Popular Culture in Fortean Times

In the comment thread to last week's post, I mentioned that Fortean Times occasionally touches on various aspects of popular culture, from cult TV and movies to comics and pop music. So I thought I'd do a quick run-through of a few examples today.

To start with some very obvious topics, there are the three shown above. The X-Files (FT 82, August 1995) was not only one of the most fortean TV shows of all time, but its first appearance in 1993 coincided with the wider distribution of FT to "mainstream" retailers like WH Smith, and almost certainly contributed to the magazine's popularity at that time. Around a decade later, Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code (FT 193, March 2005) was a publishing phenomenon, bringing fringe theories that had previously been the realm of specialist writers (and FT contributors) like Lionel Fanthorpe and Lynn Picknett to a much wider audience. Just over a century earlier, Bram Stoker had done something similar in his novel Dracula - the title character of which went on to become one of the most recognisable and ubiquitous pop-culture icons of them all, as recounted in the cover feature of FT 257 (January 2010).

At a less obvious level, you can find references to popular culture in almost every issue of FT. Taking the one I discussed last week, for example - FT 73 from February/March 1994 - there's an interview with cult author William Gibson, generally credited as the originator of the cyberpunk genre. And I spotted something else in that issue, too: a book review by comics legend Alan Moore. I don't mean a review of one of his graphic novels - I mean a review written by him of someone else's work. Looking online, I see he actually did quite a few reviews for FT in those days - which pleases me enormously, as I've done over 40 of them myself. It's always nice to discover that you have something in common with a famous person!

Sticking with books and comics for a moment, here are three more covers that caught my eye. No apologies for a second appearance of The Da Vinci Code (FT 212 this time, from August 2006) - both because it's one of my favourite novels, and because I love the illustration on the cover. In addition to people like Picasso and Orson Welles, it features Da Vinci himself in the act of strangling Dan Brown! The middle cover (FT 256, December 2009) features Dennis Wheatley - best remembered today for The Devil Rides Out (the only one of his novels that I've read), although in his day he was Britain's most prolific author of occult fiction. Finally there's the only comics-themed cover I could find - FT 320 (November 2014), relating to the Fredric Wertham-inspired anti-comics paranoia than swept America in the 1950s.

I found a few shorter comic-related pieces on interior pages as well. The most interesting of these was an article in FT 277 (July 2011) called "The Morning of the Mutants", speculating that Stan Lee and/or Jack Kirby got the idea for the X-Men from the seminal (though now largely forgotten) fortean conspiracy book The Morning of the Magicians, written in 1960 by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. There's also a feature about Marvel Comics' Doctor Strange in FT 349 (January 2017, to tie in with the movie), which discusses the character's origin and fictional predecessors.

Regarding the "popular culture" of the mid-20th century, I can't resist mentioning a couple of pieces by myself - in fact the only two full-length feature articles I've had in FT. First there was "Fanthorpe's Fortean Fiction" (FT 297, February 2013) about the large number of mass-market paperback novels that Lionel Fanthorpe churned out in the late 1950s and early 60s. This was followed by "Astounding Science, Amazing Theories" (FT 355, July 2017), looking at fortean themes in the pulp science fiction magazines of the 1940s.

Pulp magazines were a huge part of popular culture in the first half of the 20th century, but - with a few notable exceptions - they're only of interest to die-hard fans today. Of those exceptions, perhaps the most important is H. P. Lovecraft, whose Cthulhu Mythos first took form in the pages of Weird Tales in the 1920s and 30s, before going on to develop a life of its own to rival that of Bram Stoker's Dracula. I found no fewer than three Lovecraft-inspired FT covers: FT 184 (June 2004), FT 369 (August 2018) and FT 390 (March 2020 - this one tying in with the movie adaptation of The Color Out of Space). Here they are:

As regards cult TV shows, I've already mentioned the most fortean of all, The X-Files - which not surprisingly made several further appearances after the one pictured at the top of this post (including FT 85 from February 1996, which had a rundown of all the fortean references in the show's first season). Three other TV-related covers are shown below, the middle of which - FT 215 from October 2006, celebrating 40 years of Star Trek - needs no introduction. The other two relate to the screenwriters (both with wider fortean interests than you might expect) behind two of Britain's most famous sci-fi icons: Kit Pedler, who created Doctor Who's second-most-famous villains, the Cybermen (FT 209, May 2006), and Nigel Kneale, creator of Professor Quatermass (FT 418, May 2022). The latter may no longer be a household name, but back in the 1950s he was really the first great TV sci-fi hero, in this country at least.

