St Francis receives the stigmata. From a foil plaque on a 13th- century reliquary. Image: Wikicommons.

On September 14, 1224, a Saturday, Francis of Assisi—noted ascetic and holy man, future saint—was preparing to enter the second month of a retreat with a few close companions on Monte La Verna, overlooking the River Arno in Tuscany. Francis had spent the previous few weeks in prolonged contemplation of the suffering Jesus Christ on the cross, and he may well have been weak from protracted fasting. As he knelt to pray in the first light of dawn (notes the Fioretti—the ‘Little flowers of St Francis of Assisi,’ a collection of legends and stories about the saint),

he began to contemplate the Passion of Christ… and his fervor grew so strong within him that he became wholly transformed into Jesus through love and compassion…. While he was thus inflamed, he saw a seraph with six shining, fiery wings descend from heaven. This seraph drew near to St Francis in swift flight, so that he could see him clearly and recognize that he had the form of a man crucified… After a long period of secret converse, this mysterious vision faded, leaving… in his body a wonderful image and imprint of the Passion of Christ. For in the hands and feet of Saint Francis forthwith began to appear the marks of the nails in the same manner as he had seen them in the body of Jesus crucified.

In all, Francis found that he bore five marks: two on his palms and two on his feet, where the nails that fixed Christ to the cross were traditionally believed to have been hammered home, and the fifth on his side, where the Bible says Jesus had received a spear thrust from a Roman centurion.

Thus was the first case of stigmata—the appearance of marks or actual wounds paralleling those Christ received during Crucifixion—described. Later stigmatics (and there have been several hundred of them) have exhibited similar marks, though some bear only one or two wounds, while others also display scratches on their foreheads, where Christ would have been injured by his crown of thorns. Through the centuries, stigmata has become one of the best-documented, and most controversial, of mystical phenomena. The extensive record makes it possible to compare cases that occurred centuries apart.

Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St. Francis’s day had begun to place much greater stress on the humanity of Christ, and would soon introduce a new feast day, Corpus Christi, into the calendar to encourage contemplation of his physical sufferings. Religious painters responded by depicting the crucifixion explicitly for the first time, portraying a Jesus who was plainly in agony from wounds that dripped blood. Indeed, the contemporary obsession with the marks of crucifixion may best be demonstrated by an incident that occurred in Oxford, England, two years before St. Francis’s vision: a young man was brought before the Archbishop of Canterbury and charged with the heresy of declaring he was the son of God. In court it was discovered that his body bore the five wounds; but the record includes no suggestion that these were spontaneously generated, and it seems he may actually have allowed himself to be crucified, either because he genuinely believed he was Christ, or because he wanted others to believe he was.

Therese Neumann, the controversial German stigmatic, claimed to have lived for years on nothing more than Communion wafers and wine. Photo: Bundesarchiv via Wikicommons

It is unlikely news of this strange case ever reached Francis in Assisi. On the other hand, it is indisputable that the saint’s fame ensured that the story of his stigmatization soon became known throughout Europe, and before long other cases of stigmata began to appear. At least ten more were recorded in the 13th century, and a recent estimate by the former BBC religious correspondent Ted Harrison sets the total number reported since 1224 at just over 400. These include such noteworthy cases as that of Johann Jetzer, a Swiss farmer who displayed the stigmata in 1507, and Therese Neumann, a controversial German stigmatic on whom the marks appeared on Fridays from 1926 until her death in 1962 (though never convincingly in the presence of scientific observers). Padre Pio, a Capuchin monk who is probably the best known of all stigmatics, is also supposed to have experienced a number of other strange phenomena and to have effected numerous miraculous healings. (Stigmatics are often associated with other miraculous events.) Pio was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002.

Until the twentieth century, reports of stigmata were confined to Catholic Europe, but the most recent count of contemporary cases, made about a decade ago, included about 25 cases scattered around the world, including one in Korea and one in Japan. This in itself is a remarkable development, but there has also been a dramatic change in the ratio of male to female stigmatics. Overall, the vast majority have always been women: 353, compared to just 54 men, a ratio of almost seven to one. But according to Harrison’s analysis, that ratio has changed dramatically in the last half-century. Among the 44 cases reported since 1946, it is 2.4:1, and among living stigmatics it is a mere 1.5:1. Harrison suggests that this may be explained “by the changes in the balance of authority between men and women, both in the church and society,” and that in previous centuries women may have manifested stigmata to draw attention to themselves in a society dominated by men and in a church that excluded them from the priesthood. Citing stigmatics who effected local religious revivals or became the leaders of messianic sects, Harrison notes “the role stigmata plays in granting to individuals and congregations a direct spiritual authority.”

Padre Pio (1887-1968), an Italian priest and stigmatic, was elevated to sainthood in 2002 as St. Pio of Pietrelcino. In the 1940s he heard the confession of the future Pope John Paul II and–John Paul recorded–told him he would one day ascend to "the highest post in the Church though further confirmation is needed." The marks of the stigmata can be seen on Pio's hands.

