Life during chaos

If there's one place and historical period I could choose to know more about, it would be England during, and immediately following, the withdrawal of the Romans in the fifth century C. E.

For one thing, this would settle once and for all the question of whether King Arthur was a real historical personage, a completely fabricated legend, or somewhere in that gray area in between.  Whoever (or whatever) he was, I doubt our picture of him was anywhere near accurate:

This one, either:

Both of which are kind of a shame, for completely different reasons.

In any case, besides finding out more about the King of the Britons, I'd love to have more knowledge about what exactly was going on back then.  There are very few written records from Britain following the withdrawal of Roman troops from the northern and western parts of the island by the (usurping) Emperor Magnus Maximus in 383.  Things stabilized a little after Magnus was deposed and executed in 387, but Roman rule in the west was definitely crumbling.  The final blow came in 410 when Roman settlers in what is now southern England -- many of whom had been born there -- pleaded for help from Rome against the "barbarian" Celts, who were not above taking advantage of the instability, and Emperor Honorius basically told them to bugger off and take care of their own problems because he had more pressing concerns, the biggest being that Rome had just been sacked by a shitload of Visigoths.

This meant that running England fell to whoever could manage to keep their head on their shoulders long enough to do so.  In some places, these were the Romano-British magistrates who chose not to decamp when the powers-that-be back on the Italian peninsula left them to their own devices; in other places, Celtic or Pictish warlords.  This period saw the beginning of the Saxon invasions from what is now Denmark and northern Germany, something that would historically and linguistically change the entire face of the country.

But the fact remains that we don't know much for certain.  The earliest record we have of the era was written at least a century after the events it chronicles -- Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) -- but it contains as much hagiography and finger-wagging about pagan sinfulness as it does history.  (For what it's worth, Gildas doesn't even mention King Arthur; the first time the Once and Future King appears in a written record is Nennius's Historia Brittonum, from around 900.  If Arthur was real, this omission seems a little curious, to say the least.)

In any case, between the withdrawal of the Romans in 410 and the unification of England under King Æthelstan of Wessex in 927, we don't have a lot of reliable sources to go on.  To be fair to the English, they had other fish to fry during those intervening centuries, what with the horrific Plague of Justinian ripping its way through Europe in the middle of the sixth century, repeated invasions by the Angles and Saxons, and then the depredations of the Vikings, starting with their destruction of the "Holy Island" of Lindisfarne in 793.  Virtually the only people who could read and write back then were monks and clerics, and you have to figure that what they'd have been writing while they were being hacked to bits would have been gruesome reading anyhow.  (Possibly, "Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea.  He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaarrrrggh.")

The topic comes up because a new study out of the University of Cambridge that found something surprising -- at least in one region, the economy didn't tank completely when the Romans jumped ship.  Pollution by heavy metals, as nasty as it can be, is a decent proxy record for the robustness of trade and industry; when things are really bad, chances are you're not going to be doing much smelting of silver, iron, and lead.  The team, led by archaeologist Martin Millett, found that in sediment cores from the River Ure in Yorkshire, the levels of metal contamination stayed fairly constant throughout the period.  This is evidence that the Roman settlement at Aldborough -- the Roman Isurium Brigantum -- continued to be a trading hub despite the chaos.

This, of course, doesn't tell you what was happening in other parts of the island.  It could be that Aldborough just happened to hang on longer, for reasons we'll probably never know.  Eventually, the plague and the repeated invasions caught up with them, too, and in the seventh and eighth centuries, there wasn't that much happening, at least not smelting-wise.  The "Dark Ages" in England are "dark" not because they were necessarily any more barbaric than any other period, but because we know so little about them -- and this gives us at least a small piece of information about one town's fate after the fall of the Roman Empire.

I'm always attracted to a mystery, and there's something compelling about this period.  Undoubtedly why there have been so many works of fiction that are set in pre-Norman England.  It's nice to have one more bit of the puzzle, even if neither the worlds of Sexy King Arthur nor Silly King Arthur are likely to come anywhere near the reality of what life was like back then.

