PAST IMPERFECT

Rupert Sheldrake. The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, 2nd edition. Icon Books, 2011.

My review of the first edition of this book in Magonia 32 (March 1989) was less than enthusiastic to say the least. In the second edition Sheldrake does seem to have made an effort to incorporate more recent scientific findings and ideas and to back-peddle on some of the political and metaphysical speculation, but I doubt that this will make his central thesis any more attractive to the scientific community.

To be fair, one of his ideas - that the more people attempt tasks, those who have not been taught to perform them will find them easier to accomplish - is a testable and therefore a scientific hypothesis. However, even if that speculation were found to be true it is hard to see how it would prove the existence of morphic fields.

The problem with Sheldrake's central idea - morphic fields which somehow organise and shape everything - is that they attribute all sorts of different puzzles and in some cases possible anomalies to a single all embracing cause - mysterious fields which cannot be detected by any laboratory apparatus, have no theoretical connection to any of the four known fields, and which have no mathematical expression. These morphic fields can therefore have just those properties that Sheldrake needs to explain all and sundry.

His account of the phantom limb phenomenon (pp. 34-44) makes no mention of the research of V. S. Ramachanrdan and his colleagues, which provides a neurological explanation. He still evokes the work of Ian Stevenson without realising that once you invoke paranormal claims, then ideas such as telepathy might equally explain some of his alleged findings.

I still get the impression that like many such, Sheldrake is rather too fastidious to accept the idea that anything as special as mind is contingent on anything so mundane and physical as brain matter (or rather the patterns of activity within the brain), and much prefers things that much more ethereal, and dare one say, cleaner, like ‘fields’.

I am not sure how morphic fields would explain how Sheldrake and Richard Dawkins, both middle class English naturalists of roughly the same age, both educated in Christian boarding schools and attending Oxbridge have such differing outlooks on life. Genes, life experience, and perhaps most of all, neurological make up, seem to me to be much better explanations. -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson.

MY FIFTY YEARS IN A STRANGE WORLD

It is hard for me to to believe it, but this Spring and Summer marks 50 years of my interest in topics ufological, Fortean, Gouldian and paranormal. This interest was sparked by a television series called Court of Mystery which ran every other week from the 18th May to 13th July 1961. This featured a number of 'unsolved mysteries' including the Eilean Mor lighthouse, the Mary Celeste, Andrew Crosse the man who made insects, the loss of the Waratah, and finally 'The Flying Saucer'. I have still have some memories of most of these episodes, which clearly made an impact on a lad of about 10. The bits of the episode on Flying Saucers I can remember are those dealing with the famous Washington radar case of 1952, and the (fictitious) story of the monks of Byfield Abbey.

Some months later, in the winter of 1961/2 I bought my first UFO book, Aime Michel's The Truth About Flying Saucers in its Corgi paperback edition for the princely sum of 2/6d. (12½ p) (about £2 in today's prices, or £4.50 or so in terms of earnings, still very cheap by today's standards). Other works followed in the next few years, including some very strange stuff now discarded completely from my belief system, such as the works of Hans Bellamy and Immanuel Velikovsky but many others established the base for my 50 years of interest in these fields.

Of course as a pre-teen and teenager my approach to all of this was pretty uncritical, though Aime Michel had inoculated me against the contactees such as George Adamski, and my grandmother's Alzheimer's pretty much inoculated me equally against belief in life after death. I suppose my approach would have been characterised as nuts and bolts on many issues, I was a supporter of the ETH in Ufology, probably was convinced that plesiosaurs lurked around Loch Ness, the paws and pelts yetis strode the Himalayas, and people possessed all sorts of wild talents.

In the very early days I had day dreams that when I was grown up I would be involved in some great scientific enterprise to investigate these things, then I pulled myself up with the thought that long before then much of this would have been discovered, we would know for certain where the flying saucers came from, and the Loch Ness Monster and Yeti would be housed in Chester Zoo, yet here we are 50 years on and no further forward, or even in the case of laboratory psychical research several steps backwards.

My approach has, of course, got a lot more critical over the years as anyone who reads my articles, Northern Echoes columns and book reviews might see. Experience has been a hard teacher, as impressive evidence after impressive evidence goes west.

50 years seems to be a good time for some sort of summing up and assessment of where I stand.

I tend these days to class myself as a sceptical agnostic, though there are some things I am more sceptical of, others a little more agnostic. I am pretty definite that there are no plesiosaurs in Loch Ness, and I very much doubt that any UFO report has ever been generated by "genuine extraterrestrial hardware", and almost as doubtful about Bigfoot roaming North America, or poltergeists writing messages in note books, making threatening texts or eating mince pies. Some other paranormal claims, such as laboratory ESP are much more difficult to dismiss, though it can hardly be said that their proponents have made out an unambiguous case for their existence.

