Ley, Lady, Ley

 “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” so Hamlet tells his old friend and intellectual sparring partner in the play. Actually there are more things in heaven and earth, particularly earth, than are dreamt of in most philosophies. Shakespeare knew this; for he was in possession of a wisdom and understanding long vanished, sublimated under a heavy defensive crust of rationalism.

Let me give you some more words, this time from A Midsummer Nights Dream, the most magical of the bard's plays, full of mystery and music. The words in question are those of Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow;

Now it is the time of night

That the graves all gaping wide,

Every one lets forth his sprite,

In the church way paths to glide.

Perhaps you know the play well, seen it performed or even performed in it yourself. I did, when I was at school. When I was fourteen years old I was Titania, Queen of the fairies. Ever since it has had an abiding fascination for me, particularly some of the more enigmatic lines. Do you know, for example, what a church way path is? I didn't that midsummer of my teens. I do now; I have done for some time.

I'll tell you in a bit, but first a word on ancients paths or roads. Alfred Watkins was an amateur archaeologist born in the county of Hereford on the Welsh border. The Welsh name for Hereford, incidentally, is Henffordd, meaning an old road, a striking coincidence, considering that old roads were to have a major impact on his life. In the early 1920s, while examining some county maps, he noticed that various ancient sites, including barrows, standing stones and stone circles seem to occur in an exact alignment. Straight lines could be drawn between them. Looking deeper, he subsequently found that old churches built atop pagan shrines could be similarly aligned.

In 1922 he published his findings in Early British Trackways, followed up three years later by The Old Straight Road, the book he is best known for. Watkins had discovered what came to be known as 'ley lines', chosen because the tracks passed through place names that often ended with the syllable 'ley.' Yes, he named them, that's true, but he 'discovered' them, in might be said, in the same way that Columbus 'discovered' America!

In Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience ley lines are defined as follows;

Ley lines are alignments and patterns of powerful, invisible earth energy said to connect various sacred sites, such as churches, temples, stone circles, megaliths, holy wells, burial sites and other locations of spiritual and magical importance.

In fact what Watkins had stumbled upon was a feature that for centuries before his time had been known as fairy roads; spiritual highways, in other words. Shakespeare knew, hence the mysterious (not for him) reference to church way paths. This is just the English name for something that occurs across so many different cultures and ages, the belief that that spirits of one kind or another, living or dead, move through the physical landscape along special routes.

The church way paths constitute a special class here, known elsewhere in Europe as 'corpse roads.' In Britain they are also known by other names, such as burial road, bier road, coffin road or lych way, the latter derived from lyches, the Old English word for corpse. In Saxon time they were known as the 'deada wegg.' I don't think there is any need for translation here, is there?

The church paths were simple enough: they were the prescribed route by which the dead were carried to their allotted burial place, straight to the gate. But more than this they accumulated a long tradition of spirit lore, routes believed to be followed by the dead after death, as Shakespeare revels in A Midsummer's Night Dream. This was a belief so widespread in Medieval Europe that the remains of those whose return was not desired in any form were often buried at cross roads, specifically to confuse their spirits. Unable to travel, the spirit would thus be 'locked' in a single location.

Just as Watkins had inadvertently stumbled across church paths, the people of the Middle Ages had stumbled across something even older, a more archaic spirit lore. We now know of Neolithic earthen avenues called “cursuses” linking burial mounds. These features can run for a considerable distance, some for many miles, and are largely straight. All of them connect funerary sites. We know the exist, yes, but we have no idea what the were for. It's not beyond possibility that they were specifically intended to serve as spirit paths. Some Neolithic and Bronze age graves, particularly in Britain and France, are fitted with blocking stones. Why? What was being blocked?

We are not simply dealing with man-made features or human superstition here. In 1987 the New Scientist magazine published an article suggesting that species as diverse as pigeons, whales, bees and -of all things – bacteria can navigate using the earth's magnetic field. Ley lines may be human but we know that they, too, have a close relationship with the same magnetic field. So, take your pick: the lines are are simply areas of altered magnetic fields or they carry traces of all past energies, of those who have trodden these mystical ways since before history and before time.

Puck's words, you see, have a wider significance than even Shakespeare may have understood. They connect with a spirit lore that extends all the way from Ireland in the west to China in the east. It's possible to come across references time after time and place after place. In Germany they were called Geisterwege, routes to be avoided at night. The Handwortbuch der deutschen Aberglaubens describes them thus;

The paths, with no exception, always run in a straight line over mountains and valleys and through marshes...in towns they pass the houses closely or go through them. The paths end or originate in a cemetery...therefore this way or road was believed to have the same characteristics as a cemetery...where spirits of the deceased thrive.

In Ireland these were the fairy paths, routes that had such physical reality in the minds of the living that building patterns were adapted to ensure that they were not obstructed. Does this sound familiar? It should do if you have any acquaintance with Chinese culture; for the same belief underpins feng-shui divination, in which homes and other places have to be protected, so to speak, from the straight and narrow! The belief is that troublesome spirits travelling along such ethereal pathways will bring bad luck if blocked on their journey. In Ireland those who suffered unforeseen misfortunes, or sudden illness, were said to live in houses that were in a “contrary place.”

Now a real life story, one I got from Paul Devereux, writing in the Fortean Times. There is a croft, now a cattle shed, at Knockeencreen in County Kerry. In an interview carried out in the 1980s, the then occupant told of troubles his grandfather experienced with cattle dying from wholly unexplained reasons. The front door is exactly opposite the back door. A passing gypsy told the grandfather that the building stood on a fairy path between two hills. “Keep the doors slightly ajar at night”, she advised, “to allow the fairies free passage.” And so he did, and so the cattle stopped dying. No more bad feng-shui.

The important thing here is that the energy is not obstructed, either on the ley lines or the dragon paths of Chinese tradition. For if they are...well, you've been warned. If you would like to discuss this further you might care to join me for a drink at the Ancient Ram Inn in Wooton-under-Edge in the county of Gloucestershire. I should warn you, though, that it is reputed to be one of the most haunted places in England. A few years ago an investigation was carried out by a team from the UK Paranormal Study, headed by Kieron Butler. Mr Butler – silly man – decided that a spot of Ouija game play was called for, which called for an unexpected entity:

We asked for a sign outside the board and we heard a deep kind of groan or yell. I felt his presence rush across the attic towards us as did Mr Al and the others felt a freezing blast of air hit us with force. I felt him at first right behind me, we continued then I felt him stand in the spot I was sitting, I felt overcome by a feeling I cannot explain but I think he was trying to get into me as if I could be used as a channel. This was getting unbearable and I then felt a terrible stabbing pain in my back, moments later the board spelt out stab & die...then I felt all the pain and feelings return before I passed out.

