came to appreciate the consistency and order of their world. As the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, put it, centuries before Christ: “There is a time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted.” The universe is, in truth, like the mechanism of a great clock, each piece designed for a purpose and each fitting accurately into the whole.
Into this established order and consistency, human beings like ourselves are born and seek to make the best of our lives. A disordered life on an ordered background would seem a hazardous way to live. Those who set out to “buck the system” will clearly do so at their peril.
The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe and his wife, Patricia, in the course of a long writing career, have recently completed a trilogy of books, both fascinating in their content and challenging in their interpretations. They have extracted from the orderliness of the world around them, and from its long history of people and events, the disordered, the abnormal, the mysterious — and have found much to leave us wondering.
In the first of these books, they singled out people who conformed to no order, system, or established patterns of behaviour. They found for us, to use the modern jargon, “one off” people, eccentric to a fault. Shakespeare said of Julius Caesar that he “Bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus.” He stood out from all the others around him. This book introduced us to some weird and wonderful people, and it is a fascinating read.
The second of their books moved away from people and concentrated on areas, places, and houses — which, in their turn, looked like all other places and houses, but certainly weren’t. There are many grand houses in the land, but few like Bowden House, Llancaiach Fawr, or Borley Rectory, with their experiences of poltergeists and ghostly apparitions. There are many feared passages at sea where lives have been lost, but few as feared as the Bermuda Triangle, where whole ships and crews have disappeared without a trace. Only the intrepid and the foolish would venture casually and uncaringly into some of the places the authors outlined for us.
This book is the third of that trilogy. It identifies for us, this time, strange and mysterious objects. Most objects are commonplace. They are around us in millions, their purpose known and easy to understand. Those researched for us in this book are certainly neither ordinary nor commonplace. A box, for example, is by no means something out of the ordinary. The world is full of them, of all shapes and sizes, made of wood, cardboard, iron, or even silver. You will read in this book of boxes more sinister, with strange locking devices so made that if the unwary, or the unwelcome, dared open them the consequences could be fatal. There is another box, which — if any truth can be attached to the claim — contains within it the secrets of the future. A diamond, by legend, is a girl’s best friend, but not the great diamond the authors have singled out for us, possession of which over generations has caused misery and death. The curse that was believed to have brought disaster to those who opened the tomb of Tutankhamen was as nothing compared to what appears to have happened to most of those who bought or inherited the Hope Diamond.
The authors have identified for us, in this, their latest work, machines, mazes, steeples, wells, precious stones, and more — and all of them have stories to tell. Some of what they describe for us seems almost beyond belief. Often, they will admit themselves baffled by what they have found. Sometimes they venture into interpretations. For many years, scholars were left baffled by the great mass of Egyptian writing that had been found but could not be read. The picture-based hieroglyphic language was like none other, and it could well have remained a mystery forever had not a stone been unearthed at Rosetta bearing a like inscription in three languages: two known, and one, the Egyptian, unknown. From the known it was possible to decipher the unknown, and thus were released the secrets of that picture language, so long hidden from us.
What mysteries, if any, could these objects explain? The secret of perpetual motion might have become known if only the paranoid Orffyreus had not taken an axe to his machine. The authors leave us in no doubt that things — as well as people — have a tale to tell.
The pursuit of the strange, the mysterious, the unknown, and the paranormal has exercised a fascination on many people for countless years. It has been a lifelong interest for our two authors. We owe them much for their long and careful researches, and for sharing their knowledge and expertise with us.
CANON STANLEY MOGFORD, MA,
CARDIFF, WALES 2002
(Canon Mogford is rightly regarded as one of the most brilliant scholars in Wales, and the authors are again deeply indebted to him for his great kindness in providing this foreword.)
In a universe filled with the mysterious, the anomalous, and the unexplained, it is helpful to examine these mysteries by categories, rather than trying to take in their dazzling panoramic totality.
Lecturing on the theme of “The World’s Most Fortean Object” at the 2002 Fortean Times UnConvention in the Commonwealth Institute in London, co-author Lionel concluded — after a wide survey of all the other mysterious objects that have intrigued researchers for so long — that the winner had to be the human mind. He said, “The human mind uses a physical brain that contains 1014 neurones and its electro-chemical synapse processes enable it to think as many separate thoughts as there are atoms in the known universe. There is nothing that it cannot do for us — if only we have the courage and imagination to unleash its amazing powers.”
In this book, we have surveyed and analyzed a wide and varied range of other mysterious objects. They have taken us on a lengthy but intriguing research journey through history and the contemporary world. Can a diamond carry a curse — and, in any case, what exactly is a curse and how does it work? Back to the mystery of the mind again: a magician points a bone at a victim who believes in the magician’s powers — and the victim promptly drops dead. He points the same bone at an agnostic Cordon Bleu chef, who thanks him politely and makes it into soup! The difference between death and culinary excellence lies in the minds of the chef and the man who thought the magician had strange powers.
From magical mysteries we have proceeded to look at pseudo-scientific ones: what exactly is ball lightning? Did Orffyreus really make a perpetual motion machine? What weird inventions of the brilliant but eccentric Tesla could we advantageously use today?
Locked rooms and locked boxes (like Joanna Southcott’s) are another great source of mystery — as are mazes and labyrinths. We’ve investigated several of those recently!
Curious codes, shrouded symbols, and anomalous alphabets bring their own special atmosphere of mystery with them. It’s a very human response to want to find out what’s written there.
Did the Golem of Prague really exist? Did the weird clay monster come to life and fight against its people’s enemies? If so, the great question is how?
The quest for power and the fascination of mysterious objects often walk side by side. Did Charlemagne and Hitler have access to the mysterious Lance of Longinus — and did it affect the outcome of their battles? Did alchemists like James Price really succeed in making gold? What were the Emerald Tablets of Hermes Trismegistus (alias Thoth, scribe of the Egyptian gods) and where did they go? Could they possibly have become the mysterious and powerful Urim and Thummim of biblical times?
We’ve found these investigations both intriguing and fascinating, and we have great pleasure in sharing the research data — and a few of our theories — with our readers.
Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe
Cardiff, Wales, U.K. 2002
