JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
©
2007
Mad,
Bad and Dangerous to Knowledge: Scientific Anomalies in Byron
I
previously
catalogued the wealth of scientific anomalies recorded by Thoreau, an
author so connected with Transcendental Nature that fans and scholars forget
that he carefully observed materialistic little-n nature, too—and found it full
of weirdness. Generations of his readers have failed to see the Fortean for the
trees.
And Thoreau was writing non-fiction. Still more easily
overlooked are the Fortean facts in anomaly-heavy poetry and creative prose
such as that of Poe, frequently glossed over as wholly imaginary tropes. Such
authors are squeezed between the tongs of opposite prejudices: that creative
writers are out of touch with the
“real world,” or alternatively that they should
be; either way, the presumption being that poets never really know what
they’re talking about. Our understanding of science ends up impoverished
because our understanding of art already is.
Remarkably, this myopia produces
misreadings even of Lord Byron (1788-1824), that most worldly of poets, that
infamous stateless grappler with the real, that turbocharged experience
machine, to whom “ivory tower” likely would be an archly crass euphemism for
something witnessed at the court of Ali Pasha.
Granted, Byron was all about personality
and ultimately was his own work of art (and artifice); invoking his name
rightly evokes images of drunken lust, harems, revolutionary guerrillas—“nature
poet,” for most readers, would be far down that list. Famed as Byron is for
adventurous realism, for epitomizing the strange-but-true, his personal heat
singes perceptions of his frequent treatments of the (super)natural. Trying to
recall the natural world in Byron, one inevitably thinks of—well, one thinks of
Byron. Jesus, is he distracting. It’s
taken me four days to write this thing because I keep getting drawn off course
by some fascinating, ugly and/or amusing anecdote in the biographies whose
spines I’m cracking all over my desk.
But Byronic nature: Secondarily, one then thinks of lightning-wracked mountaintops,
tempests at sea, rippling muscles of beasts. That is to say, it is easy to
think of Byron’s works as a property-box inventory of Gothic stage-dressing—the
sort of reductionist formula he despised. But that is how we are trained to
think about canonical poetry: that it treats of grand themes, rather than recording
particulars.
Byron, however, was a great collector of
specifics; and as a social and physical (he suffered from a congenitally
deformed foot) anomaly himself, he had an eye for the same in human culture and
the natural world. His works are loaded with Forteana, many personally
witnessed; and if his presentation is not scientific, it is nonetheless that of
an observant, skeptical, highly educated and well-informed layperson. Where he
does use standard Gothic imagery, he frequently links it to Fortean reality:
for example, the rapid graying of hair under fright in the opening of “The
Prisoner of Chillon: A Fable and Sonnet on Chillon” (1816) is accompanied by a
footnote in which he gives historical examples of the phenomenon. (The entire
poem is itself based on a historical person and circumstance.)
Of course, cataloguing scientific
anomalies means spoiling the drama of pat answers and tossing bombs at
consensus reality. If a reader is perceptive enough to note the Forteana, he or
she may be so prissily upset that they dismiss it anyway.
An early example of such a reaction came,
coincidentally, from Thoreau’s mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his 1840 essay
on the new Romantics, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” Emerson began with
perceptive thoughts about the nexus of art and nature: “There is no better
illustration of the laws by which the world is governed than Literature….Nature
mixes facts with thoughts to yield a poem.”1 But of course, what he
meant was capital-N Nature—“metaphysical nature”—which equates with beauty,
personal morality and “infinite good.” It follows that Byron, that very
physical poet with a feel for jagged edges and flaws, was no good: “His will is
perverted, he worships the accidents of society, and his praise of Nature is
thieving and selfish.”
There’s one claw of that pinching tong:
Byron understood the real world too well. Strip away the moral approbation, and
he stands accused of detailing freaks and recording garish particulars. That is
to say, he is a Fortean, a collector of data that is, as was said approvingly
of Byron himself, “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”2
With passing years, careers built on
analyzing the “Byronic hero” and the Westminsterization of Byron, the opposite
view has dominated: like all Romantics, Byron knew plenty about his own
passions and something about realities that inspired them—predominately,
outdated political disputes, European travel and innovative sexual
practices—and little else. That is to say, there is wide acknowledgement that
he was obviously autobiographical, with the emphasis on that personal “auto.”