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The reawakening of Merlin

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about a site in Hertfordshire, England called "Arthur's Seat" that has long been associated with the famous (but possibly mythical) sixth-century king, but which dates from Neolithic times -- over four millennia earlier.

The difficulty with teasing out fact from fiction, when there are scant contemporaneous written records of any reliability, is apparent.  A good many historians think that Arthur is based on a real person, who was a Celtic (or Celto-Roman) chieftain and fought against the first invasions of the Saxons, but the phrase "based upon" is being used in the loosest possible sense.  How many of the other figures in the Arthurian Legend cycle -- Guinevere, Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, the Knights Who Say "Ni" -- were even within hailing distance of reality is unknown, and probably unknowable.

Of course, there are always new discoveries being made, even in an extensively-researched place like England.  The most recent, and the reason the topic of Arthur comes up (again), is a manuscript found in an archive in Bristol, which I found out about because of my friend Gil Miller, who is a frequent contributor to Skeptophilia. 

The manuscript dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, and has a few interesting features.  The text is very similar to known copies of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, which formed the basis of Thomas Malory's famous Le Morte d'Arthur.  It has a few curious differences, though, particularly surrounding the relationship between Merlin and Viviane (also called Nimué) -- the Lady of the Lake.

A piece of the Bristol manuscript

In most copies of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, Viviane writes magic words on her groin, and this binds Merlin to her will, inducing him to have sex with her and teach her all of his knowledge.  Once she's had her way with him as much as she wants and has learned everything she can from him, she puts him into a charmed sleep -- this prevents him from assisting King Arthur in his fight at the Battle of Camlann against his villainous nephew Mordred (or Modred or Medraut), resulting in the deaths of both Arthur and Mordred.  Afterward, Merlin is fated to sleep "until Britain needs him again," at which he'll awaken and use his magic to save the day and make up for allowing Arthur to die.

Merlin, from Howard Pyle's illustrations for The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The new version takes out some of the more risqué bits.  Viviane inscribes the magic words on a ring instead of on her skin, and Merlin is simply bewitched rather than doing the deed with her.  The outcome is the same -- Merlin gets put into a charmed sleep -- but otherwise, the Bristol fragments have been cleaned up a bit by the prudish sorts.  Here's the passage from one of the standard sources:

And the girl [Viviane] made Merlin lie down in her lap, and she started to ask him questions.  She moved around him, and seduced him again and again until he was sick with love for her.  And then she asked him to teach her how to put a man to sleep.  And he knew very well what she was planning, but nevertheless, he could not prevent himself from teaching her this skill, and many others as well, because Our Lord God wanted it this way.  And he taught her three names, which she inscribed on a ring every time that she had to speak to him.  These words were so powerful that when they were imprinted on her, they prevented anyone from speaking to her.  She put all of this down in writing, and from then on, she manipulated Merlin every time that he came to talk to her, so that he had no power over her.  And that is why the proverbs say that women have one more trick than the devil.

What I find interesting about the new manuscripts is that from handwriting analysis, they were written in northern France -- but an annotation in the margin has been identified as an English script style used in the early fourteenth century, so the manuscript somehow made its way to England only a few decades after it was written.

Interesting as it is, it doesn't improve our knowledge from a historical perspective.  The Bristol manuscripts were still written a good seven centuries after Arthur's time, and don't add anything much to the legend, unless you count whether or not Merlin had sex with Viviane.  Back in the British "Dark Ages" -- between the exit of Rome in the fourth century and the consolidation of the Saxon kingdoms in southern and eastern England in the seventh century -- there were damn few records of any kind being kept, and whatever there was didn't survive.  We're relying on folk histories (which intermingle history with legend and mythology) and records that were written way after the fact.

So the sad truth is, we'll probably never know which bits of the story were true and which were not.

But it's still a cool discovery.  I had no idea how much handwriting analysis tells scholars; I didn't realize that it was distinct enough as to time and place that you could confidently say "this was written in northern France in around 1250."

