Moon eyes

The oral tradition presents anthropologists and historians with a difficult, sometimes insurmountable, problem; given that by definition its antecedents were not written down, there is no way to tell whether a particular legend is true, is entirely made up, or is in that gray area in between.

Sometimes corroboration of the true tales can come from odd sources -- such as the story amongst the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest of a massive earthquake and tsunami, that was later shown to be true not only by geological evidence -- but by written records from Japan.  But hard evidence of this type for legends in the oral tradition is rare, and in any case, an earthquake in the Northwest isn't exactly a far-fetched claim to begin with.

It's when the stories are more out there that it becomes harder to discern whether they're entirely mythological in nature, or whether there might be some bit of real history mixed in there somewhere.  Which brings us to the strange tale of the Moon-eyed People of the Appalachians.

Botanist, naturalist, and physician Benjamin Smith Barton, in his 1797 book New Views of the Origins of  the Tribes and Nations of America, talks about a conversation he'd had with Colonel Leonard Marbury, who had worked as an intermediary between the Cherokee and the American government.  Barton writes, "... the Cheerake [sic] tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain 'Moon-eyed-People,' who could not see in the day-time.  These wretches they expelled."  The Cherokee chief Oconostota supposedly told Tennessee governor John Sevier about them, saying they were light-skinned, had "come from across the great water," and were the ones who'd built some of the monumental earthworks in Tennessee and neighboring states. 

Soapstone carving in the Cherokee County (North Carolina) Historical Museum, believed to be a representation of the Moon-eyed People

Those two references seem to be the earliest known sources of the story with at least moderate reliability (although note that both are second-hand).  Through the nineteenth century, the legend of the Moon-eyed People -- who were light-skinned (some said albinos), small in stature, and saw better at night than during the day -- was repeated over and over, then embellished and twisted together with other legends.

One of those is the odd Welsh tale of Madoc (or Madog) ab Owain Gwynedd, who after a family conflict in around 1170 C.E. sailed away from Wales with some friends, who ultimately settled somewhere in eastern North America and intermarried with the locals.  Of course, "somewhere in eastern North America" is a pretty broad target, so this opened up the gates for a variety of claims, including that there's Welsh blood (and/or Welsh linguistic influence) in the Monacans and the Doegs of Virginia, the Tuscarora of New York, and even the Zunis of New Mexico and the Mandans of North Dakota.  This runs up against the problem that there's no good genetic or linguistic evidence supporting any of this -- despite claims of "Welsh-speaking Indians," there's pretty certainly no such tribe.  So braiding together the Moon-eyed People (for which there's no hard evidence) with the legend of Madoc ab Owain (ditto) doesn't make the case for either one any stronger.

Side note: aficionados of science fiction and fantasy will probably recognize the Madoc ab Owain legend as the basis of Madeleine L'Engle's alternately brilliant and cringy YA novel A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which has the main character, Charles Wallace Murry, time-traveling back through Madoc's line of descent in North America.  Brilliant because it weaves together all sorts of contingent histories and what-ifs with a legend that's kind of cool; the cringy part is that a major plot point revolves around a "blue-eyed Indian = good, brown-eyed Indian = bad" thing, mixed in with a heaping helping of the Noble Savage myth.  I loved the story as a kid, but now it's hard to read it without wincing.

Be that as it may, as far as the Moon-eyed People goes, what we're left with is... not much.  Even the Wikipedia article on the legend admits, "Sources disagree as to the accuracy of the stories, whether or not the stories are an authentic part of Cherokee oral tradition; whether the people existed or were mythical; whether they were indigenous peoples or early European explorers; and whether or not they built certain prehistoric structures found in the region."

So it's a curious story, but the dearth of evidence -- combined with the fact that what we have is filtered through the eyes of white Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were inclined to view Native legends as quaint at best and outright demonic at worst -- means we have to put this in the "most likely mythological" column.

On the other hand, maybe we should wait for the people over at the This Hasn't Been History For Quite Some Time Channel to get their hands on it.  I'm sure they'll have an answer at the ready.

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Jesus in Japan

We'll end the week on an appropriately surreal note.

Every once in a while, I'll run into an off-the-wall claim that admits of no particularly obvious explanation.  For example: have you heard about the town of Shingō, Japan, in Aomori Prefecture on the northern tip of the island of Honshu?  If you have, I'll bet it's for one reason:

It's where Jesus was buried.

There's a sign there that identifies the burial site:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

According to the claim, Jesus skipped town on the eve of the crucifixion, leaving his brother Isukiri to be tortured and executed in his place.  Isukiri makes no appearance in the Bible, the people of Shingō admit; that's because he was intended to take Jesus's place right from the get-go, and needed to keep his identity secret.  The claim also helpfully explains the years of Jesus's life before his public ministry started, at age thirty or so.

He was in Japan, of course.

How he got to Japan from Palestine is never really explained.  Last I looked, they're not all that close together, and in between lie such special attractions as the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and Siberia.  But despite all this, Jesus made the trip three times -- on the way out when he was a twenty-something, then back to Jerusalem when he started preaching, and then a final time to get out of what Pontius Pilate et al. had planned for him.

So while things didn't end so well for Isukiri, Jesus made out pretty well. He married a local girl, became a rice farmer, fathered three children, and lived to the ripe old age of either 106 or 114, depending upon whom you believe.

