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 Precognition is one of the most intriguing paranormal abilities. The ability to see the future is probably a talent that most of us have, but when we experience it, our left brains often interfere and hurl up all sorts of arguments about why what we’re seeing can’t be so. These left-brain objections and arguments are usually rooted in our cultural and societal mass beliefs, which prove to be quite powerful and persuasive. Nonetheless, we can tune into the future, usually when our need and desire are great. What we do with the information depends on our particular beliefs.

And that intro brings me to Igno Swann. He’s probably most famous for being the co-creator – along with Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff – of the remote viewing project at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s. This project eventually became the U.S. government’s Stargate project – psychic spying. Swann also wrote several books about remote viewing and  psychic phenomena and this evening, I happened across one of them – The Nostradamus Factor: Accessing Your Innate Ability to See into the Future. We’ve owned this book for probably twenty years and as I paged through it, I realized I had never read it!

The premise is that any one of us can see the future- something that Swann didn’t understand until April 1988, when he was lecturing in Dermold, then in West Germany. He had been invited to give  a series of lectures about psi research.  He was billed as the famous American super psychic  who had astonished scientists since his first formal laboratory experiments in 1970 (at Stanford).

Other speakers were there, too,  some of them practicing psychics who were doing readings. The irony was that Swann didn’t do individual readings, and despite all his research into prophecy and prediction, didn’t provide any predictions about the future, either. He knew that many predictions turned out to be wrong and he felt he had a scientific reputation to protect.

After he gave the keynote address, he asked for questions from he audiene of several hundred people. The room was utterly silent. Finally,  an elderly woman asked Swann to give the group at least one prediction.  He was irritated about being put in this position and frantically sought a diplomatic way to get out of the situation.

 As his irritation escalated into anger, he heard  a rushing sound around him and had a sense of getting larger. “Then there was a clarity of some unfamiliar kind, which was somehow like liquid- and in this liquidness what seemed like a thousand pictures flashed through my consciousness. I had the distinct, lightninglike impression that most of the people in the audience already knew the future at some ‘place’ deep within them. And I knew their conscious minds were disconnected from this deep place.”

He felt he knew what they knew collectively, and an aspect of this “hidden knowledge” exploded into his consciousness. He blurted, “Okay, you want  prediction? Here’s a prediction. The Berlin Wall will come down in eighteen to twenty-four months.” The translator repeated the prediction twice. After an initial silence, the people in the audience  began to rise to their feet, clapping, and then the crowd, Swann, wrote, “became unglued.” People burst into tears, hugged each other,  and some people even rushed to the podium and hugged him.

Swan couldn’t understand why he’d blurted the prediction. After all,  at the time he gave this prediction, it looked as if the Berlin Wall would still be standing well into the  21^st century.  He felt his colleagues would believe he had lost his marbles. 

However, nineteen months later, the Berlin Wall came down practically overnight. Swann felt vindicated.  “I had one of the most rewarding experiences of my life…watching my prediction come true on real-time television right before my eyes.”

As he watched the wall coming down, he wondered if he could foresee other things. By the end of 1990, he had discovered the answer: yes. And that answer was one of the reasons he wrote Your Nostradamus Factor.

 Swann – like Targ and Puthoff, Colin Wilson, Terrence McKenna, Whitley Strieber, Dean Radin, Caroline Myss,  Mona Lisa Schultz, Lynn McTaggart, Jane Roberts, and many others – was a pioneer in consciousness research. He died in January 2013. His book is no longer in print. But there are so many astounding anecdotes in the book, that from time to time we’ll be posting some of them. Even though these stories are older, they are somehow perennial and have much to show us about how precognition – future seeing – can work for each of us.

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Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years for handing over 700,000 classified documents to Wikileaks that exposed  the inner workings of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

George W Bush,  Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, the architects of war and torture, are still free. War crime chargers were never brought against them.

There’s so much wrong with this picture. Cheney, who was often referred to the Darth Vader of the Bush administration, was the worst of the bunch. Instead of being charged with war crimes, he got a new heart!  And it certainly wasn’t the heart of a Progressive. You can still see him from time to time on TV news, struggling to look tough but aware that he has become irrelevant.

