30 years ago in the Forteanverse

 

I decided to dig down close to the bottom of my Fortean Times collection to have a look back at issue 73 from February/March 1994, 30 years ago. As you can see from the picture above, its eyecatching cover features an enormous shark that's apparently crashed down from the skies into a suburban house. That's something that would undoubtedly have caught the attention of Charles Fort himself, who was fascinated by reports of fish (usually much smaller ones than this) falling from the sky. But this one, of course, is a fake - made from fibreglass, and created as an artistic statement in 1986. Located in the Oxford suburb of Headington, there's a lot more to be said about this shark - but fortunately I don't have to, because there's a detailed account of it on Paul Jackson's blog Random Encounters with the Unusual, together with several pictures Paul took himself in 2016. You can find his blog post here.

Opening the magazine and turning to the editorial, there's an item that really brings home just how much the world has changed in the last 30 years:

We now have an e-mail address on Internet ... which will mean nothing to those without a modem, but everything to the very strange people who cruise the computer bulletin-board and news services.

I'd forgotten until I read that, but there really was a time when anyone who used the internet was considered "very strange"!

As for the fortean content of the magazine, less has changed than you might think. One of the main features deals with phantom hitch-hikers and similar roadside ghosts, while another concerns rumours of large, out-of-place animals (such as the alleged Beast of Bodmin) roaming the British countryside. Those are exactly the kind of "modern folklore" stories that still loom large in the pages of FT today.

The magazine also contains the results of a reader survey, which I found particularly interesting for a subsection of questions about conspiracy theories. Thinking back, I was only just becoming dimly aware of the existence of such things in 1994 (largely thanks to FT itself), and I'd guess the majority of the wider population had never even encountered the concept yet. But FT readers were clearly way ahead of the game. Regarding belief in high-level conspiracies to suppress the truth about various subjects, here are some of the results:

• Inventions that would undermine big business and government - 64.3%
• Crashed UFOs being studied by the military - 52.3%
• International conspiracies above government level, e.g. Illuminati - 39.6%

Towards the end of the magazine, my eye was caught by a rather dubious-looking ad for "2-way mirrors". On looking closer, I saw that the same firm was offering other equally questionable items such as skeleton keys and electronic bugging equipment, as well as advice on how to beat slot machines and avoid paying TV licence fees, parking fines, road tax etc. Somehow I doubt that a similar ad would be allowed today! So for posterity's sake, here it is (just to be on the safe side, I've blacked out all the company details):

A Transformer Toy on the Moon

JAXA/TOMY/Sony/Doshisha University

I've been fascinated by space exploration all my life, and now that a significant part of my livelihood comes from writing about the subject, I follow it even more closely than ever. I'm fortunate in that the magazine I write for is aimed at school-age readers, who are intelligent enough to be excited by all things space and want to know as much as possible about it. On the other hand, it's depressing how little interest the "grown-up" media takes in the subject, often focusing more on its failures than its triumphs. This happened recently with the Japanese space agency's lunar lander, where the media seemed less interested in the fact that it was the most precisely executed robotic landing on the Moon to date than that it ended up "upside down" (or to be pedantically correct, rotated through 180 degrees instead of the planned 90 degrees).

Obviously this wasn't ideal, because it means the spacecraft can't do all the post-landing things it was meant to, but these were secondary goals all along. It was primarily a proof-of-concept demonstrator for the terrain-matching landing software, which worked perfectly. And ironically there was another thing that worked perfectly too - the very thing that gave the media their much-shared image of the "upside-down" lander. This came from a tiny gadget called LEV-2 (sometimes referred to as SORA-Q) which was ejected by the main lander just before it touched down. And this finally brings us to the point of this post, because LEV-2 was made by the TOMY toy company.

 It just happened that TOMY had exactly the experience that JAXA, the Japanese space agency, needed for LEV-2. Designed in conjunction with Sony and a university, this takes the form of a metallic sphere just 8 cm across when it's first deployed. But then, as shown in the picture at the top of this post - and mimicking the Transformer toys that TOMY is best known for - it changes shape, extending wheels on either side and revealing a camera hidden inside. It was this very camera that took the picture of the lander that's now been shared all over the world:

JAXA

 

The Saint and the Spy Revisited

(courtesy of Bing Image Creator)

As I typed out that headline, it occurred to me that some readers might expect something about Roger Moore - so for their benefit, I'll insert a suitable photo from my collection to the bottom of this post. But what I really want to talk about is the legend-laden Dorset village of Whitchurch Canonicorum, which I wrote about in A Saint, a Spy and the Holy Grail back in 2014. The Holy Grail doesn't feature in this revisit, but both the Saint and the Spy do - thanks to some intriguing new information supplied by a reader of that earlier post.

When I came back to this blog after its long hiatus, I found the following comment awaiting moderation (fortunately only since January 2023 - a few other comments had been sitting in limbo for much longer than that!):

Bonjour, my name is Bruno Mevel. I used to live in Bridport and was involved in a play in Whitchurch years ago. The play was about the different possibilities as to who was Saint Wite. That play was written by a certain Christopher Dilke, journalist and author. He was also Georgi Markov's father-in-law... the reason why he is buried in Whitchurch. Don't know if this will reach you, if it does and you want some more info here is my mail address...

I didn't actually publish that comment, as I didn't want to give Bruno's email to all the world's spambots, but I did contact him and he very kindly sent me quite a lot of info. But before I get into it, here's a quick reminder of our two protagonists:

• Saint Wite, also known as Saint Candida (from a Latin word meaning "white"), who probably lived in the early middle ages but about whom nothing is really known (though there are several legends and speculative theories). Her remains are interred inside the church of St Candida at Whitchurch Canonicorum - one of only two genuine church shrines to survive the Protestant reformation in England.
   
  
• Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who worked for the BBC. He wasn't actually a spy, but he was accused of spreading anti-communist propaganda by his former compatriots. One morning in 1978, while he was waiting at a London bus stop on his way to work, some still-unknown assailant shot him in the leg with a sugar-coated ricin pellet fired from a rolled up umbrella (you can't do this with any old umbrella, by the way - you need a specially modified one from the Bulgarian equivalent of Q branch). Markov died a few days later, and he's buried in the churchyard of Whitchurch Canonicorum, with a gravestone inscribed in both English and Cyrillic.

In my earlier post, I said I couldn't find out how Markov came to be buried in a Dorset village churchyard - so that's one thing Bruno has cleared up, with the revelation that Markov was married to someone from that area. As well as expanding on this point, the additional information he sent also revealed a rather roundabout connection between Markov and St Wite herself. Here's a summary of the whole story.

In his comment above, Bruno mentioned that Georgi Markov's father-in-law was an author named Christopher Dilke (1913–87). In his later years Dilke moved to Whitchurch Canonicorum, where he wrote a play called Legends of St Wite for the church's 900th anniversary in July 1980 (I found this mention of it on the church's own website). Bruno happened to share mutual friends with the Dilke family, and Christopher Dilke asked him to perform one of the roles in the play. The plot involved a new Saxon bishop placed in charge of Whitchurch trying to ascertain just who St Wite was. In the process, he asks various people to give their opinions on the matter. Bruno (who is French) played the role of a Breton nobleman, presenting the Breton version of the St Wite legend.

