The Indian rope trick is stage magic said to have been performed in and around India during the 19th century. Sometimes described as "the world’s greatest illusion", it reputedly involved a magician, a length of rope, and one or more boy assistants.
In the 1990s the trick was said by some western magicians to be a hoax perpetrated in 1890 by John Wilkie of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. It was claimed there were no known references to the trick predating 1890, and later stage magic performances of the trick were inspired by Wilkie's account. But this claim redefines what the Indian rope trick is. For many decades, previous commentators had accepted that accounts from the 9th century (by Adi Shankara), the 14th century (Ibn Battuta), and the 17th century (Mughal Emperor Jahangir), were versions of the trick, but this was now being denied. See explanation below.
The trick
Although diverse accounts of the trick have appeared in print it remains essentially the same. There are three basic variants, which differ in the degree of theatricality displayed by the magician and his helper:
In the simplest version, a long piece of rope would be left in a basket and placed in an open field, usually by a fakir. The rope would levitate, with no external support. His boy assistant, a jamoora, would climb the rope and then descend.
A more elaborate version would find the magician (or his assistant) disappearing after reaching the top of the rope, then reappearing at ground level.
The "classic" version, however, was much more detailed: the rope would seem to rise high into the skies, disappearing from view. The boy would climb the rope and be lost to view. The magician would call back his boy assistant, and, on getting no response, become furious. The magician would then arm himself with a knife or sword, climb the rope, and vanish as well. An argument would be heard, and then limbs would start falling, presumably cut from the assistant by the magician. When all the parts of the body, including the torso, landed on the ground, the magician would climb down the rope. He would collect the limbs and put them in a basket, or collect the limbs in one place and cover them with a cape or blanket. Soon the boy would appear, restored.
Lt Col Elliot of the London Magic Circle, when offering a substantial reward in the 1930s for an outdoor performance, found it necessary to define the trick. He demanded that "the rope must be thrown into the air and defy the force of gravity, while someone climbs it and disappears."
The accounts
In his commentary on Gaudapada's explanation of the Mandukya Upanishad, the 9th-century Hindu teacher Adi Shankara, illustrating a philosophical point, wrote of a juggler who throws a thread up into the sky; he climbs up it carrying arms and goes out of sight; he engages in a battle in which he is cut into pieces, which fall down; finally he arises again. A few words further on Shankara referred to the principle underlying the trick, saying that the juggler who ascends is different from the real juggler who stands unseen, "veiled magically", on the ground.
In Shankara's commentary on the Vedanta Sutra (also called the Brahma Sutra) he mentioned that the juggler who climbs up the rope to the sky is illusory, and so is only fancied to be different from the real juggler, who is hidden on the ground. The fact that Shankara referred to the trick's method was pointed out in 1934 in a discussion of the Indian rope trick in the Indian press. These Sanskrit texts of Shankara are the basis for the claim that the trick is of great antiquity in India.
Edward Melton, an Anglo-Dutch traveler, described a performance he saw in Batavia about 1670 by a troupe of Chinese jugglers. Grasping one end of a ball of cord in his hand, a juggler threw up the ball which went out of sight, then swiftly climbed the vertical cord until he, too, was out of sight. Body pieces fell and were placed in a basket. Finally the basket was upturned, the body pieces fell out topsy turvy, and Melton "saw all those limbs creep together again," the man being restored to life. A detailed engraved illustration accompanied this account.
Ibn Battuta, when recounting his travels through Hangzhou, China in 1346, describes a trick broadly similar to the Indian rope trick.
Pu Songling records a version in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1740) which he claims to have witnessed personally. In his account, a request by a mandarin that a wandering magician produce a peach in the dead of winter results in the trick's performance, on the pretence of getting a peach from the Gardens of Heaven. The magician's son climbs the rope, vanishes from sight, and then (supposedly) tosses down a peach, before being "caught by the Garden's guards" and "killed", with his dismembered body falling from above in the traditional manner. (Interestingly enough, in this version the magician himself never climbs the rope.) After placing the parts in a basket, the magician gives the mandarin the peach and requests payment. As soon as he is paid, his son emerges alive from the basket. Songling claims the trick was a favorite of the White Lotus society and that the magician must have learnt it from them (or they from him), though he gives no indication where (or how) he learnt this.
Short video 51 seconds. Uploaded 20th December 2009
Trick being performed for the British Army in India, which was part of the British Empire.
Scepticism
There had long been scepticism regarding the trick. In 1934 the Occult Committee of The Magic Circle, convinced the trick did not exist, offered five hundred guineas to anyone who could perform it. A man named Karachi (real name Arthur Claude Darby), a British performer based in Plymouth, endeavoured to perform the trick with his son, Kyder, on 7 January 1935 on a field in Wheathampstead, north of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, after being granted four days to prepare the site. The presentation was filmed by Gaumont British Films. His son could climb the rope but did not disappear, and Karachi was not paid. The Occult Committee demanded the trick must include the disappearance of the boy.
In 1935, Karachi sent a challenge to the sceptics, for 200 guineas to be deposited with a neutral party who would decide if the rope trick was performed satisfactorily. His terms were that the rope shall rise up through his hands while in a sitting posture, to a height of ten feet, his son Kyder would then climb the rope and remain at the top for a minimum of 30 seconds and be photographed. The rope shall be an ordinary rope supplied by a well known manufacturer and shall be examined. The place could be any open area chosen by the neutral party and agreed to by the conjurers and the spectators could be anywhere in front of the carpet Karachi would be seated on. However the conjurers of the Occult Committee refused to accept Karachi's terms.
In 1996, Nature published "Unraveling the Indian rope trick", by Richard Wiseman and Peter Lamont. Wiseman found at least 50 eyewitness accounts of the trick performed during the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and variations included:
The magician's assistant climbs the rope and the magic ends.
