The Ark

Snakes that sing, a crozier that talks, a planet that disappears. Accounts of unusual and unnatural phenomena have been recorded throughout history, and Andrew Farquharson of the Blue Mountains has collected them.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Rachael Kohn: Do you have 'Explanomania'? Do you always have to explain everything, even though you don't have a clue?

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn, and I am an Explanomaniac, but on The Ark today, I'm chastened by a man who's not only at ease with the inexplicable, he's collected accounts of unusual, even unnatural phenomena.

Now as it happens, there were people in the past like Andrew Farquharson who recorded the strange events they witnessed or heard about, but they often explained them as portents or omens. Here's the kind of thing that Andrew of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, thinks is significant, even if he's not sure why.

Andrew Farquharson: "The wolf was heard speaking with human voice, which was horrific to all." AD 690. From the Annals of the Four Masters.

"Ships with their crews, were plainly seen in the sky this year." AD 743. From the Annals of the Four Masters.

"In this year, the crozier, the ceremonial shepherd's staff of St Colman, was manifestly conversing with its own young cleric." AD 1178. The Annals of Tigernach.

Rachael Kohn: Andrew Farquharson, which of these is a more plausible account?

Andrew Farquharson: I think these ships with their crews, plainly seen floating around in the sky is probably the more plausible. There are certainly modern accounts of people seeing ships of any kind floating around in the sky. They tend not to hit the mainstream of course. People like an explanation and they may not have one.

Rachael Kohn: Now these ships are probably stars, comets, nebulae, what do you think they might be?

Andrew Farquharson: Well people tend to see things more or less in the spirit of the age in which they're in. We see things in the sky, and we think they're space ships. Well I think there's plenty of reason to think they're nothing of the kind, they're something else. People in the old days would see ships, or wagons or dragons, or whatever in the sky. That made sense to them, spaceships make sense to us.

Rachael Kohn: Well how did you become interested in collecting these accounts of unnatural phenomena, portents and omens?

Andrew Farquharson: Well I was working for many years as a technician in the School of Earth Sciences at Macquarie University, and while I was there the global warming controversy, or issue, started up and was very active and very alive, and I became interested in historic accounts of climate events, or weather events, in mostly the mediaeval period, the Byzantine period in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it grew from there. It now encompasses the British Isles, France, most of the Middle East and the Caucasus, and it essentially came from a desire to see what was in the histories that would help aid an understanding of climate change.

Rachael Kohn: What type of sources are you looking at?

Andrew Farquharson: Well the most valuable ones are what are called Annals, which are a year-by-year listing of what happened in Year X, say. They're the most valuable sources. The serious histories can be a problem because they take themselves very seriously, politically and militarily, and that's what they focus on. They can leave out a lot of things.

Rachael Kohn: Do you find many references of this kind in these Annals?

Andrew Farquharson: Oh, many, many. There's hundreds. I've got over 2,000 references now covering 1600 years.

Rachael Kohn: Goodness. Well how do you go about verifying these stories?

Andrew Farquharson: Well the main aim is simply to take the vacuum cleaner approach. I collect everything possible, including the stuff that seems simply crazy enough to be true.

The other thing is, if you take the vacuum cleaner approach and collect everything, then you start eventually to see correlations. You'll see the same incredibly severe winter that froze the Black Sea in 763 for example, recorded all over Europe. You'll see the winter in the early 800s, where the Nile River froze, you'll see that recorded other places too. You'll see meteorite showers for example, recorded for almost the same day all over the place, although there's occasional small errors, they get the day wrong. But they get the year and the month right.

Rachael Kohn: Do some of the accounts seem to you to be more fanciful than others? Like a meteor shower would be these days, accepted as a natural phenomenon.

Andrew Farquharson: Yes, they're certainly explicable, yes, and we would understand that it's bits of rocks falling out of space into the atmosphere and burning up. And some are fanciful. Mars vanishing for 12 months in the late 700s. I have no explanation for that other than something just got in the way.

Rachael Kohn: What about the sighting of snakes in Britain, can you read that particular sighting?