The record shows other patterns as well. Before Padre Pio, no priest had received the stigmata; since then, a number have. Cases appear in clusters: a single case occurred in the Iberian peninsula between the 13th and 15th centuries, but 54 were recorded between 1600 and 1799—and there have been only seven since. And the location of the wounds themselves has begun to change as medical knowledge has advanced. Traditionally, two of the five wounds have appeared on the palms, where countless icons have shown the nails that were supposed to have been hammered into Christ’s hands during crucifixion. It has since been determined that nails positioned in this way cannot support the weight of a body, and that the Romans crucified their victims by driving a nail into the arm just above the wrist. In at least two recent cases, the skeptic Joe Nickell notes, the stigmatic has bled from wounds there.

What all this suggests—even to many Catholic writers on the subject—is, first, that this phenomenon is culturally based. There seem to be no parallels in any of the major non-Christian religions, and, with the exception of the odd 20th-century Anglican or Baptist stigmatic, sufferers are invariably members of the Roman Catholic church. Evidence for the reality of stigmata, moreover, is sketchy at best; Father Herbert Thurston, the great Jesuit authority on the physical phenomena of mysticism, contended that there had been no completely believable case since that of St. Francis himself. Today, the Catholic church itself takes a cautious view of the phenomenon, accepting that miracles can indeed occur while declining to formally acknowledge even St. Francis’s stigmata as miraculous.

How, then to explain this phenomenon? Fraud certainly figures in some cases. Magdalena de la Cruz, the famous Spanish stigmatic of the 16th century whose frequent self-mortification and spectacular wounds made her a favorite at court, eventually confessed to having inflicted her own injuries. Similarly, Johann Jetzer, who claimed to have experienced not only recurrent poltergeist phenomena but also a series of religious visions, confessed in 1507 that his stigmata were fake. Four friars from his monastery were subsequently burned at the stake, and Jetzer himself escaped death only after his mother smuggled him a set of women’s clothes, in which he bluffed his way out of his death cell.

Aside from cases of outright fraud, which may well form the majority of all cases, the appearance of stigmata appears to be an essentially psychological condition whose manifestations are determined by the cultural expectations of the stigmatics themselves. A large number of sufferers seem to have displayed abundant evidence of low self-esteem, health problems, or a tendency toward self-mutilation—a potent mix when combined with exposure to the pervasive iconography of centuries of Christian tradition. It has been shown beyond a reasonable doubt that many have inflicted the five wounds on themselves, sometimes unconsciously, perhaps while in an altered state of consciousness brought on by extensive fasting or intensive prayer.

An example: Teresa Musco, a stigmatic from Naples, endured a lifetime of bad health and a total of more than 100 operations in the years leading to the early death she had predicted for herself. (She died in 1976 at the age of 33—the same age as Christ.) While she lived, Teresa habitually described herself as “a dungheap,” and her diary frequently contained the exhortation, “Lord, use me as your cleaning rag!” A contemporary, Therese Neumann, suffered blindness and convulsions as a result of head injuries, and claimed that she had lived for more than three decades on nothing more than the bread and wine she received daily at Communion. Thurston discussed her case under the heading “Hysteria and dual personality.” The modern English stigmatic Jane Hunt began to display the signs of the Passion in 1985 after suffering a series of miscarriages, and ceased to do so after she had a hysterectomy in 1987.

In at least some of these cases, investigators such as Harrison have argued, substantial evidence indicates the original wounds can recur spontaneously and apparently psychosomatically, generally on significant dates. During the 1990s, for example, an Italian woman named Domenica Lo Bianco exhibited the stigmata on Good Friday. Her fame spread, and Harrison notes that an Italian psychotherapist, Dr Marco Margnelli, has reported videoing Lo Bianco in a laboratory as she relived one incident of stigmata in a “trance state.” According to Margnelli, marks appeared spontaneously on his subject’s arm as she was taped and outright fraud could be ruled out as an explanation.

If that’s true, then Harrison may be correct in suggesting some cases of stigmata may be attributable to psychosomatic causes—in other words, to the power of suggestion. The alternative, proposed by skeptics such as Joe Nickell, is that all known cases, including St. Francis’s own, are pious–or less than pious–frauds. “Experimental attempts to duplicate the phenomenon,” Nickell writes, “have been ultimately unsuccessful [and] I feel that hoaxing–the proven explanation in numerous cases–provides the most credible overall suggestion.” He contends that even men such as St. Francis, unwilling to “perpetrate deception for crass motives,” might agree to “a pious hoax—one that would, to Francis’s mind, promote the example of Christ to others.”

Nearly eight centuries on from that day on Monte La Verna, the jury remains out; its final verdict ultimately depends on a fine judgement of human nature. Fraud or more than fraud? Hardened skeptics feel certain that they know the answer, but, for the more religiously inclined, even a close look at the record has not yet entirely deprived this phenomenon of its mystery.