Turning to movies - I was spoiled for choice here, so I've picked out three covers that really speak for themselves. First there's a celebration of 50 years of Hammer Horror films (FT 223, June 2007), then a look at one of the mainstays of those films, Peter Cushing, on the 100th anniversary of his birth (FT 301, May 2013), and finally a 40-years-on retrospective about The Exorcist (FT 313, April 2014):

To be honest, my favourite thing about The Exorcist is the music - the snippet from Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells that it uses, I mean - which brings me neatly onto the next subject. When I talk about "pop culture" on this blog, I most often mean fairly specialized things like pulp magazines, comics (from the pre-multimedia franchise days) and cult TV shows such as The X-Files. But to most people, pop culture means just one thing, and that's pop music. This is such a pervasive part of modern life that it's acquired a plethora of fortean connections - so much so that I'm going to split them into two distinct parts.

To start with, here are three cover features that deal with direct fortean influences on musicians. The first, from FT 88 back in July 1996, describes how various pop stars from David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix to Kate Bush and The Orb absorbed ufological and similar speculations into their music. Second, there's a somewhat more arcane take on the same subject by Ian Simmons (FT 244, January 2009), featuring the likes of Stockhausen and Sun Ra - a much-referenced source for my own book The Science of Sci-Fi Music. Finally, in the immediate wake of David Bowie's death, there was a cover feature about the numerous fortean influences on his work (FT 338, March 2016) - including the aforementioned Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier.

Another aspect of pop music that's of fortean interest is the way weird conspiracy theories grow up around the subject. So to round off what I honestly believed would be a shorter-than-usual post when I started it, but has ended up as probably my longest ever - here are three cover features addressing this aspect. The one on the left (FT 166, January 2003) deals with the numerous legends and conspiracy theories associated with Elvis, while the one on the right (FT 384, October 2019) does much the same for the Beatles. As for the one in the middle (FT 258, February 2010), it concerns the notion that the "Illuminati" employ popular music - and the musicians themselves - to manipulate the thoughts, beliefs and behaviour of the general public. But that's not really a conspiracy theory, is it? I mean, if you substitute "global media" for "Illuminati", I'd say it's an indisputable fact.

 

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!

Sacred Porn

As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve been doing some more online research. Just why I decided to do a Google search for “walter fritz hotwife bareback gangbang porn” will become clear in due course. You’ll be relieved to see, however, that the search results are entirely Safe for Work. You can also see that it’s rather old news, dating back three months. However, I only belatedly encountered it in the latest issue of Fortean Times (FT 345, October 2016) – and I’m glad I did, because it’s part of an ongoing (and increasingly bizarre) saga that I’ve been following off and on for a quarter of a century now.

When I first joined the Civil Service in 1991, my boss was a loveable old bloke who was full of eccentric ideas (sadly he’s no longer alive). One of his favourite hobby-horses was the theory that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. At first I assumed this was his own idea (that was the way he presented it), but before long I discovered it was quite widespread in certain circles. I read about it in Fortean Times, and even saw a couple of talks on the subject at FT Unconventions. Then in 2003 Dan Brown put the idea at the heart of The Da Vinci Code and it entered mainstream consciousness.

In its most developed form (à la The Da Vinci Code), the theory goes way beyond Jesus simply being married. It holds that Tantra-style “sacred sex” rituals were at the heart of early Christianity, just as they are in certain forms of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and many other non-western traditions. If true this would be an astonishing revelation – implying that all round the world, there is an inextricable and fundamental link between religion and copulation.

