Ssshh, it's a secret

To continue with this week's theme, which has mostly been about how completely baffling I find the behavior of my fellow humans a lot of the time, today we have: secret societies.

Which may be a misnomer.  Most of these societies are so extremely secret that you'd never ever find out about them unless you happened to read the Wikipedia page entitled "Secret Societies."  The problem is, if something was truly a secret society, we wouldn't know about it, kind of by definition.  But this would defeat the purpose, because then it would have a membership list consisting of one person (the founder), and it wouldn't be a "society" so much as "a single delusional wingnut."  So it's got to be secret (and also mystical and esoteric) enough to intrigue the absolute hell out of non-initiates, but also sufficiently well-advertised to attract a few select converts.

Which is a bit of a balancing act.

The Rose Cross symbol from the Order of the Golden Dawn [Image is in the Public Domain]

Anyhow, I did a little digging into what I could find out about the history of secret societies, and lord have mercy, there have been some doozies.  And to obviate the need of saying this over and over, I swear I'm not making any of this up.

Let's start with one that was operative in eighteenth-century Germany, but when you hear about it, you will really wish it was still around today.  It's called the Order of the Pug (German Mops-Orden), and seems to have been founded to circumvent a papal bull issued by Pope Clement XII in 1738 that forbade Catholics from being Freemasons.  So some folks got together and decided to come up with a different secret society, and they definitely pulled out all the stops.

Amongst their beliefs was an emphasis on loyalty, trustworthiness, and steadfastness, none of which I can find fault with.  But their rituals were... interesting.  During initiation, prospective candidates had to wear a dog collar and gain admittance by scratching at the door and barking.  At the climax of the ritual, the candidate had to kiss the ass of a porcelain pug statue.  After that, they were taught the society's slogans, gestures, and hand signals, at which point they were allowed to wear the group's medallion (which of course featured the face of a pug).

The whole thing was blown wide open in 1745 when a book was published in Amsterdam entitled L'Ordre des Franc-Maçons Trahi et le Secret des Mopses Révélé (The Order of the Freemasons Betrayed and the Secret of the Pugs Revealed), which resulted in most people responding with nothing more than a puzzled head-tilt.  After all, this wasn't the fifteenth century, when saying "I like pineapple on pizza" could get you burned as a witch.  So even after their secrets were exposed, no one was all that impressed.  The result was that the Pugs kind of fizzled, although apparently there was still an order practicing in Lyon in 1902.

Then we've got the Epsilon Team, which sounds like a Saturday morning superhero cartoon but isn't.  This one originated in Greece, and is a mixed-up mishmash of Greek mythology and UFOs and conspiracy theories, with a nasty streak of anti-Semitism thrown in for good measure.  The Epsilons were founded in the 1960s by a guy named George Lefkofrydis, who appears to have had a screw loose.  He claimed that there's a coded message in Aristotle's work on logic, the Organon, which reveals that Aristotle was an alien from the planet Mu in the constellation Lepus.  (The irony is not lost on me that a coded message that sounds like the result of heavy consumption of controlled substances was allegedly encrypted in a text on how to recognize fallacious arguments.)

Anyhow, Lefkofrydis's ideas somehow found favor with other Greeks who apparently spent their spare time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, and their dogma expanded to include the following:

• the Olympian gods were going to come back and initiate a cosmic war against the Jews, who are actually also aliens
• ancient Peru was visited by the Greeks, who founded the Inca Empire
• the letter E is a symbol of the society and its goals, so wherever it appears in other languages, it was planted there as a subliminal text by the ancient Greeks

This prompts me to point out two things.

First, my wife is Jewish, and thus far I haven't seen any sign of her being an alien.  She has also yet to do battle with Zeus, Ares, Apollo, et al., but frankly, if it happens I'm putting my money on her.  She's kind of a take-no-shit type, which I suspect would still be the case if she were up against scantily-clad lightning-bolt-hurling ancient deities.

Second, the "E" thing is kind of implausible, and as a linguist, I can say this with some authority.  What, bfor th Grks wnt around and distributd thm to vrybody, did popl writ lik this?  Sms kind of inconvnint.