Rumsfeld, Bush’s Secretary of defense, approved of “stripping prisoners naked, hooding them, exposing prisoners to extremes of heat and cold, and slamming them up against walls” at Guantanamo. No telling where he is, maybe working at a conservative think tan and pulling in two grand a day.

 John C Yoo,  an attorney  in Bush’s Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, is the lawyer who claimed that waterboarding is legal. He now teaches law at Berkeley, one of the most liberal universities in the country. Sort of ironic, really.Trickster? I wouldn’t take a class from this guy.

Then there is W himself, a strange little man who used to emit weird chuckles at inopportune moments, the guy who called himself the Decider in Chief, a person of such diminished mental capacity that his brainy and corrupt cabinet members made decisions for him.  Occasionally, W comes out of hiding, emerges from whatever weird cocoon he is now inhabiting in the aftermath of his disastrous eight years as president. No one pays too much attention him. Not even his own Republican party.

 So Manning, now all of 25, gets 35 years in federal prison. Whistleblower Edward Snowden saw the proverbial writing on the wall and fled the U.S. for Hong Kong before he turned over a reported 700,000 documents that expose the extent of the NSA’s spying program on Americans. He has been granted temporary asylum in Russia, another irony that has the trickster’s fingerprints all over it. Russia isn’t a country we usually associate with freedom from persecution or human rights.

 Glenn Greenwald, a journalist for The Guardian UK, is the man who broke this story. He lives in Brazil, with his partner, David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen. Several days ago, Miranda was detained for nine hours at Heathrow Airport in London, and was questioned under a provision of the UK’s terrorism laws. He was passing through London on his way from Berlin to Brazil.

In Berlin, he was visiting Laura Poitras,  a documentary filmmaker, who has partnered with Greenwald on revealing the information in these documents. When Snowden initially contacted her, she was working on a documentary film about surveillance that included an interview with Julian Assange (to whom Bradley Manning sent documents), who revealed certain information to her.  

 Not only did UK detain Greenwald’s partner, Miranda, for nine hours, but they confiscated his computer, flash drives, all his electronic equipment.  Since that happened, it’s been revealed that The Guardian has been under constant pressure from UK officials to turn over the NSA documents they had. They refused to do so and eventually sent copies of their documents out of the UK and elected to destroy their own computers and hard drives.    

 The message in all this is clear: journalists, you’ve been put on notice. Here in the U.S., journalists are no longer protected by the first amendment. But as MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted, Journalists are not terrorists.

 Since the U.S.  tries to manipulate most of the rest of the world, these whistleblowers and their journalist buddies  won’t be safe wherever they flee. Except, well, maybe Russia. Or  Brazil. Or Bolivia? Maybe not. When it was rumored that Bolivia had extended asylum to Snowden, the plane of the Bolivian president, while flying over Europe, was diverted and searched. Snowden wasn’t on board. The president got home – and raised holy hell.

 But these days, you have to raise more than holy hell. You have to look back to history, to the Nixon/Watergate years, when journalists were still protected by the first amendment, and Woodward and Bernstein published their explosive findings that ultimately  brought down the administration of Richard Nixon. And then you have to ask yourself: was George Orwell right and just way off on his timing? Is  the kind of world in which I choose to live? If not, what can I do about it?

 There are some intriguing synchronicities connected with all of this. We covered the Snowden synchros here. And here.

 So here’s another synchro. Even though David Miranda is Brazilian, his last name means something in the U.S. The Miranda Rights. We’ve all heard it in cop shows:

 You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

It means that a suspect’s Fifth Amendment rights are protected; he or she can refuse to answer self-incriminating questions. And what’s at the very heart of the Snowden/Assange/Manning travesty? That in the aftermath of this massive release of government secrets, you – whistleblower, journalist or documentary filmmakers- better say nothing that might incriminate you. You had better be afraid – and mute about your government’s illegal activities against other countries – and against its own citizens.

This whole thing is sad commentary on a country like the U.S. that supposedly stands for freedom in all its forms and touts that PR rhetoric. The truth is that our politicians violate the most human tenets of the Bill of Rights.

What have we become? Who are we as a nation, a collective, a people?

 Back in 2005, I think it was, Rob, Megan and I walked into a restaurant in the Dominica Republic and ordered dinner. Laid back town, we were there for windsurfing. But a French couple approached us and the man looked at us and snapped, “Why did you vote for Bush not only once, but twice? How could you Americans do such a thing? Do you have any idea what the repercussions of eight years of Bush are going to be?”

