Continued from Part One

The result of this disaffection with institutional Christianity was not only the growth of scepticism and atheism, but also the appearance of a number of modernist rewritings of the Gospels presented as the rediscovery of an authentic Christianity. These included such works as Gideon Jasper Ouseley’s The Gospel of the Holy Twelve, 1900; Nicholas Notovitch’s Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, 1894; Dr. Levi H. Dowling’s 1911 The Aquarian Gospel; The Crucifixion of Jesus, by an Eye-Witness, 1919; Rev. W.D. Mahan’s A Correct Transcript of Pilate’s Court, 1879; B. Shehadi’s The Confession of Pontius Pilate, 1893; Ernst Edler van der Planitz’s The Letter of Benaia, 1910; T.G. Cole’s The Twenty-Ninth Chapter of Acts, 1871; and Moccia’s The Letter of Jesus Christ, of 1917.

Gideon Jasper Ousley: pantheist, teetotaler and vegetarian

These false Gospels are a heterogeneous mix, reflecting their authors’ diverse motives and viewpoints. The Gospel of the Holy Twelve, written by Gideon Jasper Ouseley, a clergyman in the Catholic Apostolic Church, seems to have been written to promulgate Ouseley’s own pantheist, vegetarian and teetotal views, including the androgynous nature of God, styled by Ouseley as ‘our parent in heaven’. Ouseley was strongly influenced by the doctrines of the Theosophists Edward Maitland and Anna Kingsford. Despite purporting to be the reconstruction of an original Aramaic gospel narrative, Ouseley stated that he received it ‘in dreams and visions of the night’. [51]

Notovitch’s Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, pretended to be a translation of a Tibetan life of Christ, stating how Christ travelled to India to learn the ways of the Buddhas. While it’s one of the major sources for various fringe religious theories attempting to link Christ with India and Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, students of oriental literatures and religions in the nineteenth century were not hesitant in declaring it to be a forgery, especially after interviews with the monks at Himis, where Notovitch claimed to have seen the Life, revealed that they had no such document and had never even seen Notovitch. [52]

Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel was similarly influenced by Theosophy and contemporary interest in oriental spirituality, as well as Christian Science. Dowling was a believer in the Akashic records, and, like Ouseley, wrote it under the influence of astral communications received during the night. In it, Christ not only studies with the great rabbi Hillel, but also meets Brahmins and Buddhists in India, Mencius in China, and Persian magi, while travelling through India, Tibet, Assyria, Babylonia, Athens, and Italy before settling in Egypt where he joins and achieves all seven degrees of initiation into the sacred brotherhood at Heliopolis. [53]

The Crucifixion of Jesus, by an Eye-Witness, is an account of Christ’s life as an Essene monk, in which John the Baptist, the angel of the annunciation, Nicodemus and the angel at the tomb are Essenes, and it is the Essenes who arrange the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, and carry him away to be revived after the Crucifixion. Christ, in this false gospel, is indeed attracted to Mary Magdalene, but does not marry her because of His monastic vows. Despite purporting to be a translation of yet another ancient document, the text itself was completely anachronistic, and the fact that neither the manuscript, or even photographs or details of its provenance were presented made it clear that it was a forgery.

The thesis that Christ was an Essene was first propounded by Carl Bahrdt, circa 1784-92, and popularised by C.H. Venturini circa 1800-02, while it took the idea of Christ being resuscitated after Crucifixion from Paulus, and Hose’s History of Jesus of 1876. The book as a whole was probably inspired by the manuscript discoveries of the German orientalist Tischendorf in Egypt and the Levant, including the Codex Sinaiticus, in 1859, as well as various novels and stories set in Egypt in the 1860s and 70s. [54]

Rev. W.D. Mahan’s A Correct Transcript of Pilate’s Court has Pilate attempting to save Christ from the Jewish authorities as they execute Him during an insurrection against Rome. Although fraudulent, the book enjoyed immense success, and Mahan followed it up with a succession of similarly spurious religious documents, one of which plagiarised Ben-Hur. As a result, Mahan was found guilty of falsehood by the Presbyterian church and suspended from the ministry for one year. It appears Mahan was strongly influenced by the Alexander Walker’s editions of the Apocryphal Acts of Pilate in volume XVI of the 1873 Edinburgh edition of the Ante-Nicene library. Mahan’s motive in writing his own version may well have been to defend the historicity of the Biblical account from attacks from the sceptic and Republican politician Robert G. Ingersoll in the 1870s through the invention of documents that Mahan himself felt genuinely existed. [55]

The Confession of Poratius Pilate similarly presents Pilate’s viewpoint, presenting a narrative of his final years as an exile in Vienne, staying with his friend Fabicius Albinos, before finally, overcome with remorse, he commits suicide. Pilate here is also presented as attempting to rescue Christ, though unsuccessfully, and in reprisal commits terrible atrocities on the Jews before being recalled to Rome after complaints and accusations to Tiberius by Vitellius and Mary Magdalene. The book was originally written as an avowedly modern work by the Greek Orthodox bishop of Zahlah, Gerasimus Yarid, following similar fictional accounts of the Passion, such as that published about the same time in France by Anatole France. Its spurious antiquity was merely a creation of Shehadi. [56]

The Letter of Benan is supposedly an account by the Egyptian priest and doctor, Benan, of Christ’s life and training amongst the rabbis and Egyptian doctors, including the Therapeutae, and of Benan’s subsequent journeys to Gaul, Britain and Roman Italy. Its publisher, Ernst Edler von der Planitz, wasn’t an Egyptologist or religious scholar, but a novelist with a penchant for conspiracy theories, publishing such works as ‘The Lie of Mayerling’. Again, the books seems influenced by Ebers’ novels of ancient Egypt, such as An Egyptian Princess of 1864 and Uarda of 1877, as well as Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii. [57]

The Twenty-Ninth Chapter of Acts, on the other hand, has Paul travelling to Spain and Britain, where he preaches on the site of the future St. Paul’s Cathedral, Mount Lud, before travelling on through Gaul, Belgium, Switzerland, the Julian Alps, Illyria, Macedonia and Asia. In it, the Druids reveal to Paul that they are descended from the Jews who escaped from bondage in Egypt, and it appears to have been written to support the British-Israelite movement of the 1860s and 70s. [58]

Moccia’s spurious gospel was a lost thirty-three page Greek version. This was really a publicity stunt by Moccia for his forthcoming novel, but he abandoned it after he saw how seriously it was being taken. [59] If only Brown had shown similar discretion.

Other works included the forged The Gospel of the Childhood of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to St Peter, by the French Decadent writer Catulle Mendes; W.P. Crozier’s Letters of Pontius Pilate, which purported to be Pilate’s correspondence with the Roman philosopher Seneca; Catherine van Dyke’s Letters from Pontius Pilate’s Wife; the Epistle of Kallikrates, purporting to come from one of Paul’s converts; the Letter of Jesus Christ, exhorting attendance at church and keeping the Sabbath, copies of which were pasted in houses as it promised protection for women in child-birth. This latter had a contemporary version in Greek, published by Michael Salvers, and supposedly discovered in the fragments of a meteorite smashed by Patriarch Joannicius of Jerusalem. [60]

These nineteenth- and early twentieth-century apocrypha are the precursors to many of today’s works of religious pseudohistory, presenting Christ as an Essene, or a friend of Pilate, or an initiate into secret Egyptian or Indian teachings. And like the documents Michael Baigent claims to have seen to support his view of Christ in The Jesus Papers, the ancient documents on which these texts were based similarly did not appear, and no supporting evidence was provided. [61]

Not only were these new, apocryphal gospels a response to contemporary questioning of the authenticity of the canonical gospels, but they were also a response to the emergence and circulation of genuinely ancient, non-canonical Jewish and Christian texts, such as the Book of Enoch, found in a fragmentary Slavonic version and in its complete form preserved in the canon of the Ethiopian Coptic Church. The Gospel of Nicodemus, written iii the fourth or fifth centuries AD, was copied in eleventh century England, and was still circulating in chapbook editions in the eighteenth century. [62] The 1876 Tischendorf edition of the early Greek and Latin versions may well have been the versions which inspired the spurious 19th century gospels. The Egerton Gospel, a fragmentary non-canonical gospel, was discovered in 1935. [63]

A similar piece of a vanished gospel, Gospel Oxyrhincus 1224 was found circa 1890. [64] Gospel Oxyrhincus 1224 was discovered in 1903 and published in 1914. [65] Furthermore, apart from the spurious late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century gospels, other noncanonical versions of the lives of the great figures of the Bible were circulating. Three hundred years before the publication of the Gospel of Judas in May 2006, for example, an account of the treacherous apostle’s life was also circulating in the cheap, chapbook literature. [66]

The most profound challenge to the authenticity of the Biblical scriptures came from the discovery of the Gnostic library of Chenoboskion and Nag Hammadi in Egypt,

