“You think I don’t watch your movies? You always come back.”

I was disappointed to see this ‘vampire killing kit’ surface again, not because it’s back on the market (previously sold by LiveAuctioneers.com on 9.6.2012), but because Christie’s Paris have either failed to do the proper research or are ignoring the work that I and others (see also Joe Nickell’s chapter in his ‘Man-Beasts’ book) have done in the last few years to expose these kits as modern novelties.

Google Translate makes this of Christie’s auction notes;

‘Witty (s), this singular set is an invitation to travel that immerses us in the Carpathians at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It reminds us in particular to the publication in 1897 by Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The whole of Europe is so passionate about the fantasy world of vampires. Very quickly, creating Stoker transcends and creates a real fascination. This is particularly important in the Carpathian Mountains, considered the territory of vampires.

Professor Ernst Bloomberg, with the support of Nicholas Plomdeur a gunsmith Liege, then creates a business of destroying vampires. A destination for travelers to Eastern Europe, they produce kits containing the necessary equipment to protect themselves from these evil creatures.

Examples of such boxes that have survived are rare, it is nevertheless one of Sotheby’s New York, 16 November 2011, lot 112.’

Blomberg (not Bloomberg guys) is fake, Plomdeur was nothing to do with kits, and they can’t seem to make up their minds whether the kits were produced for those genuinely afeared of vampires, or if they are ‘witty’ flights of fancy. Added to which, the kit appears in the Decorative Arts department! Which is it guys? Real? Vintage novelty? Modern art? Arguably the latter of those, but in reality there’s just no evidence for these things prior to 1986, and I generously push the possible date back to c1970 in my Fortean Times article and the above-linked blog entries.

Ah well, maybe I have more work ahead of me!

 

Easter a pagan festival? Eggstremely Unlikely!

As alluring as the idea is to atheists like me, the claim that Easter was derived from a pre-existing pagan festival in honour of the goddess ‘Eostre’ turns out to have very little basis indeed. It amounts to one reference. CJ Romer has this tied up on his blog;

Eostre never existed???: why Easter is NOT a Pagan Holiday

CJ is a Christian, so in case you think there’s bias at work, here’s another three-part debunk from a Neo-Pagan writer;

Eostre: The Making of a Myth

An instructive lesson in not buying into claims just becuase they agree with our (pagan or atheist) preconceptions and biases.

Slicing the Upper Crust

I caught some of ‘Paul Hollywood’s Bread’ today on TV, and heard him pronounce that the phrase ‘the upper crust’, to mean the British upper class, originated with the practice of giving used bread trenchers to the poor. As we’ve seen before on this blog,  this kind of etmylogical literalism is usually bogus – phrases very rarely arise in this convenient, pat way, and if you hear an explanation of this sort, chances are it’s outright BS, or is at the least unprovable/unfalsifiable. But they’re appealing, easy to understand, and to remember, which is why they’ve been ‘going viral’ since well before the internet even existed (it just makes the process easier!). In this case, a TV reviewer was taken in.

This one is no exception – fortunately I don’t have to embark on an essay about it though, because Phrases.org has this one nailed, the key sentence being this one;

‘The term ‘upper crust’ didn’t in fact come to be used figuratively to refer to the aristocracy until the 19th century.’

The fact is we can’t know what was in the head of the person who coined the phrase, but the trencher explanation is at least no more likely than any other you care to dream up. In fact, it’s arguably less so, since the use of bread trenchers was long dead by this time. The earliest Google Books reference for the origin (as opposed to the phrase) is 2001, and Snopes has it appearing as part of a hoax list dating to 1999. I could find no references via the Google news archive either. It’s possible that it was in oral circulation prior to ’99, but my money’s on that list, which seems to me to have been an exercise in seeing what historical tomfoolery one could get away with in a single email forward (though elements of it certainly did pre-exist the list).

It amazes me in this day and age that TV researchers either don’t bother to take 10 seconds to check something like this. But then I suspect that, like the tour guides Phrases.org mentions, they’re more interested in storytelling and traditional history than in the real thing. But when you’re recreating historical breads as the focus of your programme, why do you need this extra fluff?

Wears the Soap?