The play was only performed once, inside the church itself. As much as anything, Bruno remembers the costumes they made for themselves, which were copied from the Bayeux tapestry (if you subtract 900 from 1980 and remember your history, you'll see this gets the period pretty much spot-on). Bruno also kept hold of the poster from the event, which was designed by a local artist named Albert Duplock. Here it is:

 Switching over to the Markov story, there's a connection with Christopher Dilke there too, because Markov married Dilke's daughter Annabel in 1975. After Markov's murder three years later, Annabel's mother claimed the Soviet KGB must have supplied the ricin that was used. This was the height of the Cold War, remember, when East-West espionage and intrigue was at its most intense. During Markov's funeral in St Candida's churchyard, the mourners - who included several other Bulgarian defectors - were protected by armed Special Branch officers who mingled discreetly with them.

As for the Roger Moore connection I mentioned - well, there isn't one really, except with my "The Saint and the Spy" title. Moore is best known, of course, for playing the most famous fictional spy of all, James Bond, in the 1970s and 80s, but those of us of a certain age also fondly remember him in the TV adaptation of The Saint, by Leslie Charteris, in the 1960s. In that series, Moore's character drove a distinctive white Volvo P1800 coupe, which I happened to see at the Bristol Classic Car Show in 2017. Here's my photo of it:

 In case you can't decipher the label on the windscreen, here's what it amounts to: This is the original Roger Moore "ST 1" 1962 TV Saint car. It was used in the first series and made its debut in the first episode [...] The registration "ST 1" was only used for filming - actual reg is 71 DXC.

The Enfield Haunting

First shown on subscription TV last year, the mini-series The Enfield Haunting was repeated on free TV a few weeks ago. Unfortunately it always seemed to be scheduled at awkward times, so I got fed up waiting and splurged £6.99 on the DVD. I’m really glad I did – it’s by far the best fortean-themed “based on real-life events” dramatization I’ve seen to date.

The usual problem with this genre is that the events in question are either 100% anecdotal or else utterly banal. That’s certainly not true here, where the case – more commonly referred to as “the Enfield poltergeist” – was exhaustively documented by means of photographs, audio recordings and multiple eyewitness testimony. Taking place in a north London council house in 1977-78, it was essentially a working-class version of The Exorcist, focused around a highly strung schoolgirl, her divorced mother and her three siblings.

I don’t know a huge amount about the case, but as far as I can tell the dramatized version sticks to the facts pretty faithfully. The characters are all based on real people, and the general sequence of events – including the bringing-in of psychic investigators and the intense interest of the tabloid media – is also true to life. No doubt events have been streamlined to some extent to make a more coherent story, and the main characters have been embellished to make them more interesting. However, the basic motivations of the two investigators – the eagerly credulous Maurice Grosse, who’s desperately looking for evidence of life-after-death, and the more cynical Guy Lyon Playfair, who just wants material for a new book – probably aren’t too wide of the mark.

The production is very British in its focus on acting and dialogue, as opposed to the traditional Hollywood reliance on screaming and special effects. The pivotal character of Maurice Grosse is played by Timothy Spall, who I became a fan of when I saw him in Mr Turner last year. Not that I imagine for a moment that the real JMW Turner was anything like as weird and interesting as Spall’s portrayal of him – and I’m sure the same is true of the late Maurice Grosse!

The Enfield Haunting also differs from more traditional horror movies in maintaining a fortean ambiguity as to what is actually going on. While some of the events do seem to be genuinely paranormal, others appear to be deliberate attention-seeking, and still others may be the involuntary result of emotional or behavioural problems, like a kind of super-Tourette syndrome. Or maybe it’s a mixture of all three. Having dug out some old Fortean Times articles – I found one by David Sutton from 2003 (FT166:39), one by Guy Lyon Playfair from 2007 (FT229:58-59) and one by Alan Murdie from 2012 (FT 288:18-19) – that seems to be pretty much the consensus about the real Enfield poltergeist, too.

With its setting in the late 1970s, The Enfield Haunting is a potentially perfect piece of retro-forteana. However, while I didn’t notice any actual anachronisms, I didn’t get a really strong sense of a “period drama” set four decades in the past either. I was worried this was an indication of just how behind the times I am (I mean, 1977 really does seem like yesterday sometimes) – but in one of the DVD extras the producers explain that they made a deliberate decision to understate the seventies setting, because it would have been a distraction from the serious story they wanted to tell.

As far as I can recall, this is the first time I’ve seen an on-screen actor portraying someone I’ve seen in real life. Matthew Macfadyen’s performance as Guy Lyon Playfair is a great foil to Timothy Spall’s Maurice Grosse – although I’m sure the real-life Playfair was never as snottily pretentious as Macfadyen plays him! Anyway, I saw the real Guy Lyon Playfair speaking at a paranormal conference in Bath a few years ago. Unfortunately it was too dark to take a decent photo while he was speaking, although I got a better shot of him as he was returning to his seat afterwards:

Out-of-place Pterodactyl

With the Farnborough airshow coming up next week, I thought it would be a good opportunity to dig out this little curiosity. It’s the coat-of-arms of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, which occupied the Farnborough airfield site for more than 70 years. Where you might expect an eagle to be sitting on top of it, instead there’s an extinct flying reptile from the Jurassic period – a pterodactyl!

I’ve always wondered about the reasoning behind the pterodactyl symbolism. As far as I can tell it really is a pterodactyl, not the later and much more impressive pteranodon of the Cretaceous period. A pteranodon was a gigantic creature, almost the size of a small aircraft, and might indeed make a good mascot for an aeronautical research establishment. But a pterodactyl was only about the size of a seagull, which isn’t going to impress anyone (except for Peter Harriman, of course).

The Latin inscription at the bottom reads ALIS APTA SCIENTIA, which according to Google Translate means “wings suitable for science”. So maybe a pterodactyl was seen as somehow “more scientific” than an eagle? That makes sense, I suppose, since everything we know about pterodactyls comes from the science of palaeontology.

A Google search didn’t shed any more light on the subject, although I did find an auction item with the following description: “A large armorial crest formerly on the South Gate at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, circa 1930s – 1950s, of heavy cast aluminium with intaglio relief design incorporating a pterodactyl surmounting a helmet and shield motif with foliate border and motto inscribed Alis Apta Scientia”.

During the First World War, the government-owned Royal Aircraft Factory designed and built a number of aircraft types – the best known being the SE5a fighter. However, private companies complained it was unfair to make them compete for government contracts against the government itself, so in 1918 the Royal Aircraft Factory became the Royal Aircraft Establishment – and refocused its attention on research rather than production. Nevertheless, it still played an important role in the development of the jet engine, the Concorde supersonic airliner and Britain’s one and only space launcher, Black Arrow. In 1988 it briefly and rather pointlessly changed its name to the Royal Aerospace Establishment, before merging into the Defence Research Agency three years later.

Pound-Shop Forteana

Here are two DVDs I bought for just a pound each (obviously) in a Poundland store last week – The Dyatlov Pass Incident and Skinwalkers. Both movies are based on true events of the Fortean kind. I first heard about Skinwalker Ranch at a talk by Ian Simmons at the Fortean Times Unconvention in October 2004, while the Dyatlov Pass incident made the cover of FT245 in February 2009. Both films were released in 2013, so the fact they’re already being sold at a massive discount suggests that perhaps they’re not very good. In the case of Skinwalkers that’s true – it might have made an enjoyable video game, but as a feature film it’s simply atrocious. On the other hand, The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a brilliant, five-star, film – the best low-budget horror movie I’ve seen in a long time.