For a long time, this was just a fringe theory based on speculation and wishful thinking – with no real hard evidence. That suddenly changed in September 2012, when the religious historian Karen King (a professor at Harvard University, just like Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code) announced the discovery of “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”. Despite its grandiose title, this was really just a tiny, business-card-size scrap of papyrus bearing a few words written in an ancient Egyptian language called Coptic. But among those few words was the phrase “Jesus said to them, my wife” – potentially turning conventional Christian scholarship on its head.

Needless to say “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” was a controversial discovery. Harvard accordingly subjected the papyrus to a barrage of forensic tests – all of which indicated its authenticity. Strangely (from the point of view of an outsider), the one thing they didn’t bother to scrutinize was the back history of the fragment. Apparently the issue of “provenance” isn’t something academics normally bother about, so it was left to a journalist named Ariel Sabar to do the necessary detective work. His findings are written up in a long article in The Atlantic magazine – and this is where the story starts to get really bizarre.

After considerable effort, Sabar traced the original ownership of “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” to a Florida businessman and amateur Egyptologist named Walter Fritz. The exact nature of Fritz’s “businesses” – some of them at least – almost defied belief. I’m going to have to quote Sabar’s own words here, or you’ll think I’m making it up:

Beginning in 2003, Fritz had launched a series of pornographic sites that showcased his wife having sex with other men – often more than one at a time. One home page billed her as “America’s #1 Slut Wife”.

This was lucrative stuff – at one point about a third of the couple’s income was coming from porn site subscriptions. But it wasn’t just sex and money – there was a spiritual dimension too. Fritz’s wife told Sabar “that she was clairvoyant and had channelled the voices of angels since she was 17” ... and then added “I’m here to do God’s service”. Fritz claimed that during sexual intercourse his wife often muttered phrases in Aramaic – the language spoken by Jesus, which she had no conscious knowledge of.

Although Fritz talked openly about his sexual and pornographic activities, he continued to maintain that “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” was the real thing. But after publication of the Atlantic article his credibility seems to have taken a nose-dive, and even Professor King herself now considers that the papyrus is most likely a hoax.

And what about that sacred porn? Sabar says in his article that “all of the sites seem to have been taken down in late 2014 and early 2015 ... but archived pages and free images and videos were easy to find online”. This brings me back to my starting point – the Google search pictured at the top of this post. I tried all sorts of keywords drawn from Sabar’s article – but frustratingly they all led back to that article, or to things written about it. Of course some of the search terms threw up porn images, but nothing I felt sure was Walter Fritz and his Aramaic-channelling wife.

Chasing Vermeer... and Charles Fort

When it comes to reading fiction, I’m very old-fashioned. Left to my own devices, I almost always go for works that were written before I was born (1957)... or before I was 21 at the very latest. This was reflected in the post I did a couple of weeks ago about Charles Fort in Fiction. But in the comments after that post, a couple of people were good enough to recommend more recent works I ought to read – To Charles Fort, with Love (2005) by Caitlin R. Kiernan, and Chasing Vermeer (2004) by Blue Balliett. I haven’t found an affordable copy of the first one yet, but you can see from the photograph that I did manage to get hold of the second (this one was recommended by Peni Griffin).

All the novels and short stories mentioned in my earlier post contained just fleeting references to Charles Fort, generally to lend credibility to some otherwise far-fetched aspect of the story. But Fort—and in particular his third book, Lo!—plays a more central role in Chasing Vermeer. If you look closely at the cover (the one depicted here is the British edition, by the way), in the bottom right corner you can see one of the protagonists, a young girl named Petra, quite clearly reading a copy of Lo! (the other protagonist, Calder, is holding a pair of pentominoes).

Petra and Calder are Middle School students just coming up to their 12th birthdays, and that’s the sort of age group this novel is aimed at. What’s more, I suspect that Chasing Vermeer was originally written as a book that could be read and discussed in class – in other words, it’s intended for “teaching by stealth” rather than as no-strings-attached entertainment. One reason I say this is that the author, Blue Balliett, was a Middle School teacher when she wrote the book (this was her first work of fiction). Another reason is that it’s written in very simple sentences, which an intelligent 11 year old (by which I mean the sort of 11 year old who would read a novel for pleasure) is likely to find infuriatingly patronizing. The irony is that you end up with a novel that has a reading age of 9 or 10 but deals with concepts and subjects that many adults would struggle with!

