REINVENTING THE DEVIL

Darren Oldridge. The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England. The History Press, 2011

In this book, a revised edition of his The Devil in Early Modern England, Darren Oldridge is principally concerned with image of the devil in the imagination of the harder-line 'hottest' Protestant reformers or 'Puritans' in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The devil in the pre-existing folk Catholicism seems to have been a sort of amoral trickster figure, with perhaps more than a hint of Loki still clinging about him, and one in which he was regularly portrayed as being bested by cunning humans. As such he was often presented as an almost pathetic figure of fun.

Oldridge shows how, under the influence of the darkly introspective new reformed religion, surely one of the most cheerless religions ever invented, making even the Taliban look liberal in comparison, he becomes a much more menacing figure. This new reformed religion saw human beings as totally depraved and in no way capable of earning salvation, which could only be a free gift of grace, and as such totally under the control of the devil as the prince of this world. Whereas before people had seen themselves as part of a whole community, part of as Oldridge puts, an army in the company of Mary and all the Saints, they were now seen as isolated atomised individuals, alone facing the whiles of the devil.

In the folk religion the devil was only a threat to the truly wicked, those who behaved themselves, and acted fairly and good neighbourly were more or less safe. By abandoning the idea of salvation through good works, the new religion exposed everyone, including the Godly themselves to his threats. Though Oldridge does not make this connection, I can't help thinking that one of the motivations of the abandonment of good works, was to liberate themselves from the restraints and conventions of the old communal culture and embark of careers of individualistic self advancement and competition.

The devil in this new order manifested in various ways, one way was in the form of wrong thoughts. The godly's own doubts, fears, temptations could all be ascribed to the actions of the devil, rather than themselves, as could the often explosive outbursts of raw negative emotion caused by the stresses of this pressure cooker environment.

He could also be encountered in what we would today think of as anomalous personal experiences, spectres, strange animals, the birth of deformed babies, tempests and thunderstorms, altered states of consciousness, night terrors and the like.

Oldridge shows how the new puritans turned back to much of the old folk imagery of the domestic devil during the witchcraft persecutions, such as those of Matthew Hopkins, with their evocations of imps and like petty supernaturals. Some of course resisted this and pointed out that it didn't make much sense to envisage the 'prince of this world' quietly lapping up bowls of milk or feeding on a supernumerary teat like some pussy cat.

The puritans saw the devil everywhere because they saw themselves as a people under siege, where all (including the monarch and the church hierarchy) were against them, just about everyone around them was imagined to be under the thrall of the devil

Though Oldridge shows that much of this died out in the Restoration, more than traces remained in some forms of Methodism, and intellectuals like Baxter and Glanville fought a rearguard action against the new scepticism. Indeed it is not really dead and survives in some straggly mutated forms. Thus while the 17th century visionary Helen Fairfax has a vision of Christ in glory which her family persuade her is in fact a satanic delusion, modern day abduction hunters such as David Jacobs and the late Budd Hopkins pressure people (often women, another link to this period), to accept that their visionary or spiritual experiences are really due to the machinations of the demonic Grays disguised as beings of light. -- Peter Rogerson

ART AND THE OCCULT

Charles Colbert. Haunted Visions; Spiritualism and American Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Gian Casper Bott (Eds.). Séance; Albert von Keller and the Occult. University of Washington Press/Frye Art Museum. 2011.

In 1855 the American artist William Sidney Mount received two letters from another artist, encouraging him in his work, and giving advice as to the manner in which his paintings should develop. Although critical of the “sameness of design” in some of Mount’s work he acknowledged the originality of much else of his work. The writer warned Mount that he could see “no merit in the groupings of works of the masters which appear artificial and savour too much of theatrical display” and that the artist should draw inspiration from nature alone.

All good advice for any artist, and all the more authoritative coming from such a great artist as Rembrandt, who was able to send this message to Mount despite having died 190 years earlier. The letters were produced by automatic writing at a Spiritualist séance, and handed to Mount, although much of their contents suggests they were written by Mount himself.

The idea that Rembrandt was guiding contemporary artists did not seem to be particularly strange in much of the artistic community in mid-nineteenth-century America. The art journal The Crayon, reviewing one of Mount’s works commented that it “exhibited a clearness of tone that is due to hints furnished by Rembrandt from the Spirit world”.