The most profound challenge to the authenticity of the Biblical scriptures came from the discovery of the Gnostic library of Chenoboskion and Nag Hammadi in Egypt, in 1945/6 and the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran in 1947. [67] With the discovery of these texts, more apocryphal and pseudepigraphal Jewish and Christian tests were gradually researched and published. The result was a flood of new translations of heterodox Judaeo-Christian texts, which had previously been lost or suppressed. These included the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, discovered in 1945; The Secret Book of James, 1945; The Dialogue of the Saviour; The Gospel of Mary, 1955; the Infancy Gospel of Thomas; The Infancy Gospel of James; The Gospel of Peter, parts of which had already been discovered in 1886 and a version published in 1972; and The Secret Gospel of Mark, discovered in 1958 and published in 1973. [68]

References to a ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ and a’Wicked Priest’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls have similarly provided material for radical speculation, with scholars such as J.M. Allegro, Barbara Thiering, and Robert Eisenmann identifying them as Jesus, Paul, John the Baptist, and Christ’s brother James. [69] In the view of at least one major scholar “these theories fail the basic credibility test – they do not spring from, but are foisted on the texts”, with the more likely candidate for the ‘wicked priest’ being Jonathan Maccabeus who accepted the pontifical vestments for the Temple at Jerusalem from the Seleucid usurper Alexander Bolas, or Alexander Jannaeus. [70]

However, academic restrictions placed on research and publication by the director of the research programme into the scrolls, Father de Vaux, and the inability of a small group of seven scholars to complete such an enormous task, along with political difficulties with the Israeli authorities, meant that relatively little was published until the reorganisation of the project with a team of sixty scholars by Emanuel Tov in 1990, and the breach of the previous academic ‘closed shop’ around the manuscripts by the Biblical Archaeology Society and the Huntingdon Library in California. [71]

Unfortunately, the academic wrangling that had hindered proper publication and research into the scrolls appeared to lend credence to rumours that the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ and ‘Wicked Priest’ were indeed Christ and the other major Christian figures, and so gave rise to rumours that the Scrolls were being deliberately suppressed because they contained materials that would undermine and discredit Christianity completely. It is as a part of this atmosphere of religious anxiety, speculation and conspiracy theorising that Holy Blood, Holy Grail found such fertile soil amongst the public, and the Da Vinci Code sprang up.

This conspiracist view of the Roman Catholic Church has been compounded because of the very real problems the Vatican has experienced in coming to terms with modernity. With the advance of secularisation in the nineteenth century, many of the traditional ecclesiastical roles of providing education, giving moral advice and presiding over marriages and funerals were lost to the state or private secular institutions, and the traditional seat of the papacy, Rome, was occupied and incorporated into the new Italy during the 1861-70 campaigns of unification. [72]

The result of this was the official promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council of 1869-70, considered by some to be a ‘magna carta of ecclesiastical absolutism’, and the Syllabus of Errors, contained in the papal encyclical Quanta Cura of 1864. [73]

The papal decree Lamentabili and encyclical Pascendi Dominica Gregis of 1907 outlawed modernist thought in Roman Catholicism prohibiting the philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, and the application of secular historical techniques to criticise the authenticity of the Bible. Instead of Roman Catholic doctrine evolving through a historically conditioned process of debate, elaboration, adaptation and development, Roman Catholic doctrine was established as immutable and eternally true. [74]

And as a reaction to the revolutionary turmoil of nineteenth century Europe, French Roman Catholic theoreticians like Joseph de Maistre and Francois Rene Chateubriand articulated an extreme conservative ideology in which “thrones and altars were to be seen as safeguards, as buffers against a return to the tragedies of the Terror. Christianity was to be privileged above philosophy; powerful popes were preferable to overconfident national churches; kings and established churches were better than elected assemblies and liberal constitutions; tradition was a safer bet than innovation.” [75]

As a result, liberal Catholic views and agendas were denounced in the encyclicals Mirari Vos of 1832, and Singulars Nos of 1834. The fascination with alleged secret royalist bloodlines from Christ through the Merovingian kings in The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail, and its successors, like The Da Vinci Code, can be seen as a deliberate mythologisation of this type of ‘throne and altar’ Catholicism.

Although Christian Democrat parties had successfully emerged to defend Roman Catholicism against hostile Protestant and secular authorities in Bismarck’s Germany and Belgium, papal disgust at nationalist appropriation of pontifical territories had led to a refusal to recognise the Italian state. Italian Roman Catholics were not even allowed to vote until 1919. [76] A rapprochement with the Italian state, which formally regulated the relations between Church and state in Italy and which granted the sovereign independence of the See of Rome and compensated the Vatican for the loss of its territories, was only established with the Lateran Pacts with Fascist Italy of 1928. [77]

The emergence of extreme Right-wing clerical Fascist movements such as the collaborationist regime of Monsignor Tiso (above) in Slovakia seemed to bear out the image of the Roman Catholic Church as a brutal, totalitarian, oppressive institution

The drawback to this treaty was that the papacy often seemed more allied to totalitarian Fascism than to democracy as the two movements headed towards a collision course in the 1930s. With the emergence of democracy in Italy after World War II and the new openness in the Church brought about by Pope John XXIII and Vatican II, a concordat based on privileges and tied historically to Fascism became an embarrassing liability. [75]

Worse, the emergence of extreme Right-wing clerical Fascist movements, such as the Rexists in Belgium, the collaborationist regime of Monsignor Tiso in Slovakia and the juntas of Salazar in Portugal and Franco in Spain further seemed to bear out the image of the Roman Catholic Church as a brutal, totalitarian, oppressive institution. The problem remains acute with continuing arguments over the papacy’s knowledge of the Holocaust and inability or refusal to prevent it.

The rise of feminism has also presented the Church with serious criticism as a patriarchal institution oppressing women through its prohibition of contraception and abortion, unequal employment opportunities which disbar women from ordination in the clergy, and, like other Christian denominations, with the worship of a solely male deity. Apart from the general trends in feminist theology common to most forms of Western Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church has experienced demands for the hyperlatreia – the extraordinary, superior veneration extended by Roman Catholics to Our Lady – to establish her as co-saviour with Christ. This was formally investigated by Pope John Paul II, who was broadly favourable, but rejected as contrary to Catholic dogma and tradition by the cardinals charged with examining it.

It is as part of this continuing debate – over the changing role of women in the Church and society, and attempts to reclaim a suppressed feminine aspect to Christian spirituality, that The Da Vinci Code and its literary antecedents’ elevation of Mary Magdalene is located.

However, the specific historical circumstances, which have given rise to this image of a Fascistic, patriarchal, oppressive Church, staffed by an Order of secret assassins, is largely obscured by the mythological distortions, which surround them. The mythology of the Priory of Sion may well be a Surrealist spoof of ‘throne and altar’ Right-Wing Catholicism, but it’s part of the general fascination with secret societies and pseudo-chivalric orders which were extremely common in the nineteenth century. During that century there was a plethora of pseudo-Masonic societies and orders, which, despite their elaborate hierarchies and rhetoric of bizarre mysticism, were largely fraternal benefit societies. Most of these became insurance companies and friendly societies in the twentieth century. [79] And while many of them championed and supported the poor in the new, mass, democratic society of the nineteenth century, they often did so under a feudal, chivalric guise, like the nineteenthcentury American socialist organisation, the Knights of Labor. [80]

As for the supposedly oppressive character of the Roman Catholic Church, this can be countered with the rise within it of leftwing, Marxist Liberation theology and more traditionally theologically orthodox critiques of exploitation and oppression, and the very many Roman Catholic clergy and laypeople martyred and murdered by brutal regimes across the world, including, naturally, Jesuits. Moreover, the rationalist critique of Christianity and the Resurrection can similarly appear just as flawed, dogmatic and credulous, involving massive leaps of logic and nonsequiturs, as the orthodox Christian account, and the view of the Essenes and the ancient Gnostics and medieval Cathars are quite at variance with what these religious groups actually believed and were like.

Nevertheless the nineteenth century crisis of faith, and the challenge of modernity, liberalism and democracy, as well as the discovery of the ancient, alternative scriptures, has created a climate in which some people feel that traditional Christianity is inadequate, and while not rejecting it completely, have drawn on and reinvented and distorted the ancient and alternative traditions to produce a completely novel view which they feel is more in accord with today’s liberal values, and have read these back into the past as closer to Christ’s true message. It’s been said that legends arise when there is insufficient information to provide people with a genuine explanation. This has been amply barn out by the rise of The Da Vinci Code and its predecessors as genuinely confused people, seeking a modern, liberal Christian spirituality, have been fed novels and pseudo-history masquerading as historical, religious scholarship.

