The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (4 page)

Wordsworth talked about the time of childhood, when everything seem “apparelled in celestial light”. This is because the child knows that there is an infinitely marvellous world out there, and automatically makes that effort that keeps the dynamo working at top speed. Human beings begin to die when they become trapped in the “vicious circle”, and become convinced they have “seen it all”. And unless circumstances force them to continue to make an effort they sink gently into a kind of swamp of boredom, of “taken-for-grantedness”, that finally engulfs them. (This is why so many people die after they retire from a lifetime of work.)

Now, obviously, the human race is on the point of an extremely interesting evolutionary development. The first step towards escape from this vicious circle is to recognize that the apparent “ordinariness” of the world is a delusion. If we could become deeply and permanently convinced that the world “out there” is endlessly exciting, we would never again allow ourselves to become trapped in the swamp of “taken-for-grantedness”. And we would become practically unkillable. Shaw says of his “Ancients” in
Back to Methuselah
: “Even in the moment of death, their life does not fail them”. “Life failure” is that feeling that there is nothing new under the sun, and that we all have to accept defeat in the end. If we could learn the mental trick of causing the dynamo to accelerate, this illusion would never again be able to exert its power over us.

Let me state my own fundamental belief about human existence. Man consists of a highly complex body, a “computer” that has taken millions of years to evolve, controlled by an entity which we call the soul, spirit or whatever. But to place the “spirit” in charge of such a complicated piece of machinery is like asking a baby to drive a Rolls-Royce. We fail to understand about 90 per cent of its potentialities. Besides, it is simply too “heavy” for us to handle comfortably. As we drag this massively heavy body around, we are in the position of a space-traveller who has been cast away on a planet where gravity is several times greater than on earth, so he cannot even stand upright, and it takes him all his strength just to crawl on his hands and knees. When he is galvanized by some emergency he can summon far more strength, and even stagger briefly on to his feet. Then he can catch a glimpse of the real answer: that he has to develop far more powerful muscles – mental as well as physical muscles.

Whenever I am faced by some exciting challenge or crisis I can see the answer. I can then see that if I could be “galvanized” like this all the time, I could rise up to a far higher level of purpose and vitality. Our trouble is that after a crisis we quickly lose that sense of emergency, and sink back into the old dull, sleepy state in which every molehill becomes a mountain, and the mind falls into a curious apathy in which it loses all sense of purpose. In fact we are so accustomed to this state that we accept it as normal. We only tend to glimpse our true potentialities when we set out on voyages – either physical or mental.

The answer lies in generating (through the use of determination) a far more powerful imagination, a sense of reality, that will make us continually aware of the potential challenges and problems, and keep us in the “galvanized” state. It is a total absurdity that a man sitting on a train should stare dully out of the window, when his mind contains a vast library of past experiences that could keep him entertained for years.

All this explains, of course, why we spend so much of our time seeking out challenges and stimulants – travel, adventure, sport, sex, alcohol; it is a pathetic and misguided attempt to hurl ourselves beyond these stupid limitations. If we could learn to identify and face the basic problem, we would have taken the most decisive step towards solving it. We would become incapable of boredom, and “discouragement” would lose its power over us. We would begin to see the way out of the trap that has been killing off human beings prematurely for thousands of generations.

Now it should be clear why I feel such impatience with those people who want to convince us that the universe is a perfectly rational and logical place, and that any attempt to suggest the opposite is a return to medieval superstition. I am prepared to admit that poltergeists are not particularly important – the scientist’s instinct is perfectly sound on that point – and neither are “time slips” or precognitions or out-of-the-body experiences; I myself feel that people who are too obsessed with the paranormal are as boring as people who are too obsessed with football or television soap operas. But these experiences are only a small part of the vast panorama of strangeness that will confront us when we learn that mental trick of slipping out of the bonds of habit, and making a powerful and continuous effort to tear aside the “curtains of everydayness” that surround us.

