Homer (8th and 7th century BCE Greek Poet)
“Young men are never dependable, but
when an old man takes a hand in such affairs, he considers the
future as well as the past, and the result is the best for both
parties.”
Horace de Vere Cole, born in 1881, came from a prominent and prosperous Anglo-Irish family with powerful connections. His sister, Anne, married Neville Chamberlin, the British Prime Minister who, unfortunately, would be forever associated with the appeasement of Nazi Germany. Yet, even with a controversial figure like Neville Chamberlin as his brother-in-law, Horace de Vere Cole’s own reputation for scandal, in many ways, is the more prominent of the two. By the time of his death in 1936, Horace had cemented himself as one of the greatest pranksters of the modern age.
Horace was carrying out his humorous schemes even in his earliest days. His first major prank occurred while he was receiving education in Cambridge. When Horace read in the news that the Sultan of Zanzibar was touring Britain, he decided it was the perfect time for one of his favorite schemes—impersonation. He spread rumors that the sultan was soon going to arrive in Cambridge. With the city expecting a royal visit, Horace de Vere Cole and his accomplice, Adrian Stephen, dressed up in African garb and presented themselves before an excited reception in Cambridge. Stephen, pretending to be the sultan, and Horace de Vere Cole, acting as the translator, were given a tour through the city and its University, orchestrated by the town officials. After the tour was complete, the imposters were ushered back to the train station, where they secretly shed their costumes and put an end to their successful prank.
During his life, Horace pulled off a respectable list of pranks. He impersonated more people, including Prime Minister MacDonald, and even dressed up as a construction worker to disrupt traffic. Horace also liked challenging prominent people, such as athletes and politicians, to footraces. Then, when his opponents took a lead in the race, he would shout that they were thieves running away with his money—sometimes leading to arrest, but always causing embarrassment. Another of his street-side pranks consisted of him leaving a cow udder hanging suspiciously out from the front of his pants. When onlookers became curious, disgusted or outraged, Horace took the further step of cutting off the udder, causing horrified reactions from the spectators.
Horace de Vere Cole also carried out more sophisticated pranks. While on his honeymoon, of all times, in Venice with his first wife, Horace decided to pull off a peculiar prank. During the night, he spread horse manure throughout the streets of St Mark’s Square. When the morning sun shone in Venice, the city was perplexed by the presence of horse manure in a city that did not even have horses. He also, curiously, was said to have hosted a party where all of the attendants had the word “bottom” present in their family names. These guests arrived at the party without any knowledge of their commonalities, but the reality of the situation soon became apparent when the introductions began. In another elaborate scheme, Horace gave out free theatre tickets to a specific group of people. All the men he gave his ticket to were bald, and when they sat down in their designated seats in the theatre, people from the balcony could clearly see that their shiny, bald, heads legibly spelled out a word crass enough to make a sailor gasp.
By far, Horace de Vere Cole’s most famous exploit occurred in 1910, when the HMS Dreadnought was anchored near Weymouth. The ship was informed that the emperor of Abyssinia wanted to tour the great vessel. The crew expressed their willingness to show off their ship to a foreign monarch, and sure enough, a Foreign Office official brought the Abyssinian emperor and his entourage to the HMS Dreadnought. Little did the crew of the ship know, however, that the “Foreign Office” official was actually Horace de Vere Cole. The costumed guests that Horace led onto the navy vessel were none other than his pals, Duncan Grant, Adrian Stephen and Stephen’s sister, who would later be known as the famous writer, Virginia Woolf. Horace and his accomplices were given a tour of the ship and its impressive guns, with Adrian Stephen replying with exotic fragments of Swahili, Greek and Latin as the pranksters were led through the vessel. One of the phrases he used, “Bunga Bunga,” later became sensationalized in Britain after the scandalous prank came to light.
When the British Royal Navy realized it had been duped by the country’s greatest prankster, they were understandably bitter—especially when the people of Britain began to mock them with the “Bunga Bunga” quote. Nevertheless, they never pursued any legal repercussions against Horace. A group of naval officers did, however, personally visit the master prankster at his home to show their disapproval.
