Champ(oll)ion

The precocious polymath who deciphered hieroglyphics was no slouch under enemy fire

Cracking the Egyptian Code The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion Andrew Robinson Thames & Hudson 2018 Pb, 303pp, illus, bib, ind, $29.95, ISBN 9780199914999

This book’s main area of interest is Champollion’s successful decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but his life story is itself notable. Born in 1790, a professor by the age of 19, his childhood was spent amidst the turmoil of revolutionary France. His home town of Grenoble was loyal to Napoleon, and was assaulted by royalist forces in 1815. When enemy bombardment set its buildings on fire, the young professor ran to the library to save its manuscripts. Following Grenoble’s fall, he was removed from his posts as librarian and professor and sent into exile.

Champollion had long been fascinated by the Near East’s ancient languages; at 13 he had begun studying Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Chaldean. Since childhood, he had harboured a desire to visit Egypt; a wish fulfilled in 1828, when he became sufficiently familiar with its autocratic ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha, as to implore him to improve the Egyptian peasant’s lot in life.

His early fascination with the country and its history was stimulated by the Egyptomania that swept France (and elsewhere) after Napoleon’s 1798 conquest of Egypt. Discovered in 1799 by an officer in Napoleon’s army who recognised its importance, the Rosetta Stone was shipped to Paris, where facsimiles were made and circulated throughout Europe and North America. The stone, with its parallel text written in Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphs, proved to be the key to cracking the hieroglyphic code.

Exiled to Paris in 1821, without the responsibilities of his former academic positions Champollion immersed himself in the city’s many libraries, with their papyri collections and the latest Egyptology scholarship. His masterstroke was to grasp that Egyptian hieroglyphs were not ideographic, that is, signs representing concepts. At least, this was not their primary function. Instead, he realised them to be largely phonetic, signs denoting sounds. It was during 1822–24 that he finally achieved the breakthrough of decipherment, despite having begun this task several years before.

Evidently, this had not been a sudden flash of inspiration; but years of struggle during which Champollion had initially followed the old erroneous path that saw hieroglyphs as conceptual rather than phonetic. During this period, the English physician and polymath Dr Thomas Young was also labouring to decipher the mysterious characters. Indeed, it had been Young who, in 1814, first grasped the potential of the Rosetta Stone when he noticed that some of its hieroglyphs were encircled (a cartouche). These, he correctly surmised, were words of greater importance, such as a pharaoh’s name. Accordingly, he sought the corresponding name in the Greek and Demotic texts, thus yielding a tentative transliteration.

Robinson, who has published extensively on writing systems and their decipherment, tells the story of Young and Champollion’s rivalry with a flair for the dramatic, and his book, aimed at a general readership, elucidates the complex subject of hieroglyphs with verve and scholarly enthusiasm. Chris Josifffe

UFO Contact at Pascagoula Charles Hickson and William Mendez Flying Disk Press 2017 Pb, 307 pp, illus, $20.00, ISBN 9781973355427

On 11 October 1973, while fishing off a pier on the banks of the Pascagoula River in Mississippi, Charles Hickson, 42, and his coworker Calvin Parker, 19, claimed to have encountered a large, oval-shaped object, out of which floated several strange, neckless, 5 ft (1.5m) tall, ‘robot’-like beings with wrinkled grey, elephantine skin and three points protruding from their heads. Physically paralysed, Hickson and Parker were apparently taken inside the object, examined and then released. The object then shot up into the sky before disappearing. The experience lasted all of 15 minutes, while its aftermath was to last years.

Hickson and Parker’s encounter, along with the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill abduction in rural New Hampshire, ranks among the best-known of UFO abductions.

At the time, it generated worldwide press coverage, with investigations by numerous researchers, including James Harder of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and J Allen Hynek; Hynek, following an extensive interview with Hickson and Parker, and convinced by their testimony, declared that the two had had “a very real, frightening experience”; he later provided a lengthy account of the event in his seminal The UFO Experience (1974).

