The Changing History (and Geography) of Lemuria

A peculiarity of certain fortean topics is the way the details develop and change over time. To pick an example, there's the legend (which, as we'll see, didn't even start out as a legend) of Lemuria. As lost continents go, it's far less well known to the general public than Atlantis, but just as intriguing to those in the know. It's been featured in at least a couple of Ancient Aliens episodes, in "They Came from the Pleiades" (2020) and "The Mystery of Mount Shasta" (2021).

In the first of these, we're informed that Lemuria was a now-sunken continent located in the Pacific, which Hawaiian folklore links to benevolent visitors from the Pleiades star cluster. In the later episode, we're told that survivors from Lemuria may still be living inside Mount Shasta - one of California's best known UFO hotspots. As with most things on the show, these ideas are wonderfully entertaining, and surprisingly credible-sounding if you restrict your knowledge of the subject to what you're being told by Tsoukalos, Pope, Childress et al. But as soon as you do a little independent research, things get a lot murkier (the Pleiades, for example, didn't even exist until the Earth was billions of years old and swarming with Cretaceous-era dinosaurs - so hardly a likely home for ancient astronauts).

My first encounter with Lemuria was probably in the Marvel Comics adaptation of Lin Carter's Thongor stories, though I've subsequently read the original 1965 Wizard of Lemuria novel, pictured above. A much more controversial novel was Richard Shaver's I Remember Lemuria (1945), which purported to be based on fact rather than fiction. My copy (edited by Ancient Aliens regular David Hatcher Childress under the title Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth) is also pictured above, together with a novel I've previously mentioned on this blog, Ron Goulart's Hello Lemuria Hello (1979). Also featured in the picture is the album Lemuria (2004) by symphonic metal band Therion.

In the lyrics of that album's title song, the name Lemuria is used interchangeably with Mu - as indeed it was on Ancient Aliens. But originally Mu and Lemuria were completely separate, and disentangling them involves going quite a way back into history. An excellent source in this context is the final book pictured above, Lost Continents (1954) by L Sprague de Camp. Best known as a fiction author, he turns his hand here to non-fiction - and does his background research far more conscientiously than Ancient Aliens ever bothers to.

The surprising fact, as I mentioned at the start, is that Lemuria didn't start out as a legend, whether in Hawaii, California or anywhere else. It began as a short-lived scientific hypothesis, developed in the latter half of the 19th century, to explain similarities between Mesozoic fossils found on the Indian subcontinent and in south-east Africa. The idea was that there used to be a land-bridge joining these two regions, stretching right across the Indian Ocean. Now mostly sunken, all that remained would have been the island of Madagascar - famous for its lemurs, from which the land-bridge got the name Lemuria.

You'll notice a couple of significant features here - first, that we're talking about a time millions of years before humans existed, and secondly that we're nowhere near the Pacific Ocean. What's more, we don't even need this hypothesis any more, because we know that, back in Mesozoic times, India was attached to southern Africa instead of being in its current position.

But instead of going away, the idea of Lemuria adapted and evolved. And it did so in a way that was peculiar to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In those days, the notion that sensitive individuals could pick up valid information by psychic means - by going into a trance and "channelling" messages from spirit entities - was well accepted in certain quarters. And that's how a lot of the key facts about Lemuria came down to us.

One strand to the Lemurian story lies within the realm of Theosophy, whose complex and confusing teachings were largely derived through psychic means. In this context, here's a passage from de Camp's book that clearly foreshadows Ancient Aliens:

Beings from Venus, which had already developed a high civilization ... guided faltering humankind to the point where the Lemurians became capable of individual immortality and reincarnation.

Most Theosophists were content to leave Lemuria in its original setting of the Indian Ocean, but several American writers of the time endeavoured to move it to the more familiar (to them) locale of the Pacific Ocean. An important development in this context came in the form of a book, A Dweller on Two Planets (1894). A cynic might describe this as a work of fiction, but it's actually presented as the channelled autobiography of a spirit entity called Phylos the Tibetan. Here, too, the second planet in question is Venus, but Lemuria is now indisputably located in the Pacific - and the connection with California's Mount Shasta is also made for the first time.