But all I can say is, if Merlin is still in his magical sleep, it's probably time for him to wake up.  I know a few places other than Britain that could use some help from a powerful benevolent wizard.  So if Viviane reads this, allow me to say: Enough already.

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London in the nineteenth century was a seriously disgusting place to live, especially for the lower classes.  Sewage was dumped into gutters along the street; it then ran down into the ground -- the same ground from which residents pumped their drinking water.  The smell can only be imagined, but the prevalence of infectious water-borne diseases is a matter of record.

In 1854 there was a horrible epidemic of cholera hit central London, ultimately killing over six hundred people.  Because the most obvious unsanitary thing about the place was the smell, the leading thinkers of the time thought that cholera came from bad air -- the "miasmal model" of contagion.  But a doctor named John Snow thought it was water-borne, and through his tireless work, he was able to trace the entire epidemic to one hand-pumped well.  Finally, after weeks and months of argument, the city planners agreed to remove the handle of the well, and the epidemic ended only a few days afterward.

The work of John Snow led to a complete change in attitude toward sanitation, sewers, and safe drinking water, and in only a few years completely changed the face of the city of London.  Snow, and the epidemic he halted, are the subject of the fantastic book The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Cities, Science, and the Modern World, by science historian Steven Johnson.  The detective work Snow undertook, and his tireless efforts to save the London poor from a horrible disease, make for fascinating reading, and shine a vivid light on what cities were like back when life for all but the wealthy was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (to swipe Edmund Burke's trenchant turn of phrase).

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Illuminating the Dark Ages

A writer friend of mine threw out a question on social media that I thought was fascinating: if you had a time machine and could visit (safely) any time in the past, when would you choose?

There are so many to choose from -- at least, if safety were guaranteed -- it's hard to pick one.  If you add in pre-Homo-sapiens times, even more so.  There are the ones that would be fascinating just from their spectacular nature.  Think of watching, from a distance, the Chicxulub Meteorite striking the Earth, ending the Cretaceous Period and the hegemony of the dinosaurs in one fell swoop.  Or how about the eruption of the Siberian Traps two hundred million years earlier -- thought to be the biggest series volcanic eruptions ever, releasing four million cubic kilometers of lava -- one of the events that kicked off the Permian-Triassic extinction, the largest mass extinction known.

Even the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. would have been something to see.

Then there are the ones of historical import.  Imagine witnessing the Mayan, Inca, or Aztec civilizations at their heights.  Consider visiting the Library of Alexandria before it was destroyed, and getting a chance to browse through works of literature for which we have no traces left.  So many classic works didn't survive -- we have only seven of the 120 plays written by Sophocles, eighteen of the 92 by Euripides, seven out of the eighty-odd written by Aeschylus -- and think of how many other amazing writers had their entire body of work obliterated, and whose names we might not even know.

So choosing only one would be fiendishly difficult.  But for me, there's one that jumps to mind whenever I consider the question.  I would love to visit Britain during the "Dark Ages," some time between the withdrawal of the Romans from the island in 410 C.E. and the consolidation of Anglo-Saxon rule starting with Penda of Mercia in the early part of the seventh century.

My main reason for choosing this time period is that it's such a historical mystery.  We have a number of accounts of events from that time, most famously the Arthurian legend cycle, but given how few records actually date from that period -- most were written centuries afterward, and based upon sources of dubious reliability -- no one knows where the myth ends and the history begins.

For example, consider the research I found out through my friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, the author Gil Miller, indicating that one of the sites associated with Arthur dates from much much earlier.

The site in question is on the River Wye in rural Hertfordshire, and is nicknamed "Arthur's Stone."  Depending on who you talk to, the Stone is said to be the place where Arthur defeated a giant, a place where he knelt to pray before going to battle against the Saxons, or a monument marking where he's buried.  Whether the Stone actually had anything to do with Arthur himself (presuming he even existed) is a matter of debate, but what this research has shown is that Arthur's Stone predates Arthur himself...

