Going Down… Beneath the Bermuda Triangle

I’ve just read two stories – a longish novelette and a shortish novel, both dating from the 1970s – by an author I’d barely heard of, called Jane Gallion. Previously I’d only seen her name in the context of a notoriously violent post-apocalyptic novel called Biker, which dates from 1969 and is still banned in the UK. But the two stories I did get hold of are quite different in tone, and it’s a shame they’re not better known. They’re both clever, well-written and interesting, and the longer of the two is bordering on a masterpiece.

To start with the shorter story – it’s called “Beneath the Bermuda Triangle” and it was published in the June/July 1979 issue of Galaxy magazine. This was a few years after the Skull the Slayer comic series I mentioned earlier this year, and it’s just as wacky a take on the Bermuda Triangle mystery. It’s got jewel-smuggling hippies, malevolent aliens, survivors from Atlantis, underwater pyramids and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

As far as I can tell, “Beneath the Bermuda Triangle” is the only story Jane Gallion ever wrote that doesn’t have any sex in it (apart from a couple of indirect references to Tantric Sex). But there is a tenuous connection to the world of erotica. The stand-in editor for that particular issue of Galaxy was “Hank Stine” – an alter-ego of Jean Marie Stine, who used the same byline on one of the avant-garde erotic novels published in the late sixties by the short-lived Essex House imprint (see my post about The Geek by Alice Louise Ramirez). Jane Gallion’s Biker was another Essex House novel – and according to an autobiographical note, she also worked as an editor there. At the same time, she seems to have been active in science fiction fandom – see this photograph of her (there were other links between Essex House and science fiction – Philip José Farmer also published several novels with them).

The novel I just read, and found so impressive, is called Going Down. In her autobiographical note (which dates from 1990), Jane Gallion says the book was written for Essex House but never published (partly because it broke two of their house rules – “no humour” and “no politics”). However, it was eventually published as an ebook in 2001, two years before the author died.

Unlike Biker (which is available as an ebook in America but not in Britain), Going Down is listed on the UK Kindle store, which is where I got it. I don’t think the listing does the book any favours – there’s no cover image or preview, the blurb is misleading and it’s classified as erotica, which it isn’t really – it’s a dystopian SF satire in which sex (or the suppression of sex) plays a significant role.

Going Down is written in the kind of avant-garde literary style that was popular in the early seventies – all in the present tense, and with no quotation marks around dialogue. In that sense, and in other ways, I found the style reminiscent of Barry Malzberg, who was one of the big name writers of the time. Thematically, on the other hand, the novel is closer to Philip K. Dick – all about a sharply stratified future society in which information is tightly controlled, and the government knows more about you than you do. The book’s structure is also reminiscent of PKD, with the point of view alternating between three different characters – one high up in government, one at the very bottom of society, and one who is a major figure in the (ultimately fruitless) rebel movement. Also, like both Dick and Malzberg, the novel has a strong undercurrent of humour, even though it’s basically a very angry book.

I mentioned science fiction portrayals of the future last week – and Going Down is one of the most prophetic I’ve come across. The society it describes is ultra-capitalist and ultra-puritanical. The government has electronic spying machines everywhere, ready to pounce at the first hint of subversive or “perverted” behaviour. Giant corporations charge people (who are always referred to as “consumers”) for absolutely everything – including having sex and going to the toilet. If you try to avoid paying for something, it’s a serious crime because it “damages the economy”. Also prescient (given recent headlines) is the utter hypocrisy of the ruling class, who impose puritanical laws on ordinary citizens while indulging in the most disgustingly obscene behaviour themselves.