The aim of the book seems to be to encourage children to “think outside the box”... both in terms of the things they think about, and the way they think about them. But this isn’t done in the way you might expect. The basic starting point—an art theft—lends itself to a straightforward detective story, but that’s not what Chasing Vermeer is at all. Petra and Calder do end up solving the mystery, but they don’t do it by analysing the evidence and making reasoned inferences. The book has a strange kind of “adventure game logic”. If one of the protagonists has a sudden intuition that the painting is hidden near something made of wood, or that the hiding place has something to do with the number twelve, then you can be certain (within the internal logic of the story) that this will turn out to be the case.

One of the most interesting and unusual things about the book are the various “puzzle” threads that run through it. To start with, there are pentominoes – a set of geometric shapes that have various mathematical properties and can be used to represent letters of the alphabet. Then there’s the idea that, out of the 35 paintings attributed to Vermeer, some of them may be the work of a different, inferior artist (this is a great way to trick children into looking critically at 17th century art!). And finally there is Lo!, by Charles Fort. An old copy of it is found quite early on by Petra (she’s the annoyingly clever one – Calder is the more likeable character), and Fort’s work continues to be quoted from and referred to throughout the book: “Calder borrowed Petra’s copy of Lo! that afternoon. She was right: Fort was an extraordinary thinker. He looked fearlessly at occurrences that no-one could explain. Even better, he looked everywhere for patterns. Calder understood the man’s fascination with connecting things that didn’t seem related, and he admired the way Fort challenged the experts.”

With its emphasis on puzzles, mysteries and the world of fine art, there’s a natural tendency to refer to Chasing Vermeer as a children’s version of The Da Vinci Code, which was published the previous year. In a way that's true... although on at least some levels Chasing Vermeer is a more intelligent book than The Da Vinci Code!

Saints in the South of France

As I pointed out in Saint Patrick of Glastonbury?, you can’t begin to understand the old mediaeval stories about saints if you imagine that people in those days had the same understanding of history—and obsession with literal truth—that we do today. There were no printed books before the 15th century, and handwritten records were few in number, terse to the point of being cryptic, and not widely distributed. So, to put it bluntly, things got made up. As in the case of The Buddha in Mediaeval Europe, stories from one tradition got adapted to another tradition. And as with Saint Patrick at Glastonbury, there was another motivation – the lucrative pilgrimage trade. People would pay good money to see the relics of saints, as long as there was a reasonable explanation of how the relics got to that particular place.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, on the south coast of France, boasts not just one but no less than four saintly connections. The picture on the left comes from Paul and Melanie Jackson, who visited the town a couple of weeks ago. It may look like a fortress, but it’s the parish church – according to the plaque it was built between the 9th and 12th centuries, and fortified to protect the “precious relics of the Saints” against Saracen raiders.

The church is dedicated to “Saintes Maries” in the plural. In one of the most important scenes in the Bible, three women—Mary Magdalene, Mary Jacobe and Mary Salome—go to the tomb of Jesus and find it empty. According to mediaeval legend, these three women later ended up being shipwrecked on the coast of France. Tradition ascribes this to the site of present-day Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Oddly, however, the church’s most prominent relics are not those of the three Marys but another saint altogether: Saint Sara.

According to some versions of the “three Marys” legend, the three women had a dark-skinned Egyptian maid who was shipwrecked along with them. This was Saint Sara, whose statue in the church at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is depicted on the right. Sara is considered the patron saint of the Roma people, who refer to her as Sara-la-Kali. Not surprisingly given this appellation, some people have speculated on a connection between Sara and the important Hindu Goddess Kali. As with the undoubted connection between the Buddha and another mediaeval saint, this isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. There was dialogue between different cultures in mediaeval times, but people would have interpreted things they heard in terms of their own culture – rather than trying to understand the other person’s culture in the way that a modern scholar or internet user would.