And because he had progeny, some of his descendants still live there in Shingō.  The Sawaguchi family, specifically, claims descent from Jesus, something that they don't seem to think is all that amazing.  Jesus, they say, didn't perform any miracles once he arrived in Shingō.  He just changed his name to Torai Tora Daitenku, and settled down to be a nice guy and a solid citizen of the village.  Which takes some of the gravitas out of being a direct lineal descendant of the Son of God.

I find all of this pretty peculiar.  What could possibly be the origin of this story?  It seems to have gained traction with Kyomaro Takenouchi, who in 1935 announced that he had found some ancient manuscripts that tell the whole story.  (They also, apparently, tell about Atlantis and the fact that humans are descended from aliens.  But another time for that, perhaps.)  There's an Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents, which explains them thusly:

More than two thousand years ago, the Takenouchi Documents were rewritten by Takenouchino Matori (Hegurimo Matori) into modern Japanese characters Kana mixed with Chinese characters.  The original documents were believed to have been written in Divine characters.

 
The historical facts recorded in the Takenouchi Documents are extraordinary.  Among them are the Sumera-Mikoto came to Earth from a higher world on Ameno-ukifune, the world government was located in Japan and the Sumera-Mikoto unified the world.  The great holy masters of the world, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Shakyamuni Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tsu were born from the five-colored races which branched off from the Japanese race and all went to Japan for study and training.  These facts may seem absurd and contrary to our prevailing understanding of world history.  However, the archaeological research of recent years has gradually revealed the true existence of ultra ancient civilizations which are all mentioned in the Takenouchi Documents.

So all the cool holy people came from Japan, or at least studied there.  Got it.

Of course, it's not like we can study the documents themselves.  The originals were confiscated by government officials during World War II, and subsequently destroyed in an air raid.  Which, of course, is simultaneously unfortunate for the skeptics and convenient for the true believers.  And it leaves the Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents free to say any damn thing they want to about them, but also brings up the question of what exactly the Association is Studying.

But there's more to it than just some probably spurious documents, and the tale seems to predate Takenouchi's "discovery."  What's more interesting is that not only do the people in Shingō mostly seem to accept the story as true, they participate in some curious rituals -- such as marking newborns' foreheads with black crosses, and sewing "Star of David-like patterns onto babies' clothing."  All, if you believe the tale, a cultural memory from two thousand years ago.

Even so, I'm not buying it.  Cultural contamination, whether deliberate or unwitting, is simply too easy to do (consider two examples I've looked at here at Skeptophilia -- the cult of John Frum and the Sirius B story from the Dogon).  Which is more likely -- that Jesus Christ made three trips to and from Japan, on foot, or that in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century some Christian guy from the West ended up in Shingō and got the whole crazy tale started?

In any case, it's made for a considerable tourist attraction.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons courtesy of photographer Jason Hill]

So that's our weird claim for the day.  Jesus in Japan, and the crucifixion of Isukiri, Jesus's less-known, and extremely unlucky, brother.  If I'm ever in Japan, I'll make a point of checking it out.  At least it's safer for tourists than visiting Jerusalem, these days.

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The family tree of folk tales

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was a fantastic collection of Japanese folk tales called The Case of the Marble Monster and Other Stories.  They had been collected in the 1950s by an American, I. G. Edmonds, and through the wonders of the Scholastic Book Club became available for schoolchildren like myself.

The stories center on the wise and humorous character of Ōoka Tadasuke, who was a real person -- he lived from 1677 to 1752 in Yedo (now Tokyo), and was an acclaimed and popular magistrate who got a well-deserved reputation not only for his fairness and concern for the plight of the poor, but for coming up with brilliant solutions for difficult cases.  In the first one, "The Case of the Stolen Smell," a miserly and nasty-tempered tempura shop owner claims that a poor student living above his shop is deliberately waiting until he fries his fish, so the aroma will make the student's bowl of rice (all he can afford) taste better -- and the merchant demands compensation for all the smells the student has stolen.

Judge Ōoka hears the complaint, then orders the student to get together all the coins he has, and it looks like the poor young man is in trouble, but then the judge orders the student to pour the pile of coins from one hand to the other, and declares the fine paid.  The tempura shop owner, of course, objects that he hasn't been paid anything.

"I have decided that the payment for the smell of food is the sound of money," Ōoka says, with a bland smile.  "Justice, as always, has prevailed in my court."

The whole collection is an absolute delight.  Several of them -- notably "The Case of the Terrible-Tempered Tradesman" and "The Case of the Halved Horse" -- are laugh-out-loud funny. And in fact, I still own my much-loved and rather worn copy.

A woodcut portrait of the wise Judge Ōoka Tadasuke [Image is in the Public Domain]

Humans have been telling stories for a very, very long time.  And of course, as a novelist, the topic is near and dear to my heart.  Stories can be uplifting, cathartic, funny, shocking, heartbreaking, edifying, instructive, and surprising -- allowing us to access and express our strongest emotions, creating a deep bond between the storyteller and the listener (or reader).

How long have we been telling our invented tales, though?  The tales of the wisdom of Judge Ōoka are about three hundred years old; of course, we have far older ones, from the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), which was first written down in the twelfth century C.E. but probably dates in oral tradition to a millennium earlier, to the Greek and Roman myths, back to what is probably the oldest written mythological story we still have a copy of -- the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates to around the eighteenth century B.C.E.  But how much farther back in time does the storytelling tradition go?  And how could we be at all sure?