The assistant climbs the rope, vanishes, and then again appears.
The assistant vanishes, and appears from some other place.
The assistant vanishes, and reappears from a place which had remained in full view of the audience.
The boy vanishes, and does not return.
Accounts collected by Wiseman did not have any single account describing severing of the limbs of the magician's assistant. Perhaps more importantly, he found the more spectacular accounts were only given when the incident lay decades in the past. It is conceivable that in the witnesses' memory the rope trick merged with the basket trick.
Citing their work, historian Mike Dash wrote in 2000:
Ranking their cases in order of impressiveness, Wiseman and Lamont discovered that the average lapse of time between the event and witness's report of the event was a mere four years in the least notable examples, but a remarkable forty-one years in the case of the most complex and striking accounts. This suggests that the witnesses embroidered their stories over the years, perhaps in telling and retelling their experiences. After several decades, what might have originally been a simple trick had become a highly elaborate performance in their minds ... How, though, did these witnesses come to elaborate their tales in such a consistent way? One answer would be that they already knew, or subsequently discovered, how the full-blown Indian rope trick was supposed to look, and drew on this knowledge when embroidering their accounts.
There are various explanations of the trick as stage magic.
In his book on the topic, Peter Lamont claimed the story of the trick resulted from a hoax created by John Elbert Wilkie while working at the Chicago Tribune. Under the name "Fred S. Ellmore" ("Fred Sell More") Wilkie wrote of the trick in 1890, gaining the Tribune wide publicity. About four months later, the Tribune printed a retraction and proclaimed the story a hoax. However, the retraction received little attention, and in the following years many claimed to remember having seen the trick as far back as the 1870s. According to Lamont, none of these stories proved credible, but with every repetition the story became more ingrained and was really only a myth.
Lamont also claimed that no mention appears in writings before the 1890 article. He argued that Ibn Battuta did report a magic trick with a thong, and Jahangir with a chain, not a rope, and the tricks they described are different from the "classic" Indian rope trick. He said that the descriptions of the trick in Yule's editions (1870s) of Marco Polo's book are not in the body of the work, but in a footnote by Yule, and only refer to these non-classic accounts.
Lamont's popular but controversial work dismissed important accounts such as Shankara's and Melton's as irrelevant to his theme. This is because his book is not really about the trick itself, but about what he called the 20th-century legend of it being Indian, the fame of the trick, which peaked in the 1930s. It is this fame, chapter 8 of his book claimed, which originated from Wilkie's hoax.
Penn & Teller followed Lamont's work and examined the trick while filming their three-part CBC mini-series, Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour. According to that miniseries, the tour travelled the world investigating historical tricks, and while in India they travelled to Agra where they recreated the trick.
Penn and Teller invited two British tourists shopping nearby to see what they claimed was a fakir performing the trick. As they walked back, an assistant ran up and claimed the fakir was in the midst of the trick, so they rushed the rest of the way so they wouldn't miss it. As the witnesses neared the room they dropped a thick rope from a balcony. The witnesses saw what they thought was the end of the trick, the rope falling as if it had been in mid-air seconds before. A sheet was then removed from a boy with fake blood at his neck and shoulders, hinting that his limbs and head had been reattached to his torso. According to their account, the rumour that a British couple had witnessed the trick was heard a few weeks later in England.
Fraser and Champneys suggested that the rising of the rope could be achieved by fast vibration of its origin due to the effect of parametric excitation (or parametric resonance). The effect is similar to the vibro-levitation in soft materials, such as liquid droplets, cornstarch, and to the stabilization of an inverted pendulum with vibration foundation (the Kapitza's pendulum), where small fast oscillations can be substituted by an effective "levitation" force.
Analyzing old eyewitness reports, Jim McKeague explained how poor, itinerant conjuring troupes could have performed the trick using known magical techniques. If a ball of cord is thrown upwards, one end being retained in the hand, the ball rapidly decreases in size as it rises. As it unwinds completely the illusion of the ball disappearing into the sky is striking, especially if the pale cord is similar in color to any overcast cloud. Before the cord has time to fall the climber leaps up, pretending to climb, but really being lifted by a companion. Skilled acrobats could make this quick "climb" look very effective until the climber's feet are at or even above the lifter's head. Then a noisy distraction from other members of the troupe is the misdirection needed which allows the climber to drop unseen to the ground and hide. This type of "vanishing by misdirection" is reported as having been used very effectively by a performer of the basket trick in the 1870s.
The lifter continues to look upwards and holds a conversation with the "climber" using ventriloquism to create the illusion that a person is still high in the air and is just passing out of sight. By now there is no cord or climber in the air, only an illusory climber as Shankara described (see above under "accounts"). Ventriloquism is quite capable of producing this remarkable effect, and a report from near Darjeeling by a school headmaster who witnessed the trick states specifically that ventriloquism was used. As to the falling of the pieces of the climber, according to an Indian Barrister-at-Law who saw a performance about 1875 which included this feature, it appears to have been produced very largely by acting and sound effects.
When a magician acts out the visible catch of an imaginary deck of cards thrown by a spectator, or throws a ball in the air where it vanishes, the appearance or disappearance really occurs at the location of the magician's hand, but to most spectators (two out of three in actual testing the magic appears to occur in mid-air. McKeague explained the falling body parts as being produced by much the same acting technique. He explained Melton's account of seeing the limbs "creep together again" (see above under "accounts") as being the result of contortionists' techniques.