For a really far-fetched theory, we have to turn as usual to Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. This confidently asserts that Sara (Anglicized as Sarah) was the daughter of Mary Magdalene and... well, you can guess the rest!

Literary name-dropping

I’ve always had a special liking for novels that are filled with factual references. I may be in a minority on this -- most people see this sort of thing as shameless padding, which it probably is! But I like it because it’s one of the most painless ways to learn new things. It’s one of the reasons why Philip K. Dick’s VALIS is a favourite novel of mine, and why I like The Da Vinci Code despite its awfulness. The first book of this type that I ever came across was a novel by Robert Silverberg called Dying Inside, which I read 40 years ago when it was first printed in the July-August and September-October 1972 issues of Galaxy magazine. These were among the first grown-up science fiction magazines I ever read -- I was about 14¾ at the time.

Dying Inside is a vaguely Fortean novel, about a telepath who earns a living ghost-writing essays for students who have more money than brains. It isn’t the most thrilling adventure ever written—in fact it’s positively dull—but it’s got a lot of sexual references in it, which are quite interesting when you’re 14¾. It’s also packed full of factual allusions... almost none of which I understood at the time, although I was fascinated by them nonetheless.

There are references to classical music—Schoenberg, Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, Bartok, Bach and Schoenberg, and to high literature from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Balzac, Dostoyevsky and Proust. When I was a student in the late seventies I used to listen to Radio Three a lot, and developed a taste for all the composers mentioned. Great literature, on the other hand, is something I’ve never had much interest in.... although I did go through a phase circa 1975 of trying very hard to read Finnegans Wake, which Silverberg also alludes to (“Earwicker’s borborygmi”). I’ve got more time for poets than I have for heavyweight novelists, and he namedrops some of the best: Tennyson, Browning and T.S. Eliot (whose ashes are buried at East Coker, a few miles from where I live).

For some reason, there aren’t that many painters mentioned in Dying Inside, but the ones who are are among my favourites: Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Bruegel and El Greco. Another artist, M.C. Escher, is referred to as M.G. Escher!

There are very few scientists, too—the only one I found when I just looked through was J.W. Gibbs, whose name will mean a lot to anyone who did physics at university and very little to anyone else. On the whole, though, Silverberg is less interested in the materialistic side of things than the mystical: he mentions Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine, the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad-Gita, and a number of quasi-forteans such as J. B Rhine, Arthur Koestler, Wilhelm Reich and Edgar Cayce. He also mentions the I Ching, which features in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (which I didn’t read until 1976) and General Semantics, which features in A.E. van Vogt’s masterpiece The World of Null-A (which I didn’t read until 1994!).

Silverberg even namedrops a couple of fellow science fiction authors: Theodore Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov. Seeing Asimov on his visit to Birmingham in 1974 was the high point of the seventies for me... even though I saw Silverberg himself at the Eastercon in Manchester the following year!

Post-Fortean Books

Several years ago I used the lulu.com self-publishing website to set up my own “publishing imprint” called Post-Fortean Books. But because I had a properly paying job at the time, I didn’t really have the leisure or motivation to do much in the way of marketing or publicity. Since then times have changed, and I’ve just gone through the process of reissuing all the books on Kindle. Four of them are also listed on iTunes, while the other two have just been submitted. Here are the details (in each case the link at the beginning goes to the US Amazon site and the one at the end to amazon.co.uk):

The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries: A collection of Sherlock-Holmes style detective stories set in present-day Oxford. All the stories have loosely Fortean themes (“The Dangerous Book”, “The Invisible College”, “The Shakespearean Super-Chimp”, “The Abducted Astrobiologist”, “The Ghost in the Machine”, “The Shocking Science Quarterly” and “The Inverted Pyramid”). This one is listed on iBooks. [Get it from Amazon UK]

The Aquarius Code: A loose pastiche of The Da Vinci Code, written in 2006 when such things were topical. My story has a stronger fantasy/sci-fi element, though, and plenty of Fortean trappings (Earth Mysteries, Glastonbury, occult rites, Illuminati etc). A 17,000 word novella. This one has just shown up on iTunes as well as Kindle. [Get it from Amazon UK]