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References:

50. McGrath, Atheism, p. 141.
51. ‘Veggie Tales’ at httpalwww.teklonics.org/Iplouseley0l
52. ‘The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ’ in Goodspeed, E., Strange New Gospels (Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1931), at htipa/www.tertullian.org/articles/goodspeed strange_new_gospels. htm.
53. ‘The Aquarian Gospel’ in Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels.
54. ‘The Crucifixion of Jesus, by an Eye-Witness’, in Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels.
55. ‘The Correct Transcript of Pirate’s Court’, in Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels.
56. ‘The Confession of Pontius Pilate’ in Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels
57. ‘The Letter of Benan, in Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels.
58. ‘The Twenty Ninth Chapter of Acts’, in Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels.
59. ‘The Letter of Jesus Christ’, in Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels.
60. ‘The Letter of Jesus Christ’, in Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels
61. ‘The Family Guy’, Kevin McClure in Fortean Times 210 p. 60, reviewing Baigent, M. The Jesus Papers – Exposing the Greatest Cover-up in History (San Francisco, Harper San Francisco 2006).
62. Charles, R.H., trans, The Book of Enoch (London, SPCK 1917); ‘The Gospel of Nicodemus’ in Swanton, M., trans., Anglo-Saxon Prose (London, J.M. Dent 1993), p. 207; ‘The Gospel of Nicodemus’ in Ashton, J., Chap-Books of the 18th century with Facsimiles, Notes and Instructions, first published Chatto and Windus, 1882 (London, Skoob Books Publishing, undated), pp. 30-1,
63, ‘The Egerton Gospel’ in The Complete Gospels – Annotated Scholars Version (Sonoma, Polebridge Press 1992), p. 412.
64. ‘Gospel Oxyrhincus 840′ in Miller, Complete Gospels, p. 418.
65. ‘Gospel Oxyrhincus 1224′, in Miller, Complete Gospels, p. 422.
66. ‘The Unhappy Birth, Wicked Life, and Miserable Death of that Vile Traytor and Apostle Judas Iscariot’, Ashton, Chap-Books, p. 32.
67. J. Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics (London, Hollis & Carter 1960), p. XII; J. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls – A Re-Appraisal (London, Penguin. 1964), p. 17.
68. ‘The Gospel of Thomas’ in Miller, J., Complete Gospels, p. 301;’The Secret Book of James’, in Miller, Complete Gospels, p. 333.’The Gospel of Mary’ in Miller, Complete Gospels, p. 359; ‘The Gospel of Peter’, in Miller, Complete Gospels, p. 399, ‘The Secret Gospel of Mark’, in Miller, Complete Gospels, p.408
69. Vermes, G.. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (London, Penguin 1995), p. XXX.
70. Vermes, Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. XXX, 36. J. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls – A Reappraisal (London, Penguin 1964), pp. 104-9.
71. Vermes, Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. XVII – XXI.
72. Wright, Jesuits, p. 214.
73. Wright, Jesuits, p. 234, 237.
74. Wright, Jesuits, pp. 240-1
75. Wright. Jesuits, p. 239.
76. Wright, Jesuits, p. 251.
77.’Lateran Pacts’, in P.V. Cannistraro, ed., Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy (Westport, Greenwood 1982), p. 299. 78.’Lateran Pacts’, Cannistraro, Fascist Italy, p. 300.
79. See Axelrod, A., The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies & Fraternal Orders, (New York, Checkmark Books 1997).
80. ‘Knights of Labor’ in Evan, LH., Brewer’s Dictionary ofPhrase and Fable – Revised Edition, (London, Cassell 1981), p. 636.

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From Magonia 61, November 1997

In issues 54-6 of this magazine, the erudite Peter Brookesmith ran the first two of a three-part article entitled Communion Cups and Crashed Saucers. Therein, he attempted to locate the origin of the saucer mythos squarely within Western religious experience, particularly that of the ‘American Religion’. It was an impressive piece. Brookesmith is an elegant writer with a deep understanding of the scientific and religious issues. He applies Occam’s razor with almost surgical skill. Moreover, he is not afraid of courting controversy. In this case he savagely attacked the Semitic religions supposed psychological evils, using Hyam Maccoby’s Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil to castigate Christianity in particular with its semitic past. It was heady, pungent, hard-hitting material.

It’s also deeply flawed. Religion is a notoriously difficult thing to define. Not all cultures have gods or a concept of an immortal soul as articulated in the Semitic religions, though they may have a concept of supernatural powers or ceremonies or rituals which are central to their culture. A truly alien civilisation, such as the Mechs in Gregory Benford’s Galactic Centre novels may well only be able to understand it as ‘a form of art’ (1). Political and social movements such as Fascism, Communism and Humanism may also be classed as religions. The above movements all have an inward, moral dimension as well as an outward corporate structure and their own set of rituals, even if the first two consisted mostly of watching the great dictator rant on his balcony. They also offer a form of transcendence – the individual gains purpose and the reward of being part of the greater struggle of the race, or the working class, or simply a sense of communal solidarity against the great mysteries of human experience.

Question of morality are, of a necessity, couched in the language of transcendence. Although utilitarianism – the philosophy that good is whatever gives the greatest happiness to the greatest number – remains popular with Vulcans, most discussions of morality are founded, albeit unconsciously, in transcendentalism. This states that moral values, goals and duties are transcendent, fundamentally true and eternally fixed things, not subject to vagaries of time and fashion. A comparison is made between moral values and mathematics. Murder is a evil for the same reason that 1+1=2. Neither fact changes, regardless of whoever and whenever the deed or calculation is performed. People, including atheists, can and will martyr themselves for their beliefs, or castigate themselves for their own perceived unworthiness. As a social force, religion is best defined by its origin in the Latin ‘religio’ – binding together. Religion binds man to man to form society, and human beings to the cosmos and the divine.

If religion is notoriously difficult to define, how much harder is it to define ‘the American religion’. Brookesmith is clearly impressed with the book of the title, and quotes it several times in his article. By this he presumably means the forms of Christianity and Reform Judaism which externally have massed choirs, an anglophone ritual and where the sexes are not segregated in the congregation. Internally, these religions preach individualism, self-reliance, democracy and progress. This marks off Protestant America from the Roman Catholic, Hispanic countries to its south. One Latin American writer spoke of the railway journey between Mexico and the United States as “moving from the melancoly ‘We’ to the triumphant ‘I’.”

National characteristics are abstractions, however. Within any society there are individuals who perceive their culture differently from the rest, and may hold views that the rest consider deviant.

America is not, and has never been, a monoculture. It was settled by a patchwork of competing immigrant European communities who interacted with the native peoples. Although this interaction largely took the form of genocidal warfare, the First Nations did leave their mark on the American political system, which was partly modelled on that of the Iroquois League. A sizable proportion of the American population has always been Roman Catholic, with a slightly different ethic from their Reformed and Evangelical co-religionists. In addition to this there are extra-European cults brought by those poor souls hauled over there during the slave trade. Voudon, Santia and Rastafarianism all have their American devotees, and can all be called American religions with at least as much accuracy as mainstream Protestant Christianity. Rather more recently, Buddhism, Islam and the Baha’i faith have all made inroads into the American soul. There’s also a strong occult tradition from Pennsylvania Dutch powwowing to the more recent imports of Druidism, Wicca and Crowleyanism.

Of course, the dominant religious tradition was Christianity, but in recent years this has broken down. The religion of progress is now being supplanted by cults that reject technology as a source of evil. Ecopaganism and the revival of interest in First Nation and tribal spirituality are the most obvious examples of this. Ritual magick, Crowleyanism, Wicca, Juidism and Odinism are cultural imports from Europe, especially Britain, but they’ve settled down nicely in their new homeland. so nicely in fact, that they’ve assimilated themselves to the local population and then been re-exported back to Europe.

It comes as no surprise that Russia’s Chief Shaman, Alina Slobodova, got her diploma in shamanism from Professor Harner in California. (2) These religious movements may be intensely antiscientific, harking back to a simpler, richer and holistic society which many of their members may seek to recreate, such as the Tipi people in Vancouver. These cults frequently invoke alien activity as an article of their faith. Many explicitly see the saucers as leading us into the New Age of peace, harmony and sensitivity to nature. Brookemith discusses the impact of Christian millenialism on Darkside Ufology, (3) yet any discussion of the influence of new religious movements, especially those which have their origins in tribal spirituality, on ufology is curiously absent.

A cultural commentator has remarked that much of the dissatisfaction in American society and rejection of progress has come from the realisation that America is no longer a new country, but is now actually quite old

In the late 40s and 50s when ufology emerged, many Americans certainly did have a naive faith in the benefits of technology. Society and ufology have changed since then, however. At least one cultural commentator, an Australian architectural student, has remarked that much of the dissatisfaction in American society and rejection of progress has come from the realisation that America is no longer a new country, but is now actually quite old. Yet despite his awareness of the changing, fluid nature of the subject, Brookemith seems to locate ufology’s ethnographic present firmly in 1947. The world and America have come a long way since then. The most obvious change is that the moral consensus is breaking down. Politics and social life is no longer the preserve of middle class white males, no matter how much the Republicans may huff and puff. This invalidates, at least partially, the concept of an ‘American religion’.