Both films take the form of “found footage” following the disappearance of a team that set out to investigate the mystery in question. In the case of Skinwalker Ranch it’s essentially a modern take on the “haunted house” theme – with the usual ghosts, poltergeist phenomena and spectral hounds joined by UFOs, ancient aliens and animal mutilations. In the movie the ranch is being investigated by a group of professional paranormal researchers, and one of the few positive things I can say about it is that the entire cast looks the part (i.e. unattractive social misfits with no discernable personality). Their behaviour is anything but professional, though – the film belongs to the visceral school of horror, with large amounts of screaming and very little in the way of ratiocination.

The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a different matter altogether. To start with, the central mystery is far more intriguing. Instead of a rambling mashup of subjective phenomena occurring over an extended period of time, it’s tightly focused on one specific incident that left real physical evidence (nine dead bodies, to be precise). The aforementioned Fortean Times article, from 2009, began as follows:

The story sounds like something out of a low-budget horror movie: nine young students go on a skiing holiday in Russia’s Ural Mountains but never return. Eventually, their bodies are discovered – five of them frozen to death near their tent, four more bearing mysterious injuries – a smashed head, a missing tongue – buried in the snow some distance away. All, it seems, had fled in sudden terror from their camp in the middle of the night. [...] At the time, seemingly baffled investigators offered the non-explanation that the group had died as a result of “a compelling unknown force” – and then simply closed the case and filed it as “Top Secret”.

The incident took place in February 1959; the FT article coincided with its 50th anniversary. There are several factors that make Dyatlov Pass one of the 20th century’s most intriguing Fortean mysteries. What was the “compelling unknown force” that caused the students such terror? Why did the deaths from hypothermia occur before – not after – the deaths from crushing physical injuries? Why did several of the bodies show signs of radiation damage? What were the mysterious orange lights seen in the sky around the time of the incident? Most intriguingly of all – why did the Soviet military (this was during the Cold War, remember) stamp the case Top Secret and close the area off to civilians?

The film follows a group of American students who attempt to follow in the footsteps of their Russian predecessors – only to suffer the same fate. This is a much more cerebral film than Skinwalkers – with intelligent, educated characters who think things through and don’t do very much screaming at all. It has a strong plot – unexpectedly so for this type of film. The viewer is presented with a number of obvious choices (Was it a UFO encounter? Was it a Yeti-like creature? Was it a natural accident that has morphed into something more sinister through folklore and misinterpretation?)... and then – culminating in one of the most perfect twist endings I’ve ever seen – the movie comes up with a completely different, even more satisfying, explanation of its own. There’s a fine line between whetting the appetite and spoiling the plot, so I’ll just say “Philadelphia Experiment” and leave it at that.

An Astounding Prediction

Astounding Science Fiction started life as a pulp magazine, but by the latter half of the 1940s it had moved upmarket. It was printed on thinner, better quality paper in a smaller paperback-style format. The covers, as you can see from the examples above, were considerably less garish than pulp magazines of the period such as Planet Stories. Astounding’s writers tended to be more thoughtful and sophisticated than their pulp counterparts, too – and so were its readers, to judge from some of the letters printed in the magazine. Perhaps the most famous of these appeared in the November 1948 issue (the one with The Players of Null-A on the cover). I’ve written about it before, in Science Fiction Prophecy – but that was 12 years ago now, and it’s bang on topic for this blog, so I thought I’d mention it again.

The letter in question was written by Richard A. Hoen of the University Club in Buffalo, New York. When I wrote the first piece I knew nothing at all about him, but according to an obituary that appeared in 2010, he was a 20-year old student when he wrote his famous letter. At first sight it was nothing special – just his personal ratings and a few other comments on the stories that featured in a particular issue of the magazine. A lot of “letters to the editor” took that format. The extraordinary thing in Hoen’s case was that the issue he was critiquing was the one dated November 1949 – exactly 12 months after the issue his letter appeared in!

Spookily enough, when November 1949 duly came around, that month’s Astounding bore an uncanny resemblance to Hoen’s description of it. But that wasn’t because of any great precognitive powers – or the possession of a time machine – on Hoen’s part. If that had been the case, then the match between his description and actuality would have been perfect, or nearly so – but in fact there are several major discrepancies. Basically the match is as close as the magazine’s editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., could make it!

Or maybe Hoen “saw” some slightly alternative version of the future. Maybe that was what Campbell was thinking when he printed Hoen’s letter in 1948. His comment at that time was: “Hm-m-m – he must be off on another time-track. ‘Fraid it’s not THIS November ‘49.” But by the time November 1949 came around, Campbell was pretty close to being able to put the issue together the way Hoen had described it. His editorial in that issue, “Science Fiction Prophecy”, makes the point that certain types of prophecy, once they’ve been made, have a tendency to be self-fulfilling: “Generally, a desirable, practically attainable idea, suggested in prophecy, has a chance of forcing itself into reality by its very existence. Like, for example, this particular issue of Astounding Science Fiction.”

So what aspects of his prediction did Hoen “get right”? Quite a few, as it turns out. All three short stories listed by Hoen are there in the actual magazine: “Final Command” by A. E. van Vogt, “Over the Top” by Lester del Rey and “Finished” by L. Sprague de Camp. So is the novelette, “What Dead Men Tell” by Theodore Sturgeon.

Hoen mentions two non-fiction articles, by R. S. Richardson and Willy Ley. There’s nothing in the actual magazine by Willy Ley, but there is an article by R. S. Richardson – although on a different subject from the one mentioned by Hoen.

Hoen scored another near-miss in one of the magazine’s two serialized stories – “Gulf” (part 1 of 2) by Robert A. Heinlein. Hoen doesn’t say the story is serialized, and he gives the author’s byline as Anson MacDonald – although he also refers to him as R. A. Mac H., so it’s clear he meant the story to be written by Heinlein (“Anson MacDonald” was a pseudonym Heinlein used earlier in his career).

Hoen describes the November 1949 cover as being the work of Hubert Rogers, which it is. As you can see from the photograph above, the cover story is “...And Now You Don’t” by Isaac Asimov. This again is a serial, the first of three parts, which was subsequently published in book form as the final two-thirds of Second Foundation (the first third, “Now You See It...” appeared in the January 1948 issue, seen in the bottom left of the photograph).

But Hoen doesn’t mention Asimov at all in his letter. In his version of the magazine, the cover story is “We Hail” by Don A. Stuart – a pseudonym that Campbell himself used on a number of stories back in the 1930s. You might imagine this would be the easiest part of the prophecy for Campbell to make come true, yet he didn’t. Maybe, as a full-time editor, he just didn’t have the time or inclination to write a story himself!

