LIGHTS, CAMERA, PHANTOMS

Gordon Rutter. Ghosts Caught on Film 3: Photographs of the Supernatural. David and Charles, 2011.

In his book Apparitions published in 1953, the then influential psychical research G. N. M. Tyrrell produced a list of the properties of what he considered to be the perfect apparition. One of these was that apparitions could not be photographed, for the simple reason that they were not physical objects present in the environment, but hallucinations, or as we might say today virtual experiences. This had been the view of such early psychical researchers as Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore, and even F. W. H. Myers who had rather more complicated theories, never assumed that apparitions were real in the same fashion as Volkswagens.

This does not stop large numbers of people from claiming that they have photographs which show ghosts. This book, following on from those written by Melyn Willins and Jim Eaton, presents some of these; this collection being based on those submitted in response to an event 'Hauntings: The Science of Ghosts' at the Edinburgh Science Festival in 2008.

There are several explanations for so called ghost photographs. Many in the days of film were double exposures, others are created by photographers blindness, a form of scene blindness in which photographers concentrating on the task in hand fail to notice people moving into the frame; others are caused by environmental factors such as dust, insects, condensation from breath, mist and the like, or marks on the lens or film. One of the most significant causes is paradolia, the 'seeing' of faces and figures in random patches of light and shade or features in the environment.

There are examples of all of these in this book, the latter being especially well covered. Indeed in a good number of the photographs reproduced here I just couldn't see the alleged ghost at all, at least until I read the text where it was pointed out where you should see it. Sometimes I could then 'see' the figure or face or whatever, clearly an example of suggestion.

Rather more interesting are cases in which more or less clear figures can be seen in photographs in which the photographers claim that there was definitely no-one else around at the time. Of course that assumes both that the photographers are telling the truth and that their memory has not become distorted over time.

In almost all the photographs in this book, the image is only detected when the photograph is examined, it is not a case of seeing a ghost and photographing, further suggesting non-paranormal explanations. Indeed it is not clear how, if at all alleged paranormal entity or process could produce these pictures.

As earlier reviews in Magonia have shown, there is now great interest in the art world over nineteenth and twentieth century spirit imagery. These were, of course, usually the work of conscious artifice, so the notion of art still applies. Whether it can apply to the mind's perceptions of forms and faces in ambiguous features on a photograph is a more difficult to assess, at the least it might argue that art is to a certain degree in the eye of the beholder.

Perhaps for Magonia readers the most interest might lie in trying to understand what the seeing of signs and wonders in often barely visible ambiguous features in a photograph might shed on our society, and its need for "rumours of angels" in the most unlikely places.

LONDON CALLING

Simon Webb. Unearthing London; The Ancient World Beneath the Metropolis. History Press, 2011.

We tend to think of the prehistoric stone circles, henges, barrows and leys of the ritual landscape as being confined to the empty parts of the country - the 'Celtic Fringe', or the uplands of Pennines and Peak. But of course at one time all of Britain, including London, was the 'Celtic Fringe' of Europe, and this book explains how a turn in a busy street, a dip in the road, or a feature in a park topped by a band-stand might indicate a ritual alignment, a lost river valley or the remains of a burial mound.

Although London barely existed as a settlement before the founding of the Roman Londinium, the evidence of pre-Roman occupation crops up all over the region, from the Stanwell Cursus, a ritual landscape feature now buried beneath Heathrow Airport to the Celtic barrows in Greenwich Park, which were joined a couple of thousand years later by Saxon burial mounds at the same location.

This idea of continuity of use is the overriding theme of this book. Pre-Roman London seemed to have been primarily a religious centre, with the Thames and its tributaries bearing evidence of continued ritual use over millennia. The small islands between the tributary rivers, particularly where the Tyburn and the Effra flowed into the Thames, formed ritual centres where a great deal of evidence has been discovered of pre-Roman and perhaps even pre-Celtic religious practices. These islands and the surrounding marshland, collectively known as Thorney Island, are now of course at the religious and temporal centre of the nation, being the site of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

Severed heads have been found in a number of locations along the river and at sites along the course of the Walbrook which flowed adjacent to the Roman city, presumably as sacrificial offerings as part of a Celtic cult. Two thousand years later curious echoes of the cult continued. According to legend the severed head of the Celtic king Bran, is buried under the White Mount, the site of the Tower of London which itself is famous for the execution, by the severing of the head, of enemies of the Crown. In fact the last execution by the axeman at the Tower took place as late as 1747. The heads were traditionally put on display at the southern end of London Bridge marking the entrance to the City.