A new study by Sara Graça da Silva (of the New University of Lisbon) and Jamshid Tehrani (of Durham University) has taken a shot at figuring that out.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recognize Tehrani's name; he was responsible for the delightful study of the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" that amounted to using cladistic bootstrap analysis to determine which were related to which.  Now, da Silva and Tehrani have gone one step further -- employing another technique swiped from evolutionary genetics to analyze folk tales and determine how old the most recent ancestor of the various versions actually is.

There's a technique used by taxonomists and evolutionary biologists called a molecular clock -- a sequence of DNA, some version of which is shared by two or more species, and which undergoes mutations at a known rate.  The number of differences in that sequence between two species then becomes an indication of how long ago they had a common ancestor; the more differences, the longer ago that common ancestor lived.

De Silva and Tehrani used the same approach, but instead of looking for commonalities in actual DNA sequences, they looked at what amounts to the DNA of a story -- the characters, themes, and motifs that make it stand out.  As with Tehrani's earlier study of "Little Red Riding Hood," they found that many folk tales have related versions in other cultures that make it possible to do this kind of comparative phylogenetics.  And some of them seem to go back a very long way -- notably "Jack and the Beanstalk," their analysis of which found common ancestry with other versions dating back to the Bronze Age.

In one way, it's astonishing that this is possible, but in another, it shouldn't be surprising.  The oral tradition of storytelling is common to just about every culture in the world.  I remember my maternal uncle telling us kids creepy stories in French about the loup-garou and feu follet and les lutins that scared the absolute hell out of us (and we loved every minute of it).  That cultural inheritance has very deep roots -- and as da Silva and Tehrani showed, those roots show through in versions of stories we still tell today.

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Creating the Rake

It's seldom that we can pinpoint the exact moment of origin of an urban legend.  Much more commonly, they start out from a campfire tale that spreads and changes, as if the people passing it along were participating in a giant, freewheeling game of Telephone, until somehow just about everyone knows some version of it and no one really has any idea where it started.

"The Rake" is one of the exceptions.  Like Slender Man, Ben Drowned, and the Black-eyed Children, the Rake began as creepypasta -- scary, allegedly true, first-person accounts that were created and shared online.  The Rake first appeared in 2013, with the following post at 4Chan:

Here’s what we’ve got so far: Humanoid, about six feet tall when standing, but usually crouches and walks on all fours.  It has very pale skin.  The face is blank.  As in, no nose, no mouth.  However, it has three solid green eyes, one in the middle of its forehead, and the other two on either side of its head, towards the back.  Usually seen in front yards in suburban areas.  Usually just watches the observer, but will stand up and attack if approached.  When it attacks, a mouth opens up, as if a hinged skull that opens at the chin.  Reveals many tiny, but dull teeth.

So yeah.  As an Official Paranormal Researcher (at least according to the stoned guy I met in the haunted underpass a few days ago), I can confidently say that if I saw anything like this, I would respond by looking the monster straight in the eyes (all three of them), and then proceed to piss my pants and have a stroke.  Because I may be a Paranormal Researcher, but I am also a great big coward.

Be that as it may, the Rake spread around the internet at a high rate of speed, once again showing the accuracy of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's quip that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots."  To be fair, a lot of people sharing stories of the Rake knew they were fiction and never claimed otherwise; but pretty soon, it started to slip over into that foggy boundary region where the story ends with "... and my cousin's best friend's aunt swears she actually saw it happen."

One of the most common photographs associated with the Rake, although this thing seems to have the standard number of eyes and other facial features.  For what it's worth, I remember seeing this photo maybe twenty years ago -- where it was claimed to have been a monster someone caught on a hunting trailcam in my home state of Louisiana.

From a post that everyone knew was fiction, to an urban legend at least some folks were trying to claim was real, the Rake has now arrived at full-blown cryptid status, where there are YouTube clips wherein it supposedly was captured on video:

Okay, I have to admit a couple of those clips are pretty freaky, and make me glad that (1) it's daytime, and (2) my dog Guinness is right here by my side.  Although it bears mention that Guinness is a bigger scaredy-cat than I am, so I'm not sure how much help he'd be if the Rake actually showed up in my front yard, especially given that our yard is not so much "suburban" as "in the middle of abso-fucking-lutely nowhere."

But I digress.

Where it gets even funnier is that people who talk about how the Rake is real, when confronted with the very certain date of its creation, say, basically, "yeah, we know, but it's still real."  They say that the Rake is a tulpa -- a fictional creature that became real because so many people were putting their creativity and mental energy into imagining it.  Aficionados of The X Files may remember the simultaneously hilarious and terrifying episode "Arcadia," where Mulder and Scully find themselves battling a tulpa created to keep people in an upscale gated community from breaking their homeowners' agreement about things like putting up cutesy garden statues and whimsical house adornments.  Even more grim than that is the claim that Lovecraft's evil pantheon are tulpas -- that so many people are obsessed with Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth and Tsathoggua and the rest of the gang that the Elder Gods are now out there, ready to kill you in various eldritch ways, especially if you live in an accursèd house in Providence with a gambrel roof.

Sorry to bear the bad news if you just moved into one of those.  I don't make the rules.

In any case, I don't think we have much to worry about, with regards to the Rake.  It pretty clearly didn't exist even in fiction prior to 2013, despite any back-dated video footage to the contrary.  The worst I'm expecting to see if I look out into my yard are chipmunks, rabbits, and the occasional fox.  That I'll bring Guinness along if I go out at night is purely for the purpose of giving him some companionship. 