The actual cover story, by Asimov, contains an interesting bit of “prophecy” itself. On the penultimate page of this instalment, one of the characters exclaims “What the black holes of Space are you d...doing aboard this ship?” There’s nothing odd about that, you might think, because black holes are among the most outlandish and exotic things to be found in outer space. But the use of the term “black hole” in this context only dates from the 1960s! Anyone encountering the phrase in the book version of Second Foundation may imagine it’s a later editorial change, but as you can see from the picture below it was there in the original 1949 magazine!

Weird News

It may seem paradoxical to talk about “news” on a retro-themed blog, but the traditional Fortean fascination with weird news for its own sake – rather than being pitched as evidence for some specific theory or other – seems to be increasingly a thing of the past. I think that’s a shame, and it’s one of the reasons I still look forward to getting Fortean Times every month. While its online competitors are busy promulgating their favourite conspiracy theories, the magazine – as it says right there on the cover – remains dedicated to “The World’s Weirdest News Stories”.

There are a couple of really good ones in the current issue, January 2015 (pictured above, together with the January issues from 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010). On page 9 there’s the story of a London shopkeeper who was robbed last September after being put in a hypnotic trance by a customer, the whole thing having been caught on CCTV. Then page 26 has a collection of stories, all from 2014, about various people who turned out to be alive after being declared dead by doctors.

While these stories may lack the kneejerk like-share-comment appeal of a Bigfoot sighting or UFO encounter, they do have two major advantages over big-ticket Forteana of that kind. For one thing, they’re not just anecdotal events – they’re a matter of public record, with multiple witnesses. Secondly, there’s no obvious CSICOP-style wet blanket that can be thrown over them. With Bigfoot, for example, the skeptics can always say it was a bear or someone dressed in an ape costume. On the other hand, I really can’t see how they could debunk the hypno-heist – except perhaps to claim the shopkeeper was a willing participant who helped set the whole thing up for the cameras. But if that was the case, I’m sure the police would have had something to say about it – wasting their time is a criminal offence in Britain, after all.

One of the strongest arguments against claims of the paranormal – or any kind of enhanced mental powers – is that if people really possessed them they would use them to make money. That’s another thing I like about this story: if a person was capable of hypnotizing someone into doing something they didn’t want to do, this is exactly the sort of thing they would do. They would be out robbing wine merchants, not wasting their time appearing on Britain’s Got Talent. The only thing I find suspicious about the story is that it only happened once – not a whole string of times.

The other story, about people “coming back from the dead”, is even harder to debunk. The doctor writes out a death certificate, and the victim is seen alive some time after that – it’s as simple as that. Of course, they didn’t really die and come back to life; they were alive all along and the doctor just made a mistake. But that’s not debunking the mystery – it’s confirming it. The mystery in this case is how someone who is alive can display all the symptoms of being dead. Whatever the explanation is, it’s unlikely to be a purely recent phenomenon – which means that countless people may have been unwittingly buried alive over the years!

If you look at the cover of the magazine, “The Return of the Living Dead” and “Hypno-Heists” are the second and third items listed under “The World’s Weirdest News Stories”. The first item is “Unidentified Flying Humans”, referring to the case of a commercial airliner which reported a near miss with a human-like figure last October.

Unlike the other two stories, this one was picked up big-time by numerous online Fortean blogs, forums and websites. The general approach was to give a single-sentence summary of the encounter and then use it as a springboard for wild speculations about (a) extraterrestrial visitors to the Earth, (b) highly evolved flying reptiles surviving undetected since the Jurassic period, (c) secret military research on personal flying suits, and any number of similarly offbeat ideas.

The piece in Fortean Times, written by Jenny Randles, takes a completely different approach to the same subject matter. Instead of extracting a few details from newspaper accounts and making them fit a pet theory, she took the trouble to find out more facts about the case, not fewer. It turned out, for example, that the plane in question was on a completely different heading and at a much lower altitude than it should have been, having just recovered from an aborted landing. That doesn’t explain the encounter, but it does make it more likely that it was a fleetingly glimpsed paraglider or something of that kind. This sort of data-driven thinking – as opposed to theory-driven – is another reason I like the magazine so much.

A Saint, a Spy and the Holy Grail

Whitchurch Canonicorum is a small village a few miles west of Bridport in Dorset. At seven syllables, it’s one of the longest place names in England. This may seem a little pretentious, but Whitchurch Canonicorum is no ordinary village. It was founded in Anglo-Saxon times by the most famous Saxon king of all, Alfred the Great, who called it Hwitan Cyrican, meaning “white church”. Nothing remains of the original Saxon church, but the present building – dating from the 12th to 15th century – has more than its fair share of Fortean oddities: the relics of a mediaeval saint, an icon of the Holy Grail, and the grave of one of the most unusual victims of Cold War espionage.

Surprising as it may seem, there are only two places in the country known to contain the mortal remains of a genuine saint. One is Westminster Abbey in London; the other is the church of Saint Candida and Holy Cross in Whitchurch Canonicorum. Candida is the Latin word for “white”, and the saint herself is more often referred to as “Saint Wite”. The only inscription visible on her shrine is a modern one: Hic reqesct reliqe Sce Wite (“Here rest the relics of Saint Wite”) – apparently duplicating the Latin inscription on a lead casket found inside the tomb when it was opened in 1900.

The tomb itself is very plain – some people think that’s why it escaped destruction during the Protestant Reformation, when so many other shrines around the country were destroyed. Its only distinguishing feature is the presence of three yonic-shaped orifices, where people can place prayer cards and other offerings to the saint (“yonic” is the feminine equivalent of phallic – I had to look it up on Google).

With regard to Saint Wite (or Saint Candida) herself, nothing at all seems to be known about her from historical records. According to local legend, however, she was a Saxon wise-woman who was murdered by the Vikings. Whether or not it’s related to the legend, on the outside of the church tower are carvings representing a ship and an axe, which are often said to symbolize the Vikings. Unfortunately the images are so badly weathered they’re difficult to make out, but lower down on the church wall is another, much clearer carving. This depicts a two-handled vessel, traditionally identified as the Holy Grail.

This part of the church dates from the 12th and 13th centuries, when the popularity of the Grail legend was at its height. But although the legend has a Christian theme, it’s not often depicted in church art of the time. So what is it doing here at Whitchurch Canonicorum? If it’s true that Joseph of Arimathea took the Grail to Glastonbury, he may have landed on the Dorset coast and made his way northwards from there. His route may well have taken him through the place that was later to become Whitchurch Canonicorum.

Moving to more recent times, the churchyard contains one gravestone with a bilingual inscription – English on one side, Cyrillic on the other. This is the last resting place of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian journalist who was murdered in London in bizarre circumstances in 1978. One morning he was waiting at a bus stop on his way to the BBC World Service, where he worked at the time. He felt a stinging sensation in the back of his leg, and turned round to see a man pointing an umbrella at him. Four days later he died from Ricin poisoning. The umbrella had been used to fire a tiny sugar-coated pellet into his leg; when the sugar dissolved it released the deadly chemical into his bloodstream.

Phrases such as “worthy of James Bond” or “like something Q might have dreamed up” are journalistic clichés, but in this case they’re entirely justified. It’s tempting to think that a real-life James Bond discovered that Markov was a communist spy, and a real-life Q devised a foolproof method of eliminating him. But if that had happened, knowing how the British authorities normally operate, they would have botched the whole thing and Georgi Markov would still be alive and well today.

