ANIMAL MAGIC

Paul A. Trout. Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination. Prometheus Books, 2011.

Pat Shipman. The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human. W. W. Norton, 2011.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch !
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

This verse from Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass summarise the thesis of Paul Trout’s book: the origins of language and religion in our ancestors’ fear and awe of terrible predators.

In his opening chapters Trout recounts the various giant predators our Palaeolithic ancestors had to content with from sabre toothed tigers, huge lizards, cave bears, giant bears and all sorts of other things that even the most fervent cryptozoologist would not wish to see surviving in remote places. He argues that much of our species’ history we were less the mighty hunter than often the defenceless prey. Theirs was a world in which the terror induced by powerful predators was ubiquitous, a terror the echoes of which he traces in the mythology of many peoples, quoting many examples.

He argues that the origins of language will have been in warnings about predators and how to avoid them, and in the mimetic performances needed to warn the young of their dangers. Perhaps it was women raising the young who first constructed languages.

The first gods, he argues were these great predatory animals, the lions, leopards, jaguars, crocodiles and such like; the terrible beasts of the earth, water and air.

They are the origins of the first true great fear, that of being torn to pieces, devoured and excreted by wild beasts, the sights and sounds of prey being thus torn apart and consumed being a matter of common experience. This experience is recapitulated by the visionary experiences of the shaman, wherein he or she is devoured, disembowelled then reassembled, reborn; and initiatory rituals for the young wherein the elders take on the role of the predators with appropriate masks. These experiences mimic the fear of being devoured and the ecstasy of survival.

The encounters with these awesome beasts are not only terrifying, the hormonal changes produced by the activation of the fight/flight response are also thrilling.

He is particularly persuasive in his argument that fear and awe of predators is the foundation of sacrifice, one member of the group is sacrificed to the predator so it may be satiated and the rest of the group may be saved.

A very important point that Trout makes is that human beings had to develop strategies for detecting and dealing with predators. One is what he calls an Agency Detection Device, sensing a predator behind any ambiguous stimuli, the second is a Theory of Mind Mechanism attributes that agency with human like feelings, desires and intentions. Thus even the absence of real predators we imagine invisible ones, 'spirits' and the like. These mechanisms are the ones which invest all sorts of natural phenomena with human like minds.

Pat Shipman also tracks the relationships between early humans and animals, and sees their interaction, along with the development of tools, as transforming human consciousness and aiding the development of language. Shipman takes what Trout might see as a more conventional course, that of concentrating on the role of humans as predators rather than prey, forcing their attention ever deeper onto the animals around them, particularly prey animals. Shipman also tracks the role of domestication, starting with the wolf, which she tracks back much further than has been usually supposed, perhaps back 100,000 rather than 10,000 years.

This suggests an important modifier of Trout’s thesis, predators are not just sources of fear and awe to our ancestors, but providers and guides. Humans tracked powerful predators in order to scavenge on the kill, later as they become more and more accomplished hunters they increasing admire the other predators, seek to learn their secrets, to emulate them. In this thesis the predator is not just an enemy but a dangerous, edgy ally.

The idea of invisible predators may lead to another intellectual leap, that of seeing all the really existing physical predators as manifestations or avatars of some archetypal cosmic Universal Predator. This predator becomes manifest not only in specific predatory animals but in the totality of wild nature, seen as the giver and taker of life.

For the hunters sacrifice to the “Universal Predator” is not simply to prevent him/her taking humans, but to prevent him/her taking too much of the game that humans also depend upon The “Universal Predator” is seen as master/mistress of the game. If the game animals are scarce it is because the Great Predator has taken them: the storms, floods, droughts and dearths are its rage. The awe and trembling once felt before a flesh and blood predator is now a fear and awe of the totality of wild nature and the One Circle of creation, destruction and recreation. This awe is what the Greeks called panic, fear of the god Pan, echoes of which are still to be found as forest and mountain terrors.

