The Gates of Hell (with music video)

A long time ago on this blog, I did a post about Dante's Inferno - Hunt Emerson's comic-book adaptation of a 14th century epic poem set in Hell. As I said there, the comic does wonders for clarifying the whole point of Dante's original -  i.e. that it's basically a satire on Italian political history, rather than a serious attempt to depict the landscape and geography of Hell. But it does a strikingly vivid job of the latter even so, which has inspired a multitude of subsequent works from Sandro Botticelli's 15th century illustrations of Hell to Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's SF novel Inferno (1976), which uses the same basic setting (and, of course, Hunt Emerson's 2012 comic-book version).

On the musical side, there's a distinctly horror movie-esque portrayal of Hell in the Dante Symphony (1857) by Franz Liszt (who featured in another early post on this blog, Lisztomania). This begins with a dramatic depiction of the Gates of Hell, which inspired me to create the following video. I've added four electronic tracks of my own (demonic voice, drum machine, saw bass and synth pad), but otherwise it's just a digitally distorted vinyl recording of the opening of Liszt's symphony. Visually the gates and demons are courtesy of Bing's AI image creator, while the depiction of Hell itself is by Botticelli. When it's all put together, I think the result is pretty cool ((even though I say it myself):

I've twisted the original a bit in having the words spoken by demons. In Dante's poem, these are phrases that (in their original Italian form) are inscribed over the gates of Hell, while Liszt has them depicted by orchestral instruments, rather than being spoken or sung. But since I like playing with free software, I couldn't resist adding the synthesized voice.

The other software I used here was Tracktion Waveform Free, together with various free instrument and effects plugins (or ones that came free with Computer Music magazine, anyway). These are all great toys to play with, as I discovered a few years ago when I was doing a book called The Science of Music. I was asked to do that one because I'd previously written The Science of Sci-Fi Music - but while the latter was about a subject I knew something about (avant-garde classical music of the mid-20th century), the new one strayed way outside my comfort zone into modern digital music production. And the quickest way to learn a new subject is to try doing it yourself!

One thing I mentioned in passing in The Science of Music is that, if people who aren't fans of classical music have heard of Franz Liszt at all, it's most likely through the rhyming slang phrase "Brahms and Liszt". And as it happens, Brahms is another composer I've swiped a vinyl sample from. Unlike The Gates of Hell, there isn't even a tenuous fortean connection in this case, but I think the result is one of the most musically successful things I've done (in a chilled-out "lo-fi" sort of way). Here's the result:

While I was writing this post, I suddenly remembered that I've actually seen the "Gates of Hell", or at least a monumental bronze representation of them by the sculptor Auguste Rodin. This was at the Rodin Museum in Paris, which I visited in 2013 - the photograph below is one I took at the time. If you look closely at the panel above the gates, you'll see Rodin's most iconic image - "The Thinker" - in its original setting.

 

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.

The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic

This has to be one of the most fortean items I’ve ever seen in a museum – a spoon that was supposedly bent “with mind power” by Uri Geller! I spotted it last week amongst countless other fascinating objects in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall. This was my second visit there – I went five years ago (see this blog post), but that was on a very busy day and the milling crowds made it difficult to see everything properly. It was much quieter last week and I managed to see a lot that I missed the first time – including Uri Geller’s spoon.

Other items on display include mediaeval books on witchcraft (including Saducismus Triumphatus, which I’ve written about before), protective charms used by soldiers in the 1st and 2nd world wars, Ouija boards, a large collection of magical artifacts that belonged to Gerald Gardner (the founder of modern Wicca), and several dead cats that had been walled up inside houses to keep the rats away. To top it all, there’s a “sex magic” display featuring a large number of little dicks (at least twice as many as I managed to get in this photo):

Actually the main reason I wanted to go to that part of Cornwall was to visit a much newer and less well known museum just a few miles from Boscastle – the Cornwall at War Museum. It’s off-topic for this blog, but highly recommended for anyone interested in 20th century military history. It’s a big place, occupying more than a dozen recently renovated buildings at what used to be RAF Davidstow. There are two full-size aircraft (a Hawker Hunter and a Fairey Gannet), several torpedoes, missiles and target drones, and loads of smaller items.

