The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (28 page)

In a sense, therefore, it is irrelevant whether Fulcanelli really existed or whether he was Jean-Julien Champagne, or even whether Canseliet invented him. The “adepts” themselves recognize this basic principle when they insist upon anonymity. All the classic texts seem to agree that physical transmutation
is
a genuine possibility; yet even this may be
regarded as an irrelevant by-product. Sadoul states that this is why no successful alchemist has ever bothered to make large quantities of gold.

In a
Books and Bookmen
review of Timothy Leary’s
Flashbacks
(November 1983) John Walsh remarked: “Expanded consciousness, Leary maintains, leads to a radically different, wider and more libertarian system of ‘imprinting’ by which the human brain gives itself, in a single blinding moment, an image of the whole world within which it moves, and thereafter draws strength and mental sustenance from such a paradigm”. This could also be taken as a convenient summary of the fundamental purpose of “alchemy”.

18

The Glozel Mystery

Archaeological Riddle or Fraud?

One day in 1869 a band of hunters from the castle of Santillana del Mar, at the foot of the Cantabrian Hills of northern Spain, realized that they had lost a dog. They whistled and searched and eventually heard the animal yelping from a crack in the ground. Cold air blew up from the crack. They made their way down the crack, and their torches revealed a large cave. They rescued the dog and returned to tell their master, Don Marcelino de Sautuola, of their discovery. The Don made his way down the crack, determined that the cave was just a hole in the ground of no particular interest, and decided to seal it up to prevent village boys from playing in it. For the next nine years he forgot about it.

But in 1878 he visited the Paris Exhibition and was fascinated by glass cabinets full of Ice Age tools and engravings. (The last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago.) On his return home, Don Marcelino consulted an expert on the correct procedure for searching for Ice Age artifacts, then set out for the cave armed with a spade and a torch.

His early excavations were disappointing; he found nothing. Finally, nearly a year later, he was rewarded by the discovery of a hand axe and some stone arrowheads. He began to dig with renewed vigor. And one day, when his five-year-old daughter, Maria, was in the cave with him, he heard her call out with astonishment. She was in a recess that the Don had ignored because it was too low for him. But the child had seen pictures of charging bulls on the walls. At first the Don was unable to see anything; then, as he moved his candle closer to the wall, he recognized the eye of a bison. A closer examination revealed that the wall was covered with pictures of bison – bulls, cows, and calves – in all sorts of postures. The one he had first seen was lying on its side, in the process of dying. The ceiling and the other walls were covered with even more extraordinary paintings. When he touched them he realized that the pigment was still wet.

Together with his friend Professor Vilanova, Marcelino announced his discovery to the world; visitors – including the king of Spain – flocked to the cave (today known as Altamira). But when he went to a congress of prehistorians in Lisbon, Marcelino was stunned to discover that they regarded his cave paintings as a fraud. Indeed, all the learned men of Europe denounced them. Marcelino had them reproduced in a book; it was ignored. Ancient cavemen could not possibly paint like that, said the experts; it had to be a confidence trick. His chief enemy, a prehistorian named Cartailhac, even refused him admission to a congress in Algiers.

Years later Cartailhac went to look at newly discovered caves at Les Eyzies, in the Vézère Valley, and found them full of paintings like those at Altamira. Too late, he returned to Altamira to apologize for his mistake; the child Maria, now a grown woman, could only take him to see her father’s grave.

This story, not untypical of the behavior of “experts”, may serve as a prelude to another tale of discovery that began in 1924, when a cow stumbled into a hole in southern France. This happened on a farm owned by the Fradin family, near Glozel, not far from Vichy. The family had turned up a few pottery fragments during the First World War; now, investigating the hole into which the cow had stumbled, they found “a kind of tomb”, containing various pots and inscribed tablets. There was an oval paving of bricks, some of which had melted glass on them, and other lumps of glass lay around. A local schoolmistress told the Fradins that they had found a cremation grave and that this explained the melted glass. But another visitor to the site thought it more likely that they had stumbled upon a Roman or medieval glass kiln.