Conspiracy theory researcher Tao Makeef writes, showing admirable restraint, that "even amongst Greek neopagans, these beliefs are generally ridiculed."

Next there's A∴A∴, not to be confused with AA, which can stand for Alcoholics Anonymous, American Airlines, the Automobile Association, or a specific bra size.  A∴A∴ was founded by none other than Aleister Crowley, the self-styled "Wickedest Man on Earth," whose main interest seems to have been having sex with anyone of either gender who would hold still for long enough.  This is not the only secret society that Crowley founded; in fact, he started so many of them that for a while the number of Crowley's secret societies exceeded the number of actual members.  The meaning of A∴A∴ was deliberately left ambiguous -- it was said variously to stand for astrum argenteum (Latin for "silver star"), arcanum arcanorum (Latin for "secret of secrets"), Atlantean Adepts, or Angel and Abyss.  In Robert Anton Wilson's and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, though, they say it doesn't stand for anything; that the true adepts somehow intuit what it means, so anyone making a claim about what it stands for is just illustrating that they're not really a member.

That's how esoteric and secret A∴A∴ is.

To move your way up through the A∴A∴ ranks, you have to do stuff like "acquire perfect control of the body of light on the astral plane" and "learn the formula of the Rose Cross" and "cross the great gulf or void between the phenomenal world of manifestation and its noumenal source, that great spiritual wilderness."  Which I think we can all agree sound impressive as hell.

Last, we have the Temple of Black Light, also called the Misanthropic Luciferian Order, founded in 1995 in Sweden by a guy named Shahin Khoshnood as an offshoot of a group called the True Satanist Horde, apparently because the latter weren't batshit crazy enough.  The members of the Temple of Black Light believed in "Azerate," the extremely secret "hidden name of the eleven cosmic anti-gods," which became significantly less hidden when Khoshnood published a book about it.  The central tenet of the Temple is the worship of chaos, and the claim that God regretted having created the universe with all its laws and scientific principles and whatnot, and wished he'd left well enough alone and stuck with the whole formless and void thing of Genesis 1:1.  What we should all be doing, they say, is trying to get back to chaos, and I have to say that at the moment the Republican Party is doing a damn good job of it here in the United States.  

Anyhow, the appeal is that unlike our boring old three-spatial-dimensions-plus-time universe, chaos is supposedly "an infinidimensional and pandimensional plane of possibilities."  Whatever the fuck that means.

Ultimately, though, Khoshnood was discovered not only to be a wacko cult leader, but a homicidal maniac, and once he was arrested and charged with murder, very quickly the other members of the Temple noped their way right out of any association with him.  So I guess we're going to have to put up with our current orderly universe for a while longer, such as it is.

Anyhow, those are just four of hundreds.  I encourage you to peruse the Wikipedia page, especially if you want to significantly diminish your opinion of the intelligence of humanity as a whole.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my anatomically-correct ceramic statue of a pug.  Not for any reason in particular, mind you.  I just... um... wanted to make one.

Woof.

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It's not in the cards

When I was in college I went through a period of messing around with Tarot cards.  They were cool-looking, and the book I got that explained their meanings was steeped with arcane and mystical terminology.  The whole thing seemed ancient and magical and terribly attractive.  The fact that I was still living at home, in a staunchly religious Roman Catholic family which disapproved of anything smacking of witchcraft, only gave it that much more of a frisson.

So yes, True Confessions time: at one point in my life, I experimented with woo-woo-ism.  But don't worry, I didn't inhale.

What eventually pulled the plug on all of it was that when I talked about it with my friends, I started sounding ridiculous to myself.  I had to explain (when I was doing a Tarot reading for someone) that I was selecting a card to represent them based on their gender and appearance, and that this would establish a psychic connection between them and seventy-eight pieces of glossy card stock with weird designs that I'd bought for ten bucks in a local bookstore.  And in the back of my mind was this constant mantra of, "How the fuck could that actually work?"  I was able to shout the voice down for a while, but sooner or later, I had to admit that Tarot cards were nothing more than a pretty fiction, and any accurate readings I did could be attributed to a combination of chance, my prior knowledge of the person being "read," and dart-thrower's bias.