What's the problem with the Ancient Ram Inn? Why, it's right over a ley line.  

Dreaming on a Midsummer Night

This has always seemed like a magical time of year to me, Midsummer, the Solstice, Litha, whatever one wishes to call it; it has ever since I saw a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream when I was eight years old. The Sun is now in the sign of Cancer, my birth sign, the sign of the Moon. The magical forces are now at the height, and Robin Goodfellow puts a girdle round the Earth!

Midsummer Eve itself, St John's Eve, is a major holiday for witches and all who love them, all who love the old power and the ancient ways. Traditionally it was a fire and water festival, a central feature of which was ritual baths and bonfires. The bonfires themselves were closely linked with water, lit as they were on the shores of streams, lakes, rivers and oceans.

Midsummer marks the convergence of the Sun and the Moon. The Sun, now at its height, has entered Cancer, the great water sign, the only sign ruled by the Moon, the only sign ruled by Artemis, Diana and Hecate, the lunar goddesses. All those who share the sign of Cancer with me are collectively the Children of the Moon, hunters, witches, flyers and lovers.

This was a time when witch-hunters of the past claimed that witches rode out to meet Satan, whereas the real witches, not the monsters of imagination, simply gathered to renew their sacred bond with the earth, to celebrate its bounty and fertility. It was a time also for gathering magical plants, a time when they were at their most potent. Russian witches use to harvest those which grew on the top of Bald Mountain, considering them to be the most powerful on Earth.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is by far my favourite Shakespearean comedy, light of touch and light of heart, rich in all sorts of magic, a world of fairy visions.  And it just so happens that one of favourite paintings touches on the very same themes.  It’s The Fairy Raid: Carrying off a Changeling on Midsummer’s Eve by Joseph Noel Paton, a nineteenth century Scottish artist who painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style.  He is better known for The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania but for me The Fairy Raid is just sublime.  The technical proficiency is astounding but there is far more here.  This is a vision that could only have come of a true love of the Realm of Faerie. 

Magic, love and fruitfulness, these are the things Midsummer Eve and the Solstice are about; this is what they will always be about. All hail to thee, Children of the Moon.

Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

Salvation through Love

My boyfriend has tickets for a new production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, which premiers at the London Coliseum, the home of the English National Opera, towards the end of the month. He has contacts with the company, so were kindly allowed to attend a recent rehearsal. I can tell you that it’s all looking good!

I confess that I’m not massively keen of the German master’s ponderously Teutonic total art works. I saw Parsifal last year in the same theatre. I’d heard some extracts before but that was my first full performance. What can I say, other than it’s deeply depressive, almost as depressive as Tristan and Isolde! There is such a negative, life-denying quality to Wagner’s philosophy. I can only agree with Nietzsche, who in Der Fall Wagner – The Wagner Case – contrasted his work with that of George Bizet, contrasted gloomy northern bogs with southern light and sun!

The Flying Dutchman is different, though, because it is one of Wagner’s early operas, written at a time when he hadn’t been completely seduced by his own mythos. Compared with Tristan and Parsifal, those knights of gloomy countenance, it has a much lighter touch with some really super arias. I love the choruses too. I think the Spinning Chorus quite wonderful as is Steuermann, laß die wacht, during which the Norwegian sailors call for the Dutch crew in the silent and ghostly ship to come and join them. They end by rather wishing that they had kept silent themselves!

Thinking beyond the opera, the legend itself has long intrigued me, the story of a cursed ship and crew, condemned to sail the oceans forever. The origin is uncertain, but it seems to have appeared for the first time in the seventeenth century, though possibly of much older provenance in the bowels of nautical folklore. It’s first mentioned in print in A Voyage to Botany Bay, published in 1795, in which the author says;

I had often heard of the superstition of sailors respecting apparitions, but had never given much credit to the report; it seems that some years since a Dutch man of war was lost off the Cape of Good Hope, and every soul on board perished; her consort weathered the gale, and arrived soon after at the Cape. Having refitted, and returning to Europe, they were assailed by a violent tempest nearly in the same latitude. In the night watch some of the people saw, or imagined they saw, a vessel standing for them under a press of sail, as though she would run them down: one in particular affirmed it was the ship that had foundered in the former gale, and that it must certainly be her, or the apparition of her; but on its clearing up, the object, a dark thick cloud, disappeared. Nothing could do away the idea of this phenomenon on the minds of the sailors; and, on their relating the circumstances when they arrived in port, the story spread like wild-fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman. From the Dutch the English seamen got the infatuation, and there are very few Indiamen, but what has some one on board, who pretends to have seen the apparition.

The tale of a ghost ship was then laced with a curse, though the reason for its particular doom is uncertain. All sorts of macabre layers were added by successive authors, to the point where we have a story of a captain, struggling to round the Cape of Good Hope in a storm. Refusing to go into harbour for the night he said “May I be eternally damned if I do, though I should beat about here till the Day of Judgment.” Thereby he spoke his own doom!

For the Dutchman there is no hope at Good Hope. It was Heinrich Heine who threw in the possibility of redemption in The Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski, a satirical novel published in 1833. In this he allows the captain to come ashore every seven years to seek true love, thereby finding salvation in the devotion of a woman. This was the spin that inspired Wagner’s own romantic adaptation in the story of the Dutchman and Senta, the one woman who finally proves to be true, even unto death. It’s rather ironic considering that Heine was a Jew and Wagner a notorious anti-Semite!

Yes, OK, there is, like Tristan and Isolde, another ‘love death’ here. But the sacrifice of Senta seems much more human, altogether far, far less tortuous. The whole thing appeals to my romantic sensibilities. Seduced and deluded I may be, but I like to console myself with notions of love greater than death.

So, all in all, I’m quite looking forward to seeing and hearing it in it's full glory, with James Creswell as the Dutchman, and Orla Boyan as Senta, his one true love. I feel certain that it will be a memorable evening. Afterwards we shall have an intimate supper for two, a return to less ethereal forms of romance. You see, unlike Senta, I’m not thinking of throwing myself off a headland…not just yet awhile. :-)

Call out my name

She was no ordinary succubus.
Late into the night
Through cold, electric clouds
She flew with broken wings
On currents kindled by his dreams.
And finally, descending upon
His yearning body, she whispered:
“I’m late, my love, but tender is the morning.”