The spirit world, Spiritualism and occultism, as this book shows, played a major part in the thinking of America artists of this era. It is difficult to realise now, but at the time such concepts as phrenology and psychometry were not only part of mainstream thinking, but were seen as ‘scientific’ and ‘progressive’. Phrenology implied that the brain could be studied objectively, without reliance on metaphysical concepts, and appealed to Spiritualists as it confirmed their belief in the integration of soul and body.

The sculptor Hiram Powers used the ideas of phrenology in creating a series of portrait busts and allegorical sculptures which expressed the sitter’s or the subject’s character. One sitter asked Powers to arrange the hair on her image so that her phrenonological characteristics could be more easily seen.

Powers’ sculptures, and those of a number of his contemporaries, in their white plaster or marble purity, were often displayed in domestic settings as a form of family altar. Even the allegorical sculptures, which did not depict any individual, would be chosen by a family because they expressed the perceived character of a dead relative. Often they would be covered by a thin gauze material, to protect them from dust and fly-specks, but also to symbolise a spirit who had departed ‘beyond the veil’.

Although none of the painters discussed in this volume created images which were direct representations of ‘psychic’ or spiritualist activities, artists such as Rembrandt’s protégé Sidney Mount and George Innes, painted landscapes which were imbued with a quality of light that seems inspired by Spiritualist concepts of ‘ether’, turning depictions of farmhouses on Long Island or New England harbours into images of the ‘Summerland’.

Behind all of this was the evolution of the idea of the sculpture or painting as an object containing special powers and qualities in itself, which were made manifest to the viewer by a process of ‘psychometry’. Simply being in the presence of a painting would affect the viewer spiritually. Colbert suggest that this idea was instrumental in changing the gallery from a place where a collector would display their wealth and/or artistic sensitivity, to a place where the actual presence of art created a quasi-religious aura.

This was a change in attitude which is still apparent today, where visitors sit in silent contemplation of artworks, and the gallery has become a form of temple, and is illustrated in this book by a painting by William Rimmer (no relation, as far as I know) showing an aesthetically-dressed young woman in a cluttered Victorian drawing-room standing contemplating in apparent rapture, an elaborately framed painting.

The Spiritualist, and Swedenborgian, believed that by creating a work of art, the artist was also creating a sacred artefact. Colbert describes this as a challenge, and reaction, to, an increasingly Positivist and Darwinian era. It was also a reaction to the earlier Utilitarian and Puritan dismissal of art as a sign of idleness and triviality.

Although the subject of this book may seem a particularly obscure byway of art history, the legacy of the ‘spiritualisation’ of art is all around us today, from the pure colour of the abstract design of a modern church stained-glass window, to the use of sculptures as a way to ‘humanise’ an otherwise bleak shopping precinct.

Although none of the painters discussed in Colbert’s book produced images depicting Spiritualist or parapsychological phenomena, this is not the case with Albert von Keller. Keller (the ‘von’ was a title bestowed in 1897) was born in 1844, in Switzerland, but two months after his birth he moved with his mother to Bavaria. In 1854 they settled in Munich, where in 1863 he began studying law, but after three years left to pursue drawing at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, and began exhibiting at major galleries and exhibitions.

His interest in parapsychology was demonstrated when he joined the Munich Psychologische Gesellschaft, which included parapsychologists and a number of other influential artists in its membership. He began to participate in séances held by the Society, and became fascinated by hypnotic states, trance and mediumship.

Much of his art consisted of society studio portraits, in a loose, almost impressionistic style, but his fascination with the paranormal also found visual expression in his paintings. He became a friend of the noted parapsychologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, and many of his paintings depicted incidents from Schrenck-Notzing’s séances with mediums and hypnotic subjects.

Some critics claimed that his interest in parapsychology was a fashionable preoccupation and simply a way of finding suitably dramatic moments for his art, a claim which Schrenck-Notzing himself denied vigorously. Paintings such as ‘Hypnosis at Schrenck-Notzing’s’ and ‘Spiritualist Apport of a Bracelet’ are based directly on photographic images from séances with the medium Lena Matzinger.