Another point that needs mentioning is that some of Brookesmith’s sources are themselves highly dubious. He makes extensive use of Hyam Maccoby’s Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil which is, by the author’s own admission, a controversial work. Maccoby is librarian at a Leo Beck college, a Jewish institution, so his work is hardly that of a disinterested observer. His book’s central tenet is that Christianity is an intrinsically racist, antisemitic religion and he goes to great lengths to prove it. This is a reversal of the usual racist polemics, where Gentile Fascists attempted to prove Jewry’s hostility to the Gentile world through a selective use of those parts of the Talmud written against the amme ha-aretz – common people or goyim. While it’s true that the passion narratives in the Gospels present an extremely unflattering portrait of Jewish society in its hostility and cruelty to Christ, the New Testament as whole has a much more complex attitude to the Jews. “Give no offence to the Jews or Greeks” preached Paul. (4)

To Paul the Jews were always God’s chosen people, even after his conversion to Christianity: “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek”. (5) It’s also worth mentioning here that the Greek word usually translated as ‘Jews’ in the New Testament, ioudaioi, can also mean simply Judeans, inhabitants of Judea. Modern theologians are keen to point out that the New Testament is anti-Judaic rather than antisemitic. Judaism as a religion is attacked, but not the Jews as a race. Although Christianity does have a shameful record of antisemitic prejudice and hatred, this has not always been the case. In the 11th century abbot Stephen Harding while seeking accurate Hebrew texts for the Old Testament collected them from French Jewry. The Fifth Monarchy Men of the Cromwellian interregnum were zealously pro-Jewish, an attitude still quite common among the Evangelicals today. Chick Publications may spit hate at Catholicism, but in its respect for Judaism it is almost embarrassingly effusive.

... 

Maccoby’s theory that Judas Iscariot was an invention of the Christian church after its leadership passed to Gentile bishops seems unnecessary from an historical point of view. With the hostility of the Jewish mob and Sanhedrin already clearly detailed in the passion narratives, why should it be necessary to invent another villain for the drama, especially as the two leading religious opponents of Christ within the Sanhedrin are explicitly named in non-canonical sources like the Gospel of Nicodemus? It seems far more likely that Maccoby’s theory arose to justify his own psychological conviction that all Christians are violent antisemites.

Brookesmith’s use of Maccoby is actually quite elegant. It allows him to avoid accusations that he himself is antisemitic, while seeming to confirm his own prejudices against Christianity. Most arguments for the brutal nature of the Semitic religions largely draw on the Old Testament. The doctrine that the Jews are God’s chosen people has also been drawn into the debate. The attitude among certain neopagans and members of the antichristian left is that this doctrine is a prefiguration of Fascism and Hitler’s doctrine of the master race. Needless to say, this leaves the proponents of this theory open to charges of antisemitism. By including a book that violently attacks Christianity for its supposed antisemitism, Brookesmith has effectively dodged any potential accusations that he could be included in the roll call of the racists.

When accusations of this nature are thrown around, the ethnic origin of the writers attacked becomes immaterial. Several Jewish anti-Zionist writers have been accused of antisemitism, an accusation which may, unfortunately, carry verisimilitude as some Jews such as Dan Burros, have for their own perverse reasons joined neo-Nazi organizations. Brookesmith certainly isn’t a Nazi. His writings reveal not only a breadth of knowledge of the Talmud but also the occasional joy in its texts. His writings as a whole betray a sincere antiracism and opposition to antisemitism. He obviously includes Maccoby from a deep disgust at Christianity, rather than as a cynical maneuver in the argument. Not everyone may see that, however, and it does not necessarily stop the accusation, being made. This does not, however, mean that either Maccoby or Brookesmith is correct.

Brookesmith also has a fashionably feminist assault on the Semitic conception of God. He follows the traditional Semiticview of God as a masculine deity because he “cannot believe that anything with feminine qualities – anything other than abeing saturated in a massive overdose of cosmic testosterone would be as barbarous as the Semitic God is reported to be (inall derived religions)”. (6) This point was made two decades ago by some of the more violently antichristian of the neopagan -polemicists, and it’s quite a difficult one to answer. Certainly the vengeful Old Testament God who struck down Gideon for touching the ark of the Covenant in a mere attempt to steady it hardly shows Himself to be a compassionate being. Yet this type of savage behaviour is hardly confined to Yahweh. The Greeks’ Zeus and Vikings’ Odin were both known as martial gods who couldn’t be trusted. They were capable of violent and duplicitous behaviour which certainly exceeded that of the Lord of Hosts.

Nor is boorishness and brutality a trait confined to the male sex. Mars had his female counterpart in Bellona, the Roman goddess of war. Athena sprang fully armed and equipped for battle from her father’s head when he was suffering from a headache. These goddesses were especially brutal when spurned or crossed in love. Ishtar of the Sumerians is reproached by Gilgamesh for using and destroying her lovers. Cybele sent her lover mad so that he castrated himself. In honour of their hero, her priests in Rome castrated themselves and dressed as women. Within Hinduism the goddess Kali is still revered and held in terror. The goddess of death and destruction, her skin is a menacing black, her necklace a string of skulls. She is the consort of Shiva, the destroyer, dancing on his corpse to give him life. As the dark side of the maternal goddess Durga, there is precious little of the ‘large, warm, comforting Earth Mothers’ about her.

Regardless of the particular sex of the deities, they are symbols and attempts of the human mind to grasp the problem of evil. Theodicy is one of the trickiest parts of theology, as no explanation of evil and human suffering will ever be truly satisfactory. Monotheism lends itself to the accusation that its God is evil because it does not have an ultimately coeternal ‘other’on whom evil qualities may be projected. Explanations that God created Satan and evil to give humanity a choice now sound trite, almost as trite as the neopagan doctrine that evil does not exist, and that evil ads and conditions are merely the results of disharmony within individuals and institutions.

Brookesmith is pleased to call religion and, by extension, the abduction phenomenon, as the cult of despair. It’s “subjugation to incomprehensible and uncompromising savages, who like wanton schoolboys kill us for their sport” (7). The aliens, like God, always “hold the final way of escape”. (8) I felt the same existential depression reading Games People Play and the writings of the sociobiologists. If altruism and morality is merely the case of the selfish gene protecting its progeny, then where is the hope for humanity? From whence can spontaneity and goodness proceed, if even our better motives are mired in greed and self-interest? Can humanity ever improve, ever become greater than the sorry flesh it now inhabits? The prognosis is doubtful, at best. Religion offers some hope of transcendence, a slim chance of leaping into the infinite, even if that chance is hedged with theological pitfalls and constraints. The only alternative is the pessimism and denial of the world of the Buddhist.

This, however, is going off the track a bit. Brookesmith makes great play of the asexual, cerebrally advanced nature of the Greys, comparing them with the neuter portrayal of the angels. For this he draws upon William Blake. Now, Blake was abrilliant poet, artist and visionary. He was also deeply heterodox in his thought, and is hardly a representative of conventional Christian thinking. The Bible makes it abundantly clear in Genesis that the angels were quite fully functional in that department, for how else could they have mated with the daughters of men to spawn the Nefilim? And when you answer that question, please don’t try my patience with any nonsense about genetic engineering, cloning or ancient astronauts. Some of the Christian antipathy to sexuality comes not so much from its Judaic roots, though these are the strongest influence, but from certain strands in Platonic thought. No culture is entirely comfortable with sexuality; they are aware both of sexuality’s importance in creating society through the binding of individuals and families together in marriage, and of its potentially antisocial nature through adultery and marital strife.

Aside from this, the Greys in their habitation of a liminal fairyland are far closer to our old friends the Elves and the Pixies, even if we, take on board Quazgaa and the voice of God. These creatures certainly weren’t celebate. Victorian fairy pictures are replete with evanescent pubescent nymphs wearing only the flimsiest of diaphanous gauze engaging in all kinds of erotic play with their male gallants. The paintings may well have served as a release for the pent up sexuality repressed by the Victorians, but they also serve as a reminder of a perennial human obsession: sexuality as a link to the divine, or at least superhuman.

The Greys are only one form of ET. There are also the Nordics, the reptoids, mummies, dwarves and hairy sasquatch creatures. In recent years they’ve been overshadowed by their small insectoid colleagues, but they’re still out and about there. Brookesmith links the Nordics quite convincingly to northern European representations of angels, the mummies can be identified strongly with Andean custom of revering the embalmed dead and the dwarves’ folkloric antecedents don’t really need an explanation.