I have before me my copy of the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammerer of the Witches), the infamous fifteenth century witch-hunting manual of Heinrich Institoris, a Dominican inquisitor. Dear Heinrich knew so much about witches and women; he knew so much about succubae, my demonic sisters, and we are legion; even Japanese emperors want to sleep with us!

What is a succubus, you ask? The legend is simple and quickly told: a succubus is female, a demon – though I personally prefer to be called an imp – who takes the form of a living woman in order to have intercourse with mortal men. The Malleus is quite clear on the reasons for this;

The reason the evil spirits turn themselves into incubi or succubae is not for the sake of gaining or conferring pleasure, because a spirit does not have flesh and bones. The most potent reason is this – to harm a person twice over, that is, in body and soul, through the vices of lasciviousness, so that there comes into being people who are more inclined to all the vices.

So there! Succubae, you see, exist for one purpose and one purpose only – to steal sperm from sleeping men and then pass it to the incubi, male demons, who take the same sperm and use it to impregnate sleeping women, a sort of early form of in vitro fertilisation! According to some sources this is how witches are conceived. Oh, I should add that in case men might just be attracted to a spot of free extra-marital sex with a lascivious imp the church spread the story that the vagina of the succubus was like a chamber of ice. Clerics, I assume, most have had some empirical experience here!

There is a whole sub-text, an inner message to the Malleus that Institoris could never have anticipated, a possible reading, post-Freud, that he could never have imagined. The book is full of apprehension about women in general, fears over female sexuality. The succubae are, in a sense, an expression of that fear, rampant sexual beings, which, like vampires, come in the night to steal the life force from mortal men, blood or semen, it really makes no difference. The succubus really is a phantom of desire. To be taken by one is the Medieval version of an alien abduction!

I am not the greatest of the clan, no; that singular honour belongs to Mother Lilith, in Jewish legend the first wife of Adam. I wrote once before that if Lucifer was the first male rebel in creation then Lilith has to be the first female. And what a rebel she was: the first feminist; the first witch; the first sexually assertive woman; the first divorcee! As a figure she is an inspiration, a mentor and a guide; a woman who deliberately exiled herself from paradise in search of nothing more substantive than freedom, nothing more important than freedom. And there is nothing more important than freedom, for me as a woman and for me as a succubus.

So, late one night if you hear a rapping, rapping on your chamber door, don’t worry; it’s only me…and nothing more.

You're laying on your bed on a hot summer night
Underneath the lunar light
I am a dream I am a phantom of desire
Call out my, call out my name

Call out my name, call out my name in the night
For a bitter love, for a bitter pain
Call out my name, call out my name in the night
For a bitter love, for a bitter pain

I've come a calling from, a thousand ages past
I was the first I'll be the last
I am a scratching on the windows of your soul
Call out my, call out my name

Call out my name, call out my name in the night
For a bitter love, for a bitter pain
Call out my name, call out my name in the night
For a bitter love, for a bitter pain

Monsters of the Mind

There’s an intriguing article in the July issue of Standpoint by Ben Judah reporting from Tajikistan (In search of the Yeti.) Here he found villagers prepared to take a solemn vow on the Koran – no light matter – that they had seen the Yeti, the abominable snowman of Himalaya legend. I have not the least doubt that they have, not the least doubt that in lonely mountain passes the shadows of the mind have taken on a definite shape.

There are some interesting historical parallels here, as the author indicates;

Living close to nature, without thorough schooling, peasants have always been frightened of the mythical wild man. In the 18th century, the oppressed central European peasantry was gripped by a terror of aristocratic vampires in the run up to the French Revolution.

The hysteria raged for a generation. Thousands of sightings were reported. Villagers swore by Christ that they knew what they had seen. The Austro-Hungarian Empress [sic] Maria Theresa was concerned enough to dispatch her personal physician to investigate whether or not vampires existed. They were not real, but poverty, oppression, ignorance and superstition were.

Actually, the fear of the aristocratic vampire in this area of Europe was more than superstition, more even than a kind of metaphor for aristocratic oppression. Aristocratic oppression, particularly in Hungary, had been severe for centuries, sometimes taking on a very real, particularly bloody and vampire-like form.

I’ve blogged before about the aristocratic vampire, latterly in a humorous vein (I’d rather be bitten by a vampire!) but before that in an altogether more serious fashion in a piece I called Erzsébet Báthory, the Blood Countess.

For those who may not have heard of her, Erzsébet Báthory was a Hungarian countess, one of the best-connected in the land, who died in 1614. She was also one of the most prolific serial killers who ever lived, specialising in the torture and murder of peasant girls who lived on her estate.

The details of her crimes, carried out with a select band of accomplices, are truly terrible, but the most terrible thing was the powerlessness of the people in the face of her depravity. Her downfall only began when, running out of peasant girls, she turned on the daughters of the lesser nobility. Even then the decisive factor was that she owed money to Matthais, king of Hungary and emperor of Austria.

At the time the details of the case were embellished with rumours of witchcraft and sorcery. But it wasn’t until a hundred years after her death that a new interpretation of her actions began to emerge. This is how I concluded my previous blog;

Like Vlad the Impaler and the myth of Dracula, Erzsébet began to attract her own mythology, including the story that she bathed in the blood of her victims, believing it to be a way of preserving her youth, a tale that goes no further back than 1729. Such a suggestion is, of course, horrible, but it at least supplied both a dark rationale and a motive. The real horror of Erzsébet's life is that she simply had a taste for suffering and blood as ends in themselves. A vampire of a kind, yes, but infinitely more terrifying than any of the monster's of fiction.

It is therefore true that the monsters of the imagination have a firm grounding in reality. Fear is most often accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, an inability to deflect or avoid the malevolent forces that govern one’s destiny. Given the form of politics that prevail in present-day Tajikistan, politics that Judah makes plain in his article, it comes as no great surprise that the Yeti continues to walk the mountain valleys.

Killing Cats

The setting is Paris in the 1730s, the Rue Saint-Severin to be exact, a printer's shop run by one Jacques Vincent to be even more exact. And as every story requires a hero so, too, does this one. There are, in fact, two heroes, heroes to be found amongst the lowest class of all - the shop's apprentices, a much abused class of humanity at the time. Their names are Jerome and Leveille. The lives they have are not to be envied. They sleep in a filthy and freezing room. They have to rise before dawn to be sent on all sorts of tasks. They are abused by all with the least power over them, from the journeymen to the master. Worst of all the food they are given to eat is not fit for human consumption, not fit even for...cats.