One of the houses which then lined the Bridge was occupied by the Keeper of the Heads, whose job it was to oversee these grisly relics and dispose of them into the Thames when they got past their beast, recalling the earlier Celtic offerings to the river. The heads of the executed were also displayed at Temple Bar, marking another entrance to the City, and were displayed there until at least 1772. They were a popular attraction, and when a 'new' head was put up, crowds arrived to view it, and local shopkeepers would hire out small telescopes so that visitors could have a closer look at the exhibit.

Not all the offerings were so grisly, and large quantities of jewellery and coins have been found in the river-beds and wells of London. (Peter Rogerson has noted what may have been a modern example of a ritual offering of treasure to a river). Of course, throwing coins into a well or fountain 'for luck' is a long-established custom, but even making grave offerings seem to have survived the centuries. When the remains of a stone Roman coffin were found in the precincts of Southwark Cathedral, a number of coins of the period were found with it. When it was opened to the public, visitors immediately started throwing coins into it again, after a gap of nearly two thousand years, to the extent that the Cathedral authorities had to put up a notice asking people not to do this as it was damaging the relic!

As revealed by this book, London is a palimpsest of cultures, religions and traditions. Just as the lost rivers of London still flow, hidden beneath our feet or visible for a few moments down a culvert in a street or in an anonymous pipe across a tube station platform, so the history and legends of London survive and are visible to those who know where to look. This book will help us do just that. - John Rimmer

MEETING THE RELATIONS

Dean Falk. The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution. University of California Press, 2011.

The interest in this book for Magonia readers will be in the discussion of how science deals with dramatic anomalies, in this case in the field of human evolution. The examples given are the discovery of Australopithecus Africanus by Raymond Dart in 1924, and the discovery of Homo Floresiensis "The Hobbit" in 2004.

At the time of Dart's discovery the vision of human evolution was conditioned by the Piltdown hoax, which led anthropologists to believe that brain expansion preceded the humanisation of the rest of the body, so they imagined a human like head on an ape like body. Australopithecus showed that bipedalism developed long before major brain expansion. Dart's discovery was essentially side lined by the British establishment for many years.

Falk, who was involved with studies of the brain cast of the Hobbit , shows that similar resistance developed over that discovery, with groups who come who probably come as close to the notorious "debunkers" as has arisen in mainstream science.

The debunkers argue that the Hobbit was not an ancient hominid but a modern human with some kind of pathology, possibly microcephaly. These views tend to held against the evidence, and in at least one case by what looks like false citation. Falk argues that similar resistance greeted the discovery of Neanderthal man in the 1850s and Homo Erectus in the 1890s.

However, I rather think times have changed, it took nearly forty years for Australopithecus to be regarded as a possible human ancestor, with the Hobbit however, the debunkers are actually in a small minority, and it has been featured as a new species in virtually all the books written on human evolution in recent years. 

This is despite the fact that the Hobbit is probably the most radical scientific anomaly for many years, the presence of a creature with a chimp sized brain, walking upright and apparently making tool, as recently as 18,000 years ago was totally outside anyone's vision of human evolution, and as Falk shows, as time goes on the species gets more anomalistic, yet the majority view is not to suppress or debunk anomalies.

Rather, as with the recent case of neutrinos apparently travelling faster than light, there are at least respectful hearings, and even the sceptics rather hope they are wrong. The difference between these types of radical anomaly and those associated with the paranormal and Fortean topics, is that the former actually have evidence, whether in the form of hard physical evidence, as in the case of the Hobbit, or analysable and potentially replicable scientific results and procedures.

It should be noted that contrary to what is often thought today the reaction to the claims of parapsychologists was not one of instant and immediate dismissal, but attempts at replication. It was only when the most impressive apparent replication, that of Samuel Soal, was discredited, that parapsychology slid dramatically downhill. - Peter Rogerson

SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW

Euan Cameron. Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason and Religion 1250-1750. Oxford University Press, 2011

William J. Birnes and Joel Martin. The Haunting of Twentieth Century America: Tom Doherty Associates, 2011

Claude Lecouteux. Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and Ghostly Processions of the Undead. Inner Traditions, 2011.

