950s – which as I’ve mentioned a couple of times before (Giant from the Unknown and The Flying Dutchman in Comics) are now in the public domain and viewable online. Last year I bought a really nice volume called Creepy Presents Steve Ditko, featuring the black-and-white stories he wrote for Warren magazines after leaving Marvel. Again, some of these are distinctly reminiscent of Dr Strange in both theme and style.

It wasn’t just Ditko’s psychedelic artwork that made Dr Strange a sixties phenomenon. There was also Stan Lee’s inimitable way with words. By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth! ... By the all-seeing eye of Agamotto! ... By the crimson bands of Cyttorak! ... By the mystic moons of Munnopor! ... By the eternal Vishanti! ... By the seven rings of Raggadoor!

At a comic fair a few years ago I saw half a dozen issues of Strange Tales, from the original Ditko era, at a knock-down price. Admittedly they weren’t in great condition, but I snapped them up anyway. The one pictured above (the open comic) is #126 from November 1964, which was something of a turning point in the series. According to Blake Bell in Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko:

The scope of the series exploded with issue 126. “The Domain of the Dread Dormammu” features Dr Strange transcending the physical barriers of Earth, delving into a dimension ruled by the powerful despot Dormammu, a character Devil-like in appearance and just as ruthless. Here the series makes the turn that catapults Dr Strange into alternate, parallel universes, with Ditko’s craftsmanship and imagination stretching the boundaries of known physical laws and dimensions.”

By the time I started reading Marvel Comics in 1968, Dr Strange had his own title, with the numbering continuing from Strange Tales. The series was cancelled after just over a year, and as far as I can remember I only ever had issue #177 (pictured above), written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Gene Colan. A second Doctor Strange series started in 1974, initially drawn by Frank Brunner and then by Gene Colan. I really liked these at the time, because the art seemed much more “grown up” to my sophisticated 16-year-old mind than the usual comic-book fare of the time. Issue #5 is pictured above (a “cents” rather than “pence” copy, connoisseurs will note).

Fast-forwarding to the 21st century, Dr Strange is still around and scheduled to get the Marvel Cinematic Universe treatment in 2016. These days he’s a member of the Illuminati, along with Iron Man, Professor X, the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards, Black Bolt and Namor the Sub-Mariner. That’s not to say they’re members of the sinister Illuminati I was talking about last week – this is a secret Marvel super-group that calls itself by the same name.

I bought New Avengers: Illuminati on the basis of the title, but I’m not going to pretend I liked it (although I shouldn’t be too critical of modern Marvel comics, because I’m about as far from the target audience as it’s possible to get). To my mind, any group calling itself the Illuminati has to be one that hides in the shadows and pulls powerful strings. They don’t have to be working towards a “New World Order” – in fact they can be doing just the opposite. You might expect a “heroic” Illuminati to be working behind the scenes to maintain stability and preserve the current world order. I think that’s what Marvel’s version of the Illuminati is supposed to be doing, but it doesn’t come across very clearly in the stories. All the crises they deal with (in the book I read, anyway) could have been handled just as well by the Avengers or the Fantastic Four.

But that’s a technicality. The real reason I disliked Marvel’s Illuminati is that – in my crankily old-fashioned opinion – they repeatedly break the first rule in the superhero team rulebook. That states that at some point in every adventure, each team member should use their special ability to achieve something that couldn’t possibly have been done in any other way. That just doesn’t happen in the Illuminati (unless you count Reed’s special ability as “talking a lot”, Tony Stark’s as “being rich” and Namor’s as “having an Atlantis-sized chip on his shoulder”).