The predators of the imagination still haunt us, almost any large puddle can be seen as the home of a lake monster, the devouring water itself being seen as a predatory persona. We see beasts from the air like mothman or the chupacabra. Phantom big cats stalk the green fields of England. Once fear of the dead may have been occasioned by dead bodies attracting dangerous predators, now the dead are seen as predators, whether the physical bodies of zombies and vampires (zombies are just seen as walking hunger, vampires suck out the blood of their victims) or the more ethereal presences of ghosts, who bring something of the awesome terror of the wilderness into the settled home. The strange presences felt during sleep paralysis with their whispering noises echo predators stalking in the night.

Our pet cats and dogs are liminal creatures, the predators that we imagine we have domesticated but whose ultimate wildness we can never conquer. Call our cat by whatever human or cute name we can think of, one day they will bring a living screaming disembowelled bird or mouse as a present to remind you of what they really are. The dog is still a wolf, the predator we have had the most intimate and ambiguous relationship with. We think we have tamed it, but not a year goes by without Rover turning round and maiming or killing a child. The wolf/dog is par excellence the liminal creature, guardian of the boundary between habitat and wilderness, participating in both. With the wolf/dog we can be hunter and hunted. Like the phantom felines, phantom black dogs dog the lanes of England, in some folklore turning easily into the true, protean avatar of the Universal Predator.

In an age of the machine, where the only predator that most urban people have to fear is ourselves, it is not surprising that the phantom predators of our age are dominated by sacral or daemonic machines, the UFOs, nor that they first appeared in force after the war in which humans reached the apotheosis of their demonic predatory activity. The old image of the initiate being swallowed, dismembered and reconstructed in the maw of the predator becomes an image of being abducted by predatory aliens and subject to “medical experiments” by greys with the vast eyes of the Universal Predator.

Trout in his own final chapter argues that the modern predators are those portrayed in the range of science fiction and slasher movies, and in the reactions of the audiences. This brings us back to the themes of Monsters in America reviewed HERE. – Peter Rogerson.

UNDERGROUND, OVERGROUND, WOMBLING FREE!

Tom Bolton. London's Lost Rivers, A Walker's Guide. Strange Attractor Press, 2011.

Mark Mason. Walk the Lines, The London Underground, Overground. Random House Books, 2011.

At first sight these two titles might seem to have little in common with the sort of topics we discuss at Magonia. Both are guide books describing the authors' walks through and around London - Bolton's book is specifically a guidebook, Mason's one by implication. Where I think they come into the field of Magonian interests is the way in which they both reveal what is hidden behind the mundane facade of streets and buildings. Both can be seen as examples of 'psychogeography', although I suspect both authors would vigorously challenge the use of that word (Mason certainly would, I've heard him do so!).

Magonia comments on "vision and belief" and we try to demonstrate the way that we perceive our surroundings is a product not just of our senses, but also our memories, our emotions and our personal visions and beliefs. Sometimes these visions conform to a consensus reality, other times they are deeply personal and cannot be challenged by an 'external' reality. The witness has seen an extraplanetary craft, an alien, a ghost, a coherent political philosophy, and nothing is going to convince them otherwise.

Similarly the images we construct of our surroundings may be just as rigid. We create mental maps that control our movements - "I never go to X, it's much too far away", when in fact it's far closer than Y, where we go every week to see our old grannie. But we have no reason to go to X, so psychologically it is far away, even if it's just twenty minutes on a frequent bus service.

Both these books set out to break away from that rigidity of thought by looking at the familiar in unfamilar ways. Even if you don't live in London, everybody knows the London Transport Underground diagram. 'Diagram', that's the correct technical term, and it's important because it's not a 'map', it's a type of representation of place and space that is now used for describing virtually every underground, subway, metro, tram or bus system in the world. But its relationship to 'consensus reality' is fragile. I'm sure many people have been in an unfamiliar city and tried to navigate by the equivalent local diagram, to find that after a journey involving a complcated change of lines we finished up just a short walk from our starting place. On one of my first trips to London I made the classic naive tourist's mistake of travelling from Queensway to Bayswater via Notting Hill Gate, coming out of Bayswater Station and looking down the road and seeing the familiar London Transport sign over Queensway Station, less than 200 yards away.