 And I looked back at him and said, “We didn’t vote for him.” And yes, we understand the repercussions.  We are living them right now.

I’m not an organized person. Walk into my office and you’ll see an explosion of books, papers, storyboards, stuff. I usually know where everything is, but no one else would. But my head is organized when it comes to writing and my computer files make enough sense so that anyone could figure them out. So I knew we’d written about DMT before, but not in terms of its possible connection with NDEs, alien abductions, the paranormal, synchronicity.

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Between 1990 and 1995, Rick Strassman, a clinical psychiatrist, undertook the first new human studies with psychedelic drugs in the U.S. in over 20 years. His research involved DMT – N,N-dimethyltryptamine – which is produced naturally by the pineal gland in the brain.

 “One of my deepest motivations behind the DMT research was the search for a biological basis of spiritual experience,” he wrote in DMT: The Spirit Molecule.  He was led to the study of DMT through earlier research on the pineal gland as a “potential locus for spiritual experiences.” Much of what he had learned over the years made him wonder if the pineal gland produced DMT “during mystical states and other naturally occurring, psychedelic-like experiences.”

The study was conducted at the University of New Mexico, where Strassman was a professor. The 60 volunteers were administered a total of 400 doses of DMT.

This naturally occurring psychedelic compound  is widespread throughout the plant kingdom and occurs in small amounts in mammals, including humans.  Structurally, it’s analogous to the neurotransmitter serotonin, the hormone melatonin, and other psychedelic tryptamines. Indigenous Amazonian shamans ingest DMT during  ayahuasca ceremonies for healing and divination. Yet, no one really knows what DMT does or what its function is in humans.  DMT levels elevate while we’re sleeping, so perhaps dreaming is part of what DMT facilitates.

Strassman believes that elevated levels of DMT in the brain might help to usher the soul into the body at birth and out of the body at death and my be responsible for spontaneous mystical experiences and NDEs. Many of his volunteers experienced different worlds, some that were downright bizarre, others that were peaceful, and still others that were structurally different from our three-dimensional world.

These reports challenged Strassman’s worldview. “I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with beings occurred in our studies, or the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences.”

Some volunteers reported “reptilian” beings  with “an agenda.” There were reports of a space station that held entities – “androidlike creatures  that looked like a cross between crash dummies and the Empire troops from Star Wars, except they were living beings, not robots.” Another volunteer reported beings that were like clinic researchers that probed into his mind. Others reported on intrusive procedures  these beings performed on the volunteers.

“There were sort of long fiber-optic things that they were putting into my pupils,” said one volunteer.” Another reported  being in a place that felt like an alien laboratory, where beings “activated a sexual circuit and I was  and I was flushed with an amazing orgasmic energy.” Another volunteer reported that he’d received an implant in his forearm.

These reports prompted Strassman to take a closer look at alien abductions, a topic that hadn’t interested him before. So he started with the research of Harvard psychiatrist, author and abduction researcher John Mack. Strassman apparently saw enough parallels to propose that “the alien abduction experience is made possible by excessive brain levels of DMT. This may occur spontaneously through any of the previous described conditions that activate pineal MT formation. It also might take place when DMT levels rise from taking in the drug from the outside, as in our studies.”

Taking in the drug from the outside, as in… Do the entities, beings, aliens in abduction experiences somehow inject DMT into their abductees? If so, then according to Strassman’s findings, the DMT would facilitate the abduction in that the abductee would be able to move more easily between dimensions, levels of reality.

This proposition may not be as weird as it seems. Heightened levels of DMT may account for a lot of the high strangeness in UFO/alien encounters. It’s prevalent in advanced meditation and ritualized chanting, in psychic experiences, may be prevalent in NDEs, in both birth and death, and yes, it may have a lot to do with synchronicity.

 Hi, this is Noah. You know, the big reddish golden retriever that my humans sometimes write about. I’m now four and a half and old enough to write my own blog post. And I have plenty to say about dog day afternoons.

This term is one humans use to describe really hot summer days. And let me tell you, it’s been scorching hot in South Florida this summer – 95 degrees in the shade, the air so humid that when you draw it into your lungs it feels  as weighted as concrete. On some days, the heat index – what the air temp actually feels like – reaches 105. Since I wear a fur coat, that is very hot  and I am forced to find ways to mitigate it.