Although Going Down was originally written in the early seventies, I’m not sure if it was revised for its ebook publication in 2001. If it wasn’t, then it contains one amazingly prescient reference. I can’t remember anyone back in the 1970s worrying about Genetically Modified crops, but one of the characters in the novel does. It’s in a scene between a high-ranking member of the government, named Hennering, and his boyfriend Penrod (“a slender lad of eighteen”). Hennering wishes to deep-throat a certain part of Penrod’s anatomy after said anatomical part has been thrust up a chicken’s backside:

The pullet had been organically raised. Penrod refused to have anything to do with a chicken exposed to genetically engineered or chemically adulterated food. He was afraid it might give him high blood pressure or possibly a rash. There’s a lot of that around. But Hennering made sure the bird was clean before he gave it to Penrod. Heavens to Betsy, he couldn’t have Penrod catching anything, could he?

This scene struck me as doubly prophetic – not just the reference to genetic engineering (and pathological aversion thereto), but also the way a conservative politician indulges in behaviour that’s so perverted it wouldn’t even cross a normal person’s mind. Remember this news story from a month ago?

Prophecies and Probabilities

Since I normally do my weekly blog post at the weekend, it just occurred to me that this is my last opportunity to jump on the Mayan Prophecy bandwagon. The basic idea is that the world is going to end on Friday (21 December 2012), because more than a thousand years ago a Central American civilization called the Maya said that’s what would happen. Most of what I’ve read on the subject has been debunking the idea, with a lot of effort being put into proving that the Maya never actually said the world would end on Friday. This is really funny, because it suggests that if the Maya had said the world would end on Friday, then there would be serious cause for alarm, but actually it’s okay because they didn’t.

The Maya were a sophisticated and clever culture – they built pyramids like the one on the right, for example (photo courtesy of Paul Jackson). But history is filled with sophisticated and clever cultures. In the Western world, ancient Greece and Rome have been revered as paragons of wisdom and insight since the late Middle Ages. During the 18th and 19th centuries, other ancient civilizations were added to the cultural pantheon: Egypt, India, China and several others. But not the Maya. The idea that the teachings of the Maya should be heeded above all the others is (to put it politely) of recent manufacture. The most catastrophic event in Mayan history was the coming of the Spanish conquerors in the 16th century, which resulted in the near-total obliteration of their cultural heritage. If they didn’t foresee that clearly enough to prevent it, why believe their powers of prophecy are better than anyone else’s?

Anyone who wants to take the Mayan Prophecy seriously needs to explain why the Maya—of all cultures—got it right when no-one else did. And there’s a bigger thing they need to explain – why anyone should believe that a date-specific prophecy made more than a thousand years ago is going to come true. There simply isn’t a precedent. In the whole of history, date-specific prophecies of disaster conspicuously fail to come true.

There’s a reason for this. Macroscopic physical processes are probabilistic, not deterministic. You can’t predict when catastrophes will happen, because even the catastrophes themselves don’t know. There are plenty of big disasters that will happen, with certainty, at some point in the future – even “apocalyptic” disasters on a scale greater than anything in recorded history. A supervolcano, or a massive geomagnetic storm—particularly if coupled with a weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field—could destroy the infrastructure that holds the modern, high-tech world together. That might not literally be the “end of the world”, but it would be the end of civilized society. Events like that have happened before in Earth’s history, and it’s a dead cert they will happen again. But there’s inherent randomness in the system, so it’s impossible to determine exactly when they will happen. It may be a thousand years from now, or it may be next Thursday. Or Friday.

The Met Office can’t even predict the weather next Friday (except in terms of probabilities), so it’s ludicrous to suppose the Maya could predict some catastrophe—to the exact day—more than a thousand years in advance. Even if they were in contact with extraterrestrial aliens who had computer technology millions of years ahead of ours, they couldn’t predict something that is fundamentally indeterminate. On the other hand, it’s equally foolish to say—as some extreme skeptics have—that there definitely won’t be a world-ending catastrophe on Friday. That’s effectively saying that such a thing is less likely to occur on that day than on any other day. In other words, the extreme skeptics give special significance to that particular day just as much as the extreme believers do!