In fact it happened the other way around. Markov was murdered by Bulgarian (or possibly Russian) secret agents, because they discovered he was using his position at the BBC to spread anti-Communist propaganda. And the Communists, being super-efficient and entirely non-decadent, didn’t botch anything. Georgi Markov died, and his umbrella-wielding assassin was never caught.

I’m not sure why Markov ended up buried in a Dorset village churchyard, though.

Victorian Strangeness

Those of us with a penchant for Retro-Forteana have plenty of regular features in Fortean Times to keep us entertained. There’s the excellent “Blasts from the Past” series from Theo Paijmans, there’s Barry Baldwin’s “Classical Corner” (sometimes too retro even for me), and then tucked away at the back of the magazine there’s Jan Bondeson’s “Strange and Sensational Stories from the Illustrated Police News”.

The Illustrated Police News, despite its official-sounding name, was a sleazy Victorian tabloid that was once voted “the worst newspaper in England”. Jan Bondeson’s series has been highlighting the IPN’s more Fortean stories for three years now, ever since FT274. As that first article (which is available online) explained: “For the Fortean enthusiast, the IPN has a good deal to offer. Just like Charles Fort himself, the newspaper’s editorial staff sifted an enormous amount of newspaper copy from Britain, Europe and the United States in their search for dastardly crimes and sensational stories. When there were no recent murders, curiosities of other kinds were pressed into service: ghosts, freaks and hermits, strange deaths and premature burials all featured over the years.”

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and no less venerable an institution than the British Broadcasting Corporation has recently begun to follow in the footsteps of Fortean Times. Earlier this year the BBC website started a weekly feature called “Victorian Strangeness”, which draws heavily on the Illustrated Police News as well as other late 19th century tabloids.

The stories picked up by the BBC aren’t so much Fortean as just plain bizarre. The latest instalment, for example, starts with an irate man walking into the office of a leading medical journal carrying a newly severed human leg. That sounds like the opening of a classic Sherlock Holmes mystery... except that if it had been written by Arthur Conan Doyle, the situation would have had a less mundane explanation!

Other good stories that have appeared recently include the ship that was taken over by a menagerie of animals (11 May), the man bludgeoned to death by a clockwork automaton (24 May) and the grave-robbing monks of Sicily (31 May). But perhaps the most Fortean story was one that appeared back in April, recounting the havoc caused by an escaped circus lion (pictured above). Of course, Britain is still crawling with out-of-place big cats – a few lions, but mostly pumas and panthers – but these days they’re clever enough to behave in a suitably elusive way (see Big Black Cats: Physical or Paranormal?). They only allow themselves to be glimpsed tantalizingly from a distance – they don’t leap through windows and attack civilians the way they used to do in Victorian times!

Creeping Coffins

What have these three books got in common (apart from being battered mass-market paperbacks dating from the early 60s?). There’s a murder mystery by John Dickson Carr called The Sleeping Sphinx, a science fiction novel by Lionel Fanthorpe (using the pseudonym “Bron Fane”) called U.F.O. 517, and a non-fiction compendium called Great World Mysteries by Eric Frank Russell.

No prizes for guessing the answer is going to be Fortean in some way. Eric Frank Russell, although he was best known as a science fiction author, was one of the earliest British disciples of Charles Fort. There have been several articles about him in the last few issues of Fortean Times, as part of Bob Rickard’s series on “The First Forteans”. The other two authors have also featured in fairly recent FT articles – I know because I was responsible for both of them! I wrote about “Fanthorpe’s Fortean Fiction” in FT297, and about the Fortean aspects of John Dickson Carr’s “Locked Room Mysteries” in FT 288.

The cover of the Carr novel depicts an old coffin, and the strapline mentions “restless coffins”. And that’s the connection between the three books – coffins that move of their own accord!

The relevant chapter in Russell’s book – the only non-fiction one of the three – is called “The Creeping Coffins of Barbados”. This seemingly poltergeist-like case will probably already be familiar to readers who, like me, can remember a time when there was more to Forteana than Bigfoot videos and leaked government UFO documents.

The events occurred in the early 19th century, in a churchyard on the south coast of Barbados. Over a period of several years, every time the Chase family’s private vault was unsealed to add a newly deceased relative, the coffins were found to be in wild disarray – often standing on end. The coffins were always carefully put back in their correct places, only to be found scattered about at random the next time the vault was opened. Increasingly elaborate precautions were taken to prevent unauthorised entry to the vault, but all to no avail. Eventually they gave up and abandoned the vault.

Exactly the same story is recounted in the Fanthorpe novel, where it’s given a characteristically Fanthorpian explanation involving a time-travelling flying saucer. A number of more conventional explanations are discussed in Russell’s book, ranging from malicious damage and natural phenomena to supernatural activity. The Barbados case wasn’t unique – Russell also mentions a similar case that occurred on the island of Oesel in the Baltic, as well as two in England. For himself, Russell says he “refuses to credit that any coffins have been moved around anywhere by ghosties or eerie beasties or things that go bump in the night. Whatever shifted the coffins at Barbados and elsewhere was, I believe, a force natural enough though not within our knowledge even at the present date.”

Others who investigated the case came to very different conclusions. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, favoured a supernatural explanation, referring (as quoted by Russell) to “bodily emanations, and the residual life-force supposedly remaining in the bodies of suicides and others who have died before their time.”

Talk of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes brings us neatly to John Dickson Carr and his own fictional detective, Gideon Fell. Carr is best known for his “locked room murders”... and the creeping coffins case is a classic example of a locked room puzzle. Strangely, however, this particular novel – The Sleeping Sphinx – isn’t a locked room murder at all. It’s a very clever mystery, as you’d expect from Carr, but it’s one of the few Dr Fell stories in which the murder itself doesn’t have any “physically impossible” aspects to it.

My guess is that either Carr’s publisher or his agent told him the novel had to include an “impossible mystery” in order to please his readership (the book dates from 1947, by which time Carr’s name was virtually synonymous with the locked room genre). So the scene with the coffins was tacked on as an afterthought. That’s not a spoiler, by the way – there’s no suggestion in the novel that the “restless coffins” have any direct connection to the murder, except for the tenuous link that one of the coffins involved is that of the murder victim.

In the novel, the solution to the coffin mystery comes at the very end of the book, even after the solution to the murder itself. So I won’t say what it is – except that it’s not supernatural! Carr doesn’t mention the Barbados case explicitly, although he refers briefly to the Oesel case and the two English ones. However, he does borrow a detail from the Barbados case, where fine sand is sprinkled on the floor of the vault in a vain attempt to detect the footprints of any intruders.

In a footnote Carr mentions a book called Oddities, dating from 1928, by Rupert T. Gould. Russell’s book also refers to Gould’s Oddities. I’m not sure if this is the same book, under a different title, as one I saw for sale a few years ago – “A Book of Marvels”, also by Rupert T. Gould. I would have bought it, except that the copy in question was thoroughly saturated with stale cigarette smoke – one of the few things that can totally ruin the pleasure of reading an old book, as far as I’m concerned. So I had to settle for photographing the cover and contents page... which as you can see includes a chapter entitled “The Vault at Barbados”:

The First UFO Hoaxers?