This is really a story about revenge, a story that points back to the superstitions of the middle ages and forward to the excesses of the French Revolution. Jerome and Leveille served an uncaring master, or bourgeois, as he was known to the workers in the printer’s shop, one who, along with his equally callous wife, cared more about cats than people. This passion for cats seems to have been a feature of the printing trade at the time. One bourgeois kept as many as twenty-five, having their individual portraits painted and feeding them on fowl. Jerome and Leveille, in contrast, had to live on whatever slops they were offered, scraps from the master's table. To make matters worse the cook often sold the leftovers, leaving them with old rotten bits of meat that even the cats refused to eat.

How these cats played on the minds of our heroes. Insulted and degraded by the presence of the household cat, including one known simply as La Grise (the grey), the mistress's favourite, they were kept awake at night by the howling of the alley cats on the roof above their bedroom. Unable to get a full night's sleep, they had to rise as early as four o'clock in the morning, exhausted at the beginning of the day and even more exhausted at the end of it.

One night they had had enough; they decided to take action in the most effective way they knew. Leveille was particularly talented as a mimic. He crawled over the roof to that part of the house where the bourgeois and his wife slept, presumably isolated from the usual cat chorus. Once there he howled and meowed so horribly that neither could get any sleep. After several nights of this they decided that they must have been bewitched. Orders were given to Jacques and Leveille, dogs rather than dogsbodies, to get rid of the cats.

They did, with all of the passion and exuberance they could muster, making sure that La Grise was drawn into the holocaust. But this wasn't simply an orgy of killing. Oh, no; for with the aid of the shop's journeymen the neighbourhood cats were rounded up to appear before the tribunes of the people. The cats were tried in accordance with the forms of process favoured by revolutionary tribunals, given the last rights and duly hanged on an improvised gallows. It was a cause of huge amusement, a diversion from the usual drudgery of the working day. In this workshop in this small quarter of Paris a prelude was acted out for a drama that was to come later the same century. The mistress came. She saw La Grise hanging from the gallows, retiring in horror. The workers had the day.

This bizarre episode, true in every detail, can be found in Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. It's taken from one Nicolas Contat, the Jerome of the story, who later set down an account of his life as an apprentice. There is so much richness here, so much which tells us about the politics and, more particularly, the attitudes of the day. A lot of the subliminal messages would have been better understood by a contemporary audience than a modern one. There is the obvious resentment of the workers against the bourgeois, the resentment of the abused apprentices against the pampered cats. But in sweeping up La Grise there were clear references to old witchcraft superstitions, clear references to the cat as a familiar and the mistress as a witch.

No matter that this was the Age of Enlightenment, cats still carried a long legacy of fear and superstition. In the carnivals held before Lent they were often subject to the same kind of treatment and torture that those accused in the Great Witch Hunt once were. The abuse and torture of cats was also a feature in the festival of Saint John the Baptist on 24 June. Then cats were burned at the stake by people hoping avoid ill-fortune for the rest of the year, a variation of the Scottish Taigherm of which I wrote recently. The scream of the cat, the Katzenmusik, was a background to much anarchy and jollity. Anarchy and jollity in death, a reference to the persecution of witches, a leitmotiv for the coming French Revolution.

For those who are interested on the folklore of cats, France and witchcraft I would highly recommend Ancient Sorceries, a wonderful story by Algernon Blackwood, along with M. R. James my favourite writer in the ghost and horror story genre.

Panther, panther, burning bright

In the late 1760s William Cobbett, then only seven years old, saw something unusual in the grounds of Waverly Abbey near Farnham in Surrey. It was a cat but nothing like any cat he had ever seen before, for it was as big as a middle-sized spaniel.

Years later, now established as one of the great radical campaigners of the day, he was to recall the incident in Rural Rides, a kind of personal Doomsday Book. His sighting all those years before is thought to be the first recorded evidence of that most elusive of creatures – the British Big Cats, sometimes known as Alien or Anomalous Big Cats (ABCs), phantom cats or mystery cats. The Beast of Bodmin and the Beast of Exmoor are probably the most famous of the species, ever present and ever distant.

These cats, often described as puma or panther-like in appearance, inhabit the regions between crypto-zoology and folklore. Sometimes a rational explanation for their existence is offered: that they are the descendants of escapees or animals released by their owners into the wild by the passage in 1976 of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, making them too expensive to keep. Other times more supernatural explanations are suggested. It is one of these I want to focus one, bizarre in the extreme. It concerns a grim and awful ritual originating in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, a ritual known as the in Gaelic as the Taigheirm.

Carl van Vechten, an American writer and photographer, reports a story he lifted from Deuteroscopy, a book on second sight by one C. G. Horst, published in the early nineteenth century. This describes a cat sacrifice, clearly originating in pagan times, but allegedly practiced into the seventeenth century. There is an article on this also in the recent issue of The Fortean Times.

The ‘recipe’ goes like this. Take as many cats as you can find. Truss them up on a spit and then roast them one by one before a slow fire, having first dedicated them to all the devils. The howling of the tortured cats must not cease for a moment over the four days and nights required to complete the ritual, so just make sure plenty of cats are on hand. Oh, I almost forgot: they should all be black.

So, sticking carefully to this step by step guide, after a time the infernal spirits will be conjured up in the shape of black cats. More and more of these other worldly entities should appear, adding their own terrible howls to that of their roasting living cousins. Finally a cat of monstrous size appears. Those who conducted the ceremony only desist after granted some boon by the great cat spirit.

The last of these ceremonies was, according to Horst, held in the middle of the seventeenth century on the Hebridean island of Mull. However, the great black cat, once brought into existence, seemingly never went away. It’s most recent appearance on the island was last summer, reported by two walkers. A black panther or a black legend, I can’t really decide which.

Lovers long ago

You’ve decided to fly south; you’ve decided to go and see Andalucía in the sun. Your flight arrives at Malaga, the town where both Picasso and Antonia Banderas were born. From there you drive west on the road to Gibraltar. And what do you see? Why, mile after mile of costal development, apartment blocks without interruption, developments completed and developments abandoned for lack of cash. Welcome to the Costa del Sol, possibly the least romantic place on the face of the earth.

Some parts admittedly are worse than others. Torremolinos is not my idea of hell; Torremolinos is hell. But one thing is sure – Laurie Lee would never recognise the coast he once walked along on his distant Spanish adventure; it’s gone. Still, do not despair. The damage is bad but it’s fairly superficial. Turn inland and one can indeed find something of the old Andalucía, of the ancient kingdom of Al-Andalus, from the Alhambra in Granada to the Mezquita of Cordoba.