I still, however, own six Tarot card decks, including the one I got when I was in college.  The coolest is an Art Nouveau deck that is actually quite beautiful, with designs that remind me of one of my favorite artists, Maxfield Parrish.  I also have "The Original Dog Tarot" in which -- I shit you not -- the four suits are Bowls, Biscuits, Leashes, and Bones, and the Major Arcana include The Hydrant, The Dogcatcher, The Cat, and The Couch.

Purists would probably be pissed off about a Tarot deck that is clearly made up, but let's face it; it's all made up.  The infamous "wickedest man on Earth" Aleister Crowley claimed that the Tarot traces its origins back to an ancient Egyptian text called The Book of Thoth, but there's one awkward problem with this, which is that The Book of Thoth appears not to exist.  Undeterred, Crowley wrote his own Book of Thoth, because after all, as long as we're making shit up, we may as well do the job ourselves and not waste our time learning how to read actual Ancient Egyptian texts that might not even say what we were hoping they'd say.

Actually, the earliest Tarot cards come from some time around the fifteenth century, but at the time they seem to have mostly been used for playing games.  The first use of the cards for divination -- what's been called cartomancy -- isn't until around 1750, which seems awfully late for a practice that claims to be Esoteric Secrets From Antiquity.  The surge in popularity the practice had in the late eighteenth century was largely due to one man, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who went by the extremely subtle and creative pseudonym Etteilla.  Alliette was an occultist who had a huge following amongst the nobility, and wrote a manual called Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots (A Method for Recreating Yourself Using the Cards Called Tarots) which is the basis of all the "Tarot cards interpreted" books you see today.  Modern card decks, including the famous Rider-Waite deck, all derive from the standardization of the cards and suits by Alliette.

Lately, though, things have gone a bit off the rails, and I don't just mean obvious spoofs like my Original Dog Tarot.  If you search on Amazon for "Tarot cards" you'll find dozens (probably hundreds) of different decks, and a great many of them don't have the traditional suits, with fifty-six Minor and twenty-two Major Arcana.  There are divine feminine and divine masculine decks (some of which are highly NSFW), decks that are allegedly Norse or Celtic or Native American or Chinese or Japanese, decks centered around plants or animals or crystals or astronomical objects, queer decks and warrior decks and steampunk decks.

And -- if I haven't already made a strenuous enough point about this -- all of these were made up, most of them in the last fifty years or so.  None of them have the least thing to do with actual ancient wisdom passed down through the ages.

So there you are.  It hardly bears mention that I think divination simply doesn't work; much as it's a beguiling idea, there's nothing mysterious going on with Tarot card readers except how they manage to persuade so many people to fork over twenty bucks for a session.  Be that as it may, I'm gonna keep my decks.  For one thing, they're cool to look at.  For another, maybe I can do a reading for my dogs.  If the Ten of Bones turns up, they'll be thrilled.  That's a lot of bones.

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Tut tut

I ran into an interesting article in Science News yesterday about a new museum in Egypt that will feature the famous treasure trove of King Tutankhamun's tomb.  Tutankhamun was, as you undoubtedly know, the pharaoh of Egypt between about 1332 and 1323 B.C.E. before dying at the age of nineteen (probably of complications from malaria).  Because of his short reign and youth he's been nicknamed "the Boy King," and prior to his tomb's discovery in in 1922 held a relatively obscure spot in Egyptian history.  This may have been what saved his tomb nearly intact for archaeologists to find; no one knew it was there.

He was also eclipsed by his infamous father, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, the "heretic king" who attempted to replace the Egyptian pantheon of gods with a single monotheistic religion, the worship of the god Aten.  Trying to decree a change in people's religion went about as well as you'd expect, and after Akhenaten's death everyone went back to worshiping Ra and Horus and Thoth and Anubis and the rest of the gang, not to mention erasing every trace of Akhenaten they could find.