I’m probably taking nonsense, of course, because I don’t know anything about modern comics. But things were different 35 years ago, when I did a school project on the subject at the tender age of 11. Among other things, I produced tracings of various Marvel heroes, one of the best of which was a Ditko pinup of Dr Strange. Some time ago (ten years ago this month, as a matter of fact) I made a scan of the tracing and had a go at enhancing it digitally to make it look less like the work of an 11-year-old. Here is the result, before and after:

Iron Man, the Illuminati and the Holy Grail

For about 18 months now I’ve had work trickling in writing short educational articles for various websites. Essentially the site supplies a title, around which I have to write an article. You can find all the titles I’ve done listed on my website, under the broad headings of Science and History. Most of the topics are pretty mainstream, but a few are distinctly Fortean. Earlier this year, for example, I did an article for Synonym Classroom entitled “What Are the Flaws in the Ancient Astronaut Theory?” (As I said, the titles are supplied by the website – I wouldn’t have worded it so negatively).

More recently, a number of assignments have come in from eHow, rewriting articles which have been on that site for some time but need to be brought up to date. There’s a lot of competition for this sort of thing, resulting in a feeding frenzy every time a new batch of titles appears. Among the half-dozen I’ve managed to grab so far were three I was particularly pleased with – on Iron Man, the Illuminati and the Holy Grail (you see – it wasn’t just a contrived headline to grab your attention!).

I did What Is the Holy Grail? in July, and The History of the Illuminati in August. They’re both archetypally Fortean subjects, although the writing guidelines for eHow are pretty strict so I had to stick to facts rather than speculation in both articles.

Perhaps the most surprising title of all was one I did last week: How to Make Energy Like Iron Man. This was listed in the Science category, not Entertainment, and I’ve always wanted to have a go at one of these “science behind science fiction” articles. To make things even more interesting, the science in this case is Cold Fusion – a Fortean topic in its own right, since it’s a classic example of “damned science”. Nevertheless, all the evidence (from the movies, at any rate) suggests that the Arc Reactor in Tony Stark’s chest plate is some kind of Cold Fusion generator.

I really enjoyed researching the article, but there was one thing I kept coming across that drives me mad. That’s the widespread belief that the character of Iron Man, and/or Tony Stark, was created for the 2008 movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. As I pointed out in The Marvel Age of Comics last year, that’s simply not true. While RDJ’s interpretation of Tony Stark is definitely appealing, it’s nonsense to say things like “he created the role and no-one else could possibly play it” when the character has been around since 1963.

But perhaps I shouldn’t press the point so hard. I recently dug out the T-shirt pictured below, which used to fit me perfectly when it was new (the larger one fits me now). OK, then – if the character of Iron Man was created in 2008, this T-shirt must be newer than that, right? I reckon that makes me about 16 years old (which, by coincidence, is a pretty accurate estimate of my mental age).

Actually the T-shirt dates from 1968 (the iron-on transfer was a free gift in Terrific #1, dated 15 April 1967, but I bought it as a back issue the following year). In those days, of course, no-one had heard of Cold Fusion. The highest level of technology mentioned in the early Iron Man stories was “transistors”. I wrote an article on that subject earlier this year, too: What Is a Transistor and What Effect Did Its Invention Have on Computers?

Devon's Underground Secrets

The photograph above shows the view from inside a cave looking out. It isn’t very clear, but you can just make out what appear to be a couple of rounded archways on either side of the central pillar. Round arches were introduced to Britain by the Romans, and it was the Romans who built this cave – the part of it that’s visible in this picture, anyway. But the Romans were just the start of it. The cave complex was steadily expanded (with a short break in the 16th and 17th centuries) from soon after the Roman invasion in 43 AD all the way up to the early 20th century. In the course of that time – almost 2000 years – the caves have witnessed their fair share of secrets, from religious outcasts and smugglers to the shadowy world of freemasons.

The cave complex is located near the seaside village of Beer on the south coast of Devon. Although Beer is only 20 miles from where I live, it wasn’t until last week that I finally got round to visiting the site. Its official name is “Beer Quarry Caves”, which never sounded massively interesting to me. I pictured a typical open rock quarry with a few shallow caves dug into the rock face. In fact it’s nothing of the sort. The entire “quarry” is underground, consisting of miles and miles of man-made tunnels. Most people would think of it as a “mine” rather than a “quarry”, but technically a mine is a place for extracting minerals. What was extracted here was stone – a special kind of limestone called Beer Stone.