But what are we to make of sasquatch and his mates aboard the aliens’ craft? Hirsutism is linked, both in Europe and Asia, with animal qualities. You think of all the grind show acts featuring the wolf-boy. Hairy barbarian is another favourite image linking facial and body hair to low intelligence, savagery and cruelty. Sasquatch is supposed to be a denser relative of modern man, or perhaps his neaderthal cousin, eking out a living in backwoods America, Russia and China. He’s not even supposed to be alive, let alone zipping about in a flying saucer collecting plant samples from Latin America. The only psychological explanation for him in this situation I can think of is that he represents some kind of untainted primal man, like the hairy Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

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He represents some kind of untainted primal man, like the hairy Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

There’s a similar problem with the aliens’ location in space. Brookesmith links it to the traditional conception of the heavens as the abode of God. This is only one of the origins of the Outsiders in the Saucer mythos, however. There’s also the chthonic aspect. The deros and teros are under our feet, even as we speak, manipulating us with their engines. They fly out from the holes in the poles to spread terror over the globe, which is covered with ley lines to act as energy points to power their craft. And deep down under Area 51 there are. the laboratories and vats, fruits of their collaboration with the US government.

This is not Heaven. This is sheol, the abode of the dead. The personnel down there are truly ‘those who sit in darkness; the river Lethe of which they drink sapping their ethics as well as their identities. It is the abode of Pluto, the dark and forbidding god of wealth, from whom the military wins its technological gold for which they must pay with human souls. It might be stretching the point a bit, but you could even say it was the domaine of Vulcan. The divine smith is in his lair, under the volcano, forging his wonders such as the mechanical handmaids who serve him. He is ugly, lame and jealous, intensely distrustful of his wife’s affairs with other men, particularly his arch rival Mars. Now there’s a metaphor for the abduction mythos if ever there was one. Technology (Vulcan, or the Greys) wedded to beauty and sensuality (Venus, and by extension the erotic and sexual elements of the abduction mythos), who flirts and betrays him to the military (Mars). As an archetype, it fits the abduction mythos very well. We are now a long way from a simple identification of the saucer mythos with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

This brings me to my next point. The saucer mythology is a global one, not confined to America. There are reports from Europe, Australia, Latin America, China, Japan, India and Africa – just about everywhere except antarctica. European, Australian and Latin American culture has the same Christian roots as America, and Turkey, Iran and the Arab countries still have cultural links with the West through their worship of Allah, Yahweh under a different name, and the permeation of their scientific and religious thought with Greco-Roman philosophy. Hindu India and the Buddhist nations are completely different cultural entities, however. Yet these seem to have taken up the ufological gauntlet in recent years with a relish. If ufology has its roots so deeply embedded in the American religion, then how is it that this plant has been successfully transplanted onto such foreign soil? It’s true that this century has seen the successful export of American culture in the form of Coca-Cola, movies, rock music, art, fashion and capitalism.

This cultural penetration is by no means universal or unchallenged. The Communist bloc bitterly resisted any cultural penetration of the decadent West into its cultural sphere and rock music was singled out for especial attention. Merely playing it could get you twenty years in a gulag. Now that Communism has gone the way of the Berlin Wall, rock’s been taken up with alacrity. It has, however, taken particularly Russian and Eastern European forms, marrying itself to a strident and unpleasant nationalism. Islam too is waging its own kind of kulturkampf with the West. This may take the form of a complete rejection and hostility to Western cultural forms such as democracy and feminism, as in Iran, or to a limited acceptance as in Egypt and a positive espousal of secularism as in Turkey. Everyone may now wear jeans and T-shirt the world over, but by and large the world’s nations still retain their own popular music traditions. Sometimes these westernised appearances are just cosmetic.

The most powerful symbol of the new technological age was the moon landings. Just about everyone on the Earth who had access to a television watched them. It brought the reality of space travel home to the world’s population in the most dramatic way possible, making credible theories regarding interplanetary and interstellar travel, and generating an intense interest in SF. This should cause problems for ufological investigators in the Third World. Star Wars, Star Trek, ET and Close Encounters have been shown the world over. Even in Iran, where Western entertainment is strongly discouraged, an underground exists where cultural forms from outside the Islamic world are indulged. In Isfahan during the Revolution the faithful were watching Arnie as The Terminator. The governing clergy have, in recent years, expressed horror at the growth of satellite television. It’s now illegal to own a satellite dish. This may not present a problem, as with the aids of a few judicious bribes, a little ideological freedom may be bought along with a subscription to Rupert Murdoch’s burgeoning global stranglehold.

This does not, however, mean that Western values or views are purchased along with their entertainment forms. No audience passively absorbs everything they read, hear or see. Rather, a dialogue occurs whereby they take on board what appeals to them, and reject what does not. Identification is far too simple a theory to explain adequately what goes on within the audience’s psychology when enjoying a drama. (9) At the international level, non-western peoples negotiate First World cultural imports within the context of their own cultural forms. Thus, a South American lawyer can encounter alien beings, whose lineage lies in the huacas of the Incas. Cynthia Hind of UFO Afrinews has complained of the difficulty in getting Africans to report encounters with UFOs. They may interpret bizarre lightforms and otherworldly beings not as alien visitors but as returning gods or ancestors from their tribal belief systems: “Thus, when I approach witnesses of supposed sightings or contacts, I can be 99 per cent certain that their interpretation will be representative only of their culture.” (10)

This should disturb everyone genuinely interested in collecting the original narratives of Fortean phenomena. Hind appears here trying to foist her ideological framework on reports which the percipients have framed according to quite a different set of beliefs. If ufology is nothing more than a Western postsecular mythology, then it is no more true or valid than the African beliefs Hind believes it supplants. I don’t wish to be seen as accusing Ms Hind of deliberately disparaging or undervaluing African culture. I merely wish to point out the dangers inherent in reading unusual narratives which may embody two deep and conflicting world views.

The world’s debate is not one-sided either. It’s simply not a case of the rest of the world passively absorbing at different levels the cultural effusions of America and the West. A dialogue goes on, in which Western cultural forms may merge with noneuropean ideologies and arts, and then be re-exported back to the West. In the case of Science Fiction, the most obvious example is the Japanese Mango movies which have gained a cult following in recent years. Although they show the universal SF concern with technology and machines, the stories are framed within Japanese Confucian, Buddhist and Shinto roots. If you need an example, watch Fists of the North Star. The first 20 minutes of that epic is a narrative interpreting a future nuclear holocaust within the context of Taoist theories concerning harmony and disharmony. This actually makes the film sound far more interesting than it actually is. Plan 9 is far better.

The Wiccan and ritual magick movements which are now growing also absorbed much Eastern philosophy. One Wiccan prayer allegedly written down by Sanders or Gardner was lifted almost verbatim from Hinduism, but with the names of the deities changed to reflect the sexual dualism within modern Wicca. Wicca and related forms of occultism have played a major part in the mystical fringe element surrounding the Green movement. We are now told, for example, that Gaia, the living Earth, has chakras just like the human body. This seems to be following in the tradition of Arthur Shuttlewood et al, who advanced the theory that the Earth was covered with energy lines along which the saucers flew. This was in itself an appropriation of Alfred Watkins’ ley lines, though in a new, post-hippie form. Watkins had conceived of his old straight tracks as being nothing more than neolithic and bronze age roads. It was left to the Hippies to turn them into the ley lines of the cosmic power grid now so beloved of the ancient technology lobby. They did this through a more than healthy injection of feng shui, Chinese geomancy, in the form of Dragon Lines. The ultimate ancestor of the crop circle may have been the Mowing Devil, but he’s now been replaced by the suburban shamans. It’s to the Far East the ufologists now look, not the Near East.

Brookesmith is on even shakier ground when he tries to explore the psychology of the religions which he assaults. The ‘Christian myth’ is ‘sado-masochistic’. (11) Well, you can’t accuse him of mincing his words! The trouble is, nearly every corporate ritual society has can be accused of the same thing. The Bible is replete with stories of the sufferings of Israel at the hands of the Gentiles, and their liberation by a divinely inspired hero or heroine such as Esther. The reader of these stories is immersed in their sufferings, as the Christian is in the passion of Christ, gaining a sense of his own identity as part of the amma Israel or Christendom, and share in Israel’s or/and Christ’s triumph as Esther brings down Haman and Christ rises from the dead to reign in glory forever. If you want a secular version of this motif of vicarious suffering and redemption, try the Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph. Every year the British people are invited to remember the great debt they owe those who sacrificed their lives in the Wars, and share in their appreciation of the triumph they gained in the form of a free Europe.

Brookesmith may be right in stating that “one of the subtexts of the Christian Eucharist is cannibalism” (12), possibly following such works as William Meyer’s Vampires or Gods, published by III Press. There is a pronounced difference, however. Within the pagan religions which preceded Christianity, the sacrifices were to the gods, whom the worshippers considered consumed the offerings. In Christianity, it is the God who is consumed by the worshippers. I fully realise that amongst certain individuals excessive contemplation of Christ’s passion and the evils of the world led to extremes of self-deprivation and self-mutilation, such as the flagellants. Such excessive displays of devotion have, by and large, been discouraged by the established churches. When such fanatical displays occur there are usually a number of hidden, sociological causes behind them. It would be naive to put them down purely as being caused by a religion (13). In this respect Brookesmith’s sources have betrayed him. The American Religion is as much about sociology as it is about religion.

