FT261

The earliest observations of lightning inspired eldritch dread; not only did it come from the skies, the domain of gods, but it was powerful, deadly, unpredictable and capricious – a demonic trickster. It left an important question: why was one person or one place sing­led out for a strike? It could only be, it was impeccably reasoned, that such victims and locations had been chosen for a demonstrat­ion of divine power. Lightning was an instrument of punishment or selection. [1] In cultures as widespread as Zulu and Roman, those struck dead by thunderbolts were refused burial in sacred ground. Lightning-blasted trees or places were shunned, or sometimes hall­owed in the belief that the gods had indicated where a shrine should be built.

Those crippled or marked in some way by the fiery bolts but left alive were, in archaic societies at least, destined to become shamans, intercessors between this and the Otherworld. In the 19th cent­ury, however, the phenomenon of lightning moved from the realm of the supernatural into the burgeoning domains of natural science (physics), and a vigorous debate ensued about whether a flash of lightning can transfer an image of the vicinity of the strike onto adjacent bodies and objects. The phenomenon was given a name: kerano­graphy (sometimes keraunography), a combination from the Greek suggesting “lightning-writing/drawing”.

The issue even divided modern opinion. Cade and Davis in their Taming of the Thunderbolts (1969), say that in some cases victims of lightning “do get peculiar markings on their bodies which give rise to incredible stories of ‘lightning photographs’.” On the other hand, Frank Lane, in The Elements Rage (1966), says: “I am informed, however, that it is established today, that lightning has no photographic properties.” [2]

The French astronomer Camille Flammarion provided a typical example of one of those ‘incredible stories’. [3] On 17 June 1896, two labourers were sheltering from a storm in a hut in the south of France when a bolt struck very close to them, knocking them to the ground. A letter to the Petit Marseille the next day described the scene: “[T]he lightning cut open the boots of one man and tore off his trousers; but over and above this, like a tattooist making use of photography, it reproduced admirably on the artisan’s body a representation of a pine tree, a poplar and the handle of his watch.” Flammarion then speculated that the cabin might have acted like a pinhole camera with the lightning flash determining the exposure through a window. This was the hypothetical model for the pro­cess that most rationalists imposed on tales of lightning images.

In 1861, Charles Tomlinson read a paper on keranography to a meeting of the British Association in Manchester. [4] He told of a little girl who stood before a window during a storm in 1853 and on whose body was later found “the complete image of a maple tree” that had been illuminated outside by a brilliant flash. And again, a boy climbed a tree to steal from a bird’s nest; when the tree was struck by lightning, the boy was hurled to the ground, and on his chest was seen “the image of the tree, with the bird and nest on one branch, appearing very plainly”. These stories and many others can be found in Chambers’ Journal for 6 July 1892, or in the lists given by Flammarion; the pioneer of lightning physics Charles Steinmetz; [5] and Henry Kretzer, perfecter of the lightning rod. [6]

Kretzer published privately a collect­ion of lightning image reports gleaned from American newspapers but, since it contained such outrageous gems as the bolt that stripped silver-plating off swords hanging on a wall and electroplated a cat sleeping on the sofa below, the little volume was not taken seriously. It does, however, include a tale that corresponds with those above. Two negroes were killed by lightning as they sheltered beneath a tree in Highland Park, Pennsylvania, in July 1892. “When the clothing was removed from Cassell’s body,” wrote Kretzer, “an astounding sight met the undertaker’s eyes. Across Cassell’s breast was a picture true to nature. The browned oak-leaf of autumn was there. Twined among the foliage were a number of ferns. These too, with the exception that they were brown, were as natural as their model. So plain were the leaves and ferns that even the minutest vein was discernible.” The image faded over a few hours into a purple blotch.

We can find similar observations in nearly every age, but the earliest records describe them simply as ‘crosses’. One of the oldest examples was extensively studied by Andrés Poey, who published his own collection of lightning stories in 1861. [7] Shortly before his death in AD 363, the Roman emperor Julian allowed the Jews of Jerusalem to rebuild their great temple (the previous one having been destroyed in AD 70). The project was aborted after mysterious accidents were interpreted as divine intervention. Poey summarises: “The Jews… were preparing to lay the foundations, when there was an earthquake preceded by whirlwinds, storms and lightning, and followed by balls of fire that came out of the bowels of the Earth. That same evening there was a ‘parasélène’. [8] Crosses were found printed on the body and clothing of workers and spectators. They were dark during the days, but bright and radiant at night.” This incident is contentious because, as Poey points out, there are other contemporary accounts that make no mention of the mysterious crosses.

