'Myth or Legend?' edited by Glyn Daniel

In 1953-54 a series of twelve talks was given on BBC Radio under the heading ‘Myth or Legend?’ They were organised by the leading archaeologist Glyn Daniel, and were gathered, pretty much verbatim, in an anthology which he edited under that title (1955), which now seems somewhat uncommon. The contributors included Leonard Woolley, T.C. Lethbridge and Stuart Piggott.

Daniel drew a distinction between myth, which is wholly invented, and legend, which may, though fanciful, have a kernel of historical truth. He claimed these definitions to be well-known in academic circles: I don’t know whether they still are, but in common use I would say they have since become somewhat elided.

Though the idea for the series began with Donald Boyd in the BBC Talks Department, as Daniel acknowledges in his preface, it fitted nicely with Daniel’s drive for public education in his fields of archaeology and ancient history. He was to become a familiar face and voice on the BBC both as a populariser of his fields of study and as a ‘personality’, presenting a series on archaeology, Buried Treasure, and hosting the genteel quiz show ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?’. Indeed, the title of Myth or Legend? has an air of the game show about it: ‘and now, over to our panel, what do you think? Avalon, myth or legend? What about you, Dr Snortleberry? Where do you plump on this one?’

The inquisitorial format also suited his robust sceptical approach. He was later notorious in earth mysteries circles for refusing a paid advertisement for The Ley Hunter in Antiquity, the academic journal he edited: he wasn’t having any truck with the more speculative aspects of amateur antiquarianism.

The twelve subjects of the talks in the book are: Lyonesse and other drowned lands; Troy; Glastonbury and the Holy Grail; The Flood; Theseus and the Minotaur; Tara; Tristan and Isolt; St George and the Dragon; The Isles of the Blessed; The Druids and Stonehenge; Atlantis; and The Golden Bough. This offers a a good mixture of classical and local themes. The most obvious omission from British myths or legends is Robin Hood. I suspect this was because the focus of the talks is archaeological and the medieval outlaw wasn’t considered ancient enough. Each talk is followed by suggestions for further reading, sometimes in obscure monographs or other languages: evidently the interested reader was trusted to be undaunted by these.

The talks are brisk, informal, friendly, inquisitive and provide an excellent primer for their subjects. They are clear in saying what is known, what is probable or possible, and what is unsupported by evidence. I think they provide a useful context for the public interest in myth and legend in the period immediately before publication of The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). I wonder whether this popular wireless series, discussing with enthusiasm magical realms, epic warfare, mystical talismans, fabulous beasts and ancient English and Celtic tales, might have prepared the ground with some readers for a sympathetic response to Tolkien’s work.

The talks have a strong focus on their individual subjects, but there is less attention to comparisons and contrasts between them. They do not discuss very much why certain legends seize the popular imagination and endure, and what further dimensions of thought they might evoke. For example, the idea of an earthly paradise is implicit in several of the themes here: Lyonesse, Tara, Avalon, Atlantis, the Blessed Isles. What does that tell us about human longings and aspirations, or about art and spirituality? This is not really part of their concern in these talks, and so sometimes we may feel that, in exploring the evidence for the existence of a myth or legend, they miss its essence.

In his King Arthur’s Avalon, The Story of Glastonbury (1957), Geoffrey Ashe used as the epigraph for his book a quotation from the historian E.A. Freeman: ‘We need not believe that the Glastonbury legends are records of facts; but the existence of those legends is a very great fact.’ While myths and legends might not directly represent history, they illuminate the imaginative and inspirational world of their weavers and hearers and readers, and they may still have rich and mysterious things to tell us.

(Mark Valentine)

A New Issue of 'The Snarkologist'

The Institute of Snarkology, dedicated to the study and celebration of Lewis Carroll's splendid nonsense poem 'The Hunting of the Snark' (1876), has recently published the latest issue (or 'fit') of its journal The Snarkologist. Volume 1, Fit 9, edited by Dayna Nuhn Lozinski, offers 40 pages of commentary and speculation, with articles including "When is a Raven like a Boojum?" by Jeremy Secker; Charlie Lovett on "Is This the Weirdest Snark Ever Published?"; and Catherine Richards on "Hunting of the Appendix - A Snark Parody". This issue also includes my own fantastical prose vignette "Bellman's Map". 

(Mark Valentine)

The Tarot in England

It is now fairly well established that Tarot cards were first created as a game in the courts of Renaissance Italy and it was not until early 19^th century France that they began to be invoked for use in fortune-telling and ritual magic. From here this idea spread, via the writings of Eliphas Levi, to Britain and was soon adopted and elaborated by occultists there. The pack that was most often found in England in this period was the Marseilles Tarot, imported from France and sold by esoteric booksellers.

