Medieval Monsters

 

A few years ago I discovered (by reading about it in a book, I'm sorry to say, rather than actually noticing it with my own eyes) that several of the village churches around where I live have strange demonic or cryptozoological-looking creatures crawling over their upper reaches. Colloquially you could refer to these as "gargoyles", although strictly speaking that word only refers to fancifully decorated waterspouts. The proper term for the non-functional ornaments I'm referring to is "grotesques" (which can be used as a noun as well as an adjective).

The main purpose of this post is to show off some of the photographs I took after my attention was drawn to these bizarre medieval carvings (a good excuse to give my 75 - 300 mm zoom lens an airing). Before that, however, it's interesting to speculate as to their purpose, since no one seems to know just why they were produced in the first place. Explanations I've seen include heraldic symbols relating to the local gentry, and depictions of local folklore - which here in Somerset would mostly mean dragons (as discussed in a previous post). But while some of the carved figures may well conform to one or other of those theories, they don't explain all of them - particularly the more demonic-looking ones.

By "demonic" I don't necessarily mean overtly so, in the sense of having horns and pointed ears or whatever, but just generally malevolent-looking - like the ape-headed, cloven-hoofed figure shown at the top of this post. This, and many of the other examples I've seen, are basically "chimeras" - fanciful combinations of two or more unrelated species. These were common in the mythology of ancient Greece and Egypt, but by the Middle Ages they'd become firmly associated with Hell (Dante's depiction of it, which I talked about last week, includes several chimera-like demons).

The decorations in and around medieval churches were, almost invariably, a form of communication with the congregation, who could understand imagery even if they were unable to read. So my own personal theory is that these demonic - or otherwise "ungodly" - creatures were depicted on the exterior of the church simply to emphasize that they weren't inside it. In other words, if you came into church you were safe from such monsters, but if you stayed outside you were at their mercy.

All the pictures in this post were taken on the same day in August 2019, at three different churches - Langport, Long Sutton and Huish Episcopi - the carvings on which date from circa 1450, 1490 and 1500 respectively. The ape-demon shown above, for example, is clinging to the tower of Long Sutton church - as you can see more clearly in the following wider-angle view, which also includes a vaguely pig-like face looking straight at you:

Here's another figure from Long Sutton, which reminds me a bit of a Chinese lion-dog statue:

Now two examples from Huish Episcopi. I've no idea what the first one is meant to be, partly because it's so badly weathered, but I'd say it's definitely in the demonic category. As for the much better preserved second one, it clearly depicts a chimera with a human face and four-legged body:

 Turning to Langport church, this one is absolutely covered in inter-species hybrids! Here are a couple of striking ones:

 ... and a few more:

 Langport also has a human head, but it doesn't look at all happy - possibly a soul tormented in Hell? Though it's difficult to make out from this angle, it's actually depicted wearing a crown, suggesting that maybe it's some recently deceased (and presumably unpopular) king. I mentioned last week that Dante used his description of Hell as a vehicle for political satire - perhaps that's what's going on here too! (incidentally, what looks like a bad case of chromatic aberration around the upper part of the head is actually a lead cover that's been added to protect it from the elements).

Superheroes, Funny Animals and Sequential Art (circa 1600)

Montacute House near Yeovil in Somerset was built around 1600, at the height of the English Renaissance (Shakespeare’s Hamlet dates from around the same time). While the renaissance influence can be seen in the style and grandeur of the architecture, many of the sculptures adorning the interior and exterior of the house retain a mediaeval quaintness that is distinctly cartoony in places. I wrote about some of these a few years ago on the Montacute House blog, but since that blog seems to have disappeared from the internet I thought I’d dig out the relevant info and pictures and repost them here.

The Skimmington Frieze

This large plaster frieze (pictured at the top of this post) is one of the most distinctive features of the Great Hall at Montacute House. At first glance it looks like a single panel, but actually it’s an early example of “sequential art”, telling an amusing rustic story in two scenes. In the left half, you can see a wife hitting her hapless husband over the head with a shoe (she must have brought this along specially for the purpose, since she already has shoes on both feet!). It seems she caught him drunk in charge of the baby – which he’s still holding onto, despite all those kegs of beer he’s been working his way through. The scene is witnessed by the man’s neighbour, who proceeds to rat on him to the rest of the village. The second scene, on the right, shows the unfortunate husband being paraded through the streets in a form of ritual humiliation known as a Skimmington ride (for the background to this obscure bit of West Country folklore, see the Dark Dorset website).