Pranking, unfortunately, seemed to be the only thing at which Horace de Vere Cole could excel. In marriage and in money, his luck was very poor. In 1936, the great prankster of Britain died in France after suffering a heart attack.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
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The undefeated Japanese duelist, Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1584-1645), triumphed in more than sixty duels during his lifetime, many of which ended in the deaths of his opponents. His first duel (and kill) occurred in 1596, when a wandering samurai named Arima Kihei entered the region of Hirafuku, where a thirteen-year-old Musashi was living with his uncle. Kihei posted a notice that he would duel with whomever was brave enough to meet his challenge. Musashi, though only a boy with a stick, answered the challenge and faced the wandering samurai in combat. Despite all odds, the young Miyamoto Musashi knocked Arima Kihei off his feet and bludgeoned the surprised samurai to death with his stick. Musashi continued his lethal duels until 1612, when he faced the masterful nodachi swordsman, Sasaki Kojiro. After Miyamoto Musashi slew Kojiro with a long wooden sword (bokuto) that was shaped from a large oar, the great duelist immediately regretted killing such a skilled warrior. He continued dueling, but he never again dueled to the death.
Between Miyamoto Musashi’s debut as a duelist in 1596 and his refusal to participate in lethal duels in 1612, Musashi unsurprisingly fought in a lot of duels. One of the more famous (or infamous) of his fights occurred in 1604, when Musashi traveled to Kyoto to challenge the elite Yoshioka school of martial arts. The head of the Yoshioka family, Yoshioka Seijuro, agreed to meet the youthful duelist in combat. After arriving frustratingly late to the duel, it only took Musashi one devastating blow with his wooden sword to irreparably damage his opponent’s shoulder and arm. Injured in body and spirit, Seijuro resigned from his position as head of the Yoshioka family and became a monk. With Seijuro gone, the leadership of the Yoshioka family and school fell to Denshichiro. To regain the lost honor of his family, Yoshioka Denshichiro challenged Miyamoto Musashi to a duel to the death. Despite Denshichiro being a master of the staff, Musashi (who arrived late, once again) is said to have killed the man in a single blow to the head.
With Seijuro living as a monk, and Denshiciro dead at the hands of Musashi, the next heir of the Yoshioka family was Matasichiro, a boy of only twelve years. Like his predecessor, Denshichiro, Matasichiro also felt obligated to regain his family’s honor and consequentially challenged Musashi to a duel. This time, however, the Yoshioka family was furious and did not plan to fight fair. Remembering that Miyamoto Musashi had been arriving late to the duels, the Yoshioka family began to plan an ambush for the young duelist. With treachery on his mind, Matasichiro arranged for the duel to be held at night, in a private location, and when the time for the duel neared, the boy marched to the place of the fight with a small army in tow.
Miyamoto Musashi, however, rarely did the same thing twice, when it came to combat. Even though he had arrived at the other two duels strategically late, this time the duelist snuck to the location of the duel early. As a result, Musashi was already observing the area when the Yoshioka forces arrived and began setting up for their ambush.
With the intentions of the Yoshioka laid clear before his eyes, the duelist leapt from the shadows and charged at Matasichiro. Dodging through startled mercenaries, Miyamoto Musashi found, and killed, the twelve-year-old leader of the Yoshioka family. After Matasichiro was dead, the victorious duelist fought his way out of the mob of Yoshioka soldiers and fled to Nara, where he would be safe to return to his life as a traveling swordsman.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
Read our full biography on the action-packed life of Miyamoto Musashi, HERE.
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Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“Want of care does us more damage than want of knowledge.”
The Buddha (Lived between 6th-4th century BCE)
“Just as rain cannot pierce
a well-roofed house,
so passion cannot pierce
a well-cultivated mind.”