... by about 4,500 years.

This site is Neolithic in origin, and in fact was built before Stonehenge, which is itself incorrectly associated with Druids and the Celts.  In fact, neither of them was around at the time; that area of Britain was inhabited at that point by the Western Hunter-Gatherer culture (originally of Aegean or Anatolian origin) and the north African and Iberian Bell Beaker People, so named because of the characteristic shape of their clay drinking vessels.

So even the sites that are associated with King Arthur have no certain historical connection.  And as far as Arthur himself, we don't even know for sure who he was.  Various theories include his being one of a number of different Welsh chieftains, a half-Celtic, half-Roman military man who stayed behind when Rome made their official withdrawal, or possibly just someone who had a sword bunged at him by a watery tart.

There's no doubt that a good many of the legends that have been spun about Arthur and the Round Table and Camelot and the Holy Grail are complete fairy stories, but once again, what's impossible at this point is to tease out which bits (if any) are actually historical, all the way down to which of the various characters even existed.  I mean, I have my doubts about the Lady of the Lake and the Green Knight and even the Killer Rabbit of Caer Bannog, but what about Guinevere and Galahad and Lancelot and the rest?  Do any of these even have a glancing connection with real historical people?

I would love to know the answer to that.

So those are my musings for this morning.  Going back and witnessing the Battle of Badon Hill.  I still would have to think long and hard to choose between that and the Library of Alexandria -- but I have the feeling I'd stick with Arthur, especially since I doubt the people who ran the Library of Alexandria would have been okay with my grabbing a few dozen manuscripts to take back with me.

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One of the most enduring mysteries of neuroscience is the origin of consciousness.  We are aware of a "self," but where does that awareness come from, and what does it mean?  Does it arise out of purely biological processes -- or is it an indication of the presence of a "soul" or "spirit," with all of its implications about the potential for an afterlife and the independence of the mind and body?

Neuroscientist Anil Seth has taken a crack at this question of long standing in his new book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, in which he brings a rigorous scientific approach to how we perceive the world around us, how we reconcile our internal and external worlds, and how we understand this mysterious "sense of self."  It's a fascinating look at how our brains make us who we are.

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

Inventing Glastonbury

It must come as a shock to woo-woos to find out that some of their favorite wooful phenomena were actually invented by humans for purely down-to-earth reasons.

Take, for example, the Ouija board.  A lot of paranormal enthusiasts claim that the Ouija board is some kind of portal to the spirit world -- and an equal number of religious types think it's the gateway to hell.  Using it, they say, is just asking to be possessed by an evil demon.  Unfortunately for both contentions, the Ouija board was invented as a parlor game by a toy manufacturer named Elijah Bond in 1890.  Even the name is made up -- Bond stuck together the French and German words for "yes" and decided it would make a catchy name.  Which it is.  Better than the words for "no," anyhow, because "Nonnein" sounds kind of silly.

So finding out that the Ouija board was invented purely to make money is a little deflating to those who think it's some kind of tool for accessing the supernatural.  Which makes me wonder how the woo-woos are going to deal with the claim by archaeologists that the hype over Glastonbury is a 12th-century fabrication.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons IDS.photos from Tiverton, UK, Remains of Glastonbury Abbey, Glastonbury, Somerset (3049676967), CC BY-SA 2.0]

If you're not up to date with woo-woo mysticism and don't know what the deal is over Glastonbury, it's a town in England that is considered to be one of the most "spiritual" places in the world, right up there with Ayers Rock in Australia, Sedona, Arizona, and Salem, Massachusetts.  Supposedly, Glastonbury is the place where Joseph of Arimathea fled after Jesus's crucifixion, and when he got there he thrust his walking stick into the ground, where it took root and now flowers every Christmas.