Keller’s fascination with the occult and religious fanaticism was also demonstrated in paintings of scenes from the Germanic era of witch persecution. These, and his paintings of religious subjects often displayed an overt eroticism, which again attracted criticism. The Theosophist Carl Kiesewetter attacked as unhistorical Keller’s depictions of beautiful semi-naked young women, apparently in states of ecstasy as they suffered at the hands of their persecutors, or even as they were being burned at the stake.

Paintings such as ‘The Christian Martyr’ showing a naked St Julia hanging from a cross, and ‘The Happy Sister’ depicting a novice nun on her death-bed surrounded by the shadowy forms of other nuns, along with many of his historical subjects, display a disturbing amalgam of religiosity, eroticism, mysticism and a fascination with death in its most gruesome aspects which recurs in German art from the paintings of Matthias Grunewald to the darker works of Caspar David Friedrich, and Arnold Boecklin.

The contrast between the artists in these two books is remarkable. Keller’s dark eroticism could not be further removed from the gentle misty landscapes and idealistic portraiture of the American artists, yet both reflect the society in which they were created: von Keller working in the stifling fin-de-siecle atmosphere of Wilhelmite Germany and the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Americans in a nation which was still expanding, physically into the West, and culturally into a modernist and optimistic future.

Both books are well illustrated, although unfortunately the Colbert book in black and white only. While I can understand this because of the production costs involved, it might have been helpful if the publishers were able to note the http of some web locations of the images, which can often be found on the websites of galleries and museums. -- John Rimmer

PHANTOM PRESENCES

Colleen E Boyd and Coll Thrush (Eds.) Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History, University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

The academic community has been producing studies into witchcraft beliefs for the best part of 40 years, but is only just beginning to turn its attention to the themes of ghosts and hauntings. Perhaps because these accounts and beliefs are much more present in the general community than those surrounding witchcraft, this is a much more fraught enterprise. The work edited by Boyd and Thrush is a collection of essays on various topics, centred around the theme of haunting as applied to First American communities. The term haunting here is clearly intended by different contributors in various ways, some more literal than others.

Perhaps the central theme of this book is the haunting presence in ‘spirit’ and material form of First American communities were they were supposed to have been exorcised generations ago. Popular culture has constructed a mythology whereby this haunting presence, often in terms of forgotten ‘Indian’ graveyard threatens the present.

There is here a sense that the forgotten shameful history of genocide and slavery on which much of North American society was built may return and extract its revenge. There is also less happily perhaps an assimilation of older European traditions of the places haunted by the faceless pagan dead (raths, barrows etc) have been superimposed on this new landscape.

The various essays survey different aspects of this haunting presence, involving surviving communities, beliefs, traditions, skeletal remains and artefacts, and notions of spirit of place. If there is a major lacuna it is that there is no treatment here of the return of First Americans as ‘spirit guides’ and the like, from the times of the Shaker communities through to modern spiritualism.

Colleen Boyd a Irish American who has married into First American family, her husband being the first member of his family to go to university "in a thousand years" to quote Neil Kinnock. She surveys their beliefs and compares them with those of her own Catholic Irish American culture.

The presence of the ancestors for many First American communities has both a comforting but also an unnerving quality which must be dealt with by specific rituals, otherwise the dead can make their presence felt. Colleen Boyd describes such experiences and the rituals to deal with them, in her account of the role of First American workers in an archaeological site and their ‘supernatural’ experiences. Her wider essay raises the questions of how academics should react to accounts of supernatural experiences, and this is a theme also taken up by Boyd and Thrush in their introduction and by Thrush in his essay ‘Haunting as Histories’, and by Cynthia Landrum in her account of shape shifters.

Reading some of these accounts, it seems as though in some ways it is easier for academics to talk about these sorts of experiences in the context of other, exotic cultures, rather than their own. What are sometimes presented here as rather culturally specific indigenous experiences are in fact universal human experiences, though cultures may have differing explanations and shape the external features of the experience.

Our night visitors are now less likely to be the apparitional figures of our neighbours, and more likely to be Grays with wrap-round eyes, but the core experience remains the same. Having a Deer Person with the legs of a Deer as a phantom hitchhiker as in a story recounted by Cynthia Landrum may be culturally specific but the experience of the phantom co-traveller is much more universal. The experiences of the First American workers on the archaeological site, might well if the interviews were carried out by a researcher as sympathetic and sensitive as Colleen Boyd, be from any group of those engaged in the recovery operation after 9/11.