Around the turn of the 5th century BCE, the Psylli tribe, a people located somewhere along the coast of the Gulf of Sirte (or the Great Syrte), mysteriously disappeared after suffering a major drought. The catastrophic natural disaster virtually wiped the Psylli civilization off the face of the earth—leaving only a scattering of Psylli tribesmen (oddly associated with snake charming and healing) that would sporadically surface, here and there, for many more centuries. Yet, their tribe, as a sovereign whole, was considered destroyed.
When Herodotus, the father of history, was born within the city of Halicarnassus in 490 BCE, the Psylli tribe would have just recently disappeared. During his travels and research for his great work, The Histories, Herodotus clamed to have interviewed Libyans about the downfall of the Psylli tribe. The resulting quasi-historical tale, which he recorded in his history, was one of the more mysterious and baffling entries in Herodotus’ collection of strange stories from folklore and myth.
Herodotus wrote that a terrible, hot and dry wind swept out from the southern deserts and flowed over the lands of the Psylli, drying up all of the tribe’s vital water. The destruction caused by the wind was total—the tribe’s tanks of stockpiled water evaporated and the rivers that had long kept the tribe alive suddenly disappeared.
With the people shocked and unsure of what to do, the elders called together a council of the Psylli tribe. The council, according to Herodotus, declared that the attack carried out by the wind was nothing less than an act of war against the Psylli people. To seek vengeance, the Psylli tribe then declared war against the southern wind. The people of the tribe gathered their weapons, and whatever supplies they had left, and marched into the desert to do battle with the wind.
Herodotous (and his supposed Libyan sources) claimed that the Psylli tribe, indeed, had their battle with the wind. Yet, the battle was a massacre. As the story goes, the wind lifted a massive sandstorm from the desert dunes and buried and killed the Psylli people under a torrent of sand.
At some point, the lands of the Psylli became, once more, sustainable to human life. Fairly quickly after the members of the doomed tribe marched to their death in the southern desert, one of the neighboring rivals of the Psylli opportunistically swooped in and seized the abandoned land.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
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An interesting fact about Ireland is that it has no native snake population, besides those found in zoos or kept as pets. From what scientists have determined, the lack of snakes in Ireland dates back before the end of the last major Ice Age around 8,000 BCE. During the Ice Age, the climate in Ireland was deadly to snakes, and by the time the temperature became more hospitable, snakes still had not been able to migrate to the Emerald Isle before rising water (caused by glacial shifts and melts at the end of the Ice Age) separated it from the rest of Britain around 6,500 BCE. England is said to have been connected to mainland Europe for a few extra thousand years (until around 4,500 BCE), allowing it to be populated by species such as grass snakes, smooth snakes and adders. Ireland, however, remained snakeless, without even a hint of fossil evidence to be found, suggesting that no native snake species have ever lived in Ireland.
Science, even though it has the facts in this case, definitely does not have the special flair present in the folklore, myth and legend that was developed by ancient and medieval people to explain the absence of snakes in Ireland. The more popular of the tales is the miraculous feat attributed to the 5th-century apostle to Ireland, St. Patrick. As the story goes, St. Patrick managed to corral all of the snakes of Ireland together and drive them entirely off a cliff into the depths of the ocean.
The story of St. Patrick clearing Ireland of snakes was probably not known to another important clergyman of the British Isles, named Bede (c. 673-735). Venerable Bede made no mention of St. Patrick in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People—instead, he thought a man named Palladius was the most important missionary to Ireland. As a result, Bede included his own theories (containing nothing to do with St. Patrick) as to why Ireland has no snakes. Some readers of Bede’s history think he wrote the passage with a sense of sarcasm, which he, indeed, was known to use on occasion. Yet, the statements are still up for interpretation. This is the peculiar passage in Bede’s History that suggests that Ireland has a mystical resistance to snakes and all things poisonous.
“There are no reptiles, and no snake can exist there; for although often brought over from Britain, as soon as the ship nears land, they breathe the scent of its air, and die. In fact, almost everything in this isle confers immunity to poison, and I have seen that folk suffering from snake-bite have drunk water in which scrapings from the leaves of books from Ireland have been steeped, and that this remedy checked the spreading poison and reduced the swelling” (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Chapter 1).