Part of the difficulty, as I have pointed out a number of times before, is that no one has ever been able to produce any really impressive physical evidence for any of these claims, although ufologists and cryptozoologists might point to peculiar marks on the ground or ambiguous fragments, other physical evidence turns out to be like fairy gold and turns to dross in the light of day. None of this has any significance outside of the stories told around it.

In most cases stories are all we are left with; stories often in which apparently sane and rational people report all sorts of impossible events and experiences. A great many of these may be simple misperceptions or misremembering of ordinary events and things. I suspect that a significant number of dramatic close encounter UFO stories are probably stimulated by seeing the moon, perhaps partially obscured, low on the horizon, its dark markings transformed into an alien crew. An example of this occurred to me the other night, going to bed I saw some strange multi-coloured lights behind the trees in my garden. On going out to investigate it turned out that this was indeed the moon, its light reflecting and refracting off the trees, producing pretty colours.

Still other stories are accounts of dream like, hypnogogic and related experiences, which we might regard as visionary. These are what I once called virtual experiences, and seem to be what Jerome Clark calls "experience level" phenomena.

Whether everything is accounted by various combinations of the two above is a moot point. Common sense suggests that there may well be lots of things about both the physical environment and human psychology we don't know much or anything at all about at present. If you end up with dreamlike visionary experiences stimulated by misperception of uncatalogued natural phenomena you may find you have created some very exotic stories indeed.

I am pretty certain of several things; one is that both the "event level" and the "experience level" are generated by lots of different things. Another is that there is no hard line separating them, a third is that the claimed dichotomy between cultural source and experience is a false one, both constantly reinforce each other. I am pretty convinced that all the folk explanations are wrong.

A point we have made on a number of occasions is that the anomalous personal experiences which get reported are probably only a tip of an iceberg, being largely those experiences which can be shoehorned into one of the categories in which there is sufficient public interest to establish groups of investigators or enthusiasts, and sustain books, magazines and websites.

These are experiences for which there are ready made and acceptable folk explanations: strange lights in the sky are the work of aliens, odd looking creatures are prehistoric survivals or uncatalogued animal species, things that go bump in the night and spectral figures are evidence of life after death, other visions can be assimilated into religious traditions.

It's only a slight oversimplification to say that if someone reports a strange figure dressed in something like diver's suit you call a ufologist, if its hairy all over you call a cryptozoologist, if it wears a historical costume call a psychical researcher and if it wears a robe call the local priest and establish a shrine. If you meet a black dog the size of a calf, if your hand goes through it, call a psychical researcher, if it doesn't run like hell and call a cryptozoologist. Its all as arbitrary as that.

Faced with these multiple complexities, lack of clear boundaries and constant overlaps between experiences, literalistic explanations look very inadequate, something we have been saying in Magonia and its predecessors for 45 years. The options seem to boil down to either 'paranormal' explanations in the broad sense (either in crude terms of shape shifting boggarts etc, or in more sophisticated notions involving 'third realms', 'imaginal realms', 'idea patterns', 'psychic ethers' and such like 'information field') or in 'psycho-social' explanations in the broad sense.

The latter seems to me the more promising approach, one which argues that the ultimate source of all the aliens, cryptids, ghosts, ghouls, lights in the night, anomalous craft, and every other sort of anomalous experience is the culturally informed human imagination, an imagination which can manifest itself in the way we perceive and remember events both ordinary and extraordinary, in the spontaneous imagination of dreams and waking visions, in the processes of telling stories, in the crafted imagination of both told as true stories and in acknowledged fiction.

In all its manifestations this imagination tells us things about ourselves, reveals deep ways in which human beings think about the world. One of these ways is to divide up the world into opposites (habitat/wilderness; human/animal; past/present; living/dead; natural/supernatural; self/other; matter/spirit; earth/heaven and so on) but then yearn for bridges between them, and to populate the liminal realms between them with all sorts of numinous beings of the imagination.

TRACKING THE MEN IN BLACK

Jim Keith, Casebook on the Men in Black, Adventures Unlimited Press, 2011.

This is a new edition, with a foreword by Kenn Thomas, of a book first published in 1997. Jim Keith died in 1999. After a short summary of stories about mysterious men in dark clothing, dating from the 15th century, there is a discussion of the modern version of the tradition.

The author's argument here is that, while some of the men in black (MIB) reports are modern developments of the old traditions, others can be attributed to "interventions by the military, government intelligence, or other human agency".

