Strange Attractor’s Strange Revival

Way back when I started on this wild blogging journey, when I was just starting out writing stuff for Ferretbrain, I mentioned my enjoyment of Strange Attractor, Mark Pilkington’s journal focusing on erudite articles about off-beat subjects, with the centre of gravity being equally shared between the arts and esoterica. For a good long while, the series has been dormant, with Pilkington concentrating on making a success of its publishing arm, Strange Attractor Press, which would put out books largely within the same general spheres as Strange Attractor explored – just on here I’ve covered releases like England’s Hidden Reverse, Of Kings and Things, Days of the Underground, The Moons At Your Door, There Is A Graveyard That Dwells In Man, and Gef!, and all of those have been enjoyable and enriching in their own way.

After a long absence, though, a fifth Strange Attractor Journal has emerged from the darkness. The new Strange Attractor is edited by Mark Pilkington and Jamie Sutcliffe, whereas the previous issues were edited by Pilkington solo (note that I’ve not read Journal 4, so Sutcliffe may have been involved there). Pilkington and Sutcliffe are coy about why there’s been this long gap between issues, but to be honest it’s completely understandable: Strange Attractor Press has been undertaking ambitious projects in the intervening years and after the journal put them on the map initially, it had arguably already served its purpose. Still, it’s nice to see the old project back on track, and if Sutcliffe’s assistance can get things back on track that will be all to the good.

So, what do we get in this issue? First off is William Fowler’s Fact Or Crucifixion, a look at the infamous Hampstead Heath consensual crucifixion of the late 1960s, the legal storm and brief media flutter it inspired, and the occult and performance art motivations behind it. It’s a deep dive into an otherwise forgotten pop culture incident, and sits squarely in the Strange Attractor wheelhouse as a result. Just as appropriate is E.H. Wormwood’s The Green Crucible, offering an overview of claims of psychoactive substances being derivable from toads, and speculating about the use of toads in folk magic and alchemy.

In Tree Spirits & Celestial Brothers, Phil Legard offers a glimpse of the work of “Charubel”, an obscure working-class Welsh mystic and occult author of the 19th Century whose eccentric philosophy offered a distinctly different flavour of magic and esotericism than that propagated by the middle and upper-class Masons, Theosophists, and Golden Dawn types of the era. Humans With Animal Faces finds Jeremy Harte exploring British folklore surrounding shapeshifting ghosts and spirits, particularly spirits of humans who end up in animal form after death.

A Brainy Ferret? No, a Mouthy Mongoose!

I don’t know Christopher Josiffe, but since he’s the news editor for Fortean Times I imagine he is simultaneously quite interested in accounts of the paranormal but also rather jaded by now. After all, when you’ve trawled through enough of these things, it probably takes something rather special to make you really sit up and take notice – which means that when someone in Josiffe’s position does take an interest in a case, it’s a safe bet that it’s something a bit more special than a run-of-the-mill UFO sighting.

Such is the case with the matter of Gef (pronounced “Jeff”), who for much of the 1930s lived with the Irving family in their remote farmhouse on the Isle of Man. An unpredictable houseguest, Gef would throw stuff at his hosts, entertain them with songs, kill rabbits for them, bring them news from his travels around the island, and vary between being extraordinarily talkative and rather reticent – the latter behaviour being especially prominent when guests came (though Gef was more keen to interact with some guests than others).

That would be characterful enough behaviour in a human being… but Gef wasn’t human. The most widely-repeated description of him is that he was a talking mongoose, about a foot long, who lived behind the walls of the farmhouse and was only infrequently seen (but would sometimes poke his disturbingly human-like fingers out through cracks, or allow indistinct photographs of himself to be taken). But that’s not the whole story. Before Gef described himself as a mongoose, he claimed to be a weasel; other times, he claimed to be an earthbound spirit, but he’d be rather inconsistent on this point (as well as other details).

This bizarre situation did not go unnoticed. Gef was the centre of a media sensation which would see veteran ghost hunter Harry Price and others visit the Irvings to try and get to the bottom of the mystery. Whilst some of the purported evidence raised was pretty obviously faked, if the matter were solely a hoax by one, two, or all three of the Irving family, they seem to have had remarkable success both in recruiting others to make their own claims of encounters with Gef and in terms of the information Gef was able to get them, and seem to have kept the hoax going for as long as they did. If it was the product of a strange sort of psychological acting-out, similar objections apply.

But if Gef was real, was he a flesh and blood creature, a ghost, a tulpa, a fairy, a Jacques Vallée-esque ultraterrestrial, a witch’s familiar…? And what light can the case shed on a 1930s Britain in which Spiritualism was all the rage – or the lonely life of Voirrey Irving, growing up away from people her own age in that isolated farmhouse, and whose departure from that life into adulthood coincided with the disappearance of Gef?