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
“In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked ‘what has occurred,’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before.'”
Teresa de Capeda y Ahumada, now known at St. Teresa, was born in 1515 within the region of Avila, Spain. Her parents, Don Alfonso Sanchez de Capeda, and his second wife, Dona Beatriz Davila y Ahumada, were from wealthy and powerful families with ties to the old kingdom of Castile. Despite her family’s affluent background, Teresa would go on to lead a reform movement among the Carmelite nuns, calling for a more honest vow of poverty and a harder, more religiously sincere, life of meditation and prayer.
Teresa, the third child of nine siblings, grew up in a time of extreme religious tension. The Spanish Inquisition, brought about in 1478 by the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, was still ongoing (and would officially last until 1834). Adding more fuel to the fire, Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517 with the release of his Ninety-Five Theses. With the Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation all occurring during her lifetime, Teresa’s religious age in the 16th-century was both exciting and complicated.
As a child, Teresa was already heavily inclined to religion. While other girls her age likely dreamed of being princesses or queens, Teresa was said to have imagined becoming an anchoress or a martyr. The events of Teresa’s life began to fall into place around 1529, when Dona Beatriz Davila y Ahumada died, leaving the young saint without a mother at only fourteen years of age. The death of her mother, understandably, caused noticeable changes in Teresa. She began to seek comfort in clothing, jewelry, perfumes and stories of romance. Teresa’s father, Don Alfonso, was shocked by the newfound materialistic tastes that his daughter was developing. His concerns deepened to such a degree that he sent Teresa to be educated in Avila by Augustinian nuns.
This education, however, had more of an effect on his daughter than he wanted. When Teresa was returned into his care because of illness, Don Alfonso learned that his daughter was seriously considering becoming a nun. Teresa’s father did not give her consent to join a convent, but her desire for becoming a nun never wavered. Around 1535, when Teresa was about twenty years old, she quietly left home and joined the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation at Avila without the permission of her father.
In the first years of her cloistered life, Teresa fell ill with a debilitating illness (probably malaria) that left her largely immobilized for three years. During her long hours of inactivity, the young saint devoted the majority of her time to intense prayer. In this state of constant, focused prayer, Teresa touched the far fringes of the mental mystical realm that she would claim to explore in her later years. Yet, as she recovered from her immobilizing illness, Teresa began to dial back her prayers. By the time she had returned to fair health, Teresa seemed to be no different than any other average nun in the convent.
In her early years as a nun, Teresa put up with, and enjoyed, the questionable qualities in the Carmelite Order that she would later want to reform. Rather than a place of worship, meditation and poverty, the Carmelite Order that Teresa joined often resembled a social club, where friends could gather and relax. Teresa was initially taken in by the lax atmosphere of the convent, but after two decades of contentment, the saint was struck by a sudden drive to reform her order.
Around 1555, St. Teresa became serious about restoring the Carmelite Order to purity, and by 1558, she began to put her plan in action. Her first major breakthrough occurred in 1562, when she obtained permission from Pope Pius IV to found the convent of St. Joseph’s. A miracle is attributed to St. Teresa during the time St. Joseph’s was being built. As the story goes, Teresa’s young nephew was playing near the construction site when a section of wall fell on the boy, leading to severe injury or death. When St. Teresa arrived on the scene, she reportedly was able to perform a miracle healing, either mending his injuries or raising him from the dead.
Interestingly, the Prior General of the Carmelite Order—a man named John Baptist Rossi—was not informed about the new Carmelite convent being constructed in Spain. In 1567, he journeyed to Spain to see what Teresa was up to and was ultimately impressed by what he saw. The women, under the direction of Saint Teresa, were held to their vows of poverty and instructed in rigorous prayer and meditation. After completing his tour of the new Carmelite complex, Rossi gave approval for Teresa to found more Carmelite convents. Within the year, she made her next convent at Medina del Campo, and later founded convents for her reformed Carmelite Order at locations such as Malagon, Valladolid and Toledo. She also helped construct monasteries, such as the ones at Durelo (1568) and Pastrana (1569), for Carmelite Monks.