In one building I spotted an R1155 radio similar to the one I own (cf. the post about my various Museum Pieces). More surprisingly, in a different display in the same building I saw another very familiar object. This is something I’ve had since I was 12 years old, when I inherited all my father’s junk after he died. It’s nothing special – just a camera controller from a photo-reconnaissance aircraft – but I’ve always wondered exactly what period and what type of aircraft it came from. Unfortunately the one in the museum is unlabelled, although it appears to be identical to mine (as you can see from the two photos below). However, an online search yielded this page which includes a picture of one inside a 1950s-era Canberra PR.3/7.

WHAAM!

The new extension to the Tate Modern museum opened last week. I only need the slimmest of excuses to visit London, so I went to see it. The new part (called the Switch House) mainly houses contemporary art installations, while the original building (which used to be Bankside Power Station) contains older works of “modern art”. Prominent among the latter is Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic painting WHAAM!, pictured above. This was far and away my favourite item in the whole museum – not surprisingly, given the irresistible combination of comic-book nostalgia and military aircraft nostalgia!

Roy Lichtenstein was a controversial artist, because so many of his paintings copied the layout of published comic-book panels (for numerous examples, see this page). But I think it’s wrong to belittle his work for this reason. Yes, it’s a shame that the original artist goes uncredited, but the artistic medium, display context, gigantic size and sheer painstaking precision of Lichtenstein’s works make them totally different from the original (a fact that isn’t always clear when you see small side-by-side comparisons on a web page). In any case, the comic-book industry is much more relaxed about the "swiping" of panel layouts than it is about, say, the unlicensed use of lucrative franchise characters.

The display caption to WHAAM! states that it is “based on an image from All American Men of War published by DC comics in 1962”. But looking at its Wikipedia entry the situation is a little more complicated than that. The basic layout (including the words “I pressed the fire control and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky” and the sound effect “WHAAM”) does indeed come from a single panel in All American Men of War #89. However, the American aircraft in that panel is clearly a jet – probably a Korean-vintage F-86 Sabre. The plane in Lichtenstein’s painting looks more like a P-51 Mustang – and Wikipedia makes a good case for that being taken from a panel in the following issue, #90. Lichtenstein’s victim aircraft is noticeably different from either of those panels – Wikipedia suggests it comes from #89 again, but from a different story in that issue. Whatever sources Lichtenstein used, I still think the result is one of the greatest works of art of the 20th century.

As regards the new Switch House, I have to confess that most of the items on display went over my head. For the most part I mean that figuratively, but the small object pictured below was literally over my head ... because it was hanging from the ceiling in one of the rooms (sorry it’s out-of-focus – my camera was on maximum digital zoom). Regular readers will know I have an uncanny ability to spot things that “look a bit like a dick” (see for example this statue of Balzac or these 1940s comic-book aliens). The work pictured below is a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois entitled Fillette, which is French for “little girl”. I guess that’s what it’s meant to depict ... but it still looks like a dick to me.

A Low Budget Flying Saucer

 Here are some pictures of an odd little vehicle I saw at the Helicopter Museum in Weston-Super-Mare last week. It struck me as looking like the kind of cartoony flying saucer the Jetsons or Marvin the Martian might be see in. My previous visit to the museum was 12 or 13 years ago, and while most of the displays were just the same as last time, I don’t remember seeing this one. Either it was in storage, or else I blinked and missed it. That’s possible, since it’s half-hidden behind a screen in the far corner (possibly out of embarrassment – it’s like the airborne equivalent of a Sinclair C5).

According to the display placard, the Westland WG33 was a proposed short-range, two-seat helicopter that could be flown by inexperienced personnel and would cost less than £30,000 per unit. It was considered for use as an aerial observation platform by both the British and U.S. army in the late 1970s, but never got to the stage of a flying prototype. This full-scale mock-up was donated to the museum when the project was declassified in 1980.