Sources

Ted Harrison. Stigmata: A Medieval Mystery in a Modern Age. New York: Penguin Books, 1999; Joe Nickell. Lo0oking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions and Healing Cures. Amhurst  [NY]: Prometheus Books, 1998; Herbert Thurston. The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism. London: Burnes Oates, 1952; Ian Wilson. The Bleeding Mind: An Investigation into the Mysterious Phenomenon of Stigmata. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988

The Great Pyramid–built for the Pharaoh Khufu in about 2570 B.C., sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and still arguably the most mysterious structure on the planet. Photo: Wikicommons

There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night alone inside the King’s Chamber, the granite-lined vault that lies precisely in the center of the pyramid. This chamber is generally acknowledged as the spot where Khufu, the most powerful ruler of Egypt’s Old Kingdom (c.2690-2180 BC), was interred for all eternity, and it still contains the remains of Pharaoh’s sarcophagus—a fractured mass of red stone that is said to ring like a bell when struck.

Having ventured alone into the pyramid’s forbidding interior and navigated its cramped passages armed with nothing but a guttering candle, Napoleon emerged the next morning white and shaken, and thenceforth refused to answer any questions about what had befallen him that night. Not until 23 years later, as he lay on his death bed, did the emperor at last consent to talk about his experience. Hauling himself painfully upright, he began to speak—only to halt almost immediately.

“Oh, what’s the use,” he murmured, sinking back. “You’d never believe me.”

As I say, the story is not true—Napoleon’s private secretary, De Bourrienne, who was with him in Egypt, insists that he never went inside the tomb. (A separate tradition suggests that the emperor, as he waited for other members of his party to scale the outside of the pyramid, passed the time calculating that the structure contained sufficient stone to erect a wall around all France 12 feet high and one foot thick.) That the tale is told at all, however, is testament to the fascination exerted by this most mysterious of monuments–and a reminder that the pyramid’s interior is at least as compelling as its exterior. Yes, it is impressive to know that Khufu’s monument was built from 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing on average more than two tons and cut using nothing more than copper tools; to realize that its sides are precisely aligned to the cardinal points of the compass and differ one from another in length by no more than two inches, and to calculate that, at 481 feet, the pyramid remained the tallest man-made structure in the world for practically 4,000 years—until the main spire of Lincoln Cathedral was completed in about 1400 A.D. But these superlatives do not help us to understand its airless interior.

The interior of the Great Pyramid. Plan by Charles Piazzi Smyth, 1877. Click to view in greater definition.

Few would be so bold as to suggest that, even today, we know why Khufu ordered the construction of what is by far the most elaborate system of passages and chambers concealed within any pyramid. His is the only one of the 35 such tombs constructed between 2630 and 1750 B.C. to contain tunnels and vaults well above ground level. (Its immediate predecessors, the Bent Pyramid and the North Pyramid at Dahshur, have vaults built at ground level; all the others are solid structures whose burial chambers lie well underground.) For years, the commonly accepted theory was that the Great Pyramid’s elaborate features were the product of a succession of changes in plan, perhaps to accommodate Pharaoh’s increasingly divine stature as his reign went on, but the American Egyptologist Mark Lehner has marshaled evidence suggesting that the design was fixed before construction began. If so, the pyramid’s internal layout becomes even more mysterious, and that’s before we bear in mind the findings of the Quarterly Review, which reported in 1818, after careful computation, that the structure’s known passages and vaults occupy a mere 1/7,400th of its volume, so that “after leaving the contents of every second chamber solid by way of separation, there might be three thousand seven hundred chambers, each equal in size to the sarcophagus chamber, [hidden] within.”

But if the thinking behind the pyramid’s design remains unknown, there is a second puzzle that should be easier to solve: the question of who first entered the Great Pyramid after it was sealed in about 2566 B.C. and what they found inside it.

It’s a problem that gets remarkably little play in mainstream studies, perhaps because it’s often thought that all Egyptian tombs—with the notable exception of Tutankhamun’s—were plundered within years of their completion. There’s no reason to suppose that the Great Pyramid would have been exempt; tomb-robbers were no respecters of the dead, and there is evidence that they were active at Giza—when the smallest of the three pyramids there, which was built by Khufu’s grandson Menkaure, was broken open in 1837, it was found to contain a mummy that had been interred there around 100 B.C. In other words, the tomb had been ransacked and reused.

The subterranean chamber in the Great Pyramid, photographed in 1909, showing the mysterious blind passage that heads off into the bedrock before terminating abruptly in a blank wall after 53 feet.

The evidence that the Great Pyramid was similarly plundered is more equivocal; the accounts we have say two quite contradictory things. They suggest that the upper reaches of the structure remained sealed until they were opened under Arab rule in the ninth century A.D. But they also imply that when these intruders first entered the King’s Chamber, the royal sarcophagus was already open and Khufu’s mummy was nowhere to be seen.

