Speculative Energies: The Ideas of Lord Torridon

The Adelphi, founded in 1923 by J. Middleton Murry and others, was a monthly journal usually dominated by essays on economics, sociology and international affairs. Much of this makes dusty reading now, though it did publish George Orwell’s early journalism under his own name of Eric Blair. The earnest material was alleviated to some extent by short stories and poems, though even some of these are rather portentous. It is not, shall we say, the sort of place one would first look for fantasy or vivacity.

However, in the issue for October 1935, price sixpence, in pale yellow covers, there is a most curious item. Not ‘The Money Muddle – And A Note on Alberta’ by N.A, Holdaway, nor ‘Socialism, 1935’ by Murry himself, nor yet ‘As We See It’ by ‘Politicus’, sound, serious reading all, I am sure. There is also ‘The Ideas of Lord Torridon’ by ‘The Hon. Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr’, no doubt (we might think) a discussion of the political thought of an eminent Caledonian statesman.

The opening does not quite disabuse us of this notion. ‘Lord Torridon believed that the objectivity of abstract ideas is not a presumed but a real objectivity.’ Is that so? we murmur, wondering if there is any P G Wodehouse later on in the journal. There is a bit of engaging biography: Torridon was an eccentric, ‘impervious to ordinary social approach’, with ‘a fine but rather forbidding-looking old castle on the west coast of Scotland’ and a house in the extreme west of England. He also enjoyed visiting Paris. His simple needs were met by man and wife servants and an odd job lad. He once called his servant to help him look for an Idea he had lost.

It transpires Torridon is a devotee of the Platonic Ideas, or Images: ‘he believed firmly . . . that they lived in space as it were by themselves, but radiate to earth and us men types of themselves, which are the abstract ideas we encounte[r] in intellectual life.’ Torridon’s aim was to ‘establish a working connection with the ideas in the absolute’. He thinks this ‘might be done by means of the types’, and here he directed his ’speculative energies’, recorded in his unpublished manuscript ‘Adventures Among the Ideas’.

Evidently Torridon was an abstruse and original thinker. And this line of thought has a particular interest because, only a few years earlier, Charles Williams had also explored the Platonic Ideas in his novel The Place of the Lion (1931). Williams portrays the startling results when an esoteric mystic attempts to bring the Images of the Ideas literally down to earth. Torridon’s aim is quite different: he does not want to materialise the Ideas on the mortal plane, he wants to encounter them where they are, in their more ethereal domain. Might not this attempt also have untoward consequences? Torridon thought that the types of the Ideas on earth must ‘ever tend towards the absolute’ but that the attainment of such perfection ‘is also the occasion and the moment of disintegration’. Whether there was any direct link between Williams’ novel and this work I do not know, but it seems curious that two such fictions with similar ideas should appear around the same time.

Fictions both? Yes, because although Erskine’s apparent essay is presented as a memoir of an eccentric Scottish laird and philosopher, the piece is—probably—a work of fiction, an ingenious fantasy. For when I searched for more information about him, there was nothing else whatever to be found, either about him or his book. It is true Torridon is the name of a Scottish loch, mountain range, glen and village in the Highlands: that much is authentic. But there seems to be no record of any title associated with these.

Who then was the author of this unusual, rather peculiar work? Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr (1869-1960) was a keen Gaelic language campaigner and Scottish nationalist. He was originally named Stuart Erskine but adopted the Gaelic name later.  As Stuart Erskine he had founded and edited, with the adventurer and bon viveur Herbert Vivian, the literary journal The Whirlwind, which had a pronounced devotion to the Jacobite cause: Erskine also ran a Jacobite society.

Arthur Machen contributed some of his earliest short fiction to The Whirlwind in December 1890, including ‘A Wonderful Woman’, ‘The Lost Club’, ‘An Underground Adventure’ and the first chapter of ‘The Great God Pan’ as a stand-alone story. John Gawsworth describes the journal as ‘a paper advocating Jacobite principles, run by two young gentleman who had managed to keep it alive since the previous summer’. Alas, they could not afford to pay: and even a legal action by Machen did not yield any money (The Life of Arthur Machen, 2005, pg 106).

This background raises the possibility of a Lord Torridon whose title is from the Jacobean tradition, not the conventional one, especially since some of these titles were clandestine. Perhaps a Lord Torridon really existed, was a friend of Erskine’s, and the use of the title in the piece was a private amusement between them, or a courteous acknowledgement of an ancient allegiance. Indeed, it would be rather splendid if this were so and the great thinker was also a secret cavalier. But I think that fiction is the likelier explanation.

It would not be Erskine’s only fiction. He was earlier, in 1901-10, the author of a series of decadent detective yarns written in Gaelic for his own Gaelic language journal, as discussed by Petra Johana Poncarová in her paper ‘Snake Women and Hideous Sensations: The Strange Case of Gaelic Detective Short Stories by Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar’ (Scottish Literary Review, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2020). I am afraid my Gaelic does not quite stretch to enjoying these picturesque tales.

Still, the Torridon piece is well worth having. I like its literary trickery and I also admire the way in which a most interesting concept, with some distinct affinity to the Williams novel, is presented to the reader in such a brief, singular work. It is a beguiling way to convey a quite rarified concept. If Williams had not got there first, it might have made an exciting occult thriller. And it is a mark of the skill of the piece that I still have lingering doubts: is it, after all, fiction? Perhaps in some remote, turreted, corbie-stepped Highland castle the manuscript of ‘Adventures Among the Ideas’ may yet be found.

(Mark Valentine)

Radio Archaeology: '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)