Some old X-Files

I don’t usually hoard old magazines (except Fortean Times), but I kept these three issues of Cinefantastique because between them they contain complete episode guides to the first four seasons of The X-Files. I was prompted to dig them out last week – not because of the “reboot” currently showing on Channel 5, or from any general sense of nostalgia, but because I needed to do some research for a new book I’m working on. In looking through them, I was struck by how highbrow some of the X-Files episode titles were. Here are a few of the more Fortean examples – two from each of those first four seasons (just focusing on the titles, not the storylines).

The Jersey Devil (Season 1, Episode 5). One of America’s lesser known cryptids, this one dates back to those pre-Darwin days when mysterious creatures weren’t required to conform to the logic of evolutionary genetics. According to Wikipedia it’s “a kangaroo-like creature with the head of a goat, leathery bat-like wings, horns, small arms with clawed hands, cloven hooves and a forked tail”. Wings AND arms AND hooves… they don’t make them like that any more.

Ghost in the Machine (Season 1, Episode 7). This cool-sounding phrase was coined by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1949, as a disparaging description of the dualistic theory of human nature (i.e. a spiritual soul inhabiting a material body).

Little Green Men (Season 2, Episode 1). A facetious term for extraterrestrials, which was already well established when Mack Reynolds wrote The Case of the Little Green Men in 1951 – a Fortean-themed detective novel I wrote about in a blog post last year.

Fearful Symmetry (Season 2, Episode 18). This phrase comes from William Blake’s famous poem “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright”. The poem isn’t very Fortean, but its author was – as I explained in A 19th Century Contactee. One of the strangest spiritual creatures Blake claimed to have encountered was “The Ghost of a Flea” – his painting of which I happened to see in the Tate Gallery last year (see photo at the bottom of this post).

Paper Clip (Season 3, Episode 2). This is a reference to Operation Paperclip, a real world “conspiracy” that brought hundreds of German scientists – many of them war criminals – to the United States in the aftermath of WW2, giving them clean new records and salaried positions working for the U.S. government. It may be no coincidence that “Nasa” sounds a bit like “Nazi”.

Talitha Cumi (Season 3, Episode 24). This is one of several X-Files titles derived from a foreign language. In this case it’s Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. It’s a quote from the New Testament, which of course is full of Jesus quotes, but most of them only appear in translation. This example (from Mark 5:41) is one of only about a dozen that are given in the original Aramaic first (I’d be interested to know why they were singled out in this way). From the King James version: “And he took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.”

Tunguska (Season 4, Episode 8). This, of course, was the site of a mysterious explosion that flattened two thousand square kilometres of Siberian forest in 1908. It was probably caused by a meteor impact, although several odd things about it have led to various alternative explanations (e.g. an exploding UFO). As mentioned in my post about Ian Watson last year, his novel Chekhov’s Journey offers a particularly weird interpretation of the Tunguska event.

Terma (Season 4, Episode 9). This has to be one of the most obscure X-Files titles of all. It’s a technical term from Tantric Buddhism, referring to secret teachings carefully handed down among the inner circle of adepts. Such as, for example, that Tantric classic “Sex Secrets of the Ancient Masters” (which I really must get round to writing one of these days).

A Very Odd Picture

It’s not every day you see the founder of a major world religion working in a comic book studio, so imagine my surprise when I saw this picture in the British Museum yesterday, which depicts not one but two of them doing just that. The caption reads: “Nakamura Hikaru (born 1984): Buddha and Jesus drawing manga, cover artwork for Saint Oniisan vol. 10. This artwork for the front cover of a manga book depicts Buddha creating his own manga, helped by Jesus.”

I know almost nothing about manga comics, but Nakamura Hikaru is described as a “young and very popular manga artist who specialises in comedy.” Apparently Saint Oniisan is her best-selling title, with weekly sales around 30,000 (which would have been a relatively low figure back in the heyday of comics in the mid-20th century, but much higher today when fewer people read comics). As far as I can tell, the series deals with the comic adventures of Jesus and the Buddha as they attempt to pass themselves off as ordinary people in modern-day Tokyo. The caption goes on to say “The playful depiction of the founders of two world religions as youthful men on holiday in Japan has achieved cult status. The two divine beings negotiate the ups and downs of their life together in a humble flat in suburban Tokyo. The series explores dilemmas in everyday life with visual gags, puns and word play.”