The first order of business is simple: drink a lot of water and cool off my paws by plunging into the pool that Cassie creates with a plain tarp in a square depression under a hose from which water flows.

Cassie is the human who owns two border collies – Kilt and Willow. Their breed of dog tends to be quite focused on a task  and at the dog park, that task is racing after and catching whatever the humans toss  their way. It’s usually a ball, but can also be a Frisbee.  Although I can run fast in short spurts, these two border collies are long distance Olympic runners. I don’t compete with them. But even Kilt and Willow are worn down by the heat and end up in the pool, where all of us eventually immerse our entire bodies. This is them – without me!

I’m a large dog – 111 pounds the last time I was weighed – and there’s hardly enough room for the border collies, Red the hound and Cody the husky, but we somehow manage. Here are Cody and Red in a hole they dug to keep cool – before they joined me in the pool.

Then there are some pups who join us – Gaucho, 5 months, who keeps stealing my large orange ball and tries to bury it in the deepest corner of the pool,  and some other nameless pups who bite my ears and lick my face.

It’s when the pups join me in the pool that I miss my Nika the most. She was just six weeks old when she joined our clan. She thought I was her big brother. She would bite my ears, leap up and try to box me with her little paws. When she slept, she curled up next to me, her paws draped over my legs. She lives with her human in another city now, but we visit frequently. I can always tell when she and her human are coming for a visit because my humans say things like, “Nika is coming to see you, Noah.” She and I had a wonderful week together in the Keys this summer.

With Nika gone, I’m forced to make new friends. That’s Zappo, king of the hill. He’s a Rhodesian Ridgeback,  younger than me, and definitely a more deft climber!

I like Cody and Red, too, and the border collies, of course. I have a certain fondness for Gaucho, whose owner was raised in Argentina (thus the name, okay?). I’m also sort of smitten with Fergie, the pup next door, a German short-haired pointer whose energy is infinite and who enjoys a good tug-of-war.

But you know what? None of them are true love like Nika and me.

My humans talk a lot about synchronicity – what it is, why it is, when it is, what it means. But for me, for most dogs, it’s really pretty simple. On these dog day afternoons, I just  surrender to the heat, to the cooling bliss of the pool, with the orange ball under my chin, and am thankful for what is. I shut my eyes for a moment, the heat pours over me, and I dream of the past, am fully rooted in the present, and embrace the future, whatever it may be. I’m in the flow – and that’s when it happens, where my inner and outer worlds come together in a meaningful way, without cause and affect.

I consider my day successful and happy when I can say, at every moment, Yes. Yes to all of it. That’s when I plunge my head underwater,  where the water is deepest, and grab my orange ball. Yes, I’m ready for another round with all my buddies chasing my ball.  Yes, yes, to mud puddles and chasing squirrels. Yes, I’m ready for my next visit with Nika, when she will jump out the car window to get to me before her human has even stopped her car. I understand that’s going to happen soon.

Yeah, it’s a dog day afternoon. I smell rain approaching from  the Everglades to the west, Gaucho has run off with my ball, Kilt has stolen my Frisbee, Cody is grumpy about his human being out of town. But there are so many scents that lure us, so many distractions that seduce us, so many squirrels to chase, so many tasks to fulfill, so much to love and enjoy, that I leap out of the pool, shake myself free of the water, and race out across the dog park, hoping a human will  hurl a ball or a Frisbee. Or both.

I am Noah. Welcome to my world.

This flash mob of dancers in India is one of the most moving I’ve seen.

 Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel in physics in 1965 for his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics.  I had read about him from time to time, but he didn’t really register until I was reading a book about Wolfgang Pauli and  his obsession with the number 137.

The number puzzled most physicists. But it was Feynman, though, who said that physicists should put a sign in their offices to remind themselves of how much they don’t know. The sign would be simple: 137.

 So the other day when I was at Barnes & Noble, I found a book called Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science.  I realized I didn’t know much about Feynman except for this 137 detail, so I bought the book.

 The book is fascinating – not only for insights into Feynman the scientist, but insights into Feynman the man. The love of his life was Arline Greenbaum, whom he met at a party when he was 15 and she was just 13. She was his opposite in every way – right brain to his left brain, endowed with artistic and musical talents.