We have several other observations from the late Middle Ages. Joseph Grünpeck mentions crosses appearing on clothing in his Speculum naturalis cœlestis (1508). [9] Isaac Casaubon, who had a reputation as “the most learned man in Europe” in the early 16th century, recorded in his Adversaria that images of crosses appeared upon the bodies of a congregation in Wells cathedral during a summer storm in 1596. According to him, lightning “fell into the church” and, although no one was hurt, the terrific violence of the thunderclap threw many to the floor. “The wonderful part was this, which afterwards was taken notice of by many, that the marks of a cross were found to be imprinted on the bodies of those in divine service.” According to Casaubon, the Bishop [of Wells] and his wife were both marked, and others were “signed on the shoulder, the breast, the back, and other parts”.

During the eruption of Vesuvius in 1660, when great lightning storms were observed in the volcanic plume, “crosses” were found on linen garments “which, during the eruption, had been exposed to air”. The great Jesuit scholar, Father Athanasius Kircher, gathered accounts from local priests “across the kingdom of Naples”, and published his own report on the phenomenon the following year. [10] According to Kircher, 30 such images were found on one altar cloth, and eight on the “flank” of a child. They varied in colour, size and style; they were difficult to clean off and while most faded, some lasted more than 10 days. This may well be the phen­omenon depicted in mediæval woodcuts as a “rain of crosses”.

The phenomenon even came to the attent­ion of Charles Fort, who told of a ‘flap’ of appearances of crosses, “and then other figures” printed upon windows “in some unaccountable way” in several towns in Germany in 1872. [11] This was just after the Franco-Prussian War and some of the images were deemed politically objectionable, so troopers were sent in to smash them all. Fort then adds: “I have a collection of stories of pictures appearing on window glass” from American newspapers between 1872 and 1890. Even today, photographs said to be of faces imprinted on windows by lightning are published from time to time in the popular media.

There do seem to be periods when lightning figures are explained according to what Fort called the “dominants of the age”, theories favoured by the savants of the day; in the 19th century, we find photography used as the best analogy. Suddenly we find no more ‘crosses’ but a more sophisticated configuration likened to ‘flowers’; for example, Flammarion tells of a woman struck by lightning which left “the likeness of a flower imprinted on her leg.” He explains that this was possibly because “a flower had stood in the route of the discharge”. It seems this phenomenon was well known to doctors who treated the victims as “Lichtenberg flowers”. Rudolph Golde, a British pioneer of lightning research in the mid-1900s, told Frank Lane that the markings should properly be called “Lichtenberg figures” as they “have been known to physicists for many decades before the true nature of the markings found on bodies was explained to the medical fraternity”.

It was the German physicist Georg Lichten­berg who, during experiments in 1777 in generating lightning in the laboratory, first identified the branching root-like ‘dendritic’ patterns of electrical discharges that now bear his name. His work has inspired modern high-voltage researchers to create such lightning ‘trees’ in three dimensions and new materials; as examples of fractal and chaos theory, they are now valued as much as art objects as they are as laboratory demonstrations. Now it seems obvious that the root-and-branch patterns of radiating burns left by lightning on human skin, the lawns of golf courses, and other organic surfaces are indeed similar and seem to share the same explanation. Yet there remains a residue of keranographic incidents, leaving important questions unanswered. One is the conviction of some commentators that certain images were so graphically sophisticated and detailed – remember the maple tree, bird’s nest and oak foliage mentioned above – that nothing less than photography could explain the verisimilitude… unless, of course, it too was what the sceptics call pareidolia: reading something meaningful into an apparently random pattern.

Secondly, a number of accounts tell of quite un-tree-like images. Poey mentions the image of a palm-leaf hut and its surroundings was found etched on some dried leaves at San Vicente, Cuba; and Steinmetz notes a “perfectly engraved image of a cow” on the body of a woman who was tending it when it was struck by lightning. Thirdly, no simple photographic process could explain the curious selection by which, say, a tree is imprinted but not the rest of the scene; and also, how the images were trans­mitted through the victim’s (often heavy and opaque) clothing.