The Maury Island affair of June 1947 is one of the notorious cases cited in support of this notion, where Keith considers "the possibility that Maury Island was a government-sponsored hoax". However, he does not consider why government agents would have felt the need to carry out such a hoax, particularly in view of the inevitable publicity that it would generate.

It is very difficult to establish what did or did not occur at Tacoma at that time, in view of the somewhat unreliable sources, combined with wild conspiracy theories. Kenneth Arnold, the man generally considered - correctly or incorrectly - to have started off the whole modern flying saucer tradition because of the publicity generated by his sighting of 24 June 1947, was hired by Ray Palmer to investigate the sightings of UFOs and debris from one of them at Maury Island, Washington. Palmer, a publisher of science fiction stories, had been informed by one of the alleged witnesses, Fred Crisman.

The results of this investigation were written up in a book by Arnold and Palmer (The Coming of the Saucers, privately published, 1952). It is not clear which of the events described are strictly factual, particularly, as will be obvious to anyone who reads the book, that Arnold's account of his investigations has been professionally edited. Keith, though, does draw attention to some of the numerous contradictory reports and rumours concerning this case.

It seems odd to include the Maury Island case in a book on this subject, as the only alleged apearance of a MIB is that, according to Harold Dahl, a man in a black suit had breakfast with him in a local restaurant and warned him not to discuss his UFO experience with others. Some of the other cases discussed also seem irrelevant to the MIB theme, including some elaborate hoaxes, such as UMMO.

Keith admits that many of the MIB stories were hoaxes and that one of the most notorious hoaxers was Gray Barker. It was Barker whose attention was drawn to the claim by Al Bender, who had founded the International Flying Saucer Bureau, that he had been visited by three MIBs who had told him the secret of the UFOs and threatened him with imprisonment if he revealed the information.

Barker contacted Bender and wrote up his findings in his book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) which, in Keith's words, "launched the modern day MIB tempest". In 1962 he published Bender's story, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, which he heavily edited, as he acknowledged in his introduction.

Keith's book ends with a lot of speculative waffle as to how the MIB stories should be interpreted, but I believe it was Gray Barker who received the correct answer, as he revealed in his epilogue to Flying Saucers and the Three Men:

"The editor of a popular saucer publication, in criticizing my book, claimed he had found out who the three men actually were and identified them by name: 'Boredom, Frustration, and Disgust.' These three men, unfortunately, are often real, and lurk constantly in the shadows. You may be their next victim." -- Reviewed by John Harney

Nick Redfern. The Real Men in Black. New Page Books, 2011.

In his latest book Nick Redfern again acts as a lightning-rod for UFO rumour and conspiracy. He carries on from where Jim Keith’s book leaves off, and spreads it over a wider range of experience. We start of with the classic account of Albert Bender’s experiences and Gray Barker’s reworking and development of the themes. Redfern rightly identifies Barker as the primary source of the MIB mythology, largely through his notorious book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.

The problem is that, as Redfern continues his account of these mysterious ‘silencers’ it becomes clear that there is really no such thing as a ‘Men in Black’ phenomenon. What has happened is that Barker had created a category, with an exciting name, and since then people have felt obliged to supply examples to fit the category. Very few of the accounts described in this book have anything in common with Bender’s original experiences, and most have little in common with each other.

Redfern’s ability to attract strange stories is demonstrated at its best with the account of one Colin Perks, who “had an overriding obsession with finding the final resting place of the legendary King Arthur”. In the year 2000 Perks meets a tall, beautiful woman dressed all in black who claimed to know all about his Arthurian research even though he had apparently never published anything about it.

She told the baffled investigator that she represented a “select group of people within the British ruling elite” (not the Bullingdon Club, surely?) who were determined to prevent anyone finding the site of Arthur’s tomb, as it was a portal to a nightmarish other-world which would explode into our own with devastating results. If Perks did not give up his probing, his next warning would be from something far more unpleasant than this attractive woman. And so it was: a hideous winged creature attempted to attack him as he drove home one night.

Even so he continued his work until dying of a heart attack on Salisbury Plain in 2009, nine years after his original encounter. Redfern does point out that Perks was a chain-smoker with an unhealthy lifestyle. You may have your own views on this episode; I could not possibly comment, except to say that it does seem to be reminiscent of a number of Doctor Who storylines.

The problem with any MIB story is that we seldom have any alternative viewpoint other than that given by the ‘percipient’ or the original investigator. However in one instance cited by Redfern we are able to step back and take another look.