Two Left Hands

The picture above shows another plaster carving at Montacute House, this one an overmantel in one of the bedrooms. Like the Skimmington Frieze, this dates from the time the house was built – but it shows a more “mainstream” subject in the form of a Biblical scene (the praying figure is meant to be King David). Nevertheless, it’s still very naïve in its execution. The cherub on the left clearly has two right hands, while the one on the right (though it’s not quite as obvious) has two left hands! As Kid Robson has pointed out (here and here and here), the “two left hands” syndrome is one that occasionally afflicted Marvel Comics artist Jack Kirby.

Hunky Punks

Moving to the exterior of Montacute House, and looking up at the parapet running around the roof, you can see a lot of strange little animals sitting on it (a couple of examples can be seen in the following photograph). The technical term for these is “hunky punks”, which according to Wikipedia is a local dialect word for a grotesque stone carving. Hunky punks are most often seen on churches, but Montacute has them as well. Montacute’s hunky punks take the form of rather cute-looking animals – either chimeras (combinations of different animals) or completely imaginary species. Presumably they were the 17th century equivalent of funny cartoon animals!

The Nine Worthies

High up on the East Front of Montacute House, you can see the statues of nine figures in armour (see images below). These represent the Nine Worthies – great military leaders of history and legend, including three from classical Greece and Rome (Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar), three from Hebrew tradition (Joshua, King David and Judas Maccabeus) and three from European Christendom (King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon). The Nine Worthies were popular throughout Europe (see their Wikipedia article) and can be thought of as a kind of crusading super-team – a bit like a mediaeval version of the Avengers!

The Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition

The Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition in Drumnadrochit was much better than I’d expected it to be. As the most hyped-up cryptozoological tourist attraction in Britain, I’d assumed the visitor centre would dutifully tell people what they wanted to hear, with dumbed-down science and lots of far-fetched speculation. But it’s nothing like that at all. It features a series of sober and intelligent audio-visual presentations, together with museum displays of research equipment, newspaper cuttings and relics recovered from various wrecks. As for dumbing down – visitors (even the ten-year-old ones) are expected to take words like “bathymetry”, “pelagic”, “thermocline” and “refraction” in their stride.

In a way the Loch Ness Centre is another example of the Scottish skepticism I was talking about last week. This is particularly noticeable in the case of the best-known theory of the Loch Ness Monster, that it is a long-necked marine reptile such as a plesiosaur which has somehow managed to survive since Jurassic times. Admittedly the Loch Ness Centre features this image in their logo (which you can see in the photo above), and in innumerable toys and other souvenirs for sale in the gift shop. But inside the exhibition they stamp on this theory right at the very start. Any creature that managed to emerge unscathed from the Mesozoic would have been definitively killed off during the ice age, when the whole of Scotland was covered by a kilometre-thick block of ice for tens of thousands of years. Anything in the loch today that is larger than a single-celled micro-organism must have arrived after the ice melted. And why plesiosaurs anyway? They were pushed out of their ecological niche by whales and dolphins, which are found in plentiful numbers in the waters around Scotland.

The seemingly deep-rooted idea that a long-necked monster inhabits Loch Ness only dates from about a hundred years ago. Prior to that, mysterious sightings in the loch always referred to a “huge fish” or a “strange fish”. The word “monster”, prior to the early 20th century, only cropped up in the context of St Columba – the 6th century monk who brought Christianity to Scotland from Ireland. According to legend, Columba “drove away a water monster” in the River Ness near Inverness. It’s important to note, however, that this is a legend relating to a specific event – a miracle associated with a saint – and not recurring monster sightings by ordinary people.