Euan Cameron notes in his introduction that superstition is a tricky concept, but as the definitions in the online Oxford Dictionary ("unreasoning awe or fear of something unknown, mysterious or imaginary especially in connection with religion; religious belief or practice founded on ignorance; more particularly an irrational religious belief or practice, a tenet, scruple or practice founded on fear and ignorance") show it revolves around the ideas of false religious belief and practice.

For the theologians of the late medieval and early modern period, superstition was essentially the continuing practices of folk religion and folk magic (charms, divinations, unorthodox interpretations of Christian practices etc.), which were even then seen as hangovers from the pre-Christian past, and the beliefs in a vast range of petty supernaturals such as fairies and the like, which were regarded as being essentially morally neutral.

Cameron introduces his book by painting a general picture of life in the medieval period and the crises which led to superstitious beliefs and activity; illness, injury death, dearth, loss, sex, birth, madness etc., the fundamental insecurities of life in the pre-modern period. He then undertakes his major survey of the literature on superstition; this literature giving us a glimpse, through a glass darkly, of the actual beliefs of the masses in this period and traces the various campaigns waged by the professional religious against this folk belief, and the many disputations they held among themselves as to what constituted unorthodox superstition.

The major argument deployed was that all such beliefs and practices were delusions of the devil. The real spiritual world was divided into the wholly good angels and the wholly evil demons, with no middle ground in between, and that all non approved religious or magical practices, however apparently benign, such as charms for healing and protection, were essentially diabolical. The line between what was orthodox and what was superstition remained a debatable land, one which rival scholastic theologians could engage in vigorous debates over.

With the arrival of Protestantism, the line was drawn sharper, Protestant theologians ascribed much Catholic belief, including the power of the saints, the nature of the mass, the role of relics and imagery into the realm of superstition. With the Protestant abolition of purgatory, ghosts too were handed over to the devil, and belief in them became diabolical superstition. The appearance of the ghost in Hamlet - "spirit of health or goblin damned" - expresses the ambiguities that many must have felt at this time, with Protestant, Catholic and folkloric concepts all jostling for expression.

If Protestants derided Catholics for superstition, Catholic writers derided Protestantism for superstition and heresy in turn. There were however, Cameron argues, many ideas they could agree on, or where disputes crossed sectarian lines. These included the nature of spirits, whether angelic or demonic, and the general consensus was that they were pure disembodied spirit or intellect. There was perhaps rather less agreement on the exact powers of the devil, though it would seem that the consensus, based on theology and Aristotelian philosophy was that the devil could not effect fundamental changes in the physical world, e.g. by levitating people or turning them into animals, though he was capable of baffling the senses in order to give the illusion that these things had happened.

Cameron argues that this orthodox view limiting the powers of the devil, claiming for example that witches rides were illusory, came under challenge from the witch hunters, who tended to play up the dark powers.

A major change occurred among the intellectual elite starting in the late 17th century. There was a polarisation - on the one hand there were philosophers like Hobbes and Becker who essentially argued that all belief in supernatural creatures and forces other than God himself was superstition; there were no devils nor witches, nor angles and all superstitious beliefs and practices were no longer possibly effective but demonic, but wholly delusory. On the other there were those such as Henry Moore and Joseph Glanville who turned to the very folk beliefs that previous generations of Christian anti-superstition activists had being trying to suppress as evidences for a supernatural world. Cameron argues that they turned not to the theological literature of superstition, but to the unregulated materials of the witch trials.

He also makes an even more important point, as the new sciences demolished the old Aristotelian world view, and eroded the power of religious dogma, they opened up new possibilities. The "anti saduccee" campaigners such as Moore, Glanville, Wesley (and Robert Kirk who should also have been mentioned here) turned to the new empirical philosophy to argue for the existence and powers of supernatural forces. Others, such as Aubrey and generations of folklorists following him, have harvested such stories as 'pagan survivals' and as examples of a vanishing age, worthy of preservation.

Cameron ends his book at 1750, with just a short afterword, where it is clear that he is quite unfamiliar with the topics discussed in Magonia. Where he so familiar he would see that the old beliefs and the old debates about them go on. Psychical Researchers considered More and Glanville to be their spiritual ancestors, as "the first psychical researchers", though their emphasis on witchcraft is usually abandoned. With the State no longer able to regulate religion, the old folk beliefs could flourish, become urbanised and professionalised.