Mason subverts the tube diagram by walking along each line, and calling at every station on each route. In doing this he discovers a new topography of Greater London, replacing Harry Beck's calm linear grid and evenly spaced stations with a random journey that reverses the convention that what is below ground is hidden, what is above ground is open to all. The names on the tube maps are known, public, commonplace - North Wembly, East Action, Southfields, West Ham, the colour of the lines are familiar. But it's the above-ground bits, the suburban closes, the industrial estates, the tower blocks, the liminal semi-rural fringes, that are hidden more than any of the clearly-marked subterranian tunnel.

Consensus topography is also challenged by London's other underground, the network of lost, forgotten and mislaid rivers that we are led along in Tom Bolton's volume. These have no convenient multi-coloured maps pasted on station walls or tucked away in the back pages of pocket diaries. These have to be sought out, their presence detected through a slight dip in a road, a sound of rushing water from a manhole, an old street name or a road that meanders away from the rigid grid of a nineteenth century development.

Unlike the Underground, cut through newly delved earth, the rivers gradually shrank away, diverted into culverts and sewers, or creeping unseen in an overgrown channel behind suburban gardens, emerging occasionally as an ornamental pond in a municipal park. But imprisoned as they are they still define what lies above them. Between Brixton and Vauxhall stations there is nothing on the surface which indicates that thousands of people are travelling beneath on the Victoria Line. But the River Effra, passing unnoticed through the same locations, still influences what we experience above ground, explaining the straightness of Brixton Road and the reason why the Oval Gricket Ground is an oval. Those awkward steps in the middle of the pedestrian subway at the Croydon Flyover are there because an invisible river is still making itself felt.

There is the curious Neckinger, which seems to flow in a semi-circle from the Thames and back into the Thames, and the Wandle, once the most industrialised river in England, now a series of nature reserves. There is the Walbrook which flows from the poverty of the council estates of Hackney, beneath the riches of the vaults of the Bank of England, past the arcane mysteries of the Roman Temple of Mithras, emerging at Walbrook Wharf on the Thames, where rubbish barges are loaded and sent off to the splendidly-named Mucking Marshes in Essex. Make whatever analogies you may of that!

These books describe a world where the public space is hidden in an abstract diagram, where the hidden streams define the public space, a world where your view of reality can be redefined by an apparently random walk following a line on a map. Certainly a world suitable for Magonians. -- John Rimmer.

UFOS AND BEYOND

Jeffrey Bennett, Beyond UFOs: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and its Astonishing Implications for Our Future, Princeton University Press, 2011.

This book is mainly about possibilities rather than actualities, as we have no hard evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life. We do, however, have plenty of scientific data which indicate that some forms of life similar to that here on Earth could exist on other planets and satellites in the solar system. Life could also be common throughout the universe. As Jeffrey Bennett reminds us, astronomers in the first half of the twentieth century thought that planetary systems around stars were rare because they favoured a theory that the planets of our solar system were formed as the result of a very rare near-collision between the sun and another star billions of years ago.

It is now known that planetary systems are common, although at present it is possible to detect only the larger planets. Expected improvements in detection techniques should soon result in finding extrasolar planets about the same size as Earth or smaller. This has encouraged much scientific speculation about life, intelligent or otherwise, throughout the universe.

The author states: "In terms of possibilities for life in the universe the first thing to understand is that the universe is big, really BIG." (He is obviously referring here to the observable universe. Some cosmologists believe that the universe is infinite.) To give us some idea of the numbers involved, we are told: "The total number of stars in the sky is roughly the same as the total number of grains of sand on all Earth's beaches put together."

A chapter is devoted to discussing the nature of life and we are informed that the greatest biomass and greatest variety of life on Earth consists of microorganisms rather than animals and plants. It is known that some of these can thrive under extreme conditions, so that they could undoubtedly live on other planets or satellites in our solar system. The only other planet which might support life is Mars, where microorganisms could live deep underground where liquid water could exist.