Sociology, however, concerns itself ‘with ‘typical’ patterns of motivation of motivation as these might be located in terms of significant sociological variables-social class, education, sex, etc. It is not an attempt to provide an aetiology of motive’ (14). ‘It does not become an exercise in psychology’ (15).

To illustrate how complex the situation is, and how much of Brookesmith’s critique can be used in any cultural form, I would like the reader to consider the example of a football match. This is a mass corporate ritual whereby the faithful – the teams supporters – meet at an appointed hour on a day specially fixed for that purpose, usually sometime during Saturday afternoon. There, they watch a sacred drama which is replete in religious imagery. I even recall a poster for a match making use of the Biblical quote ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’. This fits the democratic and yet elitist nature of the game. Everyone is free to support, or not, the team of their choice. Only a minority of these, however, will be permitted to enter the pantheon of victors who win the Cup.

Like the abductees, their lives are not their own. Sides choose their champions from the hundreds of hopefuls presented to them through sports clubs and other confraternities. Their clubs buy and sell them as though slavery had not been abolished. The language used of the matches too fits the religious speech of ascetism and self-denial, of pushing oneself to the limits. Nietzche even observed that once faith in God was broken, people turned instead to health fads and physical fitness. Asceticism as an axiomatic good now seems deeply embedded within Western culture. On the pitch the players encounter herculean opposition, straining titanically to claim the final reward of victory. The trials through which they pass serve to make their triumph all the more glorious. The Church was certainly not unaware of the parallels between sport and the Christian life: ‘let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us’ (16). It was certainly not without reason that especially perseverant martyrs were called ‘athletes of Christ’. Football even has its recording angels – the referees, sternly ensuring that each sin does not go unnoticed, and enforcing the judgements of the higher powers. Of course, there is also the lucrative trade in kit in the team’s colours and other relics to satisfy the cupidity of the faithful.

Like the ufonauts, the players may also appear with grotesquely oversized heads perched precariously on thin, wizened bodies. This Mekonion appearance may seem strange, considering the amount of time they spend training themselves to physical perfection, but it is entirely explicable. I am, of course, speaking of the rubber choricatures of the England side being sold during the last World Cup. Lacking much of a sense of smell, humans recognise each other by physical, especially facial appearance. The easiest way to caricature a person, to distort him or her so as to make them look grotesque, yet keep them familiar, is to exaggerate his or her head. This is also an important factor in determining the physical shape of our alien visitors. They have large heads and spindly bodies. They are enough like us to appear credible as living beings, yet sufficiently grotesque to be marked out as alien and threatening. This is perhaps one of the most important reasons why the visitors in recent years have ceased to be technological humanoids and taken the form of our old grey friends.

“The problem is that there’s no middle ground in football any more – and we are in that middle ground”

.

There is another sphere which religion, sport and ufology share: prophecy. The Visitors seem to delight in bizarre and meaningless prophecies. ‘Cancer begins in the teeth’, for example. The pronouncements of the football pundits, however, are truly worthy of the Delphic oracle in there depth and impenetrability: ‘The problem is that there’s no middle ground in football any more – and we are in that middle ground’ (17). The similarities between football and religion mere made obvious by the painter Michael Browne in his depiction of Eric Cantona as the Risen Christ (below), widely shown in the newspapers and on television on the departure of the great sportsman from Manchester. One last thing needs to be said about football. The game is not inherently racist, but because of its mass appeal and absorbtion of nationalist sentiments, it can frequently attract racist elements who identify their teams with their own racist goals. In this it can mirror religion in the nationalistic and racial pressures that can be brought to bear on that.

It therefore seems to me that ufology is too complex a phenomenon to be reduced to a simple paradigm based on the ‘American Religion’, a concept that is anyway not without deep flaws and caveats. While the central tenet that the UFO phenomenon is merely a postsecular form of western spirituality is unassailable and the parallels drawn with other forms of religion pertinent and thought-provoking, it cannot be automatically compared with the Semitic religions. The arguments deployed against these in particular can be applied to so many other, secular rituals, that they lose their force. Ufology can only be explained or truly examined with reference to universal religious or existential concerns which take into account the globalisation of the phenomenon. It cannot be forced onto the procrustean bed of Brookesmith’s anti-Christian sentiments.

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References:

1. Gregory Benford, Tides of Light, Gollancz.
2. Keith Wime,’Wime’s World Watch’, in DeVille’s Advocate 3, p. 23.
3. See under the heading The Cult of Despair, The Godlings Descend, Magonia 56, p.14.
4. Corinthians 1, verse 32, Chapter 10, Eyre and Spottiswoode Study Bible, Revised Standard Version.
5. Op. cit., Romans 1, verse 16.
6. Brookesmith, P., The Godlings Descend, Magonia 56, footnote 20, p.13.
7. Ibid, p.14.
8. Ibid, p.13, quoting Paul Tillich.
9. For a discussion of this in the world of the funny papers, see Martin Barker, Comics, Ideology, Power and the Critics, chapter 5: ‘The Vicissitudes of Identification’. The arguments marshalled can, of course, be applied to any entertainment or cultural medium.
10. Hind, C.,’UFOs Within African Culture’, in UFOs – The Definitive Casebook, Spencer, J., ed., p.144.
11. Brookesmith, P., op. cit, p. 14.
12. Ibid, p. 14.
13. As an example of this, see Victor S. Jeffrey’s Satanic Panic for a discussion of the complex sociological and economic causes for juvenile delinquency, pseudo-satanic crime and the modern witch-hunts.
14. Religion in Sociological Perspective, Bryan Wilson, OUP, p. 20.
15. [bid, p.20.
16. Hebrews 12 v.1., Eyre and Spottiswoode Study Bible.
17. Joe Royle, Liverpool Echo, quoted in Private Eye no. 917, ‘Colemanballs’ column, p. 16.

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MINDSCAPES, Part One. From Magonia 84, March 2004.

For Forteans, it is axiomatic that the exclusion of the weird and the bizarre from the modern rationalistic weltanschauung began in the seventeenth century with the rise of institutional Science. ‘The power, that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science’, [1] as Fort himself said at the very beginning of the Book of the Damned.

Those awkward facts objects and events which couldn’t be explained by the rationalism of the academics were marginalized, ignored and forgotten. save only for connoisseurs of the weird and unexplained, like Fort. who were themselves intellectualy isolated and alienated from the governing intellectual paradigm of the times. Unfortunately, like the stifling intellectual straitjackets Fort so loudly denounced this is itself a dogmatic statement that needs serious revision. The exclusion of what has since become known as the Fortean – freaks, prodigies, omens and other sports of nature – began two centuries before the Scientific Revolution, in the 15th rather than 17th century, and the intellectual discipline which pioneered their banishment was not science. but history. More specifically it was the changes in historiography pioneercd by avowed political writers such as Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini as the medieval chronicle gave way to the humanist monograph. [2]

In fact much of the debate about such Fortean phenomcna in the intellectual counterculture forged in the 6Os has indeed been as much about history and their historical provenance, as about their scientific validity. Just as humanist historiography damned them in the fifteenth century, so they were reinstated. if only in part, with the rise of local legendary history in the academic chorographies of the 17th and the popular chapbooks of the ‘English Revolution’. While humanist historography ultimately won the academic intellectual battle, these latter were seized as models by the radicals of the 60s alternative culture for their tracts, of which the assault on establishment science was only one small part. This underground, modern antiquarian approach to history has in its turn spawned contemporary psychogeography, the exploration of the mystical aspects of place.

Although academic historians would no doubt strongly deny any connection with such an apparently spurious discipline, psychogeography does have an academic counterpart as historians, cognitive archaeologists and researchers of Cultural Studies explore the physical, changing topographies of landscapes. towns and other spaces in an attempt to delineate the mentalité these spaces express and generate in their citizens. Regardless of their intellectual respectability – or lack of it – both historiographies share a fundamental awareness of theintellectual and spiritual connection between a place and its inhabitants, and an approach to the exploration of both which is effectively summarised by that great countercultural hero and beardie weirdie Alan Moore: ‘When we excavate the place, we excavate ourselves – the inside is the outside – Hey, lady, that’s my skull!’ [3]

Whatever the specific area of inquiry may be, modern, post-renaissance historiography aims to be sceptical, carefully considering the value and biases of its sources, and concerned with the causes of the events it studies, whether they are the personal, psychological motives of the protagonists, or long term political, societal, economic or environmental forces. This scepticism particularly extends to the supernatural and mythical.

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 Geoffrey of Monmouth’s spurious account of the origins of the British from the Trojan Brutus recounted in his History of the Kings of Britain, was disproved first by the Scots historian John Major in 1521, and again by the Italian Polydore Vergil in his History of Great Britain of 1534.