In the annals of the tricks of lightning, one of the oddest cases occurred in the church of Saint-Sauveur at Ligny, France, on 18 July 1689, and is included by most of the encyclopædists mentioned earlier. When lightning struck the high altar, it didn’t leave any images but it did play with the words of the Mass. It was investigated by Father Lamy, a priest from a neighbouring town, who published his report in 1696. According to Lamy, the curtains surrounding the altar were blown off their rings, but without breaking the rings or detaching them from the curtain-rail or ripping the cloth. Altar cloths were burnt in various places, and the main cloth was torn in a huge X-shaped rent. He also reports that 50 people present agreed that they saw a statue of Christ levitated to hover in the air while its stand was shattered. But the incident that aroused the greatest astonishment and terror was the appearance of strange lettering across the main altar cloth. The text of the service card was reversed and magnified but, horror of horr­ors, the holiest words regarding Christ’s flesh and blood – Hoc est corpus meum, and Hic est sanguis meus – were missing. [12] Father Lamy was a match for this diabolical trick, seeing immediately that the omitted words were those printed in red ink on the card and that the lightning had transmitted only the main part of the text printed in black ink. The Devil may well have invented xerography here, but how the text was changed during its transfer from the card to the altar cloth remains a mystery. A couple of centuries later, Flammarion re-examined the records and concluded that Lamy’s report was factual.

We end with an aspect of our subject that, as far as we know, has never been adequately explained, either by the photo­graphic or the Lichtenberg hypotheses: the imprinting of images beneath the skin. In 1812, at Combe Hay, Somerset, six sheep were struck dead by lightning in fields near a wood of oak and nut trees. When they were skinned, “a facsimile of part of the adjacent landscape” was found on the inside of the skins. This was reported by James Shaw to the Journal of the Meteorological Society, in March 1857.

This oddity is matched across the years by the rabbit shot by Jasper Barrett near his Jefferson, South Carolina, home in February 1971. While it was being prepared for supper, his wife and a friend saw the outline in black of a woman’s face on the skinned flesh of one foreleg. It was about an inch across with a rosebud mouth, curly hair and long lashes, reminding its viewers of the fashions of the 1920s. Curtis Fuller, reporting the story in Fate (October 1971), noted that within a week of the news appearing in the Charlotte Observer, 4,000 people had trekked to see it, and for several days extra police were detailed to control the crowds.



Notes
1 Pliny the Elder (1st cent­ury) in his History says the Etruscans had nine Gods who could send lightning, including Jupiter who threw three kinds of bolts.
2 I note in passing that Lane was writing just as the new-fangled technology of xerography was entering modern business offices, by which images are transferred using an electrostatic process related to lightning coronas.
3 Camille Flammarion: Thunder and Lightning, 1905.
4 Tomlinson’s paper was later summarised in the English Encyclopædia article “Lightning Figures”.
5 Charles Steinmetz: Sunshine and Showers, 1867.
6 Henry Kretzer: Lightning Record, 1895.
7 Andres Poey: Relation historique et théorie des images photo-électriques de la foudre, 1861. He was director of the meteoro­logical observatory in Havana, Cuba. This is my Google-assisted translation.
8 Parselene or paraselena is an archaic meteorological term for the lunar equivalent of a parhelion or sundog in which light refraction through airborne ice crystals or water drops encircles the Sun with a type of rainbow containing small bright ‘suns’ (moondogs) on either side and a central pillar. It has also been used generally to include moonbows, fogbows, and ‘glories’ of which Ulloa’s Circle is the most famous.
9 Joseph Grünpeck – mentioned in Charles Fort: Wild Talents (1932, 1998) ch.18, citing Notes and Queries (2 April 1892). Fort erroneously calls him Grunpech, but I have not been able to check if the name error is in N&Q too. No specific date is given for the ‘crosses’. Grünpeck seems to have recycled material from Johannes Lichtenberger’s booklet Prognosticatio in Latino of 1488. Lichtenberger is credited – in Helga Hammerstein’s essay “The Battle of the Booklets: Prognostic Tradition… in early sixteenth-century Germany: (in Paola Zambelli, ed: Astrologi hallucinati: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time, 1986 – as the influential master of ‘prognostics’, a “fusion of astrology and late mediæval Joachimist prophecy”. Even more interesting for our topic of keranography is the name coincidence between Lichtenberger (who used the ‘crosses’ story as an omen) and Lichtenberg (a pioneer of lightning physics), of whom more follows.
10 Athanasius Kircher: Diatribes de prodigiosa crucibus quai poit ultimatum incendium fesuvii Napoli comparuerunt Martis, 1661; aka Diatribe de Prodigiosis Crucibus.
11 Charles Fort: Wild Talents (1932, 1998) ch.18.
12 Latin phrases from the Tridentine Mass, meaning “This is my body” and “This is my blood”. Some writers on the history of magic have argued that they are satir­ised in the stage magician’s incantation “Hocus pocus”.