It has always been the outdoor disappearance of the climber, away from trees and structures, which has led to claims the illusion is "humanly impossible". McKeague's explanation not only solves the mystery of the mid-air disappearance but also provides an alternative explanation for the Wiseman-Lamont observation discussed above that eyewitness reports were more impressive when much time had elapsed.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the fame of the trick increased performers would have had increasing difficulty in puzzling audiences with it, until finally the disappearance of the climber ceased to be a feature and the rare witness who had seen it spoke of a time long before. This is because misdirection of attention is extremely unlikely to be effective when the audience is expecting the disappearance, a fact which also explains why no one could claim any reward for a performance where it was specified the disappearance must be included. The increasing fame of the rope trick and the basket trick ended the possibility of using "vanishing by misdirection" in the methodologies for both tricks.
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17th century French coin shows UFO image, UFO Casebook Files
Centuries Old UFO coin remains mystery.
An unidentified flying object on a 17th century French coin continues to mystify rare coin experts. Colorado Springs, CO (PRWEB) January 28, 2005 -- After decades of seeking possible answers about a mysterious UFO-like design on a 17th century French copper coin, a prominent numismatic expert says it remains just that: an unidentified flying object. After a half-century of research, the design has defied positive identification by the numismatic community.
"It was made in the 1680s in France and the design on one side certainly looks like it could be a flying saucer in the clouds over the countryside," said Kenneth E. Bressett of Colorado Springs, Colorado, a former President of the 32,000-member American Numismatic Association and owner of the curious coin.
"Is it supposed to be a UFO of some sort, or a symbolic representation of the Biblical Ezekiel's wheel? After 50 years of searching, I've heard of only one other example of it, and nothing to explain the unusual design."
Bressett said the mysterious piece is not really a coin, but a "jeton," a coin-like educational tool that was commonly used to help people count money, or sometimes used as a money substitute for playing games. It is about the size of a U.S. quarter-dollar and similar to thousands of other jetons with different religious and educational designs that were produced and used in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.
"The design on this particular piece could be interpreted as showing either a UFO or Ezekiel's wheel, but little else. Some people think the Old Testament reference to Ezekiel's wheel may actually be a description of a long-ago UFO," he explained.
"The legend written in Latin around the rim is also mystifying. 'OPPORTUNUS ADEST' translates as 'It is here at an opportune time.' Is the object in the sky symbolic of needed rainfall, or a Biblical reference or visitors from beyond? We probably will never know for certain," said Bressett.
"It is part of the lure of numismatics that makes coin collecting so intriguing."
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Possible UFO discovered in an old wall painting in Romania
A UFO research organization in Israel has sent out a report regarding a wall painting in a 14th century church in Romania that may depict a UFO. It is similar to objects seen in paintings and coins ranging from the 4th century to the 17th century. One UFO investigator feels that the objects in the images may have an explanation that is more down to earth.
Gilli Schechter and Hannan Sabat of the Israeli Extraterrestrials and UFOs Research Organization (EURA), say they received a picture of the painting from Catalina Borta. Borta took the picture while visiting the Biserica Manastirii, or Church of the Dominican Monastery, in the town of Sighisoara. Sighisoara is believed to the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for the legend of Dracula.
The wall painting depicts a disc-shaped object over a building that is emitting smoke. It also has a caption in German that reads “Israel, hoffe auf den HERRN,” which translated means “Israel, put your hope in the Lord.” EURA explains that this is a quote from Psalms song of ascents, c.130 v.7.
The painting appears to be very old, but it is hard to tell how old. According the Monastery’s website, it was originally built in the 14th century, but was destroyed and rebuilt in the 17th century. The EURA report also notes that they are unsure who painted it and when. However, they point out that the caption in the painting probably dates it to after 1523, when the bible was translated into German.
EURA also notes that the painting is not often referenced in UFO research regarding depictions of UFOs in art. However, the image does look similar to other paintings and coins which are commonly believed by UFO researchers to depict aerial anomalies.
One such image is from the Prodigiorum Liber, which was an account of mysterious occurrence in early Rome written by Julius Obsequens. The image in question is supposed to depict a round object that was seen at sunset with a “large beam of fire” to the right. This sighting is supposed to have taken place in 98 B.C.
Image from the Prodigiorum Liber.
There are also French coins from the 17th century with a similar round object. Some researchers believe these to be depictions of Ezekiel’s wheel. However, Marc Dantonio, Chief Photo/Video Analyst for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), has another explanation. He says the shield-shaped object in these images is just that, a military shield.
Dantonio came to this conclusion by researching France in the late 1600s. He found the shields of that period did appear just like the images depicted in the coins. Furthermore, there was a civil war in France in 1680, in which the territorial aristocracy was replaced by the absolute monarch of Louis XIV. He believes the shields were placed on the coins to illustrate King Louis’ strength.
Coins from France called Jetons. These depict the shield images that are often believed to be UFOs.
A couple of shields from antiquity whose designs look similar to those in the "UFO" art.
Images provided by Marc Dantonio of a couple of shields from antiquity whose designs look similar to those in the “UFO” art.
He points out that on another coin, arrows can be seen raining down onto the shield as in an archer’s attack. He also notes that in some cases a line can be seen coming from the center of the shield, which is often mistaken for a ray of light coming from the craft. However, Dantonio explains this is actually a piece of metal that is attached to the shield to deflect arrows.
Although, Dantonio says the object is a shield, he admits that it is still a mystery as to why they are in the sky or coming out of the clouds. He writes:
“One story is that this particular coin is showing Jupiter’s Shield falling to Earth to aid Numa Pompilius, the second Roman king. The shield it said led them to victory during desperate times. But even so, it is still interesting that the shield was bestowed from on high. Was there some otherworldly influence rooted in their culture that prompted putting the shield in the sky? Protection or technology from above perhaps? That’s still a mystery.”