A later development in Scottish folklore were the “water-horses” that were said to inhabit various lochs, including Loch Ness. Called kelpies, these creatures would drag unsuspecting travellers into the water and devour them. A pair of kelpies are the subject of a huge modern sculpture near Falkirk, about a hundred miles south of Loch Ness. At 30 metres (100 feet) in height, this is currently the largest statue in Britain. I only glimpsed it a few times from the M9 motorway, but my cousin, who stayed in Scotland longer than I did, sent me the following photo that she took after I left (she sent it via Facebook, which has the annoying habit of converting good quality, high resolution pictures into small, low resolution ones):

The general conclusion at the Loch Ness centre – again essentially a skeptical one – is that historical accounts of “water horses” and “huge fish” most likely refer to sightings of Atlantic sturgeon. These can grow to several metres in length, and do indeed have a vaguely horse-shaped head. The biggest problem with any large animal living in the Loch is the lack of sufficient food, but that doesn’t apply to sturgeon which are essentially sea creatures that would only be occasional visitors to the loch. While sturgeon have been spotted in and around Scotland in past centuries, they are virtually unknown there now (except for the definitely-not-monstrous First Minister, of course).

As for modern sightings of long-necked or serpentine creatures – most, if not all, of these can be explained as misidentifications (together with a few deliberate hoaxes). The visitor centre gives plenty of examples of floating logs, swimming deer, waterbirds and boat wakes all looking like convincing Loch Ness Monsters. I only spent a few minutes looking at the Loch, but even in that time I took the two pictures below which give an idea how misidentifications might arise. The one on the left contains a few dark specks which, if you zoom in on them, you can see are birds in flight. A couple of them have distinctly arc-like shapes which could be mistaken for “monster humps” under different viewing conditions. The second picture shows a boat trailing a wake, with another long wave that has been churned up by the boat in the foreground. Again, under different conditions (e.g. in foggier weather) the latter could be mistaken for a long, serpentine creature just below the surface.

A Weird Offer!

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

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

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

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

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

Weird Wessex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dragon Symbolism

Here’s an unusual carved image that’s located just a few miles from where I live. Although I read about it some time ago, I only got round to stopping and having a look at it last week. It depicts a man battling a dragon, and it can be seen on the church of St Mary the Virgin at Stoke-sub-Hamdon. The oldest parts of the church were built during the Norman period around the year 1100, and that’s probably when this carving was produced.

Apart from the fact that a man fighting a dragon is an unusual thing to see on a church, there are a couple of striking things about the carving. The first is the clever way the arched back of the dragon fits neatly over the arch of the window (which is extremely narrow, even for the Norman period). The other is the cartoony style of the image, which is vaguely reminiscent of the Bayeux tapestry... which of course dates from around the same time.

The carving is on the exterior north wall of the church, which is a place where you often find pagan imagery on mediaeval churches (the north side was considered the “dark side” in those days). Although dragons were common in pagan folklore, this one may represent a Christianized legend. Having just done a bit of research, I’ve seen it confidently identified as “Saint Michael and the dragon” and as “Saint George and the dragon”. But Saint George is normally depicted on horseback, so personally I’d favour the first of these. There’s a hill about a mile from the church called St Michael’s Hill, which may or may not be significant.

Of course, after this lapse of time no-one can really know what legend the artist meant to depict. In a comment to my post last year about A Fortean History of Somerset, Richard Freeman mentioned that “the county also has more dragon legends than any other in the UK with a total of 11”. So who knows what the image would have meant to the 12th century inhabitants of Stoke-sub-Hamdon?

An almost universal characteristic among the dragons of European legend is that they’re bad. The majority are depicted as monsters that are just waiting to be slain by a hero (such as Saint George), while Saint Michael’s dragon was Satan himself, who was consigned to Hell. That’s a complete contrast to the dragons of Eastern tradition, which are seen as benevolent and auspicious. But there’s at least one benevolent and auspicious dragon on this side of the world, too – the Welsh dragon.

By coincidence, I saw a Welsh dragon here in England just a day after I took the photo at Stoke-sub-Hamdon. This was at a National Trust property called Bradley Manor, which is near Newton Abbot in Devon. The Great Hall there is decorated with a huge (and now partly obliterated) royal coat of arms dating from the Tudor period. This bears the familiar motto “Honi soit qui mal y pense”, but instead of the lion and unicorn it has a lion and... a dragon! (photography wasn’t permitted inside the house, so the picture here is a detail from the National Trust’s own image).