Even the old theological campaign to mark out all such folk beliefs and practices as the work of the devil continues among evangelical and other conservative Christians, who are happy to label anything from astrology to tarot cards as snares of the devil and the first steps into entry into the Church of Satan. This has a slightly secularised equivalent in the alien abduction movement as promoted by the late Budd Hopkins and his confreres, in which all sorts of dreams, visions and spiritual encounters are proclaimed to be the illusions of the demonic greys, who are awarded powers of such vastness as would have appalled the medieval writers, who would no doubt have regarded granting such powers to the devil as the rankest heresy.

This is a major scholarly work, with over 100 pages of notes, and a large bibliography. It is not one to be read lightly, and probably its main readership will be among students of theology and late medieval and early modern history, but a wider readership might benefit from the effort.

If anyone doubted that the folk beliefs and practices that the clerical anti-superstition campaigners railed against are still with us, they could consult the book by Birnes and Martin, wherein all sorts of wonders are recounted. Many would have been familiar to More and Glanville, in content and in style. Herein are tales of ghosts and hauntings, astrology, dreams and premonitions, folk healing, based on the kinds of empirical enquiry used by the latter. Like them these authors mine not scholarly works, but the modern folklore of the paperback and the journalistic interview. It also shares with More and Glanville the entirely uncritical nature of the compilation, as witness for example the inclusion of nonsense about the alleged Nazi secret weapon 'The Bell' or the Philadelphia experiment/Allende letters.

These are indications that such compilations are produced less to provide evidences to convince the Sadducees (or Pelicanists as they are now called) but as forms of entertainment, at the same level of credibility and care for truth as the celebrity gossip which dominates much of what are rather laughably miscalled 'newspapers'.

Despite this, we can still read between the lines to sense the continuation of traditions. Surely Edgar Cayce for example was in fact very much in the tradition of the village cunning man, a folk healer cum prophet who communed with the supernatural realm while in altered states of consciousness. Perhaps the only novel idea introduced in the folk paranormal in the twentieth century has been that of reincarnation, imported from India via Theosophy.

One of the superstitions that the religious authorities of the medieval and early modern period had to contend with, and sought to demonize, was that of the ghostly procession, the subject of Claude Lecouteux's book (first published in France in 1999). The central theme of this belief was, as he puts it, "During the long winter nights a strange and unidentified troop could be heard passing outside, over the land or through the air. Anyone caught by surprise in the open fields or depths of the woods saw a bizarre procession of foot soldiers and knights, some covered in blood and others carrying their heads beneath their arms".

Lecouteux argues that this is a belief that takes "a thousand and one forms" and goes back into the depths of history, and he then seeks to trace that history and the mutations of the tale, noting how, indeed, clerical and other Christian writers have altered the stories to suite theological orthodoxy and concerns.

One early form of the belief in the night host was that of the "ladies of the night", a belief that seems to have been held by women across much of Europe in the early middle ages, that when they appeared to be asleep in their bed's, they or their spiritual doubles went in and out of neighbours' houses in processions led by a a sort of goddess figure variously named as Holda, Diana or Herodias.

This secret night procession is one of a number of permutations of what one might call the secret night journey or more generally the secret night adventure, the idea, based on dreams and hypnogogic visions, that in the night, when apparently asleep, individuals take part in various fantastic adventures, such as attending witches sabbats, or in more modern times attending black masses, making spiritual journeys to meet Himalayan masters, or being abducted by UFOs.

The author uses this as the springboard for a wide ranging discussion of the various armies of the night. These include the legions of the demons, the troops of the dead, phantom armies, demonic beasts etc. More specific motifs associated with the hunt are the diabolical huntsman who hunts down and abducts the souls (and sometimes bodies and souls) of sinners, the wild huntsman a gigantic figure who hunts down fairies and dwarfs and the cursed huntsman who must hunt for ever without rest. These motifs coalesce, separate and coalesce again in different permutations.

One of the core stories that develops is that of King Herla, the British king who is invited to a wedding feast of a dwarf, when he returns he and his retinue find centuries have passed, and if they dismount from their horses they fall to dust, so must ride for ever. In more Christian versions of the eternal riders, the procession is a sort of mobile purgatory, in which the participants are tortured in various ways appropriate to their sins.

