“An interesting, though rather detestable, creature called the ant-lion is found in some of the bestiaries of the Middle Ages… The ant-lion was so called because of its size, since ‘while to other animals it is only an ant, to ants themselves it is as if it were a lion’.

“As an instance of the implicit credulity of the Middle Ages witness this account of the ant-lion given in the Physiologus. This states that the ant-lion’s father was shaped like a lion and his mother like an ant. The father was a flesh-eater; its mother herbivorous. When these two had issue, this was the ant-lion, partaking of the features of its parents, its forepart being that of a lion and its hindquarters like an ant. Being thus composed the wretched insect could neither eat flesh like its father nor herbs like its mother, and so it starved to death!”

Colin Clair, Unnatural History : An Illustrated Bestiary (1967). Alas, the ant-lion is not illustrated in the book, and nor is the gigantic gold-digging pismire, with which it shares a chapter.

Reader Mark Patterson alerts me to the usefulness of the robe in modern Druidic practice – with an important caveat.

In The Living Stones (1957), Ithell Colquhoun wrote : “It disguises imperfections of figure: round shoulders, bosoms of unmodish size or shape, pigeon-chests, pot-bellies, too-insistent buttocks, knock knees and bandy legs, all are mitigated in the merciful folds of the robe. But whatever the type of robe… its effect is often destroyed by disillusioning shoes.”

What is it about South Mimms? Further revelations from Strange Cults And Secret Societies Of Modern London by Elliott O’Donnell (1934):

“On All Hallows E’en certain members of the [Ghost] Circle were invited to meet, at eleven at night, in secrecy, at cross-roads not far from South Mimms. All turned up, the founder, as usual, arriving first, and on the neighbouring clock striking midnight, they were surprised to see a herd of pigs trotting down the road towards them, road and pigs gleaming white in the moonbeams. Never had any of the members of the Ghost Circle seen such pigs! They seemed to be positively gigantic, but thin. On they came, perfectly noiselessly, and on arriving at the cross-roads, they passed through a gateway into a field, leaving in their wake a current of icy air. There was something so strange and eerie about them that several members of the Ghost Circle, overcoming a certain reluctance, ran to the gate to have another look at them. The field, which afforded no cover of any kind, was very large, and it was empty, save for cattle. The pigs had inexplicably vanished.

“The members of the Circle learned subsequently that the cross-roads were known to be haunted by a herd of phantom pigs, but only on All Hallows E’en.”

I think at the end of this month the Hooting Yard Phantom Pig Spotting Club should convene at that cross-roads in South Mimms. Be there or be square, as the hepcats used to say, half a century ago, daddy-o!

More shenanigans from Strange Cults And Secret Societies Of Modern London by Elliott O’Donnell (1934):

“Just out of bravado [my friend] had slept several nights under a tree (known to followers of the tree cult as dangerous) near certain old cross-roads, in the South Mimms district. Now, like murder, some vices will ‘out’; and when I saw my friend, after he had been sleeping under that tree, I was startled at the great change in his appearance. In his face I could detect signs of vice I had never associated with him before. He confessed his guilt to me, and attributed it, as I have already hinted, to the cross-roads and tree influence.

“As he lay under the tree in question, watching its gently swaying branches over his head, and its smooth, gleaming trunk, he felt a current of vice emanating from it and passing into him. He felt it was trying to communicate telepathically with him, trying to fill his mind with its own foul and beastly ideas, and when at last he fell asleep, his dreams so strengthened his vicious thoughts that he could never shake them off. Day and night they obsessed him, and eventually he indulged in the vice from the urge to which there seemed to be no escape. As a last resource, in his efforts to turn over a new leaf, he went abroad, and I have never heard of him since.”

Questions : to what foul and beastly vice did Mr O’Donnell’s friend succumb, and is the sinister tree at South Mimms still standing? And what type of tree? A larch? A yew?