This is clearly born out by Lisa Phillips and Allan K McDougall of strange experiences in a Scots family living at Baldoon Ontario in 1824. The European community attributed them to witchcraft, and First American community to the local equivalent of the fairies. In later renditions these became ‘ghosts’ and ‘wild Indians’ respectively. No doubt contemporary psychical researchers would attribute them to a poltergeist.

There several references to David Hufford and his notion of "traditions of unbelief", but much of what is complained of is simply academic neutralism. Saying that ‘The Sauk’ (to mention one of the communities noted in this study) ‘believe’ is no different than an anthropologist saying "Roman Catholics believe this" or that "Hassidic Jews believe that" or "physicists believe the other". This does not imply these beliefs are false, merely that to assert that they are true would mean that one was speaking as a Roman Catholic, Hassidic Jew or physicist rather than as an anthropologist. (My own doubt comes with the "the" in the “x” believe, because it involves a fair degree of homogenisation; try saying "the English believe" and you get the point.

I mentioned earlier that a lacuna in these essays is the absence of the treatment of First American's once largely defeated being ‘returned’ as spirit guides, often seen as primitive people, "close to the earth" and sources of spiritual wisdom. It is not just spiritualists who have been guilty of this kind of exoticism, one sees it in the reduction of what were once historically dynamic and culturally adaptive peoples, into ahistoric, homogenised and non-threatening ‘first peoples’, sources of spiritual wisdom. Denying the right of people to transform their lives and take part in the historical process is a denial of part of their humanity which should be guarded against.

There can be worse dangers. When activists denounce western science and academic archaeology as voodoo science, and their academic supporters urge a separation between ‘western rationalist’ ways of knowing and ‘indigenous’ ways of knowing though blood and instinct, there is a kind of primitivism being invoked which has a racist quality. Perhaps contemporary Americans of all kinds are becoming too remote from Europe and its tragic history to know where this sort of thing leads. Substitute ‘Jewish’ for ‘western/academic’ and ‘Germanic’ or ‘Aryan’ for ‘Indigenous’ and you get your answer. -- Peter Rogerson

SCEPTICISM, OLD AND NEW

Michael Shermer. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies. How We Construct Beliefs as Truths. Times Books/Henry Holt, 2011

Edmund Parish. Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of the Fallacies of Perception. Facsimile reprint, Cambridge University Press, 2011 (Cambridge Library Collection: Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge)

Editor of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer examines the possible neurological and evolutionary origins of our willingness to believe all sorts of things, for example the need to see patterns in events, and the tendency to attribute events to the actions of conscious agencies. Much of this is fairly well travelled ground by now but still worth going over again. In general much of what Shermer says makes a good deal of common sense, but there are problems in some of his arguments.

For example he (a fiscal conservative) complains that much academic opinion is biased against conservatism, seeing it as a kind of pathology. Surely 'believers' in a variety of things could point out that much of the academic community is biased towards scepticism, and sees 'belief' as something requiring explanation.

The reality is, of course, that few if any of us are universal sceptics, indeed being a universal sceptic would lead one to the extremes of solipsism; so nearly everyone has sets of beliefs, which they will tend regard as uniquely obvious and rational, while the other fellows' are regarded as odd or even downright crazy. Thus skeptics tend to be very skeptical of parapsychological claims, yet show a much more lenient attitude towards, say, the Minnesota twin studies, every bit as belief driven (radical hereditarianism) and making as many extraordinary claims as anything produced by the parapsychologists. Still less do skeptics critically evaluate the various claims and activities of great guru James Randi.

This book shows that, actually, like many self proclaimed 'skeptics', Shermer is in fact a true believer, and, by his own admission, a congenital extremist. In high school he got religion, not for him a quiet personal faith, no, he becomes a fervent evangelist of the sort that gets up everyone else's nose; when he loses his faith, he doesn't just quietly decide that religion is not for him and get on with his life, he becomes a proselytising skeptic, a member of a "movement". His favourite sport is the extreme sport of transcontinental bicycle racing, an event which drives the participants, by his own account, to mental and physical collapse and bizarre hallucinatory altered states of consciousness, all of which sounds like some ancient vision quest or spiritual ordeal. He is attracted to radical libertarian philosophies such as that of Ayn Rand and her ilk, philosophies as every bit utopian as the most fervent Maoist. This is surely not the portrait of a cool laid-back sceptic.