Lecouteux traces the developments and turns of this myth through the writings of medieval and early modern chroniclers, chiefly from France, Germany and Scandinavia, with some references to further afield. This aspect is very thorough, but the absence of much material from Britain and Ireland is notable, with exception of Herla and a brief mention of Herne the Hunter. Though he does note the motif of the phantom host depositing a human child or limb, and a couple of examples of people being transported by the host, he does not seem to be aware of the Highland sluagh where these motifs are common, and persist into modern times. The sluagh is presumably the basis of the ballad of Tam Lin, who is rescued from the fairy host by his lover.

He is rather skeptical of the claim that the wild hunt, or rather its leader, given names such as Hennequin or Hellequin, was descended from Odin, and suggests rather that it might have originated in memories and myths of warrior fraternities.

The Hunt lived on in folklore well into the 19th century, with new motifs added, as Lecouteux notes, the riders and their accoutrements could be replaced by phantom carriages propelled by demonic (sometimes headless) horses. The legends of phantom ships may also have developed from notions of the host of the dead. One very dark motif of the hunt not discussed here is that in which the prey of the phantom hunt were the souls of unbaptised, presumably still-born, babies.

The last appearance of the classical wild hunt may well have been in the song Ghost Riders in the Sky written by Stan Jones in 1948, which was often played on the radio in the 1950s and 1960s, and is said to have been based on a cowboy legend, here damned cowboys and demonic cattle replace the hounds. In other, dimmer mutations it lives on. The sluagh seem to survive in Latin American stories of people being teleported by strange clouds, the greys of the alien abduction stories are modern fairy folk, and like them have much of the dead about them, Hellequin becomes the comic figure harlequin and lived on in pantomime and Pierrot shows, a reminder of the far from fay origins of many fairy stories.

Despite Lecouteux's three fold typology, I suspect a simpler division is between that of the aerial host, presumably founded on storms, storm clouds, flocks of migrating birds, the aurora etc., and the troop of the dead. The latter often complete with hangers-on, carts and the like, suggests more the traumas of real life conflict, and the dispirited retreats of defeated armies and civilian refugees from conflict zones. In that sense the host of the dead can be seen on our television screens almost any night.

These three books remind us that the past lives on in a landscape haunted by dreams and memes. -- Peter Rogerson.

A MIXED BAG OF HAUNTINGS

Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley (editors), Exposed, Uncovered, and Declassified: Ghosts, Spirits, and Hauntings, New Page Books, 2011.

This is a collection of ten essays, most of which could benefit from concentrating more on the details of strange experiences and how they are investigated and less on indulging in verbose and often incoherent speculation

Andrew Nichols, on haunted houses, notes that there are three major theories to account for alleged hauntings, these being the psychological theory, the spiritistic theory and the parapsychological theory. Sceptics will of course favour psychological explanations and Nichols gives examples where these have successfully solved cases of alleged hauntings. One example involved a mother and daughter hearing mysterious footsteps at night, which stopped outside the daughter's bedroom. It was also said that previous occupants had never stayed in the house for long because they had had similar experiences. Investigations showed, however, that previous occupants had stayed for quite long periods, and that the mysterious noises were caused by the wooden flooring expanding when the central heating system switched on in the evenings.

In his essay about mediumship, Raymond Buckland displays quite breathtaking credulity. For instance, he even describes how the Fox sisters, living in Hydesville, New York, became famous in 1848 for their "spirit rapping", allegedly a means of communication with the deceased. He makes no mention of the fact that Margaret Fox confessed to deception and, in 1888, demonstrated how the sounds were produced before a large audience. He is equally credulous about spirit photographers, including William H. Mumler (1832-1884), who took portraits of people in which the ghosts of deceased relations appeared. Other photographers pointed out that these were merely double exposures, and Mumler's career collapsed after he was tried for fraud (but acquitted). Buckland doesn't mention this and thus deceives the casual reader. He remarks that these days it is easy to fake a photograph of a ghost, but "there are many authentic ones still being taken". How one picks out the authentic ones is, of course, not discussed.

Another writer who discusses photographs is Joshua P. Warren, who publishes a few pictures of ghosts, of the type familiar to readers of Fortean Times and known as simulacra. The rest of his essay discusses the "bio-energy field" and Kirlian photography, then rambles on vaguely about ghosts and quantum theory.