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WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE? IN SEARCH OF THE WOODWOSE, EUROPE'S ELUSIVE MAN-BEAST
Homo sapiens was not the only species of human named and recognised by Linnaeus when publishing Systema Naturae, his revolutionary binomial system of zoological classification, in 1735. Among several others was Homo ferus, the wild man, which according to Linnaeus was covered in hair, moved on all fours, was mute, and lived apart from H. sapiens in forests, hills, and mountains. Today, none of Linnaeus’s ‘other’ species of human is recognised by mainstream science.
Bestiary depiction of European wild man
Nevertheless, his European wild man, also known as the woodwose or wudewasa, has such a richly intertwined history of folklore, depictions in medieval art and architecture, and reported true-life encounters, including certain very recent ones, that some cryptozoologists and primatologists wonder whether such beings might indeed have existed in the not-too-distant past, and may even still linger on today in some of Europe’s more remote, secluded localities. But what could they be? As will be seen from the following selection of cases, several very different identities could be involved, collectively yielding a composite, polyphyletic woodwose entity rather than any single-origin, monophyletic being.
Woodwoses (Albrecht Dürer, 1499)
WILD MEN, OR FERAL CHILDREN?
Linnaeus himself delineated various subcategories of Homo ferus, of which the most significant was Juvenis lupinus hessensis – ‘wolf boys’, or feral children. That is, children believed to have been abandoned or lost by their parents in the wild but subsequently raised there by wolves or other animals. According to legend, moreover, Romulus (alleged founder of Rome) and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. There is little doubt that such children were indeed responsible for certain reports of alleged woodwose.
Depiction of Mowgli, the wolf boy from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books, by Kipling's father, J Lockwood Kipling (1895)
As recently as 1934, for example, a supposed woodwose was briefly spied running through some trees by a party of hunters in the forests near Uzitza in Serbia. Pursuing it, they fired and the entity dropped to the ground, shocked but unharmed. When the hunters approached, they discovered to their great surprise that their quarry was a completely naked and somewhat hairy but otherwise normal-looking human youth, approximately 15 years old, terrified, and covered in mud. Taken back by the hunters to their home village, he was unable to speak any language, but was found to be remarkably fast-moving, could run naturally on all fours, and was able to imitate with startling accuracy the sounds and songs of the various beasts and birds sharing his woodland home, where he had apparently lived for much of his life, feeding upon berries and roots.
Famous statue of Romulus and Remus suckling a she-wolf
Another such case was the Wild Girl of Champagne, France, cited by Linnaeus himself (dubbing her Puella campanica) as support for his Homo ferus species. She had been confirmed to have survived 10 years (November 1721-September 1731) in this region’s forests before being captured at the age of 19. Unusually for feral children, she then learnt to read and write, and became totally rehabilitated intellectually and socially.
RETURNING TO THE WILD?
A number of so-called wild men have proven to be ordinary humans that for a variety of different reasons – from poverty, mental health issues, or escape from persecution or criminal retribution to a simple desire to shake off the burdens of modern life – had abandoned their normal life and dropped out of human society, seeking solace and solitude in the wild and regressing to an almost bestial existence.
A possible woodwose statue inside St Mary's Church at Woolpit, Suffolk, where the famous Green Children allegedly appeared many centuries ago - could they have been abandoned children, left to fend for themselves in the wild? (Dr Karl Shuker)
In autumn 1936, for instance, a team of foresters inspecting one of the great forests near Riga, Latvia, unexpectedly encountered an extraordinary apeman-like entity crouching at the base of a tree. When it saw the men, it fled rapidly, swinging itself onto an overhanging branch and climbing upwards with remarkable speed and agility to the very top. When shot at by one of the foresters, the entity shrieked and crashed down onto the ground, where it was seized by the men, who discovered that it was covered in hair and bereft of any clothing. When it was taken back to a village close by, however, the being was recognised there as a farm labourer who had disappeared many years earlier, but he was now no longer able to speak or understand speech, and was capable only of yelling gleefully when meat or fruit was placed before him.
Wild man of Orford sculpture on font in Church of St Bartolomew, Orford (Simon K/Flickr)
A similar, more famous entity was Suffolk’s “wild man of Orford”, who, during the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), was captured in the nets of some sailors while he was swimming in the sea. According to a description penned by chronicler-monk Ralph of Coggeshall in his Chronicon Anglicanum, the being was completely naked but resembled a man in every way, with a profuse and pointed beard, hair that seemed torn and rubbed on his head, and very hirsute breasts. Brought back to the local castle and guarded day and night, he was unable to speak, did not display any sign of reverence when taken into the local church, and preferred eating fish raw rather than cooked. He escaped into the sea once, but eventually returned of his own accord; when he escaped a second time, however, he did not return and was never seen again.
William Blake's famous depiction of Nebuchadnezzar in the wilderness (1795)
During the Middle Ages, insane people or simpletons were sometimes released into the wilderness to fend for themselves, so that they became little more than wild beasts. According to the Holy Bible’s Book of Daniel, moreover, the once-mighty Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II underwent a seven-year period of madness during which time he lived alone in the wild, crawling on all fours eating grass, and allowing his hair and nails to grow unchecked until he resembled a man-beast instead of a man.
AT THE SIGN OF THE WILD MAN
There is no doubt that an appreciable component of the woodwose composite is the wild man as a symbol rather than a corporeal entity, personifying Nature or various aspects of it. In traditional rural folklore, the wild man most commonly represents strength, fertility, rebirth, and the ‘noble savage’ uncorrupted by modern civilisation. Very popular in medieval times but still occurring in certain rural areas of the Balkans and elsewhere in Europe even today are countryside pageants and festivals that feature dancers dressed in elaborate, ostentatiously hairy wild man costumes and taking part in symbolic wild man hunts, in which the latter is the quarry, to be captured and killed but afterwards resurrected.
The wild man and his family (De Negker David, Renaissance Period)
Moreover, the symbolic wild man is often closely allied to the green man, in which the former’s hair is replaced by a leafy profusion of foliage but its symbolic significance remains much the same.