But that Byron paid attention to scientists and frequently observed nature and
customs like one? That doesn’t come up very much; one can only suspect that
literature majors are not disposed to link science and the Romantic. (Also
lingering here is the unholy incense of those fiction-worshippers who believe
in a false dichotomy between art and criticism.)
The result is that we are now in an era
when a major biography of Byron can claim that “unlike Shelley, he had little
curiosity about the great scientific discoveries of his day,” a statement so
laughably at odds with his poems—which he personally vandalized with heaps of
scientific footnotes—that it can only be taken as drunkenness on some literary
spirit.3
Biographer Fiona MacCarthy was more
perceptive, even if she wasn’t esoteric enough to recognize Forteana. She noted
that Byron was well-versed in scientific matters, frequently discussing them
with a medical-student friend; the subjects of interest included astronomy,
phrenology, “animal magnetism” and electricity (particularly galvanic
experiments on corpses)—much of which now is considered Fortean, pseudoscience
or both. He even half-jokingly speculated on the possibilities of air travel and
voyages to the Moon.4
Most importantly, MacCarthy sussed out an
attitudinal truth: “Byron himself was a disciplined observer. His great poem
‘Don Juan’ is built upon a quasi-scientific analysis of the human condition,
rejecting the half truths of sentimentality and cant.”5
And indeed, Byron was skilled at
collecting anomalies of human nature as well—customs, traditions and supposed
paranormal abilities. As another biographer said, “Byron defined himself as a
romantic in his intellectual enthusiasm for folkloric archaeology; he was
always fascinated by surviving evidence of ancient popular culture.”6
That included nearly lost Hebrew songs
and the like. But Byron, well-read in history, was also interested in literal
archaeology. Indeed, one of his passions was the then-controversial idea of a
historical, as opposed to merely literary, Troy. Schliemann’s Homer-guided
homing in on the
Crede
Byron was his family motto. Indeed. “Just read the damn thing” is mine. So let’s.
“The Corsair: A Tale” (1814):
Then
to his boat with haughty gesture sprung.
Flash’d the dipt oars, and sparkling with the stroke,
Around the waves’ phosphoric brightness broke….
Lest you not get this allusion, Byron
explains it in a footnote: “By night, particularly in a warm latitude, every
stroke of the oar, every motion of the boat or ship, is followed by a slight
flash like sheet lightning from the water.”
This glowing of the subtropical ocean was
unexplained in Byron’s day and the
“The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale”
(1813): He refers to the supposed self-stinging suicide of a scorpion entrapped
within a circle of flame—a strange folklore belief of the era that Byron may
have popularized. Byron considered the reality of it “dubious,” archly
commenting in a footnote, “The scorpions are surely interested in a speedy
decision of the question; as, if once fairly established as insect Catos, they
will probably be allowed to live as long as they think proper, without being
martyred for the sake of an hypothesis.”
Unfortunately, this apparently ancient
and utterly Fortean question was not settled for at least several more decades
of Scorpios d’Arc illuminating the pages of journals up to and including
“Nature.” The best early debunking I found was from a scientist who, somewhat
to his chagrin, tortured scores of scorpions to death in an array of deeply
bizarre experiments to determine that a) they simply run through any wall of
flame or hot coals to escape; b) they may touch themselves with their tail if
burned or tormented, but not sting themselves; c) they survive their own
lab-induced stings easily, as evinced by a still living self-stung scorpion he
displayed on a table during his revelation of his findings.7
It is aesthetically fascinating, and very
illustrative of Byron’s love for anomalies, that he would use this supposed
arthropod behavior for striking, robust symbolism while also doubting and
wondering about its reality:
So
do the dark in soul expire,
Or live like Scorpion girt by fire;
So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,
Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath,
Around it flame, within it death!
“Manfred: A Dramatic Poem” (1816-17):
This famously supernatural closet drama contains a rather pedestrian phenomenon
of a “sunbow” at the base of a waterfall. Byron elaborates in a footnote: “This
iris is formed by the rays of the sun over the lower part of the Alpine
torrents: it is exactly like a rainbow come down to pay a visit, and so close
that you may walk into it: this effect lasts till noon.” (He saw this
first-hand at
His reference to “galvanism upon the
dead” in Canto VIII of “Don Juan” (1819-24) reflects a long interest in the
then-new subject of electricity and electrophysiology that by that time had
already found its most famous fictional expression in Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Byron, of course, famously was an indirect cause of
“Frankenstein” with his suggestion of a night of ghost-story writing; and
“Frankenstein” is the paragon of Romantic anti-science that clearly has deeply
influenced the overlooking and misreading of the scientific in the literary
canon, including Byron’s works. Byron always acted like everything revolved
around him, and sometimes he was right.