The unicorn is a symbol of Scotland, and was introduced by the Stuart monarchs who were also kings of Scotland. However, the Tudors who preceded them were a Welsh family, and so they used the dragon instead. The lion, of course, is a symbol of England. There may or may not be any significance to the fact that lions are real creatures whereas dragons and unicorns are the stuff of folklore!

Fortean Opera

I recently came across this gothically surreal image, which illustrates an early 19th century opera called Der Freischütz. Reading up about this, it turns out to be quite a Fortean opera, which started me thinking. A Google search for “Fortean opera” turns up nothing of relevance, so I decided it was time to rectify the situation. Two or three titles sprang to mind, in addition to Der Freischütz, and some further research turned up a few others. In the end I came up with the following list (in chronological order of composition):

Il Mondo della Luna (The World of the Moon) by Haydn (1777). As the title suggests, this opera features a trip to the Moon and an encounter with its inhabitants. That wouldn’t be particularly Fortean... except that the “aliens” are fakes and the journey to the Moon is all a big hoax. As such, Il Mondo della Luna is probably the first opera ever written about a fake Moon landing – all the way back in 1777! It isn’t a well-known work (Haydn is more famous for his symphonies than his operas), but I found this clip on YouTube from a recent performance in New York. It looks quite jolly!

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart (1791). This is a famously nutty opera that turns fairy tale conventions on their head. It begins with the hero, Prince Tamino, running away from a giant snake and fainting with fright. He is saved by three young women, followers of the Queen of the Night, who give him a magic flute and a mission to rescue the Queen’s daughter Pamina from a man named Sarastro. And why is this Fortean? Because it’s all a lie! When Tamino eventually catches up with Sarastro, it turns out he isn’t a villain at all, but a wise priest of Isis and Osiris (I should have mentioned this takes place in ancient Egypt). It’s true that Sarastro abducted Pamina, but only to free her from her mother’s clutches. He was keeping her safe so she could marry Tamino... but only after the latter has proved himself worthy by undergoing an arcane, Masonic-style initiation ritual. Strange as it may seem, he is assisted in this task by his magic flute, which was given to him by the evil Queen of the Night... who incidentally also steals the show.

Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter) by Weber (1821). This is a Pact with the Devil story.... the specific pact in this instance relating to the manufacture of magic bullets which always hit their target. The catch is that the seventh and last bullet does what the Devil—or rather the demon Samiel—wants it to... after which he takes your soul as per the standard agreement. The picture above illustrates the Wolf’s Glen scene, in which the magic bullets are forged while various spirits and demons look on. The whole scene is viewable on YouTube in two parts, here and here.

Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) by Wagner (1843). The tale of the Flying Dutchman is a distinctly Fortean piece of folklore, about an old, ghostly ship that is occasionally glimpsed by sailors, its captain having been cursed to sail the seas forever. The original legend dates from the 17th century, but the opera turns it into a characteristically 19th century gothic romance. This is very early Wagner, and he went on to bigger and better things. It’s always struck me that, if the only thing that was known about Wagner was his operatic subject-matter, he would be considered an archetypal New Ager! You’ve got Celtic legends in Tristan und Isolde, the Holy Grail in Parsifal and paganism in the Ring – including this awesome invocation of the Earth Goddess!

La Nonne Sanglante (The Bleeding Nun) by Gounod (1854). Writing about Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796), H. P. Lovecraft wrote “In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes; notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and the cabalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor.” This sounds like a great idea for an opera, but unfortunately Gounod’s attempt at it was a complete flop. Interestingly, the libretto was also offered to Gounod’s great contemporary Verdi, but he turned it down. If he hadn’t, The Bleeding Nun might have been up there with Rigoletto, Aida and La Traviata!

The Makropulos Case by Janáček (1926). I watched a production of this on a portable black and white TV when I was a student more than 30 years ago, and even then it occurred to me that it’s one of the few operas where the plot actually makes sense. The central character is a young woman named Emilia Marty, who takes an interest in a legal case that has been running for a century – and who talks about events of the 1820s as if she had been there. It gradually emerges that she’s lived for hundreds of years, using various different names all having the initials EM. But there’s an explanation for this which makes perfect sense. Anyone who is familiar with the story of John Dee and Edward Kelley will know that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552 – 1612) was obsessed with alchemy and the search for eternal life. Rudolf was based in Prague, which is where The Makropulos Case is set (Janáček was a Czech composer). When an alchemist named Hieronymus Makropulos offered Rudolf a life-extending potion, the Emperor asked him to test it on the alchemist’s daughter, Elina Makropulos, first. This caused her to fall into a coma, and the Emperor changed his mind about using the potion... but when Elina woke up a week later she discovered she had stopped aging! Hence her survival into the 20th century.