While I have been beavering away at my alphabet, a few other things have cropped up which I couldn’t easily slot into the scheme. Among them, this:

“One evening, an acquaintance of mine, who is an Irish writer of some repute, having drunk rather more than was good for him, a by no means unusual occurrence, in attempting to stagger home from his club, by some means he could never quite explain, got into a strange house instead of his own, and found himself in a semi-dark room full of queer-looking people, male and female, clad in leopard skins. Being given a skin by a dark, foreign-looking girl, he tried to put it on and, in spite of his addled senses, he so far succeeded that no one appeared to notice it was upside down. Probably no one paid any heed to him, everyone’s attention being centred on a woman, who was standing in the middle of the room, haranguing them. My friend could not see her very distinctly owing to the lights being turned down, but he judged her to be coloured, she looked so dark, and not a British subject, as she spoke with a decided foreign accent. The cool night air, blowing into the room, through an open window near at hand, gradually sobered him, and his brain became quite clear. He realised then that the people around him belonged to some strange exotic cult, and finally the amazing fact that they were Leopard and Panther People dawned on him.”

The quotation is from Strange Cults And Secret Societies Of Modern London by Elliott O’Donnell, published in 1934. If his book is to be believed, Mr O’Donnell could hardly walk into a pub or a hotel lobby, or stroll through a park, without bumping into someone who had an astonishing tale to tell of weird and hitherto unsuspected goings-on in the city and its suburbs. You will be hearing more from him in coming days.

Another brief interruption to the alphabetic schedule. I am reading Chris Mullin’s Decline And Fall : Diaries 2005 – 2010, packed with amusing anecdotes and observations. Most are of course political, but I was struck by this literary snippet:

“Wednesday, 10 December 2008. To the Almeida theatre in Islington for Pat Kavanagh’s memorial meeting. Strictly by invitation to exclude the Evening Standard and the dreadful Jeanette Winterson.”

A paragraph that leaves you wanting to know more…

“[An] episode is highlighted in Ritual Magic In England (1970) by Francis King who, misled by Dion Fortune’s account of it, accused Moïna [Mathers] of killing a Miss Netta Fornario by black magic. As the incidents leading to Miss Fornario’s death did not take place until some eighteen months after Moïna’s own, the charge is scarcely worth refuting. Even if the latter had been living, the scratches found on the corpse are less likely to have resulted from an attack by Moïna in the form of a monster cat, than from running naked in the dark over rough country, which Miss Fornario had done immediately before her collapse.”

Ithell Colquhoun, Sword Of Wisdom : MacGregor Mathers And ‘The Golden Dawn’ (1975)

David McKie, who is always worth reading, had a piece in the Grauniad last week about the first lines of novels. He refers to a reference work I had never heard of, Novel Openers : First Sentences of 11,000 Fictional Works, Topically Arranged with Subject, Keyword, Author and Title Indexing compiled by Bruce L Weaver and published in 1995. No doubt one could spend many happy hours browsing through it seeking out one’s own favourites, cursing the absence of others, and making new discoveries. It set me to thinking, by the by, that such compilations, whether fat like Weaver’s or brief and idiosyncratic like any number found in books and magazines and online, seem invariably to focus on fiction. What about arresting openings of non-fiction works? How about this, from Sword Of Wisdom : MacGregor Mathers And ‘The Golden Dawn’ by Ithell Colquhoun (1975):

I was a schoolgirl sitting on a lavatory-seat and leaning forward so as to see into the depths of an osier basket lined with newspapers. The closely-printed pages carried an article by a young woman visiting an Abbey in Sicily and described the strange goings-on there. The director of the place was someone whom she called ‘The Mystic’ but did not otherwise identify: and his Abbey was far from being an ordinary monastic establishment. I stayed put until I had read through the two or three large pages, in spite of imperious rattling at the door.