Really it is.

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The shrieking skulls of Calgarth

A couple of days ago, I was doing some genealogical research on the family of my Scottish grandmother, whose forebears mostly settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and I ran across records of an early Maryland settler (not a direct ancestor) named Matthew Howard.

The Howards intermarried with various members of the Iams family, which is a direct line of mine (yes, I'm a cousin of the pet food people), so I spent a few minutes glancing through what was known of Matthew Howard.  And I found that his grandfather was an English landholder named Miles Phillipson, of Calgarth, Westmoreland, England.

Something about those names rung a bell.  Being that at the time I was puttering about with genealogy, my mind was occupied with family history, so at first I thought I must have seen the name in some old record or another.  But something about that didn't ring right, and I kept thinking about it.  I had seen "Miles Phillipson of Calgarth" before, somewhere unrelated to genealogy, but I couldn't place where.  Finally, I googled it.

The first page of hits consisted of retelling after retelling of a famous story -- the tale of the screaming skulls of Calgarth.  That's where I'd seen the name before; decades ago, in a book with a title like Strange True Tales of the Supernatural, a genre which has graced my bookshelves since I was a teenager.

The story goes something like this.  Miles Phillipson was a wealthy landowner in sixteenth century England, and his property abutted a tract of land with a hill overlooking Lake Windermere.  This adjacent land belonged to a middle-aged couple named Kraster and Dorothy Cook, who (according to most versions of the legend) were simple, kind people.  Phillipson, however, was a greedy, mean, grasping sonofabitch, and he wanted the Cooks' property, but they refused to sell at any price.  Finally, he appeared to give up, and as a gesture of goodwill and no-hard-feelings, he invited the Cooks to dinner.  While there, Phillipson had one of his servants hide in Kraster Cook's satchel a valuable silver cup that Cook had admired earlier in the evening.  When the Cooks left, Phillipson "noticed" that the cup was gone, gave the alarm, and before the Cooks knew what was happening, they'd been arrested for theft of the cup (which, of course, was found in Kraster Cook's possession).

In due time, the Cooks were put on trial for theft, found guilty, and sentenced to death.

Oh, did I mention that Miles Phillipson was the county magistrate?

On the day of the execution, as Kraster and Dorothy were readied to be hanged, they were asked if they had any last words before the sentence was carried out.  Kraster shook his head, but Dorothy said, "Look out for yourself, Miles Phillipson.  You think you have done a fine thing.  But the tiny lump of land you lust for is the dearest a Phillipson has ever bought or stolen.  You will never prosper, nor any of your breed.  Whatever scheme you undertake will wither in your hand.  Whatever cause you support will always lose.  The time will come when no Phillipson will own an inch of land and while Calgarth walls shall stand, we will haunt it night and day.  You will never be rid of us!"

Now those are what I call kickass last words.

It is not recorded how Phillipson reacted to this, but given the rampant superstition of the time, I can only imagine that he wasn't particularly thrilled.  That didn't stop him, however, from seeing the Cooks both hanged, and taking their property, tearing down their cottage, and building himself a sumptuous manor house, which he named Calgarth Hall.

Of course, it wouldn't be a tale worth the telling if it stopped there.  Shortly after the completion of the manor, the members of the household were awakened one night by a horrifying shrieking.  Coming down into the great hall, from which the noise seemed to be coming, Phillipson and his family and servants saw two grinning skulls on the mantelpiece, screaming in an earsplitting fashion.  (Mrs. Phillipson, being an Elizabethan lady, of course "fainted dead away.")  The next day, Miles Phillipson, figuring he knew what was going on, had the coffins of Kraster and Dorothy Cook exhumed -- and unsurprisingly, found the skulls missing.  He replaced the skulls, and reburied the coffins, only to have the same thing occur the following week.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Well, things went from bad to worse.  The skulls wouldn't stay buried, but reappeared in the great hall with terrible regularity.  All the servants quit.  Mrs. Phillipson and their only son took sick and died.  Miles Phillipson's reputation sank so fast there weren't even any bubbles, and he was forced to sell off his land a piece at a time until he had nothing left, and finally died in abject poverty.  Of later generations the legend doesn't speak, but Calgarth is said to still be standing, and although an exorcism was pronounced there in the nineteenth century, it is still subject to "strange sights and sounds."

What I find fascinating about all of this is not that an ancient manor house in England is the focal point of a wild tale of terror; heaven knows that it is hardly unique in that regard.  It is the intersection between legend and fact that interests me.  When I first read the tale of the screaming skulls of Calgarth, when I was perhaps fifteen years old, I figured that (like most of those sorts of legends) the men and women who peopled it were fictional, even if the places weren't.  I never dreamed that Miles Phillipson had actually lived and died in Calgarth, as per the legend, had had a surviving daughter (Anne Phillipson) whose son, Matthew Howard, emigrated to the United States in the mid-1600s and was the founder of a large and prosperous family in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.  (Why the curse didn't affect him, I'm not sure -- maybe it only applied to people who had the last name of Phillipson.)