The current display in the British Museum focuses on the work of three manga artists of different generations, Nakamura Hikaru being the youngest. As well as the cover image, several black and white pages from Saint Oniisan are also on display (see example below). There is also a short interview with Hikaru in which she says “I was surprised by the positive reactions to my manga. I received letters from religious specialists, university professors, Buddhist priests and Christian clergy. I have also had requests to use my manga in universities for teaching purposes.”

Cambridge Oddities

Cambridge is one of the few tourist hotspots that it actually makes sense to visit in August. There are crowds of tourists, of course, but that’s offset by the fact that there aren’t any undergraduates (and if you stay in your old college, you don’t have to share the lavatorial facilities with half a dozen barely housetrained students). That’s why I decided to spend a couple of nostalgic days there last week. Here is a quick rundown of some of the more unusual sights in the town:

One of the oldest buildings in Cambridge, dating from circa 1130, is the Round Church opposite St John’s College. Round churches are often associated with the Knights Templar (as with the Temple Church in London), but this one seems to have been built by a lesser known order, active at the same time, called the “Fraternity of the Holy Sepulchre”.

As I mentioned a few months ago in Isaac Newton and me, I spent my undergraduate years at Trinity College – as did Newton himself. Standing outside his old rooms in Great Court is an apple tree, pictured below. There probably wasn’t an apple tree there in Newton’s time (it’s clear from his account of the falling apple that it took place at his home in Lincolnshire), but Newton did keep a small private garden on this plot of land. He also had a large wooden shed which he used as a laboratory for his alchemical experiments – it may have been here, or inside Great Court itself.

(For more about Newton and alchemy, see my book Isaac Newton: Pocket Giants).

Sometimes erroneously associated with Newton, but actually nothing to do with him, is the Mathematical Bridge at the back of Queens’ College. The present bridge is the third to occupy this site, all using same timber-framed design. The first was built in 1748; this one dates from 1905. The mathematical nature of the bridge lies in the ingenious way the wooden ribs are arranged so that “each member is in compression with little or no bending moment”.

Cambridge has seen more than its fair share of scientific discoveries, and even one of the pubs claims to have played a part in one of them! Outside the Eagle in Bene’t Street there is a plaque that reads:

DNA Double Helix 1953: “The Secret of Life”. For decades the Eagle was the local pub for scientists from the nearby Cavendish Laboratory. It was here on February 28th 1953 that Francis Crick and James Watson first announced their discovery of how DNA carries genetic information.

One of the newer oddities in Cambridge is the Corpus Clock, dating from 2008 and belonging to Corpus Christi College. It stands at the end of Bene’t Street right opposite King’s College, giving it one of the highest tourist footfalls in England. The clock is unusual for several reasons: it has circles of LEDs instead of hands, and it only tells the correct time every five minutes (the rest of the time it runs erratically fast or slow). It also has a monstrous, animated insect called a Chronophage squatting on top of it.

It was somewhere near Corpus Christi College, back in the 16th century, that a man named Thomas Hobson used to rent out horses from a large livery stable. Although he had dozens of horses, customers always had to take whichever horse he wanted to hire out next. This gave rise to the phrase “Hobson’s Choice” – still used today to mean “no choice at all”. In his old age, Hobson helped to set up a new water supply to the town, which became known as “Hobson’s Conduit”. Cambridge doesn’t seem to have a monument to Hobson’s Choice, but it does have one to Hobson’s Conduit – on the corner of Lensfield Road and Trumpington Street:

From a Fortean point of view, the Haunted Bookshop – tucked away in a narrow alley called St Edward’s Passage – sounds highly promising. I had visions of shelves packed with occult and paranormal books – or horror fiction, at the very least. Unfortunately, however, the stock turned out to be predominantly antiquarian children’s books. The name comes from the fact that the building (previously an alehouse) is supposed to have its own ghost in the form of an occasionally glimpsed “White Lady”.