The whole thing, though, put me in mind of the famous "King Tut's Curse," which supposedly claimed the lives of a number of people who investigated the tomb and has since spawned countless movies and horror novels about evil befalling people who violate people's final resting places.  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Roland Unger, CairoEgMuseumTaaMaskMostlyPhotographed, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The story goes that shortly after Tut's tomb was opened, people associated with the expedition began to die.  The first was Lord Carnarvon, who had funded Carter's expedition, who cut himself badly while shaving and died shortly thereafter of sepsis from an infection.  While it's easy enough to explain a death from infection in Egypt prior to the advent of modern antibiotics, the deaths continued after the members of the expedition returned to London:

• Richard Bethell, Carter's personal secretary, was found smothered in a Mayfair club.
• Bethell's father, Lord Westbury, fell to his death from his seventh-floor flat -- where he had kept artifacts from the tomb his son had given him.
• Aubrey Herbert, half-brother of the first victim Lord Carnarvon, died in a London hospital "of mysterious symptoms."
• Ernest Wallis Budge, of the British Museum, was found dead in his home shortly after arranging for the first public show of King Tut's sarcophagus.

And so on.  All in all, twenty people associated with the expedition died within the first few years after returning to England.  (It must be said that Howard Carter, who led the expedition, lived for another sixteen years; and you'd think that if King Tut would have wanted to smite anyone, it would have been Carter.  And actually, a statistical study done of Egyptologists who had entered pharaohs' tombs found that their average age at death was no lower than that of the background population.)

Still, that leaves some decidedly odd deaths to explain.  And historian Mark Benyon thinks he's figured out how to explain them.

In his book London's Curse: Murder Black Magic, and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End, Benyon lays the deaths of Carter's associates in London -- especially Bethell, Westbury, Herbert, and Budge, all of which were deaths by foul play -- at the feet of none other than Aleister Crowley.

Crowley, you may recall, was the subject of a seriocomic post here about a magical battle only a couple of months ago, so he's a bit of a frequent flyer here at Skeptophilia.  For those of you who missed that one, Crowley is the guy who proclaimed himself the "Wickedest Man on Earth," and was a sex-obsessed heroin addict who became notorious for founding a magical society called "Thelema."  Thelema's motto was "Do what thou wilt," which narrowly edged out Crowley's second favorite, which was "Fuck anything or anyone that will hold still long enough."  His rituals were notorious all over London for drunken debauchery, and few doubted then (and fewer doubt now) that there was any activity so depraved that Crowley wouldn't happily indulge in it.

Crowley ca. 1912 [Image is in the Public Domain]

One of Crowley's obsessions was Jack the Ripper.  He believed that the Ripper murders had been accomplished through occult means, and frequently was heard to speak of Jack the Ripper with reverence.  Benyon believes that when Crowley heard about Howard Carter's discoveries, he was outraged -- many of Thelema's rituals and beliefs were derived from Egyptian mythology -- and he came up with the idea of a series of copycat murders to get even with the men who had (in his mind) desecrated Tutankhamen's tomb.

It's an interesting hypothesis.  Surely all of the expedition members knew of Crowley; after all, almost everyone in London at the time did.  At least one (Budge) was an occultist who ran in the same circles as Crowley.  That Crowley was capable of such a thing is hardly to be questioned.  Whether Benyon has proved the case or not is debatable, but even at first glance it certainly makes better sense than the Pharaoh's Curse malarkey.  It's probably impossible at this point to prove if Benyon's claim is correct in all its details, rather like the dozens of explanations put forward to explain the Ripper murders themselves.  But this certainly makes me inclined to file the "Mummy's Curse" under "Another woo-woo claim plausibly explained by logic and rationality."

In any case, I'm glad to hear the archaeologists are still working on the discoveries from Tutankhamun's tomb, and not afraid that they themselves will be struck down by the ghost of the Boy King.  I'll take actual scientific research over loony superstition any day of the week.

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The Battle of Blythe Road

I've been interested in the occult since I was a teenager.  It started when I was about fifteen, on one of the annual trips with my dad to Arizona and New Mexico (mostly for hiking and rockhounding, as my father was a lapidary and avid rock collector), and stumbled upon a funky little old used bookstore in the town of Alpine, Texas.  It was there I picked up a book called The Black Arts: A History of Occult Practice by Richard Cavendish, which I devoured (and, incidentally, I still own).