What is interesting about this, too, is that for the most part, one side doesn't know what the other knows.  The genealogists have all of the dates and places; Miles Phillipson was born about 1540 in Westmoreland, married a woman named Barbara Sandys, had one surviving child (Anne) born in Calgarth in about 1575 or so.  None of the databases on the Howard family mention the rather sketchy story about what their ancestor supposedly did.  And I don't think it's because as genealogists, they'd be hesitant to include a wild tale; genealogists, I've found, absolutely love weird legends about their relatives, even if most of them are careful to include a disclaimer that "this is only a story."  But apparently almost none of the Howard family descendants are aware of the screaming skulls that supposedly haunted their distant ancestor.

Likewise, none of the recountings of the Calgarth story mention that the real Phillipson had one surviving child, and that Phillipson's grandson ended up being a wealthy planter in Maryland.  I guess I can understand why they'd be reluctant to include that; it makes Dorothy Cook's curse from the gallows have a little less punch, to know that the hex only lasted one generation.  But still -- you'd think that it would show up somewhere, but I couldn't find any reference to it at all.

The whole thing is kind of curious, especially given that the other two examples of ancestral hauntings I've come across seem to be well known both to the genealogical researchers and to the haunted house aficionados.  On my side of the family, we have Alexander Lindsay, the notorious "Earl Beardie," who supposedly lost his soul to the devil in a dice game and now haunts Glamis Castle in Scotland, swearing, drinking, and rolling dice (my dad's comment upon finding out that this was one of our ancestors was, "Yeah, sounds like my family, all right.").  On my wife's side, we have the Frys, who owned Morants Court in Kent, the site of the creepy story that became Alfred Noyes's poem "The Highwayman."

I suppose that every family has legends, but not many can beat the Shrieking Skulls of Calgarth for having all of the classic elements -- a false accusation, a grasping miser who gets his due, a curse delivered from the gallows, skulls, unearthly screams at night.  So next time you hear one of your kinfolk talking about "skeletons in the closet," keep in mind that whatever creepy goings-on have occurred in your family, it could be a lot worse.

They could be literal skeletons.  That refuse to stay buried.

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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!]

The evolution of Little Red Riding Hood

Every once in a while, I'll run across a piece of scientific research that is so creative and clever that it just warms my heart, and I felt this way yesterday when I stumbled onto a link to the article in PLoS ONE called "The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood," by Jamshid Tehrani of the University of Bristol.

The reason I was delighted by Tehrani's paper is that it combines two subjects I love -- evolutionary biology and mythology and folklore.  The gist of what Tehrani did is to use a technique most commonly used to assemble species into "star diagrams" -- cladistic bootstrap analysis -- to analyze worldwide versions of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story to see to what degree a version in (for example) Senegal was related to one in Germany.

Cladistic bootstrap analysis generates something called a "star diagram" -- not, generally, a pedigree or family tree, because we don't know the exact identity of the common ancestor to all of the members of the tree, all we can tell is how closely related current individuals are.  Think, for example, of what it would look like if you assembled the living members of your family group this way -- you'd see clusters of close relatives linked together (you, your siblings, and your first cousins, for example) -- and further away would be other clusters, made up of more distant relatives grouped with their near family members.

So Tehrani did this with the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, by looking at the similarities and differences, from subtle to major, between the way the tale is told in different locations.  Apparently there are versions of it all over the world -- not only the Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales variety (the one I know the best), but from Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Korea, and Japan.  Oral transmission of stories is much like biological evolution; there are mutations (people change the story by misremembering it, dropping some pieces, embellishment, and so on) and there is selection (the best versions, told by the best storytellers, are more likely to be passed on).  And thus, the whole thing unfolds like an evolutionary lineage.

In Tehrani's analysis, he found three big branches -- the African branch (where the story is usually called "The Wolf and the Kids"), the East Asian branch ("Tiger Grandmother"), and the European/Middle Eastern Branch ("Little Red Riding Hood," "Catterinella," and "The Story of Grandmother").  (For the main differences in the different branches, which are fascinating but too long to be quoted here in full, check out the link to Tehrani's paper.)

Put all together, Tehrani came up with the following cladogram:

WK = "The Wolf and the Kids," TG = "Tiger Grandmother," "Catt" = "Catterinella," GM = "The Story of Grandmother," and RH = "Little Red Riding Hood;" the others are less common variations that Tehrani was able to place on his star diagram.

The whole thing just makes me very, very happy, and leaves me smiling with my big, sharp, wolflike teeth.

Pure research has been criticized by some as being pointless, and this is a stance that I absolutely abhor.  There is a completely practical reason to support, fund, and otherwise encourage pure research -- and that is, we have no idea yet what application some technique or discovery might have in the future.  A great deal of highly useful, human-centered science has been uncovered by scientists playing around in their labs with no other immediate goal than to study some small bit of the universe.  Further, the mere application of raw creativity to a problem -- using the tools of cladistics, say, to analyze a folk tale -- can act as an impetus to other minds, elsewhere, encouraging them to approach the problems we face in novel ways.

But I think it's more than that.  The fundamental truth here is that human mind needs to be exercised.  The "what good is it?" attitude is not only anti-science, it is anti-intellectual.  It devalues inquiry, curiosity, and creativity.  It asks the question "how does this benefit humanity?" in such a way as to imply that the sheer joy of comprehending deeply the world around us is not a benefit in and of itself.

It may be that Tehrani's jewel of a paper will have no lasting impact on humanity as a whole.  I'm perfectly okay with that, and I suspect Tehrani would be, as well.  We need to make our brains buckle down to the "important stuff," yes; but we also need to let them out to play sometimes, a lesson that the men and women currently overseeing our educational system need to learn.  In a quote that seems unusually apt, considering the subject of Tehrani's research, Albert Einstein said: "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.  Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited.  Imagination encircles the world." 