Most limestone is either too soft to use as a structural material, or so hard that it is difficult to carve into intricate shapes. That was a big problem in the Middle Ages, when everyone wanted to build ornate churches and cathedrals out of stone. Beer Stone offered the best of both worlds. In its natural, waterlogged state it is easy to work (into any shape, since it’s very fine grained) but when it dries out it becomes as hard as the hardest Portland stone. That meant there was a huge demand for Beer Stone. Not only was it used in building the nearby cathedral at Exeter, but also much further afield at Winchester Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and even the Tower of London.

The heyday of Beer Quarry was the great age of church building in the 13th to 15th centuries. All this came to an abrupt end with the English Reformation in the 1530s. This proved to be a disastrous time for the quarrying industry. It wasn’t just that work on church building came to an end, but the demolition of all the monasteries meant that millions of tons of ready-worked stone suddenly came onto the market for use in non-religious buildings.

During the enforced hiatus in quarrying at Beer, other more clandestine uses were found for the caves. When Catholic church services were made illegal, on punishment of death, they were driven underground... literally. Part of the tunnel network was converted into a chapel, the empty shell of which can still be seen today (see photograph). Originally this was decorated with fittings made of Beer Stone, but apparently these were “stolen to order” early in the 20th century. The thieves were eventually caught, but they never revealed who their clients were and they were never prosecuted. According to legend, the stolen fittings now adorn the private chapel of the Houses of Parliament!

The other clandestine use of the mine was for storing smuggler’s contraband. It was ideal for this purpose, partly because of its close proximity to the sea and partly because of the vast and confusing network of pitch-dark tunnels. Customs officers brave or foolish enough to venture into the caves often disappeared without a trace. According to the tour guide, each tunnel branches into nine other tunnels, and each of these into another nine, before they start to join up again in a gigantic rabbit warren. The tour route only covers about two percent of the total – the only part fitted with electric lights. A few years ago a visitor deliberately detached himself from a tour group in order to go “exploring” on his own with a flashlight. Its battery failed long before the search party found him... 16 hours later.

In its heyday, Beer quarry employed hundreds of workers – women and children for domestic tasks and men for the muscle work. The latter fell into two categories – “unskilled” quarrymen who were paid 3 shillings a week (with deductions for poor work) and “skilled” stonemasons who got 21 shillings a week (with bonuses for good work). Much of the masons’ skill lay in their trade secrets, which they guarded jealously – the origins of the secret society still known as the Freemasons today.

Beer caves are full of pillars, like the pair seen in this photograph. The size and separation of the pillars has to be capable of supporting the weight of rock above it, which depends on the amount of rock and its physical properties. Nowadays that would involve a complex computer calculation of the forces and tolerances involved – but that wasn’t an option when Beer quarry was being worked. Yet the dimensions and separation of these pillars are within three centimetres of what modern engineering regulations would stipulate. The masons knew the secret – and they kept it to themselves!

The slightly smudged inscription below consists of a name: Anthony Northcott, a date: 1758, and a few other cryptic symbols. Under the name is what looks like the initials AN – but if you look carefully, the “A” is actually a stylized representation of the Masonic “square and compasses” symbol!

Hoaxes in the Age of Reason

Judging from Alex Boese’s excellent book The Museum of Hoaxes, the 18th century was something of a golden age for that particular art form. It’s probably no accident that this coincided with the so-called “Age of Reason”, sandwiched between the witch-burning Puritanism of the 17th century and the Gothic romanticism of the 19th. A hoax works best when the victims think of themselves as sophisticated, logically-minded intellectuals!

I was reminded of two of the most famous hoaxes of the 18th century by this picture I saw on the British Museum website. You may spot the reason immediately – but if not, bear with me and everything will become clear in the end. The picture dates from 1771, and shows a central figure wearing female dress while adorned with distinctly male accessories, including a sword and Masonic regalia (the picture is subtitled “The Female Freemason”). The subject is the Chevalier d'Eon, whose gender was much disputed – living first as a man, and then from middle age onwards as a woman.