Some late Victorian magicians and writers tried their hand at creating their own version of the Tarot, as described by Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett in their A History of the Occult Tarot (2019). Kenneth Mackenzie, whom they describe as an English disciple of Levi, had by 1879 ‘formed his intention of writing the book entitled The Game of Tarot: Archaeologically and Symbolically Considered’, and the prospectus for this said it would include a set of 78 illustrations in a case: as they note, ‘a complete Tarot pack, in other words’. But neither book nor deck ever appeared.

In 1886, Arthur Machen’s close friend, the occult scholar A.E. Waite, published selected translations from Levi’s work as The Mysteries of Magic, with major sections on the Tarot, which Decker and Dummett regard as ‘the fountain-head of modern occultist theories of the Tarot’. Around this time, Frederick Holland, a kabbalist and alchemist, devised a Tarot for his own use, and in 1887 published a book on the subject, The Revelation of the Shechinah. At this time also Wynn Westcott, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, drew ink sketches of the Tarot trumps for his own use. His colleague in the magical order, S.L. MacGregor Mathers, coalesced all this activity and speculation in his The Tarot: Its Occult Signification, Use in Fortune-Telling and Method of Play (1888). From then onwards, the Tarot was inextricably linked with magic and prophecy.

Waite and Pamela Colman Smith then designed a new pack, the first finished and published English deck, issued by the occult imprint Rider (1909), and this has become the classic version in Britain. By the time of T S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), with its celebrated allusion to Madame Sosostris and her ‘wicked pack of cards’, the use of the tarot for fortune-telling had clearly become well-known, at least in literary and artistic circles. Helen Simpson’s Tarot novel Cups Wands and Swords followed in 1927 and Charles Williams’ occult thriller The Greater Trumps in 1932.

Other occultists in England also developed Tarot designs: but Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth deck, illustrated by Lady Frieda Harris, was not published until much later; and a further possible pack (or at least some designs for one), begun by the esoteric author Bernard Bromage in the Fifties (as I describe in an essay in Sphinxes and Obelisks, 2021) was never issued, and is now presumed lost. In his memoir I Called It Magic (2011), Gareth Knight, like Bromage a follower of Dion Fortune, recalls how hard it was to find Tarot packs in England in the post-war period and his own plans to produce one in the early Sixties. There are now many versions and variants, including what are known more generally as ‘oracle cards’.

However, there was almost certainly no historical basis for some Victorian (and modern) occultists to claim that the Tarot had Ancient Egyptian or even Babylonian origins, except in a very wide sense that certain symbols (such as the sun, moon and stars) are common to almost all early faiths. As Decker and Dummett assert (pg 177), ‘The idea persists that Tarot cards originated in ancient Egypt. No facts support this theory, while many refute it, as we have emphasised.’ That idea took hold because ancient lineage was important to these circles, since it was seen to confer authority.

Is all this esoteric work, in which a card game has become a potent magical tool, founded then upon a misconception? Well, not quite. We should note two points that make the original meaning and use of the Tarot not quite so clear-cut as all that. The first is that any hard distinction between games and magic is a modern attitude. As Nigel Pennick has described in his book The Games of the Gods: The Origin of Board Games in Magic and Divination (1989), these activities were often intertwined. Players and seers in pre-modern times did not assume that games, including cards, could only be used for one thing or indeed that they could not be deployed for different purposes simultaneously: a game might also be a ritual. Chess, for example, has sometimes been thought of in this way, an idea I explore in my story ‘A Chess Game at Michaelmas’ (Lost Estates, 2024). (My own Tarot story is ‘The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things’ about a Sancreed Tarot).

Secondly, the imagery on the cards may have been enjoyed by patrons principally for artistic or aesthetic reasons, but it clearly draws on mystical, metaphysical and magical symbols. And, again, past ages did not necessarily draw any sharp distinction between art and magic. So we should keep in view that the Tarot cards come out of a cultural milieu in which they may always have been seen as having some magical resonances, even if they were not made primarily for ritual or divinatory purposes.

Moreover, in the later 20^th century and after, while this hankering for ancient, traditional authority continues in some esoteric streams, a distinct approach has developed which essentially shrugs and says: ‘who cares? If it works for you, use it.’ Perhaps influenced by surrealism, psychogeography and the d-i-y ethic of punk, lineage is no longer seen as essential. More valued is a practice that is informal, improvisatory, contingent, syncretic, and which does not separate the arcane from the mundane. Cast a spell, then do the washing-up sort of thing, or, even better, make the washing-up the spell.

Everyday life becomes its own magical practice, alert to meaning. A modern magician might use dice and cards, joss sticks and amulets, but they will also look out for apparent coincidences, for signs on walls, for scraps of paper in the street, for chance finds in bookshops and curio shops, for unexpected encounters with strangers. They are drawn by the suspicion that all life is magic and we should keep the keenest possible open-ness to its possibilities, content only to pick up a few clues and glimpses.

