September’s Thing of the Month is a fossil echinoid—a sea urchin—dating from the Cretaceous period, some 142–65 million years ago, and found in a field close to my childhood home in Oxfordshire, UK. Also known as: fairy weights, fairy heads, fairy loaves, farieses’ loaves, Pharisee’s loaves, Paris loaves, sugar loaves, shepherds’ crowns, shepherds’ hats, shepherds’ hearts, shepherds’ knees, bishops’ knees, beggar-mans’ knee-caps, and colepexies’ (pixie) heads.
In Oxfordshire they were called thunderstones, based on the belief, likely brought to the British Isles by Norse invaders, that the stones fell from the sky during a thunderstorm. Thunderstones were kept in houses to protect against lightning strikes or to prevent human children from being swapped for fairy offspring (changelings). Placed next to the hearth, they were also thought to have the power to ward off witches who, it was widely surmised, used the chimney to break into houses.
For some, the fossils were all-purpose good luck charms, the magic equivalent of an adjustable wrench. In Suffolk, where they were called fairy loaves, they were placed next the hearth or oven to ensure that a house would not go without bread. It was also believed that they had the power to stop milk from going sour and that they could ‘sweat’, predicting rain.
The resemblance of these fossils to bread—the kind of sourdough boule that you can take out a mortgage for in New York today—makes it easy to see why they were nicknamed loaves. Less so shepherds. In his paper “Shepherds' Crowns, Fairy Loaves and Thunderstones: The Mythology of Fossil Echinoids in England,” earth scientist and all-round fossil echinoid expert Kenneth J. McNamara suggests there may be a link between the words ‘fairy’ and ‘shepherd.’ (He takes as his epigraph a quote from geologist Dorothy Vitaliano: “Nothing is too small to inspire geomyths.”) He explains that many of these fossils have been found in barrows or burial mounds, some dating as far back as the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, suggesting long-standing links to beliefs about the afterlife. The Celts thought that barrows provided access to another dimension, The Otherworld, “a mystical, enchanted world” inhabited by the sidhe, or fairies.
“This name probably has nothing to do with shepherds, but derives, in part, from the Celtic word sidhe, pronounced ‘shee.’ The second half of the word ‘shepherd’ may stem from brugh, the inside of the barrow. Thus sidhe brugh (‘shee broo’) could, over thousands of years, have transformed into ‘shepherd.’ The close similarity in the shape of the domed echinocorys to a barrow suggests the possibility that the little fossils were emblematic of a barrow.”
My fairy loaf is a satisfying object. It sits neatly in the palm of my hand and has a good heft to it. Hundreds of short, neat black lines run in sequence along each leg of the petrified echinoderm, like an abstract drawing. Down one side of the fossil dome is what looks like the scored crust of a freshly baked loaf. A forked, sandy-colored patch resembles a dusting of flour that’s turned golden in the oven. I have not learned how to use the fossil to forecast rain, and my fridge is still better at stopping milk from turning. As I don’t have a hearth I keep it on a bookshelf where I hope it wards off bad ideas. It also serves to reminds me that a person who writes about art is a person who writes about folklore.
I’m taking next Sunday off for the Labor Day holiday in the US and a triple-threat of writing deadlines. Back the following week!
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The American jazz trumpeter and composer jaimie branch died last week at the tragically early age of 39. Here she is performing with her FLY or DIE ensemble at Moods, Switzerland, in 2020.
On the cusp of its 15th birthday, New York’s indispensible microcinema Light Industry is about to open a brand new space in Brooklyn. Conor Williams has done a deep dive into their history for Filmmaker Magazine, a story which includes fainting audience members, disoriented psychonauts and an apoplectic Chantal Akerman.
Studio 17: The Lost Reggae Tapes tells the story of Vincent and Pat Chin, the Chinese-Jamaican couple behind Randy’s record store and the Studio 17 recording studio in downtown Kingston. Musicians including Bob Marley & the Wailers, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Peter Tosh, Augustus Pablo, Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown, Alton Ellis, The Skatalites, Lord Creator and many more recorded at Studio 17, but it had to be abandoned in the 1970s due to political upheaval in Jamaica. The Chins left for New York, leaving behind them some 2000 session tapes which they believed had perished. I caught this on TV in the UK a couple of years ago and it’s a good one. It’s now streaming on the BFI Player and screening at The Tabernacle in London on August 31st.
Stone Club was set up 8 months ago by artists Lally Macbeth and Matthew Shaw and this week it reached 10,000 members. Ten thousand people gripped by collective nostalgia for rainy holidays in Dorset, pac-a-macs and packed lunches in the car park next to the ruined castle. The club’s slogan is “Recreating Prehistory Since 2021” and it is devoted to standing stones, dolmen, and other ancient megaliths, primarily in the UK. The idea is that it’s affordable—6 quid for UK membership, 11 for the rest of the world—and it gets people out into the landscape. I joined a couple of months ago and was sent a nice little badge and a postcard of Stonehenge. As the club does not currently have a New York City chapter, I’ll have to make do with the badge for now. Stone Club’s charming aesthetic borrows from a plain but enthusiastic strain of 1970s British educational books and hobbyist guides, with a dash of Nuts in May. It occupies a field—or hill fort, valley, heath, whatever your favorite geographic feature is—adjacent to Weird Walk, which encourages the exploration of ancient pathways in the British Isles, and produces a series of handsomely designed ‘zines about topics including sceance fiction, dungeon synth, trespassing, medieval graffiti, standing stones and, given the importance of visiting the pub at the end of a long rain-soaked ramble, the folklore of booze. Weird Walk’s aesthetic draws on hauntology, folk horror and other figments of the neo-eerie. (The ghost of the late Mark Fisher could tell us why this fascination persists.) Their language pulls a little more heavily on the mystical and the revenant than Stone Club’s does. A part of me worries that straying too far down this muddy lane of re-enchanting the British landscape might lead those without a reliable GPS, sturdy boots and a bar of Kendal Mint Cake, to get sucked into a bog filled with undead Brexiteers; the sound of the next Tory leader promising to “keep British witchcraft British” filling their ears as they drown in slurry and non-biodegradeable UKIP leaflets. However, I’ve always loved a stone circle, so join up and get your badge. Julian Cope’s not got all solstice to wait you know.