According to a quote I came across a few days ago, Sir Isaac Newton “caused one of the earliest recorded UFO scares by flying a kite at night with a paper lantern attached to it”. That’s really one of the archetypal UFO hoaxes (although people nowadays would probably use a balloon rather than a kite)... but Newton was doing it way back in the 17th century!

And he wasn’t the only one. Athanasius Kircher was a German scholar who was born about 40 years before Newton. According to the same source as the previous quote “he launched little hot air balloons with Flee the Wrath of God written underneath”. So Kircher was another 17th century UFO hoaxer!

Of course, it’s unlikely that Kircher and Newton wanted people to think the Earth was being visited by extraterrestrials, since the idea barely existed in the 17th century. But there’s no doubt they were trying to alarm people by perpetrating a deception. There’s a tendency to think of hoaxing as a modern phenomenon, so that any unusual object seen in the sky in past centuries must have been the real thing. But why couldn’t it have been some joker flying a balloon or a kite?

The book those quotes come from is The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince (technically the Newton quote is itself a quote from another book by John Gribbin). The quotes don’t have much to do with the main theme of the book, though, which is the significant role (usually glossed over by historians of science) played by the Hermetic tradition during the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.

I find this period of history fascinating, because of the dramatic changes that were taking place in the prevailing worldview. One thing that interests me in particular (since my original specialism was stellar dynamics) is the way the universe suddenly grew from very small (with the Solar System embedded in a hollow sphere of fixed stars) to very large (with the stars spread throughout infinite space).

Contrary to popular opinion, the change didn’t come with Copernicus. He put the Sun instead of the Earth at the centre of the Solar System, but he still believed there was a rigid sphere of fixed stars – just tiny points of light – somewhere beyond the orbit of Saturn. It’s a huge leap from that to the idea of an infinite universe, in which the stars are of equal importance to the Sun, possibly with their own planets orbiting around them. In an earlier post (The man who invented aliens) I attributed this idea to Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600). According to Picknett and Prince, however, the same idea seems to have occurred to other people independently. One of them was an English near-contemporary of Bruno’s named Thomas Digges (1546 – 1595).

You may never have heard of Thomas Digges, but you’ve probably heard of a young man who lodged with him for a time in Bishopsgate – William Shakespeare. The latter worked at the same theatre, The Globe, as Digges’s son. So Shakespeare almost certainly heard the revolutionary new theory of “infinite space” direct from the horse’s mouth. One phrase Digges used in refuting the old worldview was to say the universe was not enclosed within the stellar sphere “as in a nutshell”.

“Hang on a second,” you say. “In a Nutshell is a well-known cliché. I thought Shakespeare was the only Elizabethan with a license to coin clichés. Didn’t Shakespeare say something about In a Nutshell?”

Well yes, he did. It comes from Act 2 Scene 2 of Hamlet: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

Probably the first reference to “infinite space” in English literature!

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!

Cult TV and Autoerotic Asphyxiation

I bought this lot of three Man from U.N.C.L.E books on eBay last week (I’ll explain why later). It was a very popular TV series in the 1960s – I’m fairly sure it was the first show I ever watched, back when I was 8 or 9, that wasn’t aimed specifically at children. The plots were over my head, but the U.N.C.L.E agents had some really cool guns and gadgets (which I also had, in toy form).

These tie-in novels were all written by different authors. The Doomsday Affair, by Harry Whittington, is by far the best. It’s about a plot deep within the U.S. government to drop an H-bomb on Washington D.C. as a ruse to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. That’s really quite a Fortean idea – or at least, it’s the sort of thing Conspiracy Theorists are always going on about.

The other two novels have Fortean elements, too. The Copenhagen Affair by John Oram is about man-made flying saucers being constructed in an underground Nazi factory in Denmark. That sounds promising, but the novel is appallingly badly plotted. The Vampire Affair by David McDaniel is somewhat better, and contains a number of science-fictional in-jokes – including a cameo appearance by Forrest J Ackerman (the man who invented the term “sci-fi”, and never showed any remorse for doing so).

The Vampire Affair was the reason I bought the books in the first place – because I wanted to sample David McDaniel’s writing. I first came across his name when I was researching my recent post about The Geek by Alice Louise Ramirez. In her Amazon review, she mentions that McDaniel was one of the weed-smoking hippies who helped her come up with the concept for The Geek in the first place. She doesn’t refer to him by name, but she mentions a Man from U.N.C.L.E author who “died after slipping in the bathtub”.

After a bit of research, I realized the person she was talking about was David McDaniel. Not because David McDaniel died after slipping in the bathtub, but because that’s how his family said he died at the time. Actually he was found hanging in his bedroom, in circumstances suggestive of autoerotic asphyxiation.

You can understand why his family didn’t want this to become public knowledge. Any death is a tragedy, but it’s even more of a tragedy if people roll on the floor laughing when they hear about it.

“There are worse ways to go, but I can't think of a more undignified way than autoerotic asphyxiation.” That quote comes from “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose”, the fourth episode of the third season of The X-Files, first aired in 1995. The words are spoken by the title character, Clyde Bruckman, to UFO-obsessed FBI agent Fox Mulder. In the story, Bruckman is supposed to be able to foresee people’s deaths, so this may be his way of telling Mulder that’s how he’s going to die. Or maybe he’s just trying to freak him out.

It’s true there are more dignified ways to die than autoerotic asphyxiation. Being felled by the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, for example – which is how David Carradine’s character dies at the end of [spoiler deleted]. In real life, however... well, some people think Carradine was murdered – but if so, the perpetrators made it look just like autoerotic asphyxiation.

For people in my age group, David Carradine’s most famous role was as Kwai Chang Caine in the TV series Kung Fu. That was just as much of a cult phenomenon in the 1970s as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was in the 1960s or The X-Files in the 1990s.

Orgy in the Temple

After the two videos I posted last week, there were still a few iMovie features I wanted to try out... so I started looking for another offbeat idea that would lend itself to a two-minute video clip. And I found one.

Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “I Remember Babylon” was published in the May 1960 issue of Playboy magazine. Essentially it’s an early speculation on the possibilities of satellite TV (which didn’t exist in 1960 – the idea was pure science fiction). The story contains the rather silly idea that you could beam blue movies into people’s homes in the form of “a highbrow movie about ecclesiastical art”... if the art in question came from certain Indian temples, that is.

The story refers specifically to the Temple of the Sun at Konarak, although I’ve also included two temples from the Khajuraho complex where the action is even more outrageous (some of the acts depicted there are illegal – I’ve only shown the legal ones). The text isn’t very specific about the musical soundtrack, except that it has sudden changes of mood and tempo. That made me think of Mahler, so I used various snippets from the final movement of the Resurrection Symphony. That fits in with the “ecclesiastical” theme, too.