Life could also exist on a few of the larger satellites, such as Jupiter's Europa, which is covered by an ocean of water, frozen on the surface, but no doubt liquid below the ice, the necessary heat being produced by gravitational stress.

Of course, what most readers of this book will be interested in is not just life, but intelligent life, but despite the use of the term "UFOs" in the title, there is little in-depth discussion of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Bennett confines his remarks to the search for radio signals sent by civilisations.

He does mention the possibility that there is a highly advanced galactic civilisation but that we do not yet have the technology to detect its activities, but he doesn't mention the fact that for many years some scientists have advocated looking for signs of it somewhat closer than stars many light years away by trying to detect devices such as Bracewell probes (automated spacecraft sent to survey planetary systems and possibly making contact with any civilisations it might discover) and von Neumann probes (similar devices but having the ability to construct replicas of themselves from local materials).

The author has provided a useful introduction to the possibilities of ET life for the general reader, as no great scientific knowledge is assumed. In places, though, the writing seems a bit too informal, giving the impression that it is based on notes for lectures delivered to not-very-bright students. - John Harney.

MONSTERS, INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL

W. Scott Poole. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Baylor University Press, 2011.

'Monstrous' may be the gigantic, the different or the plain just strange, but whichever they represent the other, the things that are not like us. Historian W. Scott Poole traces the American obsession with the monsters and the monstrous other from colonial times to the contemporary obsession with zombies and vampires.

From these earliest times the stories of monsters emphasise the otherness of the new continent and among that perceived as monstrous were the monstrous humans, the First Americans and the African Americans. For much of America’s history, Poole argues, many of America’s monsters have been projections of white America’s racial fears. For example he notes the essential racist idea of ‘African ape’ King Kong threatening the virginal white woman, and the similarities between the cinematic portrayal of mobs ranging after Frankenstein’s monster and the real life lynch mobs of the period.

He provides numerous examples of demonization, sometimes literally so, of the racial other in 17th to early 20th century discourse. Featuring quite significantly of this motif in the realm of fiction was the writing of the notoriously racist horror story writer H. P. Lovecraft. Sometimes this monsterization of the racial other reached truly grotesque proportions, as when the African Ota Benga was put on display in a cage in the Bronx Zoo, alongside an orang-utan.

There are, of course, other monsters. Some, like the great sea serpent or the bones of mastodons, may be held perhaps to represent the scale and grandeur of the landscape, as well as the sense of the wildness beneath the calm surface of the world.

As the 20th century unfolded, a further range of fears became expressed by monsters: atomic fears, the sense of a dark underside to suburbia, urban America’s fears of its rural hinterland, the rise of feminism, reproduction, doubts about science and America’s cultural wars. Poole traces these themes through a detailed examination of horror literature, film and television. This is clearly the area of Poole’s expertise and this book can be recommended to students and the generally interested in literature and film.

A caveat has to be entered, which is that this material has a far wider appeal than to a specifically US audience, and therefore must address wider concerns, or be capable of being read in a variety of ways. For example in Britain much of the image of the monster has to do with class rather than race. One can look at the 19th and early 20th century fears of the Mob, and current concerns about the ‘underclass’ who are seen as feral creatures of an urban wilderness.

Poole’s coverage of folk belief is much less assured than that of the crafted narrative. The coverage of the UFO and alien abduction lore is particularly poor, which is a pity as much of this lore would greatly illustrate Poole’s theses. For example many of the abduction stories contain motifs that question the role of women, address fears about reproduction, and those of David Jacobs for example, contain many of the motifs of racial fears (the racial other passing as white, fears of miscegenation, racial sexual threats to women, dangerous hybrids (half-breeds), and the sense that no walls are strong enough to protect from the depredations of the racial other that prowls by night. -- Peter Rogerson

• Brad Steiger. The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopaedia of Shape-Shifting Beings. Visible Ink (2nd Ed.) 2011.