The case of Herbert Hopkins is well known in the UFO field. He was the doctor who performed hypnotic regression on two men who had encountered creatures with “mushroom-shaped heads” during an abduction experience in Maine, USA in 1975. Shortly after he had conducted the hypnosis Hopkins was allegedly visited by a weird, hairless, lipstick-wearing individual in a black suit, who conducted a bizarre interview, dematerialised two coins from Hopkins’ hand, made threats and then left and dematerialised himself, in the classic MIB manner.

More information has come to light about Hopkins which throws a different, but still quite disturbing account on this episode. Hopkins’ nephew, also called Herbert, has revealed that his uncle “was, unfortunately, a fantasy-prone individual, craved the center of attention and limelight and on a base level he sometimes just made things up—no matter how hyperbolic—to top everybody else. As brilliant as he was in many areas, however, he was unskilled at fiction.” You can read a fuller account HERE.

Not all MIB events are as strange as these, and Redfern rightly notes that many reports were, like UFO reports, simply misinterpretations of mundane events, the activities over-enthusiastic amateur ufologists and a few genuine government agents checking out if there was anything behind all these crazy UFO reports! Some of the incidents described in this book seem so trivial as to wonder why anyone would be concerned about them, and probably tell us more about the reporter than they do about the MIB. One person was convinced that two men in dark suits who walked out of an empty building across the street from where she lived were MIB, largely on the basis that they didn’t smile when she joked at them, and drove off quickly when they saw that she was trying to get a look at their car number plates. This encounter was apparently “chilling”.

Redfern is eager to recount his contacts tales, and no wonder, for they do make curious reading, and provide a useful summary of activity at the fringe of ufology. He is less useful when it comes to arriving at any conclusion as to what this all means. And this is because, as I said at the beginning, the book proves there are no Men in Black, just lots of people with stories – whether or not they are real, subjective, paranormal or just fictional – that have, through an accident of publishing history, been classified as ‘MIB’.

I blame Gray Barker

(Oh, and a nerdy, librarianist footnote, the book has an adequate index and a good list of sources) – Reviewed by John Rimmer.

MAKING PEOPLE

Philip Ball. Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People. Bodley Head, 2011.

A major theme of the modern alien abduction folklore is that of the mass produced 'hybrid' children, fermented in various sorts of equipment from test tubes to incubators via nutrient vats. Being raised thus, these children are assumed to be somehow wan and soulless.

Though the alien abduction lore is nowhere mentioned in it, Philip Ball's excellent book shows how such fantasies develop. His central thesis is how the power of ancient and not so ancient myths continues to befuddle modern discussion of reproductive technologies. He traces the growth of various strands of thinking about people produced by human art across the ages and how they influence modern thinking on such topics. One strand, that of the creation of artificial organic life, stretches from the alchemists' homunculus through to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's Monster, another from the Jewish legend of the golem through to Capek's Robots, and the third more modern one, the industrially produced babies of Huxley's Brave New World. He shows how all of these themes were used by various technophobe writers to construct dystopian visions of the future and to imply that any child produced through human art would be some sort of less than human creature.

In the first half of the twentieth century these dystopian visions were to some extent aided by the pronouncements of some scientists themselves, particularly those associated with the eugenics movement.

Ball shows how the ideas of the Frankenstein Monster, the mass produced Xerox clone, the soulless robot, and the decanted baby, as envisaged in numerous works of science fiction, continue to bedevil rational discussion of topics such as IVF, cloning and other reproductive technologies. The hysterical reactions to the development of IVF in its early years, now largely forgotten, are presented in all their glory here. Magonia can testify to this hysteria because some 30 or so years ago we received a review copy of a tome produced by some Ultra-Montane Catholic group in the USA, mainly concerned with the Bayside Marian apparitions, but which proudly reproduced some piece from an American gutter tabloid presenting Louise Brown (the first test tube baby) as a sort of science fiction monster possessed of amazing psychokinetic powers. Even today the Roman Catholic Church opposes IVF and regards these much wanted and loved babies as 'unnatural', unlike that is those conceived 'naturally' by 9 year old victims of incestuous rape. This kind of moral reversal is what happens when you regard the welfare of real, living breathing human beings as being more important than abstract dogma as 'sentimentality'.

Other reproductive technologies are likely to be years away, but I would agree with Ball that they pose much less acute moral problems than the myth inspired headlines would suggest. Ectogenesis, the bringing of an embryo to term in an artificial womb is probably decades away. When it comes along it will as a result of developments in keeping very premature babies alive, and we actually therefore have a very good idea what it would entail. It would be hugely demanding in time and emotion on the parents, who would be tied to a hospital facility for months as their foetus develops, but there seems no reason to imagine any such child would be less bonded or wanted; indeed the father and wider family may bond with such a child even more strongly as they watch it develop over months.