Green man sculpture (Dr Karl Shuker)
CORPOREAL HUMANOID OR PARANORMAL PRESENCE?
In modern times, there have been reports of man-beasts in regions of Britain where it is simply not possible for such a species to exist without having been discovered by science long ago.
Persistent sightings of troll-like entities in the forests of Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, for instance, and even a 6.5-m-tall hairy bipedal giant allegedly encountered on Ben MacDhui, Scotland’s haunted mountain where the panic-inducing Big Grey Man is said to roam, cannot be readily explained (if accepted as genuine and not hoaxes) by normal cryptozoological theories.
Does a huge hairy man-beast entity exist on Ben MacDhui?
Consequently, it has been suggested that beings like these are not corporeal man-beasts at all, but instead are zooform entities – preternatural creatures assuming visible, humanoid form but of occult, paranormal nature and origin.
WAS GRENDEL A WOODWOSE?
The eponymous hero’s deadly foe, Grendel, in the famous Anglo-Saxon epic poem ‘Beowulf’, is generally thought of as a totally imaginary monster, and has been depicted and classified in many different ways. Intriguingly, however, some cryptozoological researchers, including American chronicler Thomas J. Mooney, have speculated that perhaps Grendel was actually a man-beast - because he is described in the poem as bipedal, clawed, larger and stronger than humans but somewhat humanoid in shape, very ugly, and residing in gloomy seclusion with his mother inside a cave hidden deep within a forest in Sweden.
Grendel, portrayed as a man-beast by J.R. Skelton (early 1900s)
If we assume (though it is obviously a very big, unsubstantiated assumption) that Grendel was based upon a real creature, a woodwose or similar man-beast would correspond more closely than any known animal species, including bears.
LAST OF THE NEANDERTHALS?
By far the most exciting suggestion on offer is that at least some woodwose reports are based upon relict Neanderthals. Variously deemed a subspecies of Homo sapiens or a separate species in its own right, Neanderthal Man first appeared in Europe as a distinct hominid with a complete set of recognisable characteristics approximately 130,000 years ago and officially became extinct here 24,000-30,000 years ago.
Co-existing alongside our ancestor, Cro-Magnon Man, for around 10,000 years, Neanderthals are widely believed to have interbred with Cro-Magnons, and such interbreeding may even have brought about the Neanderthals’ extinction, via absorption into the Cro-Magnon population.
It was veteran American cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson who first widely popularised the notion that perhaps the reports and legends of wild men in Europe arose from encounters with late-surviving Neanderthals, quietly persisting reclusively in various scarcely-traversed localities across Europe long after their official extinction date. This was subsequently championed by none other than the ‘Father of Cryptozoology’ himself, Dr Bernard Heuvelmans, who believed that the satyrs of Greek mythology also belonged to this category, and included the following paragraph in his comprehensive annotated checklist of cryptozoological creatures, published in 1986:
"[In Europe:] Wild hairy men, most probably Neanderthals having survived into historical times. Known as satyrs in classical antiquity – a name borrowed from the Hebrew se’ir (“the hairy one”) – and as wudewása (“wood being”) in the Middle Ages, they were reported until the 13th century in Ireland, until the 16th century in Saxony and Norway, until the 18th century on the Swedish island of Öland and in Estonia, in the Pyrénées ([known there as] iretges, basajaun) up to 1774 at least, and in the Carpathians (“wild man” of Kronstadt) up to 1784 at least."
Satyr statue by Frank 'Guy' Lynch, Sydney Botanic Gardens (Dr Karl Shuker)
In fact, it is possible that such beings have survived far beyond even those times in certain mountainous regions of Spain, with sightings there having being reported as recently as the 1990s, and which have since been researched by several cryptozoologists, including Sergio de la Rubia-Muñoz, who documented the following reports.
Neanderthal reconstruction (Dr Karl Shuker)
On 4 May 1993 at around 3.45 pm, in a sparsely-populated area known as Peña Montañesa (in Huesca) in the Spanish Pyrenees, woodsman Manuel Cazcarra was working with five others when, after they had all heard a scream and some squeals nearby, he went off to investigate and encountered a hairy man-beast, standing 1.7 m tall. It immediately clambered swiftly up a pine tree, where it remained, clutching a branch with its arms and legs, and screaming loudly. When Cazcarra called the other men, they came running up and one of them, Ramiro López, was just in time to see the entity climb back down to the ground and hide itself behind a dense thicket before hurling a hefty tree branch in their direction. Not surprisingly, they chose not to pursue it further!
'The Fight in the Forest' - a woodwose-featuring engraving (Hans Burgkmair, early 1500s)
These eyewitnesses were woodsmen, they were used to working in forests and were very familiar with bears, but they stated categorically that what they had seen was no bear. Mysterious footprints that could not be identified with any known species in the area were found there later that same week by a patrol of the Guardia Civil, accompanied by one of the woodsmen. And soon afterwards, an ape-like figure was seen crossing a road near the French border by a family travelling in their car towards Prats de Molló.
Wild man design for a stained glass window, generally (though not universally) believed to be by Hans Holbein the Younger
During the late spring of 1994, another putative woodwose sighting was made in this same region. While hiking from Peña Montañesa to the village of Bielsa close by, Juan Ramó Ferrer, a mountain climber from Andalusia, encountered a very hirsute but distinctly humanoid entity jumping from tree to tree and giving voice to ape-like squeals. According to the description later given by Ferrer, who had duly fled, terrified, to a campsite near Peña Montañesa, the entity was shortish, was covered with reddish hair, had very long ape-like arms, and exuded a musky odour.
It would be easy to shrug off the woodwose as merely a medieval legend, but reports such as those documented here suggest that there is much more than that to this mystery.