This problem is one of more than merely academic interest, if only because some popular accounts of the Great Pyramid take as their starting point the idea that Khufu was never interred there, and go on to suggest that if the pyramid was not a tomb, it must have been intended as a storehouse for ancient wisdom, or as an energy accumulator, or as a map of the future of mankind. Given that, it’s important to know what was written by the various antiquaries, travelers and scientists who visited Giza before the advent of modern Egyptology in the 19th century.

Let’s start by explaining that the pyramid contains two distinct tunnel systems, the lower of which corresponds to those found in earlier monuments, while the upper (which was carefully hidden and perhaps survived inviolate much longer) is unique to the Great Pyramid. The former system begins at a concealed entrance 56 feet above ground in the north face, and proceeds down a low descending passage to open, deep in the bedrock on which the pyramid was built, into what is known as the Subterranean Chamber. This bare and unfinished cavern, inaccessible today, has an enigmatic pit dug into its floor and serves as the starting point for a small, cramped tunnel of unknown purpose that dead-ends in the bedrock.

Above, within the main bulk of the pyramid, the second tunnel system leads up to a series of funerary vaults. To outwit tomb robbers, this Ascending Passage was blocked with granite plugs, and its entrance in the Descending Passage was disguised with a limestone facing identical to the surrounding stones. Beyond it lies the 26-foot-high Grand Gallery, the Queen’s Chamber and the King’s Chamber. Exciting discoveries have been made in the so-called air shafts found in both these chambers, which lead up toward the pyramid’s exterior. The pair in the Queen’s Chamber, concealed behind masonry until they were rediscovered late in the 19th century, are the ones famously explored by robot a few years ago and shown to end in mysterious miniature “doors.” These revelations that have done little to dampen hope that the pyramid hides further secrets.

The forced tunnel in the north face of the Great Pyramid, supposedly dug on the orders of Caliph Ma'mun early in the ninth century.

It is generally supposed that the Descending Passage was opened in antiquity; both Herodotus, in 445 B.C., and Strabo, writing around 20 A.D., give accounts that imply this. There is nothing, though, to show that the secret of the Ascending Passage was known to the Greeks or Romans. It is not until we reach the 800s, and the reign of an especially curious and learned Muslim ruler, the Caliph Ma’mun, that the record becomes interesting again.

It’s here that it becomes necessary to look beyond the obvious. Most scholarly accounts state unequivocally that it was Ma’mun who first forced his way into the upper reaches of the pyramid, in the year 820 A.D. By then, they say, the location of the real entrance had been long forgotten, and the caliph therefore chose what seemed to be a likely spot and set his men to forcing a new entry—a task they accomplished with the help of a large slice of luck.

Popular Science magazine, in 1954, put it this way:

Starting on the north face, not far from the secret entrance they had failed to find, Al-Mamun’s men drove a tunnel blindly into the pyramid’s solid rock…. The tunnel had progressed about 100 feet southward into the pyramid when the muffled thud of a falling rock slab, somewhere near them, electrified the diggers. Burrowing eastward whence the sound had come, they broke into the Descending Passage. Their hammering, they found, had shaken down the limestone slab hiding the plugged mouth of the Ascending Passage.

It was then, modern accounts continue, that Ma’mun’s men realized that they had uncovered a secret entrance. Tunneling around the impenetrable granite, they emerged in the Ascending Passage below the Grand Gallery. At that point, they had defeated most of Khufu’s defenses, and the upper reaches of the pyramid lay open to them.

That’s the story, anyway, and—if accurate—it adds considerably to the mystery of the Great Pyramid. If the upper passages had remained hidden, what happened to Khufu’s mummy and to the rich funerary ornaments so great a king would surely have been buried with? Only one alternate route into the upper vaults exists—a crude “well shaft” whose entrance was concealed next to the Queen’s Chamber, and which exits far below in the Descending Passage. This was apparently dug as an escape route for the workers who placed the granite plugs. But it is far too rough and narrow to allow large pieces of treasure to pass, which means the puzzle of the King’s Chamber remains unresolved.

The granite plug blocking access to the upper portion of the Great Pyramid. It was the fall of the large limestone cap concealing this entrance that supposedly alerted Arab tunnelers to the location of Khufu's passages.

Is it possible, though, that the Arab accounts that Egyptologists depend on so unquestioningly may not be all they seem? Some elements ring true—for instance, it has been pointed out that later visitors to the Great Pyramid were frequently plagued by giant bats, which made their roosting places deep in its interior; if Ma’mun’s men did not encounter them, that might suggest no prior entry. But other aspects of these early accounts are far less credible. Read in the original, the Arab histories paint a confused and contradictory picture of the pyramids; most were composed several centuries after Ma’mun’s time, and none so much as mentions the vital date–820 A.D.— so confidently stated in every Western work published since the 1860s. Indeed, the reliability of all these modern accounts is called into question by the fact that the chronology of Ma’mun’s reign makes it clear he spent 820 in his capital, Baghdad. The caliph visited Cairo only once, in 832. If he did force entry into the Great Pyramid, it must have been in that year.