The problem is, the Glastonbury Thorn doesn't flower at Christmas, it flowers in the spring, like most hawthorns.  No, the faithful say; that's because the current thorn isn't the real thing, which was cut down as an idolatrous image during the Puritan era following the English Civil War.  Even so, there are people who take the whole thing awfully seriously, which is why the current tree (planted in 1951) has been repeatedly vandalized.

Then there's the King Arthur connection, because Glastonbury Abbey is supposedly where the Once and Future King was buried after his death at the hands of his cousin Mordred in the Battle of Salisbury Plain.  There's even an inscription on a stone cross in the Abbey that allegedly has an inscription dating back to the fifth century, and which mentions King Arthur by name.

In addition to all this, or perhaps because of it, Glastonbury (or more specifically the hill Glastonbury Tor that stands nearby) has been identified as being the world's most powerful convergence of "ley lines," lines of spiritual force that allegedly encircle the globe.  "[T]he landscape as a whole," we're told, "is imbued with a beauty, mystique and numinescence which has made it well loved over many centuries, and the haunt of many advanced souls."

So with all of this romantic folklore surrounding the spot, it's no wonder that people make pilgrimages to Glastonbury every year.  Which makes a paper published by a group of archaeologists at the University of Reading all the more devastating.

Because the study has shown that all of the mystical trappings surrounding the place were the invention of some twelfth-century monks who were trying to find a way to raise money when their monastery burned down.

Archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist and her team have spent years looking at both the documents and the structures that supposedly play into the legend.  And she has concluded that after the fire, which occurred in 1184, some enterprising monks decided to cash in on the increasing popularity of the Arthurian mythology (Geoffrey of Monmouth's seminal Historia Regum Brittaniae had only been completed some 46 years earlier, and was still immensely influential).  So they started a rumor that Glastonbury was where Arthur was buried, and that he'd been buried there because it was where Joseph of Arimathea planted his walking stick.  "Look!" they said.  "There's a hawthorn tree up on that hill!  That's the ticket!"

And thus the legend of the Holy Thorn was begun.

[Nota bene: yes, I know twelfth-century monks wouldn't have used the phrase "that's the ticket."  However, considering that they would also have been speaking Early Middle English, I think I'm allowed some poetic license, here.]

Anyway, Gilchrist and her team said that the stone cross was also the product of the same enterprising brothers, and had been fabricated to resemble earlier Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stone crosses, with the clever addition of an inscription mentioning Arthur by name.  And when they rebuilt the monastery, they made sure to make it of materials, and in a style, that made it look far older than it actually was, so the pilgrims (and the profits) kept rolling in.

As they still do, lo unto this very day.

It's kind of unfortunate, really.  I've always loved the Arthurian legends -- I grew up with tales of Merlin and Gawain and Morgan le Fay and the rest of them, not to mention my discovery during my teen years of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, which led to Much Rejoicing.  The idea that the whole thing might be some twelfth-century hoax is kind of sad.

You have to wonder how all the woo-woos will respond.  My guess is, they won't.  They'll ignore the current study just like they've avoided anything remotely factual in the past, and keep on claiming that ley lines and the rest are real.  They haven't based anything on evidence yet, so why start now?

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As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

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

King of the who?

Given yesterday's post on odd coincidences, I thought it was kind of amusing that I stumbled upon the topic for today's post -- more or less by random chance -- immediately after reading two books that touched on the subject.

Both of them are about the Arthurian Legends, which has been an interest for years, so my reading them isn't itself odd.  It's odder, perhaps, that I didn't like either one of them at all.  The first was the novelization of the story from the point of view of Morgaine (Morgan le Fay), Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon.  I found just about every character in the story somewhere between obnoxious and downright repulsive, and it's hard to stay invested in a novel when I honestly don't give a damn if the characters live or die.  (My distaste was only deepened when I found out about the disturbing allegations against Bradley and her husband made by their children -- allegations which were proven in the husband's case, leading to his being sent to prison for pedophilia and dying there in 1993.)