The final step towards the modern "legend" of Lemuria came in the 1920s and 30s, with a series of books by James Churchward concerning a sunken continent called "Mu", which he proposed as a counterpart of Atlantis in the Pacific. Churchward's arguments were based (albeit shakily) on the interpretation of purely physical evidence, in contrast to the earlier mediumistic channellings relating to Lemuria - but the distinction didn't last long. The legend soon crystallized into the form most often encountered today - that Mu and Lemuria are alternative names for a single lost continent, situated in the Pacific Ocean and having strong links both with Mount Shasta in California and with benevolent aliens from outer space.

Since I love showing off my book collection, here are a couple of classics to round the post off - James Churchward's The Children of Mu (1931) and Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882):

 

Finnegans Wake

A few days ago I came across a Twitter account called Finnegans Wake and started following it. As far as I can tell, it’s tweeting the entire novel (written by the Irish author James Joyce between 1923 and 1939) a few words at a time. In an earlier post (Literary name-dropping), I mentioned that “I did go through a phase circa 1975 of trying very hard to read Finnegans Wake”. I can’t believe that was 40 years ago! Sounds like a cue for yet more nostalgic rambling...

Finnegans Wake is a difficult book, and I’m not going to pretend that I read more than a few pages here and there. I probably wouldn’t have managed even that without the assistance and encouragement of other books (some of which are pictured above). Back in 1975 I was 17 years old, and as thoroughly ignorant of history, geography, philosophy, religion, literature and linguistics as it’s possible for a human being to be. After four decades of being a boringly bookish bespectacled bachelor I’m a bit less ignorant, and flicking through the novel just now several things jumped out at me that would have gone over my head as a teenager. But the book is still as difficult to understand as ever!

The most obvious factor that makes Finnegans Wake difficult to read is the sheer number of made-up words it contains. But even if it was written in plain English it wouldn’t be an easy book. Basically it’s supposed to be a dream, which means the author can put anything he wants into it, without needing to be too clear or logical about it. It’s a very erudite dream, too, which flits from one arcane subject to another. There are several recurring themes, including some distinctly Fortean ones – for example Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, and the metaphysical philosophy of Giordano Bruno (The man who invented aliens). James Joyce seems to have had a soft spot for Bruno, who was born in the Italian city of Nola – thus making him a Nolan, and hence a kind of honorary Irishman!

I had a look through the book for a suitably Fortean passage, and found the following account of a kind of spiritualist séance:

That was Communicator, a former colonel. A disincarnated spirit, called Sebastion, from the Rivera in Januero, (he is not all hear) may fernspreak shortly with messuages from my dead-ported. Let us cheer him up a little and make an appunkment for a future date. Hello, Commudicate! How’s the buttes? Ever-scepistic! He does not believe in our psychous of the Real Absence, neither miracle wheat nor soulsurgery of P. P. Quemby.

P. P. Quimby was an American faith healer and mesmerist in the 19th century – clearly someone to be deeply “scepistical” about, along with miracle-wheat and soul-surgery!

As I mentioned in my post about Literary name-dropping, Finnegans Wake is one of the many literary works referred to in Robert Silverberg’s novel Dying Inside, which I read in Galaxy magazine (pictured above, middle-left) in 1973. But the reference is only understandable with hindsight (“Joycean dream-gabble” and “Earwicker’s borborygmi”), and it was another two years before a number of other things made me decide Finnegans Wake was a book worth looking into.

The first and most important was James Blish’s science fiction novel A Case of Conscience (1958), which I read early in 1975. A subplot running through the first half of the book concerns the protagonist, a Jesuit priest, tackling a literary “case of conscience” which “the church had never cracked”. It comes from pages 572 and 573 of Finnegans Wake (“The procurator Interrogarius Mealterum presends us this proposer...”). Right on the first page of Blish’s novel, Finnegans Wake is described as “diabolically complex (that adverb was official, precisely chosen, and intended to be taken literally)”. Later he describes James Joyce as having a “mighty intellect, easily the greatest ever devoted to fiction in English and perhaps in any language.”

That in itself would probably have been enough to make me check out Joyce’s work, but – by the kind of synchronicity that often happens – I came across several other references to Finnegans Wake in SF stories I read around that time. I can’t remember all of them now, but two that stick in my mind are Philip José Farmer’s novella “Riders of the Purple Wage” (which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions, included in the picture above), and the Brian Aldiss novel Barefoot in the Head (1969, also pictured above). The latter deals with the aftermath of the Acid Head War, in which the population of Europe is suffering the effects of Psychochemical Aerosol Bombs – making some chapters read like a kind of spaced-out sixties version of Finnegans Wake!