The Parish book is an example of sceptical examination from an earlier era. It is a welcome reprint of a long out of print and virtually unavailable title. This edition was first published by Walter Scott Ltd in 1897, an enlarged version of a German original. Despite his rather English sounding name. Parish was a German academic and a pioneer in the development of theories about hallucinations; in his day there was much discussion as to whether they originated somehow in the eye, or in the brain, and whether signals could be sent back from the brain to the eye. While some of theorising now looks quaint from the perspective of modern neuroscience, the value of the book lies in its use of personal accounts.

What makes it of interest to Magonia readers is his use of the material gathered by the census of hallucinations conducted by the Society of Psychical Research in the UK as well as comparative studies by William James in the United States and Von Schrenk-Notzing in Munich. There are extracts from the Munich census and comparative tables.

Parish was sceptical of the claims of telepathy made by the members of the SPR and his analysis contains much useful discussion as to the fallibility of memory, the role of what would become known as false awakenings, hypnopompic and hypnogogic imagery etc. He also notes the difficulties of distinguishing hallucinations from illusions. There are also a number of cases of sleep paralysis, in two of which the percipients believed they were sharing their beds with corpses!

There is even a story which today would be reported as a UFO event: a retired army man reported that at seven in the evening on either the 25th or 26th October 1887 he was standing by his carriage in front of a little church, when he saw "a black ball (the size of a small balloon) rising up into the clear sky above the roof of the church. As it rose higher it lessened in size, and vanished in the direction of the moon, then, I think, in the first quarter, with one star above it (Venus)" This gave him extremely unpleasant feelings and the idea that "some misfortune is happening". He was to associated this with a turn for the worse in his ailing mothers condition.

NEW MAPS OF MAGONIA

I've been having some trouble updating the contents pages on the Magonia Archive website, so I have re-posted them as listings which can be directly accessed from this blog. If you click on the 'Magonia Archive Contents' tab above you will go to an issue-by-issue contents list covering each issue of Magonia and its many predecessors. Click on any article title and you will be taken directly to the file in our Archive website.

As well as providing a solution to an annoying problem, I hope this will also make the Archive a little more accessible to blog readers, and help with the integration of all the Magonia on-line resources.

Although a great deal of the content of MUFOB/Magonia is now on line, there are still articles to be added, although we will not be doing this at the rate we have done in the past. We shall also from time to time be adding brand new articles to the Archive and these will also be listed on the new contents pages. In the near future I hope to be able to post an important original piece on the origins of the Magonia legend.

For the moment, there is not a separate authors listing for MUFOB/Magonia articles, but if you link to any item in the Archive and scroll down the page you will find a complete author listing there. I hope that you will find this new feature to be of some help in navigating your way around the realms of Magonia. -- John Rimmer.

BEING HUMAN

Michio Kaku. Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100. Allen Lane, 2011.

Steve Fuller. Humanity 2.0: What It Matters to be Human Past, Present and Future. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Human beings have perhaps always wondered about the future and what the world might be like after their own lives. Perhaps for long periods no one assumed that the future would be any different than the past, but at least in the West over the last 200-300 years there has been an assumption of a future very different from the present. This different future has been the subject of countless dreams and nightmares.

Michio Kaku is definitely on the dreamer end of this spectrum, and his book is a rather breathless account of possible scientific developments, though like many such it involves largely a projection into the future of current trends. Kaku correctly points out that predictions made at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century were far too conservative, what he avoids saying is that predictions made in the mid 20th century have often turned out to be over optimistic, most predicting lunar bases and Martian exploration long before 2000, to say nothing of the paper clothes, domed cities, undersea hotels, hypersonic aircraft allowing us to take day trips to Sydney and an afternoons shopping in New York, the paperless office, the 25 hour working week and more leisure and prosperity than we could know what do with. No-one predicted that children would still be taught in 19th century schools, that the old fashioned petrol driven car would still be ubiquitous, running on broken down potholed roads.