In Canto XIII of “Don Juan,” we find the
age’s inevitable reference to the supposedly singing statue of Memnon; but here
it is likened to a sound produced at a certain time of night in an old
abbey—apparently based on the one that long served as the Byron family home.
The cause of this moaning architecture is not divulged, but the poem does not
discount a possible acoustic anomaly involving sounds of a distant waterfall.
Likewise, the Memnon statue itself is bestowed with a possible rational
explanation: the warming action of sunlight.
This mingling of the wondrously
paranormal and the pragmatically skeptical is typical of Byron and the essence
of Forteanism. And yet, this scientific skepticism toward natural phenomena is
often overlooked in Byron as it is in Thoreau. Probably all great
“supernatural” writers (cf., Lovecraft) are skeptics, for a wide variety of
reasons, the best of which is simply that’s it hard to be a great writer and a
total moron.
This skepticism is most striking—if not
obvious—in the Byronic appearances of ghosts. Apparitions seem fundamental to
the Gothic-Romantic image of Byron, and it is easy to take his ghosts at
credulous face value. But Byron is often more arch and coy than that.
“I say I do believe a haunted
spot/Exists—and where? That shall I not recall,/Because I’d rather it should be
forgot,” says Byron in “Don Juan” Canto XV. A manifesto of supernatural belief?
No. As the thinly veiled reference to Hobbes suggests, it is a materialist
allusion to being haunted by one’s own psychology—one’s depression and fear.
The tone is lighter, but the attitude the
same, in Don Juan’s ghost sighting in Canto XVI. The hero lying abed hears, “A
supernatural agent or a mouse,” Byron jests. He reveals his own skepticism
while pretending to mock that of Don Juan, who had
thought
like most men there was nothing in’t [in ghost beliefs]
Beyond
the rumour which such spots unfold,
Coined from surviving superstition’s mint,
Which passes ghosts in currency like gold,
But rarely seen, like gold compared with paper.
The ghost later reappears—as an
outrageously comedic would-be lover in Halloween-style disguise.
In these scenes, dark or light, we can
see the quasi-scientific observer of humanity that MacCarthy detected. We can
also see the essentially scientific attitude that skepticism, far from
destroying wonder, enhances it by filtering out delusion and stunning us with
truth. Surely the ghosts of one’s own mind are more astonishing than those of
children’s tales.
It is thus no surprise that Byron was an
astute collector of human anomalies along with natural ones.
A compiler of legend and lore encountered
in his travels, Byron famously introduced the vampire to modern European/American
consciousness. Years before his fragmentary attempts at a vampire story—the
product of the same parlor-game session that bore “Frankenstein”—were
appropriated into “The Vampyre,” he explained in a footnote to “The Giaour”
that the “superstition” was widespread in the Levant, providing some
historical, etymological and, of course, personal background.9
Like many modern Forteans and
paranormalists, Byron was far more credulous about supposed powers of
precognition.
In “Don Juan” Canto VI, he speaks
favorably of prophetic dreams:
I’ve
known some odd ones which seemed really planned
Prophetically, or that which one deems
‘A strange coincidence,’ to use a phrase
By which such things are settled nowadays.
And in a lengthy footnote in “The Giaour,”
he explains the meaning of “second hearing”—clairaudience—by recounting a
remarkable, if incredible, personal story. A fellow rider one day reported
hearing a phantom gunshot, a precognitive warning of impending attack. Seeing
no sign of danger, Byron dismissed the warning as delusion, but said he later
learned an attack was indeed planned that day that did not work out as planned.
It is not clear that Byron truly believed this was more than coincidence, but
he evidently found it remarkable. He also notes in nearly scholarly fashion
that, while running into this bizarre form of ESP, he never encountered the
presumably more commonplace superstition of “second sight” in “the East.”
In the realm of the philosophical rather
than the observational, the conclusion of “Don Juan” features an extended
defense of free thought that could serve as an epitaph for Fort. Neither deep
nor original, it is nonetheless stirring praise for innovation; it can be
primarily read as the protest of a frequently censored poet, but is overtly
science-minded, citing such paradigm shifts as the end of witch-burning and the
vindication of Galileo:
There
is a commonplace book argument,
Which glibly glides from every vulgar tongue
When any dare a new light to present:
‘If you are right, then everybody’s wrong.’