Ball also argues that almost all the fears about clones are nonsense, based on these literary myths. There is no reason to believe that a clone (or sib-child) would be an exact copy of the donor parent, and many to believe it wouldn't. There are alleged horror stories about having a dead child cloned as a replacement, but even this would be nothing new. Dead children were often replaced the old-fashioned way in Victorian times and named after the deceased sibling (as my own great grandfather) and no doubt in some way regarded as the earlier child coming back. (This practice was the cause of a number of cases of alleged super centenarians). The main social problems with 'cloned' children may be the possessiveness of the social grandparents who would be the genetic parents and possible impacts on custody disputes.

Ball argues that these myths are generated by fears of doing things which are unnatural. This is actually nonsense, for there is no reason to regard human beings or their culture or technology as being in any sense unnatural. If you regard all works of human artifice as unnatural, that damns virtually the whole landscape of most of the world, as well as all technology and medical procedure. I note that when the late Pope John Paul II was severely injured by a gunman there was no argument to the effect that he should not undergo surgery as that would be 'unnatural' as God wanted him to be a martyr to the faith.

Behind these surface motivations he sees a deeper one, that these fearful myths about extraordinary children are ways we can indirectly talk about our hopes and fears for our real ordinary children; that perhaps in some sense all children will grow up 'other' than there parents and will escape from us. They allow us to ponder how much we seek to mould and construct all children in our image, and our own position in a dehumanised production and consumption machine. -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson

STRANGE NEW WORLDS

Ray Jayawardhana. Strange New Worlds – The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System. Princeton University Press, 2011 – Reviewed by David Simpson.

There is little doubt the discovery of tell-tale signs of life elsewhere in the universe, let alone the receipt of an indisputably alien radio signal, would have massive implications for mankind – the first sign that life is not unique to Earth.

This book takes us through the history of our quest for knowledge of the heavens, from Greek philosophers in the fifth century BC, through advances in astronomical observation methods, to the latest space telescopes. Finally it speculates a decade or more to the future, by when the author feels astronomers will probably have the means to detect the first signs of life elsewhere. It is not about SETI, ¬ the long-standing attempt to detect intelligent alien radio signals, but rather how incremental advances in telescopes now mean that, for the first time, we are able to detect planets orbiting distant stars – albeit planets much larger than Earth and inhospitable to life [as we know it, Jim] – and to infer something about their likely properties.

The title Strange New Worlds is perhaps a bit misleading as astronomers haven’t yet found any new worlds of the might-contain-life variety and those they have found are not strange in the wholly unexpected sense. They have detected an impressive number in the ‘almost certainly won’t contain life’ category, for example gas-giants like Jupiter, and rocky planets baking at 200 °C or more. Similarly misleading is the sub-title The Search for Alien Planets... hinting that astronomers are searching specifically for planets containing aliens, when they are not, and Life Beyond Our Solar System is last-chapter speculation about what future, more sensitive astronomical measurements might find. But I guess A History of Man’s Search for Exoplanets would probably not sell so well.

The subject’s chronology is presented in detail, is well referenced and gives credit to many of the main scientists involved. Their biographical stories are interesting too, although extending this to the scientists’ parents and even grandparents seems a bit much, as did the tedious information about who did a PhD under whom. I would have preferred the space to be used for a sentence or two here and there on the technical benefits of newer instruments, for example what was it about digital cameras and spectrographs that brought improved measurements? For non-astronomers like me the countless indecipherable alphanumeric strings of star identifiers were quite numbing but probably have to be there and were easily skipped.

The principles employed in detecting extrasolar planets are clearly explained, such as: measuring the tiny cyclic changes in the Doppler shift of light from a distant star – indicating the gravitation tug of an orbiting planet; ‘microlensing’¬ – looking at starlight as it is bent and amplified by the gravitational field of a large intervening object or; transit measurements – measuring the periodic changes in star brightness as it is eclipsed by an orbiting planet.

It is fascinating to appreciate the changes in scientific attitude towards the subject, from the 1980s when bothering to searching for extraterrestrial planets or even whether it was a legitimate part of astronomy was questioned, to today when vast sums of money are spent funding scientific teams exploring avenues in ‘astrobiology’. This includes, for example, working out what constitutes a biosignature – something that indicates the existence of living organisms.

Gripes aside, it is an interesting and well written book that doesn’t need much technical knowledge to be appreciated.

TWO VIEWS ON THE THRICE-GREAT

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. The Forbidden Universe. Skyhorse Publishing, 2011.

Gary Lachman. The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus Floris Books, 2011.