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I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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

The strange tale of the disappearing soldier

I've been interested in the paranormal for a long time.  It started with my uncle's scary stories about the feu follet and loup-garou, told in French, which were sufficient to scare myself and my cousins into the near pants-wetting stage, and yet which for some reason we demanded again and again.  Later I graduated to books with titles like Twenty Terrifying True Tales of the Supernatural, Real Ghost Stories, and Bigfoot: Legend Come to Life.  I supplemented this with my fiction reading, including Lovecraft and Poe, and watching shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  (With all of this, it's no wonder that I developed serious insomnia as a teenager, an ailment that continues to plague me today, four and a half decades later.)

Anyhow, all of this is meant to underscore the fact that I've read a lot of supposedly true paranormal stories.  So it always is with a bit of pleasant surprise that I run into one I've never heard before -- something that happened yesterday, when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link telling the tale of Gil Pérez, the 16th century Spanish soldier who supposedly teleported from the Philippines to Mexico City.

The story goes like this. In October of 1593, a man showed up in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, disheveled and disoriented.  He was questioned by authorities, and said that moments before, he'd been on guard duty, had felt dizzy, and leaned against a wall and closed his eyes.  He opened them to find himself in Plaza Mayor...

... but moments earlier, he'd been in Manila.

Plaza Mayor in Mexico City, where Gil Pérez appeared out of nowhere [Image is in the Public Domain]

The authorities at the time were deeply Roman Catholic, and anything like this smacked of witchcraft, so they locked him up, charging him with desertion and consorting with the devil.  Pérez said that he had no idea how he'd gotten there, but it had nothing to do with Satan -- and as proof, he said that they had just gotten word that day of the assassination of Philippine Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas by Chinese pirates, and that proved that he'd just been in Manila.

Of course, back then, there was no way to verify such information quickly, so poor Pérez was confined to the jail for two months until a group that had come from Manila showed up in Mexico City.  Sure enough, one of the people in the group not only recognized Pérez, but said his uniform was the correct one for the Philippine guard -- and Pérez had indeed been there, on duty, when Dasmariñas was murdered two months earlier, but had disappeared without a trace and had not been seen since.

At that point, the authorities let Pérez go, he joined the Philippine delegation, and eventually found his way back home.  Why the charges of black magic were dropped is unknown; after all, even if he hadn't deserted, there was still the problem that he seemed to have gone halfway around the globe in seconds.  But maybe they were just as happy to make him someone else's problem.  In any case, what happened to Pérez afterwards is not recorded.

The problem, of course, is that these sort of folk legends usually have a rather unfortunate genealogy, and that certainly is true here.  The version of the story I've related above comes from a 1908 issue of Harper's Magazine, written by American folklorist Thomas Allibone Janvier.  Janvier said he got the story from a 1900 collection of Mexican tales by Luis Gonzáles Obregón, and Obregón said that he learned of it from the 1609 writings of Philippine Governor Antonio de Morga, who said that "Dasmariñas's death was known in Mexico the day it happened," although he didn't know how that could possibly be.

Others have noticed similarities between the tale and Washington Irving's story "Governor Manco and the Soldier" which appeared in Tales of the Alhambra in 1832.  So it's entirely possible that an offhand, and unsubstantiated, comment by de Morga was picked up and elaborated by Obregón, then picked up and elaborated further by Janvier, with some help along the way from Irving's (fictional) tale.

In any case, it's an intriguing story.  I'm always more fond of these open-ended tales -- the ones where everything gets tied up neatly in the end always seem to me to be too pat even to consider accepting them as real.  But this one -- Pérez's mysterious disappearance and reappearance were never explained, he vanished into obscurity afterwards, and nothing more came of it -- those are the ones that captivate interest, because that's usually the way reality works.  It's why my all-time favorite "true tale of the supernatural," the story of Nurse Black, still gives me the shudders every time I think about it.

Not, of course, that I think that the story of Pérez is true; it's simply that the more realistic a tale is, the more likely I am to be interested in it.  And after all of these years steeped in the paranormal, to find one I'd never heard of before was a lot of fun.

  

************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

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

The strange tale of the disappearing soldier

I've been interested in the paranormal for a long time.  It started with my uncle's scary stories about the feu follet and loup-garou, told in French, which were sufficient to frighten myself and my cousins into the near pants-wetting stage, and yet which for some reason we demanded again and again.  Later I graduated to books with titles like Twenty Terrifying True Tales of the Supernatural, Real Ghost Stories, and Bigfoot: Legend Come to Life.  I supplemented this with my fiction reading, including Lovecraft and Poe, and watching shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  (With all of this, it's no wonder that I developed serious insomnia as a teenager, an ailment that continues to plague me today, forty-five years later.)

Anyhow, all of this is meant to underscore the fact that I've read a lot of supposedly true paranormal stories.  So it always is with a bit of pleasant surprise that I run into one I've never heard before -- something that happened yesterday, when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link telling the tale of Gil Pérez, the 16th century Spanish soldier who supposedly teleported from the Philippines to Mexico City.

The story goes like this.  In October of 1593, a man showed up in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, disheveled and disoriented.  He was questioned by authorities, and said that moments before, he'd been on guard duty, had felt dizzy, and leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. He opened them to find himself in Plaza Mayor...