I have always associated Brad Steiger with eminently readable potboilers on topics such as UFOs, crypto-beasts, ancient astronauts and the like, so it is a bit of a surprise to see him editing a bulky encyclopedia. Although not as weighty as the two massive volumes on vampires which I reviewed a while ago, this is still a substantial 360 pages. 

The entries vary in length from short essays on broad topics such as lycanthropy as a medical condition, the incubus, and the appearance of werewolf-type figures in a range of folk traditions and mythologies.

A large part of the book is taken up with descriptions of reports of werewolves within historic times, and there is obviously a considerable overlap with cryptozoology in many of these cases. Cases such as the Monster of the Gebaudon contains elements which combine the characteristics of a ‘paws and pelt’ feral beast with those of a more ambiguous type of entity. Creatures such as the chupacabras also fit into this borderland between folklore, mythology and cryptozoology, along with tales of wolf-reared children and feral humans.

Most cultures seem to have legends and folktales of human/wolf hybrids, although these are usually creatures of terror, some seem to be symbolic of wisdom, which can be accessed through shamanic rituals and the use of psychoactive substances. Many of these beliefs seem to date back to a time when early man and wolf-packs were competing for food and territory. In his introduction Steiger notes suggestions that at times the relationship between man and wolf may have been symbiotic, with early humans learning how to hunt in organized groups and overcoming larger and more powerful prey by following the techniques of wolf-packs. A powerful shaman would be able to take on the strength, skills and power of the wolf.

Not all of these legends are confined to the remote parts of the world. Theo Paijman’s contribution records man-beasts, shape-shifters and other demonic creatures appearing well into the 20th century from The Netherlands, many coming from Friesland, perhaps the nearest that country gets to a remote and liminal area.

Many of the entries deal with film and literary interpretations of the werewolf legend, and I am not sufficiently aware of this field to comment on it. Other entries look at violent predatory criminals, such as Harry Gordon, ‘the werewolf of San Francisco’ who terrorized the city in the late 1930s, and Thierry Paulin, ‘The Terror of Montmartre’, although I think including Jack the Ripper in this is pretty marginal.

In the review above, Peter Rogerson suggests that our fears of monsters are representative of our fears of the unknown ‘other’ – those separated from us by race, class, culture or physical or mental characteristics. I think largely this is true, but I suspect that the werewolf represents the fear of ourselves, of our inner monsters, the wolf, the pack hunter, the irrational violent core that we fear may lie within us. In the entry in this encyclopedia on ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ the writer describes the work as “revealing the potential power of the beast within the human psyche…” This is the real nature of the werewolf.

The encyclopedia is a fascinating collection of articles, but I cannot help feeling that it would be better arranged in a less rigid format, and would have been better presented as a series of linked sections - the werewolf in film, in folklore, in literature, the psychology of lycanthropy, the criminal as werewolf, the supernatural werewolf, etc. The book has an very good index so would still be easy to use as a reference work.  -- John Rimmer

JOHN DEE: MAN, MYTH AND MORTLAKE

Readers of the old printed Magonia who have long memories may recall that at one time our address included the line ‘John Dee Cottage’, as the world headquarters of the giant Magonian media empire was situated adjacent to the site of the house and garden of the great seventeenth-century magus, astrologer, magician, cryptographer, spy, alchemist, mathematician, navigator and all-round genius John Dee.

Coming up to the 400th anniversary of his death in 2009 a group of Mortlegians (that is apparently the correct name for a citizen of Mortlake) set up the John Dee of Mortlake Society to spread the word locally about our town’s most famous inhabitant, and to campaign to have a plaque in his memory erected in St Mary the Virgin’s church [left] where he is buried, which we believe will be the only extant monument to his memory anywhere in the world.

At the moment the application for permission to install the plaque is working its way through the Byzantine complexity of the Church of England bureaucracy, but we hope for a successful conclusion soon. The plaque will be of slate from a quarry near the Dee ancestral home in Wales, with an inscription by a skilled letter-carver rather than by mechanical means - this was a requirement by the Church authorities. As you can imagine, this will not come cheap!