Wagner Dream by Jonathan Harvey (2007). Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in February 1883, at the age of 69. But, according to this opera, he didn’t give up without a Tibetan Book of the Dead style struggle. He was just embarking on his last opera, Die Sieger, and he argues with his spirit guide Vairochana that he ought to be allowed to go back and finish it. Wagner Dream is an opera within an opera (Wagner’s opera Die Sieger, as imagined by Harvey, framed inside Harvey’s own opera about Wagner’s battle against death). Die Sieger is set in ancient India, where the Buddha is busy setting up his community of monks. The hero is a young monk named Ananda who is trying to persuade the Buddha to allow women to join the monastic order. But isn’t that a bit far-fetched? Wagner may have been into a few New Age beliefs like Paganism and Celtic mythology, but surely not Buddhism? And feminist Buddhism at that? But it’s all true. Back in the 1850s, Wagner really did write a synopsis of Die Sieger along exactly these lines, and he really did return to the idea shortly before his death. I was aware of that (it’s mentioned by Philip K. Dick in VALIS, and in turn I referred to it in my Worldcon talk about Parsifal as Proto-SF)... but I’ve only just found out about Wagner Dream. Now I’m kicking myself that I missed its London performance last year – although there is a short clip of an earlier Dutch production on YouTube.

Forteana Blog 2nd Annual Report

This blog has been going for two years now! The most visible change over the past 12 months is that I changed the name from “Forteana” to “Andrew May’s Forteana Blog”. This may look like blatant self-aggrandizement, which it would be if I imagined that adding my name to the blog’s title would cause people to take it more seriously rather than less seriously. Actually it was the exact opposite – I realized from comments that were being posted that some people expected the blog to be an authoritative and impartial source of information, and then they got angry when they found it wasn’t. The last straw was when someone accused me of being a troll on my own blog! So I changed the name to reflect the fact that what you get here is me, not some would-be rival to Wikipedia.

Another reason for the name change is that over the last year I’ve been trying my hand at writing on non-Fortean subjects, such as my book Bloody British History: Somerset (left) which came out in September. I wanted to be able to mention such writing without being accused of going off topic – hence “Andrew May” gets equal billing to “Forteana” in the blog title. As it is, I haven’t really gone in for the hard sell as much as I ought to – I just don’t have the perseverance, ego or thick skin required to be a successful writer!

This time last year I’d done 130 posts and had 47,000 page views. I’m now up to 180 posts and 107,000 page views. So the rate of posting is down (to essentially one per week) but the number of views per post is definitely up. By far the most successful post I’ve ever done is my annotated version of Raphael’s School of Athens, which continues to get hundreds of referrals from Google every month... nothing else comes close. That one wasn’t even a particularly Fortean subject, and I had to make an effort to come up with Fortean connections for the various individuals depicted. In light of the post’s unexpected popularity, I wish I hadn’t bothered with the Fortean angle at all, and just played it straight!

When I started this blog (and I suspect this is true of most first-time bloggers) I was only thinking a few months ahead, for which I had plenty of material. Since then it’s got steadily harder and harder to think of new ideas that are up to standard and “on topic”. The trick, of course, is in thinking of a format for the blog that is effortlessly self-perpetuating. This is exactly what my former colleague and long-time fellow Fortean Paul Jackson did when he started his own blog, Random Encounters with the Unusual, last June. Paul describes this as “a repository for the oddities that me and Mrs J have encountered on our travels, which we find interesting or amusing in some way”... the result is definitely worth adding to your RSS reader if you haven’t already.