The Promethean Galaxy: This is the only non-fiction work on the list. It’s a short (18,000 words) "exploration of the Galaxy" in science, philosophy, arts, mysticism and literature. It’s Fortean only in the sense that it refuses to take sides. Again, this one has just appeared on iTunes as well. [Get it from Amazon UK]

Kundalini Conspiracy: A 23,000 word novella that I stitched together in 2004 from several earlier short stories. Not great literature, but it’s bursting with Fortean themes (abductions, government conspiracies, past-life regression, mind control, Lovecraftian cults, cattle mutilation and probably other things I’ve forgotten). I tried to make the hero sympathetic, but I’ve been told he’s an obnoxious little pervert. This one is available as a printed book as well as being listed on iTunes and Kindle. [Get it from Amazon UK]

The Naked Guru: Just a short story (7,000 words). This is another one set in Oxford, but the style is very different from The Invisible College... more in the “sleazy comic-book sci-fi” genre (if such a thing exists). I billed this one as “For Mature Readers Only” because it’s all about a sex cult, though actually the sexual content isn’t much greater than Kundalini Conspiracy or The Aquarius Code. Only on Kindle so far. [Get it from Amazon UK]

Six Dimensional Sex: Another one for mature readers! This is set in the Swinging Sixties, and it’s a parody of a particular type of science fiction that was popular at that time -- both in its repetitively sexual narrative and avant-garde writing style. It’s an absolutely terrible book (deliberately, because I was parodying a terrible style) but my hope is that the word Sex in the title will sell it despite its awfulness. Again, this one is only on Kindle so far. [Get it from Amazon UK]

Crashed UFO in London

Hot on the heels of his Alien skull simulacrum, Paul Jackson has obtained further photographic evidence of extraterrestrial visitation in the form of this crashed flying saucer, which he spotted near his hotel while staying in London last week. I assume it’s meant to be some form of abstract sculpture, although Paul said he couldn’t see an identifying plaque on it, and his own caption confidently reads “A crashed UFO in Canada Square, Canary Wharf”.

Looking through Paul’s album from his London trip, another vaguely Fortean picture is this statue by Enzo Plazotta called Homage to Leonardo, which stands in Belgrave Square. It’s modelled after Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” drawing, which features prominently in the early chapters of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. But the image is interesting in its own right as a depiction of the Hermetic symbolism of the individual as a “microcosm within the macrocosm”.

Montségur and the fall of the Cathars

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

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

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

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

Fortean Events that Shook the World

As a general rule, events of interest to Forteans have little impact on mainstream culture... with a few notable exceptions. For my contribution to Oll Lewis's "Fortean Fives" series on the CFZ blog, I chose five events which in one way or another "shook the establishment" (the "establishment" encompassing academia, the media, the government, the Church and the legal profession):

[1] The appearance of a young Uri Geller on the Dimbleby Talk-In (23 November 1973). The show was memorable not just for Geller's (at the time completely new) stage act, but for the fact that Professor John Taylor of King's College London, brought on as a skeptical scientist, was completely taken in by it all, and underwent a quasi-religious conversion in front of the TV cameras! A couple of years later I went to a lecture by Prof. Taylor on the paranormal, and he was still a complete believer in it.

[2] The premiere of Ray Santilli's Alien Autopsy film at the Museum of London (5 May 1995). To anyone with any experience of the field the footage was an obvious hoax, and yet it was lapped up by the public and the media because -- just at that moment -- it filled a desperate need created by a combination of The X-Files and pre-millennial tension. BUFORA staked its reputation on the film's authenticity... and, when it was shown to be a hoax, British ufology died its much-publicized death!

[3] The death of Princess Diana (31 August 1997). I was tempted to write "the assassination of Princess Diana", but she wasn't assassinated -- she died in a road traffic accident. This inconvenient fact doesn't stop the conspiracy theorists, however... and also a surprisingly large number of "ordinary people" who refuse to believe that a famous person is capable of dying an accidental death! It's this refusal to believe the obvious that transforms the event from something mundane into something Fortean.