... but moments earlier, he'd been in Manila.

Plaza Mayor in Mexico City, where Gil Pérez appeared out of nowhere [Image is in the Public Domain]

The authorities at the time were deeply Roman Catholic, and anything like this smacked of witchcraft, so they locked him up, charging him with desertion and consorting with the devil.  Pérez said that he had no idea how he'd gotten there, but it had nothing to do with Satan -- and as proof, he said that they had just gotten word that day of the assassination of Philippine Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas by Chinese pirates, and that proved that he'd just been in Manila.

Of course, back then, there was no way to verify such information quickly, so poor Pérez was confined to the jail for two months until a group that had come from Manila showed up in Mexico City.  Sure enough, one of the people in the group not only recognized Pérez, but said his uniform was the correct one for the Philippine guard -- and Pérez had indeed been there, on duty, when Dasmariñas was murdered two months earlier, but had disappeared without a trace and had not been seen since.

At that point, the authorities let Pérez go, he joined the Philippine delegation, and eventually found his way back home.  Why the charges of black magic were dropped is unknown; after all, even if he hadn't deserted, there was still the problem that he seemed to have gone halfway around the globe in seconds.  But maybe they were just as happy to make him someone else's problem.  In any case, what happened to Pérez afterwards is not recorded.

The problem, of course, is that these sort of folk legends usually have a rather unfortunate genealogy, and that certainly is true here.  The version of the story I've related above comes from a 1908 issue of Harper's Magazine, written by American folklorist Thomas Allibone Janvier.  Janvier said he got the story from a 1900 collection of Mexican tales by Luis Gonzáles Obregón, and Obregón said that he learned of it from the 1609 writings of Philippine Governor Antonio de Morga, who said that "Dasmariñas's death was known in Mexico the day it happened," although he didn't know how that could possibly be.

Others have noticed similarities between the tale and Washington Irving's story "Governor Manco and the Soldier" which appeared in Tales of the Alhambra in 1832.  So it's entirely possible that an offhand, and unsubstantiated, comment by de Morga was picked up and elaborated by Obregón, then picked up and elaborated further by Janvier, with some help along the way from Irving's (fictional) tale.

In any case, it's an intriguing story.  I'm always more fond of these open-ended tales -- the ones where everything gets tied up neatly in the end always seem to me to be too pat even to consider accepting them as real.  But this one -- Pérez's mysterious disappearance and reappearance were never explained, he vanished into obscurity afterwards, and nothing more came of it -- those are the ones that captivate interest, because that's usually the way reality works.  It's why my all-time favorite "true tale of the supernatural," the story of Nurse Black, still gives me the shudders every time I think about it.

Not, of course, that I think that the story of Pérez is true; it's simply that the more realistic a tale is, the more likely I am to be interested in it.  And after all of these years steeped in the paranormal, to find one I'd never heard of before was a lot of fun.

**************************************

I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event.  The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).

There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future.  One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man.  There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.

The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine.  There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later.  This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre.  This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.

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

The strange tale of the disappearing soldier

I've been interested in the paranormal for a long time.  It started with my uncle's scary stories about the feu follet and loup-garou, told in French, which were sufficient to scare myself and my cousins into the near pants-wetting stage, and yet which for some reason we demanded again and again.  Later I graduated to books with titles like Twenty Terrifying True Tales of the Supernatural, Real Ghost Stories, and Bigfoot: Legend Come to Life.  I supplemented this with my fiction reading, including Lovecraft and Poe, and watching shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  (With all of this, it's no wonder that I developed serious insomnia as a teenager, an ailment that continues to plague me today, forty-odd years later.)

Anyhow, all of this is meant to underscore the fact that I've read a lot of supposedly true paranormal stories.  So it always is with a bit of pleasant surprise that I run into one I've never heard before -- something that happened yesterday, when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link telling the tale of Gil Pérez, the 16th century Spanish soldier who supposedly teleported from the Philippines to Mexico City.

The story goes like this.  In October of 1593, a man showed up in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, disheveled and disoriented.  He was questioned by authorities, and said that moments before, he'd been on guard duty, had felt dizzy, and leaned against a wall and closed his eyes.  He opened them to find himself in Plaza Mayor...

... but moments earlier, he'd been in Manila.

Plaza Mayor in Mexico City, where Gil Pérez appeared out of nowhere [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The authorities at the time were deeply Roman Catholic, and anything like this smacked of witchcraft, so they locked him up, charging him with desertion and consorting with the devil.  Pérez said that he had no idea how he'd gotten there, but it had nothing to do with Satan -- and as proof, he said that they had just gotten word that day of the assassination of Philippine Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas by Chinese pirates, and that proved that he'd just been in Manila.

Of course, back then, there was no way to verify such information quickly, so poor Pérez was confined to the jail for two months until a group that had come from Manila showed up in Mexico City.  Sure enough, one of the people in the group not only recognized Pérez, but said his uniform was the correct one for the Philippine guard -- and Pérez had indeed been there, on duty, when Dasmariñas was murdered two months earlier, but had disappeared without a trace and had not been seen since.

At that point, the authorities let Pérez go, he joined the Philippine delegation, and eventually found his way back home.  Why the charges of black magic were dropped is unknown; after all, even if he hadn't deserted, there was still the problem that he seemed to have gone halfway around the globe in seconds.  But maybe they were just as happy to make him someone else's problem.  In any case, what happened to Pérez afterwards is not recorded.