The effects of the Pascagoula contact were far-reaching – it inaugurated a massive wave of UFO sightings throughout the United States that lasted well into the following year. Hickson underwent several ‘repeater’ experiences, including additional sightings and telekinetic communications with otherworldly beings.

Unlike Parker, who was repeatedly hospitalised as the result of severe mental breakdowns, Hickson, perhaps benefiting from his experience as a Korean War veteran, faced the encounter head-on; he gave countless interviews, and made high-profile media appearances, including spots on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and the Dick Cavett Show, and participated in writing UFO

Contact at Pascagoula (1973), the rather straightforward book under consideration here.

Originally published by a small press and long out of print, the book includes Hickson’s version of these inexplicable events, as well as transcripts of interviews after the experience and subsequent hypnotic sessions. The documentation presents an evocative, compelling portrait of an uncanny experience that continues to defy reductionist, rational thought, while simultaneously illustrating first-hand how such encounters alter the experiencer.

Numerous sceptics have provided possible explanations for Hickson and Parker’s encounter, suggesting that it may have resulted from a hypnagogic dream state or a collective hallucination – a folie

à deux, or “madness of two,” a shared psychosis – or the result of Hickson’s trauma of war, and, indeed, the principal author of UFO Contact at Pascagoula, reporter William Mendez, dutifully considers all these possibilities, before discarding them in favour of extraterrestrial visitation. Ultimately, however, Mendez’s take, unsurprisingly given the author’s profession, is more journalistic than interpretive. Yet there is more than enough raw material here for the theoretically minded student of UFO history to study and digest.

Flying Disk Press is to be commended for bringing this important historical document back into print.

Regrettably, this new edition is a woefully inept publication, marred by slapdash formatting that introduces an appalling number of typos – the title, for example, is misspelled on the spine – that prove frustratingly taxing and distracting.

Hopefully, the publisher will consider hiring a proofreader (or short of that, simply use a spellchecker) and book designer, to give this classic of UFO literature the professional presentation it deserves. Eric Hoffman

Mystery Creatures of China The Complete Cryptozoological Guide David C Xu Coachwhip Publications 2018 Pb, 265pp, illus, bib, ind, £25.95, ISBN 9781909548510

Every so often a book will come along that is a delightful and unexpected surprise. In his foreword, Dr Karl Shuker states that, despite his decades studying the world’s animal mysteries, China was virtually the ‘Great Unknown’ for Western cryptozoologists. Despite their suspicions that, behind the language barrier, China’s size and diversity of landscapes must include a veritable ark of lifeforms, all that was known to them were a few scraps gleaned from old travelogues and rare accounts by explorers or eyewitnesses.

Xu – born in Beijing and educated in the UK – has lifted the brocade curtain on a zoo more varied, richer and stranger than Western cryptozoologists could have hoped for. He remembers how, at the age of six, he saw paintings of a plesiosaur in the Beijing Zoo and was inspired to read all he could about water monsters and, from there, to cryptozoology generally. The result of his researches over the years, this book divides cryptids into six main groups (Aquatic, Humanoid, Carnivorous, Herbivorous, Reptilian and Winged), within which he presents more than 100 creatures in 98 sections.

Each cryptid is given a description (with Pinyin and English designation) and an evaluation of given explanations (a method that compares favourably with that used by the late William Corliss in his Sourcebooks).

Many of these entries describe biological analogues of existing types; some confirming the presence of Western variants and some most probably new species. What will have forteans gawping, however, are the glimpses of mysterious creatures limited only by the Chinese imagination (and they certainly have a wonderfully rich folklore and mythology to draw upon). The ‘blood-sucking blanket’ of Jiangxi, for example, will excite folklorists such as Michel Meurger. Similarly, among the merfolk, snowmen, man-bears and sword-wielding primates we find the ‘tamarisk babies’ of Xinjiang, a rare race of fairy-like pygmies barely a foot high. Water cryptids glide beneath the placid mountain lakes – such as Tianchi (which we have often mentioned in FT) – leap from rivers or are washed ashore. Here there be dragons, inevitably, but also other giant reptiles, unicorns, weird insects and very much more. So many of them, completely new to us and all brought to life with previously unseen illustrations and freshly-translated eye witness accounts.