Cambridge has numerous free museums, of which by far the largest is the Fitzwilliam Museum on Trumpington Street. The quirkiest thing I spotted there was a pair of paintings by William Hogarth called Before and After, dating from 1731. At first sight they look innocuous enough – partly because the eye (my eye, anyhow) tends to be drawn to the girl rather than the bloke. But the latter is worth a second look in both pictures. In Before there is the distinct hint of a “bulge in his trousers” (I’m quoting from the official blurb), while in After “the man’s unbuttoned breeches reveal a tuft of pubic hair and his penis, chafed red from its exertions”. Sleazy stuff for the genteel 18th century!

Here’s Before...

... and After:

Dragon Slayers

I didn’t specifically set out to take pictures of dragon slayers last Wednesday, but by the end of the day I realized I had five of them. Together with another four photos I already had, I decided that was enough for a blog post!

There are plenty of dragon-slaying legends, many of them symbolizing the triumph of good over evil. In this sense the ultimate dragon-slayer must be St Michael – the Biblical archangel who defeats “the great dragon, the primeval Serpent, known as the devil or Satan” (Revelation 12:9). Three versions of this story are depicted above. The one in the middle is a picture I took in the Louvre in Paris two years ago, which featured previously in my post Monsters, Mystery and a Monkey. It’s an early work by Raphael, dating from around 1504.

The other two pictures I took in the National Gallery in London last week. The one on the left is by another Italian painter, Piero della Francesca, and dates from 1469. It’s less dramatic than Raphael’s version, and the dragon looks... well, unimpressive to say the least. The picture on the right was painted the previous year, 1468, by the Spanish artist Bartolomé Bermejo. His dragon is the weirdest-looking of the three – the caption describes it as “a monstrous creature, part-reptile, part-bat”.

The other saintly dragon slayer that everyone has heard of is St George (who is the patron saint of England, despite having no historical or legendary connection with the country). The story of George and the Dragon is essentially a Christianized version of the archetypal dragon-slaying legend (cf. my earlier post on Dragons and Dinosaurs), in which a community regularly appeases their local dragon by feeding it young female virgins. Then they suddenly realize the next in line is the King’s daughter, so it’s time to find themselves a dragon-slayer.

Here are three pictorial versions of St George and the Dragon, all by Italian artists:

The one at top left is by Raphael again – it’s a companion piece to his picture of St Michael and hangs next to it in the Louvre. To its right is a later version (circa 1555) by Tintoretto, which I saw in the National Gallery last week. Interestingly this reverses Raphael’s perspective – it has the fleeing princess in the foreground while St George, on horseback, fights the dragon in the background. I think Tintoretto’s version is much more dramatic – a kind of High Renaissance version of a “damsel in distress” pulp magazine cover!

The third picture is also in the National Gallery. It’s by Uccello, dating from around 1470, and has a more cartoony look than the other pictures. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is the strange (and rather Fortean-looking) atmospheric phenomenon looming in the background behind St George.

A less well known dragon-slaying legend is that of Apollo and Python. The latter was a giant serpent-like dragon in Greek mythology (after which the snake genus was named), which according to legend was slain by the god Apollo. I have to admit I’d never heard of this legend until I saw Turner’s painting of it in the Tate Gallery last week (I’ve been rude about Turner in the past, but he’s started to grow on me since I saw the film Mr Turner).

At first sight Turner’s “dragon” looks very snake-like, although if you look closely there is a huge claw-like hand visible. Basically it’s difficult to work out exactly what’s going on, which is a generic problem I have with most of Turner’s work (he painted two other “horror” pictures, one of Death on a Pale Horse and one of Sea Monsters, which are even more confusing).

Finally, here are a couple of mediaeval dragon-slayers from Somerset. The one on the left can be seen on the wall of the church in Stoke-sub-Hamdon, and was featured previously in my post on Dragon Symbolism. As I said in that post, it may be intended to represent St Michael, due to its proximity to a hill called St Michael’s Hill.

I saw the dragon-slayer on the right a few weeks ago in Wells Cathedral, on the wall of the staircase leading to the Chapter House. I don’t think he’s meant to be anyone famous – I’ve seen him described variously as a “peasant”, a “priest” or a “pilgrim”. With his right hand he’s holding one of the pillars which support the roof, while casually using his left hand to slay a small dragon with his walking stick!

