The Blog Of A Bookowl

Wait a minute…were there no seamonsters in the FT this month? No! August’s Fortean Times was packed full of UFO’s, Planet X and meteors, all of which I totally love.

My favourite snippet in this issue is from a story on meteor sightings in medieval times, when people thought they might be “magnetic effluvia” or any number of weird phenomenon (except, y’know…rocks from space). The article talks about some of the ancient folk tales that mentioned what must have been meteors. I quote:

“The statue of the goddess Diana at Ephesus (probably carved from a meteorite) “fell from the sky”.

I went to Ephesus a few weeks ago so this really piqued my interest. The Temple of Artemis where the statue would have been housed isn’t actually in the ‘ancient city’ itself (it’s nearby but not on my tour unfortunately). The statue itself is long gone, but I found a pretty snazzy engraving of her depicted with fruit and hunting dogs and all kind of weird stuff.

Now, if it really was made from a meteor that would be awesome, but Wikipedia says it was “carved of wood”. The only real reference I can find on the interweb is this page, which says it’s a “common myth”. Hmm. I wonder why the FT said it was “probably” true?

Another slip of the pen is an “upcoming event” taking place in June 2010 on the shores of Loch Ness, where psychics, witches etc will get together to try to summon the spirit of Nessie. This event will be streamed live online…oh wait, June was last month. Oops!

I’ve been a Fortean Times reader for a very long time, ever since I first saw it’s esoteric-looking cover on the magazine stand. When I went to university in London, I was delighted to note that Charles Fort had once lived next door to my favourite Chinese Takeaway at 39A Marchmont Street (there was a plaque on the wall). A resident of Hughes Parry Hall just down the road, I felt in very good company.

Thanks to a subscription gift for Xmas, the Fortean Times now comes in the post every month. I always turn down corners or draw circles round interesting snippets, so I thought I’d do a monthly round up of the best bits.

This month there’s a big spread on Seamonsters (again). The FT loves cryptozoology and I’m not much of a fan, so I often bemoan yet another Seamonster story. This one however is about Vikings, not the usual Victorian seafarers, and my favourite bit is the “Tale of Ragnar Lodbrock” whose name meant “Ragnar Hairy Pants”. (Is the FT is writing for American readers here? According to Wikipedia it’s “Ragnar Hairy Breeks” and breeks are trousers, not pants.)

This is brilliant, but quoting from the Wikipedia article:

“Ragnar was a pagan who claimed to be a direct descendant of the god Odin. One of his favorite strategies was to attack Christian cities on holy feast days, knowing that many soldiers would be in church.”

Legendary, indeed.

My other best bit is just a snippet from a story on Craig Venter, a geneticist who’s recently come to public attention for creating the first “artificial life” – an organism with man-made DNA. I won’t even pretend to understand this, but the scientists put a coded “watermark” into the organism that actually *spells out* a line from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life”

How cool is that?

Finally, there’s an article on Jung and a near-death experience that greatly influenced his later life and beliefs. I didn’t know much about Jung except bits of psychology from school, so it was interesting to know his interest in the fringe of science. The FT reproduces some pictures from The Red Book, Jung’s account of his experience. Amazingly, he drew them himself. There’s a slideshow at The Guardian, but if you want to own a copy it’ll set you back a fair bit!