Woodwose (Albrecht Dürer, 1520s)
Reports of hairy man-beasts in Europe and the Middle East (not to mention the Himalayan yeti, Mongolian almas, Chinese yeren, North American bigfoot, and numerous other similar beings reported elsewhere around the globe) date back to antiquity, and some of these definitely bear comparison with Neanderthal Man.
Wild man depiction in Omnium Fere Gentiumr - Jean Sluperji, Antwerp, 1572
EVIDENCE FROM THE BIBLE?
But perhaps we should not be too surprised that a second species of human, a hairy wild man far removed from our own naked ‘civilised’ species, may well have existed alongside us since the earliest days and even into the present day.
Wild man with shield (Martin Schongauer, 1490)
We have only to turn to the Holy Bible (Genesis 25: 21-27, referring to the brothers Esau and Jacob) for a highly unexpected yet remarkably precise corroboration of this dramatic cryptozoological prospect:
"And Isaac intreated the Lord for his wife...and Rebekah his wife conceived.
And the children struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to inquire of the Lord.
And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.
And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb.
And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau.
And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau's heel; and his name was called Jacob...
And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents."
Esau portrayed as a hairy wild man, alongside an ape (left) for comparison (Johann Scheuchzer, 1731)
What better way of describing to non-scientific laymen, back in the ancient days when this Old Testament passage was written, the existence and development of two separate species (nations) of human, one of which is modern man and the other the wild man? Perhaps Linnaeus was right after all.
'Wild Women with Unicorn', c.1500-1510, Basel Historical Museum
AND FINALLY:
Woodwose riding a unicorn - one fabulous beast, or two?
Frances.
Last edited by Frances, 4th February 2016 at 10:22.
I'm realy interested in the Unicorn, I have seen many references and connections to Unicorns and Hairy men/women.
Although I am not big on channeled material, Kathleen Odham made a reference to the Unicorn as a creature that exists as an interdimensional entity.
She referred to it on one of Mike Patersons videos.
Frances.
Charlotte Corday by Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry, posthumous (1860). Under the Second Empire, Marat was seen as a revolutionary monster and Corday as a heroine of France, as indicated by her location in front of the map.
As can be seen in this painting, Charlotte Corday has been shown with a hairy hand, distorted fingers and blackened finger nails.
I got this image from Wikipedia, but I have looked for this image on various web sites showing the painting.
All I have been able to come up with so far is the same image showing Charlotte with a hairy hand.
This painting shows the finest details of the death of Marat.
So why the hairy hand?
All I can think of is that it is a photoshopped image that has been copied from site to site.
Or, it is the real image, and a paranormal one at that.
If there are any answers out there, I would be happy to hear them.
The symbolic Hidden Hand image has a greater impact, if indeed the above portrait of Charlotte turns out to be a correct one.
Frances. ('~')
Last edited by Frances, 11th February 2016 at 23:47.
A primal heart still beats in Europe. Deep beneath the gloss of cell phone sophistication lie rituals that hark back to harvests and solstices and fear of the winter dark. Monsters loom in this shadowy heart, but so does the promise of spring’s rebirth and fertile crops and women cradling newborn babes. It turns out that Europe—at least pockets of it—has not lost its connection to nature’s rhythms.
Photograph: Charles Fréger
Strohmann (Straw Man) of German rural mythology has been variously interpreted as a Wild Man, a personification of lust and a symbol of winter.
Photograph: Charles Fréger
That connection is rekindled during festivals that occur across the continent from the beginning of December until Easter. The celebrations correspond to Christian holidays, but the rituals themselves often predate Christianity. The roots are difficult to trace. Men—and until recently, it has almost always been men—don costumes that hide their faces and conceal their true forms. Then they take to the streets, where their disguises allow them to cross the line between human and animal, real and spiritual, civilization and wilderness, death and rebirth. A man “assumes a dual personality,” says António Carneiro, who dresses as a devilish careto for Carnival in Podence, Portugal. “He becomes something mysterious.”
Photographer Charles Fréger set out to capture what he calls “tribal Europe” over two winters of travel through 19 countries. The forms of the costumes that he chronicled vary between regions and even between villages. In Corlata, Romania, men dress as stags reenacting a hunt with dancers. In Sardinia, Italy, goats, deer, boars, or bears may play the sacrificial role. Throughout Austria, Krampus, the beastly counterpart to St. Nicholas, frightens naughty children.
Babugeiri
From Bansko in Bulgaria, the masked Babugeiri, dressed in goat skins, hold a procession on 1 January. They originally symbolised fertility
Photograph: Charles Fréger
But everywhere there is the wild man. In France, he is l’Homme Sauvage; in Germany, Wilder Mann; in Poland, Macidula is the clownish version. He dresses in animal skins or lichen or straw or tree branches. Half man and half beast, the wild man stands in for the complicated relationship that human communities, especially rural ones, have with nature.
Schnappviecher
From Italy, these horned creatures are often three metres high and appear on Shrove Tuesday to spread terror on the streets of the wine village of Tramin. Their origin is unknown
Photograph: Charles Fréger
The bear is the wild man’s close counterpart—in some legends the bear is his father. A beast that walks upright, the bear also hibernates in winter. The symbolic death and rebirth of hibernation herald the arrival of spring with all its plenty. For festival participants, says Fréger, “becoming a bear is a way to express the beast and a way to control the beast.”
Photograph: Charles Fréger
Cerbul din Corlata
Goat characters appear across Romania, but in Corlata, the Stag is the central character, surrounded by dancers who resurrect the figure after it is ritually slain
Photograph: Charles Fréger
Traditionally the festivals are also a rite of passage for young men. Dressing in the garb of a bear or wild man is a way of “showing your power,” says Fréger. Heavy bells hang from many costumes to signal virility.