Micah A. Hanks, one of the more thoughtful writers on psychic experiences, discusses the relationship between such experiences and mental illness, and concludes that study of "the inner workings of the human mind" could help us to understand what we call the supernatural.

There is the now inevitable contribution from Nick Redfern, whose writings are so prolific that he must work for at least 24 hours a day. He gives us an interesting account of the monsters of folklore, and discusses the belief held by some people that the restless dead appear to the living, not as they appeared in life, but as monsters, such as werewolves and Bigfoot. He points out that these apparitions are not flesh-and-blood creatures, as they often haunt areas where there is insufficient food for them. His concluding remarks, which end by suggesting that they "may collectively represent our absolute nightmare come true", seem a bit tongue-in-cheek and, unlike some contributors to this book, he does not try to bully his readers into accepting highly speculative ideas as established facts. -- John Harney

VISITING THE MAGONIA ARCHIVE

I have now put a complete author index to the Magonia Magazine archive on this site. It can be reached via the contents tab above.

"BANDITRY AND THE DISTRESS OF NATIONS"

Jane Shaw. Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers. Jonathan Cape, 2011.

British readers who are old enough may remember newspaper adverts back in the 1960s and 1970s which read something like "Crime, banditry and the distress of nations will increase until the bishops open Joanna Southcott's box". These strange adverts were the work of the Panacea Society, the subject of this book.

The Panacea Society were one sect of the followers of Joanna Southcott (1750-1814) who had proclaimed herself "The woman clothed with the sun" in the Revelation of St John, and had died after not giving birth to the expected Messiah, Shiloh. Despite this disappointment groups of followers of Joanna continued to operate throughout the 19th century.

Odd things happen in libraries, and lives have been known to be changed by them, but few things could have been odder and few lives more changed than that of Mabel Andrews Baltrop when she went to Bedford Library on the 9th September 1914, for it was there that a library assistant handed her a little blue pamphlet about Joanna and the Southcottians. Mable, the widow of a Church of England clergyman was enthralled, for it seemed to answer her spiritual longings. Not only did she become a convinced Southcottian, she was over the next few years to set up her own Southcottian organisation, which eventually became the Panacea Society, but was within five years to discover that she herself was none other than the expected Shiloh, the daughter of God. At a rather later date she revealed that her late husband was actually the second coming of Jesus in his role as priest.

She and several women friends formed a religious community in Bedford, where she presided as the 8th prophet, hence the name Octavia.

It is this community that Jane Shaw, an Anglican priest and historian of religion, came across by accident when she read about the sale of some of its assets in 2001 and visited the community and its remaining members. She was allowed full access to their archives and was able for the first time to tell their story in this sympathetic but by no means uncritical book, which combines scholarship with an accessible style and most welcome absence of social science jargon.

We have heard the slogan "the personal is the political"; for the Panaceans the personal was not just political, it was theological, every detail of the daily lives of this group of mainly women, their loves, jealousies and petty quarrels were all given cosmic significance. Though members could do certain things in the general community, this was in many ways as closed and inward looking as any convent, indeed many ways more so.

Radical religious groups are often thought of as dangerously subversive of the established order, nothing could be further from the truth with the Panacea Society. Mabel erected bourgeois respectability and the nuances of the English class system into divine commands. Their ideology was one of Die Hard Toryism with a penchant for absolute monarchy accompanied by a total loathing of the Labour Party, trade unions and the "Bolsheviks". They replicated the English class system of the time in their community, working class members being reduced to the role of domestic servants and not allowed to attend chapel with the middle class members.

This was in fact a claustrophobic utopia, and one hedged around with all sorts of petty rules and restrictions, the more so when one of the members Emily Goodwin started to channel God the Mother. Confessions and a prohibition on sexual activity added to the tension. One can see in this community the development of a freelance totalitarian society, with its litany of thought crimes. Mabel/Octavia disapproved of voting in outside elections, so every general election the members reacclaimed her their leader. Commanded by The Divine Mother members signed a sheet of paper which read "In conformity with this command, I definitely sign my name to my desire to elect Octavia to continue the temporal and visible rule in the kingdom coming on earth until such time as a more definite Divine Rule comes into operation, and I quite understand that this election includes implicit obedience to the commands of the Divine Mother" (p259). Despots of the world eat your heart out. Needless to say when the no voting rule was relaxed so that members could vote for Stanley Baldwin the Tory leader to fight the Bolshies, there was the expected 100% turnout and 100% for Mr B.