[4] The revelation of the Third Secret of Fatima (26 June 2000). This was a mystery that had been speculated on for a long time (the original vision occurred in 1917, and the "secret" was written down and sealed in 1944)... and it's the kind of mystery that is only interesting as long as it remains a mystery! The fun was spoiled in the year 2000 when Pope John Paul II authorized publication of the secret. Conspiracy theorists refuse to believe that the published version is the "true" secret, of course -- although personally I'm sure it is.

[5] The "Da Vinci Code trial" -- Baigent and Leigh, claimants, versus the Random House Group, defendant (trial started on 27 Feb 2006). There was a time when The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was a book known only to Forteans and New Agers, but its popularity was boosted first by Dan Brown's blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, and then by Baigent and Leigh's lawsuit accusing The Da Vinci Code of plagiarism. During the trial it became clear that the judge, Justice Peter Smith, knew a lot more about HBHG than Dan Brown did (he'd actually read it from cover to cover, for example) and his final judgment is a more entertaining read than The Da Vinci Code (it even contains its own coded message... probably a first in English Law)!

Vatican Cosmology

There is an article in the BBC news today (Vatican's space mission) about a new astronomy-focused website set up by the Vatican in collaboration with the scientific community. While interesting (and on the face of it rather bizarre), this collaboration isn't a particularly new thing, as the book illustrated below (Astrophysical Cosmology, published by the Vatican in 1982) shows.

The book contains the proceedings of a study week on Cosmology and Fundamental Physics that was organized by the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, with an introductory address by the then-Pope (now soon to be beatified) John Paul II. On the scientific side it included such luminaries as Stephen Hawking, Jan Oort (of Oort Cloud fame) and Britain's current Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. The meeting was held in October 1981 at the Pope's Summer Residence at Castel Gandolfo (which featured, together with many other interesting locations and one or two not-very-original ideas, in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code).

If you think it's strange for the Vatican to be interested in modern Cosmology -- well, they invented it (sort of). It's a little known fact (at any rate, it's not mentioned in the BBC article), but the Big Bang theory was originally proposed in 1927 by one Monsignor Georges Lemaître... who went on to become president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences!

The Da Vinci Code and medieval symbolism

My hard drive has an impressive collection of letters that I've sent off to the Fortean Times on various occasions but which they didn't bother to print. I was reminded of the following example (originally written in January 2005) on a recent visit to the National Gallery, when I noticed the figure of Saint John in Michelangelo's "Entombment" painting (John is the beardless figure on the left, with long red hair and an orange dress).

The Da Vinci Code is an entertaining book, but like a lot of modern pseudo-historical works it is based on the erroneous supposition that the people of past centuries can be fully understood by assuming they have the same interests, values and beliefs as modern-day people. In fact, the average European of the Middle Ages probably understood a lot more about Christian symbolism than any 21st century professor of Religious Symbology.

An interesting book that was published around the same time as Dan Brown’s novel (but hasn’t sold as many copies) is How to Read a Church by Richard Taylor. With regard to images of the Last Supper (of which Leonardo's is only one among many) Taylor says that the beardless figure always shown next to Jesus is meant to be St John. Apparently it was common practice to depict John with long hair and rather effeminate features. In fact, John is one of the three "women" sometimes shown at the foot of the cross in crucifixion scenes, the other two being Mary Magdalene and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Dan Brown says the early church demonized Mary Magdalene because she represented the sacred feminine, but if any disciple was demonized it was Judas Iscariot, a man. According to Taylor's book Mary Magdalene was a much-loved saint, honoured as the first person to see the risen Christ. And the other Mary, the Blessed Virgin Mary, has always been venerated as the greatest of all the saints, particularly by the Roman Catholic church... the establishment that Brown sees as suppressing sacred femininity and tailoring the Bible to suit its views. This would come as a surprise to the early Protestant reformers, who according to Taylor "... objected to some of the doctrines that the Roman Catholic Church allowed to Mary: that she was without sin, that she remained a virgin throughout her life, and that she was physically assumed into heaven at her death. These teachings seemed to Protestants to be without biblical authority, and to elevate Mary to a position that was more than mortal."