How can the Egyptologists have got such a simple thing wrong? Almost certainly, the answer is that those who spend their lives studying ancient Egypt have no reason to know much about medieval Muslim history. But this means they do not realize that the Arab chronicles they cite are collections of legends and traditions needing interpretation. Indeed, the earliest, written by the generally reliable al-Mas’udi and dating to no earlier than c. 950, does not even mention Ma’mun as the caliph who visited Giza. Al-Mas’udi attributes the breaching of the pyramid to Ma’mun’s father, Haroun al-Rashid, a ruler best remembered as the caliph of the Thousand and One Nights—and he appears in a distinctly fabulous context. When, the chronicler writes, after weeks of labor Haroun’s men finally forced their way in, they:

found a vessel filled with a thousand coins of the finest gold, each of which was a dinar in weight. When Haroun al-Rashid saw the gold, he ordered that the expenses he incurred should be calculated, and the amount was found exactly equal to the treasure which was discovered.

It should be stated here that least one apparently straightforward account of Ma’mun’s doings does survive; Al-Idrisi, writing in 1150, says that the caliph’s men uncovered both ascending and descending passages, plus a vault containing a sarcophagus which, when opened, proved to contain ancient human remains. But other chroniclers of the same period tell different and more fantastical tales. One, Abu Hamid, the Andalusian author of the Tuhfat al Albab, insists that he himself entered the Great Pyramid, yet goes on to talk of several large “apartments” containing bodies “enveloped in many wrappers, that had become black through length of time,” and then insists that

those who went up there in the time of Ma’mun came to a small passage, containing the image of a man in green stone, which was taken out for examination before the Caliph; when it was opened a human body was discovered in golden armor, decorated with precious stones, and in his hand was a sword of inestimable value, and above his head a ruby the size of an egg, which shone like fire.

What, though, of the earliest accounts of the tunnel dug into the pyramid? Here the most influential writers are two other Muslim chroniclers, Abd al-Latif (c.1220) and the renowned world traveler Ibn Battuta (c.1360). Both men report that Ma’mun ordered his men to break into Khufu’s monument using fire and sharpened iron stakes—first the stones of the pyramid were heated, then cooled with vinegar, and, as cracks appeared in them, hacked to pieces using sharpened iron staves. Ibn Battuta adds that a battering ram was used to smash open a passage.

Nothing in either of these accounts seems implausible, and the Great Pyramid does indeed bear the scar of a narrow passage that has been hacked into its limestone and which is generally supposed to have been excavated by Ma’mun. The forced passage is located fairly logically, too, right in the middle of the north face, a little below and a little to the right of the real (but then concealed) entrance, which the cunning Egyptians of Khufu’s day had placed 24 feet off center in an attempt to out-think would-be tomb robbers. Yet the fact remains that the Arab versions were written 400 to 500 years after Ma’mun’s time; to expect them to be accurate summaries of what took place in the ninth century is the equivalent of asking today’s casual visitor to Virginia to come up with a credible account of the lost colony of Roanoke. And on top of that, neither Abd al-Latif nor Ibn Battuta says anything about how Ma’mun decided where to dig, or mentions the story of the falling capstone guiding the exhausted tunnelers.

Given all this, it is legitimate to ask why anyone believes it was Ma’mun who entered the Great Pyramid, and to wonder how the capstone story entered circulation. The answer sometimes advanced to the first question is that there is a solitary account that dates, supposedly, to the 820s and so corroborates Arab tradition. This is an old Syriac fragment (first mentioned in this context in 1802 by a French writer named Silvestre de Sacy) which relates that the Christian patriarch Dionysius Telmahrensis accompanied Ma’mun to the pyramids and described the excavation that the caliph made there. Yet this version of events, too, turns out to date to hundreds of years later. It appears not in the chronicle that De Sacy thought was written by Dionysius (and which we now know was completed years before Ma’mun’s time, in 775-6 A.D., and composed by someone else entirely), but in the 13th century Chronicon Ecclesiasticum of Bar-Hebraeus. This author, another Syrian bishop, incorporates passages of his predecessor’s writings, but there is no way of establishing whether they are genuine. To make matters worse, the scrap relating to the pyramids says only that Dionysius looked into “an opening” in one of the three monuments of Giza—which might or might not have been a passage in the Great Pyramid, and might or might not have excavated by Ma’mun. This realization takes us no closer to knowing whether the caliph really was responsible for opening the pyramid, and leaves us as dependent on late date Arab sources as we were before.

As for the story of the falling capstone–that remains an enigma. A concerted hunt reveals it first appeared in the middle of the 19th century, published by Charles Piazzi Smyth. But Smyth does not say where he found it. There are hints, which I still hope to run to ground some day, that it may have made its first appearance in the voluminous works of a Muslim scientist, Abu Salt al-Andalusi. Abu Salt likewise traveled in Egypt. Very intriguingly, he picked up much of his information while held under house arrest in an ancient library in Alexandria.