Like many totalitarian religious and political movements, the Panaceans were down on sex, the explicit reason usually given is that sex is part of the fallen world, but the implicit reason is that private devotions, passions and loyalties detract from the exclusive love and loyalty which should be shown to the Great Leader. It was not surprising then that when one of the founding members Kate Firth, once Mable's best friend, fell in love with a new male member she was subjected to all sorts of harassment and finally jumped ship along with her lover. The rules were everything.

Jane Shaw shows how, like many would-be messiahs and prophets, Mable had serious mental health issues, and was in mental hospitals on more than one occasion. Jane Shaw suggests that she had obsessive compulsive disorder, she seems to have been definitely agoraphobic, being fearful of going more than a few yards from her home, and her periods of intense depression alternating with those of great activity and self assurance suggest some form of bipolar disorder.

Like many such leaders, Mable/Octavia's children suffered from neglect, her two surviving sons moved across oceans to escape from her, while her daughter, who inherited her depressions but nothing of her charismatic personality, was stuck in the little closed community until she died. It is this, along with the organisations racism, snobbery and obsessive control, which suggests that "delightful English eccentricity" is not always delightful.

There is much of interest in this book, the relationship between mental illness and visionary experience, the ability of charismatic individuals to convince others of the most improbable claims, the ease into which respectable 'normal' people fell into a totalitarian order, the often incompatibility between various aspects of people's beliefs and lives, in this case the disjunction between what was clearly a radical 'feminist' theology, with the utter conventionality of the rest of the members' beliefs, and as a reminder just how strange the inter-war years were. -- Peter Rogerson.

SCANDAL OF KABBALAH

Yaacob Dweck. The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice. Princeton University Press, 2011.

After Spain and Portugal expelled the Jews, north Italy, and in particular Venice, became a major centre for Judaism. Among the prominent Venetian rabbis of this period was Leon Modena (1571-1648), who wrote an autobiography at a time when that was an unusual thing to do, so that a great deal is known about him. This book is not so much about his life, however, as a biography of his best-known work, Ari Nohem, ‘A Roaring Lion’.

This was dedicated to his leading student, Joseph Hamiz, and intended “as a cure for Hamiz’s kabbalistic tendencies.” It was, accordingly, an attack upon the Kabbalah, the mystical system which dominated Judaic thought in the late mediaeval and early modern eras.

Like most critics of Kabbalah, before and since, he concentrated upon the question of the authorship of the Zohar, by far the best-known kabbalistic treatise. The Zohar purports to be the work of Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai and his disciples in the early second century.

One of Modena’s principle arguments against this book, and the Kabbalah generally, was that in fact it was written by Rabbi Moses de Leon in the late thirteenth century. As to this, it must be said that probably the majority of the world’s religious scriptures are pseudepigraphic, that is, they were written by someone other and later than the ostensible author, quite apart from those books supposed to have been composed by God, who merely dictated it to some mortal as one would to a secretary. But it is debatable whether this invalidates these writings.

Gershom Scholem, who in the 1940s showed conclusively that the Zohar was indeed written by Moses de Leon in the 1280s, nevertheless considered the book to be a masterpiece. It would not, indeed, be inherently illogical to believe that it was really by Simeon ben Yohai, but that it contents are a load of nonsense. At the same time Modena defended Maimonides, the founder of philosophical Judaism, by attacking those (mostly Kabbalists) who had attacked Maimonides. He refused to believe in gilgul, the transmigration of souls, now more commonly referred to as reincarnation. Finally, he complained that belief in the Kabbalah might encourage Jews to convert to Christianity, which, indeed, some Christian Kabbalists expected to happen precisely because they had kabbalistic arguments that Jesus was God.

A widespread but highly unlikely story told by Kabbalists was that Maimonides had himself embraced Kabbalah before he died. Modena, fearing that something similar could happen to himself, ended his treatise with a warning not to fabricate a story that he had accepted, at the end of his life, the transmigration of souls; but nevertheless at least two copyists did just that. It is reminiscent of Charles Darwin’s supposed deathbed repentance.