The question is whether Europeans—civilized Europeans—believe that these rituals must be observed in order for the land, the livestock, and the people to be fertile.
CHARLES FRÉGER Mamuthones, Mamoida, Sardinia, Italy
Do they really believe that costumes and rituals have the power to banish evil and end winter? “They all know they shouldn’t believe it,” says Gerald Creed, who has studied mask traditions in Bulgaria. Modern life tells them not to. But they remain open to the possibility that the old ways run deep.
BOBI
Back from Guyane. I’ve been very impressed by the BOBI, an authentic character of the Creole Carnival of Cayenne, South America. It’s the mythological evolution of a bear, coming straight from Europe, and its interpretation comes with a lot of fantasy. Indeed, the visual vocabulary of this elegant bobi is a mix of a bear , an elephant, or maybe a Dasypodidae (Armadillo). It’s anyway a similar figure as we can meet in Europe in our winter traditions. And in French Guiana, the symbol of the bobi may have another layer, coming from the colonial past of this French region of slavery. The BOBI, out of control, refuses the orders of his master and tries to escape. Originally, the Carnival was the exclusive right of the colonizers. Then, the slaves started their own clandestine masquerade. The BOBI is one of these funny figures which also has do to with the quest of freedom. And that’s a good point.
Krampus
Much like Santa, people dress up as Krampus every year in early December. Unlike Santa, these guys intentionally terrify children. Here are some stunning photographs of men dressed as Krampus during “Krampuslauf” parades in Bavaria and Tyrol:
Trapajón, Carnival Silió, Cantabria, Spain
Trapajón, Carnival Silió, Cantabria, Spain
If you liked these pictures, you may be interested in checking out photographer Charles Freger’s “Wilder Mann” Series, which looks at Pagan traditions still being practiced in Europe and the amazing costumes people wear to represent the mythological figure of the “wild man”. It’s stunning, surprising, and awesome.
Charles Fréger is a fine art photographer based in Rouen, France. His latest book, Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage, was published in 2012.
Frances.
One of the photographs provided, supposedly, by Chronovisor vaticano, appearing in, supposedly, Jesus and some of his disciples, walking down a path through the fields. As for the few photos provided by Ernetti, they have been highly controversial.
Source :- Put together by Frances.
Father Ernetti & The Chronovisor : A Time Machine.
In his little 12 by 12 foot monastic cell Father Pellegrino Ernetti greeted Father Francois Brune one afternoon in the early 1960's. The two men had just met for the first time the day before during a ferry ride across Venice's Grand Canal. During their short conversation, Father Ernetti had said something that stuck in Father Brune's mind. The two, who were both experts on ancient languages, were talking about scriptural interpretation when Father Ernetti remarked that there existed a machine that could easily answer all their questions.
Father Brune was puzzled about what kind of machine could do such a thing and resolved to bring it up again with Father Ernetti in that day's meeting. When asked about it, Father Ernetti described a device he called a "chronovisor" that looked a bit like a television. Instead of receiving broadcasts from local transmission stations, however, the chronovisor could tune into the past to allow the viewer to see and hear events that had occurred years or even centuries earlier. Father Ernetti told Brune that the machine worked by detecting all the sights and sounds that humanity had made that still floated through space. Father Brune wanted to know if Father Ernetti and his collaborators had been able to see the crucifixion of Christ. Ernetti replied, "We saw everything. The agony in the garden, the betrayal of Judas, the trial - Calvary."
Father François Brune: The Chronovisor existed of that I have no doubt.
The French priest François Brune became known in Europe during the late 1980s thanks to a book entitled The Dead Speak to Us. In that book he stated that, by means of elaborate technological processes, it was possible to communicate with the realm of the spirits. But Father Brune also knew about details relating to a certain machine that would photograph the past, designed in the 1950s by the Vatican.
This machine was called the Chronovisor.
In the early 1960s Ernetti stated to François Brune, himself a Roman Catholic priest and author, that Ernetti helped to construct the machine as part of a team which included twelve world-famous scientists, of whom he named two, Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun. The chronovisor was portrayed as a large cabinet with a normal cathode ray tube for viewing the received events and a series of buttons, levers, and other controls for selecting the time and the location to be viewed. It could also focus and track specific people. According to its inventor, it worked by receiving, decoding and reproducing the electromagnetic radiation left behind from past events, though it could also pick up sound waves.
Wernher von Braun & Enrico Fermi
Ernetti lacked hard evidence for these claims. He said that he observed, among other historical events, Christ's crucifixion and photographed it. A photo of this, Ernetti said, appeared in the May 2, 1972 issue of La Domenica del Corriere, an Italian weekly news magazine. However, a near-identical (though mirrored left to right) photograph of a wood carving by the sculptor Cullot Valera, turned up, casting doubt upon Ernetti's statement.
Ernetti was born in Rocca Santo Stefano, near Rome, on October 13, 1925. At sixteen years old he entered the Benedictine abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. He remained there until his death at age sixty-nine. Father Ernetti was a linguist, biblical and musical scholar (a renowned specialist in "archaic" pre-Christian or pre-polyphonic music) as well as a scientist. Father Gabriele Amorth mentions him in his non-fiction book An Exorcist Tells his Story.
Ernetti had a degree in quantum physics.
Ernetti is said to have claimed he constructed a time viewer of sorts in the 1950s, as part of a group that supposedly included Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi. The machine was called Chronovisor, and could allegedly allow seeing and hearing events from the past. According to an explanation by Ernetti, the luminous energy and sound that objects emanate are recorded in their environment, allowing the chronovisor to reconstruct from said energy the images and sounds of a specific set of events from the past.
