Emma and the Tommy Knockers

Paul Gaunt has published, in the December issue of Psypioneer (available from the archive site soon I expect), Emma's article from the Banner of Light for 9 October, 1875, in which she claims to have seen kobolds -- red, black and metallic -- in "the mines in Germany and the Bohemar Wold", noting (appropriately) in his introduction that we have not one shred of evidence that Emma ever visited Germany.

Marie Countess of Caithness also reproduces this piece in Chapter 19 of her Old Truths in a New Light.

Personally, I think Emma cribbed this story either from Philip Henry Stanhope or Sir Charles Wyke, and salted it down (as it were) with her own experiences in English and California mines -- aside from the darkness of the late 1830s, Emma's chronology up to 1874 is sufficiently packed that a trip to the Continent is unlikely.

What's interesting to me is that place name -- Bohemar Wold. It appears nowhere in Google's indices other than Caithness's reproduction of Emma's letter. Wold is of course a field or plain, but Bohemar is a Czech word, and I think Emma meant "Bohemar Wald", the mountain range that separated the states of Bavaria and Bohemia at the time. That she got it wrong -- a quick trip to the gazetteer would have sufficed for fact-checking -- is important, I think. There were indeed plenty of mines of nearly every sort -- salt, coal, precious metals -- in that range. But -- as is so often the case -- any literate newspaper reader of the time would have known that.

That elementary spirits were an important part of Emma's world-view in 1875 should come as no surprise to any reader of Art Magic.