The Museum of the Future

The Museum of the Future is a new collection of 20 short stories, published by Jon Downes at CFZ Press under the “Fortean Fiction” imprint. I included the blurb in my Books, plural post last month, but here it is again:

Twenty tales of High Strangeness featuring conspiracy theorists, mad scientists, hippies, geeks and miscellaneous weirdos: A group of Cambridge academics investigate a crashed UFO... An outcast scientist discovers the secret of anti-gravity... A paranormal author finds himself prime suspect in the Case of the Purloined Poe... A student has a bewildering vision of the future... Four New Agers are regressed back to their past lives... An engineer invents a new way to spy on the competition... A viewer gets too deeply involved in a TV cop show... A young woman battles the spies, aliens and perverts that only she can see... and a dozen more stories!

Most of the stories were written because I was looking for an entertaining way of getting a particular idea across. As a result there’s quite a mix of styles and genres. There’s some science fiction, some adventure, some mystery and some horror. At least half the stories have a humorous element to them, and several are parodies of a specific style. I guess if I had to stick a label on the collection it would be “Fortean satire”.

There’s an account of the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery in the style of an M. R. James ghost story, and of the Rendlesham UFO incident in the style of a pulp adventure. There’s Roswell-style paranoia, transplanted backward in time from the Cold War to the period just before the First World War. There’s H. P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” retold in the style of Philip K. Dick. And there’s a murder mystery featuring homeopathy, Tesla coils and other internet-age wackiness.

The title story, “Museum of the Future”, is very short – but it’s retold five times. It’s a vision of the British Museum in the year 2012, as envisaged in 1912, 1932, 1952, 1972 and 1992. The basic plot is pretty much the same, but the background details are different every time. Not surprisingly, these reflect the political preoccupations of the time the story was written!

The Museum of the Future is published as a paperback (ISBN 978-1-909488-23-6), which I believe can be ordered from “all good bookshops” or via any of the Amazon sites. It’s also available as an ebook, but only in Kindle format (so my apologies to regular reader Colin and anyone else who may buy their ebooks elsewhere). Here are a few links:

• Amazon US – paperback
• Amazon UK – paperback
• Amazon US – Kindle
• Amazon UK – Kindle

Museum Pieces

On three different occasions in the last six months, I came across an object on display in a museum which was virtually identical to something I’ve got at home – having carefully hung onto it ever since I was at school. There’s nothing particularly Fortean about the items in question... but they’re definitely “retro”, so I thought I’d share them here.

Probably the most interesting of the three objects was in the newly reopened Imperial War Museum in London. As you can see from the photograph, they’ve got the nose and cockpit section of a WW2-era Lancaster bomber on display. I haven’t got a Lancaster bomber in my garden shed – but the right-hand picture shows a close-up of the R1155 radio receiver in the cockpit, and I do have one of those.

As a teenager in the 1970s, I already had a nostalgic obsession with anything that contained thermionic valves (aka vacuum tubes). When people discovered this, they were only too happy to unload their out-of-date technology on me! I ended up with dozens of old TVs and radios, and the R1155 was the pride of my collection. It never actually worked (I think the previous owner had cannibalized it for spare parts), but it was in pretty good physical condition when I first had it – certainly no worse than the one in the IWM:

... and here is my R1155 today, looking somewhat the worse for wear after more than 40 years in various sheds and garages:

The second item was a brass field telescope I spotted in the Royal Signals Museum near Blandford in Dorset. This looked very similar, if not identical, to one that got passed down to me when my grandfather died circa 1973. I’m not absolutely certain, but I think the telescope originally belonged to his brother, my great uncle, who spent many years travelling around the world with the British Army (possibly the Royal Signals Corps – I don’t know). This is the one in the museum:

... and this is mine (I probably should have polished it before I took the picture, but I was too lazy):

The third and last item is in the Science Museum in London. I first noticed it some time in the 1970s when I went there on a school trip, and it was still on show when I visited the museum this summer. It’s part of a display of old tools – which isn’t a subject that greatly excited the teenage me, except that I recognized the wooden drill brace as being virtually identical to one in the toolshed at home. It was one of dozens of old tools that came with the house when my parents bought it (the previous owner went mad, and a lot of his stuff was left behind when they took him away).