Nowadays this would be seen as a transgender issue, but in the 18th century that simply wasn’t an option. Whether you were a man or a woman was simply a question of anatomy, and if you claimed to be one when you were actually the other then you were perpetrating a hoax. As it happened, d’Eon claimed to be anatomically female, but was eventually revealed by post-mortem examination to be anatomically male. So to that extent, the skeptics – like the creator of this print – were right.

You can tell the artist considered d’Eon to be a hoaxer from the two pictures he’s drawn hanging on the wall. These depict two of the most notorious London-based hoaxes of the 18th century. The picture hanging on the left shows Mary Toft allegedly giving birth to rabbits. This isn’t an exact reproduction of William Hogarth’s Cunicularii, which I described some time ago in Paranormal investigation, 18th century style, but it’s the same subject. As I described in that earlier post, the hoax was particularly aimed at “supposedly intelligent and educated individuals who ‘want to believe’... and hence are easily duped by hoaxers.”

The picture hanging on the right side of the d’Eon portrait depicts the “Great Bottle Hoax” of 1749. This was the result of a wager between the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Chesterfield regarding the gullibility of the public. The Duke claimed he could advertise a patently absurd feat – that a man was capable of squeezing himself into a quart bottle – and still fill a London theatre with people prepared to hand over cash to see it. The (non) event took place at the New Theatre in Haymarket, and the Duke won his bet easily – every seat in the house was sold, and many people had to stand or were turned away. I’ve seen conflicting descriptions of the ensuing events. Some say the curtains simply remained closed, while others say a man appeared, showed the audience a bottle, thanked them for their money, and promptly left. What all accounts agree on is the riot that followed – some versions even end with the complete destruction of the theatre!

You can read more about the Mary Toft case, the Great Bottle Hoax and other examples of 18th century hoaxes on the Museum of Hoaxes website.

Museum Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Precog Fiction

A few days ago I wrote a review of Richard Thomas’s fascinating new book Para News for Fortean Times. I won’t pre-empt the review here, except to say the book is excellent value – you don’t just get Richard’s own views, but (by way of interviews) those of more than twenty key players in the world of parapolitics and the paranormal. If you’re interested in conspiracy theories, or in the overlap between conspiracy theories and ufology and other paranormal beliefs, or in the overlap between science fiction and any of the above, then you’ll find plenty of thought-provoking stuff in Para-News.

It was the last of these—overlaps between fringe beliefs and science fiction—that particularly set me to thinking. The basic idea is that certain themes of present-day conspiracy subculture are foreshadowed in earlier works of fiction, whether on screen or in print. The book refers to this as “Precog Fiction” – a term I’d never come across before, although I did do a blog post entitled Precogging Philip K. Dick. But that was about the foreshadowing of some of Dick’s fictional themes in earlier fiction. What about the foreshadowing of “non-fictional” themes in fiction?

Philip K. Dick himself is one of the most obvious examples of this. He may not have invented paranoia, but he certainly raised it to a fine art. Most of his novels, in one way or another, contain pre-echoes of the kind of conspiracy thinking you can find all over the internet these days. One of my favourites is The Penultimate Truth. This 1964 novel has the bulk of the world’s population living in underground squalor, led by the government to believe the surface of the planet is dangerously uninhabitable due to nuclear war. In reality, the surface is an idyllic paradise populated by the top-ranking elite. The details may be different, but the basic themes are the same. The government lies to its people, and keeps them exactly where it wants them through stage-managed wars and rumours of wars.

Everyone has heard of Philip K. Dick. Less well known is the author I’ve described as a British Philip K. Dick – John Brunner. One of the most chilling pieces of conspiracy fiction I’ve ever come across is a short story he wrote in 1974 called “The Protocols of the Elders of Britain”. This is how I described the story in Cold War Collaboration: “A computer engineer succeeds in decrypting an archive of Top Secret messages sent between the British government and its counterparts all over the world – not just friendly countries, but so-called enemies as well. It turns out they are all conspiring together to make the world a volatile and unstable place...” Not many people believed such things in 1974, but thousands do today.