In the following year a Vichy doctor named Morlet, who was also an amateur archaeologist, came to the farm. He had recently found a skeleton in his own garden. When the Fradins told him that they had been trying to persuade the local historical society to defray the cost of their digging, Morlet made the mistake of offering to buy their finds – and any more they might stumble upon – and told them to fence off the site. It was a mistake because it later led to the accusation that the Fradins had devised a hoax for the sake of money. Yet it seems clear that they had made no attempt to profit from their discovery before Morlet came on the scene.

The Fradins and Morlet now began to excavate the site – which became known as “the Field of the Dead” – together. They soon uncovered an astonishing variety of objects. These included bone carvings of animals and pictures of reindeer on stones, as well as marks
that seemed to be writing. In fact, they unearthed many inscribed tablets. They also found carved faces – each about an inch high – and a figure of a human being standing on an animal. One French writer, Robert Charroux, whose books on ancient mysteries have been credited with inspiring Erich von Däniken (see chapter 8), declared confidently in 1969: “Little is known about the Glozel civilization, except that it must have existed before the Flood, the great cataclysm which blocked the caves at Lascaux and swallowed up the necropolis or religious centre at Glozel, all the inhabitants having died in the disaster”. He estimated that Glozel flourished about 15,000 years ago, toward the end of the last great ice age.

This was the period of the Magdalenian culture, to which the paintings of Altamira and Lascaux (discovered in 1940) belong. Because the hunters and fishers of this period were surrounded by an abundance of food, a population explosion occurred, and large numbers of people began to live in lakeside dwellings. If, as Charroux believes, Glozel belongs to this period, then the tablets with writing on them certainly support his thesis that civilization is far older than we believe – which in turn provides an argument for the “ancient astronaut” theory discussed in chapter 8.

The Glozel pottery makes this thesis unlikely, however, for the earliest known pottery dates from many thousands of years later – 9,000 years ago in Japan and much later in Europe. Some of the Glozel pottery has owl-like faces on it, like French Bronze Age pottery (from around 2000
BC
). On the other hand, Morlet dated certain polished axe heads to the Neolithic (New Stone Age) period, after 9000
BC
. If he was correct, then writing was not invented in the Middle East (Sumer) around 3500
BC
but in France five thousand years earlier.

One noted French authority on the subject was Professor Salomon Reinach, the author of a best-selling book on the history of religion entitled
Orpheus
. His first reaction to the Glozel finds was that they might be forgeries. But when he went to Glozel he became convinced that they were in fact genuine. The skeptics were later to point out that Glozel seemed to support some of Reinach’s pet theories, such as that reindeer lived on in France much later than archaeologists believed, and that France was the cradle of civilization. In any event, he announced his conviction that the finds were genuine, and the result was a great deal of publicity, which made Glozel a tourist attraction.

Other archaeologists reacted by declaring their conviction that Glozel was a fraud and that the Fradins were busily manufacturing “ancient” artifacts and burying them. When roughly built tombs were discovered,
the anti-Glozelians pointed out that no earth had found its way between the cracks in thousands of years and that this seemed unlikely. The curator of the museum at Villeneuve-sur-Lot announced that he had taken shelter in a barn in Glozel in September 1927 and had seen some half-finished artifacts and some unbaked clay tablets. If true, this evidence was damning. On the other hand, as the Glozelians pointed out, the curator of a rival museum might have his own reasons for raising doubts about Glozel.

A commission sent to Glozel by the International Anthropological Congress of 1927 came up with an unfavourable report, declaring that the finds were “of no great age”. Police now descended on Glozel and seized various artifacts, which were sent off to the police labouratory in Paris. Reinach countered by getting a Swedish policeman named Soderman to have the bone objects tested in a Stockholm labouratory. The lab reported that the bone had a lower organic content than modern bone. The Paris police report, on the other hand, declared that the artifacts seemed to be modern and that one Neolithic axe head looked as if it had been worked with a file. But the Glozelians declined to be convinced. When accused of fraud, Emile Fradin sued and won his case – although he was awarded only one franc.