I did one guest post for Paul during the year, on Somerset’s WW2 Oddities, and another guest post for the Sevagram blog, devoted to the works of A.E. van Vogt, on the subject of Unravelling van Vogt's Fix-Up Novels. Other blogs I contribute regularly to are Jon Downes’s CFZ blog, where I do a twice-weekly “Words from the Wild Frontier” post, as well as the Lyme Regis Museum blog (currently hosted on Blogger but soon to move to the main Museum website). Also last year I started to do occasional posts for the Montacute House blog – including several folklore/mythology-related subjects that could easily have been at home on this blog, such as The Skimmington Ride, A Devilish Candlestick, Montacute's Hunky Punks and The Nine Worthies.

Devilish superstitions

Paul Jackson sent this photograph of a Bronze Age round barrow at Wilsford Cum Lake near Amesbury in Wiltshire. The barrow—a prehistoric burial mound—is the grassy hump in the background (it can be seen more clearly in the inset, which comes from Google Street View). Barrows of this kind are fairly common in Wiltshire, as well as other parts of Britain, but this is a particularly well-preserved example. It’s 4.4 metres (14½ feet) high and 36 metres (118 feet) in diameter; it dates from circa 1000 BC.

Round barrows are artificial mounds, built during the Bronze Age for the burial of high-status individuals. Over time, however, their original purpose—and man-made origin—was forgotten. They were widely considered “the work of the devil”, and in some parts of the country round barrows are known as “Devil’s humps”.

Over the centuries, ignorant superstition has attributed a wide range of phenomena to the “work of the Devil”, from eclipses and fossils to warts, migraines and masturbation. As mentioned in The Devil of Rennes-le-Chateau, masturbation continued to be demonized well into the nineteenth century. Production of excessive amounts of semen (to get back to the subject of the photograph) was thought to lead to loss of energy and vitality. Ejaculation twice a week into the marital uterus was good; ejaculation six times a day over your jeans was bad.

One of the most vocal proponents of the anti-masturbation movement was William Acton, who wrote in 1857: “Apathy, loss of memory, abeyance of concentrative power, indisposition for action and incoherence of language are the most characteristic mental phenomena resulting from masturbation in young men. The large expenditure of semen has exhausted the vital force.”

The “too much ejaculation is bad for you” superstition is surprisingly widespread. As well as Victorian England, similar beliefs can be found in the Tantric Yoga and Kamasutra-style “sacred sex” practices of India, and in Taoism and Qi Gong in China. In the context of the latter system, the loss of ejaculatory fluid is associated with a corresponding loss of “qi”, the vital life force -- resulting in premature aging, general fatigue and susceptibility to disease.

The word “cum”, by the way, is Latin for “with”. Wilsford Cum Lake is a parish made up of two small villages, one called Wilsford and the other called Lake. I’m sure that’s what you thought as soon as you saw Paul’s photograph.

William Buckland: an early Fortean experimenter

Mysterious falls of frogs or toads from the sky are among the most iconic of all Fortean phenomena. Less well-known, but just as inexplicable, are cases of trapped frogs or toads that are found alive when solid rock or masonry is broken open. At one time such occurrences were a mainstay of popular folklore, as described by Jan Bondeson in Fortean Times a few years ago (Toad in the Hole, FT221:38, April 2007). The heyday of the subject was between the late 17th and early 19th centuries -- just when the idea of testing theories via practical experimentation was coming into vogue. The "entombed toad" theory is ideally suited to testing by experiment, and numerous amateur naturalists rose to the task... though generally in a clumsy and unscientific way.

Amongst all the amateur experimenters, there was one professional on the case -- Dr William Buckland, Professor of Geology at the University of Oxford. Buckland, the son of a parish priest, was born in 1784 in Axminster (the bust on the left is in the museum in nearby Lyme Regis). By all accounts Buckland was an unusual character, possibly due to the odd mixture of a scientific vocation with a religious upbringing. As things turned out, Buckland seems to have been a good deal more open-minded than either the clergy of the time or his fellow scientists!

Buckland's experiments, as described in the Fortean Times article, were pretty rigorous. He used two types of rock, limestone and sandstone, and made twelve cavities in each. A live toad was sealed into each cavity using glass plates and clay. The blocks of stone were then buried for a year, after which they were dug up and examined through the glass plates. The toads that had been sealed in sandstone (which is non-porous) were all dead, whereas at least some of the toads sealed in limestone (which is porous) were still alive. The limestone block was re-buried... but after another year the remaining toads were all dead. Buckland concluded that it was impossible for toads to survive long periods of incarceration, and that therefore the popular accounts must be erroneous. In the Fortean Times article, however, Jan Bondeson suggests that there were flaws in Buckland's experimental method and that his conclusion was more pessimistic than it ought to have been.