The problem, though, is this: even if Smyth got his story from Abu Salt, and even if Abu Salt was scrupulous, the Muslim chronicler was writing not in the 820s but in the 12th century. (He was imprisoned in Egypt in 1107-11.) So while there may still be an outside chance that the account of the falling capstone is based on some older, now lost source, we certainly can’t say that for certain. It may be equally likely that the story is a pure invention.

You see, the forced entry that has been driven into the pyramid is just a little too good to be true. Put it this way: perhaps the question that we should be asking is how a passage dug apparently at random in a structure the size of the Great Pyramid emerges at the exact spot where the Descending and the Ascending Passages meet, and where the secrets of the upper reaches of the pyramid are at their most exposed.

Coincidence? I hardly think so. More likely someone, somewhere, sometime knew precisely where to dig. Which would mean the chances are that “Ma’mun’s passage” was hacked out centuries before the Muslims came to Egypt, if only to be choked with rubble and forgotten—perhaps even in dynastic times. And that, in turn, means something else: that Khufu’s greatest mystery was never quite as secret as he’d hoped.

Sources

Jean-Baptiste Abbeloos & Thomas Lamy. Gregorii Barhebræi Chronicon Ecclesiasticum... Louvain, 3 volumes: Peeters, 1872-77; Anon. ‘Observations relating to some of the Antiquities of Egypt…’ Quarterly Review XXXVIII, 1818; JB Chabot. Chronique de Denys de Tell-Mahré. Quatrième partie. Paris, 2 vols: É. Bouillon, 1895; Okasha El Daly, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings. London: UCL, 2005;  John & Morton Edgar. Great Pyramid Passages. Glasgow: 3 vols, Bone & Hulley, 1910; Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne. Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte. Edinburgh, 4 vols: Constable, 1830; John Greaves. Pyramidographia. London: J. Brindley, 1736; Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs: the Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004; Ian Lawton & Chris Ogilvie-Herald. Giza: The Truth. London: Virgin, 1999;  Mark Lehner. The Complete Pyramids. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997; William Flinders Petrie. The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh. London: Field & Tuer, 1873; Silvestre de Sacy. ‘Observations sur le nom des Pyramides.’ [From the “Magasin encyclopédique.”]. Paris: np, 1802; Charles Piazzi Smyth. Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. London: Alexander Strahan, 1864; Richard Howard Vyse. Operations Carried Out at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837. London, 3 vols: James Fraser, 1840; Robert Walpole. Memoirs Relating to European and Asiatic Turkey. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818; Witold Witakowski, The Syriac Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiskell International, 1987; Witold Witakowski (trans), Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre Chronicle (Also Known as the Chronicle of Zuqnin). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996.

Kersey in 1957. Although Jack Merriott's watercolor presents an idealized image of the village – it was commissioned for use in a railway advertising campaign – it does give an idea of just how 'old' Kersey must have looked to strangers in the year it became central to a 'timeslip' case.

Looking back, the really strange thing was the silence. The way the church bells stopped ringing as the little group of naval cadets neared the village. The way even the ducks stood quiet and motionless by the shallow stream that ran across the road where the main street began.

And, when the boys thought about it afterward, they recalled that even the autumn birdsong faded as they neared the first houses. The wind had dropped to nothing, too.

Not a leaf stirred on the trees they passed. And the trees appeared to cast no shadows.

The street itself was quite deserted—not so odd, perhaps, for a Sunday morning in 1957, especially in the rural heart of England. But even the remotest British hamlets displayed some signs of modernity by then—cars parked by the roadside, phone wires strung along the roads, aerials on roofs—and there was nothing of that sort in this village. In fact, the houses on the high street all looked ancient; they were ragged, hand-built, timber-framed: “almost medieval in appearance,” one boy thought.

The three, all Royal Navy cadets, walked up to the nearest building and pressed their faces to its grimy windows. They could see that it was some sort of butcher’s shop, but what they glimpsed in the interior was even more unsettling. As one of them recalled for the author Andrew MacKenzie:

There were no tables or counters, just two or three whole oxen carcasses which had been skinned and in places were quite green with age. There was a green-painted door and windows with smallish glass panes, one at the front and one at the side, rather dirty-looking. I remember that as we three looked through that window in disbelief at the green and mouldy green carcasses… the general feeling certainly was one of disbelief and unreality… Who would believe that in 1957 that the health authorities would allow such conditions?