Andrew Farquharson: Yes, I'll read the first one that says 'Snakes were seen extraordinarily in the land of the South Saxons'. That's simply from the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, from the year 776. Another historian, Geoffrey Gaimar in his History of the English adds a little more. He says, 'At that time, serpents were seen. Never before had any been observed like them. They showed themselves in Sussex. Those who looked at them said that they were white and black, that they became red and green, and changed many colours seven or eight times a day. When night approached, they sang in so sweet a manner that there was no instrument under heaven which men would so willingly hear'.

Rachael Kohn: Goodness. What does one make of that?

Andrew Farquharson: I have no idea. Maybe they were intelligent serpents from Alpha Centauri.

Rachael Kohn: What about the kind of sighting that suggest a more religious message or symbol? Such as a cross in the sky?

Andrew Farquharson: Well there's certainly many of those. Quite a few of them coincide with the beginning, for example, of the Second Crusade, and they're very descriptive about what they see in the sky. They see a white cross with the figure of Christ nailed to it, and blood issuing, and such. And could well be, they were seeing that, it could well be that there was an unusual solar effect, it could have been an aurora borealis, if the thing is happening at night, an unusual aurora.

Rachael Kohn: So religious interpretation can be provided for what is in fact a natural phenomenon?

Andrew Farquharson: It may be the case. One may proceed the other, but it depends which proceeds the other, whether the preaching for the crusade preceded the sighting, or vice versa. One may have encouraged the other.

Rachael Kohn: I imagine that these kinds of sightings arise particularly when countries are experiencing turbulent times, politics, invasions, that sort of thing.

Andrew Farquharson: It was a very turbulent period. Warfare, invasions, occasional famines, shortages of food, persecutions. They were very common, although of course the daily grind of life went on at the base of the social pyramid.

Rachael Kohn: Well 1066 was a watershed moment in English history.

Andrew Farquharson: Yes, it was. And some people saw some very strange things after the Norman Conquest. We have this account:

'In this year, truly, several people saw a sign. In appearance, it was fire, it flamed and burned fiercely in the air. It came near to the earth, and for a little time quite illuminated it. Afterwards it revolved and descended up on high, then descended into the bottom of the sea. In several places it burned woods and plains. There was no man who knew with certainty what this divined, nor what this sign signified. In the country of Northumberland, this fire showed itself, and in two seasons of one year, were these demonstrations.' And that's from Geoffrey Gaimar's History of the English, which can be an interesting source for this type of thing.

Rachael Kohn: Well at least he admits that he's not sure what it means. Is that an unusual thing for someone to say in their account?

Andrew Farquharson: It's moderately common that people say for example, as Gregory of Tours once did, that he has no idea what this means that he was describing. Other people just simply describe them with no overtones at all, with no discussion. They simply state what they saw and leave it at that. Some people do give an explanation, that it portended the death of Count X of Swabia or something like that.

Rachael Kohn: Well with the advents of the black plague, and I guess it ravaged Europe at different times, but I think the first one was the 6th century. That would have aroused some pretty frightening visions.

Andrew Farquharson: Well it was a horrific event its peak, it was killing 16,000 people a day in Constantinople in the summer of 542, so all sorts of weird things are described from that. People having what might be called mass hysteria, community-wide outbreaks of insanity, with people dying all around them. Half of everyone you knew would be dead, at least.

Rachael Kohn: Can you read from one of the accounts?

Andrew Farquharson: This is from the year 542 from the History of John of Ephesus, who was a bishop in the church.

'When this plague was passing from one land to another, many people saw shapes of bronze boats and figures sitting them, resembling people, with their heads cut off, holding staves also of bronze. They moved along on the sea, like flashing bronze and like fire did they appear. Black people without heads, sitting in a glistening boat and travelling swiftly on the sea. So that this sight almost caused the souls of the people who saw it, to expire. In this way they were seen proceeding to Gaza, Ashkalon and Palestine, and simultaneously with their appearance, the beginning of the plague took place there.' And that's from John of Ephesus.

Rachael Kohn: Gosh, that arouses feelings of horror, and certainly of demons. Do you have any indication that some of descriptions fall into the category of demonology?