The movie in Arthur C. Clarke’s story is titled “Aspects of 13th century Tantric sculpture”. However, it’s not certain that the erotic temple sculptures at Konarak (modern spelling Konark) and Khajuraho really are connected with Tantric practices. There seem to be three possibilities:

• The images depict Maithuna – Tantric sexual union performed in a ritual context. This sounds great in principle... but it doesn’t explain the depiction of illegal acts (Either you can use your imagination at this point, or you can consult Wikimedia Commons).
• Rather than real world events, the sculptures are meant to depict the goings on in some other-worldly paradise. Brian Ruhe mentions something similar in his book Freeing the Buddha, which I referred to in Buddhism and UFOs: “The fourth heaven is Tushita Heaven, another very popular vacation spot. This is the heaven with the number one greatest amount of sensuous pleasures – sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll.” Konarak and Khajuraho are Hindu temples, not Buddhist, but the same idea may apply.
• It’s possible that the sculptures have no religious significance at all, or that they’re meant to depict “bad” rather than “good” things. It’s a fallacy to assume that any image in a place of worship must be an object of worship itself. Christian churches often contain images of the devil (such as this one at Rennes-le-Chateau), while the ubiquitous Sheela-na-gig is no less lascivious than the erotic Indian carvings. One of the highlights of Wells Cathedral in Somerset is a man with toothache – nothing especially religious about that. Mediaeval masons liked to have a bit of fun – as do their modern counterparts. The sculpture of an astronaut was added to a cathedral in Salamanca during renovations in 1992, while Washington National Cathedral has a gargoyle-like carving of Darth Vader.

Shakespeare's Curse

Following last week’s highlights from my comics collection, here is another souvenir I’ve hung onto since I was at school. It’s a full-scale copy of the rather spooky inscription on Shakespeare’s tomb in Holy Trinity church, Stratford-upon-Avon. I bought it on a visit to Stratford in 1973 to see a performance of Romeo and Juliet (yuk), which I had to study for O-level English Literature (I went to school about 20 miles from Stratford).

The inscription (converted into modern spelling) reads as follows:

Good friend for Jesus sake forbear
to dig the dust enclosèd here.
Bless-be the man that spares these stones
and cursed be he that moves my bones.

This is really very unusual. English churches are packed full of tombs and epitaphs, but I’ve never seen another one that takes the form of a curse. The whole idea of a “cursed tomb” is something that occurs far more frequently in fiction than in reality. You might imagine that ancient Egypt was full of them, but according to Wikipedia that’s not the case – curses were the exception rather than the rule.

So why did Shakespeare place a curse on his gravestone? At the time I assumed it was because he was an alien, or a robot, or a time traveller from the future, and he didn’t want people to find out (that’s the way my mind worked at age 15). Other people, obsessed with the Shakespeare authorship question, might speculate that the grave is empty – since “William Shakespeare” was simply a false identity created by the secret consortium that wrote the plays attributed to him.

The most down-to-earth theory I’ve come across is that Shakespeare, like the ancient Egyptians, seriously expected some kind of physical resurrection, and he was worried that grave robbers would scupper his chances of eternal life. But that still doesn’t explain why Shakespeare felt the need to put a curse on his tomb when so many of his peers and contemporaries didn’t.

Whatever the reason for the curse, it’s done its job – no-one has tampered with Shakespeare’s grave in all the years since he was buried in 1616. Not surprisingly, however, there is no shortage of academics who are eager to dig him up – if for no other reason than to prove he was a pot-smoker.

My copy of the curse was produced by placing a sheet of paper over the inscription and rubbing it with a wax crayon. This used to be a popular way of making facsimiles of church inscriptions, dating back long before photography. I used to assume, naively, that my copy had been made directly from the stone slab of the tomb – but in retrospect that’s highly unlikely. They must have sold millions of these things as souvenirs (they only cost a few pence), and if they’d all been made by rubbing on Shakespeare’s gravestone there’d be nothing left of it! It seems far more likely that my rubbing is a “fake” made from a modern copy of the inscription.

Looking back at my programme from that 1973 production of Romeo and Juliet (I hoarded that, too) I see that Romeo was played by Timothy Dalton (later to become James Bond) while his arch-enemy Tybalt was David Suchet (later to become Agatha Christie’s Poirot).

On another trip to Stratford the previous year, I saw the much cooler play Julius Caesar – in which the part of Cassius was played by none other than Patrick Stewart (later to become Captain Jean-Luc Picard, of course). As you can see from this photo from the programme, he looked exactly the same in 1972 as he always does!

Hoaxes in the Age of Reason

Judging from Alex Boese’s excellent book The Museum of Hoaxes, the 18th century was something of a golden age for that particular art form. It’s probably no accident that this coincided with the so-called “Age of Reason”, sandwiched between the witch-burning Puritanism of the 17th century and the Gothic romanticism of the 19th. A hoax works best when the victims think of themselves as sophisticated, logically-minded intellectuals!

I was reminded of two of the most famous hoaxes of the 18th century by this picture I saw on the British Museum website. You may spot the reason immediately – but if not, bear with me and everything will become clear in the end. The picture dates from 1771, and shows a central figure wearing female dress while adorned with distinctly male accessories, including a sword and Masonic regalia (the picture is subtitled “The Female Freemason”). The subject is the Chevalier d'Eon, whose gender was much disputed – living first as a man, and then from middle age onwards as a woman.

Nowadays this would be seen as a transgender issue, but in the 18th century that simply wasn’t an option. Whether you were a man or a woman was simply a question of anatomy, and if you claimed to be one when you were actually the other then you were perpetrating a hoax. As it happened, d’Eon claimed to be anatomically female, but was eventually revealed by post-mortem examination to be anatomically male. So to that extent, the skeptics – like the creator of this print – were right.

You can tell the artist considered d’Eon to be a hoaxer from the two pictures he’s drawn hanging on the wall. These depict two of the most notorious London-based hoaxes of the 18th century. The picture hanging on the left shows Mary Toft allegedly giving birth to rabbits. This isn’t an exact reproduction of William Hogarth’s Cunicularii, which I described some time ago in Paranormal investigation, 18th century style, but it’s the same subject. As I described in that earlier post, the hoax was particularly aimed at “supposedly intelligent and educated individuals who ‘want to believe’... and hence are easily duped by hoaxers.”

The picture hanging on the right side of the d’Eon portrait depicts the “Great Bottle Hoax” of 1749. This was the result of a wager between the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Chesterfield regarding the gullibility of the public. The Duke claimed he could advertise a patently absurd feat – that a man was capable of squeezing himself into a quart bottle – and still fill a London theatre with people prepared to hand over cash to see it. The (non) event took place at the New Theatre in Haymarket, and the Duke won his bet easily – every seat in the house was sold, and many people had to stand or were turned away. I’ve seen conflicting descriptions of the ensuing events. Some say the curtains simply remained closed, while others say a man appeared, showed the audience a bottle, thanked them for their money, and promptly left. What all accounts agree on is the riot that followed – some versions even end with the complete destruction of the theatre!

You can read more about the Mary Toft case, the Great Bottle Hoax and other examples of 18th century hoaxes on the Museum of Hoaxes website.

The Curse of the Ninth

Classical music has its own version of the 27 Club in the Curse of the Ninth. The idea is that, from Beethoven onwards, no composer has been able to get beyond Symphony No. 9. It’s true that “tenth” symphonies are very scarce in the regular classical repertory. For several of the big name composers, the ninth meant “the last”: Beethoven himself, his younger contemporary Schubert, the two great Austrian symphonists Bruckner and Mahler, as well as Dvořák (whose ninth is his famous New World symphony) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (who was mentioned a few weeks ago in Reinventing Ezekiel's Wheel).