They peered into another house. It, too, had greenish, smeary windows. And it, too, appeared uninhabited. The walls had been crudely whitewashed, but the rooms were empty; the boys could see no possessions, no furniture, and they thought the rooms themselves appeared to be “not of modern day quality.” Spooked now, the cadets turned back and hurried out of the strange village. The track climbed a small hill, and they did not turn back until they had reached the top. Then, one of the three remembered, “suddenly we could hear the bells once more and saw the smoke rising from chimneys, [though] none of the chimneys was smoking when we were in the village… We ran for a few hundred yards as if to shake off the weird feeling.” [MacKenzie pp.6-9]

What happened to those three boys on that October morning more than 50 years ago remains something of a mystery. They were taking part in a map-reading exercise that ought to have been straightforward; the idea was to navigate their way across four or five miles of countryside to a designated point, then return to base and report what they had seen—which, if all went to plan, should have been the picturesque Suffolk village of Kersey. But the more they thought about it, the more the cadets wondered whether something very strange had occurred to them. Years later, William Laing, the Scottish boy who led the group, put it this way: “It was a ghost village, so to speak. It was almost as if we had walked back in time… I experienced an overwhelming feeling of sadness and depression in Kersey, but also a feeling of unfriendliness and unseen watchers which sent shivers up one’s back… I wondered if we’d knocked at a door to ask a question who might have answered it? It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Laing, who came from Perthshire in the Highlands of Scotland, was a stranger to this part of the east of England. So were his friends Michael Crowley (from Worcestershire) and Ray Baker (a Cockney). That was the point. All three were 15 years old, and had only recently signed up to join the Royal Navy. That made it easy for the petty officers in charge of their training to confirm that they had reached the village they were supposed to find just by checking their descriptions. As it was, their superiors, Laing recalled, were “rather skeptical” when they told them of their odd experience, but they “laughed it off and agreed that we’d seen Kersey all right.” [MacKenzie pp.8-9]

There the matter rested until the late 1980s, when Laing and Crowley, by then both living in Australia, talked by phone and chewed over the incident. Laing had always been troubled by it; Crowley, it emerged, did not remember it in as much detail as his old friend, but he did think that something strange had happened, and he recalled the silence, the lack of aerials and streetlights, and the bizarre butcher’s shop. That was enough to prompt Laing to write to the author of a book he’d read—Andrew MacKenzie, a leading member of the Society for Psychical Research.

MacKenzie was intrigued by Bill Laing’s letter and recognized that it might describe a case of retrocognition—the SPR term for what we would call a “timeslip” case. Looking at the details, he thought it was possible that the three cadets had seen Kersey not as it was in 1957, but as it had been centuries earlier. A long correspondence (he and Laing exchanged letters for two years) and a foray into local libraries with the help of a historian from Kersey helped to confirm that view. In 1990, Laing flew to England, and the two men walked through the village, reliving the experience.

What makes this case particularly interesting is that retrocognition is probably the rarest reported of psychical phenomena. There have only ever been a handful cases, of which by far the most famous remains the “Versailles incident“ of 1901. On that occasion, two highly educated British women—the principal and vice principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford—were wandering through the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, outside Paris, when they had a series of experiences that later convinced them they had seen the gardens as they were before the French Revolution. Detailed research suggested to them that one of the figures they encountered might have been Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI’s wife, the queen of France.

MacKenzie’s research into the Kersey incident led him to very similar conclusions, and he featured it as the lead case in a book he published on retrocognition, Adventures in Time (1997). Several factors led him to conclude that the cadets’ experience had been genuine: the obvious sincerity of Laing and his friend Crowley (Ray Baker was also traced, but turned out to remember nothing of the experience); the detail of their recollections; and a few persuasive discoveries. Among the details that impressed MacKenzie most was the realization that the house that Laing had identified as a butcher’s shop—which was a private residence in 1957, and remained one when Kersey was revisited in 1990—dated to about 1350 and actually had been a butcher’s shop at least as early as 1790. The author was also struck by the suggestive fact that the season seemed to change as the cadets entered the village (inside Kersey, Laing recalled, “it was verdant… and the trees were that magnificent green colour one finds in spring or early summer”).  Then there was the puzzle of the village church; Laing noted that the party had not seen it after they descended into the village and the pall of silence fell. Indeed, he explicitly recalled that “there was no sign of a church. I would certainly have seen it as I had a field of observation of 360 degrees,” and Crowley likewise recalled “no church or pub.” [MacKenzie pp. 4, 6, 11]   All of which seemed hard to explain, since St. Mary’s, Kersey, dates to the 14th century and is the principal landmark in the district, readily visible to anybody passing along the main street. MacKenzie, basing his case on the history of St Mary’s, interpreted this anomaly as evidence to help pinpoint the likely date on which Laing and his companions “visited” the village. Noting that construction of the tower was halted by the ravages of the Black Death (1348-9)—which killed half of the population of Kersey–MacKenzie concluded that the cadets might have seen it as it had been in the aftermath of the plague, when the shell of the half-constructed church would have been hidden by trees. And, since Laing and Crowley also recalled that the village buildings had glazed windows (a rarity in the Middle Ages), MacKenzie further suggested that the most likely date was c.1420, when the church remained unfinished, but the village was growing rich from the wool trade. [Kerridge p.5]

It’s a great story. But, looked at through the eyes of an historian, is there some other explanation for the events of 1957?