Teresa’s work did not go unnoticed. The unreformed Carmelite nuns and monks obviously had qualms about their way of life being called into question. The need for reformed convents was also criticized and questioned by the clergy, as well as the general Spanish citizenry. Eventually, St. Teresa, herself, also became a target of questioning and skepticism. As her devotion grew, she began to display more and more signs of her mystical side. As her visions and other mystical experiences grew in number, Saint Teresa began to consult with other members of the clergy for advice and direction. Some of the men she consulted truly believed her to be blessed with divine visions, but others merely thought she was insane.
Nevertheless, even with critics questioning her convents and her own mental health, Teresa poured all of her energy into spreading her reform movement. Her momentum was only halted when the Prior General of the Carmelites returned to Spain around 1575, after a large dispute had occurred between the different sects of the Carmelite Order. The Prior General forced the saint into early retirement, restricting her from founding any more new convents. The Spanish King Philip II, however, would eventually come to her aid in 1579, and send the saint, once more, out into Spain to reform the Carmelite Order.
It was during her forced retirement, before the king came to her rescue, that Saint Teresa wrote one of her most significant books—Interior Castle. Encouraged by friends among the clergy that believed in the value of her visions, St. Teresa hesitantly began, in 1577, to write a vivid book about the relationship between the God and the human soul. For the main structure and organization of the book, she relied on one of the visions that she had experienced. In the vision, God had shown Teresa a giant crystal castle. The outside of the castle was dull, black and noxious, but as she traversed the labyrinthine layers of rooms leading inside the castle, the structure began to grow increasingly brighter from a blinding light that emanated from the very center of the crystalline labyrinth.
In her book, Interior Castle, St. Teresa transformed that vision into a guidebook on how to unite one’s own soul with God. As the book is read, Teresa guides the reader sequentially through seven mansions in the castle of the human soul, with the end-goal being a complete oneness with God. The first mansion can only be cleared with meditation and a sense of humility. The second requires practice and prayer. Breeching the third mansion can only be done after attaining a genuinely impeccable lifestyle. In the Fourth mansion, the seeker must become detached through meditation as God reaches out to them. In the fifth mansion, a person’s identity of self must be cleared to make way for the presence of God. In the sixth mansion, God and the soul interact, but have not achieved union. Finally, in the seventh mansion, the soul and God become united and the meditator becomes an agent of God’s will, leading to benign works and deeds. Incredibly, St. Teresa’s Interior Castle, was written in under six months, from June through November in 1577.
Despite the book already being largely in completion for years, Interior Castle remained relatively unknown to the rest of the clergy until 1579. That year, Teresa and three fellow nuns were traveling from the convent of Medina del Campo to the other Carmelite convent at St. Joseph’s. During the journey they stayed at an inn in Arévalo, where one of St. Teresa’s male friends, the Hieronymite hermit, Diego de Ypres, happened to be staying. When the nuns arrived, Diego gave them his room, which happened to be the best one in the inn. As it happened, a heavy snowfall kept the band of clergy at the inn for longer than expected. While they loitered, Teresa casually divulged to Diego that she had written a book on the relationship between God and the human soul. As soon as her work was made known, other major members of the church began to review and edit the book. It was finally published in 1588.
Despite her writing career, and the ongoing editing of her work, Teresa continued to travel the countryside, spreading her reform and founding new convents. She died during her travels near Alba de Tormes in 1582. Many of her notable writings (including Interior Castle) were published posthumously. Her other major achievement, The Way of Perfection, was released in 1583, a year after her death. St. Teresa was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1622, and, in 1970, she received from Pope Paul VI the honor of being the first woman given the title, Doctor of the Church, for her work and influence in theology.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
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Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400)
“Some say the things we most desire are these:
Freedom to do exactly as we please,
With no one to reprove our faults and lies,
Rather to have one call us good and wise.”