A common theme in conspiracy theory is the idea that headline-making disasters are the result not of chance, but of the machinations of a small, super-powerful elite that works from the shadows. While such ideas have widespread currency today, they were almost unknown in 1948 when Eric Frank Russell’s novel Dreadful Sanctuary was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction magazine. The plot was years ahead of its time. It starts with attempts to launch rockets into space, which was common enough in the science fiction of the 1940s. But, for one reason or another, the space flights all end in disaster. It emerges they are being sabotaged by a small but powerful secret society, that believes it knows a dangerous truth about the extraterrestrial origins of humanity. The members of the society believe they are the only truly sane people on the planet, and that everyone else is suffering from a mass delusion. But are they right, or are they the ones that are delusional? The uncertainty is maintained throughout the novel in a style worthy of Philip K. Dick himself.

The term “science fiction” only came into widespread usage in the 1930s, at which time—as the name suggests—it was mainly concerned with futuristic developments in science and technology (cf. Futuristic Gadgets of the 1930s). Before then, much of what is retrospectively described as science fiction was preoccupied with the future direction of society, and had little interest in technology. As we now know, however, technology is one of the major drivers of social change – a fact that was only occasionally foreseen by earlier writers. I’ve already mentioned a couple of examples: The End of Books, with its 1895 pre-echo of iPods on the Paris metro, and The Machine Stops, with its 1909 vision of technology-facilitated social networking (see Wikipedia Prophecy).

In a similar vein, but more relevant to the world of parapolitics, is Rudyard Kipling’s short story As Easy as ABC. This was first published in 1912, although it has the still-futuristic setting of 2065. At first glance, the story could be dismissed as hopelessly outdated – the ABC of the title is the Aerial Board of Control, and the core technology of the story consists of huge dirigible airships. But the specifics of the technology aren’t as important as its role in society – to provide a single planet-wide communications infrastructure. Nowadays, we would see that as being the internet rather than a transportation network. But Kipling’s basic point is still chillingly valid – that the entrepreneurs who control the technological infrastructure are the true rulers of the world, and technology increasingly renders traditional democracy obsolete and impotent.

Early on in the story, there is a striking scene in which the protagonists, approaching a young woman sitting on a veranda, find themselves caught in an electric force field. “We heard the click of a switch, and almost fell forward as the currents round our knees were withdrawn. The girl laughed, and laid aside her knitting. An old-fashioned controller stood at her elbow, which she reversed from time to time, and we could hear the snort and clank of the obedient cultivator half a mile away... ‘Come in and sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m only playing a plough’.”

This is interesting both from the technological point of view (a mechanically operated plough would have been a novelty in 1912, let alone a remotely controlled one) and the social point of view (a middle-class young woman in charge of heavy farm machinery). But perhaps most striking is the descriptive term itself – “playing a plough”. This must surely be the first example in history of what nowadays would be referred to as “gamification of the user interface”!

The above are just a few thoughts that sprang to mind when I came across the phrase “Precog Fiction” – you can find many other fascinating examples in Richard’s book Para-News. Two of his examples actually relate to works I’ve mentioned recently in this blog (The Devil Rides Out from Phascinating Phacts and Quatermass and the Pit from Cosmic Relics)... although the specific “Precog” aspects hadn’t occurred to me before Richard pointed them out.

Another Templar Head

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

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

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

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

Secret Knowledge... by Mail Order

There was a time when American comic books were famous, among other things, for carrying mail-order advertisements for X-RAY SPECS. Too good to be true, of course... but sufficiently tempting that countless youngsters were happy to part with their money just in case. And older readers had their equivalent of X-ray specs, too -- a book containing the Secret Knowledge of the Ancient Masters. Again, something that was clearly too good to be true... but still worth a punt just in case. For several decades, science fiction magazines regularly carried "Rosicrucian" advertisements like the ones below:

From left to right, the ads shown are as follows...