No, I haven’t failed to spellcheck – it’s an old joke…

I’m an RSS subscriber to Retronaut, which if you haven’t come across it already, is a wonderful depository for old photos of all kinds. I recommend it heartily, even if sometimes there are a lack of references for those of us interested enough to find out more. A recent update included some bizarre images of supposed devices designed to curb masturbation, like this one;

No, it’s not part of a steampunk Gonzo costume…

Like the sole commenter at time of writing, I was rather sceptical that these were genuine, and if they were, that strapping them to people was really a ‘thing’ that was done with any regularity. They remind me of the spurious torture implements that were either made up entirely or fancifully replicated in order to titillate and shock Victorian sensibilities (a post on that subject coming up when I can find time to write it).

However, these pics also came from the V&A and Wellcome Trust, both august and scholarly heritage institutions, which gave me pause for thought. I also found more contextual images on the Wellcome’s website, showing people actually wearing the devices, and with original captions describing them as ‘counter-onanism’ contraptions. So I thought I’d dig deeper, and found the amusingly-titled ‘Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror’ by Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck. This makes clear that such devices were widely known about at the time, and that there was even something of a medical controversy about them – some doctors advocating their use, others decrying it. So whilst you might not have been clapped straight into one of these the first time you were caught choking the proverbial chicken (or for that matter, polishing the bean), this does indeed seem to have been a real practice. The above-linked source also details the other methods used to prevent masturbation, and explains the general attitude that it was somehow a harmful practice. Of course, we still don’t quite know the scale of usage of these devices, and it seems likely that only the most well-off parents would consider purchasing them.

We’ve come a long way since then. But then again, we still eat Cornflakes…

(More about this chap at my link above and at Cracked.com)

Spear of Destiny

Anyone following my blog is probably following Bad Archaeology, but in case not, you should check out this fascinating piece on the origin of the now traditional association between the Spear of Destiny and the Nazis.

Sanity Clause

OK, this one actually IS relevant to the season. This is a fascinating piece on the ‘links’ between shamanism, drug-taking, and the modern figure of Santa Claus. Not because of the hypothesis itself, which is pretty tenuous to say the least, but for the fact that it’s actually self-debunking. It starts out making specious connections between the (pre)historic reality of spiritual leaders taking drugs to (amongst other things) experience flight, and the folkloric/fictional activities of St. Nicholas and his derivatives. But the last third or so makes pretty clear that there’s no evidence for any of it, and those who actually work in the relevant historical fields aren’t convinced. Ronald Hutton’s comments should carry particular weight. Even the editor has left a qualifying ‘may’ in the title. Thus, no journalistic standards have been compromised, and yet I wonder whether most readers won’t still come away with the impression that Santa = Shaman.

Whilst part of me wants to rant about this, actually I wonder if this isn’t a clever way for everyone to enjoy this story. My own work on the vampire killing kits ended up being reported in a similar way, and despite my best efforts, many would still have failed to pick up the message I’ve been trying to convey (they’re not ‘real’, but they’re still worthy of interest). But the comments on the above article demonstrate a good deal of incredulity and some actual scepticism, so people are thinking critically about this kind of bold historical claim.

 

 

You’ve Got Red On You

‘Santa vs Zombies’ by Victor Negreiro

(Nothing to do with my title, which is a ‘Shaun of the Dead’ reference)

Why is Santa Claus’ tunic red? Because of Coca-Cola? S’Nope! To conceal the wounds he sustains in battle, of course! OK, perhaps not. But that explanation really has been offered on many an occasion to explain why the British ‘redcoat’ was so clad, especially in the US. A seamless seasonal link there, I think you’ll agree. The implication being that the British army that fought the American Revolution comprised thousands of scared impressed conscripts who would rout at the drop of a hat, were it not for the tyrannical discipline of their officers. Even the British have made this claim, probably because until relatively recently, soldiers were very much looked down upon in British society, such that a slight against their courage wouldn’t necessarily be a slight against the army or the Empire. Francis Grose, in his  ‘Military Antiquities’, states (though I can’t find the original source he cites online);

‘Julius Ferretus, a writer of the middle of the 16th century, in his Treatife on the Military Science, fays, that foldiers commonly wore a fhort red fagum, or frock, which colour was chofen that they might not be difcouraged by the fight of the blood from their wounds.’
-Grose, Military Antiquities, 1788 (p.6)