I started collecting Tarot decks (again, which I still own) and other objets de magique, not to mention reading voraciously other books on the occult.  By the time I was in my upper teens I'd already begun to admit to myself that it was all rather ridiculous, but -- to paraphrase the famous poster on Fox Mulder's office wall in The X Files -- dammit, I wanted to believe.

There was a time while I was in college when my attraction for magical thinking did serious war with my training in skeptical, rational hard science, but eventually I had to admit that -- as far as I'd seen -- occult practice stumbles hard over one fact; it simply doesn't work.  There's never been a single rigorous test of magical claims in which the claim has proven to be valid.  It hasn't stopped people from believing in it all, of course.  I can attest that even despite my skepticism, I'm still drawn to it.  It's undoubtedly why I write paranormal fiction; it allows me to exercise, or perhaps exorcise, some very deep-seated desires about the way I'd like the world to work.

Of course, I should interject here that the fact that it hasn't been validated yet doesn't mean it never will.  As I've said many times before about such matters as ghosts and the afterlife and cryptids, all I'd need is scientifically admissible hard evidence, and I'd have no choice but to change my mind.  But from my perspective, the times people have actually tried to do the occult have always devolved into something fruitless, silly, and... well... a bit banal.

And that brings us to the Battle of Blythe Road.

All of you will undoubtedly recognize the names of the major players in this calamitous non-event.  First, there was Irish poet W. B. Yeats; second, Samuel Liddell "MacGregor" Mathers (he added the "MacGregor" part because he was a Celtophile and didn't much like his solidly English-sounding given names); and finally, Aleister Crowley, British occultist and writer and self-styled "Wickedest Man in the World."  

Aleister Crowley in 1912 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The backdrop of all this is an occult organization called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded and ruled with an iron fist by Mathers, which held its meetings in a building on Blythe Road in London.  The Order had three levels; the lowest was initiatory, and involved study of esoteric philosophy including the Qabalah and other occult writings.  The second was where the good stuff started; once in the second order, you learned alchemy, astral projection, divination, and geomancy, and also (by some accounts) got to participate in some pretty hot-sounding sex rituals.  The third order was only for the crème de la crème, i.e., the people MacGregor Mathers liked.  It had a great many influential members -- not only the ones I've mentioned, but such luminaries as Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Machen.

The trouble started when Aleister Crowley, who was in the lowest order, demanded to be initiated into the second.  Yeats, who was quite influential in the Order of the Golden Dawn, spoke out very forcefully against Crowley's being allowed to take the step up.  Yeats and Crowley had hated each other pretty much from the get-go; a lot of it apparently stemmed from Yeats criticizing Crowley's poetry, something the latter did not accept lightly.  Yeats, on the other hand, was concerned with more than just literary output.  He took seriously Crowley's penchant for controlling and threatening people, not to mention his habit of having sex with anyone of either gender who would hold still long enough, and told some of the higher-ups that he was concerned that if Crowley learned the secrets of the second order, he'd use them for evil purposes.

So the leaders -- notably, not including Mathers -- told Crowley no deal.

Crowley, predictably, didn't take that well either.  He went to complain to Mathers, who was in Paris at the time, and Mathers sided with Crowley.  He did a solo initiation of Crowley into the second order, and gave him instructions for some spells to use against Yeats and his cronies.  Thus armed, Crowley came to the Golden Dawn headquarters on Blythe Road to open a can of magical whoopass.

What happened was nothing short of comical.  Crowley walked up the stairs, thundering the magic spells he'd learned from Mathers.  Yeats et al. were waiting for him at the top of the stairs.  When he was in range, Yeats simply kicked Crowley until he lost his balance and fell down the stairs.

And thus ended the Battle of Blythe Road.