“Richard and Arline were soul mates,” writes Lawrence M. Krauss, the author of the book. “They were not clones of each other, but symbiotic opposites – each completed the other. Arline admired Richard’s obvious scientific brilliance, and Richard clearly adored the fact that she loved and understood things he could barely appreciate at that time. But what they shared, most important of all, was a love of life and a spirit of adventure.”

 Feynman proposed to her when he was a junior at MIT. During the five years between his proposal and her death from tuberculosis, they corresponded constantly.  “…her spirit provided him with the vital encouragement he needed to keep going, to find new roads, to break traditions, scientific and otherwise,” writes Krauss.

 Their parents were concerned about their relationship. His mother was afraid that Arline’s physical condition – the TB – would be a drain on his ability to work and on his finances. But as  Feynman wrote his parents, “I want to marry Arline because I love her – which means I want to take care of her. That is all there is to it…”

 And so they were married. But  on June 16, 1945, six weeks before the atomic bomb Feynman helped to build was exploded over Hiroshima,  Arline passed away. “After she breathed her last breath in the hospital room, he kissed her, and the nurse recorded the time of death as 9:21 PM.”

 He later discovered that the clock by her bedside had stopped exactly at 9:21.

 Unfortunately, Feynman didn’t recognize the synchro. “A less rational mind might have found this cause for spiritual wonder or enlightenment – the kind of phenomena that makes people believe in a higher cosmic intelligence. But Feynman knew the clock was fragile. He had fixed it several times and he reasoned that the nurse must have picked it up and disturbed it to check on Arline’s time of death.”

I found this part of Feynman’s story deeply sad. He had just lost the love of his life, the clock on the bedside had stopped precisely at the time she had died, and he didn’t recognize it as significant. Yet, this phenomenon has been experienced by numerous people, under the same circumstances, and certainly qualifies as a synchronicity.

I think it illustrates how all too often we humans dismiss the obvious because to acknowledge it would force us, at the very least, to question how the world works and, at the outer extreme, might shatter our current worldviews.

 The day this photo was taken, it was 95 degrees in the shade and the heat index was 105.  Cody,  the husky,  and Red, some sort of hound, were so hot they simply found a cool spot in the dirt and panted.

Red belongs to Estis, a pianist who teaches music to elementary school kids and is on break this summer, and Cody belongs to Karin, who was out of town. Estis usually shows up at the dog park around four, and she’s   chatty and happy.  But when she walked in today with both Cody and Red, she looked miserable.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

Estis rolled her eyes. “Well, Karin left town on Thursday. My husband was going to drive her to the airport, so he first dropped me off at the dog park with Cody and Red. I had forgotten the park is closed  for maintenance on Thursdays, so I had to walk home with both dogs.” She lives about a mile from the dog park and Cody isn’t easy to walk on a leash.

But Estis and the two dogs finally got home and everyone settled in the kitchen – Estis and her two daughters and the two dogs.  Her daughters were painting and working on something and no one was paying much attention to the dogs.  Suddenly, Red begins to howl from another part of the house, a wild, frantic howling, and Estis and her daughters raced to the back of the house.

At the end of the hall, there’s a bathroom where they had put their caged parakeets while Cody was visiting, and the door was no longer closed. Cody had somehow managed to open the bathroom door and the door to the cage, and had grabbed one of the parakeets.

“He was totally wild, Trish, and raced up the hall with blue parakeet feathers plastered all over his muzzle, and his eyes were…just wild, I’ve never seen his eyes like that. My daughters were screaming, Red was still howling and cowering in a corner, and I raced after Cody, trying to catch him.”

Estis finally offered Cody a treat and as he opened his mouth, the dead parakeet fell to the floor. At this point, her daughters were freaking out, Red’s howls filled the air, and Cody raced up and down the hallway, “totally out of control.”

Estis got everyone calmed down and eventually put Cody out on the porch while she cleaned up the mess. Karin’s daughter was home, so Estis called her and  asked her to pick up Cody.

I was frankly astonished by this story. At the dog park, Cody is unusually gentle with other dogs, even when they’re playing and roughhousing. He races into the park every afternoon to greet his buddies – humans and canines alike – and  his joy so obvious that it’s a treat just to watch him. Then he  trots off, pursuing scents, chasing squirrels, playing king of the mountain on the mound of dirt at the far end of the park. Rob and I have often called him Cody the Trickster because he can be so mischievous. Estis’s story prompted me to think about the emotional lives of dogs, which is certainly as real as the emotional lives of humans.