With one exception, all the books pictured above are my own copies bought in the 1970s. The exception is The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick, which wasn’t published until 1981. My copy is the first British paperback edition, which I bought as soon as it came out in March 1982 (sadly, in the few days between buying the book and reading it, I heard the news that Dick had died of a stroke at the age of 53).

Finnegans Wake is referred to in the very first chapter of The Divine Invasion. The protagonist, Herb Asher, interprets Joyce’s word “talktape” (in the line “tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes”) to mean “magnetic audio tape” – the invention of which, he believes, postdates the writing of the novel. That isn’t actually true (and from the context it doesn’t sound like Joyce was thinking about a recording device anyway)... but that doesn’t stop Asher launching into some characteristically Dickian speculation:

It’s impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned talktapes in his writing, Asher thought. Some day I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until a century after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work.

At another point Dick says “He also has them sitting around a TV set” – and in this case he’s absolutely correct: television plays an important role in Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s portrayal of TV is quite prescient – not in terms of the technology, which already existed when the novel was written, but in terms of its social acceptance. When Dick says “them” he means the customers in a Dublin pub... and pub televisions were still a thing of the future in 1939. So Finnegans Wake was almost certainly the first mainstream novel to portray TV as a commonplace rather than a newfangled novelty.

Joyce made up so many new words in Finnegans Wake you can find almost anything you look for in there. As an example – after a bit of googling (for googling) I found “Feastking of shellies by googling Lovvey” and “One chap googling the holyboy’s thingabib”!

Madame Xanadu

Madame Xanadu #1 (pictured above left) dates from 1981, but I bought my copy much more recently than that. I can’t remember exactly when or where, but it was probably about 10 or 12 years ago. I don’t often buy DC comics, so it was obviously an impulse buy – probably on account of the Tarot cards on the cover, which is a subject I’ve always found fascinating. Quite apart from the Tarot connection, though, it’s a really good story. I was reminded of it last week when I saw a Madame Xanadu trade paperback (pictured above right) in a local shop. It was reduced to £4.99 so I bought that too. The story isn’t quite as perfect as the first one, but it’s still great fun.

The character of Madame Xanadu first appeared in a comic called Doorway to Nightmare in 1978, but the story in Madame Xanadu #1 is pretty self-contained. The setting is Greenwich Village, the same as the early Dr Strange stories (see Master of the Mystic Arts). But there’s little indication at this stage that Madame Xanadu has the same kind of supernatural powers as Dr Strange – the character is basically just a Tarot card reader (albeit one with genuine psychic powers and a rather mysterious background). The story includes a detailed Tarot reading as an integral part of the plot, and there’s a text article on the inside front cover about the history and use of the Tarot.

The story itself isn’t really about Madame Xanadu though, but one of her clients. It’s a variation on my favourite occult cliché – bored teenager starts to dabble in witchcraft for a giggle... gets drawn into a big grown-up world of sex and drugs... ends up summoning timeless demons who don’t give a toss whether she lives or dies. Then enter Madame Xanadu, and cue the happy ending!

The trade paperback, Madame Xanadu: Broken House of Cards, is one of a series collecting issues from a later incarnation of the Madame Xanadu title – the ones in this volume date from 2010. By this time, Madame Xanadu has been retconned as a powerful supernatural being from Arthurian mythology. Personally I feel this is a backward step, because it makes the character harder to believe in and relate to (for me, anyway), and it reduces the title’s Unique Selling Point – the use of Tarot cards – to little more than a cover story to hide the protagonist’s secret identity, instead of her primary talent. But that’s just my opinion – other people may disagree.

Having said that, it’s really a very enjoyable story. It’s set in the late 1950s, which gives it a nice retro feel (even in the 1981 comic, it was implied that Madame Xanadu had occupied the same Greenwich Village premises for several decades without appearing to get any older). There are a number of threads to the story, including one about a cult of devil-worshippers called the Church of the Midnight Dawn. As in the earlier story, the people involved are portrayed as predominantly middle-class and driven by boredom (as you can see in the sample panels below). I imagine that’s true of real-world Satanists, too... although in the real world they probably end up having a promiscuous orgy instead of conjuring up demons from hell. But you can’t have an orgy in a comic book, so you get the demons instead – which is much better!