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It began in the sixteenth century with Erasmus and the Bollandists, who, when writing the lives of saints, such as St. Jerome, broke with medieval hagiography by excluding the pious legends, which had gradually built up around their subjects’ over the centuries, concentrating instead on contemporary descriptions and records offering far more reliable accounts of their careers. This historiographical disenchantment also affected national mythology. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s spurious account of the origins of the British from the Trojan Brutus recounted in his History of the Kings of Britain, was disproved first by the Scots historian John Major in 1521, and again by the Italian Polydore Vergil in his History of Great Britain of 1534.

At the heart of this scepticism is the notion that the progress of history is accessible to the human intellect. It was an approach partly pioneered by Machiavelli and Guicciardini in the 15th century, who were determined to find the human, political reasons for the military turmoil experienced in Italy, torn between conflicting states and subject to foreign invasions, such as those of the French. Although humanist historiography contained much that is alien to modern historiography – viewing their genre as a branch of rhetoric, humanist writers saw nothing inappropriate in inventing noble speeches to put in the mouths of their heroes – this scepticism and rationalism has been their greatest legacy to modem historiography, and indeed has become its defining trait.

Medieval writers could produce histories very similar in form and content to the humanist model of the monograph. For example, the Flandria Generosa, although originally composed as a genealogy of Count Baldwin I of Flanders, in particular anticipated its form as its compilers attempted to comprehend the political complexities, which emerged with the usurpation of Robert le Frison in 1070 and the murder of Charles the Good in 1127. [4]

In general, however, the medieval approach to history was very different. The predominant form of historical writing was the chronicle, in which events for each year were noted with varying degrees of detail and interest in the causation and motives of the participants. By and large the chroniclers had little interest in the ultimate motives of their subjects, and where they do attempt to probe their psychology, their descriptions are often curt and stereotyped.

This disinterest arose in large part from the monastic compilers’ essentially religious interpretation of history. The world, including human affairs, was ruled and driven by God, whose will was inscrutable and beyond human comprehension. There was thus no point in looking too far for the causes of historical events. At the same time this attitude also permitted the inclusion of Fortean material, such as prodigies, anomalous weather, monsters and spectral apparitions as it was through such obviously supernatural occurrences that God’s will could be directly discerned. Although the exclusion of such Forteana was greatly facilitated by the rise of cxperimental, rationalist science in the 17th century, the ultimate origins of their banishment to the intellectual margins belongs to the ‘Historical Revolution’, as it has been called by the historians Dr Kelley and D.H. Sacks, of the later 16th century. [5]

Coupled with this new rationalist historiography was an explicit class prejudice, which also aided the relegation of Fortean phenomena to the social margins in line with the perceived social status of the market for such literature. Renaissance ‘politick’ historians viewed themselves as writing primarily for the education, and edification, of princes. Machiavelli, for example, dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo De Medici. The Elizabethan writer Thomas Blundeville succinctly expressed the ‘politick’ historian’s line when he stated ‘Histories be made of deeds done by a public weal or against a public weal, and such deeds be either deeds of war, of peace, or else sedition and conspiracy’ in his The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories of 1574. [6] Anything that departed from such lofty matters was ruthlessly excluded. These damned subjects, according to John Trussell, another Tudor historiographer, included celebrations like coronations and pageants, as well as novelties, prodigies and justice done on petty offenders, a list which effectively excludes most of the subject matter of today’s tabloid newspapers. Naturally, these subjects still remained immensely popular, particularly amongst the lower orders.

Although overtaken by the historical monograph as the premier vehicle of historical inquiry, the chronicle still survived and retained considerable popularity. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle, although first published in 1577, enjoyed a second edition ten years later, and the genre continued into the reign of James I/VI with Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicles of the Kings of England. Part of this popularity derived from the chronicles’ perceived suitability as a vehicle for such damned subjects, even though this made it dangerously suspicious in the eyes of the Tudor ruling elite. Edmund Bolton declared that their writers were ‘of the dregs of the common people’, [7] and considered that they had a corrupting influence on them.

How many of these depraved mechanics actually read Holinshed is actually quite moot due to books’ high cost even a century after the introduction of printing to England. The Chronicle, for example, cost twice the annual wages of the average Elizabethan labourer. Eventually the gap between such official and unofficial history was to widen still further so that such subjects were banished completely from history to form their own separate literature of marvels, such as A World of Wonders, and thence to haunt the literary margins of broadside ballads and chapbooks.

Such street literature was immensely popular. Although it’s possible to read too much into its existence, with some historians perhaps discerning nascent class conflicts and antagonisms in them which really only emerged later in the 18th and 19th centuries, some of the authorities’ fears about their subversive nature was by no means unjustified. Most chapbook authors were anonymous, but the identities of a few have come down to us. While not quite ‘the dregs of the common people’, these men certainly did not occupy an elevated position in society.

The Elizabethan chapbook author Thomas Deloney (1543-1600), for example, was a weaver, John Taylor (1580-1653), the most prolific of such writers, was a Thames waterman and a tavern keeper in Oxford and London, while going further down the social scale his contemporary Martin Parker (d. 1656) was an alehouse keeper. Unlike the more respectable taverns, alehouses were particularly regarded with suspicion by the early modern middle class. They were situated in private houses, quite often as a means of supporting themselves by people newly arrived in a city or unable to find more respectable work, serving home-brewed ale and quite often acting as brothels. With his background in such a notoriously immoral profession, it is not surprising that the respectable sections of Jacobean and Stuart society viewed Parker’s literary creations, and those of others like him, with distaste and suspicion.

Not unsurprisingly, such unofficial literature, aimed securely at the working classes, enjoyed considerable popularity during periods of social and political unrest, such as the English Civil War. The 17th century collector George Thomason amassed 22 pamphlets in 1640. By 1660 this had grown to include 22,000 assorted pamphlets, newspapers and newssheets. [8] Although such literature has been extensively studied by historians attempting to trace the theological and political doctrines expounded in them, it is often overlooked that purely theological tracts were very much in the minority. The majority of chapbooks during the period of the English Civil War were very much concerned with relating the latest wonder or prodigy to appear to the beleaguered nation. This did not, however, mean that their authors were not concerned with making a particular political or sectarian point.

The pamphlet A Miracle of Miracles Wrought by the Blood of King Charles the First recounted the miraculous cure of the 14-15 year old daughter of one Mrs. Baillie from a skin disease after being wiped by a handkerchief that had been dipped in the king’s blood after his execution. Needless to say, not a few of these tracts were distinctly radical in tone, qualities that made them immensely attractive to the nascent hippy New Left when it appeared in the 60′s. To the intellectuals of the dawning counterculture, reacting against capitalism and the stifling rationalism, which supported it, such radical pamphlets represented an autonomous, folk literature offering vital models and ideologies for the alternative society they wished to found.

Even nearly forty years after the counterculture has morphed into the less confrontational, far more capitalism-friendly ‘alternative culture’, vestiges of this fascination with 17th century radicalism still remain in the alternative press. Aporia Press, for example, publish a range of 17th century radical tracts by the visionaries Abiezer Coppe, John Robins and the Diggers, amongst others, as well as Fortean material in the Anomalous Phenomena of the Interregnum, all edited by Andrew Hopton, as well as more contemporary radical and anarchist material. As well as absorbing these authors’ attitude to the numinous and occult, the ideologues of the new counterculture also took over, to a greater or lesser extent, their attitude to history. This is effectively illustrated by the emergence of contemporary psychogeography from the ley-hunting milieu in the early 90′s.

Sixties ley hunting was essentially the hybrid child of Chinese geomancy and Alfred Watkin’s ‘Old Straight Track(s)’. From being merely the neglected remains of Neolithic tracks and pathways – damned by establishment archaeology, but not invested with any special numinous power – leys became indigenous British dragonlines – mysterious channels of supernatural Earth energies, enfolding the landscape in a web of occult architecture and power.

Instrumental in the development of such ideas was the archaeologist and paranormal investigator T.C. Lethbridge, whose dowsing experiments led him into increasingly bizarre occult speculation on the nature of witchcraft, and the origins of ghosts and genius loci in emotionally charged images and events becoming telepathically imprinted on the fabric of the landscape itself. Bruce Cathie’s notion of the global energy web as a power system for UFOs is essentially an application of this idea to the UFO mythos. Much the same can be said of the idea, espoused inter alia by Arthur Shuttlewood, that the quartz contained in the constituent rocks of the ancient henge monuments allow them to operate like the crystals in early cat’s whisker radios, regulating the earth energies generated along such leys. [9] This, however, is an attempt to put a rationalist, scientific gloss on what is essentially an occult doctrine.