The problem, of course, is that these sort of folk legends usually have a rather unfortunate genealogy, and that certainly is true here.  The version of the story I've related above comes from a 1908 issue of Harper's Magazine, written by American folklorist Thomas Allibone Janvier.  Janvier said he got the story from a 1900 collection of Mexican tales by Luis Gonzáles Obregón, and Obregón said that he learned of it from the 1609 writings of Philippine Governor Antonio de Morga, who said that "Dasmariñas's death was known in Mexico the day it happened," although he didn't know how that could possibly be.

Others have noticed similarities between the tale and Washington Irving's story "Governor Manco and the Soldier" which appeared in Tales of the Alhambra in 1832.  So it's entirely possible that an offhand, and unsubstantiated, comment by de Morga was picked up and elaborated by Obregón, then picked up and elaborated further by Janvier, with some help along the way from Irving's (fictional) tale.

In any case, it's an intriguing story.  I'm always more fond of these open-ended tales -- the ones where everything gets tied up neatly in the end always seem to me to be too pat even to consider accepting them as real.  But this one -- Pérez's mysterious disappearance and reappearance were never explained, he vanished into obscurity afterwards, and nothing more came of it -- those are the ones that captivate interest, because that's usually the way reality works.  It's why my all-time favorite "true tale of the supernatural," the story of Nurse Black, still gives me the shudders every time I think about it.

Not, of course, that I think that the story of Pérez is true; it's simply that the more realistic a tale is, the more likely I am to be interested in it.  And after all of these years steeped in the paranormal, to find one I'd never heard of before was a lot of fun.

The evolution of Little Red Riding Hood

Every once in a while, I'll run across a piece of scientific research that is so creative and clever that it just warms my heart, and I felt this way yesterday when I stumbled onto a link to the article in PLoS ONE called "The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood," by Jamshid Tehrani of the University of Bristol.

The reason I was delighted by Tehrani's paper is that it combines two subjects I love -- evolutionary biology and mythology and folklore.  The gist of what Tehrani did is to use a technique most commonly used to assemble species into "star diagrams" -- cladistic bootstrap analysis -- to analyze worldwide versions of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story to see to what degree a version in (for example) Senegal was related to one in Germany.

Cladistic bootstrap analysis generates something called a "star diagram" -- not, generally, a pedigree or family tree, because we don't know the exact identity of the common ancestor to all of the members of the tree, all we can tell is how closely related current individuals are.  Think, for example, of what it would look like if you assembled the living members of your family group this way -- you'd see clusters of close relatives linked together (you, your siblings, and your first cousins, for example) -- and further away would be other clusters, made up of more distant relatives grouped with their near family members.

So Tehrani did this with the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, by looking at the similarities and differences, from subtle to major, between the way the tale is told in different locations.  Apparently there are versions of it all over the world -- not only the Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales variety (the one I know the best), but from Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Korea, and Japan.  Oral transmission of stories is much like biological evolution; there are mutations (people change the story by misremembering it, dropping some pieces, embellishment, and so on) and there is selection (the best versions, told by the best storytellers, are more likely to be passed on).  And thus, the whole thing unfolds like an evolutionary lineage.

In Tehrani's analysis, he found three big branches -- the African branch (where the story is usually called "The Wolf and the Kids"), the East Asian branch ("Tiger Grandmother"), and the European/Middle Eastern Branch ("Little Red Riding Hood," "Catterinella," and "The Story of Grandmother").  (For the main differences in the different branches, which are fascinating but too long to be quoted here in full, check out the link to Tehrani's paper.)

Put all together, Tehrani came up with the following cladogram:

WK = "The Wolf and the Kids," TG = "Tiger Grandmother," "Catt" = "Catterinella," GM = "The Story of Grandmother," and RH = "Little Red Riding Hood;" the others are less common variations that Tehrani was able to place on his star diagram.

The whole thing just makes me very, very happy, and leaves me smiling with my big, sharp, wolflike teeth.

Pure research has been criticized by some as being pointless, and this is a stance that I absolutely abhor.  There is a completely practical reason to support, fund, and otherwise encourage pure research -- and that is, we have no idea yet what application some technique or discovery might have in the future.  A great deal of highly useful, human-centered science has been uncovered by scientists playing around in their labs with no other immediate goal than to study some small bit of the universe.  Further, the mere application of raw creativity to a problem -- using the tools of cladistics, say, to analyze a folk tale -- can act as an impetus to other minds, elsewhere, encouraging them to approach the problems we face in novel ways.

But I think it's more than that.  The fundamental truth here is that human mind needs to be exercised.  The "what good is it?" attitude is not only anti-science, it is anti-intellectual.  It devalues inquiry, curiosity, and creativity.  It asks the question "how does this benefit humanity?" in such a way as to imply that the sheer joy of comprehending deeply the world around us is not a benefit in and of itself.

It may be that Tehrani's jewel of a paper will have no lasting impact on humanity as a whole.  I'm perfectly okay with that, and I suspect Tehrani would be, as well.  We need to make our brains buckle down to the "important stuff," yes; but we also need to let them out to play sometimes, a lesson that the men and women currently overseeing our educational system need to learn.  In a quote that seems unusually apt, considering the subject of Tehrani's research, Albert Einstein said: "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited.  Imagination encircles the world."