We greatly hope that our readers will enjoy exploring the mysteries in this Big Book of Mysteries as much as we have enjoyed anthologizing them.
The authors are deeply indebted to Canon Stanley Mogford for contributing the Foreword. He is rightly regarded as one of the foremost scholars in Wales.
All humans are born with the same shared physical attributes. It doesn’t follow, of course, that we are therefore all like “peas in a pod.” In fact, we appear in endless variety: some taller or broader than others, some more handsome than the rest. Physical differences there may be, but we are all constructed of the same parts.
Temperamentally, however, it’s another story. Here we are often poles apart. To some of us the engine of a car, or the workings of a clock, is a fascinating piece of work. These enthusiasts love nothing better than taking the engine or clock to pieces, working out how the disparate pieces all work together, and then are capable of putting every one of the pieces back together. Others couldn’t care less how mechanical things work: we only get bad-tempered when they don’t.
This complex world of ours has even more for us to wonder about. There is something almost miraculous about the way it works. Equally miraculous are the lengths of daring, of achievement, that some people reach. Wondering at it all is where most of us are content to leave it. If there are scenes of beauty, we simply stand back and admire them. If something seems a mystery to us, we accept it for what it is. Where treasures are known to have once existed and are now lost, we leave others to find them. Where areas of the world are as yet undiscovered, someone else will be the pioneer. Captain Cook, many generations ago, was a man apart. He resolved, cost what it may, to sail where others had never been, to find and chart lands as yet unknown. His voyages made him a national and lifelong hero, but few of us, if offered the chance, would have signed on as one of his crew! Howard Carter spent more than twenty years of his life and vast sums of his partner’s money searching in vain in the vast stretches of the Egyptian deserts until he unearthed the secrets of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Few of us would ever have stood up to so many of those fruitless, disappointing, costly years. Most of us leave the search for truth to others and marvel at their dedication.
The Fanthorpes, certainly, are not like the rest of us. They long to know about the world we share. Indeed, if there was a Nobel Prize to be awarded for those bent on researching the mysteries of this world, they would be candidates for it. They have devoted much of their lives to a search for truth and understanding. They have journeyed many times to that area of France where Bérenger Saunière was once parish priest to trace the source of his unexplained access to immense wealth. They have flown to Canada to the money pit of Oak Island to see if, where so many others have failed, they can recover the treasure it is believed to be protecting. They have spent lonely hours in so-called “haunted houses,” or eerie graveyards, not merely unafraid of apparitions but longing to encounter them. With hindsight, knowing what happened to the Mary Celeste, they would probably have gladly booked a passage on that ill-fated vessel, simply to see for themselves what happened to cause the crew and passengers to disappear.
The Fanthorpes are no doubt both pleased and proud to have some of their work and their investigations included in this book. It may tempt others to follow in their footsteps. If they do, they will need to be stout-hearted and single-minded to match or outdo Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, whose friendship I have shared over many years.
— Canon Stanley Mogford, MA
Every so often strange things — Fortean things — turn up and smudge the elaborate picture that most of us are busily painting on the flimsy canvas of common-sense reality (which screens us from the “Ultimate Reality” that we know is waiting out there somewhere).
They may be anachronistic fossils, odd drawings, or carvings that have survived for thousands of years — huge lines carved across a flat plain so that they make much more sense from the air than from ground level, or semi-legendary, semi-mythical accounts of angels and demons, monsters and demigods, who could by a slight tweak of the text be better understood as extraterrestrials, or as the weird, vestigial survivors of strange pre-human civilizations.
In Giza, to the west of Cairo, is the site of the vast and formidable Sphinx with its human head and lion’s body. Nearby are the three great pyramids of Menkaura, Khafra, and Khufu. Usually regarded by Egyptologists as the oldest and biggest of the statues surviving from the Old Kingdom, which began approximately five thousand years ago, the Sphinx’s human face may be meant to represent Pharaoh Chephren, although the Sphinx was also regarded as an image of the benign god, Horus. Did its strange and sinister design perhaps originate in lost Atlantis?
The oldest known sphinx is far more ancient than the one in Giza. It is situated in Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and is believed to date back as far as 9500 B.C.
Small, delicate ancient mysteries can sometimes be harder to solve than those on a vast scale like the Sphinx. In 1901, divers working near the island of Antikythera found a very strange little metal device. It was well preserved and thought to have survived for two millennia at least. Careful examination by expert archaeologists, engineers, and historians led to the conclusion that it was a very early computer-type device intended for calculating the positions of the zodiac signs.
The so-called Babylonian electric cells were found by Austrian archaeologist Wilhelm Konig in 1931. He later became director of the Baghdad Antiquities Administration, working from the Iraq Museum. Digging at a Parthian site in Khujut Rubu’a, he came across a small ceramic container with a copper cylinder inside it. This had been soldered with an alloy of tin and lead, topped by a copper disc, and sealed with bitumen. An iron rod showing acidic damage was secured within the copper cylinder. In Konig’s opinion, the only possible explanation of the artifact was that it was an electric cell, and his theory was justified when working reproductions of it produced a potential difference of about one volt.
Konig’s example from Khujut was by no means unique: Numerous other examples were found in the region — all dating from the Parthian period between 300 B.C and A.D. 300. A significant part of the mystery is why the Parthians were using electric cells over two thousand years ago. No devices have yet been found that Konig’s cells may have powered.
Without travelling to Babylon, Egypt, or Greece, strange ancient mysteries abound in Britain — and few are stranger than Stonehenge in Wiltshire. These great trilithons with their thirty upright stones, each nearly four metres tall and weighing a good twenty-five tons, stand in a circle on Salisbury Plain. There are lintel stones balanced horizontally above these massive uprights, and the technical term “trilithon” refers to all three stones together.
The so-called blue stones of the structure seem to have been brought all the way across from Wales. Another interesting feature of Stonehenge is the Heel Stone (Heelstone). This is a block measuring nearly five metres in height, leaning at an angle of almost thirty degrees. There is an interesting legend attached to it: the devil is supposed to have used it to attack a monk, or friar, whose heel was struck by the stone. Other experts think that the word translated as “friar” in the Middle Ages was actually Freyja, the Norse goddess, and that the original purpose of the stone was connected with her worship.
Another mysterious site, Woodhenge, is not far away, and although little remains of the original wood today. Some experts believe that it was used as the model, or trial design, for Stonehenge itself. Others suggest that it was constructed later — during the Bronze Age — and based on the Stonehenge design.
Other ancient mysteries involve curiously ambiguous statuettes, such as the famous Woman of Willendorf, or Venus of Willendorf.
The statuette is just less than twelve centimetres high and is reckoned to be well over twenty thousand years old.