If this book needs any justification, it is that it is a modest attempt to catch a few glimpses of the strangeness that lies on the other side of the curtain.

1

King Arthur and Merlin

Legend or Reality?

King Arthur and his magician, Merlin, are two of the most popular figures in world mythology. But did either of them really exist? Or are they merely characters in a charming fairy tale?

We can understand, of course, why historians would cast doubt on the existence of Merlin. But some modern scholars have even doubted that King Arthur was a real historical character. This is obviously a question that must be settled before we go any further.

We first hear about Arthur and Merlin in a book entitled
History of the Kings of Britain
, written around 1135 by a Welsh bishop named Geoffrey of Monmouth – whose reliableness may be judged by his opening chapter, in which he explains how Britain was named after the warrior Brutus, who sailed there from the siege of Troy. A hundred or so pages later, Geoffrey describes how a king named Vortigern – who was a real historical character – ordered an impregnable tower to be built on Mount Snowdon, in Wales. The tower kept collapsing, whereupon some soothsayers told him that if he wanted the tower to remain standing, he would have to sprinkle the stones with the blood of a boy who had no father. His messengers traveled throughout the kingdom in search of such a youth, until they overheard two boys quarreling and one of them jeering that the other had no father. The fatherless boy was named Merlin.

King Vortigern sent for Merlin and his mother, who proved to be the daughter of the king of South Wales. She described how she had been seduced by a handsome youth who subsequently vanished into thin air – although she sometimes heard his voice speaking to her when she was alone. Vortigern then explained that since Merlin was literally fatherless, he had to sacrifice him and sprinkle his blood on the foundations of the tower. Merlin promptly offered to prove that the soothsayers were liars and asked to have them brought before him. “Do you know why
the tower keeps on collapsing”? he asked them. They shook their heads. “Because there is a pool underneath it which makes the earth soggy”. Vortigern’s men were ordered to dig and found the pool. Merlin then went on to foretell that if they drained it they would find two dragons (or serpents). And when this also proved to be true, Vortigern decided to spare his life. Merlin then went on to make a series of prophecies – including the augury that Vortigern would be burned to death in a tower. This came about just as Merlin foretold, when a king named Aurelius Ambrosius – the rightful heir to the throne – invaded Britain and set fire to Vortigern’s tower.

When Aurelius was poisoned his brother, Uther Pendragon, became king. After conquering Scotland, he invited all the nobles of his realm to a feast to witness his coronation. Among these were Duke Gorlois of Cornwall and his beautiful wife, Igerna. Uther fell madly in love with Igerna, and when Gorlois realized this he hurried back to Cornwall. This insulted the King, who pursued Gorlois with an army. Gorlois forestalled the rape of his wife by hiding her away in the castle of Tintagel, which was virtually impregnable, for it stood on an island that was approached only by a narrow neck of land. When he learned about this, Uther Pendragon fell into a deep depression, for he could think about nothing but possessing Igerna.

The problem was solved by Merlin, who used his magic to transform Uther into Duke Gorlois’s double. Uther went to the castle of Tintagel and was immediately admitted. That night, in Igerna’s arms, he conceived the boy who would become King Arthur.

While Uther was away his men attacked the castle in which Gorlois had taken refuge. Gorlois was killed, and Uther Pendragon married Igerna and made her queen. He reigned for another fifteen years until he was also poisoned, and then Arthur became king.

Readers of Geoffrey of Monmouth (whose book is still in print in a popular edition) will wonder what happened to the sword in the stone, the Knights of the Round Table, and other famous parts of the legend. The answer is that they were added by later (mostly French) chroniclers and given their definitive form in one of the first printed books, Sir Thomas Malory’s
Morte D’Arthur
, printed by William Caxton in 1485. Little was known about its author until 1926, when literary research revealed – to the dismay of scholars – that Malory was a robber chief who sacked monasteries and rustled cattle, and who raped a woman named Joan Smyth, the wife of one Hugh Smyth, on at least two occasions. He apparently wrote
Morte D’Arthur
in Newgate Prison, where he is buried.