Dweck’s Epilogue is entitled ‘History of a Failure’, since the addressee, Hamiz, remained a committed Kabbalist, wrote a commentary on the Zohar, practised divination, and collected kabbalistic commentaries upon Maimonides rather than reading his original works themselves. Yet Ari Nohem, which was finally printed in 1840, two centuries after its composition, was influential on the rise of Jewish rationalism in the nineteenth century. This, as exemplified by Maimonides, appeared to be the undisputed victor. Bernhard Pick could begin his 1913 book on the subject with the words “the Cabala belongs to the past”.

That of course is no longer the case; and it is interesting to notice that today’s Kabbalah schools tend to accept Simeon ben Yohai as the author of the Zohar.

This is very much an academic book: the list of ‘Works Cited’ occupies 44 pages, this for a work itself only 235 pages, and it includes manuscripts in libraries in seven different countries. It is also aimed at academics: no attempt is made to explain the doctrines of the Zohar or of Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed – neither of them easy to understand – apparently because the reader is assumed to be familiar with them already. -- Gareth Medway.

TERRORS OF HISTORY

Teofilo F Ruiz. The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization. Princeton University Press, 2011

This seems an apposite book for the times we live in, as the spectre of the final crisis of capitalism looms ever larger. Ruiz discusses the various reactions to the 'terror of history', a phrase said by the 'historian of religion' Mircea Eliade to describe not just the grand catastrophes but also the quotidian mortality of everyday life in the West.

Ruiz posits three reactions, one is the religious one, perhaps more specifically the apocalyptic religious vision which seeks to end the processes of history, indeed the organic round of birth, life and death itself and replace it with static 'perfect' world either on earth or some other worldly realm. Other reactions include the plunging into the world of the senses especially sensory excess, often using mind altering substances. The third reaction he classes as "immersing oneself in beauty", which he perhaps interprets perhaps too narrowly as the appreciation of fine art etc., surely the preserve of only the rich, but we might also extend to the scientists "beauty of equations" or the appreciation of deep time and space and the order of the natural universe.

Perhaps there is less difference in practice between the three paths that Ruiz enumerates, religion, sensory overload and 'beauty' all involve the production of altered states of consciousness which transcend the mundane world.

The value of this book is less in its actual historical discussions which at times are rather superficial, but its illumination of many activities in the modern world, from the Arab Spring to British binge drinking and the communitas of riots. We can also see this attempt to escape the terror of history by means of utopian political ideologies, or more banally the belief that the historical processes can stopped in their tracks, such as in Francis Fukuyama's notion that history had ended with the permanent victory of liberal capitalism or Gordon Brown's belief he had halted the historical cycle of boom and bust. I rather suspect that conspiracy theories also represent an attempt to escape this 'terror of history', holding out the vision that somehow the historical process is under somebody's control, even if it is a malign control.

Thomas Robisheaux. The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German village. W. W. Norton, 2009

Thomas Robisheux's 'microhistory' brings to life the protagonists in one of the last witch trials in Germany. In February 1672, Anna Schmeig, the miller's wife of the tiny hamlet of Hurden is accused of poisoning cakes that her daughter Eva gave to friend who had just given birth. The family portraits that come out of this book look surprisingly modern. The Schmeigs are what today would be called a dysfunctional family. Anna likes the booze rather too much and especially when drunk has a foul temper and is much given to curses and threats. Daughter Eva was intended to make a useful marriage with the son of a neighbouring miller, but has gone and got pregnant by local 'bad boy' Philip Kustner and had to marry him. Mummy does not approve. Eva is more than a little put out by her mothers' swearing and drinking.

These are clearly the sort of people who today would feature on shows like Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle. As Anna was also mean, and millers and their wives had, in general, a bad reputation, they may have got the reputation of being neighbours from hell. While today that term is used metaphorically, in the 17th century it could be meant very literally, the sorts of people who get ASBOs today, in those days got accused of witchcraft.

Robisheux shows how gossip circulates, and allegations of foul play develop. As he traces the activities of various court officials to get to grips with the situation, what starts out as an almost modern looking murder investigation turns into something else. That is the accusation of witchcraft, and the descent of the legal process into an Orwellian nightmare. In processes which in many ways prefigure the forced confessions and show trials of latter day totalitarian states, Anna has her words twisted and her motives constantly impugned. As in the Springer/Kyle type shows, mother and daughter end up shouting abuse and accusations at each other, only in this case the outcome for the looser (Anna) is death, by being torn by red hot pincers and then strangled (a mercy from the kind ruler) and burned at the stake. -- Peter Rogerson