The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (26 page)

Frances had had no “psychic” experiences. But in the spring of 1918 she saw her first gnome. She had gone down to the stream after school and observed a phenomenon she had often observed before: a single willow leaf began to shake on the tree by the stream. Then a small man, all dressed in green, was standing on the branch. Frances watched, breathless, terrified of disturbing him. The little man looked straight at her, then disappeared. After that, she claimed, she often saw little men wearing coats of grayish green and matching caps by the stream. She gradually reached the conclusion that the little men were engaged in some kind of purposeful activity, perhaps associated with helping plants to grow. Later, she began to see fairies, with and without wings. These were smaller than the elves; they had white faces and arms and often seemed to be holding some kind of meeting. Elsie, she insists, never saw the fairies or little men.

It was after falling into the stream yet again that Frances admitted that she went there to see fairies. And it was the total skepticism of the adults that led Elsie to decide to take some fairy photographs. This was not simply a desire to deceive. Elsie believed Frances when she said she saw fairies; her own psychic experiences made it seem quite plausible. She wanted to shake the credulity of the grown-ups. So the photographs were taken with cutouts propped up by hatpins.

When the world suddenly became interested in the fairies, the girls were in a difficult position. The photographs were fakes. Yet – according to the girls – the fairies really existed. If the whole thing had been a hoax, it would have been easier to confess. But it was not a hoax – not totally, anyway. They were in an embarrassing and anomalous position. If they admitted that the photographs were fakes, they would be implying that the whole affair was a deception. And that would be as untrue as continuing to maintain that the photographs were genuine. So they decided to keep silent.

When the whole affair blew up again in 1965, the situation was unchanged. It is true that Elsie, now a hardheaded woman in her sixties, was no longer convinced that Frances had seen fairies; yet she was absolutely certain that
she
had had “psychic” experiences and was therefore prepared to be open-minded. As to Frances, she
had
seen fairies and had nothing to retract. In a letter to Leslie Gardner, the son of Edward Gardner, Elsie remarked that after her interview with Peter Chambers (in 1965), in which she had declared that people must judge for themselves and that the pictures were “figments of our imaginations”, Frances had said indignantly, “What did you say that for? You know very well that they were real”.

In fact, Frances had always maintained that the fairies were real. In November 1918 she sent the first fairy photograph to a friend in South Africa and scrawled on the back: “Elsie and I are very friendly with the beck Fairies. It’s funny I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there”.

In his original manuscript of the Cottingley book, Joe Cooper had included a chapter entitled “Other Sightings”, consisting of accounts of fairies related to him by various witnesses, and it makes clear why he believed Frances. One man, a healer, told how he was sitting with a girl in Gibraltar, eating a sandwich, when it was snatched from him by “a little man about eighteen inches high”. An eighty-year-old official of the Theosophical Society insisted that when he was a small boy he was often visited in bed by a green-clad gnome. Another old man described seeing a green-clad gnome, about two feet high, walking along a path in a cornfield. Some young male students told how, when walking in a wood near Bradford, they saw fairies who were “circling and dancing” but who were invisible to the direct gaze; they could only be seen “out of the corner of the eye”. An elderly woman showed Cooper a photograph of a gnome seen through a frosty window; she claimed that she had come down one morning, seen the gnome, and rushed upstairs to get her camera. The photograph also shows diminutive white rabbits.

Joe Cooper finally published most of these accounts in his book
Modern Psychic Experiences
, together with many more. A New Zealand medium named Dorothy described how she used to play with a “spirit” girl named Mabel as a child and how she had first seen fairies, who came from under plants. One day she came home to find her father unconscious on the floor – a gastric ulcer had perforated – and the fairies took charge and escorted her to the doctor’s house. Joe Cooper’s own niece, Jo, who was in her thirties, described how, at the age of sixteen, she had seen three little men crouching on top of a wall.

When I wrote about the Cottingley fairies in
Poltergeist
(before Frances had “confessed”), I also went to some trouble to find accounts of “real” fairies. I described being interviewed on television at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival by a man named Bobbie (whose surname I forgot to note in my journal); in the pub next door he told me casually that he had once seen a gnome standing on the pavement outside a convent gate and that it had “scared the hell out of him”.

My friend Marc Alexander, author of many books on the paranormal, told me a story of a friend in New Zealand named Pat Andrew, who claimed to have seen a pixie when he was six. Years later, after seeing a stage hypnotist, Marc and Andrew began experimenting with hypnosis on each other. Marc had no doubt that Andrew was genuinely hypnotized, and one day he decided to try and “regress” him to the age at which he saw the pixie. The result was an amazing one-sided conversation that left Marc in no doubt whatever that, whether Andrew had really seen a pixie or not, he undoubtedly
believed
he had.

One of the most convincing accounts I know of is an encounter with a pixie as recounted by another friend, Lois Bourne, in her book
Witch Among Us
. Lois is a “witch” in the sense that she possesses odd psychic powers, of whose reality I have not the slightest doubt. She is an extremely sensible and down-to-earth woman. And in her book, among many stories that psychical researchers will find credible enough, she tells a story that will obviously cause most readers to doubt her truthfulness or her sanity. While on holiday at a cottage at Crantock, in Cornwall, she met a member of a “wicca” coven and spent an evening at her home. The woman’s husband, Rob, asked her if she would like to see a goblin, explaining that one appeared among the rushes of the millstream at Treago Mill, Cuberts Heath, every morning at sunrise; if she wanted to see him, she had to be up early. The next morning Lois and her husband, Wilfred, joined Rob at the mill gate, and they crept up to the stream. Bourne writes:

I have known Lois for years. I may be gullible and she may be a liar, but I believe her. She is not the type to invent such a silly story. And her husband, Wilfred – who also saw it – is not the type to support a downright lie.