But if Arthur was a teenager when his father died, why should he have had to prove his right to the throne by pulling a sword out of a stone (or an anvil set in a stone, as Malory tells the story)? Malory overcomes this problem by having Merlin take charge of Arthur from the moment he is born; Merlin then hands the baby over to a knight named Sir Ector, whose wife suckles Arthur.

It all sounds so absurd that it is not surprising that some scholars have dismissed Arthur as a legend. They point out, for example, that one of the main sources of information on Arthur’s period is a monk named St. Gildas who wrote a bitter and disgruntled book entitled.
The Downfall and Conquest of Great Britain (De excidio et conquestu Britanniae)
and who does not even mention Arthur – although he speaks of the Battle of Badon, which is Arthur’s most famous battle.

But a biography of Gildas by Caradoc of Llancarfan mentions that Arthur killed Gildas’s brother, Hueil, who fought against him; that in itself would obviously explain why Gildas could not even bring himself to mention Arthur’s name.

So what do we actually know about the legendary hero called King Arthur? Well, to begin with, he was not a king but a general. He did not ride around on a white charger dressed in a suit of medieval armor, because he belonged to a far earlier period – he was probably born about
AD
470, during the period when the Romans had just left Britain. He was, in fact, a Roman – or at least a Roman citizen. So his horse would have been a small Roman horse, about the size of a modern pony, and his sword would have been a short Roman sword, not a long broadsword like the legendary Excalibur.

Around
AD
410 the Romans decided to pull out of Britain – they needed all their forces to defend Rome from the barbarians. A chieftain named Vortigern set himself up as king of Britain but soon encountered trouble with the wild Picts from north of the Scottish border; around
AD
443 he invited Saxon mercenaries from the Continent to come and fight for him. They did, but when Vortigern ran out of money to pay them, they decided to stay and conquer Britain. The original Britons – whom we now call Celts – were slowly driven west into Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland. However, an ex-Roman warrior named Ambrosius Aurelianus rallied the Celts and went to war with Roman thoroughness, inflicting many defeats on the invaders. When he died, his brother, Uther Pendragon, replaced him. And one of his most brilliant generals was a young man named Artorius, the legendary King Arthur – who may or may not have been the son of Uther Pendragon.

It was Arthur who brought the Saxon invasion to a standstill in a
series of twelve great battles, the last of which, the Battle of Badon, took place about
AD
518. This established him as the Dark Age equivalent of General Montgomery or General Eisenhower. If his allies had remained loyal, it seems probable that the Saxons would have been driven back to the Continent, and it would now be Arthur’s Celtic descendants who rule Britain, not the Anglo-Saxons.

Unfortunately, Arthur’s former allies now fell to squabbling among themselves, and Arthur spent the remainder of his life trying to avoid being stabbed in the back. When he finally died, in the Battle of Camlann – which, according to Geoffrey, took place near the River Camel in Cornwall – he was fighting his own nephew Mordred, not the Saxon invaders. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur’s body was carried off to the “Isle of Avalon”, which has been identified as Glastonbury, a small town in the west of England with a famous abbey and a tor – a hill surmounted by a tower. (Although Glastonbury is now inland, there was a time when it was surrounded by the waters of the Bristol Channel.) Because the burial was secret, to prevent the Saxons from finding the body, a widespread story soon arose that Arthur was not really dead but would return to help Britain in her hour of need.

In the summer of 1113, about twenty years before Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his
History
, a group of French priests came to Bodmin, in Cornwall, carrying holy relics. When one of the locals mentioned that Arthur was still alive and was expected to return any day, the servant of one of the clerics was tactless enough to sneer. This caused a violent confrontation, and a group of armed Cornishmen burst into the church with the intention of teaching the skeptical foreigners a lesson; it was only with some difficulty that they were pacified. This seems to demonstrate that Arthur was already a legendary figure before Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his bestseller.