The Forbidden Universe is divided into two parts: the first shows how Hermetic doctrines, for example, heliocentricity, the notion of an infinite universe, the circulation of spirit moving in the blood, above all the notion that Man was a miraculous creation, divine, and capable in principle of working wonders, derived from an Ancient Egyptian theological school based in Heliopolis. The Corpus Hermeticum was a collection of documents brought to Italy from Macedonia by a monk named Leonardo de Pistoia, ten years after Byzantium fell to the Turks. It was translated by Marsilio Ficino in 1463, at the behest of Cosimo de’ Medici. It was the bombshell which started the Renaissance.

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince are professional writers, not academics, so they haven’t the time to do much research into primary sources. The first part of the book is full of illuminating and some curious facts nonetheless. Did you know, for example, that Hamlet, written in the year Giordano Bruno was judicially murdered, can plausibly be read as an allegory of the conflict between the old world system and the new? Me neither. I shall never be able to watch the play in quite the same way again. The authors put into proper context, too, the trial of Galileo. He was correctly suspected by the Inquisition of being a follower of Bruno, but neither side thought it politic to mention this.

The authors show how central Hermeticism was, not only to the Renaissance, but to the rise of modern science itself. There have been flowerings of culture before and since the sixteenth century, but without Hermeticism modern science would have taken much longer to come into being, and perhaps wouldn’t have happened at all.

The second part of the book is much more controversial, and the authors’ position guarantees that their book will be ignored by popular science magazines and Richard Dawkins. The authors contend that Hermeticism is not only an important historical phenomenon, but is actually true.

How can they possibly defend such an archaic system of thought? you may well ask. In Ancient Egyptian teaching, reflected in the Hermetic texts, Atum spills his seed and generates worlds from his own substance, so all gods and creatures are aspects of Atum and of each other (and Atum is an aspect of them, too). Hence human beings are divine. Animals and plants and indeed minerals are divine too, of course, but only human beings can gain a knowledge – ‘gnosis’ – of their divinity. This is what they exist for, so that Atum can become conscious through them. It follows then, if the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus are right, that the universe is designed for their existence. If one believes the teaching to be true, one would believe in an infinity, or at any rate a very large number, of inhabitable worlds populated by intelligent life, just as Giordano Bruno did. In other words, one would believe that the universe was intelligently designed.

Intelligent Design is not a popular theory, either among biologists or the wider educated public, who have heard it dismissed on science programs on TV or have read the books of Richard Dawkins, the former Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. Dawkins presents it as Creationism dressed up to make it seem respectable – and who wants to be associated with Bible-thumping Christian fanatics who believe the world was created in seven days four thousand years ago?

Few realise that the original proponents of Intelligent Design were an atheist astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle, and a biochemist, Michael Behe, (not mentioned in Picknett and Prince’s book). Behe is a Roman Catholic in private life, but accepts ‘common descent’ - in other words, evolution – and natural selection, too, though not as a full explanation of it. For the general ignorance and misunderstanding of Intelligent Design Dawkins and the magazines New Scientist and Scientific American are largely to blame. Busy journalists writing for magazines might perhaps be forgiven for not doing in-depth research about every news story and article they cover, but the former Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science has no such excuse. He has no business to be ignorant and personally, I don’t think he is. But the alternative is deliberate mendacity.

The authors go on to show that an increasing number of physicists have come to accept Intelligent Design, because the constants of the universe seem fixed to permit intelligent life to occur. “A put-up job,” was how Hoyle expressed it. String theory – and its development, M theory – seemed at this point to ride to the rescue of skeptics. It provided a more popular, skeptical view: we live in a multiverse, consisting of millions of universes, the majority being completely lifeless.

String theory needs at least 10 dimensions, so there is plenty of room for other universes to exist side by side our own without our even noticing it. This seems to remove the horrible necessity of believing in a deity. As Picknett and Prince put it:

“The multiverse is a concept that turns the virtually impossible into the almost inevitable.”

The trouble is, M theory has a very flimsy basis. When string theory was first developed in the late twentieth century, it was hailed as a twenty-first century theory that had been discovered in the twentieth. Unfortunately, as the authors point out, it has not lived up to its promise. Several hundred string theories were consistent with the known facts, and there was no known way of creating empirical tests to choose between them.

M theory, developed by, among others, Stephen Hawking, is an abstruse mathematical theory which attempts to find common features between all the many possible string theories. So far, it has not produced any testable results. One physicist, who had best remain anonymous, maintains that the “M” in M theory stands for “masturbation”, and, indeed, it does seem to be a bit of a “W” theory.