Suppose the converse of this precedent
So often urged, so loudly and so long:
‘If you are wrong, then everybody’s right.’
Was ever everybody yet so quite?
Therefore I would solicit free discussion
Upon all points, no matter what or whose,
Because as ages upon ages push on,
The last is apt the former to accuse
Of pillowing its head on a pincushion,
Heedless of pricks because it was obtuse.
What was a paradox becomes a truth or
A something like it….
That is simple Forteanism. Byron could
also be complex, combining his prodigious book-learning, love of anomalies and
satirical skepticism—as in his allusion to Georges Cuvier in “Don Juan” Canto
IX.
Cuvier was a great proponent of
catastrophism, which fell out of favor and as recently as 15 years ago was
considered Fortean material, only now finding favor once again as it drops the
Biblical posturing and worries us about meteorites. Musing about mental chaos,
Byron alludes to the Cuvierian idea of global catastrophes affecting the
history of life on Earth, suggesting the same may happen with human thoughts:
So
Cuvier says. And then shall come again
Unto the new creation, rising out
From our old crash, some mystic, ancient strain
Of things destroyed and left in airy doubt,
Like to the notions we now entertain
Of Titans, giants, fellows of about
Some hundred feet in height, not to say miles,
And mammoths and your wingèd crocodiles.
He goes on to ponder that one day we
shall be fossil freaks ourselves: “I say, will these great relics, when they
see ’em,/Look like the monsters of a new museum?”
If it didn’t rhyme, it could be mistaken
for a page of Fort. Using mainstream science of the day to fruitfully blur or
entwine perceptions of physical and psychological freaks—to reconsider the very
definition of “freak”—is highly sophisticated stuff.
Maybe part of the problem is that Byron
is often so funny he doesn’t seem
sophisticated. “Don Juan” Canto XI gleams with his hilarious distillation of
one of the great archaeological enigmas: “The Druid’s groves are gone—so much
the better./Stonehenge is not, but what the devil is it?”
Poets are supposed to heave shovelfuls of
numinosity to fill a round hole like
In fact, a still-significant
archaeological anomaly appears repeatedly in Byron, used by him as an effective
symbol, yet appears to have been overlooked by scholars—probably because they
had no idea what he was talking about and presumed he didn’t, either.
Byron lived in an era of European
Egyptomania informed by the archaeology that followed Napoleon’s Egyptian
campaign, and his works are replete with pyramids.10 Pyramids are,
of course, tombs; for Byron they are symbolic of mortal vanity—so impressive,
yet so totally burglarized and decayed, the bodies within them lost to time.
However, in at least two cases Byron
sharpens this criticism with cryptic suggestions that the very purpose of the
pyramids is itself lost, making them vain cipher-monuments indeed.
In “Don Juan” Canto VIII, he refers
obscurely to “Guessing at what shall happily be hid/As the real purpose of a
pyramid.”
In “Sardanapalus: A Tragedy” (1821), he
elaborates on his pyramid doubts without really clarifying them:
We
leave a nobler monument than
Hath piled in her brick mountains, o’er dead kings
Or kine, for none know whether those proud piles
Be for their monarch, or their ox-god Apis:
So much for monuments that have forgotten
Their very record!
To paraphrase Byron, what the devil is
this?! What kind of ox-amid theory is he referring to with such dripping
sarcasm? Surely it is, and always has been, well-known that whatever lingering mysteries
and subsidiary significances attached to Egyptian pyramids, they were
fundamentally pharaonic tombs. Byron himself elsewhere admits as much.
I bounced this idea off Prof. Salima
Ikram, chair of the Egyptology department at the American University in Cairo
and a renowned expert in ancient Egyptian funerary practices.11 I
did not provide her with Byron’s lines, but paraphrased them and asked whether
this was a valid controversy of the day or just some sort of confusion on
Byron’s part—say, involving the non-pyramidal burial complexes for sacred
bulls.