When I got home I carefully retrieved the drill brace, now that I knew it was a “museum piece”. I’ve still got it, along with various other bits and pieces I’ve hung onto in the naïve hope they will eventually become valuable relics of the twentieth century:

Iron Age Oddities

If I can’t think of anything else to write about, I can always dig into my collection of photographs taken in various museums. I’ll start with two that show very similar-looking objects. The one on the left was taken in the British Museum last week; the one on the right was taken a few years ago in Lyme Regis Museum. They look so similar they might even be the same object... and in a sense they are.

The object in the British Museum is a bronze mirror that was unearthed during excavations at the Roman villa at Holcombe, a few miles from Lyme Regis. Although it was discovered at a Roman site, it actually dates from around 50 BC, about a century before the Roman invasion. That period of British history is referred to as the “Iron Age”, which makes it sound primitive and unsophisticated – but it clearly wasn’t, if they had fancy decorated mirrors like this. The mirror is displayed face down, to show the intricate engraving on the back – the other side would have been polished smooth to produce a reflective surface.

The mirror on display in Lyme Regis is simply a modern replica of the one in the British Museum. It looks a completely different colour, but at least part of this may be due to the different lighting conditions. Apart from that, however, the replica is astonishingly accurate. If you open the image full size, you can see that not only has the fine engraving been reproduced exactly, but so has the seemingly random pattern of corrosion on the metal!

Actually, I’d be more interested to see a replica of what the mirror looked like when it was new. One of the reasons people insist on thinking of archaeological history as “primitive” is because objects are in such a poor state when they’re dug out of the ground. I’m sure the mirror’s original owner would have thrown it out of the house if she’d seen it in this condition!

Bronze mirrors were popular high-status items in a number of ancient cultures, and dozens of other examples have been found at Iron Age sites around Britain. But there’s another object on display in the same room at the British Museum which is virtually unique. It’s the horned helmet shown below. This was found near Waterloo Bridge in London and it dates from the same period as the Holcombe mirror, or possibly even earlier.

I have to admit I’d never heard of the Waterloo helmet until I saw it last week, although I see now that it’s important enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Like most people I tend to associate horned helmets with the Vikings (even though the Vikings didn’t really use them that much)... but with an estimated date of 150 to 50 BC, this one predates the Vikings by a thousand years. Its purpose was almost certainly purely ceremonial – the thin bronze wouldn’t have given the wearer much protection against a heavy iron sword!

Monsters, Mystery and a Monkey

I can’t think of anything to write about this week, so here are a few more interesting paintings I saw in the Louvre Museum last summer. The photos are a bit blurry because they’re my own, but I’ve included links to better images.

The first picture was painted by Raphael around 1504, when he was just 21 years old. It depicts the story of Saint Michael and the dragon from the Book of Revelation, which I mentioned in a previous post (Dragon Symbolism). The dragon in question was Satan himself, although Raphael’s version doesn’t look much like the traditional depiction of Satan... or the traditional depiction of a dragon, for that matter. It looks more like one of Hieronymus Bosch’s demons, as do the various monsters in the background. They’re easier to see in the Louvre’s own picture – Saint Michel terrassant le démon. With the exception of the figure of Saint Michael himself, there is quite a striking resemblance to Bosch... who after all lived at the same time as Raphael.

The second picture is one of the most Fortean of all paintings – Les Bergers d’Arcadie by Nicolas Poussin, dating from around 1639. The title means “The Shepherds of Arcadia” – Arcadia being a place in ancient Greece. That doesn’t sound very Fortean, except that many people (on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, as far as I can make out) believe the picture really depicts the tomb of Jesus Christ near Rennes-le-Chateau in France. I would really like to go back in time and tell Poussin that’s what people in the 21st century think the painting is meant to depict. He would probably laugh quite a bit.