Crowley retreated in disarray, but recall that he was not a man to admit defeat, and he decided to take revenge on Yeats (magically, of course).  He seduced the Irish artist Althea Gyles and asked her for help casting some spells on Yeats, but Gyles (for reasons unknown, but possibly related to the fact that Crowley was a skeevy sonofabitch) double-crossed him by snipping off a lock of his hair while he was asleep and sending it to Yeats, so the latter could come up with some Crowley-specific counter-spells.  So Crowley's second attempt to kick ass and take names also failed.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn never quite recovered from the infighting.  It splintered into bunches of schismatic offspring, such that at one point there were more secret occult esoteric orders in Britain than there were actual secret occult esotericists.  But what strikes me is that despite all this, the members still seemed to treat their practices with such infernal gravity that the whole situation began to resemble a bunch of little kids playing some kind of super serious game of Let's Pretend.  This, despite the fact that everyone knew that three of the most accomplished adepts -- Yeats, Mathers, and Crowley -- had a massive magical duel that was settled when one of them kicked another one down the stairs.

So anyhow, that's the story of the Battle of Blythe Road.  Like I said before, I would love it if I could report that there was all of this occult stuff done, à la Harry Potter dueling Voldemort, and sparks flew and crazy magic shit happened until the evil guy was vanquished by a powerful spell.  But as my grandma used to tell me, wishin' don't make it so.  More's the pity, because it sure would be fun to live in a world where Tarot decks told you the future and magic wands really worked.

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Return to Boleskine

There are few figures in the history of magical thinking more famous, or more polarizing, than Aleister Crowley.

He was a member -- eventually a leader -- of esoteric societies like the Order of the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis, and eventually founded one of his own.  After all, once you're a member of an esoteric society, you generally find it's not so esoteric after all, and either have to find one even more esoteric or else make one up.

Some time around 1900 Crowley took the latter option, and named his society Thelema, the Greek word for "will" -- as the whole idea of the thing was "do what you will," especially in matters of sex, which fit beautifully with Crowley's apparent obsession with fucking anyone of either gender who would hold still long enough.

Thelema as an abbey (located in Cefalú, on the island of Sicily) was abandoned in 1923 after Mussolini decided that Crowley wasn't exactly the sort of person he wanted in Italy, and had him and his followers deported en masse.  Today it's more or less a ruin, but still a mecca for practitioners of magick and such stuff.  Crowley had a way of leaving behind these kind of sites, and in fact one of them is the reason this whole topic comes up today -- because one of Crowley's centers of operation, Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, Scotland, recently sold after years of standing empty and decrepit for the tidy sum of £500,000 to "three unnamed investors."  The owners, who call themselves the "Boleskine Foundation," are now apparently in negotiation with the Ordo Templi Orientis (yes, it still exists) to bring back Crowley's practices to Boleskine and turn it into a "sex magick retreat."

Boleskine in 1912, right before Crowley sold it [Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently the house has a bit of a reputation even outside of Crowley's antics.  All the way back in the seventeenth century, there supposedly was a "devious local wizard" who kept reanimating corpses, and the minister of the church that stood on Boleskine's grounds spent most of his time trying to rebury them and get them to stay there.  The church itself burned to the ground, allegedly along with the entire congregation, in the early eighteenth century, and the first bit of Boleskine House itself was built in the middle of that century -- right over top of the graves that the minister had such a tough time keeping intact.  (You can see why someone as conscious of ambience as Crowley was would be attracted to the place.)

So Crowley bought Boleskine, and true to his self-styled title of the "Wickedest Man in the World," engaged in all sorts of depravity and hijinks with his friends for nearly fifteen years.  When Crowley sold the place in 1913, it went through a number of different owners, none of whom stayed there for long.  One supposedly killed himself by blowing his own head off with a shotgun.  It was owned for a time by Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, although Page apparently wasn't there all that often.  His caretaker Malcolm Dent, however, said the place was haunted.  "One evening," he said, "a small porcelain figure of the Devil rose off the mantelpiece to the ceiling, then smashed into smithereens in the fireplace."  He also said he'd been awakened more than once by the sound of "a huge beast, snorting, snuffling and banging.  Whatever was there, I have no doubt it was pure evil."

To be fair, though, the owners who bought it from Page, the MacGillivray family, scoffed at the whole thing and said their time in Boleskine House was wonderful, and free from any paranormal fooling about.  So maybe the ghosts only appear to people who already believe in them.

Pretty convenient, that.

In any case, the current owners are planning on renovating and reopening the place, and dedicating it to its previous use as a site for practicing the magickal arts.  Their public statement says that they will "promote events and activities that facilitate health and wellness such as meditation and yoga as well as education on Thelema, the spiritual legacy forwarded by previous Boleskine House owner, Aleister Crowley."