Kaku has toured around America with various TV documentary teams in tow and not surprisingly fund-hungry researcher after fund-hungry researcher has given glowing, hyped up accounts of their research. Some, mainly in the medical field, may well come to pass, even sooner that Kaku suggests, but others will encounter major hurdles.

As an example, take the idea of chips spread all over your body searching out and warning of disease, perhaps correcting it by means of nanobots. Initially that sounds great, doesn't it, but then think whether you would want employers, the state, insurance companies, scandal searching newspapers or even your partner, to have access to this data. Even if (and it is a big if) it were technically possible to produce a hacker-proof system, who can doubt that it would become a de-facto condition of employment to 'voluntarily' allow your employer access to your computer health check, and, as nasty things always happen from time to time, the state will find some pretext to persuade people to give them the power to access this data for "our own good".

Some of the other predictions here are old favourites, such as the intelligent house, the robot domestics and the intelligent computers. Kaku doesn't quite seem to understand by the way what is meant by a conscious computer, it isn't a computer which can solve very complex facial recognition problems, it is a computer which can experience things, can actually see the sunlight, feel the rain, experience something like hunger or pain if its electricity supply goes low. As no-one has any clear idea as to how conciousness arises in living organisms this is a large task indeed.

Kaku dreams of a global society living in peace and imagines that the Internet and the globalised economy might provide this, the only trouble is that in the 1850s similar claims were made for the telegraph and in the 1900s for the aircraft. History tells what the role of the latter has been as peace maker.

Kaku is correct in seeing that there is the development of a global culture of westernised young people, the International Cosmopolitan Bourgeoisie, who, whether they are in Cairo, Accra, Mumbai, Sydney or Rio de Janeiro have far more in common with each other than the 'peasants' just 10 km down the road. However it is this division between the ICB and the traditionalist peasants which is likely to fuel some of the major conflicts of the century. Furthermore as more and more people have access to global communications and entertainment systems more and more have their what they cannot afford thrust into their face. They will want it all and want it now, and when they can't get it the world will explode.

This is not an entirely bleak prospect, for necessity is the mother of invention, and the need to deal with continuous crisis will lead to new inventions, new forms of society and new discoveries. By 2100 Kaku's predictions will look as quaint as those made a hundred years ago (you really mean that in 2011 they believed that!).

Some of these futuristic dreams, particularly those surrounding human computer interaction or biological enhancement seem like nightmares to others, challenging the very concept of humanity. Sociologist Steve Fuller is one of those, and in his book he seeks to define a social science for the twenty first century. However his prescription, that both the social and physical sciences return to their theistic roots, part of which involves his promotion of intelligent design, is unlikely to win many sympathisers. Indeed so extraordinary does this project seem to many commentators that it has usually been assumed that his defence of Intelligent Design in the Dover school trial was some sort of postmodernist provocation.

Reading this book makes me doubt this, he is really serious about his aim to denaturalise science. In this he completely fails to understand the vital importance of operational scientific naturalism which allows scientists, whatever their own personal religious or philosophical views, to pursue common projects. He quotes the example of Joseph Priestley who was a Unitarian clergyman, but when performing his experiments on gases and electricity Priestley only invoked natural principles not angels, demons or boggarts, indeed in all secular matters he was a radical materialist. I also suspect that a mixture of Catholicism and Unitarianism is unlikely to attract the approval of many theologians in either camp. - Peter Rogerson.

FRENCH PSYCHICS AND METAPSYCHICS

Sofie Lachapelle. Investigating the Supernatural: from Spirtism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychics in France 1853-1931. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Sofie Lachapelle here reviews the successive waves of interest in matters psychical in France, from what were essentially religious outlooks to the at least quasi-scientific. Unlike the rather free and easy development of spiritualism on Britain, French spiritism was organised on highly authoritarian lines by its founder, a maths teacher Denizard H. L. Revail, who adopted the name Allan Kardec because it sounded Celtic.

Revail/Kardec had total control of the movement, vetting every lecture and every article in its journal to make sure it followed the party line. Much of spiritism in Kardec's time was concerned with the philosophy dictated by the spirits rather than scientific investigation of phenomena. Another group which showed an interest in paranormal phenomena were occultists, such as the followers of Alphonse Louis Constant who took the name Eliphas Levi, thinking it a Hebrew version of his given names.