The second was intended as historical scholarship, and although I'm hardly a qualified expert on the subject, this one seemed to me to face-plant rather badly as well.  Norma Lorre Goodrich's book King Arthur looks at the literary sources of Arthuriana, focusing especially on Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, and Thomas Malory.  Glossing over the fact that the earliest of the three -- Geoffrey of Monmouth -- was still writing a good five centuries after Arthur's time, she goes through intellectual backflips to support her contention that Arthur and his pals weren't from Cornwall and Wales as usually depicted, but from Scotland, more specifically the area around Stirling and Edinburgh.  Like I said, I can't give a knowledgeable opinion about her use of the source material, but I am qualified to say that her attempts at historical linguistics are nothing short of silly.  (They amount to, "if you change this letter to this one, and reverse the syllables, and add a prefix, you can clearly see these two words are the same!")

Oh, and when she mentioned "fifth century Vikings" I wasn't sure whether to laugh or to hurl the book across the room.

Speaking of authoritative sources...

Anyhow, I just stopped reading Goodrich's book last night (didn't finish it and don't intend to), so I was a little startled when, in the course of looking for a topic for today's post, I stumbled quite by accident on an article in Edinburgh Live from only last week about some new archaeological discoveries on "Arthur's Seat," the remains of an extinct volcano overlooking the Firth of Forth.  Researchers have found the site of a village occupied by the Votadini, a rather mysterious Iron Age Celtic tribe who spoke a Brythonic language (i.e. more closely related to Welsh, Breton, and Cornish than to Scots Gaelic), centered around Traprain Law, a hill fort seventeen kilometers east of Edinburgh.

Arthur's Seat [Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Monniaux, Edinburgh Arthur Seat dsc06165, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Which, of course, is exactly the area Goodrich claims was Arthur's bailiwick.  That she's not the only one who thinks there's a connection to King Arthur is evident from the name of the site, although it seems likely that the place was named a long while after Arthur's time by people who thought the Arthurian connection gave the place more gravitas.

Anyhow, the new research on the topic is more grounded in history, and more interesting.  The remains of the village on Arthur's Seat showed some significant fortification, including buildings surrounded by a hundred-meter-long, five-meter-thick rampart blocking the easiest path up to the top of the hill.  Fifth-century Roman silver coins were found at the site, suggesting the Votadini traded with the Romans living in the northern parts of England, although the evidence is their territory was only under actual occupation during a fairly short time in the middle of the second century C. E.

The archaeologists, however, found zero evidence of King Arthur having anything to do with the site.  If, in fact, there ever was a historical Arthur, something the jury is still out on.  The problem is, you can't really base history on a bunch of (way) after-the-fact, quasi-mythological accounts.  One of the best and most exhaustive analyses of the topic -- Francis Pryor's Britain A.D.: A Quest for Arthur, England, and the Anglo-Saxons -- found that the earliest source known that explicitly mentions Arthur, Nennius's Historia Brittonum, was written in the early ninth century, still a good three hundred years after Arthur's (alleged) reign.

Not exactly an eyewitness account, that.

Still, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as cosmologist Martin Rees was wont to say.  There could have been an Arthur messing about in Britain back then.  And there's no doubt that it's at the very least a fascinating legend.

I do still find it funny that I ran across this research literally the day after reaching the limits of my tolerance for Norma Lorre Goodrich's wild speculations on the same place and the same topic.  Not only that, a day after writing here at Skeptophilia on the subject of odd coincidences.  Which you have to admit is kind of meta.  Either it's the universe having a good laugh at my expense, or else I need to re-read my own post about how strange coincidences don't actually mean anything.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

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

Inventing Glastonbury

It must come as a shock to woo-woos to find out that some of their favorite wooful phenomena were actually invented by humans for purely down-to-earth reasons.

Take, for example, the Ouija board.  A lot of paranormal enthusiasts claim that the Ouija board is some kind of portal to the spirit world -- and an equal number of religious types think it's the gateway to hell.  Using it, they say, is just asking to be possessed by an evil demon.  Unfortunately for both contentions, the Ouija board was invented as a parlor game by a toy manufacturer named Elijah Bond in 1890.  Even the name is made up -- Bond stuck together the French and German words for "yes" and decided it would make a catchy name.  Which it is.  Better than the words for "no," anyhow, because "Nonnein" sounds kind of silly.