The Bell Inn, Kersey, dates from 1378 and is only one of a number of medieval buildings in the village. Photo: Robert Edwards, made available under CCL

Well, the first thing to say about Kersey is that it is exactly the sort of place that might have confused a group of strangers entering it for the first time. The village is certainly ancient—it was first mentioned in an Anglo-Saxon will of c.900—and it still boasts a large number of buildings dating from the medieval period, so many that it has become a favorite location for film-makers and is noted, by no less an authority than Nikolaus Pevsner, as “the most picturesque village in South Suffolk.” [Pevsner p.290]  Among its attractions are the 14th-century Bell Inn and several thatched, half-timbered buildings. It’s not hard to imagine that these striking remnants might linger in the memory longer than the more humdrum architecture alongside them, producing, over time, the notion that a witness had visited a place considerably older than expected.

As it turns out, there’s also a good explanation for the cadets’ failure to notice wires and aerials in Kersey. The village was not hooked up to the mains until the early 1950s, and then only after protests from the Suffolk Preservation Society, which argued strenuously for the preservation of its skyline. [Electrical Review p.414; Electrical Times p.300]  The revealing outcome of these protests may be found in the British parliamentary papers of the period, which reported that “negotiations have resulted in the overhead line being carried behind the houses on either side of the street and a cable being laid underground at the only point where the street has to be crossed.” [Command Papers p.96]

What, though, of the other details? When I first read MacKenzie’s account, I was worried by the mention of windows, since glass was expensive, and thus rare, in the 14th and 15th centuries. [Cantor p.139]  And while it’s possible that Kersey’s wealth did make it an exception in this period, one wonders why—if it was wealthy—its houses would have been devoid of furniture. There are other problems with the dating, too, not least the discrepancy between the boys’ description (of a settlement abandoned, as it might have been in 1349) and MacKenzie’s “wealthy village” of 1420.

Yet what bothers me most about the cadets’ account is something that MacKenzie never thought about, and that’s the question of whether a medieval village would have had a butcher’s shop. Such places did exist, but they were found almost exclusively in towns; meat was expensive, which meant that most peasants’ diets remained largely vegetarian, and when animals were slaughtered in a village—for a saints’ day feast, perhaps—they were hard to keep fresh and would have been consumed immediately. [Mortimer pp.10-13, 93-4]  Yes, meat consumption did rise steadily in the late 14th century (from “a tenth or less of the food budget to a quarter or a third of the total”), but the evidence we have suggests that beef was only rarely eaten; in the village of Sedgeford, in nearby Norfolk, only three cattle were slaughtered a year around this time. [Dyer pp.85-6]  Sedgeford was only about half the size of Kersey, admittedly, but even so it stretches credulity to imagine a shop with two or three whole ox carcasses in stock as early as 1420, especially when it’s remembered that Kersey had its own weekly market, where fresh meat would have been available, and which would have provided fierce competition.

What this suggests, I think, is that the cadets’ experience is better explained some other way. Some key elements of the incident—the silence, the lack of life—are highly suggestive of derealization, a psychological condition in which the real world seems unreal (as was the Versailles case; indeed, MacKenzie notes that “when I quoted to Mr. Laing Miss Moberly’s description of the trees in the park at Versailles… being ‘flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry,’ he replied that this was ‘spot on.’”) [Evans pp.34-98; MacKenzie p.7]  And the lack of agreement between witnesses (remember that Roy Baker recalled nothing unusual about Kersey) is also striking.

Of course, none of this solves the mystery of why two cadets, Laing and Crowley, were in such close agreement. But here it’s worth pointing out (as I have before) that there is a reason why “timeslip” cases usually have multiple witnesses: the passage of time, and a process of mutual reinforcement as the case is reviewed again and again, accentuate the odd and smooth out differences—just as a study of reports of the Indian Rope Trick published in Nature demonstrated that the strangest accounts were those said to have been witnessed longest ago. [Wiseman & Lamont]

No, I’d love to believe it—really I would. But without better evidence, I can’t quite bring myself to concede that these three youths really did travel back in time.

Sources

Leonard Cantor. The Changing English Countryside, 1400-1700. London: RKP, 1987; Christopher Dyer. Everyday Life in Medieval England. London: Vantage, 2000; Command papers. Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons. London: HMSO, 1951. Vol. XX; Electrical Review vol. 145 (1949); Electrical Times vol.116 (1949); Hilary Evans. Alternate States of Consciousness. Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1989; Eric Kerridge. Textile Manufactures in Early Modern England. Manchester: MUP, 1988; Andrew Mackenzie. Adventures in Time. London: Athlone Press, 1997; Ian Mortimer. The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. London: Vintage, 2009; Nikolaus Pevsner. The Buildings of England: Suffolk. London: Penguin, 1961; Richard Wiseman and Peter Lamont. ‘Unravelling the rope trick.’ Nature 383 (1996) pp.212-13.