That certainly did what McKie says Bruce L Weaver suggests is “the best way to capture readers” – it instantly put me somewhere else and piqued my curiosity. A page or so later I was introduced to an amusingly intriguing cast of characters:

I began to pick up dark hints about the activities of certain (unspecified) members, of whom others were suspicious. The rumours centred around a third studio, situated beyond the one used as a library, and their chief disseminator was the librarian, a Miss Worthington… The members were not all of Miss Worthington’s calibre, however; they included Dr Moses Gaster, the eminent Hebraist, whose youngest daughter was my contemporary at the Slade; Hugh Schonfield, whose scholarly preoccupations did not prevent his founding later The Mondcivitan Republic; Dr W B Crow, Grand Master of the Order of the Holy Wisdom and author and lecturer on Traditional themes; Margaret L Woods, the Edwardian poet; Gerard Heym, the scholar and bibliophile, and Edward Langford Garstin who was  secretary of the Society, his Alchemical treatises, Theurgy and The Secret Fire, not yet published.

This is a peculiarly British, or English, shabby-genteel world of the interwar years, suburban mystics scraping by on invisible means, their secret wisdom unsuspected by their neighbours, and often unintelligible even to their disciples. Later, Ithell Colquhoun is invited to a weekend in the country:

The basic formula for such establishments is a simple one: get hold of a large house and garden, also a biddable and industrious wife and/or a selection of concubines with similar qualities; then collect disciples of both sexes willing not only to pay for their keep but to work for it. (You recommend work in house and garden for its therapeutic value, but it also saves you the expense of employing staff.) The formula was used successfully for a number of years early this century by ‘Monsieur Gurdjieff’ at Fontainebleau; by Crowley (more briefly) at his Abbey of Thelema, Cefalu, in the early Nineteen-Twenties, and by P D Ouspensky in the ‘Thirties, when he occupied at least two different properties in the Home Counties. To expand the cynical remark that ‘behind every Western teacher is a boarding-house or a brothel’, I would put Meredith [Starr] and Ouspensky into the first category; but if the reports of inmates are exact, there were at least elements of the second chez MM Gurdjieff and Crowley.

She arrives at Frogmore on a chilly November day, met at the nearest station by her host in a “battered car”.

Frogmore proved to be a red-brick gabled house set on sloping ground; the atmosphere of the demesne at once struck me as gloomy, the interior no less so. The dining-hall was sombrely pannelled and almost without illumination; we all sat at a long table with Meredith at the head. The diet, strictly food-reform, was far from being the delicious fare vegetarian food can and should be; I remember a tasteless soup with something like barley-kernels in suspension, also whole cooked cabbage-leaves like dark linoleum. Why these could not have been chopped up, seasoned, and served with an appetising sauce I don’t know : perhaps that would have destroyed their virtue?

Writing in the 1970s – or, as she would put it, the Nineteen-Seventies – Ithell Colquhoun looks back and sees parallels with the present:

My room was cold, cramped and shabby : when later I described it to Margot, ‘Very simple’, she murmured with a far-away look. But is it simple when all water has to be carried, the lavatory is a long way down a spooky corridor, and the only warmth comes from hot bottles? Is an earth-closet in the garden that has to be emptied periodically really simpler than main drainage? Or rather, does not the absence of mod. cons. make for less simple household-running than if things were arranged with a little common sense? I suspect that to-day some hippie-girls, after enthusiastically integrating themselves with a commune, learn this same fact the hard way. Life may be simple for their men if these do little but discuss what they call philosophy, but how about the women? To keep even relatively warm, clean, and fed in primitive conditions is more difficult than in ‘squarer’ surroundings. (Incidentally, how far out-dated is much hippie ideology when it comes to considering women as human beings! Or failing to consider them at all.)

Forty years on from this spot-on observation of hippies, she still skewers, in a few simple sentences, the inanities of those of our twenty-first century eco-warriors who would like nothing better than to plunge us into a pre-industrial dark age.

I realise I have quoted on far beyond that startling opening paragraph, but doing so proves the point I suppose. Read it, and you’re hooked. I am fifty pages in, and am looking forward to the rest of the book with immense glee.