Dragons and spheres and chimeras, Oh my!

Some lovely and surreal Renaissance images of marvels and unexplained phenomena, from Taschen’s The Book of Miracles.

Pew pew pew! Malevolent forces play Space Invaders with trembling Christian folk.

This happened to a friend of a friend. He went to the shops to get a paper and some milk, but he found the whole area blasted into desert, then he was gnawed by a dragon and he went to heaven. Ker-razy.

It’s raining icebergs and sort of lion mask things, Hallelujah.

Flying duck-eel-Muppet creatures wearing crowns, obviously. Eh, happens all time round our way.

Wow, such sky beams, very dazzle, many falling over towrs, much giant sea doge.

An alarmingly massive comet makes the towers and spires go all wonky again.

Nobody could deny her crimefighting prowess, but Donkey Lizard Bearded Arse Bird Leg Woman just wasn’t working as a superheroine name.

Don’t hate you those days where huge golden spheres hover on the edge of town and shine ominous beams into your windows?

 

“Kokkuri-sama, please descend…”

A sequel of sorts to Turning the tables from a while back; the Meiji-era Japanese version of contacting the spirit world through the medium of moving furniture and incomprehensible messages. Kokkuri consisted of three bamboo rods connected to make a tripod, with a round tray or lid balanced on top. As with the Western Ouija Board, three or four people would lightly touch the lid. One person chanted “Kokkuri-sama, Kokkuri-sama, please descend, please descend. Come now, please descend quickly.” Note that -sama is the level of honorific politeness above -san, a bit like saying “Mr. Kokkuri, sir” although there isn’t really a direct English equivalent. After about ten minutes of this, the person says “If you have descended, please tilt towards [somebody present].” If all was well, the lid would move and could be used as a way for whoever or whatever had “descended” to answer questions.

Kokkuri. From a 1912 book on hypnotism by Murakami Tatsugorō, ‘Saishinshiki saiminjutsu’.

Kuchisake Onna

Japan panic: the slit-mouthed woman

Kuchisake onna goes kawaii: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. Is she pretty?

Stories of 口裂け女, the slit-mouthed woman, emerged from urban Japan in the late 1970s. At first they were particularly passed around between school children, then in the mass media. By the first half of 1979 Asahi Shinbun was highlighting kuchisake onna as a buzzword (hayari kotoba) of the year. In true, random Japanese style one of the others was “rabbit hutches”.

Occasionally Kuchisake onna was reported as a genuine physical threat, a criminal would-be kidnapper or murderer rather than a supernatural being. At times she was somehow both a real world abductor and a folkloric monster simultaneously. (See Hyaku-monogatari for the Edo origins of modern yōkai storytelling) Satoshi Kon’s extremely uneven but in places brilliant series 妄想代理人 Mōsō Dairinin [Paranoia Agent] is obviously heavily inspired by the mass hysteria over Kuchisake onna. A woman with long hair and a white mask– of the kind sold everywhere and very common in Japan to cover the mouth and nose when a person is ill, or against pollution– accosts you in the street and she asks something like “Watashi kirei?” (“Am I pretty?”) or “Atashi bijin ka?” (“Am I a beauty?”) If you agree that she is, she replies “Kore demo?” (“Even [like] this?”) as she tears off her mask to show that her mouth is slit open across the cheeks, from ear to ear. If you tell her she isn’t pretty, she becomes enraged and pursues you with a knife or scythe. The reason for her disfigurement and rage varies with the telling: sometimes it’s a plastic surgery disaster, sometimes a dreadful accident, sometimes self-inflicted. The same goes for the means of escaping her: repeating certain words, offering certain gifts, reaching a certain place before she catches you.

Turning the tables

Francesco Carancini, Italy, circa 1890s?

As psychic powers or ways of communicating with spirits go, being able to lift living room furniture a few feet off the ground in the dark has to be one of the more useless and absurd. And yet it was a thing that persisted in the repertoire of mediums for several decades. I’ve mainly been enjoying these pictures as  exercises in domestic surrealism rather than as documentation of unknown powers. They’re from a (long out of print, 1981) book called Photographs of the Unknown, which seems to be associated– although not by name– with Fortean Times. In the photo above I like the fact that couple on the right are gripping each other’s hand  apprehensively while the fellow on the left is still nonchalantly puffing away on his cigarette. The position of his left hand suggests slight annoyance that his ashtray has just been whisked away telekinetically.

Killed by a tiger in Wiltshire (Surprised!)

Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) by Henri Rousseau, 1891. National Gallery, London.

A gravestone in the churchyard of Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire records what is apparently the first documented incident of a person in Britain meeting their end after being attacked by a tiger.

IN MEMORY OF HANNAH TWYNNOY

Who died October 23rd 1703

Aged 33 Years

In bloom of Life

She’s snatched from hence

She had no room

To make defence

For Tyger fierce

Took Life away

And here she lies in a bed of Clay

Until the Resurrection Day.