The last picture is by a French painter named Jean-Siméon Chardin, who is nothing like as well known as Raphael or Poussin. But I still think it’s a good picture. It’s called “The Antiquarian Monkey” (or in French, Le Singe antiquaire), and it was painted around 1726. It depicts a monkey trying to look like the kind of refined, educated, middle-aged gentleman that I try to look like. Except the monkey does it better.

From Sardanapalus to Ashurbanipal

One of the most iconic works in the Louvre Museum is The Death of Sardanapalus, painted by Eugène Delacroix at the height of the Romantic Era in 1827. The painting is 5 metres wide by 4 metres tall, and it has to be seen to be fully appreciated – a small-scale photo like mine really can’t do it justice.

Sardanapalus was supposed to be the last king of Assyria, at the fall of that mighty empire in the 7th century BC. According to legend, instead of protecting the country against invaders, Sardanapalus spent his life in hedonism and debauchery, surrounded by wealth and loose women. When the enemy finally arrived outside his palace in Nineveh, rather than defending the city he had his concubines slaughtered and then set fire to his palace while he was still inside it.

The legend of Sardanapalus appealed to the romantic imagination – besides this painting by Delacroix, it was the subject of a play by Lord Byron in 1821. The source of the legend was a Greek historian named Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the first century BC – in other words, 600 years after the alleged events took place. In the 1820s, virtually everything anyone knew about the ancient world came from reading the Graeco-Roman classics – archaeology was still in its infancy.

The tide turned in the 1840s, when serious archaeological exploration of Northern Iraq was carried out first by the French and then by the British. It was the latter who made the greatest discoveries, under the direction of Austen Henry Layard and his local-born assistant Hormuzd Rassam, and as a result many of the best finds are now in the British Museum. On my last visit there I bought a book called Assyrian Sculpture. The picture on the cover shows one of numerous wall carvings found by Rassam at Nineveh, in the palace of Ashurbanipal – the Assyrian king from 669 to 631 BC. Although he wasn’t the last king of Assyria (and he wasn’t a drunken hedonist who committed suicide, but a great warrior who died a natural death), Ashurbanipal is generally believed to be the historical figure on which the legend of Sardanapalus was based.

The picture on the cover of the book is one of many in the British Museum depicting a favourite pastime of Assyrian kings, usually referred to as a “lion hunt”. It wasn’t really a lion hunt, though, but the ritualized slaying of a captured lion. At first sight the picture looks rather comical, due to Ashurbanipal’s rigidly upright posture as he runs the lion through with his sword. To some extent this is artistic licence – the Assyrians usually depicted kings and other dignified individuals in highly formalized poses. But more importantly, the lion is already dead – it wouldn’t have got near the king if it wasn’t! It’s got an arrow through its head, and Ashurbanipal is holding it up but the neck as he runs it through. You might think the lion looks unrealistically small, but this would have been an Asiatic Lion, not the much larger African lion seen in zoos today.

The book also includes a comic-strip style wall carving showing the sequence of events leading up to the slaying of the lion (this has to be read from right to left, like a Japanese manga comic). On the right, a small boy releases the lion from its cage. The boy is inside a little cage of his own, in case the lion is smart enough to turn round and try to eat him. But instead the lion runs leftwards towards Ashurbanipal, getting a first arrow in his back in the process. It then leaps up towards the king, who is protected by a soldier holding a shield and spear while Ashurbanipal fires point-blank at the hapless lion.

The contrast between the historical Ashurbanipal and the legendary Sardanapalus could hardly be greater – the first indulging in warlike bloodsports (and fighting human foes, as depicted in other sculptures) while the latter spent his life shagging the opposite sex in the comfort of his palace. From a moral point of view both are equally reprehensible, but the first is more consistent with the leader of a militaristic empire, while the latter only makes sense in the cosily decadent imaginations of poets and artists!

Looking back, I see that I mentioned the Ashurbanipal-Sardanapalus link once before, in Art and Archaeology. The ancient Assyrians also featured in The Bible's Excluded Middle and The Siege of Lachish.

I also spotted this small-scale sketch of The Death of Sardanapalus in another room in the Louvre – I assume it was a trial version that Delacroix painted before embarking on the full-scale one. The woman in the foreground who is having her throat slit in the final version looks like she is being decapitated in this one!