Buckland also conducted experiments on a completely different subject, and in these he was more successful. On the Dorset coast, pebbles are occasionally found which when broken open contain a distinctive structure and what appear to be small bones and fish-scales. Buckland speculated that these objects were fossilized excrement, deposited by large marine creatures such as ichthyosaurs -- a theory he proved to his own satisfaction by dissecting a number of fish and injecting their intestines with quick-drying cement! Buckland coined the word "coprolite" to refer to these fecal fossils... and he liked them so much he had a special table made to display his best specimens! The table is now in Lyme Regis Museum in Dorset.

Satori - ape, goat-man or deer?

I've come across the Japanese word Satori in several different contexts. Richard Freeman's Great Yokai Encyclopaedia (which I mentioned recently in Ningyo: the ugly little mermaid) describes a legendary Satori which is "a long-haired ape-like beast [that] can read minds and is therefore very hard to catch." I think this must be the creature shown in the picture (which I found on Wikimedia Commons).

The ape-like Satori is also discussed in a recent blog post by Dale Drinnon called "Pink Tentacle Abominable Yokai". However, Dale adds that the name Satori may be a direct transliteration of the European word Satyr, referring to a mythical creature composed of the upper half of a man and the lower half of a goat. The speculation is that the word was introduced to Japan by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th or 17th century.

Satori is also the Japanese word for "understanding", and this may have been conflated with a garbled version of the Satyr legend to transform the Satori into a mind-reading creature. Regarding Satori's ape-like incarnation, Dale writes: "When it encounters travellers passing through the mountains, the creature approaches them and begins speaking their thoughts aloud. Once the victims become thoroughly confused and disoriented, the Satori captures and eats them. It is said that an empty mind is the best protection against a Satori attack. Thinking nothing at all causes the creature to turn away in boredom or flee in fear."

The idea of an "empty mind" links to yet another meaning of Satori (and probably the most familiar meaning to Westerners) -- the moment of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism. At the London Buddhist Society in the 1990s, the Venerable Myokyo-Ni and her pupil Martin Goodson (now the Venerable Sochu) used to recount a Zen fable called "The Satori Deer", about a creature which behaves in a very similar way to the Satori Ape described above. The following (slightly abridged) is taken from an article by Martin Goodson in the February 1997 issue of The Middle Way magazine:

A woodcutter went into the forest and began cutting down a tree. He happened to glance up and there on the other side of the clearing was a strange animal. It was rather like a deer but totally white from top to toe. As he looked at it the animal said: "You're wondering what I am". The man jumped in surprise, at which the animal said: "You're surprised that an animal has spoken". The man was flabbergasted. The Satori deer said: "You are beginning to think I am telepathic and can read your thoughts". The man shuffled from one foot to the other. The Satori deer said: "You are beginning to get a little irritated with me". And he was -- he was quite cross. The Satori deer went on and said: "You are thinking of picking up that axe and throwing it at my skull". The man picked up the axe and made a lunge for this creature, but of course the Satori deer knew exactly what he was going to do. Every time a thought occurred to him, the Satori deer could anticipate it by jumping the other way. So after several futile attempts the man decided that the best thing he could do was ignore the creature and just get on with cutting down the tree. The Satori deer said: "You're trying to ignore me and continue cutting down that tree". But as the man concentrated all his energy into cutting down the tree, the Satori deer spoke less and less until eventually he fell silent. The woodsman continued to cut down the tree with the Satori deer standing there waiting until, as the woodsman raised his axe, the axe-head broke away from the handle, flew across the clearing and killed the Satori deer stone dead. And that is how to kill the Satori deer.

In the Zen interpretation, the Satori deer represents the mental commentary that goes on all the time inside your head, which you're supposed to "kill" before you achieve enlightenment. No doubt the Zen version substituted a cute-looking deer, instead of a man-eating ape, because the thought of having to kill it has greater shock value. That's Zen for you!