Andrew Farquharson: Yes, either demonology or daemonology, depending how malignant they are I suppose. Perhaps in this case demonology, people certainly thought so at the time.

Rachael Kohn: Demonology being more malignant than daemonology?

Andrew Farquharson: Yes, daemonology would be for example, if you can identify with the concepts say of earth spirits that might appear as beautifully dressed young ladies at places like Lord's or the ruins of an Aztec mother-goddess temple. She's later called the Virgin of Guadalupe, for example. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that there's more than a coincidence in these things.

Rachael Kohn: Do children ever figure in these visions?

Andrew Farquharson: Yes, there's the Account of the Green Children, as its called. It's got a little more attention recently. And it's from the reign of King Stephen, a very confused period in English history where there was a civil war raging. This account is from the History of William of Newburgh who was writing in the 12th century, and it occurred in England between 1135 and 1154.

'In East Anglia, near the monastery of Bury St Edmund, there is a village. Near this place are some very ancient cavities called wolf pits. That is, in English, pits for wolves, and which give their name to the adjacent village which is called Wolpert. During harvest, while the reapers were employed in gathering in the produce of the fields, two children, a boy and a girl, completely green in their persons and clad in garments of a strange colour, and unknown materials, emerged from these excavations. While wandering through the fields in astonishment, they were seized by the reapers and conducted to the village and many persons coming to see so novel a sight, they were kept some days without food.'

It's eventually found that the only thing they recognise as food is a type of bean; and the account continues:

'By this food, they were supported for many months, until they learnt the use of bread. At length, by degrees, they changed their original colour through the natural effect of our food and became like ourselves and also learned our language.'

They were baptized later, the boy only survived a short while, but the girl lived on to marry. And they were questioned, of course, by their hosts, and they informed their questioners that 'We're inhabitants of the land of St Martin. We only remember this, that on a certain day when we were feeding or father's flocks in the fields, we heard a great sound, such as we are now accustomed to hear at St Edmund's when the bells are chiming, and whilst listening to the sound in admiration, we became on a sudden, as it were, entranced. And found ourselves among you in the fields where you were reaping.'

And there you have it.

Rachael Kohn: What does one make of that?

Andrew Farquharson: I'm reminded of Picnic at Hanging Rock, I must say, without understanding either event particularly. But they do mention the effect of the bells on them. Sound therapy can do interesting things to people, so who knows what happened? Maybe it opened a portal in the dimension or something, for all one knows. Maybe something else.

Rachael Kohn: Andrew, I get a sense that the account is more important to you than the explanation.

Andrew Farquharson: Yes, the accounts are quite precious and I feel that simply collecting them is in a sense an honouring of something that's obscure and that people would simply read over. In some sense, I feel there's a duty for someone to collect this stuff, and not so much to find a meaning, but to simply collect it. As a researcher called Patrick Harper said, 'The cult of explanationism I think has too much of a grip on us'. And it can not so much spoil things, but it can keep us from seeing things perhaps. If we think we know what it means, we won't look at it again.

Rachael Kohn: What about the people who didn't notice Halley's Comet?

Andrew Farquharson: Ah yes. All but one. One French courtier wrote an account, apparently because he was so proud to be consulted by the French King at the time as to what it meant. But everyone else appeared to be looking the other way when we had the closest historical approach ever of Halley's Comet in the early 800s.

Rachael Kohn: Is that because people didn't have an explanation for it, and didn't see it, didn't notice it, it didn't fit into their world view.

Andrew Farquharson: Well comets don't fit into the world view of cosmology as people would understand it then. Their understanding of cosmology was actually more sophisticated than we give them credit for, but it didn't fit in. Comets don't, that's why they're viewed as portents of something, because they follow a path unlike anything else in the sky.

Rachael Kohn: Andrew Farquharson of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, where the night sky hangs low. I forgot to ask him if he found any new clues to global warming.

Next week, The Ark features the faith and fortune of L. Frank Baum, the Theosophist who wrote The Wizard of Oz. That's The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

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