So this idea was a contemporary one. Nevertheless, it’s pretty dubious. Military uniforms were bold solid colours because for line infantry (riflemen and light infantry being a special case) there was no tactical need for anything that would blend in. It was also a bonus for officers and general staff to be able to see where their men were on the black powder-filled battlefield, and for the men themselves to be able to tell each other apart in close quarters. More significantly, in an age before chemical dyes, there was also quite a limited colour palette to choose from. Hiding your sucking chest wound had nothing to do with it. A fellow WordPress blogger has a good summary of why this claim is bogus. It points out that blood is in fact quite visible against red fabric, something I can vouch for having seen period uniform still bearing obvious blood stains. But I’m just as interested in where these things come from as debunking them. So where does this red herring originate? Well, it’s actually pretty ancient – 1st Century A.D. ancient, in fact:

‘They used to wear red tunics in battle to disguise and hide the blood from their wounds, not that the sight of the wounds would terrify them, but it might make the enemy a little more confident.’
-Valerius Maximus on the Spartans

Of course we have no way of knowing whether the Spartans really did this, but as another practical warfighting race, like the British later on, it seems pretty unlikely. The claim was recycled five hundred years later by an ecclesiastical scholar of the ancient world;

‘The reddened (russata) garment, which the Greeks call Phoenician and we call scarlet, was invented by the Lacedaemonians so as to conceal the blood with a similar color whenever someone was wounded in battle, lest their opponents’ spirits rise at the sight.’
-Isidore of Seville, Origines XIX, xxii, 10

Intriguingly, Isidore also says that Roman soldiers were known as russati because of the similarly red tunics that they wore; a direct foreshadowing of the British ‘redcoats’. I suspect our missing link here is a later writer, perhaps at the height of the British Empire in the Victorian period, deliberately drawing an analogy between the armies of the two empires, just as Valerius had by referencing the Spartans. The russati/redcoat connection would have reinforced this Britain=Rome meme, and might even have inspired the appropriation of the old Spartan/Roman myth. Now, this could be used by both proponents and enemies of a given country/empire, depending how it’s spun. Valerius and Isidore give a positive angle, but perhaps more logical is the negative version in currency by the 19th century, and presumably earlier:

‘English children are, perhaps, still taught that French soldiers wear red trousers in order that the sight of blood may not frighten them in war-time ; and doubtless French children imbibe a similar theory regarding the English red coats.’
-J.A. Farrer in ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’, 1885**

Farrer’s summary is actually very comprehensive, although I couldn’t find the original source for this claim of his; ‘Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver…chose it, according to Xenophon, because red is most easily taken by cloth and most lasting;’ Which is a shame, because it would predate even Valerius (Xenophon being active c300 BC) Nevertheless, it’s still far closer to the truth than the blood thing, for which there is no evidence and no plausibility. After all, I can’t see this chap being overly worried about a spot of blood on his cloak, can you?

 

 

Expanded references; *Wardle, D. Valerius Maximus’ Memorable Deeds and Sayings: Book 1. Oxford University Press (Clarendon Ancient History Series): Oxford and New York, 1998, p57, Ch.6 para.2. **Farrer, J.A. Curiosities of Military Discipline, The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol.258-259,1885, p.133.

Devil Dogs

In my post about the apocryphal ‘ladies from hell’ a few years back, I mentioned the US Marine Corps nickname ‘Devil Dog’ in the same breath as being an invention of the press adopted by the fighting men themselves. They form part of a larger trend of applying names to your own military units that you imagine your (hopefully) fearful enemy might choose. I’ve just picked up on this piece from 2011  that deals specifically with that very nickname, and agrees with my own findings. I found it via this more recent article, which although missing the point that it’s an invented term, seems to suggest that its veracity is becoming a moot point, with ’Devil Dog’ has actually fallen out of favour, and is only really used ironically, even to the point of being a term of abuse during training. That’s really interesting – some sayings and terms persist, some change their meaning, and others disappear entirely.

If anyone’s come across any other terms like this that they suspect might be similarly invented, post a comment below and I’ll look into them. I have some other items to write up and post soon on other subject, as I’m aware I haven’t been very active online lately.

When the Lights Went Out – Revenge of the Black Monk

If a ghostly monk can bite a sandwich, what’s stopping you from giving it a damn good thrashing?

There’s a new ‘true life’ haunting movie coming out next month, and this one is British.