The controversy dragged on, but – as in the case of Altamira – skepticism prevailed, and it became generally accepted that the Glozel finds were fraudulent. And when, in 1953, the famous “Piltdown skull” was shown to be a hoax (see chapter 35), it became the fashion to classify Glozel and Piltdown together. Glozel had also been hailed as a kind of missing link – in this case, the missing link between Old Stone Age hunters and Neolithic farmers – a gap archaeologists referred to as “the ancient hiatus”. Old Stone Age hunters were supposed to have followed the retreating reindeer north and the New Stone Age farmers to have come in from elsewhere, possibly Asia. Reinach was convinced – rightly, as it turned out – that this never happened and that the New Stone Age farmers were the descendants of the Old Stone Age hunters. So Glozel filled the hiatus. Eventually, the hiatus dissolved, like the missing link. And Glozel became not merely suspect but irrelevant.

Then, in 1974, Emile Fradin – who had been seventeen at the time of the first finds – announced that scientific examination of Glozel artifacts in Denmark had proved their authenticity. The technique used was called
thermoluminescence
. When pottery is fired, it gives off trapped electrons that originate in radioactive traces in the clay. Then the pot gradually reaccumulates trapped electrons from radioactivity. If the pot is heated to between 300 and 500°C, it gives off a glow, which results
from the release of trapped electrons. The greater the glow, the older the pot. Samples of Glozel pottery had been given to Dr. Hugh McKerrel of the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, and Dr Vagn Mejdahl of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission. They measured the thermoluminescence of the Glozel pottery and concluded that it had been fired about the time of Christ, some of it possibly eight hundred years earlier.

This, of course, contradicted Reinach’s thesis that the pottery was Neolithic. But it also contradicted the notion that the pottery finds at Glozel had been fired in a kiln on the farm. Some of the tablets with writing were also dated to the same period.

Archaeologists were outraged and accused the physicists of bungling. The BBC “Chronicle” program promptly invited a team of experts to go and have another look at Glozel. Their conclusion was that the new evidence was still at variance with the facts. If the Glozel pottery dated from between 2,000 and 2,800 years ago, then the later examples should have been like other pottery of the period when France (Gaul) was occupied by the Romans. It wasn’t. It was
sui generis –
of its own unique type.

And so the mystery remains. Is Glozel another Piltdown hoax? That is a tempting conclusion, but if we accept it, we have to ignore some facts to the contrary. Charles Dawson, the man who found the Piltdown skull, was an amateur archaeologist, so he may have had a motive for the forgery (although it is still not clear what this was). But when Emile Fradin and his grandfather found the first “tomb” (or glass kiln), they had no reason for deception. And if it is true that earlier finds had turned up during the First World War, then this point is underlined. They made no attempt to cash in on the find, and it was not until a year later that Dr. Morlet arrived on the scene and the Fradins finally began to make a profit from their finds.

Did this tempt them to begin faking artifacts? That is certainly possible. But would an uneducated French farmer have the kind of knowledge to fake pottery, axe heads, bone figurines, and engraved clay tablets? Besides, one of the earliest finds was a brick with “writing” on it. If this was genuine, then the later finds may have been genuine too. And the conclusion would have to be that, at the time of Socrates, Glozel housed a small and flourishing community with its own special culture.

Reinach was undoubtedly wrong. Glozel does not prove that writing originated in France in the New Stone Age. But the (admittedly confusing) evidence seems to indicate that the experts may also be wrong and that – like Don Marcelino – the Fradins may one day be due for a belated apology.

19

The Grey Man of Ben MacDhui

At the 27th Annual General Meeting of the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen, in December 1925, the eminent mountaineer Professor Norman Collie made a startling disclosure. He told how in 1890 he was climbing alone on Ben MacDhui, 4,000 feet above sea-level, when he had a terrifying experience. As he was returning from the cairn on the plateau there was a heavy mist, and Collie heard crunching noises behind him, “as if someone was walking after me, but taking steps three or four times the length of my own”. He told himself it was nonsense, but as he walked on, and the footsteps continued to sound behind him, “I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles down to Rothiemurchus Forest”.