But it’s another place I want to write about, a place that I assume most people stuck on the coast will ever have heard of. It’s Antequera, the city of the mountains that lies to north of Granada. From the Alcazba, the Moorish castle at the highest point of the town, I looked out La Pena de los Enamorados – Lover’s Rock – a great sphinx-like face if viewed from a side angle, an Indian lying on his back. It gets its name from a romantic, Romeo-and-Juliet-style legend going back to the days when Andalucía was still under the control of the Moors

The story is that a Christian from Antequera fell in love with a Muslim girl from nearby Archidona. Leaving together, they were pursued by Moorish soldiers. To evade them the lovers took refuge on the limestone crag, standing almost nine hundred meters above sea level. Rather than surrender they leapt from there to their deaths. The story was later adapted by the poet Robert Southey in Lalia and Manuel. True or not I really don’t care; the story appeals to my romantic sensibilities. I looked on that great face with a sense of loss, a sense of old, unhappy, far-off things, and lovers long ago.

Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Dark Light

At the beginning of time, according to Jewish tradition, some angels visited Earth, there falling in love with mortal women. In consequence they taught their lovers all sorts of magical arts, revealing all sorts of divine secrets. God, in his anger, banished them from heaven. These rebel spirits, homeless and bitter, turned malevolent, associating themselves with witchcraft and the blacker arts. Now they were to be described in some sources as demons. These dangerous spirits included Azazel, Samael, and one described as the Son of the Morning Star. He is better known as Lucifer.

The Fallen Angels, Lucifer included, entered into Christian tradition, where the story continued to evolve, taking on new forms. In Jewish tradition they were sinners, punished for their transgression against divine law in much the same way that Prometheus was punished in Greek tradition. But the Christians added a new twist: Lucifer and his party were expelled from Heaven because of their pride, because they believed that they were at least equal or even superior to God. They were, in other words, the first rebels.

Cast into Hell the rebels brooded and plotted revenge. Because of their associations with women, because many of the demons were believed to have human mothers, medieval witch hunters, including the notorious Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammerer of the Witches), believed that women in general were more susceptible to devilish temptations than men, especially those of Lucifer, by this time more commonly referred to as the Devil, the horned God, who seems to be an amalgam of the Greek Pan and the Jewish Bringer of Light. Here again we are seeing a corruption of earlier tradition; for beauty has become ugly and light has become dark.

By the earliest accounts the Light Bringer was depicted as beautiful, not ugly and certainly not horned. The early Christians make no distinction between him and the other angels, except that he is always portrayed as falling. But by the fourth century AD Lucifer began to emerge as the Adversary, drawing on another Biblical concept, that of Ha-Satan, who acts in Jewish tradition as a kind of prosecutor in the underworld, judging the souls of the dead, a fearful figure, yes, but still relatively neutral. The Christians transformed him into a monster, in part a weapon in their ongoing struggle with the remnants of pagan worship, where the horned god was a benevolent, life-enhancing spirit.

There is no description of Lucifer or Satan in the New Testament. He was simply given the attributes of the pagan nature god by the Church, suitably demonised along with the earth worship that the old traditions entailed. Nature itself, the realm of the Horned One, was distanced as something wild and dangerous. There was an implicit dualism here: all spiritual entities were either on the side of good or of evil, on the side of God or of Lucifer.

It was during the time of Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century that Lucifer took on his final form, that of a hunchbacked, goat-skinned man with cloven-hooves, horns and an evil stench. He was also said to carry a stick. either used to punish people or because he was lame, a disability he received when he was cast out of Heaven.

There is the most wonderful process of confusion and syncretism in this. For the Church, Satan - he and Lucifer are now interchangeable -, the limping devil, is clearly linked to various pagan deities and heroes, including Hephasteus, the god of the smiths (Satan is often said to have the skills of a blacksmith), Dionysus, Oedipus, Achilles and Hermes with his one sandal and his shepherd’s crook.

I think it accurate to say that Lucifer or Satan or the Devil is the greatest of the Christian scapegoats, a necessary evil, if you will, a weapon with which to attack pagans and non-believers, an excuse for every misfortune. It is here that Christianity can and does fall into forms of Manichean dualism, a world perceived as a struggle between light and dark, though paradoxically dualism itself was condemned, like witchcraft, as a heresy. But Lucifer, the greatest of the rebels, travelled on his path, finally achieving a kind of resurrection, a heroic transcendence, in Milton's Paradise Lost.

The Lords of the Forest

Elf is an Anglo-Saxon word referring to the indigenous spirits of the Germanic lands. The word 'fairy' is of French derivation and began to gain in popularity over the older elf from the fourteenth century onwards. Often the terms were used interchangeably, as if they meant the same thing, with the elves steadily diminished in size, significance and overall stature, finally becoming the fey creatures of children's stories, insect-like with wings.

But the Anglo-Saxon elves were a far more significant and potentially dangerous race altogether. They feature heavily in the spells and charms of pre-conquest England. Many of these were intended as protection from the elves themselves, so its reasonable to assume a hostile relationship with humanity, although it has been suggested that in pre-Christian times a spiritual alliance existed between elves and people, an alliance said to be broken with the advent of the new faith. Once this alliance had ended the elves in their bitterness turned dangerous, though it's just as likely that people were taught to fear them by the Church.

By the twentieth century the elves had not just been tamed but given a somewhat ridiculous make-over as Santa’s little helpers. It was thanks to the fictions of J. R. R. Tolkien, particularly The Lord of the Rings cycle, that they were rescued as part of his attempt to recreate a mythology for England, lost by the advent of the Normans. They are back as beautiful, war-like and human-sized creatures; back as archers, healers and artisans, sacred, immortal, good and dangerous at one and the same time; a race with their own kingdoms, eternally apart from those of the humans. With their eventual departure from Middle Earth magic travelled with them into the sunset.

Herodias of the Witches

If Mary is the most significant of the good women in the New Testament Herodias, the granddaughter of Herod the great, and the wife of King Herod Antipas of Judea, surely has to be the most significant among the bad, second only to her daughter Salome. Salome was only an instrument; Herodias is the power. It was she who engineered the death of John the Baptist, using Salome in a particularly unscrupulous way to gain her ends. But for Herodias we would never have had the Dance of the Seven Veils! So there is no great surprise that she became the primary female villain for Christians. She was the Wicked Woman, by some accounts even reputed to be a demon.

The historical Herodias died sometime after 39AD, after she and her husband were banished to Gaul by the Emperor Caligula. But the Wicked Woman rose from the dead, taking shape as a new goddess in the pagan pantheon, possibly as a witch deity, though the links are far from clear. In any case a spirit bearing her name rose alongside Diana in Italy as one of the two figures most associated with witchcraft. The two are often paired together in leading the nocturnal Wild Hunt and in witch-trial transcripts.


Ratherius, Bishop of Verona until his death ion 974 AD, complained that many saw Herodias as a queen, even a goddess, as though this was her reward, he remarks, for killing John the Baptist. In 936 he outlawed a movement which claimed that Herodias ruled one third of the world and was thus worthy of devotion. This was a time when she was also identified with Hecate, one of the greatest of the witch goddesses. There would also seem to me to be strong associations with Lilith, the first wife of Adam according to the Jewish apocrypha, and the great demon queen.

There are many Medieval legends about Herodias, though she is often confused and conflated with Salome. In one she is condemned to ride with the Wild Hunt until Judgement Day, always carrying with her the head of the Baptist. In Romania she manifests as the spirit Irodeasa. Here masked dancers, riding hobby-horses and carrying clubs and swords, undertook nine day rituals in her honour. In Russia she is to be found as a troop of female fever demons called Herod's daughters, numbering anything from nine up to seventy-seven spirits, the youngest named as Salome. Again the associations with Lilith are striking.

A little touch of Annis in the night

Black Annis, sometimes known as Black Agnes, Black Anna or Cat Anna, is the Hag of the Dane Hills near Leicester in England who most frequently appears as a blue-faced crone with long claws and yellow fangs but also as a cat demon. In some ways she might be said to be an English version of Baba Yaga, the fearsome Russian witch. Her home was a cave known as Black Annis' Bower that she herself carved out of the rock. The cave itself, long a local feature, was almost completely filled with earth by the nineteenth century. It’s now covered by a housing estate built just after the First World War.

According to legend Black Annis eats any children who stray into the Dane Hills after dark, skinning them first and then scattering their bones. The skins were then hung on the trees to dry. When she is particularly hungry Annis goes hunting, either taking the lambs from the fields or climbing through windows to take babies from their cradles.

In the form of Cat Anna, she has powerful associations with cats, occasionally taking the form of a huge black forest cat. Until as late as the eighteenth century a mock hunt was held annually during which a dead cat soaked in aniseed was dragged from her cave through the streets of Leicester to the mayor's house. The symbolism here is now lost but aniseed is traditionally used as protection against malevolent spirits.

By some accounts Annis is a form of the ancient Celtic goddesses Anu or Danaan. There are also resemblances between Annis and the mother of Grendal, the monster from the poem Beowulf, also identified as a ketta or cat spirit.

Though the story has been enriched in folklore, Annis, it has been suggested, has possible historical origins, rooted in the lives of two fifteenth century women. The first is Agnes Scott, a Dominican nun and anchorite. Draped in the long black habit of her order she was described as the ‘hermit of the forest.’ Agnes, who died in 1455, also managed a leper colony and supposedly lived in a cave near the Dane Hills. The connection between her and Black Annis was first made by Robert Graves, the poet and writer.

The second, much more tenuous candidate, is a local witch or wise woman who is said to have forewarned Richard III of his coming death as he rode through Leicester on his way to meet the army of the invading Henry Tudor at Bosworth. Alas, this is one of those tales where history and legend draw close to one another though, as always, never quite managing to meet!

Eggs, Bunnies and Witches

Easter is almost upon us, a term I prefer to Ostara, favoured by those in the Wiccan movement. Yes, I know it's the most significant day in the Christian calendar but many of the things most associated with Easter have nothing at all to do with Christianity, most particularly those egg-delivering bunnies! It also has links with old pagan fertility rituals, of the renewal of times, of new birth and new beginnings. It is Persephone emerging from the Underworld.

The name itself honours a Germanic deity, variously spelt as Astara, Easter, Eostre and Ostara, thought at least by some to mean 'Radiant Dawn.' In essence Easter was the spirit of the spring, whose annual return was celebrated with flowers bell-ringing and singing. At dawn new fires would also be lit, another sign of empowerment.

Easter comes in the form of a beautiful young woman, whose male consort comes in the form of a rabbit; and what more fecund symbol is there than that! The eggs the rabbit brings is another indication of a resurgence of the Earth's fertility. It's not so far in the past that the symbol of such fertility was even more direct: in French, German and Italian villages special phallic-shaped cakes were carried in procession, not stopping short of the local church!

Easter is also another of the seasons of the witch, at least it is in Sweden and parts of Finland. It was a time when witches here traditionally joined together in celebration, beginning on the night before Maundy Thursday and continuing through Easter Eve, when witches mounted on brooms flew up chimneys in the company of their cats. Such was the fear of the Easter Witch that people would lock the doors of their homes and barns, as well as blocking up chimney flues. More than that, anything that could possibly used by witches, including brooms, pitchforks and rakes, were locked away least one was accused of helping the witches have fun! Crosses were also drawn on doors to let passing witches know that they were unwelcome, just as fires were kept burning in hearths to prevent them being used as a point of entry. Some of these traditions still survive; for it is Easter that children dress as witches in Sweden, not Halloween.

The Myth of the Green Man

The Green Man has become one of the iconic figures of the neo-pagan movement. No; I would go further -he has become the iconic figure; he has been ever since the 1930s when he had that name bestowed on him. Rather ironic, really, for the simple reason that he has nothing at all to do with traditional paganism. The Green man, rather, is a Christian symbol, a personification of evil, not of benevolence and fecundity.

No sooner had the latest issue of History Today landed through my post box with its usual reassuring and heavy thump than my attention was drawn to the lead article, Ballad of the Green Man by Richard Hayman, an excellent overview of the genealogy of a myth. It the whole thing fascinates me on a number of levels; but most particularly, and most immediately, in the way that history becomes myth and myth history, one feeding of the other in and endless cycle of reinforcement. Here we have 'tradition', here we have Olde England, where the Green Man walks hand-in-hand with Robin Hood, another figure of the wild woods, closely accompanied by the Queen of the May or the Lord of Misrule. I think it's time to get back to basics.

The Green Man, as Hayman says, first made his appearance in the eleventh century, a face sprouting foliage from his mouth, to be found in church carvings and decorations. He was part of a Medieval iconography which disappeared with the Reformation only to make a reappearance during the nineteenth century Gothic revival. Modern interpretations-entirely alien to the Medieval mind-saw him as an earth figure. William Anderson in The Green Man, published in 1990, saw him as "the archetype of our oneness with the earth", while John Williams in the more recent The Green Man Tree Oracle, says that he promises "ancient wisdom from the spirit of nature." And thus something is conjured from nothing in a fog of cloudy an essentially meaningless words!