Lachapelle shows how whereas Spiritists saw these phenomena as due to the actions of discarnate spirits, occultists saw them more as evidence of preternatural human powers which had been known to the ancients. Among those who had been members of the Spiritist movement was the astronomer and science populariser Camille Flammarion who was to move away from Spiritism towards what in Britain was called psychical research. To the modern eye he was perhaps more of a folklorist collecting anecdotes, which when supplied by the right sort of 'honourable' people (something Lachapelle sees as connected to 19th French notions of honour) he believed implicitly.

It was Flammarion who introduce the notorious Eusapia Palladino to France. The author shows that towards the end of the 19th century there was a growing interest in paranormal experiences among those who would be seen as the pioneers of psychology. Here she devotes particular attention to Theodore Flournoy and his work with the medium 'Helene Smith' as well as researches into somnambulism and other "pathologies of the supernatural". She then tracks the development of more 'scientific' psychical research, in particular the role of the physician Charles Richet. Richet also worked with Palladino as well as other mediums.

One of these whose influence was to span the journey from pre-Great War psychical research to the even more quasi-scientific 'metapsychics' of the interwar period was Marthe Beraud alias Eva Carriere who became well known for the production of ectoplasm. Though there are some illustrations in this book there are none of Marthe/Eva's materialisations, perhaps because the laughter that would be induced by their ludicrously fraudulent nature would be inappropriate for an academic work.

The portrait that she paints of French 'metapsychics' and the grandly titled Insitute Metapsychics International is sadly familiar. It was racked by poisonous ideological and personality disputes, allegations and counter allegations, not helped by the fact the finance came from a convinced Spiritist. The IMI was conceived as a sort of European Union of psychical research, and fell into the sort of disputes that seem to plague the latter body, not least the suspicion that the aim was to create a French dominated superstate of psychical research. Plans to set up a permanent conference centre in Geneva proved fruitless, and the internationalist vision of the IMI was to swallowed up by the rising nationalisms of the decade.

Meanwhile in the science stakes the IMI and its obsession with mediums and ectoplasm was outflanked by the new model scientific parapsychology of J. B. Rhine in the United States, part of the general drift of the leading edge of scientific research in general from Europe to the USA.

Lachapelle has done well in producing a detailed and sympathetic history, avoiding the rather hagiographic character of some histories of British psychical research on the one hand and the sneering disdain of a Ruth Brandon on the other. -- Peter Rogerson.

STRANGE TIMES, ODD SPACES

David A. J. Seargent. Weird Astronomy: Tales of Unusual, Bizarre and Other Hard to Explain Observations. Springer, 2011.

Australian writer David Seargent may be remembered by our older readers as the author of UFOs: A Scientific Enigma (Sphere 1978), one of the few sensible books on the subject published in the wake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In this book, Sergeant, a philosopher, theologian and amateur astronomer looks at some astronomical enigmas. As one might expect the treatment is always sensible, and minus the wild claims one sometimes encounters in these topics.

He looks in turn at transient lunar phenomena and other mysteries associated with the moon, including dark objects passing across it or shadowed against it; the non-existent planet Vulcan and other anomalies associated with the sun; alleged anomalies of Mars and Venus; curious meteors and anomalous stars.

One of the more curious lunar anomalies was the sighting by a Mr Harris in 1912 of "an intensely black body about 250 miles long and 50 wide ... in the shape of a crow poised" on or above the surface. This story has been hailed as an early UFO report, but that seems rather fanciful. Past ages might, however, have regarded as a dark omen of the coming terrors.

Throughout he looks for natural explanations, and argues for a version of Ockham's Razor which proposes that the explanation involving the least complexity should be preferred; and life and intelligence being very complex,. these are among the least likely explanations. His position is rather sceptical regarding complex extraterrestrial life, as he argues that truly earth-like planets may be very rare indeed. What are usually called 'terrestrial planets' he suggests should be better called Venusian planets, Venus-like conditions being likely to be the rule rather than the exception. It is the earth which is the exception because of the conditions created by the creation and existence of the moon. -- Peter Rogerson

Lamont Wood. Out of Place in Time and Space. New Page, 2011.

