June 7

Gervase of Canterbury’s Mysterious Lightning

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)

He described it simply, in way any of us would in describing something beyond comprehension…

On June 7, 1195, Gervase—a Benedictine monk at Christ Church Cathedral Priory in Canterbury, one of the most meticulous chroniclers of his age—recorded in his journals: “A marvelous sign descended near London,” consisting of a dense and dark cloud from which a white substance emerged, grew into a spherical shape, and then fell as a “fiery globe” toward the river before vanishing completely from view. And that was it—no interpretation; (surprisingly) no theological commentary; and (equally surprisingly) no attempt to explain causation of the event to God or the devil.

What he had seen was just too strange.

Eight hundred and thirty years later, physicists at Durham University identified Gervase’s account as probably the earliest known description of “ball lightning” in recorded history—a phenomenon that has been reported continuously across eight centuries, witnessed by thousands of people, including trained scientists, naval officers, and airline pilots, and remains, to this day, without a fully accepted scientific explanation. Mysteriously, it’s been seen passing through solid walls, has and exited aircraft without causing damage. Ominously, it smells of sulfur. Oh, and sometimes it explodes.

And while modern physics hasn’t offered a definitive explanation for the phenomenon, modern occultists have had their own theories since the its first sighting.

The Phenomenon

What gives “ball lightning” the power of so much open interpretation is, in many ways, its bizarre differences to traditional lightning strikes. Ordinary lightning lasts milliseconds, while ball lightning has been witnessed in colors varying from red to blue to white to violet, in sizes from a golf ball to several meters across; with fuzzy or sharp edges, stationary or moving, silent or humming or crackling—and has been seen lasting anywhere from a mere second to well over a minute in duration. Theorists claim its attracted to metal conductors, moving along railway tracks and power lines, yet can enter houses through keyholes and chimneys, and has been witnessed passing through closed windows and emerging unchanged on the other side … like a ghost.

Some have described balls of lightning being “absorbed” into an object, while some have described a sudden explosive detonation, leaving behind the dense small of ozone, burning sulfur, or nitrogen oxides (all of which had previously been associated with demonic invocation and possession).

In 1946, the Theosophical Society’s Dr. Charles Ryan noted that the association of luminous atmospheric phenomena with spiritistic manifestations and elemental activity was “so well known that there is good a priori ground for assuming that it may be present here, in some instances.” Hmmm… He was writing for a scientific audience and so chose his words very it carefully—and yet his esoteric inference was clear.

Ryan’s words, however, didn’t necessarily convince his peers. The current state of mainstream physics is essentially this: ball lightning is real, it is observed—but we still don’t know what the hell it actually is. Laboratory experiments have produced effects that look similar under controlled conditions, suggesting plasma, microwave radiation, oxidizing aerosols, and several other candidate mechanisms, yet none of those experiments has produced a fully-accepted cause. The 2014 Chinese study that captured ball lightning on video and spectrograph —the first instrumental recording ever made—showed a glowing sphere one and a half meters across, traveling horizontally near the ground after a lightning strike, and leaving a trail of silicon, iron, and calcium—precisely the elements of local soil. This finding has generated new theories without really settling the old (and decidedly occult) ones.

The Devil at Widecombe

Gervase’s 1195 account is the earliest, but, perhaps, the most dramatic occurred four-and-a-half centuries later, at the church of St. Pancras in Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Devon, during a Sunday afternoon service:

On October 21, 1638, a severe thunderstorm had been building over Dartmoor. The congregation of approximately four-hundred people by various accounts were in the middle of the service when an eight-foot ball of fire was witnessed striking the church’s exterior, tearing a large stone from the wall, then entering through the window. Inside, it moved through the nave with destructive force; pews were smashed, windows shattered, wooden beams split, and large stones hurled across the floor. The “ball of fire” then divided into two segments, with one exiting through a window by force, the other disappearing somewhere inside the church. Four people were killed, and sixty were injured. According to those early reports, the smell of sulfur was “overwhelming,” leading to the widespread rumor that it had been none other than the Devil himself, appearing in the form of hellish fire. The theological explanation offered in the aftermath was that two members of the congregation had been playing cards in the pews during the sermon, thereby provoking divine wrath in the form of such diabolical punishment.

And yet. “ball lightning” did not exist in isolation in the pre-scientific imagination; actually, it was part of a much wider category of luminous atmospheric and terrestrial phenomena that European folk tradition had been encountering for millennia. The ignis fatuus—"foolish fire,” “will-o’-the-wisp,” “Jack-o’-lantern,” “corpse candle,” “fairy light,” “hinkypunk,” and “spook-light”—was the most widely reported of these phenomena: hovering lights above bogs and marshes, graveyards and crossroads, which led travelers astray, marked the sites of buried treasure, or were omens of pending personal doom. But it wasn’t just seen within England: in Japan, the hitodama were the souls of the dead, floating near graveyards as luminous spheres and, in Bangladesh and India, the aleya confused fishermen at night and could lead them to their deaths in the marshes, while in South American Mapuche tradition, the Anchimayen were balls of luminous fire whose appearance presaged illness or death. In Welsh folklore, the “fairy fire” was held in the hand of a pwca—a small goblin-like fairy who led travelers into bogs and extinguished the light when they were hopelessly lost.

Across all of these traditions, two things are consistent: the light is intelligent, or appears to be, and the light is liminal. It appears at boundaries—between land and water, between the living and the dead, between the known path and the unknown wilderness. It behaves purposefully or capriciously, but never randomly. It is, in the folk imagination, an entity with intentions, even if those intentions are unclear. In the occult taxonomy, this placed the luminous sphere firmly in the category of elemental manifestation: a being of the fire element in its atmospheric aspect, neither fully material nor fully spiritual, operating at the threshold between the two.

The Occult Perspective

The Western esoteric tradition has always maintained a belief in beings that occupy “zones” between the material and the spiritual—often associated with the elements, yet capable of interacting with us on the material plane. Paracelsus, for example, named these beings: Salamanders (fire), Undines (water), Sylphs (air), and Gnomes (earth)—a belief carried over into some systems within the teachings of the Golden Dawn and later teachings of Aleister Crowley. Concurrent with the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical tradition, drawing on this and on Indian cosmology, developed the concept of elementals, identifying them as subtle beings composed of astral or etheric matter, not possessed of full consciousness, yet but capable of autonomous action.

Within this framework, “ball lightning” appears to be a manifestation of the classic “fire elemental”—a being of luminous energy that can sustain its existence within the material world. And that tell-tale “sulfur smell,” in many ways, remains consistent with the Paracelsian / alchemic tradition, as sulfur itself (alongside mercury and salt) was one of Paracelsus’ three principles, representing combustion and transformation. Within his own recording of the event, Gervase of Canterbury didn’t attempt to theorize the phenomenon; he remained decidedly objective to what he had seen, offering only one small commentary, calling the phenomenon “a marvelous sign.”

The question of what that “sign” truly was, or represented, remains one of the longest-lasting mysteries in the natural world. But isn’t that makes it all the more marvelous?

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist