THE GREEN CHILDREN OF WOOLPIT - INVESTIGATING A MEDIEVAL MYSTERY

If we are to believe the medieval chroniclers, during the Middle Ages Britain was a land not unaccustomed to the appearance of many extraordinary marvels and miracles - but few were stranger than the unheralded arrival in Woolpit of the green children.

This extraordinary episode is believed to have taken place during the reign of either King Stephen (1135-1154 AD) or King Henry II (1154-1189 AD), both reigns occurring during an unstable time of great poverty and hardship for the ordinary masses, and it appears to have been first recorded by two monastic scholars, penning separate but closely corresponding versions during the early 1200s. One of these scholars was Ralph of Coggeshall, who, in 1207, was the abbot of a Benedictine abbey in the Essex village of Coggeshall. The relevant passage, from his Chronicon Anglicarum, was translated into English from its original Latin by Thomas Keightley in his own book, The Fairy Mythology (1884). The other scholar was a well-educated Augustinian monk from Yorkshire, known as William of Newburgh, who documented the episode in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum.

Centre of modern-day Woolpit (Dr Karl Shuker)

In both versions, the locality where the strangely-hued visitors appeared was named as Woolpit, a small village just a few miles to the east of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. 'Woolpit' is a corruption of 'Wolfpit', for in the Middle Ages wolves still existed in Britain, and on the outskirts of this particular village were a number of deep pits dating back to ancient times that were traditionally used for trapping these creatures. However, it is possible that on at least one occasion these pits ensnared - or released? - two much more exotic entities.

Alongside Woolpit’s village name sign, depicting the green children and a wolf (Dr Karl Shuker)

One day, some of the Woolpit villagers spotted two very unusual individuals near to the mouth of one of these pits. They seemed to be children - one was a girl, the other was a boy and somewhat younger in age. Both of them were dressed in unfamiliar-looking clothes, and spoke in a language that was unintelligible to the villagers - but by far the most bizarre characteristic of this peculiar pair was their colour. It was as if they had been skilfully fashioned from summer leaves or soft meadow grass, for just like their clothes, and even the strange hue of their eyes, their skin was green!

The banner of St Mary’s Church, depicting the green children (Dr Karl Shuker)

Totally bemused, the villagers decided to take these incongruous infants to someone whose elevated status and education would enable him to decide the best course of action to pursue regarding them. And so it was that the green children of Woolpit (whose original names appear never to have been recorded) were introduced to Sir Richard de Calne, a knight living at Wikes.

Not surprisingly, Sir Richard was initially as perplexed as the villagers had been by the sight of these outlandish youngsters, who were weeping bitterly. Were they just frightened, or were they hungry too? There was only one way to find out. After doing what he could to try to console them, he then set out to discover their favourite food, by offering them as many different dishes as possible - but all to no avail. Every type of food placed before them was instantly rejected, and their anguished howls became ever louder.

Finally, inspired more by desperation than deliberation, Sir Richard and his staff brought into the house some raw bean shoots - and to everyone's surprise the children immediately made it clear via non-verbal but no less evocative means that these were what they desired. When the shoots were handed to them, however, they amazed their observers by ignoring the bulging pods...and splitting open the stalks instead! Not surprisingly, they did not discover any beans, and so they hurled the shoots away in disgust and disappointment, until they were shown that the beans were contained in the pods. At once they began eating the beans, and from their evident delight it was clear that these were a familiar food to them.

Indeed, for several weeks to come they would not eat anything else, surviving entirely upon an exclusive diet of beans. Eventually, however, the girl began to consume other foods too, but the boy refused to do so. Inevitably, he became ever weaker, and in less than a year he had died. His sister, conversely, survived and prospered, maturing as the years passed by into a normal young woman, whose skin gradually faded to a more typical shade. In due course, she married a man from King's Lynn, in southern Norfolk (and in some later accounts she then became known as Agnes Barre).

Perhaps the most significant event in her acclimatisation was that she eventually learnt to speak English fairly fluently. At last, she would be able to shed some much-needed light upon the greatest mystery of all surrounding herself and her late brother - their origin. Where had these remarkable children come from?

Close-up of top of Woolpit's village sign, portraying the green children and a wolf (Dr Karl Shuker)

In reality, however, her testimony served only to deepen the mystery, which has now spanned over eight centuries without reaching a satisfactory conclusion. According to Keightley's translation of the green children's history as penned by Ralph of Coggeshall:

"Being frequently asked about the people of her country, she asserted that the inhabitants, and all they had in that country, were of a green colour; and that they saw no sun, but enjoyed a degree of light like what is after sunset. Being asked how she came into this country with the aforesaid boy, she replied, that as they were following their flocks, they came to a certain cavern, on entering which they heard a delightful sound of bells; ravished by whose sweetness, they went for a long time wandering on through the cavern, until they came to its mouth. When they came out of it, they were struck senseless by the excessive light of the sun, and the unusual temperature of the air; and they thus lay for a long time. Being terrified by the noise of those who came on them, they wished to fly, but they could not find the entrance of the cavern before they were caught."

Readers perusing the first portion of this excerpt may be forgiven for wondering whether I had slyly inserted a description of the Emerald City from L. Frank Baum's immortal children's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Certainly, there is an unexpected similarity between this fictional viridescent realm and the supposed origin of the green children - a parallel made even more intriguing by the fact that certain accounts of the Woolpit green children have actually claimed that they were transported to Woolpit by a whirlwind, just as Dorothy and her dog Toto were transported to Oz by a cyclone! Who knows - perhaps Baum was aware of the Woolpit episode, and incorporated a modified version of its theme within his book?

Be that as it may (or may not!), it is important to note that the version of the green girl's testimony documented by William of Newburgh differs from that of the Abbot Ralph, inasmuch as he claims that the villagers had found the two children wandering through the fields around Woolpit, rather than at the mouth of one of the wolfpits. A third chronicler from this period, Gervase of Tilbury, made the same claim, and his account also amplified some of the details given in those of the other two writers:

"We are folk of St Martin's Land; for he is the chief saint among us. We know not where the land is, and remember only that one day we were feeding our father's flock in the field when we heard a great noise like bells, as when, at St Edmunds [Bury St Edmunds], they all peal together. And on a sudden we were both caught up in the spirit and found ourselves in your harvest field. Among us no sun rises, nor is there open sunshine, but such a twilight as here goes before the rising and setting of the sun. Yet there is a land of light to be seen not far from us, but cut off from us by a stream of great width."

Could Woolpit be the land of light, and could the stream be a river - or even a sea?

Faced with such a bewildering if not bewitching tale, it is hardly surprising that down through the centuries the mystery of Woolpit's green children has attracted a diverse array of theories and proposed explanations - ranging from the mundane to the metaphysical.

The most striking feature of the story is the green colour of the children's clothes, eyes, and - most especially - their skin, which has attracted appreciable attention from folklorists, and for good reason. Green is the colour of Faerie, of Nature, and, in Celtic mythology, of Death. Several well-known examples and associations readily spring to mind - could the green children of Woolpit constitute yet another one?

Ornamental wall plaque depicting the Green Man (Dr Karl Shuker)

Prominent among these is a mysterious entity known as Jack-in-the-Green or the Green Man, depicted as a shaggy humanoid figure covered not in hair or fur but in sprouting leaves instead, and sometimes merely as a foliate head. He is portrayed in many church carvings and decorations, including ornate misericords, tympana, fonts, tombs, roof bosses, and screens, and is also preserved in the name and signs of many pubs and inns. Variously classed as a pagan god, a tree spirit, or the personification of fertility and the renewal of life in spring, the Green Man's complex symbolism as well as his longstanding association in art and religion is vigorously examined in William Anderson's fascinating book Green Man (1990).

Another Green Man wall plaque (Dr Karl Shuker)

Equally noteworthy, and possibly allied to the Green Man, is the enigmatic Green Knight, as featured in a classic if anonymous 14^th-Century poem, 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. It tells of a mysterious knight with green skin, wearing green armour, and riding a green horse who arrived uninvited one day at the hall of King Arthur and challenged his knights to trade blows with him. Only one, Sir Gawain, accepted the strange visitor's challenge, and promptly chopped off his head - but instead of dying, the Green Knight merely picked up his severed head and told Gawain to meet him in a year's time so that he could return the favour. When Gawain did so, his bravery was rewarded by the Green Knight's failure to chop off his head - after which the knight revealed himself to be Sir Bertilak, at whose castle Gawain had been staying while awaiting his potentially fatal meeting with the Green Knight.

Gawain and the Green Knight (artist unknown to me)

This eerie tale has a direct link with Faerie, because it transpired that Sir Bertilak was transformed into the Green Knight by the enchantment of King Arthur's half-sister, Morgan Le Fay, and as with so many fairy links the colour embodying the enchantment was green. Green is, in any event, the favourite colour for fairy clothing, and some fairy beings, particularly elves, are often described as green-hued.

Green is the colour of Faerie and fairies

Even the land of Faerie as described in traditional folktales bears a degree of resemblance to the Woolpit green girl's account of St Martin's Land. While journeying through Wales in 1188 AD, Giraldus Cambrensis documented one such story - concerning the visit to Faerie by a boy called Elidor - in his subsequent narrative, Itinerarium Cambriae. Translated into English by R.C. Hoare, it includes the following description of Faerie:

"...a most beautiful country, adorned with rivers and meadows, woods and plains, but obscure, and not illuminated with the full light of the sun. All the days were cloudy, and the nights extremely dark, on account of the absence of the moon and stars."

Nor should we forget the legendary outlaw Robin Hood, dressed in Lincoln Green and sharing the sylvan seclusion of Sherwood Forest with Maid Marian and their band of Merry Men - for Robin and Marian are sometimes likened to or even directly homologised with the King and Queen of Faerie.

Robin Hood - Louis Rhead (1912)

Particularly pertinent to the folklore facet in seeking an explanation for the green foundlings of Woolpit is their especial liking for beans. According to ancient Celtic tradition, beans are the food of the dead - the sole sustenance of resurrected corpses and ghosts - thus enhancing the unworldly aura already encompassing these weird children.

The Middle Ages were extremely credulous, unscientific times brimming over with portents, misconceptions, exaggerations, and superstitious fancies of every kind. Hence it is a very hazardous task attempting to distinguish between fact and folklore, hearsay and truth when analysing accounts from this period. The green children of Woolpit may be nothing more than an imaginative rumour or fairytale given a semblance of substance by uncritical or distorted chronicling, but it is unlikely that this theory can ever be adequately tested.

'Family Tree' (Robert M Williams)

A very different and far more dramatic explanation was proffered by Harold T. Wilkins, an investigator of unexplained anomalies. In his book Mysteries: Solved and Unsolved (1959), Wilkins boldly proposed that the green children may have entered our world from a parallel version (existing in a separate dimensional plane but directly alongside our own), by accidentally passing through some form of interdimensional 'window' bridging the two.

Other writers have offered the equally radical scenario of a vast but gloomy subterranean world linked to our own by a worldwide labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels, and inhabited by a mysterious race of advanced humanoids, two of whose children accidentally became lost in one such tunnel and eventually wandered out into our own sunlit world above-ground.

Another dramatic proposal is that the green children are extraterrestrials. As long ago as 1651, Robert Burton opined in his tome Anatomy of Melancholy that they may have come from Venus or Mars. Much more recently, the extraterrestrial hypothesis has been pursued enthusiastically by astronomer Duncan Lunan, assistant curator at Scotland’s Airdrie Observatory. Based upon the children’s description of their twilit St Martin’s land, and the great river separating it from a luminous land beyond, Lunan has speculated that they may have originated from a planet whose one side permanently faces the sun and whose other is permanently cloaked in darkness with a twilit zone sandwiched between them. As for the great river, Lunan has postulated that this is actually a huge canal that encircles the entire planet and is used for planet-wide thermoregulatory purposes. He believes that they must have reached Earth by teleportation, and has suggested that this was accompanied by a bright auroral display, thereby interpreting the children’s description of a sweet sound of bells as a visual rather than an aural stimulus.

Bearing in mind, however, the claim by both contemporary chroniclers of the green children episode that once the two began eating normal food their green skin colour slowly vanished, and that the girl grew up into a typical-looking woman and married locally (there are even claims that some modern-day descendants of her lineage exist today, including one branch in the USA), it seems unlikely that they belonged to some alien species.

 The Emerald City, from L. Frank Baum's children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

As an advocate of Ockham's Razor - a philosophical maxim stating that the simplest answer is usually the likeliest, provided that it fits all of the available facts - I personally prefer the rather more prosaic but much more tangible explanation offered by researcher Paul Harris, with whom I have corresponded at length concerning the history of Woolpit's green children. Paul has studied this fascinating case in considerable depth, and has presented his illuminating findings in a detailed Fortean Times article (spring 1991) and subsequently elsewhere too (see my own book Dr Shuker's Casebook, 2008, for full details).

Harris speculated that the twilit world of St Martin's Land and the underground cavern through which the green children came to Woolpit may owe more to local geography than to parallel worlds and interdimensional windows. Just over a mile north of Bury St Edmunds is the village of Fornham St Martin. Remembering that the girl referred to Bury St Edmunds merely as "St Edmunds", perhaps "St Martin's Land" was her own abbreviation for Fornham St Martin. If so, her story is no longer so opaque to interpretation.

As pointed out by Harris, northwest of Woolpit and separated from it by the river Lark are the thick woodlands of Thetford Forest, at the centre of which are numerous Neolithic flint mines. Looking out from this dim, shadowy region towards the more open, and hence sunnier, countryside surrounding Woolpit on the far side of the Lark certainly corresponds closely to the scene described by the green girl with regard to the "land of light" visible from St Martin's Land and separated from the latter by "a stream of great width". And the mysterious underground cavern leading to Woolpit could be any of the flint mine tunnels running from Thetford Forest and emerging on the opposite side of the Lark.

Babes in the Wood – 1879 woodcut by Randolph Caldecott

Prior to the reign of Henry II, there had been a significant influx of Flemish weavers and merchants into Eastern England, but these were severely persecuted by Henry, culminating in a massacre of the Flemish at a battle in 1173 near Bury St Edmunds. Paul deems it very plausible that the green children were Flemish children from Fornham St Martin whose parents had been killed, and who had fled away northward into the dense woodland terrain of Thetford Forest (whose dark shadowed interior would have reminded them of twilight), but survived there for a time in a half-starved state (recalling the traditional 'Babes in the Wood' fairy tale) before wandering out among the roaming livestock of farmers and later becoming even more disoriented within this region's maze of subterranean mining tunnels - leading them ever further away from their home territory. Eventually, while wandering aimlessly through one of these tunnels, they came by chance within earshot of the bells of Woolpit's village church, and after following the familiar sound of pealing church bells they finally emerged from the tunnel, confused and dazzled by the sudden glare of the outside world's bright sunshine.

St Mary's Church, Woolpit (Dr Karl Shuker)

To substantiate this proposed scenario, Harris offered the following three thought-provoking pieces of corroborating evidence:

Firstly: in medieval times, villages were extremely insular - so much so that villagers hardly ever travelled outside their own neighbourhood. Consequently, even the dialects spoken by villagers from nearby villages were very distinct from one another. This meant that the dialect of anyone visiting Woolpit from a fairly distant, non-local village, such as Fornham St Martin, for instance, would have been virtually unintelligible (and entirely so if the children had been Flemish) - just like the green children's speech, in fact.

Secondly: there is a type of anaemia known as chlorosis that confers a green tinge to the skin of sufferers. It is caused by poor eating - and is therefore a disease to which young children lost and starving in the outdoors would be particularly susceptible. Significantly, chlorosis can be cured if the diet of sufferers is improved - and the green girl's skin did indeed become pink after she had begun to eat a wider range of foods.

(A related proposal supported by some researchers is that the green children had been abandoned or orphaned as youngsters and thereafter reared by wolves. Because these feral children would have lived in caves with the wolves away from sunlight and would probably have had a very poor diet, they may have suffered from chlorosis, turning their skin green. Moreover, in a Daily Mail letter of 2 July 1997 discussing this theory, Laraine Bates of Brome, Suffolk, stated that after appearing at Woolpit both children were said to howl at a full moon and were sometimes seen running on all fours.)

Thirdly: a centuries-old East Anglian legend tells of how two young children, heirs to the estate of their dead parents, were poisoned with arsenic and then abandoned by their evil guardian in the depths of Wayland Wood, in the vicinity of Thetford Forest. If this were more than a legend, it could conceivably explain the origin of the green children - and surely it is more than just a coincidence that one of the effects of arsenic poisoning, which is not always lethal, is that the victim's skin turns green.

Scroll enscribed with the green children's history inside St Mary Church, Woolpit (Dr Karl Shuker)

Speaking of coincidences: Over the years, several writers have alluded to a mysterious Spanish episode that duplicates almost exactly the events discussed here for Woolpit. A pair of young children, the elder of the two a girl, but both with green skin, are discovered at the mouth of a cave by villagers from nearby Banjos in Catalonia. They are taken to the home of a nobleman called Señor Ricardo da Calno (a name remarkably similar to Sir Richard de Calne!), who cannot tempt them to eat anything - except for beans. The girl gradually learns Spanish, and announces that she and her brother come from a permanently twilit land separated by a wide river from a much sunnier country.

Indeed, the only significant differences between the two stories are that the Banjos version is set in the 19th Century (the children allegedly appeared in August 1887), and the girl as well as the boy eventually dies.

Sussex-based researcher Frank Preston has carried out several enquiries in an attempt to validate this story, but all without success. Similarly, when the British Council Institute in Barcelona conducted their own investigations on his behalf, they too drew a complete blank. After methodically searching and contacting Spanish town hall, library, and museum archives, and perusing all of the relevant newspapers for August 1887, they were unable to locate a single reference to this singular incident. Clearly, therefore, it was a complete fabrication, evidently inspired by the Woolpit history - not that this is too surprising a revelation really...bearing in mind that the village of Banjos does not exist either!

But what about the green children of Woolpit? Today, more than 800 years later, they are still fondly recalled here, commemorated in a village sign and also depicted in the banner of Woolpit's church. Harris's theory remains the most convincing explanation put forward so far, but without any unequivocal physical evidence to examine we can never be absolutely certain of the truth behind this small Suffolk village's most celebrated visitors.

Yet assuming that they did indeed exist, and had inexplicably found themselves far from their home (wherever that may have been), a second link with L. Frank Baum's masterpiece The Wizard of Oz readily comes to mind. After all, their thoughts on finding themselves in Woolpit were no doubt akin to those voiced aloud by Judy Garland's Dorothy: "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore!" Nor is that the last of the Baum links.

Title page from the first edition of L. Frank Baum's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Several years ago (on 14 July 2008, to be precise), I visited Woolpit to see for myself the various relics there commemorating the history of the green children. These include the tall, elegant village name sign standing not far from St Mary's Church that depicts the two children, the church, and a wolf; the colourful banner of the church that also depicts them; and a scroll inside the church on which the history of the green children is enscribed. Walking through St Mary’s Church, moreover, I was surprised to find a most unexpected correspondence between Oz and Woolpit.

A mythological winged creature carved at the end of a pew in St Mary's Church, Woolpit (Dr Karl Shuker)

The church contains numerous carvings of animals, some real and others mythological, but one of the most startling of these, perched at the end of a pew, is an extraordinary composite beast that looks remarkably like a flying monkey!

The winged monkey carved on a pew inside St Mary’s Church, Woolpit (Dr Karl Shuker)

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends were, of course, pursued and harried by a flock of flying monkeys sent by the Wicked Witch of the West. Meticulously carved, with every feather beautifully delineated, this mini-masterpiece may be an opinicus, i.e. a griffin-related hybrid, sometimes combining a simian face with a lion’s body and the plumed wings of an eagle – yet another bizarre being finding shelter in the magical village of Woolpit.

Green – the colour of magic and mystery

IS DIVINATION MORE THAN JUST SMOKE AND MIRRORS (AND ENTRAILS, ROSE PETALS, SNAKES, FINGERNAILS...)?

No-one knows what the future holds, but down through the ages humanity has done its utmost to find out - by devising and employing an extraordinary panoply of divination rituals, ranging from the imaginative and ingenious to the downright bizarre and bewildering. Nevertheless, there is a core belief unifying all of these seemingly disparate practices. Namely, that the patterns perceived in Nature, whether they be visual, aural, tactile, moving, stationary, natural, or induced, are in some subtle, cryptic manner a reflection of what is yet to occur, but can be correctly comprehended and decoded only by those who are sensitive to them.

DIVINATION – THE EARLY DAYS

Prognostication methods involving the interpretation of these patterns or movements, as produced by all manner of non-living or non-human living objects, are collectively known as the mantic arts, and were in existence as far back as Palaeolithic times, when our long-departed troglodytic ancestors were guided by the prophecies of the tribal shaman or medicine man, which were drawn in turn from astute observations of the world around him. They also flourished in the earliest civilisations when the role of soothsayer was frequently taken by a high priest or similar religious figure in authority.

Scrying, for example, during which visions seen by psychics within crystal balls or other shiny surfaces are then interpreted by them to yield insights into future events, can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians, the Hebrews, and the druids (who also set store in epatoscomancy – deriving guidance from examining the entrails patterns of sacrificed animals). A variation on this theme, using a mirror instead of a crystal ball, is known as catoptromancy, and is currently enjoying renewed popularity thanks to New Age rituals.

'The Crystal Ball' (John William Waterhouse, 1902)

The ancient Greeks, meanwhile, favoured their oracles, through which the gods supposedly spoke directly to their mortal subjects; whereas the Romans put their faith and trust in the putative potency of augury and haruspicy (interpreting the cracks that form in the scapulae of a roasted sheep!). Gematria, an early precursor of numerology, in which divination was performed via the translation of words or passages of text from holy works of literature into numerical values, was practised by the Babylonians as well as the Greeks, Persians, Gnostics, and emerging Christians

In Asia, as far back as 1000 BC the Chinese had developed their celebrated system of I Ching, utilising long and short sticks of yarrow. And in rural Europe, a favourite divinatory technique during medieval times was the reading of patterns created by tossing a handful of pebbles (pessomancy), or a shower of other small pellet-shaped objects such as peas, onto the ground

I Ching, Song Dynasty print

Such methods as the latter, in which the techniques are purposefully devised and performed for the sole purpose of divination, are referred to as voluntary or man-made. Throughout time and the world, however, the most popular and widespread practices have tended to be ones in which humans have sought to discern the future by observing natural phenomena all around them, such as fire, water, light and shadows, weather, and wildlife.

THE FLICKERING FLAME OF FORTUNE

Lampadomancy (pyromancy) in particular is a very ancient technique. A subject's future is determined, or an answer to a specific question obtained, by observing the flickering movements of a flame (nowadays usually from a candle), and deciphering their supposed significance

Closely related is capnomancy, divining the future from the swirling, ever-changing forms assumed by smoke. This again is a very ancient system of divination, whose origins stem from those of humanity itself following its discovery of fire

Yet another related technique dating back to humanity's earliest age is sciomancy - a means of divination utilising the shape, size, and movement of shadows. Although once popular in ancient Greece, when corpses were used to cast the shadows, this particular mantic art no longer seems to be readily practised.

OF WATER AND WEATHER

Hydromancy is prognostication by staring into a dish or pool of water and analysing the patterns inherent within its lucid surface, but there any many variations upon this theme. Bletonomancy is a hydromantic art concentrating upon moving patterns of water, such as the currents in rivers and streams. And pegomancy, a technique again popular in ancient Greece, harnesses the images created by water spouting forth from a fountain

An aural version of hydromancy is leconomancy, developed in ancient Assyria. This uses as its indicators of future events the sounds or movements made when an object is thrown into water

Gazing up at clouds for inspiration and insights amid their fleecy, ever-transforming shapes is nothing new either - those earnest mantic practitioners the ancient Greeks were very fond of nephelomancy. Translating into prophecies the murmurs, whistles, and other utterances of the wind, as heard when holding a seashell to one's ear, formed the basis of austromancy in Tibet and ancient China. Ceraunoscopy featured the prediction of impending events from perceiving the flashing patterns created by lightning during a thunderstorm.

WILDLIFE DIVINATION

Not surprisingly, however, the immense multitude of wildlife with which humankind shares this planet has engendered two major branches of mantic arts. One is alectryomancy or zoomancy, in which the behaviour of domesticated or wild animals is closely observed and analysed for clues to future events. Today, it has largely descended into the realms of folklore in the Western world, but is still seriously practised in many other regions of the globe, especially Asia, and was particularly popular in ancient civilisations

One very noteworthy form was hippomancy, as performed by the Celts. Practitioners would monitor the movements of a white horse walking within a specific region of a sacred grove, and then examine the dust and hoofmarks left behind.

The Greeks studied the behaviour of snakes in ophimancy; and ornithomancy, occurring both in Greece and in Rome, involved the prognostication of events by a blindfolded augur based upon his apprentice's description of the flight movements yielded by a flock of birds passing by. One vestige of ornithomancy is preserved today in the oft-quoted traditional British verse linking sightings of specific numbers of magpies to certain forthright predictions – “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy...”

Another relic of the zoomantic arts in modern times is apantomancy – divination interpreted via random encounters with animals, as typified by the lingering superstition that a black cat crossing one’s path will bring good luck (in the UK) or bad luck (in the USA), and vice-versa with a white cat

Speaking of cats: felidomancy involves scrutinising the activity of domestic or wild cats as a guide to predicting future events (the canine equivalent is canidomancy). And there is even a mantic art known as myomancy, originating in the Middle East, in which a practitioner's predictions are based upon the behavioural activity of mice or rats.

The other major wildlife-related branch of the mantic arts is botanomancy - divination by observing plant life. Thus, the patterns and veins exhibited by leaves (and also flower petals) constitute the basis for phyllomancy. A notably curious version of phyllomancy is phyllorhodomancy. Practised by the ancient Greeks (who else?), a rose petal was placed between a person's hands after he had posed a question; he then clapped his hands together, and the seer sought the answer by examining the precise form of the resulting squashed petal. A very odd way indeed of discovering whether someone has - quite literally - a rosy future in store!

THROUGH A GLASS, STRANGELY!

Not all methods of divining the future involve such familiar objects or methods as crystal balls, tea leaves, or cards. Moreover, some of the lesser-known techniques on offer are very strange indeed. Onychomancy, for example, is divining by studying a person's fingernails; whereas hepatomancy (very popular in Babylonian times) involves examining the size, texture, colour, and shape of the lobes of a sacrificial animal's liver. Molybdomancy requires the seer to interpret the patterns and hissing sounds produced when molten lead is dropped into water.

Molybdomancy (Micha L Rieser-Wikipedia)

A method of fortune-telling still popular in China is the random choosing of a stick from a selection, all numbered, known as ming sticks, after asking outloud a specific question. Nor should we overlook kephalonomancy – an ancient technique involving the pouring of lighted carbon onto the baked head of a goat in order to determine innocence or guilt; or tiromancy - using as its guiding influence the configuration of holes and mould in or on cheese.

Mercifully, uromancy (foretelling the future from urine in place of water, widely performed by the ancient Greeks and Romans) and copromancy (ditto using faeces) no longer seem to be practiced. In stark contrast, thanks to the timeless guilty appeal of listening to gossip coupled with the often-irritating ubiquity of mobile phone conversations played out for all to hear in public, transatuaumancy – divination via chance remarks overheard in a crowd – is still very much alive.

IS DIVINATION A GAMBLE?

Not surprisingly, gambling and divination are intimately associated with one another, given that both involve attempting to foresee what is yet to happen. Games of chance featuring the dealing out of playing cards evolved from cartomancy, and the rolling of dice to determine future events (an example of cleromancy) became incorporated into many modern board games. Even the origin of the roulette wheel for employment in games of luck may well have stemmed from a mantic art – cyclomancy, which is an early method of divination using a wheel or a revolving circle to foretell the future. Clearly, this principle has also been successfully harnessed in a number of modern game shows, most notably ‘Wheel of Fortune’, variations of which have been widely broadcast around the globe

Perhaps the most extraordinary, and sometimes decidedly grotesque, contemporary links between divination and gambling, however, involve the national lotteries nowadays established in many countries worldwide. For instance, a number of occult practices are commonly employed in the selection of numbers, such as magical timing - featuring a combination of dice divination and Solomonic magic (utilising tables of planetary hours), as meticulously elucidated in the occultview.com website. During the early days of the Italian national lottery, conversely, players would be guided by unusual current events when selecting their numbers, culminating most bizarrely in a case reported from Naples when a man severely injured in a car crash was besieged by lottery players haranguing him to tell them his date of birth so that they could use its numbers in their lottery selections! This may sound surreal, but in fact is nothing more than a modern-day incarnation of numerology.

WHY SUCH DIVERSITY IN DIVINATION?

One of the most fascinating aspects of divination is the mind-boggling diversity of techniques that have evolved through the ages, as shown here, which is unparalleled among the psychic arts. There are a number of different reasons that collectively explain this situation, of which the following are by far the most influential.

   

First and foremost is personal choice. Quite simply, everyone is different. What may appeal to one person might not inspire any degree of faith or belief in another, leading the latter person to look for or devise some other method instead. Even in today’s society, this still applies. One person may testify to the efficacy of Tarot readings, whereas another swears by palmistry, and a third by scrying. For some, visual stimuli such as the movement of flames and shadows or the patterns created by tea-leaves in tasseography engender confidence, whereas others are guided more effectively by tactile stimuli like dice-throwing, or phrenology (divination by feeling the bumps on a person’s head), or instead by sounds as in austromancy and leconomancy.

Geographic location has also played an important role on the evolution of divination systems. In regions with few trees but an abundance of rocks and stones, such as northern Scandinavia, it is hardly coincidental, for example, that divination methods concentrated upon runic systems rather than versions involving cards or other systems employing paper-derived objects. The same applies with regard to divination systems on tropical islands favouring techniques featuring seashells, driftwood, waves, and other maritime-derived materials.

Occupation is very influential too, with early hunters paying particular attention to animal-related phenomena, such as the behaviour of their prey, or the structural variation of specific organs extracted from the latter, whereas farmers would note and be advised by the movements and activity of their own domestic livestock.

DIVINATION IN THE MODERN AGE

The continuing popularity of Tarot readings, scrying, chiromancy, I Ching, and a host of other familiar divination systems readily demonstrates that even in today’s technologically-advanced, ostensibly ultra-scientific age, a desire to see into the future and learn one’s fate remains just as potent now as it ever was. The ever-increasing expanse of bookshelves devoted to the mantic arts in contemporary bookshops is silent but evocative testimony to this. Moreover, such a desire is not limited to expression by the well known methods just listed. A surprising number of much less familiar systems are still practised, often in the most unexpected localities or at the most unexpected times.

Molybdomancy, for instance, remains very much alive and well in Germany during the Christmas period, and one of its most (in)famous erstwhile practitioners was none other than a certain Adolf Hitler, who was even photographed performing this feat amid the festivities held on one particular New Year’s Eve. Similarly, elderly inhabitants of the USA's New England states still attempt to foretell changes in the weather by observing the movement of smoke emitted from their houses' chimneys, thereby maintaining the archaic tradition of capnomancy.

Moreover, in what sceptics must undoubtedly look upon as a bewildering paradox, even modern scientific technology is being effectively harnessed to power the drive for ever more accessible means of divination, as evinced by the development of sophisticated computer software for the reading and interpretation of astrological charts, Tarot cards, and dreams (oneiromancy).

Similarly, scientists are nowadays casting a much more interested and far less cynical eye upon methods of divination once dismissed as folklore and baseless superstition, especially certain examples focusing upon animal behaviour. These include the activity of livestock, migratory birds, and insect swarms prior to major weather changes, and, most dramatic of all, the extraordinary ability of many varied types of animals, but notably snakes (thereby effecting a re-emergence of ophimancy) to sense impending earthquake activity.

There are even surviving elements of divination in a number of contemporary religions, most notably voodoo, Santeria, and Wicca, while the popularity of feng-shui stems from the practitioners’ hopes that it will assist both in divining and in directly influencing their future.

Quite apart from being incited by a markedly broad spectrum of interest – spanning idle curiosity and desperate urgency - to uncover the veiled secrets of the future, there is, however, one other major impetus fuelling humanity’s need for divination, and that in turn is, perhaps, the most basic psychological requirement of all. Namely, the need to stay in control.

Our greatest fears stem not from the known, over which we can usually exert at least a measure of control, but rather from the unknown, over which we generally have none whatsoever. And there is no greater source of the unknown than the invisible, intangible, incomprehensible future. If, however, we can devise mechanisms by which we may be able to penetrate, however faintly, the caliginous mists of time separating the present from the opaque equivalent that is yet to come, some of the future’s power to frighten us is diminished.

Little wonder, then, that divination achieved such prominence and diversity in bygone ages, when our long-departed ancestors’ understanding of the world in which they lived was so much less than ours today. Yet the persistence of divination in various forms within the modern world too attests vehemently to the fact that, even now, we have not entirely mastered our fear of what the future may hold for us, of our ultimate destiny and fate. And who knows, perhaps we never will.

NB - Unless otherwise credited, all illustrations included here are, to the best of my knowledge, in the public domain.

A VISIT TO EASTER ISLAND - LAND OF THE STONE GIANTS

Easter Island birdman on festival poster (Dr Karl Shuker)

Not so long ago, in a magazine and internet survey to find the world’s most mysterious, paranormal locality, the runaway winner was a certain tiny triangular island (no more than 25 km across) separated by over 2000 km of southeastern Pacific Ocean from any other inhabited locality, formerly home to an extraordinary birdman cult, and ringed by numerous stone statues of enormous size and alienesque appearance that stare inward across their lonely domain through unseeing eye-sockets yet with a gaze as chilling as the rock from which they were hewn many centuries ago. Where else could this be but Rapanui – or, as we know it better in the West, Easter Island.

MEETING THE MOAI

A special territory of Chile since 1888, Easter Island is so-named because it was first encountered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722, when it was reached by Dutch explorer Admiral Jacob Roggeveen. In April 2008, I fulfilled the ambition of a lifetime by finally visiting this truly remarkable island – containing three extinct volcanoes, a lush but entirely artificial flora and fauna almost entirely introduced by man from elsewhere to replace its own decimated native ecosystem, and only a single dusty town, Hanga Roa (with roughly 3500 inhabitants), which recalled to mind a 19th-century frontier town that had somehow been transported by cyclone far from its Wild West homeland and unceremoniously dropped down upon a fragrant tropical isle. But whereas Dorothy and Toto met the munchkins and the wizard of Oz, I met the moai – or at least a sizeable representation of them.

Alongside a half-buried moai on the slopes of Rano Raraku (Dr Karl Shuker)

No amount of photographs or films can prepare you for the sheer scale and awesome majesty of these gigantic stone statues, Easter Island’s most famous denizens, coldly aloof and silent, their thin lips and haughty visage radiating Ozymandian disdain. Numbering over 800 in total, many are still inside the quarry, within the eastern volcano Rano Raraku, where they were originally hewn from tuff (an igneous rock ash). Some lie there fully formed, waiting for the acolytes that will never come, to transport them out of the volcano and down the slopes, to be erected with honour as protective icons upon a ceremonial stone platform known as an ahu. Once greatly venerated as the revered representations of their sculptors’ ancestral leaders, and also as the earthly vessels of their leaders’ spirits, even today the moai command respect and deference – it is illegal merely to touch one of these stupendous monuments.

Having said that, some moai have not even been detached from the inner rock face from which they were carved. Consequently, everywhere that you look within this volcano’s obsidian depths there is a surreal juxtapositioning of heads, noses, brows, elongate ears, and hooded eye-sockets, staring imperiously but sightlessly upwards and inwards at every conceivable – and inconceivable – angle, like a particularly febrile nightmare of Picasso, Dali, or Hieronymus Bosch.

Alongside a toppled moai with Rano Raraku in the background (Dr Karl Shuker)

A fair few did make the journey out, however, and today they can be found in many locations around the island. A number stand half-buried in grassy soil on Rano Raraku’s outer slopes, like a scattering of abandoned chess pieces on a giant’s forgotten chessboard. Others still lie in prone humiliation, where they were deliberately tipped over centuries ago by warring clans, but in modern times a select company have been raised and re-erected onto their ahus at various sites by teams of visiting researchers. With the exception of an ahu of seven moai at Ahu Akivi at the island’s centre, which look out towards the sea, all moai were originally erected by their sculptors near the island’s edge and faced inward, overlooking their clans as protective effigies. Such sites include Ahu Tongariki (restored with 15 moai) on the island’s southeastern edge, Ahu Nau Nau (with seven moai) at Anakena on its eastern edge, and Ahu Kote Riku at Tahai on its northwestern edge.

A HISTORY OF MYSTERY

Until Thor Heyerdahl’s famous first archaeological dig here during the 1950s, it was not generally realised that a moai is more than just a giant head. In reality, it is carved down the hips, with a pair of spindly arms and long-fingered hands pressed closely to its bulbous torso’s sides. However, so many moai were half-buried in soil and other deposits after centuries of gradual concealment by natural encroachment from sediment and plant life that their true nature was not realised until Heyerdahl oversaw the first scientific excavation of a moai, revealing its entire form.

One of Easter Island's most famous and much-photographed, half-buried moai, showing one of its characteristic long earlobes (Dr Karl Shuker)

On Rano Raraku, I encountered torso-buried heads that were 6 m tall, so when you add to that the height of the hidden body, it becomes evident that these extraordinary statues are indeed gargantuan, far bigger than anything even remotely similar to be found elsewhere in the world. Biggest of all is El Gigante, which would have stood a colossal 23 m high if it had ever been transported out of Rano Raraku, but this petrified giant remains here, its vast weight (estimated at over 145 tonnes) probably proving too much for even the most enthusiastic sculptors and workers to overcome.

With a moai inside a ring of stones (Dr Karl Shuker)

Like so much of Easter Island’s past, the history of the moai is enshrouded in controversy and mystery. Estimates as to when they were created vary by as much as a millennium depending upon the authority consulted. The current consensus (discounting Heyerdahl’s problematic views of a South American origin) is that the island was first colonised in the 4th Century AD, by seafaring Polynesians, who subsequently split into separate, independent clans or kin-groups, and began constructing ahus and carving statues of modest proportions a few centuries later. By the 15th Century, however, moai production had reached frenzied proportions, as indeed had the moai themselves – now monstrously huge. Then, so abruptly that many of these statues were simply abandoned where they lay, complete or still in various unfinished stages of carving inside Rano Raraku’s volcanic bowels, moai production ceased. This is believed to be due to increasing rivalry and hatred developing between the various clans, culminating in violent battles and, as highly symbolic desecration, purposefully toppling over each other’s sacred moai.

Another factor is the wholesale destruction of the island’s once-luxuriant native foliage, most notably the giant palm trees that were eventually felled across the entire island. Their sturdy trunks were used as rollers on which to transport the moai from Rano Raraku to their chosen sites elsewhere, but once the palm trees had vanished, the moai could no longer be moved.


ALIEN RAYS AND THE STATUES THAT WALKED…?

Having said that, tree-trunk rollers (and also sledges constructed from trunks) may well be the orthodox explanation for how the moai were moved, but it is not the only one that has been proffered. Highlighting the paranormal links to Easter Island, proponents of the ancient astronauts school of belief have suggested that visiting aliens transported and erected the moai using anti-gravitational beams released from their spacecraft. Another suggestion is that the natives somehow levitated the moai by harnessing electromagnetism. And my Rapanui-born guide noted that according to traditional native lore, the moai themselves very obligingly walked to their chosen sites during the night, utilising a special life-force called mana. Then again, she was smiling when she said this. In any event, the moai are certainly left strictly alone following the onset of darkness, because even during the sunny daylight hours many visitors have reported experiencing a dark, unfathomable feeling of oppression and apprehension when in the presence of these stark, brooding sentinels.

Some moai originally bore on their heads a huge ceremonial topknot or pukao, carved from red scoria rock transported from Puna Pau, a quarry in the island’s southwestern region. How these enormous blocks were raised onto the moai’s heads, well over 6 m high in some cases, remains unresolved. A few of the lately re-erected moai have their pukao in place, but these were placed there using modern-day cranes.

Moai with topknot and restored eyes at Tahai (Dr Karl Shuker)

Most intriguing of all, thanks to the unearthing of an intact example in recent years, is the realisation that the moai originally had eyes. These were made from white shells with pupils of black obsidian, but were destroyed or removed during the inter-clan battles that marked the end of moai production.

BIRD-HEADED MEN AND LONG-EARED GHOSTS

Less famous but no less extraordinary than the moai of Easter Island, and further earning it its claim as the world’s most mysterious, paranormal location, is its erstwhile birdman cult. The cliff faces around Rano Kau, the island’s westernmost volcano, are liberally etched with striking birdman petroglyphs depicting bizarre bird-headed humanoids, often curled up in almost foetal pose – which if nothing else is fitting, given that this volcano’s slopes also harbour a prehistoric village called Orongo that contains many remarkable stone houses supposedly representing the human womb.

Until as recently as 1878, when the arrival of Christianity here swiftly suppressed it, the election of the Birdman each September was a very significant event. Every clan sent a representative to Orongo to compete for the birdman title. The competition consisted of scaling down the steep, jagged cliffs of Rano Kau into the sea and swimming through shark-infested waters to a small outlying islet called Moto Nui, where the objective was to collect an egg newly-laid there by a small seabird called the sooty tern, and bring it back safely to Orongo. The winner would be duly crowned the Birdman or Tangata Manu, bringing great glory and esteemed status to his clan, because the Birdman was deemed to be the living reincarnation of Makemake, Easter Island’s eminent fertility deity. He would then be taken away to live in solitude for the next 12 months inside a sacred cave on the other end of the island, at the foot of Rano Raraku.

Petroglyph of crouching birdman, head thrown back, on a rock near Rano Kau (Dr Karl Shuker)

The birdman cult is no more, and even its origin remains unknown, but its image lives on, sometimes in the most surprising locations. There are a number of underground cave systems on the island, including Cave of the Cannibals, whose walls are profusely decorated with birdman carvings, but when viewing them, just pray that the light does not illuminate the cave’s more frightening inhabitants – the moai-kava-kava, the ghosts of the ancestral long-eared clan chiefs, said to haunt this subterranean domain! The birdman image has also been utilised abundantly in modern-day signs and gifts for sale in Hanga Roa, but perhaps the most unexpected location for birdmen is inside the town’s church, where Christian icons share its inner sanctum with statues of bird-headed humans.

THE RIDDLE OF RONGORONGO

As if the moai, birdmen, and assorted ghosts were not mysterious enough, Easter Island can also boast an indecipherable native script language – rongorongo. Carved on wood, these hieroglyphics could only be read by the native elders and priests, but when Peruvian slave raiders reached the island during the 1850s-60s, all of its educated native men were transported to Peru’s guano mines as slaves, where they soon died, leaving no-one behind on Easter Island who could decipher the rongorongo tablets. Even today, these cryptic scripts remain largely unexplained, and the few surviving rongorongo tablets are priceless relics in museums.

Holding a replica rongorongo tablet (Dr Karl Shuker)

Whereas Easter Island may not lay claim to such overtly or ostensibly supernatural phenomena as headless horsemen, baying werewolves, or weeping statues, as someone who has experienced the sheer unearthly nature of this truly strange locality, stood in the chill shadow-casting presence of its grim monolithic moai, and shivered in the stygian gloom of caverns populated by countless carvings of grotesque long-beaked birdmen I can well appreciate why this lonely Pacific Island has been voted the world’s most paranormal place. Sometimes, not seeing a ghost (long-eared or otherwise) can be more unnerving than seeing one!

Ahu Tongariki (Dr Karl Shuker)

LIVING STATUES AND OTHER ANIMATED EFFIGIES

Pygmalion and Galatea, as painted by Jean-Baptiste Regnault, 1786


Inside any cabinet of curiosities – and especially inside the Eclectarium of Doctor Shuker – anything is possible, even living statues and other recondite examples of art imitating life in the most literal sense! So please indulge me if you will, and permit me to explore a longstanding interest of mine that resides amid the outermost shadows of unnatural history.

One of Greek mythology’s most famous stories tells of Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, who skilfully carves from ivory the statue of a young woman so beautiful and realistic that he falls in love with her, and which, in answer to his prayers, the goddess Aphrodite brings to life so that he can marry her and make her his queen, Galatea. Although I have yet to encounter a modern-day factual case quite so dramatic as this, there are many accounts on file of statues, icons, and other carved, inanimate effigies that have reputedly exhibited all manner of unexpected behaviour – weeping, moving, blinking, singing, and even wing-flapping and chess-playing. However, as examined here, could it be that these miraculous entities owe their talents more to a complex mix of human ingenuousness and ingenuity than to any divine intervention?


MIRACULOUS – OR MANIPULATIVE – ICONS?

There are numerous reports of venerated statues and icons that allegedly exhibit miraculous powers, as previously documented in detail by me in Dr Shuker’s Casebook (2008) and elsewhere. Perhaps the most famous – or infamous – examples are weeping and bleeding statues (usually of the Madonna), many examples of which have been documented from around the world. In 1995, however, Pavia University chemistry researcher Dr Luigi Garlaschelli published a revelatory paper in which he disclosed precisely how to create such an icon. Other researchers have achieved similar successes, since when, not surprisingly, this particular phenomenon has attracted rather less attention from the media. The same is true in relation to milk-drinking statues, whose ostensibly extraordinary feats have been readily duplicated by scientists and revealed to involve nothing more dramatic than capillary action.

However, these are by no means the only religious effigies that in some manner or another imitate the living form. Among the earliest known versions, present in a number of ancient Egyptian temples, was a goddess statue placed upon the altar and holding an empty vase. When the priest lit a fire on the altar, wine would miraculously appear inside the goddess’s vase, and then pour out onto the fire in front of the suitably-amazed worshippers gathered there. In reality, however, as explained by Hero of Alexandria, a perspicacious 1st-Century-AD scholar, the statue contained a secret reservoir of wine and a tube leading up to and into the bowl. As the fire warmed the statue, air expanded inside a hidden airtight chamber linked to the wine reservoir, forcing the wine up the statue’s internal tube and out into the bowl until it poured over the edge, quenching the fire, whereupon the statue would cool, the hidden chamber’s air would stop expanding, and thus the wine flow would stop.

Book documenting the moving Madonna statue of Ballinspittle phenomenon

Very different but equally noteworthy was the moving Madonna statue of Ballinspittle in Ireland. During 1985, many worshippers and intrigued tourists alike visited a statue of the Madonna at a shrine in Ballinspittle, County Cork, after hearing reports that it had been seen to move, rocking backwards, sideways, and forwards, and had sometimes even been said to move its head and shoulders. As so often occurs with such events, comparable reports also began to emerge in relation to other similar statues all over Ireland, but in the case of the Ballinspittle Madonna, events drew to a dramatic, unexpected close on 31 October, when the statue was violently attacked by some men, badly damaging it.

Luckily, before this destructive denouement occurred, the statue had been filmed by a team of scientists from Cork’s University College during some of its purported bouts of movement, but when the film was examined, no movement whatsoever could be detected. Consequently, it would seem that the Madonna’s observers had fallen victim to the autokinetic effect – the false perception of movement in a stationary object caused by the viewer’s own slight movement, but which he fails to notice due to an absence of background detail that would reveal that he was the one who was moving, not the object.

As for the life-sized crucifixion figure of Jesus at the Holy Trinity Church in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, that supposedly opened and closed its eyes during a service on Good Friday 1989, or the Madonna statue at the Mater Ecclesiae Mission Church in Thornton, California, whose eyes, chin, and hands were said to move on several different occasions during 1981, both of these icons were also filmed and photographed by investigators. When the data was analysed, however, the ‘movements’ were found to be nothing more than optical illusions – i.e. created by the angles at which the icons had been observed, photographed, or filmed.

In other words, it would seem that at least as far as religious effigies are concerned, miracles are very much in the eye of the beholder – as opposed to the lens of the camera.


MEMNON’S SINGING COLOSSUS

While visiting Egypt in 2006, one of my must-sees was among this ancient country's lesser-known attractions - yet, ironically, it is also one of its most extraordinary. Standing amid the ruins of Thebes on the West Bank of the Nile are two gigantic stone statues, aptly dubbed Colossi, but less aptly known in full as the Colossi of Memnon - as they have nothing to do whatsoever with the Trojan hero Memnon. Instead, they are 18.6-m-tall representations of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, seated on his throne, were erected approximately 3500 years ago, and are all that remain of his mortuary temple.

In 27 BC, the eastern Colossus was partially destroyed when its upper half crashed to the ground following a powerful earthquake, but far from losing its former glory this shattered edifice gained even greater fame – due to its extraordinary ability thereafter to sing! Prior to the earthquake it had been resolutely mute like any other self-respecting statue, but now, each morning at daybreak, this singular structure gave voice to a weird, readily audible sound that resembled a chiming bell – at least according to the numerous visitors that came from far and wide to hear it, believing that this statue’s eldritch cry would bring them good fortune.

The Colossi of Memnon (Dr Karl Shuker)

There is a very pertinent American maxim: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Sometimes, moreover, it may be best to leave well alone even if the object in question is indeed broken. Sadly, however, the Roman emperor Septimus Severus clearly thought otherwise, because in 199 AD he supervised the eastern Colossus’s long-awaited repair, in which a freshly-carved upper half replaced the original wrecked version. As a result, the statue regained much of its erstwhile majesty and dignity, but during the restoration process it also lost something – its voice, because from then on the statue never sang again, remaining silent to this day.

Many suggestions to explain its unwonted vocal ability and its equally unexpected silence have been proposed (though none has been confirmed). These include the effects of the earthquake causing the conversion of previous ultrasonic emissions into audible ones prior to the statue’s restoration, or the audible rubbing together of certain sections of the statue’s lower half warmed by the sun and expanding unequally as a result – or even phoney noises created secretly by Egyptian priests for the purpose of extorting money from gullible visitors.

This last-mentioned proposal, if true, would certainly not be unique in the annals of history. In the 12th Century, for instance, when Bishop Theophilus infamously smashed a number of statues at Alexandria that he deemed to be heathen, he discovered that some of them were hollow and were placed against a wall in such a manner as to permit an Egyptian priest to hide behind them and speak through their mouths to an awestruck audience of worshippers.


THE GOLEM OF PRAGUE

According to Jewish tradition, a golem is a model of a man made from clay or mud, which can be brought to life if certain holy words written upon a piece of parchment and then placed in its mouth are spoken by a Rabbi, but is rendered inanimate again if the parchment is removed (in some versions of this tale, a neck medallion bearing the words, rather than a piece of parchment, is used). The most famous example is the man-sized golem of Prague, which Rabbi Yehudah Loew ben Bezalel supposedly created and brought to life in 1580 to work as a labourer for him, but which, when he forgot to replace the parchment in its mouth, ran amok in the city’s until he finally subdued it, then hid its lifeless body thereafter in the attic of Prague’s Old-New Synagogue.

Although this story is fictitious, it is a curious anomaly that even today, it is against Czech law to enter this synagogue’s attic, even though no such ruling exists in relation to any of this country’s other Jewish temples. So could there really be something mysterious hidden in the synagogue’s attic?

Ivan Mackerle's book documenting his investigations into the Golem of Prague (Ivan Mackerle)

Czech investigator Ivan Mackerle has proposed an intriguing explanation. Namely, that there really was a golem of sorts – but not a clay creation brought to life. Instead, after learning that the word ‘golem’ translates from Hebrew not only as ‘artificial man made with magic’ but also as ‘fool’, Mackerle suggests that it was actually a retarded man cared for by the Rabbi. Moreover, he believes that the ‘parchment’ was medicine given to him by the Rabbi to control fits or seizures, that the golem’s running amok when the parchment was not replaced in its mouth was actually the man running wild due to not receiving his medicine, and that when captured by the Rabbi the man died, so to save himself from prosecution the Rabbi swiftly hid the man’s body in the synagogue’s attic and forbade anyone from entering it again.

To test his hypothesis, Mackerle succeeded in persuading the Czech authorities to allow him entry into the attic – but only to find it empty. However, he later learned that in 1883 the synagogue had been renovated, and that if any human remains had been found there they would have been removed and buried in the Jewish cemetery. So who knows? Perhaps in some unmarked grave are the mortal remains of a real-life golem.


TALOS AND THE TERMINATOR

Among the most popular of modern-day science-fiction films is the all-action series of Terminator movies, but countless centuries earlier the ancient Greeks were thrilled by tales of their very own killer android. This was an enormous bronze statue called Talos that famously came to life when, during their quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason and his band of fellow heroes landed on the island of Crete. This terrifying episode was skilfully recreated by animatronics expert Ray Harryhausen for the classic fantasy movie ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ from 1963.

Still from 'Jason and the Argonauts featuring Talos (Columbia Pictures)

Who as a child watching that film for the first time was not pleasurably chilled when - after Hercules and Hylas had robbed the gods’ own treasure chamber concealed inside the pedestal of Talos’s immense bronze statue - Talos’s head suddenly creaked and slowly turned round, looking down at the startled heroes? And then, to their even greater horror, the entire statue came to life, stepping down from its pedestal to pursue them and attempt to sink their vessel the Argo by hurling huge boulders at it. Fortunately, Jason was able to save his ship and crew by pulling out the great cork in the heel of one of Talos’s feet, which released the immortal fluid or ichor that bestowed life upon this bronze statue, and thus rendered it lifeless once more. Nevertheless, compared to Talos even Arnie’s relentless, murderous Terminator seems relatively tame!


MEDIEVAL AUTOMATA – MAGICAL OR MECHANICAL?

It was celebrated science-fiction novelist Sir Arthur C. Clarke who once wrote: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and this is definitely true in relation to certain highly ingenious creations dating back to medieval times. Today, we would readily recognise such constructions as mechanical, animatronic devices, but back in those bygone ages, they were deemed by all but the most discerning, educated observers to be magical entities, and their creators – far from being lauded for their inventiveness – could well find themselves charged with witchcraft!

Indeed, this was almost the fate of a certain enterprising student at Cambridge University during the 1540s. He manufactured a mechanical flying beetle to feature in a stage production of the play ‘Pax’ by Aristophanes, but the beetle was so lifelike that he faced accusations that it was the work of the devil! Happily, however, although a charge of sorcery was brought against him, it was dismissed – otherwise, if he had been found guilty and executed in some typically gruesome manner, the world would have been deprived in subsequent years of the extraordinary talents of occultist, alchemist, and early scientist Dr John Dee.

By the 18th Century, the world was rather more accustomed to automata, but even this enlightened age was awestruck by the inventive genius of Jacques de Vaucanson. His ability to manufacture realistic automata was unparalleled in terms of complexity and diversity. Among his most astonishing creations were a statue of the Greek deity Pan, which stood up from its seat and played its panpipes, before bowing when applauded and then sitting back down; a mandolin player that simultaneously played its instrument, sang, and tapped in time with its foot; a frighteningly lifelike asp that hissed and struck at the breast of an actress playing Cleopatra when it was touched by her; and a ‘breathing’ piano player that faithfully imitated a breathing human pianist and also moved its head whilst playing.

Indeed, Vaucanson actually began work upon the production of a mechanical man complete with artificial heart and circulatory system that would fully replicate its living counterpart, but died before he could complete it. Had he done so, the world’s first android robot might have been created – Vaucanson’s Frankensteinian ability for replicating the living state in artificial form had, after all, already been demonstrated by virtue of his most famous creation, an animatronic duck.

Internal view of Vaucanson's extraordinary animatronic duck

Even by today’s technological standards, this invention would be an exceptional feat of engineering (in 1868, kaleidoscope inventor Sir David Brewster referred to it as “perhaps the most wonderful piece of mechanism ever made”), so more than 250 years ago it was little short of miraculous. Vaucanson stated that his intention when constructing this automaton was to reproduce a real duck’s internal organs and thence to simulate the functions of eating, drinking, and digestion – and judging from Prof. John Cohen’s description of this amazing entity in his enthralling book, Human Robots in Myth and Science (1966), he certainly succeeded:

"The duck stretched its neck to take grain from a hand and then swallowed and digested it. It drank, paddled and quacked, and imitated the gestures which a normal duck makes when swallowing precipitately. The food was digested by dissolution, not by trituration, [Cohen then quotes Vaucanson himself:] “the matter digested in the stomach being conducted by tubes, as in an animal by its bowels, into the anus, where there is a sphincter which permits it to be released”."

And just to demonstrate and confirm his claims beyond any shadow of doubt, Vaucanson constructed his duck as a transparent automaton, so that its internal organs and their functioning could be clearly seen by its fascinated observers.

Vaucanson’s inspiration for his duck may well have been the mechanical peacock constructed in 1688 by General de Gennes, which could eat and walk in a lifelike manner. Or perhaps he had heard of a truly extraordinary ‘miracle’ that had taken place one day in 1653. That was when a drunken visitor to the Caiaphas chapel at Sacro Monte in Piedmont, Italy, came upon a stone statue of St Peter repentant, which incorporated in its structure a large cockerel. Allegedly, the cockerel suddenly came to light, flapping its wings and turning round on its pedestal, before just as abruptly regaining its normal, rigid pose! Needless to say, the man’s inebriated state would have been sufficient to ensure that his testimony received short shrift – were it not for the fact that the cockerel’s unanticipated activity had also been witnessed at the same time by several other visitors to the chapel.

Had a genuine miracle truly taken place, or could it be that what had been observed was a beautifully-timed, elegantly-choreographed performance by a secretly-manufactured automaton? In view of Vaucanson’s incredibly complex mechanical duck and de Gennes’s peacock, the contemporary production of a wing-flapping, rotating cockerel would certainly not be beyond the realm of conceptual or practical possibility.


THE CHEATING CHESS PLAYER OF VON KEMPELEN

No discussion of living statues and human automata can ignore the most scandalous, controversial example of all – Von Kempelen’s miraculous chess player. During the late 1700s, a Hungarian civil servant called Wolfgang von Kempelen (later made a Baron) constructed a life-sized mechanical man, dressed as a turbaned Turk and seated behind a wooden cabinet, which was so greatly skilled in the art of playing chess that it attracted the interest of many European monarchs and toured the continent successfully for over a century, passing through several owners after its creator’s death in 1804.

However, the secret of the Turk is that it owed its chess-playing success not to any mechanical inventiveness on the part of Von Kempelen, but rather to the hidden presence of a human chess player cleverly concealed within the cabinet, who moved the chess pieces on the board above by means of a series of magnets. Sadly, Von Kempelen’s chess player was destroyed by a fire that broke out in 1854 at the Chinese Museum of Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia, where it had been donated by its last owner, Dr John Kearsley Mitchell.

Revealing the secret of Von Kempelen's chess player

As proposed at the beginning of this Eclectarium blog post, there are many cases in which animate statues and other ‘living’ effigies unquestionably owe their miraculous state not to any supernatural source but to much more mundane (albeit undeniably inventive) human involvement. Not surprisingly, therefore, in his excellent book Looking for a Miracle (1993), mysteries debunker Joe Nickell claims that there is no credible evidence for the existence of any miraculous icons and effigies. Moreover, he backs this statement by noting that although there are numerous religious statues on display in museums and galleries, there is no report of any miraculous happenings with any of them, only with versions in churches and other places of worship. He concludes that this is because museums and galleries are controlled environments where the opportunity for hoaxing would be much less.

This is certainly true, but there is also an equally pertinent, alternative viewpoint to consider – could it be that it is the very act of worship that generates miracles, which is why they are never recorded in museums and galleries?

Perhaps, as succinctly voiced by St Augustine of Hippo back in the 5th Century:

"A miracle does not happen in contradiction to nature, but in contradiction to that which is known to us of nature."

Colossus of Memnon (Dr Karl Shuker)