Most of this nonsense can be traced back to the early part of the last century, when the folklorist Julia Somerset, Lady Raglan, started to take an interest in Green Man carvings, linking the figure to pagan tree worship, for which she drew heavily on Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough. This whole drift was given added reinforcement by the publication in 1921 of The Witch Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Murray, as fraudulent a piece of 'schlarship' as ever made its way into the English language. All this fashion achieved was to obscure the true significance of the foliage-disgorging face.

As I said at the outset, the Green Man only makes sense in the context of Christian symbolism; there is no evidence at all that the figure existed in pagan times. To understand him we must take account, Hayman says, of the way the Medieval Church viewed nature. In Christian art nothing ever appears in a wholly neutral form; plants or animals, rather, embody a virtue or a vice. Vice and sin are most often to be found in wild nature, places where the greatest dangers lurk. For you see, the wild wood was the place where Satan hid, ready to entice the faithful from the true path. Rabanus Marus, Archbishop of Mainz, an influential ninth century theologian, even described leaves as representing the sins of the flesh.

So, then, the face staring out from the trees, himself part plant, was a symbol of the grotesque and the dangerous in nature, not benevolence or fertility. This is the Wild Man, not the Green Man. Hayman also says that only a proportion of the extant figures are actually men; the others are demons, masks or cats. Theses figures first came into existence as illustrations on the margins of books, caught in a tangle of vegetation that acted as a metaphor for the human condition-that which trapped people physically also impeded their spiritual progress. When they make an appearance as reliefs or carvings in churches they do so in a demonic form. The further back in time one goes the more demonic they become.

For contemporary audiences the message was clear and immediate. But with the Gothic revival the Green Men lost all of their original spiritual significance, just becoming part of a supposedly authentic Medieval style. It was an easy step from there for people like Raglan to give them a new, entirely contrived message. Reborn for a modern age, an age sinking in forms of nature worship, he made its way into Wicca, one of the great manufactured religions, depending on invented traditions of one kind or another, depending on a caricature of paganism and witchcraft. How the Green Man must be laughing.

Cerridwen the Shape Shifter

Cerridwen, sometimes referred to as the Old One, is a shape-shifting lunar deity, a master magician and an herbalist. Though she can take any form she wishes, she favours of a woman or a great white sow, a clear symbol of the Moon, linking her to the Roman Diana. Like Diana Cerridwen is one of the great witch deities, the Keeper of the Cauldron of Knowledge. She also has associations with Hecate, the goddess of all the witches.

Reference to her first appears in the Book of Taliesin, a compilation which may date as far back as the ninth century AD. According to the myth she is married to a giant by the name of Tegid Foel, living near Bala Lake in North Wales. The couple had two children – a daughter called Crearwy, meaning beautiful or light, and a son called Afagddu or Morfran, though in some versions of the story the two are given as brothers. Afagddu is as ugly and dark as Crearwy is fair and beautiful. There is an obvious symbolism here in the division of nature into two complementary but contrary principles, summer and winter, day and night, female and male.

Cerridwen is the goddess of dark prophetic powers. In her Cauldron she brewed a potion granting the gift of wisdom and poetic inspiration. Gwion Bach, later to become Taliesin, the noted Welsh poet of the sixth century AD, is said to have accidentally tasted three drops from the Cauldron, instantly giving him great wisdom and insight. Following in this tradition the Welsh Bards refer to themselves as Cerddorion (the sons of Cerridwen).

Of Fish and Fools

In Greek mythology Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, is abducted by Hades, God of the underworld. In her frantic search for her lost daughter, Demeter neglected to allow the earth to flourish. As hunger grew, and people cried out to Zeus, he forced Hades to return Persephone. But in the meantime she had been tricked into eating six pomegranate seeds which meant that she was obliged to return to the underworld for six months of the year. And thus the Greeks explained the waxing and the waning of the seasons.

In the Epodes Horace says that Proserpina, possibly the Roman equivalent of Persephone, was worshipped by witches. There is really no surprise in this; for she is a goddess who can command both worlds, that of the living and that of the dead. She is the great Necromancer, presiding over death though not dead herself.

Proserpina is often depicted holding a fish, one of her sacred creatures and thereby hangs another tale! For she is the secret deity at the heart of April Fool’s Day, known in France and Italy as April Fish Day. In these countries it was once the fashion to pin a paper fish to the back’s of unwitting victims. Although All Fool’s Day only appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages it can be traced right back to Roman times, to the myth of Proserpina and Ceres, her grieving mother.

After being abducted by Pluto, Lord of the Dead, Proserpina called to her mother for help. But while Ceres could hear the echo she could not find her daughter, no matter how hard she looked. This fruitless search was commemorated by the Romans in the festival of Cerealia, believed to be the origins of the fool’s errand popular on 1 April.

Unicorn Lore

The Natural History of Unicorns is a real treat! Chris Lavers, a writer on science subjects, embarks on an open-minded quest to discover the unicorn; to discover the origins and ‘natural history’ of this fabulous creature, which flits in and out of fact and legend in a tantalisingly elusive way, always just beyond the next horizon, always just at the limits of sight.

The author does not assume anything, does not work backwards from a pre-determined conclusion, but treats his quest in a scholarly though always lively manner. His epigraph is admirable: “There are two things to avoid in dealing with a legend. The first is to make too much of it, the other is to disbelieve it entirely.” And for enthusiasts there is a tantalising promise in his introduction, “For most recorded history people thought that the unicorn existed. Recently we have come to know that it never did: so this book must end in disappointment. Not so. Unicorns did exist. There are photographs.”

Yes, it’s a natural history of a particularly fascinating kind; but it is also an examination of symbols, of religious beliefs, of art, of language, of semantics, of exploration and of transformation.

Lavers traces the origins of the legend back to a Greek historian and physician by the name of Ctesias of Cnidus, writing in 398BC. While in Persia , ministering to the king and his court, he wrote of a tale that had come from India of “…certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length.”

It is from this point that the author begins his hunt, with the fauna of India , each and every creature that could in any way resemble that described by Ctesias. We meet the Indian rhino, the Tibetan antelope, the yak and a rather fearsome ass known as a kiang. Trails are followed assiduously back through time, allowing us to discover not one fantastic beast but a range of real ones. They are disassembled and reassembled to give us something unique.

