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By Root 2024 0

that, rather than some supernatural agency or an otherwise undiscovered ancient civilization in New Hampshire, this is the product of erosion and collapse of a rock face. Anyway, it doesn’t look much like a face anymore. There’s the Devil’s Head in North Carolina, the Sphinx Rock in Wast Water, Cumbria, England, the Old Woman in France, the Vartan Rock in Armenia. Sometimes it’s a reclining woman, as Mt Ixtaccihuatl in Mexico. Sometimes it’s other body parts, as the Grand Tetons in Wyoming -approached from the West, a pair of mountain peaks named by French explorers. (Actually there are three.) Sometimes it’s changing patterns in the clouds. In late medieval and renaissance Spain, visions of the Virgin Mary were ‘confirmed’ by people seeing saints in cloud forms. (While sailing out of Suva, Fiji, I once saw the head of a truly terrifying monster, jaws agape, set in a brooding storm cloud.)

Occasionally, a vegetable or a pattern of wood grain or the hide of a cow resembles a human face. There was a celebrated eggplant that closely resembled Richard M. Nixon. What shall we deduce from this fact? Divine or extraterrestrial intervention? Republican meddling in eggplant genetics? No. We recognize that there are large numbers of eggplants in the world and that, given enough of them, sooner or later we’ll come upon one that looks like a human face, even a very particular human face.

When the face is of a religious personage - as, for example, a tortilla purported to exhibit the face of Jesus - believers tend quickly to deduce the hand of God. In an age more sceptical than most, they crave reassurance. Still, it seems unlikely that a miracle is being worked on so evanescent a medium. Considering how many tortillas have been pounded out since the beginning of the world, it would be surprising if a few didn’t have at least vaguely familiar features.*

[* These cases are very different from that of the so-called Shroud of Turin, which shows something too close to a human form to be a misapprehended natural pattern and which is now suggested by carbon-14 dating to be not the death shroud of Jesus, but a pious hoax from the fourteenth century - a time when the manufacture of fraudulent religious relics was a thriving and profitable home handicraft industry.]

Magical properties have been ascribed to ginseng and mandrake roots, in part because of vague resemblances to the human form. Some chestnut shoots show smiling faces. Some corals look like hands. The ear fungus (also unpleasantly called ‘Jew’s ear’) indeed looks like an ear, and something rather like enormous eyes can be seen on the wings of certain moths. Some of this may not be mere coincidence; plants and animals that suggest a face may be less likely to be gobbled up by creatures with faces - or creatures who are afraid of predators with faces. A ‘walking stick’ is an insect spectacularly well disguised as a twig. Naturally, it tends to live on and around trees. Its mimicry of the plant world saves it from birds and other predators, and is almost certainly the reason that its extraordinary form was slowly moulded by Darwinian natural selection. Such crossings of the boundaries between kingdoms of life are unnerving. A young child viewing a walking stick can easily imagine an army of sticks, branches and trees marching for some ominous planty purpose.

Many instances of this sort are described and illustrated in a 1979 book called Natural Likeness by John Michell, a British enthusiast of the occult. He takes seriously the claims of Richard Shaver, who - as described below - played a role in the origin of the UFO excitement in America. Shaver cut open rocks on his Wisconsin farm and discovered, written in a pictographic language that only he could see, much less understand, a comprehensive history of the world. Michell also accepts at face value the claims of the dramatist and surrealist theoretician Antonin Artaud, who, in part under the influence of peyote, saw in the patterns on the outsides of rocks erotic images, a man being tortured, ferocious animals and the like.