Ningyo: the ugly little mermaid

This time last week, I was privileged to see the late Phineas T. Barnum discoursing on his celebrated Feejee Mermaid (as pictured on the left), in the small North Devon village of Woolfardisworthy. This isn't as unlikely as it sounds, since Woolfardisworthy is the home of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, which last weekend hosted their annual gathering: the Weird Weekend 2011. In true Barnum tradition, neither the mermaid on display or Barnum himself were exactly authentic. The latter was played by Silas Hawkins, while the mermaid was a model made for the CFZ by special effects wizard Alan Friswell.

The original "Feejee mermaid" was displayed by Barnum in the nineteenth century, and should more correctly be described as a Ningyo -- a legendary Japanese creature that is smaller and uglier than the traditional European mermaid. At one time it was not uncommon for Japanese sailors to fake Ningyo specimens by stitching the top half of a dead monkey onto the bottom half of a dead fish. The first mermaid exhibited by Barnum was one of these... a genuine fake, in other words. However, after the original was destroyed in a fire, he resorted to displaying a fake fake! The CFZ model is also a "fake fake", by the way -- no dead animals were involved in its construction!

The Ningyo is an example of a Yokai -- a generic term referring to a wide range of monsters, demons, ghosts and other creatures from Japanese legend and folklore. The most comprehensive reference work on Yokai in the English language is Richard Freeman's 400-page Great Yokai Encyclopaedia, which was published by CFZ Press last year. My copy (pictured right) was secured at the Weird Weekend for just 12 pounds -- 20 percent off the list price. As if that wasn't enough of a bargain, Richard was then good enough to sign it for me... no doubt doubling its value!

Paranormal investigation, 18th century style

From a Fortean point of view, the artist William Hogarth (1697-1764) is best known for his satirical print "Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism" -- one of his last works, dating from 1762. As discussed in issue 202 of Fortean Times (October 2005), the actual target of the satire was the new religion of Methodism, but (presumably because Methodists were seen as particularly credulous) the picture contains references to several popular paranormal phenomena of the time. These include the Cock Lane ghost, the phantom Drummer of Tedworth and the hoax perpetrated by Mary Toft -- a young woman who, back in the 1720s, convinced a lot of people that she regularly gave birth to live rabbits.

There is an earlier and less well-known work by Hogarth depicting Mary Toft, which he produced in 1726 when she was at the height of her fame. Although it's not a great work of art, there is at least one sense in which the earlier picture is more interesting than the later one. Rather than Methodists (who have always struck me as rather harmless) Hogarth's satire is directed at supposedly intelligent and educated individuals who "want to believe"... and hence are easily duped by hoaxers.

The title of the print is Cunicularii, as can be seen in the lower middle caption (you may need to click on the picture to enlarge it). Now "Cunicularii" is actually Latin for "rabbits"... but, since none of Hogarth's other prints have Latin names, it's safe to assume he chose this title because (in the timeless tradition of British anatomical humour) it "sounds a bit rude". The subtitle is "The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation" -- the fictitious town of "Godliman" being similar (but not actionably similar) to Godalming in Surrey, where Mary Toft lived. The quotation "They held their talents most adroit / For any mystical exploit" is paraphrased from Samuel Butler's 17th century poem Hudibras... but it could be the motto of paranormal investigators in any century!

The three Wise Men attending at the birth (not an original idea, of course) are labelled A, B and C:

• Wise Man A is captioned as "The Dancing Master or Preternatural Anatomist", and he is exclaiming "A Great Birth!"
• Wise Man B, "An Occult Philosopher searching into the depth of things", is pictured with his hand up the subject's skirt, saying "It pouts, it swells, it spreads, it comes!"
• Wise Man C, who is exclaiming "A Sooterkin!" is labelled "The Sooterkin Doctor Astonished".

The last of the three may cause a puzzled frown, because you thought the woman was giving birth to rabbits, not sooterkins... and come to that, what's a sooterkin? But in those days it was just like it is today -- if you get three paranormal believers in a room together, you will hear three different explanations for the same phenomenon! A sooterkin, in the folklore of the time, was a small, furry, non-human creature that some women were supposed to give birth to spontaneously. The legend arose in Germany and the Low Countries, so possibly "sooterkin" is a corruption of "Pseudokind" (German Kind meaning "child", as in Wunderkind).