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The fabric of British cultural history is woven with tales of mystics, misfits and madmen, all contributing to the country’s fascination with the paranormal, writes NEIL NIXON.
British cultural history has produced numerous written and reported accounts of paranormal encounters; what follows are some lesser known events in that rich archive.
Mystics
My recent book Why mystery matters (co-written with EK Knight) involved exploring man’s long-term relationship with all things mystical. Spoiler alert: There is no historical evidence that we lived in a time before mystery fascinated us.
The earliest written accounts and creation myths often focus on mystical events, and by the time publication came about in a recognizable form, firsthand accounts of mystical events quickly became a staple of the most popular stories.
The English ‘medieval mystics’ were a first generation of writers who reported from the front line of altered consciousness, with Margerie Kempe (c. 1373–c. 1438), perhaps the best known, her one-on-one encounters with Jesus and a long series of divine revelations began after the birth of her first child.
Jesus seemed “the most beautiful and most amiable that could ever be seen by the eye of man, dressed in a robe of purple silk, sitting on the side of her bed, looking at her with such blessed cheerfulness that she was in all her spirits were strengthened….”
As early as 1545, one of Britain’s undisputed nature classics – Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus – spoke of its author feeling mystically part of the universe as he watched the wind blow powdery snow over a hard-frozen mountain: ‘the wynde blew, it toke the low fnow with it, and let it slide so over the snow in the field, which made it hard and rough because of the night frost, that I could thereby feel very well, the hollow nature of the wynde as it was that day blew. ”
The sense of possession – whether through the mind or simply through being overwhelmed by the environment, has been a consistent part of writing about nature.
Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain was written in the 1940s but not published until 1977.
This strangest of travelogues catalogs years spent wandering without set routes through a particular part of the Cairngorm Mountains to the point where the landscape itself emerges as a living thing, while Shepherd is aware of it as a character.
In the final chapter, she sees this relationship as a gateway to understanding the unknown: “There must be many exciting properties of matter that we cannot know because we have no way of knowing them… These moments come unpredictably, yet controlled, so it seems. by a law whose operation is vaguely understood.”
Outsiders
Nan Shepherd was an academic and writer with the connections and skills to present her arguments in an acceptable manner. Sometimes that ability is the only dividing line between a mainstream reporter of a strange experience and someone labeled an outsider.
A few high-profile and highly functional misfits (i.e. those for whom living a life based on their own eccentricities has proven lucrative) have candidly reported paranormal encounters.
The autobiographies of some rock stars contain such claims: Morrissey, driving a car on a wild night on Saddleworth Moor, saw a ghost, Lemmy – long before his mind-bending days in Hawkwind – saw a UFO appear on the horizon, stop in mid-air and then shoots away at incredible speed.
Britain’s biggest rock names – including John Lennon and Keith Richards – have reported UFO encounters, details of which are easily found online, though predictable perhaps – which could amount to a one-ghost-meets-route as far as Spooky Isles is concerned , took place 50 years ago when still a bunch of outsiders Black Sabbath recorded their amazing Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album at Clearwell Castle in Wales. Singer Ozzy Osbourne and guitarist Tony Iommi spotted a figure in a black cloak in a hallway and followed him to the castle’s armory, where the band was rehearsing, only to find the room empty. The castle owners – apparently – knew their regular guests.
For some, their status as outsiders becomes the basis of their fame, whatever they hoped to be remembered for.
Two examples, centuries apart, will suffice here. Solomon Eccles (aka Solomon Eagle) was already a spectacularly misfit and persecuted for his worship habits by the time the Great Plague in London sent his eccentricities into overdrive.
His subsequent spell in which he declared doom while running around with a helmet full of burning charcoal makes for one of the most vivid character studies in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). It also appears to have inspired rock singer Arthur Brown’s dress.
London taxi driver George King was in his flat in 1954 when he received word that he would become an Earth representative in the interplanetary parliament. Holdstone Down in Devon, where King met the space being Master Aetherius, remains a sacred place for the Aetherius Society to this day.
Crazy men
Eccles and King have made many accusations regarding their mental health, but they are part of a great tradition of outliers whose incredible claims went hand in hand with a lifetime of sincerely defending their experiences, and the gathering of followers willing to share the beliefs.
Our history contains many more examples, Arise Evans (1607–c. 1660) who left Wales for London after a series of prophetic and religious visions.
Predictions later claimed for him included an attempt to warn Charles I of the dangers he faced and to have told the Earl of Essex to his face that he would be blessed with promotion.
He was rewarded with arrest (including for posing as Jesus Christ) and beatings.
Britain is home to a handful of recent sufferers of the fortunately rare Cotard syndrome, characterized by anxious melancholy, delusions of non-existence regarding one’s own body (up to and including living people who consider themselves dead), and the British clinical literature continues to report cases.
Demonic possession is also far from over; the sad case of 26-year-old Kennedy Ife who died during a family-organized exorcism in Enfield in 2016 was one of many cases where malevolent spirits were suspected.
If he had bitten his father and threatened to cut off his own penis, the outcome might have been different if his family had sought medical help instead of help from the Church.
Buy Why Mystery Matters, by Neil Nixon, co-written with EK Knight, from Amazon