Probably just confusion, Ikram said,
noting that “there was always debate as to the function of pyramids.” (The
debate never really seriously questioned the pharaonic uses, however, which
remained the focus of cult worship into late Roman times, but rather, as today,
involved mystic theories and forced mergers with Biblical lore.12)
And, she added: “Also poetic license…”
And here we go again. Poets are creative
liars; Byron was likely yet another stumbler into the mumbo-jumbo imaginings of
what eminent Egyptologist Mark Lehner—himself a former psychic-worshipping
looney—calls “pyramidiots.”13
But I had learned to Crede Byron, and did some excavating of my own. It turns out that
Byron was referring to an actual discovery and authentic mystery from the
beginnings of modern pyramidology. That is to say, he knew exactly what he was
talking about.
Between 1809 and 1818,
Among the pioneers was the Italian
Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a former circus strongman and hydraulic engineer who
was a pretty Byronic character himself. He arrived at the great pyramids of
Belzoni discovered the lost and hidden
original entrance to the pyramid of Khafre and became almost certainly the
first European (and surely the first modern) to enter the burial chamber
within. But to his disappointment, anything that once remained had been
plundered—according to graffiti within the chamber—by Arab explorers, likely
sometime between A.D. 1000 and 1200. The granite lid of the sunken sarcophagus
was split.
As Belzoni himself later recounted, he
first saw within the sarcophagus only “a great quantity of earth and stones”—or
“rubbish,” as he considered it.15 But the next day, a young man
visiting the site “rummaged [through] the rubbish inside the sarcophagus…[and]
found a piece of bone, which we supposed to belong to a human skeleton. On
searching farther, we found several pieces, which, having been sent to
There you have it: bull bone fragments
found within a sarcophagus of one of the great pyramids of
Writing about the find in 1820, Belzoni
saw fit to correct popular misconceptions—corrections that indicate the
bull-bone aspect made quite a splash at the time. (Indeed, he notes that part
of the reason for writing his book is because his discoveries launched so many
crazy rumors.)
For one thing, he didn’t think there was
anything funny about it. “Some inconsequential persons, however, who would not
scruple to sacrifice a point in history, rather than lose a bon mot, thought themselves mighty
clever in baptizing the said bones those of a cow, merely to raise a joke. So
much for their taste for antiquity.” Belzoni, himself a gigantic bull of a man,
was not about to have bullishness feminized away.
More significantly, the bull-bone finding
influenced some logical speculations about the giant Egyptian sarcophagi: “It
has been stated also, that it might be supposed these large sarcophagi were
made to contain the bones of bulls,” thus explaining their enormity. But he
disagreed, noting that intact burials of ancient Egyptians often involved
multiple coffins nested within one another (as we now so famously know from
Tutankhamun), thus necessitating an oversized sarcophagus.
This still leaves us with the question of
what bull bones were doing in Khafre’s sarcophagus. It remains a mystery, as do
other anomalous remains found in other pyramids and mausoleums.
Lehner notes the case of another pyramid
where the burial chamber clearly had been plundered, yet there were human bones
dating to millennia later along with an apparently anachronistic coffin lid
bearing the pharaoh’s name. That anomaly could reflect a cult’s ritual
renovation or reuse of the pyramid’s tomb, Lehner notes. As for the bull bones,
Lehner says the former director the German Institute of Archaeology in Cairo
suggested that they “were probably an offering thrown into the sarcophagus at
some unknown later date by intruders, long after the king’s body had been
robbed and lost.”
Belzoni himself did not theorize about
the bull bones, but he was a firm believer that the pyramids were pharaonic
tombs and clearly considered the bones as some kind of trash, not an official
burial and certainly not the original one.
Byron’s firmest reference to the bull
bones came after the publication of Belzoni’s corrections; unless the poet was
insanely obstinate even by his own standards, he clearly did not follow the
controversy closely enough to have read Belzoni for the update. (Byron also
would not have been in
So the peripatetic Byron did not pursue
the findings with the consistency of a scholar; and, as Ikram suggested, he
undoubtedly flashed that poetic license in his casual assertion of total
ambiguity about pyramid purposes. Nonetheless, he offers a wonderful
freeze-frame of a scientific anomaly significant to the historiography of
Egyptology.
Indeed, it remains a significant anomaly
today, and indicative of how even experts can focus on the origins of the
pyramids to the detriment of their other 4,500 years of use. As Lehner says,
“These mysterious facts [including the bull-bone find]…hint that the history of
the pyramids is not always as straightforward as Egyptologists may think.”