 

Agatha Christie’s Séances

Given enough time, all novels become historical novels. When Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice 200 years ago, she was writing about the present, not the past. 1813 is the past now, but it’s a little window of the past that everyone knows about thanks to Pride and Prejudice. And what Jane Austen did for the Regency period, Agatha Christie did for the 1920s and 30s. As those decades fade from living memory, Christie’s novels increasingly read like historical fiction – though of course they were never meant that way when they were written. While her books are escapist mysteries and not great literature, Agatha Christie does have one thing in common with Jane Austen – a fascination with the fads and preoccupations of the upper-class society of her time.

From a Fortean point of view, the most interesting of these fads and preoccupations is the recurring theme of spiritualism. By this, I mean the belief that spirits of the dead can be contacted through séances involving things like Ouija boards, table-turning and automatic writing. Nowadays such a belief may come across as “mediaeval”, but it’s not. It was essentially a craze that arose during the latter half of the 19th century and peaked between the First and Second World Wars. It’s distinct from traditional beliefs like ghostly hauntings and necromancy (raising spirits of the dead through occult rituals) – both of which were around long before spiritualism, and are still in a healthy state today.

What I find so fascinating about Christie’s treatment of spiritualism is how widespread it seems to have been. A practice that was in blatant opposition to the scientific and religious doctrine of its day might reasonably be expected to be confined to the fringes of society. Yet it comes across as something everyone dabbled in – or at least, everyone in the “idle rich” world of Agatha Christie’s novels.

Several of Christie’s earliest short stories, subsequently reprinted in The Hound of Death, deal with supernatural (or seemingly supernatural) situations. Several of these, such as “The Red Signal” (1924) and “The Last Séance” (1927), deal with spiritualism in one form or another. In these stories, the spiritualist element is central to the plot. But just as interesting are those stories where spiritualism merely forms part of the cultural background, without any serious suggestion of supernatural goings on. In one story the characters might play a game of bridge in the evening, in another they may hold a séance. From a social point of view, there often seems to be little difference between the two activities!

The action in The Sittaford Mystery (1931) is set in motion by a séance that is presented as little more than an amusing social pastime (There were all the usual laughs, whispers, stereotyped remarks. “The spirits are a long time” ... “Got a long way to come” ... “Hush – nothing will happen unless we are serious”). In Peril at End House (1932), the séance comes at the end of the novel – and is staged by Hercule Poirot as a ruse to trap the killer. A similar thing happens in an earlier short story, “The Tragedy of Marsdon Manor” (1923). In Dumb Witness (1937), a séance takes place immediately prior to the murder.

By the end of the 1930s, it’s clear that spiritualism was fading as a popular fad – increasingly relegated to a fringe belief alongside older superstitions. The folklore of ghosts is mentioned in Murder Is Easy (1939), and a form of witchcraft or sympathetic magic features in Evil Under the Sun (1941). Nowadays, all these beliefs would be lumped together under the heading “New Age”, and you can see the germs of this subculture emerging in Agatha Christie’s later novels.

The essence of the New Age is an eclectic belief in more or less anything that is rejected by mainstream society. This sort of attitude is already apparent in Dumb Witness, mentioned a moment ago, where the two spiritualist sisters are also described as being vegetarians, theosophists, British Israelites and Christian Scientists. Like modern New Agers, they have a profound respect for anything to do with the East – “the home of mysticism and the occult”.

Another proto-New Ager appears in the novella “Dead Man's Mirror” (1937), in the form of Lady Chevenix-Gore (“...quite a handsome woman. Frightfully vague, though. She’s got a leaning towards the occult... Wears amulets and scarabs and gives out that she’s the reincarnation of an Egyptian Queen...”). None of this has any direct bearing on the story – it’s purely social background. A similar character appears in Taken at the Flood (1948) – a prospective client who consults Hercule Poirot on the strength of cryptic messages received from the spirit world. Again she is adorned with Egyptian beads, and again she is the idle wife of a successful husband. In this case, the husband is a doctor. But her husband is blind to The Truth: “Doctors, I find, have a very materialistic outlook. The spiritual seems to be strangely hidden from them. They pin their faith on Science... but what is Science – what can it do?”

Poirot wisely recognizes that, when delivered by such a person, there is no come-back to this question. It would be a waste of breath to embark on “a meticulous and painstaking description embracing Pasteur, Lister, Humphrey Davy’s safety lamp, the convenience of electricity in the home and several hundred other kindred items”.