Interestingly in this case the director has a connection to the ‘real’ story (Wiki’s version here). Inexplicably, he’s advanced the period setting by nearly a decade, presumably to hook the story onto another real life event; the energy crisis of 1973/4 (hence the title). Ironically, this draws attention to one alternate explanation for the lights going out during the ‘real’ haunting – power cuts and electrical problems happened before said shortage, and they still happen today. Even this may be redundant when we consider another explanation; that somebody might simply have been turning switches off;

‘The lights would go out, and when they looked in the cupboard under the stairs the main switch would be turned off. On one occasion, Mrs. Pritchard carefully taped it in the “on” position with insulating tape; half an hour later, the lights were off  again, and tape had simply vanished.’
-’Poltergeist!’, 1981, p.130

Wooooooo! Ahem. Anyway, Holden is the son of a one of the contributing figures in the story, Mrs Rene Holden:

‘Another neighbour, Rene Holden (who was a bit psychic), was in the Pritchards’ sitting room when the lights went out. In the faint glow of the streetlamp that came through the curtains she saw the lower half of a figure dressed in a long black garment.’
-‘Beyond the Occult’, 1988 p.237

‘A bit psychic’? Isn’t that like being ‘a bit pregnant’? The other major incidents involving Holden’s mother were the apparently spiritual theft of a fur coat, and the mysterious throwing of a plate of sandwiches around a room before a ghostly yet physical bite was taken out of one of them. All of this being under cover of another bout of another selective power failure. The latter is a rare instance of potential physical evidence of the paranormal that could have been tested, bearing as it did the impressions of apparently ‘enormous teeth’. Instead however, Holden kept the sandwich herself and somehow allowed it to deteriorate into ‘crumbs’ after only a few days. So we are told by author Colin Wilson, who has produced the closest thing we have to a written primary source for all this; his book ‘Poltergeist!’ (along with his other books like ‘Beyond the Occult’, referenced above). Though the director of the movie has drawn from family oral history for his version of the story, Wilson’s book was written closer to the time when the events in question happened, so might better reflect personal testimony. Then again, maybe not. In any case, his book was still published a good decade on from the ‘hauntings’, in 1981. Wilson himself was not involved or even present at the time, so far as I can determine. This, along with Holden’s film, is by its nature actually a secondary source and of limited usefulness in getting to the bottom of events. As Wilson relates, ‘no trained investigator came on the scene while the disturbances were at their height.’ So we don’t have any evidence from parapsychologists or even the pseudoscientific investigations of the average ‘ghost club’ to go on. Nor even any newspaper reports (that I could find). Just anecdote; although in this case it isn’t just family tradition, as visitors are also claimed to have experienced supposedly supernatural shenanigans (which of course doesn’t mean that they were). The film director claims that the police witnessed the ‘ghost’, and local MP Geoff Lofthouse writes of his personal experiences in his autobiography:

‘I suppose it would be about 1965, and I was in a Council meeting with Violet Pritchard, when I started ribbing her about the stories that were going around that her son’s house up on East Drive was haunted. Violet had great charm, but also great directness. She looked me in the eyes and said: “Well Geoff, if that’s what you think, you had better come up with me.” So after the Council meeting I picked up Sarah, and we went up to Joe Pritchard’s. Just as we entered, Violet said: “This will wipe the smile off your face.” The stories of the poltergeist had been going the rounds for a few months then. Sarah had heard them, but neither of us took them very seriously; after all, Chequerfield estate was not some haunted house in the South of London or a ruined tower up in the Yorkshire Dales, it was newly built council housing on what had been agricultural land. In we went and sat down. We had been there about twenty minutes when suddenly there was a banging on the wall, at this sound the dog, who was sitting right in front of me, stood up stock still and the hairs on his body rose up in the air. It only stood a second before darting through the door. Joe Pritchard said “It’s here again,” and to prove that it was, two candlesticks rose up and were thrown through the air. One second they were standing on a sideboard, or it may have been a shelf, and the next they had gone up into the air and broken the chandelier. This was enough for Sarah. Without any ado she dashed out of the house. I was just following her when politeness caused me to stop at the bottom of the stairs to say: “Excuse me but I have to go.” And I did, I went rapidly at the point when a number of blankets were thrown down at us.