Cody actually belongs to Karin’s son, but when he was in college he became Karin’s dog. She is his main person. Whenever she leaves the park to get something out of her car, Cody paces along the fence, watching her, waiting anxiously for her to return. She left town to meet her husband in upstate New York because her brother-in-law is dying. There has been a lot of tension in the household this summer and Cody, like most animal companions, has probably sensed it. So when his human drove off in the car with Estis’s husband that Thursday morning, bound for the airport, and then Cody ended up at Estis’s house, the bottom probably fell out of his world.

As Cody and Red panted in the shade this afternoon, I ran my fingers through Cody’s thick, soft fur and he dropped his head back, looking up at me with  eyes that are such an exquisite turquoise it’s as if you’re peering into an undiscovered sea. He ran his tongue over my hand, then my cheek as if to say, I know you what you and Estis were talking about. But I’m not a bad dog, really I’m not.  

 Red nudged Cody’s back with his snout. Hey Dude, I’m here, pay attention to me.  And they curled up in the hot shade, best friends forever.  

GOOD MORNING (afternoon, evening). Had any Kebernarans lately?

That word, kebenaran, which is Javanese, relates to unusual coincidences, and it sounds like something out of the world of Kurt Vonnegut with his karass and granfaloons.  Here’s some Javanese wisdom related to synchronicity.

“Events do not happen because of chance, but manifest themselves because of hidden forces that bring about each co-incidence, each kebenaran.   A new event is a crossroad, a co-inciding, in which the shadow of inevitability becomes a fact.”

– Niels Mulder, Mysticism in Java: Ideology in Indonesia, Amsterdam: the Pepin Press, 1998, p.84

‘Kebenaran’ comes from the root benar which means true.  The word means truth as a noun, but in its adverbial form it means by chance, by accident.  Thus, a Javanese understanding of the relationship between “truth” and “chance”?

The term “hidden force” is also suggestive and was the title of a novel from a century ago about Java by L. Couperus.

We’ve talked about the scarab beetle here before since it played a major role Carl Jung’s development of his concept of synchronicity. His story of a female patient telling him about her dream of a scarab beetle just as a beetle very similar to the scarab struck Jung’s window. He opened the window, caught it in his hand and showed it to the woman. She had been extremely rigid in her thinking and the remarkable meaningful coincidence was a break-through in her therapy.

Now we have a collection of ‘lost’ fairy tales surfacing from Germany that are entitled Prinz Roßzwifl. That’s a local dialect for “scarab beetle.” The scarab, also known as the dung beetle, buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Erika Eichenseer, cultural curator in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz, sees the beetle’s lifestyle as symbolic of fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.

Eichenseer published a selection of the 500 new fairytales that were compiled in the 19^th century by a local Bavarian historian, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886), the same time a sthe Grimm brothers were gathering fairytales that became a world famous collection. The fairy tales had been locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years.

According to an article in The Guardian, Von Schönwerth spent decades asking country folk, laborers and servants about local habits, traditions, customs and history, and putting down on paper what had only been passed on by word of mouth. In 1885, Jacob Grimm said this about him: “Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear.” Grimm went so far as to tell King Maximilian II of Bavaria that the only person who could replace him in his and his brother’s work was Von Schönwerth.

Von Schönwerth compiled his research into a book called Aus der Oberpfalz – Sitten und Sagen, which came out in three volumes in 1857, 1858 and 1859. The book never gained prominence and faded into obscurity.

Many of the fairy tales do not appear in other European collections. For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch. However, the collection also includes local versions of the tales children all over the world have grown up with including Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin, and which appear in many different versions across Europe.

Von Schönwerth was a historian and recorded what he heard faithfully, making no attempt to put a literary gloss on it, which is where he differs from the Grimm brothers. However, says Eichenseer, this factual recording adds to the charm and authenticity of the material. What delights her most about the tales is that they are unpolished. “There is no romanticising or attempt by Schönwerth to interpret or develop his own style,” she says.

So now we have a whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches coming to light. Thanks to Jim Bansholzer for alerting us to this story.