Although such ideas have now been effectively discredited, they have still left their mark, particularly in popular literature. The idea of the henge monuments, barrows and other Neolithic sacred sites as a primitive power grid for lost, antediluvian civilisations has been taken up in the 2000 AD comic strip, Slaine, whose Celtic hero draws on it to provide him with supernatural strength and ferocity during terrifying ‘warp-spasm’ battle rages. The effects of these are not unlike the physical contortions experienced by the Irish hero Cu Chulainn. Elsewhere in the strip such energies are used to propel merchant vessels through the sky, and power ‘leyser’ ray guns. Throughout, the strip is strongly informed by a pagan spirituality centred firmly on Danu, the Earth Mother.

Less obviously neopagan, but no less informed by the numinous power of place, are the works of Alan Garner. As a recent review of his latest book in the pages of the Financial Times review supplement noted, Garner was strongly influenced by the Aboriginal Australian idea ofthe songlines – tracts of landscape forged and shaped by the superhuman ancestors of the Dreamtime, and still invested with their awesome power, accessible to their descendants as they travel across their ancestral ranges through myth and ritual. Garner’s landscapes are similarly invested with occult force, occupied and haunted as they are by powerful and predatory supernatural entities such as The Morrigan in the Moon of Gomrath, while time itself is fluid and permeable. His youthful, and sometimes more mature heroes can be transported back into the past during timeslips, while mythic figures from the Celtic dreamtime may intrude into the present. Some of this is a fantastication of Garner’s own experiences, growing up in the Peak district, in an area of awesome natural beauty populated, in his own words. by ‘people of living Chaucerian speech’.

Outside of the province of children’s literature, it’s possible to discern the continuing legacy of such mystic attitudes to place in the current vogue for Chinese geomancy proper, now robbed of its cultural context and domesticated, in line with the rest of the New Age marketing phenomenon, as a tweely mystical indoor decorating fad.

Ley hunting itself, however, practically collapsed in the late 1980s under rationalist criticisms of the spuriousness of its methods and concepts. The ancient alignments of which leys were allegedly composed were often widely separated in time and purpose, while some of the supposed geographical features sculpted by the ancients were nothing of the sort, but modern railway embankments, roads and drainage ditches. The result was the discrediting of this countercultural discipline as a whole, and some of the more notorious of its products in particular, such as the infamous Glastonbury Zodiac. It should be recognised, however, that despite these criticisms the discipline still retains its intellectual validity for some, and the Society of Leyhunters continues to meet and publish its researches.

Furthermore, some enthusiasts carried on to apply the same techniques of searching the landscape for patterns connecting disparate features to the urban environment, in which the bulk of the western European population now live. The result was psychogeography. The term first seems to have emerged c.1992 or thereabouts in the name of the London Psychogeographical Association, whose pamphlet claimed that various architectural features of the metropolis had been consciously planned by the Freemasons and other covert occult groups to form patterns channelling ley energy into Canary Wharf, thus aiding the secret power elite in their quest for world domination. This particular document appears to have been intended largely as a prank. A few years previously, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in their book Good Omens rather mischievously suggested that the course of the M25, or London Orbital Motorway, was deliberately planned as a giant Satanic sigil, energised each day by the angry passage of thousands of irate motorists who thus unconsciously performed an occult ritual designed to raise the level of misery and rage in contemporary Britain.

The outré claims about the Masonic architecture of Canary Wharf seems to be influenced by Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s joke, though a number of people signally failed to get it. There thus followed a series of articles in some of the wilder reaches of the weird press examining various global capitals for signs of Masonic and occult symbolism in their layout. One issue of Matthew Williams’  Truthseekers’ Review carried an interview with a Czech researcher who traced Masonic patterns and designs in the layout of Prague, while similar symbolism has been found in that of Washington DC. In the case of the latter, the designs are almost certainly there, as much of the city’s layout was indeed planned according to Masonic principles.

Unfortunately for those versions of the theory, which see such evidence of Masonic influence, as the marks of an oppressive, Fascistic conspiratorial elite, one of the city’s planners, Benjamin Banneker, was Black. To him Freemasonry, rather than being an oppressive, elitist force, probably represented the beginning of a new, more democratic order of universal brotherhood and freedom, regardless of colour or ethnic origin.

Going further into the realm of art, psychogeography has inspired groups of people to go out and explore the mystic, visionary aspects of the urban landscape. Moore’s `Beat Seance’, referred toabove, is a case in point. At least in its CD form, it’s an hour long exploration of the weirder aspects of Highbury and its denizens, including Coleridge’s drug-induced hallucinatory peregrinations, Aleister Crowley’s residence, Joe Meek’s suicide and the 1923 football team’s brief experimentation with amphetamines, then legal, to assist their game, inter alia, all linked by their location in Highbury and grouped thematically according to the occult elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

As a piece of performance art, an exploration of the bizarre local history of one of London’s suburbs by a master of contemporary high strangeness, it works very well, according to your taste. To his credit, Moore doesn’t take psychogeography’s academic pretensions too seriously, wittily describing himself and his fellow performers as: ‘Rosicrucian heating engineers … cowboy operatives … read(ing) the street plan’s accidental creases and the orbit maps left by coffee cups.’ Moore intended it as art, and a mystical evocation of the spirit of a distinct place. It is not, however, intended as a work of serious history.

Other artists influenced by the mindset and techniques of psychogeography in their work are Ian Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. Sinclair has stated in interviews that he believes “there are always these structures of domination and power and spirits, which can be articulated for ill within the grids, patterns and geometry of the city.” He did, however, reject the idea that there “was a sub-masonic cult that meet(s) in hidden rooms”, considering instead that “just the sheer fact of people endlessly having walked between this building and that building creates a band of consciousness which remains an active thing you can tap into.” [10]

His acute concern with the mystical impact of the landscape informs works such as his Lud Heat, while his 1997 Lights Out for the Territory, has been described as ‘a non-fiction diary of nine walks charting London’s mythology, secret history and counterculture.’ [11] Similarly, Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor was based on the conceit that the 17th-18th century architect, fictionalised as Nicholas Dyer, was a secret member of a Satanic coven, surreptitiously incorporating his occult designs into the fabric of the churches he was commissioned to build. As with the landscape features around Canary Wharf, these lined up into a distinct, conscious pattern: a pentangle. Ackroyd uses the fictional Hawksmoor’s life, and that of a twentieth century detective of the same name, investigating a series of bizarre and motiveless murders, to explore the depths of human evil.

Not all of Ackroyd’s work has shared this pessimism, however. One critic of Ackroyd’s oeuvre remarked that as well as occult horror, he had “also revived the myth of Albion as a spiritual Possibility wherein all the horrors and indignities of history are somehow healed in a timeless paradise that draws in the dark and the light and transforms it into Blakean chorale of love and reconciliation.” [12] Given these psychogeographical inclinations, however, it is no accident that Sinclair subtitled his most recent book, a travelogue about the M25, a chorography.

This was the study of local history with particular reference to its surviving physical remains. Although the classic English chorographical works appeared in the 16th and 17th centuries, with William Camden’s Britannia of 1586 as one of the foremost examples of the genre, like the other forms of historical writing it, too had its origin in renaissance Italy. It first emerged in the Roman world with Ptolemy, before being revived in 1453 by Flavio Biondo with the publication of his Italy Illustrated. This dcscribed the classical remains and antiquities surviving in the Italian peninsula, itemised according to its fourteen ancient regions. It was enormously popular, and once publishcd, national pride dictated that other scholars outside Italy would produce similar works to demonstrate the antiquity of their lands. Thus, Conrad Celtis, the poeta laureatus of the German emperor Maximilian I, produced his Germany Illustrated in the later fifteenth century, followed in England by Camden’s volume, amongst others. These were intended to show that Britain, too, could boast impressive Roman remains like her continental rivals.

On to Part Two>>

References:

1. X, ed., Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned, John Brown Publishing, 1995, p. 1.
2. For a more comprehensive discussion of the development of Renaissance historiography and its break with medieval attitudes to history, see Burke, P., The Renaissance Sense of the Past, London, Edward Arnold, 1969.
3. Moore, A., The Highbury Working: A Beat Seance, RE:, REPCD03, 1997.
4. Discussed more fully in Dunbabin, J., ‘Discovering a Past for the French Aristocracy’ in Magdalino, P., (ed), The Perception of the Past in Twelfth Century Europe, London, Hambledon Press, 1992.
5. ‘Introduction’, Kelley, D.R., and Sacks, D.H., The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500-1800, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
6. Quoted in Helgerson, R., ‘Murder in Faversham: Holinshed’s Impertinent History’, in Kelley, and Sacks, op. cit., p. 147.
7. Ibid, p. 147.
8. Friedman, J., Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution- The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford’s Flies, UCL, London,1993.
9. See Shuttlewood, A., The Flying Saucerers, Sphere, London, 1976, pp. 27-32.
10. Hedgecock, ‘The lain Sinclair Interview’, The Edge, no. 6, December 1997-January 1998, P. 19.
11. Ibid, p.14
12. Newman, P., ‘The Art of Shadows’, 3rd Stone, no. 44, Autumn 2002, p. 33.

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