In turn, this only adds wisdom to the
futility of monuments Byron persipaciously saw lurking in this anomaly. One of
the first celebrities in the modern sense and a participant in that most
immortalizing of arts, Byron was acutely aware that his pyramidical musings
applied to himself. Right before one such pyramid allusion in “Don Juan,” he
cynically jokes about modern forms of glory:
What
is the end of fame? ’Tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper.
Some liken it to climbing up a hill,
Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour.
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.
Byron is still famous, and most pictures of
him are actually pretty dashing. But in our narrow focus here, we can already
see a significant aspect of Byron being forgotten, overlooked,
miscomprehended—an entire monument of scientific anomalies regarded not as a
lordly tomb, but as a different sort of bull.
1
Published in “The Dial,” October 1840, via www.walden.org/Institute/thoreau/about2/E/Emerson_Ralph_Waldo/Writings/Essays/Thoughts%20of%20Modern%20Literature.htm;
also excerpted in “Byron’s Poetry,” Frank D. McConnell, ed.
2 The words of his future lover, Lady Caroline
Lamb, in her diary. For a typical citation with authentic punctuation, see
“Byron: Life and Legend” by Fiona MacCarthy. Incidentally, the story of their
romance is, like virtually everything about Byron’s life, fascinating verging
on the incredible and well worth reading up on; it includes her convincingly
dressing as one of her own pages to satisfy a mutual crossdressing kink, and
her eventual nervous breakdown after coincidentally encountering Byron’s
funeral procession on the street.
3 “Byron:
Child of Passion, Fool of Fame” by Benita Eisler.
4 MacCarthy, op. cit.
5 MacCarthy, op. cit.
6 Eisler, op. cit.
7 “Note on the (Alleged) Suicide of the Scorpion”
by C. Lloyd Morgan, “The Transactions of the South African Philosophical
Society” (1878-88), Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 19-23, via Google Books/University of
Michigan.
8 MacCarthy, op. cit.
9 Similarly, in a footnote to “The Giaour,” he
describes the Levantine superstition of the “evil eye,” “of which the imaginary
effects are yet very singular on those who conceive themselves affected.”
10 On the Egyptology, “The Complete Pyramids” by Mark
Lehner.
11 Incidentally, Ikram’s specialty is animal
mummies. I highly recommend her project’s web site: www.animalmummies.com. Oh, and it’s
not just animals! Did you know there were food mummies?
Millennia before microwaves, latch-key kids and the back of my freezer, no
less.
12 Another Egyptologist, Prof. James Allen at
13 Lehner, op. cit.
14 Most of the following third-person detail comes
from Lehner, op. cit., as do the following quotes and observations attributed
to him. Meanwhile, here is some bonus
An actual Egyptian mummy tomb curse (from the so-called
“Pyramid Texts”): “As for anyone who shall lay a finger on this pyramid and
this temple which belong to me and to my double…, he will be judged by the
Ennead and he will be nowhere and his house will be nowhere; he will be one proscribed,
one who eats himself.”
The Sphinx at
The
15 Belzoni’s own words here and following are from
his “Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids,
Temples, Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia; And of a Journey to the
Coast of the Red Sea, in Search of the Ancient Berenice; And Another to the
Oasis of Jupiter Ammon,” via Google Books/Harvard University; also available
through the Bibliothèque nationale de France at http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/CadresFenetre?O=NUMM-105346&M=notice.
Belzoni’s book has at least a couple Fortean tidbits as well, including a
description of a mirage.
16 “Gods,
The Byron
texts used for this column are the Penguin Classics editions of “Don Juan”
(T.G. Steffan, E. Steffan and W.W. Pratt, eds.) and “Selected Poems” (Susan J.
Wolfson and Peter J. Manning, eds.). Significant sources not cited in the text
or footnotes include “The Oxford Companion to Philosophy,” Ted Honderich, ed.;
and “The Reputed Suicide of Scorpions” by Alfred G. Bourne, “Proceedings of the
Royal Society of London” (1887), Vol. 42, pp. 17-22, via JSTOR at http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0370-1662(1887)42%3C17%3ATRSOS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R.
For citations on Fort and his latter-day follower William Corliss, follow the
link in the text to the Thoreau column. As in that column, I follow Corliss in
using “anomalous” (as well as “Fortean”) to refer to the rare as well as the
unexplained. A book I wish had a reason to cite was “The Enigmatic Netherworld
Books of the Solar-Osirian Unity.” Posted Nov. 14, 2007. Updated Nov. 17, 2007.