As already mentioned, the poet W.B. Yeats had been convinced of the existence of fairies ever since he and Lady Gregory went door to door collecting information from the local peasants. They recorded these interviews in a 1920 book entitled
Visions and Beliefs
. Evans Wentz concludes his
Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries
by acknowledging: “We seem to have arrived at a point . . . where we can postulate scientifically . . . the existence of such invisible intelligences as gods, genii, daemons, all kinds of true fairies, and disembodied men”. (By the latter he means ghosts.) And he goes on to cite the very sound evidence for the existence of the poltergeist. George Russell (AE) and Evans Wentz emphasize that these entities are seen only by “psychics”, and Russell believes that such beings are not “individuals” in the human sense: “Theirs is a collective life, so unindividualised and so calm that I might have more varied thoughts in five hours than they would have in five years”.

When all of this is taken into account, we may feel that the notion that Frances really saw fairies by the stream in Cottingley no longer seems quite so absurd.

17

Fulcanelli and the Mysteries of Alchemy

In the autumn of 1926 there appeared in Paris a limited edition of a book called
The Mystery of the Cathedrals – La Mystère des Cathédrales
– whose author was named on the title page simply as “Fulcanelli”. It was a book written by a man who claimed to be an alchemist, and was addressed to his fellow-alchemists. Its thesis is that the great Gothic cathedrals are not simply temples of the Christian religion but are also “stone books” whose pages contain the encoded secrets of alchemy. According to Fulcanelli, the word “Gothic” is not derived from the Germanic people known as the Goths but from the word
argot
, meaning slang.
Arts gothiques
– Gothic art – should be spelt
argotiques
: for argot is a language used by those who do not wish their meaning to be understood by outsiders. The rest of the book is an elegant exposition of some of the “stone secrets” of the cathedrals of Notre Dame, Amiens and Bourges.

The preface to the first edition was written by one “Eugene Canseliet”, who declares that the author of the book, his “Master”, has now disappeared. “Having achieved the pinnacle of knowledge, could he refuse to obey the commands of Destiny”? “Fulcanelli is no more”, says Canseliet, and then goes on to thank the artist, Julien Champagne, “to whom my master has entrusted the illustration of his work”.

Although printed only in an edition of three hundred copies – or possibly because of this – the reputation of
Mystery of the Cathedrals
continued to grow, so that another edition was called for in 1957. In his new preface Canseliet admits that “Fulcanelli” is a pseudonym under which his master has chosen to conceal his identity, and he quotes a long letter from Fulcanelli to
his
master, congratulating him on finally achieving the “Gift of God” or the “Great Work”, the Philosopher’s Stone of the alchemists.

When the book was translated into English in 1971 it contained an additional introduction by the translator’s husband, Walter Lang – the pseudonym of Edward Campbell – in which he reveals that he has met Canseliet, and learned that Canseliet
had
seen Fulcanelli after his “disappearance” in 1922. That meeting occurred thirty years later, yet according to Canseliet, his master appeared to be thirty years younger than when he had last seen him. Fulcanelli had been eighty in 1924; now he looked a mere fifty. What was stranger still was that Fulcanelli was now dressed as a woman. Canseliet’s story was that he had received a summons from Fulcanelli, and journeyed to a château in the mountains. There he was greeted by Fulcanelli in his normal male guise, and assigned an alchemical labouratory to work in. A few days later he strolled downstairs early in the morning and stood in his braces. Across the courtyard he saw a group of three women dressed in the style of the sixteenth century. As they passed him one of them turned, and he recognized Fulcanelli. But later Canseliet recollected that one of the basic symbols of alchemy is the androgyne or hermaphrodite, and that this is sometimes used as a symbol of the “completed work” – the achievement of the philosopher’s stone. Was Fulcanelli telling him that he had now achieved the aim of a lifetime?

By the time
Mystery of the Cathedrals
appeared in English, Fulcanelli had achieved a legendary status, rather like that of the Comte de Saint-Germain (see chapter 47). This was largely due to the role he plays in a best-selling work by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier,
The Morning of the Magicians
(1960), which was largely responsible for the “occult revival” of the 1960s. According to Pauwels, his friend Bergier was studying chemistry in 1933 when he confided to his professor his desire to study alchemy – and was instantly and predictably rebuffed. The student protested that one form of alchemy – nuclear energy – should be possible, but the professor assured him that this was also an impossibility. All the same, Bergier continued to study alchemy. From 1934 to 1940 he worked with André Helbronner, the distinguished physicist who died in Buchenwald. And among Helbronner’s acquaintance there were many pseudo-alchemists, and at least one genuine alchemist, whose name Bergier never learned. “The man of whom we are speaking disappeared some time ago without leaving any visible traces, to lead a clandestine existence, having severed all connection between himself and the century in which he lived”. Bergier can only guess that he may have been the man who, under the pseudonym of Fulcanelli, wrote “two strange and admirable books,
Les Demeures Philosophales
and
La Mystère des Cathédrales
. . .”

Pauwels goes on to tell how, one afternoon in June 1937, Bergier thought he was in the presence of Fulcanelli. At Helbronner’s request Bergier met the “alchemist” at the labouratory of the Gas Board in Paris. What the man had to tell him was that Helbronner’s researches into nuclear energy were very close to success, and that “the research in which you and your colleagues are engaged is fraught with terrible dangers . . . for the whole human race”. Radioactivity, said the alchemist, could poison the atmosphere of the planet, and a few grams of metal could produce enough energy to destroy a whole city. “Alchemists have known it for a very long time”. Picking up Soddy’s book
The Interpretation of Radium
, he read aloud a paragraph suggesting that earlier civilizations (Atlantis?) had been destroyed by atomic radiation.