Despite the opinion of Professor Dawkins, it does seem that there’s a very good case for Intelligent Design. Does that mean that there has to be an Intelligent Designer? Picknett and Prince think so, but I’m not so sure. The theory of Formative Causation, developed by Rupert Sheldrake, is a possible alternative. According to this theory, all the laws and constants of the universe are habits, developed as the universe evolved. This theory could, if it turns out to be true, explain not only the anthropic principle, but also the predominance of matter over anti-matter, and the origin of life.

But whether you think that Atum thought it all out beforehand, or evolved to consciousness over billions of years, Picknett and Prince have made a good case for the continuing relevance of Hermeticism today.

In spite of the title, the reader will not get any more than a vague idea of what Hermeticism is from Gary Lachman’s book, and no understanding of why it held the greatest minds of Europe in its spell between the 1460s and the end of the seventeenth century. The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus meanders through an account of the thoughts of many occultists and writers, which, while interesting in itself, is only tangentially connected to the subject. Similarly, it is of mild interest that many of the Romantics, and the philosopher Hegel, were influenced by Hermeticism, but why was it of central importance to Copernicus, Bruno, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, Newton and Leibnitz? This we do not learn from Lachman’s book.

It is not that Lachman has failed to do his research. On the contrary, the book is diligently researched, with endnotes and an excellent bibliography. He has collected all the facts, and a few factoids, but interpretation, discrimination and insight are lacking. Perhaps this is because he also lacks, as it seems, a sense of history. For example, in order to explain the retreat of Hermeticism in the seventeenth century Lachman says:

“What was at work was a shift in human consciousness, and the visible sign of this was the rise of science.”

Not only is this the reverse of the truth (Hermeticism brought about the rise of science) but it mistakes an effect for a cause. The cause was the Inquisition in Catholic countries, and in Protestant ones what we would nowadays call Biblical fundamentalism, and a paranoid fear of magic and witches in society generally, and in the dour and unenlightened mind of James I of England in particular. It was James who asked Isaac Casaubon, a French Huguenot, to rebut an historical justification of the Catholic Church.

Rather weirdly, considering the Inquisition had recently had Giordano Bruno burnt at the stake as a heretic, and was busy silencing Galileo, the justification included Hermes Trismegistus as a pagan philosopher who prophesied the coming of Christ. Casaubon therefore attempted to rebut Hermeticism as well. He found the Greek of the Corpus Hermeticum very late, and no references to Hermes Trismegistus in classical Greek authors (Quelle surprise!) There were similarities with the New Testament: particularly the beginning of St John’s gospel, and Hermes also gives a sermon on the mount to his son Tat (Thoth). Casaubon therefore concluded that the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus were a pious fraud, an attempt by Christians to encourage their pagan compatriots to abandon pagan ways and find salvation in Christ.

Gary Lachman is right in saying that Casaubon’s findings dealt a blow to Hermeticism, and caused scholars and ‘scientists’ (the anachronistic term is mine, not Lachman’s) to become circumspect in expressing an enthusiasm for Hermes Trismegistus. However Lachman thinks that Casaubon’s conclusions are valid in the twenty-first century. Casaubon was an erudite scholar in his day, but his day was four hundred years ago. Egyptology and New Testament studies did not exist then. No modern scholar would accept Casaubon’s thesis. The consensus nowadays would be that the Corpus Hermeticum is a valid expression, in Greek, of Egyptian theology dating back to long before the Greek occupation of Egypt.

There are other factoids in Lachman’s book which it is the duty of any right-thinking person to stamp on, lest they become rampant, like horrible cockroaches.

Lachman claims that Copernicus was anal-erotic and fussy. There is absolutely no evidence for this.

He asserts that Giordano Bruno was a megalomaniac. Again, no evidence. (There is, however, evidence that Bruno was the greatest philosopher of the Renaissance.)

Lachman follows the journalist, novelist, popular science writer and serial rapist Arthur Koestler in saying Galileo was an egomaniac, and that the Roman Church leant over backwards to accommodate him. This is the reverse of the truth: it was Galileo who was circumspect, the Inquisition which was determined to silence him, because heliocentricity was a doctrine of Hermeticism, which was considered a heresy.

On the whole, therefore, I cannot recommend Gary Lachman’s book highly enough – or indeed at all. – Reviewed by Mark McCann

INVESTIGATING THE IMPOSSIBLE

Ulrich Magin. Investigating the Impossible: Sea Serpents in the Air, Volcanoes that Aren't and Other Out of Place Mysteries. Anomalist Books, 2011

Ulrich Magin is a Fortean writer very much in the Magonia mould as his introduction to this collection of essays shows, where he contrasts the various approaches to reports of anomalous experiences. The skeptical one simply says that the witnesses are lying, or drunk, or crazy or just mistaken, or there is a 'rational' explanation and that is that, end of the matter. The second approach is perhaps what we might call the mysterian approach: it is all literally true, the Loch Ness Monster is a surviving plesiosaur or some such, UFOs are space ships from other planets, apparitions are spirits of the dead and so forth. Everything is taken at face value, and writers of this persuasion usually just present a list of mysteries where the only response is to say "gee whizz". A somewhat more sophisticated version attributes everything to some all pervading mysterious force or entity (The Control System or The Phenomenon) which seems to be a secular version of either God or a trickster devil.