A plaque at nearby Hullavington (since lost… the plaque, I mean, not the village) recorded that Hannah was a barmaid who enjoyed tormenting the tiger in a travelling menagerie. Almost inevitably, Hannah didn’t enjoy her sport for very long before the tiger decided to teach her a fatal lesson. Presumably the lesson here was also deemed appropriate for local churchgoers, hence the plaque.

Hannah Twynnoy being “the first” obviously implies that other people have been killed by tigers in Britain since 1703, but I bet you don’t know how hard it is to find out exactly who those people were. Nor does there seem to be anybody keeping track of tiger deaths in Britain. Come on, this is important.

I’m reminded of a great little book from the late 1960s or early 1970s: A Small Book of Grave Humour, by Fritz Spiegl. As the title suggests, it collects epitaphs that are either deliberate attempts at black comedy or inadvertently funny because they’re so absurd. One from Gorgie Cemetery in Edinburgh is unforgettable because it’s hard to tell whether it’s meant to be funny or just turned out that way by mistake, thanks to incredibly bad syntax:

Erected to the memory of

John McFarlane,

Drowned in the Water of Leith,

By a few affectionate friends.

Spring-heeled Jack and spring-heel ‘Jacks’

Advertisement from Eagle comic, 1960s.

People nowadays complain a lot about health and safety regulations, but really… would you want your child or anyone who was near to your child taking “larger-than-life” steps in these? Nothing could be further from the space age and from being “like an astronaut on the moon” than two industrial springs welded to the bottom of crude (and probably razor-sharp) metal plates, held on with what look very like cat collars if the illustration is at all accurate. Oh well, at least in Britain the spring-heel ‘Jacks’ may have cost you 22’6 and possibly the use of your legs, but the trip to the local Accident and Emergency department was free!

Somebody was evidently thinking of the Spring-heeled Jack of popular Victorian culture, as seen in the Penny Dreadful cover above. From a few relatively restrained reports in and around London in the 1830s of a weirdly costumed pervert who leapt away and disappeared rapidly, Spring-heeled Jack quickly spun off into popular fiction, folklore, mass hysteria and numerous copycats. In the 21st century we’d say he went viral, and in the process he grew claws, wings, glowing eyes, skin-tight clothes, the ability to breathe out strange gases or fumes, and other typical attributes of a malevolent folkloric figure.

Sporadic sightings continued throughout the country until the turn of the twentieth century. Usually these incidents followed the template set down during the initial attacks: a masked or helmeted figure appearing seemingly out of nowhere with the apparent intent to terrify, grabbing and/or molesting the victim, then springing away over a wall or hedge. A number of copycats were sought by the police, arrested and a few convicted for overt SHJ attacks or for mostly unrelated ones that happened to fit in some way with the popular SHJ narrative. No actual, verifiable, “real” Spring-heeled Jack was ever caught or identified.

Mike Dash wrote a very comprehensive paper about Spring-heeled Jack, if you’re interested in reading more about the subject. He seems to be one of the only people to actually go back to primary, contemporary sources and do some sensible research, instead of  just regurgitating half-remembered Big Book of the Supernatural anecdotes.

Dash also wrote a really fascinating and entertaining book called Tulipomania a few years ago, about the eponymous craze and ensuing financial bubble that resulted from tulip bulbs becoming a hysterically sought after commodity in the 17th century. His blog is good, too.

Get your spring-heel ‘Jacks’ here, boys! Only 22’6. Ideal for a evening of hiding in the bushes and sexual assault. (Eyes like glowing coals from Hell not included.)

No Figment of the Thing That dazzled, Yesterday

I made this picture of Emily Dickinson. I can only apologise.

In which I manage to discuss the poetry of Emily Dickinson, cosmic horror, Superman, Morrissey and Steve McQueen without exerting myself unduly.

Recently I was perusing a laughable book about- well, it’s hard to say exactly. Just sort of general things that might be called inexplicable or mysteries if anybody actually gave a shit about them or they weren’t clearly the result of somebody suffering from a bout of delirious, drunken stupidity or mental illness. Like Fortean Times, but even more random. Is there a turkey in the Bayeux Tapestry? It’s not really a mystery if nobody cares about the solution.

It’s the sort of book that usually costs a few pounds in a remainder shop, or is for sale in what my esteemed colleague Kid Carpet calls Mystical Shit shops (Seriously, I am a huge fan of Kid Carpet. Download his song Mystical Shit for a start), alongside dream catchers, rag rugs and crystals to unbung your chakras. My local library has loads of these books, for some reason. And a very comprehensive  but never used section on things like irritable bowel syndrome, drug induced psychosis, anorexia and whatnot. For obvious reasons I’ve never made any effort to befriend the librarians.

Anyway, there was one interesting thing in the aforementioned book: an account of some strange jelly that apparently fell out of space in 1819 and landed in Amherst, Massachusetts. It seems not to have occurred to the author that this (at the time very small) place was the lifelong home of the poet Emily Dickinson and her family, although she wasn’t born for another 11 years.