I was prompted to write this post by a novel I’ve just read called The Pale Horse. This is later than any of the other works I’ve mentioned, dating from 1961 – by which time Agatha Christie was over seventy. This really does bring us into New Age territory, with the convergence of almost every wacky belief you can think of. The Pale Horse of the title is an old converted inn occupied by three eccentric middle-aged women. One of them is a spiritualist medium adorned yet again in Egyptian beads – and, in this case, an Indian sari. The second is a traditional practitioner of witchcraft, as handed down over countless generations from mother to daughter. The third is a pseudo-academic occultist with a library of grimoires and a mysterious electronic device that may or may not be a death ray!

Inventing the Fourth Dimension

Ever since the latter part of the 19th century, the fourth dimension has been invoked in esoteric literature as an explanation for otherwise inexplicable phenomena such as ghosts and spirits (the picture on the left is taken from a book published in 1928 called Theosophy and the Fourth Dimension, by Alexander Horne). During the same period, mainstream scientists and mathematicians have embodied the fourth dimension (and other higher spatial dimensions) in various theories of cosmology and fundamental physics. As a general rule (despite what New Agers would like you to believe) there is very little common ground between the esoteric and scientific theories. But I’ve just discovered that the two “traditions” can arguably be traced back to a common origin in the 1870s.

There is a fascinating article in the latest issue of Astronomy and Geophysics (the monthly magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society) about a little-known 19th century astrophysicist named Karl Zöllner. If you look him up on Wikipedia you could be forgiven for thinking he was just a minor player on the fringes of science, who was only interested in things like optical illusions and spiritualism. But in fact he was a prolific mainstream scientist, who did innovative work in the fields of astrophotometry, instrument design, electrodynamics, solar physics and the theory of comets. He was the first person to consider that the three-dimensional space that we live in is not “flat” Euclidean space, but is curved on a cosmological scale. The idea of non-Euclidean geometry had been around as an abstract concept since earlier in the 19th century, but Zöllner—in 1872—was the first person to suggest the Universe itself was non-Euclidean. He was led to this conclusion as the simplest explanation of a well-known but puzzling astronomical observation known as Olbers’ Paradox.

What does “curved space” mean? The easiest way to visualize it is by analogy with a curved two-dimensional surface, such as that of a sphere. A normal two-dimensional surface is a flat sheet, which is Euclidean because the angles of any triangle drawn on it always add up to 180°. On the other hand, the apparently two-dimensional surface of a sphere is non-Euclidean because the angles of a triangle add up to more than 180°. This is because the sphere exists in a higher dimensional space—three dimensions—which is Euclidean. By analogy, Zöllner imagined that the universe was a four-dimensional Euclidean hypersphere that gives the illusion of being a curved, non-Euclidean three dimensional space because we cannot directly perceive the fourth spatial dimension that he believed to exist.

In 1877, a few years after Zöllner proposed his theory of curved space, he met William Crookes—a British chemist who had recently become interested in the scientific study of spiritualism. Zöllner quickly became convinced of the reality of “spirits”, but rather than believing them to be the souls of dead people he theorized that they were visitors from the fourth spatial dimension. He expounded this theory in an 1878 book entitled Transcendental Physics, which aimed to encompass both the physical and spiritual worlds with a single theory of four-dimensional space.

Unfortunately for Zöllner, the psychic medium he chose to carry out his spiritualist experiments with was a man named Henry Slade, who was subsequently exposed as a fraud who was adept at sleight-of-hand tricks. In one of Zöllner’s experiments (pictured on the right), Slade’s “spirits” allegedly tied knots in a string that was sealed at both ends. Zöllner interpreted this as evidence that the spirits could move freely in a fourth spatial dimension.

Although Zöllner’s theories of the fourth dimension are almost forgotten today, they preceded the work of Charles Howard Hinton: Pioneer of the Fourth Dimension (mentioned recently in my post on Esoteric Mathematics) by several years. And as I said at the beginning, they can be seen as the ancestor of all subsequent New Age theories about “extradimensional entities”, as well as mainstream cosmological theories involving higher spatial dimensions.

Psychic archaeology

The town of Glastonbury in Somerset has several claims to fame that, evocative as they are, don't stand up to close scrutiny. Jesus probably never visited the town as a child, and King Arthur probably isn't buried there. The Glastonbury Zodiac is an excellent example of topographical pareidolia, and even the town's eponymous Festival takes place ten miles away, much closer to Shepton Mallet than to Glastonbury! There is, however, at least one perfectly real and historically important thing in Glastonbury, and that's its Abbey.