Shadow of the Feathered Serpent

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

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

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

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

The Great Pyramid, and other British inventions

For more than 400 years, from the time of Henry VIII to the outbreak of the Second World War, Britain was -- in the eyes of many of its citizens -- the world's Top Nation (to use a memorable phrase from 1066 and All That). And there were those who were prepared to go even further, and demonstrate that Britain had in fact been a great nation since time immemorial. To make their task harder, they had to achieve this in a way that linked Britain to those cultures they respected (such as ancient Greece, ancient Egypt and the Hebrew civilization) while distancing it from those cultures they despised (such as the Roman Empire, Germany and France).

I've already mentioned (in Magic Words) Mary Caine's theory that the English county of Somerset derives its name from the venerable old civilization of Sumeria. I've also mentioned Sir William Jones's theory that Stonehenge was built as a temple to the Buddha (The Black Buddha of Stonehenge). Most people will be familiar with poet William Blake's identification of the Biblical Jerusalem with England's "green and pleasant land"... although perhaps not with his wackier writings on the subject: "The fields from Islington to Marylebone, to Primrose Hill and St John’s Wood, were builded over with pillars of gold, and there Jerusalem’s pillars stood."

Another poet, John Milton, wrote in Areopagitica (1644) that "... even the school of Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old philosophy of this island". More than a century earlier, William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English (and therefore knew a thing or two about comparative philology) claimed that for every word in the English language that derived from Latin, there were a thousand words derived from Hebrew. In 1885, the Reverend A.B. Grimaldi produced a genealogical table linking Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, via ninety-two generations of Irish and Scottish monarchs, to King James I of England.

But all these examples fade into insignificance compared to a modest little monograph I picked up in a second-hand bookshop a few years ago... The Great Pyramid: Its Construction, Symbolism and Chronology by Basil Stewart (my copy is the Revised Third Edition, dated May 1931). The author's basic thesis is that "the Great Pyramid was built under Divine inspiration with the purpose of transmitting a message to the present age and particularly to the British race." More specifically, he claims that the pyramid was constructed by the ancient Britons, and its coded message relates to the "Tribulation" being experienced by the British people at the time Stewart's book was written (see diagram).

It's worth getting one thing straight: only the Great Pyramid was built by the British. The other, lesser pyramids were all built by the Egyptians. Just why the ancient Britons chose to build their Great Pyramid in Egypt, and not in Great Britain, isn't explained. The author does, however, explain why generations of French Egyptologists miserably failed to unlock the secret of the pyramid -- they insisted on measuring its dimensions in metric units, rather than honest British inches.

If you're wondering why Stewart's chronology ends abruptly in August 1953... well, he reckoned that by then the Tribulation would be over, the end-times would be well and truly established, and people would no longer have any control over their individual destinies. Given that by 1953 most of the British Empire that existed when the book was written had been lost, maybe he was right!

Fortean World Heritage Sites

 I recently bought a big book of UNESCO World Heritage sites. At least half the 900-odd sites are likely to be of interest to Forteans in one way or another, but here is my top ten: [1] The Pyramids of Giza (a typical work of "pyramidiocy" is illustrated at left); [2] Stonehenge (which like the pyramids is a perpetual money-spinner for New Age theorists); [3] Rapa Nui (Easter Island), with its enigmatic moai statues; [4] the Nasca lines in Peru; [5] the Old City of Jerusalem, site of the Biblical temple from which the Knights Templar got their name; [6] the fortified city of Carcassonne, stronghold of the medieval Cathar heresy; [7] Leonardo da Vinci's fresco of The Last Supper, which was brought to Fortean prominence by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in The Templar Revelation; [8] the ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley, reputed to have been part of the great Rama Empire which flourished at the time of Atlantis; [9] The Sun Temple at Konarak, with its profusion of startlingly unholy sculptures popularized by Arthur C. Clarke in his short story "I Remember Babylon"; [10] the archaeological site at Palenque in Mexico, which was notoriously theorized upon by Erich von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods (see picture below).