[1] From Amazing Stories, August 1946. 'A SECRET METHOD FOR THE MASTERY OF LIFE ... Whence came the knowledge that built the Pyramids and the mighty Temples of the Pharaohs? ... From what concealed source came the wisdom that produced such characters as Amenhotep IV, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and a host of others? ... Today it is known that they discovered and learned to interpret certain Secret Methods for the development of their inner power of mind ... This secret art of living has been preserved and handed down throughout the ages... The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) will send you a Sealed Book of explanation ... Use this coupon for FREE copy of book ...' (Amenhotep IV, credited in the ad as "Founder of Egypt's Mystery Schools", is better known today as the Pharaoh Akhenaten).

[2] From the British edition of Astounding Science Fiction, December 1955. 'SECRETS ENTRUSTED TO A FEW ... There are some things that can not be generally told ... things you ought to know ... Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws ... The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization), an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries ... Write today for a free copy of the book "The Mastery of Life" ...' (Although very similar in wording to the American ads, this one has a London address instead of San Jose, CA!).

[3] From Galaxy magazine, July 1972. 'These great minds were Rosicrucians ... WHAT SECRET POWER DID THEY POSSESS? ... Know the mysterious world within you! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! ... Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor ... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the law of gravitation ... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist ... were Rosicrucians ... The Rosicrucians (NOT a religious organization) have been in existence for centuries ... Write for your FREE copy of "The Mastery of Life" ...' (This was the first Rosicrucian ad I ever saw, way back in 1972 when I had just graduated from comic books to "grown-up" magazines. I was totally intrigued by it, and I wanted to write off for the free book but -- as with the X-Ray Specs -- my mother said I couldn't. So I've had to remain unenlightened ever since!).

Damned Data

There are nearly as many theories about the enigmatic "Head" said to have been worshipped by the Knights Templar as there are about the Great Pyramid. Was it the disembodied head of John the Baptist? Was it a demon named Baphomet? Was it a mechanical head that foretold the future, like the one constructed by Roger Bacon? Just like Great Pyramid theories, the Templar Head theories are guaranteed to send your average academic into a blue-faced apoplectic rage. "There never was any Head", they say. "It was a false confession obtained under torture. Any sane person can see that."

In the Somerset village of Templecombe there is, rather inconveniently, a wooden panel-painting of a Head (pictured on the left), which has been carbon dated to 1280... a time when the Knights Templar had a preceptory in that very village! The panel is now displayed inside the church, but it was originally found in the 1940s in a lean-to shed... where it had been used as part of the building's fabric, and covered over by plaster. If the painting was simply a forgery designed to annoy academics, it was a very strange place to put it!

The Templecombe panel is a good example of what Charles Fort called "Damned Data" -- data that doesn't fit in with currently accepted academic theories. The Head is sometimes explained away as being that of Christ, and it's true that at first glance it has some resemblance to medieval icon-paintings... except that the latter always have a halo, and usually a body as well! To clinch matters, the gaping mouth and drooping eyelids of the Templecombe Head give it an unmistakeably decapitated appearance. Anyone without an agenda to debunk The Templar Revelation would have no hesitation in saying it was the Head of John the Baptist!

Hellfire Caves

The meeting place of a notorious eighteenth century Pagan Sex Cult is not, one might be forgiven for thinking, the obvious venue for a fun day out for all the family. Yet that is exactly what the current proprietors of the Hellfire Caves in Buckinghamshire have been forced to turn them into (presumably driven by the First Law of 21st Century Tourism: if it's not a fun day out for all the family, it won't make any money).

The Hellfire Club, or the "Order of Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe", was a mock religious society founded by Sir Francis Dashwood of West Wycombe in 1746. It held its meetings in a network of caves, designed by Dashwood himself, which were adorned with statues of pagan gods and goddesses. Despite its religious trimmings, however, it seems likely that the club's members were simply world-weary atheists looking for a novel form of entertainment.

At the heart of the cave network is the so-called Inner Temple -- pictured at left as it is today (as usual, the photograph comes courtesy of Paul Jackson). It was in this Inner Temple that the Hellfire Club's most secret activities took place. And they really were secret... speculations as to their nature range from sinister Satanic rituals to wild Caligula-style orgies. Whatever they were, they were probably more fun that the rather genteel tea party depicted in the management's current tableau!