David Xu’s ‘Complete Cryptozoological Guide’ satisfies in almost every aspect. Beautifully illustrated with full colour photos and historical illustrations; it is written concisely and clearly with an extensive bibliography.

It is easy to see why it has veteran cryptozoologists singing its praises – and justifiably so!

Here is a book that will make an inspiring addition to the library of any school or any fortean. Otto Minyak

Gorey’s Worlds Erin Monroe Princeton University Press 2018 Hb, 160pp, illus, $35.00/£27.95, ISBN 9780691177045

Edward Gorey (1925–2000), author of The Doubtful Guest and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, was an inveterate collector, though he preferred the term ‘accumulator’.

He bequeathed his 19th and 20th century works on paper to the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, and this delightful catalogue teases out the links between his own work and items from the collection. A figure study by Balthus (1908–2001) is echoed in an illustration from The Listing

Attic, though it is made more fanciful by the accompanying rhyme about a phantom that “beats all night long/ A dirge on a gong/ As it staggers about in the creepers.” A reclining soldier reappears as a Zouave impaling a toddler. The flying fish, ships and chariots in ‘The Admiralty’ by Charles Meyron (1821–68) are transmogrified into “A hissing swarm of bugs” making off with another unfortunate child. In a study of bats by Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893–1967), they are transmogrified into umbrellas.

The fairly academic text is charming (yes, it can be done), but it’s the images that steal the show. Lovely. Val Stevenson

The Crescent and the Compass Islam, Freemasonry, Esotericism and Revolution in the Modern Age Angel Millar Torazzi Press 2017 Pb, 203pp, notes, bib, ind, no price, ISBN 9780999324707

The history of European Freemasonry is most certainly embroidered with false leads and questionable genealogies; likewise, the profligate emergence of Fringe Masonry with its baroque ritual lineages further complicates the historians’ task. If we then add onto this the world of Islam, esotericism, Gnosticism and politics we are truly lost in a hall of mirrors – one that is intellectually enthralling. Millar, whose previously published histories include Freemasonry: Foundation of the Western Esoteric Tradition (2015) and Freemasonry: A History (2005) makes a worthy contribution to the unravelling of this complex narrative in The Crescent and the Compass.

Ambitious, most certainly, yet what we find is a well written survey of the position of mystical theology across the spectrum of Islamic thinking and the co-fraternity it shared within the ranks of European Masonry. Historically, Millar takes us from the late mediæval period right up to the present day, taking in key personalities and organisations that have shaped the history of the somewhat unlikely bedfellows of Islam and Freemasonry. Figureheads such as the 19th century freethinker and mason Jamal Al-Afghani, the founder of the first British Mosque and Moslem rights activist Shaykh Abdullah Quilliam, and Masonic powerbroker John Yarker are considered as representatives of a heady blend of political and mystical agency, as are organisations such as the Shriners, the Zuzimites and the Nation of Islam.

Millar does not shy away from investigating how the influence of radical 20th century right-wing philosophers and ideologues such as René Guenon and Julius Evola and the emergence of a Masonry antithetical to the West were co-opted by radical Islam. The Iranian revolution is considered as an exemplar of how the mystical and the political can combine into a potent expression of social change. In a similar fashion the mythologies that often feed into anti-Western ideologies such as the ‘Protocols’ and the Knights Templar – as exploited by radical Islam or the Ultra-Right – are placed within the broader context of masonic history.

This new edition includes material on the political influence of Julius Evola within radical thought and a review of the books concerning Freemasonry discovered in Osama Bin Laden’s hideaway. With extensive footnotes, bibliography and index this is an excellent introduction to an intriguing area of history and political action and would appeal to readers with an interest in the history of ideas, Freemasonry and countercultural movements. A great read! Chris Hill