In most things I am a bit sceptical, but when it comes to the stories of the Pontefract poltergeist I am a true believer. Taps were turning themselves on, and a whole range of activity was taking place, and this in a family of everyday Pontefract people. I decided that Violet Pritchard should be my Deputy Mayor because of all the people I have met in my life as a politician, I regard few politicians with such warmness as Violet Pritchard. When I say that she was a kind and simple soul, I do not mean to be disrespectful in any way.’
-’A Very Miner MP’, 1986, p.69

Very disconcerting at the time, no doubt, but so can fiction be. There are any number of explanations for what Lofthouse relates that don’t require the existence of ghosts – something that should require some pretty extraordinary evidence to accept. This lack of empirical evidence is a perennial problem with hauntings and similar experiences, in that all available evidence is anecdotal, mediated through a third party, and not recorded until years after the fact.

Wilson, too, is not a parapsychologist. is well-known in paranormalist and Fortean circles, having written a string of ‘factual’ books and bought into a wide range of ‘phenomena’ from illusionist Uri Geller (‘The Geller Phenomenon’) to the lost city of Atlantis. He’s also an author of true crime books and fiction.

Sightings like Holden’s led to the ghost being identified as that of a local historical figure, the ‘Black Monk’. Amusingly, this turned out to be a load of nonsense, and so Wilson, having himself debunked this hypothesis (p.146-7 of ‘Poltergeist!’), rationalised the whole thing away as the ghost choosing to look like the monk based upon overheard family conversations. Alternatively, the sightings were hallucinations, delusions, confabulation, or something else entirely. But it seems that it’s easier to just make the facts fit the story on the presupposition that what the family experienced was something paranormal.

So what really went on here? We’ll probably never know, but other cases from the Fox sisters to the Enfield poltergeist suggest that these ‘ghosts’ are linked to a very real phenomenon; that of growing up. The paranormalists express this in terms of supernatural manifestations fuelled by the available ‘energy’ of puberty, but a more realistic interpretation would be that they are the result of childish attention-seeking, acting out, and/or teenage angst. The title of the new film becomes highly relevant here. All of the major physical manifestations (sandwich hurling included) took place ‘When the Lights Went Out’, giving a great deal of room for real, live, human beings to get involved, just as in physical mediumship. Whatever the case, the film looks likely to provide an interesting dramatisation of a real life experience of a ‘haunting’ – but through no fault of the makers, it isn’t evidence of the paranormal. Doubtless the true life marketing will convince many that it is.

Here we go again…

I have this on my desk at work

Another year, another extraordinary claim about poor old Leonardo. I picked this one up from Doubtful News, which quite frankly is a real goldmine for this blog. I’ve covered several instances of this in the past, including the ‘Last Supper’ debacle, which continues to bring most visitors to these pages (sadly).

The really obvious problem this time is that the painting is by no means certain to be Da Vinci’s. Until and unless it is authenticated as such, it’s pretty pointless to try to look for hidden meaning where there may well be none (even if it were a Leonardo). This is a practice that is fraught with difficulty in any case, as any ‘code’ would be indistinguishable from the false patterns one could read into just about any work of art (or natural feature, cloud, cheese sandwich, or book, for that matter).

If you need any more of a warning, the author of the new book (and yes, there’s a book to be sold, and no, it’s not written by an art historian), has serialised it with…you guessed it…the Daily Mail (purveyor of such stories as this).

The ‘similarities’ that they point out (here) are just that; artistic conventions of a certain style and period. I’m not an art historian either, but the second toe being longer than the first is a genetic trait, not just a Da Vinci one. It’s also another artistic convention dating to Classical times (check out Graeco-Roman statues – short winkies and long second toes are pretty much de rigeur). The fleur de lys is a massive red herring, since the Priory of Sion was essentially a hoax. The symbol itself is widely used outwith the ‘Priory’, and oh look, it’s one of the Virgin Mary’s symbols. Talk about cherry-picking meanings.

As for the rest, this is the Leonardo that the author/paper claim is so similar; see what you think. Note however that all of the specialists consulted are either pretty equivocal about it, or outright state that it may be Da Vinci’s school, but do not attribute it to the man himself. The ID of Mary Magdalene is suspect because the Madonna with baby Jesus and young John the Baptist is a massive trope of Christian art. How is this any different? Reminds me of the claims that the carvings in Rosslyn Chapel depicting plants and ‘green men’ are somehow definitively ‘pagan’, when in fact the natural world was important to Christians too. If you ignore the bigger picture, it’s easy to fool yourself into seeing significance where none exists.