Ernetti said he had been working with Father Agostino Gemelli at the Catholic University of Milan trying to filter harmonics out of Gregorian chants when they heard the voice of Gemelli's late father speaking to them on the wire recorder they were using (Gemelli later confirmed this incident). This got Ernetti thinking about what happened to all the sights and sounds humans make. Did they disappear completely or did they continue to exist in some way? Ernetti claimed he then approached some eminent scientists and assembled a team to work on the project leading to the construction of the chronovisor.
Through the viewing screen of the chronovisor Father Ernetti claimed to have witnessed a performance in Rome in 169 BC of the now-lost tragedy Thyestes by the father of Latin poetry, Quintus Ennius. He also claimed to have witnessed Jesus dying on the cross.
A book entitled Father Ernetti's Chronovisor: The Creation and Disappearance of the World's First Time Machine, written in German in 1997 by Peter Krassa, explores these claims. The American edition of the book, translated from the German by Miguel Jones and published in 2000, includes an appendix with an alleged "confession" by a relative of Ernetti (who chose to remain anonymous); according to this purported document, on his deathbed Ernetti revealed the real "truth" about the Thyestes and the "portrait" of Christ. The document is purported to be a fraud by Father François Brune of France.
In a 2003 interview, Brune relayed that a few months prior to Ernetti’s death in 1994, Ernetti told him that he had just partaken in a meeting at the Vatican with the last remaining scientists who worked on the Chronovisor. According to Brune, Ernetti told him the Chronovisor had been dismantled by that time. On his death bed, Ernetti reportedly recanted his claims on the Chronovisor; however, Brune theorized that Ernetti was coerced into making a false confession.
Outside of his entanglement with the chronovisor, Ernetti was an extremely respected, but quiet, intellectual whose speciality was archaic music. He spent most of his life researching and teaching this subject and was the author of such respected books as Words, Music, Rhythm and the multi-volume work General Treatise on Gregorian Chant. As a respected clergyman, academic and author, many doubt that his claims were simply fabricated.
Ernetti wrote the book The Likes and Dislikes of the Devil, a collection of his experiences as an exorcist.
On April 8, 1994 Ernetti died on San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, Italy.
Frances.
I am going to order the book as I find the story fascinating and intriguing. I love a good time travel story.
Below is a book review, I have been reading some of them so I just picked a one to post.
I will order the American version translated from German by Miguel Jones.
"Everything about the life of Father Pellegrino Ernetti suggests that this Italian Benedictine priest-scientist was a man of integrity and would not have created a hoax about his work on the chronovisor--a camera that allegedly could tune into the past or future and take pictures. Venice-based Father Ernetti (1925-1994) was an authority on archaic music, a scholar in Greek and Latin, a sought-after exorcist, a confidant of the influential, and an object of questioning by the Vatican and NASA. His work on the so-called chronovisor stemmed from his time at Father Gemelli's electroacoustical laboratory at the Catholic University in Milan from 1952.
So writes Peter Krassa in his fascinating exposé of Ernetti's life and work, translated from German and now expanded with supporting documents--such as the translation of the lost Latin classic, Ennius's Thyestes, supposedly retrieved via the chronovisor. Krassa draws on commentaries from associates of Ernetti, some of them priest-parapsychologists who were excited that he may have found a way to tap the elusive akashic records. Apparently the chronovisor (if it ever existed) was dismantled, its capacity for misuse too great to justify continued experimentation. Fr Ernetti went very quiet in the last decade of his life (by choice or force?), but, in late 1993, he and two surviving scientists from the project presented their findings at the Vatican before four cardinals and a scientific committee. What transpired has not been divulged." - NEXUS New Times, Vol. 7, No. 5, Aug.-Sept., 2000:
"It seems that this past summer I made a grave error; I wish to amend it now. I was attracted to Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor as soon as it arrived at The New Times, but never quite understanding what the book was, I continued to pass on it for review. When I recently tackled it just to better know my draw to the thing, I found myself on a journey that I knew I must share. While The New Times works to review only the latest titles, this one (at just over half a year old) deserves a second look.
"Purporting to be a biography, the book is a great deal more. Yes, it is fascinating enough as a biography — it tells of a scientist/theologian who developed a machine to look into the past — but it is also much more. To set the context of Father Ernetti, to show how his chronovisor fit into the human quest for spirit, the author also offers fascinating accounts of others who have added so much to our spiritual understandings. The chronovisor, after all, purported to grasp both sounds and images from the still-existent waves of the past, held forever in the Akashic records.
"Mr. Krassa does not merely offer examples of what these are, but gives an entire background by telling us of the 18th-century birth of mesmerism and animal magnetism, which effects came from 'a "vital fluid" diffused everywhere throughout the universe.' The author shows the spread of this belief in varied forms, and takes us through the lives of people like Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, and Edgar Cayce to explain where all of this went. He even tells of Thomas Edison’s apparatus to contact the dead!
"Enter Father Ernetti and his chronovisor. The father was widely known for his expertise in archaic music, and for his interest and talent in science and languages. When he began to speak of a machine built by scientists that allowed them to witness the past in 3D, you can bet that people took note. But with fascinating irregularities to the claims, people’s reactions widely varied. A huge reaction set in when Ernetti claimed to have photographed the crucified Christ — and when the photo was proven a fake. Ernetti was a man of good repute, and Mr. Krassa examines why an honest man would lie in this way, why he would withhold information on the supposed machine, and just what was really going on with the father.
"If I may reclassify the book, I’d call it investigative reporting of a fascinating mystery. And, it helps the reader understand better where we stand today by better seeing from where the spiritual movement has arisen. This is one of the most interesting accounts I have read, and I recommend it for those wanting to take an unusual reading trip." -
Steve McCardell, The New Times, Seattle, Washington, Fall, 2000
Frances.
Last edited by Frances, 19th February 2016 at 14:32.
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