Other big names of the 19th century never even made it to No. 9. Mendelssohn wrote five symphonies, while Schumann and Brahms only managed four each. Tchaikovsky produced seven, although his last symphony is called the sixth because one of the earlier ones, based on Byron’s gothic poem Manfred, wasn’t given a number. High-numbered symphonies were commoner in the 18th century – for example Mozart wrote 41, and Haydn no fewer that 104. But these were relatively short works that took much less time to write than the sprawling romantic symphonies of the 19th century. It was only in the 20th century, with composers like Shostakovich (who wrote 15 symphonies), that the Curse of the Ninth was finally broken.

At least some of the supposed victims of the curse would have been blissfully unaware of the fact. Schubert churned out symphony after symphony without bothering to give them numbers (or even, in many cases, bothering to have them published or performed) – it was only in retrospect that it emerged he had written nine of them. Similarly Dvořák’s last symphony is his ninth only in modern numbering systems, which include four early symphonies that weren’t published in the composer’s lifetime.

Bruckner gave his symphonies the numbers by which they are known today, and the last (which he died before completing) is indeed labelled No. 9. Despite this, it was actually his tenth symphony, because Bruckner started counting at zero instead of one (or at any rate, he labelled an early unpublished symphony with a “Ø” symbol).

The one composer who really does seem to have been superstitious about the Curse of the Ninth was Gustav Mahler (the picture shows Rodin’s famous bust of Mahler, which I saw at the Musée Rodin in Paris last month). The fact was recorded by his wife, Alma Mahler, and also mentioned by the composer Arnold Schoenberg in a speech after Mahler’s death (“It seems the Ninth is a limit... as if in the Tenth something could be said that we are not yet ready to know. Whoever has written a Ninth stands too close to the afterlife.”)

Mahler had good reason to fear the Curse of the Ninth, because around the time he finished his 8th symphony he was diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition. Mahler’s 8th was a symphony only because that’s what he chose to call it – actually it’s like nothing else before or since. The first movement is a choral setting of the mediaeval hymn Veni Creator Spiritus (“Come, Creator Spirit”). The huge second movement, lasting the best part of an hour, is a virtual mini-opera – a setting of the final scenes of Goethe’s Faust. If, like me, you’re really only familiar with the Faust legend from Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, you might expect this final scene to involve Faust being dragged down to Hell. But Goethe’s version is completely different – Faust is rescued by angels and taken up to Heaven, while the other characters indulge in mystical speculations about the Eternal Feminine and the illusory nature of reality. It’s all very New Age, and that’s what Mahler depicts in the finale of his 8th Symphony.

Mahler’s next work was equally novel, again with a hint of the New Age about it – a setting for voices and orchestra of Taoist style Chinese poetry. The result is at least as deserving of the name “symphony” as the 8th was, but Mahler didn’t call it that – apparently as a direct result of the Curse of the Ninth. Instead, he called it Das Lied von der Erde – “The Song of the Earth”. According to Alma, her husband wanted to cheat the curse by passing his ninth symphony off as something else, so he could leapfrog over the danger zone and get straight to his tenth symphony... which would be called his ninth.

But the curse wasn’t fooled so easily – Mahler’s ninth symphony was his last. He did start work on another one, but it was left unfinished at his death. Alma refused to allow any attempted reconstructions of “Mahler’s Tenth” to be performed until the 1960s – by which time symphonies were a thing of the past. The victims of the next curse, the 27 club, had already stepped onto the stage: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison...

Fighting Philosophers

The cover story in the April 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction was called “Fighting Philosopher”. While it’s not a great story, it’s a great title. Philosophers are notorious for spending all their time sitting and thinking, so the idea of them getting involved in any kind of physical activity, let alone fighting, goes against the stereotype.

I was reminded of this story by a recent item on the BBC website: When philosophers attack! – “Two men were waiting for a beer at a store in the southern Russian town of Rostov-on-Don. Somehow, the subject of the philosopher Immanuel Kant came up. Discussion morphed into argument, argument descended into fisticuffs... One of the combatants pulled out a pistol, and shot the other one several times with rubber bullets before running away. He was later arrested and has been charged with causing serious bodily harm.”

Kant was the archetypal philosopher: deep thinking, meticulously precise and (to most readers) impenetrably obscure. One of his most famous notions is the Categorical Imperative – the idea that human beings have an unconditional duty to behave in a morally correct way. This duty overrides all other considerations, and includes the usual moral injunctions such as “Thou shalt not kill”. And lying is out, too.

A French philosopher named Benjamin Constant wasn’t so sure about the “unconditional” nature of Kant’s imperative. What if a would-be murderer, searching for his victim, asked you where that victim was? If you knew the answer, should you tell the truth, which would indirectly lead to the victim’s death? Kant said yes, you should tell the truth even if it leads to someone else committing a murder – moral actions are an end in themselves, irrespective of the consequences.

Kant’s bizarre assertion was the inspiration for a murder mystery set in an Oxford college – Death at the President’s Lodgingby Michael Innes. It’s also referenced in an equally bizarre essay by Thomas De Quincey entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”. Much of the essay is concerned with the unlikely topic of the assassination of philosophers: “It is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. As these cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.”

Of course, this is all nonsense – a product of De Quincey’s rather peculiar imagination. He was a contemporary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and had a similar interest in chemically induced states of consciousness (De Quincey’s most famous work is Confessions of an English Opium Eater).

In the real world, philosophers just aren’t the sort of people who get assassinated. Or are they? A few years ago an academic came up with the theory that Descartes was murdered by a Catholic priest who wanted to silence his heretical pronouncements: “French philosopher was killed by arsenic-laced holy communion wafer” (this photograph of the memorial to Descartes in the Palace of Versailles comes from my recent visit to France).

Getting back to the subject of “fighting philosophers”, these are even less common in the real world than assassinated philosophers. The only example I could find was a biggie, though. Plato was arguably the greatest of all the ancient Greek philosophers, and one of the most influential thinkers in history. But according to his biographers he started out as a wrestler, and some say that “Plato” (meaning broad-shouldered) was his wrestling nickname. Wikipedia, with its usual po-faced sincerity, includes Plato under Category: Ancient Greek wrestlers.

Plato was an exception, and most philosophers are pacifistic by nature. The archetypal example is Archimedes, who was stabbed to death by a Roman soldier because he was too engrossed in a diagram to recognize the threat that was looming over him. The situation is even mentioned in the blurb to the Astounding Science Fiction “Fighting Philosopher” story: “Archimedes was the philosopher who wouldn’t bother to fight the Roman soldier and had his philosophical work terminated permanently”.

Wikipedia, in its effort to make sure the world knows everything it ought to, has a helpful article on Deaths of philosophers. Unaccountably, however, it misses out what must be the coolest philosopher-death of all (or the grossest, depending on your point of view). Arius was an early Christian theologian who spoke out against the doctrine of the Trinity. When he died in 336 AD, he was at least 80 years old. An eyewitness account of his death suggests it was a truly spectacular event: “As he approached the place called Constantine’s Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius, and with the terror a violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore enquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine’s Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious haemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died.”

I’m not convinced that, under the natural course of events, it’s really possible to defecate one’s own liver. But the opponents of Arius’s theology didn’t believe his death was natural – they promptly declared it a miracle!