Gef

Supposed self-portrait by Gef

The Irish ‘púca’, a trickster spirit, was believed to be the bearer of both good luck and bad fortune. In Welsh mythology it was called a ‘pwca’, and in Cornish a ‘bucca’; the English equivalent, perhaps more benign, was Puck, Robin Goodfellow, or a hobgoblin. ’Púcai’, known for their enjoyment of mischief, were said to be shape-shifters; they might appear as horses, goats, cats, dogs, hares, and other animals; less often, they took human form. Encounters with ‘púcai’ tended to occur in isolated rural places, and were only experienced by people who were alone. Nevertheless, however farfetched stories about the ‘púca’ might be, it is fair to assume that many of them had their origins in real experiences.

There are some similarities between such tales and those about Gef (pronounced ‘Jeff’), the talking mongoose who appeared in the 1930s on a remote farm at Cashen’s Gap near Dalby on the Isle of Man. Gef announced to the Irvine family, whose house he inhabited and who were the only people ever to have seen or spoken to him, that he was an ‘earthbound spirit’ and a ‘ghost in the form of a mongoose’. ‘I am extra, extra clever’, Gef said, ‘but not always kind’. The Irvines took blurry photos that made him look a little like a cat, and his reputation spread; a local bus driver claimed that Gef made disparaging remarks about him while hitching a ride, and the bus conductor added that Gef had stolen sandwiches from his lunch bag. The British press delighted in reporting the phenomenon, and Gef soon appeared in international newspapers. Before long, experts in the paranormal came to Cashen’s Gap to make assessments of the situation.

As Bee Wilson remarked in ‘The London Review of Books’, writing about Christopher Josiffe’s entertaining and exhaustive book on the subject, Gef’s story is ‘both brilliantly silly and irreducibly mysterious’, and after years of research, Josiffe remained unsure as to whether or not the episode was a hoax, leaving open the possibility that Gef lived and talked exactly as the Irving family said he did. Even towards the end of her life, Voirrey, the daughter who first discovered him, refused to say that he didn’t exist. James, her father, always insisted that the animal was real and didn’t shy away from repeating Gef’s most outlandish claims such as ‘I am the fifth dimension!’ and ‘I am the eighth wonder of the world!’.

The Irvings' farmhouse was about two miles away from their nearest neighbours and eight from the local town; the family, who had moved to the Isle of Man from urban life in Liverpool, were isolated outsiders. It is possible, as some suggest, that the episode began as a figment of the lonely Voirrey’s imagination, and that when she started to say that the dead rabbits she brought home had been killed by a friendly mongoose, she may have been inspired by ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, the well-known short story by Rudyard Kipling about the adventures of a young mongoose adopted by a British family in India. Soon, however, the occurrences took on more disturbing psychological aspects. If Voirrey used Gef ’s rants and abuse as a way of rebelling against her parents (it was widely believed that she was a natural ventriloquist), her father may have responded by projecting his feelings about a difficult and willful daughter, of whom he was overly protective, onto an imaginary creature - although Gef might well have been a real animal, perhaps a ferret, a weasel, or polecat. It is not at all obvious whether the Irvings’ impressions of Gef were deliberate deceptions or unconscious delusions, the psychic experiences of isolated and claustrophobic members of an unusual family. There remains, too, the chance that something genuinely odd and abnormal was taking place.

Gef’s story brings to mind some of the personalities and incidents that Peter Washington describes in his book Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, in which he explores the origins and development of the Theosophical Society at the end of the 19th century. It was a movement that unexpectedly prospered and became very influential, even though its leading figures were at best peculiar, and at worst charlatans. Chief among them was Helena Blavatsky, daughter of Russian aristocrats, who ran away at the age of seventeen from an older husband and spent years, according to her own account, travelling in the East, where she acquired spiritual wisdom. In due course she turned up in New York, where she met Colonel H.S. Olcott, who was drawn to her psychic ability, which seems to have been partly genuine and occasionally faked. Together they founded the Theosophical Society, made connections in India, and set up a branch in London, which attracted a surprising number of respected and well-off members. W.B.Yeats, much involved with occult groups, called her ’a sort of old Irish peasant woman, with an air of humour, and audacious power’; G.K.Chesterton, less impressed by Theosophists, described her as ‘a coarse, witty, vigorous, scandalous old scallywag’. Blavatsky wrote texts that she said were astrally dictated by Tibetan masters; they included esoteric theories and exotic stories about the Grand White Brotherhood, the Lords of Karma, the Hyperboreans, Lemurians and Atlanteans. Able to convince herself that the abundant fabrications were true, she probably believed much of what she propounded.

Washington tells many anecdotes, some amusing and others mildly shocking, about leaders in the Theosophical movement and its periphery, but although Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon is as engaging as Gef!, his tone can be overly smug or sarcastic. Rosemary Dinnage, in her astute and sensitive LRB review, remarks that ‘only those who hold that believing anything without rational backing is intrinsically wrong, or who are sure they can distinguish second-rate spiritual experience from the real thing, can take an austere view of the Western guru’. Although it is often right to denounce dishonesty and chicanery, it is perhaps too easy to make fun of the ridiculous aspects of gurus and cults - or, indeed, of talking mongooses. It is ungenerous, and possibly misguided, to dismiss them too blithely.

For further exploration:

A website devoted to Christopher Josiffe’s Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose https://gefmongoose.co.uk/

Various topics related to Gef: http://gefmongoose.blogspot.com/p/gef-links_5.html

The LRB review of Gef!: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n15/bee-wilson/i-am-the-fifth-dimension

The LRB review of ‘Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon’ (NB the LRB only allows access to one free article): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n10/rosemary-dinnage/i-want-to-be-real

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