No word yet on any kinky sex stuff, although one would have to expect that's to be a part of it if they're striving for historical accuracy.  I'll keep you posted.

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The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Tut tut

Most of you are probably familiar with the famous "King Tut's Curse."

The story goes that when British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the hitherto undisturbed tomb of King Tutankhamen, the "Boy King" of Egypt during the 18th dynasty, it unleashed a curse on the men who had desecrated it -- resulting in the deaths of (by some claims) twenty of the expedition members.

Tutankhamen was the son of the famous "Heretic King" Akhenaten, and died at the age of eighteen in 1341 BCE.  Some archaeologists speculate that he was murdered, but current forensic anthropology seems to indicate that he died of a combination of malaria and complications from a badly broken leg.

King Tutankhamen's death mask [image courtesy of photographer Carsten Frenzl and the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, shortly after Tut's tomb was opened, people associated with the expedition began to die.  The first was Lord Carnarvon, who had funded Carter's expedition, who cut himself badly while shaving and died shortly thereafter of sepsis from an infection.  While it's easy enough to explain a death from infection in Egypt prior to the advent of modern antibiotics, the deaths continued after the members of the expedition returned to London:

• Richard Bethell, Carter's personal secretary, was found smothered in a Mayfair club.
• Bethell's father, Lord Westbury, fell to his death from his seventh-floor flat -- where he had kept artifacts from the tomb his son had given him.
• Aubrey Herbert, half-brother of the first victim Lord Carnarvon, died in a London hospital "of mysterious symptoms."
• Ernest Wallis Budge, of the British Museum, was found dead in his home shortly after arranging for the first public show of King Tut's sarcophagus. 

And so on.  All in all, twenty people associated with the expedition died within the first few years after returning to England.  (It must be said that Howard Carter, who led the expedition, lived for another sixteen years; and you'd think that if King Tut would have wanted to smite anyone, it would have been Carter.  And actually, a statistical study done of Egyptologists who had entered pharaohs' tombs found that their average age at death was no lower than that of the background population.)

Still, that leaves some decidedly odd deaths to explain.  And historian Mark Benyon thinks he's figured out how to explain them.

In his book London's Curse: Murder Black Magic, and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End, Benyon lays the deaths of Carter's associates in London -- especially Bethell, Westbury, Herbert, and Budge, all of which were deaths by foul play -- at the feet of none other than Aleister Crowley.

Crowley, the self-proclaimed "Wickedest Man on Earth," was a sex-obsessed heroin addict who had founded a society called "Thelema."  Thelema's motto was "Do what thou wilt," which narrowly edged out Crowley's second favorite, which was "Fuck anything or anyone that will hold still long enough."  His rituals were notorious all over London for drunken debauchery, and few doubted then (and fewer doubt now) that there was any activity so depraved that Crowley wouldn't happily indulge in it.

Aleister Crowley, ca. 1912 [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

One of Crowley's obsessions was Jack the Ripper.  He believed that the Ripper murders had been accomplished through occult means, and frequently was heard to speak of Jack the Ripper with reverence.  Benyon believes that when Crowley heard about Howard Carter's discoveries, he was outraged -- many of Thelema's rituals and beliefs were derived from Egyptian mythology -- and he came up with the idea of a series of copycat murders to get even with the men who had (in his mind) desecrated Tutankhamen's tomb.

It's an interesting hypothesis.  Surely all of the expedition members knew of Crowley; after all, almost everyone in London at the time did.  At least one (Budge) was an occultist who ran in the same circles as Crowley.  That Crowley was capable of such a thing is hardly to be questioned.  Whether Benyon has proved the case or not is debatable, but even at first glance it certainly makes better sense than the Pharaoh's Curse malarkey.  Whether Benyon's explanation is right in all the details or not  is probably impossible at this point to prove, rather like the dozens of explanations put forward to explain the Ripper murders themselves.  But this certainly makes me inclined to file the "Mummy's Curse" under "Another woo-woo claim plausibly explained by logic and rationality."