So finding out that the Ouija board was invented purely to make money is a little deflating to those who think it's some kind of tool for accessing the supernatural.  Which makes me wonder how the woo-woos are going to deal with the recent claim by archaeologists that the hype over Glastonbury is a 12th-century fabrication.

Glastonbury Abbey [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

If you're not up to date with woo-woo mysticism and don't know what the deal is over Glastonbury, it's a town in England that is considered to be one of the most "spiritual" places in the world, right up there with Ayers Rock in Australia, Sedona, Arizona, and Salem, Massachusetts.  Supposedly, Glastonbury is the place where Joseph of Arimathea fled after Jesus's crucifixion, and when he got there he thrust his walking stick into the ground, where it took root and now flowers every Christmas.

The problem is, the Glastonbury Thorn doesn't flower at Christmas, it flowers in the spring, like most hawthorns.  No, the faithful say; that's because the current thorn isn't the real thing, which was cut down as an idolatrous image during the Puritan era following the English Civil War.  Even so, there are people who take the whole thing awfully seriously, which is why the current tree (planted in 1951) has been repeatedly vandalized.

Then there's the King Arthur connection, because Glastonbury Abbey is supposedly where the Once and Future King was buried after his death at the hands of his cousin Mordred in the Battle of Salisbury Plain.  There's even an inscription on a stone cross in the Abbey that allegedly has an inscription dating back to the fifth century, and which mentions King Arthur by name.

In addition to all this, or perhaps because of it, Glastonbury (or more specifically the hill Glastonbury Tor that stands nearby) has been identified as being the world's most powerful convergence of "ley lines," lines of spiritual force that allegedly encircle the globe. "[T]he landscape as a whole," we're told, "is imbued with a beauty, mystique and numinescence which has made it well loved over many centuries, and the haunt of many advanced souls."

So with all of this romantic folklore surrounding the spot, it's no wonder that people make pilgrimages to Glastonbury every year.  Which makes a recent paper published by a group of archaeologists at the University of Reading all the more devastating.

Because the new study has shown that all of the mystical trappings surrounding the place were the invention of some 12th century monks who were trying to find a way to raise money when their monastery burned down.

Archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist and her team have spent years looking at both the documents and the structures that supposedly play into the legend.  And she has concluded that after the fire, which occurred in 1184, some enterprising monks decided to cash in on the increasing popularity of the Arthurian mythology (Geoffrey of Monmouth's seminal Historia Regum Brittaniae had only been completed some 46 years earlier, and was still immensely influential).  So they started a rumor that Glastonbury was where Arthur was buried, and that he'd been buried there because it was where Joseph of Arimathea planted his walking stick.  "Look!" they said.  "There's a hawthorn tree up on that hill!  That's the ticket!"

And thus the legend of the Holy Thorn was begun.

Gilchrist and her team said that the stone cross was also the product of the same enterprising brothers, and had been fabricated to resemble earlier Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stone crosses, with the clever addition of an inscription mentioning Arthur by name.  And when they rebuilt the monastery, they made sure to make it of materials, and in a style, that made it look far older than it actually was, so the pilgrims (and the profits) kept rolling in.

As they still do, lo unto this very day.

It's kind of unfortunate, really.  I've always loved the Arthurian legends -- I grew up with tales of Merlin and Gawain and Morgan le Fay and the rest of them, not to mention my discovery during my teen years of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail.  The idea that the whole thing might be some 12th century hoax is kind of sad.

You have to wonder how all the woo-woos will respond.  My guess is, they won't.  They'll ignore the current study just like they've avoided anything remotely factual in the past, and keep on claiming that ley lines and the rest are real.  They haven't based anything on evidence yet, so why start now?