If this sort of approach has any need of a prophet (or role model), it is surely Arthur Machen’s Mr Dyson, that inspired idler and connoisseur of the curious, that wanderer among the backwaters and byways of London, that champion of an ingenious improbability theory always on the look-out for signs and coincidences. Ever delighted to find in my own town roamings the chapels and tabernacles of obscure sects, such as the Sandemanians, the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, the Church of the New Jerusalem, the Ancient Church of Albion (in crumbling red brick), I sometimes wonder whether one autumn day I might see the bronze and golden leaves leap around a faded and peeling painted notice-board for the Original Atlantis and Baghdad Temple of the Dysonites (est.1895).

(Mark Valentine)

Chris Massie, The Author of 'Corridor of Mirrors'

In my note on ‘Trying to Find a Corridor of Mirrors’, I explained that both the author, Chris Massie, and his book, were unusually elusive. Readers kindly contributed thoughts and information about these, and I have followed up the suggestion by one reader, Gali-Dana, of looking at his book The Confessions of a Vagabond (1931).

Wandering and hiking books were popular in the Thirties, but this is not a chronicle of agreeable amblings in the byways of Britain. It is instead a record of the poverty and hardship of Massie’s early days, especially as a struggling writer. This book itself is quite uncommon, so it may be worth recording what it tells us about Massie.

It begins: ‘It was after the war and I was a partially disabled ex-service man, destitute in London’. He had been a hospital orderly in France during the retreat of March 1918, at one point with sixty badly-injured patients under his care and very little he could do to help them. He was himself wounded and concussed during the war.

He confirms that his first books were accounts of serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Reflections from France (1916) and Red or Khaki, or Impressions of a Stretcher-Bearer (Manchester: Blackfriars Press, 1918), adding ‘Much of my work was done there in the evening by the light of two sputtering candles in a dug-out.’ He is forthright about the futility of the war and the brutal discipline meted out to independent-minded soldiers like himself by their own side, in his case resulting in lasting injuries.

In his Confessions, Massie explains that he was born ‘in needy circumstances’ and had to leave school at 14 to start work. He was already absorbed by books, and would have liked to educate himself further, but his family needed the money. He was apprenticed to a goldsmith: not an opulent job, as it may sound, but hard work ‘from dawn to dark’. The work, he said, ‘filled me with cynical contempt. We were turning out luxury goods for the idle rich’.

He lists many other jobs he did for a while: ‘I have been a soldier, a tramp, a goldsmith, a sign-writer, and a costermonger. I have been a carpenter’s mate, a clerk at a Labour Exchange, a bottle washer at a beer bottling factory, and a dramatic critic. I have written books, reviewed books, been a reporter, and addressed envelopes for a living.’ But what he really wanted to do was write. He did succeed in placing articles in Labour newspapers and periodicals and a miscellany of other places, but not enough to make a living.

In 1913 he sent an artfully composed begging letter to H.G. Wells asking for £3. Unfortunately, ‘it failed gloriously.’ Wells replied: ‘Dear Massie, I put your letter on one side to think it over, and I won’t do as you ask. You have a gift; you have genius. Your work in its way is as good as my work in my way; and why the devil I should have to do the finance business for you is more than I can understand.’ However, this was not Wells’ final word: he was in fact ‘most generous’. He also sent two of Massie’s stories to the prestigious English Review, who took them.

In 1922 he also had help from John Galsworthy, who sent him £15 so he could get married and write a bestseller he had in mind. Neither plan worked out: instead, he became a down-and-out, tramping the roads, spinning a yarn to strangers and seeking, but not always getting, alms. ‘I have written three novels in a workhouse’ he notes. They were his three earliest novels: Lady (1925), Peccavi (1929) and They Being Dead Yet Speak (1929). He gives a strong, unalloyed description of his workhouse days and the hopeless fates of his fellow inmates, though also with respect for their individual characters and peculiarities. He also gives account of others on the margins of society, beggars, match-sellers (‘timber merchants’ in the trade), hawkers, and some with sly and not quite legal routines.

Massie says at the end of his book that it is a confession of failure, but that his experiences have brought him into contact with the generosity and dignity of people living in the hardest of circumstances. He much prefers these to the sleeker sort in greater prosperity.

Soon after, Massie’s dedication to writing finally began to be recognised. He became a regularly-published novelist, with a new title every year or two: and, as we have seen, some of his novels were made into films. However, without doubt his upbringing and early vicissitudes and his own sense of failure made their mark: many of his books are about harried individuals in desperate circumstances.

(Mark Valentine)