FRINGE BENEFITS

Steven Volk. Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable and Couldn't. HarperOne, 2011.

This is a really good book on the paranormal, because Steven Volk, a mainstream journalist, takes the sensible and rarely used line on these topics, which is that he just doesn't know what it all represents and seeks to get beyond the usual believer/skeptic yah-boo stuff.
🔻

THE PSYCHOPATH TEST

Jon Ronson. The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. Picador, 2011.

Journalist Jon Ronson was asked by a neurologist to investigate a truly weird book she had received. While he was able to solve that problem fairly quickly, the search led him into the world of psychiatry, and the anti-psychiatry movement now largely dominated by Scientologists.
🔽

RELIGIOUS SECRETS AND SECRET RELIGIONS

      

David V. Barrett. Secret Religions; A Complete Guide to Hermetic, Pagan and Esoteric Beliefs. Robinson, 2011.

---

Owen Davies, Paganism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, 2011.

---

Hans-Peter Hasenfratz. Barbarian Rites: The Spiritual World of the Vikings and Germanic Tribes. Inner Traditions, 2011.

David Barrett is the author of a number of books on the byways of religion including the massive New Believers, which covered a huge range of religious and philosophical traditions, with a large section of Christianity and the 'Religions of the Book'.
🔻

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

John Hanson and Dawn Holloway. Haunted Skies: The Encyclopedia of British UFOs, Volume 2, 1960-1965. CFZ Press, 2011.

This second volume of what promises to be a giant compilation of British UFO stories takes us up to the period of the start of the Warminster 'Thing' and contains many tales to stir the nostalgic memories of ageing ufologists. Here we see an account of the Charlton crater and similar ground markings, with a brief mention of our former science editor Alan Sharp's explanation of it in terms of lightning.
🔽

GOSPEL OF THE WITCHES

Charles Godfrey Leland. Aradia or the Gospel of the Witches, The Witches’ Almanac, Hampton Roads, 2010. (First published 1899).

Charles Leland (1824-1903), a Philadelphian who founded the Gipsy Lore Society, was particularly interested in witchcraft, using the word in its broadest sense, that is, to include fortune-tellers and the like. 

🔻🔻🔻

MAGONIA 23, JULY 1986

Although dated July 1986, Magonia number 23 was, according to the notebook I recorded such things in, actually posted out to subscribers in August. Such were the delights and delays of publishing a small magazine! I notice a sad coincidence so soon after the death of Hilary Evans, that 25 years ago we were recording the death of J. Allen Hynek. In their very different ways these two people were central to the way 'ufology' subsequently developed.

🔻

HILARY EVANS, MIKE DASH AND THE THREE MINUTE MILE

I can't let Northern Echoes go by without seconding John Rimmer's thoughts on Hilary Evans, such a sad loss. I can't say that I knew him personally, we met on perhaps three or four occasions (a visit with John to the MEPL back in 1979, a couple of conferences in the 1980s and I think one of the UnConventions) but I can testify to his willingness to help, sending me free of charge a photocopy of a rare booklet in his possession when I was doing my revisionist history of abductions back in the early 1990s.
🔻

THE FORGOTTEN EPIDEMIC

Molly Caldwell Crosby. Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of History's Greatest Mysteries. Berkeley Books, 2011.

If you were to ask citizens of the United States what was the very worst thing that had happened in their country since the Civil War, I would suspect that at least 90% would say 9/11. Sadly they wouldn't even be close; like the rest of the world their country was torn by two terrible epidemics which swept the world in the wake of the Great War.
🔽

TWO OCCULT RE-ISSUES

Christopher McIntosh. Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival, State University of New York Press, Albany, New York, 2011 (1st 1972).

---

William Walker Atkinson. Swami Panchadasi’s Clairvoyance and Occult Powers, ed. Clint Marsh, Weiser, San Francisco, California, 2011 (1st 1916).

Eliphas Lévi was the principal figure in the French occult revival, and moreover, in England, the Golden Dawn was partly based upon his teachings, and Aleister Crowley (who believed himself to be Lévi’s reincarnation) modelled his Magick in Theory and Practice upon Lévi’s Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. Crowley and the Golden Dawn, in turn, provided the foundation for later esoteric movements such as modern witchcraft and Druidry. Yet McIntosh’s book is the only serious study in English, so its reappearance is welcome.

🔻

GOING ROUND IN CIRCLES

Bill Rose, Flying Saucer Technology, Ian Allan (Midland Publishing), 2011.

The title gives the misleading impression that this is just the latest in a succession of cranky books about anti-gravity devices and other unlikely propulsion systems for spacecraft, going back to Leonard Cramp's Space, Gravity and the Flying Saucer (1954), and possibly earlier.
🔽

A FORTEAN FOURSOME

        

Paul Screeton. I Fort the Lore: An Anthology of Writings by Paul Screeton. CFZ Press, 2011.

---

William J. Gibbons. Mokele-Mbembe: Mystery Beast of the Congo Basin Coachwhip Publications, 2010.

---

Brian Allan. Revenants: Haunted People and Haunted Places. Healings of Atlantis/11th Dimension Publishing 2010.

---

Rebecca E. Kedger. Hauntings: True Life Sightings and Experiences of Ghosts. Waverley Books, 2011.
🔻

VERY FUNNY OLD WORLD

Regular Magonia readers may remember the 'phantom social worker' and 'phantom health visitor' panics that we've noted over the years. Plausible sounding people with clip-boards and briefcases turn up at peoples' houses (usually the houses of those with young children) ask intrusive questions, then either walk away or are dispatched rapidly by the householder. Subsequent checks reveal that they have nothing to do with local government or health departments.

🔻

CHASING CHUPACABRA

Benjamin Radford. Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore. University of New Mexico Press, 2011

Benjamin Radford here explores the story of the mysterious blood-sucking Chupacabra from all angles. He first looks at the global history of vampiric beasts in the human imagination, showing these are almost universal, and existed long before the term Vampire became popular. Of particular interest is his treatment of how this myth surface in colonial societies, where the mainly European colonial powers and their representatives were seen as blood suckers.
🔻