Magin argues for a third way, one which acknowledges that most anomalous experiences are indeed based on experience, but experiences moulded and fashioned by culture and expectation, both by the experiencers themselves and subsequent reporters. Fortean phenomena are essentially cultural phenomena, though grounded in empirical events.

This collection of essays illustrates this approach. The first looks at how ufologists have interpreted a woodcut (illustrating a pamphlet) depicting an aerial battle which allegedly took place over Nuremberg in 1561 as a UFO event. He shows how this print updates traditional motifs of aerial battles to include the then modern devices of cannons and cannon balls, which ufologists have then proceeded to interpret as a cigar-shaped mothership emitting disc-shaped UFOs. He also makes the important point that early works like this are not interested in what we would call reportage, they are theological works aiming to make theological points.

Magin shows that this was also the case in the famous story of the 'Mowing Devil', so beloved of crop circle enthusiasts. A second version of the story significantly appeared in a pamphlet which also featured a story of a young woman possessed by the devil. I have no doubt that the same applies to the oft-repeated story of the phantom re-enactment of the Battle of Edgehill. The whole point of that pamphlet is God's wrath at the terrible sin of civil war, such that the dead must keep on fighting, presumably in hell.

In more secular times, more political anxieties take the place of religious ones. He notes the existence of a number of phantom airship reports among Germany's neighbours from 1892, as they increasingly feared Prussian militarism. There were none such in Germany itself. But in 1959, with Federal Germany feeling itself in a much weaker position, a phantom battle of the modern kind was reported at Cuxhaven on the Saxony North Sea Coast, an aerial bombardment, which local authorities feared was part of a secret Nato exercise they had not been told about. Magin suspects that this was just misperceived cloud and spray, though I wonder if it is possible that it might be due to the activities of a local Hermann Orbeth Rocket Society which conducted experiments in this area in the 1950s and 1960s according to Wickipedia.

The transient nature of most Fortean phenomena means that it is always open for true believers to insist that the stories might indeed be true, but this can hardly be the case with out-of-place volcanoes, the subject of another set of essays. Here volcanoes were reported where there are none, and their is absolute geological evidence that they were never there, at least in historic times. As Magin notes, volcanoes can't just up and leave without a trace like UFOs! While some of these may be based on other natural phenomena such as rock slides or gas fires, these are interpreted (and in some cases nothing much is interpreted) in terms of volcanoes.

Other phenonomolgical topics include much of a cryptozoolgical nature, from the role of Alex Campbell in literally creating the Loch Ness Monster out of nothing - as Magin points out, there was no prior tradition of monsters in the Loch, a point many locals made pointedly in the press at the time - to alleged monsters in the Rio Genil and Lago Maggiore, and a mothman at Lake Garda.

As an example of the role of culture and expectation in Fortenea he examines the rival perceptions of 'sea monsters' off the Spanish coast in Spanish and British accounts. The Spanish accounts contain none of the specific features found in the British accounts, they have not been encultured to the popular perception of the long necked sea serpent. As a bit of light relief there are the tales told by Mr Spencer/Spicer of the SS St. Andrew, who by his own account managed to find time between the occasions that wild animals ran amok on the ship on which he was mate, to see a group of meteorites crash into the ocean and to see the sea serpent. No doubt between these adventures he was abducted by aliens and forced to mate with a mermaid, who in return gave him a map proving the US was discovered by the lamas from Atlantis.

Something that Magin constantly emphasises is the need to go back to original sources, and critically analyse them in terms of their cultural context, and not, as is so often the case, just repeat stories from one secondary source to another, often not citing the source at all. This is of course especially true of reports from distant parts of history.

Magin's historical pieces, on tales of petrified ships, ghost roads in old Germany and the history of sacred landscapes are perhaps rather more removed from Magonia's own interests, but they demonstrate his huge range of scholarship, which puts most Forteans (yours truly among them) to shame.

The only downside to this book, is that it is a collection of previously published essays, several of which have appeared in Anomalist or Fortean Times, of which a fair proportion of the potential audience of this book are likely to be readers. I hope then that it is taster for much more from Magin.