So the journey goes on, as myth and nature come close, but never quite meet. Ctesias’ wild ass even manages to appear in the Bible, though the numerous references to unicorns in the King James Version are based on a mistranslation from the Hebrew to the Greek. Instead of a unicorn the Bible authors were most likely talking about an ox.

Lavers takes us through time and over distance in his quest, passing civilizations and natural habitats, from Asia to the Arctic . The Chimera takes shape out of a variety of sources and a wealth of mythologies. It is this which transforms such mundane objects as the walrus tusk or the narwhal tooth into something quite different. Lavers is at his most compelling in his blend of natural history with local legend; legends which give rise to new legends, new quests, and ever more intriguing transformations.

The unicorn exists, yes; it exists as a symbol of so many things, of nature itself, perhaps, wild and untamable. But in the end it is caught and it is tamed. Its journey through the forests of time and experience end when it sits down in the company of a maiden, becoming a symbol of Christ in the company of Mary. Now mild and meek, it makes its way through Christian hagiography, through medieval iconography into a New Age avatar.

And, yes, there are photographs!

Mother of the Corn

The Corn Mother belongs to an ancient pagan tradition, a deity that embraces creation and destruction, life and death. The two dimensions should not be seen as opposites, as white and black; rather in killing she gives life, and in giving life she kills.

The Corn Mother comes in many forms, sometimes benevolent, other times terrifying. But even in her most fearsome shape –and here I’m thinking of witches like the Russian Baba Yaga and the Ukrainian Iron Woman – she still provides nourishment, just as she can kill in her most benevolent guise.

She embodies the ambivalence of nature itself, fecund and destructive; she embodies human perceptions of the whole cycle of nature. She takes many names over many traditions. For the Greeks she was Demeter; for the Canaanites she was Anat; for the Etruscans she was Ceres; and for the Egyptians she was Isis. The Christians refashioned her as the Virgin Mary, drawing on older traditions, recreating the Mother Goddess in their own image.

Virgo itself is the constellation identified with the Corn Mother. The astrological sign’s modern image is based on the Babylonian depiction of a mother carrying a sheaf of corn, where the sheaf was simultaneously understood to indicate a child. This is the whole heart of so many mystery religions: the child is the mystery; the mother the life-giving deity.

Her image was corrupted and demonised in the Middle Ages. Corn Mothers became scary cannibal hags, who lay in wait in cornfields for unwitting children. But the old duality persisted, as with Baba Yaga, dangerous but also a source of wisdom, healing and protection.

The Traditions of the Corn Mother and the Corn Maiden were still being celebrated in Europe right into the twentieth century. In The Golden Bough James George Frazer records the following;

In the neighbourhood of Danzig the person who cuts the last ears of corn makes them into a doll, which is called the Corn-mother or the Old Woman and is brought home on the last waggon. In some parts of Holstein the last sheaf is dressed in women's clothes and called the Corn-mother. It is carried home on the last waggon, and then thoroughly drenched with water. The drenching with water is doubtless a rain-charm. In the district of Bruck in Styria the last sheaf, called the Corn-mother, is made up into the shape of a woman by the oldest married woman in the village, of an age from 50 to 55 years. The finest ears are plucked out of it and made into a wreath, which, twined with flowers, is carried on her head by the prettiest girl of the village to the farmer or squire, while the Corn-mother is laid down in the barn to keep off the mice. In other villages of the same district the Corn-mother, at the close of harvest, is carried by two lads at the top of a pole. They march behind the girl who wears the wreath to the squire's house, and while he receives the wreath and hangs it up in the hall, the Corn-mother is placed on the top of a pile of wood, where she is the centre of the harvest supper and dance.

It was all part of an ancient rhythm now sadly gone forever.

Looking for Monsters

I have a confession to make: I read the Fortean Times, that repository of the weird and the wonderful. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Yes, far rather this than, say, New Scientist, far too boring for a dreamer and an artist like me! Still, I do like to pick up on the occasional spot of soft science. The latest issue of the said publication has an altogether fascinating article on the impact science has had on the poor old werewolf. Headed Where have all the werewolves gone? it’s by Brian Regal, assistant professor for the History of Science at Kean University, New Jersey.

There are two essential points here: first that the ancient belief in werewolves as living creatures, going back to Pliny the Elder, weakened by the growth of rationalism, was all but destroyed by the new theories of evolution put forward by Charles Darwin and his acolytes in the nineteenth century.

The second point is that superstation is more enduring and less subject to logical dismissal than may be supposed. So, werewolves, a belief that humans could transmute, was ejected from one door only for new monsters to enter by the other, monsters to which scientific theory gave life! The Wolf-Man is dead; long live the Ape-Man!

The author makes the point that from the late seventeenth century onwards, as scientists reached out for a better understanding of apes, attempted to introduce new and more precise forms of taxonomy, old anthropomorphic preconceptions lingered. Jean Jacques Rousseau, for instance, imagined the orang-utan to be an early form of human, uncorrupted by civilization. Before that we have Edward Tyson’s Anatomy of a Pygmie, in which he effectively reconstructed a dead chimpanzee- never having seen a live one- as a hairy human, standing upright!

The discovery of Neanderthal Man lead to further speculative reconstructions. In effect the European Ape Man had been born. Not just that, but in some of the early illustrations, including one in an edition of the Illustrated London News, published in 1909, he looks remarkably, well, like a werewolf, armed with a club!
New speculations also grew about a ‘missing link’ between apes and human beings. It is with the debate about the primitive ancestry of humanity that monstrous ape-men begin to enter the scene, populating the imagination as much as dog-headed people did in the Middle Ages. Human nature needs a monster; human nature will always need a monster. Thus was the scene set for the arrival of Bigfoot, that North American chimera.

You see, as Regal says, while the theory of evolution, of organisms adapting to and being shaped by their environments, does not prove a priori that Bigfoot exists it does give tacit approval to the possibility that it could exist. It exists, as does the Asian Yeti, as a theoretical possibility. The author puts it thus;

With Bigfoot and his kindred the story comes full circle. Science helped disprove the existence of monsters such as mermaids, hippogriffs and werewolves, but simultaneously allowed for the appearance of Bigfoot.

The poor old werewolf has been replaced by Bigfoot and his kin, all thanks to the evolution of science. Even so, I still retain a high degree of reverence for magic, for transmutation and for the supernatural. Bigfoot does not excite me, whereas the Wolfman does. I shall be going to the movies soon to pay tribute to his hairy presence. :-)