This book also discusses some of the topics covered by David Seargent, including the moons of Mars, 'predicted' by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels, along with the 'monolith' on Phobos and Jupier's curious companion Iapetus. The basis of the 'Sirius Mystery' - the claims that the Dogon of Mali had knowledge of the star's binary nature before the findings of modern astronomers - is also adequately explained.

The major part of the book is largely devoted to technical and intellectual achievements that with hindsight seem to be anachronistic such as the 'computer' found in a shipwreck of the coast of the Greek island of Antikytherios, the problems involved in dating the Sphinx, Nelson's apparent use of a form of mathematical analysis that was not discovered until 1916, and the anachronistic monotheism of Akhenaton.

Wood describes some of these as 'reverse anachronisms' things which at the time seemed to be of little significance - a toy helicopter in a 15th century painting of the Virgin, or Hero of Alexandria's 'steam engine' - but only now seem anachronistic because of how they didn't subsequenty develop, and only came to be of real significance hundreds of years later.

Other chapters outline a number of literary predictions - both those intended as actual predictions, and those intended as works of fiction. A particularly poignant example was W. T. Stead's 1886 magazine article describing the sinking of an Atlantic liner, which contained many parallels with the Titanic disaster in 1912, which claimed Stead's own life.

Perhaps of particular interest to Magonia readers will be the notes on alleged depictions of UFOs in painting from the 15th century and later. Wood demonstrates clearly how these all can be explained through an understanding of the iconographic conventions of the era. There are also a number of anachronisms which were completely new to me, such as the story of the remarkable Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, who wrote a computer program just a hundred years before the first programmable computer was invented. It is also possible she invented the first computer bug!

The fact that Wood is able to explain most of these out-of-place artefacts and ideas does not in any way reduce their interest as historical oddities. An intriguing look as some byways of history. -- John Rimmer

TRUTH, FATE AND UFOS

David Godwin (compiler). True UFO Accounts from the Vaults of Fate magazine: 60 years of Close Encounters. Llewellyn Publications, 2011

For a good number of years, before it was bought by Llewellyn and turned rather New-Agey. Fate magazine was actually quite a good Fortean magazine, noted for its excellent book review section which featured the likes of Jerry Clark, J. Gordon Melton and D. Scott Rogo, and the always sensible comments of this then owner/editor Curtis Fuller. It had not always been thus, for it had been started by the rather notorious Ray Palmer.

This book brings together material from across the whole time span, though the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are rather sparse, no doubt due to the copyright laws and perhaps the unwillingness of some of the still living old hands to co-operate with the new owners. There is some very interesting early material here, for example Kenneth Arnold's report of an investigation into ghost lights in Nevada in the 1930s, with a reader's subsequent piece on similar lights in Oklahoma.

There are also early accounts of the some classic sightings, such as Father Gill and Lonnie Zamora, as well as a piece by Aime Michel, essentially an extract from his then forthcoming book Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery which features what he believed was the first genuine French encounter with a ufonaut. To the more cynical eye this 'ufonaut' looks more like a drunken motorcyclist than any creature from the far stars.

There was another side to these early days; the wild behaviour of Ray Palmer, so some pretty odd pieces are included, included a report from 'Professor' George Adamski on his UFO photographs; an article claiming that flying saucers were Martian spaceships, hailing Percival Lowell as "the expert on Mars", alongside a quote from the noted astronomer Professor Ronald Webster. Actually Ronald Webster was a pseudonym often used by Palmer himself, as was I imagine the name of the author of this article. Palmer under his own name rants on about his experiences at the hands of the US and Canadian authorities over some allegation of spying.

The more recent articles tend to the new agey, so there are a couple by women who think they are reincarnated or some such aliens - it's one up on imagining you are really the secret daughter of John F Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Even this recent material there is still some good stuff, such as our friend Nigel Watson's article showing the similarity between modern UFO beliefs and the witchcraft beliefs of earlier centuries and how both may be influenced by shamanic traditions. There are debates between Stanton Friedman and John Keel on Roswell (both wrong, but Friedman far more so) and Jim Moseley and Karl Pflock on the ETH.

Compiler Godwin regrets the domination of the ETH as an explanation for UFOs and suggests things might be much more complicated.