Besides campaigning for a suitable memorial to him, the John Dee Society of Mortlake also organises talks and events, and in the past we have had a number of distinguished scholars speaking about Dee’s life, the era in which he lived and the instruments he used in his work. There is also the now-legendary ‘Dee Tea’ held at Mortlake and Oxford every year on his birthday. You can find the Society’s website and details of how to join HERE.

The local history society for Mortlake and the neighbouring village of Barnes (called, unsurprisingly, The Barnes and Mortlake History Society - link HERE) has just published a book on John Dee’s life and home in Mortlake, and below is the review I have written of it for the John Dee of Mortlake Society’s own website. At the bottom you will see the usual link to Amazon for buying this title, and I’d just point out that the profit on any sales made through this link will go towards the costs of crafting and installing the plaque.

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Nicholas Dakin. John Dee of Mortlake. Barnes and Mortlake Local History Society, 2011.

Searching for ‘John Dee’ on Amazon brings up over 600 books by or about him. Many of these are detailed historical monographs, or attempts to understand and explain the details of his mystical and philosophical thought. And there are, indeed, some very interesting and readable biographies.

Nicholas Dakin’s book is not specifically a biography of John Dee (1527 - 1609), although it does give a broad outline of the life of this incredibly complex character. Nor is it an exposition of Dee’s occult beliefs, his mathematical work or his philosophical system. Rather it is a straightforward explanation of why John Dee is important and why Mortlake should honour the memory of its greatest resident

This book is called John Dee of Mortlake, and the ‘of Mortlake’ is the important bit. The author shows that John Dee’s house, with its library and its laboratory, was the centre of a great intellectual network that stretched across Europe, and in a way, across the Atlantic as well.

He reconstructs Dee’s house and garden in Mortlake High Street from the barest hints of description in Dee’s diaries, and accounts by people who knew him. He describes the Bibliotheca Mortlacensis, the great library Dee created at Mortlake, probably one of the largest collections of books in the world at that time.

Next to the river, and convenient for travelling to and from London and to the Queen’s palace at Richmond, the Mortlake house received many visitors: Queen Elizabeth herself, explorers like Martin Frobisher, as well as some of the great Tudor noblemen and foreign statesmen. He taught Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Lord Walsingham the art of code-breaking, others came to consult Dee for advice on navigation, for instruction in the use of mathematical instruments and maps, and in some cases to have horoscopes cast for them. Astrology was seen as a scientific practice, in the days before science and magic parted company. 

But besides these affairs of state and Dee’s great project of promoting a ‘British Empire’ - a phrase he used first - we are also shown the domestic life of Dee and his family and his life in Mortlake. Although local children were sometimes frightened by his appearance, and reputation - entirely unjustified - as a sorcerer, he was also seen as a peacemaker in disputes between local families.

We learn of Jane Dee, a dutiful wife who bore him eight children, and sometimes despaired of the domestic chaos she witnessed around her, but who was very much her own person, juggling her domestic duties, but also helping organise the transport of her entire household across Europe when her husband travelled to the Court of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague.

The author challenges some of the stereotypes that have developed over the centuries, of Dee as a black magician, necromancer, or someone who raised the spirits of the dead, and shows him as a devout Christian whose so-called ‘occult’ work was an attempt to gain for himself a greater understanding of the word of God. He also gives a very clear explanation of the nature of Dee’s relationship with the medium Edward Kelley, carefully weighing up whether he was a charlatan, a chancer, or he genuinely believed he had talents which would be useful to Dee.

Dee was an astrologer, alchemist, mathematician, navigator, philosopher, spy, clergyman, traveller, and magician. Many of the 600 books on Amazon will tell you all about those parts of his life, but it would be difficult to find one which will give you a clearer, more entertaining and straightforward account of the man who made the little village of Mortlake into the centre of the world of scholarship and learning. -- John Rimmer

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Buy the book here to help fund the John Dee Memorial Plaque (ignore Amazon's 'out of print' tag and use the 'jrimmer11' option):