Glastonbury Abbey was one of the first Christian monasteries in Britain, dating as far back as late Roman times, circa 600 AD. By the time it was dissolved in 1539, on the orders of King Henry VIII, it was the largest, wealthiest and most prestigious abbey in England. So prestigious, in fact, that the King was determined to make an example of it, ensuring that it was almost totally destroyed. As a result the Abbey was lost to history for 370 years, until the site was re-purchased by the Church of England and archaeological excavations were started. What is remarkable, in light of all the hyped-up pseudo-mysticism surrounding Glastonbury, is the well-documented role that genuine mysticism played in those excavations!

The picture above shows the remains of the Edgar Chapel at the eastern end of Glastonbury Abbey, excavated around 1910. In charge of the excavations was a professional architect (and amateur archaeologist) named Frederick Bligh Bond. Prior to the excavations, only the existence and general location of the Edgar Chapel were known... nothing about its shape, dimensions or exact position. Yet Bond seemed to know precisely where to dig -- a fact which baffled his colleagues, who couldn't follow his methods at all.

In 1918, while the archaeological work was still continuing, Bond finally revealed his secret in a book called The Gate of Remembrance. It turned out that he had used a spiritualist medium, who had obtained information about the Abbey from long-dead monks using a technique known as automatic writing. The book records no less than sixteen specific pieces of information, which were not known at the time from any other source, but which were proved correct by excavations.

Spiritualism was far more popular a hundred years ago than it is today, but even in those days it was frowned on both by the Church (who thought it was the work of the Devil) and by academics (who thought it was the work of charlatans). So given that Bond was employed by the Church, and all his colleagues were academics, his fate was pretty certain! Not only did he lose his job, but he was ostracized by the authorities and his role in the excavations was airbrushed out of the official history.

Although skeptics love to dismiss all "communications from the dead" as deliberate and conscious fabrications, it's difficult to see how this can be true in Bond's case. Even if he was so naïve as to think he could publish The Gate of Remembrance and keep his job, as soon as he saw that things were going against him it would have been easy to say "but it was only meant as a joke" or "I was conducting a social experiment on the gullibility of the masses" or something. But he didn't -- he stuck to his story even when it was so disastrously career-limiting.

In the cosy world of the Excluded Middle (where most skeptics and believers live), if The Gate of Remembrance isn't a deliberate hoax, then it must be evidence for survival after death. But Forteans don't have an Excluded Middle, and I'm sure there are alternative explanations that are more credible than either of the knee-jerk extremes. I'm struck particularly by the similarity between the "messages" recorded in The Gate of Remembrance and the sort of things people come up with under Past-Life Regression Hypnosis. That makes me think that both these phenomena have a common cause, which is probably nothing to do with dead people (whether surviving as spirits or reincarnated)... but just something that gets translated into those terms by the unconscious.

Experimental Metaphysics

Was the Biblical Ark of the Covenant an early form of electrical capacitor? A theory along these lines was presented in issue 207 of Fortean Times (March 2006) in an article by Michael Blackburn and Mark Bennett ("Re-engineering the Ark"). Specifically, they argued that the Ark was essentially a Leyden jar: a type of capacitor that was popular with electrical experimenters in the eighteenth century. The article contains no references (which is unusual for FT), and the authors present the idea as if they had thought of it themselves. They may well have done, but they weren't the first to do so. I've found exactly the same idea in an obscure journal published sixty years earlier -- the October 1946 issue of the Quarterly Review of the Institute for Experimental Metaphysics (in fact the journal is so obscure it doesn't show up in a Google search, so I've included a photograph below to prove I'm not making it up).

The paper in question is by one Captain Q.C.A. Craufurd (sic), and is entitled Experiments with a Psychic Condenser ("condenser" is the old British word for capacitor). Captain Craufurd was a spiritualist, and was looking for a physical device that could be used in séances to amplify psychic signals. He took his lead from the Biblical description of the Ark of the Covenant, which he believed had been a device of this type. He says: "What we managed to produce was an electrical instrument which fulfilled the main requirements of the Ark described in the Old Testament. It was a 'chest' of hard wood, put together without nails or screws and plated with gold within and without. In the case of my model, this plating consisted of gold leaf. The wooden box, having been carefully dried out, was varnished thickly with a coating of resin and shellac so that it became a kind of Leyden jar, capable of accepting a powerful charge of electricity. The wings of the Cherubim arching over the Mercy seat formed a spark gap at the wing tips, not a single pair